Hammerhal & Other Stories Read online

  ‘What seems perfect, rarely is,’ he said softly.

  It was a saying among his brethren in the order. Perfection was a mask worn by Chaos, and the prettiest faces often hid a singular ugliness beneath. It was his task to seek out that ugliness, and to purge it. Such was the duty handed down to the Order of Azyr and its servants by the God-King: to find the darkness, wherever it laired, and bring it to the light.

  Instinctively, Gage ran a finger along the badge pinned to his lapel. The hammer and the comet. The sign of Sigmar Heldenhammer, God-King of Azyr. The founder of Azyrheim, and the creator of the Stormcast Eternals. It was Sigmar who had led the first tribes of mortal men out of barbarism and set them on the path of civilisation. And it was Sigmar who had freed the other gods from their ancient prisons, so that the Mortal Realms might flourish beneath their guidance.

  It had been Sigmar who had first struck a blow against the Ruinous Powers, keeping the realms safe from their corrupting influence. And it would be Sigmar and his servants who would drive the Dark Gods back again, freeing the Mortal Realms from their monstrous clutches.

  Sigmar was the light in the darkness, and that darkness was here. Not just in the city, but close by. Gage could smell it. Taste it. It was on the air, and in the water. It was like an itch he couldn’t scratch. He realised he was tapping the pommel of his sword hard enough to make it rattle in its sheath. With an effort of will, he stopped himself. He felt Carus’ eyes on him.

  ‘You can feel it,’ the Lord-Veritant rumbled. ‘The call of Chaos.’ He pressed a hand to his chest-plate. ‘In here. Like the echo of a song you do not recall hearing. Or the whisper of an unfamiliar voice, echoing up out of the deep.’

  Gage nodded. ‘It seems impossible. To find it here, in a place sanctified by the hand of the God-King himself, and yet…’

  ‘Sanctity is not enough. Even the strongest stones eventually crumble.’

  ‘Yes.’ Gage frowned. ‘Tarn has friends in high places. They will not abandon him, not without proof. So we must find it, even if they would rather that we didn’t.’

  ‘Hammerhal is the greatest of the Cities of Sigmar, save Azyrheim itself. Anything that threatens it must be rooted out and brought to light. That is our task and our privilege.’ Carus’ voice was hard and sharp. ‘None may gainsay us.’

  ‘Not successfully, at any rate,’ Gage murmured. Carus’ gryph-hound stiffened, the feathers on her neck ruffling. The Stormcast placed a restraining hand on her.

  ‘Quietly, Zephyr,’ he murmured. He glanced at Gage, and gestured upwards with his staff. ‘Kuva is back.’

  Gage looked up at the web of walkways and gantries above. A slim shape dropped down through them, landing lightly on the ground nearby. Despite the heavy fur cloak and armour she wore, she made no sound at all.

  ‘Well?’ Gage asked, as the newcomer rose to her feet.

  He’d tasked Kuva with seeing to the rest of the dock-wardens on duty. He didn’t want any interruptions or surprises, whatever the night brought. If Tarn knew he was being investigated, things would become that much more difficult.

  ‘They will not trouble us,’ Kuva said. The aelf’s voice was a harsh rasp, and her fine-boned features were stern and marked by faint scars. The Lion Ranger was tall, taller than Gage, though still falling short of the towering Carus. She wore a long coat of golden scale mail beneath a cloak of white fur. Her flaxen hair was tied back from her face, revealing the tapered knife-points of her ears, and she rested a broad-bladed war-axe in the crook of her arm.

  That axe, with its wide double blade, had tasted the blood of monsters and men alike, and she had wielded it for longer than Gage had been alive – perhaps even longer than the Mortal Realms themselves had existed. There were scribes who claimed that the origins of the Lion Rangers might stretch back to the world-that-was, but only Sigmar and his fellow gods knew for sure, and they weren’t saying.

  Some among his order whispered that Kuva had been there the day the last Gate of Azyr had slammed shut, sealing the Celestial Realm away from the rest of the Mortal Realms as they reeled beneath the assaults of Chaos. They also said that she had been there, waiting, the day it opened once more, centuries later. He could believe it.

  ‘Dead?’ Gage asked. Kuva was the type to cut a knot, rather than untie it.

  ‘Unconscious. I do not kill slaves.’

  Gage snorted. ‘Hardly slaves. They’re paid a fair wage.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps not enough to deal with the likes of us, but still. Comets in their pockets, and a roof over their heads. What more can any man ask?’

  ‘Not to get hit on the head and hidden in a rubbish heap,’ Bryn growled as he stepped out of the alleyway, dusting his hands. The duardin was almost as broad as Kuva was tall, and thick with muscle beneath the heavy gromril war-plate he wore. His bald dome of a head surmounted a thick profusion of greying beard, much of it bound in thick plaits. Beneath shaggy brows, two pale blue eyes twinkled with amusement. He wore a brace of drakefire pistols holstered across his barrel chest, and had a heavy two-handed hammer slung over his back.

  ‘Then again, you humans are odds ones. Complaining about every little thing.’ Bryn nodded back towards the alley. ‘I hid him well.’

  ‘Took you long enough,’ Gage said.

  ‘Don’t ask, unless you want it done properly.’

  Bryn had once served as an Ironbreaker in the retinue of a duardin warden king, though which one he had never said, just as he had never explained why he had left the king’s service in the first place. The forge-proven armour he wore was decorated with golden knotwork and marked with Khazalid runes, which shone strangely in the light of Carus’ staff.

  Gage had worked with Kuva and Bryn for longer than he cared to calculate. A man in his profession needed trustworthy swords at his back, whatever their race. They may have had their own reasons for aiding him in his investigations, but they had saved his life – and he, theirs – more times than he could count.

  By comparison, Carus was a newcomer, though the Stormcast Eternals of the Hallowed Knights had warded Hammerhal Ghyra since its founding. As a Lord-Veritant, Carus’ authority exceeded Gage’s own. While a Lord-Veritant’s place was usually on the battlefield, they would occasionally aid the Order of Azyr if the need arose. In those instances, it was traditional that they defer to the order, though that often depended on the Lord-Veritant in question. Carus, for his part, seemed content to follow Gage’s lead – at least for the moment.

  Gage looked at the aelf. ‘The warehouse?’

  ‘Unguarded,’ Kuva said. She hesitated. ‘Or so it seems.’

  ‘That’s all to the good. If we can do this quietly, so much the better. We’ll check the warehouse first, then the airship.’

  ‘We should burn it,’ the aelf added.

  ‘Which – the warehouse, or the airship?’

  ‘All of it.’ She looked around with an expression of distaste.

  Gage smiled. The Lion Ranger had little liking for cities, even one as beautiful as this. Her order were as much creatures of the wild as the beasts whose skins they wore. They were savage and graceful, with little tolerance for what they saw as the foibles of human- and duardin-kind. Especially when it came to the reliability – or the lack thereof – of walls and cities.

  ‘I shall bear your suggestion in mind,’ Gage said.

  He tapped the grip of one of his pistols. The baroque weapons had been crafted in Azyrheim, long before Gage had been gifted them by his mentor upon his ascension to a full knight of the order. They were filled with blessed shot, and he had used them to end the life of more than one enemy of the Celestial Realm.

  Bryn chuckled, a query mark of sweet smoke rising from the bowl of his pipe. He sniffed. ‘Airships. Only a manling would think of such things.’

  Gage glanced at him. ‘Your cousins, the Kharadron, might beg to differ.’

  ‘Aethercra
ft. Different sort of thing entirely. Duardin engineering, that. Not entirely respectable, but you have to make allowances sometimes.’ He pointed at the airship. ‘That, however, is a boat with a bag of hot air attached to it.’ He puffed on his pipe. ‘Might as well be magic.’

  ‘It is magic,’ Kuva said, looking down at the duardin. The aelf hefted her broad-bladed war-axe onto one shoulder. She frowned. ‘Human magic.’

  ‘Better than aelf magic, I suppose.’

  ‘Quiet, Bryn,’ Gage said firmly. ‘I’m not concerned with how it flies, so much as what it might be carrying. And the sooner we check the warehouse, the sooner we find out. Let’s go.’

  Bryn gave a gap-toothed smile. ‘Finally,’ he said, before tapping out his pipe and stowing it somewhere in his armour.

  Kuva led the way, moving quietly. Gage and Bryn followed close behind. Carus brought up the rear, moving more slowly, so as to reduce the clatter of his war-plate. Blessed sigmarite was many things, but mystically silent wasn’t one of them.

  A blow from Bryn’s hammer was sufficient to shatter the lock on the warehouse doors. Kuva went in first. Gage followed, one hand on the hilt of his sword.

  The warehouse spread out around him. The interior was high and vaulted, the upper reaches criss-crossed with walkways. Moss-lanterns hung from the floor-to-ceiling support beams, and the bioluminescent foxfire within them cast a pale glow across the source of Tarn’s fortune: stacks of freshly cut logs.

  The stacks were twice Gage’s height, and made up of dozens of logs resting on heavy pallets. They filled the warehouse, front to back. The smell of green wood and pulp was thick on the air. And something else. Something indefinable. Gage looked around, frowning. Carus met his gaze, and nodded. He could sense it as well.

  Gage had learned, through hard experience, to trust his instincts. There was something here. They just had to find it.

  ‘Spread out,’ he said softly, ‘but stay in sight of one another.’

  ‘What are we looking for?’ Bryn said. The duardin studied the stacks warily.

  ‘Anything suspicious.’

  ‘More suspicious than two manlings, an aelf and a duardin sneaking around a warehouse in the middle of the night? The aelf’s right. Let’s just save time and burn it down.’

  Gage looked at the duardin. It was an old game, this. The Dispossessed, those ancient duardin clans who’d lost their ancestral holds and lands, had little patience where Chaos was concerned. Concepts like guilt and innocence were inconsequential when it came to the very real threat of corruption. Many among the Order of Azyr shared that outlook. Gage did not. Every innocent condemned to the pyre only made the enemy’s cause stronger.

  When he didn’t reply, Bryn chuckled. ‘Aye, then, I guess not. I’ll keep my eyes open.’ He strode off, whistling softly.

  Gage shook his head. If he and the others hadn’t been working together as long as they had, he might have been worried.

  He moved through the stacks carefully, studying them. Shadows cascaded across them in the soft glow of the moss-lanterns. More than once, he caught himself staring at a point in the darkness, thinking he’d seen something. But there was nothing there. He glanced over at Carus and his gryph-hound. The beast stalked about, hackles stiff and tail lashing. She sensed something.

  ‘That makes two of us,’ Gage muttered. He turned, fingers tapping against the pommel of his sword. It felt as if the warehouse were holding its breath somehow. As if something was watching… waiting. But what?

  Gage turned. Some instinct, honed by years of investigation into dark places, drew him to the nearest stack of logs.

  ‘Something about this wood,’ he said to himself.

  He pulled off his glove and ran his hand along the rough-hewn logs. The wood was dark, and sticky with sap. But it was sturdy, and good for building – surprisingly so, according to some of his sources. Where was Tarn getting it?

  The bark seemed to wriggle beneath his touch, and he jerked his hand back.

  ‘Sun and moon,’ he muttered as the bark split, rearranging itself into the approximation of a grinning face. Sap ran down from the sides of its too-wide mouth like drool as it smacked its lips at him. An inhuman chuckle rose from the wood. The bark splintered and bulged, thinning like wet dough, as the face rose. Two massive pink hands squirmed out of a knothole that was far too small to contain them. They clutched at Gage, and he stumbled back.

  ‘Carus!’

  ‘Avaunt, filth!’ the Lord-Veritant roared from behind him.

  He struck the floor with the ferrule of his staff, and the Lantern of Abjuration atop it blazed brightly. Azure light washed over the stacks of wood. The thing in front of Gage squealed and retreated into its log, diminishing like smoke being drawn through a flue. As the light faded, Gage heard the scuff of bare feet on the floor. He spun, drawing his rapier.

  ‘Ambush!’ he cried.

  He blocked a blow meant to stave in his skull, and opened his attacker’s throat with a quick slash. He looked down at the man he had killed. He was muscular and clad in dark robes, his head hidden behind a golden mask and his hand still limply clutching a serrated blade. The mask leered up at him, vaguely avian, but horribly, hideously something else. Gage felt a chill course through him at the sight of the ruinous sigils etched onto the mask. They seemed to twist in on themselves in the dim glow of the moss-lanterns.

  ‘The Changer of Ways,’ he hissed.

  It was the mark of Tzeentch – the Chaos God of deception and fortune. Its acolytes came in secret, wearing the mask of innocence. While the servants of the other Dark Gods haunted the fringes of civilisation, the servants of Tzeentch nestled within it like a black seed. They could be anyone and anything.

  His suspicions regarding Tarn were true then. Gage felt no triumph, only a sick sensation as he gazed at the stacks of wood. Shadows clumped across the logs in strange patterns, and he felt a chill as a sound like thousands of rats scuttling across the stacks whispered through the warehouse.

  Daemons. There were daemons in the wood.

  The thought of such hell-born nightmares loose in the world was repulsive to him on a spiritual level. Daemons were shards of the Dark Gods made hideous flesh. They could only be called forth into the material realm by certain abominable rites, practised by those who had given themselves over body and soul to the Ruinous Powers.

  Laughter echoed through the warehouse. The moss-lanterns flickered and went out, plunging the building into darkness. Gage could hear the rustle of cloth and the thump of feet. More acolytes? Or something worse?

  ‘Guard yourselves – we are not alone in here.’ He drew a pistol.

  ‘No, you most certainly are not… Gage, is it?’ a voice called out. It seemed to echo from nowhere and everywhere. Instinctively, Gage looked up, but he could see no one on the shadowed walkways above. ‘A knight of the Order of Azyr,’ the speaker continued. ‘I would be flattered, if your sort were not thick as fleas in the cities of men. It was inevitable that one of you would pull on the thread of fate and come for us.’

  ‘Us? Us who? Who are you? Tarn?’ Gage spoke loudly. Sometimes the servants of the Dark Gods liked to talk. That volubility could be used against them. At the very least, it might buy him some time. Motes of ugly light danced across the stacks of wood, and Gage thought he could make out more daemonic faces squirming in the bark. The air took on an oily tang.

  He glanced up and spotted a shape he thought was Kuva creeping along the top of a nearby stack of wood. How the aelf had gotten up there so quickly, he couldn’t say. But he knew she was searching for the source of the laughter. He needed to buy her time to do so.

  ‘Well?’ he continued. ‘Whom do I have the honour of addressing?’

  More laughter, though it wasn’t the wild cackle of a lunatic, which only made it worse. As it faded, voices rose in a slow, sonorous chant. The moss-lanterns blazed to new li
fe, revealing dozens of men and women, wearing golden masks and standing in ragged rows between the stacks. The acolytes of Tzeentch were clad much like the man he’d killed, and they were clutching a variety of weapons. Without the masks and robes, they could have been anyone: merchants, farmers, sewer­jacks or beggars.

  ‘Bryn? Carus? I could use some help,’ Gage called out, hoping they would reach him before the acolytes overwhelmed him.

  ‘Who are we?’ the voice called out. ‘We are your neighbours, witch hunter. We are the devoted, singing false praises to the tyrant-god, Sigmar. We are the labourers who work so hard in the orchards and fields, harvesting the bounty of Ghyran to feed those who live on the other side of the realmgate. We are you.’

  ‘Always so theatrical,’ Gage said, and fired.

  A mask pitched backwards. The chanting ceased, and the acolytes came at him in a rush. He met the first of them with his rapier, but there were too many to face alone. For every one he downed, two more took his or her place. The acolytes did not scream as they came, but instead chanted. It might have been a word, or perhaps a name. The sound of it grated against Gage’s ears and pricked at his concentration. It was all he could do to keep their blades from finding him.

  ‘Gage – look out!’ Kuva shouted from somewhere above him.

  He glanced up, and saw Kuva dart across the top of a stack, moving swiftly. As she ran, she sliced through the ropes holding the stack together. Logs rumbled down, smashing into the surprised acolytes. The aelf rode the rolling logs to the bottom of the stack and leapt. She landed among a knot of acolytes. Her war-axe flashed, and bodies fell.

  ‘Quick thinking,’ Gage shouted appreciatively.

  She glanced at him, and nodded. Then her eyes widened, and Gage felt a tremor run through the boards beneath his feet. He whirled, almost too late, and dodged aside. A heavy spiked flail crashed down, pulping several of the logs. He scrambled back.

  The flail’s wielder was no man in a mask. Instead, it was a being out of nightmare – a hulking brute, clad in turquoise armour. One half of its chest and one arm were bare of armour, revealing pale flesh, surmounted by a monstrous growth – a twisted, parasitic sibling, eyeless and chattering, its thin arms clutching a staff. The brute drew the sword slung from its hip with its free hand, a sickly flame clinging to the blade.