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Hamilcar: The Age of Enlightenment – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Hamilcar: The Age of Enlightenment

By David Guymer

‘Hamilcar!’

With a fierce shriek, Aeygar trimmed her wings and banked us left. Her shadow rippled across the battlements beneath us, and I shared in the aetar’s joy at her speed and power as she outpaced it. The air, as it generally was in this part of Ghur, was both humid and warm, and smelled distinctly of boar. The banners of about forty Freeguild regiments blustered in her downwash. I don’t recall now any of the banners I saw there that day. But someone clearly recognised me.

‘Hamilcar!’

After the first voice had flung my name into the air, it took wings of its own.

‘Hamilcar! Hamilcar! Hamilcar!’

It became a chant that swiftly raced ahead of us.

I grinned broadly and pumped one fist in the air.

The walls quaked in response. Excelsior warpriests grew strident in their prayers. Collegiate battlemages more daring in their castings. Crossbows spat with more zing. Even the batteries of Greywater greatcannons seemed to belch out greater volumes of smoke and fire, and who knows, maybe even did some damage amidst the chainrasp hordes and spirit hosts streaming across the causeway bridges from the Unchained Lands.

‘Soldiers of Sigmar!’ I yelled. ‘Cease your prayers, for they have been answered. The God-King sends you Hamilcar!’

I nudged Aeygar with my knees to descend and circle back.

The aetar craned her long neck to regard me regally.

‘Ahem.’ I coughed into my gauntlet. ‘Around and back, princess. If you don’t mind.’

She threw her beak wide and shrieked.

‘What are we waiting for, lord?’ said Nassam.

Despite his quiet state of polite terror, the Jerech man was as immaculately turned out as always. The short trousers he wore were neat, and somehow more-or-less white in spite of the bug splatter that was something of an unavoidable hazard when travelling in Ghur. His breastplate was a piece of polished quartz, two inches thick and alive with colours. His sleeves were pinched at the wrists with jewels. His fingers were ringed. His turban was neat, as though it had been tied just then, with a disc of gold and amber pinned to the front. His bushy moustache was lightly greased, a trick we had picked up from the lowland nomads that was supposed to keep biting insects at bay.

I looked as though I’d fallen out of bed and into an armoury.

‘Keeping them hungry, my friend.’ I pointed to where a Scourge fleetmaster in dark armour draped in sea dragon scales appeared to be in charge. ‘There, Aeygar. Put us down there.’

With quick, strident wingbeats, Aeygar descended to the parapet, scattering a unit of Darkshard crossbowmen and a grim company of aelf halberdiers wearing black helmets and mail. Her long talons scraped on the stonework as she shuffled, acclimatising to the new sense of being earthbound, and then flung out her wings as if to stretch. Their span rivalled the battlement itself, interfering with the Helstorm rocket crew embedded in the battery tower to my left. (And a good thing too – the thing is a death trap!) The blued steel and platinum scales of her torque dazzled in the light, the circlet on her aquiline brow a thread of starsilver.

Lifting her long neck to the sky, she issued a shriek of such bellicosity it would probably have split ordinary, unwarded stone.

‘All right, princess,’ I muttered as I dismounted. ‘Now you’re just showing off.’

She cocked her head, looking at me askance, and gave an innocent crow that I wasn’t buying for a second.

Nassam hurriedly climbed down.

‘This wall’s a shade on the small side for the both of us, my lady,’ I shouted back up. ‘Why don’t you go and see what you can do from the air.’

With a twinkle in her eye, Aeygar turned, stepped up onto the merlons and launched herself back into the abyss.

Her hunting cry lingered on the muggy air.

‘Stay behind me,’ I said to Nassam.

Bladegheists and glaivewraiths surged over the walls as though the fortifications weren’t emblazoned with twelve-pointed stars and blessed starwater: a spectral torrent of limbs and hooded ghost-faces, of manacles and scythes and massive tomb blades, attacking with the frenzy of a dying man seeking life.

Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a battle as much as the next barbarian king. But with the dead it’s all so… soulless. No rabble-rousing cheers. No rambling speeches. No tears of frustration or screams of triumph. The dead don’t posture their way through the first hours of a battle declaiming past glories, or describe in grisly detail the fate that awaits your skull before its dutiful conveyance to the Skull Throne of Khorne.

Call me old fashioned, but if you don’t have any of that then I don’t see how you’re supposed to know that you’ve been in a battle.

Suddenly, a behemoth dropped onto the walls from on high.

It flapped its tiny wings, ignoring the aelf halberdiers who swept in to engage it, before propelling itself at me with a ferocity you don’t expect from a creature of Death.

I spun my halberd from the wrist, meeting every blow of its spirit sword with sigmarite blade or ironoak shaft. But the war machine was relentless. Every blow ground me back. Supernatural hate had been beaten into the baroque armour that encased its skeleton. Spirit energies seethed from between its bones. It was as tall as three big men, with the strength of twenty.

Which, by my estimation, made it equal to about one and a half Hamilcar Bear-Eaters.

‘Is that the best you’ve got?’ I bellowed, and bared my teeth, more to put on a proper show of it for the aelves fighting for their lives around me than for my attacker’s benefit. It didn’t care, did it?

It came at me, heedless of my taunting.

I parried desperately as I gave ground.

‘If I was fighting a rat ogor or a yhetee, I’d probably be dead by now.’

With a furnace-like bellow, it brought its sword crashing down. I angled my halberd to take it, braced my body. I grunted as brute impact force bent me to one knee, but the follow-up swipe then swung above my head.

‘I’m always a little slow before Nassam has made his first pot of qahua.’

Dropping the lower hand from my halberd, I drew the arm back, and punched the abomination hard in the ribcage. Armour broke. Bone splintered. I took hold of an exposed rib, my gauntlet thrice-blessed and innate love of the cold keeping the chill of eternal rest at bay, and pulled. It boasted a tatty set of wings and phenomenal strength, but its weight was committed to me: I was going down and it was damn well coming down with me.

Its shoulder crunched into the parapet, and I gave a little pull on its rib to ensure its skull ground in right after it, and from there I kneed, punched and butted the thing for all I was worth.

A tremendous bang punctuated my heroic efforts and the construct collapsed on top of me.

Panting, I climbed out from under what was, now, a heap of bones.

The construct’s skull was a mess, spread over about eight feet of rampart. I climbed on top of it as though I’d just scaled the Algavr, the mightiest of the Mortal Realms’ mountains, and rammed my halberd into its back. I twisted the blade, just to be sure, and spirits fled up from the ruptured cavity, screaming through my beard and hair as they tore back to their master.

Morghasts, those constructs are called. Harbingers. Arcai. I’ve never figured out how to reliably tell the difference. But I’ve rarely heard of them travelling far from the side of Nagash or one of his generals. His Mortarchs. I remember when there were only three.

He has more now.

I watched the spirits’ flight, trying to see where they were going.

‘We’ve spoken before about stealing my thunder, Nassam.’

‘I know, lord.’

‘Since you’re here, you can put the kettle on.’

Whether the destruction of the morghast had been decisive or coincidental, the assault on the wall seemed to be ebbing. It would not let up completely. It never would. Not until we were all dead or there were no more carcasses left in the Unchained Lands to throw at us. It was as though every dead thing in Ghur had risen to beset this place, which, given the condition of the Mortal Realms after the Great Necromancer’s most recent, grandiose cry for attention, wasn’t a possibility I could dismiss out of hand.

But it would be a while before the necromantic generals could muster their wayward spirits into a concerted assault.

‘I would, lord, only…’

The Jerech stowed his smoking pistol, but could not move aside swiftly enough for the hugely armoured warrior behind him, who placed one massive gauntlet on the man’s shoulder and brushed him lightly to one side. He was a Liberator, I think, although it wasn’t so easy to tell. He was an Anvil of the Heldenhammer. Warriors of that Stormhost, as you may know, have always had a tendency to dress like lord-relictors.

The warrior stopped before me.

He looked me up and down.

After coming all this way, he apparently had nothing to say.

I smiled for the benefit of the mortals watching, but then I saw the chamber emblem on the warrior’s shoulder.

My heart sank.

‘Come with me,’ he said, his rasping voice the sound of pages being torn from a prayer book and burned.

I thought about reminding the warrior that I was an ordained Knight-Questor, able to go where I wanted and ignore whom I pleased, but my heart wasn’t in it.

I recognised the shoulder device.

I knew the Stormcast who commanded here.

My day was already ruined.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Johan Grenier.

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ISBN: 978-1-78999-238-0

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