But Bule turned away from the enemy. He had seen Fistula kill the slaughterpriest.
He had seen the skill, the speed and the rage. The skill and the speed were threats. The rage was an opportunity he must seize.
‘Fistula betrays us!’ he shouted. ‘He is apostate! Look how he abandons Nurgle for Khorne!’
Fistula blinked in astonishment, his blades deep in the corpse of a blood warrior. His battle rage gave way to blank surprise, and then returned, greater than ever, as he realized what Bule was doing. He snarled, freeing the swords, and played right into Bule’s hands. The violet blotching of his face and the contorted tendons of his neck were clear for all to see. He had always been the impatient warrior. His faith in Nurgle had been a crusading one, but only in the sense of the destruction of the Plaguefather’s enemies. He had shown little interest in the cultivation of the garden.
Now his anger doomed him.
Bule hurled the accusation. The Rotbringers heard and saw Fistula’s reaction. And Bule acted. He did so without pleasure. He swung his axe because he must, because only he could be Archaon’s champion, and Fistula’s visible wrath meant this was the moment his apostasy was plausible, and there was no chance Fistula could turn the warband against Bule.
He also swung the axe with conviction. Fistula’s rage was suspect. Bule believed the blightlord was a threat to the garden.
Even taken by surprise, Fistula’s reactions were fast. He swiped a blade across Bule’s torso. He tore the wound left by the Bloodbound champion wider and left a new furrow, dragging down deep into Bule’s gut. The filth on the blade reacted with the filth in Bule’s blood. Strains of plague did battle. Bule welcomed the conflict. It could only bear fruit, wonderful and dark.
Bule accepted his injury, gave thanks to Nurgle for the violent spread of infection, and smashed the massive axe blade down on Fistula.
The blightlord managed to jerk his head out of the path of the blow at the last second. It did him little good. The axe shattered his chestplate. It shattered his sternum. It split him open. He flailed. His arms batted at the weapon buried in his body. Their movements were so loose, so independent of one another, it was as if Fistula’s mind had been divided too, each half pulling at one set limbs.
Fistula staggered backwards, choking and gargling. Bule yanked the axe free and brought it down again. This time he smashed Fistula’s skull. The blightlord collapsed, his body erupting with maggots and rot. Its shape softened. The flesh rippled, then crumbled. Blood spread over the land. Where vegetation had grown from the death of Bloodbound warriors, it burned at the touch of Fistula’s blood.
‘Behold his treachery!’ Bule yelled, though his belief in his lie collapsed. Fistula’s blood had the same effect as that of his brothers in disease. Bule shouted to keep the lie alive in the minds of his warband just a bit longer.
Then the Bloodbound champion was upon them, and Bule abandoned all thoughts of strategy. There was no deception, no forethought.
There was battle, and there was his faith in Grandfather Nurgle.
And that was all.
Mir led the charge into the Rotbringers, and Chaos embraced the conflict. The land heaved and bucked. It burned and flourished. It was bone, it was muck, it was brackish stream and it was flaming blood. The order of the warbands broke down at once. There were no longer enough warriors on either side to maintain coherence after the initial shock, and as the numbers fell, the significance of Archaon’s words was felt by all. Mir embraced the disorder. From the moment he struck, from the moment Bloodspite and Skullthief began to feed, he saw only red. Every presence on the battlefield was a threat. The existence of any other being filled him with desperate rage. He waded in, killing any warrior within reach.
To Mir’s right, Kordos laid waste to the plague warriors with the burning fist of his anvil. He fought in silence, he killed in silence, until the anvil buried itself in the corpulent body of one of his foes. The Rotbringer slumped, his corpse smouldering, and the collapsing mass held the brazen weapon for a moment. Kordos grunted in anger, and that was the last sound Mir heard from him. The rhythm of his blows was disrupted just long enough for the huge lord of plagues to attack his flank. Mir saw Kordos’ death coming just as he cut down another barbarian. Two steps to the right and he could have joined Kordos, blocking the lord of plague’s attack.
He stepped forward instead. He heard the axe blow. The shattering of armour and the rending of flesh. When he heard the axe hit again, he knew Kordos was dead.
Mir fought on, killing his way toward glory, each corpse another step toward vengeance.
The land mirrored the storm of the war. It rose and fell with greater violence, as if Bloodbound and Rotbringers fought on the heaving chest of a great beast. It burned and flourished. It was turbulence itself.
Mir kept his feet. He lost himself in murder and wrath. He howled in an ecstasy of rage. He filled the air with his hatred for his enemy, hatred for his rivals, hatred for the other Bloodbound, hatred for himself. And the air answered. A fresh storm broke. Thunder roared, and blood lashed down in torrents and vortices. It blinded. It filled lungs. It surrounded Mir in a perfection of violent death. It turned blades away. He was coated in the bloody manifestation of his hate.
Every warrior fought for his own survival. Mir no longer knew whom he was killing. Nothing mattered except that those who stood before him fell to his blades. His axes, maddened and drunk on gore, screamed for more. And the storm of blood battled with another tempest, one of pestilence. A diseased wind battered Mir. It shrieked in his ears. It forced itself into his lungs. It was hot with decay. Each breath took in a legion of parasites. He burned the sickness out with the fever of his hate, and then in it came again.
The threat made him more furious yet. He slashed as if he would kill the air itself. He became part of the vortex of blood. Every blow was lethal. The death fountains of his enemies anointed him with victory and survival.
He saw no faces, only prey. Only shapes to be torn apart. Only skulls to be severed from their necks.
But then one spoke to him. One word, in the moment before the slavering Skullthief made the killing stroke. One word, in a voice so familiar, so in tune with his thoughts, that he had come to think of it almost as his own.
‘Lord–’ said Skull. Then Mir killed him.
He paused, suspended in his blood haze. He stared at the severed head of the blood warrior. Pale blue eyes in pale blue skin looked back at him with the final glimmers of life, and in them Mir saw not rage, but betrayal and grief.
What happened could not be helped. Only Mir could survive this war. Only Mir could be Archaon’s champion.
But this was Skull, who in all the warband had displayed a loyalty that went beyond an alliance of convenience. A loyalty that Mir now recognized, too late, as the last thing of value, the last thing unconsumed by wrath, that he would ever know.
He was vaguely aware of replacing Skullthief on his belt and picking up the head. Then he fell into the crimson fire once more, and there was nothing else. He killed and he killed and he killed. He was incoherent with rage and self-loathing. The world fell into ruin. All was storm. All was chaos. All was blood.
No longer for the Blood God. Blood for himself.
Killing and killing and killing.
Blood and blood and blood.
And…
And then Bule was alone. Alone against the being of wrath.
The storm raged on. Flame and pestilence whirled around him. The earth on which he stood shifted from loam to bone to blood to rock to all and none. There were bodies everywhere, rotting, burning and being devoured by the shifting land. The horizons had vanished. He and the Bloodbound champion faced each other in the midst of the collapse of all form.
The exalted deathbringer stood with an axe in one hand and a skull in the other. The head had been used as a weapon, and was a batt
ered, smashed relic, but Bule could see it had been one of the Bloodbound, not a Rotbringer. The deathbringer looked at the skull with his head cocked, almost with regret.
How many of his own Rotbringers had Bule killed? He did not know. The answer did not matter. What mattered was the fulfilment of destiny. What mattered was to ascend to Archaon’s side as a warrior of the Varanguard.
His mind cleared of battle frenzy. He braced himself for the charge of the deathbringer. Bule was no match for his speed. This warrior was faster and more powerful than Fistula. Bule could not evade. He would not get the first blow in, but he would, with the Plaguefather’s blessing, get the last.
Against the quick, he had always used his great bulk. He won by being the hardest to kill.
The deathbringer dropped the skull and seized his other axe. He turned his maddened eyes to Bule and rushed in. He was a thing of crimson hate. His blades howled with him.
Bule braced for the impact. He stood with all the strength of a warrior for Grandfather Nurgle. He knew the fevers and the bodily erosion of a legion of diseases. They made him strong, for Nurgle valued the great resilience of life, and its ability to decay into ever more bounty, ever more life. Bule gathered the great endurance gifted to him by the Plaguefather. He would let fury spend itself against the bulwark of illness.
The deathbringer hit. He stabbed the axes low. He plunged both blades deep into Bule’s exposed belly.
It was exposed because it was a trap. Bule’s organs had long ago ceased to function in any mortal fashion. They were reservoirs of disease. His body was the carrier of pestilence. He was beyond the reach of ordinary weapons, no matter where they stabbed him. Time and again, foes had plunged their blades into his festering mass only to find their weapons stuck, and themselves left open to his counterblow.
This time was different. Wrath itself was upon him, with speed and fury and the frenzy of boiling blood. The deathbringer’s axes had their own will. They were a higher order of death-dealer. They went too deep. They burned too profoundly. They severed something too important.
Bule felt himself come undone. The strength went out of his legs. He lost feeling in the lower half of his body. His knees must have buckled because he was sinking toward the ground, drawing the wounds even wider. The exalted deathbringer’s face twisted into an expression of hate-filled triumph. The weakness spread up Bule’s arms. He dropped his axe.
He had lost without landing a single blow.
No, he thought. Not like this. I will not fail you, Grandfather. I am still your gardener.
He held on to the most fundamental fact of his being. Death was coming to Bule, but Bule was just a name. He was a lord of plagues. To the end, this was his truth, and so he took all that he was, all the vast strengths bestowed upon him by Nurgle, the power that was more important than his axe, more important even than endurance, the essence that shaped his physical form into a poor mirror of its full reality. He became infection. As he fell, he reached out for the wounds on the Bloodbound champion’s body. His arms were weak. His blow was glancing.
But infection needed only the slightest touch to take root. All it needed was a point of ingress. All it needed was blood.
Bule found the other champion’s blood. And with the totality of his being, with the pure transmission of disease, he stole this blood from the Blood God.
The land became quiet. Fire, rot and bones became simple stone again. The empty wastes of the arena returned. The crows flew off, vanishing against the dark of the sky. The Rotbringer fell at Mir’s feet. He spasmed and twitched, still alive but fading quickly. There was no need to strike again. Even so, Mir prepared to mark his triumph with the decapitation of his foe.
He tried to raise his arms.
He could not.
He staggered back from the body. Something crawled over his flesh and through his veins. He shook so hard that he lost control of his limbs. His lungs could not draw air. He was suffocating. His gasp was the sound of iron dragged across stone.
Mir wheeled away from the Rotbringer. The stairs of the arena seemed leagues away. But Archaon stood on the end of the rock spur once more. The Everchosen waited for his champion to climb up and claim his prize. Mir would climb.
Except he was on all fours. The tremors had him in their jaws. Cold and fever hit him in waves. Thick, bloody mucus poured from his nose and mouth. He crawled toward the stairs. They were too far, too far. Behind him, he heard the Rotbringer drag his carcass forward with slow, pitiful scrapes.
Mir gasped. Everchosen, he thought. The victory is mine. Free me of this pestilence. Induct me into the Varanguard. Heal me, he thought. Let me live.
‘The final blow was mine,’ said the Rotbringer, his words barely audible. ‘Let me serve.’
Mir collapsed onto his stomach, racked by coughs. There was nothing either of them could do. Archaon knew who the victor was. He would raise that warrior up and save him.
Archaon’s laughter rumbled across the arena. ‘And thus do both exact judgement. Well done. On this day I witnessed more than a struggle between wrath and pestilence. You presented me with the contest between survival and fealty. It was instructive. And, for both of you, futile. I chose my champion before your arrival.’
No, Mir thought. His anger flared, but it could do nothing for him now. He watched Archaon walk away and out of his sight. Darkness fell over his eyes. In his last moments, he regarded the monstrosity of his years, and he recognized the fitting pointlessness of his end.
He thought he heard the laughter of crows.
The Many-Eyed Servant watched Mir and Bule die. And then it was done. He had witnessed every moment of the contest across the realms. He had looked through the eyes of insects and crows, and he had seen all there was to see. The compound tableau of vision was complete.
Except it wasn’t. There were gaps. He had not seen through the eyes of the combatants themselves. Their thoughts were closed to him. So were Archaon’s.
The Everchosen stopped up beside the sorcerer. ‘More eyes, Gaunt Summoner,’ Archaon said, in answer to an unasked question. ‘I always need more eyes.’ He gestured to the corpses below. ‘They were blind. My champion is not. And it is time he assumed his duties. Return us to my fortress.’
‘My lord,’ said the Many-Eyed Servant. He moved his arms in eldritch signs. Mystic energies gathered around him and Archaon. They grew into a great pillar of fire. It rose to the heavens. And with a clap of implosive thunder, the cold arena vanished.
‘Rise.’
Orphaeo Zuvius stood. He knew he was in the throne room. He was conscious of his body. It was healed, it was strong, and yet it retained a wound. His sight was odd. It was off-centre. He raised his fingers. He moved them toward his eyes, and when he did, his vision turned and he saw his own face from the perspective of his shoulder.
He was looking through Mallofax’s eyes.
The blue daemon bird watched what Orphaeo needed him to see. A blue jewel sat in Orphaeo’s right eye socket. A pink one occupied the left.
Orphaeo tilted his head back, and Mallofax looked up at Archaon. ‘Why have you spared me?’ Orphaeo asked.
‘Spared you? I have made you my champion. And why? Because you have vision. Because you think to look and see where others race to pointless combat and die. You sought me here, not on the battlefield. For your trespass, I have punished you. For your vision, I have blessed you.’
‘But you have stolen my sight.’
‘Have I? Look further.’
Through Mallofax’s eyes, Orphaeo examined his face again. He considered the jewels. Their facets. So many planes and angles. So many perspectives.
Of course.
With understanding came more sight. He saw as Mallofax, and he saw as the warriors under his command. He was in the fortress. He was outside its walls.
He was everywhere he would send his forces.
<
br /> All the facets of the battlefield would be his.
‘Do you see?’ Archaon asked.
‘I do, Everchosen. Oh, I do.’
‘Then it is time to go to work, champion. I have wars for you to witness and to shape.’
See No Evil
The searing gaze of the Many-Eyed Servant travelled far. Nothing was beyond his regard. He could see an entire people put to the blade and moments later the cavernous emptiness in the heart of the man who had ordered such an atrocity. He saw what the Everchosen could not see, and went where the Everchosen could not be.
Archaon exercised his omnipotence through the black-hearted loyalty of those who were pledged to the Chaos gods. The realms were nothing without the mortal souls infesting them, and souls could be corrupted, bought and bartered. Those wretches already lost to the myriad corruptions of existence found deeper damnation in Archaon’s fell ranks.
The Many-Eyed Servant peered through the storm of a land long sundered. A place the Everchosen’s armies had conquered an age before. A haunted corner of the realms, empty of the people who had existed there – for either they had been assimilated into Archaon’s conquering hordes, or their skulls now made up the bonemeal beaches of the shoreline.
The Many-Eyed Servant’s gaze had passed across this dead place before. There he had seen something that he knew would anger his master and shake the realms with his fury. What the Gaunt Summoner saw was a land retaken by an enemy force. For now the darkness of these craggy fortifications had been scalded away by columns of lightning reaching down from the heavens. From these blazing conduits came the Stormcast Eternals. The God-King’s weapons of war. Sigmar had been busy and so had the forges of the Celestial Realm, crafting immaculate plate, weaponry and souls to wield them.
The Stormcast Eternals appeared on a dead peninsula called Cape Desolation. They took the fortresses lining the hellish coast without raising a weapon, and had clear plans to expand their invasion. They would bring freedom to the people of the darkness beyond the peninsula – the Shatterlands – which the Everchosen had held in his crushing grip for a thousand years.
Age of Sigmar: Call of Archaon Page 22
