Below Celestine, the lands rolled past in an ever-shifting morass. Some were so otherworldly and ethereal that her senses could barely perceive them. Others were all too tangible. She soared over a glimmering shore whose sands were formed from minute gemstones. Ragged things staggered through the glittering beauty, humanoid figures that sifted listlessly through an impossible fortune with callused hands and cried up to her.
‘A bite of food, my lady, just a bite!’ wailed one.
‘Water, please, water,’ gasped another, yet soon enough their desperate avarice dragged their eyes back to the riches at their feet. Celestine felt sorrow and pity mingle with disgust and flew on, for she knew she could not help these wretches.
Beyond the gemstone shores came an ocean not of water but of flowing energy that shimmered and pulsed through kaleidoscopic colours beyond her ability to name. The longer that she flew above that hypnotic ocean, the more its colours captivated her. There seemed some deeper meaning to the patterns of light and shadow that she could discern if she could only just…
Celestine realised with a start that she had flown so low she was almost touching the ocean’s surface. She banked up and away with a cry of alarm, in time to see something huge shifting below the waves. An eye the size of a building glared up at her then was gone, but its look of frustrated hunger stayed with Celestine long after the monster itself had vanished.
Next came a shattered land of deep canyons and craggy islands that floated around one another like untethered clouds. Chains hung from beneath those rootless isles, ending in cages that each contained a slumped and hopeless figure. The moans of the legion of wretches rose to Celestine’s ears, but she looked away, for she knew somehow that these souls were far beyond her aid. Atop each island rose a tower of black marble and pale bone, each supporting crackling orbs of fire that leapt and spat furiously as terrible creatures capered around them and waved long, black blades.
So it went on. She passed over a revolting swamp of bubbling fluids and effluvia in which writhed maggots the size of tanks. She flew high above a castle of crystal and vellum that sprawled for miles upon miles and teemed with garishly coloured creatures that leapt and screamed. A plain of swivelling eyes, a torrential river of screaming souls, a great empty blackness that radiated the most dreadful sense of sorrow, all passed below her.
Always, Celestine felt the candle’s warmth upon her cheek. Always she sensed more than saw the light glimmering just beyond the horizon, and as she pressed on she steeled herself to the terrible sights. None of it would distract her from her purpose. None of it would prevent her from finding the answers she sought.
‘How long have I flown?’ Celestine wondered aloud. Time felt fluid and strange, and she realised that she could not say whether she had been airborne for hours, days, perhaps even weeks.
Still she felt no hunger or thirst, and that thought disturbed her in and of itself. At least, she realised, she was beginning to feel the drag of tiredness upon her limbs. Yet though the sensation was somehow reassuring in its physicality, it was also problematic.
‘I cannot imagine finding refuge in this terrible place,’ she murmured to herself. Since the mountain’s slopes, Celestine had not run afoul of any of the denizens of this realm, but she doubted that such good fortune would last forever. Still, knowing that sooner or later she would have to rest, she cast a dubious eye below her for some safe eyrie or sheltered nook within which she might take rest.
She soared over a region of infernal volcanic chasms, hellfires burning in their depths and black ash carpeting the lands about them. Yet as Celestine looked down upon the merciless realm it transformed before her eyes. As though her scrutiny had summoned it, Celestine found herself flying above a city.
Streets and buildings marched away in all directions as far as the eye could see. The buildings were looming, their architecture gothic, encrusted with grim statuary. Bleak factories and towering spires pressed close against mouldering tenement stacks and forbidding fortresses and sprawling industrial plants. Streets and roadways wound through the sprawl, so deep and shadowed that they resembled ravines between forbidding mountain crags.
The place was deserted, as far as Celestine could see, and looked as though it had been for many long years. The buildings leant against one another like drunkards, their glassaic windows hollow and shattered, their fascias crumbling in disrepair. A howling wind blew through empty doorways and sent dust storms dancing along empty streets. Somewhere a bell tolled, mournful and sporadic as though caught by the callous breeze.
Celestine realised that night-black clouds boiled overhead, thick and viscous as oil. From them fell flurries of what she first took to be snow, until the flakes touched her skin and stung her with their heat. Celestine hissed through her teeth and wiped one finger against her cheek. It came away smeared with darkness.
‘Ashes,’ she said. ‘Or something worse. And hot enough to burn.’
The clouds were settling lower now, and the rain of hot ash fell thicker from them. Celestine realised that to remain aloft amidst such conditions would be dangerous. The hollow buildings below represented the best chance for shelter that she was likely to see.
As she flew lower, a sense of brooding malevolence reached up to caress her nerves and cause the hairs to rise on the back of her neck. Celestine felt a dreadful malice radiating up from the dark streets, a watchfulness and threat that belied their empty appearance.
‘No, not down there,’ she said, mindful of the swirling ashes now filling the skies. ‘I will seek shelter amongst the higher places.’
Soon enough she saw a tall tower block that loomed into the sky, its flanks shattered by cracks. Tilting her wings, she swept lower, soaring in even as the first stinging flakes of ash kissed her flesh. The holes in the building’s sides looked ancient, and the darkness inside it was sepulchral.
‘But it’s shelter,’ she said. Celestine swooped in through the nearest rent and alighted amidst the shadows.
She prowled through the darkness with her sword held double-handed in front of her. Old boards creaked beneath her tread, and the hum of her armour’s power pack sounded loud amidst the silence. Insectile things squirmed through dark corners, and though she was far from squeamish something about their half-seen shapes made Celestine’s flesh crawl. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she realised she was in some sort of dwelling, but one that had not seen occupancy in a long, long time. Items of meagre furniture were scattered about, old chairs whose stuffing was escaping, and tables canted at strange angles on warped legs. Everything had a patina of grime and a feeling of decay and, the harder she stared, the more wrong it looked. Chair legs blended into floorboards like melting tallow. The room seemed to shift and settle subtly just beyond her peripheral vision, as though it were trying to close in around Celestine whenever her back was turned. A lopsided shelf bore pict frames, but every one was cracked and blackened as though by fire; whatever images they had once displayed were lost, and Celestine dragged her gaze away as the dark smudges that remained swam before her eyes.
On one wall was hung an eagle symbol, two headed and spread-winged. In such a small room, the large decoration seemed dominant to the point of incongruity, but Celestine sensed that there was something subtly wrong with it too. The shape of the symbol looked off to her, too jagged and twisted, its eyes cruel and its beaks open in idiocy or hunger. Perhaps both. Disquiet swelled in her heart at the sight of this bastardised symbol, and she sensed a cruel malice lurking behind the entire scene.
Celestine shook her head and moved on, keen to be out of the suddenly claustrophobic room, with its yellow-stained walls and its deep shadows. To remain felt like leaving her head poised between the yawning jaws of some monstrous thing and trusting they would not snap suddenly shut. She walked on into a hallway that tilted at a drunken angle, its floorboards split and ruptured upwards. Celestine picked her way down the hallway and into ano
ther room, this time some sort of communal washroom. She stopped at the sight of old blood smearing the tiles of the walls and floor, its source concealed within one of the wash-stalls towards the darkened rear of the room. Something dripped, slow and irregular, and as her eyes adjusted to the darkness she saw tendrils of some organic matter spread across the tiles. Their pale tips quested like blind worms, turning mindlessly in her direction and swaying as though scenting the air. Revolted, Celestine backed out and left the secrets of that noisome place undisturbed. Still she cast glances behind her until its door was out of sight, in case something should emerge from the unseen darkness.
She hastened on, the floor creaking beneath her, and passed swiftly through a succession of rooms each more oppressive and mournful than the last. Small family shrines lay toppled and abandoned or smeared with foul substances long dried to a black crust. The echoes of lives lay overturned and rotting, many broken as though hurled about and trampled. Somehow, the rooms where everything was almost intact, almost in place, were worse. They made Celestine feel unutterably sad, and her disquiet grew with each chamber, as though danger grew nearer by the moment.
She stopped in another shadowy corridor, listening carefully for any signs of movement. By this time, Celestine’s heart was thudding, and her senses were screaming of something predatory and terrible stalking her through the ruins. Though the city had looked empty, Celestine’s instincts were ever more insistent that it wasn’t so.
‘I’ll find no rest here,’ she murmured. ‘Only death.’ She cocked her head, frowning, listening hard. A sound came to her, a distant fragment too vague to place yet somehow familiar. Celestine considered dismissing it as just another artefact of this strange place, but then it came to her again, a little more distinct. A voice, warped by echoes and muffled by distance, but unmistakably a human voice. Female. Shouting.
‘No, not just shouting,’ she breathed. ‘Praying.’ Moved by a sudden sense of urgency, Celestine set off through the ruined building to seek the source of the sound.
A few minutes of hurried passage through the ruin brought her to another ragged wound in its flank. She edged carefully into the room, half of which had simply torn away from the building’s core like a rotten tooth parting company with a gum. Buckled floorboards jutted out over a drop filled with tangled rebar and mouldering rubble. Beyond, the gloomy cityscape was revealed again, now blanketed by a steady fall of hot ashes.
Celestine stopped, balanced upon a jutting outcrop of boards and peering at the buildings half-visible through the ash fall. She barely dared breathe as she listened hard for the sound to recur.
There. Her head snapped round and she peered down from her vantage point at the street below. Light flared suddenly, hot and fiery amidst the drab greys of the city. It was there and gone in a heartbeat, but it left an impression seared into Celestine’s vision. She was sure she had seen something moving in the firelight, a figure darting from one building to the next at ground level.
A voice floated up to her. Its words were echoes, but its tone was unmistakable. Celestine heard anger there, and fervour, and hate. It was a tone of righteous revulsion for something unclean, and it struck a sympathetic chord in her.
Celestine launched herself out into the ash fall, glad of the armour that protected most of her body from its searing heat. She looped down, a quick dive that she ended by tucking in her wings, shielding her face with her arms, and smashing through the remains of a broken window. Celestine rolled to a stop, finding herself crouched on a rusting gantry several levels above a derelict factory floor. Machinery, pipes and conveyors were everywhere, all of them thick with rust and verdigris. They possessed an uncomfortably biological aspect, the pipes sheathed in thin skeins of veined flesh while infernal lights flickered in the bowels of the largest machines.
As she looked over the railing, Celestine saw again that flare of fiery light. This time the voice rose clear and strident, echoing up through the shadowy factory and rebounding from ancient mechanisms.
‘In the Emperor’s name I abjure thee, warp spawn. I banish thee with the holy fires of the Master of Mankind,’ it cried.
Flames flared again and, as Celestine watched, a figure dashed across the factory floor, entering from one side of the building and sprinting hard for the other. It was a woman, clad in threadbare robes. Her dark hair flowed behind her as she ran, and she held a pair of burning brands, one in each fist. Upon her back, Celestine saw a sword was sheathed, half-concealed by the woman’s flowing robes.
Celestine drew breath to call out, but then the woman’s pursuers smashed through the doors and windows and the front of the factory and spilled across the floor. There were dozens of them, hunched and gaunt with tattered bat’s wings sprouting from their shoulders. Their snouts were long and fang-filled, and as they yawned wide they let out terrible keening cries. The creatures scrambled along on gangling limbs that ended in hook-like talons, and their dark flesh was tufted with matted fur. They were singularly hideous, and Celestine knew that they meant to chase the fleeing woman down and devour her.
The woman spun, stopping between two rusting hunks of machinery. She swept her burning brands up to point at her pursuers and bellowed.
‘Emperor’s light consume you!’
Roaring tongues of flame leapt out from each brand, hungry fireballs of golden light that shot through the gloom to explode amidst the monsters. They screeched and writhed as they burned, and those not caught by the twin blasts recoiled, wings flapping frantically.
The woman turned and ran again, and almost at once the things were after her, fresh beasts spilling through the shattered factory frontage to join the pack.
Celestine set off along the overhead gantries at a run. She ignored the cables that writhed like worms as she passed, the doors yawning like toothless maws in walls that could not be reached, and leading to rooms that appeared curiously inverted and unsettling. Her footfalls clanged on old metal. Wires sang and bolts groaned at her armoured weight, and the catwalks shuddered and swayed.
Below, Celestine saw the woman running as fast as she could. The monsters were catching up to her, though, spilling over one another and uttering their keening cries as they ran their prey to ground.
Up ahead, Celestine saw a break in the walkway. She gripped the haft of her blade tight and leapt through the hole. She spun in the air as she fell, glowing wings unfurled as best she could amidst the tangled confines in an effort to slow her descent. Celestine came down like a comet, slamming into the ground between hunters and prey with enough force to crack the ferrocrete. She rose from her crouch, blade held ready, and eyed the oncoming monsters. They had barely slowed at her sudden appearance, and Celestine saw their gaze was fixed solely on the fleeing woman at her back.
‘You shall not have her, daemons,’ she spat, and as she said it the word sounded right. Daemons of the Chaos Gods. Her age-old foes. Celestine felt righteous hatred surge within her. She leapt to meet the shrieking daemonspawn with a defiant roar.
Celestine swept her blade in long arcs, hacking at the horrible things as they came at her. Her first blow opened the skull of one daemon and took the forelimbs from another. Her return swing opened another creature’s throat, then lopped the head from a fourth. Each wound vomited black ichor, stinking filth like old sump oil that sizzled as it spattered the floor.
The daemons clawed at her with their hooked talons and snapped with their fanged maws. Yet she realised, as their blows clanged from her armour and rang off her blade, that the creatures weren’t trying to kill her. They were frantic to get past her, to continue their pursuit. It was as though, in their idiot hunger, they barely registered Celestine’s presence at all.
The thought sent fresh anger and disgust surging through her, and she used it to lend greater strength to her swings. Celestine spun, hacking her blade through several daemons then using her wings to smash another into a machine with bone-crush
ing force. The last beast dropped, broken but still trying to drag itself after its prey.
For all her efforts, Celestine realised that as many daemons were spilling past her as were falling to her blade. A lucky claw-swing rang against her shoulder and buffeted her sideways. A scrambling daemon raked its claws at her face, forcing her to leap backwards with a curse.
‘Fight me, you vermin!’ she shouted. ‘Are you truly so mindless?’
It seemed the creatures were, as they flowed on after their original quarry with hungry shrieks. From somewhere far back amidst the shadows, Celestine heard the fiery brands roar again.
‘If I want to save you, I’m going to have to fight at your side,’ she said, and launched herself skywards. Celestine beat her wings and shot through the air, weaving a perilous path between jutting chunks of machinery, dangling wires and sagging conveyor belts.
Sweeping over the hunting daemons, Celestine smashed through another stained-glass window that depicted the death of a world at the hands of a blazing orb from the skies. She shot out into a shadowed street, and amidst swirling clouds of ash she saw the woman sprinting up a winding metal stair at the street’s far end.
‘Wait! I will aid you,’ shouted Celestine. The woman didn’t even glance back, instead darting around a corner at the head of the stair. The daemons flowed after her.
Celestine beat her wings and gave chase, shielding her eyes from squalls of hot ash that danced like dust-devils down the darkened street. Rounding the corner at the head of the stair, she saw the trailing tails of the woman’s robes vanishing into a tumbledown structure at the other end of an alleyway. Daemons plunged into the building’s cavernous doorway, and fire flared within it.
Celestine - Andy Clark Page 5
