by Darius Hinks
The daemon shook his head and laughed at his own sentimentality. He was far too kind-hearted for his own good. He scooped up an armful of daemons and crushed them to his porridge-like chest, eliciting a mixture of screams, giggles and popping sounds.
After cradling his slimy children for a while, Alkhor remembered that he had work to do and lifted his sword for another strike. As he peered through the hole, however, something made him pause. The garden of Nurgle was swarming with life as daemons flooded towards reality: bloated, loping things with pallid, pockmarked flesh, pouring from the fungal groves. All was as he had been promised, and yet there was something he had not foreseen.
Some of the daemons were being diverted as they pranced and skipped through the garden. He could see, far in the distance, lines of daemons turning away from him and heading back to face something he could not see. He pulled the tear a little wider and jammed his head through, peering into the other realm. The daemons continued clambering into the real world, squeezing over his shoulders and round his head. Alkhor could see nothing for the mass of daemon flesh, so he sighed and heaved his entire body through the hole, widening it considerably in the process.
As soon as he entered the Realm of Chaos he felt a wave of power flood through his limbs. The very air was magic and he felt his skin rippling and tingling in response to it as he moved. He paused to savour the sensation, realising that this was a glimpse of what lay in store for him. Once the Lord of Decay had taken ownership of his flesh, he had no doubt that he would feel this powerful all the time. But for now, he knew he must not be swayed. Power in the immortal realms was a given; it was the mortal realm that mattered now.
He waded through the crowds of giggling daemons, using his bulk to barge through the parade of leering faces. He was still unable to see clearly so he scoured the landscape for a vantage point. A few hundred feet away was a vast, rotten carcass. It was large enough to be the foot of a mountain and far too decayed for Alkhor to recognise its original shape. There were holes in its lime-green hide though, that revealed a gleaming ribcage that would make a perfect stair.
‘That will do us,’ Alkhor muttered cheerfully, waddling over to the enormous corpse. As he got closer, Alkhor saw that the carcass had been hollowed out and occupied by enormous grubs. They were hundreds of feet long, with greyish, ridged flesh and flat, humanoid faces. As Alkhor dragged his sagging flesh up the ribcage, the worms pushed their faces between the gaps and laughed at him.
‘Time is running out,’ sang one of them. Its eyes were white, featureless orbs, but they followed Alkhor’s every movement. It had the piping, high-pitched voice of a child and spoke in a sing-song, nursery rhyme. ‘You tarried, dallied and shilly-shallied and now your time is up.’
Alkhor smiled at the worm as he climbed. ‘What do you mean, my musical friend?’
‘Working work and workedy work has made you dull, but your wife is shining bright. She has been seeeeeeen.’ The worms coiled and snaked around each other and began laughing. ‘Seeeen.’
‘Be quick!’ giggled the worm. ‘Quick as you can! Nooo time to play! Your wife has been talking. The others are coming!’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Alkhor, still smiling.
‘Your garden is soooo pretty,’ sang the worm. ‘Be quick, be quick, be quick, or the others will take their pick.’
‘The others? Who do you mean? Who, may I ask, has my queen been talking to?’
The worms coiled away, laughing nervously, and Alkhor continued climbing. When he reached the top of the corpse, he could not help but smile. The host rushing towards his portal was like an ocean of fantastical beings, all jeering and singing with delight as they hurried past. The whole shifting landscape was alive with movement as daemonkind saw their chance to broaden the boundaries of their realm.
Then Alkhor recalled what he had seen earlier and looked to the rear of the vast crowd. In the distance, on the horizon, there were columns of yellow smoke, reaching up across a violet sky. The magic-charged atmosphere allowed him to see miles into the distance and his panic grew. There was a triangle of crimson, slicing into the pallid, colourless ranks of his fellow daemons. He shuffled across the ridges of the spine he was standing on and stared at the red figures.
‘I see,’ he said quietly.
The crimson figures were usurpers – the bloody hounds of Khorne. They had sniffed victory on the winds of magic and come to claim it as their own.
‘Be quick, quick, you must be quick!’ trilled a worm with the face of a fat man.
‘Quick,’ muttered Alkhor. ‘Oh, yes. Speed is the key.’
He flapped his pathetic little wings and launched himself from the back of the corpse. To his delight, the air was so thick with magic that he was able to glide over the heads of the daemons, flying back towards the hole. Upon reaching it, he hacked left and right with his rusty sword and barged his way back to reality.
‘More!’ he bellowed, landing at the confluence of the rivers and wrenching open his chest. The garden shook at the sound of his booming, gravelly voice. There was no longer any trace of humour in his words. ‘Give me more!’
Chapter Twenty
Darkness lingered over Còlgarran Pass. The barren plains around Alkhor’s watchtower were mired in shadows and death. The asrai cavalry had succeeded in sundering the daemon army and the foot soldiers had pushed south down the slope, killing so many of the cyclopean horrors that they were almost at the entrance to the gulley. The fly queen was still locked in a fruitless duel with her prey. Ariel’s scarred servant was still riding his warhawk over the battlefield. The pair of them swooped over the fighting, clashing and parting and then clashing again.
The nobleman was now wielding an emerald sword, dealing out vicious, graceful blows each time they engaged and the fly queen lashed out repeatedly with a grim array of barbed limbs.
Above them was the cause of the darkness – a boiling ceiling of flies, fumes and crows, hanging low over the battlefield and leaving only the unnatural glare of mage-fire to illuminate the bloodshed.
The fly queen screamed again as she launched herself at her glowering prey. Her brain was being crushed by rage. She could not seem to kill the wretch who was tormenting her and, for every second she spent in this fruitless duel, her army grew more scattered and divided. There were countless hundreds of the horned, bandy-legged oafs. More of them were pouring from Alkhor’s garden all the time, clutching their swords and ledgers and clanging their atonal bells. If she could just take a moment to lead them, the asrai would be destroyed but… Her mind was clouded by fury again as the graceful shape of the warhawk slipped past her.
The part of the fly queen’s mind that was still Ordaana could not distinguish this figure from Ariel herself and the thought that she could destroy him was intoxicating.
Finally, she realised that she would have to share the kill. Anything was better than allowing the noble to live. She screeched a command and summoned the surprise she had meant to reveal if the asrai army reached the watchtower.
The blue lobes of the tower quivered and hundreds of shapes burst from its windows. The asrai faltered as they saw what was hurtling through the air towards them – hundreds of daemon-flies with giggling, daemonic riders. The giant insects did not join the battle, but answered their queen’s call. They poured from the tower and headed straight for the warhawk.
Exhausted, the fly queen finally glided away from her opponent, leaving the way clear for her subjects to strike.
The daemon-flies hurtled over the heads of the embattled warriors and were minutes away from their prey when the fly queen saw that he was making no attempt to flee. The noble was just hovering over the battle on his hawk, still wearing that same stern scowl.
As the daemon-flies approached him, half a dozen figures drifted up from the asrai ranks. The fly queen realised with a stab of panic that they were sorcerers. They had been biding their time, waiting for this moment to reveal themselves. Even now, without a single tree to hide be
hind, the nobles were playing their devious games. Ordaana watched in horror as a tall, hawk-nosed noble, draped in white bearskin, lifted a curved sword and summoned shapes from the earth. The other sorcerers followed suit and the fly queen saw that the objects were writhing, magic-charged cages – spheres of knotted root that rolled and shimmered as they rose into the air.
The banks of daemon-flies reached the sorcerers at such a speed that their riders had no time to register the wall of spheres that had suddenly appeared in front of them.
The fly queen watched helplessly as the balls of root enveloped the daemon-flies and crushed them, showering the battlefield with blood and broken wings.
The fly queen’s rage finally overcame her and she fell, howling from the sky. As she crashed, painfully to the ground, her thoughts were jarred into something more coherent. As she lay there, surrounded by the scrum of panicked daemons and watching the massacre taking place overhead, she recalled, with absolute clarity, the day Ariel banished her from her court and sent her on the path to ruin. The memory was so vivid, so painful, that it seemed to have been shone into her mind.
You fool, she thought, seeing how close she had come to throwing everything away. The asrai were playing games with her. They knew they were hopelessly outnumbered so the noble on the warhawk had kept her distracted while her army floundered, leaderless.
She shook her head and laughed. The fall had saved her. She knew, now, what she must do.
The fly queen launched herself into the air and flew away from the asrai sorcerers, leaving the daemon-flies to their gruesome end. She darted in and out of the battle lines, screaming orders at the rearguard of the army, driving them forwards and steering all of them in the same direction. They responded like automatons, lurching forwards with such purpose that the ground shook a second time. Still the fly queen did not rest. She ignored her enemy and continued haranguing her own army until every one of them was marching forwards. They turned their backs on the asrai cavalry, ignored the sorcerers drifting overhead and flooded across the plain in their thousands.
It was a massacre. The fly queen wheezed with pleasure as the full weight of her army smashed home.
The lines of asrai spearmen collapsed and hundreds of them died within minutes of the fly queen’s order.
She rose to face the sorcerers, exultant, and to her delight, she saw that the warhawk was nowhere to be seen.
The spellweavers turned their magic on the daemons below, summoning tendrils and roots and hurling columns of emerald fire, but it was no use; the daemon army was unstoppable.
Chapter Twenty-One
‘Do not speak until I say,’ said the child in the autumn leaves. The spirit looked around the rotten clearing, clearly anxious. ‘They will not like it that I have brought you into our home. We have been tricked and lied to so many times.’
Clara was standing at the edge of a brackish, fly-hazed pool and, as she studied the water, her heart sank. ‘Do we really have to go in there?’
The spirit twitched and spat, suddenly furious, clapping its hands against its golden locks and spinning around in the mud. ‘Yes!’ it cried. ‘You said! You said you wanted Zephyr to make you human again. This is the way.’ It jabbed a glinting, leaf-shrouded finger at the pool. ‘The only way!’
Clara shook her head. All the disease and mutation that she had seen across the forest seemed to be concentrated in this one stagnant puddle. What good could possibly come from entering it? She patted down her filthy, mud-splattered furs and robes. For the moment, at least, she seemed to be vaguely in control of her own body. She had no doubt that her eyes were still the same freakish, bestial monstrosities she had seen on the heath, but at least she had arms and legs again. She reached up and realised to her delight that her snake-bone necklace was still hanging around her neck. ‘What do I do?’ she whispered to the bones.
As always, she felt as though the bones were guiding her. It was the bones that had set her on the path to greatness, all those years earlier in Altdorf. She had never shared her secret with the rest of the Amber Brotherhood, but it was the snake bones that had given her the animal sight that had so impressed them. Even here, in the madness of the forest, the bones gave her a sign – a sudden itch on the side of her cranium. Her other hand moved up, as though controlled by an external source, and touched the wound on the side of her head. There was no mistaking it – her skull was sprouting a horn. The message was clear.
‘I’m already half damned,’ she muttered. ‘So I have nothing to lose.’
Zephyr nodded eagerly as Clara stepped into the water and sank into its clinging, oily depths.
She closed her eyes and, when she opened them again, she was shocked to find herself not in water, but standing at the foot of a long, dark tunnel of trees. The trees were venerable, mossy giants, free of the gaudy mutations she had grown used to. They had formed an arched walkway along a narrow, gloomy path of soft, springy turf. Clara had seen so many strange things since entering the forest that, after the briefest of hesitations, she began walking down the path.
There was an archway of sunlight at the far end of the tunnel and, as Clara approached it, she saw that it was the silhouette of a magnificent stag. It was the size of a stallion and its head was held aloft with all the dignity of royalty.
Clara’s pulse raced as she recognised the beast that had originally lured her into the forest. She was sure that, if the stag had not filled her with its strange, invigorating light, she would never have undergone the bizarre changes that had been plaguing her ever since.
The stag began trotting towards her.
‘No!’ she cried. ‘Let me go!’
Clara turned and fled, hearing the stag’s hooves pounding towards her down the path.
She burst from the surface of the water and found herself back in the glade, only, it was changed.
The pool was far larger than before. It had become a huge lake. No, she realised, the lake was no larger, she had become smaller. As her reflection looked back at her, she saw that she was a tiny, lime-green frog, powering itself through the water. She laughed at this latest absurdity.
Then she noticed that there were other changes. The grove of linden trees had returned to health. The decay had vanished. The trees looked down proudly over a lawn of grass and wildflowers. It was dusk and Clara struggled to see clearly, but she sensed that there were more shadows than trees – and the shadows were oddly mobile, rushing and swooping across the grass, despite the lack of breeze.
The water next to Clara bubbled and revealed the glum, shimmering face of a trout.
‘Wait until I give the word,’ it said, and Clara recognised the voice of Zephyr.
She could do nothing but laugh, but the fish seemed satisfied with this and disappeared back beneath the water.
Again, Clara’s spells had served her well. Despite the lunacy of her situation and her fear at seeing the stag, she had managed to protect a fragment of her consciousness. She knew, despite everything that had happened, who she was and why she was there. They can save me, she thought, kicking her long, amphibian legs and heading towards the moving shadows.
As she approached the water’s edge, she saw them a little clearer. Zephyr was there, and no longer a trout, whirling back and forth in his coat of spinning leaves. As he moved the gold of his leaves flashed light on some of the other shapes, lifting them briefly from the darkness. There was a strange menagerie gathered by the pool. Clara made out the faces of wolves, bears and other wild beasts, but they did not seem to be physical beings. They shimmered and drifted, refusing to reveal themselves. As she reached the edge of the pool, she saw even stranger shapes. Some were so vast that Zephyr’s light only revealed a giant talon or a ragged claw. Her hope grew as she saw what seemed to be a human mage or priest. He was shuffling between the other shadows, dressed in a hooded robe and leaning on a staff. Perhaps he was another wanderer from the Amber Hills? He might be someone like her. She might even know him. Then Zephyr passed in front o
f him and Clara struggled not to scream. The priest’s face was a mass of pale serpents, twisting and looping inside his deep hood.
Zephyr was trying to get the attention of the other spirits, but they were all ignoring him.
Clara hopped onto the grass and shuffled slowly closer, remembering Zephyr’s warning that she would not be welcome.
As she approached them, Clara realised that she could understand their words. This seemed stranger, somehow, than her transformation. It was not as though she had gained the ability to speak an unknown language. It was more like they were speaking a language she had always known.
‘This is not the only forest,’ said a hulking, toad-like thing, so hidden in shadow that Clara could only see its silhouette.
‘It is the only one we understand,’ said another voice. Clara turned to see a white wolf. It was the complete opposite of Zephyr. Where the golden youth was spinning around in a manic attempt to get the others’ attention, the wolf was sitting motionless at the foot of the linden trees, serene and aloof. ‘What purpose would we have anywhere else?’
‘What purpose do we have here?’ demanded another spirit. Clara saw that it was a huge eagle, with four wings. As it spoke, flames shimmered across its feathers, revealing a white spear, buried deep in its chest.
The others seemed to find this argument convincing. Several of them lowered their heads and none seemed willing to speak for a moment.
Clara sensed that there was an air of dejection and defeat hanging over them. She wondered how willing such miserable beings would be to help her and hopped through the grass, looking for Zephyr.
The golden youth was about to speak up when the flaming eagle continued. ‘Without the stag the forest has no soul. It is just a collection of trees. Whatever happens now, we are set adrift. We are nothing. We have nothing.’
