Archaon: Everchosen

by Rob Sanders

  Slipping his battlehammer from his belt, the templar smashed at the cage door set in the bars. There was a brief and blinding spray of sparks. Kastner hit it again. This time the door fell off its rust-eaten hinges in a shower of flakes. The passage beyond was round and buckled, as though weight from above had contorted its structure and foundations. Dwarf-crafted bricks sat uneasily against one another, some protruding, some angled awkwardly and others pulverised under the pressure. As Altdorf had grown in importance and Sigmar’s ruling priesthood in their overconfidence, the priest passage had been largely forgotten. But Kastner hadn’t forgotten it.

  Kastner’s armoured form sank down into the swamp that percolated in the passage. The stench was horrendous. The collective feculence of the Domplatz District – gathering, stewing and creeping slowly downhill towards the river. Each step was a putrescent struggle. Each breath was a gag-stifling ordeal.

  The waste soaked through his mail and smeared his plate. With his lip set in a permanent snarl of determination, Diederick Kastner pushed on through the endless length of the tunnel.

  He encountered side-passages and turn-offs, ladders, hatches, and cage-ways but he would not be put from his purpose. Kastner thought of the sweet city air – high above, through the crumbling stone and the newer Imperial sewer networks, up through the gratings and hatch-covers. Rank in its own way but like a noblewoman’s perfume compared to the muck he had been breathing down in the tunnel.

  Besides, Kastner had a very good reason for taking the excruciating route that he had. If the Grand Theogonist had sent twenty of his finest templars out into the provinces to destroy the man Necrodomo’s words had identified as Archaon, Herald of the End Times, then Kastner could expect heightened security about the city. Kastner tried to imagine the ordeal that would be waiting for him. Altdorf’s mighty gates fortified with extra sentries and soldiers. The watch doubled. Reiklanders, armed with bills and shields, swarming the Templeplatz about the prince’s palace, forming with engineers and their cannons a veritable gauntlet along the Templestrasse. Templars – perhaps even of Kastner’s own Order – Knights of the Fiery Heart and the temple’s men-at-arms, all placed on high alert and ready to respond, should a threat manifest itself. Should a champion of Chaos called Archaon and his Ruinous allies make an attempt to push into the city. It made for a vision of hopeless futility. A vision that had driven the templar to find another way into the cathedral.

  In the face of any such threat, it was unthinkable to all that the Grand Theogonist was in any actual danger. That the city walls could be breached by a single man and so small a force. That the Imperial Army would not be a match for any single threat. Those people could afford to be confident. None of those people had read The Liber Caelestior. None but the Grand Theogonist himself, and it was no doubt on Hedrich Lutzenschlager’s unquestioned orders that the city be elevated to such a state of vigilance and security.

  As his every doomed step took Kastner closer to the cathedral, the waste got deeper, the rats swimming through it bigger and the corpses more frequent. Every so often, something rotting in the sludge would groan and reach out for him, prompting Kastner to smash in its skull with a merciful swing of his hammer. Just as he allowed himself to believe that his trek through the city’s bowels was almost over, the knight encountered an obstacle. A colossal stone ball, as tall, broad and round as the tunnel itself. Kastner leaned against the immovable object and tried to catch his breath but he couldn’t take the foul air of the sewer down far enough to make a difference without retching. The thick river of excrement was being slowly fed by a side tunnel but the ball blocked Kastner’s route to the cathedral. It was one of the technological wonders the dwarfs had built into the system. Such colossal balls were employed to prevent blockages. Rolling slowly and gently downhill, they pushed the swamp before them, out into the river at different times and intervals along the shoreline – before being winched back on hook-points inset in the ball’s surface. This one had been jammed in the collapsing dimensions of the tunnel.

  Kastner smashed at the ball with his hammer but time had not had the same effect on the ball as on the passage. It was a solid, if slime covered, ball of solid rock. The templar might as well have been pummelling a boulder on some mountainside. Resting the battlehammer by his side, the templar tried to clear his head of the rancid stench of the sewer. The side tunnel didn’t take him to where he needed to go. Climbing out of the sewers in the middle of the Templestrasse was exactly the kind of suspicious activity that would bring a company of Altdorf’s finest down on him. He stared about the rancid darkness. At the ball and the irregularity of the brickwork in the surrounding wall. Kastner grunted.

  Moving around the side of the ball, he smashed at the wall where the ball had become wedged. The bricks – even dwarf-crafted bricks – came apart under the hammer’s insistence with a great deal more forgiveness than the ball. It was hard work, but before long the knight had decimated the side of the tunnel about the huge ball. As the impacts echoed about him, up and down the passage, it dawned on Kastner that hammering might attract unwanted attention. Holding the hammer silent he listened through the blackness and fug. Even with the weapon doing its worst and shards of brick flying, the templar’s keen senses had not abandoned him. Something had shuffled up through the sludge behind him. It was broken and awkward; it groaned at the thing it sensed in the darkness but could not see.

  Kastner allowed the thing to bathe in his darkness. In the rich effluvium of the sewer, the templar couldn’t smell it but suspected that the shambler was dead. From what he could make out, half the thing’s head was missing. He began to wonder if this was one of the bodies he had already encountered in the sewer morass. It reached out for him. Batting the cadaver back against the tunnel wall, Kastner brought up his shield and sliced its rounded edge through the rotten meat of the corpse’s neck. Shearing its head off against the brick, Kastner allowed the thing to die once and for all. The body dropped and sank below the effluence.

  Reinvigorated by the kill, Kastner slid his own body around the slimy circumference of the ball. With his armour plates catching on the broken brick at his back, it was difficult to edge around the object. With a final push, Kastner tore through a section of wall. The muck that had collected beyond oozed forth, dribbling around the ball and almost swamping the knight. Once again, Kastner found himself up to his neck in the mire. The Reik had been a bath of rose petals compared to the faecal deluge beyond and the templar found it difficult to keep his footing below the surface. Every slip, slide and step was a gagging agony. There simply wasn’t enough air left in the tunnel-space above the slurp and fester.

  Then he felt it. Where his hand expected to find the rounded wall of the tunnel, he discovered a sludge-filled alcove. Wading into it, Kastner could make out the barest impression of rungs on a rusted ladder, which his mail digits confirmed moments later. Hauling himself from the suction of the muck, Kastner climbed the short distance to a metal hatch. Feeling about its edges, he found it to be unmistakably octagonal. It was the shape of the cathedral’s Great Sanctuary and the shape of the dwarf-crafted bricks used to build it. Kastner rested his crusader helm against the hatch and risked a smile. Bringing up his shield and putting his shoulder against it, the templar smashed at the metal until the long-rusted bolt locks on the other side gave way and the hatch bucked. Hooking his fingertips about the hatch, he slid its weight to one side and climbed out of the sewer.

  Effluence streamed from his armour, pooling about his boots. Within the plate his doublet and leggings were soaked through. Kastner could only imagine how he appeared – covered from helm to toe in the waste of ancients, freshly crawled from the sewer like a rat or roach. The priest passage was roughly hewn and led to a dead end, with only a crack of light giving the suggestion of a false door. After the darkness of the sewer, the sliver of golden light was almost blinding. Taking several heavy steps, Kastner smashed his boot down on ston
e, which promptly gave with a creak and toppled. Kastner blinked his way into the next chamber, his shield held up against the harshness of the light, but found only a single stubby candle, alight but almost spent.

  As his boots crossed the uneven stone floor, the templar felt suddenly weaker, as though the raw determination that had got him through the sewers had abandoned him. He stumbled to one side, reaching out for a surface, and found a skull. A human skull, amongst many. Skulls set in stone. In fact, the chamber was filled with rough stone shelves stacked high with the browning bone of skull collections and presented skeletal remains. At intervals through the chamber, full skeletons were displayed in sarcophagi – some standing upright like the one Kastner had just smashed to the ground, others on horizontal slabs. Kastner felt dizzy. It was an effort even to walk. It was as though the very stone were sapping his strength.

  The templar shook his head within his helm. He was in the ossuary – the charnel chambers below the catacombs – housing the remains of men and women who thousands of years before had pledged themselves to the cult of the God-King and the building of his holy Empire. Kastner bit at his lip. He was standing on holy ground. The stone beneath the soles of his boots – that had once filled him with such passion and devotion – now leeched his strength and plunged his heart into a deep well of dread.

  He stumbled on through the ossuary, afflicted by the consecration of his surroundings. Rough steps took him up into the labyrinthine catacombs that riddled the foundations of the cathedral and the Templeplatz beyond. Here the subterranean tombs of distinguished priests, templars and even past Grand Theogonists were to be found. The catacombs marked the passing of more recent paragons and martyrs to the Sigmarite cause. Rather than be returned to a family estate to which he didn’t belong, Kastner had hoped one day to earn his own place in the catacombs and be honoured as one of Sigmar’s worthiest servants. Now he couldn’t stand to be in the presence of such worthies. The templar slipped down to one knee at the foot of a flight of stone steps leading down into the catacombs.

  The door creaked open and Kastner was forced to retreat noisily into the shadows. The door boomed shut and he heard the scuff of sandals on the steps. A priest was descending. Kastner felt his limbs tremble, as though he suffered a fever without the symptoms. Before, the Ruinous taint had fought the devotion in the templar’s soul and the love, pure and true, that he held for his god and his calling. Something had prevailed, though for the life of him Kastner knew not what. Here in the catacombs, in the presence of a future not to be and surrounded on all sides by the holy ground of Sigmar’s cathedral, the templar felt the corruption within him fight for its existence. Kastner clenched his mail fist. Shakes turned to quakes. Quakes to a cacophony of rattling plate.

  ‘Is there someone there?’ the priest asked with an imperious sneer. ‘Present yourself. I don’t have all day.’

  Kastner heard the priest sniff the air. ‘What is that god-awful smell? What is going on down here?’ he demanded as he descended. Two steps from him, Kastner stepped out. Colour fell from the priest’s harsh features. He had expected to find a novice or a sentry to be scolded, not a hammer-wielding warrior, dressed in faecal-splattered plate. Kastner fed off the fear in the priest’s eyes. The shaking ceased. He brought up the hammer to strike the priest down. The hammer hovered above the terrified Sigmarite. But something in Kastner wouldn’t let him do it. To murder an unarmed cleric, cowering on the cathedral steps. He turned away. ‘It’s you,’ the priest said behind him. ‘The extra men-at-arms – the templars. You’re the one they’re looking for.’

  ‘And much more,’ Kastner said, whipping around with his shield and dashing the priest into the stone wall of the stairwell. He bounced and fell back onto the stairs, tumbling head over shoulders down the harsh steps. Kastner looked down on his still form. He stared for what seemed like an eternity, his face a blank mask. There was blood. There was injury but the priest breathed still. ‘Forgive me my sins, Father,’ Kastner said to the unconscious cleric, ‘but I need to compound them. I’ll be requiring your robes.’

  CHAPTER IX

  ‘And Friar Helstrum told of Sigmar – a vision to behold.

  Through the land his power, his virtues and memory extolled.

  Sigmar knelt amongst the divines and before the Winter God.

  A gold crown of immortality our Emperor did don.

  Sigmar comes to us timely, almighty and reigning supreme –

  This, the friar did attest, the God-King revealed in his sleep.’

  – Gottfried Hachenbacher,

  the Ascended Sigmar

  The Cathedral of Sigmar

  The City of Altdorf

  Tag von den leered Thron, IC 2420

  Kastner went down on his knees. This was a relief. He felt weak and unsteady. The knight certainly didn’t want to attract any attention by falling over in his plate in the all but silent sanctuary. The floor hurt to walk upon. The stained-glass shards stung his eye. The very walls of the cathedral ached devotion. Somewhere deep inside the templar, the God-King’s divinity was leeching his soul like a vampire.

  His newly liberated robes barely fit about his armour but he wasn’t the only visitor to the sanctuary bedecked as such. The colossal chamber – feeling ever more so below the vaulted dome above him – was playing host to a number of priests, Sigmarite sisters and templars of different Orders – some also dressed in armour. Sigmar was a martial god. The wearing of armour in his place of worship did not offend him. It was a form of worship and respect. While wearing plate before the God-King was not considered disrespectful, disturbing another man’s devotions was. This worked very much in Kastner’s favour. Priests at prayer kept their distance from one another, spreading out about the chamber. Some favoured the side altars, others the spectacle of the magnificent stained-glass window. Some the colossus of Sigmar himself, wrought in gold and dominating the head of the chamber. Kastner suffered quietly before the mighty statue, the God-King looking down on him in silent, aureate reproach.

  The priest’s thick robes were doing their best to soak up the filth that covered his plate and leaked from his mail. He still reeked but there was little he could do about that and he hoped to pass for an afflicted begging Sigmar for relief. It seemed to be working. Many of those at prayer were too polite to comment on the smell or unwilling to engage such an unfortunate in conversation and simply moved away. Holding his crusader helm to his chest and pulling up his hood, the templar waited. Rather than blunder past sentries in an attempt to get in to cross to the heavily guarded Sun Chapel – the Grand Theogonist’s private temple – Kastner had reckoned on waiting in the main sanctuary, confident that the Grand Theogonist would come to him. Before Kastner was the Grand Theogonist’s golden, octagonal throne – the throne from the comfort of which Hedrich Lutzenschlager would enjoy morning observances.

  The templar rocked slightly on his armoured knees. It was just him and the God-King, in the holiest place in all the Empire.

  ‘You have forsaken me,’ Kastner hissed to himself, his dry lips pronouncing each word slowly within the confines of the hood. The templar looked up at the statue’s proud features. The statue gleamed its goldenness and from the low angle, Sigmar looked like a haughty and disdainful god. ‘I have lived a devout existence. Bettered myself with study, for your good grace. Trained to my limits and served you through the sword. I have honoured you. I have loved you. I have given you everything I have. Yet you have left me lost on a path to I know not where.’

  The templar was bathed in shafts of coloured light from the stained-glass window and felt his harsh whispers rise on the heat of the morning sun.

  ‘I am no longer an instrument of your design,’ Kastner said. ‘A yardstick to measure the purity of others, a weapon for you to wield in punishment and a shield to protect your Empire from foes near and far. I am changing. I am changed. I know it. Circumstance has turned me from
my purpose, in service of others unknown. Like the warped arrow, I fly untrue, yet hit the mark. I will not be a nothing in your eyes. A dog to be put down in the street. I am not an error. An aberration. I am not history to be re-written. I am not a mistake to be corrected. Speak to me, my lord. My Emperor-of-all. My God-King. Show my heart the way. Lead me back to your light and love. I did all in service of you. Like the arrow shaft, I can be softened and straightened. Like the imperfect blade, I can be re-forged. I beg of you, my lord. Find use for me again.’

  About Kastner, priests had started to gather for the morning observance. They stood in clusters, the daily business of cult politics dominating the conversation. The templar even heard several speak of the Grand Theogonist’s mysterious orders and the extra security around the cathedral. Clusters became crowds as the numbers grew and the domed sanctuary filled with clerics standing before the colossal figure of their god. Still they gave the stinking templar a wide berth. Kastner rose to his feet. He felt sick to his stomach. His knees felt weak.