“Daemons,” muttered Leitdorf, clutching at the book at his belt.
“Volkmar can handle them,” said Helborg. Terror seemed to invest the air itself, and he was not immune from it. “Keep your mind clear. We’ll be busy with your Natassja.”
“She was never mine.”
“Enough. We’re closing.”
They reached the base of the stairs. A long vaulted passageway led directly ahead. The walls were richly decorated with sculptures, all carved with assorted scenes of creative agony. Limbs and faces were contorted across stone friezes, locked in impossible positions of excruciation. Helborg let his gaze alight on the face of a young woman. The carving was artful, despite the debauchery. Bathed in the light of Volkmar’s staff, the subject still retained a warped kind of beauty.
Her eyes flickered open.
“Help me!” she gasped, muffled by the iron clamping her lips together.
Helborg recoiled in shock, bringing his blade up in a flash. The woman struggled against her sorcerous bonds, weeping with terror and misery. All along the corridor, other eyes opened. There were still people alive in there, locked in agony.
“You can’t help them!” cried Volkmar, calling to a priest who had swung his hammer back, ready to smash them free. “They are one with the Tower. Leave them.”
The band pressed on, walking a little faster, avoiding the piteous wails from the walls, hastening to avoid the fingers that somehow managed to clutch at them as they passed.
It kept getting hotter. The roar of the bloodfire became more complete. A doorway loomed up at them from the shadows, high and ornately carved. The corruption came from within it.
As they approached, a cloaked figure burst through the doors, screaming with fury. It might have been a man once, but it had been terribly transformed. Its spine curved over, forcing it to scuttle like an insect. Its flesh was ivory-white, though the eyes were ringed with black. One hand was chronically distorted, now little more than a collection of flesh-ribbons. The other was curled tight into a fist.
“Blasphemy!” it screamed, hurling itself at Helborg.
The Marshal caught it in mid-air with the edge of the Klingerach, hurling it back against the wall. The creature hit the iron with a crack, and slid down to the floor. For a moment it looked like it might get up again.
“Blasphemy…” it croaked. Its mouth filled with purple blood and its eyes glazed over. “She will punish…”
Then it locked into a spasm, choking and gagging. Helborg advanced to finish it off, but it expired. It slumped, twisted and broken against the iron wall.
Leitdorf gazed at it with horrified recognition.
“Achendorfer,” he breathed, unable to look away from the man’s distorted features.
“Not anymore,” said Helborg grimly, resuming the march towards the doorway.
Volkmar and Leitdorf joined him. Together with the warrior priests and Reiksguard, they clustered at the portal to the chamber beyond.
Something vast was in there. The sound of a giant heart beating came from beyond the obsidian doors. The sigil of Slaanesh was engraved on each one, burning with the sweet stench of ruin. As Helborg’s eyes swept over them, pain lodged behind his eyes.
“Trust to faith,” he said for a final time.
Then he pushed the doors open, and they swung wide. Beyond was a Stone. It was massive, rearing up from the floor like a leviathan emerging from the deeps.
They entered the chamber. Helborg looked up. Natassja was there.
And then, only then, did he truly understand what had happened in Averheim.
Schwarzhelm pressed the attack, whirling the Rechtstahl round hard, knocking Grosslich back with the force of the blow. From the corner of his vision he could see his men locked in battles of their own. They couldn’t fight their way through Grosslich’s men, but neither were they being driven back in their turn. Everything hinged on the duel.
Grosslich’s armour was gouged with many rents, all inflicted by the Sword of Justice. Still he stayed on his feet. The wound in his neck had closed, and a ring of solid black blood formed a torc beneath his chin. His skills were impressive, no doubt augmented by the latent power in his sword.
It would do him no good. Schwarzhelm spun his blade at the traitor, pulling back at the last moment and flickering the tip above Grosslich’s guard. The sorcerer switched position, but too clumsily. Schwarzhelm stabbed forwards, aiming for a gaping crack in the breastplate.
The aim was good. Grosslich roared with pain a second time. He punched out with his gauntlet, aiming for Schwarzhelm’s head. The big man reared back, keeping the sword in place, then plunged it in deeper.
Grosslich’s face bloomed with blood like a translucent sac. He staggered, impaled on the sword edge. Schwarzhelm grabbed the man’s pauldron with his free hand and hauled him further up the blade.
The two of them came together, their faces only inches apart. Grosslich’s eyes went wide with shock and pain. The mutations on his face began to shrink away. The Dark Prince’s gifts were being withdrawn.
“So you have sown,” hissed Schwarzhelm, twisting the blade, feeling the holy metal sear the tainted flesh, “so shall you reap.”
Blood bubbled up in Grosslich’s mouth, hot and black. The Averland runefang fell from his grasp. For a moment, his face looked almost normal. It was the face of a mortal man, the one who had inspired a thousand peasants to march under his banner. Before Natassja had twisted those aims, they had been noble enough.
“Dominion,” he drawled, blood spilling from his lips. “Dominion…”
His eyes went glassy, and his body went limp.
Schwarzhelm wrenched the Sword of Justice free and Grosslich fell to his knees. For a heartbeat he stayed there, struggling against the inevitable. He looked up at Schwarzhelm pleadingly. The mutations around his face shrank back into nothing. He was as he had been before, a son of Averland.
There was no hesitation. Schwarzhelm drew the Rechtstahl back and swung heavily. Grosslich’s head came off in a single sweeping movement. It spun into the air and rolled across the mud, coming to rest amidst a detachment of halberdiers rushing into assault. The men trampled it into the mire, hardly noticing it amongst the horrors of the war around them. Soon it was lost, the skull cracked and smeared with blood and grime, gone amid the detritus of the battle.
The headless corpse teetered for a moment before thudding to the ground. Heinz-Mark’s rule as elector was over, ended by the man who had crowned him.
Schwarzhelm bent down and retrieved the runefang from the mire. The black slurry had stopped dripping from the blade and the steel glinted from under the crust of corruption. He wiped it clean on his cloak, then took it up in his left hand. Just as he had done on the journey from Altdorf, Schwarzhelm carried two swords, one the Sword of Justice, the other a runefang.
He turned to face the dog-soldiers already clustering around him. They weren’t daunted by the death of their commander, and the battle still surged unabated. Grosslich had never truly commanded them. He’d been a puppet to the last, a tool for the use of subtler powers.
Schwarzhelm narrowed his eyes. He could see Kraus leading the charge on his left flank. There were Imperial troops everywhere, all lost in close-packed fighting. The situation was still desperate, and Grosslich’s death hadn’t changed it.
He was about to plunge into the ranks of dog-soldiers ahead when he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. A long, leather coat, flapping in the ash-flecked wind, worn by a man who had no business being on a battlefield at all.
“The last of the family,” said Schwarzhelm to himself, filled with renewed purpose and hefting his twin blades. “I swear it now. Death will not find you this day.”
Natassja had grown. The last elements of her humanity had been shed, and she now towered ten feet above a mortal span. Her flesh was as black as jet, tinged with a faint outline of blue fire. Her eyes, still pupil-less, blazed an icy sapphire.
Her human
raiment was gone. Her flesh was clad in shifting strips of blackened silk, rippling around her and curling over the onyx skin. Her hair raged around her face like a furnace, caught up in the throbbing bloodfire as it whipped across her naked shoulders. The tattoos that had scored her skin for so long were gone, replaced by a single burning mark of Slaanesh at her breast.
Though still achingly beautiful, her features had already been twisted with mutation. Her feet were gone, replaced with cloven hooves. Her fingers ended in talons such as her handmaidens wore. They were sheer points of ebony, slender and curved. She moved impossibly quickly, as if there were no intermediate stage between her being in one location and at the next. Even when her mouth moved to speak, the pattern of her lips was eerie and unsettling. A long, lizard-like tongue flickered between glittering fangs.
Natassja now resembled the daemons that had served her, though it was she who was the greater and more steeped in corruption. For Natassja was no true-born denizen of the aethyr, but that most terrible and despised of creations, a daemon prince, a mortal ascended to the level of a demigod. She had exchanged a finite soul for an infinity of damnation, and the terms of the bargain were daunting. Her power was near-limitless, her invulnerability near-complete, her malice absolute. In exchange for that, thousands had died in terror.
Mortal weapons now had no purchase on her, death little meaning. The world of the five senses, so long her prison, was now fleshed out with a thousand shades of emotion. Her eyes were no longer bound by the trammels of matter but by the possibilities of a profound and piercing sentience. Where a mortal saw appearances, she saw realities, stretching away over a whole range of future states towards an impossible horizon. Men appeared before her as burning souls wrapped in a frail gauze, ready to be plucked out and consumed as a lesser being might select sweetmeats from a tray.
For so long, the Vision had been so beautiful. It did not compare to the reality.
Behind her, the Stone still throbbed with energy. It had been enough to complete her transformation, magnified by the Tower, called into being by the sacrifices of the humans who had died. Averheim was her altar, the stone across which the lambs had been slaughtered. Slaanesh was pleased. The Lord of Pain smiled on her now, gifting her with the merest sliver of His own consciousness. Though her flesh was real, rooted in the world like that of the lowliest creature of the earth, her soul was an inferno, a blaze of coruscation beside which those of mortals were mere candles.
“The Sword of Vengeance,” she said, recognising its pattern within the world.
Her voice was astonishing, even to her. All those who had died to bring her into being shared a part of it. Just as with the true daemons, many tongues echoed throughout her speech. Men, women and children all spoke through her, and the sound echoed from the walls like a massed chorus. As sharp as a scream, as deep and resounding as a sob, Natassja let her new vocal cords play across their full range. It delighted her. Everything delighted her.
From down below, the one called Helborg still stood defiant. He raised the blade she’d named, as if that little spike could hurt her now. Beside him, the worm who had once been her husband did likewise. There was a third man with them who mattered, a disciple of the boy-god. She could see his soul hammering at the bonds of flesh that enclosed it. He was no stranger to the realm of Chaos, that one. He’d been into it once, and come back out again. Intriguing. That shouldn’t have been possible.
“The Staff of Command,” she said, recognising its name from the profile in the aethyr. It was ancient by the standards of the Empire, paltry by the standards of her master. It was capable of causing her some pain, but little more. “You are the Grand Theogonist of the boy-god.”
She expected the man to rave at her then, to scream some screed about her being corrupted filth that would be driven from the face of the world by the righteous hosts of Sigmar.
He didn’t. He stood his ground, and a grey, stinking cloud of dirty smog flared up at the end of his miserable staff. To him, no doubt, it was as beautiful as the rising sun.
“We recognise each other, then,” Volkmar replied. His voice came from far away. Natassja had to concentrate to hear it properly over the choir of psychic voices blaring at her. The world of the daemon was strange, far richer than that of a mortal, but confusing and hard to make sense of. It would take some time to get used to. “If you claim to know me, then you know that you will not be suffered to live.”
Natassja didn’t laugh at that brand of folly. The effrontery insulted her. She knew more about him than he could have guessed. Just by watching his soul writhe in its temporal bonds, she could feel his anguish. This one knew, deep down, the futility of what he did. He’d seen the end of the world. He’d been shown it. And still he failed to seize the truth in both hands. What the mortals called faith she knew as fear. An inability to see the full picture, a reluctance to receive what was out there to be given. There was nothing laudable in that. It was pathetic. Small-minded. Timorous.
As he spoke, the images swirling across her field of vision began to make more sense. She saw the origin of the materials that surrounded her, the age of the metals and the stories behind them. Such stories were imprinted into the matter of them, scored across the face of the world and stained in time. The iron in the shaft above her had come from a mine deep under the Worlds Edge Mountains. Even now, it screamed at the perversion around it. The world itself resisted her, knowing her for what she was. The world, however, was old and tired, and she was as young and vital as a flame.
Everything had a story imprinted on it. That was the ultimate truth. There was nothing in the cosmos but stories, some given form, some just fleeting shadows. The men before her were stories, unfolding through time, weaving in and out of possibilities like carp amongst weeds.
She gazed down at Helborg again. He’d had many choices. He could have killed Schwarzhelm. She saw that possibility twisting away into a distant future. If he had done, the Empire would have split, wracked by civil war for a generation of men until the hurt could be undone. Helborg had no idea of that. He’d been motivated by pity. So touchingly weak, so endearingly stupid.
“Nothing you can do or know can harm me, priest,” she said coolly, feeling the pangs of her birth still resonating throughout her pristine body. “Coming here only hastens your second death.”
“So thought Be’lakor,” said Volkmar, his voice holding steady. His staff was beginning to bleed its dark grey sludge profusely, polluting the symphony of colours before her and ruining the glorious harmonics of the Stone. “So thought many of your kind. You don’t know as much as you think you do. I have the power to harm you.”
This was getting tedious. Concentrating on the mortals for long enough to hear their words was frustrating. There were more important, more uplifting things to devote herself to. As a mortal she’d only been able to experience sensation across four dimensions. Now there were twelve to wallow in, and wasting time in chatter was a poor way to begin her new life of wonder.
“Then put it to the test, little man,” said Natassja, looking directly at the shifting figures below her and preparing to use the powers that were curled tight within her. “Do your best to wound me. Then, when all is done, I shall introduce you to pain of such perfection that the gods themselves will weep to hear you scream.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Volkmar fed power to his staff and the tip burst into golden illumination. The nimbus filled the chamber, reflecting back from the utter dark of the Stone and banishing the shadows around the sculpted iron walls. The fury of the bloodfire roared back, swirling around the Staff of Command like a swarm of enraged hornets.
On either side of him, warrior priests surged forwards, all eager to land the first blow on the towering figure before them. With a pang of regret, Volkmar watched as the foremost were reduced to weeping, shuddering wrecks.
The daemon’s power was a subtle one. Natassja had been elegant as a mortal and daemonhood had not changed her. There were no
sudden bursts of flame or crackling discharges of aethyr-spawned lightning. Her powers were those of the mind, of sensation, of fear and pain.
The first warrior priest to get near her exploded into a ball of blood at a flick from her shapely finger. The Reiksguard at his side was next. She shot a cool glance from her smooth eyes and his armour shattered. Beneath it, his body was transmuted into a writhing, hermaphroditic mess. Fleshy growths wrapped themselves around what was left of his throat and strangled the life out of him.
With every fresh death an echoing boom rushed up the shaft of the Stone. Volkmar could sense the enormous power contained there. It had been enough to grant Natassja her elevation into immortality and it had still been hardly tapped. With a dreadful realisation, he knew that there was nothing he could do to dent it. He might have had a thousand warrior priests with him and the result would have been the same. There was no hope left, not for them, not for Averheim.
“The blood of Sigmar!” he bellowed, defiant to the end.
He whirled the staff around and sent a stream of blazing fire at the daemon. It impacted directly on the sigil of Slaanesh at her breast and exploded, showering the chamber with spinning points of light.
Natassja took a step back, entirely unharmed. She bared her fangs and fixed Volkmar with a withering look of contempt.
He screamed, and staggered to his knees. Something vast and malice-drenched entered his soul. He could feel his essence being ripped away from within, dragged from his mortal frame on barbs of steel. She was destroying him.
His staff fell to the floor as he withdrew his power from it. Resisting the crushing influence of the daemon took all his residual art. He screwed his eyes closed, grimacing with pain. He was being dragged back to the hells he had escaped before. There, in the darkness, he could see the androgynous form of his nemesis. The Dark Prince had been waiting there since his last death, happy to welcome him back.
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