by Ian Watson
“Dunno, Sir. But…”
“Battle discipline, if you please!”
“RIFF-RAFF,” YERI HEARD Lex murmur. The former Lordly Phantasm loped into an inviting tunnel mouth. Uniquely, Lex seemed able to make power armour adopt such an insouciant gait.
Haughty, headstrong, and burning with a pious devotion: was it even possible to humble him? True humbling must occur in his very heart, like a fierce thorn taking root within to pierce him inwardly forever.
True humbling must, perhaps, issue – somehow – from Rogal Dorn himself…
Could Yeri even possibly be the agent of such humility?
He must try to be.
THIRTY MINUTES LATER, deeper into the bowels of Antro, and nearly bereft of all ammunition – their stings almost all drawn by a spasm of surprise attacks – the recce squad trotted into an arched corridor where the granitic wall was banded with spiked hoops of adamantium.
At the far end, an ancient gnome hobbled aside after allowing that first tantalising glimpse of himself. Bald-pated, with a snowy bush of beard, and an ornately wrought golden neck chain, the gnome had clutched around himself a robe that sported a stiff collar so high as to be almost a hood…
Stossen called out, “That’s one of the titches’ Living Ancestors! Collar the wizened bird, and we’ll squeeze him for juice—”
In fact Lex was already darting forward to try to snatch such a living trophy.
ALL FOUR OF the brothers were well along the corridor when the spiked hoops sprang outward from the wall on massive pistons.
The hoops instantly divided the passage into little prisoning cells with cramping, impaling bars too puissant for a power fist to wrench aside or bend.
Once again, the Living Ancestor peered round the far lip of the passage. He grinned wrinkledly.
Concealed hatches popped open in the stonework. Hairy engineers’ arms reached through to cut open armour with spinning blades.
No matter how the Fists braced themselves or bucked in a paroxysm of resistance, they lost their suits piece by piece… Yeri felt sick to his soul at his failure to forestall Lex’s capture. Biff was cursing in scum argot.
Lex giggled derisively at the busy, if cautious, dwarfs who were dismantling his armour, denuding him. “You’re tickling me!” he mocked.
And Lexandro’s blindfold was at last removed…
Disarmed, disarmoured, and denuded, the four Marines lay shackled to slabs of granite speckled pink as if meagre blood was oozing from within the stone.
After the indignity of the corridor of cages, the hoodwinked Brothers had been dragged in chains for some distance – using traction machines, by the sound of it.
Loaded on board gritty flat wagons – or so Lex judged – they’d then been conveyed through rail tunnels for perhaps ten kilometres…
Unloaded, they were dragged again. Then they were lifted and shackled firmly before the redundant chains were unwound, and the blindfolds too…
The cave they were in was easily as spacious as the Assimularum Hall of the fortress-monastery, which could hold a thousand battle-brothers. Glow-globes lit the vault hazily.
Lexandro craned his neck. This chamber held perhaps a hundred dwarfs. Most were seated around the front tiers of an amphitheatre cut from naked rock. Many of the Squattish audience were hearthguards or guildmasters, armed to the teeth and gorgeous in finely decorated armour. Others wore plainer brown fustian. Most were loudly mumbling some incomprehensible chant, though some sat silent and grim-faced.
In the proscenium area, where the slabs were positioned, several snowy-bearded Living Ancestors occupied carved stone thrones – subordinate to a larger throne set back upon a dais.
A stout, brown-bearded man reclined in that larger throne underneath a canopy adorned with a writhing eight-pointed sunburst. But for a bulging black silken loincloth, he was nude. By contrast with his full beard, his trunk and limbs were quite hairless, sleekly so, as if lately shaved. Other people might shave their chins, but this person shaved his creamy body… whereon muscles rippled like some potent tide advancing and retreating. The pupils of his eyes were dark coals. His nose was of the snubby Sagramoso variety…
The lord, no less. Flanked by Kark guards clad in black silk and armed with shuriken catapults.
Lexandro tested his wrist restraints. At the cost of some damage to flesh he could perhaps manage to rip the left-hand shackle out of the rock. His ceramically reinforced bones would take the strain. The right-hand shackle seemed impervious.
He glanced at his companions.
Biff’s side swelled, lividly bruised, studded with dried cinnabar…
From what Lex could see, Stossen’s shoulder was a sorry wreck. Flesh had charred back to the bone. Lex honoured the man for his endurance. Surreptitiously, if fruitlessly, the sergeant was straining to release himself…
Smoke arose from bronze tripods cradling smouldering cinnamon incense. Overhead, stirred by the breath of leering ventilator gargoyles, the scented haze faintly mimicked the contours of twisted phantom faces. These emerged, glaring down sombrely before dissolving, only to reform again.
That strange guttural chanting intensified – though not all of the Squats were participating. A warlord, with heavy golden chain dangling down a carapace breastplate tooled with ancestral faces, frowned dubiously at those…
…faces in the air…
His gaze dropped towards Fulgor Sagramoso, and the warlord shuddered. Lex craned his neck to see why. Faces…
Faces were forming in Sagramoso’s own flesh…
The rebel lord might have been a contortionist at some dirt-world fairground, able to command the play of his muscles in unique fashion. The tissue of his chest and belly and thighs was puckering, rippling, conjuring the semblance of physiognomies. Features were moulding themselves in the substance of his body, obtruding, then sinking back again – only to give rise to new snub-nosed countenances.
On his chest.
On his belly.
On his broad thighs.
How could it be?
Was Sagramoso truly a god?
Several of the Living Ancestors regarded the performance with wonder – though one Whitebeard eyed the transformations with evident repulsion and suspicion.
Sagramoso gazed piercingly around the amphitheatre. “My own sacred ancestors are gathering!” he proclaimed in a throaty growl. “Aye, gathering to protect us. See how they manifest themselves in my very flesh. Can you call back your dead ancestors thus, Honoured Ancients?”
Several Whitebeards looked very impressed.
“Now I am becoming my own ancestors, Reverend Ones! Their power is gathering. Soon I shall summon your own most distant forebears in similar fashion. They will speak to you through lips that open in my skin—” Drool oozed from Sagramoso’s mouth.
He seemed hardly in control of himself. Yet he hauled himself upright. His torso and thighs quivered with those gathering mute masks of flesh struggling to be incarnated, yet he lurched towards the slabs where Lex and his brothers lay stretched out like beasts awaiting butchery. One of the entourage handed Sagramoso a chainsword.
The plasteel teeth blurred into near-invisibility as the weapon activated.
The rebel lord loomed over Lex, his body in weird flux, undergoing seeming birthpangs. A whole family of inchoate parasitical visages jostled for priority.
Sagramoso swished the chainsword to and fro. Nightmare and death stared down upon Lexandro.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BUT SAGRAMOSO PASSED Lexandro by, and surveyed Stossen who was muttering prayers to himself in horror.
A smile twisted the lord’s lips, and he nodded to himself. Holding the buzzing sword just above the Sergeant’s waist, Sagramoso intoned absurd jargon as if he were being operated by some alien ventriloquist.
“Chi’khami’tzann Tsunoi,” he slurred. And more, and more.
What manner of words were those?
The former lord of Karkason quivered. The faces in his
flesh grew agitated. His voice altered timbre, becoming high-pitched as he prayed: “Almighty Master of Fortune, Grand Conspirator who moulds the lives of men to change the course of history, as I seek to change it, accept this… offering.”
Lowering the chainsword slowly, he sliced the now-screaming sergeant – who fell silent soon enough, blood bursting from his belly to harden into knots of dark rubies. Sagramoso cut until he had bisected his victim, dividing him in half upon the granite block.
Lex’s own stomach muscles crawled. A hormone-spiced stink insinuated into his nostrils – for the sergeant’s bowels, deprived of any control, had evacuated themselves.
Sagramoso smeared his hand into that excrement. Holding up his besmirched palm, he licked.
An aura of smoke wreathed the lord’s head as if his dark hair were smouldering – smoke that sought to achieve an ectoplasmic, ghostly form, which quickly writhed away into shapelessness. Were twin protrusions pushing up from his shoulder girdles underneath the skin?
In the palm that was stained with the expelled contents of Stossen’s intestine, an eye appeared. Oh how its gaze disconcerted that seeming skeptic among the Whitebeards! Quitting his throne, the oldster hobbled to confer with a seated hearth-guardian.
“Forge our destiny!” Sagramoso shrieked.
He appeared to be in some pain. Staggering, he almost dropped the sword. Then he was jerked erect. And even so, his head looked sunken as though his corded neck had contracted. Both of his muscular pectorals assumed firm features, the nipples becoming nub-noses, jelly eyes blinking above those, and mouths opening below like two ichor-lubricated wounds.
Was Yeri whimpering with dread?
Yes…
Lexandro heard the poor ex-tech mumble some pathetic litany of the Imperial Cult taught to him at his mother’s knee… while Yeri clenched his fingers tight.
Biff too seemed to be in feverish distress.
Nor were so many of the dwarfs united in their enthusiasm any longer… Some voices cried out raggedly.
When the mouths in Sagramoso’s chest began to speak glutinously, Lex’s own mind was assailed by tentative questing tendrils whose touch was nauseating.
Tendrils of maddening mutability cast all in doubt. His sacred vows to Rogal Dorn… the sanctity of the Emperor on Earth… the loyalty of the other Fists, who had surely abandoned Lex to this fate… As had Dorn, who was dead, dead forever. As had the Emperor, who was all but moribund, and whose reign was now surely drawing to its close, yielding to the reign of… what? Why, of eldritch magic from some bizarre, monstrous dimension at right angles to sanity. Whither Lex’s own soul would shortly be sucked – so therefore let him yield it obediently.
“The pattern,” Biff was babbling. “Oh what a mad twisted pattern—”
The leftward mouth in Sagramoso’s chest urged, “Kill the other mundane Marines quickly! Slice them in twain and eat their ordure! We shall summon a horde of cackling horrors to swarm all over the invaders and rout them with sheer fear—”
So it promised.
The rightward mouth was of a different opinion. “Nay, your star is almost set, Lord Sagramoso,” it called upward to his face. “Your fate is sealed. Therefore let us abandon all restraint! Forsake the corset of normality deliriously! Yield yourself utterly to Change!”
Anxiety clouded Sagramoso’s face. He swayed in indecision.
“I am surely a god, am I not?” he asked himself aloud.
One mouth replied, “Yes.”
But the other, “No.”
“You are the tool of a god—”
“You were worshipped. You demanded worship. You accepted terror-filled adoration—”
“Your craving for worship summoned forces—”
“Your craving for change in the cosmic order and your cruelty summoned the violent powers of change—”
“And the name of change is none other than… Tzeentch.”
“Tzeentch. Great Tzeentch!”
The very syllables of this strange name plucked at Lexandro’s sanity. That name seemed so puissant, so eternal and so all-dissolving. It conjured such vistas of space and time in turmoil, swept by the whirlwind which was that magic word into ingenious new geometries that no ordinary mind could ever hope to grasp; nor ever should try to, lest reality be tormented into nightmare…
“Aid me, Rogal Dorn,” prayed Lex…
Rogal?
…Dorn?
The howling, omnipotent name – Tzzzeeeeentch! – almost obliterated the primarch’s name as if “Rogal Dorn” was but the puny mewling of a baby cast adrift in a straw cradle in a black ocean of Chaos.
Rogal… …Dorn…
…TZZZEEEEENTCH.
Somehow Lex clung to that frail talisman of his primarch, even knowing that he would soon be sacrificed to the power behind that other mighty name, to become – if he was lucky – an enslaved, gibbering mite of digested soul within a vast, evasive embrace.
An ever-so-distant, yet steadfast voice whispered ultimate warning in his mind: Deny the Evil. Believe in me till you die.
Squattish faces were forming in the rebel lord’s flesh now – obscene, grimacing caricatures.
Lips opened to gibber, some greeting the dwarfish audience seductively, others mocking it. The chanting in the amphitheatre had become very ragged by now. The sceptical Living Ancestor raised his arms in protest. He glared at Sagramoso as if to annul his eerie magic by force of will. From the staring bulbous eye in Sagramoso’s palm a sickly violet hue shone out.
During moments which measured out eternities of continuing existence for Lexandro, the Living Ancestor and the glow of the eye contended silently. Sagramoso, still hefting the power sword, hardly moved.
Yet the old dwarf was faltering – while his peers shuffled about in their thrones, uncertain in this hour of need whether to side with their wise old crony or with the human godling.
Kark guards and hearthguards, allies until now, eyed each other with deepening suspicion. In these moments, pregnant with the advent of an inconceivable power, all allegiances and former certainties were protean; loyalty was but a mask, while truth assumed a series of contradictory faces.
“Oh our sacred Ancestors!” cried the ancient dwarf in anguish.
“Why, here we all are – within this body,” called out one of the mouths in Sagramoso’s chest. “Do you not know us, Venerable Rimbeldorp? Why, this man is the next thing to a god!”
“The next thing,” echoed the other mouth ambivalently. “Soon he’ll become a veritable daemon of the Lord of Change.”
“What sort of lord is that?” demanded the elder known as Rimbeldorp shrilly. “What daemonry is at work?”
One mouth laughed, slapping its lips together.
The other harangued Sagramoso. “Slay the other three Marines, you slow fool! You who worshipped yourself! We will bring you something worth worshipping. You hungered for power. Why, power is coming.”
Horns were sprouting from Sagramoso’s shoulders – frail, feeble horns as yet.
“Taste the products of their loosened bowels to tantalise Tzeentch! He loves the transformation of meat into manure. Such is the Cycle of Change! He will bring back the dead inside living flesh. His abominations will turn sane men into madmen, and living bodies into cadavers.”
“Tzeentch,” intoned the other mouth.
“Tzeentch,” chanted numerous Squats, mesmerised. “Oh sacred Ancestors, return from the dead!”
Rimbeldorp gestured fiercely at the hearthguard he had conferred with. Brandishing an axe, the armoured dwarf hurried down towards the sacrificial slabs.
Since he appeared intent on carrying out the urgings of the mouth, none of Sagramoso’s escort sought to interfere. The red-bearded squat leapt on to the slab which held Yeri, raised his axe high…
…and brought it down…
…severing the shackle which restrained Yeri’s right hand. The blade, clanging against granite, jarred loose from the little man’s grasp. He cried a loud “Ouc
h!” and clutched at his wrist, massaging himself.
Lex’s wits spun. Had the dwarf intended to free Yeri? Yes – he must.
Yeri, so close to the spectre of his own death, hardly realised this. Rearing, with his freed hand he seized the little man and threw him violently aside. The hearthguard’s head cracked open against the corner of the slab that held the two halves of the Sergeant, a knotty girdle of cinnabar encircling his waist. Blood flowed from the crumpled squat’s cranium.
Yeri tore at his other, pinned wrist. Using it as a lever, he wrenched the shackle free. Sitting up swiftly, he reached down for one of his pinioned feet – glancing as he did so towards Lexandro, with promise in his gaze.
“I’ll save you from this!” he cried. “By Dorn, I’ll do it!”
A shackle sprang free.
Craning his neck as much as he could, Lexandro saw Kark guards levelling their catapults at the contorting naked body on the block, now only fastened by one ankle. They were awaiting only their lord’s order – lest by slaying Yeri themselves they might abort the ritual of the blood-offering. Once Yeri was fully free, they wouldn’t wait a moment longer.
Lex imagined Yeri hurling his self-appointed bodyguard person obsessively towards the slab that bound Lex himself – while a hail of shuriken stars sliced through Yeri’s skin, ruptured his carapace, scalpelled his organs – and that body collapsing in a dying heap of protection upon Lexandro stiflingly and insultingly, embracing him in his death throes.
How could Lex possibly deter his wretched brother from this obscene act of quixotry, which he had read in his look, and which he was sure was impending?
“The axe, drekbrain!” Biff bellowed in Trazior patois. “Hoy the axe at Lord Saggy!”
Wide-eyed, Yeri jerked away from trying to free his other ankle. Somehow his frantic gaze took in the tensing catapult wielders, and he comprehended.
He seized the fallen axe. He hurled it.
The engraved blade spun over and over. It struck Fulgor Sagramoso full in his chest between those two contentious mouths.
