The Corrupted

by Robert Earl - (ebook by Undead)

  At least, he supposed that the thing which sprouted from the rider’s shoulder might have once been an arm. Now, it was a boneless as a filleted hare, although no fillet Grendel had ever seen had pulsed with such sickly luminescence, nor had any writhed with quite such energy. From shoulder to fine pointed tip, the tentacle moved with a restless energy, the tip twitching as if to sniff the air around it.

  Grendel realised that his mouth was open in surprise. He closed it with a snap, and then replied.

  “Greetings,” he said, and looked past the lead horsemen to those that waited behind him. They were dressed in the same ragged fashion, and for the first time Grendel noticed the lances. They were lowered towards him, and even in the frozen grey light of the afternoon, the steel tips glinted.

  “What brings you to our lands?” their leader asked, his voice rotten with a false good humour. “It is not often that we have the company of such a fine gentleman.”

  “I’m heading north,” Grendel replied, his eyes still focused on the mutated limb. “Does it hurt?”

  “What?” The horseman’s mocking expression faded.

  “Your arm, does it hurt?”

  “Oh yes,” the horseman hissed. “It hurts alright. Let me show you.”

  He nudged his horse forwards, bared a mouthful of sharpened teeth into a smile, and, with a sudden lunge, lashed towards Grendel’s throat. The fleshy rope of his limb elongated as he did so, and the tip pulsed red in anticipation of the blow, but as soon as it touched the sorcerer’s flesh the tentacle whipped away, the speed of its retreat even greater than that of its attack.

  A look of shock crossed the mutant’s face as he looked at his traitor limb, and then a look of horror. His comrades cursed in surprise as their leader’s arm wrapped around his own throat and began to tighten.

  “Fascinating,” Grendel said as the mutated limb twined itself around its owner’s neck. It grew thinner as it tightened, coiling around the bearded throat like a living noose.

  The mutant clawed at the tentacle with his free hand, but it was no good. His nails slid off the smooth surface, and his scrabbling was already becoming weaker.

  He looked at Grendel, pleading in his eyes, and tried to say something. Grendel remained impassive, and the hiss of breath merely served as the man’s death rattle. No sooner had it left his blackening lips than the veins in his eyes popped like fireworks, and his tears turned to blood.

  With a last convulsion, the strangled man slid from his horse’s back, his body thumping onto the frozen earth as his mount skittered nervously away.

  Grendel giggled.

  “Look at that,” he said to the horrified ring of horsemen, “it’s still alive!”

  And so it was. Even as the mutant’s body grew cold, its traitor limb writhed and twitched, the tentacle slithering across the frosted earth as it tried to escape the corpse.

  “Maybe I can…” Grendel began, and then broke off as he noticed the expressions on the horsemen’s faces. The horror had gone. Now there was only hatred.

  “Oh come now,” Grendel told them. “Surely you don’t think that the lord who gave him that would have let him use it against one of his champions?”

  “You follow our lord?” one of the raiders asked, doubt showing within his protuberant eyes.

  “As do all who understand his ways,” Grendel nodded, “and his ways, although ever changing, are always correct. Why else would he have led you here if not to guide me to his realm?”

  He turned to gesture across the frosted immensity of the steppe. It was endless, a barren desert of rock and ice. The only colour came from the occasional glimmer of the borealis from behind the slate grey clouds.

  The whole group fell silent. They studied the sorcerer as avidly as dogs who have found a wolf in their kennel.

  “If you truly follow our lord,” one said, “you will be able to show us some… some proof.”

  Grendel gestured towards the strangled corpse that lay on the ground before them.

  “That could have just been an accident,” the rider said, “or a trick. Show us something more.”

  “If you wish,” Grendel shrugged, fixing the man in his gaze.

  “No, not on me.” The rider backed away, a flash of sudden alarm in his eyes. “I meant on something else.”

  The sorcerer smirked at the fool as he tried to hide behind one of his fellows. Did he honestly think that flight would save him if their lord judged that the time had come?

  He dismissed the thought. He dismissed all thoughts, letting them fall from his mind as easily as the first flecks of snow started to fall from the angry black sky above. Then he focused on the corpse before him and began to chant. Power flowed around him, and then through him. He reached out with the energy and wrapped it gently around the cooling body. The tentacle, still warm, writhed in ecstasy at his magical touch.

  Grendel paused as an icy blast of cold wind rippled through his concentration. Then he started to work. At first, he was tentative, like a painter sketching out the preliminary sketch. Then, he was seized with a sudden inspiration. He would finish the work that his lord had started on this miserable human.

  Grendel’s lips twitched up into a playful smile, and he started to work faster. The blessings of Slaanesh started to flow through the corpse, and a horrible new life started to pulse through the still arteries. Its form rippled like a wax figure in a potter’s kiln and, like the tender buds of some terrible spring, fresh tentacles began to emerge from the body.

  As they sprouted, so the corpse that had birthed them began to disintegrate. It shrank as the pseudopods that grew from it twisted the dead flesh into their own forms, and soon there was nothing left of the corpse but for a shapeless mass, an unseen base for the forest of waving tentacles.

  The horsemen soothed their trembling mounts as they watched the miracle that was unfolding, for it was a miracle, of that they had no doubt. Even as they watched, new life began to pulse through the tracery of arteries and veins that lay beneath the thing’s transparent flesh.

  One of the men, his face alight with wonder, dismounted and walked cautiously over to study Grendel’s handiwork. When he was close enough, he reached out one trembling hand towards the tentacles that drew towards him.

  Grendel, who had been lost in the joy of creation, drifted back into awareness just in time to see what was happening. “Get back!” he shouted.

  It was too late. Even as the horseman brushed his fingertips across one the tendrils, they struck, licking around his wrist with a blur of movement.

  “It hurts!” the man screamed and, realising his mistake, tried to pull back, but already more pseudopods were twining around his limbs. One caught his ankle, tripping him up, and he was dragged flailing into their midst.

  He screamed again, wordlessly this time. The hiss of melting flesh filled the air as the pseudopods began to dissolve their victim, eating through his windpipe so that his screams became a gurgle.

  Some of his comrades rushed forwards to help, their swords drawn, but Grendel waved them back.

  “Stay away from it, you fools. Would you blaspheme against our lord by denying sustenance to one of his creations?”

  The horsemen hesitated. A gossamer thin tendril touched one of their boots and he jumped back with a yelp. As one, the men retreated to a safe distance.

  “See how the thing swells with the new life it has ingested,” Grendel mused, speaking more to himself than to the barbarians who stood around him. “Truly, our lord is a god of many splendours.”

  When he looked back towards the horsemen, they had all dismounted, the reins loose in their hands as they bowed down in obeisance towards Grendel’s creation.

  The sorcerer smiled, gratified. Slaanesh, it seemed, had provided him with his guides after all.

  What a place to die in: there would be no burial, and no mourners, just an endless tomb of suffocating tunnels, and the gnawing indignities of the things that lived down here. Peik sighed at the thought. He had always
wanted to die gloriously, torn to pieces by a horde of mutants, perhaps, or blasted into oblivion by some rogue sorcerer, but he was slowly starting to accept that such rewards were not to be his.

  It felt as if months had passed since the battle with the tunnel dwellers, but that couldn’t be right. After all, despite the hunger that gnawed at their stomachs, they still hadn’t starved to death.

  Peik didn’t think that they were far off it, though. More than one of the witch hunters staggered as they marched, and their rest stops became more and more frequent.

  Despite their suffering, the men remained dour and close-mouthed. Peik wondered if any of them were trying to remember the battle. Somehow, the memory of the slaughter had blurred, fading and dying like a plant without light. The memory of what had come after it…

  Peik’s thoughts skittered away to the mess the witch hunters had ended up in. There was not a single one of them whose gear hadn’t hardened with the dried blood of their victims.

  They could still smell the iron stink of it. So could other things. They scurried and slithered in the darkness, unseen and mysterious. Sometimes, when they stopped to rest, the men would hunt these things, but so far all they had caught was an anaemic centipede with mandibles as big as pincers.

  Starving or not, none of them had tried to eat it.

  Peik looked at the back of the man in front of him. His whole body drooped as he trudged blindly onwards. Peik considered asking him why he was still following Vaught, why any of them were. Did anybody really share their captain’s faith that Sigmar would lead them out of this terrible place?

  To the hells with it, Peik thought, it wasn’t as if they had anywhere else to go. He picked up his step and walked forwards, as meekly as a sheep into a slaughterhouse. After all, with the blood of the slain still stinking on his clothes, what else did he deserve?

  “There you see? I told you. I told you that our god would guide us.”

  The witch hunters gathered around their captain, their eyes dazzled with tears. The shaft of sunlight was blinding, a column of molten silver in the eternal night of the underworld.

  “You told us indeed,” Fargo nodded his head, and smeared the moisture from his eyes. He swallowed painfully. Although the tears might be from the glare of sunlight, they didn’t explain the lump in his throat. “Well done. Well done, my captain.”

  He slapped Vaught on his shoulder, and was rewarded with a low, deep-throated growl. Fargo snatched his hand away and ignored the thought that this wasn’t how Vaught had used to react.

  “Don’t worry,” Vaught exclaimed with a vulpine grin. “I won’t bite you.”

  For some reason, the jibe sent a shiver of memory through Fargo’s spine. Although a memory of exactly what he couldn’t say.

  “He spoke to me, you know,” Vaught said, mood swinging back to the philosophical. “He promised me that, on the day of our rebirth, he would remake us into even greater hunters of sorcerers.”

  His men nodded as they gazed into the blinding light of the world above. None of them was in any mood to disbelieve: none of them, apart from Peik.

  “What do you mean he will remake us?” he asked, blinking away fresh tears. “Isn’t remaking things what sorcerers do?”

  There was a blur of movement, a crunch of gristle, and Peik collapsed onto the floor. He clutched at his bruised windpipe, his cry of surprise no more than a hiss of pain. Vaught stood over him, his silhouette as black as a storm cloud against the world above.

  “You are a good apprentice,” he said, as calmly as if he had never moved, “but I will not tolerate blasphemy.”

  Peik scrambled to his feet, and for the first time, noticed the flat red glow of Vaught’s irises. The glimmer reminded him of a wolf’s gaze in the firelight, and he swallowed a surge of superstitious dread. He blinked and the colour was gone, his captain’s eyes invisible in the darkness.

  “Next time you take the name of our god in vain, I will not be so merciful,” Vaught told him, his voice scarcely louder than a whisper. Then he turned on his heel and strode over to stand basking in the sunlight. His men, taking their leader’s lizard pose as their signal, started testing the tumbled rocks for the best way out of the catacombs.

  After the stagnant air of the underworld, the icy winds of the blasted steppe bit like steel. The witch hunters, scarecrow thin within their ragged clothes, hunched against the wind as they marched northwards.

  As they marched, they searched the barren land around with hollow eyed desperation. There was no sign of the city they had escaped from, or of any human habitation at all. Vaught, though, seemed supremely indifferent to the fact that they had emerged in what was essentially a frozen desert.

  Occasionally, one would stoop to scrabble a piece of bone-dry lichen from the frozen earth, or to snatch a drink from a melt water puddle, but as soon as they finished, they hurried to catch up with their comrades. Vaught, convinced that he could smell the sorcerer they were hunting, was setting a terrible pace.

  None of his men talked anymore. Even when they huddled down to rest, they remained silent, conserving what little strength they had left. By the length of his beard, Peik reckoned that it had been over a month since they had turned their backs on the trapdoor of their gaol.

  From time to time, he found himself wondering who would be the first to drop, Fargo, probably, he was twice as old as most of the men. Then again, Kurt seemed to be feeling the ravages of hunger and cold more than most. He had almost collapsed before, and only a snarl from Vaught had kept him on his feet.

  Even as Peik dwelt on these morbid thoughts, Vaught’s god sent them salvation.

  “Down!”

  Oblivious to the urgency in their leader’s voice, the column of witch hunters collapsed gratefully. In the gathering chill of dusk, even the scant cover the rocks provided gave them a momentary illusion of warmth.

  “What is it?” Fargo hissed as he crawled towards his leader. The wind whipped a flurry of snow past him, and his eyes watered as he squinted into the dusk.

  “Over there,” Vaught whispered, nodding towards a blur in the distance. Fargo looked blindly towards the indistinct shapes.

  “See them?”

  Fargo shook his head, but then, suddenly, he could see them. It wasn’t that the darkness of approaching night had lifted, so much that it became irrelevant, as invisible as the surface of a stream when you watch a fish below.

  After so long without food, these were fat fish indeed. They were huddled in fur cloaks and hats, and they virtually glowed with health, and so did their string of packhorses. The sturdy little beasts were padded with fat: succulent, juicy fat.

  Fargo’s mouth watered at the thought of so much meat. He could almost taste the fat, and the flesh that rippled beneath the fur. “Shall we kill them?” he asked, his voice hoarse with desire.

  Vaught nodded.

  “But wait. See how they come towards us? Our god is generous indeed.”

  “Yes,” Fargo nodded vaguely, “our god.”

  It suddenly occurred to him that he couldn’t remember the name of his god, and a brief frown creased his face. Then it lifted. Compared to the succulence of their approaching prey, such details hardly seemed important.

  Fargo watched the merchants draw nearer. There were perhaps a dozen in the mule train, and although their shoulders drooped after a hard day’s ride, their heads turned constantly as they scanned the horizon for danger.

  “They’re coming right towards us.” Fargo licked his lips, and then scowled as they came to a halt.

  Had they heard him? It didn’t seem likely, but even as anxiety tightened in his stomach, the old man saw that the merchants were dismounting, ready to set up camp for the night.

  Curiosity had brought the rest of the witch hunters snaking forwards. They pressed their bodies into the bitter embrace of the frozen earth and waited, and watched.

  The merchants stretched and rubbed the tender muscles of their calves, before hobbling their horses and hoisting
their tents. The drooling witch hunters watched them set up their camp, and when the merchants sparked up a tiny cooking fire, their eyes glittered as brightly as the stars that had appeared above.

  It wasn’t until the travellers started to cook that Vaught’s men began to slowly disperse. They moved silently and without orders. Each man moved according to his instinct, loping back into the night to find his place in an encirclement.

  The freezing air grew rich with the smell of wood smoke and stew, and laughter rose up towards the stars. As the witch hunters closed in, the men ladled out the stew and began to eat. Fargo slavered at the sight. He and Vaught were creeping forwards side by side, and by the time the merchants were wiping their bowls clean with hunks of bread, the last of the witch hunters were in position.

  They waited for a moment before rushing forwards, moving as silently as death itself. Brandishing rocks or open handed, they emerged into the firelight with a ferocious speed, and suddenly they were howling with a terrible joy.

  Fargo felled the first of them. The man dropped his bowl as he rose to his feet, only to be sent spinning back with a crushed forehead. His comrade managed to draw a cutlass, but he was too late. Before the blade had cleared the scabbard, Fargo’s skeletal fingers had closed around his wrist and his teeth were tearing through his throat.

  The old man swallowed the blood eagerly. It was delicious and hot, and he was seized with a terrible hunger as he gulped it down. Even before his prey’s heart had stopped beating, he regained control of himself and let the body drop. There would be plenty of time for feeding later. Now, there was killing to be done.

  His blood-clotted beard lifted in a smile and he stooped to seize the merchant’s cutlass. He weighed it in his hands. It was a clumsy weapon, poorly forged and barely sharpened. It would do.

  With a joyful snarl, Fargo leapt forwards to slash the legs from beneath a fleeing merchant. He fell onto the fire with a screech, writhing in the embers as he groped at the stumps of his legs.