Konniger and Vido moved forward quickly, taking care to keep out of sight of any hidden watcher that might still be lurking behind that barred side door.
'We have to get inside there, of course,' said Konniger, looking at his manservant. 'Your field of expertise, I think?'
Vido went to work, studying the outside of the stone-walled warehouse building with a practiced thief's eye. The double doors on the main street front, where the wagons of merchandise would be loaded and unloaded during the day, was right out, of course, no doubt barred from the inside. The upper windows and roof looked a better bet, at least for Vido. A skilled halfing thief could scale that crumbling brickwork in half a minute or less. Vido's heavier, larger, far less nimble human master was a far different proposition, however.
A quick reconnoitre of the rest of the building found a better option: a long-disused cellar door set into the ground of the alley behind the building, covered by empty wooden crates and secured by a heavy, rusted padlock and chain. It took Konniger a few moments to clear away the crates, and his manservant only a few moments longer than that to spring the workings of the padlock with the judiciously-applied point of one of his throwing daggers. Together, they silently hauled the doors open, and peered into the darkness of the building's cellarage. The smell of dust, of dirt, of mildew and of perishable trade goods that had been in storage for far too long wafted up. There was something else there too: a sickly, cloying sweetness that smelled to Vido like perfume gone sour. Or the scent of flowers growing out of something irredeemably putrid.
Konniger saw his manservant's nose wrinkle in disgust as he caught another faint draught of the sickly odour. 'Follow the scent,' he instructed, as they descended into the darkness.
They hadn't gone too far into the surprisingly extensive and deep-dug network of chambers and passages beneath the warehouse before they heard the first scream. After that, as more screams rang out through the place, it wasn't hard to trace them back to their source and locate the hidden temple of the Cult of Slaanesh that had been active in Altdorf for these last few months.
THE KILLER CAME up through the floor at them. The environs of the hidden temple were protected by powerful Slaaneshi warding spells through which no enemy creature of Chaos could easily pass. They were woven into the walls of the place, and consecrated by rites and words of power sacred to daemon-kind.
The floor, however, was a different matter. No one had thought to put similar protections into place in the stonework of the floor.
It flew up through the cracks in the flagstones in front of the altar. A living curtain of blood, seething with lethal intent.
It seized hold of the first of them, flaying him alive in front of the other coven members, stripping away his skin with barbed tendrils formed out of the blood-stuff of its new form. Its victim fell to the ground in a bloodied meat ruin heap. When the sun rose tomorrow, the daily assizes held in the great Imperial Courts of Judgment in the Kaiserplatz would be looking for a new chief clerk of the court.
The coven drew its members from some of the most important and wealthy citizens in Altdorf, all of them drawn into the embrace of the Prince of Delights by the lure of pleasures dark and forbidden. The walls of their underground meeting place had rang with screams of mixed ecstasy and horror as new members were initiated into the blasphemous mysteries of the worship of the Pleasure Lord. Now they rang with screams of a different kind as the servant of the Blood God took its revenge on the followers of its god's most hated enemy.
IT SOLIDIFIED, TAKING new shape, the blood-stuff of its body coalescing and drawing inwards to give it physical form. The reverse Blood Change was achieved in moments, speeded by the nourishment it had taken from the dead Slaaneshi worshipper and its eagerness to kill more of its enemies. It stood before them, revealed. Its iron-hard skin was reddish-black, the colour of hardened blood. Its heavily-muscled arms ended in fingers transformed into weapon blades. Its eyes, set into a face which contained the ghost of the memory of the original face of the Reikerbahn Butcher, were blood-red, and blazed with fury as it glared at the enemies all around it. Then it was amongst them, slashing and killing, bringing the crazed savagery of the Blood God to the children of the Pleasure Lord.
A flash of its claws tore away the throat of the youngest son of an ancient Reikland noble family.
A thrust with those same claws ended the life of one of Altdorf's most prominent diamond merchants.
The career of a champion gentleman duellist ended ignominiously as the killer batted aside the thrusting blade of the man's sword and seized the hand that held it, crushing bone and flesh together in a vice-like grip. It seized hold of the dropped poniard and speared it through the skull of the screaming cultist.
A physician who had once attended the sick-bed of a member of the Imperial family received a new anatomy lesson, with himself as the subject, as the killer eviscerated him from stomach to throat.
Everywhere, there was blood. Everywhere, there was panic and terror. Everywhere there was screaming.
KONNIGER AND VIDO followed the sound of screaming, coming through a doorway leading into the antechamber of the main temple room just as a Slaaneshi worshipper ran out the door on the other side of the room, fleeing the scene inside the temple. He was stripped half-naked, his body tattooed with markings normally hidden from sight, markings that signified his secret devotion to the Prince of Delights. His eyes were glazed, either with terror or the effects of whatever powerful intoxicants the cultists took in the worship of their god. He saw them, and ran screaming towards them, drawing a dagger from his belt.
Vido looked at Konniger, who nodded at him once. This was not a time for half-measures, or the taking of prisoners. Vido drew a throwing dagger from its hidden sheath inside the lining of his cloak, and, with one smooth motion, sent it hilt-deep into the cultist's throat. The cultist dropped like a stone. They ran past his corpse and entered the temple.
The air there throbbed with the unnatural, unwholesome vitality of Chaos. The radiance from the lamps round the temple walls spilled out a strange light that hurt Vido's eyes. Everything seemed to be shifting out of focus, with odd shadows and flickering movements appearing and disappearing out of the corners of his vision. The stuff burning in the temple's gold braziers filled the air with a powerful sickly sweet scent that burned his throat and made his head swim. The altar was a strange, unnaturally contoured thing made of an unfamiliar marbled stone and streaked with veins of white and pale purple that made it look more like flesh than stone. There were things lying upon it that Vido didn't even want to look at.
His main focus, though, was on the battle taking place there in the temple. Naked and half-naked bodies lay everywhere. The floor and bed-like silk divans round the sides of the place were splashed with blood. As Vido watched, horrified by his first glimpse of the thing from the scarlet cell, he saw the creature tear open the body of a woman who Vido fleetingly recognised as being a famous actress at one of Altdorf's biggest and most prestigious theatre companies.
Von Hassen was there too, carrying a silver-wrought staff topped with a strange-shaped sigil that resembled too closely one of the signs on that altar for Vido to want to look at it for any longer than he had to. He was screaming words that sounded like unintelligible gibberish but which still managed to make Vido feel as if his head was in the grip of a giant's fist as he heard them. Von Hassen gestured with the staff, pointing it at the thing from the scarlet cell, and the air between them shimmered with power. Something lanced out from the tip of the staff, striking the daemon-thing. Striking it, but seemingly not harming it. The creature's black blood skin sizzled with the heat of the sorcerous blast, but the thing merely bellowed in savage laughter and tore apart another of von Hassen's fellow cultists. The merchant blanched, and prepared himself for another, more powerful attempt to magically strike down the creature.
'Quickly! Slay it! Prove you are worthy of the power Mistress Slaanesh has given you!' hissed Sigmund, from the sidelines.
He turned, spotting Konniger and Vido just as they saw him.
Sigmund glared at them in contempt. 'So, the sage-meddler. How much of this is your doing, I wonder?' His mouth opened impossibly wider as he spoke, a long forked tongue snaking out to lick the edges of his rouged lips just as he charged at them.
This time Vido didn't first look to receive his master's permission. The throwing knife flew from his hand, unerringly finding its target as it pierced Sigmund's right eye and struck into his brain. The man staggered, but didn't fall.
Then he reached up and plucked the dagger from out of his eye, as if it were nothing more serious than removing a small splinter from beneath the skin of a fingertip.
The wound did seem to trigger something in the Pleasure Lord worshipper, however. His mouth continued to open wider, and Vido could see the skin starting to split open on either side of that impossibly wide maw. Its right arm swelled obscenely, something there splitting through the clothing and the flesh beneath.
Vido looked on in disbelief as he saw what was happening: Sigmund's arm was transforming into something that looked like a monstrous crab-claw. The thing that had been called Sigmund gave an inhuman hiss and stepped forward, shrugging off the remains of its human disguise the way an actor casts aside a role at the end of an evening's performance.
Vido saw fangs and glittering, purple-jewelled eyes set into a face that was a grotesque parody of painted human beauty. He saw a body that was both male and female, and that was filled with a deadly, lithe grace. Most of all, though, he saw the razor-edged blades of that crab-claw limb as it came snapping towards him.
'A daemonette creature of the Pleasure Lord. If only I'd known we were facing not one but two creatures of the Realm of Chaos,' said Konniger, rebuking himself as he completed the last few gestures of what Vido fervently hoped was some piece of daemon-fighting spellcasting.
Vido's hopes proved correct. The daemon struck the Sigmarite shield of protection blessing as if it had run at full-tilt into a solid wall, sending it staggering back. Vido knew how limited his master's spellcasting powers were, and how much Konniger disliked the use of magic, seeing it as a too-easy solution to problems that could be better solved with good old-fashioned human intelligence and intuition. It was doubtful the sage-detective would be able to rouse up enough of what remained of his priestly powers to stave off the daemon-thing's next and all-too-imminent attack.
In the end, though, it did not matter. The delay, although fleeting, had been enough to allow other events to interfere. A bloodthirsty roar of challenge from the other side of the chamber served to announce that the servant of Khorne had just spotted its Slaaneshi rival. The thing that had once been the Reikerbahn Butcher literally tore through von Hassen and the few remaining cultists to get to its chief enemy. The Slaaneshi daemon turned to face the attack, and the two creatures of Chaos met in a clash of claw and fang that threw out rippling waves of invisible energy that shook the very walls of the temple chamber.
Konniger picked up Vido and pressed him into the cover of a nearby stone pillar. Vido thought his eardrums would burst any second as the air pressure inside the place seemed to increase five-fold, and the atmosphere pulsed with unnatural power thrown out by the rival daemon-things' opposing auras as they clashed together in a battle to the finish.
Konniger mouthed more prayers of protection as the daemonic energies washed over the two of them. 'The battle won't be a long one,' was Konniger's grim warning. 'No matter how powerful von Hassen's own daemon guardian might seem, it can't match the fury of the thing that was created in the scarlet cell. Tonight may already have seen the destruction of one Chaos cult in this city, but it may also see the rise of a new and terrible servant of another of the Ruinous Powers, and that is something we can never allow to happen.'
The first part of Konniger's warning came true all too soon. The blood-creature roared in fury. The Slaaneshi daemon answered with a chorus of its own angry shrieks and hisses, but the exchange ended in one final, hellish scream of impotent rage from the servant of the Pleasure Lord as the Khornate creature thrust its claws into the daemonette's hermaphrodite body and ripped out its heart. The Slaaneshi creature died with a mewling gurgle, its soul cast back into the depths of the Realm of Chaos, its body starting to dissolve into stinking slime even before it fell to the ground.
The servant of the Blood God had not survived unscathed, however. Its body was rent with wounds from the slashing claws of the Slaaneshi creature, daemon-inflicted wounds that could not be immediately healed, even with the blood-thing's unnatural powers of vitality. Hot, sizzling gouts of blood fell from these wounds, forming a red mist in the air around it. It seemed to have difficulty maintaining its Blood Change form, as the material of its Chaos-altered body and some of the essence of its daemon spirit leaked out of it.
Konniger knew it was more vulnerable now than it probably ever would be again.
'Whatever happens, don't try to help me. You can do nothing against a creature like this,' he told his manservant. 'At the first sign that I may fall, run from this place, and never look back. Go to the Church of Sigmar. Use the code words I have already instructed you in, and gain access to the very highest levels of the Church authorities that you can. Tell the brethren everything that has happened here. They will know what to do after that.'
With that, he was gone. Running out into the open. Running to face the blood-thing, running in search of any kind of weapon that might be of any use against the creature.
He found what he was looking for amongst the bloodied litter of bodies on the floor. Von Hassen's staff, still held in the grip of one of the merchant's severed arms. He picked it up, shaking it free of the last remnants of its former owner, and turned to face the daemon.
The creature flowed towards him, leaving a slick blood trail in its wake. Konniger threw a Sigmarite prayer-spell at it, and then cursed himself for a fool, as the daemon deflected it harmlessly aside. It had ritually consumed the heart and absorbed the blood of the late Archbishop Heiggler, and was thus protected against all such magics.
After that, the daemon was on him. He wielded the Slaaneshi icon like a quarterstaff, ignoring the pain as the metal of the Chaos-tainted staff burned into the flesh of his hands. Konniger abjured using weapons whenever possible, but was an expert quarterstaff fighter.
He traded blows with the Khornate daemon, ducking in to try and land a blow, ducking back out to avoid the lightning-quick slashes of its lethal knife-fingers. The pain from his burned hands was intense now, and the blistered and Chaos-seared flesh of his palms would be many weeks in healing.
If the pain was bad to him, though, then it must be nigh on unbearable to the creature of Khorne. The Blood God and the Prince of Delights inhabited opposite sides on the Wheel of Chaos, and anything connected to Slaanesh was an anathema to Khorne and his servants. Each blow Konniger landed with the magically-charged sigil on the end of the staff was like plunging a red-hot iron into water.
The daemon staggered back, roaring in rage. The Slaneeshi staff opened up bubbling wounds in the unnatural material of its body, and the air around it and Konniger was filled with a haze of red steam and the stench of charred, sticky blood-tar. The daemon tried to strike back, but Konniger expertly parried or dodged its blows. Three of the creature's knife-fingers were left smouldering and broken, one of them completely vaporised by contact with the haft of the staff. The pain only added to its rage, while the wounds only left it further weakened.
Konniger knew he couldn't keep this up for much longer, though. Despite its injuries, the daemon's vitality was still superhuman, while his was all-too-human. It would only take one missed blow from him, or one ripping slash from those terrible knife-claws, to reverse the flow of the battle.
He ducked one slashing blow, stepped aside to avoid the daemon's follow-up strike and then stepped back in to strike it across the chest, eliciting another scream of rage from the daemon, and another splatter of bubbling blood from the wound that had
been opened up into its flesh.
Almost there, thought Konniger, weaving the staff in a complex pattern of defensive moves that struck the creature several more glancing blows, forcing it back even further. Its next attack he risked allowing through, twisting his body to avoid the thrusting knife-blades, feeling one of them slice through his shoulder instead of piercing his heart as had been intended. Now, though, the daemon had left itself vulnerable.
Konniger made his move, spinning the staff in one hand, flipping it round to reverse it and then catching it again in both hands to plunge its point with all his strength into the blood-thing's chest. The spear-like bottom tip of the staff burned through the daemon's body, emerging out of its back to strike into the flesh-like stone material of the main temple altar directly behind where the Khorne daemon stood.
A violent shock of magical energy pulsed through the air of the place. Konniger released his grip on the staff, just as a blast of energy coursed through it. Had he been a split-second late in letting go, he would probably have lost both his hands. The daemon, transfixed by the staff, directly connected by it to an altar consecrated to the power of its patron lord's most hated enemy amongst the other gods of Chaos, opened its mouth to roar its final bellow of rage, but all that emerged was a steaming hiss as its body melted away around it.
It was gone in seconds, reduced to a spreading pool of bubbling, hissing, burning blood. The Pleasure God's altar was dead too, its surface split and cracked where the staff had pierced into it, its unnatural appearance of life now nothing more than curiously coloured but lifeless marble.
Swords of the Empire Page 11
