Hallowed Knights: Plague Garden

by Josh Reynolds

  The enormous, cracked archway above was thick with a shroud of yellowing vines. The innumerable corpses trapped within them had twitched into motion the moment the cobalt-limned galley had swept beneath them. The flickering starlight that danced along the rails and mast kept most of the dead at bay but, even so, there were simply too many of them. Bodies flopped and fell to the deck, smothering the azure radiance long enough for more of the dangling corpses to descend and attack.

  Dead hands groped and battered at unwary warriors, as the bodies descended towards the ship like twisted spiders. More and more of them with every passing moment, attacking the Stormcasts on the deck, and those rowing as well. The galley shuddered with their weight. The decks were a riot of struggling forms, as Stormcasts fought back to back against the deluge of leprous corpses. ‘This is intolerable,’ Aetius said, glaring up at the clutching canopy of hands and teeth that groped for him.

  ‘I shall pass along your complaints to the Steel Soul,’ Solus said, sheltering beneath another Liberator’s raised shield. The Judicator-Prime loosed a scintillating arrow, and nodded in satisfaction as it thumped into a corpse’s skull, rendering it limp.

  Aetius ignored Solus and concentrated on the task at hand. ‘Berkut – keep that shield up,’ he growled, jostling one of his warriors. ‘Serena, Tomas – brace and step, make us some room. Taya, stop playing with that thing and get back into position.’ He moved to help the warrior as she struggled with a particularly stubborn corpse. The diseased carcass clung to her shield with fierce tenacity, its crushed jaw flopping against her war-mask.

  Aetius scraped the thing away and trod on its head, pulping it. Taya nodded her thanks. ‘These things smell worse than orruks,’ she said, coughing.

  ‘Then breathe through your mouth,’ Aetius said gruffly. He spotted Gardus fighting at the prow, where the dead were thickest. Tallon fought at his side, savaging corpses with his beak and claws. The Lord-Celestant blazed with an elemental radiance as he struck down corpse after corpse. Truly a sign of Sigmar’s favour. Tearing his gaze from the Lord-Celestant, he slammed his shield into a corpse as it swung itself towards him, and smashed its crumbling face out of the back of its skull. A blow from his hammer caught another in the spine and dropped it to the deck.

  Everywhere he looked there were vines, and bodies wriggling through them. They needed to clear this place – to purify it, all at once. Even as the thought occurred to him, he caught sight of Feros and his Retributors swatting corpses from the air. Aetius glanced at Solus. ‘Solus,’ he called. Solus nodded, understanding instantly. He signalled, and nearby Judicators switched their aim, covering Aetius and his retinue, as they pushed towards the Retributors.

  ‘Heavy Hand, remember the Seeping Fen?’ Aetius shouted, shouldering aside an arrow-studded corpse. Feros glanced at him in evident confusion. Then, his eyes brightened with realisation. He laughed, loud and long.

  ‘Brothers and sisters, let us play our war-song,’ Feros rumbled. ‘If the dead wish to dance, we will give them reason to do so.’ Retributors turned towards one another, ignoring the enemies that crowded about them. Aetius’ Liberators moved to surround them, warding the paladins with their shields and hammers. Feros and his retinue began to chant, slowly and sonorously, as they clashed their hammers together rhythmically. Fat sparks of crackling sky-magic danced with every contact. The crash of hammers grew louder, and quicker. More lightning leapt up, dancing from hammer to hammer.

  Aetius resolutely looked away from the burgeoning glow. To stare at it too long was to risk blinding oneself. Behind him, Feros’ voice rose in a paean to Sigmar’s glory. Despite himself, Aetius began to sing along. Sparks leapt up, and flitted across the plates of his armour and the runes of his hammer.

  And then, with one final, echoing clash of hammers, a gout of celestial lightning snarled upwards, through the vines. Fire blossomed on the rotting vegetation, and raced from vine to vine. Twitching corpses were consumed, reduced to ash and blackened bone in moments. Aetius raised his shield and swatted aside a burning cadaver, pleased. They’d used the trick before, to cleanse the air of miasma at the Seeping Fen, and burn away the thick swarms of flies that had sought to blind them.

  A rumbling groan of displeasure drowned out the final verse of the war-hymn, and punctured Aetius’ self-satisfaction. He looked up, and saw the two monstrous statues crouching to either side of the archway turn, slowly, inexorably, towards the galley. The Great Unclean One twisted on its plinth, sword rising, as if to chop through the vessel. The eyes of the statue blazed with hideous life, and its face cracked and crumbled as it twisted with gloating malice.

  Before it could strike, a whirling barrage of hammers slammed into its blubbery features, further cracking them. Tegrus and his Prosecutors had been, until now, grounded by the canopy of vines. Now, they had taken advantage of the canopy’s incineration, and hurtled skyward to bombard the threatening statue. But even as the Great Unclean One rocked on its plinth, its companion undulated towards the flying Stormcasts, avian beak wide. The stony Lord of Change vomited a coruscating bolt of eldritch flame.

  One of the Prosecutors, half a second too slow, fell twitching to the deck, his armour warping and bulging in an obscene transformation. Stormcasts scattered as the warrior crashed down. The Prosecutor screamed in agony as his own armour consumed him, using his skin and muscle to build itself a glistening, fleshy shell. Tendrils crafted from ligament lashed at any who drew too close, and a stinger made from a splintered spinal column emerged from the heaving mass.

  ‘Sigmar preserve us,’ Aetius hissed. The newborn Chaos spawn clattered towards the closest group of Stormcasts, claws of twisted sigmarite clacking. He glanced at Feros. The Retributor-Prime nodded.

  ‘Lead the way, Shieldborn. My hammer is at your back.’

  They advanced on the creature. It spun towards them, eyeball-topped cilia sprouting from the stretched mouthpiece of a bent helmet. Something rattled, and it scuttled towards them, snapping its claws. A volley of gleaming arrows peppered its flank, drawing its attention towards Solus and his Judicators. Aetius gave a silent prayer of thanks for his friend’s quick thinking. He closed with the creature, absorbing a blow from its stinger tail on his shield. Swiftly, he smashed the tail to flinders. He dodged back as the monster whirled towards him, claws snapping. ‘Feros, put it out of its misery!’

  ‘Only the faithful,’ Feros roared, as his lightning hammer slammed down against its fleshy shell. The spawn was momentarily flattened by the force of the blow, and Feros finished it off before it could recover. He pinned it in place with his foot and brought his hammer down again and again, until the creature was a broken ruin.

  Feros stepped back. ‘Sleep now, brother, that your soul might rise again, with storms yet to come,’ he said. ‘Sleep the sleep of the faithful.’

  Aetius heard a monstrous shriek, and saw that they’d left the statues behind. Both had endured the attention of the Prosecutors, and clouds of smoke and dust rose from them. But already they were repairing themselves. Cracks closed, debris rolled back up the hunched forms, seeking familiar divots. ‘Sigmar’s bones, we’re going to have to fight them again, aren’t we?’ he said in frustration.

  ‘Your confidence is encouraging,’ Lord-Relictor Morbus said as he strode between Aetius and Feros. He sank to one knee beside the steaming remains of the Chaos spawn. Aetius looked at him, confused.

  ‘My what?’

  ‘To fight them again implies that we will survive to return this way,’ Morbus said, as he waved a hand over the broken thing. He made a grasping gesture, and murmured softly. Sparks of light rose from the ruin of meat and bone, and danced briefly across his fist, before sinking into his hand. Morbus sagged, as if a great weight pressed down upon him. He rose and glanced at Aetius. ‘That was quick thinking earlier.’

  Aetius shrugged. ‘It needed doing.’

  Morbus chuckled. ‘So it did.’ He staggered
, and Feros caught him.

  ‘Are you injured, Lord-Relictor?’

  ‘No. Merely tired.’ Morbus pushed himself away from the Retributor-Prime. ‘But then, so are we all.’ He leaned against his staff. ‘Though our bodies are fatigued, we yet advance. Thus are the faithful known.’

  ‘Only the faithful,’ Aetius said solemnly. The deck shuddered. Waves smacked at the sides of the galley as it travelled down an overflowing runnel of moss-covered stone. The walls of the aqueduct rose high over the galley, and its rim was encrusted with tumorous malformations that might have been ramparts and towers. Strange, pale faces peered out of gaping holes, watching as the galley passed by. The fungoid features retreated as the light washed over them. Aetius watched them warily. ‘This place is full of horrors.’

  ‘This is only the first level,’ Morbus said. ‘There are six more, according to our captive.’ Aetius glanced towards the mast, where the Rotbringer sat chained. Thus far, the pox-knight had given them no cause to pitch him over the side, but Aetius itched to do so regardless. As if reading his thoughts, Morbus said, ‘He has been truthful, so far.’

  ‘It will not last.’

  ‘And why should he lie?’ Solus asked, as he joined them. His armour was streaked with ash and gore, but he seemed unharmed. Aetius was glad of that, though he’d never admit it. Solus was the closest thing he had to a friend.

  ‘He is a thing of Chaos,’ Aetius said.

  Solus nodded in agreement. ‘Fair enough.’ He studied the Rotbringer. ‘Still, one can’t help but wonder…’

  ‘One can, if one tries,’ Aetius said.

  Solus dropped a companionable fist on his shoulder-plate. ‘Forgive me, brother. I sometimes forget who I’m talking to.’

  Aetius couldn’t decide whether to be insulted or not, so he remained silent. In any event, it was soon too noisy to speak. The roaring of the waters had grown deafening, and it was all they could do to hold on. The galley rose and fell, seemingly at random.

  Past the edges of the aqueduct, Aetius could see more lengthy runnels, all slanting downwards along a cliff-face at wrong angles from their own monstrous gateways. Water roared between them in an unceasing torrent, tumbling into the depths. This shroud of water was only broken by a series of steep, winding paths, which cut through the thick, fungal foliage clinging to the inner curve of the cliffs. No, not cliffs – the inner rim of the great tiers that made up this place. Carved by some gargantuan stonemason in time out of mind, at the behest of a daemon-god.

  Everything about this realm spoke of filth and degradation. It stained one’s mind, as well as one’s armour. Despite Morbus’ protective incantations, and the prayers they murmured almost constantly, a fell aura surrounded the Stormcasts. It was like a piece of grit, caught between armour and flesh, all but unnoticed at first, but growing ever more uncomfortable and distracting. It was a constant battle to keep their armour scraped free of mould, made worse by the spores that floated through the damp air.

  The deck shifted beneath him, timbers groaning. The angle of the aqueduct was levelling off as they neared the bottom. Water filled a swirling bay, surrounded on all sides by jagged rocks and thick-boled trees, the branches of which dipped into the waters. Flocks of things that might have been birds or bats glided through the air, their shrill cries sawing over Aetius’ nerves. Moisture pattered across the deck from above. It turned to steam as it reached the blue radiance flickering from the rails and mast.

  ‘That grinding sound is going to get on my nerves quickly,’ Feros said.

  Aetius was about to ask him what he was talking about, when he heard it. Like two massive stones, scraping away at one another. ‘What is that?’

  ‘This place is in constant motion,’ Morbus said. ‘The tiers turn at the whim of their maker, spinning slowly, but inexorably, in place.’

  ‘Like one millstone set upon the next,’ Solus said.

  Aetius looked at him. ‘What?’

  ‘This place. It’s like a stack of millstones.’

  ‘How would you know what millstones look like?’

  Solus shrugged. ‘I was a miller.’

  Feros turned. ‘You were a what?’ The Retributor sounded aghast.

  ‘A miller. I worked in a mill. Grinding corn.’ Solus looked at them. ‘What?’

  Feros and Aetius exchanged a glance. ‘Nothing,’ Aetius said. ‘It’s just…’ He shook his head. ‘Never mind.’ It was a reminder that heroism was more a matter of moment than birth. While many Stormcasts had been warriors in their previous lives, some had been farmers, merchants, even beggars. Faith and a moment of courage had earned them their place in the Hallowed Knights.

  A shout from Tegrus, circling above, drew him from his reverie. ‘What in Sigmar’s name is that?’ he said, staring at the edifice that rose from the mist before them.

  ‘That, I believe, is the gate to Despair,’ Morbus said.

  Aetius had seen similar structures, or the ruins thereof, before. Walled harbours were common, on the coast of the Verdant Bay. Most had been destroyed by the plague-fleets of the Rotbringers. Others had been twisted to new purpose, and made into a pale copy of the swollen bastion now coming into view.

  The harbour gateway was constructed from haphazardly piled stones, and immense, moss-covered logs, lashed together with rusty chains and thick vines. A decaying stockade of stone and wood extended to either side, vanishing into the thick mists, which rose from the roiling waters. The gateway portcullis was open, and galleys slid beneath it into the harbour beyond. ‘Should we douse these lights?’ Solus asked.

  Bells rang from somewhere beyond the palisade. Morbus shook his head. ‘It was too late for that the moment we entered this realm. Our coming was heard all the way to Nurgle’s manse.’ Aetius could hear voices raised in dolorous chanting, and the thump of drums. Reeking water vapour drifted down from the titanic waterfalls, staining everything with a vile, ashen patina. And the grinding of the tiers. Always, the grinding.

  Gardus turned to look down at them from the foredeck. ‘Aetius, move your Liberators to the rails. Solus, form up your Judicators midships. Feros, to your warriors will fall the oars, I’m afraid.’ He gestured to Tegrus. ‘Tegrus, you and your warriors will accompany Enyo. Scout ahead and see if you can find the Lord-Castellant. Do not engage the enemy unless you must. Tornus, Cadoc, remain here. We may need your speed in the hours to come.’ Cadoc, for once, offered no argument. Aetius wondered if the oppressiveness of this place was beginning to affect even the unruly Knight-Azyros.

  As the others moved to follow their orders, Aetius looked out over the rail at what awaited them beyond the stockade. Through the noxious mist, he could see the outline of what might have been a town, or towns. As the galley passed through the gateway, he realised that the rickety structures were not all in one place, but instead encrusted the cancerous hummocks of spongy-looking fungus dotting the surface of the water. A roaring sound rose from somewhere beyond them, and the current grew stronger. Soon, the order to lay on oars was given.

  Aetius glimpsed galleys drifting in the pall, and other things besides, as he ordered his Liberators into position. He saw great, undulating shapes that moved noiselessly through the water and between the half-submerged wrecks littering their path. Ghostly orbs of colourless light floated across the water’s surface, drawing near, only to then dash away.

  One of his warriors pointed towards a galley that had been cracked in two. ‘Look,’ she said. The wreck was covered in thick moss and large clumps of fungus. Makeshift tents had been erected on the drier stretches of its hull, and pale shapes huddled about flickering balefires. At the sight of the cobalt-limned galley, the inhabitants of the wreck fled into its overgrown hold.

  ‘Can we not aid them?’ a Liberator asked.

  ‘I do not think they would welcome us,’ Aetius said. ‘Stay alert. There are more than daemons and lost souls in these waters.�
� Far above, something shrieked. Carrion birds, or something worse, circling overhead.

  Aetius hoped it wasn’t an omen.

  Tegrus of the Sainted Eye glided through the noisome air, searching the murky waters below for a tell-tale flash of silver. The Lord-Castellant was close by. Tegrus could smell the tang of lightning on the air, clear and sharp, despite the obfuscating stench of this place. He banked, swooping low around the garret of a shaggy house leaning haphazardly over the water. Faces peered at him from within, eyes wide with fear. What little he glimpsed of their features, before they scrambled out of sight, set his stomach to turning.

  Even worse was the omnipresent grinding that haunted the air. It was the slow turning of the garden’s levels on an unseen axis. The air shuddered with it. Much of the miasma that clung to everything was spewed out from between the rims of the levels as they ground against one another. He could just make out the flatulent spurts of pollution in the distance, spreading over everything.

  There was foulness wherever he looked. It was in the air and the water, and in the faces of every inhabitant of this twisted realm. He saw shuffling, hunched figures fishing off crooked jetties, or wandering aimlessly along the shores of the islands. Their flesh shone with an unhealthy radiance, and their movements were stiff and full of pain. What were they? Captives? Slaves? Or had they always been here, sprouting like mushrooms in the dark? Was this what awaited the inhabitants of Ghyran if the Stormcasts failed?

  Sympathy warred with revulsion. It was his duty, as one of the faithful, to help those who could not help themselves, but did that extend to people such as this? Were these lost souls worthy of help? He banished the thoughts and tried to focus on the task before him, letting the heat of his crackling feathers burn him a path through the falling rain.