“Vrox, keep watch outside,” ordered Phaedos over the vox, and an acknowledgement rune flashed. It would not do to have the massive Obliterator blundering through the ship, for he could bring all this junk down on their heads.
“There’s a stone pyramid in here,” voxed Skarlan. “Thirty metres high. Looks like he’s built it himself, block by block. I’m checking it out now.”
Skarlan clambered up the pyramid as Phaedos swept a warren of stained wooden torture engines for signs of life. This was surely confirmation that Karnulon was insane. A Word Bearer, especially one who delved into the darkness of sorcery, had to possess iron discipline of mind. Phaedos himself had spent untold hours in meditation, hearing voices in his head and feeling unseen hands pulling at his soul as he strove to understand Chaos. Karnulon had once reached peaks of enlightenment that Phaedos barely dared aspire to, but this ship was evidence that the crucial balance in Karnulon’s mind had been disturbed.
Chaos was power, and Chaos was majesty. But it was incalculably dangerous, and madness was the gravest threat. Phaedos had heard those voices and known he could not believe them all—his reward had been a sword-arm faster than lightning and a place with Captain Amakyre’s elite coven. Karnulon had fallen into insanity, and when a Word Bearer’s knowledge was coupled with madness, that Word Bearer had to die.
“I’ve found something,” voxed Skarlan. “He has definitely been here.”
Phaedos jogged through the blackened wooden racks and brass-banded iron maidens to the tumbledown stone pyramid. He saw every stone was carved with strange alien script. Skarlan stood on the upper levels, beckoning Phaedos up.
At the top was a flat stone surface inscribed with a circle, the carvings black with dried blood.
Chunks of desiccated flesh were spattered across the stone, pooling in grooves scratched by fingernails. There were scraps of skin and shards of bone. And in the very centre, the armour.
Karnulon’s armour lay disassembled in the pool of dried blood. The crimson ceramite was edged with carved jade and covered in eyes, hundreds of them staring blindly from the chest, forearms and shoulder pads. Karnulon’s affinity with sorcery had warped his body and his armour to the extent that he had been able to see with those eyes as if they were his own—but now they were dried out and dead. A combat knife, forged from a single jagged monster’s tooth, lay beside the massive chestplate alongside a bolt pistol with casings of gold.
“It’s his,” said Phaedos. “I recognise it from the hypno briefing.”
“Agreed, said Skarlan. “But why take it off?”
“A disguise. He doesn’t want to be recognised. Whatever he intends to do, he must do it alone and in secret.”
The armour would have fused with his skin so that Karnulon and his wargear were one. To remove it would have caused immense pain, as skin and muscle encased for millennia were exposed to the air. The blood and flesh were testament to the violence Karnulon had done to himself just to tear off his armour, and even a Chaos Marine would be sorely weakened by such an ordeal. Phaedos knew of older Word Bearers whose armour digested or even breathed for them, and removing it in any case rendered a Chaos Marine more vulnerable than was decent for an emissary of Chaos.
Only some terrible imperative could force a Word Bearer to do that to himself. But Karnulon was not a Word Bearer any more—he was a renegade, a wild animal that had to be put down for the good of the Legion.
To Phaedos, Karnulon’s existence was an insult, symbolising as it did the rejection of everything Phaedos had striven for so long to achieve. Every Word Bearer would feel the same. When Amakyre had been informed that Karnulon was definitely on Torvendis, and the dog had been hunted down by the coven, Phaedos would be proud to have a hand in his death.
To the south of Lady Charybdia’s borders, between the Canis Mountains and the southern oceans, was the desert. Like everything on Torvendis it had not always been like this—a scant few centuries ago there had been lush forestland here, populated with ravenous trees that snared travellers and kept them as biological slaves bound in their roots. Flocks of rotting feathered things had gathered thick enough to turn the sky black. But the jungle, that huge slab of hungry life, had fled south and east, cramming itself onto the precipitous ledges of the broken peninsulas, leaving behind utter desolation.
The ground it left behind was so dry it was petrified and cracked in the heat. The desert was a flat sheet of hot sandy-coloured rock. Sometimes, it rained stone, and huge boulders lay where they had dropped from the sky. Dull glows from cracks in the ground told of the immense heat simmering just beneath the land, which would on occasion bubble up and scour the desert in a flood of fire.
It wasn’t just dry or hostile, although it was both those things. The desert was malicious. Even when there was only one sun in the sky, the heat washed off the endless cracked stone underfoot and leached the very life out of anything that walked there. The land was still hungry, inheriting its hunger from the voracious things that had left so suddenly. Aside from the lone skeletal carrion birds circling overhead and scuttling lizards that scampered between patches of shade, there seemed to be no living things here. Certainly a normal human would have a life expectancy of scant hours in the southern desert of Torvendis.
The man who some called Kron, and who was currently satisfied to use that name, was not a normal human and had not been for some time. He felt the desert trying to drag the life out of him through the soles of his feet, but he was made of tougher stuff than that and ignored its hunger.
He gathered his cloak around him, shielding the back of his head and neck from the glare of the three suns burning in the mauve sky. He had been glad to cast off the cold weather gear he had worn in the mountains—he hadn’t even kept the walking boots because, though the journey here from Grik’s city had been a long one, Kron had not walked it. It rarely did for a sorcerer to walk anywhere.
In the distance was his objective. Where the massive chunks of rock had landed here and there at random, ahead was a formation that might almost have been put there deliberately. It was lopsided and ugly, like the rest of this place, but the great rock spears jutting from the ground were almost like pillars, the boulders scattered around almost border stones marking out a temple precinct. Perhaps, seen from the right angle, a long stratified slab of stone was a fallen lintel and roughly rectangular chunks were the remains of a fallen wall.
Kron could see how the place could have been missed. First choked in carnivorous rainforest, then entombed in an equally deadly land of fire and death, the few who had seen this place in the last millennia had no doubt paid little attention to this particular collection of rocks. But Kron was nothing if not a man who paid attention to the worlds around him, and as soon as he saw it there was no doubt in his mind that he had found what he was looking for.
He clambered nimbly over the stones marking the outer boundaries—he was not a young man, but he was still as spry as he had ever been—and glanced around the interior of the collapsed temple. He knew what it once looked like, and was not surprised that it had weakened and fallen, for he also had some idea of what it had been built to contain.
Kron spoke a few words that should never issue from a human throat, felt their power, felt his soul squirming against the corruption they held. The ground beneath his feet trembled, not with power but with fear, fragments of rock tumbling to the ground. Kron took a deep breath, remembering how he had used this power long ago for very different ends, and spoke the final syllable.
The ground opened, like clockwork. The mechanisms were very old and the shriek of metal on stone keened up from far below as huge sections of the ground pivoted, the stone columns sunk like the tumblers of a lock, and immense black metal counterweights swung up from beneath the ground on long armatures. The circular section of the ground on which Kron stood shuddered and began to sink, forming a platform fifty metres across that bore Kron down into a deep, dark shaft. Arcane machineries whirled massively around him as the pla
tform continued its descent. Cogs span in the darkness, and the rhythmic thunder of titanic clockwork boomed.
After many long minutes, the walls of the shaft vanished above him as the platform passed through the layer of metal and machines into a vast open space. Above all was solid black; below hung a landscape of cold metal. As Kron sunk lower into the chill subterranean world he could make out massive curved walls reaching up and down, for this cavern was a hollow sphere, perhaps ten kilometres in diameter. Kron’s jaded eyes let him look on it without being dumbstruck, but even he was impressed by the sheer size of the cavity. The circle of stone on which he stood dropped like a mote of light into the darkness, towards the structure the sphere had been built to contain.
A half-glimpsed web of cables suspended a platform in the sphere’s centre, larger than a city might be on a saner world, fully five kilometres across. Upon this immense suspended plateau was a complex of temples and pyramids, necropoli and sepulchres, built of blue-black metal that glinted strangely in the light filtering down from above. Bridges spanned canyon-like avenues. Pinnacles reached up like blocky metallic fingers towards the open entrance, now a tiny circle of tantalising light in the surface far above. The buildings reached right to the edge of platform, maintaining a rigid design that spoke of how the city had been created for some purpose other than to be lived in. At the metal city’s centre was a wide plaza marked out by artificial rivers of quicksilver, with a cluster of buildings in the middle.
The platform on which Kron stood reached the silent metal city and dissolved into droplets of mercury, leaving Kron standing on an avenue of polished iron. The metal glowed a faint shimmering blue-grey as the power evaporated off every polished surface. The metal was cold and pale, haloes of condensation formed where his fingers touched it.
Even after all this time, Kron was glad to realise he could still be amazed—for this temple-city was amazing and a testament to the desperation that had once stalked the planet. That terror had forced whole populations to labour to build this temple, breached terrible secrets to create its designs, and demanded untold sacrifices in the hope that the Dark Gods would leave it inviolate. They had truly been afraid.
Kron knew true fear very well—he could taste it here, in the metallic air, and see it in the dull blue shimmer of the buildings.
Down here it was silent, and Kron’s footsteps echoed as he padded through the streets. Tomb-complexes were stacks of steel slabs, with faceless monumental statues looming overhead. Kron could smell the age here, and see the terror in the immense mechanisms swinging through the shadows overhead.
He reached the central plaza, stepping over the geometric channels where runnels of quicksilver ran. The plaza was hundreds of metres across and empty aside from the cluster of buildings in the centre. The rest of the open space was criss-crossed with miniature artificial rivers of mercury and overlooked by five tall towers like the claws of a hand reaching from the plaza’s edge.
The buildings in the centre were graven with peculiar straight-lined lettering—a normal man’s eyes would bleed from looking at them, for they spelt out the sternest of warning signs as well as complex and powerful spell-boundaries. Kron knew languages that had never been spoken by human tongues, this ancient nine-script amongst them, and he knew how to divert their power around his soul. To actually speak them, of course, was another matter entirely.
The runes glowed as Kron began to speak. His tongue burned and he could feel the skin of his lips splitting in the heat, but he had woven such powerful magic before and could take the pain. His cloak caught fire and he pulled it over his shoulders, casting it to the ground without missing a syllable.
They were dark and dangerous words. They told of power and pain. They had never been written down, because they would come alive and flee from the page.
He felt the fire in his lungs. The runes were almost too bright to look at now, emitting terrible waves of power as they tried to resist Kron’s counterspell. The buildings were shuddering, the power within them threatening to break out. Sounds like thunder from deep within the metal of the floor cracked and rumbled, and mercury hissed as it boiled and evaporated.
Kron was forced back but kept on his feet, a bubble of force striving to drive him away from the heart of the tomb-city. He was yelling now, flame licking from his mouth; throat raw and burned with every breath. A voice was answering, bellowing from beneath the precinct, a voice that had not been heard for thousands of years.
With a thunderclap, the metal shattered. Kron flung a mental shield around himself as white-hot shrapnel exploded all around him, surging in gouts of molten steel around his sphere of protection. He felt himself being flung backwards and the buildings flickered by as he hurtled away from the eruption of power. He smashed up against the wall at the edge of the city-platform and grabbed onto it desperately, the skin on his fingers soldered to the hot metal, chunks of wreckage coursing over the edge around him like a waterfall. The din was so vast he didn’t hear it at all, his mind blocking it out with a wall of white noise.
When the light died down, Kron hauled himself back onto the platform of smouldering metal. His hands and feet were scorched through to the muscle, but he had suffered such things before. He had felt bullets shear through his body and watched his blood drain away. A few burns were nothing to a man who had lived through as much as Kron.
The billows of smoke gradually dissolved into the gloom, revealing a huge glowing crater where the plaza had been. The city around it had been blasted to molten slag, the towers bubbling stumps, the bridges spindly threads collapsing into the blasted remains. Rivers of black-flecked molten metal oozed towards the crater in the centre where the blast had exposed a chamber hidden within the platform. It like a burst abscess in the metal, where something had been revealed for the first time since fear and desperation had managed to shut it away.
“Rot flesh and splinter bones! Boil gore, snap spine! The light! All pain to the light!”
The voice was a vast cacophony, like a thousand installments playing at once, all out of tune. It filled the immense spherical cavity, echoing around its distant metal walls. Even from where he stood, Kron’s sharp eyes, so much better than a normal man’s, cut through the heat haze and could see the creature he had awoken and set free.
“The rage. I remember such rage, like a wall of fire…” The daemon breathed massively with the shock of its release, its chest heaving. It was thirty metres tall, the size of a Titan war engine. Grey flesh throbbing with muscles glistened in the glow of the crater. Its heart was a slab of brass machinery punched through its chest, valves pumping cogs grinding, driving pistons stabbing from its biceps and thighs, fired by steaming furnaces that gaped from its back. Wings of thick skin stretched between steel frameworks unfolded from its shoulders, and it shook its huge equine head, the fleshy mandibles grinding, the wet red slits of its eyes glowing with anger and joy. “Such desire it was that caged me, such suffering it took. So much blood! Such a river of hate!”
The monster flexed its taloned hands, breathing in the sulphurous air. It gouged one forearm along the jagged, exposed metal of its prison cell and watched the thick, steaming daemon blood flowing across its skin. It held the arm high and let a few drops spatter onto its face, into its eyes, into its mouth, roaring with its lust for violence.
“Blood!” it keened to itself. “The blood! The pain!”
Kron stood on the threshold of the crater, and spoke in a sorcerous voice he knew it could not hear.
“Welcome back,” he said.
“Blood for the Blood God!” bellowed Ss’ll Sh’Karr.
CHAPTER FOUR
While no legend gives enough detail to piece together the face of Arguleon Veq, there is more than enough detail about the panoply of war that once clad his body and killed in his hands. Everything Veq touched turned into a legend of its own.
Slaughtersong, a steed either jet black or deathly white depending on the tale and the teller, was faster than light and s
pat fire from its eyes, and had skin (or scales, or feathers) that could turn aside thunderbolts.
Veq’s armour was, rather than just another item of wargear, a loyal retainer and vengeful bodyguard, more astute than most mortal commanders. It would give Veq counsel and, it is said, saved his life many times and had a gauntlet in many of his victories, always facing destruction to protect the semi-divine body of its master.
And then there were the weapons. No library could hold the volumes of tales that are told about the many weapons that Veq wielded in his long and terrible life and in the struggle with the Last. If every one was true then Veq would change his weaponry as often as Torvendis changed its suns, and yet there must be some truth in every story. They tell of the bow bent from the spine of a dragon that fired arrows tipped with its teeth, the whip of spiked chain with links of gold, the sword of purest emerald that put out one eye of the Last midway through the battle, and the massive spiked gauntlets with which Veq tore down mountains and cast them at his enemies.
Many rulers on Torvendis had claimed ownership of one or more of these items, and many of them are widely believed to have been correct. It was surely the spell-staff, forged by Veq from the molten core of Torvendis, which the self-styled Pontifex Infernum used to boil the southern ocean and scour every living thing from the hemisphere. It is almost certain that the shield worshipped by the Crimson Knights who ruled a century of insanity was indeed the same one that fended off the fiery breath of the Last, or a fragment of the same. And for every such artefact there were a hundred fakes, some of them masterpieces believed sacred by their discoverers and others deliberately concocted.
Anything believed touched by the hand of Arguleon Veq became something holy, a fount of power that shone with the unseen favour of Chaos, such was the power of legends on Torvendis. And though there are many swords and spears and even body parts that are described as having belonged to Veq, there are far more legends than artefacts that mirror them. It was reasonable, then, to assume that some of Arguleon Veq’s wargear still lies somewhere on Torvendis, waiting to be found, or kept secret by those who fear what power they might hold.
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