Centurion Kolkis had not slept for twenty-two years. Ever since, as a child, he had first been thrown into the selection pits to prove himself worthy of Lady Charybdia’s legions or die in the attempt, he had hungered for sensation. He could not sleep, because every second sleeping could have been spent seeking out new experiences. At his blooding as a soldier, the din of battle had been so imprinted on him that he thirsted for something equal in intensity.
He had seen the thick of the fighting at the Bloodstone Falls, and been enthralled by the screams and the stench. He had led patrols deep into the southern rainforests and been immersed in their lethal strangeness. Now, posted to a command manning the outer walls, there was little save the view to stretch his senses.
It was dull compared to the many flavours of battle he had tasted, and longed to taste again. But he had a job to do. Lady Charybdia commanded, and he had to ensure she was obeyed on his watch.
Kolkis had emerged from a night spent disciplining the more slovenly recruits, to watch the morning break over the mountains. Three suns were competing to be the first over the distant peaks. The sky was orange this morning, studded with stubborn stars, with the hard point of the Slaughtersong staring from one horizon. A fine view.
All along the walls the guard was changing. The legionaries were strapping on their scaled armour wrapped in pastel silks, and taking over from those who had stood lookout throughout the nights. Other legionaries were keeping their muscles and reflexes in trim with spear-duels fought along the broad stretches of ramparts, between the narrow bottlenecks where attackers would be bunched up and killed. Far along the wall some of the defence guns—rare, ancient, monstrous weapons that fired explosive rounds from snarling, daemon-carved muzzles—were being test-fired in the daily drills.
The walls themselves were a masterpiece built, they said, by enslaved monsters and designed by Lady Charybdia herself. The sheer surface presented to the outside world was of orange-pink rock that looked like sandstone but was harder than any granite. The massive buttresses served to shore the wall up from any direct assault, and it was doubtful that even an orbital strike could breach it—not that anyone would be insane enough to pilot a whole warfleet through the Maelstrom to reach Torvendis in the first place.
The wall kinked in many places, forcing attackers into places overlooked by two faces of the wall where missiles could be poured into them from both angles. Ditches and toothed barricades described a maze leading through the approaches to the walls that would break up a massed assault and leave its elements charging the walls in fragments. And if anyone managed to get a foothold on the walls themselves, individual sections could be closed off and barricaded, trapping the attackers inside to be eliminated at leisure.
But it was not the wall itself that was the true defence. Every wall section was commanded by a centurion, like Kolkis, with the experience, steel, and sheer devotion to the cause of maintaining Torvendis as a vessel for the worship of Slaanesh. Under every centurion were upwards of a thousand men, every one of them trained in archery and close-quarters bloodshed. The barracks complexes that filled the ground just behind the wall could disgorge enough men to pack the battlements within half an hour, and there was always a formidable guard posted that could be expected to see off just about any threat that currently existed on Torvendis. Amongst the legions manning the wall were a great many mutants who might vomit acid on attackers or tear them apart with inhuman claws, and the secretive robed figures occasionally sighted were battle-mages who could conjure up a rain of lightning if it was required.
But only centurions like Kolkis knew of the weapon that would be employed when the threat was truly great. There were elaborately decorated towers at regular intervals along the wall—these were not watchtowers or even mere decorations, but temples to the Prince of Pleasure, their interiors stained with blood and their floors marked out with complex symbols of summoning. Lady Charybdia had a pact with the warp, they said, that welded an army of daemons to her will in return for the reverence she gave Slaanesh. Such daemons could be summoned to defend her realm—the ordinary legionaries knew nothing of this, of course, because they would be the ones whose sacrifices would be used to power the summoning rituals, and as less experienced soldiers their devotion had not always been tested unto death.
One of the legionaries—a young man, his skin hardly scarred—hurried up to Kolkis.
“Sir, seventeenth cohort have been observing movement on their watch. They thought you should know.”
The lad was frightened of him, Kolkis realised. At over two metres tall with scarcely a scrap of skin unmarked by the scars of devotion, Kolkis knew he looked something like of a monster. “Movement? Scavengers?”
“Probably, sir. But with the new orders they thought they should send me to tell you.”
“Let us hope it is something more. We have had too long without bloodshed. Show me.”
The legionary led Kolkis to the watchpoint where the seventeenth cohort had just stood down. This section of the wall overlooked rolling foothills where a forest had found purchase, a dark blue-green blanket lying heavy over the plains. Scavengers, who lived off the detritus and the dead cast down the wall by the legions, used the place for cover—the legionaries, in turn, used them for archery or gunnery practice. Lady Charybdia had often ordered the razing of the forest, but every time it had been scoured with axe and fire it had grown back twice as dense within days, as if Torvendis was trying to remind them how even Lady Charybdia couldn’t have everything her own way.
Kolkis held out a hand and one of the legionaries on watch passed him a brass telescope. The centurion scanned the edge of the woods, about two kilometres from the base of the wall, trying to pick out a shape against the darkness. He saw movement but it could just have been the stiff breeze blowing across the foothills.
A flash caught his eye, like the glint of the sun on something reflective. He tried to focus on the spot and saw a tiny, wiry, dark figure darting back into the treeline.
There was a sudden, sharp sound and Kolkis looked away from the eyepiece, to see the young legionary clutching at his throat and the slim shaft of black wood that jutted from his neck, fletched with white feathers. The lad coughed and a gout of blood spurted from his mouth as, eyes rolling, he pitched backwards to land, spasming, on the floor of the battlement.
“To stations!” someone yelled and the legionaries on guard quickly hunkered down between the crenellations. Calls went up for archers and more spotters, and one of the legionaries unhooked a long curled horn from his belt, ready to give the general alarm if Kolkis gave the order. The clatter of armour and weapons rippled down the wall.
Kolkis bent down and pulled the arrow from the dying legionary’s throat, yanking hard to dislodge the barbed arrowhead. He put the tip to his tongue and ran it across the surface, breaking the skin and letting his own blood touch the metal. Instantly he felt the tingle of sorcery in his mouth, hot and metallic, dissolving into a dozen aftertastes of spices, sweetness and decay.
“Magical,” he said to himself. And magic meant something more than scavengers.
It was probably nothing, just a gang of barbarian youths claiming nobility from their chieftain fathers, testing their manliness by killing someone on the walls. But it was still an insult that deserved punishment if possible, and the orders for heightened vigilance had been very clear. Any threat was to be considered extreme.
“Sound the alarms!” shouted Kolkis and the horns sounded, braying a long atonal note that carried far down the length of the defences. Already Kolkis could see spearpoints bristling up and down the walls as the legionaries on guard took up defensive positions, ready to protect the archers and sorcerers and, if it came to it, form a formidable hedge of spears against anyone scaling the walls.
Then there was a streak of silver above the lip of the battlements, and a stray arrow clattered against the stone. Another, and someone screamed, grabbing at a shoulder. Kolkis glanced between the teeth of the bat
tlements and could see arrows darting up from the edge of the woods, each one enchanted to give them greater range and accuracy than any mundane archer could manage. He had heard that the nomads who lived on the edge of the desert hunted with such weapons, and that only they had them in such numbers—but the deserts were thousands of kilometres further south.
They had said there was something going on in the mountains—Kolkis had heard the rumours gleaned from the legions’ spies and infiltrators, telling of a new leader and a rash of rebellions. Had the tribes united, and gathered here? Was this a major assault on the walls, an attempt by the mountain peoples to bring Lady Charybdia’s forces to battle for the first time since Arrowhead Peak?
Praises to the Prince, Kolkis hoped so.
The arrows flew thicker, spattering against the ramparts like rain. The spear-armed troops crouched for cover while the parties of swordsmen, who would form a fighting reserve to block off sections of the defences if enemies made it onto the walls, raised their shields overhead for shelter. Legionaries who were too slow were falling as arrows punched near-vertical through their faces and shoulders, others were dragging themselves with speared arms or legs to take cover. Trails of blood were being left across the stone. But they were the exception—the walls had been built with just such an attack in mind, and most of the legionaries on guard were well in cover.
“They think they can take us like this?” said the cohort leader, his back against the wall next to Kolkis.
“No, soldier, they don’t. This isn’t an attack. This is a signal.” Kolkis looked back over the battlements and saw that the forest seemed to be creeping forward, and knew that the approaching black mass was a seething horde of warriors breaking from the cover of the trees and swarming towards the walls. There were trenches and barricades to tackle first, even before they ran into the teeth of the wall’s archers—but there were so many of them…
Some of them might reach the walls themselves, in great enough numbers to make this a decent fight. The dark, shuddering thrill, which Kolkis knew was his bloodlust, had ignited inside him and he prayed to Prince Slaanesh that he would have the chance to let it take over.
“Get the archers to mark their ranges!” he called to the trumpeter. “And keep lookouts posted, I want to pick off any infiltrators before they reach us. Empty the barracks and man the counter-charge ports. Send up the flares, and give thanks to Slaanesh for this fight!”
All along the wall the signals went up, the multicoloured glow of the signal flares turning the morning sky into a riot of colours. The clashing din of the trumpets called streams of warriors from the barracks just behind the wall, some heading up the complex stairways towards the top of the wall, others into the underground muster halls from where counter-attacks would be led through hidden ports amongst the warrens of defence ditches. Arrows lashed down as archery teams checked their ranges, picking out a line beyond which anything advancing would be met with a hail of arrows dipped in poisons and hallucinogens.
Combat teams, who would take the fight to the attackers if the ranks of spearmen gave way, surrounded their mutated leaders and chanted songs of praise and hatred. Sorcerers, wizened and wasted by decades of service to Slaanesh’s dark arts, hurried up winding stairways with their elite bodyguards to unlock the chambers hidden within the ornate towers, readying them in case they were needed to summon the Lust God’s own servants. And corpse-teams, devolved creatures barely human, gathered around the rearward working of the defences, ready to take the bodies of dead defenders and spirit them away to whatever pits they lived in when battle was not in their air.
And along the wall a new sound arose, growing louder and louder until it could be heard above the blaring trumpets and clatter of arriving soldiers. It was a low, angry growl, and as it swelled it became clearer. It was the combined battle-cry of hundreds of thousands of warriors, who charged as one from the treeline towards the walls, a seething dark mass covered in silver sparks where the morning sun glinted off their weapons, teeth bared and eyes wild.
The spotter teams made out many different manners of weaponry and dress, scores of skin colours, cavalry on white desert horses or swift lizardlike predators, hulking mutants and lightning-fast cave dwellers, sallow-fleshed ocean raiders and stocky barbarian tribesmen. There could be no doubt now—the Canis Mountains had united, and the only force that could bring such people together was the prospect of war against a mutually hated enemy.
Lady Charybdia’s legions readied their spears and drew their bows, and prepared to give these animals something they could really hate.
CHAPTER FIVE
In the end, it had happened almost by itself—as if it was always meant to be, waiting in the souls of every one of them for a leader to act as a catalyst. This was no longer the Emerald Sword, for the Emerald Sword was dead. There was no Serpent tribe, either, or Bear, or anything else. There were just the people of the Canis Mountains, the inheritors of Arrowhead Peak, a single nation welded together by war.
The Emerald Sword had been destroyed, and with it any hope Golgoth really had of becoming a truly great leader. But even if there was nothing left for him personally, this was a fine way to die.
Around him was a wedge of twenty thousand men and not a few women, pouring screaming from the muster camps in the forest, forming the heart of the attack. The ground was mud under their feet and every one had a weapon drawn as they ran. They had been hand-picked from the Emerald Sword and the first tribes to ally with them, and Golgoth could see Hath leading his own contingent across the foothills. Far to his left was a spearhead of cavalry on pale horses, and to the right was a massive mob of warriors from the northern coasts, led by the Serpent warriors who looked sick and loose-skinned but who were as cruel and murderous as anyone on Torvendis.
The wings of the attack, too distant for Golgoth to see, were anchored to the north by strange warriors with great ogrish bodies and huge eyes from living in the darkness of the valleys. The south wing was a mass of warriors mounted on the strangest of creatures, scaled monsters and long-legged avians, along with southern desert nomads on pale horses. The sight was awesome, a line of men pouring forward like a carpet of insects, flowing over the foothills towards the wall that separated the mountains from Lady Charybdia’s domain.
The wall stretched as far as Golgoth could see in both directions, sheer and unforgiving, with massive buttresses and a formidable overhang. It must have been a hundred metres high, five hundred metres between buttresses. On the battlements at the top could just be glimpsed tiny figures gathering—legionaries preparing to receive the attack. Many of Golgoth’s warriors carried ladders or grappling hooks—others intended to rake the battlements with bowfire. Others just wanted to lure the legionaries into open battle, and lose themselves in a chaotic killing ground beneath the walls. Golgoth, truth be told, was one of them.
The ground ahead of them was broken with ditches and rows of spikes. The mobs flowed over them, heedless of danger. So few of them had ever seen battle of the magnitude that was promised here that they were almost mad with the lust for war, and they cared nothing for the dangers. A mass of unwashed bodies crowded around Golgoth as he clambered over a barricade of sharpened logs, knowing that as he did so he was climbing on the bodies of his own warriors who had stumbled and been impaled. Even as he reached the other side he saw the ditch ahead was filling with bodies, and he joined the horde around him scrambling over the fallen.
They were screaming, some with panic as they were trampled, others with joy as they felt a rush of rage and adrenaline such as they had never felt. The first arrows began to fall, inaccurate ranging shots that still hit because the only place they could land was in the mass of warriors. Golgoth saw a warrior—one of the Sword, he was sure—stumble as an arrow punched through the side of his chest, then disappear beneath the feet of his comrades like a drowning man beneath the waves.
Golgoth pulled the shield from his back as the arrows began raining thicker. Clusters of arrow
s tore chunks out of the advance, gouging holes quickly filled by others eager to be in the front line. The ground was broken and deadly, with concealed spikes skewering unwary feet and hidden pits swallowing a score of men at once.
Golgoth could hear the trumpets on the walls, a hideous sound calling the Pleasure God’s soldiers to battle. He could see the glints of their spearheads and the glare of explosives they used for signalling. There was a distant flash and a plume of dust and broken bodies erupted nearby, a thundercrack washing over the advancing warriors. Golgoth looked up and saw the emplacement on the wall above where a huge war machine had been mounted, lobbing explosive shells into the heart of his army.
They were cowards, these slaves of a degenerate queen. They would rather butcher real men from a distance than face them with sword and axe. Golgoth was filled with hate, at Lady Charybdia who had bled the Emerald Sword of its honour, at her soldiers who he would gladly butcher in their thousands if he could but reach them, at the planet around him that had let such a cancer take power. His hate carried him forward over the smouldering craters and through the falling arrows, over the barricades and ditches.
“Forward!” he screamed at the horde around him, by now covered in blood and stumbling. “Forward, you dogs! For your honour! Die like men!”
Explosions racked the ground. Blood and earth rained down. Bodies were thick beneath his feet and the defence ditches were like swamps of gore. Spring-loaded spears shot from the ground to transfix men through the stomach.
Golgoth tried to make out what was happening further down the line. The cavalry was a mess, horses tangled in the barricades and contorted masses of men and beasts trampling one another to death. Some elements had avoided the scrum and were spread out as they galloped forward—some were even at the wall itself, horse archers firing arrows straight up and soldiers manhandling ladder segments in the hope of ascending the massive wall. Already sheets of shimmering acid were running down the walls to soak those trying to climb them, and arrows fell in thick waves.
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