The night turned colder, and suddenly Golgoth was aware of a blade’s point on the back of his neck.
“You’re too damned ugly to hide, Golgoth,” said a slick, slimy voice. The point was pulled back to let Golgoth turn his head, and he saw standing above him a pale, loose-skinned woman with deep-set black eyes and straggly raven hair. Golgoth had never met her, but he knew her by description and reputation: Lutr’Kya, of the Serpent tribe.
Lutr’Kya stepped out of the foliage into the hollow where Golgoth crouched. The scaled armour she wore like a cloak was scored and spattered with dried blood. “I thought I would find you skulking. Look at you, son of the Sword. Covered in filth. Cowering.” There was a sneer on her piscine face. She lowered her long, thin sword, as if daring Golgoth to attack her. “I hope you can think of a reason why I should not kill you, Golgoth, because I fear I never will.”
Golgoth struggled to his feet. He was covered in cuts, and he had probably cracked a couple of ribs falling from one of the siege ladders. “Kill me if you will, Lutr’Kya. Lady Charybdia couldn’t do it, Grik couldn’t. Maybe you will have more luck.”
“Damn you, Golgoth! You joke with me? You have murdered my tribesmen! You led us against the walls to die!”
Golgoth thrust his face close to hers. “You are already dead! You have been dead for generations! Look at us, Serpent bitch. We’re nothing! The Sword sold its children as slaves. The Serpent live on desolate rocks and work their men to death before they grow beards. We only exist because it isn’t worth Charybdia’s attention to have us exterminated.”
“Then we could have fought back! Damnation, Golgoth, you could have fought her on our terms, not thrown your brothers and sisters against the walls to die!”
“Better death now than slavery forever.”
“Golgoth, our tribes have been at one another’s throats for generations. But I have worked without cease to keep the Serpent tribes together, and I thought for the mountain peoples the best chance for survival was to fight as one.” Lutr’Kya’s voice was cold. “Now I see I was betrayed. You have butchered my people as sure as if the Emerald Sword themselves were manning the walls.”
“There is no Emerald Sword. There is no Serpent.” Golgoth held out his arms, indicating the ragged bands of survivors in the forest and the blood-soaked expanse of the battlefield. “This is all we have! For this one battle, we were something other than slaves. I gave you something to fight for. Your people should be grateful. They would have died as nothing just as they had lived as nothing. I don’t care about you or your people, or mine, or Lady Charybdia or anything else. All I want is a decent funeral pyre for a tribe that was dead before I was ever born.”
Lutr’Kya backed off warily. “You are insane, Golgoth of the Emerald Sword.” She took up a fighter’s stance, sword-point hovering in front of her. Her reputation was of one who preferred to have men killed, but who was willing to kill with her own hand when circumstance required. Doubtless surviving Serpent warriors would be shadowing her to protect her, but Golgoth’s hide would be hers alone if she wanted it so. “You promised hope, and for that I was willing to break the vows of my fathers and join with you. But your anger was so deep at the weakness of your own tribe that you would rather lead us all to destruction than admit the Sword is the weakest-willed of us all. You have slain my people in your madness, and I claim your life.”
Golgoth stood, hulking in the darkness, grinning with his axe limp in his hand. “Make it slow, bitch,” he said.
Lutr’Kya circled, stepping warily to avoid tripping on the roots underfoot, sizing up Golgoth and trying to decide if he really wanted to die so badly. In the end, she never found out.
A shadow passed over them, blotting out the bright stars for a second. There was a concussion in the air, a beating of great wings and a whining of machinery. Something huge and very heavy landed with a wet thump beyond the treeline, where the battleground started, and then the heat hit them—a wave of blistering hot air that seemed to blow straight off the parched desert. Leaves were torn from the trees and swirled blindingly through the air. As the wind passed Lutr’Kya turned and Golgoth followed her gaze to where an orange-red flare plumed outside the forest, bright and hot. People were screaming and running through the forest, away from the new arrival, yelling for others to follow who were too dazed or wounded to move.
Golgoth, hunkered down low, hurried forward, to the forest’s edge. Lutr’Kya didn’t stop him but followed, hanging back and still wary.
A gaggle of valley tribesmen struggled past, covered in blood, many missing limbs, supporting each other as they tripped and swore their way through the undergrowth. There was fear in their eyes—these were men facing death for the second time in a day.
Golgoth reached the edge of the forest, and peered out between the trees. The flare was a muddy glow, wreathed in steam and smoke. He could make out a shape now, humanoid but deformed with hulking shoulder muscles and strange protuberances. It was very close indeed—no, not close, but huge.
For the moment, Golgoth forgot about the death of the tribes and the funeral pyre he had tried to build for them. Was this some secret weapon of the legions, a daemon of the Lust God sent to scatter the remnants of Golgoth’s army?
Somehow, it did not seem that a fire-wreathed monster would be the sort of creature summoned in the name of the lord of pleasures. What was it, then? An omen? An ally?
“Voice of the oceans…” cursed Lutr’Kya behind him, as she realised the true size of the thing. Golgoth moved forward to get a better view. He could see the creature reached a third of the way up the wall. Its flesh was an ugly grey and there were chunks of machinery, like that of the legionaries’ guns but glowing hot and dripping gore, stuck into its body. Metal wings spread from its back. Silhouetted in the fire flaring from the joints and pistons of its machinery, it was truly immense, and Golgoth reflected that had he not lost everything he cared about, he would be afraid.
The monster looked up at the walls, and laughed, a sound like a thunderstorm. Hurriedly, legionaries were scuttling across the battlements to meet this new threat and one of the guns fired. An explosion ripped apart the ground at the monster’s feet and another hit it square in the chest—it was thrown back a step but when the smoke coiled away it was unharmed.
The monster strode over the carpet of bodies, its feet sinking into the blood-soaked earth. In seconds it crossed ground that had cost tens of thousands of lives to take just hours before. It raised its taloned arms, and roared in anger.
It was raining. It was raining blood.
The ground was squirming. As Golgoth watched, dark forms started to claw their way up out of the ground, slumping half-formed onto the wet soil and thrashing as they threw off birth cauls, unfolding limbs and tails. Tens, then hundreds, their yowling joining the roars of their master as they dragged their malformed bodies from the earth. Fiery red eyes glared and mouths filled with bestial fangs opened to howl. Like smaller versions of the beast that had summoned them, yet still each taller than a man, they unfolded hands tipped with wicked claws and stalked through the wreckage of the battlefield.
Arrows were lashing down and cannon roared. The monster was peppered with bowfire and battered by shells, but it didn’t even move. Many of its offspring pulled arrows from their muscular bodies and yelled defiance back at the walls.
“Blood!” the huge beast bellowed. “Blood for the Blood God!”
Perhaps this creature really was an ally. Perhaps it or its brothers would kill Golgoth on sight if they bothered to notice him. But either way, Golgoth knew he might have achieved something here, after all. The sheer magnitude of carnage had spilt enough blood to attract this creature, surely a daemon of the Blood God. And though Golgoth could not claim to know the ways of daemons, he could guess that those who owed allegiance to one god had little love for the followers of another. The walls had held out so far, but if this daemon chose to take out his rage on them, they might not stand for much longer.
And there was more. There had been tales of daemons summoned on the ramparts during the battle—now it seemed another power was doing some summoning of its own. Daemons were still writhing from the earth and forming bestial packs that roamed towards the walls, loping around the monster’s feet.
The daemon stomped towards the wall, the ground shaking with every step. It reached down and dug its talons into the stone of one of the buttresses, tearing deep into the crack between the stones. It pulled, and an immense block of stone was wrenched from the wall, rolling onto the ground and kicking up plumes of blood-soaked earth.
The rampart sagged and cracks ran up the wall. Several legionaries tumbled over the edge and the rest fled as massive cracks ran up the front of the wall with a sound like a glacier’s thaw. The daemon reached into the gap it had opened and pushed against the sides, opening up the wound it had made. The battlement above crumbled and more legionaries fell as the top of the whole wall section cracked and bowed, pitching men over the teeth of the rampart.
The daemon put a massive clawed foot into the wound and clambered up the wall, claws tearing chunks from the edifice. It reached up and pulled down a long section of battlement, broken rocks tumbling over its body. It bellowed with joy as it bored its way deep into the wound it had opened and tore out whole blocks of stone, opening up hidden passages and cramped chambers. A bank of pale dust was kicked up by the crumbling stone as it fell and the smaller daemons started swarming up the broken wall, up the ragged edge of the crack and vaulting up onto the battlements. The sound was awesome, like an earthquake, and the rumbling of the falling rock travelled through the ground right to the edge of the forest where Golgoth stood.
Golgoth ran out past the treeline and held his axe high. “All who can hear me!” he yelled. “All who call yourselves men! Torvendis has sent us an omen! It has sent us destruction! All who wish to see the city fall, charge!”
He ran out alone towards the daemon and its infant army, suddenly light on his feet and feeling as strong and deadly as a hundred men. Maybe there were some warriors following him, maybe he was completely alone. He didn’t care.
Because, as Ss’ll Sh’Kar tore at the battlements and his daemon followers gained form at his feet, Lady Charybdia’s wall was falling.
CHAPTER SIX
Torvendis can never be fully mapped. The deserts change to forest, the glaciers to rivers of lava, the mountains to ocean troughs and the cities to plains of dust. Trying to chart it seems to make the landscape change even faster, as if Torvendis takes exception to any attempt to unravel its secrets with compass and map. No one on Torvendis ever wakes up to the same world twice, and in a world where even the colour of the sky mutates from hour to hour nothing ever stays the same.
But even the land never changes as much as the patterns of power that have played across Torvendis for aeons, like wildfires flaring and burning out. The undersea empire of the Pontifex Infernus where columns of lava were formed into mighty fortresses and temples, the blood-soaked reign of Ss’ll Sh’Karr, the Coven of a Thousand who ruled a nation of black glass golems, the endless episodes of complete anarchy when banditry and madness were the only laws—each of these seemed an empire that could never fall. But the truth was that every one was just a single face of the endless puzzle box of power on Torvendis, and they lasted no more than the briefest phase of the planet’s past. Just as no map can ever be drawn of Torvendis, no history can ever be written.
There are only legends, and when they are compiled they are revealed to be contradictory and vague, but all equally true. Chaos on Torvendis manifested itself as change and inscrutability—many sages and prophets had tried to divide the planet’s history into neat slices of time, and all died insane. Chaos does not allow itself to be codified, and Torvendis was a world of pure Chaos, deceptively disguised as rock and ocean.
Everyone on Torvendis ended up a legend, or a part of one. The innocents crushed beneath Ss’ll Sh’Karr’s daemon legions were more in death, as a part of the daemon lord’s legacy of madness, than they had ever been in life. Those who eked out an existence in the mountains, forests and deserts played their part, unknowingly forging the borders that separated warring nations. But no one, no matter how great, ever left more than a ripple in the lake of Torvendis’s legends—even monsters like Sh’Karr or the Crimson Knights would become no more than additions to an endless gallery of tyrants, heroes and butchers.
The only legend that mattered was the tale of Torvendis itself, conquered by Arguleon Veq, pulled at by every Chaos power that dared take part in the endless war for domination of the warp. It was a story of how no one man or daemon could ever truly rule, of how Chaos was change and uncertainty and madness, of how every action on Torvendis was a triumph and every change a tragedy. And if anyone on the planet were to be asked, they would agree that this was the one legend that would never end.
The air was thick and hot, and caught in Kron’s throat. Everywhere he moved, the dense foliage of jungle shuddered and scattered drops of warm condensation down to sting on his burned skin. His burns were red and raw, chalky where they had scorched down to the muscle, and every step ached like hell. And Kron knew very well what hell felt like.
He had been walking for perhaps three days. In that time he had managed to crawl out of the desert and out of the rain of blood that still clotted his straggly hair into congealed knots. He had found the edge of the jungle and dived in. There were few better places on Torvendis to hide, and he knew that he would have to stay hidden until he was healed and ready to implement the last stages of his plan. Kron was not such a fool that he did not anticipate someone following him to Torvendis. The Word Bearers, for a start. Maybe others.
Even so, Kron wished from time to time that he had never chosen the jungle. The humidity was crushing, and every plant seemed to bristle with thorns and crawl with parasites. There were no paths, and every step Kron took forced him to push through branches and vines that clustered round him. Parasites had flocked to him—lice were feasting on the blood in his hair and clothes, wriggling things had burrowed beneath his fingernails and there was something long and slimy rooted in the skin of his back, its circular mouth eating an inflamed crater out of his shoulder blade. He hadn’t eaten or drunk anything, save for rainwater, but he knew that something must have got into his guts and was eating him away from the inside. Normally such things would be beneath his notice, but he was exhausted from sorcery and the fiery escape from Sh’Karr’s tomb, and he had never been more vulnerable. It would only be a few days before he was back to something approaching full strength, but for those days, he was all but helpless should one of his pursuers find him.
He knew he was being watched. There were a hundred birds of prey and predatory reptiles creeping after him, hoping he would eventually drop dead like every other lone traveller. The night was layered with sounds, claws against bark, the thrum of wings and the hiss of skin against skin. Kron had been in enough hell-holes to know that some of those eyes on him were human.
He reached a tree with a wide bole that had been killed by lightning or disease, and was now a hollow shell of blackened wood. It was a rare piece of shelter and, with the night sky oppressive overhead and heavy with smudges of nebulae, Kron knew he needed some rest or risk letting his immune system wind itself down. The jungle would have killed a normal man by now, with disease and infection. Kron didn’t intend to go the same way.
He stepped over the slippery undergrowth and peered into the darkness of the hollow. A spider with an odd number of legs lurked deep inside, on a sparkling web heavy with mummified insects. Eye-stalks flicked up at Kron’s approach.
Its leg span was as wide as Kron’s arms. He took a knife from his belt. The creature tensed its legs and leapt, its body splitting open into a cross-shaped mouth crammed with teeth.
Kron swiped twice and the creature came apart in mid-air, legs sliced clean off. The parts of the spider scattered into the thick undergrowth.
K
ron was old, and hurt. But he was still quick.
There was a rustling and suddenly the ground was alive, crawling with creatures that had sprouted from the severed limbs of the spider. They swarmed into a single ugly mass, surrounding Kron, each one ready to leap and inject poisons that even Kron couldn’t shrug off.
Kron whispered words that burned in his throat and traced a shape in the air. A circle of flame flickered around his feet and spread outwards, lighting up the dark green of the jungle with a flare of orange light. There was a cacophony of hooting and screeching as all manner of creatures fled the trees on wings and spindly legs. When the fire had burned away the scorched undergrowth was littered with the charred husks of spider-parasites and countless other creatures.
Kron coughed and slumped to his knees. His strength seemed to drain out of him—he had not slept since he could remember and had not had anything to eat for days. It had been so long since he had last used his powers to anything like their full potential that his body had become weak and rusted around him. Even this minor sorcery had taken its toll.
Kron crawled the last few paces into the hollow tree, the undergrowth thick and warm around his burned hands. He had never felt so old, never felt the centuries weighing down on him so heavily. Doubtless there had been a time, forgotten now, when he had wondered what it would be like to live an impossibly long life. He would have wondered how those Traitor Legion heroes and champions of Chaos felt as they endured and fought well beyond the limits of a normal human body.
The truth was that by the time Kron had begun to worry about such things himself, he had fought the wars of Chaos for hundreds of years already and lived unnatural years without even noticing. That was the kind of life his had been. He had become something other than human without realising, and even now he couldn’t put his finger on when Chaos had really got a hold on him, body and soul.
[Warhammer 40K] - Daemon World Page 15
