“What does he want?” said Makelo, who was still on lookout on the pile of rocks. “It makes no sense, captain. Karnulon has served since before the Heresy, he has learned at the court of Primarch Lorgar himself. He has had more than enough opportunity for sabotage and treachery. If he just wanted to make the Legion suffer, he could have done it without running. There is nothing on Torvendis of any significance to him. What is he trying to do? Why start a war here, when his whole life has been war with the Word Bearers?”
Makelo was right as was often the case—this was not just a mission to find and eliminate Karnulon, but to find out what could cause such a senior member of the Word Bearers to abandon his Legion. Of all the Traitor Legions, the Word Bearers could claim the greatest discipline and fanaticism to the cause of Chaos—anything that could sunder that discipline was a far greater danger than Karnulon himself.
“If Karnulon is with this Golgoth, then we must hurry, or we could easily lose him,” said Amakyre, addressing the whole coven. “Prakordian says his army has broken through Lady Charybdia’s outer defences and is invading the kingdom itself. When the battle for Lady Charybdia’s city begins, there will be half a continent of war for Karnulon to lose himself in. Feorkan?”
“Captain?” voxed the scout.
“You have the point. Makelo, Vrox, take the rear. Prakordian, stay with me. Head for the southern wall, we need to be where the killing is. All praises, Word Bearers. Move out.”
Word spreads, on Torvendis, faster than the suns travel across the sky. An event momentous enough will be known within scant hours on all corners of the world, as if the rocks and seas and winds carried the news.
It took a cataclysmic event indeed to cut through the chatter of legends and grab the planet’s attention. But a threat to Lady Charybdia, who had dominated Torvendis for so long, was something worth talking about. The planet had known there would be war—there always was eventually, if it was only patient enough. It just needed a spark to set the battlefield alight—the stain of Ss’ll Sh’Karr was spreading again. Someone had managed to weld the rabble from the mountains into something to be feared, and there was a breach in the western walls through which an army had poured.
It could be the start of a new cycle on the daemon world, a new dance of powers to see who had the honour of holding the planet for another century.
The Canis Mountains emptied of the tribes that remained—some inspired by tales of Golgoth’s victories, others in fear that Golgoth would return in triumph and exterminate those who had not marched alongside him. The Raptor tribe and the scattered swamp nomads who followed the totem of the Lizard made their way across the mountains and through the breach, mixing with the growing horde blazing its way eastwards.
Nations of headhunters and shamans uprooted themselves from the steaming jungles and headed northwards, some claiming they had been directed by a mysterious wizard to join Golgoth’s crusade, others following the howls of daemons. Canoes hacked from sentient trees swarmed up new rivers running through what had once been the deserts, and columns of warriors snaked their way northwards as they followed the dance of the stars.
Longboats from the fractured mountain coast brought a host of raiding tribes, subjugated for so long by the Serpent, who saw in Golgoth a leader who could elevate them above the Serpent if they proved their worth in battle. At the breach they met raiders from the other side of the planet, who had sailed junks from the broken islands to the south of the continent, looking to build a nation of their own in the ruins of Lady Charybdia’s city. There were even desert tribesmen, their homelands destroyed, who were just looking for something or someone to fight for and were drawn towards Golgoth’s horde as if by gravity.
From every corner of Torvendis they came, peoples too few or powerless to be worth exterminating, who Lady Charybdia’s advisors had never heard of but who, when they came together under one banner, numbered too many to count. By the time Ss’ll Sh’Karr and Golgoth of the Emerald Sword reached the boundaries of the city proper, they led an army bigger than any seen on Torvendis for hundreds of years.
Torvendis loved wars, for nothing created legends like the sound of steel through flesh. As the taste of slaughter found its way into the air and the rivers of the planet, the soil readied itself for yet another soaking of blood and the air prepared to carry ever more screams to the heavens.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The few souls who tried to record Torvendis’s history inevitably went insane, but what few cohesive threads they found were usually those that linked the titanic battles of the daemon world’s past. And many of the most revered legends of Torvendis concerned those battles—the explosive fractures in history when one power gave way to another, or a ruler emerged from anarchy. Many, many forces had staked a claim to Torvendis—some sponsored by the dark powers of the warp, others acting entirely alone as opportunists or usurpers—such was the symbolic power of the world at the centre of the Maelstrom. And always, when one power wished to wrest control from another, the incumbent was not willing to give up Torvendis without a fight.
The Crimson Knights took hold of their kingdom after a year-long siege of the Pontifex’s island fortress, sending huge war-junks bearing terrible daemonic siege engines and galleys crammed with rotting slave-warriors to assault the granite walls. Ss’ll Sh’Karr’s daemonic legion shattered a massive psychic army of the Change God on the plains of frost. Mutander and his diseased warrior-monks fought a guerrilla war against the iron empire of the Thousand that, in the end, lasted far longer than Mutander’s reign itself. Even the skies of Torvendis were repeatedly fought over, such as when clouds of harpies fought for supremacy in the ancient monstrous ages and the silken bird-engines of a hundred nations competed for a newly-risen continent in the southern seas.
It was through cataclysmic battles such as these that the landscape of power on Torvendis changed even more rapidly than its geography. The greatest of them all, of course, was that first contest between Arguleon Veq and the Last, a fight between two individuals which nonetheless saw greater destruction brought to bear than any single clash in the planet’s history. Others have claimed that their victories eclipsed those of Veq, and even that the enemy they vanquished was more terrible than the unknown horror of the Last, but their rantings are little more than gossip in the endless web of history that forms all life on the planet. But there are always new prophecies and predictions that one day there will be an even greater battle on the planet, just as there are those who claim that the greatest days of Torvendis are gone and there will never be bloodshed as majestic as that unleashed by Veq and the Last.
Only one fact is never disputed. No one dares predict the future. The wisest sage and the most deluded prophet would dare claim that Torvendis will ever be at peace.
Tarn crawled forward on his belly, keeping his profile lower than the rocks and the undulations in the earth. It was a real thieves’ curse of a night—the sky was milky with stars that covered the land with a gloomy half-light, while the Slaughtersong was dilated and wan. A decent eye could see a rat moving on a night like this, but Tarn was under no illusions that he could afford to put the foray off for another night—Golgoth’s army had swollen to awe-inspiring size and he would have to make his move on the city now or the horde would fall apart.
The landscape could, at a glance, pass for natural, but it was anything but. The rises of land outside the boundaries of Lady Charybdia’s city were not hills, but half-buried buildings, melted organically into the ground like animals wallowing in a swamp. Clumps of trees that nestled between decaying galleries and amphitheatres were not trees at all, but clusters of listing columns. The cruel starlight picked out sculptures on pediments lolling from the sandy earth. The city, they said, was always expanding because it grew of its own accord, seeding itself in its hinterland and sprouting buildings and roadways that would migrate towards their parent.
Tarn waved forward the closest men, most of them Serpent warriors who, it had turned
out, excelled at stealth and were almost as hard-bitten killers as Tarn himself. There were a few others, too, desert tribesmen whose innate magic made the shadows gather around them and a couple of reeking swamp nomads who could kill a man so fast he didn’t know he was dead.
“Anyone lost?” whispered Tarn to the closest man, a sallow-skinned Serpent with black teeth and a twin-bladed dagger permanently in his hand.
“Kin’rik’s mob took a wrong turn an hour back,” replied the Serpent.
“We won’t see them again,” said Tarn. He didn’t care much for the Serpent—he had killed almost as many of them over the years as he had of his own tribe—but they were admirable butchers and he needed to keep as many of them alive as possible to ensure that someone got back to Golgoth by daybreak. “Over the next rise and we’ll be in bowshot of the outskirts. Give the word, everyone moves as one. Find out what you can and get back without being seen. If anyone’s out here when the suns come up, nothing can save them.”
The Serpent nodded and slunk off. Quickly, silently, the order would be spreading. The infiltrating force was in position, and now the mission proper began.
Tarn dragged himself along the ground. The highest pinnacles of the city, topped with pinpoints of light, came into view past the lip of the rise. Even Tarn’s mind registered astonishment as the city came into view and he saw it for the first time, huge and terrible, bristling with light and malice.
The city was a hideous masterpiece. Tarn wondered how it could possibly still be standing—immense top-heavy towers were suspended over the endless pits of the mines by walkways and bridges that looked from this distance like lengths of silver gossamer. Every one of those bulbous towers was ringed by galleries and balconies, and on those balconies were untold thousands of legionaries and armed citizens, bows and spears catching the sickly light, lashes and pain-goads deadly in the hands of the civilians who had given up a night’s revelries to stand their watch. Tarn knew very little about what went on in those buildings—very few from outside the city would want to—but he had some idea of how serious Golgoth’s threat must be for the city to give up a night of its sacred pleasure to stand guard. The whole city seemed alive, and Tarn would have sworn the towers pulsed slowly, almost imperceptibly, as if they were breathing.
The city was Tarn’s target. The order of the night was not killing for once, but information. Golgoth was not a leader of much finesse, but even he liked to know what he was up against. He had few seers in his army (not least since he had burned all the Sword’s own wizards alive), so that knowledge had to come from the sharp eyes of men like Tarn.
A bright lance of fire leapt from the top of one tower and, in the flash of light that bloomed further along the slope, Tarn knew that infiltrators must have been spotted by lookouts and died for their clumsiness. The hot whistle of bowfire sounded sporadically as archers on the outer towers of the city loosed shots at movement they sighted. Few Serpent or nomads would survive this night, thought Tarn. Not that it really mattered, as long as someone returned—preferably him.
The wind was a low steady keening and Tarn could pick out few sounds from the city. But beneath his hands, vibrating through his prone body, he could feel the drone of thousands upon thousands of voices murmuring prayers and threats, moans of pain and growls of anger. Tarn couldn’t see them but he could feel them—slaves, immense herds of them, lashed into crowds ready to be forced forward into an unwilling army The tactic had already been used once and Ss’ll Sh’Karr had rolled over them just a handful of days before. But Tarn knew that if every slave in the city were to come pouring out of the mines into the path of the attacking horde, Golgoth’s warriors and the Blood God’s daemons could become mired in carnage while the city remained untouched.
Ah, the daemons. Tarn had fought alongside all manner of savages and butchers, men he would not turn his back on lest he get a dagger through his ribs and men he would have killed on principle had he a scrap of morality in his heart. But even he felt sourness in his mouth at the prospect of daemons calling themselves his allies. He had seen the daemons in the service of Lady Charybdia kill with lust, and still bore the writhing, fleshy scars on his mind’s eye.
Daemons were monsters, human neither in form nor in thought, fragments of the will of their god and hence with intentions impossible to predict. And the concept of the Blood God filled Tarn with terror. Tarn killed with skill and speed, but those who followed the Blood God—they called him Khorne, the Taker of Skulls, Lord Gore, and all manner of other tides—fought with nothing more than blind savagery and bloodlust. They would throw wave after wave of willing soldiers into any hopeless fight, and they fought not for victory but for the sheer joy of carnage. Victory for the Blood God’s worshippers consisted of spilling as much gore as possible and, preferably, but not essentially, surviving to do it again the next day.
But Lady Charybdia called daemons of her own god from the warp to kill for her, so it made sense that Golgoth should find a similar ally. And there was no doubt that Ss’ll Sh’Karr—whether he was the daemon prince of legend or not—led the most brutally effective shock troops Tarn had ever seen in a lifetime of slaughter. But still… daemons. Gods above, that it would come to this!
There was no more he would find out this night. The city was brimming with defenders and more slaves than a man could count. They would have to be carved through before any man even set foot in the city itself. It was as he expected. Golgoth would probably be pleased, for Tarn suspected he wanted as hard and cruel a battle as possible.
A couple more Serpent warriors died as flaming arrows lanced down, like fireflies scattering. Tarn turned and writhed back over the rise, to head back to Golgoth’s camp and report what he had seen.
If the battle that Golgoth wanted took place, hardly anything would survive. Tarn reasoned that he would be unlikely to be amongst them, having ridden his luck far too much over the last weeks. But he didn’t really mind. Most people died eventually, and if there was any battle in which to meet his end, this was it.
Night was day to auto-senses. It amused Commander Demetrius of the Violators that lesser, unimproved men thought darkness was an advantage. He could see the arrows from his vantage point on the inner walls of Charybdia Keep, as they flitted down from the city’s edge towards some enemy infiltrator. A few of the enemy might return with intelligence about the city’s defences, but what could they really tell? There were more than enough soldiers garrisoning the many buildings and crossroads to face any invader. And even if the enemy knew about the four hundred Violators Space Marines forming a ring of steel around Lady Charybdia’s Keep, by the time any of them reached this far they would be few in number and bled nearly dry. It would be good sport, thought Demetrius, for the men he left behind to defend the keep. Not as good, though, as the quarry for which he would lead the hunt.
Demetrius flexed his massive metal frame, feeling the weight of the assault cannon and the sinuous, living tendrils of the neuro-lash. He racked smoke grenades into the launchers on the upper surface of his carapace, feeling the ovoid canisters filling the breech, spinning the barrels of the cannon and letting the massive-calibre ammunition trickle enticingly through the chambers. Demetrius itched all over for battle, from his wet fleshy core to the sensitive sheets of armaplas protecting his sarcophagus.
Once, he had been terrified of being entombed in a frigid cold ceramite box, unable to feel the sensations that gave him reason to kill. But Demetrius’s nervous system, refusing to give up its lifeblood of pleasure-pain, grew like roots into the fabric of the dreadnought body and made him more sensitive to the tide of battle than he had ever been as an able-bodied Space Marine. Yes, it would be a good fight. He longed to feel fire scoring his paintwork and blood spattering his artificer-honed armour plates.
“Commander?” voxed a voice in Demetrius’s ear. Demetrius turned to see Techmarine Klaes, a tendriled servo-arm reaching blindly over his shoulder pad.
“Techmarine. We are ready?”
“Good. I want you with us, Klaes. Nothing can succeed without the fleet, and they listen to you above all other.”
“I am proud to serve.”
“You will be proud when the Blood God’s whelp is dead, Klaes. For now, revel in the battle and remember for whose praises you fight.”
Klaes nodded his helmeted head. Like many Violators he never removed any part of his armour—Slaanesh looked favourably on the Chapter and often altered their bodies so their sensations and pleasures were more immediate. No one knew for sure what Klaes really looked like any more—and that was part of what made the Violators beloved of Slaanesh. Every Space Marine was a temple to the Pleasure God, his flesh sacred and inviolate, and displaying those holy mutations was like throwing open the doors of a temple to any passer-by. Demetrius himself rarely revealed what he looked like beneath the massive armoured hull of the dreadnought body. When he did, it was in the presence of only those who truly represented the ideals of Slaanesh, like Lady Charybdia herself, or that of a great enemy before the kill.
“The force is selected then, commander?” said Klaes.
“Our best,” replied Demetrius, voice grating from the dreadnought’s vox-casters. “Koivas. Haggin. Most of the Assault units. Plenty of steel, plenty of battle-lust.” Demetrius turned back to look out over the city, with its millions of lights and glittering seas of spearpoints. “Lead the battle-brothers in their wargear rites. They must feel every bullet they fire. There will not be another fight like this on Torvendis for a good long time.”
Klaes headed off below the battlements, to bless the boltguns and armour of the Violators, that Slaanesh might send every sensation they felt straight into the soul of the wielder. Haggin would be murmuring prayers devotedly, while Koivas would be filling his system with the cocktails of combat drugs he had become all but immune to. Devriad’s squad would be carving devotions onto one another’s armour. Every Violator would be shuddering with anticipation for the battle—Slaanesh had ordained that every one of them would see bloodshed when the sun next went down, both those who stayed to defend the keep and those who accompanied Demetrius on Lady Charybdia’s own sacred mission.
[Warhammer 40K] - Daemon World Page 18
