Feorkan was at the navigational helm, overseeing the machine-spirit’s calculations. Prakordian was somewhere overhead in an observational dome, watching the distant destruction with glee, opening his mind to the echoes of the dead. All the Word Bearers were at rest in their own way, because they knew that if they had to face Karnulon, it could be the hardest fight of their long lives.
“We’ve got something here, sir,” said Feorkan. “The machine-spirit just put it up on the scopes.”
“Visual,” said Amakyre, and the image of Torvendis shimmered and disappeared, to be replaced by a view of the starscape outside. A cursor blinked over a particular star, an especially bright one.
“Close-up?”
Feorkan worked for a few moments, trying to coax the Multus’s sensors into closing on the object. Then, the image shifted again.
This time it showed a spaceship. It was wreathed in light reflected from Torvendis’s many suns and moons, but it was definitely a ship. From the measurements streaming along the lower edge of the holographic image, Amakyre could tell it was huge, bigger by far than the Multus. A massive, curved hull was underslung with powerful engines—gaping particle scoops projected past the prow and led to flared engine exhausts. Clusters of sensor arrays stabbed forward. Sleek windows covered the segmented hull, covering the ship in pinpoints of light. “Is there a signal?”
Feorkan shook his head. “As far as the Multus can tell, the ship’s dead.”
It had made no sense when Prakordian had said Karnulon was headed for the Slaughtersong. The star would have been far too distant for a one-man craft to reach. But this, of course, made perfect sense, for they had found Karnulon’s destination and it was not a star at all. Reflected in the light of Torvendis’s suns, it had burned bright and cold in the sky.
There was a name stencilled in enormous letters along the spaceship’s hull. The name was Slaughtersong.
Amakyre strode over to the comms helm and switched on the ship’s vox-caster system. His voice boomed throughout the Multus.
“Word Bearers, prepare yourselves. We’ve found him. Make ready for boarding.”
Ss’ll Sh’Karr, if he had possessed a mind approximating that of a mortal, might have been sated. He might have had his fill of blood and killing, even as the ocean of blood drained back into the earth beneath the city. The stench of the bloated corpses left behind as it receded, and the oppressive pall of smoke that hung between the towers, might have satisfied his lust for destruction.
But Ss’ll Sh’Karr was not mortal. And nor was he just a daemon—he was a prince among daemons with a soul forged from the will of the Blood God himself. For Ss’ll Sh’Karr, there was never enough blood. If there was killing to be done, he would do it. And in the pale early morning light, as Golgoth’s barbarian horde slept off a day of laughter and a night of revelry, he did.
Golgoth woke to the sound of screams. He was alone in the keep, in some high-ceilinged, colonnaded gallery where statues of frozen tears had once stood until the keep’s fall had caused them to melt. His head was thick with the wine he had drunk by the flagonful and his movements were uncertain as he clambered to his feet. He could smell burnt-out fires and the after-stink of a thousand sleeping men.
They were the screams of men in pain or fear. Golgoth ran to the nearest doorway and peered around into the corridor beyond. Shadows danced round the corner, and he saw a warrior run into view carrying a burning torch.
The man was spattered with blood, his eyes wild. He was from one of the mountain tribes, which one Golgoth wasn’t sure. He saw Golgoth, and began to yell a warning, the words of which never reached his throat.
Hulking shapes scrambled round the corner and cut the man down from behind. His midriff came apart in a welter of blood, his legs and lower half trampled beneath clawed feet, the rest of him flipped into the air by the fury of his attackers’ charge. The torch fell to the ground and flickered, its dying flames reflected in glinting, asymmetrical eyes. Daemons.
Golgoth reached behind his back and a silent prayer was answered as he found his axe still strapped there. He had no shield. His head was too thick for sorcery. He fell back on the oldest of instincts—to fight, and to buy himself time to think only after the enemy was dead.
The first daemon charged into Golgoth and just missed as he dodged backwards, into the gallery of tears—the marble doorway splintered as the daemon impacted against it. Golgoth brought the axe down and cut a fearsome slice out of the creature’s back, sending bolts of hot daemon blood spattering across his skin. Golgoth ignored the scalding pain as the second daemon clambered over its fellow to attack.
Golgoth hacked wildly at the daemon’s flailing claws, hoping to defend himself by wrecking the daemon’s hands. But Golgoth knew enough to guess that it couldn’t feel pain as mortals did, and even losing its limbs wouldn’t be enough to break its spirit.
The first daemon was back on its feet, loping twistedly with its spine shattered. It stepped behind Golgoth and slashed at him wildly—Golgoth ducked and heard a satisfying wet crunch as one daemon caught the full force of the other’s blow. Golgoth hacked at the first daemon’s leg carving a meaty chunk out of its thigh, and ran.
He couldn’t fight creatures like these, not now. Not when there might be a dozen more at any moment.
They had to be rogues, breaking away from Sh’Karr’s authority to feed on their own initiative. Even Sh’Karr would recognise the sanctity of this victory, where man and daemon had joined forces to exorcise a rotten regime of debauchery.
Golgoth was still telling himself this when he blundered out onto a balcony that projected from the side of the keep. Lush plants had once grown here but were now withering and dead. Golgoth could see out into the city around the keep and below him, the walls where so many men had died rushing the ranks of the Violators.
Daemons were feasting on piles of corpses. Men were corralled into frightened knots surrounded by daemons who took it in turns to dart in and carry them off to eat. Blood flowed like water along the battlements, licked from the stones by daemons’ tongues or drunk like wine where it pooled. The noise was terrible—the gibbering of the daemons as they slaked their thirst, the screams of the dying men and the defiant taunts of the warriors still on their feet.
The same sounds were filtering up from the lower levels of the keep, and the same scenes were being replayed on the distant towers and walkways where victorious warriors had celebrated and slumbered.
It was appalling—Golgoth could hear thousands of men dying at once.
The immense shape of Ss’ll Sh’Karr clambered up onto the walls around the keep. His metallic skull was spattered with gore and chunks of flesh. The daemons gathered around him, shrieking excitedly, as he lifted a handful of bodies and crammed them into his mass of bronze mandibles.
The magnitude of the betrayal threatened to overwhelm Golgoth. Sh’Karr had used the warriors to win a victory over the hated Lady Charybdia, and then relegated them to the status of mere sustenance. The hate could destroy him if he let it take him over, as it had nearly done when he had learned of the Grik’s betrayal.
It was an awesome effort to force his anger down. But the logical part of his mind, which had barely been there at all before Kron’s teachings, took control. There will be time for your hatred later, it said. For now, you must survive.
Golgoth turned and ran again, the scrabblings of the pursuing daemons insistent behind him. There must be a way out of the keep, through some waste chute or sewer, or even just through the main gates past daemons too intent on feasting to notice him. The pits of the city were vast enough to hide in and, when he made it out of the city, he knew exactly where he would go.
Arrowhead Peak. Hall of the Elders.
A handful of days had passed since the Multus Sanguis had picked the Word Bearers up from the surface of Torvendis. The old ship had made best speed out into orbit but the Slaughtersong’s exact position had been hard to pin down and it was further out than the sens
or readings had suggested. Strange interference made navigation all but impossible—the visual reading of the Slaughtersong’s white glow had been the most accurate indication of where it was and it had taken frustrating days to reach it, as if the ship had known they were coming and had tried to hide from them. But slowly, the Multus had closed in, and now the Word Bearers had reached their target.
The green indicator on the auspex scanner meant the air within the Slaughtersong was breathable. Captain Amakyre removed his helmet and let the smell of the place come to him—mechanical, metallic, clean and old. Very, very old.
The Slaughtersong was not old in the way that the Multus was old. It was bright and clean, with lumostrips picking out the polished chrome surfaces, every curved wall smooth and unblemished. The floor was of bright silver mesh and the walls of mirror-bright metal. Every spacecraft Amakyre had ever set foot on had been rebuilt a hundred times, with massive imposing architecture and a patina of grime. The Slaughtersong was so old, it looked new.
Amakyre waved the coven forward. A brief hand signal told them to fall into search pattern—Feorkan on point with Makelo just behind him, followed by Amakyre, Prakordian, Phaedos and Vrox with Skarlan behind. Feorkan jogged lightly ahead down the hullspace, helmet still on to gain the benefit of its auto-senses.
The Multus Sanguis’s boarding shuttle had delivered them into the space between the inner and outer hulls of the Slaughtersong. The gap was crammed with maintenance tunnels and access-ways leading to the external sensor arrays and weapons emplacements, and could take them to any point on the ship if the coven kept their sense of direction.
Amakyre was well aware that there could be anything on this ship. How long had it been up here, orbiting the daemon world? The Slaughtersong had shone down on Torvendis for as long as the legends could remember, so long it had become a part of the immensely complex star-divinations of the planet’s sages. And where had it come from? How had it come to Torvendis at all?
“Nothing on the auspex, captain,” came Feorkan’s voice on the vox. “This area’s dead. Where do we go?”
“There’s no point in scouring this place. The ship will have saviour pods and shuttlecraft Karnulon could use to escape, we must find him as soon as possible above all other priorities. We head for the bridge.”
Feorkan acknowledged and the coven moved swiftly through the hull-space. The corridors and doorways were circular with blank readout screens everywhere, evenly and harshly lit by the lumostrips running along the ceiling. His augmented hearing picked up the faint purring of machinery deep within the craft, even and smooth.
Amakyre had heard tell that before the beginning of history, before the accursed Imperium of man had seeded the stars with weakness and ignorance, before the terrible Age of Strife from which the Imperium had emerged, there was a time when technology had come to rule humankind. Many of the secrets from the Dark Age of Technology had been lost, leaving only the barest scraps of information surviving. Could this craft itself be a relic of that dark age? Was it really that old?
It was impossible, of course. The Maelstrom swallowed up everything eventually. Nothing could have survived in it for that long. But the idea was tempting—think of the power this craft could have if Amakyre could capture it, and the respect that would be due him from the Word Bearers.
A tempting thought indeed, he concluded, as the corridor passed a huge transparent wall section that looked out on a massive weapons array larger in itself than many spacecraft. But the coven had its mission. Karnulon came first.
“This is his plan,” voxed Makelo from ahead, “isn’t it? This ship. Karnulon must have found it and realised how powerful a weapon it is. Now he just has to start it up.”
Amakyre could just see Makelo’s scarlet-armoured form ahead of him, stalking past the bulkheads and machinery. “Perhaps. We will know for sure once he is dead.” Amakyre switched to Feorkan’s frequency. “Any bearing on the bridge?”
“The auspex scanner shows power conduits radiating out from a central point,” came the reply. “Somewhere in the heart of the ship. There’s lots of interference but it’s all coming from one point. There’s a lot of power in here.”
“Take us in the next entrance you find,” said Amakyre.
The lights flickered slightly and the purring of the ship’s power source went up a notch. Faint vibrations shuddered through the floor.
After untold years, the Slaughtersong was waking up.
Golgoth didn’t notice if the hard, cold star overhead was any brighter. The whole night sky seemed to leer down at him cruelly—nebulae spat stars at him and the clouds of stellar gas were sucked towards black holes as if turning their faces from him. The jagged line of the Canis Mountains, haloed in the starlight, was a grinning maw eager to swallow him.
Golgoth dragged himself over an incline and slumped down in the lee of the rock, where the chill wind sweeping across from the plains wouldn’t cut into him. The foothills of the mountains seemed colder and harsher than ever, barren and devoid of life, as if everywhere Golgoth went was destined to be touched with death. He slumped his aching, exhausted body against the earth and willed himself to sleep, but his mind stayed alert, still full of the terrible things he had seen.
It had been a nightmare. The keep swarmed with thirsting daemons, who ran unchecked by the few bands of warriors awake and sober enough to defend themselves. Golgoth had found his way down to the dungeon levels, where acres of cells led into abattoirs where captives were dissected and processed, and then into the waste pits where a slurry of rancid gore hid his scent from Sh’Karr’s daemons. He had writhed blindly through the filth, sometimes diving deep and wondering if he would ever find anywhere to come up for air, sometimes struggling wildly against slithering, clawed things that snapped at his feet as he waded.
The pits below the city had been worse. It rained body parts from above. Blind packs of surviving slaves roamed, more predators than bandits, and Golgoth had fought for his life more than once. He had tried to forget how he had eaten those he had killed, and even those he had found, to keep his strength up as the hours turned into days. But he couldn’t forget any of it.
He had swum a river of blood. He had climbed a cliff of corpses. Carrion inserts had laid eggs in his hands and feet and left them bleeding and raw where ravenous grubs had chewed their way out. His tears had been full of wriggling white worms and things had squirmed under his fingernails. Some of them were still there.
He barely remembered what he had done after clambering up the slope of bodies and out of the pits. He must have run most of the way, knowing only that he had to go east, towards the mountains and Arrowhead Peak. Now he was within sight of the mountains, Golgoth realised he had no idea what he would do once he got there. Would Kron meet him there, at the Hall of the Elders? Where even was the hall? Golgoth had never heard of it, though admittedly all anyone knew of Arrowhead Peak were scraps of legend from before its fall.
But Kron’s message was all Golgoth had to go on. It was all he had—his army was gone, his tribe butchered, his honour betrayed by a foe he couldn’t face. Only exhaustion kept his anger from boiling up and taking control of him again.
Why? Why couldn’t the gods just look favourably on him once? Why was his every triumph followed by despair and treachery? Just when he thought he had achieved a great victory, his greatest ally slaughtered his men as they slept. Golgoth had never been driven this low, not even when he had found out of Grik’s wanton abuse of the Emerald Sword, nor below the eastern walls as his attack broke on the impenetrable defences.
If Golgoth could take this whole world and crush it, he would, if it would only mean revenge. If he could face Sh’Karr now, broken and fatigued as he was, he would do it, if only to die in the name of vengeance. But he could do nothing. There was nothing left on Torvendis for him now.
A shadow passed beneath the starlight. Someone was moving behind him, over the ridge. Golgoth turned, but too late, the figure was upon him, standing ri
ght behind him, silhouetted against the weeping sky.
“Golgoth,” it said in a familiar, cold-blooded voice. “If any one of us could have survived, I knew it would be you.”
“Tarn,” said Golgoth. “I had thought I was the only one.”
Tarn loped over the ridge and settled down next to Golgoth. His thin killer’s fingers were bloody and scabbed. There were bite marks in his palms—he must have fought his way out of the city with his bare hands. His face was pale and drawn, but his eyes, rimmed with sleepless red, were wide and alert. “Have some faith, Golgoth. It takes more than that to kill me.”
“Are there any others?”
“Maybe. I didn’t see them. If there are, they haven’t come this way. You were the only one I could track eastwards. Which leads me to wonder just why you are heading in this direction, when it would be the obvious route for Sh’Karr to hunt down survivors.”
“Kron gave me a message. I think he will meet me in Arrowhead Peak, if I can reach it.”
“Although it is unwise to speak ill of my chieftain,” said Tarn, “I will wager you need some rest before attempting the journey. I will find us food and water. You sleep.”
With that, Tarn disappeared into the darkness. And Golgoth, knowing that at least there was one man left who would kill for him, gradually fell asleep.
On one screen, the suns were coming up over the Canis Mountains, framing the jagged peaks in a haze of gold, painting the valleys with a milky grey. On another, the oceans were still wrapped in darkness, starlight playing across the churning surface as sea monsters rose from the deeps to graze on the smaller creatures above. There were a dozen scenes being played out, picked up by the Slaughtersong’s sensor arrays and transmitted onto flat screens that hovered in the centre of the bridge.
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