A stone head on the ground looked up at him. Its eyes were the same as the ones studding the walls of the labyrinth. Alaric stamped on it, shattering the head and crushing the eyes. Somewhere in Aelazadne, he hoped, two members of the audience were blinded.
The basilica’s interior was twisted by heat and decay. Columns bowed under the weight of a half-fallen roof. Skeletons were embedded in the stone of the columns and walls, petrified like fossils, reaching from the rock as if they had been alive when they turned to stone.
Alaric backed up against a pillar. He looked down at the sword in his hand. It was pathetic, little more than scrap metal beaten into shape. It was worse than nothing. He put it on the ground at his feet.
He listened to the song. It was telling him to welcome death, and let it speed him towards a blessed release from life’s pain. He ignored it. The song might have wormed its way into a broken man’s mind, but Alaric was better than that. He listened harder.
He could hear drops of water spattering down through the hole in the roof, and the sound of the city groaning as it settled. A Space Marine’s senses were all greatly enhanced, but rarely had so much hinged on Alaric being able to make the most of them.
It had come through the basilica, through the rubble at the far end, and had headed upwards.
Alaric slipped from behind the column, and began the hunt.
He crept through a collapsed colonnade that had once fronted a mighty palace, now collapsed into a sprawl of rubble. He followed the trail through its cellars, between mouldering works of art and altars to the perverse faces of Khorne.
The trail led through a garden of petrified trees and a stream bed half-filled with flaking dried blood. He moved past a pyramid of bones, and a complex of slaughterhouses, where hooks still hung from rails on the ceiling and the occasional skull still dangled.
Alaric knew that the beast he had trailed was close by. It was instinct as much as the signs: the fresh, six-toed hoof prints on the wet floor, the newly killed hunters whose blood had yet to start drying, the smell of the chemicals, and the glints of blood where the beast had torn itself on a sharp piece of rubble. Alaric slowed down, making every step an exercise in discipline, as he passed over the threshold of the slaughterhouse and onto the grand processional bridge.
Once, a great palace of Aelazadne had risen over the rest of the city. It had long since collapsed, but the way up to it remained, a mighty bridge over a deep canal. Alaric walked carefully onto the bridge, keeping a statue between him and the hulking shape he just glimpsed among the stonework. The statues rose on either side of the bridge, a stern parade of Aelazadne’s kings, all of them dressed in obscene majesty that only accentuated their deformities. Eyes covered them, blinking excitedly as Aelazadne watched.
Alaric got a better look at the prey he had been sent to hunt. It was a hunched giant wrapped in swathes of scabbed skin, covered in wounds and brands. Its back was to Alaric, and he saw that it sported a crest of bony spikes along its spine.
Alaric recognised some of the beast’s tattoos: an eye, a compass, a star. He had seen them many times before, and that gave him an advantage that the keenest of Drakaasi’s hunters lacked.
“I know,” said Alaric aloud, “what you are.”
The beast looked up from its meal, a hunter it had chased down and killed on the bridge. Alaric stepped out from behind the statue. The beast’s face was humanoid, but no longer human, severely lopsided with a single fang reaching down past its chin. Its hands were fused into crab-like claws of muscle and talon.
Its eyes were sunk so deeply into the scarred folds of its face that it had to be blind. A larger third eye in its forehead was closed.
“When did they find you?” asked Alaric. “How long have you been down here?”
The beast did not attack. Something like recognition came across its face.
“Remember what you once were, Navigator.”
Navigators were a paradox of the Imperium. They were members of a bloodline that sported a stable mutation in its genes. A Navigator had a third eye through which he could look upon the warp and not be driven mad, as most men would be. As a result of the mutation, only they could guide a ship on long warp jumps, and without them all ships would be limited to the stilted, short jump journeys that meant civilian craft took decades to get between star systems. Without Navigators the Imperium’s armed forces would reach war zones centuries late, rapid forces like the Space Marines would never be able to launch their lightning operations, and the Imperium, bloated and sluggish at the best of times, would fall apart.
Their third eye, spacefarers said, could kill a man with a look.
It stood to reason that this creature, which had once been a Navigator, would make for very challenging quarry indeed.
Alaric slowly approached the mutant Navigator. Perhaps exposure to Drakaasi’s brand of Chaos had mutated it, or perhaps it had been born that way. Although their mutation was relatively stable, Alaric had heard tales from inquisitors of the monstrous aberrations every Navigator family kept imprisoned beneath their estates on Terra.
It did not attack. Alaric was probably the first person the Navigator had encountered on Drakaasi who had not tried to kill it.
“I know why they sent me here,” said Alaric, as much to himself as to the Navigator. “You are supposed to kill me.”
The song of Aelazadne rose to a sudden, brutal crescendo. The whole city shook, chunks of masonry and statues clattering down into the deep canal beneath the bridge. The Navigator roared and reared up, clamping its paws over its ears. Alaric, too, was shaken by the ferocity of the atonal chord that hammered down from the city above.
The Navigator thudded down onto all fours and roared at Alaric. Its third eye snapped open.
Alaric threw himself to the ground. A black ribbon of ragged power leapt from the Navigator’s eye, and scored a deep furrow across the bodies of the statues around him. A stone arm clattered to the ground, the sound almost lost amid the din.
Alaric ran out of cover as the Navigator’s third eye spat dark power over the bridge. He sprinted for the Navigator, head down at full tilt, and slammed into its side, vaulting over the line of dark power and up onto its back.
The Navigator bucked to throw him off and reached up to grab him. Alaric caught its hand and forced its forefinger back, feeling ligaments snapping. The Navigator’s scream of pain mingled with the song, and Alaric was so dazed by the painful harmonics that he lost his grip and fell off the Navigator’s back.
He reached around instinctively. His hand found the warm sticky mass of the last hunter to stalk the Navigator. He looked up and saw something metallic there: the broken haft of a spear ending in a jagged steel blade. The Navigator’s shadow fell over him as he grabbed it.
The Navigator’s bulk fell down on top of Alaric’s legs. The mutant’s face was centimetres away from his. The third eye opened again, the brow above it furrowed in anger and pain.
The song had driven it wild. Aelazadne was not about to cheat its audience of another death.
Alaric rammed the spear up at the Navigator’s face. The tip splintered against the stone hard cornea of its third eye. The shaft followed it, shattering and filling its eye socket with splinters.
The Navigator barked angrily and jumped backwards, clawing at its face.
Alaric jumped to his feet. The Navigator was not a creature of Drakaasi, but it had been warped and rendered mindless by this world, turned into a weapon. Drakaasi took good people and turned them into monsters. It wanted to do the same to Alaric, if it did not kill him first.
The Navigator charged half-blinded. Alaric jumped, not into the creature’s wounded face but over it, his back smacking against the creature’s hide as he rolled over it.
The Navigator continued, its massive momentum too great for it to stop.
It smashed into the stone rail of the bridge, and ploughed through it. Its forelimbs found nothing as it powered forwards. The Navigator howled as it fell from
the bridge, the sound followed by a terrible wet thump as it smacked gorily into the bed of the dry canal.
Alaric picked himself up off the bridge, breathing heavily. A thousand eyes were looking at him.
He had killed their Navigator. That had not been in the script.
Soldiers from Aelazadne’s battlements were despatched to round him up, for the hunt was over and the audience had got their blood. Alaric knew that to fight against the armoured gauntlets holding him down would only give the city more bloodshed to gloat over, and so he let them wrap him in chains and drag him back towards the Hecatomb.
They had got their blood, but Alaric had got something, too. Amongst the Navigator’s tattoos had been the familiar brand of a six-fingered hand.
The Navigator could kill with a look from its third eye. It was a quarry intended to kill its hunter. That was why Alaric had been thrown into the labyrinth with it. The daemon Arguthrax had made sure that Alaric was pitted against his best slave killer, in the hope that Venalitor would lose his best new slave.
The lords of Drakaasi had a weakness, a weakness that masqueraded among their number as a strength.
They hated one another. Their weakness was that hate.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I hear many things,” said the eldar carefully, “and I wish to know if any of them are true.”
“Get away from me,” said Alaric. “I feel unclean enough as it is.”
Kelhedros tilted his head and looked at Alaric with utterly alien eyes.
Alaric was in an isolation cell. Evidently Venalitor had been angered at Arguthrax’s attempt to kill Alaric with the Navigator and had taken out a measure of that anger on Alaric. Alaric was chained to the wall on a lower deck, and he was glad of it. Until Kelhedros’ shadow had fallen across him he had been alone.
“I have tried to understand you,” continued Kelhedros, “your kind, I mean, your species. It is like facing an animal, with its baffling instincts.”
Alaric had not had a good look at the alien before. Eldar were familiar to many Imperial citizens, since they were often depicted as weakling aliens crushed beneath the feet of conquering humans in stained glass windows or in the margins of illuminated prayer books. The truth was that no human artist could ever realise one properly. An eldar looked almost human from a distance: two arms, two legs, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, but everything else was different. An eldar radiated wrongness, from its huge, liquid eyes to the many jointed, worm-like waving of its fingers. They were disgusting and unnerving, and Alaric hated them. Kelhedros was as filthy and scarred as the rest of the slaves, but he still carried that typical alien arrogance with him. His armour still incorporated the jade green plates of the eldar armour he must have been captured in.
“This animal will not heel to an alien,” replied Alaric.
“Of course. You want to be free. They all do when they arrive here.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“You want to get out. I want to get out, too. I find you as vile as you find me, human, but it cannot be denied that we have the same goal in mind. I think neither of us has much of a chance on his own, but we are both far superior to the rest of Venalitor’s rabble, and our skills would complement each other.”
Alaric laughed, and it hurt since he was still battered from the fight with the Navigator. “Yes, I have seen what happens when a human enters into a part with the alien. I was there at Thorganel Quintus. The Inquisition brokered an alliance between the Imperium and the eldar there. I saw you xenos fall on our troops as soon as the Daggerfall Mountains were secured. I saw you butcher us like cattle because you did not want anyone to know you needed our help to destroy what we found there. I will never trust your kind. You would see all of us exterminated just to save one of your own. You would kill us all for your convenience.”
Kelhedros drew his weapon from his back—a slender chainsword, its teeth meticulously cleaned and gleaming in the shadows of the isolation deck. “The eldar you fought alongside. Were they of the Scorpion temple?”
Alaric sneered. “They all looked the same.”
“You would have remembered. No eldar is stronger or more resolute than a follower on the path of the Scorpion. The Scorpion is relentless. It cannot fail, because it will die before its claws let go, and once it has its enemy in position, its sting always kills. I walked the path of the Scorpion before fate brought me here, human. They say that you are a hunter of daemons, something remarkable by the standards of your species. The eldar think the same of me. The Aspect of the Scorpion does not come easily to us. I am not just another alien, Grey Knight, even to you. I am a Striking Scorpion, and of every living thing on this planet I am by far the most likely to escape it. Without me, you will die here, probably a broken and willing slave. Together we might return to the galaxies we know. Think upon it. You have no other choice.”
“I am very picky about who gets to betray me,” said Alaric, knowing insults would be lost on the alien, but unable to help himself when confronted with such arrogance, “and you don’t make the grade.”
“You will change your mind, Grey Knight,” replied Kelhedros. It was unlikely he even understood human hatred when he saw it. If he did, he did not respond to it. “I am out here, and you are in there. If you are so content to stay then little I can say will sway you.”
Kelhedros gave Alaric one last glance with those huge black eyes, and ducked back into the shadows. He was gone, with not even the sound of footsteps to suggest he was on the isolation deck. Alaric let himself wonder how Kelhedros had got down there at all. The alien had free run of the Hecatomb, and was certainly as tough as he suggested to have survived on Drakaasi for so long, not least against the human slaves, whose most ingrained instincts included hatred of the alien. However, Alaric knew what the eldar could do. An oath from an eldar meant less than nothing. It was a promise of betrayal.
Alaric had a long time to think in the darkness beneath the Hecatomb. Mostly, he thought about the Hammer of Daemons.
Ghaal!
That seething pit of vermin! That filth brimming sinkhole of despair! In such degradation there is purity. In such ugliness there is wonder. In such death and suffering, there is life, so holy to Drakaasi for it is life that must be ended!
The endless slums of Ghaal breed misery as they breed vermin. Its people are no more than vermin, writhing in an endless murderous mass, struggling to the surface to snatch a few moments of exultation! Was there ever such a city as Ghaal, where the trappings of wealth and culture are stripped away to reveal the raw, bleeding organs of poverty and exploitation? There is the truth of the human condition, that a human mind so easily sinks into animal violence and killing. It is a city of death where murder is the only way out, and where even the most relentless killers find but another layer of Ghaal’s anti-society to slaughter their way through.
This cauldron of hate, this pit of ugliness, this aeon’s worth of murder forced into the crumbling shell of a city! From the blood that runs in its streets are writ the names of Khorne!
—“Mind Journeys of a Heretic Saint,” by Inquisitor
Helmandar Oswain
(Suppressed by order of the Ordo Hereticus)
Alaric’s first experience of Ghaal was the stench. Down on the rowing decks, it rolled in like a foul mist. It was decay and misery, sweat and effluent, the stink of endless poverty.
“We’re in the Narrows,” said Haggard, chained to the bench just behind Alaric. Though the slaves were discouraged from speaking on the oar decks, the slavers seemed used to ignoring Haggard. “This is Ghaal. It’s a damned orifice.”
“Literally?” asked Alaric, for whom the images of the living city Karnikhal were still vivid.
“Not quite. It’s worse.”
Alaric peered through the oar-hole in the hull. It was night, and by the light of Drakaasi’s evil greenish moon he could see piles of ramshackle buildings heaped up by the side of the blood canal. The canal was part of a spider web of bloodways th
at divided up this part of the city, presumably the narrows after which the place was named, and the Hecatomb moved slowly as its hull scraped along the side of the canal. Occasionally, a reedy scream filtered through the night air from the city, followed by a dull splash as a body fell into the blood.
“A city of murderers,” said Haggard. “Every madman and piece of filth on Drakaasi ends up here. They say it’s like a beacon that drags scum.”
“What purpose does it serve?”
“Purpose? There’s no purpose here, Justicar. It’s just a city.”
“Everywhere on Drakaasi has a reason to exist. Karnikhal is a predator. Aelazadne was an altar to the Blood God. What does Drakaasi gain from Ghaal?”
Alaric looked out on the city again. Here and there the inhabitants of Ghaal, like primitives forced into ragged clothes and let loose in the streets, skulked among the shadows hiding from the moonlight. A rooftop fight sent a skinny body falling to the streets far below. Freshly slain bodies lay like heaps of rags in the street, and the sense of fear emanating from behind the black windows of the hovels was enough to suggest the thousands of people huddled there in their nightly terror. Even those few glimpses of Ghaal showed that killers walked every street and murder was the sport of choice.
“It’s a farm,” said Alaric grimly. “This is where they breed their vermin.”
“Loose the anchors!” yelled one of the scaephylyds in its strange accent. The oars were drawn in and the heavy anchor chains rattled against the sides of the Hecatomb. The ship came to a slow halt along a massive dock of black stone, where crowds of Ghaal’s vermin hurried to and fro at the barked orders of mutant gang masters.
“To arming!” yelled the scaephylyd over the grinding of the hull against the dockside. The ship groaned as ramps were lowered, and the anchors reeled fast.
Alaric knew the drill. He was starting to lose count of the number of times he and the other slaves had filed past the arming cages to pull on tattered armour, still bloodstained from its previous owner, and pick up a weapon or two. This time, however, it was different. In one arming cage was a scaephylyd guarding an oversized suit of half-plate armour.
[Grey Knights 03] - Hammer of Daemons Page 8
