“It would amuse me to keep you alive and use you to further the work of Khorne,” said Venalitor dryly, “but I have grown tired of being amused.”
Venalitor lunged. Alaric was ready. He brought up the spear to block the blow, and the blade cut clean through the haft. The blade was deflected enough to keep it from slicing through Alaric, but the spear was useless. Alaric threw the haft of the spear aside and held the tip away from his body, ready to parry or stab.
“I have learned a lot here,” said Alaric, forcing calmness into his voice. “I am not the man you defeated on Sarthis Majoris.”
“No, Justicar, you are something less.”
Alaric could have stabbed and blocked and thrust until he died, but that was not the way to win this fight. A Grey Knight might not have seen that. Alaric was not a Grey Knight any more.
Alaric dropped the spear and charged.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“I knew,” roared Lord Ebondrake, “that it would come to this.”
His voice carried down the Antediluvian Valley. Its slopes were built from stone axe heads and rough hewn spear shafts, the most ancient and primal weapons of Vel’Skan. The valley was a rift through the heart of the city, its depth cutting through aeons of war. The enemy army was strong across the valley, formed from the private forces of several of Drakaasi’s lords. Arguthrax’s slaves were tethered to posts driven into the ground, and painted with runes of summoning. Tiresia had called forth whole tribes. Scathach’s contingent was the largest, with rank after rank of solemn warriors, from uniformed men with guns, to armoured cavalry. These forces had been called forth quickly, their plan to march on Ebondrake, and kill him before he could respond.
Ebondrake lived on a permanent war footing. He was ready.
“Perhaps it would take a million years,” he boomed, his words punctuated by plumes of black fire, “perhaps a few moments, but you would turn on me. This is the way it has always been. I am as old as these mountains and the stars above us, and I have seen it so many times that I remember only an endless circle of betrayal. I told myself that when my time came, I would defy it. Nothing you have done has been anything but inevitable, and every move you make is one I have foreseen.”
A great host of beetle-black bodies came scuttling from the cracks between the weapons of the Antediluvian Valley. Thousands of scaephylyds scuttled into formation behind Lord Ebondrake, carrying the banners of their tribes. The ancient general, his carapace dulled by centuries, lumbered to the fore.
“You are our master’s master,” slurred the general through his mandibles.
“Then you are my servant’s servant,” said Ebondrake.
The general waved a forelimb in a signal to the scaephylyds. They all drew their weapons. They were still forming up down the throat of the valley, and there must have been a hundred thousand of them.
“The will of Khorne is with us!” yelled Arguthrax in reply. “You have created this revolt in the heart of our city, in the midst of Khorne’s celebrations, all to force us to unite under your rule! This is no longer a struggle for power, black lizard! This is an excommunication! Khorne despises you, and his wrath turns upon you! We true lords of Drakaasi are the instruments of that wrath!”
“You accuse me of treachery?” Ebondrake rose up off his haunches and spat black sparks in anger. “The blasphemy in the arena was naught but a distraction created to force my attention away from your betrayal! What fools, what infants, to think such a ruse would tear victory from me!”
Thurgull, an ancient from Drakaasi’s deeps, oozed through the valley wall, all gelatinous flesh and tentacles. Others of his kind were with him, smaller and less foul, but still deadly, snapping hooked beaks set into the mass of their mollusclike flesh. Corpses began writhing up from the ground, and the Charnel Lord, who had against the odds thrown his lot in with Ebondrake, shambled through their midst allowing them to lick the corpse liquor from his funereal robes.
Ebondrake’s army was huge. It was the equal of the conspirators’, even as Golgur the Packmaster’s hounds bounded in to join them. Arguthrax gave the signal, and the slaves pinned to the ground began to writhe, shafts of red light bleeding from their eyes and mouths as his allies from the warp sent their foot soldiers to possess the slaves.
“Enough words!” shouted Tireseia, nocking a flaming arrow to her bow.
“On that alone we can agree,” said Ebondrake. With a mighty blast of flame, he signalled the charge.
A flash of savage satisfaction burst through Alaric as his forehead crunched into Venalitor’s nose.
Venalitor stumbled backwards into the table, knocking the orrery onto the floor. The delicate device shattered, scattering tiny brass planets and orbits everywhere.
Venalitor tried to bring his blade around, but Alaric was on top of him. Alaric did not remember the time when he lost his mind, but his muscles did. It was the most natural thing in the galaxy to grab Venalitor by the throat and slam him over and over again into the solid table. Venalitor snarled and tried to struggle free. The table split in two, and Venalitor fell through to the floor with Alaric trying to gouge at his eyes and claw at his throat.
Venalitor jammed his knee up into Alaric’s midriff and threw the Grey Knight over his head. Alaric sprawled through the half-wrecked divination chamber through the archway, skidding through Kelhedros’ blood as he went.
He was in Lord Ebondrake’s trophy chamber.
Bodies and weapons were everywhere, displayed obscenely. A gutted corpse was laid out, plated in gold with rubies studding its wounds. It was a human in uniform, perhaps a Guard general or a planetary noble, laid out on a black marble slab like a sculpture. Alaric saw the soft features warped in anguish, and wondered for a moment if it had been a woman.
Claws and blades torn from the arms of aliens were racked up on the wall beside Alaric. Skulls and ribs that Alaric recognised as being from tyranid creatures formed a display in front of him. A captured siege engine, its black metal wrought into screaming faces, loomed in the middle of the room.
The chamber took up a full third of the palace’s cranium, and weapons and body parts taken from defeated foes filled it to the ceiling: enormous totem poles of giant creatures’ skulls; chandeliers of severed hands; statues of half-melted swords clad in skins cut from tattooed bodies; whole enemies plated in bronze, or frozen in blocks of ice kept intact by humming cryo-units; spears and swords by the hundred, displayed in fearsome walls of blades; lifetimes upon lifetimes of battles and duels, of treacheries avenged and would-be assassins uncovered: a terrible illustration of what Lord Ebondrake truly was.
Alaric pulled himself into the shadows between a pair of mummified corpses, still impaled on the spikes used to execute them.
He weighed up his situation in a split second, as only a Space Marine’s mind could. Alaric wasn’t unarmed any more. He could have his pick from any one of a thousand wicked-looking weapons on display in the trophy room, but Venalitor was still the best swordsman Alaric had ever faced.
He was too good.
“Face me, Space Marine!” called Venalitor as he stalked into the trophy chamber. “Truly, your Emperor must be a weakling god if even his very finest cower as you do.”
“You add too many flourishes to your sword work,” replied Alaric. “I noticed it when you beat me on Sarthis Majoris. Such a thing focuses the mind.” Alaric took a blade from the closest mummified corpse, a bronze scimitar, inscribed with runes, that he drew silently from the corpse’s chest. “If there’s one thing I have learned here, it’s that bloodshed is an ugly thing.”
“Bloodshed is an art!” snapped Venalitor, “and you are my canvas!”
Venalitor swept over the display of mummified bodies, the skirts of his armour billowing behind him like wings. Alaric deflected the arc of his sword with his scimitar and the bronze weapon was sliced in two. Alaric spun, pulled a spike from the skull of a second body and parried again. Venalitor’s sword was knocked a centimetre away from gutting Ala
ric, and the spike was split in two, lengthways.
Alaric lunged forwards and kneed Venalitor in the groin. Venalitor stumbled backwards, bent double, and Alaric sent an uppercut into his chest so hard that Venalitor plunged backwards through the bodies, scattering dried-out limbs and fragments of age stiffened funeral shrouds.
“Too many flourishes,” said Alaric, shaking out his hand.
Venalitor got to his feet. He snarled, and for a moment his consciousness, the true nature beneath the cultured swordsman exterior, flashed across him. A yawning maw hissed through a ring of fangs, and black eyes narrowed into reptilian slits.
There was, however, no one to see it. Venalitor braced himself for the next charge, but it did not come. He looked around, but Justicar Alaric was gone.
It was not like a Space Marine at all, but that did not matter. Alaric was ultimately like any other quarry, a puzzle to be solved, a life to be ended. Venalitor prayed a few syllables to Khorne to keep his sword keen, and began the hunt.
“Navigation’s still up,” said Erkhar breathlessly. “Praise the Emperor! Praise the saints!” He swung into the command pulpit and read from the age clouded information panel in front of him. “It’s working. There’s plasma in the conduits! The reactors are warming up!”
The smiles on the faces of the faithful were reason enough to have made it this far. It was like a rapture, as if the image of the Emperor was hovering on the bridge of the Hammer of Daemons, bestowing His blessing upon them.
The ship worked. The Promised Land was real.
“Take-off vectors are pre-loaded,” said one of the faithful from the navigations helm, surrounded by slab-like banks of memm-crystal. “They’re all up. Once the thrusters are on-line and the main engines are primed we can take off.”
“Wait,” said Erkhar. “Raezazel’s followers programmed this ship to fly into a warp rift. Those must be the coordinates in the navigation helm. Use it to take off and then switch to helm control, otherwise we’ll pitch straight into the warp.”
“Then… that’s it? It’s ready to fly?” asked Brother Hoygens. The man looked dazed, the events of the last few minutes almost too much for him to understand. It seemed like only a breath ago that the slaves had been about to die in Vel’Skan’s games. Now they had a spaceship.
“It is,” said Erkhar. “This is a miracle, an honest miracle. To those who denied that the Emperor’s light could ever shine on this world, I give you the Hammer of Daemons!”
The Hammer was a vessel worthy of the Emperor’s intervention. Exposure to Drakaasi’s elements had covered it in a sheath of corrosion, but the ship inside was magnificent. Raezazel’s followers had spared no expense. The corridors and bays shone in deep blue and gold, with a saint’s portrait looking over every doorway and porthole. Shrines to the Emperor could be found everywhere, from the simple niches with devotional candles and texts to the great three-faced altar in the ship’s main assembly area, with the triptych wrought in gold depicting the Emperor as deliverer, protector and avenger. The bridge was a reliquary with sacred bones and vials of saintly blood hovering in miniature grav-units, bathed in shafts of light in a ring around the helms and command pulpit. Erkhar had never seen anything so beautiful, not even in the days before his enslavement. The Pax Deinotatos had been an ugly ship, a base thing of rusting steel and leaking conduits. The Hammer was a mighty flying altar to Imperial glory.
“We should… pray, then,” said Hoygens uncertainly.
“We can pray when we’re off the ground,” replied Erkhar. He flicked a switch and accessed the ship’s vox-caster network. “Engines?”
“Here, lieutenant,” came the reply. It was Gearth. Erkhar flinched at the thought of Gearth having a place on their holy ship, but he would be judged like the rest of them when the Promised Land was in sight.
“Reactor status?”
“Looks like they’re working. Twenty-five per cent, if that means anything.”
“It does,” said Erkhar. “Keep me updated.”
“Yes, lieutenant.”
“Lieutenant,” said the faithful at the navigation helm. “You need to see this.”
Erkhar hurried to the navigation helm. Over the faithful’s shoulder he saw the cartographic readout that he had pulled up.
“That’s Drakaasi,” said the faithful, pointing to a planet marker on the screen, “and this is the route still loaded into the navigation cogitators. It looks like the route the ship was on when it crashed here.”
Erkhar followed the arc of the ship’s path. Its destination was only a short distance from Drakaasi. With a good, fast ship such as the Hammer undoubtedly was, it could be reached in less than an hour.
“They were so close,” said Erkhar. “It must have been the Emperor’s will that brought the Hammer down to Drakaasi before they reached it. Whatever happened to this ship’s pilgrims on Drakaasi, it was surely no worse than what lay past the rift.”
“We’ll steer well clear,” said the faithful, “but what then?”
“Get clear of Drakaasi, and clear of the Eye if we can,” replied Erkhar. His eyes shone. “Then we find the Promised Land.”
Every single living thing in Vel’Skan had chosen its side.
The power of treachery flowed through the streets of the city like pure molten hatred. Smiths turned their hammers on one another. Drill daemons on the parade grounds ordered one rank to attack another. Strangers in the street called out who was with them and who was against, and knives came out in the alleyways. Half pledged themselves to Ebondrake and the correct order of Drakaasi’s monarchy. Half devoted themselves to toppling him, to disorder, ruination and chaos.
The two armies collided all across the city, not just in the Antediluvian Valley, but across Vel’Skan, in every temple and forge, every place one human could murder another.
In the valley, Lord Ebondrake himself led the charge. His great wings pounded once, and he hauled himself up into the air, crashing down on Tiresia the Huntress. He dug her crushed body from beneath him, flipped her into the air and snapped his jaws shut on her, swallowing her in one gulp. Thousands of arrows and spears rained against him, but he breathed a sheet of black fire over Tiresia’s tribespeople, and a hundred of them died, gutted to charred skeletons by the force of Ebondrake’s anger.
Thousands of Scathach’s men slammed into the scaephylyd tide. Scathach himself drew the ancient bolt gun from his back, a relic of his days in the Traitor Legions, and put bolter shells through a score of scaephylyd bodies as his ranks of warriors struggled to hold back the living wave.
The slaves staked to the ground exploded, gore showering down, as daemons fresh and raw from the warp emerged from their possessed bodies. Wet muscle glistened all over them, new limbs withering and reforming as they vomited scalding blood, and ripped into the slimy host led by Thurgull. The Charnel Lord’s dead horde clambered over the bodies as they mounted up, dragging soldiers and daemons into caves of the newly dead to devour them.
The battle spilled out of the valley. Daemonic spawn and tentacled horrors from the sea wrestled through the temple galleries and sacred precincts, scattering statues and relics of Khorne. Tiresia’s surviving hunters took the battle to the air, flying their aerial beasts of prey into a swirling melee with winged daemons streaming from Vel’Skan’s eyries.
After a few minutes, no one remembered why they were fighting. There was a sense of betrayal on both sides, but the details were lost in the blood. Arguthrax, thrashing with a huge mace as his cauldron was hauled forwards through the heaps of dead, did not care to remember just why he had ordered his battered army forwards into the heart of the scaephylyd mass. The Charnel Lord let the events leading up to the battle sink down into the fevered pit of his mind, and concentrated instead on the holy work of bringing the battle dead back to half-life and setting them on the men they had been fighting alongside.
Ebondrake alone remembered. Part of him stayed calm enough through the carnage to remind him that if he lost, he lost Drak
aasi. He would rather die as king than live on as someone’s slave. As was right and proper for a servant of the Blood God, Lord Ebondrake sought death as eagerly as he sought victory, and there was no shortage of it choking every avenue of Vel’Skan.
The echoes of the battle rippled through Drakaasi like an earthquake reaching right through the planet’s core. Every one of the planet’s great cities felt it and they, too, were suddenly divided. The madmen of the Scourge stopped ranting and put their divinations aside to bludgeon one another with anything they could find, or hurl one another into the sea. Crested daemonfish rose from the depths to bask in the blood that foamed beneath the abattoir temples of the Scourge.
The singing of Aelazadne turned dark and clashing as its voices were replaced by the gurgle of blood in slit throats. Gorgath’s battle lines were suddenly redrawn, one army under the banner of the dragon, and the other preaching revolution as they died. Ghaal seethed with murder, its gutters overflowing with blood and its night alive with the sound of knives through flesh.
Karnikhal began to slowly devour itself.
Drakaasi quaked. The day turned blood red, while on the other side of the planet the stars grew into burning rubies like eyes gorged with bloodshed. Howling winds ripped across the plains, rousing every living thing into a frenzy, turning hidden cabals of cultists against one another or forcing the jungles into bouts of continent-wide cannibalism, predators and prey turning on their own. Even in the depths of the sea, bizarre creatures, unknown on the surface, ripped one another to shreds with needle-like teeth.
There was a sound on the wind that carried further than the clashing of blades and the screams of the dying.
It was laughter.
Khorne was enjoying this particular spectacle.
[Grey Knights 03] - Hammer of Daemons Page 25
