by C. L. Werner
The crawling army turned and marched towards the wall, setting upon the glowing rune with the rapacity of termites. Stone crumbled beneath their daemonic mandibles, falling in clumps of dust as they worked their havoc. The sorcerer waited until the hole was large enough to suit his purposes. He lifted a fat-bladed dagger of cold-wrought iron and brought the athame crashing against the jar. The vessel shattered and with it was broken the spell of azure light. The tiny daemons that had been bound within the jar flickered and faded back into their spectral world.
The sorcerer snapped his gloved fingers. Armoured warriors detached themselves from the shadows around him. He pointed at the hole his daemons had gnawed through the wall of the city. Silently, leading their horses by the reins, the warriors began to steal into the growing night beyond the walls.
The sorcerer smiled within the darkness of his hood. Tchar’zanek would learn his mistake in choosing scum like Urbaal and Vakaan to undertake such a vital quest. He would make certain the warlord understood that, when he sent him their heads in a silver box and claimed the artefact they had been sent to capture for himself.
Chapter Five
The icy grip of Norsca pawed at Pyra’s loose robes, caressing her pallid skin with frosty fingers. Whipping through the narrow, snow-covered valley between the frosty mountains, the wind was like a ravenous beast prowling the desolation. The sorceress smiled at the invigorating sensation. There was a subtle energy, a power in the very air of these northern lands. She could just see it if she concentrated and focused her witch-sight, a shimmering gleam crawling in the breeze. It was the raw element of magic itself, the primordial force ignorant cowards called Chaos and damned in their fear.
Pyra was neither ignorant nor a coward. If she were either, she would have been dead long ago. She was playing the most dangerous of games, pitting the malignance of the Witch King against the ambitions of Lord Uthorin. Each of her patrons ultimately believed she was acting as their double agent, spying and sabotaging the schemes of the other. She was content to allow them such fantasies. In the end, she did not overly care which sort of tyranny ruled Naggaroth. She was more practical than that. Idealism was for idiots clinging to outdated fancies like honour and morality. The asur were steeped in such archaic delusions, allowing them to bleed away the vibrancy of their race. Every day, the elves of Ulthuan grew weaker while the druchii grew stronger.
She would be part of that strength, whether at the right hand of Malekith or Uthorin, she would be there. With the horde of Tchar’zanek as their plaything, the dark elves would stretch their hand across the oceans and reclaim ownership of their homeland. And from the enchanted shores of Ulthuan, they would remake the world itself in their image. Brutish humans, muddle-headed dwarfs, all would be bent to the will of their rightful masters. Nothing would stand against them. Not even the gods!
Pyra closed her eyes, pressing her fingers against her forehead. She tried to will the intoxicating influence of magical power from her mind. She cursed her own carelessness. She should have expected the effect the raw energies of Chaos would have upon her. Attuned to the magical winds, Pyra was more open to their baleful touch, more susceptible to their empathic influences. Those who wielded the might of Dark Magic, the most elemental and powerful shape of sorcery, had to be ever wary. It had a seductive lure, easing the wielder into a false sense of might while it corroded their very essence from within. It would be a bitter irony if all her grand ambitions led only to her body being overcome by Chaos and she ended her days as some degenerate thing feeding off squirrels and carrion!
‘You are ill?’
Pyra opened her eyes to find Prince Inhin leaning over the side of her palanquin, a hint of concern in his sharp features. She knew his concern had less to do with her welfare than for his own. Without her sorcery, he would be unable to tap into the magic of the megaliths. Without the standing circles, Inhin’s small force of elves would be forced to march across Norsca and the Troll Country to reach their objective. Even a noble as arrogant and prideful as Inhin Bonebat knew his chances of accomplishing such a feat.
The sorceress gave her lover a reassuring stroke of her fingers along the back of his hand. ‘I will endure,’ she told him. ‘The winds of magic are strong here. They will grow stronger the closer we draw to the Wastes. It is an invigorating sensation, so much power at my beck and call.’
Inhin licked his lips with a nervous flutter. Pyra enjoyed watching him squirm under her enigmatic gaze. The prince enjoyed her being dependent and subservient to him. However, he was never really certain of his dominance; no despot really could be where sorcery was concerned. That was probably why she continued to fascinate Inhin, why he had not brought a string of concubines along with him on his long sea voyage. Still, he didn’t like to be reminded of the fact, much less of the possibility that Pyra’s powers were growing stronger the farther north they travelled.
‘The rearguard has spotted something,’ Inhin said, quickly changing the subject to more secure ground. He snapped his fingers and a pair of his shades drew close to the palanquin, bowing their heads as they met Pyra’s expectant gaze.
‘Barbarians follow us, my lady,’ one of the cloaked elves said. ‘Only twenty, but they may be scouts for a larger force.’
‘They were lead by a druchii,’ added the other scout. ‘One of those pirate bastards from the Blood-shark!’
Pyra nodded her head, dark tresses flowing about her face as they snaked out from beneath the band of her circlet. ‘Such ingratitude after Prince Inhin’s generosity. Obviously the corsair thinks to have his petty revenge by setting the animals on our track. Knowing our numbers, he would certainly have pressed the barbarians to come in force. You are doubtlessly correct when you say the ones you saw were an advance party.’
‘We should leave a rearguard to delay them,’ Naagan interrupted. ‘Every moment we tarry, the faithless asur and their allies have time to undo our plans.’
‘My plans,’ Pyra corrected the disciple.
Naagan bowed his head in deference to the withering authority in her voice, then cast a sideways glance at Prince Inhin. The noble kept quiet, making no issue of the assumed dominance of the sorceress. ‘You had someone in mind for this rearguard?’
‘If it pleases your lady, I think that Sardiss would be an ideal choice,’ Naagan answered. Unlike Inhin, he made no effort to keep challenge out of his voice. ‘As one of the Witch King’s Black Guard, his martial prowess is unquestioned. As one of the Witch King’s Black Guard, his loyalty to the cause of Lord Uthorin is less certain. That uncertainty makes him the most disposable of the assets at Prince Inhin’s disposal.’
Pyra turned her head, bristling at the smug smile that wormed its way onto Inhin’s features. Naagan would never have dared speak in such fashion about Sardiss if the Black Guard had been present. Inhin had placed his hated rival for the favours of his lover at the head of the column where he would be the first to encounter any danger. Pyra knew how keenly this treacherous plot of Naagan’s would appeal to her patron. She also knew that Sardiss’s usefulness to her made such a plan repugnant.
‘And what of the loyalty of the Temple of Khaine?’ the sorceress snarled. ‘Can we truly be certain that your loyalty is to Lord Uthorin? Perhaps you speak out against Sardiss so openly because you think to cloak your own perfidy behind such a transparent display of fealty.’
Naagan’s hand closed tight about the hilt of his sword, his eyes glowing like embers of rage. ‘You would dare!’
‘Convince me my fears are misplaced, Naagan,’ Pyra taunted. She turned back to Prince Inhin. ‘I suggest a compromise, my lord. We can ill spare many warriors to delay the animals on our trail. Naagan is correct when he says what we need is a lone fighter of incomparable martial prowess. But I do not think it is wise to send Sardiss. If he is loyal, we lose a valuable servant. If he is truly a spy of Malekith, we cannot afford to allow him out of our sight.’ Pyra watched as her word of warning wiped the smug expression off the noble’s
face. ‘I propose that we test the loyalty of Naagan as representative of the Temple of Khaine. He can leave behind his witch elf. She can linger and confront the barbarians. If she is quick about it, she might even be able to rejoin us before we reach the standing stones.’
The sorceress grinned coyly at Naagan. ‘Either way, such a gesture would bolster my confidence in the Temple of Khaine. And its representatives.’
The landscape Kormak saw as the warband left the Inevitable City was not the same he had travelled through in the cage-wagon of Jun and his slavers. Where before he had seen snow-swept tundra, now the terrain was a blasted plain of splintered rock and grisly, thorn-like growths taller than a full-grown pine and as imposing as a field of claws. A sickly pink mist rippled around the thorn-stalks, writhing between and around them like a living thing. The sky overhead seemed to pulse and gyrate in sympathy to the ugly fog. Kormak could not shake the impression of a beating heart and wondered if he was gazing upon the very essence of his Dark Gods. Crazed seers sometimes spoke of a being beyond the gods, something they called the Great Beast. The thought made even the marauder’s blood turn cold.
The warriors of Urbaal’s retinue went into the wasteland with trepidation. Those who entered the Inevitable City could never be certain if they would ever leave. Those who left could never be certain where their exodus would take them. Just by looking at the warriors around him, Kormak could tell that this plain of thorn-stalks and pink fog was as strange to them as it was to him. Like the chained thrall, they were at the mercy of the primordial powers that moulded and shaped the Chaos Wastes with their lunatic thoughts and idiot whims.
Kormak tested his chains for the hundredth time. The blackened steel was eerily flexible, warm beneath his touch as though it were a living thing. The ugly Kurgan runes etched into each link glowed with a putrid light. The marauder glared at the tattooed zealot who had presumed to take ownership of him. The shaman would need all of his magic if Kormak broke free of his chains. He’d stuff the zealot’s own head into the sack of skulls he carried.
There was hope of escape. Kormak had been exerting his mutant limb, twisting and reshaping his arm. At first the enchanted chains were able to match the shifting flesh, but the longer Kormak persisted in his efforts, the slower his bonds were to reshape themselves. It was an almost crippling effort, sending knives of agony lancing through Kormak’s body. The Norscan’s lip bled where his teeth had gnashed together against the pain. Lesser men would have resigned themselves to bondage rather than endure such suffering. Kormak despised such chattel. The gods had no use for cowards and weaklings, Kormak would not fail beneath their merciless gaze. He would make an offering of Tolkku’s soul to the Raven God before he snapped the preening zealot’s spine.
The Norscan shifted his gaze from the robes and tattoos of Tolkku, studying again the sombre warriors who surrounded them. They were massive brutes encased in armour of steel and bronze, their horned helmets obliterating their faces, scalp locks and other gruesome trophies dangling from their breastplates. Each bore a monstrous axe or murderous flail and the steeds they rode were fanged, savage giants, each horse displaying the mutating touch of the Wastes upon its powerful frame. Here was an animal with four eyes, there a steed with reptilian claws and hooves the colour of crushed rubies. Together, warrior and steed made a sight seldom seen even in Norsca, and then only as heralds of bloodshed and destruction. Knights of Chaos, riders of the Northern Wastes, these were the kind of warriors every man in Norsca openly envied and secretly feared.
At their head was a figure of blackness and glistening sapphire. Kormak could feel the power of the armoured rider as keenly as he could the hot breath of a forge. He did not need to be told that the man was one of the champions of the gods, one of their Chosen, favoured by the Ruinous Powers in ways far beyond the simple mutant gifts of Kormak or even Tolkku’s sinister magic. The Chosen sat atop his fanged black warhorse like a scaly leviathan brooding upon the waves, its awesome power slumbering, waiting, hungry and eager, for the call of battle. Urbaal, Kormak had heard the dark champion called, and the marauder did not doubt that here was a man who had long served the Raven God by sowing the ultimate change: the change from life to death.
Man? Perhaps there was nothing left inside the spiked carapace of sapphire and steel that could still be called human.
Beside Urbaal, a shape no less unsettling rode upon a sinister contrivance of spectral flesh and blazing bronze. Kormak had seen the Discs of Tzeentch before and knew that only the most powerful and wicked sorcerers could bend such daemons to their will. Vakaan was a Kurgan, if the twisted features of the magus’s physiognomy were any measure of his breeding. All those who dwelled in the shadow of the gods respected and feared their power. Even the seers and shamans, men blessed with magical powers by the Dark Gods, grovelled and trembled before them. Sorcerers were different. They sought to make pacts with the gods, to treat with them as princes seeking audience with a king. The arrogance and hubris of such men was second only to their awful power, for the gods often rewarded the bold. At least until their mood shifted and the pride of the magus was no longer amusing to them. The sagas were filled with tales of the horrors visited upon sorcerers who lost the favour of Tchar.
Vakaan’s beaked helm turned, Kormak could feel the magus’s fiery eyes study him. His body shuddered as the sorcerer’s gaze gripped him, bony growths pimpling his arms, tiny horns sprouting from his face. His mutated limbs moved in rebellion to his mind, oozing like mud around the underlying bones. An instant, Kormak felt his corrupted body exult in the fiery light of the magus, then the instant passed and the marauder felt his mutant flesh reform, lapse once more into the familiar patterns of humanity. The marauder dared raise his head and look again into the bird-like mask of Vakaan’s helm. Now the eyes of the magus were clear and blue, filled with a haunted emptiness. No, not empty. There was something in there, deep within the azure pools. Kormak could not be certain, but he thought he could see envy in the sorcerer’s eyes.
A foetal gargoyle thing scrabbled up Vakaan’s robe, climbing until it was upon the magus’s shoulder. It gibbered and drooled into Vakaan’s ear, whispering and whining. Vakaan bent his head, listening to the insane muttering bubbling from his familiar’s mouth. He closed his eyes, willing his sight into the daemon world of his familiar. Vakaan opened them quickly, the daemon disc upon which he rode rotating at some unspoken command to face Urbaal.
‘Tzar Urbaal, we are attacked!’ Vakaan gasped.
The words were unneeded, however. A circle of purple light exploded into life upon the broken ground ahead of the warband. Strange glowing runes shimmered upon the periphery of the circle, dancing with infernal volition. A deadening chill raced through the warband, exciting even the fearsome horses upon which they rode. It was a chill beyond physical cold, the parasitic clutch of something pawing at their very souls.
The warmth leeched from them gathered within the glowing circle, the stolen scraps of life force allowing something to breach the barrier between worlds. Like a foulness, the thing burst out from the void, billowing forth from nothingness like smoke from a flame. It was vile and hideous, shifting and burning with coruscating bands of light and fire. From a few inches it expanded into a towering nightmare of glistening flesh and gyrating vapour. Its pulpy, stalk-like body was like that of a mushroom and it swelled rapidly into horrible life. Ropy limbs separated from the pulpy trunk, a mass of black tendrils burst from the truncated cap, rivalled only by the wiry coils that oozed from its base and seared the dead ground with blazing ichor.
The daemon whirled within its circle of light. Little eyes, like the eyes of a thousand spiders, crawled up the trunk-like body, settling between the tendrils of the cap, finding little pock-mark perches from which to stare at the panicking horses and horrified men. A beak-like blade of bone pushed its way out from the stalk just below the level of the spider-eyes and smiled. Malicious, merciless, and utterly inhuman.
‘Back!’ Vakaan shrieke
d, his hands already moving in the gestures of a spell.
There was no time for the magus’s warning to have any effect. The daemon’s ropy arms expanded like the petals of a flower, exposing thick oily veins. As the limbs opened, from each of the rope-like veins a gout of luminous purple fire exploded. Three of the riders were caught in the first blast of daemonic flame; men, beasts and armour melting into a waxy mash as they were utterly consumed.
A ghastly shriek, like a vulture’s giggle, thundered from the daemon’s beak. As if in response, war cries roared from behind the pink mists. Through the forest of thorn-like growths, warriors in blackened armour and horned helms came charging, axes and flails clenched in their pounding fists. Soldiers of the Raven Host, but their advent did not mean relief for Urbaal’s beset warband. Their arrival meant betrayal.
Urbaal glared through the smoke rising from his slaughtered knights. He saw the cloaked sorcerer commanding both warriors and daemon. There was no mistaking the thorn-crown of Odvaha, court sorcerer of Tchar’zanek himself.
Urbaal did not know how deep Odvaha’s treachery ran, nor how mighty the magus’s sorcery might be. The entire landscape they had entered upon leaving the Inevitable City might be Odvaha’s creation, the flamer that attacked them but the most minor of his minions. This did not matter to Urbaal. By betraying them, Odvaha had defied the command of Tchar’zanek. To defy the will of the Prince of Tzeentch was to defy the Changer himself!
