by Warhammer
‘Perhaps they wander in through the stone arches.’
‘Perhaps. I don’t know, manling, I am not a wizard.’
‘Speaking of wizards, where do you think our black-robed friend went?’
‘As far away from me as possible, if he has any sense. Or maybe the monster ate him.’
‘Somehow I doubt we should be that lucky.’
Kelmain emerged from the Paths of the Old Ones and into the chamber of the temple. He was grateful to have avoided the Slayer’s axe. He was even more thankful to be out, for no matter how great the protective power of the amulets his masters had showed him how to make, he always felt there was an element of terrible danger within the place. You could never be sure when some ancient protective device would spring to life or some rogue daemon of the Twisted Paths, unheedful of the warning runes on the talisman, would seek to gulp down your soul.
He was pleased to see that his acolyte’s face showed the apprehension he kept so well concealed. Young Tzeshi was paler even than usual, despite the fact that he had at least a hundred beastmen and Chaos warriors at his back. He bowed on seeing Kelmain and sketched a gesture of deepest respect on the air. Kelmain nodded to him and indicated that he should continue. As he departed he could hear the youthful mage begin the chant that would extend the protective spells enfolding him to enclose all of his followers.
There was no reason why he should not. Their experiments so far had been successful and their scouting parties had covered half the globe. Soon, if all went according to plan, the armies of Chaos would be able to move swiftly from the Chaos Wastes to any nation on the surface of the planet, bypassing borders and fortifications, emerging deep within the territory of their foes.
Filled with a vision of glory, he strode through the ancient haunted hallways to speak with his brother.
Felix shuddered. They had walked for hours now, and the road had become stranger. The stones had a melted, fused look that he had come to associate with the warping influence of Chaos. Sometimes it looked like faces leered out of the walls or that bodies were trapped frozen within the stone. Sometimes he felt like they were moving very slowly whenever he took his eyes off them. The strange jewels in the ceiling overhead sometimes vanished, taking with them their illumination. When that happened, he had to move forward trusting in the dwarf’s keen tunnel-bred senses, following the glow of the runes on the axe. They were lighted all the time now, and that was never a good sign. In the past it had always predicted the presence of evil magic or vile monsters.
Moving through the gloom was not reassuring. It felt like anything could be there, waiting. Sometimes he could imagine the presence of strange formless things in the dark, just behind him. He could picture huge jaws opening to snap at him. Even though he knew it was useless, he often turned and glared behind him. He had to fight down the urge to take out his sword and sweep the air all around. He told himself that had anything been there the Slayer would know, and would do something about it. The thought provided cold comfort.
‘These tunnels do not run below the earth,’ said Gotrek. He sounded almost thoughtful.
‘What do you mean?’
‘A dwarf can sense depth. Only a cripple would not know how deep below the mountains he was. All my life I have had this knowledge and never once had to think about it. Now, it is gone. It is like the loss of sight, almost.’
Felix could not quite picture it being that bad, but he realised that he was in no position to know. How would he feel if he suddenly lost all sense of up and down, he wondered, and then realised that he simply could not get his head around the idea.
‘I really do wonder where that magician went to.’ Felix said. It was not that he was keen to catch up with the Chaos sorcerer. He simply wondered how he had gotten away. Presumably there must be some way in or out of this strange place, and he must know it. If they could only find him, perhaps they could convince him to get them out of here. He doubted that even the wickedest of wizards could withstand the Slayer’s powers of persuasion under the circumstances. Come to think of it, he would help Gotrek himself, if the need arose.
‘Doubtless he is running as fast as his legs will carry him, manling. I never yet met a wizard who would stand and face cold steel, given any choice.’
Felix wondered about this. He could recall facing several magicians who had not run away from them. Still, this did not seem like the time to point this out to the Slayer. ‘He might be our only way out of here.’
‘We need place no reliance in the followers of Chaos.’
‘We may have to. Otherwise your heroic doom will take the form of starving.’
Gotrek grunted. He did not sound impressed. ‘If that be so, that be so.’
For the first time Felix was really forced to consider the fact that they might die here. There was no food and nothing to drink. Not unless they went back and ate the beastman corpses and drank their blood, and that was not a thing he could imagine the Slayer doing. They were probably poisonous anyway, and that was assuming they had not already been eaten by some other foul denizens of these supernatural ways.
Get a grip on yourself, he told himself. A dozen heartbeats after the thought occurs to you, and you are already considering eating beastmen and the gods alone know what other horrors. Things have not come to that pass yet, and you’ve been through worse. You’ve been through battles and sieges and treks through frozen mountains. You’ve fought dragons and daemons and monsters of all descriptions. You’re not dead yet. In spite of himself, though, Felix could not help but feel they had never been so isolated or so far from home.
Teclis followed the oddly glowing runes up to the ledge. Ahead of him the path ended at another archway within which flowed the strange polychromatic swirls of energy he had seen earlier. The sense of immense controlled energies contained within was awesome. He paused for a moment, knowing what he must do, but not quite prepared to do it.
This was the path Tasirion had written about. All he had to do was pass within it. All of these strange interdimensional corridors he had passed through so far had merely been a preparation for this. They were simply the approaches to the true Paths of the Old Ones. He had a feel for their structure now. They were like tunnels dug down through the surface of reality. What loomed before him was more like the entrance to an underground river.
The trail was clear. Why was he hesitating? He already knew the answer. Things had decayed since the time of the Old Ones. That much was obvious. Their works were potent but they had been infiltrated and corrupted by the powers of Chaos. Who could tell whether they would work the way they were supposed to, or even the way they had when Tasirion passed this way all those scores of years ago?
As it was he had two choices. He could turn and go back the way he came, and try to find another way to avert the doom of Ulthuan. If such were possible in the limited time he had available. Or he could press on, trusting to his knowledge and his spells as he had always done. He allowed himself a smile. Many had called him arrogant, and he supposed it was too late now to prove them wrong.
He stepped forward and touched the surface of the glowing substance. It felt cool and liquid and it flowed around his fingers, engulfing them. He took a deep breath and pushed through. In a heartbeat he was swept into the raging currents beyond. He had a brief glimpse of a huge corridor along which tumbled thousands upon thousands of glittering many-coloured spheres, hurtling along like asteroids through space. He sensed dark malign presences and prepared himself to meet them.
‘At least the lights are back on,’ said Felix, realising that he was whining. They could see again. The path curved upward, or perhaps it was downward at a strange angle; he could no longer tell. All he knew was that even though it felt like they were walking on the flat, he could see the curve of the path. It was an effect that was most disorientating. Perhaps, after all, he could understand what Gotrek had been talking about earlier when he mentioned how confusing it was to no longer be able to sense depth. The cues that
his eyes were giving him no longer matched the cues his body felt. It created an immense sense of dislocation.
‘There is another source of light,’ Gotrek said. Felix realised that he was right. The pathway ahead split into two, one going upwards, the other going downwards. Both ended after about fifty strides in glowing archways. No, he realised, it was not just the archways that glowed, it was what was within them. They appeared to be filled with some substance like mercury, except that it glowed and pulsed with all colours. Shimmering patches drifted over the surface like oil on water, pulsing as they went. The effect was eerie and definitely supernatural.
Even as the thought occurred to him, Felix heard an immense slithering sound behind him. Something huge was dragging itself from the dark tunnels through which they had passed. His forebodings had proven themselves to be true after all.
Out of the darkness a massive creature dragged its bloated body. Its head was draconic, but where its mouth should have been was a mass of squid-like tentacles. As they writhed, Felix saw a huge leech-like mouth the size of a manhole cover in its midst. If anything, it was worse than the first beast they had encountered.
It stank awfully and its skin seemed putrid. When he looked closely, enormous maggots writhed beneath it, sometimes biting their way through and inching away. It took Felix a moment to realise what they were: young. The thing was being eaten alive by its own progeny, although that did not appear to do anything to damp its own appetite. There was something about the look and the stench that was familiar, that reminded him of the followers of the Plague God Nurgle he had seen at the Siege of Praag. Was it possible that this thing was some sort of pestilential daemonic creature of the lord of pestilence? He did not suppose it would matter all that much if the creature ate him. Even as he watched he realised that something worse might happen. The maggots bursting forth from within it were crawling towards him.
Worse still, hideous high-pitched laughter emerged from somewhere high atop the beast’s skull. When he looked he could see that one of the excrescences looked suspiciously like a human head. As the realisation struck he heard the creature speak. ‘Once I was like you – soon you will be like me – ha ha! Lord Nurgle’s gift will be yours, and you will be his – ha ha!’
Felix had once seen a caterpillar being eaten alive by the larvae of a wasp that had been implanted within it. He wondered if this was what would happen to him if those bloated, squelching sacs of foulness bit him. He braced himself for combat even as their foul parent loomed over him. Its shadow fell across him, bringing with it an awful stench. Then it leaned forward like an avalanche of flesh and pus.
I have fought some awful things, Felix thought, but surely this must be the worst.
The currents of magic swept Teclis down the endless corridor of many-coloured lights. He touched things, smashed through gossamer webs of energy and emerged on the other side. Before he could orientate himself, he tumbled headlong. Strange hallucinations overtook him. He passed through scenes he well remembered. His childhood, his first book of spells, the battles that had wracked Ulthuan when the Dark Kindred had invaded while he was still a youth. The mighty confrontation at Finuval Plain where he had fought with the Witch King and eventually triumphed. They flickered past. Between them were intervals where he hurtled down the long extra-dimensional corridor.
Sometimes the scenes were subtly different. In some, he looked into the book and saw there spells of convoluted evil that turned him to the darkness. In some of the battles he fought not against the Witch King but with him, clad in dark armour that was a reflection of Malekith’s own. In others he saw himself standing over the body of his dying twin and laughing. Even as he felt horror he realised that these things reflected something within himself, some possibility. Were these his secret dreams and nightmares, or were they something else?
He touched the protective amulet on his breast and concentrated his mind, clearing the images from his thoughts. As sanity returned, a phrase came to him, an expression from Tasirion’s book: The Paths of the Old Ones have been corrupted by Chaos, you must be wary of the Twisted Paths.
He saw now what the mad mage had meant. Tasirion had claimed that the Twisted Paths were where the work of the Old Ones intersected with bubbles of pure Chaos. The stuff was malleable. It responded to the thoughts and dreams and sometimes the simple presence of sentient minds. He realised he had been falling through them and as he did so he had altered them.
In a way they were windows into other worlds, temporary things, bubbles rising through the seething extra-dimensional sea of Chaos, places that would exist for one heartbeat, or ten, or perhaps a lifetime or a millennium. He knew that he could, if he wished, guide himself towards them and enter them.
What would it be like, he wondered, to be caught in such a bubble, a miniature universe sculpted from his own innermost wishes, reflecting his own secret history? Could he make a paradise? Could he create a place where his illness had not struck him, where he was as strong and perfect as Tyrion, where the darkness within him would never have to come to light, where he would never need to feel jealousy or envy or bitter pain?
Was this the secret of the Old Ones’ disappearance? Had they departed from our world to this place and created their own bubble universes, nestled within the sea of Chaos? Was such a thing even possible? It was a concept to boggle the mind. Even as it struck him, he accelerated faster through the corridors of this strange space. As he did so he saw that the bubbles of the Chaos stuff were travelling along like droplets of mercury dropped down the funnel of an alembic. Sometimes two would impact and merge, sometimes they would split and go their separate ways. It was like watching some primordial life forms. He moved to avoid any that came too close, fearing that they might be semi-sentient or drawn to him in some way and that they might consume him. The hallucinations stopped, as he had thought they would.
He studied his surroundings closely, noticing that the tumbling spheres were agitated by great pulses of energy, flowing first one way and then the other like seaweed being dragged about by the tides. He realised almost at once that the energy flows were linked to the disturbances in Ulthuan and elsewhere. By tracking them to their source, he could most likely find the cause of the disturbance.
There were other presences here too, none of them mortal. Some were alien and uninterested in him. Others were malign and followed in his wake like sharks following a ship. They were daemons who had somehow found their way into this colossal labyrinth. He knew that only his protective amulets kept them at bay, and that at the first touch of weakness they would take him.
Suddenly a strange intuition touched him, a feeling of dry ghostly presences such as there had been in his dreams. Was it a product of his imagination, he wondered, or had those trapped sorcerers really reached out for him? Or was it some subtle form of attack projected by the creatures following him? He willed himself to slow and as he did so, noticed an archway that glowed in a strangely familiar way. Moreover, he noticed a trace of an awesomely powerful magical resonance created by a thing that was not in itself Chaotic. It was in fact the resonance of a weapon or device that was powerfully resistant to Chaos, an artefact of near-godlike power. Was this some treasure lost long ago in the paths? Was this something he was supposed to seek?
Such a thing might prove very useful to him on his quest. By an effort of will, he pushed himself towards the archway. Within what seemed like heartbeats he hurtled through it and emerged to face horror.
Felix dived to one side as tendrils descended towards him. He lashed out, hacking the tips of a few and hit the ground rolling, just in time to see a mass of bloated white maggots moving towards him. He noticed that on each side of their leech-like mouths were small clusters of eyes that reminded him of a spider’s, only these contained a strange intelligence and a glittering malice that was uncanny. Large as they were, though, he could not see what harm they could do him as long as they did not get close enough to bite. And he had no intention of allowing that to h
appen.
Gotrek was already amid the mass of maggot-things, hacking at them with the axe. Their jelly-like quivering flesh gave no resistance. The things burst under the impact, sending milky fluid that stank like rotten curdled milk everywhere. Overhead, the high-pitched laughter of the daemonic thing sounded anew. Felix wondered what it knew that he did not.
He threw himself forward, keeping behind the Slayer, guarding his back against anything that threatened to get past. Not that there was much danger of that with all the carnage the dwarf was wreaking. The huge monster leaned forward, tentacles stretching once more. Long rubbery limbs, suckered like a squid’s, threatened to wrap around him. He cut at them, and his blade bit deep, causing more of the hideous milky fluid to surge forth. He noticed that the floor beneath his feet was becoming sticky, and his movements slower. The sheer nauseating stench was threatening to overwhelm him.
Gotrek showed no sign of slowing. Whenever a tentacle looped near him, he chopped it in two. The thing did not die, though. It hit the ground and began to writhe away like a snake, showing a life, if not an intelligence, independent of its original owner. Even as Felix watched, the severed tentacle began to heal and regrow, like the limbs of the fabled troll, or the heads of some daemonic hydra.
The huge bloated body of the monster had started to expand like a balloon as it sucked in air. Felix had the feeling that this was the prelude to nothing good, but he could not for the life of him predict what was going to happen. The thing was too alien, their circumstances beyond the ambit of all his previous experience. He was starting to wonder if they had somehow been cast into hell. At this moment, it seemed all too likely.
The monster exhaled, a gust of stinking, buzzing breath unlike anything Felix had ever quite experienced. It was a black gale that thundered around his ears, then he realised that the buzzing had nothing to do with the breath; it was the foul wingbeat of millions upon millions of flies. These were not any normal flies, either. They were huge things with fat glistening jewelled bodies, and eyes just as intelligent and malicious as that of the monster or the maggots. Perhaps they were all part of the same thing; perhaps they all shared the same intelligence.
