Masters of Stone and Steel - Gav Thorpe & Nick Kyme

by Warhammer

  And if he was wrong, that changed nothing. His path was set. If Neferata knew, and still permitted him to enter her palace armed, then her hubris was even greater than he had thought.

  Mathas tore his eyes away from the mansion and started forwards again. The Black Knight watched him for a moment more before continuing onward.

  Another hour passed before they reached the palace. They did not approach it along the main avenue. The door that waited for Mathas was on the opposite side from the grand entrance. The Black Knights took him through a maze of ever-narrower streets, weaving through an endless graveyard. Colossal, nitre-encrusted obelisks clustered like sentries, looming over the road. The passage was so tight, the Black Knights now walked single file. Mathas’ shoulders brushed against the obelisks. Melting snow streaked his armour with gore. The road, slick with blood and slime, glowed faintly, giving just enough light for Mathas to see where he was going. He glanced behind once, and the way back was lost in impenetrable darkness.

  The path narrowed still, winding and twisting. Mathas felt he had become a carrion worm, burrowing through a gigantic corpse. He lost all sense of direction; he had been unable to see the mass of the palace since entering the cemetery. A huge, squat monument reared up ahead, crouching over the path like an immense toad. The road entered a tunnel in its base.

  The wind still blew inside the tunnel, whining in captivity. The crimson melt of the snow ran down the slope, and the low walls echoed with the footsteps of Mathas and the Black Knights. The tunnel ended in a wide antechamber, where the Black Knights brought Mathas to face a massive door. It was metal, but as dark and gleaming as obsidian. Its surface appeared featureless at first glance, but once he was closer, Mathas saw runes. They swam in the surface like oil on water. They shifted, flowed into one another and flickered on the edges of meaning. Mathas could not read them, but protean menace reached out from the door and wrapped tendrils around his soul.

  The wind rose and fell. It hissed and rasped, and became the voice of the door.

  ‘Who would be pyre-bound?’ said the door.

  For the first time, the lead Black Knight spoke. The cold that blew from his soul shaped itself into words, the syllables cut into sharp pieces by the rattling of teeth. ‘Mathas Hellezan,’ he said, turning Mathas’ name into a foul incantation.

  ‘Mathas Hellezan,’ the door repeated.

  ‘Firstborn of the house,’ said the Black Knight.

  ‘Firstborn!’ the door exulted. ‘Let him pass, and grasp his fate-thorn.’

  The door opened, swinging inwards into gloom with the sound of a mountain grinding apart. A faint glow wavered deep inside the stone tunnel. Mathas’ eyes adjusted, and he realised a single torch hung on the wall, waiting for him.

  Without looking back or glancing at his undead escort, he drew his sword and marched into the tunnel. The door closed behind him with the boom of hollow thunder.

  Mathas raced down the tunnel, anxious that the caprice of the test might snatch the illumination away. The floor crunched under his boots. As he entered the circle of light thrown by the torch and snatched it from the wall, he saw that the floor was a pavement of bones. Skulls, femurs, pelvises and more, densely packed together into an uneven surface. There was no distinguishing between individual bodies. The floor was a compressed hecatomb, its brickwork stained the colour of old blood. Viscous fluid, too thick to be water, flowed down its length. The stench of corruption was foul. Mathas breathed through his mouth, and the smell scratched at the back of his throat.

  The tunnel was about ten feet wide, and fifteen feet high at the centre of the rounded vault of the ceiling. It descended deeper into the foundations of the palace. Its slope was steep and its curve was sharp. Mathas could only see twenty feet ahead as he advanced down the spiral.

  Echoes scrabbled upwards to meet him. Garbled and overlapping snarls. They grew louder, the voices becoming more distinct, and eager. They were unintelligible, as if the speakers had mouths full of bones. The noise of claws scraping against walls twisted Mathas’ spine into a knot. The stench was almost overpowering.

  He moved as fast as he dared, careful not to slip on the curves of skulls poking up like slick cobblestones from the floor. The gabbing, snarling voices were close now. He sensed the enemy around the next curve. Monstrous voices laughed. They could hear him, too.

  There was no point in attempting stealth. Gathering himself, he raised his sword and charged. ‘Withstand and prevail!’ he shouted.

  There was an answering roar, and from around the bend came a trio of hulking monsters. Their flesh was pale as the underbelly of a dead fish, and was pierced by long, jagged bones, the trophies of former victims that stuck out of their limbs and torsos like spines. What had been mortal had become gargoyle, and they bared their blackened teeth in pleasure and drooling hunger.

  The lead monster swung a misshapen bone-axe at Mathas before he was in range, missed and lunged clumsily, grasping for him with its filth-encrusted claws. Mathas dropped the torch, crouched, and drove his sword upwards with both hands, impaling the horror through the throat. ‘I have not come here for you,’ Mathas snarled as the monster staggered against him, its great weight almost bringing him down. ‘I am here for the Queen, and you try my patience.’ The monster choked on the blade. Dark, stinking blood gouted from its jaws, soaking his armour. One of its eyes burst from its skull. It dropped its axe and tried to grab him, but it was dying, and its claws slapped against his pauldrons, then fell to the side.

  The other horrors gabbled at Mathas. Their words were nonsense, yet there was something in the rhythm of the yells that sounded like mottos, as if they were hurling the pride of their own noble houses back at Mathas.

  ‘Your foul blood sullies a noble blade!’ Mathas shouted back. ‘But come. I will kill you just the same!’

  The horrors clawed and beat at the body of the first. They were crowding forwards, and in the confined space of the tunnel, they could not reach past the body to sink their claws and blades into Mathas. Between their blows and the mass of the corpse, his knees almost buckled. He managed to step to the rear, sliding his blade out of the body. With a jerk, he leapt backwards. The dead horror fell. The monster on the right had jammed its claws into the corpse’s flesh to pull it away, and the sudden shift pulled it forwards, off balance. Mathas slammed the point of his sword into the beast’s eyes and punctured its brain. He threw himself to the side as the last of the horrors reached for him. It caught his helm with the flat of its axe blade. His head rang with the blow and his eyes blurred. He swung to his right, slicing open the ghoul’s flank. It howled, dropped its axe and clutched at him with both hands.

  The grip was powerful. His armour began to buckle under the pressure. The diseased claws sank into the seams. The beast gnawed at the front of his helm, breaking teeth on metal and suffocating him with the stench of its breath. It held Mathas’ shoulders, its strength like a vice of iron. He managed to move his forearms up, stab the monster in the belly and saw upwards, slicing through muscle and viscera. The horror’s snarls mixed pain and rage. It tore his visor off with its teeth, and the blood from its shredded gums and lips poured over his face and neck. Mathas gagged at the poisonous, rotting fluid. With desperate strength, he brought his sword up higher, and at last cut through too much for the monster to live. It stiffened, its snarl fading to a gurgle, and then fell, taking Mathas down with it.

  Choking and coughing, Mathas broke free from the dead grip of the horror and squirmed out from under the hulk. He wiped his eyes clean of the thing’s blood, and tried not to think about how he might have been tainted. He picked up the torch and moved forward again.

  The spiral passageway ended after another few hundred yards, levelling out into a wider cavern littered with bones, scraps of flesh and piles of detritus. The stench made his eyes water. On the other side of the chamber was an iron door. It screeched as Mathas hauled it open, and the echoes of its scream were swallowed up by a choir of shrieks in the huge
space beyond.

  Mathas crossed the threshold and walked out onto a finger of fused bone which arched gently upwards, extending over an abyss. The light of the torch could not reach the walls or the ceiling. The bottom of the cavern was an unguessable distance below. Its deep night was broken by fitful streaks of light and the glow of apparitions. Phantoms glided over the pathway to circle Mathas, rising from the depths and dropping back into them. They keened in distress and hunger, in anger and eagerness, in grief and madness. Spectral hands, gnarled as talons, formed out of ghostly energy, reached for him as they flew past, but they did not come near enough to touch him. The bridge seemed to be forbidden to the wraiths, and they screamed in an intensity of pain and frustration as they passed.

  From somewhere in the dark came the heavy beat of leathery wings. Mathas held the torch high and swung it from side to side, but the thing that made the sound remained out of sight.

  Mathas kept to the centre of the bridge where the footing felt even more precarious than in the tunnel. There was nothing to keep him from falling off the sides if he stumbled too far – or if something hit him. The flapping of the wings passed overhead, closer now, as if the predator were closing in, making ready to attack.

  Ahead, the bridge reached a platform. But Mathas’ hopes that he had reached the far side were dashed when he saw it was a circular surface at the apex of the bridge’s arc. The span continued on the other side. Shaped into a shallow bowl, the platform was ringed by stones twisted into gnarled forms, as if it were in the grip of a giant skeletal hand. The stones thrummed with sorcerous power. Wraiths clustered around, casting the bowl in the sickly green of their soul-light, but though the power of the stones seemed to draw them, it also held them at bay. The phantoms were spectators, Mathas thought, forced to bear witness to the struggle to come, but unable to affect its outcome.

  The screams of hunger chilled Mathas. He was surrounded by the ghastly persistence of existence after death. To become such as these things was worse than oblivion. The nature of their captivity in this cavern was even worse. It was a display; a statement that his struggle for survival was nothing more than another’s entertainment.

  Your hopes are meaningless, it signalled. You are but a plaything.

  Above him, the flapping of wings circled, waiting for him to reach the platform.

  ‘Are you amused?’ Mathas shouted at the unseen queen of Nulahmia. ‘I come to bring an end to your delights! You are right to hide from me!’ He ran forward. Let there be an end to games, he thought. Victory or death, let either come now.

  Mathas crossed the ring of stones at a run. There was a sudden sharp flap from above, as of wings being tucked in for a dive. He changed direction abruptly, pounding around the curve of the bowl as the snarl from above became a roar. Unable to alter its trajectory quickly enough, the hunter smashed down into the centre of the platform, splintering the surface of bones.

  The brute turned slowly, tracking him, its breath making like snarling bellows. It had the form of an immense bat. The talons on its wings were as long as his forearm; its massive torso furred and muscular – a body suited to battering through doors.

  Varghulf, Mathas thought. The family chronicles made reference to such monsters in descriptions of past battles. Viscous saliva dripped from its fangs.

  Mathas charged, aiming his sword at the varghulf’s throat. It swept a wing at him, and in the moment before it struck, Mathas hurled the torch into the monster’s face. His aim was true. The varghulf shrieked, its fur smouldering and its face blackened with the burn. Mathas threw himself to the right in the direction of the monster’s retaliating blow, and though weakened, the impact knocked him off his feet and sent him sliding up the platform, smashing against one of the stones. His chest plate cracked. He felt broken movement in his ribs as he struggled to his feet.

  The varghulf swiped at its eyes with one of its wings, and lashed out with the other with wide, sweeping blows as it stormed up the slope towards Mathas.

  He ran to his left, away from the scything wing, then down along the monster’s flank. Half-blind, the varghulf missed him. It paused at the ring of stones and sniffed for its prey, stopping just long enough for Mathas to plunge his sword into its spine.

  The varghulf screamed and leapt. Blood streaming down its back, it flapped its wings and flew straight up from the stones. Mathas held tight to the hilt of the blade. He rose with the monster, his weight dragging open a longer wound. The varghulf climbed vertically, then looped, and Mathas fell.

  He landed on his back. The impact knocked the air from him, and pain exploded down his spine. He could not move. Above, the varghulf climbed higher yet, then dived for him, its jaws gaping in fury. For a terrible moment, the sight of those jaws and the blaze of the monster’s uninjured eye held Mathas, extending his paralysis. Then, he thought of his family, and of his duty, and of the dream of freeing Nulahmia from the tyrant who arranged these battles for her amusement. Teyosa’s face rose before his mind’s eye. You do not die here, she said, her voice as strong in his heart as if she had really spoken.

  With a surge of desperate determination, he rolled to the side and rose to his knees. The burning vision of the varghulf’s face was still before his mind’s eye. Its monstrousness was mesmerising, and though he had broken from its grip, it remained the vivid centre of his reality. It was the core of everything, and so when he rose, he stabbed at that centre with his sword. His instincts and reflexes knew where the face was even more than did his rational mind. He thrust, and the blade struck the eye of the varghulf. The speed and weight of the monster drove the blade deep into its skull. The varghulf’s scream cut off. Its immense body shuddered, and then, with a crash, collapsed.

  Mathas crawled out from underneath a wing. He staggered up the side of the bowl to the descending arc of the bridge. Wraiths shrieked at him, skeletal fingers of ectoplasmic energy reaching out in frustration. Mathas’ stride steadied as he marched along the span, the adrenaline of victory coursing through his frame. It gave him the focus to work through his pain, and he moved faster. He raised his sword in challenge.

  ‘I know you are watching!’ he shouted. ‘I know you can hear me. Your nemesis has come, Neferata. Your end is here!’

  His words were lost in the wailing choir of phantoms. But to speak the words aloud was a form of power. He did not have to hide any longer. Here, in this monstrous place, his rage was natural. Who would not wish destruction upon Neferata after this? So he roared his truth, and raced for the far end of the bridge.

  At the foot of the bridge was another wide platform. Five doorways led off it. Each of the doors was forged from the same obsidian-black metal as the one that had barred the entrance to this netherworld of slaughter. In them, too, runes appeared, disappeared, and shifted, threatening him with meaning, but withholding the blow. Understanding was an executioner’s axe poised over his neck.

  Mathas stepped onto the platform, and the door in front of him began to move. It stopped after a few inches, opening no more than a hand’s breadth. Mathas regarded it with suspicion. The other doors were silent. This was the path of the labyrinth he was directed to choose, then. He did not like having his hand forced. Then again, he thought, how much choice have we had at all?

  None.

  Even so, he delayed the inevitable, rebelling to the extent that he approached the doors to the left and right of the open one. The wraiths shrieked with mocking laughter at the futility of his gesture. The other doors were sealed to the walls. They would not move for him. Surely, they waited for some other victim, concealing some other doom.

  Mathas returned to the first door. He grabbed the edge and, with a harsh scrape of metal against stone, dragged it open. The space beyond was completely black. He held the torch forward, and the flame became a feeble red glow, illuminating nothing. Mathas hesitated, picturing himself stepping forward and plummeting to his death. But where would be the sport in that?

  He crossed the threshold, and the darknes
s drew back like a receding tide, settling into the recesses and corners of the chamber.

  He was in a circular, domed hall. Sconces of skeletal human arms held torches on the curved wall. In the centre of the floor was a huge mound of bodies, the corpses of hundreds of warriors cast in iron, their death agonies and their shame of failure preserved for eternity. Limbs, armour, weapons and severed heads tangled together in a mass grave of humiliation. Would-be champions were now the tortured foundation for the throne that sat atop the mound. It was constructed of bone. It gleamed ivory-white in the torchlight, yet it was not as white, or as pure a thing of death, as the skin of the tyrant who now rose from it.

  Neferata walked slowly down the mound of bodies, and Mathas felt his strength, his courage, his very ability to move, drain away. His sword arm hung limp at his side. The torch dropped from his fingers. He was paralysed. It was not mere beauty that transfixed him, but something far more terrible. It was majesty, a sublimity of command. Her presence struck him with awe, the true awe that was the supreme form of horror. Her being was too great for the hall, as if she were somehow larger than the space through which she moved.

  She wore her tall, spreading crown of overlapping plates and gold-plated bones. It sat low on her brow, and beneath it her eyes glittered, eyes of devouring darkness that pulled Mathas’ soul with the strength of a monstrous whirlpool. Her lips, dark as arterial blood, curled upwards slightly in cold amusement. Her armour, of the same black and gold plating as the crown, left her arms bare, as if they disdained such mundanities as protection. Her only weapon was a dagger, and it was sheathed.

  ‘Well met, Mathas Hellezan,’ she said. Her voice was low and compelling, like a torrent dragging him to the heart of a glacier. ‘But where is my promised nemesis?’

  The taunt broke Mathas’ paralysis. With a cry of hatred, he ran forward, sword raised. He reached the foot of the mound at the same moment Neferata did. She still had not drawn her dagger. He swung his blade at her neck.