by Guy Haley
The light became harsh. The creature noticed her, and its leer spread. It said no word, but lowered its staff. It flashed.
She hardly felt the magic touch her. She tried to move then, but could not, and when she looked down she saw her feet had gone to crystal that was spreading up her legs with a feeling of unbearable tightness. Her new glass skin vibrated with the energies of change.
Screaming things with slow beating wings flew from the light in flocks, and they were not so pretty. The bobbing spheres touched down upon the platforms and the ground beyond, burst with soft sighs, and from them sprang gangling things of violent pink that bounded cackling into the trees. They whooped and called, blasting fires of many colours from their palms, and setting the wet trees ablaze.
The last she saw was a hideous giant: scab-skinned, dusty smelling, with a bird’s head as long as a man’s body. It hauled itself from the light, and spread wings covered in madly swivelling eyes.
The crystal closed over her face, then the top of her head, and yet still she could see.
Her soul screamed for release from its prison. As her mind collapsed into fractal insanities, swift daemon beasts galloped from the growing rift. By then Odifus had seen what was happening away on the old landing pads, and tried to run, scattering his prizes in his terror. He did not get far before he was torn to pieces, and his thin blood was drunk by the jungle. The crystal growths spread faster, and faster, and more of the daemons of Tzeentch poured onto Noxia.
The gods were fighting.
The War in the Rift had begun.
Chapter Four
FIRST IN NURGLE’S FAVOUR
In the horarium of Mortarion, all the clocks were still. The daemon primarch of the Death Guard was enwrapped in black filaments that penetrated his skin and his eyes. By the dark miracle of the Mycota Profundis, he communed with his estranged gene-son, Typhus, and the primarch did not like what he was hearing.
‘I cannot come to Iax, Mortarion, I have orders from a higher power,’ Typhus was saying. ‘The First, Third and Fourth plague companies are with me. We are returning to the Scourge Stars.’
Typhus’ sepulchral voice emanated from a perfect recreation of his shoulders and head, a living bust, presented in cross section like a vivisected anatomical specimen. Tubes and organs moved beneath layered bone, fat and armour. The wound given Typhus by the Emperor’s witch-brothers troubled him still, months after the battle for Galatan. There were blackened areas within his body that were new, that even the regenerative powers of Nurgle struggled to make good. The blade of Captain Grud had cut deep. The constant buzz of the Destroyer Hive his body played host to was subdued.
‘You are injured. Fear has you,’ said Mortarion. The pleasure the primarch felt at his son’s setback was transmitted between them along with his words, and Typhus bridled.
‘Fear has nothing to do with it, my gene-father,’ said Typhus. ‘I am the Mortal Herald of Nurgle. I am bidden to return by our god. I must go, and so must you. Your material holdings are under attack at this very moment. The Great War between the gods has begun.’
‘No!’ said Mortarion. ‘I will not abandon my campaign. We are close. Guilliman will die by my hand, and his realm will be ours. Not three worlds dedicated to corruption, but hundreds! Billions of souls are ripe for the harvest. My brother comes now. The trap is set. I will snare him.’
‘Listen to me, Mortarion,’ said Typhus patiently, infuriating the primarch further. ‘You must heed these tidings. I come to you not as your son, or your First Captain, but as the Herald of Grandfather Nurgle. You must return. This is not a request. He cares nothing for your feud with your brother. Change disrupts the cycle of death and rebirth. This is the real war. Put aside your petty rivalry, you are commanded to do so by your god.’
‘How dare you,’ said Mortarion. ‘How dare you treat me in this way, as if I were a child to be scolded.’
‘I perform my role, as our god ordains,’ said Typhus. ‘You would be wise to perform yours as his champion.’
‘And where are these commands, Typhus?’ Mortarion’s expression twisted so much the black filigree of the mycelia broke and re-formed on his face. ‘Has Nurgle himself come down from his dark house to tell you? I have heard nothing, from manse-warden, the uncleanly or any other of his princes, therefore he does not command me. I refuse to be manipulated by you again.’
‘He makes his will known to me in his way, father,’ said Typhus. ‘There are portents, there are impulses. I have been sent visions, I have been given signs.’
‘Not even a visitation?’ scoffed Mortarion. ‘In that case I must immediately abandon my victory,’ he said sarcastically.
‘No herald would be necessary, my lord – if you were but to listen to the warp, you would hear it too,’ said Typhus calmly. ‘I rise in his favour. The command is sure, and imperative. Leave now.’
‘I am well enough occupied here,’ snapped Mortarion. ‘Begone. I am the son of his mightiest enemy, and among his foremost servants. If he wishes to command me, then he may do so himself.’
‘Father, you said it yourself, you are a servant. Do not forget it. You are a primarch but you serve a god. I warn you now. There is a hierarchy. Grandfather does not make himself seen. He is everything. He is everywhere. He will know you defy him. This is as clear a command as you will get. View it as warning.’
‘I take no orders from you, First Captain.’ Mortarion’s wings beat once, wafting the noisome vapours of his horarium about. ‘You owe everything to me.’
‘You have it the wrong way round, my lord. It is I who led you to your current status. Once again, I fulfil my duties of messenger for your advantage.’
‘You are a serpent, Typhus. You always have been. You always will be.’
‘So be it,’ said Typhus. ‘You overestimate your worth. Your arrogance blinds you. You defied Nurgle’s will to make this war, and you defy it again to remain. Nurgle is an indulgent grandfather. He delights in the activities of his children, wayward though they may be, but he has limits. You rapidly approach them. If you transgress them, there will only be one consequence, Mortarion. Grandfather will be displeased. The mightiest rages come from the best-humoured. Do not make him–’
Mortarion let out a hiss of rage. Green and purple smokes boiled from the respirator fixed to his face. He swung Silence, his great scythe, cutting through the stalk of the fungus that bore Typhus’ image. Typhus growled as phantom pain reached over the warp for him, and the image tumbled, already dissolving. It hit the ground in a splash of black matter, and was gone.
The mycelial spread that sustained the Mycota Profundis shrivelled. Mortarion wrenched himself free of its embrace before it had fully decayed, causing the warp-fed fungus to keen with a human voice.
‘I am Mortarion, lord of the Death Guard! Bringer of plague, the mighty, the indomitable,’ he said. In the glass prison upon the great central clock, the soul of his alien foster father raced around and around in terror. ‘No one commands me!’
Mortarion’s anger manifested as a blast of psychic energy that washed out from him and through his thousands of clocks. As it touched them, they set into motion and began to chime. Broken time clattered around the horarium.
‘No one,’ he repeated. ‘Do you hear me? No one!’
Mortarion’s rebellion did not go unnoticed.
In a house as big as forever, in a garden of repugnant fecundity, something monstrous stirred. An eye that could encompass a universe rolled stickily in its socket, and its gaze fell upon Ultramar.
Ku’Gath was stirring the cauldron when the storm began. He looked to the sky where purple-and-green clouds crowded out the sun. Lightning of sickly colour played within them, and when they cracked they made a noise like rotten tree boughs breaking.
‘It’s going to rain,’ he said miserably. He didn’t like rain. It reminded him of his rival, Rotigus. He turned to
say this to Septicus, but his lieutenant was gone, slain at the hand of Roboute Guilliman. No mere banishing, but the true death, his existence burned from reality. Daemons were timeless, and the day would come when they would meet again. However, those moments had already passed, and though they would be fresh to Ku’Gath, there would be no more made. Septicus was dead.
Everyone was sad. The nurglings feeding the flames with damp wood went about their duties sullenly. They did not sing or shriek. Their silence would have suited Ku’Gath perfectly, if it did not remind him of his loss. The plaguebearers chanted out their counts much subdued. After aeons of singular misery, Ku’Gath finally had others who felt the same way, and he did not like it one bit.
‘I even miss his pipes,’ moaned the lord of plagues. A slow, fat, greasy tear rolled down his cheek. His loose eye followed, and vanished with a plop in his cauldron.
‘Damn and blast,’ he muttered. Thunder boomed overhead. He looked up again. ‘And now the rain will come and dilute my potions! Oh for botheration, botheration!’
He pushed his hand into the liquid, searching for his eye.
Nurgle’s cauldron was full to brimming, the potion within the brightest green. Its glow lit up the rotting face of Ku’Gath. Lightning teased the shine, driving it back mischievously, and making Ku’Gath seem a statue of a moment, cast in blacks and whites.
Ku’Gath fished about, pushing his arm deeper, and deeper. The mixture was potent, dangerous even, and stripped his unearthly flesh from his arm as he swirled it round and round. But he exerted himself, drawing a little more energy from the warp, remaking his flesh as quickly as it was melted. He enjoyed the pain. It burned and tickled in a most effervescent way.
‘Where is it? Where is it?’ he muttered. ‘I need my eye for I must… what?’
His hand grasped something hard, something spined. He tugged upon it. It would not move.
‘What is this?’ he growled; then he roared. ‘What is this?’
He tugged, he heaved; his belly knocked against the cauldron, sending it rocking on its stumpy legs. Tides of thick slime slopped over the edge, sending nurglings screaming. Their tiny stampede was beneath his notice, but hundreds died beneath the clawed feet of their brethren. The fire steamed. The smell it put out was truly abominable, but Ku’Gath was far too outraged to enjoy it.
‘Something in my stew! Something in my pot!’ he roared. ‘Out, out, out, foreign ingredient!’
He yanked. Whatever it was did not move. He yanked harder, and then there was movement. Too much movement. Ku’Gath fell. He let go of the object, spraying the elixir everywhere as he toppled back, demolishing a fair part of the hospital’s ruins, and further, so that he landed on his spongy behind in a rising cloud of dust, and moist rubble was his seat.
The object rose. It broke the surface, and showed itself to be an antler. A filthy hood followed, then wicked eyes, and a nose, and a mouth, bent upward in a superior smile. A warty hand slapped upon the cauldron’s side, and pushed down, so that from the brew shoulders came.
Out from the poisons Ku’Gath had so carefully concocted rose another Great Unclean One, and this fellow Ku’Gath knew only too well.
‘Rotigus Rainfather, second in Nurgle’s favour,’ he gasped.
Rotigus rose from the deeps, slopping the precious fluid over the side in gloopy waves.
‘No! No! Stop!’ shouted Ku’Gath. He pushed himself back to his feet, tripping on his own rolls of flab as he raced back to his mixture. His talons tore at his guts and ripped his skin, but he was far too angry to notice. ‘Grandfather lent me this cauldron! It is mine to use, not yours!’
Rotigus coughed, and a wash of Ku’Gath’s precious elixir spilled from his mouth. He tried to speak, but gurgled, then hawked and spat a gob of maggots and slime, clearing his throat.
The rain fell heavier, and heavier.
He coughed again and again, spewing into the mix. Finally, the rancid contents of his mouth were in the stew, and he smiled wider, and then spoke.
‘Well met, my festering kin.’ He held out a hand. In it a glistening orb swivelled. ‘You dropped your eye.’
Ku’Gath snatched his eye and screwed it back into place. ‘There is nothing well about this meeting. Now get out of my cauldron.’
‘Ah, ah, ah!’ Rotigus admonished. ‘Not your cauldron, rot sibling, Grandfather’s cauldron.’
‘He gave it to me to use!’ snapped Ku’Gath.
‘Well, he allowed me to manifest in it. What do you think about that?’ Rotigus grinned, dipped a finger in the mix, and sucked it clean. ‘Most filthy, most contagious. What is this?’
‘None of your business, precipitator of precipitation,’ growled Ku’Gath.
‘This is the blight, isn’t it? This is what you and the half-son intend to slay Guilliman with.’ He took another taste. ‘Tangy,’ he said.
Ku’Gath’s ire boiled his brains, to the extent that steam puffed from his ears and mouth.
‘Get out of there! You’re spoiling it!’
‘Making it better, you mean,’ said Rotigus. He reclined in the cauldron and made a satisfied sigh. ‘I’ll give you this, it is rather invigorating.’
‘Is it now?’ said Ku’Gath. He took up his paddle and gripped it hard, like it was a halberd or a spear, and not a utensil of medicine. ‘Sit in it, and die. Drink it, and die. This is the most potent ailment ever conceived of!’
‘Really?’ Rotigus slurped up a mouthful of the stuff and spat it high in a small, green fountain. The maggots that fell perpetually from his mouth surfed high upon the spout.
‘This disease is the Godblight. It will kill the primarch. It would kill any of the Anathema’s little toy men. There was one, a foe of all, who dreamed of similar, long ago. I shall finish what he did not have the wit to unleash. Mine is better. Refined. And best of all, I shall free it.’
‘Lovely,’ said Rotigus. ‘Would it kill Mortarion?’
‘Yes it would kill Mortarion. It would kill him dead!’ shouted Ku’Gath indignantly. ‘This disease rots body and soul, in and out! Nothing is immune to it. You will die! Not just the short death of banishment, but the true death! Your being will be corroded, your essence will be the feast of soul-bacillae. You will feed the next generation of spirit pox, and thereby become bountiful. But Rotigus, the Rainfather, he will cease to be.’ Ku’Gath gloated. ‘Dead!’ he added for emphasis.
‘Ah, dead. But will I? Really?’ said Rotigus. He flopped his flabby arms out over the sides of the cauldron as if he were in a refreshing bath. His skin hissed on the hot iron, but that did not seem to discomfort him overly much, and the tentacles that fringed his left hand moved with lazy pleasure, and the mouth above them in his wrist lapped at the potion. ‘Thing is, Ku’Gath old fellow…’ He grinned now, wide and yellow and horrible. ‘I’m very much alive, aren’t I? In fact, I am positively refreshed!’
Ku’Gath deflated a little, and wrung his hands anxiously around the paddle.
‘It is not yet finished,’ he said. ‘But it will–’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Rotigus. ‘I am sure it will do all those things. It will kill the primarch, it would kill me, but right now, well.’ He splashed his hand in and out. ‘Right now it will not, will it? Right now, I am sitting in it, and I am still alive, no?’
‘But–’
‘That’s why I am here.’ He leered. ‘You are running out of time. The Changer is making his move on Grandfather’s grounds. There will be fighting in the flowerbeds. War in the glasshouses of the damned. It is starting now, in the Scourge Stars.’
Ku’Gath was taken aback. ‘But the treaties! Why would…’
Rotigus lay his head back on the cauldron’s iron rim. ‘Ku’Gath, let me be frank with you. I understand why Grandfather Nurgle loves you over all we others. You are very charming in your grumbling. He likes you. I like you! You might not know it, because you
are an old misery guts, and probably think everyone hates you, because you are so terribly self-centred. Everyone’s thinking about me, everyone hates me.’ Rotigus mimicked Ku’Gath’s voice, and rolled his eyes dramatically. ‘But nobody cares. They don’t think about you, and when they do, you are liked.’ He slapped a wet hand, large as a man, against his chest. ‘You are, however, a little naive. The godswar never ends. The treaties struck between the brothers will not hold, they never do. There will be another accord, I am sure, but for now we have new war. You know this, I know this.’ He smirked. ‘We all know this! They move. Khorne and Tzeentch’s legions have allied. They are jealous of Grandfather’s gains, and work to take the Scourge Stars from us. Personally, I blame Mortarion. It is not right to allow mortals to play the great game, even ones like him.’
‘What?’
‘You heard,’ said Rotigus. ‘If I were you, I would have a little rearrangement of my priorities. The Grandfather will not look kindly upon those who aren’t ready for the muster. You know, the kind of daemons who are off doing their own thing, so to speak. Things like this.’ He looked meaningfully into his bath. He went a little cross-eyed. Flatulence bubbled from him, popping in large brown bubbles at the surface. ‘Ah, that’s better.’
‘You mean… you mean I should leave?’ asked Ku’Gath.
Rotigus scooped up a handful of liquid, poured it over his tentacles, and shrugged.
‘But, but this is a catastrophe!’ said Ku’Gath. ‘My plague is nearly finished! I… I… I have crafted something special, something delightful that will kill the Anathema’s son, spirit and body. This is as good as the plague that made me. It is better!’
‘Ach, nobody cares,’ said Rotigus, and dabbled his fingers in his bath. ‘The Anathema’s son,’ he said mockingly. ‘Oh do shut up. What is he? One man? One counterfeit demigod? This is the game of real gods! This reality is doomed, Ku’Gath. The mortals here are finished. They always lose, in the end, and this bunch have already lost, they just can’t see it yet. The gods fight over the spoils, before the next corruption begins. Fresh realms await.’ He gave Ku’Gath a sly look. ‘Surely that makes even you happy, miserable one?’