by Warhammer
Either way, the Eight Lamentations would belong to Archaon, and with them the Three-Eyed King would reap a great and terrible toll from his enemies.
Eight
Crawling City
Adhema clung to the side of the immense worm, her armoured fingers digging into its thick hide. It was like climbing some vast, breathing mountain. She had allowed her terrorgheist to fly free, and hunt the steppes as it willed. Entering the worm-city required more subtlety than the shrieking bat-beast could muster.
So she climbed, hand over hand, moving more swiftly than a mortal – especially one in full armour – could have. It was no tricky thing to avoid the watch towers that clung like fungal growths to the worm’s flanks. More difficult were the sweeping beams of reflected light, which swept the grasslands below, and the worm’s flesh, searching for enemies. The worm-folk had been attacked too often to be entirely lax in their security measures.
Often, she was forced to pause in her ascent, to wait for a searching beam to pass away. In those moments, she entertained herself with the thought of what she was going to do to the deathbringer when she finally caught him. The servants of Khorne could endure much before they expired. And she had learned the torturer’s arts during her time among the desert tribes of the Great Emptiness. Neferata insisted that her servants availed themselves of a well-rounded education.
He had killed several of her sisterhood, and deserved a painful death as his reward. To kill a mortal was but to pay homage to death. To slay an immortal, however, was to do that which death had forbidden. Her foe had broken that law and thus must pay the price.
Once such thoughts might have disgusted her. Then again, maybe not. In her youth, when her heart still beat, she had thought that the sum total of the world was her father’s kingdom, and that world was good. She remembered climbing into bed using the backs of her servants as a stool, and the archery lessons with screaming targets – peasants, mostly, and a few criminals. Her father had believed that blood was the best teacher of all and had schooled her accordingly. Such was the way her family had always ruled Szandor.
Szandor the Proud. Szandor the Cruel. Where gibbet cages hung in every market square and the enemies of the aristocracy were impaled on short stakes so that their agonies might last for hours, if not days. Szandor, where hymns in praise of the Undying King were sung on high holy days and a tithe of flesh was offered up to his servants.
Szandor, the last gasp of resistance in western Shyish. Neferata had seen to that. The Mortarch of Blood had wielded the might of Szandor as a swordsman might wield a blade, bleeding the enemy of days, weeks, months. Until at last the blade broke, and she cast it into her opponent’s face, to make her escape.
But not alone. She took the firstborn daughters of the great families with her. She took them, and made them fit for purpose, full of spite and anger. Adhema grinned, and licked her teeth. Her fangs, like those of an adder, or a wolf, the better to bite out the throat of the enemy. Neferata’s catch were the orphans of a thousand murdered kingdoms, united in their hatred of the Ruinous Powers. But hatred alone wasn’t enough. Like anything, it had to be honed to a killing edge.
Despite the intervening centuries, she could still hear the voice of their teacher as he schooled her and the others in the arts of war. The Blood Dragon himself, the finest warrior Shyish had ever seen. How Neferata had coaxed him down from his mountain, Adhema did not know. But she was grateful. By his hand had the lessons of her father been built on, and in some cases, discarded entirely.
It was the nature of time that the old ways gave way before the new. Wit replaced weapons, and cunning became the anticipator of carnage. For her queen, war was a game of applied strategies. An artistic endeavour, equivalent to painting – every brushstroke another stratagem, every subsequent dab of colour a new factor applied to the problem. The realms were vast, and the war that raged across them was not a single conflict, but a thousand smaller ones, each one with its own purpose and peculiarities.
Szandor had been one such. She paused, staring up at the yellow moons. In Shyish, they were silver and dead, scoured of all threat by the will and whim of the Undying King. Here, they swelled with obscene life. It was said by the liche-monks of the Dead Vaults that whole tribes of the Chaos-tainted prowled the lunar crags of the Beast-Moons, their forms warped into howling mockeries of wolves. She had fought such creatures before, and had enjoyed it immensely. They died as easily as any other living thing.
Above her something cawed. She looked up, frowning. Carrion birds – ravens – circled overhead, their raucous cries trickling down towards her. To her eyes, far keener than those of a mortal, something about them seemed off. They left a stain on the air, as if by their very nature they offended the laws of this realm.
She watched the ravens circle and dart down, into the city. A slow grin spread across her face. Those were not natural birds. Her mistress had been right. ‘Well, this has suddenly become more interesting.’
She scuttled up the side of the worm, moving more quickly now, heedless of the beams of light that occasionally swept over her. Men in the watch-posts stared in alarm as an inky black shape clattered past, moving more swiftly than they could perceive, in fits and starts, between one eye blink and the next.
And soon it was out of sight, and no more than a fading memory.
Shu’gohl, the Crawling City, squirmed ceaselessly across the grasslands of the Amber Steppes. The immense, segmented form of the worm stretched from sunrise to sunset, carrying a city of several million on its back. It devoured all in its path with unthinking hunger, and some days great herds of beasts stampeded ahead of it, seeking safety.
Shu’gohl was but one of ten – ten great worms, driven up onto the surface in aeons past by great rains. Someday they might descend once more into the cavernous depths of the realm, but for now, they were content to continue their mindless perambulations.
Like Shu’gohl, many of the ten bore some form of metropolis upon their back, and had done so since before the Age of Chaos. The oldest stories claimed that the ancestors of the worm-folk had fled to those fleshy heights in order to escape Gorkamorka’s hordes. Isolated and ever-moving, they had ignored the tides of Chaos sweeping across the realm. Until the eyes of the Dark Gods had at last turned towards them.
A few had fallen to Chaos, in those final fraught decades before the opening of the Gates of Azyr. Guh’hath, the so-called Brass Bastion, had carried tribes of Bloodbound in slow pursuit of Shu’gohl, as had Rhu’goss, the Squirming Citadel. Both ancient beasts had been cleansed by the efforts of the Stormcast Eternals, and the worms themselves continued their journeys, only dimly aware of the wars waged upon their backs.
But Shu’gohl was the greatest of the worm-cities, despite all that it had endured in its centuried life. The Crawling City had flourished in the wake of its liberation from the skaven of the Clans Pestilens, and was now once more a major port of call for travellers from across the realms. Volker could believe it.
His eyes were drawn to the ever-present storm that flickered across the great worm’s head – the Sahg’gohl. The Storm-Crown. A temple complex had been constructed there, aeons past, and a realmgate raised, connecting the city to the Luminous Plains in Azyr. That realmgate was open now and travellers passed through it freely. ‘May it always be so,’ Volker murmured, lifting his amulet and touching it to his lips.
‘Gods below, it’s the size of a mountain,’ Lugash growled from nearby. He stared down at the vast, crawling shape with wide eyes. The wind caught at his beard, causing the blades woven into it to rattle and clatter. ‘What does it eat?’
‘Everything,’ Zana said, leaning over the rail. ‘Anything. It once devoured an entire kingdom, bit by bit, over the course of a century.’ She pulled on her helmet. ‘Thankfully it’s slower than the day is long.’
Volker shook his head. An odd saying. Maybe days were longer in Chamon. He peered
over the rail. Shu’gohl was longer than he could take in at a glance. Even at this height, its distant segments vanished over the horizon. A slow, sonorous grinding marked its eternal journey, and an omnipresent dust cloud, thrown up by its undulations. The city on its back was a narrow strip of creation, rising up from within the bristles that coated the worm’s hide. Smoke rose from its highest towers, and beams of light, cast upwards by immense mirrors, swung across the darkening sky.
The Kharadron vessel swooped silently towards a group of the tallest of the bristle-towers, where aerial docklands, built from hair, skin-plates and other assorted materials, stretched in the round. Like Excelsis, Shu’gohl had made the sky-borne duardin traders welcome. Docking was apparently a complex process involving venting the belaying valves and what seemed like a lot of shouting.
When the Zank had subsided in its berth, boarding ramps were extended to the rough, spongy jetties. Brondt saw them off with a glower. ‘Goodbye, good luck, good riddance,’ he said, one hand resting on the pommel of his cutlass. He pointed at Zana. ‘Mathos – don’t bother me for at least a year.’
Zana saluted him airily. ‘Half a favour, Brondt.’
He sneered and turned away, to vent his frustration on his crew. ‘He likes me, really,’ she said, stepping aside so that Roggen could lead Harrow off the vessel. The demigryph snapped at an unwary Kharadron, prompting a flurry of curses. Roggen apologised profusely, and tried to hurry the demigryph towards the cunningly designed lift network. Volker sighed.
‘Maybe you were right about the beast.’
‘No. Roggen wouldn’t have abandoned her willingly.’ Zana clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Besides, as you said, she might come in handy.’
‘Worst comes to worst, we can eat it,’ Lugash said, stumping past them.
The lift – a platform suspended by pulleys and thick ropes of braided worm-hair – carried them to the streets far below, at a speed just short of ridiculous. Volker felt the bread he’d eaten trying to climb back up out of his stomach, even as they reached the bottom.
The city was a forest of high, swaying setae towers rising above cramped, squirming streets. Bridges and walkways made from worm-scale and hair connected these towers to one another and the street. It was like looking up into some vast web, full of colour and sound. Mirror plates hung from the towers reflected criss-crossing beams of lantern light down into the streets, and up into the heights. Even at night, Shu’gohl was as bright as day.
‘Do they fear the dark so much, then?’ Roggen asked, looking around. People moved to and fro across the cracked, uneven streets. The ground underfoot twitched tremulously. Volker stumbled more than once. It would take time to get used to.
‘Not the dark, but what’s in it,’ he said. He shifted his long rifle onto his shoulder. ‘The skaven took this city once. They fear that happening again. And not without cause, I suspect.’ He gestured to the base of a nearby tower, where strange, hairy hides were nailed up. ‘There are still skaven, deep in the worm. Gnawing away at it, as they do everything.’
‘We hunt them, in the bleeding season,’ a voice said. Soft but strong, with a strange guttural accent. Volker and the others turned. A woman clad in thick robes and a curious type of scale armour strode towards them. Coiling, worm-like sigils marked the hem of her robes, and the hammer symbol of Sigmar had been etched onto every scale of her armour. She was pale, as all the folk of Shu’gohl were, and her long hair was almost white, though Volker judged her as being younger than himself. ‘When the gut-shafts expand, and grow slick, we descend into Olgu’gohl and burn back the infestation for another year.’
‘Olgu…?’ Roggen began, trying and failing to pronounce the odd syllables. Harrow chirped and rubbed his shoulder with her beak. Absently, he patted the beast.
‘The Squirming Sea,’ the woman said. She bowed her head. ‘I am Nyoka Su’al’gohl. I have been expecting you.’ She pressed her fist into her palm and bowed. She wore heavy, ridged gauntlets, and silver bells were threaded through her hair. They made soft harmonies as she moved. ‘Sahg’mahr bless and keep thee.’ She straightened. ‘The Builder sent word. I am to escort you to the Libraria Vurmis.’
‘The – Grungni, you mean?’ Volker said. Of course the god would have someone waiting on them. Grungni left little to chance, it seemed.
She nodded. ‘The Builder, yes. Come. You must be eager to see it.’ She turned away. Volker and the others shared a look. He cleared his throat.
‘See what?’
She glanced at him. ‘The book.’ She spoke as if to a child. He wondered if all the worm-folk were so abrupt. Perhaps something was being lost in translation.
Volker hesitated. Zana pushed him aside. ‘What book?’
‘The duardin book.’ Nyoka frowned. ‘Why else would you come to a library?’
Zana shrugged and looked at Volker. ‘She has a point.’ She gestured. ‘Lead on.’
Lugash stepped between them. ‘Wait a moment – why should we trust her? She could be a spy.’ He glared at Nyoka. ‘Going to lead us into an ambush, then?’
‘If I were, I would not admit it, just because you ask,’ Nyoka said.
Lugash blinked. ‘Good point.’ He sniffed. ‘I’ll be watching you.’
‘Good. That way you will not get lost.’ Nyoka gestured. ‘Stay close. The city is crowded this time of year, and outsiders can become easily disorientated.’
As they walked, Volker studied his surroundings with an engineer’s eye. Shu’gohl had grown in the century since its liberation, upwards and outwards, or so he’d heard tell. The streets were almost as crowded as those of Excelsis, though it was far more peaceful. Freeguild warriors in grey uniforms patrolled the streets alongside the members of the infamous Setaen Guard in their dark robes and polished armour. The Guard wore full-face helms, wrought in the shape of writhing tendrils, and mail hoods, further lending them an air of subdued menace.
Volker noticed a definite tension in the air between the two groups. Hostile looks and knots of discontent on street corners, swiftly dissipated by the attentions of the freeguild. The city was by no means a powder keg, but it wasn’t especially friendly either.
Like Excelsis, the narrow streets had their share of traders cluttering the path. Some worm-folk, but there were others as well, among them grim-faced duardin merchants, selling weapons and tools, and colourfully robed desert nomads, selling spices and salt. He saw a scar-faced ex-freeguilder hawking strange jewellery, which still stank of the sea bottom, and a thin, hollow-cheeked woman handing out religious tracts. She pressed one into his hand before he could get away, and said, ‘Nagash is all, brother, and all are one in him. In death, all are equal, and all are safe…’
Lugash spat a curse, startling the woman. She vanished into the crowd as they pushed away from her. Lugash shook his head. ‘You manlings have too many gods.’
‘I only worship one,’ Volker said, feeling for his amulet. The Nagashites weren’t the only ones out in force. He saw white-robed and golden-masked Hyshites walking in single file, their heads bowed and their arms crossed, and a coven of wild-haired forest-brides singing eerie hymns in praise of the Lady of Leaves on a nearby street corner.
Nyoka spotted his gesture and smiled, pleased. ‘You are one of the Devoted?’
‘I – yes,’ Volker said. ‘You as well, I take it.’ He motioned to her armour. She nodded.
‘I carry the hammer in his name, and proudly.’ Her hands flexed, and she cast a speculative glare at the forest-brides. They began to dance wildly, attracting a crowd. ‘I have made grist of his enemies, for the mills of heaven.’ Startled, Volker glanced at Zana, who smiled grimly. Nyoka was a war-priestess, then. Like old Friar Ziska, though hopefully she wasn’t mad as well. But then, perhaps you had to be a little mad to make your home on the back of a monster.
Mad or not, Nyoka – or the trappings she wore – commanded respect. People ma
de way for her, bowing and making the sign of the hammer. Even the Nagashites stepped aside, though with far fewer smiles. As in Excelsis, all faiths were welcome, but only one was truly honoured. That much was evident from the wayshrines that littered the streets.
Volker wasn’t the only one interested in their surroundings. Roggen stared openly, clearly impressed. He held Harrow’s reins tightly, and when the demigryph suddenly lurched to the side, he was almost dragged off his feet. The beast padded towards a noisome stall, where a bespectacled trader hawked a bevy of exotic animals – infant merwyrms glaring out of their glass bowls, scaly peryton eggs and a chained ghyrlion were among his merchandise.
The ghyrlion, its thorny mane clattering, snarled once at the demigryph before slinking away beneath the egg baskets. The colourful birds in their cages shrieked and squawked in growing panic as Harrow approached, but the demigryph had eyes only for a bevy of mangy wolf-rats, crouched in heavy wooden cages. The trader’s patter stuttered into silence as Roggen finally halted his steed’s advance.
The wolf-rats screeched in their cages, lashing hairless tails as they bit at the bars. The feral rat-creatures were as large as gryph-hounds, and almost as vicious. Roggen gestured to the merchant, and reached for his coin purse. Volker couldn’t hear what they were saying, but given what he’d seen of Harrow’s appetites so far, he could guess.
‘What is he doing?’ Nyoka asked. She watched the transaction in puzzlement.
‘Buying his beast a treat,’ Zana said, in disgust. The merchant kicked the cage open and leapt back as the wolf-rat burst free. The slavering vermin darted towards Roggen, jaws wide. Harrow gave a scream of joy and swatted the animal from the air. The demigryph’s blow snapped the wolf-rat’s spine, and it flopped limply to the street. Harrow ducked her beak and lifted her prey easily. Roggen smiled and patted the beast.