by Darius Hinks
The fly queen felt neither pride nor shame as she studied the nightmare below. She looked at the point where the eight yellow rivers met and knew that her time had almost come. There was only one part of her past still lodged in her insectoid brain – a simple desire for revenge – and that revenge was about to be granted. Seated at the conjunction of the rivers was the daemon, Alkhor, smiling proudly at the culmination of his work. He looked like he had been slapped to earth from a giant ladle: a tumbling, almost pyramidal pile of flab. His torso was gaping open like a pair of rotten doors and his innards were crammed with every mould and contagion imaginable.
As viscous liquid rushed into his body, his gruesome cabinet of curiosities shivered and hissed. With every shiver the grim trophies popped and multiplied, dividing like cells and forming new, even more grotesque forms of life that merged with Alkhor’s flesh. As these births shook his body, Alkhor grew larger and laughed harder.
The fly queen flew towards him. Her wings were nearly twelve feet in span and her body was a huge, armoured hulk of bristles, but beside Alkhor she looked no bigger than a bluebottle.
She was only thirty feet away when Alkhor noticed her.
One of the cyclopean tallymen emptied a jar of spores into the daemon’s chest cavity and triggered another violent judder. The unwitting daemon turned around and was about to head back to the forest when Alkhor enveloped it in vomit.
A column of blazing yellow liquid spewed from Alkhor’s mouth, flying with such violence that his chins trembled and clapped against each other, applauding the display.
The torrent was brief – no more than a few seconds – but powerful enough to do its job. As the fly queen whirred higher, attempting to dodge the jet of liquid, she saw it hit an invisible barrier, several feet away from Alkhor’s wobbling face. For a brief moment it splashed across the air, as though hitting a pane of glass, then it broke through, creating a tall, black gash, hanging in the air above the garden.
The fly queen circled and spiralled, unsure what to make of this new wonder. It was a hole in nothing – a tear in the sky – and, as she flew closer, she saw that there was something moving on the other side.
There was a wet popping sound as the hole grew wider and began spraying shapes into the garden.
The fly queen looped out of the way as hundreds of daemons began pouring from the hole and slapping down onto the ground – a violent hail of blubber and horns.
Alkhor laughed as he witnessed the scale of his success. The pressure of the daemons was forcing the tear in reality to widen and strain. As it did so the area of garden nearby began to undulate, like a reflection seen in rippling water.
‘My children!’ he gurgled, opening his arms as hundreds of daemons bounced off his face. Heaving his massive bulk upright, Alkhor grasped the two sides of his gaping chest and slammed them together, so that he could start dancing around with them.
‘Lead them to victory, my queen!’ he cried, looking around the garden. He caught sight of the fly queen and waved her over. ‘Our children have arrived in the nick of time. The tree fairies are coming to drive us out, Ordaana. They will not…’ his words broke down into giggles as the influx of daemons pounded against his face with even more force, filling his gaping mouth with wriggling, pallid monsters. ‘They will not expect to find so many new friends,’ he managed to say eventually. ‘You must hurry to greet them while I complete my work. He’s almost here, my queen.’ Alkhor’s eyes widened as he realised the truth of his own words. ‘I can feel Him forming in my flesh, Ordaana. Just a few more specimens and He will arrive. Now that the portal is open, He’s free to become part of this realm.’ Alkhor’s voice trembled. ‘Soon, I will become Him. Soon, I will be a god. A god that walks the earth.’
The fly queen tried to reply, but all that emerged was a lisping, incoherent hiss.
Alkhor nodded, understanding her just the same. ‘The king and queen are yours, Ordaana. None shall have the pleasure of killing them but you. That was my promise.’ Then he turned back to the wound he had made in the air and began using his huge, rusty sword as a lever, wedging it in the gap and trying to widen it. Another glut of daemons poured out as he jammed the sword deeper and the ground beneath Alkhor’s feet began to bubble and change.
The fly queen felt a rush of joy. She could no longer recall what slight had driven her to despise Ariel and Orion with such passion, but the thought of their deaths shone through all the filth and filled her with purpose. The daemon’s dreams of godhood sounded like lunacy to her, but what did it matter if she could take Ariel’s head from her lying shoulders? She let out a long, screeching cry and the daemons all flooded in her direction. A host of plague-bearing tallymen, bandy-legged and cyclopean, led the charge, waving rusted swords and blowing discordant, three-stemmed horns. Scrambling between the larger daemons’ legs came the blubbery, little replicas of Alkhor, giggling, scampering and cartwheeling with pleasure. Larger, shapeless monsters bounded dog-like through the crowd, slobbering and panting and powering towards her on muscled, tentacle-legs. Finally, entering the garden from every direction came vast squadrons of the daemon-flies, each as big as she was and carrying spear-wielding, cyclopean riders.
The army was vast, but as the fly queen led them north towards the border of the garden, it grew even larger, bolstered by the torrent of daemons spraying from the hole Alkhor had created. The numbers were beyond counting – in the thousands, certainly, but with every second that passed the hole in the sky added hundreds more.
The army waddled, giggled and slithered north with the fly queen at its head. The stomach garden was surrounded on all sides by towering, impenetrable walls of fungus, but at its northern-most point there was a blubber-lined valley – a giant oesophagus, that allowed Alkhor’s children access to his noisome playground. The blubbery passage had formed on the site of a narrow valley called Còlgarran Pass and the name swam up from the depths of the fly queen’s mind, giving her an odd chill of recognition.
The rocky walls of the valley were no longer visible, subsumed by a rippling forest of mauve, coral-like fingers, but its original shape was still recognisable – a deep cleft through the landscape, half a mile wide at its northern entrance and no more than fifty feet across as it entered the garden. Alkhor had grown a sentinel to guard its entrance: a gelatinous, indigo tower of fungus. Ordaana felt a distant sense of awe as she studied the repulsive thing: a slumped column of greasy lobes, reaching high up into the clouds, like a glistening blue stalagmite. The tower was adorned by sinister, slow-moving tentacles that drifted around it, floating like weeds in silt. The tentacles were studded with glistening white barbs and the gelatinous tower was peppered with hundreds of murder holes, each one revealing the grinning face of a tallyman, watching over the entrance to the valley.
Alkhor had summoned the watchtower from the ground weeks ago but, until now, its tentacles had stood idle, waiting for a chance to deploy their venomous embrace. As the fly queen led her daemon host north up the Còlgarran Pass, she saw that the watchtower would soon have its first taste of asrai blood. It was nearly dawn and, as the sunlight tried to break through the tropical haze, it silhouetted a line of figures emerging from the trees.
Who has reached us first? wondered the fly queen, as her thoughts filled with images of raw, bloody meat.
The sun rose higher and pierced the miasma, revealing the first glimpse of the enemy.
The fly queen laughed in disbelief as she saw how pitiful the attackers looked. It was a line of asrai spearmen, a few hundred at most, wearing suits of dark, leather armour and moving in phalanxes, their spears lowered.
The crowds of daemons below her heard her laughter and echoed it. Thousands of malformed throats howled in derision at the approaching army and many of the tiny daemons collapsed to the ground, rocked by hysterics.
The fly queen realised that this pathetic force was all that remained of the forest’s defences. She waved her armoured forelegs and the daemon army flooded out to meet them
.
The daemons quickly filled the wasteland surrounding the entrance to the valley. The land sloped up towards the oncoming spearmen, but the fly queen did not see that being a problem when the numbers were so heavily weighted in her favour. Their eagerness to greet the enemy gave the daemons a burst of speed that saw the entire host spew out from the valley in less than an hour. Then they paused on the crest of the hill, glancing back at their queen.
She howled and thrashed her wings, triggering a chorus of trumpet blasts from the plague-bearing heralds below. The daemons charged.
Or, rather, they lurched, capered and gambolled. It was a wild, mind-shattering sight, but the asrai spearmen continued their implacable march, their stern, pale faces becoming visible as they advanced and their banners hanging limply in the humid air. Even the tattered shreds of the fly queen’s mind were enough to know that this was not a usual tactic for the asrai. To advance slowly, across open ground, was their least favoured form of attack. They would prefer to slip unexpected from the trees. She laughed again, considering that there were no trees. For miles around Alkhor’s garden, there was only a circle of desolation. He had channelled so much energy into filling his garden with life that it had drained the surrounding area, leaving nothing but a carpet of lime-green mushrooms.
The fly queen’s laughter faltered as she saw more figures emerging with the dawn. The spearmen were just the vanguard, she realised, as other shapes moved into view. Behind the spearmen was a larger force of footsoldiers, moving just as slowly. These soldiers also carried spears and glaives and wore plates of leather armour, but there were far more of them – nearly a thousand, she reckoned. She looked at the tide of mutation rushing toward them. There were at least ten daemons for every spearman and more would be arriving all the time as Alkhor widened the portal.
Bile dripped from her mandibles as she fixed her hungry gaze on a figure flying back and forth over the enemy lines. It was a nobleman, mounted on a great hawk and wearing an elaborate spined helmet. His brow was low and heavy and his face was a fierce spiral of ritual scars, but the fly queen was not afraid. She could already imagine the sensation of his bones dissolving in her abdomen. She gave a final hissing screech and swooped down to attack.
The noble rose up in his saddle when he saw the fly queen drop from the clouds of smog. He raised a bow and shot an arrow, howling a curse as his mount carried him up to meet her.
The fly queen and her rancid host crashed into the asrai lines.
Seconds before impact, the spearmen stopped advancing, dug their heels in and raised a thicket of spears.
There was an explosion of daemon flesh as the asrai lines held.
The fly queen smashed the nobleman from his hawk and they both slammed into the crush of bodies, tumbling back through the front lines.
The nobleman leapt to his feet and hacked down at the fly queen’s wings with a spear.
The blade bit home, cutting deep into the black carapace. As it did so, green shoots shot up from the ground and pounded into the fly queen, attempting to latch onto her wings.
The fly queen thrashed her huge bulk, sending spearmen flying in several directions as she fell on the nobleman.
Her mandibles locked around her opponent’s head and closed with a satisfying crack.
Blows rained down on the fly queen as she wrenched herself free from the tendrils and launched herself back into the air. To her rage, she saw that she had only succeeded in crushing the nobleman’s helmet. Her intended prey had rolled clear and was still alive, helped to his feet by the other asrai. The nobleman looked back at her with an infuriating, nonchalant expression. He was covered in the wounds of many battles and the golden torcs that he wore around his biceps were dented and misshapen, but he was utterly calm as his warhawk swooped down and bore him up for another attack.
As the nobleman was carried into the air, preparing to continue the duel, the fly queen screeched in rage. This scarred brute was one of the Mage Queen’s servants. She could smell Ariel’s deceit pouring from his skin. She prepared to attack, then paused, distracted by a booming sound that was so loud it rang out over the din of the battle. She thought she could hear the low rumble of thunder and flew higher to investigate.
Her rage grew as she saw that the sound came, not from the heavens, but from hundreds of horses, charging towards the rearguard of her army from the west. She had been lured into a trap. The nobleman and his footsoldiers were bait, sent to drag the daemons from the safety of the narrow valley. As the fly queen flew higher she saw hundreds of asrai riders crash into her army from behind, ploughing through them with spears lowered and arrows flying, tearing a deep gash into the daemonic horde.
The riders trailed banners from several of the forest’s realms and they were moving at such speed that the tallymen collapsed under the charge, unable to lay their diseased blades on their attackers.
Hundreds of daemons fell, torn apart by spears, swords and hooves and their attack faltered. As the daemons realised they were being attacked from two sides they floundered and lurched in different directions, crashing into each other in the confusion.
The nobleman saw his chance and waved the spearmen forwards. He was flying thirty feet or so over their heads and the whole army saw his signal. The phalanxes charged with a defiant roar, smashing deep into the daemons’ vanguard as the cavalry ploughed into their flanks.
The fly queen panicked, thinking that, yet again, her lack of skill might delay Alkhor’s victory. She screamed furiously at the daemons. Then she swooped low and wrenched one of them apart with her claws, waving its broken limbs at the others as a warning.
The sight of the enraged fly queen was so terrifying that it drove the daemons to launch a counter-attack.
As the daemons formed themselves back into ranks, the riders’ momentum slowed. The deeper they advanced into the daemon horde, the harder they found it to move. The scene descended into a chaotic rout and the fly queen saw that neither side held the advantage.
The fighting grew frantic and confusing and the fly queen was consumed by bloodlust. What had seemed to be a simple victory was already becoming a desperate, bloody scramble for survival. She plunged back down into the press of bodies, thrashing her wings, lashing about herself with barbed limbs and searching for the nobleman who had defied her.
For a while she was too busy killing to find her enemy, then something shimmered in her peripheral vision and she felt the noble’s spear plunge into her abdomen.
The fly queen rounded on her attacker, raising her barbed limbs and towering over the asrai that surrounded her.
The noble was still calm as he drew his bow and loosed several arrows at her.
The fly queen batted them aside and lunged at him, drooling blood as she prepared to feed.
Chapter Nineteen
Alkhor fell backwards across the ground. Daemons popped, bursting beneath his weight and spraying him with pus. ‘It tickles,’ he cried in good-humoured tones. ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it!’ He lashed out with his quivering arms, squashing several more daemons. ‘I don’t have time for these games, my beloved children! I have to work!’
He stood up, wiped blood and bile from his gut and turned towards his creation. ‘Our grandfather is starting to arrive.’
The hole in the sky was now taller than he was. Since the departure of Ordaana, he had been hacking and stabbing at it with his sword. By leaning all his weight into each sword strike, he had made steady progress in widening the hole.
His grandfather’s garden was now clearly visible through the gap – a place of such wonderful fecundity and colour that it made Alkhor realise how much more work he had to do on his own little plot. To his delight though, some of the bizarre flora was already starting to leak through the hole, along with the crowds of daemons. It would not be long now. Soon, his grandfather would be able to take hold – spreading His garden into the heart of the forest. And then He would emerge, through Alkhor’s willing flesh and claim dominion over the
world. Alkhor was about to give Him a gift that would surpass anything he had received before: a foothold in the physical realm. The two worlds would become one and the Lord of Decay would be free to roam wherever he pleased, without constraint, spreading His gifts across the entire world. Through Alkhor, Nurgle would do what none of the lesser gods had managed to achieve. He would seize this world for his own. The Pleasure God, the Blood God and the Changer of Ways would all be forced to kneel before the pestilent majesty of the Great Corrupter.
Alkhor thought he might cry. Powerful emotions rocked his mountainous frame: pride at what he had achieved, devotion to his grandfather and bottomless love for the manifold forms of life he was about to spread across the world. He paused to take in the incredible sight – the pus-drenched realm of the Plague Lord, seeping into the equally deranged mortal domain. He could hold back his emotion no longer and a tear formed beneath one of his cherry-red eyes. He thought of all that had happened to him. He pictured himself as he was before the Plague Father adopted him – a poor, misunderstood young doktor, arrested for his groundbreaking work and left to rot in a lightless dungeon. How long ago that seemed now. How long since he began his journey by striking up a conversation with the boil that appeared in his armpit. How could he have foreseen this? How could he have known that he was destined to bestow this wonderful cornucopia on the world? He thought proudly of Ordaana and shed another tear. She barely knew the glorious future he had shared with her.