Archaon: Everchosen

by Rob Sanders

  The bolt stabbed up through the muscle of the bull’s chest. The close range had buried the bolt right up to its feathered flight. The beastman snorted with sudden surprise. Its bludgeoning stone crashed to the ground, bouncing off the toppled obelisk from which it came. The bull staggered back across the slaughter of the circle. Gasping. Snorting. Moaning like a herd of frightened cattle.

  Kastner pushed himself to his knees. His arms were shaking. His head felt light and the wound in his side burned with every excruciating movement. He got unsteadily to his feet, his plate rattling with exhaustion. Putting one foot in front of the other, the knight walked about the stone circle and recovered Terminus from where it lay, splattered with both mud and blood before the base of a rough obelisk. The sword felt heavy in his hands and the knight needed both to drag the blade across the stone circle. The bull had made it to the gore-dripping altar, bent over double, its great chest heaving with the difficulty of breathing.

  With more effort than he could bear, Kastner heaved Terminus above his head, roaring his side-splitting agony. The greatsword crashed down on the altar surface, sending a crack through the ancient stone. The bull had pushed itself away through the slick blood on its surface and crashed down beside its shaman at the foot of the herdstone. It groaned, one hoofed slab of a leg shaking uncontrollably. It spread the fingers of one huge hand across its chest and around the bolt through its thunderous heart. Its other arm waved the Sigmarite knight away in silent pleading. With difficulty, Kastner moved around the broken altar and swayed above the bull in his own torment. The templar shook his head as clouds of the beastman’s hot breath enveloped them both. The herdstone ached with the unnatural energies of its making and construction. Its wyrdstone gleamed like shadow, charged with the offering of so many souls slaughtered in the circle before it. The bull nestled its mighty horned skull against it, like an infant at its mother’s bosom. Still it thought its Ruinous patrons would deliver it.

  ‘No,’ Kastner said, his lips bloodied and bruised. The beast closed eyes wet with fear and frustration. Its arm came down in monstrous acceptance. Kastner lifted Terminus once more and brought the blade down on the creature’s thick skull with all the fury he could summon from his pain-wracked body. Blood sprayed the knight’s ruined armour as he hacked down through horn and bone. The blade came down again and again, its cleaving movements becoming wilder and wilder. Although the fire in his arms succumbed to the effort, the fire in his heart did not. He. Would. Kill. Them. All.

  The heavy blade went wide, missing the beastman’s demolished skull and clashing through the irregularity of the herdstone. The metal of the blade rang strangely against the material and Kastner felt a sudden agony burn through his mind like the tip of a fire-stoked poker. The hurt and surprise was such that the Knight of the Twin-Tailed Orb dropped Terminus in the gore of his ruined foe and stumbled at the altar, his gauntlet clasped across his right eye. A groan of delicate anguish escaped his lips. Blood, hot and thick, spilled through the metal digits and down his face. He tried to see but he could not. Blinking his left eye open through the blood and the pain he found that he could not do so with the right. His heart became a whisper. He roared his fears and fell to his armoured knees. All he could see with the right was the deep darkness of the world now gone. A throbbing woe. A feverish affliction. A white-hot absence. Doom in all its pure honesty.

  Snatching his gauntlet from his hand he traced the tip of a finger through the bloody socket and across the ruined eye. He felt the prick of an object within and the simultaneous agony of a pain the like of he which he had never experienced. It was like a crash of lightning through the mind, throwing everything within into the dread, darkness and disorder that followed. Kastner tried to think. To focus his way through the constant torment. Terminus must have struck a flinty shard from the wyrdstone and sent it like an arrow head into his eye. Clutching his other hand, the knight smashed the metal fist into the herdstone in frustration and anger. He had been stupid. Rash. Irrational. And he had paid for it. He had lost something that he couldn’t possibly get back. The realisation burned him.

  The templar remained before the stone for a while, kneeling in the end of his enemies. The shame of tears rolled quietly down one blood-speckled cheek. Gore steamed from the ground. The fire began to die. The raw redness of the dawn reached through the open sky.

  Kastner felt something nudge his arm. It was Oberon. The stallion pushed at him gently with its nose, as though unsure whether its master was dead or alive. The knight was so still. The steed was not the only one interested. Kastner looked up. The novice-sister was kneeling before him, her bound books in her lap, her lips parted as she stared at his eye. It was a botched mess. A spider-shaped puncture wound revealing the darkness within. Blood ran like tears from its ruination. The girl tore a strip of clean material from her chemise and proceeded to wrap it about Kastner’s head, covering his blind eye. She had been talking but Kastner hadn’t noticed.

  ‘So you’re a knight,’ the girl said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re a knight?’ she repeated. Her voice was annoyingly up-beat. Sing-song and provincial. She moved the pile of books closer, as though she were protecting them. Kastner grunted. From the sound of her voice, the templar found it difficult to believe that the girl had ever looked between the covers of one. ‘I’ve never seen a knight close up. There were some that visited the Reverend Mother, you know, with important persons and such…’

  ‘A knight is an important person,’ Kastner grizzled. He needed something to concentrate on other than the agony in his head. The girl didn’t seem to have noticed that Kastner had spoken. She rambled on.

  ‘The one I saw up closest, well he wore the same kind of armour as you. Different symbol, though. Some kind of animal, I think. One of the girls in the scullery said it was a griffon, whatever that is…’

  ‘You’re a sister?’ Kastner put to her.

  ‘Yes, well, no – I’m a novice,’ the girl admitted. ‘I work in the scullery…’

  ‘I got that,’ Kastner said. The blinding agony of his eye was making him short and sarcastic. ‘A Sigmarite?’

  ‘Why, yes, sieur,’ the girl said. ‘The Reverend Mother said that one day I’d make a very fine Sister of the Imperial Cross.’ Kastner had heard of the order. Like his own knightly order, the Sisters of the Imperial Cross answered ultimately to the Grand Theogonist in Altdorf. The order maintained priories and convents of dutiful sisters throughout the Empire and took as their symbol the Imperial cross – the same cross that adorned the pommel of Terminus. North, south, east and west – the Sisters of the Imperial Cross honoured Sigmar as their patron and took as their solemn duty the spiritual unity of the God-King’s Empire. ‘She gave me this…’ the girl told him. She pulled a silver hammer from her robes from where it was hanging on a chain.

  ‘Where’s your priory, girl?’ Kastner demanded, pushing himself to his feet. He wobbled and the novice went to steady him.

  ‘The Hammerfall,’ the girl told him. ‘In the Middle Mountains. Going on three years now.’

  Kastner turned and put his head to Oberon’s.

  ‘Good boy,’ the templar told him. Then to the novice, ‘Girl – get my sword and my steed.’

  ‘I have a name, you know,’ the girl scowled.

  Kastner nodded to himself. The girl really wasn’t bright. She clearly knew no better than to answer back to a knight. If Kastner had truly been of noble birth he might have had her answer for it. It was the same pluck he had seen in the cage, before the bull. Three years at the Hammerfall – and still a novice. Little wonder, given the mouth on her. Little wonder that she had found her services indispensable in the scullery, the knight reasoned. He turned.

  ‘What’s your name, girl?’

  ‘Giselle,’ she said.

  Kastner nodded slowly.

  ‘Girl,’ he said, ‘get my swor
d and steed.’

  ‘Don’t you have…?’ Giselle began.

  The knight turned his head, brought up his hand and slapped it down into his gauntlet.

  ‘All right, all right,’ the girl said, heaving Terminus out of the gore. ‘I just thought you’d have a squire for this sort of thing.’

  ‘I do,’ Kastner said, finding his footing and striding for the woods. As he passed Emil’s crossbow on the ground – the unknightly weapon that had saved the knight’s life – he scooped it up.

  With Terminus’s bloody blade over one shoulder, Oberon’s reins in the other hand and her pile of books under an arm, Giselle followed the templar out of the stone circle. Kastner stepped over the two warhounds Emil had shot. Even in the sliver of morning sun, the tracks were easy to follow. The pads of the savage dogs were everywhere. Emil’s body had been dragged through the trees. There were scraps of clothing. Blood. Even a couple of the boy’s fingers. There were also bodies. The bodies of emaciated hounds that the squire had managed to gut with his short sword or skinning knife. One by one the knight stepped over the carcasses of dead dogs. There were so many that it was hard to believe any of the herd’s hunting pack had been left alive. They hadn’t. Kastner found the last of the beasts, its tainted jaws still wrapped around Emil’s neck.

  Kastner trudged down into the bloody mire about the boy’s body, pulling the warhound off him. A crossbow bolt, planted there by hand, was buried in the dog’s stab-thrashed belly. Emil was a mess. Kastner felt cold emotion wash through his pain-wracked chest. Giselle came up behind with Oberon. She allowed the greatsword to fall and spear the ground and looked at the templar. The girl saw the grief – the responsibility – pass across Kastner’s face.

  ‘Is he alive?’ she asked. Kastner didn’t answer. ‘Saw a man fed to the Graf’s wolves once,’ the girl said absently. ‘He looked much like that.’

  The boy’s limbs were savaged, his ragged torso was a fang-punctured mess, his handsome features all but gone. Kastner brought his ear to the squire’s mauled chest. He paused. He held his own breath. Then he heard it. Faint – but there. The beating of the boy’s heart. He felt it. The slight rise and fall of his ribcage. Kastner closed his eye.

  ‘Hang on, Emil,’ the knight said.

  Hauling the moaning Emil out of the puddle of his own blood, Kastner laid him across Oberon’s saddle.

  ‘Get up,’ Kastner told the girl. She shook her head.

  ‘I don’t ride.’

  ‘You do today,’ Kastner said. ‘Give me your foot.’

  ‘I’ve never ridden a horse in my life, sir. My family couldn’t even afford a broken mule…’

  ‘Girl – I need you to do this,’ Kastner said. ‘He needs you to do this. There is a small temple in the foothills of the Middle Mountains, near the village of Esk.’

  ‘A temple to Sigmar?’ the girl asked, suddenly interested.

  ‘Yes, a way temple,’ the templar replied.

  ‘I need a temple,’ she said and Kastner found the girl’s delicate foot in his gauntlet. He pushed her up onto the mighty Oberon. There she uncertainly took the reins with Emil laid before her. She hugged her books to her.

  ‘There you will find a priest named Dagobert. Tell him Sieur Kastner sent you. He will recognise my steed and my squire. This is Oberon.’

  ‘This priest,’ Giselle asked, ‘he is a wise man?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kastner said. ‘He will know what to do.’

  ‘I mean,’ Giselle said, ‘is he a learned man? My Reverend Mother bade me promise, on the blood of the Founder, that I deliver these tomes to a learned man, a priest – a true servant of Sigmar.’

  ‘Your books be damned, girl,’ Kastner said, his agonies making him sharp and impatient. ‘A man’s life hangs in the balance.’

  ‘My lady was very specific,’ the girl said moodily. ‘A learned man, she said. A true servant of Sigmar.’

  ‘You’ll find none truer,’ Kastner said irritably. He pulled Oberon to a stop. He rubbed his blood-splattered forehead with his fingers. He needed the girl more than he cared to admit to her. His trials – his agonies – were making him discourteous. ‘You were taken by the beasts of the forest on your way to deliver these tomes?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘The Drakwald is not to be travelled lightly,’ Kastner told her. ‘Take my squire to Father Dagobert. He is a good man. A learned man. He will see to your tomes and answer any questions your Reverend Mother has. But please, take my man to him first.’

  ‘My Lady seeks no answers from the books, sir,’ Giselle said. ‘She said take them. Take them far from the Hammerfall. To safety.’

  Kastner frowned, but he did not have time for further questions. He handed her Emil’s crossbow. ‘If any bar your path, you tell them you are on the temple’s business and put this in their face. They will think twice – I assure you.’

  Giselle took the weapon.

  ‘How might I find this temple?’

  ‘Oberon knows the way,’ Kastner told her.

  ‘You would entrust this man’s life to a horse?’

  ‘No, I entrust him to you,’ the templar told her. ‘Gorst!’ Kastner called to the forest. ‘Gorst – get yourself out here, you mangy beggar.’

  Giselle looked about. The fingertips of red morning radiance probed the dank forest. Then she saw him, emerging like a skittish animal from behind a tree. A wretched figure. A flagellant draped in chains – his head trapped within a small cage. Giselle’s lip curled with obvious disgust. ‘Girl, meet Gorst. Gorst – I want you to lead Oberon to Father Dagobert. You remember the temple at Esk?’

  The flagellant nodded slowly. ‘Gorst – the God-King asks this of you. Do you understand? You will not fail him. You will not fail me.’ The flagellant nodded. Kastner slapped Oberon’s hindquarters, prompting the stallion on. As the horse reached Gorst, the flagellant broke into a run, leading it into the forest at a trot. As Emil moaned at the movement and Giselle rolled in the saddle, the novice turned back to look at Kastner.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ the girl called over her shoulder.

  ‘The God-King’s work,’ Kastner told her. ‘There is stone to smash and bodies to burn. I shall ensure that this dark path leads nowhere. The Empire is no place for the children of Chaos. The next warherd to pass through here will know that.’

  As the Knight of the Twin-Tailed Orb became lost to her in the halo of morning sun breaking through the trees, Giselle nodded and turned back to her path. She thought on the slaughter of the stone circle. ‘I think they will,’ she said to herself.

  CHAPTER V

  ‘Why did chance its steps betray,

  Far from friend and home –

  On trails left by the hands of fate

  Where only shadows roam.’

  – The Brothers Ziegler

  The Drakwald

  Hochland

  Sonstill, IC 2420

  Diederick Kastner was lost.

  North had not taken him north. It had taken him to another place. Somewhere the sun rarely shone – and when it did, it bled across the sky like a wound, keeping impossible consort with the moons. Diederick wandered, his mindless steps and stumbles plunging him through forest he had never known. He dragged Terminus behind him in one trembling, white fist. The tip of the sword’s broad blade left a furrow behind the templar, cutting through the tangle of the forest earth.

  Kastner’s battered armour felt like a fireplace, reflecting the feverish heat of his body inwards. Droplets fell from his brow and cheeks, pitter-patting against his breastplate. He moaned his exhaustion, madness dripping from his lips like Gorst or the madmen he’d seen in hospice cages. He tried to stem its flow but even the attempt to do so became a senseless rant.

  Day and night danced about him, like lovers at a fête, swinging each other aroun
d – each revolution getting faster and faster. The sensation was sickening. The land moved beneath his feet and his stomach shifted, causing the knight to heave and vomit down the trunks of trees. He tumbled. He fell – his plate clattering like a tray of tankards to a tavern floor. His sweat dropped to the black forest earth. Buds on the trees erupted and buried the knight in blossom. Leaves glowed glorious green before bronzing, withering and raining down to the ground about him. Frost crept both through the naked woodland and the templar, harbinger of snowfall which dusted everything a dirty white. Within moments it was gone, leaving puddles in its wake that were guzzled by the thirsty earth and once again the twigs and branches of the canopy were dotted with shoots of green.

  Kastner crawled. He pushed himself from tree to trunk. He stabbed the toe of his boots into the dirt for purchase, like the climber of a slope or mountain. Roots slithered about his footfalls while foliage seemed to reach out for him. Insects stung, bit and ate the templar alive. Birds and bats flew at him. Forest vermin raced before his unsteady feet. All were blurred and indistinct. Afterthoughts of their own noxious existence.

  A snake shot out and snapped at his foot. Kastner blundered back into a tree, disturbing an owl which flapped its great wings at him. His next footfall wasn’t there and neither was the one after that. The knight tumbled. He fell for what seemed like an eternity before hitting the ground. It was a steep slope, littered with logs and boulders pushing up out of the ground. Kastner hit one before bouncing and falling against another. Some were plate-scuffing glances while others knocked him briefly from what little sense he had left. Pieces of plate were torn from his suit and the sword Terminus was lost to him.

  A short plummet later and the templar felt his body snap straight through the rotten branches of a dead pine. While his mind struggled with the impossibility of what he was experiencing, his body cleaved straight through dry wood. His armour crumpled as he slammed stomach first into a thicker, more resilient branchlet lower down the giant. Something like a rib broke inside the knight but before he could claw himself to safety, the weight of his plate dragged him down through the living boughs and branches. They beat him and smashed him to near unconsciousness before depositing the knight in a twisted pile at the foot of its trunk, his face in the dirt.