by Rob Sanders
Dagobert shook his head and looked down. As he did he felt the razor tip of a bone sword dimple his double-chin. One of the Chaos knights was beside him, arm and weapon outstretched.
‘The weapon of a coward,’ Archaon said, ‘in the hands of a man who is anything but. Do not fear me, Father.’
‘Fear you?’
‘I mean you no harm,’ Archaon told him. ‘You. Gorst. The girl. This horse. You’re the only kindly souls I know in the entire world.’
‘I don’t fear you,’ Dagobert said. ‘I fear what you will become.’
‘What I have already become,’ Archaon said. ‘Destiny has made its play. Fate has chosen a side. Now it’s my turn. The gods of light and darkness have created this doom between them. Well, they will get more than they bargained for with my miserable soul. If I am to be end to all then all will end. Man and god will fear me for the annihilation I will bring. The rise and fall of the sun, the ever-lengthening horizon – wretched covenants with deathless damnation. Nothing will stop me. Do you hear?’
‘I’m trying to save you, child,’ Dagobert said desperately.
‘And I you, Father,’ Archaon said. ‘Lutzenschlager and his Sigmarites are out in force. They will scour their miserable Empire for me and any associated with me. They will capture you. They will torture you. They will kill you. I would save you from that. For the kindnesses you have done me, priest.’
‘You would have me come with you?’ Dagobert said incredulously. ‘Betray my god? An entire lifetime’s worth of prayer and devotion?’
‘Your god is liar,’ Archaon hissed. ‘A trader in souls who would betray those most in love with him. Those who, for him, have fought the hardest.’
‘I cannot follow you into damnation.’
‘Then come to save my soul, Dagobert,’ Archaon said, lightening a little. ‘I don’t care for your reason. I care that you are by my side. With me or not, I would have the counsel of a man of the world – a wise man – in these tumultuous times.’
‘So that we may all become the playthings of Dark Powers?’
‘Dagobert,’ Archaon said. ‘We have a book of tomorrows and the means to translate and interpret its riddles. I mean not to be the pawn of the infernal powers any more than your pig of a God-King. Help me forge my own path – and save your life into the bargain.’
The tip of the bone sword tapped the priest on the chin. ‘You’ll have to excuse them,’ Archaon said. ‘They seem tediously intent on my continued existence.’
After a moment’s reflection, the priest dropped the pistol to the stable floor with a thud. Archaon nodded. The tip of the bone sword drifted from the priest’s chins.
‘Just as well,’ Archaon said. ‘Wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself. Balls, barrels, black powder. I don’t trust them. The thing is just as likely to blow up in your hand as put its shot through me.’
But Dagobert couldn’t find it in himself to derive any humour from the situation. He turned and the winged Chaos knight stood to one side. As he walked away, the lines of his face cutting deep with the gravest concern, Archaon stopped him at the stable door.
‘Father.’
Dagobert looked down to one side at the straw on the floor in grim acknowledgement. ‘Pack up the wagon with the tools and provisions for a considerable journey,’ Archaon said. ‘If you please. Have the girl and Gorst, if you can find him, assist you. Take anything from the manor house for your comfort. The rest will be put to the flame. Do you understand?’
Hieronymous Dagobert did understand. He understood that he was damning himself to Ruinous confederacy. He understood that he was doing it for the love he still bore both the man and the boy he had known.
‘I understand,’ the priest said, and left the stable.
And so Archaon went north. North through the dark woods of Hochland. Across the Middle Mountains, where the Hammerfall still smoked among the peaks, and through the wilds of Ostland and the Forest of Shadows. Riding at the head of the wagon, the white bonnet of which soon became a blood-splattered brown, Archaon watched the world of men unfold before him. His good eye took it all in. The life of the place was intoxicating. He had never really appreciated it before. The trees. The buzzing insects. The birds calling through the canopy. The people, everywhere, a plague on the land – living out their selfish existence in ignorance and obedience to lesser gods. Archaon had never appreciated the complex vitality of the world until he had wanted to destroy it. Though his ruined socket was covered by a leather eye-patch, the dark templar could still see. He saw ash. He saw smoke. He saw bodies burning beneath benighted skies. He saw the doom of the north clawing its way south and he the herald of its annihilation.
Behind him the wagon was flanked by four of his winged warriors on horseback. Archaon’s Swords, as he came to call them, were five in number. There was little to tell the silent warriors apart and they were not much interested in conversation, so it was difficult for Archaon to set them apart in terms of character: they didn’t seem to have any. Archaon let his imagination fill in the details, assuming that at some time – perhaps long before they were lost to Chaos, they had been men with hopes, dreams and fears, like everyone else. In the end, the dark templar simply took Terminus and cut numerals into the black of their pauldrons, naming the warrior who seemed to shadow him most closely ‘Eins’. The other Swords became ‘Zwei’ and ‘Drei’ – who seemed to Archaon closer than the others, and Archaon fancied them brothers in a former existence. ‘Vier’ and ‘Fünf’ appeared to hold each other at a distance and the templar imagined that perhaps they harboured some secret dislike for one another, in the days before their dreadful damnation.
Archaon had two Swords travel on either side of the wagon at an ambling gait, while Eins drifted at the rear to ensure no one was following them. Gorst was always following them, but Archaon had informed the Swords that the flagellant wasn’t a threat, and on occasion even had his uses.
Father Dagobert, sullen and silent since leaving the inferno of the Kastner estates, thought of the Swords as a prisoner escort. He couldn’t so much as pass water in the trees without one of their number loitering nearby. There was little need for such precautions. He had decided to stay with Archaon – and as the warrior had put it, attempt to ‘Save his soul’.
The girl Giselle had been another case entirely. The sister had no relationship with Archaon. She had not known him… before. She owed him her life, and that was about it. Being not especially bright, for Giselle the choice was simple. Travel with Archaon and Dagobert north into the terrifying unknown and damnation, or remain in the Empire. With the simple honesty of a girl innocent in the ways of the world, she had confessed to Dagobert that she intended to quietly leave the party and present herself to a temple or convent. It was not Archaon or his Swords that prevented the sister from leaving. Echoing Archaon’s own words, Father Dagobert found himself warning her to stay. He told her that she would be turned over to the Grand Theogonist’s men by any of Sigmar’s servants. That she would be tortured for what she knew, imprisoned and executed as a heretic. He told her that he was protecting her – as Archaon had done Dagobert.
In reality, she became Dagobert’s prisoner – the priest watching her as the Swords watched him. In truth, Dagobert saw his salvation in her. The girl was so stubborn and her simple faith so enduring that Dagobert found the fight in her something of an inspiration. In the insanity of such dark times, he found her to be a compass to guide him back to the light. He could trust in her unbreakable will. In order to save Archaon’s soul, he needed to preserve his own: which meant he needed Sister Dantziger. This meant that on several occasions he was forced to betray her confidences. Sometimes the girl would just slip away. On other occasions, she simply ran for her life, appealing to those they encountered on the dismal roads of the Empire for assistance. Dagobert brought her back. Sometimes forcefully. When she slipped into the
hamlet of Smallhof, begging the villagers to be hidden, the priest had been forced to tell Archaon, for their own safety, as well as the girl’s. Archaon set his Swords on the hamlet, with instructions to find her. The search soon descended into a bloodbath, with Archaon and Dagobert looking on, as the Swords tore the village apart searching for the girl. They slaughtered all who would hide her: all who would inform on them and send word to the soldiers, templars and witch hunters on their tail. After Smallhof, Archaon had Father Dagobert chain one of the sister’s wrists to the driver seat of the wagon. It was better than breaking her leg, which had been Archaon’s other suggestion.
As time went on, the forests of the Empire gave way to the grim cold of Kislev. The sun was lower in the sickly sky, its light struggling to reach through the northern haze. The dreadful days and nightmares in between seemed to stretch into weeks uncounted and months that were marked by whether and how hard the snows came. The companies of soldiers and lone Sigmarite knights that had hunted them through the Imperial provinces were a mercifully rare experience in the lands of the Gospodar. Step by step, the warband’s progress became less of an escape and more of a dark pilgrimage. They were no longer hunted, it seemed – bar the occasional and wretched attempt of lone witch hunters to bring them to Sigmar’s justice. The dawn, feeble as it was, began to promise more to the warband than just an opportunity to put more distance between them and their persecutors.
The Kislevites themselves were as welcoming as their ice-threaded hovels. They were a backward and superstitious people, bleak and hard as iron. Unlike villagers in the Empire, they didn’t run for their homes or send for their lord or baron at the sight of Archaon and his warband. They did nothing but work their farmsteads and watch with ghoulish, hollow expressions as another madman rode north to his destiny. Their only luxury seemed to be in the greasy extravagance of their facial hair and the impregnation of their womenfolk, who went about their backbreaking chores with swollen bellies and small armies of bedraggled urchins. Some said it was the cold that drove Kislevite men to their beds, since they were not known to be especially accomplished lovers. Some said that they spent much of their time this way with their wives out of necessity. It was part of their culture. To be ready – for the next incursion, the next invasion, the next war against Chaos. As Archaon rode along frost-shattered roads and through the smoky homesteads of the northern division he understood that the wastrels clinging to their mothers’ dirty skirts were simply the hardened savages and horsemen he would have to fight on his way back through Kislev on his return to the Empire. The idea amused Archaon and on one occasion he even drank to Kislevite courage, toasting the northerners with their own potato swill, in an all but empty watering hole.
The crows gave way to vultures; the spice on the air to the cold, copper tang of old blood. The warband started to lose the little light they had across the Troll Country. There were no friendly faces to be found there. Even Ungol nomads and archers on horseback, despatched by the Tsarina to cull the beasts of the borderlands, were open in their hostility. On the frost-bitten plains and amongst the howling hills, Archaon encountered all manner of winter savagery. Prides of white sabretusks that slashed the wagon bonnet and leapt at Archaon in the saddle. Hordes of gnoblar cannibals, driven insensible with hunger and feasting on each other as well as themselves. Herds of northern rhinox and great mammoths, stampeding across the icy plain: hormone-fuelled and aggressive, charging anything in sight. Savage tribes of albino orcs, mounted on blind boars of war, observing the warband’s passing from a distance. A pack of direwolves, struck down by some monstrous and unnatural mange, howling their torment through the blackened stakes of a dead forest. All manner of blood-crazed creatures, eking out an existence on the shadowy frontier of the Chaos realm. Monsters that would have long died out, were it not for the game trails leading north out of the Tsarina’s lands, carrying lone maniacs and defectors. Men of death and destiny.
The savage lands tested Archaon and his Swords – more than their escape from the Empire or the harsh indifference of the Gospodars. Beyond the torchings of the God-King’s way temples en route and the bloodshed necessary to secure passage, the warband had tasted little of the murder required to honour new and Dark Gods. Crossing the borderlands, Archaon had traded a magnificent bear skin for the life of the Ungol chieftain that wore it. With the cloak, Archaon received the blessing of the Ursun, father of the Bears and patron god of Kislev, from the nomad chief. It could have been custom, fearful courtesy or even an insult. Archaon didn’t know. He did know that blessings from any power other than the dark, primordial entities he now served scorched his soul and within moments the Chaos warrior had reneged upon his deal and ended the chieftain as an offering to the Star of Universal Ruin. With the shaggy hide about his shoulders, keeping the worst of the chill from his bones, Archaon wiped the innocent blood of the Ungol from the searing blade of Terminus and bade his Swords slaughter the Ursun-worshipping nomads for the same purpose.
In the Troll Country the warband made scabbards of the low beasts – things of horn and fang, some that walked on four legs and some that walked on two. Though the monstrosities had all the advantage of number and brute nature, they had only been lightly bathed in the darkness of the north. Though hard won, the warband’s victories were ones of survival against packs and predators, and as such, were squalid offerings to the dread pantheon. Oddly for a place with such a name, the warband never encountered such a thing as a troll.
All through their journey, with the ancient forests of the Empire behind them and the cruel Kislevite winter a recent memory, Dagobert continued his translations. Having the miserable Giselle take the wagon’s reins and with the wind and the beast-things howling through the tears in the bonnet, Dagobert tried to unlock the secrets of their destination and destiny. Like everything The Liber Caelestior had delivered, all but the most significant of details were vague and open to interpretation. Deliberately so, the priest thought. Necrodomo the Insane had a dark gift, but he was no less a charlatan than other prophets of his ilk. Sometimes, Necrodomo hedged his bets. For such a prognosticator the unfolding moments in an hour, a day, a year or a lifetime were like drops of water in a river, flowing by. Sometimes the waters were crystal clear. At other times, the waters were white with the violent churning of their passage or murky with the silty burden of past meanderings.
Archaon would routinely interrogate the priest as to the tome and its secrets. Whereas before, Dagobert’s interest ran to Archaon’s salvation and opportunities the volume might provide. Now, reading Necrodomo’s revelations had become a duty. As the warband’s steeds climbed and the wagon struggled through the heavy snow of Black Blood Pass, Dagobert read of the northmen’s ambush. The avalanche of ice and rock that tumbled down before the warband, blocking its path and the riders that rode up behind them. The greasy marauders of Edric Ulfensbane seated on their shaggy mounts, cutting silhouettes of horn, fur and axe into the blinding glare of the Worlds Edge Mountains. The northman was known as Red Edric in the Jottenheim and it was said that he and his Norscans charged a heavy toll for those travelling the Pass. One traveller – one life. The horsemeat of accompanying steeds was considered an added bonus for a job well done – and Red Edric’s men had grown fat on a diet of horsemeat and death.
Archaon and his Swords were outnumbered four to one by the marauders, but it made little difference. Ulfensbane’s murderers were no match for the dark templar and his knights of Chaos. Archaon decorated the snow with their lopped limbs and livid gushings. With their winter steeds slain and axe-brothers butchered, the last of the northmen abandoned their leader to the Chaos warriors, choosing to leap from the crag upon which Archaon had cornered them. Taking their chances with gravity, rather than the certainty of a horrible and immediate death at Archaon’s hand, the northmen might have made the terrible drop if the snows below had been deep enough. They weren’t, and the marauders became bloody smears on the rock and ice of the slo
pe below. Edric Ulfensbane wouldn’t take such a cowardly course and presented his icicle-encrusted axes to Archaon. Sliding the steaming blade of Terminus in the drift, the Chaos warrior crunched along the crag towards him. Reading the northman like a hunter might the tracks of a wild animal, Archaon reared back and to the side, out of reach of Red Edric’s wild and murderous swings.
‘Drown me in snow, would you northman?’ Archaon seethed, before ducking beneath the arc of the Norscan’s weapons and grabbing him by his furs. Throwing him down into the drift, Archaon proceeded to bury the man alive, drowning him as he might in a stream or river. Red Edric’s arms and legs flailed as he choked on the snow – held there in Archaon’s feverish grip. Leaving the northman’s body to freeze, Archaon recovered Terminus and trudged past Dagobert and Giselle, who had watched from the wagon.
‘That wretched book earned the trouble of its keeping today,’ Archaon told him, pointing his crusader blade back up at the Pass blocked with a small sea of settling snow. Dagobert nodded, shivering to think what it might have been like for them buried in the avalanche. ‘Keep reading,’ Archaon said. ‘I wish to know more of the misfortunes that are to befall us… before they actually do, of course.’
‘It doesn’t work like that,’ Dagobert said, a little harshly. Archaon turned on the priest. Dagobert’s frost-rosy cheeks paled, while Giselle – chained to the wagon – wouldn’t even look at the Chaos warrior. ‘I mean, my lord,’ Dagobert said, ‘that much of the translation is educated guesswork and interpretation.’
‘Then guess well, priest,’ Archaon told him, walking on through the snow, ‘lest we all die for the sake of secrets already in our possession.’ Calling through the crystal cold air, Archaon ordered Zwei and Drei to find them an alternative route through the Pass. On the way back down the mountainside, the warband and wagon encountered a frost-bitten Gorst, the flagellant, weighed down with his chains, only just having caught up to them.