by Rob Sanders
Archaon turned Oberon about and started to ride for the wagon.
‘Target the horses,’ the dark templar ordered, as the Swords followed on their own steeds. The Mung swept in again, like a shoal of fish darting in and out on its prey. Instead of turning aside their flint-edged blades of corruption, Archaon swung Terminus about him, turning the flaming blade in his wrist and cleaving down either side of him as the swarm of marauder steeds passed by either side. The horses were bedevilled and fast but they were also light and lacking in armour. The plain became a cacophony of equine shrieks as Archaon cut through legs, opened up throats and chopped entire heads from oncoming beasts. With the Swords of Chaos following suit with their own bone blades, the warband cut a bloody, screeching path through the stampede. Encouraged by the progress Archaon was making against their enemies, a herd of centigor rode down out of the mountains, spearing the unsaddled Mung with the long shafts of their wicked weapons.
With arrows shot awkwardly from the confusion on the ground glancing and splintering off his plate, Archaon leaned from one side of Oberon to the other, cleaving through the Mung mounts until finally he heard the sound of a chariot, rattling at tundra-tearing speed towards him, blades whooshing through the air as they spun with the turn of the wheel. The Hu-Mung-us drove on a pair of demented steeds, with archers either side of him, bows at the ready. Archaon roared Oberon into a charge. The Hu-Mung-us whipped at his horses with spiked reins and Archaon and the Mung chieftain blazed across the bloody field towards one another.
Holding Terminus out in front of him, Archaon angled the blade to turn aside the arrows flying from the chariot. With the blades swishing either side of it there was no way the Chaos warrior was going to get near enough to take the chieftain’s head off his shoulders. Hauling at the reins, Archaon brought Oberon to a sudden stop, using the momentum to slip down out of the saddle and onto the frozen earth. The field was littered with the bodies of horses. Slapping Oberon away, Archaon advanced on foot as the Mung chieftain’s chariot thundered down on him. The Hu-Mung-us clenched his teeth in rage as he drove the horses hauling the vehicle, who frothed at the mouth, directly at Archaon. Sliding down onto his side in the frozen mud, the dark templar slipped between the ferocious horses as their hooves pounded the earth either side of him. As Archaon heard the swooshing scythe pass, he struck out with his own blade, cleaving through the right wheel, smashing one side of it to pieces. Clambering awkwardly to his feet, Archaon watched as the broken wheel stabbed into the hard ground, anchoring one side of the chariot to the earth. The vehicle bucked and was thrown suddenly in confusion, the horses knocked senseless by the sudden stop and the archers thrown forward onto their hindquarters. Only the Hu-Mung-us seemed to have held himself in place, although the towering marauder was bleeding from a gash on his head.
‘Come on!’ Archaon bellowed, running at a slight crouch towards the ruined chariot, Terminus held out to one side in both of the Chaos warrior’s gauntlets. The huge chieftain slid a colossal scimitar, serrated with wyrdstone flints, from the vehicle before abandoning it and moving to meet the dark templar. Archaon readied himself for the impact of the giant’s mighty blows and the satisfaction of his crusader blade punching through the marauder’s body. It was a satisfaction that never came, however. A centigor bounded up behind the Hu-Mung-us and launched its spear, slamming it straight into the Mung chieftain’s back, straight down between the shoulder blades. The Hu-Mung-us took two more unsteady steps before letting his scimitar fall from his grasp and crash down onto his knees.
‘No!’ Archaon roared, denied of his victory. The centigor heard his furious challenge and a savage smile formed on its bestial face. Moments later it was gone. Along with the hybrid’s head, which had been sliced clean off its muscular torso by a bone sword wielded by Eins who had ridden up behind it to defend his master. As the blood steamed off the tundra and both horse tribe and beasts scattered, Archaon had to content himself with the howls of the dying and the unearthly shrieks of the rhinox spawn, put out of its misery by two more of the knight’s Swords.
When Archaon wasn’t slaying the subjects of the Ruinous Powers, he was actively attempting to recruit them. As Dagobert translated more of The Liber Caelestior and unlocked the secrets of Archaon’s further damnation, it became obvious that an excursion into the chill lands of Naggaroth to access the so-called Altar of Ultimate Darkness would be impossible without a full incursion from the Wastes as a distraction.
‘The Witch King’s mother is a sorceress of great power,’ Dagobert told his master.
‘The Witch King’s mother?’
‘Yes, my lord,’ Dagobert said. ‘The head of a coven of sorcerous hags. They will see us coming, master. They will know our dark intent.’
‘Then we shall hide it within an even darker intent,’ Archaon had told the priest. ‘We shall invade the kingdom of Naggaroth from the north at the head of an immense army.’
‘Where shall we find such a force, my lord?’ Dagobert said. ‘Warriors worthy of your leadership.’
‘Finding men willing to die for greatness is not the problem,’ Archaon told him. ‘Certainly not here in the Wastes, where nearly every marauder, warrior and fiend is determined to bring glory to his daemon patron in blood. Finding men to lead such slaves to darkness in my name… much more difficult.’
And it was.
On his journey north, Archaon had met men like him. The damned. The doomed. Men who thought themselves bound for legend. Men who thought they could catch the fleeting eye of an uncaring god. The dark templar had travelled their path, he had fought and he had killed such men. He became to such accursed hopefuls as much a part of the Wastes as the perversity of the land and the howling ruination that swept across it. He became the test the aspirant flotsam and jetsam that washed up along insanity’s coast had to pass. The yardstick of worthiness. A touchstone of warrior skill, dogged ingenuity and will irrepressible. A question of faith. The longer he spent in the Wastes, the more of a test Archaon became. As he travelled and slaughtered his way poleward, the knight found warriors more worthy of his blade and the time spent slaying them. These were men who had been to the darkness and back. Who had fought their way to the heart of it and returned. They had survived. They had survived others like themselves. This was a credit to them and Archaon began to think that they could be a credit to him also.
Those unfortunate souls that had returned from the lands of midnight delirium in the continent core were different. They were changed. Like Archaon, their bodies and minds had acclimatised to the abnormality and lethality of their environment. The mind-bending rulelessness of the place, its stomach-churning grotesquery, the constant demands of defence and slaughter. In the Wastes, you were only safe if you were dead, and there was no guarantee even of that. Those that had returned from the Gatelands at the centre of the Wastes and had not completely lost their minds were physically altered. They were not just stronger in mind, will and body – not just faster in thought and reflex – like Archaon had become. The world had confused them with something else. Their skin was no longer their own. They were gifted with extra limbs, some of use and some anatomical studies in uselessness. They returned unmade, malformed and inconstant of flesh. Their minds also seemed similarly fragmented. Their sanity had been smashed by what they had seen and even been subjected to. They had picked up the shattered pieces and reassembled them as best they could. They had not just returned themselves. They had returned at the head of sometimes hundreds of others, attracted to their possibility like a dwarf to a vein of gold. Archaon would use these champions of the Chaos gods. They would be the battering ram he would use to smash his way into the realm of Naggaroth.
Archaon’s Swords of Chaos were a beginning – but only that. The winged warriors had proved themselves over and again. They were his personal bodyguard, however – their bone swords and shielding wings were always where he needed them to be. Their first conce
rn always seemed to be Archaon’s person. They were not an army. They were the honour guard of a dark hero. An armed escort into eternity.
Despite their silent obedience and life-saving interventions, Archaon was still wary of his knights of Chaos. He found himself studying their fighting style, in case one day they turned assassin and he was forced to fight them himself. He still didn’t know where they had come from or how they knew where to find him. They said nothing of their origins – although the wings on their armoured backs and the weapons of bone drawn from their own bodies testified to time spent in the Wastes and the damned interior of the dark continent. They said absolutely nothing. Nothing about their lives before their fall to Chaos. Nothing about their time in the Wastes. Nothing about who had sent them or their reasons for seeking out the dark templar as their master. In turn, The Liber Caelestior had little to say about them, apart from the fact that they were Archaon’s constant companions. His Swords. His Swords of Chaos. Only the markings of their plate said anything about their past. The eight points of the Ruinous Star suggested that they honoured all gods of Chaos with equal reverence and disdain. Glyphs and designs woven into the black of their armour and even the bone of their skull-helms, told of their subservience to former warrior overlords and daemon masters: Hordrak the Prodigal, Khardunn the Gloried, Engra Deathsword.
Archaon needed more than guardians and henchmen. It was time for him to do more than wage war. He had to become a warlord. Not just a warrior, but a general. He needed to show the gods that he could harness their dogs of differing allegiance and sworn enmity to one sled. The one that would carry Archaon to a greatness impossible to ignore. For that he needed loyal lieutenants, whose talents, warbands, tribes and hosts would combine to create the army of lost souls Archaon would need.
Some – despite their warped minds and bodily blessings – were deemed undeserving of such honour. Haarlax Shrike – despite his death-dealing prowess, would not leave the tower of skulls he was constructing to honour his Blood God to join Archaon’s band. He had to die with his followers and his tower had to fall. Lord Mortriss and his Knights of Ruin had been wandering the Wastes so long in the service of Nurgle that they literally fell apart – rusted plate and bone – at the swing of Archaon’s sword and the smash of his shield. The spindly sorcerer Zartas Uthezarn had impressed Archaon with his mastery of pink and blue flame that poured from horrific holes in his palms. Only days after Archaon recruited the Changer’s servant to his cause, the sorcerer had been showered with infernal gifts and degenerated into a sickly spawn. Archaon might still have found use for the malformed horror but for the fact that Uthezarn, on some level truly knowing what he had become, set himself alight in a purple blaze.
There were others who travelled as part of Archaon’s growing warband but did not prove to be up to the task. Slaug of the Twin-Axes went mad in the Shimmering Hills. One day his drool turned to froth and the Khornate warrior cut through Wernher Ichelheimer, Gismund the Mad, Durgrim Trollcleaver and his Longshanks before Archaon and his Swords could put him down. Archaon lost Nikitia Vang and her warriors of the Annointed to the decimation that was Ogvaldr the Aesling and his fiend-tempered sword Snaga. The dark templar lost his Bronze Company to the last man in his attempt to bring Ogvaldr to battle again in the great depression known as the Odea-Ossis or ‘Arena of Bones’. By the time he met the Aeslinger’s warband again it was a shadow of its former self. Many of his best had been immortalised in stone with a single glance of the cockatrice that haunted the Inconsolable Mountain. With some regret, Archaon ended Ogvaldr the Aesling on the Arga Floe and with even more watched the daemon blade Snaga lost to a bottomless crevasse in the ice. Archaon executed much of the dross that surrendered to him from the Ogvaldr’s warband but took the scampering plague that was the giant rat-thing Stenomys. Even the monster proved more trouble than it was worth, the infestations making their home in its fur afflicting Archaon’s Kvellig cult warriors. The hairless tribesmen and their shamans suffered a pox that turned them into a herd of shambling corpses that couldn’t be shepherded and ultimately ended up walking into the Wastes in all directions.
The witch Grastlana le Faux had her uses. In unleashing her dark illusions to make Archaon’s warband appear larger than it was at the time, she assisted the Chaos warrior in dissuading some of the Wastes’ larger monstrosities from attacking them. Her spectral additions had also impressed the disdainful Prince Aleghast and his warrior-entourage enough to join the warband rather than fight Archaon for the blood-right to cross the Burning Bridge – the only crossing for hundreds of miles across the glowing channel of molten rock known as the River Sunder. Aleghast proved incapable of taking orders, and not long after Archaon allowed the prince and his entourage to be eaten by the Ravening – a nomadic band of barbaric Kurgans that worshipped, as an incarnation of Khorne, a huge ogre in Archaon’s ranks called the Great Spleen. Grastlana le Faux herself had to be ended after Archaon discovered that she had been assuming the illusion of his form and issuing orders to his men that furthered the witch’s own Tzeentchian undertakings.
The last of Archaon’s failures to recruit able warriors to his growing host was Bhorgl the Obscene. Bhorgl – like his Prince of Pleasure worshipping warherd – was a beastman. He was a bald, fleshy thing of shaved fur, muscle, piercings, tattoos and looted jewellery. He came to Archaon willingly, professing with his thick goat’s tongue that Slaanesh admired the beacon of pride and self-adulation that was the Chaos warrior Archaon. Archaon didn’t believe the beast’s praise and didn’t like him either but had to admit that the extra muscle would be useful. Bhorgl proved popular in the warband. His brute warriors brought with them the secret of brewing fungus ale from the black mushrooms to be found about ruined buildings. A number of his warriors were also crude musicians, with their suggestive horn arrangements and rough voices. Their songs were coarse and invariably about relations with livestock.
While away with his Swords, reconnoitring a distant temple to some renegade god of the Chaos pantheon, an unnatural storm swept in that seemed to turn the world about, losing the dark templar and his warriors in the maelstrom. Archaon was unconcerned. He had left the warband with Iskavar Gan. Iskavar was a pale and capable Kurgan warrior, whose warband had been slain by Archaon’s own. The Kurgan’s spear arm had been something to behold, several of Archaon’s warriors ending up with javelins through them from impossible distances away. Always dressed in the filth of furs and the spikes of his black armour and shield, the Kurgan had accepted a place at Archaon’s side as a lieutenant. He was easy to like and used to show off his aim by launching javelins into the sky and spearing vultures as they circled. In the spirit of the evening, with the fire roaring, vermin crackling on the spit and drink being passed around, Iskavar Gan took of the potent ale.
As the storm intensified and the warband huddled about the fire, Bhorgl’s musicians played. Meanwhile, their muscle-bound beastlord and two of his Slaaneshi gors found their way through the material of the wagon bonnet and inside, looking for what treasures of the Wastes and supplies Archaon secreted there. To his pleasure, Bhorgl the Obscene found Sister Giselle trying to sleep. His hoof falls on the wooden floor of the wagon had disturbed her. In truth, like everyone else in the Wastes, the girl barely slept at all and when she did it was with one eye open. Hieronymous Dagobert had been sheltering in the wagon also, studying The Liber Caelestior in the meagre light of a candle. Bhorgl the Obscene wasn’t interested in ancient tomes. The beastman couldn’t read anything beyond the fear in his victims’ faces. Licking his thin lips with his thick tongue, Bhorgl instructed his gors to restrain the pair.
‘What do you think you are doing?’ the priest demanded, the gor manhandling him around. ‘Gan!’ Dagobert roared. ‘Gan!’ But Iskavar Gan wasn’t coming. Any members of the wider warband that might have cared that an atrocity was about to take place in the wagon – and there were few – had their ears occupied with the roar of the fire, the storm
and the cacophony of bestial pipehorns. Iskavar Gan, a canvas water satchel of ale lying empty beside him, was unconscious, like a wrestler out for the count.
Dagobert blustered his anger at the intrusion and hollow threats, while Giselle fought – her screams punctuated with vulgar insults. Bhorgl let slip a wet chuckle. There was the sudden glint of a thin, curved blade amongst the thrashing covers. Giselle always kept a surgical shiv – long stolen from the hospice wagon’s depleted supplies – beneath her pillow. The girl hit out, passing the blade across the gor’s pink throat. It split open like a ripe fruit. Giselle kicked the beast from the bunk. Clutching its gushing neck, it fell back out of the wagon. Giselle scrambled back against the wagon sideboards.
‘Are we having fun yet?’ the Sister of the Imperial Cross asked with a snarl, holding the razor-sharp shiv blade out before her. Bhorgl drew a bulbous billy club from his studded belt. It was the beast lord’s weapon of choice for subduing his victims or rendering them unconscious.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ Bhorgl told her. ‘I won’t touch your flesh.’
‘You’d better believe it, milksop,’ Giselle taunted, waving the scalpel.
‘Your flesh shall touch the inside of my gullet as it goes down my throat,’ Bhorgl promised. ‘You’ll still be alive, of course. Raw flesh tastes better off the bone. Warm and with screams.’
An armoured shape stepped up through the bonnet canvas behind Bhorgl the Obscene.
‘I’ll ask the Great Spleen and his Ravening horde,’ Archaon said, snatching the billy club out of the Slaangor’s fist and knocking him to the ground senseless with a single smash to the beastlord’s horny skull. A bone sword slipped effortlessly through the wagon material and round in an arc, stopping just before the hairless throat of the gor pinning Father Dagobert to the bunk. The beastman glared its salacious hatred of Archaon. Eins came up behind his master. They were both frosted with the ash and ice of the tumultuous storm. ‘Get their beast-compatriots. Take these reprobates out to whatever cave the Great Spleen has crawled into and feed them to Khorne’s chosen. He’ll like that.’