by Rob Sanders
Archaon had the monster sleep away from their camp. The ogre was too dangerous to keep nearby. He might wake like a furious bear from hibernation and kill them all. His pilgrim-barbarians – the Kurgan degenerates that worshipped the Spleen as some representative of their god – slept like dogs nearby. Like the Great Spleen, it paid to keep the cannibals’ bellies full.
As the Swords dragged the Slaangor away, it licked at Archaon with its fat tongue.
‘Timely,’ Father Dagobert said.
‘We have you to thank for that,’ Archaon told him. ‘We were lost in the storm.’
‘And?’
‘You scream louder than she does, old man,’ Archaon said. The priest raised his eyebrows and shrugged. When Archaon looked at Giselle, she still had the curved shiv pointed at them. Her eyes glistened with confusion and loathing. Eins moved in to take it from her. ‘Leave it,’ Archaon commanded. ‘She’s not a prisoner.’
‘We’re all prisoners in this place,’ Giselle said.
It shocked Archaon. He hadn’t heard her speak to him in a long time – and only then in hisses of hatred. Beneath the rags of her old Order and the grime on her skin and in her tangled hair, she had grown up. Her voice had lost the annoying insistence of youth and ignorance. She was older and wiser. Her dread existence in the dark corners of the world had gifted her that at least. He found himself transfixed. She hurt to look upon. She had, impossibly, retained some essence of simple purity in the Wastes. Hiding in the wagon. Hiding beneath the blankets of her bunk. Exposing herself only to Dagobert’s obsessions and growing insanity. It was an impressive achievement. She was something to be admired. Or destroyed. When she spoke again, the words, uttered with a savage belief, cut through him. ‘A prison without walls. Serving a sentence without end. Shackled to your doom.’
‘Leave…’ Archaon said. His voice was but a whisper.
‘I leave, I die,’ Giselle said. ‘Here, in the shadow of your great darkness – a warning to the terrible things of this place – my light at least shines on.’
‘Your light…’
‘My burning hatred for you, my lord,’ Giselle said through clenched teeth. ‘And I would not have it extinguished for all the world, you abomination. If here, in this enforced exile, this prison, this cell of shadow about you – if here is the only place I can abhor you then here I will be. Sigmar hears all prayers – even in this cursed place.’
Archaon nodded slowly. The God-King’s name, said with such bitter reverence, stung his soul.
‘But he does not answer them,’ the Chaos warrior told her. Slipping the wavy blade of a kris dagger he had taken from the butchered body of a Khazag horse-chieftain from its sheath of petrified wood, Archaon tossed the blade onto Giselle’s bunk. ‘You need to defend yourself,’ Archaon said. ‘I can see that. I keep company with the damned and I won’t always be there to protect you from them. Put your faith not in prayers to weakling gods. Put it – as I do – in cold steel. Put it in a will of the same, and have the courage to put the blade where it is most needed.’ Archaon looked about the miserable interior of the wagon. ‘Get some sleep.’ With that the dark templar left.
But Giselle Dantziger couldn’t sleep. She felt like she never slept. From the secluded cloisters of the Hammerfall, her life had now become a living nightmare. A nightmare from which she wanted to wake up. She saw The Liber Caelestior in Father Dagobert’s sleeping embrace. She wondered if the tome held the secrets of what she planned to do next. Such a notion took her out onto the freezing grit. The chill wind felt its way through her tattered robes like the hands of death. Above, the sky was dark and heavy – although it was impossible to tell if it were truly night or not. Archaon’s men were sleeping around the flames of the dying fire. Grunting through their own bad dreams. Snoring. Farting. She found one that was not. Iskavar Gan’s hand reached out for her filthy skirt-tails. The Kurgan had been skewered into the ground on his own willowy javelins. Demotion, to be sure. Punishment for his lack of leadership, in the face of Bhorgl’s little insurrection. Death with the coming dawn. Archaon liked the warrior, but as his lieutenant Iskavar Gan had failed him and an example had had to be made.
‘Forgive…’ the Chaos warrior said as the Sister of the Imperial Cross pulled her skirts from his bloody fingers.
Giselle tip-toed through the limbs of sleeping warriors and tribesmen, the cold and horror of the gloom beyond the fire’s light requiring her to stay close. Who knew what daemon things lurked in the shadows beyond the fire, waiting to rend flesh and swallow souls. Beyond she could hear the Great Spleen, as the warband often did, disturbed from its hulking slumber by such a twilight fiend. She could imagine the bald, fat-bellied ogre snatching the devil from the shadows and smashing it with the Blood God’s own wrath into the rocky landscape thereabouts – for the Great Spleen did not deign to use weapons beyond the huge hands that its god had gifted it with. The cannibal barbarians of the Ravening would eat well tonight – with both beastmen and daemonflesh in the offering.
Beyond the fire, Giselle found the mammoth-skin tent the Swords regularly had the warband’s lesser servants erect for their master. Oberon stood nearby, nibbling at stunted black lichen and grasses that were trying to force their way up through the frozen soil. The stallion’s flesh was matted with scars and fresh wounds. It should have died long ago but some infernal force kept it alive, serving its master. Archaon regularly had Dagobert stitch the horse’s flesh, as he had the priest do with his own. Dagobert was a fumble-fingered seamstress but the ragged repairs were enough to close both the steed and its master up and allow their bodies to unnaturally heal.
At the entrance, the heavy hide of the malformed mammoth keeping the worst of the wind and cold out, the sister found Eins. The winged knight of Chaos stood impassive in its armour and skull helmet. It had its arms folded and regarded her with the silent menace of a vampire. Its bone swords were sheathed and its wings creaked as it spread them – blocking the girl’s passage. The girl and the killer regarded one another.
‘You are here for your master’s protection,’ Giselle told him. ‘And you think he needs protecting from me?’ The scorn of the girl’s forced laughter had little effect on the Chaos knight. ‘I think he might consider it an insult to suggest that the chosen of the Ruinous Powers would need such protection.’ Giselle put up her hair, winding it into a messy bun, to demonstrate her true intentions to the deathly henchman. She steeled herself and reached out to touch the thing’s black wing. Her intention was to move it aside, but Eins slowly retracted it from her reach, unwilling to let the Sister of the Imperial Cross scald it with her unpolluted touch. With that, Giselle pushed her way inside.
It was warm. There was a small fire, providing both heat and low light. Archaon’s armour decorated a rack made from the skeletal frame of a withered and twisted shrub. His shield and the crusader sword Terminus sat there also, the Sigmarite blade shimmering in its afflicted agony. Spectral flame no longer danced across its comet-carved surface as it did when the dark templar held the weapon in his God-King hating hands. Archaon was wrapped in a mound of furs by the fire. Giselle approached. She felt not quite in charge of her own movements. She knelt. She drew the Khazag kris from its petrified scabbard and held it over the mound. The blade glimmered in the light from the fire, trembling in the girl’s grip. The sister held her breath. Time and again she tried to force it down. Again and again the serpentine blade stopped at dimpling the furs. She exhaled with the effort and slammed the knife down beside the sleeping Chaos warrior.
‘What am I doing?’ Giselle hissed to herself. ‘What am I becoming? Blessed Sigmar forgive. I don’t know what is happening to me.’
Leaving the blade warming by the fire, she pulled the layers of furs aside to join Archaon beneath them. She found only more furs.
‘Have you come to return that to me?’
Archaon’s voice was everywhere. Gis
elle turned. She squinted. He was kneeling in the shadows of the tent, beyond the fire, where Giselle’s eyes struggled to acquire him. ‘Perhaps to slide it into my heart?’
Giselle turned, fearful. Her fingers slid down the furs and back towards the kris. Archaon reared to his full height in the murk of the tent. He was all doom-laden melancholy and physical prowess. He wore only his eye-patch. The dark templar’s flesh was both ugly and impressive. Horrific bruising. Patchworks of old scars. Fresh wounds – some stitched, some cauterised, some yet to be dressed. A black web of corruption reaching out from his ruined eye in the eight-pointed star of his Dark Gods, running beneath the flesh of his face like some savage’s tattoo. ‘Why are you here, girl?’ Archaon asked. ‘To kiss me, or kill me?’
Giselle’s anger and disgust returned to her in a cold rush. Archaon was so ghoulishly confident. Like everything else – she hated him for it.
‘I’ve come to save you,’ the Sister of the Imperial Cross said.
‘I thought that was Father Dagobert’s hope.’
‘It is a shared honour, my lord.’
‘My lord?’ Archaon marvelled. ‘Not Ruinous dog? Son of the Dark Gods? Scum of all the world?’
‘Can a man not be more than one thing at once, master?’ Giselle said.
The knight allowed himself a cruel chuckle.
‘Pray what have you come to save me from?’
‘Why yourself, of course,’ the girl told him. ‘And the world from the plague that is both of you.’
Archaon smiled. ‘Go ahead, girl… Save me.’
The taunt was too much for the sister. The Khazag knife was in her hand. She pushed herself up at him, the slight weight of her malnourished body behind the tip of the blade. Archaon was predictably fast. Killers of all breeds of darkness tried to destroy him every day. His reflexes came from some unearthly place and the strength in his hands and arms was like cold iron. He brought around his hand and snatched the girl’s wrist from between them. The blazing manoeuvre was shocking enough but Giselle let out a half-scream as Archaon came at her. He followed with some kind of combat roll – a choreographed tumble that took him over her and then she over him – the kris held between them. Giselle ended up in the furs, Archaon on top of her, both her wrist and the knife pinned above her head.
‘Save me!’ Archaon roared. The rawness of the command echoed about Giselle’s heart. It was daring, barbed and bombastic in delivery – but behind the volume was a desperation. A pleading behind the words. An inviting vulnerability in the trailing last syllable. She felt Archaon’s grip tighten about her wrist. Giselle got her fingers to the messy bun she had tied in her hair outside the tent. There she had secreted the surgical shiv she had used to slice the beastmen open. Within moments it was out and clutched in her white-knuckled fist.
She stabbed at Archaon’s snarling face. The razor tip of the blade shot for the knight’s good eye. For that second, the darkness of Archaon’s eye became her world. The play of pupil and the beautiful colours about it – tinged to an unnatural hue. She saw the momentary surprise – the fear even. Then a terrifying acceptance. He said nothing. The searing intensity of his gaze did all the talking. He invited her into the darkness. The shiv lurched forward. Giselle Dantziger would change the world in the God-King’s name. She would slay the chosen of the Dark Gods. And he would let her.
But she faltered. The strength died in her arms. Like a fire doused, the struggle left her. With his hand about her wrist, the dark templar slowly moved the blade aside and pinned her to the furs. He burned into her with his gaze. The fight suddenly returned but she was only half there. She spat at the Chaos warrior and bit at his face like some wild animal. He kissed her back. The bloodshed of the Wastes, the laughter of the Dark Gods and the appetite for apocalypse were washed away. The immaculate fire that burned on his lips and in his chest could not be ignored. Archaon’s heart felt as if it was broiling in his own blood. It thumped against the inside of his ribcage, slowing. Slowing. Searing to a stop.
He pulled his lips from Giselle’s. The dark templar’s face was strained with a panic he had not known for a long time. A bugle horn that drowned out his racing thoughts and sounded the end of Archaon. The blood settled in his veins. His lips stung. His heart felt fit to burst.
Giselle squealed as Archaon’s fists squeezed about her wrists, threatening to pulverise the bones in each. The kris knife and shiv tumbled from her grip and fell down the side of the furs. Archaon released her, grabbing at her ragged robes and tearing them. There, around her neck, Archaon found it. On a tarnished chain, he found Sigmar’s hammer. It was only half there, the silver bearing the harsh marks of a file – probably taken, like the surgical shank, from the hospice wagon’s supplies. In the light and with the girl already covered in the grime of the Wastes, Archaon hadn’t noticed. He stared down at her in disbelief. She had smeared the sacred silver on her lips. The sister just looked back through him, watching the warrior of Chaos die. There were no taunting words to be had. No death-bed threats. No recriminations. A silence racked Archaon’s body.
The dark templar’s face contorted about a snarl. He would not be purified. He would not be burned in the fires of his God-King foe. He would not allow the world to go on without him. He was the end of existence; not the other way around.
Giselle watched the agonising battle rage on in the knight. To be. To not be. The dark templar’s forehead glistened with cold sweat. The muscles in his face were taut to the point where the sister thought they might break it. He suddenly thrust his left shoulder at her – as though popping back in a dislocated arm. They both heard it. The distant thunder of Archaon’s heart – willed back to beating. It thumped rhythmically and insistently between them.
A chill terror crept through Giselle. She had tried to kill Archaon – chosen of the Chaos gods – and failed. She had tried to save him but instead had damned herself. She could not quite imagine what horrors awaited her. She lay there then, in the furs, expecting vengeance to come… but it did not. Archaon faltered. The presence of the God-King within him had weakened the Chaos warrior. He lowered himself slowly and lay his head against her chest. The pair lay there for a long time, the fire crackling beside them and the winds of the Wastes battering the heavy hide of the tent. Archaon held her. To the sister’s surprise, she held him back. She felt his breathing slow. Archaon was asleep. As she drifted into oblivion herself – for the first time in a long time – Giselle Dantziger’s thoughts were not on murder. She dreamed not of death, but of life. Of hope in the darkness. Of a fool’s paradise in the hearts of doomed men. A place where the dying fire of noble gods might be stoked once again.
CHAPTER XII
‘Khaela Mensha Khaine, for hate’s sake, hear our petition – as blood answers the throat slit. Keep the hearts of the druchii cold and bitter, wherein the murderous will of our survivor-civilisation be preserved for all eternity. Bring death, just and swift, to the weak. Daub the revenger’s blade with the blood of enemies old. Watch over the inconstant north. Grant the wild men and their wilderness your darkness. Let blade and bolt bring sacrifice to your altar. Bless the druchii, ever your acolytes and assassins, with murder in your name and victories as certain as spite.’
– Hellebron, the Hag Queen of Har Ganeth,
The Pact of the Pitiless
Eisarnagga Glacier
The Watchlands of Naggaroth
The Soul Harvest – First Blood (Druchii Remembrance)
The will of the Dark Gods took Archaon west. It did not matter that west was the direction the dark templar had chosen for himself – he was the chosen of the Ruinous Gods in all but name and a regular doom would not do for him. While other warriors and chieftains stumbled onwards into their doom, the incomprehension and darkness of the continent interior waiting for them, Archaon was reserved a greater fate. He would not be showered with gifts that ushered others through greatness
and on into spawndom because he asked for none. He would not be a simple pleasure. A mind lost. A bloody fate. A soul to be played with. He would not be a pawn moving through a perpetual war or a player in a never-ending round of gladiatorial games. Not even for the gods’ entertainment. Archaon’s will burned bright in the maelstrom and like a gratification denied or a tasty morsel on the plate left for last, his journey would be savoured.
By the time he passed over the Anvil of the Gods, where dark heroes were forged and the mountainous ridges of Damnation’s Teeth and the Arkhang Peaks fought for supremacy of the skies, Archaon commanded a considerable force. With a mighty army made up of champions of the Chaos gods, glory-hungry warriors, amalgamated warbands and tribesmen of the infernal north, Archaon crossed the impossibilities of the Abyssal Plain. He tested the mettle of his men at the great gathering known only as the Wars of Omission – fought between and within the colossal black walls of star-shaped ziggurats that pervaded the land and towered over the blood-soaked earth of the Wastes. His host was nearly burned alive in the deep freeze of the Kankgari Basin before facing the Golden Horde of the savage Chi-An, the Serpent Cults of the Tu-Kara and the fleshless warlords of the marauder Yin.
All Archaon did was give battle to the lesser existences of the world – either as general or blade to bloodied blade – or sleep. He gave his everything to fighting his way across the warping landscape of the Wastes. When you knew not where you were, when you knew not the time of day – let alone the week, month or year – progress was everything. Archaon fought on. The madness of the Shadowlands was his mentor; the murderous intentions of his myriad enemies his teachers. He learned much of combat and of death. As the knight of a weakling god, decked in protective plate, he was an expert with broadsword and shield; on horseback or face to faceplate. In the Wastes he had come to understand the limitations of such strength, such technique and practice. He learned more than he could have imagined in the Wastes – because he had to. He had learned to be deadly with bow and crossbow, and a confident thrower of javelin and spear. He made it his goal to become proficient with every exotic weapon used in failed attempts to end him and acquired the speed and agility necessary to evade attacks rather than trust their failure to his plate and shield. Terminus was his constant and tortured companion, but Archaon learned new ways to wield the weapon – unthinkable techniques and handling learned from the barbarian Kurgan, the warrior Hung and damned companions of the elder races. Archaon even learned how to kill and defend himself without weapons – with the hand and mind, learning both eastern secrets of empty-handed death and manipulation of the strange energies of the Wastes about him in the form of basic wards and protections. He learned how to slay with effortless proficiency – not just the vulgarities of decapitation, the removal of limbs or the stabbing butchery he had acquired in the knightly orders. He came to know the precise vulnerabilities of man, his bestial aberration, the warriors of other races, the monster and the daemon.