by Rob Sanders
Then as quickly as it had begun, the magnificent ordeal was over. Archaon was on his knees surrounded by corpses. His flesh was the bronze of dried blood. His body ached with the agony of battle. He trembled with power and potential undreamt of. The gods of Chaos were with him. They had blessed the venture that was his life of death. They had scarred their union into him: eight black, ever-smouldering marks, charred around his head like a Ruinous crown.
Archaon pushed himself up and stumbled through the bodies. He fell from the Altar of Ultimate Darkness and clawed his way through the carnage to the wall. With his back to the overpowering evil of the blinding darklight of the shrine, he walked away with all the strength he could muster. He walked through the ruined sanctums, through the labyrinthine slave pits and the citadel underbarbicans. He felt his way along sharp passageways and through chambers of black stone. He met no opposition. He had killed all who had haunted the Citadel of Spite’s corrupted architecture.
Grasping the slender bars of a warped and wicked portcullis, Archaon flung it up into the stone of the gate it barred. He strode through the archway, feeling the bite of the cold night air on his naked flesh. At first the gloom coming off the surrounding mountains and the searing stars in the open sky dazzled him. As his eye adjusted from the absolute darkness of the floating fortress’s inner sanctums to the twilight outside, he wandered across the stone deck. Towers reared above him, colossal and crooked, challenging the mountain peaks for supremacy. Beyond, Archaon could hear the slosh of water and the clash of ice. Beneath the soles of his feet he could feel the gentle sway of the floating fortress – ever so slightly. As the glacier had melted and rampaged through the valleys, building in strength and volume, the Spite had started to rise on its freezing waters. Between the natural buoyancy of the cavern-riddled foundations of the floating fortress and the dark magics re-awoken by its baptism in the calamitous body of water forming about it, the jagged keel-ridge of the floating fortress had almost cleared the valley floor.
Reaching the black stone battlements of the Citadel, Archaon looked down at the glossy, berg-choked waters that crashed along the druchii vessel. He then looked up the mountain slopes. The valley floor was gone. As were the bodies of the Hag Queen’s druchii army and Gorath’s Bloodsworn marauders. They had long been washed through the mountains and out towards the nearby western coast of Naggaroth. In the valley’s place was the broad, flowing course of a meltwater river. It was black with depth and white with shattered ice. On the mountainside nearby, the forest was ablaze. Archaon could see his army camped out on the water’s edge, above the snowline. Dravik Vayne had ordered the great pines and firs of the mountainside cut for huge bonfires. Even from the towering deck of the Spite, Archaon could see that victory over the druchii and the Bloodsworn had resulted in a celebratory mood. There was drinking, eating and the enjoyment of the fires. There was a union among Archaon’s army of the apocalypse that the dark templar had never known.
He stood and watched for a minute before spotting Vayne, his sorceress and his corsairs down by the new shoreline. By the raging meltwater, Sularii and the Brothers Spasskov inspected the Tzeentchian’s sorcerous handiwork. Further along the shore, Archaon could see a line of armoured figures, kneeling and frozen in the snow. The battered remnants of Gorath the Ravager’s Bloodsworn knights – infernal warrior contraptions that had sunk in the glacial waters and slowly marched their way to shore to find their leader dead and their allegiance transferred. Archaon could see that Vayne was taking no chances with the clockwork knights and had them under his Slaaneshi guard. The corsair-captain himself paced the snowy shore, not taking his eyes off his beloved Spite. When he finally saw his warlord and master standing at the battlements and looking down upon the encampment, the dark elf’s laughter echoed up and down the mountainsides. He clapped his hands in grinning approval before picking up Sularii and savagely kissing the sorceress.
‘I told you he would do it,’ Dravik Vayne laughed. He called up at Archaon. ‘Permission to come aboard!’
As Vayne’s carrying jubilation drew the eyes of the celebrating army to the Spite’s towering battlements, as marauders, beastmen and Chaos warriors saw their general’s blood-drenched form, horns were sounded, swords and shields were clashed and a roar of supremacy rose to meet him.
‘Permission granted,’ the Chaos warlord told them.
CHAPTER XIV
‘Always know that you know nothing…’
‘The Way of the Kyu-Shinobi is the way of death unseen, proceeding from every darkness and shadow…’
‘Even monkeys sometimes fall from the trees…’
‘The arts of death did not fail you – know that it was not the art that failed – it was you…’
‘Victory is ever in your grasp – even if you fail to achieve it…’
– Dark Empress Shotoko of the Invisible Army, from The Nine Disciplines of the Kyu-Shinobi
(Trans: The Bloody Pool of
Myriad Rivers Merging)
The Saturnine Sea
The Great Eastern Ocean
Vermintide
And so Archaon headed out across the expanse known as the Great Eastern Ocean. It rivalled the Wastes or the Steppes beyond the Worlds Edge Mountains for its mind-breaking endlessness. Dark, choppy seas gave way to glassy waters. Land was a rare treat.
The Spite kept no log. No records of where the floating fortress and its growing corsair flotilla had been or where it was going. The weather changed so regularly that there was little point in following its fickle nature in ink. The floating fortress crashed through intruding ice, struggled through furious squalls and cut across the crystal calm of sun-scorched seas. With the ocean so vast and open and the heavens so changeable, it was became difficult to keep track of time. The sun did rise and set but the days ran into one another like paint on canvas.
Like Father Dagobert with his torturous translations of The Liber Caelestior, the floating fortress and its flotilla of captured vessels pushed on into the unknown. Brooding in his throne, atop the Spite’s tallest tower, scope in hand, Archaon would have the priest read the insanity to him. It didn’t make much sense to the Chaos warrior. Dagobert – the portly priest wrapped up in his moth-eaten furs – was never without the damned tome. His wild, grey hair draped both his fat face and the book over which he was perpetually hunched, creating a private booth for his distractions. The mind-twisting translations had driven him to madness and back – at some times convincing the priest that he knew everything and at other times that he knew nothing. When Archaon’s anger got the better of him – threatening to pitch both the tome that toyed with his existence and the priest translating it over the tower battlements – it took Giselle’s entreaties and distractions to calm him. In less dangerous moods, Dagobert tried to placate the dark templar with analogies and comparisons. He told Archaon The Celestine Book of Divination was very much like the telescope through which he scanned oceans and his future the horizon. He insisted that the same spot in the distance might appear very different from different approaches or through the perversities of changing light and weather. This did not please the Chaos warlord any more.
Archaon’s destiny ate away at him. He had achieved the first treasure of the Chaos gods and had been blessed with their Mark. As the years passed and he made the ocean his own, Archaon noticed the changes such a blessing had brought him. Like an animal, his senses had grown keen. He smelled the fear in those about him. His teeth had grown sharp and his tongue tasted his impending victories on the air. He could hear the blood gush through his enemies’ veins. Staring hard enough, he could see through the very flesh of his opponents. He could see the horror of their innards and the exposed vulnerabilities their weakling bodies presented. He could see the cracks of former breakages in bone; the positions of organs hiding within cages of rib; hearts that beat like entrancing targets. His own muscle and sinew was taut – like a spring-loaded trap –
making his attacks savage, blistering in speed and frenzied in execution.
Within, Archaon was like cold stone. His own doubts and fears were afterthoughts. Every action had the full commitment of body, mind and soul. Every stab and sweep of his sword was blessed with boldness. He believed he had overcome every failing, every challenge, every enemy and like wings that belief took him far. Between his blade and their secret doubts, his enemies undid themselves before him. Archaon would entertain no fantasies of death – no delusions of grand failure. He walked, thought and killed with the assurance of a god – though unlike many of his calling, he had no aspirations to be one. Such figments of fancy were a weakness – and Archaon believed he had none.
Other changes were more physically obvious. Networks of blue veins appeared through his pallid flesh, forming insane patterns across the surface of his body. Showing Dagobert, the priest did not seem to know the dialect but the Brothers Spasskov recognised it instantly, telling Archaon that he was bleeding the incantations of ancient magical wards through his skin like a tattoo that covered his body. The warlord was suspicious but the sorcerers told him that it was a blessing from the gods – the veins and letters forming an enchantment, like a suit of ringmail beneath the surface of his skin.
When Archaon had his sword, shield and crusader armour recovered by Vayne’s corsairs from the caves below the Citadel, they were all a mess. His battered shield was covered in sucker marks from a great squid beast he had fought and the greatsword Terminus was stained with gore. His plate was scratched and his chainmail in shreds. Upon reassembling the mess, he discovered that the suit of armour had an infestation. A cloud of tiny black flies – so tiny, they were all but impossible to make out individually. All attempts to rid the rank plate of the infestation failed. When still, the flies settled and accumulated on the armour, making Archaon one with the darkness in poor light. When the Chaos warrior moved, the disturbed flies formed a haze drifting about him like a miasma or black mist. In combat Archaon found that the mist distracted his enemies and masked some of his movements and evasions. Over time, the dark templar’s intentions to rid himself of the infestation faded, adapting his ducks and weaves to the mist’s movements.
Such gifts and adaptations made Archaon only hunger more for the treasures and blessings of Chaos. He was the chosen of the Dark Gods but not the Everchosen. Not general of the daemonic legions, not herald of the End Times and the coming apocalypse. Unlike the Altar of Ultimate Darkness that the Citadel of Spite carried within its depths, Father Dagobert’s heretical volume said little about the location of his next treasure. All the priest could tell him from the twisted translations was that it was an ancient relic of infernal significance. The priest gleaned that the artefact was to be found in a tomb, in an undiscovered land, somewhere in the Great Eastern Ocean. It had been the torment of such details that had driven Archaon to adopt the life of a buccaneer. For years he had had warriors and captains chasing every clue and scrap of information regarding the treasure’s nature, location and existence. Many failed to return, while others returned to the Spite with little more than their lives. In some of the warlord’s most desperate moments he deprived them even of those, but most he simply sent off again in pursuit of some new intelligence or possibility.
Archaon had sent his marauders to their deaths in the jungles of Pahaulaxa, to the south sea islands of cannibal giants, the Hinterlands of Khuresh and the Witch seas of Naggaroth. His warbands plundered lost cities, put entire islands and their primitive civilisations to the flame and fought savage southerners of similar ilk and madness from the bottom of the world. Those that did return carried with them innumerable tales of lost treasures, cursed artefacts and lands of the lost. There was little to narrow Archaon’s miserable search. Poring over maps recovered with enemy ships, ancient scraps, charts and improvised scribblings, Archaon discovered nothing that would tell him of the treasure’s location. The Chaos warrior thought he might go mad.
For a year or two, insanity did indeed prevail and the ocean ran red with the blood the warlord spilled in the mortification. Every sign of civilisation sighted through the warlord’s scope was destroyed. Coastlines were ravaged. Forests were torched. Ancient city-ports were turned to sunken rubble. Lone vessels, convoys and fleets were attacked on sight. Crews were butchered and ships blasted from the waves. Archaon’s armada left thousands of bone-littered wrecks in its wandering wake. Portly merchantmen and greatships from the west; slavers, pirates, raiders and marauders; flotillas of oriental and druchii designation.
Archaon became the terror of the Eastern Ocean. The Dragon Emperor despatched fleets of mighty war junks to destroy Archaon’s armada after Heyang was sacked and burned. The druchii corsair kings of the Broken Lands called him the Red Death. The Hobgobbla Khan slavehulks avoided the Chaos armada like a plague, while the actual plaguefleet of Papa Feste failed to bring the guns of his bloated galleons on Archaon on several occasions. Both the maritime empires of the Man-Chu marauders and the Nipponese pirates of the Kironshima Wan swore blood oaths on Archaon’s end. The cannibal civilisations of volcanic island chains in their skull-adorned catamarans and outriggers prayed to their fire gods for aid against Archaon’s dread fleet while the lizard men of Hexoatl and the Emerald Empire sacrificed each other to Tzunki and their Old Ones to rid them of the raiding warlord.
Dravik Vayne and the armada’s Chaos lieutenants knew they had lost their master to madness the day he left aboard a flotilla of recently recruited junk-raiders with their defecting Man-Chu crews for company. The Spite had sighted a clanfleet bearing the markings of the Eshin. Vayne had told Archaon it was a trap and that the skaven assassins of the Ind and the Lords of Decay had long plotted his downfall. This did not sway the mindless warrior, who sailed straight into the brown, stinking filth that was the Saturnine Sea and the fleet of fat, filthy dhows waiting there. The verminships were armed with cannons that projected unnatural flame that set many of Archaon’s black junk-raiders ablaze. The dhows were also swarming with skaven decked in the black headdress and rag robes of warrior-assassins. Bare-pawed and armed with an assortment of curved sabres, cleaver falchions and kris-blades – each glazed with all manner of exotic poisons – the creatures were nimble and trained in the low arts of death. The clanships vomited forth skaven in such number – swimming, swinging and leaping from their fat vessels – that Archaon’s flotilla of marauder junk-raiders were swiftly swamped with Eshin vermin.
Vayne knew better than to disobey his master’s orders but when the flotilla didn’t return, the corsair-captain set a course for the brown miasma that was the Saturnine Sea on the horizon. The effluent waters bobbed with the corpses of Man-Chu raiders and ratmen alike, many bearing the trademark butchery of the warlord, both enemy and ally. Vayne considered it unlikely that despite being new additions to the armada, the piratical raiders of the Man-Chu would turn on Archaon. Vayne had every flaming wreck and piece of wreckage searched. They found him in the belly of a verminship. The vessel was listing badly and still aflame. Within they discovered their lord amongst a tangled nest of dead assassins. The ratmen had been broken, smashed and gutted. Some of their death-smeared weapons had found their mark, however. Archaon had been cut and stabbed by the assassins but had fought his way to bloody victory. Vayne found him still smashing what remained of a skaven’s skull into the hull of the verminship with groaning insistence – the victim of some murderous delirium.
‘Secure the ship,’ Vayne told Archaon’s Swords as the grim sentinels stood over their crazed master. When Eins and Zwei didn’t move, Vayne pushed, ‘The master will want the wonder of the ratmen’s cannons at his command. This hulk is going down. Have the vessel jury-rigged for return to the Spite’s drydocks in accordance with your overlord’s wishes as well as his wellbeing.’
Taking a moment to demonstrate their displeasure, the silent Swords left the site of degenerate massacre and attended to the skaven ship. The sorceress Sularii watch
ed them go, flanked by a pair of Vayne’s druchii corsairs. As the winged warriors left, excitement cut through the mask of dour concern that sat on her sharp features.
‘Are we going to do it?’ the sorceress asked.
Vayne allowed himself a wolfish smile.
‘There’ll never be a better time,’ the dark elf captain told her, stepping daintily through the carnage, limbs and dismembered bodies. He turned to the corsairs. ‘Go. Watch the Swords. Ensure they are distracted with the doom of this vessel.’
The druchii nodded. The corsairs nodded and left to attend to their duties of subversion and sabotage. Archaon moaned as what remained of the skaven’s skull disintegrated in his hands. He looked up at Vayne and his sorceress with an unseeing eye. He wasn’t blood-drunk. This was no blessing or affliction of the Blood God. Quite the opposite. He was lost in a storm of sensual savagery. A storm of the corsair-captain’s arrangement. The experience was more than a gift from the lieutenant and his Prince of Pleasure. It was a dreamy distraction. The air was muggy with death and the passion that had brought about such endings.
Vayne soaked up his master’s ecstatic sufferings. He knelt down behind the warlord, laying his slender hands on the Chaos warrior’s shoulders. He leant in to Archaon’s ear. The chosen of Chaos seemed not to know he was there. His neck spasmed and his head twitched in some private heaven of his murderous making. Vayne kissed the brawn of Archaon’s blood-speckled neck and nibbled at his master’s ear.
‘I wish I could be in there with you,’ he hissed lasciviously. Turning his head, for a moment, it seemed that the warlord had understood him.
‘Dravik…’ Sularii warned, coming up behind the corsair-captain and needling the druchii’s shoulders with her own dagger-sharp nails. The realisation that Archaon might not be as lost in his never-ending moment of bliss as first thought sent a thrill of horror through the dark elves. The Chaos warrior could snatch for his heretical blade – buried in the muscle-bound body of some rat monster half-breed – and end them for their treacheries. ‘Dravik…’ Sularii groaned, sensing the imminence of her end. Even the prospect of her death excited the dark elf sorceress. Archaon seemed to be fighting the deviancies he was experiencing. A snarl wrinkled its way through his lip. The warlord had been locked in the sensual sanctum of his own mind and Dravik Vayne had thrown away the key. Taking his face in the digits of his willowy fingers, the druchii leant in and kissed the chosen of darkness, the chosen of the Ruinous Powers and now the sole chosen of Slaanesh.