by Rob Sanders
As Archaon led his warherd down through the Scabyrinth, his half-breeds feasted. The legs of monster arachnids and malformed shellfish eaten whole provided an army’s bounty after the necessities of cannibalism on the lifeless Wastes. They soon encountered those who viewed the undercanyons similarly. Beastfiend hunting parties and migrating daemonbreeds, who favoured the warm passage of the Scabyrinth over the murderous cold of the hail-lashed wilderness above. The disturbing forms of god-cursed spawn that leapt at them from caves and hollows. Malformed monsters of great size and ferocity. Some were hibernating in the twists and turns of the Scabyrinth undercanyons. Word was passed down the ragged line for half-breeds to be silent and soft of hoof.
Other creatures treated the depths of the labyrinth like a game trail, feasting on the things that travelled back and forth along it. Archaon and his beastfiends were forced to slay such abominations, swarming the great creatures while hacking them with bone-axe and viciously stabbing them with spears. Such creatures also provided valuable sustenance. Archaon passed the word for half-breeds to cut strips of meat from the colossal carcasses and hang it from their belts for later. Archaon did not intend to stop. He needed his warherd strong. He needed them to keep eating so that they could keep marching and fighting.
‘We’re getting close,’ Sheerian said, hobbling up behind Archaon. The Chaos warrior knew what it must have taken to do that, pushing through the pain of aching joints and dragging his bird’s foot. It wasn’t simply to be agreeable or indulge in idle conversation. Sheerian knew better than to indulge such pointlessness. Archaon suspected that he wanted to be close to the Eye. Surrendering the jewel had been difficult for the sorcerer – to be forced once again to see the world as others saw it, cursed with the limitations of common sight. Archaon couldn’t trust the Tzeentchian as far as he could spit, and often suspected he was scheming some way to earn the mystical gem back. In the meantime, the best the Tzeentchian could expect was hobbling close to his master and bathing in the Eye’s sorcerous power. On occasion, when their needs were shared, Archaon found the sorcerer’s knowledge and advice tedious but useful. ‘Look…’
Sheerian pointed up at the ice above their heads. The black crystal of the floe had started to glow a dark purple as the balelight of the polar rift reached through the ice. ‘The Gatelands, my lord.’
‘And the palaces of doomed daemons,’ Archaon said.
‘Powerful entities, master,’ Sheerian added. ‘They bear the favour of the Dark Gods to hold sovereignty in such lands. It is a great honour reserved for the most dangerous and twisted of their kind.’
‘Do you have a point, sorcerer?’ Archaon growled, crunching through the wet gravel beside a black stream. ‘For, if you do, I would have you make it.’
‘Only that,’ Sheerian said, his bowed head mottled with age, ‘it would be wise to exercise caution here. That’s all.’
‘Understood.’
As Sheerian fell back, unable to keep pace with his master’s determined progress, Archaon reached a sharp corner in the canyon. Archaon could hear shouting, and the roar of a great beast bouncing about the twisted path of the labyrinthine ravine. It had been some hours since his sword had been baptised in daemonblood or nestled in the flesh of some monster or brute beastfiend. Drawing Terminus, Archaon came to a halt. Opening the Eye of Sheerian, the warlord peered up the torturous twists and turns of the canyon. He saw an engagement of some kind. A monstrous creature, tormented by scores of infernal gors. One carried a banner of some kind.
‘Sorcerer,’ Archaon called, prompting Sheerian to hobble up behind. The Swords of Chaos moved forward like sentinels, bone swords drawn and wings extended protectively about them like warrior-gargoyles. Archaon raised a fist, prompting Vier to lay a twisted gauntlet on Giselle’s shoulder and bring the addled girl to a stop. Ograx the Great saw the signal also and slowed, settling his mighty skull-axe across his shoulders. Behind his hulking form the cavalcade of half-breeds and beastfiends slowed also.
‘My lord?’ Sheerian asked. Archaon drew him close, into the halo of light that the sorcerous Eye cast about the warlord when it was open, so that the Tzeentchian sorcerer might also be caught up in its dark potency and catch a glimpse or vague suggestion of what Archaon was seeing.
‘What do you see, sorcerer?’ Archaon demanded. ‘The banner: what does it show?’
Archaon saw the ancient’s shoulders gently fall as he once again sampled the gift of the Eye. When he was younger, Archaon remembered seeing Sieur Kastner doing something similar. He would similarly demonstrate such relief upon taking a swig from his flask. The relief of an addict. Sheerian took his time. ‘Sorcerer,’ Archaon demanded. ‘What do you see?’
Sheerian almost cracked his ancient face with a horrible smile.
‘We are near…’ the sorcerer said absently.
‘Sorcerer,’ Archaon told him, ‘I swear by your faithless lord, if you don’t tell me what you see, I’ll put out your greedy eyes.’
‘The claw symbol of the daemon lord Agrammon, my lord,’ the ancient told him. ‘Daubed on skins, armour and a banner. A hunting party, sent out to trap the exotic beasts of the Wastes for the daemon lord’s collection.’
Through the Eye’s shimmering gaze, Archaon saw the crude symbol to which the sorcerer made reference. A claw or pincer, an emblem of infernal royalty. The mark of the daemon Agrammon. With it Archaon saw the sensual sigils of the Prince of Pleasure, the Ruinous Power Agrammon honoured with his bottomless greed, his indulgence and his monstrous menagerie. The symbols were splashed across the shaven chests of beastfiend trappers: creatures of sickening flesh, entwining horns and long tapering snouts. Their eyes were blank and white, while in their pincer-fingers they held twisted tridents of sinewy bone, and long whips that they cracked about the foul creature they had trapped against the canyon wall.
Archaon turned the Eye on the monstrosity they had cornered. A primeval horror of scale and warty skin – gnarled enough to turn aside a blade – it was some aberration of the Wastes: a toad-like dragon. Its webbed feet splashed about in the shallows of the meltwater stream, and it unleashed thunderous croaks from its huge rubbery maw as Agrammon’s bestial trappers thrust their tridents at it and slashed their whips of sinew in the shallows. As one of the long-snouts splashed through the black waters at the toad dragon, forcing it back, the creature ballooned its bulbous throat and reared up. Opening its great maw the thing regurgitated its last meal upon the beastfiend. The vomit was a deluge of bloody bile and steaming bones. The trapper trumpeted a ghastly shriek from its long snout as the acidic contents of the toad dragon’s stomach drenched it. As flesh began to dribble from its bones, the Slaaneshi trapper stumbled towards its compatriot beasts but the long-snouts backed away. Within moments the beastfiend had become a steaming mound of melted flesh, hissing and dissolving on the shoreline of the stream. The toad dragon hopped forward, croaking its monstrous desire to be left alone. The Slaaneshi beastfiends trumpeted their own fears as they skipped back through the waters on the tips of their hooves.
Through the dizzying vision presented to him by the enchanted Eye, Archaon could see movement in the shadows. Along the opposite wall of the canyon, he could see the spiny silhouettes of rude wagons and ramshackle cages, dragged along by bipedal beasts of daemonic burden. The bars of the cages were barbed and twisted and held all manner of captured quarry. Half-breed prisoners. Wasteland spawn. Monsters and daemons. Prizes of every shape and size for Agrammon’s ever-expanding collection.
A great black shape reared from one of the wagons where it had been making a fuss of the yapping pack of horned hunting hounds, whose tapering snouts had tracked the hunting party to the foul toad dragon. Rearing to full height and striding from the shadow of the canyon wall, a malformed hulk looked upon the failure of the beastfiend trappers to contain the toad dragon with sneering contempt. It appeared to be an ogre of some kind, warped by the corrupting insistence of
the Southern Wastes. It was a horror to behold. Its flesh was black like the charcoal of a fire, while its back was monstrously hunched and its belly huge. The rest of the creature’s frame sported a kilt of roughly stitched skins and furs that covered the monster’s loins, passed across its belly and then over its shoulder before being pinned to its hunch on great spines that protruded from the hump. The furs did not conceal the creature’s blubbery chest, which Archaon assumed the ogre exposed in honour of its patron power. The monster sported a second face – a malformed twin of some kind. Its eyes were misted and a milky black poison leaked from its mouth and dribbled down the ogre’s colossal belly. One of the monster’s arms was short and atrophied, while the other was muscle-bound and as thick as a tree.
‘What is that foul creature?’ Archaon put to his dread sorcerer.
‘The brute is called Jharkill,’ Sheerian said. ‘He is the best of Lord Agrammon’s hunters and the tyrant-keeper of his royal menagerie.’ Archaon nodded as they watched the monster from afar. As the creature stomped forward from the shadows it gave some kind of unintelligible instruction to its hunter half-breeds. Beastfiends on the canyon ledges above the toad dragon hauled down on staffs of monstrous bone, prising boulders off the canyon side that crashed down either side of the cornered creature. The boulders carried between them a rough net of sinew that trapped the toad dragon and pinned it to the shoreline.
The toad dragon would not submit, however. As it thunder-croaked its amphibious fury, the thing exuded a slimy pus from its warty skin that allowed it to squirm and slide out from under the weighted net. As it bounded forward, the monster’s grapnel-like tongue shot out from its gaping maw. The sharp tongue speared its way through the back of a fleeing beastfiend and out through its chest. There the fleshy grapnel opened and the tongue retracted like a whip, dragging the unfortunate creature back into the rubbery mouth. A second and third half-breed died similarly, trumpeting their horror from their tapering snouts as they were dragged to an acidic doom.
Stomping forward as the Slaaneshi beastfiends ran, Jharkill produced a great bow carved from the tusk of some previous victim-monster. Taking a bone arrow from a fur quiver that formed the back of its kilt, the ogre wiped the barbed arrowhead against its belly, smearing it in the poison that leaked from the mouth of its assimilated twin. Confidently stringing the bow as the toad dragon leapt forwards, the ogre held the arrow and hooked the sinew of the string on the clawed fingers of its atrophied arm. With its other monstrous appendage it pushed the tusk bow away from it, building a colossal amount of power in the barbarian weapon. As the toad dragon’s belly heaved and its bulbous throat filled with the rancid contents of its stomach, the ogre let fly, sending the length of the arrow hurtling at the monster. With a thud the arrow hammered through the creature’s scales and into the rubbery flesh of its shoulder.
The monster croaked in anguish, its bounding charge veering into a stumble and a splashing flounder through the shallows. Within seconds the poison had taken effect and the toad dragon was lurching this way and that up the shore, its eyes dazed and rheumy. The thing finally crashed into the bank, its warty back rising and falling with the exertion of breathing. Its mouth fell slackly open, as though it were half-asleep, and sizzling vomit seeped out, collecting about the creature’s head.
Archaon watched with interest as Jharkill approached the monster and gave his bow to a beastfiend that had trotted forth. Several other half-breeds approached, cautious of their master’s fury in the face of their failure. The ogre slipped a length of sinewy string from his furs, upon which were strung tiny skulls, pendants of glyph-etched bone and crude effigies carved in horn and petrified wood. He handed the string to another beastfiend, who moved nimbly forward through the black waters of the stream to tie the savage charm about the toad dragon’s neck. This done, the half-breed returned with one of the effigies – a small, primitive sculpture of some four-legged monster. This the half-breed gave to Jharkill, who had taken up the shaman’s staff. The staff towered over even Jharkill and bore the ragged banner that had initially identified the hunting party as belonging to the daemon lord Agrammon. Above the Ruinous symbols of Dark Gods and fell masters, Archaon could see a cross bar upon which a plethora of primitive effigies hung. They were all shapes and sizes. Some were crafted to represent creatures that stood on two legs, while others were figurines of four-legged monsters, like the toad dragon. Others cut such strange shapes and figures that it was difficult to imagine what monstrosities they represented. The staff jangled as Jharkill brought it down and the half-breed tied the effigy to one of the many strings of dried sinew that hung from the cross bar.
To Archaon’s amazement, the ogre cracked his staff on the rock of the canyon floor, causing the toad dragon to immediately haul its drowsy bulk from the shallows. Jangling the staff towards the wagons and wheeled cages that were lined up against the opposite wall of the canyon, Jharkill seemed to control the creature’s impulses. The monster groaned, as if in some private torment inflicted by the staff, and hobbled between the jabbing tridents of Jharkill’s long-snouts and the snarling of his horned hunting hounds. It dragged itself up into a large cage that had been crafted to accommodate such a creature and lay miserably down.
With the cage secured, Jharkill directed word to be passed for the hunting party’s wagons to roll on up the canyon. Archaon nodded with approval. On into the Gatelands, towards Agrammon’s palace with cages full of creatures damned and monstrous for his daemon lord’s collection. As the wagons and wheeled cages trundled away, the beastfiends of the hunting party trotted alongside, forming an escort. Jharkill walked up to one of the half-breeds, and Archaon recognised it as the creature that had initially fled in the face of the toad dragon’s wrath. The beastfiend realised at the last moment that he was now to suffer his master’s displeasure and turned his trident on the ogre too late. Jharkill snatched the beastfiend up from behind, ending the long-snout’s trumpeting alarm by biting the half-breed’s head off and tossing the decapitated body into the stream.
‘Seen enough?’ the sorcerer Sheerian asked.
‘Enough to tell me how I’m going to get into Lord Agrammon’s palace undetected,’ Archaon said, turning and walking back to where Ograx and the Swords of Chaos had brought Archaon’s army to a halt. ‘We seek a daemon lord,’ Archaon told them, with Sheerian translating his command into dark tongue for the bestial prince. ‘A daemon lord who has something that belongs to me. I mean to get it back. There is a hunting party ahead, returning to this wretched daemon’s palace. I mean to go ahead alone and join it by the time it reaches its destination.’
‘You are going to steal the Steed of the Apocalypse?’ Sheerian asked.
‘I am,’ Archaon said with supreme confidence.
‘How will you find it, my lord?’
‘The Eye will guide me,’ Archaon said.
‘I fear on this occasion, master, the Eye will not be enough,’ the ancient mewled. ‘For the daemonic beast Dorghar has many forms. It is a creature of ill will and monstrous temperament. I fear it will be difficult to locate.’
Archaon considered. Sheerian was, of course, correct.
‘I am told this creature is the most prized of all Lord Agrammon’s foetid specimens.’
‘Some say that’s true, my lord.’
‘Then it will no doubt take pride of place in the greatest of the menagerie’s cages and enclosures,’ Archaon said. Sheerian nodded slowly, for the sorcerer could not fault the warlord’s logic.
‘You go alone, my lord?’ Sheerian interrupted once again.
‘Yes,’ Archaon rumbled.
‘Take at least your Swords of Chaos,’ the sorcerer said. ‘Agrammon’s palace will be crawling with half-breeds, daemonkind and infernals.’
‘Lord Agrammon must not know of our presence,’ Archaon told the ancient with cold certainty. ‘Or else all is lost. The fewer of us that enter the palace, the fewer there w
ill be to alert the daemon lord to our presence and intentions.’ Eins, Zwei and Drei stood in silence, but the stillness of their wings and the way they looked down at the canyon floor told Archaon that they were no happier about the prospect of their warlord entering an enemy palace alone. He was their warlord, however, and the order was observed without contention. Ograx the Great wasn’t about to disagree. If the warlord Archaon wished to sacrifice himself on the palace altar of the daemon lord Agrammon, all the better. The bestial prince would simply take Archaon’s barbarian horde for his own. For that reason, Archaon knew he could count on Ograx to hold the army back. ‘Track the hunting party,’ Archaon told him as Sheerian translated his words. He jabbed two fingers at the eye sockets of his skull-helm and then the same two fingers down at the canyon floor. ‘Follow, but at a distance. Make camp near the palace and wait.’
Ograx wrapped his fat tongue around some choice words. Sheerian looked uncertain.
‘For how long?’ the sorcerer translated.
Archaon grunted. He had no sun or moon to guide them by. The only thing he could count on was the rhythm of bodily needs. Thirst. Hunger. Sleep.
‘When the last gor of the horde has risen from slumber, on the third of such risings, three days as the rest of the world knows them will have passed. If I am not returned by then with my prize, then storm Agrammon’s palace with every half-breed at your disposal.’
Ograx the Great nodded his head, heavy as it was with its crown of horn. As Archaon went to leave, Sheerian piped up once more.
‘This steed, my lord,’ the sorcerer said. ‘It is one of the treasures of Chaos, is it not? A trapping by which the Everchosen of the Chaos gods might be known.’
‘And possibly much more,’ Archaon said, turning his head to one side. ‘I would not risk so much for anything less.’
Archaon turned his back on the sorcerer. Ograx turned away also, intent on savagely issuing Archaon’s orders to the horde through a brutal hierarchy of bulls, gors and taurs. He could feel Sheerian and the Swords of Chaos watching him go. He didn’t look back. They had their orders and would obey them or there would be literal hell to pay. As Archaon trudged up through the wet gravel of the stream, he saw Giselle and Vier. The girl had wandered beyond the vanguard of the horde, waiting for Archaon’s orders. She stood absently, up to her ankles in the freezing, black waters, the musty furs in which she was buried trailing through the meltwater stream. Vier hovered nearby in his own agonies, uselessly stretching his malformed wings. Archaon nodded to the Chaos warrior, whom Archaon had assigned as Giselle’s minder and bodyguard. Vier bowed his head with difficulty, a signal of silent obedience.