by Ben Counter
‘You maniac!’ cried the beastmaster as the bloody tumult spread like a fire.
Skanis could see the scars on the Clawed Fiend’s back and the burned patches where the beastmaster’s prod had been used like a branding iron. She cracked her whip as it loped towards her, but it had suffered so much it didn’t seem to notice the new red line opening up among the old scars.
‘You are mine!’ the beastmaster shouted at the Clawed Fiend. She cracked the whip again, but the creature didn’t flinch. ‘Obey me! Obey!’
Skanis didn’t stay around to watch what followed. He ran for the far end of the menagerie, darting around the beasts until he reached a twisted mass of rusted steel that granted access to the floors above.
He felt the razorwing chick shoot past his ear and grabbed it out of the air as he ran. Behind him, the Clawed Fiend bellowed and the beastmaster’s voice reached him from the tumult. He couldn’t tell if she was still cursing him, or screaming.
It didn’t matter. He would never be down here again.
To the ignorant, it might have seemed beautiful.
This high up, the layer of smoke and cloud was a hazy, translucent layer of grey laid over the city. Commorragh looked like the spiny hide of a flayed beast beneath the fug. The uppermost spires pierced the clouds, each trying to outdo its neighbour. Some were shattered and dark, long abandoned save by the few creatures able to survive at this altitude. Others blazed with light where the archons and nobles tried to banish the desperation of their lives with the pursuit of power or pleasure.
The outside of the spire’s pinnacle was covered in vanes and spikes, the remains of a communications system that had gone dark centuries ago. Skanis clung to one of the vanes against the shriek of the cold wind. His chest burned with each freezing breath but he exulted in the feeling. The lungs Urviel had given him were efficient enough to function up here. Any normal drukhari would have wilted and fallen asleep, never to wake up. Skanis was not normal.
Commorragh was beneath him now. Above him was just the sky, the veined purple of festering meat. Tiny winged specks wheeled in the upper cloud layer, forming loops and spirals as they swarmed. A flock of razorwings out hunting.
Skanis took the razorwing chick from his shoulder. It ruffled its red and steel plumage. He held the chick up into the wind and it spread its wings, and hopped out of his palm.
The tiny razorwing caught an updraught and soared high above the spire pinnacle. Then it looped down again, newly assured in its flight, and arrowed down towards the flock below. Skanis watched it merge with the pattern.
Now, it was his turn.
Skanis gripped the vane with both hands. He felt the flickers of pain down his back and the wrenching in the places where his ribs met his spine. He gasped out loud as, even through the high scream of the wind, he could hear the sound of bone cracking and skin tearing.
Finally, with a wonderful wash of agony, his wings were fully spread.
They were beautiful. Skin – his own and donated from dozens of specimens in Urviel’s lab – was spread across a framework of carved and hollowed bone. Scalloped lengths of flesh formed feather-like trailing edges. Urviel had carefully spliced new veins and arteries into the muscle, and they ran in a pulsing spider’s web across Skanis’ whole wingspan.
Skanis could have hung there forever, letting the knifing wind ignite the pain receptors of his new wings. But he had not come this far just for the sensation. That kind of quest was for the vermin of Commorragh, who destroyed themselves looking for a new experience to cloud over their misery. He opened his eyes, bunched up the grafted muscles in his legs, and launched himself off the spiretop.
The wind caught his wings and he flew straight across the top of the cloud layer. Protective membranes slid across his eyes to protect them from the wind. He hurtled, gathering speed, and angled his wings to soar up in a loop so fast and wide he thought he would breach Commorragh’s atmosphere entirely. But then he reached the apex and dived again, pulled up to skim the smog layer, and left a rippling wake of disturbed smoke as he went.
Another spiretop rushed past beneath him. He glimpsed an eyrie built into its architecture – a nest-like structure where others like him survived far above the darkness of the city. He saw their wings, some feathered and some bat-like, and their masks that resembled narrow raptor beaks. They watched him as he soared overhead, and raised their daggers and swords in salute.
There were more spires too, stretching off further than Skanis’ altered eyes could see. They had their own eyries, their own new angels, whose place was so far above the streets that they lived in another world.
The Scourges were the drukhari who had escaped Commorragh. They roosted in its abandoned spiretops and flew the air currents above the clouds. They were his people now, his species, apart from the rest of this miserable society. Skanis would find them and join them in abandoning the desperate cruelty of the drukhari. He would finally find what he had never had in the kabal – his own kind. He would be new. He would be complete.
The sensations of the flight were so overwhelming he didn’t notice the wound on his forearm opening up again. The slashes in his leg and ribs were pulled apart too, and fresh blood flowed from them, dissipating in droplets into the wind. He left a trail of red as he circled and dived.
The blood fell through the cloud layer and into the swirling flock of razorwings. The creatures caught the scent and formed into a great dark wave of bodies, swelling upwards to hunt down the source.
Skanis did not notice them until the first of them broke his line of sight and soared above him. He banked and flew with his new companion in the sky. Another joined it, then a dozen more, and as one they hurtled down at him head-on.
Where they passed him in mid-air, their knife-sharp feathers sliced deep into his skin. He cried out and tumbled, having to fight to stay aloft. More of the flock darted at him, slashing at him with every pass. His blood showered down and drove their feeding frenzy higher.
Skanis twisted and dropped to get out of the heart of the flock, but the lure of his blood kept them on him as if they were each tied to Skanis’ body by an invisible thread.
One tiny shape detached itself from the swooping mass of razorwings. Its uncertain wings took it on a wide, halting loop until it fell back down towards Skanis, folding its wings back as it gained speed.
Skanis just saw it as it shot towards him. The razorwing chick he had rescued from the gutters outside Kaledari Spire.
The chick arrowed straight into Skanis’ left eye.
Skanis cried out as the razorwing thrashed in his eye socket. He lost control of his flight and he fell, spinning end over end, into the cloud layer. His wings were tatters now. A hundred wounds sprayed blood into a fine red mist around him. The razorwings followed him, slashing and devouring as he fell.
The pet grotesque loped eagerly down the alleyway at the scent of putrefaction. Urviel followed it through the gloom, tossing bones and body parts into the hide bag carried by a second grotesque beside him. Each grotesque had been made of the same scraps he found here in the lowest levels of Commorragh, where the trash of the spires eventually found a way into Urviel’s domain.
It was a good day. Something had happened up on Kaledari Spire and the bodies were still falling. Fresh corpses, still wearing the garb of a great lord’s courtiers, were littering the gutter-levels. Urviel had almost filled the bag with severed limbs and caved-in heads.
‘What have you found?’ the haemonculus hissed as the lead grotesque snuffled and growled at a heap on the ground. Urviel approached to see a pale, thin-limbed shape, broken against the stone where it had landed.
Urviel recognised the tattered wings that still clung to the corpse’s back, and the unnaturally elongated bone structure.
‘Hmm, yes, one of mine,’ said Urviel. Patients and experiments came and went and Urviel no longer recalled names or faces,
but he knew the pattern of feathered skin along the edge of the wing. Urviel lifted the draping tatters of membrane for a closer look. ‘Did I know your name?’ He paused. ‘Yes. You thought you would be the one in a thousand who finds the eyries of the Scourges. But now you have come back to me. They always do.’
The grotesque gathered up the shattered body and threw it into the hide bag. Urviel’s harvest for the day was complete, and it had been good. No matter how many drukhari came to be altered on his slab, no matter what dreams they had of moving beyond Commorragh, they always came back to him in the end. Another would come tomorrow, with the same dream, and the city would drag him back down, too. His flesh would become part of Urviel’s next creation. Commorragh was a living thing. This was its life cycle.
Commorragh would hunger again. And there would always be another to feed it.
About the Author
Ben Counter has two Horus Heresy novels to his name – Galaxy in Flames and Battle for the Abyss. He is the author of the Soul Drinkers series and The Grey Knights Omnibus. For Space Marine Battles, he has written The World Engine and Malodrax, and has turned his attention to the Space Wolves with the novella Arjac Rockfist: Anvil of Fenris as well as a number of short stories. He is a fanatical painter of miniatures, a pursuit that has won him his most prized possession: a prestigious Golden Demon award. He lives in Portsmouth, England.
For millennia, Asdrubael Vect has ruled the dark city of Commorragh, crushing any who dare to cross him. His reach is long and his position unassailable... or so he thinks.
A Black Library Publication
First published in Great Britain in 2018.by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Alex Boyd.
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ISBN: 978-1-78572-950-8
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