[Warhammer 40K] - Daemon World

by Ben Counter - (ebook by Undead)

  Grik walked closer. He shrugged the thick furs off his shoulders and Golgoth saw the chieftain was a hulking muscular creature. His face was flat-featured as if pushed in; his hair, black and lank, stuck to his face with grease and sweat. There was something wrong with his mouth—it turned down at the comers and carried on down either side of his throat under the layers of hide and leather he wore. Those glowing eyes were pits in Grik’s face, no pupil or iris, no lids.

  Golgoth weighed his axe, the sorcerer’s silver spines now melting from its haft. He had nearly lost control, he knew, in the fight by the wagons. Now this hateful creature was laughing at him, this mockery of a man, boasting that he was using the Emerald Sword as a tool for his own ends. He had to keep his ice heart from melting. He had to keep his power in control, when all his life he had let his rage loose to overcome any obstacle.

  In Grik’s hand was a glaive, with a long handle and a thick, chopping blade pitted with age and nicked from a thousand butcherings. “I will show you weakness, Golgoth. You will know what weakness is when you are on your knees begging for death.”

  The glaive cut the air as Grik swung it, lumbering closer. Golgoth tensed, feeling the ice within him melting. Surely it was only rage that would take him through? Surely only hatred could win?

  Grik roared and slammed the glaive down into the ground, carving through the furs and into the earth. Golgoth swiped at Grik’s torso but the big man was suddenly quick, darting back too fast to see, and the butt end of his glaive slammed into Golgoth’s chest. Golgoth stumbled back and felt the heavy blade slicing into his burned shoulder as the chieftain hacked down at him. The tip of the glaive cut through the hide of the tent and light flooded in. In daylight Grik’s skin was pale and sallow, and the chieftain bellowed as Golgoth rolled away from him.

  As he roared, Grik’s mouth came fully open. It gaped from his upper lip to his lower chest, a huge wet red maw studded with irregular teeth, a glistening flap of dark flesh pulsing deep inside. Golgoth stumbled to his feet and Grik lunged, the huge mouth snapping wetly shut a hand’s span from Golgoth’s face.

  Golgoth swung heavily and his axe bit deep into Grik’s arm, only angering the monstrous warrior more.

  Grik struck out and Golgoth had to leap back to avoid disembowelment. He parried Grik’s return stroke and felt the chieftain’s bestial strength.

  Grik was an animal. A monster. He was impossibly strong, as fast and deadly as he was deformed. In a brawl such as this contest was becoming, Grik would win by strength and bloody-mindedness alone. That must not happen. The odds had been heavily against Golgoth even surviving the mountain journey, but he had made it all the way here, to the chieftain’s tent and the presence of his enemy. He would not fail now.

  Control was the key. Grik was a beast, who had no control. Golgoth could be something more. And that was how Golgoth would kill him.

  He wouldn’t cleave open Grik’s stomach or slice off his head. Grik was too huge and powerful for Golgoth to despatch with one heroic killing blow, such as he had used to sever the heads of lesser men in the days before Kron had taught him there could be more.

  The strength and the speed and the accuracy that Kron had given him were bound even tighter by icy bars of control: Golgoth forced every instinct he had into a cage where he could command them like soldiers. He wanted to plunge his axe blade into Grik’s stomach—he promised himself he could, if he was only patient. His warrior’s spirit demanded that he batter Grik to the ground and stamp down on his mutant face—Golgoth silenced the voice and commanded his body to weave and parry, draw blood and weaken his opponent, frustrate Grik’s rage and torment him into making mistakes.

  Grik seemed slower already, his glaive ponderous as it swung. Golgoth met it and turned it aside with his axe, gauging the return and dodging it entirely. The edge of his axe grazed Grik’s skin and with every cut Grik bellowed, the massive distended jaw jabbering and strands of saliva flying. Golgoth parried and counter-struck, the axe quick in his hands, Grik’s blood soaking into the furs on the floor and flaps of slit skin hanging off the chieftain’s frame. Grik was enraged and every wound made it worse, anger and pain clouding his reason. He charged and bludgeoned over and over again, missing and exhausting himself while Golgoth kept himself in check and, patiently, slowly, bled his enemy to death.

  Golgoth was aware of others gathering, watching through the tears in the tent’s hide walls—Grik’s warriors and even those of his own men who had survived. They knew better than to intervene. Grik would never forgive them if they won his duel for him, and none dared risk helping Golgoth in case they found themselves on the losing side. This had become a duel, and only one man was permitted victory.

  Grik was all but on his knees. Golgoth stepped round a clumsy lunge and hacked downwards, cutting through the back of Grik’s thigh, severing the hamstring. The chieftain crumpled, his breathing heavy like a tired horse, sweat a glassy sheen on his face, his red eyes dull and bleeding. The blade of his glaive touched the floor as the energy bled out of him. He looked up at Golgoth who stood over him.

  What he saw was not hatred; it was not rage. It was control.

  Golgoth drove his axe into the back of Grik’s head, shattering the spine where it joined the skull. Control.

  Grik kneeled upright for a few moments, as if trying to shrug off his death and fight on. Then the final drops of energy seeped from him and his monstrous bulk toppled to the floor, the breath rattling out of his cavernous mouth.

  There was silence. The warriors and tribes people gathered outside the tent had been holding their breaths as Grik died, unable to believe it was true. Now their chieftain was dead.

  Golgoth knew they could kill him now, if they wanted. It didn’t matter. Grik was dead. The Emerald Sword stood a chance of survival. It was done.

  He had been planning this victory, in one way or another, for his whole adult life. Perhaps it was the mind-spell of control that Kron had taught him, but Golgoth still felt cold inside. The hollow in his soul, which he had dreamed of filling with triumph, was still there. Had he done anything more than kill a man?

  The Emerald Sword could still decay and fall. The mountain peoples could fragment, never to be bound by the Sword, to be absorbed by the empire of Lady Charybdia or whatever might come after her. Even the memory of Arrowhead Peak would wilt into nothing, disappearing into the sea of Torvendis’s legend.

  Golgoth could die that very moment and still have woven a story worth telling. But how long would it survive? When a man no longer had stories told about his life, then he was truly dead. The greatest legends let their creators live forever. Could Golgoth be something more than another killer?

  Golgoth stepped out of the tent, the harsh daylight almost painful. The people of Grik’s city were staring at him, this blood-covered warrior with one arm charred and oozing, hair thick with gore, blinking in the light.

  No. This was not Grik’s city any more.

  Golgoth saw Hath in the crowd, one eye swollen shut and crusted with blood.

  “Get men back on the watchtowers,” said Golgoth. “Pull this place down and have them put up somewhere fit for a chieftain. And gather healers, we are all bloody and wounded.”

  Hath nodded and turned to bark orders. Golgoth limped over to Tarn, who still had a stained dagger in each hand and the blood of a half-dozen men spattered on his face. There would be elders and adopted foundlings who would still owe loyalty to the memory of Grik. Tarn was the perfect resource for dealing with such obstacles.

  Yes, the new chieftain of the Emerald Sword had much to organise.

  Prakordian, Phaedos decided, had proven to have uses.

  Though his devotion to the pantheon of Chaos was worrisome, Prakordian’s skills as a deadspeaker had put the coven firmly on the track of the renegade at last. Between the Word Bearers’ guns and Phaedos’s own chainsword the coven had left nothing alive at the temple seven days before, but even death could not silence what Prakordian desired to hear. />
  That the acolyte was already dead hadn’t deterred Prakordian—in fact, it made things easier, for a dead man had few defences. Sorcery had forced the lips to open and speak, condemning the tattered lungs to draw breath and the pulped brain to remember. On the stone floor of the temple, the forest of chains sighing above and the torn banners still smouldering, Prakordian had forced out the truth.

  The one they had chosen to start with had been lowly, his body was the most intact. Bullets to the gut had blown out his spine—the upper half of his body had been relatively unblemished. Prakordian mumbled spells with words that could not be spoken by weaker men, cast a complex gesture above the body, and wove a spell that dragged the acolyte’s tainted soul back from the world of Torvendis’s dead.

  It was a form of torture almost by proxy—though there were things more terrifying than looking out from a tomb of dead flesh, those things were not very numerous. The acolyte had babbled in his horror, about the dreams he had suffered where pleasure became pain and back again, about the secret war in every Slaaneshi follower’s mind between the demands of the god and their own human decency. It told the coven much of the perils of honouring one power of Chaos over another—the whole essence of Chaos was anarchy where any power might wax or wane, and giving fealty to any one alone would lead to decay of the soul and madness. But amongst the babblings, the truth could be filtered out, even as the dead soul disintegrated in the bounds of Prakordian’s spell.

  The acolyte had known little. The temple was an outpost of faith, an epicentre for the spread of the Slaaneshi worship that Lady Charybdia fed upon. The temple’s chief priest, a degenerate named Yrvo, had been of little importance outside the strange silken cage of the temple. The sacrifices, the crude pleasure-sorcery, the divination through blood and agony—it was all typical of blinkered, unenlightened creatures made up the population of Lady Charybdia’s empire.

  But there had been something else, hidden deep in the dying spirit’s insanity.

  An order, issued by Lady Charybdia herself and hence of paramount importance, had arrived carried by a bound messenger daemon several days before. A spacecraft had arrived unbidden on the planet, on the unpopulated side of the mountains, evidently small but alien and invasive. It was commanded that all temples offer shelter to any riders travelling to investigate the trespass.

  There were many such commands, proscriptions and enforced celebrations, new and sometimes bizarre laws, or just scraps of Lady Charybdia’s thoughts disseminated for her subjects’ benefit. But this one nugget of information caught in the minds of coven like prey in a snare.

  A spacecraft, one that shouldn’t be here.

  Karnulon.

  If anything, it was better than a sighting of the man himself. There was little doubt that the renegade could change his appearance almost at will—a Space Marine could be three metres tall, and broad, but Karnulon’s magics would definitely stretch to giving him normal human proportions. A Chaos Marine’s wargear could be cast aside, implant scars covered up, all signs of Karnulon’s true heritage obliterated. But a spacecraft would be harder to hide.

  Captain Amakyre had sent Phaedos, Skarlan and the hulking Vrox to investigate their first lead. Amakyre himself, Makelo, Prakordian and Feorkan had remained in the temple, to divine other anomalies from the magical atmosphere of Torvendis.

  Skarlan was a soldier, nothing more. Vrox was a monster, blessed by Chaos with a very special flavour of corruption, but a monster with a monster’s intellect. So it was that Phaedos was in command.

  One day, Phaedos would carry the accursed crozius of the Word Bearers’ Emissary, and fight as a battle-chaplain to the Dark Gods, instilling their majesty into his brothers. He would have to spend centuries honing himself in action and meditating on the mysteries of the Chaotic pantheon, but it was through success on missions such as these that he would win the attention and favour of the Legion.

  It was late afternoon when Phaedos clambered over the last ridge and saw what lay east of the Canis Mountains. It was like an open wound in the earth, a boiling, steaming expanse of swampland, a landscape of pure decay. At some point in Torvendis’s past the power of Chaos that pulled on the planet had tugged a little harder, and like a spring tide corruption had been forced to the surface and saturated the ground. Stagnant lakes bubbled in the distance. Strangled, twisted trees were black against plumes of marsh gas. The ground was a sodden mire where thin strips of stable ground gave way to sucking marsh, and a gauze of brownish mist and swarms of swamp insects lay over everything.

  The information on Torvendis had suggested there were inhabitants in those swamps, and Phaedos could imagine what devolved wretches they must be. There was nothing to eat but the scum of algae and the inevitable marsh lizards, no shelter but the rotting boughs of fallen trees that had yet to be swallowed by the swamp. Phaedos was looking down from the rock slopes above the edge of the swamp and even from here the dark, damp stink of the marshes filtered up to him.

  The grey-brown swamps stretched as far as Phaedos’s enhanced vision could see, dissolving into the distance. For most of Torvendis’s population, this sight marked the edge of the habitable world. That made it a good place to hide.

  “Anything?” came Skarlan’s voice over the vox. Phaedos glanced across the rocks and saw the red-armoured form of Skarlan stalking down towards where the rocks met the swamp, bolter readied.

  “Nothing yet. Stay in contact. All praises.”

  “All praises.”

  Satisfied there was no immediate threat, Phaedos beckoned and Vrox lumbered over the ridge behind him, eyes bulbous magnalenses. Phaedos headed downwards, scanning the swamps. If there really was a ship down here, it could have been swallowed by the marshes or even towed away by scavengers into the heart of the corruption where even the Word Bearers might never find it. Just because this was the ship’s supposed location it didn’t mean it was still here.

  Beneath Phaedos’s feet the rock became crumbly and gave way to the edge of the marsh. The boots of his armour sank up to the ankle, then to the knee. Vrox lumbered into the marsh, tearing through the fibrous ground and releasing gouts of greasy marsh gas. A couple plumed into flame, washing inconsequentially over Vrox’s biomechanical skin. Phaedos let his auto-senses sweep over the sickly landscape, trying to pick out a foreign shape amongst the broken forms of trees and bulges of debris-choked ground. The mist exuded by the marshes formed a pale canopy, turning the suns overhead into smears of light. The only sounds were the footsteps of Phaedos and Vrox, the whirring of armour servos, and the ugly sucking of the marsh as it swallowed the spectral shapes of fallen trees.

  “Possible contact,” came Skarlan’s voice. “We’ve got an artefact. Sending coordinates.”

  Twin crosshairs blinked on Phaedos’s auto-senses, projecting from the inside of his helmet onto his retina. Phaedos peered towards their location and made out a tiny dark glint amongst the rot. He picked out Skarlan a few hundred metres away, keeping his bolter trained on the artefact as Phaedos approached and Vrox stomped along behind him. Phaedos saw the anomaly was a teardrop-shaped bulb of metal, sides ribbed, engines flaring from the rear, long horizontal viewports like reptilian eyes.

  It was a pre-Heresy craft, such as roosted in the vast raiding capitol ships of the Word Bearers. It was a single-man vessel but a large one with room for lavish chambers within the bulbous hull. It was Karnulon’s craft, without a doubt, for only one who had been with the Legion since the Heresy would have a personal ship like this. It had crash-landed at a shallow angle, leaving a long furrow behind it that had filled up with brackish water, and looked like nothing so much as a huge metallic beached whale.

  Phaedos approached the side hatch, bolt pistol drawn, and saw it was open. Karnulon must have abandoned the ship, not caring if the swamp scavengers looted it, a sure indication that whatever his plan, Karnulon was committed to pursue it, and was not planning to return.

  Skarlan was backed up by the door, ready to pivot in through t
he hatch and bring his bolter to bear on whatever waited inside. Phaedos reached his side and looked in through the hatch to the indistinct darkness beyond.

  “Go!” he called and ducked in through the hatch, Skarlan entering beside him, each covering all the possible angles of threat.

  Phaedos let his augmented vision cut through the darkness. Instantly the fact registered that Karnulon had stripped out all the decks and bulkheads, leaving only the engines partitioned from a cavernous interior lit by suspended glow-globes high above, like the night sky. A ship of this size should have had three or four decks divided into private quarters, a bridge, an armoury, a galley, and as many other rooms that the owner could fit in. But this ship had only one chamber, vast and dark. Into that interior was crammed ten thousand years’ worth of a sorcerer’s obsessions.

  Books lay about in huge piles, some with covers bound in ensorcelled chains to keep their knowledge from leaking out, others burst like seed pods in drifts of loose pages. Towering cabinets, some leaning against each other precariously, held trophies and trinkets from millennia of battles—skulls of aliens from the bestial to the delicate, flayed skins with intricate surgical patterns or lurid tattoos, weapons of astounding design, brutal or artistic or both. There were captured banners woven from threaded gold, chunks of scorched metal torn from Titans, brains of psychics in jars of preservative, age-stained reliquaries looted from Imperial chapels.

  Bottles and jars of chemicals were racked around scorched alchemical altars. Narrow catwalks high above linked the heads of gargantuan statues.

  Phaedos flicked on his auspex scanner, the screen pulsing but failing to show any bright tell-tale of life. He and Skarlan began to move through the labyrinth of detritus, passing avian skeletons in jewel-studded cages and shrivelled, severed hands that were nailed everywhere. The ceiling high above was like a steel sky lit with electric stars, casting strange fractured shadows over everything.