It would be a good day, thought Demetrius. One of the best.
Lady Charybdia looked down from the balcony over the assembled seers and sorcerers. Plucked from all over the city and brought into the gatehouse of the keep, they were young and old, deformed and pristine, male and female and everything in between. There were hundreds of them in the crowd below, and only a very few knew why they had been called here. The tall stone walls of the gatehouse cast a shadow over the crowd and they shivered in the lightless cold. Most of them had been dragged from their beds and herded through the streets to the keep—some were still naked and painted from the pleasure-domes.
Lady Charybdia had her spies keep a record of all those born with sorcerous talents. She knew she would need them in a situation like this, because she liked to know who she was fighting, and the best way to know was to ask her enemy. For that, she needed a plentiful supply of those born with sorcery in their blood.
The few below who saw her and recognised her through their fear flinched and went pale.
A gaggle of sages, swamped in voluminous robes, trailed in Lady Charybdia’s wake, keeping a respectful distance. Lady Charybdia waved an impatient hand and they scuttled forward, murmuring sacred words, making complex gestures with their hands. A filmy white light, like a pale gauze, fell over the crowd below—some of them whimpered in fear, others said their own prayers for salvation.
“Have you found him?” asked Lady Charybdia of her sages.
One of the sages was thrust forward to speak. “Yes, my lady. He is not a difficult target, we can smell him from here.”
“Good. You are ready?”
“A last few syllables and it will be complete, my lady.”
“Then proceed.”
A few moments more, and the spell was cast. Shapes and lights flickered in the air in front of Lady Charybdia, powered by the energy of her unwilling sorcerers and focused by the lore of her sages. The image hardened until it was something shaped like a man, then like a deformed man, then like something else entirely with strange growths sprouting from its back and its forehead. Nauseating energy rolled off it, pure malevolence. Low moans rose from the crowd as the older and more infirm dropped dead, drained of their lifeforce by the hunger of the spell.
“Ha!” cried the image. “She watches! She sees! She sees her death!”
“You are the one who calls itself Ss’ll Sh’Karr,” said Lady Charybdia coldly.
The image coalesced into the form of the daemon prince. Life-sized, it towered over the balcony, massive bestial head thrust forwards out of the nimbus of power that formed the scrying window. It could see her, too.
It grimaced at her. Lady Charybdia could not remember seeing an uglier creature. “The flesh-god rots you, lady. He drains your strength. This land will be bathed in blood to wash away his stink.”
“The Blood God abandoned this world long ago, daemon,” replied Lady Charybdia coldly. “Ss’ll Sh’Karr was trapped and slain by those he tried to subjugate.”
“I am free!” bellowed the image, and with the exclamation more of the crowd died, blood pouring from their noses and ears. Lady Charybdia shut out the annoying buzz of their death cries.
“The Blood God saw his world made weak and set me upon it!” continued the daemon. “I am his hound of war! My hand is his hand!” The daemon’s voice was a bellow so loud it shook the stones of the gatehouse and knocked the frailer sages off their feet.
“You are not Ss’ll Sh’Karr,” said Lady Charybdia calmly. “Ss’ll Sh’Karr is dead.” She clapped her hands briskly and a quartet of well-muscled legionaries marched out onto the balcony, holding between them the massive skull that had been nailed up in the chapel of the keep. “The monstrous skull of Ss’ll Sh’Karr. They took his head,” she continued. “The same as I shall take yours.”
The daemon peered out from the image at the immense skull, the empty eye sockets returning his gaze. The daemon’s face twisted, its mandibles parting, and Lady Charybdia realised it was smiling.
Then it began to laugh. It was a hideous, hacking, roaring sound, and with every bark of laughter members of the sorcerous crowd died as their bodies ruptured wetly. The daemon lifted a steel-taloned hand to its face and dug the claws into its ugly grey flesh, tearing at the rubbery skin and into the dark wet muscle underneath. The monster that called itself Ss’ll Sh’Karr dug its palm into its face, grabbing a massive handful of flesh, and pulling.
Like scraps of a wet, gory mask, the daemon’s face was torn out, stringy sinews snapping, hot gobbets of ichor raining off the image. The illusory blood mingled with the real blood welling up from the crowd, now a heaving, moaning mass of the dying.
The burning eyes smiled hideously. The fanged mandibles leered in a broken rictus, slick with the daemon’s own blood. As the gore ran off the ruined face, Lady Charybdia saw what the daemon had found so amusing.
Its skull was forged of brass. Its mandibles were hinged sheets of metal, with steaming pistons powering the throat. Alchemical fires burned deep within its jaws and flickered in its eyes. Exposed to the air, the brass was beginning to smoulder with the heat.
“They thought they had killed me, the vermin and slaves who tried to face me! They thought I had been banished, just because they took my head! It takes more than one wound to bring down the Blood God’s will incarnate. I forged a new skull, and showed them how the soldiers of Khorne avenge themselves!”
It occurred to Lady Charybdia that what the daemon said might actually be true. Her sages certainly believed it—many were voiding themselves in fear, quaking even more than they did when Lady Charybdia herself was displeased. She had, herself, bowed in awe before daemons in her distant past, and if truth be told she felt no little apprehension at the fact that Ss’ll Sh’Karr himself might really be camped outside her city with untold legions of daemons and barbarian followers.
The titanic image of the daemon shuddered and faded. Lady Charybdia glanced down from the gatehouse balcony to where the heaped bodies of the sacrifices lay, their lifeforces drained by the effort of powering the sages’ spell. Only a few still lived, and they were thrashing as their lungs collapsed and blood seeped from their noses and ears. Even once the survivors had crawled off, thought Lady Charybdia, it would leave a terrible mess.
A shame. They might have one day served her as sorcerers and seers—but their sacrifice was a small price to pay if it gave some clue as to the nature of her enemy. The image was gone now, leaving only the fading pinpoints of fire that had burned in the eyes of the brass skull. A few more divinations would give a better idea of whether this really was the daemon prince who had forged a reign of blood that still left scars on Torvendis, but for now the ceremony was over.
One thing was certain. The invading horde would have to make their attack before the night was over—the barbarian army would fall apart without food or water, and only by attacking and seizing the city would they hope to keep up the momentum of their invasion. All the signs spoke of another well-lit night, with the stars and moons gathering to watch the battle—it would happen tonight, when the barbarians would think the city’s archers were at a disadvantage. If Ss’ll Sh’Karr was at their head, he would carry with him the weight of legend, but Lady Charybdia had not been idle as queen. Her city brimmed over with traps and killing grounds, where even unarmed slaves and slovenly hedonist-priests would have their uses in blocking up the narrow arteries of walkways.
Ss’ll Sh’Karr could attack if he wished. His army would be repulsed, and the Violators would see to it that even forging a new skull wouldn’t be enough to save the daemon. Lady Charybdia swept back into the keep, leaving her sages to deal with the cleanup. There were new legends to write before the sun came up again.
Golgoth crouched behind the tangle of rocks, painfully aware of how exposed he was, almost within bowshot of the city. He knew that it would take little more than a sharp-eyed archer and a quick-witted sorcerer to put an arrow in his eye. But Ss’ll Sh’Karr had insisted
that Golgoth be present to see this, and he imagined that it would be unwise to snub his ally. So Tarn had led him to this spot and told him to keep his head down as he watched what Sh’Karr had planned. There were others here, too, infiltrators culled from the Serpent and the desert peoples, who would raise the signal to the rest of the horde when the time was right.
Golgoth knew Sh’Karr’s plan. The key tribal leaders knew—Lutr’Kya of the Serpent was even now leading the war-chants of her warriors and the south island headhunters had picked their deadliest butchers to fight alongside the Serpent in the spearhead. It would be better killing than either had seen for decades. It was, quite frankly, an insane way to begin a battle, but then Golgoth had rarely placed much faith in a balanced mind. And whatever happened, it would be as good a way to die as any.
Ss’ll Sh’Karr stomped over the nearest rise, massive strides taking him towards the city. Sighting shots whistled down from the city, and one or two even hit and bounced off his thick daemonic skin. Ss’ll Sh’Karr had torn off his face to reveal a dimly glowing brazen skull. Golgoth found it hard to imagine that anything the monstrous daemon prince did could surprise him any more.
Silver flashes marked spell-wrought arrows that stuck into Sh’Karr’s flesh and dissolved in the heat rolling off him. He ignored them and began to chant.
These were old words and the language was painful to hear, rolling and guttural from Sh’Karr’s inhuman throat. The wind rose to echo the daemon’s words and Golgoth recognised the intricate patterns of sound and the reverberations of power that had haunted Kron’s spells. But this was on a different scale—this was massive, setting the rocks shuddering and the very fires on the city’s watch-towers flickering.
Sh’Karr was yelling now, bellowing prayers to the Blood God that were old when Torvendis was young. Golgoth’s view of the city blurred as the air itself shook with power, and strange lights were flashing in the skies. The stars began to fade from view, recoiling from the magnitude of sorcery that Sh’Karr was calling up.
Then, there was another sound, rolling beneath the wind and the chanting. It was a sound Golgoth had heard many times before—too many times, in the thick of battle and dead of night alike.
Screaming.
In the endless pits beneath the city, millions of slaves were screaming.
The city had been built on the site of a great plain across which had been fought battles without number. Some of the greatest conflicts the Maelstrom had ever seen had ebbed and flowed across that land, one of the few stable places on Torvendis, and lain down the endless layers of war dead that Lady Charybdia’s slave hordes had mined for the pure experience of conflict. There were near-limitless mounds of corpses compressed and ossified into fossil strata, massive daemonic war engines and gargantuan beasts of battle. Bullet shells were sown in the ground like crop seeds. The ground yielded an unending crop of corroded blades and arrowheads.
But the most potent of all the layers was the furthest down, beneath the bones of prehistoric monsters and the skeletons of daemons, bound to their mangled remains but far from dead. It was the place where the heat of Torvendis’s core met the corrupted outer crust.
It was where the blood from all those battles had flowed down and settled, an ocean of gore filtering through layers of the dead. It was a vast, invisible underground sea lying under immense pressure in the pores of fossilised bones and between strata of stone.
The blood had been there ever since the first drop had been shed on Torvendis, from the days when the Last ruled the planet and Arguleon Veq had the strength to challenge it. Every creature killed on the plains was represented by a drop in that ocean of death.
A lake of blood lay beneath Lady Charybdia’s city. It was to this that Ss’ll Sh’Karr spoke, for there was nothing more sacred to unholy Khorne than an ocean of the blood that was shed in his holy tribute.
The slaves knew it first. The walls of the mines were bleeding, and blood was pooling up around their feet. Many tried to ran, whole gangs breaking from their chains and charging in huge scrums up the slopes of spoil, guards lashing at them. Many others gave thanks to whatever god had taken pity on them for letting them die at last.
The blood burst in torrents from fractures in the mine faces. It fountained from the ground in hot red geysers, it crashed against the foundations of the city’s mightiest towers. The level rose and closed over the heads of the slaves who had given up on any hope of freedom, and swirled around the ankles of those who tried to flee up the sharp rock faces. It even carried some of the most resourceful, those who had managed to find something that would float, upwards towards the lowest walkways of the city itself.
The magnitude of the death dealt in the first few minutes of Ss’ll Sh’Karr’s attack sent hideous dark waves of death throes pulsing through the sensitive streets of the city. They rippled up the walls of the keep, fouled the wine and wilted the plants in the pleasure-gardens. Not even Mape and all Lady Charybdia’s counsellors and sages had ever been able to calculate the true numbers of the slaves that toiled in the mine-pits—anything up to two hundred and fifty thousand drowned in the half-hour it took the mines to fill with blood.
The defenders of the city looked on in horror as the corruption of the Blood God befouled their city, waves of it crashing against the lower levels of the towers, huge swells swallowing the guard outposts suspended above the pits and sweeping away the lowest walkways. When elaborate stained-glass windows gave way, gouts of blood pumped into the towers and exploded upwards to fountain spectacularly over balconies and through the mouths of doorways.
The centurions bellowed to the defenders to hold fast. The assault had come from an unusual quarter, but then what was to be expected when the Butcher God sent its minions against the fair city? They had all heard the legends where nations were drowned in rivers of blood during the days of Ss’ll Sh’Karr, but they had also heard of how that daemon was defeated and killed. Nothing could destroy the city that Lady Charybdia had built, much less unclean barbarians and the remnants of a foul empire that had already outstayed its welcome on Torvendis.
This was just the prelude. When the real attack came, it would hurtle into the teeth of a city now brimming with the rage of Slaanesh.
The horror unfolding beneath the city was the cue for the attackers to advance. When the first waves of blood lapped at the edge of the mine pits, the desert folk sent up bright alchemical flares and the Serpent sent signal arrows shrieking. The spearheads, assembled in narrow columns behind ripples of high ground, picked up their heavy loads and began the charge towards the city.
Ten thousand Serpent under Lutr’Kya, and a contingent of near-naked headhunters under Skorkan the Gouger of the Southern Ocean, formed the first wave. The Serpent hauled longboats edged with shields, and every warrior had an oar alongside their axe or sword. The headhunters carried eight-man canoes hacked from thick-boled jungle trees with the withered heads of their enemies nailed to the prows, and were armed with stone-headed picks blessed by the thousand snake gods of the islands. Skorkan himself was at the place of honour at their head, the skulls of his most notable enemies forced under his skin so they bulged from his torso like cancerous growths.
They charged towards the city under the cover of a swirling sandstorm conjured up by the desert nomads. The headhunters, with their lighter craft, leapt into the blood ocean first, pushing off in their canoes and paddling furiously towards the closest towers. The Serpent launched their longboats in the headhunters’ wake, arrows plunging into the blood ocean around them. Just as they had done down the corpse-choked rivers of the southern islands and along the broken northern coasts, the first raiders attacked by boat, and there was little the massed defenders of the city could do to stop them in the first minutes of the horde’s attack.
The defenders had imagined almost any method of invasion, but an amphibious assault had not been anticipated. There were precious few legionaries defending the lower levels and the ranks of archers had to redeploy ha
stily before they could send accurate volleys of arrows into the sea of blood directly below them. Thousands of warriors on hundreds of boats were launching from the western shore of the blood ocean, chanting battle-songs to the sound of tribal drums and shrill war-skirls. They seemed without number, and they very nearly were.
Skorkan the Gouger reserved for himself the honour of being the first invader to set foot in the city, as his royal war-canoe burst through the scenic window of a low-level pleasure dome, carried on a cascade of blood into the worship-pit where a few drained revellers still lay. The stone-headed weapons of Skorkan and his retainers tasted their first kills of many as they cut through the degenerate pleasure-priests and charged up the winding stairways.
The battle had begun. The horde of Golgoth and Ss’ll Sh’Karr had done the unthinkable and violated the city itself. As the word went round the defenders that there were outsiders within the bounds of the city, the message became clear.
Slaanesh was angry with this unprecedented offence. Slaanesh would be avenged.
Commander Demetrius flicked through the vox-channels, relishing the taste of the confusion. He revelled in the potential of his allies’ terror—the graver the threat, the more profound the thrill of battle. It was clever, he thought, how the horde had attacked, raising the ocean and sending in those who had survived raiding the rivers and seas. Worthy, almost, of a Space Marine’s planning. But not quite.
[Warhammer 40K] - Daemon World Page 19