[Warhammer 40K] - Daemon World

by Ben Counter - (ebook by Undead)

  He kicked against the wall. He tore the axe from his back and hurled it across the chamber. Tarn watched, impassive.

  A movement caught his eye, something small and flittering. Golgoth hoped it was a rat, so he could stamp it to death and let some of his anger bleed out. Or even better, a harpy, so he could hold its wings and tear them off. But it was neither. It was a bird, tiny and quick, with feathers of a brilliant iridescent green. It was the same bird that Golgoth had seen in the keep, and that had delivered Kron’s message.

  The bird shimmered across the chamber and into one of the side tunnels. Golgoth ran after it and Tarn followed wordlessly, sprinting as Golgoth plunged into the darkness of the tunnel.

  It led downwards. Golgoth sometimes thought he had lost the bird, but each time he heard the flutter of its wings or saw a flash of green in the faint light. The light was coming from the walls and floor now, a dim glow let off by some strange phosphorescent matter that clung in blue-white patches to the stone. The tunnel wound further down and Golgoth imagined it was describing a spiral that drilled far down into the mountain.

  The tunnel emerged into an enormous underground cavern where the air was close and hot. Stalactites hung, huge and dripping like fangs, and trickles of water spattered down into an unseen pool far below. The walls and floor were too far away to be seen, as if there was a whole world beneath the mountain and the ceiling above was the sky. Golgoth’s footsteps seemed to take an age to echo back to him.

  The floor formed a bridge that curved down across the cavern towards an immense irregular sphere of stone, like a heart of rock suspended in the centre of the cavern. The bridge led to an archway carved into the stone, with darkness beyond.

  A tiny flashing green dot that was the bird flitted through the archway ahead. Golgoth followed it, taking care to keep his footing on the wet stone as the bridge became thinner and thinner. There was a very faint rumbling in the air, as if they were so far down they could hear Torvendis’s heart beating.

  “Do you know of this place?” asked Golgoth.

  “No. And neither did the tribes when they lived here,” replied Tarn. “Or else they would have held this place against Lady Charybdia.”

  “Unless they would rather have faced her up there than be trapped down here.”

  The stone heart loomed in front of them. Golgoth could just see that same faint phosphorescence beyond as he approached the threshold.

  Carefully, he stepped through the arch, aware that Tarn was hanging back some way behind. The bird was hopping impatiently on the floor just inside, its tiny dark eyes glancing here and there. Golgoth stooped down to see if it was carrying another message, but it took flight, fluttering away across the expanse of the cavern and out of sight. Golgoth stood up, took a breath, and walked into the Hall of the Elders.

  The glowing lichen was thick on the ceiling making the whole room a ghostly pale blue-grey. It was a circular room as large as the grandest feasting halls, with a huge rectangular slab like an oversized sarcophagus in the centre.

  The pale light seemed to congeal around the sarcophagus. Gradually it coalesced into human forms, a crowd of them, standing several deep around the slab. More detail emerged from the glow until Golgoth was looking at the faces and clothes of glowing ghostly men and women. They turned to look at Golgoth as he entered. They were tall and broad-shouldered, wearing the same furs and skins that the mountain peoples had worn for as long as the Canis Mountains had existed. Their ages were impossible to guess, for they had smooth-skinned faces but lined, weary eyes, pure black with no pupils.

  “Another one,” said one man.

  “Do not sound so jaded,” said a different voice, a woman’s. “How long has it been since the last?”

  “It will be the same,” came a different reply, and Golgoth realised that every statement came in a different voice. “They are always the same. Why don’t we ask him? See his face turn pale.” A male ghost walked towards Golgoth—Golgoth could see right through him. “You. Do you know what this place is?”

  “The Hall of the Elders.”

  The man seemed young and strong, with hair down to his shoulders and a bow slung at his back. Was this one of the Emerald Sword’s dead, a young warrior slain on some ancient battlefield? The ghost smiled. “And are you worthy to stand within it? If you are not, Torvendis will swallow you and spit you out as a rock or a tree. It has never failed to do so, not once. When this world was founded, we were placed here as guardians. We are the first of the Emerald Sword, our purpose is to ensure that only the one whose soul was pure hate should see this place and survive.”

  Golgoth smiled. “Hate? I know nothing about this place. But I know everything about hate. If I could crush this world, I would, just to give my hatred somewhere to go. If I could drain the Maelstrom dry, I would do it. I would fight the gods of Chaos if it meant I could find an outlet for my hate.”

  The ghostly man turned to the watching ghostly crowd. “Well?”

  A woman walked up to Golgoth. She was a warrior-woman such as the Sword had bred before it became weak. Her hair was hacked short and even though it was composed of the same swirling fog as her, Golgoth could see the sword at her side was notched and pitted with use. She laid a hand on Golgoth’s chest. It was cold.

  Then, pain. Golgoth felt as if he were immersed in ice, the sheer agonising cold flowing right through to his bones. Suddenly, the chamber was gone and he was high in the air, hurtling over the Canis Mountains. The viewpoint shifted and zoomed in to one of the valleys where a brutal battle raged, a half-dozen tribes mingled in bloodshed. A giant warrior swung a halberd and took a head with every stroke. Golgoth could see the red raw hatred in his soul, this man who had given up on his humanity and embraced a life of slaughter.

  No, a voice spoke somewhere in the back of Golgoth’s head. This one has far deeper loathing than this.

  Another change. The cold gripped again and dragged Golgoth across the skies of Torvendis and the disease-ridden southern islands shimmered into view. Golgoth’s view shot down and into a dark cabin of warped tropical wood. A woman rolled the body of a murdered man under the cabin’s single bed. Golgoth knew, somehow, that this woman had killed many like this before in revenge for some wrong done to her, and would kill a great many more, in a fruitless attempt to exorcise the howl of rage in her head. Her hatred consumed her entire soul and drove her every action.

  No. Not enough, said the distant voice. This one has hatred deep indeed.

  Another change. The Crimson Knights of legend, in red robes with their faces cowled, stood in a circle and debated how best they might commit yet more atrocities before the people of Torvendis found the will to rise up against them.

  Something huge and sentient beneath the seas built a mighty black reef to wreck passing ships, so it could drag the crews down and feel their lives ebbing away beneath the world. It did this because it wanted the world to suffer.

  A mighty sorcerer plunged a staff of awesome power into the ocean and let it boil. His rage was so great that only the eradication of life would sate it.

  No, came the voice. He has more hate than any of them. It is deeper and deadlier. It would drive him to more terrible things than any of these have committed, if he only had the power.

  Ss’ll Sh’Karr, in Torvendis’s distant past when he first ruled, sat on a throne of bones, thousands of bodies heaped at his feet, drinking in the blood of a tortured world and feeling the Blood God’s loathing pumping through his veins.

  The cold was terrible. It seemed to chill Golgoth’s body and freeze his very soul. He was laid utterly bare, his whole mind open for scrutiny. Everything about him was stripped away, his memories, the layers of his personality, even Kron’s sorcery that had kept him alive through so much.

  There was only one part of him left. The thing that beat at his core and kept him living when everything around him told him he should die.

  His hate.

  The cold let him go. He was whole again, lying gas
ping on the surface of the chamber, the ghostly figures of the Emerald Sword standing around him. The warrior-woman was kneeling beside him, removing her cold hand from his chest.

  Her black eyes were wide with shock. “The… the loathing… the violence… this is betrayal, this is purest hate. It is deeper than that of any other living thing on Torvendis. You have lost everything. Your hatred is pure, born of betrayal. Arguleon Veq told us that one like you would come to the Hall of the Elders. It has been so long, we never thought you would…”

  “It is him?” asked a man.

  “It can be no other.”

  Suddenly, the figures were fading away, coiling up into wisps of smoke that filtered up towards the ceiling and then were gone. Golgoth was alone in the chamber. If, of course, the ghosts had ever been there in the first place. His breath came in gasps—the memory of that terrible coldness, and the afterimages of the terrible things the elders had shown him, left him dizzy and shaken.

  Had this chamber really been here since the birth of the Emerald Sword tribe? Had Golgoth been the first to survive the test? Perhaps, he thought, here he would be able to find a way to exact his revenge and begin to rebuild his tribe. That strange feeling in his heart was hope, turned savage by the depth of his hatred and rage. Sh’Karr would be bled dry. Torvendis would be his, no matter what it took. The totems of the Emerald Sword would cast their shadows across the whole world.

  The huge sarcophagus shuddered and with a grinding of stone the lid moved aside. Golgoth got to his feet and peered inside—his eyes caught a flash of green.

  It was a blade, long and thin, with a two-handed grip. It was made entirely of crystal that shone in the milky light, a vivid green crystal.

  It was the same weapon that had once found a home in the hands of Arguleon Veq. It had been the subject of legends that Golgoth had heard as a child, told around tribal campfires to remember the days of warlike glory past. It was the Emerald Sword.

  It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. The Emerald Sword was a legend, gone with the age of Arguleon Veq and the Last. But it was here, right in front of him, and in that moment Golgoth was absolutely certain that this really was the sword itself. His tribe, so abused and corrupted, had been founded to guard the sword on the orders of Veq himself. Golgoth was the last of the tribe, and so it fell to him to take up the weapon and exact vengeance against those who had opposed the word of Veq by destroying the tribe.

  Golgoth reached into the sarcophagus. It smelled of dust and age inside, and the air was so dry it seemed to suck the moisture from his skin. His hand closed around the cold, crystal haft of the sword, feeling it tingle against his fingers.

  It was light, and so perfectly balanced it seemed to want to swing itself. Golgoth swept the shimmering blade through the air, watching the shining green trail it left behind it like a shooting star.

  The rock beneath his feet was rumbling. The wan light flickered like a dying fire above him. Suddenly the walls of the chamber were moving inwards and billowing out like something alive, with a deep, throaty heaving sound. Golgoth ran for the archway and came out onto the bridge where Tarn was backing away, ready to run. Tarn glanced at the sword in Golgoth’s hand, then up at the huge bulb of stone, before turning and sprinting towards the other side of the cavern.

  Golgoth looked up before he followed.

  The stone heart of Torvendis was beating.

  Phaedos put up a better fight than Vrox had. He was fast and he had learned a thousand different feints in his years as a Word Bearer. In the endless galleries of the neoplasma generators, where the gigantic cylindrical turbines hung suspended between a web of gantries, Phaedos turned to face Arguleon Veq.

  It was brave, in so much as anything a Word Bearer did could be called brave. It showed his devotion to the Legion, which was typical. Arguleon Veq had come to loathe those such as the Word Bearers above all others—mindless preachers who covered up their self-serving conniving with the veneer of a debased religion. They spouted hatred from the pulpit as if it was something sacred, and butchered anything in their way just to prove they were superior to the wretches they ground beneath their feet. That was what Chaos could do—rot away a man’s humanity and have the cruelty to let him believe he was still worth something.

  Phaedos, backed against the railing around a corner, jumped out as Veq approached in the hope of ambushing his foe. Veq caught Phaedos’s chainsword on his own sword and locked the blade between the teeth of the chainblade, twisting it out of Phaedos’s grasp. Phaedos let go and rolled beneath Veq’s guard, blasting a volley of bolt pistol shells up into Veq’s body. Veq twisted and felt the air turn searing hot as the bolts shot past his torso, close enough to singe his robes.

  “Armour,” said Veq, and plates of armour shot through the air from the depths of the Slaughtersong to slam around his body. Much of Veq’s old panoply had fallen into the hands of prophets and tyrants down on Torvendis, but the Slaughtersong had kept the starheart sword and the armour of the deep safe in its armoury.

  The armour had been carved from the bony exoskeletal plates of the giant sea creatures that scoured Torvendis’s ocean bed. Ribbed, roughened plates of bone and cartilage thudded into his upper body and arms, as mail of meteoric iron, like silk carried on a wind, flowed through the air and wrapped itself around his abdomen and throat. Hardened spines sprouted down his back and gauntlets of ensorcelled sharkskin slid onto his fingers.

  Phaedos caught his falling chainsword, but his next stab was turned aside by a greave of solid, iron-hard bone that had not been there a second ago. Veq grabbed the collar of Phaedos’s armour with his free hand and hurled the Word Bearer into the side of the nearest turbine. Blue-white sparks fountained as electricity coursed through Phaedos and he fell hard onto the walkway.

  He fought until the last. But by then his muscles were burning inside his power armour and his arm was slowed. Veq turned the chainsword aside with his boot, kicked it into the air, caught it and drove it through the small of Phaedos’s back, chainblade chewing through plasteel and bone. Phaedos writhed like a pinned insect, gasped, and died.

  Veq could not deny it felt good. It felt almost as good as it had done all those years ago, when he had tamed the Maelstrom in the name of Chaos, stormed cities and slain armies for the voices in his head he called gods. He had wished to drown in an ocean of blood, revel in a torrent of flesh, delight in decay and wield the powers of change like a weapon. He had done everything they had asked of him, and he had asked only that they honour him as their greatest champion in return. He had given himself over to Chaos, and it had taken ten thousand years to get himself back.

  He left Phaedos’s body smouldering on the walkway, and moved on to hunt down the others.

  The curious thing was, almost all of the legends were true. Arguleon Veq really had been tall as a mountain when he wanted to be (which was rare—he had learned early on that a small target survives longer). He had walked the bottom of the oceans to hunt the things that lived there. He had torn down the gates of the Obsidian City and broken the back of the Overdaemon that ruled there. He had taken on an army of alien savages and killed them all with his bare hands. He had done all the things that the legends said he had before he had come to Torvendis, and many of the things he had done afterwards. And, above all, he had fought the Last.

  Of course, no one on Torvendis actually knew what the Last was. If any of them had guessed correctly, they had been drowned out by the other theories that survived. The ones that said the Last was a huge and powerful daemon, or a god who fell foul of a conspiracy amongst the innumerable other deities of the warp, or some ancient and arcane war machine left behind by aliens. Veq would have found the lies they told amusing, had they not covered up a more terrible truth.

  The truth was that the Maelstrom had not always occupied this tract of space. That the Maelstrom was there at all was, in part, down to Veq, a fact for which he would never forgive himself. Soon, he told himself, soon the truth would be known, and he
would have perhaps gained himself some measure of redemption. It would not be enough, not anything close to what he would have to do to atone for all the evil he had wrought. But even if it was just a gesture, it would be more than he had ever truly accomplished before.

  Arguleon Veq had fought the Overstayer of the green-skinned barbarians and burned the Immortal Library of the Ninety-Seven Sorcerers. He had waited at the courts of the gods when the Imperium of Man was still throwing off its birth caul and he had seen the universe with eyes so jaded by experience that he could look upon the warp itself and not go mad. But he realised now that he had never done anything of which he was proud. He had seen what Chaos was, what it had done to him and demanded in return, and now nothing he had done seemed to justify a fraction of esteem in which his memory was held.

  It was not that he was a good person at heart. Veq could find little place in his soul for those innumerable unfortunates who made up the armies he had slaughtered, and on Torvendis millions of men had died to satisfy the requirements of his plan. No, it was not goodness that gnawed in the pit of his tainted soul. It was anger.

  For once, Golgoth was quicker than Tarn. He called on every thread of sorcery that Kron had left him, leaping down the slope with the legs of an antelope, the tireless energy of a sea kraken driving his limbs, a hawk’s eyes looking for the quickest path away from Arrowhead Peak. The Emerald Sword in his hand covered the mountainside around him with a vibrant green glow, and rocks fell like hail all around him as he ran. A sound like a hundred thunderstorms raged from below, like the bellow of a subterranean god.

  Tarn lagged behind, though he was sprinting, too. The two men had made it out of the tunnels of Arrowhead Peak more by luck than forethought, for there was no way they could retrace a route with the tunnels spasming like pumped arteries and the walls of the chambers pulsing in and out. Now, they were separated by the rain of stone and the terrible heaving of the mountainside beneath them.