[Warhammer 40K] - Daemon World

by Ben Counter - (ebook by Undead)

  Golgoth risked a glance backwards. He caught a glimpse of Tarn, stumbling and clutching an arm where it had been broken by falling rock. The mountain slope above him was shuddering violently and huge slabs of rock were detaching to slide down and reveal the bone-white ancient strata beneath. The mountain peaks all around were shaking as they slid out of their stone sheaths, gleaming points punching out and stabbing towards the sky. The Canis Mountains had never looked more like the teeth of the Last, teeth set into a jaw that ran the length of the continent.

  The sky above was caught between night and day, the speckled black velvet of the Maelstrom punctured by the violent flares of a dozen suns, gathered sombrely to watch the destruction.

  Golgoth reached the bottom of the slope and sprinted down the length of the valley. It was the same one that had held the rushing blood river scant hours before, but now the walls were cracked and the torrent was a churning knee-high mass darkened to purple by detritus thrown up by the quaking underfoot. The whole mountain range seemed to quiver and with a noise like nothing Golgoth had ever heard the ground rose like an ocean wave, carrying Golgoth higher and higher until he was sure he could see clear across the mountains, to the coast in the north and the foothills westwards.

  The whole range seemed to be breaking apart, smooth white peaks rising from the grey stone. Here and there deeper fissures had opened and plumes of magma spattered into the air. Avalanches swept down mountainsides. Ice-filled valleys shattered like broken glass. Many-coloured lightning lanced down from where violent air currents had been driven into massive black thunderheads.

  The swell died and the ground plummeted again. Golgoth had no idea where Tarn was, or where he was—he felt the shifting land was taking him closer to the plains of the west where he might be safer, but huge chunks of rock were collapsing into chasms and boulders were tumbling down towards him all around.

  The Canis mountain range shattered down its spine, giving way to something far older and more terrible. Beneath the greatest peaks, the heart beat ever stronger as the Last broke ground on Torvendis once again.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Many legends claim to tell of the birth of Torvendis. Creation legends are amongst the oldest of the tales told in the courts of prophets and around the campfires of barbarians, and every people that has ever graced Torvendis has a different tale of how the planet came to be.

  There are those that say the planet is an egg laid in the time before the gods, which will one day hatch into a new god that will subjugate the warp and bring about the final war between all forces, from which only Chaos will emerge. Others maintain the world is the heart of the Maelstrom, turned to stone when Chaos infected the warp storm and took it over like maggots infest a corpse. Still others have died to protect the notion that Torvendis was given to the real universe by the gods of the warp, to act as a bridge across which the ignorance of reality might be enlightened by the madness of Chaos.

  Arguleon Veq had heard most of these legends and perhaps he alone, aside from the Chaos gods themselves, knew the truth. Because there had not always been a Maelstrom. Once, countless thousands of years before, there was just a tract of realspace, scattered with stars and a handful of inhabitable worlds. Intelligent species, as species would, found amongst these worlds a home for themselves or a colony for their offspring. When the fabric of reality became too thinly stretched and the warp bled through, untold numbers died or were driven mad over the course of a generation as the rules of reality were rescinded. Stars imploded or exploded or mutated into something new. Planets were swallowed and melded and tortuously deformed into daemon worlds. Populations died as one, or fled, or welcomed the daemonic powers as saviours or gods. It was a time of terrible madness and conquest.

  Some worlds survived. There were species that were simply too tough to roll over without a fight, like the green-skinned hordes or the nocturnal reptilians that infested asteroid belts. Others were too clever.

  Arguleon Veq was not the only one who knew there had once been eldar on Torvendis. He was, however, the only one outside the gods who knew just how long ago they had been there. Torvendis had been a jewel in the now-fallen empire of the alien eldar, a species which prized knowledge and self-mastery over all other things and who at their height commanded technology that bordered on the most powerful magic. Torvendis had been a beautiful world, with verdant forests, shimmering seas, and towering cities of glass and ivory. It had been a world of learning and culture, a place jealously guarded by the eldar as a crucial link of the webway that held their empire together.

  Torvendis had been caught in the heart of the eruption of warp space. The systems around it were torn apart and their populations enslaved. Torvendis endured, protected first by a fleet of warships, then a shield of sorcerous energies, and then just the faith and invention of the eldar themselves. The eldar, though long-lived, were still mortal, and they were cut off from their fellows elsewhere. Gradually, one by one, they died. Torvendis, however, did not.

  The hold of the Slaughtersong held a flight of fighter craft, huge chromed raptors with delta-swept wings and bundles of particle projectors jutting from the fuselage. There were seventy of these craft lined up neatly in the hold, lit by the stark floodlights high up on the ceiling waiting to be launched at the will of the ship’s master just as they had waited since they had flown against the Last.

  It was a good place to hide, a vast space covered with fighters, each one providing formidable cover with its underslung bomb casings and landing gear. And it was here that two of the Word Bearers had fled.

  Arguleon Veq could smell them, the oil and age of their equipment, their sweat, their bodies corrupted with the stink of the warp. Veq couldn’t hear their vox-communications but he knew from the way they had scattered that it was every battle-brother for himself now. Their leader and the psyker had gone one way, these two the other, and the dangerous one a third.

  Veq moved slowly and quietly, the starheart sword held low to prevent its glow from giving him away, the armour of the deeps dripping with brine to keep its plates from grinding audibly. It felt so good to be back in the chitinous armour, with a blade in his hand and an enemy to fight. Veq knew how that feeling could be so seductive, how it had dragged him into the fold of Chaos and kept him a slave for so long.

  He could catch no glimpse of scarlet armour between the forest of landing gear. There had been a time when he could see and hear anything that dared move within a league of him, but he was an old man and his glory days, he admitted to himself, were over. He would have to hunt down his enemy the old-fashioned way.

  Veq saw the bolt before he heard its report, like a tiny steel insect buzzing towards his head. His reactions were almost as sharp as they had ever been, he was pleased to note as he ducked the shot and let it thud into the hull of the fighter behind him. The shooter, though, had slipped back into cover.

  He was a damn good shot, this one. Probably the scout.

  Veq broke into a run and allowed himself a small sensation of satisfaction as his sprint lured the other Chaos Marine into spraying a storm of bolter fire, explosive shots rattling around him on full-auto. Miniature explosions studded the hull of the closest fighter as Veq leapt, kicked off the side of the ship and vaulted onto the wing of the ship opposite.

  The Word Bearer was almost directly below him, trying to track Veq while firing off the rest of his clip. Veq slashed downwards and the wing of the fighter sheared off in a crescent of sparks, crashing to the floor and forcing the Chaos Marine to dive out of the way.

  A reflex action forced Veq’s blade hand to deflect a shot from the scout, taken in the instant Veq had left himself open. In the split-second the other Space Marine dived under a fighter.

  “‘Slaughtersong’. Give me fighter command!” yelled Veq as he dropped off the ship he was standing on, bolter rounds shattering the cockpit behind him.

  Of course, my lord, replied the ancient ship in a metallic voice directly into Veq’s inner ear, and sud
denly the cockpit instrumentation lit up on seventy ships.

  They had nearly got him. A split-second either way and they could have got him in the head, or knocked him off his feet with a shot to the body. He was old, and slow, and these were a pair of Traitor Marines who had fought for so long that they acted as one. The scout was a better shot but the Space Marine was more reckless, and together they could have killed him.

  Arguleon Veq was the greatest champion the Maelstrom had ever known, and he had not got there without knowing not to underestimate the enemy. He raised a hand and a fighter craft suddenly juddered into motion, blue-flamed thrusters flaring as it rose into the air revealing the Space Marine sheltering beneath. Veq brought his hand down and the craft fell, smashing into the floor of the hangar and scattering metal fragments as the Marine rolled frantically out of the way. Veq swept a hand sideways and another fighter slammed into the first, rupturing its fuel tank and sending a plume of flame washing through the air.

  The Space Marine was running into the nearest cover, on fire. Veq knew that power armour meant the Marine could ignore the flames. But he was lit up like a beacon, and Veq didn’t pass up opportunities like that.

  He charged, kicking off against the hulls of ships nearby, flipping through the air to avoid the bolts the scout sent speeding towards him. He reached the fighter under which the burning Space Marine was trying to hide, vaulted on top of it, rolled across the top of the hull and swung down behind it, star-heart sword slashing downwards as he fell.

  The starheart blade had no respect for even the most ancient of power armour. The Space Marine never even had time to register Veq’s presence before the sword had passed down the centre of his helmet and through the armour’s collar, splitting the chestplate and abdomen and carving through the groin. Cleanly bisected, the awful stink of entrails rolled out as the Space Marine’s body fell in two in a welter of blood.

  A flash of pain burst against Veq’s free arm. His reactions had got his body out of the way but the scout’s shot had still winged him, burying itself in the chitin on his armour and bursting deep inside. The muscle was bruised and Veq felt the bone crack.

  Stupid, slow old man.

  His anger welled up inside him and he willed a dozen fighter craft into the air, wheeled them around the hangar, and dropped them in a rain of falling metal, smashing craft all around and triggering a spectacular chain of explosions. He slammed more fighters into the burning wreckage, sending flaming craft scudding along the metal floor. Floodlights were shattered by flying shrapnel. A wave of hot air filled Veq’s nostrils with the overpowering smell of fuel and flame.

  A bolt lanced out, shot wild. The scout was panicked. For a Space Marine to panic meant a great deal—he must be trapped somewhere in the mass of burning wreckage, hoping to kill Veq with a lucky shot so he could get clear and put out the flames.

  No one had got a lucky shot against Veq for many thousands of years. Another wave of fighter craft piled into the wreckage, bringing with them a slew of ammunition crates that detonated in the flames like huge stacks of firecrackers. The wreckage filled one corner of the hangar and was piled halfway up the wall, surrounded by a blue-flamed moat of burning fuel.

  Amazingly, the scout wasn’t dead. One arm hanging limp, wreathed in flames, he was dragging himself from beneath the edge of the wreckage. His bolter was wrecked but he was pulling a bolt pistol from his belt with his good arm.

  Veq strode across the burning floor, the fire crackling against the armour of the deeps. The scout emptied the magazine of the bolt pistol but Veq could see every shot coming and swatted them away The scout’s helmet was off and Veq could look into his bare, blistered face. His eyes were defiant and what was left of his lips were drawn into a snarl. He dropped his pistol and pulled a combat knife from his waist.

  “Defiant to the end,” said Veq, almost with pity. “What must they do to your soul to make you so blind?”

  The scout didn’t answer. Perhaps his lips were burned shut or his throat scorched open. Perhaps he just refused to answer someone who stood so sternly against everything the Word Bearers stood for.

  Veq raised the starheart blade, and cut off the Word Bearer’s head.

  The surface of Torvendis was shimmering as if in a heat haze. The sands and rocks were squirming suddenly free of their bonds. The Emerald Sword had been drawn. The Last was free. Torvendis knew it was the end of all things and, because Torvendis and the Last were one, it was glad.

  The gleaming teeth sunk into the earth, leaving the wreckage of their stony scabbards where once the mighty Canis Mountains had risen. The earth groaned as they were pushed further through the ground, spearing through the planet’s mantle until they surrounded the city where Lady Charybdia had ruled and where now a howling horde of daemons still feasted.

  A new mountain range rose as the jaws of the Last reformed themselves in a ring around the city, forming a huge circular maw a thousand kilometres across. Ss’ll Sh’Karr looked up from the corpses mounded at his feet and watched as the bone-white spires rose and began to close in on the city.

  No mortal could ever understand what thoughts run through the mind of a daemon. But if Ss’ll Sh’Karr could ever be capable of feeling fear, perhaps it was then, when the Blood God’s chosen was confronted with a foe that even he could not best.

  The oceans were churning as if in ecstasy or pain, thrashing the northern coasts with towering waves and wrestling the southern island chains beneath the surface. Titanic kraken which had not left the ocean bed for aeons reared up, immense living islands themselves, as if to glimpse the sky of Torvendis just once before they died.

  And it was a dying sky. Blood-red weals, like infected wounds, burst from the horizon. Thick black banks of cloud were split in two by terrible sudden storms, which opened up the sky to the pure weeping majesty of the Maelstrom. Rifts in the ground spat geysers of lava high into the air to fall as black stone rain.

  In what were once the foothills of the Canis Mountains, Golgoth and the few remaining tribesmen cowered as a thick rain of acid fell. Golgoth was no longer too proud to throw himself beneath a slender overhang bury his head beneath his arms and pray to any god that would listen that all this death around him not take him too. He still held the Emerald Sword—though it was surely the drawing of the sword that had brought such destruction to Torvendis, it was all he had left in the world. Not even his rage could keep him going. He could see huge slabs of land rearing up from where the swamplands had been, and a spider’s web of molten rock bubbling up through the wreckage of the mountains.

  He had never seen such death. The magnitude of it all was enough to make even Golgoth forget the depths of his hatred.

  He could not know that his very hatred had made all this possible, or that the Emerald Sword tribe he had so nearly destroyed was the key to the devastation. He wondered in his desperation if this was the Last, come to reclaim its world as more than a few prophets had predicted throughout Torvendis’s history. It would have been little comfort to him to discover he was right.

  The jungles were writhing, the dense trees rioting in delight at the terror even as lightning slashed into them and set fires that breathed immense towers of smoke into the sky. Distant places that had taken their leave of Torvendis’s history for the past few centuries—the ice caps, the snaking coral sandbars that took up half an ocean, titanic skeletons with mined cities built into the skulls—suffered too. Some came alive where no life should be. Others sank beneath the waves, or were blown high into the sky.

  Torvendis spasmed and screamed. Its very mantle and core in torment, sending pulses of lava gouting from the surface. From orbit, it looked like Torvendis was bleeding to death.

  The youngest of the Word Bearers, and the most dangerous, was the last to face Veq. Veq knew the leader was still out there, but as he headed from the burning hangar into the machine-spirit core the Slaughtersong told him the Word Bearers’ captain was in the maintenance layer. That meant he was trying to esca
pe with the psyker, to go back through the boarding lock of the attack shuttle that had brought the coven here, and return to his own ship.

  He would not succeed. In fleeing, he had chosen to end his own life running instead of fighting. He had condemned the psyker to the same fate. The young Word Bearer was cleverer than his captain in one truly important area—he knew how to die, a rare and valuable commodity that Veq had seen very little of, though he had experienced plenty of death.

  The machine-spirit of the Slaughtersong was, perhaps, even older than the rest of the ship. Veq had found the ship towards the beginning of his career in the Maelstrom and even then he knew it was something special. That is was a relic of the Dark Age of Technology there was little doubt, and the machine-spirit was the strongest evidence. The core was like an arena ringed by towering grey-black memory stacks as tall as buildings, each with a faint ripple of light playing across the surface. The wide circular arena of dark glassy stone was full of wispy lights, forming complex shapes and swirling patterns that broke up and reformed at the speed of the Slaughtersong’s thoughts. The ship was all but sentient, a companion as much as a vessel, a counsellor and sounding board as well as a weapon.

  The Word Bearer had chosen this place because he thought he could hold the Slaughtersong hostage, threatening Veq with a battle in the heart of the vessel’s mind. It was clever. It was the only thing that would give him a chance. The memory stacks contained more information on Veq’s life than Veq could remember himself. There would be no pyrotechnics here.

  Veq stalked out into the arena, bathed in the light. There had been a time when he had held a gun that fired salvoes of sentient flesh-grubs which would seek out anything living, or release daemonic riphounds that would hunt down the Word Bearer by scent alone. But his wargear had mostly been lost in the battle with the Last or ended up sacred relics on Torvendis, so his sword and wits would have to do.