Lord of Undeath

by C. L. Werner

  As Makvar urged the wedge onwards, he noted for the first time that, unlike the legions of undead that the rearguard had been forced to fight their way through, those around Vogun’s warriors exhibited no interest in the Stormcasts. They were fixed entirely on attacking the Chaos horde. It was tempting to put the change down to the light of the warding lantern, its energies repulsing the undead, but Makvar thought it must be more than that. The skeletons and zombies appeared to finally be drawing a distinction between ally and enemy.

  ‘Brannok!’ Makvar called out to the Knight-Heraldor. ‘Have the warriors bringing up the rear stay their attack. Keep the undead from breaking the wall, but otherwise visit no harm against them.’

  The Knight-Heraldor was puzzled by the command but didn’t hesitate to execute it. Sounding a call upon his battle-horn, he relayed the order to the Liberators holding the base of the wedge.

  For a time, the seemingly endless tide of undead that had pursued the Stormcasts up the hill continued to hurl themselves upon the shield wall. The Liberators drove them back, using sword pommels and hammer hafts to repel the decayed soldiers, but they quickly returned, stabbing and slashing at the Anvils with mindless tenacity. However often the undead were repulsed, they came again.

  Then a change came upon the skeletons following behind the wedge. As they advanced towards the Stormcasts, they suddenly lowered their weapons. Without a sound, they marched onwards a few paces, but made no effort to assault the shield wall. When the wedge gained ground and moved forwards, the skeletons did likewise, but they didn’t make any further attempts to engage the Liberators. From Gojin’s saddle, Makvar could see the rear ranks of the undead continuing their menacing advance. Once they climbed to a certain point on the path, however, all the hostility seemed to drain out of them, as though they had crossed some invisible barrier.

  ‘Keep a careful watch on them,’ Makvar told Brannok. ‘Sound the alarm if they try to attack again, but I don’t think they will.’ He looked at the slope above, at the fearsome Chaos chariots ploughing through the undead warriors. ‘At least not while we share a common enemy.’

  What happened after that, Makvar knew, would be the difference between success and failure.

  From the back of his decayed dragon, Lord Harkdron watched as the storm-knights smashed their way through his warriors. Again and again, he used his magic to reanimate the fallen, to pour into their mangled flesh and shattered bones the eldritch power that would restore them to a semblance of life. However quickly he tried to reform and reassemble the broken skeletons and mangled zombies, though, he couldn’t match the rapidity with which the strange knights were destroying his troops.

  The hordes of Chaos were likewise redoubling their efforts. Harkdron’s undead threatened to engulf the flank of the Slaaneshi army. To counter that threat, bands of daemonettes flitted through the skeletal regiments, hewing and hacking with their ghastly claws. Two terrifying chariots drawn by daemonic steeds sped through the streets of the temple district, their spiked wheels pulverising the undead warriors who fell beneath their charge. After them, an even larger chariot thundered across the broken corpses, reducing them to such shattered debris that even Harkdron’s magic could find nothing to infuse with animation.

  Packs of daemons raged and howled, trooping through the wreckage of Nulahmia on slobbering mounts that were neither reptile, horse nor insect, but an impossible amalgam of all three. Crab-like fiends of Slaanesh scuttled along rooftops and clambered down walls, their slimy hides exuding clouds of musk. Hulking spawn, maddened wrecks of Chaotic energies and tortured flesh, dragged themselves through the ruins, striking all that dared to stand in their way with gigantic claws and whipping tentacles.

  As his dragon flew above the battlefield Harkdron tried to direct his forces, to draw new legions from the most ancient of Nulahmia’s crypts. It was then that he saw a stirring of the rubble below. The Temple of the Bloodbat had been demolished by the storm-knights, cast down by the thunderous magic they bore with them. Beneath the mound of debris, the great daemon Mendeziron had been entombed. Much like the catacombs the vampire was emptying, the mound of rubble made for an unquiet grave. Lesser daemons flocked towards the shifting mound, gathering about it with a terrible air of expectancy.

  Harkdron sent his will rushing through the companies of bone warriors and deadwalkers he had summoned, commanding them back towards the fallen temple. If he hurried, if he brought enough force to bear, perhaps his warriors could vanquish Mendeziron while the daemon was still weakened by the storm-knights’ attack.

  Hope withered in the vampire’s heart when the rubble suddenly exploded outwards, chunks of stone spinning through the air as the thing buried under them erupted to the surface. Mendeziron had been bloodied by the storm-knights, his flesh ripped to tatters by the crushing enormity of the temple. Smoke rose from skin scorched by the electric fury of the battle-horn; steam vented from rivulets of boiling ichor that dripped from his wounds. Charred clumps fell from the daemon’s body as he stalked out from the rubble. The pain of a Keeper of Secrets, the unique agony of one of Slaanesh’s most terrible manifestations, was like a lodestone to the daemons that were marked by the Prince of Chaos. From across Nulahmia they came, intoxicated by the sensations flowing from Mendeziron. And as they drew near to him, their identities were subsumed under his hideous malignance. Ensnared by the power of Mendeziron, the daemon host could do naught but obey his commands. The command was to kill and conquer.

  Pride kept Harkdron from repenting his decision to focus on the storm-knights, allowing Mendeziron to slip through his fingers. The daemon was a mighty tool of the enemy, but the storm-knights were something worse. They were interlopers. Chaos could defeat him, but the storm-knights could steal his victory from him. How would he redeem himself in the eyes of his queen if her salvation were bought only with the aid of these storm-knights? Harkdron would be her rescuer; he would allow none to take that from him! He would share the esteem of Neferata with no one!

  Harkdron’s dragon soared above a pack of daemonettes, the rotting beast’s stench washing across them as it raked its claws through their ranks and used its bony tail to swat a handful of them into the rubble of a mausoleum. The bone warriors opposing the daemonettes rallied for a moment, revivified by the vampire’s necromancy. But it was only a momentary resilience. Harkdron had been pushing his arcane talents to their limit and beyond. Each spell he cast felt like drawing blood from a dry vein. He could feel his mind growing fuzzy as the residual harmonies of the spells he evoked broke through his overtaxed defences.

  Seeing the resurgent Mendeziron and his daemons, Harkdron knew that only an even greater magic could stand against them. Something beyond his own fading energies. The vampire snarled defiantly at the Keeper of Secrets, letting his mockery stab at the abomination’s ego. There was a way to summon the power he needed to destroy the daemons, though only a warrior of Harkdron’s calibre was brave enough to draw upon it.

  Even as Mendeziron sent a ray of searing magic rippling towards him, Harkdron turned his dragon’s climb into a sweeping dive. Over the heads of snarling daemons, he flew his steed onto the ruined Queensroad. There, rising amidst the wreckage of war, stood an object of such menace that even the rampaging hordes of Chaos had given it a wide berth – the Obelisk of Black, a forty-foot spire darker than night itself, a frozen fang of death. The hieroglyphs that shone across its obsidian surface hadn’t been cut into the Obelisk, nor had they been painted or seared into the glass-like stone. It was as if they had been pressed into the skin of the structure, pushed just under the surface so that they seemed to be scratching at it from within, as though trying to force their way free.

  Harkdron didn’t know what the hieroglyphs said. They were of a time from beyond time, a relic of the world-that-was and hoary with age even in that mythical era. Once, in an unguarded moment, Neferata had told him even she could read little of their meaning, and even that much
was enough to haunt a Mortarch.

  The vampire lord didn’t need to understand the hieroglyphs to recognise the power bound within the Obelisk. It filled him with a sort of frightened awe, like staring into the fires of a volcano. The magnitude of the arcane force entombed within the obsidian monolith was such that even now he hesitated to draw upon it. Summon not that which cannot be dismissed was the first law of necromancy, a warning to all who would violate the rules of death.

  Out from the smoke, the enormity of Mendeziron stalked towards Harkdron. The daemon’s hooves shattered the skulls embedded in the street, his claws smashed the statues lining the road, and his seductive malevolence dragged the ghosts of Nulahmia into the furnace of his infernal heart. The vampire could feel the Keeper of Secrets pawing at his mind, promising him the most excruciating torments before his spirit was consumed. Such was the fiendish lure of the daemon’s voice that it made Harkdron anticipate the promised torture with almost overwhelming desire.

  It was the thought of Neferata, of failing his queen, that moved Harkdron to indulge his instinct for survival. Mendeziron was nearly upon him, reaching towards him to pluck him from the saddle of his zombie dragon, when he broke free of the daemon’s spell. Crying out in rage, he spurred his dragon to attack. The rotted beast reared back, its bony jaws gaping wide as it spewed a blast of decayed flesh and corpse gas into the face of the daemon.

  Mendeziron stumbled back, skin bubbling and sloughing from his bovine skull as the dragon’s pestilence washed over his flesh. The daemon’s eyes flashed with pitiless enmity. A great sliver of scintillating flame erupted from one of his hands, swiftly cooling and solidifying into a gigantic blade. A second blast of draconic breath scorched Mendeziron, burning a great hole through the monster’s chest – but even such grievous injury wasn’t enough to blunt his assault. His mighty claws snapped closed about the dragon’s body, sinking deep into its rotting carcass. Held fast in Mendeziron’s grip, the dragon couldn’t avoid the giant sword as the daemon rammed it into the creature’s gut. Withered organs and nests of carrion worms spilled from the beast’s carcass as the daemon wrenched the blade crosswise. Heedless of the raking claws and smashing wings of his foe, Mendeziron twisted the sword deeper and drew the beast closer.

  Harkdron jumped from the saddle of his mangled steed, leaving the zombie dragon trapped in Mendeziron’s clutches. Impaled upon the daemon’s blade, the beast could only writhe helplessly as its adversary ripped it apart. The vampire could feel Mendeziron’s rage clawing at him with obscene persistence, assuring him that he would suffer far greater atrocities of flesh and spirit before his own existence was extinguished.

  The vampire looked to the Obelisk of Black. Rushing to the monument, he ripped the gauntlet from his hand and buried his fangs in his own flesh, tearing open his palm. Glancing back at Mendeziron as the daemon continued to butcher the dragon, Harkdron pressed his bloodied hand to the Obelisk and called out to the power buried within it. At once, the infernal whispers of Mendeziron were burned from his mind, exorcised by a deafening tide of spectral wails and ghostly moans. Through that tempest of phantoms, a commanding presence enveloped him. Without conscious thought, without even the concept of resistance stirring inside him, Harkdron found strange words of an unknown language slithering across his lips. Fresh legions of the undead stirred at his call, but so too did something else.

  Mendeziron cast aside the mutilated ruin of the zombie dragon and turned towards Harkdron. The Keeper of Secrets grinned with what was left of his face, deciding to savour the vampire’s torment. All around him, flocks of lesser daemons came stealing up the Queensroad, eager to draw their own vicarious amusement from Mendeziron’s depravity.

  The great daemon took one lumbering step towards Harkdron, then froze in place. His eyes fixed upon the Obelisk, growing wide with alarm as he saw the power slumbering within the monument respond to the vampire’s call. Before Mendeziron could retreat, that power erupted into a spectral wave of death. A black storm of ethereal energies spilled across him and his followers, ripping and tearing at them with ghostly claws. The chill of ancient graves stifled the burning ferocity of Slaanesh’s daemons, shredding their unnatural essence into tatters of desire and sensuality. The forms the daemons had taken on were cast down, burned away by the shrieking maelstrom.

  The Keeper of Secrets crossed his arms, evoking the infernal magic of Slaanesh. A shimmering trapezohedron flared around his body, a cage of light to hold back the darkness. For an instant the barrier crackled with purple sparks and jade flickers, then the ghostly forces seeped through the breaches they had torn in the arcane ward. The daemon banished the first surge of phantoms with a nimbus of arcane flame, but more spirits swiftly rushed in to take the place of those he vanquished. As the howling phantoms swirled around him, the daemon found himself being consumed, his physical presence devoured by the maelstrom of spectres. Mendeziron’s claws crumbled as they were reduced to dust, his horns wilted like melting wax, his howls of defiance collapsed into a death rattle. Mighty as the daemon’s magic was, it was unequal to the power that now raged across Nulahmia and the dread being that was its master.

  Spirits from the world-that-was, ghosts of the legendary past, the slumbering dead of numberless millennia – the spectral storm overwhelmed the Slaaneshi along the Queensroad, annihilating them utterly. Then, the ghoulish tide poured out across the burning streets, striking down the scavengers and despoilers prowling among the debris, slaughtering the few inhabitants yet hiding in secret refuges. The storm rolled onwards, sweeping into the temple district. The hungry spirits smashed down the hordes of Chaos trying to fight their way up the Pathway of Punishment. They crushed the regiments of bone warriors and deadwalkers trying to hold the approaches to the Throne Mount. The Anvils’ rearguard was beset by the spirit storm, even their mighty valour incapable of denying the spectral fury of Shyish’s dead. One after another, black-armoured Stormcasts were dragged from the shield walls to be consumed by the swirling fog of undeath.

  The daemonette fell, the severed halves of her body streaming ichor. Neferata swung away from her fallen adversary to face a second snarling enemy, sending a bolt of withering sorcery searing into the clawed daemon’s limbs to leave the creature twitching upon the ground. Around her, the queen’s morghast bodyguard struggled to hold back the mob of Slaaneshi attackers, their halberds glistening with the filth of daemonic veins.

  Though the undead continued to hold most of the Slaaneshi horde as they battled to reach the summit, the daemonettes had been able to slip through the lines. Stalking the vampire queen, they had proven persistent and malicious foes. Neferata’s steed had been so savaged by the claws and whips of her enemies that she could feel its energies draining out of it with each step it took. To restore Nagadron’s vitality, she let the dread abyssal feast on the lifeless husks of her fallen morghasts.

  Distracted by raising new regiments of bone warriors to oppose the Slaaneshi forces, Neferata had lost track of the storm-knights and their progress punching through the Chaos horde. When she was at last able to spare a glance down the hillside, she was surprised to see how far they had come. Despite the fact that a veritable horde of enemies still stood between them, the ebon knights were proving unstoppable. Though the undead had ceased attacking them, the storm-knights remained wary of their decayed allies – a wariness that did as much to impede their advance as the blades of Chaos. Once again, Neferata cursed Harkdron’s foolish decision to attack the newcomers.

  Casting her gaze further afield, Neferata looked across the burning ruin of Nulahmia for some sight of her lover. Instead of Harkdron, however, she saw a black cyclone of spirits raging through the desolation, a tempest of destruction that was obliterating all in its path. She could see the glowing apparitions that swirled out from the midst of the eldritch gale, spectral warriors that slew whatever stood before them. Phantom swords cut down skeletal soldiers while storm-knights expired on ethereal spears, their
spirits streaking into the sky in bursts of blue light. The cyclone’s greatest havoc was turned upon the legions of Chaos, however. Droves of barbarians and beasts perished as the spirit hosts spilled across their ranks.

  For an instant, Neferata wondered if, despite her doubts, one of the other Mortarchs had seen the spirit-beacons and come to her aid. The manifestation was certainly a feat of necromancy on a scale far beyond that of a deathmage or vampire lord. At the same time, it didn’t have the eldritch imprint of her fellow Mortarchs. There was nevertheless something familiar about the phantom storm, something that sent an icy chill rushing through her blackened heart.

  Another swarm of daemonettes came dancing up from the Pathway, overwhelming her remaining morghast guards. Neferata set her magic against the assault, driving the creatures back. She could see the ghastly hunger in their eyes, the lascivious sneer on their faces. For the moment, she stood alone against them, a fact that emboldened these creatures of Chaos. Slithering up the jagged slope, bypassing the regiments of undead filling the Pathway, a serpent-like daemon-beast carried the Slaaneshi warlord himself into the Mortarch’s presence. The lion-faced mortal brought his glaive shearing through the skull of the last of her morghast defenders, the weapon’s enchantments shattering the ancient bone like an eggshell.

  Before the warlord and his daemons could charge Neferata, however, they were beset by a barrage of crackling lightning. Winged storm-knights flew overhead, hurling javelins down upon the Slaaneshi horde. Each projectile became a lance of celestial fire before it smashed into the daemonettes. The infernal creatures shrivelled under the fulminating assault, their essence steaming away.