by Darius Hinks
When Ghal Maraz cracked against the Prismatic King’s leg, the limb burst apart in a spray of light and thunder. The daemon shuddered, sagging back towards its throne. The shadow it cast flickered once more, then faded completely. The Celestant-Prime advanced on the reeling Lord of Change, but again there sounded within the deepest layers of his mind a cry of warning. Again he wondered at the trickery of a foe who could manipulate the senses as thoroughly as the Prismatic King.
He turned his eyes to the golden surface of Ghal Maraz. There, in the godhammer’s sheen, he saw only an empty throne. There was no daemon, no Prismatic King. Not even a flicker of the fiend. The monster’s sorcery could deceive mortal senses, but it couldn’t obfuscate the holy relic with its trickery. The Celestant-Prime turned, staring at the reflection in the hammer, searching for the true shape of the Prismatic King.
What he found was Throl. In the godhammer, the wizard’s shadow was a long ribbon of darkness, vast and hideous – the daemon had entered the man’s body. The Celestant-Prime glared at his enemy. Around them, the sounds of battle faded away, diminishing into nothingness.
‘Much better than the last time,’ the Prismatic King grinned, laughing at the shock the words provoked.
‘If we’d met before, you would already have found your doom,’ the Celestant-Prime snarled, advancing upon the daemon.
‘Only if you win,’ the daemon hissed. ‘You haven’t. Not now, and not then.’ Its gemlike eyes sparkled with malignance. ‘Haven’t you wondered, all those dim memories tugging at you, pulling you here and there?’
‘They brought me here,’ the Celestant-Prime said. ‘They led me here to destroy you.’
The thing wearing Throl’s body laughed again. ‘That is because you’ve been here before. Some foolish test set by your god for you to prove your worth. Didn’t you know? Didn’t your little godling tell you? We’ve danced this dance before, you and I.’
The Celestant-Prime raised godhammer. ‘I’ve no stomach for the lies of daemons,’ he snarled.
‘The best lies are hidden in the truth,’ the daemon mocked. The flesh around its mouth began to shrivel, scraps of blistered skin sloughing away from the bones. ‘There was a real Throl. He thought he could resist me. I even let his identity linger when I assumed his flesh. But there is only so long a mortal shell can contain the grand enormity of my spirit.’
A rending crash rumbled through the hall. Cries of bewilderment rose from the Stormcasts as their erstwhile foes disintegrated into broken glass. The vast shape that leaned against the throne broke apart like a reflection lost in a rippling pool.
‘Kill it, my lord,’ Deucius cried out as he turned away from the wreckage of his last enemy. Other Thriceblessed were converging upon the strange tableau now, surrounding the wizard who had deceived them for so long.
‘Destroy the traitor and have done with it,’ Othmar cursed.
The Prismatic King held its decaying hand towards the Celestant-Prime. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know where the Pillar of Whispers is? I will tell you. Such was ever my purpose, great Ghal Maraz. I will admit, Sigmar is clever in his way. The Maze of Reflection can thwart his cunning but is hardly capable of holding the hero chosen to bear the godhammer. No, I couldn’t kill you and I couldn’t trap you.’ The gloating daemon’s jaw fell off, crumbling to dust as it struck the floor. Still the fiend’s voice slithered from its decaying mantle of flesh. ‘All that was left to me was to destroy you.’
‘Then you have failed, monster,’ Deucius declared. ‘The Celestant-Prime is triumphant. It is you and your slaves that are vanquished!’
‘Do you know where the Pillar of Whispers is hidden?’ the daemon mocked. ‘It is locked away, buried inside a vessel of my own creation. I have held the Thriceblessed a very long time. While they were my guests, I fashioned a simulacrum in their shape. I took one of the Stormcasts from my maze and replaced him with my copy. A perfect copy. A reflection so complete that even it believes itself to be real! That, Ghal Maraz, is where the Pillar of Whispers is hidden! To find the realmgate, you must destroy the simulacrum! Only the godhammer will free it from its mantle of flesh!’
‘More lies!’ Othmar raged. He swung his hammer at the disintegrating body, collapsing its ribs and smashing the carcass to the floor. The desiccated head continued to grin up at the Celestant-Prime.
‘How many must die to unlock the realmgate?’ the Prismatic King’s mockery bubbled up from the bodiless head. ‘Will it be the first or the second, or the two-hundred and second? How many can you strike down before your spirit is broken? How much innocent blood can stain your hands before you are unfit to carry the godhammer?’
The Celestant-Prime listened to no more. Throwing back his head in a roar of outrage and frustration, he brought Ghal Maraz smashing down, obliterating the last shred of what had been Throl’s body and the Prismatic King’s vessel. Denied its host, the daemon’s spirit would be cast back into the Realm of Chaos.
But it was destruction, not defeat. The daemon was vanquished, yet its evil lingered on.
‘It can’t be true,’ Lord-Celestant Devyndus declared. ‘The daemon lies. We are all of us true Stormcasts. You have seen us fight. You have seen us cut down the slaves of Chaos!’
Deucius gestured to the dust that had been Throl. ‘That thing did the same, killing its own servants, springing its own traps all so that it could lull us into trusting it.’
‘But if the simulacrum doesn’t even know it’s false, how can we discover it?’ Othmar asked.
The Celestant-Prime was silent, brooding upon the choice the Prismatic King had put before him. Striking down the Thriceblessed would send them back to Sigmaron, but each time a Stormcast was reforged, he left something of himself behind, becoming less and less human with each incarnation. More, it would blacken his own spirit to massacre his own comrades. He would be tainted, befouled. Unfit to bear Ghal Maraz.
The champion stared down at the sacred hammer. As he did so, he studied the golden sheen. The reflection within the godhammer – the only true reflection within the deceit of the Eyrie. Inspired, the Celestant-Prime held the hammer aloft.
‘Sigmar will show me the way,’ he said. ‘The glory of the God-King will reveal the simulacrum!’ Spreading his wings, he rose into the air above the Thriceblessed, circling above them as he studied the image within the hammer’s golden sheen.
It was when he looked to one stalwart warrior who had fought so valiantly throughout their long march to the fields of Uthyr, that the Celestant-Prime saw a disruption in the reflection. Like the Prismatic King’s daemonic husk, the shadow of the warrior had no presence in the reflection Ghal Maraz revealed to him. The Stormcast wasn’t real, he was naught but a conjuration endowed with shape and form.
The Celestant-Prime returned to the floor, wings folding against his back as he sombrely marched past the Thriceblessed. He could feel the relief issue from each warrior he passed and the trepidation of those he had yet to approach. There was only one, however, who had reason to fear.
Deucius fell to his knees in shock when he saw the Celestant-Prime walk towards him and shake his head.
‘But I know who I am,’ he said.
‘You know who the Prismatic King made you to be,’ the Celestant-Prime corrected him. ‘Know this – by your sacrifice is the daemon undone. We will not forget you. We will mourn you. The realmgate will be secured and the darkness of Chaos will never again befoul it. By Sigmar, this I vow!’
One blow of Ghal Maraz was enough to shatter the simulacrum. The semblance of Deucius shattered in a blaze of light. From the midst of that destruction, a torrent of molten sapphire bubbled and oozed. Gyrating, spinning in a coruscating maelstrom, the Pillar of Whispers stood unleashed. The Celestant-Prime could feel the discordant vibrations spilling from the midst of the whirlpool, the opposing cadences of a different world.
‘A path back to Azyr?’ Lord-Celestan
t Devyndus wondered as he peered into the maelstrom.
‘A path away from here, at least,’ Othmar said. Staring down at the whirlpool, the warrior stepped out into the pulsating waves of force, diminishing as he was drawn through the gate. One after another, the rest of the Stormcasts followed.
The Celestant-Prime was the last to pass through the realmgate. In his mind, he wondered at the fiendish snare the Prismatic King had laid for him and at the daemon’s claims that theirs was an old struggle. The premonitions that had affected him so strongly – had they been premonitions, or memories of some failed effort from the past?
Whatever the truth, the Celestant-Prime had proven himself now. He would ascend with the Thriceblessed and take his place in the God-King’s war.
About the Authors
Darius Hinks’ first novel, Warrior Priest, won the David Gemmell Morningstar award for best newcomer. Since then he has carved a bloody swathe through the Warhammer World in works such as Island of Blood, Sigvald, Razumov’s Tomb and the Orion trilogy. He has also ventured into the Warhammer 40,000 universe with the Space Marine Battles novella Sanctus.
C L Werner’s Black Library credits include the Space Marine Battles novel The Siege of Castellax, the End Times novel Deathblade, the War of Vengeance novel The Curse of the Phoenix Crown, Mathias Thulmann: Witch Hunter, Runefang, the Brunner the Bounty Hunter trilogy, the Thanquol and Boneripper series and the Time of Legends: The Black Plague series. Currently living in the American south-west, he continues to write stories of mayhem and madness set in the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000.
An extract from Beneath the Black Thumb.
‘You come to me offering death,’ said Copsys Bule, stabbing his long-handled trident into the soft red soil. Blood or something distantly akin to it oozed lazily up around the sinking tines. ‘A kingly gift, envoy, but death flourishes where I choose to sow it. I am a harvester of death.’
Kletch Scabclaw studied him with eyes that could have gleaned weakness from diamond. They were milk yellow, and glared over the mangy scrap of man-skin that he held pressed to his muzzle in the claws from which he had taken his name. The look on his furry, verminous face might have been one of disgust, though at what, or who, was something the plague priest kept for himself.
‘A new age begins, they squeak-say.’ Spreading his paws, the skaven irritably swatted aside a buzzing bloat fly. Through Bule’s blurred vision it appeared to have three eyes, until the rat-man snapped his claws and his vision once again became clear. ‘War comes. Even to you.’
Bule snapped his head up.
The skaven immediately backed up a pace, hunched for fight or flight. Light on his foot-paws, he stood atop the rotten mush that went up to Bule’s greaves. His right paw had gone for the weapon he concealed beneath his robes, and he hissed a warning through his scented rag.
Bule smiled, rotten flesh yielding to produce something too, too wide for a human mouth.
Slowly, Kletch held up his empty paws, then the gnawed-on nub of his tail. It switched over the rat-man’s head with irritation. ‘I did not come-scurry all way from clan-burrow to fight-quarrel. The Black Thumb and Clan Rikkit were friend-allies in the Age of Chaos. Is written. Is remembered. Now we must-need fight tooth to claw again.’
Bule turned his back with a mild shake of the head. Withdrawing his bloodied trident, he stabbed three new aeration holes into the soil, the tines spearing an inch deep before hitting something unyielding. Baring the black stubs of his teeth he gave a grunt of pleasure, planted his foot to the back of the fork-head, and rocked back and forth on the handle.
Levering the trident against his bloated girth, he turned over the unyielding patch in a waft of decomposing flesh.
The human corpse tore off its blanket of topsoil and flopped over. A face that was grey-black and runny and lovely as a crop of sweet tubers fresh out of the ground stared up at the slow circling stars with the clarity of the dead. Disturbed maggots and worms squirmed under the starlight, as if divulging some great secret under torture. Bule watched them re-bury themselves, lulled by the drone of a billion bloat flies and the rank cackle of crows.
Wriggle. Wriggle.
‘Rotbringer,’ the skaven prompted him.
Bule pinched his eyes wetly, mind asquirm with worms and portent. The rat-man continued.
‘The lightning men hit clan-burrows in Cripple Fang, Untamed Lands and Putris Bog. Even clan-cousins from far Ghyran come-flee, tunnelling the realm-places to bring word of war.’
Shouldering his trident, Bule turned around suddenly enough to elicit a low squeal of alarm from the plague priest of Clan Rikkit. The rat-man leapt to one side, reaching again for his concealed weapon, but Bule merely squelched through the spot he had been occupying as though he were a zombie suddenly impelled to be elsewhere.
‘Bule. Bule!’
Copsys Bule ignored him, his armour emitting a mould-muffled clank with every step. Several of the spiked plates were split apart at the joins, but the damage to his armour had been inflicted not from without but from within. Corpse gasses distended his belly, opening up the plates from the inside like a fat grub eating its way out of an egg sac. Everywhere there remained living skin, swellings, boils and tumours caused further buckling, mottling the once-green metal to black.
Not since before the Age of Chaos had Bule known an equal, and his gardens brought weeping harvest to lands from the Bloodbloom Fields in the south to the Avalundic Ice Kingdoms in the north, from the peat bogs of Murgid Fein to the unconquerable Rabid Heights and their gargant kings.
His demesne was too vast for one name.
It encompassed the Pox Sands, the great Bloat Lake, the Plantation of Flies, fleshwork patches stitched with irrigation ditches that steamed with blight and hummed with spawning daemonfly. As far into the bubonic haze as the eye could see, scrofulous, once-human things tilled the soil with rakes and hoes, or waded into pools with long prods to turn the bloated corpses that floated in them, gestating towards ripeness. Hundreds expired in the time it took Bule to walk past them, and were dragged away to the nurseries to replenish the soil in their turn.
But it was the nature of lesser beings to attach small names to great things.
They called it the Corpse Marshes.
Seemingly at random, feeling where the dead desired his knife, he squatted down into the mire. A sigh of simple pleasure escaped him. The crucified remains of men, women and children staked the ground in serried rows for a stretch greater than a man could ride in a day. Here could be found the bodies of almost every race, including several that no longer existed anywhere but as they did here now. For reasons fathomable to few but Bule himself, he called it his Living Orchard. A foetid breeze moaned through the dead, making them hum and sway, like lush-leaved trees in bloom. Drawing a curved knife from his arming belt, he sawed away a hand that liquefaction was beginning to pull away from the wrist. It was human. A nectarine blackness trickled from the cut. He licked it from his hand, eyes closed in ecstasy.
There was no plan in his mind of how his garden should be, but he knew what needed to be done towards its completion. And it would be soon. Very soon.
The thought thrilled him even as the part of him that had cherished these labours was saddened by their imminent passing.
‘There are a great many of your kind here,’ Bule said, aware that the rat-man had followed him and was now crouching on an old wall behind him. Keeping his distance. ‘Your fur. Your guts. You teem with life like no other.’ He cut away another sagging limb with a clinical slash. ‘Nothing rots as quickly as a skaven rots. Nothing embraces Grandfather Nurgle so completely.’
‘Is that what you want-wish me to take back to my masters?’
‘Ask me again come the high moon.’
‘Why-why? What changes then?’
Bule licked his knife with a wide smile. Birds cried in fevered tongues, a di
seased animal sagacity that he might one day have the fortune to fathom but half of. ‘You come on an auspicious night. For the first time in two and a half thousand years the stars will align my realmgate with another.’
‘And then?’ Kletch hissed, suddenly wary.
‘Ask me again come the high moon.’
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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
First published in Great Britain in 2015.
This eBook edition published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.
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The Realmgate Wars: Hammers of Sigmar © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2015. The Realmgate Wars: Hammers of Sigmar, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer, Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78251-546-3
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
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