“Someone’s here,” she whispered, turning to the others, with excitement in her eyes.
Most of the men were still looking at the meat with disgust, but Ungaur the Blessed stepped to her side and nodded, towering over her with his fur-clad bulk. He ran a hand over the animal bones in his beard and looked from Sväla to the others. “There are only a dozen of us here, Sväla.”
Sväla shrugged. “We could walk away, I suppose. Travel all the way back to the main front gates, gather up a larger group and be back here in a few hours. Maybe there would still be someone on the other side of this door.”
To Sväla’s surprise, her son stepped forward in her defence. “She’s right,” he muttered, still blushing. “If we leave now, we might never know who was through there. This palace is enormous. We might never find another soul. And then what would we do? Wander these empty halls till we have nothing left to eat but each other?”
Valdür the Old nodded in agreement. Then he kissed the fetishes dangling from his spear and placed a hand on the door’s ivory, serpentine handle. He looked to Sväla for her signal.
She raised her weapon, gesturing for the others to do the same, then nodded at Valdür.
Valdür swung the door open to reveal a series of interconnected rooms. They were linked by dozens of archways, each of which was hung with glittering, diaphanous curtains.
As Sväla stepped into the first room she felt as though she had entered a feverish dream. She could never have imagined such depraved opulence. Gold lanterns were hung from the ceiling, revealing rows of marble pilasters and casting dramatic shadows over the dark, plum-coloured walls. The marble was carved to resemble lithe, naked couples, locked in a series of passionate embraces. She allowed her eyes to trace over the writhing figures up to the plasterwork ceiling. The plaster was moulded in incredible detail and showed even more copulating figures, all writhing in ecstasy as they reached out towards the figure sprawled at their centre. Sväla was unsurprised to notice that the source of their pleasure was Sigvald. His rapacious grin was just visible beneath a forest of groping hands. As Sväla looked closer, her disgust grew. Many of the bodies draped over Sigvald were barely human: serrated wings, vermicular tails and porcine snouts were all depicted in erotic, loving detail as they caressed the laughing prince.
Remembering the danger of their situation, Sväla dragged her gaze from the ceiling to study the rest of the room. She realised that even the furniture was oddly lewd: the voluptuous, gilded curves of the chairs were all carved to resemble carnal acts of the most unspeakable invention.
“Sväla,” whispered Valdür, tapping her on the shoulder and gesturing to one of the draped archways.
She saw slender figures moving back and forth on the other side of the flimsy curtains. They were silhouetted against the glow of a fire and as their outlines rippled across the silk, they seemed as dreamlike as everything else. Sväla turned to see that most of the tribesmen were staring up at the plasterwork, utterly engrossed by the writhing figures. Only Valdür and Ungaur were waiting for her next order.
She looked back at the curtain. The music and laughter was emanating from the other side and as the silhouettes slipped back and forth, she realised that they were performing an elegant dance to an odd, percussive tune. She looked down at her wiry, tattooed frame and her filthy, torn furs and felt suddenly ridiculous. What was she doing here? She took a deep breath and clutched her knife a little tighter. Then she stepped over to one of the pilasters and looked up at the tower of heaving, marble flesh. Still holding her breath, she drew the iron blade across the palm of her left hand and flicked a long line of blood across the entwined figures. As the blood ran down the stone, she let out her breath in a prayer to Völtar, begging for the strength to tear down this palace of sin. Then she turned back to her men. They all now had their eyes fixed on her. She waved six of them to one side of the archway and six to the other side. Then she stepped up to the curtain and wrenched it open.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Mord Huk bellowed with disgust at the strange figure sprawled before him in the snow. The creature’s body was a wiry patchwork of badly sewn skin and deliberate self mutilation, but it was not so much the thing’s flesh that made him howl, it was the ludicrous trails of lilac that surrounded it. The creature was strapped securely to a frozen rock at the summit of a small hill, but its hair seemed to be alive, and as Mord Huk tightened his grip on its throat the pale purple locks trailed over his muzzle, slicing through his thick skin like razors.
“Tell me!” he demanded, in a low, guttural belch.
The creature giggled and squirmed as Mord Huk’s slavering jaws loomed closer. “Such a novice,” it wailed in a creamy falsetto. “You could learn so much from me, dog head. I’m the Geld-Prince’s most skilled surgeon. I could teach you how to extract information with real artistry. Instead of all this ineffective ugliness.”
Mord Huk jolted his head back with a bark of pain, as another of the tendrils sliced into his muzzle. “Tell me,” he grunted, lifting his victim’s head and slamming it back down again with a moist crunch.
The creature vomited blood over its white, skeletal chest and laughed. “One useful technique is to tell the subject what you would like to know.”
Mord Huk raised his huge axe over the creature’s head. “Where is Sigvald?” he grunted, pointing the axe at the glittering palace drifting a few miles north of them. “His army has not come back. Where has he gone?”
“Ah, I see. That, I’m afraid, I cannot answer. You’re right about the palace though. He abandoned his home, and his wife even, so that he could wage war on you.” The creature looked up at the drooling, armour-clad brute hunched over it and laughed. “For the life of me I can’t see why he bothered. How could he leave such a delicious morsel behind for an ugly mongrel like you?”
Mord Huk’s axe sliced through the creature’s neck with a thunk and its head rolled from the rock, sinking deep into the snow and leaving behind a small lilac shrub of hair.
The champion backed away from the corpse and wiped the blood from his armour. Then he turned to the ranks of soldiers spread out below him, panting slightly as he glared down at them with blazing red eyes. He drew a deep breath and howled with such force that he stumbled backwards across the snow. “Sigvald’s wife!” he roared, jabbing his axe at the Gilded Palace. “Bring her!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Sigvald felt the mountain shift beneath him, as though straining to be free. Oddrún staggered to one side as the surrounding rocks began trembling and lifting from the ground, shedding clumps of snow as they rose into the air. As they moved, they picked up speed, hurtling cometlike towards the starless sky.
Sigvald was delighted by the strangeness of the scene. He had never travelled so far north before and he felt drunk on the surreal landscape. He laughed, remembering that he also felt drunk because he was drunk. He looked down at the small green bottle in his hand, unsure for a moment how it got there. Then he remembered: the pain of his wounds had made it too painful to travel, even strapped to Oddrún’s back, so he had ordered Víga-Barói to find him something to ease his discomfort. It had certainly done that. His whole body was tingling and throbbing with energy and his mind was a wonderful, jumbled mess.
Oddrún continued plodding wearily through the snow, with the laughing prince waving his bottle at the heavens. Soon, there was a whole shower of stones, springing from the ground and rocketing up towards the sky, flashing with refracted moonlight as they went. Sigvald’s head lolled back on his neck as he followed their ascent, up through the falling snow, towards the low clouds. After a while, he realised that not all of the vast shadows overhead were clouds. The flying ships had followed them north. “Oddrún,” gasped the prince, pointing his bottle at the nearest one. It was huge beyond imagining and carved from the rotting carcass of a leathery, bloated amphibian. Hundreds of gaudy sails were hung from its sides and flickering, sallow lanterns shone out through its bony hull. As Sigvald
gazed, bleary-eyed up at the ship, he realised that he could even make out pale faces peering down at him from the gunnels.
Oddrún glanced briefly up at the ship, before pointing down the slope. “Almost there,” he muttered.
Sigvald leant forward to peer over his shoulder and saw that he was right. At the bottom of the next crag was a line of black rock, carving a straight path through the snowdrifts and disappearing into the distance. “The road,” he cried, spraying wine on the back of Oddrún’s hood and starting to laugh. “Doctor Schliemann was right!”
Oddrún climbed carefully down the icy rocks and waded through the snow towards the road. As he reached the edge of the black rock, he hesitated. Despite the high drifts on either side, no trace of snow could be seen on the road. The giant leant out over the rock, peering into the flawless void. This close up, the road seemed more like a ribbon of ink, sunk deep into the glittering snow. There was no sign of edges or texture of any kind—not even the faintest glimmer of reflected moonlight.
“Look,” cried Sigvald, turning the giant’s head back the way they had come.
Oddrún turned around and they both stared in amazement. The crag they had just scaled down was rippling like a curtain in the wind. As they watched, the whole mountainside slumped and reared with the breeze, as insubstantial as smoke. As the wind picked up, even the snow-laden sky began to swell and bulge like liquid.
Sigvald took another swig of wine and threw the empty bottle at the cliff, laughing incredulously as it stretched and writhed through the air, before finally sinking into the mountain like a pebble into a lake. “It’s all falling apart,” he cried, rising up from Oddrún’s shoulders and wrenching the last few strands of blackened hair from his scalp. “Reality is collapsing. All of it—apart from the road.” He waved at the broad expanse of black. “See? Everything else is in flux, but the road stays constant.” He slapped the giant’s shoulders. “Quick, Narrerback.”
The giant trod hesitantly on the black rock with one foot. The surface held and he stepped fully onto the road.
They both looked up to see that even the air above was clear of snowflakes. A straight void hung over them, like a tunnel carved through the storm.
Oddrún made no comment and loped off down the road, with Sigvald still laughing on his back.
After several hours, the horizon began to change. Shimmering curtains of light rippled in and out of view, drenching the whole landscape with emeralds and pinks and even forming briefly into recognisable scenes. As he watched from his swaying perch, Sigvald saw mountainous faces leering down at him from within the lights: everything from daemonic monsters to innocent babes, flickering in the endless night.
They had left the army in the daemon’s garden. Sigvald had told Víga-Barói and Baron Schüler that such a journey into the intangible should be for him alone, and ordered them to remain and keep watch over the Decadent Host. Now, as he watched images blossoming in the air before him, Sigvald wished he had at least brought the baron along. If anything could have convinced a doubting convert, it would have been this.
“We must be nearly there,” he slurred. Then he laughed in delight as his words appeared in front of his face as a row of luminous script. “Look at this,” he cried, sending more letters into the air. “My speech is real!” As new letters formed, they jostled with the others, forming an incandescent mess of consonants and vowels. “What an incredible place,” he laughed, squeezing the giant’s shoulder.
Oddrún gave a noncommittal nod as he trudged on down the road.
The further north they went, the stranger their surroundings grew. The mountains on either side became rivers of rock, snaking through the sky and pouring to the ground in huge, granite cascades, and the sky grew crowded with ever more putrid ships, each one shrouded in clouds of winged snakes that circled and dived around them like hungry gulls. Through the heart of it all, the road remained untouched, carving through the lunacy as surely as it had carved through the snow.
Sigvald pointed at the horizon and tried to cry out, but instead of words, another torrent of radiant characters tumbled from his mouth, and this time, the words were in a language he did not recognise.
Oddrún looked up to see two thin, black pyramids of rock rearing up ahead of them, surrounded by clumps of wizened hawthorn.
Sigvald grabbed the gold casket from Oddrún’s side and popped it open.
The box was empty, but before Sigvald had a chance to emit any more of the dazzling glyphs, he noticed that a figure had appeared beside them on the road.
The prince immediately recognised the jerky, bird-like gait of Doctor Schliemann. The scholar was as young and clear-eyed as the day Sigvald first welcomed him to the Gilded Palace, decades earlier. There was a key difference, however: his flesh was as vague and insubstantial as the characters drifting around Sigvald’s face.
“The Lucid Gate,” said the young doctor, staring up at Sigvald from behind his wire-rimmed glasses. His words rang out quite clearly. “A single point of clarity between two worlds.”
“You’re restored,” Sigvald tried to say, but the words just poured from his mouth as glittering, diaphanous treacle.
The doctor shook his head, seemingly able to understand. “Not restored, prince. My soul is still tied to the casket by your sorcerer’s artifice. My spirit is eternally bound to your service. It’s just that the proximity of the Ruinous Powers is enabling you to see a different aspect of my being.” His robes shimmered as he pointed at the gold casket. “As long as you live, I can never be free from that prison.”
Sigvald nodded eagerly, oblivious to the pain in the doctor’s voice. Then he pointed at the black pillars looming ahead of them.
The doctor nodded. “Chaos wears countless faces, prince. There are many different gates, in many different places, but if you pass between those stones, I guarantee you will leave the mortal realm.”
Sigvald tapped one of the swirling arabesques on his armour with a questioning expression. The curves were sculpted in the shape of a symbol—the mark of Slaanesh.
The doctor shrugged. “I can’t say what you’ll find beyond that gate, no one can, but it’s definitely possible that if you travel any further you will see the face of your god.”
Sigvald rolled his eyes ecstatically and plucked another small bottle from Oddrún’s robes. He peered at the label in confusion for a few seconds, then emptied its contents in a single gulp. As the giant plodded on beneath him, he held the empty bottle up to his eye and peered through it like a telescope, laughing hysterically as he surveyed the rippling landscape through the green glass.
After another hour of walking they reached the gate.
Sigvald freed himself from the giant’s back and dropped to the ground in a crumpled heap.
Oddrún stooped down and helped him to his feet, keeping a steadying hand on the prince’s shoulder as he stood, swaying slightly before the two black obelisks.
The surface of the stones was unmarked, but there was movement inside: a steady pulse, deep within the rock. On the other side of them, the road appeared to continue, as straight as before.
“What do I do?” asked Sigvald. He touched his lips in shock, surprised by the sound of his own voice. It was only then that he noticed the dazzling characters had vanished. “I can speak!” he exclaimed, turning unsteadily towards the ghostly doctor.
Schliemann shrugged and nodded but gave no reply.
Sigvald lurched towards him. “What do I do, doctor?” He looked back at the ominous stones. “Do I just step through?”
Schliemann opened his mouth to reply, but before he could, Sigvald threw himself through the gate with a bark of laughter.
Instantaneously, he reappeared, grinning and looking around himself excitedly. His face dropped as he saw Oddrún and the doctor.
“It’s not so simple,” explained Schliemann, shoving his glasses up his nose and nodding to the withered mass of hawthorn at the base of the rocks. “There is a ritual to be observed.” There
was a gleam of excitement in his eyes as he looked at the bushes. “First you must take a berry.”
Sigvald nodded eagerly and rushed towards the hawthorn.
“Wait,” grumbled Oddrún, extending one of his long arms and clasping the prince’s shoulder. “He’s lying to you, Sigvald.”
Doctor Schliemann narrowed his eyes but did not turn towards the giant. “You know the wards that bind me, prince. I am unable to tell you anything that is not true.”
“He’s tricking you then,” insisted Oddrún, stooping down to Sigvald’s level and gripping his other shoulder. “Don’t do it.”
Sigvald looked up at the giant with a tormented look in his eyes. “It’s just there,” he whispered, pointing to the stones. “The garden of my lord.”
Oddrún simply shook his head as the prince stepped away from him and plucked one of the berries.
“I have to know how it feels,” said Sigvald, peering at the fruit as though it held all the mysteries of the universe within its taut, blood-red skin.
“Stand against one of the stones and draw your sword,” said the spectral figure.
“Oddrún?” said Sigvald, nodding to the berries.
The giant backed away, shaking his head. “You’re going to die.”
Sigvald looked back at the berry. “Die,” he said quietly, rolling the word around his mouth a few times. Then his face went slack and he stood in silence for a while, seeming to forget his surroundings.
“Prince,” said the doctor after a few awkward minutes had passed. “You need to hold one of the stones and draw your sword.”
Sigvald snapped out of his reverie and looked around in confusion. “What? Oh, yes. Yes.” He weaved across the road back to the stone and drew the sword he had borrowed. Then he reached out and splayed one of his hands across the black rock. “It’s warm,” he said, looking back at the doctor in surprise. “It feels like skin.”
[Heroes 04] - Sigvald Page 26