Daemon World

by Ben Counter - (ebook by Undead)

  But the Last fought long and hard against Arguleon Veq, that awesome champion of Chaos, and all agree that sometimes the outcome of the duel was far from certain. The Last must have been terrible indeed to truly challenge Veq, perhaps skilled in sorcery, composed of energy, or possessed of some other power that none can guess at. But the most persistent impression is one of immense size.

  The Canis Mountains are argument enough for many. When the combat came to deceit and subterfuge, the Last lay in wait for years, intent on ambushing Arguleon Veq. When Veq let his guard down—a mistake, a lure?—the Last reared up from beneath the ground and nearly devoured him. The impressions left by the Last’s huge maw remained in the earth, as that range of sharp towering peaks called the Canis Mountains.

  The mountains were the first thing that Captain Amakyre of the Word Bearers saw as the ocular arrays of the Multus Sanguis focused for the first time on the surface of Torvendis. They were like a ridge of old scar tissue from a wound that had healed and been reopened a dozen rimes—ugly, gnarled ripples of rock running the length of the continent that dominated the face of the planet. Amakyre drew back from the eyepieces of the array, his millennia-old power armour whirring as he descended from the helmsman’s pulpit to the bridge deck of the Multus. The Multus Sanguis was as old as the Word Bearers Legion itself, and like the Legion it had doggedly survived everything the galaxy had thrown at it. Amakyre’s mission was important and he had chosen the Multus precisely because it was fast, tough, and had an unusually active (if unstable) machine-spirit that could look after itself if left alone. The ship was like a massive cluster of cathedral spires, stained and encrusted with weapons emplacements and gargoyles, that tore angrily through space on the dull red glow of its engines. In addition to its other qualities, it was the largest ship in the Word Bearers’ fleet that was capable of a planetary landing.

  Inside, the interior of the Multus Sanguis was convoluted to the extent that only a tiny fraction of it was habitable, the rest open to hard vacuum or full of twisted metal. Only the bridge, engineering decks and Word Bearers’ quarters were safe. This made the Multus Sanguis all but impossible to board, and it could run on the barest of skeleton crews as it did now.

  Amakyre gestured at the pasty-skinned lackeys that cowered from his presence, and one of them flicked a switch that projected the image of Torvendis high above the amphitheatre of the bridge.

  The black, age-stained ironwork of the bridge was edged with grey in the light of the holograph.

  Amakyre stared up at the pale, scarred world, trying to scry some meaning from its appearance: the tortured wound of the mountains, the sallow expanses of rotted swamplands, the multicoloured city of Lady Charybdia like a jewelled net cast across the centre of the continent. The shattered multitude of islands in the oceans to the west, the chewed-up peninsula to the south where slabs of rainforest crowded between bottomless chasms—where had the multitude of Chaos gods left their mark? Torvendis was a world of massive symbolic stature, existing as it did at the very heart of the Maelstrom where other worlds would decay and fragment, preserved by the way a hundred currents of the warp pulled in every direction upon the world and cancelled each other out. The eyes of every gloriously malign deity turned upon it, if only to see which one of them could claim dominance over it as the centuries flickered past.

  Torvendis was tormented indeed, Amakyre saw. With sight honed by ten thousand years of contemplation, he could detect the wounds beneath the planet’s surface and the currents of violence that had swept across it. All the more remarkable then that Lady Charybdia, misguided as she was to treat her god Slaanesh as prime amongst Chaos, had held on to power for as long as she had.

  But Amakyre, captain of the Word Bearers Chapter, wasn’t here for Lady Charybdia. He had made sure he knew enough about her to anticipate her reactions to the Word Bearers’ arrival, but that was all he cared about as far as she was concerned. He was here for the one his Chapter called Karnulon.

  Amakyre turned at the sound of the bridge blast doors opening. The circle of lackeys who crouched around the edge of the circular bridge deck cowered at the noise, turning their eyes—those who still had them—to the riveted floor.

  Brother Prakordian stepped through the smoke that boiled in from the noisome lower decks. Prakordian wore power armour the colour of old blood, the same as Amakyre’s, and with the same snarling daemon emblem on the shoulder pad. But where Amakyre’s limbs were studded with campaign badges and decorations from millennia of war, the ceramite of Prakordian’s armour was covered with engraved ramblings. Prakordian was a deadspeaker, to whom the words of the dead echoed in the half-trance that Space Marines endured instead of sleep. When Prakordian emerged from that non-sleep there would be another passage graven onto his armour, more words powerful enough to survive death and reach Prakordian’s corrupted mind. Somewhere inside that pale, tight-skinned, hairless head there were a million words circling, vying for the Chaos Marine’s attention, the last chance of the deceased to make some mark on the universe. Prakordian’s gift—and it was a gift, for it made him useful to the Word Bearers and therefore to Chaos—meant that even those who gave up their lives could still be interrogated.

  “Praises!” called Prakordian, breathless with excitement as soon as he glimpsed the mutilated disk of Torvendis. “Such a world! Such death!”

  Some would have been amused by Prakordian, who somehow still possessed wonder as well as the fanaticism that tainted every Word Bearer, as if his devotion to Chaos was more like the malice of a child than the cynical hatred of an ancient warrior. But it took a lot to amuse Amakyre now, when he had sought to bleed the galaxy dry of virtue since the days of the Heresy.

  “Take care you are not deafened, Brother Prakordian. There have been more battles fought here than the rest of the Maelstrom together can claim. This is your first sight of the enemy, brother, and it is an enemy indeed. This world is what Karnulon will be using as an ally. He will use its power against us. Know your enemy, and do not let its beauty distract you. If you can do your sacred duty here then the voices of the dead may be a little louder before we leave.”

  And their duty was sacred indeed. Karnulon was one of their own, a Word Bearer of considerable reputation for viciousness in the face of war, and Amakyre had seen what could happen when one of their own lost his discipline. Though it was often scattered, fighting on a score of worlds at once according to the plans of its warlords or the Primarch Lorgar himself, the Word Bearers still retained their integrity as a fighting force. They still had discipline. They still had a chain of command. So many had lost it in the years since the Heresy—some Legions were just roving bands of butchers, others were insane predators who struck from the warp at random. The Word Bearers were a cohesive fighting force, capable of being wielded as a precise and devastating weapon by the enlightened Lorgar. Men like Karnulon had to be destroyed to protect the Legion. If rogues were left unchecked, the Legion would eventually become no better than the piratical Astral Claws or the madmen of the Thunder Barons.

  Amakyre had known Karnulon. Karnulon had been there in the depths of the Heresy, and had weathered ten thousand years of war in the name of Chaos. Amakyre remembered those twin lightning claws that sent crescents of power arcing off his dark scarlet power armour, the hard-edged face that had never aged and was lined with experience rather than years. He remembered how Karnulon had been taken to the court of Lorgar himself, and had perhaps even spoken with that reclusive giant, before rumours of his education in sorcery and his rapid warp-mastery of magic.

  Now Karnulon had disappeared and taken with him too many secrets of the true face of Chaos. Amakyre had been charged with finding him—and he had also been granted the power to judge his brother Chaos Marine, which allowed Amakyre to execute Karnulon once it was determined why the renegade had taken his leave of his Legion.

  Amakyre was a captain of his Legion. A hundred Word Bearers had fought and died at his word, a hundred of the warp’s finest warr
iors. He had been relieved of that command to complete this mission, to find Karnulon and bring back what remains he saw fit. Amakyre knew how important he was, for he had overseen thousands of battles. The Legion thought this task to be equally important, and Amakyre was resolved not to fail. And fail he would not, for the six Word Bearers he had with him were enough to accomplish anything.

  “And we are sure he is here?” Prakordian was saying.

  “No, we are not sure,” replied Amakyre sternly. “We know his ship came this way. We know this is the only place of shelter for light years around. But we will not assume we have found him until he stands before us.”

  “But if we have found him, then why has he come here? So many eyes look upon this world. It is no place for a fugitive to hide.”

  “That will be answered when we find him.” Amakyre waved an impatient hand at the rag-clothed, scarred lackeys who cowered at the edge of the amphitheatre. “Navigation!” he yelled, and a handful of them scuttled towards ancient black iron consoles, where monitor screens blinked from inside gaping daemon’s mouths and tell-tale lights spelled out the dark thoughts of the Multus Sanguis. Thin, dirty-nailed fingers scrabbled at keypads and a network of complex glowing lines appeared around the image of Torvendis. Ghostly equations and occult diagrams flashed here and there at random, symptoms of the ship’s growing unpredictability—the Multus was old and thoughts came to its machine-spirit unbidden. In its senility, it was becoming more human.

  The many trajectories the Multus could take were marked out in glowing green. Sites large enough to land the ship were orange patches projected onto the surface of the image. There were places in the foothills of the mountain range, but Amakyre knew the ship would be hard to miss from the great walls surrounding Lady Charybdia’s city. Much of the swampland would swallow up the ship’s huge weight and if they landed on one of the islands the Word Bearers coven would have to somehow find their way across hostile waters before they could even begin their quest.

  “There,” said Amakyre, pointing towards a place in the far north of the continent, where the mountains met the sea. The rocky terrain would be inhospitable, but flat and stable. Amakyre strode over to one of the lackeys and hauled it (Amakyre could no longer tell the males from the females, so riven with scars and malnutrition were they) to its feet. The Chaos Marine was about twice the height of the wretch.

  “This is where we will land. Inform the machine-spirit.” He cuffed the lackey and sent it scurrying off down an access tunnel that would lead it to the housing of the Multus’s machine-spirit, deep in the heart of the ship’s prow. The machine-spirit would need feeding now, so while delivering the co-ordinates, the lackey would provide it with the warm blood it craved.

  It was not surprising that Prakordian had been the second to emerge from the stasis-meditation the Word Bearers observed during travel through the warp. The youth (Amakyre could only think of Prakordian as a youth, though he was many centuries old) was filled with anticipation of secrets uncovered and blood spilt. The other Word Bearers of the coven would be waking now, and Amakyre would hold a sermon for them. He had to make sure they understood the importance of their task and the terrible consequences for the whole Legion if Karnulon reneged on his loyalties and went rogue, as no other Word Bearer had ever succeeded in doing before.

  There would be weapons rites to observe for Vrox, who could not speak the litanies himself after the Obliterator virus had turned his mouth into a gun-port. The landing would have to be supervised and the Multus’s machine-spirit placated with more blood. There was so much to do even before they made planetfall, and Amakyre trusted all these tasks to no one but himself.

  He strode off the bridge deck and into the roiling steam that billowed up from the lower decks, heavy with incense, sweat and decay. With every step he took he praised the pantheon of Chaos. With every task completed, he brought the galaxy closer to unification under darkness.

  Lady Charybdia let herself drift down the shaft sunk deep into the immense foundation block, the sighs of spirits trapped in the walls cushioning her descent. Very few knew that it was even possible for something to travel this far down, for the foundation blocks of the keep seemed as solid as anything on the planet. But this one was networked with narrow channels and low-ceilinged galleries like flaws in a diamond, winding their way down through the massive stones and down to the same level as the most ancient of battle sites. The air was old and laden with the powdered bones of the war dead, the stones rough and traced with spiralling cross-sections of skeletons.

  It pleased Lady Charybdia that she was the only one who both knew of these places, and was able to travel between them and the rest of Charybdia Keep. Most of the retainers she kept here had no idea that any world existed outside the cramped tunnels and blood-warm grottoes.

  Lady Charybdia came to a junction where the shaft led to a long, torchlit passageway. She breathed a command and the lamenting spirits let go of her, letting her elegant, altered body in its white silks drift to the floor. The air here was warm and stifling and she felt her lungs open up in response—a survival reflex, a relic of her earlier life when she fought and butchered like any Chaos champion.

  The wall was studded with skulls, nailed to the stone with golden spikes. Normally such decoration was far too blatant for Lady Charybdia, but these skulls were special. They had been hacked out of the earth in the deepest mine her minions had ever sunk, so deep the heat killed off mortal men and precious daemons had to be summoned to complete the work. But it had been worth it, for these were not human skulls they had found.

  They were eldar. At some time impossibly distant, eldar had walked upon Torvendis. They were a strange race, obsessed with eking out the secrets of the universe and then guarding them like a jealous child guards its toys—and yet the pursuit of knowledge had all but destroyed their civilisation, when their decadence had caught the attention of Slaanesh. Some claimed the eldar thus brought Slaanesh into existence, but such was heresy—Slaanesh was as old as lust, and lust was older than anything.

  Lady Charybdia did not know why eldar might have visited Torvendis all those millennia ago. Perhaps they had become marooned on the world by accident, and the Maelstrom was certainly an easy enough place for a spacecraft to become lost. Then again, seeking out the secrets of Torvendis was just the sort of desperately inquisitive thing the eldar might do, so maybe they had been here deliberately. Whatever the case, Lady Charybdia was the only one on the planet to know the aliens had once been here, and that knowledge—like so many things—pleased her.

  She admired the lines of the skulls as she passed. They looked human only at a distance, up close they were different in every dimension—wide-spaced, teardrop-shaped eyes, small jaws and teeth, elegant cheekbones, tapering craniums. It was easy for Lady Charybdia to imagine how Slaanesh might wish to take such an elegant species and turn their sophistication into a tool for his worship. They were beautiful, almost as she was beautiful, and the ultimate sensation of their dying must have given Slaanesh much pleasure when their planets were annihilated at his arrival.

  The chamber ahead was large and circular, with rib-like supports holding up a domed ceiling of mottled red-black stone. It was one of the biggest cavities in the foundation, and standing on its threshold was like looking inside a great living organ, dark and hot, the hum of life felt through the soles of the feet.

  In the centre of the room, where the floor sank into a circular depression, kneeled one of Lady Charybdia’s legionaries. He was rather more than two metres tall, his skin so heavily tattooed it was impossible to tell what colour it originally had been. His torso was bare and around his armoured legs hung lengths of silk-like banners, embroidered with the symbols of the Pleasure God in hair shorn from the heads of those notables the legionary had defeated. One hand held a spear, the point a twin-pronged blade designed to pin down and disembowel. The other was placed palm-down on the floor, feeling for movement, for any sign that something below might be stirring.<
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  Lady Charybdia approached the kneeling figure at the centre of the chamber. “Arise, centurion,” she said. She knew his rank because of the particular symbols he wore on his silks and skin, but she did not know his name. To her, none of them had names. They were just instruments she used to maintain her position of worshipful pleasure.

  The legionary stood, his eyes fixed on the ground. To look on Lady Charybdia without due reason had become a crime in the city without its ruler ever having to order it so.

  “Has our guest woken of late?”

  “He has not, my lady.”

  “Then our hospitality must not be to his liking. Shall we wake him, and see to his needs?”

  “If my lady wishes.”

  “Your lady does.”

  The legionary stood aside, stepping up from the depression. He took a knife from his belt and, silently, cut a long, deep cut in the side of his abdomen. Sheathing the knife, he pulled a roll of parchment from the wound, slick with blood, and unrolled it. Still averting his eyes, he held out the parchment for Lady Charybdia to take.

  On the parchment was written the code-rite, which was re-divined and written down by Lady Charybdia’s sorcerers after every visit she made to her guest. The means by which the guest could be woken had to be kept safe, and it had to be different every time. If someone broke in and defeated the legionary, his death would destroy the parchment as his digestive acids broke through his prepared intestines and dissolved it.

  Lady Charybdia spoke the sacred syllables, her voice barely above a whisper lest the power of those words bleed into the foundation and pollute the purity of the keep. As she finished, there was a grinding sound beneath her feet, and Lady Charybdia and the legionary stepped back as the stones shifted. The floor of the depression began to rise, reaching the level of the chamber’s floor and continuing to form the top of a pillar of stone. The polished curve of the pillar showed a cross-section of the stone, revealing smeared, stretched ribcages and distorted skulls ghosted into the rock.