Daemon World

by Ben Counter - (ebook by Undead)

  Bright magical arrows were spearing up from all over the barbarian lines, fired by the mysterious southern assassins, and with every one a tiny figure seemed to topple from the battlements to land broken far below. Bright spears of lightning suddenly arced down in reply, leaping from one of the towers down into the heart of the milling cavalry. There was a white flash and a cloud of vaporised dirt, horse and human flesh rained wetly back down onto the barbarian lines.

  They were dying, just as men were dying all along the wall. Golgoth didn’t care—he had seen enough men die and had killed enough himself. There was no room to care, not with all the anger that filled him to bursting. He waded through the gore towards the wall, the warriors thinning out beside him, as arrows began to stud the shield he held above his head and his hair and skin became sticky with the thin drizzle of blood.

  It was dark and dry inside the wall. The sounds of battle were beginning to filter through the rock, a dull throb of war-cries and screams, punctuated with sudden roars as the guns were brought to bear and bolts of magic hit the ground.

  Tarn drew his dagger and placed it between his teeth. He wedged his body sideways into the crack and began to force himself upwards, the tough leathers he wore protecting his skin from the sharp stone. The dagger was his only weapon, because here within the structure of the wall there was no room to carry a shield or a sword. Tarn didn’t mind—he could kill with a dagger better than most men could kill with anything. He was tough enough to never need anything other than his bare hands, truth be told. Grik had chosen him at birth, weeding him from the weaker infants by the simple expedient of exposing them for longer and longer periods until there was only one left, and that one was Tarn.

  The gap would have been too narrow for most, but Tarn was slim and lithe, his body all muscle and bone. The massive stones that made up the wall had settled over the centuries and they had moved ever so slightly, leaving gaps between them that were just large enough for a slender man to squeeze into.

  As he clambered higher the dim sounds of battle shifted, from the thunderous noise of the horde below to the recoil of guns and crackle of magic from above. He could smell the incense and perfumes with which the Pleasure God’s followers anointed themselves and conducted their rites—many would call them effeminate, but Tarn had seen the hideous mess they had left of hunters and scavenger packs that had been caught by their patrols, and knew they were as utterly ruthless as the proudest barbarian. He had heard tell the legions did not feel pain like other men; their magic was as deadly as that of the most powerful tribal sorcerers and they spoke with daemons to lay their plans.

  In some ways, Tarn wondered if he wouldn’t have made a fine servant of Lady Charybdia. The gods knew he had little enough allegiance to the Emerald Sword or to Golgoth—he had fled Grik’s employ when it became clear the old man was mad as well as mutated, and had joined with Golgoth mainly because he could not survive alone in the mountains and Golgoth seemed the best option for his continued survival. Tarn didn’t even hate the legions as most of the tribes did—he didn’t hate anyone particularly, and considered everyone else to be subordinate to his immediate desires for survival and adventure. But fate had seen fit to deliver Tarn to the Emerald Sword rather than Lady Charybdia, and so Tarn would kill for Golgoth and enjoy it while he could.

  Tarn forced his way up through the crack until he emerged through the floor of a tiny chamber, set deep within the wall, where the air was close and hard to breathe. The smell of spices and some strange alchemical substance was strong and stung his eyes. There was a single lit torch guttering on the wall—Tarn guessed it must be some forgotten spell that kept it alight.

  He took his dagger in one hand and glanced around the room, making sure he was safe. At one side, the floor had collapsed, presumably as a result of the fissure in the wall below, revealing the crack from which he had crawled. The walls were odd, covered in intricate designs with a strange texture—it was only at second glance that Tarn realised they had been covered in skins, stretched and cured, that were scattered with tattoos. The designs twisted and swirled as he watched, spectral eyes seemed to stare—he shook the idea out of his head and moved silently through the room’s only door.

  He came out under a wooden staircase. It was obviously carrying troops up onto the battlements, judging by the clatter of armour and the pounding of tramping feet. He could smell the troops’ sweat and perfumes, hear their voices muttering incoherently in what must be prayers to their god. Tarn peered between the planks of the steps and saw dozens of bare feet, many covered with old, shallow wounds, self-inflicted.

  The gaggle of troops passed and Tarn quickly hauled himself up onto the stairway. It was narrow and the air was still close, but this time the smells coiling down from above were mixed with blood and death. Tarn knew those smells well—this place, strange as it was and filled with many things he would not understand, was still just a battlefield like all the rest of them. And the battlefield was the only place Tarn felt at home.

  Golden icons hung on the walls, carved into shapes like coiled snakes or twisted branches. There were scratch marks in the walls, and over the doorway at the top of the stairs had been nailed a corpse, old and mouldering. It was wearing the tatters of a legion uniform and Tarn guessed it was a malefactor, killed for some indiscipline and displayed as a reminder to others. These people were not so much unlike his own, thought Tarn.

  For the moment, he was alone. But Tarn knew that not only were the walls crammed with legions, there were several other infiltrators like himself making their way into the heart of the defences.

  Some were to head for the barracks to kill the reserves and draw legionaries down from the walls. Others, like Tarn, were to cause as much bedlam as possible on the walls themselves. Most wouldn’t make it through the walls or onto the ramparts at all, but those who did had been picked from the coldest killers in the mountains.

  There was a guard on the other side of the door—Tarn heard his breathing through the wood. He silently opened the door a crack and stabbed the guard behind the ear without even peering through the doorway. He caught the body as it fell, wiped his blade on its satin uniform, and dumped it just behind the doorway, closing it behind him. It was Tarn’s first kill of this enemy—another for the endless catalogue of killings that he kept filed away in his head. Few men like him kept count of their kills for long, but Tarn had, although he would have needed some time to calculate before he came up with a final tally.

  Tarn saw the staircase had ended and he was now in a corridor just below the level of the battlements—the corridor’s ceiling was the floor of the ramparts above, and the tramping of dozens of feet filtered down along with shouted orders and the whistle of arrows let fly. Tarn darted down the corridor and emerged in the open air, on a ledge on the rear of the wall leading up towards the ramparts. The ledge was narrow to hamper attackers coming down—the only other way to reach the vulnerable barracks and command posts behind the wall consisted of a very long drop. The defences were well-constructed, designed to funnel attackers into bottlenecks where they could be confronted and killed by a relatively few trained men, or bunch them up on the wall where guns and archers could be turned on them.

  A short, narrow flight of stairs led to the ramparts and Tarn could see the frenetic activity. Gangs of archers were firing volleys then moving as a smattering of arrows clattered against the ramparts in reply Spearmen were forming reserves to plug gaps in the walls as men fell. Units of soldiers armed with swords, shields, and more exotic weapons besides, were taking up position at junctions and doorways to face any attackers that might find their way onto the walls.

  Tarn watched as a creature appeared that was, presumably, human, but had little of a human’s shape—it was twice as tall as a man with dark red scaled skin and tentacle-fingered whips for arms. It had no legs but a thick mantle of skin, like the foot of a slug, showing beneath its kilts of scale and wrappings of silk. It was barking orders from a great wide mouth,
and from the elaborate decorations of its misshapen uniform Tarn guessed it was an officer of some kind. Tarn would have called it Touched, others would refer to it as deformed or mutated—Torvendis produced a great many malformities in its offspring and some were strong enough not just to survive but to prove superior in some respects to normal humans. Some tribes killed them at birth regardless of their strength.

  Lady Charybdia evidently valued those that were useful to her. Tarn certainly saw this particular monstrosity as a formidable soldier that evidently held no little respect amongst the other legionaries.

  Tarn had no respect for anyone or anything save himself. He jogged up the flight of steps, crouched low until the mutant was just above him. It was facing the other way and pointing with its snakelike fingers to the battlefield below it, yelling out targets in a strange language for the archers to launch their volleys at.

  Tarn silently stalked up the last few steps until he was standing in the mutant’s shadow, acutely aware that just one pair of sharp eyes could pick him out and raise the alarm. He stood up and saw the battlefield for the first time. A dark writhing mass seemed to be oozing across the landscape towards the walls, thinning out as it coursed across ditches and walls of spikes. Explosions flashed as guns and magic sent what looked like showers of dark dust into the air—Tarn knew those specks would be bodies and fragments of bodies, torn apart in an instant.

  It was no way to die, either beneath the hammer of the guns or beneath the feet of your fellow warriors. Tarn had hoped Golgoth would let him fight his battle up here, where the killing was clean.

  It was time to join in.

  One of the archers paused to draw a handful of arrows from his quiver and happened to glance backwards. His eyes met Tarn’s and for a second they just stared at one another. The legionary was older than most, with sunken eyes and features that were not just lined by age but riven with straight vertical scars, self-inflicted, a measure of devotion to the Pleasure God. The legionary yelled a warning and the mutant commander turned, eyes on stubby stalks fixing on Tarn.

  Tarn never made mistakes. Sometimes, he unwittingly created a situation which, although unplanned for, could nevertheless be turned into an unusual advantage. Not mistakes.

  He threw the dagger hard and dropped out of sight onto the stairs as the first arrows flew—he heard the thunk of metal through bone and knew that his blade had punched through the mutant’s skull. With luck, its brain would be in the normal place and it would be dead before it hit the floor.

  Tarn pressed up against the side of the stairway, keeping low so he would see anyone coming onto the head of the stairs before they saw him. He heard footsteps and darted forward on instinct, ramming an elbow into the first face that appeared, shattering his opponent’s jaw and driving the bone through the arteries at the top of the throat. In the same motion he grabbed an arrow from the dying man’s quiver and stabbed it into the groin of the archer following, seizing the back of the man’s neck as he doubled over squealing, and pitching him over his shoulder to tumble brokenly down the stairs.

  More would come, and he was trapped on the stairway just as the builders of these fortifications had intended. Tarn reached up, dug his fingers into a crack between two stone blocks of the wall, and jamming the side of his foot against the wall took two long strides straight up it, vaulting over the rear parapet and onto the main ramparts. He landed behind the archers who were gathering to rush down the stairs at him. He wrapped an arm around the neck of the nearest and snapped the spine where it met the skull, a trick he had learned as a child and which was little more than a reflex action to him now. The other hadn’t even noticed he was behind him when he grabbed the dead man’s bow, took a handful of arrows and loosed off three shots into the archers. He counted quickly as he fired. Six—no, nine left. Two of the arrows hit home. Seven.

  He glanced behind him. There was a bizarrely ornate tower a short sprint down the ramparts, a ribbed column topped by jagged ramparts like a crown and a tall, slim steeple. The tower had a solid-looking door covered with runes. It might open, it might not, but the other options were through the archers or over the front of the wall.

  Arrows spat towards him from the quicker-witted archers. Voices were yammering in a foreign tongue, but Tarn knew what they would be saying—he’s behind us, you morons, kill him quickly.

  If Tarn backed away, even if he picked a man off with every shot, they would stick him full of arrows before half of them were dead. He was good with a bow, but better with his bare hands. He charged.

  The bow was thin but strong, made of some matt-black substance with a gold handgrip. The ends were tipped with gold, too, which tapered to a sharp point. Tarn sprinted a few steps and plunged that sharp tip into the stomach of one archer and let the momentum of his charge carry him into the other six, bowling them over. An arrow shot wild, arcing high into the air.

  Tarn scrabbled and found a short sword scabbarded at the archer’s waist. He ripped it free and let his morions slip into the old grooves that had been worn into his movements by countless training duels and battlefield scrums, lashing and parrying, jabbing up underneath the jaw of one man, withdrawing the blade and slicing the arm off another.

  Four.

  The pommel, formed into a golden orb, shattered a temple and the blade skewered a thigh.

  Three.

  The fight was over. Three-on-one odds basically meant victory—the legionaries were well-trained and, perhaps more importantly, utterly dedicated to their fight, but Tarn had taken on more men than this a hundred times and won. Back when he had worked for Grik, he had become notorious for taking on tasks that required more than just slitting men’s throats while they slept, so eager was he to prove he could fight anyone, on any terms, and win.

  Three men? Three dead men, as far as Tarn was concerned. And they were dead, before the thought had even left his mind.

  The warm, sticky blood in his hair was almost comfortingly familiar, like the numbness in his palms from the jarring of blade against bone. The burning in his limbs would ache like hell the next morning, but for now it told him of the strength and speed that let him kill men before they could make a sound.

  After a lifetime of it, killing should have become a dull routine, but for Tarn, there was nothing else in the world worth doing more.

  The noise of the dying archers had attracted attention. He heard voices and the clatter of spears from down the ramparts, and even spotted the muzzle of one of the infernal guns swivelling towards him, ready to blast point-blank into the ramparts in case attackers had made it onto the walls in numbers.

  The tower it was, then.

  Tarn ran down the battlements and up the steps. The door was made of heavy wood, stained black, and engraved with runes. His eyes refused to focus on them, as if a part of him was afraid to look at them. Blurred shapes snaked around the wood.

  Tarn realised he had wasted precious moments standing glaze-eyed at the door.

  He tried the door. It swung open. He darted inside sword-first, ready to take on a gaggle of vengeful legionaries.

  The room inside was lit by a quartet of braziers that gave out a painful dark red glow. The same weird, eye-burning runes were carved everywhere, on the walls and ceiling, and on the floor where concentric circle designs radiated out from a single squirming symbol of a knotted snake.

  The room had too many walls. Tarn couldn’t count them.

  The door behind him swung shut of its own accord. There were no other obvious exits.

  Tarn did not panic. He had been in situations that were technically hopeless before. His warband had been surrounded on some lonely mountain slope by elite houseguards of the Serpent tribe, and he had crawled from the resulting pile of corpses, wounded but alive. He had killed his way through a longhouse of Grik’s enemies to find himself ambushed by bowmen who rained flaming arrows down at him, but he had thrown himself insanely at the closest and come out alive. He had even set out to help kill Grik himself, and he h
ad not only made it out alive but seen Grik dead and bagged not a few of his tribesmen besides.

  No, it was not panic. Tarn looked at the possibilities—go back out onto the ramparts and die, or stay here and die. This was a horrible place that repulsed him for no obvious reason, but it had a doorway wide enough to admit two men at most and at least he could kill his share of them before they piled through and overwhelmed him. Not such a bad way to go—and plenty of the whoresons would remember Tarn for a long, long time. How many men had made it alive onto the battlements of Lady Charybdia’s walls and spilt the blood of its defenders with his bare hands? Not many. Maybe none.

  Tarn had never regretted anything. He had killed more men than most people had ever met. He had never wasted his life in loyalty to anyone he would be better off killing than obeying. He had never lost a fair fight. There were no good days to die, but this one was better than most.

  He had no way of barring the door. But when he heard the legionaries scrambling up the steps, the door did not fly open. Something heavy bashed against the solid wood and the door buckled—they were trying to batter their way through. Was the door locked? Tarn couldn’t see a lock or a bolt on it.

  Probably magic. Tarn ignored it, and took up position with his back to the wall beside the door, on the opening edge.

  Another hit, and the door bulged and splintered. The runes were agonised squiggles, running like drops of water down the wood.

  The door burst inwards and the brass-shod head of a four-man ram ripped into the room. Before it had time to withdraw Tarn’s blade lashed through the opening and cut deep into the throat of one of the legionaries—he heard the cry of anger and pain. Two men tried to scramble into the room and Tarn caught one in the side of the head with a vicious side kick, cracking the sword’s pommel onto the back of the other’s neck. He glanced through the wreckage and bodies and saw there were maybe two dozen legionaries lined up on the battlements, queuing up to kill the infiltrator.