Demetrius would not be among them. He had other matters to attend to.
There was a sudden roar behind him. He pivoted his massive dreadnought body to see the beast rising from its moorings behind the wall, as did all the hundred Space Marines Demetrius had assembled on the walls. They were mostly trained for close-quarter bloodshed, armed with chainswords and other, more exotic weapons they had fashioned or found. Haggin, who led one of the largest war-bands, wore a huge scissoring crab-like power claw on each hand. Koivas fought with the barbed tendrils that grew from the lower half of his face as mandibles, keeping his hands for the twin bolt pistols he always carried. Their armour was pale blue, often stained with the juices of their bodies that ran from the joints or riven with battle-scars worn proudly. Every head was turned towards the beast that rose level with the battlements amidst the bellowing of its engines.
The Thunderhawk gunship was monstrous. Its wings were covered in thick, gnarled skin, between which was suspended the huge underslung fuselage painted in the Violators’ colours. Muscular tentacles had grown through the metal and clung all over the hull like roots. The front viewports were deformed into warped metal slits, pale glows leering out. Nothing living had been into the cockpit of the Thunderhawk gunship for centuries, ever since a daemon had first been enticed into the craft’s machine-spirit. Now the whole fleet was a menacing flock of huge winged beasts, able to strike from the air with greater speed and precision than even a Space Marine pilot could manage.
A further pair of Thunderhawks, similarly mutated, rose above the battlements. They turned and their bellies opened, revealing payload compartments ringed with grav-cushioned benches. Demetrius waved his whip-arm and Koivas yelled an order to his men, who clambered up into the belly of the first Thunderhawk. The other warbands followed suit, a hundred Chaos Marines in total, enough Violators to grace any battle-field. Demetrius himself stood under the last Thunderhawk as tentacles draped down from the pay-load compartment and wrapped around him. They hauled his huge metal body up into the heart of the craft and the fuselage closed beneath him.
There were thirty Chaos Marines in here with him, seventy more in the other craft, bathed in the dim biological glow of the Thunderhawks’ innards. The air was thick and close, and smelled of the potent warrior-hormones that coursed through the veins of the Violators.
“Klaes?” voxed Demetrius.
“Commander?” replied the Techmarine.
“Take us out.”
“Yes, sir.”
The grav-couches engaged as the Thunderhawk shot forward, carrying with it the intention to slay the Blood God’s spawn for a second time.
Golgoth felt the arrow thunking into the wood of his shield as he held it over his head and pushed hard against the hull of the longboat. The stink and shouting of the Serpent and Emerald Sword warriors was all around him, as a hundred-strong wave of boats was launched along the edge of the blood ocean. Above him loomed the bulbous-headed towers ringed with balconies and strung with walkways, on which Golgoth caught glimpses of tiny, distant figures launching a rain of arrows against the attackers. Before him stretched the choppy sea of blood, criss-crossed with the waves of a thousand boats storming across it. Already they were saying that Skorkan had spilt blood. Golgoth felt a sharp pang of jealousy—he wanted to kill. Rarely had he felt it this strong. Maybe it was Ss’ll Sh’Karr bringing the influence of the Blood God, or maybe it was just that he was so close to the tyrant who had corrupted the Emerald Sword. Either way, soon there would be more blood on his hands, and he thanked all the gods for it.
A final heave, and the longboat slid into the pink-foaming surf. Golgoth leapt on as the boat was launched, and twenty other warriors did the same. Every man grabbed an oar and began paddling to the beat of the helmsman’s drum, the dragon-headed prow cutting through the waves of gore.
Golgoth clambered past the warriors and leaned out over the prow, the blood waves speeding by beneath him, the boat knocking aside floating bodies. He could see the southern islanders speeding their canoes towards the lowest towers, and one tower was even now teeming with warriors trading blowpipe darts with arrows.
“Where are you?” he yelled above the chanting and the drums. “Where are you? I’ll tear your guts out, you bitch! I’ll eat your heart!”
He could feel her, somewhere up there in the heart of the city—a cancer, an arrogance that dared corrupt the souls of his brothers. Lady Charybdia had given Golgoth a reason to fight, and she would regret it for the rest of her short, painful life.
He pointed towards the nearest tower, a huge-bellied construction of black stone lapped by the waves of blood from which projected a long, slender spire topped with a glass sphere. “There!” he cried to the helmsman.
The men cheered as the longboat swung round towards the tower, and they saw the archers scrambling over its upper surface to take up firing positions.
Arrows were falling more thickly now. Golgoth spotted warriors flailing and tumbling over the side of their boats, or falling back into the hull and being pitched over the side by their comrades as dead weight. A sorcerous blast, like a lightning bolt, shattered the prow of one ship, sending broken bodies flailing into the blood. Somewhere in the distance, through the forest of towers, a pleasure-barge with pastel silken sails had been launched and was fending off swarms of head-hunter canoes.
Arrows thudded into the woodwork of the longboat from the fat-bellied tower. One man screamed, his arm pinned to his oar by a white-fletched shaft. Golgoth wrenched it free, kicked the wailing man over the edge, and took up the oar himself.
The helmsmen steered them towards a yawning hole in the tower wall, where a huge window had shattered under the pressure. The drumbeat hammered faster as the longboat hurtled through the gauntlet of the archers, volleys of arrows splintering against the shield they held overhead. Another man’s death-scream was a strangled gurgle as an arrowhead tore open his throat. The helmsman was pitched backwards over the stem, two arrows in his chest, and another warrior took up the tiller to hold them on course.
The side of the hull scraped angrily against stone as the longboat coursed through the window and into the body of the tower. Golgoth’s eyes adjusted to the darkness and he could see writhing, humanoid sculptures encrusting the walls, silks and bodies bobbing, shafts of weak light filtering in through skylights stained with incense. Spices and burnt offerings formed a scum on the surface of the blood. The inside of the tower was a single spherical cavity covered in sculpture. The lantern-spheres had been snuffed out by the cascade of blood when the window had first shattered and now the place was lit only by faint shafts of light filtering down from where the hollow spire joined the top of the sphere, and a few round skylights in the upper surface.
“Up the walls!” someone yelled, and warriors reached out to grab the gold-leafed sculpture and drag the longboat to the wall. Clambering out, they began to climb the sculpture just as the first arrows came whistling down through the skylights. The warriors slung their shields over their backs to protect them as they climbed.
Golgoth could smell the enemy, perfumed and effeminate. He could taste their cowardice and degeneracy. He dipped into the well of power inside him that Kron had taught of, sent it coursing through his arms and into the hands that dragged him upwards. An arrow spanged against the perverse sculpture by the side of his head, but he ignored it. One of the Serpent soldiers was hit in the thigh and fell spiralling into the filthy gore below.
Golgoth’s hand reached a sill and suddenly he was in the open air again, out on the upper surface of the tower’s base. The dark stone beneath him was smooth and mottled. The shadow of the spire fell on a unit of archers, maybe twenty-strong, who had been using the surface of the tower’s belly as a platform to fire on the attacking boats. Golgoth pulled himself onto the stone and saw other warriors doing the same, clambering out around him and through the other skylights.
Golgoth left his shield on his back, unhooked his axe and swung it two-handed
at the nearest thing that moved—a legionary archer, whose nocked arrow sped upwards as his shoulder and arm came away from his body and Golgoth felt the hot spatter of blood against his face.
Golgoth didn’t care about control anymore. These men were vermin—not men at all, but the tools of a sick and corrupting god, manipulated by their queen who was no more than a puppet herself.
Arrows sped towards him. He knocked them aside with the haft of his axe, letting Kron’s sorcery give him the reflexes of a striking snake and a madman’s disdain for harm. He ran towards the closest knot of archers, hacking two apart before they had a chance to draw another arrow from their quivers, kicking the other so hard in the jaw that his head snapped backwards and he rolled down the side of the tower.
Emerald Sword warriors would, only scant weeks ago, have killed Serpent soldiers on sight, and would die a terrible death rather than fight alongside them. But now Lady Charybdia had dared make herself a common enemy of all the tribes, and so it was together that the Sword and the Serpent fought, butchering anything that opposed them on the tower surface with sword and axe.
A lance of light spat down and scored deep into the black stone of the tower. Golgoth dived as two warriors came apart in a blinding flash and ear-splitting noise. He looked upwards through the glare and saw a spindly figure composed of flame sending bright bolts of power down at them from a walkway high above.
“Upwards!” cried Golgoth. “With me!” He ran towards the slim main body of the tower, spotted a closed doorway of black wood, and charged through it like a bull through a fence. A stairway ran in a spiral around the inside of the tower and Golgoth led the way upwards. Legionaries were heading down towards them, hoping to block the attackers’ path on the narrow stairs, but Golgoth was almost ablaze with power and smashed into them, hardly bothering to swing his axe, simply swatting the men aside. Blades found his flesh, but the pain just made him stronger. Bones shattered as his shoulder hit shield, but he called out to the sorcerous potential within him and they were knitted back together before he reached the next man.
All the hatred was flowing out of him through the violence he did to the enemy. It was the same lust for battle he had always had, but a hundred times stronger and a thousand times better. He had seen his tribe brought low, seen his army thrown back from the walls, felt the contempt of Lady Charybdia and the uncaring cruelty of the gods. Now, he forced all that hate into a tiny white-hot spark and let it power the tricks that Kron had taught him back in the Canis Mountains. He hurled legionaries from the stairway with one hand, split them clean in two with the axe in his other, and left the survivors to be trampled by the warriors who followed him, bellowing their own war-cries.
They were like him. They wanted to write their own legends, too.
Golgoth burst out into the open air again, this time dizzyingly high, on a balcony that ran round the tower. A slender walkway spanned the gulf to the next tower, blocked by the fire-skinned sorcerer and his twenty-strong legionary bodyguard who made a formidable ring of spearheads around him.
The sorcerer spoke a few syllables of command and the legionaries, unquestioning, charged, spears held low.
Golgoth tore the shield off his back and threw it, so its iron-banded edge caught the closest legionary square in the face and pitched him off his feet. There was only room on the walkway for three men to fight side-by side, and soon a Serpent warrior with a shock of white hair and a pair of livid scars through one eye was at Golgoth’s shoulder. The Serpent had a sword with a blade at each end and a two-handed grip in the centre. Looking at Golgoth, there was a smile in his one good eye as he cast his own shield idly over the edge of the walkway. There would be no need for it here—Golgoth clearly cared nothing for his own safety, so neither would those who fought by his side.
Fire washed through the air, swirling around the legionaries and flowing over Golgoth and the warriors emerging from the doorway behind him. Golgoth hit the polished stone floor as the white magical flame carved through a half-dozen warriors like a knife, searing off limbs and heads. The stench of burning skin and the alchemical stink of sorcery almost overwhelmed him.
The Serpent warrior died as a spear punched through his gut, thrust by a legionary charging through the flame. Golgoth kicked the legionary’s feet out from under him and knocked him off the walkway. An axe thrown from behind him split open the face of the next legionary and by then Golgoth was on his feet, axe cleaving through anything that stood in his way—warriors clambering over themselves to get closer to the sorcerer who dared threaten their leader.
One of the Emerald Sword had grabbed the dead Serpent’s strange double-bladed sword and leapt past Golgoth’s swinging axe blade, slicing through the stomach of one legionary before being pitched off the walkway to fall, flailing wildly, towards the crashing crimson waves.
A legionary archer fired. Golgoth caught the arrow and jabbed it through the eye of the nearest enemy He batted aside the weapon of the next and simply trampled him beneath his feet, using the added height to swing his axe down at the heads of those guarding the sorcerer.
White fire rained down on him. Hot lightning crackled, conducted through the legionaries and up into Golgoth’s body. Sounds and lights flashed in Golgoth’s mind. But he was no longer afraid of sorcerers—he was a sorcerer himself, who turned his power inside himself and used it to kill up close, rather than from afar like a coward.
The palm of his hand blistered as he closed it around the neck of the sorcerer, whose long, thin, lizardlike face was blurred with the heat and flame rolling off it. His eyes were flinty black, like gem-stones, skin puckered and pale with flame rippling over it like liquid. The sorcerer’s mouth opened to scream, but its forked tongue just rattled as Golgoth squeezed the life out of it.
His enemy’s spine snapped and Golgoth shook the body violently to make sure it was dead, swinging it left and right and sending enemies flying. Warriors ran past him, dragged the sorcerer’s body to the ground, and hacked it to bits with their own swords. They threw the mangled limbs down towards the blood surf and cheered.
The desert nomads galloped across the surface of the blood sea, the hooves of their horses throwing up crimson plumes of spray. Alchemical charges, made of powdered dragon bone with fuses of harpies’ hair, were thrown through the windows of the nearest tower as they galloped past—the explosion tore out the root of the tower and sent it toppling, shedding legionaries like lizard scales, to crash onto the shore.
The next wave of warriors went on foot, using the fallen tower as a bridge, clambering up the spindly roadways that still connected it to the rest of the city. They were funnelled into bottlenecks and the kill from the watching archers was huge, but there were too many of them to be stopped. Like blood from a severed artery, they bled into the city, Emerald Sword and Serpent, reeking swamp-dwellers and lithe, white-haired raiders from the eastern seas. The first of the city’s major temples to be overwhelmed fell as the flood of warriors coursed over its razor-studded battlements and into the sacred precinct, overwhelming even the daemons summoned there by its priests and befouling Slaanesh’s sacred icons with their presence.
The dead of the battle were falling like snow, their bodies adding to the scum of corpses choking the dismal comers where the blood tide met stone. A thousand men died when retreating legionaries destroyed the tower that the few remaining Bear tribe warriors were using to enter the city. The same number of legionaries were blown to bits when the desert horsemen galloped up the side of a tower and captured one of the few guns that besmirched the skyline of the city—they blasted great holes in the closest defences before detonating the weapon’s ammunition stockpile.
No one had ever got this far before. Lady Charybdia’s soldiers had never died by enemy hands within the city itself.
The pleasure-barge raked the approaching canoes with shots from the bolt throwers mounted in its prow and stem. Archers high up in its rigging added their arrows to the fire that was peppering the red waves an
d picking the crews off the attacking boats. The waters around it were thick with bodies, both of the headhunters and of the barge’s crewmen, who had been killed when blowpipe darts hit them or daring boarding parties had made it onto the deck.
The barge was protecting the immense, glass-domed palace of pleasure that formed one of the city’s most sacred sites. Silver struts like the legs of a spider supported a crystal canopy above a network of pleasure-pits. The most elaborate and intense rites of Slaaneshi worship were conducted in the sunken pits and across the upholstered surfaces, fuelled by the censers that breathed hallucinogens and the labyrinth of tunnels that would bring in slaves and revellers from all over the city. Priceless works of sensual arts stood alongside perfume-soaked altars to the Lord of Pleasures. No bare-chested savage could be allowed to set foot on that holy ground, where the praises of Slaanesh had been acted out by revellers for centuries. The crew of the barge were bound by the worship of their god to protect the waters around the dome, and they were doing a very good job of it.
The headhunters were dying. They were fighting with bravery far beyond that which might be expected of such primitives, but with every volley of silver-tipped bolts more of them were toppled into the waves. The pleasure-barge’s crew—press-ganged revellers and hardened legionaries—were fighting back, fuelled by the righteous anger of Slaanesh. When the Prince of Pleasure was angry, he was angry indeed.
The blood-ocean swelled beneath the barge and the canoes were scattered. Something huge welled up underneath—
—and then the air was filled with splintering wood and broken, flying bodies, the screech of tearing metal and the bestial roar of something singing the praises of the Blood God. Ss’ll Sh’Karr burst up through the hull of the ship like a sea monster of legend, metallic jaw ripping through the rigging, smouldering claws tearing the keel in two. The daemon prince erupted clean out of the blood and landed on the side of the pleasure-dome, shattering its crystal walls.
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