[Grey Knights 03] - Hammer of Daemons

by Ben Counter - (ebook by Undead)

  Venalitor looked down at the arena. The Vel’Skan arena slaves were making a break for the northern side of the arena, scrambling up onto the seating, and killing the spectators who tried to resist. Many of the slaves of other lords had joined the breakout, and Alaric was up on the arena wall directing the fight.

  “No,” said Venalitor, “they’re heading for the northern gates. Have the scaephylyds gather to the north of the arena. The Ophidian Guard will pursue them. If we can slow the slaves down, they will be crushed between the two.”

  “And the Grey Knight?”

  Venalitor thought for a moment. “I was rather hoping I could kill him, but do not pass up the opportunity should it arise.”

  “Where will you be, my duke?”

  “Lord Ebondrake will need me,” said Venalitor, “whether he acknowledges it or not.”

  “Very well. What were his orders?”

  “Kill them. Get to it.”

  The slavemaster raised a mandible in salute and turned to the scaephylyds gathering on the upper seating, chittering to them in their insect tongue. They scurried off towards the northern gates, ignoring the riot that was spreading around them.

  Alaric was not stupid. He should know full well that a breakout in Vel’Skan would, at most, lead to a day of freedom, and several years of torture. The Grey Knight had an objective in mind, something beyond just running for his life. Venalitor wondered what it might be. There was nothing in Vel’Skan that would benefit the slaves, nothing so defensible that the Ophidian Guard could not besiege and break it.

  There was, of course, one possibility, one chance for a dramatic gesture that, while it would surely cost the life of every slave who escaped, would nevertheless appeal to a servant of the corpse-emperor as a dramatic final gesture before death. It was insane, of course, but just because Alaric wasn’t stupid that didn’t mean he wasn’t insane. After all, Venalitor had put a great deal of effort into driving him mad.

  That was where Venalitor would confront Alaric and kill him. After all, even if Ebondrake considered him at fault for Alaric’s actions, Venalitor was sure that few sights would gain him more respect among Drakaasi’s lords than him standing on the battlements holding a Grey Knight’s severed head.

  Some good would still come of this, Venalitor decided. Idly cutting his way through the few rioting idiots who got in his way, he headed north.

  “I see,” said Arguthrax. “It started here.”

  The daemon’s brass cauldron had been dragged through the narrow confines of the prison on chains hauled by his burliest slaves, since many of the ceilings were too low for him to be carried. Hound-like retriever daemons snarled ahead of him, snapping at one another as they tried to find a scent. There was nothing. Considering how the prison stank, that in itself was a sign.

  The arena slaves had broken out. Many of them were dead, killed by the gaolers as they fought. The arming cages had been ransacked, and the branding room had been blown up, leaving a crater in the arena floor above. It had been swift and violent. Something had given them enough hope to stage the breakout, and they must have had help from outside to even get out of their cells.

  In front of Arguthrax was the wrecked torture chamber. Torment cages had been torn from the walls. Blades and spikes were scattered across the floor, and everything was burned. A charred body lay in the centre of the floor, hollowed out by flame. It had been the body of a large human, but the retrievers shied away from it.

  “Daemon,” said the handler, one of the few of his slaves that Arguthrax permitted to speak. The handler was a particularly cruel soul, and probably would have worked for Arguthrax whether he was a slave or not. “Shell of a possessed.”

  “Yes, they guarded this place. Someone knew how to start this. I desire to know why.”

  The sounds of battle reached down from the arena. The other lords were fighting up there, some with each other, most to quell the rioting. Arguthrax would have liked to join them, but he had other priorities.

  “If we can demonstrate that one of Venalitor’s slaves was down here,” he said, “then he will be suspected of treachery. I can think up a few reasons why he might have done it: to create dissent among the lords, where he might gain Ebondrake’s confidence; to postpone the crusade because he is a coward; or to bring the freed slaves into his fold for use as fodder against me. It does not matter. So long as the link is there it will bring him down.” Arguthrax looked around the chamber. Aside from the heady tang of suffering, there was little of interest. “Bring me the corpse,” he said.

  The handler grabbed an intact-looking limb and hauled the body over to Arguthrax’s cauldron. Arguthrax reached down and picked up the body. Chunks of burned flesh fell off it. The body was just a shell, the eyes and mouth burned into gaping holes by the force of the flame.

  “Possessed,” sneered Arguthrax. “Such a waste, a cloak of flesh to hide their beauty. This thing probably couldn’t remember either of the beings it once was.” Arguthrax paused as he spotted something glinting in the caul of burned meat. He pushed his paw into the disintegrating body and pulled out a jet-black shard, glossy with corrupted blood.

  It was the tip of a sword, broken off in the possessed creature’s body.

  “The Guard,” hissed Arguthrax. “The Ophidian Guard did this.”

  The slaves knew when Arguthrax was angry. They had seen it often enough, and they had seen their fellow slaves die as a result. Even the brutalised cauldron slaves tried to shrink away from their master.

  “Ebondrake!” growled Arguthrax. “Curses upon your scaly hide! Deceitful lizard! Scales and claws and lies! All this to save your damned crusade!” Arguthrax shuddered with anger, slopping blood over the edge of his cauldron. “To betray us! To betray me, the Despoiler of Kolchadon, the End of Empires, the Bloody Hand of Skerentis Minor!” The blood overflowed, sloshing from the pits of the warp through the bridge formed by Arguthrax’s rage. It poured in a torrent, swirling around the torture chamber. “Take me to the surface! Take me to the lords! Ebondrake will pay!”

  Gearth, who had somehow contrived to survive, plunged both his knives into the thorax of the scaephylyd who charged at him. The insectoid creature writhed on the twin blades, and collapsed. Gearth’s blades went with it, but the killer picked up the scaephylyd’s spear. A blade, after all, was a blade.

  “They’re trying to block the way!” called Erkhar. He and his faithful were on one side of the slave army, safely away from Gearth’s murderers and the greenskins who took up the other flank. Alaric was somewhere in the middle, the mass of Hathrans behind him.

  Alaric realised that Erkhar was right. The slaves had made it out of the arena, and already many of their number had been lost to the enraged spectators who fought back. Now the way in front of them, along an uneven avenue of blades lined with titanic shields and segments of plate armour, was darkening with the sanding forms of hundreds of scaephylyds.

  Beyond them, up a flight of steps formed from a stack of axe heads, was the palace of Lord Ebondrake. Its half-blinded skull grinned down on the battlefield as if it was anticipating the slaughter.

  That was Alaric’s objective. He was going to take the palace. If it cost the life of every slave, he would take it.

  Alaric turned to the Hathrans behind him. Few of them really understood what was happening, only that they had broken out of the arena, and they were at a loss to know what to do next.

  “The Emperor sees us even here!” shouted Alaric. “For His glory, sons of Hathran! For your lost brothers and sisters, for the man at your side! For the Emperor!”

  “For the Emperor!” echoed Corporal Dorvas, raising the axe he had taken from a dead arena slave.

  The Hathrans yelled and charged. Alaric went with them, because he was their figurehead now, and if he faltered, they would too.

  The scaephylyd line was not yet fully formed, but there were plenty of the creatures to spare. Alaric had not known that Venalitor commanded so many of them, but it did not matter. He
had always known that the slaves would not do this without a fight.

  The two lines collided. Gearth whooped as he leapt into the air and landed directly on top of the largest scaephylyd he could see. The greenskins followed him, One-ear bowling the closest alien over and pulling its legs off. The other side of the line hit a moment later, Erkhar’s faithful charging, in as disciplined a line as they could muster. They had swords, and the scaephylyd had spears, and several of them died in a few moments to the aliens’ longer reach, but they had faith and the weight of the charge behind them, and the aliens were forced back.

  It was bedlam in the centre. There was no room for skill. A massive press of men heaved down on the scaephylyds. Alaric was face-to-face with one of them, its mad asymmetrical eyes rolling in hatred. His spear was useless in the crush, so he let it go and rammed a fist into the scaephylyd’s mandibles, feeling chitin crunch under his fingers. He pulled, and the thing’s mandibles came away. It reared and screeched, spraying foul blood everywhere. Alaric drove an elbow into the top of its head, clambered onto its armoured abdomen, and ripped off a limb that stabbed at him. He grabbed a spear that another alien tried to transfix him with, stood up on the body of the creature he had knocked out and stabbed all around him at the sea of insect bodies.

  The Hathrans were scrambling all over the scaephylyds. Alaric could see them dying, torn apart or trampled to the ground, but they were also winning. Scaephylyds were weighed down with men and stamped to death in the throng. Others were stabbed dozens of times, their carapaces pierced and broken, spilling blackish organs onto the ground.

  Alaric led the way. All the slaves looked up to him. Without him, they were just a crowd of dead men. With him, they were a fighting force.

  “Forward! Arm yourselves and leave the wounded!” Alaric tore a malformed alien blade from the claw of a dead scaephylyd, and held it up so that the Hathrans and other slaves could see him. He pointed it towards the palace. “For your Emperor! For freedom!”

  The slave army heaved forwards, and the scaephylyds were pushed back. Scaephylyds were breaking and trying to regroup away from the crush. One-ear and his greenskins, along with many of Gearth’s killers, howled war cries as they ran the broken aliens down.

  There was no time to pause and finish the job. Alaric led the way right through the middle of the scaephylyds, cutting them down or battering them to the ground. He was covered in their viscous blood and had to wipe it from his eyes to see. “Leave them! Forward! All of you!”

  The slave army rolled over the scaephylyds. Alaric broke into a run, the few knots of scaephylyds still in his way struggling to get away from him. Ahead of him was the short run to the palace of Lord Ebondrake. Vel’Skan rose in sinister bladed shapes on either side, fantastic buildings constructed around the core of a sword hilt or along the blade of an axe. How much of the city was dedicated to hunting down Alaric and the escaping slaves? At least most of the inhabitants would be assuming that they were headed out of the city. If the slaves reached the palace quickly enough, and everything went to plan, there was a chance that they might actually succeed.

  There was hope, then, but Alaric could not let it dull his senses. Many more of them would die before they escaped Drakaasi. Alaric knew full well that he could be one of them.

  “With me! Bring the fight to them! For freedom!” Alaric charged towards the palace steps, and the army charged with him.

  Tiresia the Huntress, who had taken the heads of all seven Brothers of the Nethermost Darkness in her youth, loved nothing more than a bow in her hand and a cunning quarry to hunt. The slaves escaping Vel’Skan’s arena were ideal.

  Her mount, one of her flying creatures akin to a spiny stingray, swooped low at her mental command, weaving between the giant sword tips and spear shafts of Vel’Skan’s skyline. She spied one of the arena slaves cowering among the ragged banners of a forgotten lord, clinging to the crossbar of a giant spearhead.

  Tiresia drew her bow from her back, and shot the slave through the neck with an arrow tipped with snake venom. She circled as the slave, a skinny pale thing no more than arena fodder, seemed to dance with joy at being shot. It was the toxin sending his muscles into spasm, the same toxin filling his lungs with foam. He lost his balance and fell from the spear, breaking his body against the marble battlements of a fortress mansion below.

  Tiresia added another head to the trophy room in her mind.

  Arguthrax the bloated daemon and his train of mutilated slaves were making their way, in the direction of the arena, across a plateau formed by a discarded shield. This surprised Tiresia. Arguthrax wasn’t a hunter of her prowess, but he still enjoyed killing for sport as much as the next daemon. Throughout Vel’Skan, stray slaves were being chased down and dismembered, or handed over to Khorne’s priests to serve as future sacrifices. It was not like something as venal as Arguthrax to miss out on the fun. She swooped low over him, yanking the head of her beast up so that it hung in the air over him.

  “Frog-beast!” she called down. “No hunt for you? Does the warp scorn even sporting death now?”

  Arguthrax looked up at her. Like many of Drakaasi’s lords, he was spectacularly ugly. Tiresia fancied that the other lords, even the daemons, were on some level jealous of her attractive near-human form. Few could become as corrupt as her and yet stay relatively unblemished by the touch of the warp.

  “Faugh! Pretty child. What do you know of death? What do you know of anything? To you, this is just a game!”

  “As is all death,” replied Tiresia, “for the Blood God plays dice with our souls. Blessed are those who play by the same rules as him!”

  Arguthrax spat on the ground. “The game? What game is this?” He brandished the obsidian shard in his paw.

  Tiresia guided her mount down and hopped off it to the ground, shouldering her bow. She walked closer to Arguthrax to get a look at the shard.

  “The blade of an Ophidian Guard,” sneered Arguthrax, “used to kill the chief gaoler of the arena.”

  “The Ophidian Guard? This cannot be, hideous one.”

  “Why not? Are you as dense as you are decorative, hunter of worms? I have prosecuted a war against the deceitful cur Venalitor for months. Surely even you are aware of this?”

  “Of course,” said Tiresia. A few of her attendant hunters had seen that she had alighted, and were guiding their own mounts to the ground. They flew blunt nosed skysharks, less impressive than her flying ray, but dramatic nonetheless. “You defied Lord Ebondrake. There were few who did not see a reckoning for both of you.”

  “And this is it! Think on it, girl. Ebondrake wants us united for his crusade, and what better way to unite enemies beneath him?”

  “Give them a common enemy,” said Tiresia.

  “So you are worthy of your lordship after all. Of course! A common enemy! Something that even dukes and daemons can indulge in destroying together! This! The escape!”

  Tiresia’s hunters gathered around her. They were not accustomed to seeing their mistress surprised by anything, but she was definitely taken aback by Arguthrax’s words. “Can this be true? With as much honesty as you can muster, daemon. Is this thing possible?”

  “It is not only possible, it is inevitable. What more proof do you need?” Arguthrax held out the shard again. “Dying proof, huntress! The truest thing on this planet! Lord Ebondrake wants his crusade and he profaned the very games of its celebration to ensure that we were of one sword! This blasphemy is his doing! This abomination unto Khorne will be revisited on him! The warp will have its justice!”

  “We cannot make such an accusation,” said Tiresia. “No matter how certain we may be, we are but two lords among many.”

  “Then find others!” retorted Arguthrax angrily. “They will unite behind us! Bring them together, the Traitor Marine and the thing from the deep, the walker of dogs and all the rest of them! Together, we will make Ebondrake pay! Mark my words, I will dine on lizard before the sun sets!”

  Tiresia shouted orders t
o her followers in clipped hunter cant. The hunt was forgotten and they took to the air to seek out their fellow lords and spread the news. Arguthrax’s cauldron was borne aloft again, and the slaves continued their procession towards the fortresses and parade grounds of Vel’Skan.

  Ebondrake had tried to manipulate them towards unity, but if there was one thing that could truly unite the lords of Vel’Skan, it was news of treachery.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The skull that formed the pinnacle of Lord Ebondrake’s palace grinned down as if anticipating the bloodshed. The slope of axe blades leading up to the entrance in its throat was still stained brown-black with the blood of recent sacrifices. Nothing in Vel’Skan, it seemed, could be considered holy or worthwhile if it was not regularly covered in blood. The dagger through the skull’s eye cast a long, jagged shadow over the palace approach.

  It was silent. The skull’s remaining eye socket was dark. The balcony in front of it, from which Lord Ebondrake presumably took flight, was empty. The entrance, a tall narrow archway built to accommodate Ebondrake’s wings, was also deserted.

  “Looks undefended,” said Corporal Dorvas.

  “Maybe,” said Alaric. “The riots at the arena are buying us time. Ebondrake won’t be back until the slaves are captured or dead.”

  “You know of Ebondrake well?”

  Alaric shrugged. “I tried to kill him once.”

  “You tried to kill that? Throne alive.”

  “It was not part of the plan at the time.”

  The slaves were up ahead, nervously approaching the palace’s great brass doors.

  “What do you think it was?” asked Dorvas, nodding up at the giant skull.

  “A prince of daemons, perhaps,” said Alaric. “Or something we’ve never heard of. I feel Drakaasi has a complicated past.”