[Grey Knights 03] - Hammer of Daemons

by Ben Counter - (ebook by Undead)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Duke Venalitor left behind footprints of Kelhedros’ blood as he stalked through the trophy chamber.

  He had never been here. Very few, save Ebondrake, ever had. He did not know his way around. He had not expected it to be this huge, or for there to be so many places for Alaric to hide.

  Somewhere in the sea of corruption that Venalitor had for a mind, frustration surfaced.

  “The men you killed in your madness,” said Venalitor, “they were the ones I took from the cities of Sarthis Majoris, some of your Guardsmen, too. Did you recognise them as you killed them?”

  There was no answer from the darkness. Night had fallen, and the only light bled from a few glowing orbs scattered around the trophy collection, apparently placed there to make the bladed shadows longer.

  “What about Skarhaddoth? I saw you kill him. You are the champion of Drakaasi. How does it feel to be proclaimed the planet’s most dedicated servant of Khorne?”

  A footstep reached Venalitor’s ears. He froze, his blade held low, ready to cut the legs out from under the charging Grey Knight.

  Venalitor pivoted, and sliced through the dark shape looming towards him. His blade cut clean through the body, the hanging body, strung by a noose from the ceiling, an executed enemy of Ebondrake’s left to dangle and rot in the trophy room.

  He was jumping at nothing.

  Alaric smashed through a bank of blades and shields, scattering ancient weapons everywhere. A blade hammered down and caught Venalitor’s sword, snapping the star-forged metal, and sending half the blade spinning off into the shadows.

  Venalitor threw himself backwards. He barely escaped being bowled to the ground by Alaric’s impact.

  Alaric landed heavily, but on his feet, cracking the tiles underneath him. He carried a halberd in his hand: the Nemesis weapon of a Grey Knight.

  In his other hand was the gauntlet-mounted storm bolter.

  “I hope Ebondrake enjoyed your little gift,” said Alaric, noticing the moment of shock passing over Venalitor’s face as he saw Alaric’s weapons. “It cost you more than you realise.”

  Venalitor’s eyes flickered down to the haft in his hand and the broken stump of its blade.

  “That was my favourite sword,” he growled. He gave up all pretence that he was a normal man, and his features melted away, his nose and mouth joining into one circular fanged orifice and his eyes becoming liquid slits. With a practised motion, Venalitor drew a pair of short swords from his back.

  “Now,” said Alaric, “we’re almost even.”

  “Almost,” hissed the thing that called itself Duke Venalitor.

  The ring of their blades clashing was so rapid and relentless that it sounded like the trophy chamber was filled with driving rain. Venalitor slashed too fast to see, but his blades rang off Alaric’s halberd. Alaric knocked Venalitor back with raw strength, his greater reach letting him hack out in arcing strikes, too artless to wound, but enough to force Venalitor back across the chamber, step by step.

  Alaric fired a burst from his storm bolter. Venalitor swatted the bolter shells away like insects. Venalitor ducked low and cut down at Alaric’s legs. Alaric blocked one strike with the butt of his halberd, swung the blade down to turn the second, and kicked out to catch Venalitor in the chin. A deep cut was opened up in Venalitor’s monstrous face, and from the wound reached tendrils of blood, snaking towards Alaric’s limbs to entangle them and leave the Grey Knight defenceless.

  Alaric grabbed a handful of the tendrils with his bolter hand, and forced them up to his mouth. He bit into them, tearing at them, like he had torn at the raw meat of the Hathran sacrifice in his half-remembered madness. The tendrils fell limp, and Alaric spat out the blood.

  He had learned a lot. He could fight like an animal when he had to. He could give up everything he had ever been taught in the duelling vaults of Titan and revert to the brutality written into his blood. He could go further than his enemy, be more relentless, more devoted to bloodshed. That was what Drakaasi had taught him.

  Alaric shattered one of Venalitor’s swords, knocked the other one aside, and grabbed the swordsman’s wrist. He picked Venalitor up, and threw him through the great siege engine in the centre of the chamber. The machine came apart and collapsed, scattering blood-blackened timbers and chunks of iron everywhere.

  Venalitor rolled onto his front and got to his knees. Alaric didn’t give him the chance to regain his feet. He picked up a length of wood, and smacked Venalitor around the side of the head, hard enough to throw him back again, crashing through a stand of ornamental armour.

  Venalitor’s hand closed on nothing. He was on the edge of a sudden drop.

  He had come to rest on the edge of the opening formed by the skull’s eye socket. To one side, through the other eye, stabbed the corroded form of the Hammer of Daemons, shards of rust flaking off it as it shuddered with the force of its engines. Beneath was Vel’Skan.

  The sight of Vel’Skan at war was enough to strike the voice from Venalitor’s throat. Armies clashed in the streets. Banners of a dozen lords waved as their followers clashed. A gout of black flame showed that Ebondrake himself was fighting. The outskirts of Vel’Skan were already aflame, tinting Drakaasi’s night a dull orange.

  Daemons danced through the carnage. Killers competed to die first.

  “Survival,” said Alaric, “was never enough.”

  “This… this was you,” said Venalitor. His monstrous face was bleeding away as the rage was replaced with wonder. “Arguthrax and I, Raezazel, Gorgath, your madness, this was all you. It was all your plan.”

  “Of course. I am a Grey Knight. I could hardly come to a world like Drakaasi and leave it intact.”

  “You turned us against one another. Our hatred was our strength and our weakness. Our pride, our wrath, our devotion, all these were just a weapon for you.” Venalitor smiled. “The Dark Gods would be proud of you, Justicar.”

  Alaric had never heard anything so hateful, because he knew that it was true.

  He fired his storm bolter point-blank into Venalitor’s chest. Venalitor’s armour held, but the force of the exploding bolter shell was enough to knock him off his feet.

  There was no floor behind him to break his fall. He dropped his sword as he flailed at nothing.

  Venalitor fell from the eye socket of Lord Ebondrake’s castle. Tendrils of blood lashed out for something to grab onto, but they found nothing. His eyes met Alaric’s as he fell, and there was something like horror in them.

  Alaric watched Venalitor fall, following him down into the darkness of Vel’Skan.

  Haulvarn had been avenged. Alaric sought some elation at that fact, but it was as elusive as Raezazel’s truth. There could be no triumph on this tainted world.

  Alaric turned away from the eye socket, away from the sight of Vel’Skan at war, and headed for the Hammer of Daemons.

  The Hammer was shuddering as its plasma reactors filled up with superheated fuel. Most of the corrosion had been shaken off it, revealing the deep blue of its hull and the gold painted decoration. It must have been a truly magnificent craft when it was launched. It still was extraordinary, and it was ready to take off.

  Alaric hurried up the steps towards the torture chamber, dragging his armour behind him. He saw that the boarding ramp of the Hammer was still down, but judging by the roar of the engines it wouldn’t stay that way for long. It was time to leave Drakaasi.

  He heard footsteps behind him. He turned to see One-ear and his surviving orks, still slathered in scaephylyd blood.

  One-ear looked at Alaric, and then up at the Hammer of Daemons, and in his alien mind he must have known that this was the only chance he and his fellow greenskins had to get off Drakaasi.

  One-ear spat on the ground, snarled at Alaric, and led his orks back down the steps towards the war-torn streets of Vel’Skan.

  “Justicar!” shouted Corporal Dorvas from the ship’s boarding ramp. “We’re on autopilot! We’ll leave you
behind if we have to!”

  Alaric hurried up the ramp just as it began to close and the engines rose in pitch. Plasma was coursing through the ship’s conduits, swirling from the reactors through the engines. Inside, the Hathrans were finding whatever they could to hold on to as the ship began to shudder even more, throwing aside anything that wasn’t fixed. Candles rolled across the tilting floor and sacred texts fluttered from the walls.

  “I see you’ve found your gear,” said Dorvas, looking down at the power armour that Alaric was hauling along. “If you get us off this planet you’ll have earned it back.”

  “Where are we going?” asked Alaric.

  “We’re worrying about that once we’re off Drakaasi,” replied Dorvas.

  The Hammer’s engines flared, and all sound was drowned out as the plasma generators came online.

  The whole ship lurched, and the sound of breaking bone signalled that the ship, after centuries embedded in the palace of Vel’Skan, was finally taking off.

  Lord Ebondrake’s palace split in two. Shards of bone fell and impaled battling cultists on the palace approach below. The engines flared and blew out the back of the cranium, incinerating dozens as plasma fire spewed from the exhaust housings. The cranium collapsed, burying the torture chamber and trophy hall in a rockslide of fragmented bone. The Hammer of Daemons was finally free. The last of the corrosion was thrown off it, and, lit by the fires of the burning city, the ship rose on vertical thrusters to look out over Vel’Skan.

  Very few saw it. Most were too busy killing and being killed. A few did notice it, and assumed it was a weapon called forth by Ebondrake or the conspirators. Perhaps Ebondrake’s enemies had sent it to destroy the palace, or perhaps Ebondrake had finally chosen to reveal it, sacrificing his palace to bring some ancient wrath down on Arguthrax and his fellow traitors.

  Very few, even of those who saw it, particularly cared. It was just a distraction from the killing.

  Alaric fought to keep his footing as he pushed his bulk through the door in the bulkhead designed for a man a metre shorter. The Hammer shuddered again, and Alaric nearly fell. He had to hurry. By the time the Hammer escaped Drakaasi’s atmosphere it might be too late.

  The flight deck of the Hammer of Daemons was as lavishly decorated as the rest of the ship. The blue walls were inlaid with long ribbons of gold, forged into images from the life of the prophet Raezazel.

  The ship’s shuttle craft had survived the years intact, sealed inside the flight deck away from the ravages of Drakaasi. It was deep blue and chased in gold like the rest of the ship, and decorated with multiple stylised mouths, which Alaric realised, with a lurch, must be the symbol of Raezazel. A dozen mouths had spoken from the daemon’s flesh as it taunted him. Alaric opened the access hatch in the body of the shuttle and threw his war gear inside. He could wear it again when it had been purified.

  “Good idea,” said Gearth. Alaric turned to see the killer, still smeared with blood and war paint. “This thing’s full of mental cases. They think they’re flying right up the Emperor’s arse. If they’re wrong we could end up anywhere, and if they’re right, then… well, me an’ the Emperor ain’t seen eye to eye since I was born.”

  “Why are you here?” asked Alaric.

  “Same reason as you,” replied Gearth. “To get off this thing, and take my chances on my own. You’re tough, Justicar, but you don’t know the nethers of the Imperium like me. Fighting’s all very well, but me, I could hitchhike my way out of the Eye. You could use someone like me around.”

  “You said once,” said Alaric, “that you didn’t know why you committed your crimes, why you killed those women.”

  Gearth glanced around as if afraid that someone was listening. “I guess. What does it matter?”

  “You never will.”

  Alaric shot Gearth once in the stomach. The bolter shell exploded in his abdomen and blew a length of spine out of his back. Gearth flopped to the ground.

  “The Blood…” he gasped. “The Blood God… promised…”

  Alaric started to clamber into the shuttle.

  “You’re gonna… leave ’em…” said Gearth, his pained whisper barely audible over the ship’s engines. “Gonna… leave ’em all… the Guard boys, everyone… just… to die out here…”

  Alaric ignored the dying man, and hauled the shuttle’s hatch closed behind him.

  The cockpit was barely big enough for Alaric to fit. He thumbed a command stud, and the flight deck doors ground open. The air in the deck boomed out into the thin atmosphere and took Gearth’s body with it, the flimsy corpse trailing blood as it tumbled out into Drakaasi’s night. Alaric gunned the shuttle’s engines and flew it out of the flight deck, feeling the waves of superheated air from the Hammer’s engines buffeting it as if it was a falling leaf.

  He wrestled for control. He cleared the Hammer’s wake and had it back.

  Now, it really was time to get away from this planet.

  “The flight deck just opened,” said Haggard, clinging to a guard rail around a floating relic as he stumbled onto the bridge. “Someone took a shuttle out.”

  “Then they have forsaken their life’s reward,” replied Erkhar calmly. The streams of the upper atmosphere were hammering against the hull, and anything loose was being thrown about, but Erkhar was as calm as if he was sailing on a glassy sea. The rift in space shone in front of him, filling the bridge with crimson light, opening to swallow the Hammer of Daemons.

  “What’s that?” asked Haggard.

  “The rift,” replied Erkhar. “Switch off the autopilot. We’ll take her away from Drakaasi on manual.”

  “Yes, lieutenant,” said the faithful at the navigation helm.

  “The Emperor will show us the way,” said Erkhar as the ship swung away from the rift, towards the billowing nebulae of the Eye of Terror. “We have but to listen. In our prayers, in our dreams, there is the way to the Promised Land.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Duke Venalitor’s body was impaled on one of the many swords making up the web of steel into which were built the thousands of homes where Vel’Skan’s poorest dwelt. The point went in through his back and out through his chest, just below the scar on his armour left by Alaric’s bolter shot.

  He was alive when he hit. With his spine cut, Venalitor couldn’t even writhe, just lie there as the pain racked through him and his body slowly slid down the blade blunted by time.

  No one noticed him die. Below him was a battle with no lines, a swirling melee where all sense of order and alignment had broken down and everyone was out killing for himself. It was a riot, a massacre, and a scene being repeated throughout Vel’Skan, but more than that, it was infecting the whole of Drakaasi.

  Venalitor’s head lolled to one side. He could see something burning on a blood river snaking out of Vel’Skan’s outskirts. It was a ship, his ship, the Hecatomb, cut loose from its moorings beneath the city. It blazed from stem to stern.

  The wards would have been breached. What was held prisoner there would escape. Venalitor knew then that he should have killed it when he had the chance.

  For someone who had not been human for so long, the last thing Venalitor felt was a very human emotion.

  He felt despair.

  Alaric saw the army falling back through the city, beetle-black swarms of scaephylyds pouring in from every side.

  He saw Arguthrax, carried aloft by a tide of daemons, blazing a path of fire and ruination towards Ebondrake’s palace. Arguthrax would take the palace, but, once there, he would find that its greatest prize was already gone.

  He saw Lord Ebondrake on the pinnacle of a mighty temple, holding its brass dome against a horde of Vel’Skan’s citizens who had gathered in a spontaneous army to bring him down. He incinerated them by the dozen, but there were too many of them, and they had set the temple alight, and were working at its columns with picks and hammers.

  Soon it would collapse, and even Lord Ebondrake would be gone.

  Similar sce
nes were playing out all across the city. Streets were like cities of fire, buildings like sacrificial candles, battle like a disease gradually claiming everything.

  Alaric looked away from the city. There was nothing he could do now to make it worse. He aimed the shuttle’s controls upwards, accelerating to orbital speed. He glanced down at the fuel gauge. Much of the fuel had evaporated in the shuttle’s tanks in its years lying idle, but there was just enough to get him out of orbit once he was beyond the atmosphere, and perhaps to somewhere the Inquisition would find him. That was why he had left the Hammer of Daemons. Even if Erkhar’s Promised Land was real, there was no place in it for Alaric, not yet.

  The swirls of Drakaasi’s atmosphere gave way to the diseased void of the Eye of Terror. It wasn’t a good place to be cut adrift, but it was safer than Drakaasi. Alaric could survive for years if he had to in half-sleep, his brain shut down until only the most basic of life processes were continued. After Drakaasi, he could do with a few good years to think it all over.

  As Alaric let the main engines kick in, a plume of orange flame licked up from Vel’Skan. It was Ebondrake’s temple, finally collapsing in a ball of fire. Ebondrake was probably dead.

  Alaric took no satisfaction at all from that knowledge.

  The rumble of the planet’s atmosphere ceased, and Alaric left Drakaasi behind forever.

  Raezazel the Cunning licked the blood from Dorvas’ face.

  Around him, hundreds of Hathrans lay torn and bloody on the deck of the Hammer of Daemons. He had come to them as swift as a whirlwind, their tiny determined minds reduced to fear, and then silence, by Raezazel’s touch.

  He slid through the corridors and decks of the ship. It was as familiar as one of his own forms, like a cloak of flesh that fit him perfectly: the shrines and inscriptions put up by pilgrims who never understood that they were doing the work of Chaos; the ship’s own structure, in itself a subtle prayer to the Liar God; the smell and the feel of it.