by David Guymer
Only the great Cathedral of Altdorf represented a grander sight.
‘A door over here, manling.’
Gotrek pulled open a darkwood door situated behind and just to the left of the defiled altar. It led to an unlit stair. It spiralled only one way. Down. Taking a sniff of the foetid air, Gotrek positioned his axe so that its steady glare would illuminate his way, and began to descend. Felix paused just long enough to ensure that Caul saw where they were headed, and then followed.
At last, Morzanna saw evidence of Hurrlk’s workforce. Bloated, ironclad abominations lay slumped at their stations in chains. Steel had been worn to flesh and then finally to bone, before Hurrlk and his minions had let them be discarded. Morzanna moved through them without pity. Soon the city would be liberated. Time would flow and mortal bodies would perish. They would acclaim her. Had their minds not been destroyed by torment, stimulants and, evidenced by the tangle of nails and copper wire over their craniums, Hurrlk’s obsessive ‘treatments’.
The passage grew progressively narrower as they entered the more recently excavated regions of the crypts. There was blood on the walls, increasing numbers of damaged constructs evidence to the labour directed here. The presence of bodies did nothing to negate the sense of emptiness. Their breathing was listless, autonomic. They would stop if they could. The walls were rougher, recently gouged, supported by wooden joists scavenged from the ruins without. The City of the Damned held no shortage of lumber, particularly when the same derelict could be exploited over, and over, and over again.
The air this deep was warm, moist and well used. A magical haze distorted rock and air with equal, ambivalent power. With every breath she felt it. It lit a fire like vodka in her belly, the taste lingering inside her throat like a sticky liquor. So much more than she had felt before.
Inconceivably more.
The effect grew more intense the deeper they delved. Her breathing became laboured, fingers tingling, head swimming with dark potentiality. Hurrlk walked through it, appearing to feel nothing and perhaps he did not. With an effort of will, Morzanna followed. And that was when she noticed something amiss.
The daemons were gone.
A measure of the empyreal dread that had driven them out began to creep into her mind and suborn her subconscious. The magic was not merely some exudate from the Realm of Chaos. It was possessed of a dark malice, an evil so ancient, so elemental, that even Morzanna felt tainted.
Vibrations passed through the thick air, will alone enforcing the generation of sound from the fickle particles of the aethyr. The voice of her daemon patron struck her like a crushing blow to the soul, it mocked rather than encouraged, daring her to fail even as it threatened failure’s consequence.
Deeper, my daughter. Do not surrender now.
The stairwell under the temple was narrow, wallowing in a dull, even red that slowly faded as Gotrek bore his axe around the turn of the stair. The steps had been smoothed over the centuries and were too narrow for Felix’s comfort. He was grateful the walls were close enough for him to lay hand to each side. Gotrek showed no such caution. The slaying of the daemon had only whetted his appetite for killing, and the dwarf took the spiralling descent as one born to stone. The light grew dimmer and Felix, unable to match the dwarf’s pace, was swallowed by darkness. Panic threatened. He took a calm breath and buried it. There were only two ways; up and down, and he needed light for neither.
In fact, with the departure of Gotrek’s light source, Felix could see an actinic pink picking at the corners of darkness below. It did not look far. Both hands to the walls, Felix counted the steps, ninety-three in all, the pink glow brightening with each one until he emerged into a fierce light. He squinted, eyes adjusting to the illumination and sudden space.
He was in a rough-hewn chamber; walls, ceiling and even the floor gouged by shovel and pick. It extended for about twenty feet before, as if by ill-luck, falling into a corridor. A pair of balefire torches burned in perpetuity from corbels on the wall. The air was warm and thick as mud. His chest ached from breathing it, but he welcomed the pain as a flagellant did the lash. It was a distraction from the voices. Hearing the careful tread of Caul and the others from the stairwell, Felix started down the corridor.
Like the chamber before it, the way was hand-cut. Every dozen paces there was a wooden brace against the ceiling, every three dozen another bracketed torch spewing acrid pink fumes. Coughing into his cloak, he hurried on, emerging into a second, wider, chamber just after Gotrek, and just in time to hear the dwarf’s indignant cry.
Slumped against the walls in chains as thick as Gotrek’s arms lay abominations which even the Ruinous Powers would have cast from their realms as obscene. Steam-drills hung idle and crusted with blood. Iron-plated chests glowed hot, causing necrotising flesh-grafts to bubble and bleed. Mutated beyond nature’s scope, bodies fused with mechanical elements and infected with daemonic taint, the wretched core of each was something inviolably human. Felix signed the hammer, trying to ignore their distant stares.
‘Someone should put them from their misery,’ said Gotrek, axe twitching, but doing nothing. There were too many to deliver mercy to them all.
The chamber widened further into a cavern as they progressed. Occasionally, a rough gash in the rock face revealed smoothly laid stone or the corner of an engraving. Shafts bore down and off at tangents, sloping shelves of bare rock curled up towards secondary, long abandoned work faces. Felix swore he heard voices ahead. But then he heard voices from all around, and in the cavernous deeps, it could have come from anywhere. These catacombs were not just being excavated, they were being re-excavated. Perhaps the first baron, Albrecht von Kuber, knowing what was trapped here, had collapsed the acropolis upon the daemon’s head?
With a worried look back, Felix hurried in step with his companion’s brisk pace.
He did not need a dwarf to tell him the baron had been less than thorough in his efforts.
Hurrlk awaited her, infinitely patient, hunched before a ragged tear in the rock face. The signs of haste were plain. The edges were jagged, blackened and glassy, and chipped with metallic debris from some explosive device. Cracks extended through the rock and into the ceiling. Rubble had been left where it was blasted out. The opening itself was unsupported.
The skaven had rightly presumed that it need not remain open for long.
Morzanna gazed into the breach. Therein lay the mercurial glow of a portal to the shadow-paths, the ways between worlds. The dark magic it exuded was afflicted with the most mephitic taint. With an irony that must have delighted the Ruinous Powers, it was both the wellspring of Be’lakor’s corporeal might and the source of his damnation. Following the purge of the Pious, the daemon’s sundered essence should have returned to the Realm of Chaos.
But it had not.
It had come here, to this buried temple, to be trapped liked every other soul.
But soon the great daemon king would be free.
Morzanna hesitated only a moment at the threshold. Power beat at her face like a furnace. It was a garbled distortion of darkness and colour, of energy and form. The shadow-paths belonged to the realm of daemons and gods and other, older, entities stranger and more powerful even than they. A mortal did not simply walk into the lands of the gods.
Not unchanged.
She smiled and stepped forward. It had been too long since she had felt something truly new.
The cavern ended abruptly at a granite face. Gotrek’s axe blazed in the magic-soured air, crystalline arteries of zircon and quartz glittering in the glow. The digging here had been fierce. Bits of rock were scattered, seared with alchemical burns that varied in colour from rock to rock. Gotrek gave a disapproving snort.
‘Effective job, but hasty. Skaven work if ever I saw it.’
Felix frowned, turning as Caul and the others panted into view. The man breathed as Felix did, slow and deep, face flushed like heated iron. Rudi and the flagellants mouthed unheeded nothings. They wavered on their f
eet. It looked as though they would collapse at any moment.
Gotrek traced the breach with his fingers, presenting the dust to his good eye and rubbing it in with a low chuckle. Felix saw what had caught the dwarf’s attention. Beyond the Slayer’s broad shoulders swirled some manner of portal. At first glance it was a silvery-grey, but colours flowed like oil over water. Gotrek lifted his axe towards it. When the blade came within six inches the portal began to crackle like kindling, its cryptic colours bleeding to the edges to reveal a pellucid window of silver light. Gotrek twisted around and grinned.
‘You coming?’
Felix gave a sigh, then set his jaw and nodded. As if he had ever had a choice.
The portal spat small arcs of black lightning that raked the flat of the starmetal blade. The air stung with ozone. Gotrek’s beard began to turn fluffy and rise. The axe pressed into its surface and the skin of energy flexed, the instinctual flinch of living flesh from a flame. Gotrek continued forwards until first his axe, then his arms, and then finally his entire body had disappeared. The portal continued to writhe, as though physically pained.
Felix had learned well the effect Gotrek’s weapon had on daemons and their manifestations, but the malignant will he sensed from the portal had not been dimmed.
Merely redirected.
Felix took a deep breath and climbed in.
Best then to be on the other side before it looked back.
Reality flexed, like the beaten skin of a drum, and Morzanna crossed the threshold of reality into the shadow-paths. There was a sensation of travel. Stars diffracted their light all around, vibrating like wasps in a spider’s web. They were blurry, milky smears that faded into infinity behind her. The flow of lights gave the impression of incredible speed, and of direction, but she felt nothing, as if her velocity was so great that sense and sound could no longer reach her. And she was not alone. She saw shades, pellucid echoes of the Damned. Like the bizarre streaking lights, they streamed past without so much as a whisper. Faceless. Voiceless. There were hundreds of them. Thousands.
Tens of thousands.
My army, thundered the voice of Be’lakor. As puissant as before, it came now from everywhere, all the more intense for being the only sound admitted to his pocket reality. They answer the muster as will all. Service to the Dark Master is timeless and does not expire with death.
The words of Be’lakor reverberated within Morzanna’s skull, pounding on her ears from within. At that moment she would have stepped back if she could, retreated to her own dimension of ash and fire and been content. Dark laughter flexed its fingers beneath her skull, kneading the bruised lobes of her brain.
The gods betrayed you child, as they once betrayed me. Come. We are all damned now.
Sounds surged towards her, like wolves on a wounded deer. There were voices, broken squeals, a blinding palette of noise that breakneck acceleration smeared into a funnel of dark glory. Then suddenly it stopped.
Her feet were on solid ground. Her lungs drew real air that smelled of warpstone and sweat. The chanting voices of mutants and the chittering of ratmen flooded her flesh and bone ears with sound.
The mutants she heard packed the floor of a large, circular chamber. Its high walls were obsidian smooth, carved with archaic glyphs that twisted before the eye and sank unread into the stone. Pillared arches led to other doorways, presumably onto shadow-paths to other dimensions and other times. Bodies rippled and twisted in a warpstone haze as though viewed through a distorting glass. Smoke drifted between them and through them. Morzanna saw human-like shapes but there were so many that it was impossible to distinguish one figure from another. They were silent, waiting. At points around the chamber, arranged into the motif of an eight-pointed Chaos star, galleries sat atop grooved pilasters. Skaven leaned over the rails, lassitude infecting every inch of their bearing. Their shoulders were stooped even beyond their racial hunch, eyes dim, tails drooling from the platforms to lay across the bowed heads of the mutants below.
Morzanna turned her attention to the chamber’s centre, the object of the mutants’ devotion and the ratmen’s dejected stares.
Rendered in glittering warpstone chalk, an eight-pointed star mirrored precisely the orientation of the galleries. At its centre, an altar rose organically from the obsidian flooring. It was the length of a coffin and about half as high again, barbed at both ends with elaborate curving spines. It was black, but of a shade far beyond the mundane darkness of the walls, columns, floor, and the cloaked ranks of degenerate ratmen. Emptiness incarnate, the witchfires and sickly warplight were drawn in to their deaths. Upon its stygian face lay the skeleton of a man. He would have been tall, no less than seven feet, with broad shoulders that bespoke immense strength in life. A pair of mutants, eye-less and with long, ribbony fingers caressed the remaining fragments, mewling mad devotion as they actualised its assembly.
A swelling awe overwhelmed Morzanna’s earlier uncertainties.
For the possession of a single knuckle of this skeleton would sorcerers have gone to war. Kharduun the Gloried was the former, mortally flawed, avatar of Be’lakor himself. Even in decay a measure of the Master’s potency imbued them, somehow contriving to overshadow even the altar upon which they lay. Morzanna could not shake the fear that, at any moment, the skeleton would rise from its repose. That it had power enough to do so was beyond question.
All it required was the will.
At seven of the eight points encircling the skeleton a darkly robed sorcerer assumed their position. Ubek flexed his mammoth paws. Nosta gave a distorted ripple of unbidden excitement. The others similarly made ready. The air, already suffused with the vitiating power of Chaos, began to warp. Morzanna felt the accrual of magic as a pressure on her eardrums, painless at first but rising. It swelled against the walls, like a dragon chick against its shell.
Your place, daughter.
As though her limbs were the daemon’s to command, she moved to the northern point of the star. The position was the most powerful, and the most perilous. First amongst the eight, she was the channel through which the others would draw the Wind of Dhar from the Polar Warp Gate. She was the one who would suffer the most. Ubek, in the ancillary position to her left, welcomed her with a covetous growl.
She wondered what these petty sorcerers expected to happen next. Each had been plucked from their own time before the coming of the Pious. They had not seen the world that she had seen. And even she did not know what Be’lakor intended for his former champion. The uncertainty should have thrilled her.
It did not.
The walls trembled, flecks of chalk flickering around the corona of the Chaos star.
Bring forth the Anointed, Be’lakor rumbled. With the death of a champion shall a champion be remade.
Golkhan strode through the kneeling mutants. They did not attend him, focused on their chant. The smoky haze broke and re-knit as he passed. The channels carved into his armour collected deep shadows, as though the Chaos warrior was being hollowed. His armoured shoulders trembled with anticipation, grey eyes fixated upon the altar and its promise of power. He approached the Chaos star. There was a ripple of energy as his foot crossed the chalked line, the disturbance spreading thin as the rest of his body crossed. Then, with a flash of silver, the wards sealed behind him.
You will be my weapon on this earth. My will again made flesh.
As one, the sorcerers began to chant the words that Be’lakor positioned, syllable by syllable, within their minds. At each point of the star, hands traced their unique sequence of sigils, the magic so dense that they held their shape once formed, oozing like jelly through their fingers.
Golkhan approached the altar.
One of the sightless mutants selected a fragment of ulna, enwrapping it within tendril-like fingers and caressing it with its lips. Golkhan spread his arms as the mutant came and, with great reverence, fixed the fragment to the matching depression in Golkhan’s vambrace. There was a click as it slotted home. The mutant held its br
eath.
And then the champion let out a howl of agony, clutching the offending forearm in his other gauntlet.
‘It hurts!’
The laughter of Be’lakor reverberated between column and stone.
You desire power the gods themselves shun. Of course it hurts.
The fingers of the second mutant willowed over the array, a gourmand at a feast of power. Golkhan ground his teeth.
A shard of pelvis, perhaps. I would have my champion scream again.
Felix dove through the portal just as the cavern around him began to shudder. There was a wave of repulsion that sought to throw him back, its hatred a physical force against his skin. It was like being bound in wire wool. But its full fury was directed elsewhere. The mercuric skin swelled and broke before him.
Felix could not begin to imagine what Gotrek was suffering.
There was no sign of his companion ahead, or of others behind. Felix tried to take in his surroundings, but he had entered the realm of the ethereal, a world that his mind could only superficially process. There were lights, voices, spectres of men briefly beheld, a sensation of forward speed. Wavering tentacles stretched through the grey. The black tendrils extended from his direction of travel and, for a moment of panic, he feared they came for him, but they reached past him. The voices were drawn to them, changing in some strange, feral, way as they drew near. With their every twitch, the entire sub-dimension trembled.
With a sudden scream of sensation, Felix felt hot air on his face and his body was expelled back into the world of the physical.
Still struggling to translate his perceptions of that other plane, he saw fading tendrils flickering across his vision. They reached into the portal at his back, and for the numerous portals that ringed the circular chamber in which he found himself. Losing them with the realignment of his senses to the material plane, Felix tracked the tendrils to their source, shielding his eyes from the electric shell of energies that marked an eight-pointed star at the chamber’s centre. There was a black-robed sorcerer at each of its eight points, an altar enshrined at its core, an assortment of human bones lying upon it. A powerful figure struggled in the grip of torment between two others. He was difficult to make out in detail. Power shimmered across his armoured body as though it were concealed behind a waterfall.