by C. L. Werner
Tz’arkan felt the force of those crashing swords. It could feel the mongrel vibrations caused by their collision, vibrations magnified far beyond the magic of either sword on its own.
Brazenly, the daemon tried again to cripple its foe with doubt. ‘You think to kill what is eternal, mock-king? Do you know what it is you stand before? I am Tz’arkan the Render. Tz’arkan the Woe. Tz’arkan the Blight. I was there when the star-gods fell. I was there to watch the first apes climb up from the slime and call themselves elves. I have seen the rise of continents and the collapse of empires. I have been there from before the beginning, when all was raw, primal and untainted by the unnatural harmonies of what you call order. I will be there when all of this is cast down, ravaged until it is less than dust. I will be there when Great Khorne calls the Last Slaughter and all is drowned under a tide of blood. You think to kill me, mortal? I am destiny! I am eternity! I am–’
Only two words passed Tyrion’s lips as he glared at the daemon. It was the elf who now wore the mocking smile, the haughty arrogance of disdain. ‘Prove it,’ he challenged the daemon.
Ancient beyond even the reckoning of elves, versed in all the evils and horrors of a million nightmares, Tz’arkan was nevertheless oblivious to its own weakness. Something it had absorbed from its mortal host after so many years. Of all the things to spur the rage of Malus, the jeers of an enemy were the most certain. Now, it was the daemon who had consumed the druchii lord who felt the primitive, unthinking fury of its vanquished host boil within it. Roaring, Tz’arkan lowered its horned head and charged at Tyrion. The aura of power clinging to the elf was forgotten in the blind urge to rend and maim. The enchanted swords were dismissed as brutish blood-lust filled Tz’arkan’s mind.
With the huge daemon rushing at him, Tyrion threw himself forwards in a diving roll. As he came up under the driving daemon, he stabbed his swords into Tz’arkan’s body. The monster howled in pain, aethyric blood steaming from its wounds. Tyrion clenched his jaw tight, straining his muscles to their utmost, forcing the warpsword and Sunfang to shift and turn inside the daemon’s body. Inch by gory inch, he forced the weapons together.
A withering blast of power exploded from Tz’arkan as the warpsword and Sunfang touched. Magnified still further by the aethyric essence of the daemon, the magical discharge ripped Tz’arkan apart. The beast’s torso was flung high into the air, collapsing hundreds of yards away in a heap of bubbling corruption. The lower part of the fiend’s form was blasted into dripping giblets that spattered the armour of the asur and druchii, who had forgotten their own fights to observe the Regent’s duel with the daemon king.
Despite the fury of Tz’arkan’s destruction, Tyrion himself was unfazed. Standing right at the centre of the arcane explosion, he was unmarred by either the violence or the gore of his enemy’s annihilation. He held the warpsword before his face, watching as the fragments of Tz’arkan’s essence were sucked down into the depths of the unholy blade. A fitting death for a monster that had brought such misery into the world.
As Tz’arkan’s corpse corroded into puddles of stagnant filth, clouds soared into the sky, seemingly sucked into the void left by the daemon’s passing. Thick, syrupy drops of black rain began to shower down upon Reaver’s Mark, drawing shouts of confusion and alarm from the elves below. It seemed the very heavens were mourning the daemon king’s destruction.
Only a few knew better, those who had sensed the far-distant ritual that had unleashed an unprecedented surge of magical energy across the world. The storm that swept across Reaver’s Mark was much more than cloud and rain. It was the fury of the aethyr unchained.
Drusala could feel the obscene taint of Death Magic that coloured the storm. She knew that far across the sea a great evil had been revived. The clouds to the east blazed with violet fire, lightning boiling and flashing from within their smouldering depths. A deathly chill swept across Reaver’s Mark, silencing the sounds of battle that yet lingered. The druchii and their asur foes drew back, gazing uneasily at the comrades around them, feeling at the very core of their beings the occult force that rippled all around them.
Then the arcane taint seeped down into the bodies lying strewn about the battlefield. The corpse of Tullaris rose to its feet, brains drooling from its split skull. The carcass of Spite slithered across the earth with its broken back. The dead of both druchii and asur rose again, granted a ghastly semblance of life by the forces surging through them. Bony hands clawed their way upwards as still more ancient dead were awakened, pulling themselves from the ground on skeletal arms and withered talons. Barbarian marauders who had been slain millennia before rose alongside skeletal elves and the rotten husks of goblins that had been slain during the rampage of Grom the Paunch.
Living warriors cowered before the graveborn, drawing away with the instinctive repugnance of all things living for all things undead. The animated corpses made no effort to close the gap between themselves and those who had been their comrades in arms. The graveborn simply stood where they were or stumbled about in directionless idiocy. It was only when the surviving witches of the Blood Coven appeared upon the volcanic spur that the undead found motivation and purpose.
The red-clad Blood Coven sent their magic wafting across the battlefield, binding those undead closest to them to their power. Following their example, the other sorceresses yet remaining to the host of Hag Graef began to exert their own power. Coldly, they stirred the desiccated hearts and tattered mentalities of the graveborn, turning them towards the asur, driving them into battle once more. Fallen asur now crossed swords with their living kinsmen while once-slain druchii were given the chance to avenge themselves against their slayers.
‘Aid us,’ one of the Blood Coven snarled at Drusala. ‘Lend your magic to our purpose and we may yet win the day!’
Drusala knew she didn’t have the power to fight the witches. Not now. She had expended too much energy releasing Tz’arkan. What little she still possessed was sustaining the glamour that cloaked her. There was nothing she could do to defy the Blood Coven. Nothing she could do to keep the graveborn from slaughtering the asur and killing Tyrion. She had risked so much to preserve the hero that now all she could do was watch impotently as all her plans were unravelled.
As she turned her eyes towards Tyrion, Drusala saw him step boldly towards the nearest of the undead. The asur hero raised the warpsword high, brandishing it before the oncoming horde of graveborn horrors. ‘This is the Warpsword of Khaine!’ Tyrion shouted, his voice booming across the battlefield. ‘Dead of Ulthuan, attend me! This is the blade of the Destroyer, the Murderer of Nations, he who cut the life from you and cast you into the dominion of corpses!’
The undead froze as they heard Tyrion’s cry. Sightless skulls and rotting eyes turned towards him wherever the graveborn fought, staring in sepulchral fixedness at the black blade he held overhead. The Blood Coven raged and shrieked, trying to coerce the undead back into the fight, but the carcasses refused their commands. All across Reaver’s Mark, the druchii sorceresses were finding themselves unable to break the uncanny fascination Tyrion exerted over the graveborn.
‘I speak for the Destroyer,’ Tyrion declared, slashing the warpsword through the air before him. ‘You belong to Khaine. By right of conquest and death, you are the slaves of the Bloody-handed God. My enemies are the enemies of Khaine. The enemies of Khaine are your enemies.’ The Regent’s face became a mask of unbridled hate as he gazed across the horde of graveborn and turned towards the druchii. He thrust the warpsword towards the black-armoured warriors. ‘Slay them all!’ he commanded.
By the hundreds, by the thousands, the undead set themselves against the druchii, stabbing at them with splintered spears and broken swords, clawing at them with rotten fingers and bony claws. The warriors of Har Ganeth, of Clar Karond and Hag Graef met the attack with the iron resolve of their own hate, striving to push the undead back that they might again close with the living as
ur and sell their own lives in the killing of their ancient foes.
Upon the volcanic spur, the witches of the Blood Coven loosed their magic against the tide of skeletons climbing up towards them. Dozens of corpses were blasted into splinters by their spells, but for each corpse they vanquished three more graveborn seemed to take their place. Again, the witches called for Drusala to help them, but this time their cry was one of abject terror. Frantically they looked about them for the sorceress, but of Morathi’s handmaiden there was no sign. In the confusion of shifting battle, with the Blood Coven fixated upon their undead warriors, she had vanished.
At last the undead reached the top of the spur. The first few were sent falling to earth by the sorcerous wind the Blood Coven summoned, but there were too many for the witches to resist. Their magic faltered and they were dragged beneath the oncoming swarm. Shrieking, they were torn asunder by the rotten hands of the graveborn.
Across Reaver’s Mark, the sinister undead crashed against the shields and blades of the druchii. Fighting like fiends, the sons of Naggaroth tried to drive them back. Hundreds of the graveborn were cut down, but the dead cared not. Relentlessly they continued to throw themselves at their enemy. Finally, even the hate-ridden resolve of the druchii could take no more. First one regiment, then another, turned and fled, retreating back across the fields of Ellyrion they had ravaged only days before.
Tyrion raised his sword once more, but this time it was Sunfang he held and it was living warriors he addressed. ‘Defenders of Ulthuan,’ he shouted. ‘Khaine demands blood! The blood of Naggaroth and Malekith’s slaves!’ A terrible cry of ancient hate and savage violence sounded from every asur on the field as they heard the song of Khaine in Tyrion’s words. Viciously they followed their Regent as he led them across the field in pursuit of the broken druchii. Like wild animals, the asur fell upon their foes, hacking them to pieces when they caught them, rending their foes to ribbons even as they lay dead upon the ground. Only the Phoenix Guard, exalted and marked by Asuryan, maintained the discipline of warriors. Over them, Khaine’s Bloodsong held no power.
While Tyrion led his maddened army in the massacre of their routed foe, a lone figure prowled amidst the carnage they left behind. Drusala picked her way carefully among the corpses as she emerged from the fissure at the base of the volcanic spur that had become the grave of the Blood Coven. As she drew some of the fading energies rising from the twice-slain graveborn, she found enough power to adjust the glamour she had cast about herself.
For the merest instant, the image of Drusala, handmaiden of Morathi faded. It had been a wondrous mirage, crafted from the murdered handmaiden’s own soul, a semblance that had deceived even other spellcasters. Morathi was almost reluctant to cast it aside, but she knew the role of Drusala had served its purpose. The situation had changed and she had to change with it. Using the magical energies she’d gathered from the undead, she transformed herself into the likeness of a Sapherian mage.
Teasing one of her now blonde tresses behind her ear, the sorceress turned to join Tyrion in his hunt. There was a delicious flavour to the idea of hunting down the shattered druchii host. If the massacre were complete enough, it might even cause some delay in her son Malekith’s schemes.
As she started towards the asur army, Morathi noted a broken corpse dragging itself along the ground. She recognised the animated remains of Spite, Malus Darkblade’s steed. The thing was crawling towards the puddle of corruption that had been Tz’arkan. Even in its undead state, despite the horrific transformation of Malus’s body, the reptile was trying to reach its master.
Morathi shook her head at the pathetic display and smiled. ‘You were a useful pawn, for a time, Malus Darkblade. But you were, after all, only a pawn in a much greater game.’
Her eyes already envisioning the new steps she must take to ensure her plans came to fruition, the sorceress hurried to join Tyrion’s triumphant asur.
About The Author
C L Werner’s Black Library credits include the Space Marine Battles novel The Siege of Castellax, Mathias Thulmann: Witch Hunter, Runefang, the Brunner the Bounty Hunter trilogy, the Thanquol and Boneripper series and Time of Legends: The Black Plague. Currently living in the American south-west, he continues to write stories of mayhem and madness set in the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000.
An extract from The Curse of Khaine,
Book III of Warhammer: The End Times
by Gav Thorpe
At some point lost in the depths of time someone had called it the Black Tower. Perhaps it had been black then, and perhaps it had been merely a tower. Now it was the highest pinnacle at the centre of Naggarond. The sprawling fortress had grown hundreds of outer fortifications and buttresses, spawned a warren of alleys and streets, rooftop passages and arcing bridges, becoming a settlement unto itself where the only law was the shifting will of the Witch King, alliances were fleeting and death a constant risk.
Its walls were festooned with the heads and corpses of the thousands that had displeased Malekith over the preceding millennia. Some were hung upon hooks and chains, others in nooses and gibbets. Hundreds were skeletons, preserved by dire magic, but dozens were more recent, mouldering flesh clinging to bones gnawed by the clouds of harpies that circled over the bastion seeking new victims to scavenge.
The Black Tower.
A name filled with more grief and terror than three simple words could describe, etched into the last memories of the unfortunates upon the wall, burned into the agony of those still writhing in the dungeons that were dug into the bedrock beneath the high walls and banner-wreathed ramparts.
None remembered who had first named it, not even Malekith himself as he sat upon his iron throne in a grand hall atop the tallest keep. He did remember a time when Naggarond had not existed, one of only a handful of beings across the entire world.
He had grown up in the Black Tower, the grim atmosphere overshadowed by the brooding presence of his father, Aenarion, and the wicked, bloody machinations of his mother, Morathi. His opponents had claimed that those decades had laid a similar darkness upon his heart.
The Witch King no longer possessed lips, but the irony of history would have caused them to twist into a cruel smile. A face ravaged by holy fire contorted beneath hot iron in an approximation of humour, the sort of humour that delighted in looking out of the window at the heads of a dozen generals who had failed Malekith during the recent war against the barbarous northmen. He viewed them now, taking satisfaction from the screams that had filled this chamber as their bodies had been split apart by dark magic and heated blades.
He looked out past these tokens of his anger, to the surrounding fortress and the high curtain walls beyond. Past them dark shadows pierced the sky, none quite as tall as the Black Tower, shrouded in the dismal chill mists of Naggaroth.
Naggarond.
But this was not the city of his birth, though the Black Tower had been his childhood home. That honour belonged to a fallen place, razed and raised again and again throughout the turning epochs, built upon the blood-soaked soil of ancient Nagarythe.
Anlec.
Capital of Aenarion, once the strongest city in the world, shaming even Karaz-a-Karak of the dwarfs. Anlec, envy of Ulthuan, which had fallen in battle only once, and that had been to Malekith himself and allies within the walls.
All now was ruin. The Black Tower was all that remained of Anlec. The memory was sharp even though six thousand years old.
The storm-wracked seas crashed against a harsh shore of rock pinnacles, foaming madly. The skies were in turmoil, blackened by dark magic. Through the spume and rain dark, massive shapes surged across the seas, towering edifices of battlement and wall.
The castles of Nagarythe followed in the wake of the largest floating citadel, upon the highest tower of which stood Malekith. The lashing rain steamed from his armour as he turned at the sound of Morathi’s voice from the
archway behind him.
‘This is where we flee to?’ she said, anger flashing in her eyes. ‘This cold, bleak land?’
‘They will not follow us here,’ replied the Witch King. ‘We are the Naggarothi – we were born in the north and in the north we will be born again. This land, bleak as it is, shall be ours. Naggaroth.’
‘To build a new kingdom?’ sneered Morathi. ‘To accept your defeat and start afresh as if Nagarythe had never existed?’
‘No,’ replied Malekith, flames leaping from his iron body. ‘We will never forget that which has been taken from us. Ulthuan belongs to me. If it takes a thousand years, ten thousand years, I will claim my rightful place as king. I am the son of Aenarion. It is my destiny.’
Time – mortality – was a concern for lesser beings. Millennia meant nothing to the Witch King. The tally of false Phoenix Kings that had been crowned and fallen over the course of Malekith’s life could not be numbered on two hands and he had greeted the death of each with little regard.
Sometimes he lost entire days reliving the events of his past, withdrawing into his thoughts when the burning agony of his physical shell became too much to bear. The temptation was in him again to reflect on ages past, not to escape pain, but to alleviate the boredom that gnawed at his wits.
‘My king?’
Malekith turned his gaze back from the window and his contemplations. It was Ezresor that had spoken, though it took the Witch King a moment to focus and remember his name. Malekith’s oldest agent flinched as the burning stare of his master fell upon him.