by Warhammer
Einarr was reminded of the bloodbeast of Skraevold and how it had resisted the violence of sword and axe. Even as the thought came to him, he saw some of his comrades rushing to help the Kurgan oppose the daemon. Vallac appeared at the back of the worm, slashing at it with his curved sword, the edge biting through some of its eyes. For every orb his sword ruptured, three more sprouted across the beast’s hide, glaring at him angrily.
Von Kammler approached the thing, the syllables of the Dark Tongue hissing through the mask of his helm. The daemon’s flesh quivered and twisted as the sorcery pawed at its substance, but defiantly retained its hideous shape. Thognathog stomped towards the horror, the minotaur’s mattock in one hand, the other encased within the plaguebull’s horned skull. With a bellow of fury, the ogre punched the skull into the daemon’s side, excrement exploding across him as the thing’s unclean hide was punctured. Beside the ogre, Zhardrach stabbed at the daemon with a long spear he had stolen from one of the Hung, the dwarf trying to keep Thognathog between himself and the monster.
The daemon barely reacted to the assault of the warriors, its unnatural substance reforming in a burst of pus and filth behind every attack. The drool slobbering from its mouth increased, sending a plume of smoke steaming from the ground. A burst of noxious gas erupted from the skin of the worm, a yellow cloud engulfing its attackers. They staggered back, coughing and retching, their flesh darkening beneath a swiftly spreading rash. Bubbling laughter oozed from the maggot-thing and it swung its head around towards von Kammler.
The worm’s body shuddered and convulsed as it spit something from its mouth. Coated in mucous and phlegm, it was only when the thing stood that it resembled a man. A thick, greasy rope of flesh attached the man to the worm, the slimy umbilical vanishing down the maggot’s throat. In the thing’s hand, the fleshy simulacra of an axe dripped as the plague-zombie lifted its arm and strode towards von Kammler. The knight met the thing’s slow, slopping advance, swinging his mace into the thing’s head. The weapon struck with a meaty thunk, collapsing the man’s head. Von Kammler tried to pull his weapon back, but found it embedded in the ruptured ruin of the thing’s skull. The zombie withered to the ground, dragging von Kammler’s weapon down with it. The worm’s body undulated again as it heaved a second zombie from its gullet. The worm’s convulsions continued until it had vomited a dozen of the half-digested warriors onto the ground, each still attached to it by a greasy umbilical.
Einarr watched as the plague-zombies marched relentlessly toward von Kammler, then lunged at the abominations, roaring a battle cry. Alfwyrm slashed down at the things, cutting through one of the umbilicals. The zombie attached to the coil of flesh flopped to the ground, quivering as it corroded into a pool of greasy sludge. Einarr shouted to his comrades and darted from the groping claws and flailing meat-bludgeon of a second zombie, slicing through its umbilical as easily as he had the first. His tactic was taken up by his allies, Thognathog wading in and forcibly ripping one of the zombies from its tether, the Kurgan berserker flinging himself at the horrors with his burning axe.
The worm seethed with anger, its rheumy eyes fixing upon Einarr. With a great gulping motion, it retracted the umbilicals and swallowed the remaining zombies. Another burst of corrosive gas sprayed from the daemon’s hide as its regurgitated sacrifices slid back into its gullet. Einarr’s comrades fled from the pestilential cloud, but the war leader stood his ground. He could feel the band he had taken from the frozen ship throb and pulse as the cloud washed over him. When it had passed, he could see little fingers of rust marring the metal, but on his flesh there was no sign of blemish. He sneered at the perplexed worm.
The daemon hissed again and surged forward, its enormity causing the ground to tremble. Black arrows slammed into its bulk as Birna saw her lover’s danger. Thognathog drove his hammer into the thing’s side, collapsing its substance like an old bladder. But such wounds were fleeting, the daemon’s unholy vitality causing its oozing form to reshape itself around its injuries. Like a relentless juggernaut, the horror drove on towards Einarr.
The Norscan stood his ground, an arrogant contempt filling him. He watched the plague daemon surge towards him, ignoring the frightened shouts of his comrades. He did not even lift Alfwyrm to repel the creature as it reared above him. Instead, almost without any awareness on his part, he opened his mouth and shouted at the daemon, roaring the words that seemed to burn through his brain at the vile abomination. Upon his hand, the steel symbol of Tchar glowed dimly.
‘Euooul’th’bueb’ros!’ Einarr roared at the worm, the sound of the slobbering name causing the thing to recoil in terror. ‘Euooul’th’bueb’ros, be flesh!’
The worm’s body shuddered as it heard the command, as its daemonic substance congealed into blood and bone. The purple acid that oozed from its underside sizzled as it burned through the thing’s belly. The worm slithered away from Einarr, its body trembling and convulsing as its own excretions consumed it. The Kurgan lunged at it again, this time the huge chunk of flesh that came away with his axe did not knit itself whole behind his blade, but bled freely and darkly. Thognathog followed the warrior’s example, smashing the tail of the worm almost flat beneath his hammer.
The daemon’s piteous wail shrieked through all who heard it as the retreating horror gained the base of the pillar. Like a mighty serpent, it coiled around the column and began to drag itself upward, struggling on despite the ropes of entrail and organ that dripped from its melting underside. The worm’s body shuddered again, becoming almost translucent, wisps of stagnant energies swirling about it as the daemon tried to revert to its etheric substance. Einarr glared up at the fleeing obscenity.
‘Euooul’th’bueb’ros, be flesh!’ he shouted at it again. The worm wailed piteously as the power of its True Name forced it back into a shape of mortality. The sizzling slime eating away at its body caused the daemon to lose its hold on the pillar. With a last bubbling wail, the worm toppled from the column, smacking into the ground in a great puddle of misery and corruption, its essence splashed across the plaza. For a moment, the wretched sludge tried to cling to life, but the ruin was too great even for the daemon’s essence to maintain and it settled into an oozing morass of filth.
Einarr looked down upon what he had done, stunned by the power he had commanded, shocked by his inability to account for it. As quickly as it had taken shape within his mind, the True Name of the daemon had been driven from his brain. He lifted his eyes to find the others staring at him in wonder. Even von Kammler seemed awestruck. The Hung, those that remained, screamed and scattered into the slime-coated ruins.
The Kurgan berserker turned towards Einarr, the dripping axe clenched in his armoured fist. Einarr watched him warily, waiting for the forbidding axeman to make the first move. Vallac cautiously joined the Norscan, careful to keep his eyes on the berserker.
‘You should not have freed him,’ Vallac warned. ‘He is Veig. My people have fought many wars with the Veigs. They are murderers and cannibals, thinking only of blood and skulls for their gods. The Hung should have killed him. Now we will have to kill him ourselves.’
Einarr shook his head. ‘He hasn’t tried to kill us yet,’ he told Vallac. ‘Perhaps he understands that we share a common enemy. He would be of use to us if he joins us against Skoroth.’
The berserker took a step forward, his head rising as he picked the name of the Plague Lord from Einarr’s unfamiliar words. He shouted at the Norscan, rage making his Kurgan dialect hard for Einarr to follow.
‘Kill worm, much good,’ the Kurgan roared. ‘Worm no eat Veigs now. Die with fighting, not in worm-gut.’ The berserker lifted his axe, his bloody eyes glaring into Einarr’s. ‘Kill Skoroth better.’
‘The path we walk is the same,’ Einarr said. ‘We seek the head of Skoroth.’
The bloodthirsty Kurgan lowered his head as he heard Einarr’s words, taking some time to consider what he had heard. When he looked at the Norscan again, his eyes shone from behind his skeletal hel
m with a feral gleam. ‘That be fine death, please mighty Khorne! Better than take Norseman skull, take Plague Lord skull!’ The Kurgan stared hard at Einarr, then reached forward and took his hand. ‘Berus of Veigs.’
‘Einarr Steelfist, Chosen of Tchar,’ the Norscan said, his tone as imperious as that of any jarl, as firm as stone. He turned towards von Kammler.
‘Now we are nine,’ he told the knight.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In defiance of the sludge of frost that coated the ground, the air became humid and lush as the warband emerged from the cyclopean ruins. Beyond the jumbled heaps of slime-coated stone stretched a vast, seething swamp. The reek of rot grew stifling, every breath scratching the lungs with its taint. Immense weeds rose into the sky on spindly stalks. Vines dripped across the land, choking the ground beneath their decaying foulness. Streams of stagnant water festered and flowed like sewage beneath the scabrous foliage, vermin flitting above its stench. Everywhere, the unclean life of a land remade into the pestilential image of Nurgle flourished. The swamp embodied the diseased whims of the Plague God, his mantra of decay without death, corruption without destruction.
There was no time to pause upon the threshold of the swamp, to allow their abhorrence for the foulness to be subdued by their resolve. The Hung that had scattered after the destruction of the daemon had spread word of Einarr’s sacrilege to their kin. It had not taken long for the ruins to resound with the sound of pursuers, to throb to the pulse of Hung war drums. Einarr knew they could not oppose such numbers and live, even Berus understood that if they stayed to face their enemies they would never reach the palace of the Plague Lord alive.
So they had fled, racing through the ruins, trusting more to luck than design to keep ahead of their foes. The slobbering, bubbling voices of the Hung sounded from all around them.
As they scrambled into the stinking morass of the swamp, Einarr looked back to see how near their enemies were. Impossibly, the ruins had vanished behind them, replaced by more swampland, the bog stretching as far as his eyes could follow. Yet he could still hear the sounds of the Hung as they shouted and pounded their drums, ghostly noises that came from nothingness. Einarr did not breathe any easier; whatever force had plucked them from the ruins and into the swamp could just as easily do the same for the Hung. He roared at his retching comrades, extolling them to hasten their pace. There would be time enough to rest when they were dead.
Like a living morass, the swamp tried to suck them down into its liquid embrace. The ground gave beneath their feet like porridge, defying their every effort to make speed. Tiny daemons harassed them again, hurling filth at them whenever they stopped, giggling and grinning when the warriors hurled curses back at them. The little nurglings danced across the bog, the ground refusing to drag their filthy forms into its own foulness. The daemons mocked Einarr’s suffering comrades, laughing each time a boot became trapped in the mud.
Among the fens and weeds they could hear their pursuers following them, sloshing through the diseased quagmire, eager to avenge their daemon king. Far too soon, filthy spears and arrows began to fall around them as the Hung closed in. Between her hacking coughs, Urda managed to recite words of power as she cast powdered bone across the bog behind them. When the last word hissed through her toothless face, the crone waved the feathered claw that had been one of her hands. The powder burst into flame, licking greedily at the first of the Hung as the plague worshippers charged the warband. The shrieks of the burning warriors echoed across the swamp, silencing for a moment the constant susurrus of insects.
‘That will not hold them back long,’ Vallac snarled. Even as he spoke the words, two huge marauders forced their way through the flames. Their rusting armour smoking from the fire, the massive warriors stomped towards the warband. Birna sent a black arrow shooting into the visor of one Hung’s helmet. The brute fell to his knees as blood exploded from his helm. His comrade did not pause to consider the fate of his kinsman, but rushed at the huntress. Birna tried to dodge back, but not quickly enough to avoid the attack. The Hung’s bamboo spear stabbed into the woman’s leg, the filthy muck coating it turning her blood black as it bubbled from the wound. Roaring, Birna smashed her bow into the Hung’s face, breaking his nose.
Stunned, the marauder staggered back. Before he could recover, Berus swept his axe at the warrior’s face, cleaving his skull in half. The berserker roared in triumph as brains and teeth splattered across his armour. Einarr rushed to help the reeling huntress, ripping the bamboo shaft free. He rummaged in Spjall’s medicine bag, trying to find a poultice to press against the injury.
Urda turned to von Kammler. ‘You have walked this road before,’ she said. The knight shook his steel head.
‘That is meaningless here,’ von Kammler replied. ‘Between the pulses of your heart, the entire swamp might change. All is at the whim of the Plague God.’
Einarr cursed the perfidy of the unnatural domain that obeyed no laws and followed no order. Trying to understand it was a thing hopeless and mad, the mere attempt to make sense of the rules that governed this land made his brain burn. This was the essence of the gods, a thing no man could hold within his mind, a thing that was nothing more than madness.
‘Sssmelll… ssstrooong,’ Orgrim growled. His body was covered in grey fur now, his bestial shape struggling to make words. His axe was gone, lost in the ruins, his armour reduced to a few tatters that stubbornly clung to his lupine form. The werewolf raised something that was more paw than hand and tapped the side of his muzzle, an unsettling reminder of the gesture the Aesling had made so many times before. Watching the grey beast make it caused a sliver of ice to crawl up Einarr’s spine. Einarr nodded at Orgrim and the werewolf began to lope into the weeds. Hurriedly, Einarr lifted Birna back to her feet, shouting for the others to follow the ulfwerenar. Vallac laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.
‘If eyes and ears fail, why trust a were-kin’s nose?’
‘Do you have a better plan?’ The sounds of the Hung moving through the swamp, circling around the barrier Urda had made punctuated Einarr’s words. Vallac shook his head. One by one, the small warband stole through the weeds, following in Orgrim’s path.
Einarr stared in disbelief at the stagnant swampland that surrounded them. For hours they had followed Orgrim’s lead, trusting to the werewolf’s keen senses to guide them through the mire. Now, even he seemed confused, pawing at the muddy earth in dismay, turning his head in every direction, trying to pick up some scent that would guide him onward.
‘I am really coming to hate this place,’ Vallac snarled, kicking at a rotten log. It exploded beneath his boot, hordes of termites scrambling from their broken sanctuary. Zhardrach cursed in shock, straining on the chain that bound him to Thognathog. Einarr could easily see why the dwarf was so agitated. Like everything else, the shattered log was repeated in every direction, right down to the crawling insects. Wherever they turned, it was the same. The same weeds, the same ghastly sky, the same slimy mud, like a mirror reflection of the entire swamp. Even their footprints repeated, giving them the eerie sight of watching marks appear in the mud ahead of them without any visible cause. Only they themselves were not reflected in the etheric mirrors, something that seemed to heighten the horror rather than lessen it.
It was maddening. Einarr could not tell if they were walking in circles, gaining ground or, in a very real sense, moving at all. Even von Kammler seemed agitated, unpleasantly surprised by this new trick the Plague Lord’s domain had learned.
Einarr turned to the knight. ‘It has to be some kind of illusion. It can’t all be the same.’
Von Kammler’s steel face scanned the reflected swamp. He reached to the left side of the path, ripping a small bush from the muddy ground. Instantly the same bush was torn from the earth to their right, behind and before them. The knight stormed forward, crushing one of the towering weeds in his mailed fist. Again, the destruction was repeated in the other three directions, an invisible hand snapping the sta
lk. He roared in frustration, attacking the foliage with his mace. However much he raged, the effects of his violence were dutifully mirrored.
‘It seems the great southlander has finally met his match,’ Urda hissed, satisfaction in her wrinkled face. ‘Good, I hope he rots here.’
‘If he rots here, old witch,’ Vallac snarled, ‘we rot with him.’ The hag shook her head.
‘Some of us, perhaps, but not all.’ She reached into her leather bag, pulling a set of ivory teeth from its depths. The hag closed her eyes, strange words crawling across her lips. The rune eye set in her face began to glow with power. Einarr watched in fascination as the teeth began to slither across her palm, guided by some unnatural life of their own. After a time, they settled and the light faded from Urda’s stone eye. The witch opened her mortal eyes and stared at the pattern the teeth had arranged themselves in. She looked up, staring into the swamp.
‘It is this way,’ she cackled.
‘How do you know that, witch?’ von Kammler demanded, scorn in his voice. Urda sneered at him.
‘Find your own way out, if the swamp lets you,’ she chided him.
The knight took a menacing step towards her, the mace still clutched in his hand. Thognathog stepped in front of Urda, placing himself between the knight and the hag.
‘Follow witch, leave bad stinky place,’ the ogre growled.
Einarr nodded his head in agreement. ‘Wandering in this madness will get us nowhere. Following Urda can get us no more lost than we already are.’