by Warhammer
Then light began to shine from the dragon’s ruined eye, a searing, blinding light that was at once all colours and no colour. The brilliance exploded from the dragon’s skull, her veins glowing within her body, shining through her scaly flesh as burning agony coursed through her entire bulk. The dragon flailed against the pain, her claws ripping into the walls, her immense tail crashing against the floor, smashing bones into powder. Smoke began rising from Bubos as she burned from the inside out. Steaming blood erupted from her maw, dissolving her fangs as her jaws decayed into brown slush.
Einarr saw Skoroth lifting himself from the splintered floor. The sorcerer looked up at the dying dragon, then glared at the Norscan. In the same instant, the behemoth reared back, crashing onto her side and rolling miserably across the canyon as pain assaulted every shred of her being. The sorcerer’s body exploded into a mist of flies and maggots as the dragon’s enormity crushed him. Einarr grinned at the justice of it, the mighty plague master slain by his own creature.
Bubos slammed back into the pit she had gouged, more broken bones stabbing into her ravaged frame. The dragon tried to rise once more, but greasy froth spilled down her crumbling face and the last of her lower jaw pulled free of her wasted skull. For a time, the dragon’s body continued to shudder and writhe, but whether there was still intelligence behind such agonies, or merely the last suffering of tortured muscles and nerves, Einarr could not say. Even so, he watched until the frightful force ravaging the dragon had consumed her utterly, leaving behind only a puddle of reeking filth.
Despite the pain that filled his own battered body, Einarr forced himself to rise and stride to the site of the dragon’s dissolution.
‘This time I think you don’t come back,’ he growled, spitting into the brown slush.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Einarr stalked onward through the reeking gloom of the palace, through the diseased corridors and chambers. There was a terrible quiet about the infernal structure now, as though the entire palace was holding its breath, shuddering in fear. Accustomed to the rustle of vermin, the gibbering cackle of nurglings and the squealing of rats, Einarr found the silence somehow even more horrible. Even the wailing things that had been fused into the walls were still, their decaying faces set into moribund masks. The Norscan could feel their eyes staring at him, could feel the ruin of their minds scrutinizing his every move. For good or ill, he could not say. Perhaps the poor mad things weren’t even capable of such a distinction after squandering their miserable lives for the plague god’s diseased whims.
He had not travelled far from the canyon where he had wrought the destruction of Skoroth and Bubos when the strength Orgrim’s fang had endowed him with began to fade. Einarr screamed in pain as his bones shrivelled back into their proper shape, as the fur that covered his limbs shrank back into his skin. He fell to his knees, writhing in pain as his face collapsed back into a human visage. He felt diminished as the power of the wolf left him, a great emptiness inside him. The dulling of his senses made him feel almost blind and deaf, such had been the keenness of the wolf’s awareness. He understood now the terrible lure the bestial spirit had, the grim power that had made Orgrim embrace the feral life of the ulfwerenar and shun that of his kin.
Eventually the warrior rose once more, prowling through the silent, brooding corridors, guided by the uncanny instinct that had led him so far for so long. When the corridor branched, there was no delay, he knew which path to take. When the halls degenerated into a labyrinth of narrow passages and shivering walkways, he unerringly sensed which steps to take. Einarr wondered if even Urda, with her witch-sight, could have guided him as well as the urges that tugged at his mind.
At length, he sensed he was drawing close to the very heart of the palace, the place where the Claw had been locked away by Nurgle’s thralls. It was so close now, he could almost taste it, almost feel its black power vibrating through the passages. A dull throb pulsed through the meat-like walls, almost like the pounding of a drum. The sound boomed through Einarr’s ears, thunderous after the silence of the halls. His pace quickened and he rushed onward, desperate now to seize the Claw in his hands, to secure the prize Tchar had demanded from him. To claim that which the Lord of Change had promised him.
It was an old story, among the Baersonlings, the struggle between Tchar the Eagle and the Worm Nurgle. The cunning schemes of Tchar constantly threatened by the rapacious appetite and mindless hunger of Nurgle. Sometimes the Worm would be too powerful, too swollen with plague-infested meat, for the Eagle’s talons to carry off. At such times, terrible diseases ravaged the land, felling mighty and meek with the indifference of a blind axeman. The careful plans of Tchar would be upset by Nurgle’s gluttonous feast, his mortal servants struck down along with the rest, his unwitting puppets cut from their strings. Of all the gods, it was Nurgle that Tchar reviled, for the Plague God was too unpredictable even for the Great Manipulator to coerce.
The Norscan’s hurried pace faltered as he neared the end of the corridor. The passage was blocked by a gate. Not a thing of bone and flesh, not a portcullis of quivering daemonic pestilence. After all the horrors he had endured, all the terrors he had overcome, a simple fence of steel bars separated him from that which he had struggled so long to win. Einarr shook his head in disbelief, unable to accept that this was the last obstacle that stood in his way.
Einarr strode towards the gate, seizing its bars in his hands. Instantly pain flooded through him, blazing agony that coursed up his arms in red misery. Beneath his touch, the steel bars were white-hot. Flesh melted from his fingers, fusing to the gate. But he refused to release his hold, the promise of what lay beyond greater than all the agony his body could endure. Black specks flared through his vision, the stink of his own cooking flesh filled his nose, and still he kept hold of the bars, straining to force the gate open. His teeth ground together, his muscles burned in protest as he strained them beyond their limits.
Finally even Einarr’s tremendous endurance crumbled beneath the strain. Screaming he pulled away from the gate. The warrior clenched his bloody fists, raging against the cruel caprices of the gods. He would not be denied, not now. Not when he had come so close.
The symbol of Tchar on his hand began to glow once more. He raised his gory fist to his neck, pulling free the scrap of armour he had taken from von Kammler’s gauntlet. He glared at the defiant gate. Bellowing the knight’s name, he flung the metal shard at the barrier. The missile blazed with chromatic energy as it struck the steel bars. The blinding light spread through the steel, rushing all across the portal. Before Einarr’s eyes, the bars began to twist and change, their skins of steel warping into scaly flesh, their pointed tips changing into serpentine heads. The hissing of vipers wheezed across the corridor as the snakes dripped away from the portal, slithering across the floor in a squirming carpet.
Carefully Einarr made his way past the hissing snakes, the reptiles still glistening with the energy that had transformed them. Gingerly he picked a path between the serpents, his bare toes curling as cold reptilian flesh brushed against them. By degrees, he won his way clear of the vipers’ nest, the pulsating hall beyond the gate standing unguarded and unbarred before him.
The throbbing rhythm that pounded through the walls and floor grew still more distinct as Einarr approached the shrine. Unerringly, his instincts had led him here, but now the unnatural guidance had nothing more to offer him. They had failed him because there was nowhere left to lead him.
He had arrived.
The meat-like walls vibrated with the pulse that ran through them, quivering and shaking as Einarr strode past them. A framework of rotting bodies rose before him, decayed hands clutching at him weakly, faint moans sighing from the wasted corpses. Einarr brushed the feeble grip of the wretches from him, sparing no thought for the damned slaves of Nurgle. There were others he would save, others who were worthy of life.
Past the archway of festering corpses, Einarr found himself standing within the shrine, the ve
ry heart of the palace. The room was lit by a golden light, a diseased magnificence that made his eyes water. Here the walls were a lattice of veins and arteries, the fleshy tubes quaking as black filth shot through them in chaotic spurts. The floor was an expanse of stretched sinew, a quilt of flayed human flesh. Faces stared up at Einarr from the floor, watching him with insane, maddened eyes. Upon the ceiling, glowing with its malevolent power, was the fly-rune of the plague god, branded into the quivering flesh of the palace, dripping with luminous pus, alive with squirming maggots.
By force of will alone did Einarr tear his eyes away from the sign of Nurgle, retching as the after-image of the diseased rune continued to infect his vision. When he recovered, he tightened his hold on Alfwyrm, the sword’s grip chewing into his mangled hands. He glanced about the noxious shrine, looking for the prize he had been told would be here.
Against the far wall, he could see a curtain of slimy gossamer, looking for all the world like a great sheet of mucous. Around the alcove were littered the bodies of dozens of Hung and pestigors, their corrupt bodies cut and burned. Blood still seeped from their grievous wounds, pooling in a stagnant mess upon the blinking floor.
Einarr strode towards the butchered guards, watching the black shadows that crawled at the corners of the shrine for any trace of what had killed them. Every nerve in his body on edge, Einarr stalked towards the alcove and the prize he had come so far to claim.
A dark, twisted shape emerged from the side of the alcove, its torn arm dripping against the curtain. A misshapen face grinned wickedly at Einarr as mismatched eyes struggled to focus upon him.
‘So, Steelfist continues to enjoy the favour of Lord Tzeentch,’ Vallac spat as he strode into the light. ‘By steel and strength and the lives of those foolish enough to follow him, he at last reaches out to claim his destiny!’
Whatever shock Einarr felt when he saw Vallac standing in the shrine was quickly smothered by the hate that swelled up inside him. He could well guess how the Kurgan had been able to reach this, the inner sanctum of the palace. Skoroth had been frightened of Einarr, obsessed with destroying the one who bore the mark of Tchar upon his flesh. He’d been so driven to destroy Einarr that the Plague Lord had ignored the other rat scurrying through the walls. Every ordeal he had endured, every foe he had slain had made Vallac’s passage through the palace that much easier, drawn that much more attention away from the Kurgan and focused it upon Einarr.
Einarr glared at the Kurgan, studying the wounds that marked Vallac’s body, trying to determine how much strength was left in the man, how much fight he could still muster. ‘And the brave Vallac, like a thief in the shadows, comes to steal what is not his to take!’
The Norscan’s words were intended to provoke Vallac, but the Kurgan’s reaction was not what Einarr expected. Instead of some reckless fury, bitter laughter took hold of him, wracking his mangled body like an ague. He raised his hand, closing his bloodied fingers around the rotten curtain. With a savage pull, he tore the gauze-like decay from its fixture, letting it wilt against the floor.
‘What is there to steal, Norscan! Where is the great treasure Lord Tzeentch told you to reclaim!’
Einarr stared in horrified fascination as Vallac exposed the depths of the alcove. Instead of chests of treasure, instead of altars of gold and silver, instead of piled gems and hoarded wealth, there was only a mass of greasy, dripping muscle. For one final time, disbelief seized Einarr’s heart, crushing it in an icy fist. The warrior became oblivious to everything, the pestilential light, the crying floor, the glowing fly-rune, even the Kurgan who glared at him and fingered his bloodied sword. All that existed for him in that black moment was the alcove, what it contained, and what it did not.
The Norscan stepped towards the mass of quivering muscle. He could see the slime dripping from it, the black sludge that flowed through it. Bones poked from its surface, decayed limbs and splintered ribs, the ruin of a skull locked in one final scream. At the very centre of the mass, a brown, putrid thing pulsed and throbbed, its rhythm racing away into the walls. But of the Claw, the treasure he had come so far to find, there was no trace.
Pain flared through Einarr’s body as he felt steel slash against his back. Only the weakness of the strike prevented the attack from severing his spine, even so there was enough strength behind it to make Einarr reel from the blow. He staggered back, lifting Alfwyrm in time to swat aside the crooked blade clenched in Vallac’s grimy fist.
‘You have cheated me!’ the Kurgan roared. ‘Cheated me of everything!’ He brought his blade crashing down, the edge biting into the floor as Einarr parried his strike. Before Einarr could press his own assault, the Kurgan’s sword was flashing towards his belly once more. Strength might have withered within Vallac’s arms, but the marauder had lost none of his speed.
‘The favour of Tzeentch is lost to me!’ Vallac raged, bringing his sword slashing down into Einarr’s leg, tearing deep into the calf. ‘Glory is lost to me!’ he screamed, and Einarr felt the edge of Vallac’s sword cut into his arm. ‘Life is lost to me!’ he howled and his sword swept towards Einarr’s head. The Norscan ducked beneath the furious attack, bringing Alfwyrm slashing through Vallac’s forearm. The Kurgan’s arm flopped to the floor, the sword still clutched in its dead fingers.
‘At last, something we agree on,’ Einarr snarled, plunging his sword into Vallac’s chest. He felt ribs crack beneath his strike, organs rupture beneath his steel. The Kurgan’s hot blood drenched his hand and Einarr sneered into Vallac’s stunned countenance. The marauder scowled back at him, his face splitting in a spiteful smile. Einarr flung himself to the floor as Vallac spat fire from his mouth an instant too late to consume the Norscan. Einarr scrambled across the ground, rolling away from the fiery exhalations that Vallac sent shooting after him. The skin coating the floor shrivelled and blackened beneath the Kurgan’s fire, but his opponent remained stubbornly just beyond his reach. Finally, even Vallac’s hate could not keep him standing. The fires sputtered and died, the Kurgan’s knees folded and he fell, the blade still thrust through his chest driving even deeper as it struck the floor.
Einarr stared at the Kurgan’s twitching body, watching his life drain from his ruined carcass. He felt a sense of triumph swell within him. After all he had endured, he could still find some satisfaction in life’s smaller pleasures.
The sound of buzzing flies tore Einarr’s attention from the dying Kurgan. From the tiny spaces between the pulsing veins that formed the walls, great blue flies crawled into the light, hairy legs rubbing together in an almost human expression of glee. The insects took to the air, gathering in a cloud of flittering vermin. Einarr watched in horror as the tiny bodies slowly melted together, coalescing into a terrible new form. Skoroth’s skull-like face grinned at him as the melting flies gave him shape once more.
‘Thank you for removing the Kurgan,’ the sorcerer said, the tones still tainted by the hum of insects. ‘I did not care for his fire. It was most troublesome.’
‘You’ll find me more troublesome,’ Einarr growled. He stooped to the floor and lifted a rusty axe from a dead Hung. ‘I do not know how you cheated death before, maggot-kin, I only know this time I will do better!’ Snarling, Einarr charged towards the bloated plague master.
Skoroth lifted his pudgy hand, filthy sounds belching from his throat. Einarr felt himself hurled back, as though some slimy fist had smashed into him, throwing him to the floor. The sorcerer stared down at him, eyes smouldering with a fanatic’s intensity.
‘Somehow, I fail to be impressed,’ he hissed. He stretched his hand again and the axe in Einarr’s fist began to rot, metal and wood dissolving into a paste that oozed through his fingers. Einarr’s flesh smouldered beneath the sludge. The sorcerer strode towards him, the floor wailing in revulsion beneath his loathsome tread. From the tips of Skoroth’s fingers, whip-like tentacles shot across the room, lashing Einarr’s body, tearing into his skin. Gangrenous sores spread from the welts as diseased venom pumped t
hrough Einarr’s body. Screaming, the warrior struggled to control the spasms that wracked him, striving against his rebelling body to lift himself from the floor.
‘Yes, Norscan. Scream. Shriek. Feel the suffering and sorrow flow through you!’ Skoroth’s skeletal grin spread to the dozens of tiny mouths that drooled open across his withered head. ‘Know despair, know agony, know desolation! Beg, grovel, bow your head as it rots from your body! Quail before the power of Nurgle!’
A scum of blood trickled from Einarr’s eyes, his lungs filling with stinging filth. His flesh crawled with pestilence, maggots sprouting from his wounds, burrowing still deeper into his flesh. By inches and degrees, he could feel himself dying, feel his life being drained away by the sorcerer’s fell magic. A wheezing cough wracked his body and torn scraps of lung erupted from his mouth.
Through the agony, through the slow death, Einarr forced his arm upward, his hand to close around the last charm dangling from his neckband. Blood and tissue dripped from his mouth as he forced his head off the floor and glared into Skoroth’s smirking visage.
‘Zhardrach,’ the warrior growled, hurling the dwarf’s beard-lock at Skoroth. The sorcerer lifted his arms instinctively to ward off the missile. The hairy coil bounced harmlessly from Skoroth’s hands, but as it struck the floor, it exploded in a burst of scintillating colour. From the beard-lock, great chains of iron shot upward, swirling around the sorcerer’s body, engulfing him in a cocoon of crushing, clinging metal. Soon, where the sorcerer had stood, there was only a pillar of twisted links that swayed and shuddered as the thing trapped within struggled against its prison.