Hammer Of Daemons Part 13

'We separated the men from the women,' continued Venalitor with a smirk, 'and we killed the women in front of the men. We killed them badly, in all the ways you can think of and a few you cannot. Then we let the men fight back. Half of them wanted revenge and the other half just wanted to die. The grief in their eyes was like a hymn to the Blood G.o.d. The madness was joyous. So many of them were begging the Blood G.o.d to take them in, to turn them mindless, that I made a new army from them and marched them on to the next city. Your duty was to prevent that, Justicar. I think it is fair to say that you failed.'

Your atrocities are nothing new,' said Alaric, trying to keep his voice level. We cannot save every world. We can only fight.'

'Until death?'

'Until death.'

'But you did not die. You are here. Sarthis Majoris died, but you survived. What manner of duty did you fulfil, exactly?'

Your words cannot sway me, Venalitor. I am a Grey Knight.'

'Not any more. You became something else, something less, the moment I was able to take you alive. At least your friend had the good grace to die at the first opportunity. You cling on like a disease, pretending there is some victory in your failure to the Corpse-Emperor, and ignoring the only chance for redemption you have, the chance given to you by Khorne.'

Alaric looked around him for a weapon. There was nothing of use.

It would have to be bare hands. 'I shall be redeemed, Venalitor.

Here and now, I shall be redeemed.'

Alaric charged Venalitor. The duke had been at ease, speaking idly as he stood before the altar, but he was still ready.

His hand caught Alaric by the throat. His other arm knocked away Alaric's fist. Venalitor lifted Alaric off his feet, and threw him back down into the table. His body splintered through the table, throwing gilded plates and chalices everywhere. The wound in his chest tore open, and for a moment he was blinded with pain.

'So you really do want to die?' asked Venalitor.

Alaric sprang to his feet. The wound in his chest was bleeding freely. Venalitor waved a hand, and the blood formed tendrils that lashed around his neck. He tore them aside, but by the time he had his bearings again, Venalitor had got behind him. Venalitor caught him by the shoulder and the neck, and kicked his legs out from under him. Alaric fell forwards, and Venalitor thrust him into the executioner's block of the altar. Alaric's head smacked into the stone, and the smell of old dried blood hit him.

Venalitor drew a sword from his back, a short, curved blade, like a shining razor in the candlelight. He stabbed it into Alaric's back.

Venalitor knew the ways in which a human body could be made to feel pain. The tip of the blade hit just the right point, and nerve endings caught fire in agony. Alaric could not move, only spasm on the altar as pain washed through him.

He fought it. Venalitor pulled the blade out, and let Alaric slide to the floor. Venalitor flicked the blood from the tip of his sword onto the altar, and it smouldered there, the bra.s.s icon of Khorne glowing in grat.i.tude.

'I will not kill you, Justicar,' said Venalitor. You are too valuable to me in the arenas, and there is still some use the Blood G.o.d can get from you. Just because you refuse His will now does not mean that He will be denied. I will just have to break you first. In the long run, it makes no difference.'

The slavers entered the room. Alaric fought them for a while, throwing them aside, dashing them against the floor, and snapping their insect limbs, but, slowly, their shock prods found their mark, and he was forced down onto his knees, still fighting.

Venalitor watched. There were always more scaephylyds to be enslaved, and there was no need to risk damaging his valuable gladiator. Alaric fell onto his hands and knees, and a shock prod was forced down on his neck above his iron collar, so that his face was pressed against the gravestone floor.

'I know what you are, Grey Knight. I know about Ghargatuloth and Chaeroneia, about Valinov and Thorganel Quintus. I know what you can do. None of it will help you now.'

The scaephylyds swarmed over him like ants over a corpse. They manacled his hands and feet and turned him over to carry him up on their shoulders.

'Take him below decks,' said Venalitor.

One of the scaephylyds, a particularly old and gnarled creature, had stood aside from the fracas. He turned to Venalitor as Alaric was carried, still struggling, from the feasting chamber.

'Below decks, duke?' asked the creature. It had practised the language of humans for so long that its mandibles p.r.o.nounced each syllable almost perfectly.

'You heard me, slave master.'

'Do you mean to the-'

'Not to the cell block,' snarled Venalitor. 'Open up the wards, throw him inside, and seal them again. Those are my orders.'

'Of course, my duke. There is another matter.'

'What? '

That of the war.'

THE WAR HAD started with the hunter daemons. They had begun with an audacious first strike, a lesson in superiority. They had probably not intended to kill Venalitor at all, but to teach him that he could be reached anywhere, at any time. The Hecatomb was not safe, not from an evil as ancient as Arguthrax.

Venalitor had called upon the Wrath of Ages, a warrior cult dedicated to self-mutilation and martial excellence, to descend on the stronghold of the Thirteenth Hand. The Thirteenth Hand, since returning from their failure to disrupt Venalitor's armies on Sarthis Majoris, had taken up residence in a huge and filthy tangle of entrail sewers beneath Karnikhal. The fanatics of the Wrath of Ages had besieged it, working night by night into the tangle of dried-out organs and sumps of decaying filth, while the shambling vermin of the Hand fought back with poisoned arrows and fiendish traps.

Eventually, the Wrath had reached the heart of the fortress, and had enacted a ritual that brought life back to the organs that had hung dead for many centuries of Karnikhal's lifespan. A few of the Wrath made it out, while the Hand was drowned in filth, or dissolved by digestive juices. Their remains were disgorged into the blood ca.n.a.ls, silting up the river between Karnikhal and Aelazadne, a fittingly meaningless end for such a lowly cult.

An open battle had broken out on the plains between Ghaal and Gorgath, a dismal and lifeless place. An alliance of cults loyal to Arguthrax had fought an army of scaephylyds, all from clans hoping to ascend to Venalitor's service. Venalitor was a saviour to them, a prophet of Chaos, promising to elevate them above the status of animals.

Arguthrax won. The scaephylyds were slaughtered, and the many cults took their heads and limbs as evidence of their devotion. A parade reached Ghaal, where they presented these body parts to Arguthrax. Arguthrax appeared to look on their offerings, and blessed them with a disdainful wave of his flabby hand.

Drakaasi had seen many such wars. In a way, they were a part of its machinery of worship, for the aggressors were ultimately fighting for Khorne's recognition. However, they took place away from the arenas and altars, far from the eyes of Drakaasi's lords, filthy shadow wars and rolls of a.s.sa.s.sinations. Most of Drakaasi's lords had reached their positions by eliminating a rival in such a war, and all of them had survived such aggression from rivals jealous of their position. That was how power worked: aggression and annihilation. Khorne's patronage ensured that on Drakaasi it always took the form of naked violence.

Times were different now. Lord Ebondrake's p.r.o.nouncement had demanded that the lords of Drakaasi work together to create a vast army to conquer worlds for Khorne in the wake of the Thirteenth Black Crusade. That did not allow for open conflict between the lords, and when Ebondrake took his lords to task, the results could be bloodier than any battle they could fight between themselves.

This was the matter of the war.

FOURTEEN.

IT WAS SO profoundly dark that not even Alaric's augmented eyesight could pick out anything. It was unnatural. Something was drinking the light away.

Alaric groped out in the darkness. His hand found the floor in front of him, polished metal. It was the first clean surface that Alaric had touched below decks on the Hecatomb.

In response, there was music.

It was quiet at first, a strange lilting sound, mournful, but beautiful. The last music had Alaric heard was the wailing of Aelazadne. This was something else. It sounded like a thousand distant voices. For a moment, he felt that he had intruded on something ancient and sacred, and felt ashamed to be so wounded and flawed in its presence.

However, this was the Hecatomb. This was Drakaasi. There was nothing beautiful here. Alaric tried to tell himself that over and over again as the lights began to rise around him.

He was in a chamber of gold and silver. Constellations of gemstones twinkled everywhere. The chamber was huge. It must have run the whole length of the ship's keel and more, another manipulation of time and s.p.a.ce within the ship. Asymmetrical pillars, knurled like twisted ropes, ran up the walls to support a ceiling that bulged down as if a golden sky was falling in. Panels of deep blue set into the golden walls were painted with symbols so elegant that they glowed as Alaric looked at them, bright rivulets of power running through every curve. The whole chamber seemed to shift subtly, rippling in and out, as if in time with some ancient breath.

Alaric stood up. His chest heaved, and he coughed out a clot of blood onto the golden floor. Diamonds and sapphires winked up at him through the blood.

He had never seen anything like it. It was almost organic, the knots of the pillars like ancient tree roots, the biological forms of the walls and ceiling like a great golden throat.

The music was coming from the far end of the chamber. Alaric took a couple of steps towards it. The floor gave almost imperceptibly beneath his feet, and the pillars curved over him, as if he was inside a vast creature reacting to his presence.

The chamber flared out ahead into a wide, roughly spherical s.p.a.ce, dominated by a stepped pyramid, crowned with a great shard of glowing white crystal from which the song was emanating.

More crystal hung from the walls, resonating in time, and filling the chamber with light. At the top of the pyramid there was a magnificent throne, cut from a stone like deep blue marble, covered in intricate golden script. A figure stood on the pyramid, wearing a gold-threaded, blue robe. Braziers burned with silver fire, and the song rose to acknowledge Alaric's presence, the light reaching a near-blinding crescendo.

Alaric glimpsed galleries leading off from the pyramid chamber.

The place was far bigger than the Hecatomb. For some reason, this was not the least bit surprising to him.

The figure looked up. Silver flames licked from inside the hood.

'Who are you?' it asked in a voice dry like the hiss of a snake.

'Justicar Alaric of the Grey Knights,' replied Alaric. 'I see. You may kneel.' Alaric stayed standing.

'No? Very well. Few of them kneel to begin with, all do eventually'

'All of whom?'

'All of you, of course, the slaves, the lowly, fed to me, as if I should be grateful, as if it is some compensation for the wretchedness of my station.' The figure waved an arm to indicate the blinding glory of the pyramid chamber. You see what I have to work with here.'

Alaric dearly wanted to wrench the collar of Khorne from around his neck, and let his soul tell him what he was facing, but he had tried before, and he could not remove it with his bare hands, not without breaking his neck.

'So, what is it that you desire?'

'Desire?' Alaric paused. There were many things he desired. There was so much anger and misery inside him that he could not separate it all out. 'I want to escape.'

'No, that is just a primitive l.u.s.t, a basic thing, a need for freedom, no more elegant than hunger or thirst. No, what do you truly desire?' The figure rose from the throne and took a couple of steps down the pyramid. 'Revenge? Conquest? Redemption? I used to grant wishes, Justicar Alaric of the Grey Knights. Habits die hard, so they say. They always ask me for something once they realise that, but, of course, no desires can be fulfilled here, not as I am now, unless you desire to have your soul flayed away, which I gather you do not.'

'Many have tried,' said Alaric.

'So I see from the state of you.'

Then this is how it will end,' said Alaric.

'Oh, yes.'

Alaric flexed his fists. He was in no position to fight. He was still exhausted from his battering at the hands of Venalitor, and struggling against his scaephylyds, but no Grey Knight had ever backed down and given himself to the enemy's mercy. 'I should warn you, I am not an easy man to kill.'

'Kill? Justicar Alaric, I had thought you would have more brains in that scarred head than that. You and I are much alike in that Venalitor has uses for us aside from piling up our skulls on his G.o.d's throne. No, he does not want you killed.'

The figure pulled back its hood. Beneath was the face of a man flayed of skin, with silver threads for muscles. Silver flame rippled over it. Its eyes were points of burning blue. Tiny mouths opened up in its flesh, muttering syllables of spells that cast a corona of power over it.

'He wants you possessed,' said Raezazel the Cunning.

DUKE VENALITOR WATCHED the battle from his quarters, the b.l.o.o.d.y events shimmering on a great sheet of crystal that dominated one wall of his audience chamber.

'Let me see the Scourge,' said Venalitor. The image shifted to display Drakaasi's newest city. The Scourge was a collection of ships and flotsam roped together in a gigantic conglomeration of wreckage floating on the planet's southern ocean, where millions of outcasts and heretics lived. Rumours persisted that the Hecatomb had been cut from the Scourge, and that perhaps it was the very first ship to become a part of the Scourge, and therefore sailed as the excised heart of a dead city. Venalitor did nothing to deny such rumours.

The Scourge was the link between the surface of Drakaasi and the civilisations of its deeps. Creatures evolved from scaephylyds lived there, along with lords of Drakaasi, like Thurrgull the Tentacular, who had forged their domains away from the eyes of the surface.

Ocean-going mutants crawled from the sea to kill and abduct, drowning the inhabitants of a great temple ship that dominated the outskirts of the Scourge. The temple was dedicated to Arguthrax, ministered by his daemonic priesthood, and the mutants were creatures with gills and webbed hands, who had answered Venalitor's call for allies from die deeps.

Arguthrax's priests, each with six fingers on their mutated hands, were dragged down and killed. The splendid temple ship was holed below the water-line and began to sink, dragging the dwellings of many outcasts down with it. Icons of the warp toppled into the fouled waters.

The image shifted. This time it showed a staging ground for one of Venalitor's allied cults, the Ebon Hand, a band of pirates corrupted and turned to Khorne by Venalitor's agents. They were a.s.sembling high in the mountain roosts where they had docked their skyships and dirigibles, ready to marshal their numbers and join Ebondrake's off-world crusade.

The Ebon Hand's sentries alerted the whole cult, as the sun broke over the mountain. On the flagpole at the centre of their a.s.sembly ground, where once had flown a banner blessed by Venalitor himself, now hung the body of their leader, Garyagan Redhand.

Redhand's face had been removed, and a huge, b.l.o.o.d.y maw yawned in the front of his head. His hands had been cut off, too, no doubt added to the trophies of whatever a.s.sa.s.sin Arguthrax had sent.

The war continues, then, my lord,' said the slave master. The ancient scaephylyd waited patiently at the back of the room. It was a shrewd creature that had survived as long as it had by aligning itself with Drakaasi's lords and offering them complete sub-servience.

'It continues,' said Venalitor. 'It will not end until one of us is dead.'

Then how will we be victorious?'

Venalitor looked at him. 'I will sacrifice everything I have to, and nothing more.'

'Lord Ebondrake must be guarded against.'

'A dull mind would think so, slave master, but the truth is that Ebondrake admires strength as we all do. When Arguthrax is done with, I will be closer to Ebondrake's position, not further away'

'Then what is your will?' The slave master crouched down on its haunches. It was the equivalent of a deep bow, which a scaephylyd could not do normally since it was so hunched over.

'Keep it quiet,' said Venalitor, 'for now. Use soldiers we can say were acting on their own, and that we will not miss. Kill Arguthrax's outer circles first, the allies of allies, the props holding up his domain. He is a thing of anger and hate. He will try to strike at me as directly as possible. He will elicit Ebondrake's wrath before I do, and when that happens, he will be open for the deathblow.' 'So it shall be, my lord.'

'Keep me updated on the Grey Knight,' added Venalitor. 'Once Raezazel has him, he is destined to kill Arguthrax.'

'Of course.'

The slavemaster left the chamber to pursue his many duties, leaving Venalitor watching the shadow war unfolding.

ALARIC SLAMMED INTO the wall behind him. Shards of gold showered down around him as he slid to the floor. His mind reeled.

Images of the daemon's life battered against him like gunfire.

He forced himself to breathe, and to ground his thoughts, to fight the flawed human instinct to run.

Raezazel the Cunning was flying above him. Silver wings unfolded from his robes. Fire rippled up off its body, and hundreds of mouths in its shining flesh sang at once.

You know that I can give you what you desire,' said Raezazel in its hundred voices. You are stronger than the others. You believe that you can see through the lie. Perhaps you are right.'

Alaric got to his feet. He felt weak and small. Never had he been so at the mercy of another creature.