Hammer Of Daemons Part 25

A FLASH OF savage satisfaction burst through Alaric as his forehead crunched into Venalitor's nose.

Venalitor stumbled backwards into the table, knocking the orrery onto the floor. The delicate device shattered, scattering tiny bra.s.s planets and orbits everywhere.

Venalitor tried to bring his blade around, but Alaric was on top of him. Alaric did not remember the time when he lost his mind, but his muscles did. It was the most natural thing in the galaxy to grab Venalitor by the throat and slam him over and over again into die solid table. Venalitor snarled and tried to struggle free. The table split in two, and Venalitor fell through to the floor with Alaric trying to gouge at his eyes and claw at his throat.

Venalitor jammed his knee up into Alaric's midriff and threw the Grey Knight over his head. Alaric sprawled through the half-wrecked divination chamber through the archway, skidding through Kelhedros's blood as he went.

He was in Lord Ebondrake's trophy chamber.

Bodies and weapons were everywhere, displayed obscenely. A gutted corpse was laid out, plated in gold with rubies studding its wounds. It was a human in uniform, perhaps a Guard general or a planetary n.o.ble, laid out on a black marble slab like a sculpture.

Alaric saw the soft features warped in anguish, and wondered for a moment if it had been a woman.

Claws and blades torn from the arms of aliens were racked up on the wall beside Alaric. Skulls and ribs that Alaric recognised as being from tyranid creatures formed a display in front of him. A captured siege engine, its black metal wrought into screaming faces, loomed in die middle of the room.

The chamber took up a full third of the palace's cranium, and weapons and body parts taken from defeated foes filled it to the ceiling: enormous totem poles of giant creatures' skulls; chandeliers of severed hands; statues of half-melted swords clad in skins cut from tattooed bodies; whole enemies plated in bronze, or frozen in blocks of ice kept intact by humming cryo-units; spears and swords by the hundred, displayed in fearsome walls of blades; lifedmes upon lifedmes of batties and duels, of treacheries avenged and would-be a.s.sa.s.sins uncovered: a terrible ill.u.s.tration of what Lord Ebondrake truly was.

Alaric pulled himself into the shadows between a pair of mummified corpses, still impaled on the spikes used to execute them.

He weighed up his situation in a split second, as only a s.p.a.ce Marine's mind could. Alaric wasn't unarmed any more. He could have his pick from any one of a thousand wicked-looking weapons on display in the trophy room, but Venalitor was still the best swordsman Alaric had ever faced.

He was too good.

'Face me, s.p.a.ce Marine!' called Venalitor as he stalked into the trophy chamber. 'Truly, your Emperor must be a weakling G.o.d if even his very finest cower as you do.'

'You add too many flourishes to your sword work,' replied Alaric.

'I noticed it when you beat me on Sarthis Majoris. Such a thing focuses the mind.' Alaric took a blade from the closest mummified corpse, a bronze scimitar, inscribed with runes, that he drew silentiy from the corpse's chest. 'If there's one thing I have learned here, it's that bloodshed is an ugly thing.'

'Bloodshed is an art!' snapped Venalitor, 'and you are my canvas!'

Venalitor swept over the display of mummified bodies, the skirts of his armour billowing behind him like wings. Alaric deflected the arc of his sword with his scimitar and the bronze weapon was sliced in two. Alaric spun, pulled a spike from the skull of a second body and parried again. Venalitor's sword was knocked a centimetre away from gutting Alaric, and the spike was split in two, lengthways.

Alaric lunged forwards and kneed Venalitor in the groin.

Venalitor stumbled backwards, bent double, and Alaric sent an uppercut into his chest so hard that Venalitor plunged backwards through the bodies, scattering dried-out limbs and fragments of age stiffened funeral shrouds.

Too many flourishes,' said Alaric, shaking out his hand.

Venalitor got to his feet. He snarled, and for a moment his consciousness, the true nature beneath the cultured swordsman exterior, flashed across him. A yawning maw hissed through a ring of fangs, and black eyes narrowed into reptilian slits.

There was, however, no one to see it. Venalitor braced himself for the next charge, but it did not come. He looked around, but Jusdcar Alaric was gone.

It was not like a s.p.a.ce Marine at all, but that did not matter. Alaric was ultimately like any other quarry, a puzzle to be solved, a life to be ended. Venalitor prayed a few syllables to Khorne to keep his sword keen, and began the hunt.

'NAVIGATION'S STILL UP,' said Erkhar breathlessly. 'Praise the Emperor! Praise the saints!' He swung into the command pulpit and read from the age clouded information panel in front of him. 'It's working. There's plasma in the conduits! The reactors are warming up!'

The smiles on the faces of the faithful were reason enough to have made it this far. It was like a rapture, as if the image of the Emperor was hovering on the bridge of the Hammer of Daemons, bestowing His blessing upon them.

The ship worked. The Promised Land was real.

Take-off vectors are pre-loaded,' said one of the faithful from the navigations helm, surrounded by slab-like banks of memm-crystal.

They're all up. Once the thrusters are on-line and the main engines are primed we can take off.'

'Wait,' said Erkhar. 'Raezazel's followers programmed this ship to fly into a warp rift. Those must be the coordinates in the navigation helm. Use it to take off and then switch to helm control, otherwise we'll pitch straight into the warp.'

Then... that's it? It's ready to fly?' asked Brother Hoygens. The man looked dazed, the events of the last few minutes almost too much for him to understand. It seemed like only a breath ago that the slaves had been about to die in Vel'Skan's games. Now they had a s.p.a.ceship.

'It is,' said Erkhar. This is a miracle, an honest miracle. To those who denied that the Emperor's light could ever shine on this world, I give you the Hammer of Daemons!'

The Hammer was a vessel worthy of the Emperor's intervention.

Exposure to Drakaasi's elements had covered it in a sheath of corrosion, but the ship inside was magnificent. Raezazel's followers had spared no expense. The corridors and bays shone in deep blue and gold, with a saint's portrait looking over every doorway and porthole. Shrines to the Emperor could be found everywhere, from the simple niches with devotional candles and texts to the great three-faced altar in the ship's main a.s.sembly area, with the triptych wrought in gold depicting the Emperor as deliverer, protector and avenger. The bridge was a reliquary with sacred bones and vials of saintly blood hovering in miniature grav-units, bathed in shafts of light in a ring around the helms and command pulpit. Erkhar had never seen anything so beautiful, not even in the days before his enslavement. The Pax Deinotatos had been an ugly ship, a base thing of rusting steel and leaking conduits. The Hammer was a mighty flying altar to Imperial glory.

'W should... pray, then,' said Hoygens uncertainly.

'We can pray when we're off the ground,' replied Erkhar. He flicked a switch and accessed the ship's vox-caster network.

'Engines?'

'Here, lieutenant,' came the reply. It was Gearth. Erkhar flinched at the thought of Gearth having a place on their holy ship, but he would be judged like the rest of them when the Promised Land was in sight.

'Reactor status?'

'Looks like they're working. Twenty-five per cent, if that means anything.' 'It does,' said Erkhar. 'Keep me updated.' 'Yes, lieutenant.'

'Lieutenant,' said the faithful at the navigation helm. You need to see this.'

Erkhar hurried to the navigation helm. Over the faithful's shoulder he saw the cartographic readout that he had pulled up.

That's Drakaasi,' said the faithful, pointing to a planet marker on the screen, 'and this is the route still loaded into the navigation cogitators. It looks like the route the ship was on when it crashed here.'

Erkhar followed the arc of the ship's path. Its destination was only a short distance from Drakaasi. With a good, fast ship such as the Hammer undoubtedly was, it could be reached in less than an hour.

They were so close,' said Erkhar. 'It must have been the Emperor's will that brought the Hammer down to Drakaasi before they reached it. Whatever happened to this ship's pilgrims on Drakaasi, it was surely no worse than what lay past the rift.'

We'll steer well clear,' said the faithful, 'but what then?'

'Get clear of Drakaasi, and clear of the Eye if we can,' replied Erkhar. His eyes shone. 'Then we find the Promised Land.'

EVERY SINGLE LIVING thing in Vel'Skan had chosen its side.

The power of treachery flowed through the streets of the city like pure molten hatred. Smiths turned their hammers on one another.

Drill daemons on the parade grounds ordered one rank to attack another. Strangers in the street called out who was with them and who was against, and knives came out in the alleyways. Half pledged themselves to Ebondrake and the correct order of Drakaasi's monarchy. Half devoted themselves to toppling him, to disorder, ruination and chaos.

The two armies collided all across the city, not just in the Antediluvian Valley, but across Vel'Skan, in every temple and forge, every place one human could murder another.

In the valley, Lord Ebondrake himself led the charge. His great wings pounded once, and he hauled himself up into the air, crashing down on Tiresia the Huntress. He dug her crushed body from beneath him, flipped her into the air and snapped his jaws shut on her, swallowing her in one gulp. Thousands of arrows and spears rained against him, but he breathed a sheet of black fire over Tire-sia's tribespeople, and a hundred of them died, gutted to charred skeletons by the force of Ebondrake's anger.

Thousands of Scathach's men slammed into the scaephylyd tide.

Scathach himself drew the ancient bolt gun from his back, a relic of his days in the Traitor Legions, and put bolter sh.e.l.ls through a score of scaephylyd bodies as his ranks of warriors struggled to hold back the living wave.

The slaves staked to the ground exploded, gore showering down, as daemons fresh and raw from the warp emerged from their possessed bodies. Wet muscle glistened all over them, new limbs withering and reforming as they vomited scalding blood, and ripped into the slimy host led by Thurgull. The Charnel Lord's dead horde clambered over the bodies as they mounted up, dragging soldiers and daemons into caves of the newly dead to devour them.

The battle spilled out of the valley. Daemonic sp.a.w.n and tentacled horrors from the sea wrestled through the temple galleries and sacred precincts, scattering statues and relics of Khorne. Tiresia's surviving hunters took the battle to the air, flying their aerial beasts of prey into a swirling melee with winged daemons streaming from Vel'Skan's eyries.

After a few minutes, no one remembered why they were fighting.

There was a sense of betrayal on both sides, but the details were lost in the blood. Arguthrax, thrashing with a huge mace as his cauldron was hauled forwards through the heaps of dead, did not care to remember just why he had ordered his battered army forwards into the heart of the scaephylyd ma.s.s. The Charnel Lord let the events leading up to the battle sink down into the fevered pit of his mind, and concentrated instead on the holy work of bringing the battle dead back to half-life and setting them on the men they had been fighting alongside.

Ebondrake alone remembered. Part of him stayed calm enough through the carnage to remind him that if he lost, he lost Drakaasi.

He would rather die as king than live on as someone's slave. As was right and proper for a servant of the Blood G.o.d, Lord Ebondrake sought death as eagerly as he sought victory, and there was no shortage of it choking every avenue of Vel'Skan.

THE ECHOES OF the batde rippled through Drakaasi like an earthquake reaching right through the planet's core. Every one of the planet's great cities felt it and they, too, were suddenly divided.

The madmen of the Scourge stopped ranting and put their divinations aside to bludgeon one another with anything they could find, or hurl one another into the sea. Crested daemonfish rose from the depths to bask in the blood that foamed beneath the abattoir temples of the Scourge.

The singing of Aelazadne turned dark and clashing as its voices were replaced by the gurgle of blood in slit throats. Gorgath's battle lines were suddenly redrawn, one army under the banner of the dragon, and the other preaching revolution as they died. Ghaal seethed with murder, its gutters overflowing with blood and its night alive with the sound of knives through flesh.

Karnikhal began to slowly devour itself.

Drakaasi quaked. The day turned blood red, while on the other side of the planet the stars grew into burning rubies like eyes gorged with bloodshed. Howling winds ripped across the plains, rousing every living thing into a frenzy, turning hidden cabals of cultists against one another or forcing the jungles into bouts of continent-wide cannibalism, predators and prey turning on their own. Even in the depths of the sea, bizarre creatures, unknown on the surface, ripped one another to shreds with needle-like teeth.

There was a sound on the wind that carried further than the clashing of blades and the screams of the dying.

It was laughter.

Khorne was enjoying this particular spectacle.

TWENTY-FIVE.

DUKE VENALITOR LEFT behind footprints of Kelhe-dros's blood as he stalked through the trophy chamber.

He had never been here. Very few, save Ebondrake, ever had. He did not know his way around. He had not expected it to be this huge, or for there to be so many places for Alaric to hide.

Somewhere in the sea of corruption that Venalitor had for a mind, frustration surfaced.

The men you killed in your madness,' said Venalitor, 'they were the ones I took from the cities of Sarthis Majoris, some of your Guardsmen, too. Did you recognise them as you killed them?'

There was no answer from the darkness. Night had fallen, and the only light bled from a few glowing orbs scattered around the trophy collection, apparently placed there to make the bladed shadows longer.

'What about Skarhaddoth? I saw you kill him. You are the champion of Drakaasi. How does it feel to be proclaimed the planet's most dedicated servant of Khorne?'

A footstep reached Venalitor's ears. He froze, his blade held low, ready to cut the legs out from under the charging Grey Knight.

Venalitor pivoted, and sliced through the dark shape looming towards him. His blade cut dean through the body, the hanging body, Strang by a noose from the ceiling, an executed enemy of Ebondrake's left to dangle and rot in the trophy room.

He was jumping at nothing.

Alaric smashed through a bank of blades and shields, scattering ancient weapons everywhere. A blade hammered down and caught Venalitor's sword, snapping the star-forged metal, and sending half the blade spinning off into the shadows.

Venalitor threw himself backwards. He barely escaped being bowled to the ground by Alaric's impact.

Alaric landed heavily, but on his feet, cracking the tiles underneath him. He carried a halberd in his hand: the Nemesis weapon of a Grey Knight.

In his other hand was the gauntlet-mounted storm bolter.

'I hope Ebondrake enjoyed your litde gift,' said Alaric, noticing the moment of shock pa.s.sing over Venalitor's face as he saw Alaric's weapons. 'It cost you more than you realise.'

Venalitor's eyes flickered down to the haft in his hand and the broken stump of its blade.

That was my favourite sword,' he growled. He gave up all pretence that he was a normal man, and his features melted away, his nose and mouth joining into one circular fanged orifice and his eyes becoming liquid slits. With a practised motion, Venalitor drew a pair of short swords from his back.

'Now,' said Alaric, 'we're almost even.'

'Almost,' hissed the thing that called itself Duke Venalitor.

The ring of their blades clashing was so rapid and relentless that it sounded like the trophy chamber was filled with driving rain.

Venalitor slashed too fast to see, but his blades rang off Alaric's halberd. Alaric knocked Venalitor back with raw strength, his greater reach letting him hack out in arcing strikes, too artless to wound, but enough to force Venalitor back across the chamber, step by step.

Alaric fired a burst from his storm bolter. Venalitor swatted the bolter sh.e.l.ls away like insects. Venalitor ducked low and cut down at Alaric's legs. Alaric blocked one strike with the b.u.t.t of his halberd, swung the blade down to turn the second, and kicked out to catch Venalitor in the chin. A deep cut was opened up in Venalitor's monstrous face, and from the wound reached tendrils of blood, snaking towards Alaric's limbs to entangle them and leave the Grey Knight defenceless.

Alaric grabbed a handful of the tendrils with his bolter hand, and forced them up to his mouth. He bit into them, tearing at them, like he had torn at the raw meat of the Hathran sacrifice in his half-remembered madness. The tendrils fell limp, and Alaric spat out the blood.

He had learned a lot. He could fight like an animal when he had to. He could give up everything he had ever been taught in the duelling vaults of t.i.tan and revert to the brutality written into his blood. He could go further than his enemy, be more relentless, more devoted to bloodshed. That was what Drakaasi had taught him.

Alaric shattered one of Venalitor's swords, knocked the other one aside, and grabbed the swordsman's wrist. He picked Venalitor up, and threw him through the great siege engine in the centre of the chamber. The machine came apart and collapsed, scattering blood-blackened timbers and chunks of iron everywhere.

Venalitor rolled onto his front and got to his knees. Alaric didn't give him the chance to regain his feet. He picked up a length of wood, and smacked Venalitor around the side of the head, hard enough to throw him back again, crashing through a stand of ornamental armour.

Venalitor's hand closed on nothing. He was on the edge of a sudden drop.

He had come to rest on the edge of the opening formed by the skull's eye socket. To one side, through the other eye, stabbed the corroded form of the Hammer of Daemons, shards of rust flaking off it as it shuddered with the force of its engines. Beneath was Vel'Skan.

The sight of Vel'Skan at war was enough to strike the voice from Venalitor's throat. Annies clashed in the streets. Banners of a dozen lords waved as their followers clashed. A gout of black flame showed that Ebondrake himself was fighting. The outskirts of Vel'Skan were already aflame, tinting Drakaasi's night a dull orange.

Daemons danced through the carnage. Killers competed to die first.