Age of Sigmar: Call of Archaon Read online

  ‘Is this it?’ he cried, laying out a murderous sigil of overlapping figure-of-eights. ‘Is this all that you have?’ To kill again, and to kill swiftly, felt glorious. Colours were vivid, scents sharp, cries like bells. He was a man awakening from a coma and remembering that he was furious. ‘Do you even realise whom you face?’

  He shovelled down another lizard-warrior on the flat of his tines, then span, alerted by the prickling sense of something approaching from behind.

  A robed figure stood there on the writhing carpet of sickening lizards. It regarded him through the haze of flies, neither noticeably human nor obviously reptilian. Daemonic perhaps, yet not. Its head was angled like a hoe with a row of eyes along its ridge. Some of them examined Bule archly, others with compassion, mirth, and contempt. In spite of himself, of what and where he was, Bule felt a chill.

  Blind to their visitor, a cohort of warrior lizards charged through the hazing flies. They died one by one. The inhuman apparition did not react, but, despite having no obvious mouth, Bule had the impression that it smiled at him, as though he were a bloat hound that had earned a treat.

  A tremendous death bellow drew his attention away.

  There, the mighty plague maggoth that had been rolling over the lizards’ advance with a wedge of Rotbringers in train collapsed in an avalanche of folds. A sunbeam split the monster from shoulder to navel and the armour-plated head of some apex reptile butted it aside. Fixed to the lizard creature’s back was the silver and star-metal housing of some inscrutable god-engine, which clicked and reset amidst a glow of energies. The Rotbringers retreated, their forward push stymied. Bule was aware of the enemy pouring forward on all fronts now as his own defences began to crumble. With a snarl, he took his trident overhand like a javelin and made to challenge that armoured reptile’s invulnerability.

  ‘He seeks a champion.’

  The apparition’s robes whispered as it followed him. Its clothing was made not of hides or cloth but of eyes, and the susurrus it made was the sound of hundreds of blinking eyelids, rippling white, green, black, and every other colour that skin came. It moved without truly moving. It spoke without speaking.

  ‘Seek him, champion.’

  Turning, gesturing without anything so prosaic as a pointed finger, the figure directed Bule’s gaze to the realmgate. The skin within it flexed. The stars above it wheeled. Even from afar Bule could see that the view within was no longer of the garden with which it had previously been twinned. Fury returned to him redoubled. Dis­belief. It was not mere bad fortune that had brought the seraphon upon him with the aligning stars. They had come for his realmgate.

  Somehow they had manipulated the Eightpoints to change its destination. How? The magic involved in enacting such a feat was godlike!

  The apparition hissed in sudden distress. Its cloak shimmered with many colours, every eye tightening shut as though simultaneously blinded. And then in a searing moment of universal light, it was gone.

  ‘Grandfather!’ Bule cried, light like a fire in his eyes. ‘Aid me!’

  Shading his eyes with one heavy arm, he peered into the oncoming host.

  Floating on a cushion of force above the golden spears of its warriors came the source of the light. It was as if a star had been called down from the heavens and condensed into a brittle caul of bone-brown wrappings and dry flesh. Its presence alone was massive. From its palanquin, the mummified creature regarded the battle with the distant disinclination of an inhuman god. Instinctively, Bule understood that here came a being that had known power long before some daemons had even come to be. He felt himself drawn spiritually towards it, the golden funerary mask that picked out its amphibian features in jewels swelling to fill his mind as the universe subtly reordered around it.

  It made no word or gesture, but somewhere in the cosmos something gave.

  The heavens opened.

  Bule howled impotent fury as the stars glimmered and fell, plucked from the sky, and smashed into his horde.

  The first meteorite hit at an angle, obliterating a dozen Chaos warriors utterly and blowing a crater hundreds of feet wide. Then came the rest. The ground shook under the fury. The sky turned white, light and sound reaching an intensity where they sublimated into one, a single shrieking colour in Bule’s inner eye, and even the daemons burned in fire.

  Bule struggled gasping onto hands and knees, tripping a warrior lizard running in behind him with a backward kick and riding it face-down into the filth until it stopped thrashing. He stood up, dazed senseless by thunder. Waves of power smashed out from the advancing palanquin. It was almost impossible to stand against it, but in a tremendous feat of will, he stood. He shook his head.

  ‘Aid me!’

  Nothing. Nothing but the awesome presence of this starmaster.

  Moving with difficulty, he turned and staggered back the way he had come. Never in his life had Copsys Bule run away, but Grandfather Nurgle did not know defeat.

  With every waning, he would wax again.

  VIII

  First Blightlord Fistula stepped out of the realmgate and onto another world.

  The air was syrupy, hot, sweetened by the sweat of fat citrus-scented leaves and by the bell-shaped blue flowers that he and his warriors crushed underfoot. He looked around in amazement, turning ponderously. He felt… weightier, as if the sky itself pushed him down under its palm. And the sun – forgetting for the moment that it should be night – was over large and buttercup yellow. Winged creatures rustled through the leaves above. And from somewhere, screams.

  He pulled off his helmet, wiped his running nose, and drew deep.

  ‘New lands.’

  Soon all that was green would be a verdant collage of yellows and browns and leaf-rust reds. It would be the cradle of a new land’s blight, the metastasis from which a new canker would swell. And all of it was his.

  ‘Over here,’ growled Vitane, crunching through the undergrowth in the vague direction of those screams.

  Fistula acceded to the old blightking’s instincts for pain and followed. After a few minutes of unexpectedly heavy going through the dense foliage of this foreign land, the warriors were, to a man, blowing hard, their armour hanging loose on straps. The screams got nearer. More abject. Chesting aside a branch, too weary to bother his arm with the task, Fistula pushed ahead into a sun-drenched clearing.

  Varicoloured lichens and mushrooms covered the split bark of the fallen log that dominated the clearing. The cries were coming from the other side of the log.

  Shading his eyes from the visceral brightness of the sun, Fistula saw the bray shaman, Gurhg, who was easy enough to pick out with his totemic staff and cloak woven with bones, even within a knot of his followers. There were perhaps two-dozen, stomping about and smashing horns – re-establishing dominance hierarchies and staking claim to new territories. Gurhg stood hunched and swaying in the middle of it, nodding his goat head approvingly as six men and a woman bound to a line of hastily woven racks screamed. The wails of the seventh man were of a different order. A beastman with the face of a horse and a line of horrendously infected iron piercings through its top lip diligently flensed the human with a blunt knife.

  Fistula smiled. There were people here. Good. It had been too long.

  ‘Blightlord.’ Arms spread, snout turned to bare the throat in that odd gesture of his, Kletch Scabclaw padded towards him through the forest. The skaven envoy fussed at the clasp of his cloak, but despite his obvious discomfort he did not seem inclined to take it off. At the treeline, he bobbed low and withdrew with a hiss, averting his eyes from the sun.

  ‘Where are your warriors?’ asked Fistula.

  ‘In woods. Less brave rats than I must cower where sky is less bright-strong.’

  ‘Good.’

  Fistula looked across the clearing at the brawling beastmen, and the blightkings now spreading out through the lichens to crash do
wn and rest. It was not much, but it would be a start, and more would flock to him soon enough.

  ‘I will have them seek-burrow for the way home at once,’ said Kletch, stamping his foot-paw anxiously.

  ‘Good…’

  Fistula put his hands on his hips and turned his face full on to the sun. It was his. It was all his.

  Something heavy and wet tramped up through the woods behind him. The wheezing breath on the back of his neck was thick with the stench of stagnant meat.

  ‘I began my quest with less. I can begin again.’

  Fistula spun around.

  Bule.

  ‘I see now,’ said Copsys Bule, unhelmed, smiling blackly. ‘I see what I have been missing.’

  ‘This is mine,’ Fistula snarled, baring his blades. Some withered instinct for self-preservation kept him from using them, some dim recognition that the gods too had their favourites. He backed into the clearing. Bule moved towards him, Fistula continuing to retreat until the fallen tree prevented him from going any further. He dropped into a fighting crouch. ‘I will not let you turn my conquest into another garden. You have forgotten how to do anything else!’

  The Lord of Plagues spread his arms in forgiveness as he passed from the tree line and into the sunlight. His eyes squeezed shut against the sudden glare, but still Fistula did not think to attack. Mosses mottled and died where Bule trod. Insects dropped dead out of the air as he breathed it. Throughout the clearing beastmen, skaven and blightkings alike stopped what they were doing and abased themselves.

  He came within sword’s reach, knife’s reach, arm’s reach. Fistula lowered his weapons. He felt lethargic. His skin was hot.

  Dropping to one knee in front of him, Copsys Bule leaned in and embraced him.

  Fistula made an attempt at fighting it, but he felt so weak. His breath drained up and down like fluid. He shivered with chills even as fever sweat poured down his skin. Jerking in his determination to fight, he struggled as the Lord of Plagues cradled him, lowering him to the ground. Fistula tried to stare hatred at him, but failed even in that. Delirium fogged his eyes and opened his mind to wisdom’s flood.

  Sorcerers robed with eyes. An army of champions. Chaos united. A three-eyed king. Round and around.

  ‘I’ll. Fight you. Forever,’ he swore.

  ‘Grandfather Nurgle does not want us to submit,’ Bule smiled. ‘He wishes us to rage.’

  The last thing Fistula saw before Nurgle’s Rot fully entered his mind was Bule turning towards Kletch Scabclaw, arms open in blessing and friendship.

  IX

  Copsys Bule broke up the earth with his trident. A tangle of roots knotted up the soil, making it tough, and before long he was breathing hard, a burn spreading through his shoulders. It felt good. The simple labour eased his mind and his muscles. The repetitive activity gave him the chance to think, and to order his thoughts.

  He had much to think upon.

  ‘There,’ he said, giving the ground a vigorous final crumbing, then stabbing his trident to one side. He ran his arm across his lank-haired brow, then turned and nodded.

  Vitane slid his toe under Kletch Scabclaw’s body and rolled the corpse into the rill that Bule had prepared for him. Flies crawled over the ratman’s lips. His eyes were the black of rot-pickled eggs and the smell had that same astringent piquancy.

  ‘So much life.’ However many skaven he buried, the truth of that still filled him with wonder. ‘My garden will thrive here. It is as I said to you, envoy, no other race gives so thoroughly of themselves to Grandfather Nurgle.’

  The skaven did not answer and nor did Bule expect him to. He would live again, of course. That was Nurgle’s promise to all. The ratman’s flesh would nurture many millions of short and wondrous lives, his decomposition would bring bounty to the ground in which he lay, but never again would he talk, think, or interfere in the ambitions of a Lord of Plagues.

  Pulling up his trident, Bule proceeded to bed the skaven in.

  The humans would go here, and here, either side, where their decay would be accelerated by the skaven’s proximity. One of the other rat-men he’d dig a plot for over by the south-facing tree line where its remains could feed the poplars there. They were fast growers, and the rot would spread quickly. Already their leaves were beginning to wilt and brown at the edges. Birds hawked up a thin and sickly chorus of phlegm on the bowers.

  He could see it now. He did not know how this was to end, he never had, but he knew how to begin.

  ‘Archaon.’

  Fistula was fetched up against the log, shivering like a man just fished in full armour from an ice pail. He muttered non-sequiturs under his breath, tired, for the moment at least, of raging them at the forest. His eyes rolled, like bones cast by a feverish shaman, and his brush with Nurgle’s Rot had bequeathed him a circlet of rugose blisters that rimmed his bald head like a crown. Bule examined the stigmata. There was a sign there, he knew it, but of what?

  ‘He grows more lucid,’ observed Vitane.

  ‘Nurgle favours him greatly.’

  ‘A lord of flies,’ Fistula murmured, shaking. ‘A king with three eyes.’

  A sign. Definitely.

  Taking up his trident, Copsys Bule pushed it into the ground and began again.

  He had much to think upon.

  Eye of the Storm

  The sorcerer opened his eyes. All of them.

  The Many-Eyed Servant. Disciple of Tzeentch and subject of Archaon, who was the Everchosen of Chaos and the Ender of Worlds. Envisioner of sights unseen.

  The Many-Eyed’s gaze reached far, for he saw as gods do. He was Archaon’s eyes. His gaze reached across the Mortal Realms. Searching. Searching for those who would become giants among men, warriors already pledged to ruin, who themselves searched for greater meaning and dark service. And there was no warlord of Chaos darker and greater than the Everchosen, for Archaon was Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse.

  The Many-Eyed missed nothing. He saw through the living and dead, the inhuman and inanimate, and through the eyes of daemons, glinting in shadow. Coins fell from the lids of corpses, laid out on funeral pyres. Statues blinked the dust from their stony orbs. The eyes of cutthroats, kings and all wretched existence in between were spyglasses of the soul, through which the great sorcerer observed. Even the mind’s eye was the sorcerer’s to see. The play of pictures in the blackness behind the face. Memories churned up from the past. Secrets kept and fantasies imagined.

  The daemon sorcerer looked for warriors worthy of his master’s blade and plate, seeking out the darkest potential amongst a sea of butchers, corrupters, deviants and witchbreeds. True paragons of Chaos, like Archaon himself. Knights of Ruin, ready for the Everchosen’s invitation in symbol, sign or vision, so that they might pass his test and join his baleful ranks – the living, armoured embodiment of Archaon’s wrath, visited upon the Mortal Realms.

  The Many-Eyed blinked his way across the worlds of men. He saw as the beasts did, and as the denizens who would act like beasts. In the forgotten reaches of the realm of Ghur, on a storm-lashed wasteland that savage nomads and wind-worshippers knew only as the Blasted Plain, the sorcerer found who he was looking for.

  Orphaeo Zuvius. Blessed of the Great Changer. The one they call the Prince of Embers.

  The Many-Eyed looked on Orphaeo through the eyes of the Tzeentchians that he led, the twisted wretches of his warband. In the cerulean plate and skirts of his half-robe, Orphaeo Zuvius pressed his slender body against the storm. The skies were bleeding and the winds streamed with blood, while grit plucked at his unholy vestments.

  Zuvius steadied himself with the length of a wicked glaive. He walked with the polearm like a sorcerer’s staff. It was a daemon-forged weapon, a shaft of sculpted metal crowned by a blade fashioned in the shape of Tzeentch’s willowy symbol. It was called A’cuitas, and it was a gift from Zuvius’ patron. The M
any-Eyed came to know this as he opened the ensorcelled weapon’s eyes – for it had three, like his master, the Three-Eyed King – one that opened in the fat counterweight of the glaive’s pommel and two set in either surface of the blade. The Many-Eyed took this as a good omen. From A’cuitas, the sorcerer commanded a better look of the champion’s gruesome features.

  Helmless, his face was a web of melted skin stretched across scorched flesh. The skin strands squirmed continuously across scalded features that might once have been handsome – features now contorted with self-satisfied determination and dark humour. Threadbare tresses of blue hair streamed from his head. Zuvius licked his smeared lips with a silver tongue: another of the Great Changer’s gifts.

  The glaive’s blade blinked in the bloodstreaming storm. Now the sorcerer saw through the eyes of the Prince of Embers himself. Zuvius looked up at Mallofax, who sat atop the perch created by the blade’s billhook. The creature was a familiar – a reptilian bird of cerulean plumage. The damned thing spoke to Zuvius in an ear-bleeding squawk that only the champion seemed to understand. The Prince of Embers nodded and looked back at his warband, trailing through the maelstrom of blood and wind-borne grit.

  Trudging across the Blasted Plain in his wake were Sir Abriel and the remains of the king’s household guard. Formerly charged with the protection of the royal family – for the Prince of Embers was royal indeed – the knights were now shadows of their former selves. Gone was the lustre of their plate and the mirror-finish of their weaponry. The Great Changer had twisted them as he had done the prince. They were but slaves to darkness, gangling horrors. The knights’ besmirched plate had fused to their bodies and stretched with their unnatural step and reach. Covered in the glowing sigils of ruinous sorcery, they were now the Hexen­guard of Orphaeo Zuvius.

  Behind the knights, in their shredded cloaks, were the Unseeing – the Tzeentchian sorcerers who completed Zuvius’ warband. Blind wretches, the Great Changer had taken their sight and cursed them with terrible, warped visions of the world about them. Striking out with their powers, the Unseeing turned their enemies into the frightful realisation of their horrific imaginings. With crooked hands on shoulders, the Unseeing formed a line of the blind following the blind – and all following the crunch of their master’s footsteps.