Age of Sigmar: Call of Archaon Page 8

  He killed the celestial leader’s guardians, his axe screeching through their armour before sending their soulfire raging for the heavens. The lord came at the deathbringer with all the righteous fortitude of Sigmar himself. He smashed the warding lantern back and forth across Skargan’s horned skull, battering and momentarily blinding the Chaos brute. For a moment, Skargan was caught off guard and stumbled. Wielding the length of the halberd in one gauntlet, the lord chopped at Skargan with elegant sweeps of the axe blade and thrust with the bladed spike that crowned the weapon. He smashed the bone claws of the gouger Skargan held up to defend himself and ripped through the smoking flesh of the Chaos champion’s forearm. The lord landed a kick on the deathbringer’s muscular chest with an armoured boot before cutting one of the monstrous horns from the warrior’s head.

  For a moment, Zuvius thought that he might have to face the mighty Stormcast lord himself. As the champion swung around the warding lantern for another disorientating blow, Skargan raised his axe with both hands. Instead of batting the magical weapon aside, the deathbringer’s wrath-fuelled swing smashed the lantern into a blinding nova of magical energy. Surprised by his weapon’s destruction, the lord staggered back. Skargan bellowed as the fierce flash of the lantern’s destruction bathed his Khorne-pledged flesh in the God-King’s scalding brilliance. He would not be stopped, however. Blindly back-swinging with his axe, he cut the halberd in two. Aiming with a slayer’s instinct alone, Skargan brought his axe down and cut straight through the lord.

  Plate, flesh and bone sheared away in two halves as the axe blade sparked. Zuvius watched the blinding essence of the warrior rocket into the sky. As it did, the column of lightning burning into the rock of the mesa crackled and spat to nothingness, leaving behind only heat and an afterglow.

  ‘Hold,’ Zuvius commanded. Sir Abriel and the remaining Hexenguard locked shields and waited, while those sorcerous wretches of the Unseeing who had not been skewered or blasted by the Stormcast Eternals grasped blindly for one another. They were not the only ones to have lost their sight.

  The deathbringer was a mess, but an impressive mess. His red flesh was burnt and raw, smouldering about him. The bulging muscles of his arms, chest and back hung like ribbons where the God-King’s warriors had sliced and stabbed, exposing rib and bone. One of his great horns was but a smashed stump while the champion’s eyes were misty with the scorching brilliance of the warding lantern. It was obvious from the clumsiness of his movements that he was blind but he still clutched his battle-axe to him with the murderous talent of ten sighted warriors.

  Mallofax flapped down to land on Zuvius’ shoulder. The sound seemed to spook the deathbringer, who looked about and then up into the sky, expecting the judgement and reward of Archaon, Everchosen of Chaos.

  ‘Filth sorcerer,’ Skargan growled. ‘Is that you?’

  The Prince of Embers turned A’cuitas about in his gauntlets, aiming the pommel of the daemon-forged weapon at the deathbringer. The eye opened in the metal.

  ‘Aye,’ Zuvius said. ‘It is me. I have bad tidings for you, exalted one. You have been judged unworthy.’

  Skargan’s ugly features screwed up in fury. He peered blindly up into the blood storm.

  ‘By who?’ he roared, challenging the gods. ‘By Khorne? By the Everchosen?’

  ‘By me,’ Zuvius told him. As the lightning leapt from his glaive and struck the deathbringer in the chest, Skargan Fell-of-Heart exploded. In an air-cracking blast of blood and flesh-scraps, the Blood God’s champion turned into a crimson mist, thick and bitter. Zuvius cocked his head towards Mallofax.

  ‘I sent him back to his dark god,’ the prince said, a crooked smile on his lips. ‘It’s what he would have wanted.’

  Orphaeo Zuvius didn’t have to wait long for his judgement and reward. He had been reforged to the Everchosen’s liking, and the bodies about him erupted in blue flashes. The unnatural lightning reached up into the sky with a whoosh and surrounded him. It sizzled in the blood rain, the licks and flames encircling the Prince of Embers and forming shimmering shapes.

  ‘What do you see?’ Mallofax asked of the prince. Peering hard into the heat and light of the furious vision, Zuvius looked about. In the surrounding energy, he could make out the outline of a great fortress.

  ‘Jagged spires,’ he said, ‘towers and keeps, reaching up into horror-choked skies. Walls – spiked, colossal and thick. A fortress of ruin so large that it spans the Mortal Realms.’

  ‘You see the Varanspire,’ Mallofax told him, ‘the fortress of the Everchosen. Your invitation is extended, my lord. You are worthy and he calls you to his service.’

  The raging wall of flame that encircled them suddenly died. Everything became ominously still. The skies cleared to reveal a darkness beyond. Then came the flapping of wings. While Mallofax hopped between the prince’s shoulder and A’cuitas, a flock of carrion birds descended from the darkness to feast on the flesh of the fallen.

  ‘And where do we find this Varanspire?’ Zuvius asked.

  ‘It sits in the Realm of Chaos,’ Mallofax said, ‘linked to the Eightpoints, a nexus of gateways connecting the Mortal Realms.’

  ‘A place of unrivalled destruction and death,’ Zuvius said.

  ‘Yes, my prince.’

  Zuvius licked his mangled lips. He stabbed at the rock, tapping the pommel of his glaive on the surface of the mesa. The carrion birds took to the air in a swirling flock, startled by the impact. Mallofax flapped his wings also but retained his purchase.

  ‘Invitation accepted,’ Orphaeo Zuvius said. The knight that had been Sir Abriel followed with the Hexenguard and the sorcerers of the Unseeing.

  ‘What now, my lord?’ Mallofax asked.

  ‘We follow the crows,’ the Prince of Embers said, ‘and trust in their appetite for death.’

  The Solace of Rage

  In a castle fashioned from crystal, a weaver of destiny worked.

  He, she, it – who could tell? None knew if the sorcerers had once been mortal or were daemon made. There were nine, or there were one, or there were both one and nine. In all things, including their number, they were mysterious. Or so they had meant to be.

  The Many-Eyed Servant was one of the names of the nine, and it applied in this instance to a tall, skeletal figure, impossibly thin, with limbs like reed stalks and a body to match. Atop a strand of a neck balanced a broad head, disturbingly smooth and featureless save for a line of eyes along its ridge. A body of this sort was nought but a garment, and not the most important that it had occasion to wear. In this form, the Many-Eyed Servant’s cloak defined it, name and nature – a long covering made of eyelids that fluttered and blinked, from behind which moist eyeballs of every hue peered out curiously.

  The Many-Eyed Servant dabbled long fingers in a pool of steaming quicksilver, flicking through the images it conjured there. Scenes of war. All the realms were in uproar with the coming of Sigmar. From time to time, it stopped to examine this hero or that, emitting a gentle purr of satisfaction when it saw one worthy of note, clucking in annoyance at those who disrupted its carefully placed webs of cause and effect. Once it had toyed with individuals of this type for its own ends. The Many-Eyed Servant had spent long lifetimes of men twisting the threads of fate into pleasing patterns – but no longer.

  There was a tightness around its spindly limbs, chains of fate that were not of its making. Once it had been merely the Many-Eyed, but then Archaon had learned its one true name, and forced upon it the role of servant. Now it was bound to the Everchosen’s purpose, along with all its siblings.

  The facets of the Many-Eyed Servant’s lair darkened along with its mood. Displayed by sorcerous means in panes of crystal were images of its eight counterparts. A few worked in their own dens, each a sanity-testing place conjured by the architect’s ineffable whims. Others were abroad in the realms, doing the bidding of their master. Wherever they were, they l
ooked up as one at the Many-Eyed Servant’s pique and scolded him, wary lest Archaon’s attention be directed toward them. The Many-Eyed Servant hunched its shoulders and turned its back upon them. The others were overly concerned by Archaon. If Tzeentch learned of their bending to the Everchosen’s will, the displeasure of the Changer of the Ways would make Archaon’s worst wraths seem as nothing. Nevertheless, although the Many-Eyed Servant would not admit it was afraid of their current lord, it returned to its scryings, compelled by dread and duty.

  Archaon demanded champions, and so the Many-Eyed Servant looked for them in every realm.

  In the Realm of Beasts, there was a prairie of such extent it had no single name, a landscape that a man could not cross in the space of a single life. Stretching for thousands of leagues, the plains encompassed mountains and seas, forests and mighty canyons, but for the most part they comprised grassland of rich and infinite variety. Great beasts walked there, their horns as high as the crowns of trees. Men hunted them, as bewildering in the profusion of race and tribe as the beasts themselves were in variety.

  The Bloodbloom Fields were found on these plains. The grasses were red, and its flowers crimson. The partly fossilised ribcages of animals of impossible size studded the scarlet, higher than cathedrals, their breastbones covered in patches of woodland that trailed long creepers earthward. Their eyeless skulls were osseous mesas, the phalanges of their paws greying crags.

  At the time of the Bloodbloom’s breeding, when the wind blew just so, the flowers opened and spat their pollen to be carried far and wide. The flowers sang for days during this season. Individually, the voices of the flowers were almost too quiet to be heard, but the sound of millions together created a musical sighing that gave the Bloodbloom Fields its other name, the Singing Steppes.

  These were rich lands, well populated with beasts and tribes. Even at the close of the Age of Chaos when Sigmar’s warriors rained down from the heavens with wrath in their hearts and lightning in their hands, there remained free people of the plains who had survived the terrible centuries. They were hunted because of it, for the gods loathe freedom above all else, but they survived.

  It was to this place that the Many-Eyed Servant’s attention was drawn. Its restless fingers paused in their fretful dibbling, the ripples on the silver stilled. The image sharpened, and it leaned in closer.

  Upon the Bloodbloom Fields was assembled a host of men. These were the Bloodslaves, the horde of Lord Kalaz the Hewer. The name came to the Many-Eyed Servant immediately. In ordinary times they moved restlessly across the plains, cutting a swathe across grass, herd and nation alike. Not today. Rank after rank of blood warriors and bloodreavers were arranged in a hollow circle atop a hill of stacked, gargantuan bones. To the north, the greying faces of the bones made cliffs twenty yards high; to the south, the hill sloped down gently to the plain. Atop this plateau, black and bronze armour gleamed in a sultry morning hazed by pollen.

  Around the hill, the scorched marks of the Bloodslaves’ hundred campfires pitted the red with black. A broad road of crushed flowers stretched over the horizon, marking their passage to this place of battle. A trampled field of torn earth and dark bloody stains bore silent witness to the great slaughter that had been done there the prior day. Eight cairns of fresh skulls, still pink from flensing, ringed the site, all that remained of the Heyeran people.

  The Heyeran’s horses’ bones charred in fires made with the shattered timbers of the defeated tribe’s chariots. A hundred of the tribesmen lived on, but in body only. Given the choice between the dark feast and death, they had opted to consume the hearts of their comrades. Already their old existence slipped from minds clouded with Khorne’s rage.

  All present desired fresh slaughter, and none more than the once-Heyeran, but all was still. The horde waited in silence. Their eyes were upon the open space at the centre of the ring of flesh and brass they made. Save for the moaning of chained khorgoraths and the snap of banners in the wind, silence reigned.

  The extermination of the Heyeran had been a costly victory. Lord Kalaz the Hewer was dead, cut down at the height of the battle, the last bold act of the War King of the Heyeran.

  Five of the tribe’s Gorechosen remained. The slaughterpriest Orto, the bloodstoker Danavan Vuul, the skullgrinder Kordos and the tribe’s two exalted deathbringers. There to the south of the ring was the one who called himself Mathror, horned and proud. The other was the voiceless Ushkar Mir. The ranks of the Bloodslaves were a quarter reduced, the three other Gorechosen among the slain. It did not matter, for Khorne cared nothing for the deaths of his followers, only that death had been done, and the Heyeran had been worthy foes.

  The banner of the tribe’s dead bloodsecrator spiked the earth. The hum of wrathful energy demanded a new bearer, but it and all other things must wait. Before aspirants could attempt acceptance to the circle of eight, the Bloodslaves required a new lord.

  Ushkar Mir and Mathror glared at one another. They had fought for many years together, but such things counted for nothing among the worshippers of the Blood God. Barely contained fury radiated from both.

  Mathror was a hulking brute, muscles swollen by the dark energies of chaos. A pair of brazen horns sprouted from his temples. He wore the Blood Armour, a spiked set of plates that completely enclosed his body from his cloven feet to his eyes. A bevor encased the lower part of his face, but he had no need of a helmet. His horns were as much a part of that dread panoply as any other piece, offering protection to his head. From above the bevor glared a pair of bloodshot eyes, yellow irised, trapped within a perpetual glower and overhung by brows tense with the need for violence. He bore a huge sword the weight of two men, finned and spined the length of its bloody blade. Old gore caked its runnels, but the edges glinted bright steel and were sharp enough to draw a cry from the wind. On his other arm he carried a tower shield, dark red, embossed with the runes of Khorne and the holy eight-pointed symbol of Chaos.

  Ushkar Mir was taller. He too retained a general human shape, but was also grossly swollen with unholy power. An unbeliever would have seen him as a giant, although like all the Bloodslaves he had once been an ordinary man, untouched by divinity. About his face, Khorne’s whims were clearly exhibited. Mir’s lips had withered away, leaving his teeth exposed to the root in a perpetual snarl. Around his eyes was bound a brass ring, riveted to the bone of his skull with iron. The brass was stamped deep with runes. Dark now, they glowed hot in battle. Ushkar Mir’s head was consequently a mass of twisted tissue haloed by thin wisps of brittle hair, for the runes’ heat tormented him, driving him to greater rage, which in turn made them burn hotter.

  Mir disdained armour, preferring speed and fury to a coward’s shell of metal. Beneath his simple leather harness his scars were clear to see, raised welts all across his back and chest. Unlike his mutilated head, these made coherent imagery – Khorne’s skull rune, Chaos’ eight-pointed star, and the four-base tally marks of his many slaughtered foes.

  Mir’s twin axes Skullthief and Bloodspite lay crossed upon his back, their querulous heads muzzled by their sheaths. One was black, the other red, gifts from Mir’s master. His fists were clenched, the brass bands around his knuckles buckled with the expression of his great and furious strength. His chest heaved in and out, muscles flexing with every bullish breath. Mir’s snorting was a provocation, an invitation to violence. The noise of it dominated the hilltop.

  Orto looked between the two once-men facing each other across the circle.

  ‘So?’ he said. A single word, loud as a bell and as clear as a trumpet call, carried on breath that reeked of blood. The Bloodslaves shifted at its uttering, movement rippling through the crowd’s mass. Fire kindled in their hearts after their rare minutes of inaction. However the day was to end, its beginnings were sown then, in that moment, in that one word.

  Orto had drunk of the slaughtergruel the day before, a tincture of boiling heartblood tainted by da
emon gore and powdered warpstone. Khorne had deemed him worthy once again, for he lived still, and he had been granted yet more power. His skin was taut with new muscle and his terse words carried the authority of the great Skull Lord himself. Power shone through him from Khorne’s own throne.

  ‘Mir is not worthy,’ said Mathror. ‘It should be I who leads.’

  ‘See!’ said Orto. He strode to Mir’s side on legs grown unnaturally long. He pinched at Mir’s muscles, rapped huge knuckles against Mir’s brass blind, caressed the raised scarring on his massive chest. ‘The gifts of Khorne.’

  ‘Gifts for the unworthy,’ said Mathror.

  Orto touched the black and red axes of Mir fleetingly, so as not to rouse the daemons sleeping within.

  ‘Twin axes he bears, daemon-kin from Khorne’s own legions. These are not the marks of the worthy?’ Orto barked a laugh. ‘You deny Khorne’s judgement. Your skull shall be his.’ Orto gripped his double-handed axe meaningfully. It was a cruel thing, toothed with black spikes.

  ‘I do not deny the judgment of the Skull Lord,’ said Mathror. He raised his hand, and Orto paused. For all his monstrous appearance and the fire of rage that burned in him, he spoke evenly. His voice was no ragged war-shout, but a silken thing, suggestive and deadly, a weapon in its own right. ‘Instead it is you, Orto, who denies his sense of humour!’ Scattered guffaws came from the horde. ‘Khorne laughs at Mir, and that is well. You mistake amusement for favour. Ushkar Mir will not lead us. He lacks faith.’

  ‘You think you should lead? Ha!’ said Orto.

  ‘I will not follow you,’ said Danavan Vuul. Kordos the smith, as ever, said nothing.

  A blood warrior stepped forward from the horde. He was smaller than many present, close in size to the city dweller he had once been. Tight black armour clad him, while his tall-crested helmet he carried under one arm, leaving his face free. His skin was pale blue, marbled with bloodmarks. His eyes were the same colour, so that they were hard to distinguish from the rest of his face. He looked a living sculpture carved from exotic marble. Even so, the intelligence in those eyes could not be missed. Skull was cunning, a master of intrigue in a herd of killers, and that made him dangerous on and off the field of war.