Realm-Lords, page 25
But still they came. They never stopped, only faltered, recovered and pressed forward again.
Ferendir suddenly skidded to a halt. They’d reached the edge of the promontory – a sheer vertical drop down a cliffside that ended in a narrow, rocky shelf far below, with trees clinging to the still-steep hillside beneath it. Far beneath them, a wide stream or shallow river – he could not tell which – wound through the long, meandering valley that sheltered the mining camp. Within sight, there was no easy way down the slope to the valley floor.
They were trapped.
‘Formation!’ Serath shouted as he sped into their ranks, turned and set himself to meet the oncoming enemy. ‘Side by side! Backs to the cliff!’
All obeyed instinctively, knowing that Ferendir’s master was – if nothing else – a warrior worthy of combat command. They arrayed themselves in a broad, curving line, backs to the drop-off, all facing the oncoming Slaaneshi horde. Ferendir, for his part, had no idea what might come next. Could they root themselves again? Call on the mountain’s aid? Even so, they could not stand against the enemy indefinitely. For all the daemonettes and Hedonites they’d destroyed in the fray, there still seemed to be scores of them – maybe even a hundred. Sooner or later, their numbers and amassed strength would either overwhelm their small party’s aelven magic or simply drive them – still shielded – right off the mountainside.
But as they each prepared to meet their fate, to make that last, desperate stand at the edge of the precipice, something strange occurred.
A foul, atonal horn roared through the valley, blown from behind and above them. None could see who blew the horn or what sort of horn it might be, but it seemed to be emanating from the ledges above the village, just beside the portals into the mines. The moment that strange, mournful instrument sounded, the oncoming Slaaneshi Hedonites skidded to a halt, en masse. They jostled and collided, all answering that wordless call but seeming thoroughly puzzled by it.
Ferendir watched. Waited. Stared.
They seem confused… lost, even. Clearly, someone was sounding a retreat. Why?
The Hedonites all exchanged puzzled glances, took last, vicious looks at their prey lined up before the ledge, then began, as a single mass, to edge backwards, withdrawing into the empty houses and trade sheds of the encampment.
Amidst the inhuman underlings on the front lines before them, Ferendir saw a number of new arrivals – strange, wizened forms in robes and cowls, some wearing strange masks, others with their faces hidden deep in the shadows of their hoods. There were perhaps half a dozen of them. They haunted the periphery of a fat knot of daemonettes like temple instructors trying to corral unruly children.
Wizards. They had to be. But what were they doing?
Ezarhad Fatesbane suddenly appeared on a pile of large fallen stones that used to be one of the larger structures in the duardin settlement. He stood tall and proud, gazing out over his minions towards those skulking wizards.
‘If you will do the honours,’ Ezarhad shouted, and suddenly, lilac globes of mystical energy crackled around his outstretched hands.
The wizards obeyed. Without warning, they all drew great serrated knives – short swords, more rightly – and tore into the pack of daemonettes before them. The daemonettes tried to fight back, to defend themselves, but the wizards worked swiftly and had the advantage of surprise. In short order, all thirteen of the daemonettes gathered had been slain and bled their vile black blood upon the ground.
And that ground, so anointed, began to shake.
‘What is this?’ Serath asked, almost to himself.
‘It cannot be good,’ Desriel said.
The rest of the horde was backing away now, as if they could feel what was about to be summoned. The wizards, rather than retreating, stood right where they’d done their foul sacrificial deeds, all throwing their hands and bloodied knives skywards and chanting in guttural ecstasy.
Ezarhad chanted as well, though they could not make out the words at the distance he stood from them. No matter. The intensifying orbs of sickly purple light that enshrouded his twisting, gesturing hands told them all they needed to know.
‘It’s coming,’ Luverion said. ‘His offering’s been given. There’s no stopping it.’
‘What is coming?’ Taurvalon asked.
In answer to Taurvalon’s question, the broad, bald promontory before them – the great span of rock separating them from their would-be destroyers – began to glow. It began small – just a small bloom of light emanating from within the rock itself – but it soon spread far and wide over the open ground before them. As the glow intensified, the rock itself began to seethe and liquefy, as though a bloom of magma lay just below its surface and was about to melt through the regolith and burst forth.
‘What is happening?’ Serath demanded.
‘The pretender struck down his own servants to beg aid,’ Luverion said. Ferendir thought he heard a note of sadness in the loremaster’s voice.
The half-molten rock began to ripple and crack. Then, without warning, it exploded upwards, sending a shower of molten lava droplets and still-glowing jagged fragments of stone rising high into the air before tumbling earthwards again. The stone shelf of the promontory had expanded and exploded like an overfilled wineskin. Now, rising to its full height out of a smoking pit gouged into the hillside, stood an enormous, towering Chaos daemon. It rose slowly, almost gingerly, as though it had been contorted and cramped for a long season and needed to spare its joints as it unfurled. Its great, muscular body was as tall as three aelves standing on one another’s shoulders, its four arms each tipped in some terrifying, misshapen organic likeness of a blade or bludgeon. A terrifying fan of bone and gristle crests spread out from its inhuman skull, while purple fire and black smoke rolled upwards in waves from the open well beneath it.
Espying the eight of them there on the ledge, the great daemon roared. One hand – capped in a tooth-edged harrow – came sweeping down and whistled through the air in mock threat. Its other three hands – a thorn-encrusted horn that looked something like a leafless tree, a serrated sabre blade, a mass of knobby bone and gristle – all whipped about in a shameless display of dominance.
Ferendir’s eyes skated over Serath – randomly, unbidden – but as they did so, he saw a clear change in his stoic mentor’s countenance. Anger and frustration gave way to a strange sort of peace – a grim determination. Straightening his shoulders and lifting his stone mallet to touch his forehead, Serath seemed to be preparing for some course of action whose outcome would be quite definitive.
He’s about to march out there, alone, to meet it, Ferendir realised.
But then, something even more astounding occurred. Serath shifted his weight to take a single step forward – but before he could do so, Luverion broke from their formation and marched out onto the promontory to meet the towering daemon where it stood.
‘Get back in line,’ Serath said forcefully.
‘No need,’ the loremaster said, only glancing back for an instant to offer an enigmatic smile. His pale grey eyes were bright – even eager. ‘Allow me.’
The daemon lifted one great foot out of the pit, braced it on the lip and hauled itself upwards. It now stood to its full height on the outcropping, and it was truly enormous and terrifying.
Luverion raised his sword before him, lifting its graceful, silver-bright blade high towards the sky – towards Celennar. As they all watched, they heard the loremaster calling out in a language familiar to none of their ears, calling clearly and forcefully to powers they could not name or identify. As Luverion chanted, the lunar runes on his bronze breastplate and teardrop shield began to glow. In seconds, they were glaring, as bright and brilliant as any of Taurvalon’s aetherquartz.
The daemon roared, stamped and prepared its four misshapen hand-weapons for killing blows.
Ferendir stared, amazed at what he was seeing.
One moment, the sky was blue and cloudless. The next, a small dark smudge like a bruise appeared. Moment by moment, that smudge swirled and grew. Out of it bloomed a roiling mass of storm clouds. As those clouds churned, they seemed to draw arcing branches of lightning down from Celennar’s pale form in the sky. Round and round the scintillating light and thunderous clouds went, like silver and coal tumbling in a rolling barrel. Lightning flashed. Thunder pealed. Fleet, intermittent torrents of rain spat down upon the daemon lord.
The daemon felt the rain, heard the thunder, cringed in annoyance from the crackling lightning. It dipped its head slightly, then craned it sideways to look straight up into the gathering localised storm.
At that moment, Luverion swept down his sword, as though he were a lord regent giving the order for his Dawnriders to charge.
All at once, the storm struck at the daemon. Long, barbed branches of blinding lightning flashed and crackled as thunder shook the mountainside. Swirling in torrents at the centre of the stormy column was a solid pillar of battering rain driven by a concentrated, spinning wind funnel as pointed and forceful as a stake driven through a vampire’s evil black heart.
The daemon bent, hissing and thrashing. It struck with its weapons in all directions, trying in vain to find the heart of the storm and destroy it. But the storm would not be cut or contained. Though it occupied a relatively narrow band of the air above and around the daemon, its intensity and force were terrible to behold. The rain literally slashed at the daemon’s monstrous flesh like a storm of swirling knives, tearing and ripping, drawing blood and ichor in thick rivulets. The lightning strikes – swift, sure, like the stinging of angry hornets – seared the daemon’s exposed flesh, set its hair and clothing aflame, even began to superheat and melt its infernal weaponry. One of its serrated blade-hands caught a direct strike and was set ablaze. At the heart of the maelstrom was a powerful column of hurricane wind that pressed down, down, ever down upon the massive beast. Even the ground around the daemon suffered under the torrent, the ragged rim of the well it had burst from eroding and collapsing as they watched, rock and soil blasted sideways, sent flying away under the terrible pressure of the battering rain and punishing column of wind.
All the while, Luverion stood, facing their monstrous adversary, sword and shield poised, his eyes now burning, alight with the lambent lunar energies that he’d summoned to protect them.
Something shifted beneath them. Ferendir saw that it was not just his imagination – everyone felt it. A moment later, another tremor wracked the precipice they stood upon.
Out on the promontory, huge cracks were radiating outwards from the well the daemon had risen out of. They spread towards the edges of the out-thrust ledge that they all stood upon.
It’s too much, Ferendir realised. The fury of Luverion’s storm is containing the daemon, but it’s also battering the already scarred hillside. At any moment–
The ground gave way.
All at once, the world was nothing but roaring, riven stone, collapsing soil, the screams of the tortured daemon and a sense that the ground beneath them had simply disappeared. Ferendir barely had time to register what had occurred. He snatched a few rapid impressions – the affrighted faces of the Slaaneshi as they saw the hillside collapse and scrambled backwards, the convulsions of the daemon as gravity drew it down, a quick glimpse of Serath diving towards him, trying to grab him even though he was suddenly falling through empty space.
Then the world was all darkness and rapid descent.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I have been here before, Ferendir thought. Buried alive. Helpless. Hopeless.
He tried to move, found himself bounded.
He tried to breathe, found no air.
He tried to call out. He had no voice.
The world was soil and rock and darkness and pressure. The world was living death. The world was a tomb. A seizure of panic slithered through him, threatening to swallow his body, his mind, his spirit in monstrous despair and all-consuming insanity.
No, no, no! his mind screamed. This cannot happen! We’ve come too far! Endured too much! We cannot fail now!
Then do not, his many years of training told him.
I cannot move. I cannot breathe. I cannot speak. In moments I will probably subside into unconsciousness, then death…
Where are you? Think.
Beneath a rockslide.
A rockslide where? Where did all of this earth come from?
From a mountain… but not my mountain, my home.
But all the mountains are kith and kin, are they not? Is there not a web of interlaced ley lines that binds and communicates between the peaks, at their roots and foundations? Though our mountain was our mother, and she had a name, and a spirit, and a consciousness, can this mountain not commune with her? Connect you to her?
Ferendir paused. Struggled to snatch a small gulp of trace air from a minute pocket in the soil that surrounded him.
Calm yourself. Fear, desperation, struggle – none will avail you.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Small. Shallow. Short. There may be little left…
Calm. Serene. Subside. Contract. Go inwards…
Ferendir tried to do just that. He began the mental repetition of the meditative cantrips he had been taught during his lessons at the temple. His goal: to contract his consciousness and loose it from his body, thus setting it free. If he could venture outwards, apart from his body, just long enough to dive deep and connect with the mountain ley lines and contact his mother mountain…
Something shifted. His orientation seemed to change, as if the earthfall enclosing him had slid down the hillside and he had rolled with it. Everything was topsy-turvy now, his progress halted. Ferendir felt panic rising again but fought the urge.
There is only one opportunity. If I let it slip away…
There – glowing, diaphanous, pulsing rivers of light and telluric force, buried deep in the rock and earth beneath him. Ferendir’s spirit wriggled, struggled. He felt like a fish swimming up-current against tremendous resistance. He could see – nay, sense – the ley lines, his means of communing with the mountain, but they were too far, and they seemed to radiate power that seemed to repel him more the closer he got.
Push. Death comes for you. Darkness waits to swallow you. Concentrate. Remain. Push.
His spirit swam, wriggled, reached out. It slipped backwards, then rocketed forward again with a surge of strength. The currents continued to buffet and repel him. He continued to press, to seek, to reach out.
And then, all at once, he was in the ley lines, bathing in them, secure. The light enveloped him, and he could suddenly hear – and feel – the dialogues of ancient mountains, one to another, all rumbling and mumbling and holding forth in philosophical discourses on their slow, easy subsidence, their scouring and reshaping by winds and waters, the small, eager beings that swarmed over them and paid tribute to them and sought their secrets.
Ferendir called out, Mother! Mother! Your child is in need of you!
The mountains seemed not to hear him, or not to care. They talked on, the low, subsonic thunder of their conclaves causing his whole disembodied essence to vibrate. He trembled and shook at such a frequency that he thought his spirit might be shaken apart, like a sculpture of sand on a quaking span of earth.
Mother Mountain! I call to you! I need you! Help me!
Who do you call to? a voice replied. It was not his Mother Mountain.
Why do you call? another asked. Why do you disturb us?
We are buried, he explained. We are dying. Please–
Many die, the mountains answered. We endure.
We are on a mission – a vital mission, he pressed. He could barely concentrate now. We seek the pretender, Ezarhad Fatesbane… He stole from us… the Eidolith… Kaethraxis…
It was that name that seemed to send a potent tremor through all the interlocking ley lines, rocking all the power they contained.
Kaethraxis, they all said at once, in a single, deafening voice.
We beg of you, Ferendir managed. We seek only to serve. Please… my mother…
We can provide. We are all your mother.
Again, something shifted – something physical, powerful, present. Ferendir felt his body turned once more, end over end. But when the movement subsided, as he struggled to focus his distant, physical senses and his drifting, slowly discorporating spirit, he realised with amazement that his circumstances had changed.
He could move.
The earth around him was loose.
Ferendir’s spirit leapt, suddenly, shockingly, back into his body. He moved one arm, found it immobile. He then tried the other arm and found it capable of wriggling, only slightly, against the soft, loosely packed earth around it. Ferendir began to wriggle that arm, as slowly and subtly as he could, all the while concentrating on his breathing, his focus, desperate to maintain his composure even as he raced against asphyxiation to free himself.
There. A modest cavity had been created around his movable arm. He began to reach out, to pierce, to grasp, to writhe. Little by little, he felt his whole body starting to shift under the weight of all that fallen soil and rock. His seeking hand, in one miraculous instant, broke the surface of the rockfall and felt chill, free air against it, along with small, cold droplets.
