Planetkill, page 18
The feathered thing giggles as it watches the great beast’s path bend with the stress of its regard. It longs to burst free of the throne room and hunt Uhlguth down, befuddle and misguide it, weave its little mind around with deceptions wrapped in truths painted with grey half-lies, bleed away its stupid little certainties. If its master has abandoned Uhlguth, has he not proven himself false, and therefore might not a false trail be truer than a true trail to a false master? It casts its gaze along Uhlguth’s path and realises that not even it knows if the path is true or false any more.
The Lord of Change folds its wings and dives like a falcon, streaking by the arm of the throne and spiralling around the dais. Its gaze is no longer on Uhlguth but sparkles and whirls and lights where it will. Such a pleasing diversion, a momentary but thorough delight, something to brag of when it next roosts with its kin among the fractured and spinning thoughts of its master. It chirrups and croaks, rattles its shimmering wings, clashes its opal beak in salute to its own cruelty, its own magnificence.
Below it the prince whose court this is broods on, chin on fist. His attention may be on Uhlguth, or it may pass out past Uhlguth to mortal space, or rest on places that no mind should ever behold. He does not speak, his eye does not open, and his thoughts are far and deep and silent.
In this place Uhlguth is surrounded by clotted, smoky energies that constantly evaporate into nothing or flicker into solidity or even brief life. Its own grief is an acidic miasma about it, its emotions curdling space into crawling, half-real vapour that stings its nerves as its loss stings its soul. It is trying to trace its master’s trail, straining its senses for hell-sight and mind-sound and soul-scent, but traces of the beloved blight of its master’s spirit are so maddeningly hard to see.
Finally, Uhlguth can bear it no longer. It begins to thrash and swim after its master… and finds itself held.
View the Second: Dholtchei and the Prince of Chains
Whatever the Prince of Chains was once, this place has changed him. The pandaemonic swirl has stripped him to his most primal nature: the desire to subjugate and control. That is why he rarely comes so close to the Wound, where control breaks down and structure ceases. It is hellish for him: how can he be the Prince of Chains, the Master Imprisoner, in a place where those concepts cannot mean anything?
But in Uhlguth, he has found a prize worth the risk. Chaining Uhlguth: now that, the Prince thinks as he begins his work among the moons, would be a triumph.
These moons are gently-pulsing bladders, full of soft light. Inside each sac, a pink foetus-thing big as a continent squirms in its milky amniotic sludge. The moons are joined by long umbilici of their own distended skin, hundreds of them forming a great chain that stretches away to the chuckling entropic storm of the Wound and outward until it is lost to the senses. From here, the Prince of Chains sends his manacles down to spear into Uhlguth’s hide.
The Prince of Chains is making his bonds, while Dholtchei is doing his best to unmake them.
As with the Prince, the shredding force with which this place bears down on the soul has seared away whatever Dholtchei might once have been. He suspects that he was mortal once – there are times when he is sure he remembers space a hard black instead of this eternal incandescence, and stars shining sharp and fixed instead of leering things that seize the gaze and gnaw the mind. Dholtchei knows he came into this realm around the Wound, and then he was torn apart.
He was allowed to keep his name. As a joke, apparently, to drive home what had been taken from him. No memory left, no past, no physical form. All Dholtchei has now is his name, his pain, and his desire to unmake.
Dholtchei is a tight comet of ethereal black fire from which stare his beseeching, raging red eyes. He wails as he swoops past a sac-moon, its occupant flapping its flayed limbs and wailing back, and then he falls upon the chains. For a moment there is a quick stir in his endless pain – not an easing of it, but a shift in its character – then his burning body has eaten the chain to nothing and the severed ends whip away through space. Such a petty unmaking is no consolation to Dholtchei, though. He turns to do more, carving a great black crescent against the writhing colours of space.
But the chain is back. The Prince has recreated it. Indeed, he has done it twice, and then cross-linked those two chains and the moons above them with a cat’s cradle of manacles, all in the time it took Dholtchei to turn. Dholtchei screams at the insult and hurtles himself forward like a javelin. He meets the Prince of Chains under the twisted face of the thing inside the nearest moon.
The Prince of Chains is himself made from chains, glossy black and copper, wrapped and woven, clicking against one another as he watches Dholtchei approach.
‘What good will this do you?’ he demands. The new chains are stronger, and as Dholtchei zigzags back and forth among them he leaves the links tarnished and distorted but intact.
‘This is not a prize for you,’ the Prince goes on. ‘What would you do with it? Croon at it the way you croon at my chains? Flitter about it until you get bored? Be on your way, little burning thing. I have work to do.’
‘And so we are set against one another!’ cries Dholtchei as he burns by again. ‘My work is unmaking, and my work is unending! I will unmake your work, your form and your soul. Three small things, but three less things that I must then unmake.’ Dholtchei’s voice is a constant cry of pain and anger that he will give voice to until he dies, his words interlaced with the scream in jagged two-part harmony.
The Prince of Chains is thoughtful as he sends a shackle towards Uhlguth’s blood-red back and extrudes tendrils of finer links from his other hand. He feels exasperation and contempt for this creature who has surrendered to the entropic nature of this place to become an unmaker itself. But he is intrigued, too. How might such a thing as Dholtchei be bound? Perhaps a living chain that will knit itself as fast as that black-burning body can sear it? Shackles of twisted void on which destruction can find no purchase? An interesting exercise for when the chaining of Uhlguth is complete.
His web of manacles shivers. The Prince feels this with a sense more unnaturally acute than any crude nerve-ending, a sense attuned to force, control and power. The moon-creatures yammer in their sacs, their anger potent enough to cast shadows in the thick space around them. The Prince tightens his harness and prepares a new chain. He is confident. There is not a creature he has met that he has not known how to bind.
‘Spiteful futility!’ cries Dholtchei as he passes again, links parting inside his burning body. The shades made by the sac-creatures’ anger are half-real now, milling and savaging each other. ‘Your mockery will come to nothing, and I will make you nothing!’
‘If my work offends you so, then I suspect you mistake my nature,’ the Prince replies, somewhat testily. He can feel his chains moving in ways they should not. He does not need Dholtchei’s distraction.
‘I am not your ally in this unmaking you keep crying about,’ he goes on as Dholtchei passes again and another shackle vanishes like smoke. ‘To unmake is to accept one’s own end. It is the act of a broken animal, a slave, a daemonling with no vision but what its master has stamped on it. By binding I make, and by imposing my making on the cosmos I declare myself its superior. That you turn your desire for self-annihilation outward instead of in does not grant it worthiness.’
The Prince breaks off at a wrenching groan from his chains. Not simply turbulence from the attacks, he realises with alarm. Something else is wrong.
‘Your words are meaningless until you understand!’ howls Dholtchei from a blazing dive that severs one of the Prince’s mainstay chains and sends shockwaves through the moons. ‘The matter of the universe must be broken down until no atom remains, and then the patterns beneath the matter burnt away until no axiom is left! While there is existence there is pain, and while I have my pain I will unmake until there is no existence to torment me!’
The Prince of Chains shudders. Dholtchei has given words to the terror that drives his obsession. Formlessness, disintegration, decay that he must stave off by chaining all creation to his will.
Caught between the upsurge of his own fear and Dholtchei’s marauding, the Prince is distracted until another great wrenching against his bonds drives all else out of his senses. Struggling, he realises what is happening: Uhlguth is moving. His prize is making its escape, and his work is barely half complete.
Frantically, the Prince of Chains tries to shore up his restraints, weaving new bonds and flinging them in every direction as Uhlguth thrashes against his captivity. The motion sets the foetus-moons to screaming, the psychic froth of their distress birthing rainbows and monsters into the void.
To no avail. Uhlguth is too powerful and Dholtchei has been too much of a distraction. The Prince of Chains cries in terror as one chain after another snaps, bleeding his mind and soul through the ruptured bonds. As Uhlguth begins to swim away the Prince’s web rips apart, the shock of separation catapulting the Prince of Chains away.
Dholtchei comes after him, hard on his trail. Reeling in shock, the Prince barely finds time for fear until a turn of his body shows him an expanding ball of black fire and Dholtchei’s crimson eyes growing larger and larger.
True to his nature to the last the Prince extends fingers of delicate copper manacle and tries to make a net. But his strength is gone. Dholtchei bursts through him, a saturating black fire, and the Prince’s will only holds a moment before he is unmade. His body bursts like a cocoon, the scrap of spirit within writhing and dissipating to nothing.
Behind all this, Uhlguth moves ponderously away. The line of sac-moons echoes with screams as its motion drags on the manacles, cutting their umbilicus, bleeding their life into space, their coming deaths echoing back through this realm’s twisted time to shroud them in drooling purple shadows.
Dholtchei does not see, or care. There is no unmaking big enough to sate Dholtchei short of unmaking all reality and so then the final unmaking of Dholtchei himself. And to unmake every last thing in the universe will be the work of a blurred eternity of pain and self-hatred and empty triumph after empty triumph.
It is a prospect to draw a scream from the hardest of souls and Dholtchei screams now, flying onward through the delirium that bleeds from the Wound, searching for a destruction great enough to grant him a moment’s ease.
There is pain, of course, flaring along Uhlguth’s back as the manacles break and it swims away. As it turns its face toward its destination, Uhlguth feels a sensation that might be compared to a cold wind, or a dream disappearing on awakening, or harsh sunlight falling on soft skin. Uhlguth does not bother to think on what that might mean. For all its power its mind is a bestial thing, its reason limited. It does not care about the discomfort. It thinks of its master, and pushes on.
View the Third: A Servant of the Worm Stars
The flesh of Cheagh the Excisor has the cloudy colour of a cataracted eye, dark bones visible inside the glistening mass. He wears a crawling tabard of semi-animate skin. His head is a domed lump quivering on asymmetrical shoulders: when he needs to look about him he extrudes it as a long, wavering tongue coated in eyes. His hook-axe was a gift from his mistress, who swallowed the corpses of his enemies and digested the stuff of their weapons into this heavy, never-blunted blade which she sweated out through her gelid skin. He thanked her by running through the caves in her flesh, dealing out wounds and deaths, and she thanked him by pushing from her pores new worms to carry him into space, back into the endless battle. He leans over the front of the houdah and looks ahead, gripping his axe-haft, his warriors ready behind him.
Sensations twist and blur as the intensity of the conflict ahead of him pulls and wrings at space. One moment Cheagh seems to ride upward from his mistress and then to be plunging down. There are seconds at a time of floating disorientation when the other Worm Stars seem impossibly distant or horrifyingly close, patches where time unravels and Cheagh is the scrawny mortal thing he once was or when the space around them is thick with the pulsing bodies of worms long gone. And through it all comes the taunting, cackling voices of Cheagh’s beloved mistress and her loathed sisters, the mighty Worm Stars. They yowl in pleasure as their churning worm-limbs bite and sting one another in endless predation and consummation, uncounted legions of slaves riding the worms like mites and waging battles of their own.
The endless battle of the Worm Stars, so beloved to Cheagh, but this time different too. Something new has come into the war, and Cheagh peers ahead trying to understand it.
It is a gigantic thing, coloured a vivid scarlet that Cheagh cannot remember ever seeing among the greys and off-whites of the Worm Stars’ pallid domain. It is a sphere that mocks the shape of his mistress, although its rigid red hide has none of her slick, voluptuous softness. And it is alive.
Cheagh’s mistress speaks to it, her voice a psychic shockwave that creases space, the lower registers leaking into the physical world to shake the houdah in its mounting. Cheagh feels his flesh bubble and erupt with worm-tumours as her voice washes over him, mocking and goading, an outer shell of playfulness over a core of utter malice. The thought-core of her taunt is this: What are you doing so far from home, little victim? Do you think to find help? You should not have come so close to us, little thing.
Cheagh manifests another eye in his tongue-head to see/taste the red thing’s reaction. It takes him a moment to realise that the roiling wave-front coming out of it, driving back the lashing worms, is also its voice. Its angry shout breaks over Cheagh, battering him with its alienness, pain, frustration, savage determination. Were Cheagh to look for words to capture it, he might venture: Master-gone-must-find-him! Will-find-master-will-kill-what-blocks-way-to-master! Kill-you!
Safely through the wave-front, the worm draws closer. Ahead Cheagh can start to make out battle debris: ripped-apart worm segments, wrecked howdahs and carriages, struggling, dying thralls. And then he gasps, bleeds, clutches the houdah for support as the vast voices of the Worm Stars batter him.
The sisters scream their glee at the creature’s weakness, every sneering thought dripping promises of harm, prying at the cracks in its crude wits and contemptible courage. Behind Cheagh the great sky-filling curve of his mistress’s body pushes out more and fatter worms, a churning wall of wet, grinding sucker-mouths.
And amid the bruising turmoil, clarity comes to Cheagh. He sees what the omen means. He has risen from his rest and returned to battle for this. He will fight the thralls of his mistress’s sisters and win. He will make the red thing his prize and bring it to his beloved mistress as a meal, a jewel, a slave, whatever she wishes it to be, and he will sing and bleed and kill in praise of her choice. It cannot be otherwise.
Cheagh hefts his axe in barb-knuckled fingers, twists his tongue-head around and looks at his followers. They are a jumbled mixture: some bipeds like himself, some with insect legs or maggot mouths, some whose torsos rise out of sweating slug-bodies. They grip weapons in fingered hands, or clusters of tendrils, or slurping suckers. Their skins have been agonisingly bleached with worm-bile in imitation of his own pallor. They are watching him in expectant silence. A cavity appears in the flesh of Cheagh’s chest for him to speak through.
‘This is for us. For me. Our bountiful mistress–’ (they all gouge themselves with talons, knives, the sharp edges of armour) ‘–welcomes her priest back to her war, in which she finds such loving delight.’ Another voice-wave breaks over the worm’s head, mixed with the lesser cries of thrall-minds pushed ahead by the force of it.
Pain-no-more! No-more! Says the spirit-cry, blasting out with nuclear force. Find-master! Fight-find-master! No-more-pain! Going-to-where-master-is!
‘Hear it?’ Cheagh asks his warband. He points his axe toward the red bulk ahead of them. ‘Its fear? Its pain?’ A murmur runs through the warriors. Fear and pain are things they can understand. ‘This is the trophy we will bring back to our tender mistress!’ (and along with the rest of them he slits his flesh at the last word). ‘We will offer this intruding creature’s flesh, to make our mistress–’ (he dashes one hand against his axe-blade) ‘–strong! She will grow and devour! We ride to a conquest unlike any your lives have ever seen!’
He shakes his axe and roars, dark red fog spilling from his blistering skin, his fury washing into his disciples who clash weapons, thrash their bodies and bay for combat. As their worm leads its brothers into the savagery unfolding around this red creature, it dives into the screams and oaths and challenges from a thousand thousand throats and minds, growing and blending into a frantic, joyous chorus.
Cheagh the Excisor lifts his axe and makes ready to do what he was made for.
The Worm Stars have grown lazy in their endless toying with their thralls. Their worms bite deep into Uhlguth but they cannot restrain it. It barely slows as it breaks through the swarms, and then it is beyond the Stars and free.
Did the Stars poison it? Was there venom in their words or their worms? As the sisters dwindle into three sickly points of light behind it, Uhlguth begins to feel ripples go through its flesh and spirit. The space ahead seems emptier somehow, duller to its senses. Uhlguth will not be stopped. It focuses its will and pushes on...
View the Fourth: The Silken Whisper and the Breaking of Plans
His notes on the relative abilities of male and female humans to endure the embrace of the Herikolid Moonflower: gone.
His formulations for a serum derived from the admixture of Imperial polymorphine and Lacrymole protea-syrup: gone.
His recreational tools, carefully collected by hunting more than a dozen eldar haemonculi over as many centuries: gone.
