Hand Of Abaddon, page 26
‘Far from here. As far as I can get us.’
She stopped then. ‘To what end, master?’ Yheng forced the last word; it felt unnatural on her tongue all of a sudden.
Tenebrus stopped and turned again, a wraith clothed in ragged black. His eyes glinted like opals. She recognised the barely restrained anger in them.
‘To whatever end the gods will for you. Their eye is on you, Yheng. I might not know what you learned in the black chamber, but I know that much.’
‘Is that truly what you want, master? To fulfil my destiny as fate and the gods will? You almost killed me…’
‘Revelation seldom comes without pain.’
‘And I do not trust you.’ She stood her ground. ‘I will not leave with you.’
Tenebrus’ voice grew cold. ‘What?’
‘I refuse,’ said Yheng, shaking with rage. ‘I am no pawn, Tenebrus.’
‘Fool,’ he said with cool disdain. ‘We are all pawns, Yheng! Have you learned nothing? Am I such a poor teacher that you haven’t even grasped this truth? I have strived always to stave off ruin and damnation, to be a servant, not a slave. These are the lessons I impart to you, Yheng.’
‘What did you see during the ritual?’ Yheng demanded, eyes narrowed. He had not tried to kill her yet, which meant either he didn’t want to or he couldn’t. She drew confidence from that. ‘You saw my fate, didn’t you? Or at least a part of it, enough to realise I am important. Did it scare you, to see what I will become?’
Tenebrus chuckled mirthlessly. ‘And what have you seen, my acolyte? Do not be so easily seduced by the Mother of Lies, the Father of Mendacity. They are cunning, Yheng. Augury is old, older than I dare imagine. They know what their would-be supplicants crave. With you it was easy. You want power. You think you already possess it. You do, but you are a poor mistress of it. That is what I see.’ He drew up to her, crossing the distance between them as quick as shadow itself. ‘I am powerful, Yheng, but I cannot survive alone. I need an ally.’
She scowled. ‘You mean a sacrifice.’
Tenebrus closed on her, tall as the night, an all-encompassing darkness. She had to crane her neck just to meet his gaze, and felt her early boldness challenged before it.
‘Had I wished it,’ uttered the sorcerer in a dread rasp, ‘I would have sent your soul to the ravenous children of the gods. If I wished it, I could do it now.’
Yheng reached behind her back for the knife, feeling its grip…
‘You think you have power enough,’ said Tenebrus, shrinking back to the robed sorcerer he was. ‘Show me, then.’ He gestured to the fortress, to the mirrored black of its walls. ‘Make it bend to your will.’ He took a calming breath. ‘If you can.’
Yheng could not. At least not yet.
And then she heard them, scuttling through the corridors, through the nooks and alcoves, across ceilings and barren chambers. Yheng’s eyes widened as a softly glowing pinprick of red light lit in the distant darkness ahead of her. One became two, became ten, became many.
‘Master…’ she breathed.
Tenebrus whirled to face the horde as it advanced towards them on pincered limbs.
A bridge spanned the next chamber, as wide as a starship’s embarkation deck. Tenebrus hurried onto it, urging Yheng to follow. Energised blades burned in the shadows just beyond the far side of the bridge, revealing the mechanised killers. They slowed as soon as they realised they had been seen, a machine herd letting its prey feel fear at its approach.
Run… they said, a unison of modulated voices matching Yheng’s own.
She balked, fear stiffening her limbs. They crept onto the bridge with an eerie syncopated motion. The frosty glow of the giant lumen orb above gave them the appearance of animated ice.
Flee…
Tenebrus faced them alone… until his creatures drifted up from the darkness beneath the bridge, cloaked in shadows with knives bared.
Sensing a threat, the machine killers spurred into blistering movement and the creatures responded in kind as both mechanised horrors clashed. They tore and stabbed at each other, without fear or restraint. Though the sorcerer’s creatures were larger and stronger, the Mechanicum killers fought as a unit, ganging up on their larger foes and making their superior numbers count.
Tenebrus waded into the throng, unleashing arcing shadow lightning from his fingertips. The lumen orb extinguished at his presence and the fight became one of staccato flashes, framing the violence. The outcome was uncertain, the victor impossible to predict.
Waiting at the edge of the bridge, fearful to step upon it and into the razored darkness, Yheng heard the voice again. Her voice, and yet not her voice.
Flee…
She fled.
Tenebrus bellowed after her but could not follow. ‘Yheng!’
The fortress opened up before her, reacting to her needs, her will. She plunged on through stygian darkness, on and on, deeper and deeper, the mechanisms of the fortress shifting around her. Until, after a maddened scramble through myriad long black corridors, Yheng found herself in a massive chamber. She staggered over the threshold, gasping for breath.
Stark light emanated from a vaulted ceiling. Shivering in the penumbral shadow, Yheng looked up to see a caged star. It had been shackled utterly. Studded iron banded it, a pair of concentric circles slowly turning around a flickering sphere of white fire. Six thick iron chains fastened it to the floor.
Yheng could feel the fortress. Pain. Anger.
Had it led her here? Why?
The star shuddered, every lashed coronal ejection repelled by the banded iron cage.
Such majesty…
Yheng stared agape. And then concern began to overwhelm her wonder. She felt suddenly exposed, her old ganger’s instincts signalling a warning. Hastily, she turned and was about to attempt to retrace her steps when she saw the doorway sealing behind her. For an insane moment, she thought about trying to slide sideways through the narrowing slit but quickly realised she would be crushed. It thinned to a crack and then disappeared entirely, so she rushed back into the chamber. An archway in the far wall looked like a way out, though she could scarcely see it through the radiance of the caged star.
She was making for the archway when Yheng realised she was not alone.
Stepping in front of the light, a bulky silhouette was revealed. Ragged black sackcloth clung to it, partly concealing a mechanised frame. Initially hunched, when it straightened to its full height it towered over her. A triumvirate of red, glowing lenses like eyes lit in its hooded face.
The Fourth. The Iron Magus.
Yheng had not been led here at all, she had been herded.
They had come for her at last, her fate arriving in black robes and skin of metal. Far from what was promised in the obsidian mirror, her end was to be death at the hands of a monster.
As the black cloth parted, Yheng saw something more akin to an arachnid than a human. Six limbs extended from a narrow torso and abdomen, all of it polished chrome and tarnished gold. The thing had blades for fingers, and several of those had been substituted for drills or saws or dulcetly burning torches: the Iron Magus was a torturous horror. The only visible flesh was a face, revealed as it was turned towards the caged star. A woman’s face, albeit cybernetically enhanced. Her eyes were in triplicate and bionic, but her cheekbones, and the shape of her mouth, were all distinctly female.
Yheng could not decide whether it made this confrontation better or worse.
‘Did you think,’ began the Iron Magus, her voice metallically resonant though she had no obvious oral amplifier or augmetic, ‘you were the only one who could manipulate the fortress? It is a machine – esoteric and arcane, but still a machine.’
‘I don’t know how I am changing the fortress. It just happened,’ she snapped, defiant.
‘Nothing “just happens”, Tharador Yheng. There is always cause… and effect.’ She raised one of her insectile limbs and opened her palm as if measuring an invisible weight in her hand, and then did the same again on the opposite side.
‘I see…’ said Yheng, eyes searching for an escape. ‘What even is this place?’ she asked, stalling for time. For a plan. For something that could improve her odds of survival. She gripped the handle of the knife tucked into her belt. She didn’t think she could win in a fight, but then again a cornered animal will still bare its teeth.
‘An energy core, a beating heart,’ offered the Magus. ‘It depends on what you believe.’ She advanced, slowly but deliberately, towards Yheng. ‘I have been siphoning it. A not inconsiderable task.’ She cast a glance to the periphery of the room and Yheng followed, the light hinting at blackened remains – skeletons of other magi and their servitors.
‘And what does any of that have to do with me?’
‘Nothing. It was more efficient to do this here.’
One of the limbs slid from the folds of her robes, its blade fingers shining in the reflected light of the caged star.
‘Why kill me?’ Yheng asked. ‘I am nothing to you, just a minor acolyte.’
‘An untruth,’ the Iron Magus replied coldly. ‘Even you do not believe that. Your heart, the temperature of your skin, your breathing – it all betrays you, Tharador Yheng. I am more machine now than flesh, and I can detect your lies rudimentarily enough. But I will answer your question because I find it edifying to do so. Knowledge, however profane and proscribed, should always be shared. The decaying adepts of my former Order would not agree, but then again my erstwhile masters are all dead, so that hypothesis has reached a terminus.
‘Here is the empirical truth, the abstract of my theory. You are far from nothing, Tharador Yheng.’
Each time the Iron Magus used her name, Yheng clenched her teeth. It was as if by reiterating it, she had some power over her. Perhaps she did.
Yheng was growing tired of that.
‘Whilst there are those amongst this… covenant that divine through the whispers of the Neverborn, or haruspicy, or the casting of sorcery, I place my faith in mathematics, in calculus and probability. There is a pattern to the universe, laid bare for those with the intellect to perceive it. Secrets are revealed through its non-euclidian geometries. Aberrant sciences abound, thanatology, the non-linear disciplines of etherology and immaterialogy. It all led to you. Every logical and non-logical pathway, every scientific skein and numerological calculation.
‘You are a critical variable, Tharador Yheng. A flaw in the chemical composition, one whose inherent volatility will denature the experiment. One that must be eliminated in order for the predicted outcome to be realised.’
Fell energies coursed across her bladed fingers.
‘If it is any consolation,’ uttered the Iron Magus in a voice of cold iron, ‘it will be quick.’
Yheng backed away, fastening her grip on the knife.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
hellspawned
the burned spire
the threefold wytch
The cultists had died by the knife, to ritual slaughter. It had taken time. After the killing came the dismemberment, the carving of sigils into flesh, the speaking of dark rites in forgotten tongues. They had no priest, but Clortho proved an able substitute. Herek had never liked the occultist warlord but could not deny his worth in that moment.
The others had raised up crosses made of bone, and of iron wrenched from the desert. They had staked the cultists up and bled them dry, Clortho’s profane rhetoric spoken over every drop.
Then they had prepared, blades drawn, for what would come next.
Herek was at their head, his axe held in both hands. He did not have long to wait. After the last of the cultists had been anointed and drained, the skin of reality stretched and broke. Like malformed calves ripping free of their amniotic caul, the hellspawn poured through. Capering, leaping, lunging, whirling, they fell upon the renegades with savage abandon. A deluge of horn and tooth and claw.
It overwhelmed them immediately.
‘The tower!’ cried Herek, a great swing of Harrower cutting through three blood-skinned devils intent on his death. ‘It is our only chance!’
Gunfire thundered across the plain as every Red Corsair fought for their lives, their very souls. Those who had run dry of ammunition drew blades or bludgeons. Old instincts never truly faded, and the warriors banded together in a defensive formation with Herek at their leading edge. He drew most of the hellspawn’s ire, the creatures wild with rage and madness. Rathek stayed at his side, some of the swordsman’s old frenzy reawakening, his battle plate swiftly slathered in black ichor. Kurgos stood at Herek’s other shoulder, fending off the hordes with swathes of burning promethium from a hand flamer even as he carried the insensate soul mariner like a rag doll.
No mortal foe could have withstood the punishment meted out by the Red Corsairs, but the daemonkind never balked, relentless as a plague.
‘A shame about Zareth,’ said Kurgos, his manner eerily calm. ‘We shall miss his sword.’
Herek hacked apart an ursine beast, only it was skinless and riddled with spines.
‘We shall miss them all, Vassago,’ he said sadly, and stepped over the bifurcated corpse to turn and try to rally his warriors.
Several of the Red Corsairs had fallen during the desperate charge towards the tower. Scarcely thirty remained and the cultists had been winnowed to a fraction of their original number. He saw a handful of the mortals turning, possessed by the very creatures they fought against, their bodies twisting and mutating. Shells of chitin, tentacles, a gaping maw of nubby teeth in one cultist’s chest. Horrors unbound. Kurgos burned them as his brethren put the wretches to bolt and blade.
It wasn’t enough.
The charge had slowed, mired by the sheer mass of daemonkind. Barely incarnate, the creatures were far from the monstrous terrors the renegades had fought aboard the Ruin, but they were grossly outnumbered. Skerrin disappeared under a sudden swell, his chainsword still cutting as the hellspawn dragged him down. Then Grejik soon after, impaled by a dozen horns and claws. His bolter rang dry long before his roars of defiance ended.
Reikor, Urgon, Kravix… all gone.
‘Witness us, oh gods of Ruin!’ bellowed Clortho, laying about with his battered mace, bleeding from a dozen wounds. Blood and ichor caked his face, giving him a savage aspect.
A great tide rose up at his beseeching, an amalgam of hellspawn gathering in a chittering, writhing arc, skin gleaming like wet blood. It dwarfed the Red Corsairs, casting the beleaguered warband in looming shadow. The other daemonkind retreated into it, joining it like a cursed sea recoiling from the shore.
For a moment there was cessation, a wake of renegade corpses revealed like flotsam amidst spilled blood and shell casings.
Herek gripped Harrower in both hands and planted his feet. A few of his men fired ineffectually into the tidal swell.
‘Brace yourselves!’ he roared.
And the wave of hell-born flesh crashed down.
He cut upwards into it, carving a path through flesh and bone and matter. Gore painted his armour, his face, but Herek refused to be drowned. He reaped, lopping heads and limbs, killing any unnatural thing that drew close. He pulled himself from the morass, the stinking warp-spun filth that lingered in this liminal place, this other, and through the nightmare he trudged towards the tower.
And then, appallingly sudden, it was over.
Sagging to one knee, Herek leaned hard on his axe haft. She purred, sated on daemonflesh, the hellspawn gradually dissolving at last. Emerging into his eyeline, he saw Rathek on his feet and cleaning his swords. Kurgos was behind him, but as soon as he caught Herek’s eye and saw his lord was hale, he went hunting for the injured and the dead. His pickings would be plentiful.
The effort to rise pulled his face into a grimace as Herek eyed his prize. The burned spire.
He made for it at once.
A leather flap of skin barred the entrance of a tower of grey stone, ravaged by fire. Wooden beams jutted like rib bones in a broken roof. Runes marked every stone and hurt his eyes to look upon for too long.
Herek pulled aside the door and went inside.
It was dark at first, and larger than it had appeared on the outside. He soon found himself in a nonagonal chamber lit by black candles. The wax had melted almost down to the nub, the flaming wicks flickering like whispers.
And at the back of the room, sitting cross-legged on a foul-smelling nest of hair, sat a woman. Her lustrous skin almost shone, vibrant pink changing to azure depending on the angle of the light. In the eaves above, darkness held, despite the open roof. She wore gold – around her neck, the torcs on her arms, the rings on her overlong fingers and toes, the simple circlet encasing her head. A diaphanous robe stitched with celestial symbols and arcane sigils covered much of her body, as well as the hood over her head, but left her arms and her legs from the knees down bare.
Behind her was a heavy red curtain. In front, a fan of fox-edged, faded tarot cards.
‘Are you a fate reader?’ asked Herek, stepping into the candle-light.
Only then, as he came closer and the woman pulled back her hood with a smile, did he realise she had not one face but three. She nodded, beckoning for Herek to sit. He leaned Harrower up against the wall and crouched before her.
‘What is this place?’
The witch gathered up the cards, her second aspect watching him even as the first shuffled the deck. She fanned the cards again, her long fingers gesturing over them invitingly. Then she waited, pensive, that hollow smile like a curved blade in her mouth.
Something rustled the curtain, and Herek was about to look up when the witch gestured again. Another invitation.
He chose a card and the witch turned it over, delicate, almost lascivious. Herek felt his stomach churn and the curtain rustled again, as if stirred by a breeze, but the air was utterly still.
She stopped then. ‘To what end, master?’ Yheng forced the last word; it felt unnatural on her tongue all of a sudden.
Tenebrus stopped and turned again, a wraith clothed in ragged black. His eyes glinted like opals. She recognised the barely restrained anger in them.
‘To whatever end the gods will for you. Their eye is on you, Yheng. I might not know what you learned in the black chamber, but I know that much.’
‘Is that truly what you want, master? To fulfil my destiny as fate and the gods will? You almost killed me…’
‘Revelation seldom comes without pain.’
‘And I do not trust you.’ She stood her ground. ‘I will not leave with you.’
Tenebrus’ voice grew cold. ‘What?’
‘I refuse,’ said Yheng, shaking with rage. ‘I am no pawn, Tenebrus.’
‘Fool,’ he said with cool disdain. ‘We are all pawns, Yheng! Have you learned nothing? Am I such a poor teacher that you haven’t even grasped this truth? I have strived always to stave off ruin and damnation, to be a servant, not a slave. These are the lessons I impart to you, Yheng.’
‘What did you see during the ritual?’ Yheng demanded, eyes narrowed. He had not tried to kill her yet, which meant either he didn’t want to or he couldn’t. She drew confidence from that. ‘You saw my fate, didn’t you? Or at least a part of it, enough to realise I am important. Did it scare you, to see what I will become?’
Tenebrus chuckled mirthlessly. ‘And what have you seen, my acolyte? Do not be so easily seduced by the Mother of Lies, the Father of Mendacity. They are cunning, Yheng. Augury is old, older than I dare imagine. They know what their would-be supplicants crave. With you it was easy. You want power. You think you already possess it. You do, but you are a poor mistress of it. That is what I see.’ He drew up to her, crossing the distance between them as quick as shadow itself. ‘I am powerful, Yheng, but I cannot survive alone. I need an ally.’
She scowled. ‘You mean a sacrifice.’
Tenebrus closed on her, tall as the night, an all-encompassing darkness. She had to crane her neck just to meet his gaze, and felt her early boldness challenged before it.
‘Had I wished it,’ uttered the sorcerer in a dread rasp, ‘I would have sent your soul to the ravenous children of the gods. If I wished it, I could do it now.’
Yheng reached behind her back for the knife, feeling its grip…
‘You think you have power enough,’ said Tenebrus, shrinking back to the robed sorcerer he was. ‘Show me, then.’ He gestured to the fortress, to the mirrored black of its walls. ‘Make it bend to your will.’ He took a calming breath. ‘If you can.’
Yheng could not. At least not yet.
And then she heard them, scuttling through the corridors, through the nooks and alcoves, across ceilings and barren chambers. Yheng’s eyes widened as a softly glowing pinprick of red light lit in the distant darkness ahead of her. One became two, became ten, became many.
‘Master…’ she breathed.
Tenebrus whirled to face the horde as it advanced towards them on pincered limbs.
A bridge spanned the next chamber, as wide as a starship’s embarkation deck. Tenebrus hurried onto it, urging Yheng to follow. Energised blades burned in the shadows just beyond the far side of the bridge, revealing the mechanised killers. They slowed as soon as they realised they had been seen, a machine herd letting its prey feel fear at its approach.
Run… they said, a unison of modulated voices matching Yheng’s own.
She balked, fear stiffening her limbs. They crept onto the bridge with an eerie syncopated motion. The frosty glow of the giant lumen orb above gave them the appearance of animated ice.
Flee…
Tenebrus faced them alone… until his creatures drifted up from the darkness beneath the bridge, cloaked in shadows with knives bared.
Sensing a threat, the machine killers spurred into blistering movement and the creatures responded in kind as both mechanised horrors clashed. They tore and stabbed at each other, without fear or restraint. Though the sorcerer’s creatures were larger and stronger, the Mechanicum killers fought as a unit, ganging up on their larger foes and making their superior numbers count.
Tenebrus waded into the throng, unleashing arcing shadow lightning from his fingertips. The lumen orb extinguished at his presence and the fight became one of staccato flashes, framing the violence. The outcome was uncertain, the victor impossible to predict.
Waiting at the edge of the bridge, fearful to step upon it and into the razored darkness, Yheng heard the voice again. Her voice, and yet not her voice.
Flee…
She fled.
Tenebrus bellowed after her but could not follow. ‘Yheng!’
The fortress opened up before her, reacting to her needs, her will. She plunged on through stygian darkness, on and on, deeper and deeper, the mechanisms of the fortress shifting around her. Until, after a maddened scramble through myriad long black corridors, Yheng found herself in a massive chamber. She staggered over the threshold, gasping for breath.
Stark light emanated from a vaulted ceiling. Shivering in the penumbral shadow, Yheng looked up to see a caged star. It had been shackled utterly. Studded iron banded it, a pair of concentric circles slowly turning around a flickering sphere of white fire. Six thick iron chains fastened it to the floor.
Yheng could feel the fortress. Pain. Anger.
Had it led her here? Why?
The star shuddered, every lashed coronal ejection repelled by the banded iron cage.
Such majesty…
Yheng stared agape. And then concern began to overwhelm her wonder. She felt suddenly exposed, her old ganger’s instincts signalling a warning. Hastily, she turned and was about to attempt to retrace her steps when she saw the doorway sealing behind her. For an insane moment, she thought about trying to slide sideways through the narrowing slit but quickly realised she would be crushed. It thinned to a crack and then disappeared entirely, so she rushed back into the chamber. An archway in the far wall looked like a way out, though she could scarcely see it through the radiance of the caged star.
She was making for the archway when Yheng realised she was not alone.
Stepping in front of the light, a bulky silhouette was revealed. Ragged black sackcloth clung to it, partly concealing a mechanised frame. Initially hunched, when it straightened to its full height it towered over her. A triumvirate of red, glowing lenses like eyes lit in its hooded face.
The Fourth. The Iron Magus.
Yheng had not been led here at all, she had been herded.
They had come for her at last, her fate arriving in black robes and skin of metal. Far from what was promised in the obsidian mirror, her end was to be death at the hands of a monster.
As the black cloth parted, Yheng saw something more akin to an arachnid than a human. Six limbs extended from a narrow torso and abdomen, all of it polished chrome and tarnished gold. The thing had blades for fingers, and several of those had been substituted for drills or saws or dulcetly burning torches: the Iron Magus was a torturous horror. The only visible flesh was a face, revealed as it was turned towards the caged star. A woman’s face, albeit cybernetically enhanced. Her eyes were in triplicate and bionic, but her cheekbones, and the shape of her mouth, were all distinctly female.
Yheng could not decide whether it made this confrontation better or worse.
‘Did you think,’ began the Iron Magus, her voice metallically resonant though she had no obvious oral amplifier or augmetic, ‘you were the only one who could manipulate the fortress? It is a machine – esoteric and arcane, but still a machine.’
‘I don’t know how I am changing the fortress. It just happened,’ she snapped, defiant.
‘Nothing “just happens”, Tharador Yheng. There is always cause… and effect.’ She raised one of her insectile limbs and opened her palm as if measuring an invisible weight in her hand, and then did the same again on the opposite side.
‘I see…’ said Yheng, eyes searching for an escape. ‘What even is this place?’ she asked, stalling for time. For a plan. For something that could improve her odds of survival. She gripped the handle of the knife tucked into her belt. She didn’t think she could win in a fight, but then again a cornered animal will still bare its teeth.
‘An energy core, a beating heart,’ offered the Magus. ‘It depends on what you believe.’ She advanced, slowly but deliberately, towards Yheng. ‘I have been siphoning it. A not inconsiderable task.’ She cast a glance to the periphery of the room and Yheng followed, the light hinting at blackened remains – skeletons of other magi and their servitors.
‘And what does any of that have to do with me?’
‘Nothing. It was more efficient to do this here.’
One of the limbs slid from the folds of her robes, its blade fingers shining in the reflected light of the caged star.
‘Why kill me?’ Yheng asked. ‘I am nothing to you, just a minor acolyte.’
‘An untruth,’ the Iron Magus replied coldly. ‘Even you do not believe that. Your heart, the temperature of your skin, your breathing – it all betrays you, Tharador Yheng. I am more machine now than flesh, and I can detect your lies rudimentarily enough. But I will answer your question because I find it edifying to do so. Knowledge, however profane and proscribed, should always be shared. The decaying adepts of my former Order would not agree, but then again my erstwhile masters are all dead, so that hypothesis has reached a terminus.
‘Here is the empirical truth, the abstract of my theory. You are far from nothing, Tharador Yheng.’
Each time the Iron Magus used her name, Yheng clenched her teeth. It was as if by reiterating it, she had some power over her. Perhaps she did.
Yheng was growing tired of that.
‘Whilst there are those amongst this… covenant that divine through the whispers of the Neverborn, or haruspicy, or the casting of sorcery, I place my faith in mathematics, in calculus and probability. There is a pattern to the universe, laid bare for those with the intellect to perceive it. Secrets are revealed through its non-euclidian geometries. Aberrant sciences abound, thanatology, the non-linear disciplines of etherology and immaterialogy. It all led to you. Every logical and non-logical pathway, every scientific skein and numerological calculation.
‘You are a critical variable, Tharador Yheng. A flaw in the chemical composition, one whose inherent volatility will denature the experiment. One that must be eliminated in order for the predicted outcome to be realised.’
Fell energies coursed across her bladed fingers.
‘If it is any consolation,’ uttered the Iron Magus in a voice of cold iron, ‘it will be quick.’
Yheng backed away, fastening her grip on the knife.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
hellspawned
the burned spire
the threefold wytch
The cultists had died by the knife, to ritual slaughter. It had taken time. After the killing came the dismemberment, the carving of sigils into flesh, the speaking of dark rites in forgotten tongues. They had no priest, but Clortho proved an able substitute. Herek had never liked the occultist warlord but could not deny his worth in that moment.
The others had raised up crosses made of bone, and of iron wrenched from the desert. They had staked the cultists up and bled them dry, Clortho’s profane rhetoric spoken over every drop.
Then they had prepared, blades drawn, for what would come next.
Herek was at their head, his axe held in both hands. He did not have long to wait. After the last of the cultists had been anointed and drained, the skin of reality stretched and broke. Like malformed calves ripping free of their amniotic caul, the hellspawn poured through. Capering, leaping, lunging, whirling, they fell upon the renegades with savage abandon. A deluge of horn and tooth and claw.
It overwhelmed them immediately.
‘The tower!’ cried Herek, a great swing of Harrower cutting through three blood-skinned devils intent on his death. ‘It is our only chance!’
Gunfire thundered across the plain as every Red Corsair fought for their lives, their very souls. Those who had run dry of ammunition drew blades or bludgeons. Old instincts never truly faded, and the warriors banded together in a defensive formation with Herek at their leading edge. He drew most of the hellspawn’s ire, the creatures wild with rage and madness. Rathek stayed at his side, some of the swordsman’s old frenzy reawakening, his battle plate swiftly slathered in black ichor. Kurgos stood at Herek’s other shoulder, fending off the hordes with swathes of burning promethium from a hand flamer even as he carried the insensate soul mariner like a rag doll.
No mortal foe could have withstood the punishment meted out by the Red Corsairs, but the daemonkind never balked, relentless as a plague.
‘A shame about Zareth,’ said Kurgos, his manner eerily calm. ‘We shall miss his sword.’
Herek hacked apart an ursine beast, only it was skinless and riddled with spines.
‘We shall miss them all, Vassago,’ he said sadly, and stepped over the bifurcated corpse to turn and try to rally his warriors.
Several of the Red Corsairs had fallen during the desperate charge towards the tower. Scarcely thirty remained and the cultists had been winnowed to a fraction of their original number. He saw a handful of the mortals turning, possessed by the very creatures they fought against, their bodies twisting and mutating. Shells of chitin, tentacles, a gaping maw of nubby teeth in one cultist’s chest. Horrors unbound. Kurgos burned them as his brethren put the wretches to bolt and blade.
It wasn’t enough.
The charge had slowed, mired by the sheer mass of daemonkind. Barely incarnate, the creatures were far from the monstrous terrors the renegades had fought aboard the Ruin, but they were grossly outnumbered. Skerrin disappeared under a sudden swell, his chainsword still cutting as the hellspawn dragged him down. Then Grejik soon after, impaled by a dozen horns and claws. His bolter rang dry long before his roars of defiance ended.
Reikor, Urgon, Kravix… all gone.
‘Witness us, oh gods of Ruin!’ bellowed Clortho, laying about with his battered mace, bleeding from a dozen wounds. Blood and ichor caked his face, giving him a savage aspect.
A great tide rose up at his beseeching, an amalgam of hellspawn gathering in a chittering, writhing arc, skin gleaming like wet blood. It dwarfed the Red Corsairs, casting the beleaguered warband in looming shadow. The other daemonkind retreated into it, joining it like a cursed sea recoiling from the shore.
For a moment there was cessation, a wake of renegade corpses revealed like flotsam amidst spilled blood and shell casings.
Herek gripped Harrower in both hands and planted his feet. A few of his men fired ineffectually into the tidal swell.
‘Brace yourselves!’ he roared.
And the wave of hell-born flesh crashed down.
He cut upwards into it, carving a path through flesh and bone and matter. Gore painted his armour, his face, but Herek refused to be drowned. He reaped, lopping heads and limbs, killing any unnatural thing that drew close. He pulled himself from the morass, the stinking warp-spun filth that lingered in this liminal place, this other, and through the nightmare he trudged towards the tower.
And then, appallingly sudden, it was over.
Sagging to one knee, Herek leaned hard on his axe haft. She purred, sated on daemonflesh, the hellspawn gradually dissolving at last. Emerging into his eyeline, he saw Rathek on his feet and cleaning his swords. Kurgos was behind him, but as soon as he caught Herek’s eye and saw his lord was hale, he went hunting for the injured and the dead. His pickings would be plentiful.
The effort to rise pulled his face into a grimace as Herek eyed his prize. The burned spire.
He made for it at once.
A leather flap of skin barred the entrance of a tower of grey stone, ravaged by fire. Wooden beams jutted like rib bones in a broken roof. Runes marked every stone and hurt his eyes to look upon for too long.
Herek pulled aside the door and went inside.
It was dark at first, and larger than it had appeared on the outside. He soon found himself in a nonagonal chamber lit by black candles. The wax had melted almost down to the nub, the flaming wicks flickering like whispers.
And at the back of the room, sitting cross-legged on a foul-smelling nest of hair, sat a woman. Her lustrous skin almost shone, vibrant pink changing to azure depending on the angle of the light. In the eaves above, darkness held, despite the open roof. She wore gold – around her neck, the torcs on her arms, the rings on her overlong fingers and toes, the simple circlet encasing her head. A diaphanous robe stitched with celestial symbols and arcane sigils covered much of her body, as well as the hood over her head, but left her arms and her legs from the knees down bare.
Behind her was a heavy red curtain. In front, a fan of fox-edged, faded tarot cards.
‘Are you a fate reader?’ asked Herek, stepping into the candle-light.
Only then, as he came closer and the woman pulled back her hood with a smile, did he realise she had not one face but three. She nodded, beckoning for Herek to sit. He leaned Harrower up against the wall and crouched before her.
‘What is this place?’
The witch gathered up the cards, her second aspect watching him even as the first shuffled the deck. She fanned the cards again, her long fingers gesturing over them invitingly. Then she waited, pensive, that hollow smile like a curved blade in her mouth.
Something rustled the curtain, and Herek was about to look up when the witch gestured again. Another invitation.
He chose a card and the witch turned it over, delicate, almost lascivious. Herek felt his stomach churn and the curtain rustled again, as if stirred by a breeze, but the air was utterly still.
