[Warhammer 40K] - Daemon World Read online

  Lady Charybdia spoke the sacred syllables, her voice barely above a whisper lest the power of those words bleed into the foundation and pollute the purity of the keep. As she finished, there was a grinding sound beneath her feet, and Lady Charybdia and the legionary stepped back as the stones shifted. The floor of the depression began to rise, reaching the level of the chamber’s floor and continuing to form the top of a pillar of stone. The polished curve of the pillar showed a cross-section of the stone, revealing smeared, stretched ribcages and distorted skulls ghosted into the rock.

  A section of the pillar had been hollowed out, forming a man-sized alcove where a figure was chained to the wall. The chains were tongues, cured and sewn into loops linked together, that had once spoken the words that imprisoned the occupant.

  The occupant was a daemon.

  Lady Charybdia had often had cause to witness the form of daemons. The servants of Slaanesh, formed from a portion of his magnificence and given sentience, were enthusiastic if barbaric pursuers of pleasure and were unparalleled enforcers and soldiers. But this was not like those. The Prince of Pleasure had never looked upon this creature with lust or admiration. This creature was utterly inimical to Lady Charybdia and everything she believed in, for it hated all life and pleasure, and would rather swamp the galaxy with blood than contemplate one moment of decadence.

  It was humanoid, after a fashion. It had too few fingers and its torso was lumpenly muscled, lopsided and hunched. Into its dark grey flesh had been hammered chunks of machinery, none of which seemed to serve a purpose, all still oscillating and pumping into the places where the stained metal met its bleeding skin.

  Its face was grotesque, not like Lady Charybdia’s own subtly hypnotic alterations but like a brutish animal. There were far too many eyes. The mouth was a fist of muscle covering thick yellow fangs. There was no nose, and horns sprouted from the daemon’s forehead, temples and chin. On its massively muscled chest was a deep, charred brand, the crude skull-like symbol of the Blood God burned into the weeping skin.

  Lady Charybdia would not let the name of the Blood God be spoken on her planet. Where Slaanesh valued life and the many entertainments that could be derived from it, the Blood God embraced only death. Its worshippers were blood-crazed thugs, and its daemons single-minded machines of destruction.

  Once, in one of the many phases of Torvendis’s history, the Blood God’s daemon prince had held brief, insane dominion over the world. Ss’ll Sh’Karr was the least blasphemous of its many names. Its word had commanded vast legions of daemons modelled after its own hideous image, legions that were eventually crushed by the next power to take a foothold on Torvendis. Lady Charybdia knew this because she had herself seen the rock face where the remains of that battle festered, and kept the malformed fossilised skull of Ss’ll Sh’Karr deep within Charybdia Keep. The Blood God had had its time on Torvendis, and the captive daemon was the last vestige of its presence here.

  Lady Charybdia very rarely came down to consult her captive. But there was something wrong with her world—she felt it in the sense-echoes of anticipation and approaching despair that tinted the clouds and the sky. Her servers and scouts had found nothing of the visitor whose ship still lay in the swampland beyond the mountains. Lady Charybdia only knew that it had arrived in a pre-Heresy craft such as was used by raiders and renegades throughout the Maelstrom. She did not know who or what had visited Torvendis, or why. Such ignorance was entirely at odds with the way she wished to rule, and it displeased her. Displeasure had to be stamped out.

  And there was more. It was as if the whole planet was seething, just too quiet for her to hear, thrumming with the weight of events to come.

  The daemon looked at Lady Charybdia with most of its eyes. The others whirled madly as it snarled and slavered.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked sweetly.

  The daemon growled, dog-like.

  “Good.” At her gesture, the legionary readied his spear. “You will speak, spawn of ugliness. You know what I can do to you if you refuse.”

  The daemon shuddered, trying to tear the spellbound chains from the stone. It had struggled like this for aeons, ever since it had been unwittingly summoned from the rock face by the hapless slave-miners, and hunted down by the Chaos Marines of the Violators. Lady Charybdia had long since come to the conclusion that it was too stupid to give up, and had to be tormented into obedience like an animal.

  “Bleed it,” she commanded, and the legionary plunged the blade of the spear deep into the daemon’s abdomen.

  It screamed, and Lady Charybdia winced to hear such discord in her domain. The thick red blood flowed out over the withdrawing blade and spattered down onto the stone floor, hissing as the boiling liquid touched the cold surface. The daemon shook as its beloved life-blood flowed out, and with it it’s very soul. The prospect of exsanguination held a sort of cold horror for the Blood God’s followers and servants, as if the blood loss somehow made them unworthy for the favour of their god, who despised victims above all else.

  “I can make it stop,” said Lady Charybdia levelly, as the daemon watched its blood pooling uselessly on the floor. “Or I can make it worse. Or I can make it slow. We will speak, Butcher God’s slave. You will talk.”

  “Speak what you will,” growled the daemon, its voice low and dark. “I will tell you only lies.”

  Lady Charybdia smiled. She had spoken often with daemons, and ones far wilier than this. “Why is my world so disturbed?” she asked. “Was there something planted here long ago that is coming to fruition?”

  The daemon laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. “Your world has a bitch-queen too scared to wage war. No wonder it shakes.”

  “Who has arrived here? Why is he unannounced?”

  “He has come to kill you.”

  A straight answer. Something rare. Daemons lied, but it was dangerous to just assume the opposite of what they said was true. There was always some truth in what they said, it just had to be sifted from the lies.

  “Why?”

  “It would be quicker to say why not.”

  Lady Charybdia tapped a foot and the legionary thrust the spearpoint back into the wound, twisting the blade and opening a long tear in the skin. The daemon groaned as a fresh gout of blood spurted onto the stones.

  “I do not wish to be displeased, daemon.”

  “I do not know the answers,” spat the daemon. “I was young when this world was old. Your visitor spits on your god and mine, the Maelstrom did not give birth to this planet, and the things you see had begun to fester before Sh’Karr walked on these lands. I know no more. Rot your tongue, whore, you can demand no more of me.”

  Lady Charybdia was bored with the interrogation. The daemon had come perilously close to admitting weakness—now its mind would seize up and it would retreat behind insults and threats.

  She turned on a heel, with just a backwards glance towards the legionary. “Leave it for an hour,” she commanded. “Then send it back down.”

  The legionary knelt in supplication. Lady Charybdia headed back along the corridor with its secret eldar skulls. She was displeased, for reasons she could not quite fathom. She would drown out her annoyance with the pure, scouring pleasures of the keep.

  The weather had turned in the Canis Mountains. Instead of raw cold there was damp, clinging cold, a fine mist that hung everywhere and soaked through the leathers and lupine skins. Steam rose off the massive scaly pack-beasts as they hauled the wagons of the caravan through sheer-sided valleys westwards. Golgoth’s warriors spat and swore, looking grimly at the grey-white overcast sky and grumbling about storms rolling in. The caravan was passing through the western edge of the Canis Mountains where the path ran through deep valleys winding their way towards the foothills.

  Banks of mist clung to the mountains peaks and rolled down their slopes. Sometimes the fingers of mist reached into the valleys and the caravan creaked its way in near-blindness, other times it formed a slab like a ceiling just above th
em. It was as if the world had grown smaller, the endless wild darkness of the Maelstrom walled off by the mists.

  “What can the mists give you?” Kron was asking.

  Golgoth looked at the old man. Kron had refused to take a place on one of the wagons, along with the wounded, and walked alongside them as sure-footedly as any of the warriors.

  “They can blind us and freeze us,” said Golgoth. “They give us nothing.”

  Kron smiled. “Think, Golgoth. There is nothing on this world you cannot use. I have explained this to you already. You have a rare thing, an imagination, and you can use it to turn the sights and sounds and feelings you have experienced into something tangible. This is the essence of sorcery. This is the way Chaos interacts with this world, though very few can take advantage of it. What do you feel here?”

  “The cold.”

  “Cold what?”

  “Everything. The stones, the air. Me.”

  “You. Can you become that cold, Golgoth? Not just in body. In soul. Cold-blooded. Cold-hearted.”

  Golgoth barked a short laugh. “Do not talk to me of cruelty, old man. I have skinned men alive.”

  “Not cruelty. Control.”

  Golgoth, who had killed men and beasts with his bare hands and not been able to stop, suddenly paid attention. “Control? I wish you had spoken to me of this earlier.”

  “It is the hardest lesson to learn. I had to make sure you were ready.”

  The mists ahead rolled off the last, fractured channel of the Snake’s Throat. Beyond, the way would be crude and treacherous. Not bad enough to need a sorcerer, but still hostile. The mists drew back over the peaks like lips over teeth, and revealed a sight that Golgoth, though he had heard of it, had never seen with his own eyes before.

  “Arrowhead Peak,” he breathed, his breath shortened by the suddenness with which the place had emerged from the mist.

  The city of Arrowhead Peak had been carved out of the rock, a clutch of mountains hollowed and hacked until arches and galleries stabbed from every face. There were massive pillared halls and endless winding lanes running through the hearts of those mountains, plains under stone skies where whole armies could muster and gates that yawned back against the pale stone. Bridges connected the peaks like threads stretched over the dizzying chasms.

  Arrowhead Peak was a sharp and deadly-looking place, with every tower topped with a tall spike from which banners once flew, and each pinnacle ringed by defences from which arrows could rain.

  And rain they had, in the days when Arrowhead Peak was an inhabited place. Warriors from all across the mountains had vyed for a foothold there, where the chieftains of the tribes each held their court. Treaties were made and broken. Sometimes, blood flowed in the streets when war between tribes erupted, but this served only to strengthen other alliances. The city had been the lynchpin of the mountain peoples, a place where they could match one another’s strengths and turn those strengths into real power. Back then, the tribes had marched as one when a large enough threat faced them all, with the stark white banner of Arrowhead Peak flying alongside those of the tribes. The Emerald Sword had held more than its share of power, and Arrowhead Peak had represented its best chance of taking over the dominion of the mountains.

  As Golgoth watched, a flock of harpies alighted from one of the highest peaks, a grainy black cloud boiling from the windows of some ancient palace. There was nothing living now in Arrowhead Peak that did not live off carrion. Sometimes men of the tribes ventured up into the deserted city to bring back some memento of the days when the Canis Mountains were nearly welded into one of Torvendis’s most powerful realms. Sometimes such men even returned, almost always mad, almost always alone.

  Lady Charybdia had arrived a long time before Golgoth had been born. No one really knew the whole history of the degenerate princess’s rise to power, but it was certain that Arrowhead Peak had been one of her first conquests.

  She had war engines that could fly, and vomit whole legions of silk-clad, tattooed fanatics into the caverns of Arrowhead Peak. She had treaties with packs of daemons, and huge flying monsters were bound to her words. They even said there were Space Marines, Traitor Legion warriors a head taller than the mightiest Touched, with massive gore-stained armour and weapons that spat fire.

  It had been slaughter. Lady Charybdia had an endless supply of legionaries and half-naked cultists, ferried in by skyships and lashed forward up the steep mountain slopes. The mountain warriors were penned in, with all their fighters committed and no source of help. Cultists died by the thousands and legionaries by the hundred, but there were always more. The Emerald Sword had held their great gathering hall for weeks, defending barricades of fallen pillars against waves of madmen who fought with their hands and teeth. But, like all the rest, they had fallen.

  Then the legions had left, as if the capture of Arrowhead Peak was just a passing fancy for Lady Charybdia. She left the place an eyrie for ravenous harpies, and seeded it with dark tales that kept the tribes away. She had not assaulted Arrowhead Peak in the name of power—she had done it out of sheer spite, and then abandoned it when it gave her no more sport.

  Perhaps, thought Golgoth sometimes, the mountain tribes had been weakening anyway, and one day would have fallen. But Lady Charybdia was someone to blame, and in this cold and unforgiving place, that was valuable indeed.

  “When Grik is dead, I will take back Arrowhead Peak,” said Golgoth.

  “Lady Charybdia cursed the place,” said Kron. “It was she who branded the walls with daemons. They say a day in those halls will drive a man mad.”

  “There must be a way,” said Golgoth, glancing at the old man and noting again how tall the old man was beneath his robes.

  “So the stories tell us,” replied Kron. “Concentrate for the moment on what you must do. Grik has killed more pretenders than we will ever know of. He will have more than one sorcerer and a handful of carrion beasts to defend him. Remember that control, Golgoth, because without it the strength you have will be worse than nothing. It will get you killed.”

  “Grik is just a man.”

  “No one on Torvendis is just a man. Listen, Golgoth. Learn. And never lose focus. The next lessons will be the hardest, because you will not want to learn them.”

  The mists were peeling back from the slick, broken walls of the Snake’s Throat. The beasts lowed and lumbered a little quicker as the view ahead opened up. Golgoth could see the place where the mountains rolled into the foothills, where the bladed peaks gave way to rolling foothills. In the distance, the jagged profile of the last peaks loomed pale like smoke and the foothills were ghosts just visible clinging to the horizon. From here there would be outposts and sentries, patrols of young tribesmen creeping through the shadows to blood themselves on wanderers. Grik’s eyes would be everywhere, and it would take discipline to get through without being discovered.

  Lonn sat on top of the front wagon, his Truesight scanning the rocks. Tarn was beside him, keeping his own watch with mortal, but experienced, eyes. The warriors, with Hath at the front, spread out as the ground roughened and the smooth trail was replaced by sharp, hacked channels and steps in the rock.

  The hollow bones of Arrowhead Peak drifted past them as the caravan marched on, harpies flocking around huge windows like eye sockets, bleached battlements like teeth.

  Torvendis was many things—not least, it was whatever its rulers made it. Lady Charybdia desired an immense altar to Slaanesh, a whole planet sanctified and corrupted to serve as holy ground for the Prince of Pleasure. Though she had done much, founding the city and using the resources of the planet itself to sate the pleasure-hunger and so praise her god, Lady Charybdia still had to extend a concrete influence over Torvendis as a whole. The mountains and the shattered islands that flanked her domain, and the lands to the south of desert and jungle and darkness, were beyond her direct control. The seething, swampy land beyond the mountains was further still from her rule.

  Gradually, though, she was
extending her power. The city itself crept outwards, growing from the ground or being hacked from the earth by peasants newly converted to the worship of Slaanesh. And elsewhere, temples of Slaanesh were built, to act as focal points for new followers. They also formed a kind of warning system for the city: when forces were massing against Lady Charybdia, they would hit the scattered temples first.

  Yrvo knew this, and welcomed it. To die for the Prince! Not just to experience the ultimate thrill of violent death, but to do so at the will of the Lady, and help her eternal worship of Slaanesh! Yrvo almost wished some enemy horde would come pouring over the slick, rocky landscape towards his remote temple, just so he could feel their blades piercing his skin and help him reach the limits of his senses. To die here on the wet rocks and breathe his last of the salty coastal air—that would be an experience worth the life that preceded it.

  But there was much to do in the meantime. Here, they were far away from most settlements and everything had to be done by the acolytes themselves. All around was slick, flattened dark grey stone, with the northern walls still many kilometres southwards and the harsh, barbarian-plagued seas to the west and north. Eastwards there was only the Canis Mountains, like a barrier at the edge of the habitable world. Yrvo’s temple was as remote as they came, and he was proud—the word of Slaanesh had been brought to the furthest reaches of the planet.

  The temple was delicate, and always needed maintenance. It was in a slight depression surrounded by a ridge of stone, like a scar, but the weather still took its toll on the structure. The body of the temple was a square of iron pillars which curved over to form a roof, like a cage a hundred metres on each side. Chains festooned with hooks hung down to shoulder height from the bars overhead, every link covered in tiny metal thorns and blades. Pennants and banners of every colour and design were everywhere, tied to the pillars and flying in the sharp wind that coursed right through the temple. When the wind was stronger the chains would make a sound like a choir singing, and spiked links would rain down to lie like caltrops on the rock floor.