Warhammer 40,000 - [Weekender 02] Read online

  Rothyogg’s mercenary band marched back from the far north—the War of the Bitter Lotus had been hard-fought, and the Lass’ar were weary yet victorious. They had crushed the enemies of their wealthy master, and Rothyogg now dreamed of gold and swiving; of a summer spent and a winter earned.

  But the land was parched. The rice-fields were dry, and the yak herds had moved on in search of better grazing. With their rations dwindling on the long, hot march, the ogres took what they could from the peasants that they passed, citing the glory of the Grand Imperial Army and claiming the spoils of war even out on the peaceful steppes.

  When finally they came upon their old encampment, no cook-fires burned and the corrals were empty—not a single man, ogre or beast remained, save for the rangy form of Groth who stood wrapped in a tattered Cathayan robe against the dusty wind. He watched the returning warriors as they stomped down the hillside, their anger rising at the realisation that the Emperor’s armourers and paymasters had abandoned them. Rothyogg gritted his teeth, knowing that his son was somehow to blame.

  Groth would not speak with his father’s lieutenants when they seized him. He would not be drawn or baited by their questions as to what had happened. He would only look on ruefully as they tore down the ragged tents and grubbed around in the dirt looking for the gold that they were owed.

  The old chieftain settled himself on an overturned cart and unslung his mighty bronze battle mace, planting it in the dry earth and resting his hands upon its head. He fixed Groth with a weary glare.

  “Come, young pup, and speak. Tell all who will hear your foolishness the reason that we stand here empty-handed, though we be the heroes of an empire.”

  Still Groth did not speak.

  The other warriors clamoured on all sides. They edged forwards, yearning to give voice to their anger, but none wishing to be the first to speak against the flesh and blood of their chieftain. Rothyogg gestured around to them.

  “Such fine and loyal ogres as these,” he growled, “will you not tell them why they must now return to the tribe after months of campaigning, with nothing to show for it? The great Xen Huong himself bought our loyalty for his wars, but you send his chubby treasurers away and wipe the tally clean before we can collect?”

  The chieftain narrowed his eyes.

  “By what right, young pup? By what right do you speak for the tribe?”

  When Groth finally spoke his voice was low and timid, and Rothyogg strained to hear the words.

  “Speak up!” he bellowed. “My ears still ring from the din of battle.”

  Groth repeated himself. “I did not send them away. They left because they fear us.”

  Rothyogg snorted. “Aye, they’d do well to—we’re the biggest ogres of the plains! We’ll crack their skulls if they don’t pay up!”

  Several of his mercenary champions chuckled and slapped one another on the back, pleased at their own reputation. One young bull with a thick mane of hair stepped forwards and beat a fist upon his open palm, leading the rest in their favourite war chant.

  “Lass’ari! Lass’ari! Dobi eny’tari!”

  The Lass’ari The Lass’ari The biggest and the strongest!

  Of all those gathered in the camp, only Groth remained impassive. Rothyogg roared with laughter, standing to grasp the chanting bull by the arm.

  “Why can’t you be more like Gilmog, eh young pup? He’ll be a bloody warleader one day. Men and ogre-kin alike will tremble at the mention—”

  “Will he feast on the children of men, too?”

  Groth’s words brought utter silence to them all. The wind whipped at loose tent flaps, suddenly seeming much louder than they had mere moments earlier.

  Old Rothyogg turned slowly to face his son, with his mace in hand and pure thunder in his eyes.

  “What did you say?”

  Those standing closest to Groth began to edge away, nervous glances cast back and forth. Pulling the tattered robe up around his shoulders, he stood his ground.

  “Word reaches the Dragon Emperor of your warriors’ depraved appetites, father. You bring doom upon us all.”

  Rothyogg trudged forwards, with a look of almost deranged incredulity on his face.

  “You accuse me... of...”

  “I accuse you of nothing,” said Groth. “But they say the Emperor is convinced, and his retribution will be swift.”

  He swept his arms wide and gestured up into the great blue sky. A handful of the mercenaries squinted and tried to follow his direction.

  “Soon after you left for war, I had a vision. In the dead of night the moons blinked—just once—and in that moment a new god was born. He came down from the sky and found nothing but greed in the heart of the tribes. And so he gifted the world with a mouth of its own, so that it might drink the seas and devour the land.”

  Rothyogg’s step faltered, his eyes widening at Groth’s words. The bronze mace fell from his grip, and he clawed at his chest with numb fingers. Gilmog and a few others rushed forwards to aid him.

  “More... of your madness... young pup...” he wheezed, his face pale. “I should have drowned you in the herd trough... the day you were born...”

  Groth slowly lowered his finger, pointing accusingly at the stricken chieftain.

  “Aye, perhaps that would have been better for you. Have you not seen the new star that burns in the heavens? Every night it has grown brighter. It is a bad omen—a bad omen indeed.”

  With that, he turned and strode away, his father’s warriors stepping aside with only a few gruff murmurs of disbelief. Was it mere coincidence, or had young Groth struck down the mightiest warleader of the ogre-kin with one simple gesture?

  “I will have no part of this, or what is yet to come.” His voice seemed to carry even against the wind, as though his words needed to be heard by all. “This is the beginning of the end, father—you will see. The new god is almost here.”

  Groth’s words were borne out, of course. Fraulein Nitikin writes at great length of the legendary cataclysm that ended the civilisation of the ogre-kin, though for the sake of expediency I shall spare you all the full reading at this time. Whether we choose to believe that the astromancers of the Cathayan Emperor were truly responsible, or if it was merely the result of some capricious whim of the Ruinous Powers, it cannot be denied that the devastation that followed would wound the very fabric of the world itself.

  All of the ogre tribes across the plains had watched as Groth’s new star grew larger, until finally it outshone even the sun in broad daylight. Though Rothyogg’s wayward heir had disappeared into the hinterlands beyond, rumours of his prophecy began to spread like wildfire in those final days.

  The flash of the meteoric impact was said to have lit up the mountains beyond the easternmost dwarf holds, and the tremors that wracked the earth were noted in the historical writings of Ulthuan. Even for the most long-lived of races, to have witnessed such a thing must surely have been to believe that the world was indeed at an end, for how could the land survive when the heavens had decided to vent their fury upon it?

  Firestorms lashed the plains. The grasslands burned, herd-beasts were incinerated, and countless thousands died in the first rolling wave of destruction.

  Then the rain of fire—a million times a million blazing chunks of bedrock, each a miniature of the great meteorite, hurled into the skies by its coming. What little had survived the first wave was obliterated in the second.

  Finally came the long, creeping death. Far beyond the reach of the firestorms billowed an unnatural cloud of dust; a slow, poisoned haze that hung over the ashen landscape like a funeral shroud. Even to the hardy constitution of the ogre-kin, to breathe it was to succumb to terrible sickness and no prospect but a withering, choking demise. In time, the haze grew so thick that it blotted out the midday sun and left the land in perpetual murky twilight.

  So it came to be that the survivors of this great cataclysm began to envy the dead.

  The ogres as we know them today are a people de
fined by their hunger—they know naught but the desire to gorge themselves and silence the rumbling in their bellies. They take and take, and give nothing back to the world. If one were to believe that the stories were true, then the Celestial Dragon Emperor’s vengeance upon the murderous ogre-kin was fulfilled a thousand times over with the arrival of the comet. In the weeks and months that followed, the ogres first learned what true hunger was.

  No livestock or crops had survived the devastation. In the chill, dust-choked wastelands that the plains had become, ragged survivors of the tribes emerged from out of the acidic sandstorms, roaming the ruin of their homelands in search of food. They clawed up the blasted remains of dead trees looking for softer roots to devour, and swatted blowflies and midges from the air and licked their sore palms clean afterwards. After that, in desperation they turned to their own belts and sandals, chewing over the stale leather for many hours until they could bear to swallow it.

  Their maddening hunger grew, and soon enough the emaciated ogres began to eye one another warily. Whenever one of their number fell to starvation out on the plains, the body did not lie untouched for long.

  The Lass’ar themselves fared poorly in those days.

  Gilmog had beaten down his rivals for leadership of the tribe following the eventual passing of old Rothyogg. Along with fewer than a dozen of his bull mercenaries, he led the survivors westwards away from the heart of the storms, though their direction soon faltered in the blinding haze and none could any longer be sure of the path they trod. As the sickness took them, their teeth came loose and their hair fell out in clumps. Many Lass’ar simply vanished into the murk, vacantly and wordlessly trudging away from the group, never to be seen again. Gilmog and his cronies never seemed to feel the aching hunger quite so keenly as the rest, though, or so it seemed...

  Eventually they came upon a dismal, rubble-strewn gap in the hills and found that they stood at the feet of the great western mountains that had once bordered their lands.

  “Let us carry on,” the frail ogres cried out. “Let us climb the slopes and ascend into the heavens.”

  Gilmog snarled and ground his teeth, his patience wearing thinner with each day.

  “Fools!” he growled from behind his ragged mask of sackcloth. “We are not dead! We have no place in the sky! Curse that old shaman Molthagg for putting this idea into your heads.”

  The tribe sobbed and floundered onwards, falling to their knees on the scree-slopes or simply collapsing where they stood. Even though the wind was fresher in the bare valley, the foul-smelling stream that tumbled lazily over the rocks offered them no succour.

  Wearily trailing Rothyogg’s battered old mace on the ground behind him, Gilmog felt his own strength ebbing away as they climbed. Finally he too sank to the ground, and his bulls were practically overcome with relief that they needed go no farther that day.

  On the edge of delirium, the chieftain rolled onto his back, dragging in lungfuls of the sour air. “We are not dead,” he muttered to no one in particular. “We are strong—we are the strongest. We can eat the mountains themselves...”

  With trembling fingers, he scooped up handfuls of pebbles and stuffed them into his mouth, swallowing in a series of dry gulps. The others looked on, a mix of disgust and bewilderment upon their exhausted faces. Some, the most desperate or those keenest to win Gilmog’s favour, followed his example. Though the stones weighed heavily in their guts, they took the edge off their hunger pains and allowed them to settle into a fitful sleep.

  The last day of the ogre-kin dawned as many had before, with the pale light of the sun barely managing to penetrate the blighted haze. The wind seemed to carry the faintest rumbling of distant fires, just as it always did, and the Lass’ar began to stir upon the slopes of that mournful vale.

  Some had not survived the night, and with renewed vigour Gilmog and his warriors shoved the others aside and dragged the bodies away. The stone-eaters seemed stronger than before, though the murderous glint of near-starvation still remained in their eyes, and none dared to oppose them.

  It was not until some hours later that the bulls’ carrion feast was interrupted by the sound of pitiful screams from further down the valley.

  Terrified, the other Lass’ar dragged themselves over the rocky crags on raw hands and knees. “Death has come,” they wailed, gnashing their stumpy teeth and clawing at the heavens for salvation. “He is here, now! He is here to claim us for his own!”

  His grip sticky with spilled blood, Gilmog took up his mace and led his few remaining warriors down towards the valley mouth. They had encountered other ragged bands of survivors out in the wastelands—some even with warriors of their own—but he had seen them all off. Not even the blast-mutated horrors that squirmed beneath the sands held any fear for mighty Gilmog!

  Yet, when he caught sight of the spectre in the mists, he froze.

  Swathed in tattered rags that fluttered in the wind, the silent figure stood tall and gaunt beside the foul stream. Its face was hidden by a loose cowl, but Gilmog could clearly see the creature’s scarred flesh beneath the rags, and the old blood that stained its bandage-wrapped feet.

  “Stay where you are, wanderer,” he called out with a sneer. “No ghost after all, eh? You had some of this lot worried for a moment.”

  The bulls laughed raucously, some belching over bloodied lips after their meal, but the figure beside the stream remained silent and unmoving.

  Gilmog regarded him a while longer. “Be off with you. Go back to the wastes, or I’ll break your skull and feast on your sweetbreads. Know that I am the chieftain of these lands now, and I’m not given to idle threats.”

  The figure slowly inclined its hooded head, as though considering Gilmog’s words, or perhaps listening to another voice entirely—one that perhaps only he could hear. When he eventually spoke, it was a pained rasp that cut through the rumble of the wind and reached the ears of every warrior present.

  “You are no chieftain of the Lass’ar, Gilmog. You are nothing but a foul tyrant.”

  Gilmog almost started at the sound of his own name spoken aloud. He had not expected defiance from this unknown wanderer but now that it was so, he realised that he did not relish the idea of approaching him any closer. He saw his bulls exchanging uncertain glances.

  “And you carry my father’s mace, pretender,” the figure hissed.

  Cold realisation settled over the group. The voice carried a note of grim familiarity for every single one of them.

  “Shut your mouth, scrawny one! You don’t speak to me!” Gilmog spat a wad of bloody phlegm for good measure. “How a mad wretch like you ever survived out there is a mystery.”

  Groth slowly raised his hands out from under his cloak. In spite of themselves, many of the assembled warriors, Gilmog included, let out gasps of horror.

  “Blackened flesh, raw and bloody,” said Groth. “And nine putrid stumps where ten fingers ought spread. Is it not strange what looks appetising when starvation looms?”

  Groth held out his finger—his only finger—to point directly at Gilmog. It felt like a spear aimed at his heart, even though he stood many yards away.

  “But then, you know all about that.”

  Gilmog’s eyes darted around the mist-wreathed slopes. Other Lass’ar had crept closer to watch the confrontation unfold. Their pale, withered forms clung to the jagged out-croppings and shadowy defiles overlooking the mouth of the valley. He suddenly realised that they resembled the cowled, wraith-like figure of Groth more than they did the rest of his bull warriors. Their sallow eyes and hairless pates marked them out like skeletons picked clean among the grey and black rocks of the mountains. A thought came to him, unbidden—perhaps they were already dead after all?

  Not him though. Not Gilmog or his mighty stone-eater bulls. He had no intention of surrendering to the long, slow extinction, and he would not stand for this affront to his rightful leadership from Rothyogg’s meek little whelp.

  “You want these weaklings, Groth of
the One-Finger? You want to be chieftain of the sickly and the ghost-kin?” He snorted in derision. “You can have them. I’ll cast them out of my tribe. Take them up to the heavens with you when you go, and let your new god judge them. They’re no good to me.”

  Even as he spoke, he realised that Groth had not once broken his gaze, nor lowered that accusing finger. Gilmog even fancied he could make out the glint of Groth’s eyes boring straight into him, though hidden beneath the shadow of his cowl and obscured by the clinging haze.

  Groth remained silent for such a time that Gilmog assumed that their tense exchange was over, though he could still keenly feel every pair of Lass’ar eyes fixed upon them both. He turned to leave, but Groth’s voice stopped him.

  “It was you, Gilmog.”

  The chieftain looked back, a sudden unease in his heart—an acute feeling of vulnerability that he could not quite dismiss. Nonetheless, he tried hard to keep his voice as solid and unyielding as the mountain rock.

  “What lunacy are you speaking now, man-lover?”

  Groth took a step forwards, his foot splashing down into the stream, and Gilmog flinched. He took another, and another, wading into the waters and leaving swirling red trails in the current behind him as his crusted bandages sloughed away to reveal burned and scarred flesh beneath.

  “It was you who brought the Emperor’s wrath upon us,” he said, jabbing out with his finger to accentuate the words. “It was you who first tasted the flesh of the little ones. It was you who led the rest of our warriors to feast upon the soft-meat, out in the rice fields. You deceived them all. Now you cannot satisfy your hunger, even when you devour the bodies of your own kin.”

  Gilmog became aware of his warriors glaring at him, and of other Lass’ar rising to their feet out on the valley slopes. He tried to find words to give the lie to Groth’s accusations. “No... It’s not...”