"d.a.m.nation. They really are vermin." Markers representing his forces, and those of Arguthrax, were arranged around the map like pieces in some game of strategy. "Can the Crimson Hate still fight?"
"They are squabbling amongst themselves," replied the slavemaster. To decide who will be their new generals."
Venalitor reached over and picked up the marker representing the Army of the Crimson Hate. He could ill-afford to lose them, especially considering the sacrifices he had made to acquire their loyalty. He threw the jewelled marker across the room. It bounced off an obsidian column, and skittered behind a shrine to Khorne in his aspect of the Red Knight.
"Others?" asked Venalitor.
"Arguthrax has. .h.i.t the sleepers," continued the slavemaster. "Our agent in the Wild Hunt of Tiresia was murdered but an hour ago."
"How did Arguthrax find him?" snapped Venalitor, in disbelief.
His spy in Tiresia"s court was so subtle and cunning that he didn"t even have a name, just a face so bland it left no mark in the memory.
"We know not," said the slavemaster. "Also the tactician in Scathach"s army, who was in our employ, was discovered and denounced. Scathach executed him."
"Hmm. That is less of a surprise. War Master Thorgellin was less subde in his methods. At least there was a proper execution. That would have been something to see, Scathach has quite an imagination. What progress have we made?"
The campaign against the Tribe of the Fifth Eye is a success," said the slavemaster. The Disciples of Murder have pushed them back to the ocean. The final push has commenced."
"Good, and what of Arguthrax"s sleepers?"
"They are well-hidden. My scaephylyds are hunting them down.
Many scaephylyds have been found to be suspicious, and have been liquidated, but there are no confirmed spies among us."
"Your kind were a good choice to serve me," said Venalitor.
"Without me, you would have been exterminated sooner or later. It is difficult to corrupt those who owe their existence to their master."
"Indeed, it is so," said the slavemaster, but there was no indication in its cultured Imperial Gothic of whether it took this as an insult or not.
Venalitor sat back in his throne, a black stone echo of the fabled Skull Throne upon which Khorne sat while observing all the murders committed in his name. Khorne would know how to deal with an enemy like Arguthrax.
Venalitor could not claim to know the mind of his G.o.d.
Nevertheless, it was certain that, presented with a problem like Arguthrax, Khorne would show no mercy.
"Bring them all out of the woodwork: everything that has ever paid fealty to us, every oath that was sworn. Examine the rolls for every supplication and tribute. How many creatures on this planet have offered their loyalty to me out of convenience, trusting their cunning or power to avoid their obligations? Show them they were wrong." Venalitor stood up. "Use the Army of Crimson Hate to enforce this in the open. Use the rest of our sleepers to do so in the shadows. I can always get more followers."
"It will leave us open, my lord."
Venalitor looked the slavemaster in its many eyes. Victory is given to he who will go further than the next man. Arguthrax is ancient.
His connections are thousands of years old. He will not throw them away in war. I am young. I have no allies or followers that I am not ready to expend. If I am the only one who is left, if everyone who has ever knelt before me is dead, then I will still have won if Arguthrax has lost. That is my advantage over him. Make it so, slavemaster, and do not rest until every obligation has been called in."
The slavemaster, bowed again, rolled up the scroll, and left the chambers.
Venalitor sat back down and looked at the map in front of him. He moved the markers around, each one a finely wrought statue of a daemon, or a warrior of Chaos. Some of them were spies, elite agents hidden in the courts of other lords, who in spite of their immense value were not above being used as foot soldiers in the war. Others were hapless cults created to be sacrificed, drooling madmen competing for the right to die for their master. They all had their uses.
There was one piece that Venalitor could not move around at will.
It was a tiny obsidian dragon with eyes of amber. It represented Lord Ebondrake, watching over Drakaasi from his palace in Vel"Skan.
Ebondrake was still the ultimate power on Drakaasi. He had expressly forbidden the war between Venalitor and Arguthrax. The truth was, even if Ebondrake would never admit it, that taking on both Venalitor and Arguthrax could be beyond even Ebondrake and his Ophidian Guard. That was how delicate the balance of power on Drakaasi could be.
Venalitor left the Ebondrake piece where it was. He would deal with the lizard when the time came.
ALARIC WAS STILL there. It was a very small part of him, a fragment of lucidity, and it was trapped. The rest of his mind was a dark ocean, and he was crushed on the bed of its deepest trench. Like deep-sea predators, like the feral killers of the warp, venomous things coalesced from the darkness, shards of hatred and misery, regrets and the memories of violence, flitting through his unconscious mind looking for a personality to devour.
He was the Hammer. The prayer kept him intact. He had a duty, encompa.s.sed by the prayer, and that duty was his reason for existing. He had to fight on, to act as the hammer in the Emperor"s fist, because if he did not, there was no one to take his place. He was a Grey Knight, and without men like him there would be no human race.
Slowly, he tried to drag himself up, piece by piece, memory by memory. He caught glimpses of an almost forgotten man, a giant in armour with a halberd in his hand. Painful flashes of violence a.s.sailed him, snapping at him with red teeth. He had unleashed all the horrors of his memory, and they had rampaged around his mind, shattering him until he was just a tiny shard of a human being trapped in the darkness.
SOMETIMES, RAEZAZEL"S MEMORIES flickered past his mind"s eye.
There was something in there that Raezazel had wanted to hide from him, something locked away in the madness, some secret, or something shameful, something that even a daemon recoiled from.
Its first sight of Drakaasi bloomed in Alaric"s fragmented mind: an eight-pointed star marked out by cities and the blood ca.n.a.ls that connected them; emotions, anger, fear and frustration, filtered through an unholy and alien mind.
Alaric fought to understand. There was a key to the Hammer of Daemons and the half-blind skull, but it was wrapped in the mind of a daemon, where even a Grey Knight"s mind might never survive.
He fought on. The prayer echoed endlessly as he fell through the void of his mind.
Then slowly, gingerly, clinging to the prayer like a rope, he reached up towards the surface.
ALARIC COUGHED UP a throatful of blood, and spat it out, gasping down a breath. He almost gagged on it. The stench of rotting bodies was so familiar to him that for a moment he wondered what horrible thing he was.
He was Justicar Alaric. He was a Grey Knight. He knew it to be true, but they felt like the thoughts of a stranger, intruding on his mind.
Then there was pain, screaming from his hands and shoulders. It hit him in waves, each stronger than the last, leaving him nauseous and dizzy. He had never felt so physically weak, even during those punishing battles, which surfaced, muted, in his memory.
He took in a couple more heavy breaths. His ribs ached from the force of his lungs sucking the oxygen into him. His head cleared a little, and he remembered that he still had two working lungs.
He risked opening his eyes. The yellow sun burned in a white sky.
The scorched desert was strewn with t.i.tanic bones, so enormous they must have belonged to truly immense creatures in life. They had succ.u.mbed to the desert, their life leached out of them until they fell. Perhaps the bones had been there for thousands of years, protected from decay by the parched desert. He saw a skull rearing up from the sands, and a ribcage, across which had been stretched expanses of canvas to create shade from the sun. Hovels gathered around solar stills and covered wagons. Even here, life existed on Drakaasi. There was not one part of the planet that was not home to some corrupted thing or other.
Alaric tried to turn his head. He must have been hanging there for some time because his muscles had seized up. He tried to look downwards instead.
A ribbon of blood wound its way from beneath him, off between the mountainous dunes of the desert. It was a river of blood down which the Hecatomb was sailing, and Alaric was chained to the ship"s prow by his wrists and ankles. He had to force himself to breathe when he realised.
He was alive. Raezazel had been real. Now, the suffering would really begin, for he had avoided punishment by possession, and Venalitor would make him pay.
Tiny insects flitted around him. Alaric shook his head to get them off his face. The insects were issuing from the eye socket of a sun-blackened corpse hanging beside him, for they had formed a colony inside the corpse"s skull. Executed corpses hung all around Alaric, each in a different state of decay. Many were skeletons picked clean by insects and birds of prey, others were fresh enough to still be in a bloated, discoloured state, blown up by the gases of decay like fleshy balloons.
One of them, well-worn by parasites and the desert sun, was just the upper half of a human body. It was huge and barrel-chested, the ribs fused into a breastplate. The head, when it had still had a face, must have been strong-jawed and forbidding.
It was all that remained of Brother Haulvarn.
The desert turned dark, and Alaric was lost again.
THE NEXT TIME it was the blood that woke him up.
He had no sense of time. It could have been decades since he had looked at Haulvarn"s decomposed face, or it could have been an hour. It need only have been enough time for him to become covered in blood.
It was all over him, clotting in the folds of his body, heavy and sticky. He shook it out of his eyes, and tried to understand where he was.
Everything was a whirl. His ears were full of white noise, like the roar of a fire, applause from hundreds of thousands of spectators cramming the seating that towered around him. He was in an arena.
He didn"t know which one. Arches of granite towered overhead as if the place was built into the skeleton of a vast domed cathedral.
He was standing on a heap of bodies. His arms were thrust up towards the sky in victory. His body ached as if he had been fighting for hours. His hearts were pumping adrenaline through him.
The bodies were beastmen and mutants, mixed in with arena slaves. Alaric looked down at them, seeking some understanding of what he had done. They had been killed with bare hands: skulls cracked, limbs snapped, and necks broken. Among them, Alaric saw men in the ruined uniforms of Imperial Guard: the men of the Hathran Armoured Cavalry.
Other gladiators were fighting in the arena, finishing off the flood of lowly arena slaves and captive mutants that they had been sent out to fight. Alaric didn"t recognise them, but they looked well-armed and trained, chosen slaves from the stables of Drakaasi"s lords. One was a mutant with two heads, one tearing flesh from the bones of a slave while the other whooped in victory at the crowd.
Another was a giant armoured warrior, pulling its helmet off so that it could shower its face in blood. Alaric"s stomach lurched again when he realised that the warrior was a woman.
The female warrior walked over to him and clapped him on the back. Alaric looked up at her. She had a strong, meaty face and a patch over one eye. Her armour was old and scored.
"You shed blood well," she said with approval.
Alaric tasted blood in his mouth. He prayed that is was his own.
"Is there any here," yelled the woman to the stands, "who would challenge the Betrayed?
The crowd cheered on. Alaric had been the star of the arena that day. They would not soon forget him.
Alaric had seen enough. He could do no good. He was better off oblivious. He let himself shatter again, and the darkness bled through the cracks to consume him.
THE PLANET SCARRED with the eight-pointed star fell from the void towards Drakaasi, a losing battle with gravity. This was what Raezazel had seen. He had let the image slip from his mind as it tried to possess Alaric. It had tried to hide it, and that fact made it important.
More: deep blue and gold; a shrine, dozens of shrines, built to imaginary saints; a religion built on lies, its followers oblivious.
Sacrifices: betrayed men and women, pilgrims and fanatics, lured to their doom.
Raezazel had come to Drakaasi. It was no accident that brought him there. The truth of his arrival had been kept from Alaric, but it was still there in the sea of profane knowledge that had flooded into Alaric"s mind.
Alaric held on. It would be so easy to give in and lose his mind completely. It would be such a relief. He would never have to confront the things he was doing in his madness, or be confronted with the possibility that his duty would never be fulfilled. It was the simplest thing in the galaxy to let himself slip away and end it.
But he was the Hammer. He fought to keep hold of the prayer"s meaning. Without him and men like him, there was no galaxy, there was no light burning at the heart of the Imperium to ward off the darkness. There was only madness and death.
HE WAS AWARE of a great s.p.a.ce around him, echoing with the sound of a chisel against stone.
Alaric was standing in a cavernous hall. It looked like it had once been a great meeting place. Its ceiling was of stained gla.s.s, missing so many panes that the design was impossible to make out. The place was half-ruined, the sun falling in shafts through holes in the once-ornate walls. A grand staircase led to nowhere, and weeds were breaking through the floor.
Chunks of cut stone and half-finished statues stood everywhere.
In front of Alaric, a scrawny man worked at a slab of marble with a chisel and a hammer. A figure was rising from the stone, broad-shouldered and fearsome.
The figure was of Alaric.
What armour does my lord desire?" asked the sculptor.
"No armour," said Venalitor"s voice from behind Alaric, "but capture the scars."
"I like scars," snickered the sculptor. "So many want to be perfect, but what perfection is there in a flawless form? It is the imperfection that makes all beautiful things. Ugliness, that is the truth. The subject is so ugly. Ah, there is the challenge!"
Alaric tried to turn, but his hands were shackled through a ring driven into the floor.
"And the power!" said the sculptor. "Yes, no armour, nothing to cage him."
The statue"s face was Alaric"s, but he did not recognise the expression: arrogance, certainty, cruelty. The sculptor was a genius, but the person he had captured in marble was not one that Alaric knew.
The statue was not of a Grey Knight, it was of Alaric the Betrayed.
Venalitor stepped out from behind Alaric. He was accompanied by his scaephylyd slavers, and they formed a cordon around Alaric.
"You will be remembered," he said to Alaric. "No matter what, there will be a place for Alaric in the annals of Drakaasi. Do you even know how many you have killed?"
"Not enough," said Alaric. He tested his bonds. They held tight.
They were unnatural, as fast as the collar around his neck. The scaephylyds recoiled, ready with shock prods.
"Not enough!" said the sculptor, enraptured. "Oh, that is wonderful.
Such violence! I have never seen so much contained in one human form. This will be a masterpiece, my lord."
Venalitor glanced at the sculptor with disdain. "I would not accept anything less."
"He shall be terrifying, my lord. Men"s minds will break beneath the stone gaze of the Betrayed!" The sculptor went back to the stone of Alaric"s face, bringing out the large expressive eyes, and endow-ing them with such disdain that Alaric felt a chill as he looked at them.
This was who he was. This is what Drakaasi saw: Alaric the Betrayed, a monster to take its place among the greatest champions of Khorne.
He fought the urge to vomit. The image of himself filled him with disgust. He had sacrificed so much on Drakaasi that he had lost himself.
He could not look on it any more. He felt himself thrashing like an animal against his chains as his mind sank down again, the cold ocean of oblivion seeping up to fill him. He was drowning in it, and the world slithered away into darkness.
THERE WERE OTHER times when the seas parted and Alaric could see through his own eyes.
He fought many times. He remembered men, Gearth"s killers, carrying him upon their shoulders as he celebrated some great victory. He was on the Hecatomb with them, too, screaming wordless chants, handprints of blood covering his body.
He was chained to a wall, and people were arguing. He was dimly aware that the argument was about him, about rights and honours, about who the blood he had shed belonged to. One of the voices belonged to Venalitor.
He saw cities he did not recognise, glimpses of Drakaasi"s monstrous architecture: a pyramid of skulls, heaps of severed limbs, thousands of bodies writhing in a cauldron of gore. He saw altars to Khorne, men screaming as they were dismembered, Lords of Drakaasi. He saw a towering heap of char-nel robes, and a two-headed Traitor Marine, a ma.s.s of burning red flesh, looking on Alaric the Betrayed with jealous eyes.