The beast did not attack. Something like recognition came across its face.
"Remember what you once were, Navigator."
Navigators were a paradox of the Imperium. They were members of a bloodline that sported a stable mutation in its genes. A Navigator had a third eye through which he could look upon the warp and not be driven mad, as most men would be. As a result of the mutation, only they could guide a ship on long warp jumps, and without them all ships would be limited to the stilted, short jump journeys that meant civilian craft took decades to get between star systems. Without Navigators the Imperium"s armed forces would reach war zones centuries late, rapid forces like the s.p.a.ce Marines would never be able to launch their lightning operations, and the Imperium, bloated and sluggish at the best of times, would fall apart.
Their third eye, s.p.a.cefarers said, could kill a man with a look.
It stood to reason that this creature, which had once been a Navigator, would make for very challenging quarry indeed.
Alaric slowly approached the mutant Navigator. Perhaps exposure to Drakaasi"s brand of Chaos had mutated it, or perhaps it had been born that way. Although their mutation was relatively stable, Alaric had heard tales from inquisitors of the monstrous aberrations every Navigator family kept imprisoned beneath their estates on Terra.
It did not attack. Alaric was probably the first person the Navigator had encountered on Drakaasi who had not tried to kill it.
"I know why they sent me here," said Alaric, as much to himself as to the Navigator. You are supposed to kill me."
The song of Aelazadne rose to a sudden, brutal crescendo. The whole city shook, chunks of masonry and statues clattering down into the deep ca.n.a.l beneath the bridge. The Navigator roared and reared up, clamping its paws over its ears. Alaric, too, was shaken by the ferocity of the atonal chord that hammered down from the city above.
The Navigator thudded down onto all fours and roared at Alaric.
Its third eye snapped open.
Alaric threw himself to the ground. A black ribbon of ragged power leapt from the Navigator"s eye, and scored a deep furrow across the bodies of the statues around him. A stone arm clattered to the ground, the sound almost lost amid the din.
Alaric ran out of cover as the Navigator"s third eye spat dark power over the bridge. He sprinted for the Navigator, head down at full tilt, and slammed into its side, vaulting over the line of dark power and up onto its back.
The Navigator bucked to throw him off and reached up to grab him. Alaric caught its hand and forced its forefinger back, feeling ligaments snapping. The Navigator"s scream of pain mingled with the song, and Alaric was so dazed by the painful harmonics that he lost his grip and fell off the Navigator"s back.
He reached around instinctively. His hand found the warm sticky ma.s.s of the last hunter to stalk the Navigator. He looked up and saw something metallic there: the broken haft of a spear ending in a jagged steel blade. The Navigator"s shadow fell over him as he grabbed it.
The Navigator"s bulk fell down on top of Alaric"s legs. The mutant"s face was centimetres away from his. The third eye opened again, the brow above it furrowed in anger and pain.
The song had driven it wild. Aelazadne was not about to cheat its audience of another death.
Alaric rammed the spear up at the Navigator"s face. The tip splintered against the stone hard cornea of its third eye. The shaft followed it, shattering and filling its eye socket with splinters.
The Navigator barked angrily and jumped backwards, clawing at its face.
Alaric jumped to his feet. The Navigator was not a creature of Drakaasi, but it had been warped and rendered mindless by this world, turned into a weapon. Drakaasi took good people and turned them into monsters. It wanted to do the same to Alaric, if it did not kill him first.
The Navigator charged half-blinded. Alaric jumped, not into the creature"s wounded face but over it, his back smacking against the creature"s hide as he rolled over it.
The Navigator continued, its ma.s.sive momentum too great for it to stop.
It smashed into the stone rail of the bridge, and ploughed through it. Its forelimbs found nothing as it powered forwards. The Navigator howled as it fell from the bridge, the sound followed by a terrible wet thump as it smacked gorily into the bed of the dry ca.n.a.l.
Alaric picked himself up off the bridge, breathing heavily. A thousand eyes were looking at him.
He had killed their Navigator. That had not been in the script.
Soldiers from Aelazadne"s battlements were despatched to round him up, for the hunt was over and the audience had got their blood.
Alaric knew that to fight against the armoured gauntlets holding him down would only give the city more bloodshed to gloat over, and so he let them wrap him in chains and drag him back towards the Hecatomb.
They had got their blood, but Alaric had got something, too.
Amongst the Navigator"s tattoos had been the familiar brand of a six-fingered hand.
The Navigator could kill with a look from its third eye. It was a quarry intended to kill its hunter. That was why Alaric had been thrown into the labyrinth with it. The daemon Arguthrax had made sure that Alaric was pitted against his best slave killer, in the hope that Venalitor would lose his best new slave.
The lords of Drakaasi had a weakness, a weakness that masqueraded among their number as a strength.
They hated one another. Their weakness was that hate.
EIGHT.
"I HEAR MANY things," said the eldar carefully, "and I wish to know if any of them are true."
"Get away from me," said Alaric. "I feel unclean enough as it is."
Kelhedros tilted his head and looked at Alaric with utterly alien eyes.
Alaric was in an isolation cell. Evidendy Venalitor had been angered at Arguthrax"s attempt to kill Alaric with the Navigator and had taken out a measure of that anger on Alaric. Alaric was chained to the wall on a lower deck, and he was glad of it. Until Kelhedros"s shadow had fallen across him he had been alone.
"I have tried to understand you," continued Kelhedros, "your kind, I mean, your species. It is like facing an animal, with its baffling instincts."
Alaric had not had a good look at the alien before. Eldar were familiar to many Imperial citizens, since they were often depicted as weakling aliens crushed beneath the feet of conquering humans in stained gla.s.s windows or in the margins of illuminated prayer books. The truth was that no human artist could ever realise one properly. An eldar looked almost human from a distance: two arms, two legs, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, but everything else was different. An eldar radiated wrongness, from its huge, liquid eyes to the many jointed, worm-like waving of its fingers. They were disgusting and unnerving, and Alaric hated them. Kelhedros was as filthy and scarred as the rest of the slaves, but he still carried that typical alien arrogance with him. His armour still incorporated the jade green plates of the eldar armour he must have been captured in.
This animal will not heel to an alien," replied Alaric.
"Of course. You want to be free. They all do when they arrive here."
"I have nothing to say to you."
You want to get out. I want to get out, too. I find you as vile as you find me, human, but it cannot be denied that we have the same goal in mind. I think neither of us has much of a chance on his own, but we are both far superior to the rest of Venalitor"s rabble, and our skills would complement each other."
Alaric laughed, and it hurt since he was still battered from the fight with the Navigator. Yes, I have seen what happens when a human enters into a part with the alien. I was there at Thorganel Quin-tus. The Inquisition brokered an alliance between the Imperium and the eldar there. I saw you xenos fall on our troops as soon as the Daggerfall Mountains were secured. I saw you butcher us like cattle because you did not want anyone to know you needed our help to destroy what we found there. I will never trust your kind. You would see all of us exterminated just to save one of your own. You would kill us all for your convenience."
Kelhedros drew his weapon from his back - a slender chainsword, its teeth meticulously cleaned and gleaming in the shadows of the isolation deck. The eldar you fought alongside. Were they of the Scorpion temple?"
Alaric sneered. They all looked the same."
You would have remembered. No eldar is stronger or more resolute than a follower on the path of the Scorpion. The Scorpion is relentless. It cannot fail, because it will die before its claws let go, and once it has its enemy in position, its sting always kills. I walked the path of the Scorpion before fate brought me here, human. They say that you are a hunter of daemons, something remarkable by the standards of your species. The eldar think the same of me. The Aspect of the Scorpion does not come easily to us. I am not just another alien, Grey Knight, even to you. I am a Striking Scorpion, and of every living thing on this planet I am by far the most likely to escape it. Without me, you will die here, probably a broken and willing slave. Together we might return to the galaxies we know.
Think upon it. You have no other choice."
"I am very picky about who gets to betray me," said Alaric, knowing insults would be lost on the alien, but unable to help himself when confronted with such arrogance, "and you don"t make the grade."
"You will change your mind, Grey Knight," replied Kelhedros. It was unlikely he even understood human hatred when he saw it. If he did, he did not respond to it. "I am out here, and you are in there.
If you are so content to stay then little I can say will sway you."
Kelhedros gave Alaric one last glance with those huge black eyes, and ducked back into the shadows. He was gone, with not even the sound of footsteps to suggest he was on the isolation deck. Alaric let himself wonder how Kelhedros had got down there at all. The alien had free run of the Hecatomb, and was certainly as tough as he suggested to have survived on Drakaasi for so long, not least against the human slaves, whose most ingrained instincts included haued of the alien. However, Alaric knew what the eldar could do.
An oath from an eldar meant less than nothing. It was a promise of bettayal.
Alaric had a long time to think in the darkness beneath the Hecatomb. Mostly, he thought about the Hammer of Daemons.
GHAAL!.
That seething pit of vermin! That filth br.i.m.m.i.n.g sinkhole of despair! In such degradation there is purity. In such ugliness there is wonder. In such death and suffering, there is life, so holy to Drakaasi for it is life that must be ended!
The endless slums of Ghaal breed misery as they breed vermin. Its people are no more than vermin, writhing in an endless murderous ma.s.s, struggling to the surface to s.n.a.t.c.h a few moments of exultation! Was there ever such a city as Ghaal, where the trappings of wealth and culture are stripped away to reveal the raw, bleeding organs of poverty and exploitation ? There is the truth of the human condition, that a human mind so easily sinks into animal violence and killing. It is a city of death where murder is the only way out, and where even the most relentless killers find but another layer of Ghaal"s anti-society to slaughter their way through.
This cauldron of hate, this pit of ugliness, this aeon"s worth of murder forced into the crumbling sh.e.l.l of a city! From the blood that runs in its streets are writ the names of Khorne!
- "Mind Journeys of a Heretic Saint," by Inquisitor Helmandar Oswain (Suppressed by order of the Ordo Hereticus) ALARIC"S FIRST EXPERIENCE of Ghaal was the stench. Down on the rowing decks, it rolled in like a foul mist. It was decay and misery, sweat and effluent, the stink of endless poverty.
"We"re in the Narrows," said Haggard, chained to the bench just behind Alaric. Though the slaves were discouraged from speaking on the oar decks, the slavers seemed used to ignoring Haggard. This is Ghaal. It"s a d.a.m.ned orifice."
"Literally?" asked Alaric, for whom the images of the living city Karnikhal were still vivid.
"Not quite. It"s worse."
Alaric peered through the oar-hole in the hull. It was night, and by the light of Drakaasi"s evil greenish moon he could see piles of ramshackle buildings heaped up by the side of the blood ca.n.a.l. The ca.n.a.l was part of a spider web of bloodways that divided up this part of the city, presumably the narrows after which the place was named, and the Hecatomb moved slowly as its hull sc.r.a.ped along the side of the ca.n.a.l. Occasionally, a reedy scream filtered through the night air from the city, followed by a dull splash as a body fell into the blood.
"A city of murderers," said Haggard. "Every madman and piece of filth on Drakaasi ends up here. They say it"s like a beacon that drags sc.u.m."
"What purpose does it serve?"
"Purpose? There"s no purpose here, Justicar. It"s just a city."
"Everywhere on Drakaasi has a reason to exist. Karnikhal is a predator. Aelazadne was an altar to the Blood G.o.d. What does Drakaasi gain from Ghaal?"
Alaric looked out on the city again. Here and there the inhabitants of Ghaal, like primitives forced into ragged clothes and let loose in the streets, skulked among the shadows hiding from the moonlight.
A rooftop fight sent a skinny body falling to the streets far below.
Freshly slain bodies lay like heaps of rags in the street, and the sense of fear emanating from behind the black windows of the hovels was enough to suggest the thousands of people huddled there in their nightly terror. Even those few glimpses of Ghaal showed that killers walked every street and murder was the sport of choice.
"It"s a farm," said Alaric grimly. This is where they breed their vermin."
"Loose the anchors!" yelled one of the scaephylyds in its strange accent. The oars were drawn in and the heavy anchor chains rattled against the sides of the Hecatomb. The ship came to a slow halt along a ma.s.sive dock of black stone, where crowds of Ghaal"s vermin hurried to and fro at the barked orders of mutant gang masters.
To arming!" yelled the scaephylyd over the grinding of the hull against the dockside. The ship groaned as ramps were lowered, and the anchors reeled fast.
Alaric knew the drill. He was starting to lose count of the number of times he and the other slaves had filed past the arming cages to pull on tattered armour, still bloodstained from its previous owner, and pick up a weapon or two. This time, however, it was different.
In one arming cage was a scaephylyd guarding an oversized suit of half-plate armour.
"You," said the scaephylyd at Alaric"s approach. "Here."
The armour was many times more lavish than anything the slaves had been given before. The breastplate looked like a pair of bat"s wings folded over the chest, and the shoulder guards were wrought into snarling faces. Scale mail protected the joints. Beside the armour was a two-handed sword that looked like it had been carved out of an enormous fang.
"You"re famous now," said Gearth, who was choosing from a selection of rusted knives in the next cage, "gotta look the part.
They"ll be betting on you an" all sorts. Reckon you"ve got a fan club?
Kids who know your name?" Gearth smiled through his blackened teeth. "Eh? Maybe sign something for "em, tell "em to listen to their mums and stay off the stimms?"
Alaric cast him a glance, and then looked back at the armour. It would certainly provide more protection than the disintegrating chainmail he usually wore, and which he had chosen purely because it was big enough to fit him. The sword looked useful, too.
Alaric pulled the armour on as the other slaves prayed or psyched themselves up. At the other end of the cages were the orks led by One-ear, kept separate from the rest of the slaves as they eagerly grabbed cleavers and swords. One-ear banged heads together and barked orders to keep them in line.
Alaric wondered how long it would take before he was like them, before he lived for the fight.
The balance of the sword was good. Nothing compared to a Nemesis weapon, but it would do. The ports swung open and the slaves were herded out to kill and die for Khorne.
GHAAL"S ARENA, THE Void Eye, was a squat cylinder of black rock honeycombed with caves where thousands of Ghaal"s subhumans lived. Heaps of skulls lay at the bottom of the wall like snowdrifts, and the open corpse pits around it bubbled evilly in the darkness.
Alaric could hear the sound of the crowds in the arena, hordes of sc.u.m eager to get their fix of bloodshed. He could hear clubs and whips. .h.i.tting flesh, and knew that ranks of arena warriors would be funnelling the crowds through the entrances into the arena. Many of the vermin would die, but then that was why they were on Drakaasi in the first place, to live short lives whose pain and b.l.o.o.d.y endings brought pleasure to the Blood G.o.d.
The slaves pa.s.sed through an archway into darkness, hot and close. The scaephylyds hauled the doors shut behind the slaves, and they were trapped inside, packed close. Alaric could see through the darkness, and he registered the familiar mix of confusion and apprehension on the faces of Venalitor"s slaves. Even the orks did not like it, and the human slaves kept as much distance as possible between them and the aliens. Kelhedros, on the other hand, looked focused. Nothing seemed to rattle the eldar.
Alaric looked around and picked out a small knot of faithful, cl.u.s.tered around Erkhar and praying. Alaric pushed his way through the crowd and pulled Erkhar aside.
"Lieutenant," said Alaric, "whatever lies inside the arena, there is a chance that you will not survive it."
"A good chance," replied Erkhar, "if the Emperor so wills."
"Then I may not get another chance to ask you." Alaric dropped his voice to a whisper, and Erkhar had to strain to hear him above the nervous breathing and muttered prayers. "What do you know of the Hammer of Daemons?"
Erkhar stiffened as if in shock, and his eyes darted as if to see if any faithful were nearby, even in the darkness. The Hammer?
Where did you hear of it?"
"A rumour," replied Alaric. "A legend of the land, a weapon that lies somewhere on Drakaasi."
You seek it?"
"Perhaps."