03 - Sword of Vengeance (52 page)

“Blasphemy!” it screamed, hurling itself at Helborg.

The Marshal caught it in mid-air with the edge of the
Klingerach, hurling it back against the wall. The creature hit the iron with a
crack, and slid down to the floor. For a moment it looked like it might get up
again.

“Blasphemy…” it croaked. Its mouth filled with purple blood
and its eyes glazed over. “She will punish…”

Then it locked into a spasm, choking and gagging. Helborg
advanced to finish it off, but it expired. It slumped, twisted and broken
against the iron wall.

Leitdorf gazed at it with horrified recognition.

“Achendorfer,” he breathed, unable to look away from the
man’s distorted features.

“Not anymore,” said Helborg grimly, resuming the march
towards the doorway.

Volkmar and Leitdorf joined him. Together with the warrior
priests and Reiksguard, they clustered at the portal to the chamber beyond.

Something vast was in there. The sound of a giant heart
beating came from beyond the obsidian doors. The sigil of Slaanesh was engraved
on each one, burning with the sweet stench of ruin. As Helborg’s eyes swept over
them, pain lodged behind his eyes.

“Trust to faith,” he said for a final time.

Then he pushed the doors open, and they swung wide. Beyond
was a Stone. It was massive, rearing up from the floor like a leviathan emerging
from the deeps.

They entered the chamber. Helborg looked up. Natassja was
there.

And then, only then, did he truly understand what had
happened in Averheim.

Schwarzhelm pressed the attack, whirling the Rechtstahl round
hard, knocking Grosslich back with the force of the blow. From the corner of his
vision he could see his men locked in battles of their own. They couldn’t fight
their way through Grosslich’s men, but neither were they being driven back in
their turn. Everything hinged on the duel.

Grosslich’s armour was gouged with many rents, all inflicted
by the Sword of Justice. Still he stayed on his feet. The wound in his neck had
closed, and a ring of solid black blood formed a torc beneath his chin. His
skills were impressive, no doubt augmented by the latent power in his sword.

It would do him no good. Schwarzhelm spun his blade at the
traitor, pulling back at the last moment and flickering the tip above
Grosslich’s guard. The sorcerer switched position, but too clumsily. Schwarzhelm
stabbed forwards, aiming for a gaping crack in the breastplate.

The aim was good. Grosslich roared with pain a second time.
He punched out with his gauntlet, aiming for Schwarzhelm’s head. The big man
reared back, keeping the sword in place, then plunged it in deeper.

Grosslich’s face bloomed with blood like a translucent sac.
He staggered, impaled on the sword edge. Schwarzhelm grabbed the man’s pauldron
with his free hand and hauled him further up the blade.

The two of them came together, their faces only inches apart.
Grosslich’s eyes went wide with shock and pain. The mutations on his face began
to shrink away. The Dark Prince’s gifts were being withdrawn.

“So you have sown,” hissed Schwarzhelm, twisting the blade,
feeling the holy metal sear the tainted flesh, “so shall you reap.”

Blood bubbled up in Grosslich’s mouth, hot and black. The
Averland runefang fell from his grasp. For a moment, his face looked almost
normal. It was the face of a mortal man, the one who had inspired a thousand
peasants to march under his banner. Before Natassja had twisted those aims, they
had been noble enough.

“Dominion,” he drawled, blood spilling from his lips.
“Dominion…”

His eyes went glassy, and his body went limp.

Schwarzhelm wrenched the Sword of Justice free and Grosslich
fell to his knees. For a heartbeat he stayed there, struggling against the
inevitable. He looked up at Schwarzhelm pleadingly. The mutations around his
face shrank back into nothing. He was as he had been before, a son of Averland.

There was no hesitation. Schwarzhelm drew the Rechtstahl back
and swung heavily. Grosslich’s head came off in a single sweeping movement. It
spun into the air and rolled across the mud, coming to rest amidst a detachment
of halberdiers rushing into assault. The men trampled it into the mire, hardly
noticing it amongst the horrors of the war around them. Soon it was lost, the
skull cracked and smeared with blood and grime, gone amid the detritus of the
battle.

The headless corpse teetered for a moment before thudding to
the ground. Heinz-Mark’s rule as elector was over, ended by the man who had
crowned him.

Schwarzhelm bent down and retrieved the runefang from the
mire. The black slurry had stopped dripping from the blade and the steel glinted
from under the crust of corruption. He wiped it clean on his cloak, then took it
up in his left hand. Just as he had done on the journey from Altdorf,
Schwarzhelm carried two swords, one the Sword of Justice, the other a runefang.

He turned to face the dog-soldiers already clustering around
him. They weren’t daunted by the death of their commander, and the battle still
surged unabated. Grosslich had never truly commanded them. He’d been a puppet to
the last, a tool for the use of subtler powers.

Schwarzhelm narrowed his eyes. He could see Kraus leading the
charge on his left flank. There were Imperial troops everywhere, all lost in
close-packed fighting. The situation was still desperate, and Grosslich’s death
hadn’t changed it.

He was about to plunge into the ranks of dog-soldiers ahead
when he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. A long,
leather coat, flapping in the ash-flecked wind, worn by a man who had no
business being on a battlefield at all.

“The last of the family,” said Schwarzhelm to himself, filled
with renewed purpose and hefting his twin blades. “I swear it now. Death will
not find you this day.”

Natassja had grown. The last elements of her humanity had
been shed, and she now towered ten feet above a mortal span. Her flesh was as
black as jet, tinged with a faint outline of blue fire. Her eyes, still
pupil-less, blazed an icy sapphire.

Her human raiment was gone. Her flesh was clad in shifting
strips of blackened silk, rippling around her and curling over the onyx skin.
Her hair raged around her face like a furnace, caught up in the throbbing
bloodfire as it whipped across her naked shoulders. The tattoos that had scored
her skin for so long were gone, replaced by a single burning mark of Slaanesh at
her breast.

Though still achingly beautiful, her features had already
been twisted with mutation. Her feet were gone, replaced with cloven hooves. Her
fingers ended in talons such as her handmaidens wore. They were sheer points of
ebony, slender and curved. She moved impossibly quickly, as if there were no
intermediate stage between her being in one location and at the next. Even when
her mouth moved to speak, the pattern of her lips was eerie and unsettling. A
long, lizard-like tongue flickered between glittering fangs.

Natassja now resembled the daemons that had served her,
though it was she who was the greater and more steeped in corruption. For
Natassja was no true-born denizen of the aethyr, but that most terrible and
despised of creations, a daemon prince, a mortal ascended to the level of a
demigod. She had exchanged a finite soul for an infinity of damnation, and the
terms of the bargain were daunting. Her power was near-limitless, her
invulnerability near-complete, her malice absolute. In exchange for that,
thousands had died in terror.

Mortal weapons now had no purchase on her, death little
meaning. The world of the five senses, so long her prison, was now fleshed out
with a thousand shades of emotion. Her eyes were no longer bound by the trammels
of matter but by the possibilities of a profound and piercing sentience. Where a
mortal saw appearances, she saw realities, stretching away over a whole range of
future states towards an impossible horizon. Men appeared before her as burning
souls wrapped in a frail gauze, ready to be plucked out and consumed as a lesser
being might select sweetmeats from a tray.

For so long, the Vision had been so beautiful. It did not
compare to the reality.

Behind her, the Stone still throbbed with energy. It had been
enough to complete her transformation, magnified by the Tower, called into being
by the sacrifices of the humans who had died. Averheim was her altar, the stone
across which the lambs had been slaughtered. Slaanesh was pleased. The Lord of
Pain smiled on her now, gifting her with the merest sliver of His own
consciousness. Though her flesh was real, rooted in the world like that of the
lowliest creature of the earth, her soul was an inferno, a blaze of coruscation
beside which those of mortals were mere candles.

“The Sword of Vengeance,” she said, recognising its pattern
within the world.

Her voice was astonishing, even to her. All those who had
died to bring her into being shared a part of it. Just as with the true daemons,
many tongues echoed throughout her speech. Men, women and children all spoke
through her, and the sound echoed from the walls like a massed chorus. As sharp
as a scream, as deep and resounding as a sob, Natassja let her new vocal cords
play across their full range. It delighted her. Everything delighted her.

From down below, the one called Helborg still stood defiant.
He raised the blade she’d named, as if that little spike could hurt her now.
Beside him, the worm who had once been her husband did likewise. There was a
third man with them who mattered, a disciple of the boy-god. She could see his
soul hammering at the bonds of flesh that enclosed it. He was no stranger to the
realm of Chaos, that one. He’d been into it once, and come back out again.
Intriguing. That shouldn’t have been possible.

“The Staff of Command,” she said, recognising its name from
the profile in the aethyr. It was ancient by the standards of the Empire, paltry
by the standards of her master. It was capable of causing her some pain, but
little more. “You are the Grand Theogonist of the boy-god.”

She expected the man to rave at her then, to scream some
screed about her being corrupted filth that would be driven from the face of the
world by the righteous hosts of Sigmar.

He didn’t. He stood his ground, and a grey, stinking cloud of
dirty smog flared up at the end of his miserable staff. To him, no doubt, it was
as beautiful as the rising sun.

“We recognise each other, then,” Volkmar replied. His voice
came from far away. Natassja had to concentrate to hear it properly over the
choir of psychic voices blaring at her. The world of the daemon was strange, far
richer than that of a mortal, but confusing and hard to make sense of. It would
take some time to get used to. “If you claim to know me, then you know that you
will not be suffered to live.”

Natassja didn’t laugh at that brand of folly. The effrontery
insulted her. She knew more about him than he could have guessed. Just by
watching his soul writhe in its temporal bonds, she could feel his anguish. This
one knew, deep down, the futility of what he did. He’d
seen
the end of
the world. He’d been
shown
it. And still he failed to seize the truth in
both hands. What the mortals called faith she knew as fear. An inability to see
the full picture, a reluctance to receive what was out there to be given. There
was nothing laudable in that. It was pathetic. Small-minded. Timorous.

As he spoke, the images swirling across her field of vision
began to make more sense. She saw the origin of the materials that surrounded
her, the age of the metals and the stories behind them. Such stories were
imprinted into the matter of them, scored across the face of the world and
stained in time. The iron in the shaft above her had come from a mine deep under
the Worlds Edge Mountains. Even now, it screamed at the perversion around it.
The world itself resisted her, knowing her for what she was. The world, however,
was old and tired, and she was as young and vital as a flame.

Everything had a story imprinted on it. That was the ultimate
truth. There was nothing in the cosmos
but
stories, some given form, some
just fleeting shadows. The men before her were stories, unfolding through time,
weaving in and out of possibilities like carp amongst weeds.

She gazed down at Helborg again. He’d had many choices. He
could have killed Schwarzhelm. She saw that possibility twisting away into a
distant future. If he had done, the Empire would have split, wracked by civil
war for a generation of men until the hurt could be undone. Helborg had no idea
of that. He’d been motivated by pity. So touchingly weak, so endearingly stupid.

“Nothing you can do or know can harm me, priest,” she said
coolly, feeling the pangs of her birth still resonating throughout her pristine
body. “Coming here only hastens your second death.”

“So thought Be’lakor,” said Volkmar, his voice holding
steady. His staff was beginning to bleed its dark grey sludge profusely,
polluting the symphony of colours before her and ruining the glorious harmonics
of the Stone. “So thought many of your kind. You don’t know as much as you think
you do. I have the power to harm you.”

This was getting tedious. Concentrating on the mortals for
long enough to hear their words was frustrating. There were more important, more
uplifting things to devote herself to. As a mortal she’d only been able to
experience sensation across four dimensions. Now there were twelve to wallow in,
and wasting time in chatter was a poor way to begin her new life of wonder.

“Then put it to the test, little man,” said Natassja, looking
directly at the shifting figures below her and preparing to use the powers that
were curled tight within her. “Do your best to wound me. Then, when all is done,
I shall introduce you to pain of such perfection that the gods themselves will
weep to hear you scream.”