War storm, p.18
War Storm, page 18
He’d led his folk into the garden and pledged a glopsome oath to Grandfather Nurgle, offering service and souls in return for protection and power. And he’d fought to earn those protections, fought hard or harder than his rivals, performing deeds of valour. It was Grelch who had tamed the toad-dragon Ga’Blorrgh, and Grelch who had poisoned the Sweetwater.
You did indeed, my servant, something burbled in his head.
The voice was like an itch at the back of his skull. Painful, but welcome, it gurgled and slopped across the surface of his thoughts. As if they too heard it, the maggots in his arm suddenly stiffened and began to move in strange ways, causing his flesh to ripple and pulse. Grelch stopped and looked up, towards his prize. There was an oily sheen in the air at the top of the steps, and he could hear faint buzzing as of thousands of flies.
‘Master,’ he whispered. ‘Are you near?’
The din of the battle below seemed to fade as the voice of his master filled his skull. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see his warriors coming to grips with the closest of the newcomers. Fat-bellied blightkings hacked at gleaming shields with notched axes, only to reel back as lightning-wreathed hammers struck them in return. But though they stumbled, his chosen refused to fall. Their seared flesh congealed and repaired itself, as Grandfather willed, and they lurched back into the fight.
Near, yet still sadly far, my servant, his master replied. My rotguard and I come as fast as the winds of plague can carry me, but you must open the door and let me in. Hurry, Grelch… I would wallow in the murk of the Ghyrtract Fen, taste the sweet heart of the Greenglades, and wade in the Shimmertarn. Hurry, my servant. Pile the stones and spill the blood… Open the gates to Grandfather’s garden…
The voice faded and Grelch let out a shaky breath. The clangour of battle grew loud once more: the air filling with screams and the rattle of weapons. The voice of his master, his mentor, was proof enough of Grandfather’s favour. Why else would such an enormity as his master deign to speak with him, and so kindly?
‘Don’t worry, master, there’s plenty of blood to go around,’ he said, out loud. He looked out over the Fen, and saw the silver ranks of newcomers stalk forward with ground-shaking strides, their wide shields locked rim to rim. They resembled nothing so much as a gleaming wall, and he felt a hint of unease as they drew closer to the slope and the steps. But their march slowed as his chosen warriors interposed themselves once more, crying out the name of Grandfather Nurgle as they sought to break the shieldwall. Once his warriors had finished off these shiny-skinned interlopers, he’d have them gutted and squeezed to fertilise the stones and open the garden gate.
He closed his eyes, revelling in the thought of it. Long had he yearned to see Grandfather’s garden again, in all its pestilential splendour. Now, at last, his chance had come round. A little blood, a little death, and it would be done.
However, his good humour evaporated quickly as he plodded down the steps, axe in hand. His chosen warriors had never before been bested in battle, yet these newcomers smashed them aside more quickly than he’d thought possible. Warriors bloated with the blessings of the Plaguefather were driven to their knees by hammer strikes that crushed armour and tore flesh as easily as any axe or sword. Every blow was accompanied by a snarl of lightning and the thud of a smoking body as it struck the ground.
As Grelch made his way down the last few steps, he saw that his men had become disorganised, save for a few chieftains around whom the cannier warriors rallied. The rest charged in knots and dribbles, alone or in small packs, and were ground under by the silver-armoured retinues of the newcomers. The latter had formed themselves into an impenetrable shieldwall, rim to rim and edge to edge. Shields dipped and hammers shot out to strike and return as the shields rose once more with a discipline completely alien to Grelch’s experience. The silver warriors moved as one, clearing themselves a bloody path towards the stone steps and the arch, and right towards him. He raised his axe in welcome and lumbered to meet them.
Some of his followers rose, even after they had been battered bloody or hacked apart, as the great rents in their obese frames scabbed over and their severed limbs re-grew. But that wasn’t enough, and soon they fell a second time. The weapons of the enemy were too deadly, even for those in whose veins the blessings of Nurgle ran.
Grelch moved more quickly now, lumbering towards the forefront of the battle. If he could rally his troops, they might still stand a chance. However, that hope dwindled as he saw the last of his chieftains fall to a great mauling blow from one of those deadly hammers, crushing its horned helm into an unrecognizable mass. The few warriors who remained launched themselves at the enemy, despite his commands, only to be swatted down as if they were of no more importance than flies.
Not a single man of the Ghyrtribe remained standing. Even his fattest warriors lay broken and unmoving on the muddy ground. It had happened so quickly. Behind the ranks of locked shields, he saw warriors wielding two-handed hammers begin to smash down the half-built idols and altar stones. He cried out. Helms turned, and he caught sight of his reflection in their mirror-bright features. The men moved towards him in a tight semicircle, shields at the ready. Though the lightning had faded, its glow yet remained. Grelch could not bear to look at them directly, and was forced to raise an arm over his face. They shone with a light and a heat that seemed to burn the very core of him.
As he did so, the maggots in his flesh shrivelled one by one and fell away from him, and he experienced a wave of fear – an emotion he had not felt in years – wash over him. Were these men the reason that the Dirgehorn had sounded? Were Kraderblob and the other servants of Nurgle now locked in combat with more of these pitiless invaders? What sort of beings were these who could kill so cruelly and swiftly? What sort of beings arrived in a crack of thunder and a flash of lightning?
Enemies, sweet Grelch, and far beyond you, the voice of his master rumbled.
Grelch felt the sadness those words carried. He would join his maggots soon and join his warriors, broken and dead in the mire.
Dead, yes, but not forgotten, my best, brightest bubo, his master gurgled. Grandfather watches you, Grelch. Show him how brave you are, my servant. Open the way for me, and join Grandfather in the eternal garden, where all is green and growing and life waxes fat. He waits for you, waits to take you in his arms… Hurry, Grelch. Hurry!
Grelch felt his fears evaporate as the words of his master, his mentor, filled his skull to bursting.Then he bounded ponderously down the slick stones with axe in hand. Grelch sensed, without knowing how, that only a bit more effort was required. He would show Grandfather how brave he was, and he would dwell in the garden in wonder and glory forevermore. That was all he wanted; all he had ever wanted.
‘I do not know you, murderers, but you will know me,’ he rasped. ‘I am Grelch, lord of the Ghyrtribe, and master of the Ghyrtract Fen. When you go back to whatever place spawned you, tell them it was I who sent you. Tell them that Grandfather Nurgle sends his greetings, sure as sure.’
He lifted his plague-axe in both hands and held it across his body, taking comfort in the weapon’s weight, stepping towards the silvery ranks of the enemy. ‘Come on then. Send me to the garden, if you can,’ he spat. Only a little more blood, he thought. Hadn’t intended it to be mine, but, well, you can’t have everything. Grandfather never asked more than a man could give.
One of the warriors stepped forward. He was tall, taller almost than Grelch, though he lacked the latter’s sheer bulk. His baroque armour shimmered strangely in the light of the witchfires, and he raised the hammer he carried in what Grelch thought must be a salute. In his other hand he carried a sword, its blade etched with sigils that burned Grelch’s eyes. Grelch spat at the warrior’s feet.
‘Tell me your name,’ he demanded. ‘Grandfather likes to know the names of the souls I send him.’
The warrior cocked his head, blue eyes alert behind the unmoving, too-perfect features of his mask. He lowered his weapon.
‘Gardus,’ he said. His voice was like a clear peal from a great bell. It struck Grelch’s belly like a fist, and climbed his spine into his brain where it reverberated, much as the thunder had earlier. Grelch shook his head to clear it.
Grandfather, give me strength, he thought.
‘Gardus,’ he said, chewing over the syllables. ‘Well, Gardus, a pleasure to meet you.’ Then, with a roar, Grelch swung his axe up and around, and launched himself at the warrior.
The Grandfather’s garden awaited.
Chapter One
Before the Gates of Dawn
Gardus, Lord-Celestant of the Hallowed Knights, looked down at the bloated body at his feet, then at the patina of sour bile clinging to his hammer. The plague warrior had fought bravely for being outmatched. He had hurled himself knowingly into death without hesitation or fear. Gardus wondered how such a debased creature could possess such courage. Then, would I have done any less? he wondered. He swept his hammer out, dislodging the muck which clung to it and banishing the thought in the same motion.
‘Who are the victorious?’ he called out, raising hammer and sigmarite runeblade. His voice boomed out across the clearing, reaching every ear. Some called him the Steel Soul, though he could not say where the name had come from. Regardless of its origins, his Warrior Chamber had taken the name for their own, and they bore it with honour.
‘Only the faithful,’ his warriors roared in reply.
Gardus gazed with no small amount of pride at those who had followed him into battle as they raised their voices in triumph. Liberators, Prosecutors, Judicators and Retributors, all clad in star-forged sigmarite, and bearing weapons crafted from the samen material. Their panoply of war gleamed silver where it was not rich gold. Their shoulder guards were of deepest regal blue, such as the heavens themselves, as were their heavy shields. The weapons they carried shimmered with holy fire.
They were all heroes. Their valour proven in battles all but forgotten in the haze of their Reforging. The Hallowed Knights were the fourth Stormhost to be founded, and the ranks of their Warrior Chambers were filled with the faithful of the Mortal Realms. Their only commonality was that each had called upon Sigmar’s name in battle, and been heard, and that each had shed his mortal flesh in the name of a righteous cause.
Gardus himself could but dimly recall who he had been before he had been made anew in Sigmar’s eternal forge. His old identity had been torn away by celestial lightning and replaced by something new and greater. The memories of that time surfaced only rarely, though he thought – he hoped – he was the same man he had been then. The same man whom Sigmar had deemed worthy to give a portion of his power to. Of the time before his Reforging, he remembered only fear, battle, pain and blood and, finally, the lightning which had brought him to Sigmaron amongst the stars.
He could not truly recall the cause he had died for, or the names of those who had fought beside him, in that final battle.
But I remember you nonetheless, my friends, he thought. I remember your faces, and how you died. I remember that we fought in Sigmar’s name, against the same evil I face today. I remember, and I will honour you the only way left to me – with sword and celestial fire. He lifted his runeblade and gazed at the sigils etched into its gleaming length. They seemed to glimmer with heat, the repressed fury of a storm. Sigmar himself had blessed the blade, after Gardus had forged it. I will not fail you, he thought, though whether he was speaking to Sigmar or the faded ghost-memories of half-forgotten comrades-in-arms, he could not say.
He looked around, taking stock of the battlefield. What he saw was not pleasant. The churned mud was full of monsters – most dead, some dying – their vile flesh no longer regenerating as it had during the initial moments of battle, twisted shapes whose abominable features were mirrored in the very land itself. Sickened, he smashed aside a looming icon dedicated to the Ruinous Powers. There were hundreds stabbed into the earth throughout the clearing, and they caused his stomach to twist in an instinctual revulsion. A trace of the man he had been, he suspected. Everywhere Gardus looked, disease blossomed.
The very air stank of it, and the nearby waters ran with pox. The ground was covered in a carpet of maggots – and other, unrecognizable, scavenger beasts – as well as a glistening putrescence. The sickly trees fed upon this rich loam of decaying matter, sprouting unnatural growths that resembled struggling insects or wailing faces. Thick creepers, covered in unhealthy looking cilia, sought to strangle what little normal-looking plantlife remained. Even the rocks were covered in pus-filled boils. Gardus was at once repelled and fascinated by it; he had never seen its like before.
He looked around at the crumpled and fly-ridden bodies of the plague-worshippers, and then at the idols, altar stones and obelisks that they had been in the process of erecting when the Steel Souls had arrived. The enemy might have been defeated, but there were still his works to cast down. Every dark monument would be toppled or broken up by the time they were done here. But somehow, he knew that this place would never be entirely free of the contagion that afflicted it.
Even so, that was no reason to tarry.
‘Feros, how goes it?’ he called out to his Retributor-Prime. Called the Heavy Hand by some, Feros had earned his rank at the Battle of the Celestine Glaciers, where a blow from his hammer had sheared loose the rim of one of the eponymous glaciers, sending the warriors of the Ruinous Powers tumbling into the icy depths. Like his fellow Retributors, Feros was the wrath of the heavens made brooding flesh. He smelled of lightning and rain, and his heavy, ornate armour was marked with the lightning bolt of Sigmar.
‘The cleansing of this mire proceeds apace, Steel Soul. My warriors will soon have reduced every standing stone in this fen to dust,’ Feros rumbled, his two-handed lightning hammer slamming down on a monstrous effigy and reducing it to shards.
‘Good. Tegrus,’ Gardus said, calling out to another of his subordinates. The Prosecutor-Prime dropped from the air a moment later to crouch before him with head bowed. Wings edged in the purest gold with feathers of lightning snapped out and folded back behind him with a lingering crackle.
‘Speak, and I obey, Lord-Celestant,’ Tegrus of the Sainted Eye said. His voice, slipping from the mouth-slit of his silver mask, quavered in the air like the peal of bell. During the cleansing of Azyr it was Tegrus who had scouted out the Chaos warbands infesting the Nihiliad Mountains, raining blazing arrows down upon them in order to expose their positions to Sigmar’s armies.
‘Take your Prosecutors to the skies above the edges of the fen, and watch for any sign of the enemy. They are thick as fleas in this region, and I would be ready for them when they come. And make no mistake, they will come.’
‘Perfect,’ Tegrus said, spreading his wings. ‘Makes it easier to crush them, if we don’t have to go chasing after them first.’ He took to the air a moment later, hurtling skyward, joined by his winged retinue.
‘Such exuberance may be his undoing,’ a voice said.
Gardus turned to see Solus, the Judicator-Prime, striding towards him, one hand resting on the storm gladius sheathed on his hip and the bulky shape of his boltstorm crossbow over one shoulder. Solus had no war-name, and to his credit, did not seem to desire one. He was the steadiest of Gardus’s subordinates, with a cool mind and a calm hand, regardless of the situation.
‘Only if you were not here to watch over us, Solus.’
‘As you say, Lord-Celestant. I and my Judicators shall see to it that no enemy shall catch our Warrior Chamber unawares,’ Solus said. ‘No allies either, more is the pity.’
Gardus nodded, knowing who Solus referred to. They had come here to wage war, but also to rebuild an old alliance. Only the former was his concern, and by extension that of his men. Others were occupied searching for the mysterious queen of this realm. It was Gardus’s task to ensure that they had good news to tell her when they found her.
‘Our purpose remains the same, regardless. We cleanse this place and hold it until we are ordered to do otherwise. That is what Sigmar has asked of us, and that is what we shall do,’ Gardus said. ‘Once Feros has finished shattering these stones and we have taken control of the realmgate, Lord-Castellant Grymn, Lord-Relictor Morbus and the others will be free to join us here. Perhaps once that occurs, the folk of the Jade Kingdoms – human and otherwise – will rise to join us. Until then–’
‘Until then, we are to fight their battles for them and die on their behalf?’
Gardus turned to meet the gaze of his Liberator-Prime. ‘Aetius,’ he replied.
‘I do not like this place,’ Aetius Shieldborn said, softly. ‘There is poison in the air, and the ground shudders like a sick animal.’ Aetius was as brave as a gryph-hound, but forever casting a stern eye on his fellows and the world around him. He nodded tersely to Solus, as the latter moved off to see to his task.
‘That is why we are here,’ Gardus said gently. ‘If we fail, this great forest realm might become a sour canker in the flesh of the Jade Kingdoms, a seeping malignance which no fire can cleanse and no magic can exorcise.’ He tapped Aetius’s pauldron with his hammer. ‘Much is demanded…’
‘…of those to whom much has been given,’ Aetius finished, bowing his head. He looked away and asked, ‘What of us, then, Lord-Celestant? What is our task now that the enemy has been broken?’
‘Watch for the foe while Feros and his Retributors finish seeing to these abominable stones. Help where you are needed. The quicker we are finished, the better. Whatever they sought to build here, we must utterly destroy, Aetius,’ Gardus said. ‘Only then can we take the Gates of Dawn for ourselves, and then the Lord-Castellant and the rest of our brothers will be able to march forth from the Gates of Azyr and join us here.’
