Godless

David Guymer

Then

‘How long has it been, Jago?’

The old hermit that the Darvish hillmen called the Daemon Oracle wore a cloak of tamed shadow and spider-silk with the hood pulled close, obscuring his face but for the tip of his nose, the crescent-moon of his chin, and the dolorous timbre of his voice. The skin was scale-dry and blueish. He was cross-legged in the cave’s corner, the shadowed bowl of his hood drinking up the eerie fire. It gave off no warmth, no light. It wavered like a plant in a dark wind, a thing of oil and Ulgu.

‘How long has it been since such colour walked into the Tattered Lands?’ the Oracle asked.

Shahleah waited restlessly on bent knee, one arm lain across her armour’s golden lacquer. The sculpted piece depicted birds in flight, beasts at play, men and women in passion. The Oracle’s odd fire found every depression and crack, every lustfully staring eye and gluttonous mouth, and filled it with shadow. What was gold became brown, what was silver, tarnished, what was purple, deeper than black. The fine detail work was crusted with the grit of a long road, but it was once and always fine. Her ornate longsword rested point down, held in her other hands by the meandering fuller.

As was her way, she – and though verbal language lacked the nuance to describe, much less define, her gender, of late she felt like being a she – thought long and carefully before answering.

‘I’ll ask them, Jago,’ the Oracle muttered to the shadow-flame while Shahleah considered. Then he stopped whispering and appeared to listen. The fire flexed and flickered. Following the eerie exchange, she felt the dull, familiar absence in her heart. The Oracle looked up, eyes hidden, a row of pointed teeth catching the non-light and glinting. ‘What power brings you here, pilgrim?’

‘My own,’ Shahleah returned at once.

‘You misunderstand, you misunderstand. She misunderstands, Jago. This is perilous country for Seekers to walk without favour. To whom do you pray is what I mean. We are curious. When you are sore-pressed, when the road is run, when enemies abound and you wish with all your being for hellfire upon them, on whom – or on what – do you call?’

An ursine grunt rumbled from the cave’s entrance as Cruciax of the Blunted Knives stirred. ‘You are the Oracle. You should tell us.’

‘And if I cannot?’

‘Then we have other uses for those that have none. More… pleasant uses.’

Again that shadowed flash of grin under the cowl.

‘And when you call upon such powers?’ Shahleah interrupted. ‘Do they answer?’

‘Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t,’ came the Oracle’s reply.

‘Perhaps I have less need of such aid. Perhaps I would refuse it were it offered.’

The Oracle leaned forward and emitted a hiss of laughter. ‘And yet you search for Him.’

‘That is how the game is played. It runs its course and at the end it is won or it is lost.’

The ache that beat beneath her breast pained her again for a moment. It detested the stillness, the quietude. It urged her with its palpitations to scour these mountains on hands and knees and never be still.

‘I know games, Seeker,’ said the Oracle, ‘Jago and I play them often, and we know our part in yours, oh yes we do.’

An eerie whistle broke the Oracle’s meandering flow, and the hermit drew a spouted black iron pot from a tripod set up over the ivory flames. The scream gurgled away as he poured a turgid soup into a spidershell cup, thick steam hissing out to cloy at the cave’s walls.

‘This is a waste of time,’ Cruciax growled again.

Shahleah turned to glance over her sculptured pauldron.

Three of her most exalted champions hung just in from the wind under the cave’s craggy mouth, with Cruciax at the front. He was moodily tattooed in purples and blues that looked like bruises, clad half in ringed mail and half in the belts, buckles and straps that held it up and from which spikes of various different lengths and types protruded both outward and in.

Behind him and to his right, Prefuria stood straight and silent as the exotic, pincer-bladed lance in her hand. A fine dusting of gold around her face and her fingernails elevated her flawless good looks towards a personal apogee of perfection.

The third champion would surely, in other company, have been the first to catch the eye. Hel’ein’s beauty was staggering, but of a desperate, clutching kind. Her eyes drowned in yellow kohl. Her spiked hair razored back and forth in the wind. Her delicate short swords she held tight to her breast, and her cloak fluted over a suit of mirror-scales with hundreds of furtive, self-hating little caresses.

In any warband devoted to the Chaos powers, a leader governed by fear and respect, with patronage bestowed in divine favour and bought with glory. Not her. She led because no one else cared to. It wasn’t even apathy. They had their passions, their own ways of giving praise, but none like hers.

Cruciax’s eyes bulged from his hairless, painted face. They were full of pain, the memory of it and the hope of it, as he implored her. ‘He is a schemer. He won’t help us.’

‘The search has led us here,’ said Shahleah over her shoulder, and turned back to the Oracle. ‘We followed the flight of a one-winged raven into the high lands and across the river, and thence slaughtered the Darvish in a night of revels that turned the sky pink with omens, like a sunrise in a land of shadow. That trail we took, and it led us here.’

‘Can you help us?’ said Hel’ein, her whisper mouse-like.

‘We can,’ said the Oracle, slapping dry lips and slurping on his steaming spidershell. ‘I have seen the nightworld and spoken with shadow. I have mastered the ways of the not-yet-been. But such aid is not without price, and even with my guidance, you will need to call upon my aid. The Tattered Lands are deadly, doubly so for your kind that goes alone.’

‘Our kind?’

Shahleah asked the question, but she knew the answer already – both were steps of a long, arduous, but ultimately glorious game that had to be followed through if she was to keep on playing.

The Oracle cackled and took a slurp of broth. ‘The Godless.’

Now

The Tattered Lands were a place of vast, jagged peaks that shredded the clouds into inky rags and ripped them across a dim moon. The highest peak had no name – it was enough to know simply that it was the highest, and had taken the Seekers no more than a week of hard walking to reach from the Darvish Highlands and the abode of the Daemon Oracle. Weathered lumps of ancient stonework clawed up from the black grasses like the fingers of the anguished dead, the outskirts of what had once been a sprawling temple. For any of those features might the place have earned the name ‘the Tattered Lands’, but the epithet was for the torn, ragged souls that lingered in its ruins.

At first, Shahleah had thought they were shadows. Shahleah had led her Seekers from the mountainside and through the cracked frame of the long-rotted city gates, and from the moment they had stepped inside, they had been followed. They clung to walls, slipped around corners, had no faces. Many were shaped as men, but just as many, on furtive inspection, were not. They were hulking shapes, horns and tusks and plates, bodies out of all proportion to anything that could cast such a shadow.

There was no light. No sun, no moon, no stars. And yet they were all around them, inside every ruin and under every buried street. Before Shahleah had realised that they were more than mere shadows, they were surrounded.

And without a sound, they had struck.

The sword that came for her was as black as an eclipse, as difficult to place as a ghost’s hatred. It projected a chill, a bitter sharpness that required no physical edge with which to cut.

Shahleah bent back until her gauntlet knuckles caught her on the black marble flags. The blade whispered across her. She arched back up with a push of her supporting arm, spun away from a second darting sliver of chill, and stabbed back. Her undulating blade opened up the revenant’s chest and tore its shadow into the wind. She shrieked with satisfaction.

‘Come to me, shadow of mine!’ cried Hel’ein, somewhere close.

If asked before today, Shahleah would not have been able to say how you killed a shadow, but the conventional tools seemed to apply, and it was too late to think about it now. The second was still on her, and more slid silently in as she backed away from it.

These were all similarly man-shaped, but hunched and powerful, their shoulders armoured and spiked and their jaws heavy. Their weapons were similarly massive, the dark mirror of implements made for bludgeoning rather than aesthetic cutting. A dozen or more of them came at her at once, and she fended them off with a beguiling sequence of parries, each one a masterstroke rendered in gold.

The thrill of her situation made her heart beat fast. She was alive. Whatever value that life had, she favoured it over the only alternative. Even now.

Especially now.

A great blade wrapped in monstrous hands plunged towards her shoulder. She turned it aside on her vambrace and clasped her sword two-handed. With a word of power, the serpentine blade flickered into purpled flame. She filigreed the air with it. Shadows melted into ecstatic puddles as their constituent substance surrendered itself to the blade’s lust.

Each time the weapon’s daemon was unleashed, the effect it provoked was lessened. One day it would just be a sword, but that very impermanence was a gift that made it burn all the hotter.

With a sigh of sympathetic elation, she leapt onto a crumbling fountain and looked around. The decrepit marble monument was the centrepiece of a crossroads about two-thirds of the way up into the fallen city that the Oracle had sent them to. Rubble highways bore off onto streets lined with crumbling glories and packed with shadow. Cracked walls and gaping roofs spiked the mountain slope for several miles all around, the occasional tower or temple spire rising up to the tattered clouds. This place had once been great.

‘More!’ Cruciax bellowed. ‘More!’

Great sweeps of his bloodied chain smashed through the tide of shadow, but every so often he paused, as if on purpose, took the hit to his unarmoured quarter that his abrupt halt invited, then let rip a howl of agony and plunged back into the fray. His followers fought in the same bruising style. They were as tough as any blightking, vicious as any Goresworn berserker, but many were already dead or else crying out for the Dark Prince to reveal Himself for their final suffering.

On the other side of the fountain, surrounded by the pants and yells of her acolytes, Hel’ein’s twin swords clove shadows as if they were rags unbecoming of a queen. Her thralls screamed desperate praises, loud as mortal throats could – they cried their joy at the aural revelation that was steel on cold night and the symphonic grind of boots over marble. Hel’ein herself issued a moan, tongue pressed against the back of her teeth, and practically begged absent Slaanesh to come forth and witness her orgiastic fury.

The last road, which wound further up into the mountains, was held by Prefuria and her warband, Shahleah’s brilliantly armoured elite – the Godless.

Individually and collectively, they were perfect. Every warrior was a thing of beauty, clad in gold that had been etched, fretted, enamelled, and damascened to within an inch of its base utility. Together, they were collective worship through the perfection of form and action, the collaborative exigency of holy violence.

Shahleah brought up her sword and shouted a prayer. In the heat of the moment, it no longer mattered that no one heard. She picked her target.

A forked tongue of virile incandescence lashed across the crossroads and obliterated a pack of shadows that had been circling around behind the backs of the Godless through the skeletal frame of an ancient structure that leaned into the square.

At the same moment, a shade circled behind Cruciax and struck.

The warrior cried out and gasped as the shadow-knife passed through his back and erupted from his chest in a spattering of gelid gore. He looked at her, his eyes thanking her for not intervening. She returned it with a smile. They all had their own parts to play, and she would deal with the consequences as they came. That was the game.

Cruciax’s cry turned to bubbling laughter as the blade was withdrawn. It became a howl of unsatiated torment as one of his warriors cut the shadow down before the task was complete. The furious cry spread throughout his followers, and then into Hel’ein’s – the so-called Exendentals – as the shadows slowly broke off their attack and slunk back into their city. Hel’ein herself wept at the shallow and short-lived pleasure.

Prefuria pointed up the road she had defended. She didn’t speak. There, beyond the steepled black rooftops, the plated bronze minaret of the Astrosanct shone gloomily against the pervading dark.

Then

‘The shadows keep their own secrets,’ said the Oracle, waving a scaly hand over the lightless fire. The flickering shadows it gave off coiled about his fingers like worms pulled wriggling out of the ground. ‘That was why the Astrosanct was placed here in the Tattered Lands.’

‘Will we find Him there?’

Cruciax brooded by the cave’s near wall, at times appearing to admire the atavistic cave art, but always edging ever closer to where the Oracle sat behind his fire. The length of chain he carried rattled as he fed it through his hands, looped it, pulled it taut, let it go. Nothing so painless as a blade for Cruciax.

‘Do you think He could be so close and you would not feel it? Perhaps you would not, at that. How can we imagine what it is like to be like you?’

Cruciax growled, his chain taut. The Oracle sipped noisily at his broth.

‘Who built it?’ asked Shahleah.

‘An astute question, eh, Jago? She shows promise, this one.’ He looked up from his shadow-bound fingers and found Shahleah. He seemed amused. ‘Perhaps when your soul tires of your search, you might offer it to a master who values such qualities in his servants.’

‘I said who.’

‘I do not know,’ said the Oracle, as though ignorance was a rare gift. ‘It was already long ruined when I came here in search of solitude, and that was before the Age of Chaos. The talk of the wind is that it was here long before a world was raised beneath it. But the wind tells tall tales, is that not so, Jago?’

The shadow he addressed shifted but did not answer.

‘What is it for?’ asked Shahleah.

‘It is an observatory.’

‘Of what?’

The Oracle cackled. ‘Of everything. This is the darkest corner of a very dark realm. What light is here is light that you bring with you, and little of it escapes.’ He wrapped scaly fingers around his steaming spidershell and looked up into rapt, desperate faces. ‘The old priests viewed things from across the realms and from times long before the realms were made. The shadows of those things are in the Astrosanct still. That is what it is for. Nothing escapes.’

‘You mean–’

‘I mean that even I do not know where Slaanesh is, and you will not find him in the Tattered Lands, but if you can say with certainty that he existed at all, then you may yet catch his shadow.’

Now

The Astrosanct occupied the temple-city’s highest promontory; only a few hundred feet of shadow-weathered rock climbed further above the hemispherical courtyard that housed the observatory. The strange apparatus of the Astrosanct dominated the site. It was a minaret, comprised of brass plates assembled into interlocking spirals. Each plate was rendered with impenetrable pictographic script, beautiful in its complexity. Shahleah wondered how this awesome instrument must have appeared in use, crowded by priests and scholars, those spirals clanking past one another like the gear wheels of a world clock.

The impression faded and what she saw instead were shadows. She readied her blade, but these did not move. They were the shadows cast by the Astrosanct itself – the moon and stars, though skeined by this world’s layering shadow, were free enough above the cloud layer to shine.

The Seekers spread out over the courtyard, following the circumference of the boundary walls, as Shahleah and Cruciax made a line for the Astrosanct.

Those walls were also of brass and also beautiful. Shahleah caught sight of one of the Exendentals staring, entranced, at one such segment depicting a bulky saurian in a golden headdress.

‘I could imagine the Prince of Pain residing in such a place,’ Cruciax muttered grudgingly. Even he was intimidated by the spiritual oppression that hung over the observatory.

Shahleah nodded and continued on to the Astrosanct.

The base of the apparatus was a puzzle of rings and cogs and ideograms that seemed to hark to some other world entirely. A place of sun and jungle and reptilian monsters. In several places there were depressible panels marked with hieroglyphic designs. She pressed some at random. Nothing happened. Cruciax joined her, picking dried blood from his chain with the fingernail of his un-armoured hand.

It had not acquired the blood in this mausoleum city, Shahleah knew.

Not all of Slaanesh’s followers sought after their lost purpose as she did. Did Cruciax or Hel’ein know that their own despairing efforts to rouse their absent god might have cost them this chance? Who could say? The game was unpredictable – that was the glory of it. Shahleah suspected that the Prince of Excess would have had it no other way, and another opportunity lost would give her little sorrow.

‘We should have brought the Oracle,’ Cruciax grunted.

‘Maybe next time.’

Turning around, she looked over the twilit courtyard for any further sign of how the Astrosanct might be operated, or where the shadows it had collected in aeons past might be found.

Shapes twisted and coiled around the wall that circumscribed the courtyard, but always on the other side, as though the pictograms upon the walls somehow prevented them from passing. It was then that Shahleah noticed that even her own shadow had abandoned her. She shivered deliciously.

All around the courtyard, seeing that there was nothing for them here, her warriors dropped to their knees in lamentation. Some celebrated, revelling in the sensation of denial.

‘Be alert,’ she hissed, eyes on the shadows and the walls that held them back. She had the uncanny sense that they were not alone.

There was a throb in her temple, a flex in the penumbral skein, and a section of the boundary wall appeared to turn semi-molten and bulge as though pushed at from the other side. A wave of starlight breached the weakened barrier and a hulking saurian warrior, clad in bone and silver plate and wielding a feathered spear, stepped through.

The wall sealed seamlessly behind it in a snap of interlocking brass. At the same moment, a cold-blooded consciousness pressed its way into hers. There were no words, just pictures and sensations, a string of hieroglyphs etched in brilliant, brilliant pain into her mind. She saw searing light, tiered ziggurats of gold peopled by feathered priests, their servants, and their warrior cohorts. She felt isolation. Abandonment. Silent suffering. A final icon appeared. Two symbols, one of sun, one of moon, that she intuitively put together into a name.

Eclipse.

She snapped out of the communion with a stumble and slid her blade from its scabbard. Two-score more of these seraphon had emerged from the wall at intervals around them. Surrounded. With gut-wrenching roars, the glittering saurus warriors lumbered into a charge that crushed the grieving Seekers before them.

Cruciax turned with a cry and sprinted to meet the nearest saurian. Hel’ein called for her warriors. Prefuria did both with the hum of her pincer-barbed spear.

Shahleah ignored them. She had marked their leader, as he had marked her.

Amongst the first to have emerged, he was a head taller than his warriors, as they were a head taller than her. His scales were a pale, time-worn grey. Heavy plates of platinum inscribed with the phases of the moon encased his powerful body. The mace in his huge, sledgehammer fist was silver with spikes radiating from it like coronal filaments.

Eclipse, too, was beautiful in his way.

The ancient saurus built up speed as he charged, barging down first one of Cruciax’s warriors, then another, and then Cruciax himself, beaten aside like a leaf against the armoured prow of a ship as the oldblood swept up his mace. Only once Cruciax was down, his turn expended, did Shahleah act.

The saurus was still several sword-lengths away as she struck down with her blade and spoke the word to awaken its lingering daemonic essence. A pink ribbon of energy tongued forwards. Eclipse dropped a shoulder and raised an arm, his war-plate clearly hardened against magic in some way as the lash splattered against his vambrace.

It affected him though, even if only slightly, the potent wards almost overcome by the inimicality of the sensations being forced on his cold-blooded body.

‘It is a daily torment, is it not, to be left alone?’ she said, as she drew up her sword, taking the last thunderous second to set herself to receive the charge.

With a roar of rage the silver-clad juggernaut slammed into her. For a moment, it felt as if the layers of her armour had been pressed together and driven into her chest like a hammer. She felt her feet leave the ground. For a second she flew. She landed on tiptoes, already back-pedalling, bleeding off the unwanted momentum. She whipped up her sword and smiled.

‘You must take pleasure where you find it.’

The heat taken out of his attack, Eclipse launched his mace at her instead, a swing that would have taken her head had she not been deft enough to step away and nudge it over. She turned with the parry and countered. Her blade scratched along the outside of the seraphon’s vambrace. Eclipse elbowed it contemptuously aside and delivered a punch in the mouth that sent her staggering backwards with a red smile.

She felt giddy, as though if she were killed now, she might just float away. Then, maybe, she would find Him. Her heart beat so hard she could barely hear.

The saurus came on with an overhead sweep intended to turn her into paste. She angled her blade across her shoulder and knocked the blow aside, creating the space to land a blow of her own. Her free hand made a lurid series of gestures as she punched the saurus’ armoured gut.

The aethyr blast erupted against Eclipse’s belly, lifted him off the ground and hurled him back. He smashed into the Astrosanct, the ancient apparatus buckling under his enormous mass and pinning him in place. Eclipse gave a roar of frustration, and the other saurus echoed it. Throwing caution aside, they hurled themselves at the remaining Seekers with an uncaring, empty fury.

They fought more like the Seekers themselves.

Shahleah strode towards the trapped oldblood as his warriors were cut down by blade and chain, dying in bursts of light. He struggled and bellowed, but the bent metal plating held him fast. Cruciax stumbled over to join Shaleah, wiping blood off his face and carrying what appeared to be a broken shoulder to add to his ruptured lung and dozen-or-so other slights. He eyed the struggling saurus with the same self-destructive hunger she saw in them all. His voice broke as he turned to her.

‘It is over. How much must we suffer for Him before He will stop denying us?’

Shahleah shrugged and beheaded the still-defiant Eclipse with a sweep of her blade. Starlight fell for the final time on this holy place, forgotten by its gods, as his corpse dissipated wispily into the sky.

Then, as ever

‘Which brings us to what we want.’

The Oracle drew himself up until he sat almost upright, down-curved nose and up-curved chin pincering the fire’s non-light like a scaly blue claw. ‘What I want. We will be the first to converse with Slaanesh when you find him.’

‘No,’ said Shahleah, firmly, without wanting or needing to explain why.

‘No,’ growled Cruciax at almost the exact same time.

Prefuria tightened her grip on her spear until it squeaked, and from beside her, a moment later, the fragile echo, ‘No.’

‘Can you speak with the shadow?’ asked the Oracle. ‘Have you spent two full ages of this world learning their secret ways? I would ask them the answer, but this is no secret knowledge and I fear that they would laugh.’ He hissed. ‘I despise their laughter.’ He snapped his hooded gaze to where Cruciax moved towards him around the edge of the cave wall. ‘Do not think me alone, Seeker. Do not think me vulnerable. I am not like you. I am never alone.’

‘No,’ Hel’ein repeated softly, unnoticed.

‘Try me.’ Cruciax’s chain was garrotte-wire tight. ‘Your pain or mine, do you think I care?’

‘I care,’ said Shahleah. ‘The decision is mine.’

Cruciax bared his bloody gums and snarled at her from the corner of his mouth. ‘You do not find the Prince of Pain by looking. He does not lie in some temple waiting to be found. He must be invoked. He must be appeased.’ His eyes appeared to expand as his neck took the tension in his chain. Punishment spikes bit into his swelling musculature until its powerful definition was made red with blood. The metal links groaned one against the next. ‘Your pain or mine, Tzeentchian.’

For a moment, the Oracle said nothing. The air grew cold. Shahleah felt a throbbing in her temple, and frost began to pick along the grime crusting her plate. Vapour billowed from Cruciax’s mouth.

‘What say you, Jago: our pain…’ The fire set in front of him shivered and began to mutate, taking on the shape of something spine-tailed and avian, like a one-winged raven. ‘Or his?’

The shadow familiar flashed across the room like an arrow. Cruciax swung at it but it took him under the chest, picked him up and pushed him back against the wall. He struggled and cursed, but the shadow pinned him there. The Oracle cackled.

‘No!’

Shahleah turned towards the scream. Hel’ein was already halfway across the cave. By the time the Oracle had turned as well, the woman had her swords drawn.

‘He is my flesh, my passion,’ she said. ‘He is my Dark Prince. He will not heed callow words.’

The Oracle choked and brought up a scaled hand. ‘Changer, here my pr–’

Hel’ein cut it off at the wrist, then impaled him through the heart with the follow-through of her other blade. ‘No,’ she hissed, and stabbed him again in the belly, lifting him off the ground. ‘No.’ She withdrew both blades and he fell in a heap. He gurgled wetly, smearing the stump of his arm on the ground, and Hel’ein dropped down to straddle him, fending off his hand and raising her swords. ‘No. No. No.’

‘Wait,’ wheezed Cruciax. The tattooed man staggered towards them. Bits of residual shadow clung to him and claw-marks hatched the unarmoured quarters of his torso. He brandished his chain. His hands were so slippery with his own blood that he had it wrapped around both fists to keep it held. ‘Let him suffer.’

Shahleah took a deep breath and quietly sheathed her sword.

‘Are you going to stop them?’ spoke Prefuria haltingly, her voice deep and imperfect.

‘The game will play as it plays. It has happened, and we will face what consequences we must.’

‘And what if he is right? What if we need him to find Slaanesh’s shadow?’

A slow and pleasant smile spread across the Godless’ face as she gave the question due consideration. ‘Then we will keep on looking.’

About the Author

David Guymer is the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned, along with the novella Thorgrim and a plethora of short stories set in the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Legend Awards for his novel Headtaker.

The Lords of Chaos gather their forces...
The Call of Chaos echoes across the Mortal Realms and into the grim darkness of the far future.

Two new serialised supplements, and new fiction for Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Age of Sigmar.
Collect them all and answer the Call of Chaos.

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Published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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