KNIGHT OF CORRUPTION

David Annandale

The daemon considered the nature of vision. It was his power, it was his goal and it was his frustration. Through vision, the Many-Eyed served Archaon. In serving, he saw more and more. The more he saw, the more distant the moment of great revelation became. That sight, lost to him except in blurs and fragments, was his eternal torment and goad.

No accumulation of knowledge came close to what had been. It must never stop. His vision must reach further and further, embracing more and more. Piece by piece, he would construct infinity.

The Many-Eyed Servant thought about the eyes of a fly, of the mosaic of a single insect’s vision, limited in distance yet all-encompassing in the immediate. Sight compounded then compounded again by the multiplicity of a swarm. So many pieces coming together, creating clarity.

For those with eyes to see.

How well does he answer the call? The voice came, as deep with power and with the thunder of Chaos as if the speaker were present. It was the voice of the sorcerer’s master, the voice of Archaon, reaching across the realms.

‘He hears,’ the Many-Eyed said. ‘He strives. He lacks clarity.’

He is aware of his shortcoming?

‘He is, Everchosen. He seeks to know what he must do.’

Then the trial continues.

‘As you command.’ Standing in the empty throne room, the Many-Eyed Servant looked beyond its walls. He received the vision of the swarm.

The flies were speaking to Copsys Bule again. They burrowed into his scalp, took his blood and laid their eggs in his lank, dripping strands of hair. Their buzzing was music that had accompanied him for years. It was the sound of Grandfather Nurgle’s growing garden, the melody of blessed corruption. Now, though, it had become something else. It sounded very close to whispers. The drone of insects, growing louder and softer as the nimbus circled him, had a shape just beyond his ability to perceive. He wondered if that shape would match the apparition that had spoken to him. The drone was urgent. It was commanding. It pulled, but he could not discern the direction of the tug. Since the retreat from the seraphon, the call had become both more insistent and more vague. He had a duty to fulfil, one different from any he had known until now.

He seeks a champion, the apparition had said. And then, with meaningful symmetry: Seek him, champion.

And Fistula, deep in fever, speaking unconsciously, had said Archaon.

And there were other duties too. A portion of the garden had been uprooted. Nurgle’s blessings had been rejected. There were reparations to be made.

So Fistula was quick to remind him.

‘We should go back,’ said Fistula. He marched beside Bule. His words were for the commander’s ears alone, but he did not temper their volume as much as he should have.

Bule did not know if any of the other Rotbringers heard. He thought not. But Fistula’s anger was clear. His tone was on the verge of a challenge.

‘You would have us return to annihilation?’ Bule asked.

‘No, for vengeance. For Grandfather.’

‘Your zeal is sound. Your judgement is not. We cannot go back. What makes you think the gate would return us to our point of departure? Do you even know what realm this is?’

‘No,’ Fistula admitted.

‘We are fortunate to have emerged where we have,’ said Bule. ‘Grandfather Nurgle still blesses us.’

The realm was blighted; the Plaguefather’s gifts were everywhere. The warband moved through a diseased forest. The gate was far behind but Bule wanted it further yet. He didn’t think pursuit was likely, but until his diminished warband had recovered some of its strength, it was better not to risk another clash with the seraphon. He had lost his trident in the most recent clash and now carried a pock-marked axe. He looked back at his warriors. They had been bloodied. Their numbers were reduced and the shame of retreat hung over them. This portion of Nurgle’s following had withered, and it needed to blossom once more.

‘There is no glory in luck,’ Fistula said. His bald head reddened with anger. The white spots of emerging blisters appeared. They gave him no joy. ‘And we are still retreating.’

Bule did not argue. Whether an enemy pursued or not, the effect was the same. The march had begun as desperate flight. Nothing had changed that initial impulse. Bule needed to turn the retreat into an advance. There was still strength in his warriors, and there was strength all around them. For the day and the night since their arrival, they had been surrounded by the glorious blight. The garden was flourishing. There was cause to rejoice even as there was work to do.

The terrain was rolling and gaining altitude. A river flowed on Bule’s left. The water was brown and grey and gelid, despite a fast current, and soft, rotting shapes tumbled through it. Black-crusted foam burbled around rocks, leaving a patina of slime. On both sides of the river, the forest quivered. Pendulous fungi hung from trees. There were no leaves. Huge colonies of mould covered the branches, the growths thicker than the trunks. They hauled the branches down toward the ground. The loam was thick, a festering carpet of decomposition. It rippled with feasting insects.

‘Children of the Plaguefather!’ Bule shouted. Phlegm thickened his voice, and he revelled in the wet, crackling pain at the back of his throat. ‘We turn our backs on sorrow, and march towards the ecstasy of blight. Enough of retreat! Now we hunt!’

‘What is our prey?’ Fistula asked.

Bule smiled. ‘It must be found. That is the first stage of a hunt, is it not?’ His chest expanded with an eager hope.

Bule’s optimism found its reward after they had marched less than another league. To the east, deep in the forest, a huge shadow lurked. Its form was suggestive, and Bule turned off the path to investigate. He found himself standing before the crumbled remains of a vast monument. Much of what had once been was gone, but the angle of the exterior sides of the foundation stones suggested an obelisk. If that were so, it would have towered many times the height of the tallest trees. The shattered base extended far into the forest, wide enough to have supported an entire keep. The ruins were overgrown with black, glistening lichen. At the top of the stones, the growth had been scraped away, revealing naked rock.

Bule walked the length of the monument, his boots squelching and sinking deep into the toxic mulch. Disturbed by his footsteps, swarms and stench rose in waves. All around Bule, life erupted in the celebration of abundance and decay.

‘There has been work done here,’ Bule said. ‘Someone has been building something.’ The monument had fallen long ago, but it had been disturbed recently. Though the rot had spread over it again quickly, he could see the marks of tools. Stones had been removed. Beyond the wall, the diseased vegetation had been flattened as the scavenged masonry had been dragged away. The stones that remained were so huge it would have been impossible for anything less than an army of slaves to move them.

The flies buzzed in Bule’s ears. The whine was excited. He grinned, ripping open the pustules on his lips. He had the scent of prey.

And there, the words of the flies became a little clearer. Here was purpose. Here was destiny. If he hunted this prey, he would find what he had been told to seek. And he would serve…

He blinked, surprised and puzzled.

A conviction formed. He would be in service to a being who was neither Nurgle nor one of his champions. Yet he was equally certain this allegiance would not in any way be contrary to the Plaguefather’s wishes. The paradox confused him. His need to answer the call was clear. It was his paramount duty. He was summoned. But the source of the call was lost in the insect miasma. He did not know how he was to answer.

He looked again at the wide swathe of drag marks in the putrefying vegetation. There was his direction. The marks were a clear sign. Whatever answer he must make, he would be propagating the garden, and clarity lay ahead.

Clarity and prey.

Exhilaration drove away the shame of defeat. His laugh was loud, long and braying. It turned into a generous cough, spraying yellow phlegm before him. The sputum hit the ruined wall. At its touch, the sickened, spreading lichen convulsed, bursting into sudden, accelerated, tumorous growth before dying. The lichen decomposed into a corrosive acid, pitting and crumbling the stone beneath. But as the lichen liquefied, it revealed a portion of an engraving. Bule paused. He used the edge of his axe to scrape more away, revealing the head of a hammer. Decayed as the stone was, the skill of the ancient work was clear. The majesty of the weapon shone through the grime. Bule growled and struck the wall, smashing the engraving and erasing the memory.

He turned to Fistula. He wondered if the other Rotbringer could see the triumph in his eyes.

‘I have the scent,’ he said. He raised his voice for the warband to hear. ‘Feasting lies before us!’

He lurched off, cutting through the suppurating woods in the direction of the drag marks. His vigour spread over his followers, a joyful contagion. After a few minutes, they reached another, wider path. It showed signs of recent use, and of the ferrying of heavy loads. Bule charged along the route, his hunger and eagerness growing together. The ground rose. The forest thinned, withering to a bubbling sludge at the peak of a hill. There, Bule saw his goal.

Below the hill was a wide valley. A river, much larger and even more polluted than the one the Rotbringers had left behind, flowed in from the west. It had once irrigated agricultural land. Even now, long after its conquest by Nurgle’s children, the valley’s former character could be seen in the grotesque parody it had become. The fields waved with tall, ergot-covered stalks and undulated with squirming decay. At their edge, heaps of fungi multiplied, each the parasite of the one beneath, their accumulation rising many feet into the air. A ruined city rotted in the centre of the valley. Black water filled the open foundations. The ramparts were gone, lost beneath fungal mounds. The roads were broken, collapsing into the banks of foetid canals. None of the original buildings stood; they had all crumbled into piles of shattered stone and brick.

But not everything had fallen. There were statues here, colossi hundreds of feet high, bestriding the valley. An army could pass between the huge columns of their legs. The statues had been defaced. Some heads were shattered half-moons. Others were missing altogether, and monstrous faces had been carved into the torsos. None had any hands, their arms ending in jagged stumps. Their shapes, once heroic, had been eaten away until their proportions were skeletal. They were corpses now.

And they moved.

Arms rose, coming together for absent hands to clasp in prayer before absent faces, then fell again. The western-most statue, closest to the entrance to the valley, bowed and straightened again and again, filling the air with the slow grinding of rock. Creations of wonder and majesty had been reduced to immense, meaningless, idiot gestures. A great city had been razed to nothing but a mockery.

In its place, something new had risen.

A tower had been built using the ruins of a hundred other structures. Its construction was crude. Even from this distance Bule could see the mismatched stonework, each block marked by the fragments of ancient carvings. It was a rough, scavenged construct. There was no artistry in its design. It was blocky, almost as wide as it was tall. Speed and resilience had governed its making. But it was big – its crenellated peak soared higher than the Rotbringers’ position on the ridge. Where it rose, the glorious ruin and bounty of Nurgle’s generosity ended. Around the base of the tower and spreading eastward to the valley’s mouth, the ground was barren. The temple was order reformed from chaos. Its stones, irregular and damaged, had been forced into something coherent. And clean. The walls had been scoured. There was no growth, no celebration of convulsed life on its surface. Though it was heavily fortified, it was not merely a keep, it was a site of worship. The walls had been carved to suggest armoured visages of a sort Bule had never seen before. He guessed what they represented: a myth he still refused to credit with any validity.

Further to the east, the land dipped towards a barren plain. Bule saw no life there, either. There was only the evidence of a terrible cleansing, the ground scorched by lightning. Worse still, it held the potential for new growth, unblessed by the Plaguefather. Less than a league from the temple, Nurgle’s blight ended. The meaning was clear. The land beyond was the site of another defeat. There was no way to guess what enemy had scraped the land clean of blight, but that a foe had done so was beyond doubt. For a moment, Bule wondered if the inhabitants of the tower were responsible for this tragedy. No, he decided. They had built this high edifice, but only from the wreckage of what had been before. The scoured earth did not begin at the tower. Rather, a finger of purifying fire had reached this far into the valley from the battlefield. What had happened beyond the valley must have been the inspiration for the construction of the temple, and for the noise that came from within and from the roof.

The temple rang with human voices.

‘What’s that sound?’ Fistula asked.

‘You don’t recognise it?’

‘No.’

Of course he didn’t. Such a young warrior. So inexperienced. He had not known the great wars of the past. He had not been formed by those struggles. He had not witnessed the fall of empires. He had not witnessed the extinction of what had suddenly dared to be reborn.

‘That,’ Bule said, ‘is song. It is hope.’

The song travelled to them on the humid air in snatches. It was, Bule thought, uncertain. It was spontaneous, but unled.

‘Hope.’ Fistula’s breath wheezed with the intensity of his anger.

Bule shared his underling’s rage at the blasphemy. But he also celebrated. Here was a prey whose destruction and instruction would be satisfying. The annihilation of hope was a pleasure to be savoured. The Rotbringers would hurl the temple down. All within would experience the gifts of Nurgle and know true apotheosis in the exquisite opulence of disease. An easy victory for the warband, but rich in satisfaction.

His flies buzzed in growing excitement. The pull was much stronger. The longer he stared at the temple, the closer to clarity he drew. The fall of the temple became of crucial importance. The defeat by the seraphon was suddenly trivial, merely one battle among many. Somewhere in the temple, destiny awaited.

‘Sound the horns,’ Bule commanded.

To raise his voice in praise was a strange sensation. All his life, the very idea of song had been inconceivable. He only knew what song was because of the monstrous chants of the dark warhosts. Song was the triumph of Chaos. Song was the announcement of doom. It was the liquid, burbling, discordant, cackling sound that presaged slaughter. There was no song in the lives of the people struggling to survive under the reign of night and plague.

No song until that moment when Brennus witnessed the deeds of the beings that blasted down from the heavens. Beings of light, beings of fury, their coming had illuminated the landscape with fire and routed the armies of disease. He and his fellows had watched the battle from a distance. The waves of the war had lapped at the edge of the valley while they had hidden and sought what refuge they could in the remains of the city whose name had been lost long ago. A purging sliver of fire had reached into the valley, and that holy blaze was surely the promise of more.

The destruction had been pure. The blight was gone. The emptiness to the east was sacred, and so was the sear in the valley. It was the sign of healing to come. Of the return of dawn.

And so they had built the temple and built it as high as the dead-but-restless statues. The inhabitants of the valley had numbered only a few score at the beginning. But the battle had been witnessed by many more, scattered through the hills and the forest. The activity of construction had become a beacon. Before long, hundreds had joined in the act of worship. Then thousands. They were all ragged, hungry, ill. Many were maddened by pain and grief, yet they were able to complete the simple tasks of hauling stone, even as they babbled and shrieked their horror. But even the most feral also had hope, and they were strong with it. A following formed. And those who began the building, those who led by example, and so were expected to continue to lead, were the priests.

Brennus was among their number. He knew what he had become. He accepted the calling. He was proud of it and humbled by it, as were the others who had been called to wear the robes of their new office. To their rags they added pieces of scavenged armour and fragments of robes, vestments that bore marks which resonated with their spirits, even if they did not know the meaning of the signs. And now they sang their strength. They sang their praise.

On the roof of the temple, the celebrants had erected their altar of war. Brennus himself had found its largest piece, half-buried in the ancient foundations upon which the temple would be built. It was a portion of an ornate crimson anvil, larger than a man. The beings of light had great hammers. Surely the anvil had some connection to their divinity. At the entrance to the valley, a black helmet framed by a golden halo had been found. Its visage was as unforgiving as it was blessed. The priests had placed it on the altar and it had given focus to their praise, and to their determination. They would pray here, and when the time came, they would take up the hammer to fight for their lives and their still-inchoate faith.

A large fire pit was next to the altar. A massive cauldron sat over the flames, its contents boiling. Around the cauldron was a large group of the most damaged of the faithful. Most could barely speak, and they mortified their own flesh with their fervour. They were no longer victims. Now they were flagellants, and their wasted bodies were kept alive by the fury. On all sides of the temple, sentinels stood at the crenellations, keeping watch at all hours, vigilant for signs of evil or of deliverance.

And around the altar, around the fire, around the ramparts, Brennus and his comrades sang.

The song was a patchwork, constructed of bits and pieces dredged from the collective memories of the worshippers. The people combined melodies and words passed down from generation to generation, eroded and forgotten as the centuries of darkness passed. They took the fragments, many of them devoid of any meaning save the impulse to praise itself, and put them together in the same manner they had built the temple. The result was irregular, a thing of awkward rhythms and strange halts, but it was powerful. It gave voice to the soul. Brennus sang his thanks, even though he did not know who he thanked. The hymn was raised to unnamed gods. The objects of praise were the warriors who had brought the light. Whoever they were, they had broken the forces of the Dark Gods, so they must be divine.

The worshippers sang for the warriors seen only from a distance, offering thanks for the miracle already performed, and calling upon them to return.

‘Movement,’ Kalfer shouted.

The worshippers kept singing. Brennus and four others detached themselves from the circle and joined Kalfer at the ramparts. Silhouettes gathered on the summit of the hill to the south. Soon they covered the slope. The forms were bloated, twisted. Torsos and limbs were malformed. Some were swollen. Others were too long, tentacles instead of arms. The air, foul and choking as ever, became fouler yet. Brennus’ throat began to feel tight and raw just from looking at the hulking, pestilential shapes.

And then there was music, the terrible music, a jangling discordant sound in celebration of corruption.

All along the lines of the assembled host, horns were raised. They sounded. Their blast reverberated across the valley. The noise was huge. It ratcheted like lungs filling with fluid. It buzzed with the wings of millions of insects. It echoed, it squirmed.

Brennus was sure the light in the valley began to fail more quickly, as if sickened by the sound. The air grew still worse. Brennus swallowed, and he felt the tickle of legs crawling at the back of his mouth and down into his chest.

‘Our trial has come,’ Kalfer said. He sounded determined, but Brennus could hear the fear just beneath the surface.

‘We are prepared,’ said Brennus.

‘I had hoped…’ Kalfer trailed off as the warband began to march down the hill.

‘For what?’ Heccam asked. ‘To be left alone?’ He had already picked up a double-headed flail from the stacks of weapons lining the ramparts. Its handle was long enough to be used as a staff. He held it up like an icon.

‘No,’ said Kalfer, already sounding stronger. He touched his forehead, where he wore a tight band of studded metal.

‘Good.’ Jessina was arming herself too. ‘Our duty is not to hide and hope for deliverance.’

‘It is not,’ Brennus agreed. ‘We will give praise in struggle. And if we die, we must die with pride and with hope. Then victory will be ours, no matter what.’

The horns sounded again. The army of Rotbringers was midway down the slope and moving fast. Laughter and shouts followed the second blast. Voices thickened by the flow of pus and the pressure of tumours mocked the celebrants. At the head of the host was a massive warrior. His helmet was terrifying in the blankness of its features – it had just three holes drilled into the front, which suggested an unnatural configuration of eyes. A single horn curved out and down from the right side. He raised his right arm, pointing a gigantic, pitted battle axe.

‘Grandfather Nurgle summons you to the celebration!’ he roared. His voice was thunder, and beneath it was the hum of a million insects. It came from a throat raw and suppurating and powerful. Its invitation should not be refused.

The celebrants of the tower refused it.

They loosed volleys of arrows at the Rotbringers. Untrained, they did so too soon. Most of the arrows fell short. The few that reached the warband did so only because the corrupted warriors advanced into the hail of shafts. Their shambling gait was surprisingly fast. The diseases cratering their skin and twisting their forms gave them strength, and they charged with the fervour of zealots. They too gave praise, and they came to spread the contagion of their faith.

Brennus looked back toward the centre of the roof. ‘Hurry!’ he called. A group of flagellants dragged the cauldron toward the north rampart. Brennus helped lift a curved length of metal. It was the first and only product of the temple’s forge, ten feet long and widened at one end to better receive the contents of the cauldron. The priests fastened the chute into place with rope and a wooden framework. The larger group hauled the cauldron up. As they did, disease-ridden ungors loosed a volley of arrows against the temple walls. The plague warriors laughed. The attack was simple mockery. Even so, a number of arrows whistled through the crenellations. One struck Kalfer through the throat. He staggered back, eyes wide, his mouth open in silent shock. His hands clutched at the shaft. They came away slimy. The arrow was dark with filth. The fletchings looked as if they were made from feathers, but the vanes were coiled and wiry, and they released a small cloud of spores as Kalfer stumbled and the arrow shook. One step away from him, Loressa began to cough. Kalfer fell, twitching. Retching blood, Loressa pulled his body away to the north end of the roof. She managed to reach a wall before slumping over the corpse.

‘Ready!’ Jessina called. The cauldron was in position. At the same moment, Brennus heard the clash of weapons far below against the metal door that was the sole entrance to the temple.

‘Burn them! Burn them!’ Heccam shouted.

Many hands tilted the cauldron. The boiling water poured into the chute. Brennus ran to the next aperture and looked down.

He wished they had oil, but there was only water, collected from a clean and pure stream that ran through the edge of the scoured region. Hauling the water back over those leagues had been a task almost as painstaking as the construction of the temple. Now, kept in stone reservoirs, was enough good water to last for months. And enough to hurl at the enemy.

Steaming, the boiling embodiment of resurrected faith and hope, the water fell upon the Rotbringers.

Bule had his axe raised to strike the door of the temple when the scalding rain came down. It took a few moments for the water to work its way through his armour. He ignored the pain at first, but then it became ferocious. The warriors on either side of him howled, recoiling from the burn. Bule snarled. Simple water should not hurt like that. It should turn to muck on contact with him, more irrigation for Nurgle’s garden. Instead, it dug deeper into his flesh with flashing agony. One warrior fell to the ground, the skin of his skull and his left arm sloughing off, dissolving into sludge.

This water had been transformed. It burned with noxious purity. When it touched the ground, it scoured again, eating the diseased plant life and leaving bare stone.

Bule had expected sport in killing the inhabitants of the temple. Now he encountered blasphemy. He would permit no portion of Grandfather’s garden to wither. He roared, dismissing the pain. Where his skin deliquesced, pus ran over the surface, overrunning the purity with a wealth of illness. Beside him, Fistula also stood his ground, his scalp an oozing mass of open blisters. They exchanged a look. In this moment, Bule shared the blightlord’s rage. Fistula pulled back, giving Bule the space he needed. Heedless of the searing rain, he raised his axe again, and brought it down against the door. The iron barrier shuddered in its frame. The blade left a gouge two feet long and as deep as his hand. Rust spread from the lips of the wound. The disease of metal cracked the face of the door. A prayer to the Plaguefather on his lips, Bule smashed the door again.

It buckled.

Brennus rushed down the uneven stairs of the temple. His spirit was fired by what he had witnessed. The temple worshippers had struck a true blow against the Rotbringers. He had believed they could be defeated after seeing the beings of light. Now he believed they could be defeated even by forces that were not divine. He did not dare hope that defeat would come at his hands and those of his fellows. But he would fight as if it could.

On the ground floor, there were no windows. There was only the door. In the vast hall, the worshippers in their thousands stood armed with old axes and blades. The people waited as another terrible blow battered the door. They were ragged, but they were an army, and they were ready to fight.

Brennus stopped on a landing at the top of the hall.

‘No!’ he cried as he saw some movement towards the entrance. ‘We’ll keep them out yet! Block the door!’ In a direct confrontation, he knew the Rotbringers’ strength would be overwhelming.

One of the men nearest the door turned around. ‘But we’ll be trapping ourselves.’

‘If they get in, they will win quickly,’ Brennus said. ‘Keep them out, and we continue to hurt them. Do it now!’

The man began to object again, but at both sides of the door other congregants rushed to release a cluster of ropes. Freed, the ropes swept up toward the ground floor’s ceiling, passing through a large iron hook. On the other end, massive blocks, the heaviest the people had been able to find and move, fell from their suspended position just above the doorway. They hit the floor with a booming crack. The door to the temple became meaningless. Now there were only walls.

‘Take to the stairs!’ Brennus called. ‘Strike the enemy from above.’ There were hundreds of arrow slits in the tower. The faithful would fight until the end.

Iron tore and crumbled before Bule. The door fell. Behind it was solid stone. Bule laughed, his good humour returning. He walked away from the blocked entrance. More scalding purity fell on him. The pain meant nothing. The bounteous rot of Nurgle surged into the wounds, infecting and swelling his flesh with new toxic gifts. He gathered his warband a few yards from the base of the temple wall, out of range of the water, but well within reach of the archers. He and his warriors laughed at the poorly aimed volleys. Arrows bounced off armour or sank into putrefying flesh, doing little more than release floods of larvae to the air.

‘Why hide yourselves away?’ he asked the mortals. ‘Why refuse Grandfather Nurgle’s generosity? His garden is a riot of delights. If you will not revel in the garden out here, we will send the garden to you.’ He faced his warriors. ‘They send us purity. We should answer in kind.’

The warband constructed a bonfire from the diseased branches of trees standing twisted and putrefying in the ruins. They filled copper vessels with the thickened water of the river. Within minutes, as the horns sounded again, a thick, damp smoke filled the air. It embraced the temple. The breath of Nurgle wafted into the tower’s apertures.

When he heard the first sounds of distress emerge from the interior, Bule said, ‘Thus the Garden grows.’

There was satisfaction in the lesson being taught, but even as he spoke, he knew it was not enough. His warriors would not content themselves with victory at one remove. It was a poor substitute for the direct mortification of the enemy’s flesh. And there was more. The goal that called to him was not the simple extermination of this false hope. His destiny waited inside those walls. The flies about his head flew in a concentrated swarm at the temple again and again. The call, now so tantalizingly close to clarity, was just beyond his reach.

He must find a way to pass through those walls, or shatter them.

Brennus returned to the roof of the temple. The Rotbringers’ smoke came for the priests and flagellants. He felt his chest hitch and his throat tighten in anticipation in the moment before the coiling tendrils enveloped the tower. He coughed. The stench was foul. It was rotten meat and writhing flesh. It was as dry as hollowed-out bones, yet it was as clammy as a damp fist. Heccam was among those at the ramparts and the first to breathe in the poison. The defenders dropped their bows and collapsed. Heccam clutched his head, weeping and choking.

‘We can’t,’ he moaned.

‘Stand up,’ said Brennus. He breathed through his mouth. The air felt thick enough to chew. It was furry with legs. It sank into his body. It tried to sink into his soul. It weighed him down, whispering the death of hope.

He refused to listen. With weeping lesions on his arms, he hauled Heccam upright. ‘Do not surrender,’ he exhorted. ‘Keep fighting!’

‘For what?’ Heccam muttered. Thick, yellow saliva dribbled from the corner of his mouth. Sores appeared on his face, clustering and bursting.

Brennus let go of him. He picked up his weapon instead. He turned to the wall and loosed an arrow into the spongy air. He was not alone. Others acted with him, and when one priest fell back, another stepped forward. They fought, though Brennus knew their arrows were futile against the warband, and though he heard the bubbling laughter of the Rotbringers. Each time he drew the bow string, Brennus struggled against the despair that sought to erode him from the inside out. And each time he released the bow string, he struck a blow against the despair. His eyes were watering. He felt the lesions spreading over his skin. But he would not surrender. Hope had returned to the world, and he held it fast.

The valley dimmed with the murk of floating plague and the coming of a darker night. Yet there was light. Brennus felt it in his soul. It was his strength. He saw it behind his eyes, and it guided his shots.

And then the light was real. It slashed through the gloom from above. Lightning slammed into the ground at the base of the temple. It struck the edges of the ramparts, and for a moment the temple had a dome of thunder. Priests threw themselves to the side. The light faded. Brennus’ eyes cleared, and he saw the divine warriors.

The largest part of their number had appeared outside. The blast of their arrival forced the Rotbringers back. It banished the evil smoke. On the roof, Brennus gazed upon the leader of the gods. He was a towering figure in cloaked armour. He was flanked by archers. Above, winged warriors alighted for a moment on the edge of the broken roof before taking off once more.

Holy terror assailed Brennus. He joined his fellow priests in falling to his knees. These gods were forbidding in aspect, clad in obsidian, and the cold visages of their helmets were ominous. They were beings of metal forged from the night itself. Yet there was nobility here, reflected in flashes of gold amid the black. It rimmed the shoulders. It shone from the hammer icon of the shields. And it was there in the halo that framed the helms.

The leader spoke. ‘I am Merennus. We come to bring justice to the darkness. You have fought well in the defence of the gate.’

‘Gate?’ Brennus said. But his voice emerged as a croaked whisper, and the warriors had already turned to the needs of the battle. They moved to the wall facing the Rotbringers. They towered over the ramparts. They raised magnificent bows whose strings were of searing blue light. They drew their weapons and awaited the command.

‘Judicators,’ Merennus said, ‘pronounce your judgement.’

As one, the Anvils of the Heldenhammer visited destruction on the bearers of plague.

The light. The thunder. The sudden host of warriors, their armour black yet gleaming with ghastly purity, sterile, an affront to the carnival of decay and life.

No, Bule thought.

He knew what he saw. He knew what these beings called themselves. They were Stormcast Eternals, and they were a rumour. He had heard of the struggles against them. He had dismissed the reports as lies. The gods of Chaos were triumphant. Sigmar was beaten, hiding behind his walls, trembling before the spread of the garden. The Stormcasts were lies propagated by Nurgle’s rivals and by warbands who refused to acknowledge the shame of their own defeats.

The Stormcast Eternals did not exist. This he had believed. This he had declared.

And now the myths attacked.

On the roof of the temple, armoured figures drew bows, but the arrows they loosed turned into lightning. The blasts incinerated tumour-bloated barbarians. Bule took a hit in the shoulder. It knocked him back. He snarled at the flames that shook his body. They burned brightly, attacking him with the purity that he strove to destroy with his every act, with his every breath.

‘Decimators to the fore!’ came a voice of doom from the tower. ‘Tear out the heart of the enemy! Liberators, lock shields! You are the marching wall! Crush all before you! Prosecutors, strike from the east and west! Teach the enemy to fear the skies and the wrath of Sigmar!’

And from ahead and from above, war as he had never known fell on Bule and his legion of plagues.

The lightning arrows continued to rain down. In the midst of the fury, Bule exchanged a look with Fistula. The blightlord’s eyes blazed. He nodded to Bule. They were united. The Rotbringers had fled one defeat, and now, still weakened, they faced an enemy fresh to the battlefield. This new war began with the odds against them. This was not the prey Bule had brought his band to hunt. This was a formidable opponent.

So be it.

There would be no retreat. Bule had seen, beyond the valley, the desert that came when Nurgle’s garden was uprooted. He would die to preserve the Grandfather’s gifts. And he would smash through any barrier, be it stone or metal or flesh, that stood between him and the call of his destiny.

He raised his axe high. He defied the lightning. He roared his joy of service to Nurgle, and of the fight for the glory of the garden. The warband echoed his cry. Barbarian marauders and knights of Chaos, vassals and lords, mortals and things transformed into shambling infections, all of them charged with the Lord of Plagues.

The enemy lines clashed, Bule’s mob of pestilence hurling itself against the perfect, shield-locked line of the warriors of light. Phalanxes of Stormcasts wielding huge thunderaxes cut into the mass of the Rotbringers. Bule hit the Stormcast before him with the full force of his bulk. The impact brought his enemy to a halt. The warrior swung his two-handed axe into Bule’s exposed flank. The blade cut deep through fat and muscle. Polyps burst. Rot surged through Bule’s flesh. It did not weaken him. It purged his body of the light. It gave him the strength of contagion. He laughed at the wound. He leaned into it, trapping the axe blade in the folds of his body. He brought his own axe down, shattering halo and helm. Beneath the metal face was a visage just as noble, but animated, snarling with its own fury. The Stormcast yanked his weapon free. Before he could strike again, Bule, still laughing, swung his axe sideways into his foe’s jaw. He cut the knight’s face in half. The warrior fell.

And then he and Grandfather Nurgle were robbed. He should have seen the body burst open with maggots and worms. It should have blackened with the proliferation of life, become a new mound for the garden. Instead, the corpse vanished, transformed into a blast of light. It shot from the ground. It cut through the clouds, and was gone.

These beings would not even die properly.

The falling night rang with the clash of blades and the shouts of combatants. Bule took down more Stormcasts, but their line remained unbroken. They tightened their ranks with each loss, and held the Rotbringers back from the temple’s foundations. The bowmen sent volleys of lightning into the rear ranks. Winged Stormcasts swooped out of the sky, their hammer bolts smashing into the flanks of the warband.

‘Break them!’ Bule shouted. ‘Loose the maggoth!’

The ground shook as, from the rear, the beast thundered forward, a huge mass of festering muscle and horns. It stamped into the Stormcasts with legs thick as tree trunks. Its arms were longer than its legs and batted the foes aside with broad claws. Its multi-forked tongue lashed out from a circular maw, grasping warriors in an armour-crushing grip. It lumbered into the line of Liberators, and broke the formation.

A Stormcast with a skull-faced helm cried out to the skies, and they answered. Lightning stabbed down at his command in a night-shattering, blinding maelstrom. The maggoth vanished, burned out of existence, and across the wide swatch of scorched earth, the Stormcasts surged forward once more, trampling Bule’s Rotbringers into the dead stone.

‘There is no retreat!’ Bule shouted. ‘There is only victory for Grandfather Nurgle!’ He wielded his axe with one hand. He spread his arms wide and grabbed two Stormcasts by the neck, yanking them from their shield formation. He used his massive bulk to immobilize them. He reached deep into the Plaguefather’s blessings. His strength was more than physical. He was disease made flesh. To see him was to sicken. To approach him was to die. He roared, and his voice was the vortex of contagion. His reach was enormous. He embraced his warband. He embraced the enemy. He grasped the length and breadth of the temple. In the ecstasy of his decay, he turned the air into a roiling mass of death.

His roar became the lead voice of a choir. It was joined by the shouts of his fellow Rotbringers, the ratcheting, coughing, gurgling cry of plague at war. The warband fought with greater ferocity. Each warrior’s own manifestations of disease blossomed, polluting the air even further. From inside the temple came the cries of the prey. The men and women who had been singing in praise now fell to coughing and spluttering. He could not reach their souls as his forces had with their earlier attack, but his grasp eroded their bodies. Skin turned slick. Lungs filled with fluid. Bones softened.

His assault hit the Stormcasts too. They shouted in defiance, but those near him weakened. They coughed. They staggered. The two he clutched sagged. When he released them, they clawed at their helms. Their movements were slowed, clumsy. One of them managed to pull his helm off. He gasped for air. His face was cratered. His tongue, swollen by layers of sores, filled his mouth. He could not breathe. Bule left him to suffocate. The prolonged death gave the Lord of Plagues the satisfaction of seeing a Stormcast rot before returning to the sky in that hateful light. He decapitated the other before wading in against the next, slamming his axe left and right, and at last he broke through the line.

The temple wall was only a few yards away, sealed and featureless. The route to his destiny was still blocked. The momentary triumph brought him no closer to his goal. A swarm of flies whined about him, calling and urging, but clarity eluded him.

In the moment of Bule’s hesitation, the leader of the Stormcasts leapt from the upper floor of the temple. His leap took him over his own men, and he fell to earth like a meteor. He broke the spine of a barbarian as he landed, causing the swollen marauder to burst open in a spray of pus. The Stormcast Eternal wielded a rune-marked blade and a hammer. He tore his way through the Rotbringers, gutting, severing heads, and chopping warriors down with a single blow. Three knights of Chaos charged him at once. The ground shook with their heavy steps. Their swollen, suppurating muscles expanded through the gaps in their spiked, filth-encrusted armour. They came in with halberds, axes and blades gripped in both hands. They swung with strength that had felled trees and infected entire cities.

Their blows never landed.

The Stormcast made a sweeping gesture. His cloak billowed as if caught in a wind of its own creation. Lightning and shadows clashed within. In a storm of gold as bright as the Lord-Celestant’s fury, a hail of spell hammers slammed into the knights. Amour exploded into fragments. The hammers pulverized limbs. They reduced torsos to jellied pulp. They punched through the skull of one knight and his body took two confused steps before the fact of its death sank in, and it collapsed.

Bule saw the tide of the battle turn again. The Stormcasts reformed their lines and moved to join their leader. They brought ruin to the Rotbringers between them. When the warriors met, their wedge would cut the warband in half.

The hammers of lighting came in volleys from above. The winged Stormcasts were besieging the Rotbringers, always beyond reach, beyond revenge.

Bule snarled. As the Stormcasts nearest him pulled back in order to create a more powerful formation, a fist to smash his forces, he started to pursue. But more of the enemy leapt from the upper floor of the temple to engage him. Three were on him. He welcomed them with rage. Let them gaze upon the three-eyed blankness of his helm. Let them see the mark of the fly, the mark of the Plaguefather.

And let them die.

He turned to drive his spiked pauldron up through a Stormcast’s gorget. The spike was as long as Bule’s forearm. The warrior choked, impaled through the throat, then up into the brain. Bule turned his gaze from the glare of the Stormcast’s dying light. He used his anger at the purifying burn to power his axe swing into the next warrior. He cut an enemy’s sword arm off at the shoulder. The third stabbed him in the gaping sore in his belly. The corruption of his organs hissed against the steel. This was no common blade. It burned him with a god’s anger, but his own god’s blessing reacted against the assault, keeping him alive on a foundation of plague. He slammed his axe into the Stormcast’s chest plate, hurling the warrior back. The sword slid out of his body. He pressed his advantage, blinded by pain, furious with determination. This battle was more than a struggle between two hosts. It was a war between gods.

Bule was willing to die for the glory of the garden. No matter the numbers of the Stormcasts, he would fight them, ripping them asunder with his bare hands if need be. If this was his final battle for Nurgle, he would make it a brutal one.

But no, not here. The conviction was too strong. The buzzing call was deafening. His duty was not to make a final stand. He must answer.

The call was not just coming from inside the temple. It was coming from below.

Bule looked beyond the Stormcast with which he wrestled to the left of the temple wall, at the polluted river. It flowed behind the temple, but part of the structure’s base extended into the water.

Flies clustered at that corner. The swarm took on a shape. There was the suggestion of robes. A hint of a hoe-shaped head with many eyes. A long, clawed hand pointed down, to where the river flowed beneath the tower.

Bule ran at the Stormcast. He wished the warrior could see his smile behind his helm. It was the smile of revelation. He collided with the Stormcast. The thunder of their impact shattered the air. The ebon-armoured knight drew his arm back and stabbed Bule again. Bule moved forward on the blade. His axe shattered the Stormcast’s mask. Corruption spread over the warrior’s face. Bule struck again, cleaving the hated visage in two. The Stormcast fell. Bule pulled the sword from his own gut. Steam rose from the blade and he hurled it into the night.

The path was clear to the river. Most of the combat had moved to Bule’s right as the Rotbringers sought to mob the Stormcasts’ wedge.

‘Hold them!’ Bule shouted to his army. ‘Destroy their illusions!’ He pointed to a group of knights and marauders nearest to him. ‘With me,’ he cried. ‘We go below!’

He ran for the river. It was blacker than the coming night. It was the sanctuary of life’s final degradation, unspoiled by the repulsive purity of the Stormcasts. Insects and worms squirmed in their millions over its surface. Its depths promised worse. They welcomed Bule as he plunged into them, closing over his head in a foetid embrace.

The water was thick with chunks of rotting matter. Its textures washed over him as he sank. It flooded his wounds with new parasites and infections. As he fell into the dark, he discovered it was not absolute. The glow of decomposition lit his way. In the wavering strands of green, he could just make out the black mass of the temple’s foundations.

He touched bottom, Fistula and the others following a few moments later. Already his lungs were straining. He took slow, heavy steps toward the wall. His boots disturbed the muck of decay. Bones, rags and heavy putrescence floated upward, wreathing him in a nimbus of greater filth. The sounds of battle filtered down through the water in muffled echoes.

Bule neared the wall, and it was all he could do to hold his breath, to not shout in exultation. There was an archway before him. He tried to run. Destiny was open to him. The call was so intense, he thought he could hear the buzzing of the flies underwater.

And even now, he did not know what called. He did not know what answer he must give.

He entered the archway. Now the darkness was complete. He was blind, yet his steps were sure. There was only one direction now. There were no barriers.

His lungs cried out for air. His head filled with the sounds of his body: the strange beats of his pulse, the bubbling in his blood, the wet rustling of flesh disintegrating and reforming in distorted configurations. The slowness of his movements turned the expectation of triumph into agony.

Then he found steps. He mounted them, rising into a sickly green aura again. At last he broke the surface. He drew the air into his lungs. It was close, stale and thick with spores. Bule found himself on the edge of a wide dais in the middle of a domed chamber. The curved walls and the dais dripped with fungi and lichen, which were the source of the glow. They were green-black, bulbous with disease and formed a carpet thick enough to distort the lines of the masonry. At the centre of the dais stood a high archway.

A gate. Bule approached it. He stared at it while Fistula and the others gathered on the dais. Flies circled it endlessly. The call had brought him here. This was his goal. But the gate was inert. There was no passage here. The buzz of whispers was the most insistent it had ever been, but even now they were not clear. He had no answer. Revelation was withheld.

‘Why have you brought us here?’ Fistula snarled. ‘There is no way up. All we have done is ensure our defeat.’

‘Destiny has brought us here,’ Bule said. ‘This was commanded.’

‘By whom?’

Bule didn’t answer. He didn’t know. Again, he felt that paradox: the command was not Nurgle’s, but if he served the master who called, he would not be betraying the Plaguefather. He might even be pleasing Nurgle.

There was no way through the confusion except forward.

Fistula was correct, though. There were no other exits from the chamber. There was no way of moving upward into the temple and turning the tide of the battle from the interior.

Yet this was where Bule was supposed to be. He examined the growths on the archway. They looked different from the rest. They were a pure, glistening black. No glow came from them. He reached out and his hand sank deep into their moist, fleshy texture. They were not fungi. They were naked tumours. They were the material of disease itself. The pure, unfiltered gifts of Nurgle.

They were inspiration.

New strands of pestilence ate into his flesh. They turned his blood to slime. He became their master. He was a Lord of Plagues, and he commanded his vassals to multiply.

To spread.

To march.

The garden of Nurgle exploded into voracious life. The black growths of the archway infected those on the dais, remaking them. Darkness poured from the gate. It spread over the waters. It rose up the walls. The green glow fell into the devouring corruption.

So did stone.

This concentration of disease was so virulent that its hunger surpassed flesh. Whatever could be eroded fell into its jaws. Bule willed it into the mortar. He sent it gnawing into the fissures in the stone, widening them, destroying structural integrity. His soul was a thing of uncounted hungers, and he would eat the temple.

Sigmar, Brennus thought. That was the name the divine warriors called out as they fought. They were not gods, as much as they appeared to be. They served Sigmar, and how resplendent must be his glory if these beings were his servants.

‘Sigmar!’ the warriors shouted as they cut into the Rotbringers with light and sword.

‘Sigmar!’ Brennus called too, and his fellows joined him. Many could not shout. They were too weak. Brennus could barely stand, but he leaned at the edge of the ramparts and he used his bow. Heccam was further gone, but with the coming of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer, he had recovered his will to fight. He slumped against the wall. He could barely draw his bow. But he fought. And he whispered, ‘Sigmar.’

Disease wracked Brennus’ body, but he had hope. He believed in the defeat of the plague. When a portion of the Rotbringers had broken off and disappeared into the river, the struggle shifted decisively in favour of the Anvils. The evil would be vanquished. The land would be purged of the foulness. So would his body.

‘Sigmar!’ he called, and drew his bow.

The roof cracked. The tower trembled.

Brennus stumbled, his arrow flying wild. He clutched at the crenellation to keep from being pitched out to the ground below. Darkness seeped up. Tendrils of multiplying growths spread over the roof like talons. Dust burst from the walls. The sounds of breaking stone became deafening. The tower shook harder. It groaned. The temple was diseased, and it was dying.

The blackness shrouded Brennus in a cloud of jagged flakes. His throat and eyes were on fire. Breathing felt like drowning.

The Anvils of the Heldenhammer remained in their positions. They unleashed their lightning on the Rotbringers. But their bolts dimmed. The darkness spread up their legs, the black of corruption seeking to cover the gleaming black of retribution.

Tendrils became talons. Talons became tentacles. They uncoiled from the tower and reached into the land. Perfect putrescence covered the battlefield. The Rotbringers rejoiced. They fell upon the Anvils with renewed fervour, propelled by the wave of unleashed plague.

‘Sigmar,’ Brennus croaked. He had found his light in the darkness. He would not release it. He would have this victory until the end.

The temple shuddered. It swayed. The blackness closed its fist completely around the tower. All that remained was for the grasp to close, and crush everything.

‘Sigmar.’ A desperate whisper against the night.

But then a great shout…

‘SIGMAR!’ The Anvils of the Heldenhammer roared at the night, and though Brennus could see nothing, he could hear a still more ferocious clash of arms.

And he knew that where the Anvils fought, the monsters could be defeated.

He was fuelled by a power far beyond his own. Bule felt the tower and the land contained in his hands. They were his to turn into the most perfect flowering. He had tended Nurgle’s Garden faithfully, and now he would make it bloom through the heart and bones of the enemy. The strength of a thousand plagues was his. He was the plague.

The dark was complete. The light was gone from the temple. His power reached its apex. And in that moment of completion, something else was accomplished.

The gate sprang to life.

The centre flashed. It twisted and coiled. Paths opened before him. He saw them with the myriad eyes of insects, a compound vision of choices. One choice dominated all others. It came into being with the activation of the gate. The power he held had opened the way, and now he must pass through or bring the temple down.

Behind him, the other Rotbringers were shouting victory as the walls shuddered.

‘Drop the walls!’ Fistula shouted. ‘Crush the lightning men!’

But Bule heard the call again, and it came from the other side of the gate. Archaon awaited.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Fistula demanded.

‘Archaon…’ Bule whispered. Louder, he said, ‘We pass through the gate.’

‘And leave the field again?’ Fistula was outraged.

Yes, Bule thought. They would leave. ‘Yes!’ he shouted. ‘Archaon calls!’

He stared at the path through the gate. It flickered. It led into a grey void. A cold wind blew in Bule’s face. It felt like emptiness, like the wail of the tomb. There was no garden at the end of this path. There would be nothing to cultivate. The call demanded he step away from any recognisable trace of Grandfather Nurgle’s dominion.

He made his decision. I will go, he thought.

The passage exploded with swarms of hungry flies. A welcome.

Bule looked back at Fistula and the rest of his warriors. His chosen few, he saw now, much as he had been chosen. ‘We do not abandon the field,’ he said. ‘We march to a grander one. A magnificent flowering.’

He entered the gate, abandoning the temple to its illusion of hope. Let the Stormcast Eternals triumph here. How meaningless that victory would be. How bitter it would taste for them when he returned.

When they and all their kind would learn what he had become.

About the Author

David Annandale is the author of The Horus Heresy novel The Damnation of Pythos. He also writes the Yarrick series, consisting of the novella Chains of Golgotha and the novel Imperial Creed and The Pyres of Armageddon. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction, including the novella Mephiston: Lord of Death and numerous short stories set in The Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 universes. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

The storm breaks as the Stormcast Eternals go into battle for the first time. Read the first book set in the Age of Sigmar.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in Great Britain in 2015.
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