Then he dismissed the fantasy.
There were those who knew who he was, who would not allow him to do that. And even if he killed them, there would be others, secret watchers whom he never suspected. They would bring word of his treachery to the Witch King. And Malekith was not a forgiving master to those who betrayed him. He would stretch out his cold metal hand, and a suitable vengeance would be wreaked. There was nothing more certain in this life.
No, even if he wanted to give up this life, he could not. There was no escape. There was nothing to do but make the best of it.
chapter fourteen
Prince Sardriane looked up. The face he saw was beautiful and reassuring. It was that of a lovely elf woman, his mother. He was surprised but he could not quite remember why. He felt as if he were awakening from a deep, languorous sleep and had not quite woken fully yet. He tried sitting up, but he could not. He tried moving his arms, but he could not. Something seemed to be restraining his hands and his legs and when he tried to lift his head something bit into his throat.
‘What is going on?’ he asked.
‘Hush,’ said his mother. ‘There is nothing to worry about.’
Why was she naked? Why did she caress him so lasciviously?
There was something odd about her voice. It sounded like mother, or rather it sounded as she would have if she were in great pain while she spoke. There appeared to be something wrong with her head. Two small curling horns grew out of the side of her brow. Her mouth looked a little distorted too, as did her face.
Sardriane sniffed. There was a hideous stench in the air of burned meat, mingled with charred wood. He turned his head to one side, as far as whatever was restraining him allowed, and he saw that he was in his home, or what was left of it.
The roof had crashed in, and the walls looked burned through. A few of the more intricate carvings, of which his dead father had been so proud, were still intact, but they were soot-blackened in some places and the colour of ash in others. There was something else in the air, a strange sickly perfume that was cloying and yet thrilling at the same time. It smelled of musk and rot and hinted at other things that he did not want to think about.
‘I remember,’ he said, for he suddenly did. He remembered the fall of Tor Annan, the way the howling daemonic horde had come racing towards the walls, some falling to elf shafts, the daemons ignoring arrows that had not been enchanted by a mage.
The winged things had flapped down from the sky and attacked first the siege machines and then the archers. Death had come so very close to him in the opening moments of the battle. The winged furies had struck down the elves on either side of him. Daemons had smashed through the gates and clambered onto the walls, killing everybody they encountered. One had loomed over him, been about to strike and then at the last second, at the shouted command of what might have been a leader, had struck down Alfrik instead. Mad cultists had come swarming through the broken gateway, howling and chanting ecstatically as they slew.
At first the elves of Tor Annan had fought bravely. Archers had died where they stood, still unleashing their arrows at targets that ignored them. Warriors had tried to halt the monstrous red-skinned daemons. But as the fight went on it became obvious they could not overcome their foes. Some had fled. Some had tried to surrender. And some, seeing the daemonic leader of their enemies, had been overcome by a strange madness and had started throwing themselves at its feet and grovelling in ecstatic communion.
Sardriane had been one of the ones who had fled. He had raced through the streets to the ancestral home he shared with his mother and a few ageing retainers. He had told them to bar the door and to make ready to withstand a siege. Some of them, feeling that death was preferable to falling into the hands of their enemy, had taken their own lives using poisons preserved for that purpose. Sardriane had urged his mother to do so, for he feared what might happen if she were to fall into the taloned claws of the besiegers. She had refused, saying that while he lived, she would. She had as much pride as he. After all, she too was of the Blood of Aenarion.
For a while they had huddled in their chambers while the town burned around them and screams echoed down the streets. It sounded as if some hideous carnival of torture and wickedness were taking place outside. He prayed that if they waited long enough, they would be unnoticed by their enemies and escape with their lives. He hated himself for his cowardice. He hated himself for running. It seemed unworthy of his proud ancestry. The only defence he could offer up was that he was young and he did not want to die.
At last the screaming had stopped and he had dared to peek out through a gap in the shuttered windows. He had seen lines and lines of silent faces watching the building. Some of them belonged to brazen horned, crimson-skinned daemons. Some of them belonged to cultists. Some of them belonged to people who had once been his neighbours and who now gazed at his house with features dazed and numbed and subtly altered.
As if his looking upon them had broken some evil spell, they all shouted and rushed forwards, smashing in through the doors and revelling through the halls of Sardriane’s home, smashing the ancient furnishings, burning the ancient tapestries, maiming and killing the retainers, howling with insatiable blood lust and something else, a primitive deep-throated pleasure that was even more disgusting than their desire to do harm.
They had overpowered Sardriane and his mother and carried them to their leader, a strange creature whose outline shimmered and shifted constantly sometimes suggesting a crab-clawed hulking daemonic thing, sometimes the most beautiful woman he had ever imagined, sometimes the most noble king. He had thrown himself towards the monster, trying to strike at it with a dagger he seized from the scabbard of one of his tormentors, and had been struck unconscious by a blow to the head.
That was the last thing he remembered until this moment of bleak consciousness, when he had come to and been confronted with this evil parody of his mother. He wished that he was not awake now. He wished that he was not seeing anything. He wished that it was all a horrible dream. He knew it was not. He had seen more elves die in the last few hours than he had ever expected to see die in his life. He had witnessed a whole small town wiped out and he was not even sure why. The sheer malevolence of it was virtually incomprehensible. He closed his eyes again and wished the whole thing away.
‘You are awake, little elfling. Do not pretend otherwise.’ The voice was impossibly sweet and impossibly malevolent and still it bore an odd resemblance to his mother’s.
‘Go to hell,’ he said. His mouth felt dry and it took a huge effort to force the words out, but he felt the need to make up for his earlier cowardice by a show of defiance now, even if it would do him no good whatsoever.
‘I will eventually,’ said the thing that looked like his mother. ‘Most gratefully too shall I leave this tedious place. But there are a few things I need to put right before I go. You shall help me.’
‘Never.’
‘Oh, but you will. You will help me by dying. Eventually.’
Sardriane swallowed. He did not like the sound of this at all. He had heard tales of what Chaos cultists were capable of, and this thing was mistress of such a cult. Judging by the earlier slaughter, the stories of their cruelty were not exaggerated.
‘You are going to kill me... so do it.’
‘I will at the end, but first you will beg me not to, and then you will beg me to do so, and then when I have broken your will and your sanity and made you worship me and love me, I shall kill you. I might even tell you why.’
‘I do not care.’
‘That is simply perverse, which I admire. Don’t tell me you are not in the slightest bit curious why I have slaughtered your tiny little town and killed all of your family and yet let you live.’
‘I have had other things on my mind.’
The daemon’s laughter was gentle and mocking. It reached out with one soft hand and caressed his cheek. A thrill of depraved pleasure came from the contact, a magical spark jumping from one to th
e other.
A moment later the tip of a thumb claw flipped out his eye. He did not feel much pain, only an odd ripping sensation and then a wetness as the empty socket filled with blood. The daemon muttered something and raised its hand and twisted. Sardriane’s brain lurched as it tried to cope with the impact of what was happening. One eye floated in the air above him. He was looking up at it with the eye still in its socket. A thin taut rope of nerve fibre seemed to connect it to his head. With the other eye he was looking down on himself as he wept tears of blood. The daemon reached out and put out his good eye, so that now he seemed only to be looking down on his body. His vision settled and he saw that he was lying on a pile of skinned corpses, held in place by ropes of entrails.
‘Yes,’ said the voice, simply malicious now. ‘That is what awaits you in the end, although I confess I am tempted to animate the corpses and re-enact the Masque of the Fleshless. Perhaps later...’
It reached forward and touched Sardriane’s forehead. As the elf watched he saw his own skin split and begin to part and the daemon peeled his body like a grape. He tried to swallow his own tongue but this was expected and the daemon prevented it.
‘No, Blood of Aenarion,’ it said. ‘This game has a while to run yet.’
Sardriane was a long time dying. Everything the daemon promised came true.
This evening N’Kari wore the form of a mighty, muscular human warrior with the head of bull and the lower body of a horse. It allowed him to move quickly and he enjoyed the sensation of being a quadruped. There was something about that he had always found stimulating.
It was easier to hold the shape for longer now. He was growing accustomed to this reality and its restrictions. He was learning to use the flows of its magic almost at will.
Behind him his army awaited their instructions.
It was not as impressive a force as he would have liked but it was growing. It now consisted of a few dozen bound daemons, and several hundred cultists. Some of them had been recruited from farmers and smallholders encountered en route to Tor Annan. Many more had joined him after the destruction of their town.
The souls of those who refused to submit to the ecstatic disciplines of the Cult of Pleasure were swiftly dispatched to the netherworld, bait and sustenance for the daemons N’Kari had used them to summon. In general that had not proved necessary in more than half the cases. There was a strong pleasure-loving streak in most elves, and given the choice between death and a life of drug-fuelled, esoteric pleasure a significant number made the right choice.
The rest had provided an interesting distraction.
Sometimes the allegiance of families had been split and N’Kari had required the new recruits to prove their loyalty by sacrificing those who refused to join. Sometimes this had engendered second thoughts in the recruits, sometimes in the recalcitrant converts. In any case, it had provided a few moments of relief from ennui. He delighted in the savour of any strong emotion, and these elves were good for that, at least.
‘You have orders for us, Great Master?’ Elrion asked. He was beginning to look haggard as the toll of nights of pleasure and days of horror overtook him. He twitched and frothed and broke into tears at odd times. Sometimes he would rant at the other cultists, delivering terrifying if somewhat unimaginative sermons on the nature of Chaos and the goals of their master.
N’Kari enjoyed the storytelling and the embroidery of the facts and so far had seen no reason to contradict him. If anything, some of Elrion’s more visionary passages had made the rest of his cultists even more devout. The elf had acquired his own small harem among the impressionable worshippers but did not seem to take much pleasure in it.
Typical mortal really. So hard to please. Give them what they claimed they wanted and they would inevitably discover it was not what they expected or desired. Even to a devotee of the Lord of Perversity this sometimes seemed a little too perverse.
He thought about those he had killed back in Tor Annan.
N’Kari felt the desire for vengeance swell within him. His desire for it grew with every death. Feeding on the souls of the Blood of Aenarion made him hunger for more. There was something about the spirits that gave him more nutriment and more power than any others he had ever consumed. He was going to need it, for his plan was approaching its most difficult stage.
It had taken longer than he would have liked to find this place due to the restrictions this reality placed on his abilities to travel. Even the strange paths of the Vortex had allowed him to move more swiftly when he had been entrapped within them, and he had become used to the freedom they offered. It was this fact that had provided the germ of his original plan, and the reason why he had chosen the place for his escape to which he had now returned.
Nearby there was a waystone and an entrance into the odd underworld that the first so-called rulers of this world had created to allow themselves swift travel from point to point. He could call upon its power and make it serve his own purposes.
‘Tell my best beloved to prepare themselves. They are going to witness a miracle,’ the daemon said.
Elrion’s face lit up with curiosity. He knew that his master did not make such promises lightly and that something ominous and awesome was to be expected. N’Kari smiled, revealing his enormous fangs. He reached out and stroked Elrion’s cheek with his taloned hand. ‘Yes, little mortal, you’re going to witness a mighty sorcery.’
N’Kari approached the waystone.
To his daemonic eyesight it glowed, revealing the faint seepage of energy from within the Vortex. His smile grew wider, his fangs glittered in the moonlight. He knew all about this sort of magical power and how to wield it and shape it to his purposes. He was going to perform a feat of magic here that the elves would remember for as long as they existed – which, Slaanesh willing, would not be very long even as mortals measured time.
He was going to do something here that had never been attempted before in this world and probably would never be attempted again because there was no one who could match his knowledge, magical power or skill when it came to this. There was no one else who had paid the price of being imprisoned within the Vortex for five millennia either. It had allowed him to maintain his form here in a way that few other daemons could manage without the winds of magic blowing strongly. It was going to allow him to do something else as well.
He decided that he would need to make a few sacrifices before he began. It was not that the magic required them – it was simply that he liked to begin a new venture with an offering to his patron daemon god in order to curry favour and bring good fortune. It could not do any harm, it might do some good, and at very least it would give him some pleasure, which was the main thing.
He used a waystone as an altar and offered up six choice souls to Slaanesh. If through force of habit he stole most of their essence for himself, it was only fitting because he was going to need some of the power they provided to work the spell he intended.
He drew a six-pointed star using the blood of his victims and placed a severed head at each point. Once that was done he began to chant, as much to focus his mind as to impress his followers. As he chanted, he drew more lines in a mightily convoluted hieroglyphic that represented a path between this waystone and another one, within a day’s march of where his next victim dwelled.
In his mind he visualised the tunnel of light between the two points and, as he tapped the powers of magic, he forced his view of the world onto the world itself. The thing that he was creating in his mind through the power of his magic was also coming into being in the malleable substrata of reality that the waystone tapped into.
By the time he had finished his ritual, a glimmering archway hovered in the air before him, its surface shimmering like oily water reflecting firelight. With a gesture of his claw, he indicated that his followers should pass through it. Not without some reluctance the first of them did so, disappearing through the iridescent arch, as if they had dived into strangely coloured water.
O
nly when he had witnessed the last of them pass through did the daemon join them and do the same, plunging into a gap in reality and venturing through the strange tunnel in which kaleidoscopic sensations assaulted his senses.
Takalen the Ranger sniffed the air. There was something odd about it, a smell of rotting flesh that should not have been there. The lord who owned this mansion was old but the place should not have looked so deserted and that ominous scent should not have been hanging in the air. A feeling of foreboding passed through Takalen’s mind and she shivered. Overhead her companion shrieked and she knew that the great eagle was also disturbed. It was hanging in the air far above and its eyes were much keener than hers so perhaps it had already seen what was causing the smell.
Takalen moved cautiously towards the door of the old mansion. She did not like the look of it at all. She had occasionally visited Prince Faldor and his daughter Fayelle when she had passed this way previously and she had never known them to be careless. Just because this area was comparatively safe compared to the rest of Ulthuan did not mean the old noble had relaxed his guard. In the past the door had always been shut, which was only sensible, for in these dark times who knew what strange things might emerge to threaten the peace of the locality.
The door was open now, and even as Takalen watched, a fox emerged through it, carrying something in its mouth which on closer observation proved to be the remains of an elf hand. Takalen drew her sword, and passed through the doorway. She did not expect anything dangerous – the fox would not have been there had attackers still been within. It was just that there was something about the atmosphere that set her teeth on edge and made her wary.
Inside the walls of the villa was a courtyard. She saw the first of the corpses and, although she was no weak-gutted town-dweller, it made her want to heave. The bodies had been flayed and mutilated and the dismembered parts laid out in some odd pattern. The outline had been disturbed by scavenging animals but the fact that someone had intentionally laid the parts out in an ordered way was obvious. Splashes of blood and dried out strips of intestine made that absolutely clear.