“We… we can go on,” she stammered, in the tone of voice of one who had just seen and avoided a deadly threat by a matter of inches.
They pressed on into the heart of the pyramid. The aura of gloom deepened. Ragnar’s sense of being surrounded by hidden powers intensifying as they worked their way deeper into the maze.
Scant moments later, the air ahead of them swirled. A figure materialised, seemingly coalescing out of thin air. Ragnar gazed at the apparition, his mind suddenly filled with stories of ghosts he had heard back on Fenris. It was not an inappropriate thought either. The figure before him might have been the spirit of a warrior returned to haunt the living.
It was an eldar, inhumanly tall and slender, and garbed in exotically beautiful curved armour. A huge crest rose from its gaunt helmet. Strange weapons dangled from its belt. It stood before them with its arms folded across its narrow chest. It wore an over-tunic decorated with diamond patterns, and the sleeves and leggings of its armour were decorated in gaudy checks. When it spoke its voice was thrilling and musical.
“Go back, humans,” it pealed. “You should not have come here.”
The alien was not real, Ragnar realised. He could catch no scent, and it shimmered translucently. He knew that if he reached out he could put his hand through it. Still, what was the purpose of this projection? Was it simply a way of communicating with them, or was it a distraction, intended to keep them occupied while something else sneaked up to attack them?
“We go where we will,” Hakon responded. Ragnar glanced around, sniffing the air to make sure his suspicions were not correct. “We are the Emperor’s servants, in the Emperor’s realm, and it is not for any alien to tell us where we may go.”
The eldar shook its head sadly. “I mean you no harm, Space Wolves. I bring a warning. You meddle with things that are best left undisturbed. You seek to awake something that should not be awoken. If you persist along this path, it will lead only to catastrophe on a scale you cannot comprehend.”
There was an echoing quiet as the alien’s words sank in. What was this talk about warnings and catastrophes? Was the eldar sincere or was this all some sort of trick? Sven stood slack jawed behind him, as well he might. Ragnar himself felt like he was confronting some mythical creature from one of the ancient sagas.
“What is this?” he heard Sternberg ask. “What do you wish of us, ancient one?”
The eldar pointed to the talisman hanging at Karah’s breast. “Do not seek to remake that which was broken. Do not take it to the place of the curse. Do not set the imprisoned one free. You have been warned. Even now the forces that hold it are unravelling and the spell which has kept my brethren and I here to guard it is almost undone. Go back! Go back! Before it is too late, go back!”
Even as it spoke the figure shimmered and vanished. The inquisitors and the Space Wolves stared at each other. No one spoke. There was nothing to say. All of them knew they had come too far to turn back. All of them considered the ghostly eldar’s words.
What was the thing that should not be awakened? Was this a sincere attempt to avert their doom on the part of the alien, or was it some unfathomable attempt to manipulate them for its own purposes.
He did not know. He only knew that if they did not bring the talisman back to Aerius in one piece the whole world would die. And that if they did, the plague would end, although he suspected at terrible cost. The Oracle had said this. The Space Wolves’ own Rune Priests had confirmed it. Surely, even though the eldar possessed their own dark wisdom, and possibly an ability to see the pattern of the future, it could be no greater than that of the Imperium’s own sages?
Ragnar’s head swam from trying to understand the swirling complexities of the situation. He pushed all thoughts aside, glad for the moment that he was not the leader here, that he did not need to make decisions, that it was not his task to wrestle with the mysteries that surrounded him. All he needed to do, at this moment, was fight when called on to, and win if it were humanly possible.
He smiled as this knowledge lodged itself in his brain. It was good to reduce things to such elemental simplicity. It was even better to be able to find something to concentrate on that kept his mind from pondering on things of which he had no understanding.
As they ventured further into the heart of the pyramid, Ragnar realised that the corridors were laid out like a maze. They twisted and turned with neither rhyme nor reason, and did so in such a manner as to befuddle the head of any normal man.
“Why is the place like this?” he heard Nils ask.
“Russ take me!” Sven snapped back. “Can’t you see they were just trying to confuse any fools who came in. Fools like us actually.”
“No, Space Wolf. You are wrong” Karah said. “The maze is set out according to some kind of arcane geomantic principle. The runes in the wall and the layout of the corridors are all part of a pattern designed to funnel unseen energies. I can sense the flow all around us, being channelled and directed.”
“Why?” Ragnar asked.
“I don’t know,” she responded. “Maybe it is all part of the system that has kept the pyramid inviolate for all these centuries. Maybe it’s something more. I sense that there is something powerful at the centre, though. I can feel that too.”
Not a tomb then, Ragnar thought. A temple? A nexus of mystical forces? A machine that focussed power? Who could guess why the aliens had built this place here.
Three more times they stopped, and waited anxiously while Karah dispelled the lines of fire. Then suddenly it was over. They had reached the end of the tunnel and the end of their journey.
In an open chamber which echoed hollowly with their footsteps, they came to stand before an immense stone door covered in runes. Ragnar wondered what lay beyond.
“How are we going to open this?” Sven asked, his voice too loud in the echoing chamber.
“Explosives,” Nils suggested.
“Don’t have any,” Strybjorn sniffed.
“We’ve got our grenades.”
“Won’t make a dent in this. Unless I miss my guess, it must be ten strides thick and weigh tons.”
Ragnar contemplated the immense weight of dressed stone standing before them. It seemed as massive and immobile as the pyramid itself had from the outside and just as unbreachable. Yet now they were here, in the centre of the vast, ancient monument. He knew that given time they would find a way into its secret heart.
Karah Isaan walked up to the vast stone door and placed her hands flat upon it. As she did so, lines of brilliant white light emerged from her palms and spread like a web of fire across the stone. This time the pattern did not fade away, but flashed and sparked for several long moments.
There was an earthquake-deep rumbling and a sudden swirling cloud of dust. In one motion, the stone descended into the floor, leaving the way clear into the chamber in the heart of the pyramid.
As it did so, Ragnar felt a sudden terrifying feeling of utter dread, and an overwhelming sense of evil.
Barely a heartbeat later, a deep rolling laughter, wicked and yet strangely jovial, boomed out around the chamber, and then a mighty voice spoke.
“Greetings, fools! In the name of beloved Uncle Nurgle, I, Botchulaz, favoured spawn of the most disgusting Lord of Disease, bid you welcome. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for freeing me.”
Along with his companions, Ragnar entered the chamber warily, weapons held ready, knowing that there was no way he could defend himself from what waited within.
The floor was caked in what looked like the hardened remains of a millennia of effusions of pus. and snot and phlegm. In the middle of the floor, on an altar that looked as if it was carved from a mound of pure hardened mucus, lounged an obese and profoundly disturbing figure. It was truly huge. It was obscenely fat and its skin was a blotched and unhealthy green. It rippled to the ground in many leathery folds. The reek from it was worse than any sewer. Tiny horns emerged from its foul, bulbous head. Its eyes were tiny and sparkled wit
h ancient malice. The thing gave a long, hacking cough that sent a great shower of snot spraying out onto the floor. Where the disgusting eruption landed, each drop formed into a tiny capering figure that resembled its creator. They danced across the floor for a moment and then sank into the carpet of filth, disappearing without trace.
“Emperor save us, an Unclean One…” he heard Sternberg mutter, and a shiver of horror passed up Ragnar’s spine. The Unclean One was the ancient name for a type of terrible, terrifyingly powerful daemon, devoted to the service of Nurgle, the Lord of Pestilence, and now it appeared he was in the presence of such a being. “Now all is clear to me.”
As Ragnar watched, the greenish stuff of the altar writhed and reformed. Tiny gargoyle faces emerged, stuck out their tongues, hawked and spat and then vanished into the substance of the structure again like ripples disappearing from the surface of a pool.
“Excuse me for not rising,” said the daemonic thing. “But I am not in the best of health.”
It laughed uproariously as if it had just made some astoundingly funny jest, and its laughter only died out in another long and hacking cough.
“Daemonic scum! Prepare to die!” roared Hakon.
“Please be a little quieter. Can’t you see I’m not well?” said the vile daemon, looking at the sergeant with watery eyes brimming with cynical humour. “You humans can be so tiring. Almost as bad as those eldar pests who trapped me here. Well, it’s been a boring few thousand years but oddly restful too, so I suppose I mustn’t grumble. But now I have things to do. A plague daemon’s work is never done, you know.”
Ragnar looked at the daemon in astonishment. He knew that its words were not actually being spoken aloud but somehow were appearing in his head as if by magic. And he knew also that despite the humorous tone of the daemon’s remarks, its speech was simply a way of belittling and distracting them. There was a wicked intelligence at work here.
“You shall not leave this place!” shouted Sternberg. An appalled look flashed across the inquisitor’s face. He looked like a man who has found out that his whole life’s work had been a mockery. Ragnar felt a certain sympathy for him. The inquisitor had come here believing that he was about to save his home world from the plague — but he had just found out that he freed one of the deadliest daemons in existence. A malefic being, that he had sworn to oppose with his life if need be, had been unleashed upon the universe through his actions.
And mine, Ragnar realised.
The daemon’s laughter gurgled forth. “On the contrary, my little human friend. I shall. I am very keen to see the outside world once more. I tell you, you don’t know the meaning of boredom until you’ve spent two thousand years animating statues made from your own filth, and then trying to teach them to dance. Still, every cloud has a silver lining. You know, I have devised some very interesting new disease spores.”
“You’ll never have the chance to spread them,” Sergeant Hakon spat. He looked ready to strike, but Ragnar could tell from his posture and his scent that he was unsure of himself. The daemon’s odd conversational manner and its obvious poise had thrown him. Ragnar could tell that his whole pack was struck by a similar unease. Possibly they were all dumbfounded by the thought they had been used as pawns by this vile gurgling monstrosity.
“Now, now, don’t be like that,” Botchulaz simpered. “I am entitled to my little bit of fun, you know. Have a little sympathy. You’re not the one who had been stuck here for millennia with only your own secretions for company. I mean, those eldar were unnaturally cunning, if you ask me, almost too much for a poor bumbling creature such as myself. All those wards and gates, all that power bound up in that lovely talisman. All those ancient warrior ghosts to keep my followers away. One of those accursed intricate patterns which only reveals its flaw every three thousand years when stars are falling from the sky and the moons are in the right alignment. It was tricky arranging this, I don’t mind telling you. Surely you don’t grudge me a little amusement?”
“We shall slay you where you stand,” Nils dared to say.
“Foolish boy, you can’t slay me. I am a daemon prince of Nurgle. You might, if you were very powerful and very lucky, be able to destroy this living vessel and return my essence to the warp, but you could not kill me. Not even your Emperor could do that. Believe me, I know, I met him once. A nice enough chap but very dour.”
Ragnar could not believe he was hearing this blasphemy. And yet, he realised, it was perfectly possible that the unholy fiend’s words were true. According to holy writ the Emperor had fought against the plague daemons of Nurgle over ten thousand years ago. Was it really so unbelievable that this creature had been one of them? No more unbelievable than the fact that it had survived in the heart of this pyramid all this time, and schemed for its release, using them all as its pawns, directing them all from across the vastness of space.
Almost as if it sensed his thoughts, the daemon swivelled its blubbery head and looked over at him. Its face broke into a wide grin which revealed row upon row of thousands of blotched green and brown fangs. There was a ghastly stench of halitosis and gum disease. “It wasn’t easy, I can tell you. Only at certain times could I send my thoughts questing outwards, to make contact with my minions and get you people to do my will. Seemed like an age, believe me. Oh, what am I saying? It was an age since I first got stuck here The eldar again— they never liked me, you know. I suspect the Farseers built this pyramid as a trap for my kind ages ago. You can never tell with them, they can predict the future in an odd sort of way, and they are subtle in a way you lot have never been.
“Anyway, I blundered right into it, I was only here to spread some new spores and a little good cheer among my worshippers and they dropped right out of the sky and began their rituals. Nobody was more surprised than I was when I got sucked into this prison. I might have been stuck here forever, too, if your people hadn’t interfered and slaughtered the eldar.
“Broke the blasted amulet too, and carried it away and I thought: Well, that’s that; I’m stuck, aren’t I? The amulet was the key to the whole thing and then it was broken and gone. It was hard to maintain a positive attitude, what with my poor health and all. I was so depressed that it took me centuries to get in contact with the minions and find out even the location of one piece. And men, there was all the trouble of finding a reason for you to go and get it for me. It had me worried, I don’t mind admitting.”
The daemon was mocking them, Ragnar realised. It was boasting about how it had used them, all the while speaking in tones of false sympathy and humour. Why were they standing here listening to it, Ragnar wondered? Were they all hypnotised? Memories of how he had almost been ensnared by the sorcery of Madox came back to him. That had been a close run thing and surely this creature must be a hundred times more powerful than Madox?
“Oh, that reminds me: dear Gul, it’s time for your reward.”
“Thank you, master.”
Commander Gul stepped smartly from their ranks to come face to face with the daemon. Suddenly it seemed much larger, as if somehow it had changed its size without them even noticing. It loomed over the massive figure of the inquisitors’ bodyguard, men reached forward to lick his face with a long slime-soaked tongue.
“No need to look so shocked,” the daemon said to them all. “I needed to have somebody to keep you all on the right track. And Gul has been my servant for many years, haven’t you, Gul?”
“Yes, master.”
“Man and boy, like his famer before him, and his father before that, and so on. I won’t bore you with a tedious repetition of all the sorceries that were needed to conceal his true nature from your tests. They were many and varied in nature and one so likes to preserve some of the mysteries. Anyway, it was my worshippers who did most of it, and I’m not one to hog all the credit. Suffice to say that they were difficult and costly in terms of energy and sacrifice.”
“Gul, you are a traitor to all of humanity,” Sternberg said. Frank disbelief showed in his
face. He obviously had difficulty adjusting to the thought of his trusted henchman’s betrayal.
“And you are a fool who believes he knows the truth,” Gul replied with a sneer.
Hatred twisted Ragnar’s gut. Gul had accompanied them on their quest pretending to be their ally and all the time they had been serving his vile purposes. Lars and others had died so that this man, if man you could call him, could find his way here and abase himself before Botchulaz.
“Now, now,” said the plague-thing. “There’s no need for harsh language. All’s well that ends well, and so on.”
Botchulaz’s mocking tone fuelled Ragnar’s righteous rage. He knew now that this unending torrent of cheerful clichés was nothing more than a wicked jest of the daemon’s. In its heart it hated them all, and this was its way of showing contempt for their intelligence.
Ragnar managed to throw off the spell of the daemon’s voice long enough to raise his bolt pistol and aim a shot at Gul. The shell flew straight and true and exploded within the cultist’s heart.
“That wasn’t very nice, Ragnar,” Botchulaz said as Gul collapsed at his feet. The former bodyguard gazed up at the plague daemon the way a hound might gaze at a beloved master. “I had rather planned to reward Gul, too. His wasn’t an easy task, you know. Pretending loyalty to your Emperor and his rather over-zealous Inquisition was a bit draining for a man of his background.”
Gul reached up and tugged at Botchulaz’s leg. His fingers made a hideous sucking sound as they drew back. Ragnar noticed their tips were covered in slime. “Yes, yes,” said the daemon soothingly. “Don’t worry. I’ll see you right. Least I can do, really.”