WH-Warhammer Online-Age of Reckoning 03(R)-Forged by Chaos Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Warhammer

  Map

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  About The Author

  Legal

  eBook license

  This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the world’s ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury, it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage.

  At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the largest and most powerful of the human realms. Known for its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it is a land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forests and vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reigns the Emperor Karl Franz, sacred descendant of the founder of these lands, Sigmar, and wielder of his magical warhammer.

  But these are far from civilised times. Across the length and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come rumblings of war. In the towering Worlds Edge Mountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands of the Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods. As the time of battle draws ever nearer, the Empire needs heroes like never before.

  Chapter One

  Blood exploded from the Kurgan’s nose as a leathery fist splattered it across the dark-haired barbarian’s face. The Kurgan gave a wail of agony as pain roared through his body. In that moment of suffering, he forgot to bring his club chopping down into the slave’s skull. It was an opportunity that would not come again.

  Kormak ripped the heavy iron chain from the slaver’s numbed fingers, then brought it whipping back, slashing open the man’s face from brow to cheek. Blue-black blood dribbled from the wound with syrupy slowness as the slaver staggered back.

  ‘Kill him!’ the Kurgan roared even as Kormak’s fist smacked a second time into his face, spilling him onto the rough paving of the street like a poleaxed ox.

  Kormak spun around, glaring at the knot of black-faced slavers converging on him. He lashed the iron chain at them, cracking it like a whip. ‘Who dies first?’ he growled.

  The slavers hesitated. Kormak was an imposing foe, a brawny brute of a Norscan, his limbs bulging with muscle, his skin peppered with tiny growths of bone. From either side of his head, ram-like horns thrust out from his skull. The features they framed were bestial, the nose pointed and flared like the beak of a bird of prey, the eyes little glowing embers burning from the shadow of his heavy brow. Sharpened fangs swarmed in his mouth, pushing against his cheeks and lips to further disfigure his face. Iron fetters hung in shattered disarray from his wrists and ankles and the collar about his throat was warped and broken, cracked by nothing more than the force of the muscles in his neck.

  A hulking Kurgan wearing a battered kettle helm and armour flayed from the hide of some immense reptile spat curses on the defiant slave and rushed the Norscan, a grimy axe lifted high. Kormak dove beneath the furious attack, smashing bone-studded shoulder into the slaver’s chest. The armour split beneath the impact and the Kurgan was bowled through the ranks of his fellows. Kormak snarled in his enemy’s face, using the impetus of his momentum to drive the slaver into the steely mass of the iron wagon in which the Kurgans transported their wares. Ugly, thorn-like spikes jutted from the curled bars of the cage that rose from the bed of the wagon, sharp fangs of rusty metal from which the slavers had hung the decaying tatters of those too weak to endure the hard trek across the Wastes. Kormak’s victim shrieked as he was smashed into the side of the cage, spikes punching through breast and belly.

  Kormak seized the slaver’s face, twisting it and pounding it against the bars, impaling the Kurgan’s skull on a spike with such force that the disembodied rib cage already spitted upon it was crushed into splinters. The Kurgan’s entire body shivered and writhed, twitching like a beetle on a pin. Kormak was quick to tear the rusty axe from the dying slaver’s nerveless fingers, giving a bestial grunt of murderous pleasure as he felt the reassuring weight of steel in his hand.

  ‘Now let’s give him some company on his way to meet the Crow God,’ Kormak growled, hefting his stolen blade and fixing the other slavers with his malignant gaze.

  The street upon which the fray was unfolding erupted into shouts and jeers. Pressed between the cyclopean walls that formed the bastion of the Inevitable City, the streets were a maze of winding lanes and passages, like the tunnels of a rat run, cast in perpetual shadow by the gigantic walls. Huge flagstones formed the base of the street, ancient blocks of granite that had been worn down by time and elements, stained and pitted by the violence and evil that had unfolded upon them down through millennia. Stakes of iron and bronze rose from between the blocks, supporting tattered banners daubed in the profane symbols of the northern tribes or the rotting wreckage of one of the city’s many victims. Braziers smouldered from poles of ivory and copper, casting strange, sickly lights through the eternal twilight of the city, sending weird clouds of noxious smoke crawling through the blackness. Huddled against the steel-banded walls that towered hundreds of feet into the purple sky, like vagabonds seeking refuge in the bizarre angles of the bastion, hundreds of huts of leather and hide had been raised on supports of ivory, bone and bamboo. Here were the yurts of the Hung alongside the tents of Kurgan and the huts of Norscans, even the crude shelters of beastkin and still more savage creatures could be found squashed against the walls. Over all, glowing with spectral blue vapours, were the eyes of the bastion itself, eerie witch-lights dozens of yards across set high upon the battlements. Trapped within settings crafted from silver and engraved with swirling runes, the daemon-lights gnawed and gibbered, forever trying to break free of their bondage and slaughter the mortal things upon which their light fell.

  This was the Inevitable City, a place of infamy and horror, held as a dark legend in civilised lands, told as a grim fable around the cook-fires of the northern tribes. Built by daemons or by the madness of some nameless god, it was said that no man found the Inevitable City, but rather that the city would find him when it decided he was ready. All roads in the Wastes, legend maintained, led from and to the Inevitable City, just as none of them did. One man might tread the same path for his entire life and never find the place while another might step from the familiar game trails of his own hunting grounds only to find the Inevitable City looming before him. The city found who it would in its own time and none who stepped into the shadow of its mighty walls could leave before the city was finished with him. Such it had always been. So it would always be.

  The crowd of onlookers were as motley as the cluster of tents and huts nestled against the walls. Sallow-faced Hung horsetraders eagerly cast bets with one another while Norscan reavers, still stinking of brine, howled encouragement to Kormak, but their voices were all but drowned out by the masses of dark-
haired Kurgans roaring their own support of the slavers. Kormak glared at the jeering watchers, promising himself that after he killed his captors, he would wrest a tithe of wergild from the battered carcass of each and every one.

  As Kormak’s furious gaze swept over the crowd, he was brought up short by the smouldering eyes of one of the spectators. Like faceted gemstones, the weird eyes gleamed from a pale face darkened by the spiral of a writhing tattoo. It was a face steeped in wickedness, pinched and withered by pursuit of secrets obscene and arcane. The hook-like nose drooped beneath the loop of the enormous gold ring stabbed into one nostril and from which a tiny runestone depended. Silvery studs spitted the arching brow of a sloping forehead, shining alternately from the pale skin and the black of the tattoo in a strangely compelling pattern that made Kormak’s thoughts feel fuzzy and pained. The Kurgan’s colourful robes were a riotous assemblage of feathers torn from the wings of more breeds of bird than the Norscan believed could exist. A frilled collar, like the scruff of a vulture, engulfed the man’s shoulders and about his waist was a girdle of flayed manflesh, the stretched face staring in mute agony from the Kurgan’s midriff.

  The Kurgan noticed Kormak’s scrutiny and gave the Norscan a gruesome smile of blackened teeth and dripping fangs. There was condescension and scorn in the look, but also an air of avaricious interest, like a man studying a boat or a horse he was interested in. Kormak scowled back, then spun around to deal with the bold slaver who had worked up the courage to brave his axe.

  Gore spurted from the maimed stump of the slaver’s arm, his bronze sword clattering on the flagstones while a mongrel hound darted out from the crowd to snatch up the severed limb itself. Kormak’s arm closed about the shrieking man’s neck, snapping it with a savage twist. He turned and flung the twitching corpse into another pair of slavers.

  ‘Kill him!’ the slave master roared anew, still wiping blood from his mangled face. ‘I want that animal dead!’

  The slavelord’s commands did nothing to spur his fighters. Caught between the wrath of their master and the fury of their foe, they were quickly realising that Jun the Whip was the lesser threat.

  Jun saw their hesitance, kicking one warrior forward, heedless of the way the unbalanced man was quickly dropped by the Norscan’s axe.

  ‘Kill him or I’ll put you all on the block and sell you to the Slaaneshi of Khard!’ Jun raged.

  The threat urged his warriors to a new effort. They circled Kormak like a pack of wolves, snapping and jabbing at his flanks, trying to use their numbers to offset the Norscan’s greater skill. Kormak was not deceived. As one Kurgan thrust at his side with a barbed spear, the Norscan spun to cleave the collarbone of a man rushing him from the other side.

  Jun watched his men being butchered, new anger boiling behind his eyes. It was not the death of his men that worried him, but the expense of replacing them. He might be able to sell their carrion to the city’s beastmen or some of the lower Hung tribesmen, but it would do little to offset his losses. The cursed Norscan was costing him a small fortune! First there had been the other slaves the Norscan had strangled in the cage so that he might take their ration of water, then there had been Jun’s brother-in-law, who made the mistake of stumbling too close to the bars one icy night while they were still in the Shadowlands. Jun was not enjoying the idea of telling his wife about that.

  Now the filthy barbarian was chopping through Jun’s most experienced man-catchers. Finding men of their experience and calibre was not going to be easy, much less after word got around how he had lost his old warband. Jun could feel that looming expense almost like a physical pain. Damn that Norscan and whatever fiends spawned him! And a curse on whatever mad impulse had made Jun seek out the Inevitable City to dispose of his wares rather than making the journey to Khard as he had intended! A chill went up the slaver’s spine as he wondered if the idea had been his own, or if it had been the will of the city itself drawing him to it. Reflexively he fingered the talisman of Tzeentch hanging around his neck and banished the superstitious thought. The Inevitable City was just a place, a settlement lost in the Wastes like so many others. It had not been built by daemons. It did not have a mind and soul of its own.

  ‘A pity you cannot take him alive.’

  Jun spun around at the throaty voice, then checked his anger when he saw the feathered robe of the speaker. He could read the meaning of the weird tattoos that covered the robed man’s face. This was one who served the Raven God and was infused with the strange magics of the Changer, one of his sacred zealots. It was taboo to strike down one of the god’s divine healers, a crime which even the blood-crazed servants of Khorne were loath to contemplate. The chill returned to Jun’s spine as he found his eyes drawn to the bleached skull hanging from the zealot’s girdle, little drops of glowing fire falling from its sockets to blaze and writhe on the ground.

  ‘He must be a considerably valuable slave,’ the zealot continued.

  ‘He is a mad cur that will be put down and sold for meat!’ Jun snapped, anger working its way past any deference common sense demanded he show the sinister priest.

  ‘A pity,’ the zealot shook his shaven head. ‘I should think he would bring a mighty price, especially after such a gripping spectacle as this street-show.’

  Jun’s face contorted with annoyance. He gestured to the battle. One slaver was on hands and knees before Kormak, trying to push slimy loops of entrail back into his body while the Norscan held a second man by his neck a full foot off the ground. ‘My men are having enough problems killing him, much less recapturing him. I’ll be lucky to have a half-dozen left by the time this farce is finished!’

  A black-toothed smile spread on the zealot’s face. ‘I could make it easier… for the right price.’

  Jun eyed the feather-clad sorcerer with new suspicion. ‘Why… how would you…?’

  ‘The why is three talents of silver,’ the zealot answered, holding out his hand. ‘The how would turn your brain into soup if I explained it to you. Being that we are not in a sealed circle, it would not be healthy for myself either.’

  Jun looked back at the swirling melee, watching Kormak bury his axe in the breastbone of an attacker, then wrench the weapon free in a spray of splintered ribs and torn flesh. ‘All right,’ the slave master agreed. He reached to one of his burly arms and began snapping off thin bands of silver. With a last, regretful look at the broken arm-rings, he handed them to the zealot.

  The priest’s hand closed about the slaver’s silver. He reached to his girdle, the stretched mouth of the flayed skin opening to accept the money, snapping closed again with a wet smack when the zealot withdrew his fingers. Next, the zealot removed the skull from where it dangled from his girdle. He lifted the desiccated head, staring into its dripping sockets. Faintly, Jun could hear words escaping the zealot’s lips, each syllable seeming to leave a stain in his ears. He knew this was the Dark Tongue, the sacred language of Chaos itself, and was thankful that the zealot had not shared the secret of his magic.

  Coils of dark energy swirled around the skull, pouring out of its mouth in a cloud of glowing mist. Across the street, a similar cloud began to form around the horned head of the Norscan. Kormak yelled, trying to swat away the fell magic with his axe. He glared through the press of his foes, fixing his eyes on the zealot. With another bellow of fury, Kormak charged through the slavers, rushing past them to confront the magician. Jun blanched as he saw the fearsome Norscan coming, but the sinister zealot just kept whispering to the skull.

  Kormak was almost upon the feathered zealot when a great booming report, like the crack of thunder, rolled through the street. The glowing mist around the heads of both Norscan and skull swept into their chosen sanctuaries, seeping into living man and dead bone like water soaking into a sponge. Three steps away from the zealot, his axe raised high, Kormak gave a final shout and toppled senseless at the sorcerer’s feet.

  ‘He is not dead,’ the zealot assured Jun when the slave master prodded Kormak’s bod
y with his foot. The black-toothed grin was back as the priest nodded to his recent patron. ‘I think you will find him easier to sell this way.’

  Jun grinned back. ‘When he gets where I’m taking him, he will wish he was dead!’

  The Inevitable City sat poised upon the lip of a mammoth crater, a pit stretching between the physical world and the eternal Void of Chaos. Swirling energies, coruscating tempests of black lightning and glowing fog rose from the nothingness of the Void, tearing away at the crumbling lip of reality that sought to bind and contain it.

  The searing essence of raw madness, the Void chewed incessantly at the city, corroding its foundations with the tireless labour of an eroding tide. The broken stumps of buildings and walls hung precariously over the bottomless insanity of the pit, bits and pieces of themselves levitating as they broke away, clinging to the emptiness of the Void for hours or centuries until at last sucked down into the Realm of Chaos.

  Over this vacuity, this hole in the fabric of reality, great clods of earth and stone floated upon the aethyr. Thick chains of iron stretched from each chunk of ground, tethering them one to another until finally forming an unbroken line back to the crumbling lip of the crater. The combined essence of physicality of each fragment was stronger than they were alone, strong enough even to defy the devouring hunger of the Void. Upon the largest of these floating islands, surrounded on all sides by tethered satellites of stone, sprawled the Eternal Citadel, the poisonous heart of the Inevitable City.

  Huge beyond the work of human hands, the Eternal Citadel hovered above the Void, lightning crackling about its spires and battlements, tentacles of darkness and glowing fog crashing about its walls of scarlet stone, consumed and drawn down into floating gargoyle heads to be trapped within the purple light shining from mouth and eye. The central spire of the citadel stabbed upward, twisting round and round upon itself like the horn of some titanic unicorn. The top of the tower was formed into the melting half-moon and unblinking eye, the most potent of Tzeentch’s profane symbols. Purple light glowed from behind the stained glass of the eye, betokening the power chained within.