Harrowdeep, p.25
Harrowdeep, page 25
The rage had filled him ever since. His existence was action, muscle and blood. Always blood, more and more blood forever. His former self was a past that belonged to someone else, a stain he utterly rejected. Yet the trace of the old Barradak resurfaced now and then, in a memory or a turn of phrase.
Kroacka noticed when that happened. Barradak knew that. He smelled suspicion on her. Her faith in Khorne had none of the complexities of his. For her, nothing mattered but the shedding of blood.
‘Khorne has sent us those whelps as a reward,’ Barradak said. ‘They are a gift.’
Kroacka said nothing.
‘They fell with us into Harrowdeep, and their blood will reward us.’
‘Us,’ Kroacka repeated, turning the word into a hiss. ‘We are here to serve Khorne, not you,’ she said.
‘Do not think to instruct me,’ Barradak warned.
Kroacka was silent again, her point made.
They marched on, her doubts and suspicions gnawing at the slaughter-priest.
The floor turned wet, and the temperature dropped. Moisture trickled down the walls, and Helvar thought the engravings were dripping too. The further down the corridor twisted, the colder it became, and the higher the water rose. Soon, the Transcended were ankle-high in the freezing black. And the marks on the stones dribbled and flowed, their meaning slipping further and further away as lines turned liquid. He kept listening for the sounds of the Gorewolves’ drums. He would hear them again, and soon. That had to be true. There had to be meaning in Barradak’s presence in Harrowdeep.
Helvar heard no drums. He heard less and less of anything. The flagellants were approaching a great silence, waiting ahead like a wall.
‘Ready yourselves,’ he said, as much to be sure he could still speak and make sounds as to prepare his followers for battle. His ears popped from the pressure of the approaching quiet.
The corridor came to an end at a gallery encircling an immense shaft, its top and bottom lost in darkness. To look up was to feel the threat of despair. Harrowdeep was a construct. It was something that had been built. The imagination refused to believe it had no roof. There had to be limits to the maze.
Helvar saw no sign of limits. The shaft climbed, and dropped, to infinities of shadow, and down its terrible height came a spray of shadow magic. It washed past the gallery in perfect silence.
The Penumbral Falls.
The words filled Helvar’s mind, but he could not bring himself to speak them. Not yet. The silence was too dark, the descent of shadow magic too solemn, and the meaning of what he saw too profound. The Penumbral Falls. The name lived in the myths told of Harrowdeep. It was a title in the geography of fear, a mark on the map of mystery. Helvar knew without a shred of doubt that he beheld the Falls, and his certainty was another source of disquiet. The myth forced him to acknowledge its name and its reality. It forced knowledge upon him and gave him certainty where doubt would have been welcome.
‘That was not water on the walls,’ said Valya, awed. Helvar was surprised that he could hear her so clearly. Her voice came out as a whisper, sharp and clear as silver. There was a single echo, a perfect, duplicated whole. That was not water on the walls. Then silence returned, as the Penumbral Falls dragged the words down into the depths.
The sense of Valya’s words falling was so pronounced, Helvar leaned over the stone lip of the gallery, as if he would see the sound tumbling into the dark.
Look down, another whisper came. Look down. No one spoke the words. The whisper came from inside his mind, but the command was not his. The other Transcended heard it too, for they all gathered at the lip and stared into the shaft.
Look down. Look down.
Helvar looked, his soul trembling with premonition. There were other galleries below, at irregular intervals down the length of the shaft. There were also doorways of corridors that simply ended at the abyss. And there were long stretches where the walls of the shaft were smooth, unbroken by any opening. Down the shaft went, and down, until the twilight of Harrowdeep condensed with distance into utter darkness. If there was a bottom, it was invisible. There was nothing to see there.
There must be.
Anticipation stopped Helvar’s breath.
Look down. Look down.
I am. I am. But I see nothing. Sigmar, guide my spirit. Show me what I cannot see without your aid.
Something glinted in the centre of the darkness.
Helvar had been staring so hard, he worried that eye strain was making him imagine things. Then Valya gasped, and a murmur of wonder ran through the Transcended.
Helvar saw the glint again. Bright and sharp and perfect, it had a purity beyond silver. To shine in that endless night, it must be a treasure beyond price.
Not, not a treasure. A weapon.
The conviction was the true revelation. It came over Helvar with the strength of a vision. He trembled, and his knees went weak with ecstasy. This was certainty as true as the name of the Penumbral Falls. But the revelation does not come from Harrowdeep. His heart began to beat hard with joy so great it pained him. Sigmar speaks to me!
‘That is a weapon below us,’ he declared. From the rapture on the faces around him, he saw that his Transcended already knew. They had all received the same revelation. Suppressing a sharp spasm of jealousy, he spoke again. He must speak. It was necessary. The vision was one thing, guidance another. The Transcended needed his guidance. ‘A weapon,’ he repeated, ‘that will be wielded in Sigmar’s name. It shall strike fear in the enemy’s heart, and it will turn his strength to ash. That is why we are here. That is our purpose.’
He would wield the weapon for Sigmar. That was his purpose. He understood now that he had been fated since birth to come to Harrowdeep and claim that weapon.
‘How will we find the way?’ Valya asked, sounding eager, hopeful and worried all at once.
The glint was a long, long way below, and Harrowdeep was a maze. The flagellants had not had any sense of direction in all the time they had been here.
We did not have a goal, either. ‘Faith in Sigmar will guide our steps,’ Helvar said. ‘We shall try the maze, and we shall defeat it.’
He faltered a bit at the end, because the word try sounded louder than it should have. There were no echoes in the shaft. They were smothered by the Penumbral Falls. But try echoed, as if a single strand from the chamber of echoes had followed the Transcended here, and had chosen this moment to take its stand against the silence of the Falls.
But there was another, harsher voice in the echo. Helvar knew the voice. He hated it. The echo reached down to him, then bounced back up the shaft, drawing his gaze, forcing him to see the face of the enemy once more. Barradak was there. He and the Gorewolves had also reached the shaft. They were on the opposite side and one gallery up. Helvar could barely see them through the veil of the Falls. He could feel the hate of Barradak’s glare nonetheless. The hate, and the surprise. The slaughterpriest had become aware of his presence at the same time that Helvar had seen him. Whatever Barradak had said to his followers, he had uttered the word try at the same time, and now the word sounded over and over in the shaft like the tolling of a bell.
Try… try… try… try…
The word changed. The Penumbral Falls took the echo as it passed back and forth through the shadow magic, and wove it into a new sound, a new word, a new meaning.
A new command.
Trial… trial… trial… trial…
Of course. A trial.
‘Praise Sigmar!’ Helvar shouted. The words fell dead in the shaft, and trial… trial… trial… resounded on and on. The Transcended looked at Helvar with wonder and hope. ‘Hear how the way is shown to us! Hear our destiny proclaimed! A trial awaits us, the trial we have all been seeking! Rejoice!’
He would prove himself worthy to wield the weapon. With it, his martyrdom on the battlefield would inspire legend.
‘Praise Sigmar!’ the Transcended answered.
From above came the shouts and threats of the Gorewolves. They did not last long. Barradak and his warband withdrew. They wanted the weapon too. They must not have it. Their unclean hands would not touch the sacred.
The strands of the Penumbral Falls parted for a moment, and Helvar saw, a third of the way around the gallery, another opening in the wall of the shaft.
‘There!’ he pointed. ‘There is the way! To our trial! To our glory! For Sigmar!’
He ran, and the Transcended ran with him.
Trial… trial… trial… trial…
CHAPTER THREE
Beyond the gallery, the halls became a tangle once more. As if in perverse response to Helvar’s galvanised purpose, Harrowdeep drew the Transcended into confusion. Intersections multiplied, each leading off into many twisting branches. Helvar faced far more choices, all of them bad, than at any other time since the flagellants had fallen into Harrowdeep.
The angles of the floors, walls and ceilings shifted out of true. Engravings spread over the stone again, more dense than before. Now, instead of taunting Helvar with meanings just out of reach, they disoriented him with a war of incomprehension. He understood nothing, yet knew he confronted a legion of contradictions.
The engravings worked with the tilts of the architecture to destroy any sense of direction.
‘Why am I leaning forward?’ said Stuyan. ‘Aren’t we going downhill?’
‘Haven’t you learned yet not to trust your eyes?’ Helvar answered.
Even staircases could not be trusted to rise or descend as they claimed. And everywhere, there was the clammy trickle of shadow magic. Sometimes, Helvar was sure it flowed from floor to ceiling. At those moments, he was so dizzy from the distorted angles that he wasn’t sure whether he walked on the floor or not.
He’d had to stop running almost as soon as the Transcended left the gallery. He tried to rush as best he could, but he did not want to fall or hurl himself face first into a wall. His followers staggered like they were drunk, and he could barely hold back a scream of frustration. He channelled his anger into hymns instead, and the others sang with him. Their voices faltered, gathered strength, and then faltered again as they struggled to stay on their feet. Hours passed, and the complaints began.
‘Where is the way?’ Stuyan wailed, breaking from the chants. He was from the House of Terevas, a family of minor nobles by comparison to the Sannhets. Stuyan and his sister, Evisa, had followed Helvar’s example in turning their backs on their wealth. Helvar could not fault their zeal. They lived to die for Sigmar. They renounced their former privilege with every self-inflicted lash of the whip. They were still recognisable, though, as petty aristocracy. They whined when things did not go well. The walls of Harrowdeep would be shivering with their moans of unhappiness if Helvar was not vigilant for lapses of discipline.
‘Where is the way?’ Stuyan cried again. He stumbled into a wall and clawed at his long beard in distress. ‘We are lost!’
‘We are never lost,’ Helvar snapped. ‘We can never be, because we march at the right hand of Sigmar.’ The corridor branched again, and he turned left, with authority, choosing the direction for no other reason than to be seen to be making a firm choice. He almost slipped. The corridor seemed to be running straight, but he felt himself pulled downwards. This was a descent, then. Good. The moments in which he was sure the Transcended were descending, and so had a sense of making progress towards the weapon waiting at the bottom of the shaft, were too infrequent. Too often, he felt lost, though he made sure not to show it.
The walls leaned unevenly towards each other until they met at a point and there was no longer a ceiling. The floor slanted to the left and right, the shift never apparent, and Helvar felt as if he were on a ship in a storm. As he approached the next junction, he heard the drums of the Gorewolves again.
‘The enemy is near,’ said Valya. ‘Below us.’
Helvar couldn’t tell if the drums came from above, below or to the side. ‘Be wary of such pronouncements,’ he said. ‘Harrowdeep seeks to deceive us. Be on your guard.’
The sound of drums faded, then started up again, this time seeming to come from behind. The pounding was brief, and then vanished suddenly, as if a fragment of sound were bouncing through the halls of Harrowdeep, unmoored from any origin.
The satisfaction Helvar felt at being proved right was brief. It did not ease his frustration. We cannot lose our way. Not so soon. I will not allow it. Fate and the judgement of Sigmar will not allow it.
He turned another corner, taking the second fork to the right this time. This corridor was broad, and the walls pulled back from each other, forming a curved vault. The floor was even. It did not descend, but at least it was easy to walk. The corridor was the longest Helvar had seen in some time. At first, he could not see the end in the gloom.
After a few yards, he saw movement in the distance. A few more, and Barradak and the Gorewolves came into view, approaching from the opposite direction. Barradak saw him, too. The slaughterpriest charged, roaring.
The Transcended ran to meet the foe, the pounding of their boots a thunder of righteousness, their voices a shout of furious praise.
‘Trample them!’ Helvar shouted. ‘Grind them into muck, for that is what they are! We will not die here. Our end is on another battlefield! This scum is part of our trial, and we shall go through them to the prize that awaits us!’
The Gorewolves roared along with their leader, and the sound was curiously muffled. It seemed to be coming from much further away than the hundred yards that separated the warbands.
No matter. Harrowdeep lies again.
The death of the treacherous scribe was moments away. Helvar sprinted forward, staff raised.
He slammed into a wall. The impact jolted through his frame. Blood burst from his nose and lips, and a tooth clattered to the ground. Helvar reeled back, stunned, uncomprehending. Valya, next to him, had been stopped just as violently, and she fell, dazed. The other Transcended fell over each other in a tangle.
Before him, Barradak was staggering too, his expression just as confused and furious.
Helvar blinked. His vision cleared, and so did his head.
He had run into a wall whose stone was polished into a perfect mirror. It was surrounded on all sides by a cluster of other mirrors. They looked as if they had formed naturally, a crystalline bloom of reflecting black. Wherever the Gorewolves were, it was not here. That was why their voices were muffled, and when Barradak stepped forward cautiously, reaching out a hand to touch the surface of the mirror he faced, his steps were silent. A network of mirrors, burrowing its way through levels and corridors, was bringing the images of the enemies to each other.
‘Harrowdeep mocks us,’ Helvar said, wiping the blood from his face. It mocks me.
‘At least it mocks the Gorewolves too,’ said Valya.
The Khornate scum raged as they pulled back from their mirror. They shook their weapons, the gesture all the angrier for its impotence. Barradak lingered a moment longer. Helvar locked gazes with him. Faith and rage promised each other destruction. Then Helvar turned his back on the image and marched back down the corridor, gathering his authority around him like a robe.
‘They are mocked too,’ he agreed. ‘And they are reminded that we are here, and that we are coming for them.’ He raised his voice, ‘But in being our trial, Harrowdeep serves Sigmar, and dooms the servants of the dark god. Do you hear me?’
‘We hear you, prophet,’ the others answered.
Helvar felt better. He had almost shouted the last words, because the louder he delivered his pronouncements, the more readily they were accepted by his followers. In turn, that they heard him and believed strengthened his own conviction. He returned to the last junction feeling more confident.
‘Our purpose cannot be stopped,’ he said, and believed it.
He took the next corridor on the right, and in only a few yards, it rewarded him. A staircase appeared, twisting down into the dark, and it really did go down. He felt the descent in his body, a satisfying drop with each step, and the union of sensation with the evidence of his eyes gave Helvar even more confidence. Now they were making progress. Now they were heading for the prize.
The stairs twisted down for a hundred feet or more. Distance was slippery in Harrowdeep, and Helvar didn’t dare trust his impressions too far. It was a long descent; of that he felt sure. When the staircase ended, the Transcended gathered in front of a high iron door. A red glow leaked out from under it.
Helvar pushed the door. It swung open easily, silently.
The Transcended entered a vast hall. The red glow came from the fires blazing in massive hearths and reflecting from crimson excesses of wealth. Chandeliers of rubies hung from the ceiling. Scarlet, velvet wallpaper covered the walls, and the tapestries were rich with red and gold. The chamber exuded luxury, but there was an even greater excess. The luxury was simply the reflection of overwhelming pride. It filled the hall like thick smoke. It was so thick, Helvar could barely breathe. Maybe that was why it took him a moment too long to recognise what he was seeing.
The chamber was a vision of the great hall of the House of Sannhet. Helvar saw his home, and he knew it, but the familiar had been exaggerated into something uncanny. The wealth of the Sannhets had never reached this scale. Helvar doubted that it was possible for any family in all of Ulgu even to dream of such an enormity of wealth. The decadence made him feel ill. Mounds of jewels spilled like grapes from golden goblets on a table of bronze and oak. Shelves of rose marble held books whose spines were frosted with diamonds. Huge globes of stained glass hung from the corners of the ceiling, the reflections of the fire making the colours in them swirl. This was the house of his family if the Sannhets had been worshipped. It was a house that belonged to gods.
