By the Horns

  Rob Sanders

  To Chrysaor, lord of Slaanesh – known to his victims as ‘the Wanton’ – the land was a glorious cacophony of sensations. Beneath his dark plate, the Wanton had skin of cracked alabaster and his eyes were glazed a blood red. He saw nothing with such eyes. He appreciated the world through the splendour of his other senses. To Chrysaor, everything was the screams of the suffering. It was the caress of final breaths on his face and the tang of death on the breeze. It was the taste of ruinous victory.

  The day Chrysaor’s sight was taken from him, a pair of great, ribbed horns erupted from his temples. Chrysaor savoured the exquisite agony. Through these, the Wanton experienced the realms anew. Sensitive to every quiver, quake and vibration, the horns allowed the blind warrior to build a sensory picture of everything around him. He could feel the quickening thud of his enemy’s pulse. While eyes had only shown him escaping victims within his field of vision, the sensitivity of the horns – like the antennae of creepers and crawlers – revealed to him so much more. He felt the reverberation of panicked footfalls, the ragged breathing and the muffled quake of a heart stilled in a place of hiding. He could sense these things not only nearby, but leagues away. He could feel fear through a thousand and one betrayals of a victim’s body. He could feel it now.

  Lord Chrysaor allowed the blizzard of sensations to wash over him. A groan of satisfaction escaped his albino-white lips. He enjoyed the dread darkness behind his blood-blank eyes. He could hear the terrified shrieks of the fleeing Ashqanti-Bas nomads being tortured and dying about him. Their beasts of burden and roving lifestock were being butchered in squealing horror. He revelled in the thunder of his own marauder tribesmen, as they ran down their prey on hardy, hook-fleshed steeds.

  The Sybariss, as his warband were known, were the very embodiment of ruinous depravity. Each saddle-bound savage honoured Chaos through his ignorance. They had no concept of mercy – only indulgence. They searched for their dark god Slaanesh, not only across the ever-changing lands but in the pleasures of their flesh and the resulting agony of their victims.

  Beyond the screams of the victims, the Wanton heard the laughter of madness. It was the jubilance of babbling insanity. The moans of willing victimhood. He smelled the bitterness of the hallucinogenic miasma that clouded the butchery. As the Sybariss’ steeds circled their victims and trampled them, cursed vapours poured from the beasts’ snouts. The slaughter became a crowded miasma, the victims’ deep and fearful breaths taking the fragrant fog down into their lungs. Within minutes, fleeing victims were returning. Those who had hidden revealed themselves in a mindless daze. They begged for torment, cackling to themselves and offering their flesh to the marauder savages.

  Walking through the horror, the Wanton tapped the end of his hellforged glaive across the ground before him. He found the fallen. They were stripped of flesh and cut to ribbons, quivering with ecstatic agonies. Chrysaor grinned to himself. To hear the horror, anyone would think that the Ashqanti-Bas nomads had been granted their wildest fantasies.

  The Wanton felt the approach of a victim, some stumbling, confused wretch coming at him through the vapours. Something weighed down the victim’s step on the left side. The weight of a weapon, Chrysaor concluded. It was an Ashqanti-Bas warrior. He listened. He heard the weapon’s passage through the hallucinogenic murk, the whisper of the razored edge on the air. A blade.

  With blistering speed and confidence, Chrysaor turned his glaive about in his barbed gauntlets and chopped down through the nomad. Despite being blind, his strike was perfection: gauged to cause maximum suffering and sensation, while at the same time nullifying the threat. The enemy warrior gasped. The Wanton smelled blood. He felt its warm speckle on his bone-white face. He had opened his victim up from the jaw to the thigh. Shock and hallucinogenic mumbling set in. Chrysaor heard the warrior crash to the ground before him, the rude weapon clattering nearby.

  Feeling another figure at his back, Chrysaor turned the glaive about him. Swishing it around across his shoulders, he took the top of the unseen victim’s skull off. He heard the figure scrabble and fall. Chrysaor tried to imagine the delicious rush of horrific sensations he had visited upon her. One of the nomads’ shaggy beasts of burden trumpeted dreamily through the mind-altering fog. It stumbled back and forth, heavy on its splayed hooves. The Wanton thrust his weapon deep into the thing. Feeling it crash. Feeling it suffer. It died slower than it wanted to but quicker than he anticipated. It must have already been ailing.

  Chrysaor savoured the euphoric woe about him, its vibrations reflected back at him from the surrounding slopes and rock faces of the mountain plateau. Echoes bounced back at him from towering peaks. Like many other tribes, the Aqshanti-Bas had made their home in the region known as the Plinth. The Plinth was a strange and volatile land. It was a place at odds with itself: a broad expanse of constant, rapid change. Rumbling mountains rose and fell, sometimes within the space of a day. Rivers felt their way through the transforming land. Deep canyons and crevasses ripped their way through the tumultuous terrain before becoming flash-flooding lakes and, sometimes, inland seas with waters that climbed the sides of the reaching peaks. Forests and vegetation grew with the alacrity and speed of mould, before being swallowed by rock, earth and water in the next regional flux. Such lands were not affected by sorcery. They were not corrupted by the power and mutability of Chaos. The constant re-sculpturing of the Plinth’s terrain – sometimes swift and violent and at other times moving with a slow inevitability – was a natural volatility of the realm.

  The Wanton loved it. The relentless quake and change of the landscape was like a sensory symphony. The peoples of the Plinth, wanderers by necessity, often walked into the Wanton’s waiting ambushes. With his marauder horsemen sweeping down mountainsides, sealing off valleys and crossing shallow rivers, Lord Chrysaor had spilt so much blood in the changing lands that he half expected the next erupting peak, or river gushing from a sprouting spring, to be tinged crimson in honour of the Dark Prince.

  ‘It ends, Lord Wanton,’ an infernal voice hissed beside Chrysaor’s ear. ‘The vapours thin.’ He had heard his daemonette concubines approach. Leaping from steed to steed, and running with predacious grace, the three lesser daemons had no problem keeping up with the marauder horsemen. The Travestite Maidens, as they were called, slinked up around their master, weaving themselves through his cloak and nipping playfully at his plate with their obscene pincers. He knew their true names but he only used them in their summoning.

  ‘Tell me,’ Chrysaor ordered with a gasp. Just because he couldn’t see didn’t mean that he couldn’t relish the visualisation of horrors unleashed in his name.

  ‘A child wanders,’ a second daemonette said. ‘Lost in the carnage and mutilation. His face is a contorted mask. At once both scarred of mind and barely resisting the urge to join in.’

  ‘Prey-things, cut in half,’ the third daemonette whispered seductively into Chrysaor’s other ear. He felt one of the Travestite Maidens leave him for a moment, stalking off after the child. ‘They squirm through a sea of shock and the ground-soaked butchery of livestock still alive.’

  ‘Yes…’ the Wanton said.

  ‘Dying nomads,’ a daemonette told him. ‘Laughing. Crying. Enduring. Living for our entertainment only. Lying broken. A flesh-mess on the plateau floor. One peels what skin remains from his carcass, wondering what it is he is feeling.’

  ‘What is that?’ Chrysaor asked. He could hear the tinkle of bone and the delicious sound of suffering. He could not find it in his depraved heart to enjoy the pain and sorrow. Something was off about it.

  ‘A woman approaches,’ one of the Travestite Maidens told him. ‘Her face buried in bloody hands.’

  ‘Peeled off,’ another suggested, savouring the anticipation.

  ‘Describe her,’ the Wanton commanded.

  ‘Her hair is as long as she is tall.’

  ‘A feral thing that jangles with bone charms.’

  ‘One who fancies herself a soothsayer,’ a daemonette cackled.

  ‘She did not see this coming,’ another joined in, drawing a cacophony of evil laughter from her sisters.

  ‘You are wrong,’ Chrysaor told the daemons. The sobbing ceased. In its place, the Wanton could hear the creak of bones. The tightening of muscle. The woman shrieked as she came at him. Chrysaor had known her suffering to be fake. No true deviant of the Dark Prince could savour a show of false agonies.

  The Wanton heard the soothsayer snatch something from the ground. Something that sat in the quivering carnage at his feet. He heard the slurp and hiss of a blade, pulled from its scabbard of flesh. By the sound of it being torn from its victim, Chrysaor suspected it was something short. A knife. It was curved, by the sound of its clearance. It sounded serrated, by the way it sawed at a rib on its way out.

  The lord of Slaanesh lived the anguish of his attacker. It was all there in her shriek. A battle cry. A roar of futility. A suicidal expression of doom and fear. Chrysaor wanted to soak it up, like the ground claimed her tears. The blade sang for his throat. He waited for a death he knew could not come. The Travestite Maidens would not allow it.

  There it was. The grunt of defeat. Raw defiance. The agony of the daemonettes’ cruel pincers seizing limbs in their barbed grip. The Wanton knew that the Maidens could shear the soothsayer’s arms and legs off at both elbow and knee.

  ‘Hold,’ the Wanton said. ‘Her face?’

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  ‘Still there,’ one of the Maidens twitched, ‘but not for long.’

  ‘Damn you, daemon,’ Chrysaor said. ‘I said hold.’

  Like a horrid cage of infernal flesh, they held the woman there. Chrysaor could feel the quiver of the blade near his face, still trembling in her death-determined grip. She had got close. He had to give her that. No, the Wanton decided. He could give her more. Darting his face forward, he allowed the serrated blade to slice through the skin on his cheek. Blood streamed down the side of his cheek. Sticking out an obscenely long tongue, the Wanton lapped at the deep gash. He heard the knife thump to the ground, having tumbled from the soothsayer’s grip. He could feel her eyes on him and the disbelief in those eyes. She mouthed something in her own Ashquanti tongue. He felt the spittle of her hatred and harsh syllables on his face.

  ‘Sister,’ Chrysaor said. ‘If you would.’

  ‘Why entertain the witch’s babbling when you could be enjoying her screams?’ the daemon said.

  ‘For much the same reason I entertain your own,’ the Wanton told the daemonette. ‘Though you make a compelling argument. Perhaps I should set your infernal kindred on you. I know they thirst for your agonies.’

  ‘Her speech – ’tis madness, my lord.’

  ‘Which you shall translate,’ Chrysaor said.

  ‘She says that your hordes may swallow her people,’ the Travestite Maiden said. ‘That your claws may hold her down – but that you are trapped between the land and the sky.’

  ‘And you with me,’ Chrysaor said, leaning in.

  The soothsayer spat in the warrior’s face. He smiled and let it run down his face. More savage words followed.

  ‘She says that she has appealed to all the powers of the realm,’ the daemonette told him. ‘That she has pledged her unbeating heart to the spirits of land and life, the gods of spite and sky, in return for a glimpse of your doom.’

  The soothsayer suddenly tensed. Her eyes flashed open and her face strained with an agony that, moments before, she could not have imagined. Chrysaor enjoyed her suffering and the subsequent slackening of her limbs. He had thrust the wicked tips of a gauntlet into her flesh. She coughed, the surprise softening on her face. The witch’s blood spattered across the Wanton’s face, mixing with his own. He pulled his dripping gauntlet from her chest. In it he held the soothsayer’s still-beating heart. He held the grisly trophy up before her. Together they felt it beat its last.

  ‘Then you sold it cheaply, witch,’ Chrysaor lamented, feeling the soothsayer die before him.

  The daemonettes let the victim’s corpse fall to the ground with the others. Chrysaor’s alabaster smile faded slightly. For some time now, he had felt the rumble of rock moving beneath his boots. While his tribe of savages had sprung their trap and indulged themselves in the protracted horror of the nomads’ end, the lands of the Plinth had been in monstrous motion. Now the Wanton felt the drop of temperature on the sensitive skin of his face. He heard the peal of distant thunder getting closer and could taste the metallic trace of a lightning storm already building.

  ‘Where are we?’ he said. He could feel the landscape transforming about him.

  ‘The surrounding mountains remain,’ one of the Travestite Maidens told him. Chrysaor already knew this. He could feel the panic of screams and thudding hooves bouncing back towards the torturous slaughter.

  ‘But the plateau continues to rise,’ another daemonette whispered, ‘and us with it. High above the peaks about the Plinth.’

  With the mountains of the plateau growing ever taller, reaching for the heavens, the Slaaneshi forces were trapped. In remaining to enjoy the Ashqanti-Bas, they had become trapped on a towering, mountainous island whose sides were too tall and sheer to descend. This kind of thing had happened before. It was a danger of the mutable region. Sometimes, progress or withdrawal was cut off by some new realm-sculpted feature finding shape across the Plinth. Chasms always closed, however. The mighty rivers drained and the mountains shrank.

  Chrysaor wandered the fields of desecration and murder, tapping the floor with the end of his glaive. The Travestite Maidens remained nearby, stalking off briefly to disembowel a fallen victim with their pincered appendages or help the Sybariss finish some pain-fevered enemy warrior. The Wanton could sense the thunder before it boomed across the plateau. He could feel the brief blaze of warmth from lightning striking the sky-piercing peaks. The air was thin in his lungs. His breathing grew more rapid. The mountains were still rising and it seemed that they were never going to stop.

  As time passed, the last of the suffering nomads died. Their horror and hilarity no longer echoed about the plateau. The tribe of savage horsemen, no longer distracted by carnage or their victim playthings, realised how high they were above the rest of the realm. They shivered in the plummeting temperatures and began to feel the physical effects of the altitude. It was disquieting.

  ‘The clouds,’ a daemonette said. Chrysaor felt the temperature drop further and droplets of water speckle his skin. Water vapour roiled about him. Thunder crashed through him and the surrounding mountains while lightning cracked and hummed in the darkening murk. The peaks had risen so high that they had poked through the underbelly of the storm, taking the plateau and the trapped Slaaneshi forces up into the tempest.

  Horses stamped and whinnied. Sybariss marauders began to jabber to one another in their ugly dialect. Even the daemonettes hissed their unease.

  ‘My Dark Prince,’ the Wanton said. ‘Are you here?’

  Chrysaor would give all for one glimpse of his exquisite god. To find dread Slaanesh… He reached out with his senses beyond the hideously abused corpses, his circling horde of horsemen and the mountain peaks. He listened and felt. He heard the ghostly rattle of plate and armoured boots. An army on the move. He felt the distant clang of mighty hammers in the distance grow closer with each doom-ridden strike.

  The Wanton heard the savages of the Sybariss call. They could make out ranks of armoured figures wielding crackling hammers of unearthly design, marching from the swirling gloom of the storm. Sigmar’s Storm. The daemon concubines encircled their lord, hissing and snapping their wicked pincers.

  ‘Interlopers,’ a Travestite Maiden said. Chrysaor’s heart fell.

  ‘Describe them,’ the Wanton ordered, as he had asked them to do on a thousand gore-soaked battlefields. She did, and Chrysaor came to understand their doom.

  ‘The Knights of the Aurora,’ Chrysaor said, identifying their foe. He nodded. His face was a mask of madness across which the shadow of fear passed. His long search for the Dark Prince was over. He knew that now. Slaanesh was not with him and never would be. ‘The witch was right. The lands of the Plinth have had their fill of blood and suffering. They raise us up as examples – an offering to the God-King. Sigmar has answered, sending his Stormcasts. We are caught, my deviants: between heaven and earth. Between the hammer and the anvil.’

  Chrysaor knew what they all could not. Feel what they could not know. Behind the silhouettes of armoured Stormcast Eternals were many hundreds more. The God-King could crush them with a fraction of their fielded might. An example would be made. Amongst the boom of thunder, the slash of lightning and the monstrous ranks of soldiers closing on the Slaaneshi horde with every flash.

  A crooked smile broke the tension of Chrysaor’s white face. He gave himself, body and soul, to the circumstances. It was all he could do. It was all he had left. His maniacal laughter cut through the storm and the choreographed crash of armoured boots. He lost himself in the certainty of doom, the bombast and the abominate excess. It would not be a lingering death, slow with the suffering that Chrysaor had granted his many thousands of victims. It would be cold. Sudden. Utterly annihilating, like heaven’s hammer strike.

  He was the Wanton. He roared it out. The madness was infectious. Spilling through the Slaaneshi horde like the last thing that they might ever feel, hysteria became an invitation accepted. The invitation to their doom.

  Chrysaor turned his hellforged glaive about in his gauntlets. His horns burned with sensory overload. He felt the rumbling mountains, the sky-splitting thunder and the storm. He sensed the Knights of the Aurora closing, with mighty hammers raised and their marching ranks all around the horde like the jaws of a metal trap. The lord of Slaanesh could hear the righteous bellow of the Stormcasts, celestial warriors bent on the utter annihilation of their sworn foes.