What Price Victory by Warhammer

Author:Warhammer [Warhammer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

'You were in the Torus Room!'

'Ah… that.'

'That! A-and the letter!' Delacroix brandished the communique like a weapon, utterly out of his depth. 'It says you're a fraud! It says you're with the enemy!'

'Does it? Does it indeed?' Arkannis pursed his lips. For a moment Delacroix thought the man's cold facade had been punctured, so intense was his expression. He remained, nonetheless, utterly unconcerned with the marshall's growing air of confrontation. 'How very fascinating.'

Delacroix glared at him in disbelief, grizzled features turning almost purple. 'You don't deny it?'

'Should I?'

'You die!' A pistol was in Delacroix's hand before any of his astonished comrades could react.

Acquainted for too long with the comforts of command, the sudden promise of violence left many of them startled; hissing in fear. Not so the marshall, whose finger closed on the trigger without so much as a doubt passing his mind.

Arkannis tutted, eyes flashing. 'Put it down, you silly man.'

The gun clattered noisily to the floor, discharging with an angry boom and the insect-whine of a ricochet, its spastic course culminating in a thudding impact into the rockcrete ceiling. The marshall was left agog; staring in silent befuddlement at his own rebellious fingers.

'Wh… how…'

'Quiet. Gentlemen, my name is Arkannis. As our good friend the marshall has already ascertained, I'm not here to help you.'

'How did you get in here? I… I posted guards.'

'Yes… I'm afraid they had a falling-out with some of my colleagues.'

The grim-faced PDF general, mustering his dignity with far more aplomb than Delacroix, pushed his way to the front and regarded Arkannis with a scowl, voice almost - but not entirely -

concealing its quaver.

'Listen. Look here. What do you want?'

Arkannis seemed surprised by the question. 'Want? Oh, nothing. Nothing at all.' He smiled. 'I just came to pay my respects to the dead.'

'The…?'

'Enough talk, gentlemen. I'd like to introduce you to some friends of mine.'

The door pushed open behind him, something hard and sharp scraping along its exterior surface with a velvet gride. The silence thickened. Hunched and slow, prowling, a trio of shapes slunk with tiger grace into the chamber.

Stalking on doubled-kneed legs, each step a birdlike jolt of controlled energy, their entry seemed to suck the very light from the room; warping every shadow around coiled, alien carapaces, knotting around uneven spines and ridges of bone. Their arms, two on either side of each insectile thorax, pistoned in time with each step, uppermost raptor claws scissoring together, secondary extremities -

perversions of human hands and fingers - clutching the air. In jointed gaps between cartilaginous claws, segmented flesh glistened with a sticky film of moisture. Their heads, hung low against bony shoulders, seemed by contrast smooth and organic: flesh so pale it was almost translucent, stretched across a constellation of purple capillaries - like the skin of a waterlogged corpse. Tiny porcine eyes glared beneath knotted brows, surmounted upon a prominent jaw thick with needle teeth.

'These are purii,' Arkannis said conversationally, regarding their slinking forms with an arched brow, exoskeletal frills and chords deepened and roughened by the unkind shadows.

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