The Wicked and the Warped, the new novel by Robert Rath featuring the further adventures of Trazyn the Infinite and Orikan the Diviner, is available to pre-order from Saturday. To celebrate, here is a very special extract.
Trazyn, Overlord of Solemnace, Archaeovist of the Prismatic Galleries, and He-Who-Is-Called-Infinite stepped into the chamber.
His passage disturbed the finger-deep layer of ochre dust lying on the floor. It billowed at his footsteps, sparkling in kaleidoscopic bands of colour as it floated through the shaft of light from the door.
This place had not been intended to be a tomb, but that had been the result for the unfortunates sealed within.
Skeletal bodies crawled across the floor away from the gateway, fingers sunk into the stone in their attempt to flee. Some flattened themselves against walls, arms held up to shield their ocular inputs. And in front of the gateway, half a dozen reached up towards the disc installed in the portal, their hands extended as they fell to their knees like pilgrims overwhelmed in the presence of a holy relic.
Trazyn’s sensor suite picked up the signal reverberating through the gate, dust trickling from the seams. He opened an audio package and ran a pattern-matching scry, the two waveform graphs in his vision harmonising in their serpentine motion and merging into one.
‘You did not meet your ends in vain, colleagues,’ said Trazyn, addressing the dead. ‘Your summons was heard.’
Behind him, and outside, something roared from an impossible throat.
My majestic lord, the lychguard captain sent. This unworthy one suggests we extract. I believe we have been discovered.
You believe we have been, Trazyn responded, or we have been?
Around Trazyn, the chamber began to shake. No ring of footfalls, but a deep rumble like a massive aircraft passing close overhead.
Never mind, he said. I shall return soon.
Trazyn reached out and plucked the disc from the grasping hands of the dead, cracking through their carbonised fingers so the digits crumbled at the joints and rained down at his feet to judder and jump with the shaking of the chamber. Then he ran up the stairs, through the antechamber, to the doorway, and at his signal, the lychguard acquisition phalanx ran as well.
He exploded out of the tomb, metal feet pounding the flagstones as he sprinted through the doorway and its ring of teeth. Beneath him, down the long staircase, he could see his lychguard already fanning out in a skirmish pattern, rushing towards the rendezvous point as…
Dead Gods.
Trazyn slowed his chronosense to take in the cresting tide of empyric hostiles heading towards the phalanx. They manifested out of the rolling bank of fog as they came forward, gauzy haze twisting into limbs and tongues. Rubbery bodies barrelling into reality at a run. Eyes became fanged mouths, became reaching fingers, became wings, became sniffing tubular sense organs beyond description.
They weaved through the antler forest groves and leapt over boulder beds of incisors and molars. Gambolled, somersaulted, and clawed through fields of waving insect antennae sprouting from the ground like wild grain. Scaled bone spurs the size of mesas, then dropped unheeding over cliffs to shatter and reconstitute themselves upon landing.
They did not come in fish-school streams and synaptic groupings, like a tyrannic swarm. Nor did their onslaught resemble the charging hordes of the orks, or even the endless wave attacks of which humanity was so fond. It was, dare he risk the pun, more chaotic than that.
They came from the air, appearing and disappearing like coins in the hands of a court magician. And like a magician, it seemed that anywhere Trazyn wasn’t looking was where the trick took place. Yet if it were a trick, Trazyn didn’t believe it was for his benefit. This was not coordinated or practised like a sleight of hand. He saw one group of blue apparitions solidify on the run, only to have a second group pop into existence inside them, fusing the mobs together into monstrous forms like a bad translocation accident. A group of floating tubules bathed the conjoined organism in etheric fire in order to clear their path.
Despite this lack of order, the lead members of the riotous mob overran the glyph in Trazyn’s vision indicating the rendezvous point. Even a basic divinatory scry, one based solely on visual patterns, suggested they’d need to weave through the initial ranks of the enemy to reach it before being swamped.
Trazyn’s strategic sub-mind – so often ignored as he pursued new acquisitions – blared alerts across his gaze with a series of predictive routes. At his standard running speed, factoring in hazards and enemy action, there was only a six-second window for him to make the extraction point and the Night Scythe.
He tore down the stairs, taking them in leaps and bounds, calibrating and recalibrating each jump on the fly so he didn’t overbalance and tumble to the bottom headfirst. It was undignified, to be sure, and he was glad the lychguard were running ahead so they didn’t notice him pinwheeling his arms to keep balance.
Collision alerts flared, just in time for him to react to the group of stretched azure things coalescing on the stairway to stop him. Fingers reached out, close enough that he could see dirt under the yellowed nails.
Trazyn changed his trajectory, spinning to the side with a final leap that landed his back on the wide railing stones that bracketed the stairs.
He went down it like a slide, his metal body screeching with the friction of his descent, showering the enraged horrors with sparks as he passed.
The dismount was less than elegant, the curving masonry catapulting him into space at the end of the stairs so that he landed in a hard roll, kicking up a cloud of dust before he rose and set off at what, despite his heavy metal body, could only be termed a sprint.
Divinatory paths splayed across his vision like knots of cables, stuttering, disappearing, and reappearing as new empyric beings came into reality. The backs of his lychguard drew closer as his hot-running systems began to overtake them.
They were fighting as they ran. One bashed an ambling sphere of flesh aside with a dispersion shield, scattering its broken teeth. Another rammed its scythe through an oncoming avian thing, then tore the blade upward to bisect its top half.
A chronometric appeared in his peripherals: twelve seconds to rendezvous.
Trazyn laughed aloud, his joy booming out uncontrolled. He was going to get there. Despite an entire continent descending on them, the whole party was going to get away. He savoured the deliciousness of the triumph. The thrill of it. The audacity. How alive he felt with his feet pounding the crust of a strange planet and a priceless relic in his–
The airborne thing hit Trazyn from the side, blinding and enveloping him as though it were a fisherman’s net. A net with teeth that ground on his right hip actuator while also scraping his left shoulder blade. Its membranous interior filled his vision, the light filtering through it highlighting networks of blood vessels. His right arm was lost somewhere in the diaphanous interior of a digestive system that, even to Trazyn’s imperfect biological knowledge, appeared functionally dubious.
Trazyn had found that extraordinary experiences often unlocked extraordinary observations. The sort of philosophical and practical perspective one would not have until, for example, one was half-swallowed by a medium-sized emanation of the entity colloquially known as Tzeentch.
And on this occasion, his first observation was that it was interesting how its anatomy appeared to be shifting between the avian and the aquatic. A fascinating contradiction.
He archived this line of reasoning to peruse later. Because he had just made a second observation: that the rendezvous point was getting further away, and further below him.
He’d been lifted clear of the ground, his nerveless feet pedalling in thin air.
Chronometric: ten point five seconds.
No time to free himself. No time to stream his consciousness to one of the lychguard – an operation that was always complicated by distance and heavy empyric disturbance. He might lose some of himself, drop a code chain and forfeit several centuries of memory, or a critical skill. It had happened before. He had once been so very good at playing the game Phaeron’s Peril, with its multiple decks of playing tiles, but after a bad consciousness transfer he’d completely forgotten both rules and strategy.
He catalogued and ranked options as digestive webs started melting his death mask.
Chronometric: nine seconds.
He needed an anchor, a technical object for his algorithm to adhere to. For while being lifted into the air was disadvantageous for running, it made certain things much easier.
Then he remembered the disc in his left hand.
Trazyn’s sensor suite plotted a parabolic arc, then he drew back the artefact like a discus and let it fly.
It soared true, the intricate etching on its surface spinning into a blur as Trazyn’s engram attached to its circuitry and rode it on its path towards the horde of fleshy, grasping abominations – and the running silver-and-blue figure among them.
His algorithm leapt from the disc ahead of its flight path and speared into the body of the running lychguard. Trazyn made the change as quickly as he could, usurping motor control and overwriting neurals with such speed that when he leapt into the air, the arms were still elongating and his hood folding up in layers with a ching-ching-ching as the artefact disc connected with his palm.
He came down wholly himself, laughing at the brief glimpse he’d caught of his old legs, still dangling out of the flying beast’s maw as it sailed away. There had been no time to turn off protocols and let the body reformat into a lychguard. In fact, better to let it serve as a decoy.
Chronometric: six point nine seconds.
Trazyn boomed out laughter as he ran forward, hewing into a pack of manifestations with the lychguard’s scythe. He bisected two in a wide arc, shoved another back with the haft and sprinted through the gap in their line, ectoplasm bleeding off the polearm’s blade. There was no point summoning his empathic obliterator – he had but six seconds now, and the fleshy monstrosities were drawing towards him like iron filings towards a magnet. Slavering tongues speaking runes of flame that branded the air, and hands festooned with gold bangles and crooked daggers.
Trazyn crooked his arm back, aiming for a distant lychguard twenty cubits ahead. Made his calculation as the horrors gathered in a screen, arms reaching into the intended flight path.
His arm shot forward, and the multitude of open mouths screamed in rage as they leapt – for there was no disc in the air. It had been a fake. An instant before, he’d ditched the disc sideways, spinning like a coin, so that another lychguard caught it on the run as it overtook the body that was now being pawed over with soft fingers and stabbed with sharp daggers.
Chronometric: four point seven seconds.
Trazyn ran, formatting the new body as he went. A shambling avian thing came at him from the right, its beak opening to extend a tongue like a lamprey eel, but he lunged out as if to dodge around it, spun instead, and ran around its other side as the thing’s three legs tangled and tripped it.
Trazyn surged, pumping his actuators so fast that they glowed. The rendezvous point lay ahead in his unenhanced vision, painted a manic green to show the translation zone. On the horizon, he caught a flash of aurora reflecting off metal.
Chronometric: two point three seconds.
He wasn’t going to arrive on time. Not with a garden of empyric beings blooming into existence between him and the zone. They appeared every several cubits, with a visual distortion like the shimmer of heat haze and sparks dancing upward as if released from a cracked fire log. Absently, his olfactory sensors detected a hint of ancient spices.
No, he would not make it.
Or at least, this body wouldn’t. Which was unfortunate for the lychguard, but very fortunate for the one fifty cubits distant, running on the intercept path he’d ordered straight for the lifting zone.
Trazyn leapt above an oncoming manifestation and slammed the disc out, giving its spin more force than he thought necessary.
Chronometric: one point one seconds.
He rode it as it soared across the space, skimming over a forest of reaching fingers and slashing clear through a thicket of anemone feelers. Lofting on the etheric winds that buffeted it above snapping beaks and twisted horn tips. Straight towards the space just above and beyond the final lychguard, who planted one foot on the shoulder of a charging warp-thing for leverage and dived into the air, necrodermis arms stretching to make up the distance as a host of claws and tentacles screeched along his legs, bleeding his momentum.
Trazyn entered the lychguard with the clang of the disc meeting his magnetised fingertips. And he fell into a pile of rubbery bodies and claws – just one arm length short of the zone.
Chronometric: zero point nine seconds.
And he had barely missed it.
Claws hooked under the armour panels of his cranium and pulled with a groan of strained metal. Feelers, bristling with bone needles, squirmed through the gaps in the casing, puncturing rubbery internal tubes as they quested for his neural spools. Half a dozen wet mouths leaned close to his skull to fill his auditory inputs with whispers of blasphemous things. Antediluvian runes from a half-forgotten language unfolded in Trazyn’s vision, twisting and deforming like a torture victim under the knife.
Trazyn opened his mandible, releasing an emerald twist of radioactive core flux – followed by a strangled chuckle.
Because just as they’d opened him from hips to cranium, his fingers had released the disc with a last flick of strength.
It rolled forward like a coin on edge, wobbling to and fro with ever-increasing instability towards the painted area.
Chronometric: zero point four seconds.
Zero point three seconds.
No. It tipped to one side, rolling in a wide circle before…
Zero point two seconds.
…losing momentum, rattling around in a circle and…
Zero point one second.
…stopping on edge, by the slimmest margin, within the target area.
Trazyn was still laughing when the prismatic column flashed down like a blink of lightning, snatching the disc upward through the particle stream and into the underslung portal of the passing Night Scythe.
His laugh continued even as the horde of daemons pulled his body apart. Because now, he laughed with the mouth of the Scythe pilot, safely ensconced in the control cradle of the aircraft as he banked around the immaterial mass, raising one hand in a mocking farewell.
And with his leisurely circle complete, he set his palm to the glowing surface of the control orb and flashed into the black of space.
Phew! It was looking a little perilous for Trayzn for a moment there! See what other scrapes he gets into when The Wicked and the Warped is available for pre-order this weekend.
