by Rob Sanders
‘Does the serpent speak true?’ First Apostle Drach’Var Tal asked.
‘A White Crusade gathers beyond the storm,’ Goura Shengk said finally. A hiss of infernal hostility passed through the gathering. ‘The Corpse-Emperor’s priests intend to avenge the pious worlds they have lost at our hand. This lord legionnaire has infiltrated their number.’
‘My warband is small,’ Occam admitted to the daemon prince and his council, ‘and my resources limited. Although it might be heresy for a son of Alpharius to admit it, my capabilities do not match my ambitions. The frater armies of the Crozier Worlds can be delayed and with sufficient manpower, corrupted. Why waste blighted souls in a fight with the Emperor’s hordes, when you can have them join you above Ghalmek? You can watch the failure of the cardinal warlords from your very throne. The Alpha Legion would, of course, expect to choose the most gifted for our own cultist ranks.’
‘You are in a position to demand nothing,’ Zothrac said. The acolyte and the First Apostle looked to the Abyssal Prince with the rest of the Daemon Council. Occam, too, watched the prince. The monstrous thing had once been a Word Bearer and tactical intelligence still glinted in its horrid, narrowing eyes.
‘We have a pair of prophets before us,’ the daemon prince said, ‘telling us of doom to come and how victory might be snatched from the snaggle-toothed jaws of defeat. Well, prophets must be tested, trust earned and worth measured. We must know the untruth of their flesh and the strength of their spirit. Let them be tested on the star, out on the Constellation Fields. Let them feel the light of our benighted sun and the gaze of the primordials.’
‘What of the serpent’s ship?’ Zothrac asked. ‘It sits under the High Apostle’s guns.’
Drach’Var Tal looked between his prince and his acolyte.
‘Let them be tested also,’ Drach’Var Tal said. He nodded at the hulking sentries.
As Occam and Goura Shengk exchanged unreadable glances, Word Bearers Terminators grabbed them from behind, the chainblades of their glaives resting on their shoulders. Dragged around and out of the presence of the Abyssal Prince, the pair were marched out of the throne room and down the obsidian steps.
Under Occam’s breath, he said: ‘Did you get that?’
The encrypted vox-channel he had opened with the Redacted as he came in to land had been kept open, allowing Occam’s legionnaires to eavesdrop on the judgement of the Daemon Council.
‘We’ll be ready,’ Hasdrubal promised the strike master.
‘Let me follow you,’ Vilnius Malik said, his vox signal much stronger than the sergeant’s struggling from orbit.
‘No,’ Occam hissed. ‘Proceed with the plan. Do your duty. Allow me to do mine. Occam out.’
π
Shedding Skin
Up on the command deck, Mina Perdita stood with the lord sergeant and the sorcerer Carcinus Quoda. With the shipmaster, they all watched as daemon constructs and diabolists in ritual environment suits gathered along the girders, transepts and platforia of the orbital docks. The Iota-Æternus had taken its place there under the guns of the monstrous battleship and among the half-constructed daemon ships of the Word Bearers fleet.
The Redacted watched as runes glowed to life along the length of the partitioning structures, while deviant constructs and diabolists encircled the Q-ship and began conducting dark rituals. Holding plasma torches, daemon constructs drifted across to the Iota-Æternus and burned sigils into the painted hull.
‘What are they doing?’ Naga-Khan asked, fearful for his ship. Sergeant Hasdrubal looked to the sorcerer for guidance.
‘What they are doing to the metal and machine-spirits of these other unfortunate vessels,’ Quoda said. ‘The Word Bearers are preparing Iota-Æternus. Polluting it. Making it a host for daemons.’
‘We cannot just stand here while they force this vessel to be possessed by some monstrous entity,’ Perdita said.
‘Agreed,’ the shipmaster said.
‘Let me put on a suit and clear them from the hull,’ the Assassin suggested.
Hasdrubal watched the cybernetic creatures scuttle across the hull and burn into it their dark runes of daemonic summoning.
‘We cannot risk provoking the Word Bearers,’ the sergeant said. ‘Not while Lord Occam is on the surface and the prize is still in the enemy’s hands.’
‘Also not while we sit under that battleship’s guns,’ the sorcerer Quoda said.
As klaxons erupted across the bridge, Naga-Khan rushed back to his cultist-manned runebanks.
‘What is it?’ Hasdrubal demanded. ‘What have they done?’
‘The Geller field is collapsing,’ the shipmaster called, his alarm obvious. Perdita watched as he moved from bank to bank giving orders. He moved to an engineering runebank and tore the cultist manning it aside. Frantically pushing up on a thick-set handle that appeared locked in a downward orientation, Naga-Khan attempted to reinstate the field from the bridge. Through gritted teeth he called: ‘Can’t raise the field from here.’
The sergeant turned to Quoda.
‘What can we expect?’ Hasdrubal said. As he did, channels opened and voxhailers shrieked with the sound of warp entities infecting the ship’s communication systems with their madness.
‘Expect anything,’ the sorcerer said. ‘The daemon entities of this benighted place will make the Iota-Æternus their own.’
‘Sound the alarm,’ Hasdrubal told Naga-Khan. ‘I want all operatives and Seventh Sons armed and on high alert.’
‘Affirmative.’
‘Can we get word to the warpsmith?’ the sergeant asked.
‘The ship’s vox system is overrun,’ the shipmaster said, moving from runebank to runebank.
Hasdrubal turned to Perdita. ‘Get down to the enginarium,’ he ordered. ‘Appraise the warpsmith of the situation. Tell him we need the Geller field back online or we’re going to lose the ship.’
Taking a last look at the diabolists and daemon constructs conducting their rituals about the Iota-Æternus, Perdita turned and bolted across the bridge. The ship was in uproar. Alarms had alerted the cultist crew to the emergency. As she bolted down passageways and across chambers, the Assassin took advantage of her petite form and quick step. Darting left and right through throngs of heavy-set cultists and hurdling equipment, she moved through them with slick ease. Loading needle pistols with their deadliest toxins and drawing blades from envenomed belt sheaths, the Seventh Sons prepared themselves for what they could only expect to be a boarding action. Perdita pounded down the corridors of the Q-ship and began to realise how mistaken they were.
The Iota-Æternus felt as if it were in pain. The voxhailers howled insanity while deck lamps flickered. Bulkheads opened and closed. Electrics sparked. The excruciating sound of metal warping rang through the superstructure. The vessel was hurting. Changing.
As the Assassin moved through the havoc the calls of death cultists echoing down the corridors turned to screams. Cultists fired their needle pistols into the sentience of walls and floors and slashed at grasping tendrils of cable. Everything creaked horribly as the metal of chamber walls and floors warped and became ribbed like the interior of an animal. Corridors spasmed and quaked. Cabling that ran across mesh floors began to sliver.
Perdita accelerated, leaping over lines and cables that reached out for her. She rolled under closing bulkheads that were sprouting huge daemon fangs and cleared ladderwells that closed on climbing cultists, shearing them in two. Seventh Sons reached out for her in panic and terror as cells swallowed them whole. The metal of the walls stretched about the claws and horned faces of daemon creatures materialising within the body of the ship.
The Assassin rolled across the trembling deck. As she did, a cultist sank down into the metal as though it were quicksand, dragged down by daemon claws slurping up out of the floor. Completing the roll, Perdita snatched up the needle pistol and blade left behind by the sinking Seventh Son.
By the time the Assassin reached the enginarium section, th
e entire ship seemed possessed by rampant daemonic entities infecting its spirit and violently warping its architecture. When she arrived at the section doors she found that a huge smouldering hole had been blasted through them. Within she could see Autolicon Phex with his heavy plasma gun blazing globes of sub-atomic energy into any part of the walls and floor that moved.
‘It’s Perdita!’ she called before hooking her fingers about the blasted doors and pulling them open. As she did, odious tendrils reached out for her from the opening. Entwining themselves about her limbs, the tentacles of the monstrous door aimed to hold her in their web. Flashing left and right with her recovered blade, the Assassin slashed at the appendages. Pieces dropped and writhed on the floor, and snaking stumps splattered Perdita with ichor as she tore herself free.
‘What are you doing here?’ Arkan Reznor demanded, the warpsmith moving between colossal pieces of equipment. He alternated between working feverishly with his tools and burying his Omnissian axes in the flesh-metal of machinery gaining daemonic sentience.
‘The lord sergeant sent me,’ Perdita said, ducking beneath Beta, Zeta and Theta, who drifted about the engineering chamber attempting to aid their master in his futile repairs and recalibrations.
Reznor gave her an imperious glare – the indication that he had little use for an Assassin in the enginarium.
‘The vox system is down,’ she said.
‘I know that,’ the warpsmith told her, indicating with the blade of an axe. The section voxhailers were screaming and chanting their insanity all around. Reznor retreated from an infernal maw that had opened in the pipe-lined section of wall he was working on. Swinging one of his crackling axes around, he buried it in the monstrous face forming in the piece of machinery. ‘Phex!’
As Reznor indicated the ceiling over the legionnaire, Phex looked up to see another daemon orifice opening above him. Chitinous claws and feelers reached down for the renegade but Phex aimed his heavy plasma skyward and pumped several blinding orbs into the manifestation. Swallowing the raging blasts, the daemon shrieked before drenching Phex in a shower of steaming blood.
‘The Word Bearers are conducting some kind of ritual about the ship,’ Perdita told him, moving through servitors and deck seers that had been assisting the warpsmith. ‘The Lord Sergeant and the shipmaster say they need the Geller field back online.’
‘What do you think we have been trying to do?’ Reznor called, turning to chop a horrific talon from an appendage reaching out for him. The deck beneath the boots of several servitors appeared to spoil and soften. The servitors sank in the liquid metal while inhuman eyes opened in the walls, entrancing enginseers and drawing them towards the morphing horror of the possessed machinery. As deck cabling writhed to serpentine life and coiled about Perdita’s slender leg, the Assassin stabbed her blade into the rancid tentacle, pinning it to the floor. Infernal runes spread across the surfaces of the engineering chamber like a rash, while a howling mouth opened in the wall beside Perdita. It blazed like a furnace and threatened to vomit forth sickly flame. Pointing her needle pistol into the maw, she emptied the weapon into the soft flesh-metal of the mouth, causing it to shrivel and close.
Leaping over bubbling sinkholes in the deck, the Assassin took position between Phex with his raging heavy plasma gun and the warpsmith.
A tentacle-like appendage, thick and covered in barbed suckers, erupted from the wall nearby, forcing Reznor to duck and Perdita to lean out of its rancid path. Phex was not so fortunate. The grotesque, muscular limb slithered about the legionnaire’s armoured form and lifted him from the deck. The tentacle smashed Phex brutally back and forth against the walls and up and down between the ceiling and deck. With his plate rent and crumpled, the legionnaire dropped his heavy weapon, allowing its cable to become entwined with the tentacle. Perdita watched in horror as the daemon appendage broke Phex against the compartment wall.
‘Grab it!’ the warpsmith roared, reaching out for the tentacle with his gauntlet. It was the absolute last thing that Perdita wanted to do. Burying her cultist blade into the unnatural flesh of the manifesting entity, she used it to try to anchor the appendage. It bucked and writhed like a great serpent. Reznor seized its length with one gauntlet before going to work with a power axe. The weapon bit through the daemonic brawn of the thing, spilling ichor on the deck. With the appendage finally cut in half, both Reznor and the Assassin stumbled back. One half retracted horribly into the pulsating wall while the half around the groaning Phex writhed on the deck.
‘There,’ Arkan Reznor said, pointing down the section with his axe. Perdita followed the line of the weapon to see a huge piece of arcane machinery at the far end of the engineering compartment. Crackling, fat power cables ran from the system and surrounding auxiliaries. The pipes reaching up out of the piece of machinery like an organ glowed hot with overloading power. The arcane system itself, meanwhile, was trembling and transforming before their eyes. Shaking with rage and affliction, it seemed to be fighting itself and everything else, emitting roars of agony and frustration from fang-filled maws opening in its grotesque flesh-metal body of the thing.
‘What is it?’ Perdita called back.
‘That,’ Arkan Reznor said, ‘is the Geller field generator.’
The Assassin shook her head.
‘We have to abandon ship,’ she said.
‘And go where?’ Reznor replied. ‘Trust in the strike master – he will fix this.’
‘Lord warpsmith,’ Perdita said, looking back at the pulsating horror of the Geller field generator, ‘I’m not so sure that this can be fixed.’
ρ
Serpents Beneath
Vilnius Malik crunched across the Constellation Fields. As a Night Lord he had been one with the shadows, bringing terror to masses. As a member of the Alpha Legion he had honed his death-dealing skills further, managing to hide in the light of day and bring doom to his enemies. Moving across the surface of the daemon world, even he felt exposed.
The skyline was a stabbing silhouette of spires, steeples and architectural magnificence: colossal cathedra and temple accretia dedicated to the Dark Gods of Chaos. In the distance, hellish forges and manufactoria glowed with the fell light of industry. Magna-machinery rumbled with daemon possession, while assembly lines manned by legions of warped servitors and cultist workers spewed forth entity-infested machines of war. Malik had even seen half-constructed God-Machines. The dread Titans – part daemon monster, part abominate machine – festered in their scaffolding, swarming with diabolists performing dark consecrations.
Caustic ash drifted on the foul breeze downwind from the industrial centres. Malik had dissembled his sophisticated plate, the ceramite scales bleeding into the soot-stained red of Ghalmekian Word Bearers. He had travelled down with the lighter piloted by the strike master. Holding on to the exterior hull and protected from the worst excesses of the descent by Lord Occam’s angling of the craft, Malik had arrived on the daemon world without the knowledge of Goura Shengk or his Word Bearers brethren on the surface.
Leaving the craft and landing pad, Malik had committed to a second dangerous descent, climbing down the tumbledown architecture of the dark cathedra tower in full plate. Hiding from Word Bearers sentries, warped priests and the daemon fiends that stalked the colossal building, Malik made it to the surface – if such a thing existed. Beyond the manufactoria and daemon forges, the cathedra and temple districts appeared to be vast edifices of infernal worship built on top of the ruin and rubble of former structures.
Walking along a glowing channel of molten iron, Malik’s confident strides took him up through groups of ragged pilgrims, their warped flesh further afflicted with studs, spikes and tattooed runes that smouldered. Moving aside for their Word Bearers overlord, the cultists allowed Malik to pass unchallenged. The channel and the beaten ash track that ran alongside seemed to be a bifurcating thoroughfare taking cultists, sacrificial victims and dark cardinals in wretched finery between the mighty transepts and private chapel
s of the Cathedra Nox. Even servo-skulls, built into the flesh-stripped horror of horned daemon heads, travelled noisily back and forth along the track.
Fortunately, there were precious few Word Bearers out on the thoroughfare. The ruling traitors of Ghalmek largely restricted themselves to the unholiest of structures, leaving the unremitting industry and dark worship of the daemon world to the cultists and constructs.
About the track, Malik could see the Constellation Fields. Eight-point stars of Ruinous significance turned like spiked, iron wheels on spindle-axles buried in the blood and ash. Spread-eagled and lashed to the slowly turning frames were figures. It was difficult for Malik to tell who they were. Some appeared to be priests and others mutant-cultists. A number even appeared to be decked in twisted plate while many were disfigured by daemonic possession – horns, monstrous claws, warped forms.
At a junction in both track and magma channel, Malik was forced to cross a crumbling stone bridge. Pushing his way through a gathered throng of chanting cultists, the legionnaire saw diabolist-priests with glowing green censers move about several new additions to the Constellation Fields. While most of the figures on the Chaos stars and the squealing wheels themselves were caked in caustic ash like statues, the pair of new additions were merely dusted grey. They had been presented before the thousands of daemon entities staring down from the shattered sky.
Malik paused as the throng parted, their diabolical chanting filling the air. On the first wheel he saw a face he recognised – or rather the absence of one. Lashed to the revolving star, with his head leant back, was the Dark Apostle, Goura Shengk. The ruin of his face had assumed the hellish nobility of a daemon entity. The Dark Apostle’s head now boasted a magnificent set of iron horns growing out of his skull and his muscular body was enhanced further by daemon bulk. His flesh was a nest of iron barbs – like the horns, growing out from what Malik suspected was a daemon-warped skeleton of iron. The Dark Apostle’s face was a mask of indescribable ecstasy and torment. His daemon was once more one with his flesh, Malik realised.
