Knightsblade

by Andy Clark

  ‘Get clear,’ shouted Nesh.

  Jennika glanced up to see the burning Death Cultist plunging towards them. She dropped her shoulder and slammed into Kaston’s back, knocking the Cadian aside and sprawling with her. The blazing corpse thumped down where they had stood, followed by the still-living Shanema. The Death Cultist keened a furious war cry and lunged into the mass of mutants, blades flashing in bloody sweeps.

  Bare feet and twisted shins surrounded Jennika. Punching fists and kicking feet pummelled her, and she had a split-second to be glad of her armoured bodyglove before she took a jarring blow to her jaw. Her head snapped back, and her thoughts slowed down to a dull blur. She was dimly aware of the flash of gunfire, then a firm grip hauling her onto her feet.

  ‘…ake up, your majesty,’ snapped Kaston, her voice swimming into focus. ‘Fight!’

  Jennika shook her head to clear it, then reignited her blade and brought it up in a tight swipe that sent a mutant reeling away aflame.

  ‘They don’t like the fire,’ said Kaston.

  ‘Good. Let them burn in it,’ spat Jennika, cutting and stabbing. The fight was anarchic, but their enemies were armed with little more than teeth, fists and the odd human femur. In return, Massata’s retinue landed one by one and brought their weaponry to bear.

  Venquist came down with solemn dignity, one hand pressed to his temple. A swathe of mutants reeled back, hissing and shrieking in fear. Several dropped where they stood with blood jetting from their eyes. D’bu’ko followed, and Jennika felt her horror at the xenos’ powerful technology as blasts of energy leapt from the rings he wore on one hand. The image flashed unbidden to her mind of such weapons being used against her Knight, and she thrust it swiftly aside.

  Behind them came Massata, and Interrogator Nesh with Lintiguis Mortens clinging to his side. While Nesh’s pistols boomed, Massata drew his axe and swung it in meteoric arcs. Strange energies crackled in its wake, and each mutant struck burst apart in a cloud of ash.

  Jennika caught glimpses of these things while she fought furiously, back to back with Sergeant Kaston. The Cadian mowed down howling mutants, shooting them point blank through their torsos and faces. Jennika hacked and stabbed, sweeping the legs from under one mutant then impaling another before lopping the arm from a third. Those wounded reeled away shrieking as their flesh and rags caught light in the draconsfire. Wherever these living torches staggered through their comrades, they spread terror and panic.

  ‘Drive them back in the Emperor’s name!’ cried Massata, his voice booming. ‘Break them!’

  Another sword swing, and another. A bone club struck Jennika in the ribs, hard enough to make her grunt in pain. In return she smashed her hilt into her attacker’s face to send him reeling away. She hacked and slashed, keeping a space clear, preventing their numbers from pinning her limbs, driving knees and elbows into pallid flesh where she had to.

  Suddenly the tide broke. One moment, Jennika was fighting for her life against a hissing mob. The next, the ragged remnants of the mutant horde scattered into the darkness, fleeing across the cavern and leaving their dead in heaps behind them.

  ‘Hold position,’ ordered Massata.

  Shanema ignored his order, keening another death cry as she sprinted after the fleeing mutants.

  ‘Shanema, no pursuit!’ bellowed Massata. ‘Remember the debt you owe your Emperor!’ The Death Cultist stopped, quivering in frustration as she watched her sister’s killers flee.

  Jennika, however, was glad to comply. She gasped deep breaths as she concentrated on slowing her heart rate. Adrenaline drained from her limbs, leaving pain in her jaw and ribs like rents in a Knight’s hull after a fierce battle. She extinguished her blade, checking its fuel reserve.

  ‘Sixty percent,’ she muttered. ‘Good enough.’

  Glancing up, Jennika took in her surroundings. The cavern was rough and gnarled, festooned with stalactites and stalagmites, and dotted with oily-looking pools. Jutting from one wall were the remains of a heavy, barred gate that looked to have been smashed from its hinges by the rockfall that had filled the corridor beyond. In the other direction, the way that the mutants had fled, the cavern vanished into darkness.

  ‘Nesh, auspex sweeps, I want warning if those creatures return,’ ordered Massata. ‘The rest of you, ammo check, bind your wounds. Mortens, examine these mutants and see what you can determine. No one is to touch Shemara’s remains. We will avenge her, but her body is corrupted.’

  Jennika looked at the crumpled remains of the Death Cultist, her twisted limbs and the glinting crystals growing from her like fungi. She shuddered.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Kaston from beside her. The Cadian was pulling the smoking las cell from her backpack and replacing it with a fresh one.

  ‘What for?’ asked Jennika, reloading her autopistol.

  ‘You knocked me aside,’ said Kaston. ‘Could have been my corpse laid under hers. I owe you.’

  ‘On Adrastapol we live by the Code Chivalric,’ said Jennika. ‘Its tenets do not permit me to allow allies to come to harm when I can prevent it.’

  ‘Still,’ said Kaston, and Jennika nodded graciously.

  ‘This cavern stretches back almost a quarter of a mile in that direction, then there’s another tunnel mouth,’ said Nesh, looking up from his auspex. ‘It looks narrow.’

  ‘Exfiltration?’ asked Kaston.

  ‘We shall find a route when the time comes,’ said Massata. ‘At worst we return here and scale the shaft. But if Lady Tan Draconis is correct, and these creatures have been preying on the wilds around Chimaerkeep for years, one assumes they must have other ways to escape.’

  ‘It is unbelievable,’ said Jennika. ‘Mutants. Sorcery. All lurking beneath our feet. Thank the Emperor these things seem averse to light…’

  ‘It has forced them to remain below, festering like poison in a wound,’ said Massata. ‘Still, a wound, if infected, can kill the entire body.’

  ‘That which threatens us, we cauterise with flame,’ said Jennika, brandishing her blade.

  ‘You may need to do a great deal more cauterising yet, lady,’ said Mortens, bent over the corpse of the larger mutant. He straightened up, flipping lenses back from his eyes, quill-fingers scratching over a ream of vellum as he spoke. ‘In the smaller mutants, twisting of the limbs, sharpening of the teeth and a degree of osteodeviancy appear to be the limits of their dubious blessings. This creature, however, is genuinely heretical. It bears a subcutaneous mark, a sigil that I shall not show you for the sake of your own spiritual purity, but that may have conveyed actual empyric power. Note its avian features, the feathery growths around its neck and shoulders, the enhanced musculature, not to mention its taloned feet. See also its stave, from which that unnatural flame was conjured.’

  ‘A higher order of mutant, then?’ asked Nesh. ‘A leader caste, perhaps, more rewarded by their god and thus more powerful.’

  ‘Likely,’ said Mortens. ‘And I believe there must be more than one of these beings. Quite aside from the chances that we would happen to encounter the mutants’ only leader in so fortuitous a fashion, one of these beings alone did not create all the crystalline deposits left upon the remains of the wardens on the surface.’

  ‘We press on regardless,’ said Massata.

  At the cavern’s heart, they found the missing wardens, or what remained of them. Gnawed flesh and tattered uniforms were piled high. Many bodies had been forcibly impaled upon stalagmites for ease of feeding, and gore stained the ground around them.

  ‘At least that explains what they were doing waiting for us down here,’ said Nesh. ‘Feeding in this cavern, then drawn to our lights before we descended.’

  ‘Let us hope it is simply thus,’ said Massata.

  Beyond the gruesome feeding ground, they found the cavern narrowing until it tailed off into the tunnel that Nesh had spoken of. It was narrow, barely
wide enough for them to proceed single file, and its ceiling was low.

  ‘Shanema will lead,’ said Nesh. ‘She is the best suited of all of us to battle in such tight confines. I’ll follow with the auspex, to ensure we don’t go astray.’

  ‘Venquist will take that positon,’ said Massata. ‘Down here, his ability to sense the psychic spoor of our quarry will prove more useful for wayfinding.’

  Jennika frowned.

  ‘Inquisitor. Is it not better to put our trust in the definitive data returns of an auspex?’

  ‘Lady Tan Draconis,’ said Venquist. ‘On the open field, you understand war. Down here, beyond the Emperor’s sight? This is our battlefield. Stick to swinging your sword, and let us worry about the rest, yes?’

  Jennika bristled but held her tongue.

  Within the tunnel, the confines were claustrophobic. The ceiling pressed low overhead, and the walls seemed to constrict. The air was still as ditchwater, and Jennika had to fight the sense that at any moment the tunnel might close like the throat of some awful monster and crush them in its gullet.

  As they advanced, Jennika closed in behind Sergeant Kaston. Covering her vox-bead, she whispered to the Cadian.

  ‘Sergeant, you said you owe me.’

  Kaston glanced back expectantly.

  ‘I would request an explanation as repayment,’ said Jennika. ‘What is the inquisitor really here for?’

  Kaston’s face remained neutral.

  ‘To purge the corruption from this world, that your people failed to address,’ she said. ‘He seeks proof you were not all complicit.’

  ‘You will excuse the expression, Sergeant Kaston, but that is ghurgol shit,’ whispered Jennika. ‘I’ve seen the looks he keeps exchanging with the astropath. And the way he’s put the man up front now like a hunting canid? The threat of Inquisitorial censure is an impressive blade to hang over my head, but I know and you know that the Noble Houses of Adrastapol are guilty of nothing worse than believing the Ministorum had done their job. So what are we doing down here? What is he looking for?’

  Kaston kept her voice low as she replied. Her stare was level and intense.

  ‘Dangerous questions get dangerous answers, lady,’ she said. ‘Don’t presume what the inquisitor does or does not know, or what he’s doing here. Just wield your blade, show your honour, and remember that an enquiring mind is swiftest poisoned by tainted truths.’

  Kaston turned away and kept walking, leaving Jennika to trail angrily in her wake.

  ‘They’re still out there,’ said Nesh. ‘I’m reading contact before and behind.’

  ‘We are on the correct trail,’ replied Venquist, as the group took a tight left fork in the tunnel. ‘I sense it somewhere ahead.’

  ‘Keep moving with a prayer on your lips,’ said Massata. ‘We are in the belly of the beast, now, but we shall not falter.’

  The new tunnel led downwards so steeply that they were forced to clamber and scramble. Jennika swore quietly as jutting shards of rock scratched her hands and face. As it levelled out, the tunnel branched again, then again, its ceiling becoming still lower and feeding into Jennika’s claustrophobia. Sweat beaded her forehead and ran down the back of her neck. Her heart thumped, and every breath felt tight as they pressed on and on through the narrow, dark tunnels.

  She could hear sounds, now, over the scuff and scrape of their own passage. Distant moans and cries reverberated along the passages. Ululating shrieks rang around them, their origins impossible to place.

  ‘There’s an open space coming up,’ said Nesh, and Jennika felt a flood of relief. ‘It’s big, and I’m reading some sort of gap or chasm. Perhaps a bridge?’

  Jennika realised she could see more than just their stablight beams. Illumination hazed the tunnel up ahead, a dancing blue light that filled her not with the relief of daylight, but with a nameless dread.

  ‘Be ready,’ said Massata. ‘We are nearing our goal. They will not let us pass unchallenged.’

  The tunnel ended abruptly, widening out like a yawning maw and spilling them onto a broad stone ledge. They gazed out across a vast cavern that was split across its middle by a deep, dark chasm. Brass gargoyles jutted from the cavern’s walls, ancient grotesques as large as Knights, bearded with the accumulated sediment of millennia. In their gaping mouths burned blue pyres, whose light filled the cavern with strange, dancing shadows.

  Bridges stretched across the chasm, several dozen thin spans of stalactite-hung stone barely wide enough for one person to walk across at a time. They interlinked as they leapt out over the drop, tangling together like strands of spider web.

  On the far side, beyond the perilous crossing, was another broad ledge. Beyond it, carved into the bedrock, was the entrance to some kind of shrine. There was no mistaking the Imperial nature of the architecture, the graven aquila and the images of saintly beings flanking its entrance. Yet Jennika recoiled at the foul sigils that had been burned into the stone, the defacing emblems and warping that had rendered the holy site into something altogether darker.

  ‘We are expected,’ said Massata. Waiting before the entrance to the shrine were more of the hulking avian mutants, who pointed their staves like weapons and began to chant. At the same time, a terrible rustling and rushing reached Jennika’s ears. It flowed like a wind from the tunnel to their backs, and from dozens of other smaller entrances that dotted the rock like maggot holes.

  ‘Move,’ barked Nesh. ‘Shooters, suppress the witches on the opposite ledge. Lady Jennika, rearguard, keep them off us.’

  Led by Shanema, the retinue hurried out over the chasm as fast as they dared. The footing was treacherous, the rocky spans slippery and damp, their edges rounded. The drop waited below, a hungry maw awaiting sacrificial offerings.

  Massata and his warriors opened fire as they advanced. The avian mutants unleashed their flames in return. Bolts and blasts whipped back and forth, their din echoing in ancient spaces that had not seen the fury of battle for millennia.

  Jennika cursed as mutants spilled from the tunnels behind and all around. They scrambled onto the bridges in a hissing mass, surging towards the invaders with such vigour that the weakest of their number were sent tumbling into the darkness with plaintive screams.

  ‘Keep moving,’ shouted Jennika, lashing her sword at the nearest mutants as she backed across the bridge. Ahead of her, D’bu’ko was clambering nimbly along, ushering Mortens before him. The jokaero grunted in response, and she heard the scream of his digital weapons as he incinerated a gaggle of mutants coming across a joining bridge. Jennika followed suit, firing her digi-laser into a mutant’s face and sending its corpse tumbling away.

  A volley of fireballs roared around them, the projectiles sailing wide to detonate against the far wall. Jennika heard the thunder of Nesh and Massata’s bolt weapons firing, the howl of Kaston’s hellgun.

  Another wave of mutants rushed her, and she kept her footing on the perilous span as she hacked them down one by one.

  ‘Hold formation,’ called Nesh. ‘Keep moving.’

  More fireballs whistled around them, one striking an adjoining bridge. Crystal fire splashed across it, immolating several mutants and causing the surface Jennika stood on to shudder furiously. She heard a cry from behind her, and spun to see Mortens hanging over the void. D’bu’ko had hold of his wrist with one hand and was clinging to the bridge by his other, face tight with the strain of pulling the scribe back up.

  Mortens’ legs kicked. His eyes bulged.

  ‘Jennika!’ shouted Kaston. Jennika spun again in time to see a bloated mutant rushing her, vestigial arms flailing in its flabby gut, club-like fists swinging. She swept her blade up and the mutant ran straight onto the weapon’s point, all the way to the hilt. The creature’s momentum drove her feet from under her.

  Jennika felt a moment of horror as gravity reached up to snatch her in its fist, then
she was falling into darkness.

  Runes swam across Sire Garath’s vision, picking out priority targets in the greenskin horde. His steed, Iron Drake, stood within a cannon slit set to the right of the Ironclaw gate. The embrasure provided his Knight with a limited field of fire at the attacking hordes, and with his ion shield angled forward and the armoured ferrocrete of the wall protecting him, he was all but impossible for the orks to hit.

  Garath fired with a clench of his fist, and an ork tank exploded. The fireball engulfed a mob of greenskin mechanics, and sent blazing chunks of wreckage bouncing through the xenos ranks.

  ‘They’re as thick as bloodspiders on a carcass out there,’ he said. ‘It’s insultingly easy.’

  ‘True,’ replied Sire Reikard, whose Knight, Pyromancer, stood at the embrasure on the opposite side of the gate. ‘It’s more a case of hitting something worthwile.’

  Garath grunted in agreement. ‘They’re more likely to starve us of ammunition than they are to breach the walls.’

  Checking his strategic overlay, Garath saw hundreds of orks surge towards the Draconspire’s walls. Explosions blossomed incessantly as their small arms fire and bombs hit the ’spire’s void shields. The sky filled with fire, but still, the energy field held.

  The return fire of the Draconspire militia was withering. Las and autogun fire punched through green flesh, while heavy weapons, gun emplacements and Knightly weapons laced the ork lines with shells and piled brutish corpses in bloody hillocks.

  ‘They’ve been doing this for days,’ said Reikard. ‘Will they never tire of throwing their lives away?’

  ‘A ghurgol has more brains than these savage beasts,’ said Garath. ‘They’ll keep throwing themselves at our walls, and we’ll continue killing them.’

  ‘Do not underestimate the xenos, sire Garath,’ voxed Sacristan Nilsoch, ensconced in his Crawler behind their position. ‘They have forced us to expend almost one third of our stockpiled ammunition in less than a week. The beasts’ assaults have gained the outer walls four times, and last night their infiltrator caste almost carried the Drakescale tower. Those xenos are still not all accounted for, and if Lady Suset had not led the counter-attack when she did…’