Vengeful Spirit

by Graham McNeill

  ‘Centurion!’

  Theron turned, his face ruddy with anger.

  Alcade knew that anger. He felt it too, but with the horror of the massacre in the north behind them, cold practicality reasserted itself.

  ‘Leave him be, Didacus, he’s right,’ said Alcade, letting out a long, resigned breath. ‘An oath is not an oath if it can be set aside when it suits our desires. We swore to defend Molech, and that’s what we’re going to do.’

  ‘We can still get off-world, legate,’ said Theron, his anger undiminished, but bleeding out of him with every word. ‘We can seize another orbital craft. Capture a warp-capable ship and fight on. We can still make a difference. Thirty Ultramarines is not a force to be easily dismissed.’

  ‘I have made my decision,’ said Alcade. ‘The matter is closed. We march for Molech.’

  Theron mustered his arguments, but Alcade cut him off before he could argue any more.

  ‘I said the matter is closed.’

  For a moment he wondered if Theron might attack him, but decades of devotion to duty crushed any thought of disobedience.

  ‘As you say, legate,’ said Theron. ‘We march for Molech.’

  Alcade waved his warriors towards the piled crates of ammunition and weaponry Kyro had removed from the gunships.

  ‘Gather up all the guns and blades you need,’ he said.

  He marched to stand before Kyro and said, ‘On any other day I’d have you bear the red of censure, but I need every bolter I can muster. Rejoin the ranks, and bring that vexil with you. If we’re going to die here, we’re going to do it under the Ultima.’

  Movement at the mouth of the hangar drew Alcade’s attention.

  A wide-base Army vehicle lurched into the cavern, and thirty bolters snapped to face it. Automated weapon systems tracked it, but Kyro swiftly issued an override command at the sight of the red caduceus emblazoned on its glacis.

  A heavy door rolled back on its side and a slender woman in a bloodstained coat and hard-wearing fatigues several sizes too big for her jumped down. Five men emerged behind her. Army by their bearing. Each was armed, but they were no threat.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded.

  The woman smiled in relief.

  ‘Legate Alcade,’ she said. ‘My name is Alivia Sureka and I very much need your help.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  Not Ullanor

  This is fear

  Hellgate

  In contrast to Alivia Sureka’s arrival, Lupercalia felt deserted when the Warmaster entered the city. Columns of Legiones Astartes came first, marching beneath wolf-headed vexils and tribal runes of Barbarus as the sun dipped towards dusk.

  Aximand’s company bore bloody trophies taken from the vanquished XIII Legion, while Ezekyle’s Justaerin dragged scorched Legio Crucius banners behind them for others to trample.

  Tyana Kourion’s body was nailed to a Contemptor’s sarcophagus.

  Smoke-blackened tanks and the striding engines of Vulpa, Interfector, Vulcanum and Mortis came after the infantry, their warhorns braying in triumph.

  Those citizens who had not already fled to the surrounding countryside or risked travelling to the upper transit platforms in the hope of securing passage off-world huddled fearfully in their homes. Farther ahead, a last few shuttles blasted skyward.

  Suspicious eyes watched the arrival of his army from the cover of parapets and shutters. Behind the curiosity, behind the masochistic need to see their conquerors, Horus recognised bone-deep fear.

  ‘The last time I entered this city, I was parading in glorious triumph with Jaghatai and the Lion,’ said Horus. ‘I marched at father’s right hand, and the people cheered my name.’

  Mortarion grunted with grim amusement. ‘Aye, not exactly Ullanor, is it?’

  Horus turned to address the three members of the Mournival who marched behind him. They were a sorry looking group, scarred and burned by war, but victorious nonetheless. Ezekyle in particular was looking the worse for wear, his eyes downcast and his mien truculent.

  ‘What do you think, my sons?’ he asked as they passed beneath the towering arch of the second wall.

  ‘About what?’ asked Aximand.

  ‘Why do these people not welcome our arrival?’

  ‘Aside from the fact that we killed their army?’ said Kibre.

  Horus waved that trifling objection aside.

  ‘They’re afraid,’ said Aximand.

  ‘Of what, that I’ll have them all put to death?’

  ‘Perhaps, but more likely they fear change. Right now, most of these people are wondering what our arrival will mean for them. Will they be enslaved or freed? Richer or poorer? Like all tiny cogs in a great machine, they know that it matters little whose hand is at the crank, only that it turns.’

  ‘Give it time,’ said Horus. ‘They’ll be cheering my name again when I bring them the crown of Terra.’

  ‘A crown is it now?’ said Mortarion. ‘Being made Warmaster wasn’t enough, so now you’re going to be king?’

  ‘Have you forgotten already?’ said Horus as the citadel’s rearing towers and gilded domes came into view.

  ‘Forgotten what?’

  ‘I’m not going to be king, nor even Emperor,’ said Horus. ‘I’m going to be a god.’

  Targost, or the thing within Targost, reached for Iacton Qruze. The flesh of its face was bubbling like the surface of a muddy swamp. The stench was appalling. Qruze scrambled away on his backside, fumbling for his pistol.

  Bror Tyrfingr charged the Samus-thing, but it was like trying to tackle the leg of a Warlord Titan. Samus slapped the Fenrisian away, like a man swatting an irritating fly. Bror landed on a flaming drum and rolled, spilling its contents in a shower of embers.

  The creature’s jaw cracked wide open and oozing black ichor boiled up from the interior of its skull. Serrated triangular teeth pushed out from the stump of its neck and a host of lashing, vertical tongues emerged, rough and forked. A multitude of glowing eyes formed in the roiling, glutinous mass of its phantom skull.

  Its form stretched upwards, diseased roots sprouting from its lower limbs and infesting the deck like oily ropes.

  ‘I’m Samus...’ it gurgled with mucus-thick breath, and the name struck a dreadful chord in Loken’s heart. The air tasted of static and biting on metal. Shadows moved on the wall, independent of the firelight.

  Samus, he knew that name. He knew it from a world made compliant a long time ago in another life. He’d heard it over the vox and in the air of Sixty-Three Nineteen. He’d heard it spoken by Xaver Jubal just before he’d opened fire on his brothers.

  The Whisperheads.

  Loken was there again, in that glistening cave, fighting his fellow legionary as the foundations of his world came apart.

  He had a sword in his hand, but he couldn’t raise it.

  This is fear.

  This was what mortals dealt with every day of their lives. Fear of the alien, fear of war, fear of pain, of disease. Fear of failing those who trusted them.

  How could anyone live like this?

  Loken was paralysed, his limbs leaden at his sides.

  Varren charged, burying the smile of his axe in the Samus-thing’s belly. Sawing teeth bit deep. It bent over and plucked Varren from the ground, its circular mouth fastening on his shoulder. Blood sprayed and Varren’s arm spasmed, releasing the axe grip.

  Voitek’s arms hacked at its flanks, as Severian sliced through gristle-like fronds whipping from Targost’s transforming flesh. A shot from above punched through its wraith skull.

  Karayan.

  Qruze finally had his pistol out and was pumping shot after shot into the creature’s chest. The mass-reactives were swallowed whole without effect.

  The Samus-thing laughed and tossed Varren aside. He landed forty metres away beside the altar of Davinite stone. Bror Tyrfingr picked himself up, shouted something to Qruze and Severian. Loken heard Altan Nohai shout something in return, sounding surprised.

&nb
sp; Loken’s armour registered a sudden drop in temperature.

  Then Rubio was there.

  The former Codicier threw himself at the Samus-thing, his sword a sliver of flame-wreathed bluesteel. Varren’s axe had achieved little, but Rubio’s blade sliced deep into the meat of the thing. The fire leapt from his weapon onto Samus, and the remains of Targost’s robes went up in flames with a roaring whoosh of ignition.

  It screamed, finally hurting.

  Loken felt something grip his leg and looked down to see Tubal Cayne’s hand scrabbling at his armour.

  The other hand was clamped around his own neck. Blood welled between his fingers, pumping enthusiastically from the awful chasm in his throat. He’d ripped his helmet off and his eyes took Loken’s in an iron grip. Anger, vindication and something Loken couldn’t identify poured out of Tubal Cayne. Flickering reflections of Rubio’s white fire shimmered in his widening pupils. The dying warrior tried to speak, but only wet, liquid gurgles emerged.

  Loken watched his eyes turn to glass and knew that he was dead.

  And the fear that held him rigid vanished.

  He’d fought Samus before.

  He and Vipus had killed it.

  Loken brought his sword up and charged.

  Rama Karayan tracked the battle below through his bolter’s scope. Something was affecting it. The thing his brothers faced wasn’t registering. He could see Bror, Macer and the others, but not the thing they fought.

  But prey could be hunted by its absences as much as by its leavings.

  His hunter’s eye had been honed as a youngster in the darkened mine workings of Lycaeus. The lords of the Ravenspire had recognised his gift and developed it. Not invisible enough for the Shadowmasters, but perfect for the silent killers of the Seeker squads.

  His auto-senses were linked directly with the scope of his modified bolter, and he took a breath, innately interpolating the locus of his brother’s attacks. Peripheral sight picked out the pellucid white flames of Rubio’s sword.

  He found his centre and drew in a breath.

  Held it.

  He fired. A spent casing dropped to the scaffold boards.

  It bounced, slower than should be possible. A web of frosted lines crazed its surface in a pale web.

  Strange shadows moved on the walls. Impossible shadows. They were all around him, like stalking wolves in a twilit winter forest or the dust devils of Deliverance’s ash wastes.

  Karayan felt grave-cold air and the hard, sharp edge of a blade at his throat.

  ‘Nice rifle,’ said a rasping voice. ‘I think I’ll take it.’

  Karayan moved. Not fast enough.

  The blade sliced deep, cutting back to bone.

  Loken’s sword tore through the Samus-thing’s scorched belly. Bubbling laughter spilled from its smoking skull. Ash and greasy meat cinders billowed around it. Furnace-red light shone through wounds torn in its charred flesh.

  Targost’s arms reached for him, stretching and cracking like timbers splitting in a fire. Loken put a bolt-round into its chest and hacked the hand from the arm. Another writhing appendage squirmed into existence at the stump, but it was a twisted, malformed thing.

  ‘It’s vulnerable!’ cried Rubio. ‘Its link to the warp is fraying.’

  The pathfinders surrounded the daemon-thing, hacking and shooting it. Even in such desperate straits, each shot was carefully aimed, each strike precisely placed.

  ‘I know you, Garviel Loken,’ it hissed, looming over Loken. ‘I claimed your brother’s soul in that mountain cave. He screams in torment still.’

  ‘Don’t listen to it,’ shouted Rubio, blocking a whipping appendage of glistening dark flesh. The Librarian’s hood blazed with blue white fire.

  ‘Silence, witcher!’ bellowed the Samus-thing. The force of its words drove Rubio to his knees. It spat a torrent of black fire from its writhing, toothed gullet. Rubio threw up a shimmering wall of witchfire and the flames guttered and died.

  Severian closed and slashed his blade into the daemon’s back, tearing upwards. Loken hadn’t even seen him move. Looping coils of what might once have been guts, but were now mouldering loops of dead meat spilled out.

  The beast spun around and clubbed Severian to the deck with unnatural speed. It hurled Voitek and Qruze away with a scream of pure force and slammed Loken to the deck with slithering arms like blistered snakes.

  Loken saw the gladius Targost had used to mutilate the Ultramarine prisoner. The ivory Ultima on its pommel glittered in the firelight. Its blade was dark, yet sheened with starlight. He reached for it, but a hand of scabbed knuckles and bruised fingers picked it up first.

  ‘This is mine,’ said Proximo Tarchon.

  Loken sprang to his feet as the carved warrior of Ultramar threw himself forward. He rolled beneath the Samus-thing’s writhing arms and thrust his gladius up into its belly.

  The effect was instantaneous and devastating.

  Targost’s body fell apart, as though every single molecular bond within its flesh was instantly sundered. Its form turned to liquid and collapsed in a stinking pool of rancid matter.

  The pathfinders scattered. Severian dragged Cayne’s body away from the spreading lake of smoking fluid. Loken lowered his sword and let out a shuddering breath that felt like it had been held within him for decades.

  Altan Nohai rushed to Cayne and knelt beside him.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do for him,’ said Loken.

  ‘He that is dead, take from him the Legion’s due,’ said Nohai as the reductor portion of his gauntlet slid into place.

  Loken registered the muted crack of the gunshot a fraction of a second before the faceplate of Nohai’s helmet exploded outwards.

  The Apothecary slumped over Cayne’s body, a smoking entry wound drilled through the back of his helmet.

  Armoured warriors dropped to the deck from the upper reaches of the chamber. Sons of Horus. Two dozen at least, armoured in blackened plate the colour of night. Their helm lenses flickered with dead light, as though cold flames seethed behind them.

  Most were armed with bolters. He saw a plasma gun. A melta too.

  Loken fought the urge to reach for his own weapons.

  ‘Raise a single weapon and you all die,’ said a warrior without a helmet. Loken didn’t recognise him, but saw the planed features of what they’d once called a true son.

  ‘Noctua? Grael Noctua of the Warlocked?’ said Severian.

  Loken’s head snapped around.

  Severian shrugged. ‘He was Twenty-Fifth Company, same as me.’

  ‘Severian?’ said Noctua, his shock evident. ‘When the Warmaster said two faithless cowards had returned with the prodigal son, I had no idea he meant you. And Iacton Qruze? Your name has been a curse ever since you deserted the Legion at the moment of its greatest triumph.’

  Qruze flinched at Noctua’s words, but he squared his shoulders and said, ‘You mean the moment my Legion died.’

  Loken had never respected Iacton Qruze more.

  The pathfinders reluctantly divested themselves of their weapons as the black-armoured Sons of Horus closed the noose on them. Now that he looked closely, Loken saw their proportions were subtly wrong, asymmetric and out of true, as though the warriors within were not legionaries at all, but things ill-formed and unnatural.

  Or that was what they were becoming.

  ‘And you, Thirteenth Legion’ said Noctua. ‘Especially you.’

  Proximo Tarchon slowly laid down his gladius, and Loken saw a depth of calculating hatred in his clear eyes like nothing he’d ever seen before. The blood had hardened to scabs on the ritual cuts, and the smeared ash would mark the scars forever.

  ‘When I hold this again, it will be to put it through your heart,’ said the Ultramarines warrior.

  Noctua smiled at that, but didn’t reply.

  ‘Grael Noctua, you little bastard,’ said Severian, setting his blade down. ‘Did you know I advised against your advancement three times when your name c
ame up? I always said you were too sly, too eager to please. Not good qualities in a leader.’

  ‘Looks like you were wrong,’ said Noctua.

  ‘No,’ said Severian. ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘I think you were, I’m Mournival now.’

  Loken’s heart skipped a beat at the mention of the Mournival, that confraternity to which he and Torgaddon had once belonged. A brotherhood as close to the Warmaster as it was possible to be.

  ‘Did someone say Mournival?’

  The speaker dropped from the roof spaces, and Loken groaned as he saw the modified bolter he carried. Rama Karayan’s weapon. Blood dripped from the breech and muzzle.

  ‘I remember the Mournival,’ the warrior said.

  Like the others surrounding them, his armour was black and non-reflective. Like Noctua, he went without a helm, and something in his saturnine, cocksure swagger struck him as hideously familiar.

  He retrieved Tarchon’s gladius from the deck and turned the darkly-sheened blade over as though curious at what had been done to it. He shook his head and slid the weapon into an empty shoulder sheath.

  ‘Poor bloody Samus,’ he said to Loken with a grin. ‘He’d only just earned his return after a warrior as straight up and down as you killed his host flesh on Calth. It’s getting to be a thing.’

  ‘Who are you?’ said Loken.

  ‘No one remembers me,’ said the warrior. He grinned, exposing perfect white teeth. ‘I’d be hurt if I wasn’t already dead.’

  ‘You’re Ger Gerradon,’ said Qruze. ‘One of Little Horus Aximand’s scrappers.’

  ‘The body is his, admittedly,’ said Gerradon. ‘But he’s long gone, Iacton. I’m Tarik reborn, he-who-is-now-Tormaggedon.’

  Alivia led the Ultramarines and her five soldiers ever downwards along a twisting series of switchback stairs beneath the Sanctuary. The walls were glassy and smooth, cut down through the geomantic roots of Mount Torger by the colossal power of the galaxy’s most singular mind.

  No light shone this deep, and only the Ultramarines suit lights pierced the darkness. If felt like nobody came here precisely because nobody ever came here.

  ‘How much deeper is this gate, mamzel?’ asked Castor Alcade. The smell of plasmic fire still clung to his armour, and his breath had the hot flavour of burned stone to it.