Heralds of the Siege

by Nick Kyme

  Even at this distance, the stink of the noisome fluid was like a physical blow. Vastobal recoiled, feeling his gut clench and stiffen. The gene-forged of the Dark Angels were capable of ingesting matter without effect that would have killed a normal human instantly, but this bilious reek was so utterly foul that it threatened even the iron constitution of a Space Marine. Blinking away chemical tears, Vastobal activated the atmospheric seals on his power armour and set it to a mode more suitable to an ultra-toxic death world or deep-void vacuum than the placid woodlands of Zaramund. He lurched out of his hiding place, fighting down the wave of nausea that had come over him, and gathered himself. The captain’s cloak rippled over his shoulders as he grasped the hilt of his longsword and slid a short length of it out of the scabbard, preparing for a full draw.

  The pilgrims turned to him, and he beheld horrors.

  Gawping, slack-mouthed corpses that were animated by jerky, marionette motions. Agglomerations of dead flesh that mimicked the shape and form of humans. Repellent things that belonged in a midden or a grave.

  The Death Guard Typhon did not seem to care about the sudden transformation at hand amongst the civilians, instead turning with obvious threat towards Vastobal as he made himself visible. Typhon pointed his power weapon in the Dark Angel’s direction and called out a command to halt, but Vastobal was only half-aware of it.

  His attention was taken by the things around him.

  All the mad rumours and insane half-truths he had heard about the Warmaster’s dalliance with the eldritch and unknown now came snapping into hard focus. The possibility he had always secretly hoped was untrue now revealed itself to him. Vastobal was a son of Caliban, and sons of Caliban knew the truth about monsters lurking in the dark. The rumours of the unclean are real, he told himself, and worse than I could have believed.

  Distantly, Vastobal’s duty made itself known to him. Luther had to be warned about what he had allowed to set foot on Zaramund, warned about whatever foul sorcery the Death Guard had brought with them from their alliance with Horus Lupercal.

  The creatures had other plans. The men-things reached for him, spilling black ichor across the undergrowth at his feet as clawed fingers scratched at his armour. Choking in a breath through the lingering stink in the confines of his helmet, Vastobal’s hand jerked and the rest of his sword came free.

  His unsheathing swing was wide and it took the head from one of the unhallowed pilgrims. Instead of a jet of crimson, a flood of black foulness issued into the air, and Vastobal recoiled once again. The others mobbed him and he reacted with swift, deadly force. Another, then two more of the pilgrims were cut down by his blade.

  Everywhere he opened them, blackness exploded outwards, moving like oily smoke.

  Belatedly, Vastobal realised that the repellent fluid was a colossally dense mass of tiny insects, flies that the corpses vomited out in great, buzzing swarms.

  Reason threatened to slip from him as the full extent of the horror became clear. The Dark Angel’s warrior mind slipped into pure combatant mode, some rote-trained element of his thoughts taking over as a base instinct overrode all other concerns.

  Destroy this foulness. Wipe them all out. Expunge them.

  Vastobal moved quickly, leading with the sword and cutting down everything that crossed his line of sight. In the melee, the need to destroy the pilgrims became all-consuming, as if the Dark Angel were suddenly an antibody compelled to eradicate an infection marring the body of Zaramund.

  A dark, sizzling slick of insects and black blood coated his armour as he advanced towards the old woman he had seen begin it all, the one who had been speaking with the Death Guard. She was the heart of it – yes, that was clear now. Bellowing a war cry, Vastobal went at her with his sword falling from on high, intent on opening up her stick-thin frame with one cut from jowl to bowel.

  The curved head of a scythe blade came out of nowhere and blocked the falling strike before it could connect.

  Typhon decided that the Dark Angel had gone mad.

  One moment, the Death Guard was seeing… something… and the next his gaze was ripped away from the old woman by a cloaked form crashing out from the treeline, shouting incoherent warnings about corruption and filth.

  Typhon was about to interpose himself between the civilians and the other legionary, to demand an explanation as to why one of Luther’s men had seen fit to approach their camp’s perimeter unseen – but events overtook any such calm response.

  The Dark Angel began killing. He did it with such ferocity that Typhon was momentarily taken aback. He had seen such blind fury in the Word Bearers or the World Eaters, but never from the more measured warrior kin of the First Legion.

  The civilians actually fought back. They moved with a purpose that common men seldom exhibited before the shock and awe of a legionary in full flow, but it counted for nothing. The Dark Angel put them down with swift, flashing strikes from his weapon, blood splashing where it struck. Typhon was aware of the insects again, as if coming out of nowhere, doubtless attracted by the scent of spilled blood.

  The moment stretched and he let a surge of cold anger push him forward. Typhon turned to meet the Dark Angel’s blade as he came hurtling towards the old woman, her tear-streaked face a picture of shock as this avatar of death itself thundered across the clearing.

  Their weapons clashed with a shriek of powered, crystalline steel, for a brief instant seemingly frozen in time.

  ‘Stay your hand!’ Typhon snarled.

  ‘What obscenity have you brought here, Death Guard?’ The Dark Angel shouted the words back at him, shaking with rage. ‘This profane horror will not stand!’

  Locked in their violent embrace, Typhon could see the warrior’s name etched in golden scrollwork over his breast, surrounded by laurels that designated the rank of captain.

  ‘Vastobal,’ he grunted, hoping that by addressing the Dark Angel directly he would get some sense from him. ‘Stand down!’

  ‘Never in the face of such pestilence!’ The other warrior broke out of the lock and attacked again in a flurry of slashes and jabs from his longsword.

  Typhon planted his feet in a defensive posture, fighting with both hands on Manreaper, using the shaft to parry and block every hit that Vastobal tried to land. The Dark Angel’s cloak whipped around him as he looked for an opening; he was good, Typhon had to admit, and had Vastobal’s discipline been in place instead of his rage, the clash could have followed a different path.

  His jaw set. He had no time for this. When Vastobal attacked once more, Typhon spun his power scythe in a flashing arc and used the heavy heel to knock the Dark Angel off balance.

  Hit hard, Vastobal went down on one knee and Typhon pointed the scythe’s curved blade at his head. ‘Enough!’ he snapped.

  ‘No, not enough!’ Vastobal bellowed. The Dark Angel’s sword flew at Typhon in an upward arc that was so fast, it almost caught him unawares.

  Typhon shifted in his stance, but not quickly enough to avoid the very tip of the blade screeching as it scored a line up his chest-plate, and cut into his face through the mat of his unkempt beard.

  His hand went to the wound. There was blood.

  Dark it was, so dark as to be almost black. In the few moments before the Space Marine’s accelerated metabolism clotted the wound, fat droplets fell from the cut and splashed against the ground underfoot.

  And something altered inside Calas Typhon, something dark and deeply buried. Released, it uncoiled and was reborn.

  The change was blink-fast, an element of his spirit reforming into another shape. His soul twisted at the sting from the wound – but it wasn’t the small nick in his flesh that angered him. It was the flood of emotion, of sudden rage and hatred at the Dark Angel’s insolence and idiocy.

  How dare Vastobal do this? How dare he?

  Does the fool not understand who I am? What arrogance compels him to strike me and those like me?

  Typhon let the cold, simmering fury break its banks and he st
ruck back with his scythe, putting all the power of his Terminator armour’s superior musculature into the blow. The blade struck the centre of Vastobal’s longsword and cleaved it in two – half the length whipped away with the spent kinetic force of the impact, and the other vibrated in the Dark Angel’s hand. The First Legion captain was staggered by the break, and in another time and place that might have signalled the end of this ill-fated clash.

  It was not to be. Forces larger than Typhon were at his back, a buzzing, droning vibration that ran through the meat and bone of him. They propelled him forwards into a stomping, steady advance. The Death Guard captain felt a crawling, electric sensation coursing through his bloodstream, like insects in his veins. His hearts hammered at the inside of his reinforced ribcage.

  The buzzing was in his head, the black-silver glitter ghosting at the edges of his sight.

  Typhon recalled all the times he had taken the Ritual of the Cups, a post-battle rite in which Death Guard commanders would share a draught of pure poison with their most valiant warriors. The drinking of the venoms, a challenge to the gene-forged hyper-metabolism of the Space Marines, was intoxicating in its own way and Typhon savoured the rush of it. The threat of true death made a legionary’s adrenaline surge high.

  But this was better.

  He felt potent and powerful. Unstoppable.

  Light flashed from the steel as Manreaper fell towards Vastobal’s chest. The Dark Angel rolled aside and barely escaped the weapon’s kiss as the scythe bit into the ground. Typhon slashed downwards again, and once more Vastobal almost paid with his life. From the corner of his shadowed gaze, Typhon thought he saw the earth where the blade had landed liquefying into muddy, toxic slurry.

  His fractional moment of distraction allowed Vastobal to stab him. With all of his enhanced might, the Dark Angel came forward and jammed the blunt edge of his broken sword into the tiny gap between the plates of the plackart that protected Typhon’s lower torso. Levering it outwards, the broken blade slashed power cables and artificial muscle bundles and finally tore through the wargear’s undermesh, the last barrier before the Death Guard’s flesh.

  Typhon roared and stiffened, standing in place as Vastobal lost his grip on the sword and fell back once again. It was a deadly wound, one that even a warrior of the Legiones Astartes would be hard pressed to shrug off.

  But instead of the torrent of pain he expected, Typhon experienced a boiling, churning corpse-cold at the site of the stabbing. He looked down and saw a dark red shimmer creeping along the fraction of the broken longsword’s blade that was still visible to him.

  At first he thought it to be blood, but Typhon did not bleed that colour.

  It was rust. In the blink of an eye, corrosion spread over the weapon – across the blade, hilt, pommel and all – and Vastobal’s sword turned to gritty powder, the metal exhibiting a thousand years of age in an instant.

  Vastobal’s face remained hidden behind the black of his battle-helm’s visor, but his reaction was clear through the motion of his body, his hands rising in an unconscious gesture of warding.

  ‘What have you brought here, Death Guard?’ he whispered.

  Typhon opened his mouth to reply, but the only sound that escaped his lips was the echo of the droning buzz inside him.

  He gave in to the act he was longing to complete. Manreaper glittered once more against the sun, and when its wide and lightning-fast arc was at an end, Captain Vastobal’s helm – his head still contained within – rolled a metre from the Dark Angel’s twitching corpse.

  The old woman knelt before the Death Guard, and every one of the pilgrims did the same, pressing their scabrous foreheads to the mud amidst the opened bodies of their kindred. Together, they uttered a single word in a breathy rush – ‘Typhus’ – and then fell silent.

  Typhon trembled with unchained energy, and it took a physical effort to reel himself back in. His hand went to his torso, where the ragged rent in his armour was still gaping. The edges of it were damp with clear mucus, but there was no pain. Only a cold, clammy sensation, the same as he had felt around the clusters of lesions elsewhere on his body.

  The change, he realised. This is no malaise. It is improving me.

  The old woman looked up at him, as if she caught the echo of his thoughts. Her smile was all black, rotted teeth and the bloom of new undeath.

  ‘First Captain!’

  Typhon spun around as the veteran sergeant he had left on the battlements came striding towards him, a trio of Grave Wardens in close formation behind.

  ‘My lord, are you injured?’

  Typhon slowly shook his head. ‘Sergeant, what did you see?’

  The Death Guard pointed his bolter at the beheaded Dark Angel. ‘He came from nowhere! We saw him attack you without provocation and kill the civilians…’

  ‘Is that all you saw?’ Typhon’s gaze bored into him, the air turning metallic as his hidden preternatural senses reached out.

  ‘My lord?’ The sergeant seemed confused by the question.

  Typhon waved him away. ‘Never mind.’ His hands flexed around the hilt of his power scythe and he took a step towards Vastobal’s body. The buzzing pressure at his back had returned – or had it ever really left? – and he let it gently push at him. Black flies darted around in the sudden stillness, dipping down to gorge themselves on the spill of rich legionary blood soaking into the earth at his feet.

  ‘What are we to do with the body?’ said one of the other warriors.

  Typhon glanced at the old woman, who gave him a demure, conspiratorial nod. ‘

  ‘It will be dealt with,’ he replied.

  Luther’s gaze tracked back and forth across the chart table as data scrolled from one side of the glassy surface to the other, the arrival of each new pane of text signalled by a quiet bell chime. It was a march of interminable information, bulletin after bulletin pertaining to the logistics and minutiae of maintaining a fighting force upon a newly conquered planet. While the Grand Master had adjutants to whom he could turn this task, there was a part of him that was always drawn back to peer over their shoulders. Some seed of disquiet that something vital might be missed if he did not personally cast an eye over all aspects of his new fleet and his centurions.

  Behind him, the command centre’s hatch dilated and Cypher stepped through, a mordant cast to his face. He had been about his own tasks for the past few days, since before Luther had granted Captain Vastobal leave to covertly observe the Death Guard, and he suspected that Cypher had also been using his own subtle methods to spy on Typhon and his Grave Wardens.

  ‘What is it?’ Luther demanded, sensing the onset of a new problem in the other warrior’s manner.

  Cypher offered Luther a data-slate by way of an answer. Displayed upon it was a god’s-eye pict-capture from one of the constellation of scrying satellites orbiting above Zaramund. It showed a dozen false-colour blurs caught in motion over the curve of the planet below. Starships, he guessed, captured in the act of breaking orbit at combat velocity.

  ‘The Death Guard are gone,’ explained the Lord Cypher. ‘All of them. No word to our stations. No thanks.’ He spat the word bitterly. ‘They simply boarded their vessels in the hours of darkness and then broke for the system’s Mandeville point at full burn.’

  Luther raised an eyebrow. ‘And the repair camp?’

  ‘Empty.’ The other warrior leaned in. ‘We should have listened to Vastobal.’

  ‘And where is the good captain?’ Luther glanced around the echoing command chamber, his eyes never finding the centurion he sought. ‘Seek him out for me. I would know why he did not report their preparations for departure.’

  ‘He may have tried,’ said Cypher darkly.

  Luther met his gaze, and an unwelcome chill prickled at the base of his spine. A low chime sounded from the screen-table before him and, by reflex, the Grand Master glanced down at the display.

  The newly arrived datum was a minor alert: a civilian medicae in one of the outlying colon
ial settlements was requesting assistance from an Apothecary of the Legion, to deal with an unidentified infection that had arisen in the community.

  Luther dismissed the data pane with a flick of his hand and looked back at Cypher, brooding on what as-yet-unseen effects his generosity towards Typhon’s warriors would leave behind.

  Typhon did not need to look up at the great portal across the compartment to know that the Terminus Est and his fleet had just entered the warp.

  He smiled to himself as he walked to the ornate cabinet in the corner of the meeting chamber, the pistons in his heavy armour gasping quietly with each movement. He could feel the empyrean realm out there, the thud and heartbeat pulsing of it washing against the Geller fields of his ship. Typhon imagined it as an endless, protean ocean of blood in which the vessel was now submerged. Alive and restless, calling out to him.

  He wondered what would happen if he ordered the protecting energy sheath to be shut off.

  What would I allow in? What would emerge out of myself in order to meet it?

  The smile grew as he arranged a series of pressure-sealed flasks in a row. Typhon was experiencing something that had always seemed impossible to hold on to. Clarity. That was the only word for it. He almost chuckled. It was some cosmic joke, a great irony. All his life, from his tormented youth on Barbarus to his redemption in Mortarion’s ranks and beyond, to this day, Calas Typhon had been reaching for understanding. Now he saw that it had been a part of him from the very beginning.

  Those who had hated the pallid, hollow-eyed boy that he had been, the ones who shunned him and named him half-breed and witchkin, perhaps they were the ones with the most insight. In their dull way, they had seen a fraction of Typhon’s true potential.

  What was the word that old hag used? She called me the herald…

  He liked the cadence of that title. It had import to it, the weight and moment of greater things at hand.

  Herald.

  It spoke of one bearing the undeniable truth, one who carried the harshest reality for all to hear.