Styer raised his daemon hammer high. ‘I am the hammer!’ he shouted. His voice boomed over the great cavern that had been created in the centre of the ship. Let every enemy hear him and tremble. ‘I am the right hand of the Emperor, the instrument of His will, the gauntlet about His fist, the tip of His spear, the edge of His sword!’
‘We are the hammer!’ his brothers echoed.
They plunged down the slope. The vortex of green tide and cauldron of plague reached for them with a gaping maw.
The Grey Knights hurled themselves into war.
CHAPTER TEN
FATHER OF FLIES
Breathing was pain. Knives to her throat, coals in her functioning lung. Every inhalation wracked her body, yet she couldn’t get enough oxygen. Unconsciousness hovered at the edge of her vision. Furia denied it purchase. To surrender to it would be a dereliction of duty. She still had a mission.
Her lost voice was a curse, but the old soldier, Brauner, was attentive to her gestures. Their progress was slow, but it was still progress. The journey was a long one. They had most of the length of the ship to travel. A little less than a thousand metres. With the full use of her legs, she could have reached her destination in a few minutes. At their current pace, it seemed leagues away.
The damage to the corridors lessened as they made their way towards the stern. The alteration of the vessel’s essence, though, was pervasive. The softness, the tactile evidence of decay, was everywhere. Furia noted that the power to all primary functions was still on. The Scouring Light had been corrupted, but it remained spaceworthy. The Ruinous Powers wanted the vessel for their own purposes.
She would disappoint them.
Brauner’s face was grey with exhaustion and horror. His jaw was set with the determination to march through terrors. Furia felt a stab of pity for the man. His encounter with the daemonic was upending everything he had been taught. That he was still fighting spoke well of his tenacity.
They were amidships before something came for them. The decks above vibrated with the sounds of gigantic battle. Furia’s augmetic ear distinguished the footsteps of the Dreadknight from the beat of explosions and gunfire. There was also the bellowing of orks, and other, more insidious sounds. And the worst voice still shouted its welcome to the Grey Knights. Whenever it spoke, Brauner gasped. It was a wonder that the man forged on. Perhaps the hundreds of battlefields of his career had forged his spirit into an alloy strong enough to withstand the poisonous sound of the daemon’s speech.
‘It knows them, doesn’t it?’ Brauner whispered.
Furia nodded. The echoing words were full of the satisfaction of vengeance. This was an enemy that this Brotherhood of the Grey Knights had fought before. The daemon had a particular hatred for Justicar Thawn. That suggested a name to Furia. She hoped she was wrong.
If she was correct, her journey had an even greater urgency.
A sound detached itself from the battle above. Heavy footsteps, the scrape of claws against the surface of the deck. Brauner heard it too. He hesitated. Furia pointed forward. Brauner nodded and they kept moving.
The sound was ahead of them. They were in the main passageway. Ahead, after a staircase leading to the upper decks, the hall carried on into darkness. The lumen strips had been destroyed there. Just in the last few minutes, Furia guessed. The shuffling gait came from the deep night into which she and Brauner were about to step.
At the point where the shadows took over from the light, she had Brauner prop her up against the wall. She reached for her belt. He raised his lasrifle. They waited.
The thing in the dark was impatient. When they didn’t come to it, it rushed out of the dark. It was a plaguebearer. Its horn curved to the left from its skull, oozing sacks of flesh and bony protuberances jutted from its torso. As it charged, it chanted bonewrack bonewrack bonewrack. It brandished a serrated blade almost as long as Furia was tall.
Brauner recoiled. The reflex saved his life. The plaguebearer’s swing came within a finger’s width of his face. Crying out in disgust and spiritual pain, Brauner fired. The las seared the hulk’s flesh. Pus boiled and fat burned. The daemon barely noticed. With a throat of bubbling phlegm, it said something to Brauner in syllables that were of no language, but had dark meaning for his soul. He stumbled back as if struck. His arms went limp and his gun lowered.
Furia grasped the psyk-out grenade from her belt clip. She threw it at the Plaguebearer. Her arm was strong. The grenade hit the daemon in its soft gut. It sank into the sticky flesh and went off. The blast itself was small and muffled by the Plaguebearer’s mass. The hall filled with a particulate cloud. It was highly psi-reactive. Furia and Brauner were not psykers, and were unaffected. The plaguebearer’s warp-essence took the brunt of the blast. It squealed like a grox in an abattoir. It stumbled, badly stunned.
Now, Furia thought. Shoot it.
Seeing the monster could be hurt, Brauner recovered his nerve and shot the daemon in its eye, blinding it. The plaguebearer shrieked and swung wildly. The sword hit the wall hard enough to jolt out of the daemon’s hand. Brauner kept shooting, backing out of range as the plaguebearer followed the source of its pain and tried to snatch him. It passed before Furia.
The inquisitor slid to her knees. Muttering invocations to purity, she reached for the sword. It was slick, but her hand was not organic, and so was immune to the weapon’s disease. If she still had movable lips, they would have curled in moral disgust. Vowing to serve full penance for using the enemy’s foul weapon, she reared back. Still on her knees, she turned her upper body into a pendulum, using the blade’s great length and weight for momentum. She reached as far behind her as she could before toppling over, then rocked forward, bringing the sword back down in a slashing arc. She let fly. The sword plunged into the daemon’s back. The plaguebearer stopped in its tracks. Its legs collapsed beneath it. Its bulk slammed to the deck. Its gargling scream scraped the air raw.
Yelling incoherent hatred, Brauner drained his power pack, frying the daemon with las. He concentrated all his shots at its head. When he had to change packs, the abomination was barely moving. Furia dragged herself over and grasped the sword’s hilt. She pulled herself upright, pulled the blade out of the daemon’s back, then swung awkwardly but with enough force to decapitate it. She fell to her right as the plaguebearer’s head rolled to a stop by Brauner’s feet.
The body of the daemon began to liquefy, its essence dissolving into the contaminated deck and walls.
Brauner stepped around the festering mass and helped Furia up. She pointed to the stern again, giving him orders and purpose before he could think too long about what he had seen. He nodded, shaken but still coherent. They started forward once more.
They headed for the engines.
And now, at last, he fought the enemy they had come to find. Styer swung the daemon hammer with the full strength of faith. He knew fierce joy as the Nemesis force weapon crushed the abominations that dared trespass on the Emperor’s galaxy. His weapon was joyful too. It crackled with unleashed energies as its purpose was fulfilled. Here was the enemy it had been forged to destroy.
The squad drove through the mass of struggling monstrosities like a torpedo. Individual orks and daemons, beings that would have torn apart mortal humans with amused contempt, could not stand before the strength of a single Grey Knight. Against a squad acting as a single, devastating entity, they fell like squalid vermin. Numbers were their only recourse. Within minutes, the effect of Styer’s command made itself known. Ork reinforcements poured into the trench. The Grey Knights moved through a convulsion of war. Xenos brute and daemon clashed to reach the Space Marines, and clashed for supremacy. The orks sought pillage and war. The daemons were acting with greater purpose. The will they served wanted the ship, and it wanted the Grey Knights.
Styer kept catching glimpses of the huge ork warboss. It was fighting to close with him, but the waves of daemons an
d the speed of the squad’s advance blocked its attempts. It raged with frustration.
Greenskins and daemons smashed into each other. And Styer’s squad pushed deeper and deeper into the struggling mass. Behind the battle-brothers came Gared. The Dreadknight crushed foulness with every step. Its hands were doomfists. When Gared punched downward with the left, he struck with the colossus that was now his body. Eldritch light flashed as daemons were vaporised and orks were smashed to pulp. The armature’s left wrist also bore a heavy incinerator. Its flame burned with the blue light of a star. Gared torched furrows on either side of the squad, carbonising orks, burning the daemons with psychic heat. The Dreadknight’s right hand carried a Nemesis greatsword. No enemy yet had been worth its obliterating edge. On the wrist was a gatling psilencer. Gared used it sparingly. Styer guessed he was preserving his strength for the greater enemy that awaited them. When the Epistolary did fire blasts from it, the psychic bolts hit with the force of the Emperor’s judgment. They disrupted the physical integrity of the daemons. Plaguebearers and beasts of Nurgle erupted, then vanished. Nurglings popped like foam.
The Grey Knights used little ammunition. There was no need. Their enemies crowded in, hurrying to their demise. They advanced in a wedge, hammer and sword and halberd eviscerating and crushing. Purging. They moved deeper into the trench, deeper into darkness and disease. Styer walked through a storm of rent daemon flesh. There was no pause, no slowing for anything. He was annihilation given human form.
And the great enemy called to him still. ‘Hurry to destiny, kin of Thawn! You have served me well! I would welcome you in kind!’
Between the thrusts of his halberd, Vohnum said, ‘The beast wants us to overcome its defence.’
Styer grunted. Was it holding back, luring the Grey Knights instead of truly fighting them? Was this legion of pestilence bait? He didn’t care. Everything would be put to fire and sword. ‘If the beast wants us to meet,’ he said, ‘then it is hastening its own demise.’ He smashed the midsection of a beast. Its paws scrabbled at his holy armour. He trampled it into the other bodies. ‘Is that not so, Brother-Epistolary?’ he voxed.
‘We must make it so,’ Gared answered.
A suitable note of caution. Faith without thought could shade into arrogance. If there was a welcome ahead, it was because the daemon had faith in its power. It was Styer’s duty to teach his foe the folly of its own arrogance.
Deeper still into the trench. They were approaching the lower decks now. Fewer orks had made it this far. The daemonic attacks became more concerted but to no avail. The Grey Knights were fate coming to call.
You have served me well.
The idea, the answer to evil questions that Styer had held at bay, broke through his personal wards. He faced it even as he fought. He dealt with it because he fought. He wrought destruction on the daemons and greenskins with even more ferocity. He heeded Gared’s warning. He would not deny the possible truth of the idea and would not confront threat with arrogance.
And the idea was this: if it were true that the Grey Knights had ensured the fulfilment of the prophecy, perhaps events had not conspired to this end through happenstance. If impossible coincidence was not the cause, that left unalterable destiny, something his faith in the God-Emperor would not allow him to accept, or the actions of another agent. Perhaps events had been helped along. It would not have taken much. Orbiana’s actions would have placed her at risk of being influenced by Chaos. A whispered inspiration, a nudge of intuition, little more than that could have brought the Scouring Light to the Sanctus Reach and the bonewrack icon.
Even so, what Styer had to accept was the immense strength such a being must possess to influence events beyond the empyrean. It had orchestrated its unleashing into the materium.
He realised he was already regarding the idea as a fact.
So be it. That changed nothing. He and his brothers must and would banish this thing. They would cut its triumph short.
The trench became a tunnel, a tall one, higher than the Dreadknight. The space was more constricted, and the daemons were almost a solid wall of slavering, gelatinous flesh. Sword blows rained down on Styer and he battered his way forward. The beasts tried to bite through the ceramite. He and his brothers destroyed every horror that approached the squad. The concentration of daemons did nothing to slow them down.
Almost as if the creatures were parting before them, opening the way to the final revelation.
The wall closed behind them. The tunnel opened up into another huge space that had been carved out of the interior of the ship, one that took up most of the bow. The walls of the chamber showed the detritus of what the spaces had once been. Metal storage crates, tapestries, bulkheads and marble cladding littered the floor and rose in heaps on the periphery. Every surface, the walls and the ceiling, dripped with a phosphorescent mucus. The air was filled with buzzing swarms of flies and flickering spores. Daemons filled the space, a rippling sea of plague. And in the centre, their master sat upon his throne.
The daemon was huge, bloated like a toad. Three horns grew from its head. The central one was short and hooked. The other two were long and curved. The right-hand one was broken. It oozed something red and green that hissed when it touched the daemon’s shoulder. Its jaw was huge, stretched in a grim, knowing smile over a metre wide. Two tongues licked out from between the rotting, jagged teeth. Green flesh hung from the daemon’s frame in folds of glistening fat. Lesions suppurated. Bubbles of cancer sprouted from them, gathered definition and faces, and tumbled down the vast body, squealing in the fevered joy of their birth. They joined the hundreds of their kin, forming a babbling, shifting mound that supported the platform on which the daemon sat.
The throne was an assemblage of toxic wreckage. Styer saw all the paraphernalia of a great laboratorium, along with instruments whose function he could not guess. Everything was encrusted with filth. The daemon’s arms rested beside braziers whose flames touched its flesh, scorching it black as they heated iron alembics to a white glow. Coruscating effluent flowed from tubes at its base.
Behind the throne, the air was torn and bleeding. A rift had been opened in the materium. It ran the entire height of the chamber, pulsing with non-colours. Its edges were corrosive of reality. From within came an endless parade of squirming, lurching monstrosities. The daemonic host grew larger and stronger with every dark second.
For all of the daemon’s taunting, it gazed at Styer with a seriousness of purpose. Its amusement had been a mask. Its eyes were narrowed, malevolent. They were also the eyes of a sage.
‘You have found my lost bonewrack,’ said Ku’gath, the Plaguefather. ‘You are not Thawn. But I shall grant you the same gifts I owe him.’
Styer experienced the vertigo of punished hubris. No, he was not Thawn. Who in the Chapter could claim to be? The immortal had fought Ku’gath during the Curwen Infestation. He had destroyed the daemon’s physical form, achieving a victory of legend. But in the end, the only means of ending the incursion had been Exterminatus.
Seven Grey Knights stood before the Plaguefather. Justicar Thawn was not among them. But they were seven Grey Knights.
Without despair, and without hope, Styer charged towards the throne.
They reached the enginarium. They had encountered no other daemons. A few clusters of orks, new arrivals on the ship, had crossed their path, and Brauner had managed to shuffle himself and Furia into the shadows until the greenskins passed. Their route had been otherwise empty.
The enginarium crew lay in pieces about the control chamber. The orks had been here, slaughtered them, and left. They weren’t interested in holding territory on the ship. Killing everyone would accomplish their purpose.
The control stations sat at the base of the monolith of the warp drive. Beneath the deck were the massive tubes and reactors of the plasma drive, stretching the entire aft section of the sloop. The warp drive’s containment w
as a hulking column, a tree of adamantium and iron and containment fields. Brauner eyed it suspiciously. The ship-wide rot was present here too. ‘The engines can’t be stable,’ he said.
Furia nodded vigorously.
‘Oh,’ Brauner said, as he realised why they had come.
Furia pointed to a bank of controls to the right of the warp drive. They limped their way over. Brauner helped Furia into the seat before the central panel. He marvelled that she was still alive, conscious, and functioning. She pointed to the vox handset on the console before her, then at Brauner.
He picked it up. Furia watched him. He thought about their purpose here, and who should be told about it. Trying one channel after another, he called out to Justicar Styer.
Ku’gath’s jaws widened in satisfaction as the Grey Knights pounded towards him. Styer felt nurglings burst beneath his tread. He held his daemon hammer over his shoulder, preparing a devastating swing. Its head flared as the weapon responded to the proximity of so powerful a daemonic presence. All the Nemesis weapons of the squad were aflame with anger. The collective psychic righteousness of the battle-brothers was in Styer, and he projected its fury before him. A plaguebearer tried to attack him but the energy of faith blasted the daemon apart.
Ku’gath waited until Styer was only a few steps away before he acted. He did not rise from his noxious throne. He made a hurling gesture. From his open palm came a hurricane cloud of flies. The swarm was a solid mass of black. It enveloped the Grey Knights.
It was like running into a wall. The flies covered Styer’s helmet lenses. They hit hard enough to break his charge. His ears were filled with the hum of insects and the ticktickticktickticktick of a hundred thousand jaws biting at his armour. He tried to keep moving, but the flies came in even greater numbers. He was blind, trying to force his way through a toxic flood. He had no idea where he was heading. He swung the daemon hammer. The swarm cleared for a moment. Styer caught a glimpse of Ku’gath raising both arms. Answering his gesture was a wave of nurglings on a tide of liquid corruption vomiting forth from the base of the throne. The vileness washed over him. The flies swam in torrents, fastening themselves to his armour. The sheer mass of the attack slowed him to a crawl. The current turned him. He lost his sense of direction.
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