Brothers of the Snake

by Dan Abnett

  'Powered up and set to go!' Pindor voxed back after a moment.

  Priad gestured Dyognes and Xander forward to throw off the baggage already stowed.

  'What the devil do you think you're doing?' wailed a voice.

  Priad turned. The Princess Royal of Cartomax, clad in a floor-length fur, her face pale, was rushing towards them, flanked by half a dozen less-than-eager bodyguards.

  'That's my vehicle!' she declared, glaring up at the brother-sergeant. She barely came up to his elbow. Priad was amazed at her brazen outrage. She seemed to have no fear of the towering warriors. Or maybe, he considered, her fear of the situation outweighed her fear of the Astartes.

  'We need it.’ Priad said simply.

  'Damn you!' she cried. 'It's mine! Mine!'

  'Lady, please...' one of the bodyguards whimpered, keeping his eyes fixed on Priad and his men and his hands very obviously away from his own sidearm. 'Please... they are Astartes...'

  The princess slapped the man so hard he fell over.

  'You will not take my transport.’ she told Priad.

  'I have already taken it. Calm yourself and return to the palace compound.'

  'You will escort me to safety then! You serve me!'

  Ah, now, that was it, Priad realised. She wasn't afraid of them, because she didn't understand them. Raised in the rarefied atmosphere of a high court, she had been educated to think of the Astartes as servant-warriors. Servants of the Imperium. She was royal-born, so undoubtedly they had to serve her.

  Such marvellous arrogance.

  'Go away. Now.’ he said.

  'Do you know who I-' she began to say.

  'Go away now,' Priad repeated.

  She gave an indignant shriek and shot him. Point blank, with a micro-laser from under her furs. The blast scorched his chest plate and flashed warning sigils across his visor-scope. Scyllon and Aekon had their bolters aimed at her in a heartbeat.

  She gasped and backed off a pace, incredulous.

  'Go away.’ he repeated as calmly as he could manage, trying to ignore the urgings of the target cross that filled his view and framed her face.

  'Lady.’ a voice boomed. The golden digit now hovered between Priad and the Princess. Mabuse had boosted the volume of its vox-speakers. 'I advise you to run away now. Right now. Do as the brother-sergeant instructs you.' The little holoform glared at her.

  'Why? Why?' she choked.

  The holoform of Mabuse shivered and dissolved. It was replaced by the hard-light of a crest-insignia. The rosette emblem of the Inquisition.

  'That's why.'

  She ran, wailing.

  A salutary lesson, Priad thought. Even someone haughty and thick-skinned enough to be unafraid of the Astartes hides in terror from the Inquisition.

  VI

  Pindor ran the yacht out of the garage bay into the streets. Xander and Dyognes had been forced to walk in front of it to clear the jumble of transports from the ramp. Once they were through, the two warriors reboarded, and the yacht sped clear down the boulevard.

  Monsoon rain was falling in swirling curtains. Weird electrical effects underlit the low, sinister sky and Priad saw at least five city towers struck by lightning in as many minutes.

  The road was littered with the detritus of rioting, and overturned vehicles burned in the rain. Dim figures flashed by in the shadows, fleeing down the pavements and walkways. At one junction, the bodies of nine Magistratum officers lay broken on the roadway. Priad's sensors detected sporadic gunfire from neighbouring streets.

  For one fifty-metre section, the street-level windows of a tower showed not their passing reflection but a clamour of open-mouthed ghosts, screaming at them from the rain-streamed glass.

  'Golden Throne!' cried Andromak. 'Did you see that?'

  'No.’ Priad lied.

  The yacht swooped east, along the main city highway, up and over a hump-backed bridgeway that ran across a stately park. The doum trees in the park were on fire, but the leaves weren't burning.

  'Turn east.’ Mabuse voxed. 'Head for the Sacred Mound.'

  Pindor struggled with the yacht's controls. They were unfamiliar and his massive, gauntleted hands were too big to manage the dainty, knurled levers and throttles. He tried to steer the yacht onto the wide avenue that rose through the mid-town towards the area of the Mound, and ran them a glancing blow along a section of crash barrier. The impact showered sparks into the air and left an ugly weal down the side of the luxury transport's hull.

  In quick succession, three lightning strikes brutally stung the roadway nearby, one to the front, the other two to the left. They left scorched blast holes smoking in the rockcrete. The electromagnetic pulses left them dazed and blind for a second, and the golden digit fell to the deck, dead and inert. A second later and it rose drunkenly back into the air, the holoform reigniting.

  'Come on!' Mabuse voxed.

  'Dear God-Emperor...' Pindor mumbled.

  Priad looked out. A human skeleton, its bones made of polished ebony and its socket-eyes glowing with a ghastly yellow radiance stood on the roadway ahead of them. It was forty metres tall.

  Damocles threw open the top hatches and started to blaze at the monstrous thing with their bolters, white tracers ripping the wet air. Andromak fired an incandescent blue blast from his plasma gun-Undamaged, unflinching, the skeleton thing took a step forward. 'Stop wasting ammunition!' Mabuse all but screamed, his voice tinny and shrill. 'Go through it! It's just a glamour... an apparition!' 'Do it!' Priad ordered.

  Pindor threw the throttle lever to full ahead and drove the yacht at the nightmare's black, tree-trunk tibia. They all braced for impact.

  None came. They were clear and gone, heading up the avenue. The gigantic phantom had vanished into the storm.

  The Sacred Mound was massive, its apex crackling with corposant. Damocles abandoned the yacht at the base apron and advanced at double time up through the lashing rain onto the old stone causeway that crossed the perimeter ditch to the main entrance.

  Mabuse was waiting for them under the lintel of the wide doorway. He held a laspistol in his real hand, and the fused unrecognisable remains of several corpses sprawled on the flagstones around him.

  Mabuse raised his golden hand and the roaming digit flew up and snapped back into place.

  'Come on.’ he said, turning to move into the Mound. Priad saw he carried what seemed to be a heavy knapsack on his back.

  Would you care to tell me what's going on?' Priad asked.

  'There isn't really time.’ Mabuse replied curtly.

  'Those bodies... who did you kill?'

  'I mean it, brother-sergeant... there isn't really time.’

  As if to underscore his words, a salvo of autogun fire whipped down the entrance tunnel from within, the large calibre shells ricocheting off the stone floor and low roof. Natus cursed as several rounds struck his armour.

  Priad ran into the gunfire, his bolter juddering in his fists. On his visor, the ammo tally dropped. The target cross jumped and flickered as it searched the green gloom for a body.

  A flash of muzzle discharge, hot white against the emerald background.

  The cross locked.

  Priad fired and a human figure tumbled out of cover with such force it bounced off the wall behind it.

  To his side, Khiron and Xander cut down two more ambushers.

  In seamless formation, Damocles swept into the inner atrium. Natus and Aekon covered the back, Xander and Scyllon the exit ahead. Pindor and Andromak advanced into the centre of the hall.

  Priad knelt to examine one of the bodies.

  A human male, a local. Nothing especially significant about him apart from the fact that thirty seconds before he had been brave or foolhardy enough to open fire on a squad of Space Marines. Priad's bolter fire had all but turned him inside out.

  A looter?' he asked.

  Mabuse leaned over Priad's shoulder and reached out with his golden hand. The ring finger projected a thin, searing fusion beam almost a
metre long that grotesquely peeled the corpse's flesh away from his forehead. Priad shuddered as he saw the rune branded into the front of the skull.

  'Cultist.’ Mabuse said, switching off the fusion beam. 'The inner brand, the bone-burn. In all my years of hunting these devils, I've never found out how they do that. How they brand the mark into the bone without blemishing the skin over it.'

  'I've never seen its like.’ Priad admitted.

  'It's the mark of a powerful and ancient cult,' said Mabuse matter-of-factly. 'I've terminated their activities on three other worlds. I was dismayed to find them at work here.'

  And how did you find that out?' Khiron asked.

  Mabuse turned to the Apothecary and smiled.

  'Don't tell me... there isn't really time.'

  'Indeed,' nodded Mabuse. 'Besides, there are some things you don't need to know. To keep it simple, a notorious and well-backed cult is active here on Iorgu. They carried out the murder of the old queen for one simple reason. They wanted a coronation.'

  'What?' Priad snapped. 'Why?'

  'Because only during a coronation would the stasis locks of the Sacred Mound be disengaged and the heirloom treasures of Iorgu removed for the ceremonies.'

  'They're after the treasures?'

  'No. They're after what lies under the Mound. What the treasures hold in check.'

  Priad rose. 'If there's anything that makes me want to crush a man's head, it's riddles, Mabuse.'

  'The first settlers of Iorgu, the first monarchs, bested something here. Something they encountered when they first landed. The truth of it is lost in the veils of time, and only appears to us through the world myths. Some great evil was here... had been here since before the rise of man. The Iorguan first comers vanquished it and built this mound over it. The treasures are the components of a stasis system that keeps it dormant.'

  It?'

  Mabuse shrugged. What's the worst thing you can thing of, brother-sergeant?'

  Priad didn't answer.

  'Worse than that.’ Mabuse said. 'It's locked away, slumbering, and so it's safe enough to remove the treasures for a few days each time there's a coronation. But this coronation has been forced, and the moment the hierarchs removed the treasures, the cult made its way into the unprotected Mound to stage the rituals of awakening.’

  What do we do?' asked Priad.

  Mabuse opened his knapsack so Priad could see inside. The sceptre and orb and all the other precious treasures were tumbled together inside.

  We put the relics back and re-engage the stasis system. Before it's too late.’

  VII

  The inner burrows of the Mound were cased in stone: floor, walls and roof. From the atrium, they spiralled down into the belly of the hill, lit by fluttering light reeds and caged glow globes. At regular intervals, other down-spiralling tunnels spoked away from the main run. Mabuse led Damocles down in the half light, often taking choices at junction spurs that to the brother-sergeant seemed to defy logic.

  'Trust me.’ Mabuse said. 'The inner structure of the Mound is built like a triple helix, and is full of dead ends and liar-paths.’

  'Liar-paths?'

  'Artful diversions designed by the Mound builders. Fake tunnels and curves meant to outwit tomb robbers.'

  They're outwitting me, Priad thought.

  Reality had become unkempt in the lower levels. In one section of slowly sloping tunnel-curve, it was raining and lightning flashed. In another, the walls bellied and swayed like the wall of a tidal wave. In a third, every wall-stone became a chattering human skull. None of the skulls had eye sockets. The bone bowls were smooth down to the snapping teeth.

  Mabuse seemed oblivious to it all.

  Around another wide bend however, he faltered and paused.

  'I've made an error.’ he told them. 'Go back. We should have taken the left-hand turn.'

  They retraced their steps back to the last junction.

  'No.’ he decided suddenly. 'I was right. It's trying to fool me. You're trying to fool me, aren't you?' He yelled the last phrase at the walls, which rippled and sweated.

  They went back the way they had come. Fleshless rat-dogs the size of small horses blocked their way, eyes like yellow coals, exposed muscles and organs glistening in the light. Aekon cried out in surprise and fired his bolter.

  'Glamours!' Mabuse said. 'lust walk through them.'

  Following the inquisitor's lead, Damocles waded through the semi-corporeal beasts, feeling them leave a sticky trace of ectoplasm on their armoured legs. As they touched them, the skinned things dissipated into steam.

  'They're just ghosts.’ Mabuse assured the Iron Snakes. 'Phantoms generated by the psychic birth pangs of the Sleeper. All of them, symptomatic phenomena like the storms and the auroras and the corposant'

  What they met around the next bend wasn't glamour at all. Cultists rushed them from the division of another spiral, weapons blazing. Khiron and Pindor took the brunt, reeling back. Aekon, Dyognes and Scyllon met the attack with a broadside of bolter fire that sprayed the tunnel wall with blood and bone shards.

  More cultists charged them from the depths. They carried a mixture of las weapons and autoguns. One had a flamer.

  The gout of fire wrapped itself around Priad and his armour sang out an imperilled series of alarms. Priad strode through the flame and laid in with his bolter and his power claw. Three cultists fell to the spitting gun and two more to the venerable claw-weapon.

  Andromak pressed in beside Priad and extinguished three more cultists with his plasma gun.

  Others fell back, firing as they went, chased by Priad's punishing fire.

  'The inquisitor is down!' Khiron voxed.

  Sending Andromak and Kules ahead at point, Priad hurried back to where Khiron and Natus stood over the crumpled body of Mabuse.

  He was a mess. At least three auto-rounds had hit him. His pale face was paler than ever as he held out the knapsack to Priad. When he spoke, blood gushed out of his mouth.

  'Finish it, brother-sergeant.'

  'Stay with him.’ Priad told Khiron as he took the knapsack. 'You too, Aekon, Xander.’

  'The rest with me.'

  They pressed on, ignoring the glamours that rose at them, fighting back the cultists that tried to stop them. For thirty-five minutes, they battled down the last stretch of tunnel-curve into the heart-chamber of the Mound.

  Priad lost count of the cultists they had killed. The tunnel slope was awash with blood.

  He could hear a frantic ticking, like the stridulation of insects, getting louder with each passing moment. It sounded like a billion bugs clattering their wing-cases in the darkness.

  The heart-chamber was wide and high, a chapel in the bowels of the Mound. They struck in from the left, gunning down a dozen cultists in a rattling blaze of fire. There was a podium and an altar of greasy pink stone. The cultists had laid out the most appalling offerings on the altar.

  Sacrifices. Butchery to turn even the strongest stomach.

  The fritiniency of chattering bugs increased in volume. Unseen elytra in their double-millions crisped and rubbed against each other. The air was thick and sour, and the environment sustainers in the Astartes' suits began to struggle as they worked harder.

  Apparitions of goat skulls fizzled in the air around them. Kules head-shot a cultist that they had presumed dead but was now reaching for his weapon.

  The Sleeper was almost awake.

  A noxious smoke, the vile stink of aeons, furled out around the altar. Despite his suit filters, Priad smelled grave-mould and the corrupted rot of deep tombs, locked away from air and light for thousands of years. There was a sickening taste they could sense even in their airtight helmets. A numbing dislocation. A kaleidoscope of nauseating colours.

  Priad knew his nose and ears were bleeding. The suit vents juddered as they tried to cope with the liquid welling out of him. He saw Kules and Andromak fall to their knees. Natus and Scyllon started shooting at shadows. Dyognes and Pindor wavered in
confusion.

  Bugs, stridulating bugs, were crawling all over them. Priad saw their clicking forms scurrying across his visor-view, antennae waving.

  He tried to wipe them away. He tried to reach the altar.

  The Sleeper began to form in the air of the heart-chamber. Its shape was made up of swirling insects, slowly coalescing into a solid.

  Eyes... vast ocelli in compound form... skull cheekbones... slowly swaying palps as long as a man's body. Yellow light began to froth up in the monstrous compound eyes as they resolved.

  The swarming insects coated the members of Damocles, forcing them to their knees. Priad saw the tide of insects eating the flesh from the cultists' bones. Living and dead alike, the cultists were consumed.

  The glowing yellow ocelli stared at him as they became more real. The monstrous palp mouthparts reached for him.

  Priad fired a bolter round into the Sleeper's gummy, salivating maw for good measure and reached the altar. He had to wipe blood and entrails away to find the age-smoothed recesses designed for the relics.

  Swarming carnivorous bugs weighed his limbs down and spilled in fat squirming masses into the knapsack as he opened it. He took the treasures of Iorgu out, one by one, and slotted each one back into place.

  As he reached the last one, the sceptre, the writhing weight of insects blotted out his visor and swamped his vision. He wiped his visor with his hand.

  'Sleep again!' he bellowed through speaker grilles clogged with insect parts and still-wriggling, shorn off legs. 'Sleep again forever!'

  VIII

  After the calamity, Iorgu City smoked like a kicked-over bonfire. The storm roiled away into the north and left the sky bleached of all colour except the yellowish sulphur dioxide trailing from the fires.

  A great, wounded outrage lingered in the city.

  'Message from Lord Militant Farnsey's officio.’ said Kules, transferring the vox-squirt to Priad's data-plate.

  Priad logged it with the others. Fifteen formal communiques of denouncement, from Farnsey, the Princess Royal, even the king elect.

  'Damn them all.’ he said. Damocles had purged and sealed the Mound, but had not yet made a report to anyone. Perhaps it was better if the Iorguans remained ignorant of the fate that had almost befallen them.