by Ben Counter
Another of those at the belfry was enormous, possibly an abhuman ogryn prior to his mutations. But his hulking, corpulent frame had absorbed several more individuals. Those with wit and intelligence had positions on his shoulders, their heads crowded around his. Others had been absorbed almost completely into his prodigious gut or biceps, their jaws slack and their eyes blank, criss-crossed by the heavy black tattooing on his torso. He was called the Penitent, though how or why he had acquired such a name was knowledge that had been lost in the chaos of Khezal, where he had risen to lead one of the many hordes of heretics thronging the city. Beside him was a horror in clockwork, a construction rather larger than a man with a body composed of cogs and armatures supporting a face that looked to have been scraped from the head of a giant doll, with rouged porcelain cheeks, wide eyes of emeralds and a leer that seemed to contain more threat than all the weaponry and fury of Karnikhal Six-Finger.
The many moral threats of Opis were there, all to attend upon Legienstrasse.
Karnikhal stepped forwards, wreathed in steam from his scalding armour. ‘Legienstrasse,’ he said. ‘You have pulled the strings. We have danced. Now what?’
‘I know you want me dead, Karnikhal,’ replied Legienstrasse. There was no fear on her face – there was rarely anything at all. ‘You swore once to kneel before no master but Angron of your Legion. That you obey me now burns inside you hotter than the armour you wear.’
‘And yet you stand before me!’ snarled Karnikhal.
‘Because you have been bound in the name of powers greater than either of us to the service of the Officio Assassinorum. And I too am an Assassin. So according to the words of that contract, you may not harm me. But fear not, Brother Karnikhal. I have had my scribes reword that same contract. Now I alone am under its protection. Any other Assassin is yours to disembowel as you would.’
‘And when will it end?’ demanded Karnikhal. ‘This abasement tears at me. When will it end? For how long must I serve?’
‘Until I am off this rusting orb,’ said Legienstrasse. ‘When I am gone. When I am free, you will be free also.’
‘If you lie,’ said Karnikhal. ‘If you betray us. If the contract does not burn. Then I will hunt you down, Legienstrasse. I will crack open your skull and make sport with your brain. I will bind you in iron until you think I am a god. I will…’
‘Will you, Six-Fingered One?’ said Legienstrasse. She walked up close to Karnikhal, closer than any sane person would dare. Legienstrasse was an athletic specimen now, tall and strongly built, but Karnikhal still towered over her. ‘Then you will face not only me.’
Legienstrasse wore a fatigue suit, perhaps taken from a dead Imperial Guardsman in Khezal’s streets. She unbuckled its front and pulled it down over her shoulders, turning to show the assembled threats of the belfry her bare back.
There hung, in translucent fluid-filled sacs, a dozen young. They were roughly like curled, embryonic humans in shape, but their spines were disfigured with bony spurs and their distended skulls were home to too many eyes, each faceted like an insect’s. Through the cloudy fluid could be seen the suggestions of mandibles and ridges of bone.
‘I will give birth soon,’ said Legienstrasse. ‘I, who was created for death, will become a font of life. And each of my young will learn that Karnikhal Six-Finger once threatened the life of their mother. If you hunt Legienstrasse, World Eater, you will hunt an army of me. No doubt you are in the habit of making mortal enemies at every turn. This is a brood of enemies you do not wish to make.’
Even Karnikhal seemed disconcerted by Legienstrasse’s young. Perhaps it was less their shape, and more the potential they represented. Karnikhal was among the few there who had witnessed first-hand what Legienstrasse really was. The idea of a host of them – a host who could birth their own versions, in a cycle that might never end, only grow – could number among a Chaos champion’s most extravagant dreams of destruction.
‘What news?’ demanded Legienstrasse.
The witch Stahl took a limping step forwards, accompanied by the rattle of the brace fixed to his withered right leg. ‘Two hours,’ he said, ‘and the bells can toll. The beasts will be up here and the rituals will be complete. The gate will open.’
The clockwork doll rattled and its face rotated, showing now a mask with a circle of holes punched through around its mouth, allowing sound to issue out. ‘I have calculated your route,’ it said, its synthesised voice that of an officious man perhaps originally programmed to give instruction. A punch card emerged from a slot in the front of its torso. ‘Waystations in the warp will guide your way.’
‘Where does it emerge?’ said Legienstrasse.
‘A long-forgotten world, once touched by the Imperium but now ignorant of it,’ replied the clockwork doll. ‘A small indigenous population of humans, some unintelligent xenos. A shrine was built thousands of years ago, when a prophet was visited by dreams from the warp. There I have sited the gate’s far opening. It is a perfect world for a new god.’
‘I like this not,’ said Legienstrasse, turning away from Stahl and the doll. ‘I am exposed here. Not one enemy on Opis will be ignorant of where I am.’
‘Khezal is ours!’ retorted Karnikhal. ‘Every minute more of us arrive. There is no foe on Opis who can stand against Karnikhal. These other wretches will mop up what I leave behind. Is that not so, you showers of ordure? You who shrink from this Traitor Legionary even now?’
‘Fear nothing,’ came a whisper emanating from the collection of shadows that was the First Walker of Lhuur. ‘If they walk upon your temple, they shall walk into shadow, and they will never find their way out.’
Stahl walked to the edge of the upper floor, where a drop led straight down to the torn streets of Khezal far below. He limped as he walked and blood spattered from the impalements on his back. ‘They won’t get that far,’ he said. ‘I have a hundred witches throwing beating hearts into the fire! A thousand supplicants begging the gods to tear their souls away so they can bleed their strength into us! The whole of Opis is joined in worship. A simple storm will be little effort.’
Stahl smiled, distorting the mutilations of his face. He held up both hands and the clouds overhead rushed towards a point directly above him. Lightning crashed in the boiling mass, and a deeper shadow grew over the temple. Wind whipped and rain lashed against the far side of the temple as the storm grew in a few seconds. Its winds wrapped around the temple as power wrapped around Stahl’s hand.
The bloodletters snapped and growled at the sorcery. The daemons lurking in the dark were illuminated by the lightning, revealing toad-like hides and lolling spiny tongues.
‘Shed blood!’ cried Stahl. ‘Give flesh! The eye of the warp is opening!’
It was the Gilded Pyre that took the lead, with the Peril Swift following in its wake.
They flew low. The proximity sensors sent a stream of warnings to the cockpits as both gunships weaved among the spires of Khezal. Brother Gorgythion threw his gunship through columns of smoke and under bridges connecting the spires, as anti-aircraft fire stuttered up from every district.
Gunfire punched through one wing. One of the main engines flared as pieces of the engine broke off, perforated by bursts of flak. The Gilded Pyre held its course, banking between chains of fire and swooping into the cover provided by the ragged valleys of half-ruined streets.
Up ahead was the storm. It surrounded the temple with a cage of lightning. The burning disc of the portal overhead was almost hidden by the walls of swirling clouds drawn down from the overcast sky. A haze of debris, captured by the vicious winds, seethed like a translucent dome over the temple.
The Gilded Pyre skimmed the rooftops as it made the final approach to the temple. Lightning danced everywhere, earthing through the ruins of buildings or right down into the streets, carving long charred furrows where it touched the ground.
A bolt licked out and caught the Gilded Pyre on the tip of one wing. The engine in that wing died and the gunship fell, f
lipping over with the sudden loss of thrust. The landing jets fired and somehow turned it upright, just as both engines guttered back into life and powered the gunship up from almost ground level.
‘Damned sorcery!’ yelled Gorgythion, wrestling with the controls of the Thunderhawk to keep it in the sky. The stricken engine had come back to life but was just barely holding on. Fuel was spraying from somewhere and the tank pressure was dropping. Every warning rune in the cockpit seemed lit up at once. ‘If I don’t set us down we’re falling from the sky! I’ll land us in the streets if I have to!’
‘Then we’ll never reach her!’ shouted Lysander from the passenger compartment. Squad Kirav, Scout Squad Orfos and Librarian Deiphobus made up the rest of the Gilded Pyre’s complement, all strapped into the grav-restraints as the Thunderhawk’s wild flight rattled them around. ‘Deiphobus, this is a sorcerous storm. What can you do?’
Deiphobus unbuckled his grav-restraints and pulled himself close to the cockpit door. ‘Brother Gorgythion, get me close and open the rear ramp!’
The Thunderhawk’s ramp swung down and smoky, lightning-charged air howled in. Deiphobus grabbed a handhold on the ceiling and leaned out as far as he could, Khezal’s dark sprawl hurtling past beneath him.
Gorgythion had the gunship circling the temple as close as he dared. Lightning crackled out at the ship like reaching hands, but came just short.
<
‘What can you do?’ shouted Lysander.
<
The shape of the witch was just visible amid the light – a human form, floating just above the temple’s flagstones, an iron hoop forming a corrupted halo behind him and lightning crackling off his spread fingertips.
Deiphobus focused on the shape. The Thunderhawk dissolved around him, and the witch’s mind rolled out into a labyrinth. Deiphobus checked his grip and his footing, and then let go of his body completely, diving into the consciousness of the witch.
The witch’s mind was an asylum, its cells and trepanning halls open to a sky the colour of dried blood. Each cell contained a memory, curled up and moaning, screaming, or clawing at the walls with bloody fingers. They looked, to Deiphobus’s mind’s eye, like variations on the same man – the witch himself – in various stages of disease or madness. Some were fastened to the walls with leather restraints. Some looked dead. Some were dead, their skeletons gnawed by fat, black rats. A few were laid on operating slabs, their skulls opened up and their brains being dissected by white-smocked doctors who looked just like them.
Deiphobus swooped low. He maintained the solidity of his mental form as the asylum rushed up to meet him. He felt it trying to force his shape to match that of the witch, so he could be herded into a cell and lobotomised there with all the other memories the witch had forsaken. But Deiphobus kept the shape of an Imperial Fist, and he made sure his golden armour shone to push back the shadows gathering around him.
‘Witch!’ yelled Deiphobus. ‘Show yourself! I will tear the walls of this place down to find you! You will lose your mind to me before you die, if you defy me!’
The echo of Deiphobus’s voice and the screams of the inmates were the only reply. Deiphobus snatched a patient’s chart off a cell door and read the name ‘Stahl’ written on it. This enemy had a name, then – Dravin Stahl, reported active in Khezal shortly after K-Day.
‘Stahl!’ he shouted. ‘At least die a man! Not a mindless thing, an animal, stripped of whatever human is left!’
Deiphobus let his form abandon its gravity and he flew through the asylum, rushing through doorways and gore-stained corridors, operating theatres and execution rooms where the skeletons of forcibly forgotten memories lay in electric chairs or curled up on the floor of gas chambers. Everywhere there was madness – curses scratched on the walls in languages no one had ever spoken, human figures with limbs and features jumbled and transposed, streamers of skin draped over broken torture racks of bone.
There was a pattern here, hidden in the bedlam. Deiphobus read the blood tracks smeared along the floors. They led to a single point in the labyrinth, hidden by switchbacks and dead ends. He let himself become shadowier still and punched through the walls, arrowing towards the asylum’s heart.
And here he found the great hall, its floor tiled, its walls painted dark red in a futile measure to hide the blood. Fully half the volume of the enormous room was taken up with the heaps of corpses, thousands of dead Stahls piled up and decaying. White bones poked through banks of rotting flesh. The same face stared out in every stage of decay and mutilation. Blood and corpse liquor had dried, black and sticky like tar on the floor.
One was alive. Dressed in the stained white of a medicae, he was picking his way up the slope of corpses, sorting through the blackened organs and torn limbs, throwing them aside as they came up wanting. A pile of select parts had grown up on the floor, separate from the rest. They were the parts of memories that Stahl found useful – that were worth salvaging from this genocide of his own memories.
The collected parts were marked with brands – circular and spiked, derivations of the eight-pointed star with which the devotees of Chaos identified themselves to one another. The same brands covered the face of the living Stahl.
‘There you are,’ said Deiphobus, as he gave himself substance again and felt his weight settle on the floor beneath him.
Stahl looked around. His eyes were alive and aware. This was not some excised memory. This was the witch himself – a part of him, at least, whatever piece of the witch was dedicated to murdering the memories that reminded him of what it meant to be human.
‘Get out,’ snarled Stahl. ‘You have no place here! My gods have made this place sacrosanct. It is theirs! Within this holy skull is nothing but sacred ground, which you profane!’
‘Nothing lives here but blasphemy!’ retorted Deiphobus. He drew his bolt pistol. ‘You have forsaken the very human being you are. Your gods are liars and will abandon you. Your last chance is here. Repent, and die cleanly. Defy me, and those same gods will toy with your soul like predators with prey.’
‘Repent? Repent of turning my back on the tyrant-corpse, the dead Emperor? On his kingdom of oppression and ignorance? I will die happy, Space Marine, if I die while your Emperor has no claim on me!’
‘Then die happy,’ said Deiphobus.
His first shot went wide, because in his own mind Stahl had all the powers of a witch beloved by the warp. He vanished and appeared a metre to the side, blinking out of the line of fire.
Stahl spat a few syllables of a forbidden tongue. The blood of Deiphobus’s mental form boiled and ripped open the biceps of his left arm, the shock thrusting splinters of bone through his armour. Deiphobus fell back and crushed down the pain that threatened to flood from his instincts.
The floor rippled under him. Deiphobus hit the floor and realised the dead were moving at Stahl’s request. The masses of rotting meat were reaching for him, fingers of blistered bone trying to grab his arms and legs and drag them into reach of a hundred gnashing jaws.
Behind Deiphobus was a door. A huge, iron-bound door, with scratches and old bloodstains that told him this was where the condemned memories were dragged in.
Deiphobus propelled himself towards the door. Another spell vaporised the blood in one of Deiphobus’s legs and the armour burst, spraying a mist of blood everywhere. Deiphobus told himself he was not real, that this was just a part of his mind and that he had control. But he could not do so forever. Eventually, even the mind of a Space Marine psyker would become corroded until it was as vulnerable as a real body to Stahl’s witchcraft.
Deiphobus pushed off with his remaining foot and slammed into the door. His remaining hand wrenched the bar away. The door boomed open.
&n
bsp; Every cell door in the asylum slammed open at once.
‘He is here!’ yelled Deiphobus. ‘The one who would forget you! The madman placed here by Chaos! He is here!’
From the depths of the asylum came a terrible howling. Every inmate who could move ran from his cell and towards the execution chamber. They streamed in a crowd towards the chamber doors and Deiphobus rolled out of the way as they burst in.
Stahl threw bolts of scalding blood at them. The frontmost disappeared in bursts of boiling gore. Even those who were mangled and broken charged in, carried by others or dragging themselves on bloody fingers.
Stahl could not kill them all. They climbed up the corpse piles and leapt onto him. He was dragged down to the floor and the other memories piled onto him, tearing at him with hands and teeth.
‘Gods of the warp!’ Stahl screamed. ‘Deliver me! Deliver me! You have all that I am! Deliver your slave!’
The gods did not answer.
Deiphobus let go the mental anchors holding him in the asylum, and the whole corrupted place rushed away from him as he was yanked back into his own mind.
Lysander grabbed Deiphobus’s arm and hauled him into the back of the Thunderhawk. Below, the witch had slumped to the floor of the temple and the lightning cage had broken, now just random bolts of power lancing down in every direction.
‘He is alive,’ gasped Deiphobus over the vox. ‘But he is broken. Not for long. The gods will make of him a puppet. We must land before then.’
‘Gorgythion!’ shouted Lysander to the cockpit. ‘Take us in! Brace yourselves, my brethren! The battle is joined!’
Khezal pitched steeply to one side as the Thunderhawk turned – much as it had done when the Imperial Fists launched their first assault on the Chalcedony Throne. Now it was a tortured city, half-ruined and infested, that spun beneath them as the Gilded Pyre made its final approach.
