by Ben Counter
Vials of liquid were hooked up to the corroded helm, the faceplate melded with the face of the Space Marine inside so it cracked and distorted as he spoke.
‘The last one of you I fought,’ the Traitor Marine said, ‘it was upon the battlements of Terra. I broke his back and watched him squirm at my feet. I threw him from the walls and he was torn apart by daemons. It was a good death. I would taste it again.’
‘And the last time my kind fought you,’ said Ucalegon, dipping his obsidian sword in the water to wash off the gore, ‘we cast you from Terra and chased you into the warp. You have hidden from us for ten thousand years. My task is to remind you why.’
Karnikhal Six-Finger laughed as he lunged at Ucalegon. Karnikhal’s weapon was a chainsword of ancient mark, its teeth bent and tarnished. It was alive and it was hungry.
Ucalegon caught the blade on his own, and sparks sprayed off the obsidian edge. The teeth chewed into Ucalegon’s shoulder pad, throwing chunks of ceramite. Ucalegon kicked Karnikhal in the midriff and threw him off, and the two stumbled to keep their footing in the lake of tears.
‘Hiding?’ spat Karnikhal. ‘I took a thousand skulls on Belian Minor. I martyred Saint Acelsius when I tore out her throat. These bones around my neck are the fingers of Captain Kryos of the White Consuls, and they were all I left of him to take. I never hid from anything! I am a World Eater! I am death given form!’
He lunged again, and this time Ucalegon was ready. He ducked the blow, spun and drew his blade across the World Eater’s midriff. The obsidian blade cut through the corroded ceramite. A spray of molten metal spurted from the wound and Karnikhal bellowed as he dropped to one knee.
‘You are strong,’ said Ucalegon. ‘You are quick. But you are angry, too. You cannot control it. And you cannot wield a blade if you cannot even control yourself.’
Karnikhal turned and charged. His sword wasn’t the weapon this time. He crashed shoulder-first into Ucalegon and slammed him into the wall of the chamber.
Bodies fell, shaken from their meathooks. Karnikhal grabbed Ucalegon around the throat and forced him down into the water.
‘Control?’ the World Eater snarled. ‘Control is what cages you. Obedience makes you weak. Chaos makes me strong.’
Ucalegon planted a foot and pushed himself backwards. The wall behind him came apart under his weight and he rolled through into the chamber beyond, the waist-high tears flowing around him.
He was surrounded by towering columns of bone, thousands and thousands of skeletons, some forming the great shaft of the room he had fallen into, others piled up around him in bleached white drifts.
Ucalegon rolled up onto his feet. Karnikhal stalked through the hole Ucalegon had left in the wall, crunching through the deep piles of bone.
‘Did you make an oath to kill me, Imperial Fist?’
‘I made an oath to kill you all.’
‘An oath for my death! I collect them. I shall add yours to my own skull pile at the foot of Khorne’s throne, each the head of a soul who swore to kill me first.’
Karnikhal’s chainblade howled and snarled. It seemed ready to jump from his hand and feast.
Ucalegon used the second before Karnikhal got to him. He forced everything inside – his thoughts, his senses, the pounding of his hearts and the straining of his lungs. The Emperor’s Champion was not just an expert swordsman. He could take all the battles he had fought, all the lives he had taken and all the brothers he had seen fall, and turn it all inside.
A single breath, and he was focused. The bone chamber was thrown into impossibly high relief. Karnikhal’s armour was picked out in every detail. He moved slowly, as if recorded and played back in holo so Ucalegon could dissect his fighting style. Every one of Ucalegon’s senses was enhanced to its maximum, and there was nothing in the world except for Ucalegon, his enemy, and his sword.
If he died, it did not matter. Because he would die fulfilling his duty to Rogal Dorn, to the Emperor. To the human race.
Karnikhal reached Ucalegon. He drove the point of the snarling chainsword towards Ucalegon’s throat.
Ucalegon told himself it did not matter if he died, and brought the obsidian blade up to meet it.
Lysander shook the darkness out of his mind.
The wind and rain were lashing at him. He was outside the Cacophonous Tower.
He had come to rest on a balcony, seemingly torn from an Imperial church and absorbed by the predatory tower. It was from a balcony like this that a confessor might demand supplication from a crowd of the faithful, or a cardinal bless an army before it went to war. Now it jutted from the Cacophonous Tower like a half-pulled tooth.
Behind Lysander was a hole in the wall almost as wide as the balcony itself, looking onto a tangle of fallen columns that resembled the inside of a shattered ribcage. Gutted books and pages littered the floor – prayer books, defiled and discarded for their sacredness to bleed out into the stones. Black veins pulsed below the surface of the uneven flagstones as if the tower was alive, sustained by stolen holiness.
A huge shape shouldered its way past one of the pillars. It resembled an ogryn, one of the oversized humans the Imperial Guard used as shock troops or manual labourers. But this one was deformed by the shapes of faces and bodies straining against its skin, so the bulk of its corpulent form seemed composed of captives trapped inside it.
‘The Penitent,’ said Lysander, getting to his feet. He was battered and his fused ribcage felt cracked. His artificial skin was not holding up well and he felt the blood filling sections of his armour. But he could still fight. ‘I heard tell of you from the Guardsmen in the field. They understated your foulness.’
The multi-legged shape of Legienstrasse dropped from the ceiling. She must have been waiting there, splayed across the ceiling like a spider in wait. The Penitent turned to look at her, bowing its great head.
Legienstrasse impaled the Penitent with a pair of limb-blades. She dragged the ogryn in close and her torso split open, dragging the Penitent inside. Teeth slid out from the gory edges of her body and sliced the Penitent into pieces, each chunk swallowed up into her body.
With more biomass, she grew. She was quadrupedal now, her lower limbs built to stampede and trample. Her torso now had four arms, two with clawed digits and two with blades, and her body had sheets of gristly armour that slid up to protect her head, leaving just enough room to see through.
‘They should never have made you,’ said Lysander. ‘Better the Assassinorum’s targets live than that mankind should be so perverted in you.’
‘Do not speak to me of the desecration of humanity,’ replied Legienstrasse. Her voice was that of a woman, unchanged by her altered form. ‘You who have two hearts and three lungs. You who can eat the flesh of an enemy and know their thoughts. Of the two of us, Space Marine, I am the more human. I will bring new life into this galaxy. You will only destroy it.’
‘We were both created to kill,’ said Lysander. ‘The difference is, you can only kill alone.’
The roar of engines heralded the Gilded Pyre as the Thunderhawk hovered down over the balcony. Through the viewshield, Brother Gorgythion was almost hidden behind the targeting runes converging.
Legienstrasse dived to one side. The heavy bolters mounted in the Thunderhawk’s nose hammered a cannonade through the chamber, rattling over Lysander’s head. Columns were severed and fell like cut trees. Explosive bolts blasted chunks out of the walls and ceiling.
Legienstrasse ran. One of her legs was blasted off, a hefty, meaty slab of a limb reduced to shattered bone and pulp. She leapt onto one wall and climbed faster than a man could run, the gunfire chasing her up onto the ceiling and between the dense pillars towards the back of the room.
Legienstrasse was out of sight. Lysander saw the Thunderhawk pivoting on its landing jets. Out of the side of the gunship, through a hatch where another heavy bolter was normally mounted, hung Agent Skult. The Vindicare was loading one of his specialist bullets into his Exitus longrifle, waiting f
or the Thunderhawk to get into position and for Legienstrasse to show herself.
‘Hit her in the head,’ voxed Lysander. ‘It’s the only part she can’t change. Everything else she can do without.’
<
Legienstrasse dived down from the jumble of columns, all flying talons and fangs.
A round streaked into her. It blasted a chunk out of her chitinous collar, throwing fragments of shrapnel into her face. For the first time, the human part of her bled.
Legienstrasse ran right at Lysander, who rolled out of the way, just in time to realise she wasn’t headed for him.
She raced towards the balcony and the Thunderhawk gunship hovering above it. Blood ran down her cheek as she bared her teeth and leapt at the gunship.
Skult’s second shot missed her face by a centimetre. It streaked down into her shoulder, blasting a gory tunnel through her body and detonating at the root of her back leg, blasting it off in a shower of blood and bone. Anything else would have died on the spot.
Legienstrasse crashed into the side of the Thunderhawk. Agent Skult disappeared in a flurry of bone and fang. The Gilded Pyre tipped to one side with the additional weight, and Gorgythion gunned the thruster on that side to compensate.
Legienstrasse ripped the wing off the Thunderhawk. Burning fuel sprayed. The thruster exploded and the Thunderhawk flipped over.
Lysander saw the gunship would spin over the balcony and into the chamber. He ran away from the tide of heat and noise rushing towards him. He felt the Thunderhawk crashing into the side of the opening, the crunching explosions as the rear fuel cells blew and its tail was sheared off. The hull followed in, spewing fire, and slammed into the floor.
The floor split and rose up, fractured as if by an earthquake. Lysander leapt for a pillar but it was falling too, uprooted by the force of the impact.
Fire was everywhere. It flowed around Lysander like water flooding in. And he was falling, sliding down the shattered section of the floor into the depths of the Cacophonous Tower. Everything was noise and the raging heat, battering against him, with ammunition cooking off in the blaze and peppering the stone with rogue shots.
He was Rogal Dorn on the battlements of Terra. He was Sigismund, diving into a galaxy full of xenos and heresy. He was Cortez on Rynn’s World, both hearts all but exhausted, battling for days on a rampart of the dying and the dead. He was every Imperial Fist who should have given up but didn’t know how, and in that moment went beyond death to fight on.
Lysander felt the heat all around him. Sinking into it. It was not burning fuel.
He was at the very root of the Cacophonous Tower, where the temple to Chaos met the living rock of Opis. Where the tormented architecture met the molten rock welling up through the shattered crust.
It was instinct, not any understanding of his surroundings, that forced Lysander to drag himself out of the sucking, burning mire. His hand found a ridge of stone and he hauled himself out of it, even as the ceramite of his greaves began to give way under the heat and pressure. He wiped the dirt and debris from his eyes.
The bubbling pit of lava was pierced by the pillars of the temple. Statues of intertwined bodies rose from the fire. The bones of daemons broke the surface here and there – the elongated fanged skull of a bloodletter, the twisted skeleton of a shapeshifting daemon forced into a single form in the moment of death.
The air was scalding to breathe. Lysander’s throat and mouth were blistered with the heat. The haft of the Fist of Dorn protruded from the lava. His shield was nowhere to be seen. The wreck of the Gilded Pyre slid through the shattered ceiling, a burning mass of metal that crunched into a slab of stone that broke the lava’s surface.
Legienstrasse, her form battered and bleeding from a hundred wounds, crawled down a fallen bridge of stone towards the relatively stable expanse of flooring where Lysander had landed. She was hurt. But even as Lysander watched her drag herself along, her legs reformed under her.
Lysander got to his feet. The stone under him tilted with his movement. The whole Cacophonous Tower seemed to be slowly sinking into the burning mire. Lysander jumped across to a chunk of shattered statue, a short leap away from what remained of the Gilded Pyre. He could see nothing of Agent Skult or Brother Gorgythion. Most of the passenger compartment was intact, albeit on fire.
‘Lysander!’ yelled Legienstrasse above the bubbling of the lava. ‘Can you hear it?’
The bells were tolling. The sound mixed together into terrible echoing peals that reached down through the whole tower. A sound that echoed into the warp; that bridged the gap between two universes.
Lysander leaned across and jumped to the mass of fallen masonry on which the gunship had come to rest. He realised as he moved that one of his hips had probably become dislocated, shots of pain running up one side of his body. Breathing hurt. Shards of bone were loose somewhere in his chest.
In the burning mass of metal above him was a cabinet of black metal, held in place with clamps that secured it to the side of the compartment.
Legienstrasse’s upper limbs were growing by the second, bladed fingers unfolding and reaching across the lava for Lysander. The muscle and bone were charring in the heat. Legienstrasse’s face didn’t register any pain. There was just a look of determination, as if Lysander was one final thread to cut before she could clamber back up the tower and through the portal opening in the sky overhead.
A blade of bone speared through the back of Lysander’s leg. He ripped his leg free, feeling the bone and muscle come apart inside. His armour was pumping him full of pain suppressants but they could not take it all away, and they would run out.
He dragged himself into the Gilded Pyre. The searing metal told him he could still feel at all. His nervous system was still working. He still had control, and he could still fight.
Another metre. The cabinet in the burning Thunderhawk was within reach. Lysander unbuckled the clamp restraints and the cabinet slid past him, clattering onto the stone.
Legienstrasse leapt up and slammed into one of the statues looming up from the lava. She was almost reformed now, her limbs shedding flakes of scorched muscle to reveal new wet growth underneath.
Lysander crawled out of the wreck and hauled the cabinet right side up. Freezing vapour was bleeding from its seals. He slammed a fist into the activation rune on its control panel.
The cabinet slid open. A cloud of vapour rushed out as the freezing air inside met the heat pulsing off the lava. From the vapour rose a figure, its face concealed by a skull-mask, wearing a synskin bodysuit. It wore a silver-bladed gauntlet on one hand and a rig fitted with combat drug dispensers around its shoulders.
The Eversor Assassin shrieked as it rose from the cryo-cabinet that had held it since the Assassinorum had built their facility in the Rekaban jungle. The sockets of its skull-mask fixed on Legienstrasse clambering overhead and the dispensers pumped its body full of combat drugs. Muscles and veins rippled under the synskin.
The Eversor surged from the cabinet and leapt up onto the statue that Legienstrasse was climbing. With supernatural agility he scrambled after Legienstrasse, drawing an elaborate pistol from a holster on his back.
It was Lysander’s last gambit. The Eversor the Imperial Fists had discovered in the jungle facility, brought with them on the Gilded Pyre in the knowledge that the Assassin might land the killing blow if the Imperial Fists failed. Legienstrasse was the last target the Eversor had been given, and when an Eversor had a target, it sought it out and killed it to the exclusion of everything else.
Legienstrasse saw the Eversor as it took aim at her. If there was shock at seeing a fellow Assassin here, she did not let it slow her down. She brought up a chitinous shield as he fired a spray of silvery darts at her. Flesh blackened and fell away as neurotoxins flowed. Legienstrasse swept a scythe-like bony blade down at the Eversor – the Eversor leapt, kicked off a protrusion of stone and powered into Legiens
trasse’s central mass.
The two Assassins were evenly matched. They had trained in the same methods of death, before the same masters. They had butchered the same combat servitors and memorised the same treatises on murder. Every slash of the Eversor’s gauntlet met a parry of a bony blade. Every lashing tendril from Legienstrasse was avoided or cut off.
Another movement caught Lysander’s eye. Through the rippling heat haze, the huge smouldering shape of Karnikhal Six-Finger walked down the broken staircase. Over his shoulder was slung the body of Emperor’s Champion Ucalegon.
‘Brother!’ shouted Lysander. ‘Traitor! Blasphemy! You have killed my battle-brother!’
Ucalegon’s helmet was split down the face, encrusted with dried blood. The wound carved down through one shoulder pad and out through his back.
‘He fought like the warp was in him,’ growled Karnikhal. ‘But it was with me. My gods watch. My gods intervene. Yours sits dead on his throne, and does nothing.’
Lysander walked towards Karnikhal, for the moment letting the two Assassins fight. Karnikhal was smiling.
‘I will join my Emperor at the end of time,’ said Lysander, ‘And at his side we will cleanse all that remains of filth like you from every level of reality. The warp will be scoured blank. Your gods will shrivel and die. You will watch, and you will know despair, to repay what you have done to my brother.’
Karnikhal laughed. He shrugged Ucalegon’s body off his shoulder.
The hilt of Ucalegon’s obsidian blade protruded from Karnikhal’s chest. Karnikhal sank to one knee and Lysander saw the point of the blade protruded from Karnikhal’s back.
‘There is another life,’ gasped Karnikhal. ‘I will die a thousand times. I will find you. Every Imperial Fist. I will find you.’
On the statue above, the Eversor and the Maerorus wrestled, each matching every blow struck by the other. The Eversor’s synskin was torn, and deep wounds were opened up across his ribcage. Severed limbs fell from Legienstrasse and withered as they sank into the lava.
