by Ben Counter
Gunfire rattled from the lobby where the Arbites and officers were swapping volleys of fire with the cultists. Alaric knew that if the momentum of the assault was lost, the Arbites could be surrounded and massacred. The Grey Knights had to keep moving.
'Dvorn!' said Alaric nodding to the closest wall of the chapel. 'Get us moving.'
Dvorn nodded and sprinted at the stone of the wall, hitting it with all his running strength. The thin covering of marble shattered and Dvorn's armoured body ripped through further into the building, crashing through wood and plaster.
Haulvarn followed, sword flashing. Alaric went next, charging through the ragged hole. He saw rows of glow-strips up above, networks of workdesks in front of him in a wide, low-ceilinged room. Cogitators were surrounded by reams of paper. Supervisors' pulpits broke the sea of partitioned workstations like columns, and above them slogans of obedience looked down sternly from the beams of the ceiling. 'Diligence is salvation', read one. 'The Emperor's eye is upon you.'
Las-fire spattered out at Alaric even as his eyes took all this in. He dropped low, behind the flimsy partition of the closest workstation, as lasblasts rang off his armour. Cultists were shouting and Dvorn was bellowing as he charged through the workstations to get to grips with the closest cultists. Dvorn understood very well one of the tenets of any Space Marine - when you fight, fight up close, where your strengths count for so much more.
Alaric ran forward, using the workstations for what little cover they provided. He could see the cultists sheltering behind the wooden partitions as they fired -two of them died as Haulvam's return fire chewed up their flimsy cover and ripped through their bodies. Dvorn was at the centre of a storm of splintered wood as he charged into the closest knot of cultists, hammer swinging, storm bolter blazing at point blank range. More fire streaked past as the rest of the squad entered.
Alaric heard the voice as clearly as if it were in his own head. It cut through his auto-senses and right into his very soul. It was a language Alaric had heard before on a benighted forest world where Chaotic witch-cults haunted the woods, a language taught to the cultists through communion with the dark power they had sworn themselves to. It was understood only by high priests and champions of Chaos, and what Alaric knew of it told him the speaker was ordering his men to charge.
Dozens of men and women charged in a storm of las-fire. They had been waiting in the offices of the Administratum building, waiting for the first assault to break through so they could counter-attack. They were adepts and menials, supervisors and even one in the uniform of an under-consul, armed with lasguns and autoguns looted from Departmento Munitorum shipments. They had bayonets and swords, pistols and bare hands, and as they charged they screamed foul curses in the tongues of Chaos.
'Hold!' yelled Alaric and, in the seconds it took for the charge to hit, his squad gathered around him, Nemesis weapons ready to receive the weight of the assault, las-blasts spattering against their armour and shredding the air around them. Alaric could feel the faint hum in the back of his head as the anti-daemonic wards woven into his armour overlapped, their feedback echoing in his psychic perception.
He could feel the hatred, too, pouring off the cultists like a stink.
The wave of forty or fifty cultists broke against the Grey Knights. Their priest kept yelling his orders as Alaric and his battle-brothers slashed and bludgeoned around them, every stroke severing a limb or a head. Dvorn's hammer carved great red crescents from the throng. Alaric saw mad eyes rolling between folds of red cloth, men and women, old and young. The din was appalling as the living howled curses and the dying screamed in pain.
Alaric reached forward and hauled himself out of the mass of bodies, throwing attackers aside. The priest was on the far side of the workroom - it was an under-consul, the highest Adept rank likely to be found on a world like Victrix Sonora, resplendent in a black greatcoat trimmed with silver braids and the golden sash of his office. His face was covered in layers of scabby scales, so thick that his features were just ugly lumps.
He held out a hand as Alaric clambered over the workstations towards him. A lance of lightning spat out and a blue-white flash burst around Alaric, but his wards kept his body safe and the rock-solid wall of faith shielded his mind. Alaric's storm bolter barked out a dozen rounds but they shattered in purple star-bursts in the air just in front of the priest.
The sorcerer turned and ran, and Alaric followed. From the noise of the fight behind him he knew his squad were wading through the cultists to follow him but Alaric had to give chase. The sorcerer ran through the workstations and through a narrow exit deeper into the building. Alaric charged through the wooden partitions and smashed through the narrow doorway, his auto-senses adjusting to the darkness beyond it.
At one time the main Administratum workhouse had filled the centre of the building, where the most menial adepts slaved at long wooden benches, stamping forms and marking timesheets in their hundreds. They had been surrounded by icons of diligence and berated by the building's under-consuls, who constantly sermonized them on the meaninglessness of any labour save that in the Emperor's name.
The workhouse was gone now. The floor and ceiling had been ripped away to form a cavernous space filling most of the inside of the building. Below was a tangled mess of smouldering wreckage. From the bared rafters above hung scores of banners, foul symbols and heretic words daubed in blood and filth.
In the centre of the room, three storeys high, was a monstrous cogitator. Like a massive mechanical church organ, teetering stacks of datacores jutted from the top and fumes belched from the grotesque furnace-like body. Every working cogitator from the workhouse must have been combined into one huge calculating engine, and the whole mass sat in a nest of printouts. Its tarnished black surface writhed with dull red runes and it groaned menacingly as it worked, valves and armatures chattering like a swarm of insects.
The sorcerer was running in the air above the mass of wreckage, sorcerous energy crackling around his feet. He turned, saw Alaric following him, and began to wail a hideous high-pitched chant as he flew towards the monstrous cogitator.
Flashes of blackness began to burst around the cogitator and it rumbled hungrily. Alaric's wards flared hot as the wall between realities was pulled thin and began to fracture. Horrible cackling laughter echoed around the chamber. Leering faces and gnarled limbs reached from the black gashes in the air.
'Daemons!' yelled Alaric over the vox. 'Squad Alaric, Squad Santoro, to me now!'
Daemons were Chaotic will made flesh, at once a part of the dark gods and their servants. They were the tempters of foolish humans and the foot soldiers in the armies of darkness. Daemons were a threat both moral and physical, capable of corrupting the human armies sent against them. That was why the Grey Knights had been created. To them, the words of daemons were not temptations but just another sign of their evil.
It looked like Ligeia was right, thought Alaric as he leapt into the pit. He could hear his squad close behind him. Alaric landed on his feet and carried on running as the shimmering, reaching shapes coalesced from the darkness.
He reached the closest daemons at a sprint and he could feel them recoil from the shield of faith around his soul - a dozen of them formed a wall of iridescent flesh around him and Alaric used their revulsion to get in the first blow. He carved through one with a stroke of his halberd, but suddenly he was surrounded by them. The sorcerer must have been more powerful than even Ligeia had suspected, because he was pulling a veritable horde of daemons from the warp.
Alaric stabbed and hacked at the unbroken mass of daemon's flesh around him. Deformed hands grabbed at him, howling mouths vomited flame over his armour, mad eyes spat hate. Alaric's battle-brothers were trying to pull the daemons off him as storm bolter fire ripped overhead from squad Santoro, arriving at the edge of the pit.
Alaric plunged both hands into the mass, dragged a daemon above his head and ripped it in two. He forged through the gap, storm b
olter ripping shells into the daemons behind him. Over him loomed the cogitator, deep red fires burning inside and steam billowing from malignant vents. Alaric saw that there was a ring of crude wooden statues surrounding the machine's base, and black lightning was playing around them. The sorcerer himself was standing on top of the machine, lit by the silver fire surrounding his hands. Alaric took aim, hoping to knock him off-balance and prevent him from completing the sorcery he was working. The Grey Knights were proof against direct attack from sorcery or psychic powers, but that did not mean the sorcerer could not summon yet more daemons or collapse the building around them.
'I am the hammer!' yelled a voice over the vox, and Alaric saw the enormous form of Justicar Tancred clamber up beside the sorcerer. The sorcerer turned and silver fire streamed from his hands over Tancred, framing the Terminator armour with a blazing halo. Tancred swung his Nemesis sword and, with a single stroke, carved through the sorcerer's body, the blade passing into the heretic's shoulder and slicing down through his body to come out at his waist. The upper half tumbled off down the casing of the monstrous cogitator and silver fire sprayed from the lower half, which blazed and guttered as it disintegrated with the force of the power released.
There was a terrible, high-pitched scream as the sorcerer's soul was immolated in the power gushing out of his ruptured body. The runes on the giant cogitator flared white as if they were drinking the energies of the sorcerer's death, before the two halves of the corpse thudded wetly to the floor and the runes faded.
'Well met, Brother Tancred!' voxed Alaric. 'You made good time.'
'Had to go through a few of them to get here.' replied Tancred as his fellow Terminator Marines took up firing positions on the machine beside him.
A scream went up from the daemons. Justicar Santoro directed his Marines to fire a savage volley of fire through their ranks, and squad Genhain on the far lip of the pit did the same. Daemon flesh dissolved in the crossfire. Tancred led his men down the side of the cogitator, charging past Alaric and into the broken mass of daemons. The screams as the daemons discorporated were hideous and they rose higher as Tancred's Marines trampled their bodies and impaled them on their Nemesis weapons. Alaric saw Brother Locath strike off a head, Brother de Varne cut one in two. Alaric's squad helped them and Dvorn drove another daemon into the ground with his hammer. In a few moments, all the daemons had dissolved into gory stains of many-coloured blood, leaving only the echoes of their dying screams.
Squads of officers were starting to emerge around the pit, and shotgun blasts echoed from elsewhere in the building as the rest of the heretics were hunted and cut down. Provost Marechal's voice was barking orders over the Arbites vox, organizing squads to dissect the Administratum building and cut their heretic defence into pieces, using the pandemonium wrought by the Grey Knights to press home the attack. Arbites were leading the officers in kill-sweeps, partitioning the building into zones where each squad killed anything that moved. The Victrix Sonora cult was dying, with their under-consul leader dead and the cogitator at the heart of their worship in Imperial hands.
Alaric walked through the wreckage and picked up one of the looping strips of paper that spooled from the cogitator. The giant machine was still billowing smoke but its rumbling was becoming quieter.
'...and when the Prince rises, so shall the galaxy become His plaything, and mankind will become His lieutenants in the ways of the Change just as shall the stars themselves be blotted out by the Alterer of Ways with the Prince of a Thousand Faces at His right hand...'
Rantings covered every sheet of paper. The cogitator had evidently been the means by which Ghargatuloth communicated with the cult. The fires in the heart of the machine were dying now and, without the cult leader's magic to keep it going, ugly grinding noises came from within as its workings tore apart.
Alaric dropped the paper and walked to one of the statues that surrounded the machine. It was a crude wooden figure hacked from the trunk of a tree, the dark wood charred black. The figure was vaguely humanoid but it had dozens of hands and a face covered with eyes, staring out from around a wide leering mouth. The statue was carved in a harsh, angular fashion that made it even more grotesque.
'Alaric to Marechal.' voxed Alaric, 'We're done here. We'll take what we need and leave the rest to you. I suggest you burn everything here.'
'Understood.' replied Marechal. 'I hear what you have found there. Is it true?'
'Too true, lord provost. Do not let your men tarry here. Destroy it all.'
'Of course, justicar... my men are honoured that they could fight alongside you. I do not think any of them thought they would see they day when the Astartes joined them.'
Marechal was just like the officers in a way - he had been shocked by the Space Marines, and he couldn't entirely keep it out of his voice. 'We all have the same enemies, lord provost.' said Alaric. 'Your Arbites led well here. Just be sure to finish the job and make sure nothing of this cult remains.'
'Of course, Emperor be with you, commander.'
'Emperor be with you, lord provost.'
Alaric picked up the statue and a handful of the printouts. The statue was heavier than it should be, as if it didn't want to be picked up. 'Alaric to all squads, get back to the Thunderhawks. We have what we need. Santoro, cover us over the front plaza. Genhain, we'll meet you at the landing zone. Tancred, with me.'
Alaric waved his squad back through the wreckage of the pit. They passed back through the body-strewn offices and chapel, and through the lobby where a massive firefight had erupted between the Arbites and the heretics on the upper levels. The Arbites were counting the dead and helping their wounded, and the floor was smeared maroon with blood.
The Grey Knights crossed the bullet-scarred plaza back towards where their Thunderhawks were waiting.
Alaric glanced back and saw smoke billowing from the top floors. Marechal had followed his advice. Already, the Administratum building was starting to burn.
Chapter Six
RUBICON
THE CULT ON Victrix Sonora had found itself an excellent hiding place. The Administratum, as the largest and most notoriously hidebound Imperial organisation, could have deflected less urgent enquiries indefinitely. It took Provost Marechal himself to cut through the red tape and authorise an intervention from the Arbites.
No one knew how long the cult had been there. Victrix Sonora had been a prosperous agri-world with several large cities in the Trail's heyday, but with the decline of St Evisser's worship those cities had kept their populations and lost their income. Crime became one of the most viable routes to survival. The planet's law enforcement had left Victrix Sonora to its own devices since the decline of the Trail, maintaining order around the properties of the Imperium and leaving the rest of the world to rot. They hadn't possessed the resources to police the rest of the planet and no leadership emerged from the civilian population to restore any form of order. There was no telling what had festered in the slums of Victrix Sonora before the cult came to Theograd and found its way into the Administratum.
Perhaps it had even started with the under-consul. The possibility was frightening but very real.
The cult's activities were mostly hidden but from the scattered reports in the archives of Trepytos, Ligeia had built them up into a vivid picture. What few holy places there were on Victrix Sonora had been systematically raided for the past fifty years and relics were stolen. A cargo freighter was intercepted twenty years before and an illegal cargo of looted relics stolen. It was assumed to have been little more than cutthroat smugglers feuding, but now it seemed the cult had wanted the relics and had used its influence in Victrix Sonora's criminal world to get them.
There were killings, for there were few cults that did not vent their rage or exalt their masters with violence. The cult slew apparently random victims all across Victrix Sonora, always taking body parts back with them. All these individual crimes had meant little in the planet's decaying cities, but
each one had shone like a jewel in Ligeia's perception. She had known the cult that the Arbites had traced to the Administratum building was the same cult that had been doing the work of Ghargatuloth for decades, just as she had known that Ghargatuloth was somewhere on the Trail, pulling the strings that would bring it back into real space.
The Prince of a Thousand Faces, in its reign before Mandulis banished it, had directed cults in long-term plots that they themselves rarely understood. The cult 0n Victrix Sonora was engaged in the same sort of inscrutable, slow-burning plan Ghargatuloth favoured. To most it would be a tenuous link, but to Ligeia it was the mark of certainly. That was why she had been recruited by the Inquisition, and why the Ordo Malleus had worked so hard to take her from the Hereticus. She could be certain when others could not – she could sift meaning from the most disparate of facts. Ghargatuloth was on the Trail, Victrix Sonora had been tainted by his will, and the evidence Alaric had brought back from the planet had confirmed it.
LIGEIA HAD SET the staff at Trepytos to furnishing her a set of quarters fit for a lady. They had been busy in the three weeks since she had begun her hunt for meaning. Her suite of rooms was lavish, panelled with dark hardwood and hung with tapestries. A large fire burned in an open hearth and antique furniture salvaged from the derelict portions of the fortress was now gleaming and restored. Mouldering rugs had been cleaned up and now lay on the polished wood floor. Pict-screens set into burnished gold frames hung on the walls and a vox array was set into a wide hardwood desk in one corner. An intricate crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling. One of Ligeia's death cultists stood in the corner of each room, silent and immobile, all but invisible against the finery that Ligeia affected everywhere she went.
Ligeia knew that the Grey Knights would not approve. They slept on hard beds in monastic cells free of luxury. Ligeia had detected slight unease in Jus-ticar Alaric when he was forced to confront the finery Ligeia brought with her - it was almost amusing to see. Probably he saw lavish expense as one of the forerunners of weak-mindedness and corruption. For Ligeia, it was a way to cloak herself in the image of a noblewoman, so her real talents would be hidden.
