by Ben Counter
Now, they were down to five. And Ligeia knew the Allking's forces were too many for even her death cultists to face on their own. She would be trapped down beneath the palace and killed, and there was nothing she could do except fight her best and put off the inevitable.
Torch lights danced from around the corner behind Ligeia. 'Lo! Gao!' she called, but the two cultists were already sprinting back down the gallery.
Gao jumped and planted a foot on the head of the closest statue, pushing off to somersault across the corridors. A blade flashed down and the head of the first attacker to round the corner was sheared clean off. Lo dived along the floor, twin daggers flashing upwards to gut the next attacker. The attackers were members of the Allking's own guard, the same men that had escorted Ligeia to the palace on tharrback - their heads were hidden by helmets with a dozen eyeholes cut into each, and they carried swords of what looked like pale bone.
Something screamed as the men hit the ground, something just beyond the wall of reality between real space and the warp. Ligeia held out a hand and let the meaning of the inscriptions on the wall bleed into her - somewhere she had passed a barrier and headed into a place where the creatures of the 'Emperor' - the Lord of Change, the Prince of a Thousand Faces, the horrible mingling of Imperial and Chaotic religion the Secundans worshipped - could walk freely. Ligeia could feel the walls of reality wearing thin.
Ligeia reached the next corner. Shan was crouched beside it, pointing forward to indicate the way was safe. 'The Enemy holds sway here.' said Ligeia to her death cultists as Gao and Lo sprinted back towards her. 'This is their territory, I can feel it. Your strength may not be enough here. I do not think we will survive, so you should know that you have always served me well, my brothers and sisters.'
The death cultists did not answer - they never spoke. But Ligeia knew they understood her.
Gao flipped out of the way as a shower of arrows broke against the wall. Someone was yelling back there - Ligeia let the meaning of the words through into her mind and she translated hatred and the joy of the hunt.
Ligeia ran on. She heard blades clashing ahead and by the time she reached the next junction, Xiang was standing between four dismembered bodies, knives slick with blood.
'They are closing in?'
Xiang nodded. Ligeia looked down at the bodies. One corpse sported three arms, and the dislodged helmet revealed a third eye in the middle of its forehead, blood-red and staring. Mutants. The touch of Chaos was hidden even in the Allking's own guard. Emperor alone knew how far the Allking himself had fallen.
Ligeia could feel hate seeping from the walls, the ceiling, the floor. With a yell, more attackers flooded forward - Ligeia saw tentacles reaching and a horribly distended jaw bristling with teeth as a score of men attacked from three directions.
Xiang ran up the wall and along the ceiling, cutting through two men's necks before she hit the ground. Lo dived headfirst, spinning, into a mass of men, daggers rotating with her, slicing limbs from bodies. Three attackers clambered over Lo and charged towards Ligeia herself - she pointed and willed the neuro-receptor in her large amethyst ring to fire. The digital weapon, rare xenos tech that had cost more than her father's palace, spat a blue-hot lance of laser through a man's throat and killed the charge before Xiahou flipped over her and killed the other two as they stumbled.
Ligeia felt the power before it was unleashed, a deep roar just below the range of hearing, building up to a psychic crescendo as a bolt of black fire ripped down one corridor. Darkness flooded the area and pincer-strong hands grabbed Ligeia from behind, throwing her across the corridor and hard into the wall. Light washed back and Ligeia saw Gao, the cultist who had saved her, blasted to bits by the psychic explosion. Gao's blood spattered over her and so loaded with hormones and stimulants was it that it burned her eyes.
The burning chunks of Gao's body thumped into the walls and floor. Ligeia shook the gore form her eyes and through her tears she saw the sorcerer, naked to the waist, his legs wrapped in a kilt made of dozens of pieces of brightly coloured cloth, the symbols of the Change God cut deep into his scrawny torso. The blood that ran from the wounds was deep blue. His face was completely featureless, a smooth globe of pale skin, but his shoulders and upper chest were covered in eyes. Black fire rippled around his hands and he launched another blast at where Xiang was holding off six swordsmen. Xiang jumped out of the way but was thrown hard against the ceiling by the force of the blast.
With each explosion the voices from the warp gibbered louder. Ligeia knew they were close to the source of the corruption that saturated Sophano Secundus.
Xiang and Shan grabbed Ligeia and dragged her through the smoke-choked corridor, away from the sorcerer and the soldiers charging past him.
Ligeia tried to read the very stones around her, divine the intricate pattern of the palace's sub-levels. She could taste the tangled knot of corridors and anterooms around her, and feel them radiating from a dark central heart.
This way.' she gasped, indicating where the corridor turned sharply. Lo and Xaihou ran ahead while Xiang and Shan carried her as they ran, darkness swarming around her and black flames flickering.
There was a large wooden door stained dark red up ahead. Xaihou kicked it open and it splintered, red light and unearthly screams flooding out.
Ligeia was bundled inside. The room was blood-warm, the stone floor buzzing. It had many sides, but Ligeia couldn't count them; every time she looked the angles altered and the room changed size, the dimensions squirming before her eyes.
The wall hangings were covered with writing in the flowing Secundan language, the letters wriggling like worms. Piles of books and scrolls choked the edges of the room and in the centre was a shallow pit blackened by fire and redolent with burnt spices and flesh. The symbols of Chaos were everywhere, the eight-pointed star and the arcane stylized comet of the Lord of Change, fleeing from Ligeia's vision as if they were afraid to be read. The walls pulsed with power, and a blood-red glow oozed from them.
There were three doors. The shattered door behind her was already breached, Xaihou's sword flashing out to sever the sword-arms reaching through. The other two burst open and through one stormed a swarm of the Allking's soldiers. There was no doubt about their allegiance now - every one sported grotesque mutations, claws and insectoid limbs, multifaceted eyes rolling in their chests, mouths screaming from their stomachs. Some had dropped their swords to fight with spines and pincers.
Through the other door came the sorcerer. He was powerful, Ligeia could taste it. He burned his way through the door with the black fire that covered the upper half of his body. Ligeia could see his skeleton through his burning skin, glowing with power, his dozens of eyes like bright pearls jutting from his body.
'Don't touch him!' yelled Ligeia over the noise in her head. She knew that the very presence of the sorcerer was toxic - without their minds shielded, the death cultists could be killed just by touching the sorcerer. Ligeia could not move as quickly or kill as cleanly as they could, but as a Malleus-trained psyker her mind was stronger than their bodies.
Shan was sprinting around the walls, hurling knives as fast as bullets, the blades thunking into throats and stomachs. Xiang was surrounded and holding a dozen men at bay on her own, twin daggers ripping mutants open and spilling ropy entrails onto the ground. Xiahou and Lo were by Ligeia, lashing out with their swords against anyone who approached, but there were just too many of them to kill and they were getting closer.
The sorcerer stepped into the air. The room - the temple, for that was what it must be - elongated around him and suddenly he had space to rise into the air, black lightning fountaining off him. Ligeia could hear the crescendo rising again. For her and her death cultists the room was shrinking, too small to contain the psychic blast that was coming - it would incinerate everyone in the temple.
She was dead. She could not match that power in combat. Her power was to do with meaning, not destruction. But the meanin
g in the temple, the corruption, the hate...
Ligeia opened up her mind and it flooded in, words of hatred that covered the pages of the books, prayers of corruption from the hangings on the wall, suffering and death from the very stones beneath her feet. She rose into the air with the power of it all she could feel it filling her. She had never felt that magnitude of hatred before, not with the Hereticus or the Malleus. It was like a living thing inside her, welling up and taking form, hot and angry, too huge for her to contain.
The Prince of a Thousand faces would rise. The Lord of Change would follow in the path Ghargatuloth carved through the stars. Chaos was the natural state of all things, and the feeble resistance of the blind would fall before the rising tide. Tzeentch would rule, and there would be no law but Chaos.
Ligeia crushed all those thoughts and images into a tiny hard ball of hate in the pit of her stomach, every word, every syllable. With a scream she tore them out of her mind and spat them out into the outside world.
A white-hot stream of pure hatred tore out of her open mouth and punched right through the chest of the sorcerer. Its power filled him up and he burst in a shower of white flame, black lightning, charred bones and shattered jewel-hard eyes. The flame coursed around the temple like a whirlpool; her death cultists somersaulted into the air over the tide of hatred as it smothered the Allking's men and stripped their deformed bodies to the bone.
The books and hangings were untouched. This was hatred so pure it could only touch living things. Then the last of it was gone and Ligeia was exhausted. Her body spasmed and fell - one of her death cultists darted forwards and caught her before she hit the hard stone floor.
She was gasping for air. She had never felt that magnitude of power before, never. She had never understood that she could contain such sheer strength of emotion - the Hereticus had never trained her to her full potential, and the Malleus after them had only wanted to ensure that her kind was proof against the Enemy. By the Throne, she could be magnificent.
Shan helped Ligeia to her feet. The death cultist inclined her head very slightly - a question. What now? Where do we go?
Ligeia looked around her. The charred bones of the Allking's men lay mingled with the books and papers piled up against the walls. She could hear no more orders yelled or feet ringing on the stone floor. She had incinerated the whole of the force sent down to corner her.
'We go back up.' said Ligeia.
Chapter Eight
THE MISSION
THE GREY KNIGHTS' attack came just before dawn. The storm surrounding the city formed a dome that began beyond the city walls and curved right overhead in a shield of near-opaque dark cloud and lightning, so the sun's light barely pushed through. The storm cut out all communications, electronic or psychic, but a man could walk right through it to reach the edge of the forest just beyond the high walls.
The walls were of hardwood with stone foundations and watchtowers. The Allking had put the city on a war footing - his household cavalry were in the palace, hunting down Ligeia and her death cultists, but the rest of Hadjisheim's standing army was on the walls. There were thousands of them patrolling the battlements and manning the gates that led into courtyards which would be turned into killing zones by archers and spearmen. Beyond that the lower city of Hadjisheim was a warren of poor crumbling houses, where a small body of men could mount a defence that might last for weeks. The upper city, surrounding the Allking's palace and the imposing black marble temple of the mission, was more open ground where the streets would funnel attackers into crossfires from archers on the roofs.
The Allking, however, had only ever had to fend off attacks from jealous barons or forest bandits. He didn't even know that such men as Space Marines existed.
Squad Genhain led the attack, shredding the wooden battlements and men behind them before Tancred's Terminators charged straight through the wall, splintering through into the cavity at the centre of the wall before tearing through into the city itself. Alaric and Santoro followed him through the breach, stitching storm bolter fire through the men pouring down off the walls to stop them.
Tancred kept going. The flimsy mud brick walls collapsed into powder under the boots of his Terminator armour. Townspeople fled in terror as Tancred led the charge deeper and deeper, Alaric and Santoro keeping counter-attacks off him. The Allking's soldiers were not fanatics like the household troops and they found themselves hopelessly tangled in the same streets that were supposed to fox invading enemies. When they saw the eight-foot armour-clad monsters that battered their way through the city, most of them fled. Those that fought on died beneath the guns and Nemesis blades of Alaric and Santoro.
The first archers to sight the spearhead gathered hastily on the rooftops of the upper city where the Allking's nobles cowered in the cellars below. They loosed volleys of arrows at the invaders, but every shot bounced off their armour. They set rivers of burning oil running down into the old city, but the attackers just charged straight through as if they couldn't feel pain at all.
Sprays of bolter fire sent archers fleeing from the rooftops. By the time the Grey Knights reached the avenue that led to the Allking's palace, black swarms of arrows lashed down at them like rain. Tharr were corralled into the road and lashed until they charged madly at the attackers, only to be hacked apart by the Grey Knights' blades. Squad Tancred crushed hastily-erected barricades beneath their feet, ripped apart a formation of pikemen stretched across the avenue, and pressed onwards. Squad Genhain in the rearguard sent volley after volley of bolts into the swordsmen and spearmen trying to surround the spearhead, until their weapons were dry and they had to share ammunition from Alaric and Santoro.
More and more men were drawn into the carnage. Barons eager to earn the Allking's favour charged their contingents into the upper city, forming huge swelling crowds of men who were herded like cattle into Genhain's fire zones. Dozens were trampled and crushed as they tried to flee. Archers ducked rattling volleys of bolter fire and ran when they saw the slaughter the Grey Knights wreaked on their fellow soldiers.
The last hundred men of the Allking's household army massed in the grand entrance to the palace, ready to meet the Grey Knights with claws and tentacles, the banner of the Lord of Change above them. The Allking stood ready to face the invaders personally, and his retainers were ready to collapse the roof of the entrance hall on the invaders if they broke the line.
But the Grey Knights didn't attack the palace. Tancred led them through the villa of a baron in the shadow of the palace, bypassing the palace defences. Alaric and Santoro fended off a frenzied charge from the Allking's men while Tancred bashed through the stone walls and crunched through carved black wood furniture.
The Grey Knights went out through the back wall and their objective became clear. Alaric had ordered his Marines to head for the most likely source of the darkness on Sophano Secundus: the mission temple.
TANCRED TORE THE tall black-stained wooden doors off the front of the mission, his gauntleted hands splintering through the wood. Tancred was covered in dust from pulverized mud brick houses and battered from where he had charged straight through solid marble walls, but there was no sign of his slowing down. His Terminators charged in through the breach with him, their massive frames splintering the stone steps that led up to the doorway.
'Genhain, cover us!' voxed Alaric. 'Santoro, with me!' Alaric led his squad and Santoro's in the wake of Squad Tancred. Arrows were lancing down from the nearby palace and Alaric could hear the chattering of Squad Genhain's storm bolters as they returned fire. Genhain would be responsible for keeping the battle for Hadjisheim outside the entrance to the mission, allowing the rest of the Grey Knights to deal with whatever they found inside.
Thick, heavy air rolled out as Alaric followed Tancred through the doorway: incense and burnt flesh stank. A hoarse, dim roaring, like a distant hurricane, keened from the heart of the temple.
Alaric's auto-senses automatically yanked his pupils open in
response to the dark but still it was like charging into a sandstorm. Heavy, solid darkness crowded Alaric. He could just see the shadowy shapes of the Terminators ahead, muted muzzle flashes marking the gunfire they were sending ripping through the interior of the temple.
Static flooded the vox. 'Santoro, back us up!' yelled Alaric above the roar, and plunged into the darkness after Tancred.
The screams of daemons rang out like a peal of bells, discordant and terrible, flooding Alaric's senses. For a moment he thought he would black out - and then he saw the pink and blue flames billowing up from the marble floor, bright in the shadows, reaching up like fingers to surround Squad Tancred.
A blast of light burned straight up from the floor like a spotlight, illuminating the ceiling of the temple. Alaric saw it was impossibly high - the dimensions of the Mission had warped horribly, far too large to be contained within the building itself. This was a place not fully within real space - it was saturated by the warp, taking on the strange properties of the immaterium. The ceiling was like an unnatural sky far above, ugly bulbous shapes of stone looming down from the distant walls. It was like being inside the belly of a titanic stone creature, and the mission's structure flexed and bowed as if that creature were taking breath. Lightning crackled far overhead. The walls groaned.
Daemons were boiling up through the glowing floor, long-limbed, shining, flame-spewing creatures. Alaric dived into the fray to cut through the circle of daemons surrounding Tancred.
The daemons screamed as they touched the sacred wards woven into the Grey Knights' armour. Tancred beheaded one, spilling globules of glowing blood that fell upwards towards the distant ceiling. Alaric glimpsed surreal, individual combats through the darkness, illuminated in shafts of light from below. He saw Justicar Tancred slashing at the daemons, Brother Locath fending off reaching hands that grabbed at him with charred fingers, Brother Karlin aiming his incinerator into the monsters rising around his feet and pumping a gout of flame straight downwards until it looked like he was standing in a volcano.
