by Ben Counter
There was even a Space Marine, the titanic stone form toppled completely to the floor and half-shattered. Lachryma's Seraphims skirted around the fallen Marine, using its broken forearms as cover, picking their way through the debris that remained of its torso and backpack.
Alaric could make out tarnished blackened gold inlaid into the floor, marking out elaborate patterns of mosaic that were broken and obliterated by age.
'I have something' voxed Lachryma, her voice thickened by her injury. Ludmilla and Alaric had ordered their troops to use the same vox-channel, so the Sisters and the Grey Knights could fight as one force. 'Up ahead.'
'Tancred, check it out. We're behind you.' said Alaric. He heard Ludmilla order Battle Sisters squads to move forward on either flank, surrounding any potential enemy.
Alaric followed Tancred past a giant stone Sister Hospitaller, mostly intact except for her missing hands. Ahead, the floor of the statue forest rose into a pyramid of steps leading upwards towards what looked like a temple, bathed in a very faint pale glow from above. Alaric peered through the gloom and made out columns holding up a pediment whose sculptures had long since crumbled, an inscribed frieze with a few remaining letters of High Gothic, the remains of smaller statues at the corner of every step. He saw these statues had completely eroded until they were just vaguely humanoid forms.
There was only one word still legible on the frieze below the pediment.
EVISSER.
'We've found it. It's the tomb,' said Alaric.
'Looks like we're the only ones who have been here in a long time.' replied Ludmilla. 'No one's here.'
'Valinov is on Volcanis Ultor. This has to be the reason.' Alaric was certain as he said it. It all made such perfect sense. The Trail of St Evisser was a puzzle created by Ghargatuloth, and this was the final piece.
'We can storm the place.' said Lachryma, waiting with her Sisters at the base of the steps. 'We'll take the rear, the Terminators go in the front.'
'Good.' said Alaric. 'Santoro, go with her. Genhain, follow us in and cover us if we need it. I need to see what's in there. I'll go in with Tancred.' He turned to Ludmilla, who was directing her Battle Sisters to skirt around the steps and surround the temple. 'Back us up, Sister. This is a multi-point assault on a location we have to assume is defended and there is no way to know what is inside. You may all have to think on your feet.'
'That's what we're good at, brother-captain. You and me both. Face the unknown when no one else can? Fight the darkness itself? It's what they made us for.'
The canoness was right. Sisters, like the Grey Knights, were in their own way created. Trained from childhood, saturated in the word of Imperial clerics just as Grey Knights were indoctrinated, very little remained of the woman every Sister might otherwise have become. They had, in many ways, already made the ultimate sacrifice - their lives were not their own, for they had been moulded into the only soldiers that could do the Emperor's work when it really mattered. The Grey Knights and the Sisters of Battle had more in common than a mutual enemy.
'For the Throne, Sister.' said Alaric as he went to join Tancred on the steps.
'The Emperor deliver us, brother.' said Ludmilla.
Squad Alaric and Squad Tancred moved up the steps towards the looming temple. Black threads of corruption had snaked up the columns and the top steps were riddled with dark oily veins. The whole building seemed diseased when he saw it close up, and it was huge - its colonnaded sides stretched out into the darkness where Lachryma was poised to charge into the rear of the building.
There were more rows of columns beyond the first, staggered so it was impossible to see into the inside. At the top of the steps the air was cold and wet, as if something had drawn the life out of it. Alaric could feel his senses heightened and his muscles tensed by the malice that saturated the air - his psychic core was thrumming with alarm, as forces he could not see surrounded him.
Something inside the temple screamed. It was the screaming of daemons.
'Go!' yelled Alaric, and began the charge into the Tomb of St Evisser.
COMMISSAR THANATAL SAW the broken bodies of dead Sisters lying in the trench and knew he was right. The enemy had come over the lip of the trench, fending off a spirited counter-attack from Sisters who now lay butchered on the blood-soaked ground in front of the first line. Bodies in the red power armour of the Order of the Bloody Rose lay draped on coils of razorwire or battered into the ground - the wounds were from bolters or power weapons, speaking of a murderous short-ranged straggle.
The Balurians were moving rapidly up the trenches once held by the Sisters, Thanatal and Valinov at their head. One of the regimental preachers had survived and now spoke the words of the Hymnal Odium Omnis, a High Gothic prayer of hate that most of the Balurians had learned as boys in the temples of their homeworld.
'Got one!' shouted a sergeant on the Balurian left. He was aiming his lasgun at the huge battered corpse of a Chaos Marine, its grey metal armour stained with blood, one leg folded and mangled beneath it. Thanatal could see the ornate patterning on its armour and the huge halberd it had fought with, lying spattered with Sisters' blood on the ground beside it.
'Stay back!' yelled Valinov. 'Their very bodies are corrupt!' The sergeant barked an order and his men skirted carefully around the body, the Balurian who followed giving it a wide berth.
It was just like the Enemy to threaten Imperial servants even after death, thought Thanatal bitterly. Death was too good for them - but death was what they would receive.
'Sir? Where are all the Sisters?' The question came from a young officer who was hurrying along just behind Thanatal.
Valinov interrupted. 'The Sisters are lost,' he said simply.
'Remember, son of Balur.' said Thanatal. 'Vengeance.'
The officer nodded briskly and turned to make sure his men were following.
Lost? What could wipe out so many Sisters of Battle? Many of the Balurians to the north of the line had joined the Sisters in their prayers, and all the Balurians were aware just how effective the Sisters could be. What could destroy them? And where were the rest of the bodies?
Those kinds of questions could unsettle the men. Thanatal could not let them be asked.
'By their sacrifice the Sisters of Battle have weakened the enemy!' he called out to anyone who could hear him, knowing the nervous soldiers would pass the message between them as quickly as a vox-cast. 'Through their deaths the foe has been left bloodied, and it is up to us to deliver the killing blow!'
'There!' shouted Valinov from the head of the column, pointing with his power sword. Up ahead, on the very shore of Lake Rapax, the processing plant loomed, its monstrous form a squat shadow through the clouds of ash. 'That is where they lie!'
Thanatal was thankful. The Balurians could have become too wrapped up in the idea of the missing Sisters to retain cohesion. Now they had something to charge at. 'See, sons of Balur! See how the enemy cowers! Now, strike when he is still weak! Strike for vengeance, for your comrades and for the Sisters! Vengeance, Balurians! Vengeance! Charge!'
'Charge!' yelled the old preacher, holding up his holy book and scrambling out of the trench as nimbly as a younger man to shame the soldiers who might lag behind.
'You heard the man!' shouted an officer in the mass. 'Double-time, loaded and ready to kill!'
The Balurians were alive again, filled with the fire. Thanatal broke into a run and he didn't need to lead them any more - he just had to be the first in, leading by example, Inquisitor Valinov alongside him. The Balurians surged forward, scrambling through the trenches and running along the bloodstained earth, charging towards the processing plant.
Whatever happens, Thanatal told himself, we have already won. When the time comes and they are given the chance to offer themselves up on me altar of war, the Balurians will thank me for leading them here, into the last fight.
A Chaos Marine was worth ten loyal Guardsmen, Thanatal knew that. But with enough spiri
t and no fear in their veins, the Balurians could even those odds. They would buy time for the rest of the defenders. They might even break the Enemy there on the shore of Lake Rapax. Either way, the Emperor's will would be done.
Valinov ran full-tilt, sword drawn, Thanatal following him. The Balurians yelled war-cries as they charged, and when the first heavy bolter shots rang out from the heretics holding the plant, there was nothing that could have stopped the Balurians from fighting back.
Chapter Nineteen
THE TOMB OF ST EVISSER
THE SEVENTY-SEVEN SCREAMING masques of the Hidden One were born in the depths of Volcanis Ultor six hundred years before Ghargatuloth awoke. Amongst the gangs of the underhive, where a lucky man lived to twenty and guns were as valuable as food or clean water, a prophet arose who claimed he knew each of the seventy-seven faces of death and could promise any devoted follower of his that they would be immune to each form of death that stalked the underhive. For one face was the hot buzzing steel of bullets, another the cold red pain of a knife.
The thick strangling death of drowning, the pallid crushing face of starvation - each of the seventy-seven masques lusted for death, and only by understanding them and worshipping them could death be cheated. The prophet (his name forgotten, his face remembered) told them that death itself was the object of their devotion - a study, a religion, a way of life.
His followers formed the most formidable gang in the underhive, for each one was immune to many forms of death. Eventually there was only one option left. The gangs buried their enmities for one long night of slaughter, and the prophet's followers were butchered in the twisting streets below Volcanis Ultor. Few stories came from the gang war for few survived to tell them.
No one knew where the prophet went. That he survived is not in doubt because the seventy-seven masques reappeared, worshipped in secret by those who remembered the tales of men who knew death so well they could not be killed. Gradually, the masques were revealed to be just aspects of the one - the Hidden One, a force so powerful that death itself was just one facet of its being. The cult spread, taking in the embittered and the fearful, those crushed by the weight of revenge or tainted by madness. All were welcome. The most devoted few became servants of the Hidden One himself, and his voice spoke to them through the centuries-old prophet.
Eventually, they understood.
The final masque of death was the most complete. It was utter destruction, dissolution of the body, evisceration of the soul, crushing of breath, the very cessation of existence. Once this masque was understood the follower would become something beyond death, something to whom life and death were just shadows cast by the true light of existence. A purity, a glory beyond the grasp of the living or the dreams of the dead - this was what the Hidden One promised.
The final masque could be realised only in the place where the underhive's legends spoke of destruction and chaos - Lake Rapax, a seething pit of pure corruption where the sin and hatred of thousands of years had seeped into the earth. They said it was alive, and hungry. They said monsters roamed its depths and ghosts reached helplessly from its oily surface. Beneath Volcanis Ultor they said many things, and the followers of the seventy-seven masques knew that they were all correct.
One terrible night the followers left their hovels and gathered in the streets of the underhive, following the call of their prophet. No one tried to stop them - fear gripped every heart beneath the city and the underhivers could only watch, horrified, as the insane took over the streets.
They marched out through the city's broken hinterland right to the edge of Lake Rapax, where the skeletal form of the prophet waited, howling insanely the praises of the Hidden One and recounting the seventy-seven masques that had reaped such a bounty in the underhive. His followers rejoiced as they walked in a huge crowd into the lake, the corrosive waters stripping them clean of skin and muscle, sucking the breath from their lungs, worming its way through their eyes and eating out their minds.
The lake boiled and seethed as it swallowed them up, its thick shining waters closing over the heads of the faithful, its shore foaming pink with blood. Finally the prophet himself walked upon the lake's surface, right into its very centre where, slowly, always singing the litany of the masques, he sunk beneath the waters.
The underhivers gave their thanks that the insane and the benighted had left them. Had they known the truth, they would have despaired.
The seventy-seven screaming masques did not let their followers die for nothing. The cultists really did become something else beneath the surface of Lake Rapax - with bodies of corrosive pollution and minds rebuilt in the image of the masques, they were beings so pure the Hidden One could speak to their hearts directly from beyond the veil of the warp.
And as they reformed in the toxic silt of the lake bed, their new cause was made clear to them. They were the Hidden One's children, devout followers who had transcended the boundaries of life and death. They would be given the most important task the Hidden One had - they were to travel to the forgotten place on the lake's shore, make their home there, and stay vigilant for the day when the Hidden One would bring seventy-seven shades of suffering into the galaxy.
They went to guard the great forgotten tomb, wherein lay the bones of St Evisser.
ALARIC HAD NEVER felt such a wall of pure hatred, solid and terrible. It was like charging in slow motion, the weight of malice dragging him down. It was that, more than anything, which told him he was in the presence of Ghargatuloth. That purity of emotion could only be product of the warp, ripped from the minds of humanity and layered thick over this place where the sea of souls intersected with real space. He could feel it battering against his mind, and his psychic shield felt a precariously thin barrier. If his will broke, what would flood into his mind? Would he see the madness of warp and go insane? Would Ghargatuloth himself dig his talons in and turn Alaric into a servant of Chaos? For the first time, Alaric felt he could fall. A Grey Knight could become one of the Enemy, and the Grey Knights would never be forgiven for their failure.
Then Alaric banished the doubt. He would not fall. The Emperor was with him. He stumbled onwards and clawed himself through the wall of hate, feeling the veil pulled off him. The darkness peeled away and he saw what had happened to the resting place of St Evisser.
Past the columns of the entrance the space within the tomb warped horribly,, forming a gigantic landscape with a sky of veined marble and a sun that hung in a giant censer, swinging backwards and forwards casting shadows across a hellish landscape. The tomb was several kilometres across, impossibly, like a warped mockery of a planet's surface, monstrous and wrong.
It could only be pure Chaos, the kind that had saturated Khorion IX. The land was of splintered stone, jagged plates of dark marble balancing between deep black chasms. Sprays of black water gushed upwards at random, like geysers, and large black creatures circled over the landscape like vultures. Alaric could hear screams that seemed to come from everywhere at once, and the air stank of a hundred things - sweat, blood, sulphur, burning meat, gunfire, decay, disease, pollution, incense.
Broken walls cut through the stone, becoming thicker towards the centre of the scene until they formed what looked like a skeletal city. The city clung like a parasite to a rise in the stone, as if something huge was forcing its way up from below. Empty shells of temples and basilica seemed to ooze from the mountain, forming a nightmarish labyrinth, dark and broken, a place of unalloyed death. The stone peak of the mountain pushed up through the buildings and terminated in a stark, white plateau forming the acropolis of the city. On a massive slab of the summit was a block of pure white marble, incongruous and shining, bathed in a pool of golden light. The marble sarcophagus was like the lynchpin that held everything in place, the heart of the tomb, the point to which all paths led.
Alaric tore his eyes away. He saw his Marines following him, shaking the terrible veil of hatred from their shielded minds - Lykkos carryi
ng his psycannon, Vien, Haulvarn, Clostus, Dvorn with his Nemesis hammer. Tancred and his Marines - Locath, Karlin and Golven - were close behind, their massive forms dwarfed by the scale of the evil in front of them.
Tancred made the sign of the aquila. It seemed a futile gesture here, a tiny drop of virtue in a sea of sin.
'I don't think the Sisters will make it.' said Alaric. There was regret in his voice, but they all knew it was true. 'It's up to us. Santoro and Genhain will follow, we keep moving.'
'What's our objective?' Tancred, like Alaric, knew they could not go back. Ghargatuloth knew they were there. It had to end now.
Alaric pointed to the sarcophagus, high up on the acropolis above the city. 'Throne be with us, for otherwise we are alone.'
Squad Tancred and Squad Alaric moved out, leaving the columns behind them and moving quickly onto the shattered landscape. Chasms gaped everywhere and the tortured ground formed insane angles and sharp gradients. There were a thousand places for ambushers to hide, a hundred ways to get lost. Were it not for the beacon of the sarcophagus shining up ahead, the maze of shattered marble could form a labyrinth no man would ever escape.
The screams were deeper the further in they went, like layers of suffering bearing down on them. Skeletal trees loomed between the jagged peaks of marble and somehow it didn't surprise Alaric that they had once been human beings, warped by corruption and deformed until their skeletons spread into branches and their faces screamed hopelessly from twisted trunks of skin and muscle. Sinister black shapes flapped overhead - Alaric could make out hollow rotted eye sockets tracking them through the rocks.
Alaric glanced back and saw Genhain following, hurrying to keep Alaric and Tancred in sight. Covering fire hadn't been needed yet but Alaric knew that very soon it probably would, and he would be relying on Genhain to keep enemies pinned down while the other Grey Knights pressed home the attack.
