Mark of Calth

by Edited by Laurie Goulding

  It horrifies Subiaco that this fragile lattice is all that stands between him and these monsters. He backs away from the nearest chain-link wall as a vast eye blinks before him. Subiaco only knows it is an eye because a pupil the size of a small moon dilates as it notices him. The structure around him trembles, and the shockwaves spread to the farthest reaches of the caves. He hears the sound of groaning steelwork and the grinding squeal of metal on metal. Something breaks over to his left and Subiaco hears the tap, tap, tap of steel claws at the iron lath. Hears it buckling and pulled apart.

  Cackling laughter bubbles from somewhere that could be a thousand kilometres away or could be right behind him. Subiaco does not wait to find out and runs in what he hopes is the opposite direction. He hears the scrape of metal-sheathed bodies pushing their way through tears that are too small for their impossible forms. He hears the shrieks of their pain and the howls of their hunger. He keeps running, knowing better than to look back and see what is chasing him.

  All he knows is that he has to get away.

  He runs, and the sound of hundreds of polished steel blades echoes around him. They shed sparks that light the unravelling reality in strobing flashes and throw out elongated shadows of malformed limbs, distended jaws and gutting fangs.

  Subiaco screams as he hears thousands more of the amorphous, bladed things beyond the lattice pushing their way into the collapsing cave structure. They will kill him if they catch him, but he fears that what will come after will be far worse.

  Then, ahead, a miracle.

  A great adamantium door, a towering portal that more accurately deserves – and utterly owns – the title of gate. It alone has resisted the dissolution of the caverns. It alone retains its solidity in the face of the corruption from beyond that unmakes all it touches. The gate is black and glossy, built from cyclopean blocks of titanic stone hewn from the depths of a lightless ocean. It is sealed at its centre by a great golden circle upon which is wrought a complex alchemical and mathematical equation.

  The Clockwork Angel.

  It is an ancient problem, but one that is known to Subiaco. He understands with the clarity only terror can impart that its solution will open the gate. An ornate keyboard of brass and jet sits at the centre of the great seal and his fingers make quick stabs at the black keys.

  Gears spin, pins unlock and interleaved discs of gleaming metal separate as the lock disengages and the seal splits down the middle. Golden light spills through the gap between the leaves of the gate as it opens. It is cleansing and purifying, so bright that it threatens to blind him.

  Subiaco shields his eyes from the radiance, feeling its welcoming heat spread over him.

  Behind him, he hears the screams of the bladed beasts pursuing him. The light is lethal to them, it burns and unweaves the dark power holding their bodies. The golden light spreads, undoing the damage done to the fragile walls of reality. Its healing energy is wondrous and the corruption beyond the veil is helpless before it, driven back beyond the barriers that keep it from invading the realms of sanity and order.

  The light envelops Subiaco, and he lets it...

  ...and his eyes open to find his wife standing above him, her face lined with fear. He sits up, and winces as a spasm of pain shoots up his spine. The cot-bed is uncomfortable, but is a great deal softer than a bedroll on the ground. He sees his daughter curled in the corner of their assigned room, her blanket pulled up around her knees. She looks at him with wide, frightened eyes.

  ‘I was having a nightmare,’ he says, letting out a shuddering breath.

  ‘Everyone’s having nightmares,’ says his wife, slipping her arms around him and resting her head on his shoulder.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ he says, looking at the walls of their quarters as though they might disintegrate at any moment and reveal the horror behind them. He listens and thinks he can hear the faint tap, tap, tap of polished steel claws.

  ‘What was it about?’ asks his wife. ‘Your nightmare.’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ he says.

  XVI

  The Ultramarines move out in force. Fifteen hundred warriors leave Arcology X in a kilometre-long column of heavy armour. The armoured gates open onto the blue-lit wastelands and Legion strength – enough to subdue a world – rides out to war. Ventanus leads them, shuttered within the commander’s compartment of a Shadowsword. The super-heavy’s interior is not designed for post-humans, but he has found a way to press his bulk into a space designed for a mortal body.

  The interior of the super-heavy smells of grease, engine oil, sweat and sickly-sweet gusts of pine-scented incense. He hears the crew chatter over the vox, but tunes it out. He does not need to hear their operational back and forth. Not yet.

  Though he holds no belief in the Machine-God of Mars, Ventanus gives a curt nod to the skull-stamped cog symbol on the bulkhead beside him. Though it goes against his grain, he touches the image with his fingertips. Not for luck, but to honour the Mechanicum forces that helped bring Calth back from the brink.

  Hesst, Cyramica, Uldort and the thousands of others whose names he will never know.

  As if in acknowledgement of his gesture of respect, the slates around him chime with inloading data. Reels of waxy paper spit from chattering ticker-tapes, Tawren’s feed from the cogitators of Arcology X. Geo-sat imagery fills the slate before him, a haze of information four hours old that bathes his cut-glass features in a ghostly ochre light.

  Their attack will reach the outer edges of Foedral Fell’s foundry strongpoint in around another five hours. Ventanus plans to launch his attack immediately after the geo-sats pass overhead and paint the most up-to-date picture of the tactical situation. Nearly a hundred Land Speeders with enclosed crew compartments skim the ruins before them, feeding back more immediate intelligence on the ground ahead, optimal attack vectors and revisions to the proposed route.

  It is not the way Ventanus would want to launch such a vital assault, but he suspects that few engagements in the coming war will be fought in ideal circumstances.

  The landscape around Ventanus is bleached of colour by the display, but even rendered in monochrome the horror of such planetary holocaust shocks him. He saw this devastation unleashed first hand. He knows how terrible it was, but to see the surface of Calth like this is a stark reminder that this is not a warzone that nature will eventually reclaim.

  This is all that Calth will ever be.

  Lanshear is a skeletal steel ruin, its acreage of efficient platforms and guildhalls now a blackened, shadow-haunted wasteland. Numinus fares little better, and the spaces between them are littered with the detritus of wounded strato-carriers: flattened supply crates, ruptured barrels and upended cargo containers. Most split apart on impact, spreading their contents over thousands of square kilometres of the surface. Rifles, uniforms, food packets, boots, medicae supplies and the millions of other items required by campaigning forces at war.

  It is as if a dozen armies marched through and discarded everything they were carrying before vanishing. None of the scattered items can be salvaged. All are too irradiated now to be of use. The crumpled spine of the Antrodamicus groans on the plains beyond Numinus City. The starship’s plated hull is buckled and holed in a thousand places. Ventanus remembers watching it fall from the sky, a sight no sane mind could have imagined. Smoke still billows from its gutted interior, weeks after it crashed into the surface like an extinction-level meteorite.

  It reminds Ventanus of a great plains-dwelling leviathan brought down by rapacious predator packs. A marvel of technology that once travelled between the stars in service to the greatest vision of mankind, reduced to rusting wreckage. A mighty king of the void brought low by treachery and left to rot on the world that most likely saw its keel first laid down.

  Towers stand on the horizon like broken teeth in a rotten gum, backlit by flames from the raging fires of the refinery wells. Towering dr
illing rigs sway, their surfaces corroding in the stellar radiation. Ventanus sees the death of a world in all directions, cities reduced to ashen deserts, proud hubs of industry shattered beyond reclamation and entire habitation rings pounded to glassy ruin.

  Calth was never the most beauteous planet of Ultramar, but Ventanus has seen enough of the galaxy to know it was a handsome one. It had not the wonder of Prandium, its cities were not the architectural marvels of Konor, and its oceans were not as majestic as those of Macragge.

  Yet few worlds can match the industry of its people. Every inhabitant of Ultramar is hard-working, but the people of Calth are fiercely proud of their reputation as the hardest workers in the Five Hundred Worlds. Its shipyards on the surface and in orbit constructed more warships than many dedicated forge worlds, and no vessel bearing the stamp of a Calth shipwright ever failed in combat.

  All of that is gone.

  Calth’s people endure, but the world they fight for no longer exists.

  Ventanus remembers the Calth that was.

  The dead world around him is the Calth that is.

  XVII

  Ventanus splits his Ultramarines into four spearheads, the faster vehicles moving on the flanks while the super-heavies and Dreadnoughts advance up the centre. Ventanus commands this element. Selaton commands the left, Sydance the right. Urath of the 39th will rendezvous with them at the Malonik Transit, and the strike force will swell as more of their scattered brothers bleed in from each of the Lanshear Arterials.

  The Burning Cloud, the Titan that killed the traitor engine Mortis Maxor, marches over the buckled superhighway of the Tarxis Traverse, its warhorn echoing mournfully over the ruins. Captain Aethon’s warriors are sweeping down from the north, but his force will only join with Ventanus when they meet in the middle of Foedral Fell’s ruined fortress.

  The last element of the assault force is Eikos Lamiad.

  Tetrarch of Ultramar, Primarch’s Champion. Eikos of the Arm they call him now; his army is an eclectic muster of forces stitched together from the survivors of the parched deserts and burning muster fields around the Holophusikon. Army, skitarii and Defence Auxilia rally to his banner, together with the great Telemechrus – the Sky Warrior, the twice-birthed.

  With his arm lost to Word Bearers bolts, Lamiad’s warriors have declared themselves his Shield Bearers. Already the survivors of the attack are building a mythology.

  Perhaps there is something to Sydance’s assertion that they will all have names of legend by the time this war is done. Something to inter in the museum of the future.

  Ventanus drags his thoughts from potential futures to the present.

  He has brought together a force greater than any assembled since the muster. This is an appropriate response. What little information Tawren was able to collate from the brief link with the Word Bearers cogitators before the betrayal indicates that Foedral Fell is a war-leader of great prowess and charisma.

  If he is allowed to effectively rally the Word Bearers, the war for Calth will take decades.

  That cannot be allowed to happen.

  His fortress stronghold in the foundry districts must be razed to the ground.

  The going is slower than Ventanus would like, but his time-table has allowed for this. A number of paths thought clear from orbital pict-capture are proving to be impassable on the ground. The Land Speeders are creating passage with their guns or feeding back updated routes.

  In five hours the co-ordinated arms of the Ultramarines assault will be at the outskirts of Foedral Fell’s stronghold, within minutes of the fresh telemetry from orbit.

  And armed with the most up-to-date information at his disposal, Ventanus will wipe Foedral Fell from the face of Calth.

  XVIII

  Hol Beloth follows Maloq Kartho into the ruins of a Lanshear starscraper whose spine has been broken. The towering structure lost its upper three hundred storeys when the portside void array of the Antrodamicus sheared them away with the precision of a thousand-metre blade. The shock of that impact buckled the ventral pier and robbed the building of its structural integrity. The starscraper creaks and groans in the howling winds, and wide cracks have spread from the floor to the metres-thick support columns.

  It is only a matter of time until the tower collapses.

  Neither this nor their proximity to a known Ultramarines stronghold seems to bother Maloq Kartho, who leads their small warband into the corpse-choked atrium. Concussive force from an engine engagement three kilometres away on the Niansur Lateral blew out the building’s heliotropic windows, and the scorched bodies are shrouded in ash-stained glass with brittle reflections.

  Eriesh Kigal and his Terminators have said little since they took possession of the weapon from the disintegrating cult-warriors. Zu Gunara is even more uncommunicative, and Hol Beloth is beginning to feel like less of a commander, and more of a passenger.

  ‘Why are we here?’ he asks, stopping in the midst of the corpses. A flaking skull, black and pitted, stares up at him, the jaw sagging open with the vibration of his footfall. He crushes it beneath his boot.

  ‘You ask a question that has vexed the greatest minds since man first learned to walk upright,’ replies Kartho. He puts a hand out to support himself, as though weary from their trek across the shattered hinterlands of Calth. Their armour is straining to keep the worst of the radiation at bay, and the power capacitors in their backpacks will need to be charged soon.

  Yet what they have endured is nowhere near enough to tire the Dark Apostle.

  Only now does Hol Beloth realise that Kartho no longer has his Octed staff.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ says Hol Beloth. ‘Here. This building. Why?’

  Kartho cranes his neck upwards, looking through the great void at the building’s heart. Hol Beloth follows his gaze. Dust and particles of glass spin in light filtered through the broken windows. They form strange patterns, spirals, loops and hints of suggested forms just out of reach. For the briefest moment, Hol Beloth sees something in the dancing motes, but it slips from perception even as he thinks he sees it.

  ‘We are here to witness something,’ says Kartho, as though that explains everything.

  ‘Witness what?’ demands Hol Beloth, his hand curling around the leather-wrapped grip of his sword. He no longer cares if the muttering shadows attack him, he simply wants answers.

  ‘A moment in history,’ says Kartho, holding up his hand to forestall another angry outburst at his cryptic answer. ‘Contrary to what some believe, the universe is not a sterile place. It is a grand melodrama, a tapestry of consequences, both man-made and celestial. Most are minor things, easily missed, but some are of galactic significance, universal even. And these dramas must be witnessed if they are to register in the universal paean to the dark monarchs. A number of such dramas are close, and we are here to bear witness to one.’

  ‘What’s going to happen?’ asks Hol Beloth.

  Kartho sighs and says, ‘Climb with me and we will witness it together.’

  Hol Beloth looks back up the atrium. Even with its top sliced away, the starscraper still soars to a height of nearly a kilometre and a half.

  ‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that the transit lifts still have power?’ says Hol Beloth.

  Kartho laughs, a mockery of the sound.

  ‘Good drama is earned,’ he says, setting off towards a dust and corpse-choked stairwell. ‘And, trust me, you won’t want to miss this.’

  XIX

  Like everything to do with the war on Calth, Foedral Fell’s stronghold is a thing of ugliness. Dismantled manufactoria have provided the raw materials for his fortifications: sharp-edged bastions, low-lying artillery deflectors and sunken blockhouses. It is a cancerous blight on the landscape, a fog-wreathed, orange-lit vision of damnation. Tar-black smoke streams up like claw marks on a canvas, and the air stinks of petrochemical fires.
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br />   Ventanus remembers a Word Bearer who called himself Morpal Cxir who claimed that Foedral Fell’s warhost numbered in the tens of thousands. Those numbers will have been decimated by Tawren’s orbital strikes, but by how much is the real question.

  ‘Come on...’ he mutters, watching the counter on the main slate diminish.

  At last it reaches zero, and heart-stopping seconds pass before the combat logister flickers to life. Real-time data inloads from the geo-sats. Information pours in. Ventanus processes it instantaneously, parsing tactical feeds on avenues of approach, heat signatures, topographical layouts and enemy troop dispersals. He had feared that the Word Bearers might have their own scouts in place and be ready for them, but it now appears that he was wrong to credit the enemy with such foresight.

  Readiness icons flash on the logister as the information passes down to his force commanders. They have seen what he has seen, they are hungry for this fight: dogs of war, straining to be let slip. Even Lamiad defers to his command. It is Ventanus’s right and honour to give the word.

  His theoretical is solid. The practical is in place. They all know it.

  ‘All commands, unleash havoc,’ orders Ventanus.

  XX

  The plotter table within the Ultimus is not designed to handle military-grade inloads. Its Lexaur-Kale photon arrays were designed to distribute system-wide shipping timetables and manifest lists, not co-ordinate Legion war-planning. Server Tawren has been forced to make numerous alterations to its bio-organic cognitive centres.

  Most are sanctioned modifications, but a few are those taught to her by Koriel Zeth during her apprenticeship at the Magma City. Not forbidden, per se, but frowned upon. Hesst would have approved, and the thought of her binary life-partner observing her work makes her smile.

  Colonel Hamadri and Captain Ullyet are present, but they are ghosts to her. Unaugmented and without noospheric enablement, little more than blurs in her peripheral vision. All she sees is data. They are speaking softly, but she does not hear them.