Mark of Calth

by Edited by Laurie Goulding

  The cave is the same strange silver, glistening with moisture and with the now omnipresent threat lurking just out of sight. He knows the apparently solid walls of the cave are nothing of the sort. He knows what lurks behind the fragile skin of reality and, as much as he wishes to, he cannot unknow it.

  Half-glimpsed forms flit around him like darting smoke.

  He moves through the caves hurriedly, expecting that at any moment the walls will start peeling back to reveal the corruption beneath. He hears voices, but they are meaningless to him and he cannot answer them. At every step he feels as though he is being guided, but by who or what, he cannot say.

  The sense of expectation is almost unendurable, like a guillotine blade suspended a hair’s breadth over the back of his neck. Subiaco wills himself to wake, but he has long since learned that he is powerless to control the inevitable progression of this terror.

  Sure enough, he hears the faint sound of tapping, like rats in the walls.

  Tap, tap, tap...

  Subiaco breaks into a run as he hears the clack of claws again and again.

  Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap...

  Louder now, coming from all around him. This is new, this is his nightmare moving to a higher level of terror. Then, as though a flame has been taken to the papier-mâché backing of the walls, they begin to disintegrate, blackening and spiralling away like dying embers. The walls slough from the familiar rusted lattice supporting them and the terrible void behind is revealed once again.

  It churns like the depths of a hideously polluted ocean, saturated with the filth and mire of an entire species. What is in there is not alien. It is not the horrific by-product of some race inimical to mankind. With unasked-for clarity he understands that this ocean of madness belongs to his people. Humanity creates this realm of insanity, and Subiaco runs as he hears the claws of his daemonic pursuers tearing their way through once more.

  This time they are not just behind him. They are all around him.

  The wall ahead of him bulges as something presses its unnatural bulk against the lath, and Subiaco sees gleaming fangs and amber eyes, each slitted with a dagger slash of onyx. The tear splits wider and a brood of beasts with claws of polished steel spill into the hollow cavern. Their blades gleam with murder and their flesh is fashioned from the skinless bodies of everyone he knows and loves. Screaming faces howl in torment from heaving, animal flanks, and their limbs are the beasts’ limbs, fused together in some awful biological abortion. The skulls of the beasts are metallic, gleaming wetly through pasted-on skin. Even stretched out he recognises the faces there, and his scream is one of abject loss.

  Subiaco runs, and the beasts are hard on his heels, stalking him, toying with him.

  They could catch and kill him any time they want, but there is too much pleasure to be taken in the hunt. He feels their hot breath upon him, rancid and empty.

  Subiaco knows there is only one way out and he races onwards, hoping with every breathless stride that he will reach the great cyclopean gateway with its golden seal.

  Only the gateway offers sanctuary.

  Subiaco wakes, the cries of the daemons ringing in his ears.

  And nothing has changed.

  XXVII

  The interior of the temple is a slaughterhouse, and Ventanus can make no sense of it.

  It is cold inside, freezing even. The heat from the dying star and the bombardment does not penetrate here, and steam rises from every legionary’s backpack. Columns of light stab down from the cracked roof and the poisonous fumes of burning war materiel linger at the openings in the wall, as though unwilling to enter.

  Ventanus smelled the blood before he took one step within, and now he has an answer as to what has become of the Word Bearers.

  They are in the temple and they are all dead.

  Their bodies are arranged in what is clearly a pattern, each one apparently still standing.

  This is an illusion created by the fact that each enemy legionary is held upright by a sharpened spar of blackened iron. Several thousand Word Bearers have been impaled here, their bodies arranged in a form that clearly has some significance. What that might be is a mystery to Ventanus.

  Eikos Lamiad and Kiuz Selaton lead their warriors through the columns of dead Word Bearers. Selaton carries the Fourth Company standard, that glorious, dented reminder of all they have lost and all they fight to keep.

  The Contemptor, Telemechrus, keeps pace with Lamiad, as though he is the tetrarch’s personal bodyguard. The spinning barrels of his assault cannon whine as the weapon sweeps left and right in search of a living target.

  Sydance stays at Ventanus’s side. His expression is unreadable behind his helm’s visor, but his body language is unambiguous.

  ‘Who did this?’ he asks. He doesn’t understand yet, but Ventanus does.

  ‘They did it to themselves.’

  Sydance’s head snaps around. Ventanus does’t know whether the other captain is more horrified at the idea of warriors doing this to themselves or that Ventanus has understanding enough to know it. He shakes his head and moves on. Nearly a thousand Ultramarines stand within the temple, shocked beyond words at this latest atrocity. None of them can make sense of what they are seeing. It is too alien to their understanding and fits no model of war they have been taught.

  Ventanus approaches the nearest Word Bearer and lifts his head. The dead man wears no helmet and his face has been cut open with hard slashes from a sharp blade. His features are contorted with a mixture of horror and devotion. The symbols are oddly geometric and unpleasant to look at in ways beyond the obvious.

  The pattern of impaled bodies becomes clearer the closer Ventanus gets to the centre of the temple. The groups of Ultramarines are naturally funnelled together as they approach the middle of the vaulted chamber. Ventanus feels the temperature drop still further.

  ‘They are arranged in equidistant columns,’ says Lamiad, his half flesh, half cracked ceramic face managing to convey the disgust they all feel. ‘They radiate outwards from a central point.’

  ‘Suggesting that what’s at the centre is important,’ says Ventanus.

  ‘A fane’s nave is designed to lead to a central altar,’ agrees Lamiad. ‘The place of worship.’

  ‘Worship?’ Sydance spits the word. ‘I thought we’d cured them of that half a century ago.’

  ‘Clearly the lesson did not take,’ says Lamiad, gesturing with his one good arm to the sacrificial massacre around them. The limb he lost early in the conflict could be restored, his face repaired. The technology and the craftsmen required are available, but Lamiad has chosen to remain as he is. His mythology has become important to Calth and it is a sacrifice he bears willingly.

  Ventanus has the utmost admiration for Eikos Lamiad, and hopes he will be as strong as the tetrarch when the time comes for him to make such a sacrifice.

  ‘So what’s at the centre?’ asks Selaton, holding the standard at his side. ‘I don’t see an altar.’

  Selaton is right. There is no altar, merely a sunken pit, from which issue tendrils of drifting mist. Ventanus leads the way, his fingers closing over the hilt of his sword. Everyone here is already dead, but the reassurance of a weapon in his hand is always welcome.

  As Ventanus approaches the pit, he sees that it goes down for three metres, and at its centre is another impaled body. A Word Bearer, one clad in crimson armour bedecked with fluttering oath paper and stamped with golden scriptwork.

  This is no line warrior. Every plate and edge has been crafted by hand, shaped by a master artificer and polished with the devotion that only a high-ranking war leader could earn.

  The parchment-white face is that of a cannibal ghoul, a lipless horror of gaunt cheekbones, sunken eyes and a hairless scalp. More of the geometric symbols have been cut into the bone of his exposed skull where the skin has been peeled away.
A ragged hole has been smashed through into the empty void of his brainpan.

  ‘Foedral Fell, I presume,’ says Ventanus.

  Bodies are heaped around Fell’s corpse: cultist warriors, their bodies cut open and emptied. They are staged in poses of devotion, arms chained to the spike-topped staff upon which Fell is impaled, mouths slack with praise, eyes stitched open in adoration.

  ‘What’s that he’s stuck with?’ asks Selaton. ‘It’s different from the others. That symbol...’

  ‘I saw the same thing over and over again,’ says Sydance. ‘I’d always thought it was some kind of unit marking. A load of the rabble we broke through to get to you at Numinus carried staves just like it.’

  ‘No,’ says Eikos Lamiad. ‘It is not a unit marking, not as we understand it. It is a totem, an icon of their new masters. As we still carry the aquila, our enemies now carry this. They call it the Octed.’

  Ventanus feels a spasm of revulsion at the word. He looks at the staff, its thick, inscribed haft and eight radiating spoke blades mirroring the arrangement of the dead Word Bearers. He has seen enemy champions carrying this symbol before them, brandishing it like a holy relic.

  ‘We should get out of here,’ says Ventanus. ‘Let Tawren’s guns level this place.’

  Foedral Fell’s head snaps up and his lipless sneer pulls tight over his skull.

  ‘Guns won’t save you now,’ says a bleak voice that tears from the corpse before a froth of tar-black fluid vomits from its mouth onto the corpses at its feet. ‘The Neverborn are coming for you all...’

  The Ultramarines step back from the pit, revolted and shocked. Foedral Fell’s body spasms – a series of bone-snapping convulsions that would surely have killed him had any life remained in him. The Word Bearer dances in his impalement as a tidal wave of black bilious fluid, noxious and viscous, continues to pour from his mouth.

  It is an impossible amount, more than a body could possibly contain. It squirts from his eyes and ears. It flows from his nose and jets from his mouth like a pressurised hose. The pit fills with piceous fluid, a seething cesspool of the darkest corruption. Foedral Fell’s skull is now fully submerged, but Ventanus can still hear his gleeful mantra.

  The Neverborn are coming...

  The Neverborn are coming...

  Only the bladed finial of the Octed staff remains above the oily liquid. Inky smoke coils from its spiked tips. Ropes of it writhe like mating serpents, spreading overhead like a veil of shadows, reaching out to the impaled corpses spread throughout the fane.

  ‘Back!’ cries Ventanus, now understanding that they have been lured into a trap; the very doctrines that saved them from destruction now turned against them. ‘Get to your vehicles and withdraw. Go! Now!’

  The pit bubbles over, the protoplasmic black ooze spreading over the bloody ground like an unstopped oil well. Bubbles of unnatural matter form and burst, carrying the stink of the charnel house and the buzz of a million corpse-eating flies.

  The Neverborn are coming...

  The Ultramarines retreat in good order from the growing pool of darkness at the heart of the chamber. A miasma of black smoke fills the temple, the vile breath of corrupt and daemonic gods.

  The Neverborn are coming for you all...

  And the dead warriors of Foedral Fell open eyes of blackest night.

  XXVIII

  Hol Beloth steps away from the Dark Apostle as he sees the curling horn was not some ornamentation wrought upon his helm, but a part of Maloq Kartho’s skull. The ridged appendage of bone extrudes from a swollen mass of necrotised tissue, veined with blood and coated with sticky, foul-smelling fluid.

  Nor is that the only change in Maloq Kartho’s appearance.

  His skin has taken on a rugose quality and his eyes are now opaque orbs of sickly orange.

  ‘Do you know Sorot Tchure?’ asks Kartho, his mouth a rip across a yellow skull. His lips are bloody where serrated, triangular teeth have torn them. ‘He understands many of the hidden truths of the universe, not at least of which is the power of betrayal. He knows something of the potency of its impact in the immaterial realm. To betray a friend is one thing, a trusted friend even more so. He took that lesson to heart when he began this.’

  Hol Beloth had heard the name, a whisper of one destined for great things.

  ‘But Lord Aurelian taught me that to betray a brother... ah, now that holds the greatest power of all,’ continues Kartho. ‘Their screams were like the Phoenician’s sweetest wine, their blood a baptism richer than any rained down by Angron himself. Fell was the greatest prize, a warrior whose dreams were on the very cusp of being realised when they were snatched away. Such towering desire unmade and dashed before his very eyes...’

  Kartho gurgles with laughter at the memory.

  Hol Beloth’s hand slides around the grip of his sword.

  ‘Fell is gone,’ says Kartho, ‘but you can still claim what he desired.’

  ‘Why should I trust you?’

  ‘Because you have no choice,’ says Kartho, pointing towards the horizon with a hand that looks a lot less like a hand with every passing moment.

  ‘Watch the melodrama of the universe at play,’ says Kartho as a darkly radiant light erupts on the horizon. Hol Beloth lifts a gauntlet to shield himself from the new sun that boils up in a mushrooming cloud of atomic fire. He knows where that sun has touched down and scorched the world to glass.

  ‘What have you done?’ he gasps.

  The Dark Apostle does not answer, dropping to one knee and gasping in dark rapture.

  ‘What have you done?’ demands Hol Beloth again.

  ‘The old beliefs pass away, and a great light shows us the way,’ says Kartho, looking up at him with a predatory grin as he quotes from the Book of Lorgar. ‘Now brace yourself.’

  Horrified, Hol Beloth can only shake his head.

  ‘For what?’ he asks.

  ‘A fall.’

  XXIX

  The conference chamber of the Ultimus is a hair’s breadth from panic. There was no warning, no hint of yet another disaster, but when it came it was as sudden and shocking as the moment the Word Bearers first opened fire.

  Another underground shelter is gone, transformed into a seething atomic cauldron of death. Even without the geo-sats, Arcology X’s surface augurs are more than able to read the unimaginable spike of radioactive energy from the west. Picters and rad-counters combine their data on the plotting table, and Tawren watches as the towering pyrocumulus of fire-lit smoke takes shape on the western horizon.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ weeps Captain Ullyet, clutching at something hung around his neck. ‘He is the Light and the Way.’

  ‘We just lost another one, didn’t we?’ says Hamadri, gripping the edge of the plotter tightly as the first shockwaves transmitted through the lithosphere shake the walls of the Ultimus.

  Tawren nods, too busy sifting the myriad inloads from her linked surveyors and augurs. Orbital scans combine with surface readings to build a more complete picture of what they have just lost.

  A bone-deep rumble fills the room as the surface of Calth is wrenched and torn by the force of what Tawren now understands is a subterranean detonation powerful enough to have ripped its way to the surface. These are just the first shockwaves racing from the blast; there will be worse to come.

  ‘Which one?’ asks Ullyet, the steel in his voice unwavering as dust and shards of ceiling tiles fall to the floor in a clatter of stone fragments. ‘Magnesi? Gabrinius? Which one, damn it?’

  His lapse into catechism has passed and he is barking orders like a soldier again.

  ‘Triangulating now,’ says Tawren.

  The image of the atomic storm cloud fades from the plotter and a base-level topographical map of Calth’s surface takes its place. Data coheres, readings correlate. An icon to the west begins to blink furiously.

&n
bsp; Hamadri and Ullyet look up in puzzlement, but Tawren is just as surprised.

  ‘Uranik Radial,’ she says, as though not yet ready to believe her own incontrovertible data conclusion. ‘It’s gone. Destroyed.’

  ‘But...’ begins Ullyet.

  ‘That’s Hol Beloth,’ finishes Hamadri as the main blast wave hits Arcology X.

  XXX

  They haul themselves from the spikes impaling them to the ground. Armour splits, dead flesh tears. Ventanus doesn’t see any blood pour from the huge holes in their bodies. Any fluid left in them has long since curdled in their veins. They move stiffly, as though they have forgotten how to walk.

  Or they’re just learning.

  The Neverborn. Ventanus does not know the term, but he immediately understands its substance. These are the fleshless horrors the Word Bearers brought forth from the warp. Nightmarish xenos things from a dimension shut away from the eyes of humanity for good reason. They look out from dead men’s skulls and he feels their insatiable hunger.

  He doesn’t need to issue an order. The horror of the situation demands individual response.

  Bolter fire rips through the reanimated Word Bearers, each one bleeding black smoke from the exploded meat of their bodies. Wounds sufficient to put down two legionaries barely slow them. They come on with limbs hanging off, bones shattered.

  The warriors in red crash against the warriors in blue, all adaption complete. These are no sluggish revenants, but warriors as strong and fast in death as they were in life. The numbers are nothing like even, but the daemon things squatting in the Word Bearers’ skulls do not take up their hosts’ weapons to fight. Claws and teeth are their killing tools, not guns. An eternity of war in a timeless dimension has seen to that.

  It is the only advantage the Ultramarines have.

  Ventanus shoots with pinpoint accuracy. None of his shots are wasted.

  Kill shots to the head every time.

  Inside every skull a squalling mass of shrieking darkness, solid and gelatinous. A daemonic parasite taken up residence in the body of a dead man that vanishes in a screaming implosion of displaced matter. He shoots until the hammer strikes an empty chamber, ejects the magazine and reloads with a fluid economy of motion. He shoots until his last magazine is expended and then draws his power sword.