Before the speeder can descend, Ventanus hears a bestial roar. An abominable creature with sword blade arms vaults from the back of a crushed Rhino. It is coming straight at them.
‘Incoming!’ he yells.
The speeder heels over as Selaton wrenches it around, but even legionary reflexes aren’t quite fast enough. The creature’s bladed arms slice the vehicle in half, taking Selaton’s legs at mid-thigh. Ventanus leaps clear as the speeder ploughs rock and wrecks itself in an explosion of flying steel.
He lands at the run and has his bolter out a second later.
He does not know if Selaton has survived the crash, and has no time to check.
Ventanus confronts the beast that was once Hol Beloth
The beast that brought them down rears up, a wall of expanding tissue and claws. He sees it was once a man, a legionary like him, but whatever hypermutations are wracking its frame are completely out of control. Limbs burst from gristly tumours and fanged mouths erupt across its malleable flesh.
Ventanus empties a magazine into the creature. His shells punch through its metamorphosing body. He hears the detonations, but the creature does not even appear to feel them. He reaches for another magazine, but a heavy paw the size of his chest slams him to the ground. Its bulk is enormous, swelling and evolving in an uncontrolled frenzy.
He reaches for his sword, a chain-weapon taken to replace his lost powerblade.
The creature is screaming. He cannot tell if it is in anger or pain.
Ventanus thrusts the sword into the rippling folds of new flesh and the suction is so great that it tears the blade from his grip. The monster’s body swallows the chainsword whole and Ventanus reaches for his next weapon – he unclips a pair of frag grenades from his belt, one in each hand.
Part of him knows that this is folly.
The life eater virus will destroy the monster, regardless of this fight’s outcome, but it matters to Ventanus that it dies by his hand.
He punches the grenades into the thing’s body, releasing them before his arms suffer the same fate as his sword. Both grenades detonate with a wet thump, showering him with rancid flesh as raw as protoplasm. Open wounds gape, bloody and stringy with unformed matter.
The creature doesn’t die. It is too large now, but he has hurt it.
It shrieks from its hundreds of mouths. He has a moment at best to capitalise on its pain.
Then he sees it.
In one gaping wound is a grey-bladed dagger, a weapon clinging to a leather belt that has been subsumed by the expanding flesh of the monster.
He knows what it is. He has used such a weapon before.
Hating that he has no choice, Ventanus reaches in and drags the dagger from the sopping, fleshy wound. He feels the legacy of murder imbued in the glitter-sheened blade. This weapon has a bloody history, but it also has power and he needs that now.
It is a pitifully small thing to wield against so bloated a foe, but Ventanus has first-hand experience of what harm such weapons are capable of wreaking.
The monster’s face looms over him, a bloated mass of gibbering mouths, lunatic eyes and lashing tongues. Whoever this once was, he is long gone. Ventanus wonders if he understands what he has become.
A wide mouth of erupting fangs and acidic bile snaps towards him.
‘For Calth!’ shouts Ventanus and rams the blade up into its throat.
The effect is instantaneous and horrific.
The monster tears open, folding in on itself in unravelling slabs of blood-soaked flesh and fat. Hybrid organs necrotise in seconds and its expanding matter blackens in the space of a breath. The reek of a mass grave gusts from its instantaneous decomposition and gouts of stinking black fluid jet from nameless masses of diseased flesh.
Ventanus staggers back, repulsed beyond measure at the creature’s death. Somewhere in the midst of its unmaking, he sees hints of a post-human body, but they too disintegrate before his eyes.
He spits a gobbet of rank fluid and switches his gaze to the immobile Dreadnought that holds the virus bomb.
The scaled black figure with the curling horn stares venom at him. It turns and vanishes through a shimmering hole in the world. Ventanus feels nauseous at the sight of such a violation, at the sickness he sees through the cut. The tear is already growing smaller – the fabric of the world is healing itself, and in seconds the opening will be gone.
The dagger in his hand tugs at his grip. It wants to return to that unclean realm, to go back to where it was made.
‘Sydance!’ shouts Ventanus, calling up the bomb’s countdown to his visor. ‘To me!’
A blue speeder slews around behind him.
‘How long?’ asks Sydance.
‘Ten seconds. Now get out!’
‘What? No! I’m going with you.’
‘Not this time,’ says Ventanus. ‘This time there is no thirteenth eldar.’
He kicks Sydance from the speeder and drops into the pilot’s seat. The engine belches a plume of irradiated smoke and the skimmer lurches forward, Ventanus coaxing it to one last ride.
The speeder vibrates as though it’s about to shake itself apart. The harsh bangs of engine misfire sound behind him, and a plume of flame billows in his wake.
‘Come on, fly, damn you!’ shouts Ventanus.
The speeder is descending on failing grav-plates, its power almost exhausted, its engine dead. He fights to keep it in the air, hauling the control column back and feeding his every last scrap of will and belief into the machine.
The Dreadnought looms before him, like some immovable leviathan.
Ventanus drops the warp-tainted dagger onto the gunner’s seat.
‘For courage and honour!’ he shouts. ‘For the Emperor!’
A last surge of power fills the engine and Ventanus triggers the forward guns as he throws himself from the speeder. He hits the ground hard and rolls as the skimmer smashes into the Dreadnought at full speed. The collision is ferocious, the speeder’s momentum unstoppable.
The Dreadnought rocks back on its piston legs. Then the engine block explodes and the blast throws it back.
Its gyroscopic stabilisers fight for balance. They fail.
The Dreadnought falls and is swallowed by the sucking wound in the world. It vanishes from Calth and the tear seals up behind it.
Ventanus holds his breath, counting the seconds. He waits for an explosion that never comes. He doesn’t know where the bomb with its lethal life eater virus has gone, but it is not on Calth. That is good enough for him.
He turns to the sound of cheering. It takes him a moment to realise that it is for him.
The people of Arcology X are shouting his name.
No, not his name, his title.
Saviour of Calth.
And for the first time, Remus Ventanus feels that he has earned it.
No one is coming, then. Our numbers don’t count – that’s it, isn’t it? We southern islanders are just too scattered. Our cities aren’t big enough. The enemy turned our lands to glass and ash. How could there be survivors? No point in looking, right?
To whoever finds this – I don’t want this to be easy for you. I survived. Do you understand? I survived the wave and the fires. The enemy is gone, and I’m still out here. Only now the sun is killing me, and I don’t know why, and the sky is still empty of help.
Damn you. Damn all of you.
Heavy footsteps halted outside the makeshift cell. The postulant’s time of judgement had arrived.
He was sitting cross-legged upon the deck, his back straight. He had been sitting in that position for the better part of a day. In that time, his body had healed the worst of the injuries his brothers had inflicted upon him.
The postulant lifted his head and saw himself reflected in the locked cell door. For all his advanced transhuman physiology, his face was still
mottled with purple bruises. Dried, flaking blood caked his cheek and lips. Like all born under the relentless suns of Colchis, his skin was swarthy and his eyes dark. His bloodshot gaze was sullen.
He knew his features were broader and heavier than those of unaltered humans, who looked strangely fragile and delicate to him now. He still dimly remembered what he had looked like before his rebirth into this more exalted form; most of the Legion did not. In time, he supposed that he too would forget his life in the temple before he became a part of the XVII Legion.
He had been stripped of his armour. It had once been granite-grey, but now it was the red of congealed blood, in honour of the revered Gal Vorbak. Oh, to see the things that they had seen...
His thoughts were interrupted as the cell locks were thrown, accompanied by a groan of metal. The hatch swung wide, and a pair of crimson-armoured veterans stepped into the cell, ducking their helmeted heads. Their heavy plate was hung with fetishes and inscribed with Colchisian cuneiform.
He knew them, of course. They were Bel Ashared’s warriors. Between them, they had seen a century and a half more warfare than he had.
There was a controlled aggression in their posture, and their gauntleted hands were clenched into fists. That they wanted to rip him limb from limb was obvious. That they had not yet done so was... surprising. Something held them back.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘Stand up, Marduk,’ said one of them, his vox-grille turning his voice to a throaty, animalistic growl.
‘Why?’ he said. ‘What is to be done with me?’
He saw the blow coming, but refused to flinch from it. It struck him on the side of his head, slamming him hard into the unforgiving metal of the cell wall. He crashed to the deck, and hot blood ran down his face. He tasted it on his lips.
But he did not cry out. He did not wipe the blood from his face. He merely stared up at his attacker, uncowed.
He was hauled to his feet, and did not resist. His own distorted reflection stared back at him in the emotionless lenses of the veteran warrior holding him upright. His cracked lips parted into a bloody grin.
‘You hit like a feeble woman,’ he chuckled.
The veteran growled and slammed his armoured forehead into Marduk’s face.
Darkness.
He turned the helmet over in his hands. It was a prototype Mark VI design, part of the last shipment the Legion had received from Mars, in a deep, arterial crimson – the colour of the Legion reborn. Its lenses glittered like emeralds, slanted menacingly as it stared back at him.
He flipped it over, and set it into the waiting calliper-stand, which adjusted itself to the helmet’s weight and shape, cradling and holding it steady. He reached for his electro-stylus, drawing it from its holder. Tapping the activation rune with his index finger, it began to vibrate with a dull hum. With his free hand he adjusted the position of the helmet, angling it to best allow him access to its curved interior. He brought the fine synth-diamond tip down towards the smooth, unadorned surface.
He paused.
Looking away, he glanced towards the ritual Octed, enshrined in the shadow of a small alcove in the corner opposite the low-burning brazier. The flames seemed to dim, and the temperature dropped. Hoarfrost crept across the walls. The darkness itself began to move, writhing and growing.
Tendrils of shadow reached out, groping blindly. They felt their way up the walls, worming across the ceiling and the deck. One of them touched him. Its caress was like ice. The darkness closed in, drawing his robed body into its embrace.
A steaming breath touched his neck. It reeked of tainted nightmares and rotting flesh.
The creeping darkness whispered to him, a dozen voices of madness blended into one. Blood began to leak from his ears. The stylus in his hand began to twitch.
He communed with this envoy of the Primordial Truth. Pledges were made. More blood was spilled.
An hour passed. Perhaps more.
Hell retreated finally, uncoiling itself from him and sliding back through the worn-thin veil of reality. The brazier came back to life, flames crackling, and its low light filled the room once again. Marduk winced as he released his grip on the stylus. His hand was locked in a painful claw. In fact, his whole body ached.
He glanced down at the helmet still cradled in the arms of the calliper-stand. The curved interior was covered in tiny cuneiform script. Not a single centimetre was untouched.
The handwriting was not his own.
‘Let it be so,’ he said.
He came to with a start, jerking into wakefulness. Something was inside his mind, squirming and probing. It was oily and vile, the intrusion sickening.
Marduk resisted. It pushed deeper in response, asserting its dominance.
Finally, content with its vulgar display of power, the presence retreated. A throbbing pain behind Marduk’s eyes was all that was left in its wake, aside from the acrid taste of warp-spoor in the back of his throat.
He struggled to focus. The lights were too bright. He blinked heavily, clearing his head.
He was in the master control room. Zetsun Verid Yard.
He was on his knees, and veteran legionaries stood nearby – the newest of the Gal Vorbak. He felt their anger. It radiated from them like the heat of a furnace.
Calth filled the view portal. Even from orbit, evidence of the war below was clearly visible. Plumes of smoke and dust spread from the continent below like vast algal blooms. They reached high into the atmosphere, shot through with light of varied hues.
A cracked voice laden with authority echoed in the chamber. ‘All things are at their most beautiful in death, are they not?’
Marduk struggled to locate its source. Focus.
Robed magi scurried about the platform’s control centre, while others were hunched over consoles and plugged into MIU ports. It was not one of them that had spoken, however.
‘The battle still rages, though the war is as good as won.’
Marduk’s eyes were drawn to a figure standing apart from the others, staring out into the void.
There.
The air shimmered around this unholy figure. The membrane between reality and the realm of the Primordial Truth was stretched thin in his presence.
Kor Phaeron. Master of the Faith.
‘The Thirteenth Legion is crippled, and Calth forever scarred. The sun is dying. The surface will be scoured. The last pockets of resistance will be forced underground, but it will do them no good. The planet is in its death throes. This is my victory. Not Erebus’s. Not even Lorgar’s. This victory is mine.’
The revered cardinal turned. His eyes radiated fervour and flickered with unnatural energies. ‘This whole system is a corpse,’ he said. ‘It just doesn’t yet realise it’s already dead.’
He came closer, and Marduk fought the urge to step back.
‘Bel Ashared’s warriors wish to rip out your hearts and feast upon them while you still draw breath,’ growled Kor Phaeron. ‘I am tempted to indulge them. What did you hope to achieve?’
Marduk’s skin tingled. Looking upon Kor Phaeron made his eyes hurt and he lowered his gaze.
‘Look at me,’ wheezed Kor Phaeron, his voice laced with thunder.
Marduk did as he was commanded; he doubted he would have been able to resist even had he tried.
By the time the Legion found Colchis and was reunited with their primarch, Kor Phaeron was already suffering the ravages of mortality. He was old then, too old to undergo the full augmentation procedures to become a true Space Marine. He still looked old now, but as frail and hunched as he was within his armour, there was an undeniable, fierce vitality about him.
It was more than constant rejuvenat treatments that fuelled him – it was a dangerous and fevered energy that burned hot, voracious and dangerous. It must have taken supreme willpower to keep it from consuming him. Ther
e were likely only a handful of beings in the galaxy that could have maintained that state without quickly becoming a hollow, burned out shell.
‘This is my war, postulant,’ hissed Kor Phaeron. ‘Mine. To fail in it was never an option. Taking this platform was integral to the plan. Our victory depended upon it. You understand this?’
‘Yes, my lord,’ said Marduk.
‘Yes, my lord,’ mimicked Kor Phaeron with a sneer. ‘Yet it is at this precious moment, with success or failure hanging in the balance, that you chose to turn against your mentor?’
‘It was not my–’ began Marduk, but he was silenced as the Dark Cardinal’s eyes flared. Warp-vapour steamed from his cadaverous sockets.
‘It was not your intention to imperil the taking of this station?’ Kor Phaeron snarled. ‘Perhaps not, but that is what you did. Perhaps you thought nothing at all, blinded by your lust to rise above your station by murdering one of your betters. Your own mentor. Your lack of respect is an insult.’
‘What is the purpose of a teacher who will not teach?’ asked Marduk. ‘He was no mentor to me. I was glad to kill him.’
There was a wordless objection from one of the veterans standing at his back, and he heard a blade drawn from its sheath.
‘No,’ growled Kor Phaeron to the warrior, malignant light flickering around him like a halo. The blade slid back into place.
‘Even if he had any inclination to teach me, I would have learnt nothing from him,’ Marduk continued, boldly. ‘His soul was blunted to the Primordial Truth, and his mind rigid and inflexible. It angered him that I was more attuned to the pantheon than he could ever be. That is why he refused to teach me. I was sent here to learn the ways of an acolyte, and yet I was placed under the guidance of a warrior with no aptitude for warp-craft.’
‘Clearly, then, he deserved to die,’ said Kor Phaeron.
Marduk grimaced. ‘No, I do not mean–’
‘You feel insulted in having been placed under Bel Ashared’s tutelage? Bel Ashared served the Legion faithfully for almost a century, while you are barely more than a neophyte. How long have you fought as part of the Seventeenth? Two decades? Three? You are nothing but an ingrate child.’
Mark of Calth Page 14
