Mark of Calth

by Edited by Laurie Goulding

  Then / ahhhhhhhh, hello and farewell / the whisper smiled.

  And Blanchot screamed.

  He did not scream aloud. He no longer had that privilege. His body was no longer his. His mind screamed. It shrieked as he found himself in a prison he knew that he would never escape. It howled as it was smashed not by Krudge’s rock, but by the hard stone of truth. Blanchot saw now the truth of the whispers.

  Always with you. Always the beat of your pulse.

  The words were human, but they were borrowed. The voice was made of rotting dreams.

  The thing in his body snapped out a hand and shattered Krudge’s rock to dust. Fingers splayed wide, and it grabbed Krudge’s face. It squeezed.

  His mouth shut tight, his teeth splintering against each other, Krudge let out a rising whine of purest agony before the gripping hand crushed the front half of his skull to bloody pulp and bone shards.

  Mellisen leapt back, but she wasn’t fast enough. No human could be. A single kick shattered her spine and sent her tumbling away to lie like a discarded rag doll in the rubble.

  And then Blanchot was truly alone. He could still see through the eyes that had been his, but there was a writhing darkness at the periphery of his vision, the undulating blackness of night’s corruption. His body looked around the abattoir and smiled.

  Work together. Kill together. As we did before.

  The shade of a question was added to the tincture of Blanchot’s despair.

  Remember, remember, flesh-dancer, your help to this traveller. Remember our words together.

  They had not spoken. The thing was lying. Of this last shred of honour, he could be sure.

  Words through the void, words from name to name, the flesh-dancer listening well on the dead-hope. On Veridius Maxim.

  The enormity of it swept Blanchot up. He was carried by a monstrous wave as the memories surfaced and the pattern revealed itself. The wave was rushing him towards a mountain face. The words of the thing were irresistible – when it whispered, he understood it too well, and he saw then that the truth could be as dreadful as any lie.

  Laughter slithering around the syllables of thought, the thing spoke the words it had uttered before, the words that had been its initial assault on Blanchot, the words that had been the act of his infection.

  ‘We have corrected vox failure, Veridius Maxim. Please respond.’

  Blanchot had responded. He had spoken to what he had thought was a crew, and so let the thing complete its voyage of horror.

  No. Not the crew, but this traveller. The darkness they had swallowed, and that had swallowed them. We spoke. I travel. In ships or along the links created by speech, it is all one to me. We spoke. You let me in. To Calth. To you. We have travelled far. We have travelled well.

  The thing picked up Mellisen’s laspistol. A task to finish now. There will be visitors soon. More words. More travel.

  It headed off in the direction of the dig.

  Blanchot struggled. He fought for his body, and when that failed he fought to die. The traveller denied him both. It made him watch the final slaughter, and then it made him stare at the bodies for the three days it took before a rescue team from one of the other arcologies at last broke through the cave-in.

  A squad of troopers entered, their uniforms grey beneath a layer of dust. With them was a single Ultramarines legionary officer.

  The humans stared at the lone survivor. It had thrown away the laspistol and sat slumped in a position of carefully crafted despair. The giant warrior barely glanced at the Blanchot-thing, eyeing the bodies and already moving ahead, scanning for threats.

  The thing’s eyes tracked the Space Marine.

  Speak to me.

  An infantry sergeant squatted before it. ‘Are there other survivors?’ he asked.

  The thing did not answer the human, but it did open its mouth.

  ‘The Campanile...’

  The legionary froze at the ugly, croaking sound. His ferocious battle-helm turned.

  Don’t speak to it! Blanchot’s mind howled. Kill it! Please! Please, please kill it! Kill it now!

  A clearing of the throat. A licking of the lips, and a crooked smile.

  ‘I let the Campanile in.’

  The legionary was upon the traveller in a single stride. He picked it up by the neck. Blanchot’s hope flared that the massive gauntlet would now squeeze, crushing the unlife from the horrid thing. But instead the Space Marine spoke, rage blasting from the helm’s augmitter grille.

  ‘What did you say?’

  The final dark was coming for Blanchot now, dragging him down into an infinite abyss of teeth and despair. And the screams. The screams returning in the full force of truth: the eternal screams of the crew of the Campanile.

  His body kept grinning.

  ‘So pleased to finally speak with you, my lord,’ it said to the Legion warrior.

  So very pleased.

  The death of hope. That is what the XVII Legion tried to achieve, and they came close – so very close. The citizens of Calth were innocent bystanders in a war that they had no hope of understanding, and yet they suffered worst of all.

  But hope did not die. In the shadowed caverns beneath the ravaged surface, those of us who were left regrouped and continued the fight. We all knew that as long as we held out, the XVII had failed in their primary goal: they did not break the people of Calth. Far from it, in fact.

  Hope clung to life in the caverns like a beacon, and a beacon always burns most brightly in the darkest depths of night. That seems an appropriate analogy, given what was yet to come.

  I shake the bolt round about the inside of my armoured fist. Like a die, it rattles. Like a die, it awaits an outcome. An outcome unknowable in the enclosed space of my gauntlet, a realisation it can find only in the breech of the pistol that sits brusque and empty upon my belt. I feel its inevitability, hot in my grasp, as though it might burn a hole through my ceramite palm. Heavy with the impending doom it carries, the round is a waiting demonstration of form and function – it aches perfection. Like the Ultramarines themselves, it was crafted for one purpose: to take life.

  Who am I to deny such imminence? Who am I?

  My name – for all that it matters – is Hylas Pelion. My brothers call me ‘Pelion the Lesser’, for there have been others of that name who have done more to earn their place in our Legion’s history. My achievements are many, but I stand pauldron to pauldron with champions and heroes every day, for Guilliman’s sons are blessed with many honours and a victorious tradition. My pistol has consigned many a xenos abomination to death; the edge of my blade is the world’s end to all who refuse the Emperor’s beneficent offer of unification. For my small part in the Imperium’s rebuilding, I have earned the Chapter rank of Honorarius.

  My Chapter Master died in defence of noble Calth. Sergeant Arcadas leads those left of the 82nd Company as I forge ahead with my blade, cutting a path through new enemies. Brother Molossus bears the company’s tattered standard. There is little room to manoeuvre the mighty banner in the cragged confines of Calth’s labyrinthine arcologies, but this matters little to Molossus. The standard is a part of him, the most honourable part, it seems – like so many who carry such a burden, he would rather lose the arm that bears the banner than the banner itself.

  Fighting from the front, we have taken the arcology known as Tantoraem. Arcology Magnesi had been our shelter from the solar storm – the cool darkness of the rocky enclave was a subterranean womb, where the indomitable people of Calth might begin again. The sunblind and the scarred, the scorched and the marked, they refused the let the blessed memory of their home world die.

  Calth lived on. This tiny corner of Ultramar endured.

  Over time, columned caverns became centres of basic industry and food production. Winding catacombs became thoroughfares, lined with improvised habs and grottos. Arch
ways became sentry posts and vaulted caves housed the reverential masses, who gathered to give thanks to the Legiones Astartes – Guilliman’s sons, the Ultramarines who had stayed behind. It mattered not that we too had been left behind on ailing Calth. Our presence alone seemed to give the survivors hope and purpose. They shared our determination to fight for what was left of their world.

  Our number fought on, as we were bred to do. The battle for Calth descended into an underground war. The enemy was the same: our Word Bearer cousins, carrying with them a hatred unsought and the shame of our fraternal failure. They had become dark beacons to weak-minded multitudes, and held congress with daemons. A new camaraderie to replace the old, perhaps? The stakes were the same and had never been higher. We fought for the bodies and souls of our small empire. We were the shield upon which the enemy smashed itself, desperate for innocent blood.

  In defence of that blood, we took our fight into the depths – to the arcologies and the darkness beyond. We crafted the saviour stone of our havens into watchposts, tactical redoubts and the Arcropolis – the Ultramarines fort that dominated the dome-primaris of the Magnesi system.

  Our conquering instinct – an irrepressible genetic trait – took us through the rubble, smoke and ruin. As ever, my sword led the way, since ammunition for our ranged weapons was by now precious and scarce. It took me and my brothers into the Thurcyon and Edanthe arcologies. The battles were bloody and the tunnels confined, with sword and combat shield the order of both day and night. Like a blue torrent through the foe-choked branches and systems, we battered and stabbed our way to untidy victories.

  Thurcyon held for us Dusa Dactyl, the Kreedstress of the Edictae-Ghuul. Her cultist maniacs worshipped their Word Bearer overlords – for them it was a dubious yet all-encompassing honour, securing them a martyr’s place in some after-hell of their own devising.

  Edanthe was a nightmare. A nest of otherworldly beasts, summoned to do our former kinsmen’s bidding. What they lacked in the cultists’ suicidal fanaticism, they more than made up for with murderous savagery. Things of every shape and size, monsters of fang and flame and horn and scale. Creatures crafted of whim. Some were death-dealing creations of infernal perfection while others were unshapely fantasies of a disturbed mind. A madness in flesh, forced upon my eyes. I made scabbards of the wretched beasts, my sword slipping in and out of their nightmare forms. They died hard, sapping our precious strength, before screeching back to inexistence.

  Cutting through the mobs and monstrosities, we finally faced our dark brothers once more. Their plate was a parody in ceramite; seductive sigils of forbidden lore snaked their way across the legionary red. Spikes, shanks and skewers erupted from their armour, cutting serrated silhouettes in the darkness. Worst of all was the pinpoint loathing in their eyes – their faces were masks of grinning derangement, where murderous fantasies were willed into reality.

  We ended all but one, the same soul escaping our wrath in both systems.

  A bearer of the word. A trader in lies. A living untruth known as Ungol Shax.

  I had faced Ungol Shax on the slaughterfields of Komesh but his throat eluded the edge of my blade. I would have silenced the bastard altogether, if it hadn’t have been for the frothing sea of blood and madness rising and falling before my weapons. Cultists. I spit the word.

  One after another, in a continuous train of insanity, the Chaplain’s knife-disciples threw themselves before him. Each met the blessed release of my blade or the demolishing crash of my pistol. Each death kept me seconds from my enemy’s end. When the poison-star Veridian razed the very memory of Calth from the surface of the dying world, Ungol Shax and his foetid minions followed us into the deeps. His raving multitudes swarmed the Thurcyon and Edanthe arcologies. They bred and sacrificed in equal measure, bringing forth monsters from the shadows. It took us the better part of a year to clear the systems and bring silence to the darkness once more.

  The tetrarch had warned against further expansion. He had fought alongside the legendary Ventanus on the surface and was the best of our blades, but also had a gift for arithmata and reckoning. He had the measure of a man with but a glance, and knew his worth with blade, boltgun or fusil mere moments into his company. Besides the primarch himself, he was the best tactical mind for several sectors – perhaps the whole of Ultramar – and despite having little to work with beneath the surface of Calth, had created an unfaltering enclave of order, sanity and survival amidst the chaos of war and want.

  He was not above compassion either. Those that had fled the fallen arcologies, that had run the gauntlet of daemon-haunted caves and had held out in small groups until they could hold out no more – they were welcomed through the collapsed arches of Arcology Magnesi. Not just the fighting men and women, and those that might be trained as such, but the bedraggled trickle of innocents too. The young, the aged, the infirm and the injured: all were welcome to our dwindling supplies.

  We could only hold so much ground, however. The tetrarch’s strategic calculations said so. It was better to hold three arcology systems firmly in our grip, denied to the enemy, than fail to hold five or more and allow Word Bearers and their creed-slaves to pour in, flooding the system once more with death and destruction. Whereas rock and vigilance were enough to keep cultists and brother-betrayers from the territory that we’d carved, the daemon-things were something else. Frequent patrols through our own arcologies became necessary. Screams of the awoken would report eaten limbs and the scamper of tiny monstros-ities into the shadows. Outbreaks of violence and cluster-killings amongst the survivors were ascribed to the whisperings of dark entities. Strange contagions swept through the crowded arcologies but were eventually traced back to water supplies contaminated by daemon feculence.

  These obscenities were thought to originate from Tantoraem, a nearby arcology system overrun with Word Bearers and their filthy allies. During our early fortification of Arcology Magnesi, the tetrarch had ordered the connecting mag-lev tunnels collapsed, sealing off the hab-branch of caves and caverns. What had been formerly thought of as tactically unadvisable became a strategic necessity: Tantoraem had to be cleansed for Magnesi to be safe, in the same way that the Fiend of Abydox and its greenskin empire could not be tolerated on Ultramar’s borders, when the empire was still young.

  The order was given. With Sergeant Arcadas and Brother Molossus at my side, and the standard of the 82nd Company held high above the helms of the thirty battle-brothers making up the expedition force, I led the invasion of Arcology Tantoraem.

  Our blades cut through the swarming cultists. Our battered plate took all of the hatred they had to offer. Behind, the fighting men and women of the amalgamated Magnesi garrison – former Imperial Army soldiers and members of various decimated defence force contingents – lit up the darkness with power-conserving streams of las-fire from their fusils.

  Once again, I feel the presence of Ungol Shax. There was something about the arcology’s rancid defences, something familiar, like an echo of the nightmare that had been Edanthe and Thurcyon. Ultramarines were lost and many among the amalgamates perished. Victory had its price – as it always does – but eventually Arcology Tantoraem was ours. The cavern-complex now lies carpeted with slaughtered cultists, ritually-summoned spawn and the cardinal colours of armoured cadavers – the Word Bearers who brought the righteous fury of Guilliman’s Legion down upon themselves.

  At the very rear of the Tantoraem system, in the far reaches of the hell-hole’s pillared caverns, I discover that Ungol Shax has once again eluded me. Instead I find the remaining few who would stand in the way of victory absolute.

  I shake the bolt round about the inside of my armoured fist. Like a die, it rattles. Like a die, it awaits an outcome. An outcome unknowable in the enclosed space of my gauntlet.

  I look up. Standing in the shallows of a groundwater lake is a battle-brother in red. His plate is splattered with the blood of innocents, but you wouldn’t
know. The gore has soaked into the paint, in the same way that some wayward darkness has saturated his soul. He clutches a boltgun – it clunks its emptiness about the chamber with every twitch of the recreant’s ceramite finger. The hollow sound of defeat.

  He stares into the shallows, his sallow face defiant and fearless. There is shame there; not for what he has done, but rather shame for what he has failed to do. A bitter vexation that plays out upon his cracked and mumbling lips. He is surrounded. Five believers who, their weapons being spent also, have taken to clutching and touching the armoured Word Bearer, like an honoured statue or protective totem. They whisper murderous encouragement and traitor-faith to their lord. They think their demigods and monsters will save them still.

  One among them is the cultist leader Seid Phegl, Cognosci of the Red Munion. I’ve encountered him before, in the dark and the deep – he came to Calth at the head of ten thousand fools, bought with lies and the simple tricks of beings from the beyond.

  The Word Bearer turns to look into the lake depths. He watches the dark water lap against the craggy walls, then turns back to the rest of the Ultramarines lining the shore.

  There will be no escape for him. He knows it, and the boltgun tumbles into the water. The reaction from the cultists is instantaneous, like a sudden affliction. They hiss and writhe about his impassive, armoured form. There are tears. There is fear.

  ‘A word with you, cousin,’ I call out across the water.

  The Word Bearer bridles. His acolytes haul at his ceramite limbs, but to no avail. He takes one last lingering look into the lake. My free hand unconsciously comes to rest upon the pommel of my sword. If my enemy attempts an escape, then I want to be ready.