Mark of Calth

by Edited by Laurie Goulding

  As I scrape my plate through the narrow gap, I find myself looking into the face of Olexander. The first of my party to go missing, he is in shadow also – dissolving silently under the beams of my suit lamps. His statue soaks up the illumination like a sponge: the helmet, the crystalline shaft of a las-fusil clutched in one hand, the other hand stretched to hide his eyes from the sudden horror he spotted in the darkness of the tunnel entrance.

  The tunnel entrance in which I’m standing.

  Olexander stands at the head of crowd of such statues, and I realise that I’m back in the unholy temple-cavern, the twisting tunnels of the Penetralia somehow leading back upon themselves.

  ‘Phornax!’ I call out. ‘The foe is playing a game that I cannot win. They’ve lost themselves and they wish for us to follow.’

  Phornax enters the cavern through the narrowing with the same difficulty I experienced, yet Ione Dodona and the Cicatricians slip through with ease, not wishing to be left behind in the passageway on their own.

  ‘The Word Bearers elude us,’ I say, lending words to what everyone else is thinking.

  ‘The Word Bearers are dead,’ Phornax replies, his conclusion flat and lacking in the comfort such reasoning should inspire.

  ‘Then who is it?’ I demand. ‘Those weakling cultists?’

  Phornax sweeps his outstretched gauntlet across the statues, set in their ghoulish tableau. ‘They invited something into the deep and the dark,’ the former Librarian insists. ‘Something they couldn’t control. Something that destroyed them.’

  I can’t quite bring myself to believe it. So many men lost so swiftly. No shouts. No screams. No enemy sightings. Daesenor gone without a single bolt round discharged…

  ‘Some… thing,’ I echo.

  ‘What is it?’ Ione Dodona murmurs.

  ‘Something that kills on sight,’ Phornax replies. ‘An unnatural. It hides in the shadows, waiting for us to seek it out with our lights. The horror of its otherworldly appearance alone seems enough to kill.’

  The shadows lurch forward as the barrel-lamp belonging to one of the Cicatricians suddenly disappears. We all turn, weapons raised, but the unseen beast has left nothing but a figure, carved into the darkness. Dodona screams.

  ‘Get back!’ I roar. ‘It’s in here with us!’ Bundling her behind me, I heft my shield high. She screams again. I cannot blame her. She is only human.

  ‘Lord Emperor,’ one of the soldiers cries. ‘It’s–’

  And the Cicatricians are gone, petrified into crystallised darkness. Their curiosity has killed them.

  Without thinking, I almost turn to look before I catch myself. As quick as lightning, I grab Phornax and Dodona. ‘Close your eyes, both of you!’

  Fear is a stranger to my hearts. I am Legiones Astartes – I am an Ultramarine – but there is something primal about the fear of darkness. It is a fear of the unknown that even I can understand. I keep my eyes fixed upon the engravings at my feet.

  ‘How can we kill it?’ Dodona shrieks, gripping tightly onto my shield arm.

  ‘We can’t,’ answers Phornax. Though he would deny it, I can feel him casting about with his feathery witch-sight, brushing against my soul in the darkness.

  My concern for them becomes concern for all our people, all who eke out their existence beneath the standard of the 82nd Company in Arcology Magnesi. What if such an abomination were to find its way in?

  I cannot allow that. Tauro Nicodemus must be warned.

  ‘Brother Phornax,’ I find myself saying, ‘take Dodona and get back to the terminus chamber. Do not delay. Make your way back to Magnesi and inform the tetrarch of what we faced here. The Word Bearers doomed themselves and us along with them. He will know what to do.’

  I feel objection building in my brother, but there’s no time.

  ‘Hurry,’ I urge him.

  Phornax slips a gauntlet under Ione Dodona’s arm. Though she pulls hard on my vambrace, her dread allows her to be dragged away.

  ‘What about you?’ she shrieks back.

  ‘Get Brother Phornax back to Magnesi,’ I command her. I bring the blade of my sword up sharply and carve through the crystalline form of a Word Bearer statue nearby. It shatters, and the cacophony fills the temple-chamber – the screech and fracture of tumbling obsidian echoes through the tunnels and crevices of the Penetralia.

  ‘I’ll draw it down to me,’ I tell her, ‘and give you a chance to escape.’

  She starts to speak, but my blade smashes through two more Word Bearers.

  ‘Go!’

  The tunnel devours them like a great serpent. I stand alone in a sphere of my own meagre radiance. The blackness about me is overwhelming. I feel its intention to extinguish my very existence. Who will know of Pelion? Pelion the Lesser, who fought an ancient evil in the bowels of a doomed world like the heroes of ages past, freeing the empire of Ultramar from the tyranny of things-that-should-not-be?

  I put my combat shield through a cultist. My sword cuts another in half. It rains shards of pure darkness, and the shattering feels too harsh for the chamber to contain.

  Impossibly, amongst the raucous destruction, I hear a crash from the far end of the chamber. I spin around – combat shield out in front of me and blade poised to strike. Some kind of unseen beast is headed straight towards me in the gloom.

  It’s been drawn. The distraction has succeeded. Now I will pay for my success.

  I prepare myself for the horror I’m about to witness. Some dreadful thing, so disturbing in form as to be beyond my imagining. Some abominate existence that lives only to end my own. I feel the cold perversity of its solitude, its cursed power damning it to an eternity alone, ending even those foolish enough to summon it into the light. The violence of its advance burns with primordial fury. A tsunami of crystalline frag threatens to engulf me.

  In that moment, I find myself thinking of Azul Gor. His face, full of bitterness and hatred, flashes momentarily before my downcast eyes. I think on his insistence that he could end me with a single world. Indeed, that word – ‘Penetralia’ – has led me to my doom.

  Then, I realise.

  Azul Gor survived the attentions of this beast of the beyond. Upon its summoning, the monster turned all who had gathered to witness it into solid darkness – perhaps Azul Gor was not invited to the ritual. Perhaps he had other, more important duties, or perhaps he had merely sensed the coming destruction.

  Regardless, escaping the Penetralia cost him his eyes.

  The beast is all but upon me, vomited forth from the darkness and smashing an explosive path through the victim-statues. That it means to end me is clear.

  I bring the sword to the side of my neck. There is only one thing left to do – I run the blade across my throat. Its sharpened molecular edge slips into the groove created between my helm and plate seals. It slices through the power cabling and neural feeds. The light in my visor dies. The helmet’s optics darken, and the data from my autosenses is cut.

  I impose upon myself an artificial blindness. A disability that might save my life. Everything sizzles to static-shot black.

  The impact of the beast knocks me clean off my feet, and I crash backwards through the shattered assembly. The thing feels like a charging beast of burden, some bull-grox on the stampede. It’s hard to ascertain its size from such an attack, but the monster strikes me as a powerful quadruped, or a perpetually hunched thing lunging forwards on two more powerful legs.

  No horns. No claws. No snaggle-toothed jaw.

  Perhaps no jaws at all. Just an otherworldly bulk, full of fury and ancient hideousness.

  The world has flipped about me in tumultuous darkness. I scramble back to my feet, sword and combat shield in hand. I shut down my suit lamps, plunging the entire chamber into an abyssal blackness. I doubt that this will faze the daemon-thing. I call upon my decades of training and my other sup
erhuman senses. It is difficult – as a Space Marine I rely on sight, augmented both genetically and technologically, to kill and to avoid being killed.

  Instead I tune into the beast’s movements. With my feeds and helm power cut, I cannot enhance my hearing. My ears are sensitive, though, even through the dead shell of my helmet. In a cave now carpeted with glassy shards of darkness, I can hear the crunch of its footfalls.

  I immerse myself in a world of sound. I detect every creak of every shard; the whisper of pulverised blackness underfoot; crystalline fragments evaporating into wisps of powdered darkness.

  It’s circling me. It’s confused. I haven’t succumbed to its curse-power.

  Perhaps I’m the first to do so. I enjoy its perturbation. I concentrate. I focus.

  Crunching. The sound of more shards crushed into splinters. It’s behind me now. It’s behind me… A chill snakes up my spine, but I quash it with my resolve. Such misgiving belongs not in the minds of the Legiones Astartes.

  The thing closes. I sense its horrid form at my back. I imagine its outline, and I strike.

  I spin, crunching shadow-sand beneath my boots. I slam the monster with my combat shield, then back-slam it, my short blade sweeping forwards. The sword cuts through daemon-flesh, and cuts deeply.

  I hear nothing. Not a screech. Not even a whimper of pain.

  Perhaps the being doesn’t even have a mouth, or any organ for such expression? Instead, I feel the ache of its agony within my mind.

  I turn on my heel, my blade biting into it once more from the flank. I hear the crunch of an agonised stumble. The bastard thing certainly didn’t like that.

  It circles, but gives me a wide berth. I turn with it, my sword and shield raised.

  ‘Come on!’ I roar at the beast. ‘Come on, hell-spawn! Face your death!’

  Incredibly, it has grown wary of me. I don’t think that I could destroy it with my modest short sword alone, but it definitely doesn’t seem to want another taste of the blade.

  Then, the monster does exactly what I don’t want it to.

  The crunching footfalls retreat – the thing is leaving. It has tired of playing with the blinded toy that hurts it every time, and there is other prey taking flight through the tunnels of the Penetralia. Prey that can be horrified into oblivion by the monster’s ghastly appearance.

  I swing my sword and shield about me wildly, smashing more of the statues to pieces, hoping to entice the monster back. I fail.

  Sheathing my blade, I reach out with one gauntlet and stumble for the rocky reassurance of the temple-chamber wall. I have to find my way back to the terminus. I cannot risk taking off my helm – this could be a trick, and the beast could be waiting for just such an opportunity.

  I have no real idea what it is capable of. It follows no theoretical that I can recall.

  So I make the lonely, stumbling trek back through the Penetralia – Pelion the Lesser, lost in a labyrinth, lost in the darkness outside of my war-plate, and trapped in the darkness within. A deeper darkness, if ever there was one.

  Pushing myself off one tunnel wall and scraping to another with my shield outstretched, I try to retrace my route through the winding maze of caves and passageways. It seems to take an eternity, knowing that every step of the way the beast could be ghosting my clumsy footfalls, and knowing equally that the monster could have reached Phornax and Dodona by now. Knowing that it could have them, before they have chance to power up the mag-lev engine and make their submerged escape.

  I would warn them, but for the severance of my vox-link. I hurry, but my haste is enemy to my intention. I stumble. I fall. I get up. I feel my way on.

  I know that I have reached the terminus chamber when I hear the water – the lap of the lake against the rocky shore. In my blindness, sound has become my greatest guide. I stop, and I listen.

  I can hear movement. Something paces the moist rock of the shoreline. Beyond that, I detect breathing. Shallow, terrified breathing. Not the sound of a Space Marine.

  ‘Dodona!’ I call out. Without my vox-grille, I’m forced to shout through the ceramite shell, and the sound of my voice pains my ears after so long spent in the quieted darkness.

  ‘Pelion?’ she responds with gasping relief.

  It’s a question. She can’t see me. The chamber must be in darkness. I approve. The lack of light, be it accidental or intentional, has saved her.

  She moves, ever so slightly. There is a slurp and splash of water. She’s kneeling in the shallows, hiding in plain sight.

  I hear the beast’s pace quicken. It knows where she is. It wants her to see it.

  ‘Pelion,’ Dodona whispers through the darkness. Her voice trembles. She must be cold in the water. Cold, and out of her mind with human, mortal fear. ‘It’s here…’

  ‘I know,’ I call back. ‘Brother Phornax?’

  ‘He’s gone.’

  The thing ventures into the water, its infernal legs carrying it through the shallows towards her.

  ‘Ione,’ I say, stumbling forwards along the wall of the terminus. I, too, am making for the groundwater lake. ‘Ione, I want you to stay perfectly still. Do you understand?’

  ‘I’m so scared,’ she replies, the honesty falling out of her.

  ‘I know,’ I try to reassure her. Then I lie. ‘Me too.’

  There, in the darkness of the cave and in the darkness of my helmet, I reach a conclusion. It is not enough to escape. To run for reinforcement. To flee and take the word to others that they too should flee. I am an Ultramarine. An honoured champion. Otherworld monstrosity or not, it is my duty to end this beast.

  Regardless, it is between me and my only exit. The thing must die.

  As Space Marines, we are taught and trained to make the most of any advantage that the immediate environment has to offer. I think on the mag-lev engine, and the damage it might visit upon the beast. I think on the millions of tonnes of rock hanging above us, and how I might bring it down upon the monster to crush the unlife from it. The darkness defeats me here – the daemon will not oblige me by standing in front of the tram, and if there were mining demolitions somewhere in the terminus chamber, there is no way I could find them. I discount these desperate strategies.

  I think on the darkness. I think on the light.

  The light…

  ‘I need you to do something for me, Ione,’ I call out.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘When I tell you to, close your eyes, and dive for the bottom.’

  ‘I can’t swim!’ she protests, one fear replaced by another.

  ‘You don’t need to swim. Just stay under for as long as you can. Can you do that?’

  ‘I can’t swim,’ she repeats. ‘Staying under the water won’t be a problem.’

  I listen to the monstrosity – this thing of hideous darkness that Ungol Shax has inadvertently unleashed upon the world. It strides through the shallows with predatory intent. It closes on the terrified Pioneer. I sheath my sword. I rest my shield against the wall.

  I am ready.

  ‘Now!’ I bellow. I hear her go under. The dive is messy and uncertain; there is splashing, and then nothing. She is beneath the surface.

  The beast splashes too. It is searching the shallows for its prey, staring down into the dark water.

  I reactivate my suit lamps.

  Abruptly, the movement ceases.

  Everything grows still. For an agonisingly long moment, I wait, listening to the faint lapping of the waters. I go to remove my helmet, but caution stays my hand.

  I wait. I wait to confirm what I already know. The Legiones Astartes are not particularly blessed with imagination. Tactical ingenuity, perhaps. Creativity in the construction of strategic defences. An inspiration of the moment, guiding our hand in the confusion of combat. We leave notions of fancy and the elegance of creative representation to the delicacy
of the human hand. I remember admiring the paintings of Priscina Xanthoi, remembrancer and artist on the Twelfth Expedition. I did not communicate any such sentiment to Xanthoi herself or my superiors; but staring at her paintings, her visions, her interpretations, I feared that I might lose myself within them. Her beautiful depictions of our early accomplishments, both bloody and bright, had an incredible life and interiority. She told our story in her portraits and vistas. When age began to claim her and she was summoned back to Terra, I felt that the expedition lost a little of its remembered grandeur. Our achievements never seemed so noble as when they were viewed through Priscina Xanthoi’s incredible eyes. They certainly haven’t since.

  When finally I open my eyes to the gloom of the terminus chamber, I come to wonder how the remembrancer would have painted the monstrosity that stands in the shallows before me. Would she have given it eyes, a mouth, or even a face? Perhaps her gyrinx-hair brushes might have been able to capture its full, ethereal horror. The alien nature of its existence and the revulsion of reality itself about its immaterial form. Perhaps she could have done mind-scalding justice to its chthonic grotesqueness and freakery.

  I cannot imagine such a nightmare. Unfortunately, I don’t have to.

  Ione Dodona erupts from the water, her lungs bursting to breathe the cold air again. She devotes her first lungful to the most horrified, soul-churning scream I have ever heard in my long and war-filled life. Screaming is good. Screaming means that at least she is still alive.

  My suit-lamps are casting the terminus chamber in a bleak light – light enough for the daemonic monster to have caught sight of its own reflection in the undisturbed surface of the lake.

  There is also light enough for me to see Ione Dodona stumbling backwards through the water, away from the statue of the beast, crafted in shadow.

  She is still screaming.

  I approach the indescribable horror of the crystalline thing – it is a horror beyond imagining. I fight the involuntary inclination to look away, and force myself to behold the beast. My eyes sting at the sight. I stumble. I feel my mind reel. I plunge through the glass floors of insanity. Reaching out for my training, the stunted nullification of emotional-limitation, the solid grounding of psycho-indoctrination, I claw my way back into the moment.