Mark of Calth

by Edited by Laurie Goulding

  I am Hylas Pelion. Pelion the Lesser, Honorarius of the XIII Legion, 82nd Company.

  My being floods with hatred for my enemy. It had no right to exist in this universe.

  Ione Dodona is still screaming. The Pioneer is lost. Even petrified, the daemon-form was too much for the fragility of her all-too-human mind. I think of the battle for Calth, the war beneath its surface and the greater war that must surely follow. This, then, is the shape of the enemy to come. Increasingly, the Emperor’s true subjects and servants will face evil in such forms, brought forth from the beyond by our brothers in darkness.

  Common humanity is not ready for such visions. Madness will find them, like it has found Ione Dodona. She screams and she screams, her mind broken. Perhaps it would be a kindness to spare her this torment?

  I pluck my single remaining shell from where it is mag-locked to my belt. 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 only find in the breech of the pistol that sits brusque and empty upon my belt. I draw the pistol and thumb the bolt into it.

  The weapon comes up, level with both the crystalline abomination and the screaming Pioneer. The muzzle drifts between them. My ceramite fingertip finds its way to the trigger, and both I, Pelion the Lesser, and the weapon find our way to realisation.

  ‘I was out hunting when I saw them. They was… I don’t know what they was. Flesh in all the colours of the rainbow, changing, shifting. Dozens of mouths, moving about on their bodies, spewing fire, setting the trees alight. The forest was burning. And they was floating. I tried to bring them down, but las-fire didn’t do nothing. Didn’t even break their skin. Got their attention, though.

  ‘I ran. I ran so fast. Needed to get back to Melora. Not fast enough. There were more of them, and the cabin was burning. I heard her screaming.

  ‘I don’t know what they are, but I know I want to help you take them down. Not for the Emperor or whatever-his-name-is Guilliman.

  ‘For Melora.’

  We are supposed to know no fear.

  These are not just words. To know no fear is the core of the bio-alchemical secret worming its way through the invisible threads of our genetics. We are born to fight and die, never knowing fear. We understand it. We endure it. We conquer it.

  But we never suffer it, and thus we never know its true taste. Fear is nothing more than a biological reaction, a physiological curiosity that afflicts lesser beings with various degrees of cognitive impairment.

  This is merely the first step. First, one must know no fear. Next comes the conviction of courage: giving one’s life to the absolute purity of purpose. To rise into the ranks of the Legiones Astartes means casting all else aside. Your family is dead. Your youth is meaningless. As far as the galaxy is concerned, you were never born. You forfeit any lingering pretensions of humanity.

  One warrior is nothing. The Legion is everything.

  You have to live by that code. You have to embody those words, and ensure every indrawn breath is devoted to making them true.

  As a Space Marine, you are no longer human. You are a legionary – beyond the concerns of mortality and into the genetic purity of the transhuman. You stand clad in your Legion’s colours, carry your Legion’s symbol, and serve your Legion’s lord. You wield weapons forged in your Legion’s foundry-fires. You live and breathe and sweat your Legion’s culture, drawn from your Legion’s home world, manifested in your Legion’s traditions and rituals.

  Above the legionary is the squad – the pack, the claw, the unit, the cell. Above the squad is only the Legion. This is strength. This is duty.

  Duty must blunt all other emotion. The Legions are weapons, nothing more – warriors forged for war, no different from a ploughshare melted down to become a sword. Swords know no fear, and feel no emotion. They do not pine for the days of tilling the soil in peaceful fields, nor do they break before the first blow is even struck. The Legions, and the once-humans that make up their ranks, are the same.

  But the human mind is never a clean sheet. Even taking a child’s mind – before the realities of life teach a man to settle, to compromise, and to know his limits – a wealth of lore already colours the mind’s canvas. We are not mindless weapons, and a divorce from humanity does not mean we are wholly inhuman. Humanity is our foundation, a limitation to be built upon. Therein lies the perfect strength of the legionary’s form and function. The Emperor, for all his ignorance, got so much right. We are the weapons the human race needed to lay claim to the stars – neither human nor inhuman, but something beyond both. Transhuman, or post-human, as some of the scribes say. Or perhaps once-human is closer to the truth.

  However, as with anything touched by humans, the process is not without flaw. Some minds resist the ascension from boy to legionary, and some things are carved too deep to simply be planed away while forging the psyche of the perfect soldier. Sometimes, too much of the man remains inside the soldier. These are the unlucky and flawed, the chaff that falls from the wheat. Imperfect cogs in the perfect war machine.

  Most never last long enough to stand clad in ceramite at all, let alone march beneath the Imperium’s banners. The Legions are brutal flesh-factories, and their trials cull the weak from the strong. To be Legiones Astartes, you must know no fear and live a life of absolute duty, to a greater ideal.

  Perhaps in the future there shall be some refinement or alteration of the process, something that steals the underlying humanity that forms our foundation. If so, I would not envy the diminished generations that would follow us.

  For now, there is no sure way to murder the human spirit at the heart of every warrior. Only a fool would want to.

  But I am not certain the lords of every Legion would agree with me.

  – handwritten treatise, author unknown

  Out of ammunition and out of luck, Kaurtal knew he had finally reached safety when he found the firelight.

  The light of a humble wreckage fire caught the silhouettes of the living and the dead, painting their shadows across the cave walls. The humans were hunched, spindly things, thinned by malnutrition, bent over by wounds and weariness. Most were ravaged by radiation burns long before they had made it down into the tunnels, and they bore the Mark of Calth written in pain across their deteriorating flesh. Their shadows were careless marionettes, stunted and graceless as they danced across the stone walls.

  Kaurtal’s own image – a towering warrior with a helm crested by twin horns – showed a stark, dark grandeur that he no longer felt. His shadowy avatar displayed none of his armour’s battle damage, nor any of the weariness that sank through his body to the bone.

  The connection feed sockets running up his spine were aching drill-holes that cried out for tending. The same feeds along his shoulders and chest, where his armour linked to his genhanced physique, were punctures in his flesh, pulling raw with every movement.

  He knew exactly how long he had been here. He knew it, despite the fact he lived in a world with neither day nor night, because his eye lenses’ runic display kept track of every hour, every minute, every second he spent down here in the dark.

  He had lost his own bolter six years and two hundred and forty-six days ago. In that time, he had carried another thirteen bolters, looting them from the fallen and inevitably losing them again when the fighting was at its most savage.

  For several moments, he watched the shadow-play performance sliding over the ancient rock. His own image mocked him as it flickered against the cavern wall. Winged. Horned. The sight his enemies saw. The sight his enemies had seen for almost seven years.

  ‘Lord,’ the pack of scabbed, bloody wretches called to him. ‘Lord. Great lord, please. Your blessing, lord.’

  Incredible. Desperation had them believing that he cared about their lives.

  Kaur
tal ignored them all, moving to the hulking figure at the rear of the cavern. More of the dregs and survivors scattered before him, their shadows dancing across the walls in devilish haste.

  The figure greeted him from the darkness, doing him great respect by acknowledging him first. Its eye lenses were the same blue as the drought season sky above the City of Grey Flowers, back home on Colchis. It stood in the motionless drone of active armour; its helm tusked, its great shoulders speaking of monstrous, inhuman strength. To Kaurtal, it was merely a warrior in Cataphractii plate. To the humans that served it, it was a killer made in the image of a hunched and long-forgotten primate godling. Its voice was a vox-growled expulsion of thunder on the horizon.

  ‘Jerudai Kaurtal,’ it said. ‘You still live.’

  Kaurtal nodded, with a hum of his own armour joints. ‘So it seems.’

  The Terminator lifted a ponderous claw. It might have been a welcome.

  ‘And so our paths cross once more,’ it said, ‘on the two thousand, four hundred and fortieth day.’ No surprise that Thuul cited the exact day, as well. They all counted the days. It was how the Word Bearers greeted one another. ‘Are you the last of the Twisting Rune?’

  Kaurtal was not sure. He had seen none of his Chapter in weeks. Exactly fifty-one days, to be precise, and those he had found had been bodies going to rot in an otherwise abandoned cave.

  ‘I believe I might be,’ he admitted. ‘We should speak.’

  The Terminator was silent for several seconds before replying. ‘Then speak.’

  ‘Not here.’ Kaurtal gestured to the slaves.

  The two Word Bearers moved further into the cave, and into a tunnel leading away from it.

  ‘Thuul,’ he said to the Terminator. ‘How do you tolerate them? How do you endure the whispers and the weeping, night after night? Their prayers scrape my ears.’

  The Terminator trudged through the deeper blackness, its heavy tread giving an echoing rumble. The only light was that which they brought with them: the iceburn blue-white glare of their eye lenses. Onwards they walked, into the silence, breaking the serenity with boot-steps on stone and grinding armour joints.

  ‘Do we not deserve their reverence?’ Thuul asked. He had the voice of a scholarly avalanche. ‘And do the gods not deserve worship?’

  As Kaurtal walked, he let his gloved hand trail across the jagged rock wall. ‘The gods have abandoned us,’ he said. ‘As has Lorgar.’

  Thuul’s tusked helm gave a rattle of vox that sounded like a slipping gear wheel. ‘Blasphemy, brother? From one of the exalted Gal Vorbak?’

  Kaurtal’s laughter was dry in the dark. ‘It has been more than half a decade since Kor Phaeron fled. Seven years of these tunnels lit by ritual fires and the muzzle flash of enemy bolters. Seven years of smelling the salt-stink of human sweat, and the spicy musk of leaking sores growing from radiation burns. Lorgar is not coming back for us, Thuul. He was never coming back for us.’

  ‘The sun still bleeds poison into the void.’

  ‘Calth’s surface may be lethal to life, but the ebb of a dying sun hardly threatens a rescue fleet, shielded against the radiation.’

  Thuul rounded on him. ‘Rescue is a coward’s word, Jerudai.’

  ‘Call it whatever you wish. Would our lordly father even need a fleet? He hears the warp’s song. He weaves it and rends it with the ease of silk. Why not carve reality open and come to our aid?’

  There was a pause as Thuul mused on this. ‘You drank from the Blessed Son’s wrist and tasted the divine blood. How can you, of all the Legion, bring this blasphemy to me? What madness incites you to walk this holy darkness and speak such heresy?’

  ‘Speak the truth,’ Kaurtal quoted without a smile, ‘even if your voice shakes.’

  The Terminator trudged on. Kaurtal allowed the silence for a time, but he was not the most patient soul ever to wear the red of the XVII.

  ‘Have you noticed that after two years, even the empty tunnels smell of blood?’

  Thuul grunted acknowledgement, but said nothing more.

  ‘Your servants have been mauled,’ Kaurtal prompted.

  ‘Yesterday,’ Thuul replied.

  ‘The Thirteenth hit you hard.’

  ‘Harder than you realise,’ said Thuul. ‘The blood you’re smelling is mine.’

  His war-plate was as ruined as Kaurtal’s – as ruined as every Word Bearer stranded on this dead world of cavern-cities. The scent of leaking life could be coming from any one of the charred ruptures in the thick plating. He tapped an armoured fist against his chestplate, breaking the silence with a steel-drum clang. ‘One of my hearts has stopped beating. The other labours even now. I may have a few days remaining to me, but no more than a handful. The gods only know what’s burst inside me.’

  There was another long silence before Kaurtal spoke again.

  ‘I have been moving through the underworld. Fighting when I must, but more often merely watching, waiting. Learning.’

  Thuul regarded him with soulless eye lenses, awaiting an explanation. Kaurtal gave it with a sigh. ‘I have been counting the dead. Taking heed of all that now lie lifeless.’

  ‘Thousands of the Ultramarines have fallen,’ the Terminator said. His voice was sincere enough to make the words an avowal. ‘Perhaps tens of thousands.’

  ‘I am not speaking about counting them, Thuul.’

  Another pause. Kaurtal could almost hear Thuul’s thoughts, whispering and clicking with displeasure.

  ‘I’m going to the surface,’ Kaurtal said at last.

  Thuul turned his tusked helm to the other warrior. ‘To go to the surface is to die.’

  ‘For you, perhaps. I am Gal Vorbak. My blood is poison. My touch corrodes flesh. I have eaten nothing but ash for over a year.’ He showed his gauntlet, the red ceramite ridged and knuckled with bleached skeletal spurs. The same growths showed across his war-plate – his bones had been hardening and pushing through the ceramite as the months passed in the dark. Surprisingly, the pain had been nothing more than a dull throb, no different from the muscle aches of daily training.

  The Terminator gave his passive regard. ‘You believe the daemon inside you renders you immune to the radiation of a sickened sun?’

  Not an easy question to answer. The daemon within him had been silent and unreachable for months. He was half-convinced that his last battle with an Ultramarines Librarian had somehow left him depleted – perhaps exorcised was a truer word – with the divinity flayed from his flesh. The Emperors lapdogs were beginning to realise the value of the forbidden Librarius once more.

  ‘I believe we’ll see soon enough.’ Kaurtal’s wings gave another shiver. Closed tight to his back, they were a worthless cloak of thick-veined, folded leathery membranes. He had not flown in months. Few caverns were spacious enough to allow such freedom.

  ‘But why the surface, brother? What awaits you there?’

  ‘The dead,’ Kaurtal replied. ‘I intend to live. I will escape Calth, even if I am the only Word Bearer to do so. And I will remember who died here. I will make the Legion remember.’

  ‘They already remember. We cannot leave until the war is won.’

  ‘You are deluding yourself.’ Kaurtal lifted an arm, where a beaten-iron star medallion was bolted and hammered into the ceramite of his forearm. ‘Where is the Graven Star?’ He turned his hand, showing a ritual engraving of a sinuous serpent. ‘Where are the Asps of the Sacred Sands?’ He reached to his chestplate, where a ruined parchment showed the faint signs of a red palm print. ‘Where is the Flayed Hand? I will tell you, Thuul. The Graven Star are dead. The Asps of the Sacred Sands are dead. The Flayed Hand are corpses at the bottom of a pit, skulls leering up in silent laughter at their fate, lost to an Ultramarines ambush. How many of us remain? We lead starving weaklings in a war with only one end – the Thirteenth will destroy us, and our own Legion will reme
mber none of it.’

  Kaurtal turned his pauldron as he spoke, showing the mangled sigil of the Twisting Rune Chapter. ‘How many Chapters have died down here, Thuul? It has been seven years. Where are your brothers?’ He gestured to the snarling daemon face on the Terminator’s shoulder guard. ‘Where are the rest of Hol Beloth’s men?’

  The two Word Bearers stood in the pregnant silence, saying no more. To Kaurtal, the dark cavern was a manifestation of every other cave; it embodied every night spent down here in the lightless, blood-smelling black.

  Thuul finally spoke. ‘You truly mean to abandon the Legion, Jerudai?’

  ‘They abandoned us,’ Kaurtal replied. ‘Lorgar isn’t coming. The Legion has left us here to die. I am going to the surface.’

  ‘You are damning yourself to apostasy.’ The Terminator growled a Colchisian command, and blades lengthened from their housings on the back of his oversized gauntlets. ‘And you know I must kill you for even voicing all this,’ admitted Thuul.

  Kaurtal nodded. ‘I know you must try.’

  Bad secrets always tended to be buried the deepest. After leaving Thuul’s cavern, bloodstained and even more battered than when he had arrived, it took Kaurtal almost a month to reach the surface. The journey was not an easy one. The Underworld War raged, as it had raged for almost seven years, in brutal spits and spurts, filling the caves with the grind of overwhelming violence for several nights, then fading back to give a few hours of respite.

  Kaurtal had fought on Isstvan V, when the skies burned black from the funeral pyres of three butchered Legions. Until he had been forced to burrow beneath the surface of Calth, he had honestly believed Isstvan to be the pinnacle of what was possible in war.