by Rob Sanders
As the portal was about to prove.
Klute went to speak again but Czevak’s face suddenly changed – the way it used to as the elusive solution of some long fraught problem came to him in the middle of an unrelated conversation. His finger shot up as Klute’s lips went to work on a greeting he’d long rehearsed in his head and dreams. ‘Raimus, help me out here. Do you remember that frightful business on Tannit’s World?’
Klute’s face creased in recollection, then his eyes widened in realisation. No further words were necessary. The sprightly Czevak simply grabbed Klute with a strength and athleticism he could never have exhibited in his ‘younger’ days and flung the inquisitor around, towards the archway of the Lost Fornical. With their backs to the structure, they could see little of the bolt-swarming portal; they didn’t have to. The Malescaythe’s second visitor of the evening had just arrived.
The wraithbone trembled and Klute fancied that he even heard a creak. Everywhere at once there was the effervescent gush of furious waters, like a dam had broken, which on some level it had. A gargantuan entity spilled from the Fornical and into the reality of the hangar.
A torrent of quicksilver suddenly streamed from the archway, exploding out across the ancient dais and flooding the archeodeck. The liquid metal seethed and spumed, blistering the hangar floor. It sloshed and spread perversely, flowing up and over obstacles and pooling towards anything with a soul.
The Savlar response was obvious and immediate. The Chem-Dogs – breathing deep in their nitro-chem inhalers – unleashed a hesitant hell, throwing up fountains of silver in the onrushing surge. Slugs and las-bolts lanced the entity in a fire-at-will firestorm but the barrage did little to halt the advance of the ichorous creature.
The front line of Chem-Dogs died quickly. This wouldn’t have surprised many of them; it had become somewhat of an in-joke among the Savlar that those chosen and released from the stockade by Steward-Sergeant Rourke and assigned to duties with the inquisitor and his retinue were unlikely to return – such was the danger of the ordo’s work to ordinary men. This was demonstrated in the way the Savlar Chem-Dog Guardsmen panicked in the face of the terrifying supernatural force and became intent on reloading their scavenged weaponry, allowing the sentient mercury to pool about their boots, before soaking up them like litmus paper. It oozed in through their ears, eyes and between their screaming lips, filleting them from the inside out as irregular blossoms of blades and spikes suddenly exploded from their backs and chests like an iron maiden in reverse.
Torqhuil was nearby also. He snatched his helmet from one of his mechanised appendages and donned it swiftly, effectively sealing him off from the predations of the possessed quicksilver. The silver deluge flooding the hangar seemed to flow around the Relictors Space Marine, however; almost repelled magnetically by the presence of the sacred oils, wards and purity seals emblazoned on his ornate armour.
Hessian had been caught in the sterling torrent as it blasted its animate way across the hangar and disappeared into its daemonic depths. Epiphani and Torres – sword drawn – had demonstrated the good sense to take to high ground, climbing up one of the mounted catwalks that adorned the hangar wall. Father followed them using his tiny anti-gravity drive and the three of them looked down upon the chaos and confusion of the archeodeck through two pairs of eyes.
The Mechanicus archeoxenologists who hadn’t been cut to pieces and swamped by the warp creature were now hiding behind the huge shoulders of Saul Torqhuil. The Space Marine’s servo-arms and mechadendrite tool bits snapped and whirred at anything warped and daemonic that in turn reached out for him. For extra insurance, the Techmarine swung his power axe experimentally about him in a provocative arc.
Like the decorator painting himself into the corner of a room, the Chem-Dogs were huddled together around their prayer-booming steward-sergeant, presenting a nest of barrels to the hangar and casting an improvised arc of crackling las-bolts and firepower around them. The silver waters seethed and sprayed as the supernatural tsunami rolled in and swallowed their ammunition whole.
Klute and their visitor remained on the bleached dais of the Lost Fornical, giving the dwindling stream of mercury a wide birth as the last of the entity spilled out of the warp gate from the webway beyond.
‘What is it?’ Klute yelled over the din and destruction.
The young Czevak’s eyes were roving, his mouth moving but his mind elsewhere.
‘An ichneuplasm,’ Czevak explained, ‘called the Milk of Malevolsia. It breached a derelict section of the webway and the damned thing has been trying to flay my soul across three sectors.’
‘How can we stop it?’ Klute bawled at this fresh-faced version of his master.
‘Well, quite,’ Czevak said, mistaking Klute’s question for the kind of pessimist defeatism that he usually encountered in visitors to the Eye.
Klute took in the desolation of the hangar. The monster was everywhere, sloshing against the hangar walls and sucking souls into a swirling vortex that was burrowing into the centre of the archeodeck. A mirror-glazed breaker drove towards him, devolving as it did into a fang-faced, appendage-fiend. Klute stood there, staring at himself, reflected in the brazen jaws of his killer.
Like a chromatic comet, Czevak shot between them, the metallic effervescence following the movement and shattered afterimage of his coat. As the inquisitor skidded to a halt – the prismatic haze reforming around him – he waved his arms, keeping the monstrous appendage-fiend’s attentions on him. Klute made the most of the opportunity by bringing up his shotgun sidearm from the folds of his robe and blasting the amorphous daemon with silver shot and consecrated salt. The blast buried itself in bubbling warpflesh before streaking pellets of blessed shrapnel exploded throughout the plasm. The shot left a ragged hole that Klute enlarged by working the lever action and repeatedly mauling the monster with a scatter shot exorcism.
The appendage-fiend turned back on Klute, hissing through its mirrored maw as he cranked and emptied the shotgun at it. The inquisitor blasted the impressive set of jaws into shattered fragments with one final shot before realising that the hissing wasn’t coming from the creature at all. Imbedded grains of Saint Vesta’s salt were doing their worst, burning through the warpflesh. The appendage steamed, dribbled and deteriorated back into the daemon flood.
Klute allowed his rigid arms to slacken and the weapon with them. He grunted; there wasn’t enough Saint Vesta’s salt in the sector to saint-seed the colossal entity with. Czevak was wandering across the wraithbone dais, taking in the carnage the beast was wreaking across the archeodeck: the armoured Adeptus Astartes fighting for his life, the huddled tech-adepts, the Guardsmen – barrels alight and low on ammunition – and the figures retreating up the catwalk.
‘How do we destroy it?’ Klute put to his friend and master once again.
‘Where’s the nearest logic engine?’ Czevak snapped back.
‘Why?’
Czevak was not used to consulting on impulsive plans of action. ‘Codifier, runebank, anything with cabling and an impulse interface.’
Klute nodded with exaggeration at the large bulkhead Torres had ordered sealed from the outside.
Klute watched the High Inquisitor step across the dais towards the bulkhead. Between the Fornical and the bulkhead lay a small ocean of daemonic deluge and the inquisitor wasn’t keen on losing his master to some suicide run mere moments after finding him.
‘You can’t make that,’ Klute said with grim confidence. ‘No one can make that.’ Czevak knew that his former interrogator was right. The Domino field on his Harlequin coat gave the appearance of speed; it didn’t make the wearer – especially a graceless human – any physically faster. And that was what Czevak would have to be to reach the far end of the hangar.
‘We’re going to need a distraction,’ Czevak said.
‘That’s one hell of a distraction,’ Klute replied, and then again to himself. ‘One hell of a distraction.’ Epiphani’s prediction came back to haunt
the inquisitor.
Klute died a little inside. He knew what was necessary, what had to be done. Action or inaction, damnation waited for them down either road and in the end, Klute was forced to pick what he thought was marginally the lesser of two evils. He’d damn himself before actually setting the abominate free, but Klute could live with loosening the daemonhost’s bindings a little. Through gritted teeth he began reciting some of the incantations Phalanghast had taught him.
A horrible churning began at the centre of the daemonic lake. The silver waters suddenly thrashed with a molten glow. A gargled roar of exaltation built from the epicentre of the hellish brilliance, the climax of which blew apart the hangar lamps in a cascade of sparks. As the archeodeck descended into a furnace-like twilight, lit only by the molten metal at the heart of the ichneuplasm and the ghostly radiance of the Fornical, the air rang with a harsh sibilance signalling an alteration of states. Liquid to gas. The aqueous warpflesh glowed to whiteness before seething towards the ceiling in a cloud of mercurial vapour. At the centre of the evaporation knelt Hessian, like an obscene statue – a heretic’s idol, pulled presently from the fire of the forge. His perfect skin was a blinding shell, scorching the air about him.
The ichneuplasm, which had tried to swallow the daemonhost whole, now found itself warp-scolded from the inside out. As Hessian cooled to nakedness, his eyes still aflame with terrible beauty and brilliance, the full extent of Phalanghast’s handiwork became apparent, with every centimetre of the vassal’s body covered with ornate lettering and High Gothic. The creature was a walking scripture. The daemonic deluge’s response to the threat was immediate and devastating, sweeping in on the daemonhost in the form of a colossal, argent tidal wave. As Hessian’s form became a vortex of flame once more, the daemonhost ran at the Milk of Malevolsia and left the deck, surging at the rogue wave on the stream of flame erupting from its body. Like a fireball, the abomination punched through the sea wall of warpflesh and out through the other side. The entity crashed back to the deck in infernal agony.
Klute turned to Czevak, but the High Inquisitor was already gone.
With the attention of the enormous entity dominated by Hessian’s furious assault, the silver shores of the ichneuplasm had receded, gathering in the centre of the hangar. This reclaimed space was now an assault course of debris and twisted metal: archeocrates, forklift dozers and torn up decking. As the younger, agile Czevak shot along the wall, hurdling and rolling under obstacles, a ghostly spectrum of splintered colour trailed the inquisitor.
The horrific entity was more than able to deal with multiple threats or victims, despite the distraction of the daemonhost. This was evidenced in the fashion in which it still snatched archeoxenologists from under the sweeps of Torqhuil’s axe and showered the Savlar Guardsmen with droplets of sentient evil that trickled for their eyes and ears – wherever the globules could do most agonising damage. Streams of silver jetted from the entity’s nebulous form, the monster attempting to hose Czevak down with its living effluence. The inquisitor changed course, bounding several steps up the wall before leaping for an overturned Sentinel powerlifter. The fountain followed, dowsing the walker and stalking Czevak as he vaulted for a demolished stairwell, swinging like a gymnast from the smooth metal of a detached handrail. Landing awkwardly on top of a cargo-skiff, Czevak rolled – avoiding another converging stream of metallic discharge – before sliding across the roof on the sheen of his coat. Dropping off the edge and down behind the safety of the cargo-skiff, Czevak bent over to catch his breath.
The inquisitor found himself suddenly exposed as the shadow of the cargo-skiff shortened to nothing. Initially, the inquisitor expected to turn and find that the ichneuplasm had seized the craft in its tentacular grasp and removed it. Instead, he found that Klute’s daemonhost was the root of the problem. The cargoskiff was ablaze with the same unnatural flame that enveloped the daemonhost. The creature’s eyes flared with psychic intensity as he moved the heavy craft with the free-flowing telekinetic power of the warp. Flicking his horn-budded head at the entity, the daemonhost slammed the ichneuplasm with the tumbling dead-weight of the cargo-skiff. Flaming catwalks and platforms were mercilessly ripped from the wall of the hangar by the monster’s unseen power and flew over Czevak’s head at the spuming entity, cutting whirling columns of silver in half.
Czevak made his move, blasting up the final stretch, darting and weaving between the cables and bars that were falling from the supernatural carnage above. Slamming his shoulder into the bulkhead, the inquisitor came to a skidding halt under a walkway bearing a shapely patrician in naval garb and captain’s epaulettes, flanked by a servo-skull and what at first he took to be an unusually modish astropath. They had been following his progress across the archeodeck and were now staring down at him through the walkway floor grille.
As their attention transferred back to the titanic battle, Czevak turned in time to see the daemonhost spear the aqueous body of the ichneuplasm with a mangled catwalk. The blazing abominate had missed a perverse channel of the silver sentience, however, which took his legs out from under him. As he tried to get up, wave upon towering wave of plasm crashed down on him, slamming the creature senseless into the deck.
Time was running out. Thrusting his fist into the air, Czevak unlocked a wrist-mounted stinger. Similar to the much larger Harlequin’s Kiss used by the guardians of the Black Library to inject monofilament wires into their victims and slice them up from the inside, Czevak sported a small tubular attachment, culminating in a tapered point. This injector spike was effective enough as a weapon – although the inquisitor had never used it as such. With as much force as he could muster, Czevak punched the injector point of the alien object straight through the metal wall and into the codifier bank next to the bulkhead. Like the Harlequin’s Kiss, the Stinger shot its spool of monofilament wires explosively into the wall. Tearing his wrist back, the wires and hooks retracted, dragging with them a bundled collection of aging power cables, vox-wires and hydraulic lines. Czevak tore the bundle out of the wall arm over arm with all of its associated ports, vents and consecrated unguent.
‘What are you doing?’ Captain Torres called down at him harshly.
‘Saving your ship,’ Czevak muttered imperiously to himself – the fact that his actions had introduced the ichneuplasm to the vessel was lost on him at that moment. His fingers slipped and slid over the bundle as he stripped back wires and lines in his search for one specific cable. The inquisitor risked a glance across the hangar. The Milk of Malevolsia was pressing its globular advantage. While the entity whipped itself up into a silver cyclone, whirling the archeodeck into a vortex of destruction, the daemonhost was down on its knees, struggling to re-ignite. As his perfect body writhed once more in lucent flame, he took several defiant steps and launched back into the darkness of the hangar. At that moment the hurricane swept forward, swallowing the daemonhost and throwing it around its circumference. As the fiery figure swiftly became a halo of flame plummeting uncontrollably through the whirling warpflesh, the ichneuplasm collapsed, its silver waters crashing in on themselves. The elemental energy had been spent on propelling the daemonhost, with as much centrifugal force as possible at the hangar wall.
With limbs flailing and its body spinning head over torso, like a knife tossed from some giant hand, the extinguished daemonhost flew through the air. It hit the large archeodeck bulkhead with such excruciating force that the heavy gauge door buckled and deformed around the creature’s rag doll body. Crumbling to the deck with a sickly thud, the daemonhost created an untidy pile and remained still.
The ichneuplasm wasted no time in reaffirming its affection for Czevak and, like a redirected river, washed off the far wall of the hangar and coursed across the archeodeck at the bulkhead. As desperation built and fingers slipped, Czevak shared his horror between the oncoming entity and the oily bundle. Hidden in the slimy nest he found what he was looking for: a mind-impulse interface and port. Scooping the muck out of the interface w
ith his finger, the inquisitor screwed the gritty threads into an interface socket in the back of his skull.
The ichneuplasm raged on. The Malescaythe gave a visible shudder.
‘What?’ the captain exploded on the walkway above, finger to her vox-bead. ‘The Geller field is dropping!’ Then, to Czevak. ‘What are you doing?’
As the silver torrent swept the deck, Klute emptied his shotgun at the beast, frantically working the lever action on the street silencer. Torqhuil sliced through the passing deluge with his crackling axe and the remaining Savlar – driven to inspiration or insanity – peppered the creature once more with their assorted firearms.
‘Forty per cent… thirty per cent, still dropping,’ the captain repeated from her vox-bead. ‘Madman! This is the Eye – you’ll kill us all!’ she screamed at Czevak, but the inquisitor was too busy interfacing with the ship and preparing himself for the bone-crunching slam of the ichneuplasm’s unstoppable surge.
The Malescaythe rang with the cacophony of bells, alarms and searing klaxons, heralding the impending doom of the vessel. The amethyst dreadspace outside the hanger turned sickly white. The dark, airbrushed outlines of daemonic warp predators pushed the indescribable horror of their soul-ravenous faces up against the weakening bubble of reality surrounding the rogue trader. They snapped and leered at each other and the ship as their combined warp-ethereal mass began to overwhelm and seep through the collapsing Geller field. Like frightened children, the Malescaythe’s crew and company covered their eyes to save polluting their minds and took solace in rote-learned prayers and catechisms.
The silver entity flowed on, furiously building into the wave with which it intended to pulverise Czevak and then – in its perverse currents – feast upon his soul. The Milk of Malevolsia was close enough for Czevak to see his own face in its silver waters, when the daemonic creature lurched. Ironically, it reminded the inquisitor of a swimmer seized from beneath by a monster of the deep. Every drop of the damned creature seemed frozen in position, unaffected by gravity or reality even. A shocking moment later the silver flood rushed towards the hangar ceiling, cascading the distance upwards; splashing and pooling on the roof of the huge chamber as it had on the deck. Then, once again it fell – the mercurial shower seemingly thrashing in an internal torment and horror of its own. When it hit the archeodeck once again, splashing and settling to stillness it was devoid of the warped sentience it had demonstrated up until that point. It was merely a small lake of tranquil silver. All in the hangar stepped forwards and stared into the sheen of its reflective waters.
