The Enemy Of My Enemy

by Graham McNeill

  ‘You are their leader.’

  ‘No,’ gasped Leonid. ‘I told you, I don’t–’

  ‘They still look at you as their leader,’ interrupted the Iron Warrior. ‘For this I will kill some of them now. Keep your men in line or I will kill all of them. Not you, though. Just them. All of them.’

  ‘But-‘

  ‘Silence,’ snarled Obax Zakayo. ‘Just do it. You are no use here now that the daemon has gone. You are to be taken to the Warsmith Honsou and put to work in his weapon-shops. Try and escape from him and you will not be dealt with so lightly.’

  Marched from the devastated forge, those slaves not fed inch by inch to the machines had been driven out into a twisting labyrinth of fortifications crowned with blades and kilometres of deep trenches lined with corrugated sheets of metal. Forests of razorwire linked armoured blockhouses and pillboxes bristling with heavy artillery pieces and guns that defied all proportion and reason.

  The rumble of artillery fire was a constant drone at the edge of hearing, but who was fighting and why was a mystery. Dozens of slaves died en route to whatever fate awaited them at the hands of the Warsmith Honsou, dropping in exhaustion or starvation or from the merciless beatings and random killings inflicted by Obax Zakayo.

  The gruelling death march continued for days though on a world such as this, where the sun never set and the skies never darkened, time was an absurd notion. Each day brought fresh horrors and new obscenities: roads lined with eviscerated bodies – human, alien and some so grossly misshapen as to defy any classification of form. Towers of skulls, harvest fields of billowing flesh and great monoliths raised with the scrimshawed bones of the dead.

  Leonid saw that each step brought them closer to a range of brooding, smoke wreathed mountains, their topmost peaks lost in the brightness of the sky and obscured by a layer of dark clouds. Pillars of coiling, sentient smoke rose from the plains around the mountains, called by some nameless attraction to conceal whatever terrors and wonders lurked above in the darkness.

  No matter their course, the sinister mountains always drew closer and Leonid knew with dreadful certainty that they were their destination. In the same realisation, he also knew that none of them would survive to reach the heights of those dreadful peaks.

  Each glimpse of the desolate mountains through the twisting circumvallation simultaneously fascinated and repulsed him. The citadel of Hydra Cordatus had been constructed by an unknown genius of military architecture, though compared to the monstrous fortifications raised on this world, it was a mere trifle – a footnote to the dark grandeur of this world’s defences. Leonid doubted that anything could penetrate these redoubts or that any foe could cast down its walls.

  Finally, their march had come to an end. A barbed gate of bronze led into a rectangular, earthen arena, fully a kilometre wide and twice that in length. From somewhere nearby he could hear screaming; wails of the damned in torment that set his teeth on edge and seemed to pierce his skull with lancing, glass shards of pain. The ground underfoot was surprisingly soft and loamy, crimson liquid oozing from the water-logged earth. As Leonid looked more closely, he saw that the ground was not water-logged, but soaked in fresh-spilled blood, bones and grinning skulls gleaming whitely through the red ground.

  His mind reeled at the prospect. How many must have been drained of their lifeblood to irrigate such a vast space so thoroughly? How many arteries had been emptied to satiate the vile thirst of this dark, dark earth?

  Leonid’s stomach knotted in disgust, but he had nothing in his belly to expel and dry heaved as the awful stench of fresh blood filled his senses. Sergeant Ellard held him upright as they marched across thick, timber duckboards to the centre of this place, this killing ground.

  Was that it? Was this a place of execution? Had they been brought here so that their blood might mingle with the thousands who had already been drained?

  He shook off Ellard’s hand, determined to meet whatever fate the Iron Warriors had planned for them on his feet and unaided. As they drew nearer to the centre of the arena, Leonid saw a long strip of rockcrete had been built atop the blood-soaked ground and dull, bloody rail tracks laid, running across the middle of the arena and ending at opposite walls. As they mounted the steps to the rockcrete platform, the source of the screaming was finally revealed to the Jouran slaves.

  Each sleeper laid between the rail tracks writhed in agony; a jigsaw of bodies and limbs knotted together by some dark sorcery, screaming in lunatic fever-dreams, their cries like a choir of banshees. Eyes and mouths churning in the fluid matter of each sleeper gave piteous voice to their suffering before being forced from form to formlessness that another soul might vent its endless purgatory.

  Men dropped to their knees, weeping at this fresh vileness, the frayed ends of their sanity unable to bear any more. Obax Zakayo hurled them from the platform, spinning the gibbering madmen to land in red splashes. No sooner had they landed than fleshless, bony hands reached up through the dark earth, clawing and grasping at their bodies and dragging them below the surface to whatever fate awaited them beneath.

  Leonid tried to shut out the gurgling cries of the doomed men who drowned in the bloody ground to feed the rapacious souls beneath.

  He shut his eyes…

  Splintering crystals of alternate existences clash and jangle, detaching from the walls of one plane and shifting their position to resonate at a different frequency. Echoes in time allow the planes to shift and change; altering the angles of reality to allow the dimensions to unlock, dancing in a ballet of all possibilities.

  …and cried out, his eyes snapping open again, dizzy and disorientated. He reached out to grab Ellard, steadying himself on his sergeant.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Emperor’s blood!’ hissed Leonid, looking around the death arena. He felt a sickening vibration deep in his bones as a restlessness rippled through the ground. The jagged stumps of bone jutting through the ground retreated into its sanguineous depths and the screaming sleepers howled with renewed anguish.

  Where the rail tracks vanished into the walls of this vast courtyard, streamers of multi-coloured matter were oozing from the stonework.

  Rippling spirals of reflective light coiled from the mortar, twisting the image behind like a warped lens. The walls seemed to stretch, as though being sucked into an unseen vortex behind, until there was nothing left but a rippling veil of impenetrable darkness, a tunnel into madness ringed with screaming faces.

  Warped realms, a universe and lifetimes distant, flow together, joining all points in time on the bronze bloodtracks. On a journey that leads everywhere and begins nowhere, the Omphalos Daemonium pushes itself from nothingness to form. Snaking from its daemonic womb and leaving nothing but barren rape and death in its wake.

  Obax Zakayo laughed, though Leonid could feel the fear that lurked beneath.

  And the Omphalos Daemonium came.

  Though his screaming flesh had warned him of the might and power of its evil, it had been but the merest hints of the thing’s diabolical majesty. Roaring from the tunnel mouth like a brazen juggernaut of the end times, the Omphalos Daemonium shrieked along the bloodtracks towards the horrified slaves.

  Some tried to run: they were struck down. Some dropped dead with fright while others curled into foetal balls and soiled themselves like newborns.

  Leonid dropped to his knees at the sight of the monstrous daemon engine.

  ‘It is fitting that you give homage,’ nodded Obax Zakayo.

  Vast bone-pistons drove it forward, iron and steel flanks heaving with immaterial energies. Bloody steam leaked from every demented, skull-faced rivet as wheels of tortured souls ground the tracks beneath it to feast on the oozing blood of the dead earth.

  Deep within its insane structure, it might have once resembled an ancient steam-driven locomotive, but unknown forces and warped energies had transformed it into someth
ing else entirely. The thunder of its arrival could be felt by senses beyond the pitiful five known to humankind, echoing through the planes of reality that existed and intersected within the Eye of Terror, where such things were the norm rather than the incredible.

  Behind it came a tender of dark iron and a juddering procession of boxcars, their timbers stained with aeons of blood and ordure. Leonid knew somehow how that millions had been carried to their deaths in these hellish containers; carried to whatever loathsome destination this horrifying machine desired and then exterminated. The Omphalos Daemon-ium slowed, the sleepers driven beyond sound in their torment as the towering daemon engine halted at the edge of the platform.

  Leonid wept tears of blood, his bladder and bowel voiding as the power and evil of the daemon engine swept through him. He thought he heard booming laughter and the grinding squeal of warped timber doors sliding open on runners rusted with blood.

  He rolled onto his back, seeing gusts of blood-laced steam hiss from the armoured hide of the Omphalos Daemonium. Brazen laughter rippled through the tendrils of steam as they writhed on some evil business of their own. Each tendril thickened and became more solid as they wormed through the writhing forms of the slaves on the platform.

  One lifted a sobbing man from the ground, wrapping itself around his body like a snake. Like quicksilver, the other tendrils whipped over, latching onto the body and attacking it like predators in a feeding frenzy until there was nothing left.

  Leonid blinked, too numb with horror to react as he saw the tendrils of smoke vanish and eight figures appear standing in their place. They wore grey, featureless boiler-suits and knee-high boots with silver buckles along the shins. Each carried a fearsome array of knives, hooks and saws on their leather belts.

  Their faces were human in proportion only, flensed of the disguise of skin and glistening with revealed musculature. Crude stitches crisscrossed their skulls and, as they turned their heads as though hunting by scent, Leonid saw they were utterly featureless save for distended and fanged mouths. They had no eyes, nose or ears, only discoloured, cancerous swellings that bulged and rippled beneath their fleshless skulls.

  The daemons circulated through the slaves, selecting men at random and lifting them from the ground to snap their spines and fasten fanged jaws to the blackened and swollen melanoma on their necks. Leonid pressed his hands to his ears as the daemons suckled on the cancers that grew and multiplied within the bodies of the Jouran slaves.

  One passed within a metre of Leonid and he felt a suffocating fear rise up in him, though he could barely believe that his terror could rise to greater heights.

  He saw its patchwork face swing towards him the tumourous tissue in its neck bulging with a horrid appetite as its blackened fingers reached for him, gripping his tattered uniform and hauling him upright. Its touch felt like rotted meat, wriggling with the suggestion of maggots and freshly hatched larvae. Its dead skin mask was inches from his face, its breath like a furnace of cadavers. It moved its undulating face around his, as though tasting his scent.

  ‘The Sarcomata favour you,’ hissed Obax Zakayo. ‘Corruption of the flesh given form and purpose, the malignancies devouring your body are the choicest sweetmeats to them.’

  Leonid waited for death, but the Omphalos Daemonium had greater purpose for him than mere murder, roaring in impatience as the Sarcomata’s mouth descended to the swellings on his neck. The daemon hissed in submission before tossing him through the doors of the boxcar directly behind the Omphalos Daemonium. He landed on a carpet of decomposing matter that stank of excrement and blood.

  Their loathsome hunger sated for the moment, the Sarcomata herded the rest of the slaves into the boxcars, packing them in tightly before shutting them in the darkness with nothing but their terror for company.

  ‘Where do you think they’re taking us?’ said Ellard.‘I don’t know, sergeant,’ replied Leonid, ‘but I heard that bastard Obax Zakayo mention a name. Honsou, I think.’

  ‘Honsou?’

  ‘Aye, that’s what it sounded like.’

  ‘I’ve heard that name before,’ said Ellard.

  ‘You have? Where?’

  ‘On the prison hulks that brought us here. By the sound of it, I think he was their war leader on Hydra Cordatus.’

  Leonid shivered, remembering the sight of the Iron Warriors’ leader as he stood before the walls of the citadel. Captain Eshara had called him a Warsmith and Leonid remembered the blasted rune standard and the nauseous terror that settled in his belly at the sight of such an ancient and terrible warrior.

  If they were truly to be delivered into the hands of such a monstrous being, then perhaps death at the hands of the Sarcomata would have been preferable to this stinking hell. Nearly a hundred men were packed tightly into a boxcar made to carry half that number, and the stench was an assault on the senses. So crammed were they that each man was forced to stand upright, pressed tightly against his comrades, unable to make more than the smallest movement. Men wept and wailed, slatted shafts of bright light dopplering through the warped timbers of the boxcar as the daemon engine rattled and clattered its way up into the mountains.

  Leonid could taste smoke in the air and an acrid tang of electrical build-up, like he’d felt deep in the Machine Temple of the citadel. He pressed his face to a blade of light, peering out into the bright day. Ash-stained rocks flashed past, green sparks flaring from the soul wheels as they carried the Omphalos Daemonium higher.

  The dark layer of clouds drew nearer, parting every now and then to reveal a tantalising glimpse of a jagged spire, a bladed bastion or a gun-studded redoubt. As the daemon engine began turning in a long, lazy curve, Leonid saw that their route carried them across an impossible bridge of dizzying proportions. Thousands of girders and beams were laced together in a gravity-defying structural lattice that spanned a gorge of gargantuan proportions. Its bottom was lost to sight, roiling mists and screeching beasts swooping through in its lightning-filled depths.

  ‘We have to get out of here, sergeant.’

  ‘I know. But how?’

  ‘I don’t know yet, but we’re all dead men if we stay.’

  ‘Most of the men I know who would have been handy in a fight died in the forge temple. We don’t have much in the way of forces.’

  ‘You think I don’t know that, Ellard?’ snapped Leonid. ‘Even if we die trying it’s got to be better than what we’re being taken to. The forge of Obax Zakayo was bad enough. I don’t want to find out what this Honsou’s going to be like.’

  Ellard nodded and rested his head wearily against the wall of the boxcar, staring out into the desolate landscape. Deep lines ringed his eyes and Leonid noticed for the first time how haggard his sergeant had become. Like most officers, Leonid had relied heavily on his sergeants to run his company, and none more so than Ellard. To see a man of such formidable physical presence reduced to such a wasted creature was dispiriting in the extreme.

  Leonid yawned, suddenly bone-deep tired and felt his eyelids drooping. Dimly he heard a series of dull cracks, like gunfire, but was too weary to react.

  ‘Get down, sir!’ called Ellard, leaping forward to drag Leonid to the floor of the boxcar. Tightly-packed bodies hampered his efforts, but the sergeant’s strength, though diminished, was still prodigious, and he was able to bundle his commanding officer to the ground.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ asked Leonid.

  ‘Stay down!’

  Leonid rolled onto one elbow as the sides of the boxcar exploded inwards with fist-sized bullet impacts. Shafts of light speared in as the bullets stitched a path across the side of the boxcar, slashing bloody paths through the packed slaves. Blood and screams filled the air as men jerked like mad things under the fusillade.

  Gunsmoke drifted through the bedlam-filled car. Dead men slumped against one another, held upright by the press of bodies. Blood pooled on the floo
r, swilling out the doors as Leonid heard a thunderous impact on the roof of the boxcar.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  ‘I think we’re under attack, sir. Or being rescued. I’m not sure which.’

  A crackling trio of blades punched through the bronze roof of the boxcar and a massive fist tore the sheet metal back as though it was no more than paper.

  Silhouetted against the dazzling whiteness of the sky was a huge figure in midnight black power armour. A Space Marine…

  Sudden hope flared as the figure shouted, ‘Slaves! Rise up and fight! Fight the Iron Warriors!’

  Leonid clambered to his feet, fresh energy filling his limbs at this answer to his prayers. The Space Marine looked up along the length of the train and said, ‘Hurry. The Sarcomata will gather soon.’

  Laughing hysterically in relief and released fear, Leonid began climbing to freedom, the splintered holes in the side of the boxcar providing ample hand and foot holds. He pushed his head above the level of the roof, relishing the cleansing feeling of the wind whipping through his hair. He hauled himself through the hole the Space Marine had torn in the roof and pushed himself to his knees, reaching down to help Ellard.

  The sky blazed white above them, the black sun beating down with greasy dark tendrils to somewhere beyond yet another range of mountains. Leonid forced his gaze from the sight as the energy claws retreated into the Space Marine’s gauntlet.

  Looking closer, Leonid saw that the warrior’s armour was a far cry from the gleaming brilliance of the Imperial Fists he had seen on Hydra Cordatus; ravaged with dents, scarred and patched in dozens of places with crude grafts and filler. Hot vapours vented at his shoulders from the nozzles of a massive jump pack, and a white symbol – a bird of prey of some kind – had been painted over with a jagged red cross. His helmet bore a similar symbol across his visor.

  Looking along the length of the boxcars, Leonid saw yet more of the Space Marines. Clad in an eclectic mix of colours and styles of armour, almost all of them bore a different Chapter symbol on their shoulder guards. They pulled slaves from captivity and herded them towards the rear of the daemon engine’s boxcars and, glancing down into the filthy prison he had escaped from, Leonid saw that he and Ellard were the only two to follow the Space Marine’s order to climb out. Perhaps forty men remained, staring up with terrified eyes at the armoured warrior.