He pushed past Captain Harox, who had wisely decided to maintain his brooding silence, and moved from the edge of the chamber. Kreed knew that the powers of the warp were so much greater than the mere meat and blood of beings like himself, and in the merging with one of them he might gain the kind of mastery that the serpent Erebus enjoyed. But as he watched the creatures Kyriss and Ka’Bandha goad one another, he wondered. They are not superior, Kreed thought. They’re like us. He smiled; this pleased him. When the time came, he would use that understanding to control his new power.
‘My serviles are all but extinguished,’ said the king-queen, wavering as it circled the pit in the floor. ‘I lavished so much upon them, and you have spent their lives in hours!’
The great Bloodthirster cocked its bull-head in callous amusement. ‘Their deaths oil the cogs of war’s engine,’ he rumbled. ‘What else are they for, indolent?’
Kyriss’s clawed foot stamped in bitter annoyance. ‘No, no, no! This is not the way! These cults, thrice-blessed in worship to Slaanesh, are not yours to squander. What kind of victory is this, killer? It is not only my loves that die, but the beasts of your army as well! Tell me, will the Blood God be pleased that you give up his minions so easily?’ The androgynous daemon waved its talons at the great circular window, and the battle raging beneath them. ‘Our serfs perish in their droves and you stand here and watch it happen. I turned these blighted human nests to the glory of the Ruinous Powers not for my own amusement, but for the promise of a greater victory. A larger plan in the Long War. Not for this!’
‘I know,’ spat Ka’Bandha, irritation marbling its tone. ‘I know what you were told.’ It leered toward Kreed with a mouth full of barbed fangs, as if daring him to offer an opinion. The Word Bearer kept his silence, waiting to see how the confrontation would play out.
‘Nothing seems to stop them, they are enraged beyond measure. Why do you let these Blood Whelps approach so closely?’ Kyriss demanded. ‘Your legions fall back and fall back. Soon these abhumans will be at our gates!’
The Bloodthirster released a hollow growl that might have been an attempt at a sigh. ‘Very soon,’ the winged beast sneered. ‘Pleasure-laggard, fool and wastrel. You are blind and stupid!’ Ka’Bandha hawked and angrily spat a plug of black matter against the bone floor, where it bubbled and frothed.
‘What is it doing?’ muttered Harox, breaking his silence at last.
‘Don’t speak,’ said Kreed.
‘You think your perverse games and little dramas are the fulcrum for the war, but you understand nothing.’ Ka’Bandha shook a fist at the pink-skinned creature. ‘You hide here in your palace, but I have been out there. I traded blows with this man-prey.’ The Bloodthirster’s feral jaws opened in a predatory smile. ‘And I tell you this. The “legionaries” die hard. I’ve tasted their fury, and I know they will not be beaten by force of arms alone.’
Kyriss made a negative noise. ‘You actually admire these ephemerals.’
Ka’Bandha ignored the reply. ‘The difference between us, coxcomb, is that I know how to defeat them.’ The daemon let its long tongue flick out and trace over its teeth, once again casting a jaundiced eye toward Kreed. ‘The sons of the Angel will be undone by their own flaw, and they will come to it drenched in the blood of their enemies. If we must sacrifice an army, a whole world for that, it is a price that shall be paid.’
‘And Sanguinius’s death is the key…’ It was a moment before Kreed realised that he had spoken.
The androgyne Kyriss turned on him, snarling. ‘Insolent insect! That is not our masters’ plan!’
‘No,’ said Ka’Bandha, a breaking-stone chuckle crackling inside its broad chest. ‘It is not.’
Raldoron gave the order to abandon the Mastodon when the transport became fouled in a nest of writhing tentacular masses at the foot of the bone temple. The Blood Angels deployed from the vehicle in rough order, forming into squads with wary, grim precision. The captain spared the woman Niobe a look. Her face was smeared with soot and she stumbled along at Meros’s side, sweating as she tried to keep pace with them.
Raldoron caught the Apothecary’s eye and nodded towards her, reminding him of his obligation to keep the pariah alive.
Huge crowds of aberrant creatures milled around the base of the massive cathedral in roaming packs, the flesh-hounds and the harriers snarling and barking at one another as they waited for the final attack to come.
Quick and clean, the legionaries advanced up a shallow incline toward the walls of ragged bone. The glowing haze was at its thickest here, the fog making it hard to see anything beyond a few metres distance. Preysight and light-modified visual settings through the optics of Raldoron’s combat helmet were no improvement. The sensors in his warplate constantly gave off erroneous data and filled the vision blocks with heat bloom. In the end, in irritation, he twisted off his helm and snapped it to the magnetic clasp on his hip. Without the breath grille to filter the tainted air, the thick, cloying odour of it gathered at the back of his throat. It tasted greasy and foul, like burned, spoiled fat left too long on a griddle.
They avoided the larger groups of the creatures, but it was necessary to quickly terminate smaller packs of the hellhounds that came sniffing after them, their low, nasal whines cutting the fog as they reacted to Niobe’s presence.
Pausing in the shadow of a broken spar of rockcrete, the First Captain scanned the tower rising up above them.
‘You do have a plan?’ Cassiel made the question sound like an accusation, and Raldoron’s first instinct was to rebuke him for his tone. Instead he held his tongue. The veteran went on. ‘Or do we just walk in through the gates of this abomination and ask to be taken to their leader?’
‘Orexis has cutting charges,’ he replied tersely. ‘We’ll make our own damned doorway.’
‘Does he have enough to bring this bloody place down? I doubt it.’
Raldoron glared at the sergeant. ‘Just follow orders, Cassiel. Leave the rest to me.’ His hand slipped to the pouch on his belt and he tapped it lightly, making sure that the targeting beacon secreted within was still there. The device had been placed in his hand by Azkaellon before he left the Red Tear, and he remembered the Guard Commander’s severe expression as he explained how it would function, if the need arose.
He looked up into the sky, and saw only the sallow clouds. Somewhere up there, set in position at high anchor away from the slow burn of battle that still raged on in orbit, the Scarlet Liberty was drifting with its bow aimed at the planet, lance cannons primed and missile batteries loaded and ready. Although the starship’s targeting sensors were blinded by the unusual atmospheric effects of Signus Prime’s corrupted skies, they would still – it was hoped – be able to see the beacon’s trace should Raldoron activate it. If triggered, in less than ninety seconds a hail of death from above would fall upon his location and obliterate everything – daemons, legionaries and the mysterious source of corruption Kano had spoken of.
That was the last-ditch plan, at least. To begin with, Raldoron had hoped it would not come to that, but now as he neared the objective, he wondered if it would simply be better to push the button now and let fate choose for them. This war, it had all become too supernatural for his liking, too mythic and surreal.
He frowned, annoyed at himself, and shook off the thought.
‘Captain!’ From nearby, Meros called out to him in a low hiss. ‘You should see this.’
Raldoron broke cover and moved fast and low, dodging between the ruined stubs of walls. The rise where the beasts had built their great temple was uneven, dotted with irregular patches of stone and broken roadway. The captain realised that the remains of a city lay beneath his feet, the buildings and streets cut back to almost nothing, threshed to their roots like crops cut by scythes. The Cathedral of the Mark was built on a mass grave, on a world that was littered with them.
Raldoron approached the Apothecary. Niobe was crouched close at hand, half-hidden in the shadow cast by Broth
er Racine, who stood with his bolter to his shoulder.
A trail of thick, dark blood crossed the dusty ground and pooled in the lee of a twisted stone pillar. Despite the cloying cocktail of rank odours on the breeze, the captain’s senses picked out the texture of a familiar trace: the blood of a legionary. The heavy, metallic smell was distinct and unpleasantly familiar, a scent-memory embedded in the recall of a thousand battles.
But not that of a Blood Angel. This too he knew instinctively. Meros moved and revealed the body of a warrior in steel-grey armour, the pelt of a great canine wrapped about him, the off-white fur now clumped with the vitae that had saturated it.
The Rune Priest’s body lay slumped against the pillar, a blade just out of reach where it had fallen from his numb fingers. His injuries were ugly: his throat was ragged and open, rough cuts and savage bite marks across his neck and face. The telltale points of sword strikes were visible all over his armour, each one deep and crusted with wet scabs. The legionary had dragged himself away across the wastes, leaving a ruby trail in his wake as his bio-implants had tried and failed to stem the tide of blood loss.
‘This is Jonor Stiel,’ said Meros. ‘He was Redknife’s battle-brother.’
Without warning, the Space Wolf’s eyes snapped open, as if he had been at rest, only waiting for someone to speak his name. Fresh jolts of fluid jerked from the murderous neck wound and crimson spittle foamed from his lips, soaking into his pale beard.
Raldoron stepped back in surprise as Meros drew up his medicae gauntlet, the mechanism whirring as he selected a drug philtre. But even as the Apothecary did so, the First Captain knew it was a hollow gesture.
The look of pure, unadulterated hatred in Stiel’s eyes was chilling. He glared at Meros and spat full in his face. The act was done with a cold, measured force of will and Raldoron suspected that the Space Wolf had been clinging on to his last skein of life just long enough to execute it.
Even as the light faded in his eyes, Stiel said something in the guttural, hard-edged vowels of his native tongue, a string of what could only be the most base and odious invective his people could voice.
‘He’s cursing us,’ said Raldoron, watching the Space Wolf die. ‘He blames us for this.’
‘You speak his language?’ said Racine.
‘I don’t need to.’
The Rune Priest’s body stilled, and Meros reached out to close his eyes. The Apothecary looked toward the captain. ‘His wounds–’
Raldoron silenced him with a shake of the head, but the unspoken words echoed in his thoughts. His wounds were not caused by the enemy.
‘Gather the legionaries,’ he told Racine. ‘We move on.’
Halerdyce Gerwyn awoke to screaming, and he was uncertain if the nightmare had ended, or if it had just been renewed in a different guise.
He stumbled from the pallet where he had collapsed what seemed like an age ago, finding the survivors and the ship crew fleeing from the decrepit metal chamber in abject panic. The remembrancer saw people trampled, vanishing as they dropped out of sight, slammed against the metal deck. He tried to resist as the press of bodies surged towards him, but he had nowhere else to go. Gerwyn stumbled and fell into a run with them. To resist would have seen him crushed.
Flowing like a tide, the humans boiled out into the Red Tear’s avenue-wide corridors and broke apart. The crowd went this way and that, desperation in their cries. He saw the old man, Zhomas, swept past in a flash. He was bleeding from a gash across his cheek, and stark fear robbed him of any sense of self.
Gerwyn tried to call out, but he struck a girder support and became dizzy, falling away from the crush long enough to gain some semblance of his bearings.
The corridor where he stood was open to the polluted sky, and in its murky depths he saw winged monstrosities angling down toward them, drawn by the stink of fear. Gerwyn had seen these winged furies before, in the tormented dreams and half-glimpsed visions that he had compulsively sketched on his pict-tablet. He had known even then that those things were real. The mass of them in his thoughts, the weight and facet, such details could only come from something that existed.
It did not matter that they defied nature and reason with their existence; that was what they were. A manifestation of unreality, bursting into this world like a bloom of madness.
Out there, he saw flashes of gold and red, racing to meet the daemons. The Blood Angels. The last legionaries onboard the ship had left them behind, abandoned the weak and the defenceless to rise to the fight. The remembrancer’s gut turned to ice and his legs trembled. He had seen that in the dreams as well, the full number of the warrior kindred possessed by a rage so great that they trampled the very men and women they were meant to defend in their rush to give themselves to battle. Guard Commander Azkaellon’s face ghosted through his thoughts; he had seen an apparition of that grim visage lit by a ferocity burning cold and eternal.
Gerwyn pounded the flat of his palms against his face, muttering denials over and over. If this was real, and the dream was the dream, which was worse? ‘This place is horror!’ he shouted, the words sputtering from his lips, tears streaking his face. The remembrancer felt his will breaking inside him, the fear – the colossal, monolithic fear – crushing him with its weight. He was going to die and there was nothing for him to do but wait for the moment.
Young, strong hands grabbed him by the shoulders and he was shaken roughly. ‘Snap out of it!’ shouted a voice.
Gerwyn looked up through misted eyes and saw the soldier from the Fasadian Infantry, the one called Dortmund. He seemed every inch the raw youth pressed into an older man’s uniform, unready for the dangers of a battle beyond his experience.
‘The trap closes,’ muttered the remembrancer, uncertain of where the words were coming from. ‘This is our end. They have abandoned us to perish.’
‘No–’ began Dortmund, but his words became a sudden, shill cry as his back arched. His eyes went wide as a serrated blade burst from his chest, rusted and dull with the action of many past murders upon it. The weapon was withdrawn, a wet sucking chug of blood going with it, and Dortmund dropped to the deck.
The muscular, thuggish survivor who had come with the rest of the Scoltrum evacuees stood with a dripping knife in his fist. Gerwyn backed away, but the girders hemmed him in.
Over the big man’s shoulders he saw the furies alighting on the spars of broken hull metal, claws and teeth rattling as they were drawn by the scent of blood.
‘This was always how your story was going to end,’ said Hengist, his eyes alight with fervour in the moment before he buried his blade in the remembrancer’s heart.
The daemon Kyriss scuttled across the bone floor with a high-pitched yelp and came at Tanus Kreed in a flash of talons and noise. Harox was drawing his sword, more by reflex than by forethought, coming to his defence, but it meant little. The creature batted the Word Bearers captain away and sent him tumbling over the skull-tiles, dangerously close to the edge of the great pit. Kreed hesitated a moment too long going for his own weapon, and then it was too late. Kyriss’s massive crab-claw snapped open and caught him between its barbs.
‘Pathetic meat,’ it spat. ‘What have you done? You provoke this? Your arrogant godling primarchs dare to leave the path we cut for them?’
Kreed grabbed at the claw, holding it back. It took most of his strength, and he feared that Kyriss could make short work of him if it wished, closing the vice to snip his head clean from his neck. He shot a look at the Bloodthirster, but the other beast merely grinned at the sport of it.
‘Child of Slaanesh,’ growled Ka’Bandha, making the title a mocking slur, ‘you spend so long playing your games upon silken beds and in whispering halls, you forget that the pieces sometimes have minds of their own.’
Kyriss gave a petulant grunt and released Kreed, shaking him off. ‘I am the player of games, not the played!’ it shouted, the rise of its voice screeching off the walls.
‘The obvious escapes you,’ said
the Bloodthirster. ‘Our masters wish the Angel to come to our banner, and bring his army into the schism. The Warmaster does not. Open your eyes, fool! The souls of these abhumans are clear even to one as blunt as I! The Warmaster does not wish to stand in the shadow of his angelic brother again! Sanguinius must be killed, and to be killed he must first be broken.’
‘No, no,’ Kyriss shook its head. ‘The Angel comes to us! That was the agreement! With him we have all we need, and the advance begins. That is how it will be done!’
‘Warmaster Horus begs to differ,’ managed Kreed, picking himself up from the ground. ‘I submit to you that no matter how much power you bring to him, you will never rule his heart.’ He coughed, spitting blood. ‘Perhaps your gods did not choose as wisely as they thought.’
‘Silence, animal!’ Kyriss shouted him down, then wheeled to sputter at the Bloodthirster. ‘What pact have you made without me? Speak now! Reveal it!’
‘The Angel will die today,’ intoned Ka’Bandha, drawing his great axe and weighing it in his hand. ‘One wound to fell him, one more to end him.’ He licked the edge of the weapon. ‘It will be sweet. At the end, he will beg me for it.’
Kyriss snorted. ‘He is prideful. He would never submit!’
‘He is brittle!’ Ka’Bandha snapped. ‘We have set his sons to madness and fury. Answer me this – once they have killed every servile cultist and lesser spawn on this blighted plain, what will they kill next? When their bloodlust has been stoked so high that they see nothing but the scarlet path and the red joy of murder, who will die then?’
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