Malodrax

by Ben Counter

  The bulkhead wall behind Lysander bowed away from him, and the sounds of destruction were replaced with the dense, ripping noise of reality itself tearing open. The bulkhead disappeared, the whole stern of the ship collapsing away from Lysander, plunging into an endless dark shaft lit by billows of plasma flame from the ruptured generators. The substance of the engine room, its turbines, generators, its crew of engine-gangs and tech-seers, were twisting and churning into a single twisted shaft falling into the warp like a great waterspout of liquid steel.

  Lysander grabbed a shard of the deck that peeled up beside him. Brother Skelpis fell past and Lysander grabbed him by the wrist. Skelpis’s feet kicked out over the shaft as the flame billowed brighter, great plumes of vented plasma burning as hot as the surface of a star. In its harsh white light, crewmen were ground into red slivers and the shape of the enormous engine turbines were lost as grinding masses of deformed metal roared past.

  ‘This is our stand, brothers!’ cried Lysander. ‘We did not ask for it to come like this, but it has, and as Dorn at Terra we will face it like Imperial Fists!’

  The maelstrom was reforming by the second, islands of turbines melting down into the churning mass, new forms reaching up in liquid spires, winding into new shapes in the chaos.

  Gravity was shifting again, this time to match the structure appearing where the engines and reactors had once been. The ocean of steel became a level floor, inlaid with swirling glass mosaics echoing the nebulae of the void in a riot of colour. A section of the floor sunk down, a pit ringed with stairways, and gold spiralled across the surfaces. From the gold rose the bodies of misshapen things, clothed obscenely in finery and jewels.

  Daemons. Lysander’s soul recoiled. Men had gone mad just imagining that such things could exist, and where they found an unprepared mind daemons could turn a servant of the Emperor into a craven dedicated to the warp’s Dark Gods. They came in infinite forms – these were crouched and lolling, slack jaws hanging to the gilded tiles of their pit. Every one carried a musical instrument – a harp, a horn, a drum – and as one they struck up a terrible atonal sound that rose and fell like a heavy sea. Lysander’s stomachs knotted at the sensation hammering into him.

  The scene was still transforming. The ballroom floor spread out around the daemons’ orchestra pit, walls soaring up alongside it, curving silvered columns meeting overhead to describe a great dome open to the endlessness of the warp. Meteors shot past, trailing burning clouds of souls lost in the warp and condemned to hurtle through its reaches forever. Incandescent clouds boiled out of nothingness and hardened into bright diamonds of young stars, bursting into dark red flame as they were forged, grew old and died in seconds as if to flaunt the plasticity of time in the warp.

  Daemon-giants were forged into the walls, enormous barrel chests and massive crushing hands restrained by the layers of gold and marble that held them. Their jaws gnashed and fingers clenched as they fought to escape, but they were part of the entertainment here, mighty lords of Chaos enslaved and turned into mere decorations for this monument to the warp’s opulence.

  The song roared up a tone and Lysander dropped to one knee, the sound a wall of mental noise trying to shut him down. A man would have broken down and curled up on the floor – or, worse, danced to their tune, writhing and spasming until his body came apart with the fury of it. Lysander glanced at Brother Skelpis lying on the floor beside him – Skelpis’s jaw was clenched and blood ran from his nose and ears. His eyes were bloodshot, the strain of staying conscious and sane rupturing his body.

  These Imperial Fists would follow him. They were his squad, men chosen because they would not falter even in the face of the foulest provocation. Lysander planted a foot, cracking the glass tile beneath it, and forced himself up to his feet. He was bowed and shaking, but he was upright. He would not kneel to this, no matter what might face him.

  A fountain of marble and glass spiralled up from the floor before the orchestra pit, and from it flowed a torrent of molten gold. Trapped souls writhed through it, their faces distorted with pain as they flowed from one bowl to the next, their crying out mingling with the music in terrible harmonies. The gold spilled over the last bowl and crystallised into scuttling things like golden crabs that glinted as they scurried, a host of tiny daemons underfoot.

  The madness of it would have been enough. This was not a place in reality but of the warp, conjured from the mind of some madman who had given his imagination over to the powers of Chaos. It was one heretic’s tribute to the warp, where the rantings of a diseased mind might become reality. But that was not the only danger that would face Lysander and his squad. It was not an accident that the Shield of Valour had fallen to this fate. The warp had been waiting for her, and for the Imperial Fists.

  Grand doors congealed from the blazing finery of the walls. They burst open and from the glaring light behind them emerged a host of shapes, ugly where the ballroom had its terrible beauty, brutal where it had grace in its madness. Even in silhouette Lysander recognised a make of power armour such as had not emerged from a Mechanicus forge for thousands of years, since the days of the Heresy ten thousand years before.

  Lysander knew his duty. He raised his bolter and loosed off a round. In the assault on his senses his aim was off, and the shot blew a shard of gold from the wall behind the lead figure. Lysander held down the firing stud and half the bolter’s magazine thundered off.

  Space folded, and the leader of the newcomers was suddenly shifted out of the firing line and right in front of Lysander, an arm’s length away. Lysander knew before his eyes focused on him what he would see.

  There was an awful inevitability about that dark gunmetal armour, similar in form to the Imperial Fists own power armour but of a more ancient and baroque make with exposed cabling and bulky reinforcement panels. He had known, perhaps even before the figure had entered, that he would see the yellow and black warning stripes at the joints and on the knuckles of the wearer’s enormous clawed power fist. Lysander knew the story of the markings – they were added by the first tech-priests to test the armour. They had been kept by the wearers to remind all onlookers that this was gear for war, not show, brutal and functional like the men inside.

  ‘Iron Warrior,’ spat Lysander.

  The Iron Warrior knocked Lysander’s gun hand aside. The brothers behind him jumped up to fight, for they knew their duties too. An Iron Warrior had to die. Lysander had been chosen for the diplomatic mission because he was able to compromise his hatred, if those were his orders, but this was one hatred that could never be permitted to die down. Dorn himself had decreed the Iron Warriors to be blood foes of the Imperial Fists, and every time the Chapter had crossed paths with them that decree had been proven correct.

  The Carnage was part of the Iron Warriors fleet in which they had fled justice after the Horus Heresy. It was as much an enemy as any Iron Warrior, and the Imperial Fists had sworn to destroy its like as well as the Iron Warriors themselves. But when the time had come, when Lysander had been put face to face with that ancient machine, the Carnage had won.

  Brother Skelpis jumped to his feet. Before his bolter muzzle was up, another Iron Warrior lashed out with a chainblade and sawed through Skelpis’s leg just below the knee. Skelpis toppled to the side, armour clattering, the glass mosaic floor cracking.

  Everything was unfolding in slow motion. Lysander counted a whole combat squad of Iron Warriors, ten Traitor Marines, the remaining eight of them turning their guns towards Brother Drevyn. Drevyn did his duty by charging the Iron Warriors, drawing his own chainblade as he went, and was caught by a volley of fire that cut him clean in half at the waist and tore what remained into flailing shreds of armour and flesh.

  ‘Hold!’ yelled the leader of the Iron Warriors. ‘Thul will have them alive! Hold your fire!’

  ‘Better a corpse than in chains,’ said Lysander.

  ‘You will know what it means to be
both,’ said the Iron Warrior, aiming a backhand at the side of Lysander’s head. Lysander’s mind was still ringing from the assault on his senses, still recoiling from the impossibility of the place that had coalesced in front of him, and his reflexes were slow as a drunkard’s. He brought up a hand to defend himself but he was much too late and the blow slammed into him. Everything was black for a moment and when it returned as before, Lysander was sprawled full length on the ballroom floor.

  The Iron Warrior planted a foot on the backpack of Lysander’s armour, pinning him down to the floor. Another Iron Warrior, the one who had mutilated Brother Skelpis, kicked Lysander’s bolter and hammer away. Lysander hadn’t even been able to raise it in anger, such was the effect of this daemon-born place.

  The other Iron Warriors were among the surviving Imperial Fists, disarming and knocking them to the ground. Skelpis fought on and an Iron Warrior stamped on the back of his head until he stopped moving. Another Iron Warrior wrestled Brother Halaestus and threw him to the ground, down in the pool of blood and gore leaching from Brother Drevyn’s remains. Brother Vonkaal was shot through the thigh and fell.

  ‘You killed one of ours,’ said Lysander. ‘We remember our fallen. Though it take ten thousand years, we avenge every one.’

  ‘Kraegon Thul will give you plenty more to avenge, whelp of Terra,’ replied the lead Iron Warrior.

  ‘You face the First Company,’ said Lysander. ‘We will scour you from this ship. You can never stand before us in battle.’

  ‘I’m not here to fight the First Company,’ replied the Iron Warrior. ‘I’m here to take you alive.’ He spread out his arms as if proudly showing off the insanity that surrounded him. ‘The Dancing-Place of the Lesser Gods,’ he said. ‘More ostentatious than my Legion is used to, but a place that will come at our beckoning and deliver us to our enemies. It disappoints me that you were so addled, Imperial Fist. I would have fought you champion to champion. Perhaps that will be the means of your execution when we are done with you, but that will not be for a while yet.’ The Iron Warriors leader turned to one of his squadmates. ‘Khaol! Inform the fortress that we are done here. Our haul is one captain, three battle-brothers and a corpse, all Imperial Fists. Have them make ready for our return.’

  The Iron Warrior saluted and began relaying the order through a field vox, an archaic device of tubes and valves. The daemons in the orchestra pit changed their tune, the music now rising and falling like the waves of a stormy sea, the highs piercing and painful, the lows a bass rumble that made the whole cathedral blur as it shook.

  The dome overhead peeled open. Darkness bled in. The gold turned to mottled brass, lit as if by a fire from far above. The orchestra pit was a shaft of blackness, the daemons cavorting through it as if they were breaking the surface of an inky ocean. Through the darkness overhead could be glimpsed a scattering of stars and among them one grew closer, a bloated red star near the end of its life, scattered with black sunspots and bursting out flares of red flame. Around it was a system of worlds, shattered and grey, any life on them long since drunk dry by the anger of their sun. But one world was different. Discoloured and foul, it had survived not because of some celestial accident but through a force of malevolence. So beloved was it of the warp’s gods that their favour sustained it and it could not die.

  Impossible detail reached Lysander’s eye, time and distance meaningless through the lens of the warp. He could see the shattered continents, splintered like broken glass, slowly swallowed by oceans of decaying gore. Gashes in the crust laid the mantle open, seething and bubbling with heat. Endless rotting badlands rolled around half the world, broken by mountains of bone.

  And he saw the fortress. A great black steel jaw breaching the border between the broken continent and the lands of rot, its teeth enormous towers and its jawbone a rampart of gnashing spiked rollers. The semicircle bounded by the fortress wall was studded with a thousand fires, each one manned by a thousand labourers. Black and yellow banners hung from the battlements and the watch was held by more Iron Warriors, each one a nightmare of archaic pitted steel.

  In violation of time and space, the structure of the Dancing-Place of the Lesser Gods melted and reformed into a bridge span linking its pocket of the warp with the fortress. Light years were compressed and warped as the Iron Warriors clamped a set of chains around Lysander’s wrists and ankles, and dragged him behind them onto the bridge. It was of tarnished gold and rust, worn by thousands of years’ worth of marching feet. The fortress loomed closer and Lysander could make out the filthy ragged vultures that roosted in its spires and fed on the labourers who collapsed at the forges. In the forge fields below, enormous segments of armour and gun barrel were hauled out of the fires by hundreds-strong mutant gangs. Daemons shambled among them – loping monsters of the Blood God with red skin and slavering fangs, writhing flesh-knots, drooling sacks of pestilence, shadowy things that slithered into the bodies of the dead and walked among the living, eye sockets burning with purple fire.

  The Iron Warriors, it was said, called no single Chaos God their patron, and instead were pledged to them all. Lysander’s fevered perception made out the hallmarks of many gods, from the bloodstained spiked rollers grinding away beneath the battlements to the ecstatic agony of the mutant labourers driven to dance in the flames. He could smell the fires and the cooking flesh, he could hear iron against iron and the ringing of the forge hammers. The lens of the warp magnified it all, filling his head so full of appalling sensation that there was no room left for sane thought.

  ‘Look up, Imperial Fists!’ said the Iron Warriors leader, and in spite of himself Lysander did so.

  Above him was the orbital space of this world, choked with vast reefs of gnarled coral. Spaceship hulks hung there trapped, the coral grown over them so only the odd stern or sensor mast broke through the encrustations. The awful distortion, which brought the fortress beneath into such detail, rendered the whole orbit of the planet visible, the view arcing between horizons so maddeningly that Lysander feared the sight of it would throw him unconscious.

  He saw the Shield of Valour. It had been brought along the bridge behind them and deposited in the upper reaches of the coral maze. Fire bled weakly from the nova cannon wound in its side and its engines were gone, distorted and torn off by the reality-warping weapon deployed by the Carnage. Lysander did not know how the Carnage had inflicted such destruction, but he feared to imagine the magnitude of the blasphemy brought to bear to make such a thing happen.

  Through the reef loomed three great dark halos of battered steel, crunching through clouds of shattered coral. Lysander recognised ancient marks of space stations from illuminated histories of the Heresy, bristling with ancient guns and bedecked with the heraldry of the Iron Warriors. Three star fortresses circling the crippled Shield of Valour like scavengers on the wing.

  In silence, a rain of white fire streamed from the three space stations. In spite of all his training and discipline Lysander found his thoughts turned to a desperate prayer, begging fate to turn the fire aside from the Shield. He all but cried out aloud for mercy as the bolts of fire hit the Shield of Valour.

  The three Iron Warriors star forts poured their flame as one into the Imperial Fists strike cruiser. Secondary explosions rippled along the sides of the ship, billowing out huge sections of the hull plating. The image loomed closer, brought right into Lysander’s face by the warp-distortion, a willing presentation of the ship’s death.

  He could see the ship’s entrails laid open, the warren of corridors and hallways deep into its heart. Bodies tumbled everywhere.

  The First Company spilled from the ship. They struggled to find handholds to steady themselves and keep from falling into the void. They had donned their helmets, and their power armour was proof against the void, but that was the only advantage they had over the unprotected crewmen. The Imperial Fists of the First Company were fighting on because they were Space Marines, but
there was nothing they could do – the Shield of Valour was dead, dying behind them, and the star forts were pouring waves of fire into it with impunity.

  Space Marines were supposed to die in battle, the bodies of their enemies crushed beneath their feet. They were not supposed to struggle through the warp, crushed by spinning debris or frozen in the void. Not like this, hammered to dust by an enemy leering from behind the pict-screen of a space station’s gun battery.

  Then something within the Shield of Valour went critical, an ammunition store or a remaining plasma reactor pushed past its tolerances by the barrage of fire. A white blossom bloomed in the centre of the ship, expanding outwards in a shimmering sphere. It threw off flares like a miniature sun, flinging arcs of blue-white flame that sliced through what remained of the ship’s structure.

  Almost a hundred Imperial Fists, irreplaceable veterans. The crew and the ship were a grave enough loss, but the First Company of the Imperial Fists were among the best soldiers humanity had. And as quickly as it took for the explosion to reach from the heart of the ship to the tip of its bow, they were gone, extinguished, ash.

  Lysander’s head was wrenched back down. He got a glimpse of the other captive Imperial Fists being dragged along – they had seen it, too. They knew the enormity of that crime.

  They knew what the Iron Warriors had given them to avenge.

  The bridge through the warp bowed and shifted, the malformed planet ahead rushing closer. The Iron Warriors leader hauled Lysander another few steps and suddenly they were on the battlements, the Iron Warriors sentries saluting their officer as he passed. Lysander was dragged through armouries of bolters and archaic halberds, past shrines to obscure gods heaped with rotting offerings of severed heads and animal bones, beneath statues of beings so foul Lysander’s eyes refused to focus on them.