Malodrax

by Ben Counter

  ‘You know more about this Shalhadar,’ said Lycaon. ‘Willing to share anything further, captain?’

  Any answer from Lysander was cut short as the scenery was consumed in a blast of multicoloured flame that rushed into the air above the stage and from which strode the form of Prince Shalhadar the Veiled.

  The idealised human form, as chiselled by sculptors from one side of the galaxy to the other, was rendered in solid gold. It was achingly beautiful, painful to look at, with a face moulded into an expression of wisdom and sorrow, majesty and sympathy. A mortal sculptor could never match it. The geometry was too perfect, the emotion too vividly written, to be the product of an artist’s hand. It was forged in the chill fires of the warp, where the thing that was Shalhadar had conjured its body to enthral and bewitch the humans it desired to serve it.

  Shalhadar was three times the height of a man. He had wings of feathered light. Stained glass was embedded in his golden form, in panels in his abdomen and chest depicting what a mortal mind might make of great powers of the warp – a knot of flesh and limbs, a great burning eye, a host of flying devils. His eyes were glass, deep green and blue, and a light shone through every panel illuminating the air around him as if he swam in a sea of colour.

  In his hand he held a mace, its head a globe of filigreed gold containing a white flame like a caged sun. His other was fitted with gilded blades on each finger. He wore a cloth of crimson and blue around his waist, flowing in the warm incense-scented wind that accompanied the prince.

  Prince Shalhadar’s golden feet touched the boards of the stage as he descended.

  Lysander realised that he was standing watching the daemon – not laying about him with bolter and chainsword, not rallying his battle-brothers to join him in killing Shalhadar. He was just standing there and watching him, and he could not move.

  He imagined being bathed in pain, a sea of fire around him that would get worse and worse unless he could move. He imagined his mind a wall of diamond through which no influence could reach.

  His hand twitched around the hilt of his chainsword.

  ‘A fine entrance,’ said Chaplain Lycaon. ‘How many have fallen at your feet when they see it, daemon? How many minds did you break?’

  Lysander forced his head around. Lycaon was grimacing, fighting to move. Kaderic, too.

  Shalhadar leaned down close, his too-perfect, shining face a few centimetres from Lycaon’s.

  ‘As you reckon numbers, mortal, they are beyond counting. As the warp reckons them, but a drop in an ocean of obsession. But a whisper in the hurricane.’

  Kaderic roared and brought his chainsaw down in a clumsy, swingeing blow, such as would shame a novice handling the weapon for the first time. Shalhadar, without looking, caught the chainsword in his clawed hand and turned, a smile on his gilded lips, towards First Sergeant Kaderic.

  ‘And which role do you play?’ said the daemon prince. ‘The Fool? The Master? The Misbegotten One? Everyone has a role in the tale. Everyone plays it whether they know it or not.’ The daemon cradled Kaderic’s face in his claw, and pointed to Lysander with his mace. ‘And your captain here has already played out plenty of scenes of his own. Do you know, First Sergeant, Chaplain Lycaon, the role Lysander took on while he languished on Malodrax? Do you know what he has done?’

  A shot hammered out and Prince Shalhadar’s head snapped to the side. A circular dent had been blasted into his temple. Through the blaze of light hovered the ruined face of Brother Halaestus, armour scored and smoking. Though Lysander could not see the mangled remains of the daemons he had cut his way through to get to the stage, there could be no doubt they lay behind him.

  ‘No!’ yelled Shalhadar. ‘The story must be told!’

  He swung his mace in a great arc that would have crushed Halaestus had he not thrown himself through the scenery flats before it smashed through the stage. Shalhadar grabbed Halaestus around the waist and held him up in the air, about to dash him back down against the stage.

  Shalhadar’s perfect face was blemished. The enthralling spell was broken. Lysander moved as if through glue, but he moved, and he dived at Shalhadar’s back leg. Heavy, cold metal met him as he threw his full weight against Shalhadar. The daemon prince dropped to one knee, letting out a yell of anger that sounded like a great tolling bell.

  Lycaon leapt onto the daemon prince, finding a handhold among the gemstones and glass studding Shalhadar’s shoulder, so he was face to face with him. He drew back his crozius and slammed it down.

  The power field discharged and split Shalhadar’s torso from his shoulder down to his abdomen, shattered glass and jewels scattering in a bright rain across the stage. A fractured rainbow of light sprayed out, a multicoloured torrent of power that fountained from Shalhadar’s sundered body. Lycaon was thrown off Shalhadar by the force of it, and Lysander just had time to see the Chaplain sprawling across the stage before the sheer madness erupting from Shalhadar overwhelmed his senses.

  The question of what Shalhadar the Veiled actually was could never be answered. It was, like everything born of the warp, immune to logic. The gilded body was a vessel for the real daemon, symbolic of Shalhadar’s true nature but not identical to it. The daemon itself was an essence, a mind, a mass of thought, something incorporeal by human reckoning but a force as real as anything could be in the warp. Daemons could take on an infinite variety of shapes in realspace, and Shalhadar had no shape at all.

  It was Shalhadar who saturated the theatre of his palace, flooding it with the mass of emotion and knowledge that comprised his true self. Lysander was blinded with colour and deafened by noise, swimming as if in an ocean surrounded by it.

  He fought like a swimmer trying to reach the surface, but there was nothing to push against, no sense of direction. It was not a physical struggle that would show him the way.

  Lysander turned his focus inwards. It was a technique taught early in a novice’s conversion to a Space Marine, because it was in a state of internal contemplation that a novice was receptive to the hypno-doctrination that filled his mind with the Chapter’s accumulated battle-lore. His mind fought against the sensory bedlam. Part of his mind, the part left over from the man he might have been had he never become an Imperial Fist, demanded that he curl into a ball and let unconsciousness sweep over him. But that part had been quiet for a long time.

  His surroundings resolved into an ocean, burning light below, moonless dark above. Lysander got his head above the surface. He knew this was not real – that in some sense he was still on the stage in Shalhadar’s pyramid. But if he let that reach the forefront of his mind, he would sink and pass out.

  The ocean churned. Gilded limbs broke the surface as a hundred Space Marines fought to stay afloat. The eyepieces of their white-painted helmets were shattered and they struggled blindly, thrashing at random to stave off a fate they did not understand.

  A great looming presence in the darkness dominated the horizon. A mass of boiling rage, like the smouldering mountain of burning ash from a volcano. Twin cauldrons of fire roared into life, and the ocean of light turned a dark red with their reflection. Shalhadar’s eyes narrowed as they fell on Lysander.

  Lysander found rocks beneath his hands and feet. He hauled himself up onto a rocky shore, a scattering of islands just breaking the surface. ‘Lycaon!’ he shouted. ‘Chaplain! First Sergeant!’

  ‘Give me an enemy,’ said a strained and hoarse voice beside Lysander, ‘with a heart I can cut out and a head I can sever. Not this pit of lies.’ First Sergeant Kaderic lay on the rocks, his armour scored and battered.

  ‘Stay strong. Stay focused, brother. The daemon lies and evades us, but it is never invulnerable. It is never beyond justice.’

  ‘The First?’ said Shalhadar, indicating the Space Marines drowning in the endless ocean.

  ‘My memory of them,’ said Lysander. ‘The daemon brings it forth to break me. It will not
work.’

  Shalhadar swarmed overhead, his dark mass lit from within by the flames of his eyes. There was something of that arrogance there, something of the tyrant who broke men’s minds so he had a legion of them to worship him. If he had a true form, it was this – the raw desire for power, overwhelming and dark.

  Lightning crashed down. Kaderic got to his feet and held his chainsword, still smouldering with daemon blood, up to the sky. ‘Will you kill us with deceit, daemon?’ he demanded. ‘There is no lie that ever pierced a Space Marine’s heart! Face us with steel or skulk back to the warp!’

  Shalhadar’s bellow was a crash of thunder and the blackness fell, roaring down onto Lysander and Kaderic. Lysander drove his chainblade up and felt it cutting through substance. Ropy black limbs swarmed around him and he cut about him, snapping and rending. Somewhere nearby Kaderic was roaring as he did the same thing, spitting curses at the daemon prince that constricted and writhed all around him.

  The darkness split and tore. Lysander felt the blood-slicked boards of the stage under his feet. He spat out a mouthful of rancid blood and tore his chainblade free of Shalhadar.

  Shalhadar’s golden body lay on its side, its torso split open. The rubbery black mass of the prince’s body writhed from the statue, its coils wrapped around Chaplain Lycaon, who stood on the fallen statue. Lycaon brought his crozius arcanum up, the power field crackling around its blade, and brought it down in a bright arc of lightning.

  In a burst of light Shalhadar was blasted open, shredded and dissolved in a gale of light and noise. Lysander was thrown onto his back beside Kaderic, who like him was slathered in Shalhadar’s black-grey blood.

  The glare in Lysander’s eyes died down. He clambered back to his feet and helped Kaderic up. What remained of Shalhadar the Veiled was a few scraps of charred gold, in a splintered and burned hole in the stage. Chaplain Lycaon lay beside the wreck, stirring as he grabbed his fallen weapon.

  Lysander and Kaderic pulled Lycaon to his feet.

  ‘It is dead,’ said Kaderic.

  ‘It is banished,’ replied Lycaon. ‘Imperial Fists! The beast is defeated. Let us be gone from this place.’

  The withdrawal from Shalhadar’s city took a few minutes. While reaching the palace the Imperial Fists had fought through hundreds of daemons sent from Shalhadar’s court to stop them, but with the daemon prince abolished the resistance was gone.

  Instead, there was a terrible wailing, coming from every doorway and window. In the street, in a gold-plated gutter, lay one of the city’s citizens, curled up and mewling. Like many inhabitants he wore leather straps over pallid, pinkish skin, and he was marked with scars from whips and manacles. Whatever rites of passage the people of this city went through, it required a long period of torment and incarceration.

  Lysander passed by the creature. It paid no attention to the Imperial Fists marching past.

  ‘These people have lost their god,’ said First Sergeant Kaderic beside him. ‘This is the desolation that Chaos brings.’

  ‘There will be another one for them,’ replied Lysander. ‘There is no shortage of would-be gods on this world.’

  ‘Brother Lysander,’ came Lycaon’s voice over the vox-link. ‘Join me at our head.’

  Lysander quickened his pace to where Lycaon led the Imperial Fists, moving rapidly down the main thoroughfare towards the gate through which they had entered the city. They would be gone long before news of Shalhadar’s death reached the city’s forces outside the gates, and would be vanished into Malodrax’s badlands before the prince’s army had a chance to return and seek revenge.

  ‘The daemon,’ said Lycaon when Lysander was alongside him, ‘is made of lies as we are made of flesh and bone. It is a being solely of deceit. Whenever it speaks it lies.’

  ‘So have we been taught by the lessons of Dorn,’ said Lysander. ‘And so we have all seen.’

  ‘Shalhadar’s lie was the story,’ continued Lycaon. ‘A story is a sort of lie. He lived in a world that was not real, where everything obeyed the rules of his story. Even his destruction was a part of that. Perhaps he saw himself as a tragic hero brought low by the random chance of the galaxy.’

  ‘Or perhaps,’ said Lysander, ‘this is the end of a first act, and he will return in a thousand years for the finale.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Lycaon. ‘And he lied to me, as well, right down to the final moment. Daemons have sought to do the same, of course, as has every enemy capable of a man’s speech who thought it might do him good. Shalhadar turned to me, just as my crozius came down and he told me that he was surprised it was not you who laid him low.’

  ‘Me?’ asked Lysander.

  ‘You said you were famous on this world. Could Shalhadar have heard of you?’

  ‘There is no doubt,’ said Lysander. ‘He probably knew most of what happens on this planet. He could scarcely have remained a power on Malodrax if not.’

  ‘And his words were intended to place doubt in my mind, that when you first came to Malodrax you somehow played a part in Shalhadar’s story that you have not told us, as was his suggestion when we first encountered him?’

  ‘Again, Chaplain, there is no doubt.’

  The strike force reached the gates, still in ruins from when they had blown it off its mountings. They were marching now through the detritus of their battle with Shalhadar’s daemon court, and the ground was littered with shell casings and scraps of arms and armour. The daemons themselves had dissolved away, leaving no more than bloodstains and scorch marks. Around the gate lay the city’s exiles – they had run into the city as soon as the Imperial Fists were clear, but had been stunned into senselessness by the destruction of their god. They lay with eyes open, staring vacantly, as if there could be nothing in their world any more with Shalhadar gone.

  ‘A crude lie, would you not say?’ said Lycaon as the strike force marched through the shadow of the gateway. ‘No great finesse. No devastating stroke to leave us confused and in doubt. Surely not the finest work a being like Shalhadar has ever wrought.’

  ‘Shalhadar was faced with a superior force that could destroy him,’ said Lysander. ‘He was desperate. For all the daemon claims to be beyond human weaknesses, he can still know fear. He was afraid, and he clutched at what hope he could.’

  A procession was crossing the road behind the strike force, ignoring the Imperial Fists. They were broken and weeping, hundreds of them, citizens of Shalhadar commemorating their dead god with blades and whips. They cut their skin and that of their neighbours, and when one fell from exhaustion or misery he was beaten into the ground by those who walked over him. One threw his head back and screamed, and the others turned on him as if he had begged them to, rending his flesh with their fingers and teeth to drown out their misery with blood.

  Smoke coiled up from the gilded towers as others marked Shalhadar’s death by setting light to everything around them. Shattered glass and screams of pain mingled with the cries of despair.

  ‘This city will tear itself apart,’ said Lysander.

  ‘Good,’ said Lycaon. ‘Then we have done some righteousness here.’

  The Land Speeders buzzed over the wall as the strike force passed through the gateway and out of Shalhadar’s city. They had done there what Space Marines did – they descended on a place, left it a beheaded wreck, and never returned.

  8

  ‘An inquisitor learns not to speak of his acolytes for either good or ill, for he must accept that they will come and go as the attrition of his work claims their bodies and minds. Yet I cannot allow a man of the calibre of Kalastar Venn to go unsung, he who served me as shield-bearer and master of arms for three decades, who was claimed by nocturnal predators while standing vigil over our camp. Nor can I wash my hands of the fate of my Interrogator, Talaya, who deserved not to suffer betrayal – and yet had I not paid her to the tollkeeper, I would never have glimpsed the battlem
ents of Kulgarde, and I am certain she would have accepted the sacrifice.’

  – Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan

  The storm that raged across the badlands carried handfuls of flinty shards that bit at Lysander’s face and back as he struggled through it. Malodrax knew he was there, he was sure of it, and it had thrown down shearing winds to grind him down and leave him a skeleton buried in a drift of rocks. He held up a hand in front of his face as he struggled towards the dark smudge that was all he could make of the landscape around him, and his palm was slashed open. He wore only layers of rags and the heavy hooded cloak he had found to disguise himself in Kulgarde, and they now clung to him in bloody strips.

  He could die out here, if Malodrax decided he would. In the sky through the seething darkness a moon shone yellow-white, narrowed like a mocking eye. He could hear laughter on the howls of the wind. The ground was broken under his feet, constantly seeking to trip him up, and if he fell out here, exposed, he could be dead where he lay before the storm relented.

  The ground fell away beneath his feet. His next step sent him tumbling into a ravine, head over feet down a slope of broken rock. More cuts opened up on his knees and elbows before he came to rest at the bottom of the gulley, down in the dirt.

  Lysander had made it out of Kulgarde with two possessions aside from his rags. One was the book, and the other was the Imperial Fists chainsword. That represented everything he had in the galaxy. He was laid low, battered, bloody, alone and on his knees. He was everything a Space Marine should not be. A Space Marine was towering, noble, the reflection of the Emperor himself, and an Imperial Fist was even more than that – he was the legacy of Dorn, the continuing will of his primarch. On Malodrax Rogal Dorn was cut to pieces, weak, stranded and all but unarmed.

  Lysander forced the thoughts out of his mind. A Space Marine did not know fear – the galaxy at large knew that. But more than that, he must never know despair.