by Ben Counter
‘We are regrouping just south of the encampment site, where several tunnels converge. Find others and make your way to us.’
‘Yes, Chaplain.’
A voice in Lysander’s memory, perhaps from that man he had once been before he became a Space Marine, reminded him that he knew what the predators were, where they had come from, and what they wanted. It reminded him he had not told Chaplain Lycaon of this. Had he wanted to disbelieve it? Or was he ashamed?
The stench rose. Lysander felt himself choking on it. Through the darkness loomed a shape that also had that terrible familiarity to it, a sagging mass of a torso, spindly neck and vulture head.
‘Ah, there you are,’ said the brood mother with a chuckle.
The daemon’s face was smeared with blood and she dragged behind her the corpse of an Imperial Fist, his torso ripped open. His helmet had been torn off and his bloodspattered face was wide-eyed with shock and pain. Brother Kollus of Squad Kaderic.
‘Did you think you could come back to Malodrax and hide from me?’ the brood mother continued. Lysander saw she was bigger than the first time he had seen her, gorged on her young. Their foetal corpses dangled from her midriff, neglected and rotting. She was gnarled and armoured with scar tissue, and her red eyes gleamed. ‘I can smell you, traveller. I will never forget your tender scent. I would follow you through the blood ocean, across the Mountains of Glass, through the gates of Kulgarde itself!’
Lysander took his chainsword in a two-handed grip. The brood mother stalked closer, swinging Kollus’s body playfully. Behind her, Lysander saw another Imperial Fist clambering in through a side tunnel, but he could not make out who it was.
Time, he thought. He needed more time.
‘What are you on this world?’ said Lysander, squaring his feet and looking the daemon in its decaying face. ‘Vermin? The lowest of the low? Feeding on the filth that the higher creatures leave behind?’
‘You seek to anger me. I know no anger. I know no fear or joy or hatred. I know only passion, Imperial Fist. I know only the raw emotion of the warp. That you could feel it yourself! That you could revel in it!’ She was within a few paces of Lysander now, blotting out the moonlight from above. She leaned in close. ‘Stay with me,’ she said.
A volley of bolter shots thudded into her side. The brood mother shrieked and lashed out with Kollus’s body in the direction the shots had come from, knocking aside the Imperial Fist who had jumped up from the cover of a fallen rock to take aim. She turned from Lysander and bore down on her attacker.
In her other hand she held a weapon – a chainsword. The chainsword Lysander had given her in exchange for the way to the city of Shalhadar.
The Imperial Fist rolled onto his back just as the brood mother raised the chainsword to bring it down and cut him in half.
It was Halaestus, his ruined face defiant.
The brood mother reeled back. ‘Oh, what hideousness!’ she shrieked. ‘Such ugliness!’ Her face was contorted with shock, and Lysander saw in her expression what he himself felt to look upon her.
Lysander charged at the brood mother. He slashed at her and sliced through her arm with his chainsword before he slammed shoulder-first into her midriff. She toppled backwards, the atrophied remnants of her dozens of young looking up at him with the wide blank eyes of their dried-out skulls. He thudded on top of her and felt his hand sinking into her pocked flesh as he tried to push himself upright.
The brood mother brought her chainsword – the chainsword Lysander had given her – up towards him. Lysander caught it against his own chainblade and the two screeched as their teeth ground against one another. Lysander was face to face with the daemon, and the stench of her was almost enough to knock him out.
‘Stay,’ she gasped.
Lysander drew back his fist and plunged it into her face. Bone and teeth splintered. Foul-smelling gore spattered across his face.
The brood mother was shrieking, half in pain, half in an awful cacophony of excitement, a gruesome ecstasy at Lysander’s touch. Lysander drove his fist down again and again and the brood mother reared up under him, throwing him off onto his back in the dirt. She clutched at her shattered face, sweeping around her at random with the chainblade.
Brother Halaestus shot her through the throat with his bolter. Her head toppled to the side on its broken stalk. Halaestus punched three more shots through her throat and upper chest.
Insensible, blind, the brood mother flopped onto her front and writhed through the dirt, mewling and spluttering as she groped through the filth.
Lysander clambered out of the refuse pit and took one of the side tunnels, gauging his direction and striking out for what he thought was the site of the encampment. He could hear bolter fire up ahead, and by the time he reached the knot of Imperial Fists fighting alongside Lycaon the brood mother’s offspring lay in heaps around them, shot down or cut to pieces.
‘Captain Lysander!’ said Lycaon. ‘You are late to the fight, alas.’
‘The daemon who leads them is laid low,’ replied Lysander. ‘Just behind me.’
‘Dead?’
‘As good as. A good dose of flame will see to it.’
The Imperial Fists regrouped and forged through the tunnels to the brood mother. She writhed and squealed pathetically, like a whipped animal. Sergeant Gorvetz ordered Brother Antinas forwards, as he had at the war engine, and the result was the same. Antinas drenched the brood mother in burning fuel and the flames of her pyre reached up through the fallen ceiling and into the sky. She shrieked in the flame and clawed at the air above her, her flesh boiling away and only a deformed skeleton left to tumble into the mass of burning debris.
Lysander found Sergeant Gorvetz as the Imperial Fists watched the brood mother die. ‘She killed Brother Kollus,’ said Lysander.
Gorvetz watched the fire leaping high for a moment, even as the last remnants of the brood mother’s shape crumbled away. ‘This thing killed him,’ he said. There was no emotion in his voice.
‘I could not stop her.’
‘Her?’ Gorvetz rounded on Lysander. ‘Her? You know of this creature?’
‘She was spoken of,’ said Lysander. ‘A daemon, called the brood mother.’
‘Filth upon the day we came here,’ spat Gorvetz. ‘This is no place to leave a good brother behind.’
The fire was dying down, the fast-burning fuel feeding a hot but short-lived flame. Lycaon walked through the burning detritus closer to the ashes and scorched bones that remained of the brood mother. He poked around in the debris, bent down, and came up clutching the scorched length of a chainsword. Golden paint still clung to it, and to the clenched fist symbol of the Chapter.
‘Brother Lysander,’ said Lycaon. ‘You left your weapon in your foe.’
‘It’s not his,’ came a voice from across the chamber. Brother Halaestus walked forwards, the dying fire flickering its orange glow across the patchwork face that had so horrified the brood mother. ‘It’s mine.’
On the way out of the warrens the moon sank in the sky, as if it were drowning the petrified forest in spite. The few surviving young of the brood mother scurried away from the remains of the battlefield, where they had been scavenging on the carrion of their dead around the crater where the Imperial Fists barricades had been. Kho’s pair of Land Speeders patrolled overhead, taking pot shots at the larger creatures that did not flee at the first sound of booted feet on the ashen ground.
‘Where did she find it?’ said Halaestus. He had walked up behind Lysander, waiting until they were out of earshot of the rest of the strike force. The other Imperial Fists were securing the immediate perimeter, making ready to move out.
Lysander tried to read Halaestus’s expression. He had always been steadfast, rarely emotive, a reliable and trustworthy soldier. Now there was even less to see of the man he knew, the new sections of his face artificial and dead.
‘Brother?’ asked Lysander.
‘You know full well. My chainsword. How did the brood mother get it?’
‘The Iron Warriors took our gear at Kulgarde,’ said Lysander.
‘And how did my blade make it into the daemon’s hands?’
‘How do I know?’ snapped Lysander, a little too sharply. ‘Thul bartered it with her. One of the fortress’s scum stole it and pawned it away.’
‘To a creature that followed us and ambushed us? Two connections between you and the brood mother, Lysander. She has a weapon from one of your squadmates in her hand, and she sought out an army that includes you.’
‘Do you intend to accuse me, brother?’ said Lysander, forcing his voice level. ‘Of what?’
‘Accuse you? No, captain. Just state facts. Brothers are dead and your footprints are all over the world that claimed them. Just facts.’
Lysander grabbed Halaestus by the back of the neck and pushed his face close. ‘You have lost everything that makes a Space Marine into an Imperial Fist. Your thoughts are not your own. Stay them, Brother Halaestus.’
‘You think I have lost my mind?’ retorted Halaestus. ‘What did you do on Malodrax, Lysander? Answer us. What did you do?’
Lysander let Halaestus go. Now the anger in Halaestus was clear, and a mania simmered behind his eyes that did not belong in a level-headed, disciplined Imperial Fist. ‘You are not yourself, brother,’ he said. ‘Back on the Phalanx, that will change. Until then I ask that you trust me.’
Lysander walked back towards the bulk of the strike force, now approaching a long rise in the ground that formed a blasted ridge covered in the stone trunks of fallen trees.
‘I have not forgotten you saved my life,’ said Halaestus after him. ‘But there is only so much that buys. If you betrayed what you are, you will never fully leave this planet. You know that, Lysander! You know I speak truth!’
10
‘My own brand of heresy is a common one. I am humble enough to admit that. What if knowledge was a weapon, I came to ask? Knowledge of the enemy, so warned against by the Imperial Creed, which could be a keener blade than ignorance? Instead of obeying the Creed I hoarded such knowledge and most sinfully of all, when I learned I was not alone, I sought the company of others who shared in my heresy. Thus was the name of Malodrax first passed to me, a world of daemons where countless secrets were waiting to become our mortal sins.’
– Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan
Lysander’s first sight of the sphinx was as it circled the pinnacle of Shalhadar’s pyramid, light shimmering through it as it came down to land. A canal surrounded the pyramid, stocked with iridescent fish that burst like fireworks when they leapt from the water. The only bridge to the palace led to the main gates, and it was in front of these gates that the sphinx came to land with a grace that should not have been possible for something of its enormous size.
‘Keeper of the gate!’ called out Talaya the herald of Shalhadar, from the other end of the bridge where she stood with Lysander. ‘Someone thinks himself good enough to stand before the Veiled One in audience!’
‘Wonderful,’ purred the sphinx, its voice a kingly rumble from deep in its barrel chest. ‘I was getting hungry.’ It padded a few steps along the bridge and brought its massive feline head low, peering at Lysander. ‘And is this it?’
Talaya had brought Lysander to a tower of many chambers, most of them dark, smoky dens where citizens lounged in the grip of visions and nightmares brought about by braziers of smouldering narcotics. Among them were stands of antiques, including sets of armour, from which Lysander had been bade select a suit that fitted him. Most were made for men of normal size but Lysander had found a set of oversized full plate, lacquered red and scalloped like the shell of a sea creature. He had not taken the helmet, which was fashioned into an expressionless human face with an extra eye in the forehead, and instead went bare-headed. He had found a sword, too, a fine two-hander which a Space Marine could wield in one, carried in a scabbard of gold and emerald at his waist. He still carried Inquisitor Golrukhan’s book, held by a strap to one armoured thigh.
‘And why,’ rumbled the sphinx, ‘would my lord the Veiled One stoop to share a realm with such a ragged peasant?’
‘I have brought you this far,’ said Talaya to Lysander. ‘The rest is up to you.’
Lysander walked onto the bridge, within a few steps of the sphinx. Its stained-glass wings surrounded it in a halo of colour, shimmering across the stone and gilt of its body. Its face had more of a cat about it than a human, its eyes bright and expressive considering it seemed to have been forged rather than born. A deep purr shuddered the surface of the bridge as its enormous chest rose and fell.
‘The Veiled One will see me,’ said Lysander.
‘Will he now?’ replied the sphinx. ‘How very certain you sound.’
‘I will pay what must be paid.’
The sphinx smiled, showing its teeth. ‘I doubt that greatly, strange little thing. I doubt there is anything you have that I could want.’
‘You do not want anything, save to serve your master. And you will serve him by letting me through.’
‘Do you really want to go through the whole charade? You know I must kill you if you are found wanting. Not that I would wish for anything else, of course, but there are rules that must be followed. One of them is that you must know the consequences of standing before me. Throw yourself on your belly and beg me for mercy, with tears in your eyes, and you may withdraw.’
‘Your role as gatekeeper is to weed out the unworthy,’ said Lysander, ‘for only the worthy can pay. You are a creature formed from the will of the Prince of Pleasure, the Lord of Unspeakable Excess. Your currency is sensation. That is how I will pay you.’
‘Not just any sensation,’ said the sphinx. ‘Something new. Something I have never felt before. And I am as old as this world! Your race was not yet dribbled from the guts of rotten Terra when I was already ancient. I have seen the infinite thoughtscapes of the warp and the foulest debasements of the noblest men. What can you show me that I have not yet felt?’
‘You can read minds,’ said Lysander. It was not phrased as a question.
‘I can consume them whole,’ replied the sphinx. ‘That came to bore me many aeons ago.’
‘Read mine,’ said Lysander.
The sphinx crouched down, folding its arms. ‘And what a tiny, closed mind you have. Pray, what is in here that might interest me?’
Lysander felt the daemon’s touch. It was like a slimy, unclean thing that slithered around the inside of his skull, extruding feelers into his mind. His skin shuddered and his stomachs tightened up, and every instinct he had told him to draw his sword and set about the sphinx with a view to putting out its eyes. But he held his hand still, took in a breath to steady himself, and threw his mind back to Gravenhand Ridge.
There were many choices for Lysander to bring forward. He chose Gravenhand Ridge because it was so raw, so crude. A madman named Gladian Scraw had risen to power on a promise to restore his home world’s aristocracy to supremacy. It was a story repeated on countless worlds with disaffected social classes, vulnerable to men like Scraw who offered them a dream for a future that could not possibly be. There were so many planets like that in the Imperium that the name of the particular world didn’t matter.
Lysander picked out a memory of the first time he saw Scraw’s stronghold, defended on one side by the stormy cliffs of the ocean and on the other by the steep scree of Gravenhand Ridge. He had seen it from the air, through the viewfinder of a drop pod as it plummeted towards the ancient castle where Scraw was based.
The castle doubled as an execution ground. Its wings enclosed a courtyard where Scraw’s inner guard herded the planet’s dissidents into ranks to be shot down with volleys of autogun fire. So voluminous were the deaths that a whole social class had grown up to proc
ess and murder those that Scraw feared, hated, or merely disliked. At the moment the Imperial Fists drop pods broke through the clouds Scraw was sitting on a balcony overlooking the execution ground, imbibing his regular dose of narcotic and juvenat drugs from a crystal glass as the day’s first executions greeted the dawning sun.
Scraw was a noble-faced man, carefully sculpted by the planet’s most exclusive skinscapers to resemble the aristocratic ideal. His finely curved eyebrows raised as the drop pods appeared in the sky, hurtling towards his castle, retro thrusters burning to decelerate them as they arrowed in towards the courtyard.
Scraw had sold whatever soul he had to the powers of the warp in return for lordship over his world. From a spectral gateway he summoned marched a host of burning daemons, like suits of ornate armour filled with fire, answering the contract that Scraw had signed. When the Imperial Fists landed among the corpses of the day’s first dead, they were met by a legion of daemons of the Blood God.
Lysander remembered the smell – blood old and fresh, the familiar stink of the newly dead. The sulphur and flame of the daemons. He remembered Scraw screaming from his balcony, demanding that his daemonic allies slaughter the intruders where they stood.
But he remembered most clearly the fury of the slaughter. The Imperial Fists met the enemy with a wrath that equalled the daemons’ own. The daemons were used to mortal men cowering before them, either fleeing or fawning. The Imperial Fists did neither.
The blades through flesh. The flame washing over golden armour. Lysander brought every moment back to the front of his memory.
The Imperial Fists were led that day by Chaplain Chrysonerus, whose purity of spirit made him the ideal commander to lead his brothers in the face of the daemon. Lysander brought forth the image of Chrysonerus hacking daemons to pieces with his crozius, the power mace in the shape of a gilded winged skull that flashed in his hand as if he were battling with a shard of lightning.
And most of all, he remembered their victory. He remembered Chrysonerus wading through the burning remains of the daemon legion, storming into the castle and throwing Scraw down to the courtyard. He remembered Chrysonerus dragging a sobbing Scraw towards the spectral gateway, which still stood open onto the black flames of the daemons’ home world in the warp.
