Malodrax

by Ben Counter

  Lysander closed the volume again. There was nothing in it that would help him now, and anything that did not bring Kraegon Thul closer to death was not relevant.

  The vampire moon had killed its siblings, and was splitting into pieces, sharp black cracks running across its surface. A chill wind blew off the water, and on it was a voice.

  Lysander could not make out the words. He drew up his bolter, his muscle memory reminding his limbs of the motions needed to bring it to his shoulder or to draw his chainblade. He could see nothing save a gathering of mist down the wall, at the base of what had once been a watchtower ringed with visions slits.

  Lysander looked closer. In the swirling of the mist was the suggestion of a more solid shape. It came closer and Lysander brought up his bolter. The shape was humanoid, walking slowly along the wall as Lysander watched down his gunsights.

  It was one of the xenos whose existence had been suggested by the features of Kulgarde’s surgeon and the monumental sculptures of their fallen cities. It had the same long-limbed shape, and the same flat face and large liquid eyes. Its features became more distinct and Lysander could see the embroidered finery it wore, trailing long tails of ruffled silk, dripping with jewellery. It did not belong among the brutalist architecture here.

  It came as no surprise that Malodrax had its ghosts. Lysander had seen enough remnants of the planet’s many past falls to wonder when they would appear.

  From behind Lysander came another shape, accompanied by a blast of chill that made him spin around. It had passed through him before he had got his finger onto the trigger or his chainblade in his hand, and advanced on the xenos ghost with such an attitude of menace Lysander knew what it must be before it was fully formed.

  The new ghost’s back formed into a mass of knotted muscle supporting a hunched and elongated head with a pair of ribbed horns. It held a jagged, brutal sword in one hand and pointed a talon at the xenos with another. Save for the basic humanoid layout of its limbs it could not have been more different. The alien ghost fell to its knees, even its inhuman features unable to obscure the raw fear.

  The second ghost was a daemon of the Blood God. Lysander had encountered them before – footsoldiers of the warp, one moment drilling in their thousands, perfectly in step, the next running random and wanton as they dispensed butchery on the world of real space. Each was different, for such was the way of the warp, but each had the same air of brutality and the lust for violence. Men of the Imperium, where they could speak of such things at all, called them bloodletters.

  The xenos was begging on its knees. The ghost of the bloodletter slashed its spectral blade through the alien and cut it in two at the waist.

  ‘Brother,’ voxed Lysander. ‘Are you seeing this?’

  ‘Aye,’ came the reply from Brother Kallis of Squad Kaderic, the closest of Lysander’s fellow watchmen. ‘No surprise this place is haunted.’

  ‘We are watching the past,’ said Lysander. ‘This is how this place came to be.’

  More and more apparitions glimmered into life along the walls and among the fallen battlements. Bloodletters were charging at the alien ghosts, cutting them into pieces without mercy. It was a work of crude butchery, and Lysander wondered how long it had taken for the servants of the Blood God to reduce this corner of Malodrax’s native civilisation to nothing. Perhaps it had taken place over a single night – a few hours of concentrated murder, at once a military conquest and an act of worship. The ghosts of cultists were swarming across the delta’s ruins now, wearing masks of flayed skin and crude spikes hammered through their bodies.

  Brother Kallis was hailing the rest of the strike force, waking them from their half-sleep. Many had already snapped into full awareness as the ghosts danced among them. Some cultists turned on one another as the last of the xenos were cut down, or threw themselves onto the blades of the bloodletters as offerings to their god.

  ‘This must have happened an aeon ago,’ voxed Lysander over the command vox-channel. ‘We are looking at the birth of a daemon world.’

  ‘Are we subject to a moral threat?’ came Captain Lycaon’s reply. In the parade ground below Lycaon was on his feet, crozius in hand.

  ‘I know not,’ said Lysander. ‘But this history is not complete.’

  Spectral walls rose in the moonlight, the ghosts of the long-fallen battlements and watchtowers. These were fortress-temples to the Blood God, whose warlike worshippers saw everything in terms of raw strength and conquest. They rose up in oppressive banks of masonry, enormous battlements enclosing parade grounds and execution squares, and barracks and training grounds where the ghosts of summoned bloodletters duelled with would-be champions of the Blood God.

  There was no telling how many thousands of years might be encompassed in those moments, as the bloodstained empire rose. Heads and flayed hides were mounted on the spiked battlements. Armies marched out to war, and marched back in through the fortress gates laden with captured banners and cartfuls of skulls for the altar of their god.

  Lysander knew what the next ghosts would be. They appeared on the horizon, the spectral hulks of enormous war machines. The siege engines reached the outermost walls, and in silence began to tear them down. Some were heavy with cannons that blasted silver explosions across the fortifications. Others were equipped with simple rams, driving straight into the walls and sending great hunks of stone tumbling. Some chunks of fallen masonry still lay where their ghostly counterparts had landed, now half submerged in rushing waters or eroded into shapelessness.

  Siege towers disgorged squads of ghostly Iron Warriors onto the walls. Lysander recognised the marks of their armour, the same as those worn by the traitors who had taken him and his battle-brothers into Kulgarde. Where the bloodletters had conquered with brutality and frenzy, the Iron Warriors treated warfare as a grim, methodical business, moving with efficiency and precision as they mowed down scores of cultists with bolter volleys or launched lightning close combat assaults with chainblade and lightning claw. Siege engines pulled down the watchtowers and demolition charges brought down the walls. Iron Warriors squads despoiled the temples and choked the parade grounds with oceans of silvery blood.

  It was not the scale of the bloodshed that was awful. Any Space Marine had seen death inflicted on such grand scales before. It was the manner of it that wrenched at Lysander’s gut, because it was so familiar. They fought like Imperial Fists, with expertise born of a lifetime training to fight and break the siege. Rogal Dorn had been a siege warrior, a builder and breaker of the mightiest fortresses, but so had the Iron Warriors primarch, Perturabo. Lysander realised in that moment just how close a mirror the Iron Warriors were of the Imperial Fists, created to fight the same wars in the Emperor’s name, diverged onto two different paths in the fires of civil war.

  Lysander had never hated them more. The thought was a foul taste in his mouth. That the Imperial Fists and the Iron Warriors could be so close, separated by chance alone, by fate…

  ‘No,’ said Lysander aloud. ‘We are nothing alike. Keep your lies to yourself, Malodrax. They will find no purchase here.’

  As if in response, the broken moon above shattered into a thousand tears of burning light, raining down like a host of shooting stars. In their sudden fractured glare the ghosts waned, the sight of Iron Warriors slaughtering the defeated cultists growing dim and the sound of the rushing waters rising. A slab of wind-worn stone fell into the river from a short distance along the wall, and it seemed to break the spell that had conjured the ghosts of the delta’s past.

  The light died down. There were no new moons in the sky, only the starless dark. The last of the ghosts dissolved away.

  ‘Whatever its meaning,’ voxed Lycaon, ‘let us hope it is over but not assume it.’

  ‘Everything on Malodrax is a test,’ voxed Lysander in reply. The other Imperial Fists on watch were voxing in the all-clear as the rest of the strike force pee
red suspiciously into the night from the parade ground’s perimeter. ‘This was no exception.’

  ‘If this world means to scare us away,’ voxed First Sergeant Kaderic, ‘then it chose the wrong audience for its light show.’

  ‘Back to your posts,’ said Chaplain Lycaon. ‘Next watch, take your positions. The rest of you, we have little time before we must move again. Make the most of it, for tomorrow may see a battle and I would have you fresh for the fight.’

  The shifting night turned again as Lysander found a sheltered spot below the wall, and let his mind drift down into half-sleep.

  The strike force reached the edge of the delta towards the end of the next day. Its edge, a carved gorge through which a branch of the original river ran dark and fast, gave way to rocky desert. This was the northernmost extent of the broken hinterland of Kulgarde, and in the distance rose flinty ridges of uprooted stone in a mountain range birthed by some enormous violent force. Far to the south this became the broken land where the strike force had first landed, and across which Lysander had hiked on his way to Shalhadar’s city. Here, it was a land of fortresses.

  The fortifications crossed the desert in an infinitely complex puzzle, walls intersecting in a labyrinth. The buildings clustered on the pale rock like eruptions of a skin disease on Malodrax’s surface, too many to ever count, thousands of years’ worth of construction encrusting everything.

  Even the strike force veterans, who had seen some of the stranger sights the galaxy had to offer, paused to take it in. Watchtowers sagged and crumbled, as if half dissolved away by acid. Battlements lay on top of each other as if the fortifications had been haphazardly dropped from above, crushing and warping everything underneath. Enormous craters were bite marks taken out of the landscape, revealing torn strata of past construction. Massive scars several layers deep ran across the fortresses as if gouged by huge claws.

  The closest construction shivered with movement. At first it seemed to be heat haze or a mirage caused by the trapped heat that glowered beneath the overcast sky, but as the strike force approached it became clear that a multitude of creatures covered the huge blocks of stone, swarming everywhere like termites. They were daemons, surrounded by a fug of bituminous chemical stink boiling in the heat, oozed out from Malodrax’s pores to serve its masters.

  Each had a knot of pale flesh for a torso, with a lolling, drooling mouth on the underside, and four limbs that each ended in the same combination of hand and foot. They moved on all fours but could also use these limbs to lift the blocks of stone that had fallen from the walls of the fortification they were working on. They were stronger than they looked and could wedge themselves under huge blocks of masonry, forcing their limbs straight and levering the blocks off the ground. In groups they were moving the stones back into place, rebuilding the walls and crenulations.

  ‘These are the proving grounds,’ said Lysander to Chaplain Lycaon as they watched the builder-daemons working. ‘Kulgarde bloods its siege engines here. They are tested against the fortifications, and the walls are rebuilt every day by the daemons.’

  ‘Very much like the Iron Warriors,’ said Lycaon, his eye roaming across the criss-crossing walls. An Imperial Fist automatically sized up every fortress he came across for its strongest and weakest points, the methods of entry, the most dangerous firing zones – it was as much the legacy of Rogal Dorn’s genetic pattern in their gene-seed as a matter of training. ‘They have an efficiency about them that makes their corruption all the darker. It lies deep indeed to leave the surface undisturbed. Discipline without, but in their hearts there is a deviance I am glad I cannot imagine.’

  ‘The route through the petrified forest spared us this ground,’ continued Lysander, ‘but we cannot avoid it any longer if we are to reach sight of Kulgarde. And the plan of attack requires us to head into it.’

  ‘The plan of attack has yet to be decided,’ said Lycaon.

  Brother Halaestus broke off from the strike force’s order of march, clambering up onto one of the blocks of fallen masonry. He drew his blade and sliced a limb off the nearest daemon. It let out a rumbling sigh and slumped to the ground before Halaestus drove the monomolecular blade down through its body. Halaestus kicked the dead creature aside, took out his pistol and loosed half a dozen shots through the daemons scuttling around the block, tearing out chunks of vermillion flesh and spattering the stonework with their blood.

  ‘Halaestus!’ called out First Sergeant Kaderic. ‘We have not the time to waste ammunition on these things. Stand down!’

  ‘Would that I had a universe of bullets,’ said Halaestus, his eyes looking right through Kaderic as he spoke. ‘I would fire them all at Malodrax.’

  The Dorn’s Dagger descended shortly ahead and came down on its landing jets. Techmarine Kho leaned from the cockpit. ‘I cannot cover you well from the air,’ he said, ‘if you will be so often out of sight moving through these ruins. And any enemies will likely be adapted to hiding from eyes above. I can continue to support from the air but I will not be your eyes as you would wish, Chaplain.’

  ‘Then your task is to scout out Kulgarde’s war engines,’ said Lycaon. ‘I must know if we are closing in on one, or if one approaches us. They cannot be predicted and if one’s course takes it towards us we must know. Stay out of sight as much as possible, for the Iron Warriors will have eyes out here. And take the greatest care, Techmarine. We will need you soon.’

  ‘Of course, my Chaplain,’ said Kho. The engines of the Dorn’s Dagger burned again, tinting the heavy air with the smell of burned fuel as they punched the Land Speeder back up above the fortifications.

  ‘Move out!’ ordered Lycaon, and the strike force marched on into Kulgarde’s proving grounds.

  13

  ‘“Behold!” cried one, and the other hundreds of supplicants were thrown to the ground as if by a great hand slamming down on the cathedral floor. From the skin of their naked backs burst spined growths, like thorny vines that spiralled out into razor-sharp thickets. Leaves sprouted, and fat strange-coloured flowers. Odd creatures gambolled through the forest thus created. The priests of the Chaos gods looked on, but their gods looked not. A thousand men dead in that cathedral and the powers they worshipped cared nothing, for that is the greatest evil of Malodrax. A life might be spent in devotion, but the indifference of the warp means it is a life devoid of meaning.’

  – Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan

  Captain Hexal held court in the city’s arena. His palace was a pavilion of flayed skins set up on the arena floor, around which crowds flocked to be bludgeoned back by the ring of mutants guarding it. The skins chosen for his pavilion were those covered in tattoos, so the whole foul creation was as obscenely decorative as Shalhadar’s own palace.

  Lysander watched from the stands. The arena itself, a spectacular creation of carved bone, did not interest him. It was no surprise there was somewhere in the city for combats and death spectacles to be waged in honour of Shalhadar. His soldier’s mind worked on its own, telling him he would be unlikely to make it through the cordon of mutants with enough speed to get to grips with Hexal before he could prepare or escape. What truly concerned him was what Hexal might want.

  The sound of Talaya’s mechanical limbs conveying her across the bone and stonework had already become familiar. Lysander did not have to turn around to know she was drifting regally towards him.

  ‘Lord Shalhadar has decided to receive Ambassador Hexal,’ she said.

  ‘Who is to hear his demands?’ asked Lysander.

  ‘I am.’

  Lysander looked around at her. ‘And who will go with you?’

  ‘That is a matter for my own discretion. It would hardly become the herald of this city’s lord to enter the presence of a hostile power alone.’

  It occurred to Lysander to wonder how Talaya would fare if she faced Hexal one on one. She was quick. He knew that, and her limbs gave her greate
r range. There was no telling what concoctions the generator mounted on her back could pump out – perhaps something potent enough to knock out the Iron Warrior. But if Hexal got within reach of her mechanical talons, he had the strength to tear her apart – Lysander was sure.

  And what would happen if Lysander fought her? He had no idea.

  Talaya gave him one of her hateful little smiles and clacked off down the seating rows towards the arena floor. Lysander stood and followed her.

  The crowd parted for Talaya – Shalhadar’s city knew her well and they were afraid of her. They were afraid of Lysander, too, but then he was twice the height of many of them and clad in spectacular crimson armour, so that was no surprise. Many kneeled when Talaya went past - others tried to scramble away. Lysander, however, followed in her wake.

  The mutants barred her way. One of the diminutive creatures that Lysander recognised from Kulgarde’s medical wing hurried from the pavilion and chattered away in the ear of the biggest and ugliest of the mutants. It bowed and stood aside, letting Talaya through and Lysander after her. The smell of the uncured skin hit him and he realised it had been flayed from its donor creatures only recently, without being tanned or preserved. The orderly held a flap aside and Talaya entered, her limbs letting her down onto the arena floor so her head did not brush against the raw skin.

  Inside, the pavilion was dark and noisome. The uncured skin hung with scraps of fibrous muscle and organ, and dripped blood on to the sand underfoot. The stink of it was awful. The effect was rather like walking into the inside of a huge living organ. More of Kulgarde’s mutants stood as an honour guard, this time armed and armoured like a parody of a standing army, holding the banners of Kraegon Thul’s warband. Thul’s heraldry was the stylised mechanical hand of his Legion, an open book, a tower with a crack down the centre and a pair of severed hands hanging from a hook, each depicted on the various banners.

  On a throne constructed from steel blocks sat Captain Hexal of the Iron Warriors. His chainsword leaned against the throne beside him and a diminutive mutant held his bolter. Hexal wore his helmet, showing only the brutal, inhuman, mechanical face worn by his Legion.