by Ben Counter
‘Lord Shalhadar the Veiled One acknowledges your lord’s requests,’ she said, ‘and grants them. They shall be fulfilled as quickly as the suns move across the sky. He asks but one boon from Warsmith Kraegon Thul, that he accept this gift in humility. A performance of The Chant of the Changing Ones, an act of obeisance to the gods of the warp. For we all stand before the eyes of the gods, and by their will we yet breathe.’
Two things could happen. Hexal could open the gates and let the performers through, so that Shalhadar’s act of supplication could unfold before the eyes of Kraegon Thul himself. Or Hexal could shoot Talaya and have a hundred Iron Warriors guns appear at the murder-holes, and massacre every living thing in the convoy. Lysander had thought about the odds of each eventuality, and had concluded the chances were roughly even.
Hexal gestured to the Iron Warriors of his squad, and they stood aside. Mutant slaves hauled the gates open. Talaya waved forward those essential to the performance, the actors, musicians and stagehands. Lysander jumped down from his carriage.
Hexal had decided not to kill them all out of hand. That was something. But he might still recognise Lysander, or at least realise he was a Space Marine. It was impossible for Lysander to hide his bulk and the crimson armour he wore only made him more prominent. He joined the crowd of bizarrely-dressed performers heading through the second gate, and tried not to meet Hexal’s eyes as he walked.
The broadsword on his back could cut through power armour if Lysander struck just right. Hexal’s head could be parted from his shoulders, or his spine could be severed by a blade through the abdomen. But Lysander’s mind had hosted those thoughts before, and they were choked down as he remembered that Kraegon Thul was still somewhere inside Kulgarde, waiting to die.
He swore for the hundredth time that Hexal would die. He passed by Hexal and his squad, through the gate, and into Kulgarde.
The duelling ground took up a significant stretch of the fortress interior. It was a great circular chamber of stone with galleries for the senior Iron Warriors to watch their fellow traitors drilling in close combat techniques or settling differences. This was to be their stage, the expanse of bloodstained stone scored with the marks of old blades. Their audience would be the Iron Warriors of Kulgarde, among them Warsmith Kraegon Thul himself.
Lysander watched motionless in what would become the wings as the stage was set. Sections of scenery were brought in representing a castle, a palace, a battlefield strewn with painted corpses and the fanciful clashes of colour and shape that represented the warp. Valienne, no less bedraggled and filthy than the moment Lysander found her, was arguing with the set builders and costumers about every detail. The rest of the cast were meditating or praying, each making their own form of appeal to the gods of the warp.
Pestilence was played by three youths in a costume that linked them together into a lumpen, shambling monstrosity, its lolling mouth operated by one of the actors while another rolled its bloodshot eyes and a third its malformed claw. The three were sewn into half their costumes and were blooding themselves, marking their skin with intricate bladed implements that left precise patterns of wounds on their skin. They glistened already with blood, and sang with high, wailing voices. Fate was played by a woman of improbable height and thinness, her face obscured by long white hair, her body made up to resemble a walking skeleton, accentuating her protruding ribs and sunken stomach. She was kneeling, throwing her head back and forth, barking like an animal as some spirit of the warp coursed through her. Perhaps the spirit was really there, perhaps it was a product of the woman’s diseased mind. It did not matter. She was quite mad, and it didn’t matter whether it was true spirit possession or a lifetime in Shalhadar’s insane city that had broken her.
A chorus representing the remorseful dead were praying together, partaking in a feast of raw flesh the origin of which Lysander chose not to guess at. Musicians were anointing their instruments in fresh blood.
The sets were taking shape, dividing the duelling ground into stage, backstage and the audience. A few curious mutants were peering from doorways or from beneath the gallery railings, watching bemusedly as the outlandish scenes were assembled ready to be rolled out onto stage.
Lysander had his own costume, of course. A heavy black robe hung over his armour. He had changed the armour’s helmet for an executioner’s black cowl which, thankfully, still hid his face. Less fortuitously, his role called for him to give up his well-balanced blade in favour of a huge single-bladed axe for lopping off heads. It was a reasonable weapon, but limited compared to the sword – its balance was off and the single cutting edge reduced his options in a fight by half. It could still kill well enough, though, and a Space Marine had to be ready to fight with whatever came to hand.
The stage was complete. The cast were assembled in the wings, and Lysander found himself surrounded with those fanatics of Shalhadar’s reign who had competed their whole lives for this moment. Their eyes shone with joy and an overwhelming gratitude, for they had finally been chosen to perform in the name of the Veiled One. Lysander was again grateful his face was hidden, because that was a look he could not have faked.
Lysander heard the sound of armour on stone and knew Kraegon Thul was being accompanied into the chamber by an honour guard of Iron Warriors. The musicians struck up the overture, a nauseous skirl of rising and falling tones. The actors muttered their final prayers, and as the music reached a crescendo, the first of them took the stage.
‘My fate on Malodrax did not lie among the court of Shalhadar. Malodrax had misled me, and I had almost fallen for its lies. But the willpower and intellect of an inquisitor was an obstacle this world had never come up against, and the truth became apparent to me even at the last moment.
‘I had to get out. Through the system of emergency dead drops I made contact with Agent Sildyne, who met me by a spot in the city walls where some of the city’s poorest dregs had quarried homes out of the stone. He led me and the remains of my warband, numbering Grun, Thol and Maskelin, through the warrens there and out of the city. Of all the acolytes who accompanied me to Malodrax, it was Sildyne who proved the most steadfast of purpose, the most driven to fulfil his duty.
‘This world had failed to draw me towards its false goal. Instead, as we made our way out of the city’s hinterland, I sought to understand what my purpose here really was. Though a heretic I be, still I feel the eyes of the Emperor upon me and His hand guiding me. Fate, and the Emperor’s will, would not have brought me to Malodrax, would not have seen me witness so many horrors and survive, without a reason. I merely had to understand it.
‘It was Thol who suggested to me the truth. Thol and his brother had been no better than animals when I found them, survivors among a tribe of killers and cannibals. I saw in them the viciousness of which an inquisitor must sometimes make use, but also the loyalty to one another that I felt I could turn into a dedication to the work of the Holy Ordos. As we ate a paltry meal of lizard and insect caught by the brothers, he said to me, “Lord Golrukhan, what this world wants is to be ruled.”’
‘“Indeed?” I said. “It seems to me that it wants nothing less.”
‘“But,” continued Thol, “have you known that type of dog who bites and growls at everyone, but when you earn his respect, he will never leave you?”
‘“I found two such dogs on your home world,” I replied.
‘“Or a woman,” said Grun with a smile, “who wants a man, and so who curses and scratches her nails at every man she meets, so that she knows whoever can stand to keep pursuing her is good enough for her?”
‘“I have not the knowledge of such things as you do, Grun,” I replied, “but I understand what you mean.” Grun was always the earthier of the two, and the crudeness of his language was enough to make me suspect possession when I first encountered him.
‘“Malodrax wants a ruler,” continued Thol. “But it doesn’t want just any back
stabber who can lie his way to a crown and a throne. So it sets up its trials to weed out the weak, and make sure that whoever makes it to the top is a worthy king.”
‘I was struck then by the truth of Thol’s words, and even of Grun’s. Malodrax was not unusual in being cruel to those who lived there, for any world touched by the warp must be so. But it had a purpose behind its cruelty. Not for Malodrax the callous, random cruelty that blossomed so readily wherever the warp intruded on reality. No, what I had seen thus far, while obscene, had a purpose behind it, a design that only my superior inquisitor’s mind could perceive.
‘How many on Malodrax had lived and died under its suns, never knowing they were pieces in a plan concocted by the will of this corrupted world? Believing they were the masters of their fate, while Malodrax had determined the time and manner of their deaths from the moment they first breathed its air? It was quite the revelation, for which I thanked Thol and Grun, and immediately set to meditating upon what plan I should now enact to understand more about what Malodrax wanted and how it set about getting it. Could it ever be ruled? What qualities would be necessary in a man to pass its many trials and become its lord?
‘There was one man who might qualify, of all those I had heard of on Malodrax. It was not the daemon prince of the city we had just left. Shalhadar, the Veiled One, was powerful indeed, but could a being of such infinite arrogance and self-absorption ever perceive this world’s machinations that churned away beyond him? Malodrax must have laid a thousand traps for the Veiled One, any one of which Shalhadar might walk into, blinded by his inability to imagine anyone might out-think him. No, Shalhadar was not my goal here, I understood that now more clearly than ever.
‘There was one man. I had heard his name, and I had learned much of the history that created him. A traitor to mankind, to the Emperor himself, one whose willpower had seen him defy the God-Emperor when that divine being still walked the galaxy in the guise of a man. A member of a Legion whose discipline bound its hatred in iron bands, and whose ambitions include nothing less than the mastery of all the armies of the warp and revenge against the whole human race.
‘Kraegon Thul, the Warsmith of Kulgarde. The garish sights of Shalhadar’s city had blinded me to the possibility that Thul was my true objective here. And now, I was certain. What better machine for turning Kraegon Thul into the ruler of his own warp-born empire than Malodrax?
‘The possibilities were dizzying. Was I witnessing the genesis of the next great lord of Chaos, the chosen of the Dark Gods, forged through the trials of Malodrax into a great figurehead to lead the next Black Crusade against the Imperium? The Emperor’s will had put me here, and it was surely His will that one such as I be there to stop Thul taking over Malodrax, and from there, rising to become Warmaster of Chaos.
‘“We head for Kulgarde,” I said to my warband. Though they looked grim to hear it, none objected. Perhaps they felt instinctively, as I did, that our own trial had seen us successfully evade the traps of Shalhadar’s court and that our final test was to stand against its chosen.
‘And what plan did it have for me? Malodrax could surely not tolerate an inquisitor on its soil without planning a fitting fate for him. Perhaps it wanted me corrupted, or broken, or merely dead. Or perhaps it wanted me to sit upon its throne. Whatever Malodrax wanted from me, it would not get it, for I was sworn to greater powers than any in the warp.
‘Our meal finished, we set out across the wastes in the direction of Kulgarde. Whatever fate awaited us, my acolytes showed no fear of it. They had seen what happened to those who strayed from the Emperor’s path, and that held for them more dread than any death Malodrax might inflict.’
When Lysander stepped from the wings, he was almost overwhelmed with hate at the sight of the Iron Warriors, a small retinue of them at the back of the seating, with aliens and mutants arrayed in front of them. Lysander saw right past the xenos horrors, as if they weren’t there. Instead, he saw nothing but Kraegon Thul.
The Warsmith was wreathed in oily smoke. Lysander could hear the grinding of the cogs on his shoulderguards even from the stage, even above the crooning of the choir who kneeled before the front row. Behind the clouded lenses of Thul’s helmet were eyes watching Lysander at that very moment, and Lysander imagined a film of filth crawling over his skin as the Warsmith’s corruption touched him. Thul’s air hose sprayed spurts of white vapour from its ancient seals.
Beside Thul was the skinny, atrophied form of a type of mutant Lysander recognised – a Navigator, a bearer of a stable mutation that granted him a third eye with which he could see into the warp without being driven mad. That third eye was hidden behind a band of cracked and embroidered leather wound around his forehead. His face was emaciated and his frame, tall by unaugmented standards, was bent and hunched beneath the heavy dark-blue robes. He must have been the Warsmith’s personal Navigator, who directed his fleets when he left Malodrax. How long would it be before Kraegon Thul gathered his legion of war machines and took off from Malodrax, to crusade against the Imperium he betrayed?
And on Thul’s other side stood the creature Lysander had learned was named Karnak, Thul’s alien head scientist. It was the first time Lysander had really seen Karnak clearly, the sharp and swooping lines of his elaborate armour, the half-moon shoulder guards and tall plume of the helmet that hid his face from view. Lysander could still not tell Karnak’s species – under that armour he could be of any species of roughly humanoid size and shape, which might be one of thousands of hateful aliens the Imperium had encountered.
Lysander hated Karnak as much as he hated Thul, he realised then, but it was a different kind of hate. What he felt to look on Kraegon Thul was hot and intense, a relentless, volcanic emotion that filled him with fire. Thul was everything Lysander’s Chapter stood against, an ancient enemy whose existence inflamed the anger of every Imperial Fist. But his hate for Karnak was cold and detached.
The worst sight of all was of the Imperial Fists, shackled to stone blocks just before the stage. Skelpis, Halaestus and Vonkaal were chained there. The stump of Skelpis’s leg had been cauterised and was now a red-black mass of scorched scar. Halaestus’s skin had been removed in geometric patches all across his body. Vonkaal’s torso was torn open, his organs visible through the sawn-out sections of his ribcage. Lysander could not see the hearts beating or the lungs drawing breath. Vonkaal was dead, displayed as a monument to Thul’s power. The arrogance of the display spoke of the very heart of the Iron Warriors. They had stood against the Emperor in the Horus Heresy and their Primarch Perturabo had locked horns with Rogal Dorn. They were driven by jealousy of the Imperium and the Loyalist Legions that had triumphed at the Battle of Terra. Now they displayed their captive Imperial Fists as war trophies, flaunting the possession of their deadliest enemies’ defeated.
The play was already half-done. A corpse lay at Lysander’s feet, of a cultist picked to play the personification of innocence slain by Fate. The actress who performed as Fate had killed him for real, razor-sharp needles on her hands clawing through his face to shred the brain matter behind. The mess of blood and gore pooled around the black leather boots of Lysander’s Executioner costume. Another two bodies lay sprawled at the front of the stage, one killed during the play’s opening to consecrate the stage to the Dark Gods, the other shot through with arrows representing the random cruelty of Pestilence.
‘Behold!’ called out Lysander as he followed the lines of Valienne’s play. ‘For every sin there is a punishment, and though a man might cheat it for a lifetime, in death it will find him. Though he flee into the realms of the Immaterium, yet in madness it will find him. Though he seek to hide at the end of time, in infinity it will find him. Witness the sinner! Witness his folly!’
Lysander had never spoken to the cultist who was to play the victim he executed. The scene was impossible to rehearse fully. This was not a play that could be rehearsed, only unleashed when everyone knew their par
t. The cultist playing the Sinner danced from the wings, spreading blood from the devotional wounds on his arms and legs. He wore the leather straps of Shalhadar’s pleasure-cult, and his skin was livid with old scars.
The sinner’s monologue followed. Lysander had it memorised – it was a long mockery of Chaos, of fate and the randomness of the warp, and one of the centrepieces of Valienne’s work.
Lysander watched for signs of life among the captive Imperial Fists. These were the battle-brothers he had come so far to save, and if they were just corpses hanging there, then Kraegon Thul would have won. The awful possibility, though Lysander had always known it was such, was a weight in his stomach that wanted to drag him down into the earth.
Brother Halaestus’s eyes flickered, barely enough movement to be noticed. Lysander met Halaestus’s eyes as they opened a slit, and with an equally subtle nod Halaestus acknowledged Lysander. He knew. Of course he knew a battle-brother. Halaestus had not given up hope here, he had not abandoned the belief that Lysander would return.
‘Freedom is my religion!’ the cultist cried. ‘So shall I do what I will, and the fates be damned!’
The mutants in the audience spat and heckled. Among them Lysander spotted the creatures who served as orderlies in the medical wing, and whose species counted the Bone Sculptors among their number, with their faces like long animal skulls and their fingers tipped with syringes. Lysander felt his fingers tightening on the headsman’s axe.
‘I will make water on every altar!’ cried the cultist who was to be Lysander’s victim. ‘Make every temple’s threshold my soiling-place! And the gods can chase me if they will, for I have wrought spells and magics that blind their sight! See now the wards I have created, proof against daemon and witch. That is what I think of fate! I would walk in the warp if I could, and spit at every god I saw!’
