Malodrax

by Ben Counter

  ‘I am to die. I have been left to the warders of this dungeon. The door has been removed from my cell and they will come for me when I am weak, so that I will in those final moments consider myself no more than prey. Not an inquisitor, not a servant of the Emperor, nor even a man, but a cowering, feeble prey-creature fit only to be devoured by a superior organism. Before that final breaking comes, I will make my testament.

  ‘I have broken with the codes of the Inquisition and sought out profane knowledge instead of its destruction. I made terrible bargains for such knowledge, and paid for it in the lives of brave and loyal acolytes who deserved better. I betrayed all that should ever matter to a man to follow this path and gather a greater understanding of our foes, against every teaching of righteous men. But I did this for my Emperor, because I only ever believed that to know our enemy was to defeat it, and that to defeat it was to best serve Him On Earth. I die, perhaps, as punishment for my heresies, but as all of Terra is my witness if I were to live my life again I would make those same choices, betray those same brethren, and commit those same heresies. For me, there was never any choice.

  ‘Malodrax has claimed me, as it has claimed billions before. Perhaps I should never have come here, for the very fount of knowledge it promised served as a trap to draw in flawed men like me. But though my body be torn apart by the jackals that gather even now outside my cell, I am not yet done here.

  ‘Agent Sildyne lives. He contacted me in secret, in the guise of one such warder, at great peril to his own life. He has with him that archeotech weapon for which I paid so much, and I have instructed him in the manner he will kill Kraegon Thul. If I cannot plunder Malodrax for its secrets, I can at least see to it that its most dangerous inhabitant dies. Thus is discharged the final duty I will perform as an inquisitor.

  ‘They are coming. If they find this note they will be unable to read it, unless Sildyne has broken and given them the code – if so, it does not matter what they know, for they know it already. If you are one such creature of Kulgarde reading this, know that the Emperor will have his revenge against you even if I do not.

  ‘I have a rock prised from the wall of my cell and I shall break a skull or two before they are done. In the name of my Emperor, I go to my death still fighting His fight.’

  – Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan.

  ‘Lord Shalhadar will be most pleased,’ came a familiar voice from high above. Lysander looked up to the rafters and there, among the pistons and noisome steam, clung Talaya by her spider’s legs. She clambered down slowly, savouring the moment, as if every drop of Sildyne’s blood on the floor was her own victory. ‘And Thul as well. He planned to kill Karnak for years, but one blow from that weapon and any Iron Warrior facing him would die. It was too great a risk even for the Warsmith. But when you walked through the gates of my lord’s city, the problem was solved.’

  Lysander picked up Sildyne’s sword. ‘At least I can kill one soul today who deserves it,’ he said.

  ‘Kill me?’ said Talaya. ‘What a ridiculous idea. I just came to make sure you did your job.’

  She scuttled back up a brass column, towards the darkness among the rafters.

  Lysander sprinted at the column. He hit it so hard he felt his shoulder crumple with the impact, bone and joint crushed against the metal. The column buckled and bent, ripped free from the ceiling. With a sense of satisfaction that blotted out the pain, Lysander heard the clatter of Talaya falling to the ground behind him, thrown off her perch by the unexpected impact.

  ‘Did you truly believe I would not kill you?’ said Lysander as he rounded on Talaya. ‘Do you have so poor a view of fate, to think it would not pit us against each other? From the first moment I saw you, I knew it would end with me taking your head.’

  Talaya picked herself up, losing her customary grace as she scrabbled across the floor. ‘Malodrax will have its blood,’ she said. ‘Either’s will do.’

  Talaya was fast. Lysander already knew that. When she leapt at him, propelled through the air by her back legs, it was exactly what he expected. The rain of blades that fell from her he had not anticipated. Slits opened up in her armoured body and arrowhead-shaped shards sprayed out, hundreds of them. Lysander threw out an arm in front of his face as they rained against him, embedding themselves in his skin, finding purchase in bone and sinew. A dozen slashes of pain flashed against his consciousness. Power armour might have turned them away, but not the mundane armour he wore now.

  Lysander dived forwards, avoiding Talaya as she came down talon-first on the spot where he had stood. Lysander tore off the vambrace now impaled with six or seven shards, feeling the hot blood flowing down his forearm as they were pulled free, and threw it to the floor.

  ‘Did you like that trick?’ said Talaya with a smile. ‘I have more.’

  Lysander lunged at her, reaching for one of her mechanical legs. If he could twist it from its mountings, he could use it as a weapon. Talaya flitted out of reach, skittering to one side and spearing him through the left calf with one of her talons. Lysander yelled and fell to one knee, and Talaya leapt onto his back, grabbing on with her other legs – one speared into his chest, another into the side of his abdomen, a third down through the meat of one shoulder.

  Talaya leaned forwards so he could see her face upside-down in front of his. Though Shalhadar had left her form mostly human, there was nothing human now in that face. Her eyes seemed to grow, pupil and iris merging into a swirling, star-scattered vision of the warp, smile wide and manic.

  ‘You too shall serve,’ she hissed.

  A gunshot sounded and the upper half of Talaya’s face was gone, replaced with a great red-black crater.

  The force pinning her to Lysander relented. Lysander grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and threw her down to the ground, her talons tearing free of him. The shot had hit her in the back of the head and the exit wound had blasted away everything from forehead to nose. She had been dead before she hit the floor.

  Lysander followed the path the bullet must have taken. Leaning against a pillar, still aiming down the sights of an Iron Warrior’s bolter, was Brother Halaestus. Brother Skelpis leaned against him in turn, tottering on his single remaining leg.

  ‘You live,’ said Lysander.

  ‘After a fashion,’ said Halaestus. ‘We are not alone.’

  ‘Come forth!’ shouted Skelpis behind him. From the shelter of a pillar emerged a thin, sorry figure – Thul’s Navigator, fresh bruises swelling one side of his face. He looked terrified.

  ‘Can he get us out of here?’ said Lysander.

  ‘I can!’ said the Navigator hurriedly. His voice was dry and whispery. ‘Thul has a ship, a personal transport. I can take you there. And I know the way through the orbital reef. Without me you will surely perish. Do not kill me, for your own sakes!’

  ‘Do you trust him?’ asked Lysander.

  ‘Would you?’ replied Skelpis. ‘He’s scared right enough, though. For now he speaks the truth.’

  ‘You know what will happen if you lie to us?’ said Lysander to the Navigator.

  ‘You’ll kill me.’

  ‘I would have hoped you’d credit us with more imagination than that. Brothers, you did well taking him alive. We may yet survive this.’

  ‘Don’t thank me, captain,’ said Halaestus. ‘It was Skelpis’s idea. I was just going to shoot him.’

  The Navigator knew Kulgarde well, and had been primed with the quickest routes to the fortress’s landing pad. The sounds of battle reached them as he led the three Imperial Fists through the labyrinth of passages and side rooms, through the upper levels and onto the fortifications. The few menials and mutants they encountered were shot down or had their necks broken – most were flooding the levels below, where the riot sparked by Lysander had become a pitched battle between Shalhadar’s players and the inhabitants of Kulgarde. No doubt Shalhadar’s people would be butche
red to a man down there, and everything in Kulgarde wanted to tear off a piece of flesh for itself.

  Thul’s ship resembled the older marks of shuttle used by the Adeptus Astartes, ancient and complex in design, its hull armour left bare metal with the black and yellow flashes typical of the Iron Warriors around the engines and gun ports. The iron mask symbol glowered down from the side of the ship. It was substantially upgunned compared to newer ships of its type, with ranks of rotary cannons lining the underside and twin laser turrets either side of the tail.

  The Navigator led them onto the landing pad and pressed his hand against a panel hidden among the geometry of the hull. A slice of the hull slid out to form a ramp into the ship.

  ‘One more thing,’ said the Navigator.

  The note in his voice – not of fear this time, but of certainty – told Lysander to look away. The Navigator spun around and ripped the embroidered band from his face.

  Lysander threw Halaestus to the floor. Skelpis, unbalanced, fell with him. Lysander covered his eyes with his forearm so he would not see what the Navigator had just revealed.

  The ship’s crews of the Imperium, the voidborn who served on its battleships and the craft of the Chartist Captains, were a superstitious people, and few topics carried as many dark tales and warning parables as the third eye of the Navigator. Navigators were essential to long-distance space travel, but they were mutants, and hence, while their existence was tolerated, they were hated, feared and avoided by right-thinking people who told tales of the terrors contained in that third eye. It allowed a Navigator to look upon the warp and not only keep his sanity, but chart a path through it. But most of all, it could kill. The reflection of the warp that remained in the third eye would annihilate a man’s mind if he looked into it. It could leave his body a dried-out husk, all life and moisture driven from it. It could blast him apart from the inside, leaving him smeared across the deck. A look from it could make him burst into flames or freeze his blood solid. Every tale had one thing in common – a Navigator may look feeble and broken, but a glance from that eye will kill.

  Lysander had heard enough such tales, and he knew they were true. The Navigator’s eye would destroy even a Space Marine’s mind, if he let it. Lysander did not.

  He rammed his forearm into the Navigator’s face, and felt the cold fire of the third eye as his arm smacked into it. The Navigator was thrown against the side of the ship, withered frame crumpling. Lysander had pulled the blow but even so he had felt a cheekbone break, maybe the socket of one of the Navigator’s mortal eyes. Lysander kept his arm pressed against the third eye as he looked the Navigator in the face.

  ‘Did you think you could outwit Imperial Fists?’ snarled Lysander. ‘Do you think we are children? Even if one falls, even if all the fates align and you can take one of us down with that cursed eye, the others will avenge him on that withered husk you call a body! I run low on reasons to let you live.’

  ‘Forgive me!’ yelped the Navigator. ‘I can help you! You need me! Look!’ the Navigator shrugged off his robe and Lysander saw, on his scrawny chest, swirls of old ink that formed the lines of a star map. The Navigator’s whole torso was tattooed with it. ‘Malodrax is surrounded by an orbital reef,’ he said, ‘and you will never find your way through without me.’

  ‘Without your skin, maybe,’ said Lysander.

  ‘The lock!’ said the Navigator. ‘The lock to the crucible! You do not know how to open it. I do! I know!’

  Lysander held out a hand behind him. Halaestus put the Iron Warrior’s bolter into it and Lysander pressed the barrel up underneath the Navigator’s chin.

  ‘The hand, the eye, the tower, the star,’ gasped the Navigator. ‘It is the combination. I know more, much more. Let me live, that is all I ask of you. A small favour. I mean nothing to you.’

  ‘You’re right there,’ said Lysander.

  ‘We have no time, captain,’ said Skelpis, getting back onto his remaining foot and leaning against the hull. ‘I hear Kulgarde’s forces approaching. They must be done with your players.’

  ‘Get on board and start it up,’ said Lysander, pushing the Navigator up the ramp into the ship. Inside the vessel was functional and grim, its utilitarian interior broken only by an altar to the Chaos Gods set back from the cockpit. The altar was a slab of stone, with hundreds of figures depicting the countless warp powers standing over it in niches cut into the steel bulkhead. Thul’s heraldry covered a banner hanging in the berths further back into the body of the ship – Lysander tore it down and threw it over the altar. He could destroy it properly once they were off the planet.

  The Navigator sat in the pilot’s seat and worked rapidly at the many gauges and control runes. The ship’s engines started, a loud, shuddering growl. Halaestus helped Skelpis up the ramp and the two strapped themselves into the grav-restraints in the berth section. The ship lifted up off the pad, vertical thrusters howling, and through the cockpit viewshield Lysander could see the walls of Kulgarde and the distant horizon tilting as the ship banked over the front of the walls.

  The ship angled upwards, nose to the diseased sky. The main engines kicked up a note and hurled the ship upwards.

  Lysander dropped into a place on the grav-bench, buckling the restraints around him. He caught Halaestus’s eye and for the first time realised what he must look like to his battle-brothers – Lysander wore not a Space Marine’s armour but ornate crimson plate forged in Shalhadar’s city, and he had fought with an executioner’s axe instead of the bolter and chainsword. But there was nothing to say – the sound of the engines would drown out any words. Lysander looked away from Halaestus and watched the clouds give way to the dirty black of Malodrax’s orbit, as the planet was finally left behind them.

  18

  ‘The secrets this world promises are many and powerful. Here is an opportunity to study such a world in detail, not as conqueror, but as a student of its ways. I shall bring back to my conclave a wealth of such knowledge that shall furnish the armouries of our minds for generations to come. I give thanks that I was born with the qualities to serve in the Holy Ordos of the Emperor’s Inquisition, for to know the exhilaration of such a moment is something the great masses of the Imperium shall never know.’

  – Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan

  It was the way of the Imperial Fists to capture such moments in sculpture and fable, and even then, in the very moments it unfolded, Lysander could imagine the forms this history would take.

  Lycaon was the model of an Imperial Fists Chaplain – unyielding, a complete stranger to doubt, impossible to dismay. Kraegon Thul might have been crafted to be everything the Imperial Fists hated, an Iron Warrior with the blood of Lycaon’s battle-brothers on his hands, a harvester and corrupter of the Chapter’s gene-seed, a monster with ambitions to bring down another great Heresy upon the Imperium.

  Kraegon Thul saluted mockingly, raising the Fist of Dorn as if this were a duel between brothers to decide the better swordsman. Chaplain Lycaon made no such gesture. The two circled the great anvil, keeping the altar of blackened steel between them. This was how it would be remembered, the two matching wits before the first blows, icons of the war that had begun when the Warmaster Horus broke from the rule of the Emperor, and that had never ended.

  This was the moment the Chapter’s artisans would render in memory of the event. Because the moments that followed could never be.

  Thul brought the Fist of Dorn down against the anvil. The hammer split the anvil in two with a thundercrack and from it spilled the trapped souls of a thousand sacrifices, all those in whose blood the anvil had been anointed. Lycaon was thrown off his feet by the eruption of dark magic and Lysander was thrown against the frame of the crucible’s door behind him. Thousands of teeth gnawed at Lycaon’s armour, tearing away chunks of black-painted ceramite. The gale ripped away the Chaplain’s helmet and one side of his face was torn to shredded pulp, blood welling up a
nd hardening into a gnarled half-mask.

  Lycaon arrested his fall before he plunged over the edge into the fires. He squared back up to Kraegon Thul, but the Warsmith strode through the two halves of the shattered altar and was within a hammer swing of Lycaon now. Thul thrust the head of the hammer at the Chaplain, who was barely able to turn the blow away with his crozius. A mundane weapon would have been shattered by the power field, but the Fist of Dorn was forged to withstand the fires of hell and the chill of the warp, and it would not be so easy to disarm the Warsmith.

  The released sacrifices swirled around the upper half of the crucible, weaving between the weapons and armour hanging there, howling as if they still felt the pain of their deaths.

  Lycaon ducked a swing of the hammer and rammed a shoulder into Thul’s chest. But Thul was not knocked back one step and wrapped an arm around Lycaon’s shoulder, pinning the Imperial Fist’s crozius arm to his side. Thul picked Lycaon off his feet and hurled him against one half of the anvil.

  Lysander charged across the walkway. He could already see in his mind Thul’s follow-up blow, a swing of the hammer into the prone Lycaon’s stomach, crushing him against the anvil. The only thing between Lycaon and that fate was Lysander.

  Thul turned to face Lysander. Lysander snapped off bolter shots into Thul’s chest – the Warsmith’s power armour was proof against them and the shots did little more than grab his attention, but that was Lysander’s plan.

  ‘Captain Lysander,’ said Thul. ‘You come for me again. Did you not learn from your last lesson?’ Thul lunged and swung at Lysander, the blow aimed at his head.

  Lysander’s bolter met the Fist of Dorn. The bolter shattered as Lysander knew it would. He let go of the wrecked weapon and grabbed Thul’s wrist with both hands, trying to bend it down and force the head of the hammer to the ground.

  Thul had been a warrior for thousands of years. The Traitor Legions spent most of their lives on worlds wholly or partially within the warp, where time did not flow as it did in real space. That meant some of them had been alive since the Horus Heresy, and had fought in hundreds of campaigns over millennia of warfare. Thul had fought every kind of fight there was hundreds of times over. Lysander’s gambit was the best one for the situation – lock the opponent’s weapon and use the split-second opening to get in a headbutt or a kick to the front of the knee, enough to send the enemy reeling and open for disarming and a killing blow with his own weapon. Lysander himself had practised it countless times in the sparring halls of the Phalanx, and had executed it often enough in battle. But Thul had run those same drills and fought those same battles, only more so, and he was ready.