by C. L. Werner
Havoc was consuming the streets of Tharsis. In every quarter and district, hordes of hybrid cultists surged up onto the surface from the Cloisterfells and the old mine tunnels. Regions the local militia thought safely under their control again became cauldrons of violence. Mobs of cultists tried to penetrate the perimeter around the Sovereign Spire and, for the first time since the rebellion broke out, there were attacks against the spaceport.
The soldiers tasked with keeping order at the spaceport were compelled to forsake all other duties as they hurried to defend the perimeter. In their absence the masses of pilgrims seeking to escape the embattled planet on the transports fell into complete anarchy. All pretence of discipline crumbled as they surged towards each ship, trying to force their way onto the vessels, trampling the new arrivals that had just been brought to Lubentina.
The Cult of the Cataclysm had become a crazed, wild beast after the deaths of its leaders. The grand strategies of the Great Father and Bakasur no longer flowed through its gestalt mentality. Restraint was gone and in its place there was wrath. Reserves long kept in the darkness now swelled the ranks of the fighters. Hidden traitors now revealed themselves in acts of sabotage and murder. In hundreds of places across the city, the rebels sought revenge against their oppressors, against the humans they held responsible for killing their god and his prophet.
The troops holding the spaceport knew there’d be no reinforcement of their position. With three-quarters of the city under attack and the Warmason’s Cathedral itself in the hands of the xenos, there was no longer any ground route to the spaceport still in Imperial control. Communications reached them that such units as could were falling back to the Sovereign Spire or else withdrawing from the city entirely. It was hoped that a counter-assault could be organised once the militia was regrouped. If such an effort was successful, then perhaps it would provide some relief to the soldiers on the perimeter.
For hours the soldiers held the line, fending off repeated cultist attacks. Only the disorganised and quasi-independent fashion in which the attacks were staged allowed the militia to repel them. Had the cultists surged against the whole of the line in a united effort, the position would have been overwhelmed quickly.
As a still greater tide of rebels swarmed towards their line, the soldiers braced themselves for the finish. Before the storm of cultists could strike them, it suddenly faltered. From the streets beyond the hybrid horde, a withering gunfire sounded. At first the wave of cultists turned back, swinging around to pour into the darkened street, then the rush faltered, crashing against an obstacle both irresistible and unstoppable.
The soldiers on the line cheered. Against all hope, it seemed relief had been able to reach them. Unable to raise the fighters shooting their way through the rebels on their vox units, the troops could only wonder about their identity. Had a regiment of their comrades fought their way across the city? Was it the frateris militia or had some of the Battle Sisters escaped the fall of the cathedral?
The reality silenced the cheers and sent a knot of dread rising in every man’s throat. The fighters who’d butchered a path through the cultists were armoured giants only too familiar to the men at the spaceport. The Iron Warriors had returned.
The soldiers hurriedly opened a gap in their cordon, clearing a way for the Chaos Space Marines as they marched through the perimeter. There were a handful of them now, but the soldiers had just seen that handful gun down scores of cultists. They weren’t going to provoke the Iron Warriors into doing the same to them.
As the Iron Warriors advanced, the rioting pilgrims forgot their desperate effort to leave Lubentina. They fled before the Space Marines, the panic hammering in their hearts spreading into even those who couldn’t see the giants as they marched across the landing pads.
The transport closest to the Chaos Space Marine gunship had become the scene of a tense standoff. Minister Kargil, with a retinue of guards and an entourage of servants laden down with his valuables, had been trying to bully his way onto the flyer. Kargil’s elocution had done less to cow the masses of pilgrims than the threat of the shotguns borne by his guards. Even that threat paled, however, beside the terror provoked by the Iron Warriors as they drew near. The crowd of pilgrims that had been blocking Kargil’s path to the transport now became a frantic mob as they stampeded away from the ship and away from the Chaos Space Marines. Kargil and his minions were trampled under the avalanche of frightened pilgrims, all of the minister’s valuables crushed underfoot along with the man who’d thought to escape with them.
The Iron Warriors paid no notice to the panic around them. It was of no consequence. They had what they’d come to Lubentina to recover. When they were back aboard their gunship and rising into the darkening sky, the Space Marines lost all interest in the planet below. Over the course of the Long War they’d fought on thousands like it.
Before the war was over, they would fight on thousands more.
In the darkness of the crypt, Sister Kashibai called weakly into her armour’s vox. She didn’t know if anyone could hear her, or even if there was anyone left to hear. Had it been minutes or hours since the Chaos Space Marines had fought them? It was all a blur to her, a confusion of exhausted sleep and semi-lucid instants of pained wakefulness. The Space Marine’s attack had ruptured something inside her. She could feel her vitality ebbing away with each blood-specked cough that left her throat.
Kashibai wasn’t certain that the vox was still functional. Perhaps its machine-spirit had dissipated, leaving the mechanism inert. Perhaps it lacked the strength to cast her voice more than a few metres and made it impossible to reach the cathedral above and her Sisters. She wasn’t worried about herself, about being lost in the catacombs. It was concern for them and the masses of refugees taking sanctuary in the cathedral that forced her to persist. Trishala had to be warned. She had to know that the Iron Warriors were going to penetrate the cathedral from below rather than above. The Order of the Sombre Vow had to know that the Chaos Space Marines were coming.
The urgency of getting word to her Sisters provoked another fit of coughing. In the whirr of pain, Kashibai struggled to hold on to her awareness. She couldn’t reach her chronometer, had no way of gauging how much time had passed. It might already be too late. It would certainly be too late if she fell unconscious. Maybe her earlier lapses had been longer than she imagined. Perhaps she’d been alone in the tomb not for hours but for days? The possibility sent a flare of terror rushing through her.
Through the pain, Kashibai began to sound the warning once more. Again, there was no response. Were they all dead then? Had the Iron Warriors run amok through the Warmason’s Cathedral or had the Cult of the Cataclysm finally breached the Great Gate and unleashed a horde of ravening xenos upon the God-Emperor’s children? She denied the sense of despair that welled up inside her. She had a duty, an obligation, to perform. Dire conjecture and desperate fear had no room in her mind. Resolutely, she called the alarm once more. Even with her voice dry and cracking, she continued to call out to her Sisters.
At length, Kashibai’s perseverance bore results. Not the kind she anticipated, for when an answer came to her, it sounded from the door of the crypt rather than across the vox. Amazed, the wounded Sister looked towards the doorway, watching as the speaker limped into the crypt. Trishala’s armour was stained with blood and alien ichor, battered and gouged in several places. Her face was cut and a savage bruise discoloured her left cheek. Her left arm was cradled close against her chest.
‘There’s no need to call out, Sister Kashibai. What has been done has been done.’ Trishala paced around the shattered crystal sarcophagus, inspecting the dead soldiers and Battle Sisters. She paused when she spotted Palatine Yadav’s body. ‘You found Yadav.’ She turned towards Kashibai. ‘You did what you could to bring him back to the cathedral.’
Kashibai struggled to turn herself so that she could face Trishala. ‘The Chaos Space Marines found us.
We were too few to resist them.’ She displayed her blood-specked teeth in a grimace of anguish. ‘I could only watch as their sorcerer ripped Yadav’s secrets from him. They took what they wanted, then they killed him.’
Trishala walked to Kashibai. She had seen death often enough to recognise that Kashibai was fading fast. There wasn’t much time left to her. Soon she would be drawn into the Emperor’s light. It could serve no purpose to tell her everything that had happened. To let her know the Iron Warriors had destroyed the Warmason’s Casket, or that the genestealers had stolen it from the Celestial Chapel. It could do her no good to know that Trishala had been unable to raise anyone in the cathedral on her vox and that it had likely fallen to the cultists.
‘All the God-Emperor expects of His children is that they do their utmost,’ Trishala told her. ‘That we think not of ourselves, but of our greater duty to Him and to the Imperium that is His legacy to us. That we fight to the last breath defending what He built for us.’
Kashibai’s head sagged against her chest. For an instant, her eyes closed, then snapped open in a paroxysm of fright. ‘The cathedral!’ she cried. ‘They must be warned! The Chaos Space Marines are coming!’ She gazed up at Trishala, a confused expression pulling at her pale visage. ‘We tried to stop them, Sister Superior. We did try...’
Kashibai’s words dripped away in a fit of coughing. Blood trickled from her mouth. When she shifted her body, Trishala could see a slick of crimson staining the floor beneath her.
‘You did more than I could have ever asked,’ Trishala said. She knelt beside Kashibai, clasping her hand in her own. She held tight as another fit of coughing racked Kashibai’s body. She held tight as the dying Sister again warned her that the Iron Warriors were heading for the Mourner’s Door. She held tight as she felt the strength ebb from Kashibai’s fingers.
‘Do you recall the Sombre Vow sworn by all in our order?’ Trishala asked. The question spurred a greater awareness in Kashibai’s eyes. For an instant she was free from the pain and confusion.
‘By the blood of my heart, do I swear to defend the Imperial Creed,’ Kashibai recited.
‘By the honour of my soul, do I swear to guard the sacred and protect the holy,’ Trishala joined in Kashibai’s recitation. Through the intricacies of the vow that bound them as Battle Sisters, their two voices were united.
‘And ever shall I give glory unto Him who rests within the Golden Throne,’ Trishala completed the ritual. Kashibai’s voice had fallen away before reaching the end.
It was some time before Trishala released the limp, lifeless hand that she held.
Rising from her fallen comrade, Trishala looked at the ceiling overhead. Somewhere above them was the Warmason’s Cathedral and the xenos cult. She didn’t know if any of her order remained, if they were still fighting to protect the relics entrusted to them. But she did know she was going to find out. To join them in death or glory.
The sound of artillery intruded even into the halls of the Sovereign Spire. The militia was doing its utmost to clear the overrun scholarium. Any restraint, any notion of salvaging something from the vast seminary had been abandoned. Destruction of the cultists was the only objective, regardless of what was destroyed with them. Eradicating rebel strongpoints that could threaten the Sovereign Spire and the other concentrations of Imperial strength yet remaining in Tharsis had become the utmost priority.
There were few enough of those, Cardinal-Governor Murdan reflected as he listened to the shells smashing down. The Warmason’s Cathedral had become a stronghold of cultists, an impregnable fortress behind its thick walls and solid plasteel siege shutters. The spaceport had been overrun shortly after the fell Iron Warriors departed Lubentina. The soldiers there simply weren’t able to maintain the perimeter and suppress the panicking pilgrims.
A few parts of the city had become citadels of local militia forces. The most prominent was the convent that had headquartered the Order of the Sombre Vow. Almost a thousand soldiers and frateris militia had assembled there, fending off the cult’s repeated attacks. The citadel would have benefited from a few squads of Battle Sisters, but it seemed all of them had perished in the fighting on Mount Rama. Only Sister Superior Trishala had made her way back to the convent.
Murdan took the rescue of the Shroud as a sign from the God-Emperor that, as dire as things might seem, all was not lost. Whatever happened, the Cult of the Warmason would endure. Lubentina would live on... and not as some xenos-infested rock.
The entrance of a hall-serf into the council room roused Murdan from his reflections. With the rest of the council either dead or fled, the governor had become accustomed to the isolation. He felt a twinge of annoyance at the servant’s trespass into this solitude. Then he spied the message resting on the silver tray the man carried. Murdan stared at the copper scroll the hall-serf had brought him. The message etched into the thin metal sheaf had issued from the Crystal Turret. Rakesh the astropath had been contacted by Imperial forces. Librarian Abigor of the Flesh Tearers Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes was responding to the plea Rakesh had issued. Their fifth company was en route to Lubentina. Granting no caprice of the immaterium, the Space Marines would make planetfall in several weeks.
Murdan reread the message, feeling every letter branding itself upon his soul. Dreams of having his name ensconced with such paragons of courage and devotion as his predecessors Gaurang and Rohak crumbled before his very eyes. All he had worked towards, all he had sacrificed, it would count for nothing now. He was finished. He would be stripped of his title, cast out from the Ecclesiarchy. He could almost hear the priests passing sentence on him, declaring him apostate and expelling him from the Emperor’s grace. As the prestige of Lubentina had grown, he’d cultivated many enemies, men who would be only too eager to exorcise their jealousy by pursuing his downfall.
Space Marines! They’d deemed the crisis on Lubentina so dire that a company of the Emperor’s mightiest warriors was being dispatched to assess the situation! Murdan felt an icy dread gnawing at his spine. Three months to wait for their arrival, to discover what his own fate would be. Vindicated for his efforts or condemned for his losses.
At least Trishala had saved something from the cathedral. The Shroud of Singh might not be as prestigious as the Warmason’s Casket, but it was a sacred relic in its own right. Something to offer up to the Ecclesiarchy.
Another comforting thought came to Murdan as he read over the communication once more. These would be real Space Marines, not the Chaos heretics that had added to Lubentina’s agonies. When they arrived, he could expect the Flesh Tearers to be noble and disciplined champions of the Imperium.
The bright glow of Lubentina’s sun filled Rhodaan’s vision as he gazed out from the gunship’s viewports. He motioned with his hand, waving at Uzraal to launch the torpedo.
‘It is done, warsmith,’ Uzraal reported a moment later. The torpedo moved with too great a speed to be more than a brief flash as it streaked away from the gunship. Rhodaan looked down at the targeting cogitator, watching its display as the missile sped towards the sun.
‘From Iron, cometh Strength,’ Rhodaan intoned, clapping his hand against his chest in salute.
‘From Strength, cometh Will,’ Uzraal continued, following the warsmith’s example.
Brother Gaos bowed his head and added his part to the Litany of Iron. ‘From Will, cometh Faith.’
‘From Faith, cometh Honour,’ Periphetes added, awkwardly repeating the salute rendered by the others with his left hand.
Rhodaan stared out through the armourglass window. ‘From Honour, cometh Iron,’ he swore as a bright flash flickered at the edge of the sun’s corona. Honour had been rendered to Perturabo.
It was a strange sensation for Rhodaan, knowing what he’d done. There was a part of him that was tempted to follow the same path that had lured Cornak to his doom. Claim the Dekatherion for himself, find some way to unlock its abi
lities and harness them for his own benefit. Considering the ignominious fate that had struck down the sorcerer, there was little to recommend such a path. He was an Iron Warrior and there was one thing that set him apart from the renegades and daemon-worshipping madmen of the other Legions. He still remembered what loyalty was, still obeyed the onus of duty. Whatever power he hoped to accrue for himself, he wouldn’t claim it at the expense of the Legion or by betraying his primarch.
Perturabo was a master craftsman and had made many devices over the millennia. The Dekatherion had been crafted during the Great Crusade, a time when many wonders had been shaped by the primarch’s hands. All had been wanting, falling short of the perfection Perturabo intended. In time he’d repented their fabrication and sought to destroy them. The simple fact of their existence was a point of vexation, a slight upon his sensibilities.
The blip that represented the torpedo vanished into the sun. Under Rhodaan’s supervision, the warhead had been hollowed out, allowing the despised relic to be sealed away inside. He’d drawn inspiration from his combat against the genestealer patriarch and the Beast’s demise in the atomic nodule. Once the Dekatherion was propelled into the burning maw of the sun it would be obliterated utterly.
‘It is done,’ Rhodaan repeated Uzraal’s words as the blip winked out, the torpedo and its contents consumed by the sun. He turned and growled a command to the pilot. ‘Now we return to Castellax.’
As his ship turned away from Lubentina’s sun, Rhodaan was thinking past the honour paid Perturabo. It would take more to rebuild the prestige of the Third Grand Company. Campaigns and atrocities that would far eclipse their activities on the shattered shrine world.
As guardian of the Shroud of Singh, a place was made for Trishala on the Ecclesiarchy mission ship when it departed Lubentina. The priests had heard the stories circulating about her one-woman assault of the Warmason’s Cathedral after the rest of her order had been killed and the xenos held control of the building. She’d fought her way up to the Celestial Chapel and there, amid the ruin of the violated sanctuary, she’d recovered the Shroud of Singh. Through her bravery and perseverance, the holy relic had been saved. It would remain a subject of wonder and adoration to the Cult of the Warmason.
