‘A storm is coming,’ said the captain to the air, holding Kaleb’s brass icon of the Emperor before him.
THERE WERE ALWAYS two paths. The first was wet with blood and he had already stumbled a good way down it. At the end point, always visible but forever out of reach, there was release, painlessness and the sweet nectar of rebirth.
The other route was made of knives and it was agony and torture and grief without respite, with only greater suffering heaped upon those that already wracked his mind and body. There was no conclusion to this route, no oblivion, only an endless loop, a Mobius strip cut from hell.
Solun Decius was Astartes, and against an unrefined man among the billions of the Imperium, his kind were the sons of war-gods; but even a being of such strength has its limits.
The wound grew to become a fanged maw that chewed upon him, biting and drawing his essence from the Death Guard’s body. Where Grulgor’s plague knife had sunk through his armour and into his flesh, Decius was invaded by a virus that was all viruses, a malady that was every disease that man had encountered and more that it had yet to face. There was no cure, how could there be? The germs were made from the living distillate of corruption in its rawest form, a writhing pattern of tri-fold and eight-pointed microbes that disintegrated everything they came into contact with. These invisible weapons were the foot soldiers of the Great Destroyer, each of them stamped with the indelible mark of the Lord of Decay.
‘Help me!’ He would have screamed those words if only he could have opened his rictus-locked jaws, if he could have parted his dry, gummed lips, if his throat could have channelled anything but a thick paste of blood-darkened mucus. Decius writhed on the support cradle, livid bruises forming about his body where flesh went dull with infection. He clawed at the glass walls around him, arms like brittle sticks in bags of stringy muscle and pallid flesh. Things that looked like maggots with three black eyes bored through the meat of his torso, raking him with tiny whips of poisonous cilia. There was so much pain, and every time Decius imagined he had reached the peaks of each new agony, a fresh one was brought to him.
He so wanted death. Nothing else mattered to him. Decius wanted death so much he prayed for it, Imperial truth be damned and burned! He had no other recourse. If peace would not be granted by any source in this world, what entreaty did he have left but to beg the realms beyond the real?
From the agony, came laughter, mocking at first, then gradually softening, becoming gentle. An intelligence measured him, considering, finally seeing something in the youth, a chance to refine an art only recently discovered: the art of remaking men.
Sorrow flowed over him. How terribly sad it was that the men Decius had called brother and lord ignored his pain, how cruel of them to let him suffer and suffer while the malaise burrowed deeper into his heart. He had given so much to them, had he not? Fought in battle at their sides. Saved their lives with no thought for his own. Become the very best Death Guard he could be… and for what? So they could seal him inside a glass jar and watch him slowly choke on the fumes of his own decay? Did he deserve this? What wrong had he committed? None! Nothing! They had forsaken him! He hated them for that! Hated them!
They had made him weak. Yes, that was the answer. In all this vacillation over Horus and his machinations, Decius had let himself become weak and indecisive! He never would have suffered Grulgor’s blow if his mind had been clear and focused.
Yes, through the burning pain it became clear. His error traced its roots to one place, to a single point. He had bowed to Garro’s orders. Despite the way in which it chafed upon him, Solun had let himself believe he was still raw and untested, let himself think that Garro’s way was best. But the truth? That was not the truth. Garro was irresolute. His mentor had lost his killer instinct. Horus… Horus! There was a warrior who knew the nature of strength. He was mighty. He had turned primarchs to his banner, Mortarion included! Decius thought he could stand against that? What madness must have possessed him?
Do you want death? The question echoed in him, the agony suddenly abating. Or will you grasp new life? A new strength that cannot be made vulnerable? The voice that was no voice whispered, dank and rancid in his thoughts.
‘Yes!’ Decius spat bile and black ichor. ‘Yes, damn them all! I will never be weak again! I choose life! Give me life!’
The dark laughter returned. And so I will.
WHAT RIPPED ITSELF from the medicae cradle was no longer Solun Decius, naked and close to the ragged edge of torment. It was alike to an Astartes, but only in the ways that it was a brutal parody of their noble form. Across rotten bones and raw, pustulant skin grew chitinous planes of greenish-black armour, gleaming like spilled oil beneath the light of the biolumes. Eyes that had shrivelled to knots of dead jelly erupted into gelid sapphires, multi-faceted orbs that massed across a wrecked face and set into the bone. Mandibles joined brown, cracked teeth in the mouth. A stump reached up and batted away the glass rigs of potion bottles, growing and malforming as it did into a clawed limb with too many joints. The serrated fingers inflated and hardened into solid knives of bony carapace the colour of sword beetles. What was no longer Solun Decius opened its mouth and roared, and from bleeding, suppurating lips spewed a cloud of insects that raced around the shivering body in a living shroud, a cape of beating, swarming wings.
On newly clawed feet, the Lord of the Flies raised himself up and shattered the armourglass walls of his confinement, and began a search for something to kill.
SIXTEEN
Lord of the Flies
Silence
In His Name
TOLLEN SENDER STEPPED off the gravity disc as the floating platform reached the infirmary level. The oval plate hovered for a second after he departed, then drew silently away, up one of the many vertical shafts that cut through the interior spaces of the Somnus Citadel. His lip curled. The tower had a peculiar array of scents to it that the Death Guard found off-putting. Different levels had different odours, cast out from censers and odd mechanical devices that resembled steel flowers. It was some element of the Silent Sisterhood’s discipline, a way of patterning the women used to mark out quadrants of the building. Similar methods were used for the blind astropaths on some starships and orbital platforms. Perhaps it was this unwelcome similarity that made Sendek uncomfortable. He disliked all things about the psyker arts, and all things that connected to them. Such realms were at odds with his rational, reductionist view of the universe. Sendek believed in the cold, hard light of science and the Imperial truth. The freakish facilities that verged on the edges of sorcery were disquieting to him. Such things were for the Emperor to understand, not for those with minds of lesser breadth.
But the smell… today it was different. Before it had been like roses, collecting at the edge of his senses. Now it was strange, sweeter than before, but with a sour metal taste beneath it. He kept walking.
Without making an order of it, or with anything approaching official sanction, the men of the seventy started a watch. They had nothing to do inside the citadel but drill and spar in the cramped quarters a few levels up the length of the tower, and the waiting, the inaction, chafed at them. So they took it in turns to keep the watch on their fallen comrade. Iacton Qruze was not expected to participate – Decius was a Death Guard and Qruze was not – but all the other men under Garro’s command automatically accepted and understood what was required of them. Quietly, they made sure that there was never a moment that passed when a warrior of the XIV Legion was not attending the sick bed of Solun Decius. That the young warrior was destined to die was not questioned by any one of them, but it became an unspoken imperative that he would not die alone.
Not for the first time, Sendek found himself wondering what would happen when the end came for the youth. In a way, Decius had become something of a symbol for them all, an embodiment of the resilient endurance of their Legion. He thought of the two of them matched over a regicide board on the Endurance and felt a pang of sorrow. For all of Solun’s b
rashness and arrogance, the cocksure warrior did not deserve a death of such ignominy. Decius should have perished in glorious battle instead of being reduced to fighting a war with his own body.
The smell was becoming stronger. Sendek’s frown deepened. Iago, one of Hakur’s squad and a deft hand with a plasma gun, took the watch before Tollen’s, but he was overdue. It wasn’t like Iago to be so thoughtless. Sergeant Hakur’s hard training and battle drills burned that out of his men.
Then the unmistakable aroma of blood finally raised itself from the mix of scents and Sendek tensed. There was no movement anywhere along the infirmary corridor, and where the corner turned to the isolation ward the biolumes in the walls and ceiling had been doused. Only a faint red light showed him the vaguest outline of the corridor. He broke into a run, his senses taking in everything. For a moment, the Astartes thought that there had been some kind of accident, like the spillage of some great casket of oil across the floors and wall, but the charnel house stink overwhelmed him with the raw bouquet of fresh blood and rotted meat. Sendek realised abruptly that the biolumes had not been deactivated after all. It was only that there was so much blood, in thick, sticky layers, that it damped down the glow from them. His ceramite boots crunched on a paste of broken bone fragments and melted teeth. He made out a shape in the rancid gloom: a forearm ending in rags of torn meat, still partly sheathed in the marble armour of a Death Guard. Glittering black motes moved all across the severed limb.
Sendek went for the bolt pistol on his belt as the sound began. Around him the blackened walls flickered and hummed with the sharp, piercing scrapes of insect wings. The swarms grazing upon the effluent stirred, sensing the presence of the Astartes.
He saw into the isolation ward and felt his throat tighten. There was Decius’s capsule, now little more than a broken glass egg torn open from within. Organs and fleshy objects were scattered about the tiled floor where servitors and other living things had been ripped apart. Sendek’s hand went to the neck ring on his armour, as the buzzing grew louder, instinctively keying the battlefield vox channel that would tie him to his squad leader. ‘Andus,’ he began, ‘alert the—’
The claw took him by the leg and yanked him savagely from his feet. Sendek cried out and lost the pistol at once, as his attacker threw him bodily into a glass cabinet filled with vials and bottles. He clattered through the storage compartment and rolled to the floor, hands and knees falling into puddles of thick fluid. The Death Guard tried to recover, but a hooked foot swung up and hit him in the face, spinning him over and down.
Sendek slid away, knocking aside remnants of what had once been the torso of Brother Iago, and gasped. The shrieking, roaring storm of flies hammered around the room like a cyclone, the beating of their wings sharp in his ears. He groped for something to use as a weapon and found a large bone saw among a tray of discarded chirurgeon’s tools. The Death Guard launched himself forward, turning the bright rod of surgical steel in his grip. He would make this intruder pay for killing his kinsmen.
He had only fleeting impressions of the black figure. He saw the strange wiry hairs festooning the surface of the oily armour, he felt himself gagging at the monstrous stench of death that enveloped it. A head with too many eyes and a chattering spider mouth came at him, but beneath the corrupted, fly-blown flesh there was a shape that seemed familiar to him. A terrible moment of recognition struck Sendek like a bullet.
‘Solun?’ He hesitated, the arc of the bone saw halted in his shock.
‘Not any more.’ The mouth moved but the voice came from the flies, rippling their wings and scraping their carapaces to create a droning facsimile of human speech. The claw came out of the dimness and punctured the meat and bone of Sendek’s head, splitting the Death Guard’s skull. The pink-grey contents gushed out across his armour, and the swarm dived upon the richness to feed.
‘NATHANIEL!’
The woman’s cry tore through Garro’s body in a shuddering wave that set his nerves alight. He gasped and the steel mug in his hand fell away from nerveless fingers, a tongue of dark tea spilling across the floor of the exercise chamber. Voyen saw his reaction and reached out to steady him. ‘Captain? Are you all right?’
‘Did you hear that?’ Garro said, tension running through him. He cast about. ‘I heard her call out.’
Voyen blinked. ‘Sir, there was no sound. You reacted as if you had been struck—’
Garro pushed him away. ‘I heard her, as clear as you speak to me now! It was…’ The import of it came all at once, the powerful, unfiltered jolt of fear projected into him. ‘Keeler! Something is amiss, it was a… a warning…’
The chamber’s hatch slid into the wall and Hakur was there, his expression one of deep concern. Immediately, Garro knew something was very wrong. ‘Speak!’ he snapped.
Hakur tapped the vox module built into the collar of his power armour. ‘Lord, I fear Sendek may be in trouble. He started to send me an alert call, but his words were suddenly cut off.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He went to relieve Iago,’ said Voyen, ‘at the boy’s side.’
Garro tapped him on the chest. ‘Voyen, remain here and be ready for anything.’ The battle-captain strode into the corridor. ‘Sergeant, get the Luna Wolf and a couple of warriors to meet us at the drop-shaft.’
‘Sir, what is going on?’ asked Hakur. ‘Have these women turned against us?’
Nathaniel closed his eyes and felt the echo of the cry still swimming through his spirit, a dark tide of emotion following with it. ‘I don’t know, old friend,’ he replied, taking up his helmet and locking it in place. ‘We’ll know soon enough.’
THE RESONANCE OF gunfire climbed up the shaft to them as Garro and the other Astartes rode the gravity disc down. Qruze shot him a look. ‘This damn war’s followed us here.’
‘Aye,’ replied the battle-captain. ‘Our warning may have come too late.’
Hakur cursed under his breath. ‘No signals from Sendek or Iago, not even a carrier wave. At this distance, there is no way I could not reach them. I could yell and they would hear it!’
The disc slowed as it approached the infirmary level. The stink of new death wafted up to the platform and every one of the Astartes tensed. ‘Weapons,’ ordered Garro, unsheathing his sword.
He led them off the elevator and through the corridors, crossing through the dank, blood-slick passage.
They entered the infirmary proper and Qruze made a spitting noise. ‘Sendek is here,’ he said, leaning over a dark shape in the gloom, ‘what remains of him.’
Even through his helmet filters, the odour of decay assaulted Garro’s nostrils as he came closer. The spongy slurry of meat resembled a body exposed to months of putrefaction. It was undeniably Tollen Sendek, even though the remains of the dead man’s skull were a ruined, bloated mass. He recognised the honour pennants and oaths of moment affixed to the armour. These too were discoloured with age and mould, and fingers of orange rust looped around the joints of the limbs.
One of Hakur’s men choked back a gasp of disgust. ‘He looks like he’s been dead for weeks… but I spoke to him only this morning.’
The Luna Wolf leaned closer to the body. ‘Iacton, keep your distance—’
Garro’s words came too late. Thick white pustules on Sendek’s body trembled as they sensed the closeness of Qruze’s blood-warmth and burst, throwing out streams of tiny iridescent beetles. The veteran rocked back and batted the things away, pulping great masses of them with his armoured palm. ‘Agh! Filthy vermin!’
The captain nudged a severed limb with his boot. There were too many torn hunks of meat and bone strewn about the room to be the component parts of just one human body, and he knew with bleak certainty that Iago was as dead as poor Tollen.
From across the chamber, Hakur peered cautiously into the broken isolation pod. ‘Empty…’ He snagged something with his combat blade from inside the glass container and held it up for the others to see. ‘In all the days of Terra, what i
s this?’ It resembled a thin scrap of torn muslin, slick with black liquids. As it turned in the air, Garro made out holes in the material that corresponded to eyes, nostrils and a mouth.
Qruze gave the rag a grim examination. ‘It is human flesh, sergeant, sloughed off, as species of snakes and insects shed their skins.’
The flat bangs of bolter fire echoed down the corridors leading to the other compartments of the infirmary and Garro gestured sharply. ‘Leave that. We move, now.’
QRUZE’S FACE WAS locked in a permanent scowl of harsh, cold anger. At every turn, just as he thought he had weathered each new sinister twist of fate, a fresh horror was heaped upon the others. Qruze imagined a vice turning about his spirit, gradually tightening, the pressure upon his mind and his will growing ever more intense. He felt as if he were on the verge of shutting down, as if the goodness and light inside him were in danger of guttering out. Each new sight repulsed and shocked the old soldier in ways he thought he could never be touched.
The Astartes passed quickly through a series of seal doors that lay off their hinges, ripped apart by something of great strength and violence. Past that, they came upon a curative ward with rows of medicae cradles and sickbeds, one of the Silent Sisterhood’s hospices for those of their number injured in action, he decided. The ward resembled a slaughterhouse more than a place of healing. Like the isolation chamber, the room was thick with death-stink: blood and excrement, the fetor of disease and rich organic decomposition. In each bed, the patients were dead or near to it, each beneath the smothering hands of a different malady. Qruze saw a pallid, skeletal witchseeker shaking and foaming at the mouth from some sort of palsy. Next to her was a bloated body wreathed in gaseous vapours. Then a victim killed by bone-rot, a weeping novice wracked by bubonic plague, and a naked girl bleeding from her eyes and ears.
The Flight of the Eisenstein Page 31
