Night, shadows, pallor, death. All was death with the Pallidus Mor. Syagrius was not surprised his actions were baffling to the likes of Balzhan and Krezoc. He cursed the fates that had brought him to share a campaign with them.
Krezoc moved on.
‘I am sure you did as you saw fit,’ Balzhan said dryly.
‘Meaning what?’
‘Exactly what I said.’
‘Our work on Khania is not finished, Marshal Balzhan. Our legios need to continue to work together effectively.’
‘I could not agree more,’ Balzhan replied. He said no more.
And when the tyranids had come again, Syagrius divided the efforts of the Titanicus task force. The Pallidus Mor defended Gelon, and the Imperial Hunters took the aggressive role, pursuing the enemy and destroying its largest threats before they could reach the hive. That was the principle behind the strategy – a two-pronged counter to the swarming invasion. This was what Syagrius explained to the princeps of the legios. He admitted to himself that the battle plan served his purposes by putting distance between himself and the grey fatalism of Balzhan’s maniples. He had never encountered warriors so deaf to the calls of glory.
But he had not freed himself of the thoughts of that flawed victory over the hierophant, of the judgment of the Pallidus Mor. None of the promising auspex returns had borne fruit. His campaign had been as much of a repetitive grind as the one he had left at Gelon. And the emotionless, remorseless voice of Balzhan kept calling on the vox, respectfully requesting his return. At length, he had funnelled those communications to Rekorus so he could ignore them. In particular, he wanted to shut out Krezoc’s voice. Her exchanges stopped just short of being cutting, and he could not hear her without feeling the acidic stab of the bad memory.
Balzhan had been trying to reach him now for several hours. Syagrius sighed, resigned. ‘Patch him through,’ he said to Rekorus.
‘Marshal Syagrius,’ Balzhan said a moment later, ‘the tactical situation at Gelon is becoming more serious. This is where the greatest concentration of the enemy is to be found, and it is growing. The presence of the Imperial Hunters is needed.’
‘Are you implying the Pallidus Mor cannot complete its task?’
‘I am saying the realities of this war have changed.’
Syagrius gritted his teeth. ‘Those realities will grow worse if we abandon our hunt. Our roles are clear, marshal. We must both fulfil them if victory is to be ours.’
Krezoc came on the line. ‘Is your hunt justifying the effort?’ she asked. ‘Have you considered the possibility that you are being lured away?’
‘By a mindless foe?’ Syagrius cursed himself for letting his irritation speak for him. He knew better. For all that the tyranids attacked as an all-devouring swarm, that swarm was directed. Every force that had underestimated the tyranids had suffered for doing so.
Krezoc said, ‘Will you consider the possibility?’
Syagrius hesitated. He gazed at the empty, smouldering region ahead of the Imperial Hunters. Krezoc’s logic was sound. The fact that the Hunters had found tyranid bioforms in the size and quantity that they had was a bit surprising. The biomass of this region of the continent was significantly less dense and more spread out than what the tyranids hungered for at Gelon. Yet their bio-ships continued to drop more of their monstrosities in the barren hinterlands.
Syagrius sent his consciousness deeper into the manifold. At one with Augustus Secutor, he absorbed the incoming auspex readings. The data streamed through his mind like water through fingers. He filtered it for dense clusters, the points of data accumulation that were the echoes of large movements. He found what he was looking for. He was sceptical. At the same time, this was the biggest echo yet. Syagrius and the machine-spirit of the Warlord saw the signs of vast prey thirty miles to the east. The instinct to hunt was overwhelming, princeps and god-machine feeding each other’s hunger, fusing them into a single, shared, primordial instinct. It would not be denied. Syagrius had no intention of fighting it.
‘The enemy is moving to the east of our position,’ he said to Balzhan. The formation of audible speech felt distant from his true self, here in the wash of the power and the hunger of the Titan. ‘That is our target. Each legio has its duty. We must see to them.’
‘Marshal,’ Balzhan began, ‘Princeps Senioris Krezoc is correct. You are being pulled further and further–’
Syagrius cut him off. ‘Fight well, Pallidus Mor,’ he said. ‘The Emperor protects.’ And he shut down the vox-feed.
There was a greater urgency to his sermon tonight. Confessor Lehrn Ornastas felt the fire in his heart ignite his words. Though he had written notes for the sermon, when the moment came, he ignored them. In the pulpit of the Chapel of Saint Kaspha the Unbending, Ornastas looked out over the congregation and burned with the need, as never before, to give warning. The people were manufactoria serfs and a few lower Administratum bureaucrats. The sectors of Creontiades served by Saint Kaspha’s were not wealthy ones. The jewelled spires of the city were a long way from this industrial region. This was as it should be. The dangers Ornastas had seen were in the shadows and grime of the streets. It would be in those same streets that the battle must be fought.
It was his sacred task to warn and to inspire. He must send the cleansing light of fanaticism through the doors of the chapel.
‘The might of the Kataran Spears is on Khania,’ Ornastas said. ‘The salvation of Khania will mean the preservation of Katara. But do not think we have no ramparts to protect, nor battles to fight. Brothers, the heretic is never far. Sisters, I have seen the signs of his foulness.’ Ornastas paused. He stared at the anxious eyes looking up at him. The banners hanging from the galleries seemed to move slightly, as if in anticipation of the coming struggle. ‘To arms!’ Ornastas shouted. ‘Do you think yourselves faithful? Do you call yourselves children of the Emperor? Then take up arms! Seek out the heretic! Burn him from his places of concealment! The danger is now! The time of action is upon us!’
He exhorted the congregation for several more minutes. He did not speak for as long as he usually did, and he had made some changes to the order of the service. Nothing that stepped outside the acceptable form of the rite. It was simply that tonight, he needed to end with the sermon. So he preached until the faces in the amber light of the glow-globes were red with fearful anger. Then he let the people go. As they filed out of the chapel, Ornastas listened to the chatter of thousands of voices. He heard the currents of alarm and determination. Good. He wanted to hope he had done enough.
He knew he had not. Unless they encountered slavering cultists in the next few hours, most of the people would lose their fear over the course of the night. Many of them would barely remember the sermon by the next morning.
Ornastas was trying to teach them to read the signs. He didn’t think they would be able to. Not until it was too late. He had the insight. He knew what to look for, and even he was flailing about, uncertain as to how to fight.
Ornastas left Saint Kaspha’s an hour later. He exited through the small south door. It opened into a warren of alleys that wound between the rockcrete façades of manufactoria and cramped, stinking hab blocks. The sewer gratings overflowed with human waste and the leavings of the forges. The smell was thick as fog. It stung the confessor’s lungs and nose. He coughed, his throat filling with gritty phlegm. He took the passageways at random. He had no destination in mind. He was searching. He was hunting. He struck the pavement with the tip of his staff with every step. He was announcing his presence, calling on the darkness to face him or flee.
When had he seen the first signs? He wasn’t sure. The awareness had come to him gradually. He was used to seeing the markings on the sides of buildings here. Sometimes they were desperate, illiterate prayers. More often, they were the territorial symbols of the underhive gangs. Their scrawls were meaningless to him, and he had never seen them as more t
han a background piece of the sector’s squalor. Very gradually, Ornastas had become aware of other, more disturbing markings. It took many days before he was sure he was seeing anything wrong. There were stray lines added to other symbols, the hint of something obscene lurking beneath mundane scrawls. Never anything he could identify, never a sign he could point to and say, This. This is the work of heresy. Even as his unease grew, he spent sleepless nights doubting whether what he was seeing had any meaning at all.
After the departure of the Kataran 66th, the markings became more frequent. They seemed to be emerging from beneath the overlapping tangles of graffiti. Meaning was pushing its way to the surface. The angles were more aggressive. The lines were sinuous, their lengths trailing off as if they were dropping into an abyss. The makers of the defacing art were becoming more brazen.
This morning, Ornastas had found his certainty. Instinct, or perhaps the guidance of the God-Emperor, had made him stop and look into a darkened recess. It was the doorway to a narrow hab block, barely fifteen feet across, squeezed between two manufactoria. The building had been gutted by fire. Its interior had collapsed. Rubble blocked the way a few yards past the rubbish-strewn entrance. On the left-hand wall, just visible in the gloom, Ornastas had found the harsh angles of a complete rune. Its design made him think of a skull. He could not look at it for more than a few seconds. It hurt his eyes. Something sharp jabbed into his mind. If he did not break off his gaze, he felt the rune might start to glow.
For a moment, he thought he heard, coming from a great distance, beneath the ground or beyond the sky, the tolling of a brass bell.
Now he walked the gloom of the alleys, searching for revelation and an enemy to fight. He had sounded the alarm, but lacked a target for the faithful. He would find it. He would preserve the sanctity of Creontiades.
The lighting in the alleys was poor. The lumen poles were few. Many of their globes were broken. Weak illumination, flickering and red, came from within the manufactoria. Wan glows leaked from the hab windows. Ornastas moved through a night of shifting, pooling shadows. The alleys were almost deserted. Ragged, emaciated figures fled at the sound of his staff. They ran with heads bowed and shoulders hunched in anticipation of punishment. If an ecclesiarch walked among them, they must have been found wanting in some measure.
Ornastas could well believe they were worthy of judgement. Beggars, thieves, the cast-offs of the gangs, they stood condemned by their poverty and desperation. They were undeserving of the Emperor’s light, and dwelt in the darkness of their failings. But they were not what he sought.
Knock. Knock. Knock. His staff struck the ground with sharp raps. It bounced off the high, smoke-darkened walls. The echoes ran far ahead of his advance. Ornastas turned a corner, and this alley was completely empty. The walls were blank expanses of rockcrete. Heaps of refuse as high as a man lined both sides of the pavement. The passageway should have been pitch-dark, but Ornastas could see his way forwards, very faintly. A crimson haze, like the promise of a fire to come, hung in the air. It grew stronger as he walked further into the alley. The light was no brighter, but the haze began to hum with tension.
Ornastas stopped. In his peripheral vision, he saw lines glowing red on the walls to his left and right. They disappeared when he faced them directly. He stared straight ahead, and the patterns gradually forced themselves into his consciousness. It was like having a brand slowly burned onto his brain. It hurt. He winced, and his eyes watered. He was standing between two immense iterations of the runes he had seen earlier. The angular skulls towered over him. They were at least fifty feet high.
Ornastas shook his head, trying to push the images away. He was starting to feel as if the walls themselves were thirsty for blood. He shivered, his skin running cold. The danger was much worse than he had thought. Something was eating into the soul of Creontiades, and now he feared he had come to the realisation too late. There was power here, something he dared not try to understand fully. It was lethal, and it was contagious. The psychic pressure of the runes squeezed harder. The haze pulsed with gathering violence.
‘The Emperor is my ward, and His vigilance is without rest,’ Ornastas intoned. His voice began as a croaking whisper, but as he recited the Psalm of Blessed Intolerance, he spoke louder. Soon he was shouting. ‘The Emperor’s light is without limit and without mercy. The xenos and the mutant are as ash before its glory. I walk in faith and righteousness, and the heretic burns in my sight!’ He was walking again, striking the ground with his staff to punctuate each line of the psalm. His voice boomed with the strength of the prayer. Ornastas marched between the giant runes, and they had no power over him.
Figures burst from the refuse heaps. Their clothing was tattered filth. They came at Ornastas with hands crooked into vicious claws. Their faces were a mass of ritual scars. Some of the wounds still bled, as if in their need for violence, the wretches slashed perpetually at themselves. Their teeth were filed into fangs. Some had no lips, and should not have been capable of speech, but all of them shrieked in a choir of rage.
‘Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!’
Ornastas leapt back a step and swung his staff to the left at the same moment as he depressed a stud in the shaft. The head of the staff was the winged skull of the Emperor, and it flashed with the holy energy of a shock maul. He hit the nearest cultist with the edge of one wing. He smashed the wretch’s chest in, and the electrical shock jolted his limbs rigid. The cultist fell, jerking and smouldering. Ornastas took down another with a swing to the right. There were four more, and they were on him now, clawing and biting, trying to pull him to the ground. They were emaciated, as if their fury, unable to find other prey, had consumed their bodies. They were savage, but they were weak. Fuelled with a spiritual disgust, Ornastas kicked the legs out from the cultist clawing at his face, then threw himself back, throwing the others off balance. They tried to pull the staff from his hands. He yanked it free and it hit again. The stench of ozone and burned flesh filled his nostrils as the staff flashed and flashed.
Hands gripped Ornastas’ head from behind, jagged fingernails sinking into his forehead. Blood ran into his eyes. The cultist pulled his head back sharply, as if trying to rip it off by brute strength. Ornastas lunged forwards, tearing himself free. The cultist’s nails left deep gouges in his flesh. He whirled and struck hard with his staff, bringing it down overhead and burying a wing in the skull of his attacker.
‘The Emperor is with me!’ Ornastas shouted. ‘His light is with me! His judgment is upon you!’ He smashed at the cultists as fast as they could grapple with him. He broke arms and legs, then trampled spines with his boots while he held the others at bay with electric shocks. His attacks took on their own frenzy, but he did not lose himself in them. He heard the shrieks of heresy, the howled allegiance to a false god of rage, and he clung fast to his faith.
The Emperor protects.
Ornastas swung the staff twice through empty air before he realised the struggle was over. He stumbled away from the bodies, gasping for breath. The cultists were broken and burned, nothing more than fresh refuse in the alley.
Ornastas heard the peals of the brass bell again. The sound was still distant, still beyond a veil, but it was louder, closer. The tolling faded after a few moments. Ornastas strained his ears. The bell was silent. There was only the muffled, clanking beats of the manufactoria.
Had the crimson haze diminished? He wanted to think so. It had not gone, though, and on the walls, the runes glowered at the edge of sight.
When he had found his breath again, Ornastas examined the bodies. The rags draped around one of the cultists drew his attention. Dirt-encrusted and torn as they were, they also looked familiar. Ornastas knelt over the wretch, looking closely at the markings. They were crude runes, daubed in blood. Beneath the runes, torn and defaced, were other symbols. There was so much filth, so much dried blood, so much hate expended on them that Orna
stas had difficulty making them out. At last he did, and he gasped. He saw a fist, and the remnants of scales.
The rags had been a uniform belonging to a trooper of the Adeptus Arbites.
Stolen? Ornastas wondered. Throne, let it be stolen. The murder of a trooper was a brazen act, like the assault against his person. It was another sign of the danger being worse than he had imagined. But if it wasn’t stolen… He didn’t want to complete the thought. If the wretch was the trooper, then corruption had taken deeper root. And the body was so wasted, so degraded, the clothes barely fit. If this man had been a servant of the Adeptus Arbites, he had fallen some time ago.
Ornastas straightened. He breathed a prayer that somewhere, the body of a missing trooper lay, unmourned until now. He left the alley, heading back towards Saint Kaspha’s. He had preparations to make, authorities to warn. The exhortations of the sermon were no longer enough. Spiritual war had come to Khania.
As he turned the corner, putting the alley behind him, he heard the brass bell again. It tolled once, mocking him. It presaged and summoned doom.
Chapter 2
Glory
Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine Page 3
