by Ben Counter
‘To show ourselves,’ came a reply, a high, grating hiss from somewhere near the chamber’s sacrificial stone. ‘Nothing more.’
‘Then show yourself, as you are bound,’ said Shon’tu.
The blood and shadows around the sacrificial stone flowed up into the air, as if filling an invisible vessel. They formed a spindly, roughly humanoid shape, with a head hung low between its shoulders and a long, equine face. It was somewhat taller than a man, and when half formed it drew the shadows around it like a cloak or furled wings, the spindly construct of blood obscured by the darkness that clung to it.
Behind it several more were forming in the same way, figures that seemed barely sketched on the surface of reality, stylised daemons scratched in blood onto the canvas of the air.
Shon’tu took a scroll case that hung on the waist of his armour. He opened it and unravelled the long sheet of lizard-like hide within. It was covered in cramped writing and symbols, and at the end was the seal, in black wax, of the steel helm emblem of the Iron Warriors Legion.
The leader of the daemons skittered forwards, its limbs seemingly jointed at random. Its head, which had now formed three eyes of bluish fire, was held low as it perused the writing on the hide.
‘The contract is as it was made,’ said the daemon. ‘All parties are thus bound.’
‘Then you must bargain,’ said Shon’tu. ‘The terms of our agreement state that you must enter into an agreement for services we demand of you.’
‘And you must give us what we want,’ said the daemon. ‘The Dancers on the Precipice do no man’s will for nothing.’
Shon’tu scowled. ‘It is always thus,’ he said. ‘Though our enemies are the same, though the warp’s glory relies on our labours, still the spawn of the warp must take their payment.’
‘It is written,’ said the Dancer. ‘So it shall be.’
Shon’tu opened a small compartment in the armour on his chest. Inside was a tiny glass vial of red liquid. ‘Shed by Perturabo,’ he said, ‘upon the fields of Isstvan. Collected even as the Corpse-God’s lackeys were butchered beneath our guns. Seasoned in the smoke from their pyres.’
‘The blood,’ said the Dancer, ‘of a primarch.’
Its fingers grew longer as it reached for the vial. Shon’tu snatched it back out of the daemon’s reach. ‘I have a very specific task,’ he said, ‘for which this is the payment.’
‘Give it unto us,’ replied the Dancer, ‘and it shall be done.’
‘Payment will be granted when the task is complete,’ retorted Shon’tu. ‘That is also written.’
The Dancer spat in frustration. ‘For the blood of Perturabo, for the life-stuff of the warp’s prophet, we will do as you wish. But break this covenant, delete what was written, and terrible shall be the warp’s vengeance! For ten thousand years you will find no ally in the empyrean, Warsmith Shon’tu. Only enemies shall swarm wherever your soul touches the warp, and the gods themselves will learn of it!’
‘There will be no reneging on this bargain,’ said Shon’tu. ‘That is not our way. This is a high price to pay, and it does us ill to part with it, but the victory it will buy us is worth the price and it will be paid.’
The Dancer turned to its fellows. Just beyond reality shimmered the forms of many more, a whole tribe of these warp-predators. Their silent conversation lasted a few moments and the Dancer turned back to Shon’tu.
‘What is it the Iron Warriors desire?’
Shon’tu locked the vial of primarch’s blood back into its compartment in his armour. ‘Kill Lysander,’ he replied.
The first sign that anything was wrong, as was so often the case, was when the bodies were found.
Three of them, all engineers, were found near one of the star fort’s primary thruster arrays. The array, which was used to keep the Endeavour of Will in a steady orbit around its star, had been one of the many systems to be damaged during the attack on the machine-spirit, and the engineers were attempting to get it back to working order. They wore grey habits with half-cog symbol showing they were laymen trained by the magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and the body of each had been hollowed out as if by hungry fingers cracking them open and tearing out the meat inside.
Lysander knelt in that moment beside the corpses lain out on the floor of the barracks, where they had been brought. They were a sorry sight, lopsided and sagging as if deflated. Rigalto stood behind him with a couple of the battle-brothers from his squad, along with a gaggle of crewmen who had found the bodies. Rigalto’s wounded hand was bound and bloody.
‘What other signs were there?’ asked Lysander, not taking his eyes from the bodies.
‘Prints,’ said one of the crew, a woman, stocky and smeared with machine grease. ‘On the floor and the ceiling. In blood.’
‘Footprints?’
‘I could not tell.’
Lysander stood up. ‘They were in blood?’
‘They were.’
He pointed at the corpses. ‘Their blood?’
‘I could not tell.’
‘They were eaten,’ said another member of the crew. This one was lanky with awful skin, and a deep rash around his mouth and nose where a rebreather mask normally sat. ‘Duct spiders. We had an infestation of ’em on the Executioner’s Moon. They get into the engines and breed, and they’ll chew you up just like that.’
‘This is daemon-work,’ said Lysander.
‘Are you certain?’ said Rigalto.
‘I have rarely been more certain of anything. These souls were their way in. With enough will, enough power, even the mind of a non-psyker can be a gateway for the daemon. We bloodied Shon’tu’s nose at the Tomb, my brothers. It is not the way of the Iron Warriors to send warp-spawn to do what they could themselves do face to face. We are forcing their hand.’
‘Then let us take what encouragement we can, captain,’ said Rigalto. ‘But that does not change the fact that these things are running around our star fort.’
‘Leave us,’ said Lysander. The crew, used to taking their orders from an Imperial Fist, bowed their heads and left the barracks room, leaving the Space Marines with the bodies.
‘And you, Rigalto,’ added Lysander.
‘Captain? If we are to hunt them down we must stick together. We could sweep by sections, drive them towards–’
‘Leave,’ said Lysander. ‘This is not a battle to be fought, because the enemy is not a soldier. Not this daemon. It is an assassin. It will not make itself known until it can move on its target. We could wait forever for it to emerge from whatever shadow it hides in, only for it to strike when our guard eventually falls.’
‘Then it is here to kill you,’ said Rigalto. ‘And you will use yourself as bait?’
‘The bait has no say in the kill,’ replied Lysander. ‘I shall. My orders have kept us alive thus far. Follow them again, Rigalto. Make your brothers ready, for Shon’tu will strike as soon as his daemons have either succeeded or failed. Go.’
‘As you command, captain,’ said Rigalto with a bow of the head. ‘Good luck.’
‘Dorn wrote that there is no such thing as luck,’ replied Lysander. ‘Fate perhaps, but not luck. To your duties, sergeant.’
‘Yes, captain.’
Rigalto saluted and turned away, leading his squadmates out of the barracks. Lysander turned again to the sorry sight of the bodies on the floor.
‘If you hear all, as you claim,’ he said quietly, ‘then hear this. I am the victim you are commanded to kill, but you will find no victim on this star fort. If you can feel anything so human as regret, then you will regret the binding that compels you to seek me out. I am an Imperial Fist, a son of Rogal Dorn, and I do not feel fear. But I know what fear is, because it is my duty to inflict it on creatures such as you.’
Lysander could hear them, their limbs clicking on the walls and ceiling of the corridors around the barracks like so many spiders scuttling around their web. He did not look back as he left the barracks and the corpses, and headed towards the
star fort’s apothecarion.
The Dancers at the Precipice did not perceive reality at all. Existing partially in the warp, their senses strained to reach across the veil to real space. It was the warp’s reflection they saw, the emotional echoes of structures in reality. The corridors and hangars of the Endeavour of Will were seen in the shades of old emotions left there. All areas of the star fort were veneered in a thin layer of fear, as suffered by the unaugmented crew in times of battle. Pain was scattered, like blood spatter, around old battle damage scars, and it pooled in glowing stains around triage stations and the way leading to the apothecarion.
Arrogance and a sense of iron-bound duty glowed around the command areas where the Imperial Fists were most often found, details picked out in anger and flavoured with the lust for battle secretly held by so many Space Marines, and acknowledged by only a few. The airlocks, where the dead were traditionally sent on their final voyage, were steeped in sorrow and regret. Trace elements of happiness, even pinpoints of ecstasy in hidden secret places among the star fort’s architecture, were swamped by the grim emotions of war, those stains that lasted the longest and brought out every passageway and compartment as the Dancers scampered through them.
They followed the pain. They had tasted Lysander and the train of relentless duty he left, a metallic thread winding through the star fort, and it coincided with the increasing density of pain and desperation encrusting the approaches to the apothecarion.
The Dancers had no leader. They were moved by the currents of the warp that flowed through them, and in that moment it demanded that they kill. Lysander’s was a taste they knew well, and nothing would be as delicious as to temper it with pain and anger, and the awful certainty that came with the approach of death. They had already killed, but the deaths of those whose bodies they had usurped was weak and watery. Their deaths were tasteless compared to the banquet that would be Lysander’s death. The warp gave them hunger, and they sprang on to sate it.
Techmarine Hestion was awake. His eyes opened as Lysander boomed hurriedly into the room. The autosurgeon knitting together the skin of his chest recoiled at the motion, spindly arms folding up and away from the exposed muscle. He still looked shockingly weak, his musculature scorched and wasted away, and it looked impossible for him to ever fill the armour stacked up at his bedside. He sat up as best he could at Lysander’s approach.
‘Captain!’ he said, raw-throated. ‘I have heard of battle. The orderlies know little, only that the enemy is upon us and that you have fought them off. Is it so?’
‘Thus far,’ said Lysander. ‘The battle is not done. And forgive me, brother, for I have brought it with me.’
The apothecarion darkened. Spidery shadows flickered over the glow-globes in the ceiling. Half-glimpsed figures of gnarled, blood-red muscle, cloaked in darkness, scampered around the walls. Lysander backed up against Hestion’s bed, drawing the Fist of Dorn up into a guard and shouldering his shield so it protected Hestion from the gathering shadows.
Spectral fingers lashed out, congealing into reality as they raked across Lysander’s shield. More reached out from the warp and snared Lysander’s limbs, trying to haul him off his feet. He wrenched his shield arm around and batted one of the shadows against the far wall, its body like a bundle of spiders’ legs bunching up as it slammed into the wall and thrashed to the ground. Lysander raised the hammer and punched its head into a second daemon as it coalesced in front of him – the daemon flitted back, vanishing through the wall as the hammer crunched home a hair’s breadth too late.
‘I may be laid low, but I am still Adeptus Astartes,’ said Hestion, struggling to sit up. ‘Hand me my gun, Lysander. My blade.’
‘You will fight, my brother, fear not on that score,’ said Lysander as he circled, starting at the daemons as they stalked through the half-light around him. ‘I must ask more of you than I have ever asked of an Imperial Fist.’
‘Then ask, captain. What little I have left to give, I would give in battle.’
‘For once, Hestion, do not give so unthinkingly. For I ask of you your death.’
Hestion forced himself into a sitting position and swung his legs over the side of the bed, grimacing as his half-healed skin tore. He wrenched a surgical blade from the autosurgeon above him, wielding it like a dagger. ‘I do not understand, captain,’ he said, voice strained.
‘Your death, Hestion. The one thing I can have no right to demand of you. I must ask for it, freely given.’
‘I will die here anyway, captain. The apothecary cogitator has made its prognosis. My organs are too badly damaged. Soon I will be comatose, and death will then be swift.’
Another daemon slashed forwards, aiming for Hestion. Lysander stepped into its path and caught the charge on his shield. He was forced back a pace, before swinging the Fist of Dorn into the daemon and tearing it into a shower of shredded limbs and broken shadows.
‘Back!’ yelled Lysander. ‘Just as Dorn cast the daemon from Terra, so I will cast you from this place! Back to the warp, to burn beneath the wrath of your gods! You will not take Lysander today!’
‘I told myself that death is no shame, if it be a warrior’s death,’ said Hestion. His blade was held in front of him, but his hand wavered, for most of the muscles had been scorched away and his strength was gone.
‘It will not be a warrior’s death,’ said Lysander. ‘It will be a wretched one. Will you give this to me, my brother? I ask you as a friend, not a commander. Will you accept?’
Hestion’s eyes turned from Lysander to the daemons. They were gathering more thickly now, as if the apothecarion was disappearing to be replaced by a hellish place composed of daemon’s flesh.
‘When you returned from Malodrax,’ the Techmarine said, ‘some said that you should not rejoin us. The risk was too great that you had… brought something back with you. That you were corrupted, somewhere deep down.’
‘What are you saying, Hestion?’ demanded Lysander.
Hestion’s voice shook as he forced out the words. ‘You ask if I trust you with my death, brother. My reply is that I… I do not know.’
The walls bowed in and the daemons tore through, reality splitting like torn skin. The Dancers at the Precipice roared like a tornado of daemons’ flesh centred on Lysander and Hestion, limbs lashing out at the two Imperial Fists. Lysander caught blows on his shield and on the haft of the Fist of Dorn, protecting Hestion as best he could. Hestion fended off a claw that unfolded from a stalk of lashing, knotted flesh, cutting through the unreal muscle with his blade, but other talons caught him and opened up new wounds on his half-formed skin. Hestion slumped off the bed to one knee, a red slash along the side of his throat, exposing spine and sinew.
Hestion coughed out an angry growl. He grabbed one of the Dancers with his free hand, dragging it out of the swirling mass. He stabbed down at its shifting face, the features swimming around the blade as it punched into the place where its head should have been. Limbs split and reformed, squirming under Hestion and pincering around him to hold him fast. Lysander kicked out and shattered the daemon’s body with a massive armoured boot, smacking the remains off Hestion with a swing of his hammer.
The Dancers swarmed closer. Hestion was caught by a dozen limbs at once and hauled off his feet, pulled into the mass. Lysander yelled and tried to drag the Techmarine back, even as the Dancers ripped at him too, scoring deep gashes in the ceramite of his armour and shield, clawing at his face and eyes.
‘I was there when the black sun rose!’
Lysander’s voice cut through the hiss of the daemons’ talons.
‘Upon the blood-red sands, I laid him low!’ continued Lysander. ‘I cast his head into the ammonia sea! I stood against you and I defeated you! I am the Gilded Wrath of Malodrax!’
It was upon the blasted ground of Malodrax that the Dancers at the Precipice coalesced into real space for the first time, dragged out of formlessness and bedlam by a thousand voices raised in terror and pain. Malodrax was one of a m
illion worlds found, conquered and subsequently forgotten by the Imperium, and seized by the powers of the warp who did not forget. From the flint-bladed mountains and ammonia oceans of Malodrax were forged death pits and warrens, carved by the hands of slaves and the sorcery of Chaos’s champions. Each one was dedicated to a different form of torment or execution. Artists begged the God of Change to transport them to Malodrax so they might create wonders there that no sane world would permit. Daemons gambolled between the death pits, and among them were the Dancers at the Precipice, who congealed from the stuff of the warp to attend joyfully on a millions extinguished lives.
Cultists among the shipping lanes of the Imperium diverted passenger liners and pilgrim hulks into the dead, uninhabited space around Malodrax. Their living cargoes were poured into the death pits, and the Dancers at the Precipice took their place among the daemons and madmen welcoming them to their new and final home in the lava chambers or parasite nests, the endless steel-clad tunnels hung with flensed skin, the acid springs and the oubliettes full of razorblades.
The Iron Warriors saw a place of worship and pain, yes, but also one of inefficiency and waste. Space Marines of the Iron Warriors Legion landed there and turned the bands of daemons into armies, the death pits into factories. Daemon-scholars were summoned or created to keep a tally of every death offered up to the warp, and every form of torture discovered among the madness.
Then from the warp arrived a spacecraft accompanied by the heralds of Tzeentch singing in celebration. Every daemon, it is said, stopped their bloody work and watched as it descended from the torn skies of Malodrax. It had been lost in the warp for many years, as evidenced by the blistered hull and its state of disrepair, but there was no mistaking the heraldry of the Imperial Fists it bore. It was the Shield of Valour, thought destroyed in a warp collapse decades before, and it had been vomited up by the ether as a gift to the daemons of Malodrax. The Iron Warriors formed a guard to shepherd the passengers off the ship, and even now there was no doubting the pride and deadliness of those men – for they were Imperial Fists. First among them, like an animal kept caged in his armour of gold, was a Space Marine captain who with the merest glance told everyone who saw him what he would do to them when he got free.
