‘Now,’ she said, and raised the chalice to her lips again, ‘dance.’
The gunship dropped through the deepening blue of the sky, its wings still glowing with the heat of atmospheric transition. White shark’s teeth snarled across its fuselage. Rocket pods hung beneath its hunched wings, and kill-marks marched in rows beneath the cockpit. Clouds of sensor baffles crackled through the air around it in an invisible sphere. Any weapon systems looking its way would see nothing but static.
Ianthe felt the gunship shake around her as it banked and levelled out. She allowed herself a smile as adrenaline spiked fire in her muscles. They were almost at the target.
God-Emperor grant me strength enough for this, she thought.
‘Five minutes to target. Atmosphere protocols active.’ The pilot’s voice echoed through the gunship. Amber light soaked the soldiers as Ianthe and her squad rose from the benches running down the sides of the compartment.
Hands checked rebreathers and sealed visor plates. They were all veterans, all seasoned in battle and hardened in warzones that had left them alive and taken others.
Beside her the preacher called Josef heaved himself to his feet. He shrugged, settling the ill-fitting pressure suit he wore under his robes. He slung his warhammer between his shoulders, and started to fit his rebreather over the bottom half of his face. Ianthe caught his eye, and he nodded to her as she checked the lascarbine strapped across her torso. She glanced at the two figures that remained seated beside the rear hatch.
Inquisitor Covenant was utterly still, dark eyes open, his great sword resting in its scabbard across his knees. The red lacquer on his cuirass seemed black in the amber light. The impulse-linked psycannon mounted on his shoulder moved in a slow arc, back and forth, back and forth, like the head of a patient predator. Beside him sat a woman, her sword drawn, the point resting on the deck. She wore a hessian shift over a studded black body glove, bolt pistols strapped to her thighs, the lower half of her face hidden by a double-plugged
breath-mask. A hennaed cross cut across the upper half of her face beneath a shaven scalp. Battered armour plates covered her shins and forearms, red lacquer clinging to the pitted metal. Ianthe thought she saw the emblem of the Adepta Sororitas on the armour plates, but that made no sense; the woman looked more like a wanderer or a bounty hunter than a holy warrior. Ianthe had heard Josef call her Severita, and the name seemed to fit her intensity.
Severita looked up as though sensing Ianthe’s gaze. Her eyes were green. For a second Ianthe blinked at the feeling of familiarity in that look.
‘From the lightning and the tempest, our Emperor, deliver us,’ Josef growled across the squad vox. The soldiers looked towards him, and his voice rose, rolling with strength. ‘From plague, temptation and war, our Emperor, deliver us.’ She could almost feel the words sinking into them as he spoke, stealing doubt, firing blood. ‘From the scourge of the Kraken, our Emperor, deliver us,’ he intoned, and as he spoke the next words the voices of the soldiers rose with him.
‘From the blasphemy of the fallen, our Emperor, deliver us.’
‘Two minutes to target,’ came the pilot’s voice, cutting through the prayer.
‘Depressurising now.’ The rear hatch began to open, air rushing out of the growing crack. Bright golden light cut into the compartment.
‘From the begetting of daemons, our Emperor, deliver us.’
The door gunners released the side doors, and pulled them back. Rotor-cannons folded out on weapon mounts, barrels jutting out into the thin air as the gunners set themselves. Ianthe could see green holo-light flaring in their targeting monocles.
‘From the curse of the mutant, our Emperor, deliver us.’
The spires of the hives rose from the cloud layer around them, glinting like spear-tips.
‘That thou wouldst bring them only death.’
Covenant stood, the air racing through the compartment catching his topknot as he turned to face the open rear hatch.
‘That thou shouldst spare none.’
The air buzzed as grav-chutes activated.
‘Thirty seconds to target, weapons live,’ said the pilot. The Valkyrie banked and Ianthe braced herself as the view beyond the nearest side door became the plateau of polluted clouds. Severita was standing beside Covenant, both steady as the world turned around them.
‘That thou shouldst pardon none.’
The rotor-cannons began to spin, barrels blurring. Beyond the right-hand door the crystal flanks of a spire tip came into view, so close Ianthe could see the silver angel set on its point.
‘We beseech thee, destroy them.’
The rotor-cannons fired. Casings showered out, falling into the dawn light as flames breathed from their muzzles. Sheets of crystal shattered, fragments spinning outwards on a wave of explosive decompression. The gunners panned the cannons across the spire’s flank as the gunship turned, thrusters and engines screaming as it cut its speed.
At the rear hatch, Covenant and Severita braced as the gunship tilted, hanging against the wind above the broken summit. The rotor-cannons ceased fire. Covenant leapt, Severita a heartbeat behind him. Six troopers followed, and then Ianthe was at the rear hatch, and the sky was screaming around her as she jumped into the dawn light.
The flank of the spire rose to meet her, jagged holes yawning wide. Beneath her, Covenant, and Severita triggered their grav-chutes, and seemed to jerk upwards as their fall slowed just before they hit the spire side. Ianthe and her squad activated their chutes. She felt force thump through her gut as the chute activated, and then she was through the splintered windows, and the throne room poured into her eyes.
The musicians nearest the window died first, falling as rotor-cannon rounds punched through the crystal and tore them apart. Nereid shrieked in shock and alarm. A black shadow was blocking out the sunlight. Air rushed through the shattered window as the throne chamber depressurised. A singer tumbled backwards into the sky, arms thrashing, the rushing air snatching away the broken harmony of his song as he fell. Figures were dropping through the broken windows, brutes in metal with blunt helms, moving with disordered speed. They were dark blurs, eyes burning coals in faces drooling blood. The reek of iron and ashes filled Nereid’s nose.
This was wrong, this was not as it should be.
‘No! Please, no!’ she shouted, wine spilling from her mouth as she twisted towards Saliktris. The majordomo had twisted back with the explosion, but was still at her side. She caught the impression of his slim face, as thin and beautiful as a white flame. ‘Saliktris, please…’
‘Yes, my mistress,’ he said, and the song rose.
The cacophony sliced into Ianthe’s squad. Pain exploded behind her eyes.
Sound vibrated through her flesh and bones to shake her eyes in her skull. To her left, one of her squad dropped as though felled by an axe blow. Ianthe stumbled, for a moment blind. Discordant notes bored into her. Colours exploded with migraine brightness in her sight. Her skin was writhing, a creature with its own will as it strangled her flesh.
‘No,’ she growled. The word pulled her to her feet and cleared her sight.
Flesh and chrome filled the space before her. Vast machines of blood-daubed metal towered like metal trees towards the ceiling’s apex. Flared pipes and clusters of vox-speakers sprouted from their sides. Figures stood on the blood-slicked floor. Shining metal staples ran across their skin, and soiled silk clung to their limbs. Bundles of tubes poured from their mouths and circled their necks, rising to hoods of polished pipes above their heads.
Others plucked at strings stretched between their half-fused torsos. Amongst them spindle-limbed dancers spun, cartwheeling through the throng, lidless eyes rolling in screaming faces, scythe limbs arching.
And beyond and above the crowd of horrors a throne rose. Flayed fur and skin draped its steps, crusted with blood and vomit. A figure sat on the throne, bloated to monstrous size, bulk straining against the chair’s structure, tatters of bright silk hanging from
its form like a half-sloughed skin. A web of tubes and cables coiled over it, vanishing into its bulk like worms burrowing into mud. Trays of red, glistening matter sat beside it, and Ianthe saw crimson on the lips of a small mouth set in the boulder-like head. It was a nightmare vision of careless joy sculpted in machinery and flesh. A vision that was now tearing apart.
Some of the throng were falling, dying as the explosive decompression ruptured lungs. Blood-mist aspirated from their mouths as they shuddered and folded. Ianthe fired, hosing las-fire across the room as she forced herself forwards. Some of her squad came with her, firing in ragged bursts. Covenant and Severita were amongst the press, bodies falling before them like wheat before a storm.
‘Ianthe!’ she heard Josef shout her name over the vox, and jerked around just in time to see a scythe-like blade whip down towards her face. There was no time to avoid it. She raised the lascarbine, and the blade clanged on the
case of the gun. An emaciated figure was looming over her on thin, double-jointed legs. It shrieked, sacs of skin bulging in its throat. Ianthe felt the sound shake through her. The scythe blade sheared away from the gun, and the stick-limbed figure twisted to cut again. Ianthe slammed the muzzle of her gun into it. Bones shattered under the blow. She pulled the trigger, and the thing was falling, its flesh cooking in the spray of las-fire. Ianthe brought the butt of the gun down to shatter skull and brain. She was breathing hard.
Fire and blood blurred her sight. To her left she could see a clutch of her troopers, already fewer than they were seconds before. They were shooting, but they had stopped moving, their fire ragged. Beyond them, deeper in the churning press, were Severita and Covenant. Severita’s sword was a spinning blur orbiting her as she stepped and ducked and cut, never pausing, each movement a slice that severed limbs and bisected bodies. Covenant carved his path at her side, the great sword a sheet of lightning in his hands as it cut, and cut. The psycannon on his shoulder was spinning and firing, punching figures from their feet behind the inquisitor as he cut down those in front of him. It was a sight to light the dark of despair, two warriors moving amidst a tide of horror as death reached for them. It was also about to end.
Fog was rising in the room, pink with the spray of blood, shivering with the surge of noise ripping from the throats of the dying. Ianthe saw the fog coil across the skin of the dead and flow up the steps of the throne. Something was happening, something that she could feel buzzing on the edge of sight and hissing in her ear. A heat-haze blur was shaking the air. The smell of cinnamon and burnt hair reached her nose through her breath-mask. She swayed. The sound of the screams was softening, soothing her into acquiescence.
There was nothing to do…
The future just required her to let it happen…
For once in her life there was no weight to bear, no duty or responsibility…
All she needed to do was be…
+Ianthe… Ianthe… Ianthe…+ breathed a voice that was everywhere.
Laughter, soft but brittle, itched in her awareness. The carnival of violence around her had slowed. Blades traced lazy arcs through limbs. Blood-drops fell like jewels. Skin and bone parted.
She raised her eyes to the throne. The figure on it was a blurred haze, like an image painted in smeared pigment. As she watched, a form detached itself
from the enthroned figure, pulling shape to itself as it stepped down towards the floor. It moved slowly, languidly, its limbs sheathed in iridescent skin, its eyes black pools beneath a billowing mane of violet hair. The figure’s face turned towards Ianthe and its eyes seemed to swallow the world.
+Ianthe… You poor, wronged child…+ The voice purred in her skull.
+How much has been taken from you…+ And the world was falling backwards and the memories of lives she had forgotten she had lived were dancing in front of her…
…She was coming through a rusted door, gun in hand, and the space beyond was a pit writhing with worms that looked at her with slit-pupil eyes… And Covenant was calling to her to shoot, and she was beside him firing until the charge pack in her gun was dry…
…She was standing on a stone platform beneath a sky of bruised light. Balls of lightning were falling from the heavens, and the cannon on Covenant’s shoulder was swivelling and firing, punching glowing rounds up at the corposant, and she could see the tangle of arms and mouths thrashing in the balls of flame…
…She was standing with Josef in the ruins of a violated city. His old eyes turned from the walls that still ran with ectoplasm and blood, and he began to say something…
…And now she was standing in the throne room again.
Curtains of light hung across the space, shifting between colours. The image was strobing, pulsing between colours and blinding monochrome.
The sinuous figure was at the foot of the steps to the throne, movements flowing between the shutter-blinks of light. Claws of red chitin grew from its arms, the edges blurring to black smoke as they peeled a path through the whirl of bodies. It was beautiful and vile, like a song sung from a strangled throat.
Covenant was cutting his way towards the creature, bodies falling before him, Severita at his side, sword weaving circles around his cuts.
Ianthe froze, watching the scene play out, and realised that she had seen this before, this clash of man and daemon. She had faced and survived this many times. She was not the soldier she thought, she was not even sure if she had ever been.
Josef was shouting somewhere close behind her, and one of her squad was
falling, his hands ripping at his visor to get to the flesh beneath. Another
looked at her, head rotating with serene slowness, gun muzzle rising to rest under his chin.
‘No…’ she began as his finger closed on the trigger. The las-bolt burned through his head and blew the top of his skull off.
Nereid watched Saliktris stride down the steps, his coat whipping in the wind rushing through the shattered windows. Most of her musicians and courtiers lay bloody on the floor, while the few that remained clawed desperately at the brutes cutting through them. She could see those invaders now, dark shadows, like the tattered silhouettes of men, their eyes burning, bellowing as they hacked the beauty of her world to ruin.
Then Saliktris began his dance. Sharpness glinted at the edge of his arms.
The court of musicians parted before him, and the majordomo was a blur as he met her enemies, edge to edge.
The daemon – for that was what it was, Ianthe realised – slashed through a silk-wrapped mutant and its pincer claw snapped down towards Covenant in a languid blur. The psycannon on his shoulder pivoted and fired. Rounds burned through the air, and the daemon spun, and Covenant was cutting and cutting, and the daemon swayed and pivoted around each shot and cut as though it were all a dance, as though every step and turn was part of a pattern. As Ianthe watched Josef waded to Covenant’s side, hammer battering aside clawing limbs.
‘I shall not fear,’ she heard his voice booming out the prayer over the cacophony. ‘I shall be fury. I shall be fire.’
‘Get up,’ the voice made her flinch, and then she realised it was her own, and she was rising from where she had slid to the floor amid the blood and filth. ‘Get up, now!’ And she was on her feet, gun in her hands. If there were still any of her squad alive, they might have been with her, but if they were, she did not see them. She fired, pouring las-bolts into a tall mutant with no eyes and a needle-fanged mouth. It shrieked, falling in a tangle of hook-bladed limbs. She kicked past it, boots sinking into blood-soaked fur.
To her right the daemon leapt, pivoted in mid-air, and lashed a pincer at Covenant’s head. His sword met the blow. Chitin and lightning-shrouded steel met with a howl. The daemon flipped over Covenant, a scorpion tail growing from its back as it arched through the air. The sting stabbed down.
Severita’s sword spun high, edge bright, and the tip of the daemon’s tail was falling away in a spray of ectoplasm. The daemon landed, twirling like a spill of silk in the wind
, and Ianthe could feel its laughter shuddering through her thoughts.
Blood was rising from the floor, flowing into globules and spiralling into red ropes, congealing into sculptures of flesh and chitin and claws. Josef was beside Covenant and Severita now, the trio at the centre of the circle of creatures birthing into being from the blood of the dead and the screams of the living. Covenant’s psycannon blasted a cluster of creatures to a shower of black slime, and then dry-cycled on an empty breech. The chorus of congealing daemons stepped forwards, skin spreading across their limbs.
Colours and light were running and swirling at the edge of Ianthe’s vision. A warm fog of cloying scent poured down her throat, and she gagged inside her mask.
She was at the foot of the steps leading to the throne. Above her the bloated figure on the silver chair gazed at the slaughter. Gossamer strands of light billowed through the air around the throne.
Ianthe mounted the steps.
Nereid turned and looked at the figure climbing the steps towards her. Ashes fell from its tread. Red eyes burned in its iron face. Her household guards were finally there, ringing the remaining intruders, but this other one had risen from the slaughter and reached the foot of the throne. It would not matter though, not now.
Saliktris would remove these… creatures, and then everything would return to how it was. Yes… to how it was when she woke. But at that moment she
saw Saliktris seem to slow, his endless dance stuttering, as though he were tiring. And the tallest of the invaders stepped forwards and hacked down, blade screaming. Saliktris pivoted aside, but only just fast enough to escape the edge, and the swordsman cut again and again, and her guard who had ringed the three were shrinking back. Nereid screamed at them, but they didn’t listen. And then the swordsman slashed his sword down, and Saliktris did not sway aside, and the sword split the majordomo from collarbone to groin.
Pain flared in Nereid’s chest, expanding into a burning sheet of agony. The world blinked out of existence, and the pain ran out to the edge of her being.
Crusade & Other Stories - Dan Abnett Et Al. Page 21
