by Nick Kyme
‘Answer me this, Sister,’ she said whilst her back was turned, just about to kneel down again. ‘When did we become betrayers?’
Helia could not.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Sturndrang, the underhive of Molior
The din of machinery and clattering metal resolved on the warm air, suggesting the excavation was still ongoing.
And close.
A heady scent pervaded, cloying and noxiously saccharine. It dulled the otherwise industrial and actinic scent of the underhive Exor had come to know but overlaid a much more unsettling odour that felt incongruous in the sweating, metal confines.
Somewhere close was the nexus of whatever foulness had crept into the heart of Molior and taken root. It was the source of Zartath’s disquiet and the reason why the vermin were so grossly mutated. Facts interleaved, coincidence became causality and all the disparate threads they had been following suddenly conjoined at this point, in this moment.
Logic and instinct had reached the same conclusion in the same instant and so its two agents in Molior found themselves at the precipice of a great and dark discovery.
Slowing naturally as instinctive caution took over, Zartath signalled for Exor to take the opposite flank of the wreckage. The path they had been travelling, shouldered by peaks of discarded metal, had widened, the summits either side shrinking as the debris flattened out in a rusted plain.
Exor nodded, understanding, and as the warriors diverged they crouched low and moved quietly between scraps of cover.
As well as the noise from the machines, there was light now too. As Exor crept closer, he tried to keep Zartath in his field of vision. Agatone had sent Exor after the hunter to bring him back and now the Techmarine found himself in league with him, facing some terror of the subterranean world below Sturndrang. Even with his mission parameters changed in the face of empirical evidence, Exor knew he needed to keep Zartath in his sights, watch him as his captain had ordered. It was impossible. The hunter moved too swiftly, Exor a lumpen clod in comparison. He had to settle for knowing he was close by and that, for now at least, their objectives were in alignment.
The light was coming from a string of phosphor lamps, rigged above a deep pit from which the scattered and piled wreckage had been excised. More light emanated from drum fires and the metal shells of vehicles and structures that had been turned into massive burning braziers. They reminded Exor of ribcages and he briefly wondered if their design had been deliberate.
Figures huddled in the light. Men and women, not so dissimilar to the dregs he had seen in Kabullah. The differences between them were subtle, but immediately alarming. A nervous vitality affected the ones now before him. It drove their weary bodies back to the pit where half a dozen vehicles were crowding. Three of the vehicles were industrial-grade excavators, drilling and digging. Two others were cargo haulers, brimming with scrap from the pit. The last vehicle was a freight loader, a four-track. On the back of the truck a tall figure in purple robes murmured sibilant imprecations.
The men and women were not slaves; they were supplicants. Through his visual implants, Exor discerned sigils scratched into their flesh. Self-inflicted wounds. Scarification marred faces already withered by malnutrition. None of this disfigurement or wretchedness appeared to dampen their spirits, though it was difficult to tell if they laboured in thralls of rapture or melancholy. The mood of the supplicants seemed to wax and wane according to their proximity to the pit. Exor estimated almost forty at the dig site, including the robed demagogue who he assumed was the leader. As his imprecations grew louder, chanting began in the cultists’ ranks too and a realisation was quick to form.
This was who they had fought at Seven Points, who Tsu’gan had fought too. A cult of Chaos was at large and growing in Molior’s deep underhive. Unchecked, it would be the end of this world.
About to creep closer and try to find Zartath, Exor saw the first sentry. Unlike the diggers, it moved languidly as if affected by some torpor. Disguised beneath its robes and afflicted by some kind of physical mutant action, gender was hard to determine. He did make out the strange arrangement of tubes in kind to the creatures they had dispatched at Seven Points. Seeing it for a second time, Exor was reminded of the amulet the underhiver wore when they had first delved into Molior. Tainted blood had corrupted these men and women, turned its vermin into monsters.
Pipes fed down into the pit, extracting, exsanguinating. Whatever lurked within was being siphoned and turned into a narcotic that altered its takers in initially subtle but ultimately ruinous ways, like the one that had affected the ganger called Karve.
The taint: this place in the darkness was the epicentre and the radial fractures of its corruption were slowly spreading. Like hacking down a dead tree to expose the insects burrowing under its seemingly healthy bark, the fire-born had uncovered an infestation. Only one course of action remained to them – exterminate it at the source.
Exor edged forwards, low and to the shadows, careful to avoid the sentries’ patrols. Techmarines were not adept at stealth but the sentries seemed so entranced that sneaking amongst them was not much of a challenge. The sudden and painful throbbing in Exor’s skull was. The closer he got to the pit, the louder and more agonising it became. The supplicants’ rapture was his torture. It could only be worse for Zartath.
The keening, that’s what he had called it. In mythic ages, it was a siren’s call dragging sailors to their doom. Only this siren was embedded in the deep earth of the underhive, not an ocean, and the sailors were the two fire-born who had tracked it to its lair.
There was no tuning it out, and no solace from the call. It was inside, a hollow drone that rattled around within the skull like a broken chip of bone, the damage being caused by its existence unknown until it was too late.
An ordinary man would have been driven mad by it, or driven to it, foreswearing all oaths and friendships in order to be in service to the keening. But Space Marines were not men, and did not give in to Chaos easily. A duty lay before Exor now, one he had sworn to uphold when he became fire-born, to defend mankind from threats without and within to his dying breath.
As part of the Chapter or alone here in the dark of the underhive, it did not matter.
‘Vulkan’s fire beats in my breast…’ he began, affirming his purpose and planning a route through the sentries that would get him to the demagogue. Then all thoughts of duty and tactics deserted him.
He had found Zartath. The ex-Black Dragon was on his feet, charging down the nearest sentry and roaring like a beast unhinged.
Horrified and agape, Exor watched as Zartath bore the sentry down with bone blades embedded in its chest. Shattering its blood-vials, Zartath was back on his feet and running again before the creature expired with a strange whimper of pleasure-pain. He moved low but with long, loping strides like a hound on the hunt. Blood sprayed across his muzzle, the sense-shattering keening coring out his skull – Zartath was as close to truly feral as he had ever been. So singular of purpose, so maddened, he was heedless of almost everything except the keening.
All thoughts of stealth now abandoned, Exor rose up and opened fire on the mutant closing on Zartath’s blindside. It cradled a strange-looking fusil, the stock and trigger clutched by long, bony fingers, the barrel steadied with a coiling tentacle. Truly, they had unearthed a den of ruin in Molior.
It had to burn.
Exor fired again on the move, taking the mutant somewhere in its midriff. The shot knocked it off its feet, torso and legs sheared apart in the resulting explosive crescendo. Heads turned. Faces with too many eyes regarded the second interloper in their midst. With a clawed hand outstretched, his own face occluded by the folds of his hood, the demagogue marshalled his disciples.
As one and with eerie synchronicity, the supplicants dropped what they were carrying and ran like wolves at the fire-born.
A solid shot whipped past Exor’s ear; he felt the heat and heard the speed of its passage. Another clipped his s
lim shoulder guard and he was reminded how perilously unprotected he was without his power armour. He broke into a run, loosing off three more shots in quick succession, aiming for the sentries as they were armed and already firing.
Two more went down, broken into chunks of smouldering meat by a bolt-shell’s explosive impact. He thought he had missed the third, but the round had actually bounced off the mutant whose hide was like a sheath of impervious armour plate.
A head shot overcame the problem and decapitated the sentry. There was no time to be subtle – only brute aggression would prevail. Exor knew he had to get to the pit, then confront and kill whatever was in it. He would have to go through the demagogue and his flock to reach it, unless Zartath got there ahead of him.
The ex-Black Dragon was eating up the ground between himself and the pit with long, determined strides. Reacting instinctively, he switched between evasion and sheer power. Anything in his way was cut down. Three mutant sentries so far, their spilled and noisome innards steaming on the collated trash they seemed to worship. Resistance had been fleeting, suicidal even, but as Zartath closed on the pit the ranks of defenders thickened.
It was all Exor could do to maintain a steady pace. Loosing three more bursts, his clip began to run dry. He finished it off and ejected the clip, reaching for another, but there were none so he drew his combat blade. Cursing, he realised he must have lost the spare during his descent.
Fortunately, not only had Zartath thinned the herd, his insane dash towards the pit had drawn everything to him. A morass of bodies, supplicants and sentries both, enveloped the hunter. Excited and terrified at the prospect of his own imminent death, the demagogue grew more animated. His sermons devolved to ranting. He was baying now, baying for the transgressor’s blood with all the fervour of a frothing lunatic.
A greater madness had been unleashed against him, though. Zartath had survived the labyrinthine prison of the Volgorrah Reef and killed Renegade Astartes – no enrobed zealot was going to resist him for long, even with a host to protect him.
Exor arrived to find Zartath cutting the last of the disciples down, a butcher cleaving meat. He ended the slaughter with the demagogue, who finally fled but stumbled when his robes snagged on a piece of twisted metal and fell onto his face. Crawling on his stomach, he reached the edge of the crevice his followers had been digging.
Even from a little distance away, Exor could see the shallow but widening gyre they had made in the wreckage. A speartip of metal jutted just high enough for the Techmarine to see from where he was standing. It looked like the cone of a drop pod…
A predator sensing wounded prey, Zartath sprang on the mewling demagogue who was desperately trying to claw his way into the pit. Part of his trappings had torn loose, revealing the corruption beneath. Twisted flesh, an over-wide maw in place of a natural mouth, his eyes small slits of flesh, surrendered for this other mutation. As always with Chaos, one must give in order to receive.
As he was thrown onto his back by the rough hands of the ex-Black Dragon, the demagogue uttered a single arcane word. His oratory was his gift, a boon from his dark patrons that had helped him enslave the citizens to his will. It was meant to stop his assailant dead, a single, chiming utterance of power. Zartath was singularly unmoved.
Mad with rage, Zartath rammed his bone blade through the side of the demagogue’s skull, silencing him, but failed to quieten the daemons in his own head.
Battle over, the cult vanquished, Exor went to join him at the edge of the pit.
When he was a sword length away, Zartath whirled around.
‘Broth–’ The Techmarine stopped short as the searing fire of the bone blade coursed through his chest and out of his back in radiating tremors of agony. He cried out in pain, but his voice was half-strangled and came out as a gasp. Reaching up, Exor grabbed Zartath’s shoulder in support, in trembling accusation and tried to meet his gaze.
Wild, dark eyes of pure fury looked back. There was no recognition in them, no guilt or remorse. Whatever was gnawing at Zartath’s mind was still there, embedded in his psyche. Exor staggered, the heat of the wound dulling and turning to ice as he contemplated how close to death he was again. The ice floes he felt in his blood spread to Exor’s back then his limbs, until every part of him that was meat and bone became as cold as the metal of his bionics.
This must be how the world feels to give yourself fully to the Omnissiah, he thought, imagining the cybernetic tutors of his Martian training but seeing the snorting, snarling image of the monstrous warrior he called brother in front of him instead, staring with unrestrained hate. Exor realised it wasn’t meant for him. It was fuelled by something else.
In Exor’s head, the keening was fading but in Zartath’s it had reached a deafening fever pitch he could no longer resist.
As the bone blade withdrew, a spurt of dark blood jetted from the wound. Internal bleeding. Organ damage. He didn’t need his power armour’s biological data stream to know he was in trouble. Exor was released but found his legs could no longer support him. He collapsed, the culmination of his injuries felling him.
Awareness dimming as his body began trying to shut itself down, Exor fought to stay conscious but slipped into such delirium he could not be sure of what he saw next. Memory, reality and fiction began to blend. Something emerged from the pit, hauling itself over the edge from a cocoon of metal. Striated by age, withered by entropy, the drop pod must have shifted to this place over time, moving in vermicular fashion through the slowly disintegrating layers of the underhive.
Its siren call was weak, and needed time to infect its followers and make them fanatical. Even then, releasing it from its prison would have taken years. It was the blood, leaking into the pit from its prison, siphoned by its desperate acolytes and fashioned into an elixir that promoted strength, resilience, even escape from death. Exor could think of few species whose blood was capable of such wonders.
From out of the pit emerged a figure armoured in heliotrope purple. Whether it was the presence of such august enemies that drew it forth, or some other incredulous coincidence, Exor would never know. They simply had to kill it.
Flayed skin hung in ragged strips from its war-plate. Fetish chains strung with shrivelled ears and fingers looped around shoulder guards and greaves. Its face was scarred like the men and women who had freed it and its eyes were dense chasms of fresh-remembered hate. No pupils, just two orbs of incarnadine red. There could be no mistaking a warrior of the old Legions.
A Traitor Space Marine, trapped in Molior for years.
It rose up to its full height, flakes of debris breaking off from its body and cascading downwards like shed skin. Years of accumulated dust and grit spilled from the joints of its armour. Wrenching free transfusion pipes it had attached to its exposed skin, it drew an old and scarred sword from a dusty scabbard.
The challenge it uttered was in a language Exor didn’t know, but used words and sounds that set his teeth on edge.
Zartath faced the warrior, lathered in a feverish sweat, his chest and shoulders rising and falling with heavy breaths.
A few strides separated them.
Bone-blades against tainted steel – who knew what curses were bound up in that traitor’s sword?
Spitting back a guttural retort in his native tongue, Zartath lunged at the pallid-skinned warrior.
It was then his enemy spoke, truly used its voice…
A nerve-shredding discord sawed through Exor, forcing back alertness such was its strength and amplification, so loud it almost transcended sound and turned it physical.
Zartath opened his mouth to scream but his voice was swallowed by the terrible clangour resonating through his skin, flesh and bones. He sank to one knee, clutching his fractured eardrums as the true power of the keening was unleashed. The traitor’s siren call, that which drew the weak-minded and the easily influenced to the traitor’s service and bent them towards its emancipation, had become a weapon. It was killing Zartath.
Slowly dying, but defying his enhanced biology’s attempts to put him into a regenerative coma, Exor struggled back to his feet. Fellowship to the Martian Priesthood came with the acceptance of a simple rubric – flesh will ultimately be surrendered to the machine; the machine is perfection. Exor arrived on the red world a being of flesh and blood and left partly cyborganic. His hand was a bionic; both his eyes were augmented, the corneas replaced with synthetics incorporating targeting matrices and enhanced magnification; part of his left side, his shoulder and hip were also mostly machine. Last of all was his auditory cortex – both ears and the minuscule bones inside, drum and ear canal too, had been manufactured in the forge temples of Mars.
The drumming in his skull, the latent power of the keening, had abated in preference to a more direct attack: one Exor could filter out. As he disengaged his hearing, a momentary deafness overcame him. The pain in his vibrating bones still hurt, but the paralysis from the auditory overload lifted.
Out of ammunition, his knife lost when he had first fallen, Exor used the only weapon he had left. Himself.
Scrambling, lurching bodily with every ungainly step, he threw all of his considerable mass at the Traitor who turned, seemingly dumbstruck at the insanity of the reckless attack.
The old sword swung around, hefted with less speed than it might once have been, the warrior’s muscles stiff and mildly atrophied from his long confinement. Instead of spearing the Techmarine through the sternum, it cut into his clavicle and sheared against the edge of the bone.
Agony of a thousand white-hot needles impaling his raw nerve endings shot through Exor but not enough to stop him. He careened into the warrior, hearing armour split, bone crack as it yielded to his machine-borne strength.
The discord abated and Exor hit the ground as his eyesight began to darken. But through an ever-dwindling corridor of shadow, he saw the hunter take his prey at last. As the traitor tried to rise and reassert his dominance a shaft of yellowed bone, the bloodstains on it dark like oil, impaled his gullet. A second pierced his eye socket. For three seconds he trembled and then was still.
