by Nick Kyme
As a pair of armsmen rushed forwards to drag Lieutenant Makato’s prone form back onto the bridge, Xarko felt the absence of souls aboard the ship of the men and women slain by the Black Dragons. It made him angry, but he was also confused as to what could have brought about such an act of aggression from a Chapter the Salamanders considered as allies.
Admittedly, he had never fought alongside them personally and he had heard about the instability of their gene-seed that manifested in their bizarre osseous mutation. The monsters aboard the Forge Hammer bore all the hallmarks, their leader the worst afflicted.
+What do you want?+ Xarko managed to send, shocked at the pure animal rage of the leader as he brushed against the Black Dragon’s thoughts. Red, an ocean of red, washed over every instinct, every emotion. Red wrath, black hate – psychically, it was like battering against a fortress gate inlaid with spikes. It hurt.
+GET OUT OF MY HEAD, WITCH!+
Another blow. The warrior’s rejection of Xarko’s telepathy was so violent it actually staggered the Librarian. For a moment, he feared the kine-shield would breach but marshalled enough strength to restore it.
Reason was out then. It left little other recourse.
Xarko wanted to crush them, to unleash the full potency of his gifts and rescue the ship but his earlier exertions in the fire tides had severely weakened him. With a growing sense of impotence, he realized he could hold them off but that was all. Every blow was a smack to his already bruised psyche. He didn’t know how long he could last like this. The distress signal had been sent. No doubt the bridge crew were also trying to raise assistance now Xarko had broken their silence. He only hoped it would reach Agatone soon enough to matter and that a weary crew, not a massacre, would await his overdue return.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Sturndrang, the underhive of Molior
To Agatone, it felt as if they had been searching for hours for any piece of evidence that would unlock why Tsu’gan had gone this way and who had gone with him.
The archivium was vast, an immense sprawling space, a catacomb that stretched into the subterranean shadows and went on further still. According to Issak, it was an ancient Imperial repository, an information storage facility. Data within the archive appeared to go back millennia to the time of the first Great Crusade, yet the majority of it was so old that it had fallen into ruin and decrepitude. Much was also so heavily encrypted as to be almost useless.
Not long after he and Issak had entered the place, Agatone had given up trying to glean anything of import from the scribed mess strewn throughout the chamber.
‘Looks relatively undisturbed,’ he had muttered, only partly to himself, as he had regarded the hundreds of stacks replete with books, scrolls, slates and countless other methods of storage. Theodolites sat in dusty alcoves alongside incunabula. Oraculums and divinifiers abutted stone tablets of prognostication. Reams of parchment, trapped in humming stasis fields, ranked up next to scriptora rendered on the flensed skulls of martyrs. It stretched for what appeared to be countless metres, a cornucopia of informational data requiring an army of lex-mechanics, auto-scribes and scriveners to decode and collate.
‘This will make it harder to track them,’ Agatone had concluded when faced with the gargantuan repository.
Once inside the archivium, the readings from the auspex had grown patchy. It got them beyond the threshold of the labyrinth but Agatone soon attached it to his belt, settling for passively scanning the ancient chamber.
Everything was old and carried a heavy veneer of dust. Motes clung to the air, caught in slow motion free fall in the thin shafts of light that penetrated the chamber’s fractured roof. Such scant light did little to lift the gloom, nor did the meagre ventilation help alleviate the choking clouds of dust they had inevitably disturbed.
Without the gifts of his transhuman ally, Issak had to blunder around in the shadows until Agatone had realised he was struggling and snapped on a lume-strip.
‘Here,’ he had said, passing the illuminated stick to the medicus.
In its magnesium-bright flare more details were revealed.
Entire volumes had been colonised by mildew. Mould corroded leather and wood. Data-slates were rusted, their glass screens cracked and useless. Some of the parchments and book bindings had even been gnawed upon. For though the archive was ostensibly sealed within the massive vault, the pervasive vermin of the underhive had still managed to find a nook or cranny through which to gain entry.
Judging by the crack in its main door they had seen earlier, the breach in the archivium’s passive security was recent. Agatone had no doubt Tsu’gan or his companion had perpetrated it.
For long minutes he and Issak had negotiated the musty confines of the archivium in silence, the air so still and thick it subconsciously demanded a certain solemn observance. It was after a particularly lengthy stretch that Agatone finally broke this quietude.
‘Watch your step, medicus.’ He put out a warning hand, the other one currently occupied by his bolt pistol.
Part of the floor had fallen away, revealing a gaping dark hole into the all-consuming and ever-hungry sink of the underhive. Everything was drawn to it, or so Agatone had come to feel, its gravity impossible to resist. And the only way to stay beyond its reach was to climb, build higher and higher, new atop old and layer upon layer. Those who did not, or could not, would be dragged to this pit never to return.
Having protected the medicus this far, Agatone had no desire to lose his charge to mishap.
Issak nodded in gratitude and, as he raised the lume-strip to get a better sense of his surroundings and footing, saw something in the congested route ahead.
‘Does that look fresh to you?’ he asked.
Agatone followed his gaze.
One of the stacks was damaged, hacked apart to make a passage through it. Clean and raw blade marks were visible in the hard wood.
‘They went this way.’
As he reached the shattered wood, Agatone paused to inspect it. He ran a hand across the split, trying to gauge what kind of weapon could have made it.
‘Single hit…’ he muttered, again only partially to himself. ‘Bladed weapon… very wide.’
A blunted chainaxe sprang to mind. Blunted or simply exhausted of power.
Definitely Adeptus Astartes, Agatone was certain.
‘Recent…’ he said, concluding the analysis. He looked over his shoulder at Issak. ‘We must hurry.’
Issak seemed not to hear him and was panning his lume-strip around the stacks, picking through scraps of displaced parchment.
Agatone barked at him, impatient to be moving on. ‘What is it?’
‘Everything looks…’ Issak met the Salamander’s irritated gaze, his face faintly lit in the glow of the lume-strip, ‘familiar.’
‘I thought you said you’d only heard of this place, not been here?’ asked Agatone, frowning in consternation.
‘I haven’t, but I still recognise it. As if I have memories of this place, but no idea where they’re from or to whom they belong.’
Agatone sniffed the air.
‘Atmosphere in here is addling your mind, medicus.’ The auspex began to chime softly but insistently. Agatone unclipped it and checked the screen. Then he looked up. ‘Shine the strip over there,’ he said to Issak, pointing to where he wanted the light.
Issak obeyed, revealing a sweeping stairway cluttered with debris but still passable.
‘No more delays,’ Agatone growled, sensing his prey was close, and made for the stairs.
He emerged well ahead of the medicus into an upper level. Several of the archivium’s sealed stacks here had been broken open, their locks cast aside in haste.
‘Here,’ Agatone called down as he sighted an old lifter at the back of the room, its activation panel glowing with life. ‘We rise, medicus.’
A long, metal shaft was bored down into the roof of the archivium surrounded by a lattice of reinforced plasteel. Agatone realised they must have bee
n exploring the basement levels of the repository, where its oldest records were kept. He assumed the upper levels were no more, consumed by war, disaster or time. Only this fragment of the archivium had endured but so too had its entry shaft and the lifter that would convey them to the surface.
Breathless, Issak reached the summit of the stairway and saw what had captured the Salamander’s attention.
‘You want me to ride in that? It’s probably at least hundreds of years old!’
Agatone smiled darkly. ‘Someone has revivified it, medicus. We will follow them.’
Scowling, Issak approached Agatone who was already throwing back the lifter’s security gate.
‘Why do I get the impression you’re enjoying this?’
‘Because we are close. For good or ill, Tsu’gan is coming back with me. That’s all that matters now.’
He wrenched the gate aside with a loud clatter and ushered the medicus within. When Issak was standing on the boarding plate, hands firmly gripping the guide rails, Agatone followed and closed the gate after.
‘Up?’ Issak hazarded, standing next to the operation panel.
Agatone nodded, craning his neck so he could look to the summit of the shaft where a faint scrap of light beckoned. ‘Up, medicus.’
Issak hit the activation stud and the lifter started to rise.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Sturndrang, the underhive of Molior
They were moving. It was all Exor could tell with any degree of certainty. Consciousness was fleeting, flickering in and out like a lamp pack struggling for power.
He saw the tunnel he had crawled through, though this time he had the vague sensation of being dragged.
Then the Well and him rising, the hard breaths and grunted curses of his saviour accompanying him every metre they climbed.
It was a long climb, though Exor only experienced it in fragments.
‘Where…?’ he managed to croak, before blacking out.
A hard smack and hot lances of pain in his cheek brought Exor back around. His head was throbbing and it was hard to breathe. His skin burned like it was on fire. Sweat lathered his back, face and chest as his enhanced biology reacted to the severe wound he had been dealt.
‘Wake up!’ snapped a guttural voice.
A second blow – it hurt just as much as the first.
‘Rest is for the dead,’ declared the voice, ‘and the weak.’
A third blow was threatened that Exor stopped.
‘Cease,’ he croaked, dizzy and faintly aware he was lying with his back against a wall.
Despite his ocular augmentations, the image that eventually resolved in front of him was indistinct, but he immediately recognised Zartath’s snarling visage.
‘The thing that caused the keening is dead. I am free of it,’ he growled. ‘We are going back. Our original mission is still unfinished. Agatone charged us with tracking his quarry, so that is what we are going to do.’
‘I can barely stand, let alone track,’ said Exor.
‘You need do neither,’ Zartath replied. ‘You came after me when you could have left me for dead. That’s twice I owe you fire-born a debt.’
‘You fire-born?’ Exor queried.
Zartath nodded. ‘We, us. I am fire-born now.’
Though it was but a brief glimpse, Exor saw the face of the savage give way to that of the man Zartath wanted to be but which his nature would not yet allow.
‘Get up,’ he snarled, the beast rumbling up to the surface again.
Zartath heaved the Techmarine onto his back, grunting at the strain.
‘Leave no one behind,’ he said and followed the trail left by Agatone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Sturndrang, the underhive of Molior
The scrap of light became an iris then an oval, getting wider and wider until it was a portal that led close to the surface of Sturndrang.
Agatone closed his eyes as moist, relatively fresh air from the world above washed over his face and body, cooling the underhive heat. He blind-loaded his pistol, hoping he wouldn’t have to use it, then secured his combat-blade and spare clips.
‘Are we going into battle again, Brother Agatone?’
‘Yes, we are,’ Agatone replied, opening his eyes but keeping them fixed on the portal of light.
‘I thought you knew him, this…’ he recalled the name, ‘Tsu’gan.’
‘It’s because I know him that I’m preparing for a fight.’ Agatone glanced down at the medicus to convey the seriousness of his next words. ‘Tsu’gan won’t go down easy.’
The light enveloped them and a bracing wind whipped around the lifter’s carriage as its two passengers were exposed to the elements. They had emerged into an expansive shipyard, one lost to decay and neglect but still usable for embarkation.
Ostensibly still very much a part of the underhive, the shipyard was situated at the bottom of an immense and long shaft that fed all the way to the surface of Sturndrang and the void beyond.
Wrecks of old vessels, their fuselages ripped open and gutted like animal carcasses, littered a flat rockcrete plain studded with snapped communication spikes and relay towers. Hangars and warehouses, their gates broken open and contents scavenged, colonised one small area of the yard and there were workshops and a freight depot. It wasn’t hard to imagine this place as once being inhabited but only ghosts lingered now and the echoes of old lives.
There were bodies, not of men but some indigenous prey-creature as far as Agatone could tell. Several corpses had been left out in the open to rot. What he first believed was metal reflecting off the ambient light above were actually eyes, blinking in the shadows. More of the prey-creatures, too afraid to venture closer with the bullet-holed bodies of their kin stinking in plain view. Agatone counted eight, most of which had been split by a heavy blade not unlike the one used in the archivium. Some had simply been blasted apart by some immense and unsubtle weapon.
‘Stay close to me,’ Agatone murmured, eyes scanning for threats.
‘Is he here?’ whispered Issak.
Agatone nodded.
‘How can you be–’ Issak began.
The dull throb of a turbine rotor cycling up interrupted him.
Agatone snarled, and spoke between clenched teeth. ‘No, not again…’
He ran, leaving Issak behind to fend for himself. He didn’t call back or tell the medicus what he should do. He just ran.
Bursting from behind a hangar and through a knot of ships, Agatone emerged into a sparsely occupied area of the shipping yard to see a gun-cutter rising in the distance. Comms traffic had started crackling in his ear and he assumed some of the towers retained some small level of function. He ignored it for now, intent on the figure waiting below the rising vessel. It was muscular, broad-shouldered and wearing strange armour. It was also bald with onyx-black skin.
Agatone ran harder, pumping his arms and urging his legs to greater effort. A large chasm split off the part of the shipping yard he was on and the spur currently occupied by the figure. He realised they must have scaled it. Glancing up, Agatone saw it was the only place that offered a clear run up the shaft. He could make the leap. If the figure could do it, then so could he.
A side hatch in the ship opened, sliding left to right, and another figure appeared. Smaller, human, male. Agatone locked the details away in his memory for later use. A line was lowered and the waiting figure grasped it as it came down. It still had its back to Agatone, heedless of his rapid approach.
‘I can make it…’ Agatone hissed between his teeth, psychologically preparing for the jump. It was at least twenty metres. The crackling in his earbead resolved into words. A distress beacon that was coming from the Forge Hammer. Agatone listened, scowled.
Ahead, the figure had wrapped the line around its wrist and was signalling for the vessel to take off.
Agatone could still reach it. The chasm loomed. One solid leap and he would be on him.
The message continued – Agatone began
to slow, fists clenched in slow frustration. He skidded to a halt at the edge of the abyss and could only watch as his prey was pulled into the air and away from his grasp.
The Forge Hammer was under attack. He had no choice but to return. Agatone activated the locator signal that would summon the waiting ships to come and retrieve him. He set off another beacon for both Lok and Clovius so they would know the hunt was over. Comms might be patchy but the beacon would get through.
‘Tsu’gan…’ he uttered breathlessly.
The other vessel rose, the figure disappearing within, the turbine engines carrying it far away.
Agatone found his voice, and his fury.
‘TSU’GAN!’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Heletine, Canticus southern district, ‘the Cairns’
Drakgaard watched his troops on the tactical display as they delved further and further into uncharted Canticus. For almost an hour, since the Targons’ fateful encounter, there had been no sign of the enemy and no word from the Adepta Sororitas, either. It was as if the heretics had retreated so far into their own lines that they had emerged out of the other side of the city and into the desert. Unopposed, Drakgaard felt increasingly like he was walking into a trap but his desire to grasp what he saw as a chance at a final victory overrode his better judgement.
Little was left in reserve, only a few Cadian infantry platoons, some light vehicles, any Stormtalons that could be spared: Drakgaard was betting almost everything he had on a single, decisive attack. Sergeant V’reth’s squad was too distant to recall, likewise the other Cadian regiments. Their engagements were skirmishes now, insignificant to this. The relics forgotten, Drakgaard had a taste of the enemy and was storming through a once unconquerable city in a belligerent mood. It didn’t occur to him that the ragged line of his formation was brutally vulnerable, that in a single, knockout blow his enemies could destroy him and his army.
That possibility didn’t occur to Drakgaard until he remembered something he had heard about Canticus, about the old districts where his enemy hid from sight, about the old tunnels, the world beneath a world, the city concealed as a bed of leaves would a huntsman’s trap.
