Nothing would come. Nothing had prepared him for this.
Combat itself had been a poisoned chalice: an intoxicating blend of fears and violences; at first terrifying and new, then dizzying and joyful and then, finally, regaining something of its terror at the realisation of that same joy.
It was like discovering he had a talent for murder.
It was like finding out he was a skilled butcher.
It was like coming to terms with a natural enjoyment of horror.
It was like—
Except... Except it wasn’t “like” any of those things.
He did have a talent for murder. He was a skilled butcher.
He did enjoy the horror and the carnage and the violence. The tau’va had never prepared him for that. The display wafer in his hand was laughing at him (the Mont’au devil said so, and hadn’t it served him well before?).
The insanity crawled along his spine and into his mouth and said:
Haven’t we been triumphant?
Haven’t I saved you and gloried in you and made you a hero?
Haven’t I guided you just when you needed me?
Haven’t I made you excel, just like you always wanted?
It said:
What would you do, Shas’la T’au Kais? What would you say if the old man, the old general, the old tired morsel of gristle and flesh with his imperious eyes and his holier-than-thou sneer, was here now?
What would you say to your father, little Fire Warrior?
Kais curled his knuckles around the display wafer and slowly, enjoying every rai’kan, cracked it into two jagged pieces.
If Ardias noticed he gave no indication, angling the speeder towards the humped shadows of the evening hills and extending a finger.
“There,” he said.
Over the next rise, depressed into the ground like a mighty bullet wound with jagged rock edges and black obelisks standing guard over its depths, a pit opened up into the guts of the world. A mighty disc of rock, covered in the spidery etchings of some ancient, alien hand, lay crumbled and discarded nearby. Walkways and ramps wove downwards from the surface, vanishing along tunnels that wormed their way into the exposed soil like arteries.
“I’m ready,” Kais said, more to himself than the Space Marine.
The land speeder slowed to a spasmodic halt and the two warriors stepped out onto the sand.
The Mont’au devil unsheathed its claws and prepared itself for the end.
The seven-pointed star throbbed hungrily, daemonic light racing along its vertices, creaking like a melting iceberg. Severus allowed the energy to build within his soul, a cinder point of heat that quickly grew to needle-sharp intensity. He resisted the urge to cry out.
The chanting reached its crescendo, rising to a chorus of resonant voices. Briefly the disjointed mantras of each chaos priest overlapped and reflected one another, lifting to a natural zenith. The floor of the temple pit radiated a sickly light, illuminating the four compass point shrines set at each corner.
One for each god of the major Chaos Arcana.
Nurgle.
Slaanesh.
Khorne.
Tzeentch.
Tarkh’ax, warp preserve his malevolent name, would make obeisance to them all. His sustenance was derived from the Changer of Ways — Tzeentch — but he was a being of rare cunning and understood the importance of union. By supplicating to each of the Dark Gods he would be gifted with strengths and powers beyond the remit of his sorcerous patron, sealing his ascension and anchoring him, immovably, into the realm of mortality and material.
It appeared to be working.
The plague priest to Severus’s left shrieked, fluids dribbling copiously from its hood, dropped its gnarled cane and scrabbled at its own chest, apparently arresting the spread of an intolerable fire that only it could see or feel. It gave a final pitiful squeal of agony and broke apart, scabrous residue splattering to the floor in a torrent of decayed flesh and bile.
The shrine to Nurgle’s pestilent pleasures, at the periphery of Severus’s view, illuminated with a vomit-green cast, bloated statue idol staring mutely.
Slaanesh’s hooded painbringer cried out next, pied cloak seeming to constrict and dissect its wearer, dissolving the figure with acidic slowness. The thing screamed and groaned in equal measure as its flesh peeled away.
Then the butcher priest of Khorne, erupting in a column of writhing flesh and blood, like chunks of abattoir meat.
Then Tzeentch’s sorcerer-devotee, amorphous form shifting and melding with growing speed until it oscillated and flexed alarmingly, breaking down in fluid disarray to dribble and puddle on the floor like melted ice.
As each priest willingly — if painfully — gave their life, the terrible features of their patron idol statue, constructed millennia ago before Tarkh’ax’s imprisonment, was cast in the ruddy light of its vile deity.
Four shrines of darkness and death.
The two prisoners had lost consciousness long ago, slumping against their restraints to hang limply, wrists bleeding at the tightness of their bonds. Severus dismissed them from his mind and concentrated on the surging warp-tides in his skull.
Only he remained to witness the final stage of Tarkh’ax’s release.
A surge of energy formed from the centre of the star; a glowing spine of blue white plasma that lifted high above the abyss, penetrating the clouds above and rising: a shifting spirit beacon to welcome the daemonlord back to reality.
Severus glanced at his timepiece again. 18.59 hrs. Twenty minutes left.
Tunnel gave way to tunnel. Catacomb to crypt. Withered chamber to spiral stairs. Always downwards, air growing thicker and greasier with every step, slurry underfoot growing more and more sludgelike. Like wading in glue.
“Descend here,” Ardias had said, pointing to one slipramp that coiled its way over the lip of the abyss and into the darkness. “I’ll find another route — we have more chance of recovering the prisoners this way. Do what you can. Keep them busy, make a diversion. Severus is mine.”
He’d racked his gun meaningfully, nodded once with something similar to professional respect, then jogged away across the blasted landscape, disappearing from view behind the coils of sulphurous smoke and jagged rock. A labyrinth of walkways and tunnels peppered the plunging surfaces within the pit: choosing to begin from opposite sides seemed to make the most sense.
Kais simply couldn’t bring himself to care.
Once every few raik’ors his mind would remind him — insidiously, he thought — of the ethereal Ko’vash languishing somewhere below. But all consideration of goal or purpose was quickly eclipsed behind the hissing of the rage in his mind, storming and shrieking, hunting down enemies to pulverise. Just as his descent was measured in a coagulation of the air and an impalpable sense of growing monstrousness, so too did the Mont’au-whisper flourish. With every tor’lek he walked, it grew louder, more urgent...
Killing was his reason, now. Violence was his rationality, carnage his sanctity. Equilibrium found in disharmony.
The walls moaned at him, half-formed somethings twisting and sucking at the moist earth; repugnant embryos locked in amniotic sacs of filth and disease. Kais had already exploded some, just for the sake of it. The exercise lacked gratification. He’d found gibbering daemon things and Chaos Marines instead: real prey that ran or fought back or at least reacted satisfyingly when he punched high-velocity munitions through their leering toothy faces.
He imagined how he must look now. A shadow thing of muck and flesh. Human blood going rust-brown as it dried across his armour, oily Chaos fluids staining him with an unclean patina, the asymmetry of his armour compounded by the ragged wounds and scars he’d received. His helmet was a misshapen cyclops visage, the single baleful eye of the bolter shell glowering down from above his brow.
The railgun had ceased to be a thing of grace and cleanliness long, long ago. Now it hung with chunks of gore, matted hair and filth staining every surface, viscous liquids
dribbling slowly from beneath its stock.
Vhol, fastidious in his care of technology, would not approve.
If, that is, he was still alive.
If anyone Kais knew was still alive.
As if it mattered.
He rushed across a walkway that arched unexpectedly across the chasm of the pit, uncomfortable at the exposure. A bright blue lance of light, like an inverted sunray, punctured the abyssal airspace from below. He resisted the urge to look down into the murky depths and moved on, fingering the railgun’s trigger hungrily, waiting for a target.
As if to answer some unspoken prayer a shriek rang out from nearby: a protracted shrill of avian fury. Kais spun in his spot, gun raised and ready, a guilty smile smearing itself across his face.
There were two, and they came at him together. Sleek perversions of the hulking Chaos Marines, their aerodynamic bodies tapered into fluted talons that snapped apart mechanically and grasped for him as they dropped from above. Like swooping vultures, arcane jet packs disgorging a miasmic haze of fuel and smog, they ululated as they plummeted, slicing through the air with scalpel precision. Ducking hardly seemed worth it. He did it anyway.
A claw parted the flesh of his shoulder like jelly, making him cry out. The impact dragged him forwards and briefly he was certain of tumbling over the edge of the walkway, flailing downwards into the pit. But the raptor thing was gone in a flash, a sticky trail of cyan blood hanging threadlike in the air behind it, and Kais had just enough presence of mind, even through the haze of pain, to tumble aside as the second shrieking creature gusted past to finish the job.
Its talons — expecting the soft bite of flesh — instead clawed impotently at the slippery rock of the walkway and sent the creature toppling forwards, overbalancing with a shriek. Kais pumped a vengeful railgun shot into its tumbling back, ignoring the pain in his shoulder, and watched with no small satisfaction as its jetpack ignited messily.
It rained corrupted blood.
The surviving raptor howled indignantly above; a babyshriek eulogy for its dead comrade. It came at Kais in a flurry, knife claws an iridescent smear of reflected light, fluted wedge beak keening and howling. He watched it with something like fascination, drawing himself up to his full height like a cat arching its back, and didn’t raise his gun until the thing was almost upon him, yowling and screaming in fury.
Kais knew how it felt.
He fired and dropped onto his back in one smooth motion, senses too overburdened to pick out any confirmation of his shot having found its target. The dagger-like shape rocketed past overhead, more felt than seen, flashing claws dangerously close. His stomach turned over with the frustration of failure, his enemy still very much alive. A slick confetti of debris and fluids followed it past, and Kais rolled onto his front to prepare for the inevitable follow-up attack.
The shrieking stopped. He’d been on target after all.
Trailing streamers of flesh, the raptor’s sleek descent became a chaotic stall, limbs flailing and jetpack coughing. It mashed itself against the pit-wall and tumbled, in several pieces, into the gloom below.
Kais lay still, breathing heavily, until the last ruinous metal-on-stone clang resonated from below. The echoes died away, the sultry atmosphere of the pit flourished again. He pulled himself to his feet, clenching his teeth against the pain in his shoulder, and stumbled onwards. It seemed as good a direction as any, now.
Melphea Turneus Borik sank to his knees and groaned.
The warp was a grey mist in his skull, a textured stream of smoke and shadows, illuminated from an impossible distance by the frail light of the Astronomican. He was used to its flux and whimsy, to the malevolence of the things that lived there and the sensory abstraction that was the reality of the empyrean but now... now something had changed.
Something irresistible, like a great black leviathan disgorging its slime-slick flanks from some oceanic abyss, lurked on the edge of his perception and pushed. It was a hungry force, clawing and chittering to escape, certain of its imminent liberation. Borik clutched his fingers to his face and gurgled, fighting to breathe. He could feel his attendants and novitiae clamouring round, trying to restrain him, anxious for his wellbeing. Unable to see them in a conventional sense, to Borik they seemed galaxies away.
He’d been sightless since his thirteenth year. Since they dragged him, wailing and screaming, from the nuke-slums of Caer Malafori in a “mutebox” containment vessel. Since they bundled him into the cavernous spaces and tortured chambers of the Blackship Lamentation of the Adepta Astra Telepathica. Sightless since his soul was melted and bonded with the being of the Most Holy Emperor, since he screamed and screamed for three days during the ceremony, since the pain broke every bone in his hands and left his eyes pooling away like melted metal.
He’d been sightless since his graduation as an astropath: a psychic messenger-conduit able to span the interstellar vastness separating Imperial worlds, ships, stations and outposts. Stationed within the Oraclitus Meditarium aboard the Retribution-class battlecruiser Purgatus, no more than a comm-call from the bridge, Borik had served his Emperor-God for twenty-nine years. By astropath standards, he was ancient. But this force, this malignant presence threatening to birth itself into the local warp, this was something he’d never felt before.
His attendants lifted him reverently, as befitted his status, onto his meditation pallet. He barely felt their hands. His scrying mind struggled to identify the presence, reasoning that information would be the greatest weapon in the face of an unknown threat. The warp being seemed cut off, separated from conventional empyrean by a membranous prison that, even as Borik watched, grew thin and weblike, breaking down inexorably.
The thing, the daemon thing, noticed him.
Its howls stopped abruptly, silence sucking at Borik’s awareness. And slowly, like a cancer exploring the vastness of its host body, it turned its ethereal gaze upon him.
“Little mind...” it hissed, voice coiling with insidious fire and silk, “little mind — I see you...”
Borik stammered, tongue clumsy and heavy in his mouth. “G-get back...” Somewhere far away, in the mundanity of reality, his attendants frowned and backed away, respecting their master’s wishes.
“Little mind. I’m huuuuungry...”
Borik’s panicked defences, telepathically erected fortress walls and mindbomb ghost chaff, were woefully late. Stretching out its talons of molten warpstuff through the crumbling walls of its prison, the Daemon-lord Tarkh’ax snatched up the shivering spirit morsel and guzzled it whole.
“Soooon...” it shrieked into the churning ether, overjoyed at the taste of a mortal’s soul after so many long years. Its words echoed silently amongst the vacant expanses that now comprised the brain of Melphea Turneus Borik.
“Wh... What do you want with me?” the ethereal asked weakly, briefly regaining consciousness.
Severus giggled and lifted the struggling alien into the air with a wave of his hand, coruscating energies holding it there, immobile.
“What have you got?” he said.
His vision blurred.
A carpet of slurry and sewage gurgled and slurped beneath him, sending him careening along the slippery tunnel slide with no hope of slowing or stopping. The walls, insipid white rock given an organic undulation by millennia of draining filth, made his grasping attempts to arrest the descent futile.
Somewhere way above, at the sinkhole’s mouth, the last echoes of exploding ammunition filtered downwards, making the tunnel shake. A hulking Chaos monstrosity, limbs dribbling with viscous flesh that could writhe and reshape into a multitude of heavy weapons, had blocked his path like a sneering ogre, gun barrels slurping out of its elbows and shoulders. A well-aimed pair of grenades and some cautious long-distance targeting had blown open the fleshy shell, exposing an unnatural fusion of metal and liquid within, ragged clumps of ammo and high explosives forming with moist alacrity, like melting wax seen in reverse.
He’d thrown caution to t
he wind, dangerous impetuosity filling him with a Mont’au thrill, and darted forwards through the blossoming bolter craters and thrumming lascannon rounds to drop a phosphor flare into the wound, wet edges sucking like a toothless mouth at his arm, then forced his aching legs to dive aside.
The look on the twisted creature’s face as it realised what was coming had bubbled up in Kais’s throat as a stifled chuckle. He’d braced himself inwardly, expecting the joyful sentiment to arrive accompanied, as ever, by the secret guilt at having an untaulike thought.
But he was beyond that, now.
Before he could even contemplate finding some cover from the colossal detonation the ground had liquefied with a syrupy slurp, sending him tumbling with a cry into the slippery sinkhole bowels of the chamber. Here, at the heart of a daemon-temple, even the rock of the walls and floor was capable of treachery.
Missing out on the ogre’s undoubtedly messy destruction had galled him immensely.
Slime polyps and froth-specked effluvium further pronounced the filth of his armour, seeping into the fio’dr of his regs and leaving his wounded leg and slashed shoulder throbbing with the certainty of poisoned infection. He couldn’t allow himself the time to worry about it now, and bit on his lip to take his mind off the pain.
And then the rushing tunnel walls were gone, gravity took a hold of his body, and the sinkhole spat him out like a gobbet of spittle. He landed awkwardly in a lake of sludge which bubbled and gurgled violently at his touch, rolling to stand upright with fluids and froth dribbling from beneath his arms and legs.
The chamber seemed to go on forever. A foetid mist hung above the mire, cloying at his senses and filling him with soporific gloom, shifting and ghosting around him.
What’s the point? the smog seemed to say, tendrils of musky haze stroking against his exposed flesh. Best to give up now... Lie down... Ease yourself for a while...
Fire Warrior (warhammer 40,000) Page 31
