(The daemonlord unfolded to its full height, wiry form clad now in colossal armour, articulating with the blade-edged rasp of metal on metal.)
He’d been lucky, there was no doubt of that. But there was skill there, too. A skill that would never flourish beneath the restrictions of the tau’va. A skill born in enjoyment and savagery: utterly alien and separate from the Greater Good, but able to serve it, from a distance, nonetheless.
(Its avian features twisted apart, horned and leering, eyes and beak and nostrils blazing with inner fire. It rolled its head loosely, spine-pillared shoulder-guards shrugging.)
He should have died a hundred times over, this rotaa. Was there a cost, he wondered? What price would he pay for such unnatural fortune?
(It was an armoured slaughterer, wings shedding the last of their coloured feathers to reveal the black-leather folds of batflesh beneath. It curled its vast knuckles, blood-patina’d chainmail wrapped and stapled to its very flesh, around an axe that dribbled red fluids, threw back its head, and roared.)
Everything balanced, in the end.
(It bled. It bled a sticky crimson carpet from every joint in its armour, from every chain mail link and every jagged connection of chains and spines and ancient skulls. It was a blood-monster. A gore-ogre. A butcher-giant.)
Equilibrium over excess.
(When it moved, striding forth and raising up that sickly slick blade, as big as Kais himself, the red mist of heat and vapour rising off its gory surfaces followed it like a shroud. A blood veil.)
Cheat death too often, and there’s always a cost.
Kais thought: I’ve paid the price. I’ve killed and killed and killed, and survived, and all it cost me—
Is my sanity.
The butcher daemon cocked its head at the tiny thing before it, stretched out a hand, and let its bloody aura, its dark mantle of shadow and gore, slip out of its fingers and into Kais’s mind. The Mont’au devil came slinking out of its mental shadows. Kais couldn’t resist it now. His consciousness rolled over, his rationality dissolved away into the bloody mire trickling through it, and he surrendered himself utterly, without regret or hope of salvation, to the rage.
His lips had parted before he even knew what he was saying. The air was rising in his lungs. His tongue formed the words without his bidding.
And all he could see in his mind was his father, staring down from his moral highground, spewing his expectations and judgement upon the youth before him.
Shas’la T’au Kais threw back his head, choked on bitterness, opened his mouth, and screamed: BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!
Red light lifted like lava from the pit, scattering the chittering daemon swarms and filling El’Lusha with nausea. It was an aura of savagery, merciless and insane, and if it was allowed it would swallow the world.
They were running out of time.
“We’re going in,” he said, voice hard.
“Shas’el?” Vre’Wyr’s voice betrayed his terror.
“We’re going in,” he repeated, and stepped over the edge of the pit, jetpack flaring with a whine.
Kais stormed.
Unable to think. Unable to drag any rational thought from a mind occluded behind frenzy, he emptied the railgun of its last precious shots in a cavalcade of energy, neither caring or noticing that each shot achieved nothing, hammering uselessly against the daemon’s slick armour.
The slaughterlord watched in amusement, humouring its miniature attacker, and casually swatted at Kais with its fist. The impact hurled him across the chamber, exploding his breath from his lungs and crippling his right knee. He didn’t care. Pain didn’t matter anymore.
Useless as a ranged weapon, the empty railgun made a perfect bludgeon. Utterly berserk, barely even sentient, only the tormented core of Kais’s mind, where the last fragments of his sense was besieged, recognised the ludicrousness of his attack; hammering at the butcher daemon’s legs, snarling and spitting and dribbling: utterly insane. Unable to properly stand, he staggered and crawled and yelped like a wounded ui’t, unwilling to submit to any premature mercy killing.
He wasn’t fighting any daemonlord. His muscles didn’t ache from his struggle against Chaos, or the gue’la. It was all a lie. All a replacement. All a substitute.
He looked up, and the face that looked down upon him, the face that he battered his gun against and stabbed with his knife and vented himself utterly upon—
Was that of Shas’o T’au Shi’ur.
Kais murdered his father a million times in his mind, and when the daemonlord’s axe hacked off his left arm he barely even noticed. His body gave in. His brain didn’t.
And then there were voices.
“...ais?... Come in Kais?”
He ignored them, wondering abstractly how he could go on killing with only one arm left. He pushed a fist against the stump and squeezed it tight, cyan blood welling between his fingers. The daemonlord cocked its head and laughed and laughed and laughed, watching as its enemy bled across the chamber.
“Kais? Kais, can you hear me?” It seemed to be coming from inside his helmet. This is Lusha. “It’s El’Lusha... We’re on our way, Kais. I know you can hear me! Come in, Kais!”
“You knew my father,” Kais said, not thinking, unable to move. There was blood inside his helmet now, too. He could feel it. “You knew him, didn’t you?”
“Kais?”
“Answer me!”
“What? I... Yes, Kais. Yes, I knew him. I was there when he died. I fought with him for tau’cyrs. Kais — where are yo—”
“He was perfect, I suppose.”
“What?”
“He was perfect! Never did anything wrong, I expect. Perfect.”
“Kais, what is th—”
“I’m just an echo, El’Lusha. I see that now. Just a ripple on a pond.”
“Kais, your voice... It’s...”
“All I am, and all I’ll ever be, is a bitter little shadow cast by him.”
There was no reply. Kais couldn’t bring himself to care. Everything seemed to be going slowly, now. There was less colour in the world. Everything was cold.
“Kais. Kais, you listen to me. You know how he died, Kais? You know how your father died?”
“...serving... nn... serving the machine...”
“He died because a tyranid y’he’vre put a dent in his battlesuit and he wouldn’t fall back until he’d taken his revenge. He died because he wouldn’t listen when we told him — we all told him — it was time to withdraw! Hot-headed, Kais. He was a son-of-a-ui’t with a temper, and a poor judge of character.”
Something cold opened up in Kais’s mind.
“W-what?”
“He shot a shas’ui, once, just for questioning orders. Did you know that? He was a snae’ta, Kais. A mighty general and a powerful fighter, but a snae’ta nonetheless.”
“But... but the machine...”
That was his genius, child. He understood the machine. It’s the whole thing that matters, not the parts inside. He made his speeches, he blurted his sound bites to keep the por’hui happy. Then he went right back to being an impetuous grath’im.
“Get it into your head, Kais. The tau’va isn’t real. Nobody ever reached it.
“We’re always getting closer, always approaching, but never arriving. As long as we go in the right direction, as long as everything we do is done in the name of the Greater Good— then it doesn’t matter how far from the path you are!
Kais opened his eyes, and everything had changed.
The daemonlord sensed something was wrong. The bloodlust it had gifted to the tau creature was waning. It evaporated like water, unclouding the tiny morsel’s mind and leaving it cold and sharp: a dagger of focus that no amount of insidious corruption could ever penetrate.
It didn’t matter. A pure tau died just as easily as a tainted one.
He watched it struggle with its helmet, single arm scrabbling weakly at the clasps. Tarkh’ax watched in amusement, enjoying its bloody frailty.
Finally the helmet came off, and the tau’s grey features stared up, eyes fluttering against unconsciousness. It wanted to face its death head-on, Tarkh’ax saw. It could respect that, at least.
Riding on the surging bloodlust, filled by Khorne’s brutal patronage, the daemonlord raised its axe.
The tau threw its helmet.
It tumbled across the floor towards the red shrine of the Blood God, and bounced once, twice, three times, coming to rest against the rune-daubed obsidian with its glaring optics staring upwards sightlessly.
Tarkh’ax turned its gaze back upon the dying little creature, perplexed by this bizarre final act of defiance.
The tau smiled.
And the dud bolter shell, buried deep inside the fio’tak of Kais’s helmet for so many exhausting decs, was heated by the play of malefic energies across the monolith.
It detonated with a sooty roar, and the swirling madness that was Tarkh’ax’s link to the butcher god died with a tug of energy. It shrieked its fury to the world, hefting high the axe that would obliterate forever the cringing morsel that had denied it even the smallest of deific patronage, and—
And there was the screaming of jet engines, and the ghostly distortion of anti-grav drives, and bulky shapes falling from the sky with weapons roaring.
Kais kept watching until the battlesuits had used up all of their ammunition and the hulking daemonlord was eradicated from physicality forever.
Then the world went grey.
Then the world went black.
And there was peace.
EPILOGUE
The thing in the warp thought of glory.
It was surrounded by a million, billion of its kind. Frothing and fizzing like spawning fish, running together in the ether, dragging their claws of nothingness against reality with scant hope of ever breaching the distance between the two.
In this place of madness a memory was difficult to hold. Thoughts were unfocused, uncontrollable things, impossible to grasp and concentrate upon.
Nonetheless, struggling against the innumerable tide of its fellows, the warp thing raced across the vastness of the empyrean and remembered — or perhaps dreamed — of the time that it had been Tarkh’ax, Changer of Ways, Devotee of Tzeentch, Daemonlord of Chaos.
A man, who was not a man, stood upon the bridge of a starship and stared at the orb of matter in space before him.
He was a superhuman, or as near to one as it was possible to be — and his skin, which was made of ceramite and plasteel, was blue.
The planet seemed serene from his vantage point: a swollen belly of earth and sand, hidden in shadow, waiting for the morning.
It would not come.
The sensation of teleportation was still uncomfortable to Ardias, and combined with the dangerously high quantities of stimmchem and pain-reductors the apothecary had administered, he was left feeling off-balance and hazy. Since regaining consciousness in the silence of the Chaos pit, he’d had little time to simply stand and stare.
The tau flotilla diminished into the void on the surveyor-screens, watched closely by Captain Brunt and his command crew.
“They’re gone,” a servitor said, quietly.
Ardias pondered briefly upon the xenogens. A young race, by human standards— and dangerous. There was no doubt of that. Their time would come.
“Load torpedoes,” he grunted, returning his attention to Dolumar IV. “Target the Chaos temple.”
The captain knew better than to argue. “With what?” he asked, uneasy at the Ultramarine’s presence. “A bombardment would, I assure you, collapse even the deepest—”
Ardias turned to him with eyes flashing.
“Cyclonic torpedoes,” He said. “Viral bombs. In the name of Emperor and Guilliman, purge the planet.”
And three tau, dressed loosely in fire caste regs, armourless and helmetless, stepped from the heat of daytime T’au into the cool shade of a domed building.
“This way,” El’Lusha said, voice barely a whisper. His clipped steps betrayed the acute discomfort he felt, and his two young companions exchanged a glance, careful to conceal their nervousness. Several fio’vre medics, squat and bright in cream lab coats, scurried between chambers quietly.
The pair followed El’Lusha along snaking corridors, curving architecture cooling their troubled minds and going some way to banishing their fears. Fio’sorral artworks, sweeping frescoes and mandala patterns, bolstered their serenity, so that when they stepped finally into a small antechamber they felt refreshed and ready for whatever was to come.
As if reading their thoughts, Lusha fixed them with a sombre gaze. “You should prepare yourselves,” he said, searching their eyes. “He is different. He was changed by his ordeal.”
He gestured towards a door and a small viewing panel yawned open silently. Shas’ui T’au Ju and Shas’ui D’yanoi Y’hol, newly promoted, swallowed and stepped forwards.
“By the path...” Y’hol hissed, tottering back on his replacement bionic leg in shock. Ju mumbled a calming litany under her breath, dragging thin fingers across her mouth.
Lusha watched them closely. “I... I thought that you deserved to see,” he said, awkwardly. “He talks about you sometimes, the fio’vres say. He says you were his friends.”
Y’hol frowned. “We are his friends, Shas’el.”
“Were, Shas’ui,” Lusha corrected. “He thinks you’re dead. Or maybe he thinks he’s dead. Whichever it is, there are no friends in his world anymore.”
“How did he come to this?” Ju whispered, more to herself than anyone else.
Lusha chewed his lip, searching for words. “By going too far into a place that no tau should ever venture.”
“You mean that... that ‘pit’? The por’hui won’t give any details.”
Lusha laughed bitterly and tapped at his head.
“No, Ui’Y’hol. I mean into here. We all have darkness inside us. We hide it away and pretend it’s not there, but it is. And the only way to stay clear of it is the way of the tau’va. But even the One Path won’t light up every shadow. Kais went too far into the darkness.”
Ju shook her head, bewildered. “So he’s gone then? Lost forever?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. He needs time now, that’s all.”
“Why did you bring us here, Shas’el?” Y’hol didn’t take his eyes from the viewing panel as he talked. “The truth. You could have just told us.”
Lusha sighed. “Because someone needed to know, Shas’ui. La’Kais is a hero. He kept the machine grinding along so that no one else would have to admit to the... the Mont’au inside them. He gave himself up for the Greater Good, and no one will ever know.”
They stared. And time passed.
And they left.
Alone in his mind, Kais walked the path.
He walked the path and he fought the Mont’au devil.
He raged and he killed; he relaxed and he focused.
He went deep inside himself, and refused to come out until, one way or another, he knew which way along the path he was walking.
It wasn’t as lonely as it could be, because every time he dared to open his eyes — just to check that the real world was still there — he could look down at his one remaining hand, strapped carefully in place to the restraint pallet, and read the tiny fragment of display wafer that someone had placed there.
It was broken. Only a sliver of text remained, without context or meaning, but somehow... somehow it felt right.
It simply said: With pride.
FB2 document info
Document ID: ooofbtools-2009-10-18-1-7-5-993
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 18.10.2009
Created using: ExportToFB21, FB Editor v2.0, AkelPad 4.3.2 software
OCR Source: The Black Library
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Source URLs :
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Document history:
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ие FB2, дополнительное форматирование; без вычитки (k78)
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Fire Warrior (warhammer 40,000) Page 35
