by Darius Hinks
A storm of knife blows hit Antros and he staggered backwards, raising his staff to fend off the attack. The mutant followed him with a flurry of scrabbling limbs, giggling hysterically as it pummelled his chest and head, clawing at his armour and trying to wrench the plates apart.
Antros jammed his bolt pistol in the mutant’s face and fired, filling the air with a pink spray of gore.
Tasting blood, Antros’ composure fell away, snatched by a tide of fury. He felt an animal hunger to kill and rend. More of the mutants were pouring onto the balcony, and Antros launched himself at them with a feral roar. They smashed through the balcony together, spinning out into the air and falling in a shower of bones and thrashing limbs.
Captain Vatrenus cursed as the world collapsed into colour and noise. For the last hour they had been trying to reach the second gate, ploughing through a tedious crush of ecstatic priests and grinning soldiers, but at Dravus’ command the doe-eyed hordes had erupted into blue flame. Now the entire amphitheatre was transforming before his eyes.
Seriphus and the rest of the squad raised their bolters and formed a circle around him, struggling to discern shapes in the inferno.
‘What is that…?’ began the sergeant, peering into the blinding light.
Barbed tentacles lashed out and slammed into the sergeant, knocking him from his feet and sending him crashing into his men. As Seriphus fell, the tentacle tightened around his chest armour with a crack of breaking ceramite.
The glare faded and the mob of priests was gone, replaced by a boiling mass of mutants – snarling, feral things that charged towards them bearing guns and knives.
‘Fire at will!’ cried Vatrenus and the Blood Angels unleashed a deafening volley of bolter shells.
Vatrenus triggered his chainsword, strode forwards and hacked away the limb that had latched around Sergeant Seriphus. The limb’s owner leapt to the attack. It must once have been a soldier, but its skull had split into a pair of screaming, avian heads and the body was contorted by a forest of writhing limbs.
Captain Vatrenus waited calmly until it was almost on him, then fired his bolt pistol twice with cool precision, turning both heads into a spray of feathers and bone fragments.
‘Captain Vatrenus!’ came Mephiston’s voice over the vox-network. ‘The gates! Close them now!’
Vatrenus cursed again as he loosed another volley of shots into the crowd of mutants. The gates were no more than thirty feet away, their crumbling, ancient columns towering over him, but there was now a sea of screaming mutants in the way.
‘Hestias!’ he barked into the vox, still gunning down the mutants. ‘Did you hear that?’
‘Yes, captain,’ replied Sergeant Hestias from the south side of the amphitheatre. ‘Closing the gates now. Are you still inside?’
‘Not for long,’ replied Captain Vatrenus. ‘The gates!’ he cried, leading his men forwards. ‘Now!’
Vatrenus hacked through the screaming throng, bringing his chainsword round in broad, furious swipes, severing limbs and armour and filling the air with gore. The blade growled and jolted in his grip, tearing a path to the gates.
Behind him, Squad Seriphus spread out into a semicircle, firing from the hip as the hysterical mutants crashed into them.
Captain Vatrenus felt his hearts quicken as his visor turned crimson with blood. The weight of the mutants pressed against him, hundreds of gaudy, freakish things, hacking at his power armour with knives and pummelling him with scaled limbs. He felt as though he were cutting through a surreal carnival. His chainsword joined its scream to that of the mutants, trailing sparks and smoke as it started to overheat. A cold fury came over him and he ripped his way through the crowds like an animal.
With a bestial roar, Captain Vatrenus reached the enormous gates. Mephiston had given him clear instructions. He punched through the head of a mutant, spraying the walls with blood, and grasped one of the faces sculpted into the stone.
Before he could yank it away, dozens of the mutants barrelled into him, knocking him back from the doorway. He hit the ground hard, enveloped in barbed, serpentine limbs that sliced into his power armour with a grinding squeal.
He brought his chainsword round but the blades died with a clatter, clogged with bones and armour. He hurled it aside and reached for his combat knife. Before he could use the blade, one of the mutants – a teetering giant with hideously elongated limbs – locked its arms around him, fixing him to the spot so the other mutants could assail him with their blades and claws.
Vatrenus climbed to his feet with a roar and hurled the giant off. Then he raised his bolt pistol and fired another barrage of bolt shells into the others that were swarming over him.
‘Seriphus?’ he gasped into the vox, struggling to catch his breath as he punched his way through the crowd, back towards the pillar at the side of the gate.
There was no reply and he paused, looking back into the tumbling crowds of mutants. He caught glimpses of crimson armour in the storm of blue and pink. ‘Seriphus!’ he cried, reaching the stone gargoyle that Mephiston had told him was a lever.
‘Captain,’ came a muffled reply. Then the sergeant smashed through the wall of mutants, followed by the rest of the squad. They were drenched in blood but Vatrenus did not look to see if it was theirs or the mutants’. The second they crossed the threshold and made it out of the amphitheatre, Vatrenus wrenched the stone face from the wall and yanked down the lever behind it.
There was a grinding roar as tonnes of stone dropped from the arch overhead, slamming down into place just seconds after the Blood Angels got clear. As the door crashed into place, it pulverised dozens of the mutants, hitting the ground with such violence that even the Space Marines struggled to remain standing.
Vatrenus gunned down the few mutants trapped outside the gate and then, when he was sure there were no more, he spoke calmly into the vox. ‘Chief Librarian,’ he said. ‘It is done. The amphitheatre is sealed.’
Mutants were all over Antros as he plunged towards the crowds below. He bit and hacked at them while they stabbed with their living blades and tightened snake-like arms around his throat, attempting to crush the life out of him.
As he fell, Antros howled lines from The Glutted Scythe and the mutants that had fallen with him exploded in a shower of blood and screams.
Seconds before he hit the ground, Antros managed to cry out a conjuration. Warp energy billowed from his spine, forming wings out of the aether. He pounded them once before slamming into the dust.
The force of the impact was so great that Antros almost lost consciousness. The roar of the crowd dragged him back. His psychic wings dissipated, but that single beat had been enough to save his life. He clambered to his feet and, as his animal bloodlust faded, he saw that he was surrounded by thousands of mutants. His fall had crushed a few, creating a small space in the mob, but all those nearby had turned to face him with leering grins on their grotesque faces.
Some were like the ones who had knocked him from the balcony, with tentacle-limbs ending in blades, but others had been cursed with other mutations. Some had feathered, avian heads on their shoulders; long, curved beaks jutted from their faces, wrenching their skulls out of shape and forcing their eyes onto the sides of their heads. Others had lost their heads completely and now sported the flat, black-eyed faces of ray fish in their chests. Some teetered on backward-jointed goat legs that were covered in iridescent blue and pink feathers. There were so many of the mutants that Antros could see nothing else as they launched at him from every direction.
He had managed to cling on to his staff and, as the first wave of mutants leapt at him, Antros roared an evocation and a crimson sphere burst from the ground – a shimmering dome that completely encased him. Even as he spoke the words, Antros realised that he had not plucked them from any of the prescribed texts. Without thinking, he had attempted to make a miniature copy of Mephiston’s Che
mic Spheres.
As the mutants collided with the red sphere, their bodies exploded into flame, ignited by the warpfire rippling through the dome. They thrashed and howled against the shifting surface, until the scorched wreckage of their bodies slid to the ground, covering the dome with innards and charred meat.
Through the wall of blood Antros saw the rest of the mutants hesitate, before they screamed and charged in a great wave of limbs and bodies, crashing against his blood shield with delighted howls.
Antros gasped as his mind buckled under the strain of maintaining the sphere while hundreds of mutants threw themselves against it. He roared his evocation repeatedly, incinerating countless numbers of the mutants, but they had been unhinged by their transformation. Fearless, they fried and burst against the force of his mind.
Gradually, the dome started to give, sagging towards Antros beneath the weight of living and dead mutants. He kept roaring the words but he was slowly being buried alive. He dropped to one knee, trying to take the weight of the mutants on his shoulder, but hundreds of them were swarming over him.
‘No,’ he breathed, as talons and blades started to cut through the shield, clattering against his armour. ‘This cannot happen.’ The face of his dead brother, Ramiel, filled his mind. He was being crushed, just as had happened to Ramiel. What if Ramiel had been the brother who was destined for greatness? What if he should have lived? What if it was not fate that let him die, but Antros?
‘No! It cannot end now!’ he growled. He was hunched beneath degraded foes and his face was smeared with evidence of his own barbarism. He could not accept that this would be how he ended. ‘Not like this!’ he cried.
The shield dropped again and Antros was forced onto his back. Even the ceramite of his battleplate could not hold under such a weight. It started to groan and crack, spitting rivets and spewing oil as it broke. His helmet blared warnings as the suit’s vital functions began to fail. ‘Not like this!’ he howled, picturing Ramiel again, crushed beneath the sand roamer. Rage exploded in his mind and bloodlust threatened to overcome him again.
‘No!’ he snarled, thinking back through the lines of The Glutted Scythe that Rhacelus had read with him. An invocation spilled from his lips before he had a chance to consider what he was saying. Again, the words came from instinct, rather than memory.
The ground began to rotate. Slowly at first, but with growing speed. The world became a blur and Antros realised that he, rather than the ground, was spinning – but the surrounding mutants were all turning with him. He had become a tornado and they were caught in the fury of his storm. Their bodies began to tear and snap as he turned faster and faster, blood flowing out of them in great gouts and forming a whirling column that reached up towards the mirrored sky.
With a final howl, Antros loosed his grip on the tower of spinning mutants and hurled them away from him in their hundreds.
He staggered to a halt and wiped the blood from his visor. He had carved a new space in the mass of cultists, but this time it was much larger. There was only one figure standing in the open space. Epistolary Rhacelus shook his head as he strode through the mounds of pulped flesh.
Antros was about to speak when he fell forwards, overwhelmed by exhaustion.
Rhacelus gave a grudging nod of respect as he caught him.
Antros clung on to Rhacelus and looked around. Deranged as they were, the mutants had taken a moment’s pause after seeing the warp storm that had spilled from Antros’ mind. The sight of his exhaustion was enough to remind them that they were thousands against two, however, and their grins returned as they loped and lurched towards the Blood Angels.
‘The Chief Librarian has Dravus,’ said Rhacelus, showing no sign of concern as the hordes charged towards them from every direction.
Without even looking at the mutants, he muttered an oath and raised one of his hands, fingers splayed, to the sky.
The arteries of the nearest mutants burst from their bodies, exploding through their skin like a nest of ruby serpents. The force of their escaping veins ripped them apart, and the first few ranks collapsed, falling to the ground as ragged chunks of meat.
The subsequent ranks stumbled and fell over their shredded kin, sprawling in wet innards and creating a struggling barrier for the next ranks to crash into.
‘We need to be away from here,’ said Rhacelus, hauling Antros back onto his feet. ‘Now,’ he said, summoning vaporous wings from his back and nodding for Antros to do the same.
‘I have nothing left,’ gasped Antros, but even as he spoke the words he found the strength to do as Rhacelus ordered.
Together, they launched into the sky, seconds before the crowd of mutants closed around them.
Agony knifed through Antros’ skull as he powered himself up through the air. He had never pushed his mind so far. That, combined with the blood fury that had consumed him a few minutes earlier, had left him trembling and weak. He wondered how he would hold pace with Rhacelus. The veteran looked as though he had not even broken a sweat.
They flew back up towards the wrecked balconies and Antros saw Mephiston locked in battle with Dravus. Whatever Dravus might once have been, he was now clearly one of the lost and the damned. His odd, iridescent skin shimmered as he fought, and rays of blue light were still radiating from his gemstone spear, spreading a canopy of light across the whole amphitheatre.
They flew close to the balcony, but Antros could see nowhere to land. The parts that had not fallen away were crammed with howling mutants, many firing laspistols at the two duelling figures perched on one of the statues that ringed the amphitheatre. Mephiston and Dravus were fighting on the edge of a crumbling stone shield, thirty feet wide across the top and scorched by sorcery.
At the sight of Antros and Rhacelus, the cultists turned their fire on the two Librarians, filling the sky with blinding trails of light.
Rhacelus raised his hand again, pulling spitting veins from the mutants’ bodies, ripping them into a slop of organs and skin.
The Librarians landed in the spot Rhacelus had cleared and braced for the impact of the other cultists who were charging towards them.
Antros’ head was a ball of agony, so he unholstered his pistol and unleashed a barrage of bolt fire as Rhacelus wrenched the enemy apart with their own blood.
Someone broke through the crowd and raced towards Antros. Antros was about to stop him with a blast through the chest, when he realised that the man had not been mutated. It was only when he was a few feet away that Antros recognised him.
‘Zin?’ he gasped, rushing towards the priest.
Confessor Zin reached out to him, his face contorted by agony as he tried to stem the blood flowing from a wound in his side.
‘We must save the cardinal!’ cried Zin, waving at the glittering figure battling with Mephiston. ‘Use your power, Librarian! You can undo this curse.’ Zin’s eyes were wild and frantic. ‘Call to your lord. Dravus is a good man! This can’t be how it seems. There must be a way to save him and…’ He looked down, confused and horrified, at the host below. ‘There must be a way to save everyone.’
Antros reached out to take his hand, then paused, noticing how long and spider-like Zin’s fingers had become. They were also far too numerous as they flicked and twitched towards him.
Antros was still registering the mutation when Rhacelus stepped between them and brought down his sword, beheading Zin with one clean strike.
‘Too late,’ he snapped, as Zin’s blood rushed over Antros’ armour.
Antros backed away in disgust as Zin’s corpse exploded into a mass of writhing serpents, hissing and coiling, even as the confessor’s life rushed from his severed neck.
There was no time to dwell on what had happened as another wave of cultists rushed towards them. Antros felled several more with his bolt pistol, then looked up at the duel between Mephiston and Dravus, or whatever Dravus had become.
Mephiston lashed out several times with Vitarus, but Dravus merely laughed, blocking the furious blows easily with his dazzling spear. Dravus was moving with unnatural speed and grace, matching even Mephiston’s skill.
Antros realised that Mephiston was holding back his power, struggling not to vent his full fury. He wielded his sword with one hand and clutched his head with the other, reeling as he fought.
‘We must get to him!’ cried Antros, but Rhacelus shook his head.
‘The Chief Librarian does not need our help.’ He yanked his hand back through the air, hauling more arteries from the mutants that surrounded them, filling the air with another forest of crimson threads. ‘But these lost souls do.’
‘Wait!’ cried a voice, and the cultists all paused to look up at the broken statue. Antros and Rhacelus saw that Dravus was keeping Mephiston at bay with his spear and had raised his other hand into the air. ‘Children of the Vow!’ he cried, grinning. ‘I did not enlighten you so that you could waste your time on these off-worlders! I have enlightened you so that we can march beside the Unbegotten Prince. He has called us to his banner.’
Mephiston stayed his blows and stepped back along the shield edge, lowering Vitarus and allowing Dravus to talk.
‘Now that we have seen the truth of his words, we must join Pieter Zorambus and help him realise his vision. You…’ he cried, waving at the terraces beneath the balconies. ‘Rid me of these Blood Angels. The rest of you…’ He gestured to the thousands of mutants who filled the amphitheatre, a gaudy host of leering creatures so numerous that they blurred into a sea of colour. ‘The rest of you ride north, to Volgatis! Let nothing stand in your way! Zorambus is waiting for you.’ He held up the iron bolt hung around his neck. ‘This will be our lodestone. A fragment of the Blade Petrific. A link to the Emperor’s greatest weapon. Wherever we are, this icon will lead us to the Emperor’s sword. Let your thoughts flow into the metal. Our course will become clear. Children of the Vow! Together, we will seize the Emperor’s might and take it back to Him!’
