by Joe Parrino
Prayers brought calm and clarity. Inferno rounds, originally designed for use in the Adeptus Astartes, but repurposed for his exitus weaponry, provided the answer. He carefully slid a clip of them into his pistol as he ran. His aim was sloppy, accuracy stolen by the immediacy of the threat. There were too many daemons.
Zhau ran on, bouncing across the bloated bodies of dead Cadians. Fever sweat broke against his brow. Laboured breathing burst from between his lips. Disgusting, too slow; the wound would kill him.
Bright spots of detected metal flashed against his mask. A series of blink-clicked orders had the mask detail out the length and breadth of the minefield. Zhau sprinted down it as the daemons flowed after him. Their passage was too light to set off the mines. Zhau needed an out, required shelter from what he planned. Then it dawned on him – if his pod could resist the stress of atmospheric entry, it could resist the explosion of mines.
But still they came. Gas swirled in the wake of his flight, disturbed by the sudden movement. Pale green it glowed, drifting up from the bodies of the slain.
Zhau neared the crater where his drop pod lay. The massive horde followed, howling in idiotic fury. The Vindicare launched himself from the lip, dirt crumbling beneath his feet. He spun as he flew through the air, sighted on a nearby mine. His mask extrapolated overlapping fields of explosive ordnance.
He finger depressed the trigger of the pistol. Inferno rounds, their cores filled with promethium, punched into the centre of the horde of chittering daemons. There was a brief crump.
Then the world flashed red with fire.
Zhau awoke to the sound of voices. For a moment, he couldn’t understand them. The words were washed out, the tone bleached of all meaning.
He tried to pull his pistol from its holster, to aim it at the voices. Cultists, his bleary mind thought, manufacturing the broken language of the Archenemy.
Then he caught his name. ‘Emperor’s hells, Zhau. What is happening down there?’ asked Adamta.
‘Fire,’ Zhau croaked.
‘We can see that, Vindicare,’ said Rhasc. ‘A plume of fire just erupted around the Astropathic Sanctum.’
‘Yes. The gas. The daemons.’ Zhau despised the confusion in his voice. Emperor damn him, where was the certainty, the calmness? It had all fled, banished by this accursed grogginess.
Zhau sat up and his vision swam.
‘I think I have blown our cover.’ He propped himself up on one elbow and checked his body for injuries. The Emperor had smiled on him and he had come through the experience mostly intact.
IV
Klara Rhasc had seen dozens of worlds over the course of her service to the Imperium, the Temples and the God-Emperor, each in a state of ruin and fallen to the wiles of some enemy or other. She had developed a jaded eye, a casual lack of interest or imagination. All the worlds in humanity’s demesne were the same, at the core, shaped by the whims of the Emperor’s chosen species.
She expected Achyllus Prime would be the same. Even from orbit, it looked much like all the other worlds lost to war. The drop into its atmosphere opened her eyes and revealed her assumptions for a lie.
The drop itself was a harrowing experience, stuck in an enclosed environment with the horrors that haunted Achyllus Prime’s atmosphere. Great winged things warred with one another in the turbulent skies of the planet. Voices and cries haunted the vox. She passed through layer after layer of smoke and cloud before finally slamming into the ground.
A claw punched into the pod, then pulled out with a screech of rending metal. Desperate air whistled in, stirring her hair. The temperature plummeted. Spice and salt rode the air in the corrupt richness of the Archenemy’s depredation.
The claw came again, next to Rhasc’s head. It scrabbled and tore. She could hear the grunting wheeze of some great beast’s breath, smell the foetid reek of rotting flesh.
Restrained in her drop harness, Rhasc could do little to stop the creature. She hauled at the straps, trying to reach the emergency release clips. They stuck fast. Daylight winked in, bathing the cool darkness of the ship’s interior with the angry light of Achyllus’s sun.
Shadows passed over the hole opposite her. A great eye stared out from beyond, green and gold flecked with a curved pupil wrought into some blasphemous rune. It blinked slowly. Nictitating lids coated the eye with luminous slime.
The Callidus Assassin reached a knife, drew it across the thick cloth of the restraint straps. With a snap, they parted.
The eye shifted to watch the movement. Rhasc pulled her punch dagger free and stabbed it into the organ. Something screamed against her skull. It squealed and rasped in a voice like sandpaper and steel.
Her drop was unimpeded after that.
She made landfall in a crater, slamming into the earth. Torq’s pod landed near her own. The seals popped and Rhasc leapt out. Torq shoved past her and halted.
‘Someone’s left a mark,’ he breathed. He coughed a rasping laugh.
A scorched plane stretched before her, littered with bones and burning embers.
The Vindicare was waiting for them.
‘Emperor spare me from the humour of Eversors,’ he said. The grogginess was gone from his voice. He was back to his calm, cool self. His rifle was clutched loosely in his grasp.
‘The Astropathic Sanctum is this way.’ He gestured at the vast structure rising into the sky.
Light flickered out from it, shimmering in colours that mankind was never supposed to give name to or witness.
‘I can see that,’ Rhasc said. She checked her weaponry, ensuring all was placed as it should be. Her thumb ran down the edge of her sword. Blood pooled at the cut. ‘Which dialect was the enemy using? What mongrel tongue?’
‘I know not,’ Zhau answered. His hands made to smooth at a cloak that wasn’t there. ‘I am not conversant in the particulars of the languages of ruin. In my experience, I rarely come close enough to hear them.’
‘Useless,’ she muttered in response.
Torq hugged himself, arms wrapped around his sides. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Hunt.’
‘Wait, Eversor. We will deploy together,’ said Rhasc.
His response was a spit-wet growl.
‘The Archenemy will know we are here. We should get moving,’ Zhau reminded her.
The Assassins started to run through the field of scorched dead.
V
Gothic spires reared into the sky above them. Rhasc glanced up and recoiled. Impossibly, she could see the Temple of Shades looming in the atmosphere. Corposant licked along the sides of the Astropathic Sanctum. Light flowed like water. It streamed down the high gothic splendour of the building. A bridge of colour connected the two.
Rhasc waited before the entrance to the Astropathic Sanctum. Ash-dusted rags lay over her bodyglove, scraps stripped from singed Cadian uniforms. She had removed her mask, coating her face in the flash-dried earth and the cracked bones of the dead.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Torq clamber over the side of the massive entry hall, perching atop the carved lintel like some skull-faced gargoyle. A few centimetres between her shoulder blades whispered of Zhau’s trained rifle. The feeling was surely just paranoia, but the Vindicare had shot her before. Sympathetic pain radiated from the mass of scar tissue along her side.
The Callidus Assassin affected a limp, a hitching stumble in her walk as she stepped into the fire-flickered gloom of the sanctum’s entry hall.
Cultists were already stumbling to their feet, guns and weapons appearing in their hands. Brutal features stared at her in slack-jawed amazement.
She had a second to guess the language they would speak, would understand. From the clan markings, the tattoos and pact symbols, she gathered much. Ethnic features, warped by the tides of the Great Eye, further differentiated these dregs from baseline humanity. But the bastardised languages of the Archenemy were
many and ever shifting.
She selected one and hoped for the best. ‘Zzar khayas,’ she stammered. ‘Sacrizier fuer. Camerad sacrizie khayas.’
The words were disgusting on her tongue. Already, she felt a headache forming.
She pointed outside. ‘Zzar,’ she pleaded.
The cultists boiled past her and into the sunlight.
A distant crack sounded and one of the cultists flew backwards. The back of the man’s skull exploded in a spray of blood and brain matter.
Rhasc followed, a stab of her sword slicing through a tattooed woman’s spine. She swept upward, bisecting the body in a wash of gore.
Then Torq descended.
The false face’s use of the Archenemy’s language bled into the Eversor’s mind, eating at the coherence he was rapidly losing grip on. The killing haze pounded through his vision. All colour, all meaning was bleached from the world.
He needed to kill. To rend, maim and to feel the bright wash of blood against his skin. The Eversor listened as the Callidus spun her web, drawing the cultists into the open where they could die beneath the broken light of the sun.
They boiled out, away from their cover and their barricades. Confusion took them as the Vindicare claimed the first kill.
Torq fell. His sword crunched through the skull of a short, fat man. He grabbed the arm of the woman beside him, punched his knife-tipped fingers into her pale flesh. Neurotoxins swam into her system and the woman went into convulsions. Blood and the liquefied remains of her organs spewed from her mouth and nose as she screamed into the ground.
Cultists turned to face this new fate that stole upon them.
‘Come, wretches,’ Torq bulled. ‘I will break your bones and tear free your spines.’
Torq was doom. He was death. Trained and honed by the masters of the Eversor Temple, his mind unshackled by the limitations of reason and logic by chemical cocktails, Torq tore through the two-score cultists that milled in front of the Astropathic Sanctum.
Blood flashed through the air, spraying from torn arteries, pumped by failing hearts. The rapid, muffled boom of sniper rounds culled a number of too-brave cultists who tried to stall the Eversor.
Rhasc danced past him, somersaulting into a knot of the enemy. Her neural shredder whined and men fell with their nerves liquefied.
But none could challenge Torq, or surpass this broken shell. He swung his power sword into a mutation-bulked slab of muscle that had once been human. The creature blabbered and shook as his sword lodged in its abdominal cavity, slicing into intestine and bone. It stuck fast, but Torq used the sword as a climbing tool. He pulled himself up and thundered his fist into the mewling mockery of the mutant’s face.
Two quick cracks of his fist saw blood and bone spraying. His third assault was with his open hand, almost a slap. Then he gripped and pulled the mutant’s face off. The Eversor flung the scrap of flesh into a knot of terrified men and women. He drew his pistol, shoved the wide barrel into the thing’s ruined face, then unloaded bolt after bolt until it began to sway and fall.
He flipped backwards, using the momentum to jerk his sword free. A spinning kick broke a beast-horned mutant’s neck and spun its head around until it faced back the way it came.
Torq exulted. This was where he was meant to be. This was where the chemicals kept him happy, kept him centred in rage. Gone was the pathetic weakness of his mind, his personality. It was subsumed beneath the haze that filled his hands with meat and blood.
Las-rounds flew through the air as scattered cultists fired in their panic. The crackle and crump of exploding ordnance announced hastily hurled grenades. These dregs were no match for the peerless killers that stalked through their ranks.
Cultists pulled out grenades. Zhau shot them out from their mongrel hands; some exploded in midair while others landed in the midst of startled groups of survivors. Rhasc moved through them like a deadly shadow, her blades carving lethal furrows with poison and edge.
Torq wrecked cultists like a blood-fuelled machine. The chemicals in his blood drove him to heights of slaughter and destruction. Where he moved, only chunks of quivering flesh remained. The thirsty ground, flash-dried by the corpse-gas explosion, swallowed the blood and viscera.
Torq killed until no one remained alive. Rhasc and Zhau stood before the Eversor. He almost swung at them too. The Callidus held up a hand and he stopped, his head cocked to the side in puzzlement. Great breaths hurtled out of his mouth. His chest heaved and blood slowly dripped from his hands and helmet. But the victory was hollow. There was no challenge in these mewling creatures. They were mere scraps of flesh, a waste of his talents and his fury.
‘Enough, Torq. They’re dead. They’re all dead,’ Rhasc said.
He curled in on himself mentally. ‘More,’ he said.
‘There will be more inside,’ Zhau said, pointing at the sanctum where the fires still flickered.
Rhasc wiped the blood free from her blades and dropped the filthy cultist rags she had been using for the purpose on the ground.
The crude fires burned down to sullen coals. Hasty barricades, crafted from the rotting bodies of fallen Cadians, divided the entrance hall. Their glassy eyes watched as the Assassins made ready to ascend into the darkness. That watchfulness filled the atmosphere, settling thick along her bones. She kept catching the flicker of movement out of the corner of her eyes. Her keen senses, her instinct, screamed that something was wrong here, that the Assassins were not alone. But no threat faced them, just the eerie murk of the corrupt Astropathic Sanctum.
Screams echoed down the dark stairs in the building. Blood dripped down the steps. The walls slowly expanded and contracted. The building was breathing, Rhasc realised with a shock. Corruption, like everywhere else on this world, had sunk its claws deep.
Shapes swam through the stone, like living friezes. Hands stretched out from the granite. Faces screamed in stony silence. Runes shivered and spat sparks.
Sunlight glinted far above. Booted feet echoed from the high reaches. Distant voices spoke in the mongrel tongues of the Archenemy. Above it all, at the pinnacle of the building, stone floated in looping patterns, caught by the aetheric whimsy of the Sea of Souls.
Rhasc kept her eyes focused on the Vindicare and the Eversor.
‘Shall we?’ she asked.
Torq’s response hissed out through spit-slick teeth.
‘Yes.’
VI
Las-bolts whickered down from above, splitting the darkness with bright red stabs of light. A metal ball arced through the cavernous interior and tinkled down between Rhasc’s feet.
Rhasc recognised the grenade. She gripped it with her feet, spun a cartwheel and flung it back up from whence it came. The explosion seconds later brought a shower of dust out from the walls. A stone bannister, carved to resemble a multi-limbed gargoyle with a child’s face, broke away and crashed to the ground hundreds of metres below. A massive chunk of the landing fell with it. Cultists screamed as they tumbled into the darkness before being silenced in wet bursts of flesh and blood.
Beneath them, just for a moment, Rhasc caught the faint scrabble of claws on stone. The snick-click of bone hooks scratched into her ears. A heavy animal breathing sound huffed through the shadows. Then it was drowned by the ensuing combat.
Rhasc took the stairs three at a time. The footing was made treacherous by the dripping, sticky blood, but she was an Assassin of the Callidus Temple and made to operate in extremis. At the stair before the landing, she vaulted into the air. She flung out a fan of poisoned knives which studded into eyes and hearts.
She landed in a crouch. Her phase sword licked outwards. The green blade flickered in and out of sync with reality. Blood spurted and limbs flew. She pulled the phase sword out, swept it sideways, and cut a cultist off at the knees. The man cried out in shock and pain as he fell.
More cultists streamed d
own from the upper levels. Confident in their numbers, the babbling hordes of the Archenemy came to destroy the interlopers. She could not shake the feeling that something was very wrong here, beyond the obvious corruption that afflicted everything.
Las-fire cut through the air. The sanctum strobed with red. The cultists’ accuracy diminished the more they fired, their mortal eyes unable to cope with the shifting light.
Rhasc had no such trouble. Her mask’s lenses resolved the irritation. Knives twirling, punch dagger stabbing, Rhasc carved her way through the damned.
Torq shoved past the Callidus. He sprinted into the volleys of las-fire. His executioner pistol spat needles and bolts into the front ranks. Cultists fell along the left side, towards the shifting walls. The Eversor forged a wedge clear in the teeming mass of Archenemy.
The Eversor lowered his shoulder as he ran. The flensing knives of his neuro-gauntlet swept out, cutting through the mass. He hit a mutant with two vestigial heads emerging from its neck above the sternum and pushed the monstrosity into its fellows. Panic broke out among the cultists.
Sniper fire took out any who looked to be resisting the chaos, those who tried to lead and calm their comrades. Panicking cultists swarmed, stampeding. They began to shove and jostle at one another. Torq could almost taste their desperation. More cultists impacted against his shoulder. He heaved and flung them over the edge.
Cultists fell away. Claws scrabbled against his bodysuit. Red lines of pain crawled across his skin as knives found his flesh. Blood trickled from the wounds, thick and sluggish. A lasburn grazed his right bicep.
Torq howled to the uncaring universe. These dregs did not deserve the honour of his fists. They deserved only the killing edge. Throats parted as he sawed his sword through cultists’ necks. A woman with the face of a toad gurgled as blood sheeted from her neck.
Another five died in pieces, cut and carved, maimed and broken. His sword was a whirlwind. His appearance was death.
Torq was vaguely aware of Rhasc behind him as he slaughtered his way up the stairs. She finished those he left behind, the broken and the mewling.
