That combination had put the Night Lords on the back foot. In the space of four hours they’d been driven into the inner workings of Sink Shaft One. Perhaps Cull had been foolish to assume his young warband were the supreme hunters, but he was not prone to making the same mistake twice. He had sent orders to all Claws to disengage and withdraw towards the prison cell catacombs, taking with them all the savlar and escapee convicts they could find. They would be corralled with the loco shipments brought in from the outer mines of the captured sub-precincts, and then unleashed, en masse, back upon the Loyalists. Once the horde of prisoners collided head-on with the advancing Imperials, the dynamics of the subterranean war would change.
‘My prince.’ The dire voice of Shenzar disturbed Cull’s thoughts. He twisted, looking back to see the veteran Claw leader entering the darkened command centre. Behind him came two of his Terminator brethren, flanking Vorfex. The Raptor’s Claw-kin were all dead, and soon he would be too. Cull rose to face the disgraced Night Lord, hand on the hilt of his runesword.
‘Knees,’ he ordered. One of the hulking Terminators placed a hand on the Raptor’s pauldron and forced him down. There was a clang as ceramite struck rockcrete. Vorfex’s crested helm had been removed, and was mag-locked to Shenzar’s belt.
‘You deliberately disobeyed me,’ Cull said, voice as cutting as the edge of his rune-inscribed blade. ‘You have brought disgrace to us all. It is only because of your many past services that I am going to give you a clean death.’
‘Before my prince renders judgement, may I offer him one thing?’ Vorfex said. The Raptor was wise enough to keep his head lowered. The Prince of Thorns snarled.
‘Your covering of the retreat from the junction does nothing to absolve you from either your arrogance or your stupidity, Vorfex. I expected better from one so experienced. You no longer deserve to bear the heraldry of the Eighth Legion.’
‘It was not only for the sake of the other Claws that I re-engaged,’ Vorfex said. ‘The Loyalist Terminators are spearheading their assault. If we are to overcome them we will need to call upon everything we have. Even our lost brethren.’
Slowly, the Raptor raised one hand, the palm of his gauntlet open. As he did so, he looked up at Cull for the first time. The Prince of Thorns stared at the item the Raptor was holding, before reaching out to take it.
It was a little bone token, the razor-tipped tooth of some long-dead predator.
‘What is this?’
‘I took it from one of their Terminators,’ Vorfex said. ‘Consider it part of my atonement, and a token of their destruction.’
And Cull understood. He smiled. The dark creatures the Night Lords had brought with them to the surface could only be unleashed at the right time and against the right opponent – they were far too dangerous to wake for anything less. Now, however, was the perfect opportunity.
The tide was about to turn.
+ + Gene scan complete + + +
+ + Access granted + + +
+ + Beginning mem-bank entry log + + +
+ + Date check, 3675875.M41 + + +
Day 89, warp time variance approximate.
We have attained high orbit above Zartak. Scans of the hulks in orbit have also been completed, though our systems are struggling to identify all but one of them. They are mostly of ancient design and unclear pattern. What parts we have identified have been heavily modified. It seems one is the Imperial Truth, though why and how she came to be destroyed remains unclear.
I have decided our time will be better spent on the surface. I am taking the retinue to the Adeptus Arbites facility identified by the distress signal still being beamed from the surface. No other communications have been picked up at all, not even from the primary arbitrator garrison in the Precinct Fortress. It would be unwise to go there direct without some knowledge of what in Holy Terra’s name we are getting ourselves into.
Signed,
Interrogator Augim Nzogwu.
+ + Mem-bank entry log ends + + +
+ + Thought for the Day: The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Imperium + + +
Chapter IX
There were voices echoing down ore pass 3. Skell couldn’t make out the words. The underground played with sounds, bouncing them from walls and ceilings or sending them slipping down from connecting shafts and through rock crevices. Skell would sometimes hear footsteps approaching and would dart down a side tunnel, only to have the noise pass him by without anyone appearing. Whispers dogged him too, seemingly issuing from the very shadows that slunk around the edges of the lumen orbs, strung up on wiring nailed to the close dirt walls alongside the work rotas and devotional parchments. More than once, the boy thought he saw the darkness shift and move of its own volition, and such eerie illusions had started occurring with greater frequency over the past few hours.
He tried to put it down to his hunger and exhaustion, but he knew that wasn’t really the case.
The voices he could hear now didn’t belong to phantoms. They sounded more tired than malicious, and were accompanied by the scrape of weary feet drifting up from traverse 9A. Skell suspected they were fellow prisoners, though the last thing he wanted was to risk being snatched by one of the fear-maddened gangs that now infested the underworld. Carrying on down the ore pass and taking a haulage side route would have been a simple enough way of avoiding them, were it not for the fact that Skell’s instincts, the part of his mind he’d long ago learned to trust, told him something else was coming in the opposite direction.
He was trapped.
Shadraith could sense the return of his patron. The darkness was full again, and the shadows once more obeyed his commands. They leapt ahead, darting through the tunnels like birds of prey, unhooded and released to the hunt. The Chaos sorcerer advanced in their wake, his own stride bearing fresh purpose, clad in his wet, new flesh.
The boy was close. He could feel it. This time he would not escape.
Te Kahurangi leaned heavily on his staff, trying to marshal his strength. He’d sent seven-seven and one-sixteen ahead while he paused at an ore waystation. They were running out of time, and he was slowing the young initiates down. His visions had left him drained, and the efforts of stopping the Dead Skin from discovering the boy’s presence had proven too taxing. He could no longer blank the sorcerer’s mind or keep him from the whispered advice of his daemon. Now his only hope was the Scouts assigned to him by Sharr, combing the tunnels all around.
His initiates had moved far up ore pass 3, out of sight of Te Kahurangi. At the far end of the tunnel they finally made contact.
Skell froze. His hesitation had cost him. Pinned by the realisation that he’d been trapped, he could only watch helplessly as the gangers came up from traverse 9A, rounded a corner and spotted him.
‘Don’t move,’ barked a voice. He tried to take a step along the ore pass, but instead found himself down on his knees. All the exhaustion that had dogged his blistered footsteps over the past day rushed up at him. He heard the sounds of running feet and scuffling in the dirt. He slumped. A rough hand snatched him by his ragged overalls and rolled him onto his back.
‘Just some runt,’ said one of the figures, silhouetted by the dim light. The muzzles of half a dozen autorifles gaped at him.
‘Kill him?’ suggested another, thinner voice. ‘We’ve got enough mouths to feed.’
‘Yeah, he looks near enough dead anyway.’
‘Wait,’ said a voice Skell dimly recognised. ‘I know him.’
‘So what?’
‘He sees things. Like, before they happen. He once got his cellmate to kick off a fight so we were all hauled out of a fresh seam-work in Lower South Eleven, right before the whole thing caved.’
Skell realised who it was. Nedzy, the gangly obscura addict who’d shared the cell below his own.
‘You tryin’ to say he’s witch-touched?’ asked the thinner vo
ice. ‘All the more reason to put one through his head. He’s like those freaks that killed all the lawmen.’
Skell looked up at the silhouette of Nedzy and opened his mouth, willing the words from his parched lips.
‘He’s trying to say something,’ said one of Nedzy’s accomplices.
‘Hey, what’s that moving up there?’ said another.
‘Down,’ Skell whispered.
Nedzy’s head exploded.
Scouts seven-seven and one-sixteen killed the escaped prisoners with a quick burst of suppressed shots. The six gangers went down almost as one, a series of thuds the only sound to mark their deaths. Silence settled once more over ore pass 3.
Wordlessly, the two Carcharodons initiates advanced to the bodies, pale ghosts in the half-light. One-sixteen maintained overwatch, his modified Stalker-pattern bolt pistol up and braced as it probed the darkness leading down to traverse 9A. At his feet, seven-seven knelt among the still-twitching corpses. Not all the bodies on the tunnel’s floor were dead.
‘Movement,’ one-sixteen said. One of the bodies was trying to rise. One-sixteen reached out to check for vital signs, but as he did so he locked eyes with it. The boy’s eyes flared with an unnatural white light. An arm shot up and clamped around the Scout’s wrist, the grip diabolically strong.
‘Chief Librarian, the boy–’ one-sixteen managed to vox. A scream filled ore pass 3 and, as one, the shadows rushed them.
The Dead Skin was here.
The Scouts had found their quarry, but too late. Te Kahurangi began to move, drawing strength from his force staff with a muttered litany as he sprinted up ore pass 3’s steep incline. As he went a hellish shrieking tore down the confined space. The lumen orbs strung along the walls shattered, plunging the corridor into darkness. Te Kahurangi’s infrared overlay triggered automatically, the green inner glow of his force staff’s channelling stone providing a pale, aquatic luminescence.
Cursing, he carried on, drawing reserves of strength from the psy-active bone. So intent was he on covering the ore pass that he almost missed the bodies.
There were eight. Six were the grimy corpses of escaped convicts, each bearing two small, clean entry rounds indicative of Stalker-silenced bolt shells. The other two were seven-seven and one-sixteen. They had both been disembowelled by a viciously sharp weapon, their grey carapace armour split, their faces frozen in pallid expressions of shock. To Te Kahurangi’s warp sight, the flickering remnants of ethereal, pale blue flames were still visible around the hideous wounds.
He replayed one-sixteen’s final message from his vox-log. The boy. He’d been here. The Librarian cast about, his auto-senses penetrating the darkness. Nothing. He thrust out his astral projection, scouring the nearest tunnels for the warp traces of memories and emotions. He found only cackling, mocking darkness. He was too late.
They had taken him.
The monsters had turned the Precinct Fortress’ chapel-barracks into their nesting place. Cull entered the once-sacred chamber with Golgoth at his side, his runesword drawn. Even through his death mask’s filters the stink of butchered, bisected meat was almost overpowering.
All was darkness within, the domed space filled with small clicking noises and low, pathetic whimpering. Cull triggered his preysight. The dark runes on his sword’s blade glowed gently. His clawed boots bit into flesh, and bone snapped beneath his armoured bulk. Golgoth unsheathed his lightning claws.
The floor of the chapel was a carpet of corpses, the original flagstones lost beneath a twisting tangle of limbs, torsos and heads, all torn and pale. As the two Night Lords stepped deeper into the semicircular room the clicking noises intensified, bouncing around the bloody stonework of the defiled space.
The preysight of the Night Lords picked out a figure at the chapel’s far wall, where the circular half of the room met its straight side. The man was bound to the top of what had once been an altar dedicated to the Imperial Truth, a heavy marble slab that had borne a pristine white covering and the sacraments of mankind’s deluded faith. Now it acted as a restraining table for the last living arbitrator in the Precinct Fortress, the gold aquila, the chalices and the reliquaries smashed and discarded among the corpses around it.
The figure on the altar moaned as he heard Cull and Golgoth enter, blind in the chapel’s death-choked darkness. He’d been stripped of his armour and bound with chains wrapped around the marble block, splayed and helpless. Fear radiated from him. Once he had been the commander of the arbitrators on Zartak. Now he was being kept for when the warband would require his voice – bound by Shadraith’s dark rituals – to trick any Imperials that arrived in-system before the Night Lords left.
Cull stopped in the centre of the chamber and looked up.
There were creatures in the chapel’s rafters. They had been Cull’s brothers once. They hung upside down from the gilded beams of the half-dome ceiling, the wicked talons of their lower limbs dug deep into the plasteel, and their arms crossed over their chests in slumber. They wore power armour not dissimilar to that borne by the rest of the Night Lords, except their war-plate was warped and more elaborate, fashioned into screaming mouths and twisting spines. Their helms were elongated with backward-sweeping horns or flared crests of ceramite, giving them the angular, sleek appearance of birds of prey. On their backs they carried jet nozzle jump packs like those used by First Kill or Vorfex’s Raptor Claw, except these had brass-ribbed wing extensions that hummed softly with idling warp-charge. Their fingers ended in horrific razor-edged talons, each as long as Cull’s forearm.
As Cull halted in the centre of the chapel the dormant eye-lenses of one of the creatures flared into life, two pinpricks of red light stabbing the darkness. The figure chained to the altar cried out in pathetic fear as the monster unclamped itself from its perch. With a grace belying its heavy armour, the thing turned as it dropped. There was a crunch of pulverised meat and splintered bone as it landed in a crouch in front of Cull, its sword-talons splayed among the flesh of its victims. It looked up at the Prince of Thorns with dire crimson eyes, helmeted head cocked to one side. A low clicking emanated from its beak-like vox-grille.
‘I have something for you, brother,’ Cull said, his voice echoing in the nightmarish chamber. The other creatures above had awoken as well, their gaze boring into the two intruders. Cull held out his gauntlet, an object clasped between his forefinger and thumb. It was the razor-tooth given to him by Vorfex.
The creature crouching before Cull came closer, armour plates clacking, leaning in towards the tooth as though trying to catch its scent. After a moment its gaze returned to Cull.
‘I release you to the hunt,’ the Prince of Thorns said.
The creature bowed its head and stood, the suddenly humanoid motion at odds with its formerly avian stance. The clicking noises emanating from it and its twisted kin intensified, accompanied by a build-up in the throbbing emanating from their corrupt jump packs. The creature made a vicious scything motion with one clawed hand, the razor-talons cutting the air mere inches from Cull’s breastplate. The others mimicked the motion of their leader, their unnatural claws parting reality with violent slashes. Warpflame ignited around them, a sudden, roiling conflagration of blue and purple that forced Cull to step back. For a second the chapel was lit by a howling vortex as unreality bled into the material universe through the tears torn by the talons.
The flames flared and disappeared. The Warp Talons were gone.
As the screaming of the terrified arbitrator rebounded around the now-empty chapel, Cull and Golgoth departed.
Kahu cut down the last of the heretics with a burst of mass-reactive rounds, the storm bolter shredding the fleeing figure.
‘Kill confirmed,’ he voxed. ‘Room secure.’
They were another step closer to securing the next junction, and with it the final tunnel route to the core of Sink Shaft One. The false silence returned in the wake of h
is report. His Lyman’s ear and auto-senses were combining to cut out unnecessary background audio, in this case the splitting clatter of the ore-sifting machinery that dominated the chamber they’d just cleared. It was one of the main underground refinery points, the part of the mining process where the vast tonnage of grit and earth indiscriminately hauled up by the megaborers was sifted for the precious adamantium that made the mines of Zartak so profitable. When the first colonisers had arrived extraction had been a far simpler process, the bedrock of the planetoid rich with untapped minerals. Rapacious sub-strip mining and bore-purges had led to far cruder methods as the overseers sought the last remaining deposits, wringing every ounce of the precious ore from the worthless dirt that hid it.
The sifting belts were a vital part of this process. They took the earth hauled in on the loco rails and ran it through a long chain of hydro-grates and crusher maws. The waste was reduced to liquid mud and the rock pulverised, before all of it was drained out into the silage shafts. All that remained afterwards were solid nuggets of pure adamantium, gleaming in the bright stab lumens of the sorting belts.
Whether the forces of Chaos had struck so quickly that no one had had the chance to turn the machinery off, or whether it had been reactivated on purpose, Kahu didn’t know. The engines filled the rock-cut room with clattering discord and occasional bouts of venting steam, misting the air, heavy with the stink of cut and crushed rock.
The room lay off from a junction intersection the Red Brethren had been advancing towards. Usually the company’s attachment of Scouts would have taken the time to cleanse it while the Terminators pushed on towards the primary objective, but since Sharr had surrendered the use of the initiates to Te Kahurangi it fell to Kahu’s First Company elite to divert their advance.
Carcharodons: Red Tithe Page 17
