‘Steel yourselves,’ hissed Orad as they arrived at the entrance, the oleaginous glow of rancid lanterns spilling sticky light ahead of it.
As he touched the rim of the light, Scipio could almost feel it coating his armour in a film of decay. He suppressed the urge to remove his trappings and be free of the taint, wanting nothing more than to experience the cleansing fury of his ritual ablutions.
The foetid temple was no better.
Rusted chains hung lankly from a pitted ceiling, strung with flayed corpses and gossamer-thin webs of flesh-dust. Filth-streaked columns were inscribed with ruinous sigils and contained alcoves bearing cadaverous, half-fleshed skulls. A pit was hewn in the centre of the room, which had once been some kind of great hall but was now divested of its former use and put towards corruption. Something boiled within it, wallowing in a soup of pestilence. Noxious bubbles belched to the surface as the creature moved, disturbing bleached skulls and half-digested viscera.
So it wasn’t only a temple, it was also the abomination’s feasting chamber. It was the very root of evil on Karthax.
Orad had seen enough.
‘Destroy it!’
Squads Scipio and Solinus unleashed their weapons in a terrifying storm at the loathsome spawn in the filth-pool. For a moment, it was utterly obscured from view by the Ultramarines blistering salvo.
After a full minute of the hell-storm, the reports of bolters and the hiss of flamers slowly echoed away around the circular room. Smoke and fire trailed from the pit afterwards. Most of its disgusting contents had been splattered around the walls or flecked the Ultramarines power armour.
As the smoke cleared, Orad ordered Solinus forward. The sergeant acknowledged, and approached the edge of the pit warily. He used his boot to nudge something within it, leaning back from the sight suddenly repulsed.
‘There is a body.’ Solinus waved the others forward.
Scipio crouched by the ragged corpse of a man. He was wearing robes and his flesh and bones had been utterly sundered. Bolt impacts marked his body. His exploded limbs and innards, the shattered bones and scorched skin were testament to the effectiveness of the Ultramarines weapons.
‘A sanctioned psyker of some sort,’ he decided, noting sigil-marks on the skin the fusillade hadn’t obliterated. ‘Cursed by Nurgle.’
‘So where is it?’ asked Solinus.
Scipio met his gaze, questioning.
‘Where is the beast?’ the other sergeant clarified.
‘That was not the creature I burned,’ offered Cator.
His battle-brothers were right. This thing was a puppet; no more than a vessel for whatever entity had claimed this place and transformed it into its own wretched domain. Where was the plaguebearer that had claimed the soul of this man?
Scipio turned around at the sound of ceramite clattering against stone behind them.
‘Brother-Chaplain, replace your battle-helm. This place is unclean!’
He went to go to Orad but was held back by the Chaplain’s warding hand. The wound in his power armour was seeping gore and pus. It crusted his entire forearm and was spreading.
His words were thick with phlegm. ‘Stay back.’
‘Lords of Ultramar,’ Solinus gasped and reached for his bolt pistol. ‘It has taken him, it has taken our Chaplain.’
Scipio pushed down his aim. ‘Wait!’
Orad went to speak again but bent double and vomited a stream of corruption. Chin drooling with sick, he spat a last gobbet of the stuff from his mouth. His eyes were sunken in his skull, the old wounds on his face throbbing, raw and reopened. He sank down, knee deep in the filth. His crozius fell from his grasp.
‘What are you doing?’ snapped Solinus. ‘He has the taint – we must end him now!’ He shook off Scipio’s grasp and brought up the weapon again.
Scipio stepped into his line of sight. ‘He is our Chaplain. Of us all, his faith is the most devout. How can this be?’
‘It matters not. Stand aside, now.’
Ever since Scipio had been a Scout, Orad had been his Chaplain. He had counselled his doubts on Black Reach, had instilled the power of his faith in him. And now he was damned, reduced to no more than a vessel for an insidious terror. The taint of Chaos had claimed him. It had breached his aegis through the smallest of cracks, widened it and rotted him from within.
Scipio drew his own sidearm. His voice was low and solemn. ‘I will do it.’
Nodding, Solinus lowered his aim. ‘Then do it quickly, before it is too late.’
Orad had wrapped his arms around his torso and was convulsing violently in the pool of filth he had created. There was no sentience in his eyes any more. He was a gibbering wreck, a once proud servant of Ultramar brought low.
But when Scipio drew a bead upon the Chaplain he hesitated.
There must be a way. Orad can repulse it.
In eerie synchronicity with the sergeant’s thoughts, the Chaplain’s neck snapped up and his dead eyes fixed onto Scipio’s pitiless retinal lenses.
‘Mercy…’
The trigger squeezed a little tighter in Scipio’s grasp, but he couldn’t do it. Orad shook with a sudden palsy. Something within the Chaplain was changing.
The sergeant felt a hand on his pauldron. The world was slowing as if mired in the very foul stuff that pervaded the temple. The reek of death and decay overtook the chamber, more noisome than ever.
‘Kill it! Do it now!’
Scipio was only dimly aware of Solinus’s urgent voice, of the slow chank of bolter shells filling their chambers, of the bounds of Orad’s armour bursting apart like an overfilled lung.
Too late the first shell spat from Scipio’s pistol, its burning contrails flashing in the air. The sheer lassitude of its trajectory brought on by the hell-transformation unfolding before him allowed Scipio to appreciate every spark, every mote of flame.
Too late, other shells joined it from the battle-brothers around him; nascent spits of flamer too and the glowing coruscation from a plasma gun.
Too late, Scipio realised what his hesitancy had cost them and shouted a warning to Brother Naius.
The husk of Orad’s armour broke apart under the barrage but the creature that had stolen the Chaplain’s flesh was no longer there. It had leapt onto the ceiling, latching to the rock with the acid-slime on its claws, spewing out barbed tendrils from a distended maw.
Three of the tendrils punched through Naius’s chestplate and he fell, bolter loosing off wild rounds as he died and his death grip clenched.
Scipio reached him a fraction too late. He bundled Naius over with the barbs still hooked in him. They stretched and ripped free as he went down, breaking open ceramite and taking chunks of flesh into the darkness above as the beast retracted them. Then it was gone.
‘Naius!’ Scipio unleashed a burst into the gloom but hit only rockcrete. It was a pointless act, save for the fact of venting his anger. Resting a hand over the neck where Naius’s only intact progenoid was still harboured, Scipio got to his feet. He had been one of Solinus’s squad and now his legacy had ended – all because Scipio had hesitated. The Ultramarines were on the offensive, searching the vaults in the temple above, throwing out random bursts of fire as someone saw a shadow or detected the insidious scuttling of the daemon.
Avoiding Solinus’s furious gaze, Scipio went on the hunt for the thing too, determined to avenge Naius. It was Orad no longer. Trapped for a moment in the lurid glare of a pestilential lantern, the Ultramarines saw an abomination where once had been their Chaplain. Gelid-skinned, surrounded by flies, it was more corpse than man. A horn had sprouted from the daemon’s head; claws replaced hands; it had hooves instead of feet. It was emaciated, its innards showing through diaphanous skin. Pustules and boils puckered flesh that sagged like melted wax and a grotesque hump bent the monster’s back.
Seeing the Ultramarines’ obvious disgust, it chuckled.
‘What’s wrong… brothers?’ Its hideous voice was a slurred parody of Orad’s.
Bolter impacts riddled the wall where it was clinging like some human spider, but went wide of the mark. For such a diseased beast it was quick, racing up pillars and skittering through the shadows too fast for the Space Marines to bring it down.
‘Keep it pinned,’ shouted Solinus, directing warriors left and right in pairs. Three battle-brothers guarded the temple entrance and were primed to release a deadly salvo if the creature came within range and sight.
Scipio did the same and was about to give chase, determined the beast that had killed Orad would not escape, when something seized his arm. At first, he thought it might be Solinus and he turned with defiance on his lips. That emotion turned to horror when he realised it was Brother Naius. His armour was corroding from the inside out. A bloodshot eye, rampant with pestilence, glared madly from a wound in his eye socket. The point where the tendrils had pierced his chest bulged, cracking his plastron.
Swinging round his chainsword, Scipio cut Naius down – the second son of Ultramar he had condemned by his inaction – finishing him with a blast from his pistol.
Or so he thought.
Partially exploded, a huge cavity in his stomach yawning open with pustulant debris, the undead-Naius rose on twisted limbs. The chainsword had chewed off part of his helmet. Blackened nubs of teeth bared in a snarl as the creature came at Scipio.
‘Brother!’ The sergeant ducked when he recognised Cator’s voice. A whoosh of rapidly expelled promethium followed, sending heat spikes registering on Scipio’s retinal display when the flamer burst just missed him. It engulfed the undead-Naius, though, eliciting a scream that was no longer wrenched from his former brother’s lips.
‘Don’t let the mouth barbs touch you,’ Scipio warned, backing up and searching the shadows. Behind him, Naius burned away to ash, leaving rotten armour in his wake.
Seven grotesque pillars supported the vaulted ceiling of the plague temple. The daemon weaved and scuttled between them, using the darkness to thwart the Ultramarines.
‘Herd it!’ Solinus bellowed, his voice echoing from somewhere deeper in the vast room. Sporadic bolter fire followed and Scipio thought he saw the silhouette of something unholy coming his way. He pressed his body against one of the pillars and waited. He couldn’t see the daemon but he could sense it. Not in a psychic way, Scipio was no Librarian. But it was in his nose, despite his olfactory filters; it veneered his skin, though he wore power armour over a mesh bodyglove; it buzzed in his ears like the droning of flies.
Scipio shut his eyes and focused on his instincts. The creature was fast but not impossibly so. He owed it to Orad, to Naius, to kill it.
Close now. The shouting of his battle-brothers was getting nearer. They were operating in a dispersed formation in order to cover the most ground. He heard Cator and Brakkius, the clipped shots of Ortus in the vicinity.
Not yet. He pressed against the pillar, denying the urge to engage, to wreak bloody havoc as an avenging Angel of Death. He needed for it to come closer.
When the moment arrived it almost took him by surprise, but Scipio’s body was honed, conditioned to preternatural levels and it reacted out of instinct. He opened his eyes. Springing from cover, his chainsword was already swinging. The mouth tendrils spilled like dead worms as the blade-teeth cut through them. The blade continued its buzzing trajectory, embedding in the rib bone all the way to the base of the sternum. Face-to-face with the daemon, Scipio levelled his bolt pistol and for a split second it was Orad there and not a plaguebearer.
‘Brother–’ it began to mouth, a look of anguish on its diseased face.
‘Get back to the abyss!’ The bolt pistol fired and the shell struck the daemon in the eye, turning the creature back to its true form. It still wore Orad’s flesh, strips of body-mesh clung tenaciously to his enhanced musculature, but it was not him.
It isn’t him…
The plaguebearer’s visage exploded in a bloom of viscera and bone-chips as the mass-reactive shell detonated, leaving it without a head. It sagged, deflated almost, as a keening wail ripped the air like a fat blade. Ichor exuded from the orifice in the neck, pooling about the dead Chaplain’s shoulders. The daemon was banished; its meat puppet was Orad again. A dead and decapitated Orad, but it was him.
Scipio nearly sank to his knees at the sight. Solinus steadied him. His voice was stern but genuine. ‘That thing would have killed us all. You had no choice, brother.’
But Scipio felt differently. His inaction had caused Naius’s demise; his bolter hand had slain what was left of Orad.
‘I made my choice too late,’ he breathed, avowing silently never to do so again. ‘And it killed Orad. It killed them both.’
Chapter Twenty
Sicarius signalled the retreat. He’d cut a path through the necrons, dispatching one with every blow of the Tempest Blade. The air was thick with the stench of phasal shift. At their captain’s command, the Ultramarines bled back into the ice-fog, their forms lit by the star-flash of bolter muzzle flares. Slow to react to the lightning assault, the necrons didn’t even attempt to give chase. They settled for a desultory salvo of gauss-fire and then continued their advance towards Kellenport.
‘Does this seem too easy to you, brother-captain?’ asked Daceus when they were clear. He reaped a heavy toll with his power fist and was sweating with the effort of killing, but they’d barely dented the enemy’s forces.
Sicarius’s initial silence betrayed his anger. ‘It’s ineffective, sergeant,’ he replied at last. ‘Our attacks are of no consequence.’ He opened up the battle-force-wide comms-feed. Though the necrons were blocking most vox-signals, it was only long distance communication that was affected.
The leaders of the attack groups he’d deployed to harry the necron phalanxes returned with similar replies. The mechanoids were defending themselves but otherwise had ignored them. Since their first foray, this was the fifth engagement. No one had, as of yet, managed to get close enough to the core of the force to ascertain if a high-level lord was present.
Sicarius clenched his fist, his rage impotent for now. ‘Regroup, all squads.’
‘Sir?’ asked Daceus when his captain didn’t make any move.
‘This isn’t working. I have to draw it out, Daceus.’
‘My lord,’ the voice of Sergeant Manorian crackled over the feed.
Sicarius was brusque. ‘Speak.’
‘The necrons have stopped moving.’
Sicarius acknowledged then cut the link. ‘Something has changed.’
‘A new weapon in their arsenal? Perhaps they’re consolidating after our raids? They might be having an effect after all,’ suggested Daceus.
‘No, I don’t think it’s that.’ Sicarius eyed the fog, as if searching it for the answer he wanted. ‘But I will know the answer before we’re done.’
Sicarius stared through Praxor’s magnoculars, waiting for the rest of the force to join them. The Ultramarines would regroup in an area of sparse ruins, part of one of Arcona City’s commercia districts. Most of the megalopolis had been levelled by necron heavy artillery. These blackened nubs of debris were a rare feature on an otherwise bland and flattened landscape. The squads filtered in from the north and south; west was where the necron advance was coming from – though, in truth, they dominated most of the planet – and east led back to Kellenport. Ixion and Strabo, redeployed from the Thanatos Operation, arrived first on contrails of fire. Several of their number were wounded but they’d sustained no casualties.
Venatio was patching up the injured and stopped in front of his captain.
‘I’ll need to see that,’ he said.
Lowering the scopes, Sicarius glared at him. ‘Why do you think they’ve stalled their advance, Brother-Apothecary?’
‘That’s not my concern at this time. The injury to your shoulder is, however.’
A long cleft split part of the captain’s pauldron and there was blood gumming the wound. It looked deep. Praxor had been taken aback at first when he’d seen it. He’d never kn
own Sicarius to bleed. He knew he was flesh and blood, but Sicarius was such a peerless warrior, he had never witnessed more than a scratch against his armour. Praxor hoped it wasn’t an omen.
The captain was about to protest again but Venatio’s resolve was unwavering; so too was his stare. Sicarius passed the scopes back to Praxor and seated himself on a chunk of ruin for the Apothecary to examine him.
‘The shoulder: how is it?’ Venatio was removing the cracked pauldron and was probing the mesh layer beneath to get at the wound.
‘Stiff,’ admitted Sicarius, rotating the blade once the armour was removed. Acutely aware he was being observed, he turned to Praxor.
‘Watch them, brother-sergeant,’ he said. ‘I want to know the moment anything changes.’
Praxor nodded and continued where Sicarius had left off. There was a ridge of blackened stone just ahead of the Ultramarines position. It was a better vantage point to observe the necrons so he made for it.
Agrippen met him there.
‘How do you defeat an endless foe?’ Praxor asked after a few moments as he looked through the scopes.
‘The same as any, with courage and honour,’ the Dreadnought replied.
The ridge was little more than a spur of rock, a collapsed column or statue – the damage and the ice made it hard to tell – and could just about provide enough room for Praxor and the ancient.
‘Our forces are battered, though. I would follow my captain into battle until I could no longer wield bolter and blade, but it is hard to see how we will prevail.’
‘The Chapter has been bloodied before. Some wars are merely harder than others. It is here that we truly test ourselves and prove our strength.’
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