Lysander tore the chainblade free and took stock of his surroundings. Imperial Fists and daemons were duelling, glowing blood sprayed across the gilded pavements. Beside him Halaestus wrestled with a daemon with four tentacles in place of arms. Halaestus rolled on top of the daemon and drove his combat knife down into its face again and again until it was a smouldering ruin.
Lysander grabbed Halaestus’s shoulder guard and pulled him up. ‘There are plenty more to kill!’ he shouted over the gunfire and the screeching of the daemons.
For a moment Halaestus looked at Lysander with that same blank look. Then a light went up behind his eyes and he nodded his understanding.
There were more daemons than Imperial Fists, but these creatures had never faced Space Marines before. Chaplain Lycaon threw one aside and lunged at another, slicing it in two from shoulder to hip with his crozius. The discharging of the power field was like a lightning bolt falling into the middle of the fight and the Imperial Fists surged forwards as if it were an omen sent from Dorn himself.
Past the daemon ranks, beyond the closest spires and domes of Shalhadar’s city, rose the pyramid of its palace. Lysander recognised the patterns of blue and gold covering its sides, picked out in precious stones and silver filigree.
If the Imperial Fists were to do what they came to Malodrax to do, if Lysander were to do his duty to the brothers he had left behind here, the palace would have to fall. The man knew this, and looked ahead to storming the bejewelled walls. The soldier kept fighting, focusing entirely on tearing apart the enemies that fate had put in front of him.
6
‘I spoke with one of them, the creatures indigenous to this world, evolved or mutated, I surmised, from human stock an aeon ago. His people were nomads, travelling the hidden paths between Malodrax’s perils. I told him that I was from the world beyond his planet’s sky, and it was then I realised he had no concept of a planet at all. To him his world was a gallery of hells, linked by the paths his forefathers had forged, and beyond them could exist nothing.’
– Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan
It was, by Lysander’s reckoning, rather more than two days since he had crawled into the effluent channels leading to the fortress’s sump. Forging through the filth had helped hide him among the dregs of the fortress’s lower levels, catacombs, tunnels and half-collapsed cathedral domes that maintained a society of mutants and xenos. From what Lysander had seen they served little purpose in the fortress except to survive there, like colonies of fungus or nests of vermin, with the most able of them skimmed off to serve in the forge levels above. The uppermost fortress, the battlements themselves, were the barracks and sparring halls of the Iron Warriors, but beneath them was the bleak anarchy of these malformed dregs.
Lysander had made his way upwards, towards the forges and assembly vaults. The place was a factory as well as a fortress, with its forges producing parts for war machines assembled by armies of menials. The only way out of the place was to go up, even though that would bring him closer to the Iron Warriors who would even now be scouring the fortress for him.
There had been close calls. Lysander had broken the necks of mutants who paid him more than a glance. In any other company his size would make it impossible to hide, but the mutants included plenty of the huge muscular brutes among them and Lysander, hooded in rags, could pass for one of them. No Iron Warrior would be fooled, even at a distance, and Lysander had seen patrols of them marching through the mutant hovels looking for him. It was in a ruin of a previous city, crushed among the fortress’s foundations, that they had come the closest, and Lysander had lurked in the plentiful shadows as a five-strong squad played the sights of their bolters across the hosts of mutants that cowered when they passed. If one of them had broken off from the squad and poked around in the heaps of rags that passed for the inhabitants of the hovel where Lysander had hidden, he would have been found. And he would have been shot down where he stood, because Warsmith Thul could only have ordered that Lysander be executed out of hand rather than risk him escaping again.
It was in the forges that Lysander realised he could rise no higher and still hope to stay hidden. He found himself in an enormous stone vault where gangs of menials and mutant labourers hauled massive segments of armour and machinery towards the half-finished war engines that dominated the vast space.
Lysander counted a dozen engines in various states of completion, some little more than enormous metal skeletons, others looming hulks that looked ready to ride on massive grinding wheels or spiderlike legs. One was shaped like a steel dragon rearing up, its shoulders supporting massed batteries of cannon. Another was a turtle-like hulk, countless layers of armour surrounding sally ports to deliver hordes of troops into the heart of an enemy army. Still another, apparently complete, was a mobile idol of a lizardlike god-figure on an altar that moved on spiked rollers. Steel cauldrons held mounds of bones and skulls, and fuel tanks on the figure’s back were hooked up to an enormous flamethrower wrought into the god’s mouth. Hundreds of guns studded the shoulders and torso like spines.
It was a weapon of terror, the image of a power of the warp to terrify the defenders of a besieged city as it rumbled towards the walls spewing fire and crushing fortifications. Dozens of menials scrabbled across it, hammering its final armour plates into place.
Lysander took all this in as he waited in the shadows, away from the light of the fires used to bend the plates of armour being prepared for installation on the steel skeletons. The idol-machine was the most complete war machine, possibly ready to roll out from the gates of Kulgarde and into whatever waited in Malodrax beyond.
Lysander worked his way closer to the idol machine. It was several storeys high and the workers on it looked like insects scuttling across its surface. As Lysander watched one fell from the idol’s shoulder, his death going unnoticed by the workers who laboured around the rollers where he landed. Taskmasters, brute-mutants like the ones Lysander had tried to resemble, laid into the workers with whips and prods. One spotted Lysander and trudged towards him, a slab of muscle with the features of its face barely discernible. It wore random segments of armour, plain gunmetal like the armour of the Iron Warriors, strapped to its grotesque body.
‘You!’ it growled. ‘Who is your god?’
Lysander did not know the answer. Presumably there was some power of the warp he could name that would satisfy the taskmaster, but a sane man did not seek to know their names.
‘I am here to work,’ said Lysander. ‘I am strong.’
The taskmaster drew a barbed whip and lashed it at Lysander. The bladed tip cut a deep gash into Lysander’s shoulder and Lysander dropped to one knee. The pain was like nothing to a Space Marine, but Lysander knew that tyrants loved to see supplication from those they made suffer.
‘To work?’ demanded the taskmaster. ‘You who have no brand upon him? What creature is this that knows not his place! Overseer Gortz will cut out your guts and twist them into ropes for the catapults!’
Lysander glanced up at the closest mutant worker, who was deliberately focusing on his work and not watching the taskmaster berating Lysander. Lysander could just spot the raised skin on the worker’s face, almost lost among the fronded gills around his neck. A brand was scorched deep into the mutant’s features. Lysander had no such brand. It was the mark of the taskmaster’s work-gangs, and anyone without it was an intruder.
‘It was Gortz who sent me,’ said Lysander, invoking the name of whatever creature he hoped was lord of this forge hall.
The taskmaster spat a wad of bloody phlegm into the floor. ‘If your body is as weak as your lies,’ he said, ‘you could lift no hammer for me. And I have no use for the weak.’ The taskmaster gripped Lysander’s chin and forced his head up, so he had to look into the taskmaster’s bestial face. ‘Except,’ it said, ‘as food.’
Lysander knocked the taskmaster’s hand aside and grabbed it by the throat. He stood up to his full height, lifting the massive mutant up off the floor. For
the first time the taskmaster was able to appreciate Lysander’s full size, as his feet kicked out half a metre above the flagstones.
The taskmaster drew its whip hand back and lashed the weapon at Lysander, who caught the strip of leather with his free hand and threw the taskmaster down to the floor. Before the mutant could get back to his feet Lysander planted a foot in its back and looped the whip around its neck.
Even as he was hauling on the whip to tighten it around the mutant’s throat, Lysander was looking up and gauging the consequences. The mutant workers were well aware of what was happening, but they did nothing – most of them wouldn’t even watch. They were so used to being the slaves of the taskmaster, so used to being punished for looking it in the eye, that it did not occur to them to defend the mutant. Even so, the taskmaster fancied itself important, and it would be missed sooner or later. Lysander had played his hand. He had to get out of the fortress now, here, before the Iron Warriors learned of the Space Marine-sized intruder killing their underlings in the shadow of the war machines.
The taskmaster had fallen still. Lysander dropped the whip, kneeled down and wrapped an arm around its throat, wrenching its neck and snapping its spine to make sure it would not wake up.
Lysander hurried towards the war machine ahead of him, the enormous siege-idol. He ignored the workers around him as he reached the foot of the idol, where the huge spiked roller had sunk into the flagstones of the floor. Lysander found a handhold among the battered steel plates and began to climb towards the war machine’s idol.
He climbed quickly. It was not a usual mode of transport for a Space Marine, but an Imperial Fist had to be ready to climb, leap, swim and crawl as the battle demanded it. The idol was easy to climb, with plentiful handholds among its armour plates and carvings, and in a few minutes Lysander had reached the altar. The surface of the altar was already scored and stained with evidence of past sacrifices, and doubtless many more would be required before this war machine could be permitted to rumble out of the fortress into Malodrax.
There was, realistically, only one way out of the fortress of Kulgarde. Lysander had known from the start that he would not simply walk out. It was a risk, this way, but less of a risk than staying in the fortress waiting to be hunted down by the Iron Warriors. If he died here, he would die seeking to escape, because only by first escaping could he avenge whatever happened to his battle-brothers at the hands of the Bone Sculptors.
The idol itself was a more difficult climb, with its overhangs and smooth expanses of stone. Lysander made for the head, for he knew the conceit of the builders would probably have put any command systems there. Whoever drove it would look through the eyes of the idol so they could fancy themselves the equivalent of that huge stone god, and see the fear of the soldiers in their way as they looked up at its hideous face. He was aware of a commotion below him as word finally spread of the taskmaster’s death and workers from other gangs were gathering at the foot of the siege idol to watch the intruder whose death would surely win them a higher status in the forges.
Lysander reached the face, finding useful handholds among the fangs and twisted lips. Above him was an eye socket and sure enough it was glazed with the winking lights of a cockpit or bridge beyond. Lysander forced his way up into the eye socket and kicked at the glass, feeling it crack and bow under him.
Gunfire stuttered below him and shots flew wide, pinging off the stone face. The glazing collapsed and Lysander fell through into the interior of the siege idol’s head.
In the cramped bridge were four or five human forms, merging with the baroque technology and ironwork of the siege engine’s interior. It was difficult to tell how many there were for they were fused with the metal and the machinery of the siege idol’s command systems. Their faces, glazed-eyed and barely conscious, rolled towards Lysander as he fell down on top of them, their brittle bones crunching under his weight.
‘War machine!’ demanded Lysander. ‘Answer me!’
More gunfire was spattering up at the shattered eye socket. Lysander could see through the banks of machinery to the cavity beyond the second eye socket, similarly crammed with fused human forms. Gunshots punched through the glass. Lysander could hear more shouting voices below. Soon the Iron Warriors would know, and then Lysander would be trapped here.
‘War machine!’ he repeated. ‘Whatever you are, however you were created, I am Lysander of the Imperial Fists! I can lead you out of this place! I can give you freedom!’
The siege idol lurched. Lysander planted a hand in dried, stringy flesh to find a handhold and keep himself upright. Machinery ground deep within the war engine with a sound like an avalanche. The eyes of the fused corpses opened, revealing their dried-out eyeballs, their mouths working as if trying to speak.
The rear wall of the cockpit split and receded, revealing a dark maw of iron beyond. Shards of metal split off from the wall, hovering in front of Lysander as they spun and converged.
Lysander’s stomachs recoiled. He was in the presence of witchcraft. The whole fortress of Kulgarde was a foul place, corrupted right down to the stones of its foundations – but this was pure darkness, warp-magic worked right before his eyes.
The metal formed twin pits, where bright silver shards glinted in place of eyes. The lips of a mouth. Two slits in place of a nose. It was an inhuman face, somehow more grotesque for being an indistinct result of the metal fragments as they spun and flitted.
‘Freedom?’ said a voice that took its form from the grinding of the siege idol’s engines far below. ‘There is no freedom. What is this thing? A dream? A lie? Nothing of the warp is free. You cannot offer me that, strange fleshy thing, Lysander of the Imperial Fists.’
‘Daemon,’ said Lysander. He tasted bile in his mouth and his skin crawled such that it was a wonder it did not tear itself from his back.
‘What,’ replied the siege idol, ‘did you expect?’
‘Move from this place,’ said Lysander. ‘Start your wheels and break out of this fortress. Seek your own destiny on Malodrax. Do not serve the Iron Warriors.’
‘And in doing so, save you from Kulgarde?’ replied the daemon. ‘So you might ride me to your own freedom as a bird rides the wind? And why would I do such a thing, Lysander of the Imperial Fists, when Warsmith Thul can give me a thousand years of war? A million bodies ground beneath my tracks? An ocean of blood in which to wallow? What is it that you can grant me that I might desire?’
Lysander forged his way back to the idol’s eye socket and risked a glance down. Hundreds of menials were surrounding the siege idol, jostling to get a look at the strange intruder who had killed the taskmaster and forced his way into their war engine. There were other taskmasters among them, cracking menials’ heads to make their way through the crowd, or arguing with one another about what to do.
‘You don’t know, do you?’ taunted the daemon, the note of its engines rising in amusement. ‘This slave of the dead god, this whelp of mankind. Your tiny mind cannot comprehend what one such as I could possibly desire.’
Lysander turned back to the daemon’s face. ‘You want blood,’ he said.
‘Blood?’ The daemon laughed, the sounds of pistons falling and engine chambers thundering. ‘I have all the blood I could want! A thousand men already have been butchered on my altar! My very steel was quenched in blood when it was first bent upon the anvil! Blood? What need have I of blood? Before Warsmith Thul commanded me forth, I presided over a great arena in the warp, where the blood of a million gladiators filled the place to the brim every night!’
‘An arena,’ said Lysander. His mind was working fast, trying to outpace his revulsion at being in the presence of such a being.
‘The greatest altar of the Blood God!’ cried the daemon. ‘A great ocean of hate in the warp! I stood upon the parapet and at my signal half a million men slit the throats of the other half, and at my word the survivors battled for the glory of having my eye fall upon them! And you, fleshy thing, will never know that glory, to
see two great champions butcher one another in your name. Your imagination cannot stretch to such wonders.’
‘And you prefer this tomb of steel,’ said Lysander, ‘to ruling as lord of your arena?’
‘You cannot give me what I once had,’ replied the daemon.
‘You have doubt, daemon,’ said Lysander. ‘There is more human in you than you would admit.’
The daemon’s face loomed larger, its metal components shuddering and spinning with anger. ‘I am not like you. My kind were ancient before your existence was even possible. Do not compare us, Lysander of the Imperial Fists.’
‘And yet we are in the same situation. We both want something. I want to get out of this fortress, and you want to be lord of the arena again. There might be nothing else in common between us, but we both desire. Tell me I do not speak the truth, daemon.’
The daemon’s face receded. It did not reply. Its engines thrummed angrily, a low growl of frustration.
Lysander knew it would do him no good to argue with this being further. He would only give it the chance to spin lies, or waste his time until the Iron Warriors came to oversee the storming of the siege engine and the execution of Lysander. He pulled himself back through the idol’s shattered eye socket and out onto the stone face.
A cry went up from the labourers gathered to watch. Gunfire stuttered up at Lysander, wide and ill-disciplined, sparking stone chunks out of the idol’s face. Lysander let go of his handhold and fell down past the face and chest, landing in a heavy crouch as he slammed into the stained surface of the altar.
‘Overseer Gortz!’ yelled Lysander. ‘Lord of this vault! Will you stand by while this intruder defies you? Or will you take his head and throw it at the feet of your Warsmith?’
A bellowed order split the crowd below. One of the huge taskmaster mutants, who could only be Overseer Gortz, shouldered his way to the front – a massive creature, bound in muscle sliding beneath skin that was a mass of scar tissue. One of its hands had been replaced with a mechanical steel claw, more like an industrial tool than a weapon, and in its other it carried a club almost as long as Lysander was tall, a length of steel square in cross-section studded with spikes and well-stained with the blood of menials.
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