Thul brought the Fist of Dorn down against the anvil. The hammer split the anvil in two with a thundercrack and from it spilled the trapped souls of a thousand sacrifices, all those in whose blood the anvil had been anointed. Lycaon was thrown off his feet by the eruption of dark magic and Lysander was thrown against the frame of the crucible’s door behind him. Thousands of teeth gnawed at Lycaon’s armour, tearing away chunks of black-painted ceramite. The gale ripped away the Chaplain’s helmet and one side of his face was torn to shredded pulp, blood welling up and hardening into a gnarled half-mask.
Lycaon arrested his fall before he plunged over the edge into the fires. He squared back up to Kraegon Thul, but the Warsmith strode through the two halves of the shattered altar and was within a hammer swing of Lycaon now. Thul thrust the head of the hammer at the Chaplain, who was barely able to turn the blow away with his crozius. A mundane weapon would have been shattered by the power field, but the Fist of Dorn was forged to withstand the fires of hell and the chill of the warp, and it would not be so easy to disarm the Warsmith.
The released sacrifices swirled around the upper half of the crucible, weaving between the weapons and armour hanging there, howling as if they still felt the pain of their deaths.
Lycaon ducked a swing of the hammer and rammed a shoulder into Thul’s chest. But Thul was not knocked back one step and wrapped an arm around Lycaon’s shoulder, pinning the Imperial Fist’s crozius arm to his side. Thul picked Lycaon off his feet and hurled him against one half of the anvil.
Lysander charged across the walkway. He could already see in his mind Thul’s follow-up blow, a swing of the hammer into the prone Lycaon’s stomach, crushing him against the anvil. The only thing between Lycaon and that fate was Lysander.
Thul turned to face Lysander. Lysander snapped off bolter shots into Thul’s chest – the Warsmith’s power armour was proof against them and the shots did little more than grab his attention, but that was Lysander’s plan.
‘Captain Lysander,’ said Thul. ‘You come for me again. Did you not learn from your last lesson?’ Thul lunged and swung at Lysander, the blow aimed at his head.
Lysander’s bolter met the Fist of Dorn. The bolter shattered as Lysander knew it would. He let go of the wrecked weapon and grabbed Thul’s wrist with both hands, trying to bend it down and force the head of the hammer to the ground.
Thul had been a warrior for thousands of years. The Traitor Legions spent most of their lives on worlds wholly or partially within the warp, where time did not flow as it did in real space. That meant some of them had been alive since the Horus Heresy, and had fought in hundreds of campaigns over millennia of warfare. Thul had fought every kind of fight there was hundreds of times over. Lysander’s gambit was the best one for the situation – lock the opponent’s weapon and use the split-second opening to get in a headbutt or a kick to the front of the knee, enough to send the enemy reeling and open for disarming and a killing blow with his own weapon. Lysander himself had practised it countless times in the sparring halls of the Phalanx, and had executed it often enough in battle. But Thul had run those same drills and fought those same battles, only more so, and he was ready.
The heel of Thul’s hand smacked into the side of Lysander’s head. Lysander’s helmet was dented and wrenched sideways, the eyepieces unaligned and his vision suddenly obscured. Thul spun and dropped to a knee, driving his elbow down onto Lysander’s thigh. Lysander’s femur snapped and the ceramite of his armour buckled, and suddenly he was on his back with a leg folded the wrong way in front of him. Thul wrenched the Fist of Dorn back out of his grip.
‘Very disappointing,’ said Thul. ‘All these centuries I seek to make your kind understand, and what is your response? You break your bodies against us as you have always done. As it was ten thousand years ago, so it is today.’
Lysander tried to roll away but Thul stepped on his shattered leg and the pain that shot through Lysander was too much for even a Space Marine to bear. It blinded him, a white bolt of searing cold slicing from his leg up through his whole body. His thoughts were drowned out by the blank wall of agony.
His armour dumped its reserve of painkillers into his bloodstream and his vision swam back. Thul had the Fist of Dorn up ready to drive the head into Lysander and crush his torso flat. Behind him appeared the shape of Chaplain Lycaon, armour scored and dented from the punishment Thul had dealt out. Lycaon brought up his crozius above his head like a woodcutter about to split a log, the blade positioned to come down against the crown of Thul’s head and cut it in two down to the collarbone.
Thul did not even look round. He reversed his grip on the hammer and drove it into Lycaon’s shoulder. The power field blew the armour open, revealing torn bone and muscle. Lycaon reeled backwards and Thul spun around, bringing the full force of the hammer blow into Lycaon’s chest.
Lycaon was smacked back into the remains of the anvil, and the spirits released howled a crescendo as his chest was blasted open by the discharging power field. The ceramite of his breastplate was split and splayed out like bloody metal wings. His head lolled back, mouth open, eyes rolled back, in the unmistakeable attitude of death.
Lysander might have cried out. It was hard to tell through the haze of pain and the keening of the spirits overhead. It was not the shock or the sorrow that hit him. It was the obscenity of that sight, of a man like Lycaon torn open. He could not fall – he was the image of an Imperial Fist, resembling a statue of Rogal Dorn more than a man. And here he was, turned into nothing more than meat and blood and ruptured armour, by a creature like Thul.
Lysander groped for the remains of his broken bolter.
‘I have lived for millennia,’ said Thul as he turned back to Lysander. ‘I have seen this galaxy and the truths of it. Do you think we do what we do for the sake of it? Because doing evil is its own end? If you put just a fraction of that zeal into understanding what is truly right, Imperial Fist, you would join us in a heartbeat.’
‘While one of us lives…’ gasped Lysander, feeling his guts twisting with the shock of his broken leg. He could not walk, but he could fight.
‘While one of you lives,’ said Thul, ‘the fight will never end, you will be avenged. Is that not it? I have heard the sentiment many times. You, who have lived within your Imperium, among its corruption and hatred, you still rail against those who would change it. I thought perhaps you would understand, Lysander. You have been more than a Space Marine. Malodrax saw to it you were something very different, for a while. But you are the same as the rest.’
Thul kicked the shattered bolter away from Lysander and stamped down on his ruined leg.
The shame was as bad as the physical pain. To be laid helpless by the enemy was, some said, worse than death – to permit him to do whatever he wished and not be able to fight back. It was inimical to the very existence of a Space Marine. If he died here it would not be as a warrior. It would be as a victim, his duty left undone.
But Lysander was not dead yet. There was always a way any battle could be won. The chances might not be high, but they were always there. There was something in Thul that was a weakness – he just had to find it before Thul finally took his head off.
Thul believed. That was the one lesson Lysander could be sure he had learned in all his pursuit of Kraegon Thul. The Warsmith believed absolutely in his cause.
‘Malodrax wanted me,’ said Lysander. ‘It changed me.’
Lysander wished he could see Thul’s face, so he could gauge some reaction. ‘It took you and it used you,’ said the Warsmith. ‘Just as the Imperium forged you into a weapon to use against its own, to murder and oppress your own people. Chaos is freedom, Imperial Fist! Let your experience on Malodrax break you from the cage of your mind. Abandon what you were. You have bargained with daemons and assassinated the foes of the Iron Warriors. You are an Imperial Fist no longer.’
‘I do not know…’ slurred Lysander, fighting to stay conscious, ‘what I am any more.’
Kraeg
on Thul kneeled over Lysander. ‘You can be a crusader for the freedom of the human race,’ he said. ‘We will take our war to the stars. We will strike at the Imperium, at its underbelly, for it is ancient, corrupted and soft. One swift strike with the war engines of Kulgarde and we will be at the gates of Terra.’
‘And what will you do then?’ asked Lysander. ‘With the Imperium at your mercy?’
‘Burn it down,’ said Thul, and Lysander was sure that behind that faceplate he was smiling. ‘Bring the human race to extinction, and rebuild it in the image of the warp.’
Lysander reached up towards Thul, like a leper reaching for the hem of a saint’s cloak.
He grabbed the back of Thul’s helmet. Thul believed in his cause so completely that, given the chance to convert a new follower, he had let his guard down. It would be the only chance Lysander would get.
With the few remaining drops of strength he had, Lysander tore the helmet off Kraegon Thul’s head.
Thul’s head resembled a planetoid bombarded with meteors and scoured by solar fire. It was impossible to tell between skin, bone and the pitted dark iron of his armour where the collar merged with the flesh of his neck. Corroded implants surrounded one eye socket, reaching up over his battered, hairless scalp. His mouth was lipless and narrow, his cheeks split open by age and decay to reveal the teeth in his jaw. His nose and chin were scarred by the constant application of the rebreather hooked up to the hose that ran down the front of his armour.
‘Look into my face, my new brother,’ said Kraegon Thul. ‘Mankind will fall. We shall found its new age. To none but the warp shall we bow. This I swear.’
Lysander reached down to the ammunition compartment at his waist. Normally this held spare magazines for his bolter. He opened it up and took out the device inside.
Thul’s eye glanced down and in that moment, he knew. He had lowered his defences and Lysander had brought him in with the promise of a rare prize – an Imperial Fist turned from the righteous path.
Lysander drove Sildyne’s dagger up into Thul’s face. It punched through the eye and into the socket, sinking its long, thin blade into the front of his skull. The crunch of the glass vial in the handle was impossibly satisfying – feeling it break, Lysander forgot the pain for a moment. The venom inside was injected through the microscopic holes in the blade, into Thul’s cortex.
Thul reeled away and fell against the anvil. He put a hand to his face, the dagger still sticking out of his eye.
‘Still…’ he slurred. ‘Still, Imperial Fist, you disappoint…’
The venom coursed through his Space Marine’s enhanced circulatory system. His organs, forced to peak efficiency by the gene-seed, were thrown into overdrive. Heart hammered, lungs pulsed, and brain spun. Thul clutched his head as blood, discoloured to a dark purple, spurted from his nose and between his teeth.
His slid down the anvil as the organs in his chest ruptured. More blood ran from the joints of his armour. The skin of his scalp writhed and bubbled as his brain boiled in his skull. The skin peeled away from his face, a blackened mask of gore all that remained of his features. The Fist of Dorn dropped from his fingers and clanged against the side of the anvil.
The sound of the spirits died down as they vanished, leaving the weapons and armour sections above swinging from their chains.
For several long minutes Lysander lay there on the platform before the anvil, and more than anything he would have dearly loved to let his mind fall into unconsciousness. Warm waves of dull pain were washing up and down him from his leg and shoulder. But he was not quite done yet.
He rolled onto his front and dragged himself towards the body of Kraegon Thul. The pain was worse and came in sharp, hot bursts, but it was good because it meant he could still feel something. He pulled the dagger back out of Thul’s eye. Thul’s head lolled to the side as what remained of his brain leaked out through the socket.
Lysander rolled to the edge of the platform. The waves of heat coming up off the molten steel hammered at him, but like the pain, it was good to feel something at all. He dropped the dagger over the edge and it vanished in the fire.
He took Being A Description Of Malodrax And Its Foulness from its compartment at his waist. He turned the book over in his hand and wondered if it could ever have been a coincidence that Malodrax had put the book in his path. Malodrax wanted to be ruled, but no ruler ever came up to its standards. Had it been testing Shalhadar and Kraegon Thul, by putting an Imperial Fist into their hands who might be manipulated into serving them, but who might return to destroy them? Perhaps the daemon prince and the Warsmith had been puppets, just as they had made Lysander their puppet, and Malodrax had been the real adversary all along.
Lysander dropped the book, too, into the molten cauldron. It disappeared in a lick of flame. Only then did he let himself pass out.
Halaestus was laid out among the dead in the Chapel of Dorn. Not all the Imperial Fists in the Malodrax strike force had left bodies fit to be displayed on the Phalanx, beneath the gaze of Dorn’s golden statue and the icon of the Emperor looking on from the altar. Not all had been recovered. Halaestus had left an intact body, though the mutilations from his imprisonment stood out starker than ever against the greying skin of his corpse.
Lysander had not attended the main service for the lost. He had been in the apothecarion of the Phalanx, undergoing treatment for the ruptured organs suffered beneath his own hammer. Now Lysander had made the necessary journey to the Chapel of Dorn to pay his respects.
First Sergeant Kaderic stood among the funeral slabs. Battle-brothers from his squad were among the dead. He paused by the body of Chaplain Lycaon, the fatal wounds concealed beneath the body’s golden shroud, and looked up at Lysander’s approach. Kaderic had led the strike force after Lycaon had died, having defeated Hexal in their duel and cut the Iron Warrior’s head off. He had led the Imperial Fists to the battlements where the Breaker of Darkness had sent down its gunships to pick them up. Kaderic had fought off the wretches of the fortress until the gunships could leave, carrying Lysander’s unconscious body over his shoulders the whole time.
‘You walk, Captain Lysander,’ said Kaderic. ‘In Kulgarde I had not known if I would see you living again.’
Lysander looked down at Halaestus’s ruined face. The shroud did not quite cover the top of the scar in his throat where Kraegon Thul’s Bone Carvers had torn out his gene-seed. ‘Have you heard how he died?’ he asked.
‘With valour and fury,’ said Kaderic.
Lysander wondered if there could have been a reply that meant less. An Imperial Fist was expected to fight and die with valour and fury – it would be an obscenity if he died any other way. Halaestus could have died a whimpering wreck and the same would still be said of him. Lysander had little doubt that Halaestus had gone into Kulgarde with no intention of walking out again. An Imperial Fist would never speak ill of the Chapter’s battle-dead, of course, but that did not mean Halaestus had died well.
‘They are your men now, Lysander,’ said Kaderic. ‘The First. When we saw it was you who killed Thul and avenged Lycaon and all our dead – we knew you were our captain, then.’
‘It will take them time to accept me,’ said Lysander.
‘Time, maybe, but nothing else. Whatever there was to prove has been proven.’
Lysander looked from one end of the chapel to the other. Many had died. Many that could not be replaced. And Lysander had brought them to Malodrax.
Malodrax had come close. He could not deny that. The deals he had made with daemons, the lies he had told, even if only lies of omission, to his fellow Imperial Fists, and the part he had played in the plan to assassinate Sildyne – that had been almost enough. Thul’s words had reached deep into his soul, but not quite deep enough.
It was the anger that had kept him true. That had never died down. That hot focus on revenge had kept the corruption from him, even when he was steeped in it. Malodrax thought it knew how deep a creature could hate, but it had neve
r encountered Lysander before. What compromise and doubt still clung to him, the hatred would burn away. Malodrax had come close, but no one would ever come that close again to turning Lysander into something an Imperial Fist should never be.
‘I wonder,’ said Lysander, ‘how far would be too far, in the name of victory.’
‘How many dead would be too many?’ said Kaderic.
It was not what Lysander had meant. He had been thinking of all the deeds that had brought him so close to the abyss, the deals and the alliances with the powers of Malodrax. But Kaderic, like all the Imperial Fists, did not need to know how close Lysander had come.
‘How many dead,’ agreed Lysander. ‘How many of our Chapter’s futures erased before they happen? To take command means many things, but above all it means making that choice. If a path leads to victory, but is littered with the dead, do we take it? That is what a captain of the Chapter must decide.’
‘Then when the choice must be made,’ said Kaderic, ‘what will you do, Lysander, for victory?’
Lysander looked again at Halaestus, then at Lycaon, and all the faces of the dead on Malodrax.
‘Anything,’ he said.
The Imperial Fists had sabotaged the forges and war machines before they left Malodrax with their dead and wounded. The Iron Warriors, leaderless, had retreated from the main fortress and by the time they retook it when the Imperial Fists were gone, the place had been rendered useless for Thul’s plan of sending a legion of war engines to fuel a Black Crusade and drive to the gates of Terra. It was overrun with mutants and xenos dregs who rose up in rebellion against the Iron Warriors, for with Thul dead the Iron Warriors seemed vulnerable and mortal as they never had before. Kulgarde was consumed by war. In the corpse-choked passageways and underground warrens, it seemed the place had been built to maximise the death of its inhabitants.
Shalhadar’s city had begun to tear itself apart before the Imperial Fists even reached Kulgarde. Many of the population fled into the rocky desert, there to die of thirst or starvation, or to form a feast for Malodrax’s predators that descended following the scent of death. Some of Shalhadar’s courtiers overcame their grief and began battling to see who would become the new lord of the city. Their followers slaughtered one another in the streets as the devastated citizens continued to tear at their flesh and enact ever fouler sacrifices to the gods for deliverance. The city became an ever more monstrous vision of madness, worthy of the warp itself.
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