by Rob Sanders
Carthach’s words became a strangled roar as daemon teeth sprouted from the deck and ceiling about him. Lamps flashed and shattered, the corner of the command deck becoming a nexus of darkness – the depths of a monstrous throat. The Angelbane emptied the final fury of his bolt pistol into the oblivion before reaching to hold up the collapsing roof of the chamber. He hissed his hatred at the daemonic mouth closing about him, while the servos and hydraulics of his plate strained. One moment he was Quetzel Carthach – proud warlord, dark legend and Angelbane of the Alpha Legion – the next he was a shrieking mulch of plate and bloody flesh. Then, he was nothing at all.
Mina Perdita felt everything go dark. A nest of daemonic tendrils slithered from the sparking runebank and enveloped her ragged form with hooked barbs. She prepared herself for the horror to come. She had completed her Temple’s mission. She had carried out her strike master’s orders. She had brought an end to the galactic scourge that was Quetzel Carthach. It was now time to meet her own. As life left her, the Assassin felt the tendrils heave her blasted body into the daemon-haunted flesh-metal of the possessed ship. Now all Mina Perdita had to fear for was her immortal soul.
φ
Serpents Change Their Skin, Not Their Fangs
Occam listened to the gunfire, death and horror.
As the screaming trailed off and the vox became a swarming plethora of daemonic voices, the strike master killed the channel. The Iota-Æternus and all on board – cultists, operatives, Space Marines – were lost.
Although it was difficult for the strike master to comprehend, he had even bigger problems to contend with. Quetzel Carthach might have finally met his end but he had left Occam at the mercy of his enemies. Those remaining of the Redacted and their Word Bearers allies were unarmed, within the sights and under the blades of the Grey Knights.
Occam looked up at a towering statue of the Master of Mankind, his mighty form standing astride the transept like a colossus and forming the arch under which the Redacted had just walked. His stone visage looked down on all in the cathedral with an imperious austerity – Alpha Legionnaires, Word Bearers and Grey Knights in their magnificent plate and heavily armed walkers.
Regardless of his Chapter colours or the banners under which he fought, Occam had always been a committed servant of the God-Emperor. Such faith came easy within magnificent structures such as the Cathedral-Primus or encased within loyalist plate. It was something else entirely to be a loyalist in traitor’s clothing: a renegade hated and hunted by all, whose heresy was a belief that the God-Emperor could be served from beyond such places. To fight deviants from among deviance. To battle evil shoulder to shoulder with the unholy.
Here Occam found himself once more. In consort with daemon Word Bearers while surrounded by those of the God-Emperor’s blood: all under the fierce gaze of mankind’s Master.
The strike master looked about him. The Grey Knights, their movements measured but fearless, were closing in. Their psychically charged blades crackled while the barrels of wrist-mounted storm bolters remained fixed upon the renegades.
‘It seems you have us caught between an anvil and the Corpse-Emperor’s mighty hammer of faith,’ Goura Shengk snarled, ‘and all the while your legionary brothers slither away like snakes.’
‘Quetzel Carthach was no brother of mine,’ Occam told him.
‘Well, that’s all well and good, strike commander,’ the Dark Apostle said, ‘but it seems your past failures with this Carthach have come to haunt us here in the present.’
‘Haunt us is all he can do now,’ Occam said, looking at Sergeant Hasdrubal, ‘for now he is dead.’
‘So I note,’ Goura Shengk taunted bitterly. ‘You are a twisted serpent, Occam the Untrue – proud and full of faith. We see, however, that you have finally made your pact with the darkness. That upon your order you unleashed the dread fury of the daemon storm.’
The Dark Apostle had listened to Occam’s final order: the order that had damned his ship and brought forth daemonic vengeance upon Quetzel Carthach and his Sons of the Hydra.
‘To utilise the power of the storm is not to become one with it,’ Occam told the Dark Apostle.
‘Orders?’ Sergeant Hasdrubal asked. Unlike his master, he had no interest in a spiritual debate. Like Vilnius Malik, he could not stand by in the sights of the Grey Knights with no weapons of their own and no plan to prosecute.
‘Pray tell us, serpent,’ Goura Shengk hissed. ‘What is your plan?’
‘Quoda?’ Occam asked, hoping to make use of his sorcerer’s dread powers.
‘The Grey Knights are psykers all, strike master,’ Carcinus Quoda reminded him. ‘Their combined powers have many times the potency of my own.’
With the Grey Knights like a closing trap of silver plate, intent upon taking both the Redacted and fell Word Bearers alive for Inquisitor Van Leeuwen, Occam’s thoughts raced on.
Many times the potency…
‘Strike master?’ Vilnius Malik put to him.
Power of the storm…
‘Occam?’ Sergeant Hasdrubal said as the closing Grey Knights levelled their crackling halberds at the tight group of renegades, forcing them together.
Unleashed the dread fury…
Occam reached into an armoured pouch on his belt and retrieved an object heavy with its own alien darkness. The alien Tesseraqt Malik had retrieved from the bowels of the Ghalmek’s polar cathedral. The black cube moved continually, sections opening and interlocking with one another in perpetual and fluid movement. The cracks in between the moving pieces glowed green with alien power. Occam knew it to be the generator of some exotic containment field – a piece of xenos technology that the Lord Dominatus desired for his own nefarious needs. Goura Shengk, however, had informed Occam that the Tesseraqt already contained a powerful entity in its alien field – a monstrous daemon that the diabolists and Dark Mechanicum priests of Unholy Ghalmek had made preparations to receive.
There would be no such ceremonies on Suspiria Proctor.
Occam jabbed his ceramite thumb into depressions on the six sides of the cube. As it transformed in his gauntlets, new surfaces presented new depressions which he pressed as fast as they appeared.
‘Inquisitor,’ a Grey Knights sergeant called as his brotherhood halted in a serrated circle about the renegades, the blades of halberds and barrels of storm bolters pointed inwards.
‘Do your duty, sergeant,’ Inquisitor Van Leeuwen said, his voice almost strangled with the satisfaction he felt at seeing the Alpha Legionnaires and Word Bearers captured. ‘Secure the prisoners.’
‘On your knees, foul servants of darkness,’ a Grey Knights sergeant roared at the Redacted, his booming voice full of honour and hatred.
Malik was struggling. The former Night Lord did not like being cornered and he would not be captured. He moved to rush forward at the line of crackling blades and gaping barrels but Hasdrubal stopped him, laying a gauntlet on the legionnaire’s pauldron.
‘Only at the strike master’s word,’ the sergeant growled.
‘The word of a liar…’ Goura Shengk said, his filthy daemon’s claws growing longer and blood-red brawn flexing, ‘…a thief and a coward.’
As the Dark Apostle’s daemon Space Marines also grew in ferocity and stature, spitting and hissing at the glittering cordon of Grey Knights, Occam continued to work the Tesseraqt. The black box transformed rapidly in his hands. The strike commander could hardly thumb the smooth depressions in the black, alien material quickly enough. Finally, something cleared. It wasn’t a click or thunk like the opening of a lock. It was more like a change of pressure, but instead of being felt in ears and sinuses, the effect reverberated horribly through the mind. The Tesseraqt presented no more depressions to activate. Instead, the cube began to turn itself inside out and glow with a green darkness indicating that the containment field maintained by the ancient xenos technology was failing.
‘I have two more words for you,’ Occam the Untrue said, coming up behind one of t
he Dark Apostle’s possessed sentinels. ‘Get ready…’
Throwing the Tesseraqt between the Word Bearer’s legs, Occam allowed the cube to skim across the marble of the cathedral floor.
‘Grenade!’ the silver-clad sergeant called out as the highly disciplined Grey Knights saw the object slide towards them and backed away. A Space Marine in grey plate opened fire with his storm bolter. Bolts rocketed across the transept, trailing ethereal power from the psyker’s weapon.
Occam grabbed the warped pack of the Word Bearers sentinel and forced the creature forward. The daemon Space Marine roared its agony as the psychically charged bolts blasted into its cursed plate and infernal brawn. Holding the Word Bearer up like a shield, the strike master was pushed back by the Grey Knights’ stuttering boltfire as it ripped into the thing.
A blinding green light filled the cathedral chamber. Even in the shadow of his Word Bearers shield, Occam’s optics briefly blanked out as his auto-senses cycled through appropriate filters. For a moment the green light was everything. Muted thunder rolled through the transept, while unearthly energies crackled through the marble of the flagstones. Occam could hear shouting, more urgent than before. Calls tinged with a hint of superhuman panic.
The strike master was suddenly aware of the presence of something huge. Grey Knights were backing through the green brilliance, their gauntlets held up before the optics of their helms. The floor trembled. The walls shook. Dust cascaded down from the vaulted roof. As his plate registered a bank of heat – intense and unnatural – rolling out from the site of the opening Tesseraqt, Occam held up the daemonflesh of his Word Bearers meatshield. Furious, infernal flame reached for the cathedral roof. It writhed about the monstrous form of the daemonic creature that the strike master had unleashed.
‘What have you done?’ Goura Shengk shouted. He held up his claw before the wave of heat driving Inquisitor Van Leeuwen and his Grey Knights back. ‘The Slaughterlord will destroy us all! He will not stop until the corpse of every soul on this doomed world lies at his feet.’
‘Then I suggest we leave,’ Occam the Untrue said, shoving the dying Word Bearer at the green tornado of fury and flame that was Kar’Nash’gahar, Lord of Glorious Slaughter and Slayer of Worlds.
As the alien containment field collapsed and the daemon monstrosity manifested fully, a tsunami of warped, crackling power crashed through the Space Marines in the cathedral, and Occam felt his power armour briefly die about him. Everything went black. All he was aware of was the muted roar of the daemon entity. Then he felt a distant thunder through the soles of his boots and the stone floor. The radiating energies of the monster’s manifestation were overloading the power conduits, and not just in the cathedral; a chain reaction of explosions was spreading outwards into the machineries that powered the whole floating plate.
His optics crackled back to life after his suit had been momentarily immobilised by the shockwave of dark energy. Friend and foe alike had suffered the brief overload and one by one the Space Marines surrounding the greater daemon rediscovered mobility in their armoured suits, like statues coming to life.
The transept echoed with the gunfire of Grey Knights and the horrific bellowing of the greater daemon. A towering colossus of extravagant horn, claws and bulging muscle, its ugly face jangled with bronze rings through its snout, lips and ears. A pair of ragged wings unfolded like doom above the Space Marines below. The monster’s features were uglier still for the insane rage it suffered upon being released from its prison and the spiritual torment of manifesting upon holy ground.
Psychically charged bolt-rounds ripped into the daemon’s metal-threaded flesh from the line of Grey Knights. The beast roared, its anger shaking the cathedral’s foundations as the mighty walkers unleashed their arm-mounted cannons at it. The thing attempted to shield itself using its wings but the fury of the heavy weaponry turned the leathery appendages into a mangled mess.
The colossal daemon doubled over and began to heave. A torrent of blood gushed from the monster’s jaws and hit the cathedral floor. In amongst the deluge Occam could see something akin to the length of a huge, barbed tapeworm. Snatching up its grotesque length, the daemon twirled it about its huge form. Blood rained from the length of the thing and all too late, Occam realised that the monster was wielding some devastating weapon – a daemonic flail of black barbs and cruel hooks. Whipping out with the flail, the daemon turned an advancing line of Grey Knights into a scythed mess of mangled flesh and armour. Another great swirling slash of the daemonic weapon tore through the stone architecture of the cathedral and ripped apart the workings of one of the Grey Knights walkers.
‘Sergeant,’ the strike master called through the havoc, ‘find us a way out of this.’
The cordon of Grey Knights closed about the Slaughterlord, the barb-like halberds of the silver-plated Terminators crackling as they advanced. Hasdrubal ran at the enemy; Malik and Quoda followed. A Grey Knights Terminator swung his force halberd around in a trailing arc of psychic might and the sergeant skidded to a stop across the marble flags before changing direction. Using the weight of his plate, Hasdrubal ran at the Terminator, slamming his pauldron into him. The Grey Knight was knocked back and as he was, Vilnius Malik did the same from the opposite direction.
As the Alpha Legionnaires grabbed an arm each, Carcinus Quoda slammed into the Terminator’s chest. The Terminator brothers turned their own weapons to meet this new threat, and the sorcerer tore the force halberd out of the Grey Knight’s clutches. With the weapon grasped in his gauntlets Quoda just managed to turn aside the smashing stroke of a Grey Knight before lopping the head off another weapon with a vicious back strike. Quoda dropped the halberd with a cry of pain as it burned his hands.
Running the stumbling Terminator back into the ranks of the Grey Knights, Malik and his sergeant let the Space Marine go. The other Grey Knights didn’t see the danger until it was too late, concentrating all their fire upon the flame-swirling greater daemon instead. Crashing back messily through their ranks, the Terminator went down, taking several brothers down with him and opening a hole in the closing cordon.
‘Dark Apostle!’ Occam called, even as Goura Shengk’s own warped sentinel tried to pull him away. The daemon Word Bearer ignored the strike master and shrugged his brother off. As a Grey Knight mounted a slow charge in his Terminator suit, his force halberd thrust forward like a skewering lance, the daemon Space Marine batted it aside with its huge, malformed claws. Defending his master, the creature leapt upon the Grey Knight and proceeded to savage him with horn and claw.
‘Strike master!’ Occam heard Ephron Hasdrubal call.
The sergeant had his boot on a fallen Grey Knight’s helm. Stamping down with a crack, the power armour seals gave and he broke the Space Marine’s neck. With a grunt, the sergeant scooped up the cannon he was carrying.
Snatching a combat blade from the Grey Knight’s belt sheath, he threw it to Malik. The former Night Lord immediately went to work savagely stabbing the downed Terminator in the neck, exploiting the seals between the warrior’s helm and suit.
Quoda backed towards him, desperately smashing aside halberds swung with power and hatred by hulking Terminators. Every time the psychically charged blades clashed, they crackled with the Grey Knights’ otherworldly energies.
Unleashing the fury of the cannon on the Terminators’ armoured backs, Hasdrubal brought one silver-plated warrior down and distracted another long enough for the sorcerer to jab the Grey Knight in the throat with a crunch.
Occam started moving towards the opening his legionnaires had created. The Word Bearers sentinel protecting the Dark Apostle had become a skewered mess of daemon flesh and force halberds.
‘Shengk,’ Occam called. ‘This is your last chance.’
The Dark Apostle had fallen to his knees before the immense destructive power of Kar’Nash’gahar. The greater daemon – furious, afflicted and aflame – was rampaging through the cathedral. Writhing in an inferno of green flame, the monstro
us creature was infuriated by both its sacrosanct surroundings and the Grey Knights peppering its muscular form with storm bolter fire. As Terminators in grey plate closed on the abomination, corralling it with the presented blades of their halberds, the daemon stamped down on the annoyance. Splattering them into the cathedral floor with its hooves, the Lord of Glorious Slaughter raged on, smashing one of the Grey Knights walkers into the wall with its horned shoulder.
Seeing the towering statue of the God-Emperor standing astride the chamber, the daemonic beast roared. As the horrific sound filled the chamber, Occam felt his soul shrivel. Kar’Nash’gahar tore the massive statue down with its flail and unrelenting fury. A small mountain of stone shattered across the remaining ranks of the Grey Knights. As the shadow of the falling statue buried Occam, the strike master made a decision. Instead of running for the withdrawing members of the Redacted, he made for Goura Shengk, who was stumbling towards the green brilliance of the Tesseraqt.
Occam felt the flags quake beneath his boots as the statue smashed to the ground. Stumbling and then skidding across the floor, the strike master found Goura Shengk on his knees before the daemon’s glorious destruction. As they knelt there in the green light, bolts flying wildly and a cloud bank of dust enveloping them, Occam tried to tear the Word Bearer up onto his feet.
‘We’ve got to go,’ the strike master said. Occam cared little for the daemon filth but with the Iota-Æternus compromised, he needed the Dark Apostle and the Dissolutio Perpetua to escape the system.
‘Go?’ the daemon Space Marine seethed. ‘Where would we go, serpent? Because of the sons of Alpharius, the souls we promised the Daemon Council are forfeit. Brothers of the Word will hunt us down. Because of your failures, strike master, there is nowhere to go.’