‘I’d expected an Archenemy vessel to be more… obvious,’ Darrick said. ‘This is bad enough – and how in the Great Eye are these wall lights still on? – but it looks just like one of our ships.’
‘We are in the upper decks and have not penetrated far,’ Osiron reminded them all. ‘And when the Aggrieved fell to the surface, its corruption from its crew’s heresy was still fresh. This ship died before Chaos could worm all the way through it.’
‘No,’ Caius said, goading Seth forward. ‘This ship is riddled with the Archenemy’s touch. I feel it clearly.’
‘As do I,’ Seth spoke for the first time in hours. His tongue was thick in his mouth, and slimy strings of saliva stretched between his chattering teeth.
‘Seth,’ Thade began.
‘Seth,’ the psyker replied, ‘has been dead for some time now.’
The entity dwelling within the wreckage of the Aggrieved had reached out to the sanctioned psyker as the Cadians descended. It was a trifling matter to stir Seth’s thoughts into dwelling on rebellion, bitterness and disloyalty.
At least, at first. Before the final blow that killed Seth and allowed the entity to wear the psyker’s body, there had been much to do and a surprising amount of resistance to doing it.
The entity had stirred these dark thoughts within the thin, weak, mortal soup that formed Seth’s consciousness. And at first it had been easy, the suggestions of emotion and thought blending seamlessly with Seth’s own brain function. He was an outcast among his people – thoughts of this forever rode high in his consciousness – and amplifying his loneliness and hatred of rejection was a simple matter, the merest of psychic tweaks. The entity probed with invisible fingers, tasted the surface pain, and flavoured it a touch darker, a touch angrier, minute by minute.
Disguising this gentle manipulation from the other psychically-gifted member of the Imperial coterie was no difficult feat. The entity at the edge of Seth’s mind knew that its own psychic beacon, the endless silent scream, was clouding the other human’s perceptions.
It did not know Caius was an inquisitor, and had no frame of reference for the term, as the title had not been coined in any significant way in the age when the entity had truly existed in the flesh. Even had it known the meaning of the title and the formidable skills of those that bore it, the entity would not have been troubled. Its powers far eclipsed those of the approaching mortals.
What it needed now was flesh. It could not rebuild itself without flesh; lots of flesh, blood, sinew and the other meats that made up the human form. It had woken, and the psychic pangs of its rebirth manifested as the plague, a cry for aid from its distant brethren. But now… now it needed flesh. Birthing the curse had left it weak and lingering on the edge of slumber. Finally, after weeks of regeneration, it was ready once more.
Yet its manipulations of Seth’s mind began to snap back, repressed and refused by the mortal whose skull the entity was trying to claim.
What are you doing? the mortal had asked. Seth melted back into his own thoughts, reaching for the cancerous taint taking hold behind his eyes.
What intrusion is this? Who are you?
The entity saw how the mortal manifested itself out of its meaty shell: a being of silver light with eyes of violet fire.
‘I am the death of Kathur,’ the entity had replied. It also took psychic form now, within the human’s psychic perception. A bulky, swollen figure with white armour that somehow writhed in a million little movements. Seth looked closer – the armour, despite being Astartes in shape and style, was formed of fat, wriggling maggots.
You are Death Guard, Seth had said.
‘I was. For my loyalty to the Grandfather and the pain I inflicted upon the servants of the False Emperor, I was raised above the Legion.’
As was the Traveller. Seth was serene as he spoke, as though he were idly contemplating some matter of minor curiosity rather than the presence of a daemon within his mind. You are kin to the Traveller.
‘I know no Traveller,’ it said.
The Herald. Typhus.
‘The First Captain. The Host. My brother in arms, Typhon. I am a prince of daemons and deservedly so. But the Herald’s blood is avataric and thrice-blessed by the Plague Lord.’
I understand nothing of what you say.
‘You are human. If you understood the words, the knowledge would kill you.’
The Herald, he comes for you.
‘We were friends once. Battle-brothers. We will slay Scarus together.’
I cannot let you do this. We will stop you.
‘No. You are already dying. You have turned within for too long, and I am now the force animating your mortal bones.’
I will warn Thade.
‘Your hive-brother sees you move and thinks you still live. He does not see the truth.’
I will fight you here, then.
‘You will not win.’
Even in death, we serve Home and the Throne.
‘You will not win,’ the entity said again, and launched at the psyker, its writhing claws extended. The Cadian steeled himself for the assault, and for the last time in his life, Seth Roscrain went to war.
It was cripplingly intimate, fighting on a battlefield that existed only within Seth’s mind. As his flesh and blood body walked on, drooling and whispering to itself in the darkness beneath the monastery, his consciousness and power was utterly focused within, fighting the daemon inside his head.
The ethereal Astartes lashed out with bleeding claws that tore shreds from the silver light that formed Seth’s psychic projection. Where the talons fell and rent corposant psy-flesh, they left trails of ravenous maggot-things that bored into his silver skin.
Seth screamed into the depths of his mind as his eyes blasted back with violet flame in a vicious reply. The squirming mass covering the Astartes burned away in a wave of black smoke, revealing the bloated, corrupted armour beneath.
‘Your defiance is laughable. I cannot feel pain,’ the Astartes said, readying for another attack.
I will be glad to teach you. Seth smiled through clenched teeth as the worms burrowed into his form. With a surge of concentration, his staff flared into existence, held in his hands. He pointed the aquila motif at the Death Guard.
Pain. It feels a little like this.
Golden arcs of coruscating energy leapt the distance between the double eagle symbol and the Astartes. Seth felt a moment of heated satisfaction as the daemon shrieked and writhed in the holy fire.
The mind of the Astartes-thing was a union of daemonic and once-human perceptions, and this heady clash of conception struggled to grasp just why it was feeling agony for the first time in ten thousand years. It was strong, immortal.
But it was still disembodied, and that made it weak. Most of its true strength was in its physical form, and even that was massively depleted in the wake of calling the plague.
It had been a fool to let the mortal bait it like this, and as it glared at Seth’s ghostly form, gleaming with golden light and a halo of violet flame, it saw the psyker knew it, too. Their telepathic closeness within this internal battleground sent their thoughts flashing back and forth to one another.
Are we done? Seth sneered, the eagle atop his black staff wreathed in blinding fire. I had more.
‘You die for this, human.’
I was born ready for that.
‘You will greet that death now!’
True… The two wraiths met, claws against flesh and holy eagle against armour. Both souls caught fire and began to dissolve in the psychic fury of their meeting, but only one of the souls screamed. Seth managed a smile as his psychic body immolated, and he looked into the daemon’s shrieking visage. He’d never had a chance of winning. Even now his form was dissipating in the blink of an eye compared to the slow erosion of the daemon Astartes. And still the Astartes howled.
>
…but death is worth it, he hissed as the violet light faded from his eyes, just to see that look on your face.
‘Seth,’ it had said, ‘has been dead for some time now.’
The daemon wearing Seth turned to face the Cadians. Already, it swelled and grew, bulges of contorted muscle tearing through the oversized bad weather jacket Seth had owned for years. Blood ran in trails from the sockets in his head and neck, and the aquila atop the psyker’s staff shattered in a hail of shards that killed three men.
Tionenji fired first, blowing the insides of Seth’s head out the back of his skull. Thade and the others opened fire a moment later, shredding their psyker’s stolen flesh in a hail of las-fire. Thade’s bolters pounded once each, hammering explosive rounds into Seth’s chest and sending the psyker back against the wall in a mess of blood and bone.
It wasn’t dead. It wasn’t even annoyed. Still it grew, for now it had flesh, but it needed more for a true rebirth. Clawed hands of thickening yellow flesh reached out for the closest two men in the confines of the corridor. The manifesting daemon tore the throat from the first and pulverised the spine of the second in its vice-like grip.
Corrun’s head rolled back on his neck and he collapsed, fingers spasming as they touched the gaping wound where his throat had been. The second man stayed in the daemon’s grip, wielded like a flail to hammer more soldiers from their feet and bludgeon them to death against the decking and walls.
The 88th fell back to a wider part of the corridor, the front ranks crouched so those behind could fire. Thade’s pistols roared alongside the inquisitor’s psycannon, these heavier weapons ripping chunks from the mass of warty flesh rising before them. The daemon, hunched in the hallway, regarded the fragile Cadians with one bloodshot violet eye the size of a human hand. The air reeked of burning meat and the ozone of las-weapons discharging at close quarters. More soldiers died as the beast swung left and right with its corpse flail.
‘Purge the unclean!’ Caius shouted, chanting a screed of chastisements as his shoulder cannon fired. Each bolt landed like a spray of acid, biting hard and making steaming wounds in the daemon’s flesh.
The creature began to back away, retreating from the carnage it had caused. In the space of a handful of heartbeats, fifteen men lay dead. Thade’s cry to pursue broke off in his mouth as those fifteen men, in various states of dismemberment and ruin, all began to move again. As Seth had done moments before, they too started to swell and discolour.
‘Flesh!’ the daemon roared, and clutching two corpses in each giant fist, it turned and moved down the corridor in a hunchbacked run. The Cadians heard its pounding footsteps even as they turned their guns on the rising bodies of their own comrades.
Corrun and the other slain Cadians were similarly resistant to injury as their bodies thickened and bloated in imitation of Seth’s corrupted form. Thade aimed his pistols at the wet, blinking orb in the centre of Corrun’s forehead, formed from his eyes merging as he mutated. The shells rammed into the soft tissue and detonated a moment later, leaving the daemon without half of its head.
Thade backed away. The thing that had been Corrun seemed untroubled by the myriad injuries it was sustaining in the onslaught.
‘We have to get through!’ Caius cried.
‘Hold ranks!’ Thade called. The corridor was illuminated in the flickering redness of mass las-fire. The sharp tang of ozone even smothered the reek of the monstrous beings stalking towards the Imperials.
‘Don’t let them touch you!’ Caius yelled to the men. No one asked why. The order was enough; details were irrelevant. You could tell just by looking at them that touching them was going to kill you somehow.
‘Advance!’ Thade ordered. The survivors of the Cadian 88th fell into step, unleashing fire in a relentless torrent as the daemons advanced down the narrow corridor towards them.
Outside the monastery at last, Typhus and his Death Guard escort stood at the open doors of the Shrine of the Emperor’s Unending Majesty. Although he had linked up with XIV Legion forces already on Kathur, his warband was devastated.
The Death Guard had come across the seventeen Chimeras left by the 88th in the monastery grounds.
‘Abandoned,’ Typhus hissed over the vox as he gestured to the tanks. ‘I sense only trace echoes of life.’
‘I hear the puling creed of an Imperial tongue,’ one of the Traitor Astartes had voxed as they surveyed the scene. ‘He chants.’
Typhus heard it, too. A lone man, whispering Imperial litanies across a vox-channel. The benedictions in the Emperor’s name hurt the Herald’s ears, and he deactivated the channel with a blink-click directed at an icon on his helmet’s internal display.
Find him+, Typhus pulsed to his brethren. The Death Guard moved closer to the tanks, which was when they started to die.
Nine of the turrets spun on cue, as Osiron’s servitors – hardwired into the weapons systems of the Chimeras under Thade’s orders – opened fire on the Traitors. Multi-barrelled laser turrets emitted their high-pitched whines, slicing through Astartes plate while heavy bolters mounted on the tank’s hulls boomed their own angry chorus.
No once-mortal being, even those granted immortality by the Ruinous Powers, was without weakness. The Death Guard had survived dozens of centuries as the hosts of supernatural plagues, but their incredible resilience to torments of the flesh also made them cumbersome – at least relative to their skills in life as true Astartes. They sought cover with lumbering slowness, several of their number being cut down and pain-filled lives lasting ten thousand years ending forever in a storm of ambushing fire.
Dead Man’s Hand waited until the Death Guard had advanced fully into the monastery grounds and surrounded the tanks. Vertain licked his lips as he watched the green-armoured heretics taking refuge behind smaller buildings in the estate gardens. He picked his targets, sent a series of vox-clicks to the other three pilots alongside him so they would know not to waste ammunition by overlapping his fire arc, and ordered the attack.
Vertain had smiled as he heard Zailen still chanting.
Typhus’s rage was boundless. He had ordered his men to destroy the tanks and pull the walkers apart. Half of this plan met with success. The servitors aboard the Chimeras offered little threatening resistance when the Traitor Astartes tore into the hulls and attacked them with roaring chainblades.
The Sentinels, however, retreated back into the powerless, empty night-time city, leaving only a vox echo of laughter for Typhus to sneer over.
The Herald’s forces had taken a punishing beating throughout their short commitment to this campaign, but by the Grandfather, he was here now.
And now he would…
And now…
‘No,’ Typhus breathed, feeling the hive in his intestines writhe and clench.
‘Lord?’ voxed a nearby Death Guard.
In the recesses of his mind, the eternal scream from beneath the monastery fell silent. Typhus clenched his teeth, shattering two of them and swallowing the wave of carrion-eating flies that threatened to leave his lips.
‘No!’ he roared within the confines of his horned helmet.
NO!+ his mind’s voice shrieked, a thousand times louder despite its physical silence.
From a thousand, barely a hundred remained.
Bloodstained, battered, wounded, the last hundred entered the circular bridge of the Aggrieved.
Jevrian’s broken arm was set, but he’d picked up a limp from one of the cyclopean creatures’ claws gashing his thigh. The wound was smeared with anti-ague gel but it still stung, in Jevrian’s own words, like an army of bastards.
Osiron’s breathing rattled in and out of his rebreather and he held his axe low in tired hands. Rax stalked alongside the tech-priest, jaws spread for battle, its armoured body filthy with enemy blood.
Thade and Darrick were unharmed but exhausted, and Thade’s sw
ord was clogged with gore, preventing any function. Caius had expended all of his sacred ammunition on the warp-beasts, and simply let his heavy psycannon fall to the floor, ignoring it now that it was useless.
The 88th fanned out around the circular room, looking in at the centre of the chamber where the raised control throne jutted from the floor on a grand stepped platform. Chains hung from the ceiling of the chamber, decorated by the old mark III helms of long-dead loyalist Astartes. The cogitator banks and consoles by the walls sat in ruin, many still with their operators close to their stations, wasted away to loose piles of bone on the ground.
A hundred rifles raised to cheeks as Thade pointed his fouled sword at the figure in the throne. The entity was reborn. Its reserves of strength might have been exhausted by both the plague it unleashed and the invisible, draining wounds inflicted by Seth’s final assault, but it sensed the nearness of Typhus, and that nearness made the entity bold.
It was clearly once an Astartes. Time, and the favour of its hateful god, had changed that. What sat upon the throne now was club-limbed and twisted, like something half-formed from a psyker’s nightmare and wrapped in ill-fitting Astartes armour. Its flesh was liquefied in places, melting and reforming like hot candlewax. Blisters and buboes covered its skin where bleeding rashes did not.
‘Hello,’ it said.
‘In the name of the God-Emperor,’ Caius intoned, and the daemon recognised the only true threat in the room. Power roiled from Caius. In the moment the entity sensed it up close, it knew fear.
‘Die,’ it said to the inquisitor.
Caius died. Not instantly, but within a few short seconds. The veins stood out on his face, dark and ugly, as he mustered his psychic might to repel the horrendously powerful telepathic invasion. It was more thorough and disgustingly more tender than any physical violation. Bastian Caius, who had come all this way to serve the Throne, drew his power sword and activated it, feeling an alien force eating his mind. He would have been at least a little consoled to learn of the immense effort the daemon had used in this command. He would have been proud to learn the daemon had feared him so much that it risked further psychic drain to ensure Caius’s demise.
Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Page 23