Dark Imperium: Plague War

by Guy Haley

  The rest of the Plague Guard lords fought claw and sword amid the mortals’ ranks. The Gangrel knuckled through groups of Space Marines, bowling them over with his wildly swinging crippled legs, smashing them aside with emaciated arms as their bolts buried themselves harmlessly in his body. Pestus Throon toyed with a half company of brightly garbed warriors. Famine smothered men under his ample folds of flesh. The mortals fought too well and too hard for Ku’gath to feel completely safe. Their tanks pushed into the daemonic horde, close to encircling his position. Large groups of their war engines had broken through the line of Titans loyal to Nurgle, wrought havoc on his warriors, and moved off to engage the Blight Towers. Artillery fire stirred the mist into agitation. Clouds of flies and buzzing plague drones kept the sky free of machines, but that was a passing advantage. The multitudes of mortal warriors on Ku’gath’s side lacked resilience, and were being slaughtered. Only Mortarion’s decaying sons, the Death Guard, held up the enemy and, in rare places, pushed them back.

  ‘Curse and blast,’ grumbled Ku’gath. ‘This is no activity for a creature such as I.’ He lofted a dirty flask into the advancing tanks. The glass shattered upon a track guard, and a gluey mess spread across it. The tank ground onwards a few paces, before rust spread wildfire quick, eating through its plating and locking up its tracks. The guns continued to fire, until they too were corroded fast. A shell, stuck in the breach, exploded, lifting off the turret with a little pop of fire. Another Great Unclean One would have delighted at the effect of this metal-eating phage, but Ku’gath just sighed, and lethargically speared an Ultramarine through the head with a splinter of wood he conjured from the air. ‘I should be on Iax, brewing a greater curse,’ he moaned. ‘Or never shall I smile, not once, I swear. Why can I not get anything done?’

  Septicus, on the other hand, was enjoying himself. Not far from his master he gigglingly battled the primarch. His giant’s sword thrummed through the air, catching Guilliman’s weapon in a series of ringing clashes that flung out gobbets of fire and poison. Where the poison spattered the Armour of Fate, it blistered. Where fire splashed Septicus, his flesh streamed black smoke, but never did the mirth leave him.

  ‘Why can I not take such pleasure in war?’ grumbled Ku’gath. ‘Why?’

  Squadrons of plague drones drifted by, ragged wings a blur, death’s heads raining among the Corpse-Emperor’s servants.

  ‘I wish you would all just stop. You do not see,’ announced Ku’gath to the Emperor’s warriors, ‘how misguided you all are.’ He leaned forward, forcing the nurglings to carry him onwards, closer to his audience. ‘Your god is a liar, and a quiet one at that. He does not even speak! He offers nothing but his cadaver’s smile for all your efforts on His behalf. Death is yours, and then to follow, extinguishment of your being in the wild, wild warp. But!’ he declaimed. ‘If you were to come into Nurgle’s garden, a different fate would await you. The Garden is a paradise for all, where nothing ever dies. Every soul, every life force, from that of the littlest virus to the greatest of beasts can rise again from the muck. There is no death, there is no pain, and suffering is a sweet and constant joy! Your lord offers no rebirth, no hope! Why do you fight for Him?’

  His preaching had no effect. The Space Marines were deaf to it.

  ‘Very well,’ he sulked, ‘suit yourselves,’ and continued to kill them instead.

  Squatumous was the first to be cast back into the warp. He was surrounded on three sides by the Custodian Guard and Guilliman’s soldier sons. Riddled so thoroughly with bolt shot that there were more of his guts outside his body than within, he became weak. The Sisters of Silence moved in for the kill.

  Alarmed at their approach, for their killing him would bring the true death, Squatumous let out a mighty fart, and decapitated himself with his own sword. Ku’gath snuffled as Squatumous’ soul shrieked out of the mortal realm. That was not good, not good at all. He died too easily. Parmenio’s warp current was thin gruel to the daemons, too weak to sustain them without the nexus of Mortarion’s clock. They were running out of time.

  ‘Oh, Lord Mortarion, where are you?’ Ku’gath asked the sky. He nervously watched as the Gangrel engaged in a duel with the Custodian leader.

  Another blast of soul force quaked the flesh of creation. Invisible to the mortal combatants, it was a painful light to daemon eyes, for it illuminated defeat. It shone upon disaster. Ku’gath hunted for the source, and found Bubondubon lying upon his back, arms outflung, his laughing mouth silenced as his corpse dissolved into clotted ooze and piles of squirming maggots.

  ‘Oh dear, oh no!’ Ku’gath said. ‘Bubondubon smiles no more!’

  The banishment of two of the Great Unclean Ones was bought at great cost to the mortals, but Guilliman’s army was cheered nonetheless, and pressed their advantage. The Custodians sent hundreds of plaguebearers back to the Grandfather’s wards to await the indulgence of their god. They were the lucky ones. The Sisters of Silence slew them by the dozen, cutting their souls to shreds and ending them for good.

  Ku’gath licked his lips nervously. Upon Septicus’ shoulders the day rested. He might require some aid, thought Ku’gath. He looked about. The Gangrel fought on against the lord in gold. Pestus Throon wailed and swiped at his assailants with a madly tolling handbell whose peals sent the daemons nearby into exuberant jigs. Famine continued to roll about like a demented fleshy barrel in a storm-tossed ship’s hold. Guilliman was isolated, but ever so mighty. Things looked bad.

  Ku’gath wrung his hands. ‘I cannot help myself, of course,’ he muttered. ‘Much too important.’ He feared the primarch’s blade. ‘If I attack, I could die, permanently! Come on, Septicus, a drop of blood, a single drop, that is all we require for the binding to be done.’

  His nose twitched. His dismay abated. He nearly smiled. The blood was forthcoming. He could smell it trickling down time’s twisting ways.

  Guilliman fought with terrifying skill. He was, thought Ku’gath, a god in his own way, though one fermented in a jar, a most ungodly means of creation even compared to his own undignified birth in Nurgle’s cauldron. But like a god he fought, relentless, powerful, with speed no mortal could match and few daemons either, though he was not infallible. Ku’gath was closely associated with the divine. He knew no god could avoid mistakes entirely.

  Guilliman carved a flaming trough through Septicus’ gut. The greater daemon’s cackles rose up towards a higher note, where laughter stopped and screams began, but he wrestled back his pain, and while the primarch prepared his next attack, reached out his hand.

  A tiny opening presented itself to Septicus. A long black claw caressed the primarch’s arm. Though it blistered in the unholy aura surrounding the Anathema’s son, it did its work, snagging on the softseal in the hollow of Guilliman’s elbow and opening up the space between vambrace and rerebrace.

  The primarch’s body closed itself. His immune system condemned Septicus’ best diseases to swift extinction. The suit bled sealing gels that closed up the ribbed hyperplastek, but not before a single drop of demi­god’s blood slid out of the wound, and fell glistening to the ground.

  Septicus shrieked with triumph.

  ‘Now, dear Ku’gath, now!’

  ‘Oh ho!’ said Ku’gath, approaching something close to happiness. He held aloft his left arm and snapped his fingers once.

  The noise produced was no fleshly click, but a thunderclap roar. Mouldering horns hallooed, and then so did the towers, hidden in the fogs. They turned their soul furnaces to a new purpose. Dirty lenses atop them turned upon squeaking mounts.

  The mist blinked green. Writhing beams of energy squirmed their way out of the murk, one cast from each of the unseen towers. The first caught Guilliman about the wrist as he raised his blade to strike down Septicus. The second wrapped itself about his neck. The third about his waist. Each snare caught him, held him, until he was immobile.

  Septicus grinned wickedl
y. Ku’gath wailed in triumph.

  ‘We have him! We have the primarch!’

  At Ku’gath’s call, cool downdrafts stirred the mist. Dropping from the sky came the Lord of Death, Mortarion, primarch of the Death Guard. He landed, wings extended, Silence in his grasp. The earth shook.

  Mortarion drew in a rattling breath through his respirator. Cumuli of mustard yellow fumes jetted from its underside.

  ‘Hello, brother,’ he said.

  Guilliman struggled against his bonds. The daemon who had fought him stepped back and gloated. Battle continued in all quarters. Imperial armour pushed into the enemy. Colquan and the rest continued their fights, barred from aiding their master by the remainder of the Plague Guard lords. He could not move. The energy lash around his sword arm was the weakest, its warp energies sapped by the power of the Emperor’s sword. Perhaps, given time, he might wrest his limb free. But he had no time.

  Guilliman stared up into the face of his brother. Like Fulgrim, like Magnus, Mortarion was no longer a being crafted by ancient science, but something more, and something less: a half-man warped by Chaos.

  Mortarion had always been taller than his brother, but as a daemon he was so much bigger that comparisons of height lost meaning. Mortarion was of another order of creature to Guilliman, a demigod remade as a monster from a child’s story. Beneath his cowl, his stern face had decayed on the bone. The eyes were white, the skin grey, and ropes of mucus ran from the fleshless hole of his nose visible over his respirator. All that was human about him was inflated to preposterous degree, and gilded with insanity.

  From his back two giant moth’s wings spread. Nor had his wargear escaped alteration. The Barbaran plate had turned from its original white to a pondwater green, pockmarked with glistening sores and grown to suit its wearer’s new stature. Chains hung reeking censers and trinkets that displayed Mortarion’s allegiance to the god of plagues. His warscythe had grown to the size of a communications mast, and sprouted osseous frills. His xenos pistol, the Shenlongi Lantern, had changed the least, only growing to fit his size.

  Falls of corposant welled up from within Mortarion’s robes and rolled to the ground, filling the mist with ghostly faces. Daemon flies and mites flew around him in solemn circles, bearing symbols of false religion.

  ‘I face you at last, my brother,’ said Guilliman.

  Mortarion chuckled. ‘You make it sound as if you have brought me to heel, and will beat me in combat! After ten thousand years, you remain pompous. Look about you. I have you. I have won.’

  ‘You have not won yet.’

  ‘If this is not a victory,’ said Mortarion, ‘then I should probably consult one of your tedious manuals to better acquaint myself with the meaning of the term.’

  ‘It’s not over.’

  Guilliman continued his efforts to free his arm while he spoke. Mortarion glanced down at the Emperor’s sword.

  ‘Father gave you His blade, I see. Or did you take it off His dead knee? I suppose it matters not. You will not wield it against me.’

  ‘Fight me, you coward,’ growled Guilliman. The flames on the Emperor’s Sword flared.

  Mortarion laughed.

  ‘Do you think I would stoop so low as to fight you, my brother? Look at me!’ He spread the shrouds of his wings wide, fanning Guilliman with plague winds. ‘You are so far beneath me. I am mightier than you could ever be. Why would I waste my strength on crushing an insect like you?’

  ‘Instead you save your wickedness for my people, who cannot fight back at all,’ said Guilliman. ‘How noble of you.’

  ‘Wickedness?’ said Mortarion. ‘Is that what you see? I bring them salvation from the hell our father created. I bring them the joy of endless rebirth. I bring them life.’

  ‘You cast yourself as a warlord-prophet. But you are a slave. I pity you brother, you have deceived yourself.’

  ‘It is you who is the slave!’ hissed Mortarion. ‘The slave of our uncaring father, who made us to do His bidding! You who trod the path He laid out for you without question, sure that the lies He told were the truth, too stupid and trusting to question them for yourself. You never saw what He did to me. The first time I met Him He stole from me my life’s struggle. It was nothing to Him, a bump in His smooth road to godhood. He took what I had worked and suffered for and He did not care! He called Himself the Emperor! What kind of being has the presumption to claim such a title? Who takes and takes the affections of His sons and gives so little in return? He would not even deign to tell us His name! You swallowed it all, poison milk from our machine mother, machines He created, things like we are. I tried His way. I should never have compromised my own principles. But I did. I was a champion of common people. I abandoned them for a galactic despot. Now I serve the people again.’

  Mortarion glared at Guilliman with milky eyes, defying him to challenge his pronouncements.

  ‘If I am a puppet of an uncaring master, then what are you?’ said Guilliman. ‘A being who wallows in warp power while crying hatred for the witch? A plaything for corruption and disease? You blustered long and hard against psychic power, and claimed total fearlessness and indomitability none could match, yet when faced with death, the ultimate challenge, you failed.’

  Mortarion flinched and rose up in the air, his insect wings beating quickly.

  ‘You do not know what you speak of! You do not know what it was like! I was shown the depths of suffering of a kind you could never understand, and as death beckoned I was given the power to withstand it.’

  ‘I know no suffering?’ Guilliman laughed bleakly. ‘I saw my brothers,­ many of whom I loved, all of whom I respected, turn their backs upon our creator and plunge the galaxy into war. I saw humanity reach for one golden moment of peace, brush it with its fingers, and then I saw you and the others spit upon it and tear it away. I died at the hands of my kin. I awoke to a galaxy so far from the glorious enlightenment of the Emperor it resembles the Catheric hell. You turned your back on all you claimed to stand for, cravenly, without a second thought. Where was my brother who could weather any storm, whose body shrugged off poison, who would never, ever give in? What happened to him? The Mortarion of old would never have allowed this. He would have died with honour. You must have seen, as your warriors were transformed into these hulking monsters, what awaited you should you say yes to salvation. You who called yourself the strongest of us, the redoubtable, the master of any pain or sorrow! How hollow those words seem to me now. I at least know what I am. I look at myself, and though I perceive many failures I know with unshakeable certainty that I perform the duty I was created for. That I fight for the preservation of mankind.’

  ‘Then you do not fight for the Emperor?’ asked Mortarion, his voice an insinuating rattle.

  ‘I fight for what He believed in.’

  ‘An advocate’s quibbling. You fight for yourself.’

  ‘I remain a champion of humanity, whereas you are the lackey of evil.’

  ‘Am I?’ said Mortarion. His wings beat softly. ‘Then tell me, Roboute, if our father were so good, look me in the eye and tell me that He loved us all as any father should love his sons.’

  Guilliman stared at him, his jaw clenched in anger.

  Mortarion laughed. It began as a wheezing in his lungs, thick with phlegm, rattled up his dry throat, and clacked his teeth together behind his breathing mask before hissing out in puffs of yellow gas. ‘You know, don’t you, Roboute? You’ve seen it.’ He wagged one long, skeletal finger at his kin. ‘I knew something was different about you.’ He leaned close. ‘You spoke with Him on Terra. Tell me, what did He say? Did He plead to be released? Did He beg you to be set free from His Golden Throne?’

  Guilliman said nothing.

  ‘Oh, my brother, it cannot be,’ Mortarion said in mock horror. ‘Did He say nothing? Is our father dead?’ He stood back and shook his cadaver’s head. ‘Of course He isn’t
, is He? Not in any real sense. Beings like Him are beyond mortality. You are so misguided. He sought godhood, and in a way He has what He wanted. He is a Corpse-God, a lord of death more terrible and vile than my adopted grandfather, who offers those who follow him the gift of endless renewal!’ Mortarion gestured with Silence. ‘You look at this land and see only ruination. It is a shame for you that Nurgle’s potential is invisible. Where you see destruction, I see but one phase in a cycle of death, rebirth, fecundity and decay. It is glorious, colourful, vital! So much more than our father’s pale lies. All secrets might be known within the warp,’ said Mortarion. ‘It is timeless and eternal. Everything that happens here is reflected there endlessly. Every moment can be accessed, every lie heard, every broken promise relived. I have been deep within, far from Nurgle’s garden, into realms where secrets flock like corpse flies. I found many interesting things there. Do you know why He made us?’ He drew back the scythe. ‘Do you think it was for affection? I think, once I’ve crippled you, and you lie blind and useless in an iron cage, begging to die, I might tell you, and then your fine words here will burn in your mouth.’ Mortarion made a wet, clotted sound behind his mask. His white-eyed gaze moved over Guilliman’s limbs. ‘But that is yet to come. Legs first, I think,’ he said. ‘You will not be needing those at all. Do not worry, my brother, my scythe is sharp, it will hurt only a little.’

  Silence descended.

  A blinding light stopped it dead.

  Maldovar Colquan, tribune of the Adeptus Custodes, was the first to see the girl arrive.

  He was fighting the long-armed daemon with the useless legs who had cannoned through the Imperial side like a crippled ape until he stepped in its path, grasped one filthy, emaciated arm and pulled it towards him. They duelled still.

  The bolter upon his spear flashed, sending explosive rounds into the thing at point blank range, blowing out craters in its flesh. Black blood poured from its hide. It would not fall. It blocked his thrusts with iron hard forearms, knocking away his blade. It carried no weapon. It was little more than a collection of bones wrapped in mouldering flesh, and its ribs were clearly visible through the meanness of its muscles, but it was monstrously strong, supporting itself upon one hand to swipe at him with the other. Filth leaked constantly from its paralysed hindquarters. Urine dribbled from between its knotted thighs. Faecal waste splattered against Colquan’s golden armour as he dodged and swung. His plate could not withstand a blow from its grimy paws; only his speed kept him safe. In full armour, a Custodian Guard was immense, but he moved with angelic grace.