Dark Imperium: Plague War

by Guy Haley

  Colquan did not trust Guilliman’s motives. He was among the few dissenting voices among the Ten Thousand who queried what the returned primarch’s intentions to the Throne truly were. But he hated Chaos more. When Guilliman was snared and Mortarion landed in front of the primarch, he shouted out, urging his Custodians to Guilliman’s side. Their way was blocked by a wall of daemonic flesh. Four of the greater daemons still rampaged about the battlefield, shrugging off attacks that would shatter cliffs. Innumerable lesser fiends attacked from all sides. Two of his warriors were down, their golden shapes pressed into the mud. The thing he kept away from the Emperor’s last living loyal son growled and hiccupped its glee, and battered twice as hard at him with its long arms.

  ‘To the primarch!’ he shouted. ‘To the primarch!’

  The daemon’s laugh clicked in a disease-ravaged throat. The damned thing seemed to have no voice of its own, expressing itself solely through violence and mirth. Colquan stabbed at it rapidly, driving it back. It shuffled around on its calloused lower limbs, evading every blow.

  Then, at the height of desperation, she came: a young woman walking through the press of magic-born evils as if she negotiated a market crowd. A lone Battle Sister walked at her side, an escort who had become a herald. The girl was lit golden and walked lightly. Though the ground was churned to mud, her feet left no imprint where her companion slipped and struggled.

  ‘The saint of Tyros,’ he whispered to himself. He could not think of any other word. Time slowed. The sound of the battle retreated to celestial distances. His spear ceased moving. The fight went from him. The girl took a hold of something inside him that made him forget where he was.

  Her eyes were hollows and her skin blotched. Atop her head her hair was coming out in hanks. The white shift she wore was marred by burns. She was falling apart, but around her was a soft lambency that grew as she neared the two primarchs, filtering between the combatants, setting the mist aglow, turning it from something foul to a net of glorious light. Colquan’s gaze could not leave her. The conversation of the primarch brothers faded from his hearing. The creature fighting him ceased to be a concern. He could have died then, killed by the daemon, but the Neverborn too was enchanted. The fleshless septum of its nose quivered as she walked past. It raised a quivering finger, and spoke in a hissing bellows voice, creaking and choked with grave dust.

  ‘An-ath-e-ma…’

  One word. It swam across the air, wafting towards the girl as soft as silk carried off on the wind.

  Time slid to a stop. Atoms stopped their motions. Light hung unmoving in the air. Sprays of blood made solid arches over the field, bolts hung midflight, the candles of their propulsive units stilled. An eternal cold gripped Colquan. Only he, for reasons he did not know, could look about him freely. All warriors were locked motionless in tableau vivant. Guilliman strained in bonds of living light. Mortarion had his scythe raised over his head.

  But although all things had ceased their movement, so that the universe was trapped within a slice of a moment as insubstantial as a pict conjured from water, the girl still moved. She turned her head and looked at Colquan. In her face burned golden eyes as old as time, and from her mouth sprang the luminance of a star.

  Within his ornate helm, Colquan’s mouth fell open.

  ‘My lord?’ he whispered.

  Dammed time broke through, crashing reality’s clockworks back into motion. Once more, the progression of events proceeded upon its unstoppable course.

  Everything, having been stopped, rushed to make up lost seconds, and occurred at once.

  The gangly daemon rocked upon its ruined lower quarters, amazed at what it saw. Colquan came to his senses before it did, and swung his spear around. The blade whooped through the air, connecting Colquan to the Neverborn’s neck by a bridge of arcing power. The daemon turned to strike back. As it did, its monstrous head fell from its shoulders. Its soul departed in a flurry of flies, and its body fizzed into nothing.

  The girl stepped into the air above the melee. A dome of light sprang up from the ground. It expanded with light’s speed, catching everything in its shining radius. Men and Space Marines staggered. The Neverborn screamed. Mortarion’s weapon was caught the instant before it could descend.

  A mighty wind blew up, blasting the fog away. Near the girl, the mist vanished. Further out, it flowed quickly back, revealing more and more of the battlefield, until only the farthest reaches were obscured. The sun broke through, and lit upon the broken plain. The lesser Neverborn evaporated like ice in a furnace, cast wailing back into the immaterium. The greater staggered, their bodies scourged by the girl’s glow. Their skin blistered. Their eyes cooked in their heads. They howled and screamed. Mortarion, being more daemon now than human, was flung backwards, his wings bent around his body. The bonds holding Guilliman shattered to glowing motes, and the primarch surged free.

  Guilliman did not pause to consider the strangeness of his liberation, but strode forth immediately, brandishing his father’s sword.

  ‘Mortarion, enough! Now you will face me, and collect the wages of treachery,’ shouted Guilliman.

  The Lord of Death staggered up to his feet and hefted his scythe, but he did not turn to attack his purer brother. He swung Silence backwards instead, its edge opening a slit in time and space. The daemon Ku’gath staggered through first. His palanquin was left in flaming ruins on the field, and his own back was afire.

  ‘I will face you, Roboute Guilliman,’ said Mortarion, ‘upon Iax. Follow me there, where we shall do battle the final time. We shall finish this, you and I. Your life will be forfeit, and I will take your kingdom for my own. On Iax!’

  ‘Stop, damn you, you coward! Come here and fight me!’ roared Guilliman.

  Mortarion shook his head, and flung himself through the rift. It closed behind him.

  ‘Mortarion!’ shouted Guilliman. ‘Mortarion, you treacherous bastard! Come back!’

  The primarch let out a wordless roar. Frustration and rage boiled up through his body. He tore off the helm of the Armour of Fate and cried out up at the brightening sky. His face was red. The cords of his neck stood out. Colquan had never thought to see Roboute Guilliman wear such an expression.

  ‘Mortarion!’

  ‘To the primarch!’ called Colquan again. ‘Protect the primarch!’

  This time, his warriors were able to obey.

  Septicus Seven was trapped. Skin peeled in burned sheets from his back as he waddled for the warp rift, reaching it as it slammed closed behind Mortarion. He wheeled about, blinking dripping fat from his eyes. His grip on reality was weakening. His body was damaged and disincorporating around him. The earth shivered with subterranean fevers. The star fortress was coming.

  The others fell, their links with their impermanent bodies cut, their souls flung out from the world back into the seething energy of the warp. Within its currents, their scattered essences would reform, and drag themselves sheepishly back to the Garden of Nurgle where they would be reborn in time from the pods of monumental gnarlmaws, should Grandfather forgive them their failure. The Gangrel joined Squatumous and Bubondubon on their journey back through the veil. The others would follow soon. Pestus Throon was completely flayed of his blubber, which lay as a discarded suit around him. The skin from his legs was wrinkled around his ankles like the trousers of man surprised while dressing. He was blind, his great plague weapons steaming in the mud. Reality pressed hard on all of them as the warp’s energies raced from Parmenio.

  Famine lay in his own half melted fat and could not rise. The lesser Plague Guard had been banished already, or were on their way. As Septicus watched, a flight of plague drones frittered to nothing in the air. Nurglings popped like sad balloons. The Imperial army was surging forward. Throon was surrounded by a ring of forty Space Marines, and blown apart by a thousand bolt rounds. Famine got to his feet with a chortle of triumph, only to find himself s
taring down the end of a Stormhammer’s primary armament, and was duly blasted to pieces. Their souls passed, howling misery, yet confident in rebirth.

  Septicus had undergone the process himself uncountable times, but he feared that this time was going to be the very last.

  Roboute Guilliman came at him in a frenzy worthy of his brother Angron. His sword trailed a crescent of fire that singed Septicus without touching him, curling back the edges of his black soul with its furious heat.

  ‘A truce! A parlay!’ Septicus called, catching the Emperor’s sword upon his blade. Deep strata of his being shook at the ring of metal on metal.

  ‘Speak? With you? I will destroy you all!’ roared Guilliman. ‘All you daemons, you plague monsters, change bringers, blood worshippers, tempters. I will cast you into nothing. I will wipe your stain from existence. I shall not rest,’ he shouted, bringing the Emperor’s weapon down over his head one handed, Septicus turned aside the blow, ‘until every one of your vile kind,’ Guilliman drove at Septicus’ belly, and again the Great Unclean One parried it aside, retreating further, ‘is destroyed, and the galaxy is freed of your presence!’

  ‘We cannot be destroyed!’ said Septicus. ‘We are of the warp!’ He swung his sword back at Guilliman. The primarch batted it away with the Gauntlet of Dominion. Septicus could not beat the Avenging Son, not now. All he had to do was hold him off for long enough until his body disintegrated and his soul could escape. He could feel it going, feel the fetters of corporeality loosening around his spirit. By his will, he hastened the process, laughing in anticipation at the look on the primarch’s face when he slipped from his reach. ‘You cannot win. Galatan comes!’ He pointed a weeping hand up to the sky. As the fogs sped away, a vast shape loomed. ‘Typhus is there. You may slaughter us all like swine, but you cannot bring that down! We are legion. We can never be destroyed.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Roboute Guilliman. ‘But I can make a start with you.’

  The Emperor’s sword burned bright. Septicus shrank back from its blowtorch roar. His eyes shrivelled in his head, their jelly running in thick tears down his face. He never saw the blow that ended him.

  The fires of the sword doused themselves in his guts. Septicus looked down sightlessly at the weapon buried up to its hilt in his heart.

  ‘And when you are driven from this universe,’ said Guilliman, ‘I shall purge yours also, until the warp is purified, and calm comes again to the minds and souls of humanity, though you shall never see it.’

  No chronicle would mark Septicus’ last words as worthy. ‘But–’ was all he said.

  Shouting, Guilliman ripped the Sword of the Emperor up through Septicus’ disintegrating body, cutting through softening ribs, cooking rancid organs, slicing multiple chins and his bactridian skull, until it burst from the top of Septicus’ head in a shower of gore.

  Blackness exploded from the slain daemon. Guilliman’s sword flared bright again, driving it into shadow, and out of existence.

  The light of the Emperor burned Septicus away forever.

  The sun’s light was swallowed by eclipse. Galatan rolled across the sky, bringing false evening to the plains. Guilliman stood back from the stinking remains of Septicus Seven and looked about himself. He mastered his anger. The battle could still be lost.

  The centre of the enemy army had been ripped out. Daemon corpses dissipated into rancid smears of black goo. The more of them that fell, the quicker the rest lost their hold on reality. The Legio Mortis were withdrawing from the field, guns to the enemy, but their battleline was hemmed in by tightening packs of Imperial Titans, and Guilliman thought their destruction inevitable. He squinted across the plain, his primarch’s vision enabling him to see for kilometres, until battle haze and the remnants of the fog cloaked the distance from his view. The Blight Towers remained a problem, flimsy as they looked. They spat magic from their weapons that wreaked heavy casualties upon his army.

  ‘Mortarion,’ he said. ‘Mortarion.’

  Colquan came to his side. The remaining Custodians formed up about him. The earth quaked again, stronger now, as Galatan’s immensity pulled at the planet’s core.

  ‘The enemy are retreating,’ he said. ‘Galatan is here.’

  ‘Then we will soon know who has won, and who has lost,’ said Guilliman. He looked for the source of the light that had freed him. All he saw were bodies lying before the bulk of the Leviathan. Its guns boomed. It seemed huge now the fog had gone. ‘The girl,’ said Guilliman. ‘It was the girl who freed me.’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  ‘How did she come here?’ he asked.

  ‘Does it matter?’ said Colquan. He motioned up to the star fort, black against the sky.

  ‘Yes, it does, tribune. It matters very much. I must find her. Come.’

  They located the girl a few minutes later. The Sister Superior Iolanth, pale-faced with blood loss, sat next to her. The girl’s body was ruined by whatever had a hold of her, but it breathed. Her chest rose and fell very slowly. Death was coming for her. Her eyes had burned away. Her lips were scorched back around her teeth. Nothing mortal could contain that much power for long. She was out of place on the battlefield, but otherwise looked like the uncountable innocent dead Guilliman had seen on worlds the length and breadth of the Imperium. He knelt by her, and took her tiny hand in his massive gauntlet.

  ‘Leave me,’ said Guilliman.

  Colquan turned away, motioning his men to stand back.

  ‘She lives?’ Guilliman asked the Battle Sister.

  ‘For now,’ answered Iolanth.

  ‘How did she come here?’

  ‘I brought her,’ said Iolanth.

  ‘My orders were that she remain in Tyros.’

  ‘Sometimes the Emperor dictates unpalatable actions be taken.’

  ‘And now she will die,’ said Guilliman.

  ‘You care for her death?’

  ‘You do not?’

  ‘Are you not concerned she might be an enemy trick or a dangerous psyker now, my lord?’ Iolanth was bitter, past caring about punishment.

  ‘All I see is a dying girl,’ Guilliman said. ‘Whatever she is, or was, she was in the first instance a child of Terra.’ He looked skywards at Galatan’s underside filling the sky. Lights shone where fighter craft duelled one another, dodging, weaving, firing, exploding, in frantic dogfights. They were utterly insignificant next to the star fortress’ mass. ‘In a few moments, we will either be victorious or obliterated,’ he said. ‘Tell me, Sister, do you think this is the best mankind can hope for? Do you believe we can ever survive and know peace?’

  Iolanth was surprised at his question.

  He looked at her earnestly.

  ‘I have faith, my lord.’

  ‘Faith?’

  ‘Yes, my lord. Faith in your father.’

  Guilliman nodded. ‘Sometimes, I wish I had faith.’

  The girl groaned, and turned her eyeless face towards him.

  ‘Are you the Emperor made flesh again?’ the girl asked in a quiet, quiet voice. Her wounds seemed worse now she was conscious. The words were mangled, barely comprehensible.

  ‘I am not He,’ said Guilliman. ‘He made me. I am His creation. I am His son, the thirteenth and only primarch, Roboute Guilliman of Ultramar.’

  ‘You look like Him,’ she said, though she was blind. She sighed, a smile spread over her face. ‘I have seen such wondrous things.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Guilliman asked. ‘Magnus?’ He hesitated. ‘Father?’

  Her head lolled. A last breath sighed from her mouth.

  ‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

  The girl could no longer answer.

  Iolanth shuffled closer to him, her hand pressed against her injured side. ‘Take heart,’ she said. ‘Those who die in the Emperor’s grace are not lost, but shelter within His light in the everlasting
empyrean. Oh, my lord, it is beautiful.’ She moved a strand of hair from the dead girl’s face and smiled a bloody smile. ‘The Emperor protects,’ Iolanth said. ‘Never forget that the Emperor protects.’

  Guilliman looked at the girl’s mutilated body.

  ‘I can never believe that,’ he said.

  The building whoop of powerful weapons charging rang out across the heavens. Guilliman looked to Galatan.

  ‘But we shall see the truth of it in a second, Sister.’

  Galatan’s cannons spoke. Burning sheaths of air ignited around lances of plasma. New lights lit the primarch’s face.

  A plague tower was incinerated by a single blast, then a second. Secondary armaments followed in the sunfire’s wake, crashing down on the retreating Titans. A traitor Warlord rocked under the bombardment, void shields stripped away, and collapsed into burning ruin. Bombs rained down further towards the mountains, engulfing enemy formations in expanding wavefronts of fire as wide and thick as the fog had been.

  Guilliman watched Galatan deliver its judgement on Parmenio a while, then let the girl’s hand drop, stood and walked away, ordering his generals to make their reports to him aboard the Leviathan.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Family ties

  Needle pain pierced the blackness. A soft light illuminated the interior of Justinian’s helmet. A chime sounded.

  The glow came from a thumbnail back-up helmplate. All Justinian could see was a blur through the mucranoid crusting gumming up his eyes. He blinked it away.