by Guy Haley
With a great heave, the daemon coughed up squirming coils of corposant that let short-lived monsters into being. They roared, and fought, and spat venom in a mist over all present, before dissolving into pleading screams.
‘No more questions shall I answer, but be free, and complete the task given me,’ the voice boomed from every quarter, battering Felix to his knees. The lumen failed. ‘Nurgle shall not have thy head, but many-pathed Tzeentch!’
Blood streaming from his eyes, Felix hardly saw what happened next, but experienced it as a series of vignettes stamped into his memory by strobing psychic light. Natasé’s runes exploded in showers of wraithbone and the farseer was flung back against the wall. The cage of light collapsed inward, cutting scores into Captain Grud’s armour. The razor wire burst, and the daemon shucked its bonds. The chain about its neck glowed red and melted into smoke. Remo’s ruined body convulsed and changed, taking on a shimmering iridescence. Feathers sprouted from his arms and his back. His neck lengthened, becoming wattled, the head long and avian. Talons burst bloodily from his toes. The silver nail shot from his flesh, burying itself in the wall, and the daemon stepped down.
Grud moved to counter it, his armour still smoking from the cuts of Natasé’s cage, but the beast, now twenty feet tall and growing still, swatted him aside, sending him into one of the Librarians. Felix tried to rise, but the thing’s head swung around on its neck. One look from its beady eyes was enough to pin him in place. His body seemed ablaze with fire, and he roared with the pain.
Then there was light, a soothing flame that washed him as a balm, and he turned his head in time to see Guilliman, last loyal son, the sword of his father raised high over his head. The daemon shrank from it a moment, then attacked, striking faster than the eye could follow. There was an explosion, and a screaming that seemed to last forever. The fires of the sword burst outward, whirling around. The daemon shrieked. White smoke boiled from it, its screams turning to pathetic squeals, and it shrank, reduced again to human size. Felix saw the burning Remo transfixed upon the point of the Emperor’s Sword, then fall down to the floor.
The screams died. The fires died. The room went black.
For an age Felix lay stunned. He had not even managed to lay his hand upon his sword.
Silence passed. Felix moved. He was tender all over, but he could stand. He saw the glowing eye-lenses of Grud, the Librarians and, finally, to his relief, those of Roboute Guilliman’s Armour of Fate, unmistakable by their size and height above him.
‘Lumen,’ commanded Guilliman.
The single lamp on the chamber’s roof spat sparks, then slowly returned to life.
The Space Marine Librarians were on guard, weapons out. Nimbuses of psychic energy returned to play around the heads of all the psykers. Natasé was at the back of the room, his elaborate helm discarded. His face was paler than alabaster, his black eyes slits. He shivered quietly, battered more by the power of the Immortal Emperor’s Sword than the daemon’s manifestation, Felix thought.
Of Remo only a charred corpse remained, his limbs clutched in by fire-tightened sinew, his teeth white in a screaming mouth. Grud walked over to the dead man and looked down, his eye-lenses flashing an angry blue. It was he that spoke first, and he addressed Guilliman.
‘You are the lord of the Imperium, the Imperial Regent, the Lord Commander, the last loyal son of the Emperor Himself, my master and my general,’ Grud said. ‘But I shall never do the likes of this for you again. Mark my words well, primarch, you stray into dangerous waters with what has passed here.’
Later, Felix learnt that the entirety of Grud’s brotherhood departed from Fleet Primus that day, no matter where its battle groups were, and they would not serve at Guilliman’s side for some time.
Guilliman watched Grud go. The Sword of the Emperor was sheathed at his side, as if it had not left its scabbard.
‘A dangerous course indeed, and a heavy price. This man lost his life and his soul to bring us this information,’ Guilliman said. ‘But I now know what must be done to remove Mortarion from Ultramar.’
Chapter Three
A GREAT CHANGE
‘There were cities here, once,’ said Cherala. She coughed, and spat out a gob of phlegm. Her hip was hurting again, and her foot dragged. Another dubious gift from the jolly Grandfather.
‘Shut up, Cherala. There never were.’ Odifus had a honking voice, a legacy of the ear-worms that had got into his head when he was a babe. He could barely hear still over their trilling, and shouted all the while.
Cherala cringed. Odifus’ shout stirred up clouds of bile flies from the mounds. Giant fungi quivered and turned squelching on their stalks to watch them pass.
‘There were! Grandpa said,’ said Cherala. She pushed greasy hair out of her good eye. The other was half closed by throbbing growths. The witch kin in the village said the tumours might go, they might not; it depended how hard she prayed, to her other grandfather, the fat one, merry lord, Nurgle-in-the-mist. ‘There was a city right here, in the Stink Forest.’
‘Rubbish!’ boomed Odifus. ‘No cities on Noxia. None at all.’ The pair of them had only the faintest conception of what a city was, but they knew there were lots of people in them. ‘Stupid, cramming together like that. Fastest way for pox to spread.’
Pox: they used it as shorthand for everything, whatever sickness, disease or malady, though when it came to proper description, when it mattered, they had myriad words, one for each of Grandfather’s gifts.
‘It’s true,’ Cherala said. Odifus’ dismissal of her tale annoyed her, and she fought back for once. She pointed up to the towering toad-trees, a thousand mottled slime caps growing on every one. ‘These was buildings, big as the sky, and this…’ She pointed at the squelching mosses they walked upon. ‘This was roads, all hard.’
‘First things, this is moss. Second things, roads is mud and muck,’ said Odifus. ‘This is a forest, always been a forest. Trees and slime and flies. No buildings, nothing hard.’
‘Yeah, that so?’ Cherala grumbled quietly, but Odifus heard her fine for once.
‘That’s so,’ said Odifus.
They came to the edge of the scrounging grounds. Beneath the profusion of creepers and trees, square, regular oblongs could be made out, stacked in places five high. Their rusted doors hung half open, showing foetid darknesses within. From a distance, they looked like blocky boulders, and a little kidling might take them for such, but Cherala was twelve years old, halfway through her life, and wise as they come. The blocks were metal, rotted through for the most part, and in places sunk half into the swamp, but when her grandpa – her human grandpa, that is – told the tale of the city that was, she believed, because she had seen the boxes.
‘Then what are these then?’ she said.
‘God boxes,’ shouted Odifus. ‘Gifts from Grandfather’s pantries in his Black Manse. Way, way up in the garden.’
Odifus turned back to look at her. His face was swollen with a goitre, so that it was stretched, and his jowls hung upon his chest. Sweat stained his mouldering clothes. He looked as old as fifty, though he was only Cherala’s age.
‘That’s what the god talkers say. They say,’ he bellowed, ‘that if you keeps on walking here, on and on in the Stink Forest, then you’ll come out the other side, and there you’ll find yourself in the most glorious of places, Nurgle’s Garden! Lovely it is, where the rot takes you, but you don’t feel it.’ His stomach growled, and he let out a pungent fart.
They went between the god boxes. This close to the village they had been picked clean a generation ago. Cherala’s grandfather had said a hundred years had passed since the forest came, and he was right. He was also wrong, for only a dozen years had gone by outside the three systems of the Scourge Stars. There, in Mortarion’s mortal empire, time sickened as much as flesh.
‘Nah,’ she said. ‘Nah! These are…’ She searched for the
unfamiliar words. Grandpa’s soft palate had been lost to the mouth rot, and he didn’t speak so well. ‘Rargo tainers,’ she said. ‘This was a… a… port. He said these boxes came from other places, full of all the good things we take from them now, in the big Perium, before we met jolly Grandfather, and worshipped another god.’
She spoke loudly herself now, annoyed. Her blasphemy slipped out as easy as a belch, and proved just as acid. The shrieking of the insect things in the trees dipped. The mangy birds stopped their crowing. They watched her, and judged.
Odifus didn’t seem to notice, but slapped his hand against his neck, mashing a bloodskeeter. He flicked the goo off his hands. ‘Your grandpa said that?’ He guffawed. ‘Your grandpa can’t speak worth dung. He’s the oldest man in the village, and his head is as soft as his mouth.’
The animal sounds of the forest burst back, living their frantic cycles of life and death again. Cherala held her sore tongue still. She didn’t want to offend jolly Grandfather with her grandpa’s tales, bad things happened to those that did, but she knew that they were true. He said his great-great-grandfather had worked here, and he didn’t mean grubbing about under decayed trunks for food.
Tree roots were thick in that part of the forest, shoots growing a foot a day, before collapsing into black ruin, and then again, so a treacherous web of snags replaced the moss. They went into the stacks of rargo tainers, or god boxes, if you were of Odifus’ opinion. They made green canyons topped with trees and hanging beards of lichen. Animals ran ahead of them sometimes, all of them blessed, not one – and Cherala shuddered at the thought – healthy. Such were jolly Grandfather’s gifts.
They banged on a few of the tainers, which boomed hollow as empty skulls, when the sides didn’t crumble in. All of them were empty, their contents filched long since, or rotted into mush. Many were the lairs of Noxia’s teeming life forms. When they opened doors, hissing rats bounded from their nests, or swarms of vile beetles clattered past on shimmering wings, giving Cherala a fright and making Odifus laugh loud as one of the temple bells.
The forest thinned out. The port must have been as big as the whole world, Cherala thought. The toad-trees and their crowds of slimy caps retreated. The god boxes stretched away, thousands and thousands of them. Millions, maybe. Away to the north they slumped into one another where the swamps began in earnest, but there, still near the edge, hints of regimentation persisted under the mats of green and black.
As many boxes as there were, Cherala and Odifus found nothing. Every knock boomed back. Every door opened onto emptiness. They ate a couple of rats each, raw and dripping, so they’d not kill off any gifts jolly Grandfather might have hidden inside for them to suffer.
The forest canopy opened out. The stands of trees on the god boxes thinned out. Soon they could see the boxes themselves, properly now, bright with rusts, but definitely made. Cherala traced the hints of faded lettering with her fingers, and found on one skulls cast in metal.
‘See!’ said Odifus. ‘That’s the mark of jolly Grandfather, Nurgle’s skull. He gave us these, not some Perium,’ he scoffed.
‘Get well soon,’ she cursed him, and scrambled up the side of one of the god boxes, using the vines to get on top. She stood and looked out to lumpy horizons, over the landscape’s discord of organisation and chaos.
The skies of Noxia pulsed with colour, livid as a fading bruise, a melange of greens and yellows, purples and browns. It was beautiful, and she watched the clouds swirl awhile, her pain forgotten. A veil of rain drew her eye down, and then a shaft of light penetrated, and lit upon something that made her yelp in triumph.
‘What about that then?’ she said, pointing.
Odifus looked up from the ground, where he was poking about with a stick.
‘What?’ He couldn’t see. A little way down the box lines, one had fallen off the stacks and blocked his view.
‘Over here.’ She broke into the quickest hobble her stiff hip would allow, along the long, square ridge made by the god boxes. Odifus followed her along the road between the boxes, and she could now see that it was a road, for there were patches of wet, flat stone visible, with little metal studs set into it, and gratings full of leaves.
On this road was what she’d seen. Odifus clambered over the fallen god box blocking it from view, and she wheezed a triumphant laugh.
‘Look under there! That’s got to be something!’
‘That’s nothing,’ said Odifus, approaching the weed-shrouded shape she pointed out.
‘Liar! You can see it! It’s a machine! A machine! That’s no forest thing! City. Here. Ha!’ She clambered down off the ridge, and pulled off moss and decaying cloth, revealing a heavy, brutal-looking thing, square edged in all the curves and swell of the jungle, with a cage atop it for a man to sit in, and a long arm with a pronged hand for lifting heavy stuff. Like the tainers, she thought.
Odifus lifted up tangles of dead vegetation and sniffed dismissively. The metal was rusted paper thin. Flakes of paint dropped off like scabs.
‘Something from Grandfather’s men. The Death Guard. They have tanks and such.’
‘You ever seen one?’ shrieked Cherala. ‘They’d never fit in there! That’s for a normal man, like my grandpa.’
‘Health on your grandpa,’ said Odifus moodily, stomping away from the machine. ‘This way, chatterling, these god boxes look untouched.’
‘Rargo tainers,’ insisted Cherala, and stuck out her tongue.
Sure enough, Odifus was right. The boxes there were stuffed. Some had contents that had festered away to uselessness, solid blocks of flaking wood pulp that might have been crates, the things inside mysterious lumps. But in others, brittle plastek and sturdy metals protected the contents, and when Odifus opened up a god box with a couple of bangs on the lock, and an avalanche of metal spilled out, he wheezed with joy.
‘Good steel!’ he said, lifting up a heavy bolt. ‘Good iron!’
They were machine parts of one kind or another, once protected by filmy bags full of oil. The bags had perished, the oils dried to sticky tars, but the metal itself was barely spotted. Odifus picked one piece up, then another, dropping them when he spied something better. He waded inside, pulled at the contents, and more fell from within.
‘Riches!’ he said. ‘Such riches! Hey, Cherala, hey! How many swords can we make from this? How many muck-ploughs?’
Cherala was not listening. There was a strange noise that had caught her attention, almost lost beneath Odifus’ wading through the spilled metal: a high chiming, pure, the cleanest sound she had ever heard. It entranced her, and she moved off towards it.
‘Cherala!’ shouted Odifus, but she didn’t listen to him, and he went muttering back to his treasure.
She limped ahead, and before she knew it was half a mile away from her friend. The noise didn’t get louder so much as more distinct, a ringing melody of chimes that wasn’t exactly music – it was too random for that – but which almost was.
Then she saw the lights.
The run of god boxes or tainers or whatever they really were came to an end. There was a wide space ahead, marked out by circles raised off the ground on pillars of metal. A vibrant pink-and-blue glow shimmered atop one of them, twisting about, so that she fancied she saw dancers moving in the sky. Vine-choked stairs ran up to the circle, and without thinking she ascended them, entranced by the light and the music.
When she got to the top she found the circle covered over in twisted vines, all knotted and heaving with fungus. They seemed lethargic in their growth, fat and sluggish. They had half engulfed another machine waiting there, a big thing, like a fat avian with broken windows at the front. The source of the light, and the noise, came from behind.
‘Voidskup,’ she said, recognising it from another of her grandpa’s stories, about the craft that brought the god boxes down from the sky. She crept around it, and gasped.
&n
bsp; In the centre of the circle everything had turned to clear crystal: roots, plants, metal and all. From this the light shone. The crystal was creeping outward, very slowly, but each inch it gained turned more of its surroundings to the same, clear, glassy substance. The air was dry there, and a cool wind blew outward, bringing with it scents that Cherala could only describe as clean. As she watched, she noticed that the chimes sounded when a root or toadstool was transformed, the crystal moving or contracting in some way to play the tones. The light grew brighter, moving from golds to greens and back to pinks. She gave a little cry of delight. She had never seen such beauty. A thought struck her, coming from outside her head. It spoke to her and said that, until then, she hadn’t really known what beauty was, thinking that deformity and sickness were the prettiest of things, when this, this was true beauty, clean and lovely and ever-changing.
The lights brightened, became thick and slow, coalescing into shining birds that broke out of the light and flew about. They had such plumage, and were free of all sickness. Their voices gave the finest of all musics that joined the chimes of the crystals. Glowing orbs burst from the shine, and danced about, shedding drops of gold. Where these hit the ground, more crystal appeared, and spread, while the music played all the louder, and the light shone all the brighter, reaching up for the sickly clouds and filling them with new glories.
For a moment she was happy. Only a moment.
The light swayed. A shape moved within. It had arms and legs like a man, but for a head it had a leering moon, such a vibrant yellow she could not look upon it. It came out of the light, and began to prance, waving around itself a staff of crystal, with more crystals swinging from it. Gibbering in some unknowable tongue, it let off bolts of fizzling magic that struck the ground all about, the voidskup too, turning its metal hide and the blighted plants that choked it into one giant, shining sculpture. She did not like this newcomer or his staff, but found herself unable to leave, frozen to the spot by its capering.