by Guy Haley
Tap tap tap.
The noise was coming from the base of the window. He bent low, searching for the source. Still all he saw was his own face and the glow of the candle flames in the glass. There were many lights on the walls, and where their beams fell the decorations of the fortress were visible. But Fabian’s room was in a triangle of shadow, all the darker for being contrasted with the light.
He searched along the window bottom. His fingers touched cold glass.
Tap tap tap.
A flash of lightning blasted back the dark, and Fabian found himself face to face with a small, round creature peering in through the bottom pane. It had a wide spread of horns, and a broad, grinning mouth full of dirty teeth. It was only the size of a human infant, though so corpulent it probably weighed thrice as much. Having caught his attention it lifted a skinny arm and waved at him.
Fabian fell back, dropping his candelabra.
It was a plague imp. He’d seen them before, but not that close. Only a single thickness of glass separated him from a package of diseases that would kill him a thousand times over.
‘Daemons. Daemons in the fortress.’ He scrambled up to his feet. The little thing pushed its fat face against the glass, smearing it with unspeakable filth. He got a better look at it. It wore a hood. In its right hand it carried a short wooden staff with three branches curled into hoops. Its left arm carried a crop of subsidiary tentacles, and a second, gaping mouth. A third grinned in its belly.
It watched him with interest. It tapped on the window again. The primary face grinned, spilling maggots down its front.
Fabian kept his eyes on it, and scrambled back, his hand searching for the vox-bracelet resting on the table with his effects. He found it, held it up to his mouth, and depressed the alarm rune that should bring his escort running.
‘Racej, we have a major problem.’ He only half expected a reply, and was not surprised when none came. Often, manifestations of this sort were accompanied by all manner of disruption to the workings of things. Machine-spirits liked the supernatural as much as men’s souls, and recoiled from it.
He considered what to do. Should he run for help? Racej Lucerne’s quarters were a hundred yards down the hall. There was nobody else nearby in that part of the Chapter monastery. The Fortress of Hera was huge, and the Ultramarines, even at full Chapter strength, could not fill it. He might be lucky, and stumble across one of their Praecental Guard, auxilia or other mortal servants on patrol, but they too were spread thinly. He risked losing the creature if he took his eyes off it, then it might slip away and do any amount of damage.
They were not defenceless. The failure of vox would be logged. The reason detected. The alarm would be raised. How long would that take though? That was the question.
‘Emperor,’ Fabian said. The imp was still watching him curiously, as if he were a specimen in a xenological garden. Now he knew where it was, he could make out its position by the glimmer of malevolent eyes. They blinked, and it disappeared a moment, then returned.
‘Don’t move,’ he said, to himself more than to it. ‘Just wait there.’
He grabbed his clothes, pulling his trousers on, and his boots. He left his underwear and his socks off, tucked his nightshirt into his trousers, pulled on his braces, and buckled his boots up.
‘Stay there, stay there,’ Fabian said. ‘Just stay there, Throne damn you!’
The little imp showed no signs of going anywhere, but cocked its neckless head and watched.
Fabian slowed now, for he was reaching for his weapons belt slung over the back of a chair, and did not wish to startle his visitor. His laspistol hung from the belt in its holster. His sheathed power sword rested horizontally on a wooden frame nearby.
He pulled his belt tight, slowly drew his pistol, and pointed it at the tiny daemon.
‘Got you, my friend,’ he said.
If anyone had suggested to Fabian back in his Administratum days that he would become a good shot, he would have laughed in their faces at the idea of him even touching a gun. But he was a good shot. Heated air cracked and a flash of coherent blue light punched a neat round hole in the glass.
He blinked after-images away to see the edges of the glass were a cooling orange. A curl of smoke rose from the hole. The little nurgling looked down at its belly, where a corresponding wound was already squirming shut. It pouted at him disappointedly, shook its head, then skipped off into the dark. Fabian raced to the window and pressed his face against it, trying to see around the corner. A flash of lightning illuminated the imp bounding through the puddles away from Fabian’s room, onto the wider plaza.
‘Shit!’ he said. It would take him two minutes at least to make the nearest exit. Two minutes too long.
‘Racej!’ he shouted as he went for his power sword, drew the ornate weapon, and threw the scabbard aside. ‘Racej!’ He thumbed on the generator switch. Miniature skeins of lightning crackled over the blade. His reflected face lit blue in the window. ‘Calgar is not going to be happy about this,’ he said, and ran at the window.
His sword bit through the glass. Fizzing bits of dissolving matter spattered over the rugs, setting them alight. Fabian didn’t slow, but followed his sword blade through the casement in a blizzard of glass shards, and found himself outside in the rain. Fire was licking behind him. He ignored it and raced into the downpour.
The little creature was fifty yards ahead and moving fast despite its bulk and stumpy legs.
‘Alarm! Alarm! Daemons in the fortress!’ Fabian shouted.
The storm swallowed up his voice. Rain ran into his mouth, salty as fluid from a blister, with a strong, acrid taste. He spat, and shot again at the creature. It leapt to the side from his las-beam and his shot scored the paving, sending a line of steam up into the rain.
‘Warp take it all,’ Fabian cursed. ‘Daemons!’ he shouted as loudly as he could. ‘Daemons in the fortress!’ He discharged his gun into the air twice. The crack of the beam heating the air was a feeble imitation of the thunder. ‘Daemons!’
The imp looked behind itself, chortled, waved at Fabian and ran around the corner of a monumental statue podium.
Fabian pounded after it, rain soaking him and crackling in the power field around his sword.
‘Daemons!’ he shouted, and fired above his head again. The thin wail of an intruder alarm began somewhere down the walls, closely followed by others. Giant search lumens began snapping on with noises sharp as the breeches of guns closing. ‘Oh, thank Throne for that,’ Fabian said. He half skidded around the corner, sending up a curtain of water, and ran directly into danger.
A gangling creature waited half in shadow, its horned head bowed, a black sword dangling from its arm so that the tip rested on the floor. Where the lights of the fortress lit it, he saw glistening skin rent with open wounds. The sword gleamed with deep-green highlights, and a milky fluid wept from its edges to mingle with the rain.
The nurgling pattered past its larger cousin. Fabian came to a faltering stop.
‘Plaguebearer,’ he whispered.
Hearing itself named, the thing lifted up its head. Long, lank, patchy hair ran with the downpour. A huge eye, white and bulging as a peeled egg, stared at him. The daemon hissed, a croaking exhalation that formed a single word.
‘One,’ it said.
To its right the skim of water on the stones bubbled. A horn rose up from it, and a head, then shoulders puffy with a drowned man’s skin. The first plaguebearer pointed at the second with a palsied finger.
‘Two,’ it counted, and turned inevitably to its left, where another of its kind was also rising from the ground.
‘Three,’ it said, and took a step forward.
Fabian let out a wordless shout, raised his gun and opened fire.
The plaguebearer stepped forward, its soft feet plashing in the water. Fabian hit it with every shot, punching his
sing, cauterised holes into its stinking hide, but it took them without complaint and, its eye fixed on him, came forward, one leaden step at a time. It was close enough that Fabian could see the flies bobbing lazily around its head, the maggots in its wounds, the threads of worms squirming on its black gums. Its brethren came with it, flanking it, counting out the impacts of Fabian’s laspistol on their leader’s flesh.
‘One, two, three,’ they said, keeping pace with the first.
Fabian’s shots vaporised an ear, brought fluid from swollen intestines hanging from an opened belly, destroyed the leader’s elbow.
‘Four, five, six,’ they droned.
New wounds overlaid old. Maggots fried in a weeping sore. A hit to the face destroyed its cheek, bouncing black teeth across the plaza.
‘Seven…’
Fabian took careful aim, breathed, and squeezed the trigger. His shot burst the plaguebearer’s eye. It tottered forward, and he put a second shot into the same place, blasting out the thing’s putrid brains from the back of its skull. It fell down dead, black fumes rising from the corpse as its sorcerous flesh unravelled. Unfortunately for Fabian, there were two more.
‘Eight…’
They were fifteen feet away. They plodded forward at the same, maddeningly slow pace. His eighth shot clipped the shoulder of the next closest. Then his gun ran dry. He had no spare power pack.
‘Eight? Eight,’ gurgled the plaguebearers, affirming the number of shots between them. They raised their swords.
‘Racej!’ Fabian shouted again. He looked to the heavens. ‘Oh Emperor, if you have ever had the smallest inkling that I exist, I pray that you look upon me now and protect me, because I’m going to need your help.’
He holstered his gun. His weapons were gifts from Guilliman and he wasn’t about to cast them aside, even if he was going to die. He presented his sword in a high guard. The pouring rain made the blade flash and pop with sundering molecules. Hydrogen liberated from the water went up in tiny spurts of flame.
‘Oh Throne,’ he said. ‘Oh Throne.’
Together, like automata, the plaguebearers raised their black swords, and came at him, their turn of speed surprising.
‘One,’ the first said, bringing its sword down.
Fabian parried it.
The second swung its sword into the space left by Fabian’s turning of the first blade. ‘Two,’ it said.
‘Three,’ said the other, bringing its sword in for a second strike.
Fabian parried them one after the other, his blade flashing through the air with such precision it would have made his trainer give one of his rare, wry smiles.
He was forced back. The daemons attacked mechanically, each strike counted off by their giver. Fabian’s blade was longer and he was faster, and he blocked them all. But they would win. Though the daemons had the frames of famine victims, they were taller by a head than he, and ferociously strong. Their blows jarred his arm. They did not need to wound him gravely to kill, either; one touch of their claws or blades and he was a dead man. He was probably infected by proximity alone. He couldn’t help think that with the higher parts of his mind, while his subconscious took over the business of survival. Years of training dictated his blows and counter-attacks so that it appeared to Fabian that another person wielded the blade.
Finally, he saw his opportunity, and struck. His power sword cut into the side of a plaguebearer’s neck. It hit like an axe going into wet wood. The weapon seemed disturbed by the contact: the effusion of its disruption field was muted, and the plasteel of the blade dulled. A hot pain raced along the weapon, squeezing Fabian’s hand with a fever’s aches. He gritted his teeth, but though he clung on his grip was loosened, and when the creature hissed, and pulled back, its uncanny strength wrenched Guilliman’s gift from his hand.
Fabian faced the monster weaponless, clutching his arm, dodging the blows of the thing’s fellows.
‘Nineteen,’ it hissed. ‘Twenty.’ The pass of its sword splattered him with its poison, and Fabian’s skin burned.
He moved back. They followed. He could hear gunfire down the parapet, shouts and distant counting voices. Alarms wailed all over the fortress.
The plaguebearers raised their swords.
‘Twenty-one…’ they said.
Their blows never fell. A vox-amplified voice roared out of the night.
‘Fabian, get out of the way, get out of the way!’
Fabian threw himself backwards as three bolts streaked through the air trailing fire, thudding into the plaguebearer wearing his sword. They detonated almost simultaneously, blasting stinking viscera everywhere, a large quantity of which splashed all over Fabian. Incredibly, the daemon still stood, though its torso was hollowed out and its sword arm was lying twitching on the floor.
Sword Brother Racej Lucerne came out of the night like a runaway heavy hauler, slamming the tottering plaguebearer off its feet. It lifted clean into the air, and came down twenty feet away with a hard smack. Offal slid out of its open torso. Fabian’s sword hilt hit the ground, and the weight of the daemon landing on it as it came down turned it, neatly cutting off the creature’s head as if it were the top of a spoiled fruit.
While Lucerne barged the first back, his own power sword cut clean through the second. Larger than Fabian’s weapon to the point it looked ridiculous, Lucerne’s sword didn’t so much bisect the daemon as obliterate it. The disruption boom stung Fabian’s ears. The top half of the creature lifted clean into the air. It too was dead and dissolving back into nothing by the time Lucerne brought himself to a stop and went to his comrade.
‘Are you all right, friend Fabian?’ Lucerne asked. He let his pistol swing from the chain holding it to his wrist, and reached a night-black hand out to help up the historitor. Rain plastered his tabard to his legs. The templar’s crosses of his livery gleamed in the wet.
‘I am better for seeing you,’ said Fabian. Lucerne did not move at all as Fabian put all his weight onto his arm. ‘Come on,’ said Fabian. He retrieved his sword from the bubbling mess of the dead plaguebearer. He sneezed, and cursed.
‘You should report to the medicae,’ said Lucerne. ‘These unclean Neverborn carry all manner of pestilence.’
‘We’ll let the Emperor decide if we’ll succumb, shall we?’ Fabian said.
‘Do not mock my faith,’ said Lucerne.
‘I’m not,’ said Fabian. He hunted about through the sheeting rain for the fugitive nurgling. ‘Look, these things don’t have much purchase on reality. Their bodies are already dissolving. If I were going to die from their illness, I’d be dead already.’
‘You can’t rely on–’
‘All right! I’ll get myself to the medicae,’ he said. ‘Just help me first. I’m looking for–’
‘That?’ said Lucerne. His battleplate stablight snapped on, ringing the nurgling in a hard round of light. It was in the process of exaggeratedly creeping away, and it froze.
Undaunted, it turned to look at them. It held up a finger to its lips, the tentacles around its left arm wriggling, and pointed with its right hand through the storm towards the mountainside. Fabian strained his eyes into the dark, trying to see what it was pointing at.
‘I condemn you to the Emperor’s fires, unclean thing,’ said Racej, levelling his bolt pistol.
‘Uh-oh,’ squeaked the nurgling.
Lucerne fired. The nurgling burst like a squeezed cyst, splattering all over the paving.
‘What was it pointing at?’ murmured Fabian. He shuddered. His skin felt unbearably hot.
Gunfire barked nearby. A trio of Ultramarines approached, shouting call-and-response litanies of cleansing. Two were white-helmed First Company veterans. Their leader was Tigurius.
‘Sword Brother Lucerne,’ said the Chief Librarian.
‘Daemons,’ said Lucerne. ‘This section is clean, I think.’
&nb
sp; Tigurius nodded. ‘You speak rightly. They have gone. We have contained this outbreak, for now. But they will come again. This is only the beginning. It is this rain.’ He looked up into the downpour, then down, his eyes gently aglow with his psychic might. They alighted on the bubbling remains of the nurgling, and he bent to pick up the thing’s wand between thumb and forefinger.
‘A lone nurgling, my lord,’ said Lucerne.
Tigurius stared at the little staff, which was proving resistant to reality’s efforts to banish it, remaining solid, steaming but a little.
‘Something worse, much worse. It appears one of the Plague God’s favoured servants has noticed us.’ His eyes flashed, and the little staff vanished with a miniature thunderclap. ‘This was a minor avatar of Rotigus. I can feel its touch all around this place.’
‘Who?’ said Lucerne.
‘A greater daemon,’ said Tigurius. ‘According to our books of lore, one of the Plague God’s most exalted.’
Fabian was only half listening to the transhumans. He walked in the direction the nurgling had been pointing. He saw something. A gateway in the rock.
His muscles convulsed, and he fell, Guilliman’s sword clattering from his hand. The impact of the hard stone on his knees made him gasp, but he could not get up. He hiccuped, short of breath; his head spun.
‘He has been exposed,’ said Lucerne.
‘Summon the Apothecaries,’ Tigurius told his men.
‘Fabian?’ Lucerne said.
The historitor looked up at his guardian, but could not find him. ‘I cannot see,’ he said, and his voice sounded far away.
‘We need to get him inside,’ Tigurius said. He continued to speak, but all Fabian heard was a roaring in his ears, and he felt a tightness in his chest. He tried to speak himself, to tell them what he had seen, but the words remained locked in his head.
The imp had been pointing at a subsidiary entrance to the Library of Ptolemy.
Chapter Fifteen
GUILLIMAN SPEAKS
Diamider Tefelius was not quite feeling himself. He waited at attention with his fellow officers, his lasgun held out in front of him in an awkward position that made his arms shake. His ceremonial uniform was uncomfortable, hot in the cloying afternoon.