by Guy Haley
He pointed up the side of a seven-storey building covered in judgemental statuary, all now smothered in grey moss. A sign proclaimed it to be the local Administratum office of the Hiastamus sub-district.
‘That makes no sense. According to the planetary data, and our landing point, Hiastamus should be on the other side of the world.’
‘At least we know where we are now,’ said Achilleos.
‘How long will that remain the case?’ Justinian said.
Past the office, they came to the town’s central square, also inundated by filthy water. In the centre a gargantuan tree towered over everything, and its branches were heavy with terrible fruit.
From the end of each twig a hanged corpse dangled, smothered in thick growths of fungus of a startling orange, recognisably human nonetheless.
‘Remind me why we volunteered for this mission again?’ said Maxentius-Drontio. He turned to Justinian. ‘Maybe we should topple this, it is an abomination.’
‘We cannot afford to make too much noise,’ said Justinian. ‘If we are detected, then our mission will have failed. It is as simple as that. Pasac,’ he said, ‘move on.’
They hovered over the water, passing the face of the tree where three mouth slits pumped out washes of vomit and sighed sad words of self-comfort.
‘Can it see us, that is the question,’ asked Achilleos.
‘It will be aware,’ said Magos Fe, speaking up for the first time. ‘These plants are a form of daemon, but I doubt they are sentient enough to see us as a threat, or have the means to report it.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Maxentius-Drontio.
‘I am a magos of the Technii-Psykanum, and a valued servant of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica. It is my role in life to know such things,’ said the magos.
‘Well, I do not like it,’ said Maxentius-Drontio.
They finished circling the tree, and came to another exit from the central plaza. Justinian ordered Pasac to take it. The civitas was small, and soon they were cruising back out of the town limits into the flooded lands beyond.
‘Nothing but water, and mud,’ said Achilleos. The flotsam of the town bobbed sadly past, pushed into sudden motion by the passing of the grav-tank.
‘Hiastamus was a coastal town,’ said Justinian.
The driver’s compartment door opened, and Pasac turned back to look out into the carrying bay.
‘Brother-sergeant, I have signum lock on Lieutenant Edermo.’
‘Go to him, now,’ said Justinian. ‘The sooner we can get the magos’ machines up and running, the quicker we shall have this done.’
‘Look sharp, magos,’ said Maxentius-Drontio. ‘You are up soon.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
MOUNTAIN OF FLESH
Mathieu led his war congregation towards the cut through the Loann Mountains, riding atop the principal pulpit at the feet of the protective angel above the organ. All around the train marched the hordes of the faithful, those who had witnessed the greater miracles lit up by their experiences, those who had not seen such things drawing faith from those who had.
Odricus’ Cut loomed ahead, the wound in the planet so deep the rock was still bare and weeping four millennia after it was made. It was a wound that was now infected. The shadows of the hills fell over them, chilling them with a fever’s touch; the air was hot and close, yet they shivered in that shade. Black fluid ran down the stone walls in place of water, clogging the drainage systems with its thickness, so that awful slicks of matter gathered in the gutter heads sloping down to the plain either side of the highway’s embankment and choked the hydroway canals running either side. From Mathieu’s vantage, he could see all the way down the man-made canyon, whose walls grew so close through perspective that they seemed to touch. A thin stripe of green sky watched them.
The column came to a halt before the cut. Mathieu searched the cliffs and their high tops for signs of ambush. The land all about was deathly quiet. The noise of the Witnesses was subdued by the devastation they found themselves traversing, and further attenuated by Mathieu’s height over them, so that he existed in a quiet world. The waiting engine throbbed beneath his feet. Behind him stood Odrameyer’s liaisons, his own presbyters, the headmen of various militias and the Sisters Palatine of the Adepta Sororitas, all hanging on his word.
He narrowed his eyes. If he were the enemy, he would stage an attack here. He would crowd the edges of the slot with fiends and toss in explosives to slaughter the faithful. He would fire on the Witnesses from these positions of impunity, and he would emerge triumphant with minimal casualties to show in the ranks of his infernal army.
‘I am not a man of war,’ he said to himself, then let his voice rise to a shout, and the words boomed down the length of the cutting. ‘I am a man of faith! We go forward.’
‘Most holy father,’ said Odrameyer’s chief lieutenant immediately; he had been waiting to object. ‘If we go here, the enemy will inflict on us a terrible slaughter.’
‘This is our chosen path, shown to me by the Emperor,’ said Mathieu. ‘We take it under His protection.’ He turned to look at the assembled leaders. ‘The Emperor protects,’ he said.
‘The Emperor protects,’ they responded, though a few of them could not meet his eye.
‘Fear not,’ he said. ‘Forward.’
With a titanic hiss of steam, the war train lurched into motion.
The high, dark stone of Odricus’ Cut closed overhead.
The journey through the pass was fraught, but done quickly. Seven miles lay between the two sides, and not a sign of the foe did they see. However, upon gaining the far edge they found a very different scene, the mountains having formed a bulwark against the corruption of Iax, keeping it from the provinces closer to First Landing. On the far side, Chaos ran rampant.
The hills swept down to lowlands that had once supported a mix of arboreal plots and well-organised farms. These gave way to the pasturelands of Hythia, and the large marshes the province was dominated by.
Against all logic and fluid mechanics, this was all gone. An upwelling of Stygian waters had overtaken the land, filling the lowlands as far as the eye could see with shallow lakes. No goodly living thing could be seen, only their remains: rotting woods, greened skeletons of livestock lying in puddles, all vegetation black in death. Things were alive there, but only of a malevolent sort. Clouds of insects hovered over the water, some unnaturally large, and the surfaces of the pools rippled with hidden motions. Where the land rose, small islands persisted, and buildings protruded over the dank expanses. The great highway too stood proud of the meres, its embankment now acting as a dyke, but all else was still water: dark, stagnant and noisome.
A thin, yellowish mist scudded over the lakes, ripe with scents of decay and death, restricting visibility to a few miles at most, less where the fume gathered thickly.
‘We go carefully from here,’ said Mathieu.
The train’s reactor trembled like the heart of a frightened beast as it drove out onto the plain. The mountains dwindled behind them, until they were a low mound on the horizon, the corpse of a giant who had laid down in despair and died. The marshes stretched on forever. The clouds were an awful green. A storm crackled lethargically in the distance, filling the louring sky with traceries of anaemic lightning. When rain fell on the column, it stank of sulphur, and burned the skin. The Witnesses sang louder to quell their fear, and the skies rumbled warningly in return.
After a time, hideous trumpeting blasted over the inundated farmlands, and a lookout cried out, and pointed to the south-west, where a gargantuan, pale shape disturbed the fogs. The shape resolved as a mountainous beast, come heaving across the landscape obliquely towards the road and the Witnesses. It bellowed mournfully, and a cloud of flying things swarmed around it.
The foreparts came first: a head like a hill, bearing the features of a mammalian creature, th
ough juvenile in form, as if an infant rodent had been made massive. From its slobbering mouth lolled a tongue dozens of yards long, yellow eyes blinking along its length. The beast’s face, by comparison, seemed blind; the two depressions it had either side of its face that hinted at eye sockets were covered over with slack and pustulating skin. Rodent’s teeth jutted from its upper lip, yellow and black with cavities as large as caverns. There were sockets for a lower pair, but these were bloody and pus-filled, their rawness revealed by the creature’s drooping lip. It keened as it moved, a cry of despair and pain that came close to the sound of a woman weeping. The noise of its woe filled the plain with a palpable misery, like a poison gas that, though invisible, has enough density that it might be felt on the skin before it kills. More than a few in the army watching succumbed to its sorrow, and wept.
Drool poured from its mouth, the stink of it vile even from so far away. Floods of it ran over the stumpy, cancerous limbs it used to drag itself along. Stands of sparse hair quivered over skin that was otherwise pale and naked, the covering thin enough that the watching army could see parasites large as men lurking in the deeper thickets.
Odrameyer had come up into the command pulpit for a while, and he signalled to his master voxman, whispering to her as if the beast could hear what they said, though it surely could not, so loud were its wails, and so distant it was.
‘Have our armour units move up. Give me some prognostications on range, number of rounds we may be able to fire before it is on us, and whether we might be able to kill it.’
‘Yes, sir,’ the woman said. When she had gone to her task, Mathieu placed a hand on Odrameyer’s shoulder. The colonel suppressed a little shudder as he felt the strength of the Emperor pass into him.
‘I would let it be,’ said Mathieu, and he did not hide his voice. ‘We are in no danger.’
The creature presented its flank to them. The belly rested on the ground, rippling to drag it over the land. Its spine was high and arched, lifting up the back in a crooked ridge. In the flesh-faces of this peak, small orifices twitched, sphincters unwinding in sinewy spasms and gushes of fluid. Rushing out upon these falls of slime, wriggling sacs were birthed. From afar, compared to the huge size of the creature, these seemed small, and yet they were not. They knocked free the mountain-beast’s parasites where they rolled over them. When these offspring hit the ground they did not burst into ruin, despite the great height they had fallen, but the sacs split with more explosions of foulness, and frill-headed monsters struggled out, shook off sprays of slime, and went gambolling after their giant parent. They followed, yipping happily, gathering in large packs that grew larger even as Odrameyer and Mathieu watched. Odrameyer took out a pair of magnoculars to watch some as they bounded past a ruined domicile.
Ranging runes pulsed on the magnified view.
‘Emperor alive, those things are fifteen feet long!’
They pushed through the water easily, and when they fell into areas that were too deep for them, they paddled like whelps until they could surge out, delighted.
‘Do not fear them,’ said Mathieu. ‘The Emperor shields us.’
‘Then you are sure it has not seen us?’ asked Odrameyer. He did not believe it could be so, for the eyes on the tongue looked in all directions, and the train was obvious upon the raised highway.
‘Have faith, colonel,’ said Mathieu, his calm voice a balm. ‘Whether it has or has not seen us, it will not come against us,’ said Mathieu. ‘It stays upon its course, and neither it nor its offspring look in our direction.’
This much was true, Odrameyer admitted, though he remained concerned. The beast came nearer, and would soon cross the highway, but it stayed true to its path, and it did not deviate towards them. Still, Odrameyer had his tanks fan out either side of the war train, four squadrons of them, closely packed on the road, but such was the beast’s size they could easily elevate their cannons, fire over each other, and still hit it.
‘It is going for the end of the mountains, where it shall turn west and head for First Landing. All the apostate traitors will gather there,’ said Mathieu. ‘Lord Guilliman gives open challenge to the fallen devil Mortarion. That is where the final battle will be.’
‘And the fate of Iax decided, if not all Ultramar.’
Mathieu smiled. ‘You think it is the primarch who will save this realm? That is our role in this, brother. The battle might be won or lost at First Landing, but it is by the Emperor’s will working through us that this war shall be decided. He has a great task in store for us.’
The beast reached the embankment. It paused a moment as its rotting bulk encountered shaped earth and hard rockcrete, gave out a dispirited howl, then heaved itself up the slope, gouging out a deep trench as it did so. Crash-fences buckled under it, long ribbons of metal crumpled like dry grasses dragged under and along with it, ripping out at the posts. It crushed the central safe zone between the two sets of four lanes, toppling the troughs that had once held floral displays and fine examples of trees, now only containing a stinking black slop.
The thing’s exertions caused its flesh to undulate, squeezing its orifices and forcing a rain of the monsters free from their birthing canals. They exploded on the hard rockcrete of the highway. Even those that did not meet this fate failed to hatch, for they were premature and small, twitching feebly within their sheaths of mucus.
The beast straddled the highway, its faeces-streaked hindquarters hauled up the bank, gushes of dung squirting from the rear, the smell of it so rank it caused the Witnesses to gag. Its paddle forelimbs pushed up ridges of earth and stone, and with a last mournful bellow, it slipped down the far embankment. The rest of it followed, the overstretched skin on its belly tearing with the effort, its arrival sending out a slow wave of mud and filthy water, before its progress resumed the stately, painful manner of before. Its children swarmed up and over the bank, skidding gleefully through the trails of filth their parent left behind. They skipped and squirmed, all the while baying like hounds. By the hundred they slithered their way over the obstacle, and back into the new marshes.
The stream of its offspring slackened, dwindling from a herd to groups of a few dozen, then to individuals. The last bounded over the embankment, and paused halfway across. It sniffed at the air, and turned to look at the column.
Odrameyer tensed. ‘Prepare to open fire,’ he said.
With an idiot’s grin plastered over its face, the creature waved a bloated, damp hand at the Witnesses, then raced after its kin. The giant beast moved on, and presented its back to the highway. It gave out another mournful booming, and was swallowed by the mist.
Odrameyer looked over the road. The creature had carved a furrow into the hardtop some fifty yards across and at least twenty feet deep. It was filled with a noxious mix of fluids that was only slowly running into the marsh.
‘This will slow us down,’ said Odrameyer.
‘You have bridge-building equipment accompanying your armoured units?’
‘Yes, frater, as you requested, I made sure to find some.’
‘The Emperor guides me,’ said Mathieu placidly, ‘and I guide you. I suggest you bring the mechanisms up from the rear, and make good this gap. It will come to pass that we must leave the road, but that time has not come yet.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
A MOMENT OF REFLECTION
Felix was patrolling the mid-tier eastern walls of First Landing when he encountered Donas Maxim.
A chance meeting was not unlikely. There were dozens of Chapters of Space Marines at the city. Each had their roles to play, their routes to walk. Only Guilliman knew everything, and Felix, who was influential but outside the organisational structure of any Chapter, was free to do as he wished. So he walked the walls alone.
The haze that shrouded Iax had thickened to a brown fog. The heavens rumbled with barely contained power. By chronomark, it was just before dawn,
but the sun had ceased to rise and set, and a constant, dim light suffused everything. No ships could land and none could depart. There was no contact with the fleet, but Felix had no concerns. He trod his lonely path, thinking of the future, and the many tasks he must perform to secure his tetra of Ultramar. War was only a part of that.
The mid-tier wall clung to the cliffs in ripples like those of underground flowstones. Above and below him were the delicate towers of the city, surrounded by their dying gardens; outside it, the flat agricultural plains that so incongruously interspersed the karst towers. To save himself from the miasma choking everything, he kept his helmet on, and set to hard-void protocols. His breathing echoed in his ears. His mask was clamped tight to his face. Occasional notification chimes of incoming data or systems events overlaid the hum of his reactor and the cumulative whine of hundreds of fibre bundles contracting and stretching. Cawl’s armour marks were quieter than the old. He had met Space Marines whose battleplate practically growled with every step they took, but he was glad the Gravis type was not silent, for he had come to find the clicks and hums comforting – womblike, he supposed. The sound’s similarity to that made by the machines that had kept him prisoner aboard Cawl’s ship did not bother him much. His armour was a machine he controlled. It was his protection. His ally. He could discard it or not as he pleased. He was not at the mercy of another to take a breath of free air.
He was feeling a little guilty. He should not have come here, leaving his given realm for this fight. He wondered why he had. Was it only his need to confront his gene-father about the path he was taking, or did he simply want to see him, to draw reassurance from his presence – inspiration perhaps, or strength, to perform the impossible task he had been given?
Any and all, he thought. Any and all.
He stopped at a point where the wall’s sinuous curve embraced a gun platform. A portable missile system in Silver Templar colours tracked back and forward with mechanical diligence, exactly the same speed, exactly the same arc. All the way to the north-east, where it gave a clunk and a little jerk, as its servomotors turned it back and it made a turn to the south-east, where the clunk and jerk were repeated and it returned the other way. A single, rounded glass eye stared out from the centre of the quad launchers towards the horizon. There were armoured ammo boxes nearby full of spare missiles. He saw the hulking shapes of two servitors, both offline, both with retrofitted hazard robes over their organic components. They were completely still, waiting for the voice of their machine master to call them into action.