by Guy Haley
‘My lords, oh my lords, you have come for us.’
‘How long have you been here?’ asked Vasilon.
‘A hundred days. More. We have lost count.’
‘Get up,’ said Vasilon. He moved forward to haul the man to his feet. The girl took a frightened step back.
‘Do not be alarmed, child, these are our saviours!’ He looked at them anew. ‘You are not Ultramarines.’
‘No. We are of Lord Guilliman’s line, however. We are Novamarines, a Second Founding Chapter,’ said Edermo. ‘Honoured primogenitors.’
‘I have heard of you.’
‘How many are you?’ asked Vasilon.
‘Sixty-three,’ said the man. ‘We have been hiding in the temple. Its holiness has kept us safe. We’ve been living off nothing but jarred olives. Terrible, I–’
The Space Marines’ vox-net clicked to private, cutting off their words from their external voxmitters.
‘Maybe these two, save the rest,’ Edermo said.
‘I would rather not,’ said Maxentius-Drontio.
‘…I shall call the others out to see you, they will be full of joy,’ the man was saying.
‘Do not do that,’ said Vasilon. ‘You must come with us. You and the girl.’
‘Yes, my lords, but I must tell my people. It will take only a moment.’ He got up and turned around. ‘My people!’ he shouted. His voice rang out loud.
‘Be quiet. Be quiet now!’ said Vasilon. His voice was aggressive, commanding, as the voices of all Space Marines were, qualities accentuated by his armour, but the old man was too addled or scared to pay heed, and what would have reduced a normal human to weeping only encouraged him to shout louder. ‘They are here!’
‘Silence him,’ said Edermo.
Vasilon obeyed immediately. His gun stock whipped up and caught the old man hard under the chin. His head snapped round, too fast, his neck breaking with a crunch.
The girl stared at them in utter terror, screamed, and ran, still screaming, down the hill to the temple.
‘Throne curse it,’ said Vasilon. He lifted his bolt carbine and drew a bead on the girl, twin laser dots fixed between her shoulder blades.
Maxentius-Drontio knocked his arm, sending his aim wild. The bolt skimmed past the girl’s head.
‘What are you doing?’ Vasilon snarled.
‘I did not come here to shoot little girls,’ Maxentius-Drontio said.
‘It is too late for such qualms,’ said Edermo quietly. ‘The alarm has been raised.’
The girl had gone into the temple. Its bell began to ring.
‘Emperor, no,’ said Maxentius-Drontio.
Edermo hefted his shield up out of the muck and looked at his men.
‘What we must do now will be hard. There are daemons in these mists. All it will take is for one to find these people here and our mission will be over.’
‘They have not been found yet,’ said Justinian.
‘Sergeant, this mission is supposed to be a secret. It will remain so, even if I have to slaughter half a planet to ensure it. The fate of all Ultramar depends on our actions here. A few civilians are a small price to pay.’
‘I will not do it,’ said Justinian.
‘Nor will I,’ said Maxentius-Drontio.
‘You will. I order you.’ Edermo took a step towards Maxentius-Drontio.
The Intercessor stood taller.
The lieutenant’s hand went to his sword hilt. ‘You will do it in the name of the primarch and of the Emperor.’
The bell continued to ring. Maxentius-Drontio and Lieutenant Edermo stared at each other. Justinian wondered what to do if they came to blows. Who would he aid?
In the end, the decision was taken from Justinian’s hands. Maxentius-Drontio shook his head, flicked off the no-fire catch on his gun and set off down the hill.
‘You know I am right,’ said Edermo. ‘They are dead anyway.’
‘Let’s just get this over with,’ said Justinian. He turned away down the hill after his second, his head bowed. The others followed.
A few minutes later the raucous sound of boltguns cracked through the mist. There were a few screams, and then silence descended again.
Chapter Twenty-Five
FIRST LANDING ASSAILED
Shells pounded remorselessly against the second-tier wall. Felix watched the battle from the observation jetty of a plasma battery. Only half the enemy rounds were solid-shot munitions, the others carried deadly loads of chemical and biological agents that would have slaughtered the civilian population had they remained. But the Space Marines were not safe there either, for shells crashed in waves of fire against the cliffs of rock, bringing down ornate buildings in avalanches of rubble and opening the hollow interior to perilous miasmas.
The Death Guard deployed weapons so dangerous that they fought as a Legion only, without their hordes of deluded mortal followers. Only their daemons accompanied them, and for the time being those were few in number. Felix wondered if this was how it was upon the walls of the Imperial Palace, when Chaos reached the apogee of its tide and the dream of Imperium nearly died.
Out on the field, cohorts of Plague Marines advanced in huge squares behind siege engines. They defied the Imperial guns to slay them. Bolts, missiles, cannon shells and energy beams ripped into them, but on they came, protected as much by their own astonishing resilience as they were by the buzzing energy fields of the mantlets they pushed ahead of their formations. Though Mortarion’s army was primarily composed of infantry, as was his preference of old, there were hundreds of fighting vehicles in support. Packs of Predator tanks fired at maximal range, hull down, dug into positions to the enemy’s rear. Land Raiders waited far out for a breach in the wall to be made. Rhinos snorted along behind the infantry, ready to snatch up squads and redeploy them at a moment’s notice. All the vehicles were rusty, covered in filth and mouldering fetishes, but serviceable nonetheless. Daemon engines of peculiar design roamed the battleground. Flights of bloat drones attempted to attack the higher levels of the city, but were driven back. Squadrons of blight haulers ran in support of the foot blocks, shrouding them in obscuring fogs. There was a preponderance of medium, self-propelled artillery pieces, coughing shells into high parabolas that came moaning down over the walls.
Having been concerned with the trickier battles of planetary diplomacy for the last few months, Felix saw Mortarion’s sons with fresh eyes. This form of war was an insanity to him, a mixing of the magical and the mundane that still seemed impossible. It was carnage, it was chaos. Energy screens on both sides thrummed and popped. Enemy artillery blasted ancient buildings to rubble. In return, Imperial guns gouged holes in the Plague Guard ranks. Swarms of flies passed over the battle, thick and sudden as squalls of rain, obscuring everything in sight until they passed on. Where Mortarion’s force had come from was hard to discern. Mortarion had no ships in orbit. More warpcraft, surely, Felix thought, and wondered if more awaited to be disgorged upon the dying earth.
The storm raged. Unnatural colours filling the sky raced and burned. Still no contact could be made with the fleets. No message went up and no orbital support came down. It was as if the stage had been set for a game between rival deities, where the champion primarchs of the Emperor and the Plague God would face each other to decide the fate of worlds.
That was yet to come. There was no sign of Mortarion. For all the battle’s fury, they yet endured the opening phase. Felix led his ten Chosen of Vespator and a demi-company of Silver Templars, honoured for their battles on Talasa Secundus. He had limited experience of the Chapter, but they were renowned as steely warriors, duellists all, and they were as impatient as him to fight.
Down by the lower-tier wall, guns boomed and flashed from both sides as the Death Guard attempted an escalade and the Space Marines repelled them. Ladders on rusty carts were swung into place by han
d-cranked drums, only to be targeted by melta weapons and collapse as sagging, molten wrecks. A shell got through one of the parapet energy screens protecting the walls, hitting the crenellations and lofting up the great stones as if they were made of card. All along the wall the shields were visible as bands of light. They glowed bright, the invisible made visible by strain. A generator exploded, fire roaring out in a dragonfire plume from the reinforced plasteel tower holding it. A section of the wall shield went dark, and was immediately targeted, cannon fire smacking into unprotected masonry.
Felix’s aural dampers increased their effect, cutting out the screaming whoop of the plasma casters he stood between. The vox announced itself. Cominus’ rune flashed in his vision.
‘I would wager a quart of good Ardium Red that you are staring down there so much because you want to get into it, my lord,’ he voxed. He was only fifteen feet away, but if they spoke aloud together, they would not be heard.
‘Our orders are to hold the second tier, brother-sergeant, priority-one protection of this battery.’
‘They are indeed, but who among us likes to watch a battle and not be involved?’
A triad of bloat drones attempted a run on the battery. Clunky-looking cylinder grenades bounced from the Imperial gunshields. The plasma cannons continued to fire long, blinding streams of energy while their attackers took a hammering from iron hail stubbers and Icarus lascannons. All were downed in a matter of moments. One detonated, spraying pus; the second lost an engine and crashed into the wall; the third was chased off and gutted of its daemonic components from behind, the bleeding metal shell plummeting into the fury of the fight on the lower wall.
A long, mournful wail sounded out on the plains. Fog, smoke and gas cut vision down to a few thousand yards, and Felix struggled to pick out what made the sound between the blades of the karst.
The cannons’ machine-spirits caught sight of it first, all four of them pivoting as one to lock on to their new target. Daelus, one of Felix’s Techmarines, was directing them from a control console platform bolted to the side of the second gun’s turntable. He discharged them in series, their emissions taxing the ability of Felix’s helm to protect his eyes and broiling the air to a dangerous heat.
They burned out the vapours as they speared their target, exposing it to the world.
‘Throne of the Emperor,’ Cominus said. ‘That is not a sight I ever thought to see.’
A rot-fleshed hulk two hundred feet high lumbered towards the city, moaning and howling. The plasma beams blasted its forequarters into steam, and it screamed like a thousand people dying in pain. Still it dragged itself forward, though one shoulder was charred down to the bone, and the flipper limb beneath folded under it, but it moved with a certain determination, like an aquatic beast heading for its breeding ground on shore.
As it neared, it was possible to see the weeping orifices that covered the body. From these, cocoons squeezed out, slipping to the ground and unleashing the daemon-form designated beasts of Nurgle. A seemingly endless stream of these things galloped around the flesh mountain, as eager as pups at play. They bounded through the Death Guard’s lines, upsetting their formation and bowling some of them over in their enthusiasm, though the Plague Marines were unaffected by the poisons the beasts exuded, and clambered up, grumbling, once they had gone.
More guns had turned to target the hill-sized monster, for should it reach the first wall, it would surely crash through it. Further down the second tier, the sleeved barrels of macrocannons recoiled. Groundcar-sized shells thwacked into it, blasting giant craters in its body that filled with watery blood. It lowed mournfully, and reared up, exposing an underside mottled with scabs and rashes, and the beginning of its muscular, slime-dripping mollusc’s foot. Guns from all over the fortress fired, opening its chest and belly. An explosion of fluids saturated all in front of it, and it crashed down, dead, its tiny children sniffing and mewling at the corpse.
A cheer went up from the walls, audible even over the din of battle. Felix was spared the heat of the plasma discharge a moment as Daelus vented coolant from the dorsal slots, drenching them all in white steam.
When it cleared, Cominus spoke again.
‘A small victory. The enemy come still.’
Chapter Twenty-Six
THE PLAGUE MILL
The highway became impassable on the crusade’s seventh day. For some time, the road had exhibited signs of decay. The surface cracked. The embankment scalloped with landslips. Plasteel signs and traffic direction measures were lumps of corroded matter. The land around was waste. Every living thing was dead, become a black slime that coated everything. Strange mutant things had taken the places of local creatures, similar to true animals at a distance, but when examined closely shown to be far from natural. A cloud of gnats trilled awful songs from shrivelled human faces. Herds of bovids lumbered by screaming, encumbered by fronds of useless limbs. A flock of caprids sped past, lashed into stampede by tentacles growing from their spines. Where the ground was not covered by water, it was a barren, reeky mush. When the mists parted it was possible to see unnaturally far. The remains of small towns, farms and other facilities stood in the desolation, naked as bones, so clear they might be touched with an outstretched hand, before the mists swallowed them again.
The crusaders still sang. Although their voices were swallowed up in the perpetual gloom, their hymns drove back a little of the blight, and fewer of them succumbed to disease than even the most optimistic expected, and they spoke excitedly among themselves of the Emperor’s grace.
The days darkened. The nights were full of terrible cries and stenches that wafted up from hidden hells. Those that breathed the fumes woke choking, eyes red, blood leaking from their noses. Or they might not wake up at all. The paint of tanks bubbled with rust, until it flaked off, and revealed sores of red, orange and brown beneath that spread before the watchers’ eyes. Only the war train was left unmarked. Equipment failed. Lasgun power packs lost charge. Propellant in bullets degraded, producing slow fizzes of flame when firing pins fell on them.
And then they came to the end of the road, and the situation grew worse. The highway suddenly disintegrated into a series of islands with no evidence that they had ever been joined, like a child’s sand sculpture on a beach broken up by the incoming tide. Utterly flat spaces divided them, patched with a froth of bubbles, like the spawn of amphibious creatures. Out to the east was a plain of flesh, where a hill remade as a giant daemonic face watched them greedily.
They did not delay or pause in fear, but under the militant-apostolic’s watchful eye, descended from the highway, following his directions to the north-east, skirting the flesh plain, where his heart told them their target lay.
Reality was losing its grip on Iax. The days and nights ceased to hold to normal lengths. Sometimes, night would last an hour, or a moment, day coming as soon as the sun set. Other times it would persist for hours at a time, and the crusade would be haunted by noises coming out of the dark. They did not stop. When the sky was clear of lightning and painful colour, which was rarely, they looked on alien stars, no sign of the giant crusade fleets holding orbit over the planet, or of Iax’s moons. Most of the time fog clung to the ground and the crusaders walked in human chains, arm to shoulder. Still some of them vanished, never to be seen again.
More weapons failed. More people died. The air thickened, becoming toxic. Equipment provided no safety. Only faith seemed to protect them. Iax left no room for doubt.
They reached another flooded land. Stands of dead reeds suggested it had always been waterlogged, but it too was much corrupted. Strange fungi pulsed and glowed amid dead trees. There were green shoots pushing up through the water, but all of them were grotesque caricatures of real plants.
‘The Plague God mocks the cycle of life and death,’ Mathieu explained to his followers. ‘We have seen death, now we see his idea of life. This is more dangerous to
us, yet have faith, and we shall pass unharmed.’
Overhead the storm wailed and crashed, raining spit from fanged maws, and lightning erupted from transient eyes. They saw armies battling there, and visions of times past and future. Sometimes the storm ceased, and inimical faces stared at them in utter silence.
The pilgrims slogged on through the swamp. When they rested, their legs were covered with black leeches. Many of them became sick. The water deepened. They took refuge on their vehicles, packing the upper fighting decks of the train. Those denied space were forced to cling to the side of the war train, or ride upon the tanks. With every mile, Odrameyer lost another vehicle to mechanical failure. Oil congealed in engines. Promethium denatured. But the train pushed on, sucking up the waters of the swamps to drive its pistons without harm, emitting them as purified white steams.
By the time Mathieu called upon his column to halt, half his followers had perished, and it was a much reduced crusade that looked upon their goal.
They were deep in the swamps. The mist cleared a little from the higher airs, and though it clung to the water’s surface they could see some distance. Ahead, on a rise of hills rotted black, were the broken walls of a large institution. About it burned thousands of smoking fires, and the slopes were thick with daemons.
What the institution had been, Mathieu could not tell. It was in no way exceptional. They had seen other ruined places of its type, many warped and made bizarre. But Mathieu knew, right to the iron core of his being, that it was there he must go. It was not an inner knowledge, no personal revelation that rose up unbidden from his secret self. Mathieu was wary of such impulses. Instincts could betray. They masqueraded as divine guidance. There was no better deceiver than oneself, and so on earlier feelings Mathieu had shocked himself with his auto-flagellator and prayed for the Emperor to guide him towards the truth. Sometimes he was right, and his instincts were false, poisoned by arrogance. Other times they were not.