by Guy Haley
Occasionally, he would find himself by an unshuttered window or an open loophole, and then he would stop and look outside, as he had stolen glimpses of the Palace on Terra long ago. It was dark all the time. Artillery firing made the sky flash. Energy weapons cut painful after-images into his retinas. Magna Macragge Civitas was ablaze from end to end. Only the fortress was free of flame. It was disturbing, but he supposed it had been burned before and risen, and so it would rise again.
Fabian had lost muscle tone, so spent what time he could training with his weapons. After another week, he requested an armoured environmental suit. It arrived quickly, the emblems of the Logisticarum and the Logos Historica Verita already applied to its plating. He kept it in his room, open and ready to don. He had no desire to be helpless when the need arose.
The time came soon enough: in the middle of the night, predictably. Wailing alarms woke the whole facility. Fabian’s room was lit up by flashes of red and the loud booms of landing shells. Grit bounced onto him from the ceiling. The lights were out. The power had failed. The shutter over his window had opened. The maddening dental itch of warding machinery filled his mouth as thoroughly as if an entire colony of ants had been packed in, from the brood mother to the least significant worker.
Daemons were coming.
He scrambled out of bed, and was already sealing up his carapace when soldiers of the Praecental Guard came running down the corridor, banging on every door.
‘Prepare to evacuate!’ they were shouting. ‘Prepare to head into the deep shelters!’
Fabian, his movement restricted by his half-donned suit, waddled to the door, and shouted after him.
‘What’s happening?’
One of the men turned back. When a man of Fabian’s rank asked a question, it was answered.
‘An escalade. Mortal traitors at the inner wall. Daemons manifesting on the plazas. Heavy bombardment is taking down the shields. This is it.’ He was already running away, banging on more doors. ‘They’ll be going for the anti-orbital guns next, to attempt a landing in the city, perhaps within the Fortress of Hera itself.’
Then the man was away, hallooing and hammering on doors like a pranking youth on Sanguinalia night.
‘Emperor,’ Fabian said. Grit had fallen into his boots but he had no time to empty them out. A second of tainted air could cost him his life, perhaps his soul, so he ignored the discomfort and brushed at the suit fastenings, for fragments of rockcrete had gone into these as well, and they had to be clean to make a good seal.
Undersuit first, trouser cuff connected to boot, spats over boot top and trouser. He zipped up the front, pressing down the soft sealant strip and praying he’d got all the muck out. He left the gloves off while he attached laminated hard-carbon plates to magnetic fastenings on his shoulders, shins and lower arms. The joined breastplate and backplate went on next – he paused before he put it on over his head to blow the debris from the ceiling out of the helm ring, then struggled it on. It was awkward, and heavy, and had to sit right to seal properly or it would be of no use at all. Backpack next, with its air and water recycler, then gloves, locked with a twist to the wrist, and lastly the helm, which he lowered over his head slightly out of true, then twisted into place hard as if he were breaking his own neck.
He snatched up his weapons. A moment of cursing while he adjusted his belt to take account of the suit’s additional girth, then he was out into the chaos and noise of the medicae facility.
People were screaming. The inhabitants of Macragge were inured to war and redoubtable by character, but the hospital shook with the impacts of shells punching through the failing voids, and that was enough to terrify anyone. The beam of the stablight mounted on his shoulder danced around madly, lighting on faces in moments of terror, cutting dusty tracks through falls of debris. There were soldiers there of the Praecental Guard and the Magna Macragge Civitas Auxilia. They were doing their best to direct the patients and staff down passages into the mountain. Heavy blast doors, until now shut tight, stood open. Lines of crimson flares marked out the way into the rock.
‘Move, move, move!’ an officer in blue shouted, his face sweating under his helm mask. People streamed down the corridor into the mountain, away from the violence, where the silent mass of stone would surely keep them safe.
Fabian found himself among a crush of patients and pulled along. He did not know where he was going, only that he went. Perhaps he wanted to join the battle, or to find Lucerne. He realised he was heading west – was he going to the library, he wondered? He could have forced his way through, but he reined in his urge to shove, and began to help, supporting the feeble, pushing invalids in chairs, handing them off to orderlies who hurried them into the shelters.
Something big hit the exterior of the medicae building, making it rock. The tremors subsided, only for another impact to succeed where the first had failed, and blast a hole in the side. He turned to see the outer wall collapse, as if disaster were tapping on his shoulder to make him see what it did. The wall rushed down in front of him, taking the floor with it, rubble gathering speed to collapse the floor beneath that, then the one below that, each slamming into the next like a tower of cards knocked down. He saw this through a whirl of dust and flashing as he fell back. Somehow, he kept his feet, when all about him were thrown down or slain, and when the clouds of dust blew out of the breach, the way back to the east had gone.
For a hundred yards in that direction the medicae had been stripped right back to the bare rock of the mountain, and its innermost rooms exposed like the hewn cave dwellings of a lost tribe. A wide slope of rubble slanted up from the plaza, mottled with splashes of white. From above they looked like fallen blossom, and not the corpses of the sick that they were.
There were lights down there. Fighting. Blue, ruby and orange flicking back and forth, a deadly light show of bolt and bullet, las-blast and plasma stream.
The aegis flashed, and he looked up through hideous patterns of purple. He’d been told the enemy flotilla had very few true warships, with only a handful of direct ground attack weapons among them. Evidently something had changed, for he saw the explosions spreading over the energy skin, their fury bled into the warp.
People were groaning. Dust and grit soaked up pools of blood. Limbs were scattered around like litter. He went to help, only to find the woman he reached first was dead. He was dizzy, confused – shocked by the blast, he realised – but events had no pity, and fate was not done with him.
‘They’re coming! They’re coming!’ A soldier was running from the west. Gunfire chased him.
The words of Sergeant Hetidor, the Catachan Guardsman who had trained him, came back to Fabian.
‘There are two options when faced with battle,’ Hetidor had said, probably spitting down in Fabian’s face after he’d thrown him to the gymnasia mat for the hundredth time. ‘You can run, or you can fight. But there is only ever one outcome. Either way, one day you will die. Cowardice might spare you awhile, but time will not, and old men serve the Emperor badly in a fight.’
Hetidor had reached down, grasped his hand, and pulled him to his feet. In Fabian’s dazed state, it was as if he now reached out of the past and dragged him towards the enemy. He reacted automatically. His pistol was in one hand, his drawn sword in the other, field buzzing in the sooty air. He strode past the soldier, who was kneeling and snapping off bright blue beams of las-fire down the corridor. Fabian raised his pistol and waited for a clear target.
They came out of the smoke.
They were men who had turned against reason. Dressed in ragged uniforms, cult symbols half visible under the accumulated dirt of war, they were at once savage and pitiful, undernourished, diseased, a sham army. They behaved without mercy, bayoneting the wounded with bestial shrieks of triumph. Fabian aimed his gun at the nearest, and fired. The upper two-thirds of the man’s head vanished. The las-blast wasn’t enough to cauterise t
he network of blood vessels that had, until a microsecond before, been feeding the man’s brain, and he fell down pumping vitae high from his neck, like an exclamation, or a celebratory pyrotechnic.
The man behind opened fire on Fabian straight away. The historitor ran into the spray of stubber bullets, totally unconcerned that were his undersuit nicked, he would likely die of disease. Bullets ricocheted from his armour plates. One skated, hot and urgent, off his helm’s armaglass. Fabian’s second shot felled the man, then he was among the others and set to work with his power sword.
Fabian had been well schooled in sword technique, but in the close press of the corridor there was room for only butcher’s work. In that kind of situation the warrior with the best weapon won, and Fabian’s blade was fine indeed. His power sword cleaved rifles in twain as bayonets sniffed for his vitals. His following strokes ended the lives of their bearers. The sword was sharp, but with power weapons it was the field that did the damage, undoing atoms like clothes fastenings and spilling the wet contents of bodies onto the floor. The men he hit were not cut, but exploded, his sword strokes wide furrows rather than delicate slashes in flesh.
Over a decade of fighting, and he’d never got used to the adrenal rush of it. The fear, mostly, that amazed him with its intensity every time. But there was also exultation.
Before he knew it, he was through the group, and then chasing the last few as they broke and fled. He ran screaming after them down a stairwell, emerging onto the higher plaza of the fortress proper. The cultists scattered, and were blown apart by boltguns fired from unseen places.
Suddenly, he was alone in a world of fire. He needed to piss badly, but the discomfort registered only distantly, as if it were someone else’s. He was near the Library of Ptolemy’s main gate, its domed mass rising over the violence disdainfully, as if it were morally above it all.
It was then he noticed that the door was open. Battered in, in fact, shreds of gold-plated wood hanging from their hinges. For some reason, its multiple defences had not engaged, and the creature that had done the damage was forcing itself through the gap free of harassment.
Fabian opened his vox, and tuned it to the Chapter command frequencies.
‘This is Historitor Majoris Fabian Guelphrain,’ he said. ‘I need to speak with Chief Librarian Tigurius immediately.’
Fabian supplied order codes of the highest potency, and the mortal manning the other end of the channel complied without demur. When he reached Tigurius, the Librarian was angry, and he was fighting. Fabian could hear the sound of gunfire in the background.
‘What are you doing on this channel, historitor?’
‘Listen to me. I am not going to be oblique and pretend I don’t know what a daemon is. You know what one is, I know what one is. A very large one has just broken down the main door of the Library of Ptolemy, and has headed inside.’
‘What of it, they are everywhere.’
‘It looks like the imp that was in the fortress that night. A minor manifestation of Rotigus, you said.’ The very name tasted disgusting on his tongue. ‘Believe me, that might have been minor, but this is a major one.’
There was a long burst of boltgun fire. Then Tigurius spoke again.
‘I am on my way. Do not follow it. Do not engage it. Only the warriors of the Librarius can meet this threat. If you can, keep everyone else out of there. Do not enter the library!’
But Fabian was already moving forward. In later years, he could never decide if he followed the daemon because he wished to stop it. If that were so, then he was not entirely to blame for what followed, and he felt a little less guilt. But in his heart of hearts, he knew that he had gone in because the Library of Ptolemy was open. He had been denied it for too long; he wanted to see it, he wanted to know what was in there, and damn the consequences.
Yet it was he that was damned by his actions.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
SOUL GRINDER
‘Assault on second-tier wall under way, Battery Nine Theta. Daemon machines inbound. Requesting immediate reinforcement,’ Felix voxed First Landing command, and got no answer. The storm had intensified, the vox was useless, and in the sky every flash of lightning threatened to reveal some awful vision hidden just out of sight.
The first-tier wall had fallen, breached in half a dozen places. Death Guard and their machines poured into the city. Felix found his own position under attack from artillery moving up from the rear as the front shifted. Now the second-tier power fields were failing, and shells crashed down all around him, weakening the walls and turning buildings into rubble.
He spotted the daemon pack as they came through the first-tier breach, and guessed they would come up against his battery, even before they had reached the cliffs and dug curved claws into the rock.
‘Soul Grinder pack ascending. Estimated contact, five minutes,’ he reported.
They were massive things, great corpulent bodies – seemingly of flesh, but in truth composed of the nothing energies of the warp – sat atop motive carriages fashioned like metal arachnids. The bodies wobbled with flab and were covered with Nurgle’s usual festering display of disease, but beneath their rotting exteriors muscles of iron worked, pulling them up the rock face quickly.
‘Line the parapet!’ he commanded, his vox squealing with interference from the firing of the plasma cannon. Silver Templars and Chosen of Vespator took up position, weapons aimed down.
‘Concentrate fire on the lead,’ he told his men.
Bolts flew unerringly into the plague hulks. The first had a pair of grinning heads that were half melted into one another. Stringy organic matter joined them. It possessed a pair of ape-like hands, both knotted with keratinous mutation, and used these to help pull itself up the climb. A shoulder-mounted weapon twitched upon a gimbal, half of steel and half of exposed bone. Behind this projected the mouldering hilt binding of a sheathed sword.
The following two bore strange physical attributes of their own. One had a head out of proportion with its slack-bellied torso, and a trio of hairy spider’s legs waggling experimentally at the air from its left-hand side. The other limb was a giant mechanical pincer. The third Felix only saw briefly, for it took a hit from a reversed wall gun on the lower defences that blasted one of its rear legs free and knocked it off the cliff. In a welter of oil and steaming ichors it fell into the melee below, crushing combatants from both sides, before staggering off, smiting everything that came within reach of the wriggling metal tentacles that sprouted from its shoulders, its belly and its mouth.
The remaining two drove their taloned limbs into the living stone with piston-assisted might. When they reached the area where masonry and cliff blended at the base of the wall, they tore blocks free in their hurry to gain the top.
Boltgun fire did not slow the things at all. The lead machine’s front was a mess of craters, from which issued a storm of flies that beat themselves to death against the Space Marines’ helmets, spoiling their aim.
‘A few more steps and it will be over,’ voxed Cominus.
‘Fall back,’ Felix ordered. ‘Silver Templars, bring your Hellblasters to the fore. Daelus, abandon the guns.’ The line of Space Marines leaning out over the parapet ceased fire and fell back over the broad Spiral Way leading up to the city pinnacle, taking up position against the foot of the next cliff, where collapsed buildings and broken cellars provided plenty of cover.
‘If you would give me a moment…’ Daelus said. He was still bent over his machines. Three of the four cannons were still functional and firing.
‘Now, Daelus,’ Felix commanded.
The first of the Soul Grinders emerged over the parapet, twinned faces gurning, huge hands ripping free a run of the crenellations as it hauled itself over the edge. Daelus’ forge bolter swivelled of its own accord on his servo-harness, and filled the daemon engine with large-calibre rounds. It roared and raised its shou
lder to shield its faces as the missiles exploded all over it, reached up behind its back and pulled its sword free. The weapon was fifteen feet long, rusted dull, more a bludgeon than a blade.
‘Hellblasters, fire!’ Felix commanded.
From behind a pile of broken brick and timber, a demi-squad of Silver Templars seared the dust in the air to glass with plasma weapons on maximal fire, targeting the creature’s foremost leg. It went from rusty brown to brilliant white heat in an instant, and exploded in a shower of bouncing metal sparks.
The Soul Grinder roared, staggered on its remaining three legs, then braced itself with its fist to knuckle along, scattering debris before it. It charged at the Hellblasters, sweeping aside their barricade with one blow of its sword. Poisonous liquid sprayed from its shoulder weapon, catching one of the Silver Templars and melting him alive. His plasma gun exploded as the bile ate through its powercells, mercifully killing him. The others were spotted with the liquid, but fought on, armour smoking, as it ate its way through their ceramite. Three Hellblasters fired. The fourth cast his gun aside, plasma jetting from a ruptured containment chamber, and drew his pistol.
The second Soul Grinder came over the edge, ripping out the plasma cannon from under Daelus’ feet with its pincer as it clambered onto the parapet. Daelus attempted to jump free, but was overbalanced by his servo-harness and fell with a loud clatter on the paving. He managed to get onto his back, loosing off most of his ammo when the Soul Grinder came for him, blasting off the spider legs and making it roar in anger. The additional limbs on his harness moved with mechanical precision, and he was back on his feet before the machine could recover, his Omnissian axe crackling in a double-handed grip.