by Dan Abnett
‘Yes, brother-sergeant!’ Squad Orpheon returned.
‘That’s what we are here to do,’ Porphyrian said. ‘The heretic warlord Sholen Skara is your target. We take him alive if circumstances permit. Brother Andromedes, the honour is yours. Begin the Rite of Giving Water. Bless this undertaking with Ithakan water from your flask. Prepare this world for the blood to be spilled. The blood of the Emperor’s enemies.’ As Andromedes came forward with his copper flask and anointed the rust-stained roof – the closest they could expect to get to the hive world surface – Squad Orpheon remained silent. When Brother Andromedes rose back to full height, Porphyrian voxed, ‘Brother Salames, await our return. Stand by for further orders.’
‘Affirmative.’
‘Squad Orpheon,’ the Iron Snakes sergeant said. ‘For Ithaka.’
‘For Ithaka!’
‘And for the Emperor.’
‘The Emperor!’
With that, Porphyrian led the Iron Snakes out of the troop bay and onto the roof. Their power-armoured footfalls boomed across the rust-eaten roof and onto a byzantine staircase working its way down the side of the sweat mill. Kicking the rickety railing from out of their path, Squad Orpheon dispensed with the zigs, zags and spirals of the staircase, instead dropping the distance from one mesh landing to another, shaking the structure with the rhythmic impact of each descent.
One of the landings was level with an elevated avenue stretching between hab-stacks and tower-factoria that lined the progress of the stilt thoroughfare. Thick, corroded cables running between the rockcrete path and the buildings held it steady on its stilt structure. Still, like the staircase, Porphyrian swore he felt movement in the metal and stone beneath his boots.
The elevated avenue was slick with old blood oozing downhill at a glacial pace, carrying a mesh of bones and mummified remains with it. Crunching and slushing through the muck, splashing their boots and greaves with the Blood God’s sacrifice, the Iron Snakes’ progress did not go unnoticed. If explosive detonations and the demolishing of smokescrapers and sub-spires hadn’t announced their arrival, the sight of armoured figures on the elevated thoroughfare, working their way spireward, drew hatred from the surrounding architecture like an applied salve drawing infection from a wound. The Kith were everywhere. They roared from factoria balconies, smashed the plasteel from habs and gathered in rooftop throngs to screech their demented blood lust. There were lives unpledged in the city. Deaths that belonged to Sholen Skara. Ends to honour the magister’s Blood God. Like savage primates in the treetops, the alarm spread through the hab-stacks, along the thoroughfare and up through the insanity of the hive. This was not the identification of a threat or a warning to the group. The monstrous cacophony of voices roared hoarse – hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions even, for all Porphyrian knew – unified to announce a hunt.
The hive seemed to come alive around the Iron Snakes. Cult warriors, who moments before had been wandering in a blood-hazed malaise, now gathered in crazed mobs, their broken minds filled with purpose and the roaring hatred of their fellow Kith. The savages climbed up through the stiltwork, leapt from balconies and catwalks, and shattered through the avenue-adjacent habs. They gathered in growing hordes, splashing up through the gore, intent on being the first to honour their magister and offer sacrifice to their dark god.
As the crazed masses flooded the thoroughfare, their number washing up behind the Iron Snakes as well as running down to meet them, Porphyrian could hear the sound of the Ithakariad’s thrusters taking the gunship off the mill roof. No doubt the hordes had swamped the landing site, intent on overwhelming the Storm Eagle with sheer numbers.
‘Remain on station,’ Porphyrian voxed to Brother Salames, instructing him to circle as best he could.
‘Affirmative,’ the pilot voxed back. ‘Brother-Sergeant, the Ithakariad registers many thousands of enemy targets closing on your position.’
‘Aye,’ Porphyrian said grimly. ‘We are going to make them regret such a fantasy.’
‘Enemy in range,’ Brother Deucalion reported, prompting Brothers Phrenius and Urymachus to bring up their boltguns to meet the oncoming Kith.
‘Negative,’ Porphyrian decided. ‘Conserve your ammunition. Spears and shields, brothers. Formation High-Tide. Brother Ptolomon, be the storm at our backs.’
As the roaring masses came at them, the Iron Snakes coolly mag-locked their boltguns to their belts. Sliding combat shields down onto their forearm plate and drawing a sea lance each from between their backs and packs, the Ithakans brought the blades to crackling blue life. Clutching the power spears by their grips and balancing the shafts of the weapons between their tapering tails and the sizzling blades, the Iron Snakes assumed formation.
Like a stormy sea of human detritus crashing up against ceramite cliffs, the frontline cult warriors of the Kith broke themselves against the Iron Snakes combat shields and immovable armoured forms. Batting back the shattered bodies, Squad Orpheon thrust their power spears through the roaring madness of the degenerate Kith, skewering heretics three or four deep on the shafts of their lances, before withdrawing the weapons and clearing the spears of screaming bodies with the rims of their combat shields. Stamping forth through the demolished lines of bodies, the Iron Snakes turned their power spears around above them in unison, bringing the crackling blades sweeping down on the next line of frenzied savages. As the heads of heretics rolled and bodies collapsed with theatrical choreography, Squad Orpheon brought their combat shields up to begin the meat-grinding manoeuvre again.
For the longest time, the Iron Snakes’ world became the roaring of blood-crazed cultists, red-rimmed eyes and faces contorted in hatred, in frustration and in agonising death. Working their way up the crowded thoroughfare, the progress of the Iron Snakes would not be denied. Shields shattered bone. Lances seared, swept and thudded through blood-daubed bodies. Armoured boots granted the Emperor’s peace to cult warriors whose expertly butchered forms still screeched their magister’s fell name from the rockcrete.
Squad Orpheon left a mulched carpet of the fallen in its wake. As Kith warriors surged up behind the Iron Snakes, Brother Ptolomon bathed them in a sweeping stream of flame, forcing advancing cultists to fight up through an inferno of thrashing, fiery forms. As cult warriors hauled themselves up onto the elevated avenue from the stiltworks below, and leapt to the rockcrete from surrounding balconies and habs, the Iron Snakes cut them down with the sharp crack of single bolt-rounds delivered with cool vengeance from their weapons. Blasting Kith off the thoroughfare and into the abyssal underhive below, the Space Marines kept the squad’s flanks clear of hostiles.
It started with the crack of a single beam. Then the bark of a single stub gunshot. A shotgun plucked at the rockcrete of the thoroughfare before being drowned in the chatter of an autogun. Hives were towering armouries of low-grade weaponry: stubbers crafted by underhive weaponsmiths; cheap, mass-produced autocarbines; lasguns liberated from militia storage depots. The balconies, roofs and thoroughfare-facing habs were suddenly flashing with furious fire as Sholen Skara’s Kith soldiers flooded the surrounding stacks and towers to create a gauntlet along the path of the elevated avenue. With rockcrete plucked around them, the air searing with wild beams and rounds sparking off their plate, Squad Orpheon were pinned down.
‘Iron Snakes,’ Porphyrian commanded, ‘strike!’
Bringing their power spears above their heads and shields, the Space Marines launched their lances at the oncoming cultists. Spearing their way through heretic ranks, Porphyrian watched as the mobs ahead were skewered into the rockcrete.
‘Formation Tempest!’ the brother-sergeant ordered, prompting the squad members to snatch up their boltguns from where they were magnetically dangling from their belts. Assuming positions on opposite sides of the thoroughfare and allowing the patchwork balustrade of crumbling rockcrete, corrugated sheeting and suspension cables to soak up the wor
st of the wild assault, Porphyrian called, ‘May the Emperor grant us speed and accuracy. Make every bolt count. Open fire!’
From crouches and from cover, the Iron Snakes brought up their boltguns and took aim. Lining their helmet optics up along the sights of their hallowed weaponry, the Space Marines blasted single bolt-rounds at targets hammering the thoroughfare from above. Amid the fury and waste of hive weaponry chewing up the avenue around them, the Iron Snakes took cold and certain aim, blasting apart the Kith gunmen firing down on them from catwalks, balconies and shattered hab-stack vistaports. Round after round erupted from the muzzles of the Iron Snakes boltguns, dropping cult gunmen, blasting them back through habs or from their positions among the busy architecture of tottering towers.
As the Space Marines advanced up the thoroughfare at a cover-hugging crouch, Apothecary Nemertes and Brother Ptolomon drew bolt pistols and cut down cultists still intent on suicidally rushing them from the front and the rear. This allowed the rest of Squad Orpheon to concentrate the unrelenting accuracy of their bolt blasts on the Kith gauntlet.
The switch to such a tactic – the suggestion of formations and a plan of attack – led Porphyrian to the belief that they were getting closer to their objective. Without guidance, the Kith moved between the languid torpor of exhaustion and the idle practice of torture, mutilation and murder. In agitated numbers they could form savage hordes of wild warriors, drawn to the stench of sacrifice. In the presence of heretic lieutenants, however, a cult command structure and perhaps even a magister, the Kith managed to achieve singularity of purpose and a spiritual discipline that gave the appearance of rank and file organisation, when in truth they simply felt the predacious presence of the Blood God in their hearts, filling them with a sacrificial urge so powerful that they might end their own lives in unison to appease the whims of the monstrous power’s mortal prophets. Prophets like Sholen Skara.
As progress up the avenue was made, boltgun magazines were exchanged and ammunition ran low, Porphyrian needed the heretic warlord to show his hand. The sergeant assumed that he must be near – drawn to the destruction sweeping through his city and reports from his savages that the Emperor’s Angels were in the hives. Porphyrian was counting on the assumption that the Iron Snakes were too tempting an offering to pass up.
The brother-sergeant was not to be disappointed.
Suddenly, the din of assorted gunfire died away to a ghostly echo that bounced around the perversity of the hive architecture.
‘Hold your fire,’ Porphyrian ordered.
‘What’s happening?’ Brother Andromedes called. The silence of the guns was unsettling after the fury of the previous onslaught. ‘What does it mean?’
‘It means that he’s here,’ Porphyrian told the battle-brother.
IV
‘Here you are…’
They were sickly sweet words on the air, pouring from every caster, every channel and every vox-system in the quarter. The voice proceeded from everywhere. It echoed over itself and filled the open space between the hab-stacks and towers with mellifluous, static-laced poison. ‘The Emperor’s snakes, slithering into my nest. I know not whether to be honoured or insulted.’
‘I want optics on Sholen Skara,’ Porphyrian said over the vox. ‘Now. He’s here. I’m sure of it. He would want to see this. Full scan.’
The Iron Snakes looked around endless floors of the hab-stacks and the busy architecture of tower-factoria, rotating through optical filters and engaging their auto-senses in a silhouette-scanning search of the gathered thousands of Kith forming the gauntlet.
‘There were serpents,’ Sholen Skara continued, the poetic poison of his words cursing the air. ‘In the fields, where I lived as a boy. Cowardly creatures. Low things of the decrepit earth. Death without meaning. They would hide, they would strike and they would kill the workers in the fields. Men trying to earn an existence for themselves and their families out of an unforgiving land. At my father’s insistence, I went out early, every morn and walked the rocky furrows, searching for serpents, that my father might not suffer them in his back-breaking work. I was terrified at first. When I found my first serpent I pelted it with stones and crushed it beneath a heavy rock. Its venom and the scales of its slithering body afforded little protection against gravity. The others came easy after that. Of course, they hid, they hissed and they struck when they could, but I came to enjoy their lowly, petty resistance. I gave their deaths meaning. I saved the man I loved as my father – the harsh and perhaps cruel man – for a significant end. A meaningful death at the hands of his miserable specimen of a son. My mother could not accept what had happened. I helped her to understand. I didn’t lay a finger on my mother. I loved my mother. My words simply took her to a place from which she wanted to escape. A place where taking one’s own life is a blessed release. A death with meaning. A sacrifice of spilled blood and significance. But it all started with the snakes.’
‘Target acquired,’ Brother Hyperenor reported, peering up the length of his boltgun. ‘Hab-stack south by south-west. Four hundred and thirty second floor.’
Porphyrian stared along the boltgun’s line of sight. His helmet optics magnified the dark figure – one standing among many Kith cultists in the open space of a hab-stack under further tottering construction. Standing in the skeletal guts of the accretion, with plastek sheeting whipping about in the breeze, Porphyrian could make out the silhouette of a muscular figure with a shaved head. Like the sheeting, his hive robes tangled around him in the wind. He held a vox-thief in one hand, while behind him a humpshuttle sat precariously on the half-constructed roof of the hab-stack. Porphyrian swore that even at this distance he could see the murderous glint in the magister’s eyes.
‘I have a shot,’ Hyperenor informed his sergeant. Porphyrian’s lip began to curl. He could have Hyperenor end this madness with one pull of the trigger. The Kith were nothing without their magister.
‘He’s got to go back,’ Brother Andromedes said. ‘It’s the mission.’
‘The mission,’ Porphyrian agreed bleakly.
And then something hit the thoroughfare, something that had fallen from the sky. Something drawn to the rockcrete by the irresistible force of gravity. Something fleshy and unrelenting. It died as it struck. Three more bombs of flesh, blood and bone hammered around them.
Bodies were raining from the sky.
Looking up, Porphyrian witnessed the impossible. At some secret signal from Sholen Skara – a trigger word or hand signal that formed some kind of sacrificial, suicidal insistence – the Kith had launched themselves from balconies, roofs and murderous heights on both sides of the thoroughfare. They were falling with impunity, rocketing towards the Iron Snakes with lethal force.
‘Take the sho–’ Porphyrian managed, but it was too late.
Bodies were hammering down all around them, smashing into the rockcrete, but many were hitting the Iron Snakes. Hyperenor’s weapon had been smashed from his grip by a thunderbolting Kith, who broke over the edge of the balustrade. The raining bodies were an enemy against which a boltgun or spear were useless, and Squad Orpheon were forced to hold their combat shields over themselves. Even beneath a shield, the servos, hydraulics and fibre bundles of the Iron Snakes’ power armour struggled with the relentless impacts of flailing bodies from above. Flesh forms broke over shields and splattered across plate. The Space Marines struggled to keep their footing, being smashed from one side to another by the suicidal descent of cultists.
‘Formation Phalanx,’ Brother-Sergeant Porphyrian ordered, but the Iron Snakes could not make it to one another. They were knee-deep in shattered bodies and bloody remains, while some of the Kith leaping from the lower floor were, horribly, still breathing. Screaming. Roaring. Clawing at the Space Marines’ plate. Drawing their warblades, the Iron Snakes slashed at grasping limbs and cut their way free of the growing cadaver mounds.
The suicidal onslaught had become
a torrential downpour of flesh and bone. A deluge of sacrificial offerings, rocketing down from the heavens. Porphyrian could barely see his squad. He had been knocked to the ground several times, and although he had heaved himself back up against the cascade of bodies, he had lost his boltgun and shield. Slashing about him with the warblade while being bounced left and right by sickening impacts, Porphyrian tried to wade through the limbs and smashed cadavers.
‘Climb!’ he ordered, hauling himself up the blood-slick mountain of dead flesh. He saw Brother Urymachus buried in bodies, his gauntlets clawing out for assistance. He saw Nemertes, the Apothecary, crawl free only to be slammed aside by a tumbling Kith that knocked him off the elevated thoroughfare and into the abyssal depths of the underhive. ‘Deucalion. Andromedes. Report in!’ Porphyrian called, but all he could hear over the vox were the exertions of Iron Snakes Space Marines buried alive.
Smashed this way and that by bodies that hit like mortar shells, Porphyrian hauled himself desperately up the side of the cadaver cliff-face. Using his warblade like a pick, he stabbed purchase into the mound and climbed, working his way clear. Leaping from the thoroughfare, across to the crumbling wall of the opposite hab-stack, Porphyrian climbed for his life and those of his trapped Iron Snakes. Stabbing the warblade into decrepit masonry and clawing at ramshackle balconies and smashed vistaposts with his gauntlet, Porphrian made an indomitable, powered ascent. Kith had started to hurl themselves down the face of the building, bouncing off architecture and tumbling onto the Space Marine. Holding on tight, Porphyrian’s strength and will were tested by the constant stream of suicidal cultists smashing off his pauldrons. Kith warriors attacked him from catwalks and balconies, and the Iron Snakes sergeant was forced to tear them from their purchase and launch them out into open space.