by Dan Abnett
"We use it to boost our collaborating minds. Force a way into the machine's consciousness/
'Indeed. And then?'
I glanced over at Alizebeth. Then Madam Bequin takes hold of the runestaff and delivers her untouchable blankness into the heart of it/
4Vill that work?' Kara Swole asked.
There was a long pause.
Bequin looked at me and then at Rassi. 'I don't know. Will it?'
'I don't know either/ I said. 'But I think it's the best chance we have/
Rassi breathed deeply. 'So be it. I don't see another hope, not even a remote one. Let's get on with it/
Poul Rassi and I took the runestaff between us, our hands clamped around the long haft.
He closed his eyes.
I tried to relax, but the instinctual barriers of self protection that exist in every mind kept mine from letting go. I didn't want to get inside that thing. Even from a distance, it stank of putrid power. It reeked of the warp.
'Come on, Gregor/ Rassi whispered.
I concentrated. I closed my eyes. I knew the Titan was treading nearer, because I could feel the chapel floor shaking.
I tried to let myself go.
It was like clinging to a precious handhold when you are dangling over a pit of corrosive sludge. I couldn't bear to submit and slide away. What waited for me down there was cosmic horror, a broiling mass of filth and poison that would dissolve my mind, my sanity, my soul.
Chaos beckoned, and I was trying to find the courage to jump into its arms.
I could feel the sweat dribbling down my brow. I could smell the rotten odour of the derelict chapel. I could feel the cold steel in my hands.
I let go.
It was worse than anything I could have imagined.
Drowning. I was drowning, face down, in black ooze. The sticky, foetid stuff was filling my nostrils and my ears, trying to pour like treacle down into my mouth and choke me. There was no up, no down, no world.
There was just viscous blackness and the unforgettable smell of the warp.
A hand grasped me by the back of the jacket and yanked me up. Air. I spluttered, puking out filmy strings of phlegm stained black by the ooze.
'Gregor! Gregor!'
It was Rassi. He stood beside me, knee deep in the warp mud. God-Emperor, but his mind was strong. I'd have been dead already but for him.
He looked drawn and weak. Warp-induced pustules were spotting his face and crusting his neck. Blowflies billowed around us, their buzzing incessant in our ears.
'Come on/ he said. 4Ve've come this far.' His words came broken up as he was repeatedly forced to spit out flies that mobbed around his dry lips.
I looked around. The sea of black ooze went on forever. The sky over our heads was thickly dark, but I realised that the billowing clouds were impossibly vast swarms of flies, blocking out the light.
Firelights, distant, flashing, reflected across the slime.
We were in the outer reaches of the Chaos Titan's mind-link.
Swathed in films of ectoplasmic ooze, we struggled forward, holding each other for support. Rassi was moaning. His psychic self had brought no cane to support him.
Flames underlit the horizon and the sea of sludge rolled nauseatingly. I had not encountered a mental landscape this abominable since my first dreams of Cherubael, years before.
Cherubael.
Just the thought of him in my mind brought the flies rushing around me. The slime reacted too, popping and bubbling about my knees. I felt a keening, a sharp need, that filled the polluted air around me.
Cherubael. Cherubael.
'Stop it!' wailed Rassi.
'Stop what?'
"Whatever you're thinking about, stop it. The whole world is reacting/
'I'm sorry…' I suppressed the notion of Cherubael in my mind with every ounce of my will. The tremors subsided.
Throne, Gregor. I don't know what you've got in your head, I don't want to know…' said Rassi. 'But… I pity you/
We trudged forward, first one of us slipping over, then the other, then one bringing the other down. The deep slime licked at us, hungry.
Thousands of kilometres ahead of us, a source of power throbbed. I could dimly make out the silhouette of a man. But it wasn't a man. It was Cruor Vult. 'Blood wills it', that would be the simplest Low Gothic translation. The Titan stood there, distant, the master of this psychic realm.
Daemonic forms ghosted around us. Their spectral, screaming faces were madness to behold. They were like smoke, like shadowplay. They snarled at us.
Another few hundred metres and images began to flash into my mind. We were breaking into the edges of the Titan's memory sphere.
I saw such things.
May the God-Emperor spare me, I saw such things then.
I stood on the brink and peered into the abyss of the Titan's memories. I saw cities die in flames. I saw legions of the Imperial Guard incinerated. I saw Space Marines die in their hundreds, scurrying around my feet like ants.
I saw planets catch fire and burn to ashes. I saw Imperial Titans, proud warlords, burst apart and die under the onslaught of my hands.
I saw the gates of the Imperial Palace on Terra through a blizzard of fire. I saw down through many thousands of years.
I saw Horus, vile and screaming out his wrath.
I saw the whole Heresy played out in front of my eyes.
I saw the Age of Strife, and witnessed first hand the Dark Age of Technology that preceded it.
I fell, plummeting through history, through the stored memory of Cruor Vult.
I saw too much. I started to scream.
Rassi slapped me hard around the face.
'Gregor! Come on now, we are almost there!'
We were at the heart of it all now, frail as whispers. We were in the bridge of the Titan, seeing the multiple, overlapping spectres of the men who had commanded it, all sat in the princeps's throne, all dead.
Daemons crouched on my back, writhed on my shoulders, gnawed at my ears and cheeks.
I saw horror. Absolute horror.
Beside me, Rassi reached out and touched the mind-impulse unit built into the floor of the bridge.
'Now, I think…' he said. 'Alizebeth!' I yelled.
In the rank confines of the chapel, Bequin leapt forward and grabbed the ranestaff from the hands of two inquisitors who were quivering with power, stress and terror, our eyes rolled up blankly so that only the whites showed. She gripped the ranestaff, focused her untouchable force and-
FIVE
My plan fails.
Damn Verveuk all to hell.
The unthinkable.
She was killed.
Not at once, of course. The backrip of the Titan's terrible sentience tore into her, overwhelmed her untouchable quality by dint of its sheer force, and broke her mind.
Electrical discharge crackled down the haft of my ranestaff, throwing Rassi and myself away and blasting Alizebeth back across the chapel. The scorch marks are still visible on the uncorruptible steel: the perfectly etched fingerprints of Poul Rassi, Gregor Eisenhorn and Alizebeth Bequin.
Nayl told me afterwards that the psychic recoil had tossed Rassi and myself to either side like dolls, but the main force had been directed at Bequin. She had flown through the air a dozen metres, her cloak fluttering out and cracked off the back wall of the chapel with a sound that Nayl knew meant snapping bones.
He ran to her, calling her name. Fischig lurched forward too. Rassi and I lay on the ground, weeping and gasping. The ranestaff, steaming, had landed on the stone floor between us with a clang.
My plan had failed dismally and completely.
Blood trickling from my nose, I got up, Swole and Haar helping me. I had little idea where I was. Images of the Age of Strife still permeated my mind. 'Rassi?' I gasped.
'Alive!' said Begundi, crouching next to the sprawled inquisitor. 'But he's weak…'
'Alizebeth?' I asked softly, looking to where she lay. Fischig and Nayl were hud
dled over her. Nayl looked back at me, and shook his head.
'No…' I said, pushing Kara Swole away as I stepped forward. Not Alizebeth. Not her, after all this time.
'She's hurt bad, boss,' Nayl said. 'I'll try to make her comfortable, but.
The tread of Cruor Vult echoed outside.
I staggered towards Bequin. She looked so still. So broken.
'Oh sweet Emperor, please, no-'
'Inquisitor…' said Haar. 'We're dead now, aren't we, for sure?'
I realised slowly that the Titan was right outside.
'What are you doing?' Begundi yelled at me.
I had no idea. I was only partially conscious. I had Barbarisater in my fist and was running for the door. I think I meant to go out and face the Titan with my sword. That's how far gone I was.
One man with a sword, intent on facing down a Battle Titan.
Before I could reach the door, I heard the scream of down-jets and the chatter of cannon-fire.
I didn't have to look out to know it was my gun-cutter. Damn Medea.
'Thorn to Aegis, the spite of justice! Belay! Belay!'
'Thorn requires Aegis, the shades of Eternity, Razor Delphus Pathway! Pattern Ivory!'
'Thorn denies! The cover of stillness! Belay!
Aegis responds to Verveuk. The matter, quite done.'
'No!' I bellowed. 'Nooo!' Medea's response had told me that she was following Bastian Verveuk's orders now. He had commanded her to take the gun-cutter up. He had ordered her to attack the Titan.
I honestly believe that he thought he was helping me. That he could do some good.
Damn Verveuk. Damn Verveuk all to hell.
I ran outside in time to see the majestic raptor-shape of my gun-cutter burning in low across the PDF station, blazing its guns at the slowly turning Titan. The streams of hi-cal shells were just pinging off the giant's thick, armoured skin.
Cruor Vult turned with a scrape of metal against metal, raised its right fist and fired. The conical flame-flash of its muzzle gases, white-hot to the point of incandescence, twitched and flickered around the gatling blaster
The cutter bucked and lurched as the first rounds struck it. It tried to evade, but the air was air was too thick with pelting bolts.
The ferocious salvo ripped the belly out of my beloved gun-cutter and tore off a tail-wing. Spewing flames and smoke, the cutter veered off, debris cascading away from its shredded hull. It tried to climb.
Its main engines stalled out.
Leaving a wide streak of smoke behind it in the air, the cutter banked violently to the left, ripped a wing strut through the edge of the ancient, rusted dish, and dropped. It hit the shore of the lake, burying itself in the beach mud and shingle, leaving a smouldering groove thirty metres long behind it.
I stumbled forward, trying to see, but the main bulk of the downed cutter was obscured by buildings. It was ablaze, I could tell that much. Cruor Vult began to pace slowly towards the beach.
I had a sudden mental image of a hunter walking to his wounded quarry, preparing to fire a final, point-blank kill-shot.
Around the corner of the next longhouse, I could see down the glinting shingle of the icy lakeshore. The Titan was crunching away from me, its vast treads leaving perfect indentations of pulverised pebbles behind it. The cutter was half on its side, a mangled, truncated wreck, driven down into the scree and hard, cold mud of the shoreline. Wretched black fumes were boiling out of its innards, and curls of steam were rising where the lake water was in contact with flaming debris.
There was a little, tinny bang, and an exit hatch blew out of the cutter's flank, fired off by explosive bolts. A figure, clearly injured, fell out of the hatch, and began to struggle up the beach.
It looked like Verveuk.
The Titan was only about fifty metres from the crashed vessel now, its feet lifting sprays of water as it strode through the beachline shallows.
I became aware of movement beside me. It was Haar, his long-las raised and aimed at the Titan, a defiant gesture so full of courage it quite eclipsed its own basic stupidity. Kara Swole was close behind him, anxiously accompanying Rassi, who had dragged himself out to join me. He looked half-dead from his trials in the mind-link, his eyes sunken and dark, his lips tight and bloodless.
I wonder how the hell I looked.
Begundi followed after them. He'd holstered his pistols again. He knew firepower like that was pointless. Fischig and Nayl had stayed by Alize-beth's side in the chapel.
Rassi had my runestaff, and was using it to stay upright.
'Get back/ I said to them all. 'Just get back… there's nothing we can do.'
4Ve fight…' gasped Rassi. We fight… the arch-enemy… in the name of the God-Emperor of Mankind… until we drop…'
He raised my runestaff and used it to amplify his weary mind. Psycho-thermic energy, manifesting far more powerfully than it had done through his cane, spat at the towering back of the great Titan. I don't know if he hoped to hurt it. I don't know if he was so far gone by that stage to believe he could. I think he was simply trying to distract it from the cutter.
Rassi's scorching arc of flame seemed so devastating as it swirled out of the runestaff beside me, so bright it hurt my eyes, so hot it singed my hair. But by the time it struck the Titan, its true scale was woefully revealed. It flared uselessly off the Titan's rear torso cowling.
But still he kept it going. The psychothermic fire turned green and then blue white. Haar started to fire his weapon. I think Kara did too.
Like kisses into the whirlwind, my old master Hapshant would have said.
Cruor Vult raked the cutter's wreck with blaster rounds. The first few instants of the merciless blitz ruptured the hull, twisting it, deforming it, dashing shards of metal up across the shore and out over the lake, peppering it with splash ripples.
The cutter seemed to writhe, as if it was trying to escape the bombardment. In truth, it was simply being shifted and jolted as the hurricane of shots hammered it from end to end and shredded it.
Then it exploded. A big, bright flash, a cudgelling boom and a rush of Shockwave. The blast ripped a hole in the beach and sent a significant tidal wave back across the lake towards the far side.
Where the cutter had been – where Medea, Aemos and Dahault had been – was just a pit of leaping flame. Debris, water and pebbles rained down painfully like an apocalyptic cloudburst. The Titan virtually disappeared in a sudden outrash of steam.
Verveuk had been fifty metres from the wreck, stumbling inland, the last I had seen him. When I dared raise my head from the rain of shingle, there was no sign of him.
Its murder done, the Battle Titan turned on us.
I was knocked flat, and I struck my head so hard on a prefab wall I blacked out for a second. I discovered later that Begundi had taken me down into what little cover was available with a desperate flying tackle.
Cruor Vult had improved its aim.
The cold island air was full of mineral dust from the pebbles and rock mat had been atomised by its blaster fire. Rassi and Haar simply didn't exist any more. They had been vaporised by the mega-grade military weapon. My runestaff, blackened but intact, lay on a wide patch of ground that had been transmuted to furrowed glass by the hideous alchemy of blaster fire. The only other trace of them was a small, broken section of Haar's lasrifle.
Kara Swole lay twenty metres away where the blast had thrown her. She was covered in blood, and I was sure she was dead.
And 1 was sure we were dead too. Thuring had won. He had killed my friends and allies in front of my eyes and now he had won.
I had nothing to left to fight him with. I had nothing that could take on the power of a Titan. I'd had nothing when this one-sided duel began, and I sure as hell had nothing left now.
I…
An idea came upon me, insidious and foul, wrenched into the light by the extremity of my position. I shook it off. It was unthinkable. The notion was revolting, inexcusable.
But it
was also true. I did have something.
I had something more powerful than a Titan.
If I dared use it. If I had the audacity to unleash it.
Unthinkable. Unthinkable.
Cruor Vult thundered towards me through the ebbing steam.
I could hear the whine of the autoloaders in its massive gatling assembly connecting up fresh munition hoppers. I could see the beach pebbles at my feet, thousands of them, skipping slightly with every step it took.
'Bex…'
'Sir?'
'Get Kara and run. Go for the chapel.'
'Sir, I-'
Do it now, I willed and he sprang up, running fast.
I crawled over to the runestaff and grabbed its haft. It was hot to the touch, and sticky with blood.
Duclane Haar and Poul Rassi would have to serve as the sacrifice, I realised pragmatically, already disgusted with myself. There was no time, no opportunity to do anything more elaborate. As it was, I had scarcely any of the tools, devices, unguents, charms or wards that I would normally have believed necessary to undertake an action like this.
I caught myself. Until that very moment, I had never even considered undertaking an action like this, no matter the preparations.
Kneeling on the vitrified ground in the path of an oncoming Chaos Battle Titan, holding upright in bom hands a runestaff slick with the blood residue of two beloved friends, I began the incantations.
It was hard. Hard to remember word-perfect the pertinent verses of the Malus Codicium, a work I had studied on and off for years in secret. These were writings I had been eager to learn and understand, but which filled me with dread all the same. After my first sabbatical to study the Codicium, just a few months after the execution of its previous owner Quixos, I had been forced into retreat to recover, and required counselling from the abbots of the Sacred Heart monastery on Alsor.
Now I was trying to remember the same passages. Driving myself. Struggling to repeat writings I had once struggled to erase from my mind.