by C. L. Werner
It was on Uhlan’s tongue to argue with the Fabricator, to accuse him of manipulating the Iron Warrior into this position. Playing the two officers against one another had been a strategy Oriax had encouraged. Now that Uhlan was caught between the two, it seemed he was being left to bear the consequences of failed intrigues.
Uhlan left his outburst unspoken, however. He could sense the change that had settled upon the servitor. That feeling of malignant intelligence was absent. Oriax was no longer in communion with his machine. Arguing with it now would be like arguing with his bolter.
Angrily, the Iron Warrior turned and withdrew along the proto-synthetic floor. He would tell Vallax of the Fabricator’s offer, if for no other reason than the simple fact that Oriax was right. Uhlan was bound to Vallax now. Whatever doom awaited the Over-Captain, it was waiting for his Raptors too.
Chapter XV
I–Day Plus One Hundred and Four
Over-Captain Vallax marched along the deserted corridor, the sensors in his helmet stifling the drone of sirens and the thunder of shells. It was a testament to the enormous calibre of the enemy guns that any sound at all could penetrate far enough to reach the bunker. Vallax wasn’t certain if such an achievement was impressive or absurd. Anything of such size would be almost immobile. When the time came for the guns to be dealt with, the enemy wouldn’t be able to move them somewhere safe.
The thought brought a curl to Vallax’s scarred lip. As though anywhere was safe for an enemy of the Iron Warriors.
Vallax’s hair bristled as raw hate crackled through his brain, a peculiar psycho-reactive mutation inflicted upon him by the baleful emanations of the warp and its denizens. Vallax rarely suffered such an irritant for long, but Rhodaan had proven himself not without a certain aptitude. He had not maintained his rank of Over-Captain for two thousand years by disposing of irritants while they were still useful to him. Still, Captain Rhodaan’s usefulness was no longer equal to the menace he represented. Rhodaan had acquired quite a reputation of his own in the recent campaign against the hrud. Vallax didn’t like subordinates who possessed too much renown.
The Iron Warrior glared at the ferrocrete walls, then fixed his gaze on the pseudo-mechanical flesh-drone acting as his guide. The thing was enough to nauseate even an Iron Warrior, a loathsome hodgepodge of skin and steel, cable and bone. Fabricator Oriax never assembled two of his flesh-drones quite the same way. But there was one thing the Techmarine never failed to implement. Each flesh-drone still had a recognizable face stitched onto it somewhere, a face that continually writhed in silent screams. It was said that Oriax never completely lobotomised the subjects of the conversion process, that he left just enough self-awareness in the flesh-drones for them to experience the full horror of their new existence while their mechanical programming made it impossible for them to escape it.
Even among the Iron Warriors, Fabricator Oriax was regarded with a measure of caution, a wariness that stopped just short of being outright fear. The Techmarine was an enigma to the rest of the Third Grand Company and had been so for millennia. Maimed in the crystal-swamps of Tarsis IX, Oriax was more machine than flesh, his mind driven by the strange impulses of steel, not the demands of honour and pride. Since the conquest of Castellax, the Fabricator had rarely stirred from the bunker complex beneath the Iron Bastion, and then only at the command of Warsmith Andraaz. Visitors to the bunker were even more rare.
Vallax, however, was a special case. If not for him, Oriax would never have left the crystal-swamps. The Techmarine owed his life to the Over-Captain, a fact which Vallax had exploited to his benefit many times in the past. Now, it was time for him to do so again.
The flesh-drone hesitated outside a massive titanium bulkhead, the vox-caster built into its chest spitting and crackling as it transmitted a steady stream of binary. Vallax knew the bunker was rife with traps to safeguard Oriax’s seclusion. Without the flesh-drone’s transmissions, nothing alive could penetrate the Fabricator’s sanctum.
With a growled rumble, the bulkhead door retreated into the floor, allowing Vallax and his guide to enter a vast inner chamber, its most prominent feature being the forest-like confusion of pipes rising from its floor and vanishing into the ceiling far overhead. A riotous array of pict screens flickered from every corner of the room, presenting a thousand different views of Castellax, from the dark depths of the promethium mines to the jagged spires of the Iron Bastion and the decayed sprawl of Vorago, the city’s outskirts now further despoiled by the marauding orks.
Vallax’s hand shifted to his pistol holster as he saw his own visage fill one of the monitors. His hypno-trained senses immediately estimated from what location such a view of himself would be afforded. Spinning around, he found himself staring into the skeletal face of one of Oriax’s grisly spies, the floating skulls he called his ‘Steel Blood’. The followers of the False Emperor employed similar constructs, but Vallax doubted they had the dedication to craft them the way Oriax did. There was the stink of the warp about the Steel Blood, a daemonic taint that no mortal could experience without a twinge of uneasiness. It was a sensation too elusive for understanding, like something that could be seen only out of the corner of the eye but which hid itself when viewed straight-on.
While he glared at the Steel Blood, the metal jaw of the floating skull snapped open, exposing the metal meshwork of a vox-caster. ‘Salutation and honour to Over-Captain Vallax. Deathsmith of the Faceless. Scourge of the Pox-pits. Brother Iron Warrior.’
The Iron Warrior brushed past the floating skull, ignoring the Steel Blood’s synthesised praises. ‘Show yourself, Oriax!’ Vallax’s voice boomed through the forest of cables and pipes. ‘I did not descend twenty levels and forsake the call of battle to waste words with your mindless tinker-toys.’ The Space Marine marched deeper into the tangle of machinery and monitors. ‘I am not the Warsmith, Oriax. I do not suffer proxies.’
In a single fluid motion, Vallax swung about, drew his pistol and sent a single shot slamming into the centre of the Steel Blood’s cranium. The floating skull exploded in a burst of sparks, shards of metal and shreds of organics flying in every direction.
‘Your marksmanship is as good as when you patrolled the citadels of Olympia,’ a shrill, mechanical voice reverberated from the darkness.
‘It is better,’ Vallax said, his armoured thumb rubbing across the smoking barrel of his weapon. The optics of his helmet adjusted to filter away the chemical haze that filled Oriax’s sanctum, but the compounds were so complex as to baffle even the engineering of the Legion’s artificers. His anger rising, Vallax marched in the direction of the voice. ‘Reveal yourself, Oriax. I want to look at what I’m speaking to.’
The chamber shuddered as fans suddenly churned into life, drawing away the obscuring gases and chemicals that enabled the sanctum to retain its preternatural darkness. Vallax’s optics immediately adjusted to the natural gloom, but there was no sign of anyone where the voice had spoken.
‘Is this better?’ Oriax’s voice came from the same place, rising from a vox-caster fitted to one of the pict screens. A moment later, the same words echoed from a spot some fifteen metres to Vallax’s left. The Iron Warrior spun around, glaring through the darkness. This time there was something to reward his gaze. Nestled amidst a jumble of machinery and cogitator cabinets, their blinking lights and flashing diodes casting a diabolic glow about his body, was Fabricator Oriax.
The Techmarine presented a ghastly shape, devoid of the symmetry of rational design. His body was a mass of cables and gears fused about the remnants of a man. A confusion of spidery steel arms jutted from his figure at every angle, scrabbling at the consoles arrayed about him with dazzling speed. A massive metal claw arced upwards from his back and hung menacingly above his head, fiddling with an array of rune-boards suspended from the ceiling. A set of pincers, electricity crackling between their steel talons, projected from his right shoulder, hovering about a table resting at the Techmarine’s side. Vallax felt a moment of shock
when he saw that the pincers appeared to be assembling another Steel Blood – possibly to replace the one he had so noisily destroyed. Efficiency, or anticipation? Vallax wasn’t sure which answer was more disturbing.
‘You should count yourself favoured, Over-Captain,’ Oriax’s distorted metal voice declared. ‘There are few I allow to see me as I am.’ The Techmarine’s limbs paused in their assorted duties, each curling back to point for a moment at the body to which they were attached. At the core of that trash-heap of cables and gears was a cuirass of ancient armour from the time of the Great Crusade, the skull-helm symbol of the Iron Warriors engraved across the breast. Staring from above the symbol was an iron visage every bit as inhuman and forbidding, a clutch of pale, scarred flesh surrounding a lipless gash of mouth and a torn stump of nose. A brace of mechanical eyes burned with crimson light from the pits of Oriax’s mangled face.
Vallax felt no horror at Oriax’s condition, only a sneering contempt. There was a good reason why the Techmarine hid himself away and tried to guard himself with a cloak of mystery. The brutal fact was there hadn’t been much left of him after the crystal-swamps, less than even a normal man; much less than a Space Marine.
‘I did not come here to waste time gawking at freaks,’ Vallax growled. ‘Your surrogate convinced the Warsmith to allow me to lead the assault.’
‘You find that prospect daunting?’ The synthesised voice made it impossible to tell if there was a mocking tone behind the words.
‘I worry only that Captain Rhodaan will betray his own duty,’ Vallax snarled at the Fabricator. Rhodaan’s return to the Iron Bastion had been something of a shock to him, but even more so had been the way Andraaz had responded to him. Rhodaan had been placed on an equal footing with Vallax in planning out the raid, given co-command in all but name. It was a final humiliation for the Over-Captain and one in which he read the seeds of his own ruin. Merely by surviving, Rhodaan had turned the Warsmith against Vallax. Andraaz might have overlooked treachery, but he would never forgive failure. ‘The success of my mission depends upon Rhodaan’s diversion against the ork headquarters. The vermin must believe that their command centre is our target, not the fuel dump.’
The Techmarine’s claw lowered so that it could point at Vallax, shaking at him like the reproving finger of an Olympian combat instructor. ‘Rhodaan won’t know his is a diversion unless you tell him. Lead the upstart to believe his is the real attack. Provide him with enough janissaries to cover his assault. Enough serf-meat to keep the orks occupied.’
Under his helmet, Vallax’s lips pulled back in a cunning smile. ‘Leave him ignorant of the true purpose of the mission,’ he mused. ‘But Rhodaan is no fool, he will question the deployment of my own squad as a diversionary force. He may guess the deception and undermine me.’ Vallax’s hand tightened into a fist as unpleasant memories recurred to him. ‘He has done it before,’ the Over-Captain admitted, thinking of Rhodaan’s ambush of the hrud.
Oriax’s laugh was like a burst of electronic interference. ‘You will not deploy anywhere near the blockhouse, or anywhere that might give Rhodaan warning. When the time for action comes, your squad will come to my sanctum.’ The entire console around the Techmarine shifted with him as he turned to face a particular portion of wall. At an unspoken command from the Fabricator the entire wall sank into the floor, exposing a second chamber.
Even through his armour, Vallax felt a chill and knew it to be a cold born not of flesh but of spirit, a psychic frost that betokened some great effort of witchery. Warily, he came forwards to peer into the inner room. He gasped at what he saw.
‘Each wall possesses thirteen facets, adorned with special psycho-reactive alloys found only within the Eye of Terror,’ Oriax boasted as Vallax stared at the sharply angled walls. At the base of each facet, arrayed like the spokes of a wheel, were thirteen naked things chained to stout pillars. ‘The pillars are of wraithbone plundered from the vanquished craftworld of X’amot,’ the Fabricator said, but Vallax was more interested in the beings bound to those pillars rather than the columns themselves. At first glance, the things might have been mistaken for humans of the most degenerate and malformed stock, but a second look made it apparent that whatever lurked inside those twisted bodies was anything but human.
At the centre of the chamber, its surface etched in cabalistic symbols and framed with a ring of psi-circuitry, was a great disc of bloodwood. The black hue of the disc gave evidence that the timber had recently been fed, soaking up the spirit-energy of its victims. For such a mass of bloodwood, Oriax must have had at least a hundred ‘donors’. Murder on such a scale didn’t impress Vallax. What did impress him was the fact that he recognised this apparatus and could guess its purpose.
‘You’ve recreated the Daemonculum,’ Vallax said, glancing away from the inner chamber to stare at Oriax’s corpse-like face.
‘I’ve improved upon it,’ Oriax corrected him. ‘The sorcerers of the pesedjet are too mired in superstition to truly understand such power.’ The Fabricator’s claw stretched out, gesturing at the bloodwood platform. ‘Bring your squad to me, Vallax. Stand at the heart of the Daemonculum. I shall propitiate the thirteen daemons and harness their energies to transmit you where you need to be.’ Again, the static-laughter crackled through the sanctum. ‘Unless Rhodaan has developed a warp-eye, he will never guess your purpose or your objective.’
Vallax nodded slowly. ‘This will bring great glory to both of us,’ he said. ‘The Warsmith will be impressed and will reward me greatly. You will not find me ungenerous, Oriax.’
The Fabricator’s many arms spread outwards in a great spiral, his mechanical eyes glowing in the darkness. ‘It is enough that I help the brother who saved my life. That is all the reward I ask.’
Warily, the Space Marines of Squad Vidarna, Vallax’s infamous Faceless, stepped out onto the bloodwood platform. Their Over-Captain gestured with his chainsword, motioning Oriax to begin. The other Raptors dropped into a wary crouch, their weapons at the ready. Orders or no, they were uneasy about the Daemonculum and alert for the danger they sensed exuding from the bound daemons and the wraithbone pillars.
A burst of binary crackled from Oriax’s mouth. In response, a dozen Steel Blood whirled across the massive chamber, joining the Raptors upon the platform. Another burst of binary and several of the Fabricator’s flesh-drones lumbered out into the room. The servitors had been specially built for this task, equipped with ghastly mechadendrites that curled upwards from their backs to arc downwards over their shoulders. Each mechadendrite ended not in a hand, but in a great shackle of bronze. In their semi-organic natural arms, each flesh-drone bore an iron knife and a brass bowl.
Struggling in the grip of each set of shackles were the pathetic remains of human slaves. Like the servitors, they too had been especially prepared for their function. Legs and fingers had been surgically amputated to limit resistance, tongues had been removed to silence outcries that might disrupt the cadence of incantations. In stark contrast, drugs had been administered to heighten awareness in their terrified minds of the slaves, stimulants injected into their veins to strengthen vitality and frustrate the physical toll of terror on their bodies. It was important to the working of the Daemonculum that the sacrifices experience the magnitude of fear but be incapable of perishing from fright. Their deaths had another, more purposeful design.
A cabal of servitors surrounded the bloodwood discs, their armatures wrapped in heavy cloaks adorned with a profusion of archaic symbols – the arcane trappings of the pesedjet. Each servitor grasped a black candle in its claws, a candle rendered from human fat and with a wick that was only partially corporeal, having been exposed to the energies of the warp.
Oriax flicked a claw and the robed cabal began to intone a sibilant chant, a tonality that no human voice could arrange and no human mind could conceive. The sound of the immaterium was in that chorus, the whisper of empty spaces and endless darkness, the call of the hungry void. With another flick of the Fabric
ator’s claw the flesh-drones continued their march, each drawing itself before one of the thirteen facets. They turned so that they each faced a wraithbone pillar and the daemon bound upon it. As the slaves bound in their shackles struggled futilely in their grip, the flesh-drones stood still, obedient and waiting.
The chorus rose, now invoking the names of the god-daemons of the warp, the primordial forces beyond reality, the eldritch powers of Chaos.
In perfect, mechanised synchronization, the flesh-drones raised knives and bowls. While the naked slaves tried to scream with the stumps of their tongues, the knives flashed out across their throats. The blood of thirteen murdered mortals sloshed into the bowls, some arcane energy magnifying the sound into the roar of a cataract. The stink of blood spilled across the Daemonculum and the ethereal cold vanished, switching in an instant to a hellish, sweltering blaze.
The daemons stirred in their bindings, striving to reach the bowls. Again, the flesh-drones froze, waiting upon the cadence of the cabal, oblivious to the maddened thrashings of the daemons only a few metres away. Curses and maledictions spilled from the fanged maws of the daemons, threats and entreaties, promises and pleadings for the placation of their abominable hunger.
Only when the choir reached a certain point in the incantation did the flesh-drones act. Sconces set into the roof began to spray a pungent incense into the chamber, a smoky vapour that streamed everywhere in only a few moments but, with unnatural trepidation, refused to stray across the bloodwood disc. Obscured within the smoke, the flesh-drones raised their offerings to the daemons. Unable to resist, the daemons lapped up the gory liquid with long, wolfish tongues, slurping noisily at their hideous repast.
It was some minutes before the daemons had glutted themselves, but the delay was inconsequential now. By accepting the offering when they had, the daemons bound themselves to the ritual, subjected their power to that of the Daemonculum.