by Ben Counter
More explosions hit, and Lysander was just a passenger, holding on to the pillar to keep from being thrown to the bucking ground.
His ears rang. He couldn’t see. He stumbled forwards, knowing that he had to get out of the building.
Then sound returned to him, and he could hear the building groaning as it shifted. It was a tenement block with perhaps twelve floors above his head. Other Imperial Fists were yelling, a couple crying out in pain.
The dust parted before Lysander. He had made it onto the landing pad, now a swathe of pulverised debris. The Imperial Fists were running alongside him as the building came down behind them. Lysander glanced back to see the lower floors come crashing down, the floors above them following, spraying out another wave of dust. For the second time in moments everything went dark.
‘Onward! Onward!’ yelled Lysander, not sure if anyone could hear him over the roar of crushing stone. ‘Bring blade and fist, sons of Dorn! Bring fire and vengeance! Onward!’
Through the mist, through the still-falling debris, Lysander could see the enemy force approaching. It was a whole regiment of the Aristeia household guard, walking in formation across the landing pad. Above them, already the air was warped with heat haze from the landing jets of the spaceship. Lysander could see the banners the troops held high, embroidered with the coats of arms of the Aristeia houses they served, the bright colours and gold brocade of their uniforms. Behind them trundled a pair of self-propelled artillery pieces, their crews reloading them even as Lysander watched.
And in the middle of their formation, incongruous and appalling, squatted the thing that had taken over their minds. Its shape was roughly equivalent to an enormous spider, though it had far too many legs, and chitinous armour covered its bulbous abdomen. Its face was something like a distorted mask representing a human, its mouth an obscene leer. Fleshy pinkish feelers writhed around its face, and Lysander could hear the thick honey of its voice as it urged its thralls to keep marching forwards.
Lysander recognised its description as one of the many moral threats reported on Opis, a witch-thing that had led whole regiments of Guard into battlefield traps. Already it was the subject of legend and rumour among the Guardsmen, an icon of Opis’s corruption. They said that if you saw it, you had at the most an hour to live – or that its abdomen was swollen with the bodies of still-living Guard captives, or that it could scuttle through walls and liquefy a man’s flesh with its song. Every man ascribed to it whatever he feared most, so to one it was a cannibal, to another a ghost, to another a creature that could force the dark secrets right out of his mind. It didn’t have a name, because to the Guardsmen on Opis, it didn’t need one.
Lysander ran out of the clinging dust. ‘Moral threat, my brothers! Guard your souls! Onwards, Imperial Fists!’
The other Imperial Fists were running alongside him. There was no time to stop and redeploy, to weigh up all the tactical options. That way was death. The Imperial Fists had to get toe to toe with the enemy, now, before their artillery and guns could decide the battle.
Assault-Sergeant Septuron, probably the fastest man among the Imperial Fists, overtook Lysander, holding up his chainblade like the Aristeia troopers were holding up their household standards. The spider rose up on its hind legs, exposing the drooling fringe of feelers that ran along its underside, and its voice became a high wail that scratched against Lysander’s mind.
One of the artillery pieces fired. It well overshot its target, the dull explosion bursting somewhere in the wreckage behind Lysander.
Septuron was a hundred metres from the enemy. Still the Aristeia troopers were in parade-ground formation, their neat ranks marching in step. An officer at the front drew a sword with a brilliant golden blade. Another standard unfurled, the one with a map of the whole of Opis, a standard representing the planet itself and the entire Aristeia.
Septuron dived into the front rank. His squad followed. Chainblades screamed.
The shadow of the descending ship passed over Lysander. He landed heavily on his front leg, let it bend under him, and powered himself forwards.
Gunfire hammered all around him. It stuttered off his shield and the armour of his legs and shoulder. Then there were bodies crunching under his shield, arms and legs reaching around it. He swept the Fist of Dorn into the enemy mass and bodies flew, broken apart or half crushed by the impact.
The sound was like the roaring of the ocean. The enemy surged forward in a great murderous crowd. Lysander was submerged in them, bodies around and above him, gun butts and combat blades stabbing at him from every direction. Lysander hauled his shield over his head, pushing one soldier away and pistoning the Fist of Dorn into the men in front.
He forced some breathing room. Somewhere behind him was a terrible chorus of bolter fire. Lysander turned his head enough to see dozens of men running into the volley fire of Squad Ctesiphon. Already tens of bodies were piling up, more dead slumping onto the heap of the fallen. Troops were surging around them to get to the side and rear of Squad Ctesiphon but they were swamped by a great burst of flame and Lysander saw Squad Kirav fending them off. The power field of a lightning claw flashed as Beros leapt into the enemy.
Lysander looked to the front. The spider was clambering over the soldiers around it. Purple lightning crackled about it and lanced out into the mass of fighting men almost at random, blasting showers of torn men and limbs into the air.
They didn’t matter. The Imperial Fists mattered. The spider would be perfectly happy for every one of its soldiers to die, if that meant the Imperial Fists were stopped.
Lysander kicked out and felt bodies under his foot. He forced himself up over them, elevated on a heap of bodies. ‘Ucalegon!’ he yelled, head barely above the ocean of fighting bodies. ‘Emperor’s Champion!’
‘Here, my captain!’ came the reply. Ucalegon looked like he was fighting in a crater of torn flesh, as he hacked left and right with his obsidian sword.
‘Follow, brother!’ shouted Lysander. He let himself sink back down into the mass of the enemy and drove forwards, slamming the Aristeia troops down to the ground or knocking them out of the way with the Fist of Dorn. Sometimes it was like forging through a pit full of rubble, at other moments he opened up enough space around him to see the inhuman, hollow-eyed faces of the troops. Their minds were no longer their own. They were puppets, their minds scraped clean of any soul, their bodies owned by the will of the spider.
Lysander heard the sound of a blade through muscle and bone. He knew that Ucalegon was somewhere behind him, following the gory wake that Lysander left. Ucalegon could not make his own way through the enemy army, but Lysander, with the weight of his Terminator armour and the force he brought to bear with his shield and hammer, certainly could.
Bones cracked. Bodies fell under Lysander’s feet and were ground to paste beneath them. Faces loomed through the mass, jaws lolling, eyes empty. Lysander tore through an Aristeia standard, its silks soaked already in blood.
The press of bodies was denser around the spider. Men were heaping themselves up in front of Lysander to form a barrier around their master. Lysander could just glimpse, through the crush, the towering segmented legs reaching above him, studded with black bristles.
And he saw Ucalegon, clambering over the Aristeia troops, obsidian blade in one hand as he made right for the spider.
‘Will you stand when the Warmaster would not?’ yelled Ucalegon. ‘Will you face the hand of Rogal Dorn?’
The spider turned its great face towards the Emperor’s Champion. ‘What is this?’ it said in its treacly dark voice. ‘Is it a new toy? Is it a bauble to hang upon my carapace? A pet to be coddled and tormented? Yes, yes it is all these things, but it doesn’t know it yet.’
The thing’s words were woven with sorcery. No doubt the men of the Aristeia had fallen to it, their minds bent to the service of the spider. Lysander felt it pulling at his own mind. But Ucalegon would not be swayed. His resistance to such witchcraft, as thoroughly demonstrat
ed under testing from the Chapter Librarians, was one of the reasons he had been given the mantle of Emperor’s Champion.
Lysander yelled and hauled the tide of men off him, shoving them back with his shield. He could now hear clearly, as if he had surfaced from underwater, the crackle of bolter fire behind him, the howl of chainblades and the shouting of orders as the Imperial Fists dismembered the waves of household troops storming them.
Scarlet lightning burst down from the sky. It hit Ucalegon in one shoulder, earthing through him and the bodies beneath him. The stench of charred meat, instead of blood and torn bowels, now filled the air.
Ucalegon convulsed, still on his feet. He planted the obsidian blade in the mass of bodies to steady himself. The lightning flashed again but this time Ucalegon strode forward, through the pain, ascending the mountain of the dead and dying to come level with the spider’s face.
Ucalegon’s armour smouldered, flickers of power grounding off it. He was reflected in the spider’s eyes as he drew back the obsidian blade.
‘In the name of Holy Terra I challenge!’ shouted Ucalegon. ‘Take up arms, for the Emperor’s Justice falls on you!’
The spider lurched forwards. Its face split open to animal dimensions, revealing a huge, drooling mouth with thousands of needle-like teeth. It was easily big enough to swallow Ucalegon whole and take a bite out of the mound of bodies on which he stood.
Ucalegon did not step back. He lunged forwards, driving the obsidian sword up into the spider’s top palate.
The blade sheared into its upper jaw and one of its eyes burst as the point forced its way up through the socket. The lower jaw slackened and Ucalegon planted a foot against its bank of teeth to wrench the sword free.
He struck again before the spider could recover. This time the sword went in through its remaining eye. Ucalegon twisted the blade and pulled it out, bringing a great fountain of shredded brain and purple-black gore with it.
Blinded and maddened, the spider reared up, almost throwing Ucalegon aside. But Ucalegon held onto the sword which was still lodged in the spider’s skull and grabbed the edge of a chitin plate, pulling himself up onto the spider’s head, then straddling its midsection and pulling himself up onto its abdomen.
The spider howled and bucked. The seductiveness in its voice was gone. Its control was gone, too. The Aristeia troops were left mindless, suddenly without purpose. They screamed and gibbered like animals as they fought to get out of the crushing mass around Lysander. Elsewhere they were suddenly fleeing in every direction, dropping their guns and running. Lysander kicked himself free of them and saw Ucalegon shearing off two of the spider’s legs with a sweep of his sword. The spider sank down to one side like a listing ship.
‘Septuron!’ ordered Lysander over the vox. ‘Take it apart!’
Squad Septuron ran through the collapsing Aristeia formation and set about the spider with their chainblades. Its midsection was rapidly denuded of legs, leaving it an immobile, mewling lump that bucked and writhed as it tried to throw off the Space Marines around it.
A chainblade sheared into its neck and more blood flowed than Lysander thought could be contained within even so huge a creature. Ucalegon levered an armour-plate away from it and hacked at the organs inside. The sinewy connections between its head and midsection came apart and its head was off, features still churning as the head rolled away.
‘Syncella! Skult! Where are you?’ voxed Lysander. There was no reply.
Beneath the shadow of the spacecraft, which had paused in its descent, Lysander saw Lady Syncella. The downwash of the spaceship’s jets rendered the scene blurry and veiled in smoke, but the face of the skinny, ragged blonde woman in front of Syncella was the same as the translator from vel Sephronaas’s transmission.
It was Legienstrasse.
She did not look like someone who could kill anyone, let alone an Imperial Assassin. She still wore the drab translator’s uniform, reduced to grubby rags by her flight across the mountains.
Syncella’s collar split in two and the halves clattered to the rockcrete. Lysander felt the cold, hateful aura that was released from her. If he had been forced to describe it he could have done no better than to say it was like having his soul plunged into ice – but that was barely adequate as a description. What Syncella truly was, Lysander couldn’t put into words.
Syncella’s power knives were in her hands. She crouched low, a predator about to pounce. Legienstrasse was down on one knee, hands spread on the ground, in the attitude of a sprinter on the start line.
But she was not about to break into a run. Lysander saw now that the spider’s blood, mixed in with the blood of the dead Aristeia troops, had run across the landing pad and was spreading around the feet of the two Assassins.
The skin of Legienstrasse’s forearms rippled as she drew the blood up into her, through the tiny mouths opening up on her hands. Beneath her rags, ridges of bone and muscle shifted.
Lysander had learned from Syncella what Legienstrasse was, and he understood now why she had ordered the spider and the other moral threats to bring what forces they could to the spaceport of Krae. She needed bodies. She needed blood. Above all, she needed their biomass.
Syncella leapt at Legienstrasse. Legienstrasse flitted to one side, almost too fast for Lysander to follow. She lashed out with a whip of knotted gore, twisted into a weapon that slithered from the palm of her hand by a physiology created in some forbidden Mechanicus lab millennia ago. Each of her legs split in two and she dodged on four lower limbs now, their muscle and bone exposed. And still she changed, as rapidly as it was possible to think of the next mutation.
Syncella lunged. Legienstrasse’s other arm fanned out into a shield of bony spurs and leathery membrane, catching the power knife and twisting it point-down into the rockcrete. The whip lashed around Syncella’s neck and flung her aside, sending her sprawling across the ground. It was the first time Lysander had seen the Grand Master of the Culexus Temple without grace, reduced to a mere ill-coordinated human.
Legienstrasse’s mutations withdrew, rendering her indistinguishable from a normal human woman again. Most disturbingly, her face had not changed throughout the opening exchanges. The whip slithered back into her hand.
When an Assassin of the Maerorus Temple killed, it was with the bare hand. Her Assassin’s training could guarantee that the first target would fall. It was the subsequent targets that were the problem – alerted to the danger, probably armed and with the advantage of numbers, even an Assassin would be hard pressed to kill them all empty-handed. So a Maerorus Assassin made use of that first victim and turned him into a weapon she could use – her physiology broke the body down into its raw biomass and transformed it instantly into weapon mutations. She was a living weapon, fuelled by the bodies of the dead, so that with every target she killed she became stronger. The Officio Assassinorum had bargained for centuries to gain the leverage over certain Adeptus Mechanicus tech-heretics to have the necessary research performed on rare mutant strains and shapeshifting xenos. The Maerorus Temple itself had started out as a huge, forbidden experiment camp, where thousands of subjects were rendered down to create the genetic material required to make the first Maerorus Assassin.
Lysander was looking at that Assassin now, the first and last graduate of the Maerorus Temple, as she sprinted towards Lady Syncella on an array of centipede-like limbs that suddenly sprouted from a lengthening abdomen.
Lady Syncella’s eyes turned black and a bolt of nothingness shot from her. The concentrated essence of the Culexus, a shard of utter void, was enough to blast clean the soul of any normal target. To a psyker, it was utter oblivion, the annihilation of the spirit, a casting into an anti-realm that a psyker feared worse than death. To anyone else it was an instant cessation of existence. Focused by the Animus Speculum, a psyniscience device built into Syncella’s skull, it was the ultimate expression of their killing art.
Lysander’s soul recoiled. The whole world seemed skewed sideways, som
ehow infinitely but indescribably wrong.
Legienstrasse did not miss a step. She skittered under the blast and rose up to slam into Syncella. Her torso split open into four clawed limbs, grabbing Syncella and yanking her up into the air. Arteries pulsed under her skin as they drew up the blood from the fallen Aristeia, and within her chest Lysander could see three great hearts, each larger than a man’s head, thudding wildly as they forced it all into her new extremities.
Syncella writhed and struggled. Her power knives darted in and out, shearing off limbs as new ones grew in their place. She had not reached the rank of Grand Master without being one of the most efficient killing machines the Imperium could call upon. A bony spike lanced at her head – she twisted to one side, caught it in the crook of her elbow and snapped it off. She wrenched another limb out of its socket and, as it released its grip on her, she grabbed a handful of Legienstrasse’s ratty blonde hair and drew back her fist to ram her knife into her enemy’s throat.
Blood-red whips lashed around Syncella’s wrist and held it firm. For a moment the two were locked together, face to face. Legienstrasse’s expression had still not changed.
Legienstrasse raised a human-looking hand. It split apart, fingers fanning out, forming a shield that covered one side of her face.
A bullet smacked into it and detonated, leaving the hand a smoking ruin.
Legienstrasse glanced sideways, just once, at Agent Skult. The Vindicare had timed his shot perfectly, and any other target would have been felled by a direct headshot. Skult was crouching away from the battle, nestled between the steel blocks of a rusting docking clamp, where he had taken up position to wait for his shot. Now he had taken it, and the chance was gone.
Any other target would have died, but not a fellow Assassin. Legienstrasse knew how a Vindicare fought. She knew the shot was coming. She knew when, and how, and the opportunity for a surprise kill-shot was gone.
Lysander was forging through the bodies and the fleeing Aristeia troops to close with Legienstrasse. Where Syncella could not succeed on her own, perhaps she and an Imperial Fist could. Bolter fire was kicking into the rockcrete around Legienstrasse even as she turned to hold up Syncella between her and the Vindicare, an impromptu shield that protected her vital organs as Skult fired shot after shot into her rapidly growing collection of limbs and appendages. Moment by moment Legienstrasse grew, a dizzying mass of pulsing flesh, here with petals like a flower, there with pincers like a predatory insect.