Seventh Retribution

by Ben Counter

  These were the crouched rats, who crawled on their bellies through the buried sections of Khezal, which had been slums and charnel grounds before they had been bombed or burned and crushed beneath the Aristeia’s new city. Perhaps the crouched rats had always been there – perhaps they found themselves there after fleeing into the underworld or sinking so low they could not even scrape a sleeping place in a doorway or alley. No one acknowledged they existed, so no one cared.

  Legienstrasse descended into their world, where the crouched rats gnawed on their dead for food. She read their marks, cut into the skin of corpses or burned into the walls of collapsed buildings, and learned their territories and pathways. When she saw them, she did not flee in terror or try to kill them. Eventually, they stopped fleeing from her and let her observe them, even as they clawed one another to death over breeding rights and left body parts to make boundaries.

  Then she spoke to them. She had learned their language, a handful of growls and yelps that covered all the subjects needed for their short existence.

  She said that they were human. That they were just as human as anyone who walked the distant streets of Khezal, who resided in the spires and palaces which they did not, at first, believe could exist. This city was as much theirs as anyone’s. This city deserved to have done to it, what it had done to the crouched rats.

  Many did not believe her. Many thought she was a god. It did not matter what they thought. Already they had served their purpose, and been primed to fall just how Legienstrasse needed when the time came.

  ‘Power,’ said the priest, ‘pours forth from the barrel of a lasgun. Power oozes from the wounds inflicted on a traitor’s body. And the fount of this power is the Throne of Terra! All power, all authority, all command and all obedience radiate from the undying soul of the Emperor on high!’

  The mortars, fired from the tangle of ruined tenement blocks outside, were slow that evening. The sermon had been long overdue. Attacks by enemy militia on the ground floor entrances had been solid for three days and the spiritual health of the regiment had suffered as a result. The Hektaon Lowlanders, placed in Khezal to act as combat engineers, had been pressed into service instead as infantry holding the pyramid of the Chalcedony Throne. The many levels of this necropolis were crammed with tombs and sarcophagi, the burial places of several prominent Aristeia bloodlines who had competed to see the most lavish paintings and sculptures, the most fawning epic poetry, and the most sinisterly lifelike deathmasks plastered all over the resting places of their ancestors. Each floor was a tight warren bounded by the faces of the dead and painted friezes depicting lavish processions of servants and kneeling commoners. Death was everywhere.

  The upper floors were forbidden. Something terrible had been found up there, and had been burned – some soldiers said the Imperial Fists, the Space Marines, had killed it.

  It was not a place conducive to spiritual health. The Lowlanders kneeling to hear Father Mortulas’s sermon needed his words like they needed clean water and ammunition.

  Mortulas was not a fighting man, but he wore a laspistol in a holster on one side of his webbing and a knife sheathed at the other. If it came to it, he would let blood and shed it with the men whose souls he tended. If the Emperor demanded it, if the Chalcedony Throne forced it, he would fight. He looked down at the faces of the men who listened. Two thousand men were gathered there in a lower floor, which bore the least prestige for the buried and had been used for storage before its stashes of supplies and weaponry had been looted early in the fight for Khezal. From his makeshift pulpit on a low tomb of some lesser functionary, Mortulas could see every face. There was not one he did not recognise.

  ‘This war, like all wars, is about power,’ Mortulas said. ‘Power belongs to the Emperor. While He slumbers on the Golden Throne, it belongs to Terra. On Opis, the enemies of Terra seek to take the power. They wish to rule themselves. They call it freedom.’ Mortulas spat the word as if it were a curse. ‘But it is the usurpation of the Emperor’s rule. If the Emperor does not have power over Opis, then it is no longer an Imperial world. A human world. It is an enemy world, for the Emperor decreed that all humanity, all the galaxy, must bow to His power. That is all the justification a soldier of the Imperium needs to fight. For the power that must be the Emperor’s alone.’

  Mortulas looked closer at the faces lined up in front of him. Troopers and officers knelt alike. The eyes of most were closed, many looking at the floor. A few wept. Several were marred by fresh wounds and bandages.

  ‘We have lost friends,’ said Mortulas. ‘We might call their loss a sacrifice, but none of them looked for their deaths. None of them laid down and let the enemy take them. They fought to survive and were cut down in battle. So is this truly a sacrifice, when it was not looked for? Their sacrifice is not their death, but the acceptance of the galaxy they must live in as a soldier. When we win a battle, it is not we who win the glory, for that glory is the due of the Emperor. It is not we who are happy, for we have lost our own. Even in victory, we are laid low. No, you soldiers, and those who have fallen, accept that sorrow and pain will befall them. Death and injury is a part of that, but no man escapes even a great victory unwounded. That is the sacrifice the fallen have made, and that you have all made. That was your choice. The reward for that choice is the Emperor’s grace, a gift that can only manifest to the faithful. It is not a payment, like coin to the sellsword. It is not a promise, like a line in a contract. The very act of sacrifice brings that grace upon you. Not everyone can make that decision. You, you brave and you few, can make it.’

  Explosions sounded nearby, the familiar crack of mortar rounds fired from the depths of the Cemetery district. Mortulas waited for the volley to finish, and for the sound of falling debris to die down as it pattered against the side of the Chalcedony Throne’s pyramid.

  ‘In battle, our worlds shrink,’ continued Mortulas. ‘We can conceive of nothing beyond our foxhole or our firing loop. We comprehend no one but ourselves and the friends immediately around us. But even then, in the concentrated world of war, we must not forget that this power, for which we fight, is the domain of the Emperor, and that none dwell in that domain without hope. Above all, even in death and the dark, there is hope.’

  Explosions rattled again, closer this time, shaking dust from the ancient walls. Mortulas had to steady himself to keep his feet. A couple of the Hektaon Lowlanders opened their eyes and looked around nervously as the ground shuddered.

  Then, another sound. Stone on stone, grinding, coming from overhead.

  The stone coffin under Mortulas’s feet rocked, forcing the paving slabs away around it. Mortulas jumped down as the lid cracked. The other tombs on the lower level, mostly of favoured servants and ill-favoured lesser relatives, were also cracking open. The smell of ancient death, of mould and decay, rolled out.

  The Lowlanders jumped to their feet and fumbled to bring their guns to bear. Officers shouted for calm and order, to quell any panic.

  ‘So,’ said Mortulas. ‘The enemy raise the dead. We had known this would come to pass. We have waited for it. This is the reckoning that was fated to us!’ Mortulas drew his laspistol. He was an unfit and ageing man, wearied by illness and an arduous career, but he looked ready to fight.

  Sarcophagi shattered. Guardsmen fell or ducked for cover.

  What emerged was not the dead, not the mummified remains of past Aristeia, hung with gold and wielding the weapons buried with them. What emerged were the crouched rats. Their skin was pale and patchy, their frames shrunken with disease. They scurried like animals. Their eyes were screwed shut, for even in the weak light of the Chalcedony Throne they were blinded. It did not matter. They were born fighting blind.

  ‘Heretics!’ cried Mortulas. ‘Put them to the sword! Put them to the flame!’

  Dozens of the crouched rats poured out of shattered tombs and holes that suddenly opened up in the ground. And as soon as they emerged, they were cut down. Laspistol sidearms and combat knives did f
or the first few who emerged. By the time the next few made it out, many of the Guardsmen had their lasguns at the ready and the rats were picked off before they slithered all the way out of their hiding places.

  There were a lot of them, and they did not seem afraid to die. These ragged people, as pale as worms, were apparently unarmed and determined to present themselves as targets to the Hektaon Lowlanders. Officers called for disciplined fire, and to keep out of each others’ lines of sight. Another died, two las-shots through his torso. Another, one leg sheared at the thigh. Another, crawling with his abdomen split open, shot through with three tightly-placed shots from a sergeant’s laspistol.

  One lurched up when thought dead and grappled with a Guardsman, trying to wrench the lasgun from his hands. It was thrown down and clubbed with the butts of his fellow soldiers’ guns, its head caved in and its body twitching.

  They saw a chunk of rock, glossy and black, implanted in the centre of its chest. None of them thought it might mean anything. Perhaps, when the influx of enemies was done and all were dead, they could examine the bodies and wonder why. But that would wait until the killing was over with.

  One crouched rat did not die easily. He was much larger than the rest, his skin heavily scarred and his rope belt hung with human jawbones. He reared up as another shot caught him in the chest and punched right through. His lips drew back over bare teeth. His eyes opened, to show the sockets were hollow, the eyeballs scooped out leaving red-black pits. His tongue was forked, and it flickered from his mouth as he yelled wordlessly.

  The chunk of rock in his chest glowed. Green light bled out, and arced into the floor like electricity. The crystals implanted in the other corpses did the same, and their power congealed above them, forming a layer of trapped light burning in the air.

  ‘Fall back!’ shouted Mortulas. ‘This is witchcraft! Guard your souls!’

  The leader of the crouched rats laughed, a horrible, raking sound from a torn throat. The skin of his chest blackened, his charred ribs showing through. More las-shots blew off an arm and ripped a chunk out of his shoulder. He did not die.

  He was still alive when the disc of light tore open and madness bled through. A caged portal to another realm, a doorway to the warp, appeared as reality tore open.

  The Guardsmen were in retreat, heading for the exits from the Chalcedony Throne’s lower floors. Those nearest the portal were robbed of their senses, their eyes struck blind and their minds scoured clean. They dropped, minds wiped. Others went mad and turned their guns on their fellow soldiers or, if they still possessed some spark of awareness, on themselves.

  Some fell to their knees and gave thanks that they had witnessed the realm of Chaos.

  Most survived and ran, the regimental vox-operators already warning nearby units of a moral threat manifesting at the Chalcedony Throne.

  The gate was short-lived, a makeshift work of sorcery that drained the life-force of the crouched rats in minutes. Those minutes were all it took for Karnikhal Six-Finger, World Eater and champion of Khorne, to stride through the doorway into the heart of Khezal. Alongside him, like pack hunters following their alpha, were a host of bloodletters, footsoldier daemons of Khorne, their muscular shapes dripping with scalding blood and their swords of black iron humming with the need to kill. Behind them was one of the warp gate beasts, the golems of corpses raised below the city, its legs folded under it as it forced its way through the gateway into the relatively cramped space of the Chalcedony Throne’s lower floor.

  The bloodletters set about executing the Guardsmen who survived in the chamber. It was sorry work, for the Guardsmen were driven mad or witless by their glimpse of the warp. The bloodletters’ blades took every head, from Guardsman and crouched rat, and threw them into a bloody heap at Karnikhal’s feet as the gateway stuttered closed. The only light now was the molten glow of Karnikhal’s armour and the fires in the daemons’ eyes.

  ‘Are you satisfied?’ bellowed Karnikhal. ‘Now I have swapped one master for another, the corpse-god’s killers for you? Has your pet done well? You promised me sport. You promised me skulls. I shall take yours instead, if you cannot deliver!’

  ‘Threats mean nothing, Six-Finger,’ came a reply – a calm female voice. Karnikhal took a small mirror from an ammo pouch on his belt and held it up to the light bleeding from his armour. It reflected the face of the woman who he would be forced to call master for a few hours more. ‘I care not for your god or for the honour of a World Eater. Your tally of skulls means nothing to me. I care only that you serve as you are bound. Kill me when you are released from my service, if it pleases you. It would be most educational to see you try. For now, do your part.’

  ‘You stoke my rage, Legienstrasse!’ replied Karnikhal. ‘Those few who dared to do so now adorn my armour, and they live still, trapped in their skulls to witness the anger they provoked!’

  ‘Play your part in the summoning of the tower,’ said Legienstrasse. ‘And be ready for my arrival.’

  The Amphitheatre of Carcarellon was as much a monument to excess as it was a venue for the many sports and entertainments of Khezal. Seating for upwards of a hundred thousand citizens was enclosed in the soaring archways of the stadium, with the flag of every house of the Aristeia flying. Marble of hundreds of different colours made up the structure in an eye-watering clash only accentuated by the gilt and hanging silks of the most exclusive areas, where Aristeia nobles once lounged to be waited on and entertained.

  The arena had, in the past, been adapted for everything from staged sea battles to lavish plays, and the weddings and assumption ceremonies of Khezal’s most exalted Aristeia. Now it was a great circle of beaten earth transformed into a military camp where thousands of Imperial Guard were sheltering against the siege growing outside the stadium walls.

  The golden colours of the two Imperial Fists Vindicator tanks stood out against the camouflage drab of the Plaudian and Deucalian vehicles. Imperial Guard Chimera APCs were parked where they had dropped off dozens of Guardsmen fleeing the advance of enemy forces. A couple of Basilisk self-propelled artillery pieces were having their guns calibrated to lob shells over the stadium walls into the streets outside. The most likely ways in were covered by Leman Russ battle tanks, dug in and surrounded by sandbags to serve as gun emplacements.

  The Guardsmen in the stadium looked up as the whine of engines approached. A pair of golden gunships, like great mechanical eagles, swooped down low and circled as their pilots identified places to land. The Gilded Pyre and the Peril Swift came in to land among the camo netting and ammunition stores of the makeshift camp.

  Lysander jumped down from the Gilded Pyre. He felt the reaction of the Guardsmen when they saw him – amazement and more than a little fear. The rest of the Imperial Fists strike force disembarked behind him.

  Sergeant Sthenelus ran to meet them. ‘Well met, my captain!’ he said with a salute of a forearm clapped across his chest. ‘The situation in Khezal grows more dire with every minute. The enemy is getting unprecedented numbers from somewhere. Major assaults are under way in all areas. They seek to drive us out of the city, captain! But they face the masters of the siege, the Imperial Fists, and we shall hold fast!’

  ‘They seek,’ said Lysander, ‘to pin us in place until Legienstrasse can escape. Then as far as Opis’s moral threats are concerned, this city and this planet can go to the hells, because they will have won. Gorgythion!’

  ‘Captain?’ said Gorgythion as he swung himself down from the cockpit of the Gilded Pyre.

  ‘What is your opinion of the air defences we observed?’

  ‘The enemy has not been lax in their work,’ replied Gorgythion. ‘Deeper into the city, flak guns and air defence lasers have been set up and adapted. We encountered little, but further in, it would be hazardous indeed to mount an air operation. I understand the Imperial Navy have already learned this to their cost.’

  ‘We may have to take that risk,’ said Lysander, ‘if we need to move against Legienstrasse qui
ckly.’

  ‘You are certain she is in Khezal?’ said Librarian Deiphobus, exiting the Thunderhawk behind Lysander.

  ‘Nothing on Opis is certain,’ said Lysander. ‘But we must place ourselves where she is most likely to break cover, and she is most likely to do so in Khezal. This is where the enemy is making their move, as Sergeant Sthenelus has discovered. Legienstrasse was working with Opis’s moral threats at Krae. If she is working with them here then–’

  Lysander’s words were cut off as a tremendous explosion shattered the upper levels on one side of the amphitheatre. Marble masonry rained down and Guardsmen fled the falling wreckage. A Leman Russ was buried by a great marble spur that shattered against it, hiding everything in a pall of dust.

  ‘They’re starting!’ yelled an officer in the uniform of a lieutenant of the 4th Plaudis Shock Army. ‘Man the fixed guns! Reserve men, draw to the centre!’ The lieutenant turned to the Imperial Fists. ‘My lord. Will you fight alongside us this day?’

  ‘We will,’ replied Lysander.

  ‘My thanks. Lieutenant Fordrich, Fourth Plaudis.’

  ‘Captain Lysander, Imperial Fists First.’

  Fordrich looked young for an officer – quite possibly he had attained his rank through the opaque politics of the Imperium’s officer class rather than battlefield experience. He went to the men under him who wore the uniforms of a dozen different Guard regiments. He was pointing at the Imperial Fists and Lysander saw the mix of awe and gratitude in their faces. When they fought alongside the Space Marines, an Imperial Guardsman felt like the Emperor Himself was beside them. It was one more weapon in a Space Marine’s arsenal.