Seventh Retribution
Page 26
‘Kirav!’ ordered Lysander. ‘Join the reserve. We will have need of you if the enemy break through. Ctesiphon, Orfos, I shall be at the walls with you. Ucalegon, be where the Emperor’s blade is needed. Gorgythion, get the Thunderhawks in the air but bring them down rather than take fire. We will need them later. And Sthenelus?’
‘Captain?’
‘Have you calibrated for indirect fire?’
‘We have, captain.’
‘Then lend your might to the artillery. To battle, my brothers. Legienstrasse thinks she will slow us down here. But she merely hands us her allies to die.’
Near the damaged section of the stadium, great booming explosions rumbled and the whole building shuddered. An Aristeia banner fell and fluttered down from the upper reaches. Imperial Guardsmen were forming firing lines staggered across the arena floor.
The pink fire of her wings was what told them it was her. Like the rising dawn, the flame crested the summit of the wall and bathed the amphitheatre in rose-pink light.
The Plaudians recognised her feathers and the strips of skin waving from her scalp. Word had got out that she was Antiocha Wyraxx, once a witch and now a fusion of daemon and woman. Those who had seen her, and survived, were a combination of blessed and cursed. They had been among the few who had survived her appearance on K-Day, so they were lucky. But perhaps they had used up their luck on that day. Perhaps Wyraxx, the Phoenix of Khezal, would come looking for them.
She rose over the stadium, her long wings draping down over the uppermost spires. The artillery pieces threw explosive shells over the walls in the direction of the assault, and the din of battle mixed with the strange humming song of power that emanated from Wyraxx herself.
She raised a hand and cast down a bolt of pink fire. A burst of flame, billowing upwards like a blossoming flower, enveloped a handful of Guardsmen trying to bring a heavy bolter to bear on her. A second bolt of sorcery lanced through one of the dug-in tanks and the ammunition detonated, blasting shrapnel in every direction in a rattle of staccato explosions.
‘Stay on the ground!’ yelled Lysander to Gorgythion as he ran towards the wrecked wall.
‘I must take flight!’ shouted Gorgythion in response. ‘I fought her once, I can do it again!’
‘Stay on the ground, brother! That is an order!’
Lysander and Ctesiphon were running to the breach in the wall. Guardsmen were already clambering up the seating to get to the breach. Gunfire was sounding from there, raised voices and screams.
Wyraxx had been accompanied on K-Day by living biological weapons. The Guardsmen had all pulled on their gas masks. The Plaudians and Kirgallans among them said prayers of retribution over their guns.
The enemy broke through the breach in a tide of struggling flesh. They were almost naked, all but feral. They had once been citizens of Khezal. Perhaps a few of them had been Imperial Guard, captured, brutalised and changed by Wyraxx. Whatever they had been, they were now the enemy.
They fought with blades of bone that had grown from their hands. Bone fanned out through their torn bluish skin to form plates over their chests and shoulders. Their eyes were red, as if from burst blood vessels. Their tongues were bundles of tendrils, like sea anemones. And under their skin writhed translucent pods, squirming with life eager to get out.
‘Hand of Dorn guide us! Fists of Dorn crush them!’ Lysander led the charge with a war-cry, sprinting the hundred metres across the arena floor towards the breach. The Imperial Guard guns cut down a dozen of the enemy in the first few seconds, and spore-filled organs inside them burst, filling the air with an orange biological haze. The Imperial lasguns fell silent for a moment as officers yelled to fall back and take up second firing positions. Lysander charged right into the haze, and he felt the filters in his nose and throat contracting as they recognised airborne toxins.
The first horror loomed out at him. The man’s face was split vertically, bony shards and white cilia poking through the wound. He drew back a bulbous fist, swollen and heavy with cysts primed to burst and deliver shards of biotoxin. Lysander hit the heretic so hard in the midriff with the Fist of Dorn that his deformed arm was torn off as his torso was smacked away across the arena. Lysander swung back and knocked the legs out from under a second heretic who charged at him – this one’s forearms were mutated to twist together into a bony spear, like the ram of a ship, and blue crystals of congealed venom glistening along its cutting edge. Lysander swept the stricken mutant aside with a sweep of his shield.
Ucalegon ran past him, heading for the upper seating and higher ground. His duty as Emperor’s Champion meant he had to go for the flying sorceress who was even now detonating the Plaudian tanks with bolts of pink fire.
A sniper shot blew the arm off another mutant beside Lysander. A second hit it in the jaw and sheared it off, and the mutant fell in a spray of corrupted purple-black blood. Lysander knew it was from Scout Enriaan, perched somewhere among the decorative marble surrounding the Aristeia section of the seating.
Toxin shards burst against Lysander’s armour. One grazed his face and he felt the burning as the toxin dived into his blood and spread, leaping from cell receptor to receptor, breaking down everything it touched.
The flame rippled across his face, already tight and painful from the burns he received at Krae. It raced down his neck and into his chest, where his twin hearts hammered faster.
Then it receded, forced back into pockets and crushed by the immune system of a Space Marine, filtered out by his vat-grown organs, broken down into harmless components or expelled from his pores and his lungs.
Scythes of bone were flung at him, propelled by snapping bundles of muscles bunched around the chest and shoulders of one of the mutants. They hit his shield, and were shattered into dust by the suppression field around it. The mutants rushed him at once but Lysander crunched the Fist of Dorn into the pelvis of the first, crushed the second into the floor with his shield, and dodged around the bony axe-hand of the third to shatter its face with a headbutt.
Bolter fire was punching through the enemy at will. Squad Ctesiphon advanced steadily, half the brothers kneeling to fire volleys while the others moved up. In the breach ahead, a hundred more mutant heretics were forcing their way in, and half of them were dead to the explosive fire raking through them before they were inside the amphitheatre.
Lysander dived into them, and it was good. It was good to feel the enemy – an honest enemy, one he knew to be a foe of mankind to the death – crushed and broken beneath the Fist of Dorn. It was good to feel them break against his shield, and to see them mown down by the guns of his battle-brothers.
Another foe ran at him. They were desperate to die. Lysander ducked to one side and caught the enemy on his shield, flipping the mutant up over his head and dumping it face-down on the blood-slick ground behind him. He turned to drive the Fist of Dorn down through the mutant’s skull.
‘Captain, stop!’ shouted Librarian Deiphobus, running through the carnage towards Lysander. ‘A moment with him. Just a moment.’
Lysander paused and nodded at the Librarian. Deiphobus crouched down by the heretic. Lysander knelt behind Deiphobus, holding up his shield to ward off the worst of the bone and toxin shards raining down from the breach.
Deiphobus placed a hand against the heretic’s skull. Lysander saw with distaste that larvae were squirming under the skin of the mutant’s back, things like toothed worms that forced against the skin as if they knew they had only moments left to hatch out of that doomed body.
Deiphobus screwed his eyes shut and Lysander knew that in the Librarian’s mind, compartmentalised and ordered by years of mental exercise, he was engaging the heretic’s mind in a contest the heretic had no hope of winning.
‘They’re to keep us here,’ said Deiphobus. ‘That’s it. It doesn’t matter if they survive, or even if they kill us. They just have to keep us here.’
‘As we thought,’ said Lysander.
A screech from above caught L
ysander’s attention. Wyraxx was wheeling overhead, swooping over Ucalegon as the Emperor’s Champion perched on a lone arching spur of marble that reached out over the arena seating.
Wyraxx lashed Ucalegon with fire. Ucalegon clung tight and weathered it, holding on even as the flame threatened to throw him down to the arena floor. The Phoenix of Khezal swept around for another pass, her trailing feathers coiling behind her.
Ucalegon leapt off the arch and landed on Wyraxx, grabbing a handful of the tendrils protruding from her scalp. Her face screwed up in pain and dismay. She lost altitude suddenly, the weight of an armoured Space Marine throwing her off course. Ucalegon twisted his hand, winding it deeper into her tendrils, and wrenched her head up. Wyraxx aimed upwards, lost speed and fell, spiralling down like a crippled jet as Ucalegon hung on.
‘Kirav, help Ucalegon!’ ordered Lysander into the vox. ‘Clip the arch-heretic’s wings!’
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Deiphobus put a hand on Lysander’s shoulder guard. ‘There is a disturbance,’ he said. ‘An exhalation of the warp. Reality recoils. The whole city shakes with it.’
‘From Wyraxx?’ asked Lysander.
‘No,’ said Deiphobus. ‘Look to the sky. Beyond the walls. Look to the sky.’
Lysander broke from the cover of his shield, carrying it before him as he ran forwards towards the breach. Bone spines thudded into his armour. He ignored them, just as he ignored the heretics who rushed at him. He knocked them aside or ran them over, trusting in Deiphobus and Squad Ctesiphon to deal with those who threatened him.
He reached the breach, a great crack in the amphitheatre’s outer wall where heretics were still clambering through. Lysander knocked the head off one who leered out through the crack at him. Then he placed a foot on the torn masonry and pushed himself up. He climbed the crumbling stone, bolter shells cracking into the stone around him as Ctesiphon’s bolters gave him cover. Las-fire was falling, too, as Imperial Guard in respirator masks advanced alongside Ctesiphon and raked the breach with volleys of fire.
Lysander cleared the blurry cloud of toxins and he could see into the district adjoining the amphitheatre. The street teemed with heretics, and among them were priests in purple robes, hung with bloody spiked chains, urging them on into the breach. The dead were being thrown back from the breach and torn apart, their blood smeared on the heretics yet to attack, like warpaint.
And in the centre of Khezal, blistered high above the skyline, was a new temple. It had grown like a bleeding tumour from the Cemetery district, a combination of volcanic outcrop and cathedral. It was a temple to gods whose names could not be spoken in real space, to the powers worshipped by the moral threats gathered on Opis. Sweeping buttresses reached up from torn rock, up through torrents of lava pouring from that fresh wound in the earth. They spread into balconies and eyries, asymmetrical battlements like blades and fangs of dark stone.
Staircases led to nowhere. Arched windows were blinded. Pillars held up nothing but air. Great thoroughfares emptied over the edges of its walls and supplicants poured out, tumbling onto the lower slopes of tortured rock or into the oozing torrents of lava. Like the men and women who had died to summon Wyraxx on K-Day, they were drawn from Khezal’s citizens, their lives given to honour this new temple to Chaos.
The uppermost levels held the belfries, cages of stone hung with roosts of huge bronze bells. Daemons gathered there, leaping, spasming creatures with flesh that flowed and reformed, scampering like animals through the skeletal archways and pillars.
Lysander could hear the pealing of the bells from where he stood. They created terrible anti-harmonies that seemed loud and clashing enough to tear the sky apart. Multicoloured light bled through the clouds overhead. Lysander could just see the warp gate beasts Sthenelus had reported, crouched among the belfries, and he knew the purpose of that temple.
It was as he had guessed. It was a gate. A gateway to the warp – not to summon more hellish things to Opis, but to give one inhabitant the means to escape. The warp gate opening above the temple would lead to Throne knew where, as long as it was far away from Opis, far away from the Officio Assassinorum and from the Imperial Fists.
This was Legienstrasse’s Plan C. Open a doorway into the warp and flee through it while Khezal devolved into a madness that swallowed anyone who might try to follow her.
‘Brothers!’ Lysander ordered. ‘Concentrate on Wyraxx and let us not become swamped! We must break out and forge on soon. Even victory here will be failure. We must leave here. We must leave Khezal to its evils. The true enemy is almost beyond our reach!’
Ucalegon wrestled in the dust of the arena floor, and Wyraxx was strong. Far stronger than she looked. Her black eyes narrowed and her lips showed her pointed teeth, the sharp greenish tongue that flickered between them. The burning feathers of her wings were grasping at him and the flame burned him even through his armour as the ceramite plates heated up. Ucalegon still had his sword in his hand but it was pinned down on the floor by a bundle of feathers. Wyraxx got a hand underneath and Ucalegon felt the fire growing there – he rolled to one side and Wyraxx fired a bolt of flame that just missed him, scoring his breastplate as it shrieked up into the sky.
Ucalegon drove an elbow down into Wyraxx’s ribs. The impact was crunching and she screamed, throwing her mouth grotesquely wide. From a distance she must have been achingly beautiful, a winged goddess. Up close, she was a horror.
Ucalegon pulled a fist back to punch down at her face. She spat a wave of fire at him and he fell back as it rushed around his head. Then she was on top of him, feathers around his neck.
Kirav’s squad were running to Ucalegon’s aid. Wyraxx flicked a hand at them, and two of them were thrown off their feet by a burst of flame. Kirav himself drove on through the fire and a second bolt caught him in the shoulder, spinning him around. Ucalegon lost sight of him as Wyraxx’s wings curled around.
Ucalegon realised she was going to take off again, maybe power as far into the sky as she could before letting Ucalegon fall. He fought to wrench his sword-arm free and he felt feathers tearing out from her skin. Her eyes widened and she gasped in shock as Ucalegon’s arm came free.
He slashed at the feathers around him. Feathers came apart in wisps of glowing tissue and Ucalegon fell to the ground, Wyraxx above him.
A ball of boiling pink fire grew between her eyes, aimed down at Ucalegon.
A gilded shape slammed into Wyraxx from behind. Ucalegon recognised Brother Gorgythion, still an unfamiliar sight outside the cockpit of a Thunderhawk. Wyraxx, caught by surprised, thudded back to the arena floor.
Ucalegon was on his feet and lunged. The obsidian blade slid between Wyraxx’s ribs. He pulled it out and incandescent blood flowed. Wyraxx mouthed wordlessly, her eyes wide, dragging herself back across the bloodstained sand.
Gorgythion cracked the butt of his bolter into the side of Wyraxx’s head.
‘Remember,’ he said.
He put a bolt-round through her temple and blew half her skull off.
She took a long time to die. The daemonic streaks in her substance refused to accept she was dead. Squad Kirav shot her down as she stumbled. Brother Stentor put two rounds into her abdomen and Mortz blasted one of her wings off with a rattle of storm bolter fire. It was Brother Beros who struck the last blow, impaling her chest with the blades of his lightning claw.
Ucalegon got to his feet as Antiocha Wyraxx breathed her last.
‘Your kill,’ he said to Gorgythion.
‘Would that it was through a targeting rune,’ said Gorgythion, ‘from the cockpit of the Sanctifier.’ He kicked over Wyraxx’s body, as the last of her blood was draining out into the arena sand. ‘But this will do, my brothers. This will do.’
The rumble of engines heralded the Vi
ndicators of Squadron Sthenelus, riding over the bodies and the wreckage of the shattered Plaudian tanks. <
<
Gorgythion looked down at the sorry corpse of Wyraxx. ‘The enemy’s greatest aerial threat will never fly again,’ he said. ‘I can do it.’
The bells were tolling, but the music was not there yet. Then daemons who had already bled through from the other realm were flitting around them on leathery wings, daubing the temple’s stone in blood. Other creatures cowered behind pillars or in cracks between the great stones, asymmetrical eyes fixed on the shape of Legienstrasse as she walked up onto the temple’s upper levels.
The stones were still warm, having been torn from the strata beneath Khezal’s foundations. Bones and flesh were fused with them here and there, the dregs of the streets trapped there as the temple surged up through the city’s buildings. It was a beautiful place, created by the pooled warp-knowledge of all the Chaos champions on Opis and reflected through the lens of its people, an echo of the magnificence in which the Aristeia had clothed themselves for thousands of years. Stained-glass windows had grown, like new scabs, across lopsided windows, depicting the swirling madness of the warp and the thousands of souls already cast there in the depravity taking over Opis. New stairways and rooms were growing, budding off from the temple like stone flowers. Beautiful.
Karnikhal Six-Fingers was waiting for her. Bloodletters crouched at his feet, panting like hunting dogs. He nodded his head very slightly at her approach, a gesture of supplication that was, for a warrior of Khorne, as humiliating as throwing himself prostrate at her feet.
Overhead, the Warp Serpent flew. The wound it had been dealt at Krae still bled, raining glowing blood over the hanging bells. A shadowy shape congealed in a dark corner, three eyes burning beneath its hood. It was the First Walker of Lhuur, drawn from the lines of the Starfall front where a thousand others made in its image still fought. A witch, Dravin Stahl, stood ready. A spiked circle of black iron, woven into the tortured skin of his bare back, gave him a dark halo, echoed by the circular brands etched into his face and chest.