The door swung open. Two of the Brotherhood burst in, their lasguns trained on Appollus.
‘Lord Amun…’
Abasi roared and ran at the guards, knocking them to the floor. A panicked lasgun-round scored Appollus’s thigh. Another clipped his bonds, burning a deep score in the metal links.
The guards screamed in desperate horror as Amun set about them. He was a starved creature, a cornered beast hunched on all fours. He growled, low and feral as he ripped the two cultists apart with his bare hands and sank his teeth into their flesh.
‘While I breathe, I am wrath.’ Appollus snarled with effort as he snapped the bonds holding his wrists and swung up to break the chains around his ankles. His shoulder crunched like split kindling as he hit the ground.
Amun rounded on him, saliva and bloodied flesh-chunks dripping from his mouth.
In full battle plate, the sorcerer was more than a match for the naked and battered Appollus. But under the rage’s thrall, the Traitor Marine was frenzied, uncoordinated. Appollus had fought among such warriors for longer than most men lived. He could read Amun’s strikes before the warrior threw them.
Slipping a right hook, Appollus spun the lengths of loose chain dangling from his wrists around his fists, and punched Amun in the face. Blood fountained from his ruined nose, spraying Appollus’s face crimson.
The Chaos Space Marine struck back with a flurry of reaching swipes. Appollus rode their momentum, absorbing their impact on his arms, though a shooting pain told of a fractured humerus. He snarled, stepping inside Amun’s guard to deliver an uppercut. The sorcerer’s head jerked backwards. Appollus followed it, landing two consecutive blows, before grabbing the back of Amun’s head and pulling him into a headbutt.
Amun roared as he staggered backwards, lashing out with his foot at Appollus’s legs.
The ceramite boot cracked Appollus’s shin and knocked him to the floor. The Chaplain rolled to his feet, limping to keep the weight from his damaged leg and cursing himself for getting too close. He couldn’t afford to be careless, he had to keep his own bloodlust in check.
Amun growled as he regained his footing, a stream of saliva washing from his mouth to hiss on the chamber floor. The smell of Appollus’s blood was like a knife in his brain. He needed to taste it, to devour the marrow in the Chaplain’s bones, to savour every last scrap of his flesh. Roaring, Amun charged.
Pain ran like molten steel in Appollus’s veins as he darted forwards, turning around Amun to loop his shackles over the Chaos Space Marine’s throat. The movement brought him around and onto Amun’s back. He forced the chains tight, his arms burning with the effort as Amun fought to buck him.
Amun dropped to one knee, a gurgling roar dying in his throat as his wind-pipe collapsed. He thrashed at Appollus in a mix of panic and rage as the beast within him struggled against death.
‘Die, traitor.’ The words ground from between Appollus’s bloodied teeth as he wrenched Amun’s head from his shoulders.
Even in death, Amun’s body continued to fight, his adrenaline-soaked limbs twitching in denial as his corpse shivered on the ground.
‘Your place is at our enemy’s throat.’
Luciferus’s words resurfaced in Appollus’s mind as he watched Amun grind against the stone of the floor in the last spasms of his death throes.
‘Your blood be cursed,’ Appollus snarled, bending to retrieve Amun’s blade. He would speak with the vulpine Librarian when next they crossed paths.
Coated in blood, both the traitor’s and his own, Appollus was reminded of the crimson armour he’d donned before his ordination. ‘In blood we are one. Immortal, while one remains to bleed.’ Using his teeth to scrape a finger clean, Appollus guided a bead of saliva around his chest, burning the toothed-blade symbol of his Chapter into his breast.
The iron lift rattled to a stop with a sharp grinding of gears. Appollus threw open the mesh door and stepped into the corridor, leaving the crumpled bodies of two Brotherhood to bleed out behind him. He felt his pulse quicken as he thought of the moment his fingers had closed around the first’s aorta, and remembered the satisfying snap of the second’s neck. They were the third patrol he’d come across since his escape. He hoped they would not be the last.
‘His blood is strength.’ Appollus mouthed the axiom as he stalked, a little unsteady on his feet, along the corridor. The exertion of his escape had forced the bulk of the Crucio’s toxins from his system, adrenaline washing through him like a cleansing fire, and dark scabs of crusted blood covered his torso where his flesh had begun knitting itself back together. But he still ached to his bones, a pungent sweat clothing his body.
Appollus touched a hand to his head, rubbing his skin-starved knuckles into his temples. The psyker’s touch still lingered in that pain. But pain wasn’t the only thing Amun had left him with. As he fought to stave off the rage, the Chaos Space Marine had been careless. In his panic, he had let his surface thoughts spill out; a tumultuous wave of half-formed images that had bombarded Appollus’s untrained mind. The psychic noise had been like harsh bursts of static filtered through a howling gale. Yet Appollus had done more than hold on to his sanity. With iron-willed devotion and unyielding resolve, he had focused on his duty, on his brothers.
Appollus stopped as he reached a bend in the corridor, recognising every glint of ore in the wall ahead. Zakiel, Xaphan, Herchel and Ziel; the four Death Company were alive. If what he’d gleaned from Amun’s mind was true then they were languishing in a cell at the end of the corridor. He pressed his back against the wall, feeling his muscles tense as the sharp rock tore into his skin, and listened.
There were two of the Brotherhood patrolling the corridor. Appollus ground his teeth, feeling his anger grow with every thump of their traitorous hearts. He listened to the fall of their booted feet, to the clack of their weapons as they swung loose on straps. His pulse raced as the stink of their unwashed flesh drifted to his nostrils. A red mist mustered behind his eyes. A tremor passed through his hands, forcing his fists into balls of sinew. The urge to kill was great. He looked down at the Chapter symbol on his breast as he waited and let out a slow breath of calm. Rage was not yet his master.
He waited. He counted. Focusing on the guards’ footsteps, he waited until the distance was right.
‘I am death!’ Appollus rounded the corner and threw his knife into the chest of the nearest of them. Running, he caught the body on his shoulder before it fell, and charged towards the second. The man spun round, startled, sweeping up his lasgun and opening fire. Appollus felt his corpse-shield shudder as a half dozen rounds cut into it, and snarled as a round sliced the flesh from his bicep. A second later he barrelled into the guard, tackling him to the ground. Appollus recovered first, pinning the cultist beneath him and thundering a fist into his face. He hit him again and again, deaf to the cracking of bone and ignorant of the visceral lumps of brain matter that dripped from under the cultist’s mask. Only when his fist struck rock, did Appollus stop.
The reek of torture greeted Appollus as he entered the cell, hitting him as surely as any blow. He snarled in disgust, craving the air-filtering properties of his battle helm. The four Death Company hung from the ceiling, chained in the same manner as he had been. He growled, angered by the extent the Crucio had violated their bodies. Ziel was in the worst state, the skin of his left forearm peeled back to reveal bone. Their eyes widened as he approached. They wanted to kill. Even over the stench he could smell their bloodlust. He wouldn’t keep them waiting. Raising the lasgun he’d stripped from the Brotherhood guards, he shot through their bonds.
‘Brothers.’ Appollus spread his arms. ‘I feel your thirst.’ He thrust an arm out, jabbing his blade towards the door, ‘The enemy are many, but they are flesh. We, are immortal lords of battle. We are wrath. We are death.’
The Death Company growled, shaking their limbs loose, their fists opening and closing
as they sought to rend.
‘Kill until killed. Leave none alive.’
Appollus watched them go, surprised by how much effort it took not to follow them. He ached to join the Death Company in slaughter. The Brotherhood had wrought a terrible injustice upon him, and he vowed he would see it drowned from his memory by a river of their blood. But he had gleaned more than his brothers’ location from Amun’s mind, and he had another task to attend to first.
The cavern was immense. The largest by far that Appollus had encountered. Banks of luminators hung on racks of chain, suspended from the ore-rich rock of the ceiling. Plasteel panels had been bolted down over the rock of the floor to create something resembling a functioning hangar. Rusted supply crates were heaped in small clusters around the walls. At the far end of the chamber, an antiquated Stormbird drop-ship sat locked to the deck. Its oil-black flanks were polished clean of insignia. The armour on one of its wings had been peeled back, exposing the plasteel frame beneath. Fuel cables and pressure hoses hugged its sides like creeper-vines. Beyond it, a flickering energy shield kept out the infinite void.
Appollus stared through the electro-haze of the shield. The surface of the asteroid stretched as far as he could see, a pitted landscape of undulating rock and trenched gullies. If what he’d learned from Amun was correct, the damaged Stormbird was the only transport off this rock.
Shouldering his stolen lasgun, he moved towards the drop-ship. The weapon was lighter than he was used to, like a child’s toy compared to the reassuring weight of his bolter. The lasgun followed his eyes as he scanned for targets. A trio of Brotherhood cultists rounded the Stormbird. Appollus fired, killing them without breaking stride. He ground his teeth. He missed the reassuring bark of his boltgun; the clinical snap of the lasgun was far removed from the visceral booming of mass-reactive rounds.
Klaxons screamed from what sounded like every surface. Strobing red light filled the cavern and cast wicked shadows among the rock. The resounding thud of booted feet warned Appollus of threats to his left and rear. The Brotherhood were spilling into the chamber from every angle.
He snarled as weapons-fire began competing with the klaxons, las-rounds cutting the air around him. Firing in blazing streams on full-auto, Appollus cut down the forerunners. He grinned darkly as the familiar tang of blood filled the air, and continued moving towards the drop-ship. The remaining Brotherhood approached with more caution, ducking back behind what little cover they could find. He counted at least sixty of them as he panned his weapon around, slamming in a spare powercell as the charge counter flashed empty.
To his left, an arm reached up to throw a grenade. He shot it off at the elbow. Its owner cried out an instant before the explosive detonated. Gobbets of flesh and bloodied robe fountained into the air. Fifty-seven. Appollus updated his mental tally as he ducked under the tangle of fuel feeds.
The Brotherhood stopped firing.
Appollus used the moment’s respite to assess his options. The Brotherhood had formed a firing perimeter. A few had unsheathed blades and were edging towards him. He smiled. They were waiting for him to break for the Stormbird, but he had never had any intention of boarding the vessel.
Appollus opened the intake valve in the nearest fuel hose and lifted the locking catch. Choking promethium vapour wafted out, forcing a cough from his lungs. Appollus ejected the powercell from his lasgun and struck it hard with the hilt of his knife.
‘He is my shield.’
Appollus dropped the sparking energy cell into the fuel pipe and ran. He ran with all the speed his enhanced physiology could muster. He ran like a man racing to the side of imperilled loved ones. He ran in the only direction the Brotherhood hadn’t refused him. He ran towards the energy barrier.
Shutting his eyes to protect them from the shield’s glare, Appollus threw himself through the barrier and out into the void.
Less than a heartbeat later, the Stormbird detonated, the promethium in its fuel tanks exploding outwards in a halo of fire.
Too late, the Brotherhood realised what Appollus had done.
The nearest of them were incinerated in the initial blast, vaporised where they stood. The others fled as best they could. Flaming shrapnel chased them across the chamber, tearing through flesh and bone with all the care of a maddened butcher.
Appollus watched as the rolling carpet of flame pushed out through the energy shield and vanished, its ire stolen by the airless void. He followed the fire’s retreat, diving back through the barrier and rolling to his feet.
Shards of burning metal littered the chamber. The broken and torn corpses of dozens of Brotherhood cultists were strewn about like discarded dolls. Some of the traitors were still screaming, thrashing around as their faceplates seared their skin, the thin metal super-heated by the blast. The smell of cooked blood hung in the air, as tangible as the ground beneath Appollus’s feet.
Fire and the flickering, red light conspired to recreate the Hell described in ancient Terran myth. Appollus smiled as he strode through the carnage: that made him the Daevil.
The remaining Brotherhood staggered from cover, their robes singed and ragged. They moved without purpose, staring at the smouldering wreck of the drop-ship, gripped by disbelief at what had transpired. Appollus paced towards them. Smoke drifted in wistful columns from his limbs, his void-frozen skin singed by the heat of the energy shield.
A bleeding Crucio, his face knotted in confusion, glared at Appollus. ‘Fool. That was the only ship.’ The Crucio indicated a smouldering crater filled with tangled ceramite and plasteel plating. ‘You are trapped here with us.’ He spread his arms to indicate the rest of the Brotherhood who had recovered enough to ready their weapons. ‘When I’m done with you, all the pain you have suffered thus far in your miserable life will seem like an eternity of ecstasy. On your flesh I shall redefine the art of my sect. I will hear you beg for death, Chaplain.’
‘No, heretic.’ Appollus stopped ten paces from the nearest cultist. He took a breath and looked down at the knife in his hand. Pulling back his broad shoulders, he straightened to his full height and raised his knife towards the Crucio. ‘You are mistaken.’
At the rear of the chamber, a lift rattled and bucked to a stop, its iron grate swinging open.
‘It is you who are trapped here with us.’
The Crucio looked over his shoulder.
Behind him, Zakiel, Xaphan, Herchel and Ziel paced into the cavern, bloodied blades grasped white-knuckle tight in their murderous hands.
Appollus smelled the torturer’s fear and smiled.
‘Fear not, torturer,’ Appollus snarled. ‘You will not have time to beg.’
Vox Dominus
by Anthony Reynolds
Part One
She had no face.
Or at least, not a face that he could discern.
Whenever he tried to focus on her, her features became blurred and smudged, like an over-developed pict image. Indeed, even to try made his eyes hurt. If he looked at her askance, focusing past her, he could see something of her features. They were unremarkable, it seemed. Air tubes fed into her nostrils, and her expression was blank. But whenever his gaze was drawn closer again, trying to discern more, her face would fade into obscurity.
He was as a ghost, floating weightless and insubstantial, unconstrained by his physical flesh-prison. He had cloaked himself in protective wards and enacted the letting-rituals that would hide his presence. But still she turned her blurred child’s face up towards him.
She saw him. Her power was astonishing. She pierced his aegis without effort.
‘Daal’ak’ath mel caengr’aal,’ she said, in a long-dead tongue that he nevertheless understood. ‘The blightwood grows.’
A convulsion wracked his earth-bound body back on the Infidus Diabolus. For a moment he was in both places at once. He could smell the powerful incense coiling around him, could hear t
he chant of his Host and feel the vibration of the ship’s engines. Yet he was also in the fathomless ocean of unreality, where the vision had brought him, surrounded by nebulous darkness and the powerful psychic void-presence of this girl.
The vision began to shatter like a flawed crystal, threatening to send him crashing back to his body. It cracked and splintered, leaving just the girl’s blurred face, looming close in to his own. He could not look away.
He could see her eyes now. She allowed him to see them. Galaxies shone in their fathomless black depths. She looked through him.
He tried to retreat, willing himself back to his body, but she held him, ensnaring him with her will. Her face was close now, filling his vision. It shivered, violently, shaking and shimmering before him.
A bewildering array of images, sensations and feelings flashed through his mind then, an overwhelming display. She was showing him these things. She wanted him to see them.
Later, when he returned to his flesh, he would be unable to recall exactly what he saw. Vague impressions and sensations would be all that he was left with: skies of burning yellow, an oppressive drone of a billion melancholy daemonic voices; a slender woman’s face, shining like milk and moonlight, tears running down her face. She was in a place of darkness, surrounded by movement. He saw a single blue eye, so clear and so perfect, with three pupils that jutted together to form one.
Devoid of context he could not understand them, nor perceive their purpose.
Lastly, he would remember that phrase. ‘Daal’ak’ath mel caengr’aal’. The blightwood grows.
The child – whatever she was – had seen the face of gods, and she had not baulked before them.
Then she pushed him away with her tiny child’s hands, sending his spirit hurtling through the void, spinning out of control, and the lightning flash of images and sensations was severed.
Back on the Infidus Diabolus, Marduk smiled.
The black-eyed cherubs exhaled a heady smoke and he breathed it in, letting it coil within his lungs as he rose from the waking dream. To a lesser being, the incense would have been fatal. To the Dark Apostle it was merely an aid in communing with the Dwellers Beyond. The poisons it contained helped open his soul, the better for the gods to speak their will through his flesh. Still, their message was often confused and difficult to discern.
Treacheries of the Space Marines Page 27