The Neverborn throw themselves at him, driven by desperate hunger and loathing. Ventanus sees the hatred in their dead eyes and does not know what he has done to earn it. His sword cuts through armour made heavy without power. Kinetic shock travels up his arm with every blow, but he is energised and ready for this fight.
He came here to kill Word Bearers and, damn it, that is what he will do.
The Neverborn are not silent. They scream as they claw at the Ultramarines and they shriek as they die. Their cries are tormented, but Ventanus has no pity left in him. Not for himself and certainly not for the Word Bearers.
Strobing flashes of gunfire light the dark umbra spreading overhead.
Ventanus and Sydance fight back to back. Both have exhausted their stock of ammunition.
‘A few more than twelve this time,’ grunts Sydance as he hacks his chainsword down through a Word Bearer’s collarbone and sternum with a two-handed grip.
‘You mean thirteen,’ says Ventanus.
‘No, only ever twelve,’ replies Sydance with a grin.
Ventanus understands that grin.
They are brothers and they are equals, and there is a purity to this fight. There are no lofty ideals at stake, no grand strategy in play. It is simple life or death, and there is something to be said for such simplicity.
Ventanus cuts heads from shoulders, opens chests and hacks legs from hips. His blade is always in motion. He employs every move he knows to stay alive; those learned from the blademasters of Macragge and those picked up in a lifetime of desperate brawls in almost two hundred years of war.
Telemechrus slaughters the Word Bearers by the dozen. His assault cannon shreds bodies into their constituent atoms and renders even a corpse warrior unable to fight. They claw at his body, beating broken fists to pulp against his casket. The Contemptor relishes this melee, fighting alongside Eikos of the Arm and his Shield Bearers.
The Tetrarch of Konor is no less lethal with only the one fighting limb. He has fired his pistol empty and kills with the precise strokes of a master fencer. He too has learned the lesson that the only way to put the enemy down for good is to make the decapitating strike.
Selaton and his squads are carrying the banner towards the arched portal through which they entered. He is not withdrawing, he is clearing a corridor for the rest of them to use.
Ventanus shouts the order to fall back.
Something huge and crimson slams into him, knocking him to the ground. He rolls as an armoured boot slams down. He swings his sword for the warrior’s centre-mass, but the blade clashes against the bladed Octed finial of a rune-inscribed staff.
‘Death has come to you,’ says Foedral Fell, still skewered.
‘Death will come when I’m good and ready,’ answers Ventanus.
XXXI
The world spins. Up becomes down and the ground falls away from Hol Beloth.
The starscraper, already on the brink of collapse, needed only a nudge to come crashing down. The blast wave from the cyclonic warhead’s detonation at Uranik Radial shatters what uneasy arrangement of vectors still holds it erect. Its foundations break apart and the structural members at its base buckle like wire in the face of the pounding shockwave.
Ten floors collapse in an instant, blown away like dust in a hurricane.
The building slumps, its own weight crushing it and dragging it down.
Hol Beloth grabs onto an exposed rebar, but it won’t be enough to save him. His stomach lurches and he feels momentarily weightless. He hears Kartho’s crazed laughter over the crescendo of shattering steel and exploding permacrete. Floor slabs snap like tinder and plasteel stanchions capable of holding up a building kilometres high unravel like twine.
Debris cascades around him, battering him and threatening to tear him from his handhold. The building itself wants to murder him, but he won’t let it. Hol Beloth has to stay alive long enough to kill Maloq Kartho.
The sky falls away. Through a break in the flooring slab that was once over a thousand metres above ground, he sees the surface of the world opening up.
Wide chasms rip jagged traceries through Lanshear’s outskirts. Hair-fine fault lines tear open and abyssal canyons gape like gateways to the underworld. Vast clouds of dust and smoke jet into the sky in a cloud to match that above the fiery crater that once housed his army.
Hol Beloth can see nothing of the world around him.
Everything is noise and fire, dust and impacts.
Then he hits the ground. The starscraper doesn’t stop.
Metres-thick columns smash through the surface of Calth like piledrivers slammed down by an angry god. The starscraper’s colossal mass and momentum plunge it through the rock like a sword thrust. Hundreds of metres down, previously unknown cave voids are broken into. Unconnected galleries and sinkholes appearing on no map are suddenly open to the sky.
Hol Beloth sees nothing of this. Hundreds of thousands of metric tonnes cascade down into the revealed cave systems. He is a speck of mortal flesh in a hurricane of aeons-old rock. The plates of his armour shatter like glass. Bones break and he feels the shock of furnace heat as his biological repair mechanisms fight to keep him alive.
He loses his grip on the rebar and drops through a storm of bludgeoning rock.
He falls, spinning downwards from impact to impact. Blood fills his helmet, threatening to drown him. He slams into a rock wall and it is torn away. He cannot see anything but darkness and a blitzing torrent of debris. Steel and glass fall with him in a shimmering rain.
Over the unending fury of deafening noise, Hol Beloth still hears the maddening laughter of the Dark Apostle.
At last his fall ends.
His broken body plunges into an icy lake of dark water. It is deep and the fortunate angle of impact means he only breaks six of his ribs and not his spinal column. Freezing water enfolds him, pouring down his throat and into his lungs. He gags and coughs, the deep cold shocking him from the disorientation of his fall.
Autonomic responses take over. His throat seals his primary lungs off. Implanted breathing organs alongside his genhanced ones take over. They siphon what little air is left in them and shunt that oxygen directly to his brain. Electrochemical shocks throughout his body jolt him into life, self-induced fibrillation to get his limbs working again.
Hol Beloth thrashes uselessly. He has no buoyancy, his armour is dragging him down.
Legionary armour is airtight and therefore watertight, but his has been broken open and shattered. Water rushes to fill it and the weight is enormous. He struggles to fight its sucking ballast, but his body is too badly hurt, his soul too grievously broken.
Hol Beloth sinks deeper, a stream of bubbles spuming from his lips.
An arm plunges into the water and a clawed hand grips the broken edge of his pauldron. It is bestial and scaled. Yellowed talons score deep grooves in the ceramite as he is dragged back to the surface.
Hol Beloth is hauled onto a shore of debris and rubble, gasping for breath. He rolls and vomits twin lungfuls of water so cold it burns his throat. He retches until his body is empty of fluid, tasting blood and bile in his mouth. He feels the intramuscular sphincters of his airways switch as he shifts back to his regular breathing pattern.
Cold air has never tasted so good.
Steam rises from his body, his skin hot to the touch. His incredible physiology is repairing damage that should have killed him outright. That he is alive at all is a miracle, and he looks up to see just how far he has fallen. Dust fogs the air and a rain of debris tumbles into the cave from the jagged tear in its ceiling. Latticed steelwork from the collapsed starscraper webs the opening torn in the rock like crude stitches, and sparking lengths of high-tensile wire and data cabling dangle like jungle creepers.
The gloom makes it hard to judge the cave’s dimensions, but it is not large. Perhaps a hundred metres at its wide
st. The water level of the lake is rising as more debris falls into it.
Maloq Kartho squats at the edge of the lake, impossibly unscathed by their fall. Icewater laps at his feet. Hol Beloth sees there is something wrong with the Dark Apostle. Darkness clings to the warrior, but it looks like there are too many joints in his legs.
Kartho turns his horned head and says, ‘You live,’ as though he is surprised.
‘You destroyed my army,’ says Hol Beloth.
Kartho nods. ‘Rabble,’ he says. ‘Fodder. A meat price.’
‘Why?’
‘You had no need of them,’ says Kartho. ‘You have a higher purpose than marching at the head of debased mortals.’
‘What purpose?’ asks Hol Beloth, hating that he cannot hide his urgent desire.
The Dark Apostle cocks his head to one side, as though the answer is self-evident, but furnishes him with no reply. He looks towards the broken ceiling of the cave, expectant.
‘And though the heavens rain fire upon the Bearers of the Truth, yet shall there be a greater boon given unto them,’ says Kartho, pulling himself erect. He is taller now, his body swelling with vitality. The Dark Apostle is on the verge of something incredible, a trans-formation or an ascension. Darkness seethes within him, a dangerous energy only kept in check by a monumental effort of will.
The coming hours will either transform Kartho or destroy him.
Hol Beloth does not know which he would rather see.
XXXII
Ventanus raises his sword in a two-handed block as Foedral Fell – or whatever dark force is animating his body – swings a toothed falchion in a diagonal cut. The force behind the blow is enormous. Energised sparks spray from the impact of the blades, and ozone stink fills his nostrils as the servos of his battle armour augment his strength. He rolls his wrists, letting the roaring teeth scrape down his power sword.
He sways aside from a blindingly swift return stroke and thrusts for Fell’s groin. It is a good strike, powerful and well-aimed. The point lances the crimped joint between Fell’s pelvis and thigh.
Ventanus twists, and wrenches the blade clear.
Black blood spills out. The stench is awful. The worst thing in the world. Even the filters of his helm cannot keep it out. He gags, retching dryly.
The blood stops flowing and Fell is not even slowed.
‘You kill my kin,’ says the Neverborn, a froth of disintegrating matter spilling over its lips.
Ventanus does not answer and attacks again.
They trade blows back and forth, and though his skill is the greater, the speed and strength of his opponent is phenomenal. Three times he avoids death by the narrowest margin. He hears his name called, but can’t spare a moment’s concentration to see who is shouting to him.
The sound of gunfire is a distant echo. The flash of mass-reactive detonations barely registers. He is in the middle of furious battle, but all he sees is the daemon creature trying to kill him. Fell still has the Octed staff piercing him, though it has snapped inside his body. Only the top half remains.
Two warriors in cobalt-blue and gold appear beside Ventanus. One has a face of broken porcelain and flesh, the other is in the battle colours of a Fourth Company captain. He knows them and loves them as brothers. Eikos Lamiad fights with economical grace, Lyros Sydance with vengeful fury. His brother captain was always a man given to passionate rages, most of which needed tempering, but Ventanus is grateful for this one.
To face a single Ultramarine is daunting. Three is certain death.
Foedral Fell laughs in their faces. His falchion is a blur, blocking, parrying and attacking with a speed that should be impossible. Liquid black fire leaps along the length of his blade and where it touches it burns Legion plate like dry wood.
‘The Saviour, the Lancer and the Cripple...’ giggles Fell, spinning and slamming an elbow into Lamiad’s cheek. Facial plates crack further. ‘The warp knows you...’
‘Bastard!’ cries Sydance, lunging forward. His sword cuts down through Fell’s left arm. A spray of the foul blood washes out, along with a host of wriggling things, segmented and waving like worms. Corpse feeders. Sydance gags on the stench and Fell’s falchion sweeps up to take his head.
Ventanus blocks the blow and hammers his boot into Fell’s gut. The Word Bearer staggers under the force of it, the bladed finials of the staff reflecting the light of gunfire. Something fast moving and powerful strikes it – a rogue shell or a ricochet.
The daemonic face behind Fell’s eyes shudders. Pain wracks its body and a gout of boiling black fluid jets from its mouth. It staggers and Ventanus sees his opening. He spins inside Fell’s guard and rams his sword through his breastplate.
Lightning streams the length of the blade as it punches through ceramite, flesh, bone and the stuff of night. The tip breaks through the backplate of Fell’s armour, but the metal of the blade has aged a thousand years.
Silvered steel is now corroded rust that flakes to ash within moments of exposure to the real world.
A pistoning fist slams Ventanus back as he hears his name being shouted again. He hits the ground hard and tries to rise. Something is holding him down.
Eikos Lamiad, his face a horror of ruined flesh where his mask has been shattered, has him pinned to the ground.
‘Tetrarch!’ shouts Ventanus. ‘What–’
Lamiad shakes his head as a towering shadow falls over them.
A giant in tar-slicked ceramite. A titan who fell from the skies and lived to tell of it. One arm is a crushing fist, the other a colossal cannon of spinning barrels. A hurricane of fire roars from its muzzles. Hundreds of shells expend in moments.
Foedral Fell’s body explodes.
The assault cannon’s fire is relentless. Unforgiving.
Its aim never wavers and the wretched matter of the Neverborn is atomised.
‘You will not. Harm. Him,’ says Telemechrus the Contemptor.
XXXIII
Maloq Kartho squats by the water’s edge. Waiting.
Time passes, but without his helmet Hol Beloth has no way to accurately measure it. Hours – two, maybe three. He drifts in and out of consciousness as his body diverts energy from his thought processes to healing.
There is no change in the light.
They have survived a fall that ought to have killed them instantly, which tells Hol Beloth that the Dark Apostle still has an endgame in mind. Yet they have wasted time in this cave doing nothing. If there is mayhem to be made, then Hol Beloth wishes to be about it.
Determined to take action, he looks for a way out.
Fifty metres to his left, a wide fissure in the walls leads deeper into the rock. Something metallic gleams on the ground next to the opening.
Hol Beloth forces himself upright. Pain from numerous fractures shoots up his legs. He forces it down as he limps around the edge of the lake to the fissure. Stagnant air wafts from the opening. He takes a long breath, his neuroglottis picking out chemical traces of welded steel and setting permacrete.
He squats at the opening and lifts the gleaming object from the ground, turning it around in his hands like a precious relic.
It is a cartographae drone, a bulbous cylinder equipped with a repulsor field and numerous auspex arrays. Its power cells are virtually exhausted and its calliper limbs twitch like the feelers of a dying insect. A blinking red gemlight on its frontal lobe tells Hol Beloth that it is trying and failing to link back to its control station. A Techmarine could easily repair it, but he has no skill with machines.
It takes a moment for Hol Beloth to realise the significance of this find.
He turns as booming splashes, like boulders falling into the lake, fill the cave with spray. Maloq Kartho rises on his oddly-jointed legs. He wipes cold water from his face as more huge objects splash down into the water from above. The surface of the lake churns and slaps the ro
ck. A trail of bubbles moves towards to the shore.
Hol Beloth watches as Eriesh Kigal and his Terminators rise from the dark waters like drowned sailors returned to unnatural life. Water pours from the battered plates of their armour and as each one reaches the Dark Apostle, he is anointed with three crosswise slashes across his breastplate. Without knowing how, Hol Beloth senses a significance to the thrice clawed mark.
Then a bloated shape of hard red metal emerges from the water, a leviathan of the deeps. The Dreadnought Zu Gunara. Its casket drips black water and what look like molten scads of metal that are running in rivulets from its armoured flanks. It is as though the Dreadnought is melting, as though the void-dark within is consuming the matter containing its substance.
It still carries the weapon stolen from CV427/Praxor, its bio-hazard symbol like a beacon of hope in the gloom of the cave.
‘And the devourer of life shall be borne into the belly of the Beast,’ says Kartho, turning to Hol Beloth. The Dark Apostle gestures to the fissure in the rock where Hol Beloth found the damaged drone. A forked tongue of corrugated flesh licks jagged teeth. Hol Beloth knows the Dark Apostle tastes what he has tasted.
Turned earth, blasted rock. Construction.
A way in.
‘The Unveiled One shall open the way,’ says Kartho, ‘and he that was lost shall lead the faithful to the slaughter.’
Hol Beloth holds up the cartographae drone. Purpose fills him and he throws the machine out into the water. It drops into the darkness, the red gemlight fading as it sinks to the bottom of the lake. He looks back at the fissure that leads to the heart of enemy’s lair.
‘The belly of the beast?’ says Hol Beloth, the pain of his many wounds forgotten.
‘We are the blade that opens it,’ promises Maloq Kartho.
XXXIV
Subiaco cannot escape the grip of his nightmare.
He is awake. He knows this, but wishes he were not.
Mark of Calth Page 12