Atlas Infernal

by Rob Sanders

  After the Nurgle troopers had passed, Czevak watched Torqhuil check the cloister. Trusting in the Space Marine’s superior senses, the High Inquisitor followed with Epiphani after. The smashed and trampled furniture of state rooms decorated their route and it was another landing and staircase before the retinue reached the royal apartments.

  ‘Lord Emperor,’ Klute mouthed.

  A reception hall formed the nexus of the apartments and private chambers with a myriad of doorways and arches leading anywhere and everywhere. The lofty ceiling of the great hall was dominated by the decorative cogs and clockwork mechanics that moved the considerable weight of a thick, circular adamantium door. The door had been cranked aside and numerous ladders extended from the marble floor of the hall up into the huge vault above. As Czevak and his team wandered cautiously inside the reception chamber, they were mesmerised by the collection of riches contained there.

  The palace vault was clearly full, gleaming with precious metal and valuables that were stacked to its own ceiling. The reception hall and adjoining apartments had become an unceremonious overspill for the incalculable wealth that had been jealously hoarded there. Priceless antiquities of xenos and ancient Imperial design leant against rolls of exotic silk and holy relics. Every tiny scrap of wall space was decorated with layer upon layer of rare paintings and works of art, early Farranbourgs, Disrallileo’s and banned pagan representations. The chamber was awash with mountains of coin, while the marble of the floor was carpeted in plastek credits and papered money, the currency of a thousand worlds. Mounds of chests, caskets and even common crates and baskets spilled over with precious stones and entangled jewellery while small forts had been constructed from ingots of rare metals.

  At the centre of this finery was the reception table, at which sat the polar opposite of the surrounding opulence. Skeletal Spire nobility in stained and ragged splendour rocked back and forth in their chairs. They plucked hairs from threadbare scalps and nibbled the marrow from old bones, the shattered remains of which were the only food items decorating the platinum and porcelain of the table. These were scraps tossed down the length of the table by the corpulent mass sitting at the head of the gathering. The figure could not truly be described as sitting at all, since her spine could no longer support the mountain of blubbery fat that hung from her bowed bones. She was strapped into a reinforced ferrouswood throne. The huge chair was braced with titanium struts and housed a puppet show harness arrangement of robust leather straps, suspension cables and counterweights, allowing the monstrous woman to move her arms. These she had been using to bring bones and slabs of dripping flesh to her maw from a body that lay butchered and prepared on a platinum platter in front of her. From the empty chairs at the top end of the table it seemed as though the ravenous nobles had started to satisfy their cannibal appetites on each other.

  For moments Klute was speechless, the enormity of the task before them overwhelming the inquisitor. He gestured around the huge hall and its gathered riches.

  ‘How are we going to find one coin in amongst all this?’ he hissed.

  ‘With me,’ Czevak told Klute. To the others he said, ‘Find it.’

  Epiphani drifted towards a heap of bejewelled ball gowns in the corner, while Torqhuil took a chunky visor and lens arrangement from his belt and pulled it down over his face, scanning the treasure hoard with alternating aura-scrye and psyoccula filters. Hessian sniffed through the stagnation of the chamber like some daemonic bloodhound, peeling off into a precarious coin stack.

  ‘Lady Sabine Krulda,’ Czevak announced as he skipped up an empty chair and onto the table. As he walked up its length, crashing through the porcelain and crystal, dead-eyed courtiers jealously snatched their scraps to their chests. ‘Your hive – in fact, your world – has become the victim of a daemonic intrusion. We are the high officers of his Beneficent Majesty’s Holy Inquisition. Cooperate and we will remove and destroy this scourge.’

  Klute strode up the side of the table but stopped as Czevak had done before the cannibal queen.

  Lady Krulda awoke from a doze. She was even larger close up, her rolls of corpulence hanging off both her and the throne. Her skin was pallid but threaded through with a web of ruptures and bruising where the gluttonous devouring of human flesh had caused her own to stretch and distend.

  She was naked in the chair – for no clothes would fit the Spireborn – her quadruple chin and gargantuan bosom speckled with old blood and fragments of flesh, hair and bone. What little modesty she had was preserved amongst the rolls of her amorphous form, with fat cascading down her sticky, unwashed body. Greying lengths of blood-matted hair – that ordinarily would be arranged in some extravagant style – meandered across her filthy body like lava down the side of a volcano. The tiny, doll-like eyes set in her ridiculous head blinked incomprehension at Czevak before the brute monarch grinned, showing the flesh-chunks that were stuck amongst her bloodied teeth and black gums. She licked her crusted lips at the prospect of fresh meat.

  Czevak looked down at Klute. ‘It was worth a try, in the hope that we might avoid what we are now going to have to do.’

  ‘Which is?’ Klute said, feeling his lip wrinkle.

  ‘Search her,’ the High Inquisitor said.

  The two men hovered for a moment in hesitation but with the howls of cannibalistic fury and accompanying suppression fire from the Unbound’s outdated autoguns drawing ever closer, there was little time for such scruples.

  ‘Where do we start?’ Klute said as he closed on the woman’s grotesque carcass.

  ‘Where?’ Czevak repeated as the cannibal reached out for him with weak, pudgy arms. ‘Any bloody where – just find that coin, it won’t have gone far.’

  As the two men went to work searching through the tyres of flab and the pools of congealed blood they found in between, the tower belfry began to boom. This was accompanied by a dissonance of tinny klaxons firing across the palace.

  ‘Work fast,’ Czevak grimaced.

  ‘What is it?’ Klute barked with increasing repugnance.

  ‘The palace security has been breached,’ the High Inquisitor said. ‘The cannibal hordes are on their way.’

  Czevak had realised how bad the situation was when they had reached the royal apartments. He’d expected to find members of the Unbound or at least their Ruinous officers there. That every single traitor Guardsman was required down on the palace perimeter was evidence of insatiable millions battering down barricades and soaking up the Unbound’s not inconsiderable firepower. Even the cult army commander had been required to take arms to prevent the flesh-hungry mobs taking the city into degenerate barbarism. The Ablutra Hive was now useless to the Unbound; the manufacturing powerhouse that had been the metropolis was now a flaming wreck populated by savages. Like everyone else, the Unbound were now fighting for their canker-extended lives.

  With renewed enthusiasm, Klute thrust himself arm deep into the layers of Lady Krulda’s fat.

  ‘Are you sure it’s here?’ the inquisitor asked, his eye catching the ribcage of cannibalistic delicacies still on her plate. ‘Despite her riches, the Lady Krulda doesn’t seem to be presently enjoying much in the way of good fortune.’

  Czevak came out from behind the groaning, insensible mass of the great monarch. He stood there, thoughtful for a moment.

  ‘Bye, laugh, seen, inflecting, true – I, have, been, expecting… you,’ the High Inquisitor said to himself. Czevak pursed his lips and knocked a fist against his forehead, ‘It’s so obvious.’

  ‘What’s obvious?’

  ‘So stupid.’

  The ante-chamber outside of the royal apartments was suddenly full of ear-searing gunfire. Green flak and rotten faces flashed past the doorway. Traitor Guardsmen fell back through the chamber under blazing streams of high-velocity fire reaching out from the muzzles of their autorifles. The flash of grenades down the staircase accompanied the bombastic entrance of the Unbound, the putrid bloat of their ghastly flesh doing little to impede the
precise battle manoeuvres of their Cadian origins. Traitor Guardsmen filed in through the great hall’s mighty open doors, while the rearguard sprayed the unseen hordes with explosive fire from their rifles. Everyone in the apartment, cannibal and visitor alike could hear the unstoppable mob, their groaning hunger for flesh drowning out the traitor Guard firepower.

  Suddenly they were in view, a sea of emaciated forms, degenerate savages crawling over each other’s sharp bones and smeared bodies to get a taste of flesh. Within moments it was wall to wall, cannibal howling filling the rest of the space. Czevak and Klute watched in horror as Nurgle soldiers were swamped by the riotous mob, their own swollen bulk crawling with the light frames of ghoulish hivers. The inquisitors could suddenly appreciate how the might of the Unbound – a deadly, diseased and undying cult force in their own right – could be sundered so. Traitor Guardsmen were becoming gradually overrun – despite their withering arc of fire – and dragged into the throng. The cannibals were not waiting on ceremony and satisfied their voracious desires right there in the tumult – the foetid cult soldiers eaten alive.

  An Unbound officer rasped orders at its remaining men, prompting the squad through the apartment doorway where two pus-engorged sergeants shouldered the great hall’s doors closed. Almost immediately the thick metal rang with famished fists and the thunder of wasted bodies throwing themselves at the ornamental fretwork.

  The officer turned, its head a glutinous sack of wan pestilence sitting in the fur collar of a Cadian greatcoat. It seemed shocked to find Czevak and his retinue there. As it opened its mouth to speak, a cockroach scuttled out from its froth-corrupted lungs.

  ‘Off-worlders,’ it hissed, flashing its swollen, cancerous tongue. ‘Seize them!’

  ‘Wait!’ Czevak called, bringing the room to a halt. ‘We can help each other. I’m looking for a coin – a sovereign, about this big,’ Czevak explained making the shape with his fingers.

  ‘The Lord of All cares nought for your coins and riches, his inheritance is eternity,’ the Unbound officer cackled. ‘Now, where’s your ship.’

  ‘At least we know he doesn’t have it,’ Czevak said.

  ‘Some consolation,’ Klute added.

  As the doors of the great hall boomed and creaked, the officer pointed a pallid finger at Czevak.

  ‘Tell me now off-worlder or you’re dead.’

  ‘I’m dead?’ Czevak said. ‘You should look in the mirror.’

  The Unbound officer snatched a rusted bolt pistol from its belt and shot in explosive exasperation at the High Inquisitor. Czevak became a chromatic blaze of light and colour, slipping out of the bolt-rounds’ deadly path and up the side of a mountain of coin beside the table. The bolts tore into Lady Krulda’s monstrous form, one taking her in the temple and putting a swift end to a life of cannibalistic debauchery.

  The traitor Guard officer gurgled its rage, which the Unbound interpreted as an order to fire. Their tarnished weaponry blazed fire across the royal apartments, cutting through the precious silks, paintings and furniture stored there. Coins and jewellery became priceless frag storms that cut through the air, threatening to shred anything in their path to pieces.

  As Czevak surged up the coin bank, his boots losing traction and sinking, the moundside began to roll and tumble, breaking away like a sand dune. Towers of stacked coin wavered and toppled under this molestation and the Nurgle frontline was buried in a downpour of silver and gold.

  Torqhuil’s axe, servo-arms and mechadendrite limbs were suddenly everywhere, shearing the barrels from autoguns, batting corrupted Guardsmen across the hall and plasma-torching Cadian cultists in two. With the Unbound’s caseless ammunition creating nothing more than a light show of ricochets off the Relictor’s power armour, some of the rotten soldiers turned their grungy weapons on the blind warp-seer. The Space Marine was there seconds later, forming a protective shell around the warp-seer and soaking up the high-velocity punishment as he walked her out of the maelstrom.

  One of the pus-faced sergeants was stomping up towards Klute, a sluggish chainsword outstretched in one putrid fist. The blood-rusty weapon took heads off the still-seated Spireborns at the table, while four ghastly Guardsmen brought up the rear.

  Klute brought up his shotgun pistol, blasting salt and silver shot at the Unbound and working his lever action as he side-stepped behind Lady Krulda and her throne. The traitor Guardsmen bubbled and smoked where the blessed ammunition found its mark but the street silencer had done little to stop their thunderous advance. Their gelatinous flesh had simply absorbed the blasts like an insensitive paste.

  Klute screwed up his face as more auto fire ripped into Lady Krulda’s colossal girth and the ferrouswood throne around her. The inquisitor saw the daemonhost Hessian watching from behind a pallet of adamantium ingots. As the Unbound closed and their bullets drew ever closer, Klute found himself back in desperate moral territory. Spitting the first few lines of the emancipations Phalanghast had taught him, Klute allowed the daemon a fraction of its abominate power.

  Hessian sensed the change immediately, its eyes burning with a golden light, its outline a flicker with the lick of ethereal flame. As the Unbound stormed along the table, the daemonhost launched a torrent of hellfire from its palms, roasting the traitor Guardsmen where they stood. As Hessian brought down his hands and the inferno died, Klute finished thumbing shells into his shotgun pistol and risked a glimpse around the edge of the throne.

  The suppurating sergeant and his Nurgle soldiers stood there unharmed. The daps and stipples of their paste-soggy flesh were browned and burned but the viscous bloat of their limbs and rotten features were unscathed by the supernatural firestorm. Even their Ablutraphurn flak armour had fared well beyond a few flash burns. Klute sighed. Hessian’s face creased with confusion and otherwordly anger.

  The Unbound turned their antique weaponry on the creature, the sergeant bringing its chainsword around to meet the daemonhost. Hessian took unnecessary cover behind the pallet of adamantium before giving the traitor Guardsmen his palms again, this time using the rage of his hellfire blast on the ingots. Bricks of solid adamantium flew at the Unbound, breaking and braining the parody Guardsmen, smashing though their armour and rotten bodies.

  The wall surrounding the hinges of the great hall doors gave and the large metal doors fell inwards, two more of the Nurgle Guardsmen crushed underneath. Behind the doors was a deluge of madness, a seeming single creature made up of sunken eyes, gnashing teeth and bloodied fingernails. Cannibals poured into the apartments and set upon anything with a pulse. Traitor Guardsmen near the entrance and courtiers both dead and alive became the fascination of the first wave, giving Klute and Hessian the time they needed to reach Epiphani, Torqhuil and the High Inquisitor on the other side of the hall.

  The group ran blindly through the rooms and chambers of the royal apartments, with the Unbound officer and a few remaining members of his platoon stomping up behind. Their weapons were occupied with cutting down a second wave of cannibals that had dived through the side doorway after them.

  Stumbling through the doors of the master bedroom, Czevak and his retinue clambered over Lady Krulda’s reinforced bed and discovered to their dismay that they had run out of palace. The five of them found themselves on a large balcony, commanding the best view in the city of the flame-ravaged hive and the stinking carcinogen swamps beyond. Czevak looked down over the crafted balustrade, his stomach flipping as he discovered that the fearful distance down to the base of the tower was only the beginning of the vertiginous drop. The palace and Spire descended, and below that the villas and habscrapers reached for kilometres up out of the nest of factory chimneys and gaping smoke stacks upon which the city sat. The High Inquisitor looked up at the suicidal climb which separated Lady Krulda’s balcony from the landing platform for her personal shuttle. As Planetary Governor as well as Lady of the Ablutra Hive she was expected to visit the leaders of the Ablutraphur’s sister hives.

  ‘Climb for your lives,’ Czeva
k told the others before stepping up onto the balcony and launching himself at a gargoyle carved into the Gothic stone of the Spire. If there had been time there almost certainly would have been opposition to the plan. Faced with the gun-toting Unbound and the flesh-hungry hordes rampaging through the apartments after them, there seemed little else for them to do but climb.

  Fortunately for the group, the Spire architecture was fussy and crowded, incorporating all manner of flourishes and design structures as well as statues, representations and gargoyles to help the uninitiated climber. Czevak had the benefit of youth and Hessian to all intents and purposes scrambled up through the architecture like a gargoyle. Klute found it difficult to keep visions of his flailing form falling down the side of the hive out of his mind, finding that only visions of cannibal hive city dwellers feasting on his innards kept him ascending. Epiphani didn’t have to worry about vertigo at all, the climb up the Spire side feeling no different to the blind girl than climbing a deck ladder on the Malescaythe. Father rose gently behind her on his small anti-gravity drive, using his enhanced optics to give the warp-seer a clear view of the handholds to come. The Relictors Techmarine found the climb the easiest, despite weighing the most, ascending like some bionic spider up the Spireface, grabbing features with mechadendrite attachments and gauntlets and punching through the stone with his servo-arms when no suitable feature presented itself.

  Czevak hauled himself over the lip of the landing pad, grateful for the grip on Klute’s Cretacian hunting boots. Thrusting his arm down to his friend, he helped Klute up the last segment of the climb, lugging the inquisitor up onto the platform. As the two men lay on the deck, chests heaving, it became painfully apparent that Lady Krulda’s personal shuttle was not there. The inquisitors shouldn’t have been surprised. As the food crisis had gotten progressively worse and the starvation riots had taken over, anything with wings and an engine would have been procured, hijacked or stolen to escape the hive city’s woes.