by Rob Sanders
There was no time to enjoy Mammoshad’s suffering. All Czevak could think to do was scramble to his feet and crawl for his life. Past the burnt-out corpse of Korban Xarchos. Past the motionless Rubric Marines. Past the excavation and steam-powered mining equipment.
Czevak pushed himself to his feet and ran. He immediately came to miss the comforting blaze of colour his Harlequin coat used to leave behind and he felt strangely vulnerable without it. His legs were lithe, capable and bursting with youth and vigour, however, and made short work of ground that felt as though it were moving. Rubble rained down the sides of the pit face as tremors grumbled through the earth. Czevak could barely imagine what was happening below his feet. The raw negative nullification clashing with the awesome, immaterial power of the daemon. Risking a glance behind, Czevak saw the horrifying spectacle of the entity trying to be born. The warp rift had been severely compromised in the Omega-Minus’s presence but the monstrous daemon still struggled for realisation. The creature’s massive avian head was a parody even of its warped daemonic self. The colossal beak burst from the ground twisted and aflame, the monster’s azure feathers on one half of its head melted into its flesh. With its beak mangled up into one eye, the other midnight orb bulged with cyclopean fury. An appendage surged out of the crater floor, creating a black gorge from which the deformed limb spasmodically sprang. Despite its atrophied appearance, being somewhere between an arm and a wing, the gargantuan reach of the thing came at the fleeing Czevak.
The inquisitor rolled to the side, allowing the three, spindly, malformed fingers to score grooves into the rock where he had been. As the limb retracted Czevak could feel the backdraft created by the row of twisted feathers. They had materialised out of the twisted bones of the abomination like a sail along its forearm. Bolting across the score marks, Czevak ran up alongside the wagons of the cargo tram. The smoke-belching engine was hauling its burden of bitumen trucks up the track and into the mine tunnels. Risking a further fleeting glance behind, Czevak watched the wretched perversity of the limb come at him again, the daemon attempting to drag itself out of the ground and into Melmoth’s sickly reality. As Mammoshad extended its broken reach, tendons snapped and bones split, stabbing their way out of the daemonflesh. The remaining fingers of the creature’s hand had grown wing-like and useless out of its forearm and elbow, the sparse, stunted feathers blazing with unnatural fire.
Desperate to be away from the giant, Czevak took several bounding steps before launching himself at the steam wagons. The black mineral fuel that the Nurglites had been so slavishly industrious about excavating crunched under his body. His leg dangled dangerously outside the truck but the inquisitor managed to draw the flailing limb in mere moments before the container he was riding entered the tunnels. Looking back Czevak watched Mammoshad snatch at the final truck and miss, instead settling for grasping and squeezing the locomotive’s rails with its two gangly claws. As the rails closed the wheels on the rear three wagons began to screech. Czevak buried his head in his arms as the trucks popped right out of their railings, propelling the chassis and its mineral cargo up into the tunnel ceiling. Craning his neck, Czevak watched the toppled wagons, twist, roll and skid along the tunnel behind the fast-moving train.
Somehow Mammoshad had got the warped bulk of its gnarled and bone-skewered torso out of the hole and out onto the flat of the crater bottom. Horribly, the daemon’s second wing had materialised inside its body, making what would ordinarily have been narrow hips and muscular stomach and chest a contorted nightmare of umbrella-splayed bones jutting out of the enormous entity’s flame-wreathed carcass. To make movement even more agonising, its other arm was completely fused down its broken back. Shuffling its monstrous and malformed beak along the mine floor, one avian nostril twitched and flared allowing a stream of sapphire flame to blast after the steam tram and funnel up the tunnel.
Czevak watched the warp flame rage up the passage behind the trucks, rolling and twisting across the walls and ceiling before devouring the toppled rear trucks. Pushing himself up out of the black fuel, Czevak leapt for the truck in front. It had undoubtedly been part of Korban Xarchos’s sick plan to have the Nurglite population of the burg mine their fossil fuel from around the growing daemon egg. As the warping essence leaked out of the Tzeentchian monstrosity into the surrounding rock, lending the black mineral its warp-lustre, the Nurglites would have burned it in their factories and slowly poisoned their denizens with its powerful, warp spawning properties. Evidence of the success of the sorcerer’s plan was living in the tunnels in the form of the freakshow communities hacking out a deformed and desperate existence, too unsightly for even the scabby and diseased inhabitants of the burg.
Czevak leapt for the next truck, his head coming close to being taken off by one of the tunnel’s wooden support struts. The warp flame kept coming, however, sweeping through the screaming monstrosities of the tunnels and enveloping the rear wagon. The contents of the container exploded. The bitumen was flammable enough but it was the warp lustrecence threaded through its glimmering blackness that caused the detonation. The bank of flame rolled further up the tunnel, chasing down the racing truck, igniting and blasting apart a second and a third truck. Czevak was forced to jump again and again, almost falling over the side of a wagon as the tug hurtled its train around a tunnel corner. The warp flame suddenly died and Czevak gave thanks to the Emperor that the stream had run its course. In actual fact, the repeated detonations along the length of the track had collapsed the tunnel. Tonnes of rock and earth were falling, cutting off the immaterial flames but also caving in above the steam tram. With several trucks still aflame but as yet to explode, Czevak leapt between two of the wagons and yanked the pin connecting them free. As the flaming trucks slowed the collapsing tunnel swallowed them whole, leaving Czevak in the rearmost wagon – the train bolting out of the crumbling tunnel entrance.
As the mining tram rattled through the black-brick factories, Czevak could hear the daemon Mammoshad, thundering through the smog. The burg could no longer hear the deep bass of the shift-change horn. Now the metropolis rang with the avian screech of a decimated daemon. The huge, malformed aberration must be on its feet the inquisitor reasoned. It must have hauled itself out of the open-cast mine and was crashing unsteadily through the chimneys of the industriascape. Even through the agitated fog, whipped up by the gargantuan movements of the mortally-wounded beast, Czevak could tell that the twisted carcass of the infernal creature was still aflame and setting fire to the bitumen bricks of surrounding buildings with accidental ease.
The factories ahead were already blazing firestorms through which the locomotive steamed. Czevak ducked beneath the flames and kicked burning masonry from where it had dropped into his wagon. The fuel in the trucks ahead was taking, however, and rather than be attached to a raging, runaway train, Czevak pulled the pin from out of the wagon attachment in front of him. As his container began to slow, the inquisitor watched the tug and its trucks get away from him. The engine came upon cobbled roads crossing its lines. Nurglites, fleeing the daemon crashing through their burg, ran straight across the track. Body after body smacked against the boiler and chimney, before going down under the mine engine’s wheel. After the fourth or fifth body, the locomotive jumped the tracks, sending it and its piling cart train into the side of a blazing factory.
Czevak saw a taloned claw – like that of a titanic bird of prey – slam down on the demolished wagons, the mangled torso and head of the monster lost in the smog. Czevak tumbled his own body out of the slowing wagon, from the ground watching the daemon’s scaly stump of a second leg hobble past on the intersection ahead. All about the daemon precarious buildings and leaning chimneys were blazing and falling. Getting to his feet, Czevak knew that he had to make it to the webway portal before Mammoshad trampled the tinderbox burg into an inferno. He was about to tear off uphill when a sickening spectacle caught his eye. After the daemon’s legs had stomped by, Czevak had expected to see the creature’s tail pass.
This it did, despite being a ruptured throng of feather bundles imbedded in a knotted, scaly, muscular club. The horror did not end there, however. Dragged through the demolished burg behind the daemon was another warped mass, an unrealised twin of a monstrosity, a plucked, unformed, foetal deadweight, blinking its immaterial agony at the world.
Czevak turned to sprint away up a flight of steep, fractured steps but almost immediately ran into the floating form of Father hovering behind, returned like an obedient pet with its blue, bionic eyes waiting for instructions. Czevak only had one for it.
‘Come on, this way!’
Vaulting up the steps and along twisted alleyways, Czevak shielded his face from the flames of freshly ignited buildings with the sleeves of his shirt. He barged his way through screaming Nurglites who, shocked out of their languor, could barely comprehend what was happening. Father weaved his way behind, dodging around, above and sometimes between the cancerous legs of burg workers.
Above, the fog glared bright with the city fires and the indiscriminate streams of immaterial flame snorted across the tenement rooftops by the wild and warped daemon. As Czevak’s legs began to burn with the demand of an uphill sprint and his chest wheeze with deep lungfuls of smoke and exertion, the inquisitor bundled straight into a mob of burg inhabitants. The dense crowd was formed by gaping Nurglites drifting out into the main thoroughfare from both the gin mills and faith healers across the street. They stared at the destruction wrought upon the city by the dying, behemothic thrashings of a monstrous daemon on its last legs. They gawped at the collapsing buildings and the strange flames that devoured the slum with an appetite for destruction. As Czevak pushed through their diseased bodies – just for a moment – he fancied he saw the Harlequin half-mask of one of his hunters. Czevak slowed and shook his head.
‘No, not now,’ he heard himself say before surging on through the filthy bodies of the stunned bystanders. With an adrenaline-spurred spring to his step the inquisitor bolted up the thoroughfare with Father gliding behind. A stretch up the street he saw eldritch boots dangling from a balcony upon which the gargoyle-masked leader of the Harlequin troupe sat. Slamming his back against the doorway of the tenement block opposite – escaping denizens spilling past him – Czevak watched the Great Harlequin nod slowly, doffing his wild, pink plume at the inquisitor. The slum frontage suddenly exploded as one of Mammoshad’s legs stumbled through it. Czevak instinctively backed into the doorway alcove with the other squirming bodies for cover. As the taloned claw staggered uphill, creating fresh havoc beyond, the dust of the demolished building began to thin and reveal that the Harlequin was gone.
Czevak froze. He didn’t know whether to run or hide. The Harlequins were everywhere, stationed along his route back to the safety of the webway portal. If they were not there then he was indeed losing his mind, the inquisitor reasoned. If they were really there amongst the peril of the daemon-ravaged city, then that was even worse. Over the thoroughfare rubble of the smashed tenement building, Czevak spotted the skeletal mask and carapace of the Death Jester, leant against a black-bricked wall in his long, dark coat. He was holding his shrieker cannon at ease like an agri-world harvester with his scythe.
A gout of rolling warp flame torched the roofs above before wildly streaming through the thoroughfare, razing the demolished masonry and cobbled road. Czevak was forced out into the open by flame dribbling off the roofs and onto the street. Upon realising that the Death Jester had also disappeared, the inquisitor set out across the scorched rubble. Above, the agonised screeches of the wounded daemon had grown mournful and desperate. The monstrosity could clutch to reality no more and as its presence grew ever more unstable and the warped realisation of its encounter with the Omega-Minus Pariah crippled and killed the beast, the prodigious creature began to stumble and fall.
Czevak ran at full speed for the alley through which he’d entered the damned reality of Melmoth’s World. As he cornered and bolted down the cramped alleyway’s depths, past the still-sleeping vagrants, he came face to face with himself, reflected in the Shadowseer’s mirror mask. The warlock stood between Czevak and the sanctuary of the webway. The warp gate already crackled with interdimensional activation, indicating that the Harlequins had followed him through. Czevak’s mind whirled with the dark fear he only knew too well in the presence of the Harlequin psyker. Were the Harlequins there to take him back to a prisoner’s life in the Black Library? Had some farseer seen that he had outlived his destined usefulness to the eldar and the Harlequins had come to destroy him?
Mammoshad’s club-like tail and the obscene deformity it trailed behind smashed through the alley wall, causing an unfurling tidal wave of bitumen bricks to fall towards the inquisitor. Faced with the fearful Shadowseer and the certain death of being crushed by the collapsing slum, Czevak ran at the Harlequin. As the bricks showered and smashed behind the inquisitor, the Harlequin moved to one side to block Czevak’s route. The daemon-demolished wall fell too fast for both of them, the falling masonry threatening to bury the alleyway. Instead of trying to run by, since the inquisitor knew he could never beat the reflexes of an eldar Harlequin, Czevak ran straight at the Shadowseer. As the bricks rained down, Czevak’s shoulder struck the surprised warlock in the chest. At that moment Czevak felt something that he’d only known once before, the pit of the stomach fizzle of phase-field relocation.
As both inquisitor and Shadowseer dropped back into reality a few strides up the untouched section of the alleyway beyond their positions were reversed. Czevak hit the ground nearest the webway portal with the Harlequin reeling from the impact and falling backwards up the alley. Scrambling arm over arm, Czevak crawled for the sizzling webway portal. As he pulled himself up against the black bricks that covered the wraithbone arch he looked back to see the Shadowseer flip from his back up onto his feet and draw the leaf-shaped length of his witchblade. Dark dread found the inquisitor and Czevak was rooted to the spot with irrational terror. The projected fear was fleeting, however, as the psyker’s concentration was broken by an object hurtling up behind. The warlock ducked as Father passed overhead, bringing up his mirror-mask just in time to see the servo-skull disappear through the portal.
The alley was suddenly bathed in blackness as the gargantuan form of the daemon Mammoshad – King of Kings, Enslaver of the Craven Worlds and Keeper of the Vault Abyssal – stumbled its last and toppled across the passage. Distracted, this time by the creature’s descending, avian bulk, the Harlequin got two steps into a sprint he knew he could not make. As the malformed monstrosity’s body pulverised the remaining buildings around the Shadowseer to grit, Czevak slipped in through the portal archway. The Harlequin disappeared under the immense dimensions of the daemon Mammoshad’s twisted, fallen body. As the inquisitor backed through the warp gate into the interdimensional safety of the webway, the slightest puff of masonry dust followed Czevak through. This was accompanied by the immediate sealing of the portal. Since he hadn’t runesealed the archway himself, Czevak reasoned that the gateway must have been crushed by Mammoshad’s warp-spawned carcass on the other side like the Harlequin psyker.
Collapsing in an adrenaline-drained and exhausted heap under Father’s cold optical orbs, Czevak could only hope that he had been that fortunate.
Exeunt
Interregna
The Wraith Tower, The Black Library of Chaos, The webway
CHORUS
Bronislaw Czevak had spent a life long-lived in the librariums, archives and reliquaries of the Imperium but never once had he expected to become an exhibit in one.
Following his rescue from the depraved clutches of Ahriman of the Thousand Sons, the mysterious mirror-masked Shadowseer, known to Czevak as Vespasi-Hann, escorted him – as he had done years before – to the hallowed halls of the Black Library of Chaos. Czevak had observed – with his limited, human insight – that the dark craftworld was not where it had once been.
Like a floating berg of scorched, crystal translucence, the Black Library drifted t
hrough the colossal, arterial channels of the webway. It was vast and impossible, keen-edged, yet angleless and covered in vanes and serrated flourishes that seemed to melt into one serene, silky form. Even if the daemon-sorcerer Ahriman had managed to wrench the secret of the Black Library’s location from his fragile mind, the monster would have found nothing. Upon Czevak’s arrival the darkling craftworld was elegantly negotiating the mind-numbing dimensions of a webway juncture, the living vessel allowing itself to gently drop and descend down through the chasmic mouth of the tunnel below.
Although situated in a labyrinthine dimension, the dark craftworld itself was very much its own maze of osseous passages, convoluted corridors and arched chambers. These were all devoted to protecting and preserving the perils of Chaos lore, as recorded in the innumerable tomes, scrolls and technologies stored there. Bubble vaults hung below the wraithberg superstructure of the Black Library, pregnant with the dark secrets of darker gods, the names and deeds of the Traitor Astartes and the truth of the eldar’s inevitable Fall; above reared a jagged horizon of tear-drop citadels, obelisks, monoliths, spires and columnar steeples – each its own treasury of forbidden works. In one of these towers, long before, Czevak had studied the works of the Dark Imperium. The Wraith Tower held the mon-keigh’s miserable contribution to the study of the Chaos Powers and their dark arts. It was here, in his glass prison, that Bronislaw Czevak had whiled away the hours of the occupied patient, buried in the piles of desiccated tomes and faded scrolls of his infant race, reading about – among many other cursed events, artefacts and people – Ahzek Ahriman, sorcerer, Space Marine and Chosen of Tzeentch.
The inquisitor looked down at the wraithbone desk. Like everything else in his cell – and Czevak was convinced that the term was intended in both its monastic and incarceratory sense – the desk was vitreous and crystalline clear. Czevak could see his age-spotted feet in his sandals through the alien material. It was here, in a glasseous chamber, that the ancient inquisitor had made his physical and spiritual recovery. It had taken some getting used to. The only privacy he had was a coiled curtain in which to toilet and bathe. Able to see through the flowing form of the furniture and even the walls of the cell itself, Czevak was forever bumping into objects, feeling rather like a trapped and foolish bird, attempting to escape its aviary. At first this had not bothered the largely immobile Czevak, nearly every bone in his body had been broken and his mind was shattered and frail. As the wondrous cares, technologies and magics of the eldar helped to repair his body and soul, motility allowed for the solace of study. His xenos hosts had been thoughtful enough to grow his wraithbone recess in the very area of the Black Library in which he had spent countless hours of research and contemplation – the Wraith Tower.