‘Think, Reinez!’ said Varnica. ‘The warp has used your anger. It has turned you against your brothers! Join us and help end all this!’
Reinez’s reply was a wild swing that almost took Varnica’s head off. Varnica forced his eyes away from the hellish vastness of the portal overhead, channelled a torrent of psychic power into his claw, and prepared to take a Space Marine’s life for the first time.
Sister Aescarion felt her mind pried from her head and crushed in Abraxes’s claw.
She fell to her knees. The screaming agony in her head blocked out everything save the shadowy image of Abraxes, edged in black fire, and the wicked bone-white slash of his grin.
She felt a million vicious hands reaching through her soul and clawing at the inside of her head. She heard a million voices cackling about what they would do to her when she was broken. Place her in the body of a monster, rampaging through the warp’s enemies, fuelled by her pain. Rend her into a thousand pieces, each one imprisoned in some maze of torment. Send her shrieking through the immaterium, a formless ghost driven mad by the warp’s malice. Turn her into one of them. Use her as their slave and visit a million indignities upon her.
The tiny sliver of Aescarion that remained scrabbled at the walls of her skull, trying to find some purchase to keep herself from falling into nothingness. Then, she found it.
A golden figure, his armour burning with the fire of faith, in his hand a blade that was justice. He was crowned with dominion over Mankind. The Emperor, the protector of the human race. Though Aescarion might have nothing left save that which was in Abraxes’s hand, she still had her faith. That was something the daemon prince could never have. That was what she had taunted him with – that core of her, the armoured and inviolate place that all the powers of the warp could never hope to breach.
Abraxes roared. He wanted it. He wanted to shatter that faith. But he could not. She denied him, and in his rage he forgot everything else unfolding around him.
Luko scrambled up the pinnacle on which Daenyathos had stood to watch the opening of the portal. The spire of corroded metal still stood proud of the gore, its pitted surface affording enough hand and footholds for Luko to reach the top. From here he could see the whole cyst, and the sheer futility his strike force faced.
Three Imperial Fists remained. Graevus fought off the daemons trying to rush Sister Aescarion. Aescarion was on her knees, screaming, linked to Abraxes by a torrent of black flame pouring from the daemon prince’s hand. Varnica was wrestling at the threshold of the warp portal with Reinez, the Crimson Fist kneeling on Varnica’s chest and pounding down at the Librarian with gauntleted fists.
Each Space Marine was an island in a sea of daemons. More of the things were emerging from the gore with every moment, and it would take seconds for them to overwhelm the warriors.
One part of Luko told him that they had done well to get this far, that to die facing Abraxes toe-to-toe was as good a death as any of them could have hoped to drag back from fate.
But the rest of him, the greater part, was driven only by rage. The Soul Drinkers had destroyed Abraxes once already, and lost many of their battle-brothers in doing so. Now he had returned as if he had a right to walk in the same universe as the Soul Drinkers, as if the lives lost to banish him had meant nothing.
Sarpedon had impaled Abraxes on the Soulspear, an image still burned into Luko’s mind. It had been the moment that the warriors of the Chapter realised what they must truly be – slave to neither the Imperium nor the warp. Abraxes’s return had undone that moment. That he had dared, that he had sought to make the Soul Drinkers very existence meaningless, sent anger pouring through Luko that he couldn’t have stemmed if he had wanted to.
And he didn’t want to. It felt good. This was what warriors spoke of when they talked of the glory, the rush, of battle. This was what Luko had never truly felt; now it was impossible to resist.
He crouched and drew back both claws, an animal ready to pounce. Abraxes’s attention was focused on Sister Aescarion and the daemon prince had no idea Luko was even there.
It would be a difficult leap. There was nothing easy about what he would have to do if he made the jump. But the anger in him swallowed up those useless facts and bade him dive from the pinnacle towards the twisted grin on Abraxes’s face.
Aescarion saw through her haze of pain as Luko dived towards Abraxes. The Soul Drinker thrust his twin lightning claws into the daemon’s face.
The claws punched through Abraxes’s skin around his left eye, sinking up to the knuckle. Luko braced his feet against the daemon’s upper chest and yelled as he pulled, muscles of his neck standing out as sharp cords as he put all his considerable strength into it.
Abraxes had not seen it coming. He had been savouring peeling apart Aescarion’s mind, and the shock of Luko’s assault stunned him for a moment. That was all the time Luko need to wrench Abraxes’s eye out of its socket, a flourish of his claws throwing the orb down to the bloody shore like a comet with a tail of ragged flesh.
Abraxes screamed. Wrapped up in his howl was a strangely human sound, a note of pain and shock. It was the first sign of weakness Abraxes had shown, an echo of some frailty that a human could recognise. He took a step backwards, scattering bodies from the foot of his throne as he stumbled towards the portal.
Luko hit the ground hard beside Aescarion. She still knelt, one hand on the floor, hair clinging to the sweat on her face. She was pale and blood ran from her nose and ears.
Luko looked away from her. The momentum he had bought would not last for long. Aescarion would have to fend for herself.
Luko ran forwards, rolled past Abraxes’s cloven foot and slashed at the back of his ankle. His claws bit through daemonic flesh and severed tendons whipped from the gash. Abraxes fell back another half-pace, his screams turning to anger.
Graevus leapt from the gore to join Luko. His axe hacked down into Abraxes’s knee and the leg buckled, Abraxes putting a hand down to steady himself.
Abraxes, falling back, had passed halfway through the warp portal behind him. His hand pushed down against a silvery island of power that gathered in the warp, the dark intelligences of the immaterium buoying him up. They would force him forwards again, expel him from the haven of the warp to finish the job of killing the Space Marine standing between the dark gods and an eternity of slaughter.
Graevus leapt up onto Abraxes’s chest.
‘We killed you once,’ he snarled, swinging his axe up high. ‘And this time, we’ve had practice.’
Graevus drove the axe down into the daemon prince’s chest. The blade carved down through muscle and bone. From the cavernous wound burst a fountain of light, raw power unleashed like blood from an artery. It caught Graevus square in the chest and threw the Soul Drinker to the ground, armour smoking.
Abraxes got onto one knee and held his sword up, point first. Glowing blood poured from his ruined eye as he measured the blow and stabbed the sword down into Graevus’s right hip, impaling the Space Marine through the meat of his leg and pinning him to the ground.
‘Killed me?’ hissed the daemon prince. ‘Soul Drinker, you did nothing that day but bring your own death a moment closer!’ Abraxes twisted the blade and Graevus’s leg came apart, a welter of blood mixing with the gore spattered across the metallic ground in front of the portal. Graevus screamed and his axe fell from his mutant hand.
Luko charged at Abraxes, knocking the blade aside with a swipe of both claws. Abraxes’s remaining eye narrowed as it focused on Luko.
Reinez kneed Varnica in the midriff hard enough to dent his armour. The Librarian fell to the ground and Reinez straddled his chest, bringing his hammer over Varnica’s skull head-down, ready to piston it into the Doom Eagle’s face.
Reinez’s gaze fell on the lump of seething putrescence that a few moments a go had been Abraxes’s eye. It lay in a whiteish mass, dissolving its way through the cargo bay floor, its pupil breaking up in its corrupt substance.
Beyond
the eye, Luko was battling the daemon prince, fending off a swipe of the daemon’s claws with his own gauntlets.
‘We’re trying to kill it,’ said Varnica, following Reinez’s gaze. ‘It’s the only real enemy here. No matter what you think of us, Reinez, killing Abraxes goes beyond it.’
Reinez said nothing. Varnica rolled out from under him, struggling to one knee. He was battered and broken, bones fractured all over his body, bruised organs bleeding inside. Reinez was a better warrior than Varnica. If he made the decision, the Crimson Fist would kill him.
Varnica saw, as Reinez did, that Abraxes was halfway through the portal, straddling the gap between reality and the warp.
‘We have to close it,’ said Varnica. He pointed to the sigils on the floor beneath the feet of the two warriors. ‘The blood of Dorn opened it. The same blood will close it.’
‘You spoke against them,’ said Reinez, breath heavy. ‘You… you wanted them dead.’
‘No one is leaving this place alive, Reinez,’ said Varnica. ‘The Soul Drinkers will die. You have your wish. Now kill this blasphemy. Guilliman’s blood runs in my veins, and Throne only knows what runs in the Soul Drinkers. Only Dorn’s blood will seal the gate. Only yours.’
Varnica couldn’t be sure if Reinez understood. He certainly couldn’t be certain that the Crimson Fist, as he stepped back and dropped his guard, was inviting him to strike. Perhaps Reinez left himself undefended as he absorbed the realisation that Abraxes was the true force for destruction, that the Soul Drinkers, the Phalanx, the carnage around him were all parts of what the Daenyathos and the daemon prince had orchestrated. Or perhaps he really did understand that his blood alone would seal the gate, just like N’Kalo’s had opened it.
Varnica did not wait for clarification.
He forced every drop of pain in him into the pit of his mind, and channelled it, ice-cold, into the psychic circuits built into his force claw. He lunged and punched the claw into Reinez’s chest.
The Crimson Fist’s mouth opened and a breath escaped him, the shock to his body too much for him to form words.
Varnica yelled and the psychic power discharged like a massive electrical surge through the claw, the Hammerhand snapping the blades open and tearing Reinez’s chest almost in two. Organs glinted for a moment in red light bathing the cyst.
Reinez fell back and the wellspring of blood inside him burst up through his ruined chest. The blood of a Crimson Fist, spiced with the gene-seed taken from the genetic print of Rogal Dorn, washed over the glowing symbols on the floor.
Varnica placed a palm on the floor, Reinez’s blood lapping around it. He had unleashed a great deal of his psychic reserves in killing Reinez – Reinez, as hard to kill as he was, had needed a massive burst of psychic power to ensure his death. Varnica would have to use everything he had left, drain himself past the limit of safety – and sanity.
Varnica wrapped his mind around the unreality of the portal above him, drawing on the power that surged through the sigils on the floor, and began to crush the warp portal closed with the force of his will.
Luko leapt over the stricken Graevus and slammed into Abraxes. He speared both claws into the sides of the daemon’s jaw and headbutted Abraxes in the nose. Gristle split and blood sprayed. Abraxes shook his head and threw Luko off.
Luko skidded along the blood-slick ground. Graevus was trying to get to his feet nearby, one leg buckling under him, his thigh a bloody ruin of pulpy flesh and shattered bone.
‘What matters this effort?’ said Abraxes. ‘Why must you fill what remains of your lives with such toil?’
‘Think on what remains of your life, daemon,’ spat Luko. ‘My toil will go on. Yours ends here.’
‘Pitiful,’ sneered Abraxes. ‘Which one of you can face me that will not pay for it with his life? What mere man stands my equal, to fence words with me?’
‘I seem to remember,’ said Luko, ‘that it was a mere man who speared you through the chest and threw you back to the warp to begin with. It was men who brought you back. You should be kneeling to us.’
Abraxes bellowed in rage. He snatched up his fallen blade and charged. Luko met the charge with his own, shoulder down, sprinting at the daemon prince. Luko dropped to the ground and rolled, just as Abraxes’s sword sliced towards him at chest height. The blade passed over him and Luko sprang up, driving both claws through Abraxes’s foot.
Abraxes bellowed and wrenched his foot off the ground, Luko’s claws sliding from the flesh. The daemon prince took another step back, and blinded for the moment by his anger, he did not see that once more his back foot passed beyond the boundary of the warp gate.
The circumference of the gate shrunk. Varnica was closing it, metre by metre. Luko ran forwards and speared down through Abraxes’s other foot, pinning it to the ground. The power field discharged in a staccato of noise and light, energy arcing to the floor.
The warp gate’s uppermost edge closed down on Abraxes, like a slow-motion guillotine. Abraxes saw, perhaps a second or two too late, what Luko was trying to do.
A single Space Marine could not kill Abraxes. Sarpedon had managed it, but he was a mutant beyond a human’s strength and speed, and he had wielded the Soulspear. Luko couldn’t do it on his own. But he didn’t have to.
The edge of the shrinking gate bit down into Abraxes’s shoulder. It sliced through tendons and bone, and daemonic blood dribbled glowing from the wound. Abraxes’s face creased in agony and shock.
He tried to force himself out from the gate, but Luko kept him pinned in place. The gate bit down further into Abraxes’s upper chest, and blood sprayed now from sundered arteries.
From beyond the portal, from the endless masses of hatred that boiled there, a terrible wave of scorn burst out. The warp’s evils saw their servant trapped and dying, and saw all that he had promised withering away. The strands of fate he had woven, which would take him across the galaxy disgorging the warp’s malice in the form of torrents of daemons, were snapping. The future galaxy where the Phalanx travelled the stars bringing chaos everywhere it went, that dark tapestry Abraxes had concocted with the human Daenyathos, was unravelling.
They were disappointed. Whatever they truly were, whatever passed for emotions in their godlike souls, the powers of the warp were most disappointed in Abraxes’s failure.
The daemon screamed, but the sound did not last long. His lungs and windpipe were severed. His body reformed around the damage, echoing the mutability of the horrors he commanded, but it was not enough. Tentacles slithered from his wounds and bony growths burst in every direction, but the force was too great.
Luko pulled his claws out and stumbled backwards. The portal was closing, and it was cutting the daemon prince in two. Abraxes was wedged in, the sides of the portal slicing into him – he didn’t need Luko keeping him in place now.
Luko knelt beside Graevus. ‘Come, brother,’ he said.
‘Where?’ said Graevus, watching the portal slicing down through Abraxes’s sternum into his abdomen. ‘There is nowhere left for us.’
‘There is one place,’ said Luko. ‘Let’s go.’
Captain Borganor’s Howling Griffons smashed into the daemonic host, joining the Imperial Fists in the wild melee seething around the daemon engines.
But the daemons were legion. Tens of thousands had gathered, and every one now dived into the slaughter. The scorpion-like daemon engine rumbled and raised its segmented body up on eight armoured legs, the tail coiling over its back.
On columns of fire, the Angels Sanguine leapt through the air onto the daemon engine. The engine shuddered and its tail swept them off its back. Commander Gethsemar was thrown to the ground and the engine’s insectoid head loomed over him, bronze mandibles dribbling liquid metal.
‘Not yet, brother!’ shouted a voice, and Siege-Captain Daviks plunged out of the daemon throng to grab the Angel Sanguine by the gorget. He dragged Gethsemar out of the way of the engine, even as it vomited molten metal from its fanged mouth.
/> A hundred similar stories were playing out amid the butchery. Men were dying for their brothers, or killing all around them in revenge for seeing their friends fall. But there would be no one to remember them.
The daemonic army was too big. The war engines were being completed even as daemon blood swamped the deck, ankle-deep. The Imperial Fists and the Howling Griffons, and all the souls who had come to the Phalanx for the trial of the Soul Drinkers, were going to die there.
A terrible scream erupted from every direction at once. It was a strong as a gale, and it shuddered the fabric of the Phalanx. Space Marines stumbled, stunned by the force of the noise. But daemon hands and blades did not take advantage of the distraction to cut the Space Marines down.
The daemons were howling, but not with rage – they were struck with a terrible anguish, dropping to their knees or just standing and screaming. Iron swords fell from bloodletters’ hands. Horrors turned in on themselves, liquid flesh imploding constantly as if trying to escape to some place inside.
Vladimir shook the bedlam from his head. It was a sound of abandonment and death, the dying cry of something tremendously powerful, something that had not believed it could die.
‘Abraxes has fallen!’ yelled Vladimir, barely even to hear himself over the echo in his ears. ‘The head of the beast has been struck off! Brothers, sisters, sons and daughters of the Emperor! Call down death on what remains!’
The Fangs of Dorn seemed to flash of their own accord in his hands, stabbing through the crush of daemons around him. Gethsemar and Daviks got to their feet, pushing back the horrors that had closed in over them, and fought side by side as the warriors of their Chapters carved through the mass to reach them.
Lord Inquisitor Kolgo shouldered his way into the shadow of the daemon engine. His rotator cannon hammered volley after volley into the bronze skull of the engine, and the machine reeled as if in shock, the daemons possessing it unable to strike back. The Battle Sisters accompanying the inquisitor lent their own fire, and heavy weapons from Imperial Fists at the back of the battlefield sheared its legs off and bored bleeding holes in its carapace. A burst of lascannon fire severed its tail and the weapon toppled to the ground without firing a shot. Stricken, the daemon engine let out a metallic groan as it sunk to the ground, accompanied by the shrieks of the daemon spirits inhabiting it.
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