[Imperial Guard 05] - Ice Guard

by Steve Lyons - (ebook by Undead)

  “That’s far enough!” he snapped, and the mutant came to a halt, raised its hands.

  “We understand your… suspicions, blame you for being… repulsed.” The voice was a lumbering baritone, and it came from behind Gavotski. He turned, and felt his throat tightening. The speaker stepped out of the shadows: a shambling monster with grey fur, its fingers twisted into claws, its eyes a burning red, its brow unnaturally pronounced. “We repulse ourselves,” it said, “but none of us… chose this. Didn’t want to be this way. Chaos, so… so strong… in the water, the air… It has taken a hold of… our bodies.” He swallowed painfully.

  Gavotski remembered what Tollenberg had said.

  “But you’re fighting it, fighting to keep your minds pure.”

  “If you are so loyal,” grumbled Blonsky, massaging his jaw as he climbed to his feet, “then you know your duty. The Emperor’s edict on impurities is clear. There is only one way you can be purged.”

  “And we know we must… die,” the mutant said, “but want it to be for a… purpose. We want to… want to strike against the heretics. They did this to us. They did this to our… world, to Cressida.” It was having trouble breathing, and it broke off its speech as it groaned and wheezed, sucking air into its lungs.

  “You knew we were coming!” Grayle realised. “You sent out spies, into the mountains and the forest. I saw one of them. You’ve been watching us!”

  “Just… sorry,” said the mutant, “we could not approach sooner… before the sniper on the lake, before you lost your… comrade at the landing site… before the Traitor Guardsmen… Had to choose our moment carefully, as you will… as you will appreciate. So hard, these days, to know who can be… trusted.”

  Gavotski followed the mutant’s sorrowful gaze, down to the floor, to the body of the Ice Warriors’ erstwhile guides, and to the others — six of them — cut down before he had called for his ceasefire.

  “We can’t save your world,” he said quietly. “That’s not what we’re here for. But with your help, we can save one man. An important man.”

  “Then we will give… what help we can,” the mutant promised. “We will fight in the Emperor’s… service, and pray that, when we reach the afterlife, He will… look upon our tainted souls with… with understanding.”

  The Ice Palace was as huge as Grayle had described. It rose up high above Steele — higher than he could see, held as he was.

  He was starting to get his strength back, though he was concealing this fact from his captors, letting them half-carry him, letting them think him still weak.

  The traitors bustled him down a stone staircase, flight after flight — all the way down, he guessed, to the next hive level. As they stepped out into another street, as the traitors repositioned their grips on him, Steele was let go for a second and he feigned a collapse, taking the chance to steal a glance upwards.

  He saw grand towers and turrets, and the broad undersides of bridges of ice.

  The air was more than cold, it was like invisible daggers were being driven through his bones. Steele rued the damage done to his greatcoat, though he suspected that even it would not have afforded him a great deal of protection. He knew cold, natural cold, and he knew that this was something different. The traitors, in contrast, seemed perfectly comfortable in their flak jackets.

  They were taking him to an archway in the base of the palace’s front wall. As they drew closer to it, the white surface took on a translucent quality, and Steele could see faint veins of the familiar purple fungus crazing through it.

  The archway was protected by four Traitor Guardsmen — and by a heavy portcullis, this too formed from the ice. Steele remembered Barreski’s confident words in the forest: “Just give me a couple of flamers, and I guarantee you there’ll be nothing left standing here in ten minutes.” If only it could be so easy.

  On his way here, Steele had seen at least two hundred more traitors, many of them attaching themselves to his entourage as it passed, basking in their fellows’ victory. His comrades, he accepted now, hadn’t a hope of beating those odds, of making it here. At best, they could keep some of the traitors occupied outside the palace.

  The rest, he feared, was up to him.

  Pozhar had never felt less comfortable.

  The mutants had offered him and his three comrades seats, which they had accepted, and food, which they hadn’t. Gavotski had suggested that Grayle and Pozhar get some sleep while they could, while he and Blonsky kept watch. Grayle had nodded off with his chin on his chest, but Pozhar couldn’t rest.

  Most of the mutants stayed well away from their guests, in deference to their sensibilities, or perhaps just in fear of arousing their wrath again. However, the most mutated of them, the one that had spoken to them earlier, now shuffled over to them, and announced that it had bad news.

  “Your commander has been… captured,” it wheezed. “He fought… well, but was outclassed by a… a Traitor Space Marine. However, we have found your… remaining four comrades… bringing them here.”

  Since Tollenberg, none of the mutants had introduced themselves by name. Pozhar wondered if they had names any more. Perhaps they considered themselves unworthy, had come to think of themselves, as he would once have thought of them—as he still thought of them—as mere monsters.

  “Colonel Steele isn’t dead?” asked Gavotski.

  “They are taking him to… the Ice Palace,” said the mutant, “to Mangellan.”

  “Then we can still save him,” said Gavotski. “If you can do as you said, if you can get us into the palace, we can rescue the colonel and Confessor Wollkenden. But we have to make our plans soon. We have less than fourteen hours.”

  The mutant inclined its shaggy head, graciously, and withdrew.

  Blonsky watched it go with a shudder.

  “They’re fooling themselves,” he muttered, “or lying to us. If a man’s faith is strong, he can resist the corruption of Chaos, the Emperor has taught us that. To have been mutated as these wretches have—”

  “But they’re fighting it!” said Pozhar.

  “Too late.” Blonsky turned to Gavotski. “We can’t trust them, sergeant. We don’t know what they did to deserve this, don’t know if they are cowards or traitors or just weak — but whichever it is, they are already lost. Even if they are sincere in their intentions, they cannot be cleansed of their sins. Sooner or later, Chaos will take their minds — and when that happens, they will turn on us.”

  Gavotski just nodded. “I know,” he said.

  And his words were like a knife blow to Pozhar’s heart.

  The interior of the Ice Palace was no less impressive than its exterior — and no less well-guarded. Steele was guided through what seemed like legions of Traitor Guardsmen, across an enormous hallway — formed from the ice, of course, but lushly appointed with velvet rugs and wall hangings.

  The hall was festooned with elaborate ice sculptures, lent a certain beauty by soft and perhaps sorcerous inner lights — until Steele drew close enough to make out their twisted, daemonic shapes. A frozen staircase swept in an elegant curve upwards to the balconies and balustrades of the next floor. He was dragged past this, into a small, dark corner, and bundled through a nondescript doorway.

  Behind this, steps — stone steps — stretched downwards into an oppressive gloom. There was scarcely room to descend in single file, so Steele was set on his feet and prodded in the back with a lasgun muzzle, forced to walk with a traitor close in front of him and another close behind.

  Rough-hewn stone walls opened up around them, lit only by the glows of the traitors’ lamp-packs. Steele could hear an insistent drip, echoing and re-echoing until even he could not have pinpointed its source. He felt as if he was sinking into the depths of the underhive, except that he knew he was still high above ground level. The cavern appeared natural enough — but Steele suspected that, if he could have looked with his bionic eye, he would have found tell-tale signs that it was man-made.

  Mangellan had
decided, it seemed, to complement the splendour of his castle above with the traditional dungeons below.

  The steps were streaked with ice fungus, some of them treacherously so. Steele contrived to slip, and to fall backwards, toppling the unprepared traitors that followed him like a row of dominoes. Three of them fell, screaming, over the side, and were broken on the rock floor below. It didn’t ease the colonel’s predicament at all — the casualties were immediately replaced, new hands grasping for him, forcing him to walk onwards — but it did make him smile.

  Thick iron doors had been punched into the cavern walls. They nestled in nooks, listing at odd angles. Steele felt his heart beating a little faster at the thought that Confessor Wollkenden might have been behind one of them. He resisted the urge to call out to him. He didn’t want to tip his hand just yet, thought it best to bide his time, to continue the pretence that he was a broken prisoner. Not that it was so hard to pretend.

  A door was heaved open, and Steele was thrust through it. His new quarters consisted of a windowless stone box, extending no more than a metre and a half in any direction. He had to stoop to avoid knocking his head on the ceiling, nor was there enough space for him to lie comfortably.

  A solid metal ring was set into one wall, a heap of chains draped across it. Two of the traitors placed their hands on Steele’s shoulders, pushed him down to the ground and wrapped him, quickly and efficiently, in the chains, passing them four or five times through the ring and securing them at last with a heavy padlock. By the time they had finished, he was so tightly trussed that he could neither sit nor stand, his body forced instead into an unnatural, painful hunch: the traitors’ revenge, he supposed, for his trick on the steps.

  They withdrew, and took their lamp-packs with them. The slam of the cell door plunged Steele into an impenetrable darkness. He tried to switch to infrared vision, but his bionic eye still wasn’t responding. Its HUD reported that the self-repair cycle would be completed in thirty-five seconds’ time.

  Ten minutes later, that countdown still stood at thirty-five seconds.

  The Ice Warriors were back on the move, back in the sewers — and despite their odorous surroundings, Pozhar was just grateful to be out of that chapel. He had felt no trace of the Emperor’s presence in there, not for him. He had felt like an intruder.

  His squad was eight-strong again. Barreski, Mikhaelev and Palinev had been brought up through the manhole together, and Gavotski had greeted them and explained the situation, explaining the details of their unlikely alliance with the mutants.

  Barreski had looked appalled, but he had kept his own counsel. Mikhaelev, however, had been surprisingly supportive.

  “They can help us,” he had said to the others, when Blonsky was safely out of earshot, “or we can kill them, and throw away any hope of succeeding in our mission for the sake of Imperial dogma, rules written by men who have never set foot on a battlefield. I ask you, why shouldn’t we do this?”

  Pozhar had wanted to answer that question. He had itched to tear open his greatcoat, to expose the fur that was crawling across his chest, to yell out, “Because you don’t want to end up like me!” But he had no wish to die like that.

  “Once we have the confessor,” Barreski had said sullenly, “we can pump these abominations full of las-fire. We can do that, right?”

  The sounds of combat from below had heralded Anakora’s approach. She had been collected by one of the more human-looking mutants, as had the others — but evidently she had seen through its disguise. Gavotski had sent Palinev down into the tunnels, to find her before she could flee, to convince her that there was no threat here.

  They had all listened with heavy hearts as Anakora had related the details of Steele’s last stand.

  “I shouldn’t have left him,” she had sighed — to which Blonsky had retorted that of course she should, she had been following orders.

  They had all felt as uneasy as Pozhar had in the chapel — and so, although it might have been safer to sleep there and set out for the Ice Palace in the morning, Gavotski had declined this offer. He had also stipulated that no more than two mutant guides should accompany the Ice Warriors — and so, two had been detailed to the task, chosen once more it seemed for their near-human looks and ease of speech.

  Pozhar was wading behind one of them, wondering how misshapen it was beneath its blue worker’s smock.

  He would almost have preferred the company of an obvious monster. At least that would have been concealing nothing. Not like me, he thought.

  The mutants had built a fire on the chapel floor, in which all of the Ice Warriors had recharged their las-guns’ power packs. They had also provided a few scavenged frag grenades and knives, but nothing more useful than that.

  Pozhar was concerned that they seemed to have climbed a long way down, via various ladders and sometimes short drops into underlying tunnels — but their guides had assured them that they knew where they were going, that the best way to reach the Ice Palace was to come up from below it.

  They were sloshing their way along another stinking tunnel when Palinev brought them to a halt.

  “Does anyone else hear that?” he asked. “Something up ahead.”

  They fell silent, still, listening, and they could all hear it now, could feel as well, the flow of the usually stagnant sewer water about their shins.

  Something was coming this way, swimming this way.

  The mutants were the first to react, to turn, to look at each other in pale-faced horror… and to run. One of them slipped through Grayle’s fingers, but the other was caught by Barreski and pinned against the wall.

  “What is it?” the Ice Warrior yelled in the mutant’s face. “What are you afraid of?”

  “And did you bring us down here on purpose?” spat Blonsky. “Were you leading us to it?” The mutant couldn’t answer, could only stare and babble and whimper and kick in a futile attempt to shake off Barreski’s grip.

  And then a miniature tidal wave slapped out from the opening of a nearby side tunnel, to be followed an instant later by a body: green, scaly, sinewy, bristling with eyes and teeth. It leapt into the tunnel, almost bounced off the wall, landed on its feet, and oriented itself with incredible speed as it sighted its prey.

  And then the monster was upon them.

  Steele had been alone for almost an hour.

  He knew this because his internal chrono told him so; it had kept him horribly aware of every second that had passed. And because of that drip, that infernal drip, marking off the slow passage of time, one beat every two point four seconds, a total of fourteen hundred and sixteen drips so far.

  He half-stood, stooped, in his heavy chains, his spine aching fit to break, and he prayed to the Emperor, and silently cajoled the machine-spirits in his bionic eye, but they were deaf to his pleas, those same two digits frozen in the HUD.

  Thirty-five seconds…

  He heard footsteps on the steps outside, and he knew that his time was up.

  A small, square panel in his cell door slid open, and light spilled in, almost blinding Steele after so long in the dark. A cultist peered in through the hole, satisfied himself that the prisoner was still bound, and opened a heavy lock.

  The door creaked open to reveal a tall, thin figure standing on the threshold. Like Steele before him, this new arrival had to stoop to enter the cell; there was hardly any space between the two of them as he perched on a narrow ledge in the wall opposite the colonel, arms folded casually, a smug smile twisting his lips.

  He was no longer backlit now, and Steele saw him properly for the first time, could make out his pinched features. The newcomer’s eyes were like deep black holes, into which Steele felt he could almost have fallen. He sported no visible mutations, but he wore the black robes of a cultist. His hood was folded back, to show off an elaborate tattoo that spread like a spider’s web across his face, over his shaved head, behind his ears and down his neck. He also wore a golden sash, and a general’s shoulder flash on his right
shoulder only — and he carried an ornate sceptre with the most vile obscenities carved into it: purloined and makeshift symbols of rank for a leader whose army barely acknowledged the concept.

  “Let me introduce myself,” he said in a voice as smooth as silk. “I am the ruler of this hive by right of conquest. I am the favoured of the Chaos gods, a high priest in their service. I am your jailer, your interrogator, and perhaps in time your executioner. I am all of these things and more — but the one thing you need to know about me, the most important fact in your life right now, is that I am your new, your only, master.”

  “Oh, I know who you are,” said Steele, not bothering to disguise the contempt in his voice. “You’re Mangellan.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Time to Destruction of Cressida: 12.12.08

  The creature was moving so fast they barely had time to react.

  It came surfing towards them on the shallow sewer water. Then it flexed its stumpy legs and its prehensile tail, and sprang into their midst, shrugging off Pozhar and Anakora’s las-fire. The Ice Warriors scattered as best they could, but the tunnel was narrow, confining. The creature lashed out at them with claws and fangs; its mouth was wide, incredibly wide, its teeth like chainsword blades. It almost caught Gavotski’s arm in its jaws, but he pulled away in time.

  The creature smacked back into the water on its stomach — its natural orientation, Barreski realised. It was like an alligator, its body elongated and scaled, but its back was a mess of spines, and its head a splatter of misshapen, rheumy eyes.

  It reared up again. He felt its hot, fetid breath and its spittle on his face, and he grabbed the mutant he had been holding, swung it around and gave it a push.

  The mutant screamed as it stumbled into the sewer creature — which, not questioning its good fortune, immediately sank its claws into the mutant’s shoulders, clamped its jaws over its head and dived back down into the water with it.