Far, far below him, down on the wasteland between the spires, Telach could see a long, ravaged formation of tanks bombarding the lower levels of the hive. Further out, almost lost in the smog and ash, were the two enormous Warlord Titans. They didn’t move, and no lights glinted from their cockpits. He briefly wondered what they were waiting for.
He began to move, striding out across the wreckage of the Capitolis’s pinnacle. It felt as if he’d emerged high atop some mythical pillar of the gods, thrust up from the mantle of a burning world and exposed to the gaze of the angry heavens. He could still sense corruption around him – it stuck in his nostrils, draining his strength and dragging on his muscles.
Then he saw the rift. It must have been enclosed once, hidden inside one of the Capitolis’s highest chambers and surrounded by the instruments of ritual. Now those chambers and those instruments were gone, blasted apart in an orgy of fire, and the portal was out in the open, cast upon the uttermost summit of the shattered hive spire.
To mortal eyes, it was almost nothing. An absence more than a substance, it hovered seductively on the edge of sight like a vid-feed artefact or a distortion on an auspex readout. Telach couldn’t focus on it; any attempt to do so made his eyes ache. Only the elements at its edge could be seen truly – a vague circle of flickering, wavering witchfire, ten metres across, hovering several metres above the plateau of ruin.
His psychic senses told him more. They told him that the rift was nearly complete, that the skeins of matter holding the structure of the universe intact were stretched very tight. Enormous forces clustered on the other side, ready to pour through the gap. He could hear the claws of the neverborn as they raged at the remaining resistance, scraping the veils of perception aside one by one. Daemons beyond number were clustered on the far side, ready to turn Shardenus into a nightmarish, eternal play-world for their obscene desires.
Telach strode up to the portal, feeling its unholy essence radiate across him. Out on the plains below, men continued to die, and fires continued to rage. His Codiciers followed him, each of them kindling fresh psychic fire from their force-staffs. They had the power to destroy it. The damnation of Shardenus would be halted.
By your grace, he said to himself, preparing for the challenge of closing it. We are in time.
He raised his staff.
Then, behind him, ten metres away, nearly on the edge of the dizzying drop, a pile of masonry stirred.
Telach almost didn’t turn. His first thought was that it was a lesser daemon that had followed them up, one that his acolytes were capable of dealing with.
But he did turn. Some note of disquiet made him look away from the rift and over to where the rubble was moving.
Claws extended from the wreckage, long and curved and made of black metal. A fist followed them, encased in horribly damaged armour. A spiked curve of pauldron broke free, scattering detritus as it rose.
Then the head emerged. Telach saw it thrash back and forth, shaking off the debris around it. He saw patches of skin, yellow with age and daubed with streaks of rouge, stitched together over a gaunt frame of jutting bone. He saw milky eyes set deep within ravaged cheeks. He saw curls of aether-light spill over its scalp, coursing across the tortured surface like streams of tears.
With an echoing roar, the creature pulled itself free of the wreckage, and uncurled itself. Lightning snapped and fizzed around it, lancing down from the heavens as if drawn by its unholy presence.
It was a giant; almost three times the height of a Terminator-clad Space Marine. It was a huge, shambling mess of armour plates, bulbous tumours of weeping flesh and gaudy, vivid swirls of decoration. Clusters of jewels hung from its breastplates in iron chains, clanking together as the monster moved. Flayed skin hung from its shoulders in long tatters, swirling about it in the ash-wind like grotesque purity seals. A motley collection of trophies had been bolted on to its immense frame, fighting for space amid glistening, overspilling muscle-bunches. Bodily fluids, pungent with foul aromas, sluiced across the chaotic landscape of ceramite and metal.
The creature stretched out, extending two enormous lightning claws, turning the blades and delighting in them. Witchfire crackled around it, licking and snaking up from the blasted plateau. Telach could sense the terrible hearts beating within that grotesque outer shell. He could feel the furnace of daemonic energy deep within, boiling and raging and only barely contained by the physical bonds set around it.
The monster had once been human. It had once been like he was – an Angel of Death, a Child of the Emperor.
The daemon looked down on Telach and the Codiciers. It recognised what they were. Its gaze was deranged, out-of-focus. When it smiled, patches of stitched flesh broke away from its skull, bursting free of their sutures.
‘Exquisite,’ it said.
Morvox thundered upwards, thrusting aside the living flesh that reached out to ensnare him. Filaments grasped at his armour and pulled tight before snapping. Snarls and blooms of chemical-laced fog rushed by, surging up from the abyss below and streaking up towards the summit of the stairwell.
‘Onward!’ roared Khatir, only just ahead of him.
The Iron Father’s flamers were raging just as strongly as they had been in the early stages. The mutants had ceased to be a threat – the toxic atmosphere had felled them in droves, freeing up paths ahead of the Iron Hands’ spearhead. The marble floor was carpeted with their broken bodies, bloated with fumes and with blood pouring from every orifice.
Morvox struggled to keep up with Khatir’s furious pace. The Iron Hands had spread out during the long pursuit up the Great Stair, many of them waylaid by daemonic attacks or dragged into combat along the many tributary spans. The thick chemical fog made reading locations difficult, even as it allowed them to race up the spiralling stairway far faster than before.
Morvox no longer knew how far behind his clave had fallen: their life-signals on his helm-display had gone, and damage to his right lens clouded the results further. His bolter had long since run out of ammunition, so he carried his chainsword two-handed, swinging it around him like a mace.
Even though the mutants had been eliminated, the daemons were still present. Impervious to the poisons in the air, they leapt from the inner walls of the spire and sailed over to the Stair, shrieking as they came.
Gergiz had been taken down by one of them; it had sprung from nowhere, grappling with him in an obscene parody of an embrace before tipping them both over the edge of the precipitous shaft. Morvox had seen other warriors ripped apart by them, crippled by claw-strikes, reduced to smoking, fizzing hunks of metal and ceramite by the rapid flicker of warp-fast blades.
‘Cleanse the unclean! For the Emperor!’
Khatir’s entreaties remained strong. He’d driven inexorably upwards, blazing a trail through the dark heart of the hive like a firebrand thrust into the night sky. Only now was his voice becoming cracked, the amplifiers in his helm stretched to their limit.
Something snapped out at Morvox’s shoulder then, thrusting out from the darkness. He lashed round, and his chainsword ploughed into what looked like a forest of human hands reaching out from the slough of filth that covered every surface of the Stair’s core. He hacked at them viciously, quickly turning the mutated muscles into a bloody, twitching soup of severed flesh.
Once free, he burst back into motion, sprinting hard to catch up with Khatir.
‘Purge the mutant!’ came the Iron Father’s roar from ahead, suddenly cut short by the heavy rush of flamers.
Morvox redoubled his pace, thundering around the curving sweep of the Stair, brushing aside the fronds of corrupted matter that still grabbed at him.
He rounded the corner and saw the Iron Father’s body twisted on the ground, crushed up against the inner core of the stairwell. Over it squatted a lesser daemon, its face alive with glee and covered in blood. Two of its sisters lay in the mire beside th
em, their heads severed and their skin blackened.
Morvox kept going, crashing into the daemon and carrying them both clear of Khatir’s body. It arched its back and broke free of him, pouncing to one side and swivelling around, ready to launch at him with its claws. Morvox lunged out with his chainsword, driving the blades diagonally across the creature’s body. The daemon screamed, thrashing against the whirring edges, before spinning away. Morvox went after it, thrusting out and hacking back, driving it towards the edge. He caught it again, snagging his chainsword against its body and churning through lilac flesh.
It screamed in agony before crashing through the stone railing and tumbling out into the void. Cut apart by Morvox’s blades, it dropped like a stone, wailing away into nothingness.
Morvox spun back round, hurrying over to the Iron Father, stooping over him and searching for signs of life.
They were there – very faint, just on the edge of detection.
‘Lord, an Apothecary,’ he said, stilling his chainsword and running a medicae scan over Khatir’s blood-soaked torso.
Khatir’s fist shot up. His gauntlet seized Morvox’s forearm. The grip was savage.
‘Go,’ Khatir rasped, and fresh blood bubbled up between his helm and breastplate. ‘The summit. Do it.’
Morvox hesitated. Khatir was not yet dead. Given time, given treatment, he might live.
‘I do not–’
The grip on his arm started to weaken.
‘Still, you question,’ growled Khatir, his voice degrading into a throaty mess. He sounded desperate. ‘Continue on present tasking.’
Something about the Iron Father’s voice made Morvox recoil then. For a moment, he couldn’t understand what it was.
Then he felt the old disgust rise up in him. He heard the sound of blood welling up through flesh, slipping over the mechanical components embedded there and fouling their operation. He saw the Iron Father’s raw muscle, exposed under broken armour plate, glistening wetly in the dark.
Khatir’s hand slipped from Morvox’s armour and thudded to the ground.
It will come for you soon. You will forget pity, and you will see the weakness we carry within us.
Morvox didn’t say anything more. He pushed his way from Khatir’s cracked armour and turned away. Already, from up ahead, he could hear the shrieks of the neverborn. From below he heard the thud of his brothers’ boots as they charged onwards. He started to move again, first striding, then running heavily.
Weakness.
Morvox gunned his chainsword back into life, and the sound of the lethal, mechanical parts moving lessened the nausea in his stomach.
I am surrounded by it. It is everywhere.
As he ran, he felt a nagging, itching sensation plaguing him. It made him angry. It made him want nothing more than to fight, to forget, to lose himself.
I will not succumb. I will transform.
Morvox charged along the corridor, following its line as it climbed ever higher. As he went, leaving the crippled body of the Iron Father far behind him, the cries of daemons grew louder and nearer.
I will purge it.
He picked up his pace. He relished destroying them. He wanted nothing more. When the first of them came into view, he felt like grinning.
The rest is strength.
The monster lurched into battle, crushing the brittle landscape of ruin beneath its feet. It moved with none of the sinuous grace of the lesser daemons – it was a patchwork creature of scraps and ancient relics, locked together by sorcery and its own infernal will. As it moved, whips of purple light slapped and slipped around it, bouncing from the shards of old, clattering battle-plate.
It grinned as it advanced, and its sutured face stretched. Iron teeth, each of them filed to points and dripping with viscous saliva, flashed through the drifting smog. Its eyes stared ceaselessly, bleary with malice and madness. Its lightning claws snickered back and forth, grinding against one another as the horror flexed its tattered muscles.
Across its enormous torso hung the remnants of an old breastplate, burst open by the glossy flesh beneath. An Imperial aquila had once adorned it, picked out in gold, but was now almost entirely obscured by baroque adornments and freshly-lacquered panels. Some of its residual armour had been painted a vivid purple; other pieces glowed with lurid pastel shades.
As it crashed towards Telach and the Codiciers, it gurgled with bubbling laughter, and strands of saliva hung in loops from its sagging jaw.
‘Perfect,’ it slurred, lingering on the word as if it had some significance for it.
Telach felt his hearts sink. He knew he had enough power to seal the rift. He might have had enough power, acting in concert with his acolytes, to fight the daemon-creature, though that was uncertain.
He could not do both. Even as he prepared to meet the onslaught he could sense the rift weakening further. Every heartbeat brought it closer to rupture.
Strike together,+ he sent to the Codiciers, watching carefully as the three of them fanned out across the plateau. Each one of them held their force-staff two-handed, and eddies of psychic essence reflected dully from their dark battle-plate. +Say nothing, heed nothing.+
He could sense their tenseness, their readiness. All of them had passed beyond the possibility of fear, but they could still recognise the magnitude of the horror they faced.
The Emperor protects, he mouthed.
Nedim was the first of his acolytes to lash out, sending a spitting column of silver energy straight at the daemon. It exploded as it impacted, showering the plateau with smoking, spinning trails of sparkling residue.
Malik followed him, dousing the daemon in a welter of shimmering energy. Then Djeze released, joining the streams of coruscating warp-fire in a triangle of snaking, surging force.
The daemon rocked back on its cloven hooves, thrashing its arms through the deluge and hurling gouts of the silvery matter in all directions. A cry of tortured ecstasy escaped from its lips – an amalgam of many voices, many of them human-like, some of them indescribable. It waded onwards amid the storm of coruscating energy, lapping it up and letting it crash across its broken armour.
Then it burst through the oncoming tide, shrugging off the attacks and letting them break across its flesh like rainwater. It plunged towards Nedim, swinging its claws in slow, pendulous motions. As it lumbered into range, fragments of its haphazard body began to break away, flaking free like scales being dragged from the hide of some enormous saurian.
Telach waited until the last moment, until the creature had gained enough momentum to be unable to pull back.
Unleash,+ he breathed.
An inferno of blazing silver leapt into existence, exploding in a raging storm of blinding light. The warp essence was dragged up from Telach’s very soul – the raw stuff of the aether, fashioned into lethal energy by the Librarian’s art, turned from a seething morass of formlessness and into a focused, deadly weapon.
Telach felt it thunder out from his staff, making the length of it shiver and his arms tremble. Light spilled from his eyes, from his open mouth, from the palms of his hands. The roaring maelstrom made the joints of his armour burn white-hot. He felt his whole body respond, caught up in the immense, consuming tide of power as it escaped from him.
The snaking barrage hit the daemon full on, sending it staggering back again. Its legs bowed, and it reeled away from Nedim. More unearthly cries of savage pleasure escaped from its mouth, and its long tongue flailed out wildly.
Telach took a stride forwards, maintaining the ferocious assault.
Burn, abomination. Go back to the realm that created you. Be undone. Be banished.
Djeze and Malik advanced with him, summoning up their own flurries of silver-edged bolts and hurling them at the retreating torso of the daemon.
The creature was wounded. Gouts of purple blood ran down its limbs, boiling
as the silver flames evaporated it. More slivers of its bizarre armour were blown away, spinning off into the backwash of psychic power that streamed away behind it.
But it was no lesser creature of darkness – it was a prince of pain, a master of the dark wells of a mortal’s mind, and its command of sorcery was a match for all but the greatest champions of Mankind. Moreover, its movements were not those of a creature trying to evade the punishment.
It revelled in it. It wanted more.
It crouched down, hacking up laughter from its ruined gullet, continually bludgeoned by the rain of warp matter. Then it pounced, swinging into the air with a huge thrust of its gigantic legs. Its hooves crushed the metal as it landed, then it kicked off again, lurching and swaying through the torrential fire, racing towards Nedim and shrieking with splintered laughter. Its claws flickered through the air, jumping from one position to the next like out-of-sequence frames on a vid-pict.
Telach adjusted the trajectory of his assault, aiming to knock the monster back again and clear of the Codicier, but the daemon was too fast, too powerful. Nedim braced himself and swung his staff upwards to meet the daemon’s talons, planting his feet wide apart for the impact of the claws.
It never came. Somehow, the metal spurs seemed to shift out of position, causing Nedim to miss the parry and stumble forwards.
It was enough. The daemon grabbed him by the throat and lifted him high into the air. Telach and the others came in closer, hurling bolts of crackling warp fire. The bolts hit it hard, and it reeled away again, still clutching its prey. Nedim, held up one-handed, slammed his staff down into the daemon’s face, aiming for its eyes.
Again, the blow should have connected, but – impossibly – the creature’s grinning face had already moved. It dodged the impact and flexed its arm, throwing Nedim high into the air. For a fraction of a second the Codicier hung powerless above the laughing daemon, his limbs outstretched and his staff out of position. Then the monster thrust up with both its claws, plunging its blades through Nedim’s waist.
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