by Various
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sor Talgron. ‘This was not the way I had hoped it would be. But it is necessary. When the time comes, the palace must be breached. Anything to further that goal must be done.’
He could see Wreth’s wide, blood-infused eyes staring back at him, eyelids crudely stitched open. Tears of blood and hissing ichor ran down his cheeks. There was horror writ in his gaze – he knew that something was being birthed within his flesh. He knew that his flesh was no longer his own.
‘I’m dead,’ said Sor Talgron. ‘That’s why I am here. This is my punishment.’
He reached out a hand, noting in passing that the flesh of his arm was blistered and smoking, and pressed his fingers to the roughly sutured wound on Predicant Wreth’s sternum. The skin had not healed, and he pushed his hand within.
Things squirmed in the darkness. He felt them probing at his hand and arm. Then they began to burrow into his flesh. It was not an uncomfortable sensation. The worm-like tendrils squirmed up from his forearm, up into his bicep. They made his hideously burned flesh ripple and flex.
They wriggled and burrowed further in, up through his shoulder and then deeper into his body, digging around in his organs. One pressed itself up through his neck, making his throat bulge, then up through the base of his skull, and burrowed into his brain. He felt the pressure of it against his mind. He smiled and a chuckle escaped his lips at the strange sensation. He saw fear and loathing in Wreth’s unblinking eyes.
Then the tendrils began to retract, and Sor Talgron’s smile was replaced with sudden panic. The daemonic protuberances had rooted themselves in his flesh, hooking into him, and they would not release their hold.
He fought against them, but he could not escape their grip. They had bonded with him, and were as much a part of him as his bones and muscles now. They retracted back within their host – it was not time to emerge, not yet – and Sor Talgron was dragged with them. He roared and screamed and shouted, fighting them the whole way, but was pulled inexorably in.
His hand was still within Volkhar Wreth’s body. It was impossible now to pull it free. In the space of a breath, he was pulled in up to his shoulder. He could do nothing to forestall it. Logically, it made no sense, but then the predicant’s mortal shell being host to a daemon, the majority of which dwelt beyond the veil, was not logical either.
He felt the knives and bone saws cutting into his tortured flesh, true, but it was a distant thing, as though it might be happening to someone else. He saw what was left of his arms and legs hacked from his torso, his limbs having suffered too much trauma and damage from the phosphex flames. There was nothing left to salvage.
His hearts were melted, useless things, and they were replaced with synthetic modules that whirred and clicked. His lungs were gone. A humming machine was doing his breathing for him.
‘Brain activity is spiking,’ he heard a voice say. It was muffled, like he was underwater. ‘We’re losing him again!’
Sor Talgron strained against the force pulling him into the body of Volkhar Wreth, but it was too strong. His world disappeared as his whole body was pulled within that infested torso. He was hauled down and down and down, into the deeper darkness that lurked below.
He was dragged down still further, and the darkness gave way to a liquid, milky red. He was gone from the material plane and out into the roiling nightmare of the warp, and he felt monstrous eyes turn towards him, felt the pressing intellect of unattainable sentience there, felt the presence of the gods and daemons that he had always denied; beings that had been old long before man had come down from the trees and turned into the petty creatures that they had become. He was being strangled in the bosom of hell, engulfed by the tentacles of beings the mortal mind was unable to fathom. He felt the crushing weight of their attention upon him and he screamed, his lungs filling with liquid fire.
He struggled to free himself, to swim clear of this sickening, maddening morass of hatred and fury and rage, but he could not. This was his prison and his damnation, and what was worse was that it was one he felt he deserved.
Darkness closed around him. It was all but complete, when a golden radiance appeared before him. He looked up into the face of a demigod hovering before him, and he felt the strangling tentacles fall away.
My son.
It extended a hand out towards him, light spilling from every pore. He reached up and took the mighty being’s golden hand. The demigod’s fingers closed around his own and golden light infused everything.
‘That’s it,’ said a voice. ‘It’s over. He’s gone.’
The bloody, limbless thing on the table that had once been Sor Talgron was dead. It was actually the eighth time that he had died on the slab, but this time they had been unable to revive him.
Apothecary Urhlan stepped away, unplugging the machines that had been straining to keep the captain alive. Their beeps and whirrs became a single, uninterrupted whine. He was covered in blood. It dripped off his arms and chest in thick rivulets.
‘It was always unlikely that he’d survive,’ he said to the assembled legionaries, who had returned to check on their comrades. He glanced nearby, where another legionary lay unconscious, his flesh pierced by dozens of cables and tubes. ‘That one is doing better, though. The one who brought him in. Who is he?’
‘Cataphractii Sergeant Kol Badar,’ said Dal Ahk in a hollow voice. He was staring dead-eyed at the fleshy ruin that had been Sor Talgron. ‘I thought I’d saved him.’
The master of signal turned and walked away, head down.
One by one, the other legionaries drifted away until Jarulek was alone. The Dark Apostle stepped in close, staring down at Sor Talgron’s melted face. He saw something twitch.
He blinked, thinking he’d imagined it, but then he saw it again. An exposed ligament twitched in the right side of Sor Talgron’s face. Looking closer, he thought he saw something moving within the captain’s ravaged flesh, just for a fraction of a second…
He felt the touch of the warp, then. It was seeping off the corpse of Sor Talgron like an odour, and his eyes widened in wonder. Sor Talgron twisted on the slab, and his jaw opened, working silently. A beatific smile broke across his lipless mouth.
‘Apothecary!’ Jarulek shouted. ‘He’s alive!’
Sor Talgron turned his mutilated face towards Jarulek, his empty, bloodied eye sockets locking unerringly onto him.
‘The Urizen,’ Sor Talgron croaked.
Jarulek dropped to his knees. ‘What of him, brother?’
‘He… He lifted me from the darkness.’
‘Apothecary!’ Jarulek shouted over his shoulder again.
‘I saw them, Jarulek,’ Sor Talgron whispered.
‘Saw who, my lord?’
‘The gods…’ he breathed.
Epilogue
The angled prow of the ship cleaved through the living anti-matter of the hellscape visible beyond the oculus portal. Beings of raw emotion, manifested in forms drawn from the nightmares and horror-filled psyches of mortals, scratched upon the ship’s Geller field, straining to breach it.
Sor Talgron stood upon the bridge of his hulking capital ship, staring out into the churning madness of the warp.
They had not interred him within the sarcophagus of a Dreadnought after the shocking injuries he had sustained on Percepton Primus. No, instead they built a new body for him – one of bionics, pistons, gears and synthetic organs. Almost nothing remained of his former self.
His face was a tortured horror of mutilated flesh and malformed scar tissue. They wanted to gift him a new one. Vat-grown synth-flesh, cultured muscle tissue and harvested living bone. He had laughed at the suggestion.
His eyes had been replaced, however, and he stared out into the empyrean with a pair of black orbs, eyes manufactured by adepts of the Mechanicum and enhanced by his own prayers, exhortations and dark blessings. Attuned to the warp and i
ts variances, they gave him a unique perspective that he found pleasing.
He was taller than he had been in the first incarnation of his life, that empty existence he’d experienced before he had come to his faith. There was no way of separating where his armour and flesh became one.
The Book of Lorgar was affixed to his breastplate, open to display litanies and catechisms of defilement. At his hip hung his helmet, newly fashioned in the likeness of a leering skull.
He had been reborn anew upon the apothecarion deck of the Infidus Diabolus. A fresh purpose drove him, a new conviction. A path had opened before him. A new way.
The staff of his newly attained office hung across his back. It was a potent weapon as well as his staff of office: a giant crozius, tempered in the blood of martyrs.
He had lost fully two-thirds of the 34th Company on Percepton Primus when the Ultramarines purged the world. It was a staggering final act by a beaten foe. Percepton Primus was forever tainted, but that, Sor Talgron judged, was a small loss for the toll the Ultramarines had inflicted.
He had lost much on Percepton Primus. But he had gained much, as well.
Clarity. Purpose. Belief. Faith.
At his hip, a warp flask throbbed. A heart beat within it – the heart of Volkhar Wreth.
‘Soon, my old friend,’ he said.
The Sigillite
Chris Wraight
Khalid Hassan sat in the antechamber, trying not to sweat, trying not to allow his hands to shake, trying to not do anything that would bring any more dishonour to his rank and regiment. He forced himself to remain still, his back against the polished marble wall. His palms pressed down onto the fabric of his ceremonial dress trousers. The high, stiff collar prickled at his neck, irritating his freshly shaved skin.
He felt ludicrous – cleaned and trimmed and starched, like a living meal to be served in some unholy banquet.
He drew in deep, regular breaths.
‘This is absurd,’ he muttered. ‘I was not wound this tight on the mission itself.’
He forced himself to go through the motions, to assess the current scenario, to run through the options.
‘Keep it together.’
The antechamber was large, just one of a series of opulent rooms he’d passed through in sequence. He had been accompanied inside by a man in a black shift and velvet shoes who had padded silently like a cat. The man had said nothing, just stared at Hassan with inscrutable, heavy-lidded eyes. He’d left him alone in the final room with a slight bow, withdrawing as sleekly as he’d arrived, closing two bronze-panelled doors with a quiet click of locks. Another pair of identical doors stood shut on the facing wall.
According to the gold-chased chrono on the mantelpiece opposite, Hassan had sat alone for seven minutes. It had felt more like an eternity.
At least the surroundings were comfortable. The air was cool and clear, filtered through shuttered windows. Hassan could hear the languid gurgle of a fountain in the courtyard outside. A low table stood in the centre, upon which rested a silver ewer, a towel and a single cut crystal glass that glinted in the soft light.
Hassan had not touched it. He had sat in the same starched position since being shown to his place by the feline steward. He had watched the play of sunlight through the shutters, smelled the floral aroma of the wood and the fabrics, listened to the quiet play of the fountain.
He had seen it. Even if this was the last thing he saw, he had still seen it. How many men could say the same?
He had seen the vision of the immortal Emperor, the handiwork of a thousand architects, the defensive masterpiece of the primarch Rogal Dorn. Viewed from the incoming lander it had been astonishing, magnificent – a sprawling fantasy of stone, adamantium, granite and gold. Defence towers jostled with observatories and terraced gardens; missile batteries and slotted bunkers thrust up tightly amid pillared libraries; burnished monuments to the pride and ambition of mankind, all picked out under the azure sky of the Himalazian peaks.
Now, lost in the heart of its vastness, listening to the calming trickle of water, he could run through the events of the past few days.
Captain Khalid Hassan of the Fourth Clandestine Orta, the most decorated of the serving officers of his regiment, a man who had loved his work so completely that he had had no life and no family outside of it, contemplated, with a certain fatality, the failure that had brought him to the Imperial Palace.
The air was hot and thick with dust. His armour – black carapace plates, full-face helm with opaque visor and rebreather tubes, environment spine-pack with internal pressure control – was coated with it. His filters were losing efficiency, and he could hear the echo of his own heavy breathing in his earpiece.
Ahead of him, blurry through night vision, he could see the compound rearing up into the dust-thick darkness. It was ugly, squat, heavy – a defensible bastion in the Gyptian style. A few lights blinked and flickered in the gloom; otherwise, it was shadowy and sullen, surrounded by a solid perimeter wall broad enough for men to walk upon it in pairs.
Hassan lay low, feeling the hardscrabble of the desert fringes press into his armour. He rested his elbows on the ridge before him. Tiny magnocular lenses slipped down the inside curve of his helm visor and whirred into focus. He moved his head fractionally, sweeping across the walls. Each visible detail was recorded and cross-referenced with the internal schematic held in his suit’s cogitator core.
Las-turret, two metres out of position. Corrected. Sentries visible, moving along perimeter boundary. They haven’t seen us.
He suppressed a smile.
And they won’t.
He heard Farouk squirm up alongside him, his body low and pressed into the dust.
‘Just say the word, captain,’ said Farouk.
‘Everyone in position?’ asked Hassan, completing the sweep.
‘All ready to go.’
Hassan uploaded the revised tactical overlays to the squad. Fifteen acknowledgement sigils scrolled down his helm display. He switched to an overhead schematic showing the positions of his men – they were located around the perimeter in five-man squads, each still in cover. Two of the three teams were on the far side of the compound from Hassan’s position, poised to attack the air defence tower and the atmospheric shield generators. Their sensor-resistant armour would keep all of them hidden. Until they broke inside, they would be all but invisible.
‘So what are we doing here, captain?’ asked Farouk.
Hassan smiled dryly. ‘Now? You ask me now?’
‘You’re not going to tell me.’
Hassan shook his head. ‘You know how it is.’
All of them knew how it was. That was the point of the Clandestine brigades: restricted orders, special taskings, operations outside the Imperial chain of command. Farouk chafed at it the most, but then he’d come from a regular Army regiment and was used to a less furtive way of war.
As for this mission, Hassan knew little enough himself. The orders had been shunted into the regiment core six days ago under heavy security cover. His men had re-routed from a routine sweep of the Collovis Hives. Ever since the insurrection had begun, subversive activity had been endemic in the bigger population hubs. Hassan had even heard chatter over the grid about rogue legionaries staging a prison break. He didn’t believe that one. There were always fanciful stories about those armour-clad superhumans; more, since the news of the Warmaster’s madness had filtered out.
In any case, Hassan didn’t place much faith in the Space Marines. They had a reputation, sure, but he doubted half of what was said about them could be true. The Imperium had been built by mortal men and woman, billions upon billions of them, toiling towards a future free from the horrors of Old Night. Genhanced monsters had no place there – they were brutal, clumsy tools and their time would pass.
Which left the way clear for more subtle weapons.
&nbs
p; He checked his chronometer.
‘Move,’ he ordered across the vox.
Still out of visual range, all he saw of the two other teams were their marker runes moving silently across his visor display.
Farouk stayed motionless. Behind him, the rest of his own squad remained in cover.
Hassan felt his pulse quicken as he counted down the seconds.
‘Let’s go.’
He pushed himself up, keeping his body low as he jogged out into the open. He heard the soft footfalls of his men close behind him. They broke clear of the ridge and swept across the open ground leading to the walls.
As they ran, the earth was suddenly rocked by a series of hard, sharp explosions from the far side of the compound. The night sky flared up, red and angry. Arc-lights burst into life, joined by the strained blare of intruder alarms.
The sentries on the wall ahead of them disappeared from the parapet edges, drawn by the detonations at the opposite edge of the facility.
Hassan reached the base of the wall and prepared the grapnels.
‘Too easy,’ said Farouk, joining him and taking aim.
‘So far,’ agreed Hassan, squinting as he pulled the trigger. The rope sailed up, clamping fast and pulling tight, and he began to climb.
Soon all five of them had reached the summit and they swung over the lip of the parapet. They took up their weapons – projectile rifles, as sleek, black and finely tooled as everything they carried. By the time the sentries spotted them it was too late – precise kill-shots flashed in the night.
More explosions rang out from the compound below. A shower of yellow sparks erupted in the distance, making the air smell briefly sulphurous.
‘First generator’s out,’ remarked Farouk.
Hassan grunted. Farouk was a good soldier, but his tactical commentaries quickly grew tiresome. ‘Let’s just concentrate on our tasking, shall we?’ he said.