Shield of Baal: Devourer

by Joe Parrino

  Armenhorlal cooed to himself, a childish sound and a holdover from his mortal existence. Anrakyr knew the destroyer’s mind to have been fractured by some malfunction during his conversion, but it mattered little. For the moment the skimming destroyer was useful. He floated about Anrakyr in looping circles, each flash spinning faster and faster. The overlord shot out a hand.

  ‘Enough. Cease your motions.’

  Anrakyr’s voice cracked into Armenhorlal’s dented head, reaching into the destroyer’s battle-damaged psyche. He slowed to a halt.

  ‘So many. So many of the damned packs of the accursed. Why? What draws them to this place? These meat-creatures offer little sustenance. Especially not to such as us, who have passed beyond the petty concerns of mortality.’ Anrakyr kicked one of the feebly struggling bodies at his feet, barely noticing as it cried out in unreasoning animal pain. For a moment, Anrakyr thought he could see the cunning gleam of intelligence in the creature’s eyes, some evidence of sentience.

  Primitive structures clustered around him, little more than enclosures against the elements. Decorated with bird wing motifs, tiled in grey and black, the buildings were crude. Warriors battered at the walls with single-minded belligerence. More intelligent necrons had sensed lurking humans within and ordered the warriors to deal with them.

  That organic beings should so taint Kehlrantyr brought anger to surge through Anrakyr. The jewel of one of the ancient dynasties of his people, populated by savages, reclaimed by the life that had once been extinguished and purged beneath the marching benevolence of the necrons. Life always struggled against order. That was its nature. But just once, Anrakyr wished that he would see organisms submit and accept the gift and honour he brought.

  A trio of destroyers flew overhead, followed by flyers. In the distance, a monolith patrolled, its black flanks glistening obsidian-wet in the light of the sun. Phalanxes of lesser warriors, their identities eroded by the epochs since their conversion, marched through the human settlement. They were beneath the pity of Anrakyr and Armenhorlal.

  The three triarch praetorians trailed after Anrakyr and the destroyer. They were silent, darkling things, just like their master. They rarely offered commentary or condemnation. They observed. They waited. They served.

  Despite the decades they had followed Anrakyr, the trio of necrons had never offered him their names. Anrakyr had first been annoyed by this wilful defiance. Then he had taken to calling them Khatlan, Dovetlan and Ammeg. The names weren’t particularly clever, merely the first three numerals in the necron counting system. The praetorians never questioned his choice. Sometimes they even answered to the names.

  The servants of the Silent King had been known to cow even the most recalcitrant phaerons into obedience. That they followed him, that they observed and marched alongside him, filled the necron overlord with trepidation. Why were they here? What did the last ruler of the Necron Empire want with Anrakyr?

  That these creatures had refused to submit to the Great Sleep, that they had stridden the stars for sixty million cycles acting on the orders of the Silent King, beggared Anrakyr’s mind. He could have done the same, he reasoned. His will was no less strong. But these triarch praetorians had walked the stars, shaping the mortal races, witnessing events and observing, silent as deathless gods. The evidence of those years lay on them. They were hunched, shamed-looking creatures. The metal of their bodies was tarnished, bronzed edges pitted and shadowed by weapons fire. Yes, they were unimpressive to look at, but what they represented and the havoc they could wreak more than made up for their outlandish and decrepit appearances.

  Red-painted human helmets dangled from Ammeg’s elbows. Belonging to one of the warrior caste of that despicable race, the things were crudely constructed but martially impressive. They were broken and pitted, lifted from some battlefield. She too wore eldar spirit-stones, older in provenance than Anrakyr’s looted gems. The tattered robes of some infesting species drifted about her while a fungal reek suffused her metal bones.

  All of the triarch praetorians bore some token of the warrior humans. Khatlan’s back was studded with the sickle boxes the humans discarded as they made war. They formed rows of three spines rising from the praetorian’s back and lent the necron the disgusting reek of the propellant the humans used to fire their crude weapons. Other odds and ends from scattered races and cultures coated the triarch praetorian.

  Dovetlan had elected to place steel knives in a fan around her face. Stamped and marked by rough human artifice, the weapons were crude and technologically inferior. A winged teardrop of blood decorated each blade.

  The praetorians refused to elucidate the circumstances of their acquisition of the human artefacts, nor why they wore the trophies as marks of pride. Each inquiry was met with the same blank stare and infuriating posture as any other. A fruitless endeavour, so Anrakyr could only guess their provenance. When the praetorians spoke, they stated only the obvious.

  Humans burst from a side building, led by several of their males. Anrakyr recoiled, annoyed and wary that some of their tainted cells might besmirch his chassis.

  Armenhorlal did not have time to spool up his gauss cannon before pinprick lasers ate at his chassis. The destroyer started to giggle, then laugh. Armenhorlal began thrashing, clubbing several of the fleeing humans.

  Khatlan and Ammeg stepped into the sky, propelled by their gravity displacement packs. Dovetlan placed herself before Anrakyr while the Traveller watched and observed.

  The universe groaned as scything waves of light emerged from the praetorians’ covenant rods. Weeping humans, eyes and mouths wide, desperation spewing from their wretched faces, erupted into clouds of burning ash. Other bodies were dragged out of buildings by unthinking, unfeeling warriors and lined up in rows for incineration. It was endlessly fascinating, Anrakyr mused, that life always followed the same paths. They were fleshy and pink or brown, all colours drawn from the same palette. Some were tall. Others were short. Female and male. But they all followed the same template.

  Two legs. Two arms. One head. How unbelievably common. The universe tried to impose order, from the eldar to the necrontyr to these human dregs. Two by two. A curious coincidence or evidence of some great plan? That it all led to entropy and disruption, to chaos, was an eternal shame. Only the necrons had refused such predestination, electing to take a different path rather than walk down the road that led to destruction.

  Only under the eternal hegemony of the Necron Empire would the universe finally achieve the order and certainty it so obviously craved. Anrakyr bent his eternal life towards that goal, towards uniting his kind beneath his own banner and conquering all the lesser races.

  Khatlan and Ammeg fell back to the ground, crunching into the poured stone. They resumed their place behind Anrakyr as he walked through the human settlement, stalking behind the overlord with silent threat.

  Armenhorlal trailed behind them with scattered fires burning about his body. The destroyer crooned to himself.

  They waded through piles of ash while fuel bowsers exploded and necron warriors systematically dismantled the signs of human habitation.

  The gentle breeze, swaying trees, even the soft light of the sun angered Anrakyr, brought a rage deep to what he considered his soul. It all stank of life, of a time that he wished he could forget. Bodies were gathered and fed to waiting canoptek spyders. Bound for the monoliths and the pyres burning within, the traces of organic life were slowly being cleansed from Kehlrantyr.

  The sun that glowed above, driving through the turquoise depths of a cloudless sky, was a pale thing, weak and dying, fed upon by a c’tan in the ages before the Breaking, leeched by the star gods in their desperate hunger before the discovery of the sustenance of souls.

  Scourged by the necrons who called this place home, life had crept back, perhaps borne on the stellar winds, perhaps brought by some far-reaching traveller as vermin.

  Kehlra
ntyr had not suffered the eons well.

  Change brought anger. Death was an unceasing thing, a constant, and a known quantity. And there was nothing that brought pleasure to Anrakyr like that which was known, that which remained unchanging.

  Metal crunched on stone gravel, the footsteps furtive. A cyclopean eye met Anrakyr’s fell gaze. A cryptek. It chattered, its body hunched in a posture that screamed excitement. It wrung its hands together, digits flashing in complex formations that conveyed the emotions that its skull-like visage never would.

  Excitement. Relief. Obeisance.

  Anrakyr waved the cryptek into stillness. ‘Your news?’

  ‘We have aligned the maps and the portents, my lord. The approximate entrance location has been found.’

  ‘Then where are my legions? Where are the phalanxes of this world?’

  Profound regret. Unwelcome news. ‘It seems a mountain range has arisen during the Great Sleep. The doors are buried.’

  Anrakyr took the news well, surprisingly so.

  ‘Open the doors. Dig them out. I will have my legions.’

  Gratitude. Alacrity. ‘Of course.’

  The cryptek left, scurrying away.

  Pressure pushed down from above as a shadow passed over Kehlrantyr’s fitful sun. Atmospheric displacement caused the wind to howl. Anrakyr could hear a faint buzzing noise. He turned to the triarch praetorians in confusion. They merely stared back.

  A ripple passed through his warriors. They all stiffened. Questions passed between the necrons that still possessed intelligence.

  Deathmarks stepped from hidden pocket dimensions. Consummate spies and patient assassins, they were odious creatures, underhanded constructs whose methods were distasteful. They had their uses, however, and Anrakyr permitted their presence within his army, unlike the accursed flayers whose virus was known to spread to others. Still, the overlord flinched at their sudden appearance.

  One of their number pointed above. Anrakyr looked up to see a sky pierced with swarming bone and red. From horizon to horizon descended hordes of insectile alien things.

  He knew them, knew the creatures that came to feast on Kehlrantyr. Anrakyr wanted to spit curses. His body subconsciously adopted a pose of extreme anger with the subtle inflection of utter disappointment.

  Known to the mortal races as the tyranids, he had fought the creatures on several occasions, each nearly disastrous. Their sheer numbers proved a vexing irritation that overwhelmed his mindless hordes. That they dogged him on Kehlrantyr, that they dared to disturb his plans, was unconscionable.

  The tyranids were a threat to the necrons. They were life unfettered, anarchic, predictable only in their insatiable hunger. Their consumption of the lesser races proved problematic in the establishment of necron dynastic rule and the eventual goal of the imposition of lifeless order against a galaxy teeming with Chaos.

  And now they were here, on Kehlrantyr.

  Even as he watched, streaks broke through the sky, flaring with friction fire. Bio-ships, massive organisms, dropped into low orbit.

  Already necrons were reacting.

  Green lightning started lancing from the drifting monoliths, but there were too many descending objects to knock from the sky. The warrior phalanxes did not react at all. They slouched where they stood, unheeding, oblivious to the tyranids that filled the skies.

  Chapter Three

  Jatiel was not an introspective man. Stolid, dependable, reliable, he was a sergeant in the Blood Angels Second Company. Proud of the red and gold he wore and the position he occupied, he had earned the rank some hundred years previously, fighting against the orks on Lared VII. He would hold the position until his death, never destined to rise higher.

  Beatific cherubs stared down at the gathered Space Marines, watching over the bridge of the frigate Golden Promise. The entire room was a work of art, painstakingly crafted by generations of Blood Angels. Not all of the darkness in the souls of Sanguinius’s sons could be brought to light upon the battlefield, and so the making of art was encouraged. Jatiel himself had carved the throne on which he now sat, taking rad-blasted wood from Baal and creating an artefact surpassing the work of any mortal craftsman. Gilded in red-gold, hand-painted, it dominated the bridge. As he reclined, alabaster angel wings framed his head.

  The alabaster had been mined from the deep crust of Baal Prime. When Jatiel leaned back as he did now, if he wore his helmet, the sight echoed the sigil that all Blood Angels and their serfs wore upon their shoulders and worked into every aspect of their armour: the winged teardrop of their beloved primarch.

  Pretentious, but no less so than his position demanded. All of his warriors’ armour was marked by the winged teardrop, with details picked out in gold. They were encouraged in this, to modify their battleplate with approval from the Chapter’s forgemasters.

  Only Emudor’s armour was mostly devoid of ostentation and grandeur. His artistry was subtler. Filigreed loops and whorls were carved into the curved plates, creating a trail of shadows that lessened his profile, broke it up and added to his talent for stealth. It suited his temperament; he was a brooding, dark and gently sarcastic soul.

  Jatiel’s soul, as the saying went, was sanguine. He was fine with this, content to live and serve his primarch and the Emperor in this position. The sergeant knew that he lacked the inspirational quality and the glory that some of his brothers hungered for, that others from the Chapter looked down on him and his squad. The thought brought a fang-bared smile to his craggy, careworn face. He had no desire to rise further. He served where he excelled, at the squad level.

  That didn’t make his current duty any less onerous.

  ‘When have so many enemies fallen upon a single system like this?’ he asked, gazing out through the oculus. The question was rhetorical, Jatiel barely conscious of asking it. He received an answer nonetheless. Ventara, studious, curious, bright and quick, provided it.

  The battle-brother’s eyes shone green, bright as the emeralds that studded his chestplate. ‘Armageddon.’

  ‘No.’ This from Asaliah, grizzled, older even than Jatiel. ‘You’re wrong, lad. Armageddon was bad, mark me. I won’t denigrate the warriors who fought and bled for that world, who do so still. But not near such as this.’

  Asaliah spoke from experience. Along with the red and gold of his armour, black and silver also served. The skull, crossbones and stylised ‘I’ of the Deathwatch proudly glared from his left shoulder pad. The veteran had served two terms with the alien hunters, sworn never to speak in specifics of his time with the Ordo Xenos. But the experiences he had gained, the horrors he must have seen, were etched into his face. Every gesture of his hooded eyes evoked far-off sights, glories and darkness. He served as Jatiel’s right hand, a pillar of knowledge and experience.

  The veteran scratched the dusky beard scrawling across his lower face, diving through the peaks and valleys of scars and wrinkles left by a lifetime of war and secrets in service to hidden masters. ‘Say what you like about the damn orks. They bring numbers. Always have and always will. But a hive fleet.’ Asaliah nearly shuddered. ‘That’s numbers beyond counting, beyond even beginning to count.’

  Jatiel thanked the winged primarch that Asaliah had never lost himself to the melancholia that so often afflicted the returned veterans of the Deathwatch. Indeed, many lost themselves to the Black Rage before they could impart their valuable experience and knowledge to the Chapter they returned to.

  Asaliah’s deep rumble ceased, the bass tones of his words echoing through the bridge. Silence descended over the room, taking malignant station in creased frowns and worried glances. It lived among the carved cherubs staring down with painted glass eyes.

  The hiss and crackle of vox-access disturbed, yet did nothing to dispel the silence. The slack-jawed servitor mumbles of lingua-technis joined it.

  War had come to the Cryptus System, war such as the Impe
rium had rarely known. Doom, blood and bile. Crawling horror. And Jatiel was missing it.

  Somewhere out there, the Imperial Navy were fighting to hold back a swarm of hive ships, and the soldiers of the Astra Militarum prepared to face the onslaught on the ground when the fleet inevitably failed. Soon, the Blood Angels would arrive and lend their aid, determined to stop the aliens here before they could strip the system bare and move on, threatening Baal itself.

  But Jatiel? His squad and the Golden Promise had been sent ahead of Lord Dante’s forces to monitor the battle and watch over the dead world of Perdita. It wasn’t for Jatiel to ask why. The Space Marine knew his duty. But the order chafed.

  Jatiel’s attention drifted down to the planet gently rotating below. Perdita was worthless, broken by calamity, or spawned stillborn in the system’s formation.

  Ventara broke the silence again. ‘Why are we guarding this virus-bombed waste?’ Another question lurked beneath. Jatiel knew it well enough, because he kept asking it himself. Why weren’t they fighting alongside their brothers? Why weren’t they taking the Golden Promise and joining the line?

  ‘Trust in the Chapter Master,’ Asaliah answered. Steel lurked in the veteran’s voice.

  Ventara wasn’t willing to let it lie. ‘Who even bothered to virus bomb Perdita in the first place?’

  Another of the squad, newly joined Cassuen, asked, ‘Do you think this was one of the battlefields of the Great Heresy?’

  ‘It’s too old,’ said Ventara simply. ‘Think millions of years, boy, not thousands.’

  Cassuen’s smile dipped. ‘The eldar breeds, then?’

  ‘Perhaps, but I’ve never known them to scour a world like this,’ Jatiel said. These ethereal, blasphemous creatures rarely lowered themselves with such systematic destruction. Their methods tended far more to hit and run attacks or piratical squabblings.

  Blocks of xenos material floated by, obscuring their view of the distant fleet. Circling one another in slow, complex orbits, the weaving constructs seemed at times almost to spell out runes, and at others to take on intricate polygonal shapes. Massive constructions of carved xenos bone, they appeared, at first, to belong to known eldar materials. However, these curious stones, stones that the Inquisition had taken a great deal of interest in, were engraved in some other alien runic script.