The psyker stiffened, his preternatural abilities grasping something beyond Garro’s ability to sense. ‘The Legion of Horus Lupercal.’
Rubio’s words were suddenly drowned out as a caped abomination burst from beneath the rubble at his feet. Buried there, waiting for them, it now exploded into violence. The Codicier barely had a moment to react before a snarling chainblade came roaring down on him. Blocking with his vambrace, ceramite armour meeting tungsten teeth with a flash of brilliant yellow sparks.
He caught the briefest glimpse of a scowling, furious face before a renewed, savage attack was unleashed upon him. The pommel of the chainsword slammed into his head, fracturing bone and shattering psionic crystal. He stumbled, fighting to regain his balance, but the assault was psychotic in its intensity. Dimly, he was aware of Garro coming to his aid, but his foe howled with laughter and tore an object from the depths of his tattered cloak.
‘My tomb will be yours, traitor bastards!’
‘Krak grenade!’ Garro’s shout of warning sounded as the fist-sized device went bouncing and skittering away across the uneven floor.
The cloaked warrior knocked Rubio down and left them behind, sprinting towards the tumbledown entrance. In a single, lightning-fast motion, Garro captured the grenade where it had fallen and threw it with all his might into the black depths of the nearest sinkhole. Rubio heard it clatter its way into the collapsed underlevels.
‘Run, damn you!’ bellowed the Death Guard, but in the next second Rubio was deafened by a shuddering crash of detonation. All around, the fractured walls and drooping ceiling surrendered to gravity and came down upon them.
After months of slow decrepitude, the basilica was finally destroyed. It collapsed in a last outburst of black dust and displaced air, falling into the abyss that cracked open beneath it. The earth swallowed the ruins, dragging them into the dark.
Varren staggered backwards as a massive shock-front of powdered rock and earth reached for him. He heard the panicked cries of Arcudi and the rest of the survivors, and ignored them, calling into his vox-bead, ‘Throne and Blood! Garro! Rubio! Do you hear me?’
There was no response, and he watched, his boltgun in his hand, as the great flood of dust rolled in and engulfed the survivor camp where he stood guard.
‘All of you, get down!’ He snarled the order at the cowering refugees. ‘Cover your faces and do not move.’
‘I warned them…’ said Arcudi. ‘The beast comes.’
‘Be silent, old man.’ Varren bit down on a flash of annoyance at the old soldier’s morose pronouncement, and checked his bolter’s magazine. ‘Stay down.’
He heard the flutter of a torn cape, and so did Arcudi. ‘What was that? In the dust cloud–’
‘I said be silent!’ Grim-faced, Varren drew up his bolter to his shoulder and aimed into the haze, searching for the one errant motion that would give him a target. All else was forgotten. The fate of his battle-brothers was not his concern. All he sought now was the enemy he knew was coming.
A voice muttered, out in the dust. ‘Traitors are paid only in steel, and you will pay for defying the Emperor!’ Before he could react, something moved, a form like a leaping wolf or a raptor given wing. Varren glimpsed the dull glitter of a chainsword looming and he opened fire. The legionary saw his enemy come running.
‘The beast!’ howled Arcudi, as the armoured figure came charging in with a roar.
The two warriors collided with a clash of weapons. ‘You are dead!’ the attacker screamed wildly. ‘You are all dead!’
Even as every instinct in him called out for him to meet this foe in rage and battle, Varren tried to halt the tirade before it went too far. ‘Stop!’ he bellowed. ‘You cannot fight–’
‘In the Emperor’s name, I will destroy you!’
The words were ignored and pain lanced through him. In the training pits of the World Eaters Legion, Varren had battled warriors of every stripe, from those pure of body and mind, to those driven to the edge of madness with lobotomaic taps and neural implants. But still, he was staggered by the sheer venom with which this new enemy attacked. Every legionary, no matter what his parent Legion might be, no matter what primarch he called his sire, fought to live and to win. This beast did no such thing. He fought like a madman, with no thought to survival. Everything about him was pure fury.
He fought as if he craved the embrace of death itself, but in his eyes, there was something lost.
‘Damn you!’ Varren bit down on another shudder of agony.
‘Too late for that!’ came the reply. He was pulled off his feet and slammed against a broken stone pillar. His bolter left his grip and Varren slumped, half dazed from the force of the blow. He turned, bringing up his guard to defend against any killing strike, but his foe had left him behind.
‘This will do…’ He blinked through the pain and saw the ragged warrior gather up his boltgun and work the slide. Then, he marched slowly towards Arcudi and the survivors, who quaked in fear at the sight of the cloaked figure, the bolter’s wide muzzle turning in their direction.
Varren dragged himself back to his feet. ‘What are you doing? They are civilians!’
No glimmer of remorse crossed the warrior’s scarred face as he opened fire on the unarmed people. ‘I am Cerberus!’ he declared. ‘The gatekeeper of hell! I am justice!’
‘Not in this world!’ came a shout. Varren lurched around and saw Garro and Rubio emerge from the haze. Wounded, but still very much alive, the other Knights Errant had dug themselves out of the rubble and returned to the fray.
Rubio threw out his hands in a gesture of power. The psyker tapped into the quickening at the heart of his warp-touched soul and turned it to lightning. With a sweep of his arm, an arc of crackling blue-white power blasted across the debris-strewn ground and tore it open. The ragged warrior – this so-called ‘Cerberus’ – cried out in pain and tumbled over the edge of a new abyss, into black oblivion. All around, the earth shook and caved in, howling and grinding before finally settling once more.
By degrees, the dust fell, coating everything in a thick layer of grit and ashes. His injuries sending brutal jags of pain through him with every step, Varren limped to the edge of the cave-in. In passing, he saw the survivors tending to their wounded; there were precious few of them. Almost all of Cerberus’ shots had blasted their targets into smears of blood and meat.
Varren spat blood into the new crater and glared down into it. He saw only shadows.
‘Is he dead?’ Garro approached, his armour caked in the same dark ashes.
‘No. There would be a body.’ Varren turned away, looking the other legionaries up and down. ‘I might have said the same about you. The ruins fell, and I thought that was an end to you.’
‘We were trapped for a moment,’ said Rubio, ‘but my gifts made escape possible.’
‘It will take more than the collapse of a building to kill a legionary,’ said Garro. ‘What happened here?’
‘Rubio’s smiting blast struck true, but the stone beneath the foe’s feet gave way. This entire city is nothing but layers of rubble and ruins, one atop the other.’ Varren cast a look towards Arcudi and the remains of his party. He knew full well that Cerberus would have ended them all, had Rubio not intervened. He glanced at Garro, and fixed him with a steady gaze. ‘That was no beast, battle-captain.’ Varren had expected to face some kind of warp-spawned monster, but not what could only be a gene-forged warrior-born. ‘That was one of us.’
‘Aye. It must be so.’ The psyker’s expression soured. ‘He called us traitors. I saw only a glimpse down there…’ His gaze swept up to meet Garro’s. ‘Tell us the truth. Is this enemy what I think it is?’
Garro’s expression hardened. The burden of the question appeared to age him. ‘Yes. I see now that he is too far gone. He has been consumed by madness. What happened here has broken his mind.’ He looked away. ‘
He must be killed.’
‘What?’ Varren felt a strange jolt of emotion. Was that… empathy? Despite the killer’s crazed assault, the World Eater could not help feeling some strange kind of kinship with Cerberus. We are alike, he thought. I could be him, had circumstances played out another way.
Rubio nodded sadly. ‘We all saw what he did. He ignored us in favour of attacking defenceless civilians. Old men. Women and children.’
‘You did not look in his eyes, psyker,’ spat Varren. ‘You did not see what I did. Torment and blackness. Can your witch-sight divine that?’ He struggled to articulate himself. ‘My words before… I was wrong. He is a beast. A man become an animal. But he is still one of us. He is not a traitor.’
‘I could not touch his mind,’ admitted the psyker. ‘The turmoil there is too strong, like a great maelstrom.’
Varren reached out and grabbed the battle-captain’s arm, his craggy face lit with purpose. ‘Garro, heed me. We have lost so many brothers to this schism, this damned bloody war. A traitor I will kill without hesitation. But we do not speak of a traitor. Our kinsman is lost. You must–’
‘What I must do.’ Garro snarled the words back at him, for a moment furious at the legionary’s demands. Then the heat faded and the weight of the words seemed to settle on him. ‘What I must do is make the choice. It is my duty, and mine alone, Varren. If I give an order, then so shall it be. Do you understand?’
It took the World Eater a long time to reply. ‘I understand,’ he lied.
The dawn came slowly, the weak glow of a distant sun casting only the most ghostly light upon the destroyed city. The dust and the clouds robbed everything of shade, rendering all things in grey. The only patches of colour came from the spills of blood around the bodies of the dead and the wounded.
While Garro and Varren stood watch, Rubio walked among the survivors, the coppery scent of their blood strong in his nostrils.
He found Arcudi dressing an injury on his arm with a length of dirty cloth, surrounded by the weary remnants of his band. ‘I can spare you a medicae pack, deck-captain. There are bandages and–’
‘No,’ Arcudi replied, almost too quickly. ‘No need, legionary. It is nothing, a scratch at best. Of no concern.’
‘As you wish. Perhaps one of the others, then? I see there are some in your group with greater wants.’
The soldier shook his head. ‘Your offer is well taken. But I must refuse. Please understand. It is our way.’
‘To bleed?’ The psyker gave the old man a hard look; he sensed what could be the gossamer touch of a lie in Arcudi’s thoughts, but he could not be certain of it. When the soldier did not reply, Rubio relented and walked away. Perhaps I should not be surprised, he thought. It was legionaries who brought this destruction down on them, a legionary who stalked and murdered their number. Why should they wish to trust us?
Still, he could not shake a steady sense of disquiet. He came across a line of corpses arranged in a row, all of them wrapped in makeshift death shrouds. Compelled by an impulse he could not express, a half-formed suspicion that welled up in his chest, Rubio knelt by the closest of them. With care, the psyker took the arm of a dead woman and opened her sleeve, letting his preternatural senses guide him. His gaze traced the length of the pallid limb and found something strange.
There were contusions and scarring, as he expected, but the corpse-flesh showed something more. Lesions, of a kind Rubio had never seen. He was no Apothecary, but he had seen radiation burns and cancerous growths before. The flesh-marks resembled those kind of injuries, but it was the pattern that struck him as odd. Whatever afflicted the dead woman manifested in triangular threefold clusters, almost like a deliberate mark. Rubio examined another body, and then a third. Each showed the same strange infection, each time hidden away from plain sight.
‘What are you doing?’ He looked up as Garro approached, a searching look on the battle-captain’s face. ‘Why do you disturb their dead?’
The psyker showed him the marks. ‘Have you ever seen the like, Garro?’
Even as he asked the question, Rubio saw the answer to it in the other warrior’s expression. Disgust, anger, hatred – all these emotions swept across Garro’s face in an instant. Behind him, Arcudi and the other survivors had stopped and turned to watch the legionaries.
‘I have seen such a mark before,’ said Garro, with cold ferocity. ‘And it is the herald of horror and ruination.’
In the depths of the warp, aboard the frigate Eisenstein, Nathaniel Garro and his battle-brothers had fought beings touched by the same threefold sign. They were the dead, traitors from the Death Guard Legion, bodies reanimated to new and pestilent life by some dark power from the immaterium. Those undying creatures were animated by disease and raw hate, driven by corruption – and now that same power swarmed here in the ruins, hiding in plain sight.
‘You were not meant to lay your eyes upon the mark.’ Arcudi’s voice was solemn and full of regret. ‘Now you too must meet the blessing of the Grandfather.’ The old soldier looked Garro in the eyes and smiled. ‘He has been waiting for you, Nathaniel.’
Then as one, the survivors threw back their heads and screamed. It was the same mournful howl as the blighted winds that scoured the surface of the planet.
Arcudi’s skin sloughed from his face, a papery mask of decaying flesh crumbling into fragments in the blink of an eye. All around, his cohorts transformed too, any pretence at humanity falling from them in shed rags of flesh. Pallor burst across their faces, torrents of triad scabs bursting into livid, pus-wet blushes. They shed their disguise, revealing themselves to truth.
Whatever dark potential had kept them balanced on the edge of life now withdrew, and in turn accelerated them into decay. What a moment ago had seemed human became stumbling, moaning carcasses. At their sides, the cold-skinned corpses twitched and rose to their feet, torn and bloodied flesh hanging off them, limbs ruined by bolt-fire.
Varren came running, his weapon at his side. He was aghast at the sight before him. ‘That sound!’
‘A call to their kindred,’ said Garro, drawing his weapons. ‘We are betrayed, brothers… Curse me for a fool.’
‘Combat wheel formation!’ Rubio sprang back, closing the gap with his comrades. ‘They surround us.’
Swords drawn, boltguns raised, the three legionaries drew together as the undead shambled forwards, gathering around them.
Garro raised Libertas. ‘Destroy these abominations, in the Emperor’s name!’
The creatures rushed forwards, into the flash of gunfire and the shriek of swords as the legionaries dispatched them.
They fell like wheat before a scythe, and Rubio let out a harsh bark of laughter. ‘These few, they are no match for us!’
In answer to him, a new chorus of wraithlike howling sounded out of the ruined cityscape, and the rasping of decayed limbs on cracked stone grew louder and louder. Hundreds of the horrors stumbled brokenly out of blackened doorways and caved-in passages.
‘You spoke too soon, psyker,’ Varren grated. ‘There’s a lot more than a few.’
‘We are the countless dead.’ The thing that had been Arcudi wavered before them, pressed forwards by the mass of its corpse-fellows. ‘Join us.’ From every shadowed corner they came, digging themselves from the rubble, rushing from the ruins, emerging from every shallow grave. A horde of the undying fell on them in a howling tide, overwhelming the legionaries by their sheer force of numbers.
‘Never!’ Garro shouted his denial back at the creature and Libertas sang in the air once more. The sword rose and fell as he took the heads from the necks of the corpse-things, but for each plague-ridden victim he dispatched, three more arose to take its place. The press of dead flesh was forcing them back, cutting off all lines of escape.
Rubio called upon his powers to cast bolts of snarling energy into the mass of them, but he could not hold back the
flood. ‘They just keep coming!’
‘Must we face every victim taken by the virus bombs?’ snarled Varren, his own weapons a blur of steel and fire. ‘How can they die and yet live?’
‘Cerberus,’ said Garro. ‘He must have known what they were all along.’ A thunder of shots blasted apart more of the pestilent monstrosities. ‘Stay close, brothers! If we perish here, then we will perish together.’
But then a new voice joined the chorus of madness. Like the summons of some mythic creature, the mention of his name had brought Cerberus to the fray.
‘I see you!’ came the distant cry. ‘I come for you!’
The ragged warrior was suddenly there, a whirlwind of blades, taking heads and ripping open torsos. The undying monstrosities were torn apart, limbs rended, skin carved by the spinning razor-sharp teeth of the chainsword. The legionary in his ruined armour was a black phantom, and he fought like the spirit of vengeance itself, never tiring, never faltering, ignoring every clawed slash and clubbing blow upon his wargear, his blood flowing freely from countless wounds. And still he battled on, killing the dead, returning the pox-riddled flesh-puppets to the bombed-out tombs they had crawled from. In his eyes there was only the pathological, perfect focus of the true madman.
In this deadly melee, Garro would take whatever reinforcements would offer themselves. ‘The numbers thin, do not falter,’ he called out to the others. ‘We must survive. Our duty must be done!’
‘Finish them!’ Rubio barely got the words out before a mob of undead dragged him off his feet and to the ground. The psyker stumbled under a surge of corrupted bodies and they slammed him to the ground. He vanished under a mass of snarling undead, their taloned fingers raking at his armour.
But only for a moment. A wash of telekinetic energy turned the creatures into new drifts of ashy powder, and Varren strode in to bring his comrade to his feet, slashing with his power sword to behead any foes that still moved. ‘In Terra’s name, tell me there are no more of these rotting freaks.’
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