Shadowsword

by Guy Haley

  ‘And I really don’t want us to miss,’ said Bannick. ‘Get us closer. Starstan, prepare to charge volcano cannon capacitors the second we halt.’

  Dib and the Champion duelled. Unholy blades clashed upon the edge of the sacred black sword. Dib whirled and darted faster than Dostain’s eyes could follow, but every strike in his flurry of blows was met by the black sword. One by one the other Traitor Space Marines fell around the combatants, dispatched by the Champion when they strayed too near. Soon, there was only Trastoon fighting Adelard, and Dib fighting the champion.

  Behind them the unnatural gate pulsed. Dostain peered at it, though it hurt his eyes. On the other side of the membrane of light he saw images of creatures gathering, lovely yet terrible, pressing hard against the glow. For now they appeared unfinished, flat, like uncompleted sketches drawn by a madman.

  Dostain crawled faster, his wounded shoulder hunched and left arm drawn up like a wounded dog’s leg. He dared not stand, but cowered, watching men far better than he fight because of his actions.

  Adelard whirled and chopped without slowing. His battle-hymn was loud and pure after many minutes of fighting, but his enhanced metabolism was more than matched by that of Trastoon, who was further strengthened by the unholy power of the warp. Trastoon leapt high and drove down at the sword brother, the sorcerous energies sheathing his blade colliding with the purer power fields of Adelard’s axe in eruptions of light and sound. Adelard staggered back. Dostain watched, his heart in his mouth, as Trastoon drove at him again, his sword blurring arcs of painful fire before him. Again the axe and the sword met. Again the combatants parted. Adelard was being pushed away from the gate, back towards the ring of Founders’ statues and the piles of corpses. Dostain felt sick. This was what he had brought on his world. Suffering and death. He looked around for a weapon, anything. His eyes lit upon the boltgun of the dead Space Marine, but even with both arms he would not have been able to defy its magnetic lock and pull it away from the armour.

  Then he saw the pistol, holstered at the Space Marine’s side. His injured arm held awkwardly, he crawled over. Nervously, he looked up, but neither Dib nor Trastoon saw him.

  Dostain reached for the bolt pistol with his right hand. It slipped free from its holster easily enough, but he nearly dropped it when he lifted it up. Sized for a Space Marine, the bolt pistol was too massive for a normal man to wield comfortably. With difficulty he sat back, rested it on his knee and aimed it at Trastoon. His finger felt inadequate for the task of pulling the trigger.

  ‘You should join me, you are a good warrior,’ Trastoon shouted over the buzz and crackle of locked power fields.

  ‘Never!’ said Adelard.

  ‘Reconsider. The Emperor is intolerant of those who call Him a god. You are ignorant of the lessons of the past.’

  ‘Lies!’ cried Adelard, and flung the Chaos champion’s blade aside.

  ‘Then you shall die,’ said Trastoon. He thrust with his blade at Adelard, both hands on the hilt. The axe came down to force it aside, but there was too much impetus behind the blow, and it slammed into Adelard’s torso. Adelard spun with the hit, but the blade scored a deep smoking gash across the gothic cross moulded into his chest. The power cables underneath parted and spat. Adelard let out a metallic cry through his vox-grille and fell sideways, his armour dying on him.

  ‘So many have fallen to me. You are but the latest,’ said Trastoon. He raised his sword.

  Somehow, Dostain pulled the trigger without yanking the gun off target. The shot rang out. The bolt flew true, smashing through Trastoon’s power armour and exploding inside his wrist.

  Trastoon staggered, his left hand hanging by its tendons from the ruin of his arm. His ugly helmet turned to find his assassin. When he saw Dostain, the stolen bolt pistol propped upon his knee, Trastoon laughed.

  ‘You? You dare to defy me?’

  ‘I am Planetary Governor. This is my world,’ said Dostain, and fired again. The second bolt hit Trastoon in the side, and his sword fell from nerveless fingers. The champion tottered. With a growl of effort, Adelard thrust upwards from the ground, the spike atop his power axe slamming up through Trastoon’s gorget and into his brain.

  Trastoon collapsed to the ground and Adelard fell back. The fight between Dib and the Champion was reaching its climax. The Black Templar’s armour smoked from a dozen rents. His blade slowed. With a triumphant screech, Dib fell upon him, all four swords plunging into the Champion. He covered the warrior in an obscene embrace, snake-like body coiling around the Black Templar.

  At this blow the membrane dividing the material realm from the warp pushed outwards and did not rebound. In this new extrusion, thousands of pairs of hungry eyes looked out into the universe.

  ‘The way is open!’ screeched Dib triumphantly. ‘The way is–’ Dib made a clicking noise in his throat and arched backwards. The Black Sword burst from his spine, thick blue ichor running over his serpentine body. The sword ground round, opening the wound wide, then cut outwards, almost cleaving Dib in two. The daemon herald fell gurgling, and the Champion staggered free, his armour shattered and blood pooling around his feet.

  He raised his sword to the heavens and tilted back his head. ‘Emperor, hear me! I am Brother Bastoigne of the Black Templars! I have served you! I have served you! Witness me! No pity! No remorse! No fear!’ He reversed his sword and plunged it point first into the stone. Then he knelt. Head bowed in prayer and hands clasped around the hilt of the black sword, he died.

  The membrane quivered. Pollein’s head mouthed, ‘How wonderful.’ Dib’s top half lay still, his nearly severed tail squirming beside him.

  Adelard rolled onto his side and laughed, his mirth growing in volume until it encompassed the whole square. ‘You lose, daemon! There shall be no horror upon Geratomro this day.’

  Dib roused himself, his torso curling in upon itself like a dying insect’s. A wet tearing saw his tail come free, and he crawled away from the gate.

  ‘There is but... one more death needed here, Templar... and I have found it. The last of the house of Magor.’

  With the last of his ebbing strength he plucked a dagger from his belt and cast it out.

  ‘No!’ shouted Adelard.

  The blade buried itself in Dostain’s forehead. His eyes rolled backwards, and he fell dead.

  ‘It... is... you... who... loses,’ hissed Dib. Before he had finished speaking, his body was already collapsing into bubbling, black filth.

  The membrane swelled and thinned. The faces pressed against it lost their flatness, becoming more real as the colour drained from the energy field. Then it popped, prosaically, like a child’s burst balloon.

  A hideous laughing filled the square, and the numberless brides of Slaanesh spilled into the world.

  ‘Emperor!’ said Bannick. Through the rangefinger he saw a thousand nightmares pouring into the square.

  ‘Sir, this is like nothing I’ve ever seen,’ said Epperaliant. ‘I can make no sense of these augur readings.’

  ‘We should open fire. Now,’ said Meggen.

  ‘Not yet! Look, Adelard is alive,’ said Bannick.

  They watched through their scopes as the Space Marine pulled himself inch by painful inch away from the gateway as the square behind him filled with its unholy crowd. The beings were all colours, and a shimmering light surrounded them. They fought each other and danced, and leapt upon the bodies of the fallen to tear at their flesh.

  ‘We should do it now!’ shouted Meggen.

  ‘Wait for his signal!’

  Adelard crawled on as more and more of the beings flooded the square.

  ‘He’s going to make it!’

  ‘Col! Give the order, Colaron! Do it!’

  Chensormen crept forwards, staring out of Bannick’s viewing block in dismay.

  ‘He is right. Fire now!’

  ‘Back off!’ sh
outed Bannick. ‘He’s still alive. We await his signal.’

  The Black Templar reached a lumen where Founders’ Way entered Founders’ Square and wrapped both hands around it. A group of creatures noticed him and approached. Their backward-jointed legs gave them a strutting, predatory walk. They were hideous yet beautiful, parodies of the human form, androgynous things that blended male and female anatomy to disturbing effect. Long tongues slid out from between pointed teeth. Many of them had slender, chitinous claws in the place of hands.

  ‘Now,’ voxed Adelard. ‘Do it now!’

  Bannick was frozen by the sight of the creatures. Slowly, one turned to regard him. He could swear it was looking right into his soul with its round, black eyes, right through the ranging equipment.

  ‘Sir!’ shouted Epperaliant. ‘He has given the order.’

  Something bigger was trying to come through, bull-headed and mighty. The gate shook with its roaring.

  ‘Sir!’ shouted Epperaliant again.

  Bannick blinked and looked away. His head was full of horrific imagery. His own memories of Tuparillio dead and Brasslock mutilated were bad enough, but they had been perverted, made obscene and they squirmed in his mind. ‘M... Meggen, open fire. Open fire!’ he yelled, mastering himself.

  Lux Imperator’s volcano cannon vomited the light of the Emperor into the heart of darkness. It incinerated daemonic flesh, and slammed into the unholy gateway. The result was a titanic blast of violet unlight. For a second, the square teetered on the brink of the warp, and the crew of Lux Imperator had a veiled view of the horror that awaited them on the other side of death.

  The gate swelled, leaving Adelard to sit upon its edge. Then, with a thrumming boom, it imploded. Daemon creatures were sucked howling back from whence they came. A wash of energy blasted outwards, sending Adelard bouncing up the street and clearing the sky above the square to reveal the blue sky of noon.

  Echoes died. After-images died. What did not die and never could was the memory of what Bannick witnessed in that square.

  Silence fell.

  ‘We... we did it,’ said Meggen.

  ‘No. Lux Imperator did,’ said Bannick.

  ‘Emperor protect us all,’ said Epperaliant.

  ‘Lux Imperator! Lux Imperator, come in!’ Cholo’s voice crackled out of the vox.

  ‘The vox is working,’ said Epperaliant in a daze. ‘Erm, Bannick, I’ve clear signals across all channels.’

  Bannick rested a shaking hand on the refraction array. His wounded left arm pulsed. In his head, Tuparillio danced with the creatures in an eternal hell of purple fire.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Respond on my behalf. Lux Imperator to...’

  ‘Stop!’ said Chensormen. He had his gun out, causing Epperaliant to give out a strangled cry of surprise. ‘You are all under arrest. Hand over your arms.’ Bannick turned in his chair, this new development driving back the horrific images tormenting him. ‘Slowly, honoured lieutenant. I am relieving you of command. This vehicle is under my control. You, commsman, do not answer those hailing you. Lock the hatches. Nobody is to leave this tank.’

  He waved Epperaliant out of his chair. Epperaliant obeyed in baffled consternation.

  ‘We’ve done nothing wrong,’ said Bannick. ‘We have ended the rebellion. The war is won.’

  ‘This war is never won,’ said Chensormen, ‘and regrettably you have seen the truth of the war behind the war. You have done well, and fought with honour and courage for our lord the Emperor of Terra. You should be proud. But it is over now. This is a situation that can only be handled in one way. I–’

  Chensormen gave out a bubbling moan and fell to the deck, blood frothing at his lips, eyes wide, revealing Shoam crouched in the ladder well behind him, a bloody shiv in his hand.

  Bannick’s good hand went to his sidearm, Epperaliant stared at Shoam, mouth still agape. The Savlar coolly ignored them, climbed up onto the command floor, sat across the dying commissar and calmly stabbed him through heart. The commissar’s head lolled, his eyes dulling.

  ‘What have you done, you basdacking Savlar murderer?’ yelled Epperaliant.

  ‘Mute the vox,’ said Shoam.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lux Imperator, respond. This is Cholo aboard Ostrakhan’s Rebirth. We’re breaking through. The enemy are fleeing. What is your position and status, over?’

  The crackle as Cholo waited for a reply sounded like an accusation. Epperaliant’s hand hovered over the response button.

  ‘Mute the vox, Epperaliant,’ said Bannick.

  ‘Sir, we’ve got to report this. It’ll see us all–’

  ‘Do as he says,’ said Bannick. ‘Let’s hear Shoam out.’ His hand stayed upon his pistol butt.

  ‘Yeah, you know, don’t you, honoured lieutenant,’ said Shoam with a yellow-toothed grin. He slipped his makeshift knife back into his boot. ‘You understand, else I’d be dead already. What I have done,’ he said to Epperaliant, ‘is saved you all.’ He wiped his shiv on the commissar’s uniform. ‘This one here, he was going to kill you for what you saw.’

  ‘What the... Shoam? What the basdack have you done?’ said Meggen, who had come forwards to investigate the ruckus.

  ‘You best listen to this, Meggen man,’ said Shoam. ‘You too, coghead. We’re all in this together.’

  ‘In what?’ said Meggen.

  ‘What do you mean, what we have seen? The xenos?’ said Epperaliant.

  ‘You know those weren’t xenos,’ said Shoam. ‘Leastways, not in the normal sense.’

  ‘Explain yourself. I think we’ve only a few minutes before people get suspicious,’ said Bannick.

  ‘Nah, you got longer. There’s a war on. Shoam lifted his respirator to his mouth and took a long draught of nitrochem. ‘We Savlar are sent everywhere, to the worst places, places where people like you don’t go. We are scum – nobody cares about the scum. Thing is, when you’re scum, you learn to survive. We can survive anything. You survive Savlar itself, it gives you the knack to keep from death until it can’t be kept no more. When I was a boy, I hear tales of places my kind fight, places filled with things like what we saw. Things that aren’t xenos, noble boy, things that are worse by far. There was this one regiment. It wasn’t the first, and it ain’t gonna be the last. It fought these things, and it won. And they were all making with the celebration at the end, when some high-born dog gives the order, and they were gunned down. Them that ran were hunted, and then the hunters were shot too.’

  ‘How can you know, if they’re all dead?’

  ‘I didn’t say they were all dead. Like I say, Savlar survive. Not all of them died. Savlar are everywhere. One or two got word out to other Savlar, and Savlar talk to Savlar wherever they are, because we don’t trust no one else. This here, the Imperium doesn’t want anyone to know about it. They will kill and kill to keep the secret. Men like this stuffed jacket.’ He prodded the dead commissar with his toe. ‘He’d kill you all then kill himself for what we seen. You wait to see what happens to this world now. If we breathe a word of this, then we all die.’

  ‘But why?’ said Epperaliant.

  ‘Because we know the truth,’ said Shoam. ‘We know the truth that the Emperor ain’t the only god in the universe. Them things we see, they’re the servants of the Dark Gods. Things from the warp. Things I ain’t supposed to know about, things you ain’t supposed to know about.’

  ‘Lux Imperator, come in. We are reading your ident beacon. We have a fix on your position. Is anyone alive in there?’ came Cholo’s voice.

  ‘We’re going to have to dump the commissar somewhere. They see shiv marks in him, it won’t matter what I say,’ said Shoam.

  ‘Get his body below,’ said Bannick.

  ‘You basdacking kree bird, what have you done!’ shouted Meggen.

  ‘Do it,’ said Bannick. ‘Hide him.’
/>   ‘Col!’

  ‘Just do it!’ shouted Bannick. ‘Best to have options, right, Shoam?’

  Shoam nodded in acknowledgement. Roughly he bundled the dead commissar below.

  Bannick looked to them all. ‘What do you say, are we going to keep this between ourselves?’

  ‘What basdacking choice do we have?’ said Meggen.

  ‘I mean, we can tell absolutely no one, not even the others on Cortein’s Honour.’

  Meggen nodded hesitantly. ‘Sure. If the other option’s death. I’m in.’

  ‘Starstan?’

  ‘I do not care for the policies of the Imperium, but those of the Adeptus Mechanicus are hardly less stringent. Should it be known what occurred here, I would be in danger myself – although not in the same way as you, the result would be the same. I shall keep my silence, if I can be assured that you shall keep yours.’

  ‘Epperaliant?’

  ‘Sir, I... I can’t. I... If this is supposed to be secret, maybe there’s a reason. Maybe we shouldn’t know. Maybe–’

  ‘Epperaliant, if we do speak, we’ll all die. Shoam has it right.’

  ‘He’s a criminal. What he did is wrong,’ said Epperaliant pleadingly.

  ‘Fine. See me swing,’ said Shoam, clambering back up the ladder. ‘Then you bleed out your last in an Inquisitorial interrogation chamber. We’ll all die one way or another, nobleman,’ said Shoam.

  ‘Sir...’

  ‘Lux Imperator, we are approaching. We’ll be with you shortly. Scout elements have you sighted. What happened down there?’ said Cholo.

  ‘Epperaliant, I need to know you won’t talk,’ said Bannick desperately.

  ‘I cannot promise that,’ said Epperaliant. ‘He’s lying. We could have valuable intelligence. A new threat...’

  Shoam chuckled and shook his head. ‘That threat is as old as time, and then some. You know nothing they don’t already. You heard what Chensormen said.’

  ‘Sir! Please.’

  Bannick’s gun rasped from its holster. He held it unwaveringly at the commsman.