Old Earth

by Nick Kyme

  What followed was bloody. Not just running, a stampede. The edge of the wall cleared, revealing bodies. Some of them had been dismembered by the blast. Gethe looked away.

  ‘What was that?’ he said, urging men to the battlements, ignoring the requests for information over the vox from farther down the wall. ‘Snipers on the crowd,’ he snapped through the vox instead, and the three watchtowers and the riflemen within made ready.

  The refugees cried out, some pointing to the shining muzzles of the sniper rifles. Others bellowed angrily, but fell back.

  Smoke still trailed from the blast site. Gethe suspected a bomb but couldn’t be sure. Reacting immediately before he possessed the facts would be a mistake. He had to remain calm, and transmit that calm to his men. There were stills below making grain alcohol, vendors cooking meat on old fyceline stoves; any one of them could have exploded. It had felt big, though, something specifically made for impact. Powerful enough to be felt all the way up on the battlements.

  ‘Don’t they realise they can’t breach the wall?’ said Renski.

  ‘Let’s take no chances, eh, proctor?’ said Gethe.

  ‘Was it an attack?’ asked Renski.

  ‘Inconclusive.’

  ‘We should do something, warden-primus.’

  ‘Nothing we can do right now. I won’t act in haste. Can you feel that tension, proctor?’

  ‘Sir?’

  Gethe shook his head ruefully. ‘You could cut it with a knife. I won’t stretch it any further. We wait, urge calm only. Let the clamour subside.’

  Several minutes passed of the warden-primus addressing the crowds via loudhailers, of holding the line in preparation for what might happen next. He ordered the reserves from the barrack houses. They waited in the courtyard, on the Palace side of the wall, in case of a breach.

  It took almost an hour before most of the bodies were cleared, dragged to Throne only knew where, and the refugee masses returned.

  ‘What about Nade and Uli?’ asked Renski.

  A mob had descended on the crashed Valkyrie, stripping the wreckage for parts, looting whatever remained.

  ‘They must be dead, Renski,’ said Gethe. ‘Nothing we can do for them now.’

  ‘We should try to retrieve their bodies.’

  Gethe gestured to the crowds. The mood below remained volatile but the immediate panic was over. He relaxed his grip on the battle­ments, hoping the threat had diminished too.

  ‘You want to go down there?’

  Renski gritted her teeth, her ideals meeting reality and coming up wanting.

  ‘Neither do I,’ said Gethe. He looked further into the wastes. More refugees were coming. ‘Get me the master vox,’ he said.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘The master vox, damn it! I’m trying the Legion again. And I want every other warden-primus on this wall. This could be happening elsewhere too.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Renski was about to go when Gethe stopped her.

  ‘And issue a recall order. I want every man back on the wall. Something is going on here. We just can’t see it.’

  ‘And then what, sir?’

  ‘Soon as we’re reinforced, we open the gate and take a closer look.’

  Twenty-Seven

  Of the Impossible City, in its ruination

  There was no sun, no sky and the golden light of this place radiated no warmth.

  The gate Vulkan and the Drakes took from the eldritch forest had led them here, to another realm.

  Even the air felt strange. Sound did not travel as it should, as conventional wisdom would dictate. At times it echoed for impossibly long periods, at others it bled away as if submerged beneath an unseen ocean.

  ‘What is this place?’ asked Gargo, his auspex readings baffling and contradictory.

  A tunnel stretched before them, so wide they could barely perceive its edges, its ceiling as high as a celestial vault, and the way ahead obscured by a gilded fog.

  Shadows loomed in the miasma as the Drakes made their way carefully forwards, weapons ready, eyes searching but finding no enemies. Yet a threat still lingered. Blood had been shed here, souls severed.

  The hollowed-out carcasses of dead gods and their servants emerged as the Salamanders walked on, their forms sprawled amongst the ruins of a fallen civilisation.

  ‘Look there…’ said Abidemi, his voice a distant susurration, even though he was only a metre or so away from his brothers when he gestured with his sword.

  A great Titan slumped in quiet repose – a Warhound variant, its head lying on its chin, the rear and legs hunched up behind it like a surly dog. A black griffon with a white hood set against a yellow field was painted onto its carapace. One of its weapon mounts had been destroyed, an inferno gun, its muzzle black from overheating. The other had been bitten off, teeth marks visible in sacred metal.

  Gargo approached the machine and ran a bionic hand across the wound, engaging haptic sensors in his fingertips.

  ‘A residue lingers, something in the saliva, I would guess.’

  ‘Acid, machine oil?’ suggested Zytos, unnerved by the spectacle of such a war machine brought low.

  Gargo shook his head.

  ‘I can make no sense of it, brother.’

  ‘Whatever it was, it severed the arm of a Titan,’ said Abidemi. ‘What manner of thing could do that?’

  ‘Nothing we here would want to face,’ uttered Vulkan. He stood forward of the slain Warhound, his gaze on the fog ahead.

  ‘And where is here, my lord?’ asked Abidemi.

  ‘A conduit,’ said Vulkan. ‘A place that is entirely other.’

  ‘The warp?’ asked Zytos.

  Vulkan shook his head. ‘Something else.’ He crouched down to touch a sheet of plating under his feet. ‘This is Mechanicum forged,’ said Vulkan. ‘I had heard rumours… My father’s great labour, after he made Horus Warmaster.’

  ‘I don’t understand, lord,’ said Zytos.

  Vulkan stood, leaning on Urdrakule’s haft. He gazed off into the fog again.

  ‘Though I see the hand of Mars, this place once belonged to the eldar.’

  ‘And did it bring us here, or did you?’

  Vulkan looked down to the talisman of seven hammers.

  ‘What are you asking, Barek?’ said Vulkan as he regarded his son.

  Zytos met his primarch’s gaze and held it, though it took some effort to do so. ‘Can we trust it?’

  Vulkan’s expression was curious.

  ‘It was wrought by my hand.’

  ‘A feat you have no memory of.’

  As if realising the significance of that fact for the first time, Vulkan turned his attention back to the talisman.

  ‘Regardless,’ he said, ‘we have no choice but to follow it.’

  Everything has a purpose, Vulkan had said.

  The talisman’s was to act as a compass, but to where?

  And guiltily, in that moment of doubt, Zytos was reminded of another’s­ words – Abidemi’s, spoken in the underworld below Deathfire.

  Is it him?

  The talisman brought them to the edge of a city, though it was unlike any city the Drakes had ever known.

  Bone-white spires shimmered in the golden light, spearing upwards like perfect stalagmites and then down like stalactites, as if the city had somehow curved and arched over itself.

  White-slabbed avenues fed cathedrals, temples, colonnades and amphitheatres. They stretched to every point of the compass, lost to a pale gloaming. These too loomed overhead, folded upon the same structures below, but cast no shadow. Where darkness did fall, it felt wrong, the angles at odds with the direction of the light. Some of the shadows looked like the silhouettes of people.

  At the threshold of the city, in the lee of a gigantic statue of a weeping maiden, Abidemi crouch
ed to one knee to run his gauntleted hand through a veil of mist.

  ‘It… sings,’ he said, incredulous, tendrils of vapour clinging to his fingers as if reluctant to disengage. ‘I cannot understand the words, but I feel… such sorrow. A lament, brothers.’

  Zytos had heard it too. Whenever they passed through the mist, the voices came, soft and lilting. This was a city in mourning.

  ‘Dead words for a dead people,’ he whispered, the funereal quiet affecting him.

  ‘Why are her hands open?’ asked Gargo, his eyes on the statue.

  ‘She is a daughter of the eldar,’ said Vulkan, coming to stand amongst his sons. ‘She both welcomes you and pleads to you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I believe it’s salvation,’ said Abidemi.

  ‘I see evidence of the Mechanicum’s influence here too,’ said Zytos, changing the subject. He referred to the metal conductor plates and arcane mechanisms wrought into the tunnel walls, the devices that encroached upon the city’s threshold.

  As he looked across the city, at the ruin that it had become, he discovered something else of its history.

  ‘A battle has been fought here.’

  Several walls had collapsed, a tower lay fallen across a broken colonnade. Gun emplacements had been abandoned, vehicle husks left to rot.

  ‘One which mankind lost,’ said Vulkan. ‘We should not stay.’ He held the talisman on its chain before him as if to divine their path. ‘Our way lies through it.’ He glanced at the statue. ‘Be on your guard, my sons. It was hubris for the Imperium to think it could conquer this place. It reigns here no more. Something else now holds sway.’

  As they passed through the city’s broken gates, Abidemi paused, reaching for the hilt of Draukoros.

  ‘Can you feel that?’ he asked of his brothers and father, the words repeating and then sharply dropping flat.

  ‘As soon as we crossed the border,’ said Zytos.

  ‘I see and hear nothing, brothers,’ answered Gargo, returning the auspex to his belt.

  ‘It is here.’

  Zytos turned to his father. ‘It?’

  But Vulkan did not answer.

  ‘A hunger,’ said Abidemi.

  Vulkan gave a shallow nod.

  Zytos felt it too, a presence, something malign whose attention had been attracted. They all felt it now, but only Zytos gave voice to it.

  ‘Something is coming for us.’

  ‘It has been ever since we stepped from the Iron Heart’s teleportation dais,’ said Vulkan. ‘Foulness follows… We must stay ahead of it.’

  They moved swiftly after that, though not without care as they ran through the alien ruins.

  Vulkan led the way, pausing now and then to consult the talisman, its guidance apparently unerring.

  After several hours – though time here did not run to convention, much like the light, air and gravity – they found the dead.

  Mounds of renegades, their baroque armour split and gored, littered a sprawling plaza.

  Off-white and blue, sea-green and bronze, nightshade, dirty iron, febrile green, crimson and gold – every traitorous hue had a representative. At the heart of it there rose a tower, a plated bastion of Imperial design utterly incongruous in the alien city, now surrounded by the slain. A stairway wound around the tower, corkscrewing up to a flat, battlemented summit.

  The battlefield hung somewhere between what could be considered both ‘up’ and ‘down’. Zytos found himself staring back at the part of the city they had just passed through, only it was now above instead of behind him.

  He chose not to question it, as they made for the tower.

  Cracked flagstones crunched underfoot, together with the detritus of spent shell casings. The mist had retreated here, lingering at the plaza’s edge as if reluctant to trespass.

  ‘What killed them?’ asked Gargo. ‘The dead must number in the hundreds.’

  Abidemi held aloft a golden helm. The faceplate had a crack in it, right through the eagle device above the brow. A red horsehair plume fluttered forlornly from the crown.

  ‘The Custodes were here.’

  ‘They are still,’ said Zytos, and gestured to an arm protruding from one of the mounds of the dead. It wore a golden vambrace, tarnished with blood. The gauntleted hand still gripped a guardian spear. ‘And those of the Sisterhood.’

  Several female warriors lay amongst the dead. By the position of the fallen, Zytos could imagine them fighting back to back until the end.

  Vulkan did not look upon them. Even the slain heroes of his father’s legion could not hold his attention. He looked to the shadows and the warriors slowly creeping into the light.

  A ragged warband for sure, several mismatched squads, they cleaved to broken-toothed chainblades or drew notched swords. A few carried bolters, the clips absent, their ammunition spent. They did not look like the sword brothers the Salamanders had known during the Great Crusade, nor did they resemble the traitors of Isstvan. Sigils marked their armour, daubed in blood or carved by blades. A wheel of eight points, a star that represented madness.

  ‘Do you see this?’ hissed Zytos.

  Abidemi nodded.

  ‘No. Do you see it, brother? What they have become?’

  ‘They are a future echo of something to come, something worse,’ said Vulkan. ‘This is what we are fighting against – not them, but it. Be wary, my sons. Something else clings to this place, something malignant.’

  Scattered throughout the plaza, they came together by some lingering instinct, though whatever remained of the warriors they had once been appeared greatly diminished, and usurped by animalistic hunger.

  One of the pack stepped forward, a broken chainaxe held too tightly in his grasp.

  ‘Blooooood for… ngg…’ he murmured, guttural, ravenous.

  Acid drooled from beneath his faceplate, sizzling against bare metal. Both retinal lenses had been shattered, and what glared from behind those slits no longer looked human.

  Zytos drew his hammer.

  ‘Kill them all!’

  Gargo let slip a wordless cry and threw himself at the ragged warband. A spear thrust impaled the drooling warrior, the Salamander’s bionically augmented strength enough to lift him off the ground as Zytos and Abidemi caught up and then charged ahead.

  The renegades appeared slow, as if drunk, their movements sluggish. But they died slowly too, wounds that would ordinary kill a legionary proving unfit to stop them.

  Abidemi disembowelled a Night Lord, the savage teeth of his blade making quick work of the renegade’s armour. The thing that had been a son of Curze fought on, despite its grievous injury, forcing Abidemi to behead it before he engaged another.

  Another fell to Zytos’ thunder hammer, its shoulder crushed, the guard dented inwards and biting into the renegade’s ribs and torso. A second blow lifted it off its feet, caving in its chest. Sprawled on its back, its internal organs pulped, it still stirred. Zytos finished it off with a stamp of his boot.

  He then smashed into an Iron Warrior, the strike two-handed, splitting apart its breastplate and hurling it aside. He advanced. An uppercut sent a Word Bearer reeling, the prayer parchments nailed to its armour burning with the fiery discharge from the thunder hammer. He crushed the neck of a Death Guard. A thrust of the hammer’s head broke its hip. Zytos stepped over the body, and Gargo followed in his wake to apply the killing stroke.

  The Drakes fought together, and took no return blow.

  Steadily they moved through the traitors, the tower at their backs, every death at their hands eliciting a small moment of catharsis and a pang of fratricidal guilt. This was the death of the Emperor’s dream, this place in ruins, this war. All of it.

  Blood splattered Zytos’ armour. It smeared his drakehide cloak. The scent of it felt heady through his mouth grille.

 
He heard Gargo roar, and turned to see his brother’s faceplate anointed with gore. He had torn the hearts from a World Eater, his bionic hand and forearm slick with vitae.

  Behind him, Abidemi sawed Draukoros through the clavicle bone of a Night Lord, his labours eager.

  The deaths blurred. Killing grew indiscriminate, losing meaning, collapsing into instinct and sensation. The grinding of bone, the hard spatter of blood, a spear impaling, a sword cutting, a hammer pulverising… A cacophony of murder resounded without reason.

  Zytos felt it welling up within, a hot, red anger. He tipped back his head, the urge to wrench off his helmet strong, and a bellow almost escaped his lips…

  ‘Enough!’

  Vulkan’s shout carried, despite the weirdness of the city. It broke the killing frenzy.

  The renegades were dead. The last one fell to Gargo’s spear, flung as sure as an arrow into the traitor’s chest. He gasped for breath, only now aware of Draukoros about to cleave his neck.

  Abidemi dropped the sword, appalled at what he had been about to do. It was the first time he had treated Numeon’s blade with anything but reverence.

  ‘Gargo… I could barely see, I thought you were…’

  Gargo looked back at him, chest heaving with every oxygen-starved breath. Blood soaked his bionics and he paled at the sight of it.

  Zytos ripped off his helmet, though the air was no better outside of its confines.

  ‘Father…’

  They had dismembered and destroyed the renegades. A charnel field spread out before them.

  Vulkan came amongst his sons, his merest presence radiating composure and restraint. Zytos felt it like a cleansing flame, burning away the black anger.

  ‘Now we know why the spirits would not enter,’ said Vulkan, glancing at the veil of mist lingering at the plaza’s edge. ‘The defilement of this place is far worse than I imagined.’

  ‘I felt… an urge to kill and kill again,’ said Gargo.

  ‘What have we stumbled into, father?’ asked Abidemi.

  Vulkan eyed the false shadows.

  ‘An altar, my son,’ he said, and lifted Urdrakule to gesture to an encroaching darkness that had suddenly risen up around them, encircling the plaza and edging closer with each second. ‘And we are the sacrifice.’