The tip of the sacred sword rests against his spine. Vinculus braces for the push that will finish the traitor’s life, and end the war.
The heretic’s watering eyes turn to the knights. ‘Forgive me.’
‘Wait.’ Grimaldus steps forward, a hand raised in warning. ‘Wait!’ Reclusiarch Mordred is at his side, saying the same words, giving the same order.
The sword lances home, biting deep into the man’s body. The self-proclaimed vessel falls to the stone, dying, breaking apart to free the thing within. Cancer spills from the wound, a ghost of oily smoke, leaping in a spreading cloud and clinging to the inquisitor’s wide eyes and open mouth. He damns himself to death the moment he breathes it in.
Mordred is the first to move, his crozius maul raised high. Sword Brother Grimaldus is a heartbeat behind him, chainsword revving. Vinculus falls back, screaming, tearing at his eyes, dragging them from his face with curled fingers. They come free, strings of viscera behind, and he holds them out, seemingly offering them to the two charging knights.
Vinculus falls, howling, vomiting wet blackness that has no place in a human body. Mordred and Grimaldus take him to pieces with their weapons, as if they can carve the corruption from its new host.
The inquisitor laughs through the excreted filth. Pressure builds in the air around them, as though heralding a peal of thunder. Just as it strikes, the inquisitor’s body bursts open.
Sourceless, directionless darkness falls, with the finality of a hammer blow.
The first thing he feels is the familiar pain of a broken body. Life is war, and war is pain: this is a truth he has survived a thousand times. There is no great secret to pain; he sees it no differently to the biorhythmic signs playing out on his retinal display. Pain is nothing more than a sign he is still alive.
Grimaldus drags himself to his feet, boots thudding on the scorched rock bridge above the chasm of liquid fire. His armour is halfway to annihilation, burned and scraped and chipped, bleeding sparks from severed power cables. The cathedral is a detonated ruin, and its besiegers have been cast across the cavern. Huge chunks of masonry still rain down on the cavern, plunging into the fire chasm.
Bodies lie everywhere. Dead knights, dead Sisters, dead heretics in their hundreds. Among the corpses, survivors begin to stir. But not enough. Some are already standing, weapons in their hands. But not enough.
Three minutes. According to his retinal display, he has been unconscious for three whole minutes. He will do penance for his weakness, if he survives this night. No matter that almost every soul in the cavern has suffered the same way – he sees it as a weakness that deserves punishment. Dorn’s martyring blood burns hot in his veins.
The daemon walks through the dead, hunting the living, smashing aside the few swords that rise to bar its way. It is a seething mass of deep-sea nightmare fears given form, that underwater sensation of looking into the endless black of the open ocean, never knowing what lies beyond the mist of human vision. No longer the size of the man inside which it hosted, the poisonous creature has swollen to a riper, truer scale, crushing bodies beneath its cartilaginous claws. It dances at the edge of Grimaldus’s focus, a thing of two worlds and at home in neither. The knight’s eyes water through the chiming pulses of target locks, his mind aching from the sin of witnessing the thing’s existence.
Ludoldus, High Marshal of the Black Templars, faces the beast on the black stone bridge. At his feet are the armoured forms of Jasmine, Canoness of the Bloody Rose, and Ulricus, Emperor’s Champion of the Vinculus Crusade. Two great heroes, champions of humanity in their own right, slain while Grimaldus surrendered to unconsciousness. He will ensure the penance for somnolence lasts a long, long time.
On a whim, he looks up, seeking any damage to the cavern’s expansive ceiling. He has no wish to be buried here, dead or alive. A moment later, he’s reactivating his vox link.
‘This is Sword Brother Grimaldus to the Eternal Crusader. Eternal Crusader, respond.’
‘Sword Brother.’
‘The power generators are down and the sky thoroughfares are open.’
‘Understood, Sword Brother. Gunships en route.’
The black knight reaches for a sword that isn’t there. In the absence of his own blade, he takes a weapon from the dead. The chain that had bound it to its former owner’s armour hangs loose and broken.
Ludoldus is forced onto the defensive, parrying rather than cutting, each lift of his relic blade warding away another sweep of fanged tentacles and fleshy claws. Soon enough, he’s stepping backwards, giving ground with silent curses.
He aches as never before. No single creature can be so strong. No beast of the warp has ever tested his warriors in this way. Ulricus, a warrior without compare, traded a mere seven blows with the creature before it gutted him with its talons. Jasmine lasted no longer – the two pieces of her body lie shrouded by the fall of her scarlet banner.
They cannot kill this thing. They cannot overwhelm it with numbers. Skill is meaningless against its speed. The beast’s blows weigh on him, numbing his muscles. Each of its breaths comes with a mucosal spray of rancid air, clouding the knight-lord’s sight.
The Sisters and knights fighting with him are smashed away, broken and cracked-open things tossed into the chasm of fire. Another knight reaches his side; slain in a heartbeat. And another, bashed aside by a flailing claw, knocked from the stone bridge to plummet into the magma river. Next, a Sister dies, melting and shrieking in the backwash of her own flame weapon as the beast roars the fire back against her. In a queasy blur, it looms back over Ludoldus.
He risks reaching for the grenade at his belt, but the creature’s assault batters at his blade. He needs both hands to ward the thing’s attacks away. He’s down on one knee now, kneeling among the beast’s kills, parrying above him. He needs a second – just a single second – to reach for…
The daemon pushes down against his blade. Ludoldus pours his strength into the parry, feeling his muscles crackle with tightening sinew. As the talon draws back, the High Marshal is already bringing his blade up again to block the claw’s next descent.
It never comes. The falling claw is blocked by a war maul. The weapon’s energy field crackles and strains, failing under the beast’s strength.
‘Mordred.’ Ludoldus is laughing.
It isn’t Mordred. Another warrior carries Mordred’s crozius arcanum.
Sword Brother Grimaldus’s red cloak is aflame. His armour is an ornate ruin of dented plate and blackened chains.
‘Sire,’ he breathes over the vox. An acknowledgement of fate.
The High Marshal frees one hand from his sword long enough to clutch at the holy incendiary buckled to his belt. The grenade comes free. Ludoldus thumbs the activation rune, hard enough to crack the orb’s armoured shell. He raises it, a holy icon, shouting defiance as the daemon bellows downward.
Ludoldus hurls it, not at the beast, but at the creature’s feet.
An Antioch orb is among the rarest weapons sacred to the Chapter. First created several thousand years before by Techmarine Antioch of the Black Templars, they are – by any measure – many magnitudes more lethal than the standard grenades available to other Chapters among the Adeptus Astartes. Consecrated oils and sacred acids are blended with compacted explosives, making each incendiary a personal masterpiece, inscribed with its own damnations, blessings and High Gothic mandalas. A grenade will kill the righteous and unrighteous alike, but an Antioch orb will ensure the blasphemous burn in agony as they meet their end.
The sacred sphere detonates as it crashes against the bridge. Ludoldus and Grimaldus are already retreating, refusing to show their backs to the foe, accepting flash blindness as the price of witnessing their enemy’s end. The explosion comes in a sunflare of white light, bathing the daemon in holy fire and blasting rock in every direction. The bridge starts to fall, crumbling, dragging many of the cavern’s support pillars down with it.
The beast is falling, aflame. Its shrieks don’
t end even when it plunges into the magma. Grimaldus falls back from the shattered bridge, staring in disgusted disbelief as the creature thrashes in the molten rock, its flesh igniting further, spraying liquid rock from its flailing limbs. New arms form as others melt away. New mouths tear open in its grey-squid flesh, sealing closed after they’ve jettisoned their screams. Some swallow the lava, while others vomit it back out.
Ludoldus stumbles as gravity eats the ground from under him; Grimaldus’s gauntlet slams into the collar of his golden armour, dragging him back from the precipice.
‘Gunships inbound,’ the Sword Brother grunts as he pulls his lord to safety.
‘It isn’t dead,’ Ludoldus warns him.
Grimaldus can see that himself. ‘Not yet.’
They open fire. The crashing of bolters echoes from the walls as they fire down into the molten muck – remnants of the Sisters and the black knight squads, gathered in their bleeding dozens and standing among the hundreds of dead.
The dying beast has abandoned all pretensions of humanity. With thrashing, coiling limbs too numerous to count, the subaqueous, cephalopodic thing is revealed as an avatar of pain, manifest as spraying magma and steaming screams. It defies size, for it defies mortal sight. It is the size of a man’s trapped soul; it is the size of a monster from myth, swelling and pulsating, abused by the thousands of explosive shells raining against its form.
Bolts burst inside its body, sending lava spraying in place of blood and flesh. Still it climbs. Metre by agonising metre, the thing of rock and molten sludge hauls itself up the cavern walls, seeking the lives of the insects that still volley their pinprick torment. They can feel its hate like a wind against their faces. It despises them for the sin of living. That hatred is enough to fuel its manifestation past the point of destruction.
It doesn’t reach for them. It reaches for the cavern’s support pillars. Wrapping round them. Gripping them. Cracking them.
Breaking them. One after the other, the monstrous soul claws its way from pillar to pillar, bringing down the cavern in its rage.
Nothing in the material realm can ignore its wounds forever. As the rocks begin to fall, the creature’s howls turn to whines. The sacred orb, and the bursting wounds of so many bolt shells, rip free the last of its strength. It flails at another pillar, its winding limbs failing to latch on, leaving it thrashing and tumbling to the ground among the rain of rock. Boulders shatter on the cavern floor and the ruined bridge, filling the air with dust.
The knights and Sisters ring the fallen horror, executing it with blade and flame. Feeble struggles claim no more human lives. The thing collapses in on itself, dissolving, tainting the air with clouds of stinking vapour from its scabrous wounds.
There is no silence after any victory. A battlefield will still clamour with the cries of the dying and the growling flames of burning tanks. Here, beneath the earth, any silence is slain by the thunder of falling rock and the guttural rumble of the shaking ground.
The first gunships stream in through the sky vents. On the ground, knights and war-maidens look to the vaulted cavern ceiling, praying for each Thunderhawk that weaves between the plummeting debris. Stalactites drop in a torrent of earthward spears. The burning, rolling hulks of destroyed gunships smash across the ground alongside the monsoon of lethal stone.
A blow crashes into Grimaldus, the sudden crash staggering him. It was no rockfall: Reclusiarch Mordred looms above him, coldness staring out from the red eye-lenses of his silver skull facade.
‘It is a sin most foul,’ the warrior-priest growls, ‘to steal a Chaplain’s weapon.’
Grimaldus stares up at the Reclusiarch from the ground. Instinct almost has him launch back to his feet and throw himself at his attacker, but temperance prevails at the heart of the rock storm.
‘I thought you were dead.’
Mordred doesn’t reply. He holds out his hand, waiting with insane, silent patience as the world falls down around them.
‘That is all?’ asked Ekene. The Lions were all watching me.
‘That was how the battle ended.’
‘So you earned the skull-smile through valour.’
I did not know the answer, myself. Mordred had always ignored the question when I had asked it, considering it meaningless. The result matters, he always replied, not the decisions made to reach it.
‘I was one of the last still standing at the gate. I was the first to sense the change within Vinculus, and act with Mordred. I guarded my liege lord’s life with the Chaplain’s weapon, and pulled Ludoldus back from the chasm’s edge.’
‘Those acts look fine on a roll of honour,’ Ekene said. The Pride Leader was no fool. He could tell I was holding something back. ‘But I sense there is more.’
‘There is,’ I admitted. ‘Nothing of drama and heroism. Just a moment of curiosity I have never been able to set aside.’
Only two gunships remain.
The first rises on protesting engines, whining for altitude as the boulders fall. One moment it lifts from the crumbling ground, landing gear folding closed in a clanking chorus of technology – the next it detonates in a heartsick flash of promethium fuel. Its wreckage, crushed beneath a toppled pillar, gives an animal-corpse twitch as its engines die.
The last gunship breathes lung-burning jet wash as it begins its own rise. The last knights run and leap for the gangramp, hauled up by their waiting brothers.
‘The void,’ orders Ludoldus, breathing heavily with his back to the cargo bay wall. ‘Get us into the void, Artarion.’ The pilot voxes acknowledgement as the Thunderhawk climbs higher.
‘Grimaldus.’ The High Marshal rests back next to Mordred, his weathered features in stark contrast to the Chaplain’s cadaverous faceplate.
‘Sire?’ Grimaldus replies.
‘You are the last of my knights still wearing a red cloak.’
For a moment, the knight hesitates, almost arguing that it cannot be true. But he stood with the High Marshal watching the survivors evacuate, unwilling to leave the field of battle before his men and their allies. He saw no other Sword Brothers among the living.
‘That may be true, sire.’
‘It is true.’ Ludoldus turns to Mordred. ‘I told you fate favoured him, did I not?’
Mordred says nothing, just staring with that skullish grin.
The Lions nodded among themselves, sharing smiles.
‘Not just valour, then,’ Ekene ventured. ‘Luck, as well. You were marked out from your brothers by fortune as well as ferocity.’
‘It is a possibility,’ I confessed. ‘Mordred was a mercurial soul. I have never known why he chose me.’
‘Or why he was told to choose you.’
‘Or… what?’ In all my life, I was so rarely speechless. That night, I felt my words and breath both catch in my throat.
Why he was told to choose you. As I was told to choose Cyneric.
‘I meant no offence,’ Ekene replied.
‘None offered, and none taken.’ I almost smiled, though they would never have seen it even if I had. My faceplate – Mordred’s faceplate before it was mine – revealed nothing of emotion. ‘My tale is told, cousins.’
‘Not enough blood,’ one of them said, earning agreement from his brothers.
‘And yet another reason never to trust the weak little souls claiming inquisitor rank,’ said Ekene. That earned another few chuckles. ‘I would, however, have engaged the beast myself. Blade to claw.’
‘Of course,’ the other Lions join in, with good-natured growls.
I was starting to realise the informality in their ranks was not one of ill-discipline, but unreserved brotherhood. Curious, how two Chapters from the same gene-stock can be so different. Birth world meant everything to these warriors. To the Templars, almost nothing.
‘So, cousins,’ I said. ‘I have paid your toll. Tell me what I wish to know. Speak of Khattar.’
V
Death Sentence
‘Khattar.’ Ekene made a curse of th
e name.
‘Khattar,’ several of the others echoed. They were unhelmed, their dark faces bronzed by the flames. As rank and file troopers, they seemed reluctant to look at me for long. I caught them making occasional glances in my direction, at my tabard, heraldry, or the polished silver of my skull faceplate.
‘That was no war,’ one of them said.
‘Nothing but a slaughter,’ chimed another, from the other side of the fire. Their way of retelling tales seemed be almost ritualistic. Every voice was equal. Everyone’s story mattered.
Ekene was leading the storytelling gathering. ‘I was never present at meetings of Chapter command,’ he said. ‘But I was there. I was on Khattar.’
‘I was there,’ the others chorused, in their low voices.
Around us, Lions patrolled between the hulls of the few remaining tanks left to the Chapter. The vehicles were worn down by gunfire, with smoke taint darkening their cerulean paintwork. Ekene and his brothers could have been spirits themselves, drifting among the memories of their dead Chapter.
‘Khattar was a world of priests and preachers,’ he began. ‘Of followers and the faithful.’
‘An Ecclesiarchy world,’ I said. They did not regard it as interruption. Most of them nodded, and Ekene smiled.
‘As you say, Reclusiarch. A world in thrall to the ivory tower priests of the Imperial Creed.’
‘But it soured,’ one of the others added. From the scrollwork on his shoulderguard, the warrior’s name was Jehanu. He looked young, scarcely out of his Scout trials. Space Marines show their age in their scars.
‘Their faith rotted on the vine,’ Jehanu said. ‘And they called for us.’
‘The priesthood fell into deviancy,’ Ekene took over, ‘as so many do, in so many of our tales in this Final Age of Man. They prayed to the Gods behind the Veil, and their dark untruths carried the faithful masses away from the Emperor’s light, spreading to the highest echelons and furthest reaches.’
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