by Ben Counter
‘We have not the time,’ said Lycaon.
‘Of course, Chaplain,’ voxed the Techmarine.
Inside the tower was foul-smelling and dark. The floor was spongy underfoot and Lysander looked down to see it caked with dried remains, whether human or not he could not tell – a crust of parchment skin, stringy muscle fibre and brittle bones that crunched as the strike force’s squads moved through the gloom. The walls were plastered with it and twisted limbs hung from the low ceilings like stalactites.
‘What manner of obscenity is this?’ voxed Devastator-Sergeant Gorvetz.
‘Witchcraft,’ said First Sergeant Kaderic.
Lysander moved through the lower floor of the tower alongside Squad Kaderic. His augmented eyes could see through the dark but even so the place seemed fuzzy and indistinct, as if his mind did not want to acknowledge the sheer number of bodies needed to create the carnage in which the siege tower was steeped. He saw a fully-formed body in the centre of one wall, spread-eagled, the chest and abdomen pared open. He saw distorted faces and familiar bones – pelvises, vertebrae, femurs.
Lysander caught movement from the corner of his eye. A Space Marine’s peripheral vision was excellent but he couldn’t give the shape form as it flitted out of view. Lysander’s bolter was in his hand without him having to will it.
‘The multiplicity of hearts means cardiac arrest is not an issue,’ said a voice that knifed right through Lysander’s memory.
Lysander broke into a run. The voice had come from the shadows up ahead, which clung to an archway leading deeper into the body of the tower. Lysander crunched through the bodies and through the archway, and in a shaft of light falling from a rupture in the side of the tower he saw a silhouette.
It wore ornate armour with curving shoulder guards, a high helm with just the gleam of twin eyeslits to suggest a face, and a wide cape hanging from one shoulder.
‘So restraint, not anaesthesia, is the only concern,’ came the voice again.
Lysander opened fire. He did not send the thought down to his trigger finger. The signal came from somewhere in the animal hindbrain that even a Space Marine’s training could not fully erase.
Half a dozen bolter shells ripped across the chamber. In the strobing light the interior was revealed – a chapel, the pews forged of shoulder blades and craniums lashed together with ropes of dried sinew. Severed hands hung in their hundreds from the vaulted ceiling, and on the altar at the head of the chapel sat a statue of some warp-spawned lesser god, squatting like a toad with a face that dripped with spiny tentacles. It held up four webbed hands with an eyeball in each palm. Stray bolter shots burst against its green stone, blasting chunks of its misshapen skull onto the floor.
The silhouette was gone, as if it had been nothing but smoke blown away by the gunfire.
Squad Kaderic stormed into the chapel behind Lysander, bolters sweeping every angle.
‘What have you seen, brother?’ demanded Kaderic.
‘Movement,’ said Lysander, lowering his bolter. ‘It is gone.’
‘Chaplain!’ came a vox over the strike force channel. It was Sergeant Gorvetz. ‘We are picking up phantom signals on the auspex scanner, but we may have found the source.’
The strike force gathered one floor up, where Gorvetz had found the origin of the signals his auspex scanner had registered. A great mass of brains, old and decayed but human in size and shape, hung from one wall like a huge bunch of rotting berries. A thin sheen of moisture covered them and each brain pulsed, almost imperceptibly, as if veins received blood from somewhere.
‘Tech-heresy,’ said Chaplain Lycaon when he saw the obscenity. ‘This must have been what controlled the war machine. Lysander?’
‘Without doubt,’ said Lysander.
‘Gorvetz!’ ordered Lycaon, and the Devastator-Sergeant needed no further elaboration. He ordered forward Brother Antinas, who carried his squad’s heavy flamer. The weapon was hooked up to a pair of fuel canisters on Antinas’s backpack, and required a Space Marine of Antinas’s training to carry and use while minimising the risk to his fellow Imperial Fists of such a weapon. The other Space Marines stepped back as Antinas sprayed the cluster of brains with a gout of flame, the burning fuel coating them and instantly causing them to shrivel away, their mass disappearing in the sudden yellow glare.
The darkness seemed to lift – not just because of the light, but inside Lysander. He saw in full clarity now, and the seething shadows that clung to everything receded.
‘Can you feel it?’ said First Sergeant Kaderic. ‘The shadows die away.’
‘We have exterminated a moral threat here,’ said Lycaon. ‘It will not be the first we find. Brothers, we move on. Kho! Are we clear on the far side?’
‘Clear, Chaplain,’ voxed Techmarine Kho in reply.
‘Then we leave this place,’ said Lycaon.
The strike force forged through what remained of the siege tower, sticking close as they forced through the far side of the tower, out among the spiked wheels embedded in the ground below.
Brother Halaestus sought out Lysander. ‘What did you see, captain?’ he asked.
‘Nothing,’ said Lysander. ‘And what did you see?’
Halaestus did not reply, and the strike force moved on out of the shadow of the siege tower.
4
‘An inquisitor must respect his acolytes. He must care deeply for them, as if they were members of his own family, for he has a responsibility for them that goes beyond that of a master and his underlings. But he must also be willing to pitch those acolytes into the worst peril that a human mind can imagine. Few can do it. Fewer still do not fall prey to malice, tossing aside human lives for amusement or to prove superiority. My acolytes, then, must sometimes be sacrificed in the name of something greater than any of us, but it is always with sorrow that I cast them into the path of danger. I trust that each understands that, when his time comes.’
– Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan
The fortress of Kulgarde was haunted. They were old ghosts, as ancient as Malodrax itself, and they remembered the times when the planet was not a deformed plaything of the warp. They remembered its beauty and purity, and the glee with which the dark gods despoiled it.
They clustered around Lysander like flies around decay. They sensed the desperation in him. A Space Marine was created to know no fear, but he could still recognise hopelessness when it came, he could still feel the black hole of a future cut off with no way to get it back. It was not fear that Lysander felt, but something equally cold. Every push against the restraints was a hollow gesture, every curse he voiced was like spitting into a bottomless pit.
He could see the ghosts of Malodrax now, hovering around the anatomy theatre. They were a hollow-faced, spindly species of xenos, wearing the tatters of finery that spoke of a proud and wealthy civilisation. Perhaps they were cousins to the thing that prepared to operate on Lysander now, a thousand generations removed, debased and enslaved by the lords who had taken over Malodrax after it fell.
Lysander’s body tensed, his spine arching, as the circular blade bit into his sternum. Pain meant nothing, but weakness did, and as his body was mutilated he would lose the strength that made him a Space Marine.
‘You will witness shortly that a Space Marine possesses two hearts,’ said the xenos leading the demonstration from the viewing gallery. ‘The multiplicity of hearts means cardiac arrest is not an issue, so restraint, not anaesthesia, is the only concern.’
The surgeon peeled back a patch of skin from Lysander’s sternum, revealing the slab of bone that made up his internal breastplate. It was made of fused ribs, created among the bone and muscle changes caused by the action of the gene-seed organs. The circular saw was withdrawn and the alien now wielded a long, sharp blade, like a stiletto with a double edge.
The alien aimed the point down at one of the joins in the breastplat
e, where two plates of bone joined. The blade was forced down into the joint, the blade twisted to force it open a little. Blood flowed, obscuring the white bone.
Lysander drew in his breath in a sharp hiss. His arms were manacled above his head and he forced his head round, trying to find some way of getting at the lock holding his wrists. He could almost reach it with his teeth, but the lock was just beyond his reach and he couldn’t touch it without dislocating his neck. And what if he could? He couldn’t bite through it. If he could reach it he would try, but he knew it would do no good.
Black pits of eyes looked down at him. The ghosts were watching as intently as the mutants and the xenos in the viewing gallery, as if this was the only entertainment they had in their half-lives.
Lysander had to try. That was its own reward. He would make them work at killing him, and he would fight to the end.
The blade was drawn up his chest. He felt it paring the skin away. Here and there it juddered as it met a particularly dense patch of bone.
It was almost at Lysander’s throat.
‘Removal of the internal breastplate,’ the lead xenos was saying, ‘will reveal both the organ tree and the seat of the progenoid gland. The fabled gene-seed, seat of a Space Marine’s prowess. In all the galaxy there is nothing so valuable, there is no weapon so potent.’
With a tiny metallic sound, the blade snapped off its handle. The surgeon hissed annoyedly and turned to a rack of implements behind it to find a replacement.
Lysander forced his head forwards. He could just see the blade sticking out, just below his collarbone.
His neck muscles strained as he bent his head further. His windpipe was compressed and he could not breathe. He felt the sharp metal against his lower lip and closed his teeth around the broken stub of the blade. Wrenching his head back, he pulled the blade from his chest, the sliver of pain he felt there a welcome reminder that he still lived.
The ghosts looked on. One tilted its head a little, as if in curiosity. Another opened its mouth, revealing the black void inside, perhaps in surprise, perhaps that species’ equivalent of a smile.
The blade slid into the manacle’s keyhole. The key would be simple, the manacle made for strength not complexity. A child could pick it. Lysander told himself this as he forced his head around to twist the shard of metal in the lock.
It wouldn’t budge.
The surgeon looked back round, its eyes and nose-slit widening in alarm.
The metal twisted. The lock snickered open.
Certain assumptions could be made about a xenos which was largely humanoid. For instance, very few such creatures could live without whatever organ was protected inside its cranium. A Space Marine knew this, because he had to possess all the knowledge necessary to make him the most efficient killer of any foe, including a xenos of a previously unknown species.
Lysander put this knowledge to use when his newly freed hand closed around the surgeon’s throat and lower jaw. He squeezed, his augmented strength giving him a grip powerful enough to splinter the alien’s jawbone. Its upper jaw cracked and its face distorted and narrowed.
The alien struggled in his grip, flopping around from its neck. Lysander crushed its throat, his hand now balled into a fist, and dashed the alien against the ground.
Shrieks rose from the viewing gallery. The alien orator leaned against the smudged glass, and Lysander could make out the stylised, inhuman features of its faceplate, the emerald eyepieces and the dark-green marbled substance of its armour. Lysander met the alien’s gaze.
‘I will come back, alien!’ said Lysander as he forced himself into a sitting position and grabbed the chain that held his ankles with both hands. ‘And I will find you first!’
Lysander ripped the chains out of the operating slab, the sundered links falling to the tiled floor.
Alien mandibles were clicking in alarm. Audients were fleeing the viewing gallery. Lysander swung off the slab and his bare feet touched the floor.
He ached all over. It was good. His body still worked. It was the only weapon he had. That changed a second later as he grabbed the most vicious-looking implement off the rack of medical tools on the wall. It was an autopsy knife, long, straight, double-edged, flimsy in a fight but definitely capable of killing. It was still next to nothing compared to the power armour, hammer and bolter that he wielded by choice. But it would have to do.
Lysander gave the operating theatre one last look before he shouldered his way through the only door. The alien surgeon’s blood was warm and sticky under his feet.
The medical wing of the fortress stretched around him. Ceiling-high tanks contained creatures the shape of adult humans, naked and half-developed, features soft and skin translucent, wound around with cables and hoses. The orderly creatures, hunched and robed, with their elongated faces like masks of gnarled bone, were working on wall-mounted racks of bloodstained steel where alien and human bodies were chained up in various stages of dissection. The place stank of old blood and rang with the reedy moans from waist-high cages stacked up in the corners, issuing trickles of filth collected by the drainage channels cut into the stained floor.
Lysander grabbed the closest orderly, yanking it off its feet and hurling it into the nearest glass tank. It crashed through the glass and into the wall, the half-formed body inside spilling out onto the floor. Its face was barely there, as if made of clay with the features just pushed in by a sculptor’s fingers. Its musculature, however, was that of a Space Marine, as were the scars of puckered white skin that ran across its back and chest. The implications were too grave for Lysander to give them any thought now.
The orderlies ran in every direction, recognising the escaped prisoner who should have been dissected on the slab. One snatched up a flensing knife and ran at Lysander, who knocked the blade aside with his forearm, the red line of pain along his wrist barely registering as he jammed the autopsy knife up into the orderly’s throat. The tip broke through the bony exoskeleton and punched through whatever passed for the creature’s brain. It shuddered and fell still, and Lysander dropped it to the ground.
The medical wing was madness. Brass-cased engines belched smoke as they rendered alien and human down into fat and paste. Prisoners, whether human or not Lysander could not tell, shrieked and rattled their cages as he ran through the wards and laboratories. The few orderlies who got in his path were beaten out of the way, necks broken or skulls crushed, and Lysander found a heavy wrench-like implement to fight with when his autopsy blade broke. He could hear the sounds of alarm in the distance – news of his escape had surely reached the Iron Warriors, who would be moving every spare Traitor Marine to intercept him.
The Iron Warriors were disciplined, but the opposite reflection of their orderliness was in the areas of the fortress left to their underlings and xenos allies. It was chaos down here, in its purest form. Lysander saw aliens of the surgeon’s lanky, diseased species, and realised they must be what remained of Malodrax’s natives. He saw the ghosts of their fallen civilisation, clustering around the corners of the ceiling among the shadows and spiders’ webs.
The exoskeletoned creatures, artificial serf-constructs made by the Iron Warriors to tend to their fortress, teemed in the winding corridors and fled from him as he approached. In side chambers, humans with more scar tissue than original skin lay among heaps of trash and rags. A great cauldron of body parts churned, tended by skinny, filthy humans with their eyes and tongues torn out. Shrines to lesser powers of the warp were heaped with offerings – raw meat, broken pieces of gold, bones, weapons, organs in glass jars. Some stretches of this wing were pitch-black, or ice-cold, or scorchingly hot, and every corner seemed to have some broken-minded and insane inhabitant whose mutilations and insanity crossed the border between alien and human.
Lysander survived three days in the sweltering filth that lay beneath the medical wing. The blood and gore that dripped into the drains
of the wards and operating theatres ran down here, into a great sump of decay. An underground sea of bubbling black-red filth stretched along a wide, low natural cave, and here the lowest scum of Kulgarde had been banished. Shanties of trash and scrap metal sat on pontoons of worm-eaten wood that would sink or capsize, throwing another handful of diseased mutants into the filth. Blind serpentine predators nipped at dangling legs and hands, and in the half-light of bioluminescent fungi these subhumans lived out short, brutal lives of dark madness.
Lysander’s stature as a Space Marine meant that he could not pretend to be one of the skinny, malnourished creatures that had presumably once been workers in the Iron Warriors forges. But some mutants were hulking as well as deformed, with massive shoulders and hunched bodies that, if they stood upright, would have caused their heads to brush against the cavern ceiling. Upon arriving in the sump Lysander had seen one such brute-mutant devouring one of normal human size, while others lay prostrate and watched, and surmised that the brutes were the leadership caste in what passed for a society down here. He found filthy rags to wear and went hunched. Regular mutants scattered at his approach and he avoided the brutes, but even so, it was only a matter of time before he was recognised as something other than one of this place’s mutant dregs.
And it was unclean. As foul a place as he had ever been. This place did not just house mutants – it made them, the accumulation of effluent and chemicals enough to warp even a Space Marine’s genetics until he was one of the accursed, given enough time.
On the third day there was a great commotion, a shrieking and gabbling among the mutants. They gathered on shanty roofs to watch a collection of lights approaching from the cave’s darkest reaches. Lysander watched from a distance, feeling the flimsy boards under his feet churning as the filth was stirred up.
The lights were lanterns hung from a flotilla of a dozen boats, carved and ornate, painted with gilt and bright colours. They were punted through the mire by figures in hoods and robes dyed deep crimson, and among them moved things that resembled the medical servitors that Lysander was used to seeing in Imperial medical facilities. A servitor was a machine created from human parts, such as from condemned criminals or pious souls who bequeathed their remains. Its brain was imprinted with a simple set of commands and its limbs augmented with mechanical devices appropriate to its purpose. The servitors on the flotilla had human torsos, wheeled or tracked motivator units in place of legs, and several jointed metal arms tipped with syringes, blades, saws and other implements of surgery or dismemberment. The biological parts were discoloured and blistered with disease and the steel was stained with old blood.