by Ben Counter
Lysander looked around him. He had taken shelter in a large shanty that had, by the size and smell, been inhabited by a brute that was now absent. No lesser mutants had dared to squat there and Lysander reasoned that if the owner returned he could deal with him – a good hiding place was worth that risk. Outside the shanty, at the corner of the pontoon, knelt one of the sump’s countless mutants. It wore a loincloth and its skin was pallid, covered in purplish rashes from which tiny white worms hatched in a weeping of pus. Lysander darted out of the shanty and grabbed the mutant by the scruff of the neck.
It had four eyes, arranged around a mouth in the centre of its face. Lysander hauled it off its feet and held it level with him.
‘What is this?’ he demanded of the mutant.
The mutant’s eyes rolled in fear. Lysander raised it up higher and held it over the churning gore. ‘What is this?’ he asked again. ‘Who approaches?’
‘Prisoners,’ squealed the mutant. ‘Taken from above! Thul’s prisoners! Some he sends to the Bone Sculptors to be used. The Sculptors’ isle is across the black ocean. The ferrymen take them there.’
Lysander looked again at the flotilla. The boats were painted with the eyes and teeth of monsters, like fanciful versions of the predators that snaked through the gore.
The ferrymen stopped pushing the flotilla forwards and turned to haul ropes and chains attached to wooden contraptions in the centre of each boat. The mutants began to cheer, wailing and clapping as if they were watching the return of a great hero.
A pole, like a mast, was drawn upright from inside each boat. To each was tied a body. Some were clearly dead, and they were unmutated humans as far as Lysander could tell – their skin an odd pale-pink colour, wearing straps of red leather in place of clothing, their faces – where they had faces – obscured by dark blue tattoos. One had been disembowelled, another’s skull stove in. Some others were alive, and their heads lolled as if barely aware of their surroundings. Another was like the brute-mutants of the sump, and a great cry of glee went up from the mutants when it was raised. Its skin was scaly, its face a brutal blunt snout, and it roared as the ferrymen goaded it with barbed pikes. Other mutants included one with the lower body of a snake, another with clusters of vestigial heads bulging from its stomach, and another with vividly patterned skin and curving horns.
The last three prisoners made Lysander’s stomach churn, though he had known somehow he would see them. Three Space Marines – three Imperial Fists.
Brother Skelpis, the stump of his leg bound with filthy leather strips.
Brother Halaestus, still conscious, beaten and bloody, patches of his skin burned or pared off. Lysander could see his mouth moving as he yelled and though he could not hear the words, he knew they were curses from the limits of a Space Marine’s vocabulary.
Brother Vonkaal, with iron spikes impaled through both thighs and upper arms, unconscious like Skelpis.
And one who did not live – Brother Drevyn, the two halves of his bisected corpse hanging like obscene decorations from a crossbar nailed to the mast, entrails hanging in red ropes.
It had not been enough to wipe out the greater part of the First Company. No, the Iron Warriors had to take their trophies, and parade them as if they were banners captured in war.
The flotilla passed by Lysander’s vantage point, and he saw the crew jabbing at the Imperial Fists prisoners with barbed polearms, to the shrieking delight of the onlookers.
‘What happens at the Sculptors’ isle?’ demanded Lysander of his prisoner. The prisoner squirmed and whimpered, and its eyes rolled back to their whites.
‘What do the Bone Sculptors do?’ he asked again.
The mutant was insensible with fear. Lysander threw it aside and it clattered through a wall of his shanty.
Lysander watched the flotilla’s lights pass by the settlement in the sump. Then he dismantled the shanty, selecting one wall that seemed wide and sturdy enough to support his weight on its own. Going by the length of the punting poles used by the flotilla’s crew, he found a length of wood long enough to reach the bed of the sump. He pushed off from the platform on this makeshift raft, poling in the direction the flotilla had gone.
As the light died and his vision struggled to pick out the shifting murk in monochrome, Lysander became aware of the predators that lived in those filthy waters oozing along in the wake of his raft. When they strayed too close, he batted them aside with a strike of the pole, and they gave him a wider berth for a while. Great dark shapes loomed by, segments of war machines that had fallen down from above in some long-ago collapse. Chunks of the fortress’s foundations lay half-submerged. He even passed a shipwreck, a barge something like the flotilla’s in design but far larger, its bow reaching up above the surface, a few gnawed bones still lying on the stone blocks where it had foundered.
Far above, through a tear in the cavern ceiling, glowed the dull fires of a forge. Acidic rain stung Lysander’s skin. The low, titanic moans reached him of the fortress above settling lower into the sump.
Lysander saw lights ahead and slowed down. The lights resolved into lanterns hung about a rocky island in the filth, on which was built a temple of standing stones smooth with age. Enormous bestial heads carved in stone loomed over the temple, staring out across the black sea. The flotilla had moored and its crew were taking their prisoners down off the masts and carrying them onto the island.
As Lysander watched, from the temple emerged the first of the Bone Sculptors. It bore some resemblance to the exoskeletoned orderlies in the fortress’s medical wing. But where those were hunched and feeble, this was far taller and glided with a strange elegance as it approached the prisoners being unloaded. Its head resembled three long animal skulls attached base to base, with three sets of eye sockets, mandibles, and rows of white teeth. Additional limbs, half mechanical and half bone, reached from beneath its heavy black robes, each tipped with a syringe or blade. Others followed it out, each a different form of the same horror.
And flanking the Bone Sculptors were a pair of Iron Warriors Space Marines, in the functional gunmetal of their Legion’s livery, armed with bolter and chainsword. Lysander knew that even with arms and armour, it would be throwing his life away to storm the island alone. He would die and his battle-brothers would lose any chance of escape.
It wrenched at him to leave them there. Perhaps they would be executed the instant they passed the temple threshold. Perhaps, once he left this place, he would never find a way back in. But his fellow Imperial Fists would benefit nothing if Lysander died there.
Lysander pushed the raft away from the island into the darkness before he was noticed by the Iron Warriors guarding the temple.
He swore silently that he would return, soon, and on his own terms. And when he did, for whatever evil they planned to inflict on his brothers, the Bone Sculptors would die.
5
‘My intention of authoring a natural history and sociology of Malodrax, and charting of its various lifeforms and inhabitants and the relationships thereof, was scuppered when I understood for the first time the nature of life on this world. On a sane planet, one species predates on another, one nation conquers its neighbour or is conquered. Peoples wax and wane, empires rise and fall. Not so on Malodrax. Malodrax resists even the simplest attempts of holy logic to govern its histories. In fact, I will say that it has no history, instead an infinite tumult of conflict and death that started at its birth and stretches to the Time of Ending.’
– Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan
The first sight of the enemy was the glint of Malodrax’s sun off the lenses of their rifle scopes.
It was an alien sun that rose suddenly, a small, hot orb whose light burned through the discoloured clouds, picking out the broken land in a chemical white light while leaving the shadows even darker. The strike force could do little in response save bring Techmarine Kho’s Land Speeders in even lo
wer to the ground, to keep the skimmers’ telltale movement from giving them away at a distance.
But in spite of their precautions, the Imperial Fists knew they would be found. It was the Emperor’s own fortune that they had made it this far, the better part of a day and a half, without being seen.
‘I have contacts, brother-Chaplain,’ voxed Techmarine Kho from ahead of the strike force. ‘Several, half a kilometre north-west of us.’
Chaplain Lycaon held up a fist and the strike force halted, suddenly ready to open fire or charge any enemy that showed itself. Lycaon gestured to Lysander and scrambled up the side of the shallow valley through which the strike force had been moving. Lysander followed Lycaon and dropped onto his front, crawling up the slope until he reached the crest and could see what Kho had reported.
White glints flickered along a ridge several hundred metres away. Lysander focused on one and saw the form of a head and shoulders – a figure, sighting down the barrel of a gun. One rose slightly to change position, perhaps aware the strike force had suddenly stopped. Lysander caught a glimpse of pale-pinkish skin, and a partially shaven scalp which had a fringe of feathers instead of hair. The gun was an ornate hunting rifle with a scope. The owner was wearing leather straps wrapping around his torso and upper arms, and goggles obscuring his face.
‘Do you know them?’ asked Lycaon.
‘Yes,’ said Lysander. ‘Cultists of Shalhadar.’
‘The daemon prince?’
‘The same.’
Lycaon spat into the dark earth. ‘Is he a threat?’
‘If he learns of us,’ said Lysander, ‘then yes, he definitely is. These lands are contested between Shalhadar and Kulgarde. Shalhadar will see us as invaders as much as Kraegon Thul would.’
The cultist scouts were moving now, disappearing from view behind the ridge.
‘Kho!’ voxed Lycaon. ‘Bring your speeders down and pick up Lysander and I. We are to the hunt!’
Kho’s Land Speeder bore the name Dorn’s Dagger, and was the oldest such machine in the Imperial Fists armoury. It was therefore the fastest and most reliable, with a machine-spirit housed in an archeotech core that compensated for wayward piloting and kept the vehicle arrowing straight and fast as it flew. Kho occupied the pilot’s seat, his mechadendrites folded back behind him to reduce drag, sub-manipulators in his gauntlets clattering across the complex dashboard while he concentrated on banking and throttling. Lysander sat beside him in the gunner’s seat, the heavy bolter in front of him on its mountings.
The wind shrieked as Dorn’s Dagger rode up to the crest of the slope and accelerated, the anti-grav units underneath letting out a deep hum to complement the hollow roar from the jets at the rear.
‘The Dagger has not hunted for many a month,’ Techmarine Kho said. His face was hidden behind the faceplate of his red-painted artificer armour, and the cogitator array of valves and circuits on his chest whirred rapidly as it calculated endless angles of approach and attack. ‘Let us get her blooded, captain. It is time this world began to suffer.’
The landscape ripped by, the Dagger rising and falling barely enough to keep it from barking its underside on the rocky ridges hurtling below. Lysander knelt up on the gunner’s seat, leaning into the bulk of the heavy bolter, cycling its action to check the load and playing its sights across the horizon.
Movement glimmered below. A creature ran in long, loping strides, a tail swinging out behind it for balance and a tapering head angled out in front. A rider, one of the cultist scouts, clung on, pressed low against the beast’s back for stability with his rifle slung on his back. The creature was galloping towards a knot of rocky outcrops, a miniature mountain range with passes and valleys running through it, surrounded by tilting slabs of shattered ground.
‘I see it!’ said Kho, speaking over the vox as the howl of the wind and the engines made normal speech inaudible. ‘Rain steel, brother!’
Lysander squeezed the firing stud as he held the sights steady just in front of the beast. The weapon bucked in his grip and he leaned into it harder, keeping it steady as another chain of shots ripped off. The beast was struck in the shoulder, blasting a ragged hole right through it. Its head pitched into the ground and it cartwheeled, throwing its rider spinning out of the saddle to crash broken against the rocks.
The second Land Speeder, the Talon Blade, swept around from the other side of the outcrop, its nose-mounted assault cannon hammering at a trio of scouts scrambling on foot up a rocky slope for the cover of a cave. Chaplain Lycaon was in the Talon’s cockpit alongside Kho’s fellow pilot, Brother Gethor, operating the multi-melta the Talon’s gunner used. While it was better for boring holes through tanks than chasing down fleeing infantry, a multi-melta’s concentrated heat beam was just as effective at ending a pursuit if it hit home. Assault cannon shots blasted one cultist apart, sending a shattered leg spiralling away in a spray of blood, while a beam of superheated particles carved a deep molten furrow across the rock that bisected a second cultist through the mid-torso.
The last cultist dropped to a knee and fired off a shot at the Talon Blade. Perhaps he hit, perhaps he didn’t – it mattered little because the armour of the Land Speeder and the Space Marines crewing it were enough to turn aside the shot, and the cultist was punched through by a half-dozen assault cannon shots an instant later.
‘Brother-Chaplain, do you see any more?’ voxed Lysander.
‘None,’ said Lycaon. ‘Fly a tight sweep, and watch for them doubling back. None can be permitted to reach Shalhadar.’
The two Land Speeders circumnavigated the outcrop. The Talon shot down two more riders as they fled from behind a couple of fallen boulders. Lysander spotted a cultist on foot, and Kho shot him down with the Dagger’s assault cannon before Lysander could bring his heavy bolter to bear.
‘There,’ said Lysander pointing to a ridge a couple of hundred metres west of the outcrop. A cultist rode up over a ridge and disappeared down the reverse slope.
‘We pursue,’ said Kho, and the Dagger arrowed at full speed in the direction of the fugitive.
Lysander held the heavy bolter level as best he could. Below him the assault cannon on the Land Speeder’s nose stitched a spray of gunfire along the ground just behind the rider. Lysander could make out the rider was not just another cultist. Perhaps he was a leader of their kind, going by the headdress he wore with silk pennants rippling in the wind behind him and the large wicker panniers on the beast he rode. Lysander squeezed off a ranging shot of his own and it fell just short.
The rider’s path took him down into the kind of narrow broken valleys the strike force had used to conceal their march. Each time the rider passed through Lysander’s sights he vanished behind the slope of a rise or a finger of shattered rock.
‘The Dagger does not lose her prey,’ said Kho, his voice calm even though he was sending the Land Speeder jinking a few metres above ground level, swinging between outcrops of rock.
Lysander caught a flash of pallid skin and bucking animal between the rocks. Instinct forced his finger down on the firing stud. The heavy bolter kicked and Lysander saw the broken limbs of the riding beast flailing as it flipped over and smacked into a boulder. Bright red spray painted the side of the rock.
‘He’s down,’ voxed Lysander. ‘Bank us around to confirm.’
Dorn’s Dagger swept up and banked, looping around to approach the downed rider from the other direction, slowing as it did so.
The rider had sprawled onto the ground, and was crawling back towards the broken remains of his beast. Lysander opened fire and caught the rider in the shoulder, blowing an arm clean off.
The rider reached the beast. With his remaining arm he unfastened a clasp on the side of a pannier and pulled the lid open.
A cloud of dozens of tiny bright shapes fluttered upwards, billowing towards the sky.
Birds, trailing bright plumage as t
hey flew.
‘Shoot them down!’ voxed Lysander. ‘All of them!’
He fired his heavy bolter into the flock. The assault cannon did the same. Tiny bodies burst into nothing. But there was so many of them and they flew off in every direction, too small and numerous to pick out with the Land Speeder’s weapons.
The Talon Blade reached them a moment later, but the single beam of the multi-melta was even less use. Fully half the flock dispersed into the air, beyond the strike force’s reach.
The two Land Speeders rejoined the rest of the strike force, dropping back down near ground level to reduce their profile. Lysander vaulted out of the gunner’s seat, hands still tingling from the heavy bolter’s recoil. Chaplain Lycaon dismounted the Talon Blade, his gauntlets scorched by the heat coming off the multi-melta. ‘What did they release?’ he asked Lysander.
‘Messenger birds,’ replied Lysander. ‘It is how Shalhadar’s forces communicate over a distance. He will have news of our arrival before the sun goes down.’
Lysander walked up the slope and looked west towards the horizon. The strange sun that had lit the hour was setting and its harsh light glittered against the distant hills. Among them it picked out tall slender towers and minarets, high walls cutting through foothills and mountains, thousands of banners fluttering. ‘There,’ he said. ‘The city. It dominates this land along with Kulgarde. It has an army hundreds of thousands strong, so it was said. Cultists and daemons, all answering to the city’s master.’