by Ben Counter
Somewhere in the chaos Lysander landed. The noise barely died down as the siege idol ground forwards ahead of him. He had come to rest just past the vault’s back wall, where the structure of the fortress had given way to smaller chambers now torn through and shattered by the idol’s passage. Among the rubble he could see an eclectic mix of war trophies – captured banners, weapons and armour, scattered and crushed by the sudden destruction. Lysander waved away the worst of the rubble dust choking him and a bright silver gleam caught his eye – the polished chrome casing of an alien weapon, like an oversized rifle with a barrel made up of interlocking crystal shards. He recognised one of the banners on the wall, embroidered with the rose and skulls of an order of the Sisters of Battle, hanging beside a crude rendering of a stylised bestial head probably taken from a defeated ork warlord.
Lysander rummaged through the debris. The Iron Warriors kept captured arms and armour here, and there might well be something he could use. Even if he got out of Kulgarde into Malodrax, he would have a far better chance of surviving whatever the planet had to throw at him if he was armed.
He threw aside another alien firearm, something like a multi-barrelled cannon with barrels consisting of living wormlike creatures stretched out over a black steel hub. A sword he found had been fine once, but the falling masonry had shattered its long, elegant blade – he thought it might have been alien in design, too, perhaps a weapon of the eldar, or a particularly fine example of pre-Imperial craftsmanship.
A warmth rose in both his hearts as his hands closed on a familiar hilt. A chainsword – an Imperial Fists chainsword, taken from one of his squad. He held it up and gave himself a second to look along its length, the golden livery and fist symbol of his Chapter emblazoned on the weapon’s casing. It was undamaged, its chainteeth still bright and sharp.
The sound of something huge landing among the debris behind him was all the warning Lysander got. By the time he turned to see his assailant a meaty fist clubbed into him and threw him aside. He kept his grip on the chainsword but felt his arm pinned as Overseer Gortz leapt on top of him.
Gortz’s torso had split open and from his back had grown a new limb to replace the arms broken by Lysander moments before. It was sinewy and raw, the skinless muscle oozing blood, but it was strong and its malformed hand was gripping Lysander’s sword arm.
Gortz roared as his battered face, too, split open. A second set of jaws, with an array of sharp teeth, was forced out of the front of his skull. He was mutating second by second, the second jaws opening wider than his humanoid mouth could have, revealing a wet red tendril of a tongue.
Lysander groped in the rubble with his free hand, trying to find a chunk of stone. Instead he found something less weighty but just the right size for his hand. He brought it up, smacking it into the side of Gortz’s mutating head.
It was a book. The metal fastenings and lock gave it a hard edge, and the thousands of pages were packed densely enough to give it weight. Attached to it was a chain, as if it could be hung from a belt or looped over a shoulder. Lysander changed his grip to the chain and swung it like a flail, battering Gortz’s head back two, three times. One of the fittings came away, embedded in the side of the mutant’s skull. Hot blood sprayed down over Lysander’s face.
The grip on his sword arm loosened. Lysander pulled his hand free and rammed the chainblade into Gortz’s upper chest, forcing down the motor’s activation stud. The chainteeth growled as they churned through the bone and muscle of Gortz’s ribcage. Lysander forced the chainsword down, sawing through sternum and ribs.
Gortz’s head hung limp, the second jaws yawing wide and the tongue lolling. Lysander pushed Gortz off him and made sure of the kill with a thrust through that mutant head. He looked down at the book hanging by the chain he held in his other hand.
Being A Description Of Malodrax And Its Foulness, read the title. Beneath that was branded on the leather cover the stylised ‘I’ of the Inquisition.
A Space Marine chainblade and a volume on this world apparently written by an inquisitor. Twin omens. It wasn’t much, but Lysander would take it. And the book itself was hefty enough to serve as a reasonable weapon until he could find a better replacement. Lysander wiped the back of his hand across his face to get the worst of the blood off it, and walked around the drift of fallen debris to see the path the siege engine had taken through the body of the fortress. A crumbling tunnel had been driven through a mass of wreckage and destruction, and Lysander could still hear the rumbling of the siege idol’s engines as it continued on its journey.
The Iron Warriors would definitely be down to investigate the destruction, whether word had reached them of Lysander or not. He ran down the siege engine’s path, noting the glimmer of ruddy light up ahead that could be sunlight. A wave of ashen air, tasting of dry earth and smoke, reached him, and he quickened his pace as the sounds of pursuers came from the vault behind him.
His first glimpse of Malodrax was of a grey-brown smudge under a discoloured sky, the siege idol rumbling off towards the broken horizon, two moons staring down through a mask of clouds like mismatched eyes. It was not an inviting landscape, but it was better than what he was leaving behind.
Lysander tightened his grip on his chainblade, and fled into Malodrax.
7
‘The natural history of Malodrax is beyond understanding without first abandoning the principles of cause and effect. A creature might devolve into a new form, the fossils of its ancestors far exceeding it in sophistication. Others are born through sheer randomness, from the coalescing of raw warpstuff into a form that matches the definitions of life, from sheer bloody-mindedness, as if to prove that life can exist where there should be only death.’
– Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan
The sphinx that guarded the palace of Shalhadar fought well. It flew down on wings of stained glass, the light of Malodrax’s sun shimmering in a blinding rainbow of colours, its four front legs each sheathed in gilded claws. Its massive stone-clad chest and impassive face turned aside bolter fire as it descended, holes battered through its gold and lapis headdress. It landed on the bridge that crossed the canal before the gates of the palace and roared, a terrible sound that shattered the pyramid’s grand windows and sent the golden gargoyles fleeing from their perches among the city’s rooftops.
First Sergeant Kaderic called out the sphinx, taking on the role of Dorn’s champion on this world. The sphinx, in turn, singled him out, and Kaderic dived and rolled between its enormous paws as it tried to crush him down into the bridge’s jewel-studded surface.
Kaderic drove his chainsword into the sphinx’s paw, hacking off a chunk of stony flesh. The sphinx reared back and, honour satisfied, Chaplain Lycaon gave the order to open fire. Squad Gorvetz opened up into the sphinx, blasting chunks from its body. The sphinx rampaged into the strike force, batting one Imperial Fist aside and forcing another down its gullet before the Imperial Fists charged in.
Lysander looked it in the eye. The sphinx returned the look, and even though it was surely dead, it smiled. Its lips, smeared with the blood of Lysander’s battle-brother, cracked as they were forced into the unfamiliar expression. Lysander’s chest flared with anger and he shouldered his way into the fray to drive his chainblade into the sphinx’s side.
The sphinx said nothing. Even as Lycaon vaulted up onto its neck and hacked his crozius into the back of its neck, it fixed its eyes on Lysander in silence. Lysander grabbed a handhold on the side of its face and drove his chainblade into its eye, the teeth grinding through glass and stone. Thick, oily fluid sprayed out, something like blood and something like machine oil. The sphinx fell onto its side and Squad Kaderic fell on it like hunters butchering a kill, hacking the sphinx into gory chunks as the bridge was flooded with its blood.
‘What was it?’ asked Lycaon, when the sphinx was dismembered and only the jewelled gates lay between the strike force and the palace of Shalha
dar.
‘I know not,’ said Lysander. ‘A daemon. The guardian of the gates.’
Lycaon ordered the strike force to make ready to breach the gates of the palace. Space Marines stacked up beside the gates as Techmarine Kho, his Land Speeders hovering at the other end of the bridge to watch for enemies approaching, affixed magnetic breaching charges to the doors.
‘It saw you,’ said Brother Halaestus. He had walked up behind Lysander who took his place in the stack of Imperial Fists ready to storm through the gate. ‘It knew you.’
It wasn’t quite anger in Halaestus’s face. It was a questioning, an aggression.
‘This world knows me,’ replied Lysander. ‘Its creatures know me. Shalhadar learned of me, no doubt. Few escape from Kulgarde, and fewer still go back.’ He turned to the gates, but Halaestus grabbed his arm and turned him round again.
‘Did you come back for us alone?’ demanded Halaestus. ‘Or did you have help?’
‘Breach!’ yelled Techmarine Kho. The Imperial Fists backed against the pyramid wall as the charged detonated, blowing the gates off their hinges and locks. They fell in and before they had hit the floor the Imperial Fists were charging into the shadows beyond, fingers on triggers and chainswords in hand.
‘Shalhadar!’ yelled Lycaon. ‘The eye of the Emperor reaches you even here! Even in this foul place you are not beyond His hand!’
Inside the palace, the shadows resolved into the pyramid’s interior. Pastel-coloured silken drapes and intricate tapestries of intertwined bodies hung from walls tiled in a mosaicked riot of colour. Geometric tiles picked out infinitely complex designs on the floor, shimmering fractals that baffled the eye and the brain. The high curving ceilings, their petal-shaped panels interlocking high above, were covered in frescoes of dancing daemons draped in human skins, gambolling across heaps of flayed bodies. The place dripped with a lustrous corruption, enough to break and bewitch a weak mind.
Curving staircases swept upwards, leading to upper half-floors and balconies criss-crossing the pyramid’s interior. ‘Gorvetz!’ ordered Lycaon. ‘Scout above and cover us! Kaderic, with me!’
‘Nothing up ahead,’ voxed Kaderic, whose tactical squad was at the head of the strike force. His men swept their bolter sights across side chambers and galleries branching off in every direction. There were podiums for sermonising, surrounded by seats with spikes and restraints in the armrests. Baths of steaming perfumed water. Walls racked with implements for paring and skinning, with gold and ivory handles arrayed like glittering waterfalls of blades. But no enemies. ‘We’re alone in here.’
‘You know better than that, First Sergeant,’ replied Lycaon. Overhead armoured boots clattered on mosaic tiles as Squad Gorvetz got into position to cover the rest of the strike force from above. ‘Lysander? What do you know of Shalhadar?’
‘Lord of this city, absolute tyrant of his people. Disloyal thoughts are a crime.’
‘Do you know how to kill him?’ asked Lycaon.
‘Cut him into pieces and burn them.’
‘That is what the people of Malodrax say?’
‘No,’ replied Lysander. ‘But that works on everything.’
The palace shuddered and a ripple of power ran across its every surface, sending sparks shimmering up Lysander’s spine. The two squads on the ground floor drew together, every bolter trained on the corners from which an enemy might leap.
‘The opening act left something to be desired,’ came a voice echoing from all corners of the pyramid. It was drawling and arrogant, with an inhuman resonance that demanded respect in spite of the scorn that dripped from it. ‘But that was just a taster, deliberately sour so our expectations were lowered. The death of my sphinx, rather dull. The blood in the streets quite unnecessary. But what follows will be the more delicious for it, will it not?’
‘I will not match words with a foul-born daemon!’ yelled Lycaon in reply. ‘An Imperial Fist has a tongue of steel and a voice of gunfire!’
‘Come, will you not allow me at least some drama?’ came the reply. ‘No agonising with the struggle of inflicting death? No conflict between duty and fear? But no, you are not like those who come to Malodrax as pilgrims to my majesty. You have not arrived in my city to seek something within yourselves, to kneel at the foot of a mighty throne. No, your tales are quite different. Your weakness is not worn on the outside. It is deep inside you. This second act will see that weakness being extracted from your flesh. I think I shall enjoy this production.’
Music began, a sick, pulsating skirl that brought the awful daemonic music on board the Shield of Valour to the front of Lysander’s memory. Onto a balcony above the strike force somersaulted a lone figure in bright, clashing garb, with slashed sleeves and a hooded red and blue checked cloak, like a fool from a noble’s court. The fool bowed and spread his hands, then straightened up and clapped briskly as if to signal the beginning of a stage act.
Chaplain Lycaon shot down the fool, and as far as Lysander could see from the body that fell from the balcony, it was human. The music changed tone to a fanfare and suddenly, everything was movement.
From the tapestries unravelled the shapes of cavorting daemons, their forms indistinct and malleable as if they had been picked out from only one angle in golden thread and in reality they were not all there. Shapes blistered up from the frescoes overhead, the painted daemons now come to life, dripping with colour as if they were composed of an artist’s paint that had not dried. They left bright hand- and footprints on the ceiling as they scurried.
Squad Gorvetz hammered fire up into the daemons swarming towards them. Heavy bolters blew slabs of painted plaster down from the ceiling and the squad’s heavy plasma gun left smouldering craters where it hit home. Bolter fire joined the heavy weapons, Gorvetz yelling orders to split up into fireteams and catch the daemons in a crossfire.
From the floor leapt fractal dancers, their shapes spiralling and breaking apart as they flipped and twirled. They defied the eye, leaving trailers of swirling colour wherever they went.
‘It’s a ruse,’ said Lysander as the dancers and tapestry daemons closed. ‘A performance. He wants to tie us down here. We have to push on through this.’
‘First things first,’ replied Lycaon, his crozius’s power field shimmering into life.
The Space Marines of Squad Kaderic were caught by the assault. Bolter fire blasted a tapestry daemon apart, spraying multicoloured blood where its impossible form was ruptured. Kaderic dived into the fray as he always did, and Lysander lost sight of him in the coil of a fractal dancer that somersaulted around him as he struck about it with his chainblade. Lysander’s own blade cut off the limb of a fallen fresco daemon that thudded into the floor beside him – it was a vivid red, its body the hub for a dozen limbs, amber-coloured eyes set into liquid sockets like polished gemstones in a pool of blood.
Lycaon finished off the daemon with his crozius, splitting it in two. It liquefied and the paint used to create it spread across the floor.
‘Imperial Fists!’ ordered Lycaon. ‘We cannot tarry here! Shalhadar fears us and sends his lackeys to slow us down, but we will falter not one step! Onwards, my brothers! Onwards!’
A daemon rushed at Lysander, the threads of its body unravelling and reforming into claws to rend and hack. Lysander caught the claw on his shoulder guard and threw the daemon aside, trusting the blades and bolters of his fellow Imperial Fists to finish it off.
Ahead the pyramid was changing, the walls bowing out and balconies receding to form a vast auditorium centred on a semicircular stage. Background flats fell down onto the stage – a galaxy, a castle, heaps of bodies, distant mountains, all daubed with paint. Sparks fell in a burning rain and great globes of light flared into life above the stage, casting shafts of hard silvery light.
‘The stage!’ yelled Lysander. ‘He exists in the story! He can be brought forth to die if the story is acted out
!’ Lycaon and Kaderic were fighting their way towards Lysander, following him in the direction of the stage.
Banks of seating rose from the sloping floor like rows of teeth from a jaw. The ceiling soared up impossibly high, studded with royal boxes and half-formed statues like drowners breaching the marble surface. Darkness ran down the walls, the stage drawing the harsh light to it as if jealous. Lysander vaulted the seating even as the statues broke away from the walls, stone limbs broken at the joints to give them motion, animated by sparks of black fire dripping from their eye sockets.
Lysander smashed one aside. A hard stony hand grabbed him by the throat and wrestled him to the floor. Lysander was on his back before he could get his bearings, the blank stone face with its mouth gaping wide drooling black flame. Marble fingers found Lysander’s mouth, gripping his jaw and forcing his own mouth open.
A crescent of burning light arced across Lysander’s field of view, scorching a crimson slash onto his retinas. He rolled aside as the weight went off him and saw Chaplain Lycaon’s follow-up swing taking the animated statue’s head off, his crozius slicing through marble as if it were no stronger than flesh.
Lysander said nothing as Lycaon offered his hand. Lysander took it and was pulled back to his feet.
Dozens of the statues were crawling down the walls. Imperial Fists making it into the theatre were sniping them down as they advanced down the aisles towards the stage. Kaderic was leading them, crying out the name of Dorn and the fallen forefathers of the Imperial Fists.
‘And so,’ said Prince Shalhadar, ‘the protagonist walks from the wings. And every story needs an end.’
Lysander reached the stage and swung himself up onto it. Chaplain Lycaon was beside him. First Sergeant Kaderic got there at the same time.
The light falling on the three Imperial Fists was fierce enough to burn. The rest of Squad Kaderic fighting in the auditorium were rendered shadows on shadows by the contrast.