by Ben Counter
The gulley ran in both directions, and Lysander could not see where it ended – it seemed to cut across the landscape, a deep scar dealt by some past catastrophe. He kicked some loose rocks aside and saw the brittle remains of bones there, gathered like trash in the corners. He saw a human jawbone, and the cranium of something that was not human. There was no telling how many ways this place had to kill someone. Lysander had to keep moving. And of the choice of two directions, the best bet was the one that took him further from the fortress of Kulgarde.
In the depths of the warren squatted the mother of the brood. The brood hatched from her belly, bursting from cysts in her skin, and they existed to feed her. From their substance she created more offspring and consumed them in turn, a cycle of life and death she had presided over for ten thousand years. She was born from the black blood of Malodrax, the filth of pure corruption that bubbled up from its depths, the pus of an infection that took root when the planet first felt the touch of the warp. The brood mother was everything that Malodrax was.
The first Lysander saw of her was the shadow she cast on the wall of her cavern. The place was hung with trophies and trinkets – bones, weapons, polished gemstones, hanks of filthy hair, rotted hunter’s trophies, fragments of eggshells and ancient fossils. Her shadow was at once bloated and spindly, with a massively swollen torso and abdomen, skinny arms and a long, crooked neck supporting a head that hung low like that of a vulture. The shadow played across her collection, flaring with the guttering of the fire that burned in its pit before her.
‘A shelterer from the storm,’ said the brood mother. ‘A fugitive from the embrace of our world. From her touch you have fled like a whipped child and now you come to me. Do you fancy my embrace to be more tender?’
‘There is something I seek,’ said Lysander.
‘Of course there is,’ said the brood mother. She pulled a squirming chunk of flesh from one of the glistening pods on her abdomen, and deftly spitted it on a sharpened stick. It squealed and flopped around, and the brood mother pushed the stick into the dirt, holding the morsel over the fire. Its flesh bubbled and spat. ‘You smell of another world. There is a land far away where the people worship a dead god, and where that god’s servants police their very thoughts. They fear Chaos such that they bow under a law that crushes them to death. A strange place, I have heard. Are you from that world, traveller?’
‘What do you care where I am from?’ replied Lysander. ‘You are the brood mother. I am not the only one in this cave seeking something.’
The brood mother smiled and her face split open from ear to ear, exposing the sinews of her skull and the grey-brown stumps of her back teeth. ‘You know of me? Oh, how flattering. Come closer. The fire does not reach you back there.’
Lysander took a few steps forward, into the glow of the fire. The blood on his hands and face glinted like jewels, where the accelerated clotting agents of a Space Marine had crystallised it into ruby clusters.
‘Now that is something I have not seen for a long time,’ said the brood mother. ‘Something handsome.’ She pulled the stick out of the fire and examined the charred specimen skewered on it. ‘How long has it been since I had some new blood? My young always taste the same. I cannot remember when they last had a new father. You are right, servant of the corpse-god. There is something I want.’ She ran a spindly hand, its fingers like spider’s webs, over the greyish, blistered flesh of her torso.
‘This,’ said Lysander, ‘is all I have to give you.’ He took from its makeshift sling on his back the Imperial Fists chainsword. It was clotted with blood from killing the overseer in Kulgarde, and its casing was dented and scored with use.
‘That little thing?’ said the brood mother. ‘That is not the weapon I had in mind.’
‘I read of you,’ continued Lysander levelly. ‘You are the crossroads of all knowledge on Malodrax. There is nothing you do not know. I know you were once beautiful, and that you sought out a god of the warp as your consort. I know you tried to betray him, but his guard was not down as you feared, and so he cursed you. If you will turn on your god for some fleeting moment of power, he decreed, then you will always take the lesser of any deal offered to you. Is that not so?’
‘What lies are these?’ spat the brood mother. Her body quivered with rage.
‘The lies of Inquisitor Golrukhan,’ said Lysander. ‘A collector of legends of Malodrax. He stood before you and bargained your story from you. Did he not?’
The brood mother’s face creased as she tried to think of some pithy reply. But there was nothing. ‘He was not so handsome,’ she said. ‘He called me abomination. He called me ugly! I was glad to see the back of him, that limp little whelpling. What did he have to offer me?’ She rummaged in the piles of trash behind her, spilling skulls and random scraps of weaponry and armour. She took out an embroidered glove, once burgundy with golden stitching but now spoiled with mould and dirt. ‘This is all he had! The last he possessed of some creature named Talaya. That is what I took in return for my story. Would that he had asked anything else! Alas, that a mere man knows my shame! I hope my world killed him in the end.’
‘But that is your curse,’ said Lysander. ‘You have to make a deal.’
‘Only for that which is valuable!’ retorted the brood mother sharply. ‘I can only take something you hold dear! No piece of random trash, hear me! It must be something you value, something you will grieve to have lost, or there will be no deal!’
Lysander held up the chainsword. The light glinted on its teeth, where the edges showed through the dried blood. ‘This was the weapon of my battle-brother,’ he said. ‘He now lies either dead or imprisoned in the dungeons of Kulgarde. This is all I have of him. More than that, it is a weapon of a Space Marine, of my people. It is a symbol of what we are. Without it, I am less a warrior. That is what I offer you.’
‘Hmm.’ The brood mother peered at the chainsword. Idly, she slid her young off the blackened stick with her teeth and chewed on it. Green-black blood ran down her scrawny neck. ‘Sit,’ she said, indicating a patch of earth in front of the fire.
Lysander sat down. The brood mother towered over him, her spidery shadows flitting all across the walls and ceiling of her cavern. Up close the smell of her was worse, sickly sweet and full of rot.
‘What do you seek?’ she asked, a new graveness in her voice as if this were the opening line of a prayer.
‘I want to kill Kraegon Thul,’ said Lysander.
The brood mother cackled, spilling scraps of bloody meat from her mouth. ‘Do you know, you are the second one of your kind to ask that? That ugly little inquisitor man, he said the same thing! To excise the cancer, he put it, to lance the tumour that sickened Malodrax. As if there was but one heart to the corruption, to be cut away! And now you seek the same thing.’
‘That inquisitor was doing his duty. I have that same duty, and it drives me as it did him. But I seek revenge as well.’
‘No man can speak of revenge,’ replied the brood mother, ‘if he expects to walk away from it.’
‘I would accept death,’ replied Lysander, ‘if it meant looking into Thul’s dead eye before I go.’
The brood mother’s head hung low over the fire as she peered more closely at Lysander. ‘You did not find this place by hiding from the storm,’ she said.
‘And you do not give me what I ask from the goodness of your heart,’ replied Lysander.
The brood mother steepled her fingers and thought for a long moment, the light of the fire playing across the abomination that was her face. ‘You cannot do it alone,’ she said. ‘But you have no allies on this world. You must make sacrifices and they will not be of your flesh. The question you will ask yourself, servant of the corpse-god, is how far you will go for victory. What will you do to win? No doubt you would reply ‘anything’, but it is not that simple for one such as you. You have these… these cages in which you imp
rison yourselves. These principles. These moralities your people force into your minds. You will have to fight those long before you get your hands on Warsmith Thul. Long before.’
‘I accept that.’
The brood mother waved a hand. ‘Of course you do,’ she said. ‘You do now. But you have not seen what you must do. I will not say I can perceive every moment that will come, but I can see the way the path winds. And of course, you will ignore any warnings I might give. You want to be shown the way. Well then! The path winds to the city of Shalhadar the Veiled.’ The brood mother’s eyes shifted as she focused far away. ‘He courted me once. It was a lie. Everything he says is a lie, excepting that which you expect to be a lie, in which case it will be a truth that could destroy you to believe. He almost destroyed me, and I will never forgive him, but still I imagine those dark tendrils around me! Those golden eyes on my body!’
‘How do I reach the city?’ asked Lysander quickly.
‘From this warren, westwards. The third moon should be on the horizon. Follow it. You will see the spires of the city long before you reach it. Shalhadar does not hide his glories. He is proud, a pride which Malodrax has tried to grind down, but the Veiled One has raised his spires high in spite. There is no other world where one such as Shalhadar could thrive so. It hates him, but it needs him, for without an object of its hate it would shrivel away into one more asteroid floating in the void.’
‘Will he prove an ally?’ asked Lysander.
‘Now that, servant of the corpse-god, I cannot tell you. Shalhadar needs to be served and he finds a use for all who walk through the gates of his city. That is all.’
‘Then I shall journey to the city of Shalhadar,’ said Lysander. ‘Whatever happens there, happens, so long as it brings me closer to Kraegon Thul.’
The brood mother tilted her head, listening. ‘The storm blows still,’ she said. ‘It will not be over for many hours. It would be a rash creature that did not take what shelter he could find. Will you not stay here, until it dies away?’
Lysander stood. ‘I cannot tarry here while my brothers are captive,’ he said. ‘Every hour that goes by gives Thul another chance to have them on an executioner’s block.’
The brood mother held out her hands in a pleading gesture. ‘Please,’ she said.
Lysander turned and walked towards the cave entrance, the flames casting shadows across his back.
‘Then you should know,’ said the brood mother, ‘that I do not eat all my young.’
Shadows leapt, sharp and flickering. From pools of them scuttled insectoid creatures, each waist-high to a Space Marine, with compound eyes that glimmered in the firelight. Their bladed mandibles snickered and their chitin talons rattled on the stone floor as they made for Lysander. Dozens of them were suddenly all around him, whickering blades lashing at his legs and torso. One leapt from the ceiling and onto his shoulder. His hands reached up and felt hard limbs and a pulpy central mass, pulsing and oozing like the brood mother’s abdomen. He ripped a leg off the creature and threw it behind him into the fire.
The brood mother shrieked as her young squirmed and squealed, flesh spitting in the fire. The flames leapt higher as Lysander struck around him, unarmed save for the heavy book he still carried. He slammed the book down, crushing the head of one creature, and yanked another one off the ground by a leg before slamming it into the floor.
‘Take his arms!’ cried the brood mother. ‘Take his legs! But leave the rest for me!’
Lysander stamped on a leg and felt it snap. He swung the book and knocked three or four of the creatures away from him, and broke into a run for the exit.
The cries of the brood mother followed him. Those young he could not outpace he grabbed as they tried to climb up his body, and tore them apart or dashed them to pulp against the walls. The warren wound this way and that and Lysander ran almost blind, striking out with every pace against the brood mother’s young that swarmed from every bolthole and side passage.
He emerged into what passed for fresh air on Malodrax, into the roar of the storm. The warren emptied into a valley with the worst of the winds shrieking overhead. One of the brood mother’s young clung to Lysander’s back, talons digging into his skin. He grabbed a handful of its moist bristly abdomen and tore it off.
It was a fat wingless insect of unsurpassed ugliness. Its body was a wrinkled sack of entrails, and its limbs were cased in dark-grey exoskeleton. Its head was a nest of mandibles with two huge compound eyes that glittered in the faint light reaching down through the hail of stone. It squealed pathetically, as if begging him not to kill it now he had it at his mercy.
Lysander scrambled up the valley slope and held the insect above his head, into the worst of the stone shards. Its compound eyes burst and its body was shredded, hanging in deflated fragments. Lysander threw the remains up and the wind snatched it away.
Down by the horizon was a pale smudge, the moon of which the brood mother had spoken. That way lay Shalhadar’s city – if the brood mother had told the truth. Whatever he found there, he would twist it into a way to kill Kraegon Thul, or he would die trying.
It was an oddly comforting thought, full of certainty. Lysander wrapped his rags around him and forged his way forwards into the storm.
Once, there had been empires on Malodrax. They were the empires of its native species, a proud people who had competed to create the mightiest kingdoms, surpass their neighbours, eclipse the achievements of the past and humble the generations of the future. Ambition was their religion, and they worshipped themselves.
Whatever nightmare had befallen them when Malodrax became a world of daemons and heretics, it left on the surface of the planet the faintest scars of what had been there before. Malodrax’s new order was jealous, and the storms descended to scour the Malodracian cities from its continents. The stone shards obliterated the faces of the forebears who first raised their castles and palaces over the planet’s skylines, and the half-finished statues of the last generation. Cathedrals fell. Billions of homes ceased to exist, as completely as if they had never been there. But Malodrax did not carry out its vandalism completely.
In the broken lands, ruins survived, sheltered among the hills and valleys. The greater substance of even these places was scrubbed away, leaving the stumps of proud cities like rotten teeth sticking up from the upheaved earth. Mosaics were picked clean and streets torn up. But ruins remained, the faintest trace of what Malodrax had once been, stamped down and mutilated by the daemon world’s anger.
Space Marines did not dream as other men did. A sleeping man was a vulnerable man, and a Space Marine could never be vulnerable. Instead the lobes of his brain were separated by a membrane, cultured from his primarch’s gene-seed and implanted during his conversion into a Space Marine, which allowed one half to fall into torpor while the other was awake. The animal brain stayed alert, ready to snap the Space Marine back to full readiness. What passed for dreams in that half-sleep were impressions of his surroundings, seen through the eyes of that predator.
As Lysander rested, his mind built up those cities of Malodrax from the ruins around him. Arches and towers rose up like the pinnacles of a crown surrounding the city, encompassing an expanse of sculpted stone.
The image broke and shattered, collapsing into the dark ruins around Lysander. He peered through the darkness, but whatever had woken him from half-sleep, it was nothing that could be seen.
Lysander stood and leaned against a half-fallen wall, pausing to orient himself. This valley was relatively safe from the storm, but still in the swarming darkness it was easy to get turned around and lost. Ahead was a maze of collapsed buildings, uprooted foundations, and the remnants of some great decorative edifice, a palace or a place of worship. Swirls of carved stone resembled clouds or waves, abraded and crumbling from the work of the storms. Half a face loomed out of the dirt, part of a vast statue, and Lysander recognised an echo of t
he surgeon’s features – that surgeon who had stood over him ready to cut him open, the surgeon he had killed. It had been of that species, the native xenos who had made Malodrax their home. Those who had not perished had been corrupted.
He had been woken by the wind, nothing else. That did not mean he would cease to be alert. If a Space Marine’s instincts spoke up, it was wise to listen to them.
Lysander’s eye found the book that lay in the dirt by his feet. Being A Description Of Malodrax And Its Foulness. Lysander had read only a few passages, but they had described the brood mother, her curse, and the means by which he might bargain with her. It had not mentioned quite everything about her, of course.
Lysander turned to the first couple of pages. The whole book was written by hand, perhaps by the author, perhaps by one of his acolytes. It was signed in a florid hand by one Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan. Lysander did not recognise the name, but anyone who claimed the title of inquisitor demanded at least respect.
‘I know not the date or time when I came to Malodrax, Lysander read. Somewhere beyond its lower orbit, time and space themselves cease to matter. No chronometer on my ship would tell the same tale. So I can say only that it was the first day. From the air, as my shuttle descended, I saw the delta of a river of blood emptying into an ocean of rot, and therein wallowed a titanic being. It was vast of girth, tattered wings spreading from its back, and a mass of tentacles broke the surface around its waist. Its four arms were clawed and its face a single mouth yawing open to reveal endless rows of teeth. And in that moment I imagined I was looking on a god that ruled this world and that with a thought it could swat my shuttle from the sky and send my acolytes and I to drown in the rot. But I did not look upon a god – I looked upon a corpse. As we closed I saw its flesh hanging in rags, exposing grey and dusty bones beneath, and colonies of filthy scavenger-birds swirling around as they picked away the last morsel to be found inside it.
‘In a past age, this thing had ruled Malodrax, I have no doubt, fed a river of gore by a legion of worshippers who gave it such sacrifices that an ocean was filled with their remains. But that age had passed, and new powers ruled on Malodrax now.