Malodrax

by Ben Counter

  Handfuls of filth spattered the stage from the audience. The cultist grinned as he saw his words getting to them. There were brute-mutants and forge-workers among them, and others besides – exotic xenos, witches bound in chains with steel cages bolted around their heads, celebrants tattooed from head to toe with the sigils of the warp, and followers of a corrupted machine-deity with industrial crushers and saws grafted to their skeletons.

  The chorus rose up to grab the sinner and drag him to the back of the stage, chanting the profane names of the warp gods. The audience cheered, screaming for the sinner’s head. A light fell on Lysander, and they realised the Executioner’s axe was about to swing. One of the chorus dropped to all fours to serve as the executioner’s block.

  The sinner, by now battered and bloody, grinned up at Lysander. He had waited his whole life to die this way. Whatever he might have been, whatever existence he might have lived, had been stripped away from him by Shalhadar and replaced with a mindless fanaticism. More than anything, this man wanted to die to glorify his lord.

  Lysander raised the axe. Valienne had written that the Executioner, personification of all who do fate’s work, would slice off the sinner’s head with a single stroke. She had specified that the blood would spray onto the stage and the chorus would smear themselves with it and tear the body apart, throwing the chunks of the corpse into the audience and turning the whole gathering into one celebration of death.

  The music rose. The audience screamed and bellowed. Only Kraegon Thul, Karnak and the Navigator were still. Lysander’s eyes met the lenses of Thul’s faceplate.

  The axe came down. It was not aimed at the sinner’s exposed neck. Lysander let go of the axe as it swung down and it launched from his hands, tumbling end over end towards the audience.

  The performers of the chorus were the first to realise Lysander had deviated from the script. The closest, a woman with her head half shaved and her face open with deep bored pits that revealed the cavities inside her skull, turned to follow the axe’s path.

  Lysander knew he could not penetrate power armour at this distance, not with a mundane weapon. He could not kill Kraegon Thul this way. But he could win an ally for himself in the fight sure to follow.

  The axe slammed into the stone block to which Halaestus’s hands were shackled. The blade cut right through the chain and embedded itself in the stone. Halaestus’s hands fell free.

  The woman beside Lysander screamed. The rest of the chorus took up the cry as they realised this holy moment had been profaned.

  The cultist playing the sinner kneeled up and gawped, expecting to be dead by now. Perhaps he thought he was, and was wondering why the afterlife looked the same as the one he had just left.

  Lysander ran towards the front of the stage, throwing the other performers aside. The audience only realised something was wrong when he vaulted into the front row.

  Mutant hands clawed at Lysander, tearing at the leather overcloak of the Executioner’s costume. Lysander cracked a malformed skull with a backhand and grabbed one of the skull-faced menials by the throat, smashing his forehead into the face that leered up at him.

  A knife arrowed at him. Lysander parried it with his forearm, grabbed the wrist that held it and broke the assailant’s arm. He snatched up the knife and with a weapon in his hand he cut himself faster through the pressing ranks.

  It was bedlam. A thousand things were happening at once. On stage the chorus were running wild, tearing at their hair and at each other. The other performers were rushing from the wings, the personifications of Pestilence, Fate, Malice and a dozen others weeping with horror that the performance had been destroyed. Some were trying to make their way towards Lysander, furious he had broken from the script, but were swamped by the mutants surging forwards to storm the stage. In the crowd, leaders of the mutant forge-gangs were standing and pointing down at the stage, bellowing orders for their underlings to avenge the insult of the aborted stage play.

  Halaestus had extricated himself from his chains. He had snatched the axe from where it had become embedded in the stone block and was hacking at Brother Skelpis’s chains, breaking from the task for long enough to cut the head off the brute-mutant bearing down on him.

  Talaya was leaping over the scenery, her mechanical legs sending her flying over the stage in pursuit of Lysander. Kraegon Thul stood and turned aside, his Navigator cowering in his wake. Karnak stepped into Thul’s place to cover the Warsmith’s escape.

  Lysander cut off an arm, a head, carved through a spine. The knife broke off in his hand and he rammed the stump into a skeletal eye socket, carrying on bare-handed. He clasped an equine skull in his hands, lifted and twisted, and threw the lifeless body aside.

  Karnak was waiting for him, willing to let him tire himself out battering his way through Kulgarde’s vermin. Karnak drew a long silver blade with a rapier point as sharp as the scalpels in his anatomy theatre. A spiked mace arced down at Lysander, but it just gave him something to snatch from his assailant and use to forge on faster.

  Behind him somewhere, Talaya was struggling through the mutant horde. She was faster than Lysander and more mobile, but Lysander was stronger. He was making better progress than she was. He just had to keep her off him for a few more minutes, and then it wouldn’t matter.

  Lysander shattered a mutant’s shoulder and trampled an alien orderly underfoot. Just one more row of seating remained between him and Karnak. It was occupied by one of Malodrax’s native xenos, deformed and discoloured like the surgeon Lysander had killed on his last stay in Kulgarde. Lysander broke the haft of the mace over its skull and it crumpled underneath him.

  He was face to face with Karnak.

  Karnak swept his sword in an arc. On the surface it was intended to cut Lysander in half at the waist. In truth it was a feint to draw Lysander into a defensive motion, so Karnak could spear him through with the dagger he concealed in his other hand.

  Lysander did not move. He caught the blade on his forearm, trusting the super-dense bone of a Space Marine to hold against the edge of the sword. The impact jarred through him and the blade bit deep into the bone, but it did not cut through. Lysander turned out of the path of the dagger’s point as it punched towards his abdomen.

  Karnak’s eyepieces were centimetres from Lysander’s face.

  ‘I told you,’ snarled Lysander, ‘I would return.’

  He rammed an elbow up into Karnak’s jaw. The alien’s head snapped back and Lysander locked the elbow of the arm carrying the alien’s sword, bending it the wrong way as far as the armour’s joint would allow. The armour kept the limb from breaking but the sword came loose and it was suddenly in Lysander’s hands.

  Karnak dropped back into a guard. Lysander swept the sword around his head to knock back any mutant getting too close. This was their fight now, no one else would interfere. Perhaps the mutants understood that, for none of them clawed at him now, or tried to grab him and weigh him down.

  Karnak’s eyepieces glinted. Lysander vowed he would tear that helmet off and look into whatever face Karnak sported below, before he took the alien’s head.

  ‘Malodrax has won.

  ‘I am going to die. Nothing I can do or say will change that now. Has my heresy finally been punished? Is it the Emperor’s will that put me here, and shows me my manner of death before it falls upon me? If so, I accept it. My Emperor has always been my guide, but in following Him I have strayed from the path laid out by His clerics and scriptures. If that choice was wrong, I am responsible for it, and thus should I suffer. But on Malodrax, it is not the Emperor’s will. It is Kraegon Thul’s.

  ‘I entered Kulgarde as a slave trader, seeking to purchase the stupid and the worthless from Kulgarde’s forges at a premium, to be sold on as drudge labour and sacrifices elsewhere. To do this I had items of value and currency salvaged by my acolytes in Shalhadar’s city, for while I had not succeeded in enteri
ng Shalhadar’s court I had moved among its highest echelons and the trappings of such society had not been completely stripped from me during my flight. Grun and Thol were my pack-mules, lugging these goods, while Sildyne and Maskelin were the slave masters who trained and disciplined my human stock. I had run this identity a number of times, and they were well versed in their roles.

  ‘Thus did I gain entry to Kulgarde. I was assured by the Iron Warrior serving as castellan that there would be scant business for me, for Kulgarde needed all its bodies to run its forges and construct its war engines. Nevertheless I was given leave to visit the forges and see their need for good, new bodies, so I might return in the future bringing slaves for them to purchase. I knew that this ruse would not gain me an audience with Kraegon Thul, Warsmith and lord of Kulgarde, but it was enough to get within the walls.

  ‘Firstly, Thol died. I cannot say from whence the blade came that slit his throat. Among the vast anvils and molten pits I was observing the brutal economy of Kulgarde, the raw materials it devoured and the suffering that fuelled it, and for a moment I was awed by the scope of the war that Kraegon Thul could wage. But when I next turned, it was to see Thol stumbling and clutching his throat, gurgling crimson as his blood filled his lungs. His brother Grun caught him, trying to get to the wound and stop the blood flowing, but Thol died not a minute after he hit the ground.

  ‘Sildyne and Maskelin were at my side with their guns ready, hunting for the assailant. But how Grun howled! Like the wild beasts of his home world, a keening from the world’s end. I cannot imagine anyone felt such sorrow as he did then, and my mind turned again to Talaya and the strange emptiness left in me to see her taken away. That was a chill, shivering sorrow – Grun’s was a fire ripping through him, scorching away his insides and leaving nothing but a vessel full of grief.

  ‘Could I have stopped Grun? Not without killing him, certainly. Not, perhaps, without dying myself. Perhaps it was that I did not think quickly enough, or that these old bones, able in combat as I may be, did not have the speed to match a furious feral worlder thirty years my junior. Before I had my hand on the hilt of my sword, Grun had snatched up a pair of glowing hot tongs from the nearest forge and with it had clamped the lower jaw of the nearest forge-slave. While the blade was still half-drawn he had thrown the slave into the forge, his body vanishing beneath the embers in a bright flower of flame.

  ‘I called for Maskelin and Sildyne to stop him, but already Grun had leapt over the closest anvil and run towards an enormous forge-pit where a slave master was calling the rhythm to a gang of slaves operating the bellows. Grun went straight for the slave master, ramming the tongs into the huge mutant’s belly and taking the barbed whip from his hands before the mutant’s guts had hit the floor. He wrapped the whip around the scaly bull-neck and used it as leverage to break its spine.

  ‘Already, a clamour had broken out. Orders were yelled and more mutants rushed from all corners of the great forge fields. We were seized by muscular soot-stained arms and though I could have fought, I knew myself outnumbered.

  ‘I have not seen my acolytes alive from that moment. Grun I am certain must be dead, pulled apart by vengeful hands. Of the others, I can only guess. I reside now in a cell below the foundations of Kulgarde, hundreds of metres below the ground, where the heat is stifling and the darkness total. My ocular augmentations give me the capacity to write these words but all is the deepest blacks and blues. I shall die without ever seeing even Malodrax’s sickly suns again. But not, at least, without getting some of what I came here for.

  ‘The Warsmith descended to this level of the dungeon after three days of my incarceration. Surely most prisoners would have been raving and desperate by now, with their lower extremities immersed in the noisome water that covered the floor of the cell, the nibbling creatures and waterborne insects having stripped away the meat of foot and ankle. My internal painkiller dispensers were a crude augmentation and would not let me hold up to the most severe tormenting, but they at least made that place bearable, even without food or light. Perhaps it was a disappointment that I was not begging for mercy by then, but I doubt the Iron Warriors expected me to have broken.

  ‘The door to the cell was cut open, for it had been welded shut behind me. In the sparks from the cutting torch I saw the shape of the Warsmith Kraegon Thul. Like a walking tank, like an engine of war condensed into the shape of a Space Marine, he seemed the very image of industrialised killing. There is no battlefield on which he would not look at home, from the heartland of the Imperium to an embattled daemon world, be it as a general or a frontline butcher. I was looking into the mechanical face of war incarnate.

  ‘“Your name,” he demanded. His voice was like a distant landslide, accompanied by noisome smoke from the breathing hose and the machinery that whirled and thudded on the back and shoulders of his armour.

  ‘“Lord Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan,” I said. “Of the Holy Ordos…”

  ‘“Of the Emperor’s Inquisition,” interrupted the Warsmith. “And you are the first inquisitor to tread the earth of Malodrax.”

  ‘“I am.”

  ‘By way of a reply, Kraegon Thul unhooked from his armour a trinket that I had not noticed among the machine parts and the jagged, pitted plates of his armour. It was familiar in form when I saw it clearly. A skull carved from ivory, set into a lacquered red sigil in the shape of a stylised letter ‘I’. The Inquisitorial Seal, badge of an inquisitor’s office. Simply showing it to any Imperial citizen, be he wasteland scavenger or Admiral of a sector battlefleet, can command unyielding loyalty unto the death. It is the symbol of an authority that can command the Exterminatus, place the seal on a decree of Excommunicate Traitoris, condemn a species to xenocide as Xenos Horrificus. This is what Kraegon Thul held before me.

  ‘“Others will follow me,” I said.

  ‘“The others will die,” he replied. “Unless they serve.”

  ‘“Serve you?”

  ‘“Serve me.”

  ‘I chuckled at that. “Then that is why you are here? The Warsmith of Kulgarde wastes his time. Recall the words of the man you took that Inquisitorial Seal from, the ones he spoke before you executed him. Use them for my reply. I need not say them. My sentiments and his will be the same.”

  ‘“In this fortress,” he said, “I have collected a war-staff that will one day accompany the stars of your Imperium with an army of war machines. One day soon. Among them are psykers born of this world who can strip a man’s mind away and filter from the psychic sludge that remains any information on the innards of your Imperium I could want.”

  ‘“Then I shall savour one last struggle,” I said. “Your psychic pets will have to fight to get into my brain. I wonder how many you will burn through before you can open me up?”

  ‘“I have such vermin to spare,” said Kraegon Thul. “You disappoint me. I had expected more of the Emperor’s Inquisition. You came here for whatever prizes you could bring back and with them win the renown of your fellow inquisitors, all hollow, corrupted men who hide in shadows and play games of life and death to give themselves the sham veneer of a god. The sooner it all burns, the better. Mankind will thank me when your kind are gone.”

  ‘Thul did not stop for further conversation. He dropped something heavy and wet into the water around my feet, turned, and let the door be swung closed behind him. A welding torch flared to reseal my cage and in its staccato light I saw that Thul had dropped the head of Maskelin, my pilot.

  ‘Maskelin’s eyes had been put out, those keen eyes that could pick out a landing strip through a low-atmosphere firestorm. I had chosen him from among the Ghoul Stars smugglers, where he had learned to survive among haunted spaceship graveyards and dealers in the forbidden who would kill and skin a man as soon as take his money. He was faithful and brave, and I had met few like him. Those brilliant eyes had been torn from his head and for the most fleeting moment, I was overcome with grie
f at the knowledge he must have suffered. I shrugged off the feeling, for it was not becoming of an inquisitor, and when the darkness was complete again I let my augmentations recover enough to write these words.

  ‘The volume in which I write is hidden beneath a loose stone at the back of my cell. I am certain the warders of Thul’s dungeon must know it is there. It suits them to let me continue to write in it, perhaps in order that I will come to rely on it for my sanity, so it will be all the keener cut to have it taken away. Then when I am quite mad, they will drag me to some gutter to drain away my blood, and slit my throat, and throw me to the mutants.

  ‘This is the death I accepted when I took the vows of the Emperor’s Ordos. We do not die young, or well. We die in the depths of a tyrant’s fortress, stripped of our sanity, broken in body and mind but never in will. We take with us the satisfaction of never giving in to the interrogations of whatever imprisoned us. Everything else, we lose. And so I welcome this death, because it is the death of an inquisitor. I will go to join the Emperor in his final battle, if He will have this old heretic.

  ‘And, of course, an inquisitor does not die as a normal man does. His mark on the galaxy is never fully erased. He has left his signature on the universe, he has dealt it wounds whose scars will remain. I have left my own scars, and they will not heal before my purpose is done.

  ‘I will die knowing my duty will still be done. That is why I will live forever.’

  16

  ‘I swear I can feel the glee with which Malodrax tells its lies. If the sky could smirk down, the wind laugh at us, the mountains spit upon our despair, they would. It wants more than to make us suffer. It wants us to look down on our hands and see the blood of our own, to understand the lies which have driven us to destroy what we hold most dear, before it crushes the life from us.’

  – Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan

  ‘That’s a weak spot?’ asked First Sergeant Kaderic, peering through one of the firing slits in an upper level of the siege tower. Through the dust kicked up by the tower’s rollers, Kulgarde’s walls loomed as a brutal black horizon up ahead. Lysander had drawn his attention to the place where several storeys of scaffolding had been set up, spanning enormous new-quarried blocks that had been hauled into place to cover the hole left by the shattered roller at the wall’s base.