The great gates cannot close. Even if the black knights had not destroyed the mechanics with melta detonations upon arrival, the number of corpses spread across the avenue now defies any chance of the portals sealing shut. With animal desperation, the blasphemous faithful try to save their temple-city from defilement. Teams of sweating soldiers work to haul the immense stone gates shut as their brethren die on the black knights’ blades.
The first Imperial soldier to reach the knights is Vinculus himself, a lord of the Inquisition and temporary commander of the Adepta Sororitas forces. He, like the army behind him, has had to climb the barricade of bodies.
High Marshal Ludoldus of the Black Templars is waiting for him, with the remaining nine knights of his Sword Brethren. Grimaldus is one of them. Exhausted, his breath saws in and out.
There is no shame in kneeling. They have been fighting for almost three hours, alone and without even the whisper of reinforcement. The dead lie broken in their hundreds. Amongst them, the Sword Brethren kneel on weary limbs, catching precious respite. Some are too weary to even lift their heads. As Space Marines, they will recover within minutes where mere men would need days of rest. Yet, as mortal warriors, their flesh has been pushed through torment, and even bionic limbs have malfunctioned with overworked joints.
One still stands. He will not kneel. He will not kneel.
‘You fought well,’ his liege lord tells him. ‘I am beginning to believe you were born lucky, Merek.’
Grimaldus pulls a bayonet knife from the armpit joint of his scratched armour, and casts the blade aside without wiping his blood from it. He makes the crusader’s cross to his commander, letting the wound seal itself.
Ludoldus has fought unhelmed, letting his three lungs filter the filth in the breath-starved air. Grimaldus sees his commander’s eyes flick to the left, and turns to follow the High Marshal’s gaze.
Mordred, Reclusiarch of the Eternal Crusade, stands among the dead. He watches the newest of Ludoldus’s Sword Brethren, saying nothing, staring with red eye-lenses and a grinning silver skull for a face.
Within the Temple City.
The streets are vast tunnels worming through the rock. Homes and shrines are hollowed-out caverns, forced into stability by great stone pillars, defended by shrieking, chanting, cowering families.
The war has ended, and the massacre has begun. Gouts of chemical fire spray forth in hissing rushes from the charred muzzles of sacred flamers, while the crashing bang of bolters plays in relentless percussion. Flailing, burning bodies line the ground. Despite the ingenuity of the subterranean city’s ventilation engines, filtration systems are failing under the strain of cleansing the oxygen supply. Fire eats the air before the Space Marines and Sisters of Battle can breathe it. After needing rebreathers for the march up the mountainside, Imperial forces find themselves needing to don them again to prevent suffocation underground.
The mines run deep in the volcano, but the habitable sectors of the great city sit much closer to the surface. It takes less than an hour to reach the heart of the heresy, and Grimaldus – a warrior incapable of admiring allies and enemies alike – is awed by the cathedral hewn from the burning rock. Here, great landing platforms of magma-scarred metal sit beneath the sealed sky-tunnels, where once pilgrim shuttles and mining haulers came to refuel before journeying deeper into the volcano’s innards.
A geological monument to a whole world’s power takes up kilometre after kilometre of space in the great cavern. The cathedral itself is born right from the rock, its pillars and battlements moulded from the cave walls, suspended above a molten river. The running lake of magma puts him in mind, just for a moment, of the underworld rivers flowing through so many human myths.
The last survivors still flee before the advancing Imperials, spilling in a tide across the earthen bridges leading into the temple. They die with their wounds in their backs.
High Marshal Ludoldus leads them to the rock avenue over the molten chasm. He levels his blade at the angel-adorned walls of the heretic cathedral, and sends the black knights forward in a shouting tide.
‘Destroy the power generators,’ Inquisitor Vinculus’s orders crackle over the vox. ‘I want the sky shafts open before the sun rises over this worthless world.’
His voice is joined by the High Marshal’s. ‘And kill every living soul within that temple.’
Swords cut deep and blood runs cold. After the executions, they find the arch-heretic alone, unarmed, and weeping. He wears no flowing robes of priestly office, and he sits upon no ornate throne of gold and volcanic glass. What they find is a man in miners’ overalls kneeling in meditative prayer, his cheeks silvered by the slow flow of tears. He wears a breathing mask as he prays on the battlements of his cathedral, but doesn’t even open his eyes as his killers approach from behind.
Grimaldus is among them, at the shoulder of his liege lord. He is the first to tense, to move forward in an eager rush. Ludoldus restrains him with a gesture.
‘No,’ the High Marshal says to the black knight. ‘Not you.’ Grimaldus’s chainsword sputters to stillness, idling in the burning air.
It is Vinculus – too human and so very frail – who steps forward. His frame is weak next to the knights at his side, but his voice is cold iron.
‘In the name of the God-Emperor of Mankind,’ he says to the kneeling heretic, ‘I do judge thee diabolus extremis, unfit for existence within His Holy Majesty’s galaxy.’
‘You do not understand,’ the kneeling, weeping man replies. He makes no move to defend himself as Vinculus closes from behind, bearing doom in the form of a short, energised blade. ‘I am a vessel. Just a vessel.’
The tip of the sacred sword rests against his spine. Vinculus braces for the push that will finish the traitor’s life, and end the war.
The heretic’s watering eyes turn to the knights. ‘Forgive me.’
‘Wait.’ Grimaldus steps forward, a hand raised in warning. ‘Wait!’ Reclusiarch Mordred is at his side, saying the same words, giving the same order.
The sword lances home, biting deep into the man’s body. The self-proclaimed vessel falls to the stone, dying, breaking apart to free the thing within. Cancer spills from the wound, a ghost of oily smoke, leaping in a spreading cloud and clinging to the inquisitor’s wide eyes and open mouth. He damns himself to death the moment he breathes it in.
Mordred is the first to move, his crozius maul raised high. Sword Brother Grimaldus is a heartbeat behind him, chainsword revving. Vinculus falls back, screaming, tearing at his eyes, dragging them from his face with curled fingers. They come free, strings of viscera behind, and he holds them out, seemingly offering them to the two charging knights.
Vinculus falls, howling, vomiting wet blackness that has no place in a human body. Mordred and Grimaldus take him to pieces with their weapons, as if they can carve the corruption from its new host.
The inquisitor laughs through the excreted filth. Pressure builds in the air around them, as though heralding a peal of thunder. Just as it strikes, the inquisitor’s body bursts open.
Sourceless, directionless darkness falls, with the finality of a hammer blow.
The first thing he feels is the familiar pain of a broken body. Life is war, and war is pain: this is a truth he has survived a thousand times. There is no great secret to pain; he sees it no differently to the biorhythmic signs playing out on his retinal display. Pain is nothing more than a sign he is still alive.
Grimaldus drags himself to his feet, boots thudding on the scorched rock bridge above the chasm of liquid fire. His armour is halfway to annihilation, burned and scraped and chipped, bleeding sparks from severed power cables. The cathedral is a detonated ruin, and its besiegers have been cast across the cavern. Huge chunks of masonry still rain down on the cavern, plunging into the fire chasm.
Bodies lie everywhere. Dead knights, dead Sisters, dead heretics in their hu
ndreds. Among the corpses, survivors begin to stir. But not enough. Some are already standing, weapons in their hands. But not enough.
Three minutes. According to his retinal display, he has been unconscious for three whole minutes. He will do penance for his weakness, if he survives this night. No matter that almost every soul in the cavern has suffered the same way – he sees it as a weakness that deserves punishment. Dorn’s martyring blood burns hot in his veins.
The daemon walks through the dead, hunting the living, smashing aside the few swords that rise to bar its way. It is a seething mass of deep-sea nightmare fears given form, that underwater sensation of looking into the endless black of the open ocean, never knowing what lies beyond the mist of human vision. No longer the size of the man inside which it hosted, the poisonous creature has swollen to a riper, truer scale, crushing bodies beneath its cartilaginous claws. It dances at the edge of Grimaldus’s focus, a thing of two worlds and at home in neither. The knight’s eyes water through the chiming pulses of target locks, his mind aching from the sin of witnessing the thing’s existence.
Ludoldus, High Marshal of the Black Templars, faces the beast on the black stone bridge. At his feet are the armoured forms of Jasmine, Canoness of the Bloody Rose, and Ulricus, Emperor’s Champion of the Vinculus Crusade. Two great heroes, champions of humanity in their own right, slain while Grimaldus surrendered to unconsciousness. He will ensure the penance for somnolence lasts a long, long time.
On a whim, he looks up, seeking any damage to the cavern’s expansive ceiling. He has no wish to be buried here, dead or alive. A moment later, he’s reactivating his vox link.
‘This is Sword Brother Grimaldus to the Eternal Crusader. Eternal Crusader, respond.’
‘Sword Brother.’
‘The power generators are down and the sky thoroughfares are open.’
‘Understood, Sword Brother. Gunships en route.’
The black knight reaches for a sword that isn’t there. In the absence of his own blade, he takes a weapon from the dead. The chain that had bound it to its former owner’s armour hangs loose and broken.
Ludoldus is forced onto the defensive, parrying rather than cutting, each lift of his relic blade warding away another sweep of fanged tentacles and fleshy claws. Soon enough, he’s stepping backwards, giving ground with silent curses.
He aches as never before. No single creature can be so strong. No beast of the warp has ever tested his warriors in this way. Ulricus, a warrior without compare, traded a mere seven blows with the creature before it gutted him with its talons. Jasmine lasted no longer – the two pieces of her body lie shrouded by the fall of her scarlet banner.
They cannot kill this thing. They cannot overwhelm it with numbers. Skill is meaningless against its speed. The beast’s blows weigh on him, numbing his muscles. Each of its breaths comes with a mucosal spray of rancid air, clouding the knight-lord’s sight.
The Sisters and knights fighting with him are smashed away, broken and cracked-open things tossed into the chasm of fire. Another knight reaches his side; slain in a heartbeat. And another, bashed aside by a flailing claw, knocked from the stone bridge to plummet into the magma river. Next, a Sister dies, melting and shrieking in the backwash of her own flame weapon as the beast roars the fire back against her. In a queasy blur, it looms back over Ludoldus.
He risks reaching for the grenade at his belt, but the creature’s assault batters at his blade. He needs both hands to ward the thing’s attacks away. He’s down on one knee now, kneeling among the beast’s kills, parrying above him. He needs a second – just a single second – to reach for…
The daemon pushes down against his blade. Ludoldus pours his strength into the parry, feeling his muscles crackle with tightening sinew. As the talon draws back, the High Marshal is already bringing his blade up again to block the claw’s next descent.
It never comes. The falling claw is blocked by a war maul. The weapon’s energy field crackles and strains, failing under the beast’s strength.
‘Mordred.’ Ludoldus is laughing.
It isn’t Mordred. Another warrior carries Mordred’s crozius arcanum.
Sword Brother Grimaldus’s red cloak is aflame. His armour is an ornate ruin of dented plate and blackened chains.
‘Sire,’ he breathes over the vox. An acknowledgement of fate.
The High Marshal frees one hand from his sword long enough to clutch at the holy incendiary buckled to his belt. The grenade comes free. Ludoldus thumbs the activation rune, hard enough to crack the orb’s armoured shell. He raises it, a holy icon, shouting defiance as the daemon bellows downward.
Ludoldus hurls it, not at the beast, but at the creature’s feet.
An Antioch orb is among the rarest weapons sacred to the Chapter. First created several thousand years before by Techmarine Antioch of the Black Templars, they are – by any measure – many magnitudes more lethal than the standard grenades available to other Chapters among the Adeptus Astartes. Consecrated oils and sacred acids are blended with compacted explosives, making each incendiary a personal masterpiece, inscribed with its own damnations, blessings and High Gothic mandalas. A grenade will kill the righteous and unrighteous alike, but an Antioch orb will ensure the blasphemous burn in agony as they meet their end.
The sacred sphere detonates as it crashes against the bridge. Ludoldus and Grimaldus are already retreating, refusing to show their backs to the foe, accepting flash blindness as the price of witnessing their enemy’s end. The explosion comes in a sunflare of white light, bathing the daemon in holy fire and blasting rock in every direction. The bridge starts to fall, crumbling, dragging many of the cavern’s support pillars down with it.
The beast is falling, aflame. Its shrieks don’t end even when it plunges into the magma. Grimaldus falls back from the shattered bridge, staring in disgusted disbelief as the creature thrashes in the molten rock, its flesh igniting further, spraying liquid rock from its flailing limbs. New arms form as others melt away. New mouths tear open in its grey-squid flesh, sealing closed after they’ve jettisoned their screams. Some swallow the lava, while others vomit it back out.
Ludoldus stumbles as gravity eats the ground from under him; Grimaldus’s gauntlet slams into the collar of his golden armour, dragging him back from the precipice.
‘Gunships inbound,’ the Sword Brother grunts as he pulls his lord to safety.
‘It isn’t dead,’ Ludoldus warns him.
Grimaldus can see that himself. ‘Not yet.’
They open fire. The crashing of bolters echoes from the walls as they fire down into the molten muck – remnants of the Sisters and the black knight squads, gathered in their bleeding dozens and standing among the hundreds of dead.
The dying beast has abandoned all pretensions of humanity. With thrashing, coiling limbs too numerous to count, the subaqueous, cephalopodic thing is revealed as an avatar of pain, manifest as spraying magma and steaming screams. It defies size, for it defies mortal sight. It is the size of a man’s trapped soul; it is the size of a monster from myth, swelling and pulsating, abused by the thousands of explosive shells raining against its form.
Bolts burst inside its body, sending lava spraying in place of blood and flesh. Still it climbs. Metre by agonising metre, the thing of rock and molten sludge hauls itself up the cavern walls, seeking the lives of the insects that still volley their pinprick torment. They can feel its hate like a wind against their faces. It despises them for the sin of living. That hatred is enough to fuel its manifestation past the point of destruction.
It doesn’t reach for them. It reaches for the cavern’s support pillars. Wrapping round them. Gripping them. Cracking them.
Breaking them. One after the other, the monstrous soul claws its way from pillar to pillar, bringing down the cavern in its rage.
Nothing in the material realm can ignore its wounds forever. As the rocks begin to
fall, the creature’s howls turn to whines. The sacred orb, and the bursting wounds of so many bolt shells, rip free the last of its strength. It flails at another pillar, its winding limbs failing to latch on, leaving it thrashing and tumbling to the ground among the rain of rock. Boulders shatter on the cavern floor and the ruined bridge, filling the air with dust.
The knights and Sisters ring the fallen horror, executing it with blade and flame. Feeble struggles claim no more human lives. The thing collapses in on itself, dissolving, tainting the air with clouds of stinking vapour from its scabrous wounds.
There is no silence after any victory. A battlefield will still clamour with the cries of the dying and the growling flames of burning tanks. Here, beneath the earth, any silence is slain by the thunder of falling rock and the guttural rumble of the shaking ground.
The first gunships stream in through the sky vents. On the ground, knights and war-maidens look to the vaulted cavern ceiling, praying for each Thunderhawk that weaves between the plummeting debris. Stalactites drop in a torrent of earthward spears. The burning, rolling hulks of destroyed gunships smash across the ground alongside the monsoon of lethal stone.
A blow crashes into Grimaldus, the sudden crash staggering him. It was no rockfall: Reclusiarch Mordred looms above him, coldness staring out from the red eye-lenses of his silver skull facade.
‘It is a sin most foul,’ the warrior-priest growls, ‘to steal a Chaplain’s weapon.’
Grimaldus stares up at the Reclusiarch from the ground. Instinct almost has him launch back to his feet and throw himself at his attacker, but temperance prevails at the heart of the rock storm.
Blood and Fire Page 5