by C. L. Werner
Lubentina.
When he felt other adepts of the Circle clutch at that name, trying to take it from him, the knowledge only sank deeper into his mind. It was meant for him. It was the answer to the question he’d invoked when he sent his spirit hurtling into this place of eternity and oblivion. Greedily Cornak held it close, denying the others more than a glimpse of what he’d seized. They would all reap the benefits of his discovery, but the glory would belong to him alone.
Lubentina. Not simply a world, but the world. The place where Cornak would find the treasure he’d been seeking for so long. Now, however, a complication had arisen. A cry for help, an entreaty cast upon the winds of the warp. Time had suddenly become a critical factor in his plans.
When Cornak’s consciousness withdrew back into his body, when his eyes regained their colour and the spell lost its power, the sorcerer regained his sense of existence beyond the Circle. Ambition pulsed through his hearts as he turned away from the chalice and marched to the tapestry of skin. Drawing it aside, he exposed a rack of bones from which hung the segments of an ancient suit of power armour.
An instant of confusion gripped Cornak as he looked upon the armour. It took him a moment to understand why it was coloured in shades of silver and gold, why it bore the striping and iconography of the IV Legion. Out of the shifting confusion of the Circle’s communal memories and predictions, he fixed upon this facet. Whether he truly belonged to the Legion, whether it was their gene-seed buried within his towering frame, these details were inconsequential. All that mattered was the utility of the moment, a means to an end.
The sorcerer lifted the silver helm from the stand, running his fingers across the sharp rows of spikes that marched away from the gold-coloured visor. He was Cornak, Sorcerer-Adept of the Circle, but he was also Cornak of the Iron Warriors, Hexmaster of the Third Grand Company.
Cornak closed his eyes and focused again upon the portents he’d witnessed with the Circle. They’d drawn him to the battered fortress world of Castellax, moved him to swear his services to Warsmith Rhodaan. Now they bore him towards Lubentina on an Iron Warriors warship. Promises and prophecies had drawn Rhodaan this far, manipulations of both ambition and malice. It had been easy enough to appeal to Rhodaan’s martial pride, to harness it to the desires of the Circle.
What wouldn’t be so easy, Cornak reflected as he began removing pieces of armour from the stand, would be maintaining control over the warsmith once they reached Lubentina. He wondered if he should tell Rhodaan what he’d just learned, if he should alert the Iron Warriors that the planet had dispatched a cry for help.
Would the urgency to accomplish their task before the forces of the Imperium arrived make the warsmith more or less pliable to the sorcerer’s purposes?
Chapter V
The boom of artillery rolled across Tharsis, an apocalyptic thunder that made the very air shiver. Thick plumes of smoke billowed from districts abandoned by the local militia, fires racing unchecked through fabrication-plants and hab-blocks. Explosions rocked the region around the incense factories as caustic chemical stocks boiled in their storage tanks and stocks of prayer sticks were ignited by flying embers. Rioting mobs of the most degenerate and abandoned of the city’s inhabitants ransacked the palaces of the merchant elite, looting grand manors even as the Cult of the Cataclysm advanced upon them.
Guided by the mental impulses of their magus, the cultists had accomplished much in the days since they’d emerged from their subterranean lairs. Through the old mines and the tunnels of the Cloisterfells, they’d managed to stage attacks against every quarter of the city. Some of the assaults had been mere feints, distractions to draw the militia away from Bakasur’s real objectives or force the Imperials to commit more forces to defensive positions instead of mobilising them for counter-attacks in genuinely contested areas of Tharsis. Deception had brought the mansions of the Pythian Hills under the control of the Great Father’s children. Believing the cult would advance from the scholarium to encircle the avenues of the low temples, the local militia had left only a token force to guard the palaces. They hadn’t suspected that Bakasur’s followers would strike from the hidden shafts beneath the hills, the tunnels they’d dug and kept in readiness for several months before the uprising. Loss of the Pythian Hills put a third of the city under the cult’s control, but it was the psychological impact that appealed to the magus. The wealthy merchants and ministers might have left their residences to take shelter with the Cardinal-Governor, but they would certainly be outraged that their homes had been lost. Their ire would trickle down to the officers of the militia, further demoralising them and lessening their ability to combat the cult.
Confusion, Bakasur mused, was the great failing of mankind. Even with a common purpose or a common threat, there was no real unity. Each human, no matter how he tried to claim otherwise, was a selfish creature. The illusion of community was created through deceit. A human had to be coerced into setting aside his own individual needs and desires. Whether that coercion was created by direct threat or subtle manipulation of the psyche, they ultimately served only their own identity. The mobs of looters, free from the threat of authority, sated their sense of identity upon immediate and physical plunder. The soldiers and militia who stubbornly struggled against the cultists did so because their sense of identity was bound into the idea of community, that by sacrificing themselves they endowed their individuality with a greater meaning. They had no real conception of what it was to deny the self, to actually become one with a unified mentality, to be subsumed into a communal consciousness.
As he watched a pack of Inheritors stalking through the rubble of a stretch-car corral, Bakasur felt a profound regret. The mammalian taint in his biology meant he would never fully experience the oneness with the Great Father that the Inheritors enjoyed. There would always be the residue of ‘self’, the human stain denying him that ultimate adoration of the Beast. Only when the cult was triumphant, only when he ascended into the stars to be reborn could that blight be lifted from him and he could truly enter into the glories of the Great Father.
The magus followed behind his aberrant bodyguards as they prowled through the ruined corral. The hulking cultists probed into every shadow, inspected every doorway and window. It was a commendable exhibition of vigilance, but one that was pointless. The Inheritors wouldn’t have left anyone behind. The star-children were most thorough when they went through a building. Any possible threat to Bakasur would have been shredded by their claws before they left.
Through the shattered walls Bakasur could see the slopes of Mount Rama and the leaning bulk of the Warmason’s Cathedral. Every street and concourse that wound its way up the mountain was a seething mass of refugees. Each moment bedraggled groups of survivors came creeping out from the dying city to join that surging flood of flesh and fear. The ones that did so now were too late, however. As they came prowling out of the ruins, lasguns flashed from the soldiers posted all around the base of the mountain. Mount Rama was one of three sections within the city that the local militia absolutely refused to concede to the cultists. To secure these bulwarks, it became necessary to close them off to the outside.
Bakasur shared the sense of loathing his fellow hybrids had for their human lineage, but he urged them to restraint. As much as possible they would herd non-combatants towards the perimeter, driving them into the cordon established by the militia. Whipped to the heights of desperation and terror, the panicked mobs needed more than barked commands and shouted pleas to make them turn away from the only sanctuary they could reach. Again and again, the soldiers at the perimeter were forced to fire into the refugees to keep them from charging the barricades. With each shot, the resolve of those soldiers was shaken, eaten away by self-loathing and disgust. Again, the identity of the individual overcame the necessity of action and the pragmatic truth that there were limits to how many people could be sustained within the confines of Mount Rama.
&n
bsp; Shot by shot, the perimeter was eating itself alive. The soldiers were losing their efficiency as their senses lost focus. Some numbed themselves to their actions by slipping into a calloused and brutish mindset. Others sank deeper and deeper into a mire of guilt and recrimination. Bakasur could feel the limitations of their discipline stretching. When the crisis came, these men would break.
Then the slaughter would truly begin.
The thunder of artillery drew closer. Some of the nearby buildings were rocked by explosions as shells came ploughing into them. Bakasur detached a segment of his awareness, concentrating it upon producing a psychic shell around himself to spare him the hazard of flying shrapnel. The militia had withdrawn their artillery outside the city, rotating it along the outskirts to target those districts where the cult had supremacy. The barrages had been providential to Bakasur, smashing bridges, blocking streets and reducing the orderly patterns of construction to jumbled mounds of rubble where it needed only a few determined defenders to transform them into fortresses. The artillery campaign served the cult more than it did the militia. While the movement of soldiers was blocked by the destruction, the cult continued to use the tunnels underneath to manoeuvre.
Bakasur stirred the minds of the closest of the cult leaders, advising them to pull their followers back into the Cloisterfells until the distant artillerists could be induced to direct their fire elsewhere. He started to issue a more direct note of caution to the Inheritors themselves, but hesitated when he discovered their intentions. The four-armed star-children were moving ahead of the campaign Bakasur had planned. They’d bypassed the cordon, slipping around the embattled soldiers by climbing directly up the sheer cliff beneath the long stairway that wound around Mount Rama.
Crouched low, scuttling along using all six of their limbs, the Inheritors were ascending the Ladder. The few refugees desperate enough to climb the stairway to reach the cathedral were swiftly exterminated by the rapidly advancing creatures, their mangled bodies left to bleed on the ancient steps.
The magus rejected the impulse to call the Inheritors back. It would be a profanation of his powers, a blasphemous violation of beings superior to him in every way. If the star-children had rejected his plans, then it wasn’t his place to question their choice. He was to accept it and amend his strategy so that he might best serve their intentions.
The narthex was like a lake of weeping, whining humanity. The stink of smoke, sweat, blood and fear was almost overwhelming, the babble of distraught voices not unlike the roar of a storm. The hall was packed from wall to wall with refugees, filling faster than the acolytes and frateris militia could usher them away to inner chambers and passageways. Try as they might, such order as the Sisters were able to impose on the crowds as they passed through the enormous doors swiftly collapsed once they were inside.
Trishala felt her frustration mounting every time she saw some vacant-eyed hab-serf or befuddled prayer-wright frozen in place, oblivious to his blockage of the ranks of refugees behind him. The lines would disintegrate as people strove to get around the human obstacle, pressing upon the crowds around them and breaking the coherence of the other formations. The ripple effect would quickly pass through the whole narthex. Each time it took the Battle Sisters to restore order, their power armour endowing them with both the strength and mass to push their way through the crowds without being swept away by them.
Prelate Azad was doing his best to find room for those seeking safety within the cathedral, opening long-disused annexes and half-forgotten storerooms for their use. His acolytes had recruited work-gangs from the refugees to barricade the lesser doorways and many windows that opened on the building’s lower levels. They’d sealed off the exterior balconies and walkways, leaving open only those being used by the Sisters as vantage points. The prelate had even come down to the narthex several times to confer with Trishala directly. Even in such a crisis as they now faced, there were certain strictures and rites that had to be maintained, but such flexibility as Azad could condone was made available to the Adepta Sororitas.
Trishala watched as some of Azad’s acolytes inspected the latest group of refugees passing through the gate. In accordance with the stricture she’d given the crowd in the plaza, they had divested themselves of cloaks, coats and any other garment bulky enough to conceal the disfigurements of a cultist. Trishala had seen for herself on her home world that some of them could pass for a full human, but she was hoping such creatures weren’t plentiful.
The support of the acolytes and frateris militia was essential. The Order of the Sombre Vow was already stretched thin. Only two hundred of the Battle Sisters had been assigned to the convent on Lubentina. Guarding the relics housed within the Warmason’s Cathedral was the principal duty charged to them, and the masses of terrified laity filling the chambers and halls weren’t making that task easier. Because of the nature of the cathedral’s construction, its comparatively narrow rooms with their tall ceilings and the overall slanted arrangement of floors and walls, the refugees were being piled into every available space. Even some of the lesser shrines had been given over to the survivors, their artefacts removed for safekeeping. Even so, there were some relics too impractical or too sacred to be moved, and these required a constant guard. None more so than the Warmason’s Casket and the Shroud of Singh in the Palladion. There was one sanctuary where the refugees hadn’t been allowed to settle themselves.
There were ten Sisters always on guard in the Palladion, the largest deployment of her warriors outside the narthex itself. Accounting for the other sacred places, treasures and artefacts meant detailing another twenty to watch over them. Patrols sweeping through the cathedral to both maintain order among the masses of refugees and ferret out any hybrids still nestled among the crowds consumed still more of her resources. Then there were the Sisters posted to the gatehouse and the ponderous mechanisms that controlled the immense gate, the sentinels arrayed about the various balconies and porticos to keep watch over the plaza and the slopes of Mount Rama. There were even a few warriors up on the Curate’s Leap with powerful magnoculars so they might report on the fighting in the rest of Tharsis.
Lastly there was the reserve. Thirty-six Sisters that Trishala could use to rotate with the others or draw upon should a crisis develop. It wasn’t much, especially when she had to factor the panic of several thousand untrained, undisciplined civilians into her plans. If sending four Sisters away from the gate twice an hour was any indicator, should it be necessary to quell a panic she’d need not only the reserve but warriors assigned to other duties as well.
Trishala’s attention narrowed when she saw Kashibai conducting Azad through the narthex. The prelate’s expression was severe. ‘We have been in communication with the militia. They will establish a cordon around the base of Mount Rama and constrain the flow of refugees.’
‘It is what must be done,’ Trishala said. ‘The cathedral cannot hold them all.’
Azad’s jaw tightened as he looked towards the doors. ‘We can still bring more in. We can still find room for more of them.’
‘You’ll have to order the Great Gate closed soon,’ Trishala stated. ‘While the entrance is open everyone inside remains vulnerable. We have been charged with protecting this holy place and the relics housed here. Even our own convent has been abandoned that every Sister may be available towards fulfilling this obligation. We must not permit anything to jeopardise the cathedral’s defence.’
‘If I order the gate shut, I am abandoning all those outside these walls,’ Azad said. ‘Until the last possible moment, we must keep the way open. It is the God-Emperor’s will that we save as many as we can.’
‘It is also the God-Emperor’s will that we keep any more infiltrators from getting in here,’ Trishala said.
‘We can do no good, prelate, if we let the wolves in with the flock,’ Kashibai explained, her tone grim. ‘We killed many innocents dealing with the cultists who tried to sl
ip inside before.’
‘There must be a way.’ Azad touched his fingers to the jewelled aquila he wore. ‘If I could impress on the local militia the gravity of our need, perhaps they would lend us aid. Soldiers to help share your burden.’
‘Your acolytes have spoken with them over the vox,’ Trishala said. ‘Do you think they have any men to spare? The militia has been stretched thin already. As much as we could benefit from their aid, they are depending on us to hold the Warmason’s Cathedral on our own.’
‘Where there is faith in the Emperor’s grace, all things become possible,’ Azad replied.
‘Then we will pray for your success, prelate,’ Kashibai assured him. The two Battle Sisters saluted Azad as he made his way back across the narthex.
‘If he is successful it would improve the situation,’ Trishala told Kashibai, ‘but we cannot build our strategy upon hope. Have you inspected the machinery of the Great Gate?’
Kashibai cast her gaze up at the ceiling and the control room above their heads. ‘Prelate Azad wishes to keep the doors open, but that hasn’t kept him from sending acolytes to rouse the cogitators and feed the motors. It will need a few hours to build up a sufficient reserve of energy, but they are doing their best to have everything in readiness.’
‘We should have had them ready some time ago,’ Trishala mused. ‘When the first infiltrators tried to get inside, we should have stopped the intake.’
‘You can understand the prelate’s reluctance.’ Kashibai gestured at the ragged crowds around them.
Trishala closed her hand around the icon that hung about her neck. ‘I only pray that we can afford such mercy.’ She turned towards the entrance of the narthex. ‘Come, we’ll see if there isn’t something more we can do to ready things on the outside when we close the Great Gate. There’s certain to be a rush once the crowds discover what we’re doing.’