by Ben Counter
‘Virus-bombing,’ spat Shon’tu. ‘Lysander! I owe you a betrayal! I owe you a death by deceit! Iron Warriors, retreat! Back to the Dreadclaws!’
The order did not have time to register in the minds of the Iron Warriors before the detonation charge mounted on the sarcophagus exploded. The detonation threw members of the possessed Choir off their feet, throwing chunks of statue everywhere. Normal troops would have been killed and thrown into disarray, but not the Iron Warriors. That wasn’t the aim.
Shon’tu could see, through the billowing dust and smoke, the side of the sarcophagus blasted open. The grinning skull of Ionis, resting on a bed of golden silks now tattered and blackened, rolled onto its side as if fixing Shon’tu with its eye sockets. Super-cooled air misted and rolled from the ruptured sarcophagus.
One of the Choir was loping through the ruins, falling behind his fellow possessed. He slipped to one knee, faceplate breaking open into a tangle of gnarled mandibles like a fist opening and closing. The possessed’s body convulsed and a yawning mouth opened up in its chest, a fat purple tongue lolling out and coughing out stringy red gore.
The Iron Warrior’s joints were eroding, some corrosive substance finding purchase in the joints of the armour. One of his arms fell off, crumbling bone and flaking muscle pouring from the exposed socket. The ceramite was becoming pitted and discoloured, the exposed flesh drying and flaking off as if ageing centuries in a few moments. The possessed toppled to the ground and came apart, armour cracking like dropped pottery.
‘Virus attack!’ yelled Shon’tu. ‘Mhul! Koultus! Get them back to the Dreadclaws in good order! Move!’
One of the Obliterators had been caught in the invisible tide. The virus leaking from the ruptured sarcophagus had infected the thick bands of muscle wrapping around its deformed armour. The muscles contracted, the armour plates warping and splitting under the pressure, spiny growths bursting from exposed flesh. Malformed gun barrels cycled, lumps of fused ammunition thunking to the floor. The Obliterator’s face burst into a clutch of eyeballs, each one swelling and bursting to dribble red-white gore down the torn armour. It took a long few moments to die, its body deforming until it was turned almost completely inside out, metallic organs split into fans of bloody steel and loops of articulated entrails clattering around its feet.
The warning systems built into Shon’tu’s cranial augmentations were sending pulses of alert hormones through him, and setting off microscopic klaxons and strobes in his ears and eyes. Every bio-alert was going off, his armour detecting the presence of pathogens, his augmetic organs fending off the voracious strains of virus which mutated into new forms with every moment.
Shon’tu made it to the rear of the tomb. Twin blast doors had descended, cutting off the Tomb of Ionis and turning it into a biological containment zone. Shon’tu ripped through the first door with his power claw, punching through the front and ripping the door off its mountings. The second lasted no longer, and he was through, the cavernous outer hull voids reaching ahead of him. Steelwatcher Mhul and the remaining possessed had made it through too, and Shon’tu could feel the impacts of the Obliterators stomping behind him.
The virus incubated in Ionis’s ancient corpse was voracious enough to kill a Space Marine, but not a warsmith of the Iron Warriors. Most of the Iron Warriors of Shon’tu’s own unit, veterans with multiple augmetics and enhanced physiologies, had also made it, their altered immune systems rapidly adapting to the virus’s assaults. Most of the possessed were gone, left behind among the ruined statuary to writhe and deform as they died.
Shon’tu cast a glance back towards the Tomb of Ionis, now a smoking ruin blanketed in an invisible layer of bio-predator. The emotions in him were not human, but might have most closely resembled a mix of anger, shame and hate.
‘A trick worthy of victory,’ said Shon’tu. ‘But it is no victory you have won here. All my brothers wait for you. The Ferrous Malice waits for you. You have bought yourself a far worse death, Lysander, and I will still be the one to deliver it.’
The remains of the Iron Warriors strike force headed for the waiting Dreadclaws as maintenance servitors were already trundling to erect replacement bio-seals to cut off the Tomb of Ionis.
It did not matter, this defeat, any more than the failure of Velthinar to destroy the Endeavour of Will’s machine-spirit truly mattered. Shon’tu had not reached the position of warsmith without thinking many steps ahead. The next stage of the star fort’s death was already laid out, ready to be enacted with an order. The Imperial Fists had achieved nothing here but to listen to the ticking of the clock counting down their final moments.
Lysander knew there would be little time before he would have to act again in the star fort’s defence. The Iron Warriors were the masters of the siege, just as the Imperial Fists were the masters of defence – Shon’tu would not have thrown his entire force against one weak spot. He would have more in reserve, ready to storm in when the first breaches were opened. They would attack soon enough. Shon’tu would not let the ignominy of defeat last for long.
Lysander was alone as he ascended the chill spiral staircase towards the belfry, a place lined in marble and silver plate, kept isolated from the rest of the star fort. Above him the lofty reaches of the belfry’s rafters were hung with huge bronze bells. The belfry’s single occupant knelt on the floor, a small desk in front of him with an array of inkwells, quill stands, pots of sealing wax and reams of parchment. His head was bent as if in prayer and he did not turn to look at Lysander – not because he did not care that the captain had approached, but because the eyes hidden under the heavy bottle-green hood could not see at all.
‘News must be grave,’ said Astropath Vaynce. ‘It is rare anyone comes up here when there is not some crisis to be transmitted to the galaxy.’
‘I am sorry to break your silence,’ said Lysander.
‘It is in silence that I take solace,’ replied Vaynce. ‘But I have my duty. What do you wish of me, Captain Lysander?’
‘I have a message I need you to send,’ said Lysander. He could see now that the shadowy walls of the belfry were lined with intricate cages, each with several tiny, silent birds, their bright plumage hidden in the gloom, hopping between their perches. Vaynce had the company of several hundred birds in total.
‘I understand the Tomb of Ionis was violated,’ said Vaynce.
Lysander was silent for a moment. ‘It is no concern of yours, astropath. Damage was inflicted to the star fort, as would be the case in any battle.’
‘Ionis had lain here for thousands of years,’ said Vaynce. ‘So few knew what his sarcophagus really contained. A stroke of cunning, do you not think? To contain a sample of such a dangerous bio-predator within the body of the last man it killed, and disguise it as his resting place? How many men and women who served here knew it was beneath their feet? I would imagine it was sealed there so it could be recovered and employed as a weapon by the Imperial Fists. Perhaps that purpose was forgotten. In any case, it will not be fulfilled now.’
‘Ionis decreed with his last breaths that he be used as such a weapon,’ replied Lysander.
‘Some would call it a violation,’ said Vaynce, ‘of the venerated dead.’
‘Then let them say it,’ said Lysander. ‘I have answers for them.’
Vaynce smiled and turned. His eyes were bound with a strip of embroidered cloth which could not quite hide the enlarged, scorched pits beneath. He smiled. His teeth were black, carved from ebony and inscribed with prayers of humility and perseverance. ‘Mere words, captain,’ he said. ‘Forgive me. I spend much time alone. Proper etiquette has rather… passed me by.’
‘Can you encode my message now?’ said Lysander.
‘Indeed,’ replied Vaynce. He took a book from beneath the pile of parchment in front of him and opened it. Its pages were crammed with symbols, some pictures of animals or objects, others completely abstract. Each had a meaning that changed with its proximity to other symbols, forming an infinitely com
plicated language of symbols that those strange, blessed individuals known as astropaths had to master before they could serve the Imperium. Vaynce ran his fingers along the page, reading the symbols through the feel of the ink on the paper. ‘Commence, if you will.’
Captain Lysander dictated his message to Astropath Vaynce. He kept it succinct, leaving out all but that which was necessary, knowing that an astropath’s art became more difficult, the message more prone to mistranslation at the other end, the longer it was.
Vaynce did not flinch as he heard it. One hand flicked through the book with a speed born of decades of practice, the other scratching down symbols on a strip of parchment that unrolled from a tiny motorised reel. He used a quill and reddish ink.
When Lysander was done, Vaynce lit a stick of incense and took a fingertip of ash, smearing it in a circular symbol onto the floor in front of him. He spat into the circle, mumbled a prayer, and wiped off the ash and spittle with his sleeve. The ritual done with, he rolled up the parchment into a tight tube and sealed it with a blob of wax and the ring that hung on a chain around his neck.
‘And the recipient?’ asked Vaynce, although it was obvious to whom the message was addressed.
Lysander told him the identity of the recipient. Vaynce scrawled a corresponding symbol on the outside of the rolled parchment, then climbed unsteadily to his feet. He tottered over to one of the bird cages, opened the door, and took out a bird with blue and red plumage that glittered under the light of the belfry’s glow-globes. The bird sat calmly on Vaynce’s finger, tiny black eyes flitting from Lysander to the astropath, making no effort to fly away.
‘We all have our ways,’ said Vaynce. ‘Every one of us is different. Some make sculptures, some paint pictures. Some even make music. But in the end we are the same. Whatever we create, we must destroy.’
The astropath tied the rolled-up message to the bird’s leg with a piece of scarlet ribbon. ‘Go, go,’ he whispered, and the bird flitted off his finger and skipped up towards the bells hanging from the rafters.
‘It is the trauma of destruction,’ said Vaynce, ‘that gives it form in the warp. To see our creations die gives us the focus to do what we must.’
A grid of needle-thin lasers glittered into existence, strung between the bells like a driftnet. The tiny bird flew through the grid and disappeared in a flash of flame.
Vaynce closed his eyes. The embroidery around his eyes glowed and the empty sockets smouldered beneath them. Flickers of blue-white power played around Vaynce’s skull, earthing through his fingers to the belfry floor.
Lysander, though he possessed no psychic ability, could feel the fabric of reality shifting, as if a wrinkle was being pulled out or the galaxy had moved along some infinitely distant fault line.
Vaynce coughed and his shoulders slumped. Smoke coiled off him.
‘It is done,’ he said.
‘Was it received?’
‘Impossible to tell,’ replied Vaynce. ‘It would be futile, I believe, to expect a confirmation, given the recipient.’
‘Then we are finished here,’ said Lysander.
‘I understand.’
‘No,’ said Lysander. ‘Perhaps you do not.’
Vaynce sighed and sat back down next to his writing desk. ‘What I have sent for you is… toxic. The information contained therein is dangerous.’
‘Not least,’ said Lysander, ‘to our enemies. And I have no doubt that Shon’tu has the means at his disposal to tear memories from even the mind of an astropath. Ours would not be the first Imperial force to be undone by just such a breach.’
‘Some astropaths possess compartmentalised minds,’ said Vaynce. ‘Dangerous knowledge can be isolated and burned away, and the memory wiped clean. But not I.’
‘Then you know what must be done.’
‘Of course.’ Vaynce pulled down the hood of his robe, exposing a shaven skull criss-crossed with burn marks.
Lysander levelled his storm bolter at the back of Vaynce’s head. The selector was set to single shot – even so, it would be massive overkill.
‘If there was another way,’ he said, ‘I would take it.’
‘I have always known that it would end this way,’ replied Vaynce, his voice unwavering. ‘Some of us can see… echoes, of what might be. I saw this place many times before I was assigned to this star fort. I knew that I would die here. Whatever form our duty takes, we must welcome it, must we not? We must give thanks that we know what must be done.’
Lysander did not answer. The report of the storm bolter shot echoed around the belfry, ringing off the bells overhead. Vaynce’s headless body slumped onto its front, the astropath’s skull vaporised by the bolter shell’s detonation.
Lysander lowered the gun. He left the body where it was, and descended the stairs to join his fellow Imperial Fists.
PART THREE
The ritual chamber, when stripped of the battlefield trophies the Iron Warriors had set up there, served as a passable fighting pit. Two huge doorways were revealed when captured banners and tapestries were removed, and the sacrificial stone was strewn with a handful of shell casings and a sprinkling of blood to ready it for battle.
One door rumbled open. The holding pen beyond was full of the seething, coiled flesh of the first combatant, a serpentine monster composed of dozens of torsos fixed end to end. Its hundred limbs were fused from the claws and talons of executed xenos creatures, and they skittered along the floor drawing sparks as the serpent raised a head hung with grasping hands around a crocodilian maw. The serpent whipped around the chamber, every movement revealing another way in which human and xenos had been fused into a single horror. Here and there faces remained and they were alive, conscious and full of terror, features deformed in pain. A stinger on the serpent’s tail was held in place by a fusion of human and alien heads, half-flensed skulls and drooling jaws screaming silently.
The second door opened. The creature revealed was enormous and apelike, its massive shoulders supporting club-like arms that dragged along the ground, leaving a trail of blood from its torn skin. Skinless muscle wrapped a framework of fused skeletons, the bones inscribed with runes that glowed with the creature’s fury. Steam hissed between its vertebrae and from the vertical mouths of its two heads, wreathing around the tiny red eyes set deep into each deformed mass.
The serpent reeled around the wall opposite the newcomer, hissing and spitting as it reacted to its rival. The beast roared, its two voices combining to a storm of atonal noise, and slammed its fists into the floor. The serpent made to cower and the beast took a step forwards, before the serpent bunched its muscles and struck.
The beast was far too quick for anything of its size. One fist whipped up and caught the serpent around the throat, holding it down pinned against the floor as the length of its body thrashed. The beast’s other fist came up and hammered down onto the top of the serpent’s head, again and again. Bone crunched and gore spattered across the chamber’s walls.
But the beast had not paid attention to the serpent’s stinger. The slender point of curved bone hissed with acidic venom as it arched over the beast’s shoulder, the human and xenos heads embedded around it twisting as the muscle beneath tensed.
The beast slammed the serpent into the ground again. Its mouths split wide as it made to bite into the serpent’s head, and bloody saliva ran between the rows of fangs lining its mouths and throats.
The stinger punched down through the flesh of the beast’s shoulder. The beast let out a twin howl as the poison sacs along the serpent’s underside emptied themselves into its torso. Flesh and skin blistered along the beast’s back, and greenish boils welled up and burst. The beast clutched at its shoulder, and chunks of corrupted flesh came away by the handful, exposing bone and organ beneath. The serpent, wounded but alive, slithered away to the back of the room and watched the beast stumble blindly. The venom had reached its faces and they were withering away, fangs falling from its jaws and thudding to the floor amid the rain of bloo
d and muscle.
The beast thudded into the wall and slid down it. Its voice was growing weak as its lungs were eaten away. Its upper body was now a semi-liquid mass, only the bones remaining intact as everything between them sluiced away. Finally it was silent, gory skulls lolling senselessly, blood emptying away into the drains in the chamber floor.
Doors opened and crewmen entered the room. Most of the Ferrous Malice’s crew were mutants, whose deformities had made them reviled and oppressed by the rest of the Imperium, and who eagerly flocked for the chance to serve the Imperium’s enemies. In their malformed limbs they carried goads and coils of rope, and they advanced on the wounded serpent coiled in the corner. They jabbed at it, driving it back towards the door it had emerged from as its half-crushed head wavered between them and its coils bunched up as it prepared to strike.
The mutants yelled to one another in the short, barking language of the ship’s crew, herding the serpent back. The serpent snatched a goading pike off one of the mutants and splintered it between its jaws, and threw another off his feet with a lash of its tail. But metre by metre the crew forced it through the doorway, and one of their number hauled on a lever that slammed the door shut behind it.
‘Leave us,’ came an order from vox-casters mounted in the chamber. The mutants cowered at the artificial voice and hurried out of the chamber, dragging their wounded crewmate along the floor.
In their place, Warsmith Shon’tu entered. When the last of the crewmen were gone and the door shut behind him, he walking over to the dead beast and examined its ruined corpse. He knelt down and magnification lenses unfolded over his eye, bringing out the detail of the beast’s strange physiology. With much of its flesh liquefied it was clear from the skeleton the number of creatures that had been fused together to make it.
‘You have your sacrifice,’ said Shon’tu, though the beast could surely not hear him. ‘A hundred victims made it, and a hundred more made its conqueror. Once they died by the knives of our priests, and again they died by violence. This is what was written. This was what you demanded.’