by Nick Kyme
A broad chasm, some thirty metres across, now separated the metal platforms that had been joined by the stairs. The surviving orks saw that they couldn’t follow the Space Marine across. Instead, they paced the edge of the upper platform, bellowing at Solarion in outrage and frustration and taking wild potshots at him with their clunky pistols.
‘It’s raining greenskins,’ said a gruff voice on the link. ‘What in Dorn’s name is going on up there?’
With one eye still on the pacing orks, Solarion moved to the edge of the platform. As he reached the twisted railing, he looked out over the edge and down towards the steel floor two-hundred metres below. Gouts of bright promethium flame illuminated a conflict there. Voss and Zeed were standing back to back, about five metres apart, fighting off an ork assault from all sides. The floor around them was heaped with dead aliens.
‘This is Solarion,’ the Ultramarine told them. ‘Do you need aid, brothers?’
‘Prophet?’ said Zeed between lethal sweeps of his claws. ‘Where are Scholar and Watcher?’
‘You’ve had no word?’ asked Solarion.
‘They’ve been out of contact since they entered the command bridge. Sigma warned of that. But time is running out. Can you go to them?’
‘Impossible,’ replied Solarion. ‘The stairs are gone. I can’t get back up there now.’
‘Then pray for them,’ said Voss.
Solarion checked his mission chrono. He remembered Karras’s orders. Four more minutes. After that, he would have to assume they were dead. He would take the elevator down and, with the others, strike out for the salvage bay and their only hope of escape. A shell from an ork pistol ricocheted from the platform and smacked against his breastplate. The shot wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate ceramite, not like the heavy-stubber shells he had taken at close range, but it got his attention. He was about to return fire, to start clearing the upper platform in anticipation of Karras and Rauth’s return, when a great boom shook the air and sent deep vibrations through the metal under his feet.
‘That’s not one of mine,’ said Voss.
‘It’s mine,’ said Solarion. ‘I rigged the fuel dump in their fighter bay. If we’re lucky, most of the greenskins will be drawn there, thinking that’s where the conflict is. It might buy our brothers a little time.’
The mission chrono now read eighteen minutes and forty seconds. He watched it drop. Thirty-nine seconds. Thirty-eight.
Thirty-seven.
Come on, Karras, he thought. What in Terra’s name are you doing?
KARRAS BARELY HAD time to register the sheer size of Balthazog Bludwrekk’s twin bodyguards, before their blistering assault began. They were easily the largest orks he had ever seen, even larger than the door guards he and Rauth had slain, and they wielded their massive two-handed warhammers as if they weighed nothing at all. Under normal circumstances, orks of this size and strength would have become mighty warbosses, but these two were nothing of the kind. They were slaves to a far greater power than mere muscle or aggression. They were mindless puppets held in servitude by a much deadlier force, and the puppeteer himself sat some ten metres behind them, perched on a bizarre mechanical throne in the centre of the ship’s command deck. Bludwrekk!
Karras only needed an instant, a fraction of a second, to take in the details of the fiend’s appearance.
Even for an ork, the psychic warboss was hideous. Portions of his head were vastly swollen, with great vein-marbled bumps extending out in all directions from his crown. His brow was ringed with large, blood-stained metal plugs sunk deep into the bone of his skull. The beast’s leering, lopsided face was twisted, like something seen in a curved mirror, the features pathetically small on one side, grotesquely overlarge on the other, and saliva dripped from his slack jaw, great strands of it hanging from the spaces between his tusks.
He wore a patchwork robe of cured human skins stitched together with gut, and a trio of decaying heads hung between his knees, fixed to his belt by long, braided hair. Karras had the immediate impression that the heads had been taken from murdered women, perhaps the wives of some human lord or tribal leader that the beast had slain during a raid. Orks had a known fondness for such grisly trophies.
The beast’s throne was just as strange; a mass of coils, cogs and moving pistons without any apparent purpose whatsoever. Thick bundles of wire linked it to an inexplicable clutter of vast, arcane machines that crackled and hummed with sickly green light. In the instant Karras took all this in, he felt his anger and hate break over him like a thunderstorm.
It was as if this creature, this blasted aberration, sat in sickening, blasphemous parody of the immortal Emperor Himself. The two Space Marines opened fire at the same time, eager to drop the bodyguards and engage the real target quickly. Their bolters chattered, spitting their deadly hail, but somehow each round detonated harmlessly in the air.
‘He’s shielding them!’ Karras called out. ‘Draw your blade!’
He dropped the cryo-case from his shoulder, pulled Arquemann from its scabbard and let the power of the immaterium flow through him, focusing it into the ancient crystalline matrix that lay embedded in the blade.
‘To me, xenos scum!’ he roared at the hulking beast in front of him.
The bodyguard’s massive hammer whistled up into the air, then changed direction with a speed that seemed impossible. Karras barely managed to step aside. Sparks flew as the weapon clipped his left pauldron, sending a painful shock along his arm. The thick steel floor fared worse. The hammer left a hole in it the size of a human head.
On his right, Karras heard Rauth loose a great battle cry as he clashed with his own opponent, barely ducking a lateral blow that would have taken his head clean off. The Exorcist’s shortsword looked awfully small compared to his enemy’s hammer. Bludwrekk was laughing, revelling in the life and death struggle that was playing out before him, as if it were some kind of grand entertainment laid on just for him. The more he cackled, the more the green light seemed to shimmer and churn around him. Karras felt the resonance of that power disorienting him. The air was supercharged with it. He felt his own power surging up inside him, rising to meet it. Only so much could be channelled into his force sword. Already, the blade sang with deadly energy as it slashed through the air.
This surge is dangerous, he warned himself. I mustn’t let it get out of control.
Automatically, he began reciting the mantras Master Cordatus had taught him, but the effort of wrestling to maintain his equilibrium cost him an opening in which he could have killed his foe with a stroke. The ork bodyguard, on the other hand, did not miss its chance. It caught Karras squarely on the right pauldron with the head of its hammer, shattering the Deathwatch insignia there, and knocking him sideways, straight off his feet.
The impact hurled Karras directly into Rauth’s opponent, and the two tumbled to the metal floor. Karras’s helmet was torn from his head, and rolled away. In the sudden tangle of thrashing Space Marine and ork bodies, Rauth saw an opening. He stepped straight in, plunging his shortsword up under the beast’s sternum, shoving it deep, cleaving the ork’s heart in two. Without hesitation, he then turned to face the remaining bodyguard while Karras kicked himself clear of the dead behemoth and got to his feet.
The last bodyguard was fast, and Rauth did well to stay clear of the whistling hammerhead, but the stabbing and slashing strokes of his shortsword were having little effect. It was only when Karras joined him, and the ork was faced with attacks from two directions at once, that the tables truly turned. Balthazog Bludwrekk had stopped laughing now. He gave a deafening roar of anger as Rauth and Karras thrust from opposite angles and, between them, pierced the greenskin’s heart and lungs.
Blood bubbled from its wounds as it sank to the floor, dropping its mighty hammer with a crash.
Bludwrekk surged upwards from his throne. Arcs of green lightning lanced outwards from his fingers. Karras felt Waaagh! energy lick his armour, looking for chinks through which it might burn his
flesh and corrode his soul. Together, blades raised, he and Rauth rounded on their foe.
The moment they stepped forward to engage, however, a great torrent of kinetic energy burst from the ork’s outstretched hands and launched Rauth into the air. Karras ducked and rolled sideways, narrowly avoiding death, but he heard Rauth land with a heavy crash on the lower floor of the bridge.
‘Rauth!’ he shouted over the link. ‘Answer!’
No answer was forthcoming. The comm-link was useless here. And perhaps Rauth was already dead.
Karras felt the ork’s magnified power pressing in on him from all sides, and now he saw its source. Behind Bludwrekk’s mechanical throne, beyond a filthy, blood-spattered window of thick glass, there were hundreds – no, thousands – of orks strapped to vertical slabs that looked like operating tables. The tops of their skulls had been removed, and cables and tubes ran from their exposed brains to the core of a vast power-siphoning system.
‘By the Golden Throne,’ gasped Karras. ‘No wonder Sigma wants your ugly head.’
How much time remained before the ship’s reactors detonated? Without his helmet, he couldn’t tell. Long enough to kill this monstrosity? Maybe. But, one on one, was he even a match for the thing?
Not without exploiting more of the dangerous power at his disposal. He had to trust in his master’s teachings. The mantras would keep him safe. They had to. He opened himself up to the warp a little more, channelling it, focusing it with his mind.
Bludwrekk stepped forward to meet him, and the two powers clashed with apocalyptic fury.
DARRION RAUTH WAS not dead. The searing impact of the ork warlord’s psychic blast would have killed a lesser man on contact, ripping his soul from his body and leaving it a lifeless hunk of meat. But Rauth was no lesser man. The secret rites of his Chapter, and the suffering he had endured to earn his place in it, had proofed him against such a fate. Also, though a number of his bones were broken, his superhuman physiology was already about the business of re-knitting them, making them whole and strong again. The internal bleeding would stop soon, too.
But there wasn’t time to heal completely. Not if he wanted to make a difference.
With a grunt of pain, he rolled, pushed himself to one knee, and looked for his shortsword. He couldn’t see it. His bolter, however, was still attached to his thigh plate. He tugged it free, slammed in a fresh magazine, cocked it, and struggled to his feet. He coughed wetly, tasting blood in his mouth. Looking up towards the place from which he had been thrown, he saw unnatural light blazing and strobing. There was a great deal of noise, too, almost like thunder, but not quite the same. It made the air tremble around him.
Karras must still be alive, he thought. He’s still fighting.
Pushing aside the agony in his limbs, he ran to the stairs on his right and, with an ancient litany of strength on his lips, charged up them to rejoin the battle.
KARRAS WAS FAILING. He could feel it. Balthazog Bludwrekk was drawing on an incredible reserve of power. The psychic Waaagh! energy he was tapping seemed boundless, pouring into the warlord from the brains of the tormented orks wired into his insane contraption.
Karras cursed as he struggled to turn aside another wave of roiling green fire. It buckled the deck plates all around him. Only those beneath his feet, those that fell inside the shimmering bubble he fought to maintain, remained undamaged.
His shield was holding, but only just, and the effort required to maintain it precluded him from launching attacks of his own. Worse yet, as the ork warlord pressed his advantage, Karras was forced to let the power of the warp flow through him more and more. A cacophony of voices had risen in his head, chittering and whispering in tongues he knew were blasphemous. This was the moment all Librarians feared, when the power they wielded threatened to consume them, when user became used, master became slave. The voices started to drown out his own. Much more of this and his soul would be lost for eternity, ripped from him and thrown into the maelstrom. Daemons would wrestle for command of his mortal flesh.
Was it right to slay this ork at the cost of his immortal soul? Should he not simply drop his shield and die so that something far worse than Bludwrekk would be denied entry into the material universe?
Karras could barely hear these questions in his head. So many other voices crowded them out.
Balthazog Bludwrekk seemed to sense the moment was his. He stepped nearer, still trailing thick cables from the metal plugs in his distorted skull.
Karras sank to one knee under the onslaught to both body and mind. His protective bubble was dissipating. Only seconds remained. One way or another, he realised, he was doomed.
Bludwrekk was almost on him now, still throwing green lightning from one hand, drawing a long, curved blade with the other. Glistening strands of drool shone in the fierce green light. His eyes were ablaze.
Karras sagged, barely able to hold himself upright, leaning heavily on the sword his mentor had given him.
I am Lyandro Karras, he tried to think. Librarian. Death Spectre. Space Marine. The Emperor will not let me fall.
But his inner voice was faint. Bludwrekk was barely two metres away. His psychic assault pierced Karras’s shield. The Codicer felt the skin on his arms blazing and crisping. His nerves began to scream.
In his mind, one voice began to dominate the others. Was this the voice of the daemon that would claim him? It was so loud and clear that it seemed to issue from the very air around him. ‘Get up, Karras!’ it snarled. ‘Fight!’
He realised it was speaking in High Gothic. He hadn’t expected that.
His vision was darkening, despite the green fire that blazed all around, but, distantly, he caught a flicker of movement to his right. A hulking black figure appeared as if from nowhere, weapon raised before it. There was something familiar about it, an icon on the left shoulder; a skull with a single gleaming red eye. Rauth!
The Exorcist’s bolter spat a torrent of shells, forcing Balthazog Bludwrekk to spin and defend himself, concentrating all his psychic power on stopping the stream of deadly bolts.
Karras acted without pause for conscious thought. He moved on reflex, conditioned by decades of harsh daily training rituals. With Bludwrekk’s merciless assault momentarily halted, he surged upwards, putting all his strength into a single horizontal swing of his force sword. The warp energy he had been trying to marshal crashed over him, flooding into the crystalline matrix of his blade as the razor-edged metal bit deep into the ork’s thick green neck.
The monster didn’t even have time to scream. Body and head fell in separate directions, the green light vanished, and the upper bridge was suddenly awash with steaming ork blood.
Karras fell to his knees, and screamed, dropping Arquemann at his side. His fight wasn’t over. Not yet.
Now, he turned his attention to the battle for his soul.
RAUTH SAW ALL too clearly that his moment had come, as he had known it must, sooner or later, but he couldn’t relish it. There was no joy to be had here. Psyker or not, Lyandro Karras was a Space Marine, a son of the Emperor just as he was himself, and he had saved Rauth’s life.
But you must do it for him, Rauth told himself. You must do it to save his soul.
Out of respect, Rauth took off his helmet so that he might bear witness to the Death Spectre’s final moments with his own naked eyes. Grimacing, he raised the barrel of his bolter to Karras’s temple and began reciting the words of the Mortis Morgatii Praetovo. It was an ancient rite from long before the Great Crusade, forgotten by all save the Exorcists and the Grey Knights. If it worked, it would send Karras’s spiritual essence beyond the reach of the warp’s ravenous fiends, but it could not save his life. It was not a long rite, and Rauth recited it perfectly.
As he came to the end of it, he prepared to squeeze the trigger.
WAR RAGED INSIDE Lyandro Karras. Sickening entities filled with hate and hunger strove to overwhelm him. They were brutal and relentless, bombarding him with unholy visions that threatened to
drown him in horror and disgust. He saw Imperial saints defiled and mutilated on altars of burning black rock. He saw the Golden Throne smashed and ruined, and the body of the Emperor trampled under the feet of vile capering beasts. He saw his Chapter house sundered, its walls covered in weeping sores as if the stones themselves had contracted a vile disease.
He cried out, railing against the visions, denying them. But still they came. He scrambled for something Cordatus had told him. ‘Cordatus.’
The thought of that name alone gave him the strength to keep up the fight, if only for a moment. To avoid becoming lost in the empyrean, the old warrior had said, one must anchor oneself to the physical.
Karras reached for the physical now, for something real, a bastion against the visions.
He found it in a strange place, in a sensation he couldn’t quite explain. Something hot and metallic was pressing hard against the skin of his temple.
The metal was scalding him, causing him physical pain. Other pains joined it, accumulating so that the song of agony his nerves were singing became louder and louder. He felt again the pain of his burned hands, even while his gene-boosted body worked fast to heal them. He clutched at the pain, letting the sensation pull his mind back to the moment, to the here and now. He grasped it like a rock in a storm-tossed sea.
The voices of the vile multitude began to weaken. He heard his own inner voice again, and immediately resumed his mantras. Soon enough, the energy of the immaterium slowed to a trickle, then ceased completely. He felt the physical manifestation of his third eye closing. He felt the skin knitting on his brow once again.
What was it, he wondered, this hot metal pressed to his head, this thing that had saved him?