by Nick Kyme
The Techmarines began to chant, manipulating a succession of rune-marked dials along the Ark’s side. Piece by piece its armoured shell folded back to reveal a golden sarcophagus, its surface glinting in the amber light.
Gerard’s voice once again brought the warning. ‘They’re coming,’ he said. ‘More than I can count.’
‘Hold them back,’ Mathias replied. ‘At any cost. We only need minutes.’
Gerard and Dorner drew their chainswords and kicked them into life even as the sound of the screaming cultists began to echo through the darkness of the hall beyond. Ackolon put himself between the sarcophagus and the door’s threshold, his bolter levelled. ‘Hurry, Chaplain.’
REINHART AND APOLLOS found the battle-sisters and Savaul in a long gallery leading to Montgisard’s chapel. They had formed a ragged line across the width of the hall. Step-by-step, they struggled through a seething mass of carnage, the space before them boiling with the streak of las-rounds, bolter shells and intermittent gouts of roaring flame. The stink of blood and promethium choked the air. ‘Throne,’ Apollos whispered.
Reinhart hefted his blade. ‘Come, Apollos. For the sword of Dorn.’
The Terminator looked over at him. ‘For the sword of Dorn, Castellan.’
Together, they charged into the centre of the battle-sisters line. Helena spotted them first. A grim smile crossed her features. ‘The Templars are with us!’ she shouted.
A cheer from the sisters rolled over the din.
With Reinhart and Apollos leading, they formed a wedge and drove into the screaming cultists. The writhing mass was frenzied to the point of suicide, hell-bent on keeping the Emperor’s faithful from reaching the chapel. Within moments, the blood of the enemy dripped from Reinhart’s armour, his blade a whirling blur of slaughter, his bolt pistol screaming its song of death. Through the carnage he could see Apollos. With every swing the Terminator’s thunder hammer cleaved away huge swaths of cultists. Savaul fought in his shadow, a surgical grace to his movements, each shot of his laspistol toppling a crazed heretic.
Ahead of them lay their goal: the towering bronze doors of the chapel.
Reinhart ducked the swing of a whining chainaxe and blew the wielder’s head away in a shower of gore. He vaulted the fallen heretic, watching as a Sister stumbled beneath the blow of a crackling power maul. Successive rounds tore her arm off and then her left leg below the knee. Her death grip discharged her flamer in a wide arc, the white flame incinerating all those standing before her. A cultist fell before Apollos, his ribcage crushed beneath the Terminator’s armoured boot.
Reinhart breathed hard, his armour wrenched and scorched, the skin of his face blistered. Only four of Helena’s sisters remained, but the doors were within reach. They had to keep moving.
‘The doors, Apollos, the doors!’
Apollos nodded. With a thunderous bellow the Terminator dropped his shoulder and plunged through the heretics, striking the doors with the full force of his weight and shattering them in an explosion of fragmenting wood and twisted bronze.
Reinhart and the others followed close on his heels… into hell.
BROTHER DORNER DIED in the first moments of the cultists’ charge. It was an errant shot, catching him in the throat and blowing out the back of his neck in a shower of blood. He fell to his knees, chainsword still raised in a blow that would never come, then pitched forward on his face. Gerard roared in fury and waded into the corridor. Hacking like a man possessed, the Sword Brother tore a bloody swathe through the maddened heretics. The floor became slick with blood and for a moment the foe recoiled from his savage onslaught.
At the threshold of the crypt, Ackolon pumped round after round into the melee; behind him, Mathias and the Techmarines continued their work. He risked a hurried glance.
The Chaplain stood before the altar and chanted the sacred rite of interment as the Techmarines’ servo-arms lifted the sarcophagus up and into the yawning cavity of the Dreadnought. For a moment, through the fogged glass set into the sarcophagus’s lid, the Apothecary caught a glimpse of an emaciated face. Brass tubes and wires inlaid with lexmechanical runes glistened from its eyes, ears, nose and mouth.
A scream of warning from Gerard brought him about just as a traitor PDF officer lunged at him with his sword. Ackolon caught the weapon in his gauntlet. Snarling he snapped the blade in half and put a bolter round through the officer’s chest. With a startled look in his eyes, the heretic fell to the floor.
Ahead of him, Gerard continued to scream: not in warning but in pain. The Space Marine had dropped his bolt pistol and was pressing his hand against his temple as he fought. Blood ran from his eyes. Ackolon noticed the rime of frost that crackled its way up the crypt doors and then he spotted the robed psyker at the back of the corridor.
Gerard’s agonised voice shrieked over the tumult. ‘Get out, Ackolon! I can’t hold it! Pull back! Close the do—’ With a loud crack Gerard’s head split.
Ackolon grunted as a las-round scorched across his check and burned away his ear. He dove for the door. Wrenching Mathias’s rosarius from the lock, he rolled into the crypt firing on full auto to keep the heretics at bay.
The doors boomed shut and Ackolon swung to his feet. ‘Chaplain Mathi—’ He stared in horror at the scene before him. Cerebus and Fernus were sprawled across the altar, a single bolt shot through each of their heads. Mathias stood over them, his pistol drawn, his armour caked in psychic frost.
Mathias glared at him, blood haemorrhaging from his eyes and nose. The Chaplain staggered forward and fell to his knees. ‘Ackolon… ki… kill me! The psyker, I… have expunged him, but I can’t hold… at bay for… for long!’ Even as he spoke, Mathias began to raise his pistol, his arm trembling. Behind them, the crypt doors started to buckle.
Ackolon placed his bolter to Mathias’s head, closed his eyes, and fired. Then, dropping his weapon, he sank to his knees and waited for his own death.
The violent squeal of heavy pneumatics brought him around. Ackolon looked up in awe. Somehow, Cerebus and Fernus had completed the rite of interment before Mathias killed them.
Like a vengeful god of death, the Dreadnought rose above him. The hollow pitch of Ezekiel’s voice trumpeted from the war machine’s loudspeaker.
‘Take me to the enemy, Apothecary.’
REINHART CHOKED ON the smell of corruption as he stormed through the shattered doors behind Apollos. The interior was a charnel house. Flayed bodies and blood-soaked banners hung from the flying buttresses ribbing the chapel’s nave. Heaps of stone pews were piled like children’s building blocks near the chapel doors to make room for an undulating mass of Chaos worshipers. Two massive fires, a nebulous green tint to their flames, burned at either side of the sacristy’s altar. Within the flames, blackened human forms chained to iron stakes cried out in torment. At the Templars’ appearance the heretics spun. Screaming their fury, they poured down the nave.
With Helena and Savaul beside him, the Castellan slammed against a toppled marble pew, his eyes burning in the acrid air. Apollos hunkered against the heap across from them while Helena’s sisters turned and defended the splintered doors. They were surrounded.
Helena rose from the cover of the pew, her bolter kicking. ‘By the Emperor, the altar!’ she yelled, oblivious to the gunfire tearing up the marble around her.
Reinhart punched home a fresh magazine and stood to add his own firepower.
Where the sacristy’s rear wall once stood a tenebrous ripple of sickening warp energies now spiralled, twisting the laws of reality between the four anchor points of the Necrolectifiers. At the altar’s base nine robed warp priests chanted, their shaven skulls branded with ruinous curses.
‘Is it open?’ Apollos roared.
Helena shook her head. ‘No, but almost. We only have minutes.’
‘The priests! Aim for the priests!’ Savaul screamed. As one, they poured fire over the heads of the cultists only to see their shells detonate just short of their target. Reinhart spat a
curse. ‘What is this heresy?’
‘Psykers!’ Savaul yelled.
Behind them one of the sisters fell, her body hacked apart as she was pulled through the doors.
‘We’re going to have to get close!’ Apollos shouted.
Helena let loose another barrage and fell back behind cover. ‘We’ll never make it. We have no defence against the warp. Their energies will tear us apart even if that mob doesn’t.’
Apollos raked down another wave of cultists. They were almost on them. ‘We’re running out of time!’ The warp gate began to darken.
Reinhart looked at his companions, each in turn. He knew there was only one option. The Emperor’s eyes were upon him. ‘Give me all of your grenades!’ he yelled to Helena.
She looked at him, a question on her lips, even as understanding blazed in her eyes. Unclipping her last two, she handed them over.
Reinhart ripped away a portion of his tabard, binding up her grenades with two of his own. He kept one in his hand.
From across the streaking avenue of fire Apollos watched, realising Reinhart’s intent. ‘No!’ he screamed. ‘Let me go, I have the best chance!’
A sudden, deafening eruption blew apart what remained of the chapel doors. A shattered piece of lintel struck Apollos in the temple, knocking the young Terminator unconscious. Helena’s remaining sisters simply ceased to exist, their bodies vaporised. Reinhart shook himself from his dazed concussion, a heavy ringing in his ears. He felt warmth streaming down his chest. A bloody crater smoked just below his shoulder. Next to him, Helena coughed in the swirling dust, her face covered in blood from a deep gash across her forehead. Her left leg was gone. Savaul lay unconscious next to them. Through the roiling haze they could see a thronging horde of cultists climbing over the rubble of the devastated doorway.
‘Can you hold them?’ Reinhart asked.
Helena braced her bolter and nodded. She smiled at Reinhart. ‘You do know what true honour is, Marius Reinhart.’ ‘The Emperor protects, Helena,’ he said and briefly grasped her hand.
The Battle Sister smiled again. ‘The Emperor protects, Castellan.’
Reinhart vaulted from cover. Hugging the grenades close to his body, he charged through the haze. It took a moment for the Chaos worshippers to realise what dashed between them. But, before they could react, the trembling discharge of an assault cannon shook the chapel’s foundations and ripped them to bloody pulps. A grenade arced over the Castellan’s head and detonated in a cloud of heavy smoke – masking his approach. Reinhart glanced over his shoulder as he covered the last few metres and saw the silhouette of an ancient Dreadnought in the shadow of the ruined threshold.
He whispered a word of thanks, then turned and emerged from the smoke in the midst of the unsuspecting psykers. Thumbing away the pin of his grenade, he barrelled onto the altar’s landing. He felt the first stabs of pain within his mind but they were too late.
‘The Emperor does protect,’ he said, and the gate was shut amidst lightning and flame.
THEY FOUND HIM in the smoking rubble outside the chapel’s entrance; his body and armour shattered, his features burnt. He awoke as a young Templar Neophyte knelt next to him. His crusted eyes cracked open, miraculously intact. Ackolon blinked.
The shadowed forms of Templars picked their way past them, bolters aimed. He tried to focus on the man leaning over him. ‘Brother,’ the Neophyte said. ‘Hold on. The Apothecaries will be here soon.’
Ackolon coughed, attempted to raise his head. He knew his wounds were mortal ‘How… where?’
‘The Revenant, brother, your flagship. High Marshal Ludoldus himself sent us after we received a call for aid from an Inquisitor named Vinculus. It appears we’re working with the Ordo Hereticus now,’ he said. ‘A crusade has been called against the remainder of the cult you and Castellan Reinhart stopped here.’
‘The others…’
‘Brother Apollos and the interrogator live, sir, we are pulling them out now. Brother Yesod has already been extracted.’ Ackolon nodded. He began to go cold. What little feeling he had left was slowly fading. He struggled to rise again. ‘What is your name, Neophyte?’ he rasped. ‘Helbrecht, sir.’
Ackolon fell back, his vision blurring. He thought he could hear Reinhart and the others calling his name. ‘Tell them, Helbrecht,’ he whispered, ‘tell them we knew no fear…’
And then he too joined his battle-brothers.
NIGHTFALL
Peter Fehervari
Terrible things wait amongst the stars and only a terror greater still may ward against them. So the Lords have taught us and thus have They shaped and shielded us through the hungry night. But strength demands sacrifice and Sarastus must pay its dues. Know then, that every thirteenth year, upon the dawn of the Black Star, our Lords shall descend and terrible will be their wrath should our tribute prove unworthy.
— The Blind and the Bound. The Revelations of True Night
SARASTUS WAS JUST another forgotten world left to rot in the backwaters of the Imperium. The life of a hive-world was measured by its productivity and when the seams of its industry ran dry, the planet had quietly slipped off the Imperial charts. Soon after that the darkness had come.
True Night had touched Sarastus three times, each visitation miring the planet deeper in damnation. Four of the great hive cities now lay silent, their will to live smothered beneath decades of fear. Carceri, once the greatest, was now merely the last. Blighting the plains like a vast scab, it was a black ziggurat of heaped tiers, its spires clutching hopelessly at the sky. The manufactorums were still, the hab-warrens shadow-haunted mausoleums. Of its massed millions perhaps some hundred thousand remained, huddling in the lowest tiers, far from the touch of the stars. The prophets of True Night ruled them with an iron hand, but they were as fearful as their thralls, for in the balance of Sarastus the only ones who truly mattered were the sacrifices.
To the prophets who chose them, they were the blessed; to the thralls who surrendered and mourned them, they were just the ghouls. All were ragged, skeletal shadows with gaunt faces and hungry eyes. Most would kill on a whim and many wouldn’t hesitate to make a meal of the dead. Cast into the uppermost tier of the hive they scavenged and murdered beneath an open sky, striving to prove themselves worthy of the darkness. When True Night fell none were older than thirteen.
JUDGEMENT BEGAN WITH a song, a drone so deep it stirred the entire hive. Throughout the day it rose in pitch and complexity, blossoming as the sun waned, charging the air with potential. As night drew near, the planet itself seemed to hold its breath, as if playing dead for the stars. But while the thralls trembled and the priests mumbled prayers, the ghouls thrilled to it. This was their night!
Tantalising and threatening by turns, the call drew them to the walled plaza nestling at the peak of the hive. Long ago the square had hosted the elite of Carceri, but now only these feral youths remained to pass through the crumbling majesty of the gates. They came in a trickle and then a tide, none sparing a glance for the imperious faces glowering down from the lintels; they knew nothing of the past, and cared even less. They were here for the Needle, because tonight the Needle sang.
Gazing up at the gently vibrating monolith that dominated the centre of the plaza, Zeth felt the old awe welling up again. No matter how many times he saw it, the Needle was a shocking, impossible thing. About twenty feet across, it was a vast splinter woven from twisted iron spars, every inch encrusted with black barbs. One end was embedded deep in the rockcrete of the plaza, the other ascended in angular coils to disappear amongst the clouds. It was the brand of the star gods on Sarastus and it was Zeth’s only friend.
Most of the ghouls feared the monolith, but Zeth had always been drawn to it. During the first terrifying days of his ordeal he’d hidden in its shadow, finding strength in its agonised contours. Soon afterwards the visions had begun. They were just teasing flashes – a rich darkness glittering midnight blue – a black-feathered king dying from within and without – the ho
wl of a hunter high above… There were never enough pieces to complete the picture, but Zeth knew the Needle had given him an edge. He’d glimpsed enough of the future to get ahead of the game.
Losing himself in the Needlesong, Zeth remembered the words of the scarred prophet, “Listen for the Needle. It’s Their mark and your measure. Time will come when you’ll hear it sing and then you’d best be ready, for the Lords will be close. Win their favour and you’ll taste the stars, fail them and you’ll be worse than dead…”
The weak would be culled and the strong would be taken. It was a simple promise that had become the vicious core of Zeth’s soul. He was ready for the test. He was hungry for it. Impatiently he watched the sun bleed into the horizon.
AS WAS THEIR way, the masters of Sarastus returned on the eve of Nightfall. Their vessel was a jagged, jaundiced predator, slicing between the stars like a serrated knife. Its hull, a blue so deep it was almost black, bore no ornamentation or marks of allegiance. It was a creature of shadows, much like its crew.
From the shrouded recesses of his command throne, Vassaago observed the world he had enslaved. Flickering holo-reports veiled his bleakly handsome features in a web of light and shadow, but his eyes were changeless black orbs. Impassively he assessed the prospects for this harvest. Another hive had died and the last was teetering on the brink of extinction.
‘Lord, I must prepare for the harrowing.’ The words were spoken in a discordant electrical hiss and Vassaago frowned, turning to the thing hovering beside him.
The sorcerer had entered his service a mere century ago and he still considered it an outsider. It claimed an Astartes heritage, but its demeanour had more in common with the extremes of the Mechanicum. The tattered swathes of its robes completely hid its physique and Vassaago had never seen so much as a hand emerge from that formless mass. Stranger still was the absence of anything recognisable as a face. Perhaps the coarse iron sheet it wore was just a mask, but if so it made no concessions to anything remotely human. Such as eyes… It was an uncanny creature to be sure, but Vassaago had entertained stranger allies over the millennia.