by Paul Kearney
Some of them struggled on their crosses, as they must have struggled through years uncounted, but they were stuck fast. They endured the torture unendingly, and around the feet of every one the maggot-life of Chaos writhed and squirmed, feeding on their dripping blood, their chopped viscera, and above all, on the pain itself, nourished by it, growing on it.
‘Throne of Terra,’ Regan said in a cracked whisper on the vox, and his voice was near breaking.
These were the Viridian Consuls, a proud Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes whose primarch was Roboute Guilliman himself. In each of these agonised forms there dwelled the holy genetic remnant of the Emperor of Mankind. And now that blessed legacy was being tormented and corrupted by an eternity of pain, made immortal by the power of the Dark Gods. They would suffer here until they turned to Chaos, and embraced the foulness of the warp. They had suffered here for centuries. And yet still they resisted.
Even Drake, hardened as he was, felt an overwhelming hatred and rage rise up in him at the terrible spectacle.
And, he thought to himself, when Marneus Calgar sees this, he will loose the Ultramarines. There will be a terrible reckoning. He will burn Fury to ash.
This place – this thing, must be destroyed. These souls must be released from their pain. No matter if it takes my life to do it. No matter what dark technologies lie hidden here. This cannot stand.
He collected himself, and tapping the oculars on his helm, he zoomed in on the farther reaches of the foul chamber. The lake shone there, beyond the tortured Space Marines. A grey-green, rippling expanse of liquid that steamed and plopped like a bubbling cauldron. It stretched for another half a mile beyond the grey strand before him, and rising up out of it there was an island, maybe a mile wide, cragged and broken like some wave-shattered shore, made of black stone or metal – he could not make it out – smeared with green growth that seemed to move and shift as he looked at it.
And on the highest reaches of this island there was what looked almost to be a castle or keep of some sort, its walls rearing up like sheer cliffs of shaggy filth, bedecked with looming towers, some of them formed from the sharp prows of void ships, others composed of the blunt rectangles of freight containers stacked like immense bricks, five hundred feet high. There were battlements, hacked out of layered metal, and stained poles upon which ragged banners hung, moving sinuously in the air currents which came and went, engendered by the humid steaming heat of the place. Some were scarlet, others green. The devices upon them had been made of flesh, skin and gleaming bone, and everywhere below them there were dunes of skulls, thrown up at the base of the black walls like pebbles tossed on a beach.
Drake saw Khorne’s rune there, painted on the walls in dried blood and smeared tissue, the symbols a hundred feet high, bordered by thousands more skulls affixed to the battlements. And he saw what he now knew to be the badge of these Chaos scum. The Ultramarines sigil, turned upside down to form the Omega which was the symbol of the end days, bisected by a bloody sword, wreathed in wing-like flames. Though some of the Consuls had kept their faith, all through the long agony of their torment, others had not. The Chaos warband they had degenerated into had its heart here, Drake could feel it. The psyker in him could sense a great, keen intelligence ahead, one that would soon become aware of him. He felt a fierce exultation at the thought of confronting it, of ending the abomination.
‘Here, at last,’ he said quietly, ‘we come to the heart of the thing. The lair of the beast.’
Eighteen
The Ultramarines lost nine more battle-brothers to the treacherous denizens of the hulk as they descended in Drake’s wake, following the path the inquisitor had blazed for them.
They were some two miles above him, following the waypoints he had marked out in coded vox coordinates. But things had changed since Drake had passed this way hours before.
As the Ultramarines drew closer to the hollow hall and the castle of skulls where Drake awaited, so it seemed that they attracted more and more attention from the loathsome Chaos spawn that infested these lowest levels. Their progress slowed, until they were fighting for every yard, springing ambushes left and right – great gargling beasts that leapt out of the very decking at their feet or that slapped down from catwalks far above, right into their midst – and in their wake hurtled possessed, raving monstrosities that might once have been of their own kind, now ravening mindlessly out of the noisome dark.
And there were things more twisted than these, kept in the shadows by the faith of Chaplain Murtorius and the psychic shielding of Librarian Ulfius. They watched, and did not engage. Their eyes could be seen gleaming.
By the time the Ultramarines were within narrow-vox range of Drake, nearly every member of Fifth Company was nursing a wound or damaged, acid-eaten armour. It fell to Calgar himself, his two honour guards and Starn’s Terminators, to bludgeon a way through.
Three times, they had to be resupplied with ammunition for their storm bolters, and twice they had to halt while Brother Salvator made what repairs he could manage to the ancient armour these veterans wore.
Nothing could withstand Marneus Calgar and his two bodyguards; with power gauntlets and power axes they smashed their way deeper into the filthy core of Fury.
But now the rear of the column was being attacked as well, and Magos Fane lost four of his skitarii to a particularly determined assault composed of huge slithering monstrosities and a dozen frenzied Chaos Marines, their armour slathered blood-red. The Blood God’s crooked antler-like rune was emblazoned on their shoulderplates.
Horned monstrosities, armed with what had once been the holy relics of Adeptus Astartes weapons, would have slaughtered more of Fane’s followers had Captain Galenus and Fifth’s champion, Gerd Ameronn, not come to their aid. And it was Chaplain Murtorius who slew the last of these Khornate followers, shouting alternating battlecries and curses as he beat them to a bloody pulp with his crozius.
The corridors and passageways were alive with the enemy now, and it was a running fight in places as the Ultramarines dashed from position to position in a welter of fire. The enemy were trying to cut the column into pieces and then deal with the severed remnants, but again and again the Ultramarines re-formed and drove their foe back.
Two of their number too badly wounded to continue were left behind with explosive charges which they detonated after being engulfed by their warped brethren, bringing down part of the passageways behind the column, their gene-seed destroyed with them. But their sacrifice brought something of a respite for the main body of Fifth, and the column staggered on behind the Chapter Master.
Their blood was up now, and while it in no way dulled their perfect professionalism, it made of them a puissant force of pure, unadulterated violence, their years of training and experience, their genetically honed bodies and minds bent to one thing only; destruction of the travesties that were attacking them, and obedience to the man who led them all, and whose resolve never faltered. It was for places like these that the Adeptus Astartes had been created. It was for times like these that they had been born.
In a brief respite between attacks, Calgar called up Inquisitor Drake for a situation report. The inquisitor sent his reply in a brief encoded vox-burst.
Main base of the enemy at my location, coordinates to follow. All quiet here, but I sense a great number of the foe in this place. This is the key, the heart of it.
Calgar looked back along the tangled, overgrown and half-wrecked passageways in which Fifth Company now took up station behind him. The company had lost almost a quarter of its strength since its arrival on Fury, but with Ninth’s Devastators and Starn’s veterans, he still had over seventy Ultramarines with him, plus Magos Fane’s dozen or so skitarii. It was not enough, he knew that. But it would have to do. If they could but put an end to the foulness in this thing, then their losses would not have been in vain.
‘Gather up all the ammunition you can scaven
ge,’ he told Captain Galenus, who stood beside him, chainsword dripping and steaming. ‘The enemy’s armament will find itself cleansed by its use in our hands. Let Chaplain Murtorius bless and anoint it.’
All spare magazines that could be found were now stripped from the carcasses of the Chaos warriors by the Ultramarines to bolster their own firepower, though the warriors of Fifth handled these clips somewhat gingerly at first, until Murtorius smeared holy oil on them and growled prayers over the filthy runes that bedecked them. Most of the Ultramarines defaced these runes with their gladii and scratched the Chapter sigil into the magazines, to exorcise the last black remnants of their former owners.
‘Desperate times,’ Captain Galenus said to his Chapter Master.
‘How are we for ammunition, Caito?’
‘Each man still has some dozen clips, my lord. But we are low on promethium, and missiles for the launchers.’
‘It is not far now, according to Drake. But the sternest test is yet to come. These attacks are meant to wear us down, not to stop us. Whatever is at the heart of this hulk, it knows we are coming now, and it awaits us.’
‘It will regret that,’ Galenus said, and Calgar smiled inside his helm and set one huge gauntlet on his captain’s shoulder.
‘Courage and honour, my brother.’
‘Courage and honour.’
They had not made another quarter of a mile before the attacks began again, in a constricted series of passageways that were slick with putrid mud underfoot and that twice collapsed around them as they advanced, the Ultramarines digging each other out of the wreckage; a tumbled morass of debris that was both metallic and organic, as though someone had filled a swamp with scrap metal and then upended it on their heads.
They came under fire as they pulled each other free, bolter rounds, plasma beams and las-bolts, so that they went to ground in a blinding spray of muck and stinking liquid, viscous and clinging, and even the superlative targeting of their autosenses had trouble picking out their foes. It was not until the Devastators fired a series of their precious launcher missiles down the passage that the firing tapered off, but the missiles set off a further series of collapses which blocked the way ahead. To make things worse, vox with Inquisitor Drake was lost at the same time.
Calgar led his battle-brothers down a side tunnel, relying on instinct alone to take them on the right path, always descending, their journey marking a great spiral into the guts of Fury, and all around them the tunnels were no longer things constructed and built, but more like the biological innards of some enormous creature that twitched and belched and groaned around them.
Insanista in tenebris. The words found themselves in Calgar’s mind even as he blazed a way downwards, trying to get back to the waypoints that Drake had set out for them.
The ancient phrase meant fury in the dark, but Calgar’s wide reading and research also suggested that it meant madness.
Both of them were here with him, walking at his side. He felt them as surely as he felt the presence of his honour guards. They walked the passageways of the hulk like ghosts, urging him to set aside his discipline, his training, to give in and succumb to their blandishments in a glorious abandonment of all restraint. To let his anger and his disgust have free rein. To follow death and murder into the dark, and there encounter the glowing heart of true wisdom.
So disquieted was he by these impulses that he spoke to Brother Murtorius as the Chaplain drew near on the march.
‘This place radiates the filth of its evil with every step we take,’ he said. ‘Brother, pray for us as we strive to strike at its black heart.’
The Bull brandished his crozius and let the light of it wash over them.
‘My lord, our very deeds are offered up as prayers. When we smite the enemy in his lair, the blood we spill rises up like the voice of a mighty choir. Everything we do, we do for the Emperor, for the ignorant masses of our fellow Man. And for each other. As long as our faith holds strong, we cannot be defeated, even in death.’
‘I have been–’ Calgar found the words sticking in his throat. Anger glowed in his hearts, and as he clamped it down, it left behind a sick residue of doubt that gnawed at him.
‘The influence of the Ruinous Powers is seductive in this place,’ Murtorius went on, looking at Calgar out of his skull helm. ‘It is an old evil, and we are in a stronghold of its minions.’
‘I have been in such places before, many times,’ Calgar said. ‘But brother – I worry that I have brought us here to this pass because of the pride I feel, the overweening confidence I have in my brethren. Perhaps I erred. I was arrogant.’ He paused for a second. ‘I pray I have not brought us to the brink of ruin.’
‘Never,’ Murtorius said stoutly. ‘What is death, but a passageway to a greater peace wherein we shall know the immortal soul of the Emperor Himself? No – so long as we hold true to the Codex, to the precepts of our mighty Founder, then it is of no matter whether we live or die. The Chapter will go on. The Imperium will endure. Our part in the story will have ended, that is all.’ The Chaplain lowered his crozius.
‘But we must beware of losing all hope, my lord. Despair is a sickness of the Death God, fecund and decaying at the same time. It is the siren call of the grave. The eight dead Space Marines we found in the cathedral chamber high above us succumbed to it, and allowed themselves to leave the world rather than face what was to come. That was a despair so deep that even shame had no part of it. It was an abnegation of self.’
‘No Ultramarine will die like that,’ Calgar swore, his doubts dissolving at the Chaplain’s words. ‘Not so long as I am able to stand and feel the blood of Guilliman beat in my hearts.’
‘Then let us be content to fight, and follow the precepts of the Throne, while we have strength. And never forget, Chapter Master, that even when hope is gone, faith remains.’
Librarian Ulfius came up on vox. ‘My lord, we have large auspex contacts to our rear, and there is weapons fire echoing in the tunnels we have just traversed.’
Calgar snapped back into an instant appreciation of the present.
‘Alert the rearguard. I will be there presently. The company will halt here. Captain Galenus, to the vanguard – hold fast.’
Another voice, toneless and somewhat shrill.
‘Chapter Master, I will join you at the rear. I must speak with you urgently.’ It was Magos Fane.
‘Very well. But be swift, magos. Murtorius, with me.’
Calgar and the Chaplain strode down the line, leaving the honour guards at the front of the column to bolster the defence there. The Ultramarines were spread along some three hundred yards of tunnel, crouched in a foot of thick green water in which oily smears reflected the light like flattened rainbows. Thin worm-like tentacles were reaching blindly out of the walls at them, and many of the company had drawn their gladii and were methodically hacking the things off.
Of their original deep-blue livery, little was to be seen. Fifth were so scored and burned and covered in filth that barely a handspan of blue remained visible on their armour. But their eyelenses gleamed bright scarlet as Calgar passed by, and they had all wiped clean the Ultramarines sigil that they bore on one shoulder. Brother Salvator and Apothecary Philo were tirelessly going up and down the line, effecting minor repairs and administering to the more severely wounded. When an Ultramarine in this place could no longer walk on his own two feet, he had to be left behind. It was a strategy that scoured Calgar’s soul, but there was no help for it. His brethren knew it, and accepted their fate without complaint.
Brothers, let me be worthy of your faith. Let not this sacrifice be for nothing. Emperor, watch over me. Great Guilliman, guide me.
Chaplain Murtorius dropped back and began blessing his brothers, sloshing through the stinking water, his crozius held high and blazing again. He alternated his blessings with stories of the Ultramarines heroes of old, speaking to e
ach Space Marine by name, complimenting him on his deeds, remarking on their collective appearance with a dark wit that had the brethren laughing over the vox, setting his hand on their heads and calling them to remember past glories, and the darkness the Chapter had known in the past.
He was a pearl beyond price, and Calgar heard Murtorius’ words still echoing in his own mind as he went down the line.
Some Space Marine Chaplains held that their brethren needed nothing more than thunderous sermons to keep their faith true and unsullied by doubt. The Bull was subtler than that, for all his fearsome reputation. He knew what it took to keep fighting men’s hearts high. Sometimes a little cajolery, a little self-mockery went farther than a pious reiteration of Chapter dogma. And yet his faith was solid as a mountain.
A good Chaplain was not just respected, or feared. He was loved.
It was not a distinction that could be readily understood by those who had never stared death in the face time and time again, and it was as true for Adeptus Astartes as it was for lesser men.
Calgar had known many Imperial commissars who were rigid and unyielding in their orthodoxy, their blind allegiance to the tenets of their training. But the mark of true greatness was the ability to look beyond it – to remember the humanity of those who put their lives on the firing line – to make misgivings into a joke. To laugh at death in the company of others who faced it also. That was a truth as ancient as warfare itself.
Magos Fane was waiting for him at the rear along with some of his attendants and a pair of skitarii, their red robes now green-grey with muck. Second squad was with them, Sergeant Gaden and his brethren in firing positions facing back down the way the column had come, brother Unser sweeping the hand-held auspex back and forth, and Brother Ulfius alongside him, his psychic hood flaring bright under its covering of accumulated filth.