by Paul Kearney
‘We will stand here as long as you need us, my lord.’
Calgar turned to Drake and his men, a swift appraisal from the cruel blankness of the Corvus helm.
‘Follow me. We do not stop.’
Then he turned and began running up the massive staircase into the dark, and it was all Drake could do to keep up with him.
Twenty-Three
Captain Galenus changed the magazine in his bolt pistol. He had four left on his belt, eighty rounds. Not much, all things considered, but the chainsword still glittered in his right fist as its teeth sped too fast for eyesight to follow, spraying black blood as it thrummed in his grasp.
‘Sergeant Greynius, report,’ he said, snapping off a round which took a Chaos Marine clear in the centre of his helm’s mouth-grille, and then stepping forward to thrust the chainsword into the vulnerable join between neck and breastplate. The weapon shuddered in his hand and the foe toppled, hands going up to its throat, a black fountain steaming up into air that seemed already saturated with the stuff.
Greynius’ voice came up on the vox. ‘There are forty-six of us still alive. All the ammunition has been shared out. Brother Philo reports that the gene-seed of eight brethren is lost along with their bodies.’ A pause, heavy with unexpressed anger. ‘In retreat, we leave them behind.’
‘We will all be left on the battlefield today, brother,’ Galenus said. ‘It no longer matters. It is how we go that counts.’
He cast a glance around the chaos that enveloped Fifth Company. Third squad had been detached to slow up the enemy advance and they had bought the rest of the company precious time to make up some distance, before being overwhelmed. Seven battle-brothers, gone in the space of as many minutes, and the howling mob which had consumed them was now on the move again, like a great beast whose hunger could not be sated.
Fifth was now some half a mile from the side gate which Marneus Calgar had disappeared into, and as far again from the Adeptus Mechanicus forces that were still battling hard near the cavern entrance. The heaviest formations of the enemy were still trying to come up, but more lightly equipped companies were streaming out over the plain in their hundreds, desperate to come to grips with the Ultramarines. They took no notice of casualties – and Fifth had cut them down like grass – for they had the magnitude to soak up any number of dead.
They were things unhinged, human once perhaps, but now mere vessels of flesh and bone, filled with the madness of Khorne, the reckless despair of the Plague Father. Death and killing were all that mattered in the broken remnants of their ruined minds. Galenus had seen many of them laugh as they were cut down, taking twisted joy in the violence of their own extinction.
But Fifth still held together – the surviving squads, what was left of them, held their formations and their discipline. And still, Galenus drew them back, yard by bloody yard, retreating towards the farther walls of the Blood Keep wherein his Chapter Master had disappeared. Calgar would need him, before it was over – he was sure of that. And he did not intend to let the Lord of Macragge down.
A trio of Chaos hounds was burned up by the jagged blue-white lightning which arced out of Librarian Ulfius’ fingers. They yowled and shrieked as they burned, becoming black, jerking bonecases, skulls falling apart under the psychic assault. Ulfius staggered a little as he stepped back into the line, and it was Chaplain Murtorius who beheaded another of the beasts with his crozius before it could leap on the Company Librarian.
‘Don’t go to sleep on me now, brother!’ the Bull shouted, and he stepped forward with the blazing crozius held high.
‘What glory it is, to fight and die for the Emperor. We are lucky men today, my brothers – today we pit our faith and strength against the worst of all enemies, and today we send them back to the abyss whence they came!’
There was an answering growl from the embattled Ultramarines around him. The company champion and banner bearer, Gerd Ameronn, joined him to bulk out the thin blue line. Warspite gleamed in his fist, burned clean by the power field that surrounded the ancient blade.
‘Fine speech, brother,’ he said.
‘I felt it was called for,’ and there was humour in Murtorius’ tone, despite the grim skull helm he turned to Ameronn.
Something new was speeding towards them. They felt the thunder of it through the earth under their feet. The hordes of Chaos rabble that had been surging forward now slowed, then halted – but they were in no way disheartened or in retreat. They began chanting ‘Khorne, Khorne, Khorne!’
There was a sound like a stampede of enormous herd animals, and the air shook. And then out of the ranks of the Chaos troops there burst a scarlet avalanche of galloping shapes, huge, horned, bellowing. And on their backs a band of scarlet daemons waving their long blades, black with the evil of the warp.
‘What misshapen monsters approach,’ Chaplain Murtorius said. ‘The juggernauts of their foul god. Now, brothers, we shall truly be tested.’
The onset of the immense, heavy, red-hued creatures was enough to strike terror in the heart of any man. They were the size of rhinoxes and the daemons on their backs goaded them on with roaring shrieks.
‘Open fire!’ Captain Galenus ordered. ‘Aim for the mounts. Bring them to their knees, Fifth.’
Then the cavalcade of juggernauts slammed into the Ultramarines line and smashed it to pieces.
Marneus Calgar ascended the massive staircase with even strides, his honour guards on either side of him, Drake and his men struggling to keep up. Far below, the sound of the fighting echoed up the tunnel-like space, as Brother Starn and his First Company brethren fought to hold the doors.
The staircase was titanic in length and scale, each step almost a yard high. As they ascended, so the stone of its composition changed. It shifted to steel alloy, and cabling ran alongside them in thick snakes, clamped to the walls and ceiling. It was all in remarkably good repair, and though it streamed with moisture, the fecund growth which infested the rest of Fury seemed here to be held in abeyance.
‘I am reading a low energy field,’ Drake said, panting. ‘Like a Geller field, but different.’
‘It inhibits organic life,’ Calgar said. ‘They wanted this access route kept clear. It is an ancient register, and ha
s been running for many centuries. All this work here, this engineering – it is not the work of the Ruinous Powers, nor of Man.’ He was looking around himself intently, but he did not slow his stride for a moment.
Other dark entrances, passageways and conduits led off the staircase, and the thrum of power grew under their feet. A few ceiling plates had buckled and fallen onto the steps below, and a few massive cables hung free of their brackets, but otherwise their surroundings were in good repair.
Finally, Calgar stopped, and bent to run his gauntleted fingers over a series of markings which etched the wall. ‘We are indeed in the hull of an ancient vessel of some kind, built in millennia long gone. And now, see who the architects were.’ He gestured, and Drake scrambled up the steps to join him.
The skull and cog of the Adeptus Mechanicus, stamped indelibly into the metal, but at an angle.
‘The staircase is later work, but these bulkheads are original.’
‘We are only some two miles above the absolute centre of the hulk,’ Drake said. ‘By my readings, the energy levels are off the scale now. It is as if we are standing squarely on the carapace of a vast reactor.’
‘Or something that functions in the same way,’ Calgar said. ‘A planetary core perhaps.’
‘You think the hulk was originally a planet?’
‘It would explain a few things.’
‘It raises more questions than answers,’ Drake retorted, baffled and intrigued despite the desperation of their current predicament.
‘If there are any answers to be found in this place, then I’ll wager they are at the top of these stairs,’ Calgar told him, with something like a ghost of humour. His anger was banked down now, and he seemed thoughtful, warier.
‘The Blood God is strong in this place,’ Drake told the Chapter Master. ‘He feeds on the energy our wrath gives him.’
‘I know,’ Calgar said quietly. ‘But anger is strength, too, inquisitor. Better that than despair.’
‘Do you not feel the way these things are growing in us all, my lord?’
‘I am master of my own emotions, if that is what is worrying you, Drake.’ And then Calgar led off once more, bounding tirelessly up the endless staircase.
Endless it might seem, but it did have an end at last. It opened out onto a vast space like the narthex of a cathedral, a towering emptiness red-lit by guttering torches and flickering lumens which sputtered and winked high above them. Huge doors were set in a dull wall or bulkhead, and it was clear to see now that they were indeed blast doors of the kind used to separate the critical compartments within a large voidship.
On the doors were forged the skull and cog of the Adeptus Mechanicus, but the symbol had been defaced and scored out. Scratched in its place was the tripartite fly of Nurgle, repeated seven times, and the angular rune of Khorne.
The doors seemed to bleed as they stood there, venting an ooze of trickling rot as though the very metal they were composed of were putrefying. And as the party drew closer to them, vast hordes of fat black flies lifted up and began buzzing round in a shapeless cloud.
Whatever else the protective field kept at bay, it had not proved equal to the task of keeping this place clean, untouched. The stench of rot hung over it and the doors were painted in bright-red blood, which the flies fed off.
Calgar stepped forward. ‘Whatever lies behind these doors is meant for me,’ he told his companions. ‘Inquisitor, look for system controls, any mechanisms which govern the very stuff of Fury itself. Find a means to destroy the hulk. I will try and make a space in which you can do that.
‘Brothers Ohtar, Morent. You will protect the inquisitor now as he fulfils this task – it is the primary objective. You are not to intervene on my behalf unless I specifically give the order. If I am right, then we have come to the crux of our task, the place where it will all be decided.’
Then he called up Fifth Company’s vox. ‘Caito, do you hear me?’
There was a crackling roar, a storm of static.
‘Captain Galenus, if you can hear this, then your orders are to disengage with all speed and join me at my current location. Abandon the battle. It has served its purpose, and drawn out most of the forces from this stronghold. The Adeptus Mechanicus will prevail on the field – they have been planning this. Link with Brother Starn and then make your way to these co-ordinates.’
Nothing. Calgar looped the message and set it on repeat, then shut down the vox.
‘It is too late for Fifth, lord,’ Brother Morent said sombrely, grasping his axe, the blade flickering with fire.
‘Perhaps. Remember your orders, and abide by them. What comes next will test us all, even unto death.’ And with that, Marneus Calgar strode forward and smote the glistening, fly-spotted doors with one crashing fist.
They swung open, trailing streamers of slime and blood. A red light shone out on those standing there, as if they had all been bathed in gore.
An enormous, fire-flickering expanse opened out before them, perhaps four hundred yards long and half as wide, the roof looming up into impenetrable creeping shadow. On both sides, enormous pillars as wide as a Dreadnought reared up, green with bubbling rot, and beyond them were banks of cogitators and vid-screens, many dead, others flashing with mechanical and electronic life.
There was a heavy stench of decay, but underlying it was the metallic, oily reek of heavy machinery, and the chamber seemed to quiver with buried life as they stepped over the threshold, as though great wheels were turning under the floor.
Like the nave of a cathedral, or the baroque interior of an ancient voidship, the way stretched out before them, and at the end of it a dais rose up to a mighty throne, made of skulls and bones, held together with skeins of decaying flesh, boiling with putrescence. The very air dripped with malice and anger, the stench of an unquiet grave.
‘I have been waiting for you,’ a voice said, one that stunned the thick air and echoed off the walls in a thudding boom.
And then the immense thing on the throne stood up, towering in a black and scarlet silhouette that caused Drake’s men to cry out in terror and fall to their knees on the floor. Great wings extended, thirty feet across, and out of the stench and the darkness two eyes burned, black and lightless, but distinct, deeper than any shadow.
‘Welcome, Marneus Calgar. My brother.’
Twenty-Four
Calgar strode forward alone, a glimmering blue giant who was nonetheless dwarfed by his surroundings, and by the creature that awaited him.
On either side, there was movement along the walls of the chamber, things sidling out from behind the pillars. They were bulbous, gleaming, vaguely humanoid. Some wore remnants of Adeptus Astartes power armour, others stood naked in the swollen meat of their sore-encrusted bodies, carrying black swords, rusted bolters, or merely wielding the curved black claws which had once been their hands. The flies buzzed around them in clouds, big as a man’s thumb, slime spattering from their iridescent wings. A murmur went up, like that of a distant crowd.
Calgar ignored them, and walked on, leaving his companions behind. The Gauntlets of Ultramar lit up with clean blue-white light on his fists, startlingly bright in that dimmed place.
The creature at the end of the nave approached him, an immense shape, horned, winged, its footfalls echoing like stones set loose by an avalanche. It wore armour fashioned from a hundred stitched-together plates of ceramite, and between the plates its flesh bulged red and shining. It bore a great crimson blade which pulsed with dark light and dripped carmine drops of bubbling putrefaction on the floor that hissed and burned there with the stench of corrosive acid.
The face it displayed might once have had human features, but the twisted energies of the warp had rent it out of all proportion. There was a fanged mouth that came and went, teeth yellow as a sick man’s vomit, and those pitiless holes for eyes, slits that opened into an absolute void; a glim
pse of the immaterium itself.
‘Name yourself,’ Calgar said, his voice as calm and steady as though he were speaking to a new acquaintance.
‘There is a power in names,’ the thing said, and it halted some ten yards from the Chapter Master. ‘I had one once. I was named Phrynon, back when I had mortal form.’ He paused. ‘I see the name is not known to you. And yet it was well enough known once. I was Chapter Master of a band of unfortunates your kind knew as the Viridian Consuls.’ He grinned, his teeth puncturing the flesh of his lower face so that it bled.
‘That was then. Now I am the Witness, leader of the Broken, those who were betrayed, who were sent into the pit on the whim of a lie.’ He cocked his immense horned head to one side. ‘A false saint sent me here, Marneus Calgar, and made of me what I am. I hated him for it, but I see now that it was meant to be. It was destined. I was brought here to confront the reality of existence, to bear witness to its truth. My followers found it here with me, in the black, warm deeps of the warp. And now you are here, also, to confront that same truth. I brought you here, lured you in as I too was once ensnared.’
Calgar flexed his fists. When he spoke his voice was thick with grief or anger, or both.
‘I mourn for the Viridian Consuls, brothers of my own Adeptus – many of whom suffer below, clinging to their faith through long years of torment unimaginable. But you – you are nothing but the spawn of the warp, and I am here to end you, Phrynon, or whatever name you choose to call yourself by.’
The thing laughed, but its eyes lit up with a light like that of distant stars. It stepped forward, and they saw now that it did not have human feet, but great cloven hooves that rang on the metal plates of the floor.
‘Fine words! Do you think I have not heard their like before, Lord of Macragge?’ Its voice bellowed out in a whip of scorn that woke echoes up and down the steaming chamber.