The Damnation of Pythos

by David Annandale

  Kanshell swallowed. ‘Yes, sergeant.’ He walked up to the entrance.

  ‘Is it possible that these people are innocent of anything more than false belief?’ Khi’dem wondered. ‘And they had nothing to do with what happened?’

  ‘They knew,’ Galba replied. That was enough to condemn them.

  Kanshell disappeared inside the lodge. It was as if a current pushed him deep into the crowd. Galba waited, his Lyman’s Ear picking out the serf’s voice from the uproar of song. He was trying to speak to someone. His questions kept being cut off. He was moving, closer, Galba guessed, to the centre of the lodge.

  The chanting stopped. In the silence, Kanshell whispered, ‘What is happening?’

  ‘Why, the truth is happening,’ a woman’s voice answered. ‘Revelation.’

  ‘That’s my book,’ Kanshell said. ‘Why did you take it?’

  ‘For the truth,’ came the reply, with the cadence of a refrain.

  ‘Truth,’ the congregation echoed with a massed whisper.

  ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it?’ asked the first voice.

  ‘I already know the truth,’ Kanshell protested.

  ‘You know it without knowing it.’ The new speaker had deeper, harsher tones. Galba recognised the head priest. ‘You swim at the surface. Now you will plunge. All of us will.’

  ‘All,’ said the woman, and the choir whispered, ‘All.’

  ‘Bid them come,’ the priest commanded. ‘The truth is theirs, too. And then you will truly worship with us.’

  ‘I can’t bid them,’ Kanshell protested.

  ‘Oh, I think you can,’ said the priest.

  The silence was broken by the sounds of a struggle.

  In three strides, Galba had reached the entrance to the lodge. Followed by his squad, he marched inside. He shouldered through the colonists, sending them flying. He stopped a few steps before the centre. The priest stood there, hooded, facing him. Beside him, the assistant, Ske Vris, had Kanshell’s arms pinned behind his back. Galba blinked rapidly, trying to clear his vision. The light patterns in the structure were toxic fragments, weakening the bedrock of reality. On the floor, at the nexus of the web, sat a worn book.

  ‘Release him,’ Galba said. He was almost disappointed that the perfidy of the colonists was revealing itself so easily, and in such a mundane fashion.

  ‘Of course,’ the priest answered. Ske Vris let go of Kanshell, who stumbled to the side.

  Galba frowned. The priest held what looked like a ceremonial dagger, but it was pointing to the floor. No weapon had been held on Kanshell. He had been restrained, nothing more.

  ‘You have come at last,’ the priest said.

  ‘Not to worship,’ Galba snarled.

  The priest cocked his head. Galba sensed a smile within the shadows of the hood. ‘Perhaps not. But to witness, certainly.’

  Ske Vris moved to one side, leaving the priest alone. The man was a single step away from the centre of the room. The novitiate went beside Kanshell, and draped an arm around his shoulder, as if reassuring him that all was well. These people had not planned to harm the serf, Galba realised. They wanted his conversion. And they had wanted the presence of the Space Marines.

  Galba raised his bolter. Behind him came the chunk-clack of his brothers making ready with their weapons. He scanned the lodge. The priest was the only one armed, and he presented no threat. Even so, Galba felt the tension of imminent combat. There was a threat here, though he could not see it. He kept the muzzle of his gun trained on the priest. ‘Cover all sides,’ Galba spoke over the vox battle channel.

  ‘I have the exit,’ Khi’dem reported.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Quiet here. The larger crowd is still concentrated near the gate.’

  To the priest, Galba said, ‘And what are we here to witness?’

  ‘We have already said it. Truth. Revelation.’ He raised his hands to his hood and pulled it back. Scattered around the congregation, other members of the priest class did the same. The man before him had the face of brutal, feral corruption. His black hair was a leonine mane. Ritualistic scars and tattoos ringed his hairline. A lower canine had been fashioned into a fang that protruded over his upper lip. His eyes were a liquid crimson, devoid of pupil. His acolytes were just as debased. Some had faces that lives of violence had turned into masses of scar tissue. Others had been marked in more precise fashion, with sinuous runes running across forehead and eyelids. All bore some kind of injury like a badge of office. Galba saw missing ears, cheeks cut in half, scalps peeled back to the skull. And in every face was a sick, cancerous joy.

  With the religious caste unmasked, the appearance of the rest of the people seemed to change. The new context altered Galba’s perception of the other colonists. Their glow of faith now had an ugly hue. Their rough appearance was the product of a cultural choice. They had embraced something dark, and now they waited for a culminating event.

  The cultists stared back at Galba with a gloating triumph.

  ‘My name, legionary, is Tsi Rekh,’ said the priest. ‘I am proud to be a priest of Davin. I am proud that the Gods of Chaos opened the warp to me and my fellow pilgrims, transporting our humble craft to this place made sacred in their honour. I am proud to walk a world shaped by other worshippers, shaped to find its true purpose on this very day. And I am proud to have reached the moment of my destiny.’

  Galba’s finger tensed on the trigger, but Tsi Rekh did not attack. The cultists raised their voices again. The song had no words. It was a sustained cry, rising and falling, twisting through overlapping chords. It was moan and sigh, howl and magnificat. Tsi Rekh did not join it. He took the last step to the centre of the lodge.

  He stood over the book. The lightweb reacted. Galba’s perception changed again. The light beams did not move, but the presence of the priest completed a portrait painted by jagged slashes in reality. Where there had been a pattern of painful madness that tortured by hinting at meaning, now that meaning was made manifest. Tsi Rekh was standing in the midst of an altar of light, a light made of wounds.

  Tsi Rekh raised the knife.

  Galba fired.

  Reality trembled.

  Eighteen

  The priest

  The offertory

  The feast of all souls

  The bolter shells struck Tsi Rekh. Some tore right through muscle and flesh and flew on to kill the Davinites in the rows to the rear of the lodge. One struck the dagger, smashing it to iron slivers. The other projectiles punched into the priest’s body and exploded. Fountains of blood burst from the wounds. Flecks that had been bone shot through the air. The wounds were terrible. They were craters. Tsi Rekh’s form was hammered to crimson meat. His silhouette disintegrated.

  Yet he stood.

  The rest of Galba’s squad fired less than an eye-blink after the sergeant. The Iron Hands raked the ranks of the cultists with shells. They were methodical. Their commanding officer had responded to a manifest threat, and they were acting in kind. There was no doubt that the cultists were the enemy. It did not matter that they carried no weapons. An attack was under way. Galba knew this to be true, even if the nature of the assault was still hidden from him.

  The squad turned the lodge into a slaughterhouse. The air became moist with blood. The bass rattle of the guns competed against the wet thchunk-thchunk-thchunk of bodies being rendered by the devastating firepower. The flesh was weak, and it flew into pieces before the unbending warriors. The cultists were decimated, and more died with every fraction of a second.

  Yet still they sang.

  The choir redoubled its celebration. There was no pause in the hymn. The awful joy rose higher. Blood washed over the floor of the lodge. It covered Kanshell, who lay flat, cowering. The vitae of Tsi Rekh’s congregation mixed at his feet with his own. His life cascaded down his legs, coating the book. He was ba
rely a form anymore.

  Yet still he stood. And still he smiled.

  Galba stopped firing. Tsi Rekh’s armoured tunic hung in tatters. There were holes in his torso wide enough for Galba to see right through his body. The priest could not be alive. Galba did not know what force was holding him up. He did not question it. He knew only that he must bring the foul thing down. He mag-locked his bolter to his belt and brandished his chainsword. He would cut the remains of Tsi Rekh into pieces if that is what it took, but this thing would no longer mock him.

  He stepped forward, revved his blade, and raised it over his head. Around him, the killing was almost done. Most of the Davinites lay dead. A few, among them Ske Vris, had dropped to the ground, sheltering behind ruined corpses. They were no longer singing. That did not matter. The song continued. It was carried by the lodge itself, echoing from timbers drenched in gore, thrumming in vibrations from beams that Galba now realised only appeared to be light.

  Tsi Rekh’s nose was gone. Black clots and grey matter oozed from the void in the middle of his face. But his eyes were alive. Their redness burned. They stared at Galba with sickening triumph. As the chainsword paused, roaring, before descending on its killing arc, Tsi Rekh opened his mouth wide. His jaw was half shot away. His teeth were missing or reduced to jagged stumps. His chest was a broken, pulped mess. There was nothing left of his lungs. Yet a coughing hiss emerged from his ruined mouth. Galba heard it over his chainsword, over the guns of his brothers, over the dreadful song. The priest was laughing.

  Galba brought the blade down onto Tsi Rekh’s skull. The whirring teeth ground through bone. They turned brain into paste, and then to mist. Galba bisected the priest’s head. His strike was fast, violent. The Davinite’s body offered no resistance to the weapon or to Galba’s strength. The killing blow took no time at all.

  But time itself was taken. It was stretched. Galba moved against a thick current, and the single act became a gallery of frozen hololiths. The chainsword took an eternity to come down. Each step of the mutilation became a sculpture in metal and flesh. As the skull parted to each side, the eyes did not die. They blazed with victory. They held Galba’s gaze. The moment stretched on and on and on. It waited for Galba to realise everything.

  He saw, then, the full canvas of desolation. He had been lured into the lodge. He and his squad had been manipulated into butchering the cultists. He knew, with an awful certainty, that the blow he was now striking would have consequences as terrible as the lance fire from the Veritas Ferrum.

  Blood everywhere. A luxuriousness of blood. A stinking, dripping, celebration of blood. An exaltation in a temple. Before an altar. Drenching an icon created by the first among traitors.

  An offering.

  In this moment of the death of illusions, Galba also saw the death of the real. The eyes flared, and time resumed its lethal march. The crimson light embraced the death by chainsword. It burst from the eyes. It engulfed the skull, and then, as the corpse laughed one final time, it swallowed the rest of the body. It was an old light, rotten as a dying star, but also burning with stellar force. Galba yanked his blade free and staggered backwards. The light unfurled from within the priest, yet it was not truly light. It was what had been seeping through the pattern of the web. It was energy, and non-matter, and madness. It was the rage of the warp.

  The storm burst over the space of the temple. Galba heard the shattering cracks of wood. The lodge was flying apart, but he could not see the destruction. He could see nothing but the insane howl of blood. It was blinding, but his helmet did not recognise the glare as light and did not shield his senses from the rage. The song became even louder, deafening. Galba heard scratching coming over the vox, but could not make out any words. He stumbled, buffeted by the fury of the monstrous event.

  He was standing metres away from a tear in the fabric of the universe. The wound in reality opened wider and Galba crouched, refusing to fall, unable to do anything but keep his footing. The tempest buffeted him, clawing at his eyes and ears and mind. The world teetered on the edge of dissolution.

  Instead, something else materialised. It grew from within the storm. It stole the stability of the physical plane, twisting the raw stuff of reality to its own purposes. It gathered in the eye of the gale, using the still-standing remnants of Tsi Rekh as a core around and upon which it constructed something huge. Darkness twisted, gathered definition, became a silhouette. The shadow became a form, taking on mass. The shape stopped changing, though the suggestion of writhing remained in the form of vicious coils and curved spines breaking up its outline.

  The non-light faded, sucked into the being that had taken the offering and stepped out of nightmare and into the world. Galba could see again. He saw the enemy the Iron Hands had been seeking.

  ‘Daemon!’ someone was screaming. It was Kanshell. He was curled in a ball, his lasrifle forgotten, his arms hiding his face. ‘Daemon!’

  The being cocked its head Kanshell’s way for a moment. It made a sound that Galba knew was laughter, though it filled his head with the shrieks of diseased infants. Then it strode towards him, the last of the warp-light trailing from it like candle flame.

  Daemon. Galba could not reject the word. The truths he had known lay in ruins before him. He knew something about the superstitions of the past. He knew about the monsters conjured by the darkness of human ignorance. One of those monsters now stood before him, and the myths were but pale whispers next to the reality of the thing.

  It was immense. It towered over Galba. Its head would have broken through the roof of the lodge, had the building still been standing. It was bipedal, a distortion of the human form that stopped just short of being unrecognisable. Its limbs were grotesquely long, but rippled with taut muscle. Its pelvis was skeletal, and just above it nestled the cleft skull of Tsi Rekh. Its chest was a broad carapace covered in slit-pupilled eyes. They looked exactly like those on the armour of the thrice-cursed traitor Horus, but these were alive. They blinked, twitched and stared at Galba.

  The daemon’s head was all fanged maw surrounded by a halo of giant, twisted, asymmetrical horns. They pointed forwards and back, sprouting from the forehead and the base of the skull. Two massive ones curled downward like tusks, almost as far as the creature’s chest. Its forked tongue, long as a snake, whipped and coiled as if seeking prey, the movements strangely echoing those of the abomination’s jointed tail. Beneath a heavy brow, the eyes were as blank and featureless as Tsi Rekh’s. They had the glow of a fire-storm. Galba thought they were blind with rage, because the head always turned in the direction the chest-eyes were looking.

  In its right hand, the daemon clutched a staff that ended in a vicious collection of blades. It looked like nestled tridents, but there was also something ceremonial about the configuration. There was artistry in the angles of this metal forged in a delusion’s furnace. There was meaning. The daemon held the staff in a way that reminded Galba of how Tsi Rekh carried his. The weapon was a mark of office. The implications of that idea were as horrific as the being’s presence.

  It spread its arms, welcoming the world to its toxic embrace. It opened its jaws wide. It sighed, releasing an aaaahhhhhhhh of unspeakable appetites. It tilted its head back, turning the blank eyes to the void above. It was midday, but darkness rose like vapour from the daemon, forming a canopy of empty black that stretched over more and more of the settlement with every passing second. It was like ink spreading through the air, yet it was something more ominous than that. It was an acid that devoured reality, leaving nothing in its place.

  At the height of the Davinite ritual, Madail is summoned

  The surviving cultists whispered. The daemon cocked its head. Its tongue licked at the sound, and found it good. The monster spoke, and its voice was the one that had been Galba’s torment since the first night on Pythos. The sound was the mockery of every principle and every hope. It was huge and deep and sibilant. It was a slithering
of mountains, a thunder of serpents.

  ‘Speak my name,’ the daemon said, and it laughed its delight in its voice. It laughed, and nightmares echoed.

  ‘Madail, Madail, Madail,’ the Davinites whispered. The crowd by the gates picked up the chant, and made it vast.

  ‘Madail,’ the daemon repeated. It savoured the syllables, dragging them out: Madaaaaaaaail. The second half of the name became an ecstatic exhalation. It was the shape of the synaesthetic shadows Galba had tasted. He had been assaulted by premonitory echoes, and now, at last, here was the sound, coming in judgement and night. Madail.

  The daemon gazed down upon the Space Marines. ‘I am the shepherd of the flock,’ it announced, turning the words into obscenity. ‘And I am here to bring my charges to new pastures.’ Madail leaned forwards, its eyes rolling in eagerness. ‘Throw wide the gates,’ it commanded.

  ‘Now!’ Ske Vris yelled.

  Explosions erupted at the base of the palisade. The gate disappeared in a pillar of flame. An entire section of the wall, a hundred metres long, collapsed, opening the settlement to the teeth of the predators beyond. The Legion serfs recoiled from the blasts. Some were crushed under burning trunks. But they held their ranks, and they began firing at the cultists. The Davinites, unarmed, did not retaliate.

  ‘The offertory,’ said Madail.

  The Davinites moved as if possessed by a single mind. Those nearest the serfs ran into the streaks of lasfire, laughing as they were cut down. The rest of the crowd rushed through the fallen gate.

  Madail sighed again in anticipation. ‘And later,’ it said, ‘the communion.’

  The Iron Hands and Salamanders unleashed the full fury of their bolters on Madail. Dark ichor erupted from the impacts. For a moment, the daemon revelled in the sensation of being struck. Then it brought the haft of its weapon down, striking through the bloody floor of the lodge, down to the earth itself. A wave rippled out from the point of the hit, the ground suddenly as volatile as a lake in a storm. It threw the Space Marines into the air. Galba landed heavily but rose to his feet, firing again. Madail gestured, its free hand clawing at the air, gathering reality into a cluster of folds. The shells fell into the folds and vanished.