And then, somehow, there was a clearing, an eye in the reptile storm. Ske Vris stopped. She faced Kanshell. She was covered in the blood of her kin, and her smile shone all the brighter. She extended her left hand to Kanshell.
‘Join in the worship, Jerune,’ she said. ‘You see the only real Truth. Sing the praise of Chaos.’
Kanshell did not answer. He brought the lasrifle up instead. Before he could pull the trigger, Ske Vris lashed out with the staff. A beam shot out from the ornate bladed tip. It was a dark energy, the deep, rotting violet of pain. It knocked the rifle from Kanshell’s hands and threw him onto his back. It spread over his limbs, a crackling slick. For a moment, his arms forgot what they were. They wanted to change, to become strange. Then the energy dissipated. Ske Vris stood over him. Around them, the war of predators spun. Blood fell in sheets.
‘Are you convinced?’ the Davinite asked. ‘Can you see?’
Kanshell tried to rise. His arms and legs were weak. The ground sucked at him. He saw the moment of his death, and the death of all sanity, of all hope, on Pythos. But he saw nothing to worship. He spat bloody phlegm.
Ske Vris shrugged. ‘A shame. No matter. You were adequate to your purpose.’ She raised the staff.
A las-shot sheared through the cultist’s shoulder. It sent her spinning. Ske Vris grunted, stumbling. Fist still closed around the staff, her arm fell to the ground. The stump smoked. Blood trickled down her flank, but she did not fall. She backed away on clumsy legs.
Tanaura entered the clearing. She had been clawed. Three huge diagonal slashes ran from her neck to left hip. She bore the injury with contempt. Her face was set with the righteous fury of the faithful confronting the heretic.
Ske Vris sagged, but still she smiled. ‘Yes,’ she gasped. ‘Yes, you understand. You will appreciate…’
She paused. The world paused. The saurian war stilled on the lip of a great precipice. Ske Vris looked down at her blood striking the ground. ‘Can it be so?’ she whispered, full of wonder. ‘Am I so blessed?’ She dropped to her knees. She turned to Tanaura. ‘Yes,’ she said, beatific. ‘The offertory is complete. The communion begins.’
There was a huge boom, as if the planet were an anvil struck by a hammer. Then more beats, smaller, but ominous because they did not stop, and they were coming closer.
The day fell into darkness.
Nineteen
The shaft
Unbending
Now
The first sounds of battle did not reach Atticus until the Iron Hands arrived at their target. But he saw the handiwork of a foe long before that. As the company spiralled deeper into the earth, he looked at the xenos architecture in a new light. His perspective was due to more than the revelation of a new region of the structure. This creation had destroyed his ship. Galba had been right: it was a machine, and it had attacked.
The shaft was more clearly a weapon than the rest of the ruins had been. He felt as though he were moving down a rifled gun barrel. The ramp was part of the scoring of the weapon, but so were the runes. They were also part of the power source. He accepted the fact as self-evident. He was conscious of their effect. Even when he closed his human eye and looked at the world solely through the filter of bionics, they still squirmed at the periphery of his vision, still whispered subaural obscenities. He could hear them now, hear them as a shifting fog of nightmare images before his mind’s eye.
He knew something now of what Galba had faced. He still rejected the idea that the powers at work could not be fought by the strategic application of physical force. Whatever used weapons could also be destroyed by them. If the runes were a source of energy, then he would scour them from the shaft walls. But he also acknowledged there were other types of force. Rhydia Erephren used one, with perhaps even more aggression than she would admit to herself. Galba was not a psyker, Atticus accepted that, but the sergeant was more attuned to these energies than he was, more open to oblique thinking. That was why he wanted Galba dealing with the colonists and their worship. He could not imagine how they had played a role in the death of the Veritas Ferrum. But they had. Galba had a better chance of piercing that veil.
The thought crossed Atticus’s mind that he could have explained to Galba why he was entrusting the legionary with this aspect of the mission. He processed the consideration, acknowledged its truth, then filed it away.
Halfway down, he asked Camnus, ‘Any thoughts, Techmarine?’
‘Captain?’
‘This must be more than a fixed cannon.’
‘I agree. I cannot guess at its intended function.’ His servo-arm waved at the serpentine runes. ‘The glow troubles me,’ he said.
‘We have seen it before.’
‘The intensity is greater. It is clearly concentrated in the runes.’
‘What do you conclude?’
‘Nothing definite.’
‘Extrapolate, then.’
‘That our ill-fated barrage was not just reflected…’
‘I saw that for myself,’ Atticus snapped.
‘I mean to say that it seems to have been absorbed, too.’
‘Madness,’ Atticus objected. The beam that had downed the ship had been far more concentrated than the lance fire.
‘Agreed,’ said Camnus. ‘Nonetheless, I believe it to be true. We should prepare ourselves for worse.’
Atticus cursed the warp, cursed the race that had found the means of harnessing its powers in the physical realm, cursed this manifestation of architecture and machine.
Down, down, into the twisting of stone. The dirty light of Pythos’s day did not reach far. It was replaced by the slow throbbing light from the runes. What lay at the bottom of the shaft came into view. A rheumy eye opened. Beneath the shaft was a circular shape of the same diameter. It was marked by a single rune, the largest and most complex of the entire system. The beat of the light was the pulse from this sigil. Atticus returned its glare. ‘That,’ he announced to the company, ‘is what we have come to destroy.’
The Raven Guard had plunged on ahead. They waited on what appeared to be the last spur of the ramp. ‘Captain Atticus,’ Ptero voxed, ‘Do you wish us to begin placing charges?’
How very politic, Atticus thought. Still, he accepted the gesture of respect. ‘At once, legionary,’ he said. ‘My thanks.’
Then, bouncing down the shaft came the echoes of weapons fire. Atticus tried to raise Galba. He found nothing but white noise. ‘We complete the mission,’ he told his warriors. ‘Our brothers know what they are about.’ And he led the way down.
The giant sigil did not mark the end of the descent. The shaft opened up in a vast hemispherical cavern, almost completely filled by a rock dome. This construct was what the tunnels led to, its curved surface their dead ends. The spiral ramp divided as it left the shaft. It became a shelf that ran around the entire circumference of the cavern, hugging the concave wall. Steep staircases zigzagged off from it at regular intervals. The stairs stopped every three metres at a landing. A glance told Atticus the nature of the stairs’ function: they were what had permitted the xenos architects to carve the runes into the cavern wall. The dome itself appeared featureless apart from its one great rune at its peak. The rest of it was smooth black stone. It had no seams that Atticus could detect. It was as if an immense bubble of magma had cooled into a formation as black as obsidian and smoother than ice.
‘We were unable to damage the base of this thing,’ Camnus pointed out.
‘Then we will attempt its roof,’ Atticus replied. Everything has a weakness, he thought. I will wager it is your eye.
Legionaries leapt from the ramp, landing with dull thuds on the roof of the dome. They began to place linked charges. The work had barely begun when the sounds of the war from above changed. There was a lull. Then a greater fury, one that grew in waves, echoes building on echoes.
Then light. Coming
closer.
Khi’dem’s left arm vanished below the elbow. The shock of elastic reality returning to stable form disrupted every electrical impulse of his armour and every synapse of his nervous system. For several seconds, his lungs forgot how to breathe, and his hearts stilled. His mind stuttered, his very identity ripped from him. Breath, pulse and thought returned together. He blinked, trying to make sense of the runes that blinked crimson before his eyes as his armour restarted the systems that still worked. The Larraman cells of his blood were forming scar tissue over his stump before he had full knowledge of his mutilation.
In these first moments of reality’s return, he knew only one impulse: move. He did. He rolled out of the path of the striding daemon. He tucked his knees under his chest, shoved against the ground with his right arm, and made it to his feet. He was surrounded by the dismembered pieces of legionaries. He saw Apothecary Vektus, reduced to a writhing head and torso, grunting his final curses before his fall into silence. Then Khi’dem heard the coming of a storm beyond the patch of night that floated above Madail. He managed to put some distance between himself and the daemon before the Hellfury missiles struck. The force of the blasts knocked him sideways. He staggered, but kept his feet.
Madail stood in the centre of the explosions, bathed in fire. The eyes of its chest were closed. Its head was facing up, its maw wide open in chilling ecstasy. It jabbed its staff upwards. The fireball reversed, shrank with a thunderclap of displaced air, and was absorbed into the blades of the staff. Then the flame returned in a stream of concentrated energy. It shot through the shield of darkness. Khi’dem heard the shriek of tearing metal, then a new explosion. Unbending fell through the dark. Streaming smoke, one wing gone, its engines aflame, it streaked in like a comet. It passed over Khi’dem. It touched earth once, rose as if denying its fate, and then slammed down, digging a massive furrow, disintegrating yurts, and roaring towards the centre of the plateau.
‘No,’ Khi’dem whispered as he realised what loomed. Behind him, the daemon laughed. The Demolisher cannons of the Vindicators boomed, and the daemon laughed.
Unbending’s nose was crushed by the impact. The gunship’s speed bled away. Its momentum lasted longer, and it began a slow, agonised somersault. The fire embraced the rest of the hull as secondary explosions touched off. It had turned into a towering torch when it toppled into the great shaft.
Fire and metal roared towards the Iron Hands. Atticus looked up from where he was standing overlooking the sigil. He saw the burning gunship, and knew it as the herald of catastrophe. No orders were needed, and he gave none. The Space Marines scrambled for cover. Atticus glared at what hurtled his way, taking a full second to blast the fates with his hate, and then he too moved. He threw himself to the right, pounding along the perimeter shelf behind his troops. The legionaries on the dome were leaping for the lower shelves. The company moved fast.
The blow came faster. Unbending struck the top of the dome with the force of doom. Its frame compacted like a god’s fist. The ship’s propulsion system was breached. The explosion filled the cavern with killing light. Behind the flash came the flames. They washed over the dome. They raced around the cavern. There was no shelter. There was only distance from the immediate blast. There was the fortitude of metal and the strength of armour. And there was luck.
Precious little of it.
The wreckage of the ship crushed legionaries. The anger of the explosion reduced others to cinders. Atticus’s auto-senses shut down, blocking the flash. In the moment of blindness, he stopped running. He crouched, grounding himself on the ledge, leaning against the wall. The flames and the wind slammed into him. His armour’s temperature shot up to critical levels. A giant’s hand sought to pry him from his perch and hurl him to the storm. He held fast, and after the first moment of the assault, he had the firestorm’s measure. He rose in defiance.
‘We will not fall!’ he shouted. He was surrounded by a cyclone of fire. The howl of the winds was such that he could barely hear his voice inside his helmet. The vox was caught in its own storm, and he did not know if any of his brothers received his words. None of this mattered. He stood, and as long as even one of the Iron Hands still lived to fight, the Legion did too.
He turned around, rejecting the heat that reached through to the traces of the human that still remained and reminded him of the reality of pain. He lifted a foot, challenging the wind to do its worst, and took a heavy step forwards, into the gale of fire. The readouts on his lenses were blinking, erratic. He had no sure knowledge that he was not the sole survivor. No matter. Battle was engaged. He was at war, and there would be no further retreats for the X Legion. Not one more step. And so he walked into the fire.
A body stumbled past him, propelled towards the edge of the shelf. Atticus snapped out an arm and caught the legionary by the wrist as he started to plummet. Atticus dropped to a knee and held fast. The other warrior dangled, then managed to grab on to the ledge with his other hand and haul himself up.
‘My thanks, brother-captain,’ he said. He was Achaicus, from the Assault squad commanded by Lacertus.
Atticus heard him clearly over the vox. The storm was abating. ‘Give me your thanks in force of arms, brother,’ Atticus said. Over the company channel, he voxed, ‘Report, Iron Hands, and regroup. Retaliation calls to us.’
The fire burned itself out. Nothing remained of Unbending except smoking, twisted fragments. Looking down from the shelf, Atticus saw them scattered around the base of the dome. They did not resemble the bones of a gunship. They were shrivelled detritus. They were another shame, another humiliation that Atticus would carve from the enemy’s hide.
The company shook off the effects of the blast. The Iron Hands acknowledged Atticus’s orders. There were gaps in the roll. Fourteen more battle-brothers had died in the destruction. Atticus could hear the rumbling beat of combat coming from the surface. Big guns firing. The Vindicators. He cursed his luck. He ran back to the shaft and looked up. The Thunderhawk’s fall had smashed entire sections of the ramp. The Raven Guard and the Iron Hands’ Assault squad could make it back up. Not so the rest of the company. Atticus growled. He looked at the dome. It was untouched. The impact and explosion had not even scratched the sigil. His fists tightened.
He called Lacertus and the Raven Guard to him. They looked up the shaft, and he did not have to explain. ‘Go back to the surface,’ he told them. ‘Provide support.’
‘What about the rest of the company?’ Lacertus asked.
‘We will find a way.’
‘How?’
‘We will punch handholds into the sides of the shaft if we have to. All I ask is that you leave some of the enemy for us to kill.’
Arms crossed and gauntlets slammed against chestplates as the squads made the sign of the aquila. Atticus turned away as they rode the fire of their jump packs back up the shaft.
‘Captain?’ It was Camnus.
‘I order you to give me good news, brother.’
‘I may have found a way forward.’
‘Where are you?’
‘On the floor of the cavern.’
Atticus ordered a rally at Camnus’s position, then made his way down, leaping from landing to landing of the nearest staircase. He reached the base of the dome in less than a minute. A number of his legionaries had arrived first, some clearly thrown down by the explosion. He saw damaged armour. He also saw a few fatalities.
Running from the base of the dome and back towards the main body of the ruins, precisely spaced along the cardinal points of a compass, were rocky tubes about four metres in height. Camnus had taken up a position beside the nearest one. ‘These are the tunnels,’ he said.
Atticus nodded. ‘And?’
‘They are not made of the same rock as the dome.’
He was right, Atticus saw. The tube’s brickwork used the natural rock of the plateau. It was not the deep, glistening black
of the hemisphere. ‘You think we can break through,’ he said.
‘Yes. Then make our way back up through the ruins.’
Atticus nodded. ‘Do it.’
‘So ordered.’
Then, as the Techmarine began to direct the placing of charges, the great blow came. It had no source, but the entire chamber rang. Something all-important changed. For a moment he thought the world had shifted under his feet. Then he realised he had felt the beginning of a rip.
And then, the light. Light from the worst of darkness.
Engine of Fury and Medusan Strength fired in unison. The colossal shells landed with lethal precision at Madail’s feet. The ground erupted. Boulders and dust were thrown dozens of metres into the air. They rained back down as the next salvo arrived. For almost a minute, Khi’dem could see nothing of the daemon. He saw only the plateau transformed into a volcano.
Madail reappeared. Chest-eyes still closed, head still tilted back in rapture, the daemon strode out from the geysers of earth. After two steps, it opened its eyes and ran to Khi’dem’s left, heading for Medusan Strength. The Vindicator surged forwards to meet it. The Demolisher cannon roared again. The daemon seemed to wince in anticipation at the moment of the barrel flash. The shell struck the abomination in the chest. Huge as Madail was, no mass even its size could survive such a blow. Any mass that belonged to the materium would have disintegrated.
The daemon laughed. There was the huge flash of the blast. There was the great thunderclap. And there was the laugh. Khi’dem blinked. The explosion was strangely sanitised, as there was no debris. The blow knocked Madail back several paces. The daemon laughed again as it spun once, recapturing its momentum with the grace of a dancer. Its delight in the experience was clear. It charged Medusan Strength again. Behind it, Engine of Fury closed in. It approached in an arc, staying out of the way of the other Vindicator’s fire, and keeping its own cannon silent for fear of striking its brother. Its engine howling, it rushed in to smear the monster over the landscape with its siege shield.
The Damnation of Pythos Page 28