The Damnation of Pythos

by David Annandale

  Medusan Strength fired once more. As it did, Madail leapt. The daemon sailed high over the shot and came down on top of the tank. It landed hard enough to drive the Vindicator’s treads into the ground. Medusan Strength reared up like an enraged animal. The legionary riding in the hatch fired upward with his combi-bolter. Madail plunged the tip of its weapon down, spearing the Space Marine. The daemon pushed down harder, and the blades stabbed all the way through the chassis and embedded themselves in the ground. For a surreal moment, Khi’dem saw the tank pinned like an insect to a board.

  Madail hissed with pleasured anticipation, and the staff glowed an incandescent red. The heat was savage. Khi’dem saw the armour near the staff turn molten. Ruptured fuel lines and ammunition ignited. The tank shook with a chain reaction of internal explosions. Then it blew apart. Madail exulted in the centre of light and tortured metal.

  Above, the darkness was spreading, as if the longer the daemon walked the earth, the further the stain of its existence spread.

  Engine of Fury reached Madail. The massive siege shield struck the back of the daemon. Madail did not move. The Vindicator came to a sudden halt. The towering figure vaulted over the tank as the cannon fired. Madail leaned down and stretched out its immense arms. It embraced the rear of the vehicle. It laughed as the treads turned the ground into mud, fighting in vain to break free of its grip.

  The daemon waited. Khi’dem heard the snarl of the other Thunderhawk close in. He could not see it through the darkness.

  Madail could.

  A steady barrage from Hammerblow’s battle cannon chewed up the surface of the plateau, carving deep trenches towards the daemon. As the shots struck it, and Khi’dem stared in horrified wonder, Madail hurled Engine of Fury into the air. The tank flew up like a missile. It passed through the darkness, and Khi’dem heard the sickening, crunching bangs of massive bodies in collision. Hammerblow hurtled into view, locked in a fatal embrace with the Vindicator. The two machines slammed into the ground, shaking the plateau.

  There was a moment of relative calm. The sounds of crackling flame and secondary explosions were the echoes of battle, the fading uproar of a war lost. Khi’dem looked around. He was the only legionary standing. But the Thunderhawk and tank had not gone up. Perhaps there were survivors. Khi’dem stumbled towards the wreckage. He was halfway there when the explosions came, knocking him down, robbing him of the last of his brothers.

  Madail bestrode the battlefield, basking in the glory of its good works. ‘A fine dance,’ it called out. In its mockery, its voice became musical, but it was the music of ragged dreams, the chords of strangled hope. ‘Is there no one else?’ it asked.

  Rising once more, Khi’dem could not imagine that the daemon was speaking to him. He was, in this moment, beneath notice. But he wondered that the daemon spoke in Gothic. There was something directed, personal about the doom that was unfolding, as if these awful moments, this tragedy of the warriors of the Veritas Ferrum, had been waiting since the dawn of the galaxy.

  ‘Ahhhhh,’ said Madail, slicking the air with hungry delight. ‘Welcome.’

  Khi’dem saw jump-packed legionaries rise from the central shaft. They began firing at the daemon. It ignored their shots.

  ‘Welcome,’ Madail said again. ‘Witnesses. Witnesses to the great communion.’ It advanced to the edge of the shaft. It looked out beyond the plateau. It pointed with its staff. ‘Servants of the toy god,’ it called out, ‘look what you have brought me. Behold what you have wrought.’

  Khi’dem looked. The need to face the worst allowed him no other option. He knew that the Iron Hands and Raven Guard were looking too.

  To the east, with the immense, rumbling crack of an earthquake, something was rising. It glowed with a malevolent light, the crimson-streaked deep orange of burning blood. Coils of energy, like solar prominences, flared and danced around the object. The impossibility of the vision confused Khi’dem at first. He did not know what he was seeing. Then he realised it was the stone pillar, the anomaly that had been the nexus of all the struggles on Pythos.

  The monolith climbed towards the sky, and its true nature was revealed. The pillar was merely the tip of a cyclopean structure that was not a column at all. Other, lower columns now appeared, rising in parallel. Then the bases of the columns, curving inward towards each other, joining together. To his horror, Khi’dem saw a gargantuan replica of Madail’s staff. It was a symbol and a weapon. It was an aeons-old monument that had been created not as a commemoration, but in anticipation of this moment. Apotheosis had arrived. The bladed stone rose now to claw the sky. It climbed and climbed, a hundred metres, two hundred, three hundred, and still more. It was a tower so laden with significance that it threatened to shatter all meaning. It rose until it loomed over the Pythos landscape. No tree or hill for hundreds of kilometres in all directions was its equal.

  The multifoliate tower reached higher yet, and now there came a new sound. To the grating of stone was added a great, rhythmic pounding. Behind the glare of the monument’s infernal energy, Khi’dem saw shifting, hulking shadows. Hills, his eyes tried to tell him. Hills that rose and fell to a massive beat.

  Waves, his mind realised. Waves a hundred metres high. The ocean had joined in the dark celebration, paying tribute to the terminal event. It heaved itself up again and again, rising and falling to the beat of sanity’s funeral, a massive darkness beneath the grey sky, its surface reflecting the apocalypse fire of the monument. Khi’dem thought he saw things disporting themselves in the waves. Monsters of the deep, forced up by instinct to celebrate as the planet fulfilled its destiny.

  The sounds became ever more deafening, a symphony of deep madness, the endless grinding of stone punctuated by the boom, rasp, boom, rasp of the ocean. And underneath, another theme was preparing itself. It was coming closer, beat by beat, moment by moment, doom by doom. When it arrived, it would be the only sound. It would swallow everything. It would crush everything.

  It would be everything.

  Madail moved to the lip of the shaft. It raised its arms, holding the staff up towards its gargantuan model. The light from the monument was so intense it dimmed the day. It pulsed even brighter as Khi’dem watched. The energy was being fed by something. Strands like ectoplasmic vitae flowed to it through the air, the echoes of distant violence coming to add their deaths to the growing toll.

  The moment approached. The tower rose to its full height. The energy reaching the critical point. Madail stood in ecstasy before the sights, a priest with the powers of a god.

  ‘Now,’ the daemon cried out, in command and prayer.

  Now.

  Twenty

  The end of day

  Horn of plenty

  Drumbeats

  In answer to the daemon, the sound that had been rising beneath the earth and sea arrived. It was a single beat, so profound that it tore reality asunder. The beat came from the monument. The sound was a ripple that raced from that centre to embrace the world. At the same moment, the energy burst free. It took the form of directed, cancerous light. It shot from the points of the black stone blades, the individual beams joining into one that descended into the shaft.

  The great beat shook the world so hard that it knocked the Iron Hands and Raven Guard out of the air. They had only just risen from the hole when the beam struck. Ptero hit the ground. He rolled up and was on his feet in an instant. His brother, Judex, and one of the Iron Hands were less fortunate. They were clipped by the beam. That was enough. Where they were touched, their armour and body ceased to exist in the material sense. An explosion of unreal being overtook them. Madness given form ballooned and crawled from their wounds. Eyes and fangs and clawed limbs multiplied. The two legionaries were dead before they landed with sickening wet thuds. Their corpses devoured themselves until they were nothing but a squirming, senseless mass of snapping entrails and moaning, whistling bone fragments.

  The
energy from the monument poured itself into the shaft, and Ptero felt that awful rip widen. The tear was, he realised, more than a shift in the nature of all things. It had a specific location. There was a plague about to be unleashed, and it had a source, a point in reality that had been so corrupted that it was now going to burst and spew forth abomination.

  Already, the disease was propagating. The stain of night that hovered over the daemon now established its dominion. Tendrils that looked like vapour but moved with the slash of lightning rose to the cloud cover. They altered the clouds. The black spread like oil over water. The day of Pythos, never more than a sour insult, died in agony.

  Something worse than night stole over the firmament. The black was absolute, and it was deep. It was not a veil that blocked the light, beyond which the galaxy remained sane. It was a theft. The sky was gone. The stars were gone. Over Pythos now was nothing, a void made terrible by the absence of all that should be, and even more terrible by the sense of ghastly possibility, of imminence. Something would fill the void. Something that should not be.

  And from the bottom of the shaft came a noise, an uproar, the rising cacophony of a great horror unleashed.

  The light struck the sigil of the dome. Standing at the base, Atticus could not see the rune react to the contact, but he could hear the result. He could feel it. He heard a huge door opening, a door that was stone and iron and flesh. He felt the dome fill with the rotten energy. The black stone pulsed with an abyssal light. The tearing continued, and now Atticus knew that this worst thing was occurring inside the dome.

  ‘Get us into this tunnel,’ he ordered Camnus. ‘Do it now.’

  ‘We are ready, brother-captain,’ the Techmarine replied.

  The company drew back. Camnus set off the charges. The explosion sounded muffled, drowned by the thrumming of the energy beam. But the power of the blast was more than enough. It punched through the wall of the stone tube, creating a breach the width of three legionaries. The Techmarine’s demolition was skilful: the charges were strong enough to pulverise the wall, so there was little debris inside the tunnel, but not so indiscriminate that they weakened the ceiling and brought it down. The way in was clear.

  Atticus entered first. His warriors had a clean run open to them back to the surface, where he knew war awaited. But he paused. He was sure that what was happening in the interior of the unbreachable dome was critical. He looked again at the dead end. What, he wondered, was the point of these tunnels if all they did was run into a wall? The xenos creation – whether architecture, mechanism, or both – was perverse, its functions opaque. But he was learning that there was nothing futile about any of its elements. The tunnels had a purpose. If they existed, it was to bring something to the dome, or to release something from it. As the company gathered in the tunnel, Atticus examined the dome wall once more.

  ‘Something is changing,’ he said. The pulsing was much faster here than over the rest of the hemisphere. It was painful to observe. It was a blackness that strobed, an energy detached from any known configuration of the eletromagnetic spectrum. It was light’s diseased twin. The intensity of the disturbance rose even as Atticus spoke, and as it did, it crossed a threshold.

  Atticus blinked. Each of his eyes was receiving radically different data, and the split was disruptive, assaulting his mind with a fusion of migraine and digital feedback. He shut one eye, then the other. The human eye saw the pulse as a perverse impossibility. His bionic one registered something far more profound. It saw a flicker. The wall was phasing in and out of existence at the speed of insect wings. Atticus picked up a piece of rubble and tossed it against the wall. The stone was atomised.

  Camnus joined him. ‘That,’ the Techmarine said, ‘is a gate.’

  Atticus nodded. ‘And it is opening.’

  The pace of the flicker increased. A vibratory thrum filled the tunnel, shaking dust loose from its roof. The black became so intense, it was almost blinding.

  ‘Iron Hands,’ Atticus called. ‘Weapons ready.’ An eager certainty took hold of him. ‘We are about to find our enemy.’

  The thrum built to a piercing whine. The nature of the flicker changed once again. The gate’s moments in the material realm became fewer, then shorter, then irregular. Winning the war were the time fractions when the barrier was only an illusion, a memory of a wall.

  The memory faded. With a sharp crack of dissipating energy, the gate vanished. The way into the dome was open.

  As was the way out.

  Atticus did not wait for the enemy to declare itself. He had been forced into fighting a reactive war ever since the return from the Hamartia raid. No more. He entered the dome with his finger already depressing the trigger of his bolter.

  The space was suffused with a dirty glow. It was the diluted form of the ray that had struck the sigil. The floor was level and featureless, except for what looked like a dais, fifty metres in diameter, in the centre. The interior walls were festooned with runes, larger and more complex than the ones on the wall of the outer chamber. They were the source of the light, but they faded as the thing in the centre of the dome manifested itself. It began as a thin line in the air, stretching from the apex of the vault to the dais. The line twitched and jerked like captured lightning. With each movement, it left a copy of itself behind. Within a few seconds, a black, jerking web occupied the central ground. It spread farther, shorter segments multiplying, connecting, the formation becoming more and more jagged.

  Atticus scanned quickly, saw that there was no shelter. The Iron Hands’ armour would have to suffice. ‘Form an arc,’ he commanded. ‘Keep the gate at the centre. It is ours. Let nothing pass. Prepare to concentrate fire on what stands before us.’

  The pattern froze. When it did, Atticus realised he was not looking at a web, but at a pane of cracked, shattered reality. There was the blast of a horn, long and deep at first, then rising in pitch from mournful horror to shrieking delight. The broken pane fell in pieces, the edged fragments cutting more chunks out of the materium as they dropped. Behind the fragile layer of reality lay the great depths of madness.

  And from those depths an army came.

  Bellowing, braying, laughing, snarling, singing, cursing, gibbering, the hordes poured into the dome. They were a cascade of monstrosity, a flood of the perverse: flesh, horns, hooves, jaws, claws, wings, tails, pincers. Arms that were blades, blades that had eyes, weapons and armour and life made indistinguishable. Hide the crimson of anger, the pink of hideous infants, the green of disease, the white of corruption. The frothing, squirming swarm of the maggots was as nothing to this onslaught. The maggots had been a mere sketch, the planet rehearsing an idea now terrible in its blossoming.

  Atticus had his enemies, and they were daemons. Perhaps, at a level he did not acknowledge as existing, he had always known this would be his fight. Or perhaps he simply rejoiced at having something to kill. He did not know what the truth was, and he did not care. He adjusted to the reality of the impossible without a pause, and that was all that mattered.

  ‘Kill everything,’ he said. He raised his voice over the howling mob that raced towards the company. He became the machine. ‘Spare no flesh!’ he snarled as the rounds raked into the front lines of the monsters. ‘This is nothing but the endless spew of weakness. We have abandoned the flesh, and will not be dragged down into its swamp. Exterminate it! Scour the planet of inferior life!’

  The explosive shells ripped their targets apart. Some of the daemons fell, killed as easily as any other form of sentience. Others absorbed the damage without slowing. Still others underwent a transformation, writhing and screaming, muscles and skin and bone ripping and cracking until there were two monsters where there had been just one. From the smashed hole in the real, the monsters continued to arrive. The abyss of the warp was full of distorted, ravening life, and the numbers were beyond counting.

  Legions were descending on the single compa
ny.

  The leading edge of the daemon plague was almost upon the Iron Hands. Monsters were going down, pulped and torn beyond repair by the lethal hail. When they died, they lost their form, flesh revealing its essential flaw as it dissolved. The floor of the dome was slick with deliquescing bodies. The advance did not slow. At its centre, giving it shape, was an ordered force of blood-red, horned, sinewy beasts armed with blades almost as long as a man. They were surrounded by a plague of monsters like an explosion of foam on the crest of a great wave. There were so many daemons that they were climbing over each other to reach the Space Marines. The shapes were as varied as madness. Some had just enough of the human about them to make the distortion of the form all the more perverse. Others were vaguely canine, but horned, armoured, massive. And still more were of no recognisable derivation at all. They were chaos made flesh, a cancer of grasping jaws and tentacles.

  Atticus could see the truth: the army of damnation was infinite.

  So much the better.

  ‘Take them!’ he roared.

  So ordered, the Iron Hands did not meet the wave on the defensive. The offence was all they had left, and so they took it. They attacked. A metal battering ram surged forwards to crash into the daemonic multitude. Bolters were mag-locked. The weapons were chainblades, power fists and flame.

  Atticus swung his chainaxe into the twisted visages before him. He felt the impact of his blow up the haft of the axe, a satisfying jar to his arms. Perhaps the flesh he destroyed was a lie, but it tore and died as well as any truth. Ichor sprayed over him. A daemon raised its sword over its head, two-handed, and brought it down at Atticus’s face. He grabbed the blade with one gauntleted fist and snapped it in half. With his other hand, he swung the axe in and decapitated the daemon for its effrontery. The head snarled at him as it arced away to be trampled by the melee. The body flailed at Atticus for several more seconds before it collapsed. It was smashed to pulp before it even had a chance to begin dissolving back to the formlessness of the warp.