Darras threw the door back. He looked down at them for a moment, and then, to Kanshell’s shock, he laughed. ‘If you two are the answer to my call,’ the sergeant said, ‘then the Iron Hands have come to a sorry end, indeed.’ He turned sombre. ‘Get in,’ he said, as saurian and daemon came together.
Kanshell and Tanaura scrambled aboard. Darras slammed the door closed. Tanaura turned to the viewing port and looked out at the war of madness. The earth was shaking with the blows of monsters, and there was still the deeper, slower booms of the approaching giants. ‘Do we fight?’ she asked. She sounded eager. Her wounds were bleeding freely, but her eyes shone with the mission of her faith. Inaction was heresy.
‘We will,’ Darras told her, ‘if we must. And we will strike when we have a purpose. Until then, I will willingly let our enemies fight each other. I have no respect for suicide disguised as bravery.’
Tanaura looked at him, her face flushed with indignation, but she had the sense to bite down on her retort. Kanshell felt a rush of sympathetic anger. Darras did not understand the nature of faith. The struggle they were engaged in went far beyond the material world. Kanshell did not want to die, but if the right thing to do was charge back out and claw at the monsters with his bare hands, then he vowed that he would do just that. To die with the praise of the Emperor on his lips was not suicide. It was martyrdom.
Darras moved to Erephren. The astropath looked ghastly. Blood flowed in a constant stream from the empty-looking orbits of her eyes. Her skin had thinned and tightened over her skull. Her breath rattled like stones. She was a funerary sculpture that had been given a dry, whispering life. But the will that animated the frame was so fierce, it burned. Kanshell kept thinking he saw an aura in his peripheral vision, a spiky black crown of crackling determination.
‘Any chance of clearing the way again?’ Darras asked.
A tiny, sharp shake of the head. ‘I have the strength for one last battle with the anomaly, sergeant,’ Erephren said. ‘I cannot squander it.’
‘So be it.’
Kanshell cleared his throat. When Darras’s helmet turned his way, he dared to ask, ‘You have spoken with Captain Atticus?’
‘I have. He brings the rest of our forces. And then,’ he nodded at Tanaura, ‘you will be part of a great charge.’ He paused. The compartment filled with the sounds of the revel. He spoke again, and he was addressing his fellow legionaries. ‘This action will be worthy of song, though those songs shall never be written. But brothers, we will know the full measure of our worth. And could we ask for a better reward in our final moments? I think not.’
In unison, the other Iron Hands clapped arms to breastplates, an accord in action that was more eloquent than any oath.
And in the next instant, the ship was rocked by a gigantic blow. It knocked Kanshell off his feet. The blow came again. Something huge was slamming against the gunship. Darras checked out the viewing port. The amourglass had been knocked out of the frame, and the foetid air of Pythos was coming in, filling the compartment with the stench of too much life.
‘Brace!’ Darras yelled, and the ship heaved again. A horn almost as tall as Kanshell punched through the fuselage. It withdrew, then hit again, tearing the side of the gunship open. One more hit, and there was a hole large enough for the monster to stick its head inside the compartment.
The thing looked like a saurian, but it was covered in crimson metal plates. Kanshell could not tell if it wore armour, or if the metal was the daemon’s hide. Its hinged jaw opened wide and from it issued a roar like the grinding of immense gears. It shook its head back and forth, widening the hole still further, the thick shielding of Iron Flame giving way before the daemon’s eagerness to reach its victims. On its back rode one of the horned, sword-wielding horrors. The smaller daemon laughed and urged its mount on to greater violence.
Darras and the other Iron Hands retaliated, but the daemon shrugged off their rounds. Kanshell backed away as far as he could from the daemon. He fired his lasrifle, knowing the act was futile, grasping for a shred of meaning in the fact of the gesture alone. He tried to hit the juggernaut’s eye. It was not a small target, but he was too unskilled, and the daemon’s movements were too violent. It shoved its head further. It was trying to force its bulk into the ship. Its jaws snapped in Erephren’s direction. The monster had come to neutralise a threat.
Catigernus lunged forwards, a krak grenade in hand. When the daemon’s jaws opened, he threw the grenade down the monster’s throat. Instead of recoiling, it snapped at him, and severed his arm at the elbow. As he fell, the grenade went off inside the daemon. There was a muffled detonation, and the daemon’s throat blew out. Somehow the daemon still had a voice, and its shriek went so high, it climbed beyond hearing. Then it cut off as noxious ichor, a stew of blood and oil and venom, poured to the deck.
The daemon convulsed so violently that its rider fell off. When it rose, trying to squeeze into the hole past its agonised mount, Darras blew its head apart with bolter shells. The juggernaut refused to die. Its pain and its fury were silent, but the violence of its actions was eloquent. It shook its head back and forth, horn tearing the ship asunder. Its jaw swung like a broken flap and one of its eyes had burst outward, but it had been slowed only for a moment, and shouldered its way in, ignoring the weapons fire. Its remaining eye fixed on the astropathic wraith. She returned its stare with a blind gaze that was almost as inhuman.
A krak missile streaked past Iron Flame and slammed into the side of the daemon. Its rear legs buckled, and it slid from the Thunderhawk. It turned to face its new attackers. It was struck by a second rocket that reduced the armoured flesh on its right shoulder to slag. The murderous stream from an assault cannon hit its chest and head. For a moment, the daemon leaned into the salvo. Then its form disintegrated into jagged wet shrapnel.
Kanshell blinked at the gap where the daemon had been. Some distance from the gunship, the warp spawn and the saurians struggled. But nothing else was attacking the ship in this moment. Then massive silhouettes appeared. They were the Imperium’s way of war given form. Atticus had arrived.
The captain stepped up into the ship. He clasped forearms with Darras in greeting. Atticus was even more fearsome than when Kanshell had seen him last. He was drenched in ichor. His armour was scarred and gouged. Kanshell could hear its servo-motors whirring at a louder volume than was healthy, and now and then there was a stuttering grind. The damage was not slowing Atticus, but it stripped away still more of his vestigial humanity. He was an autonomous weapon, pausing from killing only to find a new target.
He stood before Erephren. The being of metal and the being of vision. Neither of them had any use for the sad limitations of the flesh. Kanshell shivered, feeling his puny condition reduced to pathetic insignificance in a universe where only the likes of Atticus and Erephren mattered. He clung to the Emperor’s divinity. That was a truth beyond any other, and it mattered even more than the majestic and terrifying inhumanity before him.
The Space Marine spoke to the astropath. ‘We have a great work ahead of us.’
‘Then we must begin,’ Erephren replied.
Outside, the sound of frenzied battle and massive footsteps drew closer. The time of last things had come.
Twenty-Two
Resurrection
To the tower
Witness
Atticus was surprised to see any of the Legion’s serfs still alive. He would not have thought any mortal could survive more than a few seconds of the new face of Pythos. He nodded at Tanaura as the forward elements of the company formed up with Erephren at their centre. ‘You have done well,’ he told his serf.
‘The Emperor protects,’ she answered.
Atticus said nothing. Her blatant flouting of the Imperial Truth did not so much anger as disappoint him. He looked at Kanshell and saw the fervour in his eyes. Superstition was giving both of them the strength to fight on. He
turned away, disgusted by their weakness, and disgusted that their crutch was serving them well.
Atticus took the head of the formation. The wreckage of Iron Flame was still surrounded by a diminishing oasis of calm. The daemons and the saurians had not finished their dance, though the respite was almost over. The giants were a handful of strides away, slowed by their conflicts with the largest daemons. Atticus’s impressions of those warp monsters were fragmentary. They had emerged from the shaft while the Iron Hands were still fighting their way through the ruins, and they had remained huge shadows in the distance. There was something different about this variant of monstrosity, something more than their great size. Their movements suggested the mechanical along with the perversity of warp unlife. Atticus felt the hint of a kinship that he rejected even as he recognised it.
He chose not to look more closely at those shapes. There was no useful knowledge that awaited him there. All that mattered was the destruction of anything that stood in the path of this final advance.
‘We march!’ he shouted.
The Iron Hands moved forwards. They left Iron Flame behind. They headed back in the direction of the plateau, in a straight line towards a tangle of warring monsters. Though the pace was slower than the bloody rush to the gunship, Erephren was finding the strength in some hidden reserve to walk. She strode like the whisper of death over the blasted earth, her steps precise. Blind, she was unmoved by the phantasmagoria on all sides. Sighted in a more awful sense, her face was set against visions Atticus could not imagine.
The two serfs ran parallel to the formation. They had no protection from the warriors of their Legion, nor did they expect it. But Khi’dem walked with them, the last of the Salamanders 139th Company staying true to his Legion’s misguided concern for preserving that which was not strong enough to preserve itself.
As they crossed the last dozen metres of open ground, a light to the north caught Atticus’s eye. It was a bruised glow, deep shades of violet and blue and red mixing and staining. It was the light of putrefaction. It was growing brighter. Where it shone, the daemons had ended their celebratory war with the saurians. They were building something. It was huge. It was being constructed of countless fragments.
No, Atticus realised, it was not being constructed. It was being summoned into existence by the combined powers of thousands of fiends. He saw jagged chunks of metal flying into place, pieces of a gargantuan puzzle. They were rising from the ground for kilometres in every direction. The fragments were just one of the elements of the assemblage. There were also the bones and ragged flesh of saurian and human. And the daemons themselves. They threw themselves into the creation, becoming a hideous, squirming mortar that cemented the fragments, made them a whole, and gave the form definition.
The form was the greatest horror. Atticus’s vision swam with a rage that threatened to devour his reason, leaving nothing behind but a howling engine of destruction. He knew this shape. He was witnessing a resurrection. The Veritas Ferrum was coming into being once more. But the proud, soaring lines of the strike cruiser were now distorted, bubbling, carrion things. Forming over its prow was a figurehead hundreds of metres long. It was a thing of horns and a gaping maw filled with needle teeth, and it moved. It lived. It had eyes that shone the white of lunacy, and it laughed. The ship was corpse, and it was scavenger, as ready to feast on itself as on any uncorrupted thing that crossed its path.
It would have a path, Atticus knew. The ship would traverse the void once more. It was the means by which the daemonic legions would leave Pythos and spread their curse through the galaxy. Sickened, he saw how utterly the Iron Hands had danced to Madail’s tune. Their every act since arriving in the Pandorax System had been in the service of this moment. Even their coming had been no bit of happenstance. They had been lured, and then they had been made to cavort for the amusement of the daemonic puppet-master.
As if in answer to his despairing fury, the monster arrived. Madail travelled on a high mound of bones that moved over the landscape like a wave. The remains were bleached clean of all flesh, but shone with traces of blood and the clear slick of agony. The daemon’s course stopped a dozen metres from the Iron Hands. Madail made an expansive gesture towards the reforming ship. ‘Behold the art,’ the monster said.
From behind the company came the boom of the giant saurians taking another stride closer. Atticus kept moving. The Iron Hands did not pause. Madail’s hill of bodies moved in parallel with them.
Madail’s chest-eyes were wide with eager hunger. ‘The machine and the spirit,’ it said. ‘That is your goal, though I think you would turn from the words. Yes, yes, I think you would.’ The tongue whipped its length through the air, tasting the daemon’s own speech. ‘Come, then. Rejoin your ship. Be the full expression of your being. Become the undivided vessels of Chaos.’
‘No,’ Atticus said. He spoke quietly, to himself more than to Madail. He was done with the dance. His reason cut through the fog of rage, and he saw the doom the daemon was tempting him to embrace. The seduction of Madail’s words was a lie. The fiend did not believe the Iron Hands could be corrupted so quickly. It did not expect their surrender. It expected their fury. It expected their futile attack. If the company charged, it would face not just the might of Madail, but that of a thousands-strong daemon army and the already sentient obscenity of the Veritas Ferrum. Annihilation would be certain.
No, then. No.
And if Madail desired that attack so much, perhaps it feared the alternative to the same degree.
‘Confound the enemy!’ Atticus shouted. ‘Onward to our victory!’ He tasted his own eagerness to exploit the daemon’s mistake as he increased the speed of the march. He glanced back, saw that Erephren was keeping up. She was striding as if possessed by the energy of death itself. She had an appointment with her fate, and it was not in this place.
Atticus led the way forwards, on the original course, making for the plateau and, beyond it, for the tower whose power would be wrested from his foe.
‘You will stop,’ Madail announced.
Atticus ignored him. A wall of daemons waited just ahead, but it was a thinner wall. So many of the abominations were still fighting the saurians or being consumed by the resurrection of the Veritas.
The wall was too thin. The Iron Hands struck, sending bolter fire on ahead of their advance, then smashing into the enemy. They were a battering ram, unstoppable, and this was their true identity. This was what they were, not the submission of the purity of the machine to the corruption of the warp. With chainblade and fist, they smashed the daemons down. Even the serfs fought without fear. Their weapons were weak, but the accumulation of blows took its toll, and they moved with surprising agility, desperation keeping them out of the grasp of claws, and off the point of blades.
‘Stop!’ Madail shouted, and for the first time, Atticus heard something like tension in the daemon’s voice.
The legionaries punched through the line and marched faster. The route ahead was clear.
‘Stop them!’ Madail roared. Waves of daemons broke off from the summoning of the ship. The counter-attack raced forwards on the winds of madness.
‘Brothers,’ Khi’dem said, ‘You sacrificed much for the remnants of my Legion. You have my thanks.’ He left his position from the side of the serfs and ran back down the length of the column.
‘What are you doing?’ Atticus demanded.
‘Finding time.’ Khi’dem stopped beside Ecdurus and took the legionary’s rocket launcher. He angled away from the company, heading straight for Madail, whose raised staff was shining with a building, trembling glow.
Madness, Atticus thought, but the leading daemons were upon them. The crimson, blade-wielding horrors fought to the front of the line against graceful grotesqueries that married the illusion of human femininity with savage claws and talons.
‘Into the fires of battle,’ Khi’dem intoned as he reached the
base of the moving hill. He wrestled the rocket launcher onto his shoulder with one hand. He fired. The missile streaked past the daemon. Madail laughed, ignoring the single Space Marine, unleashing the built-up energy of its staff. As the rear of the Iron Hands’ column was consumed by a violet fire that melted the warriors to slag, the rocket exploded against its target.
Khi’dem had not missed. He had struck a colossus in the corner of the eye. ‘Unto the anvil of war,’ he whispered over the vox.
The saurian snarled, and it turned to find its attacker. In its line of sight was the giant daemon. With a heave, the reptile hurled its opponents aside and brought its immense anger down upon Madail. A foot larger than a tank smashed the hill to shards. It obliterated Khi’dem, and drove Madail down under hundreds of tonnes of mass.
The daemons howled, hurling themselves at the monster that had committed sacrilege. A tide of obscene shapes swarmed up the legs of the saurian. Its brothers came roaring to its aid. The assault on the Iron Hands faltered.
Atticus had his time. He used it. The march ate up more ground. The Iron Hands reached the plateau before more waves of daemons caught up. The company repulsed them. The daemons attacked again and again, their forces beyond counting. Their leader had not returned, was perhaps destroyed, and the daemons’ tactics fell victim to their own chaos. Their anger made them reckless. They fought each other for supremacy. And they failed to stop the advance.
But their numbers made the result inevitable. They eroded the formation. Discipline preserved the Iron Hands’ cohesion, but the unit became smaller with every metre of ground. Then the winged daemons arrived. Ptero and Lacertus’s squads had hurt them, but they, too, had infinite forces to spare. They swooped down on the company with screams so piercing, Atticus saw wounds open on the faces of the serfs. The daemons flew as swimming through the air, and indeed they resembled creatures of the sea. One executed an elegant dive and decapitated Tanaura. Her body ran on for a few steps as though supported by a faith that persisted beyond death. It collapsed in front of Kanshell.
The Damnation of Pythos Page 32