The Damnation of Pythos

by David Annandale

  ‘The Emperor…’ Kanshell gasped. ‘The Emperor protects.’ He fired upwards, scorching the belly of the demon with las-fire. It squealed and flew to the side, into a stream of bolter shells from Darras. Then it fell to the ground, twitching.

  ‘The Emperor…’ Kanshell kept repeating. His eyes were wide, unblinking. ‘The Emperor… The Emperor…’

  Atticus realised he was hearing a prayer, the only one Kanshell had either the breath or the mental capacity left to utter. The little man’s religion was what kept him in the fight. The reason disgusted Atticus. Was this the shape of mortal fidelity to the Emperor? A superstitious worship that made a mockery of the truth for which the Emperor and the Legiones Astartes had sacrificed so much? If so, what point did anything have?

  There was duty. There was war. There was the fact of being true to what it meant to be a legionary of the Iron Hands. If there was nothing else, that was still enough.

  Over the plateau, past the shaft, through the ruins of the settlement, the advance continued. Then the company was moving down the final slope. The monument waited for Atticus. It was serene, towering so high that it was above any petty concern on the ground. It did not care. It pulsed with the glow of Chaos’s great revel.

  Another light, a huge flash from behind, as if a true sunrise had come to Pythos for the first time in its history, a sunrise that contained no life, but only the promise of crematoria. Atticus looked back. The light came from one of the giant saurians. It bisected the monster, then blew it apart. Streaking from the centre of the blast, riding a dark comet, came Madail.

  The remnants of the Assault squads and the Raven Guard rose to meet the daemon. Madail struck with indifferent impatience. A beam from the staff caught Lacertus. His ashes drifted to the ground while the daemon picked off the rest of his command.

  Ptero alone reached the prophet of the warp. He landed on Madail’s neck and drove his lightning claws into the creature’s right eye, but the chest-eyes never lost their focus on the targets on the ground. The daemon’s only reaction was to reach up with its right hand. It mimicked Ptero’s attack and drove its huge claws through his chestplate. The Raven Guard shuddered, but stabbed again at the punctured orb. Madail’s hand tightened into a fist. It yanked the Space Marine’s hearts free and squeezed them to pulp. Ptero fell. A split second after his body hit the ground, Madail landed, crushing and burning all within a five metre radius. Camnus existed as a mechanical silhouette for a moment, and then he, too, was gone.

  The daemon spread death, but missed its target. Erephren ran, sprinted, in the last moment before the impact. She can see you coming, Atticus thought. You cannot surprise her.

  And now the final reckoning. They had reached the monument. Erephren ran past Atticus. ‘Time,’ she murmured. Her movements were strange, savage jerks, and Atticus thought again of puppetry. Erephren’s body, he saw, had become the puppet of her will.

  The daemons fell upon the last fragments of the 111th Clan-Company.

  Erephren touched the tower.

  The force swallowed her with a hunger that said got you. Erephren let it. She fell into the infinite depths. The vistas of absolute insanity surrounded her. But she was not a mere bit of psychic flotsam to be absorbed. Her physicality, however small, was as real as the tower’s. She used her materiality as an anchor. She shaped her identity into an adamantium kernel. She weathered the attacks. From the consuming deluge of revelation, she seized on a fragment of knowledge: the hulks of dead ships around the Mandeville point of Hamartia. The mines had done good work. She made a weapon of that small triumph. She used it to forge her war song.

  We have hurt you. We will hurt you. I will hurt you. She became a single purpose.

  She became a voice. She was a message. She was a cry of warning.

  The warp was infinity. It was also zero. There was no space between Pythos and Terra.

  She gathered her will, drawing on the final sparks of her life. She used the perfect, mad clarity of the anomaly. She prepared to send her shout across the zero.

  The pulse of the cyclopean structure stuttered. Madail howled curses whose shape snapped the bones of the air. It lunged for Erephren. Atticus launched himself upwards from daemon to daemon. He was climbing an avalanche of warp-flesh. Darras was with him, and they both rose before the great daemon. Darras swung his blade at Madail’s chest. The eyes blinked shut. The blade shattered. Madail snarled and impaled Darras with the staff. The weapon went all the way through the body of the Space Marine and struck the writhing daemons below. Madail struggled to pull it free. Atticus made a final leap, hurling himself, chainaxe raised, at the monstrous head.

  The head snapped forwards and sideways. The jaws caught Atticus around the torso. They squeezed, crushing. The damage alarms flashed before his vision. He ignored them. He felt no pain.

  He had so little flesh remaining.

  And he had seen the daemon’s defensive reflexes. What it protected was what he must strike.

  He made as if to swing the axe one last time at the daemon’s blank left eye. The chest-eyes looked up at him in amusement. Atticus seized his moment. He reversed the chainaxe and brought it down with terrible speed at the daemon’s true vision. His surprise was total. The axe ground deeply into the eyes. Acidic jelly poured down Madail’s torso.

  The daemon screamed, releasing Atticus. He fell on a carpet of struggling abominations. He tried to rise. His armour did not respond. It was a coffin enclosing the inert metal of his body. Deep inside his shell, there was an awful, swimming movement where none should be.

  But Madail was staggering too, for a few more precious seconds. And then the glow stopped its flicker. It became a single, steady, magnificent beam that shot up and, for a moment, pierced through the nothing, opening a window to the stars.

  Only for a moment. Then the light resumed its malignant pulse, and the absence consolidated its grip around the planet. Atticus managed to turn his head. He saw Erephren release the tower and collapse. She lay on her side, her face towards his. Her eyes were the terrible, clear absence they had always been, but he felt her true gaze on him. She nodded once, and then was still.

  Atticus looked back at Madail. The daemon had mastered itself. Its uninjured eyes regarded him with a perfect rage. ‘You have not won,’ Atticus ground out.

  Madail advanced.

  Feeling all that was left of him puncture and bleed out, Atticus uprooted the last of his humanity from his awareness. The machine rose to his feet for one last time. He closed with the daemon. ‘The flesh is weak!’ he roared, and met the darkness.

  Kanshell saw it all. He saw his nightmare injured. He saw the light from the tower. And he saw the nightmare kill his captain.

  The daemons ignored him. They let him live. They flowed around him, an ocean of madness, as they feasted on the bodies of the Iron Hands.

  They let him see. They let him see that the stone sun did not set. They let him see the slow rise of the reborn, daemoniacal Veritas Ferrum. They let him see the moment of the next dark exodus approach.

  He clutched the single moment of hope to his heart. The warning was sent, he thought. The Emperor will know. The Emperor protects. The Emperor protects.

  His refrain faltered only when Madail loomed over him and a vile, pustule-ridden hulk with a horn where its eyes should be seized his arm.

  ‘Little creature of faith,’ Madail said, ‘will you show the strength of your belief? Will you bear witness?’

  Kanshell’s long screams began as he was carried towards the unholy ship.

  Epilogue

  Astropath Emil Jeddah stiffened in shock. His mouth gaped wide, his face contorted. Mehya Vogt, his scribe, saw that look countless times every day, and she always winced in sympathetic pain. How could she not, when she knew the damage he was suffering with every message he received? This one, it seemed, had pierced his cortex like a stiletto of ice. It s
pread through his nervous system, hijacking his entire being for the length of its reception. His blind eyes rolled back in his head. His jaw worked, and he began to sing. Vogt grabbed her stylus and tried to start the transcription. The sound coming from Jeddah’s throat was plaintive, urgent, agonised, an atonal chant filled with the smoke of distant war.

  It was also largely unintelligible.

  The song ended. Vogt looked down at what she had written on her tablet.

  Jeddah used a cloth to wipe away the blood from his nose. ‘What…’ he began, then stopped. He rubbed at his temple. He tried again. ‘What is the message?’

  Vogt hesitated. ‘It is priority extremis,’ she said.

  ‘I’m aware of its urgency.’ He ran a hand over his scalp, wiping away the sweat of pain. ‘I felt it.’ What he meant, Vogt knew, was that he had suffered it. He measured urgency by the severity of the psychic wound the message caused. ‘But what is the content?’ When Vogt did not answer right away, Jeddah continued, ‘I couldn’t tell for myself. There was too much distortion.’

  ‘I… I find the message disturbing,’ Vogt said at last. ‘There was only one word I could pick out, but it makes no sense, and…’

  ‘Read it to me.’

  She did. The word was wrong. It had no place in the Imperium. When she shaped them, the syllables were not just foreign in her mouth. They felt unclean.

  Jeddah sat very still. His skin, white as marble, took on a grey tinge. When he stood, he did so gingerly, as if reality had turned to thin ice. ‘Take me to Master Galeen,’ he said. ‘Bring the transcription.’

  Vogt took Jeddah’s arm and led him from his cell. They walked the hallways whose dim lighting was barely strong enough to illuminate the way for the scribes. Mosaics covered the walls on either side, but their designs were lost in the gloom. Though she had the use of her eyes, Vogt felt that she, not Jeddah, was the one who was blind in this twilight world. She transcribed messages that she struggled to understand, and moved through endless shadow on missions whose import she was never told. She did not understand the nature of this one, either.

  But she sensed Jeddah’s worry.

  They reached the processing chamber, deep within the City of Sight. It was a vast space, better lit, but the glow-globes were so high above in the domed ceiling that their rays felt weak and thin by the time they reached the ground. Dominating the centre of the chamber was the message repository. Tens of thousands of missives were amassed here in hundreds of stacks five and ten and twenty metres tall. Balconied galleries circled the hall, and from each extended multiple retractable platforms. Scribes, administrators and servitors used them to have access to the repository. Sometimes, a message was removed from the stacks, but at any given moment, dozens more were added. Sheets of vellum dropped from the upper levels of the chamber, falling like snowflakes.

  Straight ahead, at the base of the repository, Helmar Galeen, hunchbacked, face pinched narrow with permanent disapproval, sat at his massive desk, examining one message after another, passing some to servitors to add to the stacks, tossing others down a chute that led to an incinerator.

  ‘What is it, Jeddah?’ he asked without looking up.

  ‘A message from the Pandorax System. I thought you should see it.’

  Galeen sighed, put down his stylus, and held out a hand. Vogt gave him the transcription. The administrator read it, then turned his cold gaze first on Vogt, then on Jeddah. ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ he asked.

  ‘I thought–’ Jeddah began.

  ‘To annoy me with an archaic word?’ Galeen interrupted.

  ‘It might be more… relevant than that.’

  ‘So I should announce the collapse of the rational tenets of the Imperial Truth because of this single message?’

  Vogt was about to retort, but Jeddah must have felt the tension through her arm – he placed a warning hand upon her shoulder. Galeen did not tolerate scribes who did not cower before him. ‘That transmission is priority extremis,’ Jeddah said, his voice calm.

  Galeen gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Of course it is. We are at war. Every message is priority extremis.’ He waved a weary hand at the stacks before him. ‘Most of these contain actual communications, or at least complete imagery. Not one talks about myths.’

  A servitor approached, and Galeen handed it the message. ‘Take this to the stacks,’ he said.

  He turned back to Jeddah. ‘The priority rating is the only reason I’m not dropping that nonsense into the flames. Now return to your duties.’

  Jeddah bowed. They withdrew.

  Vogt paused and looked back as they reached the exit from the chamber. She wondered why she cared, why her heart had constricted in her chest as if she had lost something or someone vital. The message was only a single word. What difference could it make?

  ‘Can you still see it?’ Jeddah whispered.

  ‘No.’

  But before they walked on, she looked back one more time. She tried to spot the servitor. She tried to follow the message as it fell into the stacks. She failed. It was just another snowflake, another snowflake falling, fallen, buried. It had come out of the night, and now was returned there, smothered in the continuous shhh-shhh-shhh of messages covering each other in the oblivion of white noise.

  Afterword

  Monsters. I have always loved them. It is, for me, no small part of the joy of writing Warhammer 40,000 and Horus Heresy stories that this fictional universe is rife with monsters, human and inhuman. So when I found out from Nick Kyme and Laurie Goulding that I would have the opportunity to tell the story of Pythos, it would be a gross understatement to say I was excited. Here were all the monsters my heart could desire, and a stage upon which to have them clash in all their variety.

  So what kinds of monsters are there here? Obviously, there are the flora and fauna of Pythos itself, and the daemons of the Damnation Cache. But the Iron Hands are monsters in their way, wilfully so, and I wanted to explore this idea, particularly in the character of Captain Durun Atticus.

  Unlike my beloved Black Dragons, the Iron Hands are not monsters of the flesh. Quite the reverse, in fact: their rejection of the flesh and its perceived weakness is pushing them further and further away from their remaining humanity, to their cost. One of the (many) aspects that I love about Graham McNeill’s Fulgrim is the implication that Ferrus Manus had grave doubts about the path his Legion was heading, but met his fate on Isstvan V before he could do anything to reverse that course. The tragedy of what happens to the Iron Hands at the Dropsite Massacre is a compounded one. Not only is the X Legion shattered, but the very beliefs its surviving fragments cling to are contrary to what their primarch would have wished.

  In Atticus, I pictured a warrior who has travelled a long way down that road. His rejection of the flesh is almost total, and so the very thing that makes him an extreme embodiment of the ethos of his Legion also makes him a symbol of their tragedy. That personal tragedy of his, incidentally, was something I touched on in the short audio drama Veritas Ferrum too, which sprang out of the writing of this novel, as I worked out how these surviving Iron Hands travelled from Isstvan V to the Pandorax System.

  Another of the wonderful things about the universe of the Horus Heresy is that the oppositions are complex ones. If the Iron Hands have chosen a form of inhumanity, so have the Emperor’s Children, only they have embraced the excess of the flesh. Is it any wonder, then, that Atticus would feel even more justified in his beliefs? The monstrous acts of the Emperor’s Children are clearly wrong, but does that mean what Atticus chooses to do is correct?

  My hope was to have some of this complexity of opposition extend to the situation on Pythos. Atticus is at one extreme, his disgust with the flesh diminishing his capacity for mercy and other fundamental human characteristics. Galba, nowhere near as transformed, is much more humane, and the Salamanders are even more so, of course. Th
e question I wanted to ask, though, was, ‘Who is right? Or is anyone?’ The mercy that the Iron Hands do extend has catastrophic consequences. But is the alternative Atticus represents better? Must he become a monster of iron and cold calculation, a thing barely recognisable (if at all) as human in order to be able to do battle with other monsters? If so, what then?

  I think this is one of the big questions that the Horus Heresy asks: given the stakes, given the terrible nature of the threat represented by Chaos, what extremes are justified in response? I don’t think there is an easy answer here. I do think the hard questions themselves are as interesting as they are important. At least, that was what I hoped to suggest in these pages.

  This doesn’t mean the characters don’t seek answers themselves, and those answers are often in the form of a faith of one kind or another, whether the characters acknowledge this or not. And so this was something else I wanted to explore in the book. The Horus Heresy is such an inviting playground in this regard, because we are witness simultaneously to a mythological clash of titans, echoing everything from the War in Heaven to Ragnarok, as well as to the birth of a very specific faith: what will become the Imperial Creed.

  Atticus has faith of a kind, though it certainly isn’t a religious one. Madail has a faith too, based on the ultimate triumph of the Ruinous Powers. But then there are the unfortunate mortals swept up in the wars of gods. The serfs aboard the Veritas Ferrum don’t have any choice about their flesh. They are what they are. So where can they turn for strength when faced not only with a demoralising military catastrophe and a world that wants to eat them, but also attacks from forces beyond their comprehension, if not to the belief that promises salvation from those forces?