Soul Drinker

by Ben Counter

  THE HELL WAS still with them. Sarpedon couldn't have turned it off if he'd wanted to. It made them ten metres high, strid­ing angels of death with guns that fired thunder and swords that slashed lightning. They lost a dozen men to heavy weapons that raked the broken ground with fire; another ten to the dripping, tentacled things that thumped down from the ceiling of the cave they had charged into.

  But they had not slowed down. It was the classic Soul Drinkers' assault, fast and deadly, heedless of danger, cutting through everything that moved. Hunch-limbed slaves fled, hulking black-armoured warriors were sliced and blasted apart. With Sarpedon at their head they ran through tunnels and broad chambers packed with heaps of rotting meat, crevasses full to the brim with corpses, crossed bridges made of human bones.

  The fortress was teeming with life - tunnels were knee-deep in insects and there were colonies of skeletal flapping creatures that hung like bats. Most living things fled instinc­tively at the Soul Drinkers' approach, such was the aura of righteous death surrounding them. Some stood and fought, directed by the fanaticism with which Ve'Meth had infected them, but the blubbery eyeless monsters and crooked-limbed humanoids that ran along the walls were shredded by bolter and chainsword, and the Soul Drinkers pressed on. Squads Dreo and Givrillian must have picked off a hundred enemies between them with snap shots. The assault elements in the lead, led by Sarpedon himself with talons slashing, carved their way through twice that number by the time they reached the huge subterranean lakes of bile with their islands of folded skin, and the towering cathedrals with pillars of coagulated blood.

  Ve'Meth knew they were there and his fortress was coming alive around them. The walls quivered and oozed and the defences became more and more organised the higher they got. Slave-packs blocked orifice doorways with piles of their dead. Serried ranks of warriors filled caverns with rows of pikes. Heavy weapons were dragged by deformed pack beasts into corridor junctions, studding the walls with gunfire before the weight of the Soul Drinkers' assault slew the gun­ners, turned the weapons around, raked the path ahead with fire and moved on.

  Sarpedon knew they were close. The volcanic cupola of boiling pus was raging above them, and the black laughter echoed through his mind. He could feel a massive responsi­bility bearing down on him, oppressive as the fortress's stink - they were within striking distance now, and suddenly the possibility that they might get this far and fail was bright in Sarpedon's mind.

  But he must leave no room for doubt. He was a comman­der, responsible for the most vital mission in his Chapter's history. They would kill Ve'Meth or they would die - either way they would not go back to the Brokenback having failed.

  Sarpedon rounded a corner and saw the library before him. The cavern was as big as the Cathedral of Dorn had been back on the Glory. It walls were of bleeding veined meat, and gar­gantuan cases of books were piled on top of one another in crumbling towers. In a glance Sarpedon's augmented vision and quick mind saw the millions of volumes bound in dae­mon's hide with pages of skin and clasps of bone, the tablets of black rune-carved stone, and scrolls of tattoos cut from the backs of cultists. He could hear them whispering, gibbering their secrets in a thousand tongues, crammed mouldering into every space and lying in great rotting heaps in every cor­ner.

  This was the accumulated vileness that every perverted tongue had preached in the name of Ve'Meth, the vast tomb of blasphemy that fuelled the daemon prince's influence.

  Sarpedon was about to call the flamer Marines forward when the first shell grazed a knee joint and slammed into a Marine from Squad Givrillian behind him.

  A bolter shell. Sarpedon would recognize it anywhere - but it was different, a low-velocity mark that had not been issued to Space Marines for thousands of years...

  'Traitors!' he yelled in warning, diving to the side as the fusillade opened up. A wall of bolter-fire tore across the library, shredding the tainted books and thudding into the Marines pouring in through the arched entrance. Twenty or more life-runes winked out at the edge of Sarpedon's vision as chunks were blasted out of the fleshy walls all around him.

  Chaos Marines. The traitor legions. Those who turned from the Emperor's light and betrayed Mankind ten thou­sand years before, when the Emperor still walked among men and Rogal Dorn's Imperial Fists had yet to be split into their component Chapters. It was a sign, of course - the Architect of Fate had directed them to this place not just to kill Ve'Meth but to confront a symbol of what could happen when faith is lost and perverted, when the tendrils of the enemy reached into men's hearts and they forgot the sacred will of the Emperor.

  He could see only the muzzle flashes from their positions hidden amongst the towering shelves and mounds of books on the other side of the chamber. They were disciplined and accurate - they had lost nothing of their martial prowess, for a Space Marine's quality as a soldier remained where loyalty and dignity did not.

  'Charge!' rang the cry of Chaplain Iktinos and he led Squad Karvik's Assault Marines out into the library, hoping to rush the Traitor Marines under the covering fire of their battle-brothers. But the traitors seemed to ignore the fire tearing into the mouldering books and worm-ridden shelves around them, and Squad Karvik was cut to pieces, the survivors minus their sergeant scrambling into cover as the compacted meat of the floor erupted all around them. One of them grabbed the power sword of the fallen Sergeant Karvik. Sarpe­don knew Karvik had carried the weapon for twenty years, and would have wanted nothing more in death than to know it would carry on his work in the hands of another.

  'If we have to die, then we will.' voxed Iktinos on the com­mand channel. 'But if there is an alternative, commander-'

  'We need to flank them,' replied Sarpedon, thinking fast. 'Givrillian!'

  'Unlikely, commander.' replied Sergeant Givrillian, who clambered through the debris to Sarpedon's side. 'They have an elevated field of fire and excellent cover. We will be impeded and exposed all the way.'

  Givrillian was right. The Soul Drinkers would have to forge on right through several tottering bookcases, ten metres high or more - they would either break through them and bring tonnes of rotting debris down on their heads, or climb them which would be like scaling a sheer cliff under fire. Either way the Traitor Marines would have free rein to pour fire into them as the Soul Drinkers moved, and would probably redeploy as soon as Sarpedon got into any kind of flanking position.

  But all was not lost. There was always hope, even if that hope was merely for a good death in battle with the Enemy.

  'Iktinos?'

  'Commander?'

  'I believe we shall die. Pray for us, then lead the charge.'

  GRAEVUS KEPT GOING as the rushing torrent of blood threat­ened to close over his head. His feet crunched through piles of bones on the bed of the channel, and there were tiny, sharp things zipping past him with the flow.

  He was in the heart of his spearhead, with Tellos and the assault squads ahead of him and Karraidin in the rear. They had known the instant they entered the fortress that they were in some living thing, and had soon found themselves wading through the sludge in its intestines, shielding themselves from the noxious fumes exuding from the pulpy walls of its lungs, and now struggling through the gushing tunnels of its veins. They could feel its evil heartbeat through the floor and hear its slow breathing rambling through the walls. And Graevus could hear the buzzing of the corpulent insect-god that brooded at its peak, waiting for them, thirsting for the prize of a Space Marine's blood.

  'Opening ahead!' came the vox from Sergeant Hastis, whose assault squad was on point.

  'Take it!' replied Graevus, knowing that even Space Marine power armour would suffer from immersion in this caustic, befouled gore that passed for the fortress's blood.

  Ahead of him the Soul Drinkers pulled each other out of the sucking blood flow. A hand reached down and a Marine - one of the half-armoured battle-brothers, hauled Graevus's bulk upwards onto the shelf of slick rock that led into to an upwards-curving inlet.

&nb
sp; Storm bolter-fire sounded above the rush of the blood tor­rent. 'Something on our tail.' voxed Karraidin by way of explanation.

  The gunfire kept stuttering.

  'Karraidin? Is that still you?' asked Graevus.

  'Negative, Graevus. Killed it.'

  Bolter fire. Bolter fire, without a doubt - but not theirs, maybe Sarpedon's...

  The first Graevus saw of the Chaos Space Marines was a severed head. It span back down the inlet, past Graevus as he followed Sergeant Tellos who, inevitably, was the first to sprint towards the gunfire. It wasn't a helmet, but a head - in the shape of a Space Marine helmet but covered with skin, with eyepieces that were not photoblocker lenses but wet, cataracted living orbs.

  Tellos had carved his way through the first and Graevus barrelled past him into the next one. It had doubtlessly once been a Marine, but its skin had grown outside its armour, pink and bleeding from sores and tears. Some of its organs were outside, too, loops of necrotic entrails and pulsing, sputtering valves. Its face mask had sharp stained teeth instead of a filter grille, and its bolter muzzle had a fleshy mouth that spat that mark four bolter ammunition across the room. Tattooed onto the skin of one shoulder pad was a three-orbed symbol that Graevus had seen daubed onto the vehicles of turncoat armies and carved into the hides of vic­tims massacred by Chaos cultists.

  Graevus hardly noticed the towering piles of volumes and the great drifts of rotting books. He was only dimly aware of the bolter fire replying from below, where Sarpedon's Marines were trying to engage the Traitor Marines. His whole vision was filled by the Chaos Marine as he slammed the blade of his power axe into the enemy's midriff, carving right through the dead-fleshed torso.

  The Chaos Marine tried to turn his bolter on his assailant, but Graevus's hand speed had increased so greatly since his axe arm had changed that the return stroke had already sliced the Chaos Marine in two through the spine. The axe whirled and the blade slashed down, hacking the Chaos Marine through the collar bone down to the mid-chest.

  Tellos was already in the heart of the Chaos Marine posi­tion, killing all around him, with the Assault Marines beside him relishing the chance to follow him in forging a trail of the dead.

  Bolter fire was raining down on them but all was confu­sion - the Chaos Marines were on the back foot now, breaking ranks to form a new firing line, but the Soul Drinkers were in no mood to stand around and let the enemy shoot at them.

  Graevus looked through the mist of blood and saw the next target - a leader of some kind, wielding a sword edged with gnashing teeth.

  He brought his axe blade out of the quivering body at his feet, and charged back into the fray.

  * * *

  'WE'VE GOT THEM pegged back, commander! Move while they're down!'

  It was Karraidin's voice, but it might as well have come from the throat of Rogal Dom himself. 'You heard the captain.' yelled Sarpedon. 'Move!' The fire that came down onto them was broken and pan­icked. The sounds of blades through power armour rang from above as Sarpedon's spearhead crossed the foetid expanse of Ve'Meth's library to where the exit in the far wall was a raw, open wound.

  Sarpedon leapt over the tumbled heaps of books and into the ribbed throat that curved upwards beyond.

  Losing a leg hadn't slowed him down. And the laughter was so loud now it was drowning out his own thoughts. The aegis hood's protective circuitry was white-hot against his body as it struggled to protect his psyker's mind.

  'This is it, sir?' said Givrillian at his side. It wasn't really a question.

  'Stay close.' voxed Sarpedon. 'Fast, disciplined, and no one runs.'

  He didn't need to say it. But they needed to hear it -words that had been drummed into them as novices, reminding them that the training and values that they had extolled all their lives as Soul Drinkers would still serve them here.

  They didn't know how they would kill Ve'Meth. They didn't really know what Ve'Meth was. The few of them who had seen a daemon prince on the field of battle each carried a violently different memory, for Chaos was ever-changing and never rose twice in the same form.

  Ve'Meth could be anything. But there wasn't much that bolter and chainsword couldn't kill.

  The throat was steep but none of them stumbled. The mus­cles shifted and contracted, trying to throw them off, but they dug their fingers into the rubbery flesh and held on.

  At the top a clenched fist of flesh blocked their path. Chainsword slashed through it and Sarpedon ripped his way through with his talons, staff in hand, ready to shred what­ever he saw on the other side.

  It took a split-second for his eyes to adjust to the dark­ness. The whole fortress had been pitch-black but this was something else, an abysmal pit of darkness, as if the magni­tude of evil here had sucked up the light and devoured it.

  Then his augmented eyes forced an image out of the dark­ness, and he saw Ve'Meth's true form for the first time.

  Ve'Meth was a multitude of bodies - between seven and nine hundred at Sarpedon's first count, standing rigid in square formation. There were men, women, in finery and engineer's overalls, primitive rags and camouflage, some squat and muscular from high-grav environments, some life-spacers with willowy limbs and thin faces. Every one had the same expression of intensity. Every one was looking at him.

  Something stirred in their midst and Sarpedon saw one of them was holding a weapon - something old and crusted with runes, glowing with power. A gun.

  The first bullet buzzed through Brother Nikkos's chest - and then it hit him again and again, whipping through the air in wide looping orbits to punch again and again through the Marine's armour. Nikkos toppled and came apart, armour joints clattering to the floor, slopping his sliced body onto the polished black coral.

  Another shot barked from the weapon even as the return fire tore apart the first rank of Ve'Meth's bodies, riddling another Marine. Another, and another, each one singling out a Soul Drinker and piercing him a dozen times before he died.

  Every mouth opened. Eight hundred voices laughed.

  Marines were flooding into the chamber around Sarpedon but they were dying all around. Sergeant Dreo hurled himself to the ground as the bullet-daemon skimmed past him and dismembered one of his squad. Chaplain Iktinos strode for­ward, diving between two dying Marines to sweep his crozius arcanum through the three closest bodies - they were thrown through the air with a flash of the power field. More were dying with the bursts of return fire but the Soul Drinkers were dying faster and the air was filled with the hideous buzzing flight of the daemon-bullets.

  A well-placed shot took the gun-wielding body in the throat but another stepped into its place in the ranks, took up the weapon and fired again. Time and time again the ancient gun barked and with every shot another battle-brother died, and every time the firer fell another took its place.

  'Discipline! We have to kill them all!' yelled Sarpedon. Glancing to the side he saw Givrillian, the many-eyed Sergeant Givrillian who had been his most trusted and level­headed soldier, being speared by a tiny glowing monster even as he loosed a salvo of bolter shells into Ve'Meth.

  Above the screams and the gunfire was the laughter, loud with the voices of Ve'Meth and louder still inside Sarpedon's head. He looked through the mayhem and saw Sergeant Dreo trying to form a firing line. Half his squad were dead.

  They had to kill every body at once. That was how Ve'Meth ultimately defended itself - not with its soldiers or its dae­mon gun, but with the fact that it was formed of host bodies, hundreds of them, and Sarpedon was certain it could survive with just one. It could take more, too, and Sarpedon knew it would be pleased to take one of his battle-brothers if it could.

  There was one way. He had seen it done often enough, but never like this. If enough of them stayed alive, if that disci­pline would hold even when every single one of them could die in the blink of an eye...

  'Sergeant Dreo!' yelled Sarpedon. 'Execution duty!'

  'Execution duty, line up on me!' bellowed Dreo. The sur­viving Soul
Drinkers had all lined up for execution duty many times before, when traitors to the Emperor had been taken alive and sentenced to death, or when battle-brothers had committed some grave transgression for which death could be the only penalty. There had been enough executions following the Chapter war, when unrepentant rebels had been put to death with a massed bolter volley in the nave of the Cathedral of Dorn.

  More died, a dozen at once. Gaps formed in the firing line even as it was formed. But Sergeant Dreo, the crack shot, didn't rash. He had been given charge of the execution on many times and knew full well that a clean kill needed one concentrated wall of fire. Many died in the seconds he paused. But it was one concentrated volley, or nothing.

  The guns were in position, a line of bolters stretching two deep across Ve'Meth's chamber, the front rank kneeling.

  'Fire!' yelled Dreo, and the front rank opened fire.

  As one, a hundred of Ve'Meth's bodies fell, bodies punched open by the explosive bolter shells that ripped through them. The front rank emptied their magazines into a sheet of shrapnel that tore into the host bodies. The gun wielder fell and another bent to take up the weapon, to be torn apart in turn.

  The front rank paused to change magazines and the rear rank came in flawlessly, keeping up a steady stream of fire that swept across the chamber. By the time the first rank took up the fire again they were pouring bolter shells into the mangled remains of eight hundred bodies, oozing tainted blood onto the black coral.

  'Cease fire!' barked Sergeant Dreo. 'Good kill.'

  The silence was shocking. Sarpedon lowered his bolter and through the gunsmoke stared at all that remained of Ve'Meth - a room full of broken bodies, blood spattered up the walls, torn limbs and bodies heaped across the floor.

  A screaming began - quiet at first, but growing louder and louder. A grainy cloud of pestilence rose from the bodies. It solidified and darkened, and in its depths Sarpedon could see movement - huge shapes, filth-caked, daemon-plagued worlds, plunging away through space, falling into the dark­ness, hurling away from him and out of sight, faster and faster.