The Last Hunt

by Robbie MacNiven

Trickery would serve no purpose at this stage,+ spoke Yenneth into his mind, though her thought-voice sounded strained. +I offer you this one chance to work together and help to turn fate back on itself. Save the world you have died on so many times before.+

  Joghaten checked his armour’s auto-senses, but the chrono display, locator beacons and time stamps were non-functioning, cycling constantly through their digits. He deleted them all, scanning the street as he did.

  It was quiet. The upper slopes of the city, if indeed it truly was Heavenfall, had not yet been consumed by battle.

  If we hurry we can cut out the cancer in this place,+ Yenneth willed. +And forewarn you and your brethren in time to resist them when they rise from below.+

  ‘Forewarn me?’ Joghaten snapped. ‘What madness is this?’

  ‘She is right, brother,’ said Qui’sin.

  The Master of Blades turned to his Stormseer, and saw by his rigid posture and shaking grip on his force staff that he was under a tremendous amount of strain.

  ‘I do not know how but… I sense a presence here,’ he went on. ‘I sense myself, just as I now realise I did before. We… we are all here already, my khan.’

  You must not be seen,+ Yenneth urged. +I have laid a glamour about us, and I will seek to redirect any focus away, but if you directly interfere above the surface you risk more than your lives, or the fate of just this place. Stay at my side at all times.+

  The farseer began to move towards the devotarium’s open gateway. Joghaten looked to Qui’sin. Eventually the Stormseer nodded. They followed.

  The khan checked the vox-net as he passed into the shade of the devotarium’s courtyard. What he heard sent a chill running up his spine. The voices of his brotherhood, repeating words he’d heard before, mere hours earlier. Worse, his own voice, clear and distinct, snapping orders for clarification over the link as he realised that the swarms out on the plain began their fresh assault on the Founding Wall. He blink-clicked the vox transmission sigil on his visor display, but it was unresponsive.

  Do not attempt to communicate,+ Yenneth warned. +I have already sent a subtle imperative warning of the cult’s presence. You will act on it, Joghaten Khan, and save many lives, but we must also do our part without being discovered. The leader of the swarm lies below.+

  Joghaten’s response was interrupted by Feng’s curse. The small band had entered the devotarium’s cloistered heart. There, between the shadows and the sunlight, just beyond a spore-clogged fountain, a squad of White Scars was passing by. It was a squad Joghaten recognised immediately. Lau Feng’s riders. The steedmaster himself was there, half turned away as he prepared to enter one of the devotarium’s side rooms. Joghaten looked from him to the Feng by his side, thoughts baulking. He felt a presence in his mind, encouraging but urgent. Yenneth, desperately trying to keep them moving.

  I am concealing our presence,+ she thought to them. +But I cannot maintain it for much longer. We must descend. Do not hesitate.+

  As though in a dream, Joghaten and the others passed through the shadowed cloisters, barely a dozen paces from where the other Feng and his hunt-brothers were conducting their clearances, seemingly oblivious to them. As he went, the khan realised he and the others were making no noise at all – even their footsteps had become silent, masked by the incredible power of Yenneth’s witchcraft. She led them to an open grate, an entrance to the darkness of the devotarium’s undercroft.

  Feng brought up the rear. He refused to look at his double, so oblivious to his presence. He knew what was about to happen. He remembered it exactly, from the other side. He was about to look up, and see himself – his helmet gone, scalp gashed, battle­plate scarred. The impossibility of it all drove him on into the darkness, even as he felt his own disbelieving eyes fall on himself.

  ‘He will follow,’ he hissed to the rest of the group as they descended the narrow stone stairway into the undercroft.

  I will stop him,+ Yenneth responded. +I have conjured an illusion of his fallen brother to halt his pursuit.+

  Feng recalled Eji’s screaming, acid-scarred face, blocking his path down into the undercroft. Despite his best efforts, he shuddered. Were they all tricks? Was his very existence a lie? How many times had he descended these stairs? How many times had he seen his own ghost, dragged from another reality? How many versions of this place, altered beyond recognition, existed?

  Such thoughts would have broken the will of lesser warriors. The White Scars, however, could only respond to adversity with greater determination. It had always been the way of Chogoris, even before the coming of the Khagan. Tense and with weapons drawn, they made their way into the darkness of Darkand’s underworld, guided by a witch’s promise.

  The Founding Wall, Heavenfall

  Qui’sin turned sharply, his force staff raised. Below the xenos assault was still slamming against the unbroken rock of the Founding Wall. All about him the carnage of battle unfolded, Pinnacle Guardsmen loading and firing down into the rising tide, or shooting up at the gargoyles battling the Space Marines’ combat flyers overhead.

  And yet, a part of the Stormseer remained detached from it all. There was a presence, if not here then somewhere in the city, somewhere nearby. A presence he knew he recognised, though its exact identity remained just beyond his grasp. A sense of foreboding prickled at the edge of his senses. He patched a link to Joghaten.

  ‘There is something in the city,’ he told the khan. ‘Something’s coming.’

  ‘Have you received word from the squads deployed to the catacombs?’

  ‘No, but I fear the xenos presence is far greater than we anticipated. I would strongly advise reinforcing our rear lines, and those units sent underground, as well as moving into the evacuation catacombs. If the xenos are using the tunnels below the city, they could slaughter most of the population before we even became aware of them.’ After a moment’s pause, Joghaten responded.

  ‘Very well, weathermaker. I shall come to you directly, and send combat squads up the slope to occupy the shelters and evacuation tunnels right now. If the xenos come, if they truly are as numerous as you believe, we shall be ready.’

  Time is the devourer of all things.

  – Ovarid, Imperial scholar

  Chapter Nineteen

  ECHOES

  TIME TO FURNACE SEASON PEAK

  [TERRAN STANDARD]: 10 HOURS.

  TIME TO PREDICTED PRIMARY XENOS PLANETFALL [TERRAN STANDARD]: 0 HOURS.

  The catacombs, Heavenfall

  They encountered no more White Scars beneath Heavenfall, though it wasn’t long before they engaged the first xenos. They were alone initially, in the crypt and mausoleum levels below the temple district, hybrids concealing their deformities beneath the heavy gowns and caps of the cult of the Voice of the Emperor. Yenneth and the Space Marines fought side by side, guided by a white light glowing from the intricately carved tip of the farseer’s runestaff.

  None of the White Scars spoke as they descended ever deeper into Heavenfall’s depths. It felt as though to do so would be to shatter the dream they had become lost in. As they went further though, and the man-made tunnels gave way to narrow, natural fissures and passages scarred with vile xenos bio-infestation, a sense of revulsion began to intrude on their thoughts. It was accompanied by a scratching, like claws on the inside of the skull, grinding away. Even Qui’sin could not block it out – Kemich’s distressed cries echoed through the winding tunnels as her master struggled on, bearing the full weight not only of the twist in reality they now occupied, but also the unshielded psychic horror of the monster lurking below.

  Eventually, just as Joghaten was becoming convinced they had been cursed to wander the underworld for eternity, Yenneth signalled back to them. They had reached their destination.

  The cavern that opened out before them was vast, and irrevocably tainted. Lit up on the Space Marines’ visor displays, its rugged floor and
the thousands of great jagged stalactites that studded its ceiling would have been an awesome sight, were it not for the horror that now infested it. Great globules of alien flesh wormed and burrowed into the cracks and fissures that lined the uneven floor and walls, and coiled like monstrous parasites around stalagmites and stalactites. A web of xenos meat, throbbing and alive, had turned the entire chamber into a vast, living nest, a place of unnatural growths and chitin-plated tumours. The other-worldly, stomach-turning stench of the Great Devourer – spilled guts, digestion juices, waste and bile – permeated everything.

  Even worse were the things nesting in the chamber. The walls were studded with thousands of pale amniotic sacs, row upon row nestled into the uneven Darkand rock. Multi-limbed alien forms were visible within the milky depths, writhing and churning with new life. Hundreds of the sacs had already split, their fluids oozing across the worm-infested floor. Their former occupants – slick genestealers with see-through flesh and carapaces that were still hardening, scuttled in an ever-rotating circle around the thing dominating the centre of the cavern, the sounds of thousands of claws scraping off rock creating a deep susurration that had risen through the tunnels and burrows and into the catacombs above.

  The beast they surrounded was a monstrosity. Far larger than even the mawloc they had faced outside the city, it filled the centre of the mountain’s heart with a wall of pulsing, leathery skin and chitin plates as thick and gnarled as the flanks of a fleet escort. The beast’s primary maw was large enough to swallow a Land Raider, while scything talons and tendon whips the length of an Imperial Knight bristled from its multiple limbs. It was shrouded in a miasma of spores, churned out from its vapour chimneys and spine ducts. The mere sight of it painted across the auto-senses of the Space Marines caused a surge of sickening revulsion to wash over them.

  And yet it was not the true master of the swarm. The source of the synapse link, identified now by Qui’sin as so powerful that it was able to reach the swarms still gathering out on the plains, was the patriarch latched parasitically to the larger monster’s back. The dominatrix was a symbiotic creature, a carrier host for a synapse leader of tremendous power, its reach extended by the as-yet unknown means by which its flesh meshed with that of its host. Magos biologis usually listed the synapse master as something akin to a withered hive tyrant, yet this one was different. The spade-like nature of the dominatrix’s talons and the size of the tunnels that branched off from the cavern implied it had been deposited by the hive fleet somewhere out on the plains and had burrowed its way beneath Heavenfall, where it had linked with the genestealer cult’s patriarch. From there it had controlled not just the swarm, but the cult secreted within the city as well.

  The symbiotic creature,+ Yenneth thought as the small band stood staring up at the beast dominating the cavern. +The mistress of the swarm. She has sensed us.+

  The genestealers circling the dominatrix had changed direction. The nearest peeled off and were skittering along the cavern floor towards the intruders. Their shrieks filled the air, and were answered by a deep, earth-shuddering bellow from the dominatrix.

  ‘Glory be!’ called a human voice, cutting through the alien uproar. It was a voice Joghaten recognised. Septimus Traik. The High Enunciator of the Emperor’s Voice was standing on a high rocky ledge to the right of the tunnel they had entered through, apart from the alien swarm that filled most of the chamber. He was clad in his heavy ceremonial gown, though the beads of his broad-brimmed hat had been drawn back to reveal a gaunt, wicked old face, as white as Joghaten’s armour. He grinned down at them from his perch, revealing teeth sharpened to wicked fangs. The two dozen Pinnacle Guardsmen surrounding him mirrored the unsettling expression; their own helms were removed, revealing skulls left bloated and deformed by the hybrid effects of the xenos.

  ‘I had not heard her great voice until this moment!’ Traik called over the thunder of the oncoming swarm. ‘A blessing upon you for bringing this about, on the eve of our ascension!’

  ‘He is the cult magus,’ Qui’sin said, realisation mixing with disgust in his voice.

  ‘He must die,’ the farseer said aloud. ‘As must the symbiotic creature. Only then will the swarms on the surface scatter.’

  ‘You dream, witch,’ Joghaten said, staring up at the hulking alien leader-beast as it shifted its bulk around to face the tiny prey-things that dared disturb its nesting. ‘It is too vast for us to harm.’

  ‘Individually yes,’ the aeldari agreed. ‘But not if we combine our powers. Qui’sin, will you take the rock with me?’ She raised her runestaff, pointing towards Traik’s perch.

  ‘If it means tearing that traitor apart,’ the Stormseer replied darkly.

  ‘The rest must keep the swarm at bay. We have to be fast.’

  The small band set off, making for the rocky promontory occupied by Traik and his hybrids. The magus laughed openly as they approached, gesturing at his twisted guards.

  ‘More flesh for our saviours, my children,’ he shrieked. The Pinnacle Guard responded by meeting the charge of the White Scars with blades and claws. Joghaten parried a Darkand knife not unlike a Chogorian kindjal and used his momentum to carry his second tulwar through the snarling hybrid’s guard, opening its throat in a jet of discoloured blood. Beside him Feng had struck with the force of a stampeding ux horn, roaring incoherently as he used his armoured bulk to shatter ribs and snap grasping claw-limbs. Even he, however, could not match the sheer destructive power of the aeldari farseer in those first few seconds of contact.

  The witch was a blur, her already fearsome speed and agility given a further edge by a psychic quickening even the likes of Qui’sin could never have hoped to emulate. Three rapid heartbeats and a dozen razor-blows, and six deformed cult members lay clinically beheaded at the base of the outcrop. Qui’sin had barely struck down the first hybrid to come at him before the farseer had opened a path for him to the top of the rock. He hefted his force staff and scrambled after her, grasping on to hideous alien flesh-growths to help clamber up the uneven stone.

  ‘You cannot stop what is coming!’ Traik was screaming. ‘You cannot stop the Great Devourer. We will consume the entire galaxy, and your flesh and blood and bone will fuel our next conquest!’

  Traik was still screaming when the farseer reached him. She got there before Qui’sin, far faster than the heavily armoured Adeptus Astartes. The magus’ ranting was cut short as the aeldari’s blade flashed out, a tracer of white light in the foetid darkness. Qui’sin saw Traik’s head tumble, the white beads of his ceremonial veil turned red as they broke and scattered into a thousand specks of brilliance. The body toppled backwards, gown flapping, and was lost in the mass pressing against the base of the rock.

  A howl of dismay arose from the hybrids, and Joghaten, Feng and Timchet struck all the harder, chopping left and right with tulwar, dao and kindjal. The mass around them, however, did not lessen. It only increased, as the first wave of purestrain gene­stealers struck.

  ‘The beast is the last unbroken link between the swarm and the hive mind,’ the farseer said to Qui’sin, gesturing up at the dominatrix. ‘We must sever it.’

  ‘How?’ the Stormseer demanded through clenched teeth. The presence of the symbiotic creature, the scratching in his skull, was almost unbearable. Only Kemich, perched loyally on one shoulder, gave him a degree of focus, a psychic anchor which he could tether his mind to.

  ‘Crush it,’ the farseer said, raising her runestaff and stretching out her free hand.

  ‘We cannot make contact with its mind,’ Qui’sin said. ‘We’ll both be consumed the moment we do.’

  ‘I did not refer to crushing it psychically.’

  Qui’sin followed the seer’s staff, and realised where it was pointing. He understood. Widening his stance on the flesh-veined rock, he planted his force staff and began to chant in the ancient tongue of Chogoris.

  While below him, his brothers di
ed.

  Timchet’s kindjal was stuck. It had lodged itself between a hybrid’s ribs, and now the deformed creature was scrabbling at his armour as the blade twisted and sliced its insides. He snatched it by the neck and physically dragged it away, separating the body from the blade through sheer strength.

  But by then it was too late. He was already aware of the next hybrid behind him, already turning, but the thing’s lasrifle discharged at point-blank range, searing through the back of his left knee joint. He grunted as his leg gave out, alien flesh pulping beneath him as he went down on one knee.

  He would have died there with a las-bolt to the back of his head had Feng’s energised dao not severed first the rifle’s barrel and then its wielder’s skull. The türüch was a perpetual web of keen-edged motion slashed with gouts of blood and ichor, his power lance inscribing bright, deadly arcs in the chamber’s darkness. The manic fury he had displayed during the fighting in the arena appeared to have gone, replaced by what native Chogorians called the sword song – the metamorphosis from killing to artistry.

  Joghaten too danced to the song’s cutting tune. He did not know it, but he grinned. His body, battle weary and wounded in dozens of places, could only carry on for so much longer, yet the khan was no longer aware of the aching in his muscles or the pounding of his hearts or the blood trickling down inside his armour. He thought only of death and glory, and how his soul soared to the song of his blades as they split skulls, severed limbs and opened alien bodies.

  Timchet regained his feet as Feng and Joghaten killed, killed and killed again. He did not dance as they did. He was weary, so weary. He yearned for Hagai’s presence. If the xenos witch could manipulate time surely that meant he was out there, somewhere, if not in this reality then in another?

  Perhaps, in some strange and unthinkable parallel, he was still by his side.

  Back against the rock, kindjal in his fist, Timchet fought on.

  The witch was trying to bring down the stalactites. Her fist was clenched and her knuckles were white where she gripped her runestaff. Qui’sin could sense the pressure she was exerting over one of the jagged rock shards above the dominatrix. He felt the stone tremor and shift fractionally. She was not strong enough, however. Not alone.