Bloodied hands reached from the bookcases. Mouths filled with gnashing teeth opened up in the floor to snare their feet. The Angels Sanguine were stumbling through the confusion, laying about them with their glaives at every shape that loomed through the smoky gloom.
‘Stand fast!’ yelled Daviks. ‘Onwards, brethren, for the honour is ours! Though the Griffons reap the tally, it is we who shall take the head of the arch-traitor! Sarpedon is here! Onwards and take his head!’
Daviks felt a flare of pride. It was unbecoming for him to lust after an honour in battle, but it came unbidden, and he let it push him forward through the horrors unfolding around him.
He knew that Sarpedon was here.
He knew it, because he had walked right into hell.
‘Do you know where you are?’ said the grating metallic voice of Daenyathos.
N’Kalo struggled. He was chained. His consciousness barely surfaced over the thudding of pain, but the feeling of his restraints sang clearly. He forced against them, but they held.
He had been battered senseless. He remembered Iktinos, the skull-helm of the Soul Drinkers Chaplain emotionless as the crozius hammered again and again into the side of his head. Where and how still escaped him. He was a captive, he was sure, and over him stood a purple-armoured dreadnought that could only be the legendary Daenyathos.
N’Kalo did not answer.
‘You are somewhere you will never leave,’ said Daenyathos.
N’Kalo was aware of a room of immense size. His vision swam back beyond the dreadnought and he saw that he was in a cargo hold, a vast space that could hold legions of tanks and Rhino APCs. It was empty now save for the area set up in the centre, at the heart of which N’Kalo was chained. He was surrounded by a complicated circular pattern scorched into the deck, scattered with bones and flower petals, gemstones and bundles of herbs, pages torn from books, human teeth, bullets and chunks of rock torn from alien worlds. Around this sigil knelt the pilgrims who had arrived on the Phalanx, they had claimed, to oversee the trial of the Soul Drinkers, and they held their standards of the blinded eye aloft. They were hooded and robed and issued a low chant, dark syllables repeated in a terrible drone.
N’Kalo was aware that he still wore his armour and his battered helm was back on his head. It made no sense for his captor to leave him armoured. He might not have a weapon in his hand, but a Space Marine in armour was still more dangerous than one without. It could help him when he broke out, and there was no doubt in his mind that he would. Whatever agenda Daenyathos had, and whether the Soul Drinkers were heretics or blameless, Daenyathos and Iktinos had revealed themselves to constitute a moral threat and N’Kalo had a duty to escape and bring them to justice.
‘You wear your thoughts on you as if they were written on your armour,’ said Daenyathos. ‘You desire escape. That is natural. A Space Marine is not created to be caged. And you desire revenge. You would call it duty or justice, but it is ultimately death you wish on me for orchestrating your defeat and capture. This, again, is natural. A Space Marine is a vengeful creature. But do you see now, helpless as you are, what a pitiful animal you truly are? Freedom and vengeance – what do these things mean, when compared to the matters that shape the galaxy? How much does your existence mean?’
N’Kalo struggled again. His chains were set into the deck of the cargo hold. They were probably chains built into the deck to keep tanks from sliding around when the Phalanx was in flight. One Space Marine could not break them.
‘My duty is within myself,’ said N’Kalo. He knew he should have stayed silent, but something in Daenyathos’s words, in the way he seemed genuinely passionate in spite of the artificiality of his voice, compelled him to reply. ‘Though the galaxy may burn and humanity collapse, I must fulfil my duty regardless. And so I call myself a Space Marine.’
‘That is the response of a weak mind,’ said Daenyathos. The dreadnought’s body turned away to something off to the side, outside N’Kalo’s frame of vision. ‘You choose to ignore the matters that affect the galaxy, and shrink your mind down to one battle after another, one petty victory over some xenos or renegade, and tell yourself that such is the totality of your potential. I chose instead to abandon the duties that restrict me, and rise to become one of those very factors that mould the galaxy at their whim. It is a choice I made. Yours is a mind too small to make it. The Soul Drinkers were like you, and I had to make that choice for them. Were they wise enough to understand, they would have thanked me.’
Daenyathos’s massive tank-like torso swivelled back to face N’Kalo. One of his arms was a missile launcher, while the other ended in a huge power fist. That fist was now encased in a gauntlet from which protruded several smaller implements – manipulator limbs, blades, needles, an assortment of attachments for finer control than the dreadnought’s power fist afforded.
‘What is this?’ said N’Kalo. ‘Why have you brought me here?’
‘That is a question I am willing to answer,’ said Daenyathos. ‘But not through words.’
A circular saw emerged from among the implements. N’Kalo tensed, forcing against his bonds with every muscle he had. He felt joints parting and bones cracking, shots of pain running through him as his muscular power pushed beyond the limits of his skeleton.
The chains did not move. Perhaps N’Kalo could break and twist his limbs until they could be slipped out of their bonds. Perhaps he could crawl away, steal a weapon from one of the cultists.
The circular blade cut through N’Kalo’s breastplate. Sparks flew, and bright reflections glinted in the lenses set into Daenyathos’s armoured head.
Daenyathos worked quickly, and with great precision. Soon the breastplate was lifted off in sections, smaller manipulator limbs picking apart the layers of ceramite until N’Kalo felt the recycled air of the Phalanx cold on his chest.
The chanting changed to a terrible falling cadence, a piece of music about to end. N’Kalo felt the power charging in the air and saw a glow overhead, as if from a great heat against the ceiling of the cargo hold. Crackles of energy ran down the walls, earthing off the massive feet of Daenyathos’s dreadnought body.
N’Kalo felt pain. He gasped in spite of himself, the impossibly cold touch of the saw blade running in a red line along his sternum.
The ceiling of the cargo hold was lifting off, metallic sections peeling apart and fluttering into the void like dead leaves on the wind. The hull parted and the air gushed out. The pilgrims looked up at the rent in the side of the Phalanx, calm and joy on their faces even as the sudden pressure change made their eye sockets well up red with burst vessels. Hood were blown back by the swirling gale and, in spite of the pain, N’Kalo’s mind registered the face of a woman ecstatic as foaming blood ran from her lips. Another one of the pilgrims was their leader, impossibly ancient, and his dry and dusty body seemed to wither away as he raised his wizened head to the origin of the light that fell on him.
The light was coming from Kravamesh, the star around which the Phalanx orbited. A burning orange glow filtered down through the debris swirling around the hull breach. The hull parted further, like an opening eye, and the last tides of air boomed out.
The pilgrims were dying, each moment robbing another of consciousness. N’Kalo realised his armour had been left on so that he could still breathe while the cargo hold fell apart.
The saw was withdrawn. Without air, the only sound was now vibrations through the floor. The faint whir of servos as a manipulator arm unfolded. The rattling breath N’Kalo drew through the systems of his armour as the cold hit the open wound in his chest.
‘Do you know,’ said Daenyathos, the sound of his voice transmitted as vibrations through his feet, ‘what you are to become?’
N’Kalo gritted his teeth. He could see Kravamesh above him, its boiling fires, and though its fires looked down on him its light was appallingly cold.
‘The key,’ continued Daenyathos. The manipulators extended and hooked around N’Kalo’s ribs. N’Kalo y
elled, the cry not making it past the insides of his own armour. ‘Dorn’s own blood is the only key that will fit the lock he built around Kravamesh. The Soul Drinkers do not have it, though it suited me for them to continue believing they did. You have it, Iron Knight. The blood of Dorn flows in your veins.’
The manipulators forced at the edges of N’Kalo’s fused rib breastplate. The bones creaked. N’Kalo strained every muscle in his body, forcing against the pain as well as his restraints.
He saw Rogal Dorn, his golden-armoured body kneeling at the Emperor’s fallen form. He saw the Eye of Terror open, and the battlements of Earth burning. Some ancient memory, written into the genetic material on which his augmentations were based, bled in the final moments into his mind.
N’Kalo felt the impossible pride and fury of Rogal Dorn. They filled him to bursting, too much emotion for a man, even a Space Marine, to contain. The Primarch was an impossible creature, in every aspect superior to a man, in every dimension vaster by far.
N’Kalo could see Rogal Dorn at the Iron Cage, the vast fortifications manned by the soldiers of Chaos, the shadow of the entire Imperial Fists Chapter falling on it as Dorn orchestrated the assault.
The last images were ghosted over the monstrous eye of Kravamesh opening wide, vast and unholy shapes emerging from its fires.
Daenyathos punched the mass of his power fist into N’Kalo’s chest, splintering through the ribs. Daenyathos ripped the fist free and N’Kalo’s organs were sprayed across the cargo bay deck in the shape of bloody wings. The gore iced over in the cold of the void.
Daenyathos’s massive form leaned back from N’Kalo. The pattern scorched into the deck glowed red as if it was drinking N’Kalo’s spilled blood. The glow was met by the burning orange light from above. The head of Daenyathos’s chassis looked up towards the tear in the hull as the fires of Kravamesh billowed suddenly close.
From space it looked as if a bridge of fire was being built, reaching from the mass of Kravamesh towards the speck of the Phalanx. Shapes rippled along the bridge, tortured faces and twisted limbs, howling ghosts that split and reformed like liquid fire.
The observation crews on the Phalanx saw it right away. Every sensor on the Imperial Fists fortress-ship screamed in response. But the Phalanx was embroiled in open warfare, its crew managing the chaos unfolding from its archives, and without the whole crew at their stations the huge and complex ship could not react in time.
The tendril of fire touched the hull of the Phalanx. Daenyathos stood in the swirling mass of flame that incinerated the remains of N’Kalo and the pilgrims. From the flame emerged shapes – leaping, gibbering things, limbs and eyes that turned in on one another in an endless mockery of evolution. They danced madly around Daenyathos as if he was the master of their revel. Reality shuddered and tore as the insanity formed a huge circular gate in the centre of the cargo bay, the fire rippling around a glassy black pit that plunged through the substance of the universe and into a place far darker.
Daenyathos stood before the warp portal. The fires of the warp washed around the feet of his dreadnought chassis, and the daemons slavered as they slunk through the flame. But Daenyathos did not falter. He had seen this moment a million times before. He had dreamed it over thousands of years in half-sleep under Selaaca.
Vast mountains of filth and hatred shifted in the darkness beyond the portal. Tendrils of their sheer malice rippled through the substance of the cargo hold, blistering up the metal of the deck with spiny tentacled limbs. Blood-weeping eyes opened up in the walls. The daemon cavalcade shrieked higher and higher as one of the forms in the portal detached itself and drifted, half-formed, towards the opening.
It coalesced as it approached, taking the shape of something at once beautiful and appalling. A vast and idealised human figure, glistening pale skin clad in flowing white silk, surrounded by a halo of raw magic. Torn minds flowed in its wake, ruptured spirits shredded into madness by the warp. A taloned hand grasped the flaming edge of the portal, hauling its vastness towards reality.
The perfect, maddening shape of the head emerged. Its features looked like they were carved from pure marble, its eyes orbs of jade. The music of the warp accompanied it, a thousand choirs shorn of their bodies.
‘It is time,’ said Daenyathos. ‘The threads of the destiny meet here.’
‘Free!’ bellowed the daemon prince in its thousand voices. ‘Banishment, agony, all over! A vengeance… vengeance flows like blood from a wound! The wound I shall leave in the universe… the hatred that shall rise in a flood. Oh unriven souls, oh undreaming minds, you shall be laid to waste! Abraxes has returned!’
SALVATION’S REACH
Chapter One
Dan Abnett
Something, perhaps the year of living by the skin of his teeth on occupied Gereon, or merely the fact of having been born a sly and ruthless son of a bitch, had given Major Rawne of the Tanith First a certain edge.
He could usually smell trouble coming. That morning, he could definitely smell trouble coming. As edges went, his was as fine and sharp as the one along the blade of his straight silver warknife.
At dawn, with the twin suns beginning to burn up through the petrochemical smog across the city bay, he left the regimental billet and walked down to the rockcrete wasteland of the bayside revetment. There, he wandered as far as the bridge, and crossed over to the pontoons in front of the island guardhouse.
The pontoon walkway clunked underfoot. Looking down through the mesh, he could see the water, toxic brown and frothy. The massive galvanic plants along the bay, Mechanicus developments that powered and lit the hive city’s core systems, had just flushed their heatsinks, and filled the coastline with its morning dose of radioactive effluent. There was steam in the air, steam that stank of sulphur and rolled like a fog bank, white in the suns’ light. The waters of the bay and estuary had been corrosively acidic for a thousand years. It was sobering to think that anything still lived in it.
But things did. Just below the surface, they squirmed and moved, leech-mouthed, slug-slick, with dentition like crowded pincushions and eyes like phlegm. Rawne could see them, following him beneath the surface, a dark, wriggling mass. What gave them their edge? Was it the sound of his footsteps, the passing heat signature of his body? Pheromones? His shadow on the water?
They were survivors. They had adapted to their environment instead of allowing it to kill them. And they killed anything that threatened them.
Just like him.
Three Urdeshi troopers were manning the guardhouse. They didn’t know him, and he didn’t know them. They weren’t his concern. He had chosen that particular morning because it was pretty much the last chance he was going to get before the regiment shipped out. The point of no turning back had been reached.
But still, there was the nagging discomfort of his edge. Something was off. Something was wrong. He’d chosen the wrong day to try it. Maybe the troopers suspected him of something, maybe they were wired up for some reason. Maybe something had given away his true intent.
Under ordinary circumstances, the doubt would have been enough to make him abort, turn around, and go home. The uncertainty would have been sufficient to make him blow it off and try again another day when the odds were more favourable.
Except there weren’t going to be any more other days. It was now, or it was never. There were no more chances. The monster, that monster, should have been dead long since. Justice and decency demanded it, and only the dedicated efforts of good men who ought to have known better were ensuring the monster’s salvation.
Dedication. Rawne had always possessed a measure of dedication. He knew what was right and what was wrong. He knew when an order was a bad thing and needed to be ignored. He knew that sometimes a man had to be counter-intuitive. A man had to do what looked like a bad thing so that everything else would be right in the end.
The monster was destined to die. Its death was required, demanded. Efforts had already been made, by more than one intere
sted party. Rawne couldn’t stand by and let things carry on.
Rawne was a man of serious convictions, after all. Thankfully, they’d all been wiped from his record the day he joined the Imperial Guard.
The Urdeshi watched him as he approached. What did they suspect? Did they know what he had really come for?
He stopped at the outer cage gate. The Urdeshi troopers wore black metal pins that indicated they had been seconded to serve the Commissariat’s S Company, the close protection and security detail. They asked him his name and his business, and studied the papers he passed through the metal letterbox. One of them took a long time over the Contact Permission document signed by Rawne’s commanding officer, as though he had literacy problems.
They let him through. They checked his ID tags. They eyed his tattoos with scorn. He was some kind of heathen farm-head from an agri-world, an indentured barbarian, not a proper fighting man from a civilised place like Urdesh. Only his rank kept the insults at bay.
They took his sidearm, put it in the guardhouse locker, and made him sign for it. Then they patted him down.
The Urdeshi had been fairly thorough up until that point, but now the long night shift and a clutch of caffeine headaches began to show. Rawne had been patted down by the very best in his time. He knew precisely how to twist or turn, innocent movements that looked like balance-keeping, so that even somebody taking the pat-down seriously could be misled and misdirected. Rawne kept his hands raised. By the time they’d finished, they would believe they had methodically checked everywhere, where in fact he had kept them entirely clear of one or two areas.
They found the knife. Tanith warknife, straight silver, buckled to his right shin.
Hammer and Bolter Year One Page 111