by Nick Kyme
Tongues of fire spewed from the mouths of their weapons, lapping at the casket eagerly. For a moment, the venerable tomb of Saint Absetia seemed impervious but after a few seconds it ran with flowing silver tears. Quickly turning molten, the casket bled all over the plinth and then the floor, oozing like wax.
Like many of his kind, Lufurion was a child of the warp. Though not a true neverborn, he could nonetheless feel the veil between reality and the ether thin with the destruction of the casket. He shuddered, chilled and excited at the same time. A ripple passed through Faustus too. Lufurion saw it reflected in the mirror sheen of the silver before it curdled and blackened. In it Faustus was revealed as a monster, a daemon-spawn trapped in the shell of a man. The Luna Wolf was screaming, a proud warrior of Cthonia no longer.
Lufurion did not witness what Faustus saw: a warrior of the old war, the first great war, clad in legionary battleplate. He saw the ideal, the lie. Slipping from the present for a moment, his gaze seemed to wander as he outstretched his gauntleted hand.
‘They are close…’ he whispered. ‘I can hear their voices, calling out to me. Ahenobarbus… Narthius… Klaed… all of them.’ Faustus lowered his hand, withdrew from the warp and the past life it held in thrall. He turned his attention to Lufurion. ‘Bring forth the witch.’
At Faustus’s command, a tall enrobed figure emerged from the shadows into the dying light of the fire. His violet armour marked him out as one of the Incarnadine. Lufurion gave Preest a subtle nod as their eyes met across the lake of molten silver that had spilled from the casket like blood.
Faustus stepped through it, largely heedless of the sorcerer and intent on whom he clasped in his gauntleted hands.
She was little more than a girl, weak and blind, a gossamer-thin chasuble clinging to her frail frame like a pair of flaccid, diaphanous wings. She was, in many respects, an insect but a useful one. At least for the present. She was flanked by another pair of mortals, a male and female, their features hidden behind their robes but all too visible to the daemonic sight of Faustus. He noted the chains that were locked to the iron collars around their necks, and was careful to keep his distance.
Preest bowed in supplication.
‘Master…’ he hissed.
Faustus ignored him, stooping to seize the girl by her bony jaw. She was weeping, for her plight or the desecration of Saint Absetia’s tomb, it did not matter. All that concerned Faustus were her tears.
‘Cry, little witch. Tell me where my brothers are to be found.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Sturndrang, the underhive of Molior
‘He lives,’ said Zartath, standing amidst the carnage of the arena battle, ‘and walked away from the fight.’
After burning the mutant cultists, Agatone had set the ex-Black Dragon loose. They had reached Seven Points, found it to be a haven for the depraved and debased worshippers of Slaanesh, but their quarry was gone. With no other lead, they needed to find Tsu’gan’s trail, and soon, before it went cold.
Zartath had done just that and was crouching over a spoor he and he alone could discern.
Agatone joined him, leaving Exor to watch over Issak and act as sentry. Though most were no match for Adeptus Astartes, the underhive was fraught with many hazards Agatone was keen to avoid. A delay now could destroy any remaining chance they had of finding Tsu’gan, and he was determined to bring the wayward fire-born back. Third’s reputation was damaged, the confidence of its Chapter Master in it tarnished. They needed this. Agatone needed this. It would be done, one way or the other.
‘Which way?’
Zartath gestured vaguely east.
Even to Agatone’s enhanced senses, it was just more industrial gloom. The pipes, gantries and striated sub-levels seemed to extend endlessly.
‘How long ago?’ he asked.
‘Few hours.’
Keen to get moving again, Agatone was about to rise and summon the others when Zartath grabbed his wrist.
‘He did not leave alone,’ said the ex-Black Dragon.
‘An ally?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Zartath, ‘or a prisoner,’ he snarled, not liking that word for all the memories it raised of his own incarceration, and let Agatone go.
Agatone got to his feet and hailed Exor.
‘Techmarine, we leave now.’
Exor turned. He looked battered, his carapace armour shredded by the rat swarm, but at least his wounds were healing.
‘Zartath has his trail,’ Agatone concluded.
‘Still no word from the others,’ said Exor as he joined them. The Techmarine had been checking the vox-bands, trying to locate the frequencies of the other hunting parties and make contact. All of his attempts had proven fruitless so far, however. ‘Some sort of deep subterranean interference. Perhaps if we could get higher, above some of this metal and compacted industry…’ He sounded irritated, and Agatone wondered how much his injury was bothering him or whether he could still hear the keening. It lingered at the edge of Agatone’s hearing, like a barely audible sub-tone, grating but still present. His system had been purged of tainted blood, but some of its effects clung on tenaciously.
‘Lok and Clovius’s warriors would be very useful right now, but we go where Zartath leads us,’ he said. ‘Keep trying, brother.’
Exor nodded.
Agatone turned his attention to Issak.
‘You kept your word, medicus. You’ve honoured us with your service, but I won’t ask anything further of you. Here is where we part ways.’
Issak smiled, as a man does when he realises a fundamental truth and takes pleasure in his own enlightenment.
‘I was wrong, Brother Agatone.’
Agatone frowned, restive and eager to be moving on.
‘Speak your mind, medicus.’
‘My calling is not in Kabullah. It is here, with you and your warriors. Let me come with you, and see this through. You have already said you cannot vouch for my safety. I accept that and will join you anyway.’
‘He will slow us down,’ said Exor.
Issak gave the Techmarine a sideways glance.
‘With respect, in this terrain, in the underhive, you would slow me down.’
‘He has a point…’ said Agatone, considering. ‘The medicus comes with us, but we go now,’ he decided, brooking no further protest and turning to his huntsman. ‘Zartath…’
The ex-Black Dragon was staring into the shadows. His gaze followed the distant figure of a blood-stained boy carrying a spear. But there was no water and no fish for him to catch.
‘I can see…’ Zartath began, half rising before he realised it was an apparition, some manifestation of his subconscious, and not a boy at all. A second figure stood behind it, looking on grimly. So, both father and son had returned. Though he could not yet fill the lacuna in his memory, Zartath knew he had done this to them. He felt their revenant malice, their cold, dead eyes glaring and–
‘Brother!’
–was brought back from the edge of the nightmare by Agatone’s voice.
‘Are you still with us?’ asked the captain.
Zartath nodded, obeyed. He led them away from Seven Points, following Tsu’gan’s trail. And the keening inside his head thrummed ever louder.
As the others followed, Agatone slowed to grab Exor’s shoulder.
‘Keep a watchful eye.’
The Techmarine nodded.
Despite his familiarity with the underhive, Issak struggled to keep pace. Zartath moved quickly through the wreckage. Sometimes stooped, occasionally on all fours, it was hard not to think of him as a beast. But he traversed the low ceilings, access pipes and crawl spaces like he was born to it. To his brothers, he seemed driven. To Issak, the transhuman warrior looked possessed. Something had invested him with purpose, a bloodhound with the scent of its prey pungent in its nostrils. A singular imperative drove h
im, one the others had no knowledge of. It rang loudly inside his skull, a promise and a curse combined.
For several hours they gave chase, following Zartath into the underhive, not really knowing how far or how deep they had plumbed in search of Tsu’gan. Occasionally, Zartath would stop, pausing to examine some detail or re-check their route. They had only doubled back once before he had Tsu’gan’s spoor again.
They were getting closer.
No one challenged them. There were no more gangs, no more monsters, just darkness and metal, the toxic agglomeration of centuries’ worth of neglect and industrial entropy. Agatone was uncertain what the silence presaged, but he assumed and prepared for the worst.
When Zartath finally came to a halt, he did so standing at the precipice of a wide, circular abyss. It was vast, large enough to accommodate a small starship and its ragged edge suggested it had either fallen to ruin or something had punched through it.
‘Another false trail?’ asked Exor as he watched the shadows around them for any sign of disturbance.
Agatone slowly shook his head, his eyes on Zartath’s unmoving form.
‘I don’t think so. Not this time.’
The ex-Black Dragon had his back to them but it was obvious from the angle of his neck that he was staring down in the chasmal darkness in front of him.
‘I have heard of this place,’ said Issak. He was walking in between the two Salamanders, protected on either flank. Agatone might have acceded to his joining them, but was not about to leave the medicus undefended.
Agatone stopped, prompting Issak and Exor to do the same. He kneeled down like a father might to a son, so his eyes and those of the medicus were at roughly the same height.
‘Tell me what you know.’
‘It’s called the Well, and has been here for as long as I can remember.’ He spared a glance towards the chasm and Zartath loitering over it, who appeared to be transfixed, before averting his gaze back to Agatone. ‘You have to understand, Molior is old. Its roots go deep. Much of its vastness is uncharted. Unknown. What the Imperium does not need anymore,’ here he gestured to their immediate surroundings, ‘it forgets, and leaves it to decay. Do you know what this place was before it became a hive?’
Agatone shook his head. He also gestured to Exor to go and keep an eye on Zartath.
Issak went on. ‘It was an Administratum archivium, a place of secure knowledge about the Imperium and its history. Over the centuries, millennia even, it was neglected. Forgotten.’
‘What is your point, medicus? And how can you know all this?’
‘You hear things. Learn things… My point, Brother Agatone? The knowledge kept safe… it is still here.’
Agatone saw Exor in his peripheral vision. The Techmarine was waving them over.
‘Whatever lies here, it is no concern of ours. I want Tsu’gan. Zartath says he’s close. That means we’re almost done. I won’t linger.’
Zartath looked down into the abyss, as still as a statue. Exor was standing beside him surreptitiously running a bio-scan.
Agatone stalled the Techmarine’s report with his upraised palm. He had known something was wrong with Zartath since Kabullah. It didn’t matter now. He had to hope the ex-Black Dragon would perform his duty long enough so that they could achieve the mission.
‘What do you see?’ Agatone said to Zartath, no louder than a murmur.
‘Darkness… something is alive down there.’
The so-called ‘Well’ reminded Agatone of a long gullet, fanged with spiky and uneven teeth. It was not so much of a stretch to imagine it having sentience, to being a microcosmical glimpse of something larger and more terrible. In truth, the gullet was a wide and broken shaft, rough at the edges, and the teeth were jutting rebars and large splints of twisted metal. He looked up to the ceiling, and saw the pattern repeated. Rather than at the bottom, Agatone gauged they were actually somewhere in the middle of the shaft.
‘I can see a trajectory,’ said Exor.
Agatone nodded. ‘Something crash-landed here, hot and violent enough to bore through the surface and several layers of sub-hive beneath.’
‘I hear it…’ uttered Zartath, and made the others turn.
He was still staring.
‘The keening?’ suggested Agatone, at which Zartath nodded.
‘It’s much louder below.’
Agatone turned to Exor. ‘What did that scan tell you?’
‘Nothing. Physically, he is fine. Better than I am, for certain. Whatever’s wrong with him is not in his body, brother-captain. But I am no Apothecary.’ He looked to Issak, and the medicus shrugged.
‘Without conducting a more thorough examination, from what I can tell he is right. Zartath’s illness is psychological.’
Agatone scowled. He still needed the huntsman, but Zartath was verging on the catatonic. He tried to get what he needed.
‘Is Tsu’gan down there? Did he follow the keening too?’
‘No. He climbed…’ For the first time since he had reached the Well, Zartath looked up and pointed, ‘up there.’
He gestured to a gantry leading to a stairwell, which rose up and over the edge of the shaft that had been cored through Molior and into a higher level.
Moving away from the shaft seemed to help Zartath’s cogency, so Agatone gently pulled him back from the edge. Zartath looked him in the eye.
‘It doesn’t matter what you do, captain. I must go to it. End it.’
Agatone seized Zartath’s shoulders, trying to stay the focus of his attention, but the ex-Black Dragon’s eyes wandered.
‘We are close, brother. I need you here with me if we’re to finish this.’
‘This is as far as I can go by your side, captain,’ Zartath replied, shrugging out of Agatone’s grasp.
Engaging his retinal augmentations, Exor scanned the point Zartath had indicated.
‘I have faint heat traces, some blood.’
Hope kindled briefly as Agatone turned to the Techmarine and asked, ‘Recent?’
‘Very.’
As if drawn to it by the siren-like keening, Zartath was moving towards the edge of the shaft again. When Agatone reached out to hold him back, the ex-Black Dragon snarled.
‘Stand down,’ Agatone warned, but didn’t let him go.
‘Release me,’ Zartath growled.
‘You are not yourself, brother.’
Exor drew his bolt pistol, firmly pushing Issak behind him, but Agatone waved him off.
‘I am handling this.’
‘I am a warrior,’ said Zartath, his tone almost pleading, ‘I am not to be handled like some beast.’
‘You are not a beast,’ Agatone replied, but heard the lie in his words. ‘At least… I know you can be more than that.’
For a moment Zartath almost looked like he believed him and the hollow opals that were his eyes softened in a fleeting impression of remembered brotherhood, before it was swallowed behind something darker and more feral.
Breaking free of Agatone’s hold, Zartath roared and the bone blades slid from his forearms.
Not waiting for a command, Exor fired. The shot was high and deliberately wide, glancing Zartath’s shoulder. The impact spun him and he staggered backwards. It was enough to send him over the edge of the shaft and into the darkness below.
Agatone leapt to grab his flailing hand, but missed.
‘No!’
He was left on his stomach, facing the abyss and watching Zartath’s slowly shrinking form as it descended, until the darkness claimed and he was lost from sight.
‘Captain.’ Exor came rushing over. ‘I had no choice. I had to–’
Agatone got up without the Techmarine’s help.
‘At that range, you could have killed him. I thought you would have. What stopped you?’
‘I saw the man grow
larger than the beast,’ Exor replied. ‘I believed, as you did, that he could be saved.’
‘Do you still believe that?’
‘I do, brother-captain.’
‘Can you track him?’
‘Yes, I can follow his biological trail easily enough,’ he tapped his bionic eye as if that explained how, ‘but what about Tsu’gan?’
‘Go after Zartath. Find whatever is driving him to the brink of insanity and bring him back. I won’t lose one in order to find another. I’ll continue after Tsu’gan.’
‘Take the auspex then,’ said Exor. ‘It’s inloaded with Tsu’gan’s biological signatures. Not foolproof but it’ll help you find him.’
‘Won’t you need it?’
‘I can find him in that hole without it. If he’s alive, I’ll bring him back, captain.’
Agatone nodded his thanks, attaching the scanner to his belt. ‘When did you do all that? The data inload, I mean?’ he asked.
‘A few seconds ago when I blinked.’
Agatone laughed out loud. ‘Secrets of the Martian brotherhood, eh?’
‘There is only one brotherhood that has my allegiance.’
Agatone smiled, finding a soul tempered by the anvil.
Exor seemed not to notice and gestured to Issak, who was looking in the direction of the shaft where he had just seen, or thought he had seen, Zartath plummet to his death.
‘What about him?’
‘The medicus comes with me. I’ll need him.’ Agatone held out his hand, and Exor seized it in the warrior’s grip.
‘You do realise it’s madness to split up our party,’ said Exor.
Agatone nodded. ‘Sometimes you have to risk everything in order to succeed at something.’
‘Vulkan’s fire beats in my breast,’ Exor said to his captain.
‘With it I shall smite the foes of the Emperor,’ Agatone concluded. ‘Move quickly.’
As part of his trappings, Exor had a high-tensile strength wire and grapnel gun. Stepping back, he fired the launcher into the Well where it snagged on one of the many outcrops of metal debris. He then attached several disc-shaped objects to his belt.
‘Suspensors,’ he explained. ‘They’ll slow me down enough that so I don’t break my neck or get impaled on a rebar.’ Then he leapt over the edge and let gravity take him.