by Nick Kyme
‘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 him, 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 he
lp 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.
Agatone didn’t need to watch him land and make the slow traverse. Exor was on his own now. Entering Molior as little more than a neophyte, he had grown into a battle-brother with similar skill and judgement to a veteran. Agatone wanted fiercely to have him as a member of Third Company. He would need warriors like that to help rebuild it, and forge its reputation anew. First, he had another fire-born to bring to heel.
Issak looked up from the Well. ‘How could he have survived that fall?’
‘We Adeptus Astartes are hard to kill, especially fire-born. Takes more than a long drop to finish us.’
‘But Zartath isn’t a fire-born,’ Issak replied.
‘Ah medicus, but he is. And I would see all my brothers returned to Nocturne’s forge.’
Urging Issak to move, Agatone eventually reached the other side of the chasm, where Exor had indicated Tsu’gan had gone. Clambering up to the precise spot, Agatone reached down to help the medicus and easily hauled him onto the ledge where he was crouching.
Standing, Agatone looked out into the deeper underhive, trying to imagine Tsu’gan’s route and what he could have been doing. All he saw was further wreckage: a sloping ceiling, shattered pipework, trails of viperous but inert electrical wire… and an icon. It was half-buried in all the detritus, begrimed and otherwise obscured by filth. But Agatone’s keen eyes discerned its symbol as well as its meaning.
It was an Imperial eagle split down the middle, one head and wing lost to decay.
Agatone checked the auspex. The trail led to the broken eagle. Beneath it there was a gap in the rubble just large enough for a transhuman body to crawl through.
‘The archivium you mentioned,’ said Agatone, pointing, ‘could that be it?’
Without a Space Marine’s genhanced vision, Issak didn’t see it at first, but after a few seconds he made out the eagle.
‘It must be.’
‘Tsu’gan went inside,’ said Agatone, without a trace of doubt.
Issak frowned, unable to make the connection. ‘To what end?’
‘I’m not sure it was his idea,’ said Agatone. ‘Either way, that’s where we are going.’
Exor hit the ledge hard and felt the impact throughout his body. His wounds were healing but more slowly than he’d like and they flared angrily. He winced, taking a moment to marshal the pain and catch his breath.
The suspensors were lightening his weight, but not enough. As a means of lessening the encumbrance of a lascannon or heavy bolter, their intended purpose, they performed well. Utilised as an improvised anti-gravitic, less so. In his current condition, without them he might already be crippled so he bit down, retracted the grapnel and prepared for the next jump.
Launching the cable into the darkness, focusing on a point where he could snare the grapnel hook, Exor tried to gauge the distance to the ground but couldn’t. Depth was impossible to speculate as was Zartath’s eventual position. He could be dead. If that was the case, then Exor would still have to locate him and haul his body back to the surface then wait for Agatone’s return.
He leapt out into the unknown.
He
at from a venting pipe seared his face as Exor passed through a grimy cloud of steam and gritty particulate. He landed awkwardly, jarring his knee and wondered if he had over-estimated his fitness for duty. Rolling onto his back, he looked up through the now-dissipating miasma jettisoned from the pipe and estimated he had descended almost eight hundred metres by variously rappelling down and leaping from ledge to ledge.
As the mist cleared fully, he saw something else. A claw mark, just two or three metres above him.
The inner side of the shaft led to the various sub-levels of the underhive. Whatever object had cored through each level had exposed them to each other, like layers of diseased flesh. Ordinarily accessed through myriad tunnels, lifters or stairways, the Well made reaching Molior’s sub-strata much easier. Zartath had chosen this place to make ingress, hunting down an enemy only he could perceive. Exor would have to follow him and hope they could overcome that enemy together.
As a Techmarine, and a relatively inexperienced one at that, he knew little of battle psychology. But it didn’t take an expert to know that Zartath, whilst loyal, was damaged. He had heard about the ex-Black Dragon’s imprisonment in the alien realm and his subsequent rescue by the Firedrakes. He had also heard about his heroism during the dragon-strife when all of Nocturne was at war, but Zartath was still an enigma. If he found him, alive, sane, Exor was not sure what to expect or how to approach him. Logic would dictate he formulate a plan, but that was of no use here. Instinct was all he’d have to go on.
Noting the position of the claw marks and Zartath’s likely entry point, Exor lifted himself up using a strut of broken rebar for support. As he did so he felt a tiny vibration, like a minor seismic tremor, ripple through the metal. At first he thought he had got up heavily, moving awkwardly because of his injuries, but then realised the vibrational resonance persisted even when he was still and the ledge had settled under his weight.
Tiny flakes of metal peppered his armour and exposed skin. So focused on the descent through the Well, Exor hadn’t noticed until he had stopped and taken stock of his situation. Now he looked up and saw the glinting, metal drifts fogging the air. Larger pieces of debris accompanied them and as he analysed the scene in more detail, noting the massive chunks of wreckage on the verge of plunging down into the shaft, Exor was put in mind of a slowly eroding cliff face. Only in this instance, the cliff was a steadily widening hole suffering under the effect of sustained seismic resonance. He realised that the Well had been much smaller originally. It must have taken decades for it to reach its current size. Whatever initially came through was likely much smaller than he had first estimated but its arrival had triggered an effect that was slowly shaking the entire area apart.