The Devastation of Baal

by Guy Haley

  The tyranids were in disarray. Those attacking the walls stopped dead, or fell down, their limbs curled inward. Others ran back and forth aimlessly or attacked their broodmates. Out on the plains the ordered pattern of the assault broke into pieces.

  Then they began to scream.

  Seth and Jool looked on in disbelief as consumption ships fell from their tethers, bringing down soaring capillary towers. Explosions bloomed along the flanks of bio-ships full of volatile gases.

  Lightning crackled around the hole in the sky. It warped the view of space around it, distorting all things as if viewed through twisted lenses.

  A deafening roar blasted across the landscape. A giant figure hauled itself out of the pit made by the meteor’s landing.

  ‘Daemon!’ said Seth.

  Jool growled, something in him responding to the Neverborn’s arrival. ‘How long until your craft arrive?’

  Seth checked his chronometer. ‘Six minutes. If they make it.’

  The daemon smote the earth with its axe. The ground trembled and split. From the wound in the ground a thrusting column of skulls burst, turning as it grew. Reality writhed around the column. Skulls from all over the battle­field were drawn to it, bursting from the dead, bouncing wet and dripping across the dust plains. At the base of the growing column they rolled impossibly upward, adding themselves to the girth of the tower.

  Rotating like a screw, the tower rose higher and higher, until the pinnacle touched the hole in the sky. The tip disappeared within the unnatural void, but the pillar did not stop; it continued to twist, heading out of the real world into some other place.

  A deafening peal of thunder blasted across the plains. Seth and Jool were battered backwards by an invisible force. Warriors from both Chapters screamed as the Black Rage answered Khorne’s call.

  Seth blacked out, for how long he could not tell. When he rose again, his thoughts were black and barely under his control. Only by dint of his formidable will did he retain his sense of self, while Space Marines around him cast off sanity and leapt howling from the bastion into the mass of screaming aliens. Flickering visions of the distant past threatened to overwhelm him. The scent of blood tormented him. Something made him grip Amit’s Reliquary to his chest so hard he feared he might break it and spill its precious contents upon the bloodied ground. Its presence calmed him, allowing him to think. He looked at the cylinder.

  ‘To me! To me!’ he roared. Bloody spit flew from his mouth. ‘To the relic! It will save us!’

  His men reeled towards him, fighting against their curse, but when they drew closer to their lord, they calmed.

  Swarms of daemons were descending the column, crawling downwards head first towards the dying world of Baal Primus. They ran with supernatural speed from the base of their hellish stair, fanning out in every direction. The lead elements charged into the tyranids. Locked in position, the aliens were easy prey for the daemons, and a great slaughter began.

  A red tide swept upward towards the fortress. Suddenly, the screaming of the tyranids stopped. They awoke from their trance. No semblance of order returned to the swarm. Whether they fought against the daemons, fled or did nothing seemed to be the product of chance. They roared and screamed all the louder. Now they did so as beasts, not the vessels of the hive mind.

  ‘How can this be?’ said Seth. His head throbbed with fury. Waves of bloodlust battered his psyche. He wanted to kill.

  Through it all, somehow, the Thunderhawks came. Engines roared loudly. Six of them arrived. There was space for only one atop the fortress. It landed heavily, the other five peeling off and strafing the tyranids and daemons surrounding the fortress. The assault ramp slammed down.

  ‘My lord, we must depart,’ voxed the pilot, the strain of the daemon’s call in his voice.

  ‘We go now,’ said Seth to his men. ‘Or we shall be damned.’ He clutched at his head, fingers scratching his shaven scalp. His skull pounded to irresistible war drums.

  Jool growled and twitched, still kneeling after the ­psychic blow of the daemons’ arrival. Slowly, he shook his head, and rose up before Seth.

  Seth’s hands closed protectively around the casque, prepared to kill Jool to save it. But, perhaps because of Sanguinius’ feather, Jool had control of himself still. With deliberate, stiff movements, he reached up and unclasped his helm.

  ‘We cannot go back,’ said the lord of the Knights of Blood.

  ‘I see,’ said Seth. And he did.

  Jool’s face was contorted beyond any generous definition of humanity. His muscles strained under skin turned a terrible shade of red. His eyes were yellow. Sharp, elongated teeth crowded his mouth, forcing his lips back so they were painfully stretched.

  ‘The rage has us. It punishes us. My Chapter is finished.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Years ago. It began like it is with you, a rise in the thirst, a growing number of our brothers falling into the Black Rage. In our desperation we let ourselves give in to the thirst. For a while it helped, by the blood of the innocent we controlled ourselves. It did not last. Soon, these changes set in. We thought blood would save us. It damned us. Look upon me, Seth. There are creatures like me imprisoned in the Tower of Amareo on Baal. If our true nature were known, we would be exterminated. Only blood keeps the Black Rage in check now. Only blood. This is why we fight alone. I would fight with you because you, of all our brother Chapters, would understand.’

  Jool looked out over the battle. Most of his warriors had broken from the fort, and fought outside its walls.

  ‘The wrath of the beast provokes the thirst. The daemons of Khorne covet our kind. They see our rage as the same as theirs. They are wrong. Ours remains a holy fury. No doubt this new beast wishes to subvert our might to its own end and deliver us as slaves to its bloody god. It shall not be so!’

  He threw his helmet down, and drew his sword.

  ‘Go now, Gabriel Seth. Take what remains of your warriors. Remember us. Strive so that what happened to our Chapter does not happen to yours. We sacrifice ourselves in penitence. It is our due. We shall show the Neverborn that though we may rage as they do, we shall never fall into their ways. For we are noble, we are pure, we are the sons of…’

  The daemon screamed again. A fresh wave of anger and the desire to slay threatened to undo Seth’s resolve. Jool roared.

  ‘Leave!’ said Jool, his voice losing its humanity, becoming harsh and animalistic. ‘Take the relic back to Baal. Aid… Aid Dante. We will cover your retreat.’

  ‘My lord…’ voxed the pilot.

  Seth shook his head clear of red fog. The day was so bizarre it had taken on the semblance of a dream. If he did not control himself he would end in a nightmare of blood.

  ‘We leave,’ he voxed. He held up the reliquary. ‘Look upon the purity of the Great Angel and be saved!’

  Those of his warriors still in possession of their minds obeyed, running aboard the first Thunderhawk. When it was full, it lifted off, and the second descended. Belthiel followed, dragged by his brothers, raging and ranting, and Harahel. Seth saw them all aboard the ships.

  Jool strode away without another word. The few of his warriors remaining in the bastion followed. One remained, a nameless warrior, his eye lenses locked with Seth’s.

  Then he too was gone.

  A third Thunderhawk lumbered down from the sky. More of Seth’s warriors were losing themselves. Their psyches ravaged by the hellish anger of Khorne’s daemons, they turned from salvation and ran back into the fray. The vanguard of Ka’Bandha’s force had reached the false corrie the forts looked over. With smoking black swords they laid the aliens low. Bio-acids washed over them without effect. Bullet grubs passed through their unearthly flesh as they flickered in and out of existence.

  Seth swallowed hard. He had seen this before. The daemon’s manifestation was weak, despite the storm c
urdling the heavens. Their invasion would not last long.

  The fourth gunship descended. Dreadnoughts and warriors ran on board. The wounded were carried, limp and unresponsive, into the craft. Other battle-brothers raged and shouted as they got onto the ship, on the verge of losing all self-control.

  Seth locked Blood Reaver to his back, setting aside violence. His hands free of the tools of war, he cradled the holy relic, and bowed his head in silent prayer.

  Minutes passed. A hand grasped him. Seth looked up into the face of Appollus. In one hand was his gore-caked crozius, in the other Seth’s helm. The Chaplain breathed hard, and for a moment Seth thought Appollus would slay him, but he held out Seth’s helmet, and waited while the Chapter Master replaced it on his head.

  Outside the wall the sounds of fighting had intensified, a three-way racket of screams issuing from human, daemon, and tyranid throats.

  The Chaplain nodded once. Together, they clambered aboard the final ship and it lifted off, climbing fast and hard for the sky.

  Sentor Jool led his last warriors into a savage’s vision of hell. The tyranids continued to devour the world while they were being slaughtered. Huge, fleshy structures pumped away the resources of a world even as they burned. Caught in the throes of their consumption cycle, the tyranid ships were unprepared for the advent of the warp storm. They fell flaming from the sky. Feeder tubes toppled and draped themselves across the landscape with deafening wet slaps. Intestinal towers burst as they collapsed, sending out floods of biological slop in corrosive tsunamis across the dead land.

  The ground was breaking apart under the influence of the daemonic incursion. Fissures gaped wide, aglow with magma. Seething blood welled up through the ground and boiled alien bioconstructs alive. Mountains of skulls grew from holes in the stone. Around the stairway of bone, reality warped the most, the land turning to screaming flesh. The plains were already overrun with daemons, but still the legions of Khorne marched down and around the spiral stair in infinite procession, into the battle for Baal Primus.

  Thousands of lesser daemonkin fought tyranid beasts. Uncanny blades met hyper-evolved symbiotic weapons. The screams and shrieks of monsters rent the air. The tyranids were acting erratically; divorced from their controlling intelligence, they reverted to instinctive behaviour patterns, and these were open to the corruption of the Blood God. They were easy prey, many of them having lost whatever passed for a mind. They acted without thought. Many writhed upon the ground.

  Into this raging battle the last of the Knights of Blood plunged. They tore off their helmets, revealing faces as monstrous as those of the daemons they fought. They sang out their death songs into the thinning air. They made no distinction between xenos and Neverborn, slaying all that came within reach of their weapons.

  Sentor Jool was swamped with the rage of Khorne. Gone was the niggling psychic pressure of the alien mind, replaced by a ferocious urging to kill. He looked to his own men and wanted to hack them down, but he resisted; he drew on the purer wrath within him, forcing aside the daemonic influence scratching at his soul.

  ‘I will not succumb! I feel the wrath of Sanguinius! I feel the holy force of his anger!’ he roared. He smashed down a small tyranid beast, crushing it as surely as an insect with the spiked guard of his chainsword. A bloodletter rose to meet him, long black tongue whipping through the air as it swung a massive brass sword at the Chapter Master’s head. Jool’s sword met its blade mid-sweep. He held it there while he raised his gun and blasted a dozen holes into the daemonspawn, until its unnatural flesh succumbed and it died with an angry scream.

  Hot gales raced through the depleted air. Sentor Jool howled, expelling the invasive anger of the warp from his spirit by the force of his voice.

  The Knights of Blood fought for fighting’s sake. The ­battle could not be won. His warriors were never the most cohesive force. Upon that battlefield they finally abandoned any semblance of squad tactics. They killed and died alone.

  Only Jool had a goal he intended to meet. He battled his way through the shrieking hordes of tyranids and their daemonic tormentors, onward, to where the great red daemon Ka’Bandha slaughtered the largest alien weapons beasts, carving away their heads with absurd care. His trophies toppled not downward from gouting necks, but fell away upward into the vortex turning about the pillar of skulls.

  ‘Ka’Bandha!’ Jool shouted. ‘Ka’Bandha! Fight me!’

  The Angels’ Bane did not hear him, so Jool forced further passage through the three-sided melee, weaving past a blood-crazed Dreadnought fighting a monstrosity composed entirely of screaming mouths. He felled a bloodletter grappling with one of his warriors, shot down a hound with a frill of skin around its neck that leapt at him. The tyranids he ignored unless they directly confronted him. Though the daemons were legion, their hold on reality was tenuous. Every one killed saw three thrown into the warp, and many were but pale outlines, monsters sketched in hate on the canvas of reality.

  ‘Ka’Bandha! Face me, in the name of the Great Angel! Fight me!’

  At that the greater daemon did turn its apish face upon Jool. Yellow teeth in red skin grinned horribly at him. Yellow teeth like Jool’s own, red skin like his own, and eyes that stared with the same intensity.

  A single crack of leathery wings sent Ka’Bandha high over the fray. He landed bowed before Jool in a billow of dust, his fist planted firmly in the ground.

  Growling, Ka’Bandha rose up, and spread his wings and weapons wide. He looked down upon the Chapter Master with ferocious mockery.

  ‘Here I am, Sentor Jool. I will fight you, though you are no primarch.’

  The daemon took up a combat pose, axe ready to strike, whip snaking back and forth hypnotically.

  Air shimmered with heat around Ka’Bandha. Steam rose from the beast’s unnatural muscles, carrying the stench of rotting blood and old murder. Most dangerous were the waves of pure aggression beating off the thing. There was no seduction in the daemon’s lure, no promise of pleasure or knowledge or the cessation of suffering as the other dark gods offered, but a raw, open invitation to violence and bloody abandon. It hammered against Sentor Jool’s mind, threatening to crack it open and send him screaming into madness. In the black promise of Ka’Bandha, Jool saw his worst excesses.

  ‘See how much you are alike to me,’ Ka’Bandha said, taking in Jool’s hideous visage, the muscles straining in his neck and the blood pounding fit to burst his veins. ‘Truly you are Khorne’s creatures. Join me, and war by my side in an eternity of glorious slaughter. For you who thirst for blood, I offer oceans to slake your need.’

  Jool fell to his knees with a groan. His hearts ran so fast something gave inside him. He spat a mouthful of his own blood onto the ground where it hissed and bubbled.

  ‘Pathetic,’ said Ka’Bandha. ‘You are nothing compared to your gene-sire.’

  ‘By his fury,’ said Jool. He forced himself onto one knee.

  ‘See how he struggles,’ mocked Ka’Bandha.

  ‘By his fury shall I stand!’ said Jool quickly, fearing the knowledge of words would slip away from his mind and leave him dumb.

  ‘Ah, fury,’ said Ka’Bandha. He cracked his whip. ‘Fury is the power Khorne gives. Only by his gift do you stand, capable of facing me, when any other of your unworthy breed would have ripped his own skin off at the sight. Now, turn around, and take your rightful place at my side. All your line will be mine, eventually. Seek my favour, become the first.’

  Sentor Jool looked up into the daemon’s face and shook his head.

  ‘Very well. You cannot beat me.’

  Jool laughed, the blood pooling in his throat making it a gurgle. ‘We delay you, monster. Your power is not so great. Already your host unravels. Your time here is limited.’

  ‘You will still die!’ shouted Ka’Bandha with sudden rage.

  ‘I do not care.’ Jool raised his sword. ‘Sanguinius
banished you. I cannot. I come to give you my testament, daemon,’ he said, his voice strangled. ‘They call us monsters, rightfully so, but let it be known to you and your master that it is Sanguinius’ fury that gives me strength, not bastard Khorne’s.’

  Sentor Jool roared his last and charged at the Angels’ Bane.

  Seth’s vision was a nauseating spiral of red and black. He clenched Amit’s Reliquary to his chest. If he let go, he would attack his men. Through slitted eyes he watched them go through the same internal struggle. Waves of red hot hatred washed up from the planet below. The Thunder­hawk bucked, engines screaming with effort. More than gravity assailed it. Its machine-spirit too was gripped with wrathful impulses.

  ‘By his Blood am I made, by his Blood am I made, by his Blood am I made,’ muttered Seth over and over again.

  Appollus took up the chant. The others joined him, spitting the words through clenched teeth, moaning them between pleas for blood. There were so few Flesh Tearers left. Five Thunderhawks. So few.

  The Thunderhawk burst from the gravity well of Baal Primus. For a second all was well; their weight slipped from them, the pushback of acceleration diminished. If this were a normal extraction, they would be aboard the Victus in a matter of minutes.

  The illusion of normality was ripped away as the ­Thunderhawk encountered the storm. Most storms in the warp affected only the immaterium, but this was such a powerful tempest, it intruded into reality, rucking up the flat plane of space into titanic waves. The ship bounced along the surface of a tortured universe. Within, the Flesh Tearers felt their souls half ripped from their bodies. Flashes of the past intruded into Seth’s mind. He saw his primarch. He saw the Great Enemy. Worse things came at him, landscapes of bone, rivers of blood, hell-spawned warriors fighting desperately, eternally, for the amusement of a violent god.

  Metal squealed. The ship was bent and stretched like dough. Terrible pain speared Seth through and through, every cell in his body individually and sadistically impaled. His helmplate display fizzed. The chronograph ran forward at incredible speed. Diabolical faces leered at him through electronic static. Wicked voices hissed in his ears. The Space Marines were screaming, caught on the double-edged blade of pain and bloodlust. At the edge of his consciousness, Seth apprehended the wail of failing engines, alarms, and the battle shouts of the insane.