A squat skitarii warrior with piston-like legs sprang from the crowd, its arms extended to batter him with twin pneumatic hammers. Machen caught it on his drill, but the dying cyborg cracked him over the helmet so hard his visor shattered. Shards of glass licked his eyeballs like sandpaper. Half blind, he cast the corpse away and parried a jabbing blade. And suddenly he was vomiting inside his armour, his whole body wracked by spasms of agony. Phaedra’s air was crowded with a billion tiny killers and he’d left the wound in his leg untreated too long.
‘Make way!’ Iverson yelled over the loudhailer and suddenly the Triton was rolling backwards. The Confederates leapt aside as it gathered speed and ploughed into the pursuing ranks of skitarii, steamrollering scores of the slow-moving cyborgs into a paste of meat and metal.
‘Purge them, brothers!’ Machen heard the boy preacher bellow.
With a cacophony of buzz saws and chainblades, Joyce and his Zouaves charged after the gunboat and tore into the skitarii stragglers who had escaped the onslaught. Squinting through a haze of blood the captain followed like a battered tank, trying in vain to blot out Templeton’s endless saga.
And then the bell tolled thirteen and we knew all our granite-carved victories were but scribbles in the sands of time.
Cutler’s torch found the words first:
‘THE BELL TOLLS’
The phrase was smeared in blood above the gaping bulkhead to Silo Chamber 3. A headless corpse lay across the threshold with its arms folded neatly across its belly. Its wayward head was propped up inside the splayed ribcage, bloodshot eyes staring up at the colonel in mute outrage.
I guess you won’t be flying us out of here after all, Señor Ortega, Cutler thought grimly as he recognised the corpse. Which means none of us are getting off this mud ball. But that was a problem for later.
Cutler shone his torch into the dark space beyond. The silo stank of promethium and blood, but all he could see was the blood and its sundered containers. Something had turned the chamber into an abattoir, garnishing it with a display of ragged limbs and yawning torsos, all bedecked with glistening streamers of entrails. There was a deranged order to the carnage, everything positioned and angled just so, the hideous parts hinting at some infinitely more hideous whole. It was a pattern Cutler had seen twice before, first in the hovels of Trinity, wrought in broken junk, then in Dorm 31, rendered in flesh.
‘Who did this?’ Sandefur asked weakly. He looked like he was going to be sick.
Loomis, Cutler decided. It will be Loomis this time.
‘Nothing human,’ Cutler answered. ‘We have to kill it.’
They entered the silo one by one, with Pope taking the rear, still shepherding the tau ambassador. O’Seishin was almost apoplectic with terror, his deep-set eyes whirling about the butchery as if afraid to settle anywhere. He was muttering a mantra in his native tongue, speaking so fast he was almost tripping over his own words.
Welcome to our ‘psychic malaise’ you smug bastard, Cutler thought as he pushed on into the chamber. It was a hollow cylinder, about ten metres in diameter with a sloping ceiling that pinched into an intake duct high above their heads. He played his light around the aperture, but found nothing. Apart from the duct and the grilled vents in the floor the silo was featureless. There was nowhere to hide.
But you’re in here somewhere. I can feel you…
A cackle came from behind them, fluid and feral and rancid with hate, then an awful cacophony of voices: ‘Trinity in embers…’
They whirled round and saw the daemon. It was plastered against the wall above the doorway with its arms splayed wide and its ebony talons buried in the metal. It wore Loomis’s face like a flesh mask stretched across something other, but the bulging, terror-struck eyes were still his. His naked body had bulked out with muscles that rippled and writhed with a life of their own, as if searching for their true form. But worst of all were the faces. There were dozens of them suffocating under his skin, all screaming and snarling for a way out.
‘Trinity remembers!’ shrieked the faces drowning in Loomis’s flesh.
Pope reacted first, but the daemon was faster. As the greyback raised his carbine it launched itself from the wall and landed right in front of him. Its jaws gaped impossibly wide, tearing the remnants of Loomis’s face in half. A pink, leech-like maw surged forward and engulfed the horrified greyback’s head before he could fire. The monster arched backwards at the waist with bone-snapping violence and hauled Pope into the air, swallowing him down to the waist. His flailing legs smacked O’Seishin from his perch and sent his drone spinning away. There was a violent burp and Pope was gone, compressed to a writhing bulge in the daemon’s belly.
‘Kill it!’ Cutler roared and leapt forward with his sabre. A claw flashed out with inhuman speed and caught the blade mid-swing. The colonel fought to free it as that hungry, lamprey maw twisted to face him.
‘Down!’ Sandefur yelled, opening fire with his carbine. Cutler threw himself prone as the energy bolts seared across the chamber. The daemon screeched in pain and swung to face the new threat, letting Cutler’s sabre clatter to the ground. The lieutenant was down on one knee, firing in rapid bursts that gouged smoking pits into the horror’s churning flesh. The daemon belched and its entire body heaved as if wracked by a massive spasm.
‘Look out!’ Cutler yelled, but it was too late. The daemon spat Pope back out and the half-dissolved cadaver thudded into Sandefur, throwing him to the ground and spattering him with corrosive juices. He screamed, trying to throw the corpse off, but Pope’s bony arms locked around his neck, animated by some hideous un-life. The corpse’s mouth yawned wide and vomited into Sandefur’s face. The lieutenant’s shrieks trailed into ragged chokes as his flesh was eaten away by the smoking bile.
Cutler rammed his retrieved sabre into the daemon’s belly and twisted. The beast roared in pain and lashed out, throwing him clear across the chamber. He hit the wall hard and sagged to the ground, blood spewing from deep gashes across his chest. Through a haze of pain he watched the abomination rear up towards its full height. It seemed to be uncoiling from within itself, erupting from the possessed man in a ravenous slurry of eyes and maws and tongues that blinked and gnawed and screamed their way into reality.
‘He’s coming home,’ the drowned faces chorused. ‘And you didn’t kill him, Whitecrow. You never killed him!’
‘What are you?’ Cutler groaned through gritted teeth as he felt consciousness slipping away.
‘What are we?’ The faces cackled in disharmony. ‘We are Trinity!’
Then they laughed like a winter wind, and through the wind Cutler heard the tolling of a bell. The bell.
And then he was back in the blighted town again, entering the heart of its darkness with the witch and her weraldur, who everyone called Mister Frost and whose true name was known only to her. They walked into the chapel of rainbow light and found the daemon bell hanging from a chain into nowhere. It was a black iron monstrosity tarnished by a cancer of coral nodules that pulsed with unholy vitality. The cone was easily big enough to accommodate several standing men, but Cutler doubted any man would last long if he attempted such a thing, for its mouth was the wellspring of the toxic light.
‘What is it?’ Cutler asked as he had asked so many times before.
‘A rift into the Whispersea,’ Skjoldis gave her eternal answer, ‘a gateway to the warp. The taint flows from it like blood from an open wound.’
It’s warp-forged, but it carries the blight of Phaedra, Cutler realised. And this was a new truth, something he hadn’t known back then. Someone’s brought Phaedra to Providence…
And then the bell tolled again and the world shimmered and twitched and the dark man was standing before them. His greatcoat seemed impossibly black in that place of many colours and his bowed head was swathed in the shadows of a wide-brimmed hat. He was taller than any man had a right to be, but agon
isingly thin with it, as if every fibre of his body had been stretched to the breaking point, attenuating him into otherness.
‘All the worlds unfold into one,’ the stranger said, ‘and so all the stains of corruption become one strain.’ Its voice was an ephemeral whisper that rode the streamers of light. ‘You know, it’s taken forever and a day to find you, Colonel Ensor Cutler. So long I’ve almost forgotten why I ever came looking.’
‘How in the Hells do you know my name?’ Cutler challenged, taking a step forward. ‘Who are you?’
The stranger looked up, casting the shadows from its face. Its bloodless skin was incised with a lattice of smouldering, smoking scars that framed inhuman eyes: one was a dead black orb, the other a burning augmetic. It smiled and the seams of magma running through its flesh were routed into a fresh configuration. Reality seemed to shiver and shimmer before the new order.
‘Me?’ the stranger said. ‘I’m just a man who found his way back home.’
And then the world exploded in a flash of pure white light.
The Last Day: The Shuttle Pad
The skitarii horde is broken for the time being, but the respite cost us heavily. We lost almost half our infantry in the struggle, together with a pair of Zouave knights. We must be gone from here before the tech-guard masses again, as they surely will. The Sentinel scouts are coming up on the shuttle pad now…
Iverson’s Journal
‘What do you mean you’re not sure, Quint?’ Iverson growled into the vox. ‘Either you’ve found evidence of a skirmish or you haven’t. Which is it?’
‘Quite so, commissar, quite so,’ Quint blustered. ‘Indeed, something most certainly happened here, but it’s…’
‘Put Van Hal on the line.’
‘Sir, I don’t see…’
‘Van Hal here,’ the veteran broke in. ‘We’ve got blood outside the shuttle – lots of it – but no bodies. Quint’s right. Something’s very wrong here.’
‘Maybe Cutler’s team hid the bodies,’ Iverson suggested.
‘Then they left Seven Hells of a mess behind,’ Van Hal said. ‘No, it doesn’t add up.’
‘And there’s no sign of our infiltrators?’ Iverson frowned. Without Cutler’s pilot nobody was going anywhere.
‘If they’re here, they’re inside the shuttle. Want me to check it out?’
‘No, secure the pad and wait. We’re only a block away.’ Iverson cut the link and turned to the witch. To his surprise she was sitting cross-legged on the floor with her eyes closed. That was when he realised how cold the wheelhouse had grown despite the heat outside. The scrawny Lethean helmsman had noticed it too and was staring at the woman in abject terror.
‘Is witchcraft,’ the Mariner muttered in his broken Gothic. ‘She carries the taint!’
‘Keep your eyes on the road!’ Iverson snapped. ‘She is the Emperor’s servant.’ At least I think she is. Either way, he knew where her mind was wandering. I just hope you find him alive...
‘Whitecrow!’ the voice said again, growing more insistent. ‘You must wake up!’
Skjoldis? Cutler stirred, struggling against the white oblivion that had swallowed him. Is that you? His eyes flicked open. He was still in the temple, but the unholy light was gone, leaving behind a washed-out façade of the reality. A jagged chasm yawned beneath the spot where the daemon bell had hung. The bell itself was gone, along with its master.
We fought, the dark man and I, Cutler remembered. At least it felt like fighting. He rose and hobbled over to the rift. It was an infinitely black gash in the greyscale murk of the temple. To fall in there would be to fall forever.
‘Open your eyes, Whitecrow!’ the voice nagged again.
I have, he thought. Haven’t I?
‘Skjoldis?’ he said it aloud this time. ‘We were wrong. We were wrong all along.’
More memories… Skjoldis with her arms spread wide, struggling to stem the tide of ghosts that came flooding from the bell in the dark man’s wake. There were so many – angry ghosts and bitter ghosts and mournful ghosts – phantoms in every shade of misery and malice, all drawn to the dark man like moths to an unholy flame. He lured them with promises of redemption or vengeance or simple silence that radiated from him like black light. And while Skjoldis held them back with incantations and imprecations, Cutler duelled with their master, though they did not fight with guns or blades. He couldn’t recall the way of it, but he knew his soul hung on the outcome, and perhaps the soul of his world too, so he fought with everything that he was, but in the end it was the weraldur who ended it. With an honest swing of his axe he sundered the chain suspending the bell and tore down the gate, casting out the dark man and his congregation.
But they never fell back into the Hells. They simply fell somewhere else.
‘He’s still on Providence,’ Cutler said. ‘We didn’t kill him.’
‘I know,’ she sighed. ‘I’ve always suspected it.’
‘Then why didn’t you tell me, woman?’ he asked bitterly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me the bastard had us beat?’
‘Because it was the best we could do, but it would not have been enough for you, Whitecrow.’
‘The best we could do was lose him?’ Cutler was staring into the rift as if he might jump. ‘He’ll come back, Skjoldis. Maybe he’s the one sending the daemon after me.’
‘The daemon was spawned by the death agonies of Trinity’s damned.’ She stood before him now, a hovering, hazy spectre. ‘It shadows you through the warp because you are its father in murder, Whitecrow. It was your command that purged Trinity and conceived its malice.’
‘And what am I supposed to do about it?’
‘The only thing you can do: you fight.’ She sighed, a long, soul-weary exhalation. ‘Sometimes there is nothing more to be done. But now you must wake up…’
…Before it is too late.
Cutler opened his eyes. Again. He was back in the charnel house of Silo 3, slumped against the wall where the daemon had thrown him. The daemon! His eyes roved about frantically, but found nothing. Why would it spare me? Then he saw its legs. They were kneeling amongst the corpses, as if in prayer. Smoke was still pouring from the charred ridge of its waist and above the waist there was nothing at all.
What in the Hells? Cutler tried to rise and pain hit him in a raw red wave that almost washed him back to oblivion. He looked down and saw the shredded ruin of his jacket. Gingerly he pulled aside the rags and grimaced at the gouges in his chest. The daemon’s slash had cut deep.
You have to get up, Whitecrow! Skjoldis urged.
‘And do what, woman?’ Cutler said. ‘Our flyboy’s dead. We’re not going anywhere.’
A contemplative silence, then: Is his head intact? Yes… I see from your thoughts it is.
‘His head? What’s the poor bastard’s head got to do with anything?
Bring it to the cockpit, Whitecrow. There may be a way.
He struggled to his feet, too exhausted to argue. His comrades were dead. Sandefur’s skull had been hollowed out by the daemonic bile and what was left of Pope wasn’t even recognisable as a man. O’Seishin was gone. Blackened shards of his throne drone were scattered around the chamber, a couple of them embedded in the metal walls like blades.
It was his drone that killed the daemon, Cutler realised. There must have been a bomb built into it and O’Seishin triggered it when the beast went for him. But where’s the sly son-of-a-bitch got to?
He found the ambassador halfway down the access corridor. The ancient tau was breathing in ragged gasps as he pulled himself along, dragging his spindly legs behind him like dead things. He looked up in abject terror when the colonel loomed over him.
‘Now where do you think you’re going, Si?’ Cutler chided.
‘I was wrong,’ the tau whispered, staring at the severed head hanging from the colonel’s belt. ‘We cannot work
in concord. Your species is sick.’
‘Well, I won’t argue it.’ Cutler bent painfully and heaved his quarry up and over his shoulders. ‘But you and me, we’re going to see this through together.’
‘Then Cutler’s alive?’ Iverson asked as the witch got to her feet.
‘He is dying,’ she answered in a brittle monotone. ‘We are running out of time.’
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘We’re coming up on the shuttle now.’ He saw the Sentinels stalking about on the pad ahead, restless and distrustful of the lull. He appraised the witch thoughtfully.
I have to know. Whatever it is she’s hiding about me, I have to know.
‘Tell me,’ he said quietly, certain she wouldn’t mistake his meaning.
She didn’t meet his eyes, but he could feel her coming to a decision.
‘Iverson…’
Something hit the Triton so hard the whole world seemed to quake. There was an ear-splitting boom and a shriek of tortured metal. A bloom of orange fire spewed from the prow, detonating the lascannon and immolating everyone up front.
‘Down!’ Iverson yelled, throwing himself across the witch. The cabin windows exploded inwards, shredding the bewildered helmsman instantly. Fragments of glass and charred meat rained down on Iverson’s back as he covered the witch.
Get up!
Iverson’s greatcoat was smouldering as he rose to his knees. Bierce stood over him with his hands clasped behind his back, untouched by the fire storm.
War is the only truth, your will to fight the only virtue.
The witch’s guardian burst through the door. His face went dark with fury as he took in the carnage. With a broken cry he hauled Iverson off his charge and lifted her in his arms.
‘She’s all right,’ Iverson wheezed, coughing on the acrid smoke. ‘Just dazed.’
That was when he heard the clamour from the deck below. He swung the door open and stared into a scene of abject chaos. The greybacks were milling about in disarray, trying to escape a searing hail of energy bolts that seemed to come out of nowhere. Men were going down fast, picked off by the unseen assailants amongst them.
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