by Joe Parrino
Breaking before him, the cultists tried to turn and run, but none could escape his reach. Some chose to leap to suicide rather than face this avatar of Imperial vengeance in their midst. Torq’s fury rose all the higher when these cowards fled from him.
At the next landing, the cultists ran away into the dark corridors that webbed the Astropathic Sanctum.
One door yawned wide. Flapping footsteps echoed from the hall. Torq began to give chase.
‘Control yourself, Eversor,’ the Vindicare said with mild disdain.
Torq paused. Something in the words spoke to the tiny nugget of discipline that lurked in his heart.
‘Slaughter them after the primary target has been eliminated, Torq,’ exhorted Rhasc.
Headache pain bloomed white-hot in Torq’s skull as they neared the summit of the tower. The combat drugs that swam through his blood began to unravel, leaving the haze of chemical hangover.
Sunlight burned into his eyes. It came from a crack in the sanctum’s walls. The edges of the rock glowed cherry red, molten from the fury of what had broken through. A drop pod, plain and black, lay on the landing. The door was missing.
The stone on this landing was shifted, crystalline and dancing with echoed fire through the mineral striations. Petrified hands and horrified faces reached out from within. But the sickening feeling of corruption was gone, missing, torn away and dampened.
Something ticked away at Torq’s mind. A niggling presence, an annoyance, a shred of thought, demanded his attention. An aura suffused the air.
He felt dead inside, hollowed out and empty. Even the fury that hobbled his mind, that freed his body to accomplish his kills, rested. His legs burned from the effort of climbing so high.
His voice, when he spoke, was nearly normal, slurred only with the onset of exhaustion. Indicators winked into life on his support pack. Tubes that fed into sockets all along the Eversor’s neck and back began to swell. Further stimms entered his bloodstream. ‘Were we expecting another Assassin?’
Rhasc examined the drop pod. ‘Adamta said nothing of another one coming.’
It was the same type of craft that had brought each of them to this world, and to countless others.
Dismembered mutants lay in a circle around the craft. Terror studded what remained of their bestial faces.
‘It would appear that the Vanus was withholding information,’ Zhau said. No hint of surprise lurked in the bland Vindicare’s tone. He trailed a gloved hand through the blood. His eyes followed the arcing spray of vitae along the walls. ‘Dead for at least an hour,’ he stated.
Rhasc’s unease spiked, even past the bristling insinuations and presence of the Vindicare.
Her neural shredder flickered into her hand, but nothing emerged from the darkness.
VII
Broken bodies lined their ascent. Mouths gaped in silent terror. Glassy eyes stared widely from ritually scarified features.
They moved silently, even Torq. Zhau led them.
Reasoning and meaning pressed through the chemicals that tainted Torq’s mind.
The rock here was striated with passages, each wrought with Gothic numerals and grinning gargoyles. Shifting sounds of crackling, falling rock echoed from within. No cultists emerged to challenge them.
The darkness itself was gone, missing from the heights. Instead, the Assassins were bombarded by the shifting madness of the upper chambers. The ceiling pulsed whenever Torq looked up, morphing from transparency to defiled murals desecrated with blood. When it turned empty, when the ceiling fell away, Torq was confronted with the enormity of the Temple of Shades. Between the sanctum and the fane lurked the spoiling warp. Great shapes swam through the space, owing no fealty to reality or the laws of logic and reason.
His fingers kept coming together, sliding across in chalkboard whines as sparks danced between the knife-tips.
The dead mocked him, brought the echo of rage stirring. They offered no relief, no sport to his torment. That they had already faced the Emperor’s judgement brought no solace.
The sanctum expanded at the top. The stairs ended. A great plaza, once lined with stone and gold statues of the frail men and women who had served in this building, stretched away. Those statues were now strewn across the floor, dividing the room into a maze of shattered glory. Heat haze, or something like it, stirred ripples through the lazy air. Mammoth doors, vast and gold, were wrenched open.
Light and swirling colour pulsed from within.
Torq felt an itch hum into his gums, a small rattle against his teeth.
Thunder-cracks split the fragile environment. Bolt shells lanced through the air. The Assassins fell to the ground.
Booted feet, driven by tremendous strength and depthless malice, crunched the flagstones. Blasphemous war cries tore into the room. A bolt hit the gold face of a fallen astropath statue to his left. Splinters and shards broke away and whickering snaps of shrapnel carved through the air, cutting into Torq’s flesh.
Torq smiled, teeth bared in a rictus grin. He rose to his feet and began to laugh.
Cultists were nothing compared to this threat, this challenge.
‘Come, traitors and oathbreakers. Come and face Torq of the Eversor. Come and face the judgement of the Throne of Terra. Come and face death!’
Disappointment flooded through his veins. There were only seven of the turncoats. Seven of the giants in red and gold, veterans of the Long War and servants of ruin, dared to face him. Pitiful creatures.
Sneering their own reply, the Chaos Space Marines charged through the broken field of statues. Torq met them.
These power-armoured behemoths dwarfed the Assassin. Torq faced two of the traitors. He brandished his sword, splaying his neural gauntlet.
Horned heads lowered and screaming chainswords gunned for the Eversor. He blocked one with his power sword. The weapon’s molecular dissonance field erupted into angry life, flashing with coruscating electrical discharge. Teeth from the chainsword flew off the weapon. Adamantine-tipped knives created a storm of deadly edges. Torq ignored the pinpricks of pain that swatted at his flesh. Pain was nothing. Blood was nothing. He saw only red.
The battlefield narrowed. The plight of his comrades, his fellow Assassins, bled away from his mind. They meant nothing in the moment. Torq could hear them in some distant corner of his mind. Could hear the coordination they were attempting, the desperation of their own battles, but he was unheeding.
His sword carved through the air, snapping through space faster than the human eye could follow. The traitor’s hand separated from its wrist. The Chaos Space Marine roared in response. A red gauntleted hand swept forward, fast as muscle-cables and ceramite would allow, and thundered into the side of Torq’s head.
The Eversor saw sprites of flashing stars dance through his vision. Blood leaked from between the teeth of his skull mask. Part of the mask slipped to the ground, shattering like porcelain.
Bellowing a prayer to its blasphemous gods, the other Crimson Slaughter Space Marine tackled the Eversor. Oily as a snake, Torq slipped from its crushing grip. The five tips of his neural-gauntlet punched into the back of the traitor’s helmeted skull. Mounted tubes gurgled and bright neurotoxin flowed directly into the Crimson Slaughter’s brain.
Shudders wracked the traitor as toxins ate into his nervous system. Boots hammered into the stone. Convulsions wracked the Crimson Slaughter. He died with sudden finality.
The one whose hand he had stolen switched to his bolter. The weapon chattered as it sprayed fire at the Eversor.
Torq cursed and rolled. He jinked and danced. Nearly inhuman reflexes pushed him forwards. The chemicals that stole his mind pushed him forwards. Gravel slipped under his feet.
The Chaos Space Marine walked backwards as he fired, tracking the Assassin with a storm of bolts. It backed unknowingly into a corner formed by two fallen statues.
> Torq ran up the side of one, clawing himself up with quick stabs of his gauntlet. The Chaos Space Marine was slow to address this sudden change in position. Torq’s own pistol leapt into his hand. He opened fire.
Toxic darts flew from the pistol. Studding into the joints between the Crimson Slaughter’s war-plate, the darts delivered more of the neurotoxin.
A hand grabbed the Eversor’s ankle.
‘Not again, false face,’ he growled. A memory of fog and pain crawled into his abused mind.
Instead of the Callidus Assassin’s mocking, a voice made of abandoned sepulchres and toxic knowledge answered. Torq was pulled down and slammed into the plaza’s floor.
His sensorium pack cracked and the acrid stench of stimms flooded the air. The rich iron stink of his own blood mingled with the dust.
Shudders and tics marred the Chaos Space Marine as it loomed over him. Blood and bright green neurotoxin wept freely from the puncture wounds in its helmet. It said something again as it aimed its bolter at his face.
Torq was beginning to rise, beginning to spit his own response, when a new puncture wound joined the five others. Smoke curled out from the hole in the traitor’s helmet.
It slumped as it stood, still as a statue.
Torq groaned in frustration. ‘Mine,’ he said.
‘No,’ answered Zhau. A whispered prayer ghosted over the vox, driven by the Vindicare’s calm voice. ‘Thus do the enemies of the Emperor find the judgement of the righteous. Let light and–’
Torq tuned him out, cutting the vox-link in a flash of anger.
Torq sought the Vindicare through the melee, past the blur of speed and grace that was Rhasc as she engaged three Chaos Space Marines. Torq was taken aback for a moment, stunned by the artistry of the Callidus’s movements. She was a dodging blur, flowing between buzzing chainswords driven by monstrous strength. One hit would be enough to destroy her and yet she endured. She danced like water out of the way of the attacks. Rhasc mounted her own returns, pinpricks of poison with a knife in her left hand and her punch dagger in her right. Blood streamed over the clotted red plates of the traitors’ power armour.
Even as he watched, as he ran forward, one of the Chaos Space Marines fell with her dagger slipping out of its gorget.
Zhau claimed another with a crack of his exitus rifle. This time the traitor’s chest cavity erupted in gore and shards of black bone.
Four traitors remained. Torq leapt onto the back of the one still facing against Rhasc. It was turning from the Callidus as it heard his sudden approach. By then, it was already too late. Torq flew through the air and landed on top of its powerpack.
His sword carved into the traitor’s spine while his neuro-gauntlet punched through its skull. It toppled forward and Torq used the momentum to sprint to the remaining three.
Renewed bolter fire announced the arrival of reinforcements. Seven had not been enough, Torq knew. Now the traitors did as well. The room fairly shook with the tramping of their boots. Blasphemous oaths and paeans to the unholy beings who they claimed to worship, filled the space.
Torq saw their numbers and even he knew they presaged death. The three Assassins were outmatched, outgunned.
The Eversor bellowed his fury, raised his pistol, and then felt his anger bleed away to be replaced by paranoia. Distrust latched onto his soul and he turned on Rhasc, who ran beside him.
A black-clad figure clambered over the ruins of a robed statue. Its hands twitched and grenades fell among the traitors.
A hollow feeling blooms inside the Eversor, bleeding in the twitching remnants of his pain. This is fear. This is the place he will not go; he takes the drugs to keep away. He is alone with himself, the bleeding remnants of the man he could be, should have been.
Sylas Torq can do nothing. He is trapped. He is alone with himself, his true self.
All he can see is the bone-white grin of a skull.
The figure stood between three of the Traitor Space Marines. Their motions were furtive, wary. Their attacks were almost half-hearted. The figure drifted between them like a ghost. It carried no weapons in its hands.
Instead, the figure shimmered close and reached out to rest a hand on a traitor’s pauldron.
A scream wailed free from the Crimson Slaughter, thick with gurgling blood. Its gauntleted hands wrapped around its own skull as the hideous sounds broadcast from its vox grille.
The figure dropped a small object at the feet of the other two. The object burst a second later in a shower of golden light. Babbles of incoherent speech curdled free from the Chaos Space Marines. Soul-light streamed from their heads.
The lens mounted on the left side of the figure’s helmet drew in the light. He paused a moment.
A beam of energy shot free from the lens, scratching against Torq’s mind. The newcomer wielded the beam like a scalpel, carving into the two, unmaking the gibbering wrecks.
The lens clicked and the light died.
VIII
The fourth Assassin approached his comrades.
Blackness blocked out the twitching warp light above them. The dismal gloom of the sanctum grew thicker. Rhasc, Torq and Zhau all had weapons ready, but something held them back.
Rhasc’s heart began to beat faster, past the adrenaline still flowing through her system after the battle against the Traitor Space Marines. Who was this? What was this?
The figure approached without threat, without obvious weapons. A skull mask, almost akin to the one that locked away Torq’s brutal features, grinned its porcelain humour at them. The steps were quiet, sure and calm.
The figure spread his hands wide, a gesture of peace, of stayed conflict.
The sense of wrongness increased in the room. Rhasc’s heart beat faster. The white skull grinned.
‘What are you?’ Torq muttered. The Eversor puffed himself up. Rhasc could see his muscles twitch as he worked himself up into a threat posture.
The wrongness grew, becoming oppressive, almost painful.
Clicking and whirring, a lens rose from the skull mask’s temple and swept over them.
A voice croaked out from the figure. It was a halting thing, dry throated and broken. ‘Culexus Temple,’ it said.
Rhasc was stunned. Every Assassin knew the rumours, the tales that another Temple existed. In an organisation as fraught with secrecy as the Officio Assassinorum, legends abounded. It was a way of creating a mythology, of tying their individual exploits into a greater narrative. Stories spoke of another Temple, its agents skull-faced like the Eversors which comprised a different offshoot from humanity.
This Assassin, this thing, claimed to come from that Temple.
‘Who are you really?’ Zhau asked. He raised his exitus rifle and rested the butt casually against his shoulder. ‘Speak, or I end you now.’
The skull cocked to the side. Lenses whirred.
‘Was my answer not sufficient?’ the voice asked, sounding genuinely confused. ‘I am known as Noctus Kord of the Culexus Temple.’
Fear and paranoia sent the blood pounding along Rhasc’s veins, throbbing in her temples.
‘We are oathbound to eliminate the heretical filth known as Severin Drask. That is why I am called here. That is, I presume, why you are here as well.’
The voice grew stronger as the Culexus spoke. Rhasc loathed every word, despised this man without knowing why.
‘We near the summit of the sanctum. Why did you wait so long to reveal yourself?’ Rhasc asked. She nearly spat the words.
‘I have been following since my deployment, easing your passage. Did you not feel my presence?’ The croaking quality left the Assassin’s voice. ‘I have been told by my masters that my condition has an adverse effect on allies.’ He turned to face the broken golden doors. ‘Regardless, time grows short. I became impatient with your pace, unsure of the probability of your survival in this engage
ment, and have ensured your continued service to the Throne.’
Rhasc retied her hair, gathering the errant strands that had slipped free in her fight with the Chaos Space Marines. Distaste and anger lurked in her thoughts. She bled from a dozen small cuts, gifts from stone splinters in the opening fusillade.
‘We should proceed,’ she urged.
The broken gold doors, veined with black corruption, beckoned. Light and colour dilated within, the broken stuff of the Temple of Shades, the empyrean bleeding and moulding reality.
Her skin crawled to even behold such horror, let alone set foot within. Duty called. The mission and the Imperium demanded that this threat be stopped before it could take further root.
She stepped forwards and entered the true sanctum of the astropaths.
The rich scent of blood hit her like a wall as soon as she passed the threshold. Rank incense rode the air currents. Withered bodies and scraps of skin and parchment covered every surface with runes made from blood and bile.
The corruption made her skin itch and her brain buzz. The very air was thick, rife with unrealised potential. It was pregnant, waiting and lurking. Kord’s presence dampened the effect, eased the oppression, but could not eliminate it entirely. Yet the Culexus seemed to be the only one truly unaffected.
Tics marred the Eversor’s movements, while Zhau’s constant stream of prayers filled the vox.
Vast cables snaked through the room.
‘We need to find a way into the Temple of Shades,’ said Zhau. The Vindicare picked his way through the sacrificed astropaths.
Rhasc’s eyes flickered over the Astropathic Sanctum’s map layout. ‘The briefing indicated that the astropaths installed a teleportation array in a side chamber.’
Kord asked, ‘Why would the witches need a teleportation chamber?’ He idly gestured at the amniotic tanks. ‘It doesn’t appear as if they were designed to go anywhere.’
‘Emergencies?’ Rhasc reasoned. ‘This planet went through a turbulent period in its early colonial years. Perhaps the adepts of the Astra Telepathica desired an escape route.’