by Joe Parrino
A flicker of movement in its dying eyes, a slight smile, brought her warning. She pulled her punch dagger free from its gut, brought it up to block and had the sword nearly wrenched from her hand.
‘Death to the False–’ the Chaos Space Marine began. In its hand, a power sword glowed with a cruel purple light. Daemon maws slavered down its length.
A poisoned dart took the traitor through the throat, skewering the creature’s windpipe and cutting off the air it required to speak. It drew back its sword for an answering strike. Rhasc stepped into its guard, close against the burned ceramite of its war-plate. The heady stink of blood and offal wafted from the traitor. She ducked below the swinging arm. Her punch dagger swiped up, severed cabling and sawed through fibre-muscles. Oil spurted like blood. The armour whined in a facsimile of pain while the arm fell to its side.
A scream emerged from the sword as it fell out of the gauntleted fist and clattered to the marble. Tongues licked free along its length and the sword tried to crawl back to its master.
Rhasc continued to swirl around the Space Marine’s back. It tried to turn and face her, but, rendered bulky and cumbersome by its heavy war-plate, the Space Marine was too slow. Rhasc was faster. Her punch dagger sliced in through the side of its skull.
A heavy weight landed on her back and bore her to the ground.
Glazed eyes, crinkled with hunger, and snapping jaws closed in on her face.
II
Zhau saw the Callidus fall. He hesitated for a moment. Chances calculated in his head, driven by the honed synapses of his mental faculties.
Faith filled him. The zealot’s warmth brought meaning to his work. He was a champion of the God-Emperor walking through the profane, bringing the Emperor’s judgement to those who thought themselves beyond reproach, beyond the light of the Golden One. But he could not do this alone. His chances for mission success were too low.
Though he had abandoned his mask as useless upon arrival, Zhau’s practiced eye took in the angle, the distance. His rifle snapped to his shoulder. A switch flicked on its side saw a normal round chambered. The sniper drew in a breath, loathing the unholy air that filled his lungs. He depressed the trigger.
The rifle bucked. Blood spurted and burst with the sound of a popping sack. Rhasc emerged from underneath the mutant’s bulk. Her gaze met his, and she hesitated, then nodded. Zhau returned the gesture.
Heavy bolter fire streamed towards Zhau, who was walking through mutants and sawing the creatures in half. Curses came from the battling Crimson Slaughter as they felt the sudden impact of friendly fire. The Vindicare ran, moving forwards. There was no time to retreat here, to find more viable cover. The Crimson Slaughter saw him moving and lumbered toward him, chainswords grinding out a buzzing paean to their dark masters.
Zhau watched the angles, let them come close. With a motion born from long practice, he flipped another switch on his exitus rifle. Turbo-penetrator rounds clinked into the chamber. ‘Emperor’s will guide my shot,’ he breathed. ‘Grant me your patience.’
Time seemed to slow and horrific detail emerged from the brutal planes of the Space Marines power armour. Flapping faces, ripped free from human skulls, mouthed unknowable words. Defiled aquilas graced their breastplates. Fire leaked out from their eye lenses.
In the blink of an eye, the Space Marines drew level. Zhau blurred into motion, jinking to the left. Just as swiftly, he raised his exitus rifle and opened fire.
The bright flare of the turbo-penetrator round leapt from the barrel. A sharp crack accompanied it, not from the rifle, but from breaking ceramite. Designed to puncture adamantium, the round burrowed through the chest cavity of the first traitor, carving through meat and gristle. Another crack of ceramite announced its emergence microseconds later. It tore through the Space Marine’s right arm and severed the appendage.
Scarcely slowed by its journey, the round continued until all three of the traitors lay dead.
‘We cannot tarry. We cannot allow ourselves to be slowed by this delaying tactic!’ Rhasc shouted.
The Assassins punched through the melee in a burst of gore and black-clad lethality.
The traitors struggled to readdress. Zhau ran in a serpentine pattern, weaving from side to side. Bolts hammered all around him. His ears rang with the constant boom of angry bolter fire.
They passed beneath the baleful shadow of the arches, into the inner darkness of the heathen shrine. Muzzle flare split the blackness and gave meaning and shape to the gloom.
Shrouded statues seemed to move as the light flashed. Leathery wings flapped overhead.
More corrupt Space Marines loomed out of the shadows, the evil glow of their eye lenses providing scant warning. A massive arm punched into the right side of Zhau’s torso and threw him. He cracked painfully into the marble.
The prayers that had been streaming from his mouth ceased, stunned away by the pain. He struggled to rise as dark shapes closed in. Wicked knives caught the scarce light as they flashed in descent.
Zhau felt despair and anger roll through him. His target would survive him, left free of the Emperor’s judgement. Then the zealot caught a twitch of green light.
A bright beam sawed through the cavernous space, throwing the broken outline of three warriors into sharp relief. The light hammered them, cut through their armour and vaporised their blasphemous flesh. Bodies blew backwards and the traitors crashed into the marble wall as their flesh burned.
It was horrifying, this uncaged light. Then it died and Zhau was left with the stinging afterimage. A hand stretched through the bright phantoms afflicting his vision. His skin crawled and he drew his knife in a smooth motion.
Pale and white, a grinning skull chased the hand. Zhau relaxed, as much as he could with the Culexus so close, and Kord hauled the Vindicare to his feet. Rhasc waited impatiently behind.
Sounds echoed around them. Voices clamoured. Pale wisps of flame tried to draw them down false paths, to some rotten hell within the heathen shrine.
But Zhau knew that the Emperor guided their sprinting steps. He knew because light bloomed at the end of the long hallway they were running down. It was noxious and unclean, but evidence of their journey’s end.
Sorcerous words shivered the air. Vast declamations of power that Zhau had neither the mind to understand nor the desire to, grew and grew. They passed from the shadow and into the light.
The ritual was nearly over. A pile of bodies served as his altar, their flesh moulding and morphing into a shape more pleasing to the Changer of the Ways.
Words ripped from Drask’s mouth, left his tongue burned and blackened by the bright fire of their passing. He could feel the daemons pressing in at his consciousness, could feel their approval, their need, hammering at his hearts.
Above the Temple of Shades a rift was forming. Glinting through the void, the iron hulls of ships lurked. Bright smears of golden light marked their colliding Geller fields. An invasion fleet to storm the False Emperor’s domain and herald the end times, granting victory in the Long War. It was through his will that this would be done. His power and his will.
The symphony of the warp flowed from his fingertips, danced down the edge of his staff and broke free from the cage of his mind. It was the most beautiful thing Severin Drask had ever heard.
Pride and awe melded within his hearts. Already he shook with earnest anticipation of the glory. The exhaustion that had afflicted him was gone, channelled through the dripping red tip of the ritual knife that had ended the lives of the astropaths and paved the way for ascension.
Fever-bright eyes bored into the sky. Gasping breath, weak from blood loss and pain, joined the symphony as so many others had before. This last weak, drooling thing was the final catalyst for the ritual.
Drask slammed the knife down, felt the satisfying crack of the man’s sternum. Aspirated blood sprayed into his faceplate, peppering it wi
th vitae. The astropath’s soulflame streamed up toward the heavens.
The crucial moment arrived. The final words began to leave Drask’s mouth.
A bullet hammered into the back of his skull.
III
The blasphemous bulk of the sorcerer lord staggered forward, slamming into the writhing altar of bleeding bodies.
Faster than Rhasc thought possible, the sorcerer lord turned and regarded the interlopers. Kord was already running forward, light vacuuming into his helmet.
Rhasc was beside him, ready to destroy this blasphemy. Zhau had taken the shot, but something had stopped the kill. It fell to them to end this.
Heathen war cries filled the temple’s heart as corrupt Space Marines barrelled into the chamber.
Rhasc ignored them; she had eyes only for the sorcerer lord. Her neural shredder screamed its whining blast, casting minor sorcerers into gibbering wrecks. They flung their own retaliation back: flaming runes, serpents of light and shadow. They fizzled in the air near the Culexus, robbed of their potency by some unknown artifice.
Drask roared towards them, scattering a phalanx of his attendants. Whips of fire carved through the air. Bolts hammered from his gauntlet.
Shrapnel carved into Rhasc, stitching bright lines of pain in her body. Still she ran forward. In her hand waited a death card, a lasting reminder of the long reach of the Callidus Temple and the God-Emperor of Mankind.
She outpaced Kord. Her dagger reached through the metres intervening between herself and Drask. Kinetic force slammed her back, pulled her from her feet and shoved her through the air.
Light blasted from the Culexus’s lens and flapping daemons disintegrated in bursts of smoke and screaming shards.
Drask’s sword punched through Kord’s skull, shattering the lens. The sorcerer lord was yelling something, bellowing in pain and anger and broken loss. Shots from Zhau’s rifle spanked off his armour.
Rhasc rose to her feet, feeling the full crushing presence of the warp on her soul as the sorcerer tossed aside the broken body of the Culexus.
She hurled her poison darts, but they bounced off the sorcerer’s Terminator plate.
He lowered his staff and pointed it at her. A shot from Zhau’s exitus rifle slammed into his hand, bursting it in blood and shards of ceramite. The golden staff fell to the floor of the fane.
The sorcerer lord’s storm bolter chattered. Rhasc prepared herself for death. She flung herself at the sorcerer, determined to end his wretched existence. Somehow, she leapt above the stream of fire. Her phase sword slid through the air and carved through one of the curling ivory horns that adorned his helmet. It bit deep into the ceramite and blood gouted from the wound.
An iron grip caught her as she fell. It squeezed and Rhasc felt something in her spine snap. The blade fell from her grasp.
More shots hammered into the sorcerer lord, but he ignored them now, pulling the Callidus toward the altar of writhing bodies.
Then Klara Rhasc heard laughter. The deep booming laugh of Torq echoed through the chamber.
IV
Skull mask grinning, the Eversor ran on broken legs, the fury pushing him past the boundaries and requirements of flesh. Every step brought a pain so deep it nearly broke him.
Clarity had found him in the wake of the possessed Space Marine’s death. Purpose filled him, pushed him to his feet, sent him stumbling to the activation console. The rage pushed him on, past the point of his broken body. He had arrived in the fane in a wash of gore, punching his way through the dregs of a rearguard.
Only a paltry few enemy guarded the teleportation array’s terminus. Mutants, large and stupid, bellowed challenges. For once, Torq ignored them. His bolt pistol answered their cries with death.
Heads burst. Chests erupted with bone and blood.
His fury demanded a rarer target. Bodies carpeted the obscene ground surrounding the Temple of Shades.
In the darkness of the fane’s outer precincts, past glowing crystals filled with fire, Torq pushed on. The knowledge of what he must do filled him. He had a failsafe built inside him, an insurance policy to ensure the demise of an Eversor’s target.
The withered limbs of daemons sought to waylay him, sought to slow him down. Torq carved through them with his sword, traded the swiping hits of his power weapon with claws and talons. An angry line of pain ran down his back, slicing through some of the tubes that kept him sustained. Liquid spattered and painted the gloom.
He wheeled, faced a beaked horror with a nest of spindly limbs. ‘You won’t stop me,’ Torq told it. ‘I’ll pluck your arms one by one and break that smug grin off your heathen face.’
It squawked at him. Clawed limbs speared through the air. Torq’s sword chopped, once, twice. Arms fell to the ground, writhing like worms before dissolving into noxious smoke. The daemon squawked again and ran away into the darkness.
The bones in his legs ground together. Dull, pulsing heat radiated up his spine.
His frenzy began to slow.
Before, Torq would have given chase and made good on his threats. Now, his thoughts returned, brought him back to himself.
Bright things, like winged maggots, flapped overhead, trailing ropes of slime. They circled him, drawn to the Eversor’s pain. His bolt pistol burst one like a ruptured balloon. A looping cry lanced into his skull and set his ears ringing. More came, sweeping in from the darkness.
Torq ran, dodged between the dripping slime. The hiss of acid filled his ears. Every step brought torture, a test of the flesh.
He emerged in the temple’s heart to see his comrades fail and Rhasc brought to the altar. The sky writhed overhead with greedy anticipation. Torq could see the ethereal light of the warp glint off voidships. Souls wailed from the altar. Faces stretched across the air, drawn in swirling skeins of smoke.
Bands of mutants and Crimson Slaughter traitors chanted, smacked their weapons against their chests, gripped in a fanatic’s rapture.
His thoughts slowed to a crawl, bereft of the frenzy that defined his life. Torq laughed. His pistol boomed, heralding his presence. Bolts punched at the sorcerer lord and hammered at the war-plate.
They did little more than mar the paint. The sorceror lord picked up his staff.
A prayer lit up the fane like the ringing of a clear bell. It broke through the guttural chanting of the hordes of Chaos. Zhau’s voice rose in a sacred hymn. The Vindicare joined him. ‘Day of wrath and doom impending…’
Chaos Space Marines died as Zhau found his mark. Blood painted the unclean air.
‘The Emperor’s judgement descends on you!’ Torq bellowed. ‘Face His wrath.’
Zhau’s voice underlay Torq’s advance. His sniper rifle bucked as it cleared a path. ‘Wondrous sound the rifle flingeth, Through Terra’s temples it ringeth, All before the Throne it bringeth.’
Every syllable brought death to the Emperor’s enemies. Those same enemies closed on the sniper as he slid from cover to cover, crunching through the marble, venting their fury.
Heads turned. The sorcerer lord’s incantation faltered.
Viktor Zhau bought him his passage through the gauntlet of triumphant Crimson Slaughter and their debased servants. Even as they isolated the Vindicare Assassin, as they pulled him down and tore at him, Torq punched into the sorcerer lord with the speed and inexorable weight of a wrecking ball.
‘You’re dead,’ Rhasc spat through broken teeth. Drask cast her away towards his crowd of attendants. The sorcerer lord lowered his staff, golden tip shining.
‘No,’ Torq said with a laugh. ‘He is.’
The staff punched through Torq’s chest, breaking through the sternum and heart. Drask shouted in triumph.
The Eversor felt unimaginable pain boiling away his thoughts and eating his mind. Blood gouted down the haft of the sorcerer’s weapon. Torq watched his lifeblood flow away. Beneath his mas
k, a grim smile bloomed.
Torq surrendered himself to death, accepting his fate.
Failsafes snapped deep within the Eversor. Chemical compounds reacted with one another, setting off a chain reaction inside his body. His flesh expanded. Fire flickered out from his mouth and Torq detonated.
Scouring fire erupted from his body.
Severin Drask screamed as his plan fell apart around him, as the Changer of the Ways withdrew his support, and the world died in loss and fury.
V
Rhasc watched through her one remaining eye. The other drooled fluid down her cheek, burst as the sorcerer had cast her aside so he could deal with Torq.
She watched as the fire consumed the altar, consumed the heart of the Temple of Shades. Zhau’s singing had stopped, broken in the crash of bolter fire.
Confusion reigned among the traitors who stood around her.
Shudders rocked the Temple of Shades. Rock groaned then racked and fell away. Shapes flickered into being, long-fingered, cruel and sharp.
Rhasc felt the buzz of corruption against her skin intensify. Her eye grew wide. Her face paled.
The fane was collapsing back into the warp. Blood flashed, sucked away into the maws of manifesting daemons.
The haunting cries of the neverborn echoed through the fane as they sought mortal souls.
Klara Rhasc tried to crawl away, to make it back to the teleportation circle. She called to Adamta over the vox, unheeding that it no longer functioned. She made ten metres before something sharp slid between her ribs.
Foul breath gusted down around her. Rhasc flipped over, brought her last poison dart up and shoved it into the face of an equine thing. It recoiled, jabbering in some dark tongue.
Numbness chased out of her wound. Ripples passed through her flesh. Desperation drove her movement. She struggled weakly, scraped her way across breaking marble. Rhasc failed; her strength left her.