Crusaders of Dorn

by Guy Haley

  ‘I cannot raise him, brother,’ said Gulvein.

  ‘Nor I,’ said another.

  ‘Then we must find him,’ said Helbrecht. ‘Now.’

  Through winding ways that doubled back upon themselves, Helbrecht and his men hurried, the sound of battle growing tantalising near then far again. Eventually, Helbrecht’s sensorium locked onto the locators of the other group, and they made all haste to the aid of their brothers. They crashed directly through a thin wall, bursting into a narrow hall where Ceonulf and his strike group were sorely embattled.

  Ceonulf’s men were grouped tightly upon a bulge in the floor, Ceonulf at their centre. Four of their brothers lay dead upon the deck, with two more badly wounded. Boltgun shots punched through the air in all directions, blasting puffs of spreading fibre from the habitat’s fabric.

  ‘Where is the foe?’ roared Helbrecht, casting about for their enemy.

  ‘High Marshal!’ shouted Ceonulf. ‘Take care, my lord!’

  The Space Marines searched in vain for the cythor, but saw nothing. The fifteen remaining men of Ceonulf’s group continued firing wildly. A stray round ricocheted off Gulvein’s armour into a ridge upon the wall where it embedded and exploded.

  ‘Cease fire, castellan!’ barked Gulvein. ‘You fire at nothing.’

  ‘Wait! They return!’ replied Ceonulf.

  Chimes rang in their helmets, warning of spikes of exotic radiation.

  ‘There!’ shouted Helbrecht, pointing to a space to the left of Ceonulf’s circle.

  Things that defied categorisation shimmered into being, intersecting layers of impossible shadows that flowed into one another in a manner that hurt the human mind. They were undeniably sentient, and hostile. They writhed through the air, anticipating the track of bolt rounds and slipping around them. Ceonulf’s men let out battle cries and concentrated their efforts. Helbrecht’s group spread out, surrounding the shapes and lending their own might to the fight. The creatures were caught in a murderous crossfire, but unbelievably they passed through it unharmed. They closed upon Ceonulf’s group, then leapt amid the combatants. For the duration of an eyeblink, they took on recognisable form: humanoid creatures of pure shadow whose skins writhed with glowing marks. Curved blades descended, dragging trails of condensing hydrogen fog after them. Once, twice. The crack of ceramite being breached cut through the sound of guns. Two brothers fell, one dead, the other clutching at his neck.

  The creatures slipped out of existence, all indication of their presence abruptly vanishing.

  Helbrecht’s men ceased firing and lowered their weapons in confusion, Ceonulf’s men following suit a moment later.

  ‘We were attacked fifteen minutes ago, my lord,’ voxed Ceonulf. ‘They appear, attack, withdraw. Four times they have done this. We have three minutes, ten seconds until they attack again, if their previous pattern holds true.’

  ‘Have you slain any of their number?’

  ‘No, my lord,’ said Ceonulf angrily.

  Helbrecht pushed his way past his men. ‘High energy indications when they appear suggests beings of nought but warpcraft. They can avoid our weapons.’ He looked to the floor. A single patch of glowing blood sparkled there, although it was hard to look at, appearing to be upon the floor one instant, then above it, then passing through. ‘This is devilry,’ he said. ‘But they can be hurt. They evidently have form. What has form can be trapped.’

  ‘Two minutes, my liege.’

  ‘Graviton guns! Meltas!’ Helbrecht ordered. ‘We will see how they fare when they can no longer move. Cage them in bolter fire, bring them down with the gravitons and destroy them.’

  An impromptu fire-team of two graviton guns and a meltagun were deployed to Helbrecht’s instruction, opposite Ceonulf’s position.

  A minute later the odd radiation returned, starting a wail of alarms in their helms. A second after that the creatures returned, hauling themselves from dark spaces near the ceiling. The patterns of their bodies glowed a throbbing blue, green, red and gold.

  Once again, the Space Marines lay down a withering curtain of fire. Watching carefully, Helbrecht saw that some rounds did indeed hit the creatures, but they passed through them and did not detonate. The passage of the bolts hurt them, for he saw the squirming shadow of their beings convulse and flicker more quickly. He waited until they had been shepherded together.

  ‘Now, brothers, now!’

  Pulses of force nudged Helbrecht as the gravitons fired. The effect was immediate. The creatures shrieked. The shades that made them were violently arrested, and they solidified into the forms seen before, though now they were wracked with agony. Mouths opened, wide and full of razor teeth. Long pale hair flicked across featureless faces. They jerked around, unable to free themselves. The roar of the meltagun announced the death of the first. Before the second met the same fate, Helbrecht strode over and plunged the Sword of the High Marshals into the creature. He gasped at the shock of the contact. A deep cold surged up the blade, penetrating right to the interface of his bionic arm with an intensity that burned.

  Helbrecht held fast. The darkness of the creature’s body ran like oil, fleeing from the bite of the holy sword towards the shadows around Helbrecht’s feet. As if dragged at by some force exerted by the blade, this darkness was sucked back toward it, turning for an instant again into the form of a shadow-man. Helbrecht saw slender, pointed ears, a hooked blade and pupil-less eyes that blazed green. Then it collapsed into itself, arms, legs, head and all, compacting into a dense column of purest black that shuddered then stilled. All the light fled from it, the room dimmed, and the column ceased its movements. Helbrecht twisted his sword, and the corpse collapsed into a sift of ash.

  Silence fell on the battlefield. The Black Templars waited tensely for a further three minutes ten seconds, but no more creatures came.

  ‘These are an unusual enemy,’ said Helbrecht.

  ‘Where are the cythor fiends?’ said Ceonulf.

  ‘We found many dead, in a chamber near our ingress point,’ said Gulvein. ‘Maybe these things killed them.’

  ‘The ones we saw showed no sign of injury, brother,’ said Helbrecht. ‘And this thing had the seeming of an eldar wretch.’ He gazed at his sword edge thoughtfully.

  ‘Then what are they doing here?’ said Ceonulf. ‘Are these then the cythor? They are of a different form, but I have heard of stranger filth. Perchance they attempt to deceive us.’

  ‘No,’ said Jurisian heavily. The Master of the Forge came unsteadily through a door opening onto the chamber. One arm of his servo-harness had been sheared off. A crack in his left thigh plate was bobbled by sealant foam stained with blood. Several brothers and Bayard followed him, his black sword smoking. The number of their party was much reduced. ‘They are not the cythor, my brothers. They are their hunters.’ He stood a little taller, one human hand and a limb from his servoharness pressing into the wall for support. ‘Come, I have something to show you.’

  ‘I came across this place not long after we spoke, my liege,’ said Jurisian.

  He had led them down a short yet convoluted passage to another large chamber. Within were thousands of corpses floating in the air at different heights and at no common orientation. Some lay peacefully, as if in deep sleep. Many others were contorted, terror clear on their faces. The majority were human, but there were many aliens there also. The larger proportion of the humans were not readily identifiable as Imperial, but representatives of cultures known and unknown. The xenos likewise were of differing types. All were united in death, but most markedly in their appearance. Their bodies were hollow, their skins transparent; they appeared almost as glass sculptures. They would perhaps have been mistaken for such were it not for the clothes, trinkets and weapons they wore, and the augmetics that persisted still in some of the more advanced.

  The Black Templars – Helbrecht, Jurisian, Bayard, Gulvein and Ceonulf
– gathered around one of the corpses. Whatever process the man they examined had undergone had affected only the organic matter of his body; the nerve splices of his augmetic eye were clearly visible in the bowl of his skull. This one differed in one other important aspect also. His remains were full of a marbled glow, blue and green, red and gold, the sole lit lantern in a room full of extinguished lights. Helbrecht pushed it gently. The corpse moved into a new position and remained there, unaffected by momentum.

  ‘He is the last,’ continued Jurisian. ‘All the others have finished the process. They have been consumed.’

  ‘There must be thousands of them,’ said Ceonulf.

  ‘Tens of thousands,’ said Jurisian. ‘And there are other chambers like this.’

  ‘Then where are they, and what is this thing of light here?’ said Bayard angrily.

  ‘Give me your hypothesis, Forgemaster,’ said Helbrecht.

  ‘I do not believe the cythor are entirely of our realm of existence, my liege,’ said the Forgemaster.

  ‘This stinks of warpcraft,’ growled Gulvein.

  ‘This is not the work of the warp. The geometries of the warp defy explanation of any kind. If anything, these dimensions here exhibit a greater complexity. Many of us have noticed the inconstancy of the rooms here, the lack of match between exterior and interior.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Helbrecht. ‘I have seen it for myself.’

  Jurisian nodded, the movement accompanied by the faint whirr of muscle bundles. ‘Though complex, the dimensions of this place are explicable. This whole habitat is an expression of higher dimensional physics.’

  ‘Explain,’ said Gulvein.

  ‘The universe we exhibit comprises four dimensions – height, width, depth and time. These creatures are, perhaps, natives of more.’

  ‘You speak of the warp,’ said Bayard.

  ‘I do not,’ said Jurisian. ‘The warp is separate, unto itself, another realm entirely. There are more dimensions than the four in our own field of existence. It is through these that entrance to the warp is effected, and how some of the greater mysteries of the Adeptus Mechanicus are realised, but these dimensions are not of the warp. They are as real and physical as the heft of your sword, or the roundness of your bolts.’

  ‘I do not understand,’ said Bayard.

  ‘Imagine, champion, that you lived in a world of three dimensions instead of our four,’ said Jurisian patiently. ‘Width, depth and time. You would have no concept at all of up or down, as there would be no height. It would appear perfectly normal to you. But that would not mean that height did not exist, only that you are incapable of perceiving it. So it is here.’

  ‘You speak in riddles. If such a place existed, I would be able to see it. I can see no flat world, and so it is not there!’ said Bayard.

  ‘I speak of the greatest mysteries of the temples of Mars. It is not given to you or even to me to understand them, but that does not mean they do not exist.’

  Helbrecht spoke. ‘You posit then a creature that exists as a physical being, not a witch or daemon born out of the warp?’

  ‘Yes, my lord. These new forms of the cythor are as real as you or I, but possess further dimensionality to them that makes them difficult for us to perceive. Forgive me, my lord, but I am unable to elucidate further. This field of study is the preserve of the greatest of the magi of Mars. My only knowledge of it is practical – the application of these prayer-equations to the proper functioning of field generation and suchlike. I do not know sufficient incantations to reveal the secrets encoded within this man or this building.’

  Helbrecht gestured at the glowing corpse. ‘And what is this then, Jurisian?’

  ‘These are remarkable creatures, my liege. A fine enemy, deadly and complex. This, I believe, is how they reproduce.’

  ‘You speak as if these xenos filth exceed mankind in perfection,’ said Bayard.

  ‘I do not, for that is not possible. Their very nature is a sign of their weakness. Why do they trouble this place at all? For amusement? A weakness. To feed? A weakness. To breed? A very great weakness indeed,’ said Jurisian.

  ‘This is reproduction?’ said Ceonulf, looking at the endless floating dead.

  ‘Upon the seventeen worlds we scoured, we found no breeding population, no sign of permanent occupancy. Their cities were diamonds dropped on sand,’ said Jurisian. ‘Think of those worlds, brother, untouched away from their settlements. Did it not strike you as odd? When man takes a world, it is remade to his satisfaction. Many creatures do this, but not the fiends. According to the lore of the Death Spectres, the fiends come and then they go.’

  ‘Preposterous,’ said Bayard.

  ‘Hear me, brothers,’ said Jurisian. ‘There are creatures of the water of many worlds who must spawn upon the land, and creatures of the land who must spawn in the water. Perhaps these beasts are of that sort – they invade our existence to birth their foul progeny periodically, then depart.’

  ‘And the creatures we fought across the Ghoul Stars?’ said Bayard. ‘Limbs, flesh and blood. Not this glow of light here.’

  ‘Temporary forms, perhaps. I do not know. I am no magos biologis, brothers.’

  Helbrecht made an angry noise in his throat. ‘And when the breeding is done, the creatures of the ocean depart.’

  ‘Back to the water,’ said Jurisian. ‘Whatever that is for them.’

  ‘And the shadow beings, they are some further manifestation of this?’ said Bayard.

  ‘I do not think so,’ said Jurisian carefully. ‘In some of the other chambers there are smashed corpses, like these, but broken, the glass of them scattered upon the floor.’

  ‘A hatching?’ said Ceonulf.’

  ‘I though so too initially, but these here have been consumed utterly, and are whole but empty. The cythor’s other form is of light – the creatures we fought are shadow.’

  ‘Then what do you suggest?’ said Helbrecht.

  ‘Where there is a glut of prey, my liege, there are always predators. We came here to destroy the cythor fiends and we find them departing. These other creatures, the shadow-eldar, have come to feed upon our foe.’

  ‘Ridiculous,’ sneered Bayard.

  ‘It is of no concern whether Jurisian is right or if he is wrong,’ said Helbrecht sternly. ‘Both xenos can be killed whatever hell-form they clothe themselves in. We shall root out the canker from this world, and purify the sector fit for the sons of Terra.’

  ‘Praise be,’ murmured the Black Templars.

  ‘We should consider withdrawal,’ said Ceonulf. ‘Destroy the world from orbit. We can strike these installations from the sky with ease.’

  ‘Where are the cythor, brother?’ said Jurisian. ‘Not here. To be sure we would have to annihilate the world. Exterminatus will prove difficult to enact upon a planet of this kind.’

  ‘Do you think something as mundane as Exterminatus will destroy them, brother, these things that can fold themselves around space at will? We must meet them with blade and bolt, as our brotherhood has done since the time of Sigismund. It is the only way to be sure,’ said Bayard.

  ‘How long do we have until this facility fails?’ said Helbrecht. He spoke tersely, his temper rising.

  ‘I cannot say, brother,’ said Jurisian. ‘I have my brothers-in-the-forge Yoth, Skardus and Herl scouring the place for mechanisms, but if what I suspect is true, we would not likely recognise them should we see them. They may well be hidden from us. For what it is worth, there are hints of energy fields about the structure, and they appear stable in nature.’

  ‘Monitor them,’ said Helbrecht. ‘I will order all brothers to withdraw upon your command as soon as you see signs of failure. Is that clear, Forgemaster?’

  ‘Of course, High Marshal.’

  Helbrecht clenched his fists. ‘We must hurry,’ he said. ‘We must strike before our foe has
fled or is destroyed by these others. I will not allow our glory to be snatched from us by degenerates.’

  ‘Then we must find to where the cythor have gone,’ said Ceonulf.

  ‘There is an umbilicus, a root that goes down from the very centre of this habitat complex,’ said Jurisian. ‘I have re-examined the augur soundings of the fleet, my lord. There is a hint of something else down there, a little above the metallic boundary. Perhaps another habitat.’

  ‘Then we go down,’ said Helbrecht.

  ‘My lord, the pressure of the planet’s air increases a thousandfold. It is too great,’ said Ceonulf. ‘And the heat...’

  ‘Terminator armour is proof against such pressures and such heat,’ said Helbrecht. ‘Send for mine.’

  The castellan was not to be dissuaded. ‘My Lord Helbrecht, to go down there is tantamount to suicide. Let others go in your stead.’

  ‘Do not say to me that I am of greater worth than other servants of the Emperor!’ said Helbrecht in a sudden rage. ‘This is my inaugural crusade. I called it. It falls to me to finish it. If I am to expire, so be it. I do so gladly in the service of the Lord of Man.’

  None dared gainsay him.

  Deep within the clouds of Grave Core, a sister platform to that above rode out the ceaseless storms. A twisting stalk gathered itself from the top of the structure to wind its way up through the surging clouds, where it joined to the centre of the dense mesh of the upper complex. At that depth the pressure crushed the air to a hot, soupy liquid. The winds turned into raging currents. Downdraughts of cooler air and upwellings from further into the planet’s roiling interior bubbled upwards. Down there was a core of hot ice, an intolerable country where diamonds rained on continents of hypercompressed carbon bobbing on viscous seas.

  There, on the very boundary of a place where the conditions were inimical to all life, the fiends had their last outpost in the galaxy of man.

  The stalk was half a kilometre wide, made of huge cords thicker than an armoured battle-brother and stronger than plasteel. Even so, by rights it should have been shredded, and it was not. The cord and the pregnant structure that fruited from it were still, untroubled by the liquid winds that spent their fury upon them.