Herdantes went to speak but the blood in his throat only gurgled. He pointed to the darkness just outside the camp instead. It was north, deeper into the mountain range. Scipio narrowed his gaze and made out the jagged silhouette of a frozen peak.
‘Are you armed?’
Herdantes nodded wearily. His breath was coming out in ragged gasps. Patting the bolter on his lap was difficult. ‘Half a clip.’
‘Use them wisely. I’ll return,’ Scipio promised. A group of guerrilla fighters appeared out of the blizzard and he waved them over. ‘Get him up, regroup at the command tent.’
The storm was so loud, the humans just nodded.
Scipio left them and headed for the jagged peak.
Largo was hunkered down behind a cluster of snow-caked boulders, staring into a sheer-sided rock face above. He glanced over at Scipio as he crouched next to him.
‘It’s up there,’ he whispered, nodding to the fathomless darkness.
The blizzard was getting worse. It made following Largo’s gesture almost impossible.
‘I see nothing,’ Scipio hissed.
‘It’s there. It’s got Renatus. Look…’ Largo unclasped his bolter’s targeter and gave it to the sergeant.
Scipio lined the crosshairs over a plateau above. The night-vision scope picked out the shoulders and spines of massive rocks in the darkness. He tweaked a dial on the sight to heat-tracking. A muffled red shape resolved as the image went from hazy green to grainy blue. It was moving. There was another shape in front of it, though its red glow was less vibrant.
Renatus. Scipio suspected the dead Ultramarine’s generator was providing most of the heat trace.
‘It took his head, brother-sergeant. Tore it off in front of me.’
Scipio scanned the area through the targeter. A chasm fell away a few metres beyond the boulders, explaining why Largo had given up pursuit. A fragile ice escarpment led to the edge of the precipice which was thorned with dagger-like crags.
He brought the crosshairs back up to the plateau again, gauging the distance the necron had climbed. The fact they were capable of such feats surprised him. ‘Where is your squad, brother?’ Scipio asked.
Largo was nonplussed.
‘Where are your brothers?’
Largo looked behind at the snow-shrouded encampment.
Scipio still had his eye on the plateau. Something was happening. ‘We cannot indulge in personal vengeance, Largo.’
‘Renatus–’
The sergeant cut him off. ‘Is dead. But the rest of your battle-brothers still live. We’re– Move!’
Scipio dropped the targeter and thrust Largo aside as the necron landed between them. It had vaulted the chasm.
Both Space Marines were on their feet quickly with weapons drawn.
‘Circle it!’ Scipio shouted. He began strafing along the necron’s flank, drawing its gaze, as Largo went the other way to blindside the monster.
It tracked Scipio’s movements, like an alpha predator tracks a threat. Scipio levelled his chainsword, but kept the movement slow. His bolt pistol was at his side, ready.
It was a ghoul, this thing. Ropes of skin clung to its skeletal form and great tranches of flesh swathed its back, fashioned into a cape or robes. Blood crusted its muzzle and thicker visceral fluids drooled through the cavities in its structure, hanging off cables and congealing over wires. Its face was the most disturbing aspect of its appearance, for it was a mask of flesh. The human called Fuge had been butchered for his skin and this creature had taken his face whole, robbed the man of the only thing left to him in death – his identity. Even so, the mask was breaking, stretched too thinly across the necron’s gruesome visage, and patches of gore-streaked metal showed through. As the flayed one glared at him, Scipio saw a piece of chewed skin tear and fall to the ground.
‘A face…’ It spoke with sepulchral madness, trembling with anguish. ‘I had a face. Give me my face…’
Scipio realised it wanted his face or anyone’s. It was the only reason it had jumped from its perch. It had decapitated Renatus and lost his face. Now the wretched creature wanted another.
Only Scipio’s psycho-conditioning stopped him balking in terror.
Largo could wait no longer. He’d drawn his gladius – with only the necron between them, he might hit Scipio with his bolter – and leapt at the creature.
With viperous dexterity, the flayed one parried the blow and stabbed Largo in the shoulder. It drew a shout of pain from the Ultramarine.
Scipio launched his attack a second later before the necron could injure Largo further.
Again, the creature moved with preternatural swiftness, coiling its body around to slash at the brother-sergeant. The talons missed Scipio’s neck by a finger-width and he stepped back, warding off the monster with a chainsword thrust. It smacked the weapon aside, chain-teeth spitting sparks but doing little else.
Largo attacked again, slowed by his wound. He managed to land a blow on the necron’s shoulder but it pranged off as if striking adamantium. The resulting shockwave ran up Largo’s arm and into his shoulder, numbing it.
‘Flesh…’ A jagged wound ripped open Largo’s face, drooling blood.
The blizzard was worsening and enveloped the combatants in a swirling maelstrom.
Scipio’s shout was almost robbed by the wind. ‘It’s not working. Follow me, brother.’ He peeled off from the attack, making for the escarpment.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Largo, taking off after Scipio.
‘Do you trust my judgement, brother?’
‘You are my sergeant.’
That was all the answer Scipio needed.
Behind them, the necron turned. Despite its fluidity in combat, when not under imminent threat its insanity seemed to slow it down. It took a few seconds to realise its prey was running, then it sprang into the air with a dense crunch of servos and landed on the boulders, squat like a skeletal gargoyle.
‘Flesh…’ it hissed, filled with a terrible yearning. ‘I need it…’
Backing slowly towards the escarpment, Scipio could feel the ice cracking under his weight. This was no ordinary necron, he realised. It was one of the masters, a superior construct. Within a few seconds of the engagement, Scipio knew the chances of the two of them defeating it were slight.
‘When an enemy seems unbeatable, do not attack it head-on.’ The sage words of Telion came back to him. ‘Instead, devise another strategy that turns its strength into a weakness and balances the odds.’
It was massive, a hulking monster of a necron. Judging by its size and the strength behind its blows, Scipio reasoned it probably weighed more than him and Largo combined. He remembered how it had leapt from the plateau, the power in its servos, and saw the raw need in its eyes to take their skin.
‘Are you ready, Largo?’
They were barely a half-metre from the edge where the escarpment curled like a clenched finger and was at its weakest.
Largo nodded.
The flayed lord’s shoulders were heaving up and down with the movement of its chest. It had no lungs, no way of dragging air into its body even if it needed to. It was emulating a remembered behaviour.
Scipio was reminded of a rabid dog. He’d holstered his bolt pistol, and pulled out his gladius as he called to it. ‘You want our faces,’ he said, drawing a shallow cut across his cheek with the blade. ‘Come and take them.’
The flayed lord threw back its head, emitting a shriek of machine-noise, and sprang off the boulders.
Scipio waited until it reached the apex of its jump and then shouted to Largo. ‘Now!’
The Ultramarines threw themselves aside a split second before the necron crashed down in their wake. It whirled around when it realised its prey had gone, skin-robes flecking the snow with blood and matter.
Cracks veined the ice, but the escarpment held.
Largo had rolled onto his back. ‘It’s not breaking!’
‘Give it some encouragement,’ Scipio bellowed.
>
Largo unleashed his bolter against the cracking ice. The effect was instantaneous.
A massive chunk of the escarpment sheared away from the rock face and took the flayed lord with it. Their last image of the creature was its hellish eyes, blazing, thwarted.
Largo got up and punched the air. ‘Ha! Bastard!’
Scipio grabbed his shoulder. ‘Now we go.’
Both gave a last look to the plateau where Renatus’s headless corpse was lying unmourned, without honour. The destruction of the flayed lord would have to do as tribute.
Then they ran back towards the camp and the command tent where Scipio hoped the rest of his squad were waiting.
The sun was warm against his tanned skin. It felt good to be out in the mountains, alone and unshadowed. Sahtah couldn’t remember the last time he’d been climbing, he couldn’t remember…
He couldn’t remember…
…Anything.
Reality came crashing back like a cold wave. The sensory illusion faded and he was clinging to the rock face again, his talons lodged in the sheer-sided wall of the mountain. Sahtah had been broken for a moment, but his mechorganic body had healed him. He blinked, though it was an android interface rather than a physical one – he had long since surrendered his eyelids. Even during the long sleep he had not closed them. His awareness during those aeons had been fleeting, confusing, as if he were only partially alive and a passenger in someone else’s body.
He didn’t know how far he’d fallen but the ice-gorge was dark and deep. The spines of rocks scraped and broke against his body. His robes were being torn. Sahtah moaned, climbing faster, but the damage only worsened. A false sense of urgency filled him. He wanted to be out of the chasm and back amongst the peaks. Reaching the lip of rocky plateau, he pulled himself up and found the feast he had left behind.
It had no face.
Sahtah wanted a face. The one he wore now was virtually gone; his robes were in tatters too. He regarded the semi-armoured carcass lying in front of him.
It would have to do.
When he saw the glistening ribbons that bound it, the redness inside, the pallor of its succulent organs, he was overcome. Like the ghoul he knew he was but inwardly reviled, Sahtah sprang onto the corpse and continued to feed. And as the red matter inside splashed across his borrowed face and drizzled down the cage of his ribs and amassed in his joints, he was visited by such horrific visions.
Flesh palaces resolved in his ancient mind, infinite realms devoted to the skin. Corpses hung from hooks and ringed the vaulted ceilings on chains like gruesome chandeliers. Blood ran in rivers, thick with viscera and carrying chunks of bone. Piles of offal, threads of muscle and intestine formed incarnadine sculptures that decked the stinking halls. And everywhere the feast of the flayers went on indefinitely, lost to madness, lost to flesh.
Sahtah threw back his head and emitted a keening that reverberated around the mountains. It signalled his desire, his terrible anguish and the certain knowledge that he was damned.
In the distance his slaves heard the call of the master and echoed it.
‘Why have they stopped fighting?’
Across the encampment, the flayed ones had shuddered to an abrupt halt. As one, they squatted in the dirt and growled – a dirge of machine-noise that hurt Jynn’s ears.
Only the Space Marines seemed unaffected. The one Scipio had called Brakkius was standing stock-still and peering into the darkness. He moved at some unseen disturbance ahead – Jynn had no idea what – and signalled to the others who had recently joined them.
‘Is it Scipio?’ she asked.
Brakkius regarded her as a disapproving mentor would his student. His eyes were two ovals of blood-red. ‘Brother-Sergeant Vorolanus is still absent.’
Clearly the cobalt giant didn’t approve of first name familiarity.
‘Who then?’
Jynn’s question was answered when three of her guerrillas emerged from the blizzard supporting one of the Ultramarines. His injuries looked bad but he was walking, albeit with help.
‘Herdantes…’ There was an edge to Brakkius’s voice, an undercurrent of suppressed anger that frightened her. She also felt something else at the sight of the stricken Space Marine.
She realised it was anxiety.
For Scipio.
At Brakkius’s command, two Ultramarines went to their wounded comrade and took his weight off Jynn’s men. The three guerrillas looked exhausted when they finally reached her.
‘The metal-heads are no longer killing us,’ said Sia. She had a small cut on her forehead and the arm of her jacket was slashed, but otherwise she was unharmed.
‘Glad you made it,’ said Jynn, exchanging a brief embrace with all three of them. Of the twenty-four guerrillas she’d started with at sun-up that day, only nine remained before the night was out. Doc Holdst was amongst the tally of the dead. It was hard to be grateful for anything when confronted with such wasteful loss.
Jynn turned to Brakkius. His attention was on the Space Marines dragging the one called Herdantes to the command tent. ‘We need to move. My people, or what’s left of them, are all here.’
Brakkius didn’t bother to look at her. ‘Mine are not.’
She tugged on his vambrace to get his attention. It was like trying to move a mountain. Brakkius didn’t shift. Jynn went on anyway. ‘Look, those monsters have stopped for whatever reason. Maybe they’re fallible after all and there’s a malfunction in their wiring or something – I don’t care. I’ve lost nearly two-thirds of my people and the rest of us won’t last much longer once those metal-heads come around again. We have to move!’
This time Brakkius met her gaze. It was impossible to tell through the lenses of his battle-helm but she hoped there might have been a measure of respect in his eyes. He held her gaze for a few seconds before looking back at the darkness.
Another Space Marine approached him and stopped by his side. ‘Herdantes is badly wounded.’ He glanced at Jynn. ‘The human is right, we must leave this place.’
‘I won’t leave him, Cator. You go – lead the others back to Lord Tigurius if you can. I’m staying.’
Brakkius resumed his vigil.
In the end, Cator didn’t have to decide. Two more cobalt giants came running through the blizzard.
Jynn recognised Scipio – the other one she’d heard him call Largo.
Now they could go.
‘I’m pleased you’re alive, Jynn Evvers,’ said Scipio upon reaching the command tent.
‘So am I.’ It was a truthful answer at least. She was about to say more when the low growl emitted by the dormant flayed ones grew into a shrieking cacophony. Several of Jynn’s men were sick, some wept openly. It took all of her resolve not to break down too.
‘What is it?’ she asked, her hands pressed to her ears.
Scipio exchanged a knowing look with Largo and said, ‘Time for us to leave.’
He recognised that sound and as they fled back down the mountain, headed for what she assumed was an army of Space Marines somewhere below, she heard Largo mutter to himself.
‘It’s not dead.’
Chapter Thirteen
Fear saturated Damnos. It permeated its air, its rock and ate away at its people like a cancer. Their screams, their plaintive moaning, their abject grief was an urgent throb at the back of the Librarian’s mind.
Tigurius was a supreme psyker, the most accomplished of his Chapter, perhaps of any Chapter. There were others with power, of course: hooded Ezekiel, enigmatic Vel’cona, dreaded Mephiston. All were masters of their art but Tigurius was of the Ultramarines, the purest of all Space Marines, and his abilities were prodigious. Even so, he struggled to find a path through the necron shroud and the fear they propagated.
His mind had touched that of the necrons. It found only infinite darkness and endless hate. There was something buried in that well of nothingness, a warning; he felt certain of it. Without knowing why, he realised it was important and that by not seekin
g the truth of that vision he would be allowing some heinous evil to pass. Tigurius had fortified himself, performed the many rituals and psychic mantras designed to steel his mind against any potential aggressors. The Herald was strong, far more potent than he had first realised. Tigurius resolved that this time he would be prepared.
Inscribed in the ice with the pommel of his force staff were three concentric rings. Double-banded, he had also wrought sigils of warding and aversion to bind them together. Tigurius crouched down in the centre, his eyes closed, and tried to ride the darkling waves of his subconscious.
Everlasting night filled his mind, the fearful voices of the humans pushed to the fringes and no longer a distraction. He went deeper and fashioned a psychic beacon that he attached around the Hood of Hellfire like a halo. Still, the darkness would not yield. Landscapes resolved below him as he soared across Damnos as a mental projection of himself. It was grey and bland, the life had left it.
Was this a vision of the future? Was he witnessing their ultimate failure?
Something glowed up ahead and Tigurius soared towards it. Psychic winds buffeted him, tried to throw him off course and dash him against the rising mountains on either side. He renewed his efforts, making his body into an arrow that sliced the air apart and cut through the tempest.
For a moment, a tiny light shone below him but it was fleeting and quickly snuffed out. The glow ahead intensified, turning from a phosphorescent white into a sickly emerald. Too late, Tigurius realised the danger he was in and tried to flee. The light became a blazing green orb that reached for him with the tendrils of its light.
One caressed the Librarian’s arm and pain, hot and incandescent, fed into his body. His heart was thundering, a dull ache filled his head and a keening wail deafened his thoughts.
Must return…
All his efforts were focused on getting back but something was stretching the psychic landscape below, reshaping it so the distance became light years instead of leagues. Behind him, the baleful sun rose further and its tendrils grew with its influence.
They lashed at the Librarian like the appendages of some ocean-borne beast, a kraken or leviathan of old. Tigurius was forced to weave and pinwheel and dart as the sparrow eludes the eagle. Though he had not moved from his chosen spot since the vigil began, he still felt the physical exertion of his efforts. Mind and body were concomitant aspects of most beings – one affected the other. At that moment as he angled through the mental sky, his mind was being put to the sternest test and it visited that self-same tension upon his body.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 117