The twenty-fifth was different – a human female, average height, slim build, clad in a long russet cloak with a theatrical cowl draped over her face.
Siirt bowed. As he did so, his men silently fanned out on either side of him. Their positions, weapon-states and armour integrity all registered on his retinal display as tiny red sigil-clusters. He had no doubt that the woman in front of him commanded similar data on her own pet warriors.
‘Magos Ys,’ said Siirte. ‘This is unexpected.’
‘It should not be,’ replied Ys. Her voice was smooth and unruffled, though an undertow of quiet anger marked it. ‘Where is Commander Rauth?’
‘He is engaged in operations.’
‘Summon him.’
‘I cannot. Contact cannot be established at this time.’
‘You must have some means.’
‘The clan has undertaken operations deep underground. We have not been able to send or receive comm-traffic for two standard days.’
The magos didn’t respond immediately. Siirt thought he heard a low clicking from under the woman’s cowl, then she walked towards him. He detected the trace sounds of his men priming their weapons, and issued a mental pulse warning them to remain calm.
‘Do you know what has happened to my war engines, Medusan?’ asked Ys. Her voice had lost any pretence of civility.
‘I do not, magos.’
‘Then you are blind as well as stupid,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you do not appreciate how precious such things are to us.’
Siirt remained perfectly still. He could almost taste the tension on the air. The magos gave off subtle signal traces of aggression, some of which he could pick up with his inbuilt instruments.
She was extremely angry.
‘I have not seen this data,’ he said.
‘I have spoken to my princeps,’ said Ys. ‘He has been in touch with Lord General Nethata, who has his own reasons for doubting your commander’s judgement. For a long time I have urged restraint, but all tolerances have their limits.’
‘I know nothing of this,’ he said.
‘Yes, so you say. Are you capable of saying anything else?’
‘The sensor impressions we have confirm that the current action is over,’ Siirt said, keeping his tone neutral. ‘I expect a full report from the front within the next few hours. After that, according to the schedule I have, the assault on the Capitolis spire will commence, and full comms may be re-established.’
‘The next few hours.’
‘Yes.’
‘I am troubled that you think that is, in any sense, satisfactory.’
The magos reached up and pulled her cowl back. It revealed a slender, elegant face entirely composed of interlocking plates of metal. Her eyes glowed red, just like the lenses of an Iron Hand’s battle-plate. The sigil of the Mechanicus was embossed on one cheek and the winged griffon emblem of her forge-guild on the other.
Somehow, the effect was more troubling than the mix of flesh and metal that Siirt was used to seeing. Ys was the complete article.
‘My skitarii will deploy here before setting out,’ she said. ‘I shall resolve this situation myself, since those in the field have proved so woefully incapable of doing so. If he will not come to me, I shall come to him. I do not care where he is, nor how busy his duties make him – we shall talk.’
Siirt swallowed.
‘That is not permitted, magos,’ he said. ‘The combat zone is proscribed to non-military personnel. We can accommodate you here until communications are re-established, after which a hololith transmission can be routed directly to your private chambers.’
Ys looked at him frostily. Her red eyes blazed through the smog of drifting ash, glinting from the metal plates around them.
‘Is that your final word?’ she asked.
Siirt tried to hold her gaze. From somewhere, he could sense a power build-up, and blink-commed a warning to his men.
‘It is.’
The burst came too suddenly. Siirt felt massive, acute pain in his temples, and clapped his hands to his head. He could hear the terse grunts of his men as their neural implants crackled and they fell to the floor. He staggered, stumbling forwards, gagging from the pain. The world seemed to reel, and he reached out to break his fall.
Then it was over. Ys reached out, catching him before he collapsed. He looked up groggily and found his face a hand’s breadth from hers. He was sweating, his heart racing. Something very powerful had been unleashed, something that, just as before, was capable of reaching right into their systems and rendering them helpless.
If it hadn’t made him feel so bad, he might have admired the artifice of it. How much did the Mechanicus know of Medusan machine-protocols?
‘I recommend a more helpful attitude,’ said Ys, holding his arm firmly in her metal fingers. ‘More skitarii will be landing shortly, and I do not expect them to be impeded.’
Siirt looked up at her red eyes, unable to speak. He was close enough to smell ritual incense on her robes. In the background, he could hear the sounds of his men struggling to breathe.
Ys brought her face even closer to his, leaning forwards as if she wanted to whisper some intimate conspiracy between them.
‘I shall speak to him,’ she said, her voice low. ‘Even if all the forces of the Annihilator stand between us, I shall speak to him. And when I do, as the Omnissiah guides my hand, he will listen.’
The gates to the Capitolis were shut. Their ornate, gilded surfaces still swam with witchlight, flickering out into the darkness of the tunnels in slowly ebbing swirls.
With the banishment of the daemons and the destruction of the remaining enemy troops, the cavernous space before the portal had slumped into darkness once more. The stench of cordite and blood still lay heavy in the air. The cries of the dying and the wounded echoed eerily in the vast spaces, rebounding from the rockcrete walls like the forlorn wails of spectres.
Rauth looked up at the immense baroque doors, ignoring the clangs and booms of activity around him. Every instinct within him urged him to break them down and surge on up into the spires beyond. That, for the time being, was impossible, even for him. Telach’s closing of the gates had given them the breathing space they needed to regroup. The claves, freed from battling the last of the daemons, had already stalked back down the length of the tunnels, slaughtering any residual traitors they came across and corralling the surviving mortals into fresh columns for renewed assault.
The respite would only be brief. They consolidated, just for the moment, gathering their strength again, rounding up those mortals who could still march and giving the Emperor’s Mercy to those who could not.
Rauth no longer felt much at all for those who suffered. He certainly didn’t despise them. The itch, as Telach referred to it, that loathing of human frailty, had ceased to have much purchase on him since the last vestiges of his own mortal frame had been flensed away. In truth, he had little idea how much organic matter remained, locked away in pockets within his giant mechanical skeleton. A brain, perhaps some spinal matter, progenoids; not much else.
For all their weakness, though, the mortal troops were necessary. Nethata had not answered the summons. Rauth didn’t know why. Perhaps fighting out on the surface had been heavier than expected; in any case, it was not good enough. The Guard under the Lord General’s command would be needed for the final push if the Iron Hands were not to be bogged down by the sheer volume of enemy troops within the Capitolis. Just as before, the human contingents would be needed to tie up the enemy assaults, freeing the real warriors to strike up at the pinnacle.
The summit was where the nightmares lay. Telach had divined that much, at least – whatever he’d sensed was there, growing in power with every passing heartbeat.
As if summoned by Rauth’s thoughts, the Chief Librarian lumbered up then. Rauth turned to face him. Telach’s shoulders looked slumped even under his heavy battle-plate, and he radiated fatigue. His armour still snaked with curls of opalescent energy, bu
t the dazzling radiance that had blazed earlier had, for the time being, gone out.
‘When will you be ready to fight again?’ asked Rauth.
Telach straightened.
‘Whenever required, lord,’ he said.
‘That will be soon,’ said Rauth. ‘You know it must be. Tell me, what waits for us in there?’
‘I do not know. The spires are shielded from me.’
‘Then guess.’
Telach hesitated. He drew in a deep breath, and Rauth heard his damaged vox-grille rattle.
‘The neverborn,’ said Telach at last. ‘They used a proscribed name: a fallen primarch, now lost to the Eye. Perhaps they do so to mislead us, or perhaps they taunt us with the truth. Sometimes they speak the truth even when they would be wiser not to – they have strange natures.’
Rauth nodded.
‘I heard the same name,’ he said. ‘But it is not him that waits for us. If it were, we would be dead already.’
‘Indeed,’ said Telach. ‘Perhaps a creature in his power, though, one who nurses a special hatred for us. When we enter the spire I will know more. Beyond that, I will only say this: it is not yet manifest. Time is against us, lord. This pause must be a short one.’
‘You do not have to tell me that,’ growled Rauth, gazing hungrily back up at the sealed doors. ‘I long for nothing else but to get in there.’
Telach let slip a grim laugh then. Perhaps, out of all of the senior Iron Hands in Raukaan, he was the only one still capable of such a thing – a residual, infinitesimal, sense of irony.
‘Be careful what you wish for,’ he said.
The walls were alive. Metal, once as inanimate and as cold as ice, had sprung into fluid life. Riveted bracings curled around the base of pillars and crept over the lintels of doorways. As the bracings moved they let out a faint noise – a hiss, punctuated with bubbling pops as the structure flexed and rippled.
Mesh-steel floors undulated like hide stretched across a drum. Growths punched up through the surface, shiny and phosphorescent. The air shimmered with curtains of gauze, drifting aimlessly as idle currents ran down the winding passageways.
A heartbeat rang out, long and slow, underpinning the steady chatter of the vaults above. It welled up out of the depths, sonorous and echoing. As it beat, the curtains in the air trembled, spilling tiny points of glistening dust onto the skin-floor.
Old coolant pipes had burst free of the walls. They gurgled with dark crimson contents. Further along, where the corridor tilted and swivelled round to the right, blood-coloured fluid spilled freely across the floor. It sank into the drum-hide surface in a foam of pink, bubbling as it was devoured.
It was hot, almost unbearably so. Heat radiated from the living walls, making them drip with moisture. Even so high up, there was no escape from it. What remained of the corridors, the service tunnels, the transit shafts, the meeting chambers, the chapels and pleasure gardens – all of it was soaked in soft, cloying, sticky heat.
Voices echoed down the corridors, faint and broken. A child sobbed, over and over again, lost in the maze of pulsing, throbbing matter. Women whispered or hissed; men laughed too hard, as if making up for some unutterable, dreaming horror with hollow mockery.
Valien never saw the owners of those voices. He trod along the soft, fleshy ways, stumbling in half-blindness, trying not to hear them. At every corner he would pause, believing that someone was waiting for him just on the other side. Whenever he staggered around it, though, another foetid artery would await him, empty and seamy and stuffed with spores. The place was at once deserted and full; both empty of bodies and singing with souls.
The walls closed in on him. Where they had once been dirty, dark and cold they were now glossy, organic and hot to the touch. Breathing remained difficult. Valien’s suit’s systems were giving out – he could feel his atmospheric filters clogging with spores. Sweat had collected in his boots, and his bodyglove was sticky with it. Dehydration had given him a persistent, sick headache, and his dry tongue was swollen in his mouth.
He knew that he was somewhere very high in the spire of the Capitolis. He had taken the difficult way up, the circuit-ous route. It would have been quicker to have cut across to the vast, roofless chamber that ran up the very centre of the spire, to the colossal spiral stairway carved from marble and lined with steel that curled up and up around the adamantium spine of the Capitolis. That was Shardenus’s glory: the Great Stair, an immense series of gilded steps that climbed for hundreds of metres without break from the filth of the earth to the smog of the heavens.
That way had been guarded, thronged with mutants, cultists, dead-eyed warp beasts and shuffling spawn, and so he had been forced to find the dank, twisting, hidden ways up, the ones that had been abandoned, forgotten or closed off. His world became a dark procession of cramped, clammy tunnels, each one dripping with fluids like bodily organs. The walls themselves trembled like flaps of skin, and the air stank with the musk of living matter. The dark, gothic majesty of a world’s command centre had been perverted, turned from austere stone and metal into a nightmarish image of flesh, bone and blood.
Only once did Valien see evidence of what the Capitolis had been like before corruption had come. He stumbled at the end of a long, dizzying climb up a series of tortuous capillary tunnels, falling to his knees from light-headedness as he reached the top and clambered into a tiny, deserted chamber. Ahead of him, only a metre or two away, was a column of carved onyx. The column was surmounted with a statue. A grave, mournful face stared back at him out of the dark, rendered in thick sweeps of a sculptor’s chisel.
He’d seen the same figure many times before. The likeness was a standard one, propagated by the Ecclesiarchy and sanctioned in the manuals of all the artisan guilds. A near-identical statue had stood in the Talica shrine on Hespera, the one in which he’d undertaken his final training. It was Rogal Dorn; the Lord Protector, Saviour of Terra, master of the Fists, the golden son standing resplendent in his armour at the dawn of Mankind’s eternal reign across the stars.
Alone among the paraphernalia of the upper spires, that statue remained untouched. Pools of glistening liquid fermented gently at its base. Tendrils crept up the polished surface of the pillar, straining to reach the figure at the top and choke it.
Valien looked at it for a long time. In the past, in other places, he’d found the selfsame image preposterous. He’d mocked the angular jawline, the narrow eyes, the rigid, clenched expression of resolve. For a cynical man in a cynical profession, such caricatured defiance had always struck him as faintly ludicrous.
No longer. Valien found himself remembering the stories he’d been forced to memorise in the schola, of Dorn’s tortured progress through the webs of madness spun by the Arch-Traitor in the final battle for Terra, alone and surrounded by the raw stuff of Chaos.
As he recalled the texts, the legends, the myths, he managed a faint smile.
So it was for you, so it is for me.
Valien got back to his feet, trying to ignore the soft sucking sounds his boots made on the trembling floor.
But you were a primarch, the exemplar son of a living god.
He started to stumble onwards again. As he did so, his fingers strayed to his chest. He ran his fingers over the indentations just below his heart.
And I am the lowest of your Father’s servants; a criminal and a blood-drinker and a sinner given the tasks no right-thinking human would undertake.
The ambient heartbeat echoed in his thick, clammy head. Another tunnel snaked away from him, blurry and lost in heat-haze. He limped down it, following nothing but instinct, remembering almost nothing of the orders Heriat had given him. A drive older than all others, older even than base survival, goaded him on.
Curiosity. Now, after all this, I will find out what evil has been gestating here. He saw no mortals. He had not seen a living soul since Venmo Kilag, far down in the abyss of tunnels in the Capitolis’s bowels. If he had been feeling less sick, less faint, he might h
ave speculated on the fate of the millions of men and women who had once inhabited such a huge spire and were now nowhere to be seen. He might have wondered what terrible magicks locked their voices in the air, making them speak as if still alive and moving through the corridors. He might have paid a little more attention to the strange faces half-buried in the shifting skeins of the walls and the floors, or the way the ceilings bulged, or the long trails of blood that led to the transit shafts.
When my curiosity is sated, I will do what I came for.
Valien crept onwards, wheezing in the thick air, pushing spore-veils aside with his shaking hands.
I will carry out the order.
He hardly knew where he was going. He was blind, weak and disorientated, and the last of his mortal strength was ebbing. For all that, he retained a certain confidence. As surely as if the Emperor Himself were guiding him, he knew he was coming to the heart of it. Even at the end, bereft of senses, his faith remained absolute.
I will accomplish it.
He crawled on.
And then, only then, will I die.
Chapter Seventeen
For a while at least, the guns had fallen silent. The wasteland between the spires had reverted to a bleak, toxin-infested swamp, untroubled by the grinding passage of tank groups or the tread of Titans. Hot winds blew across the tangle of blasted buildings and roadways, pulling ash across the evidence of fighting. Smouldering wreckage started to coat with a thin layer of coal-black filth.
The twin Melamar hives had finished burning. Their precipitous outer walls were broken and black, and a thousand columns of smoke rose lazily into the gloomy sky. To the east, the Axis spires still raged with untamed fires. Immense gashes had been cut into the flanks of the conurbations, glowing with fringes of magma-hot metal.
To the north, the vast structure of the Capitolis stood inviolate, half-lost in the haze of distance. Its mighty walls rose high, pristine and surmounted with ranks of gun batteries. A soaring mass of domes, gothic buttresses and blackened turrets thrust above them, undamaged still, glowing with light from within. Far up, sweeping towards the summit, the lights altered in hue, going from red to purple. The uttermost pinnacle was hidden by drifting shrouds of ash, but the intense and unnatural glow bleeding from it couldn’t be hidden.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 234