‘I will not, lord,’ he said. ‘Never again.’
Columns of men were moving. They didn’t march with the assurance they had done, back when the Iron Father had roused their spirits with his exhortations of duty and sacrifice. They were hunched, sullen, exhausted, terrified.
Marivo watched them pass before dropping back out of sight. The interior of the tunnels echoed with the thud of their boots. Loudspeakers blared out orders, one after the other, all of them demanding more duty and more sacrifice. He barely listened to them – they had become little more than background noise.
He slumped back against the grav-train track housing – a trench barely a metre deep – pressing himself against the cracked ferrocrete wall. His boots slipped on the viscous slime underfoot. He didn’t look too closely at that; it had a familiar stench.
Khadi squatted beside him, breathing heavily. She had barely made it into the shelter of the wall’s shadow. Her physical strength was recovering, but her resolve had crumbled. On the long trudge back from the front line she’d broken into bouts of random sobbing, interspersed with sudden explosions of rage. He’d seen such things before, but that had been on long, arduous campaigns of warfare. The assault on Shardenus had been going on for a matter of days, but already troops were losing their minds from stress and exhaustion.
The trench gave little shelter – just a slightly deeper shadow against the whole mass of spotlights, tracer beams and moving vehicle headlights. Still, it had given him what he needed: a breathing space, a chance to collect his shattered thoughts about what had happened and put them in some kind of order.
Marivo had seen whole companies of loyalist troops swept away. While the daemons had swooped down on them from above, no effective resistance could be mustered. Only luck had saved him. Somehow he’d kept out of the worst of the massacres, dragging Khadi behind him and firing only when he’d had to. His old injuries had started to play up again, and his shoulder had blazed with pain, hampering his aim and making his eyes water.
Then the Iron Hands had returned, marching back down the tunnels and laying waste to all before them. They had been as terrifying as anything else. They had killed, and killed, and killed. Until then he’d have sworn that nothing could stand against a daemon, but they had. They had never taken a backward step. Even as the unholy monsters had ripped into their sacred armour and plunged glowing claws into their exposed flesh, they’d kept on fighting.
All of this Marivo had watched, staying hidden amid the stink and the corpses, holding on to Khadi and keeping his hand clamped over her helmet’s mouthpiece in case the sobbing started again.
If you could fight those monsters, he’d thought, why were you not by our side when it might have done us some good?
As the worst of the horror and the fear subsided, that question burned in his mind. It made him angrier the more he pondered it.
So it was that he didn’t rush to join the shuffling rows of men making their way along the tunnels and back to war. An instinct deep within him told him that he ought to, that his oaths of office in the Guard bound him to service and that refusal to move when ordered was a betrayal, but he resisted it and stayed hunched in the shadows, his arms around Khadi in an unconscious embrace of protection, his lasgun primed to fire at anyone, from either side, who got too close.
‘What are we going to do?’
Khadi’s voice was little more than a whisper. Marivo glanced down at her. Her tear-stained face looked fragile. Her armour didn’t fit her properly; it never had.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
There was little point in pretending otherwise. He didn’t have a plan, and he hadn’t been able to come up with one on the dangerous and wary flight back down the length of the tunnels. All he had left was anger, fear and fatigue.
Khadi pushed herself away from him and craned her neck up above the lip of the trench wall. Her movements were tentative, but at least she was able to move again.
‘They’re still moving,’ she whispered. ‘I can see Iron Hands. They’re rounding up anyone still on their feet.’
‘I know,’ said Marivo, remaining where he was.
Khadi turned back to him, looking scared.
‘You don’t want to go back to them?’
She wasn’t being sarcastic, but she might as well have been. The words stung Marivo, like a mockery from the past.
Half of him did. The old half of him wanted nothing more than to drag himself back over the wall and report for service, just as he had done in the Melamar spire. His lasgun charge was low, but they would probably find a pack for him, and maybe a replacement helmet. Enough men had died, so there were sure to be spares.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
Khadi slipped back down beside him. Her hands were trembling.
‘I can’t go back there,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Throne, I can’t go back. We’ve done our bit. We’ve done so much.’
Marivo nodded slowly.
‘We have,’ he said.
Khadi leant towards him.
‘Could we get out?’ she asked him, her voice suddenly urgent. ‘This place is still in a mess. We could do it.’
Marivo had thought much the same thing. He didn’t know exactly how far down the tunnels they’d already come. In the dark, the wreckage and the confusion there was no way of telling.
‘Maybe,’ he said, not wanting to give her too much encouragement. ‘If they see us try, they’ll kill us.’
Khadi smiled weakly.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But others must have got out. It can’t be that far. We can get back into Melamar, lie low. There’ll be people alive in there, survivors, waiting it out, just like there were before.’
Marivo stayed silent. The struggle within him intensified.
‘And what then?’ he asked, speaking to himself as much as her. ‘What if we made it? How long do you think it’ll be before they catch us up?’
He looked at his hands, feeling weak and tired.
‘They never stop,’ he said.
Khadi grasped his hands then and held them in hers. The movement was sudden, unexpected. Marivo almost snatched them back, but didn’t.
‘Marivo,’ Khadi said. She looked at him, for the first time, like she was looking into the face of someone she could respect. ‘We’ve done pretty well, I reckon, to get this far. Come with me. Forget about your duty – look where that’s got us. We could make it, the two of us. Shardenus is a big place.’
Marivo looked up at her, startled. He had never heard her speak like that before. For the first time, he heard the strength in her voice.
‘We don’t have much time,’ she said. ‘I’m going. I’ve decided.’
She got to her feet, swaying a little as she found her bearings.
‘What will you do?’ she asked, looking at him anxiously. ‘You have to choose now. Come with me – we can make it.’
Marivo couldn’t take his eyes away from her. His mind cycled through the options, over and over, just as it had been doing for the last half-hour. Just as it had been for the last half-hour, the choice remained impossible.
Khadi looked over her shoulder, itching to go. From somewhere deep in the tunnels, the sporadic thud of bolter fire could still be heard.
‘Come on,’ she said, getting ready to make her move. ‘What’s it to be?’
Marivo remained still for a fraction longer. Then, finally, he stirred himself. He felt no confidence in his choice, but at least he’d made it.
‘All right,’ he said, hoisting his lasgun into position. ‘Maybe I do have a plan.’
Chapter Eighteen
Valien crept on all fours along the conduit. The tunnel was barely big enough to squeeze down, and it pressed against him tightly. Yielding flesh slid over him, lubricated by a layer of thick, glistening slime. He had to go slowly, pausing often to catch his breath.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He’d used up the last of his suit’s stimm-shots. Whenever h
e stopped moving for any length of time he’d start shaking from fatigue. He didn’t know where he was exactly, except that there was nowhere else to go, nowhere to keep climbing to. He’d reached the end.
A purple light glowed at the end of the tunnel. He pushed himself towards it. With each push of his legs he got a little closer, and the sensations within him intensified. He felt phlegm rise in his throat, and swallowed it down.
The walls around him began to yield a little. The tunnel opened out as his hands pressed against it, exposing a narrow orifice at the end, just a few metres away. Through the trembling lips of the orifice, Valien could see nothing but a swirling cloud of purple.
He hesitated. The weight of dread in the air had become so heavy that he almost couldn’t move. Every physical action required a huge effort of will.
It is in there. If I go in there, I die. It is in there.
The prospect of his own demise chilled him a little. He’d expected it to be quick – at the end of an arbitrator’s power maul, perhaps, or locked in heroic combat with a similarly skilled agent of the arch-enemy.
You do not deserve any of that. Not for the sins you have committed.
Valien licked his parched lips, and shoved himself forwards. The slick walls of the tunnel slid over him, leaving trails of glistening slime on his armour. His forehead pressed against the trembling lips of the orifice. The gap was barely wider than his shoulders.
He closed his eyes for a moment.
Blessed Emperor… he began, before trailing off.
He could no longer remember the words.
He opened his eyes again, took a spore-filled breath, and pushed his head through the gap.
Immediately, he knew where he was. From his know-ledge of the spire’s schematics, he recognised the shape of the governor’s audience chamber, right at the top of the administrative palace. There was no mistaking the room laid out before him – it must have been over a hundred metres in diameter and perhaps twice as high, and nothing else in the upper spires was remotely as big.
He had emerged high up one of the inner walls. Below him, he could make out a glittering carpet of slime strewn across what had once been marble flagstones. It looked like incarnadine vomit.
The remaining walls of the chamber soared up far above him, terminating in a sheer pointed arch. Chandeliers hung on iron chains from the ceiling, each one emblazoned with crystals and burning with lilac fire.
The chamber was octagonal. Five of the walls, including the one Valien had emerged from, had been constructed from dark stone, fluted and ornamented in the Imperial Gothic style. Most of that decoration was now covered in a thick layer of translucent ooze which glistened warmly in the light from the chandeliers and dribbled obscenely over the faces of sculpted angels.
The remaining three walls were made of armourglas and formed part of the outer skin of the spire. The huge windows looked south, out across the wasteland between the hives. Though his view was clouded by the filth in the air, Valien could just make out the hunched outlines of the Melamar and Axis hives on the southern horizon.
It was an odd thing to see. He’d been active in Melamar Primus only days previously, creeping through the corridors and goading its inhabitants into action. Back then, he’d been in confident control of all his considerable faculties; now, he was only a finger’s width from expiring.
His gaze dropped back into the chamber itself. Before Shardenus’s ruling classes had turned to corruption, Valien imagined that the space would have been austere and elegant. The workmanship of the panes was impressive. The statuary, what remained of it, was imposing. It would have been a fine location to receive ambassadors, Imperial officials, trade delegations.
Now the place had been turned into a carnival of grotesquerie. Facets of the glass swam with filmy matter. Mouths opened and closed obscenely between the flexing stonework. Dripping protuberances snaked out from pools of bubbling froth, lashing back and forth as if searching for prey. Twisting lines of burning incense rose up from the floor, each one a different colour – purple, crimson, cobalt, cadmium. Coloured smoke merged and melded, turning the air of the chamber into a vaguely blood-coloured murk.
The chamber was full. A chorus of murmuring emanated from its occupants, thousands of them, all arranged around a tall throne in the centre of the marble floor. As far as Valien could make out, they were all naked, all bare-headed, all covered in tattoos and splattered purple sigils. They swayed in unison, rippling in time with an ever-present heartbeat that ran through the bones of the structure around him.
Valien didn’t look at them for long. Their murmuring made him feel nauseous, and he had to grip the edges of the orifice to keep himself in place.
He knew where he’d have to look next. He’d been putting it off, forcing his gaze to skirt around it, trying to avoid the inevitable. As surely as if it possessed gravity of its own, however, the throne demanded his attention. With his heart still hammering, Valien let his eyes rise until he was looking at it.
The very act was painful. No figure sat in the throne. The seat was made of obsidian. It was strangely angled. Light reflected from it in unpredictable ways, making it look at once bone-dry and blood-wet. Incense-heavy air shimmered above the empty seat, trembling with every beat of the immense heart. The effect was like heat-haze, or hallucination, or dreaming.
Valien squinted, trying to make some sense of it. He couldn’t latch on to anything. Every time he tried to focus, the image would slip away. Trying to fix on to the shimmer over the throne was like trying to control ball bearings on a metal sheet.
He clenched his fists and hunkered down, peering through the narrow gap and pushing his head out further. His eyes narrowed. He switched off his augmetic implants, resorting to his natural sight alone.
The distortion over the throne clarified a little. Even attempting to look at it made his head throb. Tears started in his eyes.
He saw something, just for a moment. It was just an impression – a fleeting after-image of a ghost presence, like a hololith spinning into being or a retina-burn after an explosion.
It was man-shaped, but far bigger even than a Space Marine. Valien saw tatters of dried flesh waving as enormous arms thrashed out. He saw the glint of armour rimmed with bronze, and harlequin patches of intense colour on ancient ceramite. He saw long, curved claws made of metal, and clusters of jewels hanging from clanking iron chains. He saw the remnants of a face, a once beautiful face, now a rag-tag collection of stitched sinew and gristle held together by steel clips and nutrient tubes. He saw two eyes, burning through the curtains of incense like plasma bolts.
He felt his grip slipping, and one hand dropped from the edge of the orifice. A gasp of pure horror burst out of his lungs, overriding all his psycho-conditioning and neural training. The world shifted around him, shaking and blurring. He could feel himself losing his precarious footing.
He pulled his eyes away – it was difficult – and tried to right himself. Waves of sickness washed over him, dragging at his frail, fractured consciousness.
He reached down to his chest again, searching out the indentations below his heart, beginning to make preparations.
As he did so, the daemons came. He didn’t see where they came from – they seemed to swim up out of the air itself. They screamed at him, hurtling towards the orifice like loosed bullets homing in on a target.
He saw the first of them just before the end, just before it came to take him.
It was beautiful – so, so beautiful.
He tried to reach down again, to do the thing he had travelled so far to do, but it snatched him away too quickly.
He felt its talons lance through his shoulders, punching through the flesh under the bone and hooking him out. Musk, maddening and potent, clogged his nostrils, accentuating his sudden, shocking agony. He felt himself lift, borne aloft by a violent kick and carried far out into the open. Dimly, as in a dream, he heard mortal worshippers bellow their rage at him.
The daemon�
��s claws ripped through him, tearing up his already tortured flesh and flaying layers of armour like falling leaves. Then, its work done, it dropped him.
With his last flickers of awareness, Valien saw where he was headed. The empty throne rushed up to greet him, replete with the fractured, semi-manifest horror that it cradled between its arms.
Before he hit it, he only had time to do two things. The first of those was to scream.
Rauth felt anger course throughout his veins, as rich and virulent as he had ever felt it. His armies were assembled again, ready to storm the gates, and his residual capacity for fury had been rekindled. It was not a good time to hear bad news.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked, keeping control of his voice with difficulty. ‘What do you mean, he wants to discuss terms?’
‘He has ordered his forces to remain where they are,’ said Khatir. ‘He says he will not commit them until certain conditions have been met.’
They stood at the base of the enormous gates to the Capitolis spire. Only Telach and Dozeph Imanol were with them; the rest of the claves stood in their assault formations across the huge expanse of the gates’ antechamber. Ranks of mortal soldiers stood behind them, thinned out since the last muster but still presenting a formidable force of arms.
Khatir was as angry as Rauth. Imanol, the Veteran Sergeant of Clave Prime, said nothing. He lurked silently on the fringes of the discussion, his Terminator plate crusted with blood and the residue of the daemonic. Telach too was silent. His exhaustion was palpable.
‘I will flay him,’ said Rauth, balling his immense fists.
‘He can be compelled,’ growled Khatir. ‘Give me leave to go.’
Rauth’s instincts were the same. He had a brief, satisfying mental image of tearing through Nethata’s scant defences and seizing control of the precious armour under the mortal’s control. It could be done.
He turned to Telach, suppressing a burning desire for revenge.
‘What of the Capitolis?’ he asked.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 236