It saw the danger, and tried to lunge at him again with the goad. By then, though, Marivo had been able to spin his lasgun back the right way round. He fired, and the shot blasted the creature clean over the railing. It tumbled out into the void, shrieking wildly before its plummet carried it out of earshot.
Marivo slumped against the railing of the stair, his hand clamped to his bloody stomach. He leaned against the stone. All around him, men and mutants grappled with one another.
Feeling dizzy, he let his head swing around. He looked out over the edge of the stairwell. The void fell away into blackness below him, vertiginous and yawning, and he realised how high he’d come already.
When he saw the green bloom race towards him from out of the depths, he had no idea what it was. He watched it puff out like algae in water, swimming out of the darkness and swirling up in broad, milky swathes.
Only when it hit him did he recognise what it was. He remembered the toxic fog of the wasteland, how it had nearly killed him before. He crashed to the floor, trying not to breathe in and knowing he would have to. The air around him flushed green as clouds of chemical fog raced up the core of the spire, billowing and boiling like thunderheads before a gale.
Marivo tried to rise, staggering forwards, then crashed to earth. He could feel blood run down from his eyes, and his skin begin to burn. He began to lose consciousness, but somehow managed to roll himself onto his back. He heard other bodies crash to the floor with wet thuds. He heard both men and mutants dissolve into fits of coughing.
His vision went cloudy. The sounds of gunfire receded, becoming muffled and echoing.
Marivo had no idea how the spire’s seals had been breached. He had no idea whether it had been intentional or not. Before he died, though, he did realise something that he guessed might be important: those of mortal flesh and blood, whether pure or mutant, could not fight for long in such conditions. They would die as the chemical filth filled their lungs. Only those encased in armour and with the physique of demigods could tolerate it.
The Emperor’s Angels.
Marivo let his head fall back. He gazed directly above him. As he did so, clouds of green-tinged fog rushed over him, sweeping up the Great Stair and curling around the core.
Bolted to an overhanging bulkhead, only five metres above him, was a standard-issue Imperial aquila. Marivo had seen thousands of such emblems during his service, and that one was no different. It was streaked with purple fluid and cracked from solid-round impacts, but it was still intact. Somehow it had survived the desecration, a tiny portion of Shardenus’s dignity still unbroken.
That gave him comfort. The image had been with him since childhood, defining him, giving him purpose. It was the emblem of his life. It was the emblem of all their lives. Now, at the end, it watched over him with blind, impassive eyes, unfurling its angular wingspan across the scenes of devastation.
‘Holy Throne of Terra…’ he breathed, beginning the catechism that would guide him to the Emperor’s side.
He knew he had achieved very little. He had killed a few traitors, and gathered a few more loyalists to his side. He had followed the orders he’d been given, even at the end when he’d had the chance to get out. Whenever he could, he’d stayed on his feet, fighting on, standing up to horrors that were far in excess of his limited powers.
He didn’t know whether that made him a hero or a fool. He knew what Khadi thought.
‘Holy Master of Mankind…’ he rasped, coughing.
He never finished. His jaw fell open, his lasgun fell from his hands, his chest stopped moving. All around him, traitors and loyalists slammed to the stairs, retching and scratching at their throats.
And so it was that, flat on his back, his unseeing eyes staring towards the heavens, Alend Marivo died the way he’d always known he would: his uniform on, his blast-visor down, and with image of the eternal Imperium gazing down upon him.
Telach sprinted up the stair, flanked by his three Codiciers. His breath came in deep, ragged gasps. Warp fire trailed from his armour in long glowing streamers, and the head of his staff flared like an imprisoned sun. The gap between the Stair’s edge and the bulk of the hive around him narrowed dramatically, closing down to nothing more than a few metres. He saw the curve of arches soaring towards their keystones, and knew the end was close.
Light streamed from the joints in his battle-plate, leaking out from the incandescence within him. He was burning himself up, bleeding with summoned psychic fire that consumed him even as he used it to kill the creatures that blocked his progress. The agony of it had long since ceased to plague him. It drove him onwards, keeping his purpose pure, goading him into ever greater feats of endurance.
Only he knew the full measure of the monsters being birthed in the spire above. If the rift opened, many more abominations would spill through, condemning Shardenus to a living hell of madness. The lesser daemons they had fought since entering the tunnels required only trivial sorcery to spin into being. The ones that were coming demanded sacrifices of worlds: they were devourers, the shrivers of souls, the bringers of torment.
One of Fulgrim’s sons. And he has fought us before.
Telach kept running, leaping up several steps at a time. Warp creatures crashed against his psychic shielding, burning away at the touch of the dreadful aegis around him. With every impact, a little of his strength was chipped away, a fragment of his power dissipated.
He’d gone faster than the others, using his psychic gifts to propel him. Only Nedim, Malik and Djeze, similarly wreathed in layers of fire and capable of using their powers to sustain them, had been able to keep up. Telach had blazed a trail up through the high places, using his warp-summoned powers to speed him onwards. Even he had not been able to outrun the clouds of toxins that had rushed up the central core, sweeping through the ranks of mutants before them and laying them low. Now, with the swarms of traitor creatures thinned out, every step, every boost, took him a little closer to the conflict that waited.
He had to be quicker. He ignored the stress-warnings from his armour, and he ignored the blood swilling in his boots, and he ignored the growing tears in his muscles. He kept going, ever upwards, ever higher, carving a path through the vaults of darkness like a spear of starlight surging up through layers of shadow.
When he finally broke through, it came as shock. He thundered onwards, tearing along the broken marble stairwell. He reached a ruined segment – a jumbled heap of fallen masonry and metal struts, as if a whole section of wall had been blasted inwards, clogging the way ahead. There was no way around – it seemed as if the entire spire had collapsed in on itself, closing up the abyss between the core and the rest of the structure and forming a massive clot of semi-molten, tangled ferrocrete.
Telach picked up the pace, accelerating towards the wall of ruin. By the time he hit it, he was moving at massive speed. He burst up into the wreckage, burrowing through it and throwing the lumps of detritus aside like a leviathan emerging from the deep. He felt his Codiciers follow him, burning and destroying as they came. His momentum carried him straight through, barging away plasteel beams and hurling cracked blocks of masonry aside. He heard huge crashes as rebars and rockcrete arches crashed down into the stairwell below, bouncing and disintegrating as they whirled into the abyss.
Then he broke out, bursting into the open on the far side. The layers of broken hive-structure gave out at last. Above them was a sky formed of boiling ash clouds and flickering orange lightning. Telach shrugged off the debris in dusty clouds, emerging into a scene of pure desolation.
He clambered higher, pulling himself free of the well he had bored through the broken metal, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
The pinnacle of the Capitolis was gone. Whole towers, domes and structures had all gone, blasted apart in a storm of incendiary fury. What remained was a blunt, unstable, half-collapsed plateau at the very top of the hive. It was comprised of molten metal and broken pillars, riven with crevasses, still flickering
with windswept flame, open to the elements and buffeted by the endless, driving ash.
Telach spun round, searching for the enemy that he had sensed for so long. His Codiciers pulled themselves free of the wreckage and joined him, their fists crackling with opalescent energies.
The plateau was big – four hundred metres across, at least – but was as uneven and treacherous as any blast site. Over to Telach’s left, a huge gouge plunged down the southern face of the spire, still burning furiously and sending rolling plumes of smoke drifting across what remained intact. Everything was black, scorched into carbon by the furious firestorm that had swept through the upper levels.
Far, far below him, down on the wasteland between the spires, Telach could see a long, ravaged formation of tanks bombarding the lower levels of the hive. Further out, almost lost in the smog and ash, were the two enormous Warlord Titans. They didn’t move, and no lights glinted from their cockpits. He briefly wondered what they were waiting for.
He began to move, striding out across the wreckage of the Capitolis’s pinnacle. It felt as if he’d emerged high atop some mythical pillar of the gods, thrust up from the mantle of a burning world and exposed to the gaze of the angry heavens. He could still sense corruption around him – it stuck in his nostrils, draining his strength and dragging on his muscles.
Then he saw the rift. It must have been enclosed once, hidden inside one of the Capitolis’s highest chambers and surrounded by the instruments of ritual. Now those chambers and those instruments were gone, blasted apart in an orgy of fire, and the portal was out in the open, cast upon the uttermost summit of the shattered hive spire.
To mortal eyes, it was almost nothing. An absence more than a substance, it hovered seductively on the edge of sight like a vid-feed artefact or a distortion on an auspex readout. Telach couldn’t focus on it; any attempt to do so made his eyes ache. Only the elements at its edge could be seen truly – a vague circle of flickering, wavering witchfire, ten metres across, hovering several metres above the plateau of ruin.
His psychic senses told him more. They told him that the rift was nearly complete, that the skeins of matter holding the structure of the universe intact were stretched very tight. Enormous forces clustered on the other side, ready to pour through the gap. He could hear the claws of the neverborn as they raged at the remaining resistance, scraping the veils of perception aside one by one. Daemons beyond number were clustered on the far side, ready to turn Shardenus into a nightmarish, eternal play-world for their obscene desires.
Telach strode up to the portal, feeling its unholy essence radiate across him. Out on the plains below, men continued to die, and fires continued to rage. His Codiciers followed him, each of them kindling fresh psychic fire from their force-staffs. They had the power to destroy it. The damnation of Shardenus would be halted.
By your grace, he said to himself, preparing for the challenge of closing it. We are in time.
He raised his staff.
Then, behind him, ten metres away, nearly on the edge of the dizzying drop, a pile of masonry stirred.
Telach almost didn’t turn. His first thought was that it was a lesser daemon that had followed them up, one that his acolytes were capable of dealing with.
But he did turn. Some note of disquiet made him look away from the rift and over to where the rubble was moving.
Claws extended from the wreckage, long and curved and made of black metal. A fist followed them, encased in horribly damaged armour. A spiked curve of pauldron broke free, scattering detritus as it rose.
Then the head emerged. Telach saw it thrash back and forth, shaking off the debris around it. He saw patches of skin, yellow with age and daubed with streaks of rouge, stitched together over a gaunt frame of jutting bone. He saw milky eyes set deep within ravaged cheeks. He saw curls of aether-light spill over its scalp, coursing across the tortured surface like streams of tears.
With an echoing roar, the creature pulled itself free of the wreckage, and uncurled itself. Lightning snapped and fizzed around it, lancing down from the heavens as if drawn by its unholy presence.
It was a giant; almost three times the height of a Terminator-clad Space Marine. It was a huge, shambling mess of armour plates, bulbous tumours of weeping flesh and gaudy, vivid swirls of decoration. Clusters of jewels hung from its breastplates in iron chains, clanking together as the monster moved. Flayed skin hung from its shoulders in long tatters, swirling about it in the ash-wind like grotesque purity seals. A motley collection of trophies had been bolted on to its immense frame, fighting for space amid glistening, overspilling muscle-bunches. Bodily fluids, pungent with foul aromas, sluiced across the chaotic landscape of ceramite and metal.
The creature stretched out, extending two enormous lightning claws, turning the blades and delighting in them. Witchfire crackled around it, licking and snaking up from the blasted plateau. Telach could sense the terrible hearts beating within that grotesque outer shell. He could feel the furnace of daemonic energy deep within, boiling and raging and only barely contained by the physical bonds set around it.
The monster had once been human. It had once been like he was – an Angel of Death, a Child of the Emperor.
The daemon looked down on Telach and the Codiciers. It recognised what they were. Its gaze was deranged, out-of-focus. When it smiled, patches of stitched flesh broke away from its skull, bursting free of their sutures.
‘Exquisite,’ it said.
Morvox thundered upwards, thrusting aside the living flesh that reached out to ensnare him. Filaments grasped at his armour and pulled tight before snapping. Snarls and blooms of chemical-laced fog rushed by, surging up from the abyss below and streaking up towards the summit of the stairwell.
‘Onward!’ roared Khatir, only just ahead of him.
The Iron Father’s flamers were raging just as strongly as they had been in the early stages. The mutants had ceased to be a threat – the toxic atmosphere had felled them in droves, freeing up paths ahead of the Iron Hands’ spearhead. The marble floor was carpeted with their broken bodies, bloated with fumes and with blood pouring from every orifice.
Morvox struggled to keep up with Khatir’s furious pace. The Iron Hands had spread out during the long pursuit up the Great Stair, many of them waylaid by daemonic attacks or dragged into combat along the many tributary spans. The thick chemical fog made reading locations difficult, even as it allowed them to race up the spiralling stairway far faster than before.
Morvox no longer knew how far behind his clave had fallen: their life-signals on his helm-display had gone, and damage to his right lens clouded the results further. His bolter had long since run out of ammunition, so he carried his chainsword two-handed, swinging it around him like a mace.
Even though the mutants had been eliminated, the daemons were still present. Impervious to the poisons in the air, they leapt from the inner walls of the spire and sailed over to the Stair, shrieking as they came.
Gergiz had been taken down by one of them; it had sprung from nowhere, grappling with him in an obscene parody of an embrace before tipping them both over the edge of the precipitous shaft. Morvox had seen other warriors ripped apart by them, crippled by claw-strikes, reduced to smoking, fizzing hunks of metal and ceramite by the rapid flicker of warp-fast blades.
‘Cleanse the unclean! For the Emperor!’
Khatir’s entreaties remained strong. He’d driven inexorably upwards, blazing a trail through the dark heart of the hive like a firebrand thrust into the night sky. Only now was his voice becoming cracked, the amplifiers in his helm stretched to their limit.
Something snapped out at Morvox’s shoulder then, thrusting out from the darkness. He lashed round, and his chainsword ploughed into what looked like a forest of human hands reaching out from the slough of filth that covered every surface of the Stair’s core. He hacked at them viciously, quickly turning the mutated muscles into a bloody, twitching soup of severed flesh.
Once free, he burst back into m
otion, sprinting hard to catch up with Khatir.
‘Purge the mutant!’ came the Iron Father’s roar from ahead, suddenly cut short by the heavy rush of flamers.
Morvox redoubled his pace, thundering around the curving sweep of the Stair, brushing aside the fronds of corrupted matter that still grabbed at him.
He rounded the corner and saw the Iron Father’s body twisted on the ground, crushed up against the inner core of the stairwell. Over it squatted a lesser daemon, its face alive with glee and covered in blood. Two of its sisters lay in the mire beside them, their heads severed and their skin blackened.
Morvox kept going, crashing into the daemon and carrying them both clear of Khatir’s body. It arched its back and broke free of him, pouncing to one side and swivelling around, ready to launch at him with its claws. Morvox lunged out with his chainsword, driving the blades diagonally across the creature’s body. The daemon screamed, thrashing against the whirring edges, before spinning away. Morvox went after it, thrusting out and hacking back, driving it towards the edge. He caught it again, snagging his chainsword against its body and churning through lilac flesh.
It screamed in agony before crashing through the stone railing and tumbling out into the void. Cut apart by Morvox’s blades, it dropped like a stone, wailing away into nothingness.
Morvox spun back round, hurrying over to the Iron Father, stooping over him and searching for signs of life.
They were there – very faint, just on the edge of detection.
‘Lord, an Apothecary,’ he said, stilling his chainsword and running a medicae scan over Khatir’s blood-soaked torso.
Khatir’s fist shot up. His gauntlet seized Morvox’s forearm. The grip was savage.
‘Go,’ Khatir rasped, and fresh blood bubbled up between his helm and breastplate. ‘The summit. Do it.’
Morvox hesitated. Khatir was not yet dead. Given time, given treatment, he might live.
‘I do not–’
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