The grip on his arm started to weaken.
‘Still, you question,’ growled Khatir, his voice degrading into a throaty mess. He sounded desperate. ‘Continue on present tasking.’
Something about the Iron Father’s voice made Morvox recoil then. For a moment, he couldn’t understand what it was.
Then he felt the old disgust rise up in him. He heard the sound of blood welling up through flesh, slipping over the mechanical components embedded there and fouling their operation. He saw the Iron Father’s raw muscle, exposed under broken armour plate, glistening wetly in the dark.
Khatir’s hand slipped from Morvox’s armour and thudded to the ground.
It will come for you soon. You will forget pity, and you will see the weakness we carry within us.
Morvox didn’t say anything more. He pushed his way from Khatir’s cracked armour and turned away. Already, from up ahead, he could hear the shrieks of the neverborn. From below he heard the thud of his brothers’ boots as they charged onwards. He started to move again, first striding, then running heavily.
Weakness.
Morvox gunned his chainsword back into life, and the sound of the lethal, mechanical parts moving lessened the nausea in his stomach.
I am surrounded by it. It is everywhere.
As he ran, he felt a nagging, itching sensation plaguing him. It made him angry. It made him want nothing more than to fight, to forget, to lose himself.
I will not succumb. I will transform.
Morvox charged along the corridor, following its line as it climbed ever higher. As he went, leaving the crippled body of the Iron Father far behind him, the cries of daemons grew louder and nearer.
I will purge it.
He picked up his pace. He relished destroying them. He wanted nothing more. When the first of them came into view, he felt like grinning.
The rest is strength.
The monster lurched into battle, crushing the brittle landscape of ruin beneath its feet. It moved with none of the sinuous grace of the lesser daemons – it was a patchwork creature of scraps and ancient relics, locked together by sorcery and its own infernal will. As it moved, whips of purple light slapped and slipped around it, bouncing from the shards of old, clattering battle-plate.
It grinned as it advanced, and its sutured face stretched. Iron teeth, each of them filed to points and dripping with viscous saliva, flashed through the drifting smog. Its eyes stared ceaselessly, bleary with malice and madness. Its lightning claws snickered back and forth, grinding against one another as the horror flexed its tattered muscles.
Across its enormous torso hung the remnants of an old breastplate, burst open by the glossy flesh beneath. An Imperial aquila had once adorned it, picked out in gold, but was now almost entirely obscured by baroque adornments and freshly-lacquered panels. Some of its residual armour had been painted a vivid purple; other pieces glowed with lurid pastel shades.
As it crashed towards Telach and the Codiciers, it gurgled with bubbling laughter, and strands of saliva hung in loops from its sagging jaw.
‘Perfect,’ it slurred, lingering on the word as if it had some significance for it.
Telach felt his hearts sink. He knew he had enough power to seal the rift. He might have had enough power, acting in concert with his acolytes, to fight the daemon-creature, though that was uncertain.
He could not do both. Even as he prepared to meet the onslaught he could sense the rift weakening further. Every heartbeat brought it closer to rupture.
+Strike together,+ he sent to the Codiciers, watching carefully as the three of them fanned out across the plateau. Each one of them held their force-staff two-handed, and eddies of psychic essence reflected dully from their dark battle-plate. +Say nothing, heed nothing.+
He could sense their tenseness, their readiness. All of them had passed beyond the possibility of fear, but they could still recognise the magnitude of the horror they faced.
The Emperor protects, he mouthed.
Nedim was the first of his acolytes to lash out, sending a spitting column of silver energy straight at the daemon. It exploded as it impacted, showering the plateau with smoking, spinning trails of sparkling residue.
Malik followed him, dousing the daemon in a welter of shimmering energy. Then Djeze released, joining the streams of coruscating warp-fire in a triangle of snaking, surging force.
The daemon rocked back on its cloven hooves, thrashing its arms through the deluge and hurling gouts of the silvery matter in all directions. A cry of tortured ecstasy escaped from its lips – an amalgam of many voices, many of them human-like, some of them indescribable. It waded onwards amid the storm of coruscating energy, lapping it up and letting it crash across its broken armour.
Then it burst through the oncoming tide, shrugging off the attacks and letting them break across its flesh like rainwater. It plunged towards Nedim, swinging its claws in slow, pendulous motions. As it lumbered into range, fragments of its haphazard body began to break away, flaking free like scales being dragged from the hide of some enormous saurian.
Telach waited until the last moment, until the creature had gained enough momentum to be unable to pull back.
+Unleash,+ he breathed.
An inferno of blazing silver leapt into existence, exploding in a raging storm of blinding light. The warp essence was dragged up from Telach’s very soul – the raw stuff of the aether, fashioned into lethal energy by the Librarian’s art, turned from a seething morass of formlessness and into a focused, deadly weapon.
Telach felt it thunder out from his staff, making the length of it shiver and his arms tremble. Light spilled from his eyes, from his open mouth, from the palms of his hands. The roaring maelstrom made the joints of his armour burn white-hot. He felt his whole body respond, caught up in the immense, consuming tide of power as it escaped from him.
The snaking barrage hit the daemon full on, sending it staggering back again. Its legs bowed, and it reeled away from Nedim. More unearthly cries of savage pleasure escaped from its mouth, and its long tongue flailed out wildly.
Telach took a stride forwards, maintaining the ferocious assault.
Burn, abomination. Go back to the realm that created you. Be undone. Be banished.
Djeze and Malik advanced with him, summoning up their own flurries of silver-edged bolts and hurling them at the retreating torso of the daemon.
The creature was wounded. Gouts of purple blood ran down its limbs, boiling as the silver flames evaporated it. More slivers of its bizarre armour were blown away, spinning off into the backwash of psychic power that streamed away behind it.
But it was no lesser creature of darkness – it was a prince of pain, a master of the dark wells of a mortal’s mind, and its command of sorcery was a match for all but the greatest champions of Mankind. Moreover, its movements were not those of a creature trying to evade the punishment.
It revelled in it. It wanted more.
It crouched down, hacking up laughter from its ruined gullet, continually bludgeoned by the rain of warp matter. Then it pounced, swinging into the air with a huge thrust of its gigantic legs. Its hooves crushed the metal as it landed, then it kicked off again, lurching and swaying through the torrential fire, racing towards Nedim and shrieking with splintered laughter. Its claws flickered through the air, jumping from one position to the next like out-of-sequence frames on a vid-pict.
Telach adjusted the trajectory of his assault, aiming to knock the monster back again and clear of the Codicier, but the daemon was too fast, too powerful. Nedim braced himself and swung his staff upwards to meet the daemon’s talons, planting his feet wide apart for the impact of the claws.
It never came. Somehow, the metal spurs seemed to shift out of position, causing Nedim to miss the parry and stumble forwards.
It was enough. The daemon grabbed him by the throat and lifted him high into the air. Telach and the others came in closer, hurling bolts of crackling warp fire. The bolts hit it hard, and it reeled
away again, still clutching its prey. Nedim, held up one-handed, slammed his staff down into the daemon’s face, aiming for its eyes.
Again, the blow should have connected, but – impossibly – the creature’s grinning face had already moved. It dodged the impact and flexed its arm, throwing Nedim high into the air. For a fraction of a second the Codicier hung powerless above the laughing daemon, his limbs outstretched and his staff out of position. Then the monster thrust up with both its claws, plunging its blades through Nedim’s waist.
The Codicier was torn in two, his torso rent cleanly apart in a bloody flail of gore and broken ceramite. The pieces crashed to the ground, followed by a rain of wet slaps as his eviscerated entrails followed him down.
The daemon swung around, doused in blood and buffeted by the roaring, spitting streams of silver fire from the remaining three Librarians. It threw its tortured head back and uttered a gargling cry of triumph, soaking up the furious volleys of warp matter as they exploded against its flanks.
‘Magnificent!’ it bellowed, revelling in the carnage it had caused even as it suffered under the torrents of forking energy. Blood ran down its scarred chin, and its long tongue lapped it up. ‘Give me more, Gorgon-spawn! Give me more!’
Malik and Djeze each withdrew steadily, maintaining the lines of blistering force from their staffs, unwilling to be caught within strike-range of the creature’s claws.
Telach felt a cold dread pass through him. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the rift pulsing. The empty space between the ring of witchfire had distorted further, as if it were bulging outwards. The daemon-creature’s presence in the world was drawing the others towards it. For the first time, he saw shapes on the other side – writhing shapes, pressing up against the thinning walls of matter.
+Do not withdraw!+ he ordered the Codiciers, feeding more energy to his crackling staff and breaking into a run towards the towering daemon. +It can endure this fire. Move in – get closer.+
As he ran, the last bolts of warp energy crashed into their target. Telach withdrew his power to the staff itself, coating it in a sheen of magnesium-white. The length of it blazed with sudden brilliance, transforming into a force-weapon of concentrated luminescence.
‘For Manus!’ he roared, breaking into a rare battle-cry as he lumbered heavily into range.
The daemon lurched towards him in turn, swaying and giggling even as its cloak of flayed flesh crisped away in the deluge.
‘Manus?’ it laughed, frothing at the mouth with insane glee, bringing its talons into position and clanging them together. ‘I was there when he died, Iron Hand.’
Then it broke into a shambling, rocking charge, thrashing its arms as it came in a whirl of blades and blood.
‘We killed him,’ it mocked, bursting through the sheets of aether-flame. ‘We will kill you.’
Chapter Twenty-One
The Mechanicus crawler made its way slowly across the Gorgas, rocking and swaying as it crunched through the remnants of civilisation. Ahead of it, vast and magnificent even in ruin, reared the burning spires of Shardenus Prime. Lightning flickered across the heights, leaping down from swirling bands of cloud. The pinnacles of the spires blazed furiously, shining like blood-red beacons across the landscape of desolation.
Ys looked at it impassively. Her throne was hoisted on suspensors and remained reasonably level during the passage, but even the slightest jolts annoyed her.
She was ashamed, and she was still angry. Progress was too slow, and the chances of achieving what she needed to achieve diminished as every minute passed.
She glanced at the signals from her skitarii escorts. Some of her tracked units had pushed ahead, looking for a faster way through the wreckage.
They wouldn’t find one; her cogitators had plotted the most efficient route on the basis of detailed schematics. She would have to be patient. She would have to sit, immobile, locked inside the huge metal shell of her mobile fortress, and wait for the kilometres to pass.
I will kill him for this, she determined, gripping the sides of her throne with metal fingers. The judgement is just; Mars will understand.
She sat on the throne, watching through the noosphere projections as the spires drew slowly nearer, marking where the Iron Hands had broken in and gauging where their fighting must have taken them.
Her resolve hardened; it couldn’t come quickly enough.
I will kill him.
Telach leapt into the air, using his servo-powered legs to catapult him upwards. As he hurtled towards the daemon he swung his staff round, lashing out at its unholy flesh.
He had to move quickly. For all its shambolic appearance, the creature was the fastest enemy he had ever faced. Its blades whirled around him in a flickering, wavering dance, sometimes seeming to shift in and out of existence entirely. The gaudy array of grotesquerie was a distraction, masking a terrifying level of power within. Its muscles, bursting out from behind cracked armour plate, were a terrible mix of genhanced, warp-wound strength.
Even as he fought for his life, conscious that the rift was growing with every second, desperate thoughts raced through Telach’s mind. He had been party to lore forbidden to most; he knew the names of ancient traitors from the old Legions. He knew much of the history of his Chapter, even fragments of those forgotten days, millennia distant, when primarchs had walked among mortal men.
He did not know enough. The lore was incomplete. He did not know the name of the creature he faced.
Telach’s power staff crashed against the daemon’s claws, hurling fresh gouts of warp fire in all directions. Its talons swept back towards him and Telach veered away, smashing its forearms aside with his staff.
The creature’s hide ruptured, exposing a flickering skein of kaleidoscopic sinew. Fresh purple blood burst out, popping and cascading over the glowing matter beneath.
By then Djeze and Malik had closed in again, wielding their lightning-crowned staffs and hammering them into the daemon’s body. Their skill was prodigious, their bravery absolute, their commitment total. They fought as all the Emperor’s Angels did – brutal, fast, deadly. Their bionics made them stronger again, bolstering the momentum of every blow and speeding up their reactions by precious nanoseconds. The power of the aether rushed to their aid, enveloping them in curtains of consuming fire, flaring out with each staff-strike and raging against the unholy aegis surrounding the daemon.
It wasn’t enough. For all their speed, the creature of Chaos was faster. For all their strength, it was stronger. For all their warp-mastery, it was far, far more steeped in the sorcery of the immaterium.
It punched out with its taloned fist, rocking Telach back on his heels and denting his breastplate. As he tumbled away, he saw talons whistle round, cracking into Djeze’s helm. The acolyte went reeling, stumbling backwards across the tilted, broken landscape.
Then the daemon switched direction again, swivelling effortlessly. For all its demented, carefree laughter, every move it made was judged with deceptive precision. Malik charged in, bringing the tip of his staff down and releasing another torrent of spitting argent fire.
The barrage sprayed across the daemon’s leading leg, sending a stream of purple blood splattering across metal and ceramite, but the move had been foreseen. Before Telach could close in again, before Djeze could regain his feet, the daemon opened up its gauntlet.
The movement was perfect. Lilac energy exploded on impact, ripping through the ash and sending a resounding snap across the plateau. Malik was hurled through the air, careering wildly away from the explosion, his staff broken and his armour smoking. Even as he was cast aside, the daemon opened up its other fist, hurling a flaming ball of purple warp matter sailing after him. The second explosion was greater than the first – a monumental boom that engulfed the stricken Iron Hand in a welter of raging, consuming destruction.
His armour broke open, exposing the flesh within to the pure power of the warp. Telach heard Malik scream briefly before the Codicier landed heavily, c
olliding with the charred girders of the plateau. The sound was cut off by a sickening snap, and Malik’s limbs fell limp. A length of adamantium rod the width of a man’s forearm protruded from his cracked chest, impaling him to the summit of the spire.
By then Telach was moving again, wielding his force-staff two-handed. He rammed it down on the daemon’s tattered thigh, plunging the tip through the sorcerous muscle and burning it up with crackling warp fire. It reacted instantly, sweeping its claws around to knock him clear. Telach ducked, feeling the killing edges sweep above him by a finger’s width, before thrusting the staff upwards, aiming at the monster’s heart.
A little faster, and he would have done it. The daemon parried the blow just in time, bringing its gauntlet across to lock against the staff. It grasped the metal, squeezing it tightly and forcing it away. Telach pushed back, feeling his arms burn under the enormous pressure. He felt blood and sweat run down his temples.
The daemon leered over him, drooling from cracked lips.
‘Excellent,’ it crooned, piling on more weight. ‘I shall relish bleeding you last of all.’
Then Djeze roared back into combat, his gauntlets streaming with psychic energy. The Codicier leapt high, vaulting over a ridge of smouldering masonry and jabbing down with his staff. The blazing tip of it hit hard, driving deep into the daemon’s armoured shoulder. Opalescent fire surged out, crashing across all of them in a glittering, torrential deluge.
The daemon released the pressure on Telach’s staff and was beaten back, laughing all the while. Strips of skin from its sutured face were ripped away, revealing bloody muscle tissue underneath. More armour fragments were blasted clear. It roared with pleasure from every bloody wound it received, revelling in every impact and fresh bite of warp flame.
Freed to move again, Telach swung his staff around, building momentum. He unleashed a fresh torrent of crashing, roaring destruction, adding his fire to Djeze’s in a brutal, spitting conflagration. Under the twin assaults, the daemon withdrew further, limping awkwardly, thrashing its limbs wildly amid the deluge as if swimming through it.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 241