Telach pursued, sending bolts crashing into its retreating torso. Both Librarians unleashed all they had left, emptying themselves against the daemon. The air itself seemed to carve open, riven apart by the elemental forces loosed through it. Stabs of lightning intensified, drawn by the enormous clash of energies, crackling and snapping around them like solar flares.
Even that was not enough. The daemon slowly regained its balance, and its demented laughter morphed into something more sinister, more purposeful. It pushed back against the veils of silver fire with bleeding hands. It lowered its broken pauldrons and strode forwards, step by step, back towards the two Iron Hands.
It had been badly hurt – a long gash ran down its disintegrating face, making its jaw sag horribly. A smoking hole had been torn in its midriff just below the shattered aquila, exposing blackened, pulsing organs within. Its tongue flickered back and forth, snaking across exposed bone and metal plate.
‘This has been exquisite,’ it gurgled.
Then it lunged, bursting through the crackling arcs of warp lightning, sweeping towards Telach like an avenging angel. Djeze intervened, and was blasted aside, thrown down with a contemptuous swipe of a bleeding gauntlet.
Telach planted himself, holding his staff before him and feeding it all the power he could muster. A glimmering shield formed in front of him, and he felt his armour servos stiffen against the coming impact.
The daemon thundered into him, wrapped in a glowing nimbus of purple flame, its claws sweeping back and forth in a blur of blinding movement.
Telach parried furiously, though the force of the blows nearly shattered his forearms. He was driven back, stumbling as the massive creature hammered at his defences. The shield before him buckled, ripped, and then splintered. He felt a fist thud heavily into his flank, cracking his armour and breaking the bionics beneath. He spun away, only for talons to rake down his helm. His right eye-lens cracked, and a rapier-thin claw gouged into his eye-socket.
Telach tried desperately to summon up psychic power, but his staff was ripped away from him. He punched out, clenching his gauntlet and going for the daemon’s chest. The daemon’s right claw shot down, taking his left arm off at the elbow. Its blades sliced cleanly through the metal workings of Telach’s armour, breaking the pistons and gears in a cloud of electric discharge.
Telach fell heavily, crashing on to his back. He felt his consciousness waver, and blood ran down the inside of his helm like oil. He struck out blindly with his right hand, and missed. He felt huge, warm fingers grip his throat, pressed against the armour of his gorget and pushing inwards.
Telach’s left eye blinked blood away, and his vision briefly cleared. The daemon’s face hung over him.
Its skin was hanging from its bones, suspended by stray lines of surgical wire. Blood ran freely down across its hide, pooling and bubbling in the folds of flayed flesh and shattered armour pieces. Jewels clanged on their twisted chains, each of them lit from within by twisting flames. Some of them were round and smooth, with the sheen of xenos artifice on their surfaces.
The daemonic face swung lower, and fluid dripped from the exposed flesh onto Telach’s helm. Its breath stank of incense and musk.
‘You have forgotten so much,’ it said.
Telach looked into its rheumy eyes, knowing the end had come. He was pinned. His hearts thudded in unison, going into overdrive just to keep him alive.
‘You do not know who I am,’ said the daemon-creature. Its voice was suddenly petulant. ‘You do not even know the names of your brothers I killed. Why have you forgotten so much? Why do you not remember?’
Telach felt fresh blood wash hotly across his torso, and his vision briefly went dark again. He concentrated furiously, trying to stay conscious at the last, determined to meet his death with his eyes open.
‘I do not need to know your name,’ he rasped. ‘You are just another traitor.’
The daemon roared with anger. It curled its claws into fists and slammed them into Telach’s body, denting his armour and beating the Librarian further down into the crushed and twisted terrain.
‘Santar knew!’ the daemon screamed. ‘He knew who I was! He knew that it was Julius Kaesoron, First of the Emperor’s Children, who had beaten him! You are shadows of what he was! You are sick! Where is the sport in fighting such diminished creatures?’ It drew its talons back higher, poised to attack, and fire ran along the length of the claws.
‘Ferrus would weep,’ it said, ‘to see what you have become.’
Telach blearily watched the points plunge down at him. He saw his distorted reflection in the metal as the polished edges rushed towards his neck.
The blade that saved him came out of nowhere, and crackled with a blue disruptor field. It locked with the daemon’s claw just above Telach’s helm, throwing glittering illumination across his battered armour and holding firm.
‘He never wept,’ came Rauth’s machine-growl.
Then the clan commander threw the daemon’s claws back up from Telach’s neck, strode across his battered body and launched into combat.
Nethata was slammed against the wall of the tank’s cockpit, and his head bounced painfully from a metal bulkhead.
He pushed himself back into his seat, regretting having released the restraints only minutes earlier. He pulled the strapping back across his chest, and the tank’s tilting floor rocked back to something like horizontal.
‘What was that?’ he snapped.
‘Our escort,’ replied the tank’s commander. ‘They’re finding our range; I’m moving up.’
The tank’s chassis swayed again as the engines coughed and growled. Nethata twisted around in his seat, squinting into his auspex and trying to make sense of the readings that flooded across the tiny screen.
If he’d been in Malevolentia he’d have had a whole bank of pict readouts to look at. He’d have had dedicated comms units, and tactical overlays, and everything else a field commander needed to coordinate a massed armour advance.
But Malevolentia was gone. It had taken a terrific amount of punishment before it had succumbed. Its armour was the best in the formation, and had absorbed a number of direct hits before the end.
Heriat had just kept advancing through all of it, even when the whole roof of his vehicle was on fire and the main cannon had been knocked out. Nethata had watched it all unfold on a tiny, grainy vid-feed all the while, powerless to intervene.
He’d tried to open up a comm-link. He’d not wanted to try to persuade Heriat to withdraw – that would have been pointless. He’d not wanted to berate him, nor query his motives, nor demand control of his army back, all of which would have served no purpose either.
To the extent that he’d had any plan at all, he’d wanted to say that he understood, and to assure him that the two of them needn’t die as enemies. He’d wanted to relive, just for a moment, some fragment of the shared memories they had accumulated over many long, difficult years.
Perhaps Heriat wouldn’t have listened. In any case, the link hadn’t worked – either Malevolentia’s systems were damaged, or he was being blocked.
So Nethata had watched, mute, as the final beams of light had shot out, piercing the super-heavy’s armour plate and striking at the engines within. The end had not been quick – more shots had been needed to ignite the fuel tanks that finally brought the machine to a flaming, shuddering stop.
The tank’s heavy bolters had kept firing the whole time. The engines had stayed running, pushing it ever closer to the semi-ruined walls of the Capitolis. Before he eventually died, Heriat had done more damage to his targets than the next ten units combined. Nethata knew that if any annals of the campaign on Shardenus were ever compiled, Heriat would be recorded as a hero, just as he himself would be painted as a traitor.
He couldn’t argue with that, even though it made a mockery of his decades of decorated service. Such was the price of giving in to pride, of forgetting what the place of individuals was within the boundless war machine of
the Emperor.
Nethata tried to shake such thoughts from his mind. He turned his attention back to the auspex readings. Even from the limited data he had, he could see that the remainder of the loyalist armour was destined for Heriat’s fate. Dozens of filtration towers had been taken down. Large sections of the hive walls had been demolished, setting off chain reactions within the spire that broke the atmospheric seals. Still, though, the defending gun positions were intact, and their rain of fire had barely lessened.
They had done all they could. Nethata considered whether to issue the order for withdrawal, wondering whether his troops would still take his commands. With their final task achieved, he still entertained the possibility of escape, of getting back to the fleet and away from Shardenus before the vengeful clan could catch up with him.
Even as he weighed his options, three new readings appeared on the extreme edge of his auspex range. One of the signals was very strange, like nothing he’d ever seen before. The other two were more familiar – Warlord Titans, heading towards the Capitolis at speed.
‘Lopi,’ he breathed, gauging the distance and trying to work out how long it would take them to reach the Capitolis. ‘At last. What has kept him?’
‘Did you say something, lord?’ asked the tank commander, turning round in his seat.
Nethata put the auspex down and looked at him. The game wasn’t over yet; not quite.
‘We’re going back, commander,’ he said. ‘Full reverse, and then follow the coordinates I give you.’
For a moment, the commander resisted. Just as before, he was unwilling to leave the fight.
‘I must protest,’ he said. ‘We are fully engaged.’
Nethata ran a finger along the edge of the bolt pistol he’d been given by Heriat. It was a commissar’s weapon, a weapon designed to enforce discipline. He didn’t plan on using it, but it was nice to know he had it, just in case.
‘Protest all you want,’ said Nethata calmly. ‘Then follow my orders. I don’t care who drives this thing, but one way or the other I will rendezvous with those machines.’
Telach fought for breath. Rauth had driven the daemon back, grappling with it in a brutal melee and pursuing it across the plateau. Telach had been left behind, broken in the wreckage. His cracked helm fed him a whole series of damage markers, though he could barely see them through the screen of blood in his one working eye. The pain where his arm had been severed was ferocious, even though more bionics had been ripped away than actual flesh.
Amid all of that, though, Telach’s overriding emotion was dread – not for himself, but for the portal he had been unable to close. ‘More Iron Hands were emerging from the spire below, but Telach knew they would be able to do nothing against such an arcane threat. He dragged himself away from where his brother warriors charged into battle against the daemon-creature, hauling his broken body one-handed across the knife-sharp detritus of the plateau. All around him the elements whined, tearing at his broken armour and clogging the rents with hot ash.
Despite the blood clotting over his eye, he could see it well enough. The witchfire at its rim was now raging like the world’s fire, red and angry. In the centre of the circle, the air itself was pulled back and forth, flexing like an amniotic sac. The creatures on the far side were obvious now, at least to one with his perception of the immaterium. Even as Telach watched, a clawed hand shot through the barrier, breaking into the universe of the senses in a cascade of multi-hued light.
No time remained. His staff was broken. Summoning the rituals of banishment was beyond him. All he had was himself – his own soul, pregnant with psychic power even as his body collapsed into oblivion.
He had always been prepared to make such a sacrifice. The likelihood of it coming down to such extremity had always been high.
Telach crawled on, feeling the tangle of metal and rubble beneath him rake at his exposed body. Shattered fragments of his breastplate ripped away, torn from the carapace beneath and dragged from their connector nodes. A mix of organic muscle and bionic components fizzed and ripped, mixing blood and lubricant freely.
The portal flexed further. Another inhuman arm reached through, gripping the rim and pulling it taut. The sound of hissing laughter broke across the barrier, growing in volume.
Telach kept going. He was dimly aware of a rising crescendo of bolter fire. Some of it crashed into the portal itself, aimed by those who had no real conception of what they were shooting at. They couldn’t hurt it by mechanical means – if the thing had been susceptible to such damage then it would have been destroyed when the atomic had gone off.
Only one power had the capacity to destroy the rift – the human mind, born out of a mortal cranium, locked in a skull of bone and steeped in psychic power. That, at least, was one organ the Iron Fathers had never tried to replace.
Telach hauled himself to his feet, ignoring the sharp waves of agony that radiated through him. He tottered towards the portal, fighting to keep conscious, to keep one leg moving in front of the other. As he went, he began the process of unbinding.
It was hard to do. Every discipline of a Librarian’s training focused on retaining control, of keeping the vast psychic potential within him under severe censure. Failure to do so resulted in the release of pure warp energy into the universe, creating vortices of unpredictability that threatened to destroy everything around their centre.
He limped closer, feeling the last shreds of physical control leave him. His secondary heart gave out with a hot, agonising burst. His consciousness frayed at the edges, making it seem like he was stumbling down a long tunnel of blurring, overlapping images. He felt a storm of psychic power bursting out from his inner core, roaring up from the depths of his mind and crashing through the barriers he’d spent a lifetime erecting.
The daemons on the far side of the rift saw him coming, and knew what he was doing. They clawed ever more frantically, trying to prise the last elements of the portal open, screaming obscenities and sending images of eternal torment directly into his reeling mind.
By then Telach had reached the edge of the rift, and his mind had almost ceased to function. He was deaf to the physical world and immune to its sensations. He burned from within with a furious white fire, one that bled from his soul in a torrent of destruction even as it sucked at the burning rim of the rift.
He was losing himself, dissolving into a rage of psychic essence, his very being dissipating into a flood of burning, consuming aether.
Telach’s last act was to throw himself forwards, plunging into the swirling vortex of energies in an almighty blaze of full-spectrum light. He heard a massive explosion as if from far away, booming like the crash of surf on a distant shore. He felt the portal buckle and rupture around him, spinning apart as the energies of his dissolution reacted with it. He felt his own body ripped apart as the laws of the universe violently reasserted themselves.
Then he heard a vast sound, roaring like thunder, before it died away. A sensation of falling overtook him.
He passed through, rolling into nothingness.
It went dark, and everything stopped.
Then there was something like light, and something like time.
In his last moments, Telach knew he had destroyed it. He knew that because the world of Shardenus had gone. The entire universe had gone. In its place was a shifting, swaying abyss of infinite possibility. He didn’t see it – he had no eyes left to see anything – but it persisted before him. He had awareness still, a measure of sentience, but nothing else.
For a moment, it was staggeringly beautiful. He drifted amid its primordial majesty like a pearl tumbling across the face of the ocean.
Then they came for him, howling out of the depths. He had frustrated them, and he was adrift in their realm.
In its last seconds of existence, the soul that had been Telach knew what fate awaited it. It was exposed. It would be consumed, and its agonies would be as infinite as the pleasures of those that feasted upon it.
But
just then, for a fragment of what passed for time in that place, before the neverborn swam up out of the seething face of eternity to feed, it basked in the fading knowledge of what it had done.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Rauth swung his sword wildly, making no attempt to lend finesse to his blows. He launched his blade around him in huge, vicious arcs, leaving long trails of disruptor energy hanging in the air behind. With each blow, he took another step forwards. Stride by stride, he bludgeoned the daemon back.
The creature staggered away from him, barely meeting each incoming thrust. Rauth hacked and parried with abandon, moving with terrible speed. His armour had taken a ferocious battering during the ascent and plates hung from their mountings like discarded trophies. The ceramite across his left leg had been ripped away, exposing linked steel pistons in place of flesh and bone. His storm bolter had long since been discarded, and now he fought like a warrior of ancient legend, sword in hand and with an aura of righteous fury blazing from his blade.
As he pressed forwards, the familiar thunder of bolter fire broke out from behind him. Those of the claves who had survived the horrors of the interior were breaking out onto the plateau, loosing what ammunition they had at the retreating form of the daemon. They fired in constant torrents, each bolt slamming into the retreating creature and bursting through the lilac skin.
If it had been intact and in the full glow of its unnatural strength such impacts would not have troubled it, but it had been mauled by the attacks of the four Librarians. The power holding its sinews together was unravelling fast, and every swipe of Rauth’s blade, every detonation from a reactive shell, dragged it closer to physical oblivion.
It raged back, slashing at Rauth with its claws, lashing out with an equally ragged loss of control. Rauth grimaced as his right shoulder guard was shattered. His movements became even faster, propelled by hundreds of subcutaneous motors working in concert.
Rauth whirled his blade round, building up momentum for a final, heart-bursting lunge. As he swung the blade into position, a massive explosion burst out from behind him. Jets of crimson fire shot across the sky, streaking far out above the wasteland below. The air seemed to shudder, as if the elements themselves had been ripped out of alignment before snapping back into place. The entire pinnacle rocked, and more crevasses opened across its jagged surface.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 242