Gortz reached the base of the siege idol and began to climb. The crowd began to chant his name as it got closer to the altar where Lysander stood.
Lysander was very aware he was not armed. There had been nothing in the cockpit that would have made a passable weapon. One of the bone cauldrons was within arm’s reach and Lysander grabbed the largest bone there, perhaps a femur from a pack beast or oversized mutant, long and heavy enough to serve as a club.
Gortz reached the altar to a cheer from the crowd. Up close his face was a horror, a mask of torn and hanging skin through which could be seen the bloodied bone.
‘You dare?’ growled Gortz. It was all the introduction Lysander supposed he would get.
Lysander dropped back half a step and Gortz took the bait, swinging with his club. Lysander ducked it and the club smashed shards of stone out of the idol. Gortz followed up with his claw, stabbing it down as it snapped shut, aiming to grab Lysander around the shoulder so its blades would cut down into his upper torso.
Lysander rammed the femur up into the claw, jamming it for a moment. The blades of the claw crunched through the bone but by then Lysander had swivelled out of the way and was face to face with the mutant.
Lysander matched him in height. Gortz’s musculature was grotesque, more massive and powerful than a Space Marine’s build. A Space Marine was trained to see such things as an advantage in his favour instead of a weapon in the enemy’s hand. Gortz was stronger, perhaps, in a raw and brutal sense, but that slowed him down. It meant he could not react quickly enough when Lysander drove the heel of his right hand up into Gortz’s massive jaw, splintering bone as it snapped the mutant’s head back.
Lysander rammed his knee into the mutant’s groin, not pausing to wonder what might actually be there. His left hand hooked Gortz’s forward leg and threw Gortz onto his back. The mutant sprawled onto the altar and Lysander was on him, both knees dropping into the mutant’s abdomen, right fist punching over and over down into his face. The ravaged face was a mask of gore, the bone of the eye sockets and jaw open to the air, bloodshot eyes rolling.
Gortz’s only move was to snap the claw at Lysander’s neck. Lysander knew it was coming before Gortz did. He leaned back and the claw passed over his face. Lysander grabbed Gortz’s elbow and wrenched it, feeling the joint part and the tendons snap, the claw hanging useless.
Gortz roared as the claw clattered to the surface of the altar. The mutant tried to raise his other arm, dropping the club to claw at Lysander’s face with his fingers. Lysander caught Gortz’s hand in his own, forcing it back down to the altar. A philosophy of unarmed combat that Space Marines learned – one among many – stressed the isolation and neutralisation of an enemy’s individual joints. The sleep-taught technique came to the front of Lysander’s memory as he forced Gortz’s wrist around and placed his palm down on the elbow, and put all his strength into forcing the hand up in the wrong direction.
Gortz’s forearm snapped with a sound like a gunshot. Lysander took his weight off Gortz and turned him over, kneeling now in the small of the mutant’s back. He wrapped an arm around Gortz’s neck and forced his head back, so he was looking up at the stone face of the mutant looming down above the altar.
‘Here, daemon!’ yelled Lysander. ‘Here is the champion of your arena laid low! Do you want his head? Shall I hold it up as a trophy? Give me what I want, daemon, and you will live your glory again!’
The crowd were silent below. They had expected to see Gortz victorious, as he must have been countless times before while rising to the rank of overseer. Now one of them cried out, a long, keening howl of sorrow and disbelief. Others joined him and in a few moments the sound filled the vault.
The sound of the siege idol’s engines growled and thundered, and resolved into a low, grinding laughter. It echoed the cries of the menials below, mocking them even as they fell to their knees and tore at their skin in distress.
The siege idol lurched forwards on its rollers, and menials scattered to keep from being crushed. The idol moved forwards towards the back wall of the vault, crunching through segments of armour and equipment laid ready to be installed on the half-finished war machines.
The siege idol accelerated towards the back wall of the vault.
Lysander had given it what it wanted, in return for a chance of freedom. It was a deal with a daemon – there was no way he could pretend it was anything else. But this was the way it had to be. This was the way he would avenge his lost brothers, and give himself a chance to save those who still lived down there in the guts of Kulgarde Fortress.
The thought was broken as the siege idol gathered speed. Standing on the altar mounted on the front of the war machine, Lysander would be crushed when the idol hit the wall and the huge chunks of masonry started to fall. Lysander threw Gortz to one side and jumped off the altar, grabbing the idol’s arm and swinging to the side of the war machine.
Lysander clambered along the armour plates covering the machine’s side, where gun ports shaped into grimacing daemons’ mouths made for some easier handholds.
With a deafening grinding sound the rollers at the front met the wall and the siege engine rode up as blocks of masonry shifted and split. Enormous slabs of it fell and kicked up clouds of pulverised rock. The siege engine forced its way through the wall, engines screaming as they worked up to maximum rev and gouts of flame bursting from the exhaust ports on the machine’s back.
One block of stone, the size of a building, tumbled down towards Lysander, smashing off armour plates as it fell. Lysander leapt off the side of the war machine before it could crush him, covering his head and rolling with the fall. Everything was earthquake and thunder, the heat from the machine’s engines and the battering of stone against his body.
Somewhere in the chaos Lysander landed. The noise barely died down as the siege idol ground forwards ahead of him. He had come to rest just past the vault’s back wall, where the structure of the fortress had given way to smaller chambers now torn through and shattered by the idol’s passage. Among the rubble he could see an eclectic mix of war trophies – captured banners, weapons and armour, scattered and crushed by the sudden destruction. Lysander waved away the worst of the rubble dust choking him and a bright silver gleam caught his eye – the polished chrome casing of an alien weapon, like an oversized rifle with a barrel made up of interlocking crystal shards. He recognised one of the banners on the wall, embroidered with the rose and skulls of an order of the Sisters of Battle, hanging beside a crude rendering of a stylised bestial head probably taken from a defeated ork warlord.
Lysander rummaged through the debris. The Iron Warriors kept captured arms and armour here, and there might well be something he could use. Even if he got out of Kulgarde into Malodrax, he would have a far better chance of surviving whatever the planet had to throw at him if he was armed.
He threw aside another alien firearm, something like a multi-barrelled cannon with barrels consisting of living wormlike creatures stretched out over a black steel hub. A sword he found had been fine once, but the falling masonry had shattered its long, elegant blade – he thought it might have been alien in design, too, perhaps a weapon of the eldar, or a particularly fine example of pre-Imperial craftsmanship.
A warmth rose in both his hearts as his hands closed on a familiar hilt. A chainsword – an Imperial Fists chainsword, taken from one of his squad. He held it up and gave himself a second to look along its length, the golden livery and fist symbol of his Chapter emblazoned on the weapon’s casing. It was undamaged, its chainteeth still bright and sharp.
The sound of something huge landing among the debris behind him was all the warning Lysander got. By the time he turned to see his assailant a meaty fist clubbed into him and threw him aside. He kept his grip on the chainsword but felt his arm pinned as Overseer Gortz leapt on top of him.
Gortz’s torso had split open and from his back had grown a new limb to replace the arms broken by Lysander moments before. It was sinewy and raw,
the skinless muscle oozing blood, but it was strong and its malformed hand was gripping Lysander’s sword arm.
Gortz roared as his battered face, too, split open. A second set of jaws, with an array of sharp teeth, was forced out of the front of his skull. He was mutating second by second, the second jaws opening wider than his humanoid mouth could have, revealing a wet red tendril of a tongue.
Lysander groped in the rubble with his free hand, trying to find a chunk of stone. Instead he found something less weighty but just the right size for his hand. He brought it up, smacking it into the side of Gortz’s mutating head.
It was a book. The metal fastenings and lock gave it a hard edge, and the thousands of pages were packed densely enough to give it weight. Attached to it was a chain, as if it could be hung from a belt or looped over a shoulder. Lysander changed his grip to the chain and swung it like a flail, battering Gortz’s head back two, three times. One of the fittings came away, embedded in the side of the mutant’s skull. Hot blood sprayed down over Lysander’s face.
The grip on his sword arm loosened. Lysander pulled his hand free and rammed the chainblade into Gortz’s upper chest, forcing down the motor’s activation stud. The chainteeth growled as they churned through the bone and muscle of Gortz’s ribcage. Lysander forced the chainsword down, sawing through sternum and ribs.
Gortz’s head hung limp, the second jaws yawing wide and the tongue lolling. Lysander pushed Gortz off him and made sure of the kill with a thrust through that mutant head. He looked down at the book hanging by the chain he held in his other hand.
Being A Description Of Malodrax And Its Foulness, read the title. Beneath that was branded on the leather cover the stylised ‘I’ of the Inquisition.
A Space Marine chainblade and a volume on this world apparently written by an inquisitor. Twin omens. It wasn’t much, but Lysander would take it. And the book itself was hefty enough to serve as a reasonable weapon until he could find a better replacement. Lysander wiped the back of his hand across his face to get the worst of the blood off it, and walked around the drift of fallen debris to see the path the siege engine had taken through the body of the fortress. A crumbling tunnel had been driven through a mass of wreckage and destruction, and Lysander could still hear the rumbling of the siege idol’s engines as it continued on its journey.
The Iron Warriors would definitely be down to investigate the destruction, whether word had reached them of Lysander or not. He ran down the siege engine’s path, noting the glimmer of ruddy light up ahead that could be sunlight. A wave of ashen air, tasting of dry earth and smoke, reached him, and he quickened his pace as the sounds of pursuers came from the vault behind him.
His first glimpse of Malodrax was of a grey-brown smudge under a discoloured sky, the siege idol rumbling off towards the broken horizon, two moons staring down through a mask of clouds like mismatched eyes. It was not an inviting landscape, but it was better than what he was leaving behind.
Lysander tightened his grip on his chainblade, and fled into Malodrax.
7
‘The natural history of Malodrax is beyond understanding without first abandoning the principles of cause and effect. A creature might devolve into a new form, the fossils of its ancestors far exceeding it in sophistication. Others are born through sheer randomness, from the coalescing of raw warpstuff into a form that matches the definitions of life, from sheer bloody-mindedness, as if to prove that life can exist where there should be only death.’
– Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan
The sphinx that guarded the palace of Shalhadar fought well. It flew down on wings of stained glass, the light of Malodrax’s sun shimmering in a blinding rainbow of colours, its four front legs each sheathed in gilded claws. Its massive stone-clad chest and impassive face turned aside bolter fire as it descended, holes battered through its gold and lapis headdress. It landed on the bridge that crossed the canal before the gates of the palace and roared, a terrible sound that shattered the pyramid’s grand windows and sent the golden gargoyles fleeing from their perches among the city’s rooftops.
First Sergeant Kaderic called out the sphinx, taking on the role of Dorn’s champion on this world. The sphinx, in turn, singled him out, and Kaderic dived and rolled between its enormous paws as it tried to crush him down into the bridge’s jewel-studded surface.
Kaderic drove his chainsword into the sphinx’s paw, hacking off a chunk of stony flesh. The sphinx reared back and, honour satisfied, Chaplain Lycaon gave the order to open fire. Squad Gorvetz opened up into the sphinx, blasting chunks from its body. The sphinx rampaged into the strike force, batting one Imperial Fist aside and forcing another down its gullet before the Imperial Fists charged in.
Lysander looked it in the eye. The sphinx returned the look, and even though it was surely dead, it smiled. Its lips, smeared with the blood of Lysander’s battle-brother, cracked as they were forced into the unfamiliar expression. Lysander’s chest flared with anger and he shouldered his way into the fray to drive his chainblade into the sphinx’s side.
The sphinx said nothing. Even as Lycaon vaulted up onto its neck and hacked his crozius into the back of its neck, it fixed its eyes on Lysander in silence. Lysander grabbed a handhold on the side of its face and drove his chainblade into its eye, the teeth grinding through glass and stone. Thick, oily fluid sprayed out, something like blood and something like machine oil. The sphinx fell onto its side and Squad Kaderic fell on it like hunters butchering a kill, hacking the sphinx into gory chunks as the bridge was flooded with its blood.
‘What was it?’ asked Lycaon, when the sphinx was dismembered and only the jewelled gates lay between the strike force and the palace of Shalhadar.
‘I know not,’ said Lysander. ‘A daemon. The guardian of the gates.’
Lycaon ordered the strike force to make ready to breach the gates of the palace. Space Marines stacked up beside the gates as Techmarine Kho, his Land Speeders hovering at the other end of the bridge to watch for enemies approaching, affixed magnetic breaching charges to the doors.
‘It saw you,’ said Brother Halaestus. He had walked up behind Lysander who took his place in the stack of Imperial Fists ready to storm through the gate. ‘It knew you.’
It wasn’t quite anger in Halaestus’s face. It was a questioning, an aggression.
‘This world knows me,’ replied Lysander. ‘Its creatures know me. Shalhadar learned of me, no doubt. Few escape from Kulgarde, and fewer still go back.’ He turned to the gates, but Halaestus grabbed his arm and turned him round again.
‘Did you come back for us alone?’ demanded Halaestus. ‘Or did you have help?’
‘Breach!’ yelled Techmarine Kho. The Imperial Fists backed against the pyramid wall as the charged detonated, blowing the gates off their hinges and locks. They fell in and before they had hit the floor the Imperial Fists were charging into the shadows beyond, fingers on triggers and chainswords in hand.
‘Shalhadar!’ yelled Lycaon. ‘The eye of the Emperor reaches you even here! Even in this foul place you are not beyond His hand!’
Inside the palace, the shadows resolved into the pyramid’s interior. Pastel-coloured silken drapes and intricate tapestries of intertwined bodies hung from walls tiled in a mosaicked riot of colour. Geometric tiles picked out infinitely complex designs on the floor, shimmering fractals that baffled the eye and the brain. The high curving ceilings, their petal-shaped panels interlocking high above, were covered in frescoes of dancing daemons draped in human skins, gambolling across heaps of flayed bodies. The place dripped with a lustrous corruption, enough to break and bewitch a weak mind.
Curving staircases swept upwards, leading to upper half-floors and balconies criss-crossing the pyramid’s interior. ‘Gorvetz!’ ordered Lycaon. ‘Scout above and cover us! Kaderic, with me!’
‘Nothing up ahead,’ voxed Kaderic, whose tactical squad was at the head of the strike force. His men swept their bolter sights across side chambers and galleries branching off in ever
y direction. There were podiums for sermonising, surrounded by seats with spikes and restraints in the armrests. Baths of steaming perfumed water. Walls racked with implements for paring and skinning, with gold and ivory handles arrayed like glittering waterfalls of blades. But no enemies. ‘We’re alone in here.’
‘You know better than that, First Sergeant,’ replied Lycaon. Overhead armoured boots clattered on mosaic tiles as Squad Gorvetz got into position to cover the rest of the strike force from above. ‘Lysander? What do you know of Shalhadar?’
‘Lord of this city, absolute tyrant of his people. Disloyal thoughts are a crime.’
‘Do you know how to kill him?’ asked Lycaon.
‘Cut him into pieces and burn them.’
‘That is what the people of Malodrax say?’
‘No,’ replied Lysander. ‘But that works on everything.’
The palace shuddered and a ripple of power ran across its every surface, sending sparks shimmering up Lysander’s spine. The two squads on the ground floor drew together, every bolter trained on the corners from which an enemy might leap.
‘The opening act left something to be desired,’ came a voice echoing from all corners of the pyramid. It was drawling and arrogant, with an inhuman resonance that demanded respect in spite of the scorn that dripped from it. ‘But that was just a taster, deliberately sour so our expectations were lowered. The death of my sphinx, rather dull. The blood in the streets quite unnecessary. But what follows will be the more delicious for it, will it not?’
‘I will not match words with a foul-born daemon!’ yelled Lycaon in reply. ‘An Imperial Fist has a tongue of steel and a voice of gunfire!’
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 288