‘Come, will you not allow me at least some drama?’ came the reply. ‘No agonising with the struggle of inflicting death? No conflict between duty and fear? But no, you are not like those who come to Malodrax as pilgrims to my majesty. You have not arrived in my city to seek something within yourselves, to kneel at the foot of a mighty throne. No, your tales are quite different. Your weakness is not worn on the outside. It is deep inside you. This second act will see that weakness being extracted from your flesh. I think I shall enjoy this production.’
Music began, a sick, pulsating skirl that brought the awful daemonic music on board the Shield of Valour to the front of Lysander’s memory. Onto a balcony above the strike force somersaulted a lone figure in bright, clashing garb, with slashed sleeves and a hooded red and blue checked cloak, like a fool from a noble’s court. The fool bowed and spread his hands, then straightened up and clapped briskly as if to signal the beginning of a stage act.
Chaplain Lycaon shot down the fool, and as far as Lysander could see from the body that fell from the balcony, it was human. The music changed tone to a fanfare and suddenly, everything was movement.
From the tapestries unravelled the shapes of cavorting daemons, their forms indistinct and malleable as if they had been picked out from only one angle in golden thread and in reality they were not all there. Shapes blistered up from the frescoes overhead, the painted daemons now come to life, dripping with colour as if they were composed of an artist’s paint that had not dried. They left bright hand- and footprints on the ceiling as they scurried.
Squad Gorvetz hammered fire up into the daemons swarming towards them. Heavy bolters blew slabs of painted plaster down from the ceiling and the squad’s heavy plasma gun left smouldering craters where it hit home. Bolter fire joined the heavy weapons, Gorvetz yelling orders to split up into fireteams and catch the daemons in a crossfire.
From the floor leapt fractal dancers, their shapes spiralling and breaking apart as they flipped and twirled. They defied the eye, leaving trailers of swirling colour wherever they went.
‘It’s a ruse,’ said Lysander as the dancers and tapestry daemons closed. ‘A performance. He wants to tie us down here. We have to push on through this.’
‘First things first,’ replied Lycaon, his crozius’s power field shimmering into life.
The Space Marines of Squad Kaderic were caught by the assault. Bolter fire blasted a tapestry daemon apart, spraying multicoloured blood where its impossible form was ruptured. Kaderic dived into the fray as he always did, and Lysander lost sight of him in the coil of a fractal dancer that somersaulted around him as he struck about it with his chainblade. Lysander’s own blade cut off the limb of a fallen fresco daemon that thudded into the floor beside him – it was a vivid red, its body the hub for a dozen limbs, amber-coloured eyes set into liquid sockets like polished gemstones in a pool of blood.
Lycaon finished off the daemon with his crozius, splitting it in two. It liquefied and the paint used to create it spread across the floor.
‘Imperial Fists!’ ordered Lycaon. ‘We cannot tarry here! Shalhadar fears us and sends his lackeys to slow us down, but we will falter not one step! Onwards, my brothers! Onwards!’
A daemon rushed at Lysander, the threads of its body unravelling and reforming into claws to rend and hack. Lysander caught the claw on his shoulder guard and threw the daemon aside, trusting the blades and bolters of his fellow Imperial Fists to finish it off.
Ahead the pyramid was changing, the walls bowing out and balconies receding to form a vast auditorium centred on a semicircular stage. Background flats fell down onto the stage – a galaxy, a castle, heaps of bodies, distant mountains, all daubed with paint. Sparks fell in a burning rain and great globes of light flared into life above the stage, casting shafts of hard silvery light.
‘The stage!’ yelled Lysander. ‘He exists in the story! He can be brought forth to die if the story is acted out!’ Lycaon and Kaderic were fighting their way towards Lysander, following him in the direction of the stage.
Banks of seating rose from the sloping floor like rows of teeth from a jaw. The ceiling soared up impossibly high, studded with royal boxes and half-formed statues like drowners breaching the marble surface. Darkness ran down the walls, the stage drawing the harsh light to it as if jealous. Lysander vaulted the seating even as the statues broke away from the walls, stone limbs broken at the joints to give them motion, animated by sparks of black fire dripping from their eye sockets.
Lysander smashed one aside. A hard stony hand grabbed him by the throat and wrestled him to the floor. Lysander was on his back before he could get his bearings, the blank stone face with its mouth gaping wide drooling black flame. Marble fingers found Lysander’s mouth, gripping his jaw and forcing his own mouth open.
A crescent of burning light arced across Lysander’s field of view, scorching a crimson slash onto his retinas. He rolled aside as the weight went off him and saw Chaplain Lycaon’s follow-up swing taking the animated statue’s head off, his crozius slicing through marble as if it were no stronger than flesh.
Lysander said nothing as Lycaon offered his hand. Lysander took it and was pulled back to his feet.
Dozens of the statues were crawling down the walls. Imperial Fists making it into the theatre were sniping them down as they advanced down the aisles towards the stage. Kaderic was leading them, crying out the name of Dorn and the fallen forefathers of the Imperial Fists.
‘And so,’ said Prince Shalhadar, ‘the protagonist walks from the wings. And every story needs an end.’
Lysander reached the stage and swung himself up onto it. Chaplain Lycaon was beside him. First Sergeant Kaderic got there at the same time.
The light falling on the three Imperial Fists was fierce enough to burn. The rest of Squad Kaderic fighting in the auditorium were rendered shadows on shadows by the contrast.
‘You know more about this Shalhadar,’ said Lycaon. ‘Willing to share anything further, captain?’
Any answer from Lysander was cut short as the scenery was consumed in a blast of multicoloured flame that rushed into the air above the stage and from which strode the form of Prince Shalhadar the Veiled.
The idealised human form, as chiselled by sculptors from one side of the galaxy to the other, was rendered in solid gold. It was achingly beautiful, painful to look at, with a face moulded into an expression of wisdom and sorrow, majesty and sympathy. A mortal sculptor could never match it. The geometry was too perfect, the emotion too vividly written, to be the product of an artist’s hand. It was forged in the chill fires of the warp, where the thing that was Shalhadar had conjured its body to enthral and bewitch the humans it desired to serve it.
Shalhadar was three times the height of a man. He had wings of feathered light. Stained glass was embedded in his golden form, in panels in his abdomen and chest depicting what a mortal mind might make of great powers of the warp – a knot of flesh and limbs, a great burning eye, a host of flying devils. His eyes were glass, deep green and blue, and a light shone through every panel illuminating the air around him as if he swam in a sea of colour.
In his hand he held a mace, its head a globe of filigreed gold containing a white flame like a caged sun. His other was fitted with gilded blades on each finger. He wore a cloth of crimson and blue around his waist, flowing in the warm incense-scented wind that accompanied the prince.
Prince Shalhadar’s golden feet touched the boards of the stage as he descended.
Lysander realised that he was standing watching the daemon – not laying about him with bolter and chainsword, not rallying his battle-brothers to join him in killing Shalhadar. He was just standing there and watching him, and he could not move.
He imagined being bathed in pain, a sea of fire around him that would get worse and worse unless he could move. He imagined his mind a wall of diamond through which no influence could reach.
His hand twitched around the hilt of his chainsword.
‘A fine entrance,’ said Chap
lain Lycaon. ‘How many have fallen at your feet when they see it, daemon? How many minds did you break?’
Lysander forced his head around. Lycaon was grimacing, fighting to move. Kaderic, too.
Shalhadar leaned down close, his too-perfect, shining face a few centimetres from Lycaon’s.
‘As you reckon numbers, mortal, they are beyond counting. As the warp reckons them, but a drop in an ocean of obsession. But a whisper in the hurricane.’
Kaderic roared and brought his chainsaw down in a clumsy, swingeing blow, such as would shame a novice handling the weapon for the first time. Shalhadar, without looking, caught the chainsword in his clawed hand and turned, a smile on his gilded lips, towards First Sergeant Kaderic.
‘And which role do you play?’ said the daemon prince. ‘The Fool? The Master? The Misbegotten One? Everyone has a role in the tale. Everyone plays it whether they know it or not.’ The daemon cradled Kaderic’s face in his claw, and pointed to Lysander with his mace. ‘And your captain here has already played out plenty of scenes of his own. Do you know, First Sergeant, Chaplain Lycaon, the role Lysander took on while he languished on Malodrax? Do you know what he has done?’
A shot hammered out and Prince Shalhadar’s head snapped to the side. A circular dent had been blasted into his temple. Through the blaze of light hovered the ruined face of Brother Halaestus, armour scored and smoking. Though Lysander could not see the mangled remains of the daemons he had cut his way through to get to the stage, there could be no doubt they lay behind him.
‘No!’ yelled Shalhadar. ‘The story must be told!’
He swung his mace in a great arc that would have crushed Halaestus had he not thrown himself through the scenery flats before it smashed through the stage. Shalhadar grabbed Halaestus around the waist and held him up in the air, about to dash him back down against the stage.
Shalhadar’s perfect face was blemished. The enthralling spell was broken. Lysander moved as if through glue, but he moved, and he dived at Shalhadar’s back leg. Heavy, cold metal met him as he threw his full weight against Shalhadar. The daemon prince dropped to one knee, letting out a yell of anger that sounded like a great tolling bell.
Lycaon leapt onto the daemon prince, finding a handhold among the gemstones and glass studding Shalhadar’s shoulder, so he was face to face with him. He drew back his crozius and slammed it down.
The power field discharged and split Shalhadar’s torso from his shoulder down to his abdomen, shattered glass and jewels scattering in a bright rain across the stage. A fractured rainbow of light sprayed out, a multicoloured torrent of power that fountained from Shalhadar’s sundered body. Lycaon was thrown off Shalhadar by the force of it, and Lysander just had time to see the Chaplain sprawling across the stage before the sheer madness erupting from Shalhadar overwhelmed his senses.
The question of what Shalhadar the Veiled actually was could never be answered. It was, like everything born of the warp, immune to logic. The gilded body was a vessel for the real daemon, symbolic of Shalhadar’s true nature but not identical to it. The daemon itself was an essence, a mind, a mass of thought, something incorporeal by human reckoning but a force as real as anything could be in the warp. Daemons could take on an infinite variety of shapes in realspace, and Shalhadar had no shape at all.
It was Shalhadar who saturated the theatre of his palace, flooding it with the mass of emotion and knowledge that comprised his true self. Lysander was blinded with colour and deafened by noise, swimming as if in an ocean surrounded by it.
He fought like a swimmer trying to reach the surface, but there was nothing to push against, no sense of direction. It was not a physical struggle that would show him the way.
Lysander turned his focus inwards. It was a technique taught early in a novice’s conversion to a Space Marine, because it was in a state of internal contemplation that a novice was receptive to the hypno-doctrination that filled his mind with the Chapter’s accumulated battle-lore. His mind fought against the sensory bedlam. Part of his mind, the part left over from the man he might have been had he never become an Imperial Fist, demanded that he curl into a ball and let unconsciousness sweep over him. But that part had been quiet for a long time.
His surroundings resolved into an ocean, burning light below, moonless dark above. Lysander got his head above the surface. He knew this was not real – that in some sense he was still on the stage in Shalhadar’s pyramid. But if he let that reach the forefront of his mind, he would sink and pass out.
The ocean churned. Gilded limbs broke the surface as a hundred Space Marines fought to stay afloat. The eyepieces of their white-painted helmets were shattered and they struggled blindly, thrashing at random to stave off a fate they did not understand.
A great looming presence in the darkness dominated the horizon. A mass of boiling rage, like the smouldering mountain of burning ash from a volcano. Twin cauldrons of fire roared into life, and the ocean of light turned a dark red with their reflection. Shalhadar’s eyes narrowed as they fell on Lysander.
Lysander found rocks beneath his hands and feet. He hauled himself up onto a rocky shore, a scattering of islands just breaking the surface. ‘Lycaon!’ he shouted. ‘Chaplain! First Sergeant!’
‘Give me an enemy,’ said a strained and hoarse voice beside Lysander, ‘with a heart I can cut out and a head I can sever. Not this pit of lies.’ First Sergeant Kaderic lay on the rocks, his armour scored and battered.
‘Stay strong. Stay focused, brother. The daemon lies and evades us, but it is never invulnerable. It is never beyond justice.’
‘The First?’ said Shalhadar, indicating the Space Marines drowning in the endless ocean.
‘My memory of them,’ said Lysander. ‘The daemon brings it forth to break me. It will not work.’
Shalhadar swarmed overhead, his dark mass lit from within by the flames of his eyes. There was something of that arrogance there, something of the tyrant who broke men’s minds so he had a legion of them to worship him. If he had a true form, it was this – the raw desire for power, overwhelming and dark.
Lightning crashed down. Kaderic got to his feet and held his chainsword, still smouldering with daemon blood, up to the sky. ‘Will you kill us with deceit, daemon?’ he demanded. ‘There is no lie that ever pierced a Space Marine’s heart! Face us with steel or skulk back to the warp!’
Shalhadar’s bellow was a crash of thunder and the blackness fell, roaring down onto Lysander and Kaderic. Lysander drove his chainblade up and felt it cutting through substance. Ropy black limbs swarmed around him and he cut about him, snapping and rending. Somewhere nearby Kaderic was roaring as he did the same thing, spitting curses at the daemon prince that constricted and writhed all around him.
The darkness split and tore. Lysander felt the blood-slicked boards of the stage under his feet. He spat out a mouthful of rancid blood and tore his chainblade free of Shalhadar.
Shalhadar’s golden body lay on its side, its torso split open. The rubbery black mass of the prince’s body writhed from the statue, its coils wrapped around Chaplain Lycaon, who stood on the fallen statue. Lycaon brought his crozius arcanum up, the power field crackling around its blade, and brought it down in a bright arc of lightning.
In a burst of light Shalhadar was blasted open, shredded and dissolved in a gale of light and noise. Lysander was thrown onto his back beside Kaderic, who like him was slathered in Shalhadar’s black-grey blood.
The glare in Lysander’s eyes died down. He clambered back to his feet and helped Kaderic up. What remained of Shalhadar the Veiled was a few scraps of charred gold, in a splintered and burned hole in the stage. Chaplain Lycaon lay beside the wreck, stirring as he grabbed his fallen weapon.
Lysander and Kaderic pulled Lycaon to his feet.
‘It is dead,’ said Kaderic.
‘It is banished,’ replied Lycaon. ‘Imperial Fists! The beast is defeated. Let us be gone from this place.’
The withdrawal from Shalhadar’s city took a few m
inutes. While reaching the palace the Imperial Fists had fought through hundreds of daemons sent from Shalhadar’s court to stop them, but with the daemon prince abolished the resistance was gone.
Instead, there was a terrible wailing, coming from every doorway and window. In the street, in a gold-plated gutter, lay one of the city’s citizens, curled up and mewling. Like many inhabitants he wore leather straps over pallid, pinkish skin, and he was marked with scars from whips and manacles. Whatever rites of passage the people of this city went through, it required a long period of torment and incarceration.
Lysander passed by the creature. It paid no attention to the Imperial Fists marching past.
‘These people have lost their god,’ said First Sergeant Kaderic beside him. ‘This is the desolation that Chaos brings.’
‘There will be another one for them,’ replied Lysander. ‘There is no shortage of would-be gods on this world.’
‘Brother Lysander,’ came Lycaon’s voice over the vox-link. ‘Join me at our head.’
Lysander quickened his pace to where Lycaon led the Imperial Fists, moving rapidly down the main thoroughfare towards the gate through which they had entered the city. They would be gone long before news of Shalhadar’s death reached the city’s forces outside the gates, and would be vanished into Malodrax’s badlands before the prince’s army had a chance to return and seek revenge.
‘The daemon,’ said Lycaon when Lysander was alongside him, ‘is made of lies as we are made of flesh and bone. It is a being solely of deceit. Whenever it speaks it lies.’
‘So have we been taught by the lessons of Dorn,’ said Lysander. ‘And so we have all seen.’
‘Shalhadar’s lie was the story,’ continued Lycaon. ‘A story is a sort of lie. He lived in a world that was not real, where everything obeyed the rules of his story. Even his destruction was a part of that. Perhaps he saw himself as a tragic hero brought low by the random chance of the galaxy.’
‘Or perhaps,’ said Lysander, ‘this is the end of a first act, and he will return in a thousand years for the finale.’
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 289