‘Quite,’ said Lycaon. ‘And he lied to me, as well, right down to the final moment. Daemons have sought to do the same, of course, as has every enemy capable of a man’s speech who thought it might do him good. Shalhadar turned to me, just as my crozius came down and he told me that he was surprised it was not you who laid him low.’
‘Me?’ asked Lysander.
‘You said you were famous on this world. Could Shalhadar have heard of you?’
‘There is no doubt,’ said Lysander. ‘He probably knew most of what happens on this planet. He could scarcely have remained a power on Malodrax if not.’
‘And his words were intended to place doubt in my mind, that when you first came to Malodrax you somehow played a part in Shalhadar’s story that you have not told us, as was his suggestion when we first encountered him?’
‘Again, Chaplain, there is no doubt.’
The strike force reached the gates, still in ruins from when they had blown it off its mountings. They were marching now through the detritus of their battle with Shalhadar’s daemon court, and the ground was littered with shell casings and scraps of arms and armour. The daemons themselves had dissolved away, leaving no more than bloodstains and scorch marks. Around the gate lay the city’s exiles – they had run into the city as soon as the Imperial Fists were clear, but had been stunned into senselessness by the destruction of their god. They lay with eyes open, staring vacantly, as if there could be nothing in their world any more with Shalhadar gone.
‘A crude lie, would you not say?’ said Lycaon as the strike force marched through the shadow of the gateway. ‘No great finesse. No devastating stroke to leave us confused and in doubt. Surely not the finest work a being like Shalhadar has ever wrought.’
‘Shalhadar was faced with a superior force that could destroy him,’ said Lysander. ‘He was desperate. For all the daemon claims to be beyond human weaknesses, he can still know fear. He was afraid, and he clutched at what hope he could.’
A procession was crossing the road behind the strike force, ignoring the Imperial Fists. They were broken and weeping, hundreds of them, citizens of Shalhadar commemorating their dead god with blades and whips. They cut their skin and that of their neighbours, and when one fell from exhaustion or misery he was beaten into the ground by those who walked over him. One threw his head back and screamed, and the others turned on him as if he had begged them to, rending his flesh with their fingers and teeth to drown out their misery with blood.
Smoke coiled up from the gilded towers as others marked Shalhadar’s death by setting light to everything around them. Shattered glass and screams of pain mingled with the cries of despair.
‘This city will tear itself apart,’ said Lysander.
‘Good,’ said Lycaon. ‘Then we have done some righteousness here.’
The Land Speeders buzzed over the wall as the strike force passed through the gateway and out of Shalhadar’s city. They had done there what Space Marines did – they descended on a place, left it a beheaded wreck, and never returned.
8
‘An inquisitor learns not to speak of his acolytes for either good or ill, for he must accept that they will come and go as the attrition of his work claims their bodies and minds. Yet I cannot allow a man of the calibre of Kalastar Venn to go unsung, he who served me as shield-bearer and master of arms for three decades, who was claimed by nocturnal predators while standing vigil over our camp. Nor can I wash my hands of the fate of my Interrogator, Talaya, who deserved not to suffer betrayal – and yet had I not paid her to the tollkeeper, I would never have glimpsed the battlements of Kulgarde, and I am certain she would have accepted the sacrifice.’
– Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan
The storm that raged across the badlands carried handfuls of flinty shards that bit at Lysander’s face and back as he struggled through it. Malodrax knew he was there, he was sure of it, and it had thrown down shearing winds to grind him down and leave him a skeleton buried in a drift of rocks. He held up a hand in front of his face as he struggled towards the dark smudge that was all he could make of the landscape around him, and his palm was slashed open. He wore only layers of rags and the heavy hooded cloak he had found to disguise himself in Kulgarde, and they now clung to him in bloody strips.
He could die out here, if Malodrax decided he would. In the sky through the seething darkness a moon shone yellow-white, narrowed like a mocking eye. He could hear laughter on the howls of the wind. The ground was broken under his feet, constantly seeking to trip him up, and if he fell out here, exposed, he could be dead where he lay before the storm relented.
The ground fell away beneath his feet. His next step sent him tumbling into a ravine, head over feet down a slope of broken rock. More cuts opened up on his knees and elbows before he came to rest at the bottom of the gulley, down in the dirt.
Lysander had made it out of Kulgarde with two possessions aside from his rags. One was the book, and the other was the Imperial Fists chainsword. That represented everything he had in the galaxy. He was laid low, battered, bloody, alone and on his knees. He was everything a Space Marine should not be. A Space Marine was towering, noble, the reflection of the Emperor himself, and an Imperial Fist was even more than that – he was the legacy of Dorn, the continuing will of his primarch. On Malodrax Rogal Dorn was cut to pieces, weak, stranded and all but unarmed.
Lysander forced the thoughts out of his mind. A Space Marine did not know fear – the galaxy at large knew that. But more than that, he must never know despair.
The gulley ran in both directions, and Lysander could not see where it ended – it seemed to cut across the landscape, a deep scar dealt by some past catastrophe. He kicked some loose rocks aside and saw the brittle remains of bones there, gathered like trash in the corners. He saw a human jawbone, and the cranium of something that was not human. There was no telling how many ways this place had to kill someone. Lysander had to keep moving. And of the choice of two directions, the best bet was the one that took him further from the fortress of Kulgarde.
In the depths of the warren squatted the mother of the brood. The brood hatched from her belly, bursting from cysts in her skin, and they existed to feed her. From their substance she created more offspring and consumed them in turn, a cycle of life and death she had presided over for ten thousand years. She was born from the black blood of Malodrax, the filth of pure corruption that bubbled up from its depths, the pus of an infection that took root when the planet first felt the touch of the warp. The brood mother was everything that Malodrax was.
The first Lysander saw of her was the shadow she cast on the wall of her cavern. The place was hung with trophies and trinkets – bones, weapons, polished gemstones, hanks of filthy hair, rotted hunter’s trophies, fragments of eggshells and ancient fossils. Her shadow was at once bloated and spindly, with a massively swollen torso and abdomen, skinny arms and a long, crooked neck supporting a head that hung low like that of a vulture. The shadow played across her collection, flaring with the guttering of the fire that burned in its pit before her.
‘A shelterer from the storm,’ said the brood mother. ‘A fugitive from the embrace of our world. From her touch you have fled like a whipped child and now you come to me. Do you fancy my embrace to be more tender?’
‘There is something I seek,’ said Lysander.
‘Of course there is,’ said the brood mother. She pulled a squirming chunk of flesh from one of the glistening pods on her abdomen, and deftly spitted it on a sharpened stick. It squealed and flopped around, and the brood mother pushed the stick into the dirt, holding the morsel over the fire. Its flesh bubbled and spat. ‘You smell of another world. There is a land far away where the people worship a dead god, and where that god’s servants police their very thoughts. They fear Chaos such that they bow under a law that crushes them to death. A strange place, I have heard. Are you from that world, traveller?’
‘What do you care where I am from?’ replied Lysander. ‘You are the broo
d mother. I am not the only one in this cave seeking something.’
The brood mother smiled and her face split open from ear to ear, exposing the sinews of her skull and the grey-brown stumps of her back teeth. ‘You know of me? Oh, how flattering. Come closer. The fire does not reach you back there.’
Lysander took a few steps forward, into the glow of the fire. The blood on his hands and face glinted like jewels, where the accelerated clotting agents of a Space Marine had crystallised it into ruby clusters.
‘Now that is something I have not seen for a long time,’ said the brood mother. ‘Something handsome.’ She pulled the stick out of the fire and examined the charred specimen skewered on it. ‘How long has it been since I had some new blood? My young always taste the same. I cannot remember when they last had a new father. You are right, servant of the corpse-god. There is something I want.’ She ran a spindly hand, its fingers like spider’s webs, over the greyish, blistered flesh of her torso.
‘This,’ said Lysander, ‘is all I have to give you.’ He took from its makeshift sling on his back the Imperial Fists chainsword. It was clotted with blood from killing the overseer in Kulgarde, and its casing was dented and scored with use.
‘That little thing?’ said the brood mother. ‘That is not the weapon I had in mind.’
‘I read of you,’ continued Lysander levelly. ‘You are the crossroads of all knowledge on Malodrax. There is nothing you do not know. I know you were once beautiful, and that you sought out a god of the warp as your consort. I know you tried to betray him, but his guard was not down as you feared, and so he cursed you. If you will turn on your god for some fleeting moment of power, he decreed, then you will always take the lesser of any deal offered to you. Is that not so?’
‘What lies are these?’ spat the brood mother. Her body quivered with rage.
‘The lies of Inquisitor Golrukhan,’ said Lysander. ‘A collector of legends of Malodrax. He stood before you and bargained your story from you. Did he not?’
The brood mother’s face creased as she tried to think of some pithy reply. But there was nothing. ‘He was not so handsome,’ she said. ‘He called me abomination. He called me ugly! I was glad to see the back of him, that limp little whelpling. What did he have to offer me?’ She rummaged in the piles of trash behind her, spilling skulls and random scraps of weaponry and armour. She took out an embroidered glove, once burgundy with golden stitching but now spoiled with mould and dirt. ‘This is all he had! The last he possessed of some creature named Talaya. That is what I took in return for my story. Would that he had asked anything else! Alas, that a mere man knows my shame! I hope my world killed him in the end.’
‘But that is your curse,’ said Lysander. ‘You have to make a deal.’
‘Only for that which is valuable!’ retorted the brood mother sharply. ‘I can only take something you hold dear! No piece of random trash, hear me! It must be something you value, something you will grieve to have lost, or there will be no deal!’
Lysander held up the chainsword. The light glinted on its teeth, where the edges showed through the dried blood. ‘This was the weapon of my battle-brother,’ he said. ‘He now lies either dead or imprisoned in the dungeons of Kulgarde. This is all I have of him. More than that, it is a weapon of a Space Marine, of my people. It is a symbol of what we are. Without it, I am less a warrior. That is what I offer you.’
‘Hmm.’ The brood mother peered at the chainsword. Idly, she slid her young off the blackened stick with her teeth and chewed on it. Green-black blood ran down her scrawny neck. ‘Sit,’ she said, indicating a patch of earth in front of the fire.
Lysander sat down. The brood mother towered over him, her spidery shadows flitting all across the walls and ceiling of her cavern. Up close the smell of her was worse, sickly sweet and full of rot.
‘What do you seek?’ she asked, a new graveness in her voice as if this were the opening line of a prayer.
‘I want to kill Kraegon Thul,’ said Lysander.
The brood mother cackled, spilling scraps of bloody meat from her mouth. ‘Do you know, you are the second one of your kind to ask that? That ugly little inquisitor man, he said the same thing! To excise the cancer, he put it, to lance the tumour that sickened Malodrax. As if there was but one heart to the corruption, to be cut away! And now you seek the same thing.’
‘That inquisitor was doing his duty. I have that same duty, and it drives me as it did him. But I seek revenge as well.’
‘No man can speak of revenge,’ replied the brood mother, ‘if he expects to walk away from it.’
‘I would accept death,’ replied Lysander, ‘if it meant looking into Thul’s dead eye before I go.’
The brood mother’s head hung low over the fire as she peered more closely at Lysander. ‘You did not find this place by hiding from the storm,’ she said.
‘And you do not give me what I ask from the goodness of your heart,’ replied Lysander.
The brood mother steepled her fingers and thought for a long moment, the light of the fire playing across the abomination that was her face. ‘You cannot do it alone,’ she said. ‘But you have no allies on this world. You must make sacrifices and they will not be of your flesh. The question you will ask yourself, servant of the corpse-god, is how far you will go for victory. What will you do to win? No doubt you would reply ‘anything’, but it is not that simple for one such as you. You have these… these cages in which you imprison yourselves. These principles. These moralities your people force into your minds. You will have to fight those long before you get your hands on Warsmith Thul. Long before.’
‘I accept that.’
The brood mother waved a hand. ‘Of course you do,’ she said. ‘You do now. But you have not seen what you must do. I will not say I can perceive every moment that will come, but I can see the way the path winds. And of course, you will ignore any warnings I might give. You want to be shown the way. Well then! The path winds to the city of Shalhadar the Veiled.’ The brood mother’s eyes shifted as she focused far away. ‘He courted me once. It was a lie. Everything he says is a lie, excepting that which you expect to be a lie, in which case it will be a truth that could destroy you to believe. He almost destroyed me, and I will never forgive him, but still I imagine those dark tendrils around me! Those golden eyes on my body!’
‘How do I reach the city?’ asked Lysander quickly.
‘From this warren, westwards. The third moon should be on the horizon. Follow it. You will see the spires of the city long before you reach it. Shalhadar does not hide his glories. He is proud, a pride which Malodrax has tried to grind down, but the Veiled One has raised his spires high in spite. There is no other world where one such as Shalhadar could thrive so. It hates him, but it needs him, for without an object of its hate it would shrivel away into one more asteroid floating in the void.’
‘Will he prove an ally?’ asked Lysander.
‘Now that, servant of the corpse-god, I cannot tell you. Shalhadar needs to be served and he finds a use for all who walk through the gates of his city. That is all.’
‘Then I shall journey to the city of Shalhadar,’ said Lysander. ‘Whatever happens there, happens, so long as it brings me closer to Kraegon Thul.’
The brood mother tilted her head, listening. ‘The storm blows still,’ she said. ‘It will not be over for many hours. It would be a rash creature that did not take what shelter he could find. Will you not stay here, until it dies away?’
Lysander stood. ‘I cannot tarry here while my brothers are captive,’ he said. ‘Every hour that goes by gives Thul another chance to have them on an executioner’s block.’
The brood mother held out her hands in a pleading gesture. ‘Please,’ she said.
Lysander turned and walked towards the cave entrance, the flames casting shadows across his back.
‘Then you should know,’ said the brood mother, ‘that I do not eat all my young.’
Shadows leapt, sharp and flickering. From pool
s of them scuttled insectoid creatures, each waist-high to a Space Marine, with compound eyes that glimmered in the firelight. Their bladed mandibles snickered and their chitin talons rattled on the stone floor as they made for Lysander. Dozens of them were suddenly all around him, whickering blades lashing at his legs and torso. One leapt from the ceiling and onto his shoulder. His hands reached up and felt hard limbs and a pulpy central mass, pulsing and oozing like the brood mother’s abdomen. He ripped a leg off the creature and threw it behind him into the fire.
The brood mother shrieked as her young squirmed and squealed, flesh spitting in the fire. The flames leapt higher as Lysander struck around him, unarmed save for the heavy book he still carried. He slammed the book down, crushing the head of one creature, and yanked another one off the ground by a leg before slamming it into the floor.
‘Take his arms!’ cried the brood mother. ‘Take his legs! But leave the rest for me!’
Lysander stamped on a leg and felt it snap. He swung the book and knocked three or four of the creatures away from him, and broke into a run for the exit.
The cries of the brood mother followed him. Those young he could not outpace he grabbed as they tried to climb up his body, and tore them apart or dashed them to pulp against the walls. The warren wound this way and that and Lysander ran almost blind, striking out with every pace against the brood mother’s young that swarmed from every bolthole and side passage.
He emerged into what passed for fresh air on Malodrax, into the roar of the storm. The warren emptied into a valley with the worst of the winds shrieking overhead. One of the brood mother’s young clung to Lysander’s back, talons digging into his skin. He grabbed a handful of its moist bristly abdomen and tore it off.
It was a fat wingless insect of unsurpassed ugliness. Its body was a wrinkled sack of entrails, and its limbs were cased in dark-grey exoskeleton. Its head was a nest of mandibles with two huge compound eyes that glittered in the faint light reaching down through the hail of stone. It squealed pathetically, as if begging him not to kill it now he had it at his mercy.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 290