‘Your role as gatekeeper is to weed out the unworthy,’ said Lysander, ‘for only the worthy can pay. You are a creature formed from the will of the Prince of Pleasure, the Lord of Unspeakable Excess. Your currency is sensation. That is how I will pay you.’
‘Not just any sensation,’ said the sphinx. ‘Something new. Something I have never felt before. And I am as old as this world! Your race was not yet dribbled from the guts of rotten Terra when I was already ancient. I have seen the infinite thoughtscapes of the warp and the foulest debasements of the noblest men. What can you show me that I have not yet felt?’
‘You can read minds,’ said Lysander. It was not phrased as a question.
‘I can consume them whole,’ replied the sphinx. ‘That came to bore me many aeons ago.’
‘Read mine,’ said Lysander.
The sphinx crouched down, folding its arms. ‘And what a tiny, closed mind you have. Pray, what is in here that might interest me?’
Lysander felt the daemon’s touch. It was like a slimy, unclean thing that slithered around the inside of his skull, extruding feelers into his mind. His skin shuddered and his stomachs tightened up, and every instinct he had told him to draw his sword and set about the sphinx with a view to putting out its eyes. But he held his hand still, took in a breath to steady himself, and threw his mind back to Gravenhand Ridge.
There were many choices for Lysander to bring forward. He chose Gravenhand Ridge because it was so raw, so crude. A madman named Gladian Scraw had risen to power on a promise to restore his home world’s aristocracy to supremacy. It was a story repeated on countless worlds with disaffected social classes, vulnerable to men like Scraw who offered them a dream for a future that could not possibly be. There were so many planets like that in the Imperium that the name of the particular world didn’t matter.
Lysander picked out a memory of the first time he saw Scraw’s stronghold, defended on one side by the stormy cliffs of the ocean and on the other by the steep scree of Gravenhand Ridge. He had seen it from the air, through the viewfinder of a drop pod as it plummeted towards the ancient castle where Scraw was based.
The castle doubled as an execution ground. Its wings enclosed a courtyard where Scraw’s inner guard herded the planet’s dissidents into ranks to be shot down with volleys of autogun fire. So voluminous were the deaths that a whole social class had grown up to process and murder those that Scraw feared, hated, or merely disliked. At the moment the Imperial Fists drop pods broke through the clouds Scraw was sitting on a balcony overlooking the execution ground, imbibing his regular dose of narcotic and juvenat drugs from a crystal glass as the day’s first executions greeted the dawning sun.
Scraw was a noble-faced man, carefully sculpted by the planet’s most exclusive skinscapers to resemble the aristocratic ideal. His finely curved eyebrows raised as the drop pods appeared in the sky, hurtling towards his castle, retro thrusters burning to decelerate them as they arrowed in towards the courtyard.
Scraw had sold whatever soul he had to the powers of the warp in return for lordship over his world. From a spectral gateway he summoned marched a host of burning daemons, like suits of ornate armour filled with fire, answering the contract that Scraw had signed. When the Imperial Fists landed among the corpses of the day’s first dead, they were met by a legion of daemons of the Blood God.
Lysander remembered the smell – blood old and fresh, the familiar stink of the newly dead. The sulphur and flame of the daemons. He remembered Scraw screaming from his balcony, demanding that his daemonic allies slaughter the intruders where they stood.
But he remembered most clearly the fury of the slaughter. The Imperial Fists met the enemy with a wrath that equalled the daemons’ own. The daemons were used to mortal men cowering before them, either fleeing or fawning. The Imperial Fists did neither.
The blades through flesh. The flame washing over golden armour. Lysander brought every moment back to the front of his memory.
The Imperial Fists were led that day by Chaplain Chrysonerus, whose purity of spirit made him the ideal commander to lead his brothers in the face of the daemon. Lysander brought forth the image of Chrysonerus hacking daemons to pieces with his crozius, the power mace in the shape of a gilded winged skull that flashed in his hand as if he were battling with a shard of lightning.
And most of all, he remembered their victory. He remembered Chrysonerus wading through the burning remains of the daemon legion, storming into the castle and throwing Scraw down to the courtyard. He remembered Chrysonerus dragging a sobbing Scraw towards the spectral gateway, which still stood open onto the black flames of the daemons’ home world in the warp.
‘See, Gladian Scraw,’ Chaplain Chrysonerus said. ‘To you what lies beyond is an unknowable realm, where powers greater than any of us hold sway. To you it is a place of awe. To us, to the pure-hearted servants of the Emperor, it is one more nest of enemies to be purged. Brothers! Imperial Fists and Sons of Dorn! Will you follow me?’
Gladian Scraw screamed as the Imperial Fists cheered and followed Chrysonerus into the gateway. Lysander was among them as they marched through the gateway to the Garden of Vharlan Ghesh, ruled over by a daemon prince sworn to the Blood God, a realm of bloody madness where his legions battled endlessly for the delight of their master.
Lysander did not dwell on how Gladian Scraw died, doubled up with madness to look on the insanity of this realm. He did not even focus on the revenge the Imperial Fists took on Vharlan Ghesh, or the many battles fought there against the daemons of the Blood God. He focused instead on that moment when Chaplain Chrysonerus had called on his battle-brothers to charge into hell, and they had followed him.
That was how much the Imperial Fists, the human race, hated daemonkind. That was how deep their disgust and their desire for revenge went. If they could, every Space Marine in the Imperium would storm into the warp and butcher every single daemon, every wayward thought the Chaos Gods gave form, and would march to the foot of those very gods’ thrones.
Lysander’s mind had a whole gallery of these memories. The memories of hate, the force of a human’s anger focused through the discipline of a Space Marine and directed at the daemon. It was a pure hate, a disgust at the unnatural origin of the daemon and a rage at everything it stood for.
Rogal Dorn had written that there was no star in the galaxy that burned as bright as an honest human’s hatred, and no hatred as hot as that directed at the daemon.
The sphinx recoiled. Its front paw hovered over Lysander, its eyes focused far away.
‘Do you see?’ said Lysander. ‘Do you understand now what we are? For everything you are, for each one of us you kill, for every one you corrupt and force to his knees, there are a billion more directing every moment of their hatred at you. And what you feel now is something you have never felt, and that is my payment to you.’
‘And what is it?’ asked the sphinx. ‘What is this ice that flows through me? This dark claw that clutches my mind?’
‘It is fear,’ said Lysander. ‘My kind were created to feel no fear, but we understand it. We were all once men who felt fear as does anyone else, and we must know it because it is a weapon we wield.’
‘I have never felt this before,’ said the sphinx. There was a note of wonderment in its voice. ‘This fear. I have heard the word, I have seen it in the eyes of those thrown onto the altars of the Pleasure God, but I have never felt it until now! This is a sensation I feel for the first time. And so the toll is paid.’
The sphinx stood aside. Behind it rose the great golden gates of the pyramid. The sphinx settled down on its haunches, taking up its place watching over the bridge. Lysander walked past it and the gates began to open.
He glanced behind him. Talaya had watched the exchange with a curious smile on her face. As Lysander approached the palace gates she turned away and walked back into the sprawl of the city.
The sheer lavishness of the palace was designed to dull the senses and overwhelm an inquisitive min
d. It was a kind of camouflage, Lysander realised, just like scrim nets stretched across an Imperial Guard camp or the baffling burst of signals emitted by a strike cruiser to mask its communications.
The inside of the pyramid was divided into countless chambers, curved and irregular in shape, by walls plated in gold and silver or lacquered in deep blue and vivid violets. Scaffolds were set up everywhere and a small army of the city’s people were swarming over them, painting in sketched-out frescoes on the ceiling or laying mosaics on the floor. Lysander could make out the vaguest hints of twisted bodies in the paintings, inhuman shapes and features melting into one another. A sense of uncleanness crawled over him and he looked away. The floor was no better, for while the designs were abstract they were mesmerizingly complex. They seemed to want to draw his eyes right out of his head.
‘You!’ cried out a voice. Lysander looked up from the floor to see one of the painters advancing towards him. It was a man, his age impossible to guess given the artistic mutilations covering his face. His nose had been cut off, leaving a pair of nostril slits, as had his ears. His eye sockets had been pared back to reveal the whole of his eyeballs, unblinking and rimmed with exposed muscle. He wore paint-spattered robes and carried reams of parchment and canvas covered in paintings and sketches. ‘Take up a brush or a trowel, newcomer! Beautify this place! Scrub away its ugliness!’ He looked Lysander up and down, appraising his crimson armour and sword. ‘Eyes of the warp, you are ugly enough yourself. Just by standing there you put us back months! Make yourself useful!’
‘I seek Shalhadar the Veiled,’ said Lysander.
The artist dropped the mass of painting he was carrying. ‘No one sees the Veiled One,’ he said.
‘He will see me.’
‘We are not there yet!’ cried the artist. The painters and mosaicists looked up at his outburst. ‘The story hasn’t reached his entrance! He is in the wings, ugly one!’
Lysander grabbed the artist by the shoulder, gripped hard and lifted the man off the ground. The artist’s mutilated eyes rolled in fear. ‘Where is he?’ demanded Lysander.
‘In the… in the wings…’ gasped the artist.
Lysander threw the artist aside. ‘Out!’ he yelled. ‘Everyone out!’ He drew his sword and held it high.
The people of Shalhadar’s city clambered down from the scaffolds and ran for the gates. Their half-painted frescoes glared down with thousands of eyes set in daemonic faces. Those working on the mosaics fled too, leaving scars in the unfinished floors. Among the artisans Lysander saw the many varieties of the city’s heresy – some had decorative scars and mutilations like the lead artist, and others were robed and stitched like the cultists from the alleyway. There were new ones, too, like those with patches of iridescent scales sewn onto their skin or with their flesh blistered up with wriggling egg sacs. The latter reminded Lysander of the brood mother, and he steadied his hand against the instinct to cut them down.
With his sword in hand, Lysander walked further into the palace. It was impossible to tell how far the palace extended, for the dimensions within the pyramid made little sense given its apparent size when seen from the outside. With the artists gone sounds echoed from deeper in the palace – footsteps perhaps, skin on skin, the whispered voices of daemons. Shadows coalesced on the edges of his vision, the movement banished when he tried to focus on it.
Ahead a vast domed space opened up. It resembled, of all things, an opera house, with an enormous pipe organ dominating one wall, reaching high up to the arching ribs of the ceiling. A round stage stood in the centre of the hall, surrounded by circles of seating.
As Lysander entered, the light from thousands of candles hanging in holders from the ceiling went dim, save for a shaft of light falling on the stage. A single figure walked into the light. Lysander couldn’t see where he had entered from. He wore a long white robe and his face was heavily made up in white, with black lips and eyes daubed on as if his features were twisted in mourning.
‘Many thanks, traveller, for your attendance at our sorrowful show!’ said the actor in a wailing voice. ‘You could have been anywhere in the infinite galaxies this night! Enveloped in the bosom of fleshy luxury. Riding the waves of the endless ocean of the mind. On some distant world of beauty, grasping its ethereal wonder before it is spoiled by the cruelty of the mundane. But no! You are here, with us, to witness the Tragedy of the Cadaverous Lord!’
Lysander realised he was being addressed, though the actor did not look at him directly and spoke to the whole opera house as if every row were packed with spectators. The actor bowed gravely and was spirited away again, vanished into a hidden trapdoor or by an optical illusion. Lysander chose not to sit.
The lighting shifted to the warmth of a morning sun. Dozens of extras walked across the stage now, in archaic Imperial dress such as that still favoured by some of the Imperium’s oldest aristocracies. They wore ruffs and long trains, enhanced with decorative bionics. Their bionics were non-functional, and where they met the skin the actors’ makeup could not conceal the torn skin and weeping wounds.
They began a song of longing and misery, echoed by strains of music from the pipe organ and from concealed musicians whose sound boomed from every direction. The actors hit harmonies too complex for their apparent numbers. They sang of how the soul of mankind had withered away, leaving the people empty and barren.
‘Where has gone the oversoul that conquered Terra/Where has gone the lust to enslave stars?’
A great and benevolent power saw the suffering of the human race. It was depicted by a voice booming from off-stage, presumably belonging to a man of the city selected for his deep, reverberating baritone. Lysander could not be sure if it was a god or some kind of collective will of humanity.
He could not see where the tale would lead yet, but it brought about such an unease in him that he felt a flicker of a very human weakness. His bile rose and he had a stale, acid taste in his mouth, though he could not place just what in the opera and its performance was affecting him.
He could walk onto stage and throw the actors off. He wouldn’t even have to bloody his blade. Bare fists would be more than enough. But he reeled in his hatred again, that only minutes before he had been baring raw and bleeding for the sphinx at the gates. He did not remind himself what he had done to get this far, because it brought about a deepening of his unease.
The god called forth its servants, all garbed like angels from the margins of prayer books. They had wings of wooden frames and feathers, and golden halos riveted to their temples. They danced and sang of the infinite wisdom and kindness of their master, who still went unseen and unnamed. One among them was different – he wore a mask of gold, and his feathers were golden, too, laced with red ribbons and gemstones. According to the lyrics he was most favoured of the god’s servants and was sent down to humanity to give them back the joy and life they had lost.
But this servant, over the course of the next hour or so, fell from grace. He first deprecated the temples built to him, and said he should not be treated as a god, but eventually he came to accept them and then to desire them. He lounged among throngs of concubines brought to beautify his court. He gave the people a purpose, but it was to serve him, to glorify him and grant him his every desire. He was corrupted through and through until even the people could not pretend he was anything else.
The actor playing this false god did not remove his golden mask throughout the performance, until a climactic scene where the people finally rose up and demanded he prove to them that he was a god deserving of their adoration. The false god rose from his throne of heaped-up bodies and threw back his hood, taking his mask in his hands as the music swelled and he sang of his power and perfection, and damned those who doubted him. He would show them the face of their god, and they would be struck into blind, mindless servitude to look on it as punishment for rising up.
The false god took off his mask. Beneath was a rotted, skeletal face, the skin peeled away and the muscle turned to
a maggoty pulp. The eyes were sunken in their sockets and the teeth grinned from pared-back lips.
A terrible atonal music of horror took over. Actors in Imperial garb rushed across the stage screaming, contorting. They trampled and threw one another from the stage. Such was the violence that Lysander was certain the blood was real. Some were dragged off stage insensible, perhaps even dead.
When it was done and the stage was empty, when even the false god had left for the wings, a few survivors straggled into the light. They sang they would follow the greater power, the one who had been usurped and betrayed by his corrupted servant, for they had seen how the false god’s corruption had manifested itself in the face of a corpse. They vowed to worship only the true power, to follow his path and reach his city. They took the symbols of the Young Prince, the Sigil of Pleasure, and the Hand Unchained, to deny the false god’s ancient dogmas of obedience, denial and suffering. And so the tragedy ended on a note of hope, a counterpoint to the horror of the climax.
The clown-like narrator shambled back onto the stage, newly spattered with blood. ‘You who could have been anywhere, nestled in a velvet pit of pleasure or kneeling before the altar of the awesome, you chose instead to grant us the honour of your attention. And our gift to you is the Tragedy of the Cadaverous Lord! Thus the one called Emperor enslaved the souls of his people. But what of our brave band who saw the fall from grace, who espied that corpse-face on the mask of gold? In this city, wonder of wonders, they gather! Before the Veiled One, Lord of Lords, they kneel! And that is the greatest honour you could give us. To stand among us, to marvel at the beauty of Shalhadar, and to cast back the darkness of the Corpse-God from this holy place.’ The narrator bowed low, and with a final soaring note from the hidden musicians the light fell dead and the opera house was full of darkness.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 295