‘A morte perpetua, domine, libra nos.’
A chorus of fearless female voices. Their chanting refrain rang about the halls like church bells, driving away the darkness, returning strength and agency to Marcus’ exhausted limbs. He gathered himself, then froze. A pale, ape-like thing was clambering down the rubble towards him.
It was naked and genderless, lidless eyes staring, open-mouthed as its flesh oozed up its body like molten wax, like a candle dissolving in reverse. It appeared to be of the same corrupted species as the hunters, but in an even more unfinished state of evolution. It resembled a figure crudely sculpted from some living clay. Marcus fired in panic as it pounced, livid red bolts flashing past its head before two more lanced through its chest, killing it. He turned to flee and saw salvation mounting the fallen stone some distance behind him.
Black power-armoured bodies seemed to materialise out of the gloom like angels, their pale, chanting faces framed by curtains of black hair as they unleashed a booming hail of flickering bolter-fire. Marcus threw himself to the ground as more half-melted figures exploded about him, showering him in gobbets of hot, steaming flesh.
Sister Adamanthea seized the air, impassioned with faith as she sang before her Dominions. Her scarred features were tight with rage as the vox at her throat amplified her voice to a terrifying roar.
‘And though they may cower and hide, naught shall save them from His righteous fury!’
She threw down her hand and the Dominions fired. A chorus of pounding thunder shook clouds of dust and debris from above. Marcus crawled away as the explosive rounds demolished boulders and bodies alike.
Adamanthea howled. ‘Neither stone nor steel shall save them from faith unbreakable.’
As if in obedience to her declaration, the Dominions’ gunfire dislodged a huge statue, which slowly toppled onto several of the creatures as they fled.
Marcus scurried into an archway where he lay in darkness, panting and weeping, clutching his lasrifle to his chest. He watched from behind a pillar as several more mutants loped past him towards the advancing Battle Sisters. The creatures’ forearms bulged as they moved into position among the rubble, their hands swelling into monstrous club-like appendages. One of them squatted beside a chunk of masonry nearby and Marcus recoiled in horror as the skin of its swollen fist peeled back to reveal a toothed, circular maw, the throat of which already glowed with witch-fire.
Marcus felt a horror that plunged into his very bowels. Witch-fire! These creatures were daemonic in origin, the insane heresy of the warp made fire and flesh. He groped instinctively for his rosarius when he remembered it had been lost, torn from him during his uncontrollable ascent of the stairs outside. He suddenly felt as though he were falling, shrinking, lost to despair. Even the litanies of protection he had spent his life memorising failed to reach his whimpering lips.
The Sisters of Battle marched, faltering neither in step nor in song as the mutants rose and vomited fire from their arms. The inferno brightened the walls, revealing rows of cracked aquila that crested the great arches, watchful as the Battle Sisters below were consumed.
Two of the women staggered forth, their bodies wreathed in flames, bolters still blasting, screaming in either agony or rage. The others returned fire, shredding three of the mutants where they stood. But the creatures flooded in from the depths of the cathedral, joining their obscene brethren as they dowsed the Sisters’ line with streams of fire. The Sisters could only answer the blazing volley with more screams and a dwindling holler of bolter-fire.
Weak with terror and exhaustion, Marcus retreated deeper into the archway as one of the mutants approached, the flesh of its face writhing about its staring eyes as it sniffed the air.
‘Suffer not the mutant to live!’
The silvery cry of Sister Adamanthea rang out as the Battle Sisters charged, bellowing prayers of strength and protection, their verses unbroken as two more fell screaming in flame. Adamanthea held her eviscerator aloft with both hands and charged at one of the flame-throwing mutants, heedless as the abomination smothered her in fire. The flames washed over her power armour as she sprang, slashing the monster in half. Its cleaved remains hissed and smoked, its fires drowned in blood.
Adamanthea hurtled on without pause. Her blade cartwheeled through two more mutants as her Battle Sisters destroyed yet more with point-blank bolter-fire, slashed them with combat knives, tore open their flesh with power-armoured fingers.
The heat was becoming unbearable, but the screams of the dying Battle Sisters seemed only to urge their surviving comrades to sing all the louder. Adamanthea moved to protect them as more pale fiends scampered towards them. Terror gave way to desperation and Marcus raised his lasrifle. But as he tried to steady his quaking sights against the nearest mutant, something fell upon him.
Gelatinous paws wrestled the weapon from his grip and dragged him, shrieking and kicking, from his hiding place. The whispers closed in once again, masking the indomitable howls of Sister Adamanthea. Marcus watched the world burn behind him as the mutants dragged him towards whatever horror awaited at the heart of the cathedral.
The whispers intensified as they hauled him by his arms towards the fires burning at the cathedral’s crossing, barely illuminating the vast derelict halls of the transepts either side. He could hear a heavy slopping sound nearby. The mutants led him to what had once been the cathedral’s baptistery, laying him before the ruined shrine as though presenting an offering.
Marcus looked up at the crumbling two-storey structure. Cracked pillars surrounded a fathoms-deep baptismal well. Pilgrims from across the galaxy had once come here to be reborn in the light of the Emperor, perhaps to become missionaries, spreading the faith wherever they roamed. Now, the well had become sanctum to something else: a pale, undulating thing that crooned and gurgled at Marcus as he shivered before it.
The daemon rose to get a better look at him, faceless though it was. It stood at least four times the height of a man, its long, slender body a column of molten meat, streaked with pulsing veins. The creature flexed its whip-like limbs, splattering dollops of fat across the floor. Eyeballs streamed around its body, clustering like bubbles as they stared down at the helpless missionary.
The well in which the thing had been lounging brimmed with swirling flesh, liquefied somehow by the alchemy of the warp. This pale sludge slopped and oozed over the lip of the well, creating huge polyps that bulged onto the floor. They swelled and wriggled into humanoid forms that hurried away to join the battle Marcus could hear, still raging far behind him. He gagged, sickened, not only by the majestic sacrilege before him, but also the growing sense that some part of him welcomed it.
He watched, hypnotised as the daemon’s face swirled, forming a vortex at its centre, an iris of flesh that seemed to open a hole in the very fabric of reality. It created an aperture through which Marcus could hear things that made his sinews itch, eldritch words with the power to corrupt both minds and flesh, to shape the course of destiny itself.
The daemon extended a welcoming arm towards him, the flesh of its hand spiralling into a tentacle. Marcus gave a silent scream as he saw himself reach, unwittingly, for it.
The tentacle curled around his hand and slithered up his sleeve like a snake. Marcus felt his flesh burn at its touch. The thing dissolved into his arm as it swam through skin and bone towards his throat. He felt its psyche merging with his own. He blinked, and found himself staring down through countless eyes at his own choking body.
Marcus’ terror-stricken mind flooded with moving images – snatches of strange memories, frantic and emotive – one streaming after another like water flooding the hull of a sinking ship. The daemon’s consciousness was fusing with his own as it absorbed him body and soul. But as his perception expanded, Marcus comprehended with dizzying horror that these memories belonged not to the daemon, but to himself. The creature had infiltrated his mind months ago.
Tendrils of arcane influence had been whispering through the cracks in Marcus’ faith without him even realising. The daemon knew his thoughts because it had helped shape them, goading his pride, luring him with his own desire to prove himself.
His awareness alighted upon another image, another soul ensnared by the daemon’s psychic coils. Marcus found himself staring through the eyes of a man prowling the forest alongside his brothers. All of them had been hypnotised by alluring whispers in the trees that promised a hunter’s bounty, but instead led them to their doom. The image vanished, replaced by that of Adamanthea’s stony visage. The daemon had been eavesdropping when Marcus directed her towards the City of Whispers. The image rippled into another. Marcus saw hands before him, gnarled by mutation. The fallen hunters, their bodies smelted into liquid flesh, then clumsily remoulded to carry out the daemon’s bidding. The hands were prising ancient stones from their moorings, tearing away the brittle cement of the aeons-old bridge. The image melted away. Now, they lay in wait for the unwitting missionary and his protectors. They wanted him alive, and Marcus felt the daemon gorge on his terror at the thought of it.
Fear. Marcus’ heightened senses could feel it radiating from these ruined walls, from the entire city. The outlying tribes had projected their terrors upon this place for generations, drenched it in dread, softening reality like sodden parchment until it tore. The daemon had whispered through this opening for centuries, luring the weak, the proud, the arrogant, rendering their living flesh into a perfect mercurial state, gathering clay enough to form a legion of horrors. But the daemon wanted more.
Marcus gasped as the tentacle fused around his throat. He suddenly comprehended a great web cast across the galaxy. A nexus of threads moored to every world; strands of influence tugging and tensing, teasing fate towards some unfathomable goal. The whispers coalesced into a single word that gurgled up from his throat like vomit: the name of his new master, the dread being that dwelt like a venomous spider at the centre of a cosmic web.
‘Tzeentch! Tzeentch! Tzeentch!’
His lord craved an envoy, a missionary, one skilled in the use of subtlety and words, who could whisper the ruinous creed to the outlying tribes, gather worshippers whom the Changer of Ways could warp to his purpose to raise a cathedral of corruption that would radiate his influence around this world and make it his own. Marcus would indeed become a prophet of legend, a chosen of the Architect of Fate. His burning ambition would soon become flesh.
The world went black.
Marcus thought he was dead, only to realise he was lying on the floor, gasping in pain. Beside him lay a severed tentacle, thrashing as it dissolved into ash. A suffocating wave of heat washed over him, brightening the surrounding ruins like dawning sunshine. The daemon was breathing a jet of fire from the vortex in its face, chasing an armoured figure from pillar to pillar. Above the chugging growl of the woman’s eviscerator, Marcus could hear a sinister chime, like a blade repeatedly drawn from its sheath. Sister Adamanthea was laughing.
She charged, bounding over broken masonry, lashing out at the liquescent daemon as it heaved itself backwards, gathering itself to unleash another hail of fire. The blade whooshed several times through empty air as Adamanthea slashed the great weapon about her with the grace of a dancer. The creature rolled about the well, avoiding each furious swipe.
It exhaled another column of fire, but Adamanthea had already dodged aside and was hurdling over the gaps in a broken flight of stairs. They led onto a balcony overlooking the well. She dashed around the circumference of the terrace above the daemon, barely outrunning the jet of flame scorching her heels, her eviscerator carried low, trailing behind her like a saw-toothed tail.
She scooped up a rock the size of a cannonball and flung it at the daemon’s head. The missile shattered on impact and the creature reeled, flames guttering in its strange maw. Seizing her chance, Adamanthea sprang from the balcony with a shriek like tearing metal as she spun through the air, gathering momentum. She swung her eviscerator around and down and hacked the churning blade into the daemon’s exposed neck.
The creature lurched like a tide as its arms whipped up, wrapping around the Battle Sister’s wrists, halting her lethal stroke. She snarled in frustration as it prised her hands from the hilt, releasing the trigger. The eviscerator’s teeth stilled, quenching the spray of blood and meat. The huge weapon stood silent, lodged deep in the centre of the creature’s neck as streams of flesh swirled up its body to seal the grievous wound and remount its half-severed head.
The daemon turned a livid red as it swung Adamanthea through a pillar. A section of the balcony collapsed in an avalanche of dust and tumbling stone as the creature flung her limp body into the floor, the weight of her power armour punching a crater into the slabs. Pinning her with its arms, her eviscerator still embedded in the centre of its neck, the daemon poured a weight of molten flesh down through its limbs on top of Adamanthea, streaming through the cracks in her shattered armour. Her torso enveloped in streaming flesh, the daemon hoisted her into the air, as if it wished to get a better view of her agony as it bent her to its will.
Marcus heard cries and bursts of bolter fire. Whatever was left of Adamanthea’s squad was approaching, but the clamour sounded too distant for them to arrive in time to save their commander. Adamanthea struggled weakly beneath the cocoon of rippling flesh and Marcus clapped his hands over his ears, moaning as the whispers intensified once more. The daemon turned crimson as it squeezed her. Marcus could feel it straining to make her speak. Its rage boiled as it tried to force its name from her lips as it had done to him. Through the daemon’s eyes, Marcus could see the Battle Sister staring back at him – not with anger, not with hate, but a cold serenity.
She was praying. Her faith was immaculate, impervious to doubt. A single immovable truth existed at the core of her being: though her body may be broken, no force in the galaxy could break her faith. She was the Emperor’s will incarnate, His righteous fire was her own. The Adepta Sororitas had no need of augments or gene-engineering, not when their strength flowed fierce and pure from the Emperor himself. Should their bodies be rent asunder it would be because He willed it.
Faith was Sister Adamanthea’s true armour. It was also her greatest weapon, the force with which she performed such fearsome miracles upon the battlefield. This was the certainty that burned at the heart of every Battle Sister, a spirit that would endure, ferocious and unyielding, until the very last of their sinews had perished and the Emperor summoned them to dwell in His eternal light. Martyrdom was their immortality. Death only spurred the living to achieve even greater heights of valour. As such, Adamanthea and her Sisters were immortal, their faith a fire unquenchable.
Marcus felt tears streaming down his face in helpless awe of Adamanthea’s faith. The daemon fought to break her, but it may as well have been trying to wring words from a stone. It hurled her to the floor with a howl, fragments of broken power armour scattering as the creature smashed her down.
The daemon loomed over the wounded woman, swelling as it guzzled the last of the melted flesh from the reservoir in which it stood. A buckled pauldron slid from Adamanthea’s shoulder with a clang. She was clawing steadily up a chunk of a wrecked pillar as she hauled herself upright, blood pooling at her feet. Marcus could feel waves of hate crashing inside the daemon as it glared at the wretched mortal beneath it, an inferno of thwarted rage preparing to erupt.
Adamanthea was still clambering up the broken pillar when the creature abruptly drowned her in fire. The conflagration rose and boiled until it filled the chamber with clouds of flame.
Marcus cowered nearby. He whimpered beneath the scorching heat, his eyes closed, but still seeing what the daemon saw: a churning chaos of flames that would reduce the woman to a smear of ash for her insolence.
A figure burst through the flames like a tiger, clawed hands outstretched. Shielded by faith alone, Sister Adamanthea�
�s body was miraculously intact, as if the firestorm were but a breeze.
She caught the protruding hilt of her eviscerator as she pounced on the daemon’s chest. As she clutched the trigger with both hands, the weapon roared into life in a flurry of churning ichor. The daemon staggered back. Adamanthea let herself drop, dragging the blade downwards, unzipping a deluge of gore in her wake.
She landed on the lip of the well as the daemon emptied itself above her. She slashed the creature into chunks as it fell, its severed limbs dissolving in mid-air as she whirled the eviscerator about her. When the daemon’s head finally dropped within range, she delivered her final stroke.
Marcus’ vision turned black once more. His head spun as he fell into a faint.
Marcus awoke to find three bloodied Battle Sisters kneeling nearby. They were chanting prayers of sanctification, restoring the Emperor’s presence to their polluted surroundings. They continued their litanies as Marcus cried out, agony suddenly flooding his body. He stared in horror at his hands, the flesh of which stirred on the bones, winding about his fingers like smoke. He touched his face and the flesh came away on his fingers, like strands of hot tar. The realisation of what the daemon’s touch had done to him hit like a blow. He curled up and retched in pain.
‘Sister Adamanthea?’ His once powerful voice had withered to a croak.
The Dominion Superior knelt beside what remained of her squad. She was drenched in blood and filth. Her brooding green eyes were piercing in her blackened face. Her gorget had been shattered, her vox-grille destroyed, revealing a small cybernetic port in her throat, surrounded by welters of scar tissue.
‘Will you hear my confession?’ said Marcus, feeling for the corded claw that hung from his neck. He tugged the pendant free and offered it to Adamanthea.
‘Return to the village wearing this,’ he said. ‘Fulfil the hunter’s oath in my stead and you will bring this world into the light.’
Lords and Tyrants Page 7