Lords and Tyrants

by Warhammer 40K

  Hurzley peered doubtfully at the hatch. ‘We could shoot through it, but we’d probably kill ourselves with the ricochets.’

  Fell was already pulling another melta-charge out of his tactical webbing. ‘A good thing we don’t have to, then.’ He clamped it to the hatch and set the timer with a practised flick of his fingers. ‘Stand back.’

  Alyss closed her eyes, but the actinic flash seemed to burn through her eyelids. When she opened them again there was a large hole in the middle of the hatch, the edges now glowing cherry-red, and dim light spilling out from beyond.

  Razorfang bounded through first, spurred on by Hurzley’s whistle. Fell followed with a diving roll that cleared the molten edges and brought him up to his feet in a firing position. Hurzley followed more slowly, encumbered by his carapace armour but simultaneously protected by it. Lacking the cyber-mastiff’s agility, Fell’s battle-honed reflexes or Hurzley’s armour, Alyss clambered through carefully to avoid burning herself.

  They were in an artificial cavern filled with towering silos and skeletal gantries, a place that Alyss guessed acted as some sort of recycling or processing facility for the city’s sewage, though what the end product could have been was anybody’s guess. It was unlikely to be checked on unless something went wrong, and had enough space between the tanks and on the walkways for a sizeable crowd to assemble and even to live, for a while.

  Which appeared to be exactly what had happened.

  ‘What in the Emperor’s name…?’ Hurzley said in horror, staring up at glyphs daubed on the silos. Even from this distance Alyss could make out renditions of the eight-pointed star, as well as other, less familiar and far less wholesome symbols, and she felt anger surge within her that anyone had dared make such blasphemous marks in this place. She felt the pressure of it in her head, too – a crawling tide of low-level psychic filth that buzzed, hummed and threatened to eclipse everything else.

  It would have killed her had Hurzley not abruptly pulled her behind him.

  ‘Hostiles!’ the ex-Arbites snapped as a shot spanged off the aquila on his shoulderpad. Alyss saw a figure on a gantry some distance away. Hurzley thumbed a switch on his shotgun to select an Executioner round, raised his weapon and pulled the trigger. A moment later the shell’s tiny robot brain had found its mark and their assailant fell backwards with a scream.

  He wasn’t alone, however. From out between the support struts of the nearest silo lurched a ragged band of several dozen men and women wielding autopistols and crude clubs, screaming blasphemous war cries. Alyss fired at them but her shot flew wide, distracted as she was by the buzzing in her head.

  Fell simply hurled a frag grenade into their midst.

  The explosion flung them to the ground, clothing torn and flesh shredded. Fell walked towards them almost casually obliterating skulls with bolter shells as the heretics writhed and mewled in pain. Alyss watched in grim satisfaction as they died, but caught Fell’s arm as he was about to the execute the last.

  ‘We should question him,’ she said urgently. ‘Look around. I see filth, I see graffiti, I see discarded food wrappers…’ She paused, looking at a pile of fire-blackened bones several metres away that she strongly doubted had belonged to any animal, and felt nausea surge in her gut. ‘There must have been more of them. Where did they go?’

  ‘And why are these ones still here?’ Hurzley put in.

  ‘We’ve faced cultists before,’ Fell remarked. ‘These barely put up a fight. I think we’ve found the dregs.’ He pulled his Inquisitorial rosette out and knelt down on the injured heretic’s chest. ‘Do you know what this means?’

  Even in the grip of debilitating pain from his grenade wounds the man’s face paled and his eyes widened in terror as he saw the symbol.

  ‘No! No, please!’

  ‘Where are the others?’ Fell demanded. ‘Why did you remain?’

  The heretic’s eyes darted desperately from side to side, but no help came. ‘Too weak… Not worthy…’

  ‘Not worthy of what?’ Fell snapped. He brought his combi-bolter up into the man’s view. ‘I can give you a single shot to the head or I can pulverise your limbs and leave you to bleed out. Where are the others?’

  Hurzley’s vox crackled and he cursed under his breath as he listened. ‘General alert. There has been a cultist uprising in the city. Even the governor’s palace is under attack from a mob. I suppose that answers your question.’

  Fell shook his head. ‘It’s a diversion.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Alyss asked, although she harboured the same suspicion.

  ‘I’m no witch, but you don’t survive war if you don’t learn to follow your gut sometimes.’ He got back to his feet and aimed his combi-bolter at the heretic’s left knee. ‘Last chance, scum. Where are the others? What are you not worthy of?’

  Alyss had seen a man’s will break before, but never as sharply as this. Whether through pain, fear, insufficient faith in his false gods, or a combination of all three, the heretic began weeping and his voice rose to a desperate shriek.

  ‘The sword! The sword, the sword, the sword!’

  Fell looked over his shoulder at Alyss. She nodded grimly – his words had the ring of truth.

  ‘Damn,’ Fell muttered. His bolter shell ended the heretic’s existence in a moment and he activated his vox. ‘Inquisitor! They’re coming for the blade! Do you read?’

  There was no answer except the crackling of static enforced by the metres of rockcrete above them. Fell swore and turned to Hurzley. ‘What about the city’s local channels?’

  ‘We’re locked out,’ the ex-Arbites said. ‘Transmission’s been restricted to the military, and I don’t have time to break in.’

  Fell let out a wordless snarl of frustration. ‘We need to get back to the dig site, as fast as possible.’ He pulled out the data-slate and scanned the schematics, then pointed towards a hatch on the far side of the chamber. ‘It shouldn’t be too far. That way.’

  This hatch was easily openable by hand from the inside, and Fell hauled it aside to let them through. Then they were back into the foetid darkness of the sewers, making the best pace they could across ­uneven footing and looking for the access ladder that would allow them to regain the surface.

  ‘We’re missing something,’ Alyss said suddenly, realisation dawning now she wasn’t concentrating on guiding them to the purification station or surrounded by its brain-fogging aura.

  ‘Well?’ Fell demanded, splashing through a noxious puddle.

  ‘We still don’t know who killed Speltmann, or how!’ Alyss said urgently. ‘We still don’t know who sent those ident-tags, how they got them, or why they wanted us to go to Speltmann’s manse!’

  Fell grunted in apparent frustration. ‘Is this really the time, Nero?’

  ‘Yes!’ More and more, Alyss was convinced that her point was vital. ‘There’s a third player here! Someone is manipulating us!’

  ‘Someone’s always manipulating us!’ Fell snapped, stopping and rounding on Alyss so sharply that she nearly lost her footing. Behind her, Hurzley clattered to a stop as well and she heard the skittering of Razorfang’s claws on wet brickwork. ‘Welcome to the real world, Nero! If you serve the Inquisition as long as I have you’ll learn that there’s always another layer of shadows, there’s always a hundred agendas that you don’t even know about! All we can do is try to serve the Emperor to the best of our abilities, and right now that means–’

  ‘You know,’ Alyss said, shocked. Fell’s bluster was a front; she sensed dishonesty coming off him like waves.

  ‘What are you–’

  ‘You know who’s behind this,’ she insisted, and saw his eyes narrow above his respirator. ‘You know who the third player is!’

  ‘Fell?’ Hurzley asked from behind her. ‘What’s she talking about?’

  ‘Throne-damned witches,’ Fell muttered.


  Alyss suddenly became very aware that the luminator allowing Fell to see her was strapped to the top of his combi-bolter, and her mouth went dry.

  ‘Fell?’ Hurzley demanded more forcefully. Razorfang’s robotic growl began to rise.

  The ex-Guardsman raised one hand in a placating gesture. ‘Easy, Hurzley.’

  ‘Easy, nothing,’ Hurzley said, and racked his shotgun. ‘If the girl’s telling the truth then you’re telling lies, and that means you’re a threat. Out with it.’

  Fell’s eyes closed for a moment, then opened again, weary and resigned. ‘I don’t know who’s behind it, and that’s the truth. But I have a suspicion.’

  ‘Well?’ Hurzley said.

  ‘Eldar. They’re the only ones I can think of who might have been able to steal Katzeed’s tags from her body.’

  Alyss felt her eyebrows shoot upwards. ‘Eldar? Why? How?’

  Fell glared back at her with eyes like shards of knapped flint. ‘Because unless I miss my guess, without them I would be dead and the Manchewer would have razed Abram’s World to the bedrock.’

  Alyss frowned, confused. ‘They helped you slay the warboss?’

  ‘No, Nero,’ Fell said, shaking his head. ‘They slew the warboss.’

  Alyss felt as if she’d been struck in the chest with a power maul. ‘But you–’

  ‘We’d underestimated the orks’ numbers and strength,’ Fell said coldly. ‘They were monsters, Nero. My kill team was annihilated and I’d lost my arm, I was practically passed out from pain and blood loss and about to die when suddenly…’ He shrugged. ‘Suddenly the greenskins were fighting someone else. I couldn’t follow what was happening, I was barely conscious, but something wiped out the bastard’s command. I never saw how they got there, how they left, or who they were. I managed to vox that the orks were now leaderless and our counter-charge got to me in time to save my life.’

  ‘And you took the credit for it?’ Alyss asked, aghast.

  ‘That wasn’t my idea!’ Fell protested. ‘I told the story truly to my commander, but what were we supposed to say? The sector needed to hear that we’d saved them so that’s what they got told, and the general swore the few who knew the truth to secrecy.’ His lip curled. ‘And now I’ve broken that oath, to convince you that I’m no traitor while the inquisitor’s in danger.’

  Alyss frowned. ‘Does the inquisitor know?’

  ‘Of course the inquisitor knows!’ Fell snorted. ‘You think an Ordo Xenos inquisitor would be taken in by that story? Those events were what drew me to her attention. I told her the truth, of course. From my vague descriptions and her own knowledge, she surmised the eldar had intervened against the orks, although if she knows why, she never shared it.’

  ‘And now they draw us into an ambush?’ Hurzley said.

  ‘Or sought to warn us,’ Fell argued, waving an arm in the direction of the surface. ‘They sent us after a nest of corruption, we were just too slow. If the xenos act against us then rest assured, I’ll take a piece of them.’

  Alyss nodded slowly. She was ashamed she’d thought Fell a traitor, but also angry that one of the great Imperial victories she’d been taught about was a lie. Yet she could see why the lie had been created.

  She shunted her warring thoughts aside. There would be time enough to confront them later. Assuming she survived.

  The access ladder brought them up through a maintenance hatch and into the utter mayhem that had engulfed Verbaden City. Light poles had been destroyed but flickering flames from vandalised buildings cast shifting shadows, and robed and masked figures flitted through them, whooping with grotesque mirth.

  ‘This way,’ Alyss said, getting her bearings. She activated her comm-bead. ‘Inquisitor, do you read? What is your situation?’

  ‘We’re defending the dig site,’ Ngiri replied after a second, to Alyss’ immense relief. The inquisitor sounded tense but calm, despite the shouts and gunfire in the background. ‘The cultists appear focused on reaching the blade.’

  ‘We’re coming,’ Alyss said as the three of them and Razorfang sprinted down a street. ‘We’re only about a block away.’ She cast a glance over her shoulder at Hurzley, who was labouring under the weight of his armour and dropping behind.

  ‘Go on!’ the ex-Arbites puffed as his cyber-mastiff fell back to match its master’s pace. ‘We’ll get there as soon as we can!’

  ‘Just you and me for now, then,’ Fell said grimly, and lengthened his stride. Alyss accelerated to keep up, and together they pelted past blank-faced windows and piles of refuse until they reached the gaping hole in the city that marked the location of the dig site. Alyss could see robed figures swarming into a depression in the ground a hundred metres or so away, but the earth between her and them was criss-crossed with dig trenches too wide to simply jump across.

  ‘I thought I was done with trench fighting,’ Fell grunted, unslinging his combi-bolter and dropping down into the nearest. ‘Come on, Nero!’

  Alyss followed him, listening to the shouts, screams and gunshots on the air and trusting that Fell’s military instincts would guide them along the right path. He barely slowed when they came upon cultists, gunning them down from behind before the heretics even realised they were there, and so when he skidded to a halt in the red mud, Alyss collided with his broad back.

  ‘By the Emperor…’

  Alyss got a momentary impression of a monstrous figure filling the trench in front of them before Fell’s combi-bolter spat a burning cloud of promethium. The weapon bathed the apparition in liquid fire for one, two, three seconds…

  …and then it came screaming through and swatted Fell so hard he flew backwards, the combi-bolter sailing out of his grip and clean out of the trench.

  Alyss had seen an Adeptus Astartes once – this thing was bigger. She thought for a moment that it was some sort of ogryn before she caught sight of its face and realised with horror that the creature was a mutated human, swollen beyond all biological norms into a ­raging block of muscle. Its teeth had been replaced with triangular metal blades, so sharp Alyss could see specks of blood on its lips from where it had cut itself, and it reached for her with huge hands tipped with bone-white talons. Alyss raised her laspistol and fired on full-auto, but the barrage of shots had no appreciable effect other than eliciting a roar of rage and setting a rune flashing, warning her that her power pack was nearly expended. The mutant moved with shocking speed for something so huge, and she only just managed to duck a swipe that would have taken her head off. She back-pedalled desperately, nearly tripping over Fell’s groaning form.

  ‘Down!’

  Alyss threw herself into the mud as a shotgun blast took the thing in the shoulder, drawing a gout of black ichor, and Razorfang flew at it. The cyber-mastiff struck the mutant in the chest, steel jaws snapping, as Alfrett Hurzley stormed past Alyss, still unloading shotgun shells.

  The mutant grabbed the cyber-mastiff and wrenched its head clean off, then snatched Hurzley up and dashed him down back-first across one monstrous knee with a sickening cracking noise. The ex-Arbites’ body flopped bonelessly as it was cast aside. Alyss raised her useless laspistol again and commended her soul to the Emperor.

  Something flickered into view overhead, roughly human-sized but leaping with a thoroughly inhuman agility and grace. Its outline was oddly blurred and its appearance distracted Alyss for what would have been a fatal second, had the new arrival not landed on the mutant’s back and plunged a thin tube attached to its forearm into the creature’s neck.

  The mutant thrashed wildly for a moment, then landed at Alyss’ feet with a crash and didn’t move again. Its assailant hopped nimbly off, the apparently disparate pieces of its form rushing together into a cohesive whole.

  Tall. Lithe. Clad in shifting diamonds of colour, its face hidden by a distorted, grinning mask. An alien-looking pistol in one hand and the other empty save for the stra
nge device strapped to the back of its forearm, bulbous at one end and thinning to a point where it extended out over the wrist.

  An eldar.

  It looked at Alyss and she met its eyes for a second, mere gleams in the shadows but still deep and unreadable. Then its mask tilted towards her in an apparent nod of acknowledgement before it turned and launched itself into the air with a keening war cry.

  ‘After it!’ Fell gasped, staggering up to his feet, bleeding from claw wounds and his flak vest shredded. Alyss cast a momentary glance at her fallen comrade, then turned away. The living needed her now.

  Robed corpses littered the trench floor in ones and twos, ripped apart by the alien’s exotic weapon or simply dead, although Alyss guessed that if she inspected those bodies she’d find a small puncture wound such as that in Phinius Speltmann’s gut, or the back of the huge mutant’s neck. Certainly, the xenos seemed no friend to the Ruinous Powers.

  When they got to the main dig site, Alyss fervently wished that a few more had joined it.

  There were cultists everywhere, surging forward to assault an improvised barricade of packing crates and power loaders. Alyss saw the incandescent discharge of Ngiri’s plasma pistol, heard the crack of Jekri’s arc-rifle, and felt the psychic blow that swept half a dozen attackers off their feet and into the mud wall. Carmine must have been tiring, though, as three picked themselves back up almost immediately. Even as she watched, howling deviants hauled Sef Lentzen out from behind the barricade and set about clubbing him to death. The rest would be overwhelmed in moments.

  ‘My power pack’s nearly out!’ Alyss warned, dropping a heretic with her laspistol. Fell pulled out two more frag grenades and hurled them into the mob, sending bodies flying, but Alyss could tell it wasn’t going to be enough.

  ‘I’ve got one krak left!’ Fell panted, weighing it in his hand. ‘Can you see anyone who looks like their leader?’

  Their intervention hadn’t gone unnoticed. Cultists were looking around to see where the grenades had come from, and their gazes fixed on Alyss and Fell. It would reduce the amount trying to breach the inquisitor’s barricade all at once, Alyss supposed. Perhaps their deaths would be of use.