Dark Imperium

by Guy Haley

  A second, smaller bell hung from the traitor’s hand. He swung it like a weapon at Felix’s head. Felix recovered quickly, his Primaris physique, aided by the Codicier’s psychic might, purging the great bell’s effects from his mind, and he swung his power sword, cleaving the bellringer’s hand from his body. Blood, thick and slow as tar, congealed at the stump. Felix levelled his sword, and rammed it as hard as he could at the traitor’s chest. A sparking furrow split the armour as the point scraped across the rounded chest-plate, setting the traitor’s tabard aflame. It bit near the bellringer’s armpit, and penetrated the metal to the rotten meat beneath. Felix put all his weight onto the sword, and pushed it through his enemy. Metal squealed on metal. The disruption field cracked and banged. Stinking smoke wisped from the wound.

  The traitor roared, and flailed once again with his smaller bell. Felix released his sword and punched hard with his gauntlet, caving in the traitor’s helmet. As the bellringer fell, Felix yanked his sword free and swung, cutting through the bell’s supporting horn. It fell with a muted clank, and was silent.

  Instantly, the effect of the bell vanished. The Primaris Space Marines recovered their wits and attacked with renewed vigour. Death Guard fell by the dozen, though the cost to the Ultramarines was high.

  ‘Onward!’ shouted Felix. ‘Onward! To the chapel!’

  Blade and fist swinging, Felix battled his way toward the chapel’s high doors. Seeing their leader so far out ahead of them, the Primaris Space Marines let out a war shout and pressed on, bludgeoning their foes with rifle butt and combat blade when the range became too close to effectively fire.

  Cutting the head from a power-fist-wielding plague champion, Felix made the chapel doors first. He raised his sword and shouted, ‘For Guilliman! For Ultramar! For the Emperor!’

  The battle was done soon after.

  Felix set a rearguard before going into the chapel with Maxim and Gerrundium. The dead were moving still. Their progress was slow, but they were coming on inexorably.

  Having positioned his men, Felix returned to the feasting hall and the doorway that led into the chapel. Maxim solemnly pushed open the door, and together they were confronted by the daemonic mechanism of Mortarion.

  All fittings had been stripped from the chapel, leaving it a bare chamber with chipped walls where mosaics had been torn free and murals smashed. Plaster crunched underfoot.

  Plinths empty of statues held strange alembics. They bubbled furiously, emitting cool smoke that smelled of sickness. They were arrayed at precise intervals, seven in all, surrounding a huge thing made of brass, wickedness and glass. Its lower part was an immense half globe, full of swirling black particles that, on closer inspection, proved to be evil-tempered flies. The smokes of the alembics were conveyed to this chamber by tubes of moist leather, though whether this was to feed or to kill the flies could not be discerned.

  Towering proudly from the seething mass of bottled flies rose a complicated mechanism of verdigrised bronze and brass. Seven cracked white dials were mounted on the upper parts, their faces divided into seven portions.

  As technology, the machine’s exterior appeared elegant but primitive, something from a backward world of steam and clockwork. In the centre was a network of fluid circuitry of more sophisticated alien manufacture, though what that held inside was the most esoteric and primitive of all. The xenos circuitry encased a glowing shard of what looked like stone. It had no deliberate shape, appearing natural, or at least created using poorly refined growing processes, but the curve of it – the bladed end and the knotted parts spaced down its length – suggested a monster’s finger hacked from a cruel talon. Spiral wires were plugged in to crudely drilled holes in several places. Crowning it all was complicated network of gears that drove three brass orbs around and around, like an orrery depicting a system of a few planets.

  The combination of sciences was bizarre. Such was the mix of technologies employed in the machine’s creation, from the most advanced secrets to the lowest tech base, that were it not for the aching green glow coming from it, and the sense of palpable evil that accompanied this fell light, it could have been taken for some dramatist’s stage prop.

  Clockwork tick-tocked with fussy efficiency. The flies’ buzzing set the Space Marines’ teeth on edge, but worse was the hum coming from the rotating spheres.

  ‘It is a clock, a monstrous timepiece,’ said Maxim. ‘A warp thing.’

  ‘Can you discern how it works?’ asked Felix.

  ‘In some profane manner, time itself is sickened by this device,’ said Gerrundium.

  ‘Can you feel it, my brother?’ Maxim asked Gerrundium. ‘How it reaches out from here, casting a shade over the planet?’

  ‘I see it as a stain, many armed and ominous, that embraces all to its darkness,’ replied Gerrundium.

  ‘Such evil,’ said Maxim. ‘And it is not confined only to this room, or even to Ardium alone. Its influence spreads throughout the sector, linking worlds in a dark web of diabolical cause.’ Maxim’s hand traced through the air, pointing out something invisible to Felix. ‘It is this that destabilises the star-realm of Ultramar, allowing the leakage of the warp through space and time, returning the dead to unliving life and tempting the faithful from the righteous path.’

  ‘How can a machine do such things?’ asked Felix.

  ‘It is not a machine,’ said Maxim. ‘Not in our sense. It looks like a machine. There is xenos deviltry here besides the machinations of Chaos. Aeldari, perhaps. Those parts are tormented…’ He paused. ‘Like they are a piece of a device made to function contrary to its intended purpose. But it is mostly warpcraft. This device was certainly crafted by Mortarion, the fallen primarch. It has the hallmarks of his work.’

  ‘Then Lord Guilliman’s information was correct,’ said Felix. ‘Is it safe for my warriors to enter the room?’

  ‘Safe enough. The device has a perfidious purpose that affects the minds and souls of mortal men. Our warriors should be immune, so long as they focus and do not lose themselves as you almost did, captain.’

  ‘Then I will call them in and have this thing demolished,’ said Felix. ‘We have seen enough. The dead are at the doors of the Palace Spire. I will call in our transports, as soon as this machine is in fragments, and we will leave.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Mycota Profundis

  The long-dead builders of the Endurance would no longer recognise the interior of the battle-barge. Ten thousand years had passed since its keel had been laid. But time, even of so long a span, was not responsible for its transformation.

  Thick, poisonous vapour swirled through its corridors, growing thicker the higher up the ship’s decks one went. At the very heights of its rotten command spires, the gas displaced the air, and would kill a mortal man in seconds. The cowed tribes who made up the ship’s mortal contingent were confined to the lower decks, where the air approached breathable and the fog was confined to ceilings of the highest halls, snaked and coiled among the corroded ducts. Even so they lived terrible, shortened lives, their lungs rotting from the moment of their first breath.

  To the daemon primarch Mortarion, the air was invigorating. He strode through its comforting billows. His robe sent it into a storm of complicated curls where three-lobed sigils and grinning skulls might be seen, though only for a moment. In the high levels he walked, the mist was liquid thick and hid the sides of the corridors. Glinting droplets made up the clouds, condensing on metal and flesh, and moisture beaded the primarch’s clothes. Other parts of the Endurance were sweltering as equatorial swamps, but the heights were chill as mountaintops, and here daemonkin, immune to the effects of the toxic air, took the place of wretched humans as crew. The air aside, the machinery of the vessel in the heights required a certain touch. No mortal effort could ensure its smooth running.

  Coiled, organic tubing took the place of metal pipes. Taut nerves replaced
wiring. Rotting brain matter stood in place of circuitry nexuses, and daemons trapped in warded pots did the work of cogitators. A thick plaque of pulsing flesh covered over the walls and made the floor soft underfoot. Where it had not been subsumed, the steel and iron of ancient Imperial work was flaked with corrosion. Blackened plastek peeled from wiring. Everywhere was a state of decay.

  The fleshy parts of the Endurance teemed with disease that broke it down and digested it as quickly as it grew. Great patches of it were black with putrescence. Crops of livid cysts throbbed on the walls, trickling oil where they had burst. There were rooms where the flesh had died. There maggots fell as rain, and flies clogged the workings. Whole decks had been overtaken by foetid jungles. Others were thick with slime where unnatural ecosystems had succumbed to virulent plagues, for the interior of the Endurance was a small part of Grandfather Nurgle’s Garden, dug up and transplanted into the fertile ground of the mortal world.

  It was a vital decay. The ship still functioned. It still moved through space as it had been made to. It quivered as its ancient engine stacks pushed it vigorously free of the Macragge System.

  Mortarion’s personal domain differed in form to the chaotic machine-life of the rest of his ship. He came to a door covered with throbbing, vein-like ivy. A pass of his cadaverous hand, and the door opened for him, sending the choking fog into a swirling dance.

  On the far side was nothing but cold, bare metal.

  The ancient magi who had built the Endurance would have recognised these halls. They were rusty, pockmarked by acid burns from the corrosive mists, but they lacked the fleshy vitality of other parts of the ship.

  Mortarion emerged into a spire whose floors had been cored out to make a single, towering space. When completed, the alteration had sported decorative gargoyles, and fantastically detailed railings had edged the walkways formed by the edges of the removed floors. That was long ago. The statues were now nubs of iron, the railings dissolved to paper-thin fretting. The fog was at its thickest at the tower’s peak, where it formed clouds thick enough to rain. A light, acidic drizzle fell from on high. Puddles of it sat in concavities it had dissolved in the floor.

  Mortarion stood at the base of the tower. With its interior structure removed, the true scale of an Imperial battleship was revealed. This single tower was a hundred metres across, and three hundred high. He raised his hands and tilted his face upwards. His yellow eyes closed, and he let the rain fall upon his face. It ran in greasy trails around the breathing mask embedded into his flesh.

  With a gurgle of pleasure, Mortarion shook out his double wings. They resembled those of a giant fly, veined and diaphanous. After a couple of experimental twitches, Mortarion set them into blurring motion, and he rose smoothly from the ground.

  His wings made a noise as loud as a hundred chainswords revving, but he moved serenely, his long robes trailing after him, dripping with the liquids they had accumulated on his walk through the ship.

  He rose to the tower’s top where a pier extended from one wall. It was so corroded by the fog that it shook as he landed upon it. He folded his wings away back into his robe. As he walked the pier, it swayed and squealed, letting out a shower of rust, but it bore him surely, and he arrived at the door at the far end. Another pass of his hands sent the door grating into the wall. He went through onto a set of wrought iron stairs that curved up inside the skin of the spire. There were holes in the hull there through which shone the steady burn of stars. But the mist was unaffected; the air was unaffected; Mortarion was unaffected. Where decompression winds should rush, there was dank stillness. The Endurance no longer obeyed the strictures of reality.

  A final door opened into the last chamber remaining in the tower. It had been in ages past the spire’s viewing dome. Now it was Mortarion’s horarium, his retreat, his sanctuary. A home away from home when he was forced to leave the comforting landscapes of the Plague Planet behind.

  He had never thought to leave the Eye of Terror. It amused him that he had. It was good to be abroad again.

  The armourglass dome still covered the top of the tower, though the petal-shaped panes that made it up were broken in several places, and one was missing entirely. This did not affect the poisonous atmosphere, nor the temperature. Rather than the killing cold of space, the dome retained the chill of high mountains: unpleasant, but not deadly.

  If one looked past the reality-defying properties of the horarium, there were four items of note in the chamber. The first was its vast array of clocks. They hung from every part of the walls below the glass of the dome. They stood in tocking ranks upon the floor. Small carriage clocks and giant gilded edifices under glass domes occupied dozens of tables. Their ticking resounded loudly. A new chime went off every second, for the clocks ran asynchronously, marking as they did the time of many layers of reality. Every few minutes, the ringing of many bells would coincide, and sound as a single deafening round of mismatched peals.

  The largest of the clocks was the second item. Occupying the central portion of the room, and twice the height of the daemon primarch, it had three faces and stood on three legs worked with the tripartite symbol of Nurgle. The legs did not obviously represent those of any kind of beast, fantastical or otherwise, but were made so that it crouched over the floor, giving the impression it was about to strike. Its faces were a metre across, and each had seven hours and three hands with pointers made in the shape of flies. The time was approaching the clock’s midnight. A massive scythe on a chain served as a pendulum. It swished across the space beneath the clock. Reality sighed as the blade cut into the very stuff of creation, and every tick-tock was the death of something fine.

  The third item was contained within the great clock. Atop the timepiece was a huge bell jar, covered all over with arcane symbols. The lower half extended into the space between the triple faces. The upper half made a lesser dome below the greater. There was something inside: a prisoner. Its presence explained why metal tubes were attached to glass valves in the jar. They allowed certain poisons to be introduced, though not to kill. The jar was a device of torment.

  The thing inside the jar was no longer alive, but it could suffer. Streamers of corposant moved behind the glass. As Mortarion entered the room, they coalesced, becoming a monstrous alien face. Even in death, the soul’s psychic potency was great enough to stop a mortal man’s heart by sight alone, and then raise up his corpse to serve the creature, but to Mortarion the killing scorn it broadcast was a balm.

  ‘Good day, father,’ he said. The primarch’s voice was ghostly. A deep, sighing whisper.

  For a thousand years, Mortarion had pursued the soul of his adoptive father through the warp with packs of baying beasts. Over the landscapes of insanity and through the kingdoms of dreams, the pursuit had gone on. Mortarion had turned his face entirely from the mortal realm in those years, so bent was he on having his final vengeance upon the xenos creature that had adopted him, used him and had been slain by the Emperor when Mortarion had failed to kill him.

  Imprisoning his alien father’s soul had brought Mortarion a modicum of peace the Emperor had denied him.

  The hunt was long ago, and the novelty of the prisoner had worn off. The lord of death paid no heed to his foster father’s glowering and went to the clock’s pendulum. He caught the scythe by the handle at the apex of its swing, and unhooked it from the chain. Without the scythe, the clock continued to tick, defying the logic of real mechanisms.

  Mortarion weighed the scythe in his hand. ‘Silence,’ he said, naming the weapon. He ran his hand along the head. His dry hands rasped on the steel. Unlike most other things aboard the Endurance, the scythe was free of decay, and sharp as a dying woman’s curse.

  The fourth and final thing of note in the room was not visible to mortal sight. It had to be summoned. Mortarion stood under the centre of the clock, extended his right arm and opened his hand. He closed his eyes a moment.

 
‘I call upon you, loyal servants of the Great Father. Commune with me, in the name of the sevenfold path.’

  The vapours in the room thickened about the spot directly below the clock’s centre. Mortarion stepped back. He rested his hand atop Silence’s head, his robes stirring in the stinking wind, and waited. The fog whirled faster and faster until it formed a small vortex of black light. The vortex thickened, taking on the shape of a tall fungus. The flesh of it was ethereal to begin with, but grew more solid with every passing moment. Once solid, the fungus grew unnaturally fast, its rounded tip questing upward towards the base of the clock. From the bottom of his prison, Mortarion’s father watched it approach, recoiling as it wormed its way within the clock and bumped the base of the glass, smearing it with poison. Black mycelium spread across the floor from the fungus’ bulbous volva. They threaded themselves across the floor, swift as serpents and gossamer fine, rising up and engulfing the clocks of the room in a stringy, slimy mat. Where they encountered Mortarion, they engulfed him to his waist. The daemon primarch closed his eyes, shuddering at their touch in a combination of ecstasy and abhorrence.

  Mortarion had never lost his disgust of warpcraft.

  The wind dropped. The fungus cap, a pale and narrow thing clasped close to the stalk, pulsed horribly. A wet, musty smell suffused the fog. At once, the clocks went off together, rippling the vapours with a violent carillon, and then they all stopped.

  ‘Mortarion,’ said a voice.

  The daemon primarch opened his eyes. They were shot through with the root systems of the fungus, the whites veined with black threads that extended into the yellow of his irises.

  Beneath the clock was an image of Ku’gath: the Plaguefather, Great Unclean One and favoured of Nurgle. It wavered as if seen through a jet of forge heat. There were similarities with an Imperial hololith, but they were entirely superficial. The head looked real behind its curtain of heat, severed as if it had been carved from the body, so that the veins and ways of the organism could be seen around the edges, as if in an anatomical cross section.