present ourselves to the Howling Griffons so they might put a bullet in
the back of our heads and be done with it?’
‘Because there are matters unfinished amongst us that our enemy’s
retreat has permitted to us to address,’ replied Sarpedon.
‘You mean Daenyathos,’ said Salk, ‘and Iktinos.’
‘We still have no understanding of what they intend here,’ said
Tyrendian. Somehow he, as always seemed the case, had come
through the battle in the archive with barely any scar or blemish on
him. Perhaps his psychic talent was not limited to throwing lightning
bolts in battle, but also gave him some kind of inviolability, some ward
against the ugliness of war. ‘Presuming it was Iktinos, under
Daenyathos’s direction, who brought us to this juncture, there is no
indication of what he actually wants to achieve here.’
‘Then we shall find out,’ said Sarpedon. ‘The Howling Griffons will
attack again soon, or a cordon will be set up to contain us. Either way,
if any of us are to begin the hunt for Iktinos and Daenyathos then we
must do so soon. I do not believe our whole force can move through
the Phalanx quickly enough. The whole of the Imperial Fists and
Howling Griffons will mobilise to stand in our way. But if a smaller force
does so while the main force must also be dealt with, we will have a
greater chance of breaking through any opposition and finding
Daenyathos.’
‘Then who will go?’ said Tyrendian.
‘Sergeant Salk,’ said Sarpedon. ‘I ask that you select a squad and
accompany me. I cannot do this alone. Captain Luko, you shall take
command of the rest of the Chapter.’
‘You are our chapter master,’ replied Luko. ‘It is to your leadership
that our battle-brothers look. Would you deny them that in their final
battle? Let one of us go.’
‘No, captain,’ retorted Sarpedon. ‘I am faster than any Space
Marine. Foul as they are, my mutations serve me well in that regard.
Not to mention, I would send no man to face Iktinos or Daenyathos
save myself. And I may be their leader by right, but ask any Soul
Drinker what man he would prefer to fight alongside and those who are
honest will name Captain Luko.’
Luko did not reply for a long moment. ‘If I was asked that question,’
said Luko levelly, ‘then I would say Chapter Master Sarpedon. Is it my
fate that I will be denied that in these, our last moments?’
‘It is,’ said Sarpedon. ‘I promised you peace, captain. It will come
soon. I did not promise I would be there when it arrived. Forgive me,
but these are my orders.’
Luko said nothing, but saluted by way of reply.
‘Our objectives?’ asked Tyrendian.
‘Draw in our enemies, keep them busy. The fiercer the fight here, the
shorter odds you buy for Salk and myself.’
‘I shall round up a squad,’ said Salk. ‘I know who to choose. It will
not take long.’
‘Then we must part,’ said Sarpedon. ‘Remember, regardless of
whose blood flows in us, we are still sons of Dorn. If there was ever a
man who did not know when to give up, it was Rogal Dorn. We are
blessed with a battle in which we cannot fail. Think on Dorn, and forget
how to lose.’
The assembled Soul Drinkers saluted their commander. Then, to a
man, they bowed their heads to pray.
Like a poisoned barb in flesh, like an infection, the warp portal had
caused to grow around it a corrupted cyst that ran with blood and pain.
From the steel of the Phalanx it had chewed out a great cathedral of
gore, its arching ceiling ribbed with clotted veins of filth and its walls of
vivid, oozing torn flesh. Blood washed in tides born of Kravamesh’s
gravity, like wine swirled in a bowl, and through it slithered all the foul
things of the warp.
Every power of the warp wanted its hand played on the Phalanx. So
many of their servants had been banished or destroyed by the Imperial
Fists and the other Chapters represented there that even their aeonsold
hatreds could not stop them from sending their minions to join
Abraxes’s own. Brass-skinned soldiers of the Blood God marched
from the blood onto the shore of torn metal, their black iron swords at
attention and their muscular bodies moving in time as if they were on a
parade ground. Flitting snakelike things with long lashing tongues
darted here and there, quick as hovering insects, snapping at the
morsels of flesh that scudded on the surface of the blood. And a horde
of decaying forms hauled on rusted chains as they dragged an
enormous thing of rotting flesh out of the mire, a contented smile on its
bloated face as it plucked a tiny squealing daemon from the rents in
its skin and swallowed it down. It seemed that every shape of the
warp’s hatred was emerging from the blood-gate, beyond which vast
intelligences gathered to watch this invasion of the Imperial Fists
sanctum.
On an island of corroded metal, all that remained of the docking bay
deck, stood Daenyathos. He seemed the only solid thing in an arena
of flesh that mutated at the whim of the Dark Gods, as if the
dreadnought’s chassis anchored the whole scene in realspace and
without him it would all collapse into the warp under the weight of its
own madness.
‘I brought you here,’ he yelled, voice amplified to maximum. ‘It is at
my sufferance that you walk again in the realms of the real. Abraxes
the Fair, Abraxes the Magnificent, I call upon you to hear me.’
Abraxes rose from his throne of bodies, twisted and fused together
from crewmen whose minds had shattered under the psychic assault
of the gate’s opening. The daemon prince’s beauty was not marred by
the blood that soaked his garments and ran down his perfect alabaster
skin. ‘Abraxes is not summoned,’ he said in a voice like song. ‘He
arrives not at the whim of another.’
‘And yet,’ replied Daenyathos, ‘you are here. For who else would I
bring forth to have his revenge on Sarpedon of the Soul Drinkers?’
Abraxes leaned forward. ‘Sarpedon? And yet here I thought that
Imperial Fists, as delicious as they would be, were the sole morsels I
might find here to soothe my hunger. Yet Sarpedon is here… where is
he? The gate is opened fully and the daemon army is ready to march. I
would march upon him first, and destroy what remains in celebration of
my revenge!’
‘I imagine,’ said Daenyathos, ‘that he will come to you. But mere
slaughter is too small an objective for one such as Abraxes, is it not?
To butcher a starship full of Space Marines is a worthy endeavour for
any petty prince or aspiring daemon, but for Abraxes? Surely your
dreams are grander than that?’
‘Explain yourself!’ demanded Abraxes. ‘I grow impatient. See! The
horrors of Tzeentch march to my tune. A thousand of them emerge
from the warp at my whim! I shall lead them forth without delay unless
your words are profound indeed.’
‘This is a spaceship,’ said Daenyathos. ‘A spaceship as huge and
deadly as any the Imperium has ever fielded. And now it is a
spaceship with a warp portal. I have stolen the Predator’s Eye from the
star Kravamesh and embedded it in the Phalanx. What could the great
Abraxes desire more than a doorway into the warp from which spills all
the legions under his command, and that he can take between the
stars as he wishes?’
Abraxes clenched a fist, and his thoughts could almost be read on
his face. They were not human thoughts – they would not fit in a
human mind. ‘I shall extinguish stars,’ he said. ‘I shall weave a pattern
across the galaxy, even unto Terra!’
‘I can lead you there,’ continued Daenyathos. ‘For a lifetime I
studied the path that will take you beyond the reach of the Imperium’s
cumbersome armies and into the orbits of its most populous worlds. It
is a path that leads to Terra, I assure you. But it leads also through
the very soul of humanity! Imagine world after world falling, drowned in
madness, their last sane vision that of the Phalanx appearing like a
dread star above them! A thousand times a thousand worlds shall
share this fate, so that by the time you reach Terra it shall be to deal
the death blow to a species cringing on its knees before you!’
‘And for what reason would a Space Marine lead me on such a
dance?’ said Abraxes. ‘You who were born of the Emperor’s will. You
who have sworn so many oaths to destroy all such as me. Why do
you wish your species to undergo such a tortuous death?’
‘I need no reason,’ said Daenyathos. ‘Hatred is its own justification.’
‘Ah, hatred!’ said Abraxes, jumping to his cloven feet. The blood
washed around his ankles, mindless predators slithering from the
foam. ‘The human gift to the universe. The greatest work of man. Even
your Emperor himself was in thrall to it. There has been no creation to
rival it. It builds worlds and brings them down. Aloud it is war, and in
silence it is peace. The human race is nothing but a trillion
manifestations of hatred! When humanity is gone, I think I shall
preserve alone its hatred. From it I shall mould whatever I see fit to
succeed them. Hatred alone shall rule among the stars.’
‘And so it shall be,’ said Daenyathos. ‘But first, the Phalanx must
become your own.’
‘That,’ replied Abraxes with scorn, ‘is a task worthy of my notice
only because Sarpedon’s death shall be a part of it. Sarpedon is the
last of the universe I once knew, one in which Abraxes could fail.
When he is gone, only victory shall be left. I can see the fates twining
out towards destruction. There is no thread that humanity can follow to
safety. Sarpedon dies. They all die. Then your universe shall follow!’
With the atonal braying of a hundred pipes, Abraxes’s army
gathered on the blood shore. Greater daemons, hateful lumps of the
warp’s own will given form, were the generals of a thousands-strong
army. Bloodletters of Khorne chanted in their own dark tongue, bodies
smouldering as their lust for slaughter grew. Abraxes’s own horrors
were a shuddering tide of formless flesh, shifting in and out of solid
forms at the speed of thought. Plaguebearers, emissaries of the
plague god Nurgle who had once been Abraxes’s sworn enemy,
fawned around the enormous drooling avatar of rot that was their
leader.
Abraxes strode to the head of his army. In response, the walls of the
cyst opened into vast orifices, leading towards the interior of the
Phalanx. Lesser daemons scrambled forwards, shrieking and gibbering
with the joy of approaching battle. The lords of the daemonic host
howled a terrible cacophony of bellowed orders and the army
advanced, horrors of Tzeentch following Abraxes like the wake of a
battleship.
Daenyathos could see in the army’s advance another thread of fate
winding its way towards a conclusion. Even Chaos had to observe the
inevitability of fate. Abraxes, a being that had perfected its use of
unwitting pawns such as the Soul Drinkers, had been drawn by that
same fate to serve Daenyathos’s design. Through Abraxes,
Daenyathos’s own will would be done.
It had taken so long and so much to reach this point, but that was
merely a prelude. The bloodshed on the Phalanx was the true
beginning of Daenyathos’s remaking of the galaxy.
Sarpedon had nothing but raw instinct to go on. He knew a little of
Daenyathos and rather more of Iktinos’s ways, but even so it was
barely more than guesswork that took him through the cordon of
Imperial Fists and into the vast training section of the Phalanx, where
sparring circles and shooting galleries were equipped with hundreds of
target-servitors and racks of exotic weapons from cultures across the
galaxy.
The industrialised sections of the Phalanx, the cargo bays and
engineering sections towards the rear of the ship, were the best place
for a single Space Marine to hide. Even a dreadnought would find
places to hole up there. That was where Sarpedon resolved to look,
but first he would have to cross the training sections.
‘We should take the mock battlefield,’ said Sergeant Salk. His
squad, picked from the survivors of the battle in the archive, was
advancing in a wide formation to give them the widest angles of vision.
Ahead, a jumble of deck sections formed a series of slopes, hills and
valleys, each section on hydraulics which could move them into a new
topography to create a constantly changing battlefield. It was here that
waves of target-servitors and the shifting landscape combining to
create a test as much mental as it was physical.
‘Agreed,’ said Sarpedon. ‘We must make good time.’
‘If we find Iktinos, commander, what will we do?’
Sarpedon raised an eyebrow. ‘Kill him,’ he said. ‘What do you
think?’
The atmosphere of real battlefields clung thickly to the recreation. It
was not just the bullet scars from live-fire exercises on the forests,
ruined villages, jungles and alien environments wrought from flak-board
and steel. It was the echo of all the imaginary wars that had been
fought there, battles which had their own echo in the real bloodshed
the Imperial Fists trained there later encountered. The skills they
learned there served them well, or failed them, in the depths of war on
Emperor-forsaken alien worlds, and the traces of those desperate
times clung to the mock fortifications like a freezing mist.
‘Contact!’ came a vox from up ahead.
‘Close in!’ ordered Salk. ‘Cover and report targets!’
Ahead was the recreation of a village ruined by shellfire, craters
moulded into the floor sections and the blank, broken walls featureless
save for the empty eyes of windows and doorways. A building in the
shape of a chapel, its walls devoid of sculpture, dominated the centre
of the village with its bell tower tailor-made for snipers. Sarpedon
scuttled into the shell of a mock house, crouching down on h
is
haunches by a doorway. Sarpedon couldn’t see most of Salk’s squad,
spread out and in cover as they were, but he knew they were there.
At the far end of the mock village, Reinez walked into plain view. The
Crimson Fist’s armour still had the filth and scorching of battle, and in
the quiet he jangled with the many icons and seals hanging from him.
He looked just as Sarpedon had left him in the lab, battered and
bruised, but with none of his fires dimmed.
‘Sarpedon!’ called Reinez. ‘I know you are here, you and your
traitors. I think we left some business undone when last we met!’
‘Orders, commander?’ voxed Salk quietly.
‘Hold,’ replied Sarpedon.
‘We could take him down.’
‘You have my orders. Hold fire.’
Reinez walked forwards to the town square in the shadow of the
church. ‘Well?’ he shouted. He had his hammer in his hand, and
scowled at the ruins as he searched out the purple of Soul Drinkers
armour. ‘Do not tell me you care nothing for the fate of Reinez! You
took my standard, you humiliated me, you cast me out from my own
Chapter with your treachery! How can you do all this and yet let me
live?’
Sarpedon stood up from his cover and walked into the open, his
talons clicking on the hard deck sections. Reinez watched him coldly,
wordlessly.
Sarpedon took the Axe of Mercaeno in one hand. ‘This need not
happen,’ said Sarpedon. ‘We are both Space Marines. For one to shed
another’s blood is heresy.’
‘You speak of heresy?’ barked Reinez. ‘You, who have already slain
so many of my brothers? There has not been enough Adeptus
Astartes blood spilled yet for my liking. A few drops more and then it
will be done.’
‘Reinez, I have no quarrel with you here. I seek one of my own, the
one who has orchestrated all that you have railed against. It is he who
deserves all your hate, just as he deserves mine. If you truly want
revenge for what happened to your brothers then let me pass or join
me, but please, do not stand in my way.’
‘You knew it would not end any way but the two of us to the death,’
said Reinez. ‘You knew that from the moment a Crimson Fist fell to a
Soul Drinker’s hand. Fate will not let us go and it will kill one of us
before either walks away.’