compromising memories trapped in a fractured mind. An atrocity quite
in keeping with the Philosopher-Soldier’s conviction that everything he
did, no matter how obscene, was for a good beyond the conception of
lesser human beings.
Sarpedon knew now what Daenyathos planned. It was no less
appalling than the betrayal of the Soul Drinkers had suggested. It was
entirely appropriate that Abraxes, an icon of treachery and malice,
should himself just be a cog in such a scheme. The annihilation of
Iktinos’s personality was similarly in keeping with Daenyathos’s way of
doing things.
Iktinos had not completed his mental suicide before the
unconscious part of him, the one laid open by the Hell, had submitted
to Sarpedon’s request. Iktinos had, indeed, told Sarpedon everything.
Sarpedon hefted Iktinos’s body into the airlock. He slammed the
inner door shut and turned the wheel to lock it again. Through the thick
portholes Sarpedon could see the multicoloured nebulae of the Veiled
Region, unknowable and hungry. Sarpedon would give its ravenous
young stars something to feed on.
He tried to think of something to say to Iktinos, some powerful
parting statement that would both condemn the traitor and express
regret that the Chaplain, his old friend, was gone. But there was no
point. Iktinos could not have understood anything in his current state,
even if the words did reach him through the heavy airlock door.
Sarpedon thumbed the control stud set into the wall beside the door.
Pneumatic cables hissed as the airlock was depressurised. A warning
light strobed, then the airlock’s outer door opened and the remaining
air whistled out. Silence followed and Iktinos’s body, dislodged from its
resting place by the final decompression, drifted out of the airlock and
beyond the grasp of the Phalanx.
A craft the size of the Phalanx was typically surrounded by a halo of
debris and thin gas out to a distance of several tens of metres.
Sarpedon watched as Iktinos’s body fell beyond the halo zone, into the
pure void. At some point the Chaplain had finally died, but it hardly
seemed much of a distinction with his mind already destroyed.
The outer door slid shut again, and Iktinos’s body became lost
through the condensation misting on the porthole as the airlock filled
back up with air. Sarpedon turned away.
Iktinos was dead. Sarpedon had kept one of the promises he had
made to himself. A tough as taking on Iktinos had been, the next
promise would be harder to fulfil. Sarpedon knew where Daenyathos
was and what he was trying to do, but the way he would stop the
Philosopher-Soldier had yet to make itself clear.
It did not matter. The time for weighing up the risks and probabilities
of battle had come and gone some time ago. Now, Sarpedon had
something to fight for, and there was no deadlier weapon than that in a
Space Marine’s hands.
‘Throne behold us,’ whispered Pallas as he set eyes on the Path of the
Lost for the first time. ‘Watch over us, my Emperor. Watch over us.’
The Path of the Lost, as recorded in the archives of the Imperial
Fists, was a dark place. Its floors were covered with grates to allow the
blood to drain out, and a thousand rusting torture devices were piled up
as detritus in its shadowy corners as the fashions of punishment
changed. An Imperial Fist might have the honour of being interrogated
in the Atoning Halls or perhaps brought in chains before the Chapter
Master – but those who were outsiders, prisoners of war or
condemned heretics would be banished to the Path of the Lost. There
would be doled out their tortures or executions away from the eyes of
the Chapter down in the Phalanx’s rusting, filthy underbelly.
That would have been bad enough.
The strike force advanced, fire teams covering one another, as they
crossed the threshold and entered what the Path of the Lost had
become. The horror of the warp’s invasion had bled down inevitably into
the Path, some unconscious malice dragging the warp’s dark energies
into the torture chambers and execution grounds.
Across the walls and floors shimmered the torn faces of the Path’s
dead. Delicate eldar features, each forced into a dying rictus, bulged
from the warping metal. Like drowning swimmers struggling to the
surface, humanoid shapes broke the surface to sink down again, an
endless pulsating mass of bodies. The ghosts of mutant renegades,
fouled with horns or sloughing skin, pushed against the fabric of
reality, teeth gnashing.
‘There must be a million dirty secrets down here,’ said Luko, casting
an eye across the constant parade of the executed and damned.
‘Nothing of your concern,’ said Sergeant Prexus. His squad had
been charged with forming the bulk of the strike force, with nine more
Imperial Fists under his command.
‘I think it is, sergeant,’ replied Luko. ‘All those dark deeds the
Imperial Fists thought hidden from the universe, they might well come
back to bite us down here.’
‘If you are finished,’ said Sister Aescarion, walking between the
Imperial Fist and the Soul Drinker, ‘time is a factor.’
Prexus’s squad advanced into the cluster of execution chambers
that marked the entrance to the Path of the Lost. Pallas, Luko and
Graevus followed the Imperial Fists in, Varnica and Sister Aescarion
watching the angles behind them.
Several tiled rooms with drains built into the floor, walls crazed with
old bullet holes, had seen hundreds of captives executed in the past
decades and centuries. Now those walls bulged as if they held veins
fed by a vast heart, faces and hands pressing against the surface. The
floor quivered underfoot as grasping hands tried to snare the feet of the
Imperial Fists.
‘Steel your souls,’ said Sergeant Prexus, his chainsword held ready
as he took point. ‘Recall the parables of Rogal Dorn. He walked into
the hell of the Vengeful Spirit, and though assailed on every side, he
did not fall. Though the Angel fell, the strength of our primarch’s soul
did not let him follow. Though the Emperor was laid low, Rogal Dorn
did not know despair. Let his strength be your strength, my brothers.
Let his strength be yours.’
‘We are watched,’ said Varnica. He slid a hand into his force claw
gauntlet, and it snickered shut around his wrist.
A shape flashed through the execution chambers, half-glimpsed
through the gaping doorways and holes in the collapsed walls. The
Imperial Fists gathered into a battle formation, gathered around Prexus
with bolters aimed out in all directions. Pallas was beside Prexus, his
own bolter ready.
‘They envy us,’ said Varnica. ‘No matter how grave our situation, it
cannot compare to the unfinished business of the dead.’
More shimmering silver-grey forms rippled in and out of sight, flitting
from electric chair to injection table to gallows. Quicker and closer
they came, the howling of their voices growing, until they were like
a
tornado of torn souls with the strike force trapped in the storm’s eye.
‘Hold fast,’ cried Prexus. ‘The enemy shows its hand. Its foulness
here is manifest.’
Reality bowed and flexed around Varnica’s force claw as he
channelled his psychic power into the Hammerhand. Aescarion
dropped to one knee, power axe ready, and was taken aback to see
Graevus take up the same posture beside her, his own power axe in
his mutated hand.
One of the ghosts tore from the mass and arrowed towards them.
Varnica leapt, drawing back his force claw. The spirit had the hollow
face and alien eyes of the eldar, the inhuman geometry of its frame the
very essence of the xenos. The ragged matter of its body echoed the
curved shapes of its once-elegant armour, shredded into streamers of
spirit-stuff by the ravages of its grim death.
Varnica’s force claw closed on the spirit and sheared it in two. The
wall of force generated by the eruption of his Hammerhand power
ripped the xenos spirit apart, a sphere of energy bulging outwards from
ripped the xenos spirit apart, a sphere of energy bulging outwards from
the impact.
Varnica skidded to the floor. With ear-splitting screams, more of the
Phalanx’s dead were shrieking into the Imperial formation. Aescarion
swatted at one, the blade of her power axe scything through a vaguely
human mass of glowing energy. The discharging power field shredded
the spirit into a cloud of falling sparks.
‘Open fire!’ yelled Prexus, and ten boltguns hammered in unison.
Shapes rippled along the floor and grabbed at their feet, while ghostly
hands reached from the floor. Prexus was snared by hands clutching
at his ankles, and he cut them through at the wrist with a swipe of his
chainblade. Apothecary Pallas speared an apparition through the
throat with the needles of the narthecium he wore around one hand,
the medical device doubling as a weapon up close.
From the maelstrom coiled a serpentine apparition, terminating in
the gnashing face of some foul mutant, its features knotted into a
mass of tentacles trailing behind it. Its long gnarled fingers were tipped
with metal blades, and shards of bone stabbed from the echo of its
form.
‘The Vizier!’ yelled Prexus.
The apparition grinned, its face almost splitting in two along a fissure
lined with fangs. It dived, too fast for the Imperial Fist in its way to
avoid it. The Vizier dived into the Space Marine, its whole length
disappearing into the warrior’s breastplate. The Imperial Fist was
suffused with a blue-white glow bleeding from between the plates of his
armour and shining through the eyepieces of his helmet, and he
dropped his boltgun as he was wracked with sudden convulsions.
Varnica ripped one of the ghosts from the swirling mass, impaling it
on his force claw, and slammed it into the ground where it dissipated.
He turned to see the Imperial Fist in the throes of possession. Shards
of bone were bursting from under the Space Marine’s forearms and
shoulder guards.
Prexus leaped onto his possessed battle-brother, wrestling him to
the deck. Varnica pushed through the cordon of Imperial Fists to
Prexus’s side. He withdrew his hand from his force claw, attaching it
back onto the holster at his side, and placed his hand against the
possessed warrior’s forehead.
Aescarion and Graevus joined the Imperial Fists cordon, slashing at
the ghosts that swooped close. Luko was on his own, pivoting and
slashing in every direction, his lightning claws perfectly suited to this
fight where he was assailed from all sides. Scraps of spirit flesh floated
down like shed leaves, faces breaking into ragged scraps of detritus as
their distant screams died with them.
‘In the name of the Emperor and His mighty soul that shields us all
from the enemy,’ yelled Varnica, ‘I cast thee out. From this good
brother’s soul, where you shall find no purchase, I cast thee out!’
Power arced off the Imperial Fist’s armour. The possessed form
forced itself to its feet and threw off Prexus with strength beyond even
a Space Marine. Prexus crashed into the tiled wall of an execution
chamber, sliding down among the rubble and old bloodstains. Varnica
kept hold of the possessed Space Marine, his hand still clamped
against his forehead.
The faceplate of the Imperial Fist’s helmet became like liquid,
rippling and shifting into a face that was an animal mass of tentacles.
A forked tongue flickered from its lipless mouth.
‘This spirit tastes good,’ it hissed.
‘Out, daemon,’ shouted Varnica. ‘The Emperor’s light burns you.
The iron of this warrior’s soul cages you. Out, out, wither and die!’
‘Do you know how much is left of him?’ slathered the Vizier. ‘He has
barely a name. The rest of him I consume. I shall leave him a shell
with the mind of an infant.’
‘I said out!’ yelled Varnica. The shape of the Vizier rippled around
the Imperial Fist, stretching and deforming as if it was being pulled
from the body by invisible hands. Finally, with a shriek, it came away
and the Space Marine clattered to the floor, insensible.
Aescarion and Graevus leapt on the Vizier as it writhed, confused for
a moment. Aescarion’s axe bisected its face, the power field burning
through the spectral matter. The Vizier threw her to the floor with a
lash of its long tail, but Graevus’ axe was already descending towards
where its neck should be. The axe cut through it and its head was
sheared from its body. The serpentine form dissolved into the air, and
the head had shimmered away to motes of light before it hit the
The ghosts dissolved away, slinking back into the shadows. The
Imperial Fists tracked their bolters through the darkness as Luko
watched the rag-like slivers of ghostly flesh erode away from his
gauntlets.
Silence fell again, broken only by the plinking of tiles falling from the
bolter-scarred walls.
‘What was it?’ asked Pallas, cradling the fallen Imperial Fist’s head
and undoing the armour seals around his neck.
Prexus picked himself up from the deck. ‘The Vizier,’ he spat. ‘A
mutant warlord. A psyker. Centuries ago he was captured and brought
to the Phalanx. He died down here. I do not recall the whole story.’
‘I imagine it was far from unique,’ said Luko.
Pallas removed the Imperial Fist’s helmet. The faceplate was still
twisted into a semblance of the Vizier’s tentacled face. Underneath,
the warrior’s face was bloodied and battered, with growths of bloody
bone poking through the cheekbones and scalp. He drew a shallow
breath and winced.
‘Brother Dolonis,’ said Prexus, kneeling beside the wounded man.
‘Can you fight?’
‘No, my brother,’ gasped Dolonis in reply. ‘The pain… is everywhere.
It has changed me. My body is not… not my own. I can still hear it
laughing…’
Aescarion cast her eye over Dolonis’s body. Shard
s of bone had
penetrated through his armour all over. Knots of it were forcing his
shoulder pads away from his body and knife-like growths jutted from
his greaves. A pool of rapidly congealing blood was spreading beneath
Dolonis.
‘We must leave him,’ said Aescarion.
‘He is a battle-brother,’ replied Prexus.
‘He cannot fight and we cannot take him. And the enemy has been
within his mind. He is a moral threat. If he lives, we will be back for
him, but for now we must leave him.’
‘I agree with the Sister,’ said Varnica. ‘You have not seen the ruin a
possession can make of its victim. The possessor can plant a piece of
itself that can continue even after the daemon is dead.’
Prexus stepped back from Dolonis. ‘Brother. I cannot make this
decision for you.’
‘Leave me,’ said Dolonis, the words causing him obvious pain. ‘Just
put my bolter in my hand.’
Prexus handed Dolonis his gun. Aescarion knelt beside him and
took a loop of prayer beads from a pouch at her waist. She pressed
them into Dolonis’s free hand.
‘Pray for us, brother,’ she said. ‘We will pray for you.’
Pallas gently lowered Dolonis to the deck.
‘We need to move on,’ said Luko, stepping over the rubble further
into the tangle of execution chambers. The feeble light reached to the
threshold of another warren, this time of cell blocks of tight winding
tunnels lined with steel doors and stretches of manacle-hung walls. ‘If
Abraxes’s influence has woken the old dead here, then he probably
knows we have disturbed them. We must reach his portal before he
sends his own forces down here.’
Prexus did not, or could not, say anything further. With a final
glance at Dolonis, he led his squad out of formation towards the
deeper regions of the Path.
‘You fight well, Sister,’ said Graevus as he and Aescarion took up
their position in the middle of the marching order.
‘You expected otherwise?’ said Aescarion.
‘I did not mean…’
‘We are the daughters of the Emperor,’ she said, ‘just as you are his
sons. I may not have two hearts or three lungs, but I have every bit the
resolve of a Space Marine.’
‘So I saw,’ said Graevus. ‘You were quick to leave Dolonis to his
fate.’
‘As I would with a sister of mine,’ said Aescarion sharply. ‘A sense