The din of death echoed up the bile-slicked slopes of the fortress to reach Ve’Meth. The screech of ended life, the low keening of pain, the roar of anger. The dim crackling of gunfire was drowned out by the delicious racket that living things made when they suddenly became living no more.
That there was so much death, however, was tempered by the fact that so much of it was of Ve’Meth’s own servants. Space Marines had died, and their passing was most satisfying – but daemons had been torn asunder and their spirits banished to the warp, and slaves and beastmen had died in droves. Gelentius Vorp, champion of Nurgle, had actually been killed, which was something Ve’Meth had considered to be effectively beyond the capability of anything mortal.
Ve’Meth sent out a command through the living stone of his fortress. Every servant who dwelled within his walls snapped to attention and ran, slithered or wallowed towards its designated position within the organic warren of the fortress, ready to receive and repel the invaders in corruption’s name. Even if the Imperial weaklings got within striking distance of Ve’Meth’s abscess-chamber his bodyguards should deal with them quickly enough.
And if they didn’t? Well, then Ve’Meth would have to handle things personally.
A host-body broke ranks and strode towards the rear of the chamber where Ve’Meth kept a shrine to himself. Images offered up from cults and worlds under his domination were piled up against the sweating coral wall – crude idols of an insect-god, a beautifully wrought reliquary in the form of a golden snake, totems of shrunken heads and human bones, and hundreds more. Ve’Meth swept them aside to reveal the wooden box he kept there, burned with runes to keep the unworthy from opening it. The host lifted the lid, reached a hand in and removed Arguotha.
It pleased Ve’Meth to savour the memory again of all those centuries ago, when he still had a single mundane body. On his long pilgrimage through the Eye of Terror he had been beset by the Daemon Arguotha, who flew into a rage when he saw the suppurating marks of favour the Plague God had bestowed upon Ve’Meth. The daemon set his thousand offspring on Ve’Meth but the young champion had faced them all and won, scattering them in combat. Then Arguotha himself attacked, yet Ve’Meth had shown no fear and defeated the daemon. He wrestled it to the ground and intoned the canticle of binding, making the daemon his own to do with as he wished. And Ve’Meth had wished to bind the daemon into his favourite weapon.
Arguotha had brooded over the centuries and his anger was marked upon him. His barrel was gnarled and toothed, the metal of his casing twisted into faces that ground their teeth and screamed from time to time. In the magazine slung beneath, the thousand young of Arguotha writhed in captivity, eager to be released.
If the Space Marines dared cross Ve’Meth’s threshold, they would get their wish, and Arguotha would speak once more.
‘Medic!’ Graevus glanced up to see Apothecary Pallas ducking through the scattered gunfire towards where the Marine from Squad Hastis was trying to pile the oozing mass of his lung back into the massive rent in the side of his chest. The Marine knew he was dead, but he wanted to make sure Pallas took the gene-seed organ from his body for transport back to the Chapter apothecarion.
Brave lad, thought Graevus. They all were.
Graevus’s spearhead had made it across the beach, clearing out the black stone fortifications of the mutants and cultists who were sheltering there. Karraidin and Squad Hastis had made it up there too, leaving a gory trail of the dead across the sand. Now the Soul Drinkers were at the foot of the cave-riddled mountain fortress, taking fire from hundreds of murder holes and firepoints studding the slopes above them. The weapons were crude and badly aimed but there were scores of them, pouring fire down onto the Soul Drinkers.
‘Give the word, Graevus,’ said Karraidin as his hugely armoured bulk clambered over the stone outcrop of the fortification in which Graevus was taking cover.
Graevus peered out at the Soul Drinkers still arriving through the gunsmoke. ‘Give it a moment. If we make a break for it now we’ll leave half the lads strung out under fire.’
Karraidin risked a long look at the firepoints above them, his aristocratic features profiled against the corpse-strewn battlefield. ‘The fortress is teeming with them. There must be thousands.’
‘It’ll be in our favour, captain. Enclosed spaces, up close. Like a boarding action.’
Karraidin smiled grimly. As a Soul Drinker who had distinguished himself in spacecraft boarding actions, for which the valuable terminator suits had been designed, he knew full well the intense, half-blind butchery that the Soul Drinkers would have to wade through.
‘Can’t wait,’ Karraidin said, and Graevus knew he meant it.
Another purple-armoured body dived into the cover of the rock, bullets snickering into the sand beside him. It was Sergeant Karvik, chainsword in hand.
‘My squad’s in position sir,’ he gasped.
Squad Karvik had been trapped in the shallows when the spearhead had first advanced, and must have sprinted through both the regrouping beast-cultists and the fire from the slopes. ‘Good work, sergeant. Captain, that’s all of them. We move.’
‘Soul Drinkers, with me!’ called Karraidin over the vox and vaulted over the stone wall. All around the Soul Drinkers squads broke cover and ran, snapping shots at the openings overhead. Graevus saw Marines fall, some to be helped by their battle-brothers as they passed, others to pick themselves up and carry on, others to lie where they fell.
Karraidin had spotted an opening at foot-level – a ragged cavern entrance from which ran a runnel of sickly brown ichor. Through the shadows inside Graevus saw Chaos troops, hunched figures clad in rags, manoeuvring an autocannon to cover the entrance. A volley from Karraidin’s storm bolter caused them to duck so that by the time they had squeezed off a burst of shots the closest Assault Marines were upon them, Sergeant Tellos in their midst. Three Marines fell, large-calibre autocannon rounds punching through their bodies, before the gun crew were cut to pieces and the Soul Drinkers were inside.
Graevus’s eyes adjusted instantly to the darkness, and he realised that this was something that had not been built; it had been grown. The tunnel stretching into the heart of the fortress was ribbed and puckered, the internal organs of something long-dead or dormant, something that might wake or be revived at any moment. And this particular monster’s brain was Ve’Meth.
The assault squads were fifty metres down the tunnel with Tellos and Karraidin, spraying bullets at things that dared move in the shadows.
‘What do you think, Graevus?’ voxed Karraidin.
In any normal situation Sergeant Graevus, with the decades of experience feeding a honed combat instinct, would have carefully weighed up the routes likely to bring them within striking distance of a tactical objective. But this was not a normal situation, and Graevus knew exactly where they had to go to exterminate the pollution that had deformed this whole planet. ‘I think we go up,’ he said.
The Hell was still with them. Sarpedon couldn’t have turned it off if he’d wanted to. It made them ten metres high, striding angels of death with guns that fired thunder and swords that slashed lightning. They lost a dozen men to heavy weapons that raked the broken ground with fire; another ten to the dripping, tentacled things that thumped down from the ceiling of the cave they had charged into.
But they had not slowed down. It was the classic Soul Drinkers’ assault, fast and deadly, heedless of danger, cutting through everything that moved. Hunch-limbed slaves fled, hulking black-armoured warriors were sliced and blasted apart. With Sarpedon at their head they ran through tunnels and broad chambers packed with heaps of rotting meat, crevasses full to the brim with corpses, crossed bridges made of human bones.
The fortress was teeming with life – tunnels were knee-deep in insects and there were colonies of skeletal flapping creatures that hung like bats. Most living things fled instinctively at the Soul Drinkers’ approach, such was the aura of righteous death surrounding them. Some stood and fought, directed by the fanaticism with which Ve’Meth had infected them, but the blubbery eyeless monsters and crooked-limbed humanoids that ran along the walls were shredded by bolter and chainsword, and the Soul Drinkers pressed on. Squads Dreo and Givrillian must have picked off a hundred enemies between them with snap shots. The assault elements in the lead, led by Sarpedon himself with talons slashing, carved their way through twice that number by the time they reached the huge subterranean lakes of bile with their islands of folded skin, and the towering cathedrals with pillars of coagulated blood.
Ve’Meth knew they were there and his fortress was coming alive around them. The walls quivered and oozed and the defences became more and more organised the higher they got. Slave-packs blocked orifice doorways with piles of their dead. Serried ranks of warriors filled caverns with rows of pikes. Heavy weapons were dragged by deformed pack beasts into corridor junctions, studding the walls with gunfire before the weight of the Soul Drinkers’ assault slew the gunners, turned the weapons around, raked the path ahead with fire and moved on.
Sarpedon knew they were close. The volcanic cupola of boiling pus was raging above them, and the black laughter echoed through his mind. He could feel a massive responsibility bearing down on him, oppressive as the fortress’s stink – they were within striking distance now, and suddenly the possibility that they might get this far and fail was bright in Sarpedon’s mind.
But he must leave no room for doubt. He was a commander, responsible for the most vital mission in his Chapter’s history. They would kill Ve’Meth or they would die – either way they would not go back to the Brokenback having failed.
Sarpedon rounded a corner and saw the library before him. The cavern was as big as the Cathedral of Dorn had been back on the Glory. It walls were of bleeding veined meat, and gargantuan cases of books were piled on top of one another in crumbling towers. In a glance Sarpedon’s augmented vision and quick mind saw the millions of volumes bound in daemon’s hide with pages of skin and clasps of bone, the tablets of black rune-carved stone, and scrolls of tattoos cut from the backs of cultists. He could hear them whispering, gibbering their secrets in a thousand tongues, crammed mouldering into every space and lying in great rotting heaps in every corner.
This was the accumulated vileness that every perverted tongue had preached in the name of Ve’Meth, the vast tomb of blasphemy that fuelled the daemon prince’s influence.
Sarpedon was about to call the flamer Marines forward when the first shell grazed a knee joint and slammed into a Marine from Squad Givrillian behind him.
A bolter shell. Sarpedon would recognise it anywhere – but it was different, a low-velocity mark that had not been issued to Space Marines for thousands of years…
‘Traitors!’ he yelled in warning, diving to the side as the fusillade opened up. A wall of bolter-fire tore across the library, shredding the tainted books and thudding into the Marines pouring in through the arched entrance. Twenty or more life-runes winked out at the edge of Sarpedon’s vision as chunks were blasted out of the fleshy walls all around him.
Chaos Marines. The traitor legions. Those who turned from the Emperor’s light and betrayed Mankind ten thousand years before, when the Emperor still walked among men and Rogal Dorn’s Imperial Fists had yet to be split into their component Chapters. It was a sign, of course – the Architect of Fate had directed them to this place not just to kill Ve’Meth but to confront a symbol of what could happen when faith is lost and perverted, when the tendrils of the enemy reached into men’s hearts and they forgot the sacred will of the Emperor.
He could see only the muzzle flashes from their positions hidden amongst the towering shelves and mounds of books on the other side of the chamber. They were disciplined and accurate – they had lost nothing of their martial prowess, for a Space Marine’s quality as a soldier remained where loyalty and dignity did not.
‘Charge!’ rang the cry of Chaplain Iktinos and he led Squad Karvik’s Assault Marines out into the library, hoping to rush the Traitor Marines under the covering fire of their battle-brothers. But the traitors seemed to ignore the fire tearing into the mouldering books and worm-ridden shelves around them, and Squad Karvik was cut to pieces, the survivors minus their sergeant scrambling into cover as the compacted meat of the floor erupted all around them. One of them grabbed the power sword of the fallen Sergeant Karvik. Sarpedon knew Karvik had carried the weapon for twenty years, and would have wanted nothing more in death than to know it would carry on his work in the hands of another.
‘If we have to die, then we will,’ voxed Iktinos on the command channel. ‘But if there is an alternative, commander–’
‘We need to flank them,’ replied Sarpedon, thinking fast. ‘Givrillian!’
‘Unlikely, commander,’ replied Sergeant Givrillian, who clambered through the debris to Sarpedon’s side. ‘They have an elevated field of fire and excellent cover. We will be impeded and exposed all the way.’
Givrillian was right. The Soul Drinkers would have to forge on right through several tottering bookcases, ten metres high or more – they would either break through them and bring tonnes of rotting debris down on their heads, or climb them which would be like scaling a sheer cliff under fire. Either way the Traitor Marines would have free rein to pour fire into them as the Soul Drinkers moved, and would probably redeploy as soon as Sarpedon got into any kind of flanking position.
But all was not lost. There was always hope, even if that hope was merely for a good death in battle with the Enemy.
‘Iktinos?’
‘Commander?’
‘I believe we shall die. Pray for us, then lead the charge.’
Graevus kept going as the rushing torrent of blood threatened to close over his head. His feet crunched through piles of bones on the bed of the channel, and there were tiny, sharp things zipping past him with the flow.
He was in the heart of his spearhead, with Tellos and the assault squads ahead of him and Karraidin in the rear. They had known the instant they entered the fortress that they were in some living thing, and had soon found themselves wading through the sludge in its intestines, shielding themselves from the noxious fumes exuding from the pulpy walls of its lungs, and now struggling through the gushing tunnels of its veins. They could feel its evil heartbeat through the floor and hear its slow breathing rumbling through the walls. And Graevus could hear the buzzing of the corpulent insect-god that brooded at its peak, waiting for them, thirsting for the prize of a Space Marine’s blood.
‘Opening ahead!’ came the vox from Sergeant Hastis, whose assault squad was on point.
‘Take it!’ replied Graevus, knowing that even Space Marine power armour would suffer from immersion in this caustic, befouled gore that passed for the fortress’s blood.
Ahead of him the Soul Drinkers pulled each other out of the sucking blood flow. A hand reached down and a Marine – one of the half-armoured battle-brothers, hauled Graevus’s bulk upwards onto the shelf of slick rock that led into to an upwards-curving inlet.
Storm bolter-fire sounded above the rush of the blood torrent. ‘Something on our tail,’ voxed Karraidin by way of explanation.
The gunfire kept stuttering.
‘Karraidin? Is that still you?’ asked Graevus.
‘Negative, Graevus. Killed it.’
Bolter fire. Bolter fire, without a doubt – but not theirs, maybe Sarpedon’s…
The first Graevus saw of the Chaos Space Marines was a severed head. It span back down the inlet, past Graevus as he followed Sergeant Tellos who, inevitably, was the first to sprint towards the gunfire. It wasn’t a helmet, but a head – in the shape of a Space Marine helmet but covered with skin, with eyepieces that were not photoblocker lenses but wet, cataracted living orbs.
Tellos had carved his way through the first and Graevus barrelled past him into the next one. It had doubtlessly once been a Marine, but its skin had grown outside its armour, pink and bleeding from sores and tears. Some of its organs were outside, too, loops of necrotic entrails and pulsing, sputtering valves. Its face mask had sharp stained teeth instead of a filter grille, and its bolter muzzle had a fleshy mouth that spat that mark four bolter ammunition across the room. Tattooed onto the skin of one shoulder pad was a three-orbed symbol that Graevus had seen daubed onto the vehicles of turncoat armies and carved into the hides of victims massacred by Chaos cultists.
Graevus hardly noticed the towering piles of volumes and the great drifts of rotting books. He was only dimly aware of the bolter fire replying from below, where Sarpedon’s Marines were trying to engage the Traitor Marines. His whole vision was filled by the Chaos Marine as he slammed the blade of his power axe into the enemy’s midriff, carving right through the dead-fleshed torso.
The Chaos Marine tried to turn his bolter on his assailant, but Graevus’s hand speed had increased so greatly since his axe arm had changed that the return stroke had already sliced the Chaos Marine in two through the spine. The axe whirled and the blade slashed down, hacking the Chaos Marine through the collar bone down to the mid-chest.
Tellos was already in the heart of the Chaos Marine position, killing all around him, with the Assault Marines beside him relishing the chance to follow him in forging a trail of the dead.
Bolter fire was raining down on them but all was confusion – the Chaos Marines were on the back foot now, breaking ranks to form a new firing line, but the Soul Drinkers were in no mood to stand around and let the enemy shoot at them.
Graevus looked through the mist of blood and saw the next target – a leader of some kind, wielding a sword edged with gnashing teeth.
He brought his axe blade out of the quivering body at his feet, and charged back into the fray.
‘We’ve got them pegged back, commander! Move while they’re down!’
It was Karraidin’s voice, but it might as well have come from the throat of Rogal Dorn himself.
‘You heard the captain,’ yelled Sarpedon. ‘Move!’
The fire that came down onto them was broken and panicked. The sounds of blades through power armour rang from above as Sarpedon’s spearhead crossed the foetid expanse of Ve’Meth’s library to where the exit in the far wall was a raw, open wound.
Sarpedon leapt over the tumbled heaps of books and into the ribbed throat that curved upwards beyond.
Losing a leg hadn’t slowed him down. And the laughter was so loud now it was drowning out his own thoughts. The aegis hood’s protective circuitry was white-hot against his body as it struggled to protect his psyker’s mind.
‘This is it, sir?’ said Givrillian at his side. It wasn’t really a question.
‘Stay close,’ voxed Sarpedon. ‘Fast, disciplined, and no one runs.’
He didn’t need to say it. But they needed to hear it – words that had been drummed into them as novices, reminding them that the training and values that they had extolled all their lives as Soul Drinkers would still serve them here.
They didn’t know how they would kill Ve’Meth. They didn’t really know what Ve’Meth was. The few of them who had seen a daemon prince on the field of battle each carried a violently different memory, for Chaos was ever-changing and never rose twice in the same form.
Ve’Meth could be anything. But there wasn’t much that bolter and chainsword couldn’t kill.
The throat was steep but none of them stumbled. The muscles shifted and contracted, trying to throw them off, but they dug their fingers into the rubbery flesh and held on.
At the top a clenched fist of flesh blocked their path. Chainsword slashed through it and Sarpedon ripped his way through with his talons, staff in hand, ready to shred whatever he saw on the other side.
It took a split-second for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The whole fortress had been pitch-black but this was something else, an abysmal pit of darkness, as if the magnitude of evil here had sucked up the light and devoured it.
Then his augmented eyes forced an image out of the darkness, and he saw Ve’Meth’s true form for the first time.
Ve’Meth was a multitude of bodies – between seven and nine hundred at Sarpedon’s first count, standing rigid in square formation. There were men, women, in finery and engineer’s overalls, primitive rags and camouflage, some squat and muscular from high-grav environments, some life-spacers with willowy limbs and thin faces. Every one had the same expression of intensity. Every one was looking at him.
Something stirred in their midst and Sarpedon saw one of them was holding a weapon – something old and crusted with runes, glowing with power. A gun.
The first bullet buzzed through Brother Nikkos’s chest – and then it hit him again and again, whipping through the air in wide looping orbits to punch again and again through the Marine’s armour. Nikkos toppled and came apart, armour joints clattering to the floor, slopping his sliced body onto the polished black coral.
Another shot barked from the weapon even as the return fire tore apart the first rank of Ve’Meth’s bodies, riddling another Marine. Another, and another, each one singling out a Soul Drinker and piercing him a dozen times before he died.
Every mouth opened. Eight hundred voices laughed.
Marines were flooding into the chamber around Sarpedon but they were dying all around. Sergeant Dreo hurled himself to the ground as the bullet-daemon skimmed past him and dismembered one of his squad. Chaplain Iktinos strode forward, diving between two dying Marines to sweep his crozius arcanum through the three closest bodies – they were thrown through the air with a flash of the power field. More were dying with the bursts of return fire but the Soul Drinkers were dying faster and the air was filled with the hideous buzzing flight of the daemon-bullets.
A well-placed shot took the gun-wielding body in the throat but another stepped into its place in the ranks, took up the weapon and fired again. Time and time again the ancient gun barked and with every shot another battle-brother died, and every time the firer fell another took its place.
‘Discipline! We have to kill them all!’ yelled Sarpedon. Glancing to the side he saw Givrillian, the many-eyed Sergeant Givrillian who had been his most trusted and level-headed soldier, being speared by a tiny glowing monster even as he loosed a salvo of bolter shells into Ve’Meth.
Above the screams and the gunfire was the laughter, loud with the voices of Ve’Meth and louder still inside Sarpedon’s head. He looked through the mayhem and saw Sergeant Dreo trying to form a firing line. Half his squad were dead.
They had to kill every body at once. That was how Ve’Meth ultimately defended itself – not with its soldiers or its daemon gun, but with the fact that it was formed of host bodies, hundreds of them, and Sarpedon was certain it could survive with just one. It could take more, too, and Sarpedon knew it would be pleased to take one of his battle-brothers if it could.
There was one way. He had seen it done often enough, but never like this. If enough of them stayed alive, if that discipline would hold even when every single one of them could die in the blink of an eye…
‘Sergeant Dreo!’ yelled Sarpedon. ‘Execution duty!’
‘Execution duty, line up on me!’ bellowed Dreo. The surviving Soul Drinkers had all lined up for execution duty many times before, when traitors to the Emperor had been taken alive and sentenced to death, or when battle-brothers had committed some grave transgression for which death could be the only penalty. There had been enough executions following the Chapter war, when unrepentant rebels had been put to death with a massed bolter volley in the nave of the Cathedral of Dorn.
More died, a dozen at once. Gaps formed in the firing line even as it was formed. But Sergeant Dreo, the crack shot, didn’t rush. He had been given charge of the execution on many times and knew full well that a clean kill needed one concentrated wall of fire. Many died in the seconds he paused. But it was one concentrated volley, or nothing.
The guns were in position, a line of bolters stretching two deep across Ve’Meth’s chamber, the front rank kneeling.
‘Fire!’ yelled Dreo, and the front rank opened fire.
As one, a hundred of Ve’Meth’s bodies fell, bodies punched open by the explosive bolter shells that ripped through them. The front rank emptied their magazines into a sheet of shrapnel that tore into the host bodies. The gun wielder fell and another bent to take up the weapon, to be torn apart in turn.
The front rank paused to change magazines and the rear rank came in flawlessly, keeping up a steady stream of fire that swept across the chamber. By the time the first rank took up the fire again they were pouring bolter shells into the mangled remains of eight hundred bodies, oozing tainted blood onto the black coral.
‘Cease fire!’ barked Sergeant Dreo. ‘Good kill.’
The silence was shocking. Sarpedon lowered his bolter and through the gunsmoke stared at all that remained of Ve’Meth – a room full of broken bodies, blood spattered up the walls, torn limbs and bodies heaped across the floor.
A screaming began – quiet at first, but growing louder and louder. A grainy cloud of pestilence rose from the bodies. It solidified and darkened, and in its depths Sarpedon could see movement – huge shapes, filth-caked, daemon-plagued worlds, plunging away through space, falling into the darkness, hurling away from him and out of sight, faster and faster.
The screaming reached a pitch so loud Sarpedon could hear nothing else. He knew what he was watching – this was the empire of Ve’Meth, the kingdom it would have built in the name of its god, the empire that Sarpedon had destroyed before it could be forged. Unable to survive outside its host bodies, the daemon prince didn’t mind dying, but its dreams of domination were dying with it, and that it could not stand.
The horror. The agony. Everything Ve’Meth had feared was coming to pass and it poured its hatred and terror out into the chamber, filling it with a screech of rage and the huge dark image of a universe cleaned of his presence. Then the scream became weak and the image pale, as Ve’Meth’s lifeforce dissipated. The dark miasma dissolved and the chamber fell quiet.
The aegis circuit was calm. The vast oppression of Ve’Meth was lifted and suddenly the ugliness was bleeding away from the world – the darkness was not quite so complete, the stench was bearable, the weight of evil was lightening.
‘Mission complete, my brothers,’ said Sarpedon. ‘Count the dead and regroup.’
Sergeant Graevus watched as the Plague Marine dissolved. It was screaming, but the sound was dulled by the layers of ceramite and muscle that covered it. Graevus had been sure his Marines would battle the traitors to a standstill in the towering library, and that they would grind each other down until there was nothing left. The assault had swept through the Chaos positions but the enemy were undaunted and supremely resistant to injury, and Soul Drinkers were beginning to die. If that was the way it had to be, then that was how Graevus would have died – but then there had been a terrible keening from the otherwise silent Plague Marines and the traitors had convulsed with a sudden shock.
The Soul Drinkers had not paused to ponder their luck. Instinctively, Graevus knew that Sarpedon had done something magnificent at the fortress’s peak, but most of his mind was concentrating on driving his axe blade through the enemies before him.
Now the Plague Marines were dead or dying, dismembered by the Assault Marines or riddled with bolter shells as they reeled. Some had pitched over the edge of the towering bookcases and been broken on the floor far below. Those who did not die by the hands of Soul Drinkers were dying all the same, their bodies liquefying as the Marines watched.
The Plague Marine was on his knees – his lower legs were gone. Alternate layers of skin and metal were flaking away and the skeleton was started to be exposed, gnarled and twisted, riddled with wormholes. The body collapsed, losing all shape as heavy metal implants rolled out onto the ground.
Graevus turned from the stinking mess, feeling something suddenly different in his mind. The buzzing was gone.
The bloated insect-god was dead.
From orbit, the unnamed planet turned dark and clear as the clouds dissolved. The thick layer of flies dissipated and the banks of yellowing pollution faded. Suddenly the sensoria aboard the Brokenback mapped out every detail of a world dominated by oceans and scattered with rocky islands – for the first time the crew could see the towering coral stacks and blood-soaked beaches of the archipelago, and pick out the rotting ships, suddenly pilotless, which foundered and broke up in the rough seas.
Communications were back. Commander Sarpedon requested transport immediately. Lygris authorised a wing of Thunderhawks to land on the body-choked shore in the shadow of the fortress – the auspex arrays found the island completely dead, where hours before it had teemed with unholy life. Sarpedon and Graevus met up on the beach, compared scars, and embarked onto the Thunderhawks.
As on the ordinatus platform so long ago, there was plenty of room on the gunships for the return flight. Of the four hundred Marines who had landed on the unnamed planet, half were dead, slain in the assault on the fortress-island, or lying at the bottom of the great ocean that girded the planet.
When they reached the huge dark bulk of the Brokenback, the first welcome they received was the screaming of a thousand sensors all over the space hulk. Lygris’s anomaly had returned, and this time, it was vast… and closing.
Sarpedon sprinted down the corridor, the stump of his severed leg trailing bandages where Apothecary Pallas had been dressing it when the alarms sounded. Lygris caught up to him at the next bulkhead, his anxious face picked out in the strobe of the warning lamps.
‘We picked it up about six hours ago, but it faded out,’ Lygris was saying. Serf-labourers ran past them, heading for damage control stations. ‘I doubled the sensorium watch but it seemed just an anomaly. Now it’s of a higher magnitude than most of our sensors can measure. We’re using Sector Indigo to track it.’
‘Where is it now?’ Sarpedon had come straight from the apothecarion, which was packed with the Soul Drinker wounded. His armour was still crusted with unclean blood.
‘Seventeen thousand kilometres at the last count. It’s closing, but it’s erratic.’
‘Not natural.’
‘No.’
‘Ve’Meth’s dead. The planet died with him. I want to know what this thing is before we’re within turret range, and it’s going to have to be one hell of an explanation to stop me opening fire.’
‘I’m with you on that, commander.’
Sarpedon and Lygris reached the viewing chamber, its lavish décor crudely inappropriate. Several of the Chapter’s Tech-Marines were directing servitors to aim their image intensifiers at the great nimbus of light that filled the whole oculus. The whole room was bathed in its silvery light, and at its heart something was solidifying, lithe and serpentine.
‘Targets!’ called Lygris.
‘Not yet, sir,’ replied Tech-Marine Varuk, who had lost most of a kneecap to bolter-fire in the fortress and had yet to visit the apothecarion. ‘Half the sensors say it isn’t there and the other half say it’s a black hole. We’re aiming guns by eye but it’s a fraction of what this ship’s got.’
Sarpedon was well aware of the kind of offensive force the Brokenback could muster, wielding as it did the armaments of several cruiser-sized Imperial craft and the arcane weaponry of sinister alien craft. But if there was a foe who would only be seen when he wanted, who could get up close…
Ve’Meth? No. Ve’Meth was dead. What, then?
The shape in the light shifted and became real – smooth skin, long and powerful limbs, twin silver stars for eyes. Occult symbols flashed in concentric circles which stayed imprinted on the eye. A hand reached out towards the oculus, and suddenly the figure was much, much closer.
‘Incoming-Incoming-Incoming…’
The voice, activated by early warning systems on one of the ancient component ships, boomed through the space hulk as something huge and powerful landed on the upper surface. The sensoria that should have seen it all overloaded simultaneously, burning out a hundred hard-wired servitors in a heartbeat.
The Brokenback shut down. The engines died, the life support systems reverted to failsafe and large areas of the hulk were flooded by hard vacuum. All helm control died and the Brokenback drifted helpless, as if awed by the power of the being that stood astride it. It reached down and long, graceful fingers dug into blackened metal. With a rippling of serpentine muscles, it ripped the top six decks off the Brokenback.
It looked down at the armoured humans that teemed in the corridors and gun decks. It shone a bright silver light down on them and opened the gate to his silver city, letting his beautiful minions drift down like falling stars onto the ship below.
‘I am the Architect of Fate,’ it said in a voice like music. ‘I am the Engineer of Time. I am Abraxes, Prince of Change, and you are all my children.’
Sarpedon stared up at the towering figure shining against the blackness of space. He had seen some things in his decades as a Soul Drinker, not the least of them in the last few days. But none of them compared to this.
It was several kilometres tall. Wings of light spread out from its back, framing its beautiful face and flowing hair. Its body, muscular yet slim, was clad in a toga of flowing white silk, and arcane symbols glowed in wide circles all around it. Glowing figures were pouring from a disk of light that hung in space behind it – strange-shaped things made of pastel-coloured light and birds with feathers of amethyst.
Sarpedon had to tear his eyes away to see the desolation around him. The roof of the oculus room was gone, along with several decks of the space hulk, exposing a huge raw wound of broken metal to the vacuum of space that cut across countless sector and component ships. Gases vented from ruptured plasma conduits. Fractured capacitor spines flashed as their energy bled into the void.
The Soul Drinkers were hastily donning their helmets against the vacuum. In the distance a tiny white shape that was Father Yser convulsed as the air was dragged from his lungs and his limbs froze. Suffocated and ravaged by cold, the pressure drop tearing at his organs and with the sight of the Architect of Fate flaying his mind, Yser died in a dozen different ways at once.
Father Yser, who had taught the faith in the Architect to the Soul Drinkers Chapter in the depths of the Cerberian Field, what seemed a lifetime ago. He had been the vessel for the greatest revelation in the Chapter’s history, he had guided the Soul Drinkers to the Brokenback and the unnamed planet. He had seen the terror that was Ve’Meth. And now he had been destroyed at the first sight of the being he worshipped.
‘Weak,’ said the musical voice again. ‘See how weak it is? For one such as this, Commander Sarpedon, my mere presence is death. But you are different, are you not?’
Sarpedon knew the vox was nothing more than static and his voice wouldn’t sound outside his own helmet. But he spoke anyway, certain that the thing that called itself Abraxes could hear him.
‘What are you?’ he asked. ‘How do you know who I am?’
‘The second question first, commander. I have watched you for so long, searched the galaxy for someone who could make himself more than the dullards who infest your worlds. You burn so bright, Sarpedon. I could not fail to notice you even from the Silver City where my lord holds court.
‘And what am I? I am Abraxes, herald of the Lord of Change. I am your salvation. I am the glory that Yser saw in his dreams, and that turned him into a beacon for you and your battle-brothers. I am the one who granted you visions, Sarpedon, of the foulness I would have you destroy. I gave you this beautiful ship, and see how easily I could destroy it. And I am he who blessed your body and the bodies of your brothers, forged the strength of your mind so the daemons of the warp fled before you.
‘I am your prince and you are my subjects, for you have done my will ever since you saw the folly of your Imperium. I am the Architect of Fate, the Engineer of Time. I am the glory and the essence of what the smallest of minds call Chaos.’
It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. But…
The daemon prince brimmed with power the like of which not even Ve’Meth had possessed. Abraxes was the figure Sarpedon had seen daubed by Yser’s flock, and carved into the statue that stood alongside the primarch in the Cathedral of Dorn. And the shimmering creatures that were teeming down onto the mangled surface of the Brokenback were surely daemons. Yes, this was a great and powerful prince of Chaos that bestrode the space hulk, the same one who had spoken to the Soul Drinkers in the guise of the Architect of Fate.
Sarpedon had thrown aside ten thousand years of service to the Imperium, because he saw honour in the Emperor where there had been none in the Imperium. But now he saw that what they believed to be the Emperor’s will was nothing more than one more lie – the machinations of Abraxes, who had wished only to rid himself of a fellow daemon.
The knowledge was flooding over Sarpedon, and it was more than he could bear. He had been so sure they had achieved something magnificent, that they had thrown off the shackles of weak humanity and become the true soldiers of the Emperor – could they really be nothing? Could they really be worse than nothing, the foullest of traitors not through malice but by ignorance?
The star fort. The ordinatus. The Cerberian Fields and the Brokenback. Ve’Meth. What had the Soul Drinkers done? Try as he might, he couldn’t help but remember the words of Inquisitor Tsouras’s envoy and Chapter Master Gorgoleon – words like treachery, heresy, daemonancy. Sarpedon had killed both men, and now the horrible realisation was dawning that both had been right.
The Soul Drinkers had performed the will of Chaos. They were as much a part of the armies of the enemy as the Traitor Marines they had battled in the fortress of Ve’Meth. They had been pawns in the game of the Dark Gods, soldiers in the army of corruption. That they did not know what they had been doing was irrelevant. No true servant of the Emperor considered ignorance a defence. The Soul Drinkers were Chaos Marines.
‘Ah, he understands,’ said the voice like a thousand choirs. ‘He knows what he is. He has thrown away the purity he held so dear, and done it willingly. He has turned his back on his allies, slain my enemies at my behest, accepted his mutant form as a blessing. And he has done all this without coercion. Sarpedon understands what he is, and he understands that there is no turning back.’
‘It’s not true,’ Sarpedon heard himself gasping.
Abraxes smirked. ‘You know yourself, mutant. I do not lie.’
Mutant. That word… and then Sarpedon felt it once more, the vile oppression of uncleanliness, the mantle of loathing that draped over him. It was just as he had felt when he had consumed the flesh of the mutant on the star fort, a crushing weight of the universe’s loathing. His blood was impure, his flesh corrupt, his skin tainted. Every eye that looked upon him would do so with hatred. He was the lowest of the low – mutant, inhuman, vermin.
It would be falling on his battle-brothers, too – Graevus with his executioner’s hand, Tellos with his heightened senses and strange metabolism. Even Givrillian, steadfast Givrillian slain in the grand chamber of Ve’Meth, was a deformed mutant. As Abraxes lifted the illusion of nobility from their minds the vileness of mutation would be sweeping over them as it was over Sarpedon.
Sarpedon sunk to the twisted deck, his unholy, unnatural insect legs splayed around him. Mutant. Traitor. Soldier of Chaos.
Abraxes was standing right over Sarpedon. He reached down and Sarpedon looked up through tears of rage – there was something in the daemon prince’s hand, like a needle held between the gargantuan fingers.
‘But Sarpedon, it pains me to see you so distressed.’ Abraxes’s face was troubled and sincere. ‘Can you not see what you could be? You and your Chapter have achieved astonishing things. You have thrown aside the shackles of the Imperium, and you did it yourselves, for I merely stood back to watch. You proved your strength of mind when you turned your back on the tradition of mindless authority that threatened to make you weak. And with my guidance you destroyed Ve’Meth, who was a twisted parody of the glories of Chaos.
‘Chaos is a wonderful thing, Sarpedon – it is freedom incarnate, where all things can change and the universe is subject only to the will of the strong. It is what you have been seeking all along, a release from the hypocrisy and dishonour of the Imperium. You sought the Emperor’s blessing, because you were still naïve in the ways of the universe. The Emperor is nothing, Sarpedon, a corpse on a throne, to whom you were devoted only because you did not know what true Chaos could give you. But now I have shown you, and can you honestly say that you and your Chapter can truly follow anything other than Chaos and the glorious lord of change?’
It was true, all true. Had he really believed it was the Emperor who had granted him this foul mutation and the heretical visions that guided the Chapter to Ve’Meth?
The object Abraxes was holding was about the length of Sarpedon’s forearm, a gleaming cylinder of microcircuitry that shone in the starlight. ‘My lord is the only power in this galaxy worth fighting for. Join me, march as my soldiers across the stars, and give yourself to destruction in the name of the changeling god. What else is there? Your Emperor is nothing, your Imperium has excommunicated you. The only purpose you have left is the pursuit of Chaos, which you have executed so well already. There is no need for you to live a lie any longer, Sarpedon. You can have what you wanted at last – a lifetime spent in the service of a power you can believe in, towards a goal you can achieve. And in the name of my God, I wish to show you my gratitude for slaying my enemy.’
The Soulspear. A lifetime ago, it had been the only thing that mattered. It had torn the Chapter apart and set in motion a chain of events that had left the Soul Drinkers broken and heretic, with nothing left but to throw their lot in with the power which had shown itself to be a true god. The Soulspear – ancient and powerful, the artefact that should have cemented those Chapter traditions that had, instead, been thrown away.
Sarpedon reached up and took the Soulspear from Abraxes. It could be a new beginning. The Soulspear could be the symbol of a new Chapter, formed from the ashes of the Soul Drinkers, following a god that could reward them for their devotion. Sarpedon could lose himself in the eternity of battle, wielding the Soulspear as a mark of how he had broken away entirely from the lies of the Imperium and the corpse-Emperor. He could exult in the slaughter of the change god’s enemies. He could blaze a trail of death against the stars, and have a purpose in slaughter that he had sought for so long.
From the back of Sarpedon’s mind rose, unbidden, the snippets of history he had learned as a novice, when the story of the Soulspear had been one of pride and anger at its loss. It had been given to the Chapter by the Primarch Rogal Dorn, to show that he held them in no less esteem than the great Imperial Fists legion from which the Soul Drinkers had been founded. The custody of such an artefact had shown that the Soul Drinkers had their place in the grand plan of the Emperor, that they were beholden to His will.
Something stirred in Sarpedon’s mind. Why had he turned the guns of his Marines on the tech-guard, and slain the envoy of Inquisitor Tsouras when he had declared the Chapter Excommunicate? Was it pride? Anger? Or something else, something he only had to realise?
He glanced across at his brother Marines. He saw Tellos, unarmoured as always, and it was somehow no surprise that the hard vacuum didn’t seem to affect him. He saw Graevus and Karraidin, Tech-Marine Lygris, Apothecary Pallas and all the other Soul Drinkers who had followed Sarpedon through everything. Most had witnessed the catastrophe of the star fort and the hell of Ve’Meth, and all had fought through the horror of the Chapter war. Sarpedon could have led them through hell and every single one of his battle-brothers, he was sure, would have followed. If he bowed before Abraxes, they would follow him again. And they would follow him to the death if he did not.
Sarpedon’s fingers tightened around the Soulspear. He found the row of pits in the cylinder’s surface, and felt the tiny lasers punch through the skin of his gauntleted fingertips.
Rogal Dorn had resisted breaking up the Imperial Fists legion until he risked being branded a rebel. When forced to relent he had taken great pains to ensure each of the Chapters who bore his gene-seed were held in equal esteem, infused with the belief in independence and nobility that had characterised the Imperial Fists. Why had he done so? Was it just fatherly pride, for the Imperial Fists and their successors were in many ways his sons? Or was there something else?
Rogal Dorn had realised something that was beginning to dawn on Sarpedon, too. And as it did so Abraxes’s spell was breaking. Would the other Soul Drinkers realise in time? Perhaps they were already lost to Abraxes. It some ways it didn’t really matter any more.
His blood seeped through the pinprick holes in his fingertips and touched the gene-encoders built into the Soulspear. It was one of the weapon’s secrets that it was attuned to the blood of Rogal Dorn, who had first discovered it. Only those whose veins flowed with Dorn’s blood – the Imperial Fists or their successor Chapters, like the Soul Drinkers – could wield it. The weapon was hot and thrumming in Sarpedon’s hand.
Abraxes stepped back. The shimmering daemons were gathered around his feet. ‘Choose, Sarpedon.’
But Sarpedon had already chosen.
Twin spikes of pure vortex leapt from the Soulspear, infinitely darker than even the black backdrop of space. Sarpedon flexed his unholy mutant legs and prepared to run. He would have to be fast, and hope that the ship’s gravitic field wasn’t damaged. He would need to be strong and accurate, and would have to rely on his battle-brothers to do what was right.
He fixed the Daemon Prince Abraxes with a determined eye. ‘This Chapter,’ he said grimly, ‘is owned by no one.’
Sarpedon charged. There was no way to communicate with his fellow Soul Drinkers, but he didn’t need to.
Karraidin closed the fastest, barrelling into the closest daemons, shining creatures of pink and pastel blue light with serpent-fingered hands and huge gaping maws. His storm bolter chattered silently in the vacuum, shells ripping into the luminescent bodies. Tellos was right behind him and literally dived into the fray, blades swinging through daemonic limbs. Streaks of light flickered soundlessly against the blackness of space as every Soul Drinker opened fire, engaging the daemonic horde that had descended onto the Brokenback. Dreo waved the closest Marines towards him and was forming a firebase from which he could send volleys of fire raking across the landscape of twisted metal. Luko was charging across the broken deck, gathering Marines as he did so.
All they had to do was to keep the daemons occupied, while Sarpedon struck.
The missing leg didn’t slow him. He propelled himself towards the towering figure of Abraxes, the Soulspear in his hand. The daemon prince’s face showed shock and anger as the battle erupted around his feet. The rings of arcane symbols that shone around him turned to angry reds and yellows, his shining eyes turned dark, and ruddy veins stood out against his alabaster skin as he channelled his rage into strength.
‘Fools!’ Abraxes roared. ‘You are nothing! Nothing!’
Sarpedon ignored him, and the only sound was his own breathing. He would have to be fast, and he would have to be accurate. He didn’t know if he could do it. But it didn’t matter if he couldn’t – for if there was one thing that had not changed, it was that to die fighting the Enemy was an end in itself.
Fungus-bodied things, whose arms ended in flame-belching orifices, bounded into Sarpedon’s path. Triple slashes of light darted and Luko’s lightning claws felled two of the monstrous daemons, chainblades lashing out from the Soul Drinkers at his side. The daemons came apart, their shining flesh disintegrating. Sarpedon ran through them, swinging the Soulspear and carving the scattered daemons in two as he passed.
He drew his arm back, focusing on the huge pale-skinned torso of Abraxes. Silver fire rained from the daemon prince’s outstretched hands, punching through Sarpedon’s armour like bolts of molten metal but Sarpedon couldn’t afford to falter now.
He flexed his seven mutant legs and jumped, tensing his arm. The fire was ripping through him now, shards of pain shearing into his torso. He felt one lung puncture and another leg torn and useless. The glare from Abraxes was blinding – there was bolter-fire stitching across Abraxes’s chest and shafts of light were bleeding out into space.
Everything slowed down. There was nothing in the universe but Abraxes, Sarpedon and the sacred weapon in his hand. There was only one sound now, a rhythmic thumping that was getting faster and louder as Sarpedon hurtled closer. It was Abraxes’s heartbeat, quickened by anger, pumping silver fire through the daemon prince’s veins.
Sarpedon hit, jabbing his talons into the glowing skin of Abraxes’s chest. Clinging to the daemon prince, burning with magical fire, Sarpedon drove the point of the Soulspear through the skin and into the huge beating blasphemy of Abraxes’s heart.
Afterwards, for most of the time Sarpedon would remember very little. But sometimes, when before he had dreamt of the battlements on Quixian Obscura, he would dream of a massive flare like the birth of a new sun, a beam of light that ripped from Abraxes’s ruptured heart. The pure madness of the warp that was the daemon prince’s lifeblood flooded out into space, hurtling Sarpedon away on a tide of fire, pouring out onto the shattered decks of the Brokenback.
He would recall the daemons of the change god drowned in liquid fire, screaming and gibbering even in the soundless vacuum as their flesh dissolved. Then, as the dream faded, the ball of white fire that had been Abraxes would implode into a ball of blackness that sucked in the many-coloured flame and disintegrating daemons. Soul Drinkers clung to the battered metal to avoid being dragged into the vortex. A gauntleted hand – Sarpedon would never discover who it belonged to – grabbed one of Sarpedon’s flailing legs and hauled him down to the deck.
Then silence would fall, the light would die, and Sarpedon would awake.
Sarpedon limped onto the new bridge of the Brokenback. It had been several months in the construction – a hard armoured bubble in the heart of the space hulk, which acted as a focus for all the many control systems that ran throughout the various component ships. On the cavernous front curve of the sphere was set a huge viewscreen, displaying a composite image taken from all the sensoria studding the hulk’s hull.
The place was silent aside from the distant rumble of the engines and the gentle thrum of the control consoles. Sarpedon hobbled across the metal deck of the bridge and up onto the command pulpit. The prosthetic strapped to the stump of his missing leg clacked on the floor as he walked – the replacement bionic would take some time and was providing a learning experience for the Chapter apothecarion. Two other legs were badly fractured and were still splinted – a Space Marine healed quickly but it would still be weeks before Sarpedon lost his lopsided, limping gait.
The control lectern in front of him flashed with readouts and weapons runes. The Tech-Marines kept on finding new directional thrusters and weapon arrays, and it was a race to keep them all connected to the bridge as quickly as they were discovered. It would take years to explore the Brokenback fully, and there were doubtless places and systems aboard that would never be properly explained.
This was the home of the Soul Drinkers now – a space hulk that had been found drifting and polluted, now cleansed and made holy. It was indicative of the Chapter as a whole – they had been cleansed, too, of all the millennia of lies that had afflicted them. It had cost them terribly, with losses bordering on the irreplaceable. But that would not be enough to break the Chapter – the great harvest would begin again, where the Brokenback would descend on scattered backwards worlds and select the bravest youths for induction into the Chapter. It had been Sarpedon’s first order when he had woken in the apothecarion, burned and broken – the Soul Drinkers would gather a new generation of novices and begin to replace all that they had lost. It would take time, but they had been lost for so many thousands of years that time was not a worry.
Perhaps some of what Abraxes had said was true. Perhaps the Emperor was nothing more than a corpse on a throne, dead and powerless. Such a thought would be the pinnacle of heresy for a law-abiding Imperial citizen, but the Soul Drinkers had long since ceased to care about such things. Perhaps the Chapter really was alone, without any power to lend them strength and show them the way.
But it didn’t matter. The Emperor might be dead, but there were still principles He symbolised that were worth fighting for. The horror of Chaos was very real, and just because the Emperor didn’t guide their hand it didn’t mean that the Soul Drinkers couldn’t follow the ideals He represented. Chaos was worth fighting, not because the Emperor was telling them to but because destroying the enemy was the right and noble thing to do.
The Soul Drinkers had been lapdogs of a corrupt Imperium for thousands of years, and then the slaves of Chaos. But they had thrown aside both these masters – and in any case, they had destroyed two terrible princes of Chaos, and was that not something they could be proud of, no matter that else might have happened?
This was the Soul Drinkers’ fate – they would fight Chaos wherever they found it, spurning all masters, renegade and alone. They had been born to fight and fight they would – they didn’t need the Emperor or anyone else to give them a reason to take up arms. When Sarpedon had recovered and the Chapter was rebuilt, there would be nothing to stop them. It was a lofty ambition, to be devoted to the destruction of Chaos, when they were hated by Chaos and Imperium alike and could never rely on allies from anywhere. But if that was the only way the Soul Drinkers could fight the good fight, that was how it would be.
Perhaps it was ridiculous, or ironic. Sarpedon was past caring. He would die fighting to fulfil the principles the Emperor had founded the Imperium upon, and which had been betrayed by the liars who ruled in his name.
And so on the bridge of the space hulk, the mutant and excommunicate Space Marine vowed to do the Emperor’s work.