CHAPTER TEN

The creature killed Filo Eros first. He had been the closest of the Adored to the new threat, and, thrilled by his own luck, took the chance to claim the glory of the kill for himself. He had hefted his heavy sabre in two hands and sprinted straight for the Patriarch, battering cultists aside with the sheer concussive force of his transhuman charge.

The creature barely glanced in Eros’ direction as it flicked its tail – long, corded with muscle, ridged with chitin, and ending with a curved barb – through the layer of ceramite that protected his stomach. It lifted him from the ground as it drove the barb deeper, tearing through abdominal muscles and intestines first before aiming upwards, puncturing his diaphragm, and settling between his lungs. There, it convulsed, pumping viscous black venom into Eros’ chest cavity.

Xantine saw none of this detail. He simply saw his brother’s mouth foam with dark spittle as he lolled, impaled on the creature’s tail; saw him convulse, silently, as the beast deposited him to the cathedral floor slowly, almost tenderly.

Xantine watched as the poison worked with cold efficiency, as his brother of a hundred conflicts, of a thousand years of shared existence, twitched and sucked in his last gasp of damp air.

‘I shall have to secure a sample of that,’ Xantine said, under his breath.

At his shoulder, Sarquil raised his chaincannon, taking aim at the monster. ‘No!’ Xantine commanded, slapping the weapon down with an open palm. Its multiple barrels were blazing hot to the touch, even through Xantine’s gauntlets. ‘Have some decorum, Sarquil. This foe is mine.’

Sarquil opened his mouth, ready to argue, then thought better of it. He checked his chaincannon’s ammunition counter and shrugged, his huge Tartaros Terminator plate whirring musically with the motion. ‘So be it,’ he said, turning to resight his weapon on a hunting pack of genestealers attempting to conceal their advance on the Dreadclaw’s position.

The Patriarch scanned the cathedral, eyes unblinking. Its swollen skull pulsed, the beats in time with the waves of pressure in Xantine’s mind.

There was another restless presence alongside it. S’janth prowled the edges of his consciousness, her wariness turned into full-blown terror.

Run, she urged. Run, run while we can.

No, he shot back, his transhuman system flooding with adrenaline and other stimulants of more exotic provenance, in anticipation for the battle to come. S’janth repeated the command, more insistent this time.

Run, she said. Run, run, run.

The word became a percussive drumbeat in Xantine’s head as the monster’s eyes alighted on his own, irises of turquoise and yellow meeting across a shattered world of dust grey and dirt brown.

He would not run. He would kill this abomination, on his own, and be worshipped for the feat.

Runrunrunrunrun…

Enough! he screamed in his own mind, loud enough to drown out the daemon’s insistent demands. I am Xantine, lord of the Adored, and there is no enemy I cannot lay low.

He levelled Anguish once again, pointing it at the massive xenos creature. He hated to repeat himself, but there were standards to maintain.

‘I am Xantine,’ he began again, ‘magnificence of the Adored, paragon of the perfect Third, and–’

The rest of his challenge became a strangled cry as the Patriarch leapt at him, its claws raking polished purple ceramite as it launched him backwards, sending him skidding into a pile of collapsed masonry.

Xantine’s vision swam, the force of the impact exacerbated by the psychic pressure in his head from the proximity of the Patriarch. More by impulse than intent, he leapt to his feet, adopting a Chemosian duelling stance as he allowed his senses to examine his wounds. He found a catalogue of sensation.

Pain, in his fused ribs, dull and distant. Like storm clouds on the edge of a city. He tasted blood in his mouth, rich and ripe, like wine.

This is no xenos half-breed, S’janth said. If you will not run, then I will. Let me in, lover. Share your flesh, give me your sensation, and together we can escape this doomed world.

She was wheedling him now, her desperation leading her to cajole him in ways that only she knew. Ways that had worked many times before. He could feel her power – still not fully restored to her former glory, but strong. Standing in the wreckage of the Cathedral of the Bounteous Harvest, Xantine wanted to sink into her, to give himself to her, to feel her use his body with that power, that grace.

Vavisk’s face flashed in his mind, his bass voice rumbling. ‘You have shackled yourself to this thing that wears your skin.’

The words were needles that pierced his pride. They stung worse than the pain in his ribs.

‘No!’ he roared. He was furious at S’janth for questioning his skill, at Vavisk for questioning his leadership, and at the xenos monstrosity that was currently raking its claws through his pink-clad Adored. Xantine bit hard into his anger, chewing it, tasting it, using it as fuel.

‘I will kill you, beast,’ he spat.

The cathedral was engulfed in a melee. Figures in the bright robes of the planet’s elite guard were pushing their way into the vast space, ascending side stairs from unseen basements and scrambling through gaps in the broken windows. They were setting up firing positions, using crumbled columns and smashed statues as barricades, felling cultists by the dozen as they were able to bring their gold-inlaid lasguns to bear. Still they came, climbing over the corpses of their xenos-tainted brethren, giving their lives willingly to protect the huge beast that stalked between the pews.

‘Help, my lord!’ one soldier in magenta robes called. A genestealer talon was embedded in her leg, pinning her to the stone floor. She had crippled the creature, and its legs dragged limply behind it, a cauterised hole visible above the knee in each. But still it crawled forward, a cold light in its yellow eyes, sharp teeth gnashing.

‘My weapon,’ she gasped, scrabbling for a lasgun that lay among the detritus from the cathedral, just out of reach of her grasping hands. It would be a triviality to kick it to her.

Instead, Xantine allowed the creature to move closer – so close that it could almost reach the woman’s incapacitated leg – before he brought his boot down on its skull. She looked up at him, a mixture of awe and terror written on her sweat-streaked face.

Pleasure: the thrill of death, so close, so final. A minuscule lurch in the stomach, unmoored, like flying.

His eyes were fixed on the Patriarch again. The creature had turned its back on him, and he would punish it for its impudence.

‘Good!’ Xantine called, forcing a snide humour into his voice, projecting it loud enough that it could be heard even over the din of battle. ‘Good! Finally, I have been blessed with a worthy foe!’

The Patriarch turned, and Xantine thought he registered surprise in its alien eyes. The blow that knocked him to the ground would’ve bisected a typical human. But he was no typical human.

He started to circle the creature, his rapier held in a light grip, its mono­molecular tip piercing the air.

‘I am Xantine, magnificence of the Adored, and paragon of the perfect Third. You – well, you may have brute strength, but I have killed a thousand of your kind.’ He spun the rapier, its power field thrumming. ‘Come, that I may kill you, and make this world my own.’

The Patriarch stalked towards him, slower this time, taking a moment to size up this larger, more resilient prey. It was wary of him. That was good.

Pleasure: satisfaction rippling out from his prefrontal cortex, through his nerves and muscles. A wave of satisfaction, cold and delicious, like ice water, salving the pain in his chest.

The Patriarch leapt, its talons extended for a decapitating strike. Xantine knew it was coming this time, and ducked to the left, thrusting Anguish upwards in two hands to impale the monster through its throat. It was an ostentatious strike that would see the Patriarch doom itself: the most perfect killing cut of all.

‘You are too…’ he called as the Patriarch twisted in the air, wrenching its alien body in a way impossible for humans – impossible even for trans­humans. ‘Slow,’ he finished, as the creature brought a huge talon down across his wrist, sending his rapier skittering across the cathedral floor.

Pain: sickly in its warmth and wetness, the result of a blow that would have severed his hand were it not for his armour. He is naked without his weapon, a moment of vulnerability.

Let me in, S’janth whispered, choosing her moment.

‘No,’ Xantine grunted, forced to parry an unexpected swipe from the Patriarch on his spiked gauntlets. The force of the blow sent him staggering backwards, skidding on the uneven floor of the damaged cathedral, away from the rapier.

Let me join you, my love. Share your body with me, so that we may live to savour the galaxy together.

Xantine brought the Pleasure of the Flesh up in one motion, pulling the pistol from its soft leather holster and pumping three shots in the direction of the Patriarch. The bolts struck their target, but the alien was bounding across the chamber, already too close, and its thick chitin sent the mass-reactive rounds pinging off into the depths of the cathedral. Xantine heard distant screams as they exploded amongst human and xenos bodies alike.

The Patriarch was on him again, and without Anguish, he was forced into a duellist’s stance, arms held forward to either deflect or, better, avoid its blows. Xantine, like most of his Legion, had trained extensively in bladework, but the creature was relentless, its alien physiology rendering it seemingly immune to fatigue.

It brought its talons down again and again, scything at air until eventually, inevitably, Xantine mistimed a feint, and the Patriarch’s talons found their target. They dug deep into his upper arm, slicing through the silver-and-gold chains that hung from his marbled pauldron until they reached transhuman flesh.

Pain: in his upper left arm, bone deep. Hot and sharp and localised, like exposure to a miniature sun.

Xantine yowled and rolled with the blow. The movement softened the impact slightly, ensuring his arm wasn’t severed completely.

He was panting now. Bleeding, too, the gash in his arm deep enough to defy the enhanced clotting agents in his blood. He felt the blood on his skin, felt it as it cooled and became tacky, his advanced physiology trying to staunch the flow and close the wound. He felt S’janth in his soul, empowered and emboldened by the spike of agony she had tasted.

The Patriarch closed on him again. Xantine scanned the cathedral, searching for flashes of purple and pink amidst the mass. He was looking for help, but found none.

‘Sarquil,’ he gasped over the vox, trying to slow his breathing. His quarter­master opened his own channel, the rhythmic sound of his chaincannon audible in the background.

‘Yes?’ Sarquil asked. There was no pretence to decorum for the Terminator now, and certainly no honorific for his warlord.

‘I have reconsidered my position,’ Xantine said, spitting bloody saliva. ‘Would you care to join me in felling this beast?’

‘Not at all, my lord,’ Sarquil replied. The smile on his face was evident even over the vox. ‘I would not want to usurp your great honour.’ Xantine heard the chatter of Sarquil’s chaincannon as it chewed through mutant bodies. ‘Besides, I am certain that you have the matter entirely in hand.’

‘Bastard,’ Xantine hissed, closing the vox-connection a moment later. He tried to attract the attention of Lordling, but the giant was lost to his bloodlust, shrieking as he dragged his massive zweihander through cultists, even as they dug claws and blades into his back like crampons and climbed his massive frame. He was shrieking from his slit mouth, his eyes rolling in his head. With pain or pleasure, Xantine could not be sure.

He opened the vox again, blink-clicking to his command-level frequency. ‘Vavisk, Torachon, do you copy? Where are you?’

Torachon’s voice came back a moment later.

‘A thousand apologies, my lord,’ the vat-grown Space Marine said. ‘We are facing surprising resistance at the cathedral entrance. Something seems to have rallied these abject wretches.’

Xantine had seen it too. The Patriarch’s arrival had galvanised the cultists, who fought now with absolute disregard for their own lives. Theirs wasn’t the wild, howling abandon of the Pantheon’s cults, their morale as fickle as their loyalties. Instead, they battled with cold, alien efficiency, bearing trauma that would send a typical mortal into lethal shock with dead eyes and rictus snarls.

He was on his own.

Not quite true. He was never on his own.

Behind you, my love, S’janth said.

The Patriarch swung a balled fist into his back.

Pain: like an asteroid impact on a planet’s surface. A spine, bent to almost breaking point, bruised ribs battered further.

Xantine was off his feet before he’d registered the pain. He skidded across the cathedral floor again, scraping pink and purple from his elaborate armour. He heard a machine whine and sputter, and realised the blow had been hard enough to shatter the ceramite casing of his backpack’s power core. The sound was joined by a low rumble, like a carnodon purring. He looked around the cathedral, craning his abused neck, for the source of the strange sound, before he realised it was coming from inside his head. So sweet, she whispered, her caution and fear giving way to pleasure at his pain. She was swelling inside his body, using that pain as fuel.

Xantine looked up to see the Patriarch looming over him. Acidic saliva dripped from its needle teeth. It took his head in its hand. The fingers were cable-strong as they closed around his skull. For a moment, it held Xantine’s head in place, cradling it carefully, like a mother would hold a baby.

Then it slammed his head down, smashing skin and skull against the stone floor.

Pain: in his head, sharp and loud, like an explosion in both of his ears.

SLAM

Pain: in his head, white and blinding, like a sun exploding.

Yes! S’janth says, ecstatic. Yes!

SLAM

Pain: in his head, the worst pain, the sickening pain of bone cracking and breaking.

More, more, MORE! she screams.

SLAM

The pain is overwhelming. It is absolute.

Xantine starts laughing. He looks up at this grossly proportioned thing, this walking nightmare, this disgusting attempt at perfection of form. It is hideous.

‘Savour…’ he cries, through foaming blood in his mouth.

SLAM

‘Your…’

SLAM

‘Last…’

SLAM

‘Breath…’

LET ME IN! the daemon in his head cries.

He feels the pain, truly feels it, as only a transhuman can. He knows every inch of his body, every organ, every bone, every artery. They are aflame now, and he wants to remember this sensation: this perfect agony.

And then he lets her in. She is warm, and there is no pain. She wants to take his body, but she cannot, not yet, so they share it, joining their power.

They are powerful. So very, very powerful.

The Patriarch is fast, but he – they – are faster, now. He watches as the creature slashes for his throat with a taloned arm, and he catches the limb in flight, holding it with minimal exertion. He looks at the arm, and his eyes take in the creature in more detail than he thought possible.

He can see the ridges and whorls in its chitin, an individual fingerprint for a creature of a hive mind. He can feel the throbbing of corrosive blood under its skin, so chemically different from his own. He can smell its stink: of sewers and filth, both human and xenos.

He sees it as she sees it, in the framework of sensation. Rough and smooth, light and dark, pleasure and… pain.

He places the palm of his other hand around the Patriarch’s arm, and gently, carefully wraps his armoured fingers around it. He tests the weight, the tensile strength of the xenos biology, sliding his hands along the limb to find the proper purchase.

Xantine breaks the arm. The chitin casing shatters, firing dark purple shards into the air where they hang for a moment, twinkling like stars. Blood fills the ragged hole, dark, thick, and stinking of ozone.

The Patriarch screams. The sound is a high-pitched screech to everyone else in the cathedral, but to Xantine, the sound is long and low, as stretched out as his reality. It is screaming in pain, in rage, in whatever emotion – or approximation of emotion – that it can feel. He drinks it in, and even with its potency dulled by distance and separation, it has a strange purity.

The Patriarch spins away, leaving its broken arm in Xantine’s hands. It flails with its stump as it tries to balance on the uneven floor, and Xantine finds himself taking the chance to retrieve his rapier from the floor of the cathedral.

A wise choice, he thinks, where no one can hear him. This thing is wounded, and S’janth is growing stronger on a surfeit of pain, but it is still lethal, still an apex predator on this world of prey.

The Patriarch rushes him, slicing down with another taloned arm: its second of four. He dances out of the curve of the blow, and digs the rapier’s tip in through the Patriarch’s armpit. Even here, the armour is thick, but – grudging praise to those perfidious aeldari smiths – the slender blade slips through to the shoulder, cutting through tendon and bone, through nerves and whatever else these creatures hide under their outer shells.

The Patriarch’s momentum is still carrying it forward, and Xantine wraps its arm around himself in a perversion of an embrace. Xantine finds himself cradled in the bosom of a xenos alpha strain for a millisecond, before he is spinning, tearing the second arm loose at the joint. The limb separates and Xantine sends it caroming into a mass of cultists, showering them with caustic gore. They scream, in pain and sadness, and it is a delightful sound.

The Patriarch stumbles, its missing limbs throwing off its preternatural balance, and its clawed foot slips in a slick of purple gore. It falls and splays out. Cultists rush to its side, placing their hands on its chitinous hide, trying to help it up. It flails with a bone talon and shreds the closest of their number, carving through bone and organs and gristle as it pulls itself back to its feet.

It turns and sprints towards Xantine now, loping like a canid, barrelling genestealers and mutants out of the way. Liquids are leaking from its damaged body – oily blood from the stumps of its arms, stringy saliva from its fanged mouth.

‘Xantine,’ he hears over the vox. The voice is faint to him, but he knows it is violently loud in reality, distorted and devastating.

It is Vavisk.

‘We have breached the cathedral,’ he says. There are no honorifics in his speech. There never are. ‘We will be with you in a moment.’

Ahead of schedule, but no matter. The kill will still be theirs.

Surgical augmentation has made his voice a weapon, and while he lacks the raw power of a devotee of noise such as Vavisk, it is still a hammer blow when projected with such force. The wave of sound hits the Patriarch as it leaps, and it overcorrects, twisting predictably in the air. Xantine slides smoothly to intercept it, holding his rapier in two hands. The tip of the weapon enters its fanged mouth. Xantine braces, power-armoured boots skidding on the cathedral floor, and feels as the monomolecular blade slips down the monster’s throat, slicing through muscle, tissue, and major organs on its journey into the creature’s guts.

The Patriarch’s momentum arrested, Xantine lets the tip of the rapier fall to the ground. The creature drops with it, still skewered on the aeldari weapon. It is still alive, and it stares, yellow eyes wide, as blood bubbles up its throat to mix with its stinking saliva. It forms a dark foam along the length of the blade that sends a shiver of disgust through Xantine’s floating consciousness.

He thrusts the tip of the rapier down, out through the Patriarch’s stomach. It slides easily into the cathedral’s stone floor, pinning the beast in place like an insect in a collection. It flails and claws at him, but Xantine watches himself avoid its grasping swipes expertly, so slow they seem to his divorced reality.

He knows the daemon’s next move. She ignores the melee around her, ignores the dying screams of humans and mutants alike. Their pain, their misery: these are crumbs of sensation to a sublime being such as S’janth. She wants something new, something exhilarating, something she has never tasted before.

Xantine takes up a long blade, discarded in the melee. It’s rusty and well used, one end wrapped in dirty material that form a grip. It’s a makeshift weapon, with no art to its construction, no balance to its heft. But it will cut. It will do.

He takes the Patriarch’s leg in his armoured hands. The thing kicks frantically, as if its life depends on it. It does, he thinks, with detached amusement. He is stronger; more accurately, the daemon inside his body, gorged on pain and pleasure, is stronger. He rakes the eagle-wing blades on his vambraces across the Patriarch’s inner thigh, gouging deep enough – he thinks – to sever nerves. Its kicking slows, and he pulls the leg outwards, bringing the rusty blade down, hard.

The first blow makes it halfway through the limb, so he applies a second, and a third. He hacks with a delicious insouciance, like a butcher at work, dispassionately carving meat, until the leg is held on only by strands of chitin and sinew. He pulls, and it detaches with a glorious pop.

He feels the wave of pleasure travel through the daemon. To him, it is just a ripple, an echo of her sublime sensation, but still it is powerful. Then he is moving again, applying his art to the Patriarch’s other leg, sawing and slicing until this too comes loose in his hands.

It would be simple enough to kill this creature. He could put his pistol to its eye and pull the trigger, or slide his gilded paring knife into the seam between the chitinous plates that protect its swollen brain. But S’janth wants to prolong this pleasure. She doesn’t want to just murder this xenos monstrosity; she wants to ruin it entirely, destroying everything it is and everything it represents to demonstrate her own superiority. Her own perfection.

Xantine watches as slowly, carefully, lovingly, she tears the Patriarch down, drinking its alien pain like nectar. She leaves a shell of a thing: mewling, bleeding, weak.

The effect of the torturer’s art is transmitted to the Patriarch’s flock. Their resistance, so galvanised by the arrival of their lord, breaks. Mutants and monsters hold their skulls and scream as their brood leader is torn apart. Mad from the transmitted pain and spiritually bereft, they hurl themselves at Xantine and his coterie. They run shrieking, wild-eyed, lashing out with crude clubs and blunt blades. Others stagger around the cathedral as if waking from a nightmare, their eyes wide, their mission forgotten. They are easy kills for the Space Marines of the Adored, who tear them apart with claws, disembowel them with blades, or smash them into the ground with fists.

S’janth is feasting on the pain. She is a crescendo, rising, rising, rising, until she is a single scream of ecstasy, burning brighter than any star. And then, like a star that has used its fuel, she starts to contract, to collapse in on herself.

He takes his moment. He has shared his body with the daemon for long enough now that he has learned to keep the faintest touch of consciousness on his body, and he uses these fingerholds now to claw himself back into his flesh-and-bone form. She barely resists, rendered almost insensate by her banquet, and he asserts his primacy within his own skin.

He catalogued his pain once more, the sensations suddenly brought into sharp focus. His cracked skull had already started knitting itself back together, the slow motion of bone becoming a deep throb in his ears. The torn skin of his shoulder had scabbed over, new skin forming underneath the protective layer, pink and itchy. His muscles were burning, pushed to limits beyond even his transhuman physiology by the daemon’s influence.

It felt wonderful.

‘They are breaking,’ Vavisk rumbled over the vox. ‘Survivors are running into the sewers and pipes under the city.’

‘Let them flee,’ Xantine said, his voice projecting in the ancient cathedral as the last of the dying insurrection bled out through doors and broken windows. ‘Let them return to their holes to tell their squalid vermin of me – of my magnificence.’ He stepped to the top of a pile of corpses and raised his arms aloft. ‘I am Xantine,’ he bellowed, loud enough to rattle the broken glass in what was left of the huge windows. ‘And I have saved this world!’

He could hear cheering from outside.