CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Sarquil depressed the chaincannon’s trigger, and the ancient barrels started to spin. The whine was musical – Sarquil was meticulous in his maintenance of his weapon – but it took a few moments to build to its crescendo.

It was all S’janth needed. The transhuman body she dwelled within was not as perfect as the form she had once held, but it was still fast and strong. They found themselves at odds on occasion, but when their purposes aligned, they could will Xantine’s Space Marine form to feats of strength and skill that no flesh-and-blood consciousness could ever achieve.

She leapt from the throne and rolled as the first shells spat from the muzzle of the chaincannon. They tore through thick carpet, sending tufts of material into the sweet-smelling air of the chamber. She kept moving, her armoured legs pumping, her black hair whipping behind her head, until she reached hard cover: a huge symbol of Slaanesh crafted from aeldari bones. She dropped, squatting on her haunches, her back pressed against the relic. The Pleasure of the Flesh thrummed in her hand, and she felt a brief connection with the daemon that inhabited the weapon.

The chaincannon began its dirge once more, and the symbol exploded, sending splintered bone fragments bouncing off her pauldrons. More suffering for that benighted race. Delicious. She moved again, firing the daemon-possessed pistol as she ran. Each shot hit, and the gun quivered as it waited to smell hyper-oxygenated blood on the air, but Sarquil’s thick Tartaros plate absorbed the impact of the mass-reactive shells, and she felt the weapon’s disappointment. ‘Don’t pout, little one,’ she said, as she halted again, this time behind an enlarged silver effigy of Xantine himself. ‘There is always more pain.’

Sarquil padded forward, quiet as ever. ‘Is this how the glorious Xantine leads? Allowing your Neverborn to fight on your behalf?’ He injected poison into his voice. ‘Do you feel like you’re in control?’

It was almost imperceptible, but she heard a quiver in his voice. It wasn’t fear – the Anathema had cruelly bred that most delectable of emotions out of these insipid creations – but it was something close. Uncertainty. This was not going as Sarquil expected.

It was not as Xantine expected, either, she knew. She felt his consciousness moving gently within her, agitated and confused. They had made an arrangement, but she was prolonging the pleasure, toying with her prey.

It felt wonderful. Her daemonic form had been utterly obliterated by her aeldari captors, and the subsequent millennia of captivity had rendered her too weak to take her new host’s body outright. But the city had nourished her – so close she could taste its suffering and its misery, its pleasure and its joy.

She had hidden her strength from everyone, even her host, and used it now in this vital, pulsing, muscular form. Her twin hearts beat with hot blood, her muscle fibres bunched in anticipation, her senses rang with scents and tastes, images and sounds.

She turned and dug her shoulder into the pedestal of the statue. The pink ceramite of her armour scraped against the metal, and she pushed. The statue swayed, tipping forward, then back towards her. She rode the momentum, and pushed again – an almighty heave that sent the depiction of Xantine toppling towards Sarquil. The Terminator swung his power fist at the artwork, caving in its inanimate chest with an almighty crack, and redirecting its bulk to slam harmlessly against the chamber floor. The statue’s head dislodged, and rolled lazily, until it came to rest, face frozen in a beatific smile.

S’janth used the distraction, planting one armoured boot on the toppled pedestal, before launching herself forward, her weight braced against the sharp point of her rapier. She aimed the weapon at Sarquil’s breast, aching for the kiss of blood and bone as it tore through the Space Marine’s fused ribcage and enlarged organs.

She was denied. Sarquil was off balance, and couldn’t bring his power fist to bear, but the Terminator reacted with admirable speed. He lifted his chaincannon instead, putting the bulky weapon between the trunk of his body and the tip of the blade. It was just enough. The rapier raked through the weapon’s casing, before sliding up Sarquil’s right arm, carving a deep furrow in the purple ceramite. The gouge sparked and hissed, venting gases. Sarquil roared with pain and frustration.

Her blackened lips shaped a smile at the sound. It wasn’t the pain that she craved – she wanted the raw, wet agony of a slow-killing wound – but the Space Marine’s reaction showed that she’d hit something deep, something important. That was good.

S’janth rolled and came up in a lithe fighting stance, firing the Pleasure of the Flesh from the hip. The mass-reactives blossomed against Sarquil’s chest, where they dug holes in the pristine plate. Pinpricks of pain spiked in the ether again, but nothing substantial enough to fell the warrior. She would need to get closer, to feel his hot breath on her face as he died.

S’janth fell forward, her fingers disappearing halfway into the thick carpet, and ran like an animal, four limbs pumping to close the ground between the two figures. Her eyes flicked between power fist and chaincannon as she ran, anticipating the parry, waiting to see which way to feint before burying the rapier in her prey.

She didn’t see the boot. Sarquil swung his tree-trunk leg forward, catching her as she charged. Her own velocity – unnatural, impossible, inhuman – counted against her, and she crumpled, winded, to the floor. She was wheezing curses to her temporary mortal weakness when Sarquil pressed the boot against her chest, and she felt the solid bone cage of her ribs creak under the incredible weight of both the giant and his ornate armour.

‘Not so fast now, are we?’ Sarquil said. ‘It is a shame to destroy one of Slaanesh’s creations, but you cannot be trusted, daemon.’

He raised the chaincannon, and aimed it at her forehead. She took in its snarling jaws, traced the six blackened barrels back to the depths of the ancient weapon. A Space Marine would not beg for their life, but she was no Space Marine. She was a creature of desire, pleasure and pain, of obsession and indulgence, and the concept of oblivion – a plane of no sensation – horrified her.

She offered Sarquil slaves, weapons and soldiers. She offered him Slaanesh’s favour, even though it was not hers to give, and promised to bring him to his father, even though Fulgrim would not grant him audience. She offered him anything, everything, that he could ever want.

When that failed – when Sarquil simply stared back with his dark eyes – she clawed and scratched and raved, black foam frothing from black lips. It was all for naught.

Sarquil depressed the trigger of the chaincannon.

The weapon exploded.

The rapier had cut deep, severing key arteries inside the cannon’s bulky frame, causing a catastrophic failure when it was finally fired. Its barrels erupted outwards, bending and bowing like a flower blossoming; its trigger, receiver and ammunition cycler simply ceased to exist, atomised by the detonation.

Light and sound filled her senses. There was pain, too. Hot shrapnel tore through the meat of her face, glazing her cheeks with blood that ran like tears.

But there was more pain in this room. Sarquil’s right arm was missing, vaporised to the elbow. What remained of the limb hung limp against his side, pink-white bone degloved by the force of the blast. Explosions continued up the chaincannon’s ammunition feed as it hung limp at his waist, staccato detonations leading towards the reactor on the back of the Tartaros armour. He stumbled, power fist clutching at his missing arm, as he tried to steady himself, howling in agony.

Sarquil staggered between portraits and landscapes, smashing sculptures and knocking over busts, destroying the cultural wealth of this world in his pain. He stopped, finally, massive feet splayed wide, his face a mask of rage. He was framed against the window, framed against the purples and pinks, blacks and golds of the Great Rift. She thought of that place. A shifting tide of sensation where she could shed this mortal frame and rejoin her patron and prince, by his side after millennia alone.

But not yet. There was pleasure to be had first. Improvising, she hurled Anguish, full force, at Sarquil’s central mass. The warrior reacted too slow, blinded by pain, or frustration, or both, and the blade, perfectly thrown, bored through his stomach armour. It found skin and muscle, blood and organs as it travelled, soft and yielding. It passed through them all, tearing and ripping, until it reached something hard: bone – the bone of Sarquil’s spine – where it finally stopped its course.

The starlight reflected in his metal pate as he staggered backwards, carried by the momentum of the thrown rapier, towards the window. His shoulder touched glassaic and it shattered, allowing the cold of the city into the chamber. It touched her skin like a caress. He started to fall into the void.

She moved faster than she thought this body could, and caught the hilt of the rapier in one hand, arresting the fall. Her glove was already sticky with gore, the white of the silk now stained red with Sarquil’s innards. The giant teetered at the window, his feet on the ledge, his body suspended above a precipitous drop into the lower reaches of the overcity. His eyes met hers. His wide, pleading; hers slitted, feline. For a moment, a perfect study in opposites.

It could not last. The blade was buried deep in muscle and bone, but Sarquil was too heavy in his Tartaros plate. The monomolecular blade of Anguish dislodged from its home amongst his thoracic vertebrae, and the huge Space Marine slid backwards. Blood and bone fragments burst from the wound as the ancient weapon left his body completely, a bloom of red and white that the warrior seemed to wear on his chest like a flower as he fell from the council tower, past massive hab-blocks, vast agglomerations of pipes, and statues the size of skyscrapers.

The speck of purple and red shrank until it was so small that even her augmented, transhuman eyes could no longer track it. She reached out with her other senses – ones only her kind possessed – but could not locate Sarquil’s soul amongst the millions that called Serrine their home.

She could delve into the city’s depths to find her prey. She imagined Sarquil, weak and dying, his bones broken, his body pulverised. She would enjoy placing her sword between his shoulder blades, leaning on the weapon until it drew out the last of his lifeblood. But she might not find him, or worse, he might be dead already. Such a tiresome possibility – no pleasure at all.

She looked out into the city, its lights dimmed, its souls flickering like candles as they slumbered. Others burned brighter, engaging in the pleasures that Slaanesh encouraged. She would join them, she decided. She could show them such delights.