Текст книги "The Outcast Dead"

Автор книги: Грэм Макнилл

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

‘Damn you,’ said Kiron, pressing the chirurgeon against the wall of his home. ‘You have to do something. Do you realise who this is? This is Gythua of the XIV Legion. He was the first Lantern Bearer, one of the original Seven! This man saved my life when we drove the Ringers from the equatorial ridges of Iapetus. He carried the Emperor’s banner and planted it in the dark heart of Cassini Regioat the fall of Saturn. Do you understand?’

Atharva and Asubha prised Kiron’s fingers from the chirurgeon’s neck before his anger and grief overcame his intellect.

‘Kiron, let go,’ said Atharva. ‘Killing him won’t help Gythua.’

‘He has to save him!’

‘Nothing can save Gythua now,’ said Asubha. ‘He has walked the Crimson Path.’

Kiron stepped away from Antioch, his fists balled and a perfect rage boiling behind his grey eyes. He stared in hatred at the cowering chirurgeon, but even as the need to break something threatened to turn his anger into murder, Severian called out a warning from his watchful position at the doorway.

‘Save your anger, brothers,’ he said. ‘A better target for it comes this way.’

‘Our hunters?’ demanded Tagore. ‘Who is it, Imperial Fists or Legio Custodes?’

The Luna Wolf shook his head.

‘I don’t know who they are,’ replied Severian, looking back out the door into the square beyond, ‘but they are armed and they are definitely notImperial.’

EIGHTEEN

Dark Imperium

The Battle of Crow’s Court

ALL OF IT was here, all of the echoes of truth retraced, all the wasting light and the garbled words of a million madmen. It seethed in the whisper stones, swirling around the length of the tower like caged electricity that must soon earth or else burn away the fool who has summoned it into being.

Evander Gregoras swayed on the point of exhaustion, his body wasted and his flesh drained of life and vitality. He had not eaten or slept in days, the obsession to unlock the truth of what had come to this tower driving him to that liminal space between devotion and madness. A lifetime’s worth of text in touch-script filled the air, a static explosion in a library held aloft in the aetheric energy that engulfed the chamber.

His books, his scrolls and every single note he had ever assembled on the Pattern was here, and the letters shimmered as though embossed with luminous gold script. The walls of the chamber oozed light into the motionless forest of pages, and as each word bled into the air it was lifted from the page before dissipating into the aether.

As each one vanished, Gregoras subsumed its meaning and assimilated it into his understanding of the Bleed. He knew that his greatest work was dying around him, but it was a small sacrifice to unlock the elusive meaning that danced around him.

The lattice above him pulsed with light, but it was light that neither illuminated nor warmed the skin. It was a gateway to the nightmares of a city of telepaths, stored and tapped and dissected like an anatomist with a hitherto unknown form of life. The worst of the nightmares were gone, purged by the diligent and methodical work of his cryptaesthesians, but the core of it… ah, the heart of the nightmare… he had kept that here, wrapped in such complex allegory, tangential metaphors and obscure symbolism that only one as versed in the Pattern as he would ever know it for what it was.

Thiswas what Kai Zulane knew, this was the secret he carried within him that only he could understand. Thiswas what Sarashina had thought was so important that it could be trusted to no one else. Nothing of such power could pass through the Whispering Tower without leaving a bruise, and if you knew how and where to look you could reform the source of that impact.

Like a forensic chirurgeon reconstructing a murder weapon from the damage done to the victim, so too was Evander Gregoras assembling the billion fragments of information that had been hidden within the mind of the tower’s greatest failure.

Its pieces were cohering, but too slowly…

He had seen tantalising hints… word shapes, expressions that meant nothing to him, but which were redolent with the promise of grim darkness in a far future…

An age of war in a lightless millennium…

Great Devourer…

Apostasy…

The Blood of Martyrs…

The Beast Arises…

Bloodtides…

Times of Ending…

Over everything, he heard the dolorous sound of marching feet, of armies going to war in an endless parade of slaughter and mayhem that could only end with the extinction of all things. These armies would never surrender, never forgive and would only ever lay down their weapons when death claimed them at the end of war itself.

Was Kai foreseeing the end of the Imperium? Had he seen the ultimate victory of Horus Lupercal? Gregoras did not think so, for these words and images were heavy with age, dusty and burdened with a weight of history that could only be earned after the passage of millennia. Little more than fleeting glimpses, they nevertheless left Gregoras in a state of dreadful terror, like a man trapped in a nightmare of his own making and from which he knows he cannot ever awaken.

‘The truth once learned, cannot be unlearned,’ had been a favourite aphorism of his teachings, but oh, how he wished it could be…

Each piece was a horror of war and destruction, of stagnation and doom. As his notes dissolved around him, they fed new morsels of information into his head in an unstoppable and inevitable torrent. It was coming faster now, each unlocked piece of the puzzle adding a piece to another, larger image, until the entirety of what had come to Terra in the wake of Magnus’s foolhardy intrusion began to emerge.

It rose from the patterns of light like a black colossus, a destiny and a nightmare all in one. His mind tried to grasp the full scale of what he was seeing, but it was too large, too monumental and too terrifying to ever be contained within one fragile mortal skull.

Gregoras screamed as he saw a dark world of teeming insects, clad in black and grey, toiling endlessly in darkened hives and subterranean nests of squalor and misery. This was a world where nothing ever changed, nothing grew and nothing of worth was created. And yet, this was a world where such horror was not seen for the nightmare it was, but as a victory, as an existence to be celebrated and rendered magnificent.

Gregoras could not imagine how the insects could bear to live such terrible lives, never knowing the glory that could be theirs, never understanding that the horror of their daily lives was unendurable. Not only did the insects exist in such stagnation, they actively fought to preserve it. Inexhaustible armies poured from this world to drive back invaders and outsiders, but instead of reforging their destiny anew on the worlds they claimed, they willingly recreated the lightless hell world from which they had come.

He knew this world, just as he knew that these insectswere not insects at all.

The Pattern filled the chamber, pouring in with geometric accumulation of all that had passed through the whisper stones and the minds of the dead and dying. Gregoras could not bear it all, falling to his knees as the last of his books burned to ashes in the fire of truth that consumed them and poured into his mind.

‘Take it back!’ he yelled. ‘Please, take it back! I don’t want this, I never wanted to see this…’

Gregoras fell forward onto his hands and knees as the dream of the red chamber and its fallen angels filled his mind with all its awful truth. He saw everything Sarashina had seen, the clash of blades, the offer and the sacrifice, the honour and the evil. He saw it all in a blink of an eye that went on for an eternity.

And towering over it all was a seated giant atop a monstrous throne of gold, a nightmare engine constructed by lunatics and sadists. The giant’s flesh was withered and long dead, a living corpse of metastasised bone and endless agony. Invisible light poured from this giant, and the torment behind his eyes was the purest pain in the world because it was borne willingly and without complaint.

‘Oh, no…’ whispered Gregoras, as the last fraying thread of his sanity began to unravel. ‘Not you, please not you…’

The giant turned its gaze upon him, and Evander Gregoras screamed as he finally understood how this nightmare had come to be.

ATHARVA RAN TO the doorway of Antioch’s lean-to, searching the darkness for sign of the new arrivals. They weren’t hard to find, and were making no effort to conceal their approach. Every third man carried a lit torch, and the flames glittered on the ironwork crows that stared down at the unfolding drama with sculpted indifference.

Atharva counted thirty of them, tall men armoured in contoured plates of beaten iron shaped into a form that was at once familiar and yet subtly different. It took a moment for Atharva to recognise the shapes before him, for their armour was an almost perfect representation of a form of war plate no longer manufactured, a style that had not been worn in battle for hundreds of years and existed now only in revisionist history books and the dusty annexes of the Gallery of Unity. They carried guns that Atharva recognised as a kind he had once touched in that same gallery, weapons that were no less deadly for their age.

Anger touched Atharva, for the appearance of this rabble ran roughshod over the honour of the Legions, whose appearance was openly mocked by such accoutrements of war.

That they were not Legiones Astartes was immediately apparent, but who were they?

‘Who in the name of all that’s perfect are they?’ asked Kiron at his shoulder.

‘I do not know,’ said Atharva, ‘but I intend to find out.’

He closed his eyes and let his mind drift beyond the confines of this squalid refuge. He felt the glaring mind presences of the men, recognising the touch of bio-manipulation in their inflated physiques and gnarled genetic code. They were freaks, abominations against humanity crafted by a geneticist with no sense of beauty or the natural workings of a body. The Pavoni bent the base codes of physicality, but even they were bound by the fundamental building blocks of life.

These men had been twisted out of shape and pressed into a mould, the functionality of which their bodies could never hope to maintain. To a man, they were dying, but didn’t realise it. Their minds were a crude mesh of aggression, fear and incipient psychosis. On any civilised world, they would have been locked away for the rest of their lives or handed over to the Mechanicum to be wrought into the most basic servitor class.

Yet in the centre of these men was a very different figure, a man whose flesh had likewise been augmented beyond the human norms, but whose body displayed none of the crudity employed in enhancing the others. This man’s physique was a work of genius, in the same way that the printing press had been a work of genius in comparison to handwritten manuscripts. And just as the printing press of old had been superseded by more powerful solutions, so too had this man’s biology…

Atharva briefly touched his mind, and recoiled at the jagged, razor edges he found in its construction. Like volcanic rock formed from the heat and pressure of the deep earth’s forces, it was glassy and scarred, shaped to one purpose and one purpose alone: to conquer a world.

The vitrified scarring on this man’s mind was familiar and it took a moment only for Atharva to recall where he had seen such rude psycho-cognitive engineering.

Within the mind of Kai Zulane.

He pulled back as he sensed the rampant hostility of the man’s unconscious mental defences, all belligerence and vicious barbs – like an attack dog guarding a threshold. There would be no dominating this man with the Athanaean arts. Atharva opened his eyes, looking at the bulky, crudely-armoured form of the man with a new sense of wonder and awe.

‘To destroy you would be to run amok with a flame-lance in a library of priceless tomes.’

‘What did you say?’ growled Tagore.

‘These are no ordinary men,’ said Atharva. ‘Do not underestimate them.’

Tagore shook his head. ‘They will die like ordinary men,’ he spat. ‘Thirty warriors? I will kill them myself and we will be on our way.’

Atharva placed a restraining hand on Tagore’s shoulder and tried not to flinch when the World Eater gave him a ferocious grimace of bared teeth and wild aggression. The implants on the back of his skull hummed with activation, and Atharva saw the danger inherent in the habitual use of such augmetics. Tagore was as much a prisoner of its siren song of violence as Angron had ever been of the slave culture said to have trained him in the arts of slaughter. He wondered if Angron appreciated the irony of enslaving his own men.

‘Antioch!’ shouted the man with the vitrified mindscape. ‘The men in there with you, send them out. Babu Dhakal wants them.’

‘Shitting, bastard hell,’ hissed Antioch. ‘It’s Ghota. Throne help me, we’re dead.’

Atharva spun to face the cowering chirurgeon. ‘Who is he, and who is this Babu Dhakal?’

‘Are you serious?’ said Antioch, crawling on all fours to get beneath the heaviest table in his shack. ‘Babu Dhakal is trouble, like you hadn’t brought enough to my door already!’

‘And Ghota?’

‘The Babu’s attack dog,’ said Antioch, trying to put as much heavy furniture between himself and the open doorway as possible. ‘You don’t mess with Ghota if you know what’s good for you. People who do end up hung from hooks in pieces.’

Asubha hauled the man from his hiding place and said, ‘Who is Dhakal, a local governor? The authority around here?’

Antioch gave a strangled laugh. ‘Sure, you could say he’s the authority around here. He’s a gang lord, one of the last left standing after the blood eagle war. He controls all the territories from the Crow’s Court to the Petitioner’s Arch and south to the Dhakal Gap. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll do as Ghota says.’

‘I’m getting tired of waiting, Antioch!’ shouted Ghota, his voice a gurgling rasp of cruelty.

Tagore and Subha flanked the doorway, and Severian peered through a gap in the ill-formed brickwork. Atharva moved to where Kai lay in a cursive pose of misery, his body a reeking mess of vomit and expelled matter. Thankfully, he was unconscious, though he shivered with micro-tremors as his body purged itself.

Atharva heard the metallic clatter of weapons being readied to fire and swept Kai into a protective embrace as thirty heavy calibre rifles opened fire.

A sawing blitz of gunfire tore into Antioch’s surgery, ripping through the adobe bricks and sheet metal like a las-cutter through flesh. Woodwork splintered, brickwork was pulverised to powder and the air filled with ricochets, flying glass and smoke. The noise was deafening, thunderous and intended to intimidate as much as cause harm.

In a bygone age and against any other targets it might have worked.

Atharva looked up as the barrage ceased, his enhanced sight easily picking out the forms of his fellows. None had been hit by more than a passing sliver of glass or bullet fragment.

Severian grinned and said, ‘What’s your plan, son of Magnus?’

As much as he loathed resorting to violence, Atharva knew this was no time for subtlety or clever words. Only one plan of action would see them through this encounter.

‘Kill them all,’ he said.

Tagore grinned. ‘First sensible thing you’ve said all day.’

THE WORLD EATERS charged from the smoke and dust of gunfire, sprinting with ferocious speed that seemed impossible for such enormous figures. Atharva watched them run with the morbid fascination a man might reserve for watching one alien species destroy another.

Tagore hit first, his fist punching clean through the breastplate of a warrior with twin topknots of black hair and a forked beard. Even as the man fell, Tagore stripped his dead hands of his weapon and turned it on the men standing beside him. The armour Ghota’s men wore looked like Thunder Armour, but that resemblance did not stretch to its protective qualities. Thudding recoil and enormous muzzle flare obscured Atharva’s view for the briefest second, but in its wake he saw three men cut virtually in two by Tagore’s point-blank discharge.

Subha and Asubha charged at his flanks, the energised blades torn from the spears of the dead Custodians flickering with blue light. Subha’s charge was the hammerblow of pure force, scattering men like the detonation of a grenade. Though the blade he bore was more akin to a greenskin’s cleaver, Asubha wielded it with the precision of a skilled dissector of the dead. Two men went down, headless, a third and fourth with their innards tumbling to the square in looping ropes of wet meat. A fifth lost both his arms and collapsed with a gurgling scream of pain.

Atharva emerged from the bullet-riddled remains of Antioch’s surgery with Kai held at his side. He maintained a kine shield around the astropath’s body as he watched his brothers of the Crusader Host take Ghota’s men apart. Argentus Kiron loosed relentless bursts of plasma from a position of cover in the ruined façade, incinerating heads with every shot and taking cover from the desultory return fire coming his way.

Yet for all the initial damage wreaked by the Outcast Dead, these men were not ordinary mortals who would be cowed by such horrific slaughter. They had been engineered by unknown means to disregard fear or compassion, and fought back with instinctive brutality. Tagore took a round to the side and roared in pain as a shower of bright blood erupted from the wound.

The World Eater shouted, ‘In the name of Angron!’ and put a fist through the shooter’s face, spinning on his heel to unleash a hail of fire into his scattering enemies. Two men were punched from their feet by the impacts. A knot of warriors armed with pistols and long, gutting knives surrounded Asubha stabbing and cutting with manic fury. Atharva saw one blade cut deep into the meat of Asubha’s bicep, but the World Eater twisted aside before the blow cut the tendons of his shoulder.

He spun low and cut his attacker in two, darting like a striking snake as he stabbed and thrust with his butcher’s blade. Tagore appeared at his side and shot two men in the back before they could turn to face him. The World Eaters sergeant laughed, revelling in the murderous ballet that raged around him, and didn’t see the blow that drove him to his knees.

Ghota loomed above Tagore, a heavy hammer of wrought iron spinning around his body as though it weighed nothing at all. Another crashing hammer blow thundered into Tagore’s side, sending him spinning through the air as he struggled to rise. Subha threw himself at Ghota, but a backhanded jab of an elbow smashed into his jaw and sent him flying.

‘Kiron!’ shouted Atharva, edging towards one of the narrow alleyways that led from this battleground. ‘Kill that one!’

A bright lance of plasma energy spat from the ruins, but either Ghota had heard Atharva’s shout or some preternatural sense warned him of imminent danger, and he swayed aside from the killing blast. The warrior of Fulgrim’s Legion vaulted from the ruins and ran towards Ghota, outraged that this upstart had ruined his perfect record of headshots.

Asubha thrust with his crackling blade, but Ghota turned it aside and sent a thunderous left hook into his attacker’s jaw. Asubha staggered, his face a mask of shock more than pain. A pistoning jab crashed into Asubha’s face, then another, and the warrior reeled as Ghota swung his hammer in a killing arc.

Atharva dropped his kine shield long enough to lift his mind into the lower Enumerations where he could draw on the basic abilities of the Pyrae. With a surge of thought, Atharva hurled a searing bolt of cracking fire towards Ghota. It struck the hulking warrior before he could deliver the deathblow to Asubha, and the cloak at his shoulders erupted with flame.

Ghota roared in pain and tore the blazing cloak from his armour as a fluid shape emerged on the flank of the attackers. The ghostly form of Severian slid from the shadows like a wolf on the hunt. He killed without warning, leaving dead bodies in his wake and moving before his victims were even aware of their danger.

Kiron threw aside his discharged plasma carbine and swept up Subha’s fallen blade. The edge no longer crackled with energy, but Kiron did not care. His dirty white hair flowed behind him as he attacked like a swordsman forced to fight with an unbalanced blade.

‘You might look like us, but you’re just a pathetic copy,’ snapped Kiron.

Ghota laughed. ‘Is that what you think?’

A duel between a swordsman and a longer-reaching hammer was an unequal contest, but these were no ordinary combatants. As Severian killed with impunity and the World Eaters regrouped in the midst of a furious short-range firefight, Kiron darted and wove between slashing blows of Ghota’s hammer. His skill was prodigious, his footwork flawless and his attacks launched with no hint of their target, and Atharva saw him working towards a decapitating strike.

It was a battle of contrasts: precisely controlled skill and perfect discipline against raw violence and hunger for the kill. In the end, there could only be one victor. Kiron ducked beneath a killing arc of the hammerhead and thrust his blade into the narrow gap between Ghota’s breastplate and pauldron. The blade stabbed deep into the meat of the man’s body, yet he merely grunted as the blade went in. Ghota shoulder barged Kiron, gripping him by the neck and smashing his forehead into the exquisitely handsome features of his opponent.

Kiron’s nose and cheeks broke, transforming his beautiful face into a shattered mask of fractured bone and squirting blood. Atharva paused in his escape, stunned at Kiron’s wounding. Though gunfire and screams still filled the square, the tempo of the battle seemed to drop as the combatants on both sides watched so perfect a warrior fall.

Ghota’s hammer looped around in a bludgeoning curve, and smashed into Kiron’s shoulder, destroying muscle and flesh and driving down into his chest in a welter of broken ribs. Atharva heard the crack of bones and felt a sympathetic spasm of pain as Kiron’s agony flared in the aether.

Kiron spat a torrent of blood, staring defiantly at his killer.

Ghota’s hammer swung around to crush Kiron’s skull to splinters.

A heavy fist caught the enormous weapon’s haft on its downward arc, a pale, sepulchral hand streaked with blood and empowered with all the strength bred into the warriors of Mortarion’s deathly Legion.

Gythua sent a right cross into Ghota’s jaw, the blow hitting home like a pile-driver and sending Babu Dhakal’s warrior reeling.

‘That’s my friend you’ve killed,’ he barked.

Atharva knew the Death Guard should not be alive. He should already be dead, a bled-out corpse cooling on Antioch’s bench. He shouldn’t even have survived the crash, but here he was, unyielding even unto the end. Ghota shook his head and spat blood, taking in the measure of his opponent and giving a crooked-toothed smile.

‘You’re as good as dead,’ said Ghota.

‘That’s as maybe,’ agreed Gythua. ‘But come near my friend again and your blood will run with mine on this fine ground.’

‘I’ll kill you before you can raise a fist,’ Ghota promised.

‘Then come on, boy,’ snapped the Death Guard. ‘You’re boring me already.’

Gythua’s talk was brave, but Atharva knew he could not hope to stand against Ghota. Determination and honour were keeping Gythua on his feet, but they wouldn’t be enough against so formidable an opponent.

The sounds of gunfire slackened, and Atharva saw that as Kiron and Ghota had fought, Severian and the World Eaters had finished the battle. Bodies littered the square, some cut open, some headless and some simply torn limb from limb. The odds in this battle had turned on their head, and Atharva saw that understanding in Ghota’s blood-red eyes.

The warrior raised his hammer and spat on the ground before walking away from the slaughter. No one raised a weapon against him, though Tagore had one of his victim’s guns held across his bloodied chest. Subha and his twin watched Ghota go with a mixture of wary respect and anger, while Severian swept up a fallen rifle and scanned for fresh threats.

With Ghota out of sight, Gythua sank to his knees beside Kiron, his head dropping to his chest as the life ebbed from him. Atharva ran to his side and laid Kai down on the ground in time to catch the Death Guard as his indomitable strength finally gave out. He held the dying warrior and wiped blood from his ghostly pale face.

Beside him, Kiron coughed a frothed mouthful of blood and struggled to speak through the pain of his shattered body. The World Eaters gathered round, bloodied angels of death come to witness the final moments of their fallen brothers. Even Antioch had emerged from the wreckage of his home to see something most mortals would never see through the entire span of their impossibly brief lives: the death of a Space Marine.

‘Didn’t… think… you’d get a… glorious death… all to… yourself, did you?’ hissed Kiron with gurgling, breathy effort.

‘Can’t say I was… trying… to die at all,’ replied Gythua. ‘Damn fool of you to go up against that big bastard.’

Kiron nodded. ‘He made me miss, and… I never… miss…’

‘I won’t tell,’ said Gythua, and the last of his life bled out.

Kiron nodded and put a hand on Gythua’s shoulder before letting out a rattling cough that stilled his breath. Atharva watched the light of his aura fade to grey and bowed his head.

‘They are gone,’ he said.

‘They died well,’ observed Tagore, one hand pressed to his side where he had been shot.

Asubha knelt beside the two dead warriors and closed their eyes.

‘Their Crimson Path is ended,’ said Subha.

Tagore looked over at Atharva and aimed his gun at Kai. ‘You still think the astropath is worth this?’

‘More than ever,’ said Atharva with a nod as Severian emerged from the shadows with a weapon held at his shoulder.

‘Good enough,’ said Tagore, lifting the weapon as though seeing it for the first time.

Severian turned his gun around in his hands and said, ‘You know what these weapons are, who they were made for?’

‘Yes,’ replied Atharva. ‘I do.’

‘I heard they were dead,’ said Tagore. ‘I thought they all died in the last battle of Unity.’

‘So history tells us, but apparently Terra holds its own secrets,’ said Atharva, staring at the thin wisp of fumes drifting from the hissing patch of ground where Ghota had spat.

‘History can wait,’ said Severian. ‘Our hunters will not, and this will draw them to us like moths to a flame.’

‘What about Gythua and Kiron?’ asked Subha. ‘We can’t just leave them here like this.’

Atharva turned to Antioch. ‘Do you have any suggestions, chirurgeon?’

‘I can’t keep them,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’m in enough trouble as it is.’

‘No, but as chirurgeon in a place like this, you must be aware of places where dead bodies can be taken.’

Antioch looked up, and whatever caustic reply was forming on his lips remained unspoken as he saw the deadly earnestness in Atharva’s eyes.

‘Best you can do is to take them to the Temple of Woe,’ he said. ‘There’s an incinerator there if you don’t want the bodies picked clean by daybreak.’

‘The Temple of Woe?’ asked Atharva. ‘What is that?’

Antioch shrugged. ‘A place where folk that don’t want their dead left to rot take their bodies. They say it’s run by a priest, if you can believe that. I hear he’s some madman who lost his mind and thinks that death is something you can appease with prayers.’

‘And how would we find this place?’

‘It’s a few kilometres east of here, built into the foot of the scarp you can see over the roofs there. You can’t miss it, there’s dozens of statues carved into its walls. Leave your friends at the feet of the Vacant Angel, and they’ll be done right.’

Atharva’s psychic senses flared at Antioch’s words, and the memory of his recurring vision returned with all the clarity of a lucid dream.

A haunted mausoleum, a stalking wolf and the towering statue of a faceless angel…