A voice interrupts her thoughts. ‘Will it work?’
She turns. An Ultramarines captain has entered the stack room. It is Sullus. She is not sure what to make of Sullus. From observation of micro-expressions during the journey to the palace, she believes that Ventanus does not trust his judgement or reliability.
‘It will work,’ she says with a conviction she does not entirely feel.
‘And the vox system?’ he asks, looking at the ancient engine with a dubious expression.
‘That too. Another half an hour, perhaps.’
‘We don’t have anything like that, server,’ says Sullus. ‘They are at the wall. Can’t you hear them? They’re at the gate, and they will burn this if they get to it.’
‘Then make sure, captain,’ she replies, ‘that they do not get to it.’
One of the magi nods to her. She clears her throat, and walks up to the MIU socket.
The plug connectors lock into place.
The data-engine purrs.
Thiel blows open the next hatch. The daemon-thing on the other side lunges at him, howling. It has teeth – rotten, broken pegs of teeth – all the way around its yawning mouth, which is big enough to swallow him whole. Its legs are back-jointed, with bird’s feet.
Thiel rips the electromagnetic longsword through its maw, severing the upper and lower jaws. Then he puts two bolt-rounds down its sputtering gullet.
Kerso moves in to back him up, hosing the daemon-thing with fire. The thing is already shrieking and spasming, spraying the flagship hallway liberally with ichor. It starts thrashing as the fire wraps around it.
From behind them, Chapter Master Empion yells a warning. A second daemon, a thing made of hair and arachnoid limbs and antlers, has scuttled out of the shadows. It grabs Kerso before he can turn, splitting his armour down the length of his spine, peeling his carapace away like foil. Kerso is screaming. His flamer unit tumbles away, weeping fire.
Thiel hacks off two of the spider-thing’s legs. They are like black willow trunks, ropey and matted with brown fuzz. More ichor spatters. Another leg lashes at Thiel. Too many limbs.
Kerso is done screaming. A lack of skull has silenced him. The thing pinning and peeling him has vomited acid juices onto his head and shoulders to render him more palatable. Kerso’s head is a fused, smoking lump of tissue.
The thing has one eye, a huge white orb that throbs with a sickening, celestial light. It is crowned with a spreading tree of sixty-point antlers.
Brother Bormarus has a heavy bolter. He slugs repeated shots into the creature’s wizened form. Rounds detonate under the skin, pulsing the slack flesh out or tearing it and spraying gobs of meat and pus.
Empion leaps forward alongside Thiel. He has a thunder hammer, and he breaks legs with it. He smashes at the daemon-thing’s body. The energised strikes fracture chitin and pulp tissue. The daemon-thing rears back, dropping Kerso’s corpse, waving its spider legs in a defensive posture. Some legs trail, broken and useless. It has hundreds of them.
Bormarus fires again, aiming at the exposed belly. Something bursts, and the hallway is filled with a noxious stench. Flies swarm everywhere. The daemon-thing flops forward. Thiel ducks a slicing limb, and stabs his longsword into the baleful eye, twists it, and keeps twisting and digging until the unholy light goes out.
Zabo recovers Kerso’s flame-unit and burns the twitching hulk.
‘Every door, a new horror,’ says Empion to Thiel.
‘And every moment a moment lost,’ Thiel replies.
They’re fighting their way down-ship towards the auxiliary bridge. The banging and scraping on the outside hull is getting louder and more persistent: the Word Bearers are on the verge of boarding from their ships alongside. But there is no point fighting for a ship that they can’t control. The auxiliary bridge is a vital practical asset. The Macragge’s Honour has lost its primary bridge tower and its shipmaster, but a replacement for Zedoff has been located among survivors picked up from the Sanctity of Saramanth. Master Hommed, along with a contingent of ready and prepped command officers, is following on behind Thiel’s desperate advance.
The fight is chamber by chamber, companionway by companionway. Daemons lurk in every shadow and around every turn. They spilled into the flagship from loose folds of the warp when the main bridge was compromised, and flow through the vast vessel like a flash flood of ink, of pitch, of liquid tar.
Thiel, Empion and the rest of the ship’s defenders are learning how to daemon-fight under practical conditions. Fire and blades have greater efficacy than projectiles or energy weapons. It seems that the primordial entities suffer greater harm from simple, basic injuries: the primitive qualities of edge, and blunt force, and flame.
Thiel has a theoretical developing, a proposition that suggests a link between damage and ritual function. Fire and cutting or stabbing tools were essential elements of ancient magic-working. It seems more than coincidental that their symbolic provenance should be retained. It is as if the daemons, products of the primeval void before man’s birth, remember the sacred instruments that were used to summon them.
He doubts he will ever have the opportunity to write down or propose this theoretical. He believes that, if he ever should, he would be scorned as a superstitious fool.
Urgency is renewed. Bormarus leads the way. Flies buzz in the clefts of the hall, and gather in frenzies around the bulkhead lights. Mould has formed on ceilings and wall ribs, and slime is dribbling up through deck seams.
Beyond the next blast hatch, a broad prep chamber is littered with dead men. They are almost all flagship crew, most of them ratings, but Thiel spies at least four Ultramarines among the dead. All of the corpses look as though they have been crushed under the treads of a Baneblade convoy. The bodies form a broken, mangled carpet of flesh, bone and armour. The floor of the chamber is slick with blood. Flies buzz.
Thiel can hear dripping.
He looks up. The ceiling is covered, just like the deck. Bodies have been crushed into it, crushed and squashed into the ceiling like papier maché. Small pieces drop or splat down as gravity works its gradual influence.
‘What did this?’ Empion murmurs, marvelling at the sheer ingenuity of the horror.
There is a scraping sound. They turn, and find out the answer to his question.
6
‘Here they come!’ cries Arook Serotid.
The Word Bearers charge out of the fog, their huge red figures dwarfing their cultist troops. They drive the ragged brotherhood warriors ahead of them like packs of dogs into the onslaught of the palace guns. They use the cultists as shields.
‘Meet them! Deny them!’ Ventanus orders. At last, he fires his boltgun. Along the line of the walls and the gate, bolters open up, jagging, jumping and crackling with muzzle-flash. Heavier Legion weapons join in. Autocannons. Lascannons. The precious instruments they reserved for this moment.
The firepower slaps into the enemy charge, properly hurting it, slowing it, breaking it. Thousands of separate explosions and blasts tear men apart or throw them into the air. Tracer-bright streaks of las and plasma stitch across the enemy line. Black-robed humans are mown down. Ventanus smiles under his helm as he sees crimson-armoured figures shudder and fall amongst them.
But there is an inevitable balance. Because it is finally time to utilise the Legion-issue weapons, it is also time to suffer equivalent wrath. The assaulting Word Bearers open fire with bolters and heavy cannons, supplementing the light infantry weapons of the chanting brotherhoods. Mass-reactive shells punch into the walls, scattering large chunks of stone, and rip into the gate. The loyalist forces start taking much heavier casualties.