The lead tank, proud in its plating of Mechanicum red, was a monstrosity of wrath and sound. The overcharged squeals of its volkite array overlapped one another as it ignited row upon row of the hunched, horned creatures. Its gang ramp slammed down last. Only two warriors stood within. A familiar figure clutched his spear low, firing bolts from the hip. The other was clad in foreign crimson, aiming a bolter he didn’t fire. His hands shook with miniscule tremors.
‘Sagittarus,’ said Diocletian, reloading his guardian spear. ‘Your chariot awaits.’
Sagittarus ordered his warriors – Ra’s warriors – into the vehicle. He was the last to board, still fighting, executing the downed Neverborn that clawed at his ceramite-sheathed legs. Behind him, daemonic limbs were ground to poisonous slush in the hydraulic press of the closing ramp.
He had to kneel to fit his chassis within the confines of the Raider, even with its expanded crew hold. He vented pressure from his hydraulics and settled into an ugly crouch.
Within the red-lit confines of the crew bay, he found himself face to face with an inhuman creature hanging from the commander’s cupola ladder. His gunlimb was half-raised before Diocletian stepped in front of it.
‘It’s harmless, Sagittarus.’
Through the scrolling lists of retinal data, Sagittarus saw the creature’s wide eyes and slinky, furry form in better detail. Sapien gave an unsimian squawk and scampered away as Sagittarus lowered the cannon.
In the driver’s throne Arkhan Land held the steering bars with both hands, peering through the vision slit with an old man’s squint. He was shaking, babbling. Spit flecked his chin. He stammered questions that weren’t questions, questions that he didn’t truly want answered.
‘What am I looking at. What is this. What are these things. What am I seeing.’
‘Back to the Godspire,’ Diocletian ordered the robed man.
‘I… But…’
‘Stay with us, Land. Focus on your duty. Get us back to the Godspire.’
‘I… I… Yes. The spire. The central tower. Yes, of course. At once.’
The tank rattled and banged around them as it tilted in a heavy swerve, crashing through more of the beasts. As Diocletian was greeting his closest warriors, Sagittarus spared a brief glance at the red figure standing slightly apart.
‘Blood Angel,’ he greeted the Baalite.
‘Custodian.’
Sagittarus turned to Diocletian on slow, whining servos. ‘Dio. You took your damn time in the Palace.’
The other warrior nodded. ‘I see you’ve made a mess of Dynastes. Ra won’t be pleased.’
‘We’ve been fighting for two hundred and ninety-three hours since the walls fell,’ Sagittarus pointed out.
‘Twelve days of this would explain why you look terrible,’ Diocletian agreed. There was no humour in his tone.
Sagittarus took stock of Dynastes and found it difficult to disagree with his kinsman’s appraisal. Juhaza was somehow still standing, though his stare was unfocused and he swayed as he held on to the ceiling rail. Solon stood next to him, teeth clenched as whatever corrosive foulness had splashed across his armour still fizzed and popped, unable to eat into the auramite but slowly dissolving the left side of his face.
Solon grinned back at his leader. ‘I’ll live, Sagittarus.’
Arkhan Land groaned a weak, troubled cry. The tank bucked as the relic hunter rammed something at high speed, and there was a brief rise as the repulsorlift plating carried the Raider over whatever he’d struck.
‘I… I can’t–’
‘Don’t stare at them,’ Sagittarus interrupted. ‘Fear makes them stronger.’
‘I…’
‘Who are you?’ the Dreadnought demanded.
‘I… Arkhan Land.’
‘I’ve heard of you.’
‘Just get us to the Godspire,’ said Diocletian.
The daemon no longer soared on great wings above the city of arcane bone, nor did it stalk alone in silent predation. The wounds it had taken in its hunts were lessons of pain etched upon its corpus. No matter that it lacked the capacity to truly reason, it had still learned its lessons well. The threat of dissolution goaded it towards caution. Incarnate murder was unsuited to naked war, and even immortals could learn from agony.
Alone among the horde, the daemon was kindred to every other creature. It was the piercing of flesh with a tool of war, and the blood that ran with the first slaying. It was the madness of the mind that comes from murder, and the rotting of a brother’s body. It was the savage and guilty pleasure of life triumphing over other life, and the panicked pain of knowing your own death has come. It was the deed that reshaped the destiny of a species.
And thus, it could hide anywhere within the host. No shape was forbidden to it. No part of the ravening horde saw it as a shard of another Power. All were its kindred.
The daemon shifted between forms, discontented with mere beasts of myth and pagan nightmare. It propelled itself as something feathered and winged, a creature of lies given hunched, avian form. It crawled on six legs. It slid across the ground slug-like on none. The cluster of senses that throbbed within its corpus skull acted in place of sight and scent, drawing it towards the next kill.
It thinned its corpus to near-nothingness, becoming a virus within another daemon’s ichor sprayed against the faceplate of a Martian war robot. It thinned further, to mist, to air, seeping in through the cracks in the machine’s armour plating, infecting the biological cortex cradled in the cognitive soup. A moment later the Castellax turned its weapons upon its own kindred, annihilating them with its cannon and claws.
Amused but unsatisfied, the daemon ghosted free of that semi-living cage and leapt skywards, embedding itself in the cold, cold metal of an ornithopter passing overhead. Small effort to warp the vehicle’s iron hull, rippling through it, heating it, swelling it – sending biological vein-threads through its inorganic form and rewriting the machine’s essence. The daemon could feel the dull disquiet of the flying vehicle’s pilot as she lost control.
The ornithopter exploded at the head of its formation. It didn’t scatter or fall from the sky; the daemon kept the spinning, burning shards of jagged metal loosely together, each fragment of debris taking its own shape. A flock of flickering, scorched raptor-things veered and whirled, a host of gargoyles with bodies of shredded metal and fire.
Three other ornithopters veered away from the spreading cloud of burning, clawed homunculi, but it was already too late. The cloud of savaged metal razored through them, a thousand cuts shredded their hulls and wings beyond function, plunging them from the air. The daemon lingered within each vessel long enough to savour the sickly sweet death-thoughts of their doomed pilots, then it was gone, coalescing once more in the teeming horde below.
With a predator’s instinct it sensed it was being hunted. Somehow, the Anathema’s Daughters could see it no matter the form it took. When it revealed itself they were the ones to give chase. They summoned the Golden, they directed the machine rage of the towering metal constructs striding throughout the city. The rawness of its consciousness knew pain, and it was not supposed to be this way. As strong as it was, it couldn’t hold to incarnation if it sustained many more wounds. It bled now. Everything that bled could be killed.
The daemon had killed several of the Anathema’s Daughters, finding nothing within to devour. Their flesh was tasteless, their deaths without nourishment or joy. It felt their presence as a devouring chill, their nearness dragging at its incarnated form, unwinding the threads of its essence. With low, hungry cunning it had learned to blend in among its lessers, taking their shape, mimicking the weakness of their forms until the perfect moment at the apex of each kill. Such immersion deceived the Golden and the grey, robotic souls at their sides. But never the Soulless. The Anathema’s Daughters always knew. To face them was to fight crippled and weakened; the daemon knew the weary, desperate weakness from its own hunts, seeing the futile thrashings of those it killed most slowly. To face the Soulless was to face the same destruction the daemon inflicted upon all others.