Hand Of Abaddon, page 25
‘A threat arises…’ was all Maendaius would say.
Drussus looked on appalled. They had all witnessed what had happened to Helicio. The other Ultramarines had gathered now, the survivors, and their tension echoed that of Drussus. He began to slide his gladius from its scabbard.
‘Sheathe it,’ Areios ordered.
‘If he looked beyond the veil, can he be trusted?’ asked Cicero. ‘Can anything he says be verified, brother-lieutenant?’
‘None of it,’ answered Areios flatly. They all looked to him now for leadership. He should try to reach his Chapter, send a missive to Calgar informing him of Epathus’ death. Procedures would need to be followed, a replacement leader for the Sixth Company found and appointed. He should cleave to mission protocol and finish what they had started on Garrovire.
But Areios had ever listened to his instincts, and he trusted them, even if he did not wholly trust Maendaius in that moment.
‘Where?’ he asked simply. ‘Where must we go to meet it?’
‘To the edge of darkness,’ the Librarian murmured, ‘in stygian night, and into a gulf of dying stars…’
Chapter Twenty-Five
on your feet
shielded by an aquila
chanting
At least she wasn’t dying, Kesh realised as she came to. Her heart thumped hard. She was dizzy, in pain. Her forehead was cut and bleeding into her eye. She wiped at the blood with her hand and her glove came back red. Every inch of her body ached. She must have been out for only a few seconds. Tall, dark walls of rock still surrounded her. Cold fear slid into her veins like ice water, and her hand began to tremor.
Even at Tartarus it hadn’t been like this. Her near brush with death had shaken something loose, and Kesh felt her resolve waver as an old memory impressed itself.
She felt another hand grip hers, squeeze it.
‘You better stay alive,’ Munser was saying. ‘Stay alive.’
‘I can’t…’ she rasped. ‘I can’t…’
The walls closing, the light failing. The bones smothering her…
‘Captain,’ Munser urged. They had gone unnoticed for a few seconds, a natural overhang in the rock face partially shielding them from view.
Kesh refused to move. All she could see were the bones. She was back on Gathalamor, in the catacombs.
‘Get up,’ said Munser. ‘Get up, damn you, ma’am!’
Here and no further: if she moved now she would slip beneath the bones, never to resurface.
‘Kesh, they’re dying. We’re dying! Damn you!’ He threw a solid punch to her jaw, and Kesh felt it like he’d hit her with a meat-slab. Her eyes met his as if she was seeing the lieutenant properly for the first time since he’d found her.
Still alive.
Las-fire and solid shot still rained down. Her troopers still died.
‘Help me, lieutenant,’ she grunted, finding her courage though her head was still spinning. She swore at the pain in her jaw.
Munser lifted her up, still holding on to the banner pole somehow. He had Lodrin with him, and the trooper helped get the captain to her feet.
‘Come on, ma’am,’ Munser was saying, ‘we can’t die here. On your feet, on your feet.’
The ground underneath lurched like a boat slipping in the water, and she stumbled. Munser and Lodrin held her, a crutch at either side. They were moving. Still dazed, only vaguely feeling the weapon pressed back into her hands, Kesh glanced at the body that had been lying next to her.
Hagan was on his back, torn open, eyes like glass. The blast had kicked them back as he shielded Kesh with his body. It had ripped his uniform apart to little more than shreds. An aquila was tattooed on his chest.
Shielded by an aquila… she thought, and shrugged Munser and Lodrin off.
‘Just a flesh wound,’ she lied but felt steady enough to carry on unaided. She kept her eyes and her head down, aimed squarely at the path ahead. A quick glance behind and she saw the gate yawned open in her wake, the flakboard barricade all but destroyed. A cultist who had been up in the watchtower began to stir, half buried by rubble.
Kesh shot it through the neck.
‘God-Emperor!’ she roared, fighting off the vertigo.
Throne, where in the hells had that even come from?
They had a foothold now. The cultists that had been entrenched above were being driven back by weight of fire, the sheer numbers of the Militarum the deciding factor. Men and women fed into the meat grinder, the hammer not the scalpel. The attrition was appalling. Around half the Catachans remained, led by a lieutenant in a tactical helmet with tattoos on her face. They stayed with Kesh and her platoon, roughly two hundred soldiers at the vanguard of the Imperial assault. Resistance against such indomitable determination wilted. Even the zealotry of the insane had it limits.
Kesh emerged from the back of Kreber Pass battered and bleeding, but alive. Gasping but triumphant. Cool air touched her skin and she breathed deeply. Sensing a turn of the tide, the cultist army began to break ranks. Some fled, abandoning their posts, seeking a path deeper into the mountains and away from Imperial vengeance. Others martyred themselves in acts of reckless aggression but were swiftly put down. Those that remained, who kept to their posts, eventually collapsed, crushed between the forces still advancing down the pass and those led by Magda Kesh that were suddenly at their backs.
Once the outcome of the battle became clearer, the colonel had sent in armoured Sentinels, the walkers too precious to waste in a headlong assault but perfect for rapid deployment as the enemy host capitulated and needed to be put to the sword. It happened quickly after that, the cleansing of the mountains, the securing of the pass itself. In time, a new checkpoint would be established, one branded with the Imperial eagle. It would be fortified, garrisoned and held. The pitch of the war had tipped, as it often did, seesawing towards Colonel Falden and his Northern Front Offensive.
As the last gasps of the fight played out, Kesh found herself advancing up a narrow and snaking trail through crags. It was good to be in open air again, away from the claustrophobic darkness of the pass. That fear which had gripped her, paralysing: she had been right back there again, in the catacombs of Gathalamor, buried amongst the dead…
Kesh shook it off, focused on the present. Munser was behind her, together with Lodrin and Mavin. She led two other squads, one of which was Catachan, the troopers having dispersed amid the dense terrain to root out pillboxes and hidden bunkers. Explosions detonated nearby. Smoke plumes haunted the air.
Kesh went deeper, headed towards where she thought the enemy’s command echelon would be. They encountered sporadic resistance, but it was half-hearted, lacking the vehemence of the earlier stages of the defence. She lost one trooper to an ambush but one of the Catachans violently gutted the sniper with a savage-looking blade before further damage could be done.
After that, it turned silent and Kesh wondered if that was it, and whether the enemy commanders had already quit the field. At the prickling of her skin and the hackles rising on the back of her neck, she realised she was wrong.
‘They’re here…’ she hissed to Munser, who had bundled up the Mordian flag and carried it and the banner pole on his back, attached to his other kit.
They both crouched amongst the rocks, Kesh’s urgent battle sign to stop moving and wait heeded by all in the small force. One of the Catachans came forward, stealthy like a jungle cat, a broad woman with arms like banded steel and a bandana over her head. She had the tattoo of a snake around her left eye. Her rank pins made her a sergeant, and she had a lasgun etched with many kill-marks cradled in her thick-fingered grasp.
‘Situation, captain?’ she asked gruffly but respectfully.
‘Something up ahead,’ said Kesh, looking to a sharp bend in the path that seemed to lead to a wide gulley.
The sergeant cocked her head to one side, then sniffed at the air. She pointed to her ear, gesturing if anyone could hear what she was hearing.
Kesh nodded. Low on the breeze, rhythmic, repeating. And a smell, like sulphur.
‘Chanting,’ she said grimly.
They moved fast and low, lasguns close to their bodies, hurrying around the bend in the path with as much caution as they dared. A hidden gulley revealed itself, concealed by the crags and only reachable by this path. How Kesh had known, how she had decided to come this way, she could not answer. But she knew what she needed to do next.
A commune of robed figures came into sight, kneeling around a large ritual circle etched in blood. Several lesser acolytes lay dead nearby: traitor adjutants, vox-operators, soldiers. All had been sacrificed to the conclave. The air shimmered, felt strange, as if it was partially out of phase with the world around it. Some of the Catachans fired without orders, perhaps impelled by some deep-seated hatred or atavistic fear. Las-bolts and solid shot simply dissipated.
‘Warp magic…’ rasped a trooper called Kranich, his fear like cold ice in the air.
They all felt it.
They all saw it.
The demagogue of the commune stepped forth from its place at the circle, and its fellow cultists took up the chant, the words like ugly knives in Kesh’s mind. She grimaced, the taste of wet copper in her mouth, the scent of hot iron in her nose. The rest of her troopers, even the Catachans, stood still, as if literally petrified, able only to stare, the expressions on their tortured faces hinting at the war happening within.
The demagogue’s robes were finer than the rest, embroidered with sigils and other arcane devices. Kesh found it hard to focus on them for long; they seemed to squirm and shift before her eyes. It wore a conical and horned helm that covered its face, barring only its mouth. Grey flesh, like that of the dead, peeked from beneath the edges of sleeves. Its mouth was filled with arrow-sharp teeth, the kind of teeth common on some denizen of the deep sea. It clutched a sword with a serrated edge in one hand, scraped from a flesh scabbard. In the other was a staff, only it did not clutch it with a human hand but rather a tripartite tendril glinting wetly in the unnatural light.
And then it spoke, its words overlaying those of the chant, and Kranich died.
He died spitting blood, foaming at the mouth, crumpling to his knees. A single word did that, though it was no word that Kesh had ever heard and spoken in no language that she knew. It did not even sound like language, or really a word at all. It sounded like it had been called forth from the abyss, a malady without form.
Kesh’s mind railed as it tried and failed to make sense of it.
The demagogue spoke again, a new inflection, a different malady, and the Catachan sergeant collapsed screaming, hands thrust over her ears as she seemed to drain before Kesh’s eyes, as if all her vital fluids were being siphoned away, as if her very essence were being drunk by some unseen entity from beyond.
It slid its sword into Munser, the act slow and without effort. Munser could only watch as the demagogue’s blade pierced him. He coughed up blood, a great gout of it all over his chin, spattering his face. His eyes found Kesh, and she watched, paralysed, horrified, as Abel Munser sank to his knees as the sword was withdrawn and the demagogue moved on to the next trooper.
All the while, the chanting persisted, every excruciating death bringing whatever rite the cultists were performing to its conclusion. Eerie faces lingered in the air, bestial, horned things, barely glimpsed and then only half forgotten. They had the consistency of smoke but were slowly forming into something more substantive. Kesh dared not imagine what would happen should the things contained within the ambit of the circle reach coalescence.
Her fingers found the coin, the Silent Sister’s talisman, and the moment she touched it she was free.
She fired, the lasgun already clenched in her other hand, and shot the demagogue through the heart. It staggered, sword falling from its grasp still stained with Munser’s blood. Radiating shock, it began a high-pitched squeal, its voice inhuman and echoed in turn by those of its dark flock. It rallied, a black nimbus rising around its hand, a snarl to its spine-fanged mouth. Kesh felt its intent, the desire to hurt, to maim and then to kill. She felt it in the other cultists too, the eight emoting as one, a conduit to the warp.
The lasgun grew suddenly hot in her grip and she dropped it. Her sword unsheathed a moment later, almost an act of divine kinaesthesia as she felt it rise as if wielded by another’s hand.
By His hand.
It might have been the uncanny aura of the ritual circle or the trauma of seeing Munser so cruelly dispatched, but a light emerged from the blade, a radiance that burned away the black cloud around the demagogue. And when the light touched the Militarum troopers, they too were free and raised their weapons. As Kesh struck the demagogue, the cultists died to a blistering hail of las-fire.
Cold mountain air returned, biting but cleansed of whatever unearthly aura had overtaken it. Little remained of the commune, nought but smouldering cloaks and robes, their contents dissolving into puddles of ichorous matter. So too the demagogue, whose wretched squealing faded like a weak echo on the breeze, its body a blackened ooze that was turning to a noisome smoke.
‘Don’t breathe that in,’ Kesh warned, as she went over to Munser.
Still alive.
She bellowed, ‘Medicae!’
And as the ones who had borne witness to this miracle stood there, dumbfounded but relieved to have survived, Operation Hell Gate was concluded. Imperial victory was assured. It was, as it turned out after all, the Emperor’s will.
Kesh sat alone in the prefab barrack house. It was part of Station Vulture, a hastily erected strongpoint on the north side of Kreber Pass and the new forward position of the Northern Front Army.
No one had come for her. No priests, no confessors with their callipers or holy unguents. As she waited for news on Munser’s condition, she could only assume those who had fought against the commune had not truly understood what they were seeing – or perhaps they had simply decided to keep whatever they had witnessed to themselves. They were a handful of troopers, not an entire army like back at the Last Stronghold.
This one, though, this latest deed left Kesh the most unsettled. Had it been the coin? Was it somehow blessed? Or had it been her, and the coin had simply stirred something within her, called to her? She turned it over and over in her callused hands as she sat at the edge of one of the bunks, utterly lost in thought. The memory of bones intruded and she pushed it down, not liking this latest development. She had enough to wrangle mentally without her past coming back to betray her.
Therefore she didn’t see Vosko enter and nearly leapt out of her skin as the adjutant announced herself.
‘Ma’am.’
‘Merciful Throne, corporal! I think I nearly stopped breathing just then.’
Vosko had been there in the attack on the commune but gave no outward sign, no hint of deference. ‘Apologies, ma’am. I meant no alarm.’
At first Kesh wondered if Vosko had brought some word about Munser, but she discounted that almost immediately; the medicae would be standing here and not her adjutant if that was the case. Also, the adjutant had another wax-sealed scroll.
Kesh raised an eyebrow as Vosko handed it over.
God-Emperor, not another suicide mission…
She read, frowned. Read the words of the scroll again.
‘Ma’am,’ Vosko enquired, ‘is everything all right?’
‘Barren is done for the Eighty-Fourth,’ said Kesh. ‘We’re being reassigned.’
‘Where to, ma’am?’
Kesh looked up at the adjutant, the parchment scroll hanging loosely in her hand.
‘Somewhere called the Stygius Gilt.’
Chapter Twenty-Six
seeking an alliance
red lights in the darkness
an audience at last
Darkness engulfed her. As cold as the eternal grave, it permeated her bones, her mind, suffocating breath and thought. Yheng reached out, trying to find a tether to bring her back, some thread of the vision Augury had shown her, but a nightmare of darkness swallowed her. Of Tenebrus, standing over her, and she bleeding out over the ground. Her potential ended by his blade.
She woke, having fallen asleep in some lightless chamber, to find the sorcerer glaring down at her with ophidian eyes.
‘Gods!’ she cried, but he was quick to silence her, his bony hand snaking around her mouth and clamping it shut.
‘We must leave this place, Yheng,’ he whispered. ‘It is no longer safe.’
‘It has never been safe,’ she hissed, after managing to wriggle free.
Tenebrus straightened, his eyes on the shadows beyond the room. ‘Our foes come for us.’
Still groggy from a fitful sleep, Yheng struggled to get her bearings. She couldn’t remember coming here, though her wanderings within the fortress were not so unusual. Ever since Augury had shown her what lay in the obsidian mirror, something had awoken within her. And despite her initial euphoria, the experience had left her weak, fatigued. In any case, it had led her back to him.
‘Our foes or yours?’ she spat but instantly regretted her bold-ness.
Tenebrus’ head snapped towards her. ‘Been making some new friends, have we? I thought I smelled Augury’s reek on you.’ He leaned in close, near bending double so their faces almost touched. ‘Know this, Yheng, you are my acolyte, and I your master. I will preserve you if I can, but only if you do as I bid, exactly as I bid.’
Yheng nodded, content to be obedient for now. Hurrying to her feet, she gathered her meagre belongings including the ritual knife, which she tucked in her belt, and left after Tenebrus. The sorcerer had already risen again and was shuffling away down a corridor.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Yheng, calling out but only just above a whisper.
