Hand Of Abaddon, page 32
‘Right now we are drifting in order to preserve power. Fekke… we’ve only just managed to get life support working again and the Queen is running at maybe twenty per cent. Defences are minimal and the crew registers are just coming in. I won’t know how bad it is until that’s done, but we’ve lost a lot of souls.’ She took another drink.
‘How long until the ship can fight again?’
Helvintr hurled the bottle against the wall, where it smashed into fragments and the alcohol left a darkened stain.
‘Fight?!’ she asked, exasperated. ‘Fight? Blood of the aesir, inquisitor, I am just trying to get her fit enough so we can limp to safe harbour. There is no fight.’ She seemed to regret her earlier outburst and murmured something about ‘needing to clean that up’ before falling back into moribund silence. She looked enervated, spent.
Rostov seemed to consider his next words, though he had given no reaction to the smashed bottle.
‘And what about the Blackstone Fortress? I assume we had to evade it.’
Helvintr’s face turned as cold as her homeland. ‘It’s gone. After it nearly gutted my ship, the damn thing disappeared. Back into the warp like it had never been, save for the death and destruction left behind.’
‘This doesn’t end here, shipmistress,’ Rostov asserted, and Syreniel wondered if he was going too far. ‘The hunt isn’t over.’
Helvintr looked like she wanted to punch him. Instead, she very carefully set down her drinking horn.
‘We are far fewer ships than when we started out. The first time we fought this thing, it destroyed the Macharius and three escorts like they were nothing. How do you think we will fare in a second round?’
But Rostov was undeterred. ‘You wounded it, and we still have the Astartes. We need only find a way to get them aboard.’
‘Only, you say, only… Skìtja! The number of times someone has said “only” to me and it presaged disaster.’
Her mood if anything had worsened as the conversation went on, and Syreniel noticed she was using more of her native tongue the drunker and angrier she became.
She got to her feet, swaying only slightly.
‘Powerless, inquisitor, that is what we are. Near adrift in the void, our prey fled and barely blooded. There is no way to find, no way at all. It’s over.’
A grizzled thrall appeared at the doorway at that moment.
‘Captain…’ he said, his voice a deep rumble, his face tracked with old scars. Despite his forbidding appearance, he looked afraid. ‘There is a large signal return on our close-range sensoria.’
Helvintr shrugged off her drunken torpor at once. ‘Mark and class?’
The thrall paled, his pallor like chalk. ‘Unidentified.’
‘It has come back to finish us off,’ murmured Helvintr, partly to herself. ‘If this is our wyrd then so be it.’ Then louder for the room, she said, ‘Skìtja, we’ll give it a fight then.’
‘We go to war after all then, shipmistress?’ asked Rostov as she was leaving.
The alert klaxons began sounding anew.
‘No,’ said Helvintr as cold as endless winter. ‘If it is the Blackstone Fortress returned, then we go to our deaths.’
Chapter Thirty-Four
an uncertain fate
engulfed by the storm
domain of the warsmith
They followed the river of death, ankle-deep in its crimson waters. The dead crunched underfoot, skulls and bones yielding to the weight of their armour. Old swords and axe blades scraped their blunted edges against their boots. That the old warrior had slain this many said much about his prowess, yet they had overcome, and in this Herek took some heart that his travails would not be in vain. No further champions barred their way, so he and Rathek walked without interruption or rest. It felt ill-advised to make camp here and Astartes could march for days without becoming fatigued. Neither wanted it, anyway; the end of the journey beckoned and all that was left to do now was reach Behethramog.
In truth, Herek had no idea what it even was, let alone where, but he trusted the prophecies of the soul mariner and they had led them this far. They had made it to the Abyssal Nadir, and like the spool of twine that describes the path through a labyrinth, the river was their only marker. Behethramog had to be at its terminus, and so they walked.
Herek hefted his axe onto his shoulder, his severed bionic hand tethered to his belt like a trophy. If Kurgos survived, he would have the chirurgeon reattach it despite the phantom pain of the missing appendage. They had given much to get to this point, but Herek was resolved to give all if needed. He had been promised, though his patron had not seen fit to speak with him since before the ritual. Reach Behethramog with the burden and he would be given the strength he sought. The strength to matter.
As if recognising his proximity to the end, the susurration had worsened in the last few hours, and Herek wore a perpetual scowl now as he tried to shut out its murmuring refrains. Without the serums concocted by Kurgos, he had no means to quieten it apart from his own will.
That would have to suffice.
He hoped that the chirurgeon still lived. Clortho he would take either way, but Kurgos was a friend and such men were few in the service to the Dark Gods. Another walked by his side, hands on the pommels of both of his swords, ever wary of the endless desert. A bitter wind had struck up, darkening the bloodlight of the sun and stinging their exposed skin. Rathek appeared to pay it no mind. He had changed since the daemon whispers had abated. A rueful smile split Herek’s lips as he considered that those whispers were now his to carry instead. The swordsman had grown more considered and philosophical. He possessed none of the mania that had characterised his demeanour aboard the Ruin. He no longer screamed in the night, nor went on bloody rampages throughout the ship, trying to shut out the voices in his mind. The oubliette where they had put him during his ‘episodes’ remained a haven. Rathek slept there out of habit, Herek supposed, though he had never asked him and nor would he. His brother’s business in that regard was his own. Familiarity could be a comfort, even to the damned.
He had lost his hearing during battle when a grenade made for auditory and optical shock detonated at extreme short range. It had nearly killed him. A callous act, but back then they were being hunted as rebels, and Astartes were prone to extremes in the name of retribution. Particularly those loyal to the Throne. Herek had killed the warrior, taken his head, and then dragged Rathek from the field.
That had been long ago, in an old war. There had been four of them back then, Herek, Rathek, Kurgos and Innox. Baelus Innox had died on the warship Mercurion not long before the Red Corsairs had taken it for their own. But that would come much later. Many decades before, they had each sworn fealty to the Tyrant and become Red Corsairs. It felt like an age since Badab, when they had worn the silver-and-blue livery of the Astral Claws and served an unjust and draconian empire. With their erstwhile brothers’ blood still wet on their blades, the vitae of the Fire Hawks and Marines Errant, they had knelt to him and he had brought them into his rebellion.
Herek still carried the memories of those days around his belt. He hadn’t found Harrower at that stage. That had come later, in the Maelstrom, when the Imperium had chased them and the Badab War had ended in defeat. He had cut heads all the same, an executioner of men. They rattled like empty shells against his armour, the helmed skull of a Minotaur and a Star Phantom hanging off his belt alongside a more recent kill. The cords that had strung up the other relics of those earlier days had frayed and snapped. The helmed heads resided on the Ruin now, Herek having gone back into the field to recover them after battle.
‘A taker of heads and a culler of men,’ he mused aloud, and Rathek half turned in query, not quite catching the words on Herek’s lips.
‘It’s nothing, brother,’ Herek told him. ‘Just remembering.’
The old days?
‘The old days.’
Rathek nodded to himself, as if having his own reminiscences. Then he asked, Where do you think this will end?
Herek let out a long breath. ‘Where do all quests end? Either in victory or death.’
And what is victory, for us I mean? Is it glory in the eyes of the gods? Is it a fortress, a domain like our liege lord?
‘Clortho would hold it is the ascension of dark powers. He speaks of the Path of Glory.’
And is that what you think?
The wind had begun to worsen, the air muddying with reddish sand. A ruddy darkness slowly descended. Both warriors put on their helms, trudging now where before they had marched.
‘I think we are renegades, brother. That has been our path ever since the old war.’
Rathek made no reply; the atmosphere was so benighted any subtle gesture would be lost, but Herek knew what he thought. That they had strayed closer to the edge where honour was traded for damnation.
The storm grew thick. Heads down, they had to forge through it. The river sloshed at their feet, their only marker. And the susurration became so loud it was crippling. Herek fell to one knee, the wind battering him. Rathek had gone. Despite cycling through the visual spectra of his retinal lenses, Herek could not find him. He called out, but heard his word echoed back at him. He could swear they were mocking. The reek of wet iron assailed him, potent and cloying despite the filters in his helm. Senses numbing, he began to lose any notion of direction. At his feet, the river appeared to have dried up, his boots now shuffling sand instead of sloshing through water.
Herek turned, still bowed by the wind that had turned into a punishing gale. Nothing behind him, just a reddish-brown murk like old blood. He called out again, but the storm smothered his voice. A filtration warning flashed up on his retinal display: the rebreather in his helm was clogging. Hitching Harrower to his back, Herek scratched at the grille with his hand and saw clumps of brownish matter stuck to his gauntleted fingers. He staggered, one step then another, like wading through tar. The wet-iron smell intensified despite the fact his olfactory filter approached saturation, as the voices in his mind grew louder, becoming one with the howling storm.
Pummelled, he fell onto his hands and knees, half sinking in the dirt.
Clawing for every tortured yard as scything sand abraded his armour, Herek glimpsed a faint glow ahead. It could have been a trick of the light, like a lantern’s aura glimpsed through fog, but it persisted as he crawled towards it.
According to his helm plate, his oxygen had red-lined and carbon dioxide was spiking. Enhanced Astartes biology would keep him moving, but there was something unnatural about the storm that thwarted the defences of his armour, and Herek felt himself suffocating. His body bucked, thrashed like a drowner fights the sea before succumbing to its quiet death. Still he crawled as black edges encroached on his vision. If he could just reach the light… But the desert wanted him, a waiting grave to an unwilling soul. It hammered him, cut at him, consumed him. Staving off his anger, knowing the more he struggled the quicker he would sink, Herek tried to steady himself. He realised he was being submerged and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. All his forward momentum had been arrested. The desert first reached his waist, then in seconds his chest, and then he was up to his neck. He stuck out a hand as if trying to grab the light… until the sand swallowed him.
An absence descended, of light, of sound, of touch. He had become numb to all of it, entombed in the desert. At first there was peace, and then a slow horror began to encroach, the whispers in his mind becoming screams. Dark promises. The denizens of the immaterium eager to feast on his immortal soul.
And then he was rising, a hand gripped firmly around his wrist. Rathek, surrounded by the lambent aura of a flaming torch, had him. He pulled as Herek pushed and together they hauled the Red Corsair lord upwards. It took all of his strength, the sand unwilling to relinquish him, until at last he was wrenched free and lay gasping on the desert floor. The storm had lessened, the dark recoiling from Rathek’s torch. It was a long femur yellowed with age, the end wrapped in cloth and leather, burning a deep amber colour.
Still alive? he signed.
Herek nodded, clasped his brother’s forearm and was hauled back to his feet. He glanced at the fire, which prompted Rathek to look over his shoulder.
As the storm ended and the air cleared, Herek could see bones stretching away in the distance ahead of them. It was as if a troop of soldiers had stumbled upon this place and died as they marched. The tattered remnants of cloth banners snapped on the hot breeze. Shattered spears and shields, still clung to by their skeletal owners, jutted towards the sky or else lay half buried in sand. There must have been nigh on a hundred men, their bleached-bone skulls grinning towards the uncaring sun.
‘What is this place, a warrior’s grave?’ Herek yanked off his helm and watched a torrent of sand spill from inside it. He had no answer for how the sand had infiltrated the seals.
Very nearly, remarked Rathek.
‘They were seeking something…’ Herek mused, and noted the marks on their armour. Sigils of Ruin. ‘A pilgrimage. But how did they get here?’
Could they have followed the same path as us?
‘Doubtful. They could not have passed the warrior at the ford.’
Then they must have come here via a different road.
‘Or else did not plan to come here at all.’
As the warm breeze drifted across Herek’s face, bringing with it the scent of wet iron, no answer was forthcoming.
I think I know what they were looking for. As Rathek threw away the torch, leaving it to gutter out on the soft dunes, he gestured towards a sweeping rise. An umber-hued cliff rose up over the horizon, a narrow path threading to its summit where a gargantuan gate stood about a mile away. It was wreathed in a massive pyroclastic cloud, only now parting, with crimson lightning flashing in its depths.
‘Behethramog…’ Herek uttered.
Though it had no visible guards, no obvious defences, they trod warily as they ascended the narrow path. More than once, Herek stumbled and each time Rathek stopped but did not reach out a hand. He merely waited patiently for Herek to gather himself again.
It is killing you, he told him.
‘You are not the first to say that. It does not alter my fate, but passing through that gate might.’
And then what?
‘Then we will see what the gods will.’
They trudged on and Herek did not falter again.
As it grew nearer, the gate shimmered like red gold in the bloodlight. It was wide enough for an army marching abreast. The repetitive drum of hammering came from within, and the reek of caustic smoke in the air was thick.
Two huge columns braced the immense gateway. Each had been carved into the simulacrum of a monstrous creature, one flesh and the other machine. The gate itself was fashioned of iron and a pair of crossed hammers had been engraved into the archway above it, amongst other less identifiable imagery.
What now? asked Rathek, standing before it.
Herek took in the metal expanse of polished gunmetal grey. His eye followed its contours all the way to the arched apex. He pulled Harrower off his back, hefting the axe midway down its shaft to make wielding it one-handed easier.
‘We knock.’
He struck with a heavy, overhead blow and a plangent gong resounded across the metal. Letting the weight of the swing carry the axe and embed its blade in the ground, Herek watched. And waited.
It had left no mark, no visible sign of the blade cutting the metal. Not even the barest scar. This fact remained unspoken between them as Herek and Rathek retreated several steps as the gate began to move. It trembled, an audible mechanism turning its paired doors inwards, revealing massive interlocked cogs set into the ground. The floor was metal, its joins and rivets thronged with soot and smeared with oil. A wall of heat struck them in a blast wave and they both had to brace themselves to stop from being pushed back.
Fume and flickering firelight drenched the interior. Smoke lay thick on stifling air. Underfoot, glimpsed through a grated floor, was a writhing magma lake. Muffled screams echoed up from it in the heat draughts.
Eight thick metal pilasters held up the ceiling and led in procession into an umbral cella where a many-stepped plinth ended in an octagonal dais, a black anvil at its crown. A huge warsmith stood behind it, beating a piece of metal into shape with fuller and tongs, his forge hammer more akin to a weapon of war than a tool. He wore thick leather gloves, blackened up to the wrists, and covered up to his elbows. The rest of his arms, his burly shoulders and slab-like torso were bare and dappled with sweat. Countless burn marks and welts marred his thick skin, and a flat-headed helm covered the upper half of his face but left his sneering mouth visible.
Chains dangled above the hulking smith, attached to tools within easy reach, both blunt and sharp, piercing and bludgeoning. Skulls hung from the chains too.
Behind him, in the shadows at the back of the vast forge, hooded attendants were shovelling an endless pile of weapons and bones into the magma pit below. Like their master, they were big, easily the size of ogryns, and wore leather aprons to shield their bodies from the spit of magma and flame.
‘Is this your domain, warsmith?’ demanded Herek, stepping into the reflected firelight emanating from below.
‘Nay,’ he said in a voice both thunderous and metallic, the sound loud like weapons clashing and shields buckling. It hurt Herek’s ears to listen to it. ‘I serve the Arkifane. This is his temple.’
‘Then I would speak with him, warsmith.’
He laughed, a low rumble of tank tracks grinding, of the boom of cannons firing. It was not a pleasant sound.
‘He is not here. I am here, though the maker moves my hand as if it was his hand. I am but a servant of his art.’ Setting down the fuller, he reached for one of the tools dangling above, a much larger sledgehammer, and carried on in his work.
