Choose Your Enemies, page 29
‘Seems clear enough,’ he agreed, striding out confidently in the direction I’d indicated.
All went well at first, and we made good progress, although the air between the hedges seemed thick and cloying – an effect I’d initially put down to the lack of any breeze, and the narrowness of the passage, which was barely wide enough to walk down in single file. Since Vekkman had decided to take the lead, which was fine by me, I followed, drawing my sidearms as I did so, finding their familiar weight distinctly comforting. Jurgen, of course, was right behind me, something I was aware of without needing to turn round to look, and Amberley followed hard on his heels. I wasn’t sure if anyone behind me had drawn their weapons too,[188] but Vekkman now had a bolt pistol in one hand, with the self-confident air of a man perfectly prepared to use it, and a curious obsidian staff, about the length of my chainsword, in the other. I’d never seen anything like it before, but it looked sinister, somehow, a faint nimbus of abnatural energies playing about it.
‘Can you smell that?’ Jurgen asked, and I nodded.
‘I can,’ I said, my sense of unease growing exponentially. A thick, cloying scent was hanging in the air, mingled with that of damp leaves and clipped foliage. ‘Like the tunnels around the temple we found on Drechia.’
‘Really?’ Vekkman glanced back at me, his face perturbed. ‘Then we must be getting close.’
‘I think we are,’ I said. ‘Look at the leaves.’
He peered at the nearest hedge, and nodded slowly. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said. The vegetation had changed, taking on a more fleshy aspect, like tiny green tongues; as I stared at the nearest it seemed to move slightly, curling in a fashion which seemed faintly and repulsively lascivious. ‘Best get on, then.’
‘Better had,’ I agreed, and we picked up the pace, through passages which continued to change and mutate the deeper we penetrated into the heart of this unhallowed place. Now green was giving way to a thousand shades of pink and brown, throbbing with unholy life – coiling and writhing around us, reaching out beseechingly as we passed.
‘Second left, first right,’ Vekkman muttered, no doubt trying to keep his mind on the job. The cloying scent was growing thicker with every footstep, making us all light-headed, and I found myself grateful for Jurgen’s proximity, his familiar earthy aroma undercutting it and keeping me grounded. ‘Second left… Stop! Dead end.’ He turned his head, scanning our surroundings, looking faintly confused. ‘I must have miscounted.’
‘You didn’t,’ I said, a thrill of alarm coursing through me. I’d been counting too, and I’d wager that the rest of us had as well.
‘Back up,’ Amberley suggested, turning round carefully, keeping as far from the palpitating walls as she could. ‘Retrace our steps.’
We set off back the way we’d come, Amberley now in the lead. After a couple of twists and turns she slowed her pace, glancing around with a distinctly hesitant air.
‘There should be a side passage here,’ she said. ‘But it’s gone.’
‘Warpcraft,’ Vekkman said, sounding irritated rather than afraid. ‘The space is changing around us.’
‘That way,’ I said, pointing at the nearest hedge; my knack for remaining orientated still seemed as reliable as ever, even in an environment as eldritch as this. I activated my chainsword. ‘If the path’s blocked, we’ll just have to make our own.’ I swung the humming blade at the wall of vegetation, hacking through it as easily as the body of a gretchin – even more easily, in fact, as there were no bits of bone to check the whirling teeth, even for a millisecond. Pieces of twig, shredded leaves and gobbets of sap sprayed in all directions as I carved my way through, creating a gap into the next lane which widened appreciably as the intertwining bushes writhed backwards out of the way of the screaming blade.
‘Good idea! Keep going!’ Amberley urged me, so I did, slicing inexorably through one hedge after another, while the others hurried in my wake, crowding though the holes I’d carved before they closed up again like healing wounds.
‘This might be faster, sir,’ Jurgen suggested, cradling the melta, and tempted though I was, I shook my head.
‘It probably would. But if it set this lot on fire we’d go up like kindling.’ Which, on the whole, was a pretty compelling argument for doing it the hard way. And I had to admit, harder was what it was getting. The hedges were getting more and more flesh-like, oozing viscid secretions, and now my whirling blade seemed to be drawing blood rather than sap. The going underfoot was getting harder too, slippery and uneven, and I fought to keep my footing firm as I advanced.
Then, abruptly, I was through, stumbling into the wide glade at the heart of the labyrinth in a spray of blood and viscera, the others hard on my heels. The walls around us had completed their transmogrification, becoming palpitating flesh in their entirety, limned with pulsating veins which formed shapes suggestive of images of staggering depravity. Images which, in many cases, were being enthusiastically enacted by men, women and androgynes of all shapes and sizes. It made the debauches I’d witnessed on Drechia look like a gathering of tech-priests debating a fragment of machine-code.
As I tore my eyes away from the unedifying spectacle in search of an immediate threat, a strange sense of disorientation swept over me. After a moment of puzzlement, I realised that the space into which we’d intruded seemed bigger than it should have been, apparently covering an area larger than the exterior of the maze we’d entered such a short time before.
Like the cavern we’d stumbled into on Drechia, the cultists were arranged about a central altar, at which dimly seen figures muttered and capered with an air of fell purpose.
‘Yanbel.’ Amberley tapped her comm-bead. ‘Send the message.’
‘I’ll try,’ the voice of the tech-priest assured her, ‘but I can’t be sure I’ve broken the encryption on their system. And even if I have, they may not listen.’
‘They’ll listen to this,’ Amberley said, and added a few incomprehensible phrases in the lilting eldar tongue. ‘Transmit that.’
‘Consider it done,’ Yanbel said, and cut the link. I might have wondered what the cryptic exchange was all about, but under the circumstances, as you’ll no doubt appreciate, my attention was elsewhere. I fell naturally into a guard position with my humming chain-blade, and raised my laspistol, searching for a target. Fortunately none of the orgiasts seemed to have much attention to spare for our abrupt arrival, although that was a state of affairs none of us expected to last for much longer, and we formed up in a tight defensive knot.
‘There are the stones, sir,’ Jurgen pointed out helpfully, raising his voice a little to cut through those of the celebrants, which were beginning to mingle into a single, unified chant. I felt the palms of my hands tingling again; this was a sound I’d heard far too recently to be unaware of the implications.
My aide was right. Dozens of the shimmering crystals had been piled up in a heap on a raised dais at the exact centre of the maze, surrounded by writhing, gibbering cultists. They glowed just as brightly as before, their colours shifting and fluctuating in the same manner as the one Amberley had shown me, but something seemed different about them; faint threads of darkness were drifting across them now, like dribbles of ink in water. At first I wondered if I was imagining it, but gradually the blemishes spread, like a fungal infection slowly consuming a rotting ploin.
‘This is bad,’ Vekkman said, raising the obsidian rod. The energy discharges were more visible now, racing up and down it, and I glanced round to make sure that Jurgen was far enough away not to affect whatever it was supposed to do. After all, this was Vekkman’s area of expertise, and our very souls probably depended on it. ‘They’re generating too much warp energy for the null rod to dissipate.’ And, for the first time, he and Amberley exchanged a glance of complete mutual agreement. ‘So we’ll just have to disrupt the summoning the old fashioned way.’ At which point he opened fire with his bolt pistol, targeting the nearest cultist.
‘What?’ I said, more than a little taken aback by this development. The memory of being swarmed by the cultists on Drechia was still vivid, and provoking these ones into attacking us seemed unwise in the extreme.
Vekkman looked at me, his eyes cold even for an inquisitor.
‘They’re opening a pathway for a daemon. One that makes the last specimen you encountered seem like a gyrinx kitten. Our only chance of saving this world from damnation is to stem the flow of energy from their corrupted souls before it’s too late.’
‘What he said,’ Amberley agreed, opening up with the storm bolter in the forearm of her suit. The two inquisitors began to advance behind a barrage of bolts, felling cultists all around them as they went.
‘Wait,’ I cautioned, being completely ignored for my pains. ‘Why are the stones here?’ They were the key to all this, of that I was certain, although I couldn’t for the life of me see how.
‘She comes! She comes!’ An ecstatic shriek cut across the sound of chanting and gunfire, and a capering figure clad only in blasphemous sigils daubed in substances I didn’t care to speculate about the origins of leapt onto the dais in front of the heap of shimmering, ailing stones. It was Fulcher, although fortunately Amberley was too far away and too occupied with despatching heretics to say ‘I told you so.’ Even before the echoes of the governor’s cry had time to die away, the air directly above the heap of stones crackled with energy, then ripped, and something inchoate stepped or slithered through. My breath stilled, a sense of soul-stifling horror rippling through me at the sheer blasphemous wrongness of whatever it was intruding on the real world. I glanced at Amberley and Vekkman, who ceased their butchery to turn and stare at it, then at Jurgen, who simply raised the melta he carried and waited for an order to fire.
This wasn’t like the daemon we’d seen on Drechia, although something about it suggested a common origin, the kind of kinship you might notice between a gretchin and an ork, say. There was nothing tangible about it for the eye to actually fix on; rather the suggestion of a presence, which hovered in the air with a palpable sense of gloating anticipation. Fulcher fell to his knees, his arms outstretched, his face upturned towards the nebulous horror floating over the altar. His voice quavered with the passionate eagerness of the truly demented.
‘In Slaanesh’s name I welcome thee. In Slaanesh’s name I bind thee–’ Then, with one voice, the cultists screamed.
Fulcher was the first to go, and serve him right if you ask me, blood, flesh and bone flowing like candle wax as he was sucked into the void where the thing hovered just above his head. Then the cultists closest to the dais were consumed, their intertwined bodies melting together as they were drawn out into one melded gobbet of writhing flesh, which grafted itself onto and engulfed what was left of the erstwhile governor. After that the process accelerated; before any of the heretics had time to realise how comprehensively they’d been betrayed, they were snatched up and added to the roiling mass of floating flesh. Even the bodies of those summarily executed by the inquisitors were seized on, adding their scattered blood and bone to the ghastly conglomeration.
‘Those rocks are getting darker,’ Jurgen said, while Amberley and Vekkman redirected their fire at the Chimera-sized tumour floating in the air above our heads. He was right, too, the dark patches I’d noted before spreading even faster across and within them. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It means I’m consuming the souls they contain.’ A mellifluous voice drifted across the open space, and I felt a thrill of sheer terror coursing down my back. It was horribly familiar, all the more so for the number of times I’d heard it in my dreams recently. The floating mass of flesh began to shift again, taking on a more defined shape, different to the one I remembered in my nightmares about the confrontation on Adumbria, and completely unlike the human witch I’d first encountered on Slawkenberg, but somehow echoing and amplifying both. ‘Which makes me a thousand times stronger than the last time we met.’ A ripple of laughter escaped the partially formed mouth, so light-hearted and alluring that I found my mouth beginning to smile in response before my rational mind clamped down hard on the impulse. ‘So you can forget all about sending me back to the warp this time, even with that horrid little friend of yours here.’
‘Is that who I think it is, sir?’ the horrid little friend in question asked, frowning in perplexity, and aiming the melta as he did so. ‘Only I thought they weren’t supposed to be able to come back for a thousand years after you banished them.’
‘It’s Emeli all right,’ I said, as the towering daemon solidified completely and stepped down off the dais. I fought down the terror which threatened to overwhelm me as her shapely hoof struck the ground, envying my aide his simple and unshakable faith that the Emperor protects, and would continue to do so even in circumstances as dire as this. The inquisitors were holding their ground, although I knew Amberley well enough to be aware of the effort this would be costing her.
The spirit stones were flickering more feebly now, as their essence continued to drain into the hideously alluring abomination. ‘Don’t ask me how.’
‘Rules are for the little people,’ Emeli said dismissively, and Jurgen fired the melta. Like the bolts of the inquisitors, however, the burst of ravening energy had no discernible effect, beyond the momentary appearance of a minute blemish on the smooth, sweet-scented flesh. Which, I suppose, neatly put paid to the faint hope I’d clung to, that my aide’s presence might weaken her enough for a concentrated barrage of heavy weapons fire to despatch her back to the warp like it had the last time. She frowned at Jurgen. ‘I don’t know why I even bothered to tell my little pet to have you killed.’
Strangely, I felt a flash of petulance at that point, as I realised that the assassin in the air car and his confederates had never been after me at all, and that my aide had been the real target all along. Fulcher had even remarked on his absence at the conclusion of the affair, although the significance of that hadn’t struck me at the time.
‘At least you’re consistent in the quality of the help you find,’ I sniped, hoping to goad her into some kind of rash action we could take advantage of. Not the safest or most sensible plan, of course, but it had worked before, and right then I was out of any other ideas. Besides, if I’m honest, it’s somewhat galling to escape an attempt on your life only to discover that you were just meant to be collateral damage in the first place, so I suppose a bit of pettishness on my part was only to be expected.
‘I take what I can get,’ the daemon said, with a decorous shrug. ‘And what I get now is this world, and everyone on it to play with, and the souls of the eldar infesting it to feed to Slaanesh. Not to mention a door to the webway for when I get bored.’
‘Enjoy it while you can,’ I said, reflecting that she probably would, and that there wasn’t a damn thing any of us could do about it, but at least I’d go down fighting. Besides, Amberley seemed to be having a fairly vehement conversation with someone over her vox-link, so the more of Emeli’s attention I could attract, the better her chances of pulling off whatever it was she was trying to achieve. I caught the phrase ‘if so much as a single one fires, you’ll all answer to the Inquisition,’ then my attention was entirely back on the daemon. ‘Jurgen, with me,’ I said, knowing he’d follow without question or hesitation, then leapt at the monstrous form, my chainsword whirling.
Editorial Note:
At which point it seems incumbent upon me to insert a further piece of explanatory text from another source, without which the next part of Cain’s account is likely to seem wildly improbable.
From The Eldar: a History of Their Presence in the Ultima Segmentum, and Some Musings Upon Possible Means of Their Eradication, by Baltazar Thromp, 997 M41
With the hindsight of history, we can only speculate what unfathomable motives drove the eldar to take their last desperate gamble. But take it they did, thereby sealing their fate, and ensuring the ignominious defeat which inevitably awaits all who dare to challenge the might of the Emperor and His stalwart warriors.
Without warning, the entire eldar fleet left their positions, closing in as one on Skyside Seventeen. To the consternation of all who witnessed it, however, the defenders held their fire, despite the multiplicity of targets thus presented.
Unopposed, the xenos interlopers began an assault against the very centre of Imperial power among the orbitals: the residence of the governor himself.
TWENTY-EIGHT
‘That’s more like it,’ Emeli said, with a liquid laugh of pure enchantment; had Jurgen not been so close, insulating me against the worst of her daemonic aura, I felt sure I would have succumbed to the allure of her hideous charms by now. Even knowing that to give in would forfeit my very soul, the urge to submit was almost overwhelming, held at bay only by my tenacious instinct for self-preservation. ‘You always did play hard to get.’
‘You never did,’ I riposted, somewhat ungallantly, and swung my chainsword at a shapely calf studded with shimmering scales, the knee surmounting it roughly on a level with my face. The blade whirled through the plundered flesh of which it was composed without leaving any trace of its passage, muscle and skin knitting together instantly behind the whining teeth, and I took an involuntary step backwards as the unspent momentum tugged at my balance. Actinic light flared as Jurgen triggered the melta, at point-blank range this time, and a small char mark appeared for an instant before vanishing without a trace.
Emeli laughed again, with a trace of vindictive glee. ‘You see? You can’t hurt me at all any more.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that,’ I said, out of sheer bravado rather than any conviction, I must admit. The last time she’d taken physical form, getting close enough to her to bring that body within Jurgen’s warp-dampening aura had allowed us to inflict a modicum of damage on it, but this one seemed utterly impervious to the effect of his gift.
