Lazarus, p.14
Lazarus, page 14
The others were fighting too, surrounding themselves with piles of dead and gore. Jequn handled his sword like Lazarus, with a little less speed but more bone-breaking finality. The skull-headed club Demetrius wielded was somehow even bloodier than the swords. Instead of tearing open wounds in long slits, it smashed into the gris like a hammer whose blunt, heavy head was surrounded by a swarm of invisible teeth that shredded and tore. Behind her, Ysentrud could hear Raziel battling the gris that wrapped around to him, and she could hear the thud of bodies and something else – a moaning howl that rose and fell, and a chill wind touched her back. She didn’t turn to see what the Librarian’s sword was doing to those it touched – she didn’t want to. It was hard enough watching Lazarus and the others fight. But she kept her eyes open, her head up, to make sure the enemies were falling – and not surging past her Dark Angels protectors to grab her and drag her towards one of their pits again.
The circle of those protectors grew tighter. As fast as Lazarus and the others were cutting them down, there were always more, more, a surging flood of grey-masked people driving forward. They were smashing into the Dark Angels with whatever they had, some of them grabbing on with bare hands, trying to slow the Space Marines with their numbers, to drag them down with their weight. They drove in, and right in front of her Lazarus was forced back a step, then another, his massive, armoured body pushed towards her by a tide of silent fanatics. Then one of them slipped past.
The man was dressed in rags, coated in mud. A patchy beard spread across his face, the hair growing through the splotches of grey fungus that coated his skin. One arm was bleeding, the skin ruptured open where Lazarus’ sword had passed close, but in the other hand he held a knife, which he was swinging at her, the blade cutting through the air at her face. Ysentrud made a noise, a growl, a whimper, a denial, and raised the stake she still clutched. Somehow, by the grace of the Golden Throne, she got that rusty piece of metal between her and that falling knife. The blade clanged off the stake and banged painfully against her knuckles, then the tip hit her forearm, carving a furrow in her red skin. She barely felt the cut, but the blow had slammed her arms down, stripped away the meagre protection of the rusty stake, and the bearded man was driving in again, stabbing the knife straight at her belly. Ysentrud tried to pull the stake back around to block, but she was too slow and the man was right there, the stink of his breath on her. In that endless moment as the knife drove forward, she found herself staring at the grey mask that covered his eyes. It was moist, shining in the daylight, and made up of circles of mould that overlapped each other, covering the skin beneath, and she could see grey threads of the fungus striating the white of the man’s eyes and marking the brown of his pupils. Then those eyes went wider as a wave of blood suddenly smashed out in a great halo around the man’s head.
Ysentrud blinked, then the blood splashed against her, sticky and surprisingly hot, and the man sank to his knees, the knife falling from his hand. Beyond him, Lazarus was bringing his sword back around, its heavy pommel dripping blood from where he had smashed it into the back of the man’s head, crushing his skull like an egg. Part of Ysentrud wanted to vomit again, but she was too busy falling to her knees, scrambling for the dropped knife while never taking her eyes off the Master of the Fifth.
He hadn’t turned his helm. He’d struck the man down with his backhand blow without looking, and now he was turning that motion into the start of a swing, a great two-handed cutting arc like the ones she had imagined him giving. It ripped through the gris that were rushing in, cutting apart limbs and torsos, barely slowed by its tearing path through muscle and bone. At the end of the arc, Lazarus stopped the huge sword, holding it across his body at the height of his waist, and then he drove himself forward. He slammed into the crowd as they crashed into him, and for a long moment he was still, an armoured stone being pounded by a tide of silent, dead-eyed humanity. But his sword crackled, its energy field biting and tearing into the front rank of attackers, splitting chests and rupturing ribs, cutting throats and tearing through collarbones and jaws. The gris fell apart against that terrible blade, held still and unmoving by the Dark Angel, and then he took one step forward, shoving into the crowd, rippling them back. Then another, and another, and now Lazarus was forcing them back, breaking them. His boots were crushing over bodies, the dead and the almost dead, and then suddenly they shattered.
By bolters and blades the gris had been torn apart, killed in masses that left drifts of corpses on the ground, their blood making gory puddles out of the dirt. A few of them still moved and twitched, but for the most part the bodies were shattered red smears, barely recognisable as having once been human. Ysentrud held the bloody knife in front of her in both hands, staring at the man Lazarus had killed with his pommel. His head was lopsided, deformed by the blow, and through the tangled mess of hair and bone that was the back of his head she could see the smashed remnants of his brain. White and grey, the strands of fungus mixed in with it weren’t immediately obvious, but they were there, a net that ran all through the dead man’s cortex. She stared at it in silence, clenching the knife tight, her face sticky with drying blood, then she turned her head and retched again.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Lazarus cleaned Enmity’s Edge on the body of one of the dead, waiting for the mortal to finish vomiting. When she was done, he sheathed his sword and held a hand out to her. She stared at it for a long moment, then dropped the knife she’d been clutching and reached out, letting him help her up.
‘Can you walk?’ he asked, and she nodded. She followed him back to the ships, where the other Dark Angels had formed up. ‘Brother Asbeel.’ The Apothecary finished stapling shut a jagged cut that ran down one of the Scouts’ necks and came over. Lazarus gently pushed Ysentrud towards him, and Asbeel took her hand, turning it to expose the bloody gash on her forearm. The scanner servo arched over his back and whirred and clicked, its glass eyes staring, sensor wands stroking the air over the wound like an insect’s antenna.
‘Minor, even for a mortal,’ the Apothecary said. ‘Hold still.’ Ysentrud looked as if she desperately wanted to move, but Asbeel took hold of her arm as his narthecium whirred into place over the wound, and the mortal shut her eyes, waiting. There was a sharp click as a needle stabbed out of the complex medi-pack, and then Ysentrud relaxed as the drug wiped away her pain. ‘It will take just a moment to stitch up.’
‘Casualties?’ Lazarus asked him.
‘One of the explosions that blew open the tunnels was right under Squad Bethel,’ Apothecary Asbeel said as tiny servos in the narthecium whirred, stitching the mortal’s delicate flesh back together. ‘Two have minor injuries, but Variel lost most of his left arm. It will need replacing. Scout Squad Jotha came under heaviest attack at the start, before they could pull back to the ships. Two of them have injuries that will degrade their combat abilities for the next few hours. Two are missing. Dead or alive, I do not know.’
‘They do that,’ Ysentrud said, almost a whisper. She had turned her red face away from the work the Apothecary was doing. ‘My lord. In the histories and the stories. The gris take people. They take bodies. Sometimes just the brains. We don’t know why.’ She frowned, looking faintly queasy again. ‘I saw a group of gris, dragging something big and bloody. They took it into one of the holes.’
Two Dark Angels missing. Lazarus stared at the still-smoking holes surrounded by the shredded dead. A hundred of them for every missing Scout, at least, and that wasn’t nearly enough. But his men hadn’t been the only targets. ‘They take the living to infect,’ Lazarus said. Infection was not something that could happen to a Space Marine. That did not mean the gris would not try.
Ysentrud nodded, then shuddered. ‘Yes.’ She looked around, suddenly realising something. ‘The Regent Next. I don’t see him!’
‘Taken,’ Lazarus said, and Ysentrud stared at him, her eyes wide in the red skull mark of her face.
‘What are we going to do?’ she asked.
‘Do?’ Lazarus said. He reached up, and his winged helm hissed softly as he pulled it off. ‘These gris laid a trap. Wounded my brothers. Took two of them. We will do what must be done. We will slay every last one of them.’
‘For the Lion!’
The shout echoed up from the gathered Dark Angels, so deep and powerful Lazarus felt it in the heavy bones of his chest. But the shout seemed to rattle Ysentrud, and the mortal trembled after it had ended, her thin body shaking beneath the filthy robes wrapped around her. She clutched them tight to her, standing next to him with her head down, eyes on the ground. A frail thing, even more so than most mortals, but there was information locked behind her strange red eyes that he needed.
My Dark Angels. You have come for me again.
There was something here, on this world, something behind these gris, and it knew them, and it wanted them dead.
Yes, he needed to know more about this world, and the Emperor had provided. He looked at the mortal, still trembling in his shadow.
‘You did well, Learned Ysentrud.’
‘I did nothing, my lord,’ she said, and he could smell the fear in her sweat, read the exhausted tension in her body.
‘You survived,’ he said.
She looked at him again, uncertain, but she nodded and her shaking went away. Mostly. Good enough.
Lazarus looked away from her and called his command squad to him, and the sergeants of each of the squads. ‘We have fought the first true battle of this war,’ he said when they had gathered around him. ‘There will be more.’ He turned to Sergeant Asher, whose face was hard, anger tensing every muscle. ‘What did you find?’
‘We went into the tunnels the gris made – the ones we had not destroyed. They all converged into one passage, less than half a mile from the edge of this farm.’ Asher pointed to the thick jungle lying to the west, away from the volcano. ‘That tunnel was larger than the others, older, deeper. But it was a dead end. The gris brought it down behind them, collapsed it to keep us from following.’
Of course they did, Lazarus thought. He looked to Ephron. ‘Can we divine these tunnels with auspex? Map their nest out from above?’
The Techmarine shook his head. ‘The earth here plays havoc with auspex scans. We will not get more than a few yards without our readings becoming unreliable to the point of uselessness.’ Ephron paused, and Lazarus could hear him whispering to himself in the strange, buzzing private language of the Techmarines. ‘It may be possible to divine them using acoustic waves. We have the explosives to send out a pulse, but I would need equipment from the Sword of Caliban to build a receiver, and time to set it up.’
From the ship. Time to set it up. Time, and what would the gris be doing while Ephron did his work? But it was a start.
‘Contact the Sword of Caliban. Claim what you require.’
‘Master Lazarus,’ Ephron said, his voice sharp. ‘I do not have to. The Sword of Caliban has contacted me. They have received an emergency transmission from the Fabricator Locum. She states that the Regent Prime has sent Reis Home Levies troops to attack her forge on Norsten.’
Adamantine Wings shifted and lurched, the Thunderhawk’s powerful engines roaring as the ship fought the savage crosswinds kicked up by the storm they were tearing through. Lazarus barely noticed the movement, the sudden jerks nothing compared to the evasive manoeuvres he’d felt in hundreds of combat drops, but he unconsciously shifted with the craft’s movements, keeping his face centred in the sights of the holocaster clinging like a spider to the ceiling of the transport’s hold.
‘This is Lazarus, Master of the Fifth. What is your need?’
In the narrow aisle that ran down the centre of the hold, a hissing cloud of light took shape, cast by the myriad lenses of the holocaster. The light brightened and dimmed, then snapped suddenly into place, pale motes forming together into a woman’s face. The face was beautiful, smooth, unblemished, perfectly symmetrical. Too beautiful – it was a mask the colour of ivory, still and unmoving except for the mane of white hair that framed it, and the eyes. They were the deep colour of wine, unmarred except for a dark circle in their centre, like a pupil. But this pupil split into two, then three, the black points moving around each other like shifting stars, then merging again into one, before splitting again. A shifting, distracting dance as she stared at Lazarus.
‘Precision.’ Fabricator Locum Gretin Lan’s voice was clear, but with a rippling sound like faint music behind the words. ‘Master Lazarus, you and your Dark Angels were summoned to fight a threat that my own auspex could not detect. Now my holdings are assailed by members of the Regent Prime’s Levies. Schedules have been disrupted. Personnel have been lost. Quotas are endangered. Precious technological fabricants have been damaged. All of this occurred without signal or provocation. I respond to the situation but seek elucidation to root causes. Communication with the Regent Prime has been unfruitful. Thus, I reach out to you, Master Lazarus of the Fifth Company.’
The Fabricator Locum might want precision, but she didn’t seem to care about conciseness. Lazarus decided to offer her both. ‘You have pict data of the attack?’
‘Of course. I shall offer.’ Her face faded from the holofield, ivory and white becoming a cloud of static, and then the light redrew itself into a flat pict of a bulbous air transport ship sitting on a snow-covered field, rough mountains rising behind it. The pict shuddered, lines of static dancing across it, and then resolved again. The static was snow now, heavy flakes drifting across the pict, dusting the transport’s pitted metal hide. On the edge of the image something moved, a wavering blur that resolved into a mob of servitors trundling towards the ship, their tracks churning the snow. They were cargo units, and the scarred and wrinkled torsos of what had once been men and women stuck out of heavy mechanical bases, metal braces holding them up and wrapping around their arms, making them into heavy clamps or nests of jointed tentacles like twisting spinal columns. Their heads bobbed, mouths wired shut or flopped open, drooling, but they oriented on the ship, blank eyes shifting. Then a hatch popped open on the transport’s curved side. Light flashed out of the dark interior, and the drifting snow splashed up from the ground in neat lines until they reached the servitors. The bullets pouring from the ship smashed into flesh and steel, and blood and electrical sparks arced through the air.
The servitors muddled to a stop, bumping into each other as the ones in front lurched to a halt and tried to back up while the ones behind still ploughed forward. The gun, some kind of heavy stubber, raked back and forth, smashing metal and tearing through flesh. It left behind a ruin of broken machines and bleeding bodies, all of them still except for a lone servitor that turned a slow circle on its damaged track, its human head lolling, blood leaking from the wound in its temple. Beyond the broken cyborgs, figures had started to run out of the transport, men and women dressed in the black uniform of Reis Home Levies, running through the snow with guns raised, their eyes–
‘Cease.’ Lazarus snapped out the word, and the holo froze, hovering in space before him. Almost in its centre glowed the face of a woman. A black rebreather covered her mouth and nose, but her upper face was bare. Her brown eyes were dull, empty, and surrounded by a shiny grey mask of fungus. ‘Do you know these marks?’
‘They are unfamiliar,’ the Fabricator Locum said. The pict dissolved and was replaced again by the holo image of her face, perfectly still, pale lips shut and fixed in a tiny, enigmatic smile even as she spoke. ‘Assumption was made that this was a form of cosmetic camouflage.’
‘It is not.’ Lazarus looked at the forge leader, watching as her pupils split and circled and moved. ‘Are you aware of the uprising, the enemy that seized the Redwash Gate? The people of Sudsten call them the gris.’
Gretin Lan blinked at him, a flicking of half-translucent nictitating membranes that moved sideways across her eyes. ‘My databases indicate they are mythical figures central to a kind of terror fable told by the civilian population of Sudsten. A supernatural, lurking horror whose purpose is to frighten children and the naive.’
Six hundred years ago. That’s when the Regent Prime at the time had declared war against the gris. And in all that time they had never informed the Adeptus Mechanicus forge that the gris even existed. Even if he had believed they were no threat, it was unconscionable to keep their existence hidden. Lazarus sat in his jump seat, his face set, one finger tapping against the hilt of Enmity’s Edge.
‘You require information,’ he said. ‘This one will provide it.’ He waved a gauntleted hand at Ysentrud, and the holocaster’s sights followed his gesture, framing the stylised red skull of her face.
‘A Wyrbuk.’ The Fabricator Locum’s voice was filled with disgust. ‘An infected organic system, a contemptible copy of an elegant cogitator. A mutant.’
‘And the person you will be listening to while I review all information you have collected on the disposition and placement of the forces attacking you,’ Lazarus said, his deep voice a breath away from a snarl. ‘The soldiers that attacked you are gris, and I have made a promise to burn their infection from this world. We come, now.’
‘Master Lazarus.’ The pupils in Fabricator Locum Lan’s eyes spun apart fast, then jerked themselves together. ‘When I contacted your ship, it was not a cry for martial aid. The only reason my forces have not rooted out these attackers is because of the sensitive nature of the area where they have taken shelter. We will be able to–’
‘We come. Now.’ Lazarus looked towards the mortal. ‘Learned Ysentrud. Please inform Fabricator Locum Lan about the gris.’ The young woman blinked at him, her red eyes wide, but then she nodded. She turned to face the ivory-coloured mask of Gretin Lan, and her crimson face went smooth and mask-like itself as she slipped into her teaching trance.
