Lazarus, p.33
Lazarus, page 33
When Lazarus died the first time, when he had been wrapped in sorcerous flames on the bitter world of Rimenok, he had chosen that death. It had been a tactical choice, one that would buy his men the time they needed to keep the battle from becoming a rout, so they could salvage victory from the claws of defeat. It had been a worthy sacrifice, and he had done it without thought, without the hope that he would rise again.
Yet he had been given a second life in a new body, with another chance to serve his Emperor, his Imperium and his Chapter. To offer his life again, and there was nothing better than that. He would go to the flames as many times as he could for the Dark Angels. But this…
He was alone. Heris Amis had gone, but he hadn’t, really. The gris was still burrowing into him, stealing from him, feeding on him. He was feasting on Lazarus’ mind, and there was nothing the Master of the Fifth could do but hang on grimly, wrapped around the last bits of himself that had yet to be taken, the knowledge he had vowed never to let go. He hung on, burning, dying, burning, dying, and wondering each time – should he try to ride the illusion of death into the true darkness? He’d been there once before. He might be able to reach it again, to lose himself in that black, to deny his body, his mind, his knowledge, his soul to this enemy.
And so the beast came to Droslin, and beneath its claws the walls did fall–
That fragment of the story he had been translating echoed through his head, a phrase disconnected, a memory uncoupled. Was it some side effect of what Heris Amis was doing to him, a crumb dropping from the jaws of the gris as it consumed his mind?
No. No. Lazarus shook his head in the flames and remembered The Doom of Droslin. The lesson that story taught, the one he had tried to convey to Azrael. The temptation of pride, of obsession. The sin of believing that he was the only possible answer. Doom had come to Reis, wearing the form of Heris Amis, and it had torn down the walls. It had torn down his walls. But he did not face it alone. His brothers were still out there, beyond the flames, fighting. Demetrius. Zakariah. Raziel.
His brothers may yet stand. And while they did, there was hope, and so he kept fighting, drawing out every moment until there was nothing left but pain, and bitter rage, and the need for vengeance.
Symmetry, Heris Amis would say. But Lazarus didn’t care. He just wanted Enmity’s Edge in his hand, and Heris Amis’ head at his feet.
So he burned, and burned, and burned. Until the flames stuttered around him.
The great conflagration flickered, like a candle sputtering in the wind. Then it was back. All the pain, all the heat was there again. And then another stutter, and in the places between the flames there was mud, and grass, the stench of rot, the taste of blood in his mouth. There were flames again, but Lazarus was driving against them, trying to shove them out of his head. They weren’t real, they weren’t, and when they flickered again, he was on his hands and knees, reaching out for Enmity’s Edge.
Flames.
Wrapping his hand around the grip.
Flames.
Standing.
Flames.
He was standing, and the Knights were still around him, still as statues. There was the sound of explosions, of guns and screams, of shrill birds in the jungle. There was the sight of Raziel on his hands and knees in the mud near him, trying to rise, and then the flames – the flames he shoved away, and they stuttered and broke, like a bad holo, shattering into nothing. Lazarus was standing, breathing, sword in his hand, rage and remembered pain boiling through him like acid in his arteries, but he leashed it, focused it, and found what he needed.
Heris Amis’ grey-bannered Knight Valiant stood before him, still except for a tremor that stirred its huge limbs and made its helmet-shaped head shake, like a man in the grip of a seizure.
With a snarl, Lazarus leapt into the air, climbing the Knight. His boots rang against its thick armour as he ran across it, the mag-locks holding him to the back of the metal giant. There was the hatch, and there the hole he had carved, and with a stroke he smashed Enmity’s Edge down and shattered the damaged latch of the armoured door. It bled grey ichor, but he ignored it, moving to the other latch and smashing his sword down again. Enmity’s Edge tore into the armour, and the Knight twitched below him.
‘Lazarus!’ It was Raziel. The Librarian was wavering on his feet, but he was standing, his armour splattered with grey slime and blood. ‘Heris Amis… I feel him… What is happening?’
‘He is trying to take me. To take us. All of us,’ Lazarus snarled, driving down with Enmity’s Edge. ‘But he falters. And so he will die!’
Halfway through the last hinge on the hatch, the giant went still, rigid. Lazarus could feel the flames again, the burning beneath his skin, tearing his muscles apart, broiling him inside his armour, but he didn’t stop. He didn’t acknowledge the pain as he struck again and again until he had torn the last latch apart. Reaching down, he ripped the hatch open, his burning muscles screaming with pain.
Inside the Knight, in the thickest part of the chest, was the Throne Mechanicum, the centre of the machine, its heart, its brain, the place where the human pilot would sit. Except here was something else, a pile of mould that had tried to shape itself into a man. It was squeezed into the chair, too large for the throne, but the thing had compressed itself like a mud doll, and cables and umbilicals ran from the inside of the Knight into that grey mass like gleaming spikes driven into a rotting brain.
With his teeth gritted against the pain, Lazarus lifted Enmity’s Edge. But the world was flickering around him again, stuttering. The grey flames were trying to draw him back, and he had to wait until he could see, until he could be sure of his strike. When his vision cleared, when the world came back, he could hear something, a vast bellow that shook the air, but he ignored it, driving his sword down into the centre of the gris’ chest.
The grey mould squelched beneath Enmity’s Edge, spattering and boiling at the touch of the power field. It was more like mud than flesh, and Lazarus drove his blade deep, until he felt it crunch into the Throne Mechanicum. Sparks ripped through the space, and the Knight spasmed again, spasmed as Heris Amis’ awful shape was spasming, and Lazarus saw the lumpy head of the gris master shifting, splitting, opening like some awful flower, to reveal Amis’ grey face.
‘No!’ the monster that had been a man shouted, and half-formed hands grabbed on to Enmity’s Edge. They sizzled against the blade, spattering apart, but were still clutching as Lazarus tried to pull the sword back for another thrust.
They fought, the sword shifting between them, until that roar Lazarus had heard was a wall of sound, vast and terrible, and there was something falling from the sky like a great stone. Rage of Angels, the last Thunderhawk the gris had claimed, was tumbling through the air spilling fire and smoke. Gretin Lan’s ship was right behind it, a white shadow following its terrible fall. The dying ship was diving straight towards the Knights, towards where Lazarus still wrestled with Heris Amis, still fighting to pull Enmity’s Edge away so he could drive its point through the gris’ face.
‘Lazarus!’ Raziel shouted from below, and on the end of that shout Lazarus felt it again. The cold and perfect stillness as the world froze around him, as the Librarian warped time and opened a vision of a dozen paths of possibility in Lazarus’ head.
In so many of them, Heris Amis won. The gris tore Enmity’s Edge from Lazarus’ hand and ripped him apart. Or wrapped Lazarus again in the memory of flames and took his mind, burning him out from the inside, stealing every memory, every secret of the Dark Angels. There were only a scant handful of paths where Lazarus got away. Survived, only to watch Heris Amis triumph. But there was one. One very short path, where there was a chance of vengeance. And the surety of flames.
Without hesitation, Lazarus chose that path, and time gripped him again. Heris Amis was reaching out with one blunt hand to grab his helm, to wrench his head back, as the sound of the falling ship rose to a world-shaking scream, and Lazarus jerked his blade to one side. The Knight Valiant moved, staggering as the blade tore at its controls, moving over until it stood directly in the path of Rage of Angels’ fall. The wreckage of the dying Thunderhawk struck the Knight and smashed it backwards, flipping it through the air like a toy. Lazarus was ripped away, sent flying like another piece of shrapnel surrounded by flame, until he slammed into the ground and everything went black once more.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Wrapped in memen state, Ysentrud drifted, serene, as she poured out the history of every Imperial Guard regiment that had been produced by Reis since the planet rejoined the Imperium. Every battle, every engagement, every commendation and reprimand, flowing out, out, out.
She couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, but that didn’t matter. The painful memories that had filled her head were gone, shoved out by the merciless stream of facts pouring from her. This was what she had been made for, the culmination of her red pall infection, of her training, of her whole life so far. She was a Wyrbuk, and she was being read from cover to cover, and the satisfaction of that filled her to the brim.
Except for one tiny corner. A sliver of personality that had stepped aside from the great roar of the information flooding out of her. A little piece of her that simply rocked in the darkness, giggling viciously as she gave the gris exactly what it wanted. And then that darkness cracked.
There was a flicker of light, a stutter of something like a broken pict caster trying to warm up. In the tiny flashes of light she saw fungal trees. She saw one of the gris monsters, staggering. She saw Demetrius, lurching back, his skull mask cracked and marked with grey sludge like blood. She saw Jequn reeling like a drunkard, his sword hissing as its point dragged through the mud.
‘No.’
The voice echoed through her head, the only sound, unrelated to the images flashing past.
‘Yes,’ she said through her laughter, and in memen she proceeded to the tax figures for the eastern region.
The light around her flashed, stuttered faster, until she was back, cast out of the darkness of her head. She was lying on the ground, blinking up at slivers of smoke-stained sky that she could see through the fungal fronds waving above. Tilting her head, she saw Petra standing beside her, swearing and shouting, ‘What’s wrong, what the fugg is wrong, you mouldy beast? Fight!’ at one of the grey monsters that had walked with her like guardians. The thing gave her no answer, just stood silent out in the clearing as the Interrogator-Chaplain raised his crozius and then smashed it down into the creature’s misshapen body.
‘Her!’ It was Jequn’s voice. The Ancient was standing, shaking, his body wracked with convulsions, and the one word was all he said before he snarled and twisted, his teeth locking shut, eyes bright with hate, a man fighting with himself.
‘Who?’ Petra looked around.
In her head, in her body, all through her nervous system, Ysentrud could feel the gris that infected her trying to pull out, to pull away.
‘No!’ Heris Amis’ voice echoed through her head. ‘Stop!’
‘Stop?’ Her head fell back onto the soft ground, and she giggled. ‘No. Oh no, no, no. You wanted me, you Throne-cursed, mutant-blooded pile of daemon shit. So have me. All of me.’ She could feel the tendrils inside her thrash, but the gris only knew how to consume, to dig in, not to let go. The probes the grey pall had set in her mind were barbed, meant to hook deep, and Heris Amis couldn’t free her any more than she could force him out, and her mouth twisted into a rictus of spiteful humour.
‘Her?’ Petra’s face was confused, frustrated, angry. ‘This… thing?’ Heris Amis was too busy to answer with any of his thousand mouths, so Petra shook her head and drew her autopistol. ‘Damn it,’ she growled, aiming the weapon at Ysentrud’s head. ‘I told you this plan was too complicated, Sebastian.’ Her finger started to tighten on the trigger as Ysentrud looked up at her, staring at the barrel of the gun even as the information roared out of her. She was unable to move, unable to do anything but giggle and wait for her head to be blown apart – and then something smashed into Petra.
Heavy and grey, it struck her like a sack of rotting flesh, knocking her off her feet. The lash commander fell with a grunt, all the air knocked out of her. Ysentrud blinked and realised the thing that had hit Petra was the head of one of the monstrous gris, ripped away from the thing’s body.
Then Demetrius was there, standing over her, his battered skull mask flickering with reflected sunlight, his crozius crackling in his hands. ‘Petra Karn. You gave your aid to a creature of the immaterium. You betrayed all of mankind. There is one sentence for that.’
Petra had pulled herself up to her knees, gun still somehow in her hand. She got off a wild shot and the slug cracked uselessly off the armour over the Interrogator-Chaplain’s chest.
‘Death,’ the Dark Angel intoned, and swung his crozius.
Ysentrud closed her eyes, just long enough to miss what happened when that terrible weapon struck the lash commander. But she couldn’t miss hearing the awful, sizzling crunch, nor avoid the ugly scent of flesh and blood boiling away in the gold-coloured field. When she opened her eyes again, she saw Demetrius swinging the crozius back, his head tipped down towards her, the green-and-red glow of his eyes bright over her. A giant, an overwhelming presence, terrifying and good, protecting her. But then he stumbled.
She couldn’t see what had moved him. There was too much happening, and most of her head was filled with the figures of Reis’ Imperial tithe contributions for the first century after reunification. She saw Demetrius move, saw his crozius fall and smash to the ground beside her, its deadly field spattering her with mud and steam. His hand still gripped it, but he was standing, and she realised that his arm had been severed, cut through at the bicep. His armour was glowing, his flesh was smoking, his red, red blood was splattering the ground. Demetrius was turning, spun by the blow that had maimed him, the strike of Ancient Jequn’s sword.
‘Not free,’ the standard bearer of the Fifth hissed. ‘Almost. Almost. Then he came for me again. Focused on me. To kill her.’ Jequn raised his sword over Ysentrud. ‘I do not want to, brother. I do not want to do anything this thing wants me to do, but I cannot stop it. You have to. You have to kill me!’ Jequn stood frozen over Ysentrud, terrible in his size, in his fierceness, bearing his terrible sword, and for the second time she waited for death. Waited, while Jequn fought. Waited, while Demetrius recovered from the blow that had taken his arm. Waited, still pouring out her teachings, as that great sword finally began to fall, cutting straight down at her until Demetrius lashed out and crashed one armoured leg in a vicious kick against the Ancient’s knee.
The smooth slice of the sword faltered and its blade struck, hissing, into the earth beside her hip. So close. Too close. With a sizzling roar the field of it touched her, tearing through her flesh, ripping it apart, touching her bone and shattering her hip joint. In the mud Ysentrud convulsed, screaming, and in her head the memen state faltered, the information slowing as pain overwhelmed her brain.
‘No,’ she hissed to herself, fighting to shove back the pain, fighting to stay in memen. The pain howled in her, though, so huge, echoing off all the other pains, tearing down the fragile barriers the stimm had made against them. It was swallowing her up, feeding on her like the gris had been trying to do, and even as she tried to force it down, to hang on, she could feel herself drowning in it.
‘Fight!’ The command came from the skull mask that hovered over her, its glowing eyes burning into her. One word, so deep it rumbled through the pain, and she understood. This Dark Angel. All the Dark Angels. Demetrius and Jequn and Lazarus all. They needed her. They needed her. And then, for the first time in the longest time, maybe for the first time ever, she understood that she had a purpose, that her life had a meaning, and the awesome truth of that made it possible to shove back the pain, to grasp the tatters of her memen state and pull it back together.
‘Fight,’ she whispered, and smiled, and then forced out the rules and regulations of packing stimm according to strict Imperial guidelines for the past eight hundred years.
The information poured out of her again, and above her, Jequn swayed. Then he tossed aside his sword, spreading his arms wide, bereft of weapon and banner as he stared at Demetrius.
‘Brother,’ he croaked, his body trembling, battling to stay still.
The Interrogator-Chaplain reached down and picked up his crozius, taking it from his severed right hand with his left. ‘Brother,’ he said, and then swung the weapon up, smashing it into the Ancient’s face, crushing his skull.
Ysentrud closed her eyes, feeling the blood splattering down, hot on her skin, feeling the pain still roaring through her body, but she was pushing, still pushing, giving Heris Amis everything. Focusing her memen and teaching the gris a new way to suffer.
There was fire all around Lazarus.
Flames of red and gold, flickering over twisted wreckage, dancing over foetid vegetation. Red and gold. Not grey. Not multicoloured, bright and unnatural. He pushed himself up from the ground, feeling the heat through his armour. It was hot but not searing. The flames close to him were small, isolated things. Behind him was a greater heat, where a massive piece of what had been Rage of Angels roared, burning fuel eating through its armoured fuselage.
In front of him, the Knight Valiant lay stretched out on its back, one of its legs jutting out awkwardly to one side. The front of the massive machine had been crushed, as if an angry god had smashed its fist into it.
Lazarus shook his head, trying to clear it. His body ached as if he’d been beaten with hammers, but that pain was already dull and fading as the Belisarian Furnace between his hearts spilled its mixture of stimm and healing elements into his blood. His transhuman physiology was healing the trauma that bruised him inside and out.
