Lords of blood, p.117
Lords of Blood, page 117
‘Damn right,’ said Idrin. ‘If we leave now, we may be able to escape while they eat the big one.’
The eels were moving away from the barge. Their movements became a frenzy as they set to work on the corpse.
‘Follow him,’ said Astorath.
Cellew shrieked as an eel as long as five men rose up from the flooded hold and slapped hard against the deck. Pale teeth flashed. Idrin tracked its swerves through the offal and put it down with a shot through its head. It limply slithered back whence it had come.
‘They’re coming through the holes in the hull,’ Idrin said, peering into the waterlogged hold. That too boiled with the eels. More leapt up from the water and threw themselves against the edge of the open hatch, trying to gain purchase on the deck and get at the bounty of carrion there.
‘They pose no danger to us,’ said Dolomen, crushing one under his boot.
‘With all due reverence, my lord, it’s not you I’m worried about.’ Idrin shot two more dead. ‘Cellew, get on the bow gun!’
Cellew ran ahead to the ladder. ‘I’m on it.’
The barge rocked. Cellew fell onto the boat with a shriek. Idrin stumbled.
‘Emperor’s life,’ he said.
A gargantuan eel breached the water ahead of where the patrol boat was moored. Spray rushed over the barge, and the eel landed hard, crushing the gunwales and what little was left of the barge’s fittings. A head the size of a Rhino armoured personnel carrier turned towards them and hissed breath that smelled of mud and fish up the deck.
‘By the Blood,’ growled Dolomen. ‘Is that the biggest, or are they going to keep getting bigger?’
‘That’s pretty much the biggest one I’ve ever seen,’ said Idrin.
Bedevoir, Idrin and Dolomen opened fire at once. Bolts and las slashed through the pouring rain into the creature, but it was so immense that the shots did little harm to it. The feared bolt weaponry of the Adeptus Astartes was little more than a nuisance. Wounds that would blast a human to undifferentiated pieces of meat were spots and nicks upon its slimy body.
It heaved itself further onto the barge, its immense weight depressing the front deeper into the mud. Corpses rolled down the deck and into the sea. Blood and water rushed from stern to prow. The creature was a living cable of muscle, as capable of squirming its way across the mud and marsh as it was of swimming, but the barge was simply too narrow for it to move effectively. From the patrol boat the sound of the heavy stubber set up as Cellew riddled its tail with shot, but these wounds troubled it not at all.
‘I shall deal with this personally,’ said Astorath. His armour purred, and the black wings set around his jump pack unfurled. Holding his axe crosswise across his body, he activated it with a sharp jerk. The head cracked with awakening power. Rain fizzled into the disruption lightning playing over the black metal.
‘Cease fire,’ said Dolomen. ‘Let our lord do his work. We’ll take care of these smaller ones.’
A forest of eels danced over the edges of the hold and round the fringes of the boat. Idrin switched targets, clearing a way to the ladder.
‘Save your ammunition, Bedevoir,’ said Dolomen. He slung his boltgun across his back and drew his combat blade.
‘Aren’t you going to stop Lord Astorath? He is putting himself in danger.’
Dolomen glanced at the High Chaplain, who was advancing towards the giant eel.
‘You stop him, if you like.’
Astorath ignited his jump pack as he broke into a heavy run. His feet slammed into the deck so hard it dented. When the jet of his pack reached a screaming whine he leapt, neurally setting the pack to full burn as he did. He arced up, his mechanical wings spreading, adding range to the leap. He swung his axe up over his head and prepared to bring it down as he came spearing from the air.
Wind shrieked through the metal feathers. His axe roared through the rain. He shouted out the first line of the Litanies of Hate.
‘Trust only in your enemy. His desire to slay you shall never waver.’
He landed on the side of the eel. His weight was such that his boots plunged through the side of the beast, dealing it a grievous wound. As he hit, he brought his axe down, adding the impetus of his short flight to the blow. The head buried itself deep. The disruption field banged mightily when it met so much matter, and blasted a hole three feet across into the eel’s body.
The creature hissed and thrashed. Astorath was flipped from its side and fell to the deck in a torrent of thin blood. The eel was far from dead, and it bent double to deal with this new threat, thrusting down with its blunt snout. Astorath burned his jet to get clear, sending himself skidding along the metal in a spray of sparks. He hacked at the side of the beast as he slid, opening a series of ugly injuries far along its anterior half. Its mouth chased after him, snapping at his feet even as the exhaust from his jump pack seared its snout. Teeth like glass swords closed around his ankle.
Astorath sported a harder shell than most prey, and the fangs shattered on his ceramite, but the eel held him fast, whipping its head around, hurling Astorath high into the air and bringing him down hard on the deck. The Executioner’s Axe was jarred from his right hand, leaving him holding it with the left only, far towards the bottom of the haft. Icons flashed warning reds in his helm display. He swung the axe awkwardly as the creature coiled to deliver another punishing flick. The blade buried itself in a quarter of the way down the body, not far from where Astorath had inflicted the first gash, but as the beast wrenched him away to again dash him upon the metal, the axe was torn entirely from his grip. It fell from the smoking wound into the central flooded hold, where it was swallowed up in churning knots of eels.
The eel brought Astorath down hard, denting his left wing. His vambrace cracked. Alarms wailed in his helm. The eel worked him around in its mouth, attempting to bring the full pressure of its enormous jaws to bear. Astorath ripped at its teeth with his hands, wrenching them out and throwing them down. Blood poured from the beast’s mangled gums, adding to that flowing from the axe wounds, but still the eel showed no sign of tiring.
On the deck, Dolomen and Bedevoir saw their lord in trouble and turned their attention to the giant eel once more, riddling its slimy body with bolt-rounds. The side of it went from sleek to ruined in a second of furious gunfire. The pain sent it wild, and it whipped its head back and forth, biting down harder all the while.
Astorath punched at the thing, his armoured fists skidding from its mucus covering. He grunted with pain as one of the razor teeth found its way through the softseal at the back of his knee. His battleplate responded, dosing him with pain nullifiers, but the tooth remained lodged in his flesh, moving back and forth with every toss and turn of the beast’s head, penetrating deeper into the knee joint.
Bolt fire roared from the Space Marines on the deck. Idrin shot methodically with his lasgun, scoring the hide with burns. Their shooting abated as the beast turned upon its coils, forcing them to flee as it rolled further up the deck, crushing the dead to smears and buckling the barge’s frame under its immense bulk.
Astorath clawed at the beast. It flicked back its head, opening its jaws as it did so, and catapulted the Redeemer of the Lost high into the air. He fired his jump pack, but it stuttered and coughed, alarms in his helm warning him of its non-functionality even as he plummeted into the thing’s gullet and was swallowed whole.
The eel’s throat convulsed, pushing Astorath down into its belly. His armour sealed itself, switching on its internal life support systems, shutting out the world.
The Redeemer took stock of the damage. His armour was malfunctioning in multiple places. The outer shell was cracked in three different spots. The thrashing of the beast’s head had broken some of the fibre bundles that gave extra strength to his legs and severed several connections between the components. His bodysuit was torn wide open around his knee. His own wounds were hardly less severe: torn ligaments, ruptured membranes, internal bleeds and the savaging of his leg.
Already his body and his battleplate’s systems raced to alleviate the worst of the pain and maintain his combat functionality. Within hours, he would begin to heal.
If he escaped.
The eel’s body was a cold place. More of the slime-coating that protected its skin slicked its gullet. Internally, it was a spongy thing that appeared to be comprised mostly of mucus.
The digestive tract spasmed again, pushing him lower into the beast. Multiple hearts arrayed in strings thrummed at high speed near the gut wall. Vital fluids gurgled. The gullet opened up, dumping him into a bath of digestive acids. His alarm chimed out the warning clarion for toxic environments. Where his bodysuit had imperfectly sealed, the acid leaked in and burned flesh.
‘Enough,’ said Astorath. He braced his feet against the beast’s stomach wall. Elastic tissues stretched under his boots, then tore. ‘Stand by, Brother Dolomen,’ he voxed. ‘I am coming out.’
Hooking his fingers into the gut wall, Astorath began to dig.
Idrin continued to fire at the gargantuan eel. The deck was awash with so much blood that it collected in the open holds faster than it could drain away, lifting up the thrashing knots of lesser eels and granting them easier access to the men fighting on the deck.
‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ he yelled. ‘Nothing can bring a marsh eel this size down.’
Heavy stubber fire banged from Cellew’s boat. The sea was alive with the motion of serpentine bodies. The dry hissing of the eels overcame the patter of the rain, so that it seemed the weather was screaming.
‘Stand your ground,’ Dolomen said. He moved his attention from the giant eel to its lesser kin, blasting a path with boltgun and grenades to the edge of the central hold.
A number of events occurred in such quick succession that Idrin struggled to keep track. Dolomen jumped feet first into the central hold, where he disappeared under the filthy water. Bedevoir continued to fire at the giant eel with his bolt pistol, while sweeping his chainsword at the creatures writhing all over the deck. The eels bit at Bedevoir’s feet and shins, but did nothing more than break their own teeth. Idrin’s boots provided no such protection, and he was forced up onto the gunwales, where he balanced precariously over Cellew’s boat. She was having an even worse time of it, abandoning the main gun and retreating to the wheelhouse, where she fired through a broken window at the eels as they tried to get in.
The giant eel reared up with an awful screech. Idrin saw movement in its side, then Astorath burst through its stomach wall covered in gore. Bedevoir charged to his aid, hacking his chainsword into the eel’s side and tearing the wound wider. Still it would not die. Its thrashing was weakening, but it had strength to spare to kill them all.
‘Now, Dolomen!’ Idrin heard the Redeemer cry.
Dolomen pulled himself up from the central hold, Astorath’s axe held in one fist. He lofted it at the High Chaplain. It was an awkward throw from a disadvantageous angle, but such was his strength that the weapon flew true. Astorath caught it in both hands, the blade burned once more with lightning, and the Redeemer swung it down, catching the eel below the jaw and opening its throat for a run of five yards.
The eel shook, and flopped. Astorath struck again, then again, until its neck was a mess of axe cuts and its glassy spine was exposed to the air.
Astorath waded through the flood of guts pouring from the beast. He raised his axe a final time, slid his hands to the end of the haft, then with the extra reach gained he swung the blade, cutting neatly through the spinal column some twelve feet above his head.
The beast fell to the deck, its jaw continuing to snap as its life drained away.
‘Are we going now?’ Idrin said.
Astorath limped from the ruin of his foe, crushing lesser eels underfoot, his axe held across his body. His jump pack wings were shattered, his armour breached, yet he seemed even more terrible than before, dripping as he did from helm crest to soles in watery eel blood, and roped about with sheets of slimy guts.
‘We are going,’ he said.
Dolomen heaved himself fully out of the pit. Bedevoir covered him as they retreated. The Space Marines jumped one at a time onto the patrol boat, eels shaken free from the boat’s sides by their impacts. The rest they butchered with inhuman efficiency.
The eel shoal went into a feeding frenzy and fell on their monarch. They leapt out of the water, latching onto the giant corpse draped over the grounded barge. Others fought with each other in the sea in their fever to get at the flesh. Those on the deck moved like a living tide, swimming into the giant eel’s wounds to consume it from within.
‘Jump, mortal man,’ shouted Dolomen.
The boat was a long way down. Still, leaping was preferable to becoming eel food.
‘I came back here for a quieter life,’ Idrin said to himself, and jumped.
Dolomen caught him, an act that amused the Space Marine but left Idrin unaccountably annoyed.
‘Go!’ Bedevoir shouted.
Cellew opened the throttle. As they pulled away from the vessel the propeller chopped the sea bloody, mincing the eels crowding the boat.
When Dolomen set Idrin down, he felt even more of a fool.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘You didn’t need to catch me.’
Dolomen shrugged. ‘You might have injured yourself. You could have slipped on one of these ugly beasts.’ He pushed a dead eel around with his foot.
Astorath sat down awkwardly while Bedevoir unscrewed parts of his armour. The grounded barge and its swarm of eels receded behind the scow. It was still raining, and blood was washing surely out of the deck drains. Dolomen stooped low, picked up a dead eel as thick as his arm and made to throw it overboard, but stopped.
‘You say these things are edible?’
Idrin shouldered his gun.
‘More than that. They’re quite good, as it happens.’
Dolomen chuckled. His voxmitter made it sound like a failing engine.
‘Then tonight we eat well!’
Dolomen went about collecting the eels. Idrin felt eyes on him, and looked back to find Astorath, now half-unclad, staring at him.
Idrin looked away again. Astorath had a gaze that was difficult to bear.
Uneasily, he looked out over the water to the grounded barge, knowing he had seen something aboard that he was not meant to.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BRINGER OF MERCY
As they moved away from the barge, Bedevoir and Dolomen helped Astorath remove the rest of his armour, and their diagnosis of its condition was not favourable.
‘It is in no fit state for combat, my lord,’ said Dolomen. He spread the plate out on the deck and surveyed the pieces critically, taking Astorath through the damage to its doleful conclusion. ‘This cannot be repaired here. A Techmarine would struggle under these conditions. It needs to be returned to the forge.’
‘I can see,’ said Astorath.
‘How is your leg, my lord?’ asked Bedevoir.
Astorath flexed his knee. ‘It will heal.’
‘We should call in support, bring down spares from the Eminence Sanguis. Maybe Artemos as well to see to your injuries,’ said Dolomen.
They were drawing near to an archipelago, all its isles crowded with black trees. Astorath looked deep into the swamps.
‘I hear the music of the lost’s pain,’ said Astorath. ‘We are getting close. This quest for mercy is almost done. We will proceed as planned.’
‘This is a poor course to follow,’ said Dolomen. He stepped closer to the Redeemer and lowered his voice. ‘We have no information on how strong Jadriel and the others are. They are Primaris. They may be able to best you. If you do not have your armour, I cannot guarantee your safety, and you are injured.’
‘None of us can guarantee our safety, Dolomen,’ said Astorath. ‘We all fall eventually. If we leave now, then we will lose our chance to do our duty. They are our blood-kin, and must have mercy.’
Bedevoir hung around the prow of the boat, politely waiting for them to finish. The two mortals watched the Space Marines, Cellew nervously, Idrin with his blank-eyed curiosity.
‘My lord, it is my duty to advise you. We may have to consider leaving the Red Wings to their fates here. They will die anyway. You should not risk yourself in this way.’
‘They will die, but they will do so alone and unshriven. Mercy is my role, brother,’ said Astorath, so low even Dolomen could barely hear. ‘I will not leave these brothers to madness and slow deaths, nor to the sorry end that awaits this world. They must be delivered from their suffering cleanly, with honour. I have always expected to die doing this duty – if that time is now, so be it.’ He rested a hand on Dolomen’s shoulder plate. ‘But I do not think it is, not yet.’ He removed his hand, and stared into the approaching swamps. ‘The lost are in there.’
The boat left behind the open water for narrow river channels overhung by slimy, black-wooded trees. Beneath their boughs the humid day became closer still. Clouds of insects gathered between the mosses hanging from the branches. They irritated Idrin and Cellew, but though they gathered around the unclad Astorath in huge swarms, his thick, modified skin seemed impenetrable to their bites and he ignored them.
Once he was sure the two Space Marines had finished their private debate, Idrin approached.
‘These swamps cover hundreds of square miles,’ he said. ‘If your warriors are not here, they may be further to the north, in the swamps on the coast there. But if they’ve gone deeper into the forests here, we’ll never find them. Not without proper augur sweeps.’
The boat puttered along a narrow channel. Cellew kept it slow, for the water was choked with tree roots and rotting boughs. The sharp prow nosed through tree limbs whose twigs were so closely entwined that the gun mounted on the front broke through them with a constant, wet crackling. Cellew’s face was immobile with concentration.
