Hand of abaddon, p.8
Hand Of Abaddon, page 8
After the maddened rush to wreak carnage, order had begun to assert itself. The soldier-horde broke up as officers took charge, coordinated, rallied and redeployed. Tactics, if not strategy, became part of Imperial thinking again. They took fire from the raised battlements, but it was a light rain. The enemy’s storm was turned outwards.
She paused for but a second or two, looking to Munser for confirmation.
He shook his head at Kesh. ‘I follow you,’ he told her.
The others nodded in concert. A gathering of a few had turned into several squads. Then two platoons. Priests began to sing their throaty catechisms, zeal in their eyes. More officers arrived, Mordian and others besides. All waited on Kesh’s next order.
Swallowing down her momentary unease, Kesh swiftly organised three assault groups who divided up and hit stairways and ladders. She felt powerful, inspired. They rose quickly, almost unopposed, the bulk of the enemy fighters occupied with what came for them outside the walls. By the time they had realised saboteurs were in their midst many of their positions were overrun.
Hurrying across a lower battlement Kesh shot a cultist point-blank, his body falling noiselessly off the wall and onto the courtyard below. Another she gutted with her bayonet, but the blade became trapped and she had to release her rifle, which plummeted away with the dead. Pulling her sidearm, she shot another. Leading the charge now, she quickly scooped up a slain comrade’s sabre and let the killing mood take her. Cultists and defectors fell to her sword, her wrath.
Wings as black as sackcloth, fire unending…
Old waking dreams assailed her as she fought, a lick of flame in every flash of gunfire, every shine of metal as the light struck it.
Kesh pushed it down, forced herself to see what was there. The solidity of the hilt in her hand, the acrid bite of smoke in her throat. Every lung-bursting stride. Higher, higher.
Near breathless, she gained the summit of the Citadel Wall, and took a few seconds to gaze between the massive crenellations at the mighty war engines braced and blistering in the scorched fields beyond. Imperial Knights, their pennants fluttering in the hot wind. Livery as bespoke as each war engine, sigils of rampant beasts of myth and ancient weapons rendered in dark silhouette. Only two machines, the muzzle flares of their weapons like a dying star unleashed, a baleful aura coruscating around the capacitors as they built to fire.
A rippling halo of heavy blasts ringed the Knights, their activated ion shields crackling with ozone and energy displacement. They held their ground but did not advance, stymied by the relentless barrage of the guns.
A flare of light against her face made Kesh turn. In the distance, promethium fires burned as the wells and silos rose up in great jets of black and red. Smoke ran thick like an aurora, an oil slick across the veil of night, the sky transformed to funerary black.
The first of the guns on the wall fell to the northernmost assault group, a loud explosion followed by a thick grey plume further polluting the war front. Kesh led two squads to the second, spiking it with a pair of fused krak grenades and letting the stowed magazines do the rest. It caused carnage amongst the enemy ranks, their positions utterly undone and overtaken. The attackers moved swiftly, disengaging as soon as their ruthless work was complete. Horns had begun to sound, a wall garrison raised.
Kesh signalled to Lodrin and a spurt of flame cleansed the steps beneath them.
Mavin pointed through the thinning smoke. In the city below, a surge of traitor forces had joined those contesting the outer streets. An armour-clad giant in pitted brown and fever yellow, vibrant with oxidisation, led the horde. A barbute helm bulged around his lumpen forehead, his armour straining to contain his girth.
‘Emperor’s mercy…’ hissed Munser, and for the first time fear edged his voice.
The dread warrior’s spike-hammer took a heavy tally, turning the mood of the fight in several places, bludgeoning through men as though they were nothing more than rotten bone. Emboldened, the traitors rallied. Kesh felt the swell of the battle shift, the inevitable push as the tide turned, and knew they had to return to the courtyard.
Seconds before they were about to embark on the difficult climb back down to the courtyard, a huge blast shuddered through the wall. One trooper tripped, lost her footing and fell to her death. Others stumbled, on both sides, enemy combatants swift to seize on any advantage.
The great gates pinwheeled inwards, splitting and fragmenting as they turned, buoyed on a dust-filled pressure wave. Half of one of the gates cleaved the Termite where the Imperials had made their last stand, severing it into two pieces. The resulting explosion killed over fifty men. The other flattened a horde of cultists, crushing them bodily beneath its incredible mass. The heathens did not even have time to scream.
Through the morass of dust and smoke, flames reaching thirty feet or more into the city, strode another hulking warrior. This one wore a red crest upon his helm, white armour dirtied but still gleaming. He raised an axe to the heavens, a ragged black cloak snapping in his wake. Kesh made out the lightning-and-axe sigil on his armour, her blood chilling as the warrior declaimed, ‘Jagun hak sang tal!’
At the Storm Reaper’s arrival, his counterpart clad in corroded metal seemed to quicken, as if recognising a fellow apex predator in his hunting ground. The Traitor Marine swung the haft of his spike-hammer across his body into a guard stance and stood his ground. A challenge in any language. Rabid cultists and other followers of the Dark Gods flowed around him, a foetid boulder amidst a sea of carnage.
Before Kesh realised what she was doing, she had descended the stairs, Munser, Lodrin and the others in tow, a host of Guardsmen following on after. Fifty men against the horde. Fifty to join the fighters emerging through the shattered gate being led by the Storm Reaper. It had been several months since she’d even seen, let alone fought alongside, a Space Marine. The crusade had stretched everyone, even the mighty Angels of Death. Many amongst the Guard warned against battling hand in glove with the Astartes.
No fight ever ended well with or against the Angels, Dvorgin had always said. Thoughts of the old man dying on the cold Gallanhold floor turned to grief before hardening into determination and finally vengeance.
‘Into them!’ Kesh roared.
The growing melee seethed like a turbulent ocean as the Mordians chased the wake of the Storm Reaper’s forces. A few stragglers had joined them, a lieutenant of the Gunbad amongst them. The woman’s face was awash with crimson, her teeth starkly white, her trench-axe darkened with dirt and blood.
They clashed, the Space Marines, the lightning against the immoveable cliff. Kesh couldn’t see much; she was fighting through the masses, clashing in close combat before the melee broke apart or shifted and became a firefight again. Lodrin’s flamer tanked out and he slipped the heavy rig off his shoulders, pulling a laspistol. Mavin kept up the pace, features cold as alabaster, teeth gritted against the madness. He fired on endless repeat, steady despite his fear. Garris took to the killing work like he was born to it, his bayonet slick and red. Munser did his best to marshal the rest, calling out orders, trying to keep everyone up.
Garris overextended in his eagerness to vent his fear and anger. Arterial spray got in his eyes, and he was wiping it away when the axe blade caught him in the neck. He died quick, swallowed in the mass like so many others. Kesh watched him go, feeling detached from reality. They just had to keep going. To survive.
A large armoured cultist, her bulky frame lined with steel plates, stymied the advance. Kesh skidded to an abrupt halt as the traitor swung a chainblade. She ducked, barely avoiding the growling teeth, clods of chewed-up skin and gristle spattering her like a grisly rain. A stab of Kesh’s sabre raked metal but failed to penetrate, and she was bowled over by the cultist’s sheer girth. Others of her kind had rallied to her, clutching hatchets, clubs and dirty pistols.
Several fighters went down on both sides: brief, close-ranged fire exchanged, then it was blades and bayonets. The old way.
Kesh scrambled back, rolled aside as the chainblade hacked down at her, taking a chunk out of the paving beneath. She was chanting, the cult demagogue, offering up Kesh as sacrifice.
An Imperial priest, spitting litanies like they were daggers, hurled himself at the cultist, but she cut him down, splitting him from shoulder to hip. The awful, noisy churn of tearing flesh and muscle was all that Kesh could hear, but it gave her a moment to clamber to her feet. Still shaky, her improvised parry scarcely turned the chainblade meant for her chest. The sabre cracked and shattered, ripped apart by adamantine teeth, but the shards got stuck in the mechanism. A few strangled sputters and the engine died. Grunting, the cultist threw down her weapon and came at Kesh with bare hands. Kesh shot her once through the throat and again through the eye, scorching a third hole through a dirty sacking hood.
As the cultist fell back, a gap emerged in her wake and Kesh quickly exploited it.
‘Forward, forward!’
Revealed through the narrow window in the melee, the Storm Reaper was on his knees. Deep rents scored his armour, leaking eagerly with blood, his axe fallen beside him still crackling with energy but no use to nerveless fingers that could barely grip, let alone heft.
Time seemed to slow for Kesh as he raised his gaze to his killer, a retinal lens in his helm broken and showing the flesh-and-blood man beneath. His eye narrowed with hatred as the traitor stove in his head.
She wanted to turn away, to cry out in anguish and fear, but instead Kesh ran. She ran towards the duel, towards the body of the Storm Reaper tipping sideways, his face a red ruin.
Lodrin and Mavin called after her, so did Munser, his deep voice unmistakable. They were calling her back from her death. But Kesh knew, she knew without any uncertainty, that in this moment the battle would be decided. Allow the dark champion to prevail and the Imperial assault would falter. Already the guns were being retaken, the cultist horde finding courage in their warlord’s victory.
God-Emperor, thought Kesh, and knew not from where the next words came. Let me be thy instrument.
She had holstered her pistol – it would be no use in this fight – and instead reached down for the axe, caged lightning running across its blade. Into her. She felt it sear her skin, send spikes of pain through her arm. Felt its sheer weight, the immense thickness of the grip. She used two hands, shoulders buckling, blade dragging as it spat sparks along the ground…
He laughed as he turned his eyes on her, his baleful mirth like poison in Kesh’s veins. Being close to him, she felt her resolve ebb and knew this creature or some part of its essence had been used to taint the tunnels. They had known, the traitors, and had taken precautions. None of that mattered now.
Kesh scraped the axe, like a child wielding an anchor, and saw her opponent stride towards her. He swung the spike-hammer from hand to hand, like a pendulum counting down to her doom.
Throne… the axe felt as heavy as a battle tank, how could she even raise it?
Around her, the sea of fighters had parted as if they understood on some primal level that they needed to bear witness. Kesh barely saw them. Her eyes were scrunched in pain, her fingertips blackening.
The stench of him was the worst thing, of offal and septic pits. His presence brushed against her as a miasma and Kesh felt that hopelessness again, the despair that had nearly killed them all in the tunnels.
Close now, so close… and Kesh still dragging the axe.
He spoke, the Traitor Marine, said something in his crude language. Words to put teeth on edge. Briefly, she wondered if it was admiration, but she was less than a worm to this warrior. It was amusement, she realised.
The spike-hammer lifted, about to strike its death-knell.
Shoulders and arms seething with agony, Kesh felt her burden lighten. For a fleeting second, she thought she might be dead and this feeling a symptom of the afterlife, but the axe was still in her hands, rising, lightning arcing… She struck, a bolt of such fury that it cut through the Traitor Marine’s war plate and burned through the corruption of his innards.
He died, painfully, horribly, consumed by conflagration and crashing backwards to the ground, still aflame.
A shockwave rippled through the cultist horde, who moaned in dismay, a cry of triumph rising in counterpoint from the Imperials.
Kesh felt light, a pure and pearlescent light. She couldn’t figure out where it was coming from, but it bathed her entirely… And all her doubts fled before its touch.
Chapter Nine
hunted
at least our end will be bloody
susurration
Though it stabbed at his pride, Graeyl Herek, lord of the Red Corsairs, fled.
As a Renegade Astartes, he was unaccustomed to running from his foes, but then again he had not been expecting this foe and certainly not in such force. Someone wanted them dead, and so the hunters had become hunted. A fringe world, a nothing city: he and his brothers had come here seeking slaves. It should have been easy, a minor inconvenience as part of a much longer journey. Then came the ambush and the cold realisation the Red Corsairs were not alone.
They had fought at first, Astartes arrogance coming to the fore, but the first attack had been costly. Bitter-tasting though it was, Herek had ordered his warriors to retreat.
Fall back, regroup, regain the upper hand.
It had bought them a small respite, lost in the warren of unknown city streets.
But the stalkers were coming and they had overwhelmed the Red Corsairs vanguard already. The red and the black of his warriors’ armour had turned mainly to red. Hargul and Unrith were dead, and he doubted Baruss would rise to see the next dawn of this world’s star. Kurgos, the ship’s chirurgeon, carried the gasping warrior on his back without complaint or apparent hardship. Slow and ponderous was Vassago Kurgos, but indomitable.
A rueful smile curled Herek’s mouth at the thought before he patted Rathek on the shoulder as the shadow passed over them from above. The buildings either side were tight and close, but the stalkers weren’t using the streets. They had taken to the rooftops. The swordsman stopped at once, his plated form drenched in gloom as he crouched beneath the ragged awnings that stretched across the narrow market alleyways and looked upwards…
Rathek made the sign for enemy close.
Aren’t they always, Herek thought ruefully.
The Red Corsairs needed fresh crew for the Ruin. They had already been forced to scuttle their other vessel, the Fell Lord, stripping its bones for everything of worth, the cult priests sacrificing the weakest of the slaves in a bid to earn the favour of the gods. And though Herek placed less faith in the deities of Chaos than some of his more zealous followers, he could not deny divine providence would be useful right now.
He had eight in his company, another sixteen spread across the rest of the marketplace in three smaller groups, moving from alcove to alcove, human and Astartes alike. A raiding party, confident in their pre-eminence until the stalkers fell upon them, drawn by only the hells knew what. Now they ran, like dogs. Hurt and bleeding. Trying to remain hidden.
The shadows moved on, the distant hiss of their binharic war-argot fading as they went. The Red Corsairs waited a few moments longer, staying down, never rising much above a crouch.
Gothar had made the error of climbing for the rooftops. The iconoclast had gained the lip but only for a second or two, his headless corpse falling back, neck cauterised with nothing above it but a red mist. Stay down, quiet, goad the attackers to them. Not for the first time since landfall, Herek cursed ever coming to Felsrath and Rancor City.
It had been several weeks since they had left port, buoyed on the success of wrenching his old sword – though in truth something far more significant than that – from the mailed fist of the Black Templars. A hard fight, and ultimately, for Herek, unsatisfying on account of the fact that Morrigan still lived and their feud remained unresolved. Still, a victory was a victory, and taking the sword back from him had felt like a coup.
He had another purpose now, a path he must follow.
At first, Herek had felt destined. Chosen. His previous feats now rang hollow, the Fell Lord a gutted ruin left adrift in the void after a warp storm tore through it, altering a great many of the crew and driving the rest to madness. Some malignancy had befallen them, so said Clortho, and had clung on like barnacles accreting to a ship’s hull.
Herek had begun to suspect he had angered the gods.
And that was before the voices had started.
Gods, he hoped they were his guide and not malicious sirens sent to scuttle him and his warband against the rocks of his ambitions.
Ahead of them the narrow street, flanked by flaking walls, came to an end. The alley mouth widened into a large communal square. They had been here before and in their retreat had somehow doubled back, the vendors’ carts and hawkers stalls upturned or collapsed. The dead remained where the Red Corsairs and their cultists had struck them down. A cohort of local watchmen amongst the bodies, woefully outclassed. Herek felt the bite of irony as he regarded their harrowed faces.
First to the alley mouth, Rathek turned, keeping low with his back pressed as close to the wall as he was able. This was not the path we took, he signed.
He was right. Herek had been driving them towards the heart of the city’s labyrinth, not to this kill-zone. Not for the first time, he shut his eyes and tried to focus. At the edge of his mind, in the liminal borderlands between sleeping and waking, he heard them. The old words from a place unknown, the susurration he had come to call it.
Are you a tether I must follow? Where are you leading me?
Or had they given him that name? The things he knew now, the dark truths purloined from a forbidden realm intruding on his imperilled present, they haunted him.
