Саймон Спуриэр - Fire Warrior

Kais thought, with crystal clarity: I’m going to die .

“Kill me, if you must,” the ethereal said calmly. “My people will retaliate and crush you to dust.”

Severus giggled, idly dragging the tip of the blade across the tau’s flesh, enjoying the pale blue whorls and patterns it opened up in its wake.

The Aun, pinioned by invisible forces in the air, hadn’t cried out once, so far. These things, these tau, they were simply no fun .

Severus glanced at his timepiece.

Ten minutes.

“...tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock...” he muttered, grinning at the tau, then laughed like he’d said the funniest thing in the world. The voice in his head was so loud, now, that he couldn’t honestly say which of the two consciousnesses had been there first of all.

Snarling, the daemon-thing lifted a claw from Kais’s arm and scrabbled at his helmet, perplexed by its inability to get at his head.

“Wannnntt to eeeat your eeeyes...” it hissed, voice barely understandable beneath a drizzle of sputum and blood.

Finding himself with one arm free, Kais scrabbled for a weapon. His gun was out of reach, his knife holstered at his other hip, pressed down by the weight of his enemy. Seeing no other options, he pushed his fist directly into the cavernous wound in its guts, grabbed a handful of slippery vertebrae, and pulled.

It roared. It roared and squealed and shrieked, muscles spasming and arms twitching, tortured nerves sending contradictory messages through its unnatural form. It tried rising with its enormous wings, a thick blood sludge vomiting from its maw across Kais’s optics, but couldn’t control their leathery beating. It jerked and twitched and snarled, forever howling with enough force to shudder Kais’s very brain, but he held on to the brutalised spine with all his dwindling strength, and twisted.

He realised, without any surprise, that he was shrieking and howling just as much as his enemy.

Finally, mercifully, the beast flopped to one side in a tangle of rictus-stiff limbs and matted gore. Kais’s hand was wrapped around the pommel of his knife and tensing before his mind was even fully recovered from its exertions. The Mont’au insanity raised his arm, fed it with all of his remaining strength and brought it down in a glimmering arc.

The Chaos beast’s head sagged from its body with a wet rasp. The thing rustled as it died.

As if responding to some invisible signal, the circular doorway opened slowly, sphincter-muscles relaxing obscenely.

Kais stared out at the very base of the Temple abyss.

Ardias sunk his chainsword into the Traitor Marine’s guts with something like relish. In all the galaxy, of all the myriad enemies that clustered around the frail light of humanity, nothing was as satisfying to purge, he thought, as a traitor.

The thing gurgled a blasphemous oath, shuddered as its guts flopped out of its armour shell, and lay still. Ardias stooped to catch his breath and took a look around the chamber.

Just another crypt, one among dozens, lined with moistness and filth, vague suggestions of organic forms jutting from its walls and slurping doorways pulsing every few moments. If he came out of this alive, by the grace of the Primarch, he’d take great pleasure in overseeing an orbital bombardment of this place.

His descent was taking far too long. Perhaps he’d taken a wrong turn, or lost his bearings amongst the snaking corridors and stairways that he’d travelled, unable to tell which would wend its way back towards the shaft of the abyss, and which coiled endlessly away into the rock and soil of the earth. It was true that his sensors and compass readings were scrambled and confused by whatever foul energies riddled the pit, but he’d served the Emperor’s glory long enough to learn to rely upon his own senses just as much as those of his battle armour. Being lost meant someone was messing with his mind.

“T’au,” he voxed, uncomfortable at the thought. “T’au — are you there?”

“Ardias?” came the stammered reply, thick with interference. “Is that you?”

“Of course it is. Where are you? Are you near the bottom?”

The alien sounded changed, somehow; laughing grimly before answering. “Not near it, human. At it.”

Ardias blinked, surprised yet again by the tau’s resourcefulness. Delpheus’s dying prediction, it would seem, had been correct.

He was just wondering what orders to give the xenogen when the dead Chaos Marine decided it wasn’t dead at all and rose up with a roar.

Ardias, as if from a distance, heard shots, the tinny impart of bolter shells against his armour, the final abortive crackle of the vox-line being severed—

And a sharp pain exploded in his mind.

Everything went black.

Although every conceptual philosophy he had absorbed as a youth told him to scorn such fanciful observations, Shas’el T’au Lusha stood at the edge of the pit and recognised evil . Stretching in a wide bowl, nestled like some unhealed wound in the crux of three flint-covered foothills, the sweeping camber of its lip gave way to an uneven shaft some fifty tor’leks across. A curtain of black fumes and unnatural stinks rose from the abyss like the emissions of a pestilent volcano, detectable even within the confines of the battlesuit. A network of walkways, gouged roughly from the walls of the shaft, turned inwards like mutant ganglia to penetrate the rock itself and vanish into the gloom: bore holes that glowed with green and blue light.

Lusha found himself reciting litanies and sio’t meditations without even thinking. Lessons to bring serenity to his mind, lessons to restore him to equilibrium, lessons to stave off the horror of excess and selfishness, lessons to reaffirm the superiority of the tau’va.

“By the path...” he mumbled, astonished at the vastness of the desolation.

Chittering daemon things, like carrion crows, were gathering in a black pall above the abyss, orbiting the flexing blue-white pillar of energy that rose up from deep underground. Its lightning-bolt gesticulations punctured the very clouds and became fluted and spoutlike, segueing into the sky and sucking at the eye somehow, slurping everything into it little by little.

Lusha wondered vaguely where it led.

His team cast long shadows across the lip of the abyss, the sinking sun painting the sky a piebald red. Like splattered blood.

“El’Lusha...” Vre’Tong’ata commed. “I’ve found something.”

The shas’vre’s suit drifted forwards, mandible fingers extended and holding something small. “It was lying on the floor,” he explained.

El’Lusha mentally commanded his own digits to unfold from their protective sheaths and watched with interest as Tong’ata tipped two fragments of display wafer into his grip.

Placed side by side, it was just possible to make out the cracked message.

“Oh,” he whispered, beginning to understand. “Oh, Kais...”

“What is it, Shas’el?”

He looked back round at the pit, swollen darkness gathering around it like anti-light. “It is a reason, Shas’vre.”

A long range comm warning chimed peacefully, interrupting his thoughts.

“Shas’el? This is the Or’es Tash’var .”

“Ui’Gorty’l?”

“Yes. Shas’el, something’s happened. Whatever was blocking Kais’s signal has vanished. We think it was a gue’la communicator, holding open a channel with the shas’la.”

“And now it’s gone? Can you raise him?”

“Not yet, Shas’el. There’s a lot of interference.”

Lusha took a breath, fighting the adrenaline. “Kor’ui,” he said, keeping his tones measured and calm. “Listen very carefully. Find Fio’el Boran. Tell him to boost the signal. Tell him I need to be able to speak to Shas’la Kais.”