Dan Abnett - Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

At times like this...

How many times has he prayed there would never be any more times like this? The sad truth of the matter, there is only war. There’s always another war to fight. Oll knows this. He knows it better than just about anyone.

Maybe this is it. Maybe Grammaticus was right, for once. Maybe this is the end war. Maybe this will be the last fight.

Krank’s trying to get up. He’s shaken. Oll looks for Rane. He sees the boy being dragged into the shadows by something.

‘It got him, it got him!’ Krank is gabbling.

‘It’s all right,’ Oll tells him, not looking at him, just looking at Rane. ‘Grab the water. Get to the skiff. We’re going.’

The boy might be dead. Might just be passed out. A lasgun won’t do any good now. The thing that’s got him has stepped right out of the warp. Oll doesn’t know what Rane or Krank are seeing. Probably something out of an illuminated bestiary. Oll sees it for what it is. Filthy matter, fused into a humanoid shape, clothed in the trappings of a nightmare. It’s real enough, real enough to kill, but it’s not real all the same. It’s just a reflection in the energy of this world of something out in the Immaterium. Something hungry, and agitated, and impatient to get in.

Call it a daemon, if you like. Too specific a word, really, though maybe that’s all that daemons are.

Oll glances down at the bodies he has killed, the ragged warriors in black. They knew about warp-magick. Not much, but enough to tinker with it. Enough to believe they’d found the unbearable truth. Enough to form a cult, a religion. Enough to lose their minds. Like the idiot Word Bearers. Warp-stuff is pernicious. Once you touch it, it sticks. Hard to ever get it off you again.

The black knives of their brotherhood. Ritual knives. Athames. He picks one up, the nearest, and wedges the pommel of it into his rifle’s barrel. An improvised plug bayonet will do in a pinch. He managed well enough at Austerlitz.

Oll jams it in, then steps forward and rams the black blade into the thing pawing at Rane. Black light spurts in all directions. There is a stink of bad eggs and rotten meat, a cloud of smoke.

The daemon-thing screams like a woman, then dies, and the matter of it collapses into black slime. The stuff is all over Rane, and the boy is out cold. But he’s still got a pulse.

Oll looks around. The girl, Katt, is standing behind him, staring at Rane.

‘Give me a hand carrying him,’ Oll says.

She doesn’t say anything, but she takes hold of Rane’s feet. Zybes appears, fear in his eyes, and helps her with the boy.

Oll yanks what’s left of the knife out of his gun, and tosses it into the soiled water. He touches the symbol at his throat, and murmurs a thanks to his god for deliverance. Adrenaline is spiking in his old limbs. He hates the rush, the burn of it. He thought he was past that nonsense.

He turns back to the skiff. The shooting will have attracted attention, but he reckons they’ve got time to pull clear and head out into the channel.

He sees the knife brother Graft felled. A commander, an officer, the leader of the pack. A majir. Face down. Blood everywhere from that head wound. There’s a knife on the decking beside him, another athame.

But the leader’s is a good one. A crafted one. A special one to mark his authority and significance. It’s a finer thing than the crude ritual spikes the others are wielding, if something so inherently warped and evil can be said to be fine.

It may not be exactly what Oll’s looking for, but it’s the closest he’s seen yet, and he’d be a fool to leave it.

He picks it up, wraps it in a rag, and stuffs it into his thigh pouch.

Three minutes later, the skiff engine rumbles into life, and the boat edges out into the dark water, away from the landing.

Criol Fowst snaps awake. He sits up, pulling his face off the cool, damp decking. There’s blood everywhere, blood all over him. He fingers his scalp, and finds a patch of skull that hurts really badly and shouldn’t be quite so mobile.

He is sick several times.

He knows something’s been taken from him, something very special and precious, something given to him by Arune Xen. Fowst’s future depended on it. He needed it to get all the power and the control he dreamed of possessing.

Someone’s going to die for taking it.

No, worse than die.

Muffled pounding. As if his ears are blocked. As if everything’s foggy. Like blood thumping in his temples.

A noise. A scratchy, reedy noise. It’s a vox. The vox in his helmet. A transmission. What’s it saying?

Ventanus tries to answer. His mouth is numb, slack. He’s upside down. He can smell blood. It’s his.

What is that transmission? What is the message? So tinny, so far away, so muffled.

He struggles to hear. It starts to get louder, louder, sweeping up through the layers that muffle it, like sound coming up through water, until it becomes clear and loud and comprehensible.

‘Samus. That’s the only name you’ll hear. Samus. It means the end and the death. Samus. I am Samus. Samus is all around you. Samus is the man beside you. Samus will gnaw on your bones. Look out! Samus is here.’

‘Who’s talking? Who is this?’ Ventanus stammers. ‘Who’s on this channel? Identify yourself!’

He is lying on the ground, on his back, on a slope of rubble and chewed-up lawn. He’s in the grounds of the palace of Leptius Numinus.

He gets up. Two Ultramarines are dead nearby, one crushed, one torn in half.

Ventanus remembers. He remembers Cxir changing.

He looks around.

The daemon is huge. It’s got immensely long arms, thin and bony, and it walks on them the way a bat uses its furled wings to walk. The twin horns on its head are immense.

It is attacking the palace. It is ripping the front walls down. The collapsing sections spew out in great, dust-thick torrents of stonework and plaster.

Battle-brothers and Army are retreating ahead of it, blasting up at it with everything they have: bolters, las, plasma, hard rounds. The shots pepper and puncture the thing’s grotesque black bulk, but it doesn’t seem to feel the damage inflicted. Ventanus can hear its voice in his ear, gabbling over the vox.

‘Samus. It means the end and the death. Samus. I am Samus. Samus will gnaw on your bones. Look out! Samus is here.’

Ventanus sees Sullus. Sullus has picked up his sword, the sword he used on Cxir. Ventanus knows, he simply knows, that Sullus is trying to make amends for the evil his mistake has unleashed.

Sullus is rushing the daemon, hacking at it.

Ventanus moves forward. He starts to run.

‘Sullus!’ he yells.

Sullus isn’t listening. He is covered in spatters of ichor, hacking at the thing’s rancid flesh.

The daemon finally seems to notice the cobalt-blue figure chopping at the base of its backbone.

It steps on him.

Then it moves on, oblivious to the mass-reactives streaking into its flesh. Another part of the palace frontage crashes down.

Ventanus reaches Sullus. His body is compressed into the lawn in a steaming, scorched depression that oozes slime. He tries to pull him out. Sullus is alive. His armour has protected him, though there are crush injuries. Bones are broken.

Ventanus hears a crash and a trundling sound. One of the Shadowswords ploughs into the palace grounds. It has come over the bridge, and rammed down the gatehouse to get into the compound. It has brought down the gate the Word Bearers lost hundreds trying to destroy.

The superheavy rumbles across the mangled lawns, knocking down some of Sparzi’s emplacements. It lines up its volcano cannon. Ventanus hears the characteristic sigh-moan of the capacitors charging for a shot.