Deathwatch (38 page)

Karras looked at him, surprised by the tone. ‘I’m listening.’

‘Back in the xenos nest, after the horde broke away to hunt you and Watcher, something caught my eye. There was a cave deep at the back. I noticed it when I was clearing out the last of the genestealers. I took a quick look.’

‘And?’ asked Karras.

‘Talon Two, Three and Four are aboard,’ reported Reaper One. ‘What’s that? Alpha, please hold. We’re having some kind of trouble with the lines.’

Zeed continued. ‘There were several pods there, made of metal. No chitin. These were not tyranid things. They looked more like one-man boarding torpedoes – a diamonite drill for a nose and all the hallmarks of human construction. Big enough for genestealers, Scholar. In fact, when I looked inside, there were marks consistent with genestealers having broken out from within.’ The silence that followed his words was thick and heavy with unspoken implications.

A single line dropped down the shaft now. The slack hit the floor in front of them.

‘Some kind of trouble with the winches, Alpha,’ voxed Reaper One. ‘Damned strange. We’ve had to drop a manual line. You and Five will need to pull yourselves up.’

Karras ordered Zeed to go first. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’

But Zeed wasn’t finished talking. He moved to the rope and grabbed it, but there he stopped and asked, ‘You see it, don’t you?’

I see it
, thought Karras sourly.
The Inquisition. The Ordo Xenos.

The genestealer infestation on Chiaro had been deliberate, engineered by men against men. But, in the name of Holy Terra, why?

‘They’ll burn this place out,’ continued Zeed, tugging the line to make sure it was secure. ‘The mines are almost dry now anyway. It must be why they chose this planet. They won’t wait long once we’re gone. They can’t afford the truth getting out. No one else is getting off this rock. Not after us.’

‘Exterminatus,’ murmured Karras to himself. The word carried a chill all of its own. A whole world purged of life. Extreme, but what other recourse was there, he supposed, when the civilian population was infected with genestealer taint? It could be rooted out no other way, and it was far too dangerous to risk the chance, even remote, that it might get off-world somehow.

He thought of the woman they had worked so hard to recover, and of the alien creature readying to tear its way out of her womb. Would he ever know why it had been so important to retrieve her? Would he ever know exactly how he and his team had served the Emperor’s Will? They had risked their lives, stood on the edge of the abyss and faced their end. Did they not deserve to know? And if Karras ever did discover why, would he feel it justified that a whole planet would pay the price for the games the Inquisition had played here?

That seemed unlikely.

‘Say no more on this, Ghost. For now, at least. I’ve a feeling Sigma monitors all we say and do. Nowhere on the
Saint Nevarre
is secure. For now, just keep your eyes and ears open. Even the best surgeon makes occasional mistakes. Sigma had best be careful lest he get cut by his own scalpel one day.’

‘Count on it, Scholar.’

The Raven Guard began his climb, his own muscles working in perfect concert with the tireless artificial fibre-bundles beneath his ceramite plate. Within moments, he was high above Karras, and now the kill-team leader gripped the rope and began his own climb. He was only slightly slower than the Raven Guard, but then nobody moved quite as fast as Siefer Zeed.

Karras had pulled himself some fifteen metres from the ground, and was just about to pass beyond the lower lip of the vent shaft when, suddenly, he stopped. He felt something sharp, bitter, pricking at his psychic awareness; a sense of something deeply wrong. It was only the briefest instant, but in that instant, he knew his sense of victory back at RP2 had been premature.

There was a rushing of air from below. Something powerful grasped his armoured ankle and, with terrifying physical force, hauled him from the rope.

Karras fell two metres and crashed into his attacker. The clip on his webbing cinched tight, arresting a further fall.

He whipped his head around to see the broodlord glaring up at him, spitting and twitching violently as it clung to the rope just below him. The fall into margonite-infused waters had not killed it, but immersion in that dangerous and corrosive solution had melted its flesh horribly and given it an unearthly white glow. Gleaming bone poked out between ragged gaps in the creature’s scorched flesh. The stumps where Karras had severed two of its wrists were horribly burned and withered. The other pair of arms, however, still with their sharp-clawed, five-fingered hands, were very much intact and still every bit as lethal.

Releasing its grip on the rope with one of these hands, the beast batted savagely at Karras, once, twice. He spun wildly. His weapons were knocked away and plummeted to clatter hard on the stone of the chamber floor below – all but his combat knife, sheathed on his right greave.
Arquemann
’s strap was severed by the beast’s second strike. Karras felt the force sword spin away from him and turned to see where it fell. The blade struck the floor point-first and lodged itself deep and hard in the stone. Karras’s hearts sank. He knew his talents would not be able to call the blade back to his hand. Not now.

‘Scholar,’ shouted Zeed from further up the rope.

The Raven Guard had reversed his climb. He was moving downwards again.

The broodlord lunged, attempting to pass Karras completely and grasp the rope above him, and Karras realised with a start that it did not simply want to kill them all. It was attempting to retrieve the body of the woman. It wanted the unborn thing inside her.

But, as the ruined creature leapt past him, Karras grabbed it and grappled with it, desperate to prevent its ascent. The accursed alien was still physically stronger by far, despite its dreadful wounds. It thrashed and struggled, and beat at Karras with the disfigured limbs that could not clutch the rope.

Karras saw no other option. Right here, right now, he had but a single chance to ensure the mission’s success. The cost would be great, but the Black River claimed all in the end – even those who had returned before from its furious astral waters.

With a roar of defiance, he drew his combat knife, stretched up and, gripping the broodlord tight with his other arm, cut the rope with a single hard slash.

Together, they tumbled backwards, plunging to cold, hard rock.

The monster screamed in rage. It was a scream that cut of abruptly when the ground leapt up to strike them both. The impact was brutal. Karras grunted, felt bones shatter. His knife skittered away. Even power armour couldn’t protect him completely from a fall like that.

Pain surged through him. Warning glyphs flashed red on his left retina. His right eye was blind. He didn’t know why. Several of his armour’s subsystems were non-functional. Main systems and motor controls were reporting progressive drops in efficiency. The suit’s joints were starting to lock up.

Heavy footfalls – clawed toes on blood-slicked stone – sounded near Karras’s head. He looked up with one eye.

The beast stood over him, trembling in rage and pain.

Just one more hideous terror in a galaxy filled with them,
thought Karras.
It is not your destiny to rule, monster. Only man can rise above his bestial instincts. Only man can ascend to a higher state of consciousness. For man alone, there is hope of salvation. That is why you and your kind will lose. Always. The future belongs to man.

The tyranid broodlord crouched over him and raised its clawed hands, ready to rip his armour open like foil and tear the organs from his flesh.

Karras had little life left in him, but he fought back with the only weapon that remained in reach.

He let the power of the immaterium flow through him.

White balefire rose from his body. It flared across his battered armour, and he bent all his will towards the destruction of the beast that was standing over him.

The air crackled with all that ethereal power. Karras heard voices taunting him, voices from the warp, the dark domain from which his power flowed. It was always a risk, always had been, but he was ready for that. He had been trained for it. He cast his inner gates wide and let more of the power flow through him. He turned his mind to the mantras with which the mighty Athio Cordatus had taught him to protect himself.

The broodlord staggered, buffeted by the rising psychic surge. Immediately, the monster turned to its own powerful gifts and battle was joined between the two one last time.

Dimly, Karras could hear voices calling to him on the link, but it was no good. There was nothing they could do for him now. They had the package. They had to get away while the broodlord was held here. Success had a price. Today, the price was his life, as he had always known it would one day be.

The ground beneath the two bitter enemies began to shudder. The stone floor started to crack and chip. Small loose rocks began rising up into the air, lifted on currents of psychic fire. Dust and dirt began to rain down in great drifts from fresh cracks in the chamber’s domed ceiling and in the lip of the vent shaft.

Karras sensed a surge in the broodlord’s power, fuelled by raw animal rage. The resonance of the unborn xenos parasite was moving away from their location. Reaper One was withdrawing. The broodlord had lost.
Operation Night Harvest
, whatever its true purpose might be, had come to a close. Talon Squad had succeeded.

Now it was time to end this properly, and there was only one way left.

‘I die in battle,’ Karras spat at the creature. ‘And in so doing, earn my rebirth.’

He opened the gates of his mind as wide as he could, far further than he had even risked before. The flow of power was a crashing, raging tide now. The mocking voices from the warp grew louder, closer. The ground beneath him shook as if caught in the middle of a massive seismic cataclysm.

‘We die here together, xenos filth,’ roared Karras, ‘but of the two, only I will live again!’

Great, lethal chunks of rock began to tumble from the ceiling, smashing into the ground to shatter with all the force that weight and gravity could muster.

The beast fought back, its own power rising to meet the flow of Karras’s own, strength for strength.

Karras could channel no more. He gave himself over completely to the power that flowed through him, hoping it would be enough. He felt unseen things closing on him from a great distance, but their speed was immeasurably high. He prayed that he and the broodlord would die before his soul was forfeit.

The thick ceiling of the chamber gave a great heave above them and collapsed completely. Absolute finality tumbled towards the locked combatants, thousands of tonnes of sharp black rock spinning end-over-end. Karras loosed a final, raw-throated shout:

‘I fear not death, I who–’

He didn’t finish it.

Silence.

No more chittering voices to drive him mad. No more crashing surge of psychic power testing the limits of his strength and sanity. Nothing.

Just silence.

Silence and pain.

Karras knew death when he felt it. He had embodied it for over a century. He had passed through its dark veil to prove himself worthy of the name Death Spectre. And now he felt it rage through his system, all white fire and black ice, at once burning and freezing his flesh to the deepest core. His plate armour was pierced and torn, the claws of the frenzied tyranid abomination more than equal to the task of ripping a full suit of Space Marine power armour to pieces. One of his hearts – his primary – was all but demolished, and his secondary heart, the organ known as the
Maintainer
, struggled to keep him alive while so much of his blood ran free. Great sticky pools of dark red welled up from the jagged rents in his ceramite shell. The blood itself was far from normal. Even now, the powerful coagulants it contained allowed it to clot, sealing wounds that should have killed him already. But it was too late. Karras had buried himself and the tyranid broodlord in an impossibly deep grave. Here they would lie, tangled in death. But that was all right. To Karras, even this was a victory. He had taken his foe with him. This abomination, at least, would threaten the Imperium no more.

Ah, I hear them. I hear the waters around me now.

His consciousness pulled free of his ruined body and slid beyond the physical world into that familiar passage which led to the next. It was the Black River. All around him, the great cylinder of dark water surged and splashed. He felt it pulling him.

The broodlord had no presence here.

Of course, it doesn’t. As if such a blight on reality could possess a soul!

But there
was
something else here. As Karras was pulled along by the surging currents of the Black River, he became aware of something vast and powerful shifting into his reality from somewhere else. Dread filled him. He had sensed such a presence the last time he had died. Across a century, the memory of that battle on the edge of oblivion returned to him. This thing, this new presence, had the same foul air of that other, and yet this one was far more powerful. Karras knew at once, as the thing began to materialise before him, that here was an enemy he could not overcome.

Its voice, when it finally addressed him, was the voice of a great multitude surrounding him on all sides. The dark waters themselves grew agitated at the sound. Everything seemed to shake and judder, and the pain Karras thought he had left behind with his ruined physical body came suddenly back to him, only now magnified many times with each word the dark being spoke.

‘Lyandro Karras,’ it hummed and cracked. ‘First Codicier of the Death Spectres. Son of Occludus. How exquisite your pain!’

It laughed, and the sound was like a thousand burning needles thrusting into one’s flesh.

‘Would that I could linger to enjoy it,’ the presence continued. ‘But I did not breach the boundaries of time and space and interfere in your escape merely to take pleasure in your torment. A greater prize I seek, and nothing else will content me.’

Karras could make little of this. The words themselves were agony to him. He tried to will himself past the being, to be swept swiftly into the eternal Afterworld by the raging waters of the tunnel, but he was fixed firm, and no amount of psychic struggle could free him. He tried to fix his awareness on the dark form now hovering before him, but he could hardly look at it. Something almost physical and utterly irresistible forced his senses away every time.

He did manage to get a sense of the thing, though it made little true sense at all.

Three faces. Five horns. Seven wings. All black as a moonless, starless night.

The black of the void.

The being laughed again, revelling in the inability of the human mind to comprehend both its power and its form.

‘You are not dead yet, Lyandro Karras,’ the terrible voice said. ‘Even now, your physical form fights to remain alive. Will you rise again? Ah, you may just. Only, when you do, you will carry a message for me, for there is one known to you who owes me a debt – a very great debt indeed.’

Karras railed at this lunacy. He was no messenger of daemons. Better that he die once and for all. Let the Black River sweep him away right now. ‘I shall carry no message for the likes of you,’ he hissed. ‘Release me or destroy my soul completely, but you will have nothing from me!’

The being squeezed close around him, and Karras’s mind howled with fresh agony.

‘You
will
carry this message, Librarian, or I will bring a doom on your beloved Chapter that you can scarcely imagine. Centuries of agony and dishonour, I will rain down on them. They will not escape my wrath for a second. It will not begin today, of course. What is doom without a little anticipation, after all? Let it take a decade to begin. Perhaps even longer. But it will come, a fate so black that their name will be expunged from the records, and it shall be on your head.’

‘Empty words, daemon,’ spat Karras.

‘You know better,’ replied the presence. ‘There is much the Death Spectres endeavour to keep secret. But it is not so secret as you think. So, you will deliver this message for me, or I will deliver your oh-so-venerable brotherhood into misery, torment and eternal damnation.’

Karras howled in anger and pain. ‘I deny you! The words of Chaos sit only on the tongues of liars and traitors. You know nothing. Emperor of Man, deliver me unto silent oblivion. Cut me free from this monstrosity!’

The daemon delighted in this. Its laugh was so deep and potent that it distorted even the shape of the Black River, stretching it here, compressing it there, so that it flexed and strained such as Karras had never seen it do before. There could be no greater testament to the power of this entity. And then it said something that robbed Karras of any confidence he had left.

‘The Shariax,’ it gloated. ‘Such a burden to those who sit upon it.’

Karras fought to stay silent, though a screaming denial echoed in his mind.

‘Even now, its power leeches life from your beloved Chapter Master. So it has been with all the First Spectres. Foolish Corcaedus. There is a great price to be paid for sitting on the Glass Throne. Yet the Death Spectres are ever willing to pay it, terrible as it is. And all because of the vision that drove your founder to the very border of madness!’

How can it know this?
thought Karras.
Occludus is protected. No daemon could have manifested on such sacred ground. We would have known.

‘What would the Inquisition do, I wonder, on learning of the Shariax? What would your vaunted Lords of Terra think?’ Again, it laughed and the sound was a raw, oozing malevolence pressing in on Karras’s mind, smothering it, choking it. ‘So you
will
carry my message, Lyandro Karras. You will carry it, or we shall discover the terrible power of a secret revealed.’

Karras said nothing. He could find no words. His mind spun. There could be no compact with this abhorrent thing. He could not stain his soul. Far better he were unmade entirely, wiped from existence as if he had never been. But hoping for such was futile. Here he was, and he could do nothing to change it.

Naught but hope for final death. Then, at least, the role of messenger will not fall to me.

The daemon read his thoughts.

‘No,’ it said simply. ‘You shall not die. I have already apportioned some part of my power to sustain you. My strength supplements your own, fuelling your recovery. And I have compelled others, your fellows, to seek you out. They dig even now.’ Again, that laugh, so painful, like splashes of acid on open wounds. ‘Ever after, you shall owe your survival to me, Librarian. Let the knowledge burn inside you until you do as I have asked.’

Karras could stand no more of this. His sanity was at breaking point. If he lost it, fragile as it currently was, he would be open to full possession. ‘Speak your damned message and be gone, warp abomination. I will deliver it or I will not, but speak it now and free me, curse you!’

‘Then listen well, insect, for such you are to me. You will tell that treacherous Exorcist cur, Darrion Rauth, that I have forgotten neither him nor his debt. You will tell him this: I will not be denied. What is owed me shall be paid in full. I, Hepaxammon, Prince of Sorrows, will
not
be denied!’

With these last words, the daemon’s rage was so great that Karras almost lost himself completely. Countless inner voices invaded his mind, overwhelming it, repeating over and over and over, ‘Hepaxammon will not be denied!’

He felt himself diminish, felt his identity, his very consciousness, being drowned out, eroded, burned away. He struggled to grasp hold of it, repeating to himself the mantra that had defined so much of his life – his Chapter’s motto:

I fear not death, I who embody it in His name.

I fear not death, I who embody it in His name.

I fear not death…

‘…you who embody it in His name!’ boomed a fresh voice. It was powerful, all-consuming, almost like that of the daemon Hepaxammon, but this was a single voice, not a multitude, and each word pulsed with soft white light that burned away Karras’s agony. Each word muffled the dreadful sound of the daemon’s many voices. Muffled them until there were none left at all.

Then something most unlikely intruded over all else.

Karras heard the clapping of pinion feathers.