Descent of Angels (42 page)

Then followed a series of transfers, as she had been handed reverently from one set of arms to another, until she had been laid against an upright slab of what felt like smooth stone.

She stood with her back to the slab of stone, the sound of a slow and terrible heartbeat booming in the air, as though she were trapped in the ribcage of some enormous beast. Her hands were untied, though they had been secured to the stone slab by some metallic clamps fixed with sliding bolts.

Hands gently cradled her face, and she shuddered at the touch.

She felt her blindfold being removed and blinked in the sudden light.

Before her, she saw a man in a crimson robe with a mask of gold, expressionless and unknowable, on his face.

‘Dusan?’ she asked, more in hope than in any expectation of being right.

‘Yes,’ said the masked man. ‘It is me you speak with.’

Even in this nightmarish situation it made her want to cry to hear a familiar voice.

‘Please,’ she cried. ‘What are you doing? Let me go, please.’

‘No, that cannot be,’ said Dusan. ‘You are to become the Melachim, a vessel for the ancient ones who dwell behind the veil. You will bring us victory against the unclean ones.’

‘What are you talking about? This doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Not to you,’ agreed Dusan. ‘You are godless people and this is a godly act.’

‘Your god?’ said Rhianna. ‘Please, let me go. I promise I won’t say anything.’

‘You lie with your words,’ said Dusan neutrally. ‘It is the way with your people.’

‘No!’ shouted Rhianna. ‘I promise.’

‘It makes no difference now. Most of your people are dead and the rest must soon follow when you host the Melachim. As I said, there will be pain, and for that I am sorry.’

‘What are you going to do to me?’

Though she could not see his face, Rhianna had the distinct impression that Dusan was smiling behind the immobile surface of his mask.

‘We are going to defile you,’ he said, pointing upwards. ‘Your impure flesh will be home to one of
our
angels.’

She followed his gaze and wept tears of blood as she saw the angel of the Saroshi.

TWENTY-THREE

T
HE DARKNESS OF
the mineshaft was no obstacle to the Dark Angels, their armour senses easily compensating for the utter blackness beneath the cliffs. Each step took them deeper into the planet’s surface and brought retribution for all the deaths suffered at the hands of the Saroshi treachery closer.

Zahariel felt the psychic power beneath the earth as an actinic tang in the roof of his mouth, an unpleasant taste of rancid meat and corruption. He glanced over at Brother-Librarian Israfael and saw that he too suffered the vile reek of the warp.

Israfael’s Stormbird had touched down barely moments after the Lion’s order had been issued, a team of servitors and Mechanicum adepts helping to deploy the modified cyclonic warhead from the aircraft’s interior.

Zahariel had been reminded of the bomb secreted in the Saroshi shuttle when he had first seen the device. It resembled an ovoid cylinder strapped to a hovering gurney with chain link restraints. Numerous wires and copper-plated tubes surrounded the device, and Zahariel could plainly see why it could not have been dropped from the air.

Without any words spoken, they had set off into the depths of the world, the Lion leading the way as the angels began their descent.

The going was easy, and Zahariel wondered what the Saroshi were doing beneath the world. Mistress Argenta had spoken of creatures being dragged from the empyrean and given material form, and though such things sounded like the dark nightmares of madmen and lunatics, the things he had seen on the surface had made him rethink that comforting delusion.

If such things were possible, what other kinds of creature might lurk in the depths of the warp? What manner of powers might yet exist there, of which humanity was not yet aware?

Their path wound deeper and deeper into the ground, and the Dark Angels travelled in silence, each warrior wrapped in a cocoon of his own thoughts. Zahariel kept company with his worries that an irreparable gulf had opened between Luther and the Lion, for the two warriors were normally inseparable, yet here was the Lion going into battle without his brother.

Zahariel had told no one of what Luther had told him in the moments before the Saroshi bomb had activated, and he feared for what the future might hold if that fact came to light. Indeed, it might have already come to the Lion’s notice, for little escaped his understanding.

He forced such gloomy thoughts from his mind as the Lion raised his hand to indicate a halt. The Lion sniffed the air and nodded.

‘Blood,’ he said. ‘Lots of it.’

The Dark Angels advanced more cautiously, their bolters held at the ready, fingers on triggers. Soon Zahariel could smell what his primarch had sensed earlier, and he gagged on the powerful scent of old, rotten blood. A dim glow built from ahead, and the passageway widened until it opened into a great archway that led into a cavern thick with a miasma of fine smoke.

Only as Zahariel approached did he realise that the smoke was in fact etheric energies, visible only to Israfael and himself. The rest of the Dark Angels appeared oblivious to the drifting clouds of smoke, the twists and curls of it imbued with agonised suffering and fear. Perhaps the Lion could see it too, for his gaze seemed to follow the drifting trails of pain and anguish traced in the smoke.

The Dark Angels entered the cavern, and the mystery of what had become of Sarosh’s missing population was a mystery no more.

The enormous space vanished into the distance left and right, illuminated by glaring strip lights hanging from the cavern’s roof. Steel walkways crossed an immense chasm that was filled almost to the brim with dead bodies, millions of dead bodies.

It was impossible to say how many, for the depth of the chasm was beyond sight, but Zahariel remembered Kurgis of the White Scars talking of a figure in the region of seventy million missing people. Could this be the remains of so many?

It seemed inconceivable that so many dead could have been secreted here, but the evidence was right before them.

‘Throne alive!’ swore the Lion. ‘How—’

‘The missing people,’ said Nemiel. ‘Zahariel, so many…’

Zahariel felt his emotions rushing to the surface and quelled them savagely. An Astartes was trained to control his emotions in a combat situation, but the sheer volume and density of the fear emanating from the endless chasm of the dead was overpowering.

‘Steady, Zahariel,’ said Israfael, appearing at his side. ‘Remember your training. These emotions are not yours, so shut them out.’

Zahariel nodded and forced himself to concentrate, whispering the mantras he had been taught by Israfael over the years of his transformation into an Astartes. Gradually, the feeling subsided, only to be replaced with a towering sense of furious righteousness.

‘We move out,’ said the Lion, heading for the nearest of the gantries crossing the chasm. His footfalls on the metal echoed loudly in the cavern, and the Dark Angels followed their primarch further into the depths.

Zahariel kept his gazed averted from the ocean of corpses, though he could not completely shut out the anguished echoes of their deaths. Whatever came next, whatever death and destruction the Angels of Death visited upon the heads of the Saroshi, it would not be nearly enough.

R
HIANNA
’
S SCREAMS CAME
from the heart of her being, for the sight above her was so hideous, so unnatural that it defied any understanding. The entire roof of the cavern was covered with what appeared to be a creature of translucent mucus, its surface gelatinous and festooned with a million unblinking eyes.

It occupied the roof of the chamber like some enormous parasite, hundreds of metres in diameter, and it seemed to shift and ooze so that its boundaries were fluid. Dripping tendrils like writhing tentacles hung down from the body of the vast, amorphous… thing that filled the air with nonsensical hissing, hooting and buzzing sounds.

Stars glistened within its body, distant lights of long dead galaxies swirling in its depths, like morsels devoured in ages past and not yet digested. Her breath came in short, painful gasps as she fought to hold onto her sanity in the face of something so utterly wrong, something that plainly should not be.

‘What… what…?’ she gasped, unable to force her mind to think of the right words.

‘That is the Melachim…’ breathed Dusan, his voice full of reverence and love. ‘It is the angel from beyond that will defile your flesh and wear it as a cloak to walk amongst us.’

Rhianna wept, and as the trails reached her lips, she knew that she wept blood.

‘No, please… don’t,’ she pleaded. ‘You can’t.’

Dusan nodded. ‘Your vocabulary is incomplete. We can. We will.’

‘Please stop,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to do this.’

The Saroshi cocked his head to one side, as though digesting her words and trying to find the meaning.

‘Ah,’ he said, pointing to the masked figures that surrounded her. ‘You have misunderstood. It has already begun.’

O
NCE ACROSS THE
gantries that spanned the chasm of bodies and into the narrow tunnels that plunged into the deep, Zahariel felt the echoes of the dead begin to fade. They were still there, pressing at the walls of his skull, but he could feel them recede. At first, he was grateful for this, but then he realised that they were simply being drowned out by something stronger and more insistent.

It felt as though a hammer had been taken to his head.

Zahariel dropped to one knee, a blinding spike of pain shooting through his head as if someone had jammed a hot skewer into his ear.

Brother Israfael staggered under the psychic assault, but remained on his feet, the psy-damping mechanism wired into his helmet protecting him from the worst of the pain.

‘My lord!’ gasped the Librarian. ‘It has begun… the xeno creature from the warp. It is attempting to pass fully into our world.’

‘You’re sure?’ asked the Lion.

‘I’m sure,’ affirmed Israfael. ‘Right, Zahariel?’

‘It’s definitely coming,’ said Zahariel through gritted teeth.

‘Then we have no time to waste,’ said the Lion, turning and picking up the pace.

Zahariel used the cavern walls to pull himself upright, his mental wards no use against the force of the power filling the air around him.

Nemiel reached out to him and said, ‘Here, brother, take my hand.’

Zahariel gratefully accepted his cousin’s hand. ‘Just like old times, eh?’

Nemiel grinned, but Zahariel could sense the awkwardness behind the gesture. He hauled himself to his feet and tried to shake off the dread feeling building in the pit of his stomach.

The Lion was already some distance ahead and Zahariel had to jog as fast as he was able to catch up. Every step was painful, his wounds and burns from the embarkation deck not yet healed, despite his speeding metabolism. Worse than this was the psychic pain that seeped into his very pores, against which his armour offered no protection.

The deeper the Dark Angels ventured into the depths, the more insistent the sound became, and Zahariel hoped that Brother Israfael’s device could defeat it. He spared a glance over his shoulder to ensure that the hover gurney and its servitors were keeping pace with the Astartes.

The lobotomised servitors appeared not to feel the soul-deep anguish of this place, and Zahariel envied them. The electro-psychic pulse weapon gleamed in the half-light, and he shivered at the fearsome potential he could feel in the warhead.

From ahead, Zahariel could hear the sounds of voices and a throbbing noise that reverberated through every sense and even those beyond human understanding.

A sickly light, unhealthy and life-draining, filled the chamber ahead, spilling into the tunnel that the Dark Angels descended like a slick. The Lion was first into the cavern, with Nemiel a close second.

Brother Israfael followed the primarch, and the remainder of the Dark Angels swiftly joined their battle-brothers.

A wave of revulsion flowed through Zahariel as he emerged into the cavern, though he was not the source of that emotion. It washed from the robed figures that surrounded an upright slab of dark, veined stone as they chanted and sang a hideous chorus around a screaming woman bound to the slab.

Zahariel followed the howling gaze of the Saroshi’s prisoner and felt a crawling, sick horror as he saw the source of the monstrous evil that dwelled in this forgotten, red-lit cavern beneath the world.

Its jelly-like body was like that of some deep ocean trench-dweller, shimmering, apparently fragile, and lit from within by bursts of coloured, electric light. A million eyes stared out from its hideous form, and he could feel its raw hunger as a gnawing ache in his chest. Even as he watched, the outline of the creature was fading, but instead of a sense of triumph, Zahariel knew that it was close to achieving its goal of translation.

Where others, including Zahariel, remained paralysed by the horrific sight of the creature above, the Lion was already in motion. His pistol shot down two of the robed and masked figures as they chanted, and his sword flashed into his hand as he charged.

Seeing their primarch in action spurred the Dark Angels to follow, and with a fearsome war cry they leapt to the attack.

Pistols blazed and swords glittered in the dead light of the monster above, but as each of the masked chanters died, Zahariel sensed a dreadful amusement course through the air.

The masked figures made no attempt at defence, and Zahariel was seized with a sudden conviction as to why, as he looked into the agonised eyes of the woman bound to the upright slab.

Her face was stretched in a soundless scream, her eyes empty and glassy, as though filled with black ink. Dark power floated in her eyes, and as Zahariel looked into her, something inhuman looked back.

Zahariel raised his pistol, but even as the monstrous essence of the creature on the roof of the cave began to pour into its host, something of the woman surfaced for the briefest second, and a moment of connection passed between them, more profound than Zahariel had ever experienced before, or ever would again.