For those lucky few, freedom had been short-lived, but they returned with tales of blood and carnage, with immateria-axes stained gore-red, with words of violence and hunger for killing. It fortified the rest of the prisoners, giving them hope and anticipation.
He’d howled away his bloodlust into the warp prison, watching as second by second his release grew nearer. Three millennia had been a long time to wait.
This Severus, this pawn of the Master, this small thing with its books and its incantations, this fur-hung fooclass="underline" it gashed apart the throat of a single man-thing and the prison collapsed, the walls splintered with warpfire fury, the inchoate empyrean beyond wafted and grasped and—
Keraz the Violator was born into reality with a roar and a shriek and a neck-splitting lunge that pulverised in an instant the years and years of inactivity. The blood flowed and the world screamed and he laughed and laughed and laughed.
There were xenogens here: grey-faced things that cowered and shivered in his shadow. It didn’t matter. Blood is blood is blood. Red or grey or green or black, he didn’t care; it gushed and gouted, its rain splatter a cherished baptism against his armour, its slick ebbings hanging in matted chords from the chains wrapping his gauntlets. There was gunfire, somewhere. More of his brothers, emerging behind him. Less devoted, undoubtedly. Theirs was a service of command and obedience, an undivided gaggle of beliefs controlling their actions. They lacked Keraz’s devotion to a single aspect of their dark pantheon.
Blood for the Blood God!
Skulls for the Throne of Bone!
As inescapable as the night, the madness came upon him. Gunfire couldn’t hurt. Plasma orbs and pulse shots were a background staccato, rattling on his armour ineffectually. Only the killing was real.
A figure stepped into his path; a shape shrouded in a torus of energy and protective power that stayed his bloody hand, forcing a bellow of fury from his ancient guts. He recognised through the red haze the pinched features of Severus, his liberator, and tried to turn away to find a new plaything to crush, a new morsel to dissect.
“Stop,” the man said, and unbidden his feet obeyed. He had no choice. His roar of anger quaked through the world. Severus smiled, enjoying himself. “Take these ones. Take them to the planet surface.” He pointed to a dark recess, blood-splattered walls shadowing a pair of figures, and then he was gone, stepping lightly through the shimmering portal.
Keraz hefted his axe, chain edge shrieking, arrow wedge shadow falling across the cringing shapes. One was human, he saw without caring, old features open in terror, grey moustache quivering in a silent moan. The other was xeno, standing rigid and tense but betraying not a hint of fear.
It didn’t matter. Terror wasn’t compulsory — only blood mattered.
But the axe never came down — at its zenith the words of power gripped his body and Severus’s command overcame him. As meek as a lamb, but raging and boiling within, he dragged the two figures into the portal and vanished in a gust of energy and heat.
Kais was too late.
His mind still couldn’t be operating properly, surely. Surely he was too overwhelmed by this sudden escalation of events, this inexplicable horror. Surely that was why nothing was making any sense.
Figures appearing from nowhere, fluttering creatures cackling and gibbering, everywhere was blood and fire and hate. He thought, am I going mad?
Perhaps.
Whispers like cobwebs, like dessicated corpse talk, like the papery rustling of a million inserts, filled his mind. Perhaps this was a gue’la trick? Some hitherto unknown technology and resource they’d concealed from tau intelligence until it was needed? Yes — yes, that must be it.
A hidden army of berserk monstrosities, waiting to be unleashed; a cunning deceit they’d arranged to ensnare the Aun and crush the tau... He wondered briefly if El’Lusha and the others, still aboard the Or’es Tash’var, would concur. This was the remit of Auns and shas’os, not of flawed shas’las.
But...
But that wasn’t right... As he stumbled through twisted corridors, humans were screaming and dying, black monstrosities sweeping from glowing portals to murder the terrified paleskins, dragging them away to Aun-knows-where. And things, vermin with red-scale skin and spiny thorns, fluttered and swooped, scavenging amongst the bodies for flesh. They left trails of slime and pus as they crawled, chattering and giggling like infants.
Reaching the concilium was a blur. Had he slept? Was he, perhaps, dreaming? Where was the scowling blue-armoured Space Marine? In all this bedlam Kais would have welcomed a familiar face, even one so threatening as Ardias’s.
Towering devils. Black-on-red-on-rust armour. Eyes like volcanoes. Axes and guns and blades and claws. Spines and chains and leering skulls. Shadow Marines. Hate Marines. Pain Marines.
The voice in his brain, hissing and whispering, fluctuated and diminished — a poison echo like a ringing in his ear. He wondered if everyone could hear it, or if this was some awful new symptom of his madness.
The Enduring Blade had become distilled insanity, everywhere the clamour of screams and blood and gunfire. Even encased once again in the comforting envelope of his helmet, even cradling the blocky meltagun he’d found decs before, the fear bubbled up in him and refused to cave in to an assault of meditation and litany. He was running scared.
Portals like great sucking lips opened on every side, smacking together wetly and disgorging their cackling cargo, ghost trails of warp and plasmic splatter following them.
Oh, he was scared of death, that much was true. Scared of pain and oblivion. Scared of the laughing black-armoured devils with their glowing eyes — so like the Space Marines yet so different. Scared of insanity and madness and rage. Scared of failure.
But more than that, scared of himself.
In his darkest dreams, in his soul, this was how he imagined the Mont’au. As he ran for the boardroom, hooves clamouring on the deck, wounded leg forgotten in the rush, he saw the ember-eyed hulks twisting to face him, pausing in their bloody carnage, weapons raised, and each time there came a hesitation: a split-raik’an pause in which, he knew, the armoured creatures were staring at his battered form, his blood encrusted wargear, his crater-dented helmet, wondering—
Which side is he on?
But he was gone and sprinting before the hesitation was over, and the gunfire was just a distant chatter at his back.
Ignore the screams.
Ignore the whispering.
Get to the ethereal. Save the ethereal. Focus. Concentrate.
The door to the boardroom wouldn’t open. Stomping footsteps closed in behind him. Something cackled nearby. Moving without thinking, he opened fire with the meltagun, dragging its slipstream of boiling air across the immovable bulkhead beside the door. A ruddy glow appeared wherever it touched, oxidising treatments skittering across the metal in a ballet of blue fire circlets. It was too thick to succumb to the assault.
A wide pipe above the sealed doorway clicked and clattered, bruised metal protesting at the conflicting expansion and contraction of its heating and cooling surfaces. Kais shrugged mentally and turned the gun on the conduit directly, its searing melta stream puckering and flaying the metal.
The thing behind him came around the corner.
The pipe ruptured and a flare of promethium flashed across his vision. The explosion hurled him off his feet, toppling him backwards. Everything tumbled downwards in his helmet display, a blur of metal and flame. His back found the deck with a breath-exploding thump, curling him over in a ball. A sheet of fire vomited overhead: a horizontal geyser of burning vapours sprouting from the ruptured pipe. The black-metal monster behind him shrieked as the fire lance struck it head-on, mashing it against the corridor wall like a swatted beetle.