“Yes, youngling yess...” he grinned, nodding. “For you, anything.”
The spirit hissed its new name, ethereal words echoing massively inside his cancerous skull. “Captivating,” he grinned, “A fine choice, my child.”
Siphistus returned his attention to the command deck. A small gaggle of Traitor Marines, varied armour styles colourfully declaring their different originator Legions, milled about with guns drawn, anticipating a fine view of the coming destruction. The Plaguelord recognised blood-red World Eaters and gaudy Emperor’s Children lurking amongst his own Plaguemarines, even an occasional blue-and-gold representative of the Thousand Sons, thrumming with arcane sorceries. Daemon things cackled and hissed, traitor priests slithering from console to console, two sleek-limbed Chaos Raptors perched loftily in the portcullis viewing bays, avian spines hunched. To witness them all together, bitter differences and rivalries disregarded, favoured gods collaborating with rare unity in a pantheon of insanity, warmed the plague lord’s long-rotten heart with a frail surge of pleasure.
All of them were silent. Dumbfounded. Dwarfed by the monstrous power of this vessel, this living chaos-god, this titan-contaminator, this city-sized disciple of Nurgle.
“Gendemen...” he gurgled, phlegmatic voice catching and rasping unkindly in his throat. The Machina Dragon-Bile salutes you!”
The beast raised a limb and howled. The Marines clashed their weapons together and laughed and roared. Siphistus grinned and giggled and chuckled, and didn’t ever want to stop.
Somewhere a gun opened fire.
El’Lusha jumped a building distractedly and sent the combat drones ghosting along a side street, data feeds opening secondary windows on his HUD. A “target-acquired” tone rang out and he fired off a pair of missiles, turning away dismissively as the smoke trails corkscrewed away. Somewhere amongst the city wreckage the tiny drone-controlled stingers weaved and rushed amongst crumbled pillars and zeroed in on a group of twisted chaos-things efficiently. They were everywhere. A black tide, impossible to fully beat back.
The battlesuit team pushed across the western districts, sensors carefully attuned to Aun’el Ko’vash’s precise biosignature. It was like seeking a t’repa in a gerosh’i.
“This is a waste of time...” Lusha declared, distractedly sweeping his fusion blaster across an open-fronted building to smoke out a gaggle of winged daemonettes. Vre’Wyr and Vre’Kol’tae picked off the chittering fiends with cool precision.
“You think we should try a different district, Shas’el?” Tong’ata commed, scouting ahead, his voice excited. The sky was a ploughed field of clouds and artillery detonations, long trails of smoke undulating vertically from countless fires throughout the city.
“No point. There are other teams operating all across the city...”
“You don’t think we’ll find him, Shas’el?”
He sighed, feeling old. Listening to hunches, he remembered O’Shi’ur (who was more guilty of it than most) saying with a wry smile, was the first sign of madness.
“I think... I think that all rotaa we’ve been bluffing and counter bluffing, and if this dirty little war has one recognisable feature, it’s expecting the unexpected.”
“Shas’el?”
“Consider. These warriors. These ‘Chaos’ creatures. They seem to me as near to Mont’au as it is possible to be... Do they strike you as rational beings?”
“Well, no, but—”
“So, answer me this... Where does an irrational force conceal its prisoners? Rationally, the ethereal would be well guarded — held wherever the enemy numbers are thickest. Here in the city, correct? But irrationally...”
“Outside the city?”
“Hmm.”
The drones returned from the side streets silently, one of them venting smoke from a lucky bolter shot. It wobbled erratically, as if embarrassed, before regaining balance. Lusha chewed his lip before opening a channel to the Or’es Tash’var.
“Ui’Gorty’l here. How goes the hunt, Shas’el?”
“Listen to me, Kor’ui. I want you to expand the survey drones’ target areas.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t care how you do it. Use every drone you’ve got, if you have to. I want sensor checks for energy readings, lifesigns, weaponsfire, comm-frequencies... everything.”
“Shas’el, a planetwide survey would take rotaas!”
“Then I suggest you get started. Start outside the city. Work outwards. They won’t be far away... supplies, reinforcements, that sort of thing... It’ll be close...”
“What will?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“But—”
“Skip it, Kor’ui. Get to it.”
The voice on the comm was quietly surly. “Of course, Shas’el.”
“Good. Is there any other news on La’Kais?”
“We lost the reading. It was probably just a sensor fault.”
Lusha shook his head, ignoring his team’s weapons-fire from further along the street. “Kor’ui — how long since you graduated from ’saal rank?”
“W-what?”
“You heard me. How long?”
“Seven tau’cyrs...”
“And in all that time, how many ‘sensor faults’ have you encountered?”
“Uh...”
“Quite. Keep scanning for him. If he’s alive, I want to know it. Lusha out.”
He cut the channel before the crewman could respond, and bounded into the air with unnatural lightness to assist his team.
He trod the path.
A sword-edge trail, bordered by the abyssal depths of madness.
The bloodlust threatened to overwhelm him again, red mists descending in a carefree melange of blood-snarled, wet-lipped violence. It whispered and trilled hungrily: a song of killing and unstoppability. You can’t die, it grinned. You’re a god!
It was lying. The rational part of him knew it, digging its fingertips in and clinging to the tenets of the sio’t grimly. No compromise. Equilibrium above excess. Unity above unrest. Altruism above egotism.
The choice seemed a cruel one:
Machine or beast.
Soulless efficiency or primitive savagery.
T’au’va or Mont’au.
Was there no middle ground?
Kais gritted his teeth and squeezed the trigger over and over again, punching gore holes through black and red armour, boring glow-edged craters into daemon flesh, lancing black blood wounds with perfect, silent, recoilless efficiency. A bolter shell blasted open what little remained of his torso guard in a spray of shattered fio’tak and he stumbled into the shadows with a strangled yelp. The roaring of the Marine throng eclipsed even the chattering of their weapons, and he realised with a momentary rush of astonishment that, in their haste to confront him, they were casually blasting each other aside.
The titan had been an almost impossible obstacle. He’d risen through its crawl spaces like a parasite, planting a trail of bombs as he clambered ever upwards, losing all sense of time and scale somewhere within its buttressed midriff. Already its interior was changing: the inelegant lines and angles of gue’la construction softening with moist organic corruption, green hazes filling the air and a bitter patina, like oil-black rust, creeping stealthily across the gloomy bulkheads.
His legs ached, head throbbing with the physical exertion of the climb. He remembered once — what seemed like an age ago now, but in fact only that morning — being physically sickened by the idea of gue’la blood staining his hooves. Now the matted gristle and filth of humans, tau and, worse, the stinking black fluids of Chaos, were drying and glistening across hooves, ankles, legs... He looked liked he’d waded through a sea of blood, and, terrifyingly, he couldn’t bring himself to care.