The wound on his leg was infected, he knew, seeping with ineffectual antibodies and crusted by an ugly series of lesions. He’d paused to apply fresh medipacks twice during the ascent, squatting in shadowed recesses and biting back on the screams of pain welling in his throat.
He returned to the present with a jolt, the chatter of chaotic gunfire suddenly conspicuous in its absence. He risked a glance over the obsidian console and withdrew into cover with a hiss.
The Chaos filth on the command deck had calmed, resolving themselves with some loosely organised sense of purpose. Stepping over the mangled shells of their comrades, several had taken up firing positions and were waiting with unnatural concentration bent upon the second that he revealed himself, guns with jagged toothed maws trained unwaveringly.
“Come out come out come out come out, little piggy...” something giggled, its voice a singsong shrill.
A grenade skittered into the recess beside him. He stared at it for long raik’ans with an incomprehensible feeling of indignation, reviewing his choices: remain where he was and die; dive out of cover and die.
Not really thinking, acting on adrenaline-wired instincts more than rational thought, he scooped up the grenade and bowled it back towards the Marines, fully expecting his hand to detonate in bone-flecked cyan madness. He just made it, withdrawing himself behind the console as it arced away to erupt in mid-air. A tumult of fire and shrapnel peppered the outward surfaces of his cover.
He leapt into the blastwave without waiting, ignoring the agony of his wounded leg as he pushed down on it and surged forwards. A greasy smoke patch occluded his advance, tumbling shapes half seen through the haze shouting and bickering. Some peripheral part of his mind registered the bloodslick across the floor with a surge of triumph, as shrapnel-diced bits of power armour crumpled like paper.
And then he was through the smoke and amongst them, a tawny blur barely reaching chest height on these daemonic hulks, which spun and fired and cleaved with growling blades, just missing their elusive prey. More often than not they impacted cruelly against their comrades, close confines turning every carefully executed lunge into a brawler’s hack, every well-aimed shot into a point-blank bloodsplatter disaster.
Kais kept low, fighting back on the sickly sweet Mon-t’au whispers, and sowed madness throughout the command nave.
Keraz the Violator vented his frustration joyously.
He’d been denied his rightful butchery upon the orbiting vessel, commanded to escort the prisoners down to the planet. Him, Champion of the Blood God, on escort duty like a novice pup! The indignity made him shriek.
He’d been ordered and commanded by the sneering governor, unable to hack the smug head from its over-pampered shoulders by the sorcerous bindings protecting it. He’d been dispatched to Lettica to oversee the battle, travelling instantaneously through the last crumbling fragments of the eldar’s warp-prison as it shook itself apart. Then, diverting to the eastern districts with news of the titan’s discovery, he’d anticipated a spectacle worthy of a Lord of Destruction.
He’d spent an hour and a half milling about in tedious expectation as the plaguelord in the pilot’s chair coaxed power from the war machine’s engine.
He was bored. He was blood-thirsty.
And finally, like an offering from the Throne of Bone itself, like a ray of darklight penetrating the interminable clouds of tedium, a morsel of prey flesh had come his way A beige blur to his right sent him spinning hungrily, daemon axe laughing and delighting in its red and gold arc. It bit flesh, wailing its song of cleaved bone and armour, and Keraz gloried in the destruction.
Abruptly the prey morsel was at his left, ducking beneath a hail of bolter fire from some other idiot Marine. Keraz, grateful for the prey’s hardiness (protracting his moment of grisly pleasure), backstepped and cleaved leftwards, and again to the right, then a downward chopping blow, a spinning orbit slice, always chasing the elusive beige and tawny shape—
Every time he turned the xenogen helmet ghosted past his view, lost in a boiling sea of battle lust and bloodsplatter. In no time at all the rage came upon him, the berserker fury turning his muscles to fire and his mind to steam, and he gave up on any logical means of bonehewing the shadow-quick enemy in a whirlwind of undirected insanity. Flesh gurgled, armour parted, bones shattered—
Blood for the Blood God!
When finally the fit abated and he glanced about himself, the slow realisation of something being wrong stole upon him. Jellylike lumps of meat, encased in spine-tipped, chain-festooned armour, cluttered the deck. A dozen Chaos Marine bodies, dejointed in thoughtless butchery, reduced to stinking black charnel and dusty necrosis. Axe wounds on every surface. Nothing moved in the command nave.
The Blood God, upon reflection, would not celebrate his name this day.
The xenogen stepped out of the shadows, head tilted in disbelieving gratitude. It shot him twice in the chest, and Khorne the Butcher God guzzled his soul with relish.
Kais approached the vile creature in the throne, watching him with a silent glare of hate. It was powerless, nauseous power armour bound to the chair with thick cords and safety straps, head encased within a weird profusion of cables and gadgetry. Apart from Kais, it was the only thing still alive in the command nave.
The red-armoured devil had brutalised everything that moved, carving a gruesome path through its protesting comrades. If ever Kais was confronted by the reality of the Mont’au, it was in that moment of orgiastic carnage; without target or rationality or reason. Killing the butcher had felt like cauterising a wound.
The diseased figure in the throne gurgled quietly. Thick sludge dribbled obscenely from its mouth, curled into a dour sneer of defiance. Its bright eyes, arctic blue irises glimmering in the half light, tracked him as he moved.
“Here,” he said, placing the final auto-deploy charge in its pus-flecked lap.
Then he turned and stalked out.
VII
18.37 HRS (SYS. LOCAL — DOLUMAR IV, Ultima Seg. #4356/E)
The cavern, its subterranean walls damp with sweat, echoed to a chorus of ugly words and unformed gurgles. Governor Lord Meyloch Severus paused in his chanting, drawing a breath and licking his lips. Too many of these alien phrases and litanies — transcribed long ago by servitors procured secretly from the Adeptus Mechanicus — required an intolerable abundance of uncomfortable syllables that dried out his mouth and made his throat ache. A small price to pay, he supposed. The servitors had lasted about a month each, he recalled, carefully attuned minds quickly succumbing to the burden of xenoheresy and shutting down in smoke-belching frenzies. One had bitten off its own fingers in a last-ditch attempt to arrest its writings, mutilated digits squirting blood and lubricant feebly across the imprint wafers it perched over, stylus clattering to the floor. Had it not been for his impatience to finish translating the eldar text, Severus would have found the entire episode highly comical.
As it was, the cartouche that had sealed the entrance to the temple-pit had been of negligible value, simply heroic accounts of the warlocks who’d wrought the warp prison and their leader, Farseer Jur Telissa. Severus often found himself dreaming at night of the fluted psych-helm of the alien sorcerer, enjoying the sensation of obliterating the figure’s pale, serene features in an imaginative variety of ways. On those nights he awoke in disappointment, knowing that Telissa was far, far beyond his vengeful reach and feeling somehow, strangely, as though the bitterness and anger weren’t his own.