The shrieking stopped. He’d been on target after all.
Trailing streamers of flesh, the raptor’s sleek descent became a chaotic stall, limbs flailing and jetpack coughing. It mashed itself against the pit-wall and tumbled, in several pieces, into the gloom below.
Kais lay still, breathing heavily, until the last ruinous metal-on-stone clang resonated from below. The echoes died away, the sultry atmosphere of the pit flourished again. He pulled himself to his feet, clenching his teeth against the pain in his shoulder, and stumbled onwards. It seemed as good a direction as any, now.
Melphea Turneus Borik sank to his knees and groaned.
The warp was a grey mist in his skull, a textured stream of smoke and shadows, illuminated from an impossible distance by the frail light of the Astronomican. He was used to its flux and whimsy, to the malevolence of the things that lived there and the sensory abstraction that was the reality of the empyrean but now... now something had changed.
Something irresistible, like a great black leviathan disgorging its slime-slick flanks from some oceanic abyss, lurked on the edge of his perception and pushed. It was a hungry force, clawing and chittering to escape, certain of its imminent liberation. Borik clutched his fingers to his face and gurgled, fighting to breathe. He could feel his attendants and novitiae clamouring round, trying to restrain him, anxious for his wellbeing. Unable to see them in a conventional sense, to Borik they seemed galaxies away.
He’d been sightless since his thirteenth year. Since they dragged him, wailing and screaming, from the nuke-slums of Caer Malafori in a “mutebox” containment vessel. Since they bundled him into the cavernous spaces and tortured chambers of the Blackship Lamentation of the Adepta Astra Telepathica. Sightless since his soul was melted and bonded with the being of the Most Holy Emperor, since he screamed and screamed for three days during the ceremony, since the pain broke every bone in his hands and left his eyes pooling away like melted metal.
He’d been sightless since his graduation as an astropath: a psychic messenger-conduit able to span the interstellar vastness separating Imperial worlds, ships, stations and outposts. Stationed within the Oraclitus Meditarium aboard the Retribution-class battlecruiser Purgatus, no more than a comm-call from the bridge, Borik had served his Emperor-God for twenty-nine years. By astropath standards, he was ancient. But this force, this malignant presence threatening to birth itself into the local warp, this was something he’d never felt before.
His attendants lifted him reverently, as befitted his status, onto his meditation pallet. He barely felt their hands. His scrying mind struggled to identify the presence, reasoning that information would be the greatest weapon in the face of an unknown threat. The warp being seemed cut off, separated from conventional empyrean by a membranous prison that, even as Borik watched, grew thin and weblike, breaking down inexorably.
The thing, the daemon thing, noticed him.
Its howls stopped abruptly, silence sucking at Borik’s awareness. And slowly, like a cancer exploring the vastness of its host body, it turned its ethereal gaze upon him.
“Little mind...” it hissed, voice coiling with insidious fire and silk, “little mind — I see you...”
Borik stammered, tongue clumsy and heavy in his mouth. “G-get back...” Somewhere far away, in the mundanity of reality, his attendants frowned and backed away, respecting their master’s wishes.
“Little mind. I’m huuuuungry...”
Borik’s panicked defences, telepathically erected fortress walls and mindbomb ghost chaff, were woefully late. Stretching out its talons of molten warpstuff through the crumbling walls of its prison, the Daemon-lord Tarkh’ax snatched up the shivering spirit morsel and guzzled it whole.
“Soooon...” it shrieked into the churning ether, overjoyed at the taste of a mortal’s soul after so many long years. Its words echoed silently amongst the vacant expanses that now comprised the brain of Melphea Turneus Borik.
“Wh... What do you want with me?” the ethereal asked weakly, briefly regaining consciousness.
Severus giggled and lifted the struggling alien into the air with a wave of his hand, coruscating energies holding it there, immobile.
“What have you got?” he said.
His vision blurred.
A carpet of slurry and sewage gurgled and slurped beneath him, sending him careening along the slippery tunnel slide with no hope of slowing or stopping. The walls, insipid white rock given an organic undulation by millennia of draining filth, made his grasping attempts to arrest the descent futile.
Somewhere way above, at the sinkhole’s mouth, the last echoes of exploding ammunition filtered downwards, making the tunnel shake. A hulking Chaos monstrosity, limbs dribbling with viscous flesh that could writhe and reshape into a multitude of heavy weapons, had blocked his path like a sneering ogre, gun barrels slurping out of its elbows and shoulders. A well-aimed pair of grenades and some cautious long-distance targeting had blown open the fleshy shell, exposing an unnatural fusion of metal and liquid within, ragged clumps of ammo and high explosives forming with moist alacrity, like melting wax seen in reverse.
He’d thrown caution to the wind, dangerous impetuosity filling him with a Mont’au thrill, and darted forwards through the blossoming bolter craters and thrumming lascannon rounds to drop a phosphor flare into the wound, wet edges sucking like a toothless mouth at his arm, then forced his aching legs to dive aside.
The look on the twisted creature’s face as it realised what was coming had bubbled up in Kais’s throat as a stifled chuckle. He’d braced himself inwardly, expecting the joyful sentiment to arrive accompanied, as ever, by the secret guilt at having an untaulike thought.
But he was beyond that, now.
Before he could even contemplate finding some cover from the colossal detonation the ground had liquefied with a syrupy slurp, sending him tumbling with a cry into the slippery sinkhole bowels of the chamber. Here, at the heart of a daemon-temple, even the rock of the walls and floor was capable of treachery.
Missing out on the ogre’s undoubtedly messy destruction had galled him immensely.
Slime polyps and froth-specked effluvium further pronounced the filth of his armour, seeping into the fio’dr of his regs and leaving his wounded leg and slashed shoulder throbbing with the certainty of poisoned infection. He couldn’t allow himself the time to worry about it now, and bit on his lip to take his mind off the pain.
And then the rushing tunnel walls were gone, gravity took a hold of his body, and the sinkhole spat him out like a gobbet of spittle. He landed awkwardly in a lake of sludge which bubbled and gurgled violently at his touch, rolling to stand upright with fluids and froth dribbling from beneath his arms and legs.
The chamber seemed to go on forever. A foetid mist hung above the mire, cloying at his senses and filling him with soporific gloom, shifting and ghosting around him.
What’s the point? the smog seemed to say, tendrils of musky haze stroking against his exposed flesh. Best to give up now... Lie down... Ease yourself for a while...
His knees started to weaken.
That’s it...
Just for a short while...
The lake is so warm...
He felt his eyelids grow heavy and couldn’t for the life of him think of any reason why he should try to keep them open.
Yessss...