Shadows in the Sand (Warhammer 40k, story)

Chapter Seventy-Two

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Reminder dear listeners, the Voxbox remains open at all times!

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"She simply needs to find the last of her armor."

Guilliman, one hand braced against the writhing crimson-black flesh beneath him, turned his head toward his brother.

The movement cost him.

Even through the Lion's helm, even with its filters dragging what little purity they could from the arena's diseased air, his breath still rasped against his throat like broken glass.

"...I have no idea who you are talking about."

"Neither do I."

A tumbleweed slowly rolled by, the only sound in the silence.

It was the silence of three demigods, a dying Primarch, and an entire galaxy watching through servo-skull eyes as the absurdity settled between them.

"...Brother."

"Yes," the Lion said. "I know how it sounds."

Angron's growl rolled through the arena, deep enough to shiver the wet floor beneath their boots. His tail dragged behind him, blood hissing as it cut shallow furrows through the living meat.

The Lion did not look away from him.

"But the little whisper-man on my shoulder told me an ally is on her way."

Guilliman stared.

"...What."

Mortarion leaned forward, both hands wrapped around Silence. The great scythe rested easy in his grip, though his hunched back bowed by the smallest measure beneath the weight of rust, rot, and centuries of surrender dressed up as wisdom. Flies crawled through the rents in his armor. Spores drifted from him in lazy, corpse-pale clouds.

"Brother," he rasped, voice wet behind the rebreather's corroded grill, "are you certain your ten-thousand-year nap did not invite an early onset of dementia?"

"I am sound of mind, traitor."

"I am sure." Mortarion's dead eyes flicked toward Guilliman. "And where is this whisper-man now?"

"On my left shoulder."

The Lion's expression did not change.

"He is very small."

The Lion glanced toward his left pauldron.

The little robed figure clung to the edge of the dark green ceramite with both tiny hands, its brown hood tilted up toward him. Within the shadow of that hood, nothing resembling a face could be seen. No eyes or mouth. No gleam of spirit-light.

It whispered again, as though it had taken offense at Mortarion's tone.

The Lion's eyes narrowed.

Curious.

They could not see this entity.

Either way, a topic for later.

The toxin was growing in his chest.

He felt it with every breath. A damp heat behind the ribs. A slow, ugly pressure working its way deeper with each pulse of his hearts. The cuts across his cheek throbbed where Mortarion's rot had taken root, the skin tight and fever-hot beneath the blood.

He did not have much time.

Neither did Guilliman.

Angron was the louder threat. The obvious one. A red storm of muscle, iron, and divine hatred, circling with murder in every step.

But Mortarion was the true problem.

His spores filled the air. His patience poisoned the battlefield. His willingness to strike at Guilliman made every exchange a trap, and every breath the Avenging Son took inside the arena brought him closer to the edge.

For the next few minutes, the Death Lord was the greater danger.

So the Death Lord would fall first.

The Lion lifted the Shield.

Fealty sat low, ready at his hip.

Then the Lord of the First charged.

---

Captain Gabriel's thumb flicked the safety of his bolter off.

All around him, the gathered forces of the Imperium waited.

Silence held sway behind the hastily fortified battlements, not the silence of calm, but the silence of warriors counting heartbeats and ammunition. Astartes stood shoulder to shoulder behind walls that rose chest-high even on their armored frames, thick slabs of ceramite and adamantine dragged into place by servitors and Dreadnoughts. Lower firing ports had been cut for the Skitarii and heavy weapon platforms that filled the gaps between transhuman giants, their optics glowing red through the gloom, their gun-mounts tracking the black horizon with insectile patience.

The walls could withstand many a foe.

But the horizon was black with them.

"Restius," Gabriel said.

Behind him, within the cramped circle that now served as their communication hub, his battle-brother answered without looking up. Cables ran from his armor into a rack of vox-gear and borrowed cogitators, their screens jittering beneath waves of interference. He already knew the question.

It was the same one his captain had asked twice already.

"Enemy forces are estimated at near eleven thousand," Restius said. "Auspex detects roughly three thousand traitors, six thousand cultists, and two thousand demonic signatures."

He swallowed.

A small, human thing, despite the armor, the gene-forged body, and the century of war in his voice.

"Engine acoustics near three hundred. The few scans that have managed to punch through the interference put enemy air cover at over a hundred craft."

"Understood."

There was nothing else to say.

Gabriel flicked the safety back on.

Four hundred Astartes from a dozen Chapters. One hundred Custodes. Six hundred Skitarii. Three hundred heavy weapons platform servitors. Four Custodian Dreadnoughts.

With generous rounding, fifteen hundred loyalist soldiers stood against eleven thousand foes striking from three sides, while demons and demigods battled behind a barrier of the foulest warp sorcery.

And their hopes lay in the places Gabriel would have preferred to avoid.

Four of the five Grey Knights knelt near the barrier, silver armor washed blue-white by the ritual circle glowing beneath them. Their heads were bowed. Their voices were low. The air around them bent and shivered as they forced a linked portal open across impossible distance, tying this nightmare beachhead to Tigurius and the gathering reserves back at Imperial HQ.

Enough, hopefully, to allow a withdrawal once the barrier came down and the Primarchs were secured.

If the portal stabilized.

If the line held.

If the barrier fell before the enemy reached them.

Gabriel looked past the Grey Knights to the wall itself. The sorcery rose like a wound in the world, crimson-black and wetly luminous, its surface crawling with half-formed faces that pressed outward and vanished before they could scream. Beyond it, shapes moved. Giants. Monsters. Brothers killing brothers beneath a sky that had forgotten mercy.

They needed time.

Time was rapidly becoming a resource he could no longer afford.

Four minutes to contact.

His gaze climbed toward the summit of the arches, where another hope, a heretical one, dragged himself up a wall of bone and screaming flesh with his bare hands.

No banner. No litany. No angelic light.

One mortal-shaped absence crawling toward the heart of a god-wound with explosives on his back.

Gabriel flicked the safety off.

If he lived through this, his after-action report was going to be a nightmare.

---

Koron grunted and kicked his foot loose from another snapping mouth.

Its teeth cracked against his armor plates as the grapple on his left arm whined, hauling him higher along the screaming arch. The bone beneath him flexed like muscle. Veins as thick as power cables pulsed under the surface, carrying red light upward in ugly, rhythmic surges.

'Thirty-eight feet to the top,' Sasha said, her diagnostics and computations burning through his available threads as she devoured the data they had accumulated on the warp barrier. 'You have a plan?'

'Yeah,' he replied down the link, pushing off again and covering several feet in a single jump.

'...And that plan would be?'

'...In development.'

'Lovely.'

'You got one?'

'...No.'

'See? We'll be fine.'

Moments later, they reached the top of the arches.

The apex was not a platform.

It was an altar.

The eight arches met in a crown of bone and blood three hundred feet above the arena floor, forming a broad platform of living matter. An eight-pointed ritual circle had been carved across its surface, each line packed with black rot, red ash, and clotted blood.

Twelve robed figures knelt around it.

They had been human once, or near enough for the distinction to be a cruelty. Their bodies were swollen beneath plague-stiffened vestments, shoulders hunched, spines bent, voices bubbling through lungs that had long ago forgotten clean air. Flies crawled across the waxy skin of their throats. Every chant came out wet.

Around them stood twelve demons.

Blood-red. Horned. Too tall. Too lean. Massive blades hung low in their clawed hands, the molten edges dripping light onto the meat beneath their feet. Their heads twitched with barely contained hatred, their attention split between the priests they guarded and the mortal crawling closer to their god-work.

In the center of the circle lay another demon.

It had been opened from throat to groin.

Its ribs had been pulled wide like the petals of some obscene flower, and within the red ruin of its body, something green and wet bloomed. A plague-heart pulsed there, fat and rancid, each beat pushing red light and corpse-yellow fog through the lines of the circle.

Koron made his way closer to the inner barrier as another section of screaming flesh tried to bite his boot.

"Rael," he said over the vox. "I found the source."

Static hissed back, broken by the distant roars of Primarchs battling below.

"Describe it."

"Twelve priests around a ritual circle. Nurgle markings, I think. A dozen big red horned demons with swords standing guard."

"Bloodletters," Rael said.

"Lovely name," Koron muttered, watching the demons turn toward him. "One more in the center of the circle, with its chest slit open."

Below, Rael went very still.

Koron's sensors crawled across the scene, marking heat blooms, warp-flare, pulse timing, output channels. The circle was not simply glowing. It was breathing. Every line fed into the opened demon, and every pulse from the thing inside it fed back into the barrier below.

"It's not dead," Koron said, "though judging by the screaming, it wants to be. Its ribs are spread out, and there's something growing inside the cavity. Green. Wet. Looks like a tumor pretending to be a flower. Every time it pulses, the circle lights up red and green."

No answer came.

"Rael?"

Below, behind his silver helm, Rael's face lost what little color remained to it.

"That is not a barrier," the Grey Knight said.

Gabriel turned toward him.

"What is it?"

Rael's gauntlet tightened around his spear.

"A shared channel."

Koron looked across the apex, toward the opened Bloodletter and the plague blooming inside its chest.

Sasha's voice was very quiet in his ear.

'Two gods through one wound.'

Rael heard only Koron's breathing.

Then the mortal whispered, "They built this to kill a Primarch."

"No," Rael said. "They built it to make the killing mean something."

His gaze rose to the screaming wall, to the ritual meat, to the vast enclosed arena below where brothers murdered brothers for the eyes of a watching galaxy.

"This is not a cage. It is a mouth."

Above, Koron nodded and advanced.

The Bloodletters moved with him.

Their molten blades came up from their sides, slow and eager, dragging trails of orange light across the meat beneath their clawed feet. One by one, they spread into a line between him and the priests, horned heads twitching, black tongues sliding over teeth made for tearing.

"Rael," Koron said, "how dangerous are Bloodletters?"

"Lesser demons," came the quick, professional reply. "No ranged attacks. No psyker might. Powerful melee combatants. Inside your null-aura, they should be significantly weakened."

Then a slight grunt came over the line, almost swallowed by static and the thunder of battle below.

"Even so, do not let them close."

"Got it." Koron rolled his shoulders, feeling the meltabombs shift against his back. "I'm ready to hit the barrier up here on your mark."

"Copy."

Both arms came up.

The grapples fired into the crimson flesh, drills biting deep into the warp-born meat just outside the ritual barrier. The arch screamed beneath the impact, a dozen mouths opening along its surface before the drills tore through tongue, gum, and bone.

Koron crouched low, settling into a runner's stance as the lines pulled taut.

Below him, three hundred feet down, the gathered forces of the Imperium turned as one toward the barrier. Astartes raised bolters. Custodes lifted guardian spears. Skitarii targeting lenses burned red through the smoke. Servitor weapon platforms whined as their barrels spun up.

'It's weird, not having the gravity-plates,' Koron said.

'I wouldn't know,' Sasha replied, keeping her voice light even as the numbers continued to burn across his vision. 'I never had to worry about inner ears. I had gyroscopes.'

'Lucky. They—'

"Now!" Rael shouted over the comm.

The entire Imperial force opened fire.

The world became thunder.

Heavy bolters roared. Lascannons screamed white through the poisoned air. Plasma burst against the barrier in miniature suns, while guardian spears, autocannons, volkite, melta, and every blessed weapon the Imperium could bring to bear hammered the crimson-black wall from below.

Koron launched.

His grapples reeled in hard, dragging him forward as his boots tore through meat and gristle. For one savage instant, he was flying toward the ritual circle, the Bloodletters waiting beyond it with their blades raised and their hatred burning bright enough to stain the air.

Then he stopped dead twenty feet from the ward as his absence smashed into it.

Warp-lightning screamed across the invisible surface as the edge of his null-zone smashed into the barrier. The impact threw blue-white fractures through the air, crackling outward from a point he could not touch but could feel pushing back against every part of him.

Koron growled under his breath.

His boots skidded backward through the living arch. Meat tore beneath his heels. Both grapple lines groaned as their winches hauled him forward, motors whining, housings heating, every internal warning flaring yellow across his vision.

Every muscle in his body strained.

Every cybernetic tendon locked.

And inch by inch, he pushed against the damned wall.

Seconds dragged themselves apart in his eyes. His teeth clenched hard enough to ache as the ward pressed against the border of his existence, trying to find something to grip and finding only Sasha's silver thread braided through the hole where a soul should have been.

Come on you bitch, let me in!

A fraction of give.

Koron hauled himself forward harder, shoulders and back bunching beneath the armor as he shouted over the link.

"It's giving! Keep going!"

He did not hear a reply.

He did not need to.

The roar of weapons fire doubled as every gun turned from the perimeter and unloaded into the barrier.

Another fraction.

Before him, the Bloodletters shifted. Clawed hands tightened around hilts of bone and brass as they gathered around the spiderweb of cracks spreading from his contact point. Their rage rolled against him, hot and eager, but inside the edge of his null-zone it came muted, stripped of divine music, reduced to animal violence and hate.

Behind them, the priests voices rose in a guttural wail. Bloated hands reached toward the bruised sky. Fluid-filled throats warbled and tore as their chant became panic, their god-work shuddering beneath a pressure it had never been meant to endure.

But the cracks remained.

Growing with every second, as his null-zone chewed deeper into the wall.

"Almost in!" Koron shouted, feeling the heat of his grapple winches seep through the metal and into the flesh beneath.

'What are you planning to do about the demons waiting with swords?' Sasha asked, eyeing the eight-foot-tall demonic blenders.

'I'll figure that out once it matters!' he snapped back, sweat rolling down his neck as he—

The barrier cracked apart in a shower of manifested Warp, as though the air itself had become glass.

The Bloodletters charged.

Taloned toes dug into screaming flesh. Tongues lolled from fanged mouths as molten blades descended.

Koron hurled himself left.

Molten edges scraped across the blue-white flare of his shield. His shoulder hit the floor hard enough to jar the breath from his lungs. He rolled through the impact, legs tucked tight, then pushed off with both hands and sprang back to his feet in one smooth motion.

The demons did not hesitate.

They came baying for his blood, howls scraping a chill down his metal spine, their blades dragging fire through the air as the cracked ward bled dying light around them.

For a moment, his fingers inched towards his pistol, only for cold, ugly facts to stop him.

Whatever was happening, gravity was strange beyond his twenty feet. Firing the pistol outside the zone could be disastrous.

Even the smallest possibility of the displacement shot ending up in an ally or himself, meant he could not take the risk.

Instead, he would have to ignore Rael's advice.

Predictive models bloomed across his sight, ghostly images born of mathematics.

In some, he dodged.

In others, he blocked.

In some, he won.

In others, he died.

He was an engineer.

A military one, yes, but an engineer before anything else.

But even engineers had to know how to fight.

And for once, there was nothing here to try and save.

The genestealers had worn the faces of humanity, predators pretending to be people so they could better devour them.

Chaos cultists and Astartes might be saved, given time and resources, of which there was never enough.

But demons?

True, warp-born demons?

They were shards of powerful monsters that ate and drank the suffering of others. Ancient predators that gorged themselves on the wellspring of life itself.

No.

Not with Guilliman so close to the edge.

Not with Angron's screaming humanity still ringing in his ears.

'Sasha,' he said, their time compressed as he spun all six threads of his mind into one unified rope.

'Be ready to take over the cybernetic limbs.'

'Ready.'

His arms shifted, plates opening, retracting, overlapping. Tools withdrew deeper into the forearm. Armor snapped into place over the knuckle actuators, metacarpal frame, and articulated finger struts with hard, final clicks.

Sensation faded.

Enough to feel.

No longer enough to bother.

The work they were about to do did not need exacting precision after all.

---

The Bloodletter knew prey.

Prey screamed.

Prey ran.

Prey bled hot and bright and beautiful beneath the eye of the Lord of Skulls. Prey filled the air with fear, and fear became rage, and rage became song, and the song became the hand that drove the blade.

This one had fear.

It had smelled it.

The little metal thing had come through the cracked ward stinking of sweat, pain, burned machinery, and mortal terror. It had been small. Breakable. Wrong, yes, wrong in the way cold ash was wrong inside a furnace, but still prey.

Then something changed.

The Bloodletter charged.

Its hellblade fell.

The prey moved.

It had seen faster prey. It had seen slower.

This was... wrong.

The prey moved correctly.

The blade scraped blue-white light and found no meat. The prey rolled beneath the cut, rose without the stuttering panic mortals carried in their bones, and turned toward the next strike before the first had finished missing.

The Bloodletter snarled.

Around the prey, the song thinned.

The red thunder of the Blood God did not vanish. Nothing could silence Him. Nothing could silence rage. But within the circle of the prey's absence, the song became distant, as though heard through stone and deep water. The Bloodletter's limbs felt heavier. Its hatred remained, but the joy of it guttered.

The prey looked up.

The thing's helm gave no expression.

Its breathing steadied.

Its hands opened and closed once, plates locking over metal fingers with small, final clicks.

The Bloodletter saw paths then, born of instinct carved into its essence.

It saw the little thing dead beneath twelve blades. It saw its skull split. Its limbs pulled free. Its spine torn loose and raised high beneath the red sky.

But it also saw other endings.

A blade turned by a wrist that should not have known the angle.

A knee destroyed by a strike too small to matter until the leg failed.

A throat opened not by strength, but by timing.

A hellblade caught for half a heartbeat, just long enough for the wielder to die.

The Bloodletter hissed.

The prey was still sweating fear inside its flesh.

It simply no longer listened.

The Bloodletter lunged again, and this time the little metal thing came forward to meet it.

It swept its greatsword down, aiming to split the metal thing from shoulder to hip. It was heavier inside the thing's empty space. Slower.

Fast enough still.

Until it was not.

The thing's arm snapped out like a spear, orange-white light bursting along its length.

Heat bloomed across the Bloodletter's neck.

Heat, pain, and the tickle of ants chewing beneath its flesh.

As it discorporated, it saw what the prey had done, and its lips peeled into a feral grin.

Not prey.

Good.

A death by a fellow predator was worthy.

---

The thermal blades jutting from Koron's forearms snarled with captured heat, the faintest shimmer of gravitic distortion thrumming alongside the glow.

His legs bent.

He moved under the beheaded demon as it fell, using its body to hide from the next of its kin already charging.

The Bloodletter's blade cleaved through its dead brother's torso with ease.

Then it howled as Koron's left-hand blade sank into its thigh, his right burying itself in the demon's chest before ripping down in a spray of black blood and false organs.

Two down.

Ten to go.

One Bloodletter on the right.

One on the left.

Right high, toward his neck.

Left low, toward his hips.

Arm blades catch. Right leg forward.

A third demon.

The blade-tip speared through the remains of its brother and buried itself in Koron's chest, his shield flaring as it caught the strike.

It had pulled the same trick he had.

Plates opened along his arms. His organic right arm emerged, the left little more than the shoulder and six inches of stump where the regrowing limb ended.

The grav-shear formed above his right palm, tiny emitters flaring to life as the sphere of shaped gravity crashed into the demon's blade.

He had expected resistance.

The crimson energy he had found burning beneath Angron's flesh had curled the boundary into smoke.

This did not.

The sword shredded apart beneath the tidal forces.

The broken splinters spun away as the shear buried itself in the Bloodletter's chest, coring out the warp beast's spine in a spray of black blood and burning marrow.

Three down.

Nine to go.

Two seconds before the next reached him.

The demon on the right skittered its blade up his forearm, snapping the edge toward his chest.

Duck. Close the gap.

Spiked knee rising to create distance.

Tilt two degrees off-center. Half step right. Full step left. Slide past the knee strike.

Right cyberlimb hooks under and lifts.

Balance taken.

Left cyberlimb fires at the second demon.

Lightning crackles.

Thunder claps.

Not dead.

Right arm pushes grav-shear into the lifted demon's hips and up through the chest cavity.

Dead.

Four down.

Eight to go.

New contact.

Left arm catches greatsword. Hurls over back.

Demon deflects.

Half second bought.

Two demons sweeping wide to flank.

Survival odds decreasing.

Wounded demon snaps spiked tail.

Purposefully fall back over it. Cyberlimbs catch. Rebound.

New contact's sword misses by three centimeters.

Grapple snaps out. Buries itself in the demon's skull. Catches on horn.

Pull.

Roll over its back.

Distance between flankers.

Thermal/grav-shear forearm blade cuts through its neck on the follow-through.

Five down.

Seven to go.

Wounded demon: one-point-two meters away. Advancing.

Two flankers: line ruined. Charging. Impact in two-point-nine seconds.

More demons charging. Wider angle. Encirclement in three-point-two seconds.

Predicted strikes multiplied across his sight.

Twelve.

Twenty-six.

Fifty-three.

Survival odds collapsing.

Untenable.

Change the field.

Ritual circle disruption: best option.

Distance: thirteen-point-three meters.

Demons slower.

Estimated activity window: four seconds.

Enough.

Meltabomb timer: two-second delay.

Through ritual circle.

Air contamination outside null-radius: extreme.

Inside radius: nominal.

Bomb activated.

Release.

Helmet audio sensors auto-muted.

---

The explosion above was distant, dull even to Abaddon's transhuman hearing.

The result, however, was not.

The barrier visibly flickered.

He cast his senses toward it, holding his features in the calm, implacable mask he wore for the servo-skulls.

Something had happened at the anchor point above the arena.

Abaddon looked to the corpse-worshipping fools beyond the wall, their weapons silent for the moment, their hope not yet brave enough to become sound.

Below, the Lord of the First still battled the Red Angel and the Death Lord.

Abaddon had to admit, the First was an instrument of martial skill without peer. His bladework was a thing of terrible, cold beauty, his footwork precise yet far from predictable. Every step denied certainty. Every cut punished assumption.

As much as he hated the thought, Abaddon was not too proud to recognize fact.

If he faced the Lion with only a blade, the First would take his head in six moves.

Which was why Abaddon never intended to face him with only a blade.

Setting the thought aside, he cast his senses up the stream of warp energy, feeling the joined, writhing threads of the gods power beneath his fingertips.

Khorne's blunt wrath, all heat and motion and copper in the mouth.

Nurgle's touch, slow and spoiled, bile pooling at the back of the throat.

He could feel it now.

See it.

The smoking ruin of his creation.

How?

How?!

The barrier was intact. Those blasted Grey Knights were still below, and the power they had displayed so far was nothing compared to the might of two gods pouring themselves into the rite, eager to see the last sons of the Anathema laid low.

The central runes had been blasted apart. The priests were little more than bloated, pus-oozing piles of gore. The Bloodletters had vanished, their essence sent screaming back to their father.

The other seven points of the greater rite remained, but without the central nexus, they were running on whatever power had already been banked.

A dying machine still spinning because momentum had not yet abandoned it.

But more importantly...

No souls existed within the enclosed space.

No intruder.

No martyr.

No assassin.

No witch-light. No offering. No lingering scream.

Only damage.

Only absence.

What had happened?

---

Koron gulped down air, wiping sweat from his brow before his helm snapped shut.

The central runes were gone.

The rest of the massive, complex rune-circle was still intact.

And the barrier was still up.

"Rael," he said, grunting as he pulled two more meltabombs from his back. "Sending you my video feed. Tell me what else I have to blow up."