The Outcast Dead

IT HAD BEEN over a hundred years since Asubha and Subha made war together, a century and more since they had fought as brothers on a field so soaked with blood against a foe so terrible. Live or die, the Custodian was a warrior to honour with a glorious death, and Asubha wished his Legion brothers could have witnessed this fight.

  Warriors of their skill in a contest of arms with a single opponent should have been no contest at all, but the praetorian was no ordinary foe. He fought with precise grace, his every blow weighted and measured, his movements anticipating theirs on every level. The three of them moved in a graceful ballet of thrust, dodge, counterattack and parry.

  Subha fought like Angron in the arena: with fury and unrelenting pressure. He was the perfect foil for Asubha’s careful skill. While an enemy was desperately defending against the flurry of Subha’s terrible blows, Asubha would be striking with cool precision, hunting for the killing blow that would end any opponent’s resistance in a heartbeat.

  But this fight was not going the way either of them expected.

  The Custodian repelled Subha without apparent effort, his guardian spear moving with such speed that it was surely impossible. Asubha fired his pistol, but the gold-armoured warrior swayed aside as the shot was fired. His spear spun around and hacked the barrel in two before reversing the blow and hammering the barbed haft into Subha’s stomach. The colossal impact staggered his twin, and Asubha took the opportunity to slash with the long knife he had taken from one of Babu Dhakal’s men.

  The blade scraped over the Custodian’s shoulder guard and bounced from the cheek plate of his helmet. His foe slammed an elbow into Asubha’s face and he reeled at the power behind the strike. Asubha took a step back to reorient himself as Subha circled around to flank the Custodian.

  ‘I always wanted to fight a Custodian,’ snarled Subha.

  ‘We wondered who would emerge triumphant,’ added Asubha. ‘One of us or one of you?’

  ‘There are two of you,’ pointed out the Custodian.

  ‘True, but the question still stands. Our debates would always end in stalemate, for there can be no true answer without death hanging on the outcome,’ said Asubha.

  ‘You know the answer. I can see it in your eyes. You know you cannot defeat me.’

  Asubha laughed and reversed his blade. ‘Tell me your name,’ he said. ‘That we might remember the mighty warrior we slew on Terra.’

  The Custodian brought his spear around to the guard position. ‘I am Saturnalia Princeps Carthagina Invictus Cronus–’

  ‘Enough!’ barked Subha, launching himself at Saturnalia. His twin still bore the blade snapped from the haft of the Custodian they had killed in the Vault. Though a poor mirror of that wielded by Saturnalia, it was still a deadly weapon in the hands of a World Eater. Saturnalia stepped into the attack, going low and driving his speartip at Subha’s gut. His twin spun aside from the blow, hammering his blade against Saturnalia’s shoulder. A gold plate spun off, but the heavy mail weave beneath sent the edge skidding away before it could draw blood.

  Asubha followed up and aimed a thunderous kick towards Saturnalia’s unprotected side. A burnished hip plate crumpled under the impact, and drove Saturnalia to the ground. Asubha thrust with his blade, but the Custodian leaned away from the blow, the tip of the blade scraping a furrow in his helmet’s visor.

  Saturnalia’s leg swept out in a scything arc, smashing Asubha from his feet. He rolled as he landed, barely avoiding a guillotine-chop of the Custodian’s guardian spear. Asubha was on his feet a moment later, and saw Subha slam his fist into the side of Saturnalia’s red-plumed helm. The Custodian went down hard, but before Subha could press his advantage, he wrenched off his battered helmet and swung it in a punishing arc that smashed into Subha’s jaw with a crunch of breaking bone.

  Subha toppled backwards, and Asubha threw himself at Saturnalia as he discarded his ruined helm. The two warriors went down in a tangle of powerful limbs, punching, gouging and jabbing with elbows and fists. Asubha rammed his forehead into Saturnalia’s face and grinned as he felt the warrior’s nose shatter. He dug for his knife, pistoning the blade towards the Custodian’s jaw. Saturnalia blocked the blow with his forearm, and the knife blade drove up through his vambrace and bone. They rolled, and an armoured fist slammed into the side of Asubha’s face.

  Asubha was thrown clear by the power behind the blow. He spat blood and rose to a crouch, ready to hurl himself at Saturnalia again. All finesse was gone, his fury had taken over and he and his brother were as one. Subha was already on his feet, his lower jaw all but hanging from his skull, but so too was Saturnalia. The Custodian had retrieved his guardian spear and its tip was aimed at Subha’s heart.

  A pumping barrage of shells exploded from the weapon and Subha rocked back as the explosive bolts tore into him. Each one detonated within his flesh, mushrooming from his back in fans of bright blood and splintered bone. Subha crumpled, the life already vanishing from his eyes as he fell onto his front.

  ‘Now you know,’ said Saturnalia with a rictus grin of blood.

  Asubha felt the red rage take him, and though he had always longed for the butcher’s nails, he knew now he did not need them to reach the clarity of undiluted fury. Saturnalia saw the change in him and took a step away. Asubha screamed his brother’s name and threw himself back into the fight.

  The guardian spear swung out, but Asubha dived beneath its killing arc and swept up Subha’s fallen blade. He slashed twice in quick succession as he rolled upright in one smooth motion. Blood sprayed from the twin cuts through the flexible mail weave at the back of Saturnalia’s knees, and the Custodian fell into a pool of blood, unable to stand, but still able to fight.

  Asubha circled around to face him, his anger filling him with its purity of purpose.

  ‘You will die here today,’ hissed Saturnalia through his agony. He held his guardian spear before him, and Asubha took a step forward until the tip was resting on his chest.

  ‘I know that,’ agreed Asubha. ‘But so will you.’

  Asubha drove his bloodied blade down through Saturnalia’s skull as the Custodian thrust his spear with the last of his strength. The guardian spear clove Asubha’s heart and tore through his lungs, wreaking irreparable damage to his body. Both warriors slumped against one another as though embracing in honour of their fight to the death.

  Asubha slid to the side and fell beside the body of his twin.

  As he bled out onto the temple floor, he pressed the broken blade that had ended Saturnalia’s life into his brother’s dead hand.

  ‘We walk the Crimson Path together, brother,’ said Asubha.

  ATHARVA SAW A lithe man in a loose bodyglove lift Kai from the ground, and thrust his hand towards him, uttering the fireborn cant of the Pyrae. A horizontal pillar of fire burned its way across the temple, setting alight every single piece of smashed timber and every body in its path. Flames leapt to life, greedily devouring this feast of combustible material, but they guttered and died before they reached the man holding Kai in his grip.

  The man turned as Atharva ran towards him with heavy thudding footsteps, and the building of a Pavoni flesh manipulation faded in his mind as he recognised Yasu Nagasena’s clade pet. He reached for the blade at his belt, stifling a twist of nausea in his gut at the thought of being so close to such anathema to his powers.

  Waving streams of gunfire zig-zagged through the temple, but Atharva pushed them aside with short-lived kine shields as he ran through the flames of his own making. He had seen Tagore fall to Yasu Nagasena, but had no clue as to the fates of Subha and Asubha. With Severian in hiding or fled, he could expect no aid in the fight against this clade warrior.

  ‘Oni-ni-kanabo,’ said the man with a wretched grin that made Atharva sick to his stomach. ‘Come one step closer and Kai Zulane dies.’

  Atharva’s lip curled in grimace of distaste. ‘You are going to kill him anyway, pariah.’

  ‘How does it feel, warlock?’ asked the clade warrior. ‘How does it feel
to be blind?’

  ‘Liberating,’ lied Atharva, taking another step forwards. ‘But I can kill you without recourse to my powers.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ conceded the pariah, tightening his grip on Kai’s neck. ‘Though I doubt you can kill me before he dies.’

  Though he could see the man clearly with his genhanced eyes, Atharva found it difficult to keep his image from blurring. His vision was far superior to that of mortals, but the pariah’s umbra made it almost impossible to fix him in his mind’s eye. He forced himself into the lower Enumerations, honing his concentration and sharpening his focus. The pariah’s blurred form swam into clarity, a black outline against a haze of yellow smoke and orange flames.

  Atharva tried to summon even the tiniest morsel of the Great Ocean into his flesh, but the proximity of such an unnatural creature made even that simple task impossible. The pariah was a hole in the world that drained every scrap of energy.

  Kai squirmed in the warrior’s grasp, his face twisted in pain at the pariah’s touch. He let out a cry of such desperation that even Atharva was moved to pity. As vile as it was to be near this man, Atharva could not bear the thought of being touched by him. The clade killer withdrew a long knife with a serrated edge and a blade that ended in two distinct points.

  ‘Whatever you wanted from him is gone,’ said the pariah.

  Before the pariah could stab Kai, a shape rose up behind him and swung a long spar of jagged timber at his head. The clade warrior sensed the incoming attack at the last moment and twisted out of the path of the blow. He could not avoid it completely, and instead of hammering the side of his skull, it slammed into his shoulder.

  Atharva saw the Navigator woman raise the piece of wood to strike again, but the clade warrior was not about to give her a second chance. He ducked under her clumsy swing and slammed an open palm against her chest. The woman flew back, slamming into the faceless statue with a sickening thud of flesh on stone.

  Atharva seized the opportunity and lunged forward with his own blade extended. The clade warrior dropped Kai and bent his entire body back, swaying aside from Atharva’s thrust. His hand chopped down, but Atharva’s flesh and bone were genetically toughened to withstand pressures greater than any mortal, even a clade-trained one, could bring to bear.

  Atharva backhanded the pariah in the chest, and the warrior turned the impact into a springing vault. He landed lightly amid the flames, one leg extended to the side, the other curled up beneath him.

  ‘So many psykers,’ he giggled. ‘It’s almost too easy.’

  Before Atharva could wonder what that meant, a rippling series of metallic plates rose up from the warrior’s neck. As though growing organically at high speed, curved sections of chromed metal unfolded to encase the pariah’s head in a bulbous helm of gold and silver. A tubular device extruded the side of the pariah’s newly-formed headgear, and lenses tinted with unfathomable colours slotted into place over one eye.

  Atharva sensed a terrible threat in this strange device, and put himself between the clade warrior and Kai. He passed his blade from hand to hand, readying himself to fight in close combat. Behind him, Kai groaned as the nausea of the pariah’s touch eased.

  ‘I should thank you,’ said Atharva. ‘It has been too long since I fought blade to blade. It will make a refreshing change to kill without my powers.’

  The pariah leapt into the air and the strange device attached to his helmet spat a stream of black light from the unnatural lenses. Instinctively, Atharva threw up a kine shield, but the power of the Great Ocean was dead in him. The bolts struck him in the chest, the plates of sheet steel strapped to his body offering him no protection against so abominable a weapon.

  An inferno of cold fire filled Atharva, a numbing pain that felt like liquid nitrogen flowing through his veins. Pulsing waves of dark energy exploded within him, like the supernova of a dead star. And just as an exploding sun must collapse into the gravitational hell of a black hole, so too did Atharva feel his life contracting into a deathly singularity from which there could be no escape.

  This was not just death, this was an ending that would deny his life force its release into the Great Ocean where it would exist forever as raw potential. The horror of so bleak a fate gave Atharva the strength to resist it, and he roared as he surged to his feet. The pariah landed next to him, its blade stabbing again and again. Blood oozed from the cuts, and Atharva felt a soul-deep horror at each blow.

  His every instinct was to escape this nightmarish being, this abomination that had no right to exist in a world where living things claimed dominion. Unreasoning terror made Atharva want to run and hide, anything to get away from this terrible, abhorrent creature. He fought against the insidious effects of the pariah as another knife thrust opened the meat of his body and a scorching blast of black fire from the clade warrior’s helmet enveloped him.

  Through the shocking pain, Atharva saw the unfolding battle as though viewed through a slowly shattering window. Black-clad soldiers moved like glacial automatons through the burning temple, the bullets of their weapons stuttering in slow motion as they slaughtered the huddled people taking shelter from the carnage. He saw Tagore lying where he had fallen, his stomach a smoking ruin and a gaping hole cut in his chest.

  Across from the dead warrior, Atharva saw Asubha and Subha. The twins lay side by side in death, next to the cloven body of a Legio Custodes warrior. Like Tagore, their chests had also been cut open, and they lay in vast lakes of impossibly bright blood. The temple was lost, and any hope they had of bringing Kai Zulane to the Warmaster was now ashes.

  Atharva knew he had only one option left to him, and though it was a monstrously drastic solution, it was the only way he could fight the pariah and prevent what Kai Zulane knew from reaching those who were now his enemies. It was a solution almost as grievous as death, but without making this ultimate sacrifice, he could not fight on. Atharva was a Space Marine, a warrior, and though it was giving up that part of him that made him whole, there was no other choice.

  He reached deep inside himself, to the secret place that could look into the Great Ocean and draw on its limitless power. It was a fragile thing, the incalculably precious result of a billion random mutations that had built upon one another over an unimaginably vast span of time. For a frozen instant that lasted an eternity, Atharva wondered whether death would be preferable to being blind for the rest of his life.

  ‘Only those sacrifices that have worth are meaningful,’ he said, crushing that secret part of his existence and forever severing his connection to the warp.

  He screamed in anguish, as no warrior of the Legiones Astartes had ever screamed or ever would again until the last moments of this war, when men would discover the true depths of suffering the universe could inflict upon them.

  Atharva was alone, all his carefully-wrought plans in ashes. With nothing left to lose, and with the last shred of power left to him, he reached up to the faceless angel that loomed above him with a vulture’s anticipation. He sensed the gathering anticipation of the neverborn creatures hidden behind its featureless mask, and tore aside the veil that kept them chained within it.

  ‘Kill them all,’ he commanded. ‘Leave none alive!’

  KAI EXPERIENCED ATHARVA’S battle with the pariah through a haze of blurred and overlapping auras. His body was wracked with spasms of pain at its presence, and he fought to hold onto consciousness as its repellent presence turned his stomach inside out. He huddled in the lee of the faceless statue, helpless in the face of the bloodshed that had come to the temple, cradling Roxanne to his chest as a woman he didn’t know did the same with two young boys.

  He heard Atharva shout at the statue above him and felt a bone-deep chill as a layer of frost crackled into existence on the smooth dark stone. Kai flinched at the sharp cold, and looked up as he felt the sudden presence of something far worse and infinitely more terrible than any pariah could ever be.

  The outline of the Vacant Angel shimmered, as though two of t
hem fought to occupy the same space. Like a pair of overlaid transparencies, they jostled and ran together. Kai saw a host of eyes, fanged mouths and claws press outwards from one of the images. As though the universe could no longer cope with two such competing realities, the wavering outlines snapped apart and the temple was split by a shrieking cry of birth more painful and more joyous than any endured by a mortal newborn.

  A ghostly form rose from the Vacant Angel, and though Kai’s blindsight was not yet restored, he saw its form completely. It resembled a tattered giant in spectral robes with a hood that concealed a depthless void in which galaxies went to die and the empty wasteland that could only exist beyond the event horizon of a black hole. Skeletal arms unfolded, and its voluminous robes billowed in howling winds of aetheric energy. A pair of icy white wings furled into existence from its back, cutting streamers of frozen vapour through the air.

  Crackling webs of frost formed on the stone walls of the temple, and glass shattered as the temperature plummeted to below zero in an instant. Kai’s breath misted before him and he shivered in terror at the magnificent and terrible creature Atharva had drawn out of the faceless statue.

  Its horror touched Kai deeper than any fear he had known, even in his darkest moments aboard the Argo. All the grief, all the suffering, all the unendurable pain and woes given voice in this place had shaped its form, a creature of immaterial energy now coalesced into this monstrous, avenging angel.

  Death had been wept into its faceless heart and it had been commanded to unleash that in the most direct way imaginable. The Vacant Angel swept down into the temple with its arms outstretched and a drawn-out shriek of grief exploding from beneath its hood. Kai pressed his hands to his ears as the sound cut into him like a cold knife to the heart.

  The Black Sentinels shot at the angel, but nothing so paltry as gunfire could harm such a creature. Bullets passed through its ghostly form and lasblasts simply twitched its form with light as they passed harmlessly through. Men dropped to their knees as it flew at them, driven to madness by even a glimpse of the angel’s hooded face.