I looked at the hologrid. The gaps in our lines had closed. The eldar were trapped within them, caught in a killing ground where the massed batteries of our armoured vehicles could catch them. In their lust to kill, in their desire to maim and slay, they had sacrificed their advantage and fought on a battlefield that played to our strengths. I heard the roar of heavy batteries outside.
Looking out I saw Thunderhawk gunships and Avenger strike fighters strafing the eldar. Once again, Macharius had turned around a battle, made an opponent fight where he should not have. He had turned the trap itself into a trap.
Logan Grimnar entered the chamber, looked around and nodded. ‘The xenos are well beaten,’ he said. ‘I can see you have no need of my help here.’
It sounded like high praise indeed coming from him.
No! In the time it has taken for me to get to the gate, the battle has turned. A sick feeling settles in my stomach. The enemy flight was but a ruse to lure my troops into the killing ground between the temples. Their vehicles are being smashed by the superior firepower of the human batteries. The escaping crews are being overwhelmed by the sheer weight of human numbers. Who would have thought that a human would have the wit to turn his weakness into a strength or that an eldar commander would have turned a position of strength into a weakness.
There is nothing left but to flee. The only way out for me is through the Gate of Ancients. There is still a chance that I can claim the prize I came for and turn this situation around. I must take it. I must.
Drake swayed dizzily. He put a hand to his brow. ‘The Way is open.’
A messenger raced up to the blood-spattered Lord High Commander. ‘General Macharius,’ he said. ‘Reports from the labyrinth. The eldar attacked our position down there. They have seized the portal entrance.’
‘The last attack was a distraction,’ Macharius said. He smiled warily. ‘The enemy knew the portal was going to open and took advantage of the last big attack to seize it. Now we need to stop him before he finds whatever it is he is seeking.’
We raced through the vast depths of the temple complex, past the time-worn statues of forgotten alien gods, moving towards a gate that opened on we knew not what. Faint shivering passed through the rock, reverberations from distant explosions where man and xenos fought for their lives in the valley above.
We reached the gate room. Bodies were strewn everywhere, human and eldar. It had been a brutal fight with no quarter given by either side. By the looks of things, the eldar had not even slowed down to perform their ritual torture. They had been in too much of a hurry, and it was obvious why.
Where once there had merely been stone, now there was something else. The whole area within the carved arch shimmered. It was like looking onto the surface of a pool into which many different types of luminescent dye had been poured. The colours moved and swirled. The area where the rock had been seemed fluid. It felt as if you could dive into it, the way you could dive into water.
An officer raced towards Macharius. His green tunic was ripped, his face was marked by a dozen small cuts, his eyes had the haunted look I had come to recognise in the faces of those who had faced the eldar at close quarters.
‘Report,’ said Macharius. He tilted his head to one side to indicate he was listening. Over his headset, he was still giving orders to our forces outside the temple as they dealt with the xenos attack.
‘They came at us out of the tunnels, sir. About twenty of them. We had our weapons ready but they cut us down from behind.’ He looked deeply distressed. ‘There was one of them… He was so fast, nothing could stop him.’
‘You killed some of them,’ Macharius said. He counted corpses. ‘Most of them, if your numbers are correct.’
I saw at least a dozen eldar corpses. Grimnar sniffed the air. ‘About twenty would be correct. The surviving xenos vanished through the gate. Their scent track ends at this wall.’ His frown of distaste let us know how unnatural this was. ‘They had the Fist with them.’
‘They did, Lord High Commander,’ said the officer. ‘We thought we had them, there were only a few left, but they jumped into the colours and vanished like, like…’ Confusion showed on his face. He struggled to find the words to describe what he had witnessed.
‘Did you see what happened to them?’ Drake asked urgently.
‘They seemed to… recede, growing smaller and smaller, vanishing into the distance, although they did not look as though they were moving. It was very strange.’
‘The gate is open. Wherever it leads to.’ Drake said, looking at Macharius. ‘What do we do now? Wait for them to come back through?’
‘We don’t know how this thing works,’ said Grimnar. ‘They may not emerge here. They may find their way out somewhere else.’
‘This is the only way in or out that we know of,’ said Drake. He looked thoughtful and more than a little afraid. Grimnar sniffed the air and appeared to come to a decision. He sniffed the air once more. ‘They have the Fist with them.’ He spoke something in a tongue I did not recognise, a guttural, barking language that might have been his native tongue. He nodded his head as though receiving an answer over some sealed channel on the comm-net.
‘I cannot allow the Fist of Russ to fall into such foul hands.’
He bounded forwards into the shimmering surface of the wall, and I saw then the strangeness the officer had mentioned. It was as if he were falling away from us, moving at great speed while shrinking in size, down a long tunnel filled with a multicoloured mist. I caught sight of him less and less until finally he vanished. It felt as if I had been watching him for hours but in reality only heartbeats had passed.
‘We don’t know whether it is possible to survive in there without protective gear,’ said Drake. ‘Or whether there is any way back. Or what might happen if the gateway closes while we are still within.’
‘Lemuel,’ Macharius said.
‘Sir?’
‘Inspect the gate.’ He pointed and he could only mean one thing. For a moment only, I considered refusing, but that would have meant being shot. I took a step forwards, obeying Macharius almost instinctively, and touched the surface of the gate. I pulled down my rebreather and took another step.
It was cool and I passed through it. It was like stepping into liquid only for a moment, and then I found myself somewhere else, in a long corridor lit by a strange shimmering glow. I could see no source of it, but I could see ancient eldar statues reminiscent of those in the valley.
It was cold. I kept holding my breath, unwilling to breathe in air that might prove poisonous. My heart pounded in my chest. My lungs started to feel as if they would burst. I let out my breath and inhaled. The air tasted strange but it was breathable.
I took another breath and felt nothing. My lungs did not burn. I was not poisoned. I checked the hazard monitor on my wrist. There were no indicators of danger.
I turned to the wall and looked back. Through the polychromatic, oily shimmering I saw the others looking at me. They stood frozen like statues with no sign of motion.
I frowned. There was something odd about what I was seeing, but I could not put my finger on exactly what. It was like looking at a picture, a still-life, not at living, breathing people. I paused for a moment at once anxious to move and reluctant to do so. This would be the moment of truth. I tried to step back through the portal. Once again, the cold liquid surface of the gate closed around me. I felt resistance and wondered whether I was trapped in this strange place.
Everything seemed to speed up. Macharius and the others started moving again. ‘It’s breathable,’ I said.
‘How would you know?’ Anton asked. ‘You were only gone a second.’
Something must have shown on my face.
‘Time flows differently beyond the gate,’ said Drake. ‘Unless I am much mistaken.’
‘A heartbeat here was at least a minute there,’ I said.
Drake nodded as though I had confirmed something he had suspected. ‘It is often the case when
you step beyond the normal boundaries of our continuum.’
‘What?’ Anton said. He clearly did not understand, but Drake was in no mood to explain it to him.
A thought struck me. ‘Sir, that means that the eldar may be hours ahead of us down the trail in there. Grimnar too.’
Macharius nodded, grasping the point at once. The longer we stood there, the bigger the lead the eldar would have over us. What seemed like minutes to us might be hours or even days in there.
‘We go through,’ Macharius said. ‘Now.’
He was already stepping into the portal. Drake was following. There was nothing else to do but accompany them. I took a long step into cool strangeness.
Twenty-Four
‘What is this place?’ Macharius asked. We stood on the far side of the portal, watching the remainder of our force very slowly enter the gate. Each slight movement seemed to take minutes. There was a moment of strangeness when they passed through to our side. Their limbs blurred as if their motions were speeding up, and then, to all intents and purposes, they looked normal.
‘I think it may be something the eldar built, a pathway into the beyond.’
‘Why would the eldar who stole it bring the Fist of Russ here?’
Drake paused. An odd expression flickered across his face. ‘This is a roadway through infinity. The eldar use them to pass through space.’
‘You saw that in Bael’s mind?’ Macharius said.
Drake nodded. ‘This one was a sacred path once, and it leads to something awesome. Or at least that is what I assume.’
‘Or what he wanted you to assume. Is it possible he could have projected false memories into your mind?’
‘Certainly,’ said Drake. ‘I am sure such was his intention. The eldar are clever and deceptive, and I do not trust anything I saw in his thoughts, but it is all we have to go on.’
Macharius laughed. ‘There are only two ways we can go, forwards or back.’
‘I can sense the presence of the Fist here,’ said Drake. ‘I know which way they went. There is something odd, though, a sense of a presence I do not like.’
Looking at the nearby statues I saw that one of them had been marked. It showed a crude rune in a similar style to those emblazoned on Grimnar’s armour. Just some lines quickly scratched with a blade. It took me a moment to realise what it was, then I pointed it out to Macharius.
‘The Space Wolf is leaving us a trail,’ said Macharius. ‘Let’s move out.’
‘Leaving us a trail or making sure he could find his own way back,’ Anton muttered, so low that only I could hear him. To tell the truth it did not matter. It was still reassuring. At least we had something to go on and a path back if we survived.
We moved along the path, a company of men in green tunics, along with several squads of Drake’s storm troopers. I was wondering whether we should send back for reinforcements.
From what I had seen of the eldar, six of them might be able to take us, particularly if they understood this environment and we did not. Macharius did not wait though, and he knew his business.
Of course, there was the distortion of time that passing through the gate caused. By the time help was summoned from outside, days might have passed in here. We had no option but to race ahead if we were ever going to catch up with the xenos and retrieve the Fist of Russ.
The place that we moved through was the spookiest I had ever seen. The air was close and still and oddly perfumed. My skin tingled as I marched as if it had been exposed to some strange drug. Drake’s hazard monitors told us there were no chemical or biological agents present, but it was possible that they had malfunctioned, or whatever was there was too subtle for them to detect. It was not a reassuring thought.
The way ahead seemed to be some sort of tunnel. Massive arches inscribed with odd xenos runes held the ceiling in place. There were times when that vanished, though, and we caught sight of odd vistas. Sometimes through crystal we saw the strange stars of alien skies. Sometimes we saw huge shifting masses of colour that reminded me of chemical cloud formations in the skies of hive-worlds I had visited. The path was wide enough for multiple battle tanks to pass abreast. I wondered who had built it and why.
The thought occurred to me that perhaps the Valley of the Ancients was not a sacred temple site, or at least not just one. Perhaps it was the terminus for this pathway. Perhaps the whole structure was intended to anchor the path in our reality. I pushed the thought to one side and moved closer to Macharius and Drake.
The inquisitor looked particularly queasy and I cannot say I blamed him. There was something in the strangeness of our surroundings that was getting on my nerves. Given his power and his sensitivity it must have been a thousand times worse for him.
I noticed that many of the great statues that lined the roadway had been defaced. In places, it looked as if they had fused or melted under the impact of gigantic las-beams. In other places they were oddly altered. Their features had a lewd look to them. Some of them had multiple arms which ended in claws. Others had… exaggerated physical features. The clean lines that had been the mark of so many of the statues outside were disturbed. There was something about these ones that suggested the crazed uncleanness of the followers of Chaos.
So far we’d had no problem following the right trail because there was only one. We had only two directions in which to go, forwards or back towards the exit. I began to notice that in places the stonework seemed eaten away and strange pools of multicoloured light were visible in the gaps. These swirled and shimmered in ways that hurt the eye. At times the clouds swept forwards and billowed flat as if they were pressed against a wall of glass so translucent as to be invisible. When we passed these gaps, I felt nauseous and afraid. It was as if an oppressive presence waited just out of sight, ready to pounce, and its mere closeness was enough to set my nerves to jangling.
‘I like this not,’ said Drake. ‘We are close to Chaos. This is a place where the Ruinous Powers have made their will felt.’
‘That does not bode well for our quest,’ said Macharius.
‘I am starting to feel as if nothing does,’ said Drake. ‘Perhaps this was all a mistake.’
‘Come, my friend, now is not the time for such talk, not when we are so close to finding what we seek. Just think, we will soon have one of the Imperium’s most sacred relics in our possession.’
‘I wonder whether its time here has contaminated it. I sense evil in this place.’
‘Surely a relic of such holiness could not be tainted, even by the Ruinous Powers?’
‘There is nothing that Chaos cannot turn to its purposes, nothing. So I was taught. So I believe. It is why we must be eternally vigilant, with ourselves most of all.’
Macharius looked around at our surroundings. If he were daunted by being cut off from our world within the toils of this ancient, alien place he gave no sign of it. ‘We will do what needs to be done,’ he said.
It occurred to me then that we were very far from home, and that there was a very real chance that we would never return. Less than an hour before I had been celebrating an unexpected victory. Now I was almost sick with fear of the unknown. I wondered if the eldar had known about this or whether they were as surprised by it as we were.
This is a strange and terrible place. It is not at all what I expected. The evil that destroyed my ancestors has touched this webway. All of the signs point to one thing. They created this vault thinking that it would preserve them from the power that was devouring their very souls. Instead, it looks as though they entombed themselves within it. There was no escape for them, here or any other place. The only question that remains is whether the evil that destroyed them still lurks within or whether, lacking anything else to devour, it perished from lack of prey.
My followers are nervous. They do not know why we are here. They think that we are fleeing from a battle that could easily have been won. They think that I am afraid of the Space Marines and what they might do to us. So far none of them have
had the courage to say anything, but I can tell that it is only a matter of time. Sileria, in particular, blames me for the loss of Bael. It seems they were, as I suspected, lovers. Well, he was no great loss, and I doubt whether she will be either.
I can see why they are edgy. There is something here that plays on the nerves, that makes even those who are used to causing fear, afraid. This place still reverberates with echoes of ancient terror and ancient pain, and delicious as that would normally be, there is something about it, something tainted that breeds suspicion in our minds.
They think I should be on the surface directing the destruction of my enemies. I can see that accusation in the very body language of every eldar with me. They still do not understand how quickly victory was turned to defeat. Or perhaps they think if I had not been so desperate to get to the gate I might have saved the situation. Perhaps that is nothing less than the truth.
I would have liked nothing better than to direct the destruction of the humans on the planet’s surface, but it is much more important that I should be the first to get my hands upon the ancient reality engine.
I console myself with the thought that at least there is no one here to get in our way, to stop us from finally achieving the goal I set myself all of those centuries ago. I know that time flows differently here. It was one of the warnings that the ancient books contained. I shall let my troops rest before we make our final push towards our ultimate destination.
Then we shall see what we shall see.
The roadway curved downwards and things changed once more. It was hard to put a finger on exactly when and how the changes started. All I know is that the sense of being watched by an alien presence increased. Our surroundings appeared ever more distorted. Larger and larger patches of strangely glowing colours appeared in the walls, and it was not good to look too closely at them. I had no idea how long we had marched. My wrist chronometer said it was only a couple of hours, but this was a place where time had no meaning. It was just as likely that we would return to discover no time had passed as to return and find out we had been gone for days or weeks or years.