Shere looked over at Grammaticus, his conversation over. ‘We’re moving,’ he said. ‘We’re getting out of here.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘It’s as bad as I feared. The city’s gone quiet. The Nurthene identified you and used you as a lure to draw us out.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Grammaticus said.
‘Your apology hardly counts for anything. Come on.’
Footsteps were thumping up the hallway outside. The door opened and three men came in. Two were standard humans, dressed in mail sleeves and head shawls, carrying crude pattern lascarbines. The third, attired identically to the other two, was a gene-big beast lugging a bolter.
‘We’re quitting the house,’ the gene-giant told Shere. ‘Is this the wretch who blew our operation?’
Without waiting for confirmation, the gene-giant turned and advanced towards Grammaticus.
‘Leave him, Herzog! Please, sir!’ Shere called out. ‘He’s valuable. Pech told me to watch him and keep him safe.’
‘Shame the rodent couldn’t do the same for us,’ the gene-giant growled. ‘All right, let’s head out. Double time.’
They flanked Grammaticus and hurried him down the hall. Scared as he was, Grammaticus sorted the data that had just come his way. The gene-giant was called Herzog, apparently. Grammaticus could smell the whiff of Astartes about him. The other two, the mail-sleeved standard humans, suggested to Grammaticus that the Alpha Legion used all sorts of non-Astartes operatives to accomplish their missions, not just specialists like the psyker Shere. What had Shere said?
The Alpha Legion uses any and all instruments to get its work done.
Grammaticus risked a quick surface read of the men’s minds, and saw they were soldiers of the Imperial Army, though there was something definitely non-standard about the biological samples he was getting. He dared not risk a deeper probe.
And that other thing Shere had said:
Pech told me to watch him and keep him safe.
He could only have meant the armoured giant, but the giant had identified himself as
Alpharius.
Was that another lie? How did the names connect?
They reached the ground floor of the house. Herzog raised a hand to activate his link.
The shutters opened. They banged aside, one by one, opening each window in turn, spilling hot, hard daylight into the closed house. Grammaticus flinched at each opening, feeling the residual pulse of the telekinetic power responsible. A trio of minute green house lizards danced in over an open sill.
‘Damn,’ Herzog murmured.
More lizards skittered in, running like water over the sills, some falling onto the floor with little
plips.
Inside five seconds, they were pouring in like a flood, thousands of them, rushing over the window ledges and under the doors, flowing as if dumped out of handcarts.
‘Back up! Upstairs!’ Herzog ordered.
They thumped back up the staircase. The tide of lizards behind them quickly covered the tiled floor of the hall and began to pour, like green water disobeying gravity, up the stairs.
Grammaticus could feel a malevolence in the air, a pervading touch of cloying heat and rage, the trademark of an angry, potent psyker.
‘We’re in trouble,’ he whispered. The others ignored him, except for Shere, who glanced in his direction. For a brief second, Grammaticus saw Shere’s face, the face of a startled young man with fine features. Shere was so unnerved he was letting his psyk-hood slip.
Rivers of pattering lizards were pouring in through the upper windows too. The shutters on the first floor had been yanked open. Tiny, sinuous green shapes rippled across sheet-wrapped furniture and spilled along the tiled flooring.
‘Oh hell’s teeth,’ one of the mail-sleeved operatives gasped.
‘Second floor!’ Herzog ordered. ‘Make for the bridge!’
Herzog’s mind was unguarded by distraction. Grammaticus skimmed its surface and saw that the bridge was a brick walkway linking the house to its neighbour. He started to run. They all started to run. Behind them, the swarming lizards filled the hallways, making no sound except for the
plick-plack
of their billion sticky feet.
The running men, led by the Astartes, reached the second floor. The torrent of lizards was running up the walls, coating the ceiling with a carpet of scurrying bodies.
‘Arkus! Delay them!’ Herzog yelled out.
‘Why me?’ one of the mail-sleeved operatives wailed.
‘Just do it. Broad burn!’
The operative turned, adjusting his lascarbine to the widest emission setting. He started to fire, blasting unfocused washes of energy back down the stairs, singeing and crisping the wriggling mat of advancing lizards. Tiny, smouldering bodies dropped off the ceiling and walls. The hand-painted wallpaper crisped.
Arkus kept firing, cooking thousands of squirming shapes, adjusting his aim rapidly to check each front of the swarming plague in turn.
It wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough. They reached him, and he screamed and jiggled as they rushed up his legs and his body, covering him. He started to flail wildly, enveloped by tiny, biting, snapping green shapes. He lost his footing and fell, crashing down the staircase into the main body of the green torrent. In seconds, his form was lost from view, submerged in the writhing flow.
Ignoring the grim demise of his operative, Herzog ran down the hallway, his moving weight creaking the old floorboards. He reached a door, and halted, preparing to kick it in.
Before he could, the door splintered in towards him, throwing him backwards. A snout, two metres long, shoved its way through the shattered opening. Shere yelped.
The crocodilian was a massive thing, the sort of creature that simply had no business existing on the second floor of a domestic house. It rammed its way forwards, its colossal skull swinging left and right as it came on. Its huge, scuted body and immense tail trailed back across the bridge into the neighbouring building. The house shook under its gigantic mass as it moved.
Herzog tried to drag himself back out of its path. Shere retreated, slipping over on the scurrying house lizards that were darting underfoot. Grammaticus grabbed him and hauled him to his feet, smacking the wriggling, biting things off Shere’s robe with his bare hands.
The remaining operative fired twice at the advancing monster. The crocodilian lunged forwards, extending its white-scaled neck, and took the operative like a grazer at a waterhole, snatching him up in a huge V of jaws. The man tore open, screeching, as the jaws shook him apart like a straw doll.
Herzog, on his back, fired his boltgun, and blew out one of the crocodilian’s eyes. It thrashed in pain, slamming its vast body to and fro into the walls of the bridge and the corridor, shattering plaster and shaking the building. The mangled corpse of the operative tumbled out of its jaws and it snapped forwards, seizing Herzog by the leg. Mail rings cracked and pinged away as the gigantic teeth bit down.
Herzog roared.
Grammaticus had never heard an Astartes cry in pain before. He decided he never wanted to hear the sound again. He pushed Shere aside against the moving wall of lizards and adjusted his ring. It was an Old Kind digital weapon, a gift from Gahet.
He triggered it. An incandescent blue beam lanced out from it and exploded the crocodilian’s braincase in a wet blast of meat, bone and tissue.
‘Come on!’ Grammaticus yelled.
Herzog pulled his leg free of the ruptured jaws, and got to his feet. Limping, he led Grammaticus and Shere across the bridge. They had to clamber over the apparently endless bulk of the dead crocodilian. It was still twitching.
They reached the stairs of the neighbouring house and headed down. Herzog’s leg was badly lacerated from the bite, and he was faltering. Behind them, they could hear the advancing patter of the lizard tide. The first few green shapes were appearing above them, scurrying out across the ceiling, some falling like drops of water down the stairwell around them.
‘Where did you get that?’ Herzog yelled at Grammaticus. ‘What?’
‘That weapon!’
‘Does it matter?’
‘You could have used it on us earlier,’ Shere said, scrambling down the stairs beside Grammaticus.
‘The fact that I didn’t might persuade you that I’m serious,’ Grammaticus replied.
They snatched open the main street door of the house, and came out into bright sunlight, and into the middle of a gun battle. Two Astartes warriors in purple power armour – one of them, Grammaticus was certain, the giant who had questioned him earlier – were exchanging shots along the dusty, sunlit street with gangs of nurthadtre ground troops. Crowds of braying Nurthene civilians were urging the nurthadtre on, hurling cobbles and other missiles. Half a dozen mail-sleeved operatives, anonymous in their desert shawls, were supporting the outnumbered Astartes. Las-rounds and ballistic loads streaked up and down the narrow thoroughfare.
‘Pech?’ Herzog called out.
The armoured giant glanced around. So, not Alpharius then, Grammaticus thought, unless ‘Pech’ was some nickname or surname unknown to the Cabal.
‘Get out, Thias!’ the giant yelled. ‘We’ll hold them here and rendezvous as soon as we can!’
‘For the Emperor, Pech!’ Herzog shouted, pausing to add his bolter fire to the fight for a moment.
‘Let’s go!’ he declared, turning to face Shere and Grammaticus.
They began to run again, covering the sun-heated cobbles, the sounds of the firefight behind them echoing along the overhanging walls.
‘Where to?’ Grammaticus found the courage to ask.
‘To wherever is safe,’ Herzog replied. He was still limping badly.
‘I don’t think there’s anywhere safe for us in this town,’ Shere grunted.
‘No, neither do I,’ agreed Herzog, ‘thanks to him.’ He glared at Grammaticus.
‘This was not my doing,’ Grammaticus insisted as he ran. He checked his stride suddenly, flinching as he sensed the stomach-churning ripple of psyker activity again.
Shere had felt it too. ‘What—’ he began.
The street ahead of them split as if torn open by a fierce earthquake. The road surface burst upwards, and cobblestones flew like hail.
A vast monitor hauled itself up out of the ground in front of them, pulling its bulk free of the cloven street and the earth beneath. Cobblestones, hardcore and soil spilled out around it as it emerged. Its skull alone was the size of a lifepod. Its tongue, long, dry and forked, flickered in and out of its extravagantly massive maw. The tongue was as pink as Nurthene silk. The monitor was covered in cherry-red scales. They could smell the carrion stink of its jaws, feel the tremor of its advancing steps.
‘Here be dragons,’ Grammaticus whispered.
‘What?’ Shere yelled.
Here be dragons.
It was no longer a quaintly phrased notation of warning, no longer the shorthand motto of man’s ignorance of the darker places of his universe. Dragons were real, not ambiguous scrawls on fading maps.
Grammaticus could see into it, past the giganticised body it wore, past the scale and flesh and muscle of the varanidae-genus form it had chosen, or been instructed, to take. He could see the absolute fury of its daemon heart.
Herzog began to fire, slamming bolt after bolt into the red monster’s head. Blood splattered from the snout, and two or three teeth were blown out of their sockets. The dragon lunged.
Shere screamed and lashed out with his pyrokinetic talent, and flames swirled along the reptile’s back and flanks in wild, flaring streams. The immense beast began to thrash as its scales scorched. Flames travelled down its length, engulfing it in a molten inferno too bright to look at. Its whipping, burning body and tail convulsed furiously and smashed into the surrounding buildings, bringing down their facades in thunderous torrents of brick and dry mortar.
Dust rose in solid, gagging walls. Grammaticus lost sight of Herzog and Shere. He began to run. Behind him, the death throes of the burning dragon sounded as though they were demolishing the entire city.
Grammaticus kept running. He didn’t look back.
FIVE
Mon Lo Harbour, three days later
‘W
HY IS THE
city screaming?’ asked Namatjira. No one had an answer for him, nor had they an answer to his next question, which was, ‘Why is this offensive turning into a total farce? Anybody? Anybody?’
They shifted uncomfortably, the high officers of the Imperial Army regiments at the Mon Lo front. Namatjira had summoned them to attend him in the largest meeting hall of the terracotta palace, and they were wary of his displeasure. Lord Commander Namatjira had a famously choleric temper.
He also had one of the finest martial records of any Army commander in the Great Crusade: one hundred and three successful campaigns of compliance, the last twenty-four of which had been achieved as commander of the 670th Expedition Fleet. Nurth was to have been the expedition’s twenty-fifth, making it officially Six-Seventy Twenty-Five, or the twenty-fifth world brought to terms by the 670th Fleet.
That achievement now looked to be in serious jeopardy.
Namatjira was a tall, dismayingly handsome man, with heroic features like the noblest classical statue, and skin so black it possessed a smoky sheen. He wore a frock coat of chrome plate armour over a deepwater blue uniform, and black riding boots with ornate chrome spurs. A floor-length cloak of painted silk hung off one of his shoulders, and a soldier standing to his left carried his fur shako with the reverence ordinarily accorded to a holy relic.
The soldier was a veteran of the feared Lucifer Blacks, so-called because of their coal-dust velvet coats and jet body plate. The Lucifers, an Ischian-raised elite brigade as old and celebrated as the Byzant Janizars or the Sidthu Barat, were all but extinct. Most of their strength had been depleted in the last years of the Unification Wars and, lacking the structural resilience of the Geno Chiliad, they had never rebuilt. During the Crusade, they had served a ceremonial role, providing companion retinues for distinguished commanders like Namatjira.
Five other Lucifers stood behind the Lord Commander, their hands on the pommels of their sabres. One carried a standard from which dangled the many laurels and sun disks, all stamped out of sheet gold, that enumerated Namatjira’s triumphs. Another held the golden lead of the Lord Commander’s pet thylacene, a regal, lithe beast with a dappled and striped mahogany pelt.