Angron's Monolith - Steve Lyons Read online

  He retook his desk in the Librarium: a circular chamber at the fortress-monastery’s heart, with a high, vaulted ceiling that echoed every footstep, every whisper, every breath. He sifted through the latest reports from the Armageddon jungle.

  A message from the Fourth Company’s Captain Maegar, who was stationed in the south, sounded hopeful. He spoke of feral orks exhibiting strange behaviour and of the deranged ramblings of a displaced Imperial Guardsman.

  Decario had prayed for something more concrete by now. Still, he noted that Halstron had joined up with Maegar’s company, so the inquisitor must believe there was some substance to their findings.

  The Librarium was busier than normal. Decario had assigned all the lower ranks he could spare to the task of combing through the Chapter’s extensive records again. They all knew about his visions, at least as much as they needed to know. They were searching the dusty past for a clue to illuminate the future.

  Had there been such a clue in the ancient records, of course, then Decario would have discovered it long ago. Still, they had no hope but to try.

  He lingered over a message from an Imperial Guard regiment, based in one of Armageddon’s hive cities. They were under siege, pleading for assistance.

  They had sent their request to the Blood Angels Chapter Master. A hero of the Second War for Armageddon, Lord Commander Dante had been an obvious choice to direct the Third. Almost thirty Adeptus Astartes Chapters had responded to his call to arms, and Dante had taken on the task of coordinating their forces.

  He had forwarded the Steel Legion’s distress call to several Chapters, the Relictors included, and flagged it as urgent. He hadn’t issued an order – yet.

  The Relictors had chosen their own assignment on Armageddon. Their Chapter Master, Bardane, had informed Dante of that decision, but only after his troops had put down in the equatorial jungle.

  Dante had deferred, in the end, to Bardane’s intransigence – though he hadn’t been happy about it, by all accounts. There were greater, more imminent threats to be countered, in his opinion, than that of the jungle’s unruly denizens.

  Bardane had warned Decario that the matter was unlikely to rest there.

  He laid the data-slate down on his desk and reached for a stylus. He began to compose a reply to the lord commander. Utmost regrets… Operations in the jungle have reached a critical stage… Believe that the feral orks present a clear and present danger… All forces committed at this time…

  He attributed the message to Bardane. It wouldn’t have done for Dante – or any outsider – to know that his Chapter Master was currently indisposed. He set the message aside. He would have it transmitted tomorrow. With the Emperor’s grace, another Chapter would have come to Hive Infernus’s rescue by then.

  He was struggling to focus on his work.

  There were too many people around him, their footsteps echoing, and his head was still fragile. The vision still lurked behind his eyes.

  Decario had lived a long time. His gene-seed implants kept him physically vital, but there were days when he felt every one of his four-hundred-plus years. The choices he had made throughout his long life weighed heavily on his soul.

  He rose from his seat, deciding that a stroll might clear his mind.

  His wanderings took him to a window at the edge of the basilica. He peered out through its stained glass – actually, an armourglass compound – across the spires and battlements of the north quadrant.

  ‘North’ was an arbitrary designation, of course. There were no magnetic poles for reference out here. The Relictors Chapter had been exiled from its home world fifty years ago, forced to wander the stars. Their home now was a Ramilies-class star fort: their ‘sky fortress’. It had had a name once, but very few of them remembered it. The name was considered to be outdated.

  The Relictors had had another name once, too.

  Armageddon, through the window, was a pinprick of light against the freckled tapestry of the Segmentum Solar. The war that raged across its continents seemed tiny, insignificant when set against the breadth of a galaxy like this. It was simply a matter of perspective.

  In his mind’s eye, Decario had drifted tens of thousands of light years – and a century and a half – away, in any case. He was clad in the same suit of Terminator armour, but it was painted in the proud colours of the Fire Claws Chapter: orange and black. His right fist crackled with the energy of an oversized power glove – and he was certain that he was about to die.

  His assault squad had stormed a hijacked space hulk as it drifted into the Stygies System. They had fought a running battle along the ship’s abandoned decks against an outmatched crew of Chaos Space Marines – until finally, the traitors had regrouped in the cavernous engine room, where their leader had entered the fray.

  He had called himself the Excoriator, and he was a potent Chaos Champion, with a sword forged in the flames of the Eye of Terror itself. Decario had fought toe to toe with him. He had lost. The daemon blade had shattered his force sword and broken his armour. His power fist had severed the Excoriator’s sword arm, but even this had barely slowed him. Four brothers had given their lives to save their commander as he had sprawled helplessly on the ground.

  He had sworn that he would make their sacrifices matter.

  His flailing hand had alighted upon a weapon beside him, dropped during the battle. Decario didn’t stop to wonder by whom. By the time he understood what he was holding, it had been too late. He saw the Excoriator turning towards him again, and he struck out at his nemesis with all his rapidly waning strength.

  A single action, taken in a desperate moment, but it had changed his life – and the destiny of his Chapter – forever.

  ‘Listen. Listen to me.’

  It had been the voice of Inquisitor de Marche that had reached him.

  ‘There is only the Emperor. Say it with me.’

  The daemon was battering at the sagging gates of his mind. Decario could feel its oily black talons straining through the bars, tearing at his sense of self.

  ‘There is only the Emperor, and He is our shield and protector.’

  The inquisitor had fought at his side, he had recalled. The Excoriator’s sword had laid him low. He was bleeding, but still clinging to life and to consciousness. He clung to the sword too, but lacked the strength to wrest it from Decario’s grip.

  ‘The daemon is bound within the blade. You must cast out the daemon from your mind and relinquish the sword.’

  Somehow, he had pulled the scattered splinters of his psyche together and done as the inquisitor’s insistent voice exhorted him. Letting go of the sword had felt like surrendering a part of himself, but that had just been a lie of the warp.

  He had woken on his knees, on the enginarium’s floor, and for the first and last time he had wept, convinced that he was lost. He had opened himself up to the corruption of Chaos, and his soul was indelibly stained.

  He had thrown himself at Inquisitor de Marche’s mercy. He had prayed for the Emperor’s forgiveness, but de Marche had laid down the daemon sword and knelt beside him. He had turned Decario’s head towards the still-twitching corpse of the Chaos Champion, decapitated by his own evil blade.

  ‘Don’t you see? There is nothing to forgive.’

  Decario thought about his old friend now, as he gazed out at the stars. De Marche had been a grim, distant figure before – as so many members of the Ordo Malleus were – cloaked in his own dark secrets. Following the battle aboard the Captor of Sin, however, he and Librarian Decario had grown inseparable.

  He still felt the sorrow of the last time he had seen him, when the Inquisition had come to take one of their own.

  There had been no choice but to hand de Marche over to the Ordo Hereticus. The Relictors had had to accept their punishment too and serve their penance, for allowing de Marche’s ideas to taint them. The alternative would have been their Chapter’s destruction – and they had to survive.

  Decario blinked away the image of de Ma
rche, his head stooped, his eyes hooded as he was led away to his fate in chains. He let another image swim in front of his mind’s eye instead: the one that he had been seeing in dreams for weeks.

  The image was that of an eye without a lid, always open, staring back into the Chief Librarian’s soul even as he stared at it, and weeping viscous tears of blood.

  He had known, when he had lifted that sword a century and a half ago – as vehemently as he had denied it, even to himself, he had known – that, in truth, he had been chosen to fulfil a higher purpose. He had felt the same way when he had let them take de Marche and held his silence.

  The vision of the bleeding eye was only proof of what he had always believed.

  The war on Armageddon meant nothing, less than nothing, when compared to the carnage about to engulf the entire Imperium. The only thing that mattered was that the Relictors were ready to turn back the Chaos tide. They had dire need of the artefact that, according to Decario’s divinations, had been lost and was buried deep in Armageddon’s sprawling equatorial jungle.

  They needed the shard.

  Five

  The jungle air was thick with the stench of death. Even the Relictors’ helmets couldn’t filter it out completely. They heard the buzzing of insects – much louder than usual, concentrated a short way ahead of them – and the mocking cry of a carrion bird.

  It was hardly a surprise then, when they came upon the first body.

  It was Tarryn who saw it. It was hidden in the undergrowth; he might have missed it, or stumbled over it, had a cloud of fat, black flies not marked its resting place.

  A feral ork. It was spread-eagled on its stomach, exposing a bloody gash between its shoulder blades. ‘Looks like it was felled by an axe,’ he voxed his brothers.

  The blow hadn’t killed its victim immediately. The ork had tried to run. Tarryn could trace its path easily with his eyes, from the branches it had broken and the blood it had left smeared on them.

  The Relictors followed that path and found more bodies at the end of it.

  There had been a brutal battle here, evidently. The jungle had been trampled in an area a hundred metres across. At least forty feral orks lay strewn across that area. Most of them were dead, but one of them stirred and made a feeble grab at Kantus’s ankle with a broken, bloodied hand. A bolt-round put it out of its misery.

  ‘What do you think did this?’ Nabori murmured.

  Another combat squad, was Tarryn’s first suspicion. Somehow, they had strayed off course into a neighbouring sector, or another squad had wandered into theirs.

  A closer inspection, however, revealed no chainsword bites upon the scattered corpses, no bolt-rounds embedded in their hides. The orks had been killed by clubs, axes and arrows. ‘They did it to each other,’ Tarryn realised.

  ‘Rival greenskin tribes?’ suggested Baeloch.

  Sergeant Juster shook his head. ‘Look at their markings. They’re the same – two red stripes, crossed through, on the left shoulder.’

  ‘They’re the same tribe,’ Nabori concluded.

  ‘We’ve seen infighting before,’ said Juster. ‘Maybe two or three greenskins squabbling over who gets to be the leader. But nothing on this scale.’

  Many of the feral orks were locked together, even in death, even with their primitive weapons discarded or broken. Their fingers were gouged into each other’s muscles, their tusks tearing through each other’s flesh.

  ‘A violent madness must have seized them,’ said Kantus.

  ‘One that couldn’t be sated nor exhausted, until every last one of them was dead,’ agreed Tarryn.

  It was a sombre group of Space Marines who finally left that charnel place behind them. The morning was young and they had much ground to cover before sundown.

  Nor did the jungle seem disposed towards easing their passage. It grew more densely and in tighter knots around them than in any area they had been before. Its canopy, high above the Relictors’ heads, had closed its fingers, and the light of the distant sun had to strain to reach them.

  To Tarryn, it felt as if the jungle were closing in around the Space Marines.

  He thought about the battle he had fought, three days ago. He thought about the feral ork that had violated his mind and laid him low. He knew that some greenskins developed such talents – as did some men, touched by the corruption of the warp – but it was a rare phenomenon. It felt like another bad omen.

  His squad had fought several other battles since then, albeit none quite as fraught. They had encountered and killed more feral orks in three days than they had in the whole of the preceding week: as if, for some reason, they were gathering in this area.

  They’re growing bolder…

  Other squads, they had learned from their infrequent vox-contacts, had observed increases in ork activity too. Many of them had taken casualties. A number of their enemies had been armed with scavenged weapons, or spears and axes had been more skilfully crafted than most and better able to slice through armour plating.

  Two Relictors had been killed, and one combat squad had disappeared entirely. Nobody had heard from them in almost a week. Captain Maegar had sent twenty battle-brothers after them, but as yet there had been no news from the search party, at least none of which Tarryn had been apprised.

  His thoughts kept returning to the site of the massacre.

  What profane force, he wondered, could have incited so many feral orks into such a murderous frenzy as to slaughter their own kin? The same force, perhaps, he thought, that could drive an Imperial Guardsman out of his mind.

  ‘I’ve got that stink in my nostrils again,’ Kantus grumbled, presently.

  He wasn’t the only one.

  The Relictors picked their way through the foliage, cautiously. As Sergeant Juster reminded them, there could still be an ambush ahead of them. None of them were surprised, however, by what they discovered instead.

  Another feral ork killing ground. Another place of death.

  It was just like before; in fact, the scene was eerily similar. Around forty gouged and battered corpses, festering in the midday sun, and no sign of any enemy, any force that could have visited this grisly fate upon them. No force but their own.

  The victims had died in the past two or three days, and each bore the same design upon its left shoulder: two stripes, painted with red jungle dye, crossed through.

  Sergeant Juster lifted a body with his toe. It was lying on its stomach, with an arrow shaft protruding from the back of its neck. ‘It can’t be…’

  Tarryn saw it too, though, like his sergeant, he found it impossible to believe.

  He was standing beside an ancient, wizened tree, with roots like gnarled claws clinging stubbornly to the ground. It had weathered the recent carnage, while many around it had been felled or broken. Between its roots, small patches of ugly, black flowers sprouted pugnaciously, and two feral orks lay locked in a deathly embrace.

  He looked over his shoulder and, just where he had expected to find it, there lay the ork that had stirred and made a futile grab for Kantus’s ankle.

  Baeloch still needed more convincing.

  He turned and marched brusquely away from the others. He took a well-trampled path, but the jungle soon swallowed him up regardless. A moment later, his voice broke over the vox-channel. He had found the ork that had run, with the axe wound in its back – the one that Tarryn had originally come across.

  ‘The same place again,’ breathed Nabori.

  ‘But how could we have come back here?’ asked Tarryn.

  No one could answer that question.

  When the Relictors had set out from this position before, they had marched due south to the border of their assigned sector. There, they had turned ninety degrees to the left and, a short march later, they had done the same again.

  So, how could they have ended up back in the same place?

  They should have been facing northwards – and they had been, they were sure of it – so, how could they possibly have appr
oached this site from the east?

  Tarryn’s auto-senses confirmed it, concurring with his brothers’ readings. The first trail they had ploughed still ran across their path, from north to south.

  ‘Could something have baffled our instruments?’ Nabori conjectured.

  ‘Or perhaps our wits,’ offered Kantus.

  Tarryn seized upon the first, and less disturbing, of those possibilities. ‘A disturbance in the planet’s magnetic field here, perhaps.’

  ‘In which case, why didn’t our Stormtalon pilots report it when they scouted this area three days ago?’ asked Baeloch, rejoining them.

  ‘Remember the Guardsman?’ said Nabori. ‘Remember what he said?’

  ‘Who cares about the babblings of a heretic?’ Baeloch sneered.

  But Tarryn remembered: …Ran as far as I could… I kept running, but it was always there again in front of me… waiting for me…

  ‘What do we do?’ asked Kantus.

  ‘Turn back and report what we have seen to the Librarium?’ suggested Baeloch. He was testing their sergeant, seeing what his reaction would be.

  ‘Not yet,’ Juster answered him. ‘I want to search the area again first – the area we thought we were searching before, I mean.’

  ‘March south again,’ agreed Kantus.

  ‘Or back east, the way we just came from?’ suggested Tarryn.

  The sergeant turned on the spot, mulling over his options. Tarryn couldn’t see his face behind his helmet, but he knew that, if he could, he would see a familiar thoughtful frown etched upon it. Juster glanced up at the sun, through the jungle canopy, as if to check it was still where it was meant to be. Then, he made his decision.

  ‘That way,’ he said, pointing. ‘We go that way. If there’s something, something hidden in this jungle that the jungle doesn’t want to let us see…’

  ‘Then it must be somewhere we haven’t trodden yet,’ Nabori concluded.

  ‘Somewhere in there,’ said Tarryn; and, as one, the five Relictors turned and gazed into the shadows of the unexplored jungle to the south-east.

  ‘Keep close together,’ ordered the sergeant, wading through the grasping undergrowth.