Heart & Soul - James Swallow Page 4

  ‘Attack!’ shouted Miriya and she sprinted up over a pile of fallen masonry, leading with her bolt pistol. The Battle Sister killed three of the traitor soldiers with three shots from the weapon, and she saw Oleande react with shock at her arrival.

  Still, her unexpected intervention was not enough to slow the ­Iconoclast’s murderous assault. The white-clad figure leapt into the air and came down on one of the Celestians as the Valorous Sister scrambled to reload her bolter. The tips of the sickle swords went into the flex-metal mesh beneath her chin and around her throat, and into the point where her breastplate met her thorax. The weapons were aimed perfectly into the weaker spots of the Sororitas battle armour, and they went right through, bursting out the Celestian’s back in a ­welter of red. Miriya could do nothing but watch as the Iconoclast tore the sickle swords away in opposite directions, opening up the Battle ­Sister, tearing her into rags.

  A great liquid mass of the Celestian’s blood seemed to rise up and engulf the Iconoclast in a wave, drenching the white armour until it was crimson. But then, to Miriya’s horror, the porous surface of the wargear drank in the murdered woman’s­ blood, soaking it away.

  The heretic caught sight of the new arrivals and screamed out a command. One of the Iconoclast’s surviving soldier-slaves turned a lascarbine on the Battle Sisters and opened fire, spitting shrieking bolts of yellow energy across the rubble-choked chancel. The shots went high, sizzling through the air over Miriya’s head and she bobbed as she moved.

  ‘Sister, beware!’ Isabel shouted a warning and too late Miriya realised that the las-bolts had found a different target. Above them, a great brass ceremonial censer hung from a thick, dust-caked chain; in better times, it would have been filled with perfumed oils heated into vapour, to be breathed over the heads of the faithful penitents who visited the chapel to worship the God-Emperor.

  Drained and dead, the censer was an empty vestige of the holy shrine’s previous existence, and now the beam-shots severed the chain, bringing it down in a clattering rush. The brass orb, as big as a Land Raider, crashed into the mosaic floor and broke apart, the wreckage of it blocking the archway Miriya and the others had entered through.

  The Battle Sister heard Isabel cry out and fall in the wake of the collapse. She spun, daring to disengage from the fight just long enough to find her scarred Sister lying a short distance away. A piece of bronze pipe thrown from the censer’s interior had speared her in the back, her armour’s artificial muscles sparking and jerking.

  Verity sprinted to Isabel’s side, waving Miriya away. ‘I have her, Sister! Go!’ Despite the energy bolts crackling around her, the hospitaller went to Isabel’s aid, ignoring everything else.

  Miriya shot her a nod and regathered her momentum, picking out and killing the cultist with the lascarbine before he could marshal himself for another salvo of fire. The few remaining members of the Iconoclast’s retinue of killers were more focused on destroying Oleande’s squad, and she saw another of the Valorous Heart ended in a flurry of sword strikes.

  ‘Come at me, heretic!’ bellowed Sister Oleande, drawing her own power sword and brandishing it at the enemy. She was now the last of her Order still standing inside the ruined shrine.

  The Iconoclast’s faceless visage inclined towards her, as if amused, and then the white-clad figure vaulted towards the Battle Sister with incredible speed. Blades clashed as they went into single combat.

  Miriya moved quickly, trying to close the distance, but the other ­heretic soldiers anticipated her tactics and the three of them went at her at once, stub-guns and spiked power-mauls turned upon her.

  Without the time to reload her bolt pistol, Miriya used the butt of the massive handgun to cave in the face of the first attacker to reach her, smashing through the bridge of a poly­mer visor and splintering bone, meat and cartilage.

  Without losing a moment of potential, she let her chainsword extend and swing down, the blade’s fanged teeth a blur of bloody metal as they cut into the thigh of the next attacker. The weapon sparked through dented armour and turned flesh into gobbets of red, opening up the man’s femoral artery and setting him to gush his lifeblood into the dust.

  The third attacker fired a stubber gun point-blank into her chestplate and the raw kinetic impact slammed her off-balance and into a stumble, the shock knocking the empty bolt pistol from her hand. Heat shunted from the impact site bloomed across her breast and throat, but she ignored it, thrusting herself back to her feet.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw blades flashing as Oleande and the Iconoclast duelled back and forth, but she dared not shift her gaze from the shooter for even a moment. He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Blood for the Blood God!’

  As he spoke the words, Miriya smelled the blood in her nostrils. The dark, heavy scent of it, lingering and potent. She could suddenly feel every single tiny droplet of spilled vitae that had spattered over her face as she made the chainsword kill moments earlier. The urge to lick her lips was so strong it took an effort of will to resist. ‘Get out of my soul,’ she growled. ‘There is no place for your daemon king there!’

  ‘Skulls for the Skull–!’ The gunman’s chant was cut dead when the dagger hidden in the Battle Sister’s chaplet flew from her outstretched hand and arrowed through his jawbone, locking his mouth shut. He staggered back, trying to laugh, frothing and gurgling as his own vital fluids fountained out of a new, ragged wound in his face.

  Miriya stepped to him in a single motion and grabbed him by the throat. She pulled the man to her, as if about to embrace him, but instead his body met the buzzing tip of her chainsword and she dragged him on to it. He jerked and screamed as the weapon made short work of his armour and the soft, yielding matter beneath it. When he was dead, the Battle Sister shoved him away and recovered her chaplet. She stalked back to where her pistol had fallen, shaking tainted liquid off the snap-dagger. Everything around her stank of stale, sour gore.

  She blinked away ruby droplets from her eyelashes and events slowed around her. Miriya felt the tremor of unchained ferocity singing in her nerves, the thunderous pounding of her heartbeat. The raw need to do violence pushed at her psyche.

  She stooped to grab her gun and froze. A few metres away, Oleande lay pinned to the ground with one of the sickle swords through her belly and her own blade lying out of reach. The Iconoclast stood over her, twirling the first weapon’s­ twin, the spatters of red on her white armour trickling upwards against gravity into crevices across the torso and throat.

  The blank doll-face turned to face Miriya and up came a hand to waggle a finger in her direction, like a parent giving a child a playful warning not to misbehave.

  Miriya was too far away to attack with the chainsword, her bolt pistol was out of reach and empty, and she guessed that her tactic with the chaplet-dagger would be a waste, given that the Iconoclast would be able to kill Oleande in the second she drew back her hand to throw it.

  But Oleande’s life was worth the death of the heretic, and they both knew it. Miriya shifted slightly, readying herself to explode into motion.

  Before she could commit to the act, soft, feminine laughter issued out from beneath the Iconoclast’s mask. The porcelain sheath parted into quarters and retreated back off the face beneath.

  I swear I will tear off the Iconoclast’s mask and see the heretic’s true face before I deliver the killing blow. Miriya’s vow echoed in her memory; but here the traitor was revealing itself of its own accord.

  It was a human face beneath the white covering, a woman’s­ face. Scarred and florid with the rush of blood, but an aspect that Miriya knew. Severe green eyes. Ash-blonde hair. It was Oleande’s face.

  ‘What trick is this?’ spat Miriya. ‘Your mockery is meaning­less, traitor! Whatever face you hide behind, you will still die!’

  ‘I’m not hiding, Miriya,’ said the Iconoclast. ‘And it is no trick. Is it?’ She looked down at
the Battle Sister pinned to the ground. ‘The only falsehood here is her.’

  ‘Lies,’ coughed the Sister of the Valorous Heart. ‘Avert… your eyes. The daemons take on many forms…’

  ‘No trick,’ repeated the Iconoclast, becoming angry. ‘I am no daemon, not yet.’ She reached for the hilt of the other sickle sword and gave it a twist, causing the woman on the ground to cry out. ‘I am Oleande. I always have been. This one gave up her name to steal mine. So that none would know. So that the lie could never be seen.’

  ‘No Sororitas has ever fallen.’ Miriya said the words before she could stop herself. Could it be true? The possibility sickened her on a level she thought impossible to contain. ‘I knew Sister Oleande! She would never give herself to the Ruinous Powers!’

  ‘Fool,’ said the Iconoclast. ‘Liar.’ She tapped her head. ‘Think, Miriya. Didn’t you wonder how it was my army could stay one step ahead of you for so long? Didn’t you ask yourself how I could know the tactics of the Sororitas so well?’ She let out a sigh. ‘Remember the woman you fought with at the Icarus Front. You saw me. Even if you never wished to admit it, you saw how much I loved the cut and the kill.’ She made a deep, purring growl. ‘And after a while, the faith and fire our rancid corpse-emperor gave me wasn’t enough. I wanted more. I wanted blood and skulls.’ She leered at Miriya, her violent desire leaking into every word. ‘Khorne answered my need…’

  Miriya watched her lick the congealing blood off her sword and all doubt melted away. ‘Is it so?’ She asked the question of the wounded woman on the ground. When she didn’t answer, Miriya went on. ‘Tell me the name of the Repentia who perished on the twenty-seventh day at Icarus,’ she demanded, her voice rising. She felt betrayed. ‘The one who saved the rest of us from a krak grenade. Oleande was there! She lit a candle in the name of the honoured dead that night!’

  ‘I do… not recall!’ spat the Battle Sister.

  ‘Her name was Adessa,’ said the Iconoclast, and part of Miriya’s spirit died to hear the truth spoken by the heretic. ‘Your Sister died in agony, but fear not. The Lord of Rage embraces such endings.’ She pointed at Miriya. ‘You wept for her, I remember. So soft then. But not so now. I think you hear the same clarion that I did. The rage, coming close to the surface.’

  ‘No.’ Miriya shook her head, turning inwards, concentrating on the Emperor’s Light, grasping for it. ‘No.’

  ‘You think I am the only one to fall?’ The figure in white laughed and the harsh sound cascaded off the broken walls. ‘The only one who ­willingly burned her oath for greater power? You know better than that, Sister Miriya. After all, it is your Order that carries the stain of being the first to give up a daughter to the Eightfold Path!’

  ‘Do not… speak the name!’ The wounded Battle Sister coughed up blood as she shouted out the words.

  ‘Sister Superior Miriael Sabathiel!’ shouted the Iconoclast. ‘She of the Order of Our Martyred Lady! Given unto the embrace of the Lord of Dark Delights, and such a waste too…’ She shook her head sadly, mockingly. ‘As callow novices­ we were taught that no Sister ever falls, but Sabathiel is known. She is the cautionary tale. How do you square that circle, Miriya? None fall, yet one fell? How does it feel to know you are lied to?’

  She reached for an answer and could not find one. The Iconoclast – Oleande – saw it in her eyes and smiled.

  ‘Sabathiel was only the first. She built her own war band out of pious Sisters she enslaved herself from Order of the Argent Shroud, much to their shame… And then there were the others, quietly killed and cut out of history… Or replaced. Like me.’ Oleande strode back to her wounded double and glared at her. ‘All to protect the great lie of the Adepta Sororitas, to shield its brittle heart and soul from the shattering truth of Chaos!’ She drew back and spat in her own face. ‘You see before you the blood-soaked shame of the Valorous Heart. So humiliated they were by my defection to the true gods that they made this lie. Took a Sister and gave her my aspect, so that none would know. And they’ve been following your crusade ever since, Miriya. Waiting for this moment to come and end me. To seal the secret forever and burn out the indignity that is the heretic Oleande. The Iconoclast who dared to disown them.’

  And now the veil fell. Now it was all clear; the instinct that something was amiss about the woman Miriya had met at the head of the Sisters of the Valorous Heart; their insistence on executing the heretic and doing so alone; their inexplic­able attack on Nohlan’s adepts rather than waiting for the word of the Abbess. They could not take the chance that the Abbess would rule against them, she thought. Their disgrace is too great for others to know of it.

  ‘You see the lie,’ said Oleande, nodding towards her double.­ ‘Cut it open, Miriya. And you will be reborn as I was–’

  The heavy triple-report of a bolter on burst-fire setting cut through the stagnant air of the chancel and Oleande was slammed away into the dust and debris. The flat bang of the mass-reactive shells dragged Miriya back from the edge of reverie and into the moment once more. She spun and saw Verity standing a short distance away, holding on to Isabel’s bolt rifle and shaking with adrenaline.

  ‘I… I grew tired of listening to her pontificate,’ she blurted out.

  Miriya took a step towards the hospitaller, intending to take the rifle from her, but a high-pitched scream drew her back to the fray.

  Oleande rose from the ashes, a bruise-purple impact crater­ in her chest where one of Verity’s shots had hit home. Something unholy and monstrous was living in there, inside the heretic’s chest cavity where her heart had once beat. She dragged herself up, advancing on the wounded Battle Sister who even now tried in vain to unpin herself from the ground.

  Miriya broke into a run, and came in swinging her chainsword in a growling figure of eight, as Oleande screamed wordlessly at her twin. The bitter champion of Khorne brought down her curved blade in an executioner’s blow towards the neck of the woman on the ground, intent on beheading her with a single strike.

  The chainsword blocked the fall before the blade could bite, as Miriya closed the distance to her enemy. The sickle edge skipped off the churning teeth of the bigger weapon and a torrent of white sparks sprayed into the air.

  Miriya put her weight into the parry and forced Oleande back and away from the injured Battle Sister. ‘Your foul master will not take her,’ she spat.

  ‘Do not defy the will of the Blood God!’ Oleande bellowed back. Her khopesh was slim and light, quicker to wield than the bulky engine of Miriya’s chainsword, and she struck back hard and swift, trying to find a weak point in the Sister’s­ defences. For her part, Miriya blocked each strike and kept up the pressure, forcing Oleande to back away in the face of the whirling blade-edge.

  Their weapons met again and again, corrupted steel clashing with tungsten fangs, each blow ringing a bell-tone across the echoing space of the shrine’s ruined chancel. A lucky swipe sang off Miriya’s shoulder-guard but did little more than scratch the black ceramite. In return the Battle Sister jabbed at her attacker and almost connected with Oleande’s chest, much to her incandescent fury.

  As Oleande fought back, a sickly nest of pallid tendrils wavered out of the entry wound in her chest, each of them ending in a lamprey-maw that danced in the air in search of blood and meat. The sight revolted Miriya and she attacked again, chipping off a piece of her enemy’s sickle sword with a particularly violent downswing – but every strike she threw at her target was blocked, every feint transparent to her. The fallen Sister knew her ways of war too well, just as she had boasted. Oleande had been trained by the same warrior-mentors in the same doctrines, and now she matched Miriya pace for pace in lethal deadlock.

  Oleande gave a hollow, monstrous bark of laughter. ‘You can’t kill me. I have died a thousand times and the Blood God’s gift always resurrects me…’ She reached up to stroke the squirming mass of tentacle-things emerging from the hole in her chest. ‘I
will give him your bones as tribute!’

  She reeled back, and Miriya saw the flood of motion before it came. Her foe was going to attack with all she had, and hold back nothing. The Battle Sister braced herself–

  –And in the next second Miriya heard the other Oleande cry out in pain. The sound dragged the gaze of her corrupted namesake towards her and Miriya saw the Chaos champion’s­ mouth open in hunger and avarice.

  The woman lying on the ground had finally, agonisingly, pulled the second sickle sword from her side and tossed it aside. The sudden uprush of blood from her wound spilled over her armour and the scent of the fresh vitae drew ­Oleande’s desire like a magnet. The Blood God’s servant could not stop herself from licking her lips.

  That split-second of inattention was all the opportunity Miriya needed. She roared as she brought the chainsword down in a snarling arc that severed Oleande’s sword-arm above the elbow, cutting noisily through splintering porcelain armour, meat and bone with a grinding howl. Her foe was staggered, but to Miriya’s disgust, the detached arm disgorged a bulk of pale tendrils at its severed end, which began to propel it across the ground towards her, like a fat maggot questing for carrion to consume. Without hesitation, she stepped forward and stamped the severed limb into a pulpy mess, grinding it into the broken tiles beneath until it stopped moving.