Devourer - Joe Parrino Read online

  The buzzing grew, louder and louder. She yelled, screaming into the flayer, matching the buzzing with her own vocalisations.

  Then the flayer’s head was gone, chopped away by Anrakyr the Traveller. ‘Less panic, more restraint,’ he hissed. The melee swept him away.

  Valnyr watched as knots of warriors were subsumed, dragged down by the frantic motions of flayers. She channelled energy, stealing atoms from the stale air of Kehlrantyr, converting them to heat and power. It coalesced at the head of her staff and blasted outwards with a thunderclap of noise, shattering flayers into pieces of stinging metal.

  Shrapnel expanded in a cloud of flickering metal and smoke, pinging off the chassis of nearby necrons. An unlucky false necron was caught in the blast, flung to pieces.

  Valnyr felt a moment’s pity, but it was drowned with the instinctual scrabbling for continued existence. Flayers threw themselves with mindless belligerence onto the shields of Valnyr’s lychguard.

  Everywhere she looked there were flayers, stumbling from shadowed doorways, lurching out from dark streets. With them came the static, growing and growing and growing. The sound numbed her, broke her mind apart. The cryptek could scarcely stay standing.

  All was confusion. All was broken. The world died around her, not with a bang, nor a whimper, but drowned beneath screams of static and buzzing.

  A flayed one broke through the cordon of her lychguard, still clad in the finery of a necron noble. Its mouth stretched open, broken metal teeth glittering in the green light. Talons stretched, scraping for her throat. She stumbled back, but fell into a lychguard.

  The flayer scrabbled after her.

  Valnyr spat a word. Time froze in a small bubble. It enclosed just the two of them, an intimate moment between flayer-cursed Dynast and cryptek.

  The flayer scrabbled on four limbs, prowling like some predator. It skittered and jumped, jaws distended. All the while it announced its terrible hunger. Something in Valnyr’s breast answered, but she shoved it away. She levered her staff, keeping it at bay. It snapped at her, jaws clacking.

  Time began to resume. She shoved the bladed end of her staff through the flayer’s skull. Energy swirled down the weapon, blew through the skull and erased one of her lychguard in the blast. Again came the guilt, momentary and fleeting, and again it was smothered beneath self-preservation.

  The flayer tide receded, but the buzzing stayed behind.

  Valnyr could hear words, faintly through the noise, old and lost to time in a dialect she could scarcely remember. ‘To those who have turned their faces away,’ she could hear in the buzzing and the static. ‘To those who are faithless and wretched in their jealousies.’

  She stood still, head cocked to the side. The words echoed from all around them, driven through the shadows and the gloom.

  ‘Do you hear that?’ she asked Shaudukar. The question echoed through the forgotten halls of her home.

  ‘To those who have denied us. To those who have denied me. I will wreak vengeance. I will wrench your souls and break your bones. I will cast hunger through your accursed existence. Down the eons, you will not forget. I will grant you this gift from love turned aside and make you like me, break you in my image as you have broken me. I shall cast the fear of myself into you and all of your kind. I am Llandu’gor. I am the hunger. I am the flayer, and from this moment, you shall be too.’

  ‘I am Llandu’gor,’ announced one Kehlrantyrian necron. The chorus rippled everywhere, bouncing from the dead walls.

  The division came back with a sound like fire. The necron who spoke the c’tan’s name was annihilated by one of the triarch praetorians, reduced to its constituent atoms by a covenant rod.

  Confusion reigned.

  ‘Enough,’ Anrakyr bellowed. ‘This bickering solves nothing. Cryptek, where is the entrance to the Dolmen Gate? Are we near?’

  ‘Yes,’ Valnyr answered, tearing her attention away from the buzzing and the half-heard words. ‘We are close.’

  By the time Valnyr was aware of the betrayal, she was already bisected. Anrakyr’s spear stabbed through her spine, carving her body apart. The Traveller’s expression was impassive. How could it not be? His face, his features etched themselves onto Valnyr’s memory.

  She opened her mouth to question, to ask why he had done this, but all that emerged was a scream. It sounded like static.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said in a tone that implied nothing of the kind.

  Shaudukar and Valnyr’s lychguard charged the Traveller, warscythes raised, angry and belligerent. The triarch praetorians turned them to ash with rapid blasts from their rods of covenant.

  ‘You are afflicted,’ continued Anrakyr, as if nothing had happened. ‘And that is why I am honoured by your continued insistence that you serve.’

  Already flayers were emerging from the shadowed ways, lurching out from the darkness. The stunned Kehlrantyrian necrons answered with desperation, or fell to their knees and joined them.

  Her mind sought purpose, searching for some utility, some artifice that could salvage this situation. She reached towards Anrakyr, trying to summon the presence of mind to repay his betrayal. Nothing answered, nothing except the frenzied screaming of the flayers.

  The foreigners punched free, heading towards the Dolmen Gate and the ship that would take them from this place, take them to safety and freedom. Valnyr could only watch, inching towards her fallen staff. Already lightning played about her severed spine, metal flowing and stretching towards her sundered lower body.

  But it was too slow.

  Flayers were everywhere now, surrounding the doomed remnants of their kin. A chorus arose, three words repeated over and over from those still with minds and those already broken.

  ‘I am Llandu’gor,’ they chanted.

  A snapping crackle saw her sundered body reunited. Valnyr stumbled to her feet and grasped her staff. She fired at the flayers and her kin. There was no finesse here, no discrimination and no mercy. She killed so that she would not die. She killed so that she could deny the hunger that burned within her.

  One flayer attacked, clad in markings she ought to recognise. She punched her hand through its chest, reaching its spine. She tore at it, dropped her staff and reached in with both hands.

  She failed. Flayers bore her down, hungry mouths open, eager to share, to welcome her into their curse.

  The buzzing swelled, until it was all she could hear. Gone were the words. Gone was her identity, her science, her personality, her artifice.

  With the buzzing bloomed hunger, ever-present, but now all-consuming.

  The necron once known as Valnyr, High Cryptek to the Kehlrantyr Dynasts, vented its screaming hunger to the darkness, joined by the rest of her doomed kin.

  Chapter Ten

  Through the faded shadows of Kehlrantyr they moved. Down processional avenues, watched over by the great legions that once called the tomb world home and who would now wander the halls as corrupted revenants of the glory they once possessed. Kehlrantyr’s people doomed to suffer a fate worse than the true death. Their mortality surrendered only to find their personalities erased and their purpose futile and corrupted.

  ‘A tragic loss,’ insisted Armenhorlal, shockingly lucid. ‘This world is dead. Its people are dead.’

  Anrakyr offered no response. The destroyer cooed to himself with an idiot’s sincerity.

  The deeper they moved down into the tomb world, the greater the decrepitude of the surroundings and rampant technology became. Machines rumbled. The floor and walls vibrated to a hidden hum, just on the edge of their hearing. Green sigils stood out everywhere, warning signs marked by canoptek constructs. Each announced broken quarters of the tomb world, submerged or stolen by collapse.

  Turning a corridor, they found transparent observation windows studding the processional they advanced down, offering a vista into a cavernous space. The cent
re of the world, the hollowed-out core of Kehlrantyr, gaped to their left, the ceiling arcing away impossibly far until it faded into itself.

  A bizarre, thrumming hum coated the air. ‘The warp,’ Armenhorlal said, voice quavering slightly.

  A cry went up from the front of their force. Anrakyr prepared himself for the worst. What he saw instead would have brought a smile to his face, had he been capable. Ships floated, still hanging suspended in their docks, over the world-chasm below.

  Sentient necrons broke ranks and watched from the windows. Lights activated at their presence, dispelling the darkness at the heart of the tomb world in a wash of brilliance. At the very centre of the world, suspended by sciences lost even to the oldest of crypteks, floated the Dolmen Gate, and before it the great crescent blade of a Cairn-class tombship.

  Derelict and desolate, the webway was a truly alien place. Colours that had no basis in reality and sounds and echoes broke all around them, shifting and dazzling. Some comforts were to be found, some anxiety balms. Here and there glowed the bright green of necron technology, eating into the walls, veining through the twisting corridors.

  Small spider-like constructs flowed in their wake. The command tomb of the necron vessel was a tense place. None of the necrons spoke. They all stood at their stations, silent in their thoughts, ruminating on the paths that had led them astray, that had lured them to this desperate moment.

  The near presence of the warp weighed heavily on their souls. Anrakyr felt observed, as though the eldar were watching.

  As if reading his thoughts, Armenhorlal turned to him and asked, ‘Where are our old foes?’

  Anrakyr, caught, collected himself, laughed. ‘Fading. They are a shadow of what they once were. Their empire was broken by their own hubris, and they have entered the twilight of their species. Their threat is past.’

  ‘So why do we hide here? Why not move at full speed?’ asked the destroyer.

  Anrakyr provided no answer, merely toyed with his cluster of eldar stones.

  ‘You will need allies,’ announced Khatlan, apropos of nothing. The praetorian’s tone was conversational.

  ‘You have already said this,’ said Anrakyr, watching the swirling utterly alien colours of the webway pass.

  ‘You will need allies,’ repeated Dovetlan. The praetorians moved to surround the Traveller. Their message was clear, but Anrakyr grew tired of their sudden upsurge in communication.

  ‘We know where you will find them,’ said Ammeg.

  ‘Where?’ asked Anrakyr, his frustration rising.

  ‘Where we are already bound,’ answered Dovetlan.

  ‘The Zarathusans?’ asked Anrakyr.

  ‘Yes,’ said Khatlan.

  ‘No,’ said Dovetlan.

  ‘Probably,’ finished Ammeg.

  ‘They will help,’ began Khatlan. ‘But you will need more assistance to defeat these tyranids. You cannot rely upon the Zarathusans to stand firm against these foes.’

  ‘We know of others who will assist.’

  ‘Who? The Silent King?’

  ‘No,’ said Ammeg. ‘The living.’

  Anrakyr laughed. ‘Why would the living accept our help?’

  ‘For the same reason you would seek them out. They are desperate. You are desperate.’

  ‘Desperation does not cause beings to take leave of their wits, nor does it ignore history,’ Anrakyr growled. ‘After what we have wrought here, after what we have wrought all over their “empire”, why would they agree to assist us?’

  ‘Because they have done so before. These tyranids create strange alliances. Their threat is monumental in scope. The Silent King knows this and has allowed for a loosening of the old prohibitions.’

  ‘You have hinted at this alliance before. Your decorations betray an organic taint,’ Anrakyr said.

  ‘We fought alongside the humans at the Silent King’s command once before. The alliance was convenient and ensured his victory there,’ said Ammeg. ‘We wear these decorations as a mark of honour and a reminder.’

  ‘Tell me more,’ said Anrakyr.

  The bridge was destroyed, open to the void. Shipmaster Korbel was dead, erased in a wash of bio-acid. A wing of tyranid fighter organisms had made directly for the vital nerve centre aboard the Golden Promise and broken it open. That the organisms were eliminated scant seconds later by point defence turrets offered no consolation.

  The ship was now dead in the void, while secondary systems and strongpoints were still struggling to come online. They had held for three hours, a valiant, desperate effort. A number of tyranid bio-ships lay crippled around them, a testament to Shipmaster Korbel’s command of void war. Killed in long-range duels, or broken by point-blank broadsides, they oozed frozen blood and escaped gases into Perdita’s orbit. But they had been overwhelmed by sheer numbers, surrounded by ever increasing hordes of the twisted creatures.

  The convict ships had fared worse, isolated and torn apart before they could reach the perceived safety of the Adeptus Astartes vessel. Their burning hulks already painted Perdita’s skies, carved by the maws of tyranid leviathans and cast down to be rent asunder by atmospheric entry.

  ‘Asaliah, what is your status?’ Jatiel asked as he drove his mace through a twitching termagant.

  ‘We cannot hold the enginarium, sergeant,’ Asaliah grunted. ‘Too many creatures swarm this location.’

  Frustration filled the Blood Angels sergeant. Duty drove him, sustained him. ‘We must abandon the ship. Head for the ventral hangar bay.’

  The hangar sat roughly equidistant between the Blood Angels. Jatiel knew that this was a lost cause, that he would likely not survive making it there, let alone launching a Thunderhawk. But he was a Space Marine, and he was stubborn besides.

  The sergeant and Emudor rushed through the gothic steel innards of the Golden Promise. Crew warnings and propaganda stared down at the red-armoured giants, admonishing service and praising diligence.

  Bulkheads sealed, dropping down on magnetic hinges, directing the Space Marines. One to their right, sealed and shut, exploded. Acid swamped out, followed by swarming tyranids.

  Emudor fell to his knees, a spar of metal skewering his helmet. The Blood Angel sank below the acid.

  Jatiel pushed his way through panicking serfs. He fired over his shoulder, trusting in muscle reflexes to target the tyranid swarm behind him. Twenty thousand souls aboard the Golden Promise went about their duties. Some fled from cored and voided sections of the ship, bound for others where their skills could still be useful.

  Explosions constantly rocked the ship now. Void shields were down. Jatiel could smell the actinic blowback. Smoke filled the compartments. Screaming, too. Jatiel knew it for a bad sign. ‘The ship’s air scrubbers are down,’ he hissed. Crew recoiled from the Space Marine stalking through their panicking masses. Red-robed magi, tech-priests from the Chapter’s Adeptus Mechanicus allies, swung censers and mumbled binaric prayers over sparking service panels as the Golden Promise died.

  Threat identifiers painted every face that spewed past Jatiel’s vision, his helmet locking him away from the hue and cry. Vital signs for each of his squad members showed elevated heart rates and the chemical spill of combat hormones. One flickered where nothing should be, the battle-brother Jatiel had left stationed on the bridge. Cassuen. A ghost return, an imaging artefact. A taunt from his damaged armour.

  A channel opened. Jatiel stopped moving. The request for contact, a haunting reminder of casualties presumed.

  ‘Sergeant,’ Cassuen’s voice hissed.

  ‘Brother, you live? What of the bridge?’

  Cassuen let out a cough that was thick with phlegm. A juddering, sour breath sucked in through lungs rendered consumptive by fluid. ‘The auspex–’ Cassuen began. Another horrific, laboured breath. ‘The auspex still functions.’

  It broke Jatiel’s hearts to hear
such pain and such belligerent honour, to know that his brother was so near to death, and yet still clinging to duty without succumbing to the perennial curses of the Blood. ‘Sergeant. Sergeant, they have arrived. The xenos. The gate. It is open.’

  One more wrenching breath, one more exhalation and then a long, gurgling rattle. The link remained open, but no more sound came through. Cassuen was dead, his warning delivered. His words heralded a great tremor through the cracking ship, shivering it down to its bones. Serfs staggered and fell, flung against walls and bulkheads. The emergency wailing took on an even more plaintive quality.

  Disturbing screams filtered down the broad corridors. Shadows filled with hissing, although Jatiel knew that to be escaping atmospherics as compartments were opened to hard vacuum.

  Closed bulkheads, sealed to all but the Adeptus Astartes command codes, opened as he approached. The sergeant could hear the distinctive pop-whine of firing shotcasters hurling non-standard ammunition. The weapons fired low-grade plasteks and rubber at tremendous speeds to prevent hull breaches.

  Alien cries of pain and hunger met the noises. More tyranids were aboard the Golden Promise, swarming and boiling through the proud vessel’s veins.

  A sudden clang was the only warning he had before spikes of super-dense bone chewed through the hull section next to him. Bright blue gas flooded in from the holes in the hull. Nearby serfs started coughing, then spasming as the gas-induced seizures. Their flesh melted seconds later.

  Paint abraded from Jatiel’s armour, but the self-sufficient nature of Mark VII plate ensured the gas did little more.

  The alien bones flexed and with a sound like hawked spit, the sheared-off section of bulkhead cannoned into the opposite wall. More gas flooded in. Hissing creatures leapt from the darkness, bringing with them cold, trailing vapour from an imperfect seal.