Saints and martyrs, p.32
Saints And Martyrs, page 32
‘We will prevail!’ Klavia shouted over the hammering of her weapon. ‘Hold fast, sister. The Emperor protects!’
‘The Emperor protects!’ Odilla repeated, her shout of faith dangerously close to a shriek of desperation.
The jaws of despair gnawed at Klavia too. If she hesitated to destroy the risen Sisters for even a second, she would be lost. The pull of the trigger was an act of defiance against the unspeakable. But as the song ate at her, seeking to break down her defences, she thought of what Stern had said about her visions of the monstrous nothing. There was something coming that was worse than this, worse than the perversity of Battle Sisters turned into walking blasphemies. Klavia had believed Stern’s words before. Now she felt their truth resonate with renewed urgency.
A galaxy that could permit the horror before her was depraved beyond prayers. An all-destroying nothing was not just easy to believe. It was to be expected. It was inevitable.
‘We will stop you!’ Klavia roared. She hurled her resolution and her promise into the teeth of annihilation.
VIII
THRICE-BORN AND RISEN
Falling. Burning.
No up or down, only the fire, only the song, only the embrace of horror.
Burning. Falling.
No up or down, but the atrocity was reaching to embrace Stern. The dead Sisters of Battle would claim her. On Severitas, the hope of sisterhood had been revived in her.
Now you shall have it.
A voice without sound or words, the voice in the fire engulfing her, the voice of the horror that was the Ruinous Powers.
Be one with your sisters, Thrice-Born, for they are reborn too.
‘NO!’
It was a single word. But it was a real sound, a shout like a breakwater against the wave of the daemonic song. In the word was Stern’s power, her strength. It was a denial of Chaos.
‘EMPEROR!’
One word. The affirmation of faith, of power, of purpose in this universe. It was by the Emperor’s will that she had come to Severitas. It was by His will that she fought here, now, in this very second, at this very space.
By His will, she would destroy these abominations.
And with the invocation of the God-Emperor, she no longer fell. She flew. She did not know whether she flew at the ground, the sky, or into a ruined manufactory. It did not matter. She flew with her faith. As the light of sanctified psychic energy exploded out from her once more, she felt as if she had become her faith.
She attacked, though she could not see her enemy. She became a spear of light through the firestorm around her. She fired a psychic blast ahead of her, and this too seemed more to her than before, a sword of faith launched at whatever enemy would dare to stand against the will of the Emperor.
She passed through another explosion. This one, she had caused, and the pain of passing through it felt clean, purging. It was a disruption of the attack on her, and then a disintegration. In another moment, she was clear of flame, in the open air, and she could see again.
In her wake, she left one of the walking constructs. She had blown apart its forge skull. The huge monster staggered without purpose, its pipeline arms flailing at the stump on its shoulders. Flames, ore, daemonic ichor and warp energy erupted uncontrollably from the neck. The fountain shot twenty feet into the air, and then the molten liquid within it fell back, coating the body. A shrieking aurora surrounded the hulk, eating into its form. Chunks of metal fell away. The body lost coherence. It took another few steps, and then it collapsed with a boom, crushing and burning a score of the risen Sisters of Battle beneath it.
As Stern turned her attention to the reanimated creatures, they called for her. All the strength of their song focused on a single point, on her. A spear tip forged from the monstrously familiar and the inhuman desire pierced her heart. Preparing to attack, she had let her defence slip, and no psychic shield could block the sound. The pain and the grief turned the world dark. It was only for a moment, but her flight turned into a fall. She hit the ground with an impact that shattered pavement.
The risen Sisters shouted their welcome of hunger. Grimacing, Stern pushed the pain away and stood even as the mob fell on her. They attacked her with blades. They flailed at her with broken limbs and hands hooked into claws. A few still had guns and fired clumsily. Bolter shells cut through other corpses and slammed into her armour, throwing her sideways. The daemonic song screamed into her ears, into her head, into her heart. One of us, one of us, one of us, one of us! The grotesque mockeries of Sisters of Battle were what so many believed she was, and what she had been told she was for so long. These monsters confirmed it. They embraced her. They clutched at her with greed, seeking to drag her down and make her part of their foulness. The song struck home, and so did the knives. Blades and words were one. Her armour was no defence, and the risen, distorted reflections of what she had so often feared she truly was, stabbed her again and again. Icy, burning pain slid between her ribs, into her chest, between her shoulder blades. The abominations stabbed, and they stabbed, and they brought her to her knees in a pool of her blood.
‘Never!’ she cried. She could not die here, not with her task unfinished. She could not let oblivion claim her when a greater oblivion threatened everything. ‘I am the wrath of the Emperor!’ In faith she rose, and she whirled violently, slashing with Sanctity, severing limbs. ‘Return to the abyss from which you came!’ she shouted.
She tore open the veil to the immaterium.
She launched herself into the air at the same moment, struggling against two of the monsters clinging to her. The rip in the real became a maelstrom on the ground, and a hurricane wind rushed into its maw, dragging the risen Sisters with it.
Stern was still so close to the rift of her creation that it tried to pull her in too. Holy fire rushed over her. The obscene creatures screamed and fell away from her, to be swallowed by the vortex.
The rift began to close. The remaining Sisters, their song diminished, shrieked with anger, reaching up for her. Another walking manufactory forge loomed over her, its footsteps shaking the ground with seismic force. Its massive arms grabbed at her. It launched a flaming attack from its head.
‘You have no dominion here!’ Stern hurled herself through the flames. She swung Sanctity upward. A blazing beam of psychic energy turned it into a weapon thirty feet long. It sliced vertically through the body of the daemon engine, cutting it in half. The giant’s flames died with its scream. A flood of burning ichor fell upon the remaining corpses.
‘You are nothing!’ Stern shouted at the abominations that remained. ‘In the Emperor’s name, I will tread upon you in my anger! By the Emperor’s will, I shall trample you in my fury!’
The right of destruction was the Emperor’s. The anger was hers. The pain the mere existence of the risen Sisters caused in her was tremendous. Their claim to kinship struck her where she was most vulnerable. She embraced the pain as she unleashed an inferno of blasts on the creatures. They howled as she ended their song forever, and she howled back at them. She could not escape the torment that came with destroying forms that still resembled Adepta Sororitas. She did not seek to. The agony was the pain of salvation. Its presence was the reminder that she was not one of the damned.
There was only ash below her now, the ash of corrupted flesh eddying in wind-driven spirals. To the west, the conflict still raged, and she could hear the distant fluting of that awful song.
Blood coursed from her wounds. Her body throbbed in an agony she could not afford to acknowledge.
More daemon engines were marching from the direction of the plateau. So many. So many foul creations unleashed by the force that resided in that stronghold.
Stern’s eyes narrowed. Between the engines and the risen Sisters, there was a pattern. She began to see the truth of what opposed her.
She would think through that truth later. On the ground not far away, the heldrake was tearing open the fallen Valkyrie.
‘Dagover!’ she called, streaking downward.
Dagover crawled out of the smouldering wreckage of Xenos Bane. He struggled to keep his head clear through the novelty of pain. So little flesh remained to him that sensations of any kind were rare. He would not have survived the crash if more of him had still been human. As it was, his skull throbbed from the impact. His face burned and wept with open wounds. His vision kept blurring, the optic connections fighting to stabilise.
His machinic limbs obeyed the commands of his brain after a few moments, and he was on his feet again. His movement caught the heldrake’s attention. It turned from ripping apart the Valkyrie’s ruin. Before it could attack, Dagover fired his plasma pistol at its eye. He shot it as if it were a living beast, and it reacted as if it were one. It howled in anger. The scream, a fusion of the machine and the daemonic and the human, they who had once been the pilot instead of the prisoner, staggered Dagover. His aim wavered.
The heldrake reared over him.
A beam of psychic fire struck it in the neck, tearing open its plating and releasing a flash of incandescent ichor. The heldrake launched itself into the air, its autocannon unleashing a continuous barrage.
Dagover watched the daemon engine and Stern meet in mid-air. A storm erupted above him. Crimson and silver flame clashed. Stern’s figure was tiny next to the heldrake, but the light that surrounded her was brighter than the monster’s, and it grew wider, even brighter, and angrier. Dagover’s bionic eyes tried to adapt to the glare’s ferocity. It was like staring into the death of a star. The heldrake banked sharply, trying to catch Stern in the stream of its fire. She closed with it as if she thought to tear it apart with her hands. Dagover made out the narrow line of her powerblade. Stern hit the heldrake in the neck again. She plunged the blade through the plates. A shock wave rippled outward, and Dagover winced as if he had been hit.
As if the sword were much longer than it appeared, with a cry of wrath and a flash of even more brilliant, terrible sanctity, Stern decapitated the heldrake. Its scream silenced, the body fell broken to the ruins in the street.
As Stern descended towards Dagover, he glanced at the shifting ash that had been the resurrected Sisters of Battle.
That act of destruction must have come at some cost to her, he realised. Yet she did it. That was information worth probing.
‘Your pilot?’ Stern asked when she landed.
‘Dead on impact,’ said Dagover.
They were in an island of calm in the storm of war. In the direction of the cathedral, the day burned. To the east came the sounds of machinic howls and heavy footsteps.
‘The enemy is determined to stop you,’ Dagover said.
‘You mean us,’ Stern corrected.
‘No, I mean you. These attacks, in strength and kind, are designed to stop one particular threat. Without you, the masses of heretics would, in the end, have prevailed against your sisters. You are the threat this assault has sought to vanquish. It has failed. Keep going east. You have the advantage. Destroy this army.’
Stern looked east. She saw, through smoke and fire, the shapes of more daemonic engines. She wanted to erase their existence. She wanted to make them pay, not just for their own abominated being, but for the crime of the risen Sisters. Though there could be punishment for that sin, there could never be expiation, not even if an entire heretical population was blasted to dust.
She turned back to Dagover. His cadaverous face regarded her with its expressionless eye-lenses. Destroy the army. She wanted to. There had been a taste of vengeance when she had annihilated the heldrake and the walking forge. The taste was not unwelcome.
It was also not what was needed from her.
Was this what the inquisitor wished her to become? A killing machine that he manipulated to his ends? No. That was not what she would be. That was not what the Father of Mankind commanded her to be.
‘Cut through the enemy like a scythe,’ Dagover urged quietly. ‘Blast through it until you reach whoever stands behind this.’
‘No,’ Stern said.
‘This was our purpose.’
‘The situation has changed. The Order of Our Martyred Lady needs me now. And I have to get you back safely.’
‘So then we do this all over again?’
‘The enemy’s supply of heretics may be almost inexhaustible. But I will see to it that there will never be another body from the ranks of my sisters to resurrect.’
‘Is that a wise use of…’
Stern jumped into Dagover’s hesitation. ‘My resources? My power? Me? I am not merely a weapon. I am not a destroyer, and nothing else. The Emperor is our salvation. There must be something to save. Even, I think, in you. Or we are no better than the daemons we fight. So I will return to save my sisters, and I will keep you alive as well.’
‘Even me?’ the living skull asked sardonically.
‘Even you.’
They headed back west, Stern protecting Dagover as they cut through the mobs of heretics towards the front lines. Most of the cultists were focused on advancing towards the commandry.
‘You claimed I was the target,’ Stern said to Dagover. ‘Why does the army not turn on me now?’
‘Because it has failed in its goal to stop you. I think there is another prize to be won.’
Dagover was close to being a walking tank. There was barely any human left in his armour to kill. He could hold his own, and when they reached the battlefront, Stern left him to seek her sisters. The forgefiends and the manufactory horrors were hitting them hard with flame and a storm of phosphor shells. The Sisters of Battle fought in the midst of a blinding, incinerating ocean. The heretics died in droves, their bodies forming huge pyres as they ran in the way of the fire of the engines, or were cut down by the Adepta Sororitas. Enough got through and survived in the cauldron to hurl themselves at the Battle Sisters.
It was the other half of the risen Sisters, though, that were the greatest threat. Their assault was a spiritual one even more than it was physical. The unholy song sapped the strength of the soul and left the warriors vulnerable to other attacks.
Stern saw something else as she flew low over the struggle. Though the Battle Sisters of the Order of Our Martyred Lady who fell were not rising again as abominations, the cultists were dragging their bodies away.
‘Sisters!’ Stern cried. Warp energies gathered around her and she braced herself again for what she must do. ‘Leave the resurrected blasphemies to me! Let me take your pain! Let it be mine alone! Fight instead the enemy that has dared use this horror.’
She plunged into the middle of the walking corpses. Those closest to her burst into flame at her touch. The others, howling their song of woe and welcome, rounded on her.
‘No more!’ she shouted. ‘There will be no more of you! You end now!’
She burned them. She burned the images of her sisters. She burned the images of what she was said to be. She burned them for the sake of a true sisterhood, and the promise of something to save.
IX
WALKING WOUNDED
When the Sisters of Battle retreated to the cathedral, they left behind them thousands of dead cultists and a score of smouldering daemon engines. The commandry had blunted the assault. For the moment, there were no other monsters in sight, and the cultists kept their distance from the Cathedral of Saint Thecla, gathering again to await the command for another attack. There would be no more resurrections. The abominations were ash. The bodies of the dead had been returned to the cathedral for holy rites, or cremated on the battlefield.
Stern returned to her cell in the catacombs of the cathedral. There was no time to rest, no time to heal. Her wounds had clotted, but they were deep. All she could do was pray for the strength she needed to take the fight to the enemy’s stronghold before another siege wave began. She descended the stairs. Before her mind’s eye were the faces of the Sisters of the Order of Our Martyred Lady. They were more haggard than they had been after any of the other battles on Severitas. They bore the psychic scars carved there by the risen corpses.
Klavia was waiting for Stern by the door to her cell. The Dominion’s eyes were anguished. The manner of her gaze made Stern uneasy.
What was Stern? It was always that same question, whether it was Macrina, Dagover, Klavia or herself asking. All had different answers. All had answers except her. She did not know the truth.
‘Be strong, sister,’ said Stern. ‘We have had a victory today, hard as it was.’
‘It does not feel like one.’
‘We will not see any more of those abominations. The dead rest. Their souls have always been with the Emperor. Their bodies are at rest now, too.’
‘They should never have existed,’ Klavia said with a shudder.
‘No. They should not have. But their corruption came after death. There was no fault, no lapse, on the part of our sisters. We did not see their souls coming for us.’
Klavia nodded. She clearly wanted to believe Stern’s reassurance more than she actually did.
There were so many terrible things that were possible. But they were words that Stern did not say.
She was a thing that was possible.
‘The enemy cannot attack us like that again,’ Stern said. ‘Remember that, and that the Emperor protects.’
‘The Emperor protects,’ Klavia repeated. ‘He does indeed.’ She looked hard at Stern, her eyes shining. ‘I am glad to be reminded.’
Stern watched her go, then knelt in her cell. She had not been there long, her prayers hardly begun, when she was interrupted. She looked up, surprised to see Macrina.
‘Canoness,’ she said, and bowed her head.
‘The next attack is coming sooner than we had hoped or guessed,’ Macrina said. ‘There are more daemon engines on the march. Will you come to the vestry? We must decide on our new strategy immediately.’
