Fabius Bile: Clonelord Read online

  The Twins padded silently ahead of their fellows. Fabius was one of the few, besides their gene-kin, who could tell Maysha and Mayshana apart without looking at codes tattooed on their cheeks. Both had the enhanced musculature common to his creations, but in them it was a result of breeding, rather than augmentation. The first of a new race, the progenitors of the New Man. There were others, who had come after. But the twin Gland-hounds were special, for they had been the first of their kind, and had exceeded all expectations.

  They were taller than normal humans, but not quite so tall as a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes. Broad shouldered and narrow at the waist, they wore faded fatigues found on some industrial world, now long since an ash-blown ruin, and piecemeal armour, culled from the still-warm bodies of fallen foes. Bandoliers of ammunition crossed their chests, and scattered scraps of wargear hung from their combat harnesses, most of which still worked. Scattered among it all were the trophies – necklaces of teeth and finger bones, empty shell casings and heat-warped Imperial aquilas were all in evidence.

  Both Twins wore industrial rebreathers and heavy goggles like the rest of their pack. The Gland-hounds’ thickened dermis was resistant to the chill and they could survive limited exposure to the vacuum, if necessary. In addition, the Twins carried battered, heavily modified autoguns, and a somewhat startling variety of blades, only a few of which were visible. Lights attached to the ends of their autoguns played across the crumbling wraithbone, illuminating the damage and dust in equal measure. Neither Twin displayed any sign that they understood or cared what they were looking at. Their faces were smooth. Unperturbed.

  ‘Like automatons,’ Skalagrim growled over the vox, watching them. ‘Flense the meat, only metal beneath. Worse than Igori, even.’

  ‘Only bone,’ Fabius murmured. ‘Strong bone, but bone. They are not machines. They are merely composed.’ He glanced at the other Apothecary, in his black war-plate and bestial helmet, and smiled thinly. ‘You might well learn a thing or two from them.’

  Skalagrim laughed hoarsely. Fabius stared at him, until the other Apothecary’s laughter faded into quiet chuckles. When he’d fallen silent, Fabius turned away. ‘One would think that a renegade – twice-over, no less – would think again before laughing in the face of his benefactor. Then, you have always been somewhat short-sighted. A creature of brute impulse, unable to take full advantage of an admittedly keen intellect.’

  Skalagrim snarled. Fabius laughed. ‘The cur growls. Will this be the time he bites?’

  Arrian stopped Skalagrim’s forward lunge with a hastily interposed hand. ‘Peace, brother. The Chief Apothecary is correct.’ The former World Eater swiftly drew one of his Falax blades and pressed the edge to Skalagrim’s throat. ‘But if you’ve reconsidered your membership in our brotherhood, I am happy to add your skull to my collection.’

  Skalagrim snorted and reached up to prod the blade away from his throat. ‘Any time you’d like to try, war hound, you’ll find me ready and willing. But not now. I acquiesce.’ He bowed his head in mocking apology. Fabius gestured dismissively.

  ‘If you two are finished, may we continue?’ He didn’t wait for a reply. He expanded his augurs, conducting a sensor sweep of the gallery and beyond. His battleplate’s internal systems were far in advance of their outer shell, and capable of scanning and analysing vast distances in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take. Echolocation pings swept through the darkness ahead, mapping his surroundings.

  The craftworld was empty of all save the most basic forms of life. Unfinished war machines hung limp in assembly cradles, weapons sat untouched upon racks. Whatever had happened here had done so swiftly, leaving little sign of the havoc it had undoubtedly wreaked. With nothing here to attract the attention of daemons, the Neverborn had left the silent vessel untouched. It was a tomb, floating quietly in the webway. But even tombs had their treasures.

  ‘What are we looking for this time? Just those dusty parchments you seemed so excited about?’ Skalagrim chopped through a tall sculpture of delicate crystal. Fabius frowned at the other Apothecary’s casual destruction of the xenos artefact. Skalagrim had left a trail of defaced and desecrated decorations in his wake since they’d arrived.

  ‘Yes, among other things.’ Fabius expanded the sweep of his sensors. ‘The aeldari knowledge base in regards to gene-weaving is far in advance of anything available to us. I intend to make use of every scrap that they’ve left behind.’ He gestured to the dozen snuffling mutants who followed in their wake.

  The malformed creatures carried previously acquired specimens in special preservation cylinders, great rolls of curious, impossibly thin parchment confiscated from the craftworld’s libraries, or hauled grav-sleds loaded down with wraithbone samples, studded with darkened spirit stones. The inhabitants of the craftworld either hadn’t had time to activate their vessel’s infinity circuit or had been prevented from doing so. Regardless, their loss would be Fabius’ gain.

  From up ahead, he heard a quiet whistle. The Twins had found something. ‘Spider-sign, Benefactor,’ Mayshana said, as Fabius strode towards them. She lifted the barrel of her weapon, revealing the glistening strands stuck to it. Fabius turned, letting the stab-lights mounted on his battleplate play across the wide gallery. The harsh light was caught and reflected by something.

  ‘There,’ Maysha said. He pointed. An immense, crystalline web stretched among the shadowed archways and shattered porticos around them. The strands of the web glimmered softly as the tiny, aggressive spiders that had woven it scuttled along their lengths, hunting for prey. Maysha made to draw his knife. ‘Should I…?’

  ‘No. Arrian.’

  ‘Yes, Chief Apothecary,’ Arrian said, unsheathing one of his Falax blades. Fabius studied the web as Arrian drew close to it. His helmet magnified and isolated one of the spiders. The creatures normally populated the infinity circuit of a craftworld, helping to maintain its function in a sort of symbiosis. With the craftworld’s dormancy, they had spread throughout its empty spaces, filling the silence with the soft click of their thin, hard limbs. The clicking increased as they became aware of Arrian’s presence.

  The World Eater deftly extracted a strand of the crystalline web, ignoring the spiders as they swarmed over his armour. He dripped arachnids as he trudged back towards the group, brushing the last few off as he re-joined them. Scattered bones and broken things crunched beneath his heavy tread.

  Saqqara had been right. The ship was a tomb. And a haunted one, at that. Faint snatches of long-ago transmissions still floated through the ship’s communication circuits. Occasionally, a babble of distorted voices would overpower the frequency lock and impose themselves on the vox. The ghosts of the past, their screams of denial echoing into the future forever. Appropriate, in its way. Like the ghost-signals, the eldar were a warning that no one would ever heed. A squall of feedback caused him to wince.

  ‘They are here…’

  Arrian tensed, blade in hand. Fabius motioned for him to put it away. ‘Just an echo, Arrian. We are the first living things to walk these halls in millennia.’

  ‘It’s not the living who worry him,’ Skalagrim said from nearby. The renegade crouched beside a grime-shrouded skeleton. He pried the fragile skull loose and made a show of examining it, even as it ­crumbled in his grip. ‘Tell me, war hound, what do the ghosts that haunt these halls tell you? Are you wishing you’d stayed aboard the Vesalius with Saqqara?’

  Before Arrian could answer, there was a sound like distant thunder. A dull boom. Fabius turned, seeking the source of the sound. The echoes spread out across the gallery and thinned into silence. Gland-hound and Space Marine alike stood stiff and alert, senses straining to pinpoint the sound’s origin.

  The sound repeated itself again and again, but more quietly each time, as if whatever were making it were drawing away from them. Its reverberations quivered through the wraithbone, startling strange shapes into view. L
ong-limbed, dog-like beasts that loped across open galleries, uttering high-pitched yelps, or avian forms that circled high above, beneath the jagged edges of shattered domes, shrieking in dismay.

  As the last of the echoes faded, a bloom of Medusae drifted into view, passing through the stab-lights mounted on Fabius’ battleplate. The strange creatures resembled nothing so much as a conglomeration of free-floating brain matter and ganglia. They glowed with a soft phosphorescence that set odd shadows to dancing across the darkened galleries of the craftworld. A rare find, this, and fortuitously jolted into the open by the noise. Fabius gestured. ‘Khorag, if you would?’

  Khorag chuckled. ‘Paz’uz,’ he rumbled. The bloated beast galumphed excitedly towards the bloom, trailing acidic strands of slime in its wake. Fabius grimaced, but said nothing. Khorag wouldn’t have unleashed the beast, if there was any danger of it doing permanent danger to the specimen.

  The daemon-thing flung itself on the slowest member of the bloom, dragging the creature from the air. The Medusae made no sound, but its gelid ganglia pulsed in alarm as it thrashed in Paz’uz’s grip. A mouldy paw pinned the xenos to the floor until Khorag could make his way to it, his armour wheezing and groaning with every step. He snatched up the squirming thing, ignoring its lashing tendrils. ‘A bit small, Fabius – perhaps we should throw it back, eh?’

  ‘Size is of little importance, so long as it is a healthy specimen,’ Fabius said. The static on the vox distorted his voice, creating a feedback echo. He saw Khorag tap the side of his helmet, and knew that his words hadn’t reached the former Grave Warden.

  ‘Closer and closer they come…’

  He twitched his head, instinctively trying to clear the feed. There was something familiar about that echo, as if it were a voice he’d heard before. He tensed as a sudden thought occurred to him. He had heard it before. He turned slowly, his armour’s sensors cycling through scanning frequencies.

  That they might be here, now, seemed improbable. But it was not impossible. As he turned, the dull boom sounded again, somehow closer this time. Was the internal structure of the craftworld succumbing to neglect at last? But the sound was too regular, too rhythmic. Like a series of controlled explosions.

  The vox-link crackled. Saqqara’s voice sounded in his ear, garbled and incomprehensible. The Word Bearer sounded agitated. Not un­usual, but the timing could not be ignored. A single gesture put Savona and her warriors on high alert. Ambushes were not uncommon in the webway. The twisted kin of the eldar regarded sub-space as their personal fiefdom, and reacted aggressively when confronted by those they deemed intruders. But this did not feel like them. They did their taunting face-to-face, not at a distance.

  The vox squealed, stinging his ears. A bolter roared, chewing chunks from a curving wall as something half-glimpsed darted away, laughing. Fabius’ hand dropped to his needler.

  ‘Something is here with us, Manflayer,’ Skalagrim said, tracking something with his bolt pistol. ‘I can see them, just barely.’

  Impossibly thin shadows stretched and squirmed within the glare of the stab-lights. Pale faces peered out through jagged cracks in the walls, or from within forgotten doorways, as the sound of soft singing pattered down like rain. A scream sounded down the vox-link and Fabius saw one of Savona’s warriors stagger, his armoured form shrouded in a web of monofilament wires. The renegade struggled away from a shadowed archway, fighting the taut wires, even as they sliced through ceramite and into the meat beneath.

  The Space Marine toppled forward in a cloud of blood, and was swiftly yanked backwards, into the dark. His howls of anger degenerated into yelps of pain as he was dragged out of sight. A fusillade of bolter fire lit up the darkness as several of his fellows fired into the shadows.

  ‘The King of Feathers bows before the Emperor of Ashes, and bares his neck, oh, he bares his neck for the blade…’

  ‘Not likely,’ Fabius snarled, raising Torment. Even the barest touch from the artefact would send shockwaves of pain shooting through his opponent. But he had to hit them, first. He twisted, searching.

  A mutant shrieked as something dragged it up the side of a broken wall and quickly out of sight. Another stumbled, coughing blood, and toppled with a wet whine as it clutched at the wound that had suddenly appeared in its throat. Two more died in the seconds that followed, torn apart by giggling shadow-shapes.

  ‘Close ranks,’ Fabius shouted. His words were lost as one of the Emperor’s Children howled in agony. The warrior staggered as a slim shape dodged back, clutching one of the renegade’s hearts in its grip. A second shape leapt onto the wounded Space Marine’s shoulders and plunged a flickering hand through his helmet as if it were not there, and jabbed stiffened fingers into his skull. The warrior sank to his knees, babbling and singing as the shape swiftly plucked a mass of cerebral tissue from his head.

  Arrian lunged for the shape, his blades hissing out. But it flipped away, still clutching its prize. Threat-runes flashed, spinning across Fabius’ display. Five became ten, ten became twenty, the enemy numbers doubling and redoubling. Savona shrieked a command and her warriors began to fire in all directions, pouring death into every aperture. He heard the harsh cry of his Gland-hounds as they caught sight of their foe.

  ‘Chief Apothecary, we must retreat,’ Arrian said. He scraped his blades together in agitation. Something about the Harlequins made the Nails bite worse, Fabius knew.

  ‘Funny words, coming from you,’ Skalagrim said. He revved his chainaxe.

  Before Arrian could reply, a typhoon of multicoloured shapes suddenly whirled towards them from all directions. The Harlequins dropped down from above, slithered up through cracks in the gallery floor and walls, or vaulted over the edge of the walkway, moving like leaves caught in an infernal wind. They came laughing and singing, filling the vox with noise, drowning out any orders Fabius might have given.

  The chirurgeon, sensing his agitation, began cycling stimulants into his system. Time slowed as his perceptions sharpened. The Harlequins moved languidly now, rather than lightning-quick. Like dancers following a choreography.

  He watched them flood the gallery, attacking Savona’s warriors with graceful abandon. Arrian traded blows with a tall xenos that had a vibrant red crest rising above its grinning mask, and a shimmering coat that distorted the air about it. Skalagrim bellowed and took the fight to the enemy, interrupting their movements and driving them in all directions – a sour note in an otherwise immaculate performance.

  ‘Fall back – protect the plunder,’ Fabius shouted to the pack bearers, boosting his vox-unit in order to be heard over the din. ‘Better your lives than those samples.’ He caught sight of Khorag throttling a Harlequin with one hand, spraying a noxious, alchemical liquid from the weapon he held in the other. The acidic soup splattered across gaudy forms, eliciting screams of agony amid the persistent laughter.

  Fabius swung Torment out, driving a whirling form away from the mutants carrying his prizes. The creatures clutched archaic weapons, none of which would do them much good against foes like these. Nonetheless, they fought, chanting his name. Rusted chainblades growled and antique autopistols spat as they made to defend their burdens. And one by one, they were struck down. Cursing, Fabius watched as the last fell, choking on its own blood. ‘Worthless,’ he spat, starting towards them.

  A lilting laugh caught his attention. He turned to see a gangly clown bounding towards him, blade hissing out. He jerked aside and drove Torment into the side of his attacker’s cowl. He felt bone crunch as the porcelain mask crumpled. But even as the body tumbled away, more blades darted for him, coming from all sides.

  The vibrantly hued forms spun about him in a kaleidoscopic wheel, attacking and darting away. Torment shrieked in frustration, light pulsing from within the sockets of the skull, every time he lashed out and failed to connect. Fast as he was, they were faster. Even with the combat stimulants flooding his newly grown system, h
is speed was but a fraction of theirs. They needed a distraction – to pull back and regroup.

  Thinking swiftly, he turned, seeking the closest support column. Vox still inoperative, he shouted, ‘Smash the columns – collapse this gallery and fall back to the previous. We must retreat.’ Roars of assent reached him, as he shouldered aside one xenos and slapped a second from his path. Bolters gouged wounds in the columns around him as he reached his target.

  Torment squirmed in his grip, sensing his intentions. Strength flooded his limbs, as the artefact stirred itself to full wakefulness. Harlequins swarmed towards him as he took a two-handed grip on the sceptre and swung it towards the thinnest part of the column. Torment gave a shuddering, sub-sonic cry as it struck the wraithbone, smashing great chunks out of it. He heard a krak grenade go off nearby, and suddenly the air was full of dust and splinters. A groan reverberated through the gallery, trembling up through the stabilisers in his boots. Ignoring it, he wound back and struck the column again, shattering it completely.

  Across the gallery, other columns followed the example of the first, bursting or tearing loose from the gallery. The angle of the floor beneath Fabius’ feet dipped, and another groan echoed up as the gallery, free of the columns connecting it to the upper levels, began to twist on its lower supports. Dust billowed from the ruptured wraithbone walls, as everything began to shake and shudder.

  Fabius and the others retreated back the way they’d come, pausing only to grab as many of the prizes they’d collected as possible. Concentrated bolter fire drove the Harlequins back into the dust as the renegades made their departure from the wounded gallery. Savona spat curses as she reloaded her bolt pistol. ‘I can’t contact the Vesalius, or the scouting parties we sent out to check the upper and lower galleries.’