Atharva waved away Tagore’s words.

‘Irrelevant,’ he said, looking up at the cavern’s ceiling and walls as nearly a hundred blister-turrets unmasked in readiness to cleanse this floating island of life. Both warriors knew they could not survive such weight of fire.

‘The Crimson Path before the Iron Fetter!’ bellowed Tagore, lifting his arms to meet death head on.

Atharva laughed in the face of such a wantonly self-destructive code of honour, knowing there was only one way they were going to live through the next few seconds.

‘My apologies for this desecration, Uttam Luna Hesh Udar, but my need is greater than yours,’ said Atharva, tearing the dead Custodian’s head from his shoulders.

THIRTEEN

The Crusader Host

Freedom

If You Want To Live

WITH THE POWER of the Great Ocean at his disposal, there was little beyond the reach of an Adept Exemptus of the Thousand Sons, but even Phosis T’kar would have been hard pressed to create a kine shield capable of withstanding so many guns. Atharva could protect himself with such a shield, but the rest of the Crusader Host would surely be killed, and – for the moment – he needed them alive.

Freed from the limiting confines of his cell, Atharva’s power flowed back into his body. He wanted to savour this moment, to revel in the return of his full gamut of abilities and the clarity of thought that was his to command, but time was now his enemy and the Eye had work for him.

Custodian Uttam’s blood flowed from the ruined stump of his neck, spilling over Atharva’s hand and streaming down his arm. The cracked tip of a crushed vertebra jutted from the wound and the grey matter within would beyond use in a few moments.

But a few moments was less time than he had.

The guns on the cavern walls opened fire and a cascade of lasers and solid rounds drowned the din of alarms. Thousands of shells bombarded the floating island in a blitzing storm of fire. Atharva dived inside the cell that had recently housed Tagore, but the World Eater sergeant flattened himself against its outer walls, too stupid or too proud to take refuge within its confines.

‘Can you stop this?’ bellowed Tagore, his voice almost lost in the crescendo of gunfire. Acrid propellant smoke and billowing clouds of pulverised permacrete filled the air as the solid rounds smacked into the cells and chewed them apart like necrotic viral strains attacking healthy cells.

‘That remains to be seen,’ shouted Atharva in response, pushing his consciousness into the Custodian’s head, directing the living power of the warp into the myriad dying blood vessels in an effort to keep brain death at bay.

A breath sighed from the head as the mouth fell open in a silent scream. Atharva felt the crackle of neural activity in the fitfully sparking synapses, and meshed his mind with the dying brain. He goaded it back to life with immaterial energy, letting the power of the Great Ocean reanimate cells that had been on the brink of disintegration. Atharva felt Uttam’s horror pricking the edge of his perception, and briefly wondered what manner of awareness the dead Custodian might yet be experiencing.

As more of Uttam’s brain returned to life, the stronger the maddened horror became, but Atharva kept it at bay for now. With his mental architecture attuned to the rhythms of the Pavoni in the sixth Enumeration, Atharva let his body’s newfound familiarity with Legio Custodes blood restructure itself, altering his biometrics to more closely match those of his erstwhile gaoler. Though Atharva’s body did not change outwardly, his inner flesh took on the guise of Uttam Luna Hesh Udar at the cellular level. A crude deception, conceived in haste, that would not fool any gene-sampler for long, but perhaps long enough.

Much of what the Custodian knew was Atharva’s to know: the layout of Khangba Marwu, its security protocols, its roster of forces and, most importantly, its entrances and exits. Though in the current situation, the disabling codes for the cavern guns was top of Atharva’s list of information to pluck from the dead man’s skull.

Taking a deep breath, Atharva cowled himself in the crudest of kine shields and stepped from the cell. A storm of shells battered him, enough to saw through an entire company of Imperial Army troopers in an instant, but the shield held firm for now. It seemed as though every gun on the cavern walls was aimed right at him, and Atharva knew he would not have much time to make this work.

‘All guns disengage and power down,’ he shouted, his voice so perfect an imitation of Uttam Luna Hesh Udar that no vox-sampler ever made would dispute the authenticity of the speaker. ‘Authorisation Omega Omicron Nine Three Primus.’

The deafening barrage of fire ceased in an instant as every gun retracted into an armoured housing and shut down. Smoke and dust drifted on the wind currents created by the sudden heat and passage of tens of thousands of expended rounds. The howling alarms seemed almost quiet by comparison.

Atharva dropped his kine shield and let out a relieved breath as shapes emerged from the choking dust clouds. Five of them, all bulked by unimaginably complex science to a size far beyond human, yet moving with a gait that was clearly authored from the template of homo sapiens. The twins were the first to emerge from the dust, Subha and Asubha, the butcher and the assassin. World Eaters and killers, neither bore the nightmarish augmetics of Tagore, but like their brother sergeant, their bodies were pitched in a posture of taut aggression.

Gythua followed them, a warrior from Mortarion’s Legion whose bulk and solidity had made others in the Crusader Host give him the epithet of ‘Goliath’, a giant from ancient myth. Argentus Kiron, the tall, broad-shouldered swordsman, jogged alongside him. The pair shared an unlikely friendship, for who would have thought warriors of the Emperor’s Children and Death Guard might find much in the way of common ground?

Lastly came Severian, dubbed the Wolf by his fellows for the secretive and lonely path he trod. Atharva barely knew him, but as a warrior from the Legion of Horus Lupercal, he held a unique position amongst the warriors of the Crusader Host.

Crusader Host…? The name was a joke now…

The three World Eaters greeted each other with clenched fists and primal displays of their strength, though Atharva saw the subtle dance of superiority in its ritualistic displays of prowess. Alpha male and subordinates were clearly defined in the tilt of their heads and the baring of necks. It made Atharva want to smile, but Tagore would take a dim view of any such analysis of his warriors.

Tagore swept up the guardian spear of the first Custodian to die, testing the edge of the blade with a satisfied grunt. He snapped the haft just below the cutting edge, making what was left look more like a long-bladed cleaver as Subha took up the spear blade Tagore had broken in his battle with Uttam.

‘How are we free?’ asked Kiron, picking up a fallen plasma carbine. The weapon looked absurdly tiny in his hands, but with a snap of a trigger guard, the weapon became useable. ‘Is this your doing, Atharva?’

Neither Gythua or Asubha deigned to pick up a mortal weapon, but Severian slid a blade from the shoulder scabbard of a dead soldier clad in crimson plate. In the dead man’s hands it would have been a monstrous blade, a two-handed hewer of men, but to the Luna Wolf it was little more than a gladius.

‘It is indeed my doing,’ replied Atharva, already jogging towards the bridge that led from the island. ‘But explanations can wait until we are free of the mountain.’

Tagore ran alongside him, glancing warily at the silent guns.

‘How did you do that?’ he demanded, his words still slurred with the after-effects of combat drugs and the stress of his battle with the Custodian.