Part 10 (1/2)

The crowdas attention was focused in the very centre of the arena, where Octavius could see the s.h.i.+ning white form of the female eldar warrior a Dhrykna - glittering like a pearl in the depths of a black sea. Next to her was the sinister figure of Shariele, his hands covered in dimly flickering flames. The two eldar had been removed from the volcanic cell about an hour before the guards had returned for the Marines. Octavius had had no idea what was going to happen to them, and, if he was entirely honest with himself, he hadnat really cared. He had more than enough to think about without concerning himself with the fates of two aliens. Looking at them now, however, he felt an instant pang of empathy: they stood ready for their death like gladiators in the amphitheatre. They might be untrustworthy and even offensive eldar, but right at that moment they were simply warriors, alone, outnumbered, persecuted and unsupported. If he could have broken away from his restraints and the guards, he would have run to stand beside them.

A jab of pain punched into the small of his back as the guards encouraged him to move into the cage. He resisted, standing his ground and gritting his teeth against the uncommon experience. It had been so long since he had felt real, unadulterated pain like this, and part of him thrilled at the parts of his mind that had been re-awakened. Like all the Adeptus Astartes, he had not always been a Marine, but since making the ascension his pain receptors had been kept strictly under check, partly by implants, partly by hypnotherapy, but mostly by raw willpower. Somehow, the dark eldar had managed to circ.u.mvent all of his defences and, for the first time in nearly a century, he could remember the brutal, vivid realities of the human condition: life was not only war, it was also pain.

Another jab struck him in the back, this time there was a blade sliding through the joint between the armoured plate on his back and his utility belt. It bit into the skin at the small of this back, penetrating his flesh and pus.h.i.+ng in towards one of his kidneys.

The pain of the puncture wound was as nothing to the nerve induced agony that gripped Octaviusa body as he snapped his arm round behind him and caught the blade in his gauntlet. He yanked it clear of his back, twisting it viciously and wrenching it out of the shocked guardas hands. In a jolting, pain riddled movement, Octavius turned to face the guards, flipping the blade so that he could grasp its hilt and brandish the killing edges.

As the disarmed guard flipped backwards, landing just out of range of Octaviusa blade, the others pressed in with their weapons, surrounding the Deathwatch captain with the darkly glinting promise of death.

Octavius growled out from between gritted teeth, the pain of movement curdling his brain and making his vision swim. He roared, defying his own human frailties as much as the superior position of his enemies.

aThis is not the time, captain.a The unexpected, low and almost whispering voice of Ashok came from the shadows within the cage, barely audible against the din of the auditorium. aWe will have our chance to fight soon enough.a For a moment, the Imperial Fist hesitated. Of all the voices that he might have expected to hear urging his restraint, that of the Angel Sanguine librarian was the very last on the list. Not only had he not known that Ashok was even on the planet, but he had never heard him urge restraint on anyone. Gradually, his furious defiance began to subside and it was slowly replaced by intrigue. What was Ashok doing here?

aRemember this,a he said, forcing composure into his voice as he faced the alien guards. aI will not always be in this cage. When I am not, you will die.a With that, he flipped the blade around once again, catching it by the tip and offering the hilt back to his captors.

The unarmed guard looked into Octaviusa s.h.i.+ning blue eyes with doubt and suspicion flickering over its features. In its entire life, it had probably never trusted anything with a weapon. After a moment of hesitation, presumably encouraged by the support of its peers, the creature reached forward to reclaim its blade.

The hapless guard would never trust anything with a weapon again. As it reached forward and grasped the hilt of its blade, Octavius wrenched the weapon back, pulling the guard off its feet and dragging it stumbling towards him. With a smooth efficiency that belied the pain that wracked his body, the Deathwatch captain spun the blade in his hand and then drove its point forward through the neck of the stumbling dark eldar. As it tripped after the abruptly withdrawn weapon, the alien lurched head first onto the suddenly inverted blade; its eyes bulged momentarily before its head, cleanly severed from its shoulders, bounced to the ground at Octaviusa feet.

aSuffer not the alien to live,a murmured the captain under his breath, tossing the weapon aside and then turning to stride into the cage to join the rest of his kill-team as the guards lunged forward with their blades.

The Angels Sanguine librarian was the only one of the Marines restrained and shackled to a wall of the cage. He had been there already when the rest of the team had been pushed into the enclosure, his arms outstretched by his sides and his legs bound together, suspended about a metre off the ground by shackles that looped around the bars in the cage. His head was bowed, with his chin touching down onto his chest, the characteristically heavy hood still pulled down, obscuring his features.

The rest of the Deathwatch squad fanned out around him, staring up at the cruciform librarian with suspicion and hostility etched into their features.

aWhat are you doing here, librarian?a growled Sulphus, his hostility obvious and his face creased with barely disguised disgust.

aHow did you get here, Angel Sanguine?a asked Pelias, suspicion transforming his question into a challenge.

Ashok made no response.

Octavius pushed his way through the ring of Marines and stood before the librarian, peering up at him in the half-light. The air was full of screams and yells from the dark eldar congregation in the stands of the amphitheatre outside, and Octavius could already taste the electric scent of energy discharges and spilt blood in the arena. In the back of his mind he realised that the Deathwatch team had probably been brought to fight in this forsaken pit, or at least to watch the fate of the two eldar warriors that had accompanied them from Ulthwe. The darkling aliens appeared to take great pleasure in knowing that their victims had to watch each otheras suffering. But Ashok was foremost in his mind at that moment, and he inspected the form of the librarian closely.

Aside from a few burn marks and sc.r.a.pes, there was little sign of damage on the librarianas armour. It was not clear how or whether the Angel Sanguine was properly restrained against the wall of the cage, and Octavius found it strange that he was the only one of the team that had been shackled against the bars. It seemed to him that the scene was designed specifically to give the impression that Ashok was also a prisoner when, in fact, they were all prisoners and none of them appeared in the manner of the librarian. Ashokas special restraints had clearly been dressed up to look like he had been treated even worse that the rest of them. The captainas ambiguous feelings about the mysterious librarian triggered a deep-rooted suspicion that this was all an elaborate charade.

aAre you damaged, Ashok?a he asked, peering under the folds of the librarianas heavy hood, trying to make out the expression on his hidden face.

There was no response.

aThe captain asked you a question, Sanguine,a barked Sergeant Pelias, giving a voice to the tension.

aAtreus?a prompted Octavius without turning away from Ashok.

aHe is suffering, captain. His mind is raging against itself, as though a great fury has been unleashed but deprived of a vent. It is consuming him.a Atreusa voice was calm and almost compa.s.sionate, but he stepped back away from the suspended figure of Ashok, pressing his back against the bars on the opposite side of the cage as though repelled by something unseen.

aAshok?a Octavius changed his tone, trying to lead the librarian out of his nightmare with the sound a friend. aAshok, can you hear me?a With an abrupt movement, Ashokas head lurched forward. The restraints that held his arms snapped taught, rattling against the bars behind him. His contorted features snarled into Octaviusa face and he breathed a gust of moisture against the captainas skin, as his head closed to within a few centimetres. Octavius did not flinch, but he met the burning and furious red gaze of the Angel Sanguine, holding the librarianas raging eyes in the complicated, sparkling blues of his own.

Ashok roared into his face, bunching the muscles of his neck as though straining against his restraints to unleash the violence that wracked his mind.

aAshok,a whispered Octavius, his composure standing in stark contrast to the simmering energy of the librarian. aAshok. You are not alone here.a aHe is alone,a said Atreus with a seriousness that made the others think.

aHe is not with me, thatas for certain,a murmured Sulphus, turning his back on the raging Angel Sanguine and casting his attention out into the arena, where Dhrykna and Shariele were doing battle.

aAshok,a repeated Octavius softly.

The librarian blinked and the muscles on his face writhed. Even to Octavius it was clear that a t.i.tanic internal struggle was underway in Ashokas mind. He didnat know what the dark eldar had done to the librarian, but he had seen a look like this on the face of the Angel Sanguine once before, and he knew what it meant. The last time had been in the lair of the tyranid hive tyrant on Herodian IV, when Ashok had dispatched a cl.u.s.ter of psyker zoanthropes all by himself.

Although Octavius could not pretend to understand the mysterious violence that sometimes raged in the simmering red eyes of the librarian, he did know that it was the source of Ashokas greatest power and his greatest fears. This was not a condition that the Angel Sanguine would have entered willingly, and the captainas suspicion about him was immediately replaced with concern.

Ashok blinked again, and the muscle tone of his face began to soften. His jaw was still clenched, but the muscles around his eyes began to relax as the red flames started to subside. After a few more seconds, his shoulders slumped and he fell back against the bars behind him, exhaling deeply as though with relief as his chin dropped down to his chest once again. At exactly that moment, a pulse of brilliant light flashed through the bars of the cage and the auditorium outside seemed to gasp into a collective silence a something unexpected had happened in the arena.

The body of the warp beast convulsed and thrashed as Shariele pressed his hands to the creatureas throat. The warlock was pinned to the ground under the snarling weight of the warp sp.a.w.ned monster, his shoulders run through by the vicious, curved talons of the beastas forelegs. But as the dragonette gnashed down, bringing its ma.s.sive jaws around to surround the eldaras elegantly elliptical head, Shariele reached up with his bleeding hands, struggling against the weight and piercing agony of the beastas claws, and clasped them to either side of the creatureas monstrous skull.

Streams of crackling energy flooded out around the beastas head, cascading over its shoulders and cutting channels of burning flesh into its flanks. As one, the warlock and warp beast howled in pain as the flood became a torrent of broiling power, engulfing them both in a blaze of purpling light.

The audience was on its feet, cheering and screaming in eager delectation, eyes flaring and lips running slick with saliva. This is what they had come to see. They had grown so sick and tired of the pathetic, feeble displays of the Ulthwe artisans, dancers and poets. They had been bored to the point of despair by the cowardly fragility of the occasional mon-keigh. But now they had a real spectacle: a warlock of Ulthwe locked in the jaws of a warp beast, pumping out such quant.i.ties of barely controlled power that it would surely incinerate them both.

The other warp beast was already dead, and Quruel, mistress of the beasts, was prowling like an angry mother, sizing up the flas.h.i.+ng white figure of the eldar Aspect Warrior as she flipped and spun around the lashes of Kroulir and Druqura. Quruelas lascivious tongue flicked around her lips, as though she could already taste the blood of the lightling, and her eyes gleamed with a perverse yet familiar mixture of thirst and violence.

Then there was an explosion of light a something that had not been seen on Hesperax for as long as anyone could remember. It was not the sickly, flickering half-light to which the darklings had grown accustomed, but rather a glorious eruption of brilliance. It blasted up from the floor of the arena, engulfing the point at which Shariele and the warp beast had been wrestling, and it brought a sudden, hushed silence into the amphitheatre, as though all the air had suddenly been sucked out.

As the light dimmed and faded, a stark and charred image began to appear in its heart. It was little more than a disfigured and incoherent lump on the ground where once Shariele and the beast had wrestled their last. It was not moving, and it was almost impossible to distinguish the shapes of two separate beings. The explosion of warp power had melted their flesh and their souls instantaneously, melding them into the picture of ruination.

Darting through the stunned silence, Dhrykna dived towards the faintly glowing remains of what she thought would be the last Ulthwe eldar that she would ever see. As she hit the ground, she rolled, flipping back up onto one knee at the side of what might once have been Sharieleas head. She whispered something inaudible in a language long lost to the darklings, bowing her own head for an instant in reverence for the lost warrior. Scanning the charred remains, she realised that his waystone was also ruined, which meant that his soul was lost to Ulthwe forever a but it also meant that the darkling wych queen could not offer it as a sacrifice to the minions of the Satin Throne.

The shock of the explosive light lasted only a matter of seconds, and Dhrykna could already feel the dance-like movements of the wyches behind her as they manoeuvred for their attack. She just needed another second.

Jamming her hand into the sickly, viscous and burnt remains, the Aspect Warrior could feel the wyches drawing in around her. Even without turning, she could see them in her mindas eye, one dancing off to the left and the other to the right, like a pair of co-ordinated hunters. She was not sure where the mistress of the beasts was, but she felt certain that the senior figure would wait and see what happened to her underlings before she acted a such was the infamous cowardice of the darklings.

A shriek sounded immediately behind her as one of the wyches launched herself into a deathly lunge, stabbing forward with her delicately curving blade. At the very last moment, Dhryknaas hand found what it had been questing for. She dropped flat to ground and rolled rapidly, parrying the thrusting blade with one arm and bringing the other around into a strike as she spun. The long, barbed, daggerlike incisor that Dhrykna had yanked out of the remains of the warp beastas mouth plunged deeply into the wychas neck, puncturing her throat and severing her primary nerve cl.u.s.ter. The young wych barely had time for her eyes to bulge in shock before she slumped to the ground in a rapidly growing pool of her own blood.

The s.h.i.+ning Spear sprang back to her feet, s.n.a.t.c.hing the dead wychas long, sweeping blade into her hands and spinning it in a well-practiced flourish.

She sank into a low combat stance, bracing her newly acquired weapon against her back, and she watched the movements of the two remaining darklings as the audience roared with excitement and hysteria. In the centre of the dark, circular auditorium of death, the Aspect Warrior seemed radiant, bursting with the brilliant white light of Khaineas own lightning spear.

aI do not remember how it began, Octavius.a Ashokas speech was slurred and slow, as though the part of his brain responsible for language was functioning imperfectly. His head was still sagging down towards his chest and the tension in his outstretched shoulders had eased. He was suspended like a martyr before his battle-brothers.

aI was aboard the craftworld, doing battle with the aliens.a His hesitation was slight but noticeable. aThen I was aboard a dark eldar corsair, much in the manner in which you see me now. I have been restrained like this for some time, although I have no sense of the duration. How long has it been, Octavius?a aToo long, Ashok,a said the captain, and he meant it.

aWhat were you doing, Angel Sanguine? Where did they find you?a Peliasa voice was coa.r.s.e, as though gravelled with doubts.

aWhy did you leave us?a asked Luthar, finally giving voice to the question that was in everyoneas mind.

aI did not leave you, brother-chaplain. I took the fight deeper into the craftworld. There were more enemies than merely those before us in the Hall of Khalandhriel.a The effort of speaking was almost more than the magnificent librarian could stand. Whatever his captors had done to him, they had done it perfectly.

Octavius looked up at the cruciform Angel and exhaled, weighing up the possibilities in his mind as the sounds of battle rattled through the bars and the roar of the crowd grew to a crescendo. He chanced a look into the arena and saw the startling white shape of Dhrykna springing to her feet with a new weapon in her hands, next to the crumpled form of a dead dark eldar wych. Taking a moment, he nodded his admiration for the alien warrior a she was a worthy ally on this forsaken world.