Fire Warrior

Kais didn’t need any further encouragement. He opened fire with a snarl.

The shell knocked the obscenity onto its back in a fountain of bone and gore, dust and smoke hanging around it as its flesh charred. It yowled in pain and lay still, taloned claws clutching rigidly at nothing. For a second Kais thought he’d destroyed it and the killing rage in his mind chuckled and whispered its congratulatory poison.

You can kill anything.

You are a god.

The corpse jerked upright, tilted its head, and screamed.

Kais staggered backwards, astonished, rocked by the force of the howl, clutching impotently at his ears and unable to block the audio-pickup from his helmet. The world wobbled on its axis, blurring in his mind, making his teeth rattle and his skull ache. Before he knew what was happening he was on his back, vaulted catacomb ceiling looming over. He shook his head to clear the haze and tried to move his arms, tried to rise up, tried to lift his gun but—

But the beast was on him, pi

His gun was gone, somewhere. Knocked aside in the rush.

A memory swelled abstractly from his mind. He remembered the first time he’d been given a lesson in hand-to-hand fighting, during the first tau’cyr of his training. The instructor had stared his young charges up and down and said, with no sense of irony at all:

“The first rule of unarmed combat is: don’t be unarmed.”

Too late for that. He wrestled to move but the creature’s grip was too strong, bony dagger claws scraping into his arms, slicing at his flesh and leaving his armour shredded.

It pushed its head, equine features surmounted by tall bone antlers of velvet and chitin, down upon Kais’s helmet, tongue slurping obscenely around the co

Kais thought, with crystal clarity: I’m going to die.

“Kill me, if you must,” the ethereal said calmly. “My people will retaliate and crush you to dust.”

Severus giggled, idly dragging the tip of the blade across the tau’s flesh, enjoying the pale blue whorls and patterns it opened up in its wake.

The Aun, pinioned by invisible forces in the air, hadn’t cried out once, so far. These things, these tau, they were simply no fun.

Severus glanced at his timepiece.

Ten minutes.

“...tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock...” he muttered, gri

Snarling, the daemon-thing lifted a claw from Kais’s arm and scrabbled at his helmet, perplexed by its inability to get at his head.

“Wa

Finding himself with one arm free, Kais scrabbled for a weapon. His gun was out of reach, his knife holstered at his other hip, pressed down by the weight of his enemy. Seeing no other options, he pushed his fist directly into the cavernous wound in its guts, grabbed a handful of slippery vertebrae, and pulled.

It roared. It roared and squealed and shrieked, muscles spasming and arms twitching, tortured nerves sending contradictory messages through its u

He realised, without any surprise, that he was shrieking and howling just as much as his enemy.

Finally, mercifully, the beast flopped to one side in a tangle of rictus-stiff limbs and matted gore. Kais’s hand was wrapped around the pommel of his knife and tensing before his mind was even fully recovered from its exertions. The Mont’au insanity raised his arm, fed it with all of his remaining strength and brought it down in a glimmering arc.

The Chaos beast’s head sagged from its body with a wet rasp. The thing rustled as it died.

As if responding to some invisible signal, the circular doorway opened slowly, sphincter-muscles relaxing obscenely.

Kais stared out at the very base of the Temple abyss.

Ardias sunk his chainsword into the Traitor Marine’s guts with something like relish. In all the galaxy, of all the myriad enemies that clustered around the frail light of humanity, nothing was as satisfying to purge, he thought, as a traitor.

The thing gurgled a blasphemous oath, shuddered as its guts flopped out of its armour shell, and lay still. Ardias stooped to catch his breath and took a look around the chamber.

Just another crypt, one among dozens, lined with moistness and filth, vague suggestions of organic forms jutting from its walls and slurping doorways pulsing every few moments. If he came out of this alive, by the grace of the Primarch, he’d take great pleasure in overseeing an orbital bombardment of this place.

His descent was taking far too long. Perhaps he’d taken a wrong turn, or lost his bearings amongst the snaking corridors and stairways that he’d travelled, unable to tell which would wend its way back towards the shaft of the abyss, and which coiled endlessly away into the rock and soil of the earth. It was true that his sensors and compass readings were scrambled and confused by whatever foul energies riddled the pit, but he’d served the Emperor’s glory long enough to learn to rely upon his own senses just as much as those of his battle armour. Being lost meant someone was messing with his mind.

“T’au,” he voxed, uncomfortable at the thought. “T’au — are you there?”

“Ardias?” came the stammered reply, thick with interference. “Is that you?”

“Of course it is. Where are you? Are you near the bottom?”

The alien sounded changed, somehow; laughing grimly before answering. “Not near it, human. At it.”

Ardias blinked, surprised yet again by the tau’s resourcefulness. Delpheus’s dying prediction, it would seem, had been correct.

He was just wondering what orders to give the xenogen when the dead Chaos Marine decided it wasn’t dead at all and rose up with a roar.

Ardias, as if from a distance, heard shots, the ti

And a sharp pain exploded in his mind.

Everything went black.

Although every conceptual philosophy he had absorbed as a youth told him to scorn such fanciful observations, Shas’el T’au Lusha stood at the edge of the pit and recognised evil. Stretching in a wide bowl, nestled like some unhealed wound in the crux of three flint-covered foothills, the sweeping camber of its lip gave way to an uneven shaft some fifty tor’leks across. A curtain of black fumes and u