Exocytosis Read online

  Behind the breather grille of his helmet, Vastobal’s lip curled. With each step he took, his misgivings grew firmer.

  He had spotted the civilian caravan a few hours in. Hidden from their sight, he watched them pick their way down the track leading to the Death Guard encampment. He listened to them talking and singing. He studied their manner. They were happy, and he could not fathom why. This strange group of Zaramundi natives, a mixture of all kinds from all strata of the planet’s feudal society, acted like they were on a celebratory outing to some great festival. They were buoyant, but strangely earnest with it. He searched his thoughts for the right word to encapsulate the mood he saw.

  A pilgrimage?

  Partly out of curiosity and partly because they served as a good distraction to any watchers, Vastobal shadowed the civilian band for the rest of their journey, paralleling their path until it ultimately deposited them at a distance from the gates of the repair camp.

  He found a hide inside the hollowed-out core of a fallen tree trunk and used the rangefinders in his helmet’s optics to scan the iron walls, looking for points of weakness. Vastobal planned to wait until nightfall and enter the camp in stealth, to penetrate as deeply as he could and observe the activities of the Death Guard unaware. If they thought no eyes were upon them, he reasoned, their true character would soon reveal itself.

  But the Dark Angel had barely settled himself before the armoured gates of the camp hissed open on pneumatic rods, parting wide enough to allow a figure in Terminator wargear to stride through. The livery was the same as that which Vastobal had seen in the hololith, and the massive scythe in the warrior’s hand erased any doubt as to the identity of the Death Guard who wore it.

  First Captain Typhon. Vastobal tensed, his hand falling to the hilt of his sheathed longsword. Could he know that I am here?

  The Dark Angel had heard the stories of Typhon’s battle prowess, and murkier suggestions that he was some kind of psyker – although that seemed uncertain, given the XIV Legion primarch Mortarion’s antipathy towards mind-witches. He drew on his training to slow his heartbeat and will himself to fade into the forest, lest some fraction of whatever preternatural sense Typhon might possess were to brush over him.

  It appeared to be enough. Typhon halted before the civilians, these pilgrims, looming over them, his full focus on the mortals who bowed at his feet.

  Vastobal tuned his auto-senses to maximum and strained to listen to the words passing between them.

  Calas Typhon knew well the faces of common men who looked upon him and his kind. Without fail, the emotion etched upon their countenances was always fear. The shade of it might change with the circumstance, but they were always afraid of him, terrified of the paragon of war in plate and steel before them.

  Not here, though. Not these men. They looked up at him with something approaching adoration, as if he had come to bring them deliverance. Typhon gave in to an odd compulsion to remove his battle-helm and look them in the eyes, but the act seemed only to cement their manner.

  They whispered among themselves, nodding and smiling.

  As if they know me.

  Irritation pulled at his mouth. ‘Who are you, and what do you want?’

  ‘We have come to see you,’ said one of them, a steely old woman with the manner of a lifelong matriarch. She beamed at him. ‘Ah, it was worth the trip, yes?’ She threw that question to the others and they nodded in agreement. ‘Here you are. Just like we were promised.’

  ‘I do not know you,’ Typhon retorted, annoyed by her manner and by a creeping sense of something amiss that refused to abate. ‘This is a military installation. You cannot be here. Return to your homes.’

  ‘We have abandoned them,’ she explained. ‘It was time. Your arrival made that clear.’

  He shook his head. ‘If you do not depart on your own, you will be removed by force.’ Typhon glared at her. ‘We won’t be gentle.’

  She smiled at up at him as if he were some wayward son, and gestured at the air around her. ‘We’ve all heard the whisper of the wings.’ The old woman’s choice of words shocked him into silence. ‘The glittering black-silver. Like you. We’ve all been given gifts.’ She rolled up her sleeve, revealing a bird-thin arm and tanned, wrinkled skin like careworn leather. ‘I was supposed to die of a canker. Instead, I blossomed.’

  Typhon blinked as a tiny insect buzzed between the two of them. From the corner of his eye, he realised that there were more, dancing in shafts of sunlight falling through the treeline. Black motes, coiling around like wilful smoke.

  She showed him the inside of her forearm and the lesions there, all mirrors of the ones on his scalp. Others in the group presented themselves in similar fashion, some unbuttoning their shirts so Typhon might look upon their breast or throat. He saw cold and yellowing marks in tri-part clusters. The same. The very same.

  ‘It was the Grandfather who brought me back from the canker,’ the old woman was saying. ‘He spoke to us about you, the Great Lord Typhus. Our champion.’

  ‘My name is Typhon,’ insisted the First Captain. ‘Calas Typhon.’

  ‘Oh, for the moment,’ she said, dismissing the comment. ‘Things grow and change. There is death, and rebirth.’

  The old woman placed a hand upon his vambrace, the spidery, stick-thin fingers tracing over the metal, and he looked down. She was drawing shapes there, a pattern of three interlocking circles.

  His thoughts raced. Ever since he had been a youth, Typhon had sensed the motion of greater things out beyond the edges of his perception, like the wakes of giant unseen leviathans passing below the surface of the ocean. Once, he had been marshalled in his use of those abilities, harnessing them in service to his Legion – only to be forbidden all such practices by his primarch.

  That those forces had impressed themselves upon his life was not in question, but he had rarely encountered those who had felt that touch themselves. Not even Erebus, with his marks and his words, seemed so close to him as these strangers before him now. The air was filled with a strange, potent scent – sweet and acrid all at once, like flowers blossoming from within corpse-flesh.

  ‘You see,’ she said, and her rheumy eyes were shiny with tears. ‘Yes, indeed. You do see it, don’t you? We have been waiting here for so long, my lord. Unhallowed and rescued from our maladies over and over, all for this. For now.’ She nodded, and as he looked closer, Typhon saw the broken blood vessels across her neck and face, the remnants of harsh infection. ‘It is time.’

  His gaze swept across the others and he saw the same. Hollowed faces of men that should have been long dead, drawn back from their end into a kind of null-decay. It was like a veil briefly dropping from his eyes. He saw these people as they really were: the living who fate decreed dead, held in abeyance by the very malaises that should have ended them.

  ‘How are you alive?’ he whispered.

  ‘You know,’ smiled the old woman. ‘By the grace of the Grandfather. And with your passage, herald, we can move on.’ She spread her hands. ‘We may finally impart our gifts and marks to everyone on Zaramund… and beyond.’

  Typhon looked down and saw the leathery skin of the woman’s arms rippling as tiny shapes moved beneath the surface of her flesh. Motile black specks began to extrude themselves through her pores and swarm across her hands, forming a shiny, dark mass.

  A terrible and potent reaction rose up in Vastobal, a wellspring of repulsion that spilled out of the core of his being.

  He could not tear his gaze away from the pilgrims. All of them were spreading their hands in religionist poses and oily, glistening matter was seeping from their mouths and nostrils, weeping from their eyes and ears.

  Even at this distance, the stink of the noisome fluid was like a physical blow. Vastobal recoiled, feeling his gut clench and stiffen. The gene-forged of the Dark Angels were capable of ingesting matter without effect that would have killed a normal human instantly, but this bilious reek was so utterly foul that it threatened even the iron constitution of a Space Marine. Blinking away chemical tears, Vastobal activated the atmospheric seals on his power armour and set it to a mode more suitable to an ultra-toxic death world or deep void vacuum than the placid woodlands of Zaramund. He lurched out of his hiding place, fighting down the wave of nausea that had come over him, and gathered himself. The captain’s cloak rippled over his shoulders as he grasped the hilt of his longsword and slid a short length of it out of the scabbard, preparing for a full draw.

  The pilgrims turned to him, and he beheld horrors.

  Gawping, slack-mouthed corpses that were animated by jerky, marionette motions. Agglomerations of dead flesh that mimicked the shape and form of humans. Repellent things that belonged in a midden or a grave.

  The Death Guard Typhon did not seem to care about the sudden transformation at hand amongst the civilians, instead turning with obvious threat towards Vastobal as he made himself visible. Typhon pointed his power weapon in the Dark Angel’s direction and called out a command to halt, but Vastobal was only half-aware of it.

  His attention was taken by the things around him.

  All the mad rumours and insane half-truths he had heard about the Warmaster’s dalliance with the eldritch and unknown now came snapping into hard focus. The possibility he had always secretly hoped was untrue now revealed itself to him. Vastobal was a son of Caliban, and sons of Caliban knew the truth about monsters lurking in the dark. The rumours of the unclean are real, he told himself, and worse than I could have believed.

  Distantly, Vastobal’s duty made itself known to him. Luther had to be warned about what he had allowed to set foot on Zaramund, warned about whatever foul sorc
ery the Death Guard had brought with them from their alliance with Horus Lupercal.

  The creatures had other plans. The men-things reached for him, spilling black ichor across the undergrowth at his feet as clawed fingers scratched at his armour. Choking in a breath through the lingering stink in the confines of his helmet, Vastobal’s hand jerked and the rest of his sword came free.

  His unsheathing swing was wide and it took the head from one of the unhallowed pilgrims. Instead of a jet of crimson, a flood of black foulness issued into the air, and Vastobal recoiled once again. The others mobbed him and he reacted with swift, deadly force. Another, then two more of the pilgrims were cut down by his blade.

  Everywhere he opened them, blackness exploded outwards, moving like oily smoke.

  Belatedly, Vastobal realised that the repellent fluid was a colossally dense mass of tiny insects, flies that the corpses vomited out in great, buzzing swarms.

  Reason threatened to slip from him as the full extent of the horror became clear. The Dark Angel’s warrior mind slipped into pure combatant mode, some rote-trained element of his thoughts taking over as a base instinct overrode all other concerns.

  Destroy this foulness. Wipe them all out. Expunge them.

  Vastobal moved quickly, leading with the sword and cutting down everything that crossed his line of sight. In the melee, the need to destroy the pilgrims became all-consuming, as if the Dark Angel were suddenly an antibody compelled to eradicate an infection marring the body of Zaramund.

  A dark, sizzling slick of insects and black blood coated his armour as he advanced towards the old woman he had seen begin it all, the one who had been speaking with the Death Guard. She was the heart of it – yes, that was clear now. Bellowing a war cry, Vastobal went at her with his sword falling from on high, intent on opening up her stick-thin frame with one cut from jowl to bowel.

  The curved head of a scythe blade came out of nowhere and blocked the falling strike before it could connect.

  Typhon decided that the Dark Angel had gone mad.

  One moment, the Death Guard was seeing… something… and the next his gaze was ripped away from the old woman by a cloaked form crashing out from the tree line, shouting incoherent warnings about corruption and filth.

  Typhon was about to interpose himself between the civilians and the other legionary, to demand an explanation as to why one of Luther’s men had seen fit to approach their camp’s perimeter unseen – but events overtook any such calm response.

  The Dark Angel began killing. He did it with such ferocity that Typhon was momentarily taken aback. He had seen such blind fury in the Word Bearers or the World Eaters, but never from the more measured warrior kin of the First Legion.

  The civilians actually fought back. They moved with a purpose that common men seldom exhibited before the shock and awe of a legionary in full flow, but it counted for nothing. The Dark Angel put them down with swift, flashing strikes from his weapon, blood splashing where it struck. Typhon was aware of the insects again, as if coming out of nowhere, doubtless attracted by the scent of spilled blood.

  The moment stretched and he let a surge of cold anger push him forward. Typhon turned to meet the Dark Angel’s blade as he came hurtling towards the old woman, her tear-streaked face a picture of shock as this avatar of death itself thundered across the clearing.

  Their weapons clashed with a shriek of powered, crystalline steel, for a brief instant seemingly frozen in time.

  ‘Stay your hand!’ Typhon snarled.

  ‘What obscenity have you brought here, Death Guard?’ The Dark Angel shouted the words back at him, shaking with rage. ‘This profane horror will not stand!’

  Locked in their violent embrace, Typhon could see the warrior’s name etched in golden scrollwork over his breast, surrounded by laurels that designated the rank of captain.

  ‘Vastobal,’ he grunted, hoping that by addressing the Dark Angel directly he would get some sense from him. ‘Stand down!’

  ‘Never in the face of such pestilence!’ The other warrior broke out of the lock and attacked again in a flurry of slashes and jabs from his longsword.

  Typhon planted his feet in a defensive posture, fighting with both hands on Manreaper, using the shaft to parry and block every hit that Vastobal tried to land. The Dark Angel’s cloak whipped around him as he looked for an opening; he was good, Typhon had to admit, and had Vastobal’s discipline been in place instead of his rage, the clash could have followed a different path.

  His jaw set. He had no time for this. When Vastobal attacked once more, Typhon spun his power scythe in a flashing arc and used the heavy heel to knock the Dark Angel off balance.

  Hit hard, Vastobal went down on one knee and Typhon pointed the scythe’s curved blade at his head. ‘Enough!’ he snapped.

  ‘No, not enough!’ Vastobal bellowed. The Dark Angel’s sword flew at Typhon in an upward arc that was so fast, it almost caught him unawares.

  Typhon shifted in his stance, but not quick enough to avoid the very tip of the blade screeching as it scored a line up his chest plate, and cut into his face through the mat of his unkempt beard.

  His hand went to the wound. There was blood.

  Dark it was, so dark as to be almost black. In the few moments before the Space Marine’s accelerated metabolism clotted the wound, fat droplets fell from the cut and splashed against the ground underfoot.

  And something altered inside Calas Typhon, something dark and deeply buried. Released, it uncoiled and was reborn.

  The change was blink-fast, an element of his spirit reforming into another shape. His soul twisted at the sting from the wound – but it wasn’t the small nick in his flesh that angered him. It was the flood of emotion, of sudden rage and hatred at the Dark Angel’s insolence and idiocy.

  How dare Vastobal do this? How dare he?

  Does the fool not understand who I am? What arrogance compels him to strike me and those like me?

  Typhon let the cold, simmering fury break its banks and he struck back with his scythe, putting all the power of his Terminator armour’s superior musculature into the blow. The blade struck the centre of Vastobal’s longsword and cleaved it in two – half the length whipped away with the spent kinetic force of the impact, and the other vibrated in the Dark Angel’s hand. The First Legion captain was staggered by the break, and in another time and place that might have signalled the end of this ill-fated clash.

  It was not to be. Forces larger than Typhon were at his back, a buzzing, droning vibration that ran through the meat and bone of him. They propelled him forwards into a stomping, steady advance. The Death Guard captain felt a crawling, electric sensation coursing through his bloodstream, like insects in his veins. His hearts hammered at the inside of his reinforced ribcage.

  The buzzing was in his head, the black-silver glitter ghosting at the edges of his sight.

  Typhon recalled all the times he had taken the Ritual of the Cups, a post-battle rite in which Death Guard commanders would share a draught of pure poison with their most valiant warriors. The drinking of the venoms, a challenge to the gene-forged hyper-metabolism of the Space Marines, was intoxicating in its own way and Typhon savoured the rush of it. The threat of true death made a legionary’s adrenaline surge high.

  But this was better.

  He felt potent and powerful. Unstoppable.

  Light flashed from the steel as Manreaper fell towards Vastobal’s chest. The Dark Angel rolled aside and barely escaped the weapon’s kiss as the scythe bit into the ground. Typhon slashed downwards again, and once more Vastobal almost paid with his life. From the corner of his shadowed gaze, Typhon thought he saw the earth where the blade had landed liquefying into muddy, toxic slurry.

  His fractional moment of distraction allowed Vastobal to stab him. With all of his enhanced might, the Dark Angel came forward and jammed the blunt edge of his broken sword into the tiny gap between the plates of the plackart that protected Typhon’s lower torso. Levering it outwards, the broken blade slashed power cables and artificial muscle bundles and finally tore through the wargear’s undermesh, the last barrier before the Death Guard’s flesh.