Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

I hesitated. There was no telling what effect the ravening blast of thermal energy might have on the strange, pulsating sphere, but doing nothing was hardly an option either. Even as I watched, the air seemed to ripple around it – then an arm appeared, somehow managing to seem shapely and sensual despite ending in a claw a crab would envy. A shoulder followed it, then a head and torso, curiously feminine despite the chitinous exoskeleton partially covering it. A chorus of welcome and delight swept across the summoners, while their leader abased himself before the abomination taking form in front of him.

I must admit, the surge of horrified disgust I felt at the sight of the thing was partially eclipsed by one of relief: whatever this warp-spawned monstrosity was, it wasn’t Emeli, whose daemonic form was far too deeply etched on my memory not to have been recognised at once.

‘Fire!’ I instructed, squeezing off a few shots with my laspistol at the heart of the vortex as I spoke, and closing my eyes as I did so. It didn’t do a whole lot for my accuracy, of course, but did prevent me from being dazzled by the flash of actinic light from the melta as Jurgen obeyed the instruction with enthusiasm. The thing shrieked, the cultists stopped whatever it was they were doing, and a ululating howl of anger replaced the intricate roundelay of their chanting. ‘Again!’

Our only chance, as I knew from previous encounters with denizens of the warp, was to prevent the thing from gaining a proper foothold in the material world, and the best way to do that was to inflict as much damage as we could on it before it managed to materialise completely.

‘Sorry, sir.’ My aide dropped the heavy weapon, reaching for his lasgun even before it hit the floor. ‘It’s frakked. Lucky to have got even one shot off before it shorted.’ And, indeed, sparks were still dancing around the rent the eldar Guardian’s chainsword had gouged in the melta’s casing.

‘Jurgen.’ I became abruptly aware that while our attention was on the daemon the cultists had begun to react to our presence, and not with glad cries of welcome either. ‘Pull back.’ A small tidal wave of degenerate humanity was surging towards us, brandishing what makeshift weapons they could find,57 and a small preliminary volley of thrown rocks pattered around our feet.

‘Very good, sir.’ My aide glanced around us. ‘Pull back to where, exactly?’

Outlying elements of the crowd were already appearing behind us, confirming my guess that there had been others elsewhere in the cavern when we arrived, although given the spectacle in the middle of it we can hardly be blamed for having failed to notice them at the time.

‘Good question,’ I conceded, feeling more than a little foolish. ‘Back to the tunnel we came in by. We’ll have to clear the way first, though.’

‘Clearing the way now,’ Jurgen said, unleashing a hail of las-bolts into the tide of howling insanity closing in around us. ‘But it’s not helping much.’

‘Indeed,’ I agreed, backing into the short corridor he’d managed to open in the surrounding bodies. It was already closing up around us like a healing wound, fresh fanatics hurling themselves into the gap made by their fallen fellow acolytes, leaving us almost as far from the tunnel we’d entered by as before. I swung the chainsword through a standard defensive pattern, feeling the teeth bite as the front rank closed to striking distance, reaping a gruesome harvest of viscera and blood – but still they came on. I squeezed the trigger of my laspistol, and a screaming face, so distorted with bloodlust that the gender of its owner was indeterminate, exploded like an offal-packed balloon.

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ Jurgen said, flicking the selector of his lasgun to full auto. He swung it in a short, las-bolt-spitting arc, felling a swathe of our attackers as they surged forwards, but as before there were always more to replace them; it was like punching holes in a river.

‘My sentiments exactly,’ I agreed, feeling our backs touch, our instinctive rapport in situations like this taking over without conscious thought by either of us. I risked a glance at the claw-handed, bird-footed daemon, which by now had come fully through into the real world, but which for the moment seemed happy enough dismembering a few of the cultists who had rushed to embrace it. Too busy with trying to fend off its acolytes to get a good shot at it, I nevertheless found myself ­unable to resist the horror-induced impulse to send a couple of las-bolts in its direction.