Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

Which, of course, was a big mistake, simply reminding it that Jurgen and I were a threat. Abandoning its blood-slick toys, which crawled beseechingly after it bleating their disappointment at being so cavalierly abandoned, the thing bounded towards us, tearing through the crowd of cultists like Jurgen through a smorgasbord. I barely had time to raise my chainsword, fending off a snapping claw which lunged for my face; the teeth whined, biting deep. A gush of foul-smelling ichor gouted from the wound, and the thing recoiled, an expression which would have denoted puzzlement in a human flickering across its hideous visage.58 Clearly it hadn’t been expecting to be injured so badly, and stepped back, howling mellifluously, its flesh and chitin starting to knit together as it did so. I potted it in the face and body with the laspistol, seeing the cauterised craters fade and vanish in a heartbeat – clearly Jurgen’s abilities weakened it at close quarters, but not enough for anything we had with us to damage it sufficiently to force it back into the warp. The melta might have done the job, perhaps, but it now lay at Jurgen’s feet, as far out of reach as if we’d left it back in his quarters. Now he had a heap of fallen cultists in front of him, impeding the progress of those still intent on attacking to clamber over, he was able to fire in short, efficient bursts – but if he stopped to pick up the melta, he’d be overwhelmed in seconds.

No sooner had the thought occurred to me than Jurgen spoke.

‘Running dry, sir. Should have fixed the bayonet.’ The words were hardly out of his mouth before the intermittent crackle of his lasgun ceased abruptly. ‘That’s it, I’m out.’ And with no time to reload before they reached us. Reversing the weapon in a single smooth motion he lashed out with the butt of it, catching a portly middle-aged man across the bridge of the nose with a crack of breaking cartilage and a spray of blood. As the fellow fell backwards a young woman crawled forwards, grabbed my aide’s ankle and tugged, attempting to pull him off balance. She might even have succeeded, dragging him down to be overwhelmed by the horde of fanatics surrounding us, if I hadn’t antici­pated the movement and lopped her hand off at the wrist in the nick of time. She pouted up at me.

‘That’s just mean.’

‘So’s this,’ I said, putting a las-bolt through her brain, or her skull at least, and turning to eviscerate another couple of cultists who were trying to hit me in the head with rocks they’d picked up from somewhere.

Our situation was desperate, there was no denying that; though Jurgen and I must have downed over a dozen of the cultists by now there still seemed no end to them, and their sheer numbers were bound to tell in the long run. Though I could hold them off with the chainsword for a few moments longer I was bound to tire sooner or later, and if Jurgen fell they’d be able to get behind me. I toyed briefly with the notion of passing him the laspistol, but he was already occupied walloping here­tics with his gun butt, and distracting him seemed like a bad idea.

The daemon was circling us now, beyond its shield of expendable acolytes, reminding me disconcertingly of a felinoid catching sight of a rat hole – evidently wary of approaching Jurgen too closely, but I had no doubt that if its cat’s paws succeeded in killing him it would be on me like a rash.

And that was looking more and more likely by the second. I tried the comm-bead again, but as I’d expected, heard nothing; no hope of a last-minute reprieve from our comrades, it seemed.

At that moment, however, help arrived from a most unexpected source. A party of eldar bounded into the cavern from one of the tunnel mouths we’d noticed on our arrival, brandishing spears which flickered and glowed with arcane sorceries. Their armour, though sharing the green and purple colours of the ones we’d encountered before, was richly decorated with arcane symbols, and obscured by cloaks which seemed to swirl around them rather more than the air currents in the cavern would normally account for. One, in particular, stood out from its fellows, both its raiment and archaic weapon more richly ornamented than the others. As one, they flung their spears at the cultists who had turned to meet them, spitting several, but leaving themselves unarmed apart from the pistols holstered at their waists. I expected them to draw these at once to defend themselves with, but to my surprise the spears turned in mid-air and returned to the hands of their wielders.

‘Neat trick,’ Jurgen said.