[Hammer and Bolter 16] - The Pact by Sarah Cawkwell

Author:Sarah Cawkwell [Cawkwell, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I

cannot

You must and you will, witch. You will take my power and you will complete what you have started here.

Her plan was exquisite. The creature was a daemon of death, rot and decay. She was defeating it with life. Too much life. She was taking her own life-force, combining it with the purity of the young Space Marine and she was using their joint powers to amplify it.

The daemon fed, unable to stop itself. The desperate need to take any sustenance it could from everything that lived or died around it took over and it absorbed the energy into itself. But such purity and faith, amplified at such vast power levels was the antithesis of everything it was.

Silver Skulls and eldar warriors continued to pound away at the flesh of the thing whilst Bhehan and the farseer burned at its ties to reality. The harder the two psychic beings pressed their attack, the more damage the weapons of the warriors was doing. Bolter rounds embedded themselves beneath the surface and exploded, spraying an acidic substance across the room. It damaged eldar and Space Marine alike, eating into Djul’s pauldron. But it did not go far. Whatever organisms or whatever warp magic gave it its power seemed to be fading.

‘Whatever you are doing is working, Bhehan,’ bellowed Kerelan. ‘Do not stop.’ He was slicing strips of gangrenous flesh away from the daemon as though he carved a beast. His relic blade glistened, coated with the once-lethal substance that had devoured countless men, women, children and xenos across the years. This thing stood on the sacred, holy ground of those who had come before and his fury was unmatched.

When the daemon finally stopped moving, when all the fight went out of it, Bhehan was surprised. He had anticipated it bursting like an overripe fruit. He had been ready to seek cover to avoid the inevitable rain of acid that would come with its destruction. But instead, it merely wailed as it began to lose size and cohesion. Where once a gelatinous giant had stood, now there was only a quivering lump the size of a Space Marine.

It continued to diminish, spreading across the chamber floor and littering the ground with splinters of bone and rock. One object stood out as different, unusual; glancing more closely at it, the Prognosticator felt a shock of recognition. The last time he had seen that war banner, it had been worn at the back of the noble Brother-Sergeant Igneus, the warrior he had seen during his earlier flashback.

And he understood how the plague had come into the fortress-monastery. He realised what the creature they had just destroyed had been. It sickened him almost as much as what he had done to defeat it. One of their own, twisted and distorted into something so

Do not linger on what was, came a weary voice in his mind. Instead, give thanks for what is no more. See? It dies, Bhehan.

The psyker was utterly exhausted and drained by his mental exertions, but it was as to nothing compared to the dying spark of the woman who stood beside him.

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