The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,46
power lines exploded, armourglass suddenly frosted with impact-patterns. I heard fresh alarms going off, and a status panel above me flashed runes indicating we were tumbling back into real space.
We reached the room with the menials in it. One was slumped on the deck face down, a pool of blood slowly forming under her face. The other, a male, was still on his feet, twitching madly against the far wall as if impaled on it.
The vibrations from the hull were dying down now, and the worst of the lurching subsided, but we remained in a whirling lumen-pattern of intermittent darkness. I could barely see anything with clarity – freeze-frame images of blood and terror jumped around before me.
‘Are we out?’ hissed Slovo, clutching at my cloak.
I didn’t answer. I pushed him away from me and reached for my flamer.
The standing menial was grinning at me. He was grinning so wide that it tore the edges of his mouth. Every flash of swaying light made that grin bigger and darker, and as I watched, he reached up to his mouth, pushed a hand inside, grabbed his tongue, and began to pull.
I slipped my hand over the trigger. Something long and black and glistening came out of his mouth, and just kept coming.
I opened up the flamer. I saw the man scream and writhe within the shaking torrent of extreme heat. His robes ignited in a burst, his skin crisped to black, but I kept up the roaring inferno. I saw something slimy and oil-dark curl up amid the flames, coiling for the strike. I heard fractured screaming as if from many places at once, none of them here.
I reached for my sword just as it leapt for me, a mass of prehensile limbs and wicked spines. I lashed out, severing one of the tentacles, then spun around to plunge my blade into the polyp of flesh at its heart. It shrieked and clutched at me, trying to smother me in waves of sinuous gristle, but by then I was in combat-trance, beyond mortal senses, moving faster and harder and working my blade in a whirl of pressed steel.
This was shedim. That should have been impossible, given our Geller aegis, but it was here, on the ship. I could smell its stink – the rotting of the human flesh it had taken for its own, pulled apart and remade.
I carved it open. It lashed at me, trying to drag me down, but by then I was a tongue of flame, a howl of the world’s wind. My sword gyrated, and slops of its unnatural body thudded to the deck, still jerking.
‘Anathema psykana,’ it whispered to me, rearing up in obscene mockery of physical law, growing into a tentacled slab of muscle and mucus. I saw its hundreds of eyes stare at me – hundreds of identical human eyes, copied from its host, replete with lids and lashes and tears. Its mouth had never stopped growing, and was now a huge and ragged maw lined with teeth, flapping and saliva-flecked. ‘Alone? Alone, out here? I will relish turning you inside out!’
I never listened. A mortal had to struggle not to listen to the shedim, but not me. This thing was an unbearable horror to a mortal, a temptation beyond endurance, but for me it was merely disgusting and dangerous, like a snake found under a pillow, something to stamp on.
I plunged my blade into its mouth and snickered it across those teeth, yanking them out of black gums. I danced harder, ducking under the flail of tentacles and severing those that came close. I felt its sting on my armour, the sucking pull of warp-spun strands, and slashed myself free.
The thing had a heart, it had lungs and it had organs, all pulled out of shape from its host but still necessary for it in this place. I delved to find them, cutting like a surgeon. When I reached my target the blade drove in deep, sending a jet of ink-black blood fountaining over both of us. I cut and I cut, wading into the belly of the creature to sever its essence before it could regenerate more.
It screamed all the while until I sawed out its swollen lungs, grabbing the sacs of pus and foul gas and hurling them messily to the deck. I ripped its gullet from its throat and I burst its flaccid stomach with a stamp of my boot, and that finally shut it up.