The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,59
dread that would have given its presence away sooner.
Run, I signed to my soldiers, hoping that they would see the signal and get out while they still could.
Then I saw it. The combat lumens flooded the corridor in a blush of red, catching the slick skin of something that looked like a hunchbacked infant, no bigger than a human child. It was eyeless, and its domed head was three times the size of its spindly body. I had a brief glimpse of it capering towards me on finger-like legs, a huge mouth yawning open to reveal concentric rings of human teeth.
I flooded the passage with flame, making the air shudder and blackening the bulkheads on either side of me. The creature leapt through them, its skin shrivelling and crisping from a greasy sack of bones underneath. Its howls were the howls of a human child in pain, and they set my teeth on edge.
It bounded from the walls to the ceiling, evading my flamer before launching itself at me. I switched instantly to my blade, aiming to catch its wattle neck with a slice, but it was too fast, and clattered in close. We skidded across the deck, my blade pirouetting, and it went for my throat with its distended jaws. I smelt its faecal breath waft over me and nearly vomited. I dropped my flamer and punched the horror-thing away, sending its glistening sac of grey flesh slapping from the walls.
It leapt back at me, jerkily fast, and clamped on to my leg. I felt the needle-pain of my armour breaking, then the hot wash of agony in my thigh. I whirled my blade and jabbed it down, stabbing the shedim clear. It was leaking black fluid by then, gasping, its little lung-bags quivering.
I felt light-headed. Something in that bite had got to me, and the nausea was heady. It coiled and pounced again, relentless like a cornered arachnid. Somehow I managed to angle my blade and shove it into the creature’s path, ramming it point-first down its throat.
It shivered, impaled on the length of steel, thrashing and clawing. Then it started to haul itself up towards the hilt, using its six prehensile fingers to drag itself closer.
Grimly, I reached for my discarded flamer. One hand gripping my sword hilt, the other on the trigger, I pressed the muzzle into its blindly snapping jaws.
Choke, now, I willed, opening the nozzles.
The gush of flames flooded into the daemon’s mouth, spilling and bubbling and making its flabby stomach swell into a burning bag. For a moment it writhed on that spit, gurgling and clawing closer.
Then its body burst, ripping open in a flail of dragged entrails. I shook it free of the blade, hurling its deflated husk into the deck, then stood over the remains and doused them with waves of flame.
The pain in my leg was excruciating by then, but I did not relent. Even as my vision faltered I saw the shedim’s corpse shrivel and twist.
As the last of its unnatural essence curled into ash, I finally ceased, sinking to one knee and leaning on the hilt of my blade. The flames blew out, and I was left alone in the bloody corridor, stacked high with tortured and broken flesh. I saw how many of my soldiers that thing had killed – I guessed about twenty – having gnawed its way through their chests and limbs in a hunger-frenzy. My own leg was aching too, swollen with pain far out of proportion to the size of the wound.
I gave the comm-signal to Erefan that the daemon had been extinguished. I screwed my eyes closed, willing myself not to lose focus, and shakily got to my feet. I kicked through the residue of the shedim with my good leg, and saw that it had been annihilated.
I had never seen one like that before. I added a given-name to the hundreds that already populated my internal bestiary – a ‘gnawer’ – although I was sure that in some forgotten library of the Inquisition there was a better title for such a disgusting excrescence of the warp.
Dimly, I heard the drum of running boots. The standard drill would be enacted now – running repairs, an assessment of the damage, consultation with Slovo, and then it would begin all over again. We’d drag ourselves a little further along the winding guts of the warp, a little more battered, a little less able to defend ourselves against the inevitable assault.