Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

To read anything meaningful out of these Chaos worshippers' rituals, he needed the counsel of someone more specialized.

Lin took a moment to establish contact with Inquisitor Vladilena. He used a servo-skull to scan the data here and transmitted it to the Inquisitor.

Such a reckless act startled the Inquisitor. The instant she realized what Lin was sending, she cut the transmission outright and reproached him loudly, "Are you insane? Don't tell me you lot who fuss over machine-spirits day and night don't know how to avoid contamination from the Warp!"

"I'm on the trail of a traitor Inquisitor." Not wanting to explain his special nature, Lin lied with practiced ease.

Vladilena fell silent at once. "This is a ritual circle for summoning an evil presence from the Warp. It may look derelict, but its core components are all intact. With only a little repair, it could be brought back into operation immediately."

"So the abandonment was just a smokescreen."

"Indeed. Incidentally—what leads have you turned up?"

"That is no cause for the honored Inquisitor to trouble herself."

"Wait!"

Lin was about to cut the line, but Vladilena called out to stop him. "I don't know what you people are planning to do, but I have to tell you—the Imperium's support fleet is nearly here."

Lin halted before disconnecting. "When?"

"Judging by the violent turbulence in the Warp, it should be within the next half a day."

"Mm-hm..."

This was crucial information, though Lin had no way to fit it together with the current situation. He could only offer a simple word of thanks for now. "Very thoughtful of you, my honored Inquisitor."

"...So long as you people put a bit more care into the matter of Wudier. I'll give you a set of codes that Wudier uses to contact his attendants—perhaps they'll come in useful."

This time it was Vladilena's end that cut the transmission first.

Lin had made no deliberate effort to be discreet while speaking with the Inquisitor, and the Astartes beside him had grasped the situation from what they overheard.

"This ritual circle is linked to the eye of the circle and can be activated at any moment—so he must be entangled in the conspiracy of the underhive." Kurande put forward a suggestion. "Shall we simply destroy this place?"

Lin dismissed it. "It was that Night Lord who led us here. I suspect that this most conventional course of action falls exactly within his expectations."

"Which means?"

"Either he wants to use our hands to destroy this place, or he only means to stall us with a false lead—and going by the Inquisitor's words, the former seems more likely."

Thorne did not believe the traitor had lured them here out of any kindness. "Whatever their aim, only by destroying this place can we be certain nothing goes wrong."

"Don't be hasty."

Lin turned over the clues gathered so far—a Cult of Life that was in truth a congregation of Nurgle worshippers, sacrificial rites that had been laced with something extra, and the Night Lord who had guided them here.

"We still don't know what their goal is, but at the very least there are two factions maneuvering around this group of Nurgle worshippers. And one of those forces is not strong—otherwise it wouldn't be considering using our hands to achieve its ends."

He rendered his judgment, then looked toward his retinue.

"If that Night Lord wants this place destroyed, then it means the faction opposing him is sure to come here to activate the ritual. Let's leave a squad here and see whether we can catch one of these factions by the tail."

Led by Sergeant Arlo, a band of Second Legion veterans stayed behind. They lay in wait in this place, patiently expecting the enemy who would come to activate this hidden node. The other Astartes set out once more, their objective still the eye of the circle.

Following Issaga's guidance, they at last arrived at a grim and ruined underground warren.

This warren might once have served some gang for its unspeakable clandestine production, but by now it had been remade into the heart of the sacrificial rite. At a single glance Lin saw the Nurgle worshippers who had already thrown up crude defenses outside the warren.

It seemed someone had used the time of their delay to reveal their objective to the Nurgle worshippers.

It was hard to say whether this news was good or bad.

Earlier they had already slain a great many Nurgle worshippers just to confirm the location of the ritual circle, and Lin had worried whether that might already have satisfied what the sacrificial rite required.

But since the hidden hand behind it all could still dispatch these Nurgle worshippers here, it meant those souls had not yet fed the mastermind full.

Yet by sending the last of these Nurgle worshippers straight at them, perhaps those people were only one final step—the step of the Astartes' breach—away from their goal...

Still, this was simple enough.

All they had to do was cut their way in faster than the enemy could activate the ritual!

At Lin's command, two Hellhound war-vehicles surged toward the warren's entrance like arrows loosed from the string. The Nurgle worshippers guarding the entrance went wide-eyed—they remembered all too well these engines of slaughter that had just butchered them.

"It's the Astartes! The False Emperor's lapdogs are cutting their way in again!"

Though their mouths spoke of offering themselves up for the Great Father, having only just been slaughtered by the Space Marines, they plainly had no courage for a head-on confrontation. These Nurgle worshippers scrambled and crawled back into the warren, and told the Bishop presiding over things there of the arrival of the Emperor's angels.

"No need for alarm." The Bishop waved a hand. Facing his frightened, unsettled followers, he chose a single sentence to bolster their confidence. "Everything proceeds within the Grandfather's plan!"

The words let the Nurgle worshippers recover a measure of their courage. Following the Bishop's arrangements, they concealed themselves in every shadowed corner, ready at any moment to deliver a lethal blow to the False Emperor's lapdogs.

The cavern was not wide and could not accommodate the Leman Russ pushing deep inside. One squad of Astartes and the Leman Russ were left at the entrance, in case others might gain entry to this place. The rest of the Astartes took the more compact, nimble Hellhound war-vehicles as their vanguard and drove deep into the warren.

The profane energy belonging to the Plague Father had congealed into a black mist of pestilence that pervaded the warren. A dozen or so Nurgle worshippers tried to steal close to the Astartes under cover of the black fog, but the reek of putrefaction radiating from their bodies had long since betrayed them.

The Hellhound war-vehicle swung its flame-projector around, and a jet of promethium-driven fire lit this stretch of passage bright as day.

The front rank of Nurgle worshippers was instantly carbonized in the flames!

"Cease flame." Lin directed coolly. "Switch to bolt rounds!"

Those Nurgle worshippers consumed by the fire were the lucky ones. Losing their lives in an instant, they no longer had to endure the torment of the bolt rounds—but the rest were not so fortunate.

A downpour of shells blasted the limbs of the worshippers in the rear into ragged ruin, yet the well-trained Astartes did not take their already-rotted lives. On the contrary, their fire deliberately avoided the worshippers' vitals, only robbing them of the ability to move.

The tenacious life Nurgle had bestowed upon them became at this moment a venomous curse. The Space Marines kicked aside these worshippers who lay on the ground shrieking in agony, and pressed forward, resolute and unwavering.

This was not mercy, but the prevention of the enemy's dark power from growing.

Listening to the screams outside drawing steadily nearer, the Bishop—who had not yet amassed enough Psychic power—anxiously oozed black pus from his ulcers.

That pack of the False Emperor's lapdogs was approaching him with such speed—so why was the might he could draw from the deaths of his worshippers so meager?

The Nurgle worshippers who fought on to the last still struggled in their final throes. At every corner within the warren, several Nurgle worshippers would leap out from the blind angles of vision, trying to slow the Space Marines' advance. They did indeed inflict a certain toll upon the Imperial Fists, yet they could not stop the Imperial Fists from punching clean through all their defensive lines like a single heavy blow.

As the narrow warren abruptly opened wide, the Space Marines who had pushed through to the lowest level at last drew near the heart of the sacrificial rite. At a single glance Lin saw the great door of adamantium at the far end of this hall; through the gaps in the door he could see the ghostly green profane light emanating from within.

It seemed the center of the ritual lay behind this door.

The Space Marines breached to the side of this great door, and Lin tried to interface with it—but the cogitator here had long since gone dark under Nurgle's corruption.

Fortunately, the underhive lacked the means to make a door of pure adamantium. Lin ran a quick calculation and found that this door's strength could well be blown open with meltas.

"Fall back." Lin began mounting explosives on the door.

The Space Marines readily kept a safe distance, forming an arced defensive line to hold off the Nurgle worshippers who were still surging in. But having finished setting the charges, Lin did not withdraw—he only stepped back a few paces, away from the epicenter of the blast, and then activated his own Energy Shield.

"BOOM!!!"

Accompanied by a deafening explosion, scorching molten metal sprayed out like lava. The pestilence and fungus clinging to the surface instantly vaporized into a churning mass of green steam.

Bearing his Energy Shield, Lin took the lead and walked at the very front. Without waiting for the other Astartes to catch up, he bent low and slipped through the blasted-open adamantium door.

The Bishop watched in terror as the red-robed devil advanced upon him step by step through the smoke of the explosion. The two cultists flanking him tried to fire their lasguns, but the feeble beams could not so much as raise a ripple against the Energy Shield.

"Back, lapdog of the False Emperor!" the Bishop warned, fierce in word but hollow at heart. "You may not take one more step toward us!"

Lin said nothing, only kept drawing closer.

"Your Grace the Bishop, this cannot go on!" The two cultists volunteered themselves, baring the mutated, overgrown muscle tissue upon their bodies. "We will go and stop this devil!"

"The Great Father does indeed require your devotion..."

The two worshippers nodded; they had already made themselves ready to meet again in the Garden of Nurgle. But just as they were about to act, the Bishop's cold, sinister hand crept up onto the backs of their necks.

"But I shall make your deaths worth far more!"

Their bodies swiftly withered and shrank, and the once-mutated limbs began to regress. The two worshippers went wide-eyed—they could feel the dense profane power of Nurgle within them being drawn out by the Bishop.

"Your Grace... why?!"

"Because your lives and your souls should be given wholly to the Great Father!"

The life Nurgle had granted was stripped from the two worshippers by the Bishop, and along with it their souls, already poisoned by Chaos, poured into the Bishop's hands.

The souls of the two worshippers stared in horror at the surrounding wraiths, each as full of grievance as themselves. These twisted souls, all likewise Nurgle worshippers, made them realize that the so-called return to the Garden of Nurgle after death was nothing but a laughable lie.

"No, no, no!"

They wanted to deny it, to flee. But the Chaos corruption that had once made them powerful and immortal became at this moment the heaviest shackle upon them. In their hatred they were rendered down into the Bishop's fuel, and the resentment of their dying became the finest catalyst for the power of Nurgle.

The Chaos Psychic Powers upon the Bishop climbed higher and higher. Such surging force let the Bishop reclaim his confidence.

"This is a might you could never comprehend!"

He screeched, leveling the gathered Psychic power at Lin. "You have wrecked my plan to offer this planet to the Great Father, and so you shall bear the wrath of the Great Father! Kneel and grovel before the might of the Grandfather, lowly mortal!"

A green torrent of Psychic power, bearing the force of decay, shot toward Lin!

The immense Psychic power neutralized the Energy Shield upon Lin, and a smile broke across the Bishop's face—he had already begun to imagine how the steel upon Lin would rot away under this power.

But when the Psychic assault ended, what he saw was not a priest slumped to the ground, all vitality corroded away by the Psychic force. On the contrary, Lin simply stood calmly where he was.

The Bishop's eyes went wide.

It was not that there had been no effect at all—the red robes upon Lin that symbolized his standing in the Machine Cult had indeed been obliterated by that power.

But that was all.

Lin knit his brows, brushed the dust from himself, and met the Bishop's gaze, mixed with astonishment and incomprehension.

"Your power—it's too filthy."

Now the roles were reversed. The one who had rebuked the other for failing to understand true might had become the one who truly could not understand. In panic the Bishop gathered his Psychic power anew, but no matter how he attacked, the Psychic force collapsed into nothing the instant it touched Lin.

Lin still advanced toward the Bishop step by step, and the Bishop instinctively retreated pace by pace. Only when a foot found empty air did the Bishop startle to the realization that he had nowhere left to go.

Behind him now lay only the "Pool of Life" offered to the Grandfather.

The Bishop's expression twisted into something dreadful. "Don't you come any closer!"

Lin, of course, would not heed him. The sound of his advancing footsteps was, to the Bishop, like the death knell tolling. Faced with such a demon, the Bishop felt the pus within him all but boil. He turned his head and looked back at the pool of foul water behind him, in which floated all manner of rotting organs and limbs.

Months ago, it was at the bottom of this pit that he had received his "enlightenment." Obeying the divine revelation, he had filled this pool with all kinds of filth, treating this place as a bridge linking the mortal realm to the domain of plague.

After that, he was to have ceaselessly widened the circle of the faithful, then gathered all the power together, dragging this whole planet into the Empyrean, so that the entire world might be embraced in the loving-kindness of Nurgle...

That was how it was supposed to be!

The power now gathered in this "Pool of Life" was not enough to draw this world into the Grandfather's embrace—but if he added himself, he ought to be able to summon a great envoy of Nurgle through this place.

A fierce, cruel look surfaced on the Bishop's face.

"You forced this upon me, lapdog of the False Emperor!"

He hurled himself upward and leapt into the pool.

With him at its center, the whole pool welled up with a dim green glow. The bottom of the pool seemed to open a bottomless maw, ready to devour everything within it, the Bishop included.

"Let the envoy of the True God come and deal with you, soul-devouring monster that you are!"

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