[Imperial Guard 01.2] - Better the Devil Read online

  A WARHAMMER 40,000 STORY

  BETTER THE DEVIL

  Imperial Guard - 01.2

  Steve Lyons

  (An Undead Scan v1.5)

  When Lorenzo came round…

  He was blindfolded, bound and sinking. He could feel the burn of the Catachan sun on one side of his face, the sting of its mud on the other, and the creepers that tied his hands and feet were contracting as they dried, pulling him into an unnatural hunch, his spine already aching with the increasing pressure.

  And that wasn’t the worst of it.

  The smell was like rotten fruit and vinegar, sickly and acidic at the same time. It tripped some primal alarm in Lorenzo’s head, made his every nerve scream out.

  He shifted, strained, tried to work out how much give he had. Not much, he concluded. Dry shoots cracked beneath his weight and released a fresh vinegar wave. Lorenzo rarely questioned his own senses, but he did so now. He asked himself if he could be hallucinating, if the drugs he’d been force-fed could be fuelling his paranoia, making him imagine his worst fear—because otherwise, if the smell was indeed real, then why wasn’t he dead yet?

  He wasn’t dead. That was all he needed to know. At least, so his upbringing told him. It was only a matter of time, though, before that changed. He’d be snapped in two; most likely living out his final minutes a sightless, helpless cripple until the mud claimed him. An hour from now, there’d be no trace he had ever been here.

  Lorenzo focused on that immediate test, tried to think past the fear. It was a test not so much of skill, he realised, but of resolve. His bonds had been tied well, as he would have expected; they entangled his body beyond all hope of escape—unless he could change his body’s shape.

  The fear worked for him now, the need to be free blotting out all other considerations. Lorenzo wasted no time on preparing himself, in anticipation of what was to come. He worked his left shoulder out of its socket, and the lancing pain brought tears to his eyes, almost made him black out, but he clenched his teeth and he breathed through it. The creepers slackened, almost imperceptibly but enough for his needs. He squirmed his way free of them, as the bones in his shoulder ground and crunched and popped. And he snatched the blindfold from his face—to find, to his gut-wrenching horror, that the worst had indeed happened.

  Lorenzo reached for his knife, his trusty Catachan fang, and his palm moulded itself to the handle as if it were a part of him, an extra limb. In his own mind, it was. He had carved the blade himself when he was seven, spent the intervening ten years honing it to perfection. It only occurred to him now, with hindsight, that the men who had drugged him, brought him here, might have taken it from him—but no, they would never have dared break that bond.

  He hacked at the remaining dry creepers, haste rendering his strokes imprecise, costing him time despite his best efforts to find focus. He freed his feet, at last, and hauled himself out of the sucking mud into an unsteady standing position. His lungs were heaving, partly from exertion, partly from panic at the thought of where he was, of what they had done to him: dumped him in a den.

  Half-chewed reeds clung to his clothes and his skin, coating him in their stink. His right foot had been resting against a knee-high pile of droppings, which had burnt through the sole of his boot—and he’d just stepped back onto a skull of some kind, which caved in beneath his heel. Many more bones festooned the area, most of them picked clean. The majority of them came from small jungle creatures but more than a few were distinctly human. The fact that the den was empty came as small comfort. Lorenzo’s eyes searched the trees for a spark of intelligence, a shuffle of movement, any sign of its occupant’s return. Why wasn’t he dead?

  Don’t question it, he told himself. Your one chance now is to run, to pray you are faster than it is, because it is certainly stronger, more cunning, more vicious, than you are. But which way? Can’t see it, can’t sense it. Where is it waiting?

  He couldn’t believe this was happening, couldn’t believe he had been left like this, at the mercy of a monster. The most deadly of predators on this most deadly of worlds.

  Lorenzo had seen a Catachan Devil laid low only once, and it had taken four men, each older and far more experienced than he was, to achieve that feat.

  He didn’t stop to think. He ran, heedless of the many and varied perils about him, the traps they set for the unwary. He ran, trusting to good fortune to keep him safe although good fortune was rare in the jungle. He ran, not pausing to reset his shoulder, letting his left arm hang numb by his side. And he knew that running would do him no good, because it was already too late.

  Lorenzo had the Devil’s scent on him now—and no distance would be far enough to keep it from hunting him down.

  He had to go back.

  He couldn’t go back.

  He had no choice. He had no idea where he was. He had to get back to the Tower, back the way he had come—back the way he had been brought, rather. He had to follow his captors’ tracks, the ones they must have left after they had abandoned him. He had to go back to the den.

  Lorenzo felt sick at the thought, and his nerves were screaming again.

  He couldn’t stay here much longer. The surrounding vegetation, dark, dense and twisted, had begun to react to a human presence, to orient itself towards him. It reached out with its branches and its shoots, and some plants had even begun to shuffle in his direction. The movement was slight, too slight to see yet, but Lorenzo could sense it. He could also hear the drone of an insect swarm, and something even closer: a slither, a rustle, a hiss.

  The snake, rearing up on its tail, was almost six paces tall, its scaled armour a jet black in hue, a spiky hood flaring about its triangular head as its mouth gaped open. A flying swamp mamba. It must have sensed Lorenzo’s preoccupation and used it to get close, hoping for an easy kill—but he’d seen it now, faced it with his blade in hand, and it was suddenly less sure of itself. The mamba swayed slightly, fixing him with its poisonous yellow eyes as if it thought it could hypnotise him. He knew, if he blinked, it would be on him, at his throat. But maybe it could help him too.

  Lorenzo shifted his stance a fraction, to suggest tiredness. The snake fell for his feint, and its head stabbed towards him. Its fangs were the length of his hands, drooling clear venom. He sidestepped the lunge and drove his blade toward the exposed back of its head, but pain from his shoulder shot through him, threw his balance, and he did no more than dislodge a few scales.

  Living up to its name, the flying mamba shot itself into the air with a casual tail flick, and Lorenzo gasped as its coils whipped around him. His dead left arm was pinned, but he managed to keep the right free and lashed out once more, half-blindly. The snake’s head had been coming for his throat again, and he cut a deep gash across its left eye. The head withdrew, but the body increased the pressure about his ribs, attempting to crush him into submission.

  Lorenzo’s fang went back to work, sawing at the snake’s armour until green, viscous blood welled onto his hand. His chest felt as if it would crack, each breath a feat of heroism, and he didn’t know which could endure the longer, he or his foe—but the mamba lost its nerve first, its head darting back into striking range in a last, desperate attempt to claim victory. Lorenzo drove his knife between its fangs, up through the roof of its mouth into its tiny brain, and its coils fell limp.

  An unexpected weakness rushed to his legs, and he almost fell atop the snake but willed himself to remain upright. Brief as his skirmish had been, it would have attracted attention. The eyes of a dozen creatures, some invisible to him, some lurking on the periphery of his senses, were upon him, looking for a sign that he had bee
n weakened, that now was a good time to chance their own luck against him.

  The snake’s blood still flowed freely, and Lorenzo bathed his hands in it, rubbed his clothes in it and smeared it across his face before it dried up. The stench of it made him gag, but it masked the far more dangerous smell of the den—at least to Lorenzo’s nose. It was unlikely that the keener senses of a Catachan Devil would be fooled—but they might at least be momentarily confused, and that was something.

  He approached the den from downwind, hoping this too might give him some small advantage. His shoulder still throbbed with the ghost of the agony he’d felt as he had braced himself against a gnarled tree and pushed it back into place. Lorenzo trod as lightly as he could and kept his breathing shallow, almost silent, although it was still deafening to his ears.

  Reaching a suitable vantage point, he teased aside thin, whip-like branches and peered through the gap thus created. He allowed himself a faint sigh of relief as he saw everything as he’d left it, the den trampled and broken from his intrusion but nobody and nothing else present. Maybe, he thought, its owner was dead. Maybe his captors had found the den empty and decided to use it to play a joke on him. It was unlikely, though. Not much could keep a Devil from returning to its lair to die—and “Barracuda” Creek hadn’t seemed like a man with a sense of humour.

  Lorenzo circled the den, keeping a wide berth to get no more of its scent on him than he already had. The first trail leading from it, he uncovered in short order—but his instincts told him it was too obvious, and he carried on searching.

  The second trail was better hidden, every care taken not to disturb the undergrowth, but there were signs for the trained eye; a broken twig here, a branch pushed aside there, an unnatural smoothness to the ground where footprints had been brushed out. It was this trail, then, that he followed. And he knew he had made the right decision when, some twenty minutes later, he came upon a body.

  It was lying facedown in a patch of weeds; a young man, like him, squat and powerfully muscled even by their people’s standards. Lorenzo couldn’t see what had killed him at first—he couldn’t get too close until he had ruled out infection; some jungle-borne diseases killed at a dozen paces—but then he saw the puncture wound between the man’s shoulder blades, and his blood chilled.

  The Devil must have crept up on him, driven the poisonous barb of its tail into its victim’s back before he could turn. And it could only have happened a few hours ago, because the body was intact, not yet stripped to its skeleton by the jungle’s plants and its smaller scavengers.

  The man was holding something: an improvised spear with a sharpened stone head. It was crude, evidently assembled in a hurry. Crouching by his side now, Lorenzo prised the weapon from his cold, stiff fingers. He had no compunction at all about so doing: the spear was no use to this fallen soldier anymore, but it might save Lorenzo’s life. The dead man’s fang, on the other hand, he took as a mark of respect, hoping that one day he could return it to his clan for burial. He tucked the blade into his boot and returned to the trail.

  He thought he knew now what Creek had done, had had his men hogtie the Catachan Devil, at insane risk to their own lives, and haul it away from here. A few kilometres would have been far enough, then they would have set the monster loose and run for it. Denied an immediate chance of revenge, the Devil’s first thought would have been to find its way back home—where by now it must have found a vandalised den and the culprit’s inviting scent trail waiting for it.

  It was behind him. Lorenzo didn’t know how far behind, but it was there. A short head start was all he had been given. A chance of survival, but a slim one.

  He couldn’t fight it. He couldn’t imagine doing such a thing—and if it came to it, he would certainly need more weapons than he had to even try. Nor could he outpace it, not while he was following in his tormentors’ too-faint footprints.

  All he could do was wait for it. Wait for the Devil, watch for it in every shadow, listen for it in every sound. Wait for the Devil, and hope to be better prepared for its attack than his predecessor had been… The last man to take Creek’s test, to travel this route… The man whose pain-contorted corpse would remain a vivid image in the space behind Lorenzo’s eyelids for some time to come.

  It was almost a relief when the waiting ended and terror struck.

  Lorenzo had been right about his stalker: it was stealthy. Had he not known it was coming, he might have blamed the rustling sound behind him on a creature far smaller than it was, might have missed the faint but familiar scent on the air. Even with those warnings, he barely had time to turn, to drop into a defensive crouch, to raise his fang, as the Devil came at him.

  It was an old one, too. A big one. Big and nasty. At least twenty pairs of legs. It thrust its maw into Lorenzo’s face, its mandibles click-clacking, acidic drool spraying his cheeks, and looking down its throat was like staring into an infernal pit. The Devil’s front claws were gigantic, snapping at him, attempting to gain purchase. Lorenzo pushed his newly-acquired spear into one of them, jamming it open, and he braced an arm across the creature’s thorax, using his leverage to force the head up, away from him. At the same time, he fended off the second claw with his fang, but its blade glanced off an armoured carapace and the Devil succeeded in gouging a chunk of flesh from his right calf, eliciting a hoarse yell from him. It was too strong for Lorenzo, too heavy, bearing him to the ground, and he still had its tail to worry about.

  He saw its shadow over him, felt the downdraught of its approach, and he knew he had to time his next move perfectly. He shifted his weight, ducked, rolled beneath the Devil’s front section, even as its tail smacked into the ground where he had just been and buried itself. The Devil was off-balance, but not for long. Lorenzo made a run for it, impulsively lashing out at a blood-wasp hive so that its occupants swarmed out into his attacker’s path. They were no threat to it, not like they would have been to him, but Lorenzo prayed they might blind it for a second before they realised what they’d taken on and abandoned their home forever.

  He didn’t dare look back to check, knew he couldn’t spare the instant it would take him to do so. The Devil was probably reaching for him, bringing up its tail to strike him down, and like its last victim he wouldn’t even see it coming.

  But the killing blow never came, and Lorenzo was clear, he could no longer sense his bulkier, slower pursuer at his heels. He had escaped it. For now.

  The whole encounter had taken less than ten seconds from start to finish. Lorenzo was astonished, and proud of himself, that he had lasted so long.

  He maintained a punishing pace for the next few hours, though he didn’t know where he was going: the trail was well and truly lost now, and Lorenzo didn’t dare go back to search for it again because he knew what would be waiting for him. Instead he looked for higher ground where he could, and hoped to come across a hilltop or cliff edge from which he could survey the surrounding terrain.

  He had been heading in roughly the same direction—north-north-west—since he’d left the den, but he wouldn’t have put it past Creek and his men to have led him this far only to double back on themselves.

  For the time being, however, orientation was the least of his problems.

  It would take a while for the Devil to catch up to him, but catch up it certainly would. Its breed was nothing if not tenacious—and though, when Lorenzo was at his best, the Devil couldn’t match him for speed, he couldn’t be at his best all the time. Already, his wounded leg was beginning to tell, to slow him down, and he was tiring. He tried not to think about how long it had been since he had last slept. Slept properly, that was, because the drug-induced coma of the morning had hardly recharged him.

  When he felt safe to do so, he slowed down and started to look for plants from which he could tease water, leaves with antiseptic properties that could dress his wound. Neither of these tasks were simple: on Catachan, the flora was more likely to kill than to cure, and Lorenzo needed all his concentration,
couldn’t afford the slightest slip, if he was to sift what little good there was from the downright fatal.

  Lying on his stomach, he reached between the branches of a brainleaf for edible berries, knowing that the slightest breath of air would alert the plant to his presence; cause it to fire its tendrils into him. If that happened, he would no longer be Lorenzo, no longer be a man at all, but the brainleaf’s unthinking meat puppet. This ought to have been a two-man job: one to obtain the berries while the other kept watch over him. Were the Catachan Devil to appear now—if so much as a heretic ant were to happen by, for that matter—it would be the end of him.

  The operation was successful however—moderately refreshed, his leg newly bandaged with strips of his own shirt, Lorenzo moved on.

  Nightfall changed the character of the jungle, while making it no less dangerous. The creatures of the daytime retired, and the air was filled with the chirruping and the hissing of their nocturnal counterparts. The thick canopy kept in much of the sweltering heat of the day, but the shadows grew deeper and more numerous so that lurking threats were far harder to detect. Some plants curled up their blossoms and slept, while others awoke to dance in the darkness.

  Lorenzo had been following the rushing sound of a river, and he came to its bank now. The water was clear, glistening, inviting, and his dry throat tensed in anticipation of relief—but the algae on its surface was of a toxic type, and one known to spawn a flesh-eating virus. There would be no relief here.

  He shinned up a tall tree, careful not to damage its bark and unleash the poison spores beneath it. From up here he could see a small patch of sky and identify its stars, thankful that the night wasn’t overcast, that acidic clouds weren’t gathering. Lorenzo knew now, at last, where on Catachan he was, and where he had to go—and fortunately, the blind wanderings of the evening had not brought him too far off course. He could still reach the Ashmadia Tower before he dropped, he figured. If he could stay alive that long.