The Staff of Asclepius

Graham McNeill

Isstvan Cantaro runs, though he knows he cannot escape his pursuer. Dzyban has hundreds of cultists genetically enslaved to his will. They are mortals, but they are well armed and surgically altered not to fear the Adeptus Astartes.

Especially a wounded, unarmed one.

He can hear them rampaging through the ship, uttering foul names of things best left nameless. They are little better than beasts or lab experiments that should have been incinerated at inception.

Isstvan presses a palm to the wall of the corridor as a stabbing pain from his groin rips up through his belly and into his chest cavity. His primary heart judders arrhythmically. It is failing, but has not yet switched functionality to his secondary organ.

And yet he is not mortally wounded.

At least, under normal circumstances, he would not consider himself so.

He leans against a bulkhead of bare metal, the absence of any vibrations from the Soju’s engine decks only reinforcing the hopelessness of his situation.

But Isstvan Cantaro is an Apothecary of the Ultramarines and has faced hopelessness before. He has defied it time and time again. He looks down at his bloodied gauntlet, pressed against the ivory breastplate and Ichar IV honour seal. Blood bubbles up through his fingers as he releases the pressure. The entry wound is perfectly round and utterly innocuous.

Decades of ingrained training kick in: battlefield triage, employed on his battle-brothers in the thick of the bloodiest fights – the brutal arithmetic of war that decides who lives and who dies.

Entry wound in left flank, penetrating a cracked junction between plastron and back-plate. Two centimetres in diameter.

Stubber round. Upward trajectory. Fired from ten metres.

Ricochet impact from ossified rib-plate causing it to fragment and tumble downwards through the pelvic cavity.

Femoral artery ruptured.

Without intervention, internal bleeding will almost certainly be fatal.

He could perform the life-saving operation himself, but he doubts his pursuers will allow him the time to administer the soporifics and clarity enhancers required for self-surgery.

Once, the thought of such an ignoble death would have horrified Isstvan, but more than just his life is at stake now. He bears the souls of his fallen brothers. The future of every Chapter depends on the work of its Apothecaries, as they harvest the genetic legacy of each of the Emperor’s favoured sons.

Isstvan’s squad brothers are dead, killed in the opening moments of the attack, when the traitors boarded the Soju. He alone lives, and he bears the gene-seed of seven of his brothers of Macragge. He failed to reach two others before the void claimed them, their legacy of heroism now gone forever.

The loss weighs heavily on him.

He twists a pressure seal on his narthecium gauntlet and a puff of cold air vents as a steel-jacketed vial emerges.

‘Such a small thing,’ he says. ‘Upon which so much depends.’

He kneels and grimaces as pain stabs into his belly. Reaching down, he lifts aside a small panel of the bulkhead and hides the steel vial within. He closes the panel and quickly scratches a symbol upon it: a pair of serpents entwined around a winged staff.

‘Let us see how far you have fallen, surgeon of demise...’

He pulls himself upright once more and presses on, leaving a gleaming trail of blood in his wake. His breathing is laboured and his vision greys at the edges. Oily sweat pours from his skin as the arcane biology within his body drives his healing mechanisms into overdrive.

He knows they will not succeed. The tumbling mass of shattered bullet fragments has wreaked havoc within his flesh. He needs to let his sus-an membrane shut down his extraneous bodily systems, but he bears too great a burden to allow himself the luxury of life.

Isstvan plunges deeper into the labyrinth of the ship’s lower decks. He long ago memorised the layout of the Soju, but it has been modified since he last travelled to Mars with his portion of the Chapter’s genetic tithe.

He is no longer certain of the path.

A vent, hastily scratched with snakes and a winged staff, bears another gene-vial. A smashed lumen strip becomes the final resting place for yet another, also scratched with the same sigil. It pains him to know he will not be the one to accord his brothers their proper rebirth in the body of a newly elevated warrior of the Chapter.

Once, the warriors of the Adeptus Astartes were thought of as immortal, heroes of legend who mocked death and bestrode the galaxy as demigods. The Great Betrayal put the lie to that belief, and their immortality became metaphor, a lineage of heroism passed down through the mystery of the gene-seed.

Those like him are the guardians of that immortality, the custodians of the Chapter’s future. He has failed in his duty, and the weight of that failure is a greater pain than that inflicted on his fading physiology.

He finds hiding places for three more vials before his pursuers catch up to him.

His senses are already diminished. Normally he would have detected the traitors and killed them before they even knew he was close, but his wounds are all but overcoming him.

Isstvan turns a corner and walks into a hail of fire.

Six cultists, swathed in a riot of colours: electric blues, shocking pinks and nauseating purples. They wear hoods, but he can see the scarification and piercings, the tattoos and the toxic discolouration of their flesh.

‘Dzyban!’ they yell as they shoot low-tech stubbers and autopistols. A blizzard of shells caroms from the ceramite of Isstvan’s war-plate. The armour’s spirit, already angered by its previous failure, is proof against their fire, and sends a pulse of combat stimms through his body.

The fatigue and sensory fog enveloping him fades.

His senses sharpen and the pain lifts, but he knows it is temporary. When the effects of the balm fade, he will be worse than before. But maybe it will be enough.

Isstvan charges the men, but they do not flee.

Dzyban’s gene-modification has removed any lingering traces of dread, and they howl as he attacks. They do not fear him, but they are only mortals, and mortals are absurdly easy to slay. Their limbs are barely attached to their bodies, and the trauma of even a light blow will kill them.

Isstvan destroys two with a single punch, reducing their skulls to bowls of pulped brain. A third dies as Isstvan tears out his throat, while the fourth is killed by a backhanded elbow jab that shatters his ribs to fragments.

The other two throw themselves at him, clawing with hooked daggers. Were they not neurologically altered, their actions might be called courageous, but the creatures are little more than drones, attacking only because they have been wired that way.

Both die in under a second, the bone saw of Isstvan’s reductor hollowing them out in an explosion of ripped flesh and blood. Their disembowelled corpses drop like the leavings of a rabid predator.

The passageway is an abattoir, a testament to how mercilessly efficient Space Marines are designed to be in the killing arts.

‘Very good, son of Guilliman,’ says a voice behind him.

Isstvan spins, but the balms are already draining from his hyper-energised physiology. Dizziness swamps him, and he falls as the detonation of a mass-reactive shell blows out his left knee. He backs up against a cold bulkhead – the Soju’s life support is failing – as a towering figure in war-plate even more shocking and vivid than the garb of the cultists strides towards him. The traitor’s armour is a baroque nightmare of rococo fretwork and fractal images of recombinant gene-molecules. Despite his fading vision and failing anatomy, Isstvan can see him with such awful, pin-sharp clarity that it feels like needles are gouging his eyes.

He knows Dzyban’s livery, has seen it in a thousand devotional hate-tracts.

Emperor’s Children.

‘Dzyban,’ he says, the name a curse in a hundred different languages. They have never met face to face before, but Isstvan has heard tales of Dzyban’s biological and genetic horrors across dozens of star systems.

His armour bears no resemblance to its former glory. Once, it was a glorious Phoenician purple, honoured above all others to bear the Emperor’s eagle. Now its iconography has been defaced by the blasphemous symbols of the Ruinous Powers, its colours so abhorrent Isstvan can barely bring himself to look upon them.

He kneels before Isstvan.

‘You know me?’ he says.

Isstvan does not reply, saving his breath and working his jaw to activate his Betcher’s gland. He will spit caustic saliva in his tormentor’s eye with enough force to burn through to his brain.

Dzyban’s hand shoots out and clamps Isstvan’s neck.

He shakes his head like a scolding tutor in a scholam.

‘No, nothing so vile,’ he says, working his thumb over Isstvan’s throat and forcing the acidic saliva down. ‘You and I, we are not of crude mortal matter, are we?’

Dzyban’s eyes sweep over the Apothecary’s armour, reading the ident-tags.

‘Isstvan?’ he says. ‘A name the warriors of the False Emperor regard with infamy.’

‘It reminds me of my duty,’ he snarls in reply.

‘But you know nothing of that world,’ says Dzyban. ‘I was there. I remember the world of the black sands like it was yesterday. It was glorious.’

‘You are a monster,’ growls Isstvan. ‘A base peddler in flesh and blood. I know what you seek, and you will never find it.’

Dzyban grins, exposing serrated shark teeth.

‘Not so,’ says Dzyban. ‘We are the same, you and I, devotees of the body who peel away its secrets to the truth beneath. I once bore the sacred narthecium and reductor, until the Clonelord, blessed be his name, opened my eyes.’

Dzyban’s words are no mere metaphor.

The traitor’s eyes are distended orbs in eye sockets chiselled wide by a madman’s hook, the skin of a stolen face pulled drum-taut by sinew wires drilled into the back of his skull.

The fleshsmith of the Emperor’s Children reaches behind him and produces a handful of steel-jacketed vials. They glint in the dim light of the companionway, each one acid-etched with the Ultima of Macragge.

‘Did you really think you could hide these from me?’

Isstvan sags at the sight of them.

‘I hoped so,’ he says. ‘Even if they never returned to my Chapter, I hoped to keep them from you.’

‘And yet you marked them so clearly,’ replies Dzyban. ‘I may have ascended to another level of mastery in flesh, but I do not forget the old symbols. I saw the caduceus you carved to mark them. The sigil of the healer since time immemorial. Did you hope that your brother Apothecaries might come seeking what you had hidden and see the breadcrumbs you left them?’

Isstvan nods.

‘I am insulted you thought I would not,’ says Dzyban.

‘You and your kind have fallen so far. I knew you would forget the truth.’

‘Truth?’ laughs Dzyban. ‘I could speak for years on the truths I know, truths to which your kind are wilfully blind. But you are dying, and we do not have years. In any case, your scattered fleet is already regrouping.’

The corrupted Apothecary takes one of the vials and unsnaps the seal. A red line runs down its polished side, catching the light of the corridor as Dzyban lifts it to his lips and ingests the culture suspension of preserva tive fluids and flesh matter within.

Isstvan tries to keep his expression neutral as Dzyban opens each of the vials and takes the gene-matter into his body.

‘It has been too long since I have had such fresh material to work with,’ he says. ‘I altered the receptors of my omophagea and neuroglottis to allow the preomnor to sift and filter genetic codes, to extract useful sequences and valuable zygotes from everything that passes my lips.’

Isstvan nods and coughs, leaving a wad of blood on Dzyban’s breastplate. His killer swipes a finger through the frothed expectoration and licks it clean.

He frowns at the taste.

‘What have you done?’ says Dzyban.

‘Killed you...’ says Isstvan, surging forward with the last of his strength to hammer his narthecium into Dzyban’s chest. The injector spike punches through the traitor’s layered power armour and ossified rib-plate to pierce his heart.

The Emperor’s Children warrior grunts, and his hand slams down. The spike snaps, leaving it jammed in his breastplate.

Droplets fall from the broken metal.

‘What...?’ says Dzyban.

‘The component parts of a tyrano-toxin,’ says Isstvan. ‘Harmless in themselves, but lethal – even to us – when combined and activated with the ultra-rapid catalysing agent I just introduced to your bloodstream.’

‘No...’ says Dzyban, retching as his hand goes to his throat. ‘The caduceus... I saw your trail...’

The traitor’s false face is incapable of expression, but Isstvan sees fear in his eyes as his body begins to cannibalise itself.

‘You followed the wrong symbol,’ says Isstvan. ‘The caduceus was never the symbol of healers. It was the Staff of Asclepius that was borne by an ancient healer god of Old Earth, not the caduceus – that was the symbol of commerce, traders, liars and thieves...’

Isstvan leans back against the bulkhead and smiles through the returning pain of his wounds. He feels a vibration run through the metal, the sound of re-engaging engines, of boarding torpedoes and Thunderhawks punching through bombardment-buckled hull plates.

‘The gene-seed... where?’ says Dzyban, pawing at the steel-jacketed gene-vials. The musculature visible beneath his dead skin mask is turning necrotic with hideous rapidity. The toxin is designed to kill tyrannic organisms, but it is doing a brutally thorough job on old Legion flesh.

Dzyban shakes his head. His throat is now too swollen to speak.

‘The blood-legacy of my brothers runs in my veins,’ says Isstvan. ‘I will die before my brothers find me, but all that we were and can be will live on. You will die and be forgotten, your flesh burned to ash, your memory spat upon.’

Dzyban topples onto his side. Vile, purple-flecked foam bubbles from his mouth. He grunts, trying to speak, but dissolving brain matter leaks from his ears and pools beneath the softening bone of his skull.

Isstvan hears bolter fire echoing through the ship.

Mortals dying.

His vision greys and he clenches his teeth as pain fastens its grip on him. His autonomic systems take over conscious control of his physiological functions. They shut down Isstvan’s cognitive processes, diverting all resources to his sus-an membrane.

He lets it take him into darkness, hoping it will be enough.

Death is coming for him, but he does not fear it. Not now.

‘The warrior who acts out of honour cannot fail,’ he says with his last waking breath. ‘His duty is honour itself. Even his death is a reward and can be no failure, for it has come through duty. Seek honour as you act, therefore… and you will know no fear.’

About the Author

Graham McNeill has written more Horus Heresy novels than any other Black Library author! His canon of work includes Vengeful Spirit and his New York Times bestsellers A Thousand Sons and the novella The Reflection Crack’d, which featured in The Primarchs anthology. Graham’s Ultramarines series, featuring Captain Uriel Ventris, is now six novels long, and has close links to his Iron Warriors stories, the novel Storm of Iron being a perennial favourite with Black Library fans. He has also written a Mars trilogy, featuring the Adeptus Mechanicus. For Warhammer, he has written the Time of Legends trilogy The Legend of Sigmar, the second volume of which won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award.

The Lords of Chaos gather their forces...
The Call of Chaos echoes across the Mortal Realms and into the grim darkness of the far future.

Two new serialised supplements, and new fiction for Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Age of Sigmar.
Collect them all and answer the Call of Chaos.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

The Staff of Asclepius © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2015. The Staff of Asclepius, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78572-035-2

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