While Dinah led her Celestians and Acolytes in through the southernmost door, Sister Superior Sela, a Celestian instructor under Mother Rachel's school, was leading her five sisters through the door just north of them. Her five sisters were barely eighteen, promoted by the Canoness to full Sisterhood early because of the crisis on Byzantium. Their Vestments however were the burgundy of the school, rather than the crimson of the regular lay-sisters of the order. The school at the secret abbey used burgundy and cream, rather than the crimson and white, to honor the colors of the Order, but show that they were not yet ready to don them.
Sela burst through the door to find herself in a long hallway. Ahead were antechambers where patrons were walking or milling about. To her left was the Frigidarium, a huge chamber with two large pools filled with cold water for the bathers' pleasure. Patrons of both genders were splashing in the pool, or talking along the ledge, dangling their feet into the water. Passionate kisses were shared, with gentle caresses and teasing tickles this close to the entrances, a room dedicated to sensual foreplay before enjoying the greater delights deeper in the bathhouse.
"It's a raid! Someone shouted, and the room suddenly burst into frenzied activity. Some went for their weapons, while others sought to flee the room or hide in alcoves or under the water.
Sela lifted her stormbolter and let loose with it, spraying death among the sinners. "Cleanse and Purify! For the Emperor!" The new sisters joined her, also armed with the rapid-fire stormbolters. It had been Katherine's insistence they be armed as Dominions with a fire-support role, and they were capable of laying down a withering fusillade of fire on the move. The waters of the pools ran scarlet with blood.
Behind them, Claudia led her cadre of nine Priestesses. Most were armed with short swords and small-bore firearms borrowed from the abbey's school, used to train the younger acolytes not yet ready for the larger-bore shotguns and bolters. Two of the more fanatic priestesses were carrying deadly Eviscerators, chainsaw-like swords that shredded the enemies of the Imperium. Claudia herself waved her bolt pistol and sword, leading them deeper into the bathhouse while the Dominions cleansed the Frigidarium. They hacked through the surprised patrons in the hallway, singing from the Litanies of Faith as they did so.
The crackle of lasguns rang out and two sisters fell to the tile floor. From before them, a half dozen guards in Legionnaire armor and Pilum lasrifles opened fire from a room partially concealed by a row of pillars. "Kill them! Kill the intruders!" One of them shouted, followed by the baying of terrible, unnatural hounds. Three of the Chaos hounds sprang from behind the columns and crashed into the cluster of priestesses. Paulina was knocked to the ground by a massive mastiff. Before she could react, its monstrous jaws closed about her face crushing the bones of her skull in grisly fashion. A second hound grabbed a priestess by the arm and shook its head violently, tearing the limb free from her shoulder in a ghastly spray of blood.
"Stand fast!" Claudia shouted, rushing over to save her screaming comrade, who fell to the tiles clutching her bloody stump. The former prostitute-turned-priestess struck the hound with a vicious backhand blow then shot it twice with the bolt pistol in her left hand. The distinctive whir of the Eviscerators filled the air as two priestesses screamed like things possessed. Blood sprayed from the chainsaw-like blades as one avenged poor Paulina. The second met a hound that was leaping for Claudia, shearing the mutant animal in twain and showering the priestesses in blood and entrails.
To the left was the Tepidarium, where lukewarm baths were provided, though little bathing occurred of course. The room was just another excuse for sexual exploration for the cultists of Slaanesh. Claudia's eyes widened as a hollering crowd charged at them, wielding knives, hatchets, and improvised clubs with murderous intent. From the other direction, the half dozen guards rushed them, bayonets fixed on their rifles…
"Daemonsign!" Dinah shouted in warning as the forces of Hell tore through the fragile fabric of reality. Six Daemonettes fell from the rent in time-space, lascivious grins on their exotically enchanting faces. With unearthly speed and haunting grace they rushed past Dinah and her Celestians, pouncing upon the three Acolytes on the left side of the room. The teenage sisters-in-training froze in terror as the Daemons descended on them, claws sharp as razors and strong as adamant.
One of the poor girls shrieked as her arms were grasped by two of the creatures and pinned against the wall. A third ripped her carapace armor from her body and plunged its claws into the tender flesh of her abdomen. Her wails reached a keening pitch as the Daemons gleefully tore her organs from her body and displayed them to her in sadistic delight.
Flavia's jaw dropped in mind-numbing horror at the savagery before her, unable to move. Before Flavia's eyes, one of the Daemonettes wrapped its long fingers around the neck of her lifelong friend, Julia. With torturous slowness, the creature sank its claws into the tissue and pulled, ripping the girl's throat apart. Her friend's blood splashed across Flavia's face, drenching her in the hot, salty liquid.
When asked later, Flavia would swear she remembered none of what happened next. Shocked awake by the taste of her friend's blood on her lips, she howled like Daemon from Hell herself. Heedless of the mortal peril she was in, she threw herself at the Daemonettes, swinging her shotgun like a club. In her righteous fury, she smashed one of the creatures in the face repeatedly, maniacally. She spun and crushed another's skull with the butt of the gun. Possessed by the Holy Spirit of the Emperor, she tore through the warp-spawned terrors like a force of nature. Mindless with rage, she continued to club at the beast that slew her friend, smashing it into a splattering pulp of blackish ichors. She didn't notice as she was surrounded by Dinah and her Celestians, firing their bolt pistols and hacking the remaining Daemonettes apart with their swords…
Across the room, Sister Karen and the other two Acolytes leaned around pillars, exchanging fire with the cultist guards on the stage. Suddenly, Karen cried out as a laser bolt struck her in the hip, where the armor was thinner in the joint. She spun down to the floor, clutching the wound, her face a grimace of pain. "Sister Karen!" shouted the teenaged sister-in-training, Cornelia. "You filth! I'll send you all to Hell!" The girl came around the pillar, hip-firing her shotgun at the guards. Her friend, Octavia, was inspired by her display of foolhardy courage and joined her, spraying blasts from her flamethrower. They advanced in the face of the concentrated laser fire, ignoring the blasts that ricocheted off their armor. Round after round Cornelia fired, taking cold satisfaction at each guard that fell back in a hail of blood. Octavia filled the stage in the purifying flame of holy promethium, and the guards' dying screams were as the choirs of angels to their ears.
From the far side of the room, cultists began pouring from the back rooms. The smaller, private rooms at the back of the bathhouse were where darkest of pleasures was indulged, hidden away in the voluminous shadows. The thick, stone walls hid the screams of agony from the slaves…and willing subjects…who were molested and tortured in whatever ways the cultists' twisted, deviant desires could conjure. A dozen…two dozen…more piled in from the doorways, firing blackmarket firearms or charging with a variety of melee weapons.
"Get over here!" Dinah called to Octavia and Cornelia. "Form a firing line, quick!" As her Celestians lined up, readying their bolt pistols, the two Acolytes rushed over to join. Dinah spun around and grabbed Flavia, who was still beating the Daemonette's corpse in monomaniac fury. Lifting her by the shoulder pauldrons, Dinah shoved her onto the line. Standing next to the blood and ichors-soaked girl, the veteran leveled her plasma pistol at the oncoming horde of cultists.
"For the Glory of the God-Emperor! Fire!"
Sela hopped over the corner of a pool as she fired another burst from her stormbolter. The last of the cultists in the Frigidarum was blasted to pieces by the explosive rounds. The young sisters followed her around the pool toward the large passageway that led to the Tepidarium. However, enraged cultists came rushing in, howling for the sisters' blood. Already too close for bolters, Sela let hers fall and drew the short falchion at her hip, "Sisters! Blades!"
The men, and even a few crazed women, slammed into the group of six Sororitas. Sela crushed the cheekbone of one with a left hook of an armored gauntlet, then skewered another, ramming her blade up under his ribcage. The other sisters fought furiously against the desperate odds, blades flashing. Though the sisters were heavily armored in their Vestments, the cultists had the weight of numbers, and their berserk fury. One of the freshly promoted sisters was tackled by three cultists and toppled backward into the icy waters of the pool. Even as she sank like a stone, dragging the three cultists with her, she still fought…until the water filled her lungs and the Emperor welcomed her beside his throne…
Claudia ducked under a hatchet swing and rammed her short sword upward between the cultist's legs. He screeched as the prostitute-turned-priestess emasculated him in a shower of blood. As he collapsed to the ground, she stumbled and fell against the archway between the Tepidarium and the antechamber, her chest heaving for breath. The floor was slick with blood, the bodies of a score or more cultists piled around the archway. The cries of pain and moans of despair for the mortally wounded and dying hung in the air like a funeral dirge. Of the ten priestesses who entered the building, only four were still standing, herself included.
She caught movement out of the corner of her eye and raised her bolt pistol. She recognized Sister Sela coming into the Tepidarium with four of her Dominions, teenaged trainees just promoted to full sisterhood. Sela asked, "Clear?"
"This corridor is cleansed," Claudia answered wearily. "Do we circle around to the Ephebeum, or do we push on to the Calidarium?"
"The Calidarium," Sela began moving toward the exit opposite the one she had entered, her Dominions following. "We don't want any cultists there hitting us or Sister Dinah's task force from the flank."
Claudia nodded and lifted off the archway, steeling herself for more battle. Though she and her priestesses had some training in combat since going to the abbey, they didn't have the advanced regimen the Sororitas lived under. They weren't warriors by trade, but they would prove their love for the Emperor with their toil, sweat…and blood. Through the wide hallway they moved quickly, the heavily armored Dominions leading the way with their stormbolters. The corridor became hazy with steam rolling in from the opposite end. Strange, cacophonous sound that the cultists likely called "music" drifted through the haze.
The Calidarium was a huge chamber with a glass domed roof high overhead. In the center of the room was a circular pool of water, heated to an almost painful temperature. Several smaller pools radiated around the far half. Steam vapor was belched forth from pipes emerging from the walls, giving the room a misty, surreal, dream-like quality. Throughout the chamber were fifteen of the cults most hard-core members bearing wicked-looking, barbed blades. They were clothed in little other than networks of scars, tattoos, and grotesque piercings and body modifications. Their hair was riotous with color, spiked up in outlandish styles. Towering over them was a massive figure in lavender armor, similar to that worn by the Space Marines of the Adeptus Astartes, but festooned with spikes, studs, and other protrusions. Stranges runes and unintelligible scrawling covered the face of the armor. The Chaos Marine's face no longer resembled human, the skin seemingly stretched back, the nose barely a bump in the middle of the bizarre face with two slits for breath. His eyes were sharply slanted back toward his temples and his hair was like a plume of deep purple. Rings and studs of brass pierced his lips, cheeks, eyebrows, chin, and ears. He held a large-bore pistol of brass in one hand and a three-headed flail of like metal in the other. "Come, Emperor's Whores! Let us show you the ways of pain…and pleasure!"
One of the cultists stepped forward, with shocking pink hair fanned across his head in a tall Mohawk. The mists swirled around him as though he had his own gravity that had captured the vapors into an orbit. On gnarled legs he stepped forward, his deformed body covered in grotesque patterns like burn scars. His eyes were manically wide and milky white across the entire orbs. He hissed as he opened his mouth, a tongue impossibly long lolling from it, weaving sinuously like a serpent. He lifted a twisted arm and loosed his fell psychic power, tearing the fabric of spacetime and opening a hole into the Warp.
"Kill the Mutant!" Claudia shouted. "Destroy the corruption of Chaos!"
A half dozen Daemonettes fell from the rip in reality, splashing down in the large pool of hot water, singing their siren songs. The Dominions opened fire, ripping a couple of them to pieces with explosive bolts, black ichors splattering. Claudia and the other three priestesses charged forward fearlessly, leaping into the waist-deep pool. An eviscerator struck a Daemonette at the shoulder, the chainsaw-like blade carving completely through its shoulder. Sticky, stinking ichors splashed over the combatants. The priestess wielding the eviscerator was struck in the chest with the gruesome claws of a Daemon, ripping through her ribcage. As she fell in a hail of blood, another priestess avenged her by decapitating the creature that had struck her down. A Daemonette pounced on her, dragging her under the water, threshing and splashing. The water suddenly ran red as the Warp-spawned creature grasped the priestess' chin and tore her jaw completely from her skull. Claudia blasted the Daemon with her bolt pistol, ignoring the splatter of ichors. The claws of another ripped off her right pauldron, grazing her shoulder. She whirled and rammed her sword through her attacker's eye.
The psychic mutant let out a gurgling yell, clenching his fists as his body went taut. He summoned his terrible power and hurled it at the Dominions. "Look out!" Shouted one of the sisters, leaping before Sister Superior Sela and taking the brunt of the psychic assault. She paid for her courage with her life, as the powers of Chaos entropy warped and twisted her body into something wholly unrecognizable as once human. Sela was hurled back by the wave of power, slamming the back of her head into a column and sliding to the floor unconscious.
Claudia climbed out of the pool to stand with the last two standing Dominions as the cultists five-times their number charge in for the kill. Suddenly, the glass ceiling shattered, raining shards of broken glass down onto the howling cultists. Like wrathful angels descending from Heaven, Katherine and the Seraphim fell onto the cultists, bolt pistols chattering. Sister Superior Eve led the attack, a plasma pistol in each hand, immolating the hapless heretics. The Calidarium became a chaotic melee, the elite Sororitas wreaking carnage among the traitors to humanity.
Katherine shot down with the Sword of Saint Magdalena aflame above her head, aiming right for the Chaos Marine. The Aspiring Champion of Slaanesh dodged aside at the last moment. "You were foolish to seek me out, girl. I will enjoy hearing you beg while I take your chastity from you." He whirled the flail over his head and whipped it at the Canoness. She ducked underneath it and stepped inside his guard, sweeping the flaming blade toward his chest. The Chaos Marine was canny, though, twisting away and the blade whistled past harmlessly.
"I seek your master, doomed one," Katherine replied. "Tell me where to find him and I will make your death quick." Recovering into the Einhorn guard, she thrust the blade forward at his face. He batted the sword aside with his left hand, spinning around clockwise, bringing the flail about in a great backhand arc. The spiked heads crashed into Katherine's side, driving her breath from her as her ribs cracked. She stumbled side ways as the Chaos Marine finished his spin, firing the bolt pistol point blank. The rounds thankfully ricocheted off the red-gold armor as Katherine righted herself, her face tightened from the pain.
Sensing her pain, the Aspiring Champion came forward, swinging the flail down obliquely at her shoulder. Though injured, she nimbly sidestepped and slashed the flaming sword completely through the Marine's leg just above the knee. He howled in agony, for though pain was normally pleasure to his ilk, the touch of the blessed blade and holy flames was a torture beyond description to the profane. Unbalanced, he fell over backwards, crashing to the tiles like a falling titan. Before he could react further, Katherine sprang up onto his chest, driving her sword down through him. His wailing shook the walls of the Calidarium as he was transfixed, impaled and nailed to the floor, helpless…the searing torment of the purifying flame in his chest.
"You!" Cackled the mutant psychic, pointing a gnarled finger at Katherine. His psychic power slammed into her mind, causing her to stagger. Her mind was filled with the images, sound, and sensations of people being tortured in horrific ways. Recorded by the mutant in his twisted brain while victims of the cult were tormented, he could replay them in his head for his own, warped amusement. More tragically, he could release them into the minds of others and force the poor soul to relive them.
The Canoness grit her teeth as she felt the crack of the lash, and the slice of the blade across bodies not her own. However, her will was stronger than his, her faith in the Emperor unshakable, her heart and soul tempered by decades of self-sacrifice, pious prayer, and austerity. She drove away the sounds of torture with the memories of her fellow Sisters in choir. She replaced the images of brutal sadism with the likeness of the Emperor on the Golden Throne, his stern eyes filling her with resolve. The spectral agonies faded away and she stood tall, raising her inferno pistol…