by Darius Hinks
Moments before the footsteps reached the chapel, Antros recalled the mantra Dragomir had taught him. ‘We dream, dreaming, dreamed,’ he whispered, grabbing the mirror at his belt.
Instantly the tremors ceased. Peace filled his mind at the merest thought of the Sleepless Mile.
A few moments later, when a blood thrall looked through the doorway, the candles had all blown out and the chapel was in darkness. The blood thrall stared into the rolling shadows, confused. There was a small, stooped figure standing in the darkness – a robed monk wearing a deep hood.
The blood thrall backed away, inexplicably afraid. Then the figure stepped out into the light and the blood thrall realised the shadows had played a trick on him.
‘Lord Antros,’ said the blood thrall, bowing to the Librarian.
Antros smiled, his expression serene, before heading off into the depths of the ship.
About the Author
Darius Hinks’s first novel, Warrior Priest, won the David Gemmell Morningstar award for best newcomer. Since then he has ventured into the Warhammer 40,000 universe with the novels Mephiston: Blood of Sanguinius, Mephiston: Revenant Crusade and the Space Marine Battles novella Sanctus, and has carved a bloody swathe through the Warhammer world with Island of Blood, Sigvald, Razumov’s Tomb and the Orion trilogy
An extract from The Devastation of Baal.
Already the morning gongs were ringing when Uigui the water seller roused himself for another day of thankless toil.
Uigui rose fully clothed, and went to empty his bladder into the home-made purification unit in the corner. Every drop of water was precious on Baal Secundus, whatever the source.
His single-roomed home held three cots, a table, the recyc unit and precious little else. Old transit pallets heaped with threadbare blankets against the cold of desert night were their beds. On the way to the recyc unit, Uigui passed his great burden, his idiot son. The boy had gone away to the Chapter trials full of hope, and come back minus his wits.
‘Get up! Up! Up, you little fool!’ Uigui kicked at his son’s booted feet. The boy thrashed awake and threw up his hands in alarm. A frightened face peeped out between filthy fingers.
‘Get up!’ growled Uigui. ‘Dawn’s coming – can’t you hear the Angel’s gongs?’ He looked out of a window of low-grade alabaster set into the wall of unpainted adobe. Daybreak should have shone pink through the stone. Instead a red darkness lingered outside.
Most mornings were cold but beautiful, the sky flawlessly smooth and tinted a deep rose by the light of the Red Scar. Sometimes, the colours were enough to stop Uigui and make him forget how much he hated his life. ‘Not that you can tell,’ grunted Uigui. ‘Red mist. A thick one too.’
‘D-d-d-d-do we-e-e have to, Da?’ said the boy.
Uigui looked at the boy with clear hatred as he urinated into the recyc funnel. ‘Y-y-yes!’ he spat back, mocking the boy’s stutter. ‘Now, up! I need help to fill the flasks, age be cursed, or I’d turn you over to the Emperor’s mercy and be rid of you!’
Uigui adjusted his filthy clothes and stamped, bow backed and swaying, to the door of gappy wood that separated the single room of his home from the goods yard outside. He clutched at his lower back as he reached for the door handle and rubbed fruitlessly at the pain in his bones, his mood souring further.
‘Be kinder to the boy. He is my daughter’s son,’ croaked the aged voice of the room’s final occupant. The coverings on the third bed shifted, the lump beneath them growing thin arms and knotted hands as a woman even more wasted and hunched than Uigui emerged. ‘You owe him some love for her memory, if you can’t summon some for the boy himself.’
The old woman coughed hard. Phlegm rattled around her throat. Uigui looked at her in disgust. Her face was as deeply lined as the pit of a fruit, as if time had rotted away the pleasant outer flesh, leaving the bitter, craggy interior of her soul exposed for all to see.
‘Where’s your daughter now, you old witch?’ he said. ‘Dead. Dead and gone, leaving me with a fool and a crone for company.’
‘You are cruel,’ said the old woman. Clustered carcinomas blighted her face. She had only a few more months of life in her, but her eyes were bright and shrewd. Uigui hated her eyes most of all. ‘The Emperor will punish you.’
Uigui snarled. ‘We’ll all starve long before the Emperor notices if you and your precious grandson don’t rouse yourselves. We must be at the gates before they open for the day.’
The woman shrank back into her blankets. ‘The Red Mist is here. You will have no customers.’
Uigui rested his hand on the piece of scrap he had fashioned into the door handle. It was worn almost featureless. He had unearthed the metal in his youth from one of the moon’s ruined cities. An unidentifiable artefact of the system’s lost paradisal past, it could once have been a piece of art, it could have been a component from a wondrous machine. It could have been anything. Now it was old, ugly and broken, suitable only for the coarsest work. Just like Uigui.
‘Then we will starve. Get up. We go to work.’ He flipped the door open, letting it bang into the wall to show his anger.
The Red Mist was the worst he’d ever seen: a choking, thick vapour laden with sand particles. Only on a low gravity lunar body like Baal Secundus was such a phenomenon possible, though Uigui didn’t know that. His worldview was necessarily limited. What he saw was a day’s business ruined. Red Mist was iron sharp in smell and texture, a soupy brume that lacerated the nostrils. He coughed and pulled up his scarf to cover his mouth and nose. He had no clip to hold it in place, so he pressed it to the contours of his face with his left hand.
Though his home was modest, his stockyard contained a fortune. Four huge terracotta urns, taller than men and too wide for the embrace of two people to meet around, lined the wall. With such wealth to protect, the courtyard was better built than the house. The walls were of stone, not mud brick, and high, the tops studded with rusty spikes and broken glass. The gate was deliberately small, triple-barred, plated in scavenged metal, upon whose pocked surfaces the marks of the ancients were still visible, when the light was right.
There was no sun. The early day was tainted a bloody murk. The urns were looming shapes, the wall invisible. The yard was little over twenty feet side to side, but the Red Mist was so dense that day Uigui could not see across.
He paused. At the very least the fog would be full of toxins given off by Baal Secundus’ poisoned seas. If the sands in the mist had been picked up over one of the old cities, the rad levels would be high. Uigui supposed he should fetch his rad-ticker from inside. Frankly, he could not motivate himself to retrieve it. He was old. A dose of radiation from the badlands could not shorten his life by much, and if it did, what of it? He was tired of life. It was hard and unforgiving.
Sometimes he thought of ending it all, the misery, the graft, the wearing company of his son and mother-in-law. He had no illusions death would bring a happy afterlife in the Emperor’s care; all he wanted was peace. He could not bring himself to do it. The mindless will of genes forced him to continue living, which he did begrudgingly.
Blinking gritty moisture from his eyes, he headed for the lean-to where he kept his cart. A pair of tall wheels bracketed two cargo beds, one above the other. Three dozen clay flasks were on each level. He fetched the first and took it to the tap attached to the nearest urn. To fill it he had to let his scarf drop. The dust in the mist tickled his nose and he swore. Rusty water ran into the bottle, making him want to piss again. His bladder was another thing that was failing him.
‘Boy! Boy! Get out here and help me!’
The door creaked. Out came the old woman instead, her face veiled in the ridiculous manner of her desert tribe. Uigui should never have married out of town.
‘Where’s that damn boy?’ growled Uigui.
‘Let him breakfast, you old miser, he’ll be out in a moment.’
>
‘He’s a waste of food and water,’ said Uigui. He shut off the tap, pressed the cap closed on the bottle and fetched another flask.
‘It’s not his fault,’ said the old woman.
‘I think we all know that it’s the Angel’s fault,’ said Uigui quietly.
‘Hsst!’ she said. ‘That is heresy. Would you leave him without a father as well as his mind?’
‘He went to their trials a strong youth, and was returned to me a fool. Who else should I blame?’
‘Fate,’ she said. ‘He was not meant to join them, and he is getting better.’
‘He is not,’ said Uigui sourly. He set the full flask into his cart, and fetched a third.
The crone shuffled across the courtyard to the cart, her long skirts disturbing the moist sand of the ground. There she stopped, but she did not help, only watched him, a judgemental phantom in the fog. Uigui gave her a filthy look.
In her gnarled hands a small auto-tarot deck made its tooth-grinding clicks. She pushed the button at the side. The tiles behind its scratched viewing pane clattered into place. She studied the little pictures on them a moment, then pressed the button again. Then again. Uigui fought the urge to strike her, to knock the tarot from her hand and cast her out. The tarot was the instrument of the Emperor. Even he balked at such blasphemy.
‘Help me, then,’ he said. He squinted at the sky. ‘The sun is rising.’ The fog remained as thick as ever, but the light behind it was getting stronger. ‘We are late.’
The old woman hooked her tarot deck to her rope belt, took a flask up and went to the second urn.
‘Today is a day of great portents,’ she said.
‘You say that every day,’ said Uigui.
The woman shrugged. ‘Today it is true.’
‘Nonsense,’ he said, but he was wary of what she said. She had a knack for reading the tarot. He half believed she was a witch. In truth, he was frightened of her. He slammed the latest filled flask into the cart hard, making the others rattle. ‘Where is that boy?’
The boy pushed the cart. At least he was good for that. Uigui and the old woman walked behind. The flasks knocked and clinked in their trays, warning others they were coming. It was a good advertisement, but under the cover of the fog the noise made Uigui nervous. For all that Angel’s Fall was under the direct administration of the Blood Angels, there was always the possibility of robbery on a day of mist.
They met no misfortune as they walked the street from Waterer’s Row towards the Sanguinian Way, the small city’s main street. There were precious few people about. Those figures that appeared suddenly out of the murk were swaddled head to foot, and just as quickly disappeared.
‘Quicker, boy,’ grumbled Uigui. ‘We want a good spot. I want to get there before they are all gone.’
They turned onto the Sanguinian Way. At its far end was the Place of Choosing, where the giant statue of the Great Angel spread his arms and wings to face the eastern sky. Immense though Sanguinius’ effigy was, the fog obscured it totally. With the majestic statue hidden, the cramped, low buildings that made up Angel’s Fall seemed ruder than ever. It did not look like a holy city. The fog forced attention onto its inadequacies. Even the Sanguinian Way was meanly proportioned, and crooked. Without Sanguinius, Angel’s Fall could have been any town on any backward, arid world in the galaxy.
Gongs boomed from unseen towers, signifying the start of the Peaceday markets. Only a handful of stalls had been set up at the roadside, and foot traffic on the way was low. Uigui reckoned visitors to Angel’s Fall would be fewer than usual, though there were always some. The Red Mist discouraged travel. Not only was it toxic, but Baal’s violent wildlife hunted under its cover. He cursed his luck. Water was expensive to both the buyer and the seller. The price he’d get for his stock barely covered the cost, and he owed a lot of money to Anton the reguliser. Anton took prompt payment of debts very seriously. Uigui rubbed at the stump of his left little finger, a reminder of the last time he’d been late with a payment. Anton had been nothing but apologetic; he had said he had no choice.
Uigui thought they would have to stay out late, selling to people exiting the city to travel in the cool of the night. Assuming the mist lifts today at all, he fretted. Such a fog was rare. Baal Secundus’ principal weathers were wind and dust storms, but there was not a breath of a breeze today.
‘This weather is unnatural,’ he said.
‘A day of portents,’ said his mother-in-law in satisfaction.
‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘It’s just a day. Boy. Here.’ Uigui pointed out a patch of ground in the lee of the Temple of the Emperor. The temple occupied a whole block by itself, and another of Angel’s Fall’s major streets intersected the Sanguinian Way there.
‘This will do.’ The gongs continued to ring. ‘Why all this racket?’ Uigui said.
‘Happenings. Baalfora has much in store for us today,’ said the old woman, using the local name for Baal Secundus. She settled herself down. Her joints grumbled, and she grumbled back at them, forcing her old legs to cross. Upon skirts held taut between her knees she set her tarot deck and began repetitively clicking at the workings. Uigui bared his teeth at her. He took out his irritation on the boy.
‘Come on, boy, set out the table! Where are the cups? By the Emperor, we’d all die if you were in charge here!’
‘S-s-s-orry, father,’ said the boy.
‘Don’t call me that,’ he said. ‘My son is dead. Stolen by angels. There is no one to inherit my business once I am gone. Do not presume your place.’
The boy bowed his head to hide his tears, showing the ugly scar running across the top of his head. Uigui hated the sight of that most of all. He was sure had his boy not fallen he would be up there on Baal as a warrior of the Emperor. He stared at it as the boy set up the little table that folded out from the side of the cart and put out a set of small bronze cups. Something like grief hurt him. He responded with anger.
‘Quicker!’ he snapped.
The gongs were still booming long after they should have stopped. He squinted into the dim morning. There was another sound, a distant rumbling, under the clamour of the gongs.
‘What is that?’ he whispered.
‘V-v-void ships?’ ventured the boy.
‘Silence!’ snapped Uigui. But even as his anger flew out of his mouth, he thought the boy might be right. Angel’s Fall was no stranger to the ships of the Angels. There were offworlders too, who came to pay their respects to the place where Sanguinius, purest of the Emperor’s progeny, was discovered. But rarely did they arrive in such numbers that the sound of their descent was so constant.
Uigui heard the crunch of heavy feet on sand coming down the way. He swore at himself. Angels. They would have no use for his water.
‘Bow! Bow!’ he hissed. He dropped his head, and forced his idiot son to kneel.
A huge armoured figure emerged from the murk. Armour black, his helm cast in the shape of a skull. A Space Marine priest, death incarnate. Uigui trembled. He dropped to his knees in fright, waiting for the figure to pass by.
He did not. The footsteps stopped by the little cart. Uigui felt the Angel’s regard upon him. His bladder twinged yet again.
‘Be at peace, blessed son of Baal Secundus,’ said the warrior. His voice was inhumanly deep and thickly accented.
Uigui looked up. The grimacing skull glared down at him. Breathing hoses were clamped between its stylised teeth, and eye-lenses of glowing green set below the angry brow. The armour hissed and whined in response to microshifts in the Space Marine’s posture, making Uigui more afraid.
The warrior looked down both streets of the crossroads.
‘The great square. Where is it?’
Though made hollow and booming by its projection machinery, the warrior’s voice was kindly. Still Uigui could not see past the terrible visage glowering at him.
He stared dumbly back.
‘Waterseller, I mean you no harm,’ said the Angel. ‘I come to pay my respects to my lord. Where is his statue?’
Uigui trembled and flung up his arm. He intended to say ‘That way, my lord!’ A strangled mewl came out of his mouth instead.
‘My thanks, and my blessings,’ said the Chaplain. ‘The Emperor keep you.’
He glanced up at the great temple, then strode away.
‘W-w-why does he not know?’ said the boy stupidly.
‘I do not know,’ said Uigui. Still upon his knees he gazed fearfully at the departing giant.
‘M-m-m-more!’ said the boy, and shrank back behind the cart.
Uigui followed his son’s wavering finger. More Space Marines, dozens of them. Uigui had never seen so many at one time and his body shook in terror. They walked past, armour dull in the foggy daylight. Uigui could see clearly enough to know they were not Blood Angels. Their armour was adorned in a similar manner to that of the masters of Baal. The heavy plates were beautifully formed, covered in scrollwork and delicate embellishments, and decked with bloodstone drips cased in gold, but the red of their armour was an unfamiliar hue, their helms and trim were white, and their markings were strange.
Uigui watched, amazed, as the column of warriors moved by in solemn silence, voiceless but for the growls and hum of their armour. It was not unusual to see other angels claiming descent from the Great Angel in Angel’s Fall, but only in ones or twos. When a second group in yet different colours marched by, these armoured half in black and half in bloody red, Uigui’s mouth fell open. The gongs boomed. Outside the wall, the roaring of braking jets grew louder.
‘Th-th-there’s hundreds of them!’ stuttered the boy.
For a moment, Uigui forgot his anger, and put his arm around his broken son.
‘W-w-w-why so many?’ the boy said.