OF ALL THE nightmarish visions of death and bloodshed that plagued Mesira Bardhyl, it was the Mourner she feared the most. She never saw his face, she just heard his sobs, but the depths of agony and suffering encapsulated in those sounds was beyond measure.
It seemed impossible that anyone could know such pain and sorrow and live. Yet the mourner's dark outline, stark against the white, ceramic tiles of the empty room, was clearly that of a living person.
Tears coursed down her cheeks at the sight of the Mourner, a measure of his pain passing to her as her treacherous feet carried her towards the iron-framed bed he sat on, the only piece of furniture in this otherwise featureless room.
She knew she was dreaming, but that knowledge did nothing to lessen her terror.
Despite the khat leaves Mesira had mixed with the half bottle of raquir she'd downed before reluctantly climbing into bed, the nightmare of the Mourner had still found her.
Step by step, she moved closer to the Mourner, wracking sobs of anguish causing his shoulders to shake violently. As Mesira drew closer, she felt his grief change to anger, and though she tried to will her hand not to reach out, it lifted of its own accord.
As she touched the Mourner's shoulder, the stink of burned meat filled her senses and images danced behind her eyes: burning buildings, screaming people and a firestorm so intense it billowed and seethed like a living thing.
'No,' she whispered. 'Not again.'
The Mourner ceased his weeping, as though only now aware of her.
Without warning, flames suddenly bloomed into life across his body, engulfing his head and limbs with incandescent brightness.
'You were there,' said the Mourner, apparently oblivious to the fire that consumed him.
'No, I...' cried Mesira, falling back from the killing heat.
'You were there,' repeated the Mourner, his voice accusing as the flames slithered over him. In moments, his body was scorched black and the smell of his seared flesh made her gag.
'The dead are watching and you will all be punished.'
'Please,' begged Mesira. 'Why me?'
'You were there,' said the Mourner, as if that explained everything. 'You were there.'
'I didn't do anything. It wasn't me,' wept Mesira.
'You were there.'
'I-'
'You were there,' said the Mourner, turning towards her, 'and you will pay. You will all pay.'
MESIRA BARDHYL HURLED herself from her bed, screaming in terror and clawing at the sheets as she fought to free herself from them. She thrashed on the floor of the room, kicking and shrieking like a madwoman. Weeping, she curled into the foetal position, her palms pressed against the side of her head and her bitten-down fingernails clawing at her scalp.
She bit the flesh of her palm to stifle her screams, rocking back and forth on the floor.
Her eyes were closed tightly and it took an effort of will to open them.
The room was dimly lit, a weak glow from the haphazardly arranged lumen globes on the street outside filtering through the thin curtains twitching at the window. A stainless steel sink and toilet unit gurgled behind a privacy screen and stacks of papers fluttered on the table in the centre of the room.
Mesira remained on the floor until her breathing returned to normal and her heart rate slowed, before picking herself up using the edge of the bed to steady her shaking legs. Her whole body was trembling and she bent to lift the fallen sheet and wrap it around her skinny, wasted frame.
The vision was still fresh in her mind and she wiped away tears as she made her way to the table and poured a tall glass of raquir. Loose papers lay strewn across the table, a half finished report for Verena Kain detailing - empathic readings she'd made at a meeting between Governor Barbaden and community leaders. It was a breach of security to have them lying out like this, but she had left the Imperial palace early that day, unwilling to spend any more time in Barbaden's presence than she had to.
The sounds of the city drifted in through her window: the clatter of ramshackle ground cars, the raucous sound of drunks pouring from the bars and the occasional violent oath. She could sense the feelings and emotions drifting in the air behind the sounds, but shut them out, blunting her powers with another shot of raquir.
She poured another, knowing she would get no more sleep tonight and unwilling to close her eyes again after the horrors the Mourner had shown her.
In her dream he had turned his face towards her, his flesh dripping from his blackened skull as the heat of the flames roared hotter and brighter. She had wanted to look away. She had known with utter certainty that to see his face would drive her to madness, but her head was fixed in place and when she saw his eyes, cold and white like the heart of a dead star, she had seen horrors that went beyond even those of the Killing Ground.
Sloshing, corpse-filled tenders shuddered and bumped behind a heaving daemon engine that spurted blood and travelled on tracks of bone. Forests of dead children were impaled on jangling meat hooks. Entire planets were laid waste before a tide of screaming daemons, and galaxies were extinguished by the power that poured into this world from the insane geometry of the monstrous engine.
Dead souls writhed in the depths of its awful, daemonic structure and she could feel the immense warp energy surrounding it, a flood of power saturating the air and earth and water of Salinas with its presence. Whatever this horrifying machine was, it had seen unnumbered slaughters and brought with it the dread memories of every drop of blood spilled in its vile existence.
She had seen them all, every soul torn from flesh, every violation visited upon an innocent and every vile, unimaginable horror wreaked upon the living.
As clearly as if she had stood watching it, she saw the mighty daemon engine appear before the temple in the main square of Khaturian, its bronze, eagle-winged pediment sagging where the bombs had loosened it from the stonework: the building the Screaming Eagles had attacked with melta guns and then stormed with guns blazing and blades chopping.
Mesira closed her eyes, trying to block the memories of screams, the echoing bark of gunfire and the horrifying, unending whoosh of flamers. She moved from the table to stand at the window, looking over the cobbled streets of Barbadus and watching the few people that dared pass beneath her window. They walked by without looking up, for it was well known that Barbaden's pet psyker lived here, and no one wanted to attract her evil eye.
Anger touched her and she allowed her ability to reach out, feeling the ghost touch of the minds that filled the squalid tenements and ad hoc dwellings formed in the remains of a regiment's worth of vehicles that the Achaman Falcatas had abandoned to the elements.
Barbadus was a city built upon the bones of an Imperial Guard regiment's cast-offs.
With the conclusion of the campaign to quell the rebellious system, the planet Salinas had been awarded to the Falcatas, and the regiment had been permitted to keep the bulk of its armoured vehicles, for there had not been the means to transport most of them off world. However, without sufficient enginseers or tech-priests, most had swiftly fallen into disrepair and only a handful of companies were able to maintain their tanks and transports in working order.
Those that could not simply abandoned them, and it did not take long for the enterprising citizens of Barbadus to claim them. Families lived in and around these vehicles, making homes in what had once been instruments of war.
A Leman Russ battle tank could house a family of five once any unnecessary kit had been hollowed out, a Chimera even more. Many other vehicles had been cannibalised for parts and sheets of metal, and entire districts of Barbadus were constructed from the remains of those vehicles that had rusted solid, broken down or otherwise failed.
Her senses were filled with the simmering resentment that bubbled just below the surface of virtually every inhabitant of the city, and it was a resentment Mesira could well understand, for the invasion of the Achaman Falcatas had been brutal and bloody.
The new governor had even renam
ed their capital city after himself.
No wonder they hate us, she thought. I hate us too.
Though her empathic ability was normally confined to reading humans, Mesira could feel something very different tonight, as though she could sense the planet's deep anger. The air had a charged quality, a ripened sense of importance and impending confluence that she had not felt before and which frightened her a great deal.
Something profound had changed on Salinas, but the sense of it eluded her.
Were the images she had seen in the eyes of the Mourner real or allegories?
She was not skilled in interpreting visions and wondered if Governor Barbaden's astropathic diviners might know what to make of what she had seen.
No sooner had the thought of the Falcata's former colonel entered her mind than she felt a cold breath sigh across the back of her neck.
She shivered and spun around, her hand reaching up to her scalp.
A small figure of light stood in the far corner of the room, a young girl with her hands outstretched.
You were there.
THOUGH HE CRAVED rest, Uriel was unable to sleep, the persistent sense that they were not alone still lingering at the back of his mind. After eating their fill of meat, both he and Pasanius had explored the empty chambers of the church, a crumbling vestry, some abandoned supply rooms and a number of private chapels in the transepts.
They had found nothing untoward and had then made a patrol circuit of the exterior of the church, climbing tumbled masonry and crossing angled slabs of broken roadway as they scouted the area around the temple. With only the two of them, it was impossible to completely secure such a large area, but they had found nothing to make either of them think there was anything living in the city besides themselves.
Pasanius slept sitting upright with his back against the wall, his soft snores making Uriel smile as the cares his friend had carried since Pavonis seemed to melt from his face. Though he appeared to be deeply asleep, Uriel knew that Pasanius could switch from rest to full wakefulness in a second.
The Unfleshed huddled in a circle of bodies, curled together like pack animals with the Lord of the Unfleshed at their centre. Their breathing was a cacophony of rasping, hacking gurgles and whistles through the gristly slits that were their mouths and noses.
Knowing that sleep would not come, Uriel got to his feet and wandered down the aisle of the church, pausing every now and then to examine one of the fluttering prayer papers or pictures stuck to the wall. Smiling faces stared back at him, men and women, the old and the young.
What had happened to these people and who had placed the memorials?
A number of the papers were scrawled with a date, and though the format of it was unknown to Uriel, it was clear that each one was the same. Whatever calamity had befallen these people had come upon them in one fell swoop.
Uriel moved down the aisle, unable to shake the feeling that he was, if not in the presence of another, at least being observed by someone or something. He kept a tight grip on the hilt of his sword, taking reassurance from the feel of the golden hilt and the legacy of heroism it represented. Captain Idaeus had forged the sword before the Corinthian campaign and had borne it to glory for many years before passing it to Uriel on Thracia as he went to his death. Uriel had vowed to do the sword and memory of his former captain honour, and the weight of that promise had kept Uriel true to his course through the long months of suffering and hardship.
Uriel emerged from the temple, his eyes quickly adjusting to the ambient light and enhancing it to the point where he could see as clearly as he would in daylight.
Where before the city had possessed a melancholy, abandoned feel, it now seemed altogether threatening, as though some buried resentment was allowed to roam freely in the darkness. Uriel's every sense told him that he was alone, but some indefinable instinct told him that there was more to this city than met the eye.
Dust scampered around the square as though disturbed by invisible footsteps and the wind moaned through shattered window frames and open doorways. Moonlight glinted on shards of glass and metal. Somewhere, a skittering of pebbles sounded like laughter.
Tapping his fingers on the golden pommel of his sword, Uriel set off at random into the city.
Crumbling buildings hemmed in broken streets littered with the detritus of a vanished populace: cases, bags, pots, keepsakes and the like. The more Uriel saw of such things, the more the analytical part of his enhanced brain that was trained to seek patterns in disorder realised that there was an underlying scheme to the placement of them.
These were not simply random scatterings of possessions forsaken by their owners. They were yet more silent memorials, arranged to look haphazard, but set with deliberate care: coins placed in identical patterns, ribbons tied on fire-blackened re-bars and pots stacked together as though waiting for their owners to return.
It looked as though the people who had placed these things had not wanted someone else to know that the dead were mourned and remembered.
It was yet another piece of the puzzle, but without more information, Uriel could make little sense of it. The buildings to either side of him were scarred by small-arms fire and, here and there, Uriel saw the unmistakable impact of artillery and heavy calibre shells. An army had come through this city, firing at will and killing anything that lived.
Rust brown splashes on the walls could only be blood and Uriel stopped as he saw moonlight illuminate the white gleam of bone. He knelt beside a tumbled cairn of rounded stones that covered a small skull, no larger than a child's.
A faded picture had been set amongst the stones, encased in a clear plastic bag to protect it from the elements. Uriel wiped moisture and dirt from its surface, seeing a young girl with long blonde hair in a simple white, knee-length dress. She stood beside a tall man, presumably her father, who beamed with paternal pride. They posed before a building of plain stone with a pair of shuttered windows behind them.
Uriel turned the picture over. Scrawled in simple letters was the name Amelia Towsey.
'How did you die?' asked Uriel, his whisper echoing from the walls as though he had shouted the question. Startled by the volume, Uriel looked up and caught a glimpse of something at the end of the street: a small girl in a white dress.
THREE
URIEL BLINKED IN surprise, and the girl was gone, vanished as though she had never existed.
He surged to his feet and ran towards where she had been standing.
Uriel reached the end of the street and looked left and right. There was no sign of the girl and he began to wonder if he had seen her at all. The image had been so fleeting that he couldn't be sure he hadn't just imagined her there after seeing her in the picture, but she had been so real.
Even as he began to discount his sighting of the girl he heard a soft sigh, no more than a breath, from ahead and a flash of white. Cautious, his every sense alert for danger, Uriel drew his sword and advanced along the street in the direction of the sound. The buildings around him were dark and seemed to lean inwards.
He passed more of the cairns, but didn't stop to examine them as the sighing sound changed in pitch. Instead of a breath, it was a sob: a child's uncomprehending grief.
Uriel stopped as the sound faded away and he found himself before a building of plain stone with two shuttered windows. The shutters hung from rusted hinges and a portion of the building had been punched through with bullets and shell impacts, but it was unmistakably the dwelling from the picture.
Had he been led here?
The thought should have disturbed him, but he felt no fear of this place.
All sounds had ceased and even the wind had fallen silent as Uriel picked his way over the ruined wall and entered the building with his sword held at the ready. Part of him thought to go back for Pasanius, but he felt no threat from within, just an aching loneliness.
Once again, Uriel's eyes adjusted to the changing light conditions and he saw a shattered room with smashed furn
iture scattered across the floor. Broken chairs and a table lay in splinters, charred and blackened by fire. The room reeked of old smoke and Uriel ran his finger down the nearest wall, feeling the filmy residue of spent promethium jelly.
Uriel looked around the blackened room, seeing the sad remnants of lives obliterated in an instant. Two silhouettes were burned onto the far wall, their arms raised in terror or perhaps in a final, useless, gesture of protection from the flames that had killed them.
He could picture the room on fire and the terror and pain of those within as they burned, and he hoped their deaths had been swift. Glass and ceramic crunched underfoot and Uriel bent down to retrieve something metallic from the ashes and rubble: bullet casings, autogun rounds from the calibre, stamped with an Imperial eagle and a Departmento Munitorum serial code.
'Fired in attack or defence?' wondered Uriel, seeing the melted and blackened shape of the autogun lying in the corner of the room. The barrel of the weapon was straight and silver, though pitted with rust. How had it escaped the molten heat of the fire that had destroyed the rest of the dwelling?
Thinking back to the patterns of votive offerings he had seen scattered through the streets, Uriel saw meaning in the gun's placement, following the direction of the barrel and heading into a back room.
Like the main room, this chamber was blackened by fire damage, the walls peeling and bubbled where the heat had not quite reached to scorch. The room was empty and dark, a bedroom by the look of the rusted iron bed frame collapsed in one corner.
Uriel made a circuit of the room, looking for something that the autogun in the outer room might have been pointing at. Feeling slightly foolish, he was about to leave when he saw the words written on the wall.
Partially obscured by dust, the words were nevertheless clearly visible to his genhanced eyesight, hidden, but visible to someone who was looking for something.
The Killing Ground Page 4