by William King
The road to recovery was a winding, circuitous march through fever country. There were days when I was once again sick, when it felt as if daemons were pressing down on my chest and when Ivan or Anton would spend nights beside my bed. There were times, too, when I would open my eyes and see a sister of the Orders Hospitaller, and sometimes she bore a strange resemblance to Anna.
I dreamed of her often, of how I had first seen her on Karsk when we had escaped from the worshippers of the Angel of Fire together, of how I had seen her again on Emperor’s Glory, where Ulrik Grimfang, an Adeptus Astartes of the Space Wolves, had warned me against her. I dreamed of the bodies of the men she had killed and I had found, and I dreamed of how she had saved my life.
I knew then with the odd clarity that such dreams bring that our lives were linked somehow. It might have been part of some grand design on her part or just the secret unwinding of our interlinked destinies, but our lives had touched in the oddest and most intimate of ways down through the decades. I liked to think there was some bond of affection there but I was never sure, not even of my own feelings. There had been many women in my life, as there always are for soldiers moving from world to world, but hers was the only consistent female presence I could remember.
I was certain of another thing too. That if she was here on Loki someone important was going to die. It was her nature and the nature of her service to the Emperor, and who am I to criticise? How many have I killed in the same cause?
I remembered too many of the campaigns I had fought in the name of the Emperor and Macharius. I experienced them once more in bloody, sweat-inducing dreams that had me waking in terror to stare at the murals on the ceiling depicting angel-winged Space Marines confronting all manner of xenos horrors.
I recalled the jungles of Jurasik and the orks we had fought there. I remembered the great armoured advance on Karsk IV and the burning winged statue of an evil angel perched atop the mountain-sized city of Irongrad. I marched again across the ice wastes of Caledax and watched men’s limbs turn black from the frostbite. I climbed over the peaks of Aquitaine and saw monstrous sentient spiders feast on the flesh of the soldiers they had webbed. I saw living weapons, war machines of flesh, remnants of some ancient invasion of xenos that had lurked like termites in the ruins of the human civilisation they had destroyed. I saw the redemption of worlds ruled by ancient evil cults and I saw the armies of the crusade advance, invincible, until we reached the Halo Worlds.
There everything had gone wrong. There the supply lines had grown too long and the armies too war-weary and the distances too great for reliable navigation even by the great starships of the Imperium. There all manner of horrors had emerged. There we had found ourselves bogged down in endless wars of attrition and even Macharius had seemed to lose his total certainty of victory and begun to whisper blackly of plots and betrayals.
I saw another vision now, of Loki as I had first seen it from space, a ball of green and blue and grey with toxic clouds drifting across seas that had died tens of thousands of years ago by being flooded with poisonous industrial waste. A world of manufactorum-cities whose giant chimneys poured choking clouds into the sky as their inhabitants worked day and night. A place whose landscapes had been blasted by pollution and blighted by the deserts of ash the cities had created.
I saw it as it was now, its greatest city ringed by trenches that stretched out to other man-made mountain ranges where heretics lived and bred and performed obscene rites beneath the glow of ever-burning lanterns. I saw networks of trenches that stretched as far as the eye could see, and plains of mud on which lay the corpses of millions of men, unburied, forgotten, degenerating to piles of bones and walls of skulls. I saw the clouds of gas drifting from sinkhole to sinkhole and I saw what lay beneath the ground, all of the ancient and evil and horrifying things that burrowed blindly, waiting for the chance to emerge and devour.
And just as these images flooded my mind, I felt something else, a vast dark presence. I looked up and could no longer see the murals above me. Instead I was looking into the grinning frog-like face of the gigantic daemon I had first seen on the front lines. It was smiling down at me, watching me with eyes full of that ancient malicious humour, looking at me the way I might look at a whining mosquito, a thing it was going to reach out and swat when the mood took it, and that mood might well be taking it now.
It reached down for me with one massive claw, and grabbed me in a vice-like grip and began to shake me. It was like being in the grip of an earthquake. My body was being thrown from side to side, and it seemed to me that if this kept up the life would be shaken from me.
The vast and horrible presence loomed over me and I wanted to shout defiance, but I could not. Instead I felt the vast head lower, the huge jaw distend, as if it were going to swallow me in a single gulp. A long tongue glistening with green mucus extended from its mouth and descended towards me, and I knew that if it touched me I was going to die in the grip of some vile disease.
The head descended, the tongue reached out, the world shook as the thing approached. I tried to scream and I snapped open my eyes.
Nine
I was looking up at an odd frog-like face but it belonged to the man from the next bed. He had been moved there a couple of days ago after the previous occupant’s corpse had been dragged away. He seemed friendly enough, but I was still reeling from the sight in my dream and shrank away from him.
He smiled. His teeth were broad and yellow but normal-looking. There was humour but no overt wickedness in his eyes. ‘Easy, brother,’ he said. ‘It was just a nightmare.’
He pointed to himself and said, ‘The name’s Zachariah.’
I nodded and took in my surroundings. I was in the hospital. The winged Space Marines were still fighting their fanciful battle against a bunch of particularly daemonic-looking orks. Men were still moaning and screaming and dying. I managed to sit upright. It seemed I had at least enough strength to do that now, although I still felt as weak as if my muscles were made out of water.
‘It was just a nightmare,’ I agreed.
‘We all have them,’ he said. His voice was light and pleasant with the faint burr that marked him as a Grosslander. The stained white smock he wore gave no clue as to rank or origin.
‘Not like I do,’ I said. I was feeling sorry for myself and the words just burst out.
‘You see ghosts and daemons,’ he said. ‘You were muttering about them in your sleep.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Do you see them, the disease bringer, and all his children? Little things, they ride in clouds and corpses and spread plague across the world.’
I looked at him sidelong and suspicious. ‘Was I talking about them in my sleep?’ I wondered what else I might have been talking about. I know some secrets that could get men killed. Me included.
He shook his head. ‘I have seen it too. I had trench fever and I saw it in my dreams. I kept my mouth shut because a few others had mentioned it and been shot by the commissar. There’s something going on here that normal folks are not meant to know.’
I smiled at that. He was a hick from a hayseed world and he had put his finger right on the nub of the problem. There were things going on here that we were not meant to know about. The whole Imperium is built atop layers of secrets that men have been buried to keep and that no one except the anointed few are allowed to talk about, and then only with each other. I have caught fragments of those conversations in my time, between inquisitors and Lord High Commanders, Assassins and Adeptus Astartes. They are not things I like knowing, but I cannot unlearn them.
‘You didn’t get shot,’ I said and he grinned.
‘They didn’t think I needed to be, not when the trench fever took me. I was dumped here. This is the place they send men to die.’
‘It’s a hospital,’ I said.
‘That’s what I said.’ He grinned. It was a likeable grin and it made me suspicious. I had never seen him before and here he was talking to me as if I wa
s his long-lost brother.
‘Anyway, I am not the only one who had the dreams,’ he said. ‘Nor are you. I’ve talked to dozens of men from dozens of battlefronts that have had them. They are omens, that’s what they are.’
There was an odd conviction in the way he said the word omens. He believed utterly in what he was saying and there was no trace of madness in those cold blue eyes of his. ‘They are omens. Something is happening here. Something terrible.’
I could not actually say I disagreed with him so I kept my mouth shut and waited for him to go. If he was going to spout heresy, I would need to report him to Drake or one of his minions. It was even possible he was one of the minions, put here to test the faith of those who were waiting to die. Don’t ask me why I thought that. I was sick and I was weary and I have seen and heard stranger things.
‘Our dreams are not the only omens,’ he said. Once again there was an ominous conviction in that light flat voice. I don’t know what it was that was so convincing, but there was something there, a certainty that made you believe, if not in what he said, then in the fact that the man uttering the words took them as the total truth. It spoke of a sort of faith, terrible in its simplicity. It was the sort of faith that many of us had once had in the success of the crusade. In this man, it seemed to have curdled into its opposite.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. I was encouraging him because I was honestly curious.
‘You hear stories,’ he said. He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was listening, as if, even here surrounded by the dying, perhaps dying himself, he suspected that there were spies. He was quite possibly correct. ‘The crusade is crumbling. We came too far, too fast. We came to places where man was not meant to go. We are seeing things that man was not meant to see. We are too far from Holy Terra and the Emperor’s Light.’
Again there was that conviction there, the certainty of the fanatic who had no doubts. He might have been a commissar addressing a regiment before an important battle or a martyr preparing to meet his doom in fires stoked by heretics. There was no possibility that he was wrong.
‘I had been stationed a few places before we got to Loki – we stopped at all the transhipment points on our way out and I talked to a lot of folks. I like talking and I like listening and I heard some tales that would make your hair stand on end.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like ghost ships emerging from the warp and destroying our supply craft, enslaving their crews, taking the supplies meant for us and carrying them off to the daemon worlds where the heretics dwell.’
‘You always hear such stories,’ I said. ‘I have been hearing them since I first set foot on a starship over thirty years ago.’
‘I know,’ said Zachariah. ‘But tell me, is this the first time you have believed those stories to be true?’
Again there was no doubt in his voice, only certainty. I must believe what he did. The odd thing was that he was right. Oh, in the past, in moments of doubt and fear when travelling between the stars, I had thought of those old stories. Everybody does. But the Halo Worlds were the first place that I really actually thought it was true when I was not aboard ship.
He nodded, as if seeing something written on my face that confirmed what he was thinking. He kept going like a fighter pressing his advantage in a brawl. ‘The generals all think of rebellion, if they are not already openly rebelling like Richter. What else could that be but the taint of this evil place finding its way into their minds? Why else would they plot and scheme against the greatest hero mankind had known since the time of the Emperor?’
He was tugging at the first finger of his right hand now, counting off points as he made them.
‘Armies, entire Imperial armies, have fallen into heresy. Their generals set themselves up as gods among men, as satraps for old, evil powers. They are crushed and crushed again and still more emerge.’ That was another finger. ‘You have seen that here on Loki.’
‘Our armies are falling apart. Our men do not have ammunition. Our vehicles do not have fuel. Among the far stars, the glorified clerks of the Administratum plot against heroes.’ He had reached the penultimate digit.
‘We face more and more monsters, more and more strangeness, and that strangeness is not to be found just among our enemies but among ourselves.’ And he was done.
He sat down on his bed, appearing to have exhausted himself with his tirade. I noticed he was pale and that his eyes were faintly bloodshot. There were spots on his skin that reminded me of something and it came to me that he was very sick.
‘These are times of ill-omen,’ he said, his voice starting to fade, his certainty still there but his body unable to respond to his fanatic’s will. ‘All things will end badly.’
He nodded and slumped down, a wind-up toy that has run out of power. He pulled the sheet over himself and lay still. I turned my head a little so that I could see him, closed my eyes for a moment and I was asleep.
The next morning, when I woke, two Sisters Hospitaller were there. Zachariah’s body was covered with a white sheet. I felt much better and I sat up in bed. I placed a hand on the woman’s shoulder and she turned to face me, flinching as if she had felt the hand of a corpse on her body.
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘What happened to Zachariah?’
‘He’s dead,’ she said. ‘I thought that much would be obvious.’
‘I was just speaking to him last night,’ I said.
She looked at me. Her face was pale. Her eyes glittered. There were two spots of colour far up on her cheeks. ‘That’s impossible,’ she said. ‘He died two days ago. We’ve only just picked up the notification to remove the body.’
I stared at her, unsure if she was joking. It swiftly became obvious that she was not and I said no more.
I felt strong enough to take a walk around the wards. There was no one present to object. I was still limping and a little weak and I thought sometimes, out of the corners of my eyes, that I could see those small scuttling daemons.
There were many wounded men there, wrapped in bloody smocks. Some of them were legless. Some of them inspected the stumps where hands had once been with listless, uncomprehending eyes. Some were blind, with bandages wrapped around their eyes. Many lay on their beds, their breath wheezing from their chests, phlegm gurgling in their lungs. Their skins were pale. Their eyes were white. I was reminded constantly of the heretic armies as they advanced. If only there had been the sound of gunfire, many of the noises would have been similar.
As I walked I thought about what the sister had said, about the things I kept seeing out of the corner of my eye. It seemed obvious to me that I was not one hundred per cent recovered, that the fever still gripped me, at least some of the time.
I found myself in a great hallway with a soot-smudged stained-glass window. I looked out of it. Below me I could see dark clouds of industrial gas. From the gas lifted immense chimney towers, tall as starscrapers. In the sides of some I could see glowing windows. Roads ran round them, carrying groundcars ever higher. Aircars flew between them, bearing who knew what loads.
Below me the clouds parted and I caught sight of a vertiginous view, of massive pistons rising and falling on the roof of a structure bigger than a starship. Of more effluent billowing forth. Of a huge wheel, stuck in the side of a building, turning around and around for who knew what unguessable purpose. I stood there watching and thinking and trying to sort out my thoughts and feelings.
Had I imagined a whole conversation with Zachariah? Was it merely a fever dream conjured up from scraps of overheard conversation by my own imagination or had I really spoken to a dead man? Whether Zachariah had been dream or reality, he had given voice to many points that had troubled me about the state of the Imperium and the state of the crusade.
I batted this back and forth for the rest of a long afternoon and when I returned to my dormitory bed, Ivan was waiting.
‘How goes it, Sergeant Lemuel?’ Ivan asked with mocking politeness. I slumped down on
my bed. I could not help but notice that his prosthetic arm was dented and that the motors whined even more than usual when he used it. He regarded me steadily through one normal eye and one bionic. It was a trick he used to great effect when playing cards.
‘Could be better, could be worse,’ I replied. ‘Anton could be here.’
‘Don’t let him hear you say that. And in all seriousness, he spent more time by your side than I did when you were unconscious.’
‘How long was I out?’ I was curious now.
‘Almost a week. For a long time there it was touch and go. The medicae thought you were lost a dozen times. That’s what they told me.’
‘Anton told me that you’re guarding the space port.’
‘He told you more than he should have then.’
‘You know what he’s like. Can’t keep a secret.’
‘Don’t tell anybody else you know. The Lord High Commander is in a bad enough mood anyway.’ Macharius was not normally a man to lose his temper. He was brilliant at concealing his emotions no matter how badly things went. Or he had been until recently.
‘Any particular reason?’
‘Any number of them. Take your pick.’
‘What would I be choosing from?’ I could see what he was up to now. He was going to make me work for any information I got out of him.
‘The crusade is bogged down on half a dozen war-fronts.’
‘That’s happened before. It will recover momentum eventually.’
‘There’s some sort of conclave of generals scheming to replace him.’
‘There’s always some underling seeking glory.’
‘These ones have the backing of the Administratum, or so Macharius thinks.’ That was not good news. Macharius had a number of powerful enemies among the bureaucrats who ran the Imperium. It was almost inevitable. For most of the past couple of decades he had been the most powerful man in known space. That caused a lot of friction. ‘With everything that has gone wrong they might just be in a position to pull him down. Macharius has a ship on standby to take him to Acheron. That’s where the generals are supposed to be meeting with their supporters.’