I paused for a moment, my teeth clenched in a snarl, my clothes and face drenched in gore. The house was not letting go of its lie willingly.
The chanting shouts grew louder. The walls bulged. Mouths formed in them, ten feet high. They howled at me. A wind came for me, buffeting me and trying to throw me off the staircase. I left Zander and went down to the ground floor. Other mouths opened in the walls, keeping pace with me. The chant was deafening, and the colossal pounding vibrated through my spine. It was all I could do to stay upright. But my anger was with me, and I was sustained now by the promise of victory.
One more lie. One more lie and it would all be over.
There was blood at the foot of the stairs. The spectre was feigning injury from the fall. I followed it to the entrance. The Katrin thing must have struggled with the door, because there was a larger scattering of red droplets there. I tried the doors. They would not open. I was trapped inside with the phantom. Good. I had no desire to leave until all was done.
The blood trail led me away from the entrance to the librarium. When I stepped inside, she launched herself at me with the family’s shield she had taken down from the wall. She struck my shoulder hard with the edge, knocking me back, and came at me again, swinging the shield viciously.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she screamed.
I did not answer. I would not engage with the house and let it twist my mind again. I concentrated on blocking Katrin’s attack. She was good and she was fast, but her training was not for the battlefield. I anticipated her next strike, and stepped back before it came. She overswung, losing her balance. I brought the chainsword up with a sharp jerk and smashed the shield from her hands. She tried to retreat.
She was too slow. With a swift blow from the side, I decapitated her. Her body remained upright for a moment, a geyser of blood erupting from the neck. Then it fell. Her head rolled on the floor.
Rolling, rolling, rolling.
It came to rest at the window.
The house stopped moving. The chanting ceased.
Finally, there was silence.
Chapter 22
I wiped the blood from my face. I stayed with the body, waiting for it to dissolve. Dawn broke, and grey light filtered in through the windows. It grew brighter while I stood there. I still hadn’t moved with the coming of full, cold daylight. Blood pooled. Blood began to dry. The librarium filled with the cloying stench of death. And the phantom did not vanish.
In the daylight, there was something monstrously banal about the body. Katrin’s head stared at me from its resting place, the glassy eyes wide in frozen shock.
The chainsword slipped from my hand. It thudded against the floor.
The corpse should be gone. The night was over.
I was trying very hard not to think as I stepped out of the librarium and looked up at the staircase. The mutilated remains of Zander were still on the landing. From the foot of the stairs, I could see one of his arms jutting up, soaked in blood, the hand splayed in protest.
I knew what I had done.
I couldn’t move. I had no direction. I had nowhere to run from myself, no way to shield myself from the enormity of my crime. I couldn’t even weep. Malveil had killed my children so many times in the night, and I had grieved so many times, all I felt now was the most monstrous kind of emptiness. I looked back and forth between the stairs and the open doorway of the librarium. I took half a step in one direction, then the other, and then I stood still again. If I did not move, time would stop. I would not have to make any decisions. I would not have to think. Something would make this present moment go away.
All too soon, I knew, the emptiness would be filled. I would feel what I had done. If only oblivion would come for me before that happened. If only Malveil was capable of that tiny mercy.
Instead, there came the heavy iron clang of the door knocker. It sounded like judgement.
Still I didn’t move. It took the second knock to jerk me into tentative motion. Very slowly, I turned to the door and stumbled towards it. Stupid, half-formed thoughts from a lifetime ago tumbled through my mind.
I’m covered in blood. I should clean. They’ll see and know. What if it’s Stavaak?
What does it matter?
Nothing mattered. Not any more. Why hide? I deserved judgement. I would welcome the human form. That would be the most extraordinary of mercies.
I opened the door, and found myself facing Veth Montfor.
She was alone. There was no sign of her driver. She must have left him and her vehicle at the entrance to the grounds.
I discovered that I was still capable of surprise. I was so startled, I reacted with defiance, as if there were still a battle to be fought with her. ‘What are you doing here?’ I demanded.
She gave me a long, evaluating look. She showed no surprise. She showed no emotion at all. ‘You’ve done it, haven’t you?’ she said.
‘Done what?’ Pointless, automatic reflexes had me ready to fight. My response was painfully absurd. I was standing there covered in my children’s blood.
The chainsword is in the librarium. That’s not far. Montfor can’t move quickly. I can kill her and silence her. I can…
The impulse faded, disappearing in the fog of despair.
I was not going to attack, and Montfor knew it.
‘Done what?’ she repeated, mocking but not amused. ‘Your atrocity,’ she said. She did not sound satisfied. She sounded cold, and oddly tired. ‘It’s always an atrocity.’
I stepped to one side of the door. ‘Do you want to see for yourself?’ I asked bitterly. ‘Come in. Why not savour your victory?’
‘I will never cross that threshold,’ she said. ‘Nor will you, I think.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Can you leave?’ She took a step back on the porch. ‘Can you join me outside?’
I had trouble understanding what she meant. It was as if the concept of a space beyond the walls of Malveil was becoming strange to me. I tried to do as she said. I could not take another step forward any more than I could levitate.
Montfor’s sigh rattled from her larynx. ‘Then it is truly done,’ she said. That buzzing monotone somehow sounded relieved. ‘We are finished with you. Solus is safe.’
The absurdity of her statement blew upon a faint ember of anger. ‘It will never be safe until your family is destroyed,’ I said.
‘You are wrong. The Montfors are its guardians. We have long stood for it against the Strocks, and the foulness your house has unleashed.’
‘You protect Solus from us?’
‘You seem surprised. How is that possible? Which of us is covered with blood? The blood of your children, if I am not mistaken?’
I said nothing.
She nodded. ‘I thought so. And yes, we stand on the ramparts for Solus. I will go further. We are the ramparts. Only the Montfors are strong enough to do all that must be done. The discipline of corruption is our weapon against the Strocks. It is how we resist. We know how far we can go.’ She pointed to the threshold. ‘I know what line must not be crossed.’
‘Why haven’t you turned us over to the Inquisition?’ I asked dully.
‘That has been tried. The Inquisition does not remember, but we do. The Montfors are the only ones who remember. Malveil rules by silence, but we remember. Even you, we will remember.’
‘Then you could have stopped this.’
‘No. We cannot stop Malveil. All we can do is try to contain the worst. We knew where to stop there, too. We know when not to stand in the way of what cannot be fought.’
‘You are cowards.’
‘We are not fools.’ She gave me her serpent’s smile. ‘Do not misunderstand me. I enjoy the life I lead. I will not give it up.’
It didn’t matter. I didn’t care any more. Let her drain Solus of all its wealth. I could no longe
r grasp the importance of others’ losses. ‘And who comes for me now? Stavaak?’
‘No one comes. No one enters until you are no longer a memory. Stavaak will forget too. I think, in his dreams, he may understand more than he knows. Or at least enough not to seek more understanding than is healthy. No, what comes for you is your destiny. I will let the house devour you, and we will rest in the hope that, its appetite sated, it will be quiet again for a time. Until the next Lord-Governor Strock comes from another branch of the family. There will always be another one of you, and we will always be ready.’
She turned to go, then stopped. ‘Would it please you to know you achieved your ends? Some of my allies overstepped the mark in their greed, and I did not rein them in. It was wrong to let Solus slip so far from its full responsibilities to the Imperium. That will be corrected.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘That makes no difference to me.’
‘I didn’t think so. Farewell, then, Lord-Governor Strock. I am grateful to see you destroyed.’
Montfor walked away, her cane tapping the ground. She did not look back. I watched until she disappeared around a curve of the drive. She was the last human I would see.
The door closed slowly, and when it shut, the clank of the lock was final. That was when the whispers began, calling my name, summoning me to my final task. There were many voices. Eliana’s was among them. I did not know the others, but I felt a connection to them. They were human, and I sensed a bond of blood and grief between us.
Respect the silence, the voices said. Obey the silence.
The house had fed, but it was hungry still. It had consumed my children and my wife. It had eaten most of what constituted Maeson Strock, and was eager to finish the task. It devoured our bodies and our souls, and it devoured our histories. As I responded to the commands of the whispers, I finally understood that the great masses of discards did nothing to force the horrors of the house down. That was another of its lies. The heaps and the great cyclone in the Old Tower were feeding it, funnelling the legacy of the Strocks completely into the jaws of Malveil.
I began to sob, finally, as I got to work. I had to climb the stairs and see what I had done to my son when I went past him to collect all that was personal, all that might tell the careful observer anything at all about me. I worked with the mindless persistence of a servitor, hauling everything from my tower down to the ground floor, seeing Zander again and again.
I tossed everything onto mounds in one of the rooms beyond the dining hall. Then the whispers grew in urgency, and ordered the worst thing.
One last task. One last journey. The hardest one.
I dragged Zander’s body down the stairs. In the librarium, I lifted Katrin’s corpse, slung it over my shoulder, then picked up her head. Cradling it, bowed under the weight of her body, I shuffled out of the librarium. I grabbed one of Zander’s feet and began the long, agonising voyage to the Old Tower.
All of you. Eliana’s voice stood out from the whispers. All of you at once.
I did as I was bid. I fell numerous times. I crawled a lot of the way, pulling two bodies at once. But at last I reached the Old Tower, and the door was open for me. Inside, I pushed the corpses of my children off the stairs. They fell to become part of the vortex. It was turning again, and from far below, beneath the whispers, came the chants and snarls of deeper, inhuman voices.
I descended, not because I accepted my fate but because I had no choice. I reached the platform where Devris had committed his great sin. Rivas’ body lay there in scattered pieces, his flesh and organs laid out along the lines of the eight-pointed star. At the centre of the rune stood the sundial I had seen earlier. When I stepped onto the platform, the arms of the gnomon twisted against each other, and the gnomon began to turn. A portion of the wall slid aside with a rumble. Inside the chamber beyond, things glowed with the unlight of the warp.
I crossed the final threshold, pulled by the chains of my fate, the chains that drew every Strock inexorably to the jaws of Malveil.
Eliana was waiting for me. For the moment, she was not the monster I had last seen. With her were scores of other phantoms, and I had seen their faces on the portraits in the halls. I was surrounded by my forgotten ancestors. They were gathered to welcome me among their number.
Then the wall closed again, taking away the last true light I would ever see. As the great dark came, the spectres changed, their features melting and distorting into the abominable shapes the house had given them.
‘Shhh,’ Eliana whispered. Her grin widened as her head caved in and her eyes vanished. ‘Shhh.’ Whispering. Hissing. ‘I’m here now. I’m here now.’
I screamed as they came for me. I screamed as Eliana wrapped her talons around my neck.
I screamed as the first moments of forever began.
About the Author
David Annandale is the author of the novella The Faith and the Flesh, which features in the Warhammer Horror portmanteau The Wicked and the Damned. His work for the Horus Heresy range includes the novels Ruinstorm and The Damnation of Pythos, and the Primarchs novels Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar and Vulkan: Lord of Drakes. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine, the Yarrick series, and several stories involving the Grey Knights, as well as titles for The Beast Arises and the Space Marine Battles series. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he has written Neferata: Mortarch of Blood. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.
An extract from The Wicked and the Damned.
The sky was on fire.
As beginnings go, I think it has poetry. We were at war – when are we not? – and the world was burning beneath us. Beneath me. The air tasted of smoke and the heat pressed down on me, like the hand of the God-Emperor. My ears were ringing, but I could hear men screaming, up and down the trench-line. They were always screaming. Crying and wailing. My regiment was mostly made up of cowards and children, much to my chagrin.
The ferrocrete duckboards buckled beneath me as I pushed myself to my feet and fumbled for the laspistol on my hip. The mud – we’d taken to calling it ‘the soup’, for obvious reasons – beneath the duckboards was boiling from the heat of the barrage. The trench was sloughing into a new shape around me as I stumbled towards the nearest screams. The walls bubbled, bulging outwards or collapsing inwards. The ferrocrete frames of the line were cracked and pushed out of joint. Sometimes whole sections of the line – and everything in them – vanished into the soup. Like they’d never existed at all.
War is a hungry beast, and it gobbles its prey. A regiment can die in a moment, triumph can turn to tragedy, victory to defeat. Only by maintaining discipline can the hunger of war be held at bay. But discipline, like ferrocrete, can crack and burst, and vanish under the mud, unless someone tends to it.
Men moved around me, but I barely saw them – grey shadows, uniforms coated with mud and ash, environment masks giving everyone the same inhuman features. I didn’t often wear my mask, despite the way the heat bit at my lungs and sinuses. I wanted them to see me. To see my face. To see that I wasn’t like them. They needed to be reminded of that. I needed to be reminded of that. Standards – discipline – had to be maintained.
Coughing, I stumbled down the line, shoving men aside. They didn’t protest, or I didn’t hear them if they did. They saw my face, the black peaked cap, the coat – stained with mud though it was – and they knew me. Knew who I was, what I was. And they straightened at their positions. They went quiet. Like good soldiers.
But where there are good soldiers there are bad soldiers. There are always bad soldiers, in every regiment. The lazy and the cowardly. The unscrupulous and the mad. The God-Emperor saw them, and I saw them too. I had been trained my whole life to see them. To see the signs of faltering courage in a man, sometimes before the soldier in question even realised it. And then, to act.
But not that day. Not then, with the sky burning with chemical fire and the trenches turning to soup around me. The screaming was bad for morale. Bad for the regiment. And I knew my duty.
Laspistol in hand, I swept down the line, moving quicker. The longer the screams went on, the worse the effect would be. Another lesson learned in the schola progenium. They’d taught me so many valuable things, there. I give thanks to the God-Emperor every night for those times, gruelling though they were.
The trenches I passed through were irregular canyons of mud, bolstered by support slabs of ferrocrete. In places, pre-fab bunkers of stone and metal had been sunk into the mud, their regimental markings obscured by grime and damage. Heavy environment netting had been strung over the tops of some places, in order to keep out the worst of the inclement weather. It didn’t work here – it rarely worked anywhere. But we strung it regardless, as the manuals insisted. We dug our trenches to regulation depth, despite the mud, and set our guns and placed our emplacements.
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