Hammer and Bolter 8

by Christian Dunn

  The war-rat was hurled down the tunnel at the two men. He landed in a mangled heap, his back evaporated by the unleashed malignance of his own weapon. Seeckt stared at the dead ratman, blinking in disbelief. Visscher strode over and kicked the vermin’s armoured head.

  ‘That worked pretty well,’ the riverwarden quipped.

  ‘What did?’ Seeckt asked.

  Visscher pointed at the shattered lantern. ‘I threw a rock.’

  Seeckt shook his head, his face going white. ‘That lamp was fuelled with warpstone! You might have brought the entire tunnel down about our heads!’

  Visscher shrugged, trying to hide the alarm Seeckt’s words caused him. ‘It looked like the eye-lamp the raiders wore,’ he explained. ‘I smashed one of those on the Shakerlo. I thought the lantern would do the same.’ He gestured to the mangled body at his feet. ‘Lucky for us it did.’

  ‘Lucky indeed,’ Seeckt said under his breath. The agent stooped, pulling a femur from one of the skaven skeletons on the floor. Raising it overhead, he scraped some of the glowing dust onto it. The result was too feeble to properly be called a torch, but at least it provided some illumination. Visscher followed his example and was soon similarly equipped. ‘Hold it away from your body,’ Seeckt warned. ‘This stuff is toxic even to them,’ he said, nodding at the dead skaven. ‘Pray we don’t need to use them very long.’

  Back in the maze of tunnels, the two men resumed their search for a way back to the surface. The eerie sounds of the slimy corridors became incessant and a foul reek, like the musk of a snake pit, began to fill the air. Slopping, glottal noises slithered through the passageways, bearing with them a nameless sensation that made skin crawl and blood curdle. Twice, Visscher stopped dead in his tracks, certain that he’d heard a human cry mixed amid the weird sounds of swamp and mire.

  ‘I could swear I heard Mertens,’ Visscher told Seeckt.

  The agent stopped, cocking his head to one side, straining to pick out the noise from the cloying darkness. ‘If he didn’t drown, the skaven might have captured him,’ Seeckt mused. He grimaced and directed a hard stare at Visscher. ‘Even if they have, there’s nothing we can do for the poor madman.’

  ‘It makes me sick to leave any man in the hands of such monsters,’ Visscher shuddered.

  ‘We have to save our own skins,’ Seeckt told him. ‘Get back to the Shakerlo… and let them know about Gnawlitch Shun.’

  Visscher bowed to the sense of Seeckt’s decision, even as he felt his heart blacken with guilt. There was little enough hope of their own escape, they’d throw the small chance they had away if they lingered trying to find Gustav. He could only pray to Manann that the lunatic’s death would be quick.

  The two men resumed their prowl through the muddy darkness. The musky stink in the air grew more intense, almost bringing tears to their eyes. Despite the discomfort, Visscher was grateful for the foul smell. With that filth choking the air, there was no way the skaven would be able to track them by scent. It was a small enough advantage, but one that gave the riverwarden some hope.

  That hope withered as the two men turned a corner and found themselves looking down into a vast cavern lit by glowing green lanterns and littered with crates. They had no problem recognizing the skaven lair. All their wandering through the maze of tunnels had done was to bring them back to the place they started.

  Visscher clenched his fist in impotent rage, despair clutching at his very soul. Their bold escape had come to nothing!

  It was Seeckt who pointed out the change that had come across the cavern. A grey mist hovered above the floor, almost concealing the furry bodies strewn about the slimy stones. There were hundreds of dead skaven littering the cavern. Visscher thought at first the mist might be some of their poison gas, that some accident had struck and annihilated the scheming rodents. Then, through a gap in the mist, he was able to get a good look at the dead ratmen. The bodies were viciously mutilated, hacked and torn in an abominable manner. What had happened here had been no accident, but a massacre.

  ‘They’re all dead,’ Visscher whispered. ‘How?’

  Seeckt shook his head, unable to conceive an answer. He turned his gaze across the cavern, then froze. He grabbed Visscher’s shoulder, turning the him so he faced the far end of the chamber.

  On the ground, mutilated as badly as any of the ratkin, was the body of Gustav Mertens. But it wasn’t the lunatic’s corpse that arrested the attention of the men. It was the thing walking off into the darkness, vanishing into a mist-choked passageway. Taller than skaven or man, its body covered in slimy green skin, its beaked head twisted into a fanged snout and great baleful eye. A single eye, shining with malefic intelligence, exuding the immortal hate of an eldritch race.

  ‘When Gnawlitch Shun chose a legend to hide his raiders,’ Seeckt whispered, ‘he should have made sure the legend wasn’t real.’

  It took more courage than either of the men thought he possessed to descend into the mist-choked cavern, but necessity forced them to climb down from their perch and brave their fears. They tried not to look too closely at the dead skaven as they picked their way across the devastated lair.

  Visscher, however, could not quite constrain his curiosity on one point. As the two men passed one of the boxes the ratmen had stolen from the missing ships, he stopped to open it. The riverwarden almost gagged at what he saw. The boxes were filled with wood shavings, but buried amongst the material were grotesque objects about the size of a human hand. They were squishy yet covered in a leathery skein that made them rough and resilient. In shape… there was a horrible resemblance to a human infant.

  Visscher turned away from the box in disgust. Seeckt glowered at him.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ the agent told him.

  ‘Handrich’s Purse!’ Visscher exclaimed. ‘What are they?’

  Seeckt’s eyes grew cold. The agent paced through the mist. ‘They’re skaven pups, or at least they were. They were killed at birth and then injected with certain chemicals. The brood-mothers, the creatures that birth all skaven, will eat a dead or weak pup so they can produce more milk for their healthy whelps.’

  Visscher shook his head, sickened by the image Seeckt’s words evoked. ‘Someone hopes to… to poison…’

  ‘The chemicals in these bodies would react with the brood-mother,’ Seeckt explained. ‘They’d make her produce a stronger litter. Black furred skaven, strong warrior-types. Clan Scuten needs warriors. Clan Moulder agreed to help them get them, but Gnawlitch Shun decided to intercept the shipments.’

  The riverwarden gawped as he heard Seeckt speak. ‘How… how do you…’

  ‘How do I know all this?’ Seeckt frowned and there was a trace of sadness in his eyes. ‘The burghers pay me well for my services, but the skaven pay me better.’ Before Visscher could react, Seeckt sprang at him. While the riverwarden had been busy with the box, Seeckt had recovered a sword from one of the dead ratmen. The skaven blade slashed across Visscher’s neck. Taken by surprise, the man could only stare in uncomprehending horror as his life gushed across the slimy floor.

  Seeckt turned away from the murdered man. It sat ill with him to kill a man who had saved his life, but he knew the riverwarden had to die. If not here, then when they returned to the Shakerlo. By now the skaven hidden in the ship’s hold would have finished off the crew and cleaned up the bodies of Gnawlitch Shun’s pirates. It would have been inconvenient to have Visscher tagging along when Seeckt went back to meet his employers. It was better this way.

  Casting a last anxious look towards the tunnel he had seen the marsh daemon exit, Hein van Seeckt hurried towards the rock pile where Gnawlitch Shun had lorded over his minions. It was too much to hope that the Grand Warlock had shared the fate of the other skaven. A moment’s inspection proved Seeckt’s suspicions. The skaven overlord had built his perch so close to the roof of the cavern so that he could be close to a hidden bolthole.

  Seeckt felt a certain irony employing his enemy’s escape route. H
e was certain that little detail would bring an amused titter from Seerlord Tisqueek when he reported to him.

  One day, the teeming hordes of skavendom would sweep away the Empire. When that happened, Seeckt intended to have enough gold to live quite handsomely someplace far away.

  PHALANX

  Ben Counter

  Chapter 9

  The days following the Horus Heresy formed the forgotten apocalypse of the Imperium. The Heresy itself was the subject of legends known throughout the realm of mankind – the traitor Horus, waxing great in his jealousy of the Emperor, his treason against the human race and his death at the hand of the Emperor himself. The Scouring, the period of reformation that followed Horus’s death and the Emperor’s ascension to the Golden Throne, was an afterthought, a footnote in the approved histories preached by the Imperial Church. But the truth, appreciated only by a few historians who skirted with heresy in their studies, was that the Imperium was born in the Scouring, and it was born in a terrible tide of blood.

  It was a time of vengeance. All those tainted by the deeds of Horus and the many who had sided with them, even worlds who had bowed to Horus under threat of destruction, were destined to suffer. The remaining loyal Primarchs led a campaign of bloody reconquest in which collaborators were hung in their billions. Planets full of refugees were purged lest their number contain the wrong type of war criminals. A thousand civil wars sprang up in the Heresy’s wake, the combatants left by the Imperial Army to fight among themselves until the survivors were weak enough to be conquered, subjugated and re-educated.

  It was a time of reform. The Space Marine Legions were split up into Chapters, a process which sparked its own share of shadow wars and near-catastrophes as Space Marines fought in all but open warfare for the right to the heraldries of their parent Legions. The Imperial Army broke up into millions of fragments, miniature fiefdoms with no central command. The Imperial Creed was born among the religious catastrophes that tore at humanity in the wake of the Emperor’s ascension and the Adepta of the Imperium were formed to hold the shattered mass of humanity together. Born in desperation, the Priesthood of Terra and its component Adepta founded the principles of fear and suspicion that would determine their every action in the ten millennia that followed. Whatever image the Emperor had cherished for the future of humanity, its broken remnants were formed by the Scouring into something flawed, something half-born, something fearful when the Emperor had sought to form it from hope.

  It was a time of Chaos. The powers of the warp had made their play for power over the human race and though the Emperor’s sacrifice had thwarted them, they had sunk a thousand tendrils of influence into realspace and clung on jealously. The daemonic legions unleashed in the Battle of Terra took decades to hunt down and exterminate, the Blood Angels and their newly-formed successor Chapters seeking them out to exact vengeance for Sanguinius’s death. Horus’s acolytes had opened portals to the warp in the Heresy’s dying days, seeking to seed the fledgling Imperium with secrets waiting to be uncovered and suffered by generations to come.

  No one knew how many such portals had been built by the sorcerers and madmen under Horus’s command. Some were vast gateways on forgotten worlds, ready for explorers or refugees to speak the wrong words or cross the wrong threshold. Some were built into the foundations of cities rebuilt in the Heresy’s wake, runes worked into the streets or dread temples far beneath the sewers and catacombs. Others took stranger forms – prophecies woven into a tainted bloodline, the words of a story that opened the way a little more with every telling, a song sung by desert spirits which would become a gateway to the warp as soon as it was written down.

  One gateway was an eye, ripped from some titanic predator that glided through the warp. Acolytes of the Dark Powers, gathered on a spacecraft in orbit around a star, brought the eye into realspace. Like another, living, planet, it settled into its own orbit. It looked out upon the void and wherever its gaze fell, daemons danced. The acolytes who had summoned it were shredded by the daemons that sprung up around them, their last thoughts of thanks towards the gods who had permitted them to be a part of such a glorious endeavour.

  The Predator’s Eye was seen in divinations and séances across the Imperium. It was Rogal Dorn who stood up and swore to close it. The Chapters which venerated him all sent their own champions to assist, and in orbit around the blighted star were fought many of the most terrible and costly battles of the Scouring. Rogal Dorn himself set foot on the Predator’s Eye, evading the biological horrors that budded out of its gelatinous surface as well as the daemons that scrabbled to intercept him. But even as battle-brothers fell around him, Rogal Dorn did not falter. He was a Primarch, and in him flowed the blood of the Emperor. He plunged a fist into the pupil of the Predator’s Eye, and the eye, blinded, closed in agony.

  Rogal Dorn’s surviving battle-brothers included a number of Space Marine Librarians, and for three days without rest they enacted a ritual to seal the eye shut. Dorn led their chanting and finally a sigil of power, born of his own valorous spirit, was branded against the shut eye to keep it closed.

  Dorn did not possess enough battle-brothers to destroy the Predator’s Eye permanently. His Librarians were exhausted and many had not survived the ritual. He knew that one day he would have to return to finish the job. The Predator’s Eye would have to be opened before it was destroyed, and so Dorn placed a condition on the ward that sealed it so that only his own blood could open it. He buried the Eye’s location in myths and legends, such that no one Chapter would know the full story of its location and purpose, and swore that one day, when the countless other threats had subsided and he had found another corps of Librarians and champions to face down the terrible gaze of the Predator’s Eye, the warp portal would finally be destroyed.

  But the Imperium was beset on all sides by threats that did not let up. For every daemonic foe that was despatched, rebellion or the predations of the xenos would spring up, every new danger threatening a new form of oblivion for the Imperium. For centuries the Predator’s Eye lay hidden just below the level of mortal sight, blinded yet possessing a bestial sense of anger and frustration born of the warp’s own hatred. And eventually, Rogal Dorn died, to join the Emperor at the battle at the end of time.

  The Predator’s Eye remained orbiting its star, forgotten.

  The name of that star was Kravamesh.

  Scamander braved the first volley of bolter fire that streaked across the archive. The walls exploded in torrents of burned and shredded parchment around him as bolter rounds from the Howling Griffons flew wide. One caught Scamander in the chest and blew him back a pace. Another tore through the reading table in front of him and exploded against his thigh. A storm of shrapnel crackled against him.

  ‘You will never see us kneel!’ yelled Scamander and he looked up to the ceiling, his bared throat glowing scarlet. Flames licked up from his hands, over his shoulder guards and face. Ice crusted around the table and the floor around him as the heat energy bled into him to be concentrated and forced out by the psychic reactor that churned in his mind.

  Scamander looked down at the Howling Griffons, face wreathed in flame. They were charging heedless towards him, competing for the honour of first blood. Captain Borganor was among them, ripping out volleys of bolter fire.

  Scamander breathed out a tremendous gout of flame that washed over and through the first Howling Griffons. Some were thrown off their feet by the wall of superheated air that slammed into them. Others were caught full in the blast, ceramite melting in the supernaturally intense heat, armour plates exploding. Three or four fell as the nerve-fibre bundles in their armour were incinerated, robbing them of movement as the joints melted and fused.

  Borganor leapt through the fire, crashing through a reading table already collapsing to ash under the force of Scamander’s assault. He took aim without breaking stride and put a bolter round square into Scamander’s abdomen, throwing the Soul Drinker back onto one knee.

  Other Soul
Drinkers returned fire in the wake of Scamander’s attack, and the Howling Griffons struggled through the flame to get into cover and drive them out. Borganor ignored the rest of the fight and dived under the table Scamander was using for cover, his bionic leg powering him forward.

  Borganor came up face to face with Scamander. Scamander’s bolt pistol was in his hand and the two wrestled over their guns. Scamander was half-glowing with heat, half-slippery with ice, but Borganor kept the muzzle of Scamander’s pistol away from him. His own bolter was too unwieldy for this close-quarters murder – he let it drop from his hand and took his combat knife from its sheath.

  Scamander immolated himself in a cocoon of fire. Borganor yelled and fell away. Scamander got to his feet and blasted at Borganor as he stumbled away, holding the wound in his abdomen with his free hand.

  Borganor rolled through the flames, bolter fire impacting on his shoulder guards and backpack. Chains of bolter fire hammered across the archive room and shredded parchment fell in a burning rain, filaments of ash rising on the hot air and flames licking up the walls. The huge rolls of parchment were ablaze, falling in spooling masses like waterfalls of fire and silhouetting the shapes of the Howling Griffons as they ran from cover to cover, firing all the time.

  Scamander raised his free hand, black with charred blood from his wound. Flame sprayed from his fingers and Borganor grabbed hold of a table leg to keep the burst of fire from carrying him off his feet. He trusted in his ceramite, in the rites with which he had blessed his wargear and the spirit of Roboute Guilliman he had beseeched to enter his heart and make him more than a man, more than a Space Marine. He trusted in the force of his vengeance, the shield of contempt which could spread out from his iron soul and keep him alive long enough to execute the traitor he faced.