Soul Drinkers 06 - Phalanx

by Ben Counter

  typically augmented the Librarian’s capacity for hand-to-hand combat.

  Varnica disliked the Librarium’s testing of its intensity, but he

  conceded that it was powerful, and that it would get more powerful the

  more he exercised the mental muscles that powered it.

  Varnica shook out his hand as the power around it dissipated.

  Novas smiled. ‘No door is locked when one wields the Emperor’s

  Key,’ he said.

  ‘Quite,’ replied Varnica. The Emperor’s Key. It sounded rather more

  elegant than ‘Hammerhand’.

  The room he had opened was an archive. Ceiling-high banks of index

  cards, yellowing ledger books and scroll racks exuded a smell of old

  paper that almost overpowered the stink of decay.

  On a reading table was sprawled the single body this room

  contained. It wore grand robes that suggested high office in the

  planet’s government. The dead man still had a dagger in his hand,

  probably worn more for ceremony than self-defence. The point of the

  dagger pinned a handful of papers to the tabletop. Several opened

  drawers and scattered papers suggested he had rooted around and

  found them in a hurry, and in his last moments made sure that

  whoever found him would also find those specific documents.

  The man had torn his own throat out with his other hand. He lay in

  the black stain of his blood. His body sagged with decay beneath the

  robes now filthy with old blood and the seepage of rot.

  Varnica pulled out the dagger and looked at the documents this man

  had fought to call attention to, even while the Red Night was taking

  control of him.

  They were receipts and blueprints for work done on the sewers

  beneath the Jewelcutters’ Quarter, between seventy and forty years

  before. Varnica leafed through them rapidly. They were nothing more

  than the detritus of a civil service that loved to remember its own

  deeds.

  ‘What was he trying to tell us?’ asked Hamilca.

  ‘He was telling us,’ said Varnica, ‘to look down.’

  The first of them had a face like a knot of knuckles, deep red flesh that

  oozed hissing molten metal, sinewy arms that wielded a smouldering

  blade of black steel. It congealed up from the black mass of old blood

  pooling in the sewer, that drizzle of gore from the bloodshed above. Its

  face split open, tearing skin, and it screamed. A whip-like tongue

  lashed out.

  More of them were emerging. Dozens of them.

  The sewers. Berenika Altis’s greatest achievement, some said.

  Hidden from the world above, each section of sewer was like a

  cathedral nave, a monument to glory for its own sake, lit by faded

  glow-globes and faced with marble and plaster murals. Most cities of

  the Imperium would have gathered here to worship. On Berenika Altis

  the combined efforts of the flagellants and the jewelcutters had created

  instead such a place to accommodate the filth of the city.

  It was here the blood had flowed. It was here the Doom Eagles had

  come, following the signs left them by that unnamed nobleman who

  had died in the Sanctum. It was here they realised they were getting

  close to the secret of the Red Night.

  ‘Daemons!’ yelled Novas. ‘Close formation. Rapid fire!’

  More daemons were congealing from the blood that slaked the floor

  of the sewer section. They rushed at the Doom Eagles, hate in their

  eyes and their swords held high.

  Novas’s squad drew in close around Varnica and Hamilca. The ten

  Adeptus Astartes hammered out a volley of bolter fire. Three or four

  daemons were shredded at once, gobbets of their molten metal blood

  hissing against the marble walls. But Varnica counted more than

  twenty more daemons now charging to attack. Bolter fire would thin

  them out, but this was a task that had to be finished by hand.

  Varnica thrust his right hand into the complex holster he wore on

  one hip. The sections of his force claw closed around his hand. When

  he withdrew it, it was encased in a pair of sharp blades in a pincer,

  each blade swirling with psychoactive circuitry.

  Varnica let his psychic power fill his fists. Distasteful as it was, it

  was for encounters like this that he had trained his mental muscles.

  The air warped around his hands and the force claw glowed blue-white

  with its power.

  The daemons rushed closer. Novas shot another down, blowing its

  yowling head from its shoulders. Varnica pushed his way between the

  two Doom Eagles in front of him and dived into the fray.

  His force claw closed on one and sheared it in two. A fountain of

  red-hot blood sprayed over his armour, hissing where it touched the

  ceramite. His other fist slammed down, just missing the next daemon

  in his way and ripping a crater out of the flagstone floor. He span,

  driving his right elbow into the daemon and backhanding another hard

  enough to rip its whole jaw off.

  He imagined his fists were meteors, smouldering masses of rock,

  attacked to him by chains, and wherever he swung them anything in

  the way would be destroyed. That was the secret of many a psychic

  weapon – imagination, the ability to mould them in a psyker’s mind’s

  eye into whatever he needed them to be. Varnica needed them to be

  wrecking balls smashing through the hideous things that reared up

  around him. Their bodies were walls to be battered down. They were

  doorways to be opened with the Emperor’s Key.

  Rapid gunfire sprayed around him. Hamilca’s servitors were not just

  scientific instruments – one had opened up, its torso becoming an

  archway of metal and skin within which were mounted a pair of rotator

  cannon. They blazed away at Hamilca’s direction, even as Hamilca

  himself took aim with his plasma pistol and blew the arm off another

  daemon before it could fully congeal into existence.

  Varnica’s shoulder guard turned away one daemon’s blade and he

  ducked under another. He rose, claw first, lifting a daemon above his

  head and letting the pincers snap open so the daemon was sheared in

  two. He stamped down on the blade of the first daemon and, as it

  fought to wrench its weapon up to strike again, Varnica drove an elbow

  into its face and punched it in the chest as it reeled. Purple-black light

  shimmered around the gravity well of his fist as it ripped through the

  thing’s ribs and burst out through its back.

  Hands grabbed Varnica by the collar and backpack of his armour,

  wrenching him down. He fought to straighten up but the strength and

  suddenness of the attack had caught him off guard.

  He saw the face of Novas, whose hands were pulling him down.

  Another Doom Eagle fired past Varnica, bolter shells blasting ragged

  holes in the daemon who had been about to decapitate Varnica with

  its blade.

  ‘Must I nursemaid you through every fight?’ growled Novas.

  The Doom Eagles now formed an execution line to bring their bolters

  to bear on the remaining daemons. Varnica had scattered their charge

  and now they were trying to regroup, or to attack in ones and twos

  easily shot down. A final few volleys of bolte
r fire brought down the

  remaining daemons, blasting off limbs and shredding torsos. The

  remnants dissolved into the mass of blood and filth that covered the

  sewer floor.

  Novas helped Varnica to his feet.

  Varnica clapped the sergeant on the shoulder. ‘You see, brother?’

  he said. ‘We are close. Blessed is the enemy that announces himself

  to us so!’

  ‘Blessed is your brother that keeps you alive,’ said Novas.

  ‘We know,’ said Hamilca, adjusting the programming of his gunservitor,

  ‘that the enemy fears our closing in on him. Therefore, we

  approach some place of significance to him. The documents from the

  Sanctum suggested the importance of a major intersection three

  hundred metres to our west.’

  ‘It’s the blood,’ said Varnica. ‘The bloodshed in the city finds its way

  down here, to the sewers. The enemy places himself some place

  where the blood gathers, and then... uses it? Fuels something with it?’

  ‘Bathes in it, for all we know,’ said Novas.

  Varnica checked his wargear. The daemons’ blood had burned

  pockmarks into his armour. Nothing important was damaged. One of

  Novas’s squad had suffered a deep sword wound to one arm, and the

  helmet of another’s power armour had been smashed. Varnica

  recognised the pugnacious features of Brother Solicus, a veteran of

  Novas’s command. Solicus would make a point of ignoring the minor

  wound on the forehead and the blood that trickled down his face.

  No great harm done, thought Varnica.

  ‘Move on,’ he said, and led the way westwards.

  When he looked back on the Red Night of Berenika Altis, it would

  always be the face of Gunther Kephilaes that Varnica would remember

  first. That look of surprise when he saw the Doom Eagles entering his

  realm, to be replaced with an awful smile, as if they were guests he

  had been waiting for all this time.

  The second memory would be of the writing on the walls. Kephilaes,

  later identified as an arch-heretic who had escaped repeated attempts

  to execute him on a dozen worlds, had chosen for his base of

  operations a cistern in the sewers of Berenika Altis. This place, an

  enormous tank built to accommodate overflow from the sewers, had

  been drained of water so that when the Red Night occurred, it filled up

  with blood. The roof was an enormous dome carved with images of

  jewelcutters on one side, flaunting their elaborate arrays of jewellery

  and gems, and on the other a parade of flagellants lashing supplicants

  with their scourges. This dome, and every visible surface of wall and

  pillar, was covered in writing. At first it appeared black, but it was in

  fact a dark reddish brown. Every word had been written in blood.

  Varnica, like every Space Marine, had been taught that speed of

  decision was essential in the opening seconds of battle. Even before

  Gunther Kephilaes’s face had broken into that mad grin, Varnica had

  decided that Novas would pin the heretic down with gunfire while

  Varnica himself would close across the duckboards and jerry-built rafts

  that had been lashed together over the surface of the blood. Kephilaes

  sat on an island made of toppled pillars in the centre of the blood,

  hundreds of books and tattered papers lying on the broken stone or

  floating on the surface around his makeshift pulpit. Varnica could

  reach him, scale the drums of the broken pillars and get to grips with

  this heretic in a handful of seconds. He just needed those seconds,

  and the job would be done.

  A few hand signals passed the orders on to Novas’s squad, who

  immediately began to fan out around the ledge running around the

  cistern to get multiple angles of fire on the enemy.

  Varnica knew by now why Kephilaes was happy to see them. These

  intruders meant fresh blood in which to dip the quill he held in one

  gnarled hand, the white feather stained with old blood. As Varnica ran

  forwards he noted the scholarly robes Kephilaes wore, the straggly

  white hair and hooked axe-like face, the way the substance of his

  large white eyes seemed to liquefy and run in greyish tears down his

  cheeks.

  Kephilaes raised his quill and sketched a symbol in the air. The

  same symbol appeared scored into the chest of Brother Kouras of

  Novas’s squad, the channel cut deep down through the armour in the

  flesh of the Adeptus Astartes’s chest and abdomen. Kouras slumped

  to one knee and toppled forwards into the blood. Another of the squad

  ran to grab him and haul him onto the ledge. With a flourish, Kephilaes

  drew another symbol into the second Adeptus Astartes’s face, the

  faceplate of his helmet sliced into pieces and revealing the red

  wetness of the scored meat inside. The second Space Marine was

  dead before he fell into the blood behind the first.

  The gunfire began. Bolter shells erupted against the fallen pillars.

  Kephilaes drew a letter that hung in the air in lines of burning red, a

  complex sigil that formed a shield against which the bolter fire burst

  harmlessly.

  Varnica leapt from one platform to another. This one nearly gave way

  beneath him. He jumped the last few metres, scrabbling for a handhold

  on the pillar drum he hit chest-first. A few more seconds. He needed a

  few more seconds, and then it would be over, and he would know what

  the Red Night meant at last.

  He made his own handholds, the stone warping against his fingers

  as the psychic field around them leapt into life.

  Kephilaes laughed and whooped as he scrawled in the air with

  abandon. Squad Novas dived for what little cover they could find as

  deep burning letters appeared sunk into the blood-spattered stone

  behind them. The letters were in an unfamiliar alphabet but somehow

  they made an appalling sense as Varnica glanced behind him. They

  were exultations, celebrations, of some vast power that had reached

  down from the warp and torn out what little sanity this heretic had

  possessed. The white-haired lunatic above Varnica had done all this to

  extol the virtues of heresy.

  Novas fell just as Varnica closed on the heretic. A message in that

  profane alphabet appeared across his face, chest and left shoulder. It

  said that this vile thing was no longer an enemy, but was a gift to the

  Dark Gods, with a message of thanks scrawled upon it, to serve as an

  offering. Varnica could see the wet masses of Novas’s lungs pumping

  and the glistening loops of his entrails.

  Varnica roared. The hate turned white around his hands and the fire

  blazing around them was almost too much for him to control. He

  scrambled up the last of the pillars and was face to face with the

  madman.

  The man Varnica would later identify as Gunther Kephilaes seemed

  happy to see him. He held out his arms, and Varnica saw the letters

  he had carved into his own chest beneath his scholar’s robes.

  ‘Welcome,’ he said.

  Varnica punched the heretic in the face with enough force to topple

  a wall. Kephilaes did not come apart under the blow as honest human

  flesh would. Dozens
of sigils burned pain fully bright around him,

  channelling the power away from him. Enough force got through to

  knock Kephilaes to his knees. He held up a hand to beg.

  ‘No,’ the heretic gasped. ‘You do not understand. Look around you!

  You do not understand.’

  Varnica bent down and wrapped his arms around a section of pillar.

  The psychic warp around his hands made it light. He hauled it up over

  its head, and felt a thrill of satisfaction as its shadow passed over the

  heretic.

  Varnica slammed the stone down. The heretic was completely

  crushed, the last of his witchcraft protection bled away by Varnica’s

  first assault.

  Varnica felt the crunching of bones and the wet slurp of the flesh

  torn flat. Just to be sure, he lifted the stone again and hammered it

  down once more.

  Something about the deadness suddenly in the air told him this

  heretic had breathed his last.

  Their gods always abandon them, thought Varnica. In the end.

  The Red Night had been created by Gunther Kephilaes to provide the

  vast amounts of angrily-shed blood he needed to write down what his

  gods dictated to him. This was the conclusion made by the Doom

  Eagles’ Librarium after all the evidence, including the script transcribed

  from the walls by Hamilca’s servitors, was presented to the Chapter.

  Varnica had buried Sergeant Novas that morning. Novas and the

  three Doom Eagles who had died at Kephilaes’s hands were laid on

  stone slabs, anointed with medical incense to seal up the wounds

  where their gene-seeds had been removed, and lowered into the

  funerary pits where the Chapter interred their dead. Novas was buried

  with his bolter, his copy of Principles of Squad-Level Purgation of the

  Emperor’s Foes, and the shell of a bullet that had wounded him early

  in his career and which he had saved as a memento mori. Varnica had

  prayed at the graveside, and wondered how it was that an Adeptus

  Astartes, with his soul steeled against the worst the galaxy could

  throw at him, could still feel such a human thing as grief.

  Now Varnica sat among the archives of the Chapter Librarium,

  surrounded by freshly inked tomes filled with the profane writings of

  Gunther Kephilaes. Some Chapters would have destroyed the writing

  on the walls, and compelled any Space Marine who had seen them to

  cleanse himself with fire or denial until their corruption was gone. But