Fist of Demetrius

by William King

  Sometimes I saw a single figure, an eldar who resembled someone I had seen in my dreams. Once it was one of the ghastly priests of the new god smiling and nodding at me encouragingly. Another time it was the haunted face of one of the xenos who had walked the city streets. I never saw them directly or for very long. I caught sight of them out of the corner of my eye, had the merest flicker of recognition, and then they were gone as if they had never been, disappeared like shadows when a candle is snuffed out.

  It was maddening. I could not be sure I was seeing anything. They were as real as the colours you see when you close your eyes and massage your eyelids and just as temporary. I glanced to my left at Anton and I could see he was queasy as well. Sometimes he looked swiftly to his right or left, as though he were trying to catch a glimpse of something that was not there, or which moved too quickly from his line of sight.

  He saw I was looking at him and he turned to me and said, ‘I don’t like this place.’

  For once, he was not whining or complaining, simply stating a fact. Normally I would have mocked him, but now I could only agree.

  ‘So you’re seeing them too,’ said Ivan quietly.

  ‘Seeing what?’ I asked.

  ‘The ghosts or dreams, or whatever they are.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Drake dropped back to march along beside us. He was troubled, and it was a measure of exactly how troubled he was that he chose to talk with us. ‘They are echoes, imprinted in the very fabric of this place, echoes of the people who were once here, of events that once happened, of things that once were.’

  He sounded utterly convinced of that and very afraid. He glanced towards Macharius doubtfully. He clearly believed the Lord High Commander was leading us towards disaster.

  ‘We’ve been in worse places,’ I said. ‘Faced worse foes. He’s led us through all of it.’

  ‘Where is the foe he can beat here?’ said Drake quietly. ‘What is there for him to out-think, to out-fight. If there was something to defeat, he could, no doubt about it, but what we face here are shadows and memories, and not even our shadows and memories but those of deviant xenos. This is a place of ghosts.’

  Despite the quietness of his speech, Macharius heard him. Without turning his head, he said, ‘We have an objective and we have an enemy ahead of us. We will face the enemy and we will achieve our objective. Of that, have no doubt.’

  ‘And what then?’ Drake asked.

  ‘We shall cross that bridge when we come to it,’ said Macharius. ‘One thing is certain. We will not give up now.’

  The corridors darkened. The road swooped downwards, descending for what felt a very long way. We kept marching. Every now and again we spotted a mark in Fenrisian runes that let us know that Grimnar had been here before us. It was strangely reassuring.

  The air became ever more close and still. I found I was sweating and the tunic of my uniform was sticking to me. I was very tired but had no great desire to sleep again. I feared what I might dream, and what I might see in those dreams.

  We came to a fork in the road and Macharius chose the right-hand branch. There was a rune there. The roadway continued downwards. I wondered about this. If these paths ran beneath the surface of the planet we were down very deep now, but some instinct told me that we were not, that we were in a place far more alien and strange. There were more forks and the path looped more. I tried to picture the convolutions of the roadways unwinding around me, and I could not; it had become too bizarre and complex. Occasionally, a cold breeze blew out of somewhere, but it never lasted long and did not provide much relief from the heat.

  It made me wonder about the eldar. Was this a natural temperature for them? It seemed possible that this heat was normal and comfortable for the builders of this odd labyrinth. But it was equally possible that the heat was the result of a malfunction in some xenos life support systems. There was ample evidence of dissolution and unmaking around us.

  In places there were still statues. Many of them had been defaced and some of them looked downright daemonic. A few looked as if their stonework and been melted and remoulded into newer and more crude shapes, and then allowed to cool and settle again. I knew of no way of making stone do this, of course, but that is what it looked like. We trudged on and I began to feel that we were the ghosts, walking wearily through some limbo. Our whole purpose in being here seemed lost in the fog of tiredness and brain-stun.

  I took a stimm tablet. As it fizzled away under my tongue I felt the alchemicals begin a losing battle against weariness. My sense of the strangeness of things began to ramp up. I was starting to feel as if somehow we were marching from one reality to another, from the world in which we had walked as men to the world of which I had dreamed.

  Multiple shadows lengthened around us, products of many difficult-to-discern light sources. The click of our boot-heels on the stone of the roadway echoed into the distance. I found myself listening for some sign that someone somewhere had heard them and was coming to investigate. None came.

  I looked at Drake. His face showed signs of awful strain as if the aura of this place were pressing down on him. He closed his eyes sometimes, and I could see his jaw moving as though he were grinding his teeth together. A faint nimbus of light played around his head as it tracked from side to side. He was still on the psychic trail of the eldar with the Fist, following it hound-like with his uncanny senses.

  At that moment, in my weariness, he looked as different from a normal man as one of the xenos. I suspect, at the end of the day, that is how most of us feel about psykers because it is, ultimately, the truth. They are different from us. They see things we don’t, experience things we cannot, wield powers beyond our understanding. I could not begin to understand how this place must feel to him. I only knew it was bad enough to me.

  Of all of us, only the Undertaker appeared untroubled. He kept moving mechanically, with no sign of weariness or emotion. Somehow, he looked right at home, a hollow shell of a man, amid the hollow shell of this alien place. Looking at him, it came to me that there are some mortal men who can be as strange and frightening in their own ways as psykers, and that he was one of them.

  Anton took a slug from his canteen, and then wiped sweat from his forehead. He looked off into the distance for a moment then said, ‘I hope we find those bastards before the water gives out.’

  ‘There are fountains here, we’ve passed them,’ said Ivan.

  ‘Yeah – but do you fancy drinking anything out of them?’

  ‘I will if I have to,’ said Ivan. ‘And so will you.’

  ‘I dreamed they flowed with blood,’ Anton said. I wondered about that because I had dreamed no such thing. I wondered how different the substance of the others’ dreams had been from mine.

  ‘You’ll drink it if you have to,’ Ivan repeated. ‘We all will.’

  We emerged from the archway and saw what lay below us. It was a vast bowl in which lay the remains of a ruined city. It looked as if an angry god had stamped his foot and smashed it. I thought of the destruction I had seen in my dreams and realised that this was an exact mirror of it. I realised something else. Down there, in the centre of the ruins, was a tower, and at its tip and down its length lights were glowing. The road ran no further.

  ‘It looks as though we have found what we were looking for,’ said Macharius. He glanced at Drake. The inquisitor nodded.

  At last, what I have so long sought is within my grasp. The Tower of Heaven stands before me and within it is the reality engine the ancients devised. It feels astonishing that I am finally here, having travelled so far and sought for so long. And yet now it is almost done. I will soon know whether the secret exists or not.

  It is clear that we are not alone here. At least one of the Space Wolves, possibly more, has followed us and is intent upon doing us harm. Talyn reports that he has seen other human troops passing into the city. They are not a huge force, yet they outnumber my own. Measures must be taken to stop them. I deploy the remainder of my w
arriors, giving them detailed instructions as to what they must do. They respond sullenly, seemingly unwilling at this final hurdle. I consider executing one or two as examples for the others, but it is pointless. I would simply be doing my enemies’ work for them.

  Instead, I remind Sileria and the others that we are trapped here, and the only way they are going to get out is if they do what I say. The argument sways them. They know there is no reasoning with the humans. They are beasts after all. They know also that it is in our best interests to fight together, and that I am their strongest warrior. Their chances are greatly increased by doing what I say, and they are at least bright enough to see that.

  Once I am sure they understand what needs to be done I step within the tower and begin to make my way towards my destiny. I still carry the ancient claw. I am unwilling to part with it. It has become a talisman of sorts for me, although whether for good or evil I cannot guess.

  I felt a sense of excitement, the sort that you get before you go into combat. It came from the knowledge that one way or another a resolution was in sight, that we would find what we came for or we would find death.

  I still felt tired but my head felt momentarily clearer, as if my brain realised it was going to have to make an effort to be alert if I were to live. I’ve heard tales of men being too tired to defend themselves. I’ve never encountered one in my career in the Imperial Guard. When the time comes, you fight for your life. Always.

  We marched down into the ruins. I recognised something about this place from my dreams. A few of the shattered buildings looked familiar, and some of the open plazas, full of rubble and oddly changed statues. I thought about what I had seen in my dream and wondered whether there had been any truth in it. Was it possible that thousands of worlds had died to provide the energy that birthed a daemon-god? It seemed insane, but then the universe often does.

  One thing was certain, something terrible had happened here. The streets were full of skeletons and they had not belonged to human beings. The bones of the limbs were too elongated, the skulls too long and narrow; the eye sockets were of a different shape. When Anton counted, the mouths held more teeth, and they were smaller than any human teeth would be.

  Some of the bones no longer looked like bones. They had a glassy, crystalline quality. I was reminded of the way some of the statues had been transmuted. Perhaps the same thing had happened here. I only know that the bones glittered in the eerie light in a way I have never seen before and hope never to see again.

  Something had killed all these people, and it had done so swiftly and terribly. A lot of the destruction was probably caused after the fact by all the usual small accidents that can happen when there is no one left to supervise a system. Fires that were not extinguished but spread, explosions caused by machines overheating and running out of control. The eldar technology looked nothing like our own, but I was willing to bet that such things could happen.

  And yet there was ample evidence to the contrary. There was still illumination. Something kept the hot, humid air circulating. Lights flickered around us, and strange glowing runes shimmered in the air, obviously written in the speech of the eldar. Whether they were warnings or exhortations, I could not say.

  We came to a halt when we saw the body. It was fresh. For a moment, in my weary, semi-hallucinating state, I feared that it belonged to Grimnar, but it did not. It was the corpse of one of the eldar whose kindred we had so recently fought. It was armed and armoured, and it looked as though its carapace had exploded from the inside.

  ‘Bolter shell,’ said Macharius. ‘It looks as though the Space Wolf has been this way.’

  ‘Let us hope he is still alive.’ I glanced around at the ruins. There was no sign of anything moving out there. No sound of anything living. In a human city, I would have expected vermin: cockroaches, rats, sewer-gibbons. Here there was nothing. I had a sense that even when the city was alive there probably weren’t any. My memories of the dream agreed with that, although I had no idea how much faith to place in that recollection.

  I had another image in my mind now, of fierce, silent stealthy warfare, of the Space Marine stalking the eldar through the ruins and being stalked in return, of two equally terrifying opponents locked in a struggle to the death. I wondered if we would come across the Space Wolf’s tortured and mutilated corpse somewhere along the way. I prayed not, not just for the sake of the Space Marine but because it would be a terrible omen and a portent of our fate.

  Ahead of us, the titanic tower rose into the strange sky. We began to move cautiously towards it, aware now of the presence of danger and preparing ourselves for battle.

  In my life I have walked through the ruins of many cities, but none were stranger than this nameless place where so many had died so long ago. It was too warm, and I was drugged and weary and the shotgun felt heavy in my hands. Ahead of us lay that huge and ominous starscraper, where it seemed our fates would be resolved.

  The wreckage of vehicles lay around us, looking like glittering broken eggshells. I pictured them flying through the air and simply crashing on the day doom had arrived. It was an image reinforced by the way some of them were embedded into the upper reaches of buildings.

  I reached down and picked up a shard. It was made of a crystal of some sort. It had broken the way glass breaks, jagged edged and unevenly layered. It felt more like glass than metal. I could not imagine beating it into shape or machining it, the way I had once machined parts in the guild factorums of Belial when I was a lad.

  It saved me. By pure random chance, bending over to pick up the piece of crystal lowered my head at exactly the moment the xenos took a shot at me. Something struck the wall behind me. Before I knew what was happening, reflexes developed in two decades of fighting on scores of worlds took over. I threw myself flat and scurried for the nearest cover. I noticed around me others were doing the same.

  Force of habit had me looking for Macharius. With uncanny swiftness, he had ducked inside one of the crystalline eggshell remains of a vehicle. I began to wriggle towards him on my belly, keeping down, feeling terribly vulnerable as the realisation of what had happened sunk in.

  Someone had shot at me. At me. They would have hit me, too, if I had not chosen the precise moment they had triggered their weapon to bend down. If I had done it a heartbeat earlier they would have had time to compensate, particularly given what I had seen of the quickness of eldar reflexes. It was possible they were looking at me now, waiting for me to raise my head so they could shoot me.

  I had a crawling sensation between my shoulders. I seemed to feel alien eyes glaring at me. I kept moving, not wanting to present a still target, wanting to make sure I was in a position to do my duty if someone attacked Macharius. A shotgun is not a good weapon for a long-range firefight, and for some reason I thought that this was the sort of fight it was going to be.

  I heard the faint hum of lasguns discharging as they fired. I heard a loud crack as Anton opened fire with his sniper rifle. I heard nothing else, no screams, no sounds of bodies falling. I still could not bring myself to raise my head from cover and look around. I had a very vivid image of it being reduced to bloody shreds by incoming fire.

  I reached the place where Macharius was and glanced around. I could see Drake lying behind a low wall nearby. There was blood on the ground near him, and I wondered whether he had been hit. I raised myself slightly, glanced around and saw nothing except las-bolts flickering at a multitude of hidden targets, and moved over to the inquisitor to see if he needed help. I dropped into position at his side, looked at him. He shook his head.

  I could see his hand was bleeding and I noticed a shard of sharp-edged crystal lying near him. He must have cut his hand on it when he took cover. This was a dangerous place to throw yourself down. He was already starting to bandage it. Storm troopers were closing in around him, taking up position to protect him from potential attackers. I sensed a feral hostility behind the visors of their helmets when they looked at me. To them, anyone was a
potential threat to their master.

  ‘Cease fire,’ Macharius shouted, and we obeyed. The shooting stopped. Everyone held their position, though. No one wanted to be the first to stick his head up and potentially have it removed. We waited and nothing happened. I felt my heart beating within my chest. Perhaps the eldar were still out there waiting to shoot. Perhaps they were long gone.

  Macharius gave orders. Squads began to shift position, sweeping through the rubble around us, moving systematically to see if they could find the eldar. I held my breath waiting for the sound of screaming that would tell me they had encountered what they sought.

  Nothing came in, save, one by one, reports that the area was clear. I wondered if the eldar had just vanished or were still out there hiding and watching us. Irrationally, I began to feel as if my would-be executioner were waiting for me to stand up again, as if it had somehow singled me out to be its victim. In that spooky place, having narrowly avoided death, weary and buzzed out on the stimm drugs, it seemed all too likely to be the case.

  I exchanged looks with Drake. Under his uncanny gaze, I raised myself to one knee and looked around. I hunched my shoulders to make myself a narrower target, and I held the shotgun ready to fire at the slightest sign of movement. As I did so I realised how dangerous the situation was. There were scores of tired, heavily armed men all as nervous as me in the area. All it would take would be one sudden movement, one mistake, and there would be deaths.

  Even as that thought occurred to me, Macharius rose into view, weapons held at the ready. He tipped his leonine head to one side as though listening, glanced around casually and emerged from cover with confidence. Just the sight of him doing so was reassuring.

  ‘Well, now,’ he said. ‘At least we know there are eldar around here. Let’s see what we can do to change that.’

  Twenty-Seven