by C. L. Werner
‘Your unworthy servant awaits your bidding, master,’ Bakasur told the darkness and the thing that brooded beyond the shadows. Dreadful anticipation gripped him when he felt the Great Father’s mind again reaching out to his own.
This time Bakasur wasn’t smothered beneath the flow of his master’s presence. There was no loss of identity, no threat of being consumed. Having extracted what it needed from him, now new knowledge was pouring into him, revelations that crackled like fire through his brain. The wisdom of the Great Father streamed through Bakasur’s synapses, a torrent of plot and counter-plot. The situation on Lubentina had changed at Trishala’s instigation, but where Bakasur had seen a threat the Great Father saw promise.
Trishala had tried to warn the rulers of Tharsis about the Inheritors and the Cult of the Cataclysm. Bakasur’s spies revealed that such warning had been dismissed. There would be no distress call, no appeal to the Imperium for aid. The Lubentines intended to quell their ‘rebel problems’ on their own.
Bakasur reeled at the ambitious seeds the Great Father planted in his mind. They would use this, they would harness the fear and dread of Lubentina to achieve far more than their initial design. The slow, gradual spread of the Great Father’s blessing was at an end. No more would they need to be satisfied with clutches of pilgrims waylaid before their return to the spaceport. The opportunity for a far bolder strategy now stood before them.
All it needed was the right application of pressure to make things happen.
The time had come for the Cult of the Cataclysm to emerge from the shadows.
Chapter III
From the upper reaches of the Tomb-Cutters’ Guild, Colonel Hafiz spotted a motley swarm of purple and crimson come scrambling out from the waste-runs that dipped away from the vast tomb-yards. The officer shuddered as he noted the horrible malformations that distorted the bodies of the maniacs. Though he refused to accept Sister Superior Trishala’s claims that their enemy was the product of some xenos contagion, there was no denying that they were some perversion of human stock. They crawled and squirmed through the waste channel with frenzied abandon, heedless of the acidic muck that was the runoff from the tomb-cutters’ chemical etchers. It was a sickening sight watching them trudge through the toxic filth, steam rising from their bodies as the acids burned their skin.
The searing flare of a plasma gun blasting away at the Guild Hall was a fearsome reminder to Hafiz that, however brutish and deformed the cultists were, they’d managed to arm themselves in a most formidable fashion. Much of the weaponry he’d seen them using looked to be cobbled together from mining tools and industrial implements, profanely debased towards purposes far from those ordained by the Machine God. Other weapons looked to have been stolen from the Arbites and from the stocks of Lubentina’s militia, plunder stripped from the bodies of slaughtered patrols and overwhelmed positions.
Attempting to quarantine the Cloisterfells had proven disastrous. Hafiz hadn’t anticipated an enemy as organised and numerous as that which waited in the underworld. This insurrection must have been years in the planning, for the enemy had excavated a number of new tunnels and passages, routes by which they could circle around barricades and strongpoints to fall upon the soldiers and militia from supposedly secure areas. Trying to fight them underground was a losing prospect, so with Cardinal-Governor Murdan’s approval, Hafiz had withdrawn to the surface, intending to confine their adversaries to the slumland below.
As he looked out across the funerary complex, Hafiz was confronted with the reality that even this much was proving beyond the capabilities of his soldiers. The responsibility, he knew, ultimately rested with him. He’d made the most disastrous error any commander could. He’d underestimated the enemy.
‘Alert Lieutenant Abhav,’ Hafiz told his comm officer. ‘Have his platoon concentrate fire on the crypt-presses. I want that sun gun eliminated.’
He turned back to the window as his orders were being voxed to Abhav. The crypt-presses, gigantic mechanisms of rockcrete and plasteel, were lined up across the boulevard adjacent to the tomb-yards. Their dark facades were splotched with streaks of white-grey, molten splashes of marble-dust expelled from the huge store-towers that loomed above them. The integrity of one tower had been compromised so completely that the structure now sagged at a gravity-defying angle and had spilled a huge mound of powdered marble onto the engravers’ sheds across the street.
Those store-towers had offered the first challenge to Hafiz’s plans. When the alarm had reached his headquarters that the enemy were breaking into the tomb-yards, he’d thought to send them scurrying back to their burrows with a display of force. Six Chimera armoured assault transports had been the vanguard of his attack. Two of them now stood burning in the street, blasted from ambush by missiles launched from the towers. The violence of his command’s reprisal had riddled the towers with las-fire, but even now they were a source of sporadic shots. He suspected that the enemy had breached the dispersion pipes that hung from the underside of each tower and were crawling up through them to enter the superstructure.
Out of the corner of his eye, Hafiz could see the pudgy figure of Captain Debdan moving towards the window. ‘Do you want the men to open up on the towers again?’ he asked, noticing the direction of the colonel’s gaze.
Hafiz shook his head, gesturing angrily at the tomb-yards where swarms of the enemy could be seen darting behind the pressure-kilns or boldly rushing through the glaze-showers despite the toxic chemicals puddling the floor of each stall. He saw a huge brute loping around a line of prefabricated mausoleums, what looked to be a lascannon tucked underneath his arms.
‘If we divert too much fire to the towers then that scum will just walk right in,’ Hafiz cursed.
‘We could try a counter-assault?’ Debdan proposed. ‘Use two of the Chimeras and move the men up after them.’
Hafiz grunted a caustic laugh. ‘Into that?’ He pointed at the steaming pools of acid forming between the pressure-kilns, the clouds of yellow gas venting from hoses and pipes holed by the shooting. ‘The tomb-cutters use servitors to operate that machinery and even those have to be recycled after a year. I send my troops out there and six months from now every one of them will be confined to a hospice spitting out bits of his lungs.’
‘They must be mad,’ Debdan said.
An ugly growl rattled at the back of Hafiz’s throat. Angrily he snapped off a shot with the laspistol in his hand. His target was one of the shapes slinking around by the glaze-showers, a tall rebel robed in purple. This enemy had his arms wrapped about a severed section of pipe nearly twice as tall as himself. Tied to the apex of the pipe was a loathsome icon, a fanged and leering visage, inhuman and monstrous. The colonel’s shot exploded the clay icon into a thousand fragments. A second shot pierced the icon-bearer’s neck and pitched him backwards into one of the toxic puddles.
‘Worse than madness,’ Hafiz snarled. ‘Heresy. They have done more than forsake Murdan’s authority. They’ve abandoned the God-Emperor Himself.’
The flare of the plasma gun bloomed once more from the crypt-presses. This time the shot immolated a swath of the Guild Hall’s annexe, vaporising a three-metre stretch of the building’s roof. The suppressing fire coming from Abhav’s platoon lost its intensity as most of the survivors hurriedly quit the roof.
‘Raise Abhav again,’ Hafiz ordered his comm officer. ‘Tell him to get those men back in position.’
A flurry of motion among the stacks of funerary slabs the tomb-cutters used to seal the faces of their construction drew the colonel’s attention, making him forget the plasma gun and Abhav’s routed men. It was only a glimpse, a blur, but something about the way the thing moved prickled the hairs at the back of his neck. For a moment he kept his eyes on the stacked slabs, ignoring Debdan’s questions and the vox operator’s failure to contact Abhav. His focus was entirely on the slabs and the ghastly apparition he’d glimpsed.
Horrified fascination held Hafiz when he saw the creature come sprinting out from behind the slabs, charging towards the burning wreck of a Chimera. Hafiz was amazed by the thing’s speed as much as he was revolted by its inhuman anatomy. The claw Trishala had cut from the monster in the vault didn’t begin to conjure such a nightmarish...
Hafiz was about to class the thing a mutation, but then he saw a second come loping out from the stacks, both so similar in aspect that they might have been poured from the same mould. Trishala’s insistence that the menace threatening Tharsis was alien rang once more in his ears and sent a shiver through his body.
‘Withdraw,’ Hafiz hissed, now watching the four-armed monsters slipping out from among the stacks. Just one of these things had killed two of Trishala’s Battle Sisters, its claws shredding their power armour as though it were parchment. ‘Withdraw!’ he shouted, turning from the window and seizing the vox-caster from his startled comms officer. In hurried tones he broadcast the order for retreat to his men.
‘You can’t concede the tomb-yards to these... cultists,’ Debdan objected. The captain didn’t put too much animation into his protest. He’d been after a promotion for some time and if Hafiz were dismissed for cowardice in action then Debdan might be able to jump a few ranks in short order.
‘We can’t fight them,’ Hafiz snapped. ‘Not here. Not with only a few platoons. Not against creatures that can kill Battle Sisters.’ He turned away from Debdan, barking out orders to the rest of his staff, hurrying them to quit the brief headquarters they’d established.
They had to pull out. Leave the tomb-yards to these aliens and their cult. Hafiz would bring every piece of artillery in the militia’s arsenal to bear against the zone and pound it into rubble. The area was largely uninhabited to begin with. Let the cultists have it, then bombard them from afar. It was too much to hope they’d crush the cult by such tactics, but maybe they could make them think twice about trying to gain a foothold on the surface.
Of one thing Colonel Hafiz was certain. Cardinal-Governor Murdan and his council were going to have to rethink the gravity of the problem and how much they were willing to expend to reach a solution.
From the heights of the Warmason’s Cathedral, Trishala was afforded a sweeping view of Tharsis. The cathedral was the tallest building in the city, mightier than even the Sovereign Spire. From the lowest step outside the Great Gate to the protective gargoyles that crouched atop the loftiest of its seventy bell-towers, the cathedral was one hundred and eighty metres. To this height was added that of the great summit upon which it had been built – Mount Rama. Formed from the spoil dredged up by the mines that had once been the lifeblood of Lubentina, the heap had grown and expanded until it assumed gigantic dimensions and dominated the landscape around Tharsis.
Karim Das, whose mineral exploitation swiftly eclipsed that of the other merchant guilds operating on Lubentina, gave credit for his prosperity to the wisdom and guidance of Vadok Singh. Adhering to the principles of the Warmason’s craft Das was able to accumulate a vast fortune and even marry one of his children into a noble house on Terra. To repay the bounty he’d benefited from, he set about creating a shrine to his holy patron. With the help of the Ecclesiarchy he was able to erect the Warmason’s Cathedral on Mount Rama and house within it some of the most sacred of Vadok Singh’s regalia. For those who belonged to the Cult of the Warmason, there was now a way to venerate their patron without making a pilgrimage to holy Terra itself.
The cathedral was a monolithic structure, its thick outer walls forged from plasteel and reinforced with interior balustrades of ferrocrete to support the weight of the upper floors and outer towers. Immense glassaic windows peppered the exterior, each showing fabulous scenes from the Great Crusade and the Golden Age. Colossal reliefs depicting the instruments used by Vadok Singh and the constructions shaped by the Warmason’s designs stretched across the walls. Gilded walkways and ornamented balconies jutted out from the building, hovering between the lofty bell-towers and the slopes of Mount Rama far below.
It was downwards that Trishala cast her gaze. The slopes of Mount Rama were always characterised by the throngs of pilgrims slowly ascending the approaches to the Warmason’s Cathedral. The route taken by those off-worlders seeking to pay homage to Vadok Singh was strictly dictated by revered tradition and venerated customs. The Ladder of Obeisance was the most arduous of the paths a pilgrim could choose, a winding stairway that circled nearly the whole of the mountain and counted over ten thousand steps in its ascent. Those who mounted the Ladder were considered the most pious and devoted of the Warmason’s cult, though a wealthy pilgrim could claim the same prestige if he hired one of the city’s professional penitents to make the climb for him. For those less stout of either body or spiritual conviction there were six other approaches to the cathedral, each one less taxing than the last, the least of them being the Chastened Road, which led directly from the heart of Tharsis up to the cathedral. The short journey upon the Chastened Road allowed little time for reflection or privation and pilgrims on the path, except for those brandishing the flag of their hired penitent, were subjected to the voluble scorn and jeers of the Lubentines whose habitations and vendor stands abutted the street.
Normally the indignity of the Chastened Road kept it largely free of traffic while the distinction of the Ladder meant the stairway was often a creeping mass of humanity. There wasn’t a better indicator of how much Lubentina’s situation had altered than the change that had beset the approaches to the cathedral. The Ladder was all but devoid of travellers while the easier paths and especially the Chastened Road were packed with those seeking the holy halls of the Emperor’s Warmason. Nor were pilgrims the prevailing majority of those seekers; they’d been supplanted by Lubentines, locals alarmed by the turmoil afflicting their city and hastening to the most venerated shrines. Many of the Lubentines sought to ease their minds, reflecting on the wonders of Vadok the Builder and how his works had endured through the millennia. Others sought the blessing of Vadok the Defender, to beg his protection from the trouble afflicting their city. A few came to appeal to the Warmason’s martial aspect, to find strength and courage to join the fight.
Trishala turned from her view of the city and stared through the window behind her. She watched a group of petitioners file past an onyx plinth upon which rested the Gauntlet of Vadok Singh and the stasis field generator that had preserved it for millennia. Trishala could almost see the despair rising from them; seeing them make the sign of the aquila with their hands, hearing them recite the High Gothic chants, observing them as they moved off along the angular corridor to hunt down the next shrine to render up their prayers.
The sound of Kashibai’s boots on the grated floor of the balcony drew Trishala away from the window. She returned the salute Kashibai rendered her, then directed her comrade to study the pilgrims beyond the crystalflex sheet.
‘Look at them, Kashibai,’ Trishala said. ‘How much greater would their fear be if they knew what truly threatened them?’ She turned her head to regard her companion. ‘More than just mutants and rebels.’
‘They’re frightened enough already,’ Kashibai told Trishala. Though she wouldn’t vocally contest the Sister Superior’s claim that there were xenos on Lubentina, Trishala knew she held the same attitude as Palatine Yadav on the matter.
‘When the armour of ignorance is pierced, fear is the first wound.’ Trishala closed her hand around the aquila she wore. ‘I pray the God-Emperor will spare them the truth. At least a little longer.’
‘You sound doubtful. Are you saying prayers have no power?’ Kashibai asked.
‘I am saying the prayers most apt to earn attention are those accompanied by deeds,’ Trishala said. ‘If Palatine Yadav would only give us liberty to assist in repressing these... rebels.’ She shook her head, a bitter smile on her face. ‘Our duty is here, of course. To defend the cathedral and guard its relics, especially the precious S
hroud of Singh and Warmason’s Casket.’
Kashibai nodded. ‘I recall someone once told me that there was no honour in a duty that wasn’t burdensome.’
Trishala scowled at her companion. ‘I said that to a young initiate who didn’t want to memorise her orisons.’
‘Such wisdom must surely have other applications,’ Kashibai persisted. Her expression grew serious. ‘I have faith that the God-Emperor has put us where we need to be.’
‘If I could share that conviction,’ Trishala said, ‘it would be a great solace to me. I feel that it is in battle that I can best serve the Emperor.’
Another group of petitioners bowed their way into the corridor, struggling to keep their balance in the strangely tilted hall. Though the floor was level, the angle of the walls created the illusion that the entire passage was rolling over onto its side. It was an architectural peculiarity that the Sisters had long become accustomed to, noticing it only by clumsy reactions of visitors to the cathedral.
‘Are there not other ways to earn the grace of the Emperor?’ Kashibai countered. She looked away from Trishala to acknowledge the respectful genuflection of the passing petitioners, a courtesy the Sister Superior didn’t extend. ‘Surely devotion and fealty have some value. The mine-serf working away in the dark to wrest ore from the ground to build the machinery of the Imperium, or the grox-herder tending his beasts to feed worlds he will never see.’
Trishala watched the petitioners walk to the shrine. She was always alert for some zealot whose adoration of Vadok Singh would drive him to fanatical excess. Even in times of calm there’d been those who’d tried to lay their hands upon the artefacts ensconced in the cathedral. With Tharsis swiftly losing its peaceful veneer, Trishala had posted sentinels to watch over all the major artefacts, augmenting the protection afforded by the cathedral’s acolytes. As she looked at the rotund attendant standing behind the plinth and matched him against the steady flow of petitioners, she re-evaluated the Gauntlet’s importance. A single Sister in her black power armour would present far more of a deterrent than the current guardian.