He was listening for something he did not want to hear. He did not know what it would be. It was something beyond the growls of beasts. It was something that coiled behind the night. Reality was a membrane. It was too thin, and stretching thinner as it fought to contain what pressed against it.
He pressed his palms against his eyes. Where was he finding these ideas? They were nonsense. They were relics of a dark, superstitious age. They had no place in the enlightened Imperium. Tanaura and her cronies could preach what they wanted about divinity, but he knew the Imperial Truth, and so he also knew what it had to say about these irrational terrors.
‘That’s enough,’ he whispered, barely loud enough to hear his own words. ‘Enough, enough, enough.’ The words were brittle. They crumbled like charred paper, flaking into ash. When they were gone, the false silence in the dark slithered closer. He held himself rigid, tendons popping with the effort of denial. He tried to whisper again. He tried to say, ‘There is nothing there.’ The words died before he could speak them. What if they prevented him from hearing what he feared to hear? What if he did not know it was upon him?
On all sides were row upon row of men and women lying just as still, just as terrified as he was. Anticipation was turning into madness. Within minutes of lying down, Kanshell was no longer trying to talk himself out of his fear. He was consumed by it. And still he heard nothing and saw nothing.
Nothing to hear. Nothing to see. Nothing to fear. Nothing, nothing, nothing. But the nothing was fragile. It would take little to shatter it. And when that happened, what would come? His imagination ran riot at the thought. It could not conjure an answer, so it subjected him to an avalanche of shapeless terrors, malformed deaths and creeping, dreadful intangibility. He was suffocating. His hands curled into claws. He wanted to rip the air so he could breathe again. His chest began to hitch with silent gasps. His mouth opened wide. The scream was silent. Sound was forbidden, because of what it might conceal. And still there was nothing.
Until, like insects at the edge of his vision, there was something.
Darras saw Khi’dem heading towards the rampart. He moved forwards to intercept. ‘Are you looking for something, son of Vulkan?’ he asked. He congratulated himself on keeping his tone polite, but firm. He had not given in to his instinct to open with hostilities. He walked a few steps ahead of the other Space Marine and then stopped, facing him.
Khi’dem did not force the issue. He stopped too. ‘I was going to walk along the wall,’ he said.
‘You think we might have been negligent in our defences?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Then I don’t see why this tour of yours would be necessary.’
‘Are you forbidding me access?’ Khi’dem asked.
Darras was impressed in spite of himself. The Salamander had every right to be in a blind rage, but he was calm. The question sounded more like an honest enquiry than a challenge. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I am suggesting you go elsewhere.’
‘Why?’
‘Our captain is up there. So is Brother-Sergeant Galba.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you? Do you understand the harm you do Galba in our captain’s eyes whenever you are seen in the sergeant’s presence?’
‘Ah,’ said Khi’dem. ‘I think I do now. Thank you for speaking to me, Sergeant Darras. I will do as you suggest.’
Darras waited while Khi’dem walked away. Go on, he thought. Make yourself useful and stay out of our way. He could see the logic behind Galba’s peacemaking efforts, but he saw nothing to be gained by them. There could be no relying on the Salamanders and the Raven Guard. Galba was giving in to an indulgence if he thought otherwise, one that could hurt his own reliability in the field.
Darras hoped he could make him see sense.
The night tasted wrong.
Galba stood on the eastern rampart of the base, watching the jungle. He had stood there for half an hour, trying to identify what was bothering him. It was more than the darkness that cloaked Pythos’s carnivores. He realised what it was just as he became aware of a looming presence to his right. He turned to see his captain striding his way. Atticus was the rational embodied. What was not genhanced was bionic. His existence was the triumph of science. Illogical thought broke apart as he walked. Atticus demanded discipline of reason as well as strategy, and he would have both.
Even so, the night tasted wrong.
‘Brother-sergeant,’ Atticus greeted him.
‘Captain.’
‘You are watching for something. What is it?’
Galba chose his words carefully, and doing so was duty, not evasion. He would never dissemble from the captain. But nor would he be imprecise, and he was wrestling with a frustrating vagueness. ‘I am not sure,’ he said. ‘There is a taste in the air that I cannot identify.’
‘We are in a jungle, Sergeant Galba. Given the sheer abundance of life, some confusion of scents and tastes would hardly be surprising, even with our senses.’
He had not mentioned scents. ‘You are experiencing something similar, captain?’
‘Nothing I would not expect.’ Atticus spoke without hesitation, as if this was something he had already debated on his own.
Galba hesitated, then decided he could not accept this explanation too readily. ‘There is blood in the air,’ he said.
‘Of course there is. We have seen the feral nature of this planet.’
‘But there is something underneath that taste,’ Galba insisted, ‘and I have never encountered it before.’
Atticus was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘Describe it.’
‘I wish I could.’ He closed his eyes and took a deep breath of the foetid night. He concentrated on the work of his neuroglottis as it analysed the odours at a near-molecular level. ‘The taste makes no sense,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t taste like anything.’ He stopped. That was wrong. What was there beneath, beyond the blood, yet linked to it, did have a taste. It tasted of…
He staggered. He broke through the sensory camouflage and plunged into an abyss of impossibility. ‘It tastes of shadow,’ he gasped, and the shadows filled his throat. He coughed, trying to expel them. But they were known to him now, and he could not shed the knowledge.
‘Brother-sergeant?’ Atticus asked.
Galba could barely hear him. ‘I smell whispers,’ he said. He did not know if he had spoken aloud. The shadows and whispers were the whole world. They were a synaesthetic hell. Gagging on the wet, clinging smoke of the shadows, he could not see what cast them or discern their shape. Because he did not hear the whispers, he could not understand them. He sensed the contours of words, and the malevolent stench of a language that must never be understood by anything sane. Meaning hovered just outside his awareness. It had a shape, a shape that sounded like the laughter of prey and the scream of a star.
Atticus caught him by the arm as his knees began to buckle. A strange noise buzzed and echoed around him. It seemed to be coming from the captain himself. It kept repeating. After an age, Galba realised that it was his name he was hearing. He grabbed on to that handhold of rationality and used it to climb back to steady, logical ground. Reality became solid once more. His senses righted themselves. He straightened.
‘I don’t understand what has happened,’ he said. ‘I am not a psyker.’ He disliked his defensive tone.
Atticus’s remaining organic eye fixed him with a purposeful glare. ‘Remember where we are,’ he said. ‘The barrier between reality and the warp is thin here. We cannot be surprised by effects caused by intrusions of the empyrean. It would be strange if we did not experience some kind of hallucination.’
‘This was more than a hallucination. The whispers–’
Atticus cut him off. ‘They were not whispers. That is how you interpreted what you experienced. I heard nothing.’
Because you chose not to listen, Galba
thought. Then he pushed the thought away. Atticus was right. He was reacting as if he had never heard of the Imperial Truth. There had been no whispers. There had been no shadows under his tongue. Most importantly, there had been no brush with a malign intelligence. ‘Neither did I,’ he said, agreeing with the captain and finding that what he said was true. He had heard nothing.
Then someone started screaming.
For a moment, Kanshell thought the screams were his own. His mouth was still wide open. He had his hands pressed against his ears, his eyes shut tight against the moving dark. But still he could sense the rustling flow of a million insects. He could feel the breath of lipless mouths shaping words of obscenity. So of course there was screaming.
But it was not his. His throat was locked tight by the terror of the almost-seen. He felt the visitation pass over him. It was no more substantial than a thought. Perhaps that was all it was. But an idea could be dangerous. It was thoughts and nothing more that had reduced him to paralysis. The thought ran a claw down his flesh. It scraped his heart with ice. And it was not his thought. It was not the thought of any human, yet it had come from something that knew the fears of men and women, knew their every shape and nuance and flavour, knew them as if it were forged of those very fears.
Kanshell’s breath wheezed out of his taut throat with a tiny, high-pitched whine. The idea hovered over him for a moment, and then it moved on. He did not know where it had gone, only that it was no longer trying to tempt him to open his eyes and let the madness take hold.
But someone was looking, because someone was screaming. Someone had looked upon the thing that did not exist, except as a concept, and that had been enough. The voice was male. It was hitting registers more animal than human. The man shrieked without stopping for breath. Then Kanshell heard running feet.
The thought faded. With it went the fear. In its place came a shame that was almost welcome. He lowered his hands and opened his eyes. There was nothing lurking by the ceiling. The dormitorium was as it had been earlier, only now there was stirring in the bunks. The screaming bounced off the walls, tearing at Kanshell with its pain and horror. His shame forced him into action. He jumped down from his billet, landed awkwardly, and stumbled down the aisle. The screams were coming from the mess hall attached to the dormitorium. He ran for the doorway, racing ahead of the shame. His terror of nothing had put a lie to his faith in the Imperial Truth, and he would redeem himself by bringing comfort and reason to the tormented man.
As he reached the entrance to the mess hall, the quality of the screams changed. They became ragged. A terrible wet retching choked them off for a moment, and then they started up again, at a higher pitch. It sounded to Kanshell as if there were two voices now, the screams entwining in a choral helix of despair.
He burst though the plasteel door. Georg Paert stood in the centre of the hall with his back to Kanshell. He was alone. His shoulders were shaking. His arms were up, elbows out, as if his hands were at his face. Both screams were coming from him.
Kanshell made his way between the metal tables towards the enginarium serf. ‘Georg?’ he said, trying to keep his own voice steady and calm, yet loud enough for Paert to hear over his shrieks. As he drew near, he saw that Paert was standing in a spreading pool of blood. ‘Georg?’ he said again. Calm and purpose were deserting him. The terror was returning.
Paert turned around. Kanshell recoiled. The other serf had torn his own throat apart. Flesh and muscle hung like tattered curtains. Blood soaked Paert’s tunic and hands. His mouth hung open, but no sound would ever come from it again.
Yet still there was screaming, still the two voices came from one man, and now the screams formed contrapuntal syllables: MAAAAAAAA, DAAAAAAIIIL. They created a single word, and the word was blood, and it was madness, and it was despair. And it was a prayer.
Paert fell to his knees, his life gushing from his body. He raised his hands to his eyes and plunged his fingers into them. He dug deeply and pulled, as if wrenching choice meat from a carcass. His hands full of jellied ruin, he collapsed.
Kanshell stepped backwards, his vision still filled with the worst horror, which had not been Paert’s suicide. The worst horror latched on to his reason like a cancer.
He heard the tread of ceramite boots behind him, and he turned to see Galba and Atticus. The gods of reason had arrived too late. There would be no reassurance for him now. The awe he had always felt in their presence was drowned by the worst horror. He stared at the Iron Hands, and he gave words to the worst horror.
‘His eyes,’ he croaked. ‘His eyes were screaming.’
Five
The prize
Hamartia
Perfection
‘We knew there would be hallucinations,’ Atticus told his assembled officers. They were standing in the command module of the base. The chamber was a sparse one, reduced to the bare tactical. A vox system occupied one wall, and in the centre of the room was a circular hololith table. That was all. Atticus stood before the table. He had Rhydia Erephren at his side. The hololith projector was powered up, but Atticus had not turned the display on yet. He was disposing of a distraction first.
‘We knew what would come,’ Atticus went on, ‘and it came. This system and this planet are dangerous for the weak-minded.’
‘He means you,’ Darras whispered to Galba. They were positioned near the module’s outer wall.
Galba did not answer. He thought of the ruined corpse, and of the look of surpassing terror on Kanshell’s face. It was a wonder that his serf was still sane.
‘These are the risks and costs of this mission,’ Atticus said. ‘Pythos is hostile to flesh and to reason. These are the simple facts of this terrain. Its wildlife is dangerous, and the warp is close to the surface.’
‘Did we lose many serfs?’ Vektus asked.
‘One dead,’ Atticus told the Apothecary. ‘Four others are demented, their prognosis uncertain. The one who died was unaccompanied when the suicidal fit came upon him. One of his fellows reached him too late. I have therefore issued a standing order forbidding any serf to be alone, for no matter how brief a period. Solitude is fertile ground for madness.’
Galba frowned. Atticus’s response smacked of expediency rather than conviction. It was true that the dead serf had had some time alone. But Kanshell’s account, to the extent that it was coherent, suggested that the victim had been in the dormitorium, far from alone, when reason had deserted him. Galba’s senses still carried the traces of his own experience. He knew that Atticus’s explanation for what had struck him was correct. There was no room, in the galaxy of the Emperor’s singular vision, for any other possibility. He knew this. But he felt the contrary, and this irrational instinct troubled him. It had no place in a legionary of the Iron Hands. But it was powerful enough to assail him with questions he could not answer.
‘There have been sacrifices,’ said Atticus. ‘There will be more. They will not be in vain.’ He turned to the astropath. ‘Enlighten us, Mistress Erephren.’
‘I have been tracking a fleet,’ she said. ‘The ships belong to the Emperor’s Children.’
The sound of hatred could be dead silence. Galba discovered that now. His doubts evaporated. He shared in the rage. Its purity burned away weakness. It forged unforgiving metal.
‘Go on,’ said Atticus. There was more than hate in those two syllables. There was eagerness. The captain of the Veritas Ferrum had prey in his crushing grasp.
‘A smaller squadron has detached itself from the main group. There are three ships. Their destination is here in the Demeter Sector. The Hamartia System.’
‘Tell them the names of the ships,’ Atticus said.
‘The two escorts are the Infinite Sublime and the Golden Mean. There is also a battle-barge, the Callidora.’
Galba’s eyes widened. Beside him, Darras was a study in astonishment. It was impossible that Erephren should know such
detailed information. Yet she spoke with unwavering authority. And the Callidora… Now he truly understood the fire in Atticus’s organic eye. The Veritas Ferrum had followed the battle-barge on joint missions between the III and X Legion. It was a ship all present knew well. It had once lit the void with the jewelled glow of brotherhood.
It had fired upon them in the void war over Isstvan V.
‘Do you know when they’ll reach their destination?’ Darras asked.
‘I do.’
‘We will be there first,’ said Atticus.
‘Captain,’ Galba spoke up. ‘My faith in the Veritas Ferrum is unwavering. But it is wounded. It would be outnumbered…’
‘And what madness would possess us to assault a battle-barge?’ Atticus finished for him.
‘I would not have said madness.’ Though he might have thought it, and hoped to be proven wrong. He watched the captain closely. Galba would have sworn the expressionless face was smiling.
‘Brother-sergeant Galba is right to voice his doubts,’ Atticus announced to the assembled legionaries. ‘Without the knowledge Mistress Erephren has acquired, what I propose would be worse than insanity. It would be criminal. But we know the enemy. We know his disposition. We know where he will be and when. He knows nothing of us. And he shall remain ignorant, until he feels our blade in his hearts.’
The Hamartia System was made for ambushes. Its only inhabited planet, and its innermost, was Tydeus. The forge world was a small, dense furnace of a place. Hab-domed manufactorae covered its surface like fungi. Beyond Tydeus was nothing but a series of gas giants. The largest, Polynices, was also the furthest from the star, and its gravitational force had a long reach. The outer bodies of the crowded scattered disc suffered under its tyranny. Orbits were wildly eccentric. Planetoids and chunks of frozen volatiles were in constant collision. The zone was a disordered web of shifting trajectories. For helmsmen and navigators, it was a foul place.
The Damnation of Pythos Page 8