The Damnation of Pythos

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The Damnation of Pythos Page 18

by David Annandale


  He kept working out of duty, not belief. He looked up at one point, and saw that the squads had gone into the chasm. Their brothers stood guard over the cables. Kanshell looked away, trying to summon the confidence Khi’dem had said he should feel. He failed.

  And then, sooner than he would have wished, his shift ended. Evening was closing its grip on Pythos, and the moment came to return to the base.

  There was enough clear landing space at both the base and the settlement for a troop transport to be able to ferry the large numbers of serfs back and forth. When Kanshell alighted from the crowded hold, he went, for the first time in his life, looking for Tanaura.

  He spotted her near the landing pad. More supplies were being brought down from the Veritas Ferrum, and she was among those hauling plasteel crates of ammunition to the armoury that occupied the north-east corner of the base. She was looking as grim as he felt. He almost despaired, but he had nowhere else to turn, so he followed her to the armoury, and waited outside its hangar door for her to emerge.

  ‘Agnes,’ he said.

  She turned, surprised. ‘Jerune? What is it?’

  ‘I need to speak with you.’

  She took a trembling breath. She was more than exhausted and scared. She seemed defeated. ‘Why?’ she asked.

  Kanshell hesitated. Was her faith no stronger than his, then? The evening’s gathering darkness rushed forward. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing.’ He turned to go.

  ‘Wait,’ she caught his arm. She held it with the ferocity of sudden, desperate hope. ‘Tell me.’ Her need was at least as great as his.

  ‘The things that have been happening,’ he began. ‘The things that I’ve seen…’ This was more difficult than he had expected. ‘I don’t…’

  Even now, with his old belief structure in ruins, his loyalty made it impossible to speak what he felt. It was too much like betrayal.

  Tanaura helped him. ‘The secular universe cannot explain these things.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, grateful. The constriction around his chest lessened. The relief was minute, but it was real.

  ‘What is it you’re looking for?’ she asked.

  ‘Strength,’ he answered. ‘Hope.’

  She was suddenly possessed by both. ‘There is hope,’ she said. ‘And it will grant you strength.’

  ‘Will it help me against… against the night?’

  ‘It will help you face the night.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘The Emperor calls on all of us to have courage. And doesn’t it help to know that though the forces of darkness are real, so is the force of light?’

  Kanshell thought about that. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, and that admission, that first acceptance of what Tanaura preached, opened a door in his psyche. It opened a door to the sun. Yes, he thought. Yes. He had always had faith in the Emperor, but to know Him as a god was to realise there were no barriers of distance to His power. The Emperor could see him here. The Emperor could reach him here. The warmth that came with the retreat of despair flowed through his veins.

  ‘Yes,’ he said aloud. He smiled.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ Tanaura said.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ Kanshell repeated.

  That night, he was curled in his bunk, awaiting the horrors that stalked the night. He was terrified. The horrors arrived, walking on dreams of shadow. They made the sleepers gibber and sing. They made the waking scream. But Kanshell clutched a copy of the Lectitio Divinitatus to his heart, and he was comforted.

  Twelve

  Down

  Machine

  Flood

  The Iron Hands rappelled down the façade. The Raven Guard preceded them using their jump packs. It was the first time that Ptero’s Assault squad had brought its true calling to bear. The two squads from the X Legion were led by Atticus and Galba. Darras had accepted his squad’s posting as guards at the mouth of the pit with ill grace.

  ‘I mean no disrespect, brother-captain,’ he had said, ‘but why?’

  ‘Because this is a reconnaissance mission, not an invasion. And because Sergeant Galba has, of all of us, had the most intimate contact with the enemy. If the foe approaches us below, I want as much warning as possible.’

  He still believes I am some sort of psyker, Galba thought. He resented the idea, but if Atticus thought he could be useful, so be it. He knew his duty.

  He pushed off from the stone wall. Did it twitch beneath his boots? Did his heels sink into it for a moment, as if it were flesh? Did he see the relief work writhe, like a nest of serpents? No, none of these things happened. He could be sure, he hoped, of that. Yet he felt an atavistic disgust as acutely as if they had.

  He dropped another dozen metres, pushed off again, and came down on a wide ledge where Atticus and his squad were waiting. Below, the pit fell away into dark silence. The ledge was a kind of terrace outside an opening in the wall.

  ‘This is the work of unhealthy minds,’ Atticus said, eyeing the entrance. ‘We will be doing the galaxy a service by exterminating them.’

  The architecture of the entrance was as disturbing as every other aspect of the façade. Galba did not know if he was facing a window or a doorway. It rose to a pointed arch, but the sides were asymmetrical, curving in and away from each other. Looked at directly, the entrance was a ragged wound in stone flesh. Seen from the corner of the eye, it was a dance. The arch was narrow, and angled slightly off the vertical. It stabbed at the eye, and it took Galba a moment to realise the full extent of its perversion.

  ‘The sides don’t meet,’ he said, pointing. The arch was an asymptote. The sides closed with each other, then narrowed to a razor line, but they never joined. The arch was a lie.

  ‘That isn’t possible,’ Techmarine Camnus said, offended. ‘That must be a fissure.’

  ‘No,’ said Atticus. There was a barely audible whir as his bionic eye moved up the face of the building, adjusting wavelengths to adapt to the lack of light, magnifying the objects of his gaze. ‘Brother Galba is correct. The division becomes part of the ornamentation. It goes all the way up.’

  Camnus turned his own artificial eyes on the arch. ‘The building is divided into two?’ he wondered.

  ‘Worse than that,’ said Galba. He pointed to the left, then right, at other openings. Each had its own particular deformation, as if once finished, the structure had begun to melt. The arches visible in the gloom had the same infinitesimal gap. The façade, which had appeared seamless at first, upon closer inspection was a web of tiny gaps. It was a three-dimensional mosaic.

  ‘Not possible,’ Camnus said again, only now his denial was an expression of horror.

  ‘It was built into the hillside, that is all,’ Atticus said. ‘It is being held up by the earth into which it is sunk.’

  The ledge was at its widest in front of the centre of the opening. At its edge was a curved, tapering cylinder twice the height of a legionary. It looked like an enormous tusk, projecting into the empty air of the pit. Camnus walked the few steps over to examine it. His servo-arm shone a beam over the black stone. He lit up the same fractal division. What looked like an arabesque of cracks glowed. Nothing prevented the tusk from falling to pieces, unless it was that aesthetics had a gravity of their own.

  ‘Brother-captain,’ Camnus said, ‘I can think of no plausible explanation for what we are seeing.’

  ‘It is an effect of the warp,’ Atticus replied. ‘More of the leakage in this region. We should not be surprised by aberrations.’

  ‘With respect, their existence is not what is troubling,’ Galba put in. ‘It is the organised form in which they appear. Something has moulded the stuff of the warp into this shape.’

  ‘If it can affect the material world, it can be destroyed by it,’ said Atticus.

  The Raven Guard had continued further down, and now returned to the l
edge, wounding the darkness with the glare from their jump packs.

  ‘Well?’ Atticus asked. His acceptance of the other Legions was as grudging as ever. He refused to extend more than the barest courtesy. But he was working with them. Galba was relieved that he was not being called on to play the diplomat.

  No, said the unwelcome voice in his head. You are not the diplomat anymore. You are the psyker.

  Ptero said, ‘The architecture is much the same as far as this crevasse descends. Some of the structure is still buried, however. We cannot tell how much.’

  ‘Are there any openings that appear more important than the others?’

  ‘No. To the contrary…’ Ptero hesitated. ‘Each opening is different in shape from all the others. But I am struck by the impression that they are also copies.’

  ‘Copies?’

  ‘I do not want to say that this building was created through replication.’

  ‘Yet you have just done so.’

  ‘Unwillingly, as I said.’

  Atticus made the electronic grunt that was his equivalent of a snort. ‘These are speculations that might have interested remembrancers. They do nothing to advance our campaign.’ He marched to the opening. The squads fell in behind him.

  Crossing the threshold felt like penetrating a membrane. Galba expected to find himself in a narrow tunnel, expected the walls to contract, then spasm, a gag reflex to expel the intruders. Instead, the squads were in a vast chamber. From without, the interior had appeared to be in total darkness. Inside, there was faint illumination. A dull red wash, light from blood, filled the space, overwhelming the feeble glow from the exterior. The ceiling was a distant vault, supported by pillars that all leaned off the vertical. The walls were hundreds of metres away to the left and right. Fifty metres forwards was a blank impassivity. The back wall corresponded with the rise of the plateau. Behind them, the wall was broken up by rows of the twisted arch openings.

  ‘Auspex,’ said Atticus.

  ‘Nothing,’ Camnus answered.

  ‘Energy sources?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Naturally. What can you tell me, Techmarine?’

  ‘Captain, even this space defies a coherent interpretation. The readings are contradictory and keep shifting.’

  Atticus nodded. ‘What was true moments ago is true now. The warp is at work here. What it has created is stable, so we shall navigate it until we find the enemy where he cowers from our advance.’

  They moved off. Straight ahead, near the rear wall, a ramp descended to the next level. Its slope was steep. The sharp diagonal took the legionaries down into a chamber identical to the one above. There was a ramp here, too, taking them to another space, another twin. And then another ramp.

  The pattern very quickly became dizzying. If it were not for the variations in the angles of the twisted pillars, Galba might have started to think they were descending through the same vast room over and over again. There was an eerie purposefulness to the reproduction of the chambers. There was meaning here, though he could not guess what it was. He was very conscious of the size of the rooms. They were enclosures, yet they were vast, and so they became an incarnation of the idea of space. As they repeated, they gestured towards the infinite. There was nothing functional about them. There was nothing stored in them. But they did mean something. There were voices that had shaped this stone. There was intent that had bathed it in uniform, shadowless crimson.

  Atticus was not interested in the voices or what they had to say. His one purpose was to march and kill. He would bring the rational to Pythos in the form of unblinking destruction. Galba was not satisfied. He wanted to understand. If they did not know what they were fighting, how could they hope to destroy it? Perhaps, if he could hear what was being said, he would know how to cast those words into silence.

  If he knew what this building meant, he might be able to anticipate its attack.

  They reached the bottom level. Several floors up, the exterior openings had begun to be blocked by earth and rock. The squads were now in the still-buried depths of the structure. The glow remained unaltered. This room was the close kin to all the others through which they had passed, but it had no windows at all. Instead, the exterior wall had a single, circular opening, giving onto a stone tunnel leading towards the centre of the plateau. Its shape made Galba think more of a pipe than a passageway. It advanced only about fifteen metres before a cave-in blocked the way. There were no other paths. Their journey ended here.

  ‘I still have no readings,’ Camnus said before Atticus asked.

  The captain said nothing for a moment. His helmet lenses appeared to shine with a brighter red, piercing the ambient glow with his frustration. ‘This ruin was uncovered by means that were not natural. There was a force at work. Its source must be somewhere.’

  ‘But perhaps not here,’ Camnus suggested. ‘The enemy could be operating at some distance from here.’

  ‘Where? To what end?’ Atticus did not sound as if he were expecting answers.

  Galba looked at the curve of the pipe’s walls. There was something about the design of the stonework that nagged at him. He examined it more closely. It was real brickwork here, not the impossible construction of the main ruins. The seams were almost invisible, the stones meeting in perfect joins without need for mortar. And each stone was carved with the image of a room like the ones in which he had just stood. There were the pillars, the rows of windows, the vast space, so reduced that they were just abstract lines.

  Lines that connected.

  Like a circuit.

  The light dawned. ‘This is a machine,’ Galba said.

  ‘A machine,’ Atticus repeated, as if Galba had blasphemed.

  ‘Look.’ He pointed to the walls. ‘We have been seeing so much repetition, and spaces that make no sense on their own. They are meant to work together. Like cells.’

  ‘To do what?’ Camnus asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Galba admitted. ‘But we can see the energy that is filling them.’

  ‘I see nothing that cannot be explained by the vagaries of the warp,’ said Atticus. ‘If it is a machine, it is an inert one, and this knowledge is useless to me.’ He strode back down the pipe, towards the chamber. ‘In fact, this entire action has been useless. This structure is dead. We must seek our enemy elsewhere.’

  Galba hung back for a moment. He ran a gauntlet over the rubble blocking the way. It crumbled to the touch, looser than he had imagined, though shifting it would still be a major undertaking. He noticed that the Raven Guard were also waiting. ‘Something?’ Ptero asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You sense nothing?’ Ptero had removed his helmet, and was watching Galba closely.

  ‘No.’ The other warrior’s focused stare made him uncomfortable. ‘Do you?’

  ‘I do not.’ The Raven Guard’s answer seemed incomplete.

  Galba headed off to rejoin his squad. He took three steps, and Ptero spoke again, completing the response. ‘Doesn’t it seem like we should?’

  ‘No,’ Galba told him, more quickly, and with more emphasis than he intended. No, he repeated to himself as he picked up his pace. No.

  As the squads climbed back up the last ramp, the denial matched the rhythm of the thuds of his boots against stone. It sounded far more hollow. He was not sure what Ptero was implying. He had his suspicions. He rejected them all. Yet he also felt that, at a level neither of them understood, the Raven Guard was correct. Galba should sense something. All of them should. Atticus was wrong. The machine was not inert. It might be dormant. Galba suspected it was poised. There was energy here beyond a sick glow. There had to be. In this he agreed with his captain: the revelation of the structure was itself evidence of great power at work. He and his battle-brothers were moving through its domain. They had not found the enemy they expected. Perhaps they were inside it.

 
What will you tell the captain? he asked himself. How will you convince him that this is the enemy. Will you tell him it is a form of Titan? Is that what you believe?

  He did not know. He was not sure what he believed, but as the Iron Hands entered the first of the cells above the foundation level, he was filled with a terrible sense of urgency. There was a threat here. Atticus had to take it with the utmost seriousness.

  He had sensed nothing when Ptero had spoken to him. But he felt it now. It’s coming, the inner voice said. The words were as clear as if they had been spoken aloud. The voice did not sound like his own. Warn them, it said. It was the rasp of rusted hinges, crumbling skulls, and bitter stone. Warn them, it said, and a thing of thoughts and iron murder parted its lips in an anticipatory grin. Galba’s denial evaporated. The sound of his breath became deafening inside his helmet. Festering teeth gnawed at his consciousness. Warn them, said the whisper. It’s coming, said the whisper, and once again he could see it, hovering just behind the crimson glow. The taste of shadows filled his mouth. Look to your right.

  He looked. He faced the blocked windows. There was nothing to see.

  Warn them.

  ‘Captain!’ he called. ‘The exterior wall! We are under attack!’

  The legionaries rotated as a single unit, bolters ready. There were five rows of arches, ten openings in each row. Gun barrels panned and tilted, trying to cover a huge field of attack. Nothing showed in the red wash. There was no sound.

  ‘Brother-sergeant?’ Atticus said over the combat channel. ‘What have you detected?’

  Galba hesitated. The urgency was still growing. Something was rushing at them like a mag-lev train. ‘I…’ he said, and that was all. He could be no more precise. He could not pinpoint the source of the attack.

  The sound arrived. It was a scrabbling crunch of stone and scrape of earth. It was massive, a rogue wave of gravel. The chamber shook with the reverberations. Then rubble burst inward from all the arches. Behind it came the invading force. The creatures resembled maggots. They were pale, the length of a man and as thick as an armoured Space Marine. Though they had no eyes, they had heads of a kind, and above and beneath them were pairs of forcipules, short legs angled towards each other and extending just beyond the circular, saw-toothed mouths. They snapped together with the speed of a fly’s beating wings. Their edges rubbed, creating a noise like thousands of sabres forever being pulled from scabbards.

 

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