Killing Ground w4u-4

by Graham McNeill

  'Soldiers that fought in some of the most horrific war-zones in the galaxy year after year, and now they're in charge of a planet.'

  'Exactly,' said Uriel, 'all those years of killing and suddenly it's all over.'

  'Then you have to try to turn off the instincts that kept you alive all those years.'

  'Except you can't,' said Uriel.

  Pasanius sighed and shook his head. 'No wonder their planet's a mess.'

  EIGHT

  Being alone in his private library normally brought Shavo Togandis comfort and peace, but tonight he found his irritation growing with every page he leafed through. His books had always offered comfort in troubled times, but now they offered nothing beyond vague references to steeling one's soul with something an anonymous, and frustratingly incomplete, text called ''the armour of contempt''.

  Quite how one girded one's loins with such armour went unsaid and Togandis pushed the manuscript away. Flickering electro-candles sent dancing shadows around the room, the air in the library stuffy and redolent with the lingering aroma of the sumptuous repast he had consumed barely an hour before, a roasted poultry dish with a spicy sauce and fragrant side plate of steamed vegetables grown in the cathedral gardens.

  A hovering skull with glowing green lenses for eyes bobbed at his shoulder, drifting higher into the air as he sat back on his expansive and heavily padded chair. He waved at the skull and said, 'The Sermons of Sebastian Thor, volume thirty-seven.'

  The skull scooted over to the sagging shelves, a shimmering green light bathing the gold and silver leafed spines of the books, before a set of suspensor-enabled callipers reached onto the shelf and removed a heavy tome, bound in rich red leather.

  Struggling under the weight of the book, the skull deposited it before the cardinal and resumed its position at his right shoulder.

  Togandis rubbed his tired eyes and leaned forward to open the book, straining to read the tightly wound, cursive script that filled the pages. The blank book in which he wrote his notes for future sermons sat next to him, and Togandis rested his arm next to it as he scanned the text in the volume that the skull had just brought him.

  A delicate arrangement of wires and metal rested on his forearm, and from this sprouted a lightweight, extendable armature of brass. At the end of this armature was a mnemo-quill, its nib twitching as it awaited his commands.

  Fine silver wires ran from this attachment to something that resembled a portable vox-caster sitting on the desk before the cardinal. Togandis nodded as he recited lines from the book.

  'The strength of the Emperor is humanity, and the strength of Humanity is the Emperor. If one turns from the other we shall all become the Lost and the Damned.'

  As the words left his mouth, the mnemo-quill twitched and copied the words onto the blank pages of the book. He had filled page upon page with such words, words which never failed to move him, but which he felt would be precious little use in warding the palace from the intrusions of any malicious entities.

  He dreaded the thought of returning to the palace without something concrete to show for his efforts. Of course he could recite entire verses of scripture, but Leto Barbaden would sense the lie in him in a second. Togandis mopped his brow with the edge of his napkin at the thought of Leto Barbaden.

  As colonel of the Achaman Falcatas, Barbaden had been a tyrant.

  As Imperial Commander of Salinas, he was a monster.

  He could still picture Barbaden riding tall in the turret hatch of the Hellhound as it rumbled through the burning streets of Khaturian. The Marauders had been thorough in their attentions and little of the city had been left standing by their bombs.

  What was left was being finished off by the Screaming Eagles.

  Togandis closed his eyes, remembering the feel of the pistol in his hand as he walked alongside Barbaden's vehicle. The sound of lasguns and the roar of flamers sounded impossibly loud to him, but he had not fired a shot. He remembered looking at the pistol, matt black in his pink, fleshy hand, and thinking it absurd that he of all people should be carrying a weapon at a time like this.

  It was the screaming that returned to him the most, the awful, intolerable sound of another human being in agony. It seemed inconceivable that anyone could be in such pain, but these were commonplace noises in Khaturian.

  As the Eagles completed the massacre, Togandis had stumbled from the carnage and voided the contents of his stomach over the brittle, tinder-dry ground. In the hours that followed, the Screaming Eagles had walked from the ruins, their cries of victory sounding hollow to the confessor.

  In the weeks, months and years that followed, Togandis had seen many of those same soldiers in his cathedral, drawn by feelings that they dared not voice anywhere else, to speak of what they had seen and done on that Killing Ground.

  Hanno Merbal had been one such soldier and Togandis vividly recalled the terrible things that had passed between them in the darkness of the confessional: awful sins, aching regret and unbearable guilt.

  Hanno Merbal was dead, his brains plastered over the roof of a dingy bar in Junktown. Hard on the heels of Hanno Merbal came thoughts of Daron Nisato, the former commissar of the Falcatas and a man of honour and quiet nobility.

  No wonder Leto Barbaden had transferred him out of the Screaming Eagles before the mission to Khaturian.

  A guilty flush warmed his skin as he thought of how near he had come to telling Nisato everything about the Killing Ground earlier that day, the things Hanno Merbal had told him and the things he himself had seen.

  Togandis knew he was a coward, and the thought of defying Leto Barbaden had so unmanned him that he could not unburden himself of the guilt and allow Nisato to bring the truth of the Killing Ground into the light.

  He thought of Nisato's whispered words to him as the enforcer had been dismissed from Barbaden's presence: ''To whom does the confessor confess?''

  They were simple words, honestly spoken, but the consequences… Oh the consequences.

  Togandis closed his eyes and fought the tears of guilt that threatened to spill unchecked down his face. If he wept now, he didn't think he'd be able to stop: tears for the dead and, selfishly, tears for himself.

  He took a deep breath and once again scanned the pages of the book before him, concentrating on the millennia-old words of Sebastian Thor, a man for whom Togandis had nothing but admiration and whose writings had always inspired him.

  A simple man, Sebastian Thor had stood against the tyrannies of the insane High Lord of the Administratum, Goge Vandire, and had cast him down in the fiery wars known as the Age of Apostasy. Thor had become Ecclesiarch and his sermons had always been favourites for Togandis to deliver to his congregation.

  He wondered what Sebastian Thor would have made of events on Salinas and shuddered as he pictured himself being cast from his cathedral as Thor had cast the preacher from his pulpit on Dimmamar in the middle of a prayer session.

  Pushing that image away, Togandis spent the next few hours reading passages aloud for his mnemo-quill to transcribe, steadily filling the pages of his prayer book with inspirational verses and catechisms of watchfulness against the daemon and the impure.

  The glow of the electro-candles grew stronger as the light through the high windows dimmed. Togandis heard a noise through the door behind him and blinked in surprise as he looked up and saw the darkness beyond the stained glass.

  It was later than he had imagined and he still had duties to attend to. His priests and vergers would be gathering for vespers and it would be unseemly for him not to join them. His library was just off the main body of the temple, and already he could hear insistent voices from the other side of the door.

  They seemed to be calling his name, the sound muted by the heavy timbers so that it sounded little louder than a whisper.

  As he stood and wiped a hand across his mouth, he realised that the sounds he could hear were altogether too insistent. Shavo Togandis, a master of self-deception in many other regards, was honest en
ough to know that his sermons, while filled with relevance and poignancy, were hardly ones that people gathered to hear with excitement or called out to him to deliver.

  Curious, Togandis slipped the mnemo-quill armature from his forearm and gathered up his prayer book. He made his way towards the door, but as he reached for the handle some unheard timbre in the voices on the other side of the door resonated with that portion of his mind that knew fear.

  You were there.

  With sudden, awful clarity, Shavo Togandis knew what lay on the other side of the door.

  Mesira Bardhyl felt the power growing throughout the city, a malevolent vibration in the bones that grated along her nerves like nails down a blackboard. Her room was dark, yet silver threads of light, invisible to those not cursed with psychic abilities, wormed their way inside, pushing between the brickwork, oozing through the mortar and slithering beneath the doorjambs.

  Ghostly frost limned the door and her breath feathered the air before her.

  She closed her eyes. 'Please, go away. What did I do? I didn't do anything.'

  Even as she said the words, she knew that was crime enough.

  To stand by while such slaughter was enacted and do nothing about it was almost worse than pulling the trigger or slicing with the falcata. The dead were massing and whatever dreadful, terrifying thing had brought the two Space Marines to this world had forever altered the balance of power on Salinas.

  Immaterial energies were part of the fabric of the world now, enmeshed in the very warp and weft of it, and things that had once been incapable of doing more than unleashing nightmares now had a very real, very dangerous wellspring of power to draw upon.

  She could feel a dreadful force within the room, a solidity to the air that could only be caused by another presence.

  'Please,' she wept. 'No.'

  Open your eyes.

  Mesira shook her head. 'No, I won't.'

  Open your eyes!

  Mesira cried out as her eyes were forced open and she saw him: the Mourner, his black outline a stark silhouette against the soft glow from beyond her window.

  Shimmering with spectral light, his blazing eyes fixed her in place and held her pinned like a moth in a display case. The stink of smoke and seared skin filled her senses and silver flames roared into life around her, cold and unforgiving.

  In the icy light surrounding the Mourner, she saw the burned flesh of his body, the meat and fat of him running in yellow runnels from his bones.

  You were there.

  Mesira Bardhyl screamed and screamed until her mind detached itself from her senses and spun off into the darkness.

  * * *

  Shavo Togandis felt the chill of the door handle before his skin made contact with it. His breath was mist before him and he could feel the sudden cold that engulfed the room through the thickness of his robes.

  He could feel them on the other side of the door, willing him to come out, willing him to face them, to face his accountability.

  Terror filled him, his legs feeling like they might give out at any moment.

  Togandis whispered a prayer to the God-Emperor, closing his eyes and reciting verses that he had learned as a child when he had been afraid of the dark and his mother had told him that the Emperor would protect him.

  In that moment, Shavo Togandis was four years old again, wrapped in blankets in the darkness as he rocked back and forth with the simple catechisms of a child spilling from his lips to hold back the monsters.

  The words came easily, his terror reaching back over the decades to his youth and plucking the memories from the forgotten corners of his mind. With every word spoken, he felt the terror diminish and his hand gripped the frozen metal of the door's handle.

  Togandis turned the handle and pushed, forcing his unsteady legs to carry him through the door. A wave of cold air, like a winter's breath, blew past him, questing around his body like eager hands that pulled him onwards.

  He could feel the cold wind's exploration of him, but with each recitation of his childhood prayer, their ministrations grew lighter and less urgent. With his prayer book held outstretched, Shavo Togandis emerged from his library and into the temple proper.

  His words faltered as he saw that the temple was full, but that none of those gathered before the magnificent golden statue of the Emperor at the end of the nave were parishioners or worshipers, or were even alive.

  Little more than smudges of silver light, like candle flames viewed through misted glass, they had the semblance of human forms, but little more.

  'Emperor protect me,' he whispered, unwilling steps carrying him along the transept towards the altar before the towering statue of the Emperor. The fragile courage that had bloomed briefly in the library deserted him, and cold, clammy terror seized his heart once more. His bladder loosened and he felt an almost uncontrollable urge to void his bowels.

  With an effort of will, he kept control of his bodily functions, looking past the flickering lights of the intruders towards the altar, seeing his priests, vergers, confessora minoris and attendants huddled before it.

  Their faces were alight with awe at the sight before them.

  Could they not see that these figures of light were terribly, horribly wrong?

  Did they not know that they were in the most terrible danger?

  Something of the man Shavo Togandis had been before the horror of the Killing Ground stirred within his breast and he walked towards the great statue and the living people who gathered beneath it.

  These were his people and he had a duty to them.

  As he walked, he felt the heads of the ghostly intruders turn towards him, their stares accusing and their eyes filled with a newly awakened sense of malice.

  One of his priests looked up as he approached. 'Can you see them?' cried the priest. 'Angels, your eminence! Angels of the Emperor!'

  Togandis looked towards the spectral figures, horrified that such dreadful things could be mistaken for something as holy and reverent as angels. Though the meat and bone of their faces was obscured by the silver light that billowed outwards from their core, Togandis could see enough to know that these were no angels, but daemons in human form, fiends sent from the blackest pit of the abyss.

  'Stay away from them!' shouted Togandis, hurrying his steps towards his priests. The sweat on his brow chilled him to the bone and his breath came in short, hot spikes in his chest. The priests looked at Togandis uncomprehendingly, not seeing what he was seeing, and he interposed himself between them and the figures of light.

  Togandis was breathless with fear. He could feel their hunger and anger, knowing now that these were no daemons from the pit, but the vengeful dead, hungry and voracious souls come to take what was theirs by right of blood.

  His recitation of the child's prayer seemed foolish in the face of such terrible evil and part of him knew that he should just lay down his prayer book and face the consequences of his actions. Togandis felt his grip loosening on the prayer book.

  The Falcata's previous confessor, a waspish old man by the name of Thorne, had given him the book the day before he had been killed, and as Togandis looked down at it he saw the words his mnemo-quill had written there only moments before.

  He saw the strength in those words, a strength that fanned the last, defiant embers of his heart.

  'Oh Emperor, merciful father that watches over us, send us your light that we might carry it into the dark places,' he said. 'In times of need, send us the courage that fires the hearts of all servants of righteousness. Be our strength and shield, that we might in turn be yours!'

  Togandis felt the presence of his clerics gathering behind him, and their closeness gave him strength. He flipped the pages of his prayer book, reading each passage aloud with a power and clarity he had never before displayed in the pulpit.

  Though the words he spoke were simple prayers and benediction, they carried his weight of belief and thus had strength. It was a simple revelation, yet a revelation nonetheless, and su
ch things had power.

  The cold wind that had pulled him into the temple blew again, stronger this time and without the gentle inquisitiveness it had displayed earlier. A gale blew from the end of the nave, howling and fierce, and Togandis felt his robes billowing around him, the pages of his prayer book flapping and tearing with its force.

  His priests cried out as the ghostly shapes of the congregation were swept up in the maelstrom of bone-chilling light. Like wind-blown mist, the spectres dispensed with individuality and became one howling mass of gibbering faces.

  'The Emperor protects!' screamed Togandis as the anguished phantoms screamed and wailed. The sourceless wind pulled the glittering, ghostly mass around the interior of the temple, slicing the air and twisting in coils of glittering silver light.

  They gathered beneath the rose window at the far end of the nave, above the mighty bronze portals that led to the outside world, a roiling, tumbling, churning mass of light and mist. Silver tongues of cold fire burst into life around the edges of the temple, leaping from pillar to pillar and Togandis's eyes filled with tears at the sudden stench of burning flesh.

  Frost was forming on the pews before him and a skim of ice crackled in the font beside him. The priests and vergers were on their knees, hands clasped in prayer. Still their eyes were full of adoration, and Togandis knew that the terror of the visions was meant solely for him.

  Only he beheld the true face of the spirits, for they had come for him and him alone.

  The mass of spirits shot down the nave towards the altar and Togandis felt their hunger for him in every agonised wail. The hundreds of mouths ran together and the billowing light flared outwards like the wings of some terrible, avenging angel.

  'In Your eyes we are but humble servants,' screamed Togandis, the words snatched from his mouth by the cold air. 'Turn your face towards us and banish shadows, shield Your servants and protect them from the iniquities of the warp!'