Killing Ground w4u-4

by Graham McNeill

  'What?' he snapped, grateful the caffeine was only lukewarm. 'What's not easy?'

  'Ministering to the needy,' said Shavo Togandis. 'One feels one has accepted a never-ending task does one not?'

  'Correct, Shavo,' agreed Casuaban, leaning back. 'It doesn't get any easier. Nor should it.'

  'Quite,' said the cardinal. Togandis was sweating profusely, which wasn't unusual given his bulk, and Casuaban was forced to smile as he saw him use his staff to help propel him from the palanquin.

  Free at last, Togandis made his way to the truck and shook hands with Casuaban, who fought the urge to wipe his sweat-slick hand on his trousers.

  'Good morning to you, my friend,' said Togandis. 'Another day of serving the Emperor and his people.'

  'Another day of putting right the wrongs of the past, eh?' said Casuaban.

  Togandis shot him a strange look and nodded, indicating to the priests and servitors that made up his retinue that they should set up his mobile shrine against the hull of a burnt out Griffon mobile artillery piece that was missing its launcher.

  Serj Casuaban and Shavo Togandis were an unlikely duo, but the years following Restoration Day had seen them become, if not friends, then at least comrades in shared atonement. They had never openly spoken of what they had witnessed at the Killing Ground, but both had recognised a shared need in the other and, almost without speaking of it, they had set out to repay their debt to Salinas, one person at a time.

  Every week, they would tour the worst affected slums of Barbadus, Casuaban offering medical attention and advice to those that needed it, and Togandis preaching the word of the Emperor to those who would hear it. Initially, Casuaban had the busier time on these expeditions, but as time passed and their hardships increased, more and more people turned to the word of the Emperor to see them through the years following Restoration Day.

  No soldiers travelled with Casuaban, only a driver and a handful of servitors for lifting and basic security, a situation for which he had Pascal Blaise to thank. Togandis travelled with a little less austerity, riding in a palanquin of engraved wood and silver, followed by a chanting coterie of priests and lobotomised censer bearers.

  'You're late getting here today,' said Casuaban without reproach.

  'Yes,' said Togandis, 'my somnambulating was plagued with phantasmagoria.'

  Casuaban threaded his way through the cardinal's words and nodded as he said, 'You had a bad dream?'

  'That scarcely covers the details, my Hippocratic friend.'

  'A nightmare?' asked Casuaban, as casually as he could.

  'Indeed. Visions of such repellence to make a man believe he is going quite mad.'

  'What did you dream?'

  'I think you know, my dear Serj.'

  'How could I possibly know, Shavo?'

  Togandis leaned in close, so that no one could hear. 'I dreamed of the Killing Ground.'

  'Oh.'

  'An exclamation of one syllable,' said Togandis. 'Well, it will suffice.'

  'What did you expect?' hissed Casuaban, taking hold of Togandis's arm and steering him away from the driver's cab of the truck. 'Keep your damn voice down. That's not a subject you should mention out loud, here of all places.'

  'Are you saying you do not dream of Khaturian?' said Togandis. 'I fear you would be lying to me if you did.'

  'You're not my confessor, Shavo,' said Casuaban, slipping a battered silver hip-flask from his jacket and taking a slug.

  'Ah, I see now why you do not recall your dreams,' said Togandis.

  'Don't you dare judge me,' snapped Casuaban, taking another drink. 'You of all people.'

  'If a man of the cloth may not judge you then who can?'

  'Not you,' said Casuaban. 'You don't have the right. You were there too.'

  Togandis nodded and stepped even closer to Casuaban. The medicae could smell the cardinal's last meal and the stale odour of his sweat.

  'I was there, yes, and not a rotation of this world goes by that I don't regret that fact.'

  'Really?' sneered Casuaban, jabbing his finger into the cardinal's chest. 'Then why do you still wear the medal? Pride?'

  Togandis at least had the decency to look uncomfortable. 'No, not pride. I wear it because if I did not then what message would that send to Leto Barbaden? You think he would balk at sending Eversham for us if he thought we were plotting against him?'

  Casuaban gripped Togandis's robes. 'Keep your bloody voice down!' he whispered. 'Or are you trying to get us killed?'

  Togandis shook his head and reached down to prise Casuaban's hands from his chasuble with a grimace. 'I did not come here to fight with you, Serj,' said Togandis.

  'Then why?'

  'To warn you.'

  'Warn me? Of what?'

  'I saw them last night,' said Togandis, 'the dead of Khaturian.'

  'In your nightmare?'

  'No, in the temple.'

  'What are you talking about?'

  'They came for me,' said Togandis. 'They came for me, but they didn't take me, although I confess I do not know why. They have power now, Serj, real power. It is only a matter of time before they come for us all.'

  Casuaban waved his hip-flask in front of the cardinal's face. 'I don't think it's me you need worry about, Shavo. Perhaps you should take a look at yourself first.'

  'This is no joke, Serj,' said Togandis. 'Haven't you felt it? Something has changed, and not for the better. This world is different now. I can feel it in every breath I take.'

  Serj Casuaban wanted to argue with Togandis, but the image of the small girl lying in his infirmary and the words she had said to him still haunted him. And hadn't he woken in the middle of the night with a pounding headache in the midst of a terrible dream in which a monster with burning eyes emerged from its cave to devour him?

  But the dead?

  'You have felt it!' said Togandis, seeing his expression.

  'And if I have? What can we do about it? You and I both know what we did, what we allowed to happen. If the dead are coming for us then perhaps we should let them take us.'

  'You want to die?' asked Togandis.

  'No,' replied Casuaban, his shoulders slumping and looking at the hostile faces that called the wasteland of Junktown home. 'Death would be easy. It's living with what we did that's a punishment.'

  'I'm not sure the dead see it that way,' said Togandis.

  Uriel and Pasanius followed Eversham through the corridors of the palace, their austerity making more sense now that they had met Leto Barbaden. Red-jacketed Falcatas were stationed throughout, their breastplates gleaming and their curved blades shining like silver, though Uriel noticed that none carried a lasgun or so much as a pistol.

  Eversham said little along the way, politely and concisely answering any questions put to him, but venturing no information beyond what was necessary. Of the Janiceps, he had said nothing more, simply that Uriel would understand when he saw them.

  At last, they emerged on the other side of the palace from which they had entered. High buildings with saw-tooth ramparts stretched away at angles to the main structure to form a triangular courtyard area. Where the palace was constructed of dark, intimidating rock, these wings were fashioned from a smooth pink stone that shone like polished granite. Narrow windows pierced the outer walls of the plain west wing, but no doorways led within and the roofs bristled with antennae.

  The eastern wing was of a different character altogether, its age obviously greater than the rest of the palace. The stonework of this wing was more ornate and a tribute to the craftsman's art: a building that celebrated the fulfilment of talent.

  Where the rest of Barbaden's dwelling was clean and sharp, this wing had grown old and decrepit, the stonework cracked and weathered like the face of an elderly statesman, its windows grimy with dust and memory. Despite the disrepair, or perhaps because of it, Uriel immediately liked the building, feeling a strange sense of connection to it, or to something within it.

  There was a bleak stretch o
f bare concrete in the space between the two wings, as large as the parade ground before the Fortress of Hera and large enough for the entire Chapter to assemble. Nothing disturbed the blunt uniformity of the space, no statues, no outbuildings and nothing to rescue the eye from the utilitarian nature of the ground save a drum tower that squatted, ugly and threatening, at the far end of the concrete.

  'A parade ground?' asked Uriel, as Eversham led them straight across the middle of the open concrete space.

  'Indeed,' said Eversham. 'This was the muster field where Restoration Day was declared.'

  'Restoration Day?' asked Pasanius.

  'When Imperial rule was officially restored to Salinas,' explained Eversham. 'A great day for the regiment.'

  'Yet you felt the need to hide it away back here,' said Pasanius.

  Eversham glared at Pasanius. 'The regiment died here also.'

  Uriel seized upon this uncharacteristic display of emotion and said, 'Died here?'

  'We were no longer an army of conquest,' said Eversham, the bitterness in his voice plain to hear. 'We were formally disbanded as a serving regiment and those that remained to bear arms were designated a Planetary Defence Force.'

  'That cannot have been easy to bear,' said Uriel, knowing the disdain that most Imperial Guard forces, wrongly, held for PDF regiments. Guardsmen called them toy soldiers, but such bodies of men were often the first line of defence against invasion or uprising. Uriel had met many a courageous PDF trooper in his time, remembering Pavel Leforto of the Erebus Defence Legion on Tarsis Ultra, a man who had saved his life.

  Simply because a soldier did not travel beyond the stars to make war did not lessen him in the eyes of the Emperor.

  'It wasn't easy,' said Eversham, his pace quickening with remembered anger. 'To be part of something magnificent and then to be nothing; can you imagine what that's like?'

  'Actually I can,' said Uriel.

  Eversham looked over at him and, realising he had loosened his tongue, simply nodded and resumed his usual guarded expression.

  Changing the subject, Uriel indicated the decaying east wing of the palace. 'That building? What is that?'

  Eversham said, 'That is the Gallery of Antiquities.'

  'A museum?'

  'Of sorts,' said Eversham. 'Somewhere between a regimental museum and a repository for items that Curator Urbican believes should be kept and put on display. It's a waste of time. No one will ever see them.'

  'That's where our armour is?' asked Pasanius.

  'So I believe,' said Eversham.

  'I think I should like to see this Gallery of Antiquities,' said Uriel and Eversham shrugged, as though the matter was of no interest to him, which it undoubtedly wasn't, thought Uriel.

  There was no further conversation between the three of them and a palpable sense of unease descended upon them. The feeling grew stronger as they approached the brooding grey tower at the far end of the parade ground.

  Now that they were closer, Uriel could see that a series of recessed bunkers surrounded it. The flat, featureless walls were unpunctuated by so much as a sliver of a window, though a single portal sat incongruously open at the tower's base.

  This was clearly their destination, the lair of the Janiceps, whatever they were.

  Uriel did not like the tower and saw that Pasanius felt exactly the same.

  An air of dread hung in the air and coils of razor wire surrounded it like thorn patches grown wild around the base of a dead tree stump.

  'What is this place?' asked Uriel, the words lingering like dead things long after they were spoken. 'The lair of a psychic?'

  'This is the Argiletum,' said Eversham, as though that were explanation enough, 'home of the Janiceps.'

  'Nice,' said Pasanius, looking at the grim edifice without enthusiasm.

  As they approached, a detachment of Guardsmen emerged from the nearest bunker and ran towards the edge of the razor wire. Now that he looked closer, Uriel saw numerous sheets of metal, which the soldiers manhandled with difficulty to drop over the wire until a clear path was created.

  Eversham led the way across the flattened razor wire and Pasanius leaned close to Uriel to whisper. 'I can't help but notice that these Falcatas are armed with more than just blades.'

  Uriel nodded. He too had seen the barrels of lasguns poking from the firing slits of the bunkers. The soldiers who had cleared them a path across the razor wire had been equipped with firearms. Was what lurked within this gloomy tower so potentially dangerous that Governor Barbaden felt the need to relax his policy of guns within the palace grounds?

  Uriel stepped from the sheet metal bridge and no sooner had they set foot within the circuit of razor wire than the soldiers behind them began to remove it, leaving them trapped at the base of the tower.

  Uriel saw it was formed from dark stone blocks inscribed with tightly wound warding script that ran the length, breadth and height of the tower. The portal that led within seemed to gape like the maw of some dreadful gateway to the nether-world, and for a moment, Uriel thought he could feel the breath of something ancient and malicious from within.

  'They have that effect on everyone,' said Eversham, sensing Uriel's discomfort.

  'Who?'

  'The Janiceps,' said Eversham, heading towards the open portal. 'Come, Governor Barbaden is waiting for you.'

  Inside, the tower was scarcely any less welcoming, its structure hollow and rising into darkness. A single shaft of light descended from the centre of the floor above and a frost-limned screw-stair of dark iron rose within it.

  The air was cool, like that of a meat locker, and the walls glistened with moisture. Uriel felt a strange sense of dislocation, for the curve of the walls seemed to stretch far into the distance in defiance of what the outer circumference of the tower should have been able to enclose.

  Uriel could feel the bitter, metallic taste of psychic energy in the air, an unmistakable actinic tang that unsettled him to the very core of his being. It was an irony not lost on Uriel that the potential for psychic power should so unsettle humans, yet without it the very fabric of the Imperium would crumble in the face of the vastness of the galaxy's unimaginable scale.

  Once again, Eversham led the way, although his stride was a good deal less purposeful as he made his way across the hard, reflective floor towards the stairs. Careful not to touch the handrail, Eversham began his ascent and Uriel followed him. The stairs were narrow and groaned under his weight, but Uriel's thoughts were focused more on what lay at their end than on any risk of them collapsing.

  Onwards and upwards the stairs stretched and Uriel knew, knew for a fact, that they had climbed higher than the tower had appeared from the outside. He heard laughter, small and childish, yet old beyond words.

  Whispers seemed to echo from the walls, but Uriel kept his mind on putting one foot in front of the other until, at last, there were no more stairs to climb.

  Uriel found himself in a gloomy chamber, lit only by the diffuse glow of sunlight that filtered through darkened windows that had been invisible from the outside. The walls of the chamber were cloaked in shadow, although Uriel could make out indistinct forms against the chamber's circumference, hooded figures that muttered nonsensical doggerel.

  Uriel's breath misted before him and the cold knifed into his bones. Once again, he wished he were clad in his Mk VII plate instead of this thin robe, which offered scant protection against the unnatural chill.

  Eversham strode to the centre of the room, where Governor Leto Barbaden stood before a reclining couch upon which lay something obscured from Uriel's view.

  Barbaden was speaking, his voice low and little more than a whisper. He turned at Eversham's approach and impatiently waved Uriel over.

  Uriel swallowed his anger once more and marched over to where Barbaden and Eversham stood, feeling the crackling psychic potential that emanated from the centre of the room. Barbaden moved to his left as Eversham stepped behind the reclining couch, and Uriel had his first sight of th
e Janiceps.

  His first thought was that this was some sort of cruel hoax and that he had been brought before some hideous mutant. Uriel's hand clenched as he reached for a weapon he wasn't carrying. He fought down his horror at the… thing before him and looked more closely as he saw a glimmer of a smile on one of the faces that looked up at him from the couch.

  She, or rather, they lay at a disturbing angle on the couch, a shapeless knotted mass of human flesh bound together in ways that anatomy had never intended. This was no mutant creature, but something conceived and grown within the womb as twin girls and upon which aberrant nature had played a cruel joke.

  Their heads were fused along the rear quarter of the cranium so that neither could look upon the other. The poor, malformed girls had two mouths and two noses; in each face an eye, well conformed and placed above the nose with a third, milky and distended eye in the middle of the forehead common to both girls.

  The brain of one girl was quite visible through a thin membrane of bruised skin that glistened and heaved in time with her breath. On the right side of her head was a rudimentary external ear, from which hung a golden earring, and their small, withered bodies lay in the grip of an embrace that their accident of birth had forced them into.

  They were wrapped in dark green robes of plush velveteen, and Uriel saw an eagle head badge pinned there, the symbol of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica. Was this the astropath who would transmit their message of return to the Ultramarines?

  Uriel was horrified at the pitiful sight of the girls, seeing the light of intelligence in the single eye of each one. The milky eye in the forehead of the conjoined girls swam with patterns like droplets of coloured ink stirred into white paint.

  Uriel had seen patterns like that once before, when he had looked through a crystal dome into the seething depths of the warp when the Omphalos Daemonium had seized the Calth's Pride in its grip.

  'Welcome, Uriel Ventris,' said the left mouth. 'I am Kulla.'

  'And I am Lalla,' said the other.

  'We are the Janiceps,' they said in unison.