by Various
‘First priority is survival,’ said Dvorn.
‘Where is your faith, brother?’ said Haulvarn with a reproachful smile. ‘Faith is the shield that never falters! Bear it up, brothers! Bear it up!’
Dvorn hefted his Nemesis hammer in both hands. ‘Keep the shield,’ he said. ‘I’ll stick to this.’
Alaric kicked open one of the doors leading off from the corridor. He glimpsed dusty, endless darkness beyond, an abandoned crew deck or cargo bay. He took shelter in the doorway as the howling grew closer, accompanied by the clatter of metal-shod feet on the floor. Sounds came from the other direction, too, this time the rhythmic hammering of guns or clubs on the walls.
‘Hyrk has wasted little time,’ said Alaric. ‘Barely a month ago, he took this ship. Already it is crewed by the less-than-human.’
‘Not for long,’ said Dvorn. He looked down at Visical, who was crouching in another doorway, incinerator held ready to spray fire into the darkness. ‘You were saying?’
‘I am the hammer!’ said Visical, voice returned and competing with the growing din. ‘I am the shield! I am the mail about His fist! I am the point of His spear!’
‘I see them!’ yelled Haulvarn.
Alaric saw them, too. They had once been the crew of the Merciless, servants of the Emperor aboard a loyal warship. Now nothing remained of their humanity. The first glimpse Alaric had was of asymmetrical bodies, limbs moving in impossible configurations, stretched and torn naval uniforms wrapped around random tangles of bone and sinew.
He saw the stitches and the sutures. The humans they had once been had been cut up and rearranged. A torso was no more than an anchor for a random splay of limbs. Three heads were mounted on one set of shoulders, the jaws replaced with shoulder blades and ribs to form sets of bony mandibles. A nest of razor-sharp bone scrabbled along the ceiling on dozens of hands.
‘This side, too!’ shouted Dvorn, who was facing the other way down the corridor.
‘Greet them well!’ ordered Alaric.
The Grey Knights opened fire. The air was shredded by the reports of the storm bolters mounted onto the backs of their wrists. A wave of heat from Visical’s incinerator blistered the rust off the walls. Alaric’s arm jarred with that familiar recoil, his shoulder hammered back into its socket.
The mutant crewmen came apart in the first volleys. The corridor was awash with blood and torn limbs. Carried forwards on the bodies, as if riding a living tide, came a thing like a serpent of sundered flesh. Torsos were stacked on top of one another, sewn crudely together at shoulder and abdomen. Its head was composed of severed hands, fastened together with wire and metal sutures into the approximation of a massive bestial skull. Its teeth were sharpened ribs and its eyes were beating hearts. The monstrous face split open in a serpentine grin.
It moved faster than even Alaric could react. Suddenly it was over him, mouth yawning wide, revealing thousands of teeth implanted in its fleshy gullet to crush and grind.
Alaric powered to his feet, slamming a shoulder up into the underside of the thing’s jaw. He rammed his fist up into the meat of its neck and trusted that his storm bolter was aiming at some vital place, some brain or heart the thing could not live without.
Words of prayer flashed through his mind.
Alaric fired.
The light was worse than the dark.
He was bathed in it. He felt it illuminating not just his body, but his mind. All his sins, his very fears in that moment, were laid open to be read like the illuminations of a prayer book.
Up above him was the dome of the cathedral. Thousands of censers hung from it, smouldering in their clouds of pungent smoke. The dome was painted with a hundred methods of torture, each one inflicted on a famous sinner from the Imperial creed. A body, broken on a wheel, had its wounds picked out in clusters of rubies. The victim of an impaling, as he slid slowly down a spear through his stomach, wept tears of gold leaf.
The light came not from the dome, but from below. Faith was like fire – it could warm and comfort, and it could destroy, Fire, therefore, filled the cathedral floor. Hundreds of burners emitted a constant flame, so the cathedral seemed to contain an ocean of flame. The brazen walkways over the fire, where the clergy alone were permitted to tread, were so hot they glowed red and the clergy went about armoured in shielded and cooled vestments.
The man who knelt at the altar was not one of the clergy. He was not shielded, and he could barely draw breath in the scalding heat. His wrists were burned where his manacles had conducted the heat. He knelt on a prayer cushion, but even so his shins and knees were red raw. He wore only a tabard of cloth-of-gold, and his head had been shaven with much ceremony that very morning.
A silver bowl on the metal floor in front of him was there, he knew, to catch his blood.
One of the cathedral’s many clergy walked up to where the man knelt. His Ecclesiarchy robes almost completely concealed him, forming a shell of ermine and silk that revealed only the clergyman’s eyes. His robes opened and an arm reached out. The hand, gloved in crimson satin, held a single bullet.
The bullet was dropped into the silver bowl. The kneeling man winced at the sound.
Other clergy were watching, assembled on the metal walkways, lit from beneath by the lake of fire. The reds, purples and whites of their robes flickered with the flames. Only their eyes were visible.
One of them, in the purple and silver of a cardinal, raised his hand.
‘Begin,’ he said, and his words were amplified through the sweltering dome of the cathedral.
The priest in front of the sacrificial altar drew a knife from beneath his robes. It had a blade of gold, inscribed with High Gothic prayers. The prisoner – the sacrifice – flinched as the tip of the knife touched the back of his neck.
The city outside was dark and cold. It was a city of secrets and dismal hope. It was a place where for a normal man – the kind of man the sacrifice had once been – to get by, rules had to be broken. In every side street and basement, there was someone who would break those rules. Fake identity papers, illicit deals and substances, even murder for the right price. Some of those criminals would open up a slit in a customer’s abdomen and implant an internal pouch where a small item could be concealed so well that even if the carrier was stripped to the waist and forced to kneel at a sacrificial altar, it would remain hidden.
The sacrifice had also paid what little he had to have one of his fingernails replaced with a miniature blade. As the priest in front of him raised the knife into the air and looked up towards the dome, the sacrifice used this tiny blade to open up the old scar in the side of his abdomen. Pinpricks of pain flared where the nerve endings had not been properly killed in that dingy basement surgery. The sacrifice’s stomach lurched as his finger slipped inside the wound and along the slippery sides of the implanted pouch.
His fingers closed on the grip of the gun.
‘By this blood,’ intoned the priest, ‘shed by this blade, shall the weapon be consecrated! Oh Emperor on high, oh Lord of Mankind, oh Father of our futures, look upon this offering!’
The sacrifice jumped to his feet, the metal scorching his soles. With his free hand he grabbed the priest’s wrist and wrenched it behind his back, spinning the man around. With the other, he put the muzzle of the miniature pistol to the back of the priest’s head.
A ripple of alarm ran around the cathedral. Clergy looked from the altar to one another, as if one of them would explain that this was just another variation on the ritual they had all seen hundreds of times before.
‘I am walking out of here!’ shouted the sacrifice. ‘Do you understand? When I am free and deep in the city, I will let him go. If you try to stop me, or follow me, I will kill him. His life is worth a lot more than one sacred bullet. Don’t make me a murderer.’
The assembled clergy took a collective step backwards. Only the cardinal did not move.
Even with his face hidden, the presence and authority that had made him a cardinal fille
d the cathedral. Vox-casters concealed in the dome sent his voice booming over the sound of the flames.
‘Do not presume to know,’ said the cardinal, ‘what a life is worth to me. Not when I serve an Imperium where a billion brave men die every day. Not when the Emperor alone can number those who have died in His name. Do not presume to know. Be grateful, merely, that we have given you the chance to serve Him in death.’
The sacrifice forced the priest forwards a few steps, the pistol pressed against the layers of silk between it and the priest’s skull. The sacrifice held the priest in front of him as if shielding himself from something the cardinal might do. ‘No one needs to know you let me go,’ he said. ‘The priests will do whatever you say. They will hold their tongues. And I will simply disappear. No one will ever know.’
‘The Emperor watches,’ replied the cardinal. ‘The Emperor knows.’
‘Then cut a hundred men’s throats on this altar to keep him happy!’ retorted the sacrifice. ‘A hundred killers. There are plenty of them out there. A hundred sinners. But not me. I am a good man. I do not deserve to die here!’
The cardinal held out his hands as if he was on the pulpit, encompassing a great congregation. ‘That is why it has to be you,’ he said. ‘What worth is the blood of a sinner?’
‘Then find someone else,’ said the sacrifice, walking his prisoner forwards a few more paces. The main doors were beyond the cardinal, a set of massive bronze reliefs depicting the Emperor enthroned.
‘Brother,’ said the cardinal, his voice still calm. ‘A thousand times this world blesses a bullet with the blood of a good man. A thousand other worlds pay the same tithe to our brethren in the Inquisition. Do you think you are the first sacrifice to try to escape us? The first to smuggle a weapon through the ritual cleansings? Remember your place. You are but one man. There is nothing you can do which another has not tried and failed before. You will not leave this place. You will kneel and die, and your blood will consecrate our offering.’
‘This man will die,’ hissed the sacrifice, ‘or I will be free.’
The cardinal drew something from inside his robes. It was a simple silver chain, with a single red gemstone in its setting. It had none of the ostentatiousness of the cardinal’s own diamonds and emeralds which encrusted the heavy golden chain around his neck. It looked out of place dangling from his silk-gloved fingers.
The sacrifice froze. Recognition flooded his face as his eyes focussed on the necklace in the cardinal’s hand.
‘Talaya,’ he said.
‘If you do not kneel and bare your throat to the Emperor’s blade,’ said the cardinal, ‘then she will take your place. She is a good person, is she not?’
The sacrifice stepped back from his prisoner. He did not look away from the necklace as the backs of his legs touched the scalding metal of the altar.
He threw the gun off the walkway, into the flames.
He knelt down, and bowed his head over the silver bowl with its bullet.
‘Continue,’ said the cardinal.
The sacrifice did not have time to cry out in pain. The sacrificial knife severed his spinal cord with a practised thrust, and opened up the veins and arteries of his throat. He just had time to see the bullet immersed in his dark red blood before the darkness fell.
The consecrated bullet ripped up into the serpent’s skull and detonated, blowing clots of a dozen brains across the ceiling.
The weight of the mutant thing fell onto Alaric’s shoulders. He shrugged it off, glancing behind him to the rest of the squad. Dvorn was breaking the neck of a thing with too many limbs and Haulvarn was shredding the last of the crewmen seething down the corridor with bolter fire. Fire licked along the walls and ceiling beyond, clinging to the charred remnants of the mutants Visical had burned.
‘Keep moving!’ yelled Alaric. ‘They know we are here!’
Alaric ran down the corridor, his armoured feet skidding on the spilt blood and crunching through corpses. Up ahead were what had once been the crew decks. Upwards of thirty thousand men had lived on the Merciless, their lives pledged to crewing and defending the grand cruiser. Between the mutiny and disappearance of the ship and the confirmation that Bulgor Hyrk was on board, only a few weeks had passed. That was more than enough time for Hyrk to turn every single crewman on board into something else.
Some of those transformations had taken place in the crew quarters. The walls and ceiling were blistered up into cysts of translucent veiny metal, through which could be seen the fleshy forms of incubating mutants. The crewmen had been devolved into foetal forms and then reborn as something else.
Every one would be different, obscene in its own way. Hyrk considered himself, among other things, an artist.
‘Would that we could burn it all,’ said Visical.
‘We will,’ said Dvorn. ‘The fleet will. This place will all burn, once we know Hyrk is dead.’
One of the cysts near Visical split open. The thing that fell out looked like two human torsos fused together at the waist end-to-end, forming something like a serpent with a lumpily deformed head at each end. For limbs it had hands attached to the sides of its length at the wrists, fingers like the legs of a centipede.
Visical immolated the mutant in a blast of flame. It shrivelled up, mewling. ‘How can honest human flesh become such a thing?’ he said.
‘Think not of how far a human is from these abominations,’ said Alaric. ‘Think how close he is. Even a Grey Knight is not so far removed from Hyrk’s creations. The line is thin. Do not forget that, brother.’ Alaric checked his storm bolter and reloaded. Each shell was consecrated, blessed by the Ecclesiarchy. Many, many more would be fired before Alaric saw the last of the Merciless.
Haulvarn had ripped a panel off the wall and was examining the wiring inside. ‘The cogitator data-lines run through here,’ he said. He hooked one of the lines into his data-slate. ‘There is a lot of power running to the astronav dome. Far beyond normal tolerances. Whatever Hyrk’s doing here, it has something to do with the dome.’
‘The dome on the Merciless is archeotech,’ said Alaric. ‘It’s older than anything in the fleet. It must be why Hyrk chose this ship.’
‘The only thing I care about,’ said Dvorn with a snarl, ‘is where it is.’
The floor shook, as if the fabric of the Merciless was coming apart and sending quakes running through the decks. A sound ran through the ship – a howl – the sound of reality tearing. The air turned greasy and thick, and rivulets of brackish blood ran down the walls of the warped crew quarters.
‘Daemons,’ spat Alaric.
‘Hyrk has torn the veil,’ said Haulvarn.
‘That is why it had to be us,’ said Alaric. ‘That is why no one else could kill him.’
The sound of a thousand gibbering voices filtered down from the decks above. Howling and inhuman, they were echoes of the storms that ripped through the warp. Every voice was a fragment of a god’s own voice, each of the daemons now pouring into the Merciless.
‘Upwards,’ said Alaric. ‘Onwards. Take the fight to them and kill every one that gets in your way! We are the tip of His spear, brothers!’
Dvorn squared up to the door at the far end of the crew quarters, hammer held ready. Though Dvorn was as skilled with the storm bolter as any Grey Knight, it was face-to-face, hammer to daemon hide, that he loved to fight. Dvorn was the strongest Adeptus Astartes Alaric had ever met. He had been born to charge through a bulkhead door and rip through whatever foe waited for him beyond.
Visical and Haulvarn stacked up against the bulkhead wall beside Dvorn.
‘Now, brother!’ ordered Alaric.
Dvorn kicked the bulkhead door off its hinges. The roar that replied to him was a gale, a storm of foulness that roared through the decks beyond.
Dvorn had opened the door into the wet, beating heart of the ship, a stinking mass of pulpy flesh lit by ruddy bioluminescence. Daemons, their unnatural flesh glowing, flowed along the walls and ceiling in a seething ti
de welling up from hell itself.
‘Come closer, vomit of the warp!’ yelled Dvorn. ‘Let us embrace, in the fire of the Emperor’s wrath!’
Knots of iridescent flesh formed a dozen new limbs and eyes every second. One-eyed, one-horned monstrosities bulged with masses of corrosive decay. Skull-faced cackling creatures with skin the colour of blood. Lithe, leaping things, with an awful seductiveness in their impossible grace.
Alaric planted his feet and braced his halberd, like a spearman ready to receive a cavalryman’s charge.
The tide hit, in a storm of flesh and corruption boiling straight up from the warp.
Xanthe knelt, as if in prayer, but she was not praying.
In the pitch-black hangar, she could pretend she was alone. A hundred more souls were locked in there with her, manacled to the floor or the walls, but they were silent. They had been silent for weeks now. At the start of the voyage, when they had been herded from the holding cells into the ship’s hangar, they had screamed and sobbed and begged for mercy. They had learned by now that the crew did not listen. The crew, who went about the ship masked and robed, had never once spoken to any of the prisoners, no matter how the prisoners pleaded to know where they were going, or what would happen to them. Even the children had given up asking.
Xanthe knew why they were all there. They were witches. Some of them were wise women or medicine men, healers and sages on primitive worlds who had been rounded up and handed over to the men from the sky in return for guns, or just to make the spacecraft leave. Others were killers and spies for hire whose skills had made them valuable to noble houses and underhive gangs, but had also made them targets for the planetary authorities. Xanthe was one of them, a spy, and though she had scrupulously avoided making any deadly enemies among the cutthroat nobles of her home world, her pains had not helped her when the Arbites with their riot shields and shotguns had purged the hive of its psykers.
Psykers. Witches. Heretics. Just by existing, they were committing the foulest of sins. Where they were going, none of them knew, except that punishment would be waiting for them when they got there.