[Grey Knights 03] - Hammer of Daemons

by Ben Counter - (ebook by Undead)

  “Until then, Justicar.”

  Alaric stood up to leave. The way down through the half-ruined fortress beneath the cloister was long, and it would give him plenty of time to consider Durendin’s counsel.

  “And Justicar?” said Durendin.

  “Yes?”

  “You are not dead.”

  “That is good to know.”

  “Although it may be an idea to wake up soon.”

  “This isn’t how this conversation ended.”

  Durendin smiled. “No, it is not, but then, I am not really here. I am probably elsewhere at the Eye. Perhaps I am even dead. What matters is that you are alive, and you can still do something about the situation in which you find yourself.”

  “Then, what next?” asked Alaric.

  “I cannot answer that, Alaric. I am not even here, after all. However, I think it is very likely that your situation is not a good one.”

  The Cloister of Sorrows exploded in pain.

  Alaric screamed.

  The pain was howling from one of his shoulders. He was hanging from his wrists, which were chained above him. There was nothing else to bear his weight, and one of his shoulders had come out of its socket.

  Alaric fought back the pain. He had been vulnerable for a moment and the pain had got to him, as it would to a man without the mental conditioning of a Grey Knight. His armour would normally be dispensing painkillers into his bloodstream, but he did not have his armour. He was naked. His war gear had been stripped from him.

  As he fought back the pain, he began to hear again. A deep noise like an angry ocean boiled beneath him, and he could hear the clanking of vast machinery, mixed in with sobs and screams from broken throats. The smell hit him: blood and smoke, sweat and machine oil. His mouth tasted as if it was full of iron. He could not see, but that was a problem he would deal with in due time.

  He forced his feet up, pulling up on his screaming shoulder. Slowly, he pulled himself up so that his body was almost upside-down. His feet found the roof of the cage he was in. He pushed down with everything he had, and he heard the bars buckling.

  The chain holding his hands came loose from the ceiling of the cage and Alaric crashed down onto the cage floor. He lay there for a few moments, catching his breath, gingerly testing the tendons of his shoulder. It was hurt, but it was nothing permanent. A Space Marine healed quickly. He lay on his side and let the joint slide back into place. The gunshot of pain that accompanied it was profound, but there was something triumphant in the fact that he could feel at all.

  Alaric reached up and found a blindfold tied around his face. He pulled it away and blinked a couple of times as his augmented eyes reacted to the sudden light.

  His cage was one of several hundred suspended from a great iron column down which poured dozens of waterfalls of blood. These fed the sea of blood below him, in which writhed thousands of bodies, slick with gore. It was impossible to tell if they were in agony, or in some ecstasy of worship. Daemons waded among them, hulking things with red-black skin, lashing the bleeding bodies with their whips. Corpses and parts of corpses bobbed everywhere, fished out and carried away by scuttling alien creatures with lopsided, tumoured forms.

  Slowly, the column rotated on gears that ground like thunder. The other cages had their own occupants: human prisoners, naked and weeping, old corpses, half-glimpsed freaks either alien or mutated, all of them suspended above the titanic blood cauldron. Alaric could hear droning alien prayers, pleading with the Emperor, and the ragged breaths of dying men. Tears and blood fell in a thin drizzle.

  Walls of black stone rose around the column and the cauldron. Alaric looked harder and saw that it was not stone at all but flesh, rotted black. High above, the cliff edge was festooned with barrel-sized cages, each holding a body in an advanced state of decay. Flocks of flying creatures, like oversized crows, but with ribbons of flayed skin instead of feathers, feasted on them. The decaying cliffs were riddled with tunnels and caves, and the beetlelike alien creatures scurried through them, chewing at the flesh with insert-like mandibles. The sky above was indigo, almost black, shot through with red, as if the sky itself was bleeding.

  He was in hell. Alaric had died at the hands of Duke Venalitor and woken up in hell. He had failed. Everything he had ever done, ever thought or said, and everything he might ever have done had he lived, was meaningless. He had failed as completely as it was possible to fail.

  Alaric slumped down onto the floor of his cage. He had never felt such despair. It was made complete by the fact that if he was already dead. He could not die again, and so it would never end.

  However, Durendin had told him he was not dead: Durendin, a Chaplain of the Grey Knights, a man he could surely trust completely.

  Alaric looked up. Through the bars he could see the cage above. Inside it was a huge humanoid form, one that Alaric recognised. The huge size and surgical scars matched Alaric’s own.

  “Haulvarn!” called Alaric. “Brother Haulvarn, can you hear me? Do we yet live?”

  Haulvarn did not answer. He was presumably unconscious, or dead, and like Alaric had been stripped of his war gear. Alaric tried to force the bars of his cage apart, and then to rock it from side to side in the hope of grabbing the gnarled metal of the column and climbing up to Haulvarn, but the cage was too strong and suspended too far out.

  “Haulvarn! Brother, speak to me!” shouted Alaric.

  As if in response, Alaric’s cage fell.

  Alaric kicked out in desperation as the cage plummeted towards the blood cauldron. He was slammed against the side of the cage as it hit the surface of the blood. Blood closed in around him, and hands reached in, the skin sloughing off them. Alaric kicked at the hands of the revellers, but there were too many of them. The sound of them was horrible, blasphemous prayers spilling from bloodied lips in a hundred different tongues.

  Something roared, and a whip cracked. A daemon threw the worshippers aside and stood over Alaric, leering. Alaric recognised its kind from countless battlefields. It was a foot soldier of Khorne, a “bloodletter” in the jargon of the Inquisition. Alaric remembered they carried two-handed swords as weapons of choice, but this one’s whip was just as cruel.

  The daemon recoiled as soon as the bodies were clear of the cage. The mere presence of a Grey Knight was anathema to the daemon. Even without the pentagrammic wards built into his armour, the psychic shield around Alaric’s mind pushed back against the daemon’s presence with enough violence to make its skin smoulder. The bloodletter snarled and lashed at the revellers around it, slicing off a hand here, a leg there, in its rage. Then it grabbed the bars of the cage with one hand and dragged it through the gore towards the chasm wall.

  The daemon hauled the cage out of the blood and into a cave opening. The smell was appalling, putrescence so heavy in the air that Alaric could see it trickling down the walls in foul condensation. Dark, twisted creatures scuttled towards him. These were not daemons, but some alien species, and their skin carried the brands and manacle scars of a slave race.

  The aliens dragged Alaric through the stinking tunnels into a cavern that glowed with a close red heat. It was a forge, where human and alien slaves pulled glowing weapons from vats of molten metal. Other slaves were chained to anvils, their spines twisted by years of servitude, where they beat an edge into the swords and spear tips. The din was appalling.

  Alaric saw Haulvarn’s cage being dragged through another opening, a gaggle of aliens following it.

  Haulvarn had awoken and was raging inside, trying to kick his way out of the cage.

  “Haulvarn!” shouted Alaric over the ringing of the anvils. “We are not dead! We are not dead!”

  A crowd of alien slaves pressed around Alaric’s cage as he was dragged towards one of the anvils. They were misshapen, asymmetrical creatures with a dozen eyes each, arranged without pattern around their faces, and complex mandibles that dribbled slime as they gibbered to each other in their language. A bolt was drawn back somewhere and th
e top of the cage swung open.

  Alaric tried to force his way out, but shock prods were jabbed down at him. His own strength was turned back on him as he spasmed. A single shock prod with a semicircular head was pressed down against his torso, and he was pinned in place. His muscles were paralysed, save for involuntary convulsions, and though he fought against it with everything he had left he couldn’t break free. At full strength, he would have thrown the aliens out of his way, grabbed a weapon fresh from the anvil and killed everything he saw, but he was wounded and exhausted. He did not give in, he could not, but in the back of his mind a voice told him that it was futile.

  One of the aliens, larger and darker-skinned than the rest, and evidently in charge, reached a pair of tongs into the closest forge. It withdrew a circle of glowing metal that was hinged on one side so it hung open. It was a collar.

  The alien leaned over Alaric. Its caustic spittle dribbled onto his chest.

  “Rejoice,” said the alien forge master, its Imperial Gothic thick and slurred through its mandibles, “for this shall make you holy.”

  The alien plunged the collar down onto Alaric’s throat. It snickered shut around the back of his neck. His skin hissed as it cooked under the hot metal.

  Alaric could struggle no more. His mind felt as if it was suddenly frozen. He realised what had been done to him. He knew, for perhaps the first time, what fear was.

  The human species was evolving.

  This was a truth the Inquisition went to great pains to suppress, but it could not be denied by the inquisitors themselves. Some even held the heretical belief that the Emperor planned to shepherd this evolution onwards and help the human race achieve its potential. The emergence of psychic humans created one of the critical tasks of the Inquisition: the identification, imprisonment and liquidation of emerging psykers. Every planetary governor was under pain of death to hand over all the psykers collected by his forces, whenever the Inquisition and its Black Ships came calling. What happened to the great majority of psykers herded into those Black Ships, only those sworn to secrecy knew for sure.

  A few of the psykers, perhaps one in ten or less, were strong and adaptable enough to be properly trained. An untrained psyker was a dangerous thing, an unguarded mind through which all manner of horrors could gain entry to the worlds of the Imperium. However, a properly trained psyker could guard his mind against such threats, and sometimes even make his mind far stronger than those of his fellow men.

  It was an irony, often a cruel one, that such trained psykers were essential to the functioning of the Imperium. They were the astropaths whose arcane long-range telepathy made interstellar communications possible, the soothsayers whose skill with the Emperor’s Tarot enabled them to advise on the vagaries of the future. Many Imperial citizens viewed even these sanctioned psykers with fear. Yet, in spite of the fear that followed the psyker everywhere, without him the Imperium could not function.

  To most citizens a psyker was a witch, a rogue prowling the shadows of the Imperium’s worlds to corrupt Emperor-fearing minds or bring forth foul things from the warp. A child foolish enough to display an unusual talent for magic tricks could expect his friends or family to turn him over to the local clergy. Wise women and fortune-tellers were burned at the stake on backwater worlds where Imperial servants rarely visited. Spaceship crews swapped tall tales of night-skinned humans who could rip a man’s mind out of his skull, shapechangers, firebreathers and stranger things besides. Once, long ago, a time before he could remember anything at all, Alaric had been one of those witches.

  Alaric was a psyker. All Grey Knights were. While most Space Marine Chapters made use of some psykers, only the Grey Knights required psychic potential from all their recruits. It was what made the Grey Knights capable of fighting the daemon, for a daemon’s most potent weapons threatened the soul itself.

  Daemons brought with them corruption, and fighting them exposed a Grey Knight to that corruption. They were trained to resist it, taught prayers of will-power so potent that they drove some recruits mad. Their armour was impregnated with sigils against the powers of the warp, the same symbols tattooed on their skins so that their bodies were shielded against corruption, but the most powerful defence was a Grey Knight’s psychic shield. Alaric had been taught in the very earliest stages of his training to imprison his soul in a cage of faith and contempt where no daemon could reach it.

  It was the only weapon a daemon truly feared: an incorruptible mind, anathema to the warp. The mere existence of the Grey Knights was a victory of sorts against Chaos.

  The collar fixed around Alaric’s neck was a dead, heavy thing that weighed down Alaric’s soul. It was an artefact of Khorne, the Blood God. The Blood God despised sorcery, and it despised the righteous, holy mind of a Grey Knight.

  The Collar of Khorne suppressed psychic abilities. Alaric’s shield was gone. He was still a Grey Knight, he had still trained his mind and his body beyond a normal man’s tolerances against corruption and possession, but without that psychic shield, he was ultimately defenceless.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It was a long time before Alaric could feel anything. He was somewhere infernally hot.

  Alaric was standing, and he was chained to the wall. The chamber was lit by ruddy furnaces taking up the opposite wall. Unfinished swords and sections of armour were heaped up either side of a well-scored anvil.

  “You’re not supposed to wake for a good while,” said a voice behind Alaric. Alaric tried to turn, but he was chained in place. He was dimly aware that he was still in the forge where his collar had been attached, and the iron weight of it around his neck seemed to drag him down towards the floor.

  “Where is my battle-brother?” asked Alaric through split and bloody lips.

  “I heard there were two of you,” said the voice. It was deep and gravelly, from a throat scorched by years amid the forges. “He’s somewhere in this hole, probably having the collar fixed. They had you down as witches as soon as they brought you in. Not many get the collar, you know. It’s quite an honour.”

  The speaker walked to the anvil, his back to Alaric. He was a massive man with brawny shoulders and dark skin that gleamed like bronze. Tools hung from his waist. He bent over the anvil and picked up a sword, a magnificent blade, but rough and half-finished. “I have been down here a long time,” he continued, “heard a lot of things, but it has been a long time since an Astartes graced this world. A long time indeed.”

  “Who are you?”

  The speaker did not look round. “A smith by trade. Too useful a man to kill. I guess I should thank the Emperor for that. If there’s one thing this planet needs, Astartes, it’s blades, good blades, and lots of them. So this is where I shall stay until I die, and probably well beyond, making their blades. Perhaps you’ll end up with one of mine. Believe me, you’ll know it. There are no blades like mine on this world.”

  “Where am I to be taken? What will happen to me?”

  The smith still did not turn to face Alaric. The muscles on his back snaked beneath his dark skin as he laid the sword on the anvil and took up a hammer. “Not for me to say, Astartes. Not for me to say. If I had anything worthwhile to my name, though, I’d wager it on you fighting for your life sooner rather than later. So, I’ll make you a deal.”

  Alaric laughed, and it sounded as bitter as the taste of blood in his mouth. “A deal, of course.”

  “Ah, hear me out, Astartes, unless you have somewhere better to be.”

  Involuntarily, Alaric fought against his chains.

  “I’ll make you a suit of armour,” said the smith, “the best you’ve ever held.”

  “I have armour.”

  “Not any more, and you’ve never had armour such as I can craft. Fits like a steel skin. Bends like silk. Toughened by fires as fierce as the heart of a star, strong enough to turn Khorne’s own axe aside. How does that sound? Tempting?”

  “But it will not be for free. I know your kind. Any promise from the corrupted is as
good as a betrayal.”

  “Oh no, you do not understand. In return, I ask that you seek something out for me. I dare say you will have more luck finding it out in the world than I will down here.”

  “End this,” said Alaric. “No servant of the Emperor would bargain with one such as you.”

  “Such as me? And what am I?” The smith turned just enough for Alaric to see his face in profile. His face was as beaten as one of his blades, his nose broken many times, his eyes almost hidden in scar tissue. “Find the Hammer, Astartes: the Hammer of Daemons. They say it lies somewhere on this world, and with it a hero will rise up and topple the lords of the Blood God. What would be dearer to a slave like me than to see that?”

  “Lies.”

  “The Hammer of Daemons is very real. Nothing more is known of it, but it most definitely lies somewhere on this planet. If I didn’t know better I might even say that it is right before me, chained to a wall in my forge. For you are the Hammer. Is that not so, Grey Knight?”

  The weight of the collar was too much for Alaric to bear. His head bowed as it dragged him down. Black spots flickered before the forge fires, and he smelled burning iron and bolter smoke.

  He drifted back out of consciousness, lulled into oblivion by the ringing of the smith’s hammer on the anvil.

  Karnikhal!

  That self-devouring beast! That tumour city, that cancerous glory! A great parasite oozed from the black of the earth!

  Some say Karnikhal plummeted to Drakaasi from some distant star, and grew mindless and vast over the aeons. Others claim it as some native thing, some fungus or parasite, mutated to immense dimensions by the ever-present power of Chaos. What fools are they, to seek logic in its form! The caverns of its entrails, the blood rivers oozing from its wounds, the groaning of its eternal pain, these are a face of Chaos, a face of Khorne!

  The city built across Karnikhal is a parasite upon a parasite, shanties crammed between the fatty folds of its back, spires tumbling at the whim of the beast, temples and slaughterhouses heaving with its titanic breath. All this at the whim of the mindless thing, the idiot monstrosity, the city monster that is Karnikhal!