Hammer and Bolter Year One

by Christian Dunn

  The bodies here were clustered around one door. Hamilca moved to examine them while Novas’s squad covered all the entrances.

  Varnica took a better look at one portrait, mounted just high enough to have avoided the worst of the spraying blood. It was of a member of the Flagellants’ Guild. It was a large woman, well-fed rather than naturally bulky, whose ample bosom was encased ridiculously in an embroidered version of a penitent’s sackcloth robe. Spots of red makeup simulated self-inflicted wounds and her hair was piled up in a magnificent structure held in place by the kinds of serrated needles more properly used for extracting confessions. In one hand she held, like a royal sceptre, a scourge with three spiked chains, the implement of her guild’s craft.

  In the lower corner was a handprint in blood. It was made too surely and deliberately to have been accidental, from a flailing fist. Someone had used this wall to steady themselves. Someone wounded.

  Varnica followed the tracks through the gory mess of the floor. ‘They were following someone,’ he said as he paced carefully towards the body-choked door. ‘He was wounded and limping but he wasn’t scrabbling along like an animal, as the rest of the souls were. They were after him. The Red Night sent them after one man in particular.’

  The tracks led to the door where Hamilca’s servitors were making a survey of the various wounds. ‘They dashed themselves to death against the door,’ said Hamilca. ‘Few wounds from hands or teeth. They broke themselves here trying to get through.’

  The door had been panelled with wood to make it in keeping with the rest of the government officer, but that façade had splintered with the assault to reveal the solid metal beneath. It was a security door to keep out just the kind of frenzied assault that had broken against it.

  Varnica sighed. He did not like having to use the full range of his talents. He had always felt that a psyker should properly be something subtle, an intelligence weapon, reading or remaking minds, perhaps astrally projecting to make the perfect spy. His own talents had taken a form that he found ugly in the extreme. Still, duties were duties, and he had the best way of getting through the door that would not risk destroying evidence beyond.

  He clenched his right fist and thought of anger. The lines of the room seemed to warp around his fist, as if it was encased in a lens that distorted anything seen through it. Reality did not like it when he did this, and he had to fight it.

  Black and purple rippled around the gauntlet. Sparks crackled across the segments of armour around his fingers. The region of deviant gravity Varnica willed into being bowed and seethed as he drew back the fist that now disobeyed the laws of force and energy.

  Varnica punched the door clean off his mountings. The whole room seemed to shudder, its dimensions flickering slightly out of balance as Varnica’s psychic power discharged in a thrust of force. The metal door clanged into the room beyond.

  The Librarium of the Doom Eagles liked to classify its members’ psychic powers according to categories and strength. Varnica’s was referred to as the Hammerhand, a crude but effective power that typically augmented the Librarian’s capacity for hand-to-hand combat. Varnica disliked the Librarium’s testing of its intensity, but he conceded that it was powerful, and that it would get more powerful the more he exercised the mental muscles that powered it.

  Varnica shook out his hand as the power around it dissipated.

  Novas smiled. ‘No door is locked when one wields the Emperor’s Key,’ he said.

  ‘Quite,’ replied Varnica. The Emperor’s Key. It sounded rather more elegant than ‘Hammerhand’.

  The room he had opened was an archive. Ceiling-high banks of index cards, yellowing ledger books and scroll racks exuded a smell of old paper that almost overpowered the stink of decay.

  On a reading table was sprawled the single body this room contained. It wore grand robes that suggested high office in the planet’s government. The dead man still had a dagger in his hand, probably worn more for ceremony than self-defence. The point of the dagger pinned a handful of papers to the tabletop. Several opened drawers and scattered papers suggested he had rooted around and found them in a hurry, and in his last moments made sure that whoever found him would also find those specific documents.

  The man had torn his own throat out with his other hand. He lay in the black stain of his blood. His body sagged with decay beneath the robes now filthy with old blood and the seepage of rot.

  Varnica pulled out the dagger and looked at the documents this man had fought to call attention to, even while the Red Night was taking control of him.

  They were receipts and blueprints for work done on the sewers beneath the Jewelcutters’ Quarter, between seventy and forty years before. Varnica leafed through them rapidly. They were nothing more than the detritus of a civil service that loved to remember its own deeds.

  ‘What was he trying to tell us?’ asked Hamilca.

  ‘He was telling us,’ said Varnica, ‘to look down.’

  The first of them had a face like a knot of knuckles, deep red flesh that oozed hissing molten metal, sinewy arms that wielded a smouldering blade of black steel. It congealed up from the black mass of old blood pooling in the sewer, that drizzle of gore from the bloodshed above. Its face split open, tearing skin, and it screamed. A whip-like tongue lashed out.

  More of them were emerging. Dozens of them.

  The sewers. Berenika Altis’s greatest achievement, some said. Hidden from the world above, each section of sewer was like a cathedral nave, a monument to glory for its own sake, lit by faded glow-globes and faced with marble and plaster murals. Most cities of the Imperium would have gathered here to worship. On Berenika Altis the combined efforts of the flagellants and the jewelcutters had created instead such a place to accommodate the filth of the city.

  It was here the blood had flowed. It was here the Doom Eagles had come, following the signs left them by that unnamed nobleman who had died in the Sanctum. It was here they realised they were getting close to the secret of the Red Night.

  ‘Daemons!’ yelled Novas. ‘Close formation. Rapid fire!’

  More daemons were congealing from the blood that slaked the floor of the sewer section. They rushed at the Doom Eagles, hate in their eyes and their swords held high.

  Novas’s squad drew in close around Varnica and Hamilca. The ten Adeptus Astartes hammered out a volley of bolter fire. Three or four daemons were shredded at once, gobbets of their molten metal blood hissing against the marble walls. But Varnica counted more than twenty more daemons now charging to attack. Bolter fire would thin them out, but this was a task that had to be finished by hand.

  Varnica thrust his right hand into the complex holster he wore on one hip. The sections of his force claw closed around his hand. When he withdrew it, it was encased in a pair of sharp blades in a pincer, each blade swirling with psychoactive circuitry.

  Varnica let his psychic power fill his fists. Distasteful as it was, it was for encounters like this that he had trained his mental muscles. The air warped around his hands and the force claw glowed blue-white with its power.

  The daemons rushed closer. Novas shot another down, blowing its yowling head from its shoulders. Varnica pushed his way between the two Doom Eagles in front of him and dived into the fray.

  His force claw closed on one and sheared it in two. A fountain of red-hot blood sprayed over his armour, hissing where it touched the ceramite. His other fist slammed down, just missing the next daemon in his way and ripping a crater out of the flagstone floor. He span, driving his right elbow into the daemon and backhanding another hard enough to rip its whole jaw off.

  He imagined his fists were meteors, smouldering masses of rock, attacked to him by chains, and wherever he swung them anything in the way would be destroyed. That was the secret of many a psychic weapon – imagination, the ability to mould them in a psyker’s mind’s eye into whatever he needed them to be. Varnica needed them to be wrecking balls smashing through the hideous things that reared up around
him. Their bodies were walls to be battered down. They were doorways to be opened with the Emperor’s Key.

  Rapid gunfire sprayed around him. Hamilca’s servitors were not just scientific instruments – one had opened up, its torso becoming an archway of metal and skin within which were mounted a pair of rotator cannon. They blazed away at Hamilca’s direction, even as Hamilca himself took aim with his plasma pistol and blew the arm off another daemon before it could fully congeal into existence.

  Varnica’s shoulder guard turned away one daemon’s blade and he ducked under another. He rose, claw first, lifting a daemon above his head and letting the pincers snap open so the daemon was sheared in two. He stamped down on the blade of the first daemon and, as it fought to wrench its weapon up to strike again, Varnica drove an elbow into its face and punched it in the chest as it reeled. Purple-black light shimmered around the gravity well of his fist as it ripped through the thing’s ribs and burst out through its back.

  Hands grabbed Varnica by the collar and backpack of his armour, wrenching him down. He fought to straighten up but the strength and suddenness of the attack had caught him off guard.

  He saw the face of Novas, whose hands were pulling him down. Another Doom Eagle fired past Varnica, bolter shells blasting ragged holes in the daemon who had been about to decapitate Varnica with its blade.

  ‘Must I nursemaid you through every fight?’ growled Novas.

  The Doom Eagles now formed an execution line to bring their bolters to bear on the remaining daemons. Varnica had scattered their charge and now they were trying to regroup, or to attack in ones and twos easily shot down. A final few volleys of bolter fire brought down the remaining daemons, blasting off limbs and shredding torsos. The remnants dissolved into the mass of blood and filth that covered the sewer floor.

  Novas helped Varnica to his feet.

  Varnica clapped the sergeant on the shoulder. ‘You see, brother?’ he said. ‘We are close. Blessed is the enemy that announces himself to us so!’

  ‘Blessed is your brother that keeps you alive,’ said Novas.

  ‘We know,’ said Hamilca, adjusting the programming of his gun-servitor, ‘that the enemy fears our closing in on him. Therefore, we approach some place of significance to him. The documents from the Sanctum suggested the importance of a major intersection three hundred metres to our west.’

  ‘It’s the blood,’ said Varnica. ‘The bloodshed in the city finds its way down here, to the sewers. The enemy places himself some place where the blood gathers, and then... uses it? Fuels something with it?’

  ‘Bathes in it, for all we know,’ said Novas.

  Varnica checked his wargear. The daemons’ blood had burned pockmarks into his armour. Nothing important was damaged. One of Novas’s squad had suffered a deep sword wound to one arm, and the helmet of another’s power armour had been smashed. Varnica recognised the pugnacious features of Brother Solicus, a veteran of Novas’s command. Solicus would make a point of ignoring the minor wound on the forehead and the blood that trickled down his face.

  No great harm done, thought Varnica.

  ‘Move on,’ he said, and led the way westwards.

  When he looked back on the Red Night of Berenika Altis, it would always be the face of Gunther Kephilaes that Varnica would remember first. That look of surprise when he saw the Doom Eagles entering his realm, to be replaced with an awful smile, as if they were guests he had been waiting for all this time.

  The second memory would be of the writing on the walls. Kephilaes, later identified as an arch-heretic who had escaped repeated attempts to execute him on a dozen worlds, had chosen for his base of operations a cistern in the sewers of Berenika Altis. This place, an enormous tank built to accommodate overflow from the sewers, had been drained of water so that when the Red Night occurred, it filled up with blood. The roof was an enormous dome carved with images of jewelcutters on one side, flaunting their elaborate arrays of jewellery and gems, and on the other a parade of flagellants lashing supplicants with their scourges. This dome, and every visible surface of wall and pillar, was covered in writing. At first it appeared black, but it was in fact a dark reddish brown. Every word had been written in blood.

  Varnica, like every Space Marine, had been taught that speed of decision was essential in the opening seconds of battle. Even before Gunther Kephilaes’s face had broken into that mad grin, Varnica had decided that Novas would pin the heretic down with gunfire while Varnica himself would close across the duckboards and jerry-built rafts that had been lashed together over the surface of the blood. Kephilaes sat on an island made of toppled pillars in the centre of the blood, hundreds of books and tattered papers lying on the broken stone or floating on the surface around his makeshift pulpit. Varnica could reach him, scale the drums of the broken pillars and get to grips with this heretic in a handful of seconds. He just needed those seconds, and the job would be done.

  A few hand signals passed the orders on to Novas’s squad, who immediately began to fan out around the ledge running around the cistern to get multiple angles of fire on the enemy.

  Varnica knew by now why Kephilaes was happy to see them. These intruders meant fresh blood in which to dip the quill he held in one gnarled hand, the white feather stained with old blood. As Varnica ran forwards he noted the scholarly robes Kephilaes wore, the straggly white hair and hooked axe-like face, the way the substance of his large white eyes seemed to liquefy and run in greyish tears down his cheeks.

  Kephilaes raised his quill and sketched a symbol in the air. The same symbol appeared scored into the chest of Brother Kouras of Novas’s squad, the channel cut deep down through the armour in the flesh of the Adeptus Astartes’s chest and abdomen. Kouras slumped to one knee and toppled forwards into the blood. Another of the squad ran to grab him and haul him onto the ledge. With a flourish, Kephilaes drew another symbol into the second Adeptus Astartes’s face, the faceplate of his helmet sliced into pieces and revealing the red wetness of the scored meat inside. The second Space Marine was dead before he fell into the blood behind the first.

  The gunfire began. Bolter shells erupted against the fallen pillars. Kephilaes drew a letter that hung in the air in lines of burning red, a complex sigil that formed a shield against which the bolter fire burst harmlessly.

  Varnica leapt from one platform to another. This one nearly gave way beneath him. He jumped the last few metres, scrabbling for a handhold on the pillar drum he hit chest-first. A few more seconds. He needed a few more seconds, and then it would be over, and he would know what the Red Night meant at last.

  He made his own handholds, the stone warping against his fingers as the psychic field around them leapt into life.

  Kephilaes laughed and whooped as he scrawled in the air with abandon. Squad Novas dived for what little cover they could find as deep burning letters appeared sunk into the blood-spattered stone behind them. The letters were in an unfamiliar alphabet but somehow they made an appalling sense as Varnica glanced behind him. They were exultations, celebrations, of some vast power that had reached down from the warp and torn out what little sanity this heretic had possessed. The white-haired lunatic above Varnica had done all this to extol the virtues of heresy.

  Novas fell just as Varnica closed on the heretic. A message in that profane alphabet appeared across his face, chest and left shoulder. It said that this vile thing was no longer an enemy, but was a gift to the Dark Gods, with a message of thanks scrawled upon it, to serve as an offering. Varnica could see the wet masses of Novas’s lungs pumping and the glistening loops of his entrails.

  Varnica roared. The hate turned white around his hands and the fire blazing around them was almost too much for him to control. He scrambled up the last of the pillars and was face to face with the madman.

  The man Varnica would later identify as Gunther Kephilaes seemed happy to see him. He held out his arms, and Varnica saw the letters he had carved into his own chest beneath his scholar’s robes.

  ‘Welcome,’
he said.

  Varnica punched the heretic in the face with enough force to topple a wall. Kephilaes did not come apart under the blow as honest human flesh would. Dozens of sigils burned pain fully bright around him, channelling the power away from him. Enough force got through to knock Kephilaes to his knees. He held up a hand to beg.

  ‘No,’ the heretic gasped. ‘You do not understand. Look around you! You do not understand.’

  Varnica bent down and wrapped his arms around a section of pillar. The psychic warp around his hands made it light. He hauled it up over its head, and felt a thrill of satisfaction as its shadow passed over the heretic.

  Varnica slammed the stone down. The heretic was completely crushed, the last of his witchcraft protection bled away by Varnica’s first assault.

  Varnica felt the crunching of bones and the wet slurp of the flesh torn flat. Just to be sure, he lifted the stone again and hammered it down once more.

  Something about the deadness suddenly in the air told him this heretic had breathed his last.

  Their gods always abandon them, thought Varnica. In the end.

  The Red Night had been created by Gunther Kephilaes to provide the vast amounts of angrily-shed blood he needed to write down what his gods dictated to him. This was the conclusion made by the Doom Eagles’ Librarium after all the evidence, including the script transcribed from the walls by Hamilca’s servitors, was presented to the Chapter.

  Varnica had buried Sergeant Novas that morning. Novas and the three Doom Eagles who had died at Kephilaes’s hands were laid on stone slabs, anointed with medical incense to seal up the wounds where their gene-seeds had been removed, and lowered into the funerary pits where the Chapter interred their dead. Novas was buried with his bolter, his copy of Principles of Squad-Level Purgation of the Emperor’s Foes, and the shell of a bullet that had wounded him early in his career and which he had saved as a memento mori. Varnica had prayed at the graveside, and wondered how it was that an Adeptus Astartes, with his soul steeled against the worst the galaxy could throw at him, could still feel such a human thing as grief.