Maledictions

by Graham McNeill et al.

  Some of the infected were still running, fleeing their more corrupted kin. They sped towards Schenk and the troopers, but did not see them. Their eyes, the ones that were still truly eyes and not sprouting vines or snapping insects, were blank with horror. Perhaps they saw the world around them enough to keep moving, but visions of a greater horror assailed them.

  The troopers opened fire before Schenk could give the signal. She did not object. Las cut into the bodies of the fleeing people. They dropped, their wounds smouldering, and their bodies erupted into sudden, explosive change. The dust of their final disintegration whipped up into the air. It spread in every direction, and Schenk saw that it was not carried by any wind, but driven by some other, unnatural impulse. Where it landed, the plague spread. The dust was how the contagion spread. She and Seroff had escaped its taint, but now she saw the unmistakeable evidence of its power.

  It was more than the infected that made her start to back away. It was more than the dust arcing up from the bodies in plumes. It was the other way the plague spread. It was the other kind of infection she saw taking hold.

  Schenk believed in the possibility of returning the Emperor to life, in having him walk again among his children. She had never abandoned her faith as a Revivificator, even though the Inquisition in its totality, her faction included, had abandoned her. She had continued her work on Eremus, still looking for the way to bring life to the dead. She never stopped believing such a miracle was possible, but she had ceased to believe she might be the one to discover the secret. She had vented her frustration, her anger and her bitterness on her subjects, dispassionately observing atrocious suffering and death on her medicae tables. That sour, petty vengeance on the galaxy that had betrayed her was all that she had left.

  And now she saw the miracle. Now she saw life spring out of dead matter. Only it was the wrong sort of miracle. This was not revival, for the matter that cried out in the pain of birth had never been alive before. It was stone and rockcrete and iron and glass that stirred and screamed. The flat surfaces of building façades, of the broken road and of sheets of debris wrinkled like flesh. With grinds and cracks, rigid materials bent, tore and parted, revealing the glistening of teeth and the staring horror of eyes. What had been inanimate came to life, and it screamed and writhed to feel itself diseased and dying. Wherever the dust of bodies fell, new life stirred, and the pangs rippled outward along the full length of the girders or the stone blocks, infecting whatever they touched. The disease was rushing over the industrial landscape of Eremus like a consuming tide.

  Schenk turned her gaze from the abomination transpiring close to her. She looked back towards the impact site, and saw the rise of more and greater ash plumes. Entire hills were moving, sliding down as they decayed, and struggling to lurch forward as if they might escape their doom. There was movement every­where she looked, and it was spreading quickly. Somehow, a critical mass had been reached, and the plague was reaching out to grasp all of Eremus. The futility of her mission and of Seroff’s efforts at quarantine hit her so hard she staggered.

  She and the troopers were still backing up, still holding on to a form of order. The soldiers had killed almost all the mutating civilians. The bodies no longer crawled. They were not the threat. The dust they were turning into was the danger, the dust rising and spreading and grasping at the world.

  ‘Run,’ Schenk said. There was no mission to accomplish here. Her revived ambition turned to ash in her chest. ‘Back to the perimeter,’ she said. That would be no protection, but that wasn’t her concern. She could barely think past that point. She found that she could run. Terror gave her energy, and she could ignore the pain in her limbs. She had to outrun the spread of the plague.

  Outrun it to where?

  She suppressed the thought. If she despaired now, she would die before she had a chance to think of a way to make good a true escape.

  ‘The dust is contagious,’ she warned the troopers. ‘Do not let it touch you.’

  The troopers heard her, and they ran. They had held true to their training until now, but when she broke and fled, they revealed the limits of how far Seroff had been able to shape them. Schenk had been their one shield against panic. She was the Inquisition, the authority who had the ability to end the crisis. If the Inquisition was helpless, there was no hope. They dropped their weapons and ran, quickly outpacing her. They glanced back in fear at the rotting transformations spreading over the land, and ran faster.

  More and more dust rose up. As the larger buildings and mountains of refuse caught the infection, their decompositions hurled tons of dust into the air, like ash from a volcanic eruption. For the moment the dust was relatively contained, climbing up directly above the bodies and mounds that produced it, but spreading only a short distance outward. As unstoppable as the contagion was, its spread was advancing in incremental stages, as if it were gathering strength for a shattering blow.

  The sense of volition lurking behind that hesitation chilled Schenk’s blood even further. The expanse of her ignorance before this plague was staggering. After a lifetime of study, she understood nothing. She was helpless before this foulness. She was no better than the lowest, most ignorant serf. She was just another tiny figure fleeing in panic, as if running would somehow be enough to save her life.

  The troopers pulled further ahead of Schenk, though the way the path twisted through the industrial dereliction slowed them down. They were still in her sight when the plague caught them. One fell, then another, and then the rest in quick succession, the contagion jumping faster between them as more became infected. Schenk slowed down, her lungs rasping like rusted metal in her chest, her breaths thunderous echoes inside the rebreather helm. The twisting bodies blocked her path.

  She stopped, exhausted and puzzled. She glanced back and up at the dust cloud. Its leading edge was still a short distance to the rear. As far as she could tell, no dust had fallen here yet. And if it had, why wasn’t she infected too? Perhaps her rebreather was keeping the dust away from her, but that would not matter if it turned into a dying, snarling monster around her skull. She could see no reason for the soldiers to be convulsing before her, their bodies opening up, their organs snapping at each other with stingers and claws, their bones whiplashing into contortions of ecstatic pain.

  She was missing something. Even her diagnosis of her helplessness was lacking. She was failing to grasp even the most basic elements of the plague’s contagion.

  Think later. Run now. Even if she was wrong about how humans contracted the plague, she had seen the dust infect stone and metal. If she was caught in dustfall, she would die in gibbering rockcrete jaws. She hesitated a moment longer. The route blocked by the dying troopers ran between two long hab-blocks. It would take her half an hour to try to detour around either building and find her way back onto a route towards the perimeter.

  Go now, before they turn into dust.

  The mad hope of an immunity danced through her mind and she ran. There was no choice. Irrationally, she held her breath as she passed between liquefying humans. Her skin prickled in the anticipation of being clutched by disease. Then she was past the dying soldiers and running between the stained, leaning walls of the hab-blocks. She ran for the other end of the passage between the buildings as if it were a meaningful goal.

  As if Seroff’s quarantine line represented actual refuge.

  And yet, even though terror snapped at her heels and squeezed her heart, she still felt immune. At her innermost core, where the bitter stone of her being had been shaped and polished by year upon year of frustrations and disappointments, she could not really believe she would succumb to the plague. Such an end was not permissible. The Emperor and fate would not allow it.

  So she struggled onward, clad in the armour of soured pride. Behind her, the clouds of monstrous transformation gathered and thickened.

  ‘What have you done, inquisitor?’ Seroff muttered. One pl
ume of dust after another climbed into the sky. From this position, on the perimeter of the quarantine, it was impossible to see their origins, other than being in the infected zone. This section of the perimeter was somewhat elevated, though, and Seroff caught glimpses of large movements. He thought he saw a hill of detritus drop out of sight with a plunging motion, then more dust shot upwards. All of this had begun within minutes of Schenk entering the contaminated sector.

  ‘Lord commissar,’ the trooper on Seroff’s right said, pointing. ‘Inquisitor Schenk is returning.’

  Returning was not the word Seroff would have used. He would have said fleeing or retreating. His heart sank as he watched Schenk stagger uphill the rest of the way. She pulled her rebreather off when she reached Seroff’s position. ‘We have to go,’ she hissed. ‘Now. This cannot be contained.’

  Seroff hesitated. Whatever his mistakes had been, he had never abandoned a post. To do so was contrary to everything that defined him. He was still a lord commissar. He still had the duty of that identity, and that was to hold the position, no matter what the cost.

  ‘Remaining is futile,’ Schenk said, and it struck home to Seroff that it was a member of the Inquisition urging him to flee. ‘There is no duty here. There is nothing that can be fought. There is only death.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The plague is spreading everywhere. I cannot fathom how it functions, but I know we cannot stop it.’

  Seroff looked again at the thickening dust clouds overhead. The moaning from the quarantined zone was growing louder and more and more inhuman. Schenk looked terrified. His mouth went dry. Duty fell away from him, ambition crumbled, and he was merely an old man who didn’t want to die. ‘We’re pulling back,’ he announced. ‘Regroup at barracks and prepare for new orders.’ Those orders would never come. He wanted the troops to leave the way clear for his own retreat. Then a finger of shame made him add one more command. ‘If I fall, then do as necessity requires.’ Meaningless words, but he used them as a shield against his guilt as he and Schenk began to run.

  The quarantine line broke apart. The growing cries from inside the infected zone and the sounds of strange, heavy movement made Seroff’s orders the signal for all-out flight. The soldiers ran with the moaning of doom at their backs. They were young and fast, and in moments Seroff and Schenk were alone. Seroff felt that he was, at least, spared being seen fleeing by his own troops.

  Schenk pointed north as they struggled past an abandoned Administratum complex.

  ‘The spaceport?’ said Seroff.

  ‘There will be no refuge anywhere on Eremus,’ said Schenk. ‘The only refuge is off-planet.’

  ‘How long do you think we have?’ The spaceport was more than ten miles from their position. It would take hours to reach it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Schenk. She was breathing very hard, and Seroff slowed to match her pace. She had not had the chance to catch her breath back at the line. ‘All we can do is try,’ she continued. The words were a desperate prayer. ‘We have no choice. It is our only option.’

  Seroff nodded. He did not look back. The dust storm would come before they were ready, or it would not. There was nothing he could do about it.

  Yet he wanted to understand. ‘How have we not been infected?’ he asked. ‘Are we immune?’

  ‘I have wondered the same thing. That both of us should be so lucky, and for no apparent reason, seems unlikely.’

  ‘Even so…’

  ‘Even so,’ she agreed. ‘And immunity does us no good when the city itself is infected.’

  They cut through the site of a manufactory that had been so completely stripped of usable material that it had become an empty quarter. It was quick to pass through. The ground sloped upward, and they came to a rise, from which they were able to see the next few miles. To the north-west, on their left, Seroff’s tower was just visible over the jagged hills. The spaceport was still far out of sight, but dead ahead, directly in Seroff and Schenk’s path, another plume of dust was rising to the clouds.

  ‘The prison,’ Schenk groaned.

  ‘We sealed the cell,’ said Seroff.

  ‘That doesn’t matter. The dust spreads the plague to inanimate matter.’

  As if the dust, or the will it embodied, had been waiting for them to bear witness, and to know their way was closed, the storm struck. The cloud over Schenk’s quarters fell upon the city with a dark embrace of change and death. Seroff did look back now, and the gritty clouds behind them billowed, expanded, and came down too. In seconds, the vistas of Eremus before and behind them erupted with screams. Downslope from the manufactory shell was a group of malnourished scavengers. They stopped what they were doing and looked around. From where they were, they could not see the dust, but they could hear the cries. They dropped the scrap metal they had been piling up and broke into blind, panicked flight.

  Seroff and Schenk ran too. They made for the lord commissar’s tower. There was no logic in this decision either. There would be no shelter there. The tower was not immune to change. When the dust came for it, it too would fall to monstrosity and decay. But there was nowhere to go, and the familiarity of the tower created the illusion of refuge. They moved as quickly as they could, though they were slowed by obstacles and age.

  The cries of the transforming city drew closer. It seemed to Seroff that they were caught in a tightening noose of plague. Despair and exhaustion dragged at him, urging him to lie down and accept his end. Fear drove him on. So did resentment, and bitterness. Containing a new plague would have been the chance to rise again. Instead, a world would fall under his watch.

  ‘What is this plague?’ he demanded. ‘How have we avoided contagion?’ That was the last shred of hope he had, that their luck might continue.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Schenk. ‘I can’t make sense of the infection’s form. There is no clear pattern to what it does. It is irrational. The only constant is horror, as if that could be the contagion. The plague behaves more like the dream of a disease than the reality of one.’

  The nightmare closed in on them. The sky was thick with the terrible dust everywhere Seroff looked. As they drew close to the tower, they passed another manufactory complex, one of the few still working. Its chimneys screamed. Maws opened midway up their height. Fire burst from between the teeth, and then came a torrent of black and green liquid that burned and writhed in pain. Even the molten, reclaimed metal was infected, coming to life only to die.

  They reached the tower just ahead of the dustfall. Seroff slammed the iron door behind them. There was no power in the city any longer. The only light in the dim entranceway came from the narrow slits of windows. Seroff stared at the inquisitor and saw his own terror and helplessness reflected back at him. His knees buckled. His legs felt like lead. He could barely draw breath. They had run, they were here, and there was nothing left to do.

  Now what? Seroff wanted to say, crying out to Schenk to give him an answer different from the one he already knew.

  Now what?

  The tower answered. The walls began to glisten. They twisted and groaned. Mould sprouted from the rockcrete and along the iron framework of the staircase. It grew tendrils with claws that jabbed into the new flesh of the tower. Foul-smelling blood ran in rivulets from the wounds. The tower swayed back and forth, moaning and gurgling wetly. The floor became spongy. Seroff lost his footing. He fell to his knees, his hands sinking into matter that was soft, gelid. It split, and red-flecked yellow pus oozed between his fingers.

  The tower trembled as if in an earthquake. The floor heaved, throwing Seroff and Schenk off their feet. Deep fissures opened in the bleeding walls. The entire building was about to collapse, and it also seemed to be trying to uproot itself from the ground, as if it might walk.

  The upheavals became more violent. The tower was not trying to walk, Seroff thought. It was trying to leap.

  Over
the deafening shrieks of the tower, Seroff heard what sounded like the roar of heavy engines. The moment was a brief one, and the howl of the tower’s legion of mouths overwhelmed him. His ears bled. He could hear nothing except the screams.

  The tower fell, and it wrenched upward at the same time. Rockcrete masses plunged down on Seroff, but they did not crush him. They were too soft now. They were flesh, turning to slime and soon to dust. They smothered and they choked. He was trying to swim through something that was midway between avalanche and waterfall. The foulness slammed down on him, but he was also rising. The sensation was dizzying. Gravity crushed him, and he knew they were ascending, and his words came back to him. What has fallen from the sky will make us rise again.

  Seroff choked on the slime of the tower. He struggled, squeezed by liquefying flesh, the screams tight around his skull like an iron band. The foulness forced its way into his nose and mouth and filled his lungs. Decay was drowning him, and his bones cracked under the pressure of the ascension. He tried to cry out, but only inhaled even more deeply of the slime, and he blacked out.

  Seroff came to, retching and coughing up dust in thick, blackened wads of phlegm. His ears still rang with the screams. He was coated in dust, and lying deep in filth. Every bone ached. He felt as if he had been used as the clapper in a huge bell. He managed to get to his knees, then rubbed at his face, cracking the layers of dust. He began to breathe again, and he managed to pry his eyes open. The ringing in his ears faded to an insect buzz.