Blackstone Fortress

by Darius Hinks

  He took one last, despairing look at the carnage Grekh had triggered, then shook his head and raced towards the north gate, with Grekh bounding after him. The way was now clear. Everyone not involved directly in the brawl had spotted a chance to loot the abandoned stalls and rushed back to see what they could lift.

  Draik and Grekh passed beneath the arch and out onto the walkway.

  Draik cursed as he saw that there was a wall of metal approaching the Dromeplatz from this direction too. The wall was actually the interlocking slab-shields of bullgryns – the proctor’s hulking, meat-headed enforcers. Colossal abhumans, ten feet tall and so heavily muscled that they wore thick plate armour salvaged from tanks and personnel carriers. The walkway shuddered under the impact of iron-shod boots. As they reached the gate, the bullgryns loaded their guns – wrist-mounted assault cannons, more suited to downing aircraft than halting a fight.

  All along the walkway, people were diving for cover or sprinting back towards the Dromeplatz.

  Draik looked around and saw a support strut just a few feet from the edge of the walkway. ‘Follow me!’ he barked, before taking a running jump at the strut.

  It jolted under his weight, but held firm, and he began clambering up it just as the bullgryns opened fire on the crowds below. Screams rang out, followed by the boom of exploding fuel tanks and the snap of breaking lift cables. Draik climbed higher, relieved to note that the gunfire was targeted on the gates rather than on him. Grekh was a few feet below, climbing easily up the strut, but Draik was so furious with the creature that he felt like booting him away and letting him fall to the distant void screen.

  The bullgryns pummelled their way into the Dromeplatz and the sound of fighting grew louder as the abhumans tried to regain control.

  ‘Quick!’ snapped Draik, nodding back down the way the enforcers had come. ‘Before they ask who fired the first shot.’

  They dropped back onto the walkway and raced away from the Dromeplatz, heading for the next mooring spar. When they were a safe distance from the fighting, Draik pulled Grekh beneath the loading ramp of a freight hauler and glared at him.

  ‘What in the name of the Emperor were you thinking?’

  Grekh looked blankly at him.

  ‘You can’t start firing that thing whenever you like,’ growled Draik. ‘You could have killed us both.’

  ‘We are unharmed,’ replied Grekh.

  ‘And everyone else? Are they unharmed? How long have you been here? You must know what happens if someone opens fire.’

  ‘I thought–’

  ‘You thought nothing,’ snapped Draik. ‘Think yourself lucky that the word of a Draik is unbreakable. Otherwise I would leave you to the proctors and let you explain how you’re going to pay for the damage you’ve just caused.’

  Grekh stared at him.

  Draik groaned in exasperation. ‘Let me do the thinking.’

  Grekh remained silent, so Draik whirled around and leapt back up onto the walkway.

  ‘Which is the Clarion?’ he asked as they passed prow after prow. Before Grekh could answer, Draik waved him to silence, spotting the unmistakable spires and finials of an Ecclesiarchy transport barge.

  Draik cursed as he saw a group of bullgryns waiting at the foot of the landing ramp.

  ‘The proctors won’t let him leave,’ said Grekh.

  Draik was about to approach them, with no clear idea what he would say, when a deafening explosion rocked through the Dromeplatz. The situation was clearly getting worse.

  The bullgryns outside the Clarion hesitated for a moment, then thudded off down the walkway towards the Dromeplatz, readying their weapons.

  Draik laughed and looked at Grekh. ‘Perhaps you’re more useful than I realised. Wait out here,’ he said as he approached the landing ramp. ‘And come to warn me if you see those guards coming back.’

  ‘The priest is dangerous,’ said Grekh, following him up the ramp, gripping his rifle.

  ‘More dangerous than you?’

  Grekh continued following him up the ramp, seeming not to have heard.

  Draik stopped and stared at Grekh, then shook his head. ‘Very well. But no shooting. Understand?’

  Grekh nodded.

  The doorway was built like the grand portico of a temple and the colonnades were covered in intricate reliefs – images of tortured, screaming souls, their arms thrown up in agony and despair, consumed by flames. All of them were clutching at their faces and had ragged, empty sockets where their eyes should have been. At the centre of this gruesome scene was a priest, seated in a throne carried by dozens of crook-backed wretches who were also eyeless and howling in pain. Only the priest on the throne could see and his vision burned like a sun on a star chart, an elaborate halo of delicate lines that spread around the doorway, fuelling the flames and blinding the wretched multitudes.

  ‘Taddeus,’ said Grekh.

  ‘Is that what Taddeus looks like?’ asked Draik. ‘With the…?’ He touched the mural.

  ‘No. This is his vision. This is why he came here. He’ll find that fire in the Ascuris Vault.’ Grekh was about to say more, then hesitated and shook his head. ‘Ask him to explain.’

  The door whooshed upwards and left Draik face to face with a shaven-headed, emaciated-looking woman, dressed in the filthy robes of a zealot and pointing a large, two-handed flamer at him. Her eyes were bloodshot and seemed too large for her sunken eye sockets, straining and blinking furiously as through trying to escape from her skull.

  ‘You-you are…’ she stammered, her head flicking to one side as she spoke. ‘Trespassing. Th-this is the property of the Holy Synod of Acheron and a sanctum of the Adeptus Ministorum.’

  The woman was not looking directly at Draik, but rather at a point just above his left shoulder. Every few seconds, her gaze would briefly flick towards his and, in those brief moments of contact, Draik sensed a dangerous lack of reason. Her finger was trembling over the trigger of her flamer and the pilot light was hissing quietly before the muzzle. Draik heard Grekh shifting uncomfortably behind him, struggling to refrain from grabbing his rifle.

  The woman noticed Grekh and frowned in recognition.

  Draik spoke in what he hoped were emollient tones. ‘I have learned that your master and I have a shared interest. It is important that I see him.’

  The woman’s lip trembled. She looked on the verge of either laughing or crying. ‘Shared interest?’

  ‘A location on the Blackstone Fortress. A chamber called the Ascuris Vault.’

  The flamer drooped for a moment in her grip and the colour drained from her face. She glanced back over her shoulder.

  Draik tried to peer inside the barge, but it was too dark for him to see anything clearly. There was just the vaguest flicker of candlelight washing over the bulkheads, but that was enough for him to see that the walls seemed to be moving somehow, rippling, like liquid.

  There was a rattle of heavy armour as more bullgryns clanked past, down the walkway. Even from here, Draik could hear that the proctors had yet to calm the situation. The woman looked at the bullgryns and the crowds around the Dromeplatz. She shook her head, looking even more disturbed. She was clearly a hardened fighter: her limbs were sinewy and covered in scar tissue, and she held herself like a pit brawler, tensed and hunched, ready to strike. But her eyes were those of a cornered animal.

  ‘Vorne,’ said Grekh. ‘This man knows about the madness. He knows how to resist it.’

  This was not entirely true, but Draik felt sure the Navigators would help, so he nodded in agreement.

  ‘Are you really here?’ she said, her eyes narrowing as she raised the flamer again, levelling it Draik’s chest.

  ‘Am I here?’ Draik threw Grekh a sideways glance, hoping the alien might understand the question.

  Grekh’s face remained impassive.

  ‘I am here,’ Dr
aik said, turning back to her. ‘I’m Captain Draik of House Draik. My ship is the Draikstar. You might have–’

  ‘Heresy,’ she hissed, her lip trembling again. She looked closely at Draik’s dress coat and his gleaming cuirass, sneering and suspicious, as though she expected to see traitors hiding beneath his epaulettes. ‘The seeds of the Great Enemy crawl through Precipice, breeding like rats. Old Night is here. Hunting. Feeding. Fed by all the faithless scum who come here.’

  Draik nodded, slowly, conscious of her quivering trigger finger. ‘Heresy. Of course. I understand. But I am a sanctioned representative of the High Lords of Terra. House Draik’s Warrant of Trade was awarded by Lord Saviona of the Senatorum Imperialis and ratified by every member of the High Twelve. When I see your master I will explain–’

  ‘He does not know me,’ she interrupted. There was pain in her voice, and when she allowed her gaze to briefly meet Draik’s he saw desperation.

  ‘I can help,’ he said, keeping his voice soft.

  Hope flared in the woman’s eyes. She leant out of the doorway and peered at the eagle on Draik’s breastplate, examining its two heads. She tapped them, giving them a suspicious look, as though she expected them to speak. She glanced back into the ship a few times and then, with a whispered prayer, she finally stepped aside, waving them in.

  Draik had to pause at the threshold until his eyes adjusted to the gloom. The barge’s entrance hall was lit by a single candle, drifting overhead on a winged sconce, humming slightly as an anti-grav platform carried it back and forth, revealing glimpses of the rippling walls. The movement Draik had seen from outside came from hundreds of parchment scrolls nailed to the ship’s bulkheads. The thin paper strips were covered with lines of tightly packed text and hurriedly stamped wax seals. There were scrolls hanging from the ceiling too and they rustled as Draik walked by, giving him the odd sensation he was moving through a forest.

  The woman rushed ahead, looking back repeatedly to stare at them with a mixture of horror and hope. As he followed, Draik had to step carefully over a graveyard of holy texts. Ancient, leather-bound tomes had been torn to shreds and scattered across the floor. It looked like a slaughterhouse of knowledge. As he trod through the heaps, Draik grimaced at the waste. The books were valuable relics, but it looked like a wild beast had savaged them.

  Further down the passageway, Draik heard ripping sounds. The massacre was still taking place. Papers rippled through the dark towards him, flashing in the candlelight, pale and ominous.

  Vorne paused at the foot of a metal-runged ladder leading up to an access hatch. The hatch was open and the torn pages were drifting down through the hole. ‘He’s confused,’ she said, looking everywhere but at Draik. ‘H-he might not make sense.’

  Draik nodded and gave Grekh a warning glance, before following Vorne up the ladder.

  Taddeus’ sanctum must once have looked like a relatively normal room, complete with ceiling-high bookcases, an impressive brass lectern cast in the shape of the Imperial eagle and a circle of wooden chairs. Now it looked like an explosion in a printing press. There were pages everywhere. The bookcases had been torn from the walls and the furniture had been overturned. The lectern was on its side, half buried in the mess, like a listing ship, and the chairs had been smashed into fragments, their arms and legs scattered across the piles of illuminated manuscripts. Hunched at the centre of the clutter, like a feral animal, was Taddeus. He was a solid-looking, portly man, with a ruddy, wrathful face and broad chest. Draik could imagine he must usually cut an impressive figure, but in his current state he looked more like a rabid dog. His cassock was crumpled and stained, and it was clear he had not left the room for some time. He had the same distracted expression on his face as Vorne and he did not even look up as Draik waded through the papers towards him. He was hunched over a book, tracing his finger over its pages and muttering the word ‘no’ over and over. When he reached the bottom of the page, he ripped it from the book and hurled it into the air, turning his attention to the next page.

  Vorne, meanwhile, had crossed to the far side of the room and hunkered down in another corner, watching her master with a fearful expression.

  ‘Your eminence,’ said Draik, quietly.

  Taddeus paused, but kept his gaze fixed on the book.

  The priest held his book a little closer to his face, staring at the pages.

  ‘I am Captain Draik,’ said Draik. ‘I do not believe I have had the privilege of meeting you before.’

  The priest looked up slowly from the book, fixing his eyes on Draik.

  ‘Sceptic,’ he said, his voice low and dangerous. ‘You think I failed.’ Taddeus staggered to his feet and levelled a trembling finger at Draik. Up close, he was a great, swaggering hulk of a man. ‘All of you! I can hear you whispering when I sleep. “He’s mad!” you say. “His sermons were lies!”’ He hurled the book across the room. ‘But I am the one sane man in this den of idolaters.’ He grabbed another, as yet unruined book and waved it at Draik. ‘The answer is in here somewhere. There must be one word – one word that led me astray, and I will find it!’ Then he looked back at Draik. ‘How did you break in?’ He scrambled around in the piles of paper until he found a brutal-looking mace, adorned with holy screeds and studded with razor-edged spikes. ‘This palace is forbidden to all but the sons and daughters of Holy Synod of Acheron. You are profaning this citadel with your presence. Acamantus!’ he cried, wading back and forth through the ruined books. ‘Acamantus!’

  ‘Brother Acamantus died,’ said Vorne from her gloomy corner of the room. ‘He never made it back to Precipice.’ She looked tormented by her master’s confusion.

  ‘Precipice?’ spat Taddeus, glaring at Draik, as though he had spoken. ‘What precipice? What are you talking about?’ He grasped his tonsured head and clamped his eyes shut, growling and shaking his head, as though trying to dislodge a thought. ‘You all conspire to make me forget my purpose but it will not work. The God-Emperor’s light is in me. It will burn through whatever deceits you lay across my eyes. Precipice,’ he muttered. ‘Yes, Precipice!’ He glared triumphantly at Draik. ‘See? You cannot fool me, rogue trader. I know this is not the temple at Chalcis. This is…’

  His eyes clouded over and he shook his head, clearly confused again. He stomped across the room and wrenched open a control panel, tapping at a runeboard until a shield slid back from the ship’s hull, flooding the room with red light as the docks outside were revealed. From this angle, only a fragment of the Blackstone was visible, looming ominously over the ships and mooring spars. Taddeus pressed his hands against the armourglass, staring at the scene outside, still growling under his breath. ‘The Unfathomable,’ he muttered, ‘has been fathomed. I have found it. Here in this snake’s nest I found it. Acamantus!’ he snapped, looking over at the hunched figure of Vorne. ‘We waited long enough. It is time to reach the vault.’

  ‘I am Vorne,’ she said, grimacing and hugging herself, patting her biceps furiously as she rocked back and forth on her haunches.

  ‘Is everything ready?’ demanded Taddeus, marching over to her and hauling her to her feet. ‘Where are Brothers Cynus and Lacter and the others? We should be boarding the Blackstone by now, not talking to…’ He glared at Draik. ‘Not talking to traders and thieves.’

  ‘Cynus and Lacter died too,’ said Vorne, hanging weakly in his grip. ‘All the brothers are gone, your excellency. We’re the only ones left. Do you remember?’

  ‘Gone?’ Taddeus laughed. Then he let go of Vorne and marched over to the hatch, crying out to the rest of the barge. ‘Everyone, up here now! The time is upon us. We have work to do! Great work! The work of the God-Emperor!’

  There was no reply. Vorne dropped back onto her knees and began mouthing a prayer, staring at Draik.

  After a minute or so, Taddeus backed away from the hatch, looking dazed. He caught sight of Grekh and looked even more puzzled. ‘This fiend was
in my dreams,’ he whispered, pointing his mace at the kroot. ‘What sorcery brought you here? You are a figment of my destiny.’

  ‘He is called Grekh, excellency,’ said Vorne. ‘He was with us when we attempted to reach the vault.’

  The priest’s eyes cleared, then glistened with tears. He leant against the lectern, colour leaching from his face. Draik could see the hard reality of the priest’s situation thudding into him. Taddeus juddered with each new moment of clarity, taking facts like body blows as he emerged from his delirium. As Taddeus crumpled before him, Draik thought of a way he could help – a small omission, rather than an outright lie, that would make his proposition more palatable.

  ‘Your excellency,’ said Draik, stepping closer to Taddeus and offering him a hand. ‘I have come to offer my help.’

  ‘Help?’ Taddeus glared at him. ‘What help could a rogue trader offer my holy mission?’

  ‘Your excellency, I am not a cynic. Far from it, I have been humbled by the tales of how close you came to reaching your goal in the Blackstone Fortress.’

  ‘Tales?’ Taddeus frowned.

  ‘Yes, your excellency. But I have also heard tragic stories of your reduced circumstances.’

  Taddeus glanced around his trashed room and looked embarrassed. He stood up slowly, refusing to take Draik’s hand and using the lectern to drag himself back to his full height. ‘Reduced circumstances? Reduced? How can a man be reduced when he carries the light of the God-Emperor in his fists?’

  Draik bowed. ‘I merely meant I have heard of the terrible losses you sustained, and…’ He pressed his hand across his chest armour. ‘If you are ready to complete your mission, I can offer you the full support of House Draik, both financially and in terms of other resources.’

  Taddeus looked appalled. He dusted down his cassock and drew back his shoulders. ‘House Draik?’ He narrowed his eyes.

  ‘One of the oldest Terran dynasties, your excellency. We have traced our origins to–’

  ‘Privateers,’ sneered Taddeus. ‘I am not so “reduced” I have to consort with hawkers. You have entered a holy place,’ he said, nodding at Vorne. ‘And you shall be rewarded for your sacrilege.’