by Dan Abnett
I believed, with all conviction, that it would be better for planets to burn than for that 'true matter' to be accomplished.
Which is why I went to Damask.
THIRTEEN!
Damask.
North Qualm.
Sanctum.
Under a leaden, rusty sky, the ball-tree forests followed the wind.
They looked like thick herds of bulbous livestock, surging across the rolling sweeps of scree, and the jostling, clattering noise they made sounded like hooves.
But they were trees: pustular, fronded globes of cellulose swelled by lighter-than-air gases generated from decomposition processes deep inside them. They drifted in the wind and dragged heavy, trailing root systems behind them. Occasionally, the pressure of one ball-tree against another caused a gas-globe to vent with a moaning squeal forced out through fibrous sphincters. Plumes of gas wafted above the tree herd.
I climbed to the top of a low plateau, where the bluish flint and gravel were caked in yellowish lichens. A couple of solitary ball-trees, small juveniles, scudded across the hill's flat summit. In the centre of the plateau's top stood a rockcrete pylon marker, commemorating the original landing place of the first settlers who had come to Damask. The elements had all but worn away the inscription. Standing by the marker, I slowly turned and took in the landscape. Black flint hills to the west, thick ball-tree forests in the wide river valley to the north, leagues of thorn-woods to the east, near to where we had set down, and grumbling, fire-topped volcanoes to the south, far away, sooting the sky with threads of sulphurous brown smoke. Clouds of small air-grazers circled over the
forests, preparing to roost for the night. A surly, scarred moon was rising, distorted by the thick amber atmosphere.
'Eisenhorn/ Midas called over the vox.
I walked back down the plateau slope, buttoning my leather coat against the evening breeze. Midas and Fischig waited by the landspeeder that they had spent the past two hours unstowing and reassembling from the gun-cutter's hold. It was an old, unarmed model and it hadn't been used for three years. Midas was closing an engine cowling.
'You've got it working, then,' I said.
Midas shrugged. 'It's a piece of crap. I had to get Uclid to strip in new relays. All manner of cabling had perished/
Fischig looked particularly unimpressed with the vehicle.
I seldom had a use for it. On most worlds, local transport was available. I hadn't expected Damask to be so… unpopulated.
Records said there were at least five colony settlements, but there had been no sign of any from orbit, and no response to vox or astropathical messages. Had the human population of Damask withered and died in the past five years since records were filed?
We'd left Aemos, Bequin and Lowink with the cutter, which had put down on the shores of a wide river basin. We'd carefully disguised it with camouflage netting. Midas had chosen a landing site within speeder range of some of the colony locations, yet far enough out to avoid being seen by anybody at those locations as we made descent. Tobius Maxilla awaited our pleasure aboard the Essene in high orbit above.
Midas fired up the speeder's misfiring engines and we moved off overland from the hidden cutter towards the last recorded position of the closest human settlement.
Tumble-brush scudded around the speeder, and we rode through scarp-land where root-anchored trees spread aloft branches blistering with gas-sacks so that the whole plant seemed to strain against the soil and gravity in the wind. Grazers, little bat-like mammals with membranous wings, fluttered around. Larger gliders, immense headless creatures that were all flat wingspan and fluked tail, turned silently on the thermals high above us. The landscape was jagged, broken and had the bluish cast of flint. The air was dark and noxious, and we used rebreather masks from time to time.
We followed the frothy, brackish river waters for twenty kilometres and then left the wide flood banks and juddered up through rocky scarps, sculptural deserts formed by elementally shattered flint outcrops, brakes of dusty yellow fern, and seas of lichen trembling in the gusting wind. The ugly moon rose higher, though there was still daylight left.
Midas had to slew the speeder to a halt at one place where a group of much larger grazers broke across the trail, panicked by the sound of the engines. They were dove-grey giants with steep, humped backs, trunk-like snouts and long attenuated legs ending in massive pads. Their legs seemed too slender and long to support such bulks, but like the local plant life, I
suspected the swollen torsos of these animals contained supporting bladders of gas.
They snorted and clattered away into the fern thickets. The speeder had stalled. Midas got out and cussed at the rotors of the turbo-fan for a few minutes until the mechanism chuckled back into life. As we waited, Fischig and I stretched our legs. He climbed up onto an igneous boulder and fiddled with the straps of his rebreather as he watched the hot blue streaks of a meteor storm slice the gloomy sky on the western horizon.
I gazed across the fern thickets. Air-grazers chirruped and darted in the hushing leaves. The wind had changed, and a forest-herd of ball-trees scudded in through the edges of the ferns, squeaking and rasping as the wind drove their globes and root-systems through the grounded plants.
We pushed on another ten kilometres, coming down into a rift valley where the ground became thick, sedimentary soil, black and wet. The vegetation here was richer and more rubbery; bulb snakelocks and bright, spiky marsh lilies, clubmoss, horsetail, tousled maidenhair, lofty cycads festooned with epiphytic bromeliads and skeins of ground-draping gneto-phytes. Clouds of tiny insects billowed in the damper glades and along seeping watercourses, and large, hornet-like hunters with scintillating wings buzzed through the damp air like jewelled daggers.
There/ said Fischig, his eyes sharp. We stopped and dismounted. A muddy expanse near the track had once been a cultivated field, and the rusty carcasses of two tilling machines lay half-buried in the sucking soil.
A little further on, we passed a marker stone struck from flint. 'Gillan's Acre' it read in Low Gothic.
We'd passed the township itself before we realised, and turned back. It was nothing but the stumps of a few walls covered with wispy weed-growth and rampant gnetophytes. Until at least five years before, this had been a community of eight hundred. A scan showed metal fragments and portions of broken machinery buried under the soil.
Fischig found the marker screened by sticky cycads at the north end of the town plot. It had been fashioned from local fibre-wood, a carved symbol that was unmistakably one of the filthy and unnerving glyphs of Chaos.
A statement? A warning?' Fischig wondered aloud.
'Burn it immediately/ I told him.
The vox-link warbled. It was Maxilla, from orbit.
'I've been sectioning the landscape as you requested, inquisitor/ he reported. 'The atmosphere is hindering my scans, but I'm getting there. I just ran a sweep of the volcanic region south of you. It's hard to tell because it's active, but I think there are signs of structures and operating machines/
He pin-pointed the site to the speeder's navigation system. Another seventy kilometres, roughly the location of another possible settlement listed on our maps.
'That's quite a distance, and the light is failing/ Midas said. 'Let's get back to the cutter. We'll head south at dawn/
In the night, as we slept, something approached the shrouded cutter and set off the motion alarms. We went out, armed, to look for intruders, but there was no sign. And no sign of drifting ball-trees either.
At dawn, we headed south. The volcanic region, its smouldering peaks rising before us, was thickly forested with fern and thorn-scrub. It was hot too, as stinking, heated gas leaked into the glades from the volcanic vents that laced the rocky earth. A half-hour into the sulphurous forests we were sweating heavily and using our rebreathers almost constantly.
Below the peak of one of the largest cones, the landspeeder's rudimentary scanners detected signs of activity as we rode up a long
slope of tumbled, desiccated rock. Fischig, Midas and I dismounted from the speeder and clambered up a flinty outcrop to get a better view with our scopes.
In the shadow of the cone was a large settlement… old stone and wood-built structures, mostly ruined, as well as newer, modular habitats made of ceramite. There was machinery down there, generators and other heavy systems at work under tarpaulin canopies. Tall, angled screens of reinforced flak-board had been erected on scaffolding rigs to shield the place from ash-fall. Three speeders and two heavy eight-wheelers were drawn up outside the main habitat units. A few figures moved around the place, too distant to resolve clearly.
'The last survey showed no signs of active vulcanism in this region/ Midas reminded me, echoing an observation Aemos had made on our arrival.
'See there/ I said, indicating a portion of the settlement that ran into the slope of the largest cone. Those old buildings are partially buried in solidified ash. The original settlement predates the activity/
Midas pulled a map-slate from his pocket and whirred through the index. 'North Qualm/ he said. 'One of the settler habitats, a mining town/
We watched for fifteen or twenty minutes, long enough to feel the ground shudder and see a gout of white hot liquid fire spit from one of the cones. Alarms sounded in the settlement below, but were quickly stifled. A rain of wet ash and glowing embers fluttered down across the township and settled like black snow on the flak-board screens.
Why would they persist in working this site with the constant threat of eruption?' Fischig growled.
'Let's take a closer look/1 suggested.
Covering the speeder with foliage, we set off down the forested valley. The ground between the feathery ferns and hard, dry thorn-trees was thick with fungal growth, some of it brightly covered and glossy. Though we worked carefully, we couldn't help kicking up puffs of spores and soredia.
I was wearing my button-sleeve black coat, Fischig his brown body armour, his helmet hooked on his belt, and Midas wore his regular outfit,
though he had replaced his cerise jacket with a short, dark-blue work coat. All of us melted into the forest shadows.
I still wasn't sure why Fischig had come along. After Gudrun, the remit given him by Lord Custodian Carpel seemed done with, but he had refused to return to Hubris. It seemed he trusted my instinct that the matter was far from done with.
We crossed a low stream bed, steaming with hot, pungent water that bubbled up from the vents, and came silently up along the north edge of the settlement. Now the judder of generators could be made out, the distant growl of rock-drills. Guards in khaki drill fatigues worn under spiked and blackened segments of metal body armour wandered the length of an earthwork wall that had been banked up at the edge of the trees, running great bull-cygnids on long chains. The canines were meaty brutes with lolling tongues and beards of spittle. The guards that pulled on their chains carried newly stamped, short-form lasguns on shoulder slings. Their faces were masked behind heavy black rebreathers. Workgangs, some stripped to their leggings in the heat, toiled to sluice the smouldering ash from the flak-board screens with hoses and bucket chains.
Midas pointed out where the edges of the settlement had been ringed with motion detectors and antipersonnel mines. All had been deactivated. The constant tremors had rendered both useless as defences. But there was no mistaking the aura I had felt since we had first begun to approach. A psychic veil utterly enclosed North Qualm.
I took out my scope and played it around the settlement. More guards, many more, and dozens of filth-caked workers, lounging by the entrance to one particularly large modular shed. Several supervisors moved back and forth among the resting work gangs, holding brief conversations and making notations on data-slates. Eight workers emerged from the shed carrying long, stretcher-like trays with high sides covered with clear-plastic wraps. I zoomed the magnification of the scope to get a closer look at the faces of the supervisors. I didn't recognise any of them. They were all dour, scholarly men in grey rainproof overalls.
Something vast suddenly crossed my field of vision. By the time I had reacted and adjusted the magnification, it had passed out of sight into the works shed. I had a brief memory of bright, almost gaudy metal and a shimmering, flowing robe.
'What the hell was that?' I hissed.
Midas looked at me, lowering his scope, actual fear on his face. Fischig also looked disturbed.
'A giant, a horned giant in jewelled metal/ Midas said. 'He came striding out of the modular hab to the left and went straight into the shed. God-Emperor, but it was huge!'
Fischig agreed with a nod. A monster/ he said.
The cones above roared again, and a rain of withering ash fluttered down across the settlement. We shrank back into the thorn-trees. Guard activity seemed to increase.
'Rosethorn,' my vox piped.
'Now is not a good time/ I hissed.
It was Maxilla. He sent one final word and cut off. 'Sanctum/
'Sanctum' was a Glossia codeword that I had given Maxilla before we had left the Essene. I wanted him in close orbit, providing us with extraction cover and overhead sensor advantages, but knew that he would have to melt away the moment any other traffic entered the system. 'Sanctum' meant that he had detected a ship or ships emerging from the imma-terium into realspace, and was withdrawing to a concealment orbit behind the local star.
Which meant that all of us on the planet were on our own.
Midas caught my sleeve and pointed down at the settlement. The giant had reappeared and stood in plain view at the mouth of the shed. He was well over two metres tall, wrapped in a cloak that seemed to be made of smoke and silk, and his ornately decorated armour and horned helmet were a shocking mixture of chased gold, acidic yellow, glossy purple, and the red of fresh, oxygenated blood. In his ancient armour, the monster looked like he had stood immobile in that spot for a thousand years. Just a glance at him inspired terror and revulsion, involuntary feelings of dread that I could barely repress.
A Space Marine, from the corrupted and damned Astartes. A Chaos Marine.
FOURTEEN
A tale of repression.
Rogue.
Return to the flame hills.
We've not been idle/ Bequin told me with a smirk when we returned to the gun-cutter. It was noon, and river basin was filling with bumping clusters of ball-trees driven off the flint plains by the wind. They drifted over the shingle and splashed trailing roots into the water.
Bequin was dressed in work fatigues, a rebreather slung around her neck, and she carried an autopistol. As Midas and Fischig stowed the speeder under the netting, she led me into the crew-bay and waved the weapon in the direction of a thin, filthy man chained to a cargo-loop with cuff restraints. His hair was matted and his clothes, an assemblage of patched rags, were stiff with caked mud. He looked at me with fierce eyes through a shaggy fringe of wet hair.
There were three of them, maybe more/ Bequin told me. 'Came to take a look at us using the ball-trees as moving cover. The others fled, but I brought him down/
'How?' I asked.
She gave me that look which told me not to keep underestimating her.
'Our intruders from last night?' I wondered aloud. Bequin shrugged.
I walked over to face the captive. 'What's your name?'
'He doesn't say much/ Bequin advised. I told her to move away.
'Name?' I asked again.
Nothing. I paused, collected my mind and then sent a gently probe into the shady recesses of his skull.
Tymas Rhizor/ he stammered.
Good. Another gentle push at his slowly yielding mind. The levels of fear and caution were palpable.
'Of Gillan His Acre, Goddes land.'
I switched to speech, without the psychic urge now. 'Gillan's Acre? You mean Gillan's Acre?'
'Seythee Gillan His Acre?'
'Gillan's Acre?'
He nodded. Theesey truth.'
'Proto-Gothic, with generational nuance shift/ Aemos said,
coming near. 'Damask was colonised something over five hundred years ago, and was isolated for a lengthy period. The population may not have flourished, but the language has perpetuated vestiges of older linguaforms.'
'So this man is likely to be a native, a settler?'
Aemos nodded. I saw our captive was looking from my face to Aemos's, trying to follow our conversation.
'You were born here, on Damask?'
He frowned.
'Born here?'
Ayeam of Gillan His Acre. Yitt be Goddes land afoor the working.'
I looked round at Aemos. This would take forever. 'I can manage,' Aemos said. 'Ask away.'
Ask him what happened to Gillan's Acre.'
'Preyathee, howcame bye lossen Gillan His Acre?'
His story was painfully simple, and shaped by the ignorance of a man whose kind had worked the poor soil of a lonely edgeworld for generations. The families, as he called them, presumably the clan groups of the original settlers, had worked the land for as long as his memory and the memory of his elders went. There were five farming communities, and two quarries or mines, which provided building materials and fossil fuel in exchange for a share of the crops. They were devout people, dedicated to the nurture of 'Goddes land'… God's land, though there was no doubt that by 'God' they meant the God-Emperor. As little as four years ago, after the time of the last survey from which records we worked, there had been upwards of nine thousand settlers living in the communities of Damask.
Then the mission came. Rhizor reckoned this to have been three years before. A ship brought a small order of ecclesiarchs here from Messina. They intended to establish a retreat and spiritually educate the neglected settlers. There had been thirty priests. He recognised the name Dazzo. Archprieste Dazzo/ he called him. Other off-worlders came too, not priests like Dazzo and his brethren, but men who worked with them. From the way he described them, they sounded like geological surveyors or mining engineers. They concentrated their attentions on the quarries at North Qualm. After about a year, the activity increased. More ships came
