Traitor by Deed

by Ben Counter

  Cyvon sent an acknowledgement rune as reply. Sasan left the projector alone and checked back through the doorway he had arrived through, hunting for any hidden enemies that had somehow survived the Soul Drinkers’ assault.

  Cyvon continued to watch the broadcast as a bent old man in the black uniform of the Administratum was dragged from the gaggle of prisoners to centre stage. The chained congregation watched, too, their jaws lolling open, ignoring the dead heretics littering the chamber and several of their own number who had been caught in the crossfire and killed. Cyvon wondered who these people had been before they were brought down here and condemned to this forced observance of a heretic religion. Had they gone willingly? Was this a reward for the faithful, or a punishment?

  He knew his fellow Space Marines would give him the same answer, so his questions went unasked.

  They would all say the same thing. These people were the enemy. What did it matter?

  Chapter Two

  It was all around us. The heresy, the cruelty, the death and pain. It found purchase in the most righteous and the highest-born, and in the lowest filth of the gutters alike. We all looked into the eye of death, and the weak-willed called it master.

  – Father Balthan Eugenivov, The Keprian Vengeance

  What was transmitted into the fallen stronghold was also watched by millions across Kepris. In the cities that still held out against the Voice of All, the people shuddered as they watched the inevitable unfolding. In the places the prophet’s faithful held, citizens were ordered to gather for mass screenings. The faithful themselves celebrated as the broadcast reached their barracks and places of worship.

  If there had ever been any doubt that Kepris had thrown off the cruel mantle of the Imperium, it was gone the moment the prisoners were dragged onto the stage that had been built in Sacerdotes’ Square.

  Hollowmount’s faithful had found the prisoners huddling in the basement of the Granite Basilica, where they had hidden for months. They were starving and dehydrated. Even those who were young looked aged, haggard. The Hands of All had dragged them out of hiding into the streets. Some of the heretics were torn apart by the Thricefold before the Hands of All had got the condemned to relative safety, so they could be tried and executed publicly.

  It had to be done that way, because that was what pleased the Voice of All.

  Now the unbelievers were exhibited upon the stage like chattels ready to be sold. Once, the regiments of Kepris’ military had paraded here, in a celebration of their tyranny. Now the accused looked down not on regiments of troops loyal to them, but at the people of Hollowmount, the capital of Kepris. Those gathered to watch justice being done were the uprisen and unafraid, painted with the blood emblems taught to them by Yeceqath and baying for their deaths.

  ‘This day,’ said the Uppermost Hand into the vox-caster, ‘the seven hundredth after the tyrants were cast down, a hundred more have been rooted out. For their crimes, there is only one punishment. If we could inflict it a hundred times, it would be righteous. But it can be done only once. And it will be here, as the faithful watch on. Blessed by the hand of Yeceqath is the blade! The sentence uttered by the Voice of All! Thus always shall the tyrant be brought low!’

  ‘I wish… I wish to repent,’ said one of the prisoners. ‘When I die, I am judged. I would not be judged wanting by… by Her. Please.’ He had a faded Imperial aquila tattooed on his wrinkled and spotted brow. His Administratum uniform had badges of long service and commendation still clinging to the rags.

  The Uppermost Hand scrutinised the old man. The wrinkled eyes were wet with tears. He was thoroughly broken. Worship of the Emperor was only ever a thin veneer of ­obedience and it had been stripped away by the revelation of true divinity. The Uppermost Hand held the microphone towards the prisoner.

  ‘Then repent,’ he said. ‘Give your last breath to Her, and pray with your last thought it will be enough.’

  The prisoner took the microphone in his shaking hand.

  ‘You can’t… you can’t kill us!’ The prisoner’s voice was thin and weak with the deprivations of his long hiding. The crowd hissed and spat at his words. ‘Faith in the Emperor can never die! She is mad! This heresy will be punished! For the Emperor, let her be–’

  The Uppermost Hand scowled, snatched the microphone back off the old man, and knocked him to the stage with a backhand swipe. The man crumpled, and another Hand of All hauled him back to his feet. The Uppermost Hand gestured for his weapon, a long, wicked blade with one of its edges serrated, and a servile rushed forward with it.

  ‘By the blasphemies they utter even now, we know them,’ said the Uppermost Hand. He raised the blade as his seconds rushed forward to hold the Administratum officer still. ‘Let it be done.’

  The Uppermost Hand plunged the blade into the side of the old man’s neck. He pulled it halfway out, then forced it back in, sawing through muscle and bone. The old man’s head flopped to one side and blood fountained onto the stage.

  The crowd roared. Everything they had suffered, everything they had fought against, had flowed from the wickedness of these condemned people. The authorities of the ­Imperium, the cruel and unwelcome hand of a distant tyranny that claimed its authority from a long-dead Emperor. The officials of the Imperium had been massacred in their thousands, in the basilicae and the forges, in the palaces and military barracks, chased down by the Hands of All and slain. Soon, there would be none left.

  Because it pleased Yeceqath, the Voice of All, for it to be so.

  ‘Is this death punishment enough?’ demanded the Uppermost Hand. His mask, fashioned from leather and fabric into the visage of a fanged and maned creature, was spattered with the dead man’s blood.

  ‘No!’ replied the crowd, as if with one tremendous voice.

  ‘Bring forth the Thricefold!’ screamed the Uppermost Hand.

  The Hands of All opened the cages behind the stage, and gripped the chains that held back the Thricefold. Sixteen of them had been gathered and brought to Sacerdotes’ Square for the occasion. These were the ones chosen by Yeceqath to know her truth, and nothing else. They were three times proven, three times blessed, three times changed. Their faces were split down the middle to the bone, exposing the sliver of brain. That sliver was exposed to the truth beaming from Yeceqath, filling them up and banishing the weaknesses of men.

  The Thricefold bounded onto the stage, snarling and slavering, as the Hands of All struggled to restrain them by their chains. These Thricefold had sharpened lengths of bone talon instead of fingers. The prisoners shrieked and wept at the sight of them.

  The Uppermost Hand gave the order with a simple gesture. The Hands of All released their chains.

  The Thricefold pounced.

  The crowd cheered.

  What information had been gathered on Kepris had been out of date, since nothing had been heard from the planet since the Great Rift had cut it off from the rest of the Imperium. The map that Captain Quhya now consulted was generated from the scans taken of the planet’s surface by the Suffering of Helostrix, the Imperial Navy craft that had brought the Soul Drinkers to Kepris, but the ancient, temperamental technology had its limits. The cities and the structures in the neighbouring swathe of desert were there, but who might be found there, and what side they might be on, could only be guessed at until the Soul Drinkers had eyes on them.

  The Soul Drinkers had made landfall far from likely centres of population, to give them time to establish a position and a battleplan before making significant contact with whoever now controlled Kepris. They were at the edge of the rocky desert, near where it gave way to the more habitable regions in which the planet’s cities had taken root. Hollowmount, the planetary capital, was the closest, the largest in a constellation of dense subhives housing the planet’s industrial capacity and population.

  Across the desert, among the mountains and beyond, were the shrines. Long ago
, when the Imperium was still young, a saint had come to Kepris and walked across these broken, hostile lands experiencing visions of the Emperor. This was in the period of history after the Horus Heresy and Scouring, when the masses of the Imperium deified the Emperor and His worship was spreading across the Imperium. Though most Space Marines stayed aloof from such worship, it was the Imperial creed that united the Imperium as much as its military or the rule of the High Lords of Terra. Thousands of saints, their lives and writings, made up its canon, and without the ever-presence of that religion there might be no Imperium at all.

  Wherever this saint had experienced such a vision or paused on his pilgrimage, a holy site had been established, now commanded by a fortified shrine administered by the clergy of the Ecclesiarchy. Each such shrine housed relics of the visionary, who had become known to Imperial history by the name Saint Innokens, and these relics were what the Imperium considered worth saving on Kepris. It had lost worlds before, hundreds of them, to the madness of the Great Rift, but there were always more humans born and balls of rock to settle them on. Icons of the Imperial faith, however, could not be replaced.

  The Third Company’s commanders and squad sergeants gathered around the hololith projected from Captain Quhya’s auspex scanner. It showed a grainy map of the surrounding areas, much of it speculative in regard to population centres and likely resistance.

  ‘Two objectives,’ said Quhya. ‘Firstly, the shrines. Yeceqath’s forces are laying siege to them. Several have already fallen but the planet’s own regiments and Ecclesiarchy militias are still holding most of them. The vox chatter we have picked up so far suggests the enemy are becoming more desperate, using shock troops to breach their defences. Something called the Thricefold, going by the executions from the broadcast. Most of the company will join the defences and secure the relics.’

  ‘What support do we have from the Suffering?’ asked Sergeant Phraates.

  ‘Captain Bulgovash can’t get into low enough orbit for long without running a gauntlet,’ replied Quhya. ‘Kepris’ cities still have their orbital defences. The same reason our air transports are of limited use. They are not armoured like Stormravens or Thunderhawks.’

  ‘So we fight with just bolter and blade,’ said Phraates. ‘No support from above.’

  ‘Beg not for a weapon you cannot grasp,’ retorted Chaplain Visinah. ‘Look to what fate has placed in your hand.’

  ‘Not your concern anyway, Phraates,’ said Quhya. ‘You’re going into the city. Second objective, hit Yeceqath’s power base. The broadcast in the shrine showed the cult holds ­Hollowmount. If we strike there we will force this cult to fight on two fronts. Find its leaders. Find their prophet, Yeceqath, if we can. Squads Tiridates, Respendial and Phraates, under Epistolary Oxyath, you head to Hollowmount. The rest of the company goes with me to the shrines. How do we fight, Soul Drinkers?’

  ‘Cold and fast!’ replied the assembled officers.

  ‘Move out, brothers,’ said Quhya.

  Already the engines of the Impulsors were turning over, and the Soul Drinkers were going to war.

  Hollowmount was wounded and bleeding. They had streamed out of the city as the violence had begun, before the gates were shut by the Hands of All. The refugees had set up camps outside the city as they tried to decide where to turn next – to one of the other cities, which were falling to the Voice of All one by one, or into the unforgiving desert and towards the distant shrines.

  This much could be guessed at from the ruins of the camps stretching across the scrubland outside Hollowmount, and to the edge of the encroaching rock desert. Cyvon had seen enough war in the Indomitus Crusade to read the story of bloodshed from the tangled remnants of the tents and bivouacs, and the burned-out vehicles lining the road. Closer to the city were rows of severed heads and heaps of charred bones. He could almost hear the raised voices and gunshots as the cult massacred the refugees, hunting for fugitive Imperial personnel. From what he gathered from the scenes he had witnessed beneath the shrine, most of the Imperial officials in Hollowmount had been run to ground and killed, either on the spot or later in the staged trials and executions.

  The Soul Drinkers’ column of three Impulsors swept down the road between the ruins of Hollowmount’s pain. The city had stained the horizon for many miles, and the bleached, desiccated look of the land around it suggested a gargantuan leech that had drained the earth of Kepris of all its vitality.

  Hollowmount was a conical mass of concentric tiers reaching up to a pinnacle covered in spires. In an age past it had been built around a lattice of industrial forges and manufactoria supporting a mass of tenements and public districts. Generations since had filled out the voids to make Hollowmount a solid mountain of structures, expanded outwards with new districts budding off the exterior like malignant growths. Even from outside the city, the banners hanging from the towers – depicting a golden-haired woman enthroned, a multitude of bloody hands, a sword through the throat of a crowned skull – made it clear that the Imperial aquila had been torn down and new symbols put up in its place. Here and there some Imperial emblems remained, only so they could be defaced and mutilated.

  Pillars of greasy smoke rose from charnel heaps. Wagons of corpses stood abandoned outside the gates. Hollowmount was bleeding, and it was haemorrhaging the last of its sanity.

  The column of Impulsors crunched through the last of the camps and the gate into the city came into view. It was an enormous double gate of brass, held up by a pair of watchtowers bristling with guns. The Impulsors’ engines rose in pitch as they sped along the battered roadway towards them.

  ‘I heard you speaking with Captain Quhya,’ said Cyvon. His berth inside the Impulsor was next to Epistolary Oxyath and the two could speak in the relative privacy of the vox-net, their voices masked by the engine roar.

  ‘About what?’ asked Oxyath.

  ‘You told him this planet is infected.’

  ‘That is what I felt. Infected with madness.’

  ‘How did you feel it?’

  ‘It uses no mortal sense. I felt it like… like an old taste you can still detect on your tongue. Like a sound you recognise, but cannot place. An image you are sure you have seen before, not because of the detail but the timbre and colour of the memory.’ He shrugged. ‘You are not a psyker. I cannot make you understand.’

  ‘Can this world be saved?’

  Oxyath sighed. ‘You have a talent for cutting to the heart of the matter, Brother Cyvon. To answer you, everything can be saved, but here the disease of its madness must be cut out completely. I can be no more certain than that.’

  ‘Chaplain Visinah calls them heretics and vermin, as if they were different creatures to us entirely. But these people were human.’ Cyvon looked through a vision slit in the vehicle’s side, where a heap of charred bodies still smouldered among the wreckage of the camp. ‘They are the enemy but they were human. They were not born like this. Something changed them.’

  Oxyath smiled at that. His was not a face made for smiling, and it seemed to crack with the effort. ‘Visinah would have you nerve-scourged for such words.’

  ‘That is why I say them to you and not to him. Perhaps these people remembered who they once were. That would make them a lot closer to human than us.’

  It was impossible not to see the Space Marines as different to humanity. Their size and strength alone set them apart. On primitive worlds, they were regarded as giants of myth returned from a forgotten age. Elsewhere, they were the Angels of Death, spoken of more as instruments of the Emperor’s will than men of flesh and bone. The cultists of Kepris were indeed closer to the citizenry of the Imperium than the Soul Drinkers, at least at first glance.

  ‘I sense still the old question weighs on you, brother,’ said Oxyath. ‘I do not need the psyker’s sight to know that. It troubles you that you do not know your time before the Adeptus Astartes.’

  ‘Do yo
u?’

  ‘No. Like you, I was collected from some far-flung world by the Chaplain of some other Chapter – or perhaps in my case I was harvested from the psykers on the Black Ships of the Inquisition. Then we were turned into what we are. I consider myself born from the ministrations of Archmagos Cawl, and I advocate that you do the same.’

  ‘To know who we were would bring deeper understanding of who we are now. Why we fight, what we are defending.’

  ‘We have far more than most men are ever given, Brother Cyvon. We have a purpose. A mission. An enemy to face and the means to destroy them. Rejoice in it, and have faith.’

  The gate was in full view now, twin towering slabs of bronze flanked by watchtowers and the battlements of the city wall.

  ‘They are closed,’ said Brother Sasan, watching through a vision slit. ‘Hollowmount does not welcome us. We shall have to make a door of our own.’ He turned to the rest of the squad. Even though he wore his helmet, Cyvon knew he was smiling. ‘Twenty-five brethren doing what an Astra Militarum column would fear!’

  ‘And we will!’ snapped Phraates. Even from behind the faceplate of his helmet, Cyvon could feel the glare the sergeant flashed at Sasan. ‘Break out the demo charges. Move fast, stay low. The enemy knows we are coming.’

  ‘Anything worth doing is done under fire,’ replied Sasan.

  ‘Movement on the watchtowers,’ said Cyvon. He could pick out the distant figures of men on the battlements, scurrying between gun emplacements. A pair of floodlights snapped on and swung around the devastation of the ruined camps, trying to focus on the speeding Impulsors.

  Phraates’ Impulsor was in the middle of the three. Squad Tiridates had the honour of being the first to the breach, with Squad Respendial in the rear. The first shots from the watchtower fell far short of Tiridates’ vehicle, but it would be only seconds before they were in range.