by Ben Counter
‘They watch,’ said Stentor. ‘They seek to surround us.’
‘If they attack us from behind we will just turn around,’ said Beros. ‘Let them come to us. I challenge them to try their hand. Slaves of the Dark Gods! Here is meat for you! Just lever us open and take it!’
‘Stay focused, brethren!’ snapped Kirav, his face lit pale green as he read from the auspex. ‘We are the First! We are Imperial Fists!’
‘How close are we?’ said Lysander.
‘Five hundred metres,’ said Kirav.
‘Ucalegon?’ voxed Lysander. He was greeted only with static over the vox-channel. ‘Curse these catacombs,’ he said. ‘Something is blocking the vox-traffic.’
‘There!’ hissed Stentor, peering down a side passage too narrow for a man to move along without turning sideways.
‘Your imagination is your biggest enemy,’ said Beros. ‘We have troubles enough down here without–’
Stentor’s bolter opened up, filling the close confines with strobing light and noise. Spindly shapes squirmed away down the passage, slick, silvery flesh illuminated in the gunfire.
‘Watch the rear!’ yelled Kirav. Stentor kept firing, churning up the walls of the passage. Clumps of dirt and shattered bone showered down. Brother Mortz crouched and turned, watching the passageway behind the Imperial Fists with his storm bolter levelled.
Lysander saw the creature flit out of view. Stentor’s eyes were good. It would not do to let the thing get away.
Lysander raised his shield in front of him and charged towards the wall, gauging the angle of the thing’s movement. He powered forward into the wall and through it, the compacted earth giving way in front of him. He burst into the space beyond and kept running, the massive weight of his Terminator armour careering through the labyrinth walls.
He burst into an open space. The floor was stone and an altar stood in the centre of it, with the image of a sun carved into its lid. On the altar squatted the enemy and Lysander saw that it might only generously be described as human.
Its torso was grossly elongated, resembling the body of a thick, muscular snake. Its skin was like that of a fish, scaled and silver. Its long arms and legs had too many joints and its feet had spindly fingers in place of toes. Its face was long and its features almost vestigial, with twin slits for a nose and narrow, sunken eyes.
Its mouth opened. Lysander glimpsed a bundle of bony spines in place of a tongue. Its eyes flared green and gills down the sides of its sinuous torso fluttered open.
Lysander held up his shield and dropped to one knee as the thing spat a hail of bone at him. The shards were propelled with such force they punched through, their points studding the inside of the shield. Lysander powered off his back leg and slammed into the creature, pinning it to the altar with his shield.
The creature writhed and hissed. Lysander could see nothing human remaining in its face. Whoever it had once been, he was long gone. Lysander raised the Fist of Dorn over his head and brought it straight down into the thing’s face. Its skull was crushed flat and after a second it stopped thrashing about beneath him.
More of them were slithering around, just visible crawling rapidly along the ceilings and walls. Passageways radiated off from the altar room and the enemy seemed to be closing in, forming a noose around it and tightening.
Beros leapt into the room, vaulting over the altar and letting his flamer spit a tremendous gout of flame down one corridor. The skeletons in their niches were blasted to ash and Lysander could just see the creatures writhing there, stripped to their mutated skeletons by the intensity of the heat.
In the ruination behind Lysander, the rough tunnel formed by his charge, Brother Stentor wrestled with another. The thing had its body coiled around him. Stentor stunned it with a strike from the butt of his bolter, then drew his combat knife and slit a long wet wound along its belly. The thing thrashed as its organs spilled out into the dirt. As he rolled back to his feet Brother Mortz moved towards him, walking backwards, storm bolter spitting out bursts of fire.
They were everywhere. They crawled from the walls and ceiling. Scaly hands reached up from beneath the flagstones of the floor.
‘Close in and bring the rage, my brethren!’ yelled Lysander. In his Terminator armour he was like a walking fortification, a lynchpin of the battlefield around which his fire-team gathered as if he were a tower to be defended. Mutants slithered towards them from every angle and were shot down by bolter fire, their long bodies split open and entrails spilled everywhere. Those that weathered the storm were slashed into bloody ribbons by lightning claw and combat knife, or slammed into the ground by the Fist of Dorn.
For a moment, they relented. Either their numbers were expended or they were regrouping to attack anew.
‘Which damnable thing summoned these vermin?’ spat Beros. ‘Every abomination on this planet spawns its own breed of lackey.’
‘We are close,’ said Stentor, ‘for it to break its followers against us.’
‘Or it is stupid,’ added Beros.
He was met with a deep rumbling, shuddering the whole catacomb. Clods of earth and old bones fell from the walls. Lysander crouched down instinctively, waiting for the next attack to strike home.
Darkness swarmed towards him. With the sound of a crashing wave it rushed through the corridors, and battered against Lysander’s shield in a wall of pure black.
It was ink. A sea of ink, pouring through the catacombs.
‘It knows we are here!’ yelled Lysander. ‘Now is the time to close! Forward, brethren! Forward!’
Lysander forced himself onwards through the surging tide. The ink was already waist-deep to a Space Marine. ‘Up!’ shouted Stentor over the rushing tide. ‘We have to go up!’
Lysander realised Stentor was right. The ink was rising too fast. A Space Marine in full armour could fight underwater, but even his enhanced senses could not see enough to fight beneath the surface here. Lysander slammed his shield up into the ceiling and earth showered down over him, the skulls and femurs of disturbed burials clattering against his shoulder guards.
He had opened up a higher level of the catacombs, one that had perhaps not been disturbed since it had been filled with bodies and sealed. Lysander could see the walls encrusted with bone above him. He hauled himself up through the hole and scrambled into the upper level, reaching down to haul a battle-brother up after him.
The ink was still rising. A great torrent of it was emptying into the catacombs and soon it would breach this level, too. The fire-team made it out of the lower level and Lysander led them on, shouldering through what walls stood in his way, the bones of generations of Opis’s dead crunching to dust under his feet.
Ahead was a wall, solid this time, part of a massive foundation sunk deep into the earth of Rekaba.
‘Make ready to breach!’ ordered Lysander. As the Imperial Fists stacked up alongside him, he saw their armour was smeared black from foot to shoulder.
Lysander swung the Fist of Dorn into the wall. The power field discharged with a sound like a lightning bolt and the stone blocks of the wall crumbled. The stagnant, ancient air of the catacombs was replaced by the stench of something rotting, like the desiccated heart of something vast and dead.
Ahead was the Sealed Wing of the Temple of the Muses, Rekaba’s most secret and well-guarded place. Here were the family records of the Aristeia, their bloodlines and their secrets. Everyone who claimed membership of the Aristeia had to find proof here, among the sub-lines and usurpers who had turned the questions of inheritance and legitimacy into a labyrinth. A whole caste of Rekaba’s citizens were trained to research the families of the Aristeia, to answer the hundreds of claims and counter-claims made every year.
Most of that caste’s members were impaled, flayed and bloody, on glistening chains strung along the ceiling of the cavernous Sealed Wing. Their skins had been fashioned into banners upon which were carved red runes that squirmed and migrated, tumbling through one another to form an infinite
variety of obscene curses in the tongues of the warp.
The bookcases that ran from floor to ceiling were half empty, their contents heaped up across the floor. Thousands upon thousands of books had been thrown down, and those that remained on the shelves were changed. They shuddered and growled, covers pulsing like cocoons full of some insect young, and blood ran down the shelves.
The books lying open at Lysander’s feet were blank. Their words had been bled away to feed the great pool in the centre of the Sealed Wing, in which squatted the foulest thing he had yet seen on Opis.
The pool was full of ink, drained from the enormous totality of knowledge kept in the Temple of the Muses. Half-submerged in it was the creature that Imperial intelligence had tentatively identified as Skarkrave, sometimes known as the Black Sun, sometimes the Drinker of Thoughts. Skarkrave resembled nothing so much as a vast, half-developed foetus from the womb of some enormous, roughly humanoid alien. Its swollen cranium pulsed with dark veins loaded with stolen knowledge, and its wide, flat eyes were solid pools of bluish energy. The rest of its face seemed barely sketched onto its skull and its bent, feeble torso and vestigial arms suggested that what made it terrible was not any physical prowess, but whatever was contained within that misshapen skull.
Skarkrave the Black Sun was a sciovore – an eater of knowledge. The ink in which it bathed carried the information stolen from the Temple of the Muses, and it was absorbing every word, every secret, of the Aristeia.
The servants of Skarkrave, the serpentine mutants who had attacked the Imperial Fists in the catacombs, writhed through the ink or the remains of shredded books that formed drifts of stained pages at the edges of the Sealed Wing. They raised a hissing, shrieking din at the sight of Lysander striding through the broken wall, and swarmed over the massive body of Skarkrave yelping warnings into its half-formed ears.
Skarkrave’s watery eyes turned towards Lysander. Lysander could feel the weight of its psychic interrogation as it sought a way into his mind. It felt like a great dark hand was crushing his consciousness, but his soul did not give. There were few minds in the galaxy that could break a spirit like Lysander’s.
‘Onwards!’ shouted Lysander. ‘These will all taste the wrath of Dorn!’
Lysander charged. He trusted in his battle-brothers to take care of Skarkrave’s attendants. He had to kill the moral threat before its psychic powers overwhelmed them. Speed and shock were his weapons here. He could not falter or pause, for the little information the Imperial forces had on Skarkrave emphasised the sheer scale of his mental abilities.
Lysander vaulted a heap of gutted books and batted aside the mutant who reared up at him with a swipe of his shield.
‘You are Lysander,’ said Skarkrave, the deep, crystal-clear voice resonating around the inside of his skull.
‘Out of my mind!’ yelled Lysander in response. Another few steps, closer, and he could see one of Skarkrave’s spindly hands raised.
‘Would that I could tell you, Captain Lysander, of why I am here.’
Skarkrave’s eyes flared. Bloodstained spiked chains erupted from the floor in front of Lysander, aimed to impale and entangle. Lysander dropped to one knee and rolled, snapping the chains under his shield. He leapt over another, even as a gout of fire from Beros’s flamer rippled over a handful of mutants scrambling out of the black pool towards him.
‘I care not!’ shouted Lysander. ‘I care only that you die!’
‘Would that I could give you their names, Lysander, so you might peel them open page by page, and tear their secrets from them,’ continued Skarkrave. His voice was calm and unmoved, even as bolter fire exploded around him.
Lysander was in Skarkrave’s shadow now. The floor beneath him split open into a great fanged mouth. Lysander leapt, hitting chest-first into the lip opposite, feet kicking out over nothing. The mouth ground shut and Lysander scrambled out of it, rolling away from the teeth as they gnashed closed underneath him.
‘But I am bound, Imperial Fist! Ancient pacts were called upon and under them I only serve. My silence is compelled under pain of annihilation.’
‘And silence is all you will know,’ shouted Lysander. ‘When I throw you back to the warp!’
‘So many have promised,’ said Skarkrave. ‘Not yet have they delivered.’
Tentacles, black and rubbery, extruded themselves from the inky pool in front of Lysander. The First Captain ripped through them with a swing of his hammer. One wrapped around his leg and he kicked free, tearing the tentacle off at the root. It sprayed ink as it thrashed around and Lysander planted a foot on the edge of the pool, ready to leap.
‘Such secrets I have,’ said Skarkrave. ‘I pray to my gods that I could tell you.’
‘I said, begone from my mind!’ Lysander leapt at Skarkrave. He covered the distance across the pool and thudded into Skarkrave’s enormous body. The monster’s rubbery flesh gave under his fingers as he tore handholds to climb up onto its shoulders.
Around the Sealed Wing, the Imperial Fists were butchering the mutants who attended on Skarkrave. Stentor slammed the head of one into a bookshelf, splintering its skull. Mortz’s storm bolter cut down another two as they slithered along the walls. They had bought Lysander this chance. They had rewarded his trust. Now he had to repay it, for they trusted him in turn to finish this.
Lysander raised the Fist of Dorn.
‘You want to know,’ said Skarkrave. ‘I can tell you. Spare me. Free me. All your questions will be answered.’
Lysander’s answer came in the form of the Fist of Dorn arcing downwards, power field blazing blue-white as it fell. The hammer crunched into Skarkrave’s skull and the power field blew its head apart.
Lysander fell back in the shower of bone and brain. Skarkrave’s death cry was a long and terrible scream, a thousand voices pouring out of its fractured mind as all the secrets it had devoured poured out of it in a great gale of information. The whole Sealed Wing shook, the scholars’ bodies falling from the walls, books raining down.
Lysander hit the floor. Skarkrave’s body swayed above him, fountaining gore from its caved-in skull. It toppled to one side and the silence that fell was the signal that it was dead.
Lysander got to his feet and shook his head to throw off the worst of the gore. A few bolter shots sounded as Brother Stentor shot down the last of the mutants, the last resistance dying as it thrashed out its death throes.
‘I heard it,’ said Sergeant Kirav. ‘It spoke of secrets. What did it mean?’
‘Heed not its lies,’ said Lysander. He switched to the vox. ‘Ucalegon! Do you hear me, brother?’
<> came Ucalegon’s voice, distorted but recognisable over the vox. <
‘Skarkrave is destroyed,’ said Lysander. ‘Meet us at the Muses’ Altar.’
<
Lysander led the fire-team through the wreckage of the Sealed Wing. Already Skarkrave’s body was collapsing, as if decaying at an accelerated pace. Through an archway, flanked with statues of Aristeia scholar-lords, the rest of the Temple of the Muses opened up. It was strewn with the detritus of battle, dozens of bodies lying heaped up behind the makeshift barricades of overturned tables and the piles of smouldering books they had defended. Among them Lysander recognised the grey-and-black camouflage fatigues of the Subiacan penal legions. The enemy here were not so dramatically mutated as those in the Sealed Wing – they resembled the militia reported all over Khezal, a mix of household troops and compelled citizens armed with anything they could find in the armouries of the Aristeia.
Knots of surviving Subiacans stood, heads bowed, as they heard the prayers of the preachers who had accompanied them to battle. The prayers included the code-phrases that controlled the combat drug injectors implanted in each trooper’s throat, and now the Temple of the Muses was won the injectors were flooding them with sedatives to rein in their instincts to kill.
The temple was mostly given over to museum
and library wings, where the Aristeia stored their knowledge and the artefacts of their history. But it was also a place of worship, built on the site where offerings were left to the deities of Opis’s past. Those remembered in the current incarnation of the temple were gods and goddesses of creation, art, heredity and nobility, and their images looked down from the stained glass that flanked the three walls of the altar chapel that nested in one corner of the temple. It had been defended by two ranks of Subiacans, relatively well-disciplined penal soldiers who had mown down the dozens of militia whose bodies littered the approach to the chapel. Even with their drug injectors keeping them calm, there was no doubting the fear, and a little anger, in their eyes as they saw the Imperial Fists walking through the devastation into the chapel.
‘Champion of the Emperor,’ said Lysander as he saw Ucalegon approaching the chapel. Squad Ctesiphon was with him, a unit from the Second Company who had been given the task by Lysander of supporting the Imperial assaults on Rekaba. Lysander’s own fire-team went among them, and the Imperial Fists congratulated one another that the enemy in the Temple of the Muses was broken and that Skarkrave was dead.
‘It is good it was us who broke this place,’ said Ucalegon. ‘The Guard will soon fortify it and turn it into their forward base in this area. We might not have had the opportunity to recover any evidence then.’
‘Then let us do so now,’ said Lysander.
‘Many men died here,’ said Ucalegon. ‘We would have fought over it sooner or later, but it was our word that saw it assaulted when its defenders were still at full strength. This Serrick woman’s information had better be worth it.’
‘If it is not,’ said Lysander, ‘she will never leave Opis. I think she knows that.’
The altar at the back of the chapel was a stone block carved with the symbols of the various arts – quills, actors’ masks, draughtsman’s tools and paintbrushes. Lysander knelt before it and examined the lid, on which the Aristeia had been accustomed to leave offerings of gold and artworks before war had come to Opis.
