Tales of Heresy

by Nick Kyme

  The grim-faced woman continued. ~The very worst and the very strongest of the Validus’s tithe of witchkind shambled together and became an amalgam.~ Sister Emrilia was very careful to use the sign-gesture for that word, bringing her hands together and clasping them. An amalgam, in the manner of fusion or joining.

  Leilani felt her blood run cold. ‘This I have read of,’ she broke in. ‘A group-mind, the spontaneous formation of a shared telepathic consciousness. On Ancient Terra, in the Age of Strife, the nation-state of the Jermani had a word for it. Gestalt.’

  Sister Amendera took a warning step towards the other Knight. ~The Life-Eater,~ Kendel snapped her hands back and forth. ~Why was it not used?~

  Herkaaze eyed her. ~Malfunction,~ she replied, ~Sabotage/Outside influence. Cause unknown.~

  The four of them stood for a long moment, weighing the import of what had been described. Whatever the instigating force, whatever the impetus was that had created this freakish confluence of minds, the question now at hand was how to deal with it; how to kill it, Leilani corrected herself, for such a radical mutation would not be allowed to live in the Emperor’s secular, ordered galaxy.

  The scarred woman returned to her explanation, and this time she seemed less angry, more morose at the thought of what orders she had been forced to give. Knowing full well that the squads of Witchseekers, Vigilators and Prosecutors aboard the Validus could not hope to defeat a monster fuelled by the power of witches raised to such geometric heights, Sister Emrilia did the only thing that she could.

  Her last order to her Sisters was to deploy about the dungeon decks, each of the warriors to find and take a space where they could kneel and recite the creed, a place where they could draw within and bring forth the gift of silence from themselves. There were some among the common citizenry who called the Sisterhood the “Daughters of the Gates”, partially in respect to the half, three-quarter or full helmets they wore, fashioned in designs after the portcullises of archaic castles, but the name also came in respect to their mission – to stand as the barrier between the rampant insanity of unchained witches and the safety of the Imperium. In echo of this, Herkaaze gave the command to encircle the group-mind aboard the Validus and hold it in place. Each Sister of Silence, her Pariah’s mark burning cold in the minds of the psyker freaks, was one bulwark in a ring the witches could not cross. However, by the same token, no Sister could step away. It was an impasse.

  ~But now you are here,~ Sister Emrilia signed, switching back to ThoughtMark once again, ~and you can take my place while I move in and kill it.~

  KENDEL’S LIPS THINNED. Her former comrade had not changed at all since Sheol; if anything, the beating she took on that desolate sphere had not humbled her, but instead hardened her intractable manner. Here they stood, Knight and Knight, their ranking equal and unquestioned, yet still Herkaaze spoke to her as if she were addressing an inferior.

  ~We are not here as your reinforcements,~ Kendel gestured. ~We are here to rescue you.~

  The other woman glared at her, the old scar tissue on her cheek darkening. Like the eye she had replaced, it would have been a simple matter for the Sisterhood’s chirurgeons to have patched and regrown the damaged flesh on Emrilia’s face, to have made her seamless and whole again; but instead she wore the disfigurement visible to the world, as if it were some sort of badge of honour. Amendera’s lip twisted; such a gesture was something she might have expected of an Astartes, but not a Sister.

  ~We cannot break the line.~ Herkaaze’s body language was severe and accusatory. ~One severed link and that horror will be freed to prey upon the galaxy. This is the only option. I go in and I kill it.~

  ~We,~ corrected Kendel, drawing in all of them in one flick of her hand. ~We will kill it.~

  Nortor was nodding. ~Mollitas can take the Knight’s place here, in the ring. We three will venture deeper.~

  Kendel glanced at the novice-sister and shook her head. For all her book-learning and potential, Sister Leilani was not ready for this challenge. She had too many doubts, too much churning inside her thoughts to find the serenity needed to truly bring forth the silence.

  The Oblivion Knight indicated that the Null Maiden would take Herkaaze’s place there and kneel on the deck.

  For a moment, an instant so slight that one who did not know Thessaly Nortor would not have seen it, Kendel’s second wavered; then she bowed and drew her sword, falling into the meditative stance. Before she bowed her head she drew her flamer and handed it to Mollitas without statement or ceremony.

  Leilani took it with a nod, drawing herself up, digging deep for her courage. Sister Thessaly closed her eyes and began to mouth the words of the creed.

  In the next second Herkaaze was stepping to stand in front of the other Knight. ~No support required.~ Her BattleMark was sharp and angry. ~Stand down.~

  ~In the past you censured me for failing to aid you. Now you will do the same when I make that offer freely?~ Kendel signed the words and watched the other Knight’s scarring turn crimson, the old wound showing Herkaaze’s anger like a beacon.

  There was a moment when Sister Emrilia seemed on the edge of actually uttering her rebuke out loud; but then she turned away.

  ~Come, then. But this is my vessel and command here is mine.~ Herkaaze did not wait for Kendel to acknowledge her, and walked on, towards the far hatch.

  ~Confirmed.~ Sister Amendera made the cross-fingered gesture at her chest and looked up to find her adjutant watching her intently.

  INSIDE HERKAAZE’S WALL there was madness; madness and phantoms.

  The ghosts attacked them in a horde, coming out of the decking and the ceiling, falling out of shadows and from behind support pillars. They were shimmering and wailing, the noise of them at the furthest end of the spectrum from the Sisters.

  Bolt shells and pulses of fire from the flamer moved through them, and swords were of little use. The wraiths closed and faded even as they screamed, evaporating like morning dew as their energies collided with the limits of the Pariah effect; but there were some that were flesh and blood, hidden in the morass like a dagger wrapped in a cloak. They were crewmen of the Validus, drained of mind like those on the upper decks, but unlike those poor fools, these were rendered into the bloody realms of psychosis. Concealed in the crush of their spectral doubles, they laid into Kendel, Herkaaze and Mollitas with clubs fashioned from broken pieces of metal or severed limbs.

  Corralled inside the invisible barrier, the forces that had twisted the psyches of these serfs had turned upon themselves. Their minds like rabid animals trapped in a snare, they were gnawing upon their own reason, all trace of what made them men gone now. Inside those thought-hollowed skulls, there could be nothing but darkness and void. By chance Kendel matched gazes with a man in a shipfitter’s tunic and she knew without doubt that he, like all of them, was ruined inside. It made her angry: these poor fools were not even the enemy, just the overspill of the witchery left to fester here in the bowels of the Validus. Still, she did not allow this emotion to prevent her from giving the mindless ones their due despatch. Her sword moved in flashing arcs, opening bodies to the air and sending aerosols of crimson to spatter across the walls.

  The two Oblivion Knights fought as mirrors of one another, the ingrained training of the Sisterhood’s blade schola rising to the fore without the need to frame it in conscious thought. Behind them, Sister Leilani spent fire upon the foe in grunting chugs of exhaust from the flamer’s bell-shaped mouth. They died as they were cut down or turned to shrieking torches. The bodies of the unreal became motes of dust in the still, stale air of the corridor, while the bodies of the real carpeted the decking.

  Then there came the moment’s pause, the three of them panting hard. Kendel watched Herkaaze clean her blade on the jacket of a dead serf and she wondered if the White Talon warrior had thought of these poor creatures in the same manner as she had. Amendera doubted it; Sister Emrilia had always been one for a singular worldview of black and white, good and bad. She did
not have any room for shades of grey; that, if Kendel was honest with herself, was at the heart of the disputes they had shared more than any other matter.

  Nearby, Sister Leilani returned Thessaly’s flamer to its strap across her shoulder and blew out a shuddering breath. ‘Throne’s sake,’ she husked. ‘They swarmed upon us as soldier ants would those invading their mounds. I dread to think what force compelled them.’

  Herkaaze gave the novice another disapproving look, as if she were trying to glare the younger woman into silence. Mollitas did not seem to notice, too caught up in the train of her own thoughts. The Knight saw her face grow pale as some terrible notion came upon her.

  ‘Mistress,’ she began, with a wary tone. ‘What if this…’ Leilani indicated the walls of the Black Ship. ‘If all this is the framework of some gambit by the rebel Astartes?’ Suddenly, words began to fall from her lips in a cascade. ‘It is known that some of their Legions have been said to engage with witchery, and—’

  The hard report of brass upon steel sounded, silencing the novice, and Kendel turned to see where Herkaaze had rapped the pommel of her sword against the deck. ~Must she speak so often?~ demanded the other Knight.

  ~Do you fear she may be right?~ Kendel signed the question back in reply.

  Herkaaze did not even bother to grace her with an answer, and moved on. She pointed with her drawn blade, the tip aiming at a great oval hatch up ahead. The metallic stink of psyker spoor was strongest there, the echo of it throbbing at the base of Amendera’s temples. Emrilia walked on towards the massive door, never looking back.

  BEYOND THE HATCH was a chamber that ended in a smouldering molecular furnace. It was this sight that would be the last for the most powerful and unruly of the psyker-kind processed aboard the ship.

  Executed here, on the iron deck, then cast into the open maw of the machine, their bodies would be reduced to ash; it was believed that no psychic could reconstitute themselves after such a killing.

  Perhaps, then, it was fitting that they found the group mind here, the men and women that were its component parts huddled together in a crowd, some standing, others on the floor or lying against the walls in an unearthly accumulation. Unlike the mind-dead on the other tiers, these ones seemed on the surface to be animate and alive; in some ways that made the sight of them all the more horrible.

  ‘They have no faces,’ said Leilani. In fact, she was only half-correct. The hundredfold members of this unnatural psychic amalgam each had the suggestion of eyes, nose, a mouth, but they were in a constant flux, never settling to become anything like a human aspect. Instead, they were sketches, half-finished approximations of what a person might look like, all of them the same. One moment, long of nose and narrow of eye, then fatter about the cheeks and with a tiny moue of a mouth. Bone beneath their skins made ticking, popping sounds as the structure of their skulls was warped and altered, second by second, over and over again.

  All of them turned to stare at the Sisters and cocked their heads in quizzical fashion. The novice grabbed for the flamer at her shoulder and flicked her gaze down at the volume meter: half-full. Her fingers found the trigger bar and the weapon’s emitter bell hissed in readiness.

  ~This is it,~ signed Herkaaze. ~This is the Voice.~

  They advanced across the chamber and the pieces of the gestalt closest to them retreated, propelled back by the proximity of the Untouchables’ psi-toxic presence. The three women moved in a tight triangle, each watching an angle of attack.

  But unlike the cryokene, unlike the en-dog, these shifting faces betrayed no clear intention, no emotion that could be read and predicted. They simply observed, with expressionless stares, the glimmer of intellect and intent broken into shards that barely registered in a hundred pairs of eyes.

  Leilani began to wonder how such a thing could be killed; the weapons the Sisters carried with them were not enough to terminate so many at once. And if they began a cull piecemeal, how would the group-mind react?

  The swaying, blank figures all took an abrupt breath, their faces shifting into a hatchet-browed aspect and solidifying.

  ‘Far enough.’ The rasping and atonal words were spoken by groups of them in a dislocated chorus that made her skin crawl; each syllable was uttered by a different cluster of voices in unearthly harmony. ‘Stay your weapons—’

  Leilani saw the expression on Herkaaze’s face twist into one of fury, incensed at the temerity of the demand. The Oblivion Knight surged forwards with a snarl, and the cluster of psykers nearest to her recoiled as she came at them. Sister Amendera reached out to hold her back, but she was not quick enough. Her sword still warm from earlier kills, Herkaaze struck out and carved into a woman in a prisoner’s shipsuit, the brand of a telekinetic on her forehead. The cut that ended her was a downwards slash that opened the woman’s torso, and without pause the scarred Knight extended and severed the hand of another psyker, this one a male. He fell to the floor, one arm ending in a red stump jetting fluid.

  The other psykers moved with sudden speed, and Leilani recalled the flocking motion of arboreal birds on her home world. The disparate pieces of the group-mind moved like water, flowing away from the attacker, leaving the dead and injured among their number where they fell. Leilani realised she was already seeing them as a single entity, no longer thinking of the psykers as discrete people within a larger whole.

  Cut off from the horde, the man with the missing hand suddenly screamed and there was cracking anew from the bones of his face as his flesh attempted to reset itself. Abandoned by his kind, he began to resemble the crazed remnant they had encountered outside.

  Herkaaze silenced him by opening his throat with her blade-tip.

  ‘Stay your weapons!’ This time it was a shout, every member of the gestalt bellowing as loudly as their lungs would allow. The sound was so strong in the low-ceilinged furnace chamber that it gave the Sisters pause.

  Leilani experienced a moment of confusion. Any handful of the psykers present in the chamber would have been more than a match for two Oblivion Knights and a novice-sister, and as one in this strange meta-concert, they doubtless wielded enough power to kill them all in an instant, crushing them by bringing down the deck above, by burning off all air in the chamber by pyrokene firestorm or any one of a dozen methods.

  Why then were they still alive?

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked.

  The answer from a myriad of throats made her blood chill. ‘Leilani Mollitas. Emrilia Herkaaze. Amendera Kendel. I have been waiting for you.’

  ‘They know our names…’ The novice’s words seemed tiny in comparison to the voice of the crowd.

  ~Witchery!~ Herkaaze signed furiously. ~They have plundered our thoughts!~

  ~Impossible,~ Kendel replied silently. ~No telepath can penetrate the bastion of our minds. We are Untouchable. ~

  ‘I know who you are,’ echoed the chorus, ‘and I must speak with you.’ The faces of the assembled mass moved and altered again, melting and flowing in meter to the mood of the words.

  With each utterance, Leilani felt the ebb and drag of psychic force shifting about her like an ocean of clear oil. The presence of the group-mind rebounded around them in captured echoes. The novice gripped the flamer tightly, and struggled to keep herself from shaking. First, in the things she had read in the libraria, then in the living, breathing madness she had witnessed in the transformed Astartes on Luna, and now here, before her in this ship… Every half-truth and myth Leilani had heard about the powers that lurked within the empyrean were made true.

  ~Whatever dark corner of the warp spawned you, creature, you will not manifest here.~ Kendel sheathed her blade and in its stead drew her bolter to the ready.

  Laughter pealed around the crowd. ‘This is not the face of Chaos. What you see here is only a message and the messenger.’

  ~What message?~ Kendel demanded her answer with savage jabs of motion.

  ‘A message,’ repeated the voices. ‘Once before a message came and it was too la
te to change the pattern of things. You were there, Amendera Kendel. You saw this.’

  Leilani saw the Knight nod slowly, making the sign for an Astartes. ‘Garro…’ whispered the novice.

  ‘A new message. A warning.’ The breathy choir paused. ‘For the ears of the Emperor of Mankind. Darkness comes, Sisters. The great eye opens and Horus rises. The history of tomorrow is known to me.’

  Kendel exchanged glances with her subordinate. Precognition was a known and documented psionic effect, although extremely rare and difficult to interpret. Leilani could imagine her mistress turning the words over in her mind; if this confluence of psychic had power enough to pierce the veil, perhaps… perhaps they might have some insight into the skeins of events yet to occur.

  Herkaaze spat noisily on the deck and brandished her sword. ~Destroy this monstrosity!~ she signed. ~It is some ploy, either of the witches’ origin or even the turncoat Warmaster himself! We cannot ferry this abhorrence into the Emperor’s divine presence. It must be killed!~ She advanced with her blade raised high, head sweeping back and forth like a hunting hawk looking for her next prey.

  Members of the group-mind broke apart from the main pack as she came at them, forming into smaller flocks that retreated from her along the ashen-stained walls. ‘I am not your enemy!’ came the multiple cry. ‘The storm is about to break, but the course of things can be changed!’

  Herkaaze’s only answer was to lunge and strike down another psyker.

  ‘Millennia of endless warfare can be prevented!’ Panic and desperation entered the voice of the chorus. ‘Believe me!’

  From out of nowhere, a cluster of figures rushed towards Leilani and she raised the flamer, ready to immolate them in a heartbeat; but their flowing, waxen faces turned to her, imploring as they altered, begging her to hear them out. ‘What do you want?’ she screamed out the question again.