Hammer and Anvil

by James Swallow

  The revenant walked the length of the aisle back to the altar and Verity trailed after her. At the foot of the statue, Decima went to one knee and adopted the position of a supplicant. The hospitaller could not help but see the mess of raw, dried blood across the back of her neck where she had forcibly removed the mindshackle. Crude dressings, wet with fluid, covered the worst of the wound.

  ‘You must be in such pain,’ said Verity. ‘Your body and your spirit.’

  Decima shook her head. ‘It is a benediction,’ she told her. ‘All is silence.’ She raised a hand to her temple, touched the skin there. ‘I thought they had cut out my soul, but it was only veiled. The Watcher concealed it from me. You restored it.’

  Verity said nothing. In the aftermath of the deathmark’s assault on the infirmary, she had found herself occupied by the question of the device she had found implanted in Decima’s flesh. There was no way to be certain at what level it had still functioned, and she wondered if it ever really had.

  What if the voice that tormented Decima had been something other? What if, instead of this so-called Watcher’s words issuing from her necron tormentors, they had originated elsewhere? Verity was chilled by the thought that poor Decima’s ordeal might have come not from without but from within her own agonised psyche.

  Like Sepherina, Decima tortured herself over her survival of the massacre at Sanctuary 101, and together both women had endured their torments in different ways – but perhaps in the end, both equally destructive. Both believed themselves to have failed their Order. It troubled Verity deeply to consider that it might take death itself before either of them could find their peace.

  A shadow fell over her, cast by the shifting light from the fires burning outside. Verity stepped aside as the canoness came nearer. ‘I misjudged you,’ Sepherina told the kneeling woman. ‘Rise now. The God-Emperor knows your name. Saint Katherine sees you.’ She gave a wan smile. ‘And so do I.’

  Decima did as she was commanded. ‘Milady?’ Puzzlement coloured her expression. ‘I do not understand.’

  ‘You faced the enemy alone to save your Sisters in the garrison hall. Isabel tells me you did the same for Helena, braving necron fire to recover her. If I doubted your devotion, it was wrong of me.’ She reached out a hand and touched Decima’s face. ‘You have endured so much. I cannot take one more thing from you.’

  Sepherina reached inside her robes and produced the voidblade she had confiscated from Decima hours before. ‘This is yours. A spoil of your war, I believe.’

  The revenant glanced at Verity, almost as if she were asking for guidance, and the hospitaller gave a nod in return.

  Decima took back the alien weapon and weighed it in her hand. ‘I have punished many of them with this, a sword of their own creation. It was fitting.’

  Outside, there was silence now, no marching, no gunfire. When the canoness spoke again, she did so with full voice, enough to carry across the room. ‘Mark my words. I grant my blessing and the blessing of the Order to this woman. Know her name, kindred. We welcome Sister Decima back into our fold. I know now she has never left it.’

  A brittle smile came to the survivor’s lips. ‘I have waited a lifetime to hear that.’

  Verity met Sepherina’s gaze, and it was unreadable. Did she mean what she said, or was this some final act of kindness for the ragged woman, in the moments before the necrons came to end them all?

  The questions went unanswered as a heavy fist of iron slammed once-twice-three times into the sealed doors of the chapel. Then another rang on the metal, swiftly joined by another and another, more and more crashing impacts. The Battle Sisters scrambled to their fighting positions as the sound of steel on steel grew louder and louder. The doors began to flex against the steady concussion, the makeshift blockades before them trembling.

  ‘Give them nothing,’ said Sepherina, raising her gun and drawing her sword.

  Verity pulled the bolt pistol into her hands, as the hinges broke and the doors collapsed like a falling drawbridge.

  Beyond, she saw nothing but steel and emerald.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The impacts punched into the flawless metal of the xenos machine-form, and Sister Miriya felt a momentary surge of triumph as the cryptek staggered backwards, caught by surprise at the sudden violence of her attack.

  The moment did not last. What she had thought was nothing more than some kind of ornate talisman around Ossuar’s neck cracked open. It was a phylactic charm, and from within it a horde of gel-like spiders emerged, swarming over the necron’s chest and burying themselves in the wounds she had just inflicted. Even as she watched, the living metal began to flow and scab over, in a parody of organic healing.

  Miriya ejected the clip in her bolter and reloaded. Tegas scrambled across her sightline, and she hesitated on the trigger. But the questor was not exhibiting some sudden instance of bravery.

  ‘Stop! Stop!’ he cried, his vocoder amplifying the words, making them crackle. ‘We have no need for further violence! We can find common ground, a peace!’

  Miriya’s expression soured at the thought of such a thing, and she scrambled to gather up the holy relic they had come here for, while the moment was open to her. Her hand clasped the leather cover and the Sororitas fought down a shudder of fear as she bound the sacred book to the votive chains on her belt. She vowed to stain the pages of Saint Katherine’s great work with her dying blood rather than see it stolen once again.

  Tegas was still talking, almost babbling as he tried to get all the words out. ‘There is much we could learn from one another, your technology, our insight–’

  ‘If you believe there could ever be a unity, even for a moment, between our species, you are ignorant in the extreme.’ Ossuar’s voice was acid. ‘You organiforms are below us, and ever will be.’ The necron cocked his head, examining Tegas with a pitiless stare. ‘Once I thought there might be value in you as experimental stock…’ He glanced at Miriya. ‘But no. Khaygis was right. You are not worthy of our attention. A diversion, nothing more. And now one to be swept away.’

  Some part of Tegas’s innate arrogance reasserted itself at the cryptek’s dismissive manner, and he rose up, his servo-arm swinging high. ‘No! I will not allow it!’

  Ossuar made a sound that might have been laughter, a million years ago. ‘You have no say in the matter.’ The necron’s abyssal staff rose and from the tip jetted a stream of black, inky matter that resembled smoke but moved like fluid. Miriya instinctively went to cover, but Tegas’s scuttling feet were too slow over the metal deck.

  The smoke-wreath hit him and enveloped the questor like a claw made of living mist, wrapping itself around his body, pouring into the hood of his cloak. He let out an inhuman scream, a sound like a recording of a man’s cry run back and forth through fields of distortion. Quivering, he fell, the synthetic shriek becoming a long, drawn-out moan.

  Then Ossuar was calling more blackness from the rod, letting it spread out around him like a cloak. Miriya grimaced. She had seen the cryptek use this trick before, and no sensors or preysight would be enough to penetrate the rippling wall of dark the necron bent to his will.

  Still, she had to try. Miriya thumbed the fire-select catch on her boltgun from full-automatic to single-shot setting, and began a quick dance of move-and-fire, putting rounds into the gloom as she saw flashes of metal in among the mist. Random shots blasted into the walls or exploded the orb-like containers ranged in lines along the laboratorium gallery. Storage fluids that stank sickly-sweet frothed and gushed into hidden gutters beneath the deck plates, and shards of glass-like material crunched underfoot. The unrecognisable gobs of meat and flesh-matter pooling on the tiles blackened and decayed in the open air.

  The veil of black swept towards her, and Miriya vaulted away from it, but the churn of inky colour was too swift for her to avoid. In the close confines of Ossuar’s gallery of horrors, there was little room to manoeuvre. She was aware of the book pressing into her beneath the folds of her c
ombat cloak, anchoring her to the moment with its presence.

  Green light glittered and faded at the corner of her vision. The Battle Sister spun and fired into the smoke, but the instant the round left the muzzle of the bolter she realised she had been duped. A fast, spindly presence faded in behind Miriya.

  Ossuar was suddenly there, the iron skeleton looming over her. The abyssal staff flashed, dark on darkness, and the heavy, smoking tip slammed into her like a club. Even through her power armour, Miriya felt the strike in the marrow of her bones. It seemed to penetrate her wargear effortlessly, a shocking flash of cold that deadened her arm. She lost the boltgun to her nerveless fingers, heard it clang against the deck and slip away.

  For a split-second Miriya was terrified to glance down at her limb, her mind telling her that there would be nothing there but a withered stick of elderly bone and paper-thin skin. But still she looked; her hand was bloodless and twitching with nerve-shock, but whole. Retreating, she shook off the illusion and kneaded her fingers. It was like touching the hand of a corpse.

  Ossuar did not come after her. He raised the staff until it was horizontal across the plane of his now-repaired torso. The liquid gloom emerged from the shimmering rod, but instead of a flow, this time it was a deluge. Smoke-black haze exploded from the cryptek’s weapon and flew at her.

  Reflexively, Miriya threw up her hands to protect herself as the shroud swathed her body. She knew what to expect after her earlier confrontation with the alien, but this time the attack was a hundred times more powerful.

  Darkness fell and she was suddenly in the heart of a depthless void. Nothing seemed real or substantial. She flailed, trying to find the walls and support pillars she knew were there, but there was nothing.

  The dark was in her mind. The weapon was not just something that could confuse vision. The necron technology was projecting a nightmarish mantle that cut her off from everything. It was not like the poison of a psy-witch, oily and insidious, toxic to thought; no, Miriya had faced psykers before and it did not feel like this.

  Ossuar’s weapon was very different. It was touching some primitive level of her animal brain, buried under the rational and logical. It awakened the most base of primal fears – of the dark, of isolation, of death. Even as she understood it, she felt the shroud drawing tighter, starving her mind of reason as a strangling hand would choke air from her throat.

  The void filled with emotion, and that emotion was every shade of despair. It was raw and bloody, inescapable. Suddenly, Miriya was drowning in regrets and misery. She saw the faces of the dead from days past, heard their cries pealing against the walls of darkness. Her Sister in arms and trusted friend Lethe, sad Portia whose potential had never been realised, Iona and her milk-pale face beneath the crimson cowl of a Repentia… And beyond them, a hundred, a thousand others, the whole mass of the women who had died at Sanctuary 101, rising up to blame her for failing them. The dreadful phantasms drew closer, mirrored everywhere she turned her gaze. She could not close her eyes. She could not shut them out, trying and failing to find the words of faith that had saved her before. The ghosts were drowning her, smothering her in desolation, killing all hope…

  Hope…

  Forcing the nerve-deadened hand to work, Miriya reached beneath her cloak and her trembling fingers found old leather and iron latches. She forced herself to think of what was written on the pages of The Hammer and Anvil.

  ‘Fear is the enemy of hope. Hope is the foundation of faith. Faith is the weapon to kill fear.’ The axiom came to her as if Katherine herself had breathed the words into her ear.

  Illumination came from within, streaming from a place in her heart that could never be extinguished, never be doused. It could only be hidden, concealed by the subterfuge of the enemy. The foe would fight to convince you that it was gone, the fire of the soul doused and ashes, that hope was dead… But it was a lie.

  It was eternal, and so clear to her now that it amazed Miriya she could ever have been uncertain. She spoke a litany to invoke the Spirit of the Martyr and burned her doubts, steeling herself. In one hand she clutched the sacred book; the other reached for the grip of the chain-sword sheathed upon her back.

  The darkness died, and the moment shattered. It had only been the briefest of instants, and yet in the grip of the nightmare shroud it had seemed like hours.

  Ossuar reared up and emitted a sour, hissing sound. ‘Still you defy,’ he intoned.

  ‘All acts of faith are acts of defiance,’ she shot back. Miriya attacked with a battle-cry, sweeping down with the snarling chainblade. The cryptek blocked the blow and fat yellow sparks gushed from the point where the tungsten-alloy teeth met the alien material of the abyssal staff.

  Vehemence propelled Miriya’s attack, that and her righteous fury. She executed a sweep and parry that opened Ossuar’s guard for a moment too long and the blade fell across the plane of the necron’s skull. The Battle Sister put her weight behind the weapon and there was a horrible screeching clatter as the spinning teeth ripped open the cryptek’s chromium face. Optical lenses and sensing elements were crushed instantly, and the alien gave an atonal howl.

  He struck out blindly with the abyssal staff, beating Miriya back with a random blow. ‘My vision is impaired… I cannot see…’ Ossuar swung out again as the phylactery medallion irised open, spider-menders teeming as they boiled across his silver skin towards the wound. ‘Foolish. I will self-repair. And you will pay for daring to strike a harbinger of the Sautekh dynasty!’

  Black mist emerged from nothing, curtains of dark falling. Miriya swung again at the necron, but the cryptek was gone. He appeared, stepping in and out of the churning veils, moving from one side of the laboratorium to another without seeming to cross the physical space in between. Nearby, Tegas groaned, dragging himself into a corner out of the fray.

  Tucking away the holy book, Miriya stooped and swept up her bolter from where it had fallen. She turned in a single motion to fire at the retreating alien. But each shot was late, an instant after Ossuar passed into the veil and escaped her. He was trying to wear her down, buying time to heal himself as she expended her ammunition on illusions.

  ‘I will not fight with ghosts,’ spat Miriya, and threw herself into a rapid spin, dropping low to one knee to let the boltgun describe an arc across the room. She did not fire towards where Ossuar was; instead she filled the air with bolt-rounds, firing towards where he would be.

  Half a clip of shells exploded against nothing, but then she found her phantom in the space between manifest and immaterial – and blasted it back into corporeality. Ossuar took a cluster of rounds in the torso and crashed into a stasis orb.

  Ruined, broken sounds spilled from the necron’s damaged skull. The angular metal mask was broken and fractured, and Miriya saw complex crystalline workings behind the façade. The cryptek lunged wildly with the abyssal rod, savage and random.

  Did it feel fear? she wondered. Did it feel that, now she had blinded it? Was the machine capable of emulating that state? Miriya wanted it to be so. It did not seem right that Ossuar should be able to cause such terror and yet go untouched by it.

  With a brutal axe-blow strike of her chainsword, Miriya took off the cryptek’s arm at the elbow joint and it lost the staff. The necron’s self-repair systems were going into overload, frantically trying to fix the critical damage. But the Sororitas could inflict it faster than Ossuar could heal it.

  She cut and chopped at the machine-form, taking little victories in the guttural, haphazard noises that spilled from the cryptek. The necron rallied, raising a clawed finger to point towards her.

  ‘You think you can win?’ The words were laced with static. ‘There are more of my kind than stars in your night. We owned this galaxy before your species was born. We killed the first gods and we will kill yours.’

  Slowly, deliberately, Miriya knocked the machine down once more and sheathed her chainsword. She raised her bolter and rested it on Ossuar’s damaged skullcase. ‘My God cannot
die,’ said the Battle Sister. ‘He lives in faith, and faith lives in us.’

  Miriya blasted the harbinger’s head into fragments of steel scrap, and watched the green fire of disintegration crawl over the remains of the torso, crackling with the last ergs of energy inside the alien machine.

  Questor Tegas was where he had hidden, still trembling from the after-effects of the nightmare shroud. His neural implants were stuck in a restart loop that made him twitch like a victim of palsy. The Sororitas dragged him to his feet and backhanded the adept across his synthetic face.

  ‘You are considering how to kill me,’ he grated, regaining his composure. ‘But circumstances have changed.’

  ‘Not really.’ Miriya glared at him. He could see her raw need to cut him down where he stood, burning hard in the woman’s eyes. ‘We still have a mission to complete.’ She grabbed a fist of his robes and shoved him towards the corridor. ‘Move.’

  ‘Why should I?’ he shot back. ‘I abandoned you… You want revenge for that. It is what you are. The daughters of Saint Katherine. It is what you are known for!’

  She ignored his words. ‘Sister Superior Imogen is dead. That means that I am the most senior Battle Sister, so command of this mission is mine.’ She showed him her bolter, menacing him with the weapon. ‘You life belongs to me now. The duration of it will depend on how you obey me from this point onwards.’

  ‘What I did…’ He tried to frame the words. ‘I was forced to make unpalatable choices.’

  ‘Unpalatable,’ she repeated, in a dead voice. ‘You left us to be killed.’

  ‘It was for a higher purpose! For the good of the Imperium and Holy Terra. Your sacrifice would not have been forgotten!’

  Miriya halted. ‘Do you believe that, Tegas. Honestly, and truthfully?’

  He nodded, without thinking. ‘Of course. I am the Omnissiah’s loyal servant.’

  There was a long silence before the Sororitas spoke again. ‘If that is so, then you have only one chance to redeem yourself, questor. Do you understand?’