by Dan Abnett
Gundax nodded curtly, his leather smock creaking. His charm beads clattered against each other.
‘Walk with me,’ the bishop told Drusher.
They plodded side by side down the nave. Drusher made a few admiring remarks about the temple’s towering architecture and glorious stained glass work.
‘This is a hard parish,’ said the bishop. ‘Hard and hardy on the edge of beyond. Of course, I’m not complaining. I serve the God-Emperor in whatever capacity He calls on me to perform. And here is as good as anywhere.’
‘The Emperor protects,’ Drusher said.
‘He doesn’t seem to be doing that so much here these days,’ said the bishop. ‘It weakens the faith. I have a tough enough time instilling virtue and belief into the weather-beaten folk of this blasted land, and this beast... It saps every ounce of fibre.’
‘It must be difficult, your holiness.’
‘Life is difficult. We rise to our tests. But, my dear magos, I fear for the spiritual life of this community almost as much as I fear for its flesh and blood. This thing... this beast... it is not an animal. It is a test of faith. An emissary of Chaos. For it to roam here, unchecked also shows that disbelief may roam here likewise. In every sermon I preach, I declaim as much. The beast is a sign that we have fallen away and allowed taint into our souls. To kill it, to cast it out, we must first reaffirm our faith in the Golden Throne.’
‘You make it sound simple, your holiness.’
‘It is not, of course! But this beast may be a blessing in disguise. Ultimately, I mean. If it makes us renew our belief and our trust in the absolute sanctity of the aquila, then I will offer thanks for it in time. Only in true adversity may a congregation find its focus.’
‘I commend your zeal, bishop.’
‘So... do you have any leads? Any expert insight?’
‘Not yet, your holiness.’
‘Ah well, early days. Come, let me bless you and your work.’
‘Your holiness? One thing?’
‘Yes, magos?’ said the bishop brightly, halting in his tracks.
‘You said the beast has no eyes. In fact, that seems to be the popular conviction.’ Drusher paused, remembering the words of the child on the coach.
‘No eyes, indeed! No eyes, that’s what they say.’
‘Who, your holiness?’
The bishop paused. ‘Why, the folk of Outer Udar. It is what they know of it.’
‘I was of the understanding that no one had actually seen this thing. Seen it and survived, I mean.’
The bishop shrugged. ‘Really?’
‘I know of no eye-witness. No one can offer any sort of description. No one knows the form or size of this thing. Of course, we can make guesses. We know it has teeth from the wounds it delivers, and from that I can estimate the size of the mouth. We know it is small enough to pass through a man-sized hole. And, I fancy, it has shearing claws or talons of some considerable size. But other than that, there is no certainty of its form or nature. And yet... everyone seems certain it has no eyes. Why is that, do you think?’
‘Tattle,’ smiled the bishop. ‘Tavern talk, fireside yap. You know how people invent things, especially if they know nothing and they’re afraid. I’m sure it has eyes.’
‘I see,’ said Drusher.
‘Now, come and receive my blessing.’
Drusher endured the short blessing ritual. He didn’t feel any better for it.
‘I would appreciate your collaboration, magos,’ said Fernal Skoh. Drusher raised his eyebrows and hesitated, then let the hunter into his chambers. It was late afternoon, and an ice-wind was rising in the north.
Skoh, dressed in a leather body-glove reinforced with mail links and segments of plasteel armour plate, entered Drusher’s quarters in the keep and looked around.
Drusher closed the door after him.
‘A drink?’ he offered.
‘Thank you, yes.’
Drusher poured two glasses of amasec from the flask in his luggage. Skoh was wandering the room. He paused at the table, and looked down at Drusher’s spread-out mass of notebooks, data-slates and jottings. Skoh carefully leafed through one of the sketch books, studying each water colour illustration.
Drusher brought him his drink.
‘This is fine work,’ said Skoh, making an admiring gesture towards the sketches. ‘Truly you have a good hand and a great eye. That grazer there. Just so.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re no hunter though, are you, Drusher?’
The question took Drusher aback.
‘No,’ he admitted.
‘That’s fine,’ said Skoh, sipping his drink. ‘I didn’t think so. You’re just one more fool caught up in this mess.’
‘I hear you worked the Imperial Pits.’
Skoh looked at Drusher cautiously. ‘Who’s been talking?’
‘Deputy Macks.’
Skoh nodded. ‘Well, it’s true. Twenty-five years I worked for the arena on Thustathrax as a procurer.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I was paid to travel the wilder worlds of the Imperium trapping and collecting animal specimens to fight in the arena. The odder, the more savage, the better. It brought the crowds in if we had something... unusual.’
‘Something like this beast?’
Skoh didn’t reply.
‘It must have been interesting work. Dangerous work. That’s why the bishop doesn’t like you, isn’t it?’
Skoh managed a small smile. ‘The arenas of the Imperial Pits are ungodly, according to his holiness. I was employed by a secular entertainment industry that revelled in bloodletting and carnage. I am, to him, the lowest of the low. And an outsider to boot.’
‘What did you want, Skoh?’ Drusher asked.
‘The baron tells me my fee will be forfeit if I fail to make a kill soon. I have wages to pay, overheads to consider. This job has dragged on. I can kill this beast, Drusher, but I can’t find it. I think you can. Help me, and I’ll pay you a dividend of my earnings.’
‘I’m not interested in money,’ said Drusher, sipping his amasec.
‘You’re not?’
‘I’m interested in two things. An end to this slaughter and a personal closure. I was hired to produce a complete taxonomy of this planet’s fauna. Now, at the eleventh hour, I seem to have a new apex predator on my hands. If that’s so, it will throw my entire work into disarray. Seven years’ work, you understand?’
‘You think this is an apex predator that you’ve missed?’
‘No,’ said Drusher. ‘Not even slightly. There’d be records, previous incidents. This is either a known predator gone rogue and acting abnormally or…’
‘Or?’
‘It’s an exotic.’
Skoh nodded. ‘You’ve been here a day and you’re that certain?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Do you have supporting evidence?’
‘It doesn’t match anything I’ve turned up in seven years. And it doesn’t feed. There is no sign of appetite or predation. It simply kills and kills and kills again. That’s the behaviour of a rogue animal, a carnivore that’s no longer killing due to hunger. And it’s the behaviour of a creature alien to this world. May I ask you a couple of questions?’
Skoh set his empty glass down on the table. ‘By all means.’
‘Why do they say it has no eyes? Where did that rumour come from?’
‘All I know about that is that the lack of eyes is a regular feature of the bishop’s hellfire sermons. I presumed it was hyperbolic invention on his part, which has fallen into common rumour.’
‘My other question is this – you know what it is, don’t you?’
Skoh looked at him. His eyes pierced right through Drusher.
‘No,’ he said.
By dawn the next day, there had been another death. A swine herder out beyond the crossroads had been killed in the night, and twenty of his saddlebacks along with him. Drusher went out into the sparse woodland with Skoh, Ma
cks, Lussin and two of Skoh’s huntsmen.
The air was cold and ice-fog wrapped the hillside. It was ten below. At the swine farm, the bodies of hogs and hogherd alike had frozen into the mud of the pens, their copious blood making ruby-like crystals.
In the steep thorn scrub above the swine farm, Drusher stopped the group and handed out the cartridges he’d prepared the night before.
‘Load them into your shotguns,’ he said. ‘They won’t have much range, I’m afraid.’
Macks and Lussin had Arbites-issue riotguns. Skoh had made sure his men had brought short action pump-shots along with their heavy ordnance. Both huntsmen, like Skoh, were weighed down with torso rigs supporting massive autolasers.
‘What are these?’ Lussin asked.
Drusher broke a cartridge open to show them. Little chrome pellets were packed inside in a sticky fluid suspension.
‘Trackers,’ he said. ‘Miniature tracker units. They have a two thousand-kilometre range. I usually use them for ringing birds. In fact I plotted the migration patterns of the lesser beakspot and the frigate gull Tachybaptus maritimus over a three-year period using just these very–’
‘I’m sure you did a great job,’ snapped Macks. ‘But can we get on?’
Drusher nodded. ‘I’ve packed them in contact adhesive. If you see anything – anything – then you mark it.’
They made their way up the thorny scarp, and entered a stretch of black-birch woodland. Thanks to the fog, the world had become a shrunken, myopic place. Unaided visibility was twenty metres. Stark and twisted black trees hemmed them in, gradually receding into the white vapour. The earth was hard, and groundcover leaves were brittle with frost. The obscured sun backlit the fog, turning the sky into a glowing white haze. Skoh spread the group into a wide line, but still close enough for every person to be visible at least to his immediate neighbour. Drusher stayed with Macks. There was an uncanny stillness, broken only by the sounds of their breathing and movement.
Drusher was bone-cold. Macks, wearing a quilted Arbites jacket, had lent him her fox-fur jacket, which he wore over his own weathercoat. His breath clouded the air.
‘Do you have a weapon?’ she asked.
He shook his head.
She slid a short-pattern autopistol out of an underarm rig, checked the load, and handed it to him grip first.
He looked at it uncertainly, as if it were some new specimen for collation. It had a brushed-matt finish and a black, rubberised grip.
‘The safety’s here, beside the trigger guard. If you have to fire it, hold it with both hands, and aim low because the kick lifts it.’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been a great one for guns.’
‘I’d feel better if you had something.’
‘You wouldn’t feel better if I shot you by accident, which is likely if you let me loose with something like that.’
She shrugged and put it away again.
‘Your funeral,’ she said.
‘I do hope not.’
They walked on another kilometre or two. Skoh and his hired hands had auspex units taped to their forearms, scanning for movement.
‘What was the time of death, do you reckon?’ Drusher asked.
Macks pursed her lips. ‘Four, four-thirty? The bodies had a residual core temperature.’
‘So three or four hours ago?’
The chance of anything still being around seemed very slim to Drusher. Given the Beast’s hit-and-run habits, it would be long gone by now. But the cold offered possibilities. It had set the soil hard and solid. Tracks might remain. Drusher kept his eyes on the ground.
They went across open fields, thick with rime, and along the basin of a wooded dell where the fallen leaves had frozen into a slippery mat. The fog was actually beginning to disperse, but down in the hollow it was as thick as smoke. Butcher birds, jet-black and armed with shiny hook-beaks, cawed, clacked and circled in the treetops.
Drusher suddenly heard an extraordinary noise. It sounded like an industrial riveter or a steam-powered loom. A puffing, pneumatic sputter interlaced with high-pitch squeals.
Macks started to run. Her vox-link crackled into life.
‘What is it?’ Drusher called, hurrying after her.
He heard the noise again, and made more sense of it. One of Skoh’s men had opened fire with his autolaser.
He scrambled through the frosty ground-brush, trying to keep up with Macks’ jogging as she slipped in and out of sight between the tree trunks. Twice, he went over on the frozen rug of leaves, scraping his palms.
‘Macks! What’s going on?’
More shooting. A second weapon joining the first. Stacatto puff-zwip-puff-zwip.
Then the dreadful, plangent boom of a shotgun.
Drusher almost ran into Macks. She had stopped in her tracks.
Ahead of them, in a narrow clearing between leafless tindletrees, Skoh lay on his back. It looked like his chest and groin was on fire, but Drusher realised it wasn’t smoke. It was steam, wafting up from wretched wounds that had all but eviscerated him. His heavy weapon and part of its gimbal-rig had been torn off and were lying on the other side of the clearing. Huge clouts of fused earth had been torn out of the ground and two small trees severed completely from the fury of his shooting.
‘Throne of Terra...’ Macks stammered.
Drusher felt oddly dislocated, as if it wasn’t actually happening. They walked together, slowly, towards the body of the hunter. He still had his pump-shot clamped in his hand. The end of the barrel was missing.
Macks suddenly swung left, her riotgun aimed. One of Skoh’s men stood on the other side of the clearing, half-hidden by a tree and only now visible to them. He wasn’t actually standing. His body was lodged upright by the tree itself. His head was bowed onto his chest, the angle of the tilt far, far greater than any spine should allow. Macks approached him tentatively, and reached out a hand. When she touched him, he sagged sideways and his head flopped further. Drusher saw that only the merest shred of skin kept it attached to the rest of the body.
Drusher was overcome with heaving retches, and he wobbled over to the thickets to throw up. Lussin and the other huntsman stumbled into the clearing while he was emptying his stomach.
‘Did you see anything?’ Macks barked at the other men.
‘I just heard the shooting,’ Lussin moaned. He couldn’t take his eyes from Skoh’s awfully exposed entrails.
‘That’s it, then,’ said the hunter. He leaned back against a tree trunk, and clutched his head in his hands. ‘Damn, that’s it then.’
‘It’s got to be close! Come on!’ Macks snapped.
‘And do what?’ the hunter asked. ‘Two of them, with auto-lasers, and they didn’t kill it.’ He nodded to Skoh’s body. ‘That’s my paycheque gone. All my dividends.’
‘Is that all you care about?’ Lussin asked.
‘No,’ said the hunter, ‘I care about living too.’ He took out a lho-stick, lit it, and sucked hard. ‘I told Skoh we’d wasted our time here. Stayed too long. He wouldn’t admit it. He said he couldn’t afford to cut our losses and leave. Screw it. Screw him.’
The hunter straightened up and dragged on his lho-stick again.
‘Good luck,’ he said and began to walk away.
‘Where the hell are you going?’ Macks demanded.
‘Where we should have gone weeks ago. As far away as possible.’
‘Come back!’ cried Lussin.
The hunter shook his head, and wandered away into the fog. Drusher never saw him again.
‘What do we do?’ Lussin asked Macks. She was prowling up and down, fists clenched. She growled something.
‘One of them got a round off, with a shotgun,’ Drusher said. His voice was hoarse from vomiting, and his mouth tasted foul.
‘You sure?’ Macks snapped.
‘I heard a shotgun,’ Drusher said.
‘I didn’t,’ said Macks.
‘I think I did... maybe…’ Lussin murmured
softly, rubbing his eyes.
‘Get an auspex!’ Macks ordered. Drusher wasn’t sure who she was speaking to, but Lussin didn’t move. Reluctantly, Drusher approached Skoh’s body, trying not to look directly at it. He crouched down and started to peel away the tape that secured the compact scanner to Skoh’s left gauntlet.
Skoh opened his eyes and exhaled steam. Drusher screamed, and would have leapt back if the hunter’s left hand hadn’t grabbed his wrist.
‘Drusher...’
‘Oh no... oh no…’
The hand pulled him closer. He could smell the hot, metallic stink of blood.
‘Saw it…’
‘What?’
‘I... saw... it…’ Thin, watery blood leaked from Skoh’s mouth, and his breathing was ragged. His eyes were dull and filmy.
‘What did you see?’ asked Drusher.
‘You... were... right, Drusher... I... I did... know what... it was... suspected... didn’t want... didn’t want to say... cause a panic... and anyway... couldn’t be true... not here... couldn’t be here...’
‘What did you see?’ Drusher repeated.
‘All the things... I’ve tracked... tracked and caught in... in my life... for the Pits... you know I worked for the Pits...?’
‘Yes.’
‘Never seen one... before... but been told... about them... you don’t mess with... don’t mess with them... don’t care what the... the Pits would pay for one.’
‘What was it, Skoh?’
‘The Great... Great Devourer...’
‘Skoh?’
The hunter tried to turn his head to look at Drusher. A torrent of black blood gushed from his mouth and nostrils, and his eyes went blank.
Drusher tore the auspex from the dead man’s forearm, and got to his feet.
‘What did he say?’ Macks asked.
‘He was raving,’ said Drusher. ‘The pain had taken his senses away.’
He swept the auspex around, and tried to adjust its depth of field. He was getting a lot of nearby bounce from the trackers that had gone wide, and pelted the ferns and tree boles.
Two contacts showed at a greater range. Two of the glue-dipped teleplugs anchored to the hide of something moving north-west, just a kilometre and a half away.
‘Got anything?’
