by Marc
He turned and stalked out of the medi-bay.
‘Follow me,’ Anselm said and moved swiftly after the inquisitor. They caught up with him in the control room, where he was waiting for Cantor to guide them. The tech-priest handed each of them a torch from a rack, then led the way out of the control room and towards a pair of lifts. Stopping only to pull his combat shotgun from his kit bag, Anselm followed him. Once inside, they stood silently while Cantor jabbed at buttons with his finger. The lift doors closed and a gentle humming sound filled the small room. There was a barely perceptible shift as the lift started to descend. There was almost no sensation of falling but Anselm felt his ears popping before the lift came to a gentle halt about a minute later. The doors opened and they moved out into a vast space.
The room was a hall of some kind. It seemed as if it were once some sort of meeting area or place of worship. There had once been fine paintings on the walls, but age and water damage had destroyed them, leaving only mouldering frames. What had once been furniture was now nothing more than splintered timbers and broken masonry, pushed to one side. The dust lay heavy at the edges of the room, but the middle had been worn clean by the countless feet of the archaeotech priests over the years.
They moved down through the hall, Grogan leading, his great strides kicking up dust. Cantor followed, his soft shoes shuffling, and Anselm brought up the rear. They went through a door and found themselves in a broad corridor, almost a road, leading downwards. On either side of them, doors and corridors led off in different directions. Burnt out machinery, some of it looking incredibly old, was scattered haphazardly around the area. Doors, broken and hanging off their hinges, sometimes blocked a doorway. Every now and again, they passed some dark staining on the walls or floors. It looked as if oil or some carbonised matter had been spilt there.
They came to a crossroads of sorts, lit by the harsh lights of the exploratory team who had set up permanent illumination across the dig area. High pillars held up the roof, now hung with webs of what looked like the spinnings of some long gone creatures. He could see balconies, mezzanine levels, bridges spanning the void above them. Anselm shuddered. He suddenly realised that they were moving through the heart of what had been a great city, a city to rival in splendour any that he had seen, but now ruined and desolate. In his mind’s eye he could see shops, warehouses, palaces, gardens, roads and walkways, once splendid, now mined and empty. He noticed marks in the walls from small arms fire, bolter marks and scorches from lasguns. All was quiet and beyond the perimeter of light afforded by the arc-lamps, he could see nothing. He gripped the comforting bulk of his shotgun, holding it ready as he scanned the darkness. The beam from his torch wavered as he settled the gun’s stock into his hip.
Great loops of black cabling snaked back the way they had come, no doubt supplying power to those digging deeper in the bowels of the city. Arc lamps threw stark shadows, and as they passed each lamp, Anselm saw the silhouette of Grogan rear up the wall towards him and then sink down again as the inquisitor strode past, his powerful bulk seeming to leap at him.
His skin prickled. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw movement. He turned his head, shining the strong beam of his torch into the blackness, but there was nothing there, only an empty hole where one part of a wall had collapsed. He turned his attention back to the group.
‘Do we know anything about the city, its people?’ Anselm asked Cantor.
‘Nothing at all.’ he replied. ‘The city itself is very old, but apart from the buildings themselves, which you can see around you, there is very little that it has revealed to us. It is a bit of a mystery – there is nothing in the ancient chronicles about a city or even a civilisation this far away from the galactic core. Whatever was here was either well hidden from the main routes or kept itself to itself. I would have posited some sort of pirate community or frontier world but the size and complexity of this city denies that. There is almost no evidence of how they lived other than the buildings. There is much damage, it looks like a heavy battle was fought here but over what we cannot tell. The centuries hide a lot of evidence – we found bones but they’d almost worn away to nothing, clothes had rotted, even metal had rusted away.’
Anselm shuddered. He couldn’t get rid of the feeling that they were being watched but he could see no sign of anything nearby. The dark windows of buildings seemed to gaze at him blankly but every now and then he felt that something was watching him from behind stone buttresses or broken walls. He shook his head, clearing the visions. He wouldn’t allow himself to start imagining that he could see back into the city’s living past. He looked ahead. They were coming to a narrowing of the way, almost a tunnel.
He concentrated on Cantor’s monologue.
‘Much of this part of the city was sealed off by rockfall. We had to excavate heavily in order to get past it, as sensors indicated that the city continued for some way beyond it. Took some doing, I can tell you. This rock’s hard as adamantium. Wore away hundreds of drillbits, but in the end… Ah, here we are. As you can see, what we found was well worth the effort.’
They had come to the end of the tunnel. In front of them stood a wall, carved from massive blocks of stone, fitted together with such precision that only the thinnest line separated the blocks from one another. At the base of the wall was an opening, barely two metres high, and only half the width. Surrounding the opening was an inscription in a language they could not read.
‘The translation has defeated us so far; it was sent to the Ecclesiarchy for translation but we heard nothing back.’ Cantor said, rather sheepishly. There was a stone blocking the doorway. ‘I’m afraid we had to use compact charges to remove it. The interesting thing, you’ll notice, is that none of the other blocks were scarred by the explosion. The door-block was made of a softer stone than the wall. Why, we’ve no idea, but we sent the fragments back for analysis all the same.’
Anselm had to stoop to get through the doorway, and when he lifted his head on the other side, he felt his breath catch in amazement. Ahead of him, sloping down, illuminated in the soft light of hundreds of glow-globes, the corridor stretched ahead for what seemed like kilometres. The passageway was barely wider than the door they had entered it by, but the roof stretched hundreds of metres above him. On the floor was a soft fine dust that stirred as he stepped through it.
Grogan granted. ‘Impressive.’ he conceded, striding forward, his cloak billowing behind him, throwing up miniature dust-storms. ‘But we’ve no time for sightseeing. My work is fighting heretics, not playing historian. This stuff should all be left underground where it belongs. The Imperium is best guarded with the Emperor’s word and a hellgun, not with ancient trinkets. In the meantime I want to find your missing priest as quickly as possible. Or the corpse.’ he added darkly. ‘If there is something alive down here, I want it hunted down and exterminated so that we can get off this rock.’
Cantor huffed. ‘Come on.’ Anselm said. ‘Until we find whatever’s out there, it may strike again.’ Cantor led the way down the immense corridor. Anselm gazed up in wonder. The roof soared away into darkness above him. About halfway along, there was a dark strip of rock all the way across the floor and reaching high up the walls on either side.
Cantor noticed him looking at it. ‘That’s hardened basalt.’ he commented. ‘It cut the corridor in half. Our cogitators have surmised that at one time a wall of molten lava bisected this corridor, held in place by the Emperor knows what. In time it cooled and hardened into a perfect wall of basalt. We had to cut through it with high intensity laser drills. The basalt extends for hundreds of metres in every direction as if the wall stretched far into the rock like a protective barrier. We knew once we passed it that we were reaching the heart of what had been the city – we think it may have acted as some sort of heat sink or repository for their energy needs. What we do know is that there is still much molten magma near this part of the dig, held in check by the great weight of rock.’
They passed
the ring of basalt and after some time, the passageway levelled out. Soon afterwards, it opened up into a room, perhaps ten metres wide. Machinery lay on wheeled trolleys, cables and unlit glow-globes were stacked in piles around the room, and there was the noise of humming. Anselm guessed that the machinery was pumping fresh air into the room and taking away spent air. Above them, balconies overlooked the room, and there was the faint sound of chains swinging in an imperceptible breeze.
Cantor said ‘This is the heart of Barathrum. It is the deepest our excavations have brought us.’ Then he stopped.
The body lay slumped face down against a workbench. There was a pool of blood around his head, and his hair was matted with it. Blood and brain matter were spattered against the walls. Grogan motioned Anselm forwards.
‘Anselm.’ he said. ‘You’re the chirugeon, if I remember correctly. What can you tell us?’
Anselm moved forwards, stepping over the outstretched legs of the corpse. He leaned forward and gently pulled the body round. As it slumped over onto its back, he gasped in horror. The man’s front had been torn apart, the chest a gaping cavity, arms hanging limply from sleeves of lacerated skin. Dark holes gazed into nothingness where his eyes had been, and blood had oozed from the sockets, drying into black crusted rivulets across his cheeks.
‘I can tell little from here,’ he said. ‘We must take him to the medi-bay. I will examine him there.’
He turned his face away from the shattered corpse and examined the room in which they had found him. The walls were made of small mud bricks stacked one on top of the other and sealed with some sort of rough cement. There was a glow-globe in the corner and he played it over the wall, the flickering light tracing daemonic patterns on the rough brickwork. Apart from the blood spray near the corpse, there were no other marks on the wall.
Except…
‘What’s this?’ Anselm ran his fingers over one part of the wall. The bricks seemed to be rougher here, the finish less clean. His fingertips found a line, near the floor, almost imperceptible, and followed it up until it was about half a metre above his head. Then it turned sharply, at ninety degrees and continued horizontally for about a metre.
‘A door.’ he breathed. ‘Cantor, look at this.’ The tech-priest came close and peered at the line.
‘You’re right.’ he said. A door. We’d never have seen this if you hadn’t noticed it.’
Grogan barked at Eremet. ‘Get servitors down here. I want this area sealed off and I want to know what’s behind this wall.’
Eremet nodded. ‘I will see to it, inquisitor.’
Anselm made a circuit of the room, remembering everything in case a clue came to him later. Then, reluctantly, they lifted the corpse and wrapped it in a length of tarpaulin, before placing it on one of the machinery trolleys that stood to one side. Anselm, his mind already on the work ahead, guided the trolley as its internal suspensors moved it forwards.
As they passed once more through the labyrinthine passages of the dead city, Anselm again felt the hairs on the back of his neck begin to rise. Out of the corner of his eye, in the dark passages and openings that they passed, he could swear he saw eyes glinting at him, hundreds of eyes staring, unblinking. But each time he turned his head, his torch illuminating the darkness, he saw nothing, only the empty blackness of the tunnels. He was sure it was only his imagination, but he thought he could hear laughter; laughter dusty, dry and alien. He shook his head and the sound disappeared.
The tension must be getting to him, the horrific corpse they had found and the knowledge that Grogan was once again watching him. What if this was some sort of test? What if Grogan had been sent to report back on how he was handling this enquiry, whether he was showing sufficient zeal and devotion?
What if… What if, he told himself angrily, you concentrate on the task at hand and leave the worries for another time. He had a post-mortem to carry out and despite the gruesome nature of the task, he was looking forward to it; a chance to pit his keen intelligence against something that would eventually yield up its secrets.
It took some time before they reached the apothecary’s bay. They placed the body on the operating table and unwrapped the tarpaulin. Cantor and Eremet stood back against the wall, trying not to watch, and Grogan pulled a high lab stool up close.
Donning a pair of transparent surgical gloves, Anselm began to work, cutting the shredded remains of the man’s clothing away from the body.
He muttered to himself as he did so, a habit from the days when he had a med-servitor to record the results of the post-mortem. ‘Hmm, number of deep incisions on the torso, mostly vertical… some bruising of the solar plexus… let’s see, ribs cracked on left hand side, heavy blow to the shoulder, no bruising. Most interesting…’ His voice died away as he reached across to pick up a pair of oculators and a small surgical pick. He leaned across the body and tentatively lifted up a flap of skin on the corpse’s chest. ‘Most interesting.’ he confirmed as he squinted through the oculators.
‘What is it?’ demanded Grogan.
‘Not ready to say… I just need to…’ Anselm mumbled half to himself. He transferred his attention to the man’s ruined face. Taking a pad of cotton, he soaked it in surgical alcohol and began to wipe the dried blood from the skin. Under the blood, the slashes were livid, purple and swollen. Cantor looked away and made a strangled gargling sound in his throat. Eremet looked pale. Grogan watched stoically, occasionally rubbing the vein at his temple. In the now clean face, the corpse’s empty eye sockets glared evilly and despite their lack of occupants, Grogan felt they were watching them.
It was some time before Anselm spoke again: ‘Now this is most interesting…’
This time, Grogan lost his patience. He stood up and leaned over the body on the table. ‘For Emperor’s sake, what are you muttering about?’
Anselm pulled of the oculators and stripped the gloves from his fingers.
‘This is not the work of a zoomorph, a beast, at least not in the way we thought. These slash marks are certainly caused by claws of some kind, though the exact identity of the creature that caused them is beyond my knowledge. However, they are not the cause of death, nor the most interesting part of the examination. Look at the man’s head, the area around the eyes, and tell me what you see.’
‘This is insufferable.’ Grogan declared, but bent his head until his nose was almost touching the ripped nasal cavity of the dead man.
‘Throne of Earth!’ he exclaimed. Cantor and Eremet jumped up as if they had been stung and crowded round.
‘What is it?’ the explorator demanded.
Grogan jumped in before Anselm could open his mouth. ‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘Look at the eye sockets. It seems like the eyes have been ripped out, but look more closely. It’s not just the eyes that have gone, it’s the bone around the eye socket too.’
‘And if you look through the oculator.’ continued Anselm, ‘the eyes weren’t torn out. They were removed. Something, or someone, removed those eyes with great precision, using some kind of device that removed them at high speed and with great accuracy. There are hardly any radial injury marks on the rest of the skull round the wound – this was done with something incredibly sharp – whatever else, I would say this man’s eyes were intact when they were removed. But what kind of creature takes the eyes and leaves the rest of the body?’
Anselm ran his fingers through his cropped hair and started to pace the room. He suddenly stopped. ‘What about the eyes on the other bodies?’ he suddenly exclaimed. He strode to the screen behind which the bodies lay on their gurneys. He rapidly pulled back the sheets and then stopped in disappointment. Whatever the extent of their injuries and cause of death, it was clear to see that the eyes of the other bodies were either intact or at least extant.
He turned to face the others. ‘I need to be alone.’ he said. ‘I need to think about this. I will examine the other bodies. There may be some clue as to how they died that may help us.’
Cantor a
nd Eremet bowed towards the inquisitor and left. Grogan remained.
‘Inquisitor.’ Anselm asserted. ‘I must do this alone. I need to deliver these souls into the Emperor’s care and ask their spirits to guide me in finding their killer. To do that I must be alone.’
Grogan looked suspiciously at him. ‘What is this? Is this some sort of ritual?’
‘No, it is merely that I must examine the other bodies, but I need to have my mind clear to accept whatever the results tell me, no matter how strange or confusing they may seem to my brain. I just need quiet.’
Grogan seemed to consider this. ‘Very well.’ he said, ‘but I want a full debrief.’
‘Before you speak to the others.’ he added, as he turned and strode out of the room.
IT WAS SOME hours later that Grogan heard a knock on the door of the hab-mod that had been assigned to him. He put away the documents he had been reading and opened the door. Anselm stood there, looking tired but alert.
‘May I enter?’ he asked. Grogan stood aside and Anselm entered, seating himself at the table strewn with transcripts and documents. Grogan swept them up into a pile and sat down opposite him.
‘Well, what have you found?’ he asked.
‘This is a lot darker than you or I suspected.’ the inquisitor began.
Grogan’s face twitched and Anselm could have sworn he saw the flicker of a smile pass across the older man’s craggy features. Nothing gave Grogan more pleasure, Anselm remembered, than having an enemy, preferably a self-confessed heretic, that he could pin all his fiery, destructive, righteous energies on.
‘I’ve examined all the bodies. Apart from Crans, they all seem to have died in a savage and frenzied attack. They were literally torn apart. Whatever it was that killed them, it was hugely strong, fast as a tyranid, but man-sized, bipedal, with only two arms, and legs for locomotion, not attack. The attack was frenzied, as I say, but I would say from the pattern of the lacerations, it was carried out by someone who was not. In other words, this is not the work of a beast, nor of a deranged madman, but a madman who is cold, calculated and very cunning.’
