by Ben Counter
Though this memory’s significance is unknown, the Emperor looks with favour upon those who perform their duty with thoroughness and completeness as well as zeal and so it and its associated fragments were recorded in accordance with this functionary’s orders. This task was performed during mental hygiene procedures following the previous contact and so was completed without interference in this functionary’s principal duties.
Black water flows through the streets. The hive sump has breached the lower levels and the effluent canals are overflowing. The population courses for higher ground, where the gun lines are waiting for them. As I watch, I can see the deaths of each one as a single bullet cuts through each thread.
The rings of Obsidia pass over the battlements of the fortress. The Chapter traditions demand we take to the rooftops and fight until the rings have moved out of sight, at least two days. The people of the city watch us, and try to spot their sons and brothers among the duellists. Most of us cannot be recognised any more.
I should flay the sin from my body. The flail in my hand and the blood on my back would give me a sense of righteousness. But this is not a shame that can be scoured away. It can only be put right. I walk from the scourging-hall and envy the brothers who can absolve their failures with pain.
Physical recovery procedures were undergone when mental hygiene was complete and the required rest period commenced. Given the presence of such mental stress on the part of the autoseance subject, this functionary must prepare for future contacts to become more strenuous.
SEVEN
Codicier Hyalhi
It was impossible to tell whether it was day or night on Varvenkast. The sky was permanently clouded with the smog from the hive’s factoria. The hive stretched out into the hazy distance, rising up to the north in an immense mountain of industrial architecture. The upper levels were clad in marble for that was where the hive’s aristocracy lived, among them Planetary Governor Lord Rheydolmar. Rheydolmar was currently under house arrest under inquisitorial authority. Quite possibly he would be executed before the next day dawned, whenever that might be.
It was not Hyalhi’s concern. He had his duty, the Inquisition had theirs. From his position on the landing platform, where the Aquila shuttle had made landfall, Hyalhi could see the red streamers that marked out the target district. The inhabitants had come to Varvenkast a few generations before, and after settling this section of Hive Tertius had made the district their own.
And they had brought something terrible with them. Something for which they deserved to die.
‘Follow,’ said Chapter Master Derelhaan as he jumped down from the shuttle’s ramp. ‘We must strike before word spreads of our arrival. They are vermin, and like vermin they will scatter from the light of retribution.’ Derelhaan was an enormous man, and clad in the half-gilded armour specially made for him by the Chapter artificers he resembled an ornate walking tank. He carried a thunder hammer and wore a storm bolter built into the back of his right vambrace.
The rest of the kill-team disembarked. Captain Amhrad led the seven-strong squad. They were veterans picked by Derelhaan for this mission, because he needed battle-brothers he could trust.
‘When you are close enough, use your combat blades,’ said Derelhaan. ‘Do not waste the power packs of your chainswords or your bolter ammunition needlessly. Some battles need fury. This one needs efficiency. Move swiftly and do not tarry, for we will not pause to let you catch up.’
Derelhaan led the way through the upper levels. Here the people had made the place their home – shrines were everywhere, with offerings of their meagre lives left to placate an Emperor who despised them. The golden coins and household trinkets were an obscenity, as if they could ward off the punishment due to these people.
The planetary governor and his aristocracy would suffer for allowing their world to harbour this sickness. But first, the Astral Knights would cure it.
Below was the square where the business of this district was conducted. It was busy – the traders were hawking their wares and a street preacher was holding a sermon from the base of an equestrian statue. This place had, like almost all the hive, been built as a manufactorum or refinery and only later adapted to house the hive citizens, as if the people actually living in the city were an afterthought. Perhaps the square had been an assembly floor or the base of a smelting pool.
‘Captain Amhrad, take the lead right,’ said Derelhaan. ‘Hyalhi, with me.’
The squad split up to approach the square from right angles. Hyalhi heard a door slam and a cry of alarm. Word that Space Marines were in Hive Tertius would spread quickly. It would not be believed for a good few minutes, but as more and more spotted the huge armoured figures people would start to flee.
‘Their mutation is on the inside,’ said Derelhaan as he and Amhrad descended the tight stairways towards the square. ‘Two heads and tentacles are what the preachers tell us to watch for, but these creatures do not show such corruption.’
‘Then how can we tell the pure from the corrupt?’ asked Hyalhi.
‘Alas, there is no purity here. These mutants harbour colonies of parasites that infect others, so their offspring will be mutated, too. This is a heresy of the flesh that must be torn out by the root. That is why it had to be us, my brother. That is why I chose men like you.’
Hyalhi reached the opening of a narrow alleyway onto the square. The alarm was just reaching the people there. Some of them rushed about questioning one another, seeking out some authority who could confirm or deny the rumours already spreading. Hyalhi spotted the rest of the fireteam forming up on a balcony overlooking the square.
There must have been four hundred people there, living out the last minute of their lives. Hyalhi could almost taste the sensation of their threads cut short, and see the souls flopping lifeless as the puppet strings were severed.
‘In position,’ voxed Captain Amhrad.
The booming sound of breaching charges rang throughout the district as the other Astral Knights kill-teams moved into action. The purging had begun.
‘The Emperor watches,’ voxed Chapter Master Derelhaan. ‘Open fire.’
His Imperial Majesty’s ship Needlefang
Encryption Code Hemlock
Inquisitorial Eyes Only
Scrivened: Lord Inquisitor Quilven Rhaye
Addendum personal
When I think about what I have done, I give thanks the Emperor placed in my soul the steel of an inquisitor. Once, I killed a whole nation. I incited its neighbours to tear down its fortress walls and heap its dead in the streets, to be hurled into the icy crevasses of the southern tundra. When that was too slow, I had them march the damned to the edge and herd them off, like surplus animals driven to their deaths because they were too much trouble to feed. I did this because the Emperor told me to. There was a tainted religion among them. Were all the murdered adherents to this dark faith? Of course not. One in ten? One in a hundred? Doubtful. But as their frozen eyes stared up at me from their mass graves, I did not feel regret or sorrow. I did not feel guilt. The Emperor had told me to do it, for if it was not by the Emperor’s will how could a man rise to the rank of inquisitor, carry the seal, and bear with him the authority to make one civilisation murder another?
I killed my oldest friend. He had fought side by side and back to back with me in service to the Holy Ordos since I first joined their service as a lowly scrivener, then as an explicator and interrogator. He saved my life at the Battle of St Agmaran’s Basilica. He tended my bleeding lungs as the Corpsefinder’s Blight almost ended me. But my master Lord Inquisitor Golvuur suspected in him a laxity of zeal and a harbouring of doubts as to his purpose, and so I shot my friend through the neck as he slept. I did not grieve. I did not relive the memory of that night time and time again. The Emperor had told me to do it, for He acted through Golvuur, and through the agents of His Holy Ordos.
I stood by as Golvuur wa
s executed before the Conclave of Seraphan. He was my master and I was sworn to defend him, no matter what awful things he might have done or commanded me to do in his stead. But I held the bowl as his throat was slit, because the Emperor had commanded Golvuur die to facilitate the obscure game of inquisitors and their power.
But I think we have done something here that I will look back on with regret and guilt. And even fear, though an inquisitor should never admit to something as mundane as fear. I have murdered worlds. I have betrayed every trust. I have pushed back the boundaries of what one man can willingly do to a fellow human being. But what I suspect has transpired here, I can never turn my mind towards with anything short of terror.
Whether I can continue in my duties, having in my mind such regret and doubt, will be my true test as an inquisitor of the Holy Ordos.
– Lord Inquisitor Quilven Rhaye.
EIGHT
Scout-Sergeant Faraji
‘Run!’ called out Brother Vehaal. ‘They’re coming from the east! To the crossroads! To the…’
And those were the last words he spoke. From the gloom emerged a pair of scythe blades, hazy and transparent as they hovered between existence and absence. The faint light glimmered along a slender limb of silver, and then across the carapace and insect-like head of a construct that loomed twice Vehaal’s height. It hovered above the ground trailing cabling and spine like the chains of an ancient ghost from some primitive mythology. Four more scythed limbs extended from the carapace, hissing and clacking as they moved. Its eye-lenses, assembled asymmetrically on its low-slung head, narrowed as they focused on the Space Marine Scout.
The scythes punched through Vehaal’s back and out through the chestplate of his demi-armour. Two more stabbed down through his shoulders and plunged deep into his chest cavity. The last pair sliced through either side of his waist, the tips emerging from Vehaal’s stomach. The construct drew Vehaal into a tight embrace as his eyes rolled back and the life drained from him. The bolt pistol and combat knife dropped from his hands. With a whirr of motors the construct whipped its blades outward and sliced Vehaal into half a dozen pieces that for a moment tottered in place before they fell apart and thunked wetly to the floor.
Scout-Sergeant Faraji just had time to see Vehaal die before the next pair of constructs drifted in behind the first. The human slaves called these necrons ‘wraiths’ and it was fitting, because they were more like ghosts than physical creatures. They could slip out of physical reality for a moment, long enough to drift through a wall or slide their scythe-limbs through their prey’s armour.
Prey. Down here in the necropolis, that was what the Astral Knights were. Faraji had never before felt such a profound sense of being hunted.
‘Cover and move back!’ ordered Faraji. ‘By teams, brothers!’
Faraji had trained these young recruits in the squad tactics of an Astral Knight and they responded automatically. In the times of the most extreme stress the body responded with instinct, and a Space Marine’s instincts were those of a soldier. Samahl dropped to one knee and Palao beside him, raking the passageway with shotgun fire as Rahaza and Nilhar ran past, out of the range of the wraith’s scythes. Kazzin fired with his bolt pistol as he ran, sliding into cover around the corner of an enormous tomb so he could bring his sniper rifle to bear.
In other circumstances, Faraji would have been proud of them. There was no room for pride when one of their own lay dead in pieces.
The shattering din of the gunfire died down as Samahl and Palao moved while the rest of the squad covered them in turn. The wraiths vanished through the wall, leaving only outlines of frost where they passed through the stone. The squad had driven the constructs off, for a while at least. A short distance down the passageway was a crossroads, glimpsed from a side passage as the squad passed it to escape from the wraiths. Faraji led the survivors of his squad through an archway of shimmering datamedium into the open ground of the crossroads.
Four immense tombs made up the crossroads, the spaces between them narrow alleyways of stone. One tomb was of greenish veined stone like dark marble, and its decorative accents were worked into curves and scallops at odds with the necron taste for straight lines. An archway carved into the front of the tomb suggested a doorway, either a way in for the dead to pass on to whatever lay in wait, or a way out for the inhabitant to one day rise and emerge.
Two of the tombs were twins. The asymmetrical lines of one were echoed in the other. The front ends narrowed like the prows of ships, with complex cubic structures on top like a spacecraft’s bridge. Perhaps they did symbolise the spacecraft of naval aristocrats. Rows of hieroglyphics ran along the sides of the twin tombs and Faraji could not help but imagine they were the names of battles in which the entombed had fought, like the battle-honours listed on the standards of Space Marine Chapters and regiments of the Astra Militarum.
The fourth resembled a great dark maw, a spiralling throat of carved stone like a whirlpool or a black hole in the void. This was how the necron inside had demanded it be remembered, drawn into an infinite churning throat.
‘This is too open,’ said Samahl as the squad moved into the crossroads.
‘The wraiths can come at us from any angle,’ said Kazzin, ‘whether we have a wall around us or not. At least here we can see them coming.’
‘Watch all the angles,’ said Faraji.
‘We should mourn him,’ said Palao. ‘And recover his gene-seed.’
‘We mourn our dead when we have the chance,’ replied Faraji. ‘But we always mourn them as befits a battle-brother.’
‘If you want to go back for his gene-seed, brother, be my guest,’ said Samahl.
‘Maybe I will,’ retorted Palao. ‘The Chapter’s future is more important than my present.’
What future? Faraji could almost see Samahl swallowing the words. Samahl’s attitude, still that of a young nobleman, had not yet been drummed out of him, but not even he would voice the thought the whole squad had. Recovering Vehaal’s gene-seed organs would mean nothing if the whole Astral Knights Chapter ceased to exist.
‘Rahaza, keep trying the vox,’ ordered Faraji. ‘The last we heard, Captain Sufutar was in this necropolis. If we raise his Third Company or Techmarine Sarakos we can link up with them.’
‘How far does this necropolis go?’ asked Palao. ‘It feels like we’ve marched halfway across the planet by now.’
‘The necrons are obsessed by death,’ said Faraji, looking up at the tombs. ‘Maybe that’s all there is inside this planet. Just more tombs all the way to the core.’
Brother Kazzin shouldered his sniper rifle and clambered up onto the deck of the closest ship-like tomb. He crouched on the prow, his head cocked to one side like an attentive animal.
‘I hunted,’ said Kazzin, ‘since before I could walk. My mother carried me on her horse as she rode out for phoenix season. We hunted them by the winds. I could taste them on the air. Borsis has its own winds, and they are alien, but I know them. They blow even down here. We are near the surface, brother-sergeant. The closest since we entered this necropolis.’
‘Then you can get us out of here?’ asked Samahl.
‘Perhaps,’ said Kazzin.
‘None of us will leave,’ said Faraji, ‘if we do not remain vigilant. Consider the Codex, brethren. Hope is our enemy. Hope is the false chalice we rush to drink from, only to find it is still out of our grasp and we now stand surrounded by foes. Stay sharp. We still fight the same battle.’
Faraji knew well how a Scout, only one step removed from a raw recruit to the Chapter, could tune out the sermonising about the Codex and the Chapter traditions. Faraji himself could remember how all the battle-lore and quotes from the primarchs ran into one until they lost their meaning. As a Space Marine rose to the status of a full battle-brother his mind sharpened and he could sift out the knowledge he needed from the parables and proverbs, but until then his
mind was vulnerable to being swamped in the mass of information making up the Codex Astartes.
He had been like them once. It was like reliving the memories of a different man, one decades younger, rich and privileged, who had won the honour of joining the Astral Knights but did not yet fully understand what that meant. It meant glory, of course, it meant a place in the pantheon of the Emperor’s finest.
But more than any of that, it meant a cycle of sacrifice that continued until death. Perhaps his squad would learn that before the battle for Borsis ended, whatever form that end might take.
‘Nothing but static,’ said Brother Rahaza. ‘The vox is down. If we are near the surface there’s still enough between us and the open air to block it.’
‘Then we head up,’ said Samahl. ‘Sergeant?’
Faraji found himself staring at the tomb of green-veined marble. The swirling decorations were so at odds with the rest of the necropolis architecture that the tomb seemed out of place. Entwined in the scrollwork and scalloping were the lords of a necron dynasty, enthroned and surrounded by supplicant tech-constructs. Faraji assumed these were the necrons contained in the tomb, but he had never seen inside one. Did the construct bodies lie inside, or were they recycled like the bodies of dead slaves as Hyalhi’s honour guard had found?
A set of double doors, almost hidden in the decoration, reached to the top of the monumental tomb’s front surface. Most tombs Faraji had passed did not have doors – he had assumed they were constructed around the interned bodies and sealed at the moment of completion, or that they could only be accessed by removing the enormous slab that made up the roof. Did the necrons have some reason to enter it? Or to exit?
A rattling hiss echoed from the surrounding necropolis and the squad reacted instantly, bolting to alertness. Brother Kazzin sighted down the approaches to the crossroads through the scope of his rifle.
