by Ben Counter
‘It was as I perused a map, purported to describe a realm of the warp, that the answer came to me. This map was etched on sheets of paper-thin stone, the acidic wash bringing out fanciful mountain ranges and oceans of thought. The names of warp denizens were labelled alongside their supposed lairs, where the cartographer had encountered them and bargained his soul away for secrets of the warp. His sacrifice had bought only lies, for this map was no less a fiction than the transcribed insanity of the broken-minded cultists filling the shelves around me. The futility of his endeavour inspired me as to the truth.
‘What was I doing there? Labouring at an obscene task, to validate the rule of a daemon lord over a realm of madness and death. Giving up the lives of my acolytes, one through willing payment, one through negligence, for the right to pursue that task. Abandoning the oaths I had made to the Holy Ordos of the Inquisition, casting away finally those few vestiges of honour I had clutched to my heart when I pursued my path of heresy. And for what?
‘To gain the favour of Shalhadar the Veiled, the very image of the enemy I had dedicated my life to destroying.
‘No! I shouted it out loud. The price is too high! To walk in the court of Shalhadar, to get close enough to kill him – as great a prize as that is, I will not become what Malodrax desires to win it! This world will not take me. This world will not turn me into one who walks it as a supplicant to the Dark Powers.
‘The test was to see how far I would go to walk the path I had set myself on Malodrax, and had I walked it to the end, I would have failed that test. I would have become a slave to Shalhadar, and served him perhaps like the foul multi-armed creature to whom I had given Talaya. I would have walked into damnation willingly, the kind of victory most beloved of the Dark Powers.
‘Most men could not have walked back from that brink. Having given up Talaya, they would have seen no meaning in the righteous life and would have sought the oblivion of damnation. But I was not most men. I am an inquisitor, and there is no brink from which I cannot turn.
‘I cast down the madman’s map, and it shattered on the floor. I knew I had to leave that place and abandon the dream of breaching the court of Shalhadar to which I had been devoted since I arrived at the city. I forged through the library stacks, suddenly aware of how deeply I had travelled into the levels beneath Shalhadar’s palace and how they seemed to grow around me, spreading into new configurations of the labyrinth to addle my senses. I had anticipated such traps, however, and had placed certain volumes at key intersections that I could recognise and suggest to me the correct route. I reached the entrance to the library floors, a great arch leading downwards from the grand entrance hall of the palace.
‘This hall was a soaring monument to Shalhadar. It was dominated by a huge golden statue of a perfectly proportioned human figure, its gender uncertain and its face obscured with a featureless mask. Daemons scrabbled across it, ornamenting it with brilliant lacquers and gemstones. They turned their malformed faces towards me as I burst from the archway, no doubt appearing more like a bedraggled madman from the streets than an inquisitor of the Holy Ordos. That impression was hopefully vanquished when I drew from my robe the Inquisitorial Seal, the badge of my office, into which I had wrought a powerful hexagrammic ward. I held up the seal and the daemons recoiled, the light suddenly blazing from my hand too much for them to bear.
‘Thus it was that I made my escape. I had not forgotten the sphinx that guarded the bridge. Before it could turn on me I had leapt from the bridge and into the canal surrounding the palace, and thanks to the Emperor, it did not pursue me. Perhaps to it I was no more than a morsel, a stray creature to be devoured if pursuing me proved no burden, and it was unwilling to follow me into the canal. Whatever the reason, a current caught me and dragged me out of sight of the palace, down into the tunnels and sewers underneath the city.
‘I had never sought to understand what lay beneath Shalhadar’s city. What lay on the surface was gruesome enough. I saw then the remains of an alien metropolis, with great towers of homes arranged around circular meeting-grounds ringed by statues. They were crushed and mangled by the settling down of the city above, mutilated by the torrents of filth mingling with the underground rivers rushing through the underworld.
‘In this darkness I began to rebuild the plan I had for Malodrax. Entering Shalhadar’s court was a chimera, a fiction, one that would lead me to damnation. I had to abandon that path. Dragging myself from that black river of corruption, I walked the first steps on my new path.’
Every city had its slums. In Shalhadar’s city they were jerry-built shacks and hovels crammed into the looted shell of ancient palaces – from the outside they were pristine, save for the heaps of living refuse who gathered in their doorways and alleys. Like beautiful bodies hosting a vile disease, the poverty of Shalhadar’s people was concealed by the mask of opulence the whole city wore.
The hovels formed vast narcotics dens, suffused in a dizzying fog of opiates and heaving to the music of the moaning half-dead. Some were all but comatose, stirring in feverish dreams. Others shivered and twitched, or occasionally shrieked out loud. In a city where seeking new sensations was a form of worship, these places were churches to excess and novelty.
Lysander felt a distaste that went beyond the stink of the slum as he walked in through the archway. Before him lay a cultist, naked save for a stained loincloth, his skin ragged and peeling away to reveal the pitted bones underneath. A medical device was hooked up to a needle stuck directly into his spine – whichever drug it contained, it had caused his body to atrophy while his mind travelled in strange places. Lysander stepped over the body as he pushed a curtain of rags aside and forged further into the slum.
The bodies were everywhere. They were curled up in the corners or stretched out across the floor. One cultist, a leather mask stitched on his face, was babbling about serpents that swallowed stars and worlds drowning in oceans of tears. His hands were raw and bleeding, and the bloody talons of his fingers were scratching deep red furrows in his midriff. Another was a woman who convulsed on the floor, dried foam crusted around her mouth. Some of the bodies were completely still and, for all Lysander knew, dead – certainly the smell of death hung about the place, mingling with the dizzying fog.
‘I seek Valienne,’ said Lysander out loud, addressing no one inhabitant in particular. ‘The last anyone heard, she was here. The Veiled One commands I be shown to her.’
One of the slum-dwellers crawled out from the bundles of torn-down curtains and tapestries he was using as bedding. He put a hand on the greave of Lysander’s armour. ‘The Red Knight!’ the cultist gasped. His throat was raw and his voice rasping. It was impossible to tell his age from his hollow eyes, and miniature braziers mounted on his shoulder surrounded his head in a permanent haze of smoke. ‘I saw you! You rode the tides of the warp! Your mount was hatred and your sword was despair! I followed in your wake as I soared!’
Lysander pushed the drugged cultist aside. Ahead, the shanties surrounded an open space, roughly circular, where an altar was set up consisting of a great stone basin. From the ceiling hung countless trinkets and offerings, jangling in the smoky air – bones, needles, pieces of jewellery, severed fingers and ears, bullet casings. The basin was half filled with blood, congealed and rank, and rivulets of it spilled down the sides. The smell was awful.
Here were gathered the celebrants of Shalhadar, those who still sought to worship their lord even though their fortunes had waned until they were forced to live side by side with the human refuse of that place. They wore patched and crudely embroidered robes, covered in images of open eyes and hands, and scurried like insects as Lysander approached. There were signs of disease on their faces. Lysander pointed at one, whose gnarled staff of wood suggested he was the leader of this group.
‘Where is Valienne?’ demanded Lysander.
The man stared back dumbly. Lysander guessed he was among the oldest residen
ts here, his wrinkled and sunken face disfigured by boils covering one cheek and half his jawline.
‘The Chronicler of the Sun and Stars,’ Lysander continued. ‘The Light in the Darkness.’
One of the cultists pointed a shaking finger upwards, towards the higher levels of the buildings where the hovels formed precarious layers of salvaged materials. Lysander left them to their worship and found a rickety ladder leading up. It barely held his weight, the same being true of the floor he now walked on. Up here worshippers lay in hammocks slung from the building’s rafters like roosting bats. Someone had scrawled thousands of lines of text on the walls and floor, a stream of syllables that Lysander was wary of reading in case he found meanings there that might bewitch his senses and leave him vulnerable. Even here there was power, born of despair and desperation, that the Dark Gods could turn into conduits for their corruptive influence. Lysander would not be caught with his guard down here.
The few that noticed him turned away in fear. In his crimson armour and with a Space Marine’s stature, he must have looked to them like an avenging herald of Chaos sent straight from the warp to pronounce their punishment. No doubt many of them were certain their time had come, and he heard them whimpering their last prayers for forgiveness or pity as he passed.
A section of the upper floors was curtained off with lengths of chain, locks of hair and fragments of broken gold woven into them. Lysander pushed the chains aside and looked into a chamber lit by candles and full of torn or screwed-up sheaves of paper, forming deep drifts in the corners. In the middle of this nest was a figure hunched over, scribbling away with a pen on another sheet that was already illegible with spilt ink. Greyish hair hung down over narrow shoulders.
‘You are Valienne,’ said Lysander.
The figure turned around. It was a woman, under the grime and the inky finger marks on her face. Her large, greyish eyes widened at the sight of Lysander standing over her.
‘That is one of my names,’ she said. ‘I am the concept sculptress. I am she who weaves new worlds from nothing.’
‘News has reached the court of your work. The Chant of the Changing Ones.’
Valienne gasped. ‘He has read it?’
‘He desires it to be performed.’
Valienne put her hands to her heart as if she feared she would die. Her breathing quickened. ‘Then… then the lords of the warp have heard me!’ A light went on behind her eyes as an idea hit her. ‘And you!’ she exclaimed. She stood up and looked Lysander up and down. ‘You shall be my Executioner!’
‘Bring the finished work,’ said Lysander, ‘and come with me.’
Valienne’s play was about death. She had spent her whole life writing it, revising and perfecting it, each character the personification of a way in which life could be ended. There were roles for Pestilence, Vengeance, Madness and Fate, and the dialogue was an impenetrable web of metaphor. Its staging called for countless deaths on stage, illustrations of how death could be both random and carefully plotted by powers beyond the comprehension of those involved. It was a work of cruelty, of infinite bleakness.
To Valienne, this was a work of joy. By illustrating the meaninglessness of life and the supremacy of death, she sought to make the acts of worship by Shalhadar’s citizens shine brighter in that darkness. This was the explanation she gave to the courtiers who received her into Shalhadar’s palace, who directed her into some lesser-travelled wing where she would not lower the tone of opulence and beauty.
The manuscript of the Chant of the Changing Ones was taken to Shalhadar himself, whose courtiers had already begun to assemble a cast and crew for the play’s production. The palace chambers were full of costumers and artisans. Crafters of flesh pared skin and muscle to make new faces and shapes for those hoping to serve in the chorus. Bizarre mutants, with brightly patterned skin or malformed limbs, auditioned as freak show exhibits. Psykers performed tricks of telekinesis and pyromancy, hoping to make the grade for the performance.
Lysander had watched it unfold from an upper balcony of the palace. It had been extraordinary the speed with which it had kicked into gear, as if the whole city had been primed to gather its resources of performers and madmen for just this occasion. Talaya was walking through the midst of it, ignoring the cultists and hopefuls who clamoured for her attention. She waved aside acrobats whose long, multi-jointed limbs were stripped of skin and flicked a grovelling supplicant away with a kick of a mechanical leg. She switched without breaking a step into climbing up the wall below Lysander, reaching the balcony in a few strides.
‘How much it must pain you,’ she said.
Lysander looked at her, but gave no reply.
‘How can you keep it all bottled up inside you, Lysander?’ continued Talaya. ‘Everything you see on Malodrax offends you to its core. These people and their acts of worship. This palace. This city. Me. You must want to drive that blade right through my heart, Imperial Fist. But you cannot, because playing along with this world is the only way to kill Thul. What delicious suffering I can taste on you! It twists up inside you and bleeds, does it not? It bleeds that hatred into the rest of you and rots you away. I would be there when you give vent to that hatred, Lysander. It will be something to be seen.’
‘Are we done here?’ said Lysander.
‘The Veiled One has given the order,’ said Talaya. ‘On the next dawn we will move out.’
‘Good,’ said Lysander. ‘I will be glad of it.’
‘But you are not done yet!’ Talaya gestured down at the crowds below. ‘You still have to undergo your transformation. After all, you are to be our Executioner.’
14
‘My conclave was created to seek out knowledge and use it, not destroy it out of hand through some hysterical fear of corruption. It was some way into my Inquisitorial career when I found them, having heard of them from a fellow inquisitor in the form of a cautionary tale of how far those in the Holy Ordos might fall. They did not welcome me with open arms, for anyone who sought them out must by definition come under the gravest suspicions. That is how I knew I was on the only road I could walk.’
– Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan
‘Hold!’ ordered Chaplain Lycaon, and the strike force dropped into cover behind him. In the cavernous fortress ruins there was plenty of cover but limited visibility, with every approach obscured by the walls and battlements rising all around. Techmarine Kho’s Land Speeder droned along just above head height, playing its guns across the surrounding ruins.
‘We have a sighting up ahead,’ voxed Sergeant Gorvetz.
‘Is there anyone to spot us?’ asked Lycaon.
‘I cannot tell,’ replied Gorvetz. ‘I do not think we were seen.’
‘Lysander,’ ordered Lycaon. ‘Join Gorvetz and scout ahead. Let me know if we have a viable target.’
Lysander headed through the rubble field left from a collapsed wall, picking his way from cover to cover as he passed the rest of the strike force and headed towards Gorvetz’s position. The Devastator squad had the point for that segment of the march, and had spread out through the hollow floors of a multi-levelled pale stone building. The late sun was slanting through breaks in the clouds, fractured by the ruins into beams that passed slowly across the dusty wreckage. Lysander spotted Gorvetz’s Imperial Fists ahead, crouching at the far end of the building, their heavy weapons shouldered, watching ahead through magnoculars and viewfinders.
The horizon was a broken mass of ruins. Sergeant Gorvetz was scanning it through his magnoculars as Lysander crouched down behind him.
‘Where is it?’ asked Lysander.
Gorvetz was not a man of many words, and simply pointed into the distance. Lysander looked in that direction, trying to filter some meaning from the tumbledown towers and battlements.
Then, he saw the movement. His vision adjusted to the distance and he made out the shifting clouds around its upper reache
s – birds, flying vermin, clustering around the corruption.
It was a war engine. This one was in the shape of a siege tower, its upper floors fronted with a drawbridge forming the lower jaw of an enormous daemonic face. Huge gun emplacements bulged from the tower’s sides, their massive-bore cannon traversing menacingly across the surrounding landscape, fed by ammunition hoppers so large they gave the siege tower a top-heavy, hunchbacked shape. Banners, tattered and fire-stained, hung from its timbers, bearing the iron face mask symbol of the Iron Warriors.
‘I take it,’ said Gorvetz, ‘that’s what we were looking for.’
‘It is,’ said Lysander. ‘Are there any sentries on its battlements?’
‘None that we’ve seen.’
‘Then it’s probably wild,’ said Lysander.
‘Bloody waste if you ask me,’ said Gorvetz. ‘Make a war machine and just turn it loose.’
‘Kraegon Thul is not a fool,’ said Lysander. ‘The wild war engines are left to test the others. They are sent out here to prove themselves before Thul will export them to whatever warzone demands them next. If they can survive beasts like this, they are fit to fight in the colours of the Iron Warriors. That machine has no doubt accounted for plenty others of its kind.’
‘Good,’ said Gorvetz. ‘I was worried this would be easy.’ He said it without a smile, and Lysander could not be certain there was any humour in the Devastator veteran at all.
‘The target is good,’ voxed Lysander to Lycaon.
‘Then we must move quickly,’ said Lycaon, ‘before our position becomes known. We make the approach. Imperial Fists, to battle order!’
Up close, the stench of the machine’s corruption suffused the ruins and it was clear what had attracted the clouds of winged vermin that followed in its wake. It was the stench of carrion, of the battlefield dead. It was a smell that Lysander had become very familiar with, and it brought his mind back to the hundred battles he had fought in the colours of the Imperial Fists.
