by Ben Counter
On the altar stood a chalice cut from black stone,
studded with emeralds. Borakis kept his shotgun levelled
on the altar as he approached it. The Scouts spread out
behind him.
The altarpiece’s rendition of Rogal Dorn was in gold
with diamond eyes. Dorn was twice as tall as the gilded
Astartes battling alongside him. The enemy were aliens, or
perhaps mutants, humanoid but with gills and talons. Dorn
was crushing them beneath his feet. It was a passable
work. Dozens of higher quality could be found in the
chapels and shrines of the Phalanx.
‘Sergeant?’ said Orfos. ‘Anything?’
Borakis leant closer to the altar. The chalice was not
empty. Something shimmered darkly inside it. In the dim
light it was impossible to tell, but it looked like blood.
Blood could not remain liquid down here for the length
of time the chapel had evidently been sealed. Borakis
knew the smell of blood well enough. He put his face close
to the chalice and sniffed, knowing his Astartes’ senses
would confirm what the liquid was.
Borakis’s breath misted against the polished stone.
He noticed for the first time the thin silvery wires covering
the chalice in a network of circuitry.
The warmth and moistness of a human breath made
filaments move. Expanding, they completed a circuit, wired
through the base of the chalice to the mechanism behind
the triptych.
Rogal Dorn’s diamond eyes flashed red. A pencil-thin
beam glittered across the chamber.
Sergeant Borakis fell, twin holes bored through his
skull by the pulse of laser.
‘Back!’ shouted Laokan. ‘Fall back!’
Kalliax darted forwards to grab Borakis’s body by the
collar of his armour and drag him away from the altar. The
panels of the triptych slid aside, each revealing the veiny
flesh of a gun-servitor supporting double-barrelled
autoguns. Green and red lights flashed over Kalliax as he
tried to scramble away, hauling Borakis’s corpse with him.
The autoguns opened up, the gunfire filling the
chamber to bursting. Kalliax almost made it to the hole
leading to the tunnel. His armour almost held for the extra
second he needed. Bursts of torn ceramite, then blood and
meat, spattered from his back as bullets hit home. Kalliax
fell to the floor as a shot blew his thigh open, revealing a
wet red mess tangled around his shattered femur. Kalliax
dropped Borakis’s body and returned fire with his bolt
pistol. His face and upper chest disappeared in a cloud of
red.
Laokan and Orfos broke back into the tunnel, its walls
still wet with Caius’s blood. Orfos saw Kalliax die, and he
felt that same instinct that must have seized Kalliax – grab
the body of his fallen battle-brother, carry him back to the
Chapter, see him interred with honour alongside the rest of
the Chapter’s venerated dead. But Orfos choked down the
thought. That was what had killed Kalliax. Orfos would
leave him to be entombed in this place. That was the way
it had to be.
The back wall was falling in, showering the altar with
rubble. The gun-servitors, one with a gun arm hanging limp
thanks to Kalliax’s bolter fire, lumbered out of their hiding
place towards the surviving Scouts.
‘Don’t look back!’ shouted Laokan above the gunfire,
and pushed Orfos into the carved corridor.
The walls shifted again. Orfos made a decision with
the quickness of mind that years of hypno-doctrination and
battle training had given him. He could go for the entrance
of the tunnel, to escape back into the valley. But Caius
had died in that stretch of tunnel – Orfos knew that way
was certainly trapped. That certainty did not exist for the
other direction, deeper into the structure built into the
hillside. It was not particularly compelling logic, but it was
all he had.
Orfos broke into a sprint towards the darkness at the
far end of the tunnel. Laokan was on his heels, and the
racket of the gunfire was joined by the grinding of stone
and stone. The tunnel was closing up again, the ripple of
shifting panels accelerating towards them from the tunnel
entrance. Chunks of Caius’s body were revealed, tumbling
around the vortex of stone. A severed hand, a battered and
featureless head, Caius’s bolt pistol warped out of shape.
Orfos was fast. In the tests after each surgical
procedure, he had always been. The sergeants of the
Tenth Company had suggested his aptitude was for the
Doctrines of Assault due to his speed and decisiveness of
action.
Laokan was not so fast. He was a marksman. A
trailing arm was caught between spiked panels and
Laokan was yanked back off his feet. Orfos heard Laokan
yell in shock and pain, and turned long enough to grab
Laokan’s boot, pulling his fellow Scout free of the chewing
throat.
Laokan’s arm came off, bone and sinew chewed
through. Laokan collapsed onto Orfos and tried to propel
himself forwards, buying time for them both. Orfos grabbed
Laokan’s remaining arm and dragged him behind him as
he carried on running.
Laokan snagged on something. Orfos hauled harder
and dragged Laokan along with him, every nerve straining
to keep his battle-brother free of the fate that had claimed
Caius.
There was no light now. Even the Scout’s augmented
vision, almost the equal of a full Space Marine’s, could
make out nothing but dense shadow.
The floor gave way beneath Orfos’s feet. The lip of a
stone pit slammed into the side of his head as he fell, and
teeth cracked in his jaw. He was aware, on the edge of
consciousness, of his body battering against the carved
sides of the pit as he and Laokan fell.
ORFOS WOKE, AND realised that he had been knocked
out. He cursed himself. Even if only for a moment, he
should fight for awareness at all times. He had no bolt
pistol in his hand, either. He had dropped his weapon.
Borakis would assign him field punishment for such a
failing. But Borakis, recalled Orfos with a lurch, was dead.
Orfos could still see nothing. He fumbled with the
tactical light mounted on the shoulder of his breastplate.
The light winked on and fell on the face of another stone
Space Marine, far larger than in the alcoves above – twice
life-size. Orfos read the inscription on the storm shield
carried in the statue’s left hand, a counterpart to the
chainsword in its right. It read APOLLONIOS. Orfos
recognised the trappings of a Chaplain among the
weapons and armour of an assault-captain. Beside the
statue was another of a Chaplain, this one inscribed with
the name ACIAR.
‘Brother,’ said Orfos. ‘Brother, what of this place?
What have we found?’
Laokan did not reply. Orfos looked for his brother, who
mus
t have also been knocked out in the fall.
Laokan lay a short distance from Orfos, next to
Orfos’s bolt pistol. Laokan’s body was gone from the midtorso
down, and trails of organs lay behind him in bloody
loops. Laokan was face down, nose in the dust.
Orfos knelt beside Laokan’s corpse. ‘Forgive me,
brother,’ he said, but the words seemed meaningless as
they fell dead against the chamber walls. ‘I can pray for
you later. I will, brother. I promise I will.’
Orfos picked up his bolt pistol and let the light play
around the chamber. A third statue was mounted high up,
above the lintel of a doorway framing a pair of steel blast
doors. This statue, again of a Space Marine Chaplain, bore
the name THEMISKON. Orfos recognised the chalice
symbol on the statue’s shoulder pad, echoing the statues
in the alcoves above. It was the symbol of the Soul
Drinkers.
Another crime laid at the feet of the Soul Drinkers –
this death trap, laid out to claim the lives of good Imperial
Fists. Orfos spat on the floor. Whatever holiness this place
might have had for the Soul Drinkers, Orfos wanted to
defile it. Whatever it meant to them, he wanted it made
meaningless.
Orfos looked up. The walls of a shaft rose above him.
The carvings were probably deep enough to climb, but it
would not be easy, and another fall might break a leg or an
arm and render him unable to escape that way. He turned
his attention to the door.
The metal was cold, drinking the warmth from Orfos’s
hands and face from a good distance away. A control
panel was set into the stone. Orfos was not in enough of a
hurry to press any of the buttons. He put a hand to the
metal – it was freezing, and this close Orfos’s breath
misted in the air.
The doors slid open. Orfos jumped back, bolt pistol
held level. Beyond the doors was darkness – the light on
Orfos’s armour glinted off ice and played through freezing
mist that rolled from between the doors.
Orfos stepped slowly away from the doors. ‘Whoever
you may be,’ he called, ‘whatsoever fate you may have
decided for me, know that I will fight it! I am an Imperial
Fist! Die here I may, but it is as a Fist I shall die!’
The doors were open. The lump of ice inside, hooked
up to the walls by thick cables hung with icicles,
shuddered. An inner heat sent cracks blinking through its
mass. Chunks of ice fell away. Orfos glimpsed ceramite
within, painted dark purple under the frost.
The ice crumbled to reveal a shape familiar to Orfos. A
massive square body on a bipedal chassis, squat
cylindrical legs supported by spayed feel of articulated
metal. The blocky shoulder mounts each carried a weapon
– one a missile launcher, the other a barrel-shaped power
fist ringed with flat steel fingers.
It was a Dreadnought – a walking war machine. All the
Dreadnoughts of the Imperial Fists were piloted by Space
Marines who had been crippled in battle, who were kept
alive by the Dreadnought’s life-support systems and
permitted to carry on their duties as soldiers of the
Emperor even after their bodies were ruined and useless.
The Dreadnought’s sarcophagus was covered in purity
seals and the symbol of a gilded chalice was emblazoned
across the front.
Orfos’s bolt pistol would do nothing to the
Dreadnought’s armoured body. The power fist could crush
Orfos with such ease the pilot, if there was one, would
barely register the resistance provided by Orfos’s body
before his armour and skeleton gave way.
It would be quick. An Astartes did not fear pain, but
Orfos did not see the need to pursue it as some Imperial
Fists did. He had made his stand. He had not run, he had
done his best to keep his battle-brothers alive. His
conscience was clear. He told himself he could die. He
tried to force himself to believe it.
The Dreadnought shifted on its powerful legs and the
fingers of the power fist flexed. Flakes of ice fell off it. The
cables unhooked and fell loose, showering the chamber
floor with more chunks of ice. Lights flickered as the
Dreadnought’s power plant turned over and the chamber
was filled with the rhythmic thrum of it.
‘All this talk of death,’ came the Dreadnought’s voice,
a synthesised bass rumble issuing from the vox-units
mounted on the hull. ‘Such morbidity. I have no wish to
disappoint you, novice, but you will not die here.’
Orfos swallowed. ‘What are you?’ he said. ‘Why lie
you here, in a place designed to kill?’
‘Your obtuseness has not yet been trained out of you,’
said the voice again. Orfos looked for some vision slit so
he might glimpse the pilot inside, but he could find none.
‘My tomb was built to ensure that none but an Astartes
could make it this far. So sad the Imperial Fists chose to
send Scouts to do the work of a full battle-brother. But you
have made it, and I have no intention to see you go the
way of that unfortunate brother who lies behind you.’
‘That is an answer to only one question,’ said Orfos. ‘I
asked you two.’
‘Then I shall introduce myself,’ said the Dreadnought.
‘I am Daenyathos of the Soul Drinkers.’
Chapter 2
'GREETINGS, GREAT ONE,' said the lead pilgrim, his
head bowed. Behind him snaked a chain of fellow pilgrims,
decked out in sackcloth and jangling with the symbolic
chains around their wrists.
'I am Lord Castellan Leucrontas of the Phalanx,'
replied the Castellan. The cavernous docking bays of the
Phalanx were Leucrontas's domain, just as the brig decks
and Pain Glove chambers were his, and in spite of the high
ceilings and enormous expanse of the docking chamber
his stature still seemed to fill the place. 'Wherefore have
you come to this place? You have not been asked, nor has
your arrival been announced beforehand. I must warn you
that accommodating your ship was a courtesy extended
only in the light of it not being armed, and such a courtesy
is mine to withdraw.'
The pilgrim's head seemed to bow even lower, as if his
spine was permanently bent in an attitude of prayer. 'I
would ask forgiveness, great one,' he said, in a rasping
voice shredded by years of thunderous sermons, 'but it is
not mine to offer apologies in the Emperor's name. For it is
to do His work that we have come to this place.'
Castellan Leucrontas regarded the pilgrims emerging
from the airlocks. Their ship, a converted merchantman,
was a sturdy and ancient vessel, essential qualities for a
craft that had evidently made it to the Phalanx's isolated
location at short notice. Nevertheless, there had been
great risk in taking them so close to the Veiled Region,
with its pirates and xenos, in an unarmed ship. The
pilgrims had
clearly been willing to court death to make
this journey, and still more to risk the chance that the
Imperial Fists would refuse them a berth and leave them to
drift.
'Then you represent the Church of the Imperial Creed?'
said Leucrontas. 'That august congregation has no
authority here. This ship is sovereign to the Imperial Fists
Chapter.'
The lead pilgrim pulled back his hood. The face inside
was barely recognisable as a face - not because it was
inhuman or mutilated, but because the familiarity of its
features was almost entirely hidden by the tattooed image
of a pair of scales that covered it. The image was an
electoo, edged in lines of light, and the two pans of the
scales flickered with intricately rendered flames.
'We come not to usurp your rule, good lord Castellan,'
said the pilgrim. 'Rather, we are here to observe. The
standards, my brothers, if you please.'
Several other pilgrims jangled to the front of the crowd.
Altogether there must have been three hundred of them, all
hooded and chained like penitents. Several of them
unfurled banners and held them aloft. They bore symbols
of justice - the scales, the blinded eye, the image of a man
holding a sword by the blade in a trial by ordeal. Other
pilgrims were bent almost double by the loads of books
strapped to their backs, each one a walking library. Still
others had spools of parchment encased in units on their
chests, so they could pay out a constant strip of
parchment on which to write. Some were writing down the
exchange between their leader and the Castellan, nimble
fingers scribbling in an arcane shorthand with scratching
quills.
'Our purpose,' said the pilgrims' leader, 'is to follow the
course of justice. The Emperor Himself created the
institutions that see justice called down upon His subjects
and His enemies. We are the Blind Retribution, and
whenever the process of justice is enacted, we are there to
observe. It has come to the notice of the Blind that a
Chapter of Astartes is to be tried here, for several charges
of rebellion and heresy. And so we are here to watch over
this process and record all the matters of justice therein.
This is the will of the Emperor, for His justice is the most
perfect of all and it is to His perfection that we aspire.'
The Castellan gave this some thought. 'It is true,' he
said, 'that the Phalanx is to see these renegades put to
