by Ben Counter
a compulsion, a dark fascination as powerful as the pronouncements
of the Chapter Master.
This was a true disaster. Not the side effect of a war, or a revolt that
had turned bloody. It was a catastrophe from outside, beyond the
context of anything that had happened on Tethlan’s Holt. The scale of
death was appalling. Millions lay decomposing in the streets. And yet
a part of Varnica’s mind relished it. Here was not only a mystery, but a
scale of horror that made it worth solving.
The Thunderhawk approached its landing zone, a circular plaza in
the Embalmers’ Quarter. Like every other possible landing site, it was
strewn with bodies. Fat flies whipped around the Thunderhawk’s
passenger compartment as it passed through a cloud of them,
spattering against Varnica’s armour and the eyepieces of his power
armour’s helmet. He took it off as the Thunderhawk came down to
land.
The grisly cracking sound Varnica heard was the cracking of bones
beneath the Thunderhawk’s landing gear. More crunched below the
lower lip of the embarkation ramp as it opened up all the way. Varnica
walked off the gunship onto the ground of Berenika Altis, pushing
aside the bodies with his feet so he did not have to stand on them.
‘Perimeter!’ shouted Sergeant Novas. His tactical squad jumped
down after him and spread out around the plaza. Within moments the
foul blackish flesh of the bodies was clinging to the armour of their feet
and shins, shining wetly in the afternoon sun. The filters built into
Varnica’s lungs took care of the toxins and diseases in the air, but
anyone without those augmentations would have vomited or choked on
the air.
Techmarine Hamilca was last out, accompanied by the quartet of
servitors that followed him everywhere like loyal pets.
‘What do you think, Techmarine?’ asked Varnica.
Hamilca looked around him. The tombs of the Embalmers’ Quarter
showed no sign of gunfire or destruction, and the sun was shining
down from a blue sky. If one cast his gaze up far enough, there was
nothing to see but a handsome city and fine weather. The bodies
seemed incongruous, as if they did not belong here, even though they
were undoubtedly the remains of this city’s population.
‘It is a beautiful day,’ said Hamilca, and turned to adjust the sensors
of his servitors.
‘One day,’ said Novas, ‘they’ll put your brain back in, tin man.’
Hamilca did not answer that. Varnica knelt to examine the bodies at
his feet.
What remained of their clothing ranged from the boiler suits of
menials to the silks and furs of the city’s old money elite. The wounds
were from fingers and teeth, or from whatever had been at hand. Tools
and wrenches. Walking canes. A few kitchen knives, chunks of
masonry, hatpins. One burly man’s throat had a woman’s silken scarf
tied around it as a garrotte. Its previous owner might well have been
the slender woman whose corpse lay, broken-necked, beside him.
They had killed with anything at hand, which meant the time between
normality and killing had been measured in minutes.
‘It was the Red Night,’ said Varnica.
‘Can you be sure?’ asked Hamilca.
‘I admire your desire to gather evidence,’ said Varnica, ‘but I need
see no more than this. It is my soul that tells me. So many places like
this we have seen, and I hear their echo off the walls of this city. The
Red Night came here. I know it.’
‘Then why are we here?’ said Novas. His squad was by now in a
loose perimeter formation, bolters trained down the avenues of tombs
radiating out from the plaza. Novas’s Space Marines were well drilled,
and Novas himself possessed a desire to be seen doing his duty
combined with a blessed lack of imagination. These qualities made his
squad Varnica’s escort of choice. They could be trusted to do their job
and leave the thinking to the Librarian. ‘The last time we came to a
place touched by the Red Night, there was nought to find though we
turned that place inside out. Why will Berenika Altis be any different?’
‘Just smell,’ said Varnica.
Novas snarled with a lack of amusement.
‘Do not scorn such advice, sergeant!’ Varnica breathed in deeply,
theatrically. ‘Ah, what a bouquet! Ruptured entrails! Liquefying muscle!
They are fresh! Compared to the last places we visited it, these bodies
are ripe! We have got here earlier than before, Novas. These bodies
still have flesh on them. We are not picking over a skeletonised heap
but sloshing through the very swamp of their decay. Whatever brought
the Red Night here, there is a good chance it still remains in Berenika
Altis.’
‘We shall not find it here,’ said Hamilca. He was consulting readings
from the screen built into the chest of one servitor. Another was taking
pict-grabs using the lens that replaced both its eyes, roving across the
corpse-choked streets. ‘Not in these streets.’
Varnica held up the burly man’s corpse. It was sagging and foul, the
joints giving way so the limbs hung unnaturally loose. The head lolled
on its fractured neck. ‘He will not tell us anything more, that is for
certain.’ He looked towards the skyline at the centre of Berenika Altis.
The Sanctum Nova Pecuniae rose above the necropoli of the
Embalmers’ Quarter, its spires scything towards the sky in golden
arcs. ‘Let’s ask the people who count.’
The Red Night.
It was a wave of madness. Or, it was a disease that caused violent
hallucinations. Or, it was a mental attack perpetrated by cunning
xenos. Or, it was the natural consequence of Imperial society’s
repression of human nature. Or, it was the influence of the warp
seeping into real space.
The Red Night caused everyone in the afflicted city to tear one
another apart. The urge to do so came over them instantly. Most such
disturbances led to an exodus of refugees fleeing the carnage, as the
madness spread along some social vector. The Red Night, however,
worked instantly. No word escaped the city, and so no one could
intervene until the lack of communication forced an investigation and
the first horrified reports came back of the scale of the death.
It had happened five times that the Doom Eagles knew of. Four
times Doom Eagles Space Marines reached the afflicted city to find
nothing but a multitude of well-rotted bodies, their flesh turned to black
slurry caking the gutters and bones already starting to bleach. The
fourth time, Varnica perceived a spiralling route that connected the
instances of the Red Night and, more through intuition than
calculation, plotted a route for his taskforce that took it within two
weeks’ travel of Tethlan’s Holt. When the whispers of the Red Night
had been intercepted by the astropath on the Killing Shadow, the
strike cruiser commanded by Varnica, the ship had dropped out of the
warp long enough to point its prow towards Tethlan’s Holt.
In time, the Red Night would evolve completely
into legend. Every
voidborn shiphand would know someone who knew someone who had
lost a friend to it. Collected tales of the Red Night would fill half-throne
chapbooks. Melodramas and tragedies would be written about it.
Street-corner madmen would rave about the Red Night coming the
next day, or the next week, or the next year, to take up all the sinners
in its bloody embrace.
Varnica would not let that happen. The truth about the Red Night
would be uncovered before all hope of its discovery disappeared among
the legends. Too often the Imperium caused the truth to atrophy,
replaced by fear and madness. It was Varnica’s duty, among the many
a Space Marine had to the Emperor, to scrape back as much of the
truth as he could from the hungry maw of history. Each time the Red
Night had struck, he had got a little closer to that truth, something he
felt rather than understood, as if the screams of the dying got more
intense in his imagination each time he saw those dreadful dead
streets from the sky.
The truth was in Berenika Altis. Varnica knew this as only a
Librarian could. Only a psyker’s inner eye could perceive something so
absolutely. Varnica would discover the truth behind the Red Night, or
he would not leave this city. He had never been so certain of anything.
The bodies suited the Sanctum Nova Pecuniae. It resembled a scene
from a tragic play, painted by a master who placed it on a fanciful
stage of soaring columns and marble, the dead contorted, their faces
anguished, every clutching hand and sunken eye socket the telling of
another story amid the drama.
The ground floor of the palace was a single vast space, punctuated
with columns and shrines. It was possible to walk, and indeed see,
from one side of the palace to the other from outside through the vast
archways, without encountering a wall. To a new visitor the place
would at first seem hollow, as if forming some metaphor for
transparency or absence of government. The complex architecture of
the roof, however, formed of overlapping vaults and petals, hid the
spaces where the government actually met and did business. This was
a metaphor, too, thought Varnica as he cast his senses around him,
half as a soldier and half as an appreciator of the palace’s art. The
really important people in Berenika Altis existed on a higher plane, like
a heaven sealed off among the friezes and inscriptions of the shadowy
ceiling.
The Doom Eagles had entered through an archway above which
were carved words in High Gothic proclaiming that portion of the
Sanctum Nova Pecuniae to have been built by the Guild of
Steelwrights. Notable past masters of that guild were remembered in
the statues that stood in alcoves, forming shrines to the exemplars of
the guild’s values. They held formidable-looking tools, multiwrenches
and pneumohammers, and had faces that looked like they had been
beaten out of steel themselves.
‘These dead were not mere citizens,’ said Hamilca, whose medical
servitor was playing its sensors over a knot of corpses at the base of
the nearest pillar. ‘They wear the marks of nobility. Here, the badge of
the Flagellants’ Guild. This one wears cloth-of-gold and ermine.’
‘The government must have been in session,’ said Varnica. ‘Perhaps
the timing was deliberate?’
Novas spat on the floor. He was a superstitious type, and the horror
of this place was more spiritual than the mundanity of the bodies
outside. Showing his contempt with a wad of phlegm scared away the
dark things mustering on the other side of the Veil, so the
superstitions went.
A pillar a short distance away had a particularly dense heap of
bodies around it. They were three deep, as if they had been
clambering over one another to get at the pillar. Bloody smudges from
fingers and hands painted the flutes of the pillar. Varnica walked over
to them, picking his way past the master artisans and councillors who
lay in his way. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘There is a way up.’ He hauled on one
of the blade-like stone flutes and it swung open, to reveal a tight spiral
staircase corkscrewing up through the pillar.
A body fell out. Its face had been torn so much it was impossible to
tell the back of the head from the front. Two severed arms tumbled
behind it, neither of them belonging to the first body. Varnica looked up
the staircase and saw bodies wedged into the pillar, clogging it up
before the first twist.
The leaders of Berenika Altis had thought the day-to-day business of
government vulgar enough to hide it in the grand architecture of the
Sanctum. Men and women had died trying to get at the concealed
working of government, even as they were rending each other apart.
Was it some bestial remnant of memory that caused them to flee to
the only place a nobleman might feel safe? Or had there been
something in the madness itself that compelled them to seek
something above?
Varnica said nothing. He simple forced his armoured form into the
tight space of the staircase and began dragging down the bodies that
stood in his way.
Hamilca’s servitors aided the removal of corpses greatly. Thirty more of
them lay beside the pillar, all horribly mauled as if chewed up and spat
out, before Varnica reached the top. Novas’s battle-brothers followed
him up, crouch-walking in the cramped space.
Varnica emerged in a chamber of maps and portraits, a sort of
antechamber before the government debating chambers and offices.
The lower portraits, more stern steelwright masters along with wellheeled
embalmers and jewelcutters in their leather aprons, were
spattered with blood. Framed maps depicted early layouts of Berenika
Altis and the changing political divisions of Tethlan’s Holt. Various
landmasses were drawn in differing sizes from map to map, reflecting
their relative importance. Varnica remembered that every planet in the
Imperium had a history like this, shifting, waxing and waning for
thousands of years, while the Imperium beyond did not care unless
something happened to end that history entirely.
The bodies here were clustered around one door. Hamilca moved to
examine them while Novas’s squad covered all the entrances.
Varnica took a better look at one portrait, mounted just high enough
to have avoided the worst of the spraying blood. It was of a member of
the Flagellants’ Guild. It was a large woman, well-fed rather than
naturally bulky, whose ample bosom was encased ridiculously in an
embroidered version of a penitent’s sackcloth robe. Spots of red
makeup simulated self-inflicted wounds and her hair was piled up in a
magnificent structure held in place by the kinds of serrated needles
more properly used for extracting confessions. In one hand she held,
like a royal sceptre, a scourge with three spiked chains, the
implement of her guild’s craft.
In the lower corner was a handprint in blood. It was made too surely
and deliberately to have been accidental, from
a flailing fist. Someone
had used this wall to steady themselves. Someone wounded.
Varnica followed the tracks through the gory mess of the floor. ‘They
were following someone,’ he said as he paced carefully towards the
body-choked door. ‘He was wounded and limping but he wasn’t
scrabbling along like an animal, as the rest of the souls were. They
were after him. The Red Night sent them after one man in particular.’
The tracks led to the door where Hamilca’s servitors were making a
survey of the various wounds. ‘They dashed themselves to death
against the door,’ said Hamilca. ‘Few wounds from hands or teeth.
They broke themselves here trying to get through.’
The door had been panelled with wood to make it in keeping with the
rest of the government officer, but that façade had splintered with the
assault to reveal the solid metal beneath. It was a security door to
keep out just the kind of frenzied assault that had broken against it.
Varnica sighed. He did not like having to use the full range of his
talents. He had always felt that a psyker should properly be something
subtle, an intelligence weapon, reading or remaking minds, perhaps
astrally projecting to make the perfect spy. His own talents had taken
a form that he found ugly in the extreme. Still, duties were duties, and
he had the best way of getting through the door that would not risk
destroying evidence beyond.
He clenched his right fist and thought of anger. The lines of the room
seemed to warp around his fist, as if it was encased in a lens that
distorted anything seen through it. Reality did not like it when he did
this, and he had to fight it.
Black and purple rippled around the gauntlet. Sparks crackled
across the segments of armour around his fingers. The region of
deviant gravity Varnica willed into being bowed and seethed as he drew
back the fist that now disobeyed the laws of force and energy.
Varnica punched the door clean off his mountings. The whole room
seemed to shudder, its dimensions flickering slightly out of balance as
Varnica’s psychic power discharged in a thrust of force. The metal
door clanged into the room beyond.
The Librarium of the Doom Eagles liked to classify its members’
psychic powers according to categories and strength. Varnica’s was
referred to as the Hammerhand, a crude but effective power that
