Soul Drinkers 06 - Phalanx

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