by Ben Counter
typically augmented the Librarian’s capacity for hand-to-hand combat.
Varnica disliked the Librarium’s testing of its intensity, but he
conceded that it was powerful, and that it would get more powerful the
more he exercised the mental muscles that powered it.
Varnica shook out his hand as the power around it dissipated.
Novas smiled. ‘No door is locked when one wields the Emperor’s
Key,’ he said.
‘Quite,’ replied Varnica. The Emperor’s Key. It sounded rather more
elegant than ‘Hammerhand’.
The room he had opened was an archive. Ceiling-high banks of index
cards, yellowing ledger books and scroll racks exuded a smell of old
paper that almost overpowered the stink of decay.
On a reading table was sprawled the single body this room
contained. It wore grand robes that suggested high office in the
planet’s government. The dead man still had a dagger in his hand,
probably worn more for ceremony than self-defence. The point of the
dagger pinned a handful of papers to the tabletop. Several opened
drawers and scattered papers suggested he had rooted around and
found them in a hurry, and in his last moments made sure that
whoever found him would also find those specific documents.
The man had torn his own throat out with his other hand. He lay in
the black stain of his blood. His body sagged with decay beneath the
robes now filthy with old blood and the seepage of rot.
Varnica pulled out the dagger and looked at the documents this man
had fought to call attention to, even while the Red Night was taking
control of him.
They were receipts and blueprints for work done on the sewers
beneath the Jewelcutters’ Quarter, between seventy and forty years
before. Varnica leafed through them rapidly. They were nothing more
than the detritus of a civil service that loved to remember its own
deeds.
‘What was he trying to tell us?’ asked Hamilca.
‘He was telling us,’ said Varnica, ‘to look down.’
The first of them had a face like a knot of knuckles, deep red flesh that
oozed hissing molten metal, sinewy arms that wielded a smouldering
blade of black steel. It congealed up from the black mass of old blood
pooling in the sewer, that drizzle of gore from the bloodshed above. Its
face split open, tearing skin, and it screamed. A whip-like tongue
lashed out.
More of them were emerging. Dozens of them.
The sewers. Berenika Altis’s greatest achievement, some said.
Hidden from the world above, each section of sewer was like a
cathedral nave, a monument to glory for its own sake, lit by faded
glow-globes and faced with marble and plaster murals. Most cities of
the Imperium would have gathered here to worship. On Berenika Altis
the combined efforts of the flagellants and the jewelcutters had created
instead such a place to accommodate the filth of the city.
It was here the blood had flowed. It was here the Doom Eagles had
come, following the signs left them by that unnamed nobleman who
had died in the Sanctum. It was here they realised they were getting
close to the secret of the Red Night.
‘Daemons!’ yelled Novas. ‘Close formation. Rapid fire!’
More daemons were congealing from the blood that slaked the floor
of the sewer section. They rushed at the Doom Eagles, hate in their
eyes and their swords held high.
Novas’s squad drew in close around Varnica and Hamilca. The ten
Adeptus Astartes hammered out a volley of bolter fire. Three or four
daemons were shredded at once, gobbets of their molten metal blood
hissing against the marble walls. But Varnica counted more than
twenty more daemons now charging to attack. Bolter fire would thin
them out, but this was a task that had to be finished by hand.
Varnica thrust his right hand into the complex holster he wore on
one hip. The sections of his force claw closed around his hand. When
he withdrew it, it was encased in a pair of sharp blades in a pincer,
each blade swirling with psychoactive circuitry.
Varnica let his psychic power fill his fists. Distasteful as it was, it
was for encounters like this that he had trained his mental muscles.
The air warped around his hands and the force claw glowed blue-white
with its power.
The daemons rushed closer. Novas shot another down, blowing its
yowling head from its shoulders. Varnica pushed his way between the
two Doom Eagles in front of him and dived into the fray.
His force claw closed on one and sheared it in two. A fountain of
red-hot blood sprayed over his armour, hissing where it touched the
ceramite. His other fist slammed down, just missing the next daemon
in his way and ripping a crater out of the flagstone floor. He span,
driving his right elbow into the daemon and backhanding another hard
enough to rip its whole jaw off.
He imagined his fists were meteors, smouldering masses of rock,
attacked to him by chains, and wherever he swung them anything in
the way would be destroyed. That was the secret of many a psychic
weapon – imagination, the ability to mould them in a psyker’s mind’s
eye into whatever he needed them to be. Varnica needed them to be
wrecking balls smashing through the hideous things that reared up
around him. Their bodies were walls to be battered down. They were
doorways to be opened with the Emperor’s Key.
Rapid gunfire sprayed around him. Hamilca’s servitors were not just
scientific instruments – one had opened up, its torso becoming an
archway of metal and skin within which were mounted a pair of rotator
cannon. They blazed away at Hamilca’s direction, even as Hamilca
himself took aim with his plasma pistol and blew the arm off another
daemon before it could fully congeal into existence.
Varnica’s shoulder guard turned away one daemon’s blade and he
ducked under another. He rose, claw first, lifting a daemon above his
head and letting the pincers snap open so the daemon was sheared in
two. He stamped down on the blade of the first daemon and, as it
fought to wrench its weapon up to strike again, Varnica drove an elbow
into its face and punched it in the chest as it reeled. Purple-black light
shimmered around the gravity well of his fist as it ripped through the
thing’s ribs and burst out through its back.
Hands grabbed Varnica by the collar and backpack of his armour,
wrenching him down. He fought to straighten up but the strength and
suddenness of the attack had caught him off guard.
He saw the face of Novas, whose hands were pulling him down.
Another Doom Eagle fired past Varnica, bolter shells blasting ragged
holes in the daemon who had been about to decapitate Varnica with
its blade.
‘Must I nursemaid you through every fight?’ growled Novas.
The Doom Eagles now formed an execution line to bring their bolters
to bear on the remaining daemons. Varnica had scattered their charge
and now they were trying to regroup, or to attack in ones and twos
easily shot down. A final few volleys of bolte
r fire brought down the
remaining daemons, blasting off limbs and shredding torsos. The
remnants dissolved into the mass of blood and filth that covered the
sewer floor.
Novas helped Varnica to his feet.
Varnica clapped the sergeant on the shoulder. ‘You see, brother?’
he said. ‘We are close. Blessed is the enemy that announces himself
to us so!’
‘Blessed is your brother that keeps you alive,’ said Novas.
‘We know,’ said Hamilca, adjusting the programming of his gunservitor,
‘that the enemy fears our closing in on him. Therefore, we
approach some place of significance to him. The documents from the
Sanctum suggested the importance of a major intersection three
hundred metres to our west.’
‘It’s the blood,’ said Varnica. ‘The bloodshed in the city finds its way
down here, to the sewers. The enemy places himself some place
where the blood gathers, and then... uses it? Fuels something with it?’
‘Bathes in it, for all we know,’ said Novas.
Varnica checked his wargear. The daemons’ blood had burned
pockmarks into his armour. Nothing important was damaged. One of
Novas’s squad had suffered a deep sword wound to one arm, and the
helmet of another’s power armour had been smashed. Varnica
recognised the pugnacious features of Brother Solicus, a veteran of
Novas’s command. Solicus would make a point of ignoring the minor
wound on the forehead and the blood that trickled down his face.
No great harm done, thought Varnica.
‘Move on,’ he said, and led the way westwards.
When he looked back on the Red Night of Berenika Altis, it would
always be the face of Gunther Kephilaes that Varnica would remember
first. That look of surprise when he saw the Doom Eagles entering his
realm, to be replaced with an awful smile, as if they were guests he
had been waiting for all this time.
The second memory would be of the writing on the walls. Kephilaes,
later identified as an arch-heretic who had escaped repeated attempts
to execute him on a dozen worlds, had chosen for his base of
operations a cistern in the sewers of Berenika Altis. This place, an
enormous tank built to accommodate overflow from the sewers, had
been drained of water so that when the Red Night occurred, it filled up
with blood. The roof was an enormous dome carved with images of
jewelcutters on one side, flaunting their elaborate arrays of jewellery
and gems, and on the other a parade of flagellants lashing supplicants
with their scourges. This dome, and every visible surface of wall and
pillar, was covered in writing. At first it appeared black, but it was in
fact a dark reddish brown. Every word had been written in blood.
Varnica, like every Space Marine, had been taught that speed of
decision was essential in the opening seconds of battle. Even before
Gunther Kephilaes’s face had broken into that mad grin, Varnica had
decided that Novas would pin the heretic down with gunfire while
Varnica himself would close across the duckboards and jerry-built rafts
that had been lashed together over the surface of the blood. Kephilaes
sat on an island made of toppled pillars in the centre of the blood,
hundreds of books and tattered papers lying on the broken stone or
floating on the surface around his makeshift pulpit. Varnica could
reach him, scale the drums of the broken pillars and get to grips with
this heretic in a handful of seconds. He just needed those seconds,
and the job would be done.
A few hand signals passed the orders on to Novas’s squad, who
immediately began to fan out around the ledge running around the
cistern to get multiple angles of fire on the enemy.
Varnica knew by now why Kephilaes was happy to see them. These
intruders meant fresh blood in which to dip the quill he held in one
gnarled hand, the white feather stained with old blood. As Varnica ran
forwards he noted the scholarly robes Kephilaes wore, the straggly
white hair and hooked axe-like face, the way the substance of his
large white eyes seemed to liquefy and run in greyish tears down his
cheeks.
Kephilaes raised his quill and sketched a symbol in the air. The
same symbol appeared scored into the chest of Brother Kouras of
Novas’s squad, the channel cut deep down through the armour in the
flesh of the Adeptus Astartes’s chest and abdomen. Kouras slumped
to one knee and toppled forwards into the blood. Another of the squad
ran to grab him and haul him onto the ledge. With a flourish, Kephilaes
drew another symbol into the second Adeptus Astartes’s face, the
faceplate of his helmet sliced into pieces and revealing the red
wetness of the scored meat inside. The second Space Marine was
dead before he fell into the blood behind the first.
The gunfire began. Bolter shells erupted against the fallen pillars.
Kephilaes drew a letter that hung in the air in lines of burning red, a
complex sigil that formed a shield against which the bolter fire burst
harmlessly.
Varnica leapt from one platform to another. This one nearly gave way
beneath him. He jumped the last few metres, scrabbling for a handhold
on the pillar drum he hit chest-first. A few more seconds. He needed a
few more seconds, and then it would be over, and he would know what
the Red Night meant at last.
He made his own handholds, the stone warping against his fingers
as the psychic field around them leapt into life.
Kephilaes laughed and whooped as he scrawled in the air with
abandon. Squad Novas dived for what little cover they could find as
deep burning letters appeared sunk into the blood-spattered stone
behind them. The letters were in an unfamiliar alphabet but somehow
they made an appalling sense as Varnica glanced behind him. They
were exultations, celebrations, of some vast power that had reached
down from the warp and torn out what little sanity this heretic had
possessed. The white-haired lunatic above Varnica had done all this to
extol the virtues of heresy.
Novas fell just as Varnica closed on the heretic. A message in that
profane alphabet appeared across his face, chest and left shoulder. It
said that this vile thing was no longer an enemy, but was a gift to the
Dark Gods, with a message of thanks scrawled upon it, to serve as an
offering. Varnica could see the wet masses of Novas’s lungs pumping
and the glistening loops of his entrails.
Varnica roared. The hate turned white around his hands and the fire
blazing around them was almost too much for him to control. He
scrambled up the last of the pillars and was face to face with the
madman.
The man Varnica would later identify as Gunther Kephilaes seemed
happy to see him. He held out his arms, and Varnica saw the letters
he had carved into his own chest beneath his scholar’s robes.
‘Welcome,’ he said.
Varnica punched the heretic in the face with enough force to topple
a wall. Kephilaes did not come apart under the blow as honest human
flesh would. Dozens
of sigils burned pain fully bright around him,
channelling the power away from him. Enough force got through to
knock Kephilaes to his knees. He held up a hand to beg.
‘No,’ the heretic gasped. ‘You do not understand. Look around you!
You do not understand.’
Varnica bent down and wrapped his arms around a section of pillar.
The psychic warp around his hands made it light. He hauled it up over
its head, and felt a thrill of satisfaction as its shadow passed over the
heretic.
Varnica slammed the stone down. The heretic was completely
crushed, the last of his witchcraft protection bled away by Varnica’s
first assault.
Varnica felt the crunching of bones and the wet slurp of the flesh
torn flat. Just to be sure, he lifted the stone again and hammered it
down once more.
Something about the deadness suddenly in the air told him this
heretic had breathed his last.
Their gods always abandon them, thought Varnica. In the end.
The Red Night had been created by Gunther Kephilaes to provide the
vast amounts of angrily-shed blood he needed to write down what his
gods dictated to him. This was the conclusion made by the Doom
Eagles’ Librarium after all the evidence, including the script transcribed
from the walls by Hamilca’s servitors, was presented to the Chapter.
Varnica had buried Sergeant Novas that morning. Novas and the
three Doom Eagles who had died at Kephilaes’s hands were laid on
stone slabs, anointed with medical incense to seal up the wounds
where their gene-seeds had been removed, and lowered into the
funerary pits where the Chapter interred their dead. Novas was buried
with his bolter, his copy of Principles of Squad-Level Purgation of the
Emperor’s Foes, and the shell of a bullet that had wounded him early
in his career and which he had saved as a memento mori. Varnica had
prayed at the graveside, and wondered how it was that an Adeptus
Astartes, with his soul steeled against the worst the galaxy could
throw at him, could still feel such a human thing as grief.
Now Varnica sat among the archives of the Chapter Librarium,
surrounded by freshly inked tomes filled with the profane writings of
Gunther Kephilaes. Some Chapters would have destroyed the writing
on the walls, and compelled any Space Marine who had seen them to
cleanse himself with fire or denial until their corruption was gone. But
