Hammer and Bolter 3

by Christian Dunn

  ‘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 well-heeled 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 wa
s 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 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 ski
n 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 bolter 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 gun-servitor, ‘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.’