‘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 the Doom Eagles were not like those other Chapters. They wanted to understand.
The Librarium’s scribe-servitors were still transcribing the complex code-language into High Gothic, and filling ledger after ledger with the ramblings that resulted. Varnica had one such book in front of him, leafing through the parade of obscenity. Kephilaes had been a prophet, in part at least, and the endless train of prodigies and omens filled Varnica’s mind with images of stars boiling away and the galaxy burning from core to rim.
‘Librarian,’ came a familiar voice.
Varnica looked up to see Techmarine Hamilca walking among the small forest of servitors that chittered away as they wrote. ‘I had heard tell I would find you here.’
‘Where else would one find a Librarian,’ replied Varnica, ‘but in a library?’
Hamilca smiled. ‘Your levity need be a shield no longer, Librarian. Not while you and I are the only ones to see it. The loss of Novas has affected you more deeply than an Adeptus Astartes is apt to admit.’
‘One more trial on the path, brother. One more trial.’
‘What did Kephilaes have to say for himself?’
Varnica closed the tome he had finished scanning through. ‘At the last count, Techmarine, seventeen million people died so he could tell us that a great feathered serpent was going to swallow the sun. And that a plague of cockroaches would devour a great empire. No details on which sun or which empire.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Hamilca, ‘this is a task that could be shared?’
‘One mind, I fear, is better than two when it comes to such things. I consider reading Kephilaes’s drivel a penance for losing good Doom Eagles under my command.’
‘So be it, Librarian. I and my servitors shall be ready to assist you.’ Hamilca finished making a few adjustments to the scribe-servitors, and the hum of their scribbling autoquills changed pitch slightly. ‘And so, brother I leave you.’
‘Wait,’ said Varnica. Hamilca stopped just as he was turning away. Varnica had opened another volume of the heretic’s writings. ‘Here. And here. The same name. A daemon prince. This is a record of its deeds.’
‘Kephilaes’ patron?’ asked Hamilca.
‘Perhaps. It was one of the most powerful of its kind, one of the brood of the Change God. Throne alive, I fear I shall need the services of the Flagellants’ Guild to purify myself after reading this. It was... it was a plotter without compare. A manipulator. “There was not one living soul without a flaw that he could not widen to a chasm into which that soul would fall. A saint would be prey to this great cunning.”’
‘This daemon prince,’ said Hamilca, sitting opposite Varnica and taking a book for himself. ‘It is active now? The Red Night was some form of sacrifice to it?’
‘It is possible. There is more. Here – a record of its deeds. It polluted the gene pool of a triad of worlds, so they became barbarians and warred with one another. An obscene tale about Saint Voynara, who before she died gave in to despair and called upon this prince to deliver her. And its masterpiece, the crowning glory... by Terra, what foulness I see before my eyes!’
Hamilca leaned forwards. ‘Librarian? What is it? What have you seen?’
‘It took a Chapter of Adeptus Astartes,’ read Varnica, ‘and it found in them a fatal flaw. It was their pride. That same sin we all commit, brother. Our pride, our weakness. And it turned this Chapter into an instrument of its will, through trickery compelling them to do its bidding while they thought they were doing the Emperor’s work.’
‘What Chapter was this?’ asked Hamilca. ‘Many have fallen from grace or disappeared. Is this the truth behind the fall of the Brazen Claws or the Thunder Barons?’
‘No,’ replied Varnica. ‘This daemon prince, when its name was spoken, was called Abraxes. The Chapter it commanded was the Soul Drinkers.’
Charandis
Ben McCallum
I
Prey, drunk and foolish, blundered onward, oblivious and uncaring.
The scent stung his wet nostrils, sinking hooks into his brain, flaring his bloody instincts. He could taste the blood that ran in their veins even from this distance, a coppery tang that made his lolling tongue ache, and sang up the length of his killing fangs.
Each step he took betrayed a burning hunger that physically hurt. Claws that were too long slid in and out of his monstrous paws with a lethality he had forgotten how to control. They itched so incessantly, so furiously, with pain that echoed up limbs swollen by the anger that had plagued him for so long.
Thick ropes of sour drool swung from his open maw as he moved, his lethal bulk passing soundlessly through a woodland that had been blessed by rain only a few hours ago. Water was no longer a relief to him. Each raindrop that fell from the leaves of whispering trees sent spikes of migraine-fierce pain through his leonine skull. A pelt that was once the pearly white of pure moonlight felt heavy on his back, soaked with cold rainwater and caked with a thousand kinds of filth.
He quickened his pace, his loping gait lengthening into a staggering gallop. The prey-scent intensified, and his nose burned in sympathy. He was close enough to hear the breath in their lungs, and smell the stinging reek of alcohol sweating through their pores.
Other smells clung to them, too; scents he dimly remembered as city-smells, laden with the promise of glittering spear tips and baying horns. There was a time when he would have shrunk from this scent in favour of softer, less dangerous prey. But now the anger wouldn’t let him. The anger burned in his guts and banished his instincts, compelling him to drown his pain in the hot rush of the kill.
They were making noises, now. Elf-speech whispered under the trees, their voices softened by the wine that had compelled them to journey out here. The sound lanced into his mind, firing a predator-rage he once knew how to contain. This was wrong. This was not how he was supposed to hunt.
His quarry stopped, and the low murmur of their soft voices began to grow louder. This prey was not as lethal as the other elf-creatures that moved through the woods like ghosts, but he was not blind to the danger of the metal that gleamed in their slender hands.
Slowly, agonisingly, he prowled forward, even as the unkind rage knifed arcs of pain into his bleary eyes and screamed at him to lunge.
When the moment was right, it would be satisfied.
‘A Chracian myth,’ Darath said through smiling lips, his thin arms spreading in an expansive gesture. ‘That is all this is, my friends.’
He spoke the words in the sing-song accent of the Lothern aristocracy, his diction flawless. The bleariness of his dark eyes betrayed his drunkenness.
‘Hundreds dead?’ Nesselan slurred, announcing every glass of wine he had put away today. ‘This is no myth, Darath. There is a terror loose.’
‘There is no terror here in this Chracian wilderness,’ Darath snapped, the wine fouling his temper. ‘You are a fool to believe so. We are all fools for coming here, through the rain and the wind, hunting for a ghost that does not exist.’
Darath’s sculpted cheekbones flushed red. Here, in these woods, even as the sun edged ever closer to the distant horizon, he wanted to strike Nesselan. The fool was bleeding the fun from this journey with every word that passed his lips. He had never met an elf so negative in all his days.
Thyran tried and failed to banish the tension with a false laugh.
‘These woodsmen are not liars,’ Nesselan said, crouching low and pressing his fingers to the damp earth, as if this somehow proved the truth of his words. ‘Hundreds, this ghost of yours has claimed over the years. I swear to you, by Asuryan‘s blood, that this beast is real.’
Darath knew he believed those words. Only hours ago, as they strode into the woodland of mighty Chrace, they had been warned off the trail by unwashed, uncouth locals. A great beast, they claimed, was skulking beneath this canopy. Whole scores of men had fallen to its filthy claws. Armed men, too.
In Darath’s most humble opinion, this tale was a
mean-spirited jest by the lesser folk of this barbarian wilderness.
It simply would not do.
Thyran held a flask to his lips and drank deeply. The wine was perfection, if a little too sweet.
‘Exaggeration, Nesselan, you silly man,’ Thyran laughed, ever the voice of reason. ‘Maybe it does skulk through these trees. This doesn’t mean it has slain so many. This doesn’t mean it can’t die at the tips of our blades.’
Darath watched as Thyran’s sword rasped from its sheath, feeling a jealous pang at the work of art in his fellow noble’s hand.
‘I have sparred with the very best Lothern has to offer,’ he continued, brushing a strand of fair hair from his eyes, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. ‘I promise you, we are in no danger here.’
Darath filled his lungs to speak, to curse them both for their foolish notions and their uncouth bravado. They were nobles, after all. Maybe the other two were minor nobles, of lesser houses, but the blood in their veins was of privileged stock. They were being ridiculous. They were above this.
But the words caught in his throat.
‘What was that?’ both Nesselan and Thyran said at once.
All of them had distinctly heard the loud, brittle crack! of a fallen branch being snapped in half. Darath’s fingers, thin digits armoured in gold rings, wrapped around the handle of his sword. His tongue traced a nervous circuit around his lips.
‘I told you this was no ghost,’ Nesselan hissed, his eyes wide with fear.
‘Be quiet!’ Darath could feel how heavy his breath was, laden with alcohol fumes. They should not have taken the wine with them.
‘Do not worry,’ Thyran spoke, sounding infuriatingly composed. ‘I think it was just--’
The sound that interrupted him was torn straight from a nightmare.
‘Charandis,’ Darath breathed, as the lion pounced.
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