Are there any areas of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 that you haven’t yet explored that you’d like to in the future?
Loads. It’s a big playground, though - you’ve gotta respect the fact that other people got there first, and have as much right as you to claim X, Y and Z. So while I’d love a crack at one of the Big Four (Blood Angels, Ultramarines, Space Wolves, Dark Angels) it’s not something I’m exactly crying over. I have way too much coming at me, anyway. I’d really like to do a love story based around Orion and Ariel, the Wood Elf king and queen, from their beginnings as asrai to their seasonal ascension to their people’s spiritual avatars. I’d freaking love to do a series chronicling the rise of the Black Legion and Abaddon’s position as Warmaster of Chaos. On a smaller scale, a short story about Andrej, the stormtrooper in Helsreach, and his search for Domoska in the hive city’s ruins. A lot of people keep asking me about that one.
What are you reading at the moment? Who are your favourite authors?
Right now, I’m reading Dragon Haven, by Robin Hobb As it happens, she’s my favourite author. I always have a few books on the go at once, which are currently The Stone and the Flute, by Hans Bemman, and The Clash of Fundamentalisms, by Tariq Ali. One of my favourite books is The Thirteen and a Half Lives of Captain Bluebear, which (along with Dune) I tend to read once a year. I feel another round with that beast of a book coming on. I’m sure everyone’s reading Prospero Burns right now, but lucky scamp that I am, I read it over half a year ago. Amazing novel, but a bit too recent for a re-read.
Which book (either BL or non-BL) do you wish you’d written and why?
The Philosopher and the Wolf, by Mark Rowlands. It’s about a schoolteacher who, through various circumstances, ends up being the owner of a wolf, and spends the course of the book comparing his ape’s perceptions to the wolf’s canine ones. It’s pretty simple philosophy, but it’s beautifully written. Everyone’s got life unique life experiences to draw from and shape into stories, but I wish that’d been one of mine.
Phalanx
Ben Counter
Chapter 4
The beauty of Berenika Altis was a strange thing, like a work of art not understood. It had been built in the shape of an enormous star, two of its five points extending out to sea on spurs of artificial land. Each point of the star was devoted to a different trade, the five legendary guilds that had built and financed this city. The shape was a reminder of its original purpose as an exclusive retreat for those who deserved better than the other bleak, stagnant cities of the planet Tethlan’s Holt. At the centre of the star was the Sanctum Nova Pecuniae, once a palace existing purely for the beautification of Berenika Altis, and one that now served as the seat of government of Tethlan’s Holt.
Fifteen days ago all communication had ceased with Berenika Altis. Eight million people had vanished. The planetary authorities, those who had not disappeared with the rest of the government, reacted as any good Imperial citizen did when confronted with the unknown. They sealed off the city, quarantined it, and resolved to pretend that it had never existed.
The Doom Eagles were not satisfied with such solutions.
‘A brittle beauty,’ said Librarian Varnica as the Thunderhawk droned in low over the north seaward spur of Berenika Altis. The rear ramp was down and Varnica had disengaged his grav-couch restraints, holding onto the rail overhead to lean forward and get a better look at his target from the air.
‘I see only stupidity,’ replied Sergeant Novas. His voice did not sound over the gunship’s engines, but the vox-link carried it straight into Varnica’s inner ear. ‘A shift in the sea floor and two-fifths of that city would sink into the ocean.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Varnica, ‘that’s the point. Nothing speaks of wealth like spending a great deal of it on something that might be gone any moment.’
‘Looks like they got their wish,’ said Novas. ‘Eventually. It wasn’t the sea that got them, but something did,’
‘Quite the conundrum,’ said Varnica. ‘What a puzzle box they built for us.’
As the Thunderhawk swooped lower, the streets were revealed. Each spur of the city had been dedicated to a different guild and though centuries of rebuilding and repurposing had followed, the original imprint remained. The Embalmers’ Quarter was arranged in neat rows, the buildings resembling elegant tombs. The Jewelcutters’ Quarter was all angular patterns, triangular sections of streets and many-sided intersections echoing the complex facings of a cut diamond. The Victuallers’ District was a gloomy, sheer-sided area of warehouses and long, low halls. The industrial feel of the Steelwrights’ Cordon was entirely an affectation, with rust-streaked metal chimneys and crumbling brickwork concealing the salons and feasting halls where the great and good of Berenika Altis had celebrated their superiority. The Flagellants’ Quarter, founded with the money taken from those who paid to have their sins scourged from them, echoed the flagellants’ frenzy with twisted, winding streets and asymmetrical buildings that seemed poised to topple over or slide into rubble. The Sanctum Nova Pecuniae held the disparate regions together, as if it pinned them to the surface of Tethlan’s Holt to keep them from crawling off to their own devices.
The streets were visible now, the buildings separating into distinct blocks. The streets seemed paved with a haphazard mosaic of blacks and reds, the same pattern covering every avenue and alley.
It was a mosaic of corpses.
The smell of it confirmed the few reports that had reached the Doom Eagles. The smell of rotting bodies. It was familiar to every Space Marine, to every Emperor’s servant whose business was death.
Varnica looked on, fascinated. He had seen many disasters. When not called upon to attend some critical battlezone, it was disasters that attracted the Doom Eagles. Some Chapters sought out ancient secrets, others lost comrades, others the most dangerous sectors of the galaxy to test their martial prowess. The Doom Eagles sought out catastrophe. It was less a policy of the Chapter’s command, and more 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 he
re, 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 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.
Hammer and Bolter Year One Page 45
