by Warhammer
Relief quickly turned to fear, the revelation coming as he opened his eyes and saw men gathered around them.
A circle of masks, ragged strips of robes masking old military fatigues or factorum uniforms. One of those masks regarded him, the eyes that were visible through the slits bright and azure like chips of sapphire. It wore a simulacrum of a blank face, the strange figure, and his dirty red vestments smelled of cloying incense and blood, as if one had been deployed to obscure the other. Instead, both mingled into something noisome.
Cristo glanced about, only moving his eyes. He counted seven more figures, thuggish kinds, with masks of saints or laurel-crowned paragons. Two wore the faces of eagles. The aquila daubed their attire, roughly drawn, a dark stain that reminded Cristo of blood. Cudgels and rusty knives hung from studded leather belts. A few had a flagellant’s binding rope lashed around their ankles, the dried matter trailing from its inward-facing spikes like little tears of penance. Some carried trophies. Cristo saw bones, a rotting skull. They stank, despite the effort of cloves and garlic to suppress their foul odour.
The one with the knife – it was silver, double-edged and had the ornate look of an athame – leaned in to speak into Cristo’s ear. His breath reeked of soiled meat.
‘Weary traveller,’ his voice slid with the honey of a practised demagogue, ‘I am called Convocation, and these are my flock, the Divine.’
Zealots, Low Sink had them in abundance. Most deprived settlements did, their easy charms and false promises playing well with the disenfranchised and the desperate. Ordinarily, the proctors would suppress their bolder ambitions, but the Lex had departed Meagre altogether and left something primal in its place. Gang rule was now the only law, and the largest gang of all was that of the Imperial cult.
Power abhors a vacuum, or so Cristo had heard it said. An old phrase from old lips, but it held true. And in the absence of the proctors, a new law had arisen.
Belatedly, Cristo realised the skulls hanging off their belts were of the infected. Distended and emaciated, they could be no other. Then he saw Karina and Celestia, pushed to their knees, hands bound behind their heads, and Cristo tried to rise. The knife bit, deep enough to sting and draw a thick crimson rivulet that beaded down the blade.
‘No,’ the priest called Convocation said, ‘you stay.’
‘Don’t–’ Cristo snarled.
But Convocation smiled, certain of his absolute dominion.
‘Tell me, brother of man,’ he said, like a mendicant in search of alms, ‘do you believe in the Emperor’s light and righteous judgement?’
Two burly zealots hauled Cristo up, one wearing a hessian hood emblazoned with the eagle, the other an angelic mask. The latter’s false-face only came halfway down his features; a stubbled chin was left jutting and exposed, and in direct opposition to the serenity evoked by his porcelain visage. They had short-hafted maces looped to a length of rope that tied their makeshift robes together. Heavy boots and coarse fabrics were just visible beneath. Cristo thought he caught the fringe of a partly hidden proctor’s uniform on one of them.
Make an already weak man feel powerless and watch him join the first cult that offers him succour. Convocation kept the knife close throughout Cristo’s rough handling, an eagerness for violence lighting his eyes. Cristo gave the priest no cause to act upon it, even when they dragged Karina and Celestia to their feet too.
Eight further masked figures emerged through the murk and the rain, like pale spectres. A few wielded spiked clubs, improvised lengths of timber with nails punched through the ends. Two carried large hammers. Several had pistols tucked in their rude belts. One had an autogun slung over her shoulder on a strap. Begrimed, raggedly attired but so armed, they had the look of psychotic beggars.
Convocation withdrew but didn’t speak. Instead, he gestured with the ritual knife. Two flicks of the wrist, a feudal lord ordering his vassals, and Cristo was ushered forwards.
Then began a slow march through the ruins of Meagre.
Abandoned buildings gave hollow greeting as they passed. Fires still burned in some places. In the distance, an old watchtower spewed out smoke. A sense of profound absence had taken the town. Death had swept through it, death and fear, leaving it raw and exposed like a wound. It was quiet now, barring the rain, but so is a cemetery.
Cristo tried not to imagine the lives lost or those who had succumbed to the contagion sweeping the districts. He had his head down for most of the march, trying to think, to plan a way out. Karina and Celestia were kept behind him, their fate concealed also, and Cristo thought it was probably a means to keep him in line. Not that he was in much fit state to do anything other than comply. He had slept earlier, at least. He didn’t know for how long, and it been a fitful rest brought on by exhaustion. The priest had fed him a pungent draught that Cristo had tried to refuse at first, but then rough hands had gripped his arms, his neck, before levering open his jaw, and he had drunk. It tasted vile, like strong hooch, and he thought it drugged but it had invigorated him, even quenching a little of his thirst.
‘Where are you taking us?’ he asked, but Convocation didn’t answer.
They marched in silence, a column of pilgrims being led to paradise, except Cristo thought his idea of what that meant might differ from what it meant for the priest and his flock. They were lean folk, their eyes hard and hungry, sustained by will – or more accurately the fear of what Convocation might do to them if they defied him. Cristo knew Meagre had fallen far, but for its people to accept such demagogues unflinchingly and absolutely in such a short span of time told him exactly how far.
That they encountered none of the dead was the only saving grace. Cristo feared for his daughter, and for Celestia. Not because of what the zealots might do to them but because he felt powerless to prevent it. By the time they reached the gaping maw of the maglev tunnel that fear hadn’t lessened. Apart from the uninviting dark and the cold and existential dread that comes from staring into an abyssal void, the first thing that struck Cristo was the smell. Something had died in that tunnel. It had become a burial place, a tomb of the unquiet. He had no wish to go that way, and even less for his daughter to accompany him.
‘What is this?’ he asked, slowing his footfalls and feeling the resistance of the two men charged with his compliance. Convocation had lifted the knife from his throat and now paced alongside Cristo. Surprisingly, he answered.
‘Salvation…’ The priest smiled, but it was humourless, a product of cruelty and mania. ‘Perhaps.’
‘You sound doubtful about that.’
Convocation tutted, a lecturer telling off a foolish student. ‘Not doubt. Though,’ he conceded, ‘not everyone can be saved. To be judged one must first enter the dark and see into their immortal soul.’
And so they did.
At Convocation’s gentle urging, Cristo was led into the maglev tunnel and the rest of the pilgrims followed. A chill touched the air, redolent of a butcher’s meat locker. Old blood, spoiling flesh and the actinic tang of active magnetism ran riot across his tongue. His nose wrinkled at the stench of it. Darkness swept down on him, tenebrous and abject. It smothered him. He was immediately blind and forced to rely on his other senses for navigation. More than once he slipped, near twisting his ankle. The live maglev rail hummed in his right ear, promising a swift death. Break from his captors, leap onto the rail. It would be easy enough. As his minders backed off, Cristo suspected Convocation was testing his resolve.
‘You’ll have to kill me first…’ he whispered, to which he heard to his dismay, ‘Good, good…’ and knew he had been right.
The dead found them here, in dribs and drabs, in a part of the tunnel where the lights yet flickered. Nothing like the horde that had swept Meagre and gutted it. Spiked clubs, maces and staves did for these pitiable creatures, their gaunt faces rendered up in spastic flashes of cold grey light. They were slower than the ones Cristo
had previously encountered and he wondered if this enervation was somehow symptomatic of whatever contagion had infected the populace. Certainly, it made them easier to kill, which the zealots did with unfettered abandon. It was savage, gratuitously violent, and it took Cristo a few moments to realise what it actually was. Anointment. A baptism in blood. The masks came back rubricated.
‘And so are we judged…’ he heard Convocation murmur.
Eventually, the tunnel opened out, still illuminated in spasms but here the light described a subterranean station. More or less intact, Cristo could scarcely believe his eyes when he saw the functioning mag-trans carriage aloft a few inches off the humming rail.
More of the infected lingered here, though they were skeletal, emaciated and beyond the point of perambulation. Wallowing, grasping impotently, teeth bared in a permanent grimace. Wasted, like flames deprived of air and close to extinction.
He stared as he passed them, then kept staring as they mounted the mag-trans and it ferried them deeper into hell.
Chapter XVI
The fortress
It stood empty and silent like a ransacked tomb. A fortress, sacked but unsullied.
The rig drove through into the yard, through an open gateway, unseen and unremarked. Sentinel watchtowers loomed but did no more than cast long shadows. Beyond them, beyond the perimeter wall, lay the keep itself. Stout, buttressed flanks. A ferrocrete stockade crowned by razor wire. Auto-sentry guns jerked with spasmodic motion recognition, their ammo hoppers bled dry. The most heavily guarded and well-fortified structure in all of Meagre. Precinct IX, the proctors’ last redoubt. In the end, it had not availed them.
A carpet of shell casings crunched under the rig’s tread, pushed into the dirt like brass seedlings as it trundled past. A ramp led to a canopied depot, its parking zones also empty. Barak still brought the vehicle to a halt within the chevroned lines, habit harder to break than the ex-lawman’s spirit. He wore a stony expression as they brought Jana out from the back of the cabin, Maela assisting her as she climbed down the short ladder.
She stepped gingerly on her wounded leg, the pain obvious from her pinched features. Barak took her then, clasping his wife’s hand as if to try to squeeze the hurt out of her or perhaps absorb it into himself. He wrapped his arm around her back, gently holding her up as they walked the approach road to the keep’s entrance.
The others followed, weary from the ride, a few casting nervous glances at the darkness they had left behind them. Nothing had followed, at least nothing that could be seen or heard. The Broker had fallen into silence and melancholy, the loss of the sommelier more akin to that of a loved one than the indentured slave he had appeared to be.
Fharkoum and his man muttered to one another, the fat merchant dragging Maela close like one might cling to his property in the presence of a thief. Her scorn kept the worst of his pawing at bay, a resilience having flourished in her since Hallow’s End and everything that had come after. Barak looked about to intervene but a careful glance from Maela warned him off.
See to her, it said. And he did.
Before Barak reached the entrance, Morgravia cut him off, Drover in tow.
‘Why would they leave the keep?’ she asked.
‘Your guess is as good as mine.’ Barak frowned. ‘Could be the entire precinct got deployed.’
‘And they happened to leave open the gate behind them?’
‘Fair point.’
Morgravia gestured to Drover, who looked back at her mildly aghast, poking a finger against his own chest.
‘You’ve got the gun, hireling,’ she explained.
He had smoked his cigar down to the nub and clenched it between his teeth, puffing a slow purplish smoke trail as he said, ‘Best see if anyone’s home then, eh?’
Shotgun held at waist height, Drover ducked inside.
The lumens ignited with a flash of sodium brightness, a heavy clunk echoing through the barren complex as Drover threw the lever.
Having made it as far as the generator room and now returned to a wide, dirty lobby, the nerves of the party began to ease. Barak had secured the entrance, the door sealed behind manual slide bolts, and had procured lock codes from behind the raised pulpit where the proctors processed their intake. Procedurally, it appeared little had changed since his tenure as a law keeper.
Each lock code was a sheaf of parchment like a wafer, but hardened to the stiffness of plastek, and Barak showed them to the group as they gathered around him.
‘Armoury, ammunition store, mess hall, med-bay and vox-station,’ he said, leafing through the cards like a street gambler explaining a lure to his marks.
‘Pair up, divide the tasks between us,’ said Morgravia, and no one contradicted her. Lessened in agency or not, she was still Inquisition and that commanded a certain measure of obedience.
‘Well, I for one will feel better when I’ve fed my children,’ said Drover, patting his autopistols. He then unhooked the shotgun and threw it back to Morgravia, who caught it deftly. He took the lock code for the ammunition store, and wrapped an arm around Arkyle’s back as he moved off. ‘You’re with me, partner.’
‘You know what you’re looking for?’ Morgravia called.
Drover eyed the hefty sidearm holstered to the inquisitor’s belt. ‘I’m guessing cannon shells.’
Morgravia smiled thinly, her eyes betraying her amusement. ‘You’ll do just fine.’ She turned to Barak. ‘You and I are going to the armoury,’ she told him.
He cast a glance at his wife, who he had left in Maela’s care. The courtesan held her close, Jana barely lucid in that moment.
‘I will take her,’ she said. ‘The med-bay.’
Fharkoum grunted something to Kharata, prompting the hired gun to step forwards. ‘I’ll go with them,’ he uttered, eyes cold, ‘for protection.’
Barak began to mouth a protest but Morgravia stepped in.
‘Now, why do I think you’re more concerned about your master’s property than getting this injured woman to the med-bay.’
Kharata shrugged. ‘Like I give a shit what you think.’
Morgravia let her gaze linger on him just long enough that he knew she’d kill him if anything happened to either of the two in his charge, then turned back to Barak. ‘You know the armoury. You know the guns, and you’re another pair of hands that I trust.’
He nodded by way of agreement, though still didn’t look happy about the arrangement with Kharata.
‘Then I shall procure sustenance,’ said the Broker, having reasserted her air of calm. Whatever grief or blame she harboured for the sommelier’s fate, she kept it hidden for now. The mess hall was closest to the entrance. It was visible from the lobby. It therefore didn’t surprise Morgravia when Fharkoum went with the Broker.
The lobby was a hub with several avenues all trailing off from its main nexus. A map mounted on the wall made navigation easier. The precinct house was a fortified keep but it wasn’t huge. Three floors, one sub-basement where the cells and archives were located. This area would remain sealed. According to Barak it also ran on a separate generator, so the lights would still be out.
Nothing down there for us, thought Morgravia and followed Barak towards the armoury.
Stripped almost bare, the main armoury was a sorry sight.
‘Is this it?’ asked Morgravia, scowling.
‘Precinct’s only got this one cache.’
A pair of shotguns, three stub pistols, one autogun, a few sodium lanterns and a belt of tear gas grenades. It wasn’t much. They took everything.
‘Here,’ said Barak, throwing Morgravia a handheld vox. She caught it and checked the power. A rasp of static issued out.
Barak snagged its twin to his belt. ‘Channel two,’ he said, having already clicked it into place on his own vox.
Morgravia nodded and did the same.
‘What about the sub-basement?’ she asked, reassessing her earlier assumption as she armed up. She took one of the shotguns, a lantern and a stub pistol. Like a packhorse, Barak carried the rest.
The ex-proctor rubbed at his stubbled chin. ‘Could be something useful. There’s a few old stores down there. Mainly machine parts back in the day, but that might’ve changed.’
‘It’s worth a try.’ She hefted the shotgun. It was weighty, reassuring. ‘We won’t get far on these.’
Barak raised an eyebrow. ‘How far do we need to go?’
‘Hive edge, to the gate. We need to move uphive and quickly.’
She didn’t mention that she had other concerns, ones that might mean spending more time in Low Sink. That would all depend on the Broker giving up the location of the Empath. Up until now, Morgravia had been focused on survival, but with the immediate danger passed a different imperative took hold.
‘Won’t the gate be sealed?’
‘Not for me.’
That too was misleading. She doubted she would be headed to the gate, and so she needed to find another way to ensure it remained unbarred for Barak and the others. A problem for later, although not much later.
‘Okay then,’ Barak replied, and something in his tone suggested scepticism. Lying, for an inquisitor, was like breathing. Perhaps she was losing her touch.
As she slung the shotgun over her shoulder, Morgravia noticed a barrack room leading off from the corridor to the armoury.
‘Is there a washroom back there?’ she asked, feeling the patina of grit and dirt crusting her body. She needed a bath, a shower, something. Right now, she’d settle for semi-clean water and a hose.
‘Should be a basin or two,’ said Barak. ‘You feeling all right?’
‘Tired.’
‘You want me to wait?’
‘Find your wife.’
‘What about the stores in the sub-basement?’
‘I’ll deal with those.’
Barak nodded, grateful. Before he left, he said, ‘I saw you collapse. Back in the bar.’ He held up his hands. ‘I’m not prying. I’m not. Just want to make sure I’m doing the right thing by leaving you.’
