Sepulturum - Nick Kyme

by Warhammer

  Morgravia smiled. A loyal and dutiful man. That was rare, in her experience.

  ‘I’ve faced the devils of the abyss, Barak. I’ve stared them down and vanquished them with this very hand.’ She showed him. ‘The chivalry is appreciated but I’ll be fine.’

  Barak nodded again, but lingered.

  ‘Those machines…’

  ‘You want to know what they were?’

  ‘Not really. I’d rather not know anything about your world. Mine was bleak enough, serving the Lex. I can’t imagine the burdens of knowledge an inquisitor has to deal with. Are they…?’

  ‘Anything to do with me? Yes. I think that they probably are.’

  ‘Will you stop them? Can you?’

  ‘I am the Emperor’s servant,’ was all Morgravia said.

  Barak’s face suggested he doubted that would be enough, then he said, ‘Outside the bar, before we left, before it burned to the ground, I saw lights in the sky. Red lights. And then a high-pitched shrieking. I’ve heard that sound before, or at least something similar. A mining tool, sonics. It’s used for digging. No Blackgheist mining consortium is burrowing for ore when all this shit is going on, least not one in Low Sink. I doubt any are left. Could it be related to the other machines?’

  ‘I’m assuming you didn’t just crack skulls as a proctor.’

  ‘I was an investigator too.’

  ‘Pretty good one, I’d say.’

  ‘Had my moments. So, what do you think?’

  Morgravia paused, considering how much she should say. ‘I saw them too. The lights. Didn’t hear the shriek but I did hear something else. Engine drone. Low, masked. Something small like a gun-cutter. Do the proctors have anything like that?’

  Barak shook his head. ‘Not in my day. Besides, proctors are noisy. Bright lamps, loud engines. Dominate, subdue and control. Not big on stealth.’

  ‘Another unanswered question then.’

  ‘I think they’re looking for something and they don’t want anyone else to know they’re doing it.’

  ‘Who’s they?’

  ‘I hoped you might have an idea.’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘Care to share?’

  ‘Not just yet. Let’s focus on gearing up and getting out. Something’s off about this place. I don’t think we should overstay.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘See how your wife is doing. Then meet back at the lobby.’

  That seemed to satisfy Barak, who nodded then went on his way.

  Once he was gone, Morgravia entered the barrack room and found the two basins he had spoken of. A cracked mirror reflected a haggard face back at her. Dark rings around the eyes had the appearance of kohl, and the skin was pale. Still, the features were strong, the expression resolute. Morgravia turned the faucet, releasing a slow but steady stream. After a few seconds, the briny appearance of the water cleared and she cupped her hands to make a reservoir, splashing her face. It felt warm but wet and some of the grime washed away, leaving dark trails in the sink. She found a cloth, wiped the back of her neck and ran a hand through her silver mohawk, finding it wretched with gritty particulate.

  She stared, one ice-blue eye, the other jaundiced and bloodshot staring back. And then she saw it, a reflection of light on the mirror, momentary but not imagined. Her ice-blue eye flashed, a ripple of brilliance through the sclera. Like a bionic.

  Morgravia had no bionics.

  She gripped the basin with one hand, tentatively touching the edge of her eye with the other. She was breathing hard, fast. Her heart galloped. She felt around her eye socket, gently probing. It was cold, colder than the rest of the skin around it. Another flare of light. This time unmistakable. Azure, clean. She discerned focusing rings, turning slowly on concentric arcs. She probed deeper, wiggling a finger into the tear duct, searching for a gap. She found resistance. Metal. Both hands suddenly clenched the edge of the basin as Morgravia almost fell and the red dream lingered, eager for release.

  ‘A mind without purpose will walk in dark places,’ she murmured, looking down as she repeated the words like a mantra. She’d read them in an old book several years ago, surprised at the clarity of recall.

  Taking a breath, she looked up. Nothing had changed, no horrific transformation had taken place, and the eye seemed like an eye again. But she knew. She knew. In that moment, her scars took on fresh meaning. Hurriedly, a rising fear in her gut threatening to overwhelm her if she didn’t do it quickly, she undid the flak-weave and removed the tunic underneath.

  She stood naked from the waist up, examining the roadmap of pain traced across her body. Old wounds presented themselves, bullet holes, abrasions, stabbings, but the longer scars reminded her of a clothier’s markings and the segmenting of material. She had been re-sewn like a garment. She had no idea why, but felt the presence of something parasitical within, she its host.

  Pressing her fingers against the edge of a thready cicatrice running down her sternum she began to dig with her nails. It hurt but only a little, as if some of the nerve endings had been scraped away, and blood started to bead…

  A vox crackled, stopping Morgravia, releasing her. She blinked, and heard Drover’s voice. For a second she thought it was the handheld unit but then realised it was coming through a fluted vox-horn set in one corner of the barrack room, next to the ceiling.

  ‘He’s gone…’ He sounded pained. Angry. ‘The little shit’s gone.’

  Dragging on her tunic, Morgravia found the voxponder and spoke into the boxy unit’s receiver cup.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she demanded. Her head felt heavy, hung­over. She breathed deeply to clear the fogginess from her mind.

  ‘Bastard hit me. Hard. And he ran.’

  ‘Ran where? Who? What the hell are you talking about, Drover? Are you at the ammunition store?’

  ‘Didn’t get that far. Said he felt dizzy, so I went to find a canteen. Some water. Next I know, I’m on my knees nursing a cracked skull.’

  Morgravia swore under her breath then said, ‘I think I know where he’s going.’

  She turned, about to explain further, when she saw the Broker standing in her way.

  The shotgun stood upright against the basin. She’d unslung it when she’d washed her face. The stub pistol lay on the basin’s edge, well within the Broker’s grasp. Morgravia’s monomolecular knife was still tucked in the back of her belt.

  Morgravia didn’t move. ‘I wondered when we’d have to do this.’

  Chapter XVII

  Evidence

  As Barak made his way to the med-bay, he found bullet casings, las-burns on the walls, the parts of now tumbledown barricades. He had no doubt the proctors had been deployed in force, but whoever had been left had fought hard to try to hold the keep. Against whom, he didn’t know, but the gangs had been growing bolder for years and Meagre was hardly a pillar of law and order to begin with. The few signs of incursion revealed little evidence to go on. Fifteen years since he had last trod these halls. In all that time, Precinct IX had never looked so beleaguered. He also knew its ways, and had taken a shortcut in order to get to Jana quicker. Upon happening on the shell casings that goal had been subverted.

  Stooping to examine one of the spent casings, Barak found the shards of something resembling a human cheekbone, only made from porcelain. At first he thought it might have come from a doll or child’s toy but upon closer inspection realised it was part of a mask, broken from a heavy blow and missed in the clean-up. He didn’t know of any gangs that wore porcelain masks as their signature, but then it had been a while.

  He had passed several wanted edicts on his way through the precinct, the kind usually given to bounty hunters, for their kind was rife in Low Sink, the pickings of vagrants, gang leaders and other recidivists abundant enough to serve a great many private contractors. The proctors were known to occasionally enli
st outside help, wherever a criminal element might be beyond their reach or means to apprehend or kill. Barak couldn’t remember seeing any porcelain masks, or masks of any description, amongst them and figured he might have better fortune with the archive.

  The med-bay resided on the third floor but the archive would be here on this one. Reuniting with Jana had been his utmost priority since leaving the armoury, and he didn’t like the thought of her or Maela with that bastard Kharata, but he’d found a piece of evidence and knew he should follow his old instincts. All the talk with the inquisitor had rekindled a desire he thought long extinguished. He was an investigator, and he yearned for answers. For the truth.

  And then there was the smell, faint at first but unmistakable now. It was rot and death. He followed it to the archive.

  A locked door barred entry. With a brief moment’s hesitation, Barak shoulder-barged it. The lock broke but something else had wedged the door, and it only opened a few inches. The reek intensified, foul enough to make Barak wretch. He considered again the wisdom of breaching the door. In all his years as a proctor, he had never gone against his instincts. He had to know. Stepping back, he fired off two shots, their retorts deafeningly loud in the quiet corridor, and destroyed both hinges. The door fell back with the creak of old metal. It thudded heavily and left a rectangular void in its wake.

  Barak stepped up to it.

  A records cabinet lay across the threshold, the barricade keeping him out. He climbed over it. The second-floor archive was more of an office – the proper historical records were kept in the sub-basement – but he reckoned the mask and the perp who wore it were likely to be referenced here. All thoughts of digging into it evaporated, though, when Barak discovered the cause of the smell.

  The watch captain was seated at his desk, the contents of his cranial cavity littering the opposite wall.

  Instinctively the shotgun came up, a shell snapped into the breech.

  No movement came from inside, and the air smelled ripe. The watch captain had been dead a while and must’ve barricaded himself in while death reigned outside. Wrapping an old bar cloth around his nose and mouth, Barak moved in to investigate.

  A small, leather-bound journal lay open on the desk next to the watch captain. Barak picked it up, careful to avoid the sticky blood pool that had thickened to a syrup around the dead man’s chair. A pistol lay half consumed in it, but Barak wasn’t desperate enough for more ammo to attempt to retrieve it. A dead man’s gun, especially when used for a self-inflicted wound, was a bad omen.

  He flicked through the journal, finding notes on criminal activities, names of informants, suspected gang territories and illegal enterprises – the usual material. A section had been devoted to a gang referred to as ‘the Divine’, a religious cult that had become more than a nuisance in the districts. The record mentioned burnings, abductions. The Divine were doomsayers and while they had been tolerated, their influence had been growing, and their behaviour more and more aberrant. Arrests had been made. Confessions extracted. Proctors had identified what they thought was the Divine’s main hideout, an old church on the outskirts of Meagre at the maglev north terminus. Plans had been devised to storm the location and purge it, stamp out the fire before it grew into a conflagration.

  The riots put paid to that. As did the horror that followed. It made for harrowing reading. Lists of criminals gave way to lists of the dead, those proctors taken casualty by the growing civilian unrest. It referenced deployments, not just in Meagre but in other townships of Low Sink like Fallow and Drudge, as well as other parts of Blackgheist. The spread had been endemic to low-hive. Most of this, Barak already knew or had deduced. The last paragraph was effectively a suicide note; the one immediately preceding it chilled him like cryo-ice.

  So absorbed was he in his reading, he had failed to appreciate the significance of the gentle fizz of activation emanating from the pict screen in one corner of the room. Divided into four separate feeds, each focused on a part of the precinct house. Three of the images were crazed with static, representing signal loss; the fourth was grainy but depicted the sub-basement and the cells. Not unusual for a watch captain to want to keep a close eye on his prisoners. Except in this case, most of the lights had been doused. The words in the journal returned to him.

  They appear to be agitated by light.

  Sodium lamps in the corridor leading to the cells still burned. The greyscale rendering of the pict feed made the light watery, but Barak saw the shadow flit past all the same. Fresh fear overlaid that already cultivating in his gut, like a bacterial infection rapidly worsening. He tapped a few iron keys on a slate next to the screen, cycling to a different feed that offered a wider view of the corridor.

  The scribe, Arkyle, had found his way to the sub-basement. Even with the poor resolution of the feed, he appeared manic.

  Inmates present an irritated state, their mood fractious and urgent.

  He scurried, his movements frenetic, stopping occasionally to scratch at his scalp or hunker down in the nook of the wall to gently rock on his heels.

  Complaints of headaches are common.

  He avoided the light, or turned from it whenever he got too close.

  Violent outbursts.

  Several deaths.

  He shuffled around in the darkness, searching for something.

  We lost four proctors trying to keep them contained.

  Couldn’t reach them.

  Heard their screaming.

  We left them, Throne forgive us.

  Arkyle found the secondary generator.

  Had to lock down the cells. Too many.

  Emperor help us.

  Arkyle threw the lever and the lights flickered, once, twice, revealing what was inside the cells, and then held steady.

  Drover’s voice burst through the precinct vox-emitters, and Barak nearly dropped his shotgun. He was trembling. He hadn’t shaken this bad for fifteen years. No, that was a lie, he had much more recently, back at Hallow’s End.

  The last line in the journal imprinted itself in his mind.

  They were eating each other.

  Stuffing the journal into his pocket, Barak ran.

  He barrelled through the halls of the precinct house, breath heaving, until he reached the med-bay.

  ‘We have to get out,’ he said as he barged in, breathless.

  Then he frowned as he fully took in the scene.

  ‘Where’s Kharata?’

  Chapter XVIII

  A reckoning

  The Broker glanced at the gun and then back at Morgravia.

  ‘I don’t need that to kill you,’ she said.

  Morgravia had guessed the Broker would have protection that extended beyond the servants she had surrounded herself with. Something in the augmetics, she assumed. Haptic weapons. Finger implants.

  ‘And is that why you’re here?’

  ‘I have every right to.’

  ‘Oh? How did you come to that conclusion?’

  ‘He died.’

  ‘We all die. Well,’ the inquisitor conceded, ‘most of us do. You need to be more specific.’

  The weapons lit, an array of warm light glowing at the fingertips of the Broker’s right hand. Morgravia had goaded her, wanting to know what she was up against.

  ‘Do not be facetious, inquisitor,’ the Broker warned, emotion clouding her voice. ‘It does not suit you.’

  ‘That’s fair,’ Morgravia conceded. ‘Though you don’t know he’s dead.’

  ‘I know.’

  Morgravia let that go too. ‘You are not as cold as you make out, are you?’ she said. It was a deduction not a question. ‘Though you hide it well. Voice modulation to clean out tonality, inflection.’

  ‘Are you investigating me now?’

  ‘Not currently. I warn you, though–’

  ‘You warn me?’ A f
lash of anger saw sparks crackling across the Broker’s haptic implants, like she had lightning captured in her fingers.

  ‘I warn you,’ Morgravia repeated, with all the confidence and strength that her rigorous training and indoctrination afforded. Her memory might be broken, but instincts were ingrained. She had lost events, moments, but not herself. ‘This will not unfold the way you want it to. The likely demise of your servitor was regrettable but could not be helped.’

  ‘He was no mere servitor.’

  ‘I assumed as much. A body-slave?’

  ‘A friend. A concept as alien to you as the monsters you hunt, I am sure.’

  Morgravia felt that barb a little more keenly than she expected to. She was, for all intents and purposes, alone. Her enemies had isolated her, made her vulnerable and robbed her of her greatest asset – her mind. It was also very possible they had left something behind, but she couldn’t worry about that now.

  ‘I’m not looking for a friend,’ she said. ‘I do need your help though. And, if the weapons and the servants are any gauge, you need mine. What are you running from?’

  The activation glow around the haptic weapons faded and the Broker let her arms fall to her sides.

  ‘What are any of us running from but our fate.’

  ‘Profound.’

  ‘Sarcasm doesn’t suit you either.’

  ‘It helps in my sworn vocation.’

  The Broker eyed Morgravia silently, the tension having lessened but still not entirely dissipated from the encounter.

  ‘If you’re not here to kill me, what are you here for?’

  After a few seconds, the Broker answered. ‘The machines. The ones he lost his life to…’

  Morgravia gave her a rueful look. ‘You’re the second person coming to me with theories.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Go on.’

  The Broker gave her a shrewd look but then continued. ‘I have made many deals, inquisitor. Acquired many different items for an array of clients. That list extends to the Mechanicus.’