by Warhammer
Morgravia did as he asked, her heavy stub pistol landing with a thud.
‘You were hunting her,’ she said, putting herself between Drover and his mark.
‘Not me specifically, but I took a contract. I like to get close to my kills before I pull the trigger.’
‘And she was under your nose all this time.’
Just like he was right under mine and I missed it.
‘I’ll admit that’s a little galling, but I didn’t know the Empath, what she looked like, her hideouts. No one did. That’s what interested me. I did know of her Broker, though. She puts herself around. Has to in her profession, I suppose. I kept my ear out, found out someone was looking,’ he nodded to Morgravia, ‘and offered my services as a mercenary.’
‘Who’s even left to pay you?’
‘I’ll find a precinct house that’ll honour the fee. If not, I’ll find her stash. Shouldn’t be too hard. I reckon there’ll be enough there to compensate. Broker was a rich woman.’
‘Still is.’
‘Not for much longer.’
‘I can’t let you kill her.’
Drover’s face rumpled in mock perplexity. ‘Don’t see as how you have much choice, given I’m the one holding the gun and I don’t see your skull-faced assassin anywhere hereabouts. She’s a helluva thing, by the way. Never seen anyone kill like that. Where’d you find her? Oh, that’s right,’ he said, wagging a finger in self-remonstration, ‘you don’t remember, do you? Can’t imagine what that must be like. You have my sympathies, and I mean that sincerely, but I have a contract to fulfil and I’d like to do so before there’s no leaving this place. So… if you don’t mind.’
‘Can’t do it.’
Drover gave a curt sigh and bit his lip, agitated. ‘How’s about this. I let you get what you need from her and then you head on your way. I get my fee, you get your memories. No downside.’
‘Can’t. Do. It.’
He swore. ‘She’s about half dead already. Nothing to gain here by being obstinate. Now, stand aside so I can finish her off. No reason for you to die.’
Morgravia held her ground. She felt the itch, strong and insistent, the slow uncoiling of something within her, a waking presence reacting to the threat.
‘I am a servant of the Holy Ordos,’ she said with difficulty, trying to hold the itch at bay, but it grew, expanding, conjoining as the red dream became suddenly more tangible.
cutting parting bones reshaped replaced with metal and piston blades and gears red as blood cables and wires like veins
‘And I have no desire to kill one,’ said Drover, ‘but I will.’
‘You’ll bring the wrath of the Inquisition down on you…’ she gasped, the ends of her fingers burning as she felt something sharp pushing through the tips.
‘I doubt that. If they gave a shit about you, they’d already be here,’ said Drover, seemingly oblivious to Morgravia’s discomfort.
She reeled.
Is this a symptom of my fractured mind?
He was still talking. ‘This city is going to hell. It’ll be assumed you died along with it.’
She blinked, and a grainy red haze overlaid her vision. A data stream scrolled across her iris, the focusing rings expanding and contracting. Gauging, measuring.
‘I can bring you Hel…’ she said, trying to hold on, trying not to collapse as she teetered on the brink.
‘Is that what you call her?’
‘Only to her face,’ said Morgravia, glancing at the shadows behind him. Drover half turned, fearing the effigy of death in his midst, and pulled his aim. Just enough.
Morgravia rushed him, her monomolecular blade carving a silver blur through the air. She heard the pistol retort, and felt the pinch in her side. Her armour absorbed the worst of it, but the bullet found flesh. A second shot followed the first, this one pushed aside before the muzzle flared, Morgravia’s hand on the barrel. A tile splintered with the impact. Her other hand slashed up with the knife, carving a ragged red line through the Drover’s duster.
He swore. ‘Can’t believe I fell for that,’ he growled, still wrestling to draw a bead on the inquisitor. ‘I must really like you.’ Firing off a burst, he raked the wall instead. More splinters, shattering ceramic.
Morgravia brought her knee up into his stomach. Drover let out a grunt, tossed one pistol and drew the other. Bleeding profusely, he got off a shot and Morgravia cried out as the bullet clipped her shoulder. She was empty-handed, and as the autopistol fell from Drover’s nerveless fingers he realised why. A monomolecular blade was embedded in his chest up to the hilt.
No, it wasn’t the knife. That lay on the ground, flecked with blood. She had dropped it. A blade extruded from Morgravia’s flesh, her fingers having split and conjoined into a lengthened spear of metal.
Drover staggered back as the blade slid out of him, the tongue of metal retracting as if sentient, and spat up a little blood. Barging into a basin, he slid to his rump, legs akimbo, arms by his sides. Breath sawed from his mouth, blood pooled in his lap. He gaped, eyes widening as a look of sheer, unreasoning terror contorted his features. He reached for a gun that wasn’t there, then he slumped over and did not move again.
Morgravia groaned, clutching at her arm, aghast at the bloody spar of metal inexplicably conjoined with her body. A lurching sensation overcame her, like a moment of disconcerting weightlessness before a fall. Head spinning, she crumpled onto her elbows and knees as something uncurled inside her gut. Letting out a thin, wordless cry, she tried to crawl as kaleidoscope images surfaced in her mind, crashing together like disjointed tides. The red dream… every aberration, every abuse and incursion of her flesh, collapsing and reforming…
Coalescing.
The scent of chemical sanitisation and iron, of meat and cold tangs the air. A laboratory takes form. Robed figures huddle around the slab upon which she is lying. They are festooned with blades, with scalpels and saws, and drills and hot, red beams. Their regard is alien and automated. She is a living autopsy splayed out for experimentation. Her skin is pinned back, her organs exposed. A heart pulses, rapid and arrhythmic. It glistens in the cool light like a fleshy apple mutated with arteries. It takes a few moments for her to realise it is hers. A pair of lungs inflate and deflate in stuttering dyspnoea, also hers. Ribs, cracked open and wide, admit invaders. They come with the intent to cleave, to cut, to sever and partition. They click and whirr, her faceless surgeons, creatures of metal and the sparest flesh. They remove bone and parts of her intestines. Steam rises from several nearby basins, reeking with an abattoir stench. Her surgeons emit a series of curt shrieks and whines, undercut by hissing static as they converse. Parsing their language is impossible and leaves only the impression of screaming, a cacophony of hoarse, emotionless screaming. And she realises she is screaming too, in horror, as agony descends in a red veil and the reality of their violation of her embeds itself like cold ice. As she is remade. And the surgeons cut and converse, deaf to her dismay, as cold and uncaring as the void, and in the shadows, two red suns loom over her before blackness sweeps in and the rest is lost.
She tasted dirt, and realised her face was touching the ground. Morgravia rose, slowly and experimentally. Fearing what she would see, she looked at her arm but it was flesh again, albeit with a thin seam of dried blood around the forearm and the gaps between her fingers. Like a zip, or the petals of a flower closing at dusk. The irrefutable reality of that struck her like a blow, and she fought to quash the profound sense of unravelling.
Morgravia clutched her shoulder, biting back the pain from the bullet hole. It gave her focus, an anchor to ground her. It staved off the nebulous sense of dread rising like bile up her throat. Trauma had provoked a reaction. The tenebrosity veiling her memories had parted a fraction allowing in a sliver of revelation, but still the answers would not come.
She saw the Empath, lying in a pool
of blood, and crawled to her. One glance at the wound in the Empath’s chest and Morgravia knew she was near death. The psyker reached out to the inquisitor, fingers trembling. Her mouth gaped, opening and closing in a futile attempt at speech. Morgravia took her hand, but the Empath wrenched it away and strained to touch the inquisitor’s forehead.
Trembling herself now, Morgravia leaned in and closed her eyes. She felt the chill caress of hoarfrost and the convulsion of an electrical charge as the gated vaults of her memory opened and were let out.
Chapter XXIV
Burning for our sins
After what felt like several hours, the terminus of the maglev rail led Cristo and the others to a dilapidated church. An old, tarnished effigy of the eagle crested a broken spire and bore down on anyone walking beneath it like a fell omen. Fire had devoured the roof, leaving black spurs like ribs in its wake. The reek of cooking meat choked the air, directing Cristo’s gaze from the monolithic church to a nest of hanging cages. Within each cage he saw partly burned bodies, their limbs like sticks of charcoaled kindling. A glance at Convocation, at the dewy state of his wide eyes, betrayed the fact he had put these men and women to death. He had judged them, possibly first with the blade, but then with the flame. He had done so under the auspice of the Emperor’s will, framing it as righteous. Necessary, even. Men such as the priest always sought excuses for their depravity. Cristo knew then that he would have to kill this man, or he would surely kill all of them. The alternative was indoctrination, subsumption into the cult.
‘His glory upon us…’ Convocation whispered, nodding for his flock to drag the prisoners onward.
It had been fortified, this church of perverted faith. Thorny tank traps stood outside, an impediment to the restless dead. Scaffolds holding up makeshift watch stations were occupied by snipers carrying crude rifles. A gate fashioned from two pieces of tank armour plate, doubtless stolen from an abandoned manufactory and welded to a pillar and hinge, barred the way. At Convocation’s shouted proclamation, the gate opened, admitting them into the heart of his twisted fiefdom.
Beyond its fortifications, the church was less rigorously intact. Its narthex had all but collapsed into disrepair, amounting to little more than a fractured arch of stone. Only when they entered the crumbling nave did Cristo finally understand what had happened to the people of Meagre, at least those yet living.
Crude pens had been erected and here the survivors were amassed, dirty, hollow-eyed and awaiting judgement. And before them lay their fate. A massive pit had been dug into the heart of the nave, extending down into darkness so deep it could have been fathomless, the stone flags split and sundered around it. The sheer size of it defied belief as a man-made excavation and yet the sounds of toil from below could be heard faintly echoing, putting the lie to its bottomless appearance. A crude wooden gantry zigzagged down one interior flank, disappearing into darkness. Another jutted out over the pit like a gangplank.
The pens looked down into this great yawning chasm, a sacrificial pit in all but name, the burn cages suspended above it. Their inhabitants were both fuel for sacrifices and recruits for Convocation’s army. Queues of pale-faced, haunted individuals snaked from the pens to a pair of lecterns, where a robed acolyte interrogated them. Cristo couldn’t hear what was being said but he saw the outcome of these terrifying interviews. A false answer, a sentiment that did not support the faith of the Divine, and you were dragged to the cages and hoisted over the pit to await immolation. Demonstrate enough fervour, a taste for the aberrant creed of madmen, and you were awarded a mask and a cudgel or knife.
There was weeping, screaming. Several prisoners wore the torn uniform of proctors. Most of these ended up with a mask. Cristo saw one poor soul beaten to death for trying to resist and another slit her own throat with a jagged piece of glassaic rather than face the flames. The cages were filling, and he had the sense that the lesser acolytes had been waiting for their high priest to return. Eighteen cages in all, suspended at various heights. The charred corpses of their former occupants were released by long pikes unlatching the bases of the cages and then letting the blackened remains fall as ashen offerings. It wasn’t always clean, though. Skeletal hands came apart from their former wrists and were left clinging to the bars like fetishes, a grim foretaste of what awaited whoever next entered the cage.
Cristo could scarcely believe his eyes. ‘Holy Throne…’
He watched as a factorum worker was led onto the gangplank, the two lecterns either side looming down upon him. Rather than submit to the ruling of the court, the man ran, bolting for the gangplank’s edge, preferring a quick death to being burned alive.
A pistol shot rang out, clear as a clarion, and the man slumped a few feet from making his fatal leap. Crimson blossomed on his back as two masked thugs fetched him and dragged him away.
‘None shall besmirch His glory,’ uttered Convocation, the pistol in his hand still trailing smoke from its recently used barrel. He had appeared silently alongside Cristo, his tread soft but his aroma unmistakable. ‘You asked me before where you were being taken,’ he said. ‘Look now and see… Ruination! The end of mankind as we know it, and the Emperor’s judgement over all sin.’
‘You think that pit is the Emperor?’
‘It is the maw that must forever be fed. For the Imperium to thrive, sacrifices must be made.’
‘This is insane…’ It slipped out, as natural as breathing, but the priest did not react adversely, though his eyes widened as he sermonised.
‘It is the only sanity that remains to us. A return to the old ways, to fire and purity. His will!’
He gestured, and they were ushered into the pens. As they stumbled through the gate, joining with a mass of others who were awaiting their fate, Cristo took Karina in his arms. She hugged him back fiercely, her eyes afraid.
‘What is happening? What are they doing?’
Cristo shook his head. He had no answer. ‘Stay together,’ he said. ‘I’ll get us out.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, his gaze wandering the crowd for inspiration.
The earlier hysteria that had led to the deaths had faded, replaced by a weary acceptance. The prisoners remained huddled but shuffled towards their end like dull-eyed cattle.
Celestia stared about herself, bewildered.
‘It’s an aberration,’ she said. ‘They are depraved. The mad have begun to eat each other.’
Cristo reached out and took her hand. The zealots had taken her ceremonial sword, Celestia wise enough not to try to stop them, but she watched as Vanquish was presented to the priest and Convocation slid it into his belt, a trophy of conquest. She had already earned several dark looks from the priest’s flock, her religious vestments a challenge to their own twisted beliefs. They had yet to act upon it, but Cristo thought it was only a matter of time.
‘I shall see it returned to you,’ he said.
Another promise he likely couldn’t keep.
‘They will perish for this,’ she answered, her voice vehement. ‘Not for the sword but for what they have done in His name.’
Truly the Emperor had forsaken this place and in His stead had arisen something darker, a simulacrum of the Imperial faith, but one held up to a dirty mirror and reflected back.
Staring into the darkness of the pit, Cristo could not help but wonder what was down there and why these twisted men and women had raised the church of their religion around it.
A shout rose up from the ranks of the Divine as if in answer. Part signal, part affirmation.
‘Look away,’ he told his daughter, but she did not. None of them did.
The cages were lit. The screaming began anew.
Chapter XXV
Fractured memories
Fragments resolved, pieces of a greater whole. She didn’t remember everything, not immediately. Oshanti flying the ship as they came in
to land over the haunted spires of Blackgheist. His laughter as Roper made a dumb joke, stroking his coiffured moustaches for effect. Roper’s cold, dead eyes as she crawled over his gunshot body. Hel eager to leave the ship’s hold, and her graceful cartwheeling as the rear hatch opened. Carnergie following in her wake, making some sardonic comment about the ebullience of youth. And then Carnergie atomised by a flash of light, too late raising her forcefield, too drunk to notice the trap their enemies had set.
The memories returned in a violent cascade that threatened the banks of Morgravia’s mind. They were ill-ordered, confused, a melange of thoughts and emotions.
A word rose prominently, however, and the inquisitor knew instinctively that this was the reason she had been hunting.
Valgaast.
A cult of the machine, of arcane technologies and proscribed science. They were a cancer requiring excision and Morgravia had been the scalpel.
That had been then. Before she was sprawled on the ground, jackknifed in agony. Before her mind had been flensed and raked. Before her agents were slaughtered with only the sparest flickers of memory as proof of their existence.
Morgravia had lived. She had been taken, bloody and beaten, and dragged before the heads of the cult. They wore dark robes, sigils woven into the fabric resembling both the machine cog and the eight-pointed star, the mark of Ruin. Of evil.
She had underestimated them, both their reach and the depths of their depravity. Arrogance had blinded her. Impatience had sealed her fate. They reduced her to a subject, an experiment. They remade her, cut her flesh, emptied her and refilled the void with horrors, before restitching her again.
I am a vessel for their evil…
The heavy stub pistol glinted in the coarse light of the ablutions cell. Morgravia reached for it, contrition framing her expression as she gathered the sidearm into her grasp and looked down upon the Empath. She was dead, frostbitten and cold to the touch. Tiny icicles glittered on her eyelashes like diamonds.
