Servants of the imperium, p.7
Servants of the Imperium, page 7
As it advanced on Meroved, it seemed to stretch. The skin tautened, then ripped, revealing gleaming bone beneath. It teetered on spindly legs. Its overlong arms swept down from its body like an ape’s. The ribcage bulged then broke apart, the jagged edges of bone becoming gnashing teeth and the red place within, a maw. Its neck distended, uncoiling in peristaltic fashion until the now diminutive head wobbled on a grotesque tentacle of flesh.
The clothes it had once worn sloughed away, caught by some unseen fire and turned into burning scraps that fled on a stinking breeze, until it stood naked and foul as the night it was spawned. Spoiled meat and rancid milk tainted the air.
Meroved roared, never taking his eyes off the stalk-like daemon as it bore down on him with unnatural vigour.
He missed the first blow struck at him, his own cut with the vibro-sword glancing off rubberised flesh. Meroved lost his feet, a whipping arm taking his legs and dumping him hard on the ground.
Tasting blood, he realised he had bitten his tongue.
Shoving his body up with a grunt of effort, Meroved hacked at the daemon’s ankle and was rewarded with a discordant shriek of pain.
He smiled grimly. ‘Old weapons… They leave a mark.’
He jerked, a bone spar suddenly jutting from his chest where the daemon had impaled him.
Slow, Meroved. Too slow.
Cutting down with the vibro-blade, he severed the wretched limb and left the end of it sticking in his body like a piece of shrapnel.
Rusty too…
A savage kick sent Meroved sprawling, pain lancing up his back as he struck the wall.
‘I remember this being easier with the gilded arsenal,’ he said through gritted teeth, hauling himself to his feet as the daemon paraded in front of him.
‘We have fought before, you and I,’ it said, and Meroved was all too willing to let it talk. Daemons liked to talk. It was one of the attributes of mankind that they adopted with some relish. To taunt, to beguile, to mock and to promise… These were the daemon’s tools as much as any bony blade or sharpened tooth.
Grimacing, Meroved wrenched out the bone spur sticking in his chest. The end of it was thick with dark blood and he realised it had gone in deep.
‘Possibly… I don’t remember.’ He took a shuddering breath. Any one of the blows he had sustained would have killed a lesser being. ‘My mind isn’t what it used to be. Either that or you’re just not very memorable.’
It smiled, revealing crocodilian teeth.
‘Trying to wound me with words. There’s only one word that can hurt me, and you don’t know what it is.’
Meroved sneered. ‘I don’t need your true name to kill you.’
The daemon struck with viperous quickness, and Meroved cried out as it lacerated his chest and left a ragged gouge in his flesh. He only just clung on to the vial of silver liquid he had taken from a pouch on his belt.
‘As I was saying…’ he rasped, shaking the vial hard before tossing it at the daemon. It hissed as the vial shattered, bathing it in some kind of holy acid that burned at its emaciated flesh and sent it reeling.
‘Sanctus lamenta,’ snarled Meroved, feeling the pain of his injuries. ‘It means “saint’s tears”, you ignorant piece of filth.’
Foul-smelling smoke coiled off the daemon’s body and left it raw and bleeding.
Meroved charged, swinging his sword two-handed. He closed fast before the daemon could recover, stepping between its gangling limbs and hacking up into its groin.
It writhed and staggered with every blow, emitting a porcine squeal from its overlarge mouth. Stabbing down with its arms, it tried to pierce Meroved’s shoulders and back, but he weaved and turned and stayed out of harm’s way. As long as he stayed beneath it, it could not bring its superior reach to bear.
But Meroved was tiring. The wound to his chest had taken more out of him than he had at first realised. Blood flowed freely over his armour, pooling at his feet. He almost slipped in it, and as he hastily regained his footing the daemon arced its neck and spat a fusillade of sharpened teeth, as though it were blowing Meroved a kiss.
He recoiled, but dared not release his hand from his weapon to clutch at the wound to his face. If he dropped his sword, it was over. Blood now streaming down his face as well, Meroved swept out the vibro-blade in a wide arc. He cut through the daemon’s legs at the knee and it collapsed, a spider flailing without its limbs.
Meroved cut a second fusillade of teeth out of the air with the flat of his blade and advanced. With the daemon screaming curses, he severed one arm then the other, and then began hacking at its neck. It took several blows, each one releasing a welter of stinking ichor that gummed up his armour and burned his scalp and exposed skin. Meroved did not relent. The only way to vanquish a daemon was to disassemble it. The screams of its death throes reverberated around the cavern, but Meroved was resolute. Limbs burning, dizzy from the blood loss, his attack became urgent and frenzied. His grief found expression in a final roar of triumph and retribution. When he was done, he sagged and almost fell. He dug the sword into the ground, using it as a crutch.
Nothing remained of the daemonhost but a rancid puddle of bubbling ichor that was evaporating into even fouler smoke. Meroved took care not to breathe it in. He blacked out for a few seconds, dark flashes invading his vision, and realised he was blind in one eye. He reached up with trembling fingers to find the wound and felt a ragged eye socket instead. Spitting a gobbet of blood he found the stimm-injector amongst his trappings and did not stint on the dosage. Bright fire lit up his nerve endings. He knew the effects would be short-lived and that medical attention would be needed, so he used the time he had to raise Zatu on the vox.
The servitor’s response was swift.
‘Have you found the relic, my lord?’
‘No, but I am convinced it’s here, Zatu. I have found something much, much worse.’
‘You sound injured. Should I–’
‘I am and yes, despatch the gun-cutter. Make sure there’s a full medical array. I am sending you my location. The Throne must be made aware, Zatu. A threat is here in Vorganthian. It is real and it is dire beyond imagining. The cult of the Illuminated lives. I must contact the captain-general immediately.’
He gasped for breath, clutching the wound at his side. Then he glanced at the foetid remains of the daemon, almost incorporeal to the point of absolute dissolution.
‘And try to reach Gedd. She has no idea what she’s walking into.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
City of Vorganthian, Kobor, within Terra’s light
The warehouse was large and as black as an ocean without moonlight. Gedd’s last flare had faded, fizzling to smoke, but the roof was more dilapidated here and enough ambient light came in from above that she could see fairly well without it.
She had yet to draw her sidearm, but felt the urge to now.
It was ahead. Something framed by the light. It reminded Gedd of a roadside shrine, an effigy mounted on a crude frame.
As she drew closer, she felt an instinctive urge to turn around. To not look at the shrine. Nothing good could come of knowing what the shapes were, silhouetted in the light, or why it smelled like it did. She brandished the smoking flare like a warding charm, despite how ridiculous she knew that was.
She was only a few feet away when the wind ripped loose a roof tile and the grey light fell upon the thing in front of her.
Gedd’s knees buckled and she fell hard. She was vomiting violently, the urge to do so almost subconscious. She stayed like that, on all fours, head down with one hand still on the flare and wanting the other to draw her gun but unable to.
‘Holy Throne,’ she murmured, surprised at her sudden piety. ‘Emperor… gird my soul against all evil.’
She tried to rise but couldn’t. It was as if a heavy weight had been looped around her neck. It pressed against her and made it hard to breathe. Gedd’s heart was pounding much too fast. A cardiac arrest felt imminent.
‘Breathe…’ she told herself, and in her head her voice sounded small and insignificant, like it had been when she was a child and her father had gone off to ply the deeps. A memory imposed itself in her mind, of a cold hab, of a weeping mother, of a drowned father…
‘Breathe…’ she snarled, and her voice sounded older, and the memory faded, consigned to the mental compartment where Gedd locked away all of her fears and doubts.
‘Now, get the hell up,’ she said through gritted teeth, anger lending her much-needed strength. ‘Get up!’
She lifted her head, still trembling, and then managed to get to her knees. She wiped the sick from her mouth, the flare wafting madly in her shaking grip. She held it as steady as she could, pointing it at the abomination and looking at it even though she knew the nightmare would forever haunt her afterwards.
The man hung upside down, attached to a thick iron ‘X’ like a tank trap that kept him in a cruciform position. Wire bound his ankles, wrists and neck. Someone had taken a blade to his eyelids, and his dead gaze bored into her. The flesh around his chest and abdomen had been neatly cut, and the skin flayed and pulled away from his body. He glistened, the frost upon his exposed bones turned red and shiny. The ragged flesh had been stitched to his hands and the two translucent flaps reminded Gedd of wings.
A sacrifice. An offering.
It resembled a perverse homage to the aquila, only in reverse. Purity seals nailed to his ribcage gently fluttered in the air like rotting feathers. The man had been a priest, one of the Ecclesiarchy.
Out of the corner of her eye, Gedd saw the silhouette of a second figure. It turned slowly on a length of chain, its limbs wrapped in razor wire. Beaten, battered, adorned with savage cuts, the eyes had been–
‘Holy Emperor…’ Gedd sobbed.
Then a third figure, vast and distended, writhing with parasites and a fourth bound with studded leather, its skin peeled away to reveal–
Tears blurring her vision, she looked away.
Gedd cast aside the dead flare as she began to weaken, the terror pushing her down. Bile rose up in her throat, hot and acerbic. She vomited again and saw something black and vaguely resembling a feather amongst her leavings. She had to get away, to get out. She would die if she stayed. Gedd crawled. Indistinct chattering worried at the edge of her hearing like the rapid snapping of many beaks or the clack-clack of bird talons.
She found the strength to rise, pushing up onto her heels and staggering at first before she ran, teeth gritted, into the snow and the night.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
City of Vorganthian, Kobor, within Terra’s light
He turned off the hololith, plunging the room into a penumbral twilight. Shrouded by shadows, he shut his eyes and asked for the strength to continue.
Ylax Orn sighed, weary. His bones ached, his skin felt as thin as parchment.
‘Have you ever served a cause?’ he asked. ‘I have. I still do. It was not always so. I used to be envious of the other priests of my order, the ones who had found purpose. For the longest time I looked for my own. I gave up my vestments and became a missionary, hoping I would find my path that way. Spread the creed, I thought – bring the faithless back to His light. I thought this was my purpose, my cause.’
Orn gave a sad shake of the head.
‘I searched, across worlds, across the void. I travelled on freighters and with rogue traders. I even fought at the side of the Astra Militarum. But I remained unfulfilled. I cannot describe to you how utterly demoralising that is, to seek and seek, and to not know why.
‘I actually don’t know how old I am. After the first century I stopped counting. It didn’t seem meaningful to weigh the significance of my life in years. Then I found illumination and everything I knew and understood, everything I believed was possible… It all changed.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ rasped a frightened voice from behind him.
‘Because I want you to understand why this matters.’
Orn leaned forwards and there was a sharp but diminutive flare of light. A candle flame flickered into life, easing back the darkness. Its light fell across the spines of books, and scrolls bound with leather twine.
‘History, ancestry, origins,’ he said. ‘These volumes, every scrap of parchment in this library was compiled over many years. Some are extremely old.’ Orn stepped around the pedestal where he had lit the candle and gently traced his fingers down the spine of one of the books.
‘What does any of this have to do with me?’
‘It’s blood,’ answered Orn. ‘His blood. I needed a means of reaching Him. That is my cause, my purpose. It has been difficult, I won’t lie.’ He looked up as if an answer would present itself in the grimy vaults above, but all he saw was dirty glass and shadows. ‘I have done regrettable things. I had begun to doubt.’
‘Please… let me go,’ rasped the voice.
‘I wandered, alone and in search of death,’ said Orn, as if he hadn’t heard. ‘I left behind a battlefield of the dead as the very night seemed to split open and a ragged wound tore across the black. As the burning rain began, I sought refuge in an old, abandoned chapel. I intended to die there but His will demanded a different fate for me. I found the Cage. It was just lying there, as if waiting to be discovered. And though back then I had no idea of what it actually was, I knew it was significant. And so it proved. It became my salvation.’
‘I don’t understand any of this.’
‘You will.’
‘What you do want of me? I have archival duties that must be attended to. I have scrolls that–’
Orn turned to regard a man stooped behind him. He was thin-faced and pale, studious-looking, and wore long tan robes. The two guards from the rigging platform stood in the shadows close by.
‘I need your blood, or specifically, your bloodline. You have been exceptionally difficult to find. So many records, so many falsehoods and dead ends.’ Orn smiled. ‘Psychic resonance,’ he said.
‘W-what?’
‘It leaves a mark in the ether, the little candle flames of our souls, the anima that the ravenous beyond do so hunger for. It’s unique, like a fingerprint. Yours is particularly old and rarefied.’
The man protested. ‘I am not a wyrd.’
‘Would you even know if you were? Your ancestry is deeply buried. I needed a…’ He paused, seeking the word. ‘A trigger, a way to tease it out. I narrowed it down to this city, but finding one amongst billions? I discovered a better way than dusty ancient records and enlisted a dubious ally to obtain what I needed. The trigger.’
‘Please…’ said the man, wincing. ‘Something is wrong. My heads hurts.’
‘Pain is necessary, I’m afraid.’
The man’s eyes widened, his pupils dilating. ‘I can feel it… in my mind.’
‘Yes, it’s brutish.’
‘What is it? Am I insane? Is all of this–’
‘You are awake, you are sane and the voice you can hear, that bestial voice, it is very, very old and it is stirring your psychic resonance.’
If the man thought anything about that he kept it hidden behind a mask of abject terror.
Orn seemed not to notice. He gestured to the man’s belongings sitting on a table beside him, a lectorum-bible and the tools of a scribe.
‘A census-taker,’ he murmured, turning a few of the pages and glancing absently over the names carefully inscribed within. ‘How the ordinary and the mundane can give root to the exceptional and the unique.’
‘Please…’ said the man, his voice a reedy croak, ‘let me go. I have broken no laws, I am a loyal servant of Terra.’
‘Yes,’ said Orn, his attention back on the man, ‘yes, you are. And you will serve. Rejoice, I have given you purpose. Fitting that you will give your life for Him as He once did for you. Tell me,’ Orn continued as the man was led out of the library by his minders, ‘have you ever heard of the Sigillites?’
Only when the man turned and saw the cage of black iron beyond, did he begin to scream.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
City of Vorganthian, Kobor, within Terra’s light
Gedd bent double, her hands on her knees as she tried to breathe. She barely felt the cold. The image of the butchered priest returned when she closed her eyes, so she stared into the distance and tried not to let the darkness in. She had felt something inside the warehouse, a presence both simultaneously there and not there. It lingered, like smoke on cloth after a fire or the taste of spoiled meat. It had seen her.
Gedd wanted to scream, to tear at her eyes as if it might rid her of the memory. She half imagined that terrible effigy lurching into motion, tearing free of its crucifixion and taking flight on its tattered, flesh wings, a hellish shriek resounding as she–
Gedd bit her lip and the pain brought her back.
She saw a figure moving unsteadily through the snow, which seemed only to have worsened since she had been inside the warehouse. Gedd drew the Verifier. Her aim wobbled but she managed to hold it firmly enough to draw a bead on the figure’s chest.
‘Halt,’ she said, trying to put some confidence back into her voice. ‘Peacekeeper. I am armed. Come no closer.’
The figure kept coming, swaying drunkenly and mumbling. Something wasn’t right about its uneven gait, and a long uninterrupted strand of drool hung from the figure’s mouth.
‘I am warning you.’
It looked like one of the dregs she had seen skulking in a doorway earlier.
It kept coming as if it hadn’t heard her. She fired once into the ground, hoping the shot would snap the figure out of its strange torpor but it didn’t even react. Gedd reckoned it was about twenty feet away, the snow plastered to its face and clothes. An odd ache began to build at the back of Gedd’s teeth. She winced. Then it got worse. It seemed to coincide with the proximity of the figure. Her vision began to blur. The figure started to moan and then scream, throwing its head back to clutch at its skull, tiny lightning arcs cascading from its mouth and eyes. Gedd fired, and grimaced as her head felt like it was cracking apart. The bullet tore open the figure’s shoulder, releasing a puff of blood and a ragged bloom of cloth. It staggered but didn’t stop. The lightning arcs grew worse. She felt their heat. Her own pain intensified. Is this what happened to the poor bastard her and Klein had found just off the down-trans?
