The relentless dead, p.24
The Relentless Dead, page 24
Batu’s lasgun felt as heavy as her heart as she levelled it at the watchmaster. She prayed he might see sense, do as he had been instructed, that this would satisfy the captain so she needn’t pull the trigger.
She looked into the blank eye-lenses of his gas mask.
‘Sergeant!’ one of her riders shouted.
So focused had Batu been on her dilemma that she had missed more zombies, slouching out of the shadows of the nearby tombs. They must have breached another section of the perimeter and, meandering through the necropolis, scented flesh and blood beyond it. Eight or nine of them.
The Krieg watchmaster was first to bark orders to his squad. Forgetting all else, they charged the zombies with bayonets fixed. Hesitating for only half a second, the Vostroyan captain despatched his Guardsmen to join them. He addressed Sergeant Batu before she could do likewise: ‘We can handle this. Colonel Graven has launched an assault on the Grand Mausoleum. Take your riders, both squads, directly there and support the Sisters of Battle as they direct you.’
‘Yessir,’ said Batu, concealing her relief at escaping that situation.
Calling all nine riders to her, she led the way between the tombs. They left Krieg and Vostroyans fighting a common foe, as if nothing had occurred between them. Would that convince each faction of the other’s loyalty? Depends, she thought, if it’s true about Graven.
She found more running battles throughout the necropolis: Krieg versus zombies, reassuring her that if any of the former had turned traitor, then they must be few in number. She kept clear of them, needing not to be slowed down. She would know more once she reached the mausoleum. She could hope, at least.
Detouring to avoid another melee, she approached the sacred shrine from the rear. Steering around a tight junction, she saw a Death Korpsman crouching ahead of her. He was firing around the corner of another tomb, at a target Batu couldn’t see. Hearing hooves behind him, he leapt to his feet, whirling to train his bolt pistol on her. She snapped up her own gun, but then recognised this black-clad figure.
Another watchmaster – once she would have said indistinguishable from any other, but this one she knew. Pulling on her reins, Batu cantered to a halt. Her two squads stretched out in a column behind her. About to lower her lasgun, she felt a niggling doubt. He is Graven’s watchmaster.
‘What’s the situation?’ she asked. ‘What are you doing here?’
The Krieg watchmaster shot her.
His bolt punched into Batu’s right forearm, through her light flak jacket, wrenching a cry from her throat, and even her mount spluttered in indignation. Her fellow Rough Riders, hearing the shot, strained forward, but her horse still blocked the junction. By the time she could aim her lasgun again, the watchmaster had run for it. She fired at him, missing wildly, as he disappeared into another passageway.
At the corner around which he had fired now appeared an angry-looking figure. Still recovering her breath, as much from shock as from the physical pain of her injury, Batu gaped at her. ‘Sister?’
‘You saw him? The traitor?’
Batu nodded, swallowed. Though she didn’t want to believe it, what choice did she have now? ‘I saw him.’
‘Which way did he go?’
Pain lanced through her arm as she gripped her reins again. Gritting her teeth, she spurred her mount forwards. These narrow confines benefitted a lone fugitive on foot, but speed and numbers would still win the day. This watchmaster, her former ally – even, she had thought, a friend – would pay for his betrayal.
‘Follow me.’
Crossing the Grand Mausoleum’s threshold was like stepping out of the world.
Suddenly the air felt stale but with a sharp, cold edge. Despite the broken gates, the sounds of combat from outside were immediately deadened. Barging through a short narthex, Graven burst into a vaulted chamber. His ringing footsteps echoed around galleries above him.
The light in here was gentler. Candlelight. Before him were the stepped sides of Saint Josefina’s crypt and, atop this, looming over him, the statue of the saint herself, ringed by a golden halo.
Graven thought he could have found peace here, had he allowed himself. He focused on what was important. Back at command headquarters, he had sought out a Vostroyan officer who had been allowed in here to pray. He had questioned him subtly about the mausoleum’s layout. Saint Josefina’s gaze upon him might have given him pause for a second, had he not known to expect it.
Avoiding her marble eyes, he didn’t break his step.
He reached the crypt and planted a krak grenade on it, between the carved effigies of two beseeching wretches. He activated its fuse, set to its shortest length. He stepped back and only then allowed himself a moment’s contemplation. His mistake. He became aware of ringing footsteps charging up behind him. A screamed curse on his name. Graven couldn’t turn in time. He felt a cold blade pushed through his back with enraged force. He tasted blood.
Then the krak grenade exploded, blowing him backwards off his feet.
He landed in a storm of stone dust, tangled up with his attacker. The Sister pushed him off her, yanking a punch dagger with a fleur-de-lys handle from his body. He recognised her as his erstwhile opponent with the chainsword. The livid, weeping burn in which her right eye had been swallowed was his own work. She must have remained on his heels ever since.
She scrambled away from Graven, leaving him for dead. Not without cause. He couldn’t move. Lying on his side, he couldn’t even lift his head. Oddly numb, he watched his life’s blood pooling underneath him, soaking into his greatcoat, draining away into the seams between floor tiles.
On her knees, the Sister squinted through the settling cloud. What she saw dragged from her lungs a reverberating howl of grief.
Colonel Graven welcomed death. It felt right, even fitting. His eyelids were growing heavy, but before he let them close there was one thing he had to know. One final shred of doubt.
A hole gaped in the crypt’s side. Most of the rubble had fallen inward, into the chamber beyond, which extended underground. Enough of the edifice remained to support Saint Josefina’s statue, albeit with a pronounced list. One of the plague-ridden supplicants had crumbled into marble chunks.
For a breathless moment, Graven heard no sound but the settling of debris. Then, from below came desperate movement, panicked voices, and all he had risked, the lives expended for his cause, was justified. He had done what the Emperor had brought him here to do: exposed a threat to which others had been blind. He could rest now, his purpose served. Almost.
Beneath his cheek, the floor trembled to the beat of stomping metal footsteps. He heard rubble dashed aside and pulverised beneath the surface as something forced a route towards the exit hole and up through it.
A monster bashed its way out of the partially demolished crypt, a monster Graven knew too well. Corroded power armour with a bone-white, skull-shaped visor. An abacus tucked under one huge arm. The face of the kneeling Battle Sister turned ashen at the sight of such an abomination in this sacred space.
The Tallyman!
XVII
Sister Superior Serafina heard the blast from inside the Grand Mausoleum and knew exactly what it meant.
She had failed her beloved saint, failed the Emperor Himself, and she could feel their disappointment in her. It stoked a white-hot rage in her breast.
Seeing Graven headed for the gates, she had tried to intercept him, but turning her back on his masked thralls, she had been borne to the ground by four of them. With a series of screamed invectives, she shook the last one from her.
Her sin had been overconfidence. She had underestimated Krieg resolve. No matter the wounds inflicted upon them, they fought to their last breaths. And so they shall! She swore that every one of them, every Death Korpsman on this planet, would die for what they had wrought today.
They were already on the ropes. Now, a Vostroyan Firstborn squad raced onto the scene and, sizing up the situation, laid into the Krieg from behind. Their fates were sealed. But Petrakov acted too late, as I knew he would. They would go to their graves well satisfied with today’s ill deeds.
Another Korpsman came at Serafina, and she put a bolt round in his head. Her righteous vengeance tasted like ash on her tongue.
‘S-sister… Superior…’
She recognised Elvana’s voice, but cracked and feeble. Her sister had stumbled through the broken gates, teetering on the mausoleum steps. She was bloodied and battered, had lost her chainsword, and – Emperor! – what had happened to her eye?
‘The… crypt,’ she wheezed. ‘The crypt is…’
A figure appeared in the gateway behind her, and Serafina’s breath caught in her throat. A Traitor Space Marine. One whose presence on Oleris III she had been informed of but had scoffed at, distrusting the source of the report. Where did it come from? How could it possibly be here?
She saw a plasma pistol raised, its muzzle pressed to the back of Elvana’s head. A gauntleted finger tightened on a trigger. Cruelly, time slowed for Serafina, allowing the full horror of what she was seeing to sink in, and yet she had no time to move a muscle. Flames engulfed her sister’s ruined face. Her headless body toppled down the steps.
Serafina heard the Tallyman’s booming proclamation: ‘One!’
Now, through the gates, between its feet, streamed dozens of diminutive horned creatures, their clammy flesh a sickly green in colour, rotted entrails spilling from ruptures in distended stomachs.
Nurglings! Daemonic harbingers of the Great Unclean Ones. Graven had been right all along, but she had been too blind to see it.
Around her, Battle Sisters and Death Korpsmen saw it too, disengaging from one another, bracing themselves as Nurglings swept towards them. One came at Serafina, its pinpoint eyes gleaming with malevolence, a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth twisted into a sneer. She sidestepped it, setting her sights on the creatures’ master.
Her rage had a new focus now. She released it in a scream as she mounted the mausoleum steps. She thumbed her bolter to full-auto, sending out a deadly spray ahead of her. The Tallyman shuddered as bolt rounds pinged off its armour, drawing its attention to her.
Its plasma pistol turned in her direction.
The Attilans had split up. The watchmaster heard their hoofbeats from every direction, closing in around him. Too many of them. Running for his life, he had thrown off his pursuing Battle Sister some time ago. Or else she had given up the hunt to return to her post, believing his execution assured.
Might that buy him time to explain himself to Sergeant Batu?
He doubted she would listen. In her eyes, he had betrayed her. Her angry voice echoed around the tombs: ‘Nowhere to run, Watchmaster No-Name. The longer it takes to ride you down, the more you suffer!’
He had seen Batu’s suspicions in her eyes when she had cornered him. There hadn’t been time to talk to her. Had he tried to run, she would have caught him and held him for the Sister on his heels. Once she calmed down, she might see that he had aimed to wound, not kill. Perhaps when – if – he too had time to think, then he might understand why he had taken such a risk.
He was almost back at the mausoleum. He heard the battle still in progress there. Suddenly, a figure came hurtling around a nearby corner, almost colliding with him. His squad’s former engineer. For just half a second, they looked at each other uncertainly. Chances were, the engineer still had a Sister tailing him. The watchmaster weighed up their options. His ears discerned no safe direction for them.
‘This way,’ he decided, and they turned and raced towards the battle.
In front of the mausoleum, spilling out of its forecourt to the walls of the tombs around it, Krieg and Vostroyans were fighting. Not each other, as the watchmaster had expected, but… He couldn’t tell. Until, setting his sights lower, he saw daemons scampering between the soldiers’ feet, snapping at their thighs and calves.
On the mausoleum steps, he saw a quartet of Battle Sisters, the Sister Superior among them, battering at the obdurate form of a Traitor Marine, one he recognised at once from his colonel’s description.
He felt a rush of relief, then one of guilt. His faith in Graven had not been misplaced. Better for this world if it had been. Still, his duty was now crystal clear. He needed to say nothing to the engineer beside him. In unison, they drew their bayonets and plunged into the fray.
The watchmaster joined a trio of Vostroyans, stabbing at a snarling, spitting, foot-high daemon. It writhed and twisted away from their blows, but they kept it hemmed between them, and a few palpable hits tore its flesh. The watchmaster punctured a pulsating pustule on the daemon’s neck, which erupted with malodorous green pus. It flew at him, razor teeth bared.
Stepping out of its way, he collided with someone behind him – who, whirling, snapped up her lasgun. Krieg and Vostroyan locked mistrustful gazes, then the latter nodded and, lowering her weapon, turned away.
The daemon, in the meantime, had been dealt with, toppled onto its back and shredded. The watchmaster sought another target. He found one, just a step away. It had sunk its teeth into a Korpsman’s leg and, no matter how he stabbed and clubbed at it, wasn’t letting go. The watchmaster’s bayonet skewered it. He wrenched it off its victim, unleashing a welter of his blood. He dashed the squirming creature to the ground, repeatedly, until it was a bloody pulp.
These things were neither durable nor strong. At a glance, the wound inflicted by the daemon’s bite seemed neither large nor deep. The problem was that, like the zombies, they were certainly diseased. The toll taken by them would increase in the days to come, by drawn-out, painful deaths.
Right now, the Krieg and their allies were still fighting, getting the measure of their slippery opponents. They were teaming up in threes and fours, methodically despatching one daemon at a time. Two more Krieg squads emerged from the surrounding tombs, while a thunder of hooves heralded the reappearance of Batu’s Attilan Rough Riders.
The daemons were all but beaten now, but the watchmaster feared they had only been meant to distract. The critical battle still raged at the mausoleum gates. The Sisters of Battle were trying to wrest the Tallyman’s pistol from it – without success, but at least they were keeping it from shooting into the melee. Three plasma bolts burst from its muzzle, the first streaking skyward, the other two harmlessly over the combatants’ heads.
The Sisters scattered at their leader’s warning shout. The pistol glowed white-hot, shedding waves of electricity, which swarmed up the Tallyman’s arm. It made as if to cast away the weapon, but found its gauntlet locked to it.
The pistol exploded: a gun butt must have cracked it, or its wielder had pushed it past the point of overload. The Tallyman, thrown backwards, collided with a mangled iron gate, wrenching it from its remaining hinge. Failing to arrest its fall, it crashed down in a metal heap.
The Sisters, having dived for cover, mounted the steps again. Their foe was hauling itself back to its feet, but surely they would be upon it first.
The watchmaster missed what happened next, having his own concerns. A daemon had slipped through a knot of Guardsmen, and he stepped forward to intercept it. He snatched away his foot as the pustulant creature lunged at it, and it floundered on its distended stomach in the mud.
As soon as it was dealt with, two comrades having speeded its demise, he glanced back at the mausoleum steps and was dismayed to find the situation there changed for the worse.
Now there were beastmen present, a heaving black mass of them, pouring from the mausoleum. Forced to fall back again, the Sisters formed a defensive line at the bottom of the steps. It was no use. The creatures bulled, gored, trampled their way through it, adding to the unruly scrum in the forecourt and beyond.
Nor were they alone. In the gateway behind them appeared more human-seeming figures. One was a withered crone, leaning on a walking stick, but when she spread her fingers she summoned lightning to them from the sky and moulded it into a ball, which she flung like a grenade. Idelax had described such a witch. The lightning struck a Sister in the chest and, despite her power armour, felled her.
A second and third witch wielded fire and force, like the ones he had encountered days before. The latter came marching down the steps, with the fire and lightning witches on his heels. Two Sisters standing in his path were sent sprawling by a mere sweep of his arm.
Remaining above, a nervous-looking boy wrapped a cloak about himself and closed his eyes, or rather, just his human eyes. A clutch of additional, green-glowing orbs opened on his forehead, on his cheeks, as he began to mutter to himself. Beside him, an alabaster-skinned, ebony-haired woman looked out with disdain on her lips. Her eyes locked briefly with the watchmaster’s gaze across the intervening throng, and an instant later she was gone. Like a trick of the light.
The Imperial forces now had a real fight on their hands.
The Tallyman was also back up, armour scorched black by the plasma explosion, dripping rivulets of molten metal, but standing just as tall as ever. Bereft of its weapon, it seemed content to stand atop the steps and watch the mayhem playing out before it, recording each Imperial death on its abacus’ beads. Its voice sounded clear above the tumult: ‘Five! Six!’
Then, with malicious satisfaction as it slid the final bead across the first rod, ‘Seven!’
Graven descended into darkness.
He made no effort to resist it. It was his time. He was at peace.
His peace was shattered. Roars of triumph filled his ears. He plummeted towards a seething mass of zombies – dead comrades in the tatters of their uniforms – and he remembered being here before, this nightmare pit.
He fell into their clutches, borne on a heaving raft of bony shoulders. Emperor, but there were so many! They jostled each other in their eagerness to reach him. They pulled and clawed at him. He thought they might tear his limbs from their sockets. They divested Graven of his weapons, his helmet, his badges of rank, reducing him to one of them again.
