Anathemas, page 11
The sounds coming from the apartment confirmed Josun’s suspicions. He heard furniture toppling over, shelves clattering to the floor, and voices talking over each other.
‘We’ve got amasec here!’ someone called out. Damn it, they’d found his alcohol. Josun considered waiting for them to leave, but if he did that, they’d make off with all the non-perishables and water he’d stocked.
‘Any weapons?’ another voice replied. ‘I’m tired of carrying around this scav. We need a gun.’
So they were unarmed – well, armed with improvised weapons. Josun’s finger tapped against the trigger guard of his laspistol.
Josun was angry. Livid, even. Marcus had been right. The enforcers had been the ones shelling the district from the start, trying to stomp out any trace of this vox interference. They’d even gone so far as to execute the people who’d had the misfortune of hearing the laud-hailer transmission – people who had committed the apparently unforgiveable crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And the things he’d had to do to survive in the new world that the Imperium had made – the things he’d had to do in front of his son, they made him furious. He could feel the dead enforcer’s blood still, dry and itchy on his face, tasting it on his lips.
And now these people, these rats, were going to steal from him?
Josun kicked in the door. The plasteel panel swung in with a bang and the three people inside – two men and a woman – jumped in fright. As Josun had suspected, they had no guns – one man carried a fire poker with both hands and the other brandished a utility knife, while the woman carried a crowbar.
Before any of the looters could react, Josun shot the man with the knife. The las-bolt burned through his chest and he crumpled to the ground.
The two others rushed at him, yelling in fury. They were too fast for him to aim at. The woman clobbered Josun in the side with her crowbar and Josun toppled to one side, crashing to the ground. The man raised the fire poker and brought it down in a bludgeoning strike to the joint where Josun’s shoulder met his neck. Josun’s arm went numb and he dropped his laspistol.
Josun heard the door on the ground floor opening and footsteps rushing up the stairs.
‘He’s got a friend!’ the woman yelled. The man snatched up the fallen laspistol and put it against Josun’s skull. ‘Get up, old man,’ he growled.
I’m not that old, Josun thought – a small rebellion, but an inconsequential one – and he climbed to his feet, putting his hands up for the second time that day.
The man shoved Josun out the door, using him as a shield. ‘You got a weapon?’ the woman called out. Josun saw Marcus standing at the stairs, the enforcer’s service pistol drawn.
‘Put the gun down, kid,’ the looter holding Josun said.
‘You’re not going to shoot him,’ Marcus said. Marcus’ deadly calm, the steadiness in his voice, chilled the marrow in Josun’s bones. ‘What’s to stop me shooting you if you do that?’
‘We don’t want to shoot anyone,’ the looter said. ‘He came after us, guns blazing. Killed one of my friends.’
Marcus gritted his teeth. ‘This is our home.’
‘And it’s a mean old world out there,’ the looter said. ‘This your boy, old man?’
‘The laud-hailers,’ the woman said, now emerging from the room. She looked at Marcus hungrily. ‘You remember what they said? Families only. Children.’
The man whistled. ‘So they did.’
Josun spoke breathlessly. ‘All right, listen. Listen. We can take you there. To the cathedral! You can’t get in there without us.’
The woman shook her head. ‘No. We can’t get in there without him.’ She pointed at Marcus. Marcus turned the barrel of his laspistol towards her.
‘You let my father go,’ he said. His voice was like ice. ‘You let my father go or I’ll shoot you both dead, right now.’
The man snorted. ‘You’re not that good of a shot, kid. You’re barely holding the pistol right.’
Suddenly the window of the hab exploded inwards. A black-clad woman came vaulting over through the windowsill – she must have climbed up the fire scaffolding. She cradled a pump-action shotgun.
The shotgun came up and blasted the woman holding Josun’s las. The crowbar clattered to the floor and she went down in a red cloud, her shirt perforated with little holes. The other man lunged with his fire poker but he wasn’t fast enough for the trained shooter. It took only a quick adjustment of the shotgun barrel’s angle to blow him away too.
Josun recognised the uniform – an enforcer! He could trick her with his disguise, just long enough to get close. He didn’t see any backup. There were no other witnesses… except for Marcus. Josun felt sick as his mind raced – if he could force her back out the window, over the edge of the fire scaffold…
The shotgun turned on him. Josun froze. At this close range, only a few yards away, he didn’t trust the thin breastplate to protect him.
‘Show me your badge,’ the enforcer growled. Josun cursed himself. Why hadn’t he taken the dead man’s badge?
‘I’m… I’m not,’ Josun stammered. ‘Please. Just let my son go.’
‘Show me your badge,’ the enforcer repeated. The shotgun barrel glared at him like a huge black eye.
‘I’m not a real enforcer,’ Josun admitted. He screwed his eyes shut, waiting for the end.
The woman laughed. ‘Thank the Throne for that. I thought you looked familiar.’
Josun opened one eye nervously. The woman unclipped her helmet. Josun tried to place her – the enforcer from the stampede! The one who had let him and Marcus go free.
She stuck out a hand. ‘Proctor Yronne Lamn. Planetary Enforcement.’
Josun shook her hand dumbly. ‘How… how did you find us? Were you looking for us?’
She shrugged. ‘I got lucky. I’ve been following you since the opera house. Caught sight of you as you rolled out. I recognised your son.’ She nodded over Josun’s shoulder at Marcus. ‘And I couldn’t tell if you were a real enforcer or not. Otherwise I’d have approached you sooner.’
Josun frowned. ‘So you’re not with the enforcers?’
Lamn’s face darkened. ‘They don’t pay me enough to shoot unarmed civilians.’
Josun nodded. ‘We saw some of that ourselves. The enforcers said they were working for something called the Ordos.’
‘The Holy Ordos?’ Lamn asked. ‘The Inquisition?’
Josun’s stomach dropped out from under him.
‘The Inquisition is real?’ Josun asked.
‘You didn’t hear that from me,’ Lamn answered. ‘What else did the enforcers say?’
Josun racked his brains. ‘They’re afraid of the vox network. I’m guessing they were talking about the laud-hailers, those malfunctions. They said the vox has ‘infected’ the district’s occupants somehow.’
‘They’ve abandoned sanity and reason alike,’ Lamn said. ‘The civilians and the enforcers both. It must be the vox. Listening to it must change you, somehow. Inside.’
‘So if the vox is making people sick, why don’t they send in the Sisters?’ Marcus snapped. ‘To start working on a cure, or at least evacuate the infected! Or why not summon the Space Marines – surely they could deal with whoever’s doing this?’
Josun put a hand on Marcus’ shoulder. He could see the fury bubbling in his son’s eyes. ‘Marcus…’
Marcus threw off his father’s shoulder. ‘They’re killing us, father! They’re not even trying to help! You said the Inquisition was behind this?’ he turned on Lamn. ‘Is this what the Emperor wants? Is this His will?’
‘Marcus,’ Josun warned. His eyes flitted to Lamn’s shotgun. Marcus’ words had crossed into outright heresy, and he was scared to see how the enforcer would react. ‘Some people are helping. Canon Haunild, at the Cathedral of Dawn.’
Lamn pulled a few shells from her ammunition bandolier and chambered them to fill up her shotgun. She didn’t look at Marcus, nor did she acknowledge his outburst.
‘If you’re going to get there, you’ll want someone with combat training,’ Lamn said. ‘You weren’t doing so well before I showed up, I should remind you.’
Josun looked her up and down. ‘Two enforcers ought to scare most people off,’ he said, gesturing to his own stolen uniform.
She nodded. ‘I make sure you get to the cathedral. You make sure I get to follow you in.’ She put out a hand. When Josun shook it, the armoured plates of their black gauntlets clanged, the sound echoing through the deserted hab-block.
The cathedral was a great stone building with a spiked dome. The dome was old bronze, tarnished green with verdigris. The arched windows were shattered, the walls peppered with bullet holes.
As the trio approached the entrance to the cathedral, two great double doors of varnished oak, they passed through a contemplation garden in the pavilion outside. A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire surrounded the garden – the clergy would permit only the most generous of patrons to enter the garden and enjoy one of the few enclaves of greenery in the middle hive.
The cathedral’s occupants, Josun could see, had set up a makeshift defence line from storage pallets, ruined stonework and toppled furniture. The defenders wore dark clothes in neutral tones – the dull browns of burlap and sackcloth, the grey of industrial coveralls, the black of creased leather.
The defenders carried battered-looking autoguns and most of them wore masks, either full-faced rebreathers or crude things of hammered metal, to hide their faces. Josun put an arm around Marcus and pulled him close. For once, Marcus didn’t try to squirm away.
‘My son,’ Josun said, gesturing to Marcus as if he were some kind of badge. ‘We have food and water. Whatever you need.’ Josun carried a backpack of supplies, scavenged from his own hab and several others, slung over one shoulder.
A few of the masked guards pointed guns at them but one of them, a man with a crude club made from a length of rebar, held up an open hand. The guns didn’t fire, but they didn’t lower either.
The man gestured to the cathedral doors. ‘Right this way, friends. After you.’ His mask muffled his voice.
His trepidation mounting, but painfully aware that he could do nothing but comply, Josun led the way into the cathedral. He felt relieved, glad to finally be able to put his safety back into someone else’s hands… but something wasn’t quite right. The way these people hid their faces, they didn’t look like any kind of pilgrims or parishioners he’d ever seen before.
The interior of the cathedral was just what Josun had expected – all columns and vaulted ceilings. He could hear a low, growling whirr, like a groundcar engine. Fire glowed from the burning braziers and candle sconces, casting everything into a kind of flickering half-light. Josun’s breath caught in his throat as he spotted shadows jumping along the walls.
Then he saw the bodies.
The bodies of men and women, clad in the vestments of Imperial clerics, hung from the ceiling, bound at their ankles. Their heads were purple where blood had pooled down and coagulated in their skulls.
Their killers had scalped every man and woman. Josun could see the sticky-looking red flesh of their craniums. They had tied the bloody strips of skin from their victims’ heads around their eyes as blindfolds. He could see the tattoos inked onto them: aquilas, the sigil of the Emperor, inverted.
Throne, what were these people going to do to them? He turned to run, to pull Marcus away and flee, but then he remembered the autoguns outside. They weren’t getting out of here, not through the front doors at any rate.
The growling whirr loudened, and Josun heard metal clanging on stone as something moved behind him. Josun and Lamn whirled around, Lamn bringing up her shotgun, Josun’s laspistol in his hand.
An eight-foot-tall automaton stalked towards them. Thick armour plates studded with tarnished brass rivets covered its body. Ribbed power cables crisscrossed the robot’s chest, connecting to a bulky backpack. One huge shoulder bore the symbol of a fanged skull with bat-like wings. The robot’s eye lenses glowed a hellish shade of scarlet.
Lamn started laughing, a terrified kind of cackling. Josun, screaming and backpedalling as he put his body between the creature and his son, couldn’t figure out what was so funny. Then he realised that the machine seemed somehow familiar to him.
The beaked helmet, the hemispherical shoulder pads. The bulbous, bug-like backpack! He thought back to the statue that had glared down at him just as the laud-hailers had first awakened outside the church district.
Josun wasn’t looking at a machine after all. He was looking at a Space Marine.
Lamn, still laughing as if she’d uncovered some grand cosmic joke, kept pulling the trigger of her shotgun, pumping the slide. Buckshot pinged off the Space Marine’s armour with little orange sparks. The Space Marine reached down to a sheath strapped to its thigh and drew a huge, serrated combat knife.
The corrupted Space Marine lunged at Lamn with the knife and, even as she cried and screamed, she ducked out of the way. An armoured fist swung low and clobbered her around the temple. Josun heard bone cracking and the woman fell to the stone floor, landing awkwardly on a knee and yelling in pain. She rolled onto her side, clutching her skull. Blood oozed from her ears and nose.
Josun fired the laspistol as fast as he could, energy bolts cooking the paint on the armour. The Space Marine, seemingly unimpressed, kept striding towards him as he backed away.
The Space Marine put one hand around his bicep and snapped his arm like a toothpick. Josun dropped the laspistol and screamed as it forced him to his knees. He could feel bone fragments tearing through the ruined muscle of his arm.
‘Please…’ Josun managed to choke out through the tears of pain. ‘My son…’
The fist came and Josun felt his nose break. Something hot and sharp stabbed into one eye and his left-hand vision went black. He tasted coppery blood in his mouth and felt several teeth disappear down his throat. Then the world became a spinning haze of grey stone and yellow firelight as he hit the floor.
He blearily tried to focus his remaining eye. Time seemed to be slowing down even as the cathedral’s interior turned into a dizzy kaleidoscope. He saw the Space Marine point at Marcus. To his horror, Marcus complied and approached the giant.
‘Marcus!’ Josun cried out. He tried to stand but he couldn’t; he was too dizzy and it hurt his head too much. He started to crawl on his elbow, using his good arm to drag himself forward down the aisle between the pews, following his son. He felt blood oozing from his ruined face and onto the floor, and he saw it soaking into his shirt as he dragged himself forward.
Josun heard Marcus call him, but his voice was echoing, as if there were more of him, coming from all sides. Josun shook his head to shake the echo away, to regain his focus. As he turned his head, he saw the cages, dozens of them, sitting tucked into the shadowed alcoves at the sides of the pews, hidden by the support columns and the darkness. He saw children locked inside, straining at the bars, reaching out to him.
Josun turned back towards the aisle, a new fire raging within him. He kept crawling forward until his chest and shoulder burned. Eventually he had to stop and he collapsed, panting hard.
He saw bare feet on the stone floor approaching him. He glanced upwards.
The Space Marine and Marcus disappeared up the stone stairs into the bell tower. A woman clad in dark robes, her head shaved, approached Josun.
The woman had no face. A large speaker grille dominated the entire front of her head, as if someone had cleaved the front half of her skull off and screwed the speaker into place. Her scalp and ears looked puffy, raw-red and infected where the skin met the oily metal.
‘Don’t be upset,’ she said. The voice issued from the woman’s grille-face. Josun recognised it as the one from the laud-hailers – the so-called ‘priest’ offering shelter for the desperate and the damned. Haunild. ‘A great destiny awaits your son.’
‘What are they going to do to him?’ Josun snarled, spitting blood. He lisped the words thanks to the new gap in his front teeth.
Haunild bent down. ‘The Lords of the Night will put stars of black fire in his heart. They’ll cut him open and put the blood of gods inside him.’
Josun remembered the old tales of the Space Marines, the legends out of storybooks that he’d read to Marcus as a child – superhuman warriors exploring dangerous jungles and vast deserts, recruiting children from the survivalist tribes of those harsh worlds to bring back to their great monasteries.
‘They’re going to… they’re going to turn him into one of them?’ he asked. He couldn’t feel the pain in his face any more – he just felt hollow now, a kind of emptiness in the pit of his stomach as if he had just had his guts scooped out.
Haunild chuckled. It was an unpleasant sound.
‘Let me come with you!’ Josun said. ‘Please, just… just let me be with him. You need to let me be there for him! Please, I’ll do anything, anything you want!’
The woman didn’t answer, continuing her path to the lectern. She adjusted the dials on its vox-interface and Josun heard the daemonic whispering, the black chanting, the screams of the tortured and the dying blare from the laud-hailers set into the hollows of the vaulted ceiling. He knew they’d be blaring from laud-hailers across the hive now too.
‘The vox!’ Josun exclaimed. ‘It will change me! It will turn me into someone else. That’s what the enforcers said. I’ll let it, if you just take me with you! Don’t take him away from me!’
‘Ridiculous,’ Haunild snorted. ‘The Vox Daemonicus is nothing more than a scare tactic. It’s no more dangerous than a ghost story.’
‘But the enforcers… they killed those people!’
‘And you knew they’d do it,’ Josun heard Lamn saying behind him.
