The Resting Places, page 23
‘Who are you?’ Darius demanded. ‘Of what hall? What are you doing here?’
She ticked them off on her fingers as she replied: ‘You may call me Raidne, I am of no hall, and I am going to help you defeat the creature that is killing your people.’
He snorted in disbelief. Already his mind was telling itself that she couldn’t simply have appeared like that – she must have stepped stealthily out of the darkness without him noticing.
‘You’re lying. How can you be of no hall? And how can you possibly be of any use against that thing? Why, you’re…’ He waved his gun contemptuously at her. ‘You’re nothing but–’
And she changed. Just for a fraction of an eye-blink, too quickly for him to be sure that he’d really seen it, but enough to make him reel with shock. There was a suggestion of mismatched eyes and withered limbs, flesh naked in the tunnel’s humidity but contorted and twisted like melted tallow…
Raidne watched his reaction. She hadn’t changed position.
‘You’re a crawler!’ he gasped.
‘And you’re an idiot,’ she observed. ‘But maybe we can be of some use to each other for all that.’
It was unthinkable. Crawlers were only slightly less abhorrent than the daemons of the Outside. Most were descendants of the Spike’s original underclass, warped and mutated by proximity to the djinn fires, their abnormalities magnified by generations of inbreeding, and it was rumoured that some even had psyker powers. That in itself would not be such a problem; the crawlers could be shut in the Lower Reaches and left to themselves, their numbers kept under control by periodic cleansing raids. But the pernicious influence of Outside sought to infiltrate the womb of every human mother from the humblest vat-worker to the daughters of the high-born – all lived in fear of giving birth to a crawler, and no birth was acknowledged nor infant named until the chirurgeon-brother had decreed that it was pure in the image of the Emperor. For the slightest taint – be it so much as an extra little toe – the newborn would be abandoned in the Lower Reaches to either perish or be taken in by its monstrous kin, such was the prime adjutant’s fervour for purity. Darius had no idea whether Raidne was the result of such a misbirth or the descendent of deviants, and he didn’t want to know.
‘Begone, foul thing!’ he spat. ‘Back to the pit that spawned you! And take your illusions with you!’
She nodded calmly, but not in agreement, more like his response had been entirely predictable. ‘While you do what?’ she replied. ‘Go back to Domitia and tell her how you got your squad killed and let your quarry escape? I confess that I don’t know too much about how you arbiters work, but I can’t imagine her promoting you for that.’
He found that he couldn’t answer that.
‘Or,’ she continued, ‘you can go back as a hero, having single-handedly defeated the blood-drinking beast. I’ll let you think about it for a bit while you stand here and look at…’ She prodded something that glistened redly with her bare foot. ‘Who was this, again?’
Reluctantly, Darius lowered his gun. ‘How can you possibly help me? And what is it you want in return?’
‘Not here,’ she replied, looking around. ‘It’s gone, but we’re still too close. There’s something you need to see first. Come on.’
She turned to go, but he hesitated, and she turned back.
‘I promise that you won’t end up being roasted on a spit, if that helps.’
‘Not really,’ he muttered, but he followed her all the same.
Raidne led him along twisting passageways and through echoing chambers, across bridges that spanned churning depths and through narrow gaps where they had to squirm on their bellies like worms. They climbed canted staircases and picked their way down scree slopes of rusting wreckage, edging their way around the walls of a cathedral-like space where the colossal hulks of machines lay tumbled atop each other like prehistoric beasts locked together in death. Darius lost any sense of time or direction long before that. All he knew was that she was leading them steadily, inexorably downwards, into the Lower Reaches where nobody except crawlers and the most foolhardy of scavengers dared to go.
Eventually, she stopped. ‘We’re here,’ she whispered.
‘Where?’ he asked.
‘Where I found him. Where I woke him up.’
They entered a wide, lopsided chamber through its narrowest and lowest end, and Darius gazed in awe at the sight of huge pipe-like ducts stretching up and away from him, each itself as large as any one of the tunnels that Raidne had led him along, far beyond the reach of his meagre torch. His spirit quailed at the thought of having to scale them, but fortunately the object of her interest was much closer to hand, lying on the sloping floor.
‘I couldn’t feel his mind until I was almost right on top of him,’ she said. ‘He was so weak. Not even dreaming.’
Seeing it in silhouette, his first thought was that it was another body, but quickly he saw that its outline was too rough, more like a statue of a man or a crudely carved sarcophagus, its features nothing more than lumps and indentations, legs fused together, arms fused to the torso. Closer still, Darius realised that his torchlight was shining through it in mottled shades of ochre, amber and a red so deep it was almost black, and that what he had taken for solid plasteel or resin was in fact a hollow shell of something like scab tissue, gnarled and knotted, and split open from brow to groin. The edges of the split were curled outwards as if it had been peeled open, or something had emerged, as though from a chrysalis.
‘This was keeping him alive,’ Raidne whispered. ‘I cannot imagine how. He must have been here since the first days of the Spike – a dozen generations, who knows? Down here all this time, sleeping, waiting to be awakened.’ She traced the cocoon’s whorled contours with her fingertips.
‘But who is he? What is he?’
‘He is a Space Marine,’ she replied simply.
Darius laughed; he couldn’t help it. It was as if she had told him that it was Blessed Saint Geller himself, come down from his seat at the Emperor’s right hand. Darius had only ever seen the Adeptus Astartes in the glassaic of the Great Chapel – winged, angelic beings that blasted righteous fire from their hands as they drove back the seething hordes of the Outside. He could not equate those bright-burning protectors with the ravening, gore-slicked wraith that had torn apart his crew, and he told her so.
She regarded him coldly. ‘I have seen him,’ she said. ‘I saw him lying here in his deathless sleep. I saw the intrusions in his flesh where he was made stronger than mortal men. I saw the marks on his skin – he has an aquila, just like your arbiter’s badge, tattooed across here.’ She drew a line across the top of her chest from one shoulder to the other. ‘It is the symbol of his fealty to his brothers and the Emperor.’
‘You can’t possibly know that!’ he objected.
Now it was her turn to laugh. ‘Oh, you’d be surprised the things I know. We “crawlers”, as you call us, do not have tech-priests or adepts, but those of us who have such gifts as I do pass on our knowledge just the same. The individual that woke up in this cocoon – while his body might have survived more or less intact, his mind is extensively damaged. I have been tracking him since he awoke, and when it has been safe to get close enough, I’ve been able to glimpse what is left of it. He is trapped in a state of waking nightmare, believing that he is pursued by a great beast and that the only way he can hide from it is to consume and cover himself with the blood of its servants. In this delirium he sees your people as those servants, which is why he has been killing you. The only way to stop him is to free him from his nightmare.’
‘And just how do you propose to do that?’
‘Put simply, you’re going to tell him to wake up.’
Darius snorted humourlessly and turned to leave. ‘If you have brought me all this way simply to mock me–’
Something arrested his movement. He looked down at his legs, willing them to move, to carry him far from this madness, but they refused his command. Instead, he found himself turning around to face her as if he were a puppet. He could not even strain against her control, since the muscles required to do so no longer obeyed him. She had dropped her illusory form, and he gasped at the horror of her. She was pointing at him with something that was more of a claw than a hand, and eldritch symbols swam in the air like heat haze around her outstretched fingers.
Her lopsided face twisted into a grotesque parody of a smile and she sidled closer, her proximity making his skin crawl. She touched the aquila badge pinned to his chest. ‘He recognised this,’ she said, and he realised that there was no way that the ruin of her throat could form intelligible sounds; he was hearing her voice directly inside his head. ‘It is the only possible explanation for why you are still alive. I believe that there is enough Astartes left in him to respond to its authority – possibly he is repelled by it because on some level he recognises how far he has fallen from the nobility of his duty. We can use that – you can use that – to command him.’
‘Command him?!’ he echoed, appalled. It seemed that she had left him control over his voice at least. ‘Command him to do what?’
‘To stand in his nightmare and face the beast. It is some deep part of him that he fears greatly – I don’t understand it fully, but while he runs from it, he is a coward, nothing more than a beast himself, in the thrall of his own terrors and appetites. He must be reminded that he is more than that. I believe that he will obey you because of the symbol that you bear.’
‘But I’m no Astartes!’ he blurted, alarmed at the direction her thoughts were taking. ‘He’ll take one look at me and tear me to bloody shreds!’
‘Ah, but in his delirium he won’t see the wretch that you really are. He’ll see a towering figure of authority that he will be compelled to obey.’
‘Because of your… gifts.’
‘Yes.’
‘In that case, why don’t you just create an illusion of the whole thing? Why do you need me at all?’
‘Because it doesn’t work like that. I can’t make something from nothing. There has to be a basis in reality, a framework, something for my gifts to… to…’ She struggled for words, having never been forced to explain such things before.
‘Twist?’ he suggested. ‘Pervert?’
Raidne glared at him. ‘Have a care, arbiter,’ she said. ‘If you decide to make yourself useless to me, there are many perversions I can visit upon you instead.’
Darius raised his chin defiantly. ‘You are an abomination against nature and an affront to every standard of decency and normality,’ he said. He steeled himself for her retaliation, but to his surprise found that he could move. She had released him. When he looked up again, shock and surprise froze him almost as effectively, as he saw that she was neither the blue-haired girl nor the shambling mutant.
She was Prime Adjutant Domitia.
‘What is your duty, arbiter?’ she snapped.
He wavered, stammering. A small part of his mind knew it could not really be Domitia, but it was getting smaller by the second, squeezed by the unrelenting pressure of her psyker powers, and in turn something came bubbling up from deep inside him, some animal compulsion to obey his superior. And now that he looked again, he saw that of course it must be Domitia. She must have followed him down here. Of course she wouldn’t have abandoned him! He felt a great surge of gratitude mixed with shame at the abject way in which he had failed her trust in him.
She took a step closer, drew her sidearm and pointed it at his face. ‘Your duty!’
He stared into the tunnel of the gun’s barrel, and swallowed. ‘To… to protect the Spike. I’m sorry that I–’
Her eyes were as cold and sharp as drill bits. ‘You will address me as prime adjutant, boy, or I will paint the wall with your sorry excuse for a brain.’
‘Please, let me explain–’
She thumbed the hammer back.
‘Sir, yes sir!’ he squeaked. ‘Prime adjutant, sir!’
She lowered the gun fractionally. ‘Better. And the tools that you use. Are they discretionary? Are you permitted to pick and choose or decline an order to fulfil your duty because you feel it to be an abomination or an affront?’
‘No, of course not. Sir!’ he added hastily.
‘Correct. Now, kneel.’
‘I don’t under–’
‘KNEEL!’ she roared, in a voice that echoed around the chamber. She needed no psyker powers to control his legs this time – they unhinged themselves of their own accord and dropped him to the floor before her.
She changed back into the blue-haired girl and smiled down at him sweetly. ‘See?’ she said. ‘That wasn’t so difficult, was it?’
The Beast is so close that Actaeon can smell the carrion stench of its breath. At times, he can see on the walls the shadow of its massive wolf’s head, teeth curving like daggers, and the claws on its right hand, each longer than his arm. The blood of its acolytes is becoming less effective – each time, the Beast catches up with him a little more quickly, and gets a little closer. Its bubbling howl now seems to form words: ‘Come to me, son of Blood! Give yourself to me!’ He has no breath to spare for reply. He just runs.
Then he hears the singing.
It is wordless and ethereal, trickling distantly like a sip of cool water in the tunnel’s foetid heat. It is the same singing that awoke him to this nightmare; he remembers tearing himself out of some constricting space in order to find the owner of the voice and instead finding himself pursued by the Beast. After a moment’s consideration, he changes direction. He does not know whether the song will bring salvation or damnation, only that it represents the possibility of something different.
‘He is coming,’ said Raidne. ‘He responds to my call. Are you ready?’
‘Do I have a choice?’ Darius replied. He had watched the preparations for her ritual with a deepening dread and a sense that not only was he in way over his head but also that he might never resurface.
She had found a large chamber with only one entrance, and while he cleared the floor of debris, she had gone around the walls painting symbols at certain points using her own blood. She opened a long, shallow cut on the side of her twisted thigh, and now that he looked closer without being actively repelled, he saw that much of her body was criss-crossed with old scars. When she approached him with the knife, he shrank back. She was undisguised, and the sight of her shuffling lopsidedly towards him with a blade was unnerving; it seemed to be made of bone, for one thing.
‘The ritual requires your blood too,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘Because you are a participant, obviously.’
‘Surely there must be some other way…?’
She cocked her head to one side again in the way that suggested he was being more stupid than normal. ‘Tell me then,’ she said, ‘given our limited resources, what alternative to a sanguinary vector you think would suffice to establish the primary somatic nexus for this ritual?’
‘I… I…’
‘Exactly. Shut up and give me your arm.’
He rolled up his sleeve and she drew a cut along the back of his forearm. The pain was quick and bright. She dipped her fingertips in the red that welled from him and used it to extend and elaborate on the sigils she had already drawn. They seemed to dance in the air just above the surface of the wall in a way that hurt his eyes, and lingered behind his lids even after he closed them so that, before long, he felt a headache beginning to build. She connected the sigils on the walls with lines that ran down to the floor and to a central circle, at the four cardinal points of which she piled crushed fragments of the creature’s cocoon, and then she set light to them. They burned fitfully, with much spattering and crackling. The stench of it was somewhere between scorched hair and animal fat, and made his head swim even worse than before.
And all the while, she sang under her breath – a wordless, wandering tune that insinuated itself into his ears the same way her symbols made his eyes blur. The only thing that stopped him from bolting back towards the safety and sanity of the Upper Reaches was the fear of how he was going to explain any of it to the prime adjutant. Instead, he did what he was told: he positioned himself between Raidne and the entrance, with his badge held in front of him like a ridiculously tiny shield.
‘I have to say,’ he ventured, ‘I don’t look much like a commanding figure of authority.’
‘You will,’ she murmured. ‘He will be fast, but he will stop when he sees the aquila, as before. In that moment, when the shock of seeing it causes him to lower his guard, I will be able to breach his defences and find out what I need in order to create the illusion. You understand that this will be a reciprocal experience, yes?’
He stared blankly at her.
She sighed. ‘We will be sharing his nightmare. He will see you as I intend him to, but you will also see the beast that pursues him.’
‘But it’s not real, is it?’
‘It is real to him.’
He stared around at her, alarmed. ‘But what does that m–’
Then there was a horrific squeal of tortured metal as the blood-crazed Astartes ripped his way up through the floor, right into the middle of Raidne’s protective circle.
Regardless of what Actaeon can or cannot remember, the warrior’s instincts ingrained into the deepest levels of his psyche recognise the strong possibility of an ambush, ruling out a direct approach along that passage. Fortunately, the Beast’s labyrinth has many weak spots – doors, grilles, flimsy partitions – and it is easy enough for Actaeon to navigate his way underneath the source of the singing, even whilst evading his pursuer.
