Imperial Creed, page 23
‘Your definitions are not mine,’ Krauss said.
As we crossed the square, we were met by Saultern at the head of one of his squads. I was surprised to see them. ‘What’s happened?’ I asked Saultern.
‘Nothing, commissar. At least, we hope not.’ He glanced uneasily at Krauss. The inquisitor’s interest was in Betzner, who kept his gaze on me, afraid of what would happen if he looked to my right.
‘Then what…?’
Betzner said, ‘The lower levels of the palace. Have they been searched for tunnels?’ It was brave of him to speak up. He took a risk in doing so. It did him honour.
‘You were the one to think of this?’ Krauss asked.
Still looking at me, Betzner said, ‘Yes, inquisitor.’
‘Has the palace been searched?’ I asked him.
‘It has. There was nothing.’
‘You’re sure? In a place this size?’
I looked at Betzner. The big man was worried, clearly uneasy to be voicing any opinion whatever in the presence of Krauss. He was also, I could see, consumed by the urgency of his mission. Betzner’s insights worried me. They were becoming unhealthy in their frequency and specificity. What worried me most right now, though, was their accuracy. ‘We should look again,’ I said.
Krauss nodded. The speed of his acquiescence boded nothing good for Betzner, but that was a concern for later. We went back inside the palace. We descended level after level. I did not put Betzner in the lead, but I took cues from him. Where he looked was where we headed. I half expected to find ourselves in the crypt. Instead, we moved deeper and deeper into storage areas, descending through an archaeology of Mistral’s discarded history. Crates upon crates upon crates of paintings and furniture, and documents, records, sermons, edicts. We were heading into rooms whose function was to preserve memory, but had been forgotten themselves.
We didn’t need Betzner to tell us when we had arrived at our goal. The atmosphere in this storage chamber was different. The temperature plummeted. My teeth were suddenly on edge. There was nothing to see: just rows and rows of more crates. But a great wrong was at work here.
‘How was this missed?’ Krauss muttered angrily.
‘The threat is new,’ I said. ‘Can’t you feel it?’ The toxic sensation was growing worse by the second.
We followed the growing dread. It led us to the far wall, and another stack of crates. Unlike in the rest of the chamber, there was no dust on these.
‘Move those,’ Krauss ordered.
Saultern’s troops stepped forward.
‘Wait,’ I said. The air was suddenly a riot of ozone, blood and acid. The edges of the crates glowed, outlined by corrosive energy. Reality stretched, thinned, turned brittle and frayed. There was no need to shout a warning, because we all felt the coming rip, and there was no time to retreat because the horror was already here. An iron drum was struck, reverberating throughout the palace. We threw ourselves to the ground as the crates exploded.
Jagged splinters of wood embedded themselves in the stack behind us. Flakes of parchment filled the space, falling and spinning like burning snow. The tunnel entrance stood revealed, its walls and archway covered in runes painted in blood. It sloped steeply off into the darkness. Cultists charged up from its depths. They ran though the dying flames of the explosion, already firing.
We lost two of the Mortisians immediately. We were on the defensive. We were slow in firing back, because we were human. The cultists had the initiative because they surprised us, and because of what arrived with them.
It was tall, larger than a man. It leapt and giggled. Its gait was an uneven, hopping gallop. It was the glistening pink of exposed muscle. It was all strength and flow. There was just enough of a trace of the human frame in its shape to perfect the obscenity. It propelled itself on powerful, clawed legs. Its three arms were half again as long as they should be, reaching out to grab the ground and launch itself into the air every few steps. Its face shifted and travelled, caught in a flux of permanent becoming. The gaping jaw and python tongue were never truly in one spot of its massive frame. The snarl would gape forth from the flank, then be staring straight up, then facing us with eyes the yellow of bad faith. Always there was greed, always hunger, as if there were no deciding which portion of the world to devour first.
Daemon.
I knew there were such things. At the schola progenium I had learned of their existence. I had been taught about Chaos itself, and about the forms it could take. The knowledge was a poor preparation for the reality. I found in this moment that despite my training, I had still, at a deep, instinctual level, believed in the fundamental solidity of the world. My soul could not conceive of the existence of the thing that came at us. Even now, I tried to deny it, to take refuge in the idea of my own madness. On either side of me, soldiers reacted as I wished to. They curled up, shrieking in horror.
This was not a xenos beast. This was a nightmare come to savage them.
It made another leap, and landed with a squelching thud ahead of the heretics. It reached for us. Krauss and I rose as one. His face mirrored my own horror. Our minds wanted to flee into the balm of oblivion, so our training took over, and we attacked. Bolt and plasma pistols fired. I punched a crater into the straining, slithering flesh. He vaporized a chunk of what, at that moment, might have been a skull. Both wounds filled. It jabbered and lashed out. I ducked below the blow. Krauss danced out of the way, and its fists smashed into the crates behind us.
We were fighting. The daemon was fallible. That was enough. The rest of the squad pierced the soul-eating terror and fought back. Las-fire streaked between them and the cultists. The enemy had the numbers and the momentum. The Mortisians had the training. For the moment that made the difference, and the heretics began to die.
Still crouched, I drew my sword and lunged upwards inside the daemon’s reach, cutting into the arm where it joined at the trunk. The limb was corded, powerful, and yet there was no bone. My blade sliced through flesh and gristle. The arm fell to the ground, where it dissolved into bubbling ooze. Another arm burst out of the centre of the torso. It hit my chest and sent me flying. I landed in a tangle of smashed wood and torn vellum.
The daemon’s third arm snatched to the side and grabbed Trooper Karetzky. Then its jaws were on that side, and they crunched down on the soldier’s head and chest. There was a ghastly harmony of snapping bone, spurting blood and a ragged, slashed scream.
Krauss fired again, this time disintegrating the daemon’s left leg. The creature fell his way. It used its arms to turn the tumble into a controlled roll. It had already regrown its leg as it reared over him, gaping wide to feast on his blood and soul.
I fired off four shots in quick succession as I got to my feet. I took out both the legs. I bought us nothing but seconds, but the daemon slumped backwards as it regenerated.
Krauss shouted something incoherent. He hit the daemon with another blast of plasma, keeping its attention, and started running. It followed.
More seconds. We used them well. A cultist leapt at me, a sickle in each hand. I straight-armed my sword through his neck. As the weight of the corpse lowered my arm, and the heretic slid down the blade, I fired to my right, and blew a hole the size of a plate through another of the vermin.
Two more troopers went down, killed by las and gutted by blades. Behind us, the stack of crates that ran the length of the room had collapsed, and we pulled back behind the rough shelter, drawing tightly together, focusing our fire, while the cultists continued to charge as if the only thing that mattered was death, ours or theirs, as long as it was ugly. Perhaps they were right.
As we fought, I could hear the crashes of the daemon pursuing Krauss. Though those noises were pulling away from us, the obscenity’s laughing, snarling jabbering seemed to be with us still. It was a voice that was just behind my ear, no matter what direction I was facing. The daemon was conversing with itself, with me, with the world, and with something unknowable beyond. The syllables it uttered were words, yet they tore the very concept of language apart. Guttural yet sinuous, they rasped and coughed and coiled. The survival of sanity demanded that they be sounds without meaning. The truth was worse. The words did have meaning. It was a meaning that hovered just out of reach, yet distorted the world with the force of its gravity. As I valued my soul, as I had faith in my Emperor, I must never learn what these words said, and my being revolted at the mere idea. But they had teeth, and they ground at my consciousness, they ground at my hope, and they ground at everything that made me human and rational. With every syllable that was uttered, reality became a little bit slicker, as if a coating of slime were accreting over everything around me, and everything inside me.
The heretics had human tongues, not the shifting, twisting, appearing, disappearing thing in the daemon’s maw. Yet they were barely more coherent. They were shouting hymns of praise to the dark entities they called gods. Their rants were mixtures of Low Gothic and another language, one that should have been lost to all human memory. The cultists added their dark ecstasy to the babble of the daemon. They exulted in the massacre, in the energy it fed to the forces that had summoned the daemon to the materium. Even if we killed them in battle, we might not defeat them. Every death was a welcome act of worship.
We had no choice. We fought them. We killed them. I tried to drown out the chants with prayers to the Emperor. ‘Our Emperor is our strength!’ I called to my comrades. ‘Hold fast to your faith, and it shall uphold you!’
The others prayed too, and we cut the heretics down with as much dispassion as we could muster. Our defensive posture became a tight circle, with the frenzied traitors hurling themselves at our blades more than they were shooting. They found, I think, insufficient blood in las. There was precision to our combat, and we exterminated the last of the cultists with only one other casualty of our own. That was a young man, Lingen, and it was the daemon’s litany that killed him. I hope it was just the madness of the words that was too much for him. I hope that he hadn’t begun to understand them. I hope he was granted that small degree of mercy. But he dropped his lasrifle, and shoved his fingers into his ears hard enough to draw blood. A heretic stepped in and gutted him before any of us could help. The heretic, at least, did not have the chance to revel in the death. Kortner decapitated him with his bayonet.
The death of the last heretic was no victory. The daemonic words still spread their poison. The nature of being was becoming worn, fragile. I grabbed a frag grenade from Betzner and ran towards the sounds of the hunt. The daemon was demolishing the stacks by running through them, and in its wake it had left a near-impassable heap of debris. I took the other way around the periphery of the chamber, racing to intercept the chase. The Mortisians were a step behind me.
I was two-thirds of the way towards the other end of the hall and its entrance. Krauss rounded the corner at full tilt. He was no longer firing. Behind him came the daemon. It laughed as it loped and hopped after him. It was toying with him, chasing its prey to exhaustion, and now it bellowed laughter as the game brought it back to us all.
No game for Krauss, but no flight, either. He had bought us the time to kill one enemy. He didn’t have the means to destroy the second. I didn’t know if any of us did. I ran straight for the daemon. As Krauss and I passed each other, we exchanged a look. His face was grey with more than exhaustion. His training gave him the means to withstand the exposure. His discipline gave him the will. He was human, though. We all break. I picked up the torch for him and charged the pink madness.
The face appeared in front of me. The jaws stretched wide in welcome. The laughter reached into my skull. My vision began to swim with worms. I dropped, sliding forward, and hurled the frag at the maw. My aim was true. The daemon swallowed. Its face actually showed confusion for a moment. I rolled between its legs. The proximity was enough to erode my self. I rose and staggered away, repeating my name in my head, fighting the rot of all I knew.
The grenade went off. The explosion was a muffled, wet concussion. The daemon’s central mass burst open. The glistening viscera of Chaos flew in all directions. The monster’s knees buckled. It slumped to the ground. Its mouth opened at the top of its trunk. It loosed a scream that spread a network of cracks across the stone floor, walls and ceiling of the chamber. We were all on our knees now, hands pressed to our ears, trying to block out that shriek and the claws that came with it. The daemon writhed. Its torso bubbled and bled. It twisted a full three hundred and sixty degrees, and then kept going. The scream continued, rising and falling in registers impossible for any material throat. The mouth worked, chewing the real, spreading ever wider. And then tearing.
The daemon’s muscle-flesh pulsed, its colour darkening as if being flooded with bad blood. It began to split down the centre. The mouth became two. The noise was a scream and snarl at the same time. The voices collided and fought. The colour darkened further. More limbs sprouted. The daemon’s flesh changed from the pink of a raw wind to the blue of an angry bruise, and it ripped itself in half.
Now there were two. They were smaller than the original creature, and faster. The diseased humour had vanished. The words were just as toxic before, but now they were howling complaints. The two daemons vented fury and grief at each other, but they lunged at us. One bowled into Saultern and his troops. Arms multiplied, snatching soldiers. The daemon was no larger than a man, but its reach was long, and its strength vicious. It was too greedy to focus on a single victim. It snapped a leg of one, ripped out the spine of another, yanked off the arm of a third. It spread a gospel of agony.
The other daemon had only one target. I knew there was no evading it. It was on me in two leaps. I emptied my bolt pistol into its face. I barely slowed its charge. What passed for its head flowed around the shell holes. I had my sword extended, and it impaled itself as it slammed into me. It knocked me down. The flesh of its trunk held my sword fast. I tried to saw the blade, felt it cutting sinew. The daemon snarled. It leaned down, and all I could see were teeth and darkness. Fangs were already tearing into my soul.
Then the crushing weight on my chest lifted. The daemon was hurled back. The air was filled with a new sound: the clean, metronomic punishment of boltguns. This was so much more than the individual beats of my pistol. This was the music of relentlessness. The shells hit in a directed storm, and they did not stop. The Sisters of the Order of the Piercing Thorn had come, and as I crawled out of the path of fire, I saw the true image of armoured faith.
It was a moment of realization. The contempt that the Adepta Sororitas felt for us sad, weak specimens in the Imperial Guard, and the resentment we returned, were almost articles of unexamined faith in themselves. But now I felt humbled. The ten women had not donned their helms, and their faces were ablaze with something that went so far beyond simple zeal, it should have burned all who gazed upon it. Krauss was dogmatic, and his inflexibility had served him well in this dark place. I would have shot anyone foolish enough to question my own devotion to the Emperor.
But the force that marched towards the daemons crackled with a different order of faith. These warriors were touched with sanctity. They hammered the daemons with bolter fire, and they filled the room with a fury as pure as it was limitless. They had no room in their hearts or minds for doubt. They confronted the existence of the daemons with holy rage.
The daemon absorbed the first few shells, but the blows kept coming, and overwhelmed it. With a final gibbering whine at the injustice visited upon it, the being fell apart. Its form vanished. It became a writhing puddle, and then that evaporated back into the void with an echoing moan.
The other daemon had just grabbed Betzner by the throat. The trooper was transfixed by the shape of his death. His arms had fallen limp. But as its twin disincorporated, the daemon dropped Betzner, twisting around in pain and rage. The bolter shells hit it too. It advanced against the onslaught, flowing and leaping, taking the hits but still holding onto its grip on the materium. It closed with the Sisters of Battle. They had to choose their shots carefully while the Mortisians and Krauss moved out of the way. Then the daemon was already there. Setheno was in the lead. She met the thing with her blade, bringing the sword down in an overhead swing that sliced through a third of the daemon’s trunk. She immobilized it. Hands with too many fingers grasped her arms. Claws scraped against ceramite. She did not move. The daemon wailed. The rest of the squad surrounded it and shot it into oblivion.
The silence that followed was startling. The voices were gone. Reality reasserted its stability. I joined Saultern’s squad. The daemon had killed three, crippled two others. But even those who had escaped physical injury had still been harmed. Saultern was staring at the spot where the second daemon had vanished. His eyes were blank with horror. Betzner was sitting where he had fallen. He was perfectly still. He had withdrawn into himself. I did not think he was exploring anything pleasant. Kortner stood to one side, clutching his lasrifle with whitening knuckles. ‘What was that?’ he kept repeating. ‘What was that? What was that?’
‘A xenos obscenity,’ I told him. ‘The traitors have allied themselves with a degenerate race. The creatures are dangerous, clearly. They can also be killed. Clearly.’
‘But,’ he began. One hand moved towards his head, then his heart. He was trying to express the spiritual wounds he had received. At some level, he knew he had encountered something far more insidious than a powerful xenos beast. It was necessary, though, that this knowledge remain vague. There were no such things as daemons. To believe otherwise would be harmful to the faith of the untrained individual. To be certain would be even worse.
‘What else could it be?’ I said.
He looked at me. So did Saultern. So did the rest of the squad. All the survivors except Betzner. ‘Nothing else?’ Kortner whispered.
