The Relentless Dead, page 2
Eyes that now turned upon her.
The serf’s body, or whatever controlled it, took a jerky step towards her. Its torn tunic exposed the glistening wound in its chest, from which miraculously no blood flowed. Lifting an arm like a dead weight, it reached for her. A guttural snarl welled from its throat, resolving itself into a slurred word: ‘Mother!’
The lady couldn’t help herself. Despite everything her heart and mind were screaming at her, in a tremulous voice she spoke her dead son’s name. ‘Eoric? Is that… you?’
‘You… did it… saved me from that… torture.’
‘No, don’t come any closer!’
He halted as she bade him, as she warded him off with raised hands, but she saw the same look of confusion and fear in the serf’s face that had been there before. That same look of betrayal.
‘How do I know it’s really you?’ she asked.
His speech was already clearer. ‘I knew you’d find me, mother. It was my faith in you that strengthened me in that thrice-damned place. I knew you would come for me and take me home. May we go home now, mother?’
She said, ‘A ship is waiting for us.’
‘I long to see my home again. I miss the salty taste of ohx and the gritty smell of industry. I long to reunite with cousin Laena as I promised her we would when we parted. She must have ascended to the ruling council now?’
Tears stung the lady’s eyes. She couldn’t speak. All she could do was open her heart and her arms to the unkempt, shambling figure before her, the only one who had ever truly found a place in either. Drawing together, they embraced, and she clung to the still-cold body that wasn’t her son’s body, but it didn’t matter now. Nothing in this world or any other mattered but this, but the two of them together.
She said, ‘I’ll never let you leave my sight again. If they come for you again, then I shall fight them to my final breath.’
‘Take me home, please,’ he begged her.
‘I will,’ the lady swore. ‘I will, my son.’
She turned to her husband.
She saw the knife in his hand.
She couldn’t stop him. Never had she seen such resolve in Lord Emelian before. She howled as he plunged his blade into her son’s fresh wound. Almost gleefully, he worked it to draw out the blood that had been stopped there. Perhaps he ought to have paused to ask himself, if one knife blow had not severed this body’s life thread, then why would another?
His victim groaned in pain but didn’t fold. He lashed out with his knuckles to the noble lord’s face, sending him sprawling. One hand clamped to his gushing chest, he raised the other. His eyes flashed, and that same green energy coalesced around his outstretched fingertip. Crackling, it flared to strike the prone and trembling lord.
The serf’s face had contorted into a mask of purest malice, and when the thing inside him spoke again, its rasping voice pained the lady’s ears. Her son’s tongue could certainly never have shaped the profanities it spewed.
Her husband writhed and whimpered in green fire. She smelled his burning hair and skin. Turning to the altar, she saw no salvation there. The congregants cowered around it, most gaping at the scene in abject horror. Contrary to her later assertions, she believed that they had genuinely not expected this.
Then, locking gazes with the young-old pastor, she saw satisfaction in her eyes and a smile tugging at her dry, cracked lips.
She did the only thing she could possibly have done. She turned and bolted.
The lady knocked her shin on the corner of a pew. Her impractical shoes, already soiled and split, turned under her and she crashed into the hut’s door, splintering its wood. A bright green flash dazzled her, and she felt her lacquered hair bristling. Only her fall, she realised, had saved her from a blast that had passed above her head.
She couldn’t think about that now, else she would lose her mind. Blindly, she fumbled for a latch and found it. She tumbled through the door into the cold, wet night. As she scrambled to her feet in the mud, the lady’s head turned and she caught a last glimpse of the thing behind her, in the chapel. The daemon – how could she have mistaken it for anything but? Its green-burning eyes were fixed upon her, casting the face of her old serf into shadow.
Its fingertip was poised to strike again, but then, with a grunt, it doubled over, clutching at its wound. The lady felt an unfamiliar sensation. She was grateful for her husband’s actions. Her husband, whose blackened, twisted body lay on the chapel floor. She couldn’t think about that either.
In its slow, thick, rasping voice, the daemon-thing commanded, ‘Stop her!’
So, the lady ran.
‘Evidently, you made your escape,’ said Inquisitor Idelax.
‘I know not how, if not by the Emperor’s grace.’
He scowled at her presumption. ‘I find that doubtful, unless He wished only that I find you. Did the entity in your servant’s body pursue you?’
The prisoner shook her head. ‘No. I mean, not that I saw, but perhaps I… I did not wish to see, so I…’
‘Did not look back,’ he concluded.
‘In the dark, I knew not to where I ran, nor for how long before my straining heart and lungs arrested me. I only ran.’
‘Leaving your husband to his fate.’
She left the accusation unaddressed. ‘I came upon another hut, a shed. I broke it open with a rock and, though it shames me to admit it, sheltered in there beneath a pile of rags. Throughout the night, I heard footsteps and voices without, and presumed the members of that blasphemous church to be seeking me out.’
‘And once daylight returned?’
‘I fortified myself with prayer and set off to find a priest, anybody in authority, to tell of the horrors I had witnessed.’
That was another lie. The prisoner had found her way to a provincial landing pad where, bedraggled and shaken as she was, she had drawn a constable’s attention while attempting to contact her orbiting vessel. Her incoherent answers to his questions had only inflamed his suspicions, and so it was he who had alerted the governing priesthood.
So, the lady had found herself shackled in the vaults beneath their tower. So the Inquisition had received an astropathic message, and so Idelax had been despatched to this backwater world. He didn’t tell her that he knew all this. He had just one thing left to say to her.
‘As soon as it can be arranged, you will be taken from this cell and executed by beheading.’
He had made such pronouncements to many beaten wretches like her, and their reactions varied wildly. In Lady Emelian’s case, her shoulders sagged in resignation. She seemed almost relieved to know her fate. It would not last.
‘I suggest you use your short remaining time to reflect upon your sins and pray for absolution.’ The witch hunter turned on his heel and strode out of the cell, his acolytes straggling behind him. The servitor jailer slammed the door shut, turned its heavy locks and drew its bolts.
The prisoner had told Idelax little he had not already deduced. Oleris III had been thought well rid of its witches, but evidently some had escaped the brutal purges and had since grown in power. To have drawn an entity from the immaterium, given it corporeal form!
He shuddered at the thought and cursed the fools who – albeit in ignorance – had abetted this ultimate transgression. Nor had they been the first, for how else had the rumours spread that had lured these fools here? Their weakness had endangered every soul upon this planet and perhaps across the galaxy itself.
Halfway up the winding steps, from far below Idelax heard the inevitable pounding of fists upon plasteel. He heard the muffled voice of a condemned woman, protesting her innocence anew.
‘I acted through faith and love alone,’ she screeched in vain, ‘and… and I am a noblewoman of Vostroya with friends in the highest courts. You cannot treat me like this, you have not the authority. Do you hear me? Come back! Come back at once, I command you, and unchain me.
‘Do you know who I am?’
When the lady’s throat was raw and her knuckles skinned and bleeding, she sank back against her cold stone wall and wept.
She wallowed in her misery until it was punctured by an unexpected sound. A whisper from inside the cell itself. She stiffened, her eyes seeking out shapes in the gloom. Was there a patch of deeper darkness over there? A patch in the shape of a proud, young Vostroyan soldier?
‘Leave me be,’ she croaked in fear.
‘Mother,’ came the whisper. Was it really there, she wondered, or a breath of stale air through her prison bars, or merely her imagination?
‘I know what you are now. Leave me be. Unless you can save me from this torture.’
‘Mother!’
‘No, begone with you!’ she shrieked.
‘You should be happy, mother,’ the whisper persisted. ‘Why else did you come here but to find me and be with me? Now, we both have our hearts’ desires.’
Pulling on her heavy chains, she clapped her hands over her ears, but the voice was already in her head. She thought to drown it out with prayer, but the words turned to ash on her unworthy tongue. ‘No, no, no, no,’ she moaned.
‘Now, we shall spend eternity together.’
II
Colonel Graven heard the screams of the dying again.
He woke with a start on the floor of his troop ship cabin. Beside him, the bunk provided for him was untouched. He had laid out his bedroll beside it because it was comfortable, familiar, moulded over the years to his shape.
He slept in his uniform, including its heavy black greatcoat and rebreather mask, because this too felt familiar. He had tried to imagine himself back in the trenches, surrounded by his comrades. It had not stopped the nightmares.
They were worse in transit, when jumping through the immaterium. The domain of the dead, it was sometimes said. Though the ship was insulated by its Geller field – a bubble of realspace around it – always he felt the horrors of this cursed realm, scratching, clawing in the corners of his mind. Awake, he could easily resist them. Not in sleep.
Graven served in the Death Korps of Krieg, reputedly the arm of the Astra Militarum with the highest mortality rate and fiercely proud of it. Always, here he felt the presence of the countless billions of Korpsmen who had served faithfully before him, their lives given for their world’s atonement.
He counted too many of his own regiment among them, too many of his closest comrades. When he slept, often he relived the day of their deaths, the horrors he had seen and the far worse ones his mind’s eye pictured. He heard his comrades’ voices and sometimes they even spoke directly to him.
They were angry with him.
Colonel Graven checked his wrist chrono. They were not due to reach their destination for another four hours. The last thing he wanted was to sleep, but he knew it was his duty to be rested for his next trial. He would not be found wanting this time.
He lay back down and closed his eyes, and heard their screams again.
It was raining on Oleris III as the drop-ships descended. On Oleris, it was almost always raining.
There were fewer ships than Colonel Petrakov had anticipated. The 401st Krieg Regiment, it seemed, was more depleted than he had been told. That was an inconvenience. He might have to redraw his plans.
Busy with deployment lists, he had sent a captain to greet the new arrivals. Hearing her transport pulling up, he dismissed his tacticians and scribes. He fastened his red greatcoat’s brass buttons and donned his brimless black fur hat, which boosted his unimpressive height by six inches. He waited for a rap on his office door.
‘Come,’ he instructed, and the captain ushered in two dark-clad figures.
‘Colonel Graven of the Krieg, sir, and, ah, his watchmaster.’
The Vostroyan colonel introduced himself in turn. He hid his mild distaste as he regarded his opposite number. He could smell the dirt ingrained in Graven’s dark fatigues and frayed black coat. His carapace armour plates and crested helmet were dented and scuffed. Just as Petrakov had heard, he wore a gas mask, even here, from which a hose snaked over his shoulder into a battered backpack.
One thing drew Petrakov’s eye: the fine-looking and obviously well-kept sword slung at Graven’s hip.
His unnamed ‘watchmaster’ – no such rank existed in the Astra Militarum’s formal command structure – was similarly clad, minus the visible breastplate, a rebreather unit worn over his chest. Or over her chest? The mask and shapeless uniform made it impossible to tell.
Petrakov dismissed his captain and invited his visitors to sit. For a moment he thought they might decline. Rain drummed on the tin roof of the prefabricated building. He took a bottle from his desk drawer.
‘No, thank you,’ said Graven. ‘I do not dull my brain with alcohol.’
‘Ohx, then?’ suggested Petrakov. ‘A hot drink from my own world, containing powdered grox meat, rich in nutrients and stimulants.’
‘Our feeding tubes provide us all the nutrients we need.’
‘You will not need those tubes here, nor the masks. The air is safe – auspexes confirm that no trace of the plague remains – and no intelligence suggests that our foes have chemical weapons.’
The Krieg colonel sat and said nothing. His lack of body language and expression irritated Petrakov. The large, dark lenses of his mask were like the eye sockets of a skull. Petrakov considered demanding its removal. He was in charge here, after all, as commander-in-chief of this world’s Imperial forces. A role bestowed, he recognised, by virtue of his regiment having reached Oleris first. He couldn’t judge Graven’s age from his voice. It was likely – highly likely – that, of the pair, the newcomer had the greater experience.
Petrakov sat behind his desk and tried again to break the ice. ‘Our peoples, I believe, have much in common.’
‘Oh?’ said Graven.
‘We both offer more than the standard tithe of soldiers to the Emperor.’
‘With good reason.’
‘Indeed,’ said Petrakov. ‘Both our worlds seek redemption for our forefathers’ blindness.’
‘My world immolated itself in civil war,’ said Graven pointedly, ‘to rid itself of its fickle rulers and resume the path of faith.’
The Vostroyan sighed and poured himself a glass of amasec. So much for small talk, he thought. ‘Let me brief you on Oleris III,’ he said.
‘Oleris was once a thriving agri world,’ said Colonel Petrakov, ‘until, half a millennium ago, it was ravaged by a plague of Chaos.’
He mouthed the final word rather than giving it voice. Graven had never seen the need for such genteelness. To him, it felt like cowardice.
‘No crop has since grown in its soil,’ the Vostroyan continued, ‘and its population still numbers in the tens of thousands, concentrated in the temperate zone. Oleris’ stock-in-trade now, one might say, is death.’
‘A cemetery world,’ said Graven. He had seen the stones outside.
‘Whose bones run deeper than you might expect. Plague victims lie alongside unnamed soldiers, brought here for burial en masse since a long-dead planetary governor decreed that anyone martyred for the Emperor in this sector deserved to rest in his world’s hallowed ground.’
‘Hallowed?’
‘You know not of Saint Josefina?’
Colonel Graven shook his head.
‘A venerated priest who came here to tend to the suffering. She is said to have bathed them in a holy golden light in which their lesions melted, but she couldn’t heal herself. She died here and was subsequently canonised.’
‘Then it would indeed be an honour to rot alongside her.’ My honour, perhaps? Graven couldn’t help but wonder.
He knew there was a good chance he would die on Oleris III, as on any world to which he was deployed. His comrades, for expediency’s sake, would leave him in a shallow grave here, even though he hadn’t earned the right. I will have to ensure that I survive, he told himself.
‘Saint Josefina’s Grand Mausoleum stands not five miles away,’ said Petrakov. ‘Perhaps you might pray there. I found the experience uplifting.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Graven, ‘once our work is done.’
He saw the flicker of a scowl across the Vostroyan’s face. For a colonel, he was young – not by Krieg standards but by most others. His thin moustache might have been intended to indicate maturity. It might have been darkened with dye. The male Vostroyans seen by Graven thus far had all sported similar moustaches. He said, ‘I was briefed to expect witches?’
‘Oleris has seen more than its share of those,’ said Petrakov. ‘The Ordo Hereticus believes the plague awakened… powers in the few survivors.’
‘And in their descendants?’
‘Indeed. The centuries since have seen no fewer than three full-scale Inquisitorial purges – and of course the Ecclesiarchy now governs here – and yet somehow that malignancy continues to resurface.’
‘So needs cutting out once and for all,’ Graven’s watchmaster muttered.
‘What is the current situation?’ the Krieg colonel asked.
‘A witch hunter named Idelax raised the alarm this time. He came to investigate rumours of an active coven, and found the rot ran deeper than anyone suspected. He requested military intervention, but before my regiment arrived the witches made their most audacious move.’
Graven nodded. His terse briefing had covered this too. ‘By storming the Ecclesiarchal Tower.’
‘In truth, we believe many were inside already,’ said Petrakov, ‘affecting to serve the priesthood while biding their time, until compelled to act in haste.’
‘The priests?’ asked Graven.
‘As far as we can ascertain, all dead, but we have the tower surrounded.’
‘Defences?’
‘Scant. Oleris III has no strategic value, no mineral wealth and little industry. The tower is only lightly fortified. I suspect the Departmento Munitorum would almost be willing to abandon this world.’
