Carcharadons: Void Exile, page 33
He experienced a moment’s pain as he broke both the physical and mental connections and rose, descending the ladder to the psykhanium’s mesh-plate decking. Doing so also caused the sarcophagi to disengage, the bolts containing their purity-seal-studded fronts thudding free. Hissing steam momentarily obscured the occupants before they emerged through it – hulking, skull-faced nightmares that Vey offered a fraternal greeting to.
Zaidu was among them. Like his Reivers, he was garbed in a black bodyglove that acted as his under-vest, the synth-skin dotted with ports that would allow his Mark X battle plate to interface with the Black Carapace beneath his upper dermal layers. Besides that, he wore nothing but his twin combat knives, sheathed over one another on a mag belt, and his death mask, a leering, fanged holdover from his days serving with the Reivers.
‘What happened?’ he demanded of Vey, voice as sharp as one of his knives.
‘I do not know,’ the Librarian admitted, unused to such an admission. ‘I experienced a psychic disturbance. Abrupt, and of some magnitude. I have not been able to identify its source yet.’
Zaidu began to respond, but the words faded to Vey’s hindbrain as a new sensation demanded his attention. A presence entered his mind, one he recognised. It was Enlightened Brother Dornmar, the only other Exorcists Librarian currently stationed at the Basilica Malifex. He came to Vey not with words, simply imprinting the knowledge he wished to convey directly onto his consciousness, an act that spoke of urgency.
‘A signal has been received,’ Vey told Zaidu, straightening out the impression made on him. ‘I must depart immediately to the astropathic relay. This session is over.’
‘Should I initiate emergency protocols?’ Zaidu asked. The other Reivers had gathered from their own sarcophagi around their leader, their skull masks grinning at Vey in the dissipating steam.
‘Not… immediately,’ he said as he finished ordering and interrogating Dornmar’s imprint. ‘I recommend you conduct purification rites. If there is pertinent news, I will inform you.’
‘I saw it again,’ Zaidu said, the statement catching Vey off-guard.
‘Saw what?’
‘My vision. Caedus. I defeated it again, but it was not like the first banishing.’
Vey knew of Zaidu’s visions, or at least what the almoner-lieutenant thought of as visions. He had been experiencing them since his initiation. Vey recalled how he had felt Zaidu’s mind stray moments before he had experienced the discordance. Were the two connected?
‘I will seek answers for both of us,’ he told the Sin Slayer. ‘Hold fast until my return.’
Vey did not go to Dornmar and the astropathic relay. Instead, he journeyed down, to the heart of the Basilica Malifex, the Cloister of Scars. From there he passed the Threshold into the Chapter Librarius, undoing the wards and speaking his name so he would be known to both the spirits of the place and the combat servitors hardwired into its outer pillars.
He knew what he was doing might be a mistake. Logic dictated he go immediately to Dornmar and receive his report. But the universe did not run on logic. There was something gnawing at the back of Vey’s mind, something more than the echoes of his Never-brother, Amazarak. Zaidu’s vision could not be a coincidence. The nature of whatever report Dornmar held would not solidify into the truth until Vey had received it. He believed he would find certainty not with the data-raving of an astropathic choir, but in the silence of the Librarius.
The primary chamber was vast, a cavity at the core of the Exorcists’ fortress-monastery, hollowed out and filled with the sum total of knowledge acquired over four thousand years spent warring with the daemonic. Arcane grimoires, cursed tomes, Ecclesiarchy doggerel and the ruminations of generations of the Chapter’s own Librarians and mystics filled the shelves, stacked under, alongside and above briefing transcriptions, tactical-goetic summaries, combat divinations, gene-files and star cartography.
No other Chapter was so wedded to theomantic esotericism as the Exorcists. Knowledge was power, and they knew its value. They had made the Basilica Malifex one of the greatest repositories of occult information in the segmentum, hidden from all but the Chapter and a select few members of the Ordos.
The floor of the Librarius – cold, smooth Banish corestone – was sub-divided into hundreds of sections via the thousands of towering bookshelves that filled the place. Made from black mirewood timber and carved with strange figures and goetic inscriptions, they sagged and creaked beneath the weight of multitudes of books, scrolls, parchments, data-slates and information crystals. The stacks formed narrow rows that seemed to go on forever, dimly illuminated by cobwebbed lumen orbs suspended from brass chains overhead. The shelves carried on up past the orbs, their uppermost levels lost in the musty darkness that shrouded the vaults.
Before Vey could advance into the library proper, he was approached by a gaggle of shuffling, hunchbacked figures – mortals, but garbed in the dark blue robes of the Librarius. They were bibliognosts, a subsect of the Chapter’s serfs, humans bound to live out their lives within the confines of the Librarius.
All of them had their tongues cut out at the beginning of their service. The first to reach Vey signed silently at him while keeping his gaze averted from the towering Exorcist, a ritualised greeting that put him at the Librarian’s disposal.
Vey waved the mortals away. He did not need their aid to find what he sought, and besides, he wanted to tangle up as few souls as possible in the web he was beginning to sense was now surrounding him.
He strode into the Librarius. The place reeked of damp and old vellum, dusty pages and cloying incense. It seemed to swallow the sound of Vey’s footsteps as he made his way in amongst the towering stacks. The only noises were the occasional soft fluttering of wings from things in the darkness above and the dry rustle and crackle of pages being turned somewhere amidst the endless shelves.
The rows loomed over Vey as he went deeper, the weight of their blasted knowledge seeking to bear him down. He muttered litanies he had learned on his first day as a Lexicanium, using their familiar beat and cadence to locate himself within the vast chamber and keep his path true.
It did not do to stray in a place such as this.
As he progressed, he passed several figures working in silence. The first was another blue-robed bibliognost, a series of brass magnification lenses lowered over her eyes as she tottered atop a ladder resting against one of the stacks. The second, a dozen rows on, was a wheezing servitor unit, bent-backed beneath a mound of books it was transporting with slow, shuffling steps.
Vey’s catechisms led him true. He found the centre of the chamber, the nexus where the stacks converged. A dense circle of lecterns, cogitator units and data-nodes, dusty, their screens fuzzed with age, surrounded a statue of a robed figure, head bowed, features lost in the shadows of a graven cowl. The Emperor of Man, in His guise as the Keeper of Knowledge. At the statue’s feet, in the centre of the cogitator circle, a set of black iron stairs spiralled away into darkness.
More bibliognosts stood at the lecterns and cogitators, the scratching of quills and the dull rattle of runeboards the only sounds. They were cataloguing, transcribing, translating or researching on behalf of the Chapter’s Librarians or the Inquisition. None looked up from their labours as Vey passed between them to reach the stairs.
He began to descend beneath the gaze of the Emperor. Down the tightly twisting stairs led him, into the space known as the Crypt.
It lay directly beneath the main Librarius, smaller than the grand chamber but still large and vaulted. Here the most damnable works were confined, not only texts but artefacts too – all manner of trinkets and reliquiae, from skulls and withered, shrunken heads to strange crystals, blades and daggers, cups, tarot decks, looking glasses and other arcane paraphernalia. The Exorcists knew the power of such objects, as well as their danger.
Vey was target-locked by another combat servitor at the bottom of the staircase, but it allowed him to pass. The air had a sudden, bitter chill to it, and he could feel the psychic tug and pull of the warding runes carved into the stonework around him.
He moved into the Crypt, beginning to scan the shelves. The books here were bound like beasts in chains and fetters, and every stack’s front was covered either with iron bars or sheer plates of armaglass. The latter was crazed and scarred by the scrapes of talons and the imprints of clawed hands. All the markings were on the inside.
Vey knew these shelves, knew the cursed weight they bore up. His hearing detected what sounded like whispers, breathed softly from between the stacks, but he ignored them. He counted himself past the Sixteenth Catechism of the Red Saint of Ophidia, the diary of Lord Commander Elgor Faust, Aktor Krell’s Lemegeton Profundis and the first and third scrolls of the Klepas Didactics. Between the final scroll of the Didactics and The Revelations of the Ruberics, he found what he sought.
There was a scrape of rusting metal as a servitor approached. The bibliognosts were forbidden from entering the Crypt. Servitors alone ran this part of the Librarius. Often one or more of Vey’s brethren would also be present, but currently he and Dornmar were the only Librarians in the Basilica Malifex – the weight of recent conflicts had spread the Chapter thin.
Vey used his gene ident to unlock the glass and unchain the tome he had sought out, before stepping aside to allow the servitor to properly remove it. The thing’s forearms were crude metal augmetics wrapped in purity seals and litanies from the Liber Exorcismus. Its function was the retrieval of texts such as these.
After a few tries with its pincers, it was able to heft the book down from the shelf and transport it to the nearest reading slab. Vey watched warily as the book was set down, its covers still chained. Its name was the Daemonarchia Claviculus, and it was the most complete list of Neverborn in the Chapter’s possession. It had been compiled over four millennia, a record not only of the common names – and sometimes even the True Names – of the warp spawn that had plagued humanity, but also a catalogue of their titles, ranks and appellations, and their standing within the damnable hierarchy of the empyrean. It was at once a vital and dangerous weapon in the Exorcists’ armoury, and only desperate circumstances made its evil a necessary one.
The reading slab lay beneath another large lumen orb, its light a rancid yellow, the inside of its lower half befouled where grime had collected over the millennia. The slab itself was carved with hexagrammatic runes and the names of the Seven Planetary Talismans, along with five versions of the diagrams of the Sigilus Dei Imperator Aemath, the Seal of the Emperor’s Truth. Vey would have preferred to employ more arcane tools – his black-and-red Rod of El and his incantation bowl. For a proper reading he would have anointed himself with sanctified acid-water from the marshlands surrounding the Basilica Malifex, or pentacle runes in ash from the Eternal Pyre that burned atop the fortress-monastery’s pinnacle, but there was no time for any of that. Vey was experienced in the occult ways of what the Chapter called goetia – black magicks and daemonologie. He had to press on, or he would run out of time.
The servitor retreated, and Vey stood over the book. It took a moment to find his focus, briefly touching two fingers to his forehead before undoing the chains.
The response was immediate. Before he had even touched its cover, the Daemonarchia slammed open with a clap like thunder. At the same time, the lumen overhead stuttered and went out.
Vey’s body went instinctively to combat readiness. He heard a whirring from nearby – the servitor. The whispers he had caught earlier returned, scratching at the edge of his hearing. His hands clenched into fists, and he half turned, seeking an enemy he knew was not there. He yearned to feel the hilt of his force sword, Kerubim, in his grasp.
The lumen struggled back to life. Damnation lay open before Vey – the Daemonarchia, darkness coiling up from the flayed skin of its pages, the physical corruption visible to Vey’s witch-sight. The taint was bleeding from it, clawing at the bindings of the reading slab as it sought to reach him.
It would find no purchase in him. His soul was a fallow field where even the deepest, bitterest root of corruption would not lodge itself.
The servitor had turned and was now staring at him, its one organic eye dull but fixed on him.
Vey returned its gaze for a moment, then, slowly, turned back towards the book. Twin hearts beating, he leaned over and forced himself to read the blasphemous names and titles inked with blood onto the ancient skin, pinning each writhing word in place with a murmured catechism of command.
The Red Marshal, formally Seneschal of the Fortress of Bone and Keeper of the Blood Hounds Carnus and Slaught. Known upon Arava Prime as the Crimson Vengeance, upon Antraxus VI as the Warlord of Warlords and within the Ignatius Sector as the Butcher Baron. Since its great and grievous defeat upon Fidem IV, it has been called most commonly, in the vulgar tongue of mortals, Caedus.
The servitor lunged for him. Subconsciously, Vey had been ready for it. He caught the clumsy thrust of its forearms, twisting and grasping its head in one great hand as he put his body between it and the book. He wrenched at its skull, his positioning ensuring the blood and oils from the torn flesh and ruptured machinery did not strike the Daemonarchia. Blood, touching the accursed pages, would have unleashed more than Vey was prepared to deal with.
The servitor went stiff and still, dead. Vey dropped it and turned back to the book.
‘It has returned,’ said a voice.
There was a figure, standing in the shadows between the book stacks opposite the slab. Vey found himself looking into the face of death.
He realised Zaidu had followed him.
He did not bother to question how the almoner-lieutenant had gained access to the Crypt. Though they guarded their knowledge carefully from outsiders, any within the Chapter’s complex command hierarchy – be it the Twelvefold Commandery, the Convocation of Four or the Lesser Convocation of Forty-Eight – could access the Librarius. As a newly inducted member of the lattermost body, Zaidu’s presence here was not unwarranted. What irked Vey was that the Sin Slayer had followed him, and that he had done so without Vey sensing his presence.
‘It has returned, yes,’ the Librarian said, making himself answer Zaidu directly and speak the truth, despite his reluctance to do so.
Zaidu made no physical response to Vey’s confirmation, other than to pause briefly before speaking again.
‘Then it is bound for Fidem IV.’
‘That is likely.’
‘Have the Chapter hierarchy been informed?’
‘I do not know. I have yet to visit Dornmar. I wished to test the weave of fate here before I committed to speaking to him. But if it is as we both fear, I am authorised to take immediate action.’
‘And what will that action be, enlightened brother?’
Vey took a breath, fixing Zaidu with his gaze before speaking.
‘You will prepare your Hexbreakers, and be ready to depart aboard the Witch-Bane on the eleventh bell.’
‘Is there a briefing packet? Hypno-data for the voyage?’
‘There will be by the time you board. I will compile it as soon as I have received the astropathic report.’
Zaidu nodded. Vey knew he needed to be as careful with the almoner-lieutenant as he was being with the Daemonarchia. He was like a keen, unsheathed blade – deadly when used well, but capable of wounding its owner if not wielded with control. Vey decided it was better to press him now rather than later. He needed to get a good, confident grip on him if he was going to use him correctly.
‘Will the Hexbreakers be ready at such short notice?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Zaidu said. Vey experienced a quickening of his senses, an unwelcome sharpness that linked back to the days of his initiation rites, long ago. It was akin to the heightening all Space Marines experienced when about to enter combat, a glanding of stimms and hormones, but this was something more, something truly predatory and instinctive. He tasted a passing sweetness in his mouth, and swallowed it. Amazarak’s parting gift, and curse.
Zaidu had just told him a half-lie.
‘And will you be ready, Sin Slayer?’ Vey pushed on, not pausing to address the untruth.
‘Yes,’ the lieutenant repeated. More vicious sharpening, more sweetness, a full lie this time. Vey could hear the pulse of Zaidu’s hearts – both of them active, just like his own – and see the individual beads of sweat as they ran from his bare, scarred brow. His fingers ached to grasp Kerubim.
‘You are lying,’ Vey told the lieutenant. ‘I can taste it.’
‘Your line of questioning is vague,’ Zaidu replied coldly, still lingering in the shadows, his half-skull mask grinning. ‘If you wish to get at the truth, hone it.’
Vey smiled coldly. That was more like the Daggan Zaidu he had known, ever since the desperate day he had dragged him through the blood and broken bones and burning meat of his own initiation rites. The unsheathed blade, cutting and quick. Sin Slayer, a champion of the Chapter, hunter of daemons, ruthless, relentless, uncompromising.
‘Caedus is your Never-brother,’ Vey said, attacking Zaidu head-on, just the way he liked it. ‘During your initiation into the Chapter, it was Caedus who possessed you. Who shared your flesh. Who, before my own eyes, you tore out and cast back into the warp.’
‘Clearly, I did not cast it far enough,’ Zaidu said, voice taking on a bitter edge. ‘How was it allowed to return and infest another aspirant so quickly?’
‘There will be an inquest into that,’ Vey assured him. ‘Right now, that is not my most pressing concern.’
‘Your most pressing concern is whether or not I will be an asset or a liability,’ Zaidu said with customary forwardness.
