The Relentless Dead, page 10
The temple was empty, but not as they had left it. The altar had been dragged across the floor as if in hope of relocating it until its weight had proved too great. The items that had lain upon it had been taken. The cut wire led to a frag grenade, wedged between a skull’s teeth in the wall.
They were about to move on when Graven heard a faint noise in the distance. It could have been an animal growl. He raised a hand for silence and all ten Krieg listened intensely, but the sound was not repeated. Even had it been, it would have been drowned out by the next one: the shriek of jet engines, descending above them.
The cavern shook, dislodging small stones from its ceiling.
Graven had no wish to split his forces, so returned them to the ladder. He sent the watchmaster up to greet Inquisitor Idelax and invite him to join them.
Graven led the way through the catacombs, alongside his engineer, who scanned ahead of them with a handheld auspex. Though he found no more traps, still the threat of them impeded progress – which, the colonel ruefully acknowledged, may well have been the point.
His Korpsmen followed in two files, the watchmaster bringing up the rear. Graven was hyperconscious of Idelax’s eyes on the back of his head. The inquisitor walked in the formation’s centre, at Graven’s suggestion, despite having stated tartly that he needed no protection. Each time Graven gave an order, involuntarily his gaze flickered to the witch hunter, thinking he might countermand it.
They followed the left-hand wall, a precaution against losing themselves in the labyrinth. In the underground silence, every sound they made returned to them, amplified. Their own footsteps clattered in their ears, often forcing them to pause to be sure they weren’t being pursued. Their own breaths merged into a constant susurration, not dissimilar to the spectres’ whispers.
Rounding a bend, Graven found his path blocked by a wall. A particularly large white skull in its centre glared at him, hissed at him: ‘You lead them to their doom as you did us.’
He halted his squad. ‘Spectres! Can anybody see them?’
His Korpsmen, gripping their lasguns, checked the walls, the ground, the roof before reporting in the negative.
‘More voices, colonel?’ asked Idelax, sounding like he was accusing.
Denial would have served no purpose. ‘I will not listen to them,’ Graven swore.
‘Remember, the mind is poisoned only by the words we hear.’
They doubled back, took the next left turning, and he tuned out the susurrations, telling himself that if syllables seemed to form within them, they were only a trick of the mind and they meant nothing.
It was probably due to this effort that he didn’t hear what most of his squad did, what made them halt again.
‘No doubt about it this time, sir, something is stalking us,’ reported his watchmaster. ‘Some kind of… snuffling creature.’
‘The Devourer?’
‘From what we’ve heard of that, I’d say much smaller.’
They listened, breaths bated, for a minute, but heard nothing. Eventually they moved on, but very soon a whispered message from the watchmaster made its way up the ranks to Graven. The creature had been heard again.
There was only one thing to be done.
Briefing his nearby comrades with hand gestures, Graven slipped away from them through an opening in the right-hand tunnel wall. The Korpsman immediately behind him followed him. The rest continued on their way, behind the engineer.
Graven waited in the tunnel mouth.
He drew his sword but didn’t activate it. As his team moved away from him, following their tunnel’s curve, they took their lumens with them, so that absolute darkness stole over him and now only his ears could guide him.
He heard the footsteps of his squad receding, but beyond this only his own breathing and that of the Korpsman beside him. ‘We remember what you did and we are down here, waiting for you.’
Graven heard no creature. He wondered if his watchmaster might have been mistaken, though he never had been before.
He would never know what it was that saved his life. A noise, after all, but not coming from the expected direction and almost subliminal? A subtle shifting of the tunnel’s air currents? Had it simply been instinct that alerted him, in that instant, to the threat?
He whirled around, yelling to his Korpsman, lighting up his sword and, in its pale blue glow, seeing claws, fangs and blood-crazed eyes.
The beastman flew at Graven, a spitting, snarling ball of matted hair. He had underestimated its intelligence, let it split his forces after all. It wouldn’t profit from it. It would find even two Death Korpsmen more than a match for it.
His comrade, lacking time to fire his lasgun, stepped to meet the charging creature, slid a bayonet between its ribs. Hardly wincing, it raked him with its claws. The Korpsman grunted, falling back, as Graven swung his sword. Aiming for the neck, he sliced instead into a human shoulder.
Close up, he saw scarred, blistered red skin through the beastman’s fur. It had a wolf’s pointed ears and elongated snout, and the latter thrust towards him, open wide, spittle spraying from its jagged teeth. He could smell the rot on its hot, wet breath. He thought that, were it not for his rebreather, it would likely have infected him already.
He threw up his free arm, lodging it underneath the creature’s jaw, keeping it at bay. But it was strong, far stronger than he was, scrabbling at him with clawed hands and feet.
Just as well, then, that he was not alone, that no Krieg ever truly was. Rallying, his comrade stabbed the beastman in its wounded side, working the blade inside its body. Evidently he pierced something vital, and it reeled, allowing Graven to draw back his sword and thrust it into the beastman’s stomach, sending it howling to the ground.
They continued to hack at its thrashing body until it was definitely dead.
Footsteps clattered up behind them: his squad, returning having heard the sounds of battle. Graven checked himself for injuries. There were tears in his greatcoat, but not in the breastplate beneath it. His Korpsman’s flak armour had been shredded, but his skin had not been broken.
‘One down,’ the colonel growled, ‘but many more to go.’ He watched as the beastman’s entrails burnt to ash in the blue fire of his blade.
Rain dripped through the tunnel roof and pooled along its floor. The Krieg sloshed through cold, muddy water, which seeped into Graven’s split boots. More and more, they heard activity around them, grunts and scampers, as if there were many creatures circling them, afraid to come too close.
‘It could be that we are being tracked,’ said Idelax, ‘by witches with some kind of second sight.’ Graven found this a discomfiting idea.
His engineer halted, holding up a warning hand. Hunched over his auspex, he whispered, ‘Sir, I have a reading. Life signs.’
‘How many? Where?’
The engineer made some mental calculations. ‘Ahead of us and left, around a hundred feet away, two, perhaps three of them, clustered, stationary.’
‘Directly in our path, then. An ambush?’
Graven filled in the rest of his squad, and they advanced with caution. The tunnel branched, and once more they followed the left wall as it curved back on itself. Lumen light fell upon an opening in the same wall. Graven looked at his engineer, who nodded. They withdrew a step.
The Krieg took up firing positions, two Korpsmen on their stomachs in the water, two crouching over them, two standing behind. Six guns brought to bear, with four more standing by. Idelax stepped back and watched as, at a signal from his colonel, the engineer pitched a lumen cube along the tunnel. It landed with a plop, a few feet short of the opening – from which Graven heard a rasping breath caught in anticipation.
Long seconds passed.
Then, just as he had hoped, impatience overcame their waiting foes. First one and then a second sprang from hiding with triumphant roars, which froze in their animal throats as they saw that their targets were not where they were expected to be. The ambushers had become the ambushed.
These beastmen were goat-faced, like the ones described by Colonel Petrakov. Scraps of leather armour were lashed to their muscular frames and one carried a holstered autogun, for which it reached too late. In a furious few seconds, they were ruthlessly gunned down. Clinging to its final thread of life, a beastman tried to crawl back into cover, but shuddered with the impacts of more las beams and fell still, its face submerged in filthy water.
The auspex found nothing else lurking. Graven heard more scampers and suspected that more creatures had closed in as the battle had begun, thinking again upon its abrupt cessation. ‘If we are indeed observed,’ he said, ‘then our path is easily foreseen. We must be less predictable.’
He consulted with his two navigators. Comparing the crudely sketched maps on their dataslates, they found them broadly in agreement. From now on, their role would be more crucial than ever.
They passed the tunnel opening from which the beastmen had come and took the next right turn. They marked their route with a boot-polish arrow, daubed onto a prominent skull beside the junction. At each turning thereafter, Graven chose a way at random, while his Korpsmen pored over their maps, sometimes stopping while the engineer checked bearings and distances.
Having travelled a short way in this fashion, they were halted by a new and chilling sound. It was a loud, deep-throated roar, which came from some indeterminable distance away, reverberating through the tunnels. A roar of wounded anger, but one also tinged with arrogance. It sounded like a challenge.
The Devourer was calling its foes to itself.
‘Do we take the bait?’ asked the watchmaster.
‘If we do, we make our path predictable again,’ said Graven. Catching Idelax’s narrowed gaze, he added, ‘The Emperor wishes that monster slain. What other option do we have?’
They came upon an upward-leading tunnel, where the ground was dry again. The higher they climbed, the further it narrowed about them. The bones embedded in the walls soon petered out.
They had not passed a turning in some minutes. For the third time, they heard their quarry’s roar and there was no doubt about it this time – it emanated from behind them. ‘The monster only finds its voice when we have strayed off course,’ the watchmaster observed.
Graven pressed on regardless and, soon enough, saw his hoped-for reward – a grey patch of daylight ahead. The passage took a sharper upward turn before ending at a rusted metal grille, through which he could see the sky.
It didn’t take long for two Korpsmen to work the grille free. The Krieg climbed out of a small round hill into a field, where rows of headstones and a desultory drizzle greeted them. It was mid-afternoon.
Graven allowed his squad a short break. He saw wooden huts in the distance and considered making for them to find a vox-caster and report to headquarters, but he judged them too far away, and anyway, who knew what might be waiting there?
It concerned him that Idelax, slumped on the hillside, looked weary, his blue eyes red-rimmed. ‘Inquisitor,’ he warned, ‘we cannot rest here long. We may still be watched.’
‘Yes, yes,’ agreed Idelax, tetchily.
‘This seems a good spot for us to sleep tonight,’ said Graven. ‘If you wish, you could stay here, with guards of course, until the rest of us return.’
‘Only my flesh is weak,’ the witch hunter muttered, and from a pouch inside his black cloak, he produced a small bottle of tablets and thrust one into his mouth. He swallowed, closed his eyes and breathed deeply for a minute.
He opened his eyes to find Graven still looking down at him. ‘Was there something else, colonel?’ he asked sharply.
There was, but now was not the time, not least with nine comrades within earshot. ‘No, inquisitor,’ said Graven, ‘that is all.’
They filed back down the access tunnel, back into the catacombs.
‘If our foes know our location,’ the watchmaster had pointed out, ‘they know we must come back this way and have had time to prepare.’
Already well aware of this, Graven kept a hand on his laspistol. The auspex, however, picked up nothing of concern, and soon they were back in the ossuary, once more surrounded by its bones.
‘Perhaps we have shaken off the witches’ sight,’ the colonel said, but even as he spoke, their lights found something on the tunnel floor.
It looked like a shapeless mass of rags as they approached it, but Graven had seen enough corpses, too many, to know better.
Kneeling, he peeled back a torn cloak, stiff with encrusted blood. A cracked and dented skull gaped up at him. Grey scraps of meat clung to the skeleton’s ribs, marking it as more recent than it looked, its flesh having not had time to decompose entirely but rather been stripped from it.
Only what we leave behind.
Idelax loomed over Graven’s shoulder. His jaw was taut with anger. From the remnants of its clothing, he identified the corpse as one of his former acolytes. ‘The cultists kept her alive for days. They threatened her to force compliance from me, which only underlined their lack of understanding. Finally, they took her to the monster. They took pleasure in preparing me to hear her dying screams, but she was silent almost to the end.’
He knelt beside the body too and prayed over it.
‘Inquisitor,’ said Graven at length, ‘we could bury her.’
‘No,’ said Idelax, standing. ‘No, clearly she was placed here to test our will and slow us down. Instead, our foes reveal to us that they are close at hand and give us yet another reason to–’
He was cut off by the Devourer’s roar.
It seemed like they were closer to it now, which made it easier to pinpoint its direction. ‘No time to lose,’ said Idelax, and they set off towards it, but even as they did so, from behind them came another sound.
Las fire. A sustained volley of it. Someone, somewhere in the labyrinth, was fighting for their life. It could only have been another squad, Krieg or Vostroyan. Perhaps they had heard the roar and been drawn towards it too. Graven’s instinct was to go to these comrades, but he didn’t know the way.
They walked for half an hour longer, glimpsing no more beastmen, hearing no more gunfire, but the roar of their quarry twice more. Graven heard no further whispers. He began to wonder – hope or fear? – that he had imagined those before.
Then torchlight spilled into the tunnel they were following, and soon it opened out into a small, almost circular cave, three torches fixed at equidistant points about its edge. ‘For our benefit?’ the watchmaster wondered aloud.
‘Or the monster’s,’ said Idelax.
A Korpsman pointed out moss clinging to the roof, some fifteen feet above them, evidence that there had long been light here, as nothing could have grown without it. The cave seemed empty, but five more tunnels led from it. Six ways from which an attack might come, including from behind them.
One opening was taller than the others and framed by a polished black stone archway. Embedded in its lintel, a row of six bleached skulls clutched gems in their eye sockets, glittering red, blue and green. Graven realised that every other skull in the walls of the cave had been angled towards them.
He motioned to his squad. In pairs, they crossed the cave to shine their lights along each exit tunnel. In the mouth of one, they found a beastman, which routed with a squeal. They fired after it, but Graven held them back from pursuing it. He had only glimpsed the creature’s hairy form as it dropped onto all fours to run, but it had been faster than human, and even had they caught it, they could have lost themselves or found another ambush.
The Devourer was more important. A threat to every soldier in these tunnels and, he thought, some kind of figurehead to their foes, if not an object of their worship. Though it hadn’t been heard in a while, the path to it could hardly have been clearer. The archway was like an invitation. Or a goad, he thought. As if it made any difference.
Graven re-formed his squad. He glanced at the witch hunter, who gave him a nod of approval. The colonel checked for tripwires in the archway and, finding none, stepped through it.
The tunnel behind the archway bent sharply to the right.
Another torch was mounted in a sconce on its right-hand wall, whipped by a cold, damp breeze. A Korpsman, checking her rebreather unit, confirmed that the temperature had dropped two degrees. Opposite the torch, a shaggy, horned, two-legged figure was sketched crudely on the wall, human skeletons scattered at its feet.
‘The sacrifices must be brought along here,’ said Idelax, ‘with the torches placed to ensure they miss no detail of their grisly fates.’
Graven started down the tunnel. After just a hundred yards or so, it split into three narrower, rough-hewn branches, each with torches too, their light showing him that each soon branched again. There were no bones in these tunnels.
‘These look like natural faults,’ he said. ‘There appears to have been a small amount of excavation, but not lately.’
‘The Devourer has claimed this as its territory,’ said Idelax, ‘possibly even during the Chaos plague, and its servants have kept the ossuary from encroaching upon it.’
Before Graven could reply, he heard a sound behind him – a grinding of ancient gears, followed by a resounding clang of metal upon stone. Whipping around, the Krieg snapped up their weapons, finding no targets for them.
The watchmaster took a few steps back along the tunnel. ‘A gate, sir,’ he reported. ‘A gate has come down across the opening.’ He leapt back as an autogun barked and a bullet ricocheted off the wall close by him.
Now, Graven could hear rasping breaths and what sounded like satisfied snickers. ‘A mechanism, hidden in the archway,’ he said ruefully, ‘with beastmen sneaking up to trigger it as soon as we walked through and seal us in here.’
‘With the monster,’ a Korpsman said.
‘Exactly where we wished to be,’ Graven reminded him, though inwardly he remonstrated with himself: I should have been more cautious, should have searched for more than merely wires.
