The Relentless Dead, page 11
Idelax hefted his new plasma pistol. ‘I could turn those bars to slag, if I could reach them without coming under fire.’
The engineer said, ‘A demolition charge tossed down there would blow out the gate, but it would likely bring the roof down too.’
Graven nodded. ‘Leaving us as trapped as ever. We go on.’
He picked a random tunnel branch and marched along it, then another, his squad falling into step behind him, now forced into single file. ‘Keep an eye on that auspex,’ he instructed the engineer.
‘I will, sir, but the way these tunnels wind, we could be inches from a foe before I get a reading from it.’
Graven was well aware of that. In these confines, they were at a distinct disadvantage. A foe could be in melee with them before they could employ their guns, and if that foe had claws and teeth and animal strength…
He activated his power sword. A waste of its charge with no foe in sight, he chided himself, but its light would give them heart. ‘We must keep moving, keep a step ahead of it, seek out an arena more suited to our strengths.’ He was a Krieg Death Korpsman, after all, a former engineer himself. Tunnels like this were his element. Tunnels every bit as claustrophobic and oppressive as these felt.
The tunnel he was following, however, narrowed further and became impassable. Quickly, Graven turned the squad around, knowing that if anything was coming up behind them they were well and truly cornered.
At the junction, he made another choice, which after its initial promise brought them to another blind alley. Here, the Krieg discovered scraps of bones and blood-soaked grave worker’s clothing. An extinguished torch lay on the ground beside them, as if it had been snatched to use as a weapon, in vain.
A navigator spoke up: ‘Sir, I need a moment with the wayfinder.’
‘Keep moving,’ said the colonel, gruffly.
In the next narrow tunnel, the roar of the monster reached them, and the torches seemed to gutter with its force. It sounded dead ahead of them, almost on top of them.
‘Not guiding our course this time,’ a Korpsman breathed.
‘No,’ Graven concurred, ‘but playing with us.’
He chose a path away from their tormentor, but feared that he was being herded. When next he had a choice to make, rather than maintaining his heading, he picked a tunnel that switched back, encouraged by the breeze emanating from it.
They continued in this fashion for what felt like many hours, although Graven’s wrist chrono gainsaid this.
A couple of times, the auspex picked up life signs, faint enough to be mistaken, but they steered clear of them all the same. Wherever Graven felt a breeze, he took that tunnel, even when it seemed to lead them back towards the Devourer. Especially then. He was tiring of this game of cat and mouse, and almost wished for the monster to tire of it too and make its move.
Despite this, in a twisting tunnel, where the torches seemed more widely spaced than usual, the definite sound of hooves on rock caused the colonel to signal a retreat. There must be a better place to make our stand!
The Krieg’s mapmakers had conceded defeat. They traversed tunnels that Graven thought he recognised. Sometimes they found boot-polish arrows left by their former selves and ventured into new directions from them.
As the breezes from the tunnels strengthened, Graven grew more confident in his decisions. He realised that he had stopped looking elsewhere for approval.
He turned into a tunnel definitely new to him. It was longer, straighter than most, and at its end, bright light blazed through a large round opening. He signalled to his squad behind him to proceed with stealth. The floor of the tunnel was well trodden and, increasingly as they travelled down it, strewn with broken bones and bloody scraps of clothing. A faecal stench assailed his nostrils, growing ever stronger.
The monster’s lair, it has to be! Halfway along the tunnel, he halted, sent a single spotter ahead. We weren’t supposed to find this, weren’t supposed to get this far, but I outsmarted it. Now we can turn the tables on the monster, set our own trap for when it returns.
And then he heard its roar again, blasting out through the opening.
The Devourer was in there.
It was no longer stalking them around the labyrinth, if indeed it ever had, but rather it was waiting in its lair. Waiting for them.
Now Graven was no longer so sure of himself. His spotter had frozen, turned to him for orders. The rest of his kill team looked to him too, Inquisitor Idelax’s face as inscrutable as any Krieg gas mask. Was he the one outsmarted after all? Did the Devourer know its prey were here? He felt it must. It must have heard them, smelled them or been tipped off by its psychic allies. Did they go on and face it, knowing this was what it wanted, or turn back?
Then came the roar of anger, of challenge, again, the same as every other time but this time from behind them, from no further than the end of the tunnel they were in. Which was impossible. Unless…
‘God-Emperor!’ the witch hunter breathed, and Graven felt his throat constricting. ‘Two of them.’
And they had the Krieg surrounded.
VIII
In the end, it wasn’t such a tough decision. Graven gestured to his squad and, as quietly as they could in the circumstances, they raced up the tunnel.
At least this way they had a chance. A slim chance that the trap around them hadn’t yet been closed. A chance of getting through that opening and into the Devourer’s lair before they were expected. A chance to put up a good fight and not simply be slaughtered.
Their lone spotter raced ahead of them, into whatever might lie in wait, expecting the nature of his death to be a warning to his comrades, thus worthwhile. For a second, he paused in the opening, eclipsing its blazing light. Then, firing his lasgun repeatedly, he plunged through it.
Graven followed his lead without a qualm. A cavern opened up around him. A brazier burnt at its centre, assaulting his eyes with its brightness, its smoke being drawn up through a flue pipe in the roof. The walls were draped with dusty tapestries. He saw heaped furs and piles of broken skeletons. This was a charnel house, and in its centre, by the brazier, his spotter was duelling with three creatures.
Goat-faced beastmen. Two attacked with knives, which the Korpsman’s bayonet parried. The third, with an autogun, looked for a shot between its allies. Graven charged that one with his power sword. Startled, it sprayed bullets in his direction. Most pinged off the wall around the entranceway, forcing a Korpsman on his heels to duck back through it.
Eyes still adjusting, Graven swung at the beastman’s still-blurry mass. It howled as he severed its arm below the elbow, sending its gun skittering away. Weaponless, it lunged at him, trying to bite his throat, impaling itself on his readied blade. Its sudden weight on him sent him reeling all the same. His boot went through the ribcage of a brittle skeleton, ankle twisting under him. He hit the ground, the creature’s wet corpse slamming down on top of him.
He wriggled out from under it, took stock of his surroundings. His kill team had poured into the cavern, so the two remaining beastmen were outnumbered, fighting no less fiercely for it. Hanging back beside the wall, Inquisitor Idelax levelled his gun coolly and, seeing his chance, squeezed his trigger. With a flash of superheated plasma, a beastman fell, clawing at its melted flesh.
Where was the Devourer?
Graven’s eyes searched the stacked furs, presumably its bed, which could have concealed a giant. An angry roar from right beside him made him start. It emanated from a vox-speaker lashed to a trolley. The audacity of it took his breath away, that these animals had employed a mere recording to mislead him.
The last one fell, blood gushing from its many cuts. Graven stood, breathing a sigh of relief not for his life but for his regiment’s sake. His first instinct had been right, however – they hadn’t been meant to reach this place – and now they had pierced its last deception too. He hoped.
Two Korpsmen hurried back to the entranceway, taking up positions to each side. Peering through it, one reported, ‘Nothing coming up behind us, sir.’
‘Perhaps there never was a monster after all,’ the other said. ‘Though if there is, it can’t have failed to hear the battle.’
But the skeletons were evidence enough. One, lying sprawled across the bed, was not yet picked wholly clean, still bloody. ‘I only see one entrance to this cavern,’ said Graven. ‘Should anything appear, we would be cornered here, but at least there is some cover and room to manoeuvre.’
‘Or we could mine this lair,’ the engineer suggested, ‘and hide out in the tunnels till the thing returns.’
He never heard his colonel’s reply, as a hanging tapestry by his shoulder trembled.
‘Behind you!’ a Korpsman yelled, and barged the engineer aside. Simultaneously, Graven heard a thundering of hooves. He snapped up his laspistol as a massive, black, horned beast ploughed into the cave, through the tapestry, shredding it in the process.
The Devourer, like the beastmen, was a cross between animal and human, though Graven saw little of the latter in its shrivelled yet blazing red eyes. It had a bull’s broad head, thick neck and horns, but was mutated far beyond that even. Its hirsute torso swelled with undulating muscles, and slimy tentacles extruded, writhing, from between its ribs.
It snorted, pawed the ground and tossed its head, shaking fabric from its horns. The Krieg were already fanning out, seeking cover, taking their first shots at it. The Devourer was naked but for a soiled loincloth and a clattering collection of bead necklaces – tributes of some kind? – but las fire hardly made it flinch. Its hide was tough like armour plating.
With startling speed, the monster whipped around and pounced upon a pair of Korpsmen. Its right arm was a giant, snapping claw, like that of some hideous crustacean. The claw crashed down between its targets as they separated, and bit into the cavern’s rock floor.
The monster’s roar, at such close quarters, made Graven’s ears ring and stirred the daemons in his mind. He pumped his pistol’s trigger, loosing off shot after shot. His target, at least, was too large to miss, and it had to have a weak spot. He aimed for those tiny, puckered eyes, but the monster swung away from him. Another claw swipe demolished a pile of bones behind which a Korpsman had been crouching. Two others rushed up behind the monster, gambling that blades might harm it more than beams, but again it was too fast. It rounded on them, forcing them to backpedal desperately, an inch ahead of evisceration.
They had had the right idea, thought Graven, just the wrong equipment. Holstering his pistol, he gripped his power sword two-handed.
He heard a plasma pistol’s distinctive woomph, and flames engulfed the Devourer’s claw arm. It had had another Korpsman in its sights, but now it recoiled with a howl, its fur alight, giving her a chance to scramble from its shadow.
Its huge head snapped around. The monster stared up at the roof as it sniffed out the source of its pain, and Graven suspected it was blind. Still, it found Idelax across the cavern from it, his back to the wall. Four Krieg stood between him and the Devourer, to whom it paid no heed whatsoever.
With a snort that blew steam from its nostrils, it lowered its horns and charged the witch hunter, and the Korpsmen in its path had to move fast or be gored or trampled, though some thrust their bayonets into the monster’s black mass as it thundered past them. One found his lasgun snatched from his hands as its attached blade lodged in its side, while flailing tentacles lashed others.
Idelax stood his ground, levelling his plasma weapon – until he seemed to realise that it needed more time to recharge, whereupon he could only tense himself to try to dodge the monster, as futile as this surely was.
Graven, racing up behind it, was too late to help. The inquisitor looked doomed, but a Korpsman threw himself onto the Devourer’s curved horns, baffling whatever senses it possessed and throwing it off course so that Idelax, by a hair’s breadth, was able to dive out of its way.
The monster rammed the wall with an impact that made the cavern shake – and, in the process, crushed its masked attacker.
Graven screamed with rage and stabbed it in the back, cutting into muscle, drawing blood. Throwing back its great bull’s head, the monster carried its victim with it, impaled upon one horn, and had there been hope left for him at all, it was quashed as his body was shaken like a rag doll and flung across the cavern, landing with a force that broke it further.
With the Devourer thus occupied, if only briefly, half a dozen Korpsmen rushed it, swarmed it, leapt upon it. Over and over, they thrust bayonets into its freakish form, and Graven was among them, his energy-wreathed blade slicing all the deeper. Its tentacles impeded him, discharging thick, green-glowing pus as they were severed to flop and wriggle snakelike on the ground.
With a mere shrug of its malformed muscles, the Devourer flung four attackers from it. Whirling, it lunged at the one hurting it the most, and Graven had to duck beneath the arc of its smouldering claw, before recoiling from its grasping tentacles and almost being felled again.
Preparing for the next attack, he was glad to see his watchmaster still on the monster’s back. One hand clung to a bead necklace as the other drove a sword bayonet into a brawny neck. That certainly got his unwilling mount’s attention. The Devourer bucked and thrashed, then, when it failed to dislodge its tenacious rider this way, threw itself into a wall to scrape him off.
The watchmaster hit the ground and, winded, barely evaded a stamping hoof that would have cracked his skull. The foot was raised to stamp again, but the monster, leaking blood like a strainer, teetered, and Idelax, circling the brazier, keeping it between him and his foe, now took his second shot.
His plasma stream burst against the back of the Devourer’s head, raising a ferocious burnt-meat stink – and making it, finally, buckle, although clearly it had no intention yet of giving in. Snorting with the effort, it employed its remaining tentacles to lever itself back to its feet, as the Krieg regrouped around the cavern’s edge and blasted it again with las beams, bolts and shotgun shells, widening its wounds, causing them to gush more copiously.
‘Keep it up, it can’t stand this punishment much longer!’ Graven crowed, slapping a fresh power pack into his pistol.
The Devourer turned his way again, and with a roar louder and more furious than ever, it propelled itself towards him. Graven dived to avoid it, landing in its earthy-smelling furs, in which he floundered. He rolled onto his back, to get off one more shot before the monster trampled over him. Instead, it stumbled under his comrades’ sustained assault and never reached him.
Lying on its stomach, it jerked and thrashed and snorted under las fire for a minute more, until the colonel ordered his squad to cease firing. The Devourer raised its burnt head at his approach, snorting at him, too weak to do anything more. Even its horns had half-melted into impotent nubs.
Graven hacked through its neck with his power sword until it died.
‘Hmm. Smaller than I expected it to be,’ said a Korpsman with disdain, standing over the huge black carcass.
‘More ancient, though, and powerful,’ said Idelax, ‘gorged on centuries of sacrificial offerings. Your handling of it was impressive.’
‘Thank you,’ said Colonel Graven on his squad’s behalf.
The Devourer’s viscous blood was everywhere they stepped, and it was bleeding still. It seemed like it would never stop. Two Korpsmen dropped a heavy fur over it to slow the spread.
‘One guard on the entranceway,’ the watchmaster ordered. His gaze fell upon the torn tapestry and the wide crack in the wall behind it, through which the Devourer had come. He corrected himself: ‘On each entranceway, and someone to check for others behind the wall hangings.’
Idelax noted that he didn’t assign these tasks to particular Korpsmen. They looked to each other and, silently, those most able volunteered. Others had been injured in the fight, at least two bleeding badly. One appeared concussed and sagged against the cavern wall, his head against his drawn-up knees. Or was that the female Korpsman whose voice the inquisitor had heard? He couldn’t tell.
One was dead, of course.
Idelax joined Graven and the watchmaster, praying over the body. When the monster had targeted him, when his plasma pistol had failed him, he had thought his life at an end. Not yet, he had prayed, before my comrades are avenged! and the Emperor had answered through a loyal servant’s actions. A life given in exchange for his, by a soldier who had thought his life worth less.
Not that the witch hunter disagreed, but others might have been more reticent.
‘Did he have a name?’ he asked.
The two men of Krieg exchanged an uncertain glance.
‘His life counted,’ he assured them, knowing this would please them.
Around them, Korpsmen had broken out their medi-kits, applying sterilising fluid and gauze to cuts and bruises, sealing deeper gashes with sprays of synthskin, rubbing blessed lotions into strained muscles.
Graven took a look around his squad. ‘The day is growing late, and absent the discovery of more hidden ways into this cavern…?’
‘Nothing so far, sir,’ his searching Korpsman called over on cue.
‘Then, being in a fairly defensible position, we might consider sleeping here.’
Idelax wrinkled his nose. ‘Does not the smell concern you?’ It emanated from a dark alcove at the cavern’s rear, its floor lined with straw.
Graven said, ‘You’re welcome to our spare rebreather, to filter out any toxic particles.’ It took the inquisitor a moment to realise that he meant the dead Korpsman’s rebreather, another to be certain that this wasn’t some morbid example of Krieg humour.
In the absence of a quartermaster, the watchmaster was scavenging equipment from the body. He called to a comrade, ‘Is your lasgun still shorting out?’ Hearing that it was, he tossed the fallen Korpsman’s weapon to him.
