The Relentless Dead, page 12
Graven turned to ask him, ‘What size are his feet?’
Idelax’s gaze lingered on the colonel as he swapped boots with the corpse. He had meant what he said – he had found no fault with Graven’s squad, and thus his leadership, today. It was clear that the Korpsmen under his command had faith in him, but faith, as he well knew, could be misplaced.
‘Colonel,’ said the watchmaster, ‘might the jewelled archway be the only way back into the ossuary?’
Graven was ahead of him. ‘If so, then once our enemies know we have slain their Devourer, they might well seal the opening and entomb us with it.’
‘I should take the fittest Korpsmen and find a way back there.’
‘Agreed.’
‘I am unhurt. I will come with you,’ Idelax offered.
‘Inquisitor, that is not necessary,’ said Graven.
‘Even so.’
‘Your stimms are close to wearing off. Unless you take another dose – which I would recommend against, for your own health – your weakened state would only be a hindrance.’
Idelax glared at Graven, unused to being spoken to so plainly, but knowing he was right. He gave in with a silent nod and stepped away. He watched as the watchmaster gathered three Korpsmen to himself and led them out into the tunnels. He watched as Colonel Graven helped another dress a wound on his – or her? – back, regardless of the difference in their ranks.
The words whispered to him two nights before still echoed in his mind, the accusation that complacency had blinded him.
He would not be blind again.
The watchmaster led his four-strong team around the labyrinth.
No longer being stalked, they could afford to be methodical. They followed the left-hand wall again, knowing that in time it had to lead them to the exit. The engineer had brought along his auspex, while another Korpsman had taken a wayfinder from an injured comrade.
Turning down another narrow tunnel, the engineer noted a boot-polish arrow at its mouth. ‘It’s been crossed through to mark this as a dead end.’
The watchmaster asked, ‘Then why do I see light down there?’
As they proceeded cautiously, he heard low voices too and felt a warm, stale breeze. At the end of the tunnel, light seeped through a crack in the wall, and the watchmaster knew now what to expect.
‘I remember that rock there,’ said a Korpsman, ‘but it’s been moved aside by something with inhuman strength.’
The watchmaster stepped through the crack, through the tatters of a hanging tapestry. He found himself back in the Devourer’s lair, blinking in its brazier light, with several lasguns pointed at him until their wielders recognised him.
Acknowledging his colonel and the inquisitor, he turned back around.
The torches on the walls were burning down and out, plunging some tunnels into darkness. In one such tunnel, by the glow of his lumen cube, the watchmaster saw a shadow shifting and halted his squad. ‘Life signs?’
The engineer studied the auspex. ‘No, no life signs. Almost the opposite. A cold spot, directly ahead of us.’
‘Speak up if you hear voices,’ the watchmaster ordered.
‘Watchmaster, I… I think I do,’ said the engineer.
‘Then you know what to do.’
The engineer nodded and, gripping his gun tightly, stepped forwards. The shadows seemed to coalesce before him as if to block his path, and now the watchmaster could make out a definite shape in them and trained his bolt pistol upon it.
‘I know what you are,’ said the engineer loudly and firmly, ‘so you have no power over me. I trust my commander and will not hear your lies. So, if you wish to stop us, you will have to become solid, in which case we are more than ready for you.’ He worked his shotgun’s action.
The spectre continued to hover, regarding him impassively.
‘Yes,’ said the engineer more quietly, ‘that is what I thought.’ Then, taking a fortifying breath, he marched along the tunnel, through the shadows, which smoothly dissipated as if they had never truly been there. A trick of the mind.
‘Well done,’ the watchmaster said as he and the others followed. He wanted to ask what the spectre had whispered to the Korpsman. He did not.
Not long later, they encountered their first beastman after hearing its scampering footsteps. The auspex showed it approaching, so, extinguishing their lumens – a dwindling torch was nearby, in any case – they waited in readied silence in the tunnel mouths around a four-way junction.
The beastman’s misshapen shadow fell between them, but its movements ceased. The watchmaster, hearing it sniffing, knew it had caught their scent.
In the instant that it scampered away, he charged from cover, firing, a cue for his comrades to do the same. The creature – small, dark-furred and lupine – was fleeing on all fours. It might have been the one that had escaped before. A bolt from his pistol nicked its ear. It hared around a corner, with the watchmaster hard on its heels. The labyrinth’s twists and turns slowed it, kept it in his sights, and he shot it twice more until, whimpering, the creature missed a turn and ran full tilt into a wall, which snapped its neck.
The watchmaster’s comrades caught him up as he ensured that it was dead. ‘A scout, I should think, come to check on the Devourer,’ he said. ‘It won’t be reporting back to whoever sent it, but any within earshot will have learned enough.’
They continued on their way until, some minutes later, their navigator spoke up.
‘Watchmaster, the layout of these tunnels matches those mapped on our way in.’ He showed his dataslate as proof. ‘The wall markings confirm it. I believe we are close to the archway, and I can guide us to it.’
The watchmaster bade him do so, and soon they turned into a well-remembered tunnel, with a warning scratched into its wall. At its end, they saw two figures crouched by the familiar archway. Two men, draped in black hoods and robes over grave worker’s smocks. Cultists, no longer caring to try to hide it. The watchmaster saw right away what they were doing. Just as he had feared, they were setting explosive devices.
They hadn’t seen him yet, but they would at any moment. He ran at them, and as the cultists’ heads rose in alarm, he strafed them with a three-round burst. One took the brunt: the closer and younger of the pair. The elder ducked behind him and, whether through panic or self-serving guile, gave him a hefty push along the tunnel.
The watchmaster and the young cultist collided. The latter’s eyes rolled back into his head and he expired. Frustrated, the watchmaster bundled his dead weight aside, but the older cultist had made use of the distraction, escaping through the archway, and already gears were grinding as a thick barred gate descended.
Not this time! the watchmaster swore, and he propelled himself towards the gate, dived, and rolled underneath it before it could slam down.
Out in the cave beyond it, a skull had been wrenched from the wall to reveal a wheel behind it at which the cultist stood, startled by his foe’s appearance. His eyes flickered towards a tunnel entrance, but as the watchmaster picked himself up, instead he reached into his robes for a curved, long-bladed black knife.
The watchmaster in turn drew his bayonet. Three Korpsmen, trapped behind the gated archway, could only watch as he and the cultist closed in battle – which proved to be savage, short and predictably one-sided.
The vanquished fell at the victor’s feet. The watchmaster yanked his blade out of the cultist’s guts. Mindful of the cave’s six entrances, he wasted no time in reflection. Hurrying to the control wheel in the wall, he turned it back and raised the gate, allowing his comrades to join him.
Two shone cubes into each of the cave’s other openings, disturbing nothing but hearing ominous snorts and scrapings in the distance. Returning to the archway, the engineer ran his hands over its inside surface. He rooted a couple of spikes from his backpack, drove them into the intrados with his shotgun butt. ‘That should keep the gate from being brought down on us again.’
In the meantime, the watchmaster found blood on his glove. It came from his forearm, where the cultist’s knife had found a torn part of his greatcoat, nicking him through it. Stepping through the archway, past the engineer, he had him keep watch while he dealt with it. ‘It’s nothing,’ he insisted when asked, ‘as long as I can stop the bleeding. Can you find your way back to the lair?’
The question was addressed to the navigator, who claimed that he could.
‘Good. Two of you go, I’ll stay here with the other. Some beastmen may have slipped past us, so be careful, and watch out especially for spectres.’
‘Yes, watchmaster,’ said the Korpsman without trepidation.
‘Tell the colonel we have found the archway and will hold it as long as we are able. Until morning, if we must, if that is the colonel’s decision. But tell him his watchmaster recommends that he come quickly.’
Graven led his squad back through the narrow tunnels.
They were weary but keeping themselves alert, some increasing their stimulant intake. He had judged that, on balance, it was worth the exertion – and risk – of further travel to leave this labyrinth behind them, now that they had a way out. Idelax had seemed pleased with this decision, despite looking more drained than ever, grey-faced and sunken-eyed.
Before moving out, they had had one last thing to attend to.
The explosion, when it came, made the walls shake and Idelax stumble, but the Krieg neither winced nor looked back. They walked for another minute before the aftershocks and echoes died away, and Graven knew the job was done.
He had personally placed the mining charges, lit the fuses. The Devourer’s lair was destroyed, the monster itself buried with its hybrid lackeys and its victims, and one unfortunate member of Graven’s own squad.
His mind kept picking at that scar, which was unusual. He found it both frustrating and concerning. He was only one man, he thought, one of so very many, and he died well to boot.
His squad’s first loss. Their fourth assignment. Graven had been proud of their resilience. Too proud? Never before had he served alongside anyone so long, not to his knowledge. His old engineering squads had each been disbanded, their survivors sent to bolster others. Even before the orks. That was just the way it was. The way it was meant to be. He wasn’t meant to grow accustomed to his comrades, wasn’t meant to get to know them.
This comrade had never had a name. Few people, even after talking to him, could have told him apart from any other Krieg, but Graven could. Though rarely had he seen his face, he knew the Korpsman who, high up on the gantries of an occupied forge, having broken his blade and drained his power packs, had jumped a crazed ogryn from behind, choking it with a chain. He remembered a sniper in the window of a ruined chapel, whom he had spied too late, his life saved by that same Korpsman’s lasgun and reflexes.
He had shared sentry duty with him only the previous night, sitting side by side with him in the rain.
Graven wasn’t meant to mourn him.
Are the spectres doing this to me? he wondered, but he knew that wasn’t it.
Gunfire ahead of the Krieg speeded their footsteps. It was over by the time they reached its source. The watchmaster and engineer flanked the gem-studded archway.
‘There are beastmen out there, sir, but we’ve been keeping them at bay,’ the former reported, sounding uncharacteristically subdued.
‘Tunnel mouth at four o’clock, watchmaster!’ the engineer cried, firing his shotgun through the archway. ‘Some kind of bird thing, but I clipped its feathers for it.’ That explained the squawk of pain.
‘The tunnel we first came along?’ asked Graven.
‘Clear as far as I can see,’ said the watchmaster.
‘Who still has a smoke grenade?’
There was no time to mourn dead comrades, not while the living needed him. Graven couldn’t be distracted by thoughts of mortality.
A grenade was duly produced and rolled out through the archway. It burst in the centre of the cave beyond it, sending frightened beastmen scuttling away, though undoubtedly not for very long.
‘Go, go, go!’ Graven yelled, and his squad raced through the smoke, across the cave.
In broader, bone-filled tunnels once again, they took a moment to consult their hand-drawn maps before proceeding. Their goal was to reach the exit to the surface that they had earlier discovered, and their colonel led them there.
His fallen Korpsman, he assured himself, had accomplished more than most. He had outlived most of his regiment, compensated in part for lives wasted, died with honour. He had helped to kill a monster, leaving his comrades alive and free to hunt down the ossuary’s other horrors. He could rest in this world’s hallowed soil, content that he had nothing to regret.
We should all be so fortunate, thought Graven.
IX
The Krieg erected three small tents leeward of the hill. They changed their air filters and nutrient packs. They refilled water bottles from the rain.
Inquisitor Idelax had his own superior field rations, rehydrated rice and protein, which in the absence of an acolyte he heated himself over a campfire.
The watchmaster set three sentries, one on the hill, two underneath it. He slept dreamlessly until woken for his own watch six hours later. He tested his arm, felt the stiff patch of synthskin pulling on it, but he retained full motion.
A persistent drizzle had put out the fire. The sky was a ponderous black. The watchmaster saw someone sitting on the hillside and was surprised to make out Idelax, his blue eyes clear and piercing. He acknowledged his presence with a nod, but neither of them spoke.
The watchmaster headed underground, alongside the engineer. The downward-sloping access tunnel to the ossuary ended at a T-junction. Only as they reached it did the two sentries stationed there appear.
‘Anything to report?’ the watchmaster asked.
‘Another burst of las fire,’ one said, ‘thirty-four minutes ago. Roughly north-west of here, some distance away, soon over.’
‘Same as yesterday. The same squad, perhaps?’ At least that would mean they were still fighting – or had been up until this latest incident.
‘Otherwise, watchmaster, all quiet.’
‘We’ll take over now. You are relieved,’ he told them. The Korpsmen snapped to attention, then relaxed. They reslung their weapons and made their way back to the surface.
Each way from the junction, there was a sharp tunnel bend. The watchmaster separated from the engineer. He took the left-hand tunnel and soon reached a vantage point where it branched into three.
As the echoes of his footsteps died down, a deathly silence settled. The world seemed to end at the edges of his lumen light. His world for the next three hours. He knew his comrade was a shout away, but he felt no less alone. Alone but for the skulls leering at him from the walls.
The watchmaster chose not to sit, because standing would keep him more alert. Still as a statue, bolt pistol drawn, he waited.
Korpsman 319-938-25549-04 was doing push-ups.
Half an hour into his watch, he wanted to keep his muscles limber, blood circulating. He had just checked in with his watchmaster along the tunnel. All was well. He was troubled, then, to hear footsteps behind him.
An ally, he assumed, as the pace was unhurried and a foe would have had to pass another sentry. The watchmaster again? Still, he sprang to his feet and pressed himself against the wall, his shotgun readied.
A figure appeared around the bend. ‘Inquisitor?’
‘As you were, Korpsman.’ Idelax’s blue eyes glowed in the lumen light, but he looked tired.
‘Can I do something for you?’
‘I am told you heard a spectre.’
‘Yes, sir, yes I did.’ He should not have been surprised. It was a witch hunter’s job to know such things.
Idelax lowered himself stiffly to the ground. Sitting with his back to a bone-embedded wall, he motioned to the engineer to do the same. Clearly, he anticipated a long conversation. The engineer sat, ensuring that he still had sight along each tunnel.
‘What did it whisper to you?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said. ‘I did not listen.’
‘Tell me what you heard!’ the inquisitor demanded.
He was taken aback. He had thought his answer the correct one, the expected one, but evidently not. ‘Lies, inquisitor. The spectre told me lies.’
‘What have you done to feel guilt over?’
‘I swear, there is nothing.’ It was a statement rather than a protest. It was the witch hunter’s job to ask.
‘And yet you were targeted by a thing that senses guilt and wields it as a weapon. It would go better for you, Korpsman, to confess to me. Unburden yourself of your sins, pray for His absolution and such creatures lose their power over you.’
The engineer hesitated. Only for a moment, but Idelax had surely seen it. ‘I don’t wish to be disloyal,’ he attempted to explain. ‘The spectre spoke to me not of my own actions, but rather of another’s, and as I said, it lied.’
‘Whose actions?’
‘Colonel Graven’s, sir.’
The witch hunter leaned forward. ‘Tell me everything,’ he said.
The engineer remembered:
The siege was almost over. The orks had been routed from their defensive walls. Imperial forces – Krieg forces – were closing in around the ruined city. Above ground, the roar of both sides’ guns was deafening.
Below, the shriek of a Termite assault drill chewing through the earth deafened only the five engineers inside the burrowing vehicle.
The Termite surged as, demolishing a brick wall with ease, it broke into a long-disused sewer tunnel. Its occupants braced themselves against the inner hull as it dropped four feet to flop onto its stomach, straddling a drizzle of sludge.
