The Relentless Dead, page 16
The watchmaster and one Korpsman stayed behind – partly to reinforce the Attilan squad in case of trouble, mostly to watch over Idelax, a task with which the colonel would only trust one of his own.
Their first attempt to find the temple ended in frustration. Not through any manmade blockage, but because the tunnels’ bends inexorably turned them away from where they wished to be. Glaring at a bone-embedded wall across his path, Graven felt as if its many skulls were taunting him. ‘If only we could see behind them!’
They had three mining charges left between them. An explosion would signal their presence, however, and probably for nothing if it didn’t make things worse. Reminding his squad that speed was of the essence, Graven turned them around to seek another route.
They passed close by the exit to the barn again, a chance to change direction. By now, they had walked almost two hours with silence deepening around them. They hadn’t heard a distant scrape in all that time, nor even a beastman’s snort. Were they being left alone on purpose? What if they were being steered again, by foes who remained a step ahead of them?
Either way, each second gave the witches more time to regroup.
Graven cast such doubts aside. He couldn’t let them cloud his mind. The inquisitor had expressed faith in his judgement – albeit obliquely – which had always been guided by his instincts. Instinct told him to keep going, so he did.
At first, this second route appeared more promising. Though incomplete, the Krieg’s maps suggested that they were closing in on their objective.
Then a faint tremor passed through the ground, through the soles of Graven’s new boots, through his feet. Had another tunnel just been collapsed? Was he too late? He didn’t think so. This tremor was subtler, longer-lasting, slowly building. It seemed to originate from nowhere and everywhere at once.
‘An earthquake?’ breathed his engineer. ‘Is that even possible here?’
‘No,’ said Graven, though his senses told him otherwise. ‘Oleris’ tectonic plates are highly stable, as these catacombs attest by their endurance.’ As an engineer himself, he had scrutinised the records before sending his entire regiment below ground. ‘This must be something else. Unnatural.’
‘How far do you think it extends?’ a Korpsman asked.
‘Is it centred on us?’ another wondered.
If it is, thought Graven, it portends disaster. He made a decision. Before he could voice it, the very unnatural tremor spread to the walls around them, making them shake too. No. No, not the walls. The bones!
It was the bones. The bones embedded in the earth. They were vibrating, twitching, as if straining to free themselves. A thigh bone popped out of the wall beside him, landing with a thud at Graven’s feet, where it continued to clatter. And alongside the tremor, he felt something worse, something in the very air, something dark and malevolent that he lacked words to describe but was almost suffocating him.
The seven Death Korpsmen had no target for their weapons. No defence apart from one, the last resort.
‘Run!’ Graven spluttered, and they ran, back the way they had just come.
They had covered a mere hundred yards when the tremor relented. Silence settled once more upon them. The ossuary’s bones were still again. Graven stopped his squad and they exchanged uncertain glances. It was the engineer who first voiced the thoughts of them all:
‘What in the Golden Throne just happened?’
The watchmaster had reopened the knife cut on his forearm. He perched on the edge of a moss-encrusted wheelbarrow, sterilising the wound again.
Evening was drawing in and some workers were warming up food, unappetising gruel, over a fire. The general mood was subdued but not despondent. Rather, it was resolute. Somewhere behind the huts, an Attilan drilled a group of volunteers in self-defence. Others patrolled the hamlet’s perimeter on horseback, drawing the watchmaster’s eyes whenever they passed across his field of vision.
Sergeant Batu sidled up beside him. She offered him a hot drink, which he declined. ‘Do you never take off that mask?’ she asked.
‘Not around strangers,’ he replied.
‘Oh,’ she said. Then, after a moment, ‘Makes it hard to tell what you’re thinking, but I think you wish you were down there with your people.’
The watchmaster looked into the Attilan’s face. He wondered how old she was, how long she had served, how much she understood. How could he possibly explain to her? He surprised himself by making the attempt. ‘I was trained to obey orders. Without question, without hesitation.’
‘Sure,’ said Batu with a shrug. ‘Chain of command.’ She didn’t understand. For the Krieg, it was more than that, far more.
‘What happens,’ he ventured, ‘if there are legitimate questions?’
‘Don’t trust your colonel? Think you should be watching him, yeah?’
Her incisiveness pierced his heart, making him regret his candour. He backtracked: ‘On Oleris, can anyone be trusted?’
‘Sure, if they can say the Emperor’s Prayer.’
Could it really be so simple? Not long ago, the watchmaster would have thought so too. Had this world really changed him – without changing Batu – or was it just that he had served too long, lived too long? If I have, is that not also the colonel’s doing? To the Krieg, such longevity itself was almost suspect.
‘You’ve gone inside yourself again,’ Batu prodded him. ‘What are you thinking?’
He was spared the need to answer her. He felt a sudden tremor in the earth. He and Batu both leapt to their feet. Frightened murmurs from the hamlet’s workers confirmed that they felt it too, and a couple of Attilan horses whinnied.
‘What is it?’ breathed Batu, but the watchmaster had no answer for her, and after a minute or so the quake subsided, leaving them none the wiser. ‘All riders, saddle up,’ the sergeant yelled, ‘and keep your eyes open!’
‘Sergeant!’ The cry came from a worker by the barn. ‘Come look at this.’ Batu hurried over, the watchmaster on her heels. They found the worker, white-faced, voiceless, pointing out across the fields with a trembling finger.
The watchmaster saw nothing at first, only the endless headstones, but then a stone toppled, then another. Dislodged by the tremor? No. The ground around the fallen stones – between some others too – was churning. With horror, he realised that something – some things – were clawing their way up from underground, out of the rain-softened earth. God-Emperor, fortify us!
He told himself it wasn’t possible, even as he drew his pistol and Sergeant Batu raced to her mount. If one thing was sacrosanct to the Krieg, it was the prospect of their final rest, but this…
Emaciated bodies, rotted flesh and clothing sloughing from their skeletons, were rising from their graves. They pushed themselves to their feet, standing, swaying in bewilderment, shielding lidless eyes from fading sunlight. ‘The dead! The dead return to life!’ a worker shrieked.
‘No,’ the watchmaster barked. ‘Those things are not alive. They are a mockery of life and even worse, a mockery of death.’
One by one, the cadavers took notice of the nearby hamlet and its occupants and turned in their direction. With halting, jerky steps, learning how to use their limbs again, they set out across the field. There were over a dozen of them now, with more still emerging from the soil.
‘No matter what they look like, these are not the people you once knew.’ Batu had returned on horseback, fiercer-looking in her spiked riding helmet.
‘They are abominations,’ the watchmaster concurred, ‘cheating your friends and neighbours of their well-earned peace.’
‘And their defilement of this land will not be suffered!’
The words rallied the nearby workers somewhat, persuading them at least not to flee in terror. From the hamlet’s far side, however, there came fresh cries of alarm. Batu cursed under her breath. ‘Surrounded. Yeah, of course.’
Two of her Rough Riders had joined them, and Batu sent them out to meet the more visible threat. Turning towards the watchmaster, she asked him, ‘Can you marshal the civilians? Hold the line here as long as you can, then into the barn.’
‘Agreed,’ he said, and she galloped away.
Out in the field, a horseman bore down on the foremost zombie, which plodded towards him, undeterred. The Attilan thrust his lance through the zombie’s ribcage, lifting it clear off the ground. Skewered, it pedalled the air, clawing, spitting at a foe beyond its reach, until he shook it off and trampled over it.
The second rider charged a knot of zombies, hacking with his sabre as he scattered them. Slicing through an overstretched tendon, he removed a skeletal arm, which through some vile sorcery continued to flail in the dirt. Meanwhile, the trampled zombie was already climbing up again.
The watchmaster cast a doubtful eye over his ragtag civilians. What good would their implements be against creatures impervious to pain? He mustered three with autoguns. ‘Aim at the one there, on your right. Wait on my mark and… fire!’ He added a few bolt rounds of his own to a barrage of bullets, most of which flew considerably wide of their target, though some cracked rotting bones to no avail. The zombie’s sunken eyes fixed firmly on the gunners; it kept coming.
Behind it, the Attilans came around for a second attack run. No longer did the watchmaster wish he was below with his colonel. He wished he was out there on horseback – although he almost changed his mind as a zombie leapt upon a horse itself, sinking overgrown, cracked, filthy fingernails into its flank.
The horse bucked, whinnying, and only through consummate skill did its rider remain mounted. His sabre battered his unwanted passenger, slicing off a finger, then a hand, but the zombie clambered up behind him doggedly, lunging for the back of his neck with jaws wide open. The Attilan whirled his blade, neatly lopping off the zombie’s head, which flew and bounced and rolled away. Its decapitated body stayed upright for a second, then collapsed.
‘The head!’ the watchmaster cried. ‘That is their weakness. Remove or destroy the head and they can’t function!’
The closest zombie was within a hundred yards of him now. The watchmaster and his gunners focused their fire on its head, but this only increased the frequency of missed shots. The watchmaster shattered its jaw with a carefully placed bolt, which made its head snap back but didn’t stop it.
His civilians were starting to back away, and he could hardly blame them. They had no armour, no defence against a creature surely riddled with disease. Perhaps with the Chaos plague itself! The watchmaster thought about retreating to the barn. Not yet. He reached for a frag grenade.
‘Get down,’ he growled. ‘Flat on the ground.’
He dropped to one knee, pulled the pin and bowled between the zombie’s legs. Its attention was taken for a moment, dipping its head to follow the pineapple-shaped projectile, though without comprehension.
The frag grenade exploded, buffeting the braced watchmaster with its concussion wave. Debris pattered off him, and a rotten hand landed with a plop beside him. It twitched as if to grab him and he blasted a hole through its palm. The zombie had been dismembered with gratifying ease. Its limbs, strewn across the field, fell still. He couldn’t see its head.
But he could see more zombies like it. Four more, shambling towards him.
The Attilans had problems of their own. Though several zombies lay destroyed, more had replaced them. One rider was surrounded, zombies clawing at his horse again. Distressed, it reared up, kicking out, but though it cracked the skulls of some, they didn’t fall. The other rider fought fiercely with his sabre, taking another head, but he too was hard-pressed.
The watchmaster had one more grenade. Just one. He didn’t want to waste it. He turned to his civilians. ‘Do you have such a thing as a flamer?’ They murmured that they didn’t. ‘Promethium, then? In any form? Go find it, as much as you can. Bottle it and bring it back here. Rags as well, and a combustion source. Wait, give me that.’
He snatched a worker’s shovel from him. Its edges had been sharpened. The watchmaster weighed it in his hands. It would make a better weapon than his sword bayonet for hacking through a neck, lending him better reach.
He instructed his gunners, ‘Keep aiming for their heads. If you can only slow them, that may suffice. When your co-workers bring the promethium, you know what to do? Above all, don’t let these creatures touch you. I’ll draw away as many as I can. Try not to shoot me.’
With that, the watchmaster did what his people did best, what he had had few chances to do in many months. A war cry rattled from his throat as he charged onto enemy ground, his weapon raised.
Idelax was wrenched out of his nightmares.
The daemons in his mind receded, wooden walls rushing in to replace them. He lay, clothed, on a mattress on the floor. A masked Death Korpsman was urgently shaking him awake. ‘Inquisitor, the hamlet is under attack!’
He felt like he had barely closed his eyes, although the nightmares had lasted an eternity. He had no idea where he was. He murmured vague questions, his voice thick in his throat.
The Korpsman asked if he could stand. ‘Of course I can,’ Idelax snapped, with no idea if it were true or not. He accepted assistance, all the same.
Remembering the inquisitor’s plasma pistol, the Korpsman pressed it into Idelax’s hand.
Short of breath, Idelax leaned on the Krieg soldier as they stumbled out of the hut. He couldn’t see anyone, but could hear fighting close by. Only vaguely did he recall being brought this way before.
‘Where are you taking me?’ he asked.
‘The barn, sir.’ The Korpsman stiffened as they passed an alleyway between two rundown huts and saw a figure in it. A grey-faced cadaver, tattered scraps of skin and clothing clinging to it.
It appeared to be mooching aimlessly until it heard or sensed them, whereupon its head snapped up and around. Its dislocated jaw dropped open in a voiceless groan. The zombie slouched towards them, reaching for them.
The Korpsman snapped up his lasgun. Idelax fumbled with his own gun, but was told, ‘Preserve your fuel, sir. I can deal with this.’ The zombie grew closer, too close for Idelax’s comfort. Close enough for its putrefying stink to turn his stomach. Then the Korpsman shot it squarely through its forehead.
It paused as if surprised. A livid las beam hole exposed brain matter. The zombie took another jerking step, only to be shot again. The Korpsman’s marksmanship was flawless, the second hole widening the first. It took a third shot, all the same, before the zombie crumpled as if a light inside it had snapped off.
‘They’re only a threat if they can swarm you,’ said the Korpsman, knowledgably, ‘and get their filthy hands on you.’
Idelax nodded, but in truth he had hardly heard the words. Even this small exertion had set his heart racing again. His head swam, his vision blurring. I should have listened to the medicaes, he thought. The release of his power had been the final straw. Too late now.
The watchmaster swung his borrowed shovel, connecting with a zombie’s head, the impact reverberating along the wooden handle. Whirling round, he jabbed at another’s throat, fracturing a clavicle instead.
The creatures assailed him from every direction. One scrabbled at his greatcoat’s tear, threatening to shred the synthskin patch beneath it. He drove his handle into its guts, breaking its grip only for a second. The zombie came at him again. This time his shovel’s leading edge sliced cleanly through its neck.
Three down! He wasn’t getting through them nearly fast enough. Now three more of them were on him, threatening to bear him down with their combined mass. The zombie whose skull he had dented strained its jaws as if to swallow his entire head, and he felt teeth sinking into his left shin’s greave.
Hoofbeats shook the ground beneath his feet. The watchmaster’s attackers fell away as a curved Attilan blade scythed through them.
He wasted no time signalling his gratitude – in any case, his saviour was long gone. One zombie had lost its right arm and half a leg but was still limping towards him. He stepped away from it to another, its head lolling on its chest, connected to its exposed spinal column only by overstretched tendons. A shovel blow severed those connections, and suddenly the watchmaster found himself unmolested, with a moment to take stock.
Most zombies had lost interest in him, having learned his strength. They were headed for the hamlet once more, for its ill-equipped defenders. Because they are weaker? Can these simple-minded creatures sense that somehow? These civilians were ready, however. They were lighting cloth fuses dipped into promethium-filled bottles, hesitating to throw them only because he remained in the blast zone.
An Attilan horse had been tripped by a bony hand that, rising from a sundered grave, had seized its fetlock. Its rider was being swarmed, dragged from his saddle. His comrade tried to reach him, but two zombies, caked in fresh mud, sprang up in his path and his mount shied from them. Right now, that was where the watchmaster could be most effective.
He bowled through the zombies from behind, none turning to see him coming. He planted his feet and swung his shovel, his only goal to buy time for the rider and his horse to catch their breaths. The former tried to stand, but could not support himself. He clutched at the watchmaster’s greatcoat as he fell again, almost dragging him down too.
An improvised promethium bomb exploded in midair. The watchmaster saw harsh beauty in its fiery blossom, but the zombies fighting with him hardly seemed to notice. At least some approaching the hamlet were now burning, flames catching in their ragged strands of hair and clothing.
He blinked away red blotches from his vision. He swung his sharpened shovel, felt it ringing in his hands as it stove in another skull.
Another promethium bomb burst, and another. Smoke was beginning to obscure the scene, but the watchmaster counted around thirteen zombies still standing – their numbers diminishing at last, but painfully slowly – half aflame and yet still plodding onwards, their aspects even more nightmarish than ever, looking like infernal daemons.
