The Relentless Dead, page 25
He glimpsed bodies fresher than the rest, having not begun to rot. The dead as yet uncounted, whose sacrifices had paved his way to the mausoleum. He heard their voices louder than the others. They didn’t understand what they had done to earn such ignominious fates. They blamed him too.
Like a scrumball, Graven was tossed from one part of the crowd to another. It felt like every zombie took a turn inflicting its revenge upon him. Then, just as he felt the torture might never end, the crowd parted and he fell through them, to land like a wet sack in mud.
Squelching footsteps approached him. Graven raised himself onto his hands and knees. He forced himself to do the last thing he wished to do: look up.
He already knew who he would see.
The watchmaster couldn’t find a target.
The mausoleum’s forecourt and the space around it were crammed with thrusting bodies. A deer-headed beastman, lowering its antlers, had ploughed into the crush. Death Korpsmen and Vostroyans, scrambling away from it, stumbled into each other. A comrade collided with the watchmaster, and he fought to keep them both standing.
He saw a little daemon, but red greatcoats closed about it. Bright bursts of fire and lightning told him the positions of two witches, but Krieg helmets blocked his bolt pistol’s sights. Attilan horses wheeled about the edges of the melee, their riders seeking sightlines too. He had no overview of the situation, couldn’t issue orders and knew few would hear him anyway.
He kept himself alert, bided his time, until a gap opened through which he saw the crazed eyes of a goat-like beastman. Gladly he closed with it, his bayonet ringing off its combat knife. He used the crush to his advantage, as the physically weaker but more skilled combatant. Feinting, the watchmaster drew the maddened creature after him. A hoof snagged on a daemon’s body that it hadn’t seen, stealing its balance for a crucial instant, during which he shot it point-blank in the face.
Howling, the beastman fell and was trampled underfoot. Hearing another cry, more human, alongside him, the watchmaster spun around. A Vostroyan sergeant clutched her throat, blood welling over her gorget, through her fingers. She crumpled, but the watchmaster could see no attacker. Sorcery!
The crowd shifted, more confused than ever, and suddenly a Korpsman yelled, ‘There’s something here, something we can’t–’ The warning was choked off – he was thrashing as if beset by unseen daemons. The watchmaster fought to make it to him, as blood spilled from the Korpsman’s throat too.
He recalled the testimony of Vostroyan Guardsman Bukharin, possessed but lacing his lies with truth. ‘Without us seeing their approach, there were three of them among us.’ An invisible enemy. The witch I saw vanish from the steps!
Others had worked it out too. ‘I felt it! It went that way! There!’ Blades jabbed, hands snatched at empty air, and suddenly, between them, appeared not the witch as the watchmaster had expected, but something even more disturbing: a shapeless, glistening, blood-red mound of eyes and mouths and thrashing tentacles.
The soldiers closest to it reacted with horror, but then, as their training kicked in, being trapped with it anyway, determinedly set about it.
Something held the watchmaster back, but he couldn’t quite grasp what it was. Looking at the monster made his brain itch. It didn’t react to the blows rained down upon it. Nor did it try to fight back. His every sense warned him of its dark presence, its palpable threat, but blades drew no blood from the monster, meeting no resistance as they plunged into its quivering form.
He wrenched his gaze from it. From what is it meant to distract me?
The attack came from behind him: a slender arm thrown about his neck, a small, sharp knife pressed to his throat. The witch must have seen his stripes and chosen him as her next victim. Anticipating her – if only by a fraction of a second – the watchmaster reacted to her touch, throwing off her hold before it could be tightened, rounding on her, lashing out. His elbow struck flesh, followed by his bayonet, which elicited a disembodied shriek.
His next thrust missed its mark. The witch was running, panicking, attempting to barge rather than wend through the melee, thus marking her path by the disturbance she created. The watchmaster waded after her, shouting for attention. Enough of his comrades, hearing, braced themselves against her, and now he knew her position from the ring of Death Korpsmen penning her in.
From the corner of his eye, he saw that the tentacled monster had vanished. The witch appeared, where he had known she was. Her once-pale skin was flushed. She held her slashed right arm against her chest. Scowling in concentration, the witch took a long, deep breath. A breath that didn’t seem to end.
‘Kill her,’ the watchmaster bellowed, ‘before she can…’ Do what? The air felt charged, as though she was sucking something from it. Her chest continued to swell. Despite the close quarters, he risked a shot at her, which struck her in the stomach. Grunting, the witch stumbled back into his comrades, who gleefully bayoneted her.
She emptied her lungs in a scream that tore the world open.
Warp horrors tumbled through the rifts into the watchmaster’s mind. With ease, they smashed through his too-flimsy psychic defences. Throwing his hands to his ears – he must have dropped his weapons without knowing it – couldn’t blunt the dreadful sound. Resistance was futile. As futile as life itself. The scream grew louder, shriller. He was blind, his brain throbbing fit to explode.
Then the sound ceased and the pressure behind his eyes relented.
The witch’s scream had been choked off by a death rattle. Blood poured from every orifice in her head as she fell to her knees. They had hurt her enough, thank the Emperor, so the effort of the scream had killed her before it could kill them. Her limbs still twitched and her lips mouthed meaningless words, but her staring eyes were dead.
A slavering, lupine beastman lunged at Serafina’s face.
She chided herself as she threw up an arm to block it. Distracted, she had let it get too close. The creature howled as its teeth broke on her vambrace. She pushed it away, into a pair of Krieg Death Korpsmen, who gladly set about it.
Her attention had already returned to the Tallyman. It stood atop the steps, sliding beads across its abacus with every Imperial death it witnessed. Lesser foes had kept her from it, until now. Having cursed the Krieg’s tenacity minutes ago, now she was grateful for it. She realised that, even after all, they were closing ranks to keep the beastmen from her ordained Sisters.
They had bought her the respite she had been craving.
‘Sisters, to me!’ she commanded. As many as could strove to reach her across the heaving forecourt. Three made it. It would have to be enough.
Mounting the mausoleum steps, they strafed the Traitor Marine with their bolters. The Sister Superior prayed that, damaged as its power armour was, a few rounds might get through. She was disappointed. Another bead was slid, another number intoned in a voice like a rasp across her nerves.
‘We need to get in closer,’ she fumed, ‘pry it out of that shell with our blades.’
Their barrage had had one effect. Startled, the multi-eyed boy-witch in the gateway jerked out of his mysterious trance and shrank behind his armoured ally for protection. The Tallyman gripped him by the scruff of his hessian cloak and hurled him down the steps towards the oncoming foes.
Equally disdainfully, Serafina batted him aside. Let the Krieg have him! Her sights remained fixed on a bone skull visor, through which green eyes returned her glare with apparent indifference. A chance to atone for her mistakes. As if I ever could. A chance to avenge her closest sister’s death, at least.
She might have screamed something to that effect as she crashed into the Traitor Marine. It felt like colliding with a tank. Despite her own armour, she feared her shoulder had been dislocated. Her three Battle Sisters were right with her. Last time, they had deprived the Tallyman of its most powerful weapon. This time, they had to do much worse.
Serafina snatched at the monster’s wrist but couldn’t hold it as it punched a Sister’s head and snapped her neck. On impulse, she lunged for its abacus and shuffled its beads, which had the desired effect. The Tallyman roared with indignation and focused on dislodging her. It winced as another Sister found a weak spot in its armour, sliding a dagger into its side.
The Tallyman shook Serafina off. She landed in an undignified heap on her rump. Though she leapt straight back to her feet, she saw that her Sisters too were disarrayed, while their foe appeared to have shrugged off its wound. Four Sisters – three already – weren’t enough to take it down.
She was not strong enough.
Little remained of Colonel Kleber, Graven’s old commanding officer.
Burnt cloth and burnt flesh clung to his half-melted bones. His crested helmet balanced on a leering skull, the right side of which had drooped, elongating its eye socket. The cadaver’s right foot dragged as it lurched up to the prone Graven, glared down at him.
Graven’s voice rasped from a dry throat. ‘Sir, forgive me, please. I know I disobeyed your orders.’
A swell of noise threatened to drown out his plea. It was a sound he hadn’t heard before. A harsh, staccato sound. A cruel sound. The sound of hundreds of Death Korpsmen of Krieg laughing at him. He tried to ignore them, to continue, ‘I believed I acted for the greater good.’
Kleber dropped to his haunches, fixing Graven with his damaged stare and rictus grin. His voice was cold like death itself. ‘Captain Graven, I forgive you.’
Graven blinked at him, nonplussed.
‘I forgive you – for all but your insufferable naivety.’ The laughter around him grew in volume. ‘For believing that life matters.’
‘Colonel, what are you saying?’
‘You shortened our lives by an eye-blink. We’d have thrown them away for as little, soon enough. What is life, after all, but a journey back to death, a brief respite from never-ending torment?’
‘No. No, death is peace. Death is atonement.’
‘A lie we were told to preserve our sanity and ensure compliance. But there is no peace here, Graven, and atonement is a dream.’
‘But the Emperor!’
‘Will never release Krieg from its wretched servitude. A millennium and a half after one man’s original sin, surely that is evident by now?’
He was right. It did seem clear to Graven, as if a fog was lifting from his mind. Now that it was too late. Every doubt ever to cross his mind and heart, that he had pushed away. He should have listened to himself. He remembered every battle he had fought in, each victory, each loss. What peace had they ever brought? His life – the lives of generations of his people, billions upon billions of brainwashed drones – had meant nothing, had counted for nothing. They meant nothing.
‘No sacrifice can ever be enough,’ his old, dead colonel taunted him.
A sensation new to Graven gripped his chest, as if to crush it. He didn’t have a name for it, but as it drained his scant remaining strength, as a pitiful whine escaped his throat and all he wanted was to curl up into a foetal ball and fade away, the word came to him: Despair!
Despair such as the Krieg looked in the eye each moment of their hopeless lives. Looked in its eye and spat in it.
With that new understanding, there came light.
Graven couldn’t comprehend it, because how could there possibly be light in this ultimate darkness? The light, however, would not be denied, and the laughter of the ghosts around him petered out as they retreated with the shadows.
Ghosts! He remembered the grave worker, Rayoul, and his spectre-induced lies. Remembering how certain he had been then, Graven felt his heart stirring with an echo of that faith. Kleber spoke the very same words to me, he realised, in the same voice too. A spectre’s voice. How did I not see that before?
His head had drooped, but he raised it again.
Colonel Kleber still stood over him, but somehow he seemed shorter. Golden light streamed about him, transfixing him in writhing pain. It stripped away the shadows with which he had disguised himself, and Graven saw him – saw it – as it truly was. A gaunt, daemonic figure, its skull-mouth open in a silent scream.
The light built in intensity until it blinded him, but he didn’t try to close his eyes. Or were they already closed? After what seemed like minutes, the light faded, leaving nothing of the daemon. Graven felt as if a portion of its glow remained within him.
Blinking, he began to make out shapes around him. The galleries of the mausoleum. He felt its tiled floor beneath his hands. Alive! He was looking up into Saint Josefina’s eyes. As always, she was wreathed in golden candlelight. The same light that had saved him? Had anything – the light, even the daemon and its whispers – been real? He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t summon up a prayer expansive enough for what he had experienced.
Then the memory of the Tallyman rushed back to him. That horror, however, was nowhere to be seen. Hearing the battle without, its sounds muffled by thick stone walls, Graven knew why he was back here.
His back ached where the Sister’s blade had pierced it, but the bleeding appeared to have been stemmed. His body, which before had felt so heavy, was reinvigorated. He picked himself up. From the chamber’s edges, a couple of near-mindless servitors watched him in bewilderment.
Graven snatched up his power sword. Gripped by a fresh sense of purpose, he marched towards the narthex. His pace was unhurried. He had utter faith that however long he took would be the right amount of time. Thus had it been ordained.
The gateway loomed ahead of him, his foe’s substantial form framed by it. The Tallyman made its stand on the broad stone steps, its back turned to him. Three Battle Sisters, including Serafina, stabbed and battered furiously at it. It had lost its plasma pistol. Its scarred and dented, partially melted armour leaked green pus, promethium and blood, but it endured.
It swung its abacus, caught a Sister’s jaw and sent her flying down the steps. Now there were only two. Shooting out, its hand seized Serafina’s throat. She gasped and spluttered as she was lifted from the ground, servo-assisted metal-encased fingers in the process of crushing her larynx.
Calmly, unhurriedly, Colonel Graven took two steps. He spied a crack between corroded plates of power armour. He thrust his burning sword up into that crack, through the Tallyman’s back, and out through its chest.
XVIII
With the Tallyman’s fall, the battle was all but decided.
Colonel Petrakov arrived later than he would have liked. Having had to abandon his Salamander outside the necropolis, he had rounded up four Vostroyan squads to lead through its narrow byways. Few zombies remained, but ill fortune had contrived to strew them in his path.
As far as he was able, while fighting for his life, he had parsed the curt, breathless reports in his comm-bead’s earpiece. He had heard of Imperial gains and losses in, it seemed, equal measure. Back on the move, almost at his destination, he had hoped to tip the balance.
Graven! he had thought sourly, upon hearing the news – from three sources, overlapping, unable to hide the admiration in their voices. Why did it have to be Graven? A churlish thought, he knew. He pushed it aside as, rounding one last corner, he blinked in the mausoleum’s lights.
A goat-faced beastman came barrelling towards him. Petrakov snapped up his lasgun, but before he could fire it, two Guardsmen stepped in front of him. More joined them, piling on the bleating creature – which, he realised, was already wounded and had been attempting to flee.
He sent his soldiers forward into the scrum. Petrakov himself held back, appraising the situation, judging it too chaotic to risk firing at the few foes he could see. He clicked his fingers and an aide rushed forwards, placing in them his best weapon in the circumstances. A laud hailer.
His amplified voice impressed upon the heretics the full force of his rank, his people’s noble reputation and the Emperor’s authority vested in him. ‘Surrender,’ he enjoined them. ‘Throw yourselves at His mercy.’
The beastmen fought on, not so dull-witted as to be unaware that the only mercy on the table for them was a speedy execution. The witches must have known it too, but one at least retained the naivety of youth.
The boy-witch knelt at the foot of the mausoleum steps. His extra eyes had withered, their green glows extinguished. To the nearest Battle Sister, he entreated, ‘Please, the… the thing they put inside me, it fled when it foresaw that all was lost. I’m free again.’ He broke down, racked with shuddering sobs.
Whether or not he spoke the truth was immaterial. A bolt round through one of those vestigial eyes cleansed the world of his infection.
Despite their continued resistance, the heretics appeared to have lost heart and, with it, strength. Or perhaps it was that the Imperial defenders had gained both. There was a moment when that could have changed. The Krieg watchmaster was one of the first to see a spectre as it sprang up through the ground between his feet. He felt its frigid presence in his bones, but it didn’t attack him.
He followed its flight into the sky, where it congregated with more of its kind. Their emergence caused a stir down on the battlefield, where many had not seen their like before. A few fired up into the gathering shadows, in vain.
‘They can only harm those who doubt or fear them,’ the watchmaster reminded all within reach of his voice – not many, but the call was quickly taken up by others, including eventually by Petrakov on the melee’s edge with his laud hailer, and the truth of it was soon evidenced to all.
A few spectres broke off from the pack and, choosing targets, swooped upon them. They found themselves resisted long enough to be assailed in turn. Blades sliced into their briefly solid forms and, as they fled, beams of light holed their tattered shadows. They had arrived too late, with too few allies surviving to distract for them. More pertinently, they had materialised after the Tallyman’s fall, to face foes whose hearts held few doubts any longer.
