The Relentless Dead, page 27
‘She was posing as a worker in a coastal hamlet,’ Petrakov supplied, standing stiffly in the doorway, ‘but was soon discovered, never having done a day’s work with her hands. She surrendered to my Firstborn, offering information for her life.’
‘There will be no such deal,’ the interrogator snarled.
‘But I can tell you where to find your foes.’
‘And so you shall. You’ll tell me everything you know – by choice and lighten the stains upon your soul or under torture, it is all the same to me.’
The prisoner sniffed and swallowed. ‘I saw traitors in the hamlet,’ she began. ‘Some nights, they’d slip away to meet their masters in the tunnels and receive instructions. I… I overheard directions to the witches’ temple. North from the opening behind the food store… third turning on the right, and then…’
The lady’s cracked voice faded. Interrogator Layne leaned closer to her. Thus, he didn’t hear – or disregarded – the three quick footsteps coming up behind him. He felt the lasgun muzzle pressed to the back of his head, too late to react. Squeezing his trigger, Colonel Petrakov boiled the interrogator’s brain. Before his body hit the floor, the Vostroyan had whirled to greet the jailer, who, alerted by the weapon’s crack, rushed into the cell.
He aimed for its heart, knowing that the cybernetic systems laced through its body made its brain near redundant. He missed by half an inch. The stoic servitor grunted and returned fire with the laspistol wired to the end of its left arm. Petrakov, dodging the beam, collided with the wall. As he fumbled to take aim again, the servitor leapt on him, swiping his lasgun from his hands.
‘Stand down,’ he barked. ‘I order you as your commander-in-chief!’
The gambit wouldn’t have worked on a fully-thinking soldier. The servitor, however, programmed not to question, faltered – long enough for a bolt of electricity to strike it. Crackling tendrils enwrapped its muscular body, blowing its mechanical components. It crumpled. Petrakov’s nose wrinkled as a smell of burning plastek filled the cell. Lady Emelian, still chained, sat straighter now, as green fire faded from her eyes. She looked up at the Vostroyan in hope.
His lips twisted into a smirk, and she smiled in relief. ‘I had heard rumours, but I didn’t know for sure.’
‘Not even the most arrogant of men is immune to self-doubt.’ Kneeling, Petrakov snatched the jailer’s keys from its belt. There were a dozen of them, hanging from a thick metal ring. He didn’t have much time. He had sent his aides on fools’ errands, but they never left him alone for long.
He felt the lady seething with impatience as he tried each key in turn. She warned him, ‘I cannot do that again. Not soon. I am not yet strong enough.’
The fifth key worked, unsnapping a wrist manacle. Different keys were required for the others, and tense minutes passed as Petrakov searched for them.
‘Will these actions not expose you?’ asked the lady.
The colonel shook his head. ‘The interrogator and I arrived to find an empty cell. The jailer must have freed you. It shot Layne from behind and attempted to kill me too. I shot it in return and saw a spectre fleeing from its shadow.’
The last manacle fell away with a welcome clank. Ruefully, Lady Emelian rubbed her wrists and ankles. ‘How do I get out of here?’
‘A new way into the catacombs. A secret way. I’ll take you to it.’ From his greatcoat, Petrakov produced a dataslate, handing it to her. ‘You know what to do with this? You have no doubts?’
Another flash of green. ‘They took my son from me, then my husband, then they tried to take my life. They sent those masked fanatics to murder us all.’
‘On Oleris, we are never truly parted. You will see them both again.’
The lady nodded tearfully as Petrakov helped her to stand. ‘A lifetime of blind devotion, and how was I treated for it? Abominably, let me tell you. Never once was I allowed a taste of power. Not real power such as you have shown me. My eyes are open now. I have no doubts.’
Petrakov cautioned her, ‘Even in possession of this form, I cannot slow the Inquisition, only keep a step ahead of it.’
The lady understood. ‘As long as one of us eludes their grasp.’
‘Then we will rise again, as we have many times before.’
‘And next time, or the time after, there will be a different outcome.’
They left the dingy cell together, slipping into the cold shadows of the dungeon’s furthest reaches. ‘Our ultimate triumph is inevitable,’ bragged the entity now clad in the commander-in-chief’s body, ‘so we can afford to be patient.’
‘Our numbers grow with every passing day,’ agreed the lady.
‘And the dead can wait forever.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Lyons’ work in the Warhammer 40,000 universe includes the novellas Iron Resolve, Engines of War and Angron’s Monolith, the Astra Militarum novels Death World, Ice Guard, Dead Men Walking, Krieg and Siege of Vraks, and the audio dramas Waiting Death and The Madness Within. He has also written numerous short stories and is currently working on more tales from the grim darkness of the far future.
An extract from The Fall of Cadia.
Blood and iron.
Iron and blood.
One lay on the other, and within the other. The slick shine of the iron-rich blood – still warm – on the cold surface of the bell. Two related elements, joined in accidental symbolism.
If records were to be believed, the bell had been forged from blood.
It was said that when Saint Gerstahl – the sacred soldier, favoured patron of the Cadian trooper – fell defending the Gate in the centuries after the Great Heresy, acolytes collected his vitae in a crystal reliquary. There it stayed for centuries, a venerated and lucrative relic on the shrine world christened with his name.
Until, one night, Blessed Gerstahl appeared to the cardinal with a message: he must extract the iron from the tarry, coagulated remnants and forge it into a bell.
A bell that would toll when Cadia was in mortal danger.
The cardinal forged the relic as instructed, then took the bell on a tour of the Cadian Gate, purifying world after world with the vibration of its holy resonance. A fortunate choice, since it escaped destruction when the Despoiler immolated the shrine world – and Gerstahl’s incorruptible remains – during the Third Black Crusade.
On Solar Mariatus, two million welcomed the bell. Sobbing crowds parted to make a path for the fifty Battle Sisters of the Order of Our Martyred Lady who formed its vanguard. In the Derades Subsector, it was said that its chime healed the deaf and straightened crooked limbs. And on Laurentix, in the Belis Corona System, the populace wailed in ecstasy when it tolled a dozen times without being touched by human hands.
That was when the Black Legion descended upon it, in the opening raids of the Twelfth Black Crusade.
The vanguard had sworn to die rather than surrender their relic. And they fulfilled that oath. Their bodies now lay beneath the cold iron of the bell, some resting in its shadow. Chest cavities blown open, limbs severed from the impact of traitor bolt-shells, their own vitae splashed onto the blood-forged iron. It ran in frozen rivulets down the engraved surface, turning the scrollwork and decorative psalms into channels of gore.
They had saved it, in a sense.
Their stoic defence had given Trazyn time to lock the bell and its entourage in stasis, then spirit it to the archival vaults of Solemnace.
Now it hung, unmoving and fastened in time, among the relics of Cadia past. Gazed upon by the unseeing eyes of general officers snatched from the battlefield, zigzag trench-lines full of Shock Troops and a rank of Chimera variants bisected to show internal detail.
Overhead, a squad of Night Lords Raptors arced through the vaults above a lit display of human eyes.
All of them, artefacts of the Cadian Gate. The ephemera of Abaddon the Despoiler’s twelve Black Crusades.
Darkened exhibits stretched across twenty-five square miles, a private gallery of humans, exquisitely arranged to please the historical and aesthetic tastes of the alien curator who’d imprisoned them.
Nothing in the gallery apart from maintenance scarabs had moved in over a millennium.
Which is why the soft pat-pat-pat of fluid echoed as far as it did.
It fell from the iron surface of the bell like the first drops of icicles melting on the eaves of a hab. Drip. Drip-drip.
Jewelled drops met the upturned forehead of a slain Battle Sister and stained her pale skin with splashes of crimson.
Pat. Pat-pat.
More drops. Coalescing on her brow, trickling into her open eyes.
Blood moved on the bell’s skin, collecting in beads like rain on a window and falling in defiance of the stasis field.
And the bell, without propulsion or force, began to swing.
A hand’s breadth at first. A sway. Its clapper moving in a soft pendulum arc too weak to do more than scrape the sides.
Then, the arc widened, the violent motion of the bell flinging droplets of blood to either side, spattering the faces of stasis-locked Shock Troopers. Sizzling on the protective fields of lasgun displays. Swaying wider until the bell went fully perpendicular and the clapper inside dropped, its hammer striking the iron of the bell.
Clang.
One.
The blackstone floor vibrated. A rank of medals swayed, its stasis field shorting out. An organic clatter filled the chamber, the sound of ten thousand jaws – held shut by hard-light holograms – shaken so hard that the teeth rattled.
Overhead, the flight of Night Lords Raptors tumbled from the vaults and into a trench display, snapping bones and crushing lasgun barrels. Neither Traitor Space Marines nor Guardsmen reacted.
Clang.
Two.
Trazyn, Overlord of Solemnace, Archaeovist of the Prismatic Galleries and He-Who-Is-Called-Infinite, screamed in rage.
‘Sannet! What is happening?’
‘Unclear,’ answered his chief cryptek, his multijointed fingers dancing across phos-glyph panels. ‘Unknown resonance. Macro-seismic. Cracking the vaults, releasing coolant. We’ve lost the Ooliac sand sculptures.’
‘Call the restoration scarabs.’
‘Not responding,’ Sannet answered, data-chains flashing across his ocular. ‘Our nodal program misinterpreted the vibration as a re-interment signal. The legion has entered radical shutdown. I cannot rouse them.’
Trazyn cursed the very wheel of the cosmos. The interval between shocks had been only seconds apart, and while mental speech between he and Sannet was near instant, they were running out of time before the next tectonic shudder would hit.
‘It’s not tectonic, lord,’ said Sannet. ‘It’s coming from the gallery.’
‘Where?’
‘The Black Crusades wing.’
‘That’s only two levels do–’
Clang.
Three.
The shockwave shook Trazyn apart, his joint servos spasming and dislocating with the intensity of it.
He evacuated the dying body and rushed his spirit-algorithm into the network of data-channels in the walls. Found a waiting lychguard he could use as a surrogate. Melted and reshaped the borrowed body into his accustomed form as he ran towards the gates of the Cadian gallery. Waved a hand at the enormous gates in a gesture of opening.
Clang.
Four.
The doors ahead, twice the size of a monolith, blew off their hinges and toppled down at him. He felt them crumple the necrodermis of his cranium like parchment and burst his central reactor before he transferred to another body, sheltered in the lee of a Baneblade.
He sprinted. Waving hands at display plinths, throwing code-signals from his palm emitters. Trying to restart shielding and repulsors, to protect his delicate artefacts.
‘No, no, no, no, no, no–’
Trazyn saw the bell.
Trazyn saw the blood.
He slowed his chronosense to take in the swinging relic and its sheets of ruby spray. It was far more human vitae than had been splashed on its surface.
Almost as if the relic itself were bleeding from the pockmarks and scratches where bolt-shells had marked it.
‘Sannet,’ Trazyn said, casting his visual senses into the data-stream of Solemnace so his cryptek could run analysis. ‘The stasis field has failed. Hard restart.’
‘The field is active,’ Sannet responded. ‘Movement should be impossible.’
‘Not impossible, warpcraft.’
Trazyn watched in fascinated horror as the bell completed its arc, the blood-forged metal swinging high as the hammer inside dropped like the great mace of a warmaster.
Clang.
Five.
Across the galaxy, past burning stars, teeming worlds and cold expanses of nothing, lay the blasted world of Eriad VI. The Ark Mechanicus vessel Iron Revenant hung in its orbit, casting a cruciform shadow on the surface.
Down, down, through the nuclear-blighted atmosphere and crust overrun with ork ravagers. Down in black tunnels of alien scale and curve, stood Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl.
‘Nearly,’ he said, stretching the word. His eyes squeezed tight, optic nerves rerouted through the visual lenses of the skull probe he’d guided into the bore-hole. The on-off strobe of its ultraviolet lamp – used to map the worming tunnels within the blackstone – was the only illumination. He sensed a data-stream connection. ‘Careful, little one. Rise two skull-lengths. Pivot thirty-five degrees right. Ahead four lengths – now, now, now! All ahead steady and open connection! Op–’
The data flooded in, pasting across his vision, unfamiliar glyphs that slid cold into his mind, chill as the nothing of space.
The servo-skull’s vision blasted to static, its auditory ports howling in Cawl’s augmented brain.
‘Damn it!’ he cursed, yanking the skull-jack free from his temple. ‘Qvo, another probe!’
No response. His programmable servant – cloned from a long-dead companion – was either not listening, or perhaps had reset due to the flood of data.
‘Qvo?’ He turned. ‘Qvo, are you lis–’
He stopped.
The aeldari standing behind his right shoulder had not triggered a single alert in his sensorium net.
She crouched on a cogitator bank, toes together, knees spread wide – an inverted-triangle pose inhuman in its gravity-defying grace.
‘The skeins of fate wind tight about the gate,’ Veilwalker said, her egg-like mask nothing but a swirl of smoke. The hues of her motley seemed to blaze in the dark cavern. ‘Again, I plea – does thy mind now see?’
‘Your rhymes are impenetrable nonsense,’ he growled. ‘It is a necron world, bombarded by the Despoiler during the Fourth Black Crusade. But why would he bombard an empty planet? I cannot fathom why you insisted I come here.’
‘More excavation,’ the xenos answered, cocking her head, ‘will dispel frustration.’
‘To hells with your childish rhymes. Just tell me what you want me to know!’
She shook her head, mask gleaming blue in apology. ‘You must play your role – the bell does toll.’
‘And what, by the blessed reactor, is that supposed to mean?’
Clang.
Six.
‘It started an hour ago, canoness,’ said Sister Navarette. Even with her daily training regimen, Genevieve could hear that her Seraphim Superior was out of breath climbing the bell-tower stairs.
They should have taken their jump packs.
The Shrine of St Morrican was a large edifice, and the bell-tower one of the tallest buildings in the Kraf Sector – securing the gateway between Cadia Primus and Cadia Secundus.
For nigh a hundred days it had served as a linchpin of the defence, ensuring that the Archenemy forces of the Thirteenth Black Crusade – which had overrun Kasr Myrak to the north – did not break loose into the Kraf Plain.
‘It’s ringing?’ Genevieve asked. ‘Are you certain?’
‘Without being touched.’
Genevieve bolted up the last flight, emerging into the vault of the bell-tower. And saw her own face, tight-lipped, looking back at her.
‘Canoness Genevieve,’ said her twin sister, Eleanor, with a formal bend of her head.
It was every bit like looking in a mirror. Ironic, given how different they were. Twin canonesses in twin suits of armour. Only differing in every other way – and the simple fact that Genevieve’s recent ocular augmetic replaced her left eye rather than the right.
But when they faced each other, that only enhanced the feeling of looking in a glass.
‘I see you are late,’ sneered Arch-Deacon Mendazus. ‘As was ever the case.’
‘If you wanted me here, perhaps either of you could have sent word a miracle was occurring.’
Eleanor opened her mouth to respond.
Then the Bell of St Morrican sounded.
Eleanor crouched under the bell, staring up into the dark interior, and reached out a hand to help the frail Mendazus duck underneath.
The bell moved not, its clapper hung dead at its centre. And yet the great throat reverberated with the thrum of a note struck far away.
Genevieve joined them, the two canonesses and their overseeing priest standing inside the massive enclosure, flesh shaking from the aural assault.
Genevieve touched the curving interior surface. ‘It resonates. It trembles.’
‘Signs and wonders,’ whispered Eleanor, genuflecting. ‘It rings without human hand, like its sister, the Bell of Gerstahl. The one that rang in warning of the Twelfth Black Crusade, then ascended to avoid capture.’
‘A bit late for a warning, isn’t it? We’ve been fighting the Despoiler’s Thirteenth Crusade for nigh three months.’
‘It rings in celebration,’ said Arch-Deacon Mendazus.
