The Relentless Dead, page 7
His gaunt partner pointed at a Korpsman, clenched his fist, and his target convulsed and dropped his weapon, clawing at his throat. The fire witch pointed at the other, eyes flashing, and flames burst from the Korpsman’s greatcoat. He dropped and rolled to quench the blaze. The first Korpsman too fell to his knees, struggling vainly against an invisible chokehold.
More Krieg were appearing in surrounding doorways, however, closing on their foes as instructed. The watchmaster yelled, ‘Their shield is down!’
The shimmer around the two witches had indeed vanished, presumably dropped in favour of offensive action. The Krieg brought their guns back to bear, distracting the witches’ attention from their victims, who lay gasping in the mud. The watchmaster left his own bolt pistol in its holster. The telekine was again waving his arms. A las beam to his back appeared to pierce whatever armour he was wearing, wrenching a howl from him, but he quickly recovered himself and restarted his ritual.
The watchmaster was still closest to him. From his belt he unclipped a frag grenade. He stepped from behind the meeting house and bowled it underarm. It landed with a plop between the witches’ feet, even as their dome of force sprang up again – around them and the bomb.
He relished their looks of horror as they saw it, recognised it, did the only thing they could. They leapt for cover, through the shimmer, ahead of the inevitable explosion. Fire blossomed inside the dome, marking its borders plainly, and sent a tidal wave of boiling mud out through it over both the witches.
The fire witch was first to stand, but only to find Death Korpsmen streaming at him from every direction, their war cries merging into a discordant scream for vengeance. The witch recovered his dropped cane and tried to cast another hex, but screamed himself as bayonets tore into his flesh.
The watchmaster started towards the melee, but saw the telekine, lying on his back, stirring. He drew his pistol now, bellowing a warning.
The witch brought his hands together with a clap like thunder, and the Korpsmen around him were sent flying through the air as if by a sudden tornado. Rain barrels were uprooted with them, bursting open. A Korpsman slammed into the burning hut, which creaked and groaned, straining to break free of its too-shallow foundations. Others landed, winded, in the dirt up to a hundred feet away. Even the watchmaster, far from the epicentre, felt the blast, which sent him reeling back towards the meeting house.
Only the fire witch emerged unscathed, and he helped the other to his feet as their enemies lay groaning all about them. The watchmaster took a shot at him, but the witch gestured, the shimmer reappeared between them, and his las beam was easily deflected.
He had a sick feeling in his stomach, one he recognised having felt it just one time before. The feeling that the tide had turned decisively and that the Krieg, so close to triumph mere seconds ago, were now fighting a losing battle.
But then a new sound reached his ears. An old, familiar sound to give him hope. The sound of the watchmaster’s prayers answered.
A thundering of hooves.
Graven came to with a hoarse scream of defiance.
He thrashed against imaginary foes, which dissipated into smoke. He was sweating. He was alone. He was in a burning building. Flames licked across the ceiling, and suddenly a blazing timber came plummeting towards him. He rolled out of its way as it crashed down by his head.
His scattered thoughts were reordering themselves. He remembered the witch’s attack. He remembered where he was. He could make out a glow from the window at which he had been stationed. He had made it across the room from it. Just as well, as the inferno was spreading from there.
Graven couldn’t see the door, but he remembered its position in relation to the window. He crawled on hands and knees towards it. Smoke was thickening around him – without his respirator, it would likely have choked him in his sleep. How long had he been out, and why hadn’t his comrades come for him?
Was the battle still ongoing? Over the roaring flames, he couldn’t hear.
The door was burning too. Its latch burnt his fingers through his gloves. He pushed the door open, tumbled through. The flames pursued him down wooden steps and out through the front of the hut.
Out here, the air was clearer, cooler, and he almost ran into an armoured horse. Graven drew his power sword and lit it up. He needed a moment to process all that he could see.
He saw Death Korpsmen and mounted Attilan Rough Riders. He saw the two witches, separated, both surrounded, desperate, wounded. Horses wheeled about them, riders slashing at their targets with curved sabres. The Krieg provided covering las fire and, where they saw an opening, bayonet charges.
The fire witch gesticulated, and green fire filled his eyes and mouth. He was preparing to unleash another blast. Before he could, a shotgun shell burst against his kneecap, causing him to shriek and buckle. His fire fizzled.
The telekine pointed at a charging horse; the animal stumbled, unseating its rider, who rolled expertly, tucking his chin and knees into his chest. The witch took his chance to flee towards the meeting house, but another Attilan rode him down: their sergeant, whom Graven remembered from the compound. Her horse reared up behind the witch and cracked his skull with its hooves. He fell in a welter of blood, and the gleeful sergeant’s mount trampled his body into the mud.
Graven had seen enough.
The fire witch was kneeling, attempting to cast again, his hands trembling such that he could barely hold his cane. He saw the Krieg colonel bearing down on him and began to speak – whether to curse him or plead with him, no one would ever know. Briefly, Graven wondered if the witch knew him from his crested helmet, if he recognised a foe he had thought slain, and if that stoked his fear in his final moments. They call us the Relentless Dead!
His sword cleaved through the witch’s neck.
The battle was over, but much remained to be done.
They searched the meeting house in case more witches lurked within. They dragged the altar back over the hole in the floor, along with a bench for good measure, to impede any new arrivals.
The witches’ corpses they cast into the burning hut. They let the fire burn itself out, but contained it when it threatened to spread to other buildings. They didn’t lack for rainwater for this task.
They tended to their wounded. Thank the Emperor, there had been no fatalities, only bruises, minor burns and, for the Korpsman thrown into the hut, cracked ribs. The watchmaster thanked Sergeant Batu for her squad’s assistance. She grinned at him. ‘Sorry we couldn’t get here any faster. We rode as hard as we could after picking up your colonel’s call.’
‘Your timing could hardly have been better,’ he said.
They checked on their prisoners in the barn. They had heard barely a peep from them, but that changed when they saw Death Korpsmen in the doorway. They must have heard the fighting and, now they knew its outcome, realised that they were doomed. Their anguished howls rang out across the hamlet, and the watchmaster wondered how many regretted their transgressions.
‘It wasn’t our fault,’ one wailed, ‘we only did as we were told.’
The watchmaster thought about the spectre that had attacked Graven in the night. What if his leader too had been overtaken? What if he had spoken with the spectre’s voice today? I would have known, he told himself. I would have seen it right away. Still, it was an uncomfortable thought.
The Krieg were conditioned, above all, to follow orders, not to question. How much damage could an enemy have done that gave those orders? It could not happen, he decided. The colonel resisted his spectre as any Imperial officer would. It does not control him and never could.
They had kept their informant apart from the others, in Rayoul’s old hut, tied up the same. Graven had her brought to him and told her that the witches were dead.
‘Only two of them,’ she moaned. ‘There are others, many others, more each day.’ She still feared to enter the catacombs, but he made it very clear to her that she had no choice in the matter.
The Attilans agreed to watch the hamlet while the Krieg searched underground. Sergeant Batu grinned and said, ‘No room to ride down there.’
They uncovered the hole in the meeting house floor. Graven descended the rope ladder first. By lumen light, he surveyed his new surroundings. He felt his stomach tightening. His watchmaster’s description of the ossuary tunnels had hardly done them justice.
I don’t think I have ever seen anything quite so… He didn’t have the words, but something was stirring in his chest. He clenched his teeth and quashed the feeling. They are only remains, he told himself, only what we leave behind. If it looked like the bleached skulls suspended in the walls were glaring at him, resenting his presence, it was only a trick of the dim light, a shifting of shadows.
The rest of his squad joined him, regardless of their injuries. The pain of a few cracked bones was easily negated by dialling up the stimm content of their water supplies. The informant froze on the ladder, insisting she could go no further, so Graven shook its ropes until she lost her grip and, shrieking, fell into his arms. ‘Take us to the witch hunter,’ he demanded, and with a pistol to her head, she did her best to pull herself together and obey.
For close to an hour, they trudged through the frigid darkness in their cocoon of lumen light. The informant led the way, hands bound behind her back, frequently stumbling. They followed tunnels that twisted this way, that way and back upon themselves. They came upon dead ends, including freshly dug tunnels not yet implanted with bones, and had to retrace their steps. They were watched all the way by the blank eyes of the dead.
Rayoul had been right about one thing. They could easily have lost themselves down here, but for the Krieg’s experience in similar environments. Two Korpsmen mapped their travels with handheld wayfinders, and one of them spoke up: ‘Sir, we have come round in a circle.’
The other concurred: ‘The ladder can only be a hundred yards away in that direction.’ She indicated a side tunnel.
Graven rounded on their informant, who shrank away from him. ‘I… I’m trying, I swear – I’m doing my best.’
‘To mislead us?’
‘No. I’ve only been down here a time or two and always with someone to lead the way, and I… I just don’t know…’
Graven turned to his watchmaster. ‘Return her to the barn. Find someone who can be of more assistance.’
‘Please, sir, you can’t… can’t take me back to them. They’ll know. They’ll know I turned against them, talked to you, and… Give me another chance. I know where I went wrong now, and I swear I can do better.’
‘She’s no use to us,’ said the colonel. The watchmaster signalled to a Korpsman, who seized the woman’s arm.
‘East!’ she blurted out in desperation. ‘They took him east!’
Graven turned back to her, slowly.
‘I remember now. I was there when Rayoul told you. He never lied to you, only kept parts of the truth back. He laughed about that behind your backs, said you were easy to deceive, and he… I heard him say…’
‘He said that when Idelax left, he “travelled eastward”,’ said the watchmaster. Graven recalled that too.
They returned to the ladder and, from there, followed their wayfinders. Graven pushed the informant ahead of him again and, before long, saw her confidence growing.
‘Yes, this is the way, I’m sure,’ she told them. ‘You see how these crossed bones form a line of Xs? The entrance is just at the end of that line, but hidden.’
She ran her hands over the tunnel wall, plucking and prodding at its embedded bones. Graven stood back and watched her for a minute, but became increasingly convinced that she was stalling him again. He was about to say so when he heard a soft click, and the informant whooped with delight.
A section of the wall, bones and all, swung smoothly open, and Graven sent the informant through first.
The rest followed, filing into a broad, round, smooth-edged cavern.
Its centrepiece was a squat black altar, and Graven sucked air between his teeth as he saw the profane symbols carved into its stone sides, inlaid with silver thread. Atop it sat a dagger with a twisted blade, black candles in a holder, and a tarnished silver goblet containing dregs of what might have been blood.
There were bones in the walls, albeit fewer than in the tunnels. Some had been gouged out and smashed, their remnants heaped about the cavern’s edges. Only what we leave behind, the colonel reminded himself, but still he felt a flush of indignation at such flagrant disrespect.
Driven into the walls were the poles of tattered green-and-yellow banners, flying the Plague God’s triangular symbol. Wooden benches, the same as in the meeting house but older, were scattered about. Clearly, this blasphemous church had been here many years.
Graven smelt the prisoner before he saw him. He lay behind the altar, chained to it by his wrists, curled into a foetal ball. His satin-lined cloak was torn and soiled, as was his synth-leather armour. He looked like he might be dead, until he flinched as light washed over him.
The watchmaster reached him first and crouched beside him.
‘Is it him?’ asked Graven.
‘Hard to say. He answers the description, but any symbols he may have carried have been stripped from him.’
The watchmaster shook the supine body, which roused and swore at him. ‘You’ll gain nothing from me, I have told you. The Emperor protects those whose faith in Him is staunch.’
‘Inquisitor! Inquisitor Idelax, I am His servant too.’
The prisoner opened his eyes for the first time, regarding the watchmaster with a watery gaze. ‘Praise be to Him,’ he whispered, then passed out again.
Inquisitor Idelax woke.
He felt like he had slept for a very long time. He lay in a soft bed, with sunlight streaming through windows and vague memories of being hoisted from the earth’s bowels in an improvised sling. He had been undressed, cleaned, shaved and his wounds tended. Fresh clothing was piled on a wooden chair beside him. Worker’s clothing.
His entire body ached. Manacles had left their imprints in his wrists. He didn’t trust his newfound comfort, fearing it some kind of dream or trick – but no, his mind was too strong for the former and he would soon see through the latter.
Instinctively, he felt about himself for his Inquisitorial rosette, though it had been wrested from him weeks ago. He felt the deep pang of its loss afresh.
He heard movement below him, on the ground floor of what he surmised was a grave worker’s hut. His throat was raw, so he banged his headboard against the wall until he heard footsteps on the stairs. On second thoughts, the bed was far from soft, only compared to the cavern floor.
Two masked soldiers – Krieg Death Korpsmen, Idelax had dealt with such before – entered the room. One brought a jug of water, from which he filled a chipped mug. ‘It’s laced with stimms, sir, if that is acceptable to you,’ he said.
Snatching the mug, the inquisitor drained it in one gulp.
He turned to his other attendant, whose shoulder bore the chevrons of a sergeant – no, a watchmaster. ‘Are you the one I saw down there?’ he croaked.
‘Yes, inquisitor. You are Inquisitor Idelax?’
The witch hunter nodded. ‘You command this unit?’
‘No, sir, I serve under Colonel Graven. I’ll have him informed that you have woken.’ The watchmaster motioned to his Korpsman, who set down the jug and left the room. He asked the inquisitor if he had any other needs.
‘Only information,’ said Idelax, ‘of which I have plenty to exchange.’
‘As soon as you feel stronger, doubtless the colonel will oblige you.’
‘Only my flesh has been abused.’ Against his muscles’ protestations, he hauled himself into a sitting position. ‘My mind and soul are fortified, as strong as they have ever been. No, stronger. I am ready.’
Idelax gestured to the chair. The watchmaster, standing to attention, seemed undecided for a moment, then set the pile of clothes aside and took a seat.
‘Thank the Emperor for heightening your senses,’ the witch hunter muttered, ‘allowing you to pierce this coven’s cowardly deceptions.’
‘Inquisitor, I’m sure that given time you would have done the same.’
He glared at the watchmaster sharply. ‘Not for a second was I duped!’ Then his chiselled features softened, and he sighed. ‘What I was unprepared for was that they should turn an acolyte against me.’
‘We had heard such a tale.’ The watchmaster spoke with caution.
‘The spectres didn’t show themselves to us as they did you. They targeted Djallon in secret, I believe, because he too was warp-touched. I fought him in the old barn, where the spectre that possessed him made use of his psychic talents, before it fled his shadow once I took his head.’
‘Yes, we observed the same.’
‘The distraction, I regret to say, proved more than sufficient to its purpose.’
‘We know the workers summoned reinforcements.’
‘By the time I emerged from the barn, the battle was already lost.’
‘The same witches we encountered?’
‘One, perhaps. A fire-wielding man and a woman with power over lightning. There were six more in my retinue all told. Two had already fallen, in addition to the psyker and the one slain by him, while I myself was weakened – and the workers too assailed us, held us back, while…’
Idelax trailed off. The watchmaster could see in his eyes that he was no longer in the room but reliving his ignominious defeat. It felt strange to see a witch hunter like this. Lacking his vestments, he could have been any civilian, weak and vulnerable. He was young by the standards of his ordo, old by those of the Krieg, blue-eyed and blond. The watchmaster didn’t know what to say to him, so was glad when they were interrupted.
