Hammer and Bolter 24 Read online

  Swift motion wiped the impression away. Hermis went down, claws rending his armour apart. Teale bellowed. Boltguns fired. Alien flesh burst, splattering the pale stone with their gore. Erdagon ran toward the square’s centre in a shallow arc, out of his brothers’ lines of fire. Three genestealers turned to intercept him.

  Caedis’s head felt light – his throat was closing up, as dry as desert sand. He shook within his armour as he fought the desire to charge headlong at the genestealers, knowing that his bolter was a better tool here. With every kick it gave, he imagined the sensation of Gladius Rubeum biting into his enemies, and he felt his will ebbing away.

  Guinian raised his arm, palm outstretched. Eldritch energy blazed around him, and abruptly died.

  From behind the limousines, something that could almost have been a woman stepped out.

  Almost.

  Her body was as human as any of the other inhabitants of Catria, but her face betrayed her alien origins. Her features were a little too heavy, her nose was slightly ridged, making it appear wrinkled in disgust. Her mouth was unnaturally downturned. And her eyes – they blazed with a contempt for humanity born in the cold places between the stars.

  She carried a staff glowing with wyrding might; an alien psyker, a cult witch. The Blood Drinkers had encountered several on the way to Catria.

  Caedis’s resolve crumbled, and he dropped his bolter – he could restrain himself no longer. Chanting the war cries of the Blood Drinkers, he raised Gladius Rubeum high above his head and ran at the hybrid magos.

  The taste of metal. A blast of psychic energy.

  Caedis was flung across the square, his armour dragging sparks from the stone as he skidded across it. The tactical overlays in his helmet lenses flickered. He clambered up, clumsily batting away a darting claw as he did so. Grasping hands sought to pin his arms, a genestealer’s upper claws formed into a pair of single points to drive down at his armour, but Caedis shucked off the creature’s embrace and brought Gladius Rubeum up in a wide arc as he stood, divesting the genestealer of three of its arms. He finished it with a return downwards blow.

  Guinian stepped forward to confront the witch, sending aside a blast of energy meant for Caedis.

  The air was taut, quivering with unnatural colours. Guinian shouted his praise to the emperor and Sanguinius. His hand upraised, red energy arced from his hand. The witch stood her ground, a dome of flaring light covered her, turning aside the attacks of the Epistolary.

  Caedis advanced to the square’s centre where Erdagon stood over his fallen brother, lightning claws weaving an impenetrable cage, keeping the talons of the hybrids at bay. He was on the defensive; power armour was not proof against the genestealers’ diamond-hard claws. Caedis sought to even the odds.

  He felled a hybrid from behind, cutting it near in two, the litanies of battle upon his lips. Gladius Rubeum crackled as its energy fields ripped apart another, and then Erdagon was free to attack. Another foul creature died, and another. Back to back, Erdagon and the Chapter Master fought, singing the great songs of battle, surrendering themselves fully to bloody rage.

  More genestealers were coming into the courtyard, forcing Teale and Atameo back. Teale discarded his empty gun, and laid about him with his chainsword, the blade’s metal teeth juddering as they bit into chitin. Atameo snapped off bursts of fire as he walked backwards, dropping three, four, five of the gangling beasts. Then he fell. The hybrids were fast, their reflexes outmatching those of the Adeptus Astartes. One had been able to pass through Atameo’s bolter fire and punch a clawed hand through his armoured torso, eviscerating him.

  A rush of alien anger burst over the square. Guinian cried out. The crystalline matrix about his helmet sparked and he stumbled, overwhelmed by the cult witch’s warp-born powers. Teale grabbed him by the arm, and pulled the Librarian to the centre of the square, where the others surrounded him.

  ‘She is strong!’ gasped Guinian.

  The four Blood Drinkers stood with the alien dead piled about them. The genestealers came on from every arch and doorway; creeping down stone columns, slinking out of dark corridor mouths.

  The Space Marines, heroes among heroes all, were outnumbered. Reports from the rest of the Sanctum came in through Caedis’s helmet vox. Relief was deadly seconds away.

  The false saint smiled. Her teeth were small and pointed, her gums dark. ‘You test the might of Mother Hesta, you test and you die. This is our world now, it belongs to the Children of the Stars.’

  She raised her staff, glowing with wyrding energy.

  ‘The blood of life flows quickly!’ Teale said, intoning the first line of the Sanguis Moritura.

  ‘Only in death can it be stilled!’ replied the others.

  ‘Let not ours be stilled easily, let it flow on and outward – let it flow from us as we slay those who free it!’

  ‘Blood is strength, in death it quickens!’

  They sang then the hymn of fury, dry lips bitten red by sharp teeth. They prepared to sell themselves dearly.

  Hesta pointed her staff at them and laughed.

  Stone burst inwards. Lumps of saints flew across the square, battering down several genestealers. A cloud of dust billowed outwards.

  Brother Endarmiel strode through the breach, roaring metallically. White dust coated black armour. Twin blood fists whirred. He pivoted and drove a mechanical arm forward, smashing hybrids to a pulp. Hesta’s eyes widened and she cast her bolt of gathered power at the war machine. Purple light flared around Endarmiel’s black armour. He leaned into the blast, weathered it, then strode on and smashed a fist toward the false saint. Hesta stumbled, energy flaring around her as her psychic shield took the brunt of the blow. She snarled, swinging her staff at the war machine’s leg. It connected with a resounding boom. Brother Endarmiel staggered, and Hesta howled victoriously, but the Dreadnought extended one mighty fist. The storm bolter slung underneath fired, and Hesta was cut to pieces.

  Brother Endarmiel turned from the shattered remains of the magos and turned upon the brood. Caedis and the others charged forward.

  Caught between the rampaging Dreadnought and the lord of the Blood Drinkers, the genestealers were doomed. Their claws could do little against the plating that protected Endarmiel’s sarcophagus. They scored the metal, paring red blood marks and sacred scrolls away, leaving raw tracks in the adamantium, but they could not find their way through it. They died, crushed by Endarmiel’s fists, impaled by Gladius Rubeum, cleaved in two by Guinian’s force staff, torn apart by chainsword and lightning claw.

  Erdagon fell, but the slaughter continued unabated.

  Caedis slew another of the half-xenos, driving his sword point through its alien skull.

  ‘Come,’ said Guinian hoarsely. ‘Our target lies within. I can sense them, and they can sense me. Their mother is dead and still they do not fear.’

  There were only three of them now: Teale, Caedis and Guinian. Teale turned away from them. The roars of the Dreadnought were deafening as it finished the last of the hybrids, and he had to shout to make himself heard.

  ‘I must remain here and put aside the blood rage. Erdagon can be saved, and I must retrieve the gene-seed of brother Hermis. Go with fortune and fury, sing well the hymns of battle-joy.’

  Caedis gave his assent to the Sanguinary Master. Teale set about his solemn work. Battle-brothers were arriving in the courtyard in Endarmiel’s wake, the fight was nearly done. Caedis motioned for a squad to follow, and together they exited the square and descended into the catacombs beneath Saint Catria’s Reliquary Sanctum.

  How many holy women lay interred there? At the base of the stairs, in a wide corridor paved with marble, the burials began, hollows in the wall like shelves five high, each housing a set of mummified remains. Corridors led off at regular intervals, all crammed with desiccated corpses.

  The Blood Drinkers advanced, the Thirst boiling within them.

  In a tomb remade in a crude parody of a nursery, they found the purestrains. Hollow-
eyed women and feeble men snatched the mewling creatures from cribs arranged around a throne of bone and iron as the angels of death entered. Four arms stole around the neck of each surrogate parent, and purple snouts nuzzled human necks. The bewitched humans turned to shield their hellish young with their own bodies. Some raised weapons; bolters barked, and these few fell.

  A wave of psychic malice came from this twisted family. Cold, alien eyes stared with hatred from the changeling babies.

  ‘Do not kill them, not yet,’ ordered Epistolary Guinian in his stern and sorrowful voice. ‘I must take the knowledge I seek from their minds.’

  The children of Mother Hesta hissed, tubular tongues sliding over wicked teeth. Reptilian eyes possessed of deep and terrible wisdom regarded them. Their false mothers crooned over them frantically as though they were human infants, blind to their heinous form.

  Guinian undid his helmet clasps, air hissing as the neck seal came undone. He set his helm on the floor, and stared at the xenos brood. ‘Know me now, oh foul and repellent beasts, for I will have what I seek.’ Guinian’s eyes glowed, and he reached out to the creatures.

  The purestrain young let out a haunting cry as one, heard as much in the mind as in the air. Fingers shifted on weapons in armoured hands.

  ‘Wait!’ commanded Caedis. The Thirst threatened to undo their task nigh to its completion. ‘Do not fire!’

  Guinian eyes slid open. Triumph pulled his dour face into a smile. ‘My lord, I have it.’

  ‘You can augur the path of the hulk, brother? You can find the initial source of the xenos contagion?’

  ‘Yes, my lord. I have the psychic scent of these things,’ Guinian spat the word. ‘There are patterns and trails, lord, even in the chaos of empyrean. I can lead us to their foul progenitor.’

  Caedis nodded. His eyes swam. The Thirst tortured him. Never had it assailed him so strongly, and a shadow of apprehension stole over his heart.

  ‘Excellent news’ he said, forcing himself to master his will. ‘I will recall the Second and Fifth Companies to our fleet. This will be a gathering of heroes! We shall crush this abomination at its source once and for all.’

  ‘Please!’ called one of the women. She was tall and famished, her vitality bled away by her monstrous family. ‘The children! Please, do not harm the little ones!’

  Caedis shook his head slowly. ‘Your actions are no sin of your own, but you are forever lost to us. We will commend your souls to your Saint Catria – perhaps she will judge you kindly.’

  Caedis raised his hand. The Catrians wailed and screamed.

  He let it drop.

  Promethium and bolter fire cleansed the chamber.

  ‘Where were they found?’ demanded Colonel Indrana. She fought and failed to keep the horror out of her voice. From outside the command centre she could hear the thunder of the Space Marines’ departing craft, taking the angelic warriors back to their fleet.

  ‘Bunker 85. No one saw or heard anything,’ said the medicae adept. ‘I have never seen anything like this. These cuts…’

  ‘Yes. I can see them,’ snapped Indrana. She stared. The medicae facility smelled like an abattoir, not a place of healing.

  ‘Colonel, what should we do?’

  ‘Burn them,’ she said curtly. ‘Burn them all. Contact the families. Tell them they died in defence of our home and the Emperor’s domain.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Immediately!’

  The room burst into activity, her order breaking the air of terror in the room, each of the women present thankful of a task to perform.

  There was no relief in action for her, not for Indrana. There was no one to order her, nothing to distract her from the terrible sight of her slaughtered soldiers. Slaughtered was the right word, she thought – they had been killed like animals. She looked upon the seven pallid corpses of her guardswomen, their skin bled to a sickly ashen grey, and she shuddered as she considered the nature of Catria’s deliverance.

  GILEAD’S CURSE

  Chapter Ten

  Nik Vincent and Dan Abnett

  They say the best storytellers fear nothing. I think they should fear everything. If we feel no fear then we must feel no compassion or empathy, either. Fear is our enemy unless we make bravery our friend.

  I never learnt to conquer my fear, only the art of telling a tale, and of inspiring fear and compassion in others.

  The skaven are a godless breed, but if we feel no sympathy for their plight our hearts are more surely to be made of stone than of flesh.

  The Vampire Count is a being of great strength and sadness, and if we feel no fear for him our hearts are surely more foolish than sanguine.

  But men are fools, and storytellers too, so make of this next chapter what you will, for I know where terror treads, and with all my heart I wish that these tales were not my calling, for I know that I must lead you in her footsteps.

  The sky over Nuln glowed with a strange yellow light that no one seemed to notice. The air was dry and cold and heady, and it seemed not to move at all. A door slammed closed in one quarter of the city and a window swung open in another. A whispered breath and a faint, atonal note hovered in the air, but seemed not to move or dissipate. One moment it hung over the university, and the next a stray student, alone in the quad, looked over his shoulder, sure that he’d heard a step behind him. The brilliant, green grass of the low cut lawn, smooth as a billiard table, suddenly looked grey, and the student bent down to look at it, mesmerised for a moment by the apparent fissures in the baked earth that crumbed away to sand, and then rippled, the blades of grass perishing as if they had never existed. The student blinked, and suddenly the lawn was as verdant as ever, and someone was leaning out of an upper window shouting at him to leave the bloody grass alone or suffer the penalty of a minus for behaviour.

  The student stood and looked up at the window. The tutor had turned away, otherwise he might have seen how dry the boy’s skin was, how old and tired he looked, how desiccated.

  The old and the young, and the sick died that night, and no one noticed. Cut flowers wilted and then dried to papery husks as vases and jugs were suddenly without water. When they awoke, their owners were disappointed that their blooms had not lasted longer, but times were hard and plants fragile, so the fact that they had them to enjoy at all, even for the briefest time, was a blessing. Fruit and vegetables turned to dried husks in kitchen racks and on the little vines that many of the city-folk grew to supplement their meagre diets, and no one thought to question or complain. Such was the way of the plague. Nothing could be done.

  The two moons of Mannslieb and Morrslieb hung in the firmament, flat, grey and featureless, shedding almost no light through the yellowish haze of the sky. It was as if they had turned their faces from the city, as if Nuln had somehow been abandoned.

  They came by the South Gate into the city. The City Guard of Nuln gathered in the yellow haze that signalled the twilight of the rising sun, and began preparations for opening the gate. They trimmed the wicks and filled the reservoirs of their lamps, emptied the still-warm ash from the brazier, allowed to burn out at dusk the evening before, and primed and relit it. Their breath clouded the air in front of their faces, and they stamped their feet in the chill of the morning while they waited impatiently for the boy to bring their breakfasts.

  The South Gate into the commercial quarter of the city had been quiet for months, and the guard expected no visitors so early in the day, except perhaps for a little foot traffic. It was not a market day and commerce was depressed.

  The three guards, their weapons slung on their backs, gathered around the brazier as it began to give off a little heat. Within a few minutes the boy, unarmoured and unarmed, but for a long knife, which had no scabbard, but which slotted into a leather loop at his belt, arrived with a greasy, brown paper parcel that was leaking steam and an earthy smell.

  Surn Strallan was particularly attached to his sheathless knife. It was guard issue and had been used by any
number of men before him, but the boy was inordinately proud of it, so much so that he had honed the blade to remove every nick and dink that it had suffered over scores of years, and he had sharpened it so thoroughly that it cut cleanly through human hair. As a result, the blade was as narrow as a stiletto, and looked not unlike his uncle’s, the butcher’s, boning knife.

  ‘Mutton... again?’ asked the largest of the guardsmen, ‘and old, too, if the smell’s anything to go by.’

  ‘Be grateful we’re not eating discarded shoe-leather,’ said his younger, taller companion, the man in charge of the little band.

  ‘I’m not sure we ain’t,’ said Surn, until the other men turned on him, scowling, and he handed the parcel to the old man, raising his hands, as if in surrender. ‘I’m joking.’

  ‘Not funny,’ said the old man, freeing the corner of the largest and greasiest of the pies from its paper wrapping and carefully examining the pastry where some of the gravy had leaked out, sniffing it before taking a large, hot bite.

  ‘Not remotely funny,’ said another guard, a middle-aged man with scrawny arms and legs, which didn’t nearly fill his breeches and sleeves, and a round belly, almost like that of a pregnant woman.

  When the air moved a little around the men, making them even colder in its draught, they huddled together around the brazier, eating their pies and ruminating on the state of the city. They did not see the cart and its entourage cresting the rise that led to the last few hundred yards to the gate, and if they had seen it, they would have considered it unremarkable.

  The figure that led the cart was stooped and cloaked. The man would have been taller than average, if he had stood up straight, but he leaned heavily on a staff and did not make the extra effort to draw himself up to his full height.

  There was little noise in the air, just the wet chewing and snuffling of the guardsmen as they ate the too-hot pies that made their nostrils drip, and the crackle of the little fire in the brazier. They should have heard the cart in the stillness of the early morning, but it seemed to make almost no noise. The compacted earth of the road seemed to fall away, to desiccate, as the figure walked ahead of the cart, leaving a two or three inch thick layer of fine, sandy dust for the cartwheels to roll through. The sound it made was not the usual clatter of steel tyres on hard earth, but the light, gritty, shushing sound of sand being displaced.