Hammer and Bolter: Issue Twenty-Six Read online

  Cultists followed them still, skirting the edge of the long walkway, just out of range. The Hell’s Rejects were down to sidearms now, and their ammo was low. Their legs, burning with the pain of the day’s exertions, almost failed them, but they could not afford to stop now.

  The smoke above them parted as an Aquila shuttle dropped towards the landing pad. Godric urged McLeod to go ahead while he and the others covered his escape. The young trooper obeyed eagerly, and made for the pad as fast as his weary legs would carry him.

  The cultists’ autogun-fire was ineffectual at this range, and shots pinged around the Hell’s Rejects. Unflinching, they stood sentry to ensure the data was taken to safety; yet no sooner had complacency set in than their worst fears were realised. Three dark shapes moved on the edges of the gantry, and were moving closer. As they emerged from the drifting smoke, the Hell’s Rejects looked in horror upon not one, but three traitor Space Marines. Sorokin’s killer yet lived, and he led two of his foul kin, who looked every bit as formidable. Before the storm troopers could react to the new threat, one of the traitors’ boltguns roared, felling Siegfried in an instant. Godric looked over his shoulder – McLeod was almost at the landing pad, but the shuttle was unsteady in the gale, and had still not touched down. Out of desperation, he lobbed a frag grenade towards the Space Marines, which he knew would only slow them down at best.

  ‘We must hold them off, whatever the cost,’ said Godric.

  Ishmael tried his best to hide his dismay. Then he took his trusty plasma gun from its sling. ‘I’ve been saving the last of the plasma core’s charge sir. I reckon this’ll see to ‘em.’

  ‘Good man. Let’s do this!’

  When they emerged from their ramshackle cover, the Space Marines were almost upon them. Lucky Ishmael’s plasma gun fizzed, and a ball of blinding blue energy found its mark, tearing through power armour and slaying one of the monsters outright. The cultists behind had found their courage with the arrival of their masters, and were also charging towards the landing pad, but checked themselves when the Chaos Space Marine fell. Ishmael blazed away with wild abandon, felling three cultists and winging Sorokin’s killer before the plasma core expired. Then his luck ran out as a bolter round pierced his helmet and his head exploded in a mist of blood and shattered armaplas. Godric stepped back, firing his laspistol to the bitter end until he too ran out of ammunition. He threw the pistol at the nearest Space Marine in sheer defiance. The traitor was on him in a heartbeat and grabbed him by the throat. The sergeant pulled his combat knife from its scabbard and tried in vain to stab at the traitor, who disarmed him with ease and plunged the knife into Godric’s own shoulder, before hoisting the storm trooper into the air by his throat.

  ‘It is over, Imperial dog. This planet is doomed to Exterminatus by your own hand, and we claim the souls of its billion souls for the dark gods. As you die, know that I am going to destroy the STC data and make your last soldier suffer like no other.’

  Godric’s good eye rolled back into his head as he was choked, and he saw the other Chaos Space Marine stride past them towards the landing pad. Then he started to laugh. The sound gurgled in his throat at first, then erupted into a snort of defiance and jubilation.

  ‘What is funny, you maggot?’ asked the traitor. But his question was cut short as both he and Godric were knocked to the floor by a tremendous impact. The cultists scattered, some thrown over the edge of the sky-gantry to their doom. Godric managed to roll away from his tormentor and looked around for a weapon. But it was hardly necessary.

  He had seen the tiny crimson specks burst through the smoke clouds like drops of blood rain, and had watched as they had plummeted closer and closer, until the unmistakeable forms of Adeptus Astartes Assault Marines could be discerned. He had held out long enough – the Blood Angels strike force had finally arrived, dropping from the sky on their jump packs and crashing into the traitors with the fury of angels. The Chaos Space Marines were defiant to the end, but against such odds it was fruitless. Godric picked himself up and peered over the railing at the processing plant far below where traitors clashed with Blood Angels as the very ground beneath them was sundered by the ferocity of the bombardment. The sons of Sanguinius did not need to engage, for the planet was doomed by the orbital strikes, but they fought all the same – for honour, revenge, or perhaps something deeper.

  Godric was yanked to his feet by a massive, red-gloved hand.

  ‘Sergeant Godric? You have fought well – the honour of returning the data to the fleet is yours.’

  With no further word, the angelic Space Marine jetted off the sky-gantry, his jump pack belching flame as he dropped to the ground to join the battle. His four battle-brothers followed, leaving Godric saluting his saviours dumbly.

  As the Aquila reached orbit, Godric took one last look at the monitor to see the planet below burning. It looked like hell. He chuckled mirthlessly at the irony. When would it ever end?

  Sergeant Godric had earned the nickname ‘Hell’s Reject’ twenty years ago on Armageddon, when he had been the only surviving trooper of his squad in the defence of Hades Hive. Since then he had fought countless missions, with over a hundred troopers passing through his command. Every time he sold them the lie, that they were the Hell’s Rejects, that they could survive anything, because hell itself would spit them out. But in truth, he knew that surviving massacre after bloody massacre was his curse, and that few, if any, of his men would live long following him.

  He looked at McLeod next to him – little more than a boy, really. Would he survive their next mission? Would he be as successful as Sorokin, and stay alive long enough to be counted as Godric’s friend? The sergeant almost hoped not – he did not want to see another friend die.

  He leaned back and closed his good eye. Whatever purpose the Emperor had for him, he hoped it would become evident soon. He was the Hell’s Reject, and he was paying for his destiny in the blood of his men.

  GILEAD’S CURSE

  Chapter 12

  This talk of sand makes me thirsty, and the sands of time continue to shift under me. I fear that my time is running out, that it has run out. All my hours and days are borrowed now, so let me borrow a little more of yours to get me to the end of this tale.

  Lubricate my throat with a cup more of that good wine I know you keep below stairs, and I will round off this tale in the best way I know how, weaving the strands together one last time for this, my last audience, my final tale-telling.

  I relish it, but my throat is parched, as parched as that boy’s was in the professor’s study high in the college rooms in the University of Nuln. He’s dead, too, of course. I would have loved to have heard this story from his lips. He told it like no other, they say… But I am getting ahead of myself.

  I’ll give the ending away, if I’m not careful, and all a storyteller has, in the end, is the care with which he tells his tale, and the climax he reaches in its telling. When it is his last tale, the one by which he will be, forever, remembered then care in the telling must be paramount.

  Good, my glass is full, once more. Now draw a sip yourself; I should spill such a full cup before it reaches my lips with my unsteady hand.

  Enough, enough, any more and you’ll drain the cup. The rest is mine, just as the rest of this story is yours, yours to treasure or repeat, or to do with as you will. Only, do this last thing for me: remember it, and in remembering it, remember who told it to you. It’s a wondrous tale, however badly an old bard recites it.

  Laban raised his fingers and placed them on one of the small panes of glass high up in the bedroom window. It was as fragile as a sheet of spun sugar, so fine that it could not be measured with precision callipers, but finer than a baby’s hair, certainly. It disintegrated almost before his fingers touched it, and he was left with a residue of the finest dust, like a pale-yellow powder filling the whorls of his fingerprints.

  ‘It moved,’ said Surn Strallan.

  The sound of his voice made everyone else in th
e room turn to him, and he wondered whether he could bear the gaze of so many extraordinary eyes upon him. He wanted, very badly, to blink, but found that he could not, dared not. If he blinked then he would die. If he breathed, he would die. He was going to die… He was going to die.

  When he blinked, he noticed that his eyes felt very dry, and when he spoke, he noticed that his tongue felt like sandpaper against his lips and teeth and the roof of his mouth.

  ‘I thought the carvings on the things moved,’ he said, gesturing, weakly, with one limp hand, at the table with the hourglasses on it. ‘That isn’t possible is it?’

  Mondelblatt looked at Strallan and made an odd, strangled noise in the back of his throat. The boy was suddenly less afraid that he was going to die and more afraid that he would find himself in a room with a dead professor, which was, in actual fact, a bigger nightmare than being in a room with a live professor. Mondelblatt noticed the boy’s disquiet.

  ‘Don’t you recognise a dying man’s laugh?’ he asked, laughing again, and choking horribly.

  Strallan said nothing. He did not like the old man, and, of all things, preferred not to engage with him.

  ‘You watch glass spontaneously turn to sand, and you wonder what remains to be proven impossible,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘Strange boy. A pragmatist of a sort, I suppose, but odd, nevertheless.’

  Laban and Fithvael crossed to the alcove with its table of hourglasses, and picked one up, each. The one in Laban’s hand disintegrated. The glass, by the same strange alchemy as the window glass, returned to its natural state, and the sand poured down his clothes and onto his boots. He shook it off in disgust, and tossed away the plain, brass frame that had housed the timepiece.

  Fithvael had picked up a larger, heavier piece, and something very strange did seem to be happening to the ornate, carved frame. It was made of what looked like bone, and was carved with winged scarabs and serpents twined around the tops and bottoms of the columns, rendered in mirror images of each other that stood at the four corners of the timepiece, connecting the bases. This hourglass was of a particularly ancient type that had to be turned over, entirely, rather than the bulbs being simply rotated in a static frame with a constant top and a constant bottom.

  Fithvael thought about what Mondelblatt had said before, about ashes and dust and sand. The hourglass was large and heavy. The glass was very old and very thick, but, because it had spent hundreds or thousands of years in motion, the glass had never sunk, as old pane glass did, which was always thicker at the bottom than at the top, where gravity had been able to act on the dense liquid over protracted periods of time. This glass was of equal thickness, of equal density throughout.

  It was rare glass and extremely beautiful.

  Fithvael looked at it as he held it in his hands.

  He thought to turn it over. He thought to start the sands of time moving once more. He thought to break whatever spell had been cast.

  Could it really be as simple as that? Could he stop what had been begun?

  Gilead looked to Fithvael, and then to Laban and Mondelblatt. They knew what he was going to do.

  Surn Strallan took a little longer to realise what was about to happen.

  Surn Strallan was more afraid than he had ever thought possible, and, very probably, more afraid than all the other people present in the professor’s rooms put together.

  Then he saw something.

  He didn’t know whether he saw it because he saw it, or whether he saw it because he had lost his mind, but he could not help himself. He had to speak.

  ‘There!’ he said. ‘It moved.’

  All over the city of Nuln things began to stir, small things, almost imperceptible things. It began with a winged insect hovering around the head of a child in the Reik Platz. He swatted at it, happily, playing with it, not sure how to identify this kind of creature that he had never seen in his short life.

  The bright-green, iridescent wings buzzed in the air, humming as the bug, as big as the boy’s hand, avoided the child’s reach, circled, made figures of eight around his father’s sloping shoulders, and then flew up into the sky and headed towards the university.

  It was a locust, and had emerged from a street sign just north of the Commercial Way and west of the Town Hall.

  The adults close to the child were so intent on their business and so subdued by their circumstances that they failed to notice the oddity. When he spoke of it later, the boy got a scolding from his mother and a clipped ear from his father for telling lies, serious lies in such terrible times, but he had seen it, and he knew that he had.

  The long line of scarab beetles that walked the length of Haupstrasse, end to end, in the ridge of the gutter, went entirely unnoticed and unmolested.

  The serpents that uncoiled from the street lamps along the Wandstrasse, found their way underground via the storm drains and run-off grilles that punctuated the wider streets, and no one noticed that they were missing from the castings on the lamps, or from the wrought-iron grilles or from the carvings on foundation stones and boot scrapers, door furniture and street furniture, shop signs and architectural ornamentation.

  Bugs and beasts and reptiles gathered and collected in swarms and slithers and clouds, unheeded, unnoticed.

  They knew not that they had been dormant, trapped in stone and iron, in wood and words, in paint and pictures. They knew not what they were or where. They knew only that they were newly awake, and that they had been awakened with a purpose, and they knew what that purpose was and why, and they knew who and what they served, and they questioned it not.

  The wind did not blow through the city as it should, and the Reik did not flow as it always had.

  The people had learned not to talk of the famine, of the plague, whatever it might be. It had been going on for too long, it had been too hard. They had lost their old and their young, and the children had stopped coming and the creatures were all dead. The gardens did not grow, food was bland and dry and unappetising, and all anyone could do was survive. There was nothing to talk about, nothing to celebrate. When there is nothing to live for, life is no longer cause for celebration on its own.

  Everyone felt the stillness. Everyone felt that the air was too dry, and everyone saw that the water was too dull and too still, and no one talked about it. They believed, and they assumed what their neighbours believed, that this was just the next phase, that this was what they were used to, that this was attrition. Nothing need be said.

  Mothers noticed that their fractious children produced no tears, no stringy snot, no drool. They noticed that their thirst was unquenchable and that they rubbed red and sore their dust-dry eyes. Their skin had lost its plumpness, and cheeks pinched in an attempt at good humour remained sunken for too long.

  When they looked at their hands, the few women who had clung to any shred of vanity wondered why their skin looked so dry and old, and why their nails were so ridged and flaking. They wondered why their hair frizzed and flew away, despite there being no wind to catch it. They wondered why their gums seemed to have shrunk and their teeth to have spread. They looked at their reflections and touched their faces, and wondered why they looked so damned old.

  The men wondered why they didn’t sweat or pee, and why, when they blinked, their eyes were sore. They wondered where they’d get their next drink to soothe their parched mouths and throats.

  They should have done more than wonder.

  They should have gathered or rallied. They should have evacuated or battened down the hatches. They should have hidden or defended themselves. They did none of those things. They had not the will.

  They did not look down at the black-carapaced scarabs, or up at the iridescent wings of the locusts. They did not notice the absence of the symbols, sigils and totems that were suddenly missing from where they had long been carved, embossed and painted. They saw nothing, because they had not the energy to see.

  The war of attrition was over, and they had already lost.

  The Liche Pries
t, his staff held vertically in front of him, spoke. The words were unlike anything a human had ever heard and lived to tell of. The sounds held no real breath, nothing honestly inhaled and warmed by the flesh of a body and exhaled, nothing de-oxygenated. The sounds, for they could hardly be described as words, seemed not to begin or end in any meaningful way. Where no vocal cords exist or where they are desiccated to the consistency of the catgut used by the poorest of luthiers on the cheapest of their instruments, it is hard to imagine anything more than a squawk or a rasp. When the instrument is a fleshless hollow of ancient bone, and the gut and sinew of the strings are as if they had been left in the desert for a thousand years to harden and tighten, it is difficult to imagine any cadence or rhythm in the vocal instrument, any passion or fervour, any intonation, anything that might resemble a speech pattern.

  The only advantage the Liche Priest had, and it was small enough, was that his cranium and chest cavities were remarkably large, and the mechanism he used to move air across his hardened tissues generated a frequency that, while the sound was discordant and layered in the strangest way, it was, at least, tuned low, rather than shrill.

  Noises emanated from the Liche Priest’s skeleton, not just from his wide-open mouth, but leaking out in thrums and whistles from anywhere that bones and sinews met in configurations that allowed sounds to be generated. As they came, the air in the cellar began to move, slowly whipping a dust cloud out of the mortar that had been lost from the wall dividing this room from the one below the bawdy house.

  The dust scoured the walls of the room generating more particles. It swept over and around the fallen bricks, corroding them in mere minutes, and those motes and specks joined the sandstorm that was powering around the room blasting all of the surfaces, including the bones of the three figures present.