The Relentless Dead, page 6
‘Sir, the Guardsman in question arrived with the recent intake. I didn’t know him well, but his record until now has been spotless.’
‘From a good family, I see.’
‘Yes, sir. His uncle is a lieutenant in Fourteenth Company. His sergeant tells me he was nervous, which is common, but keen to make his parents proud. There were no indications that he might…’
‘Might take his Imperial-issue lasgun and kill two members of his squad as they slept in their trench!’
The captain looked shamefaced. ‘Yes, sir.’
Exasperated, Petrakov muttered, ‘Had it been an Attilan who succumbed, I might almost have understood it. A Vostroyan, though!’
The captain frowned. ‘Colonel?’
‘Have any other Guardsmen had nightmares? Heard voices in their heads?’ A report from the Krieg Colonel Graven, which had reached him just minutes before, had made disturbing reading.
‘I doubt they would report it if they had, lest they appear weak.’
‘Find out,’ snapped Petrakov.
‘Sir.’ The captain hesitated. ‘Sir, have you read to the end of my report?’
He had not yet. He looked back at the slate in his hands. ‘I read that the traitor was killed as he tried to escape.’
‘But the truly disturbing part,’ said the captain, ‘is what happened after.’
‘Emperor-loving lickspittles, why can’t you leave us be?!’
Another spray of bullets was unleashed from a window of the shack. Colonel Graven kept his head down behind a rain barrel, bracing it against repeated impacts. It was holed, spewing out into the mud.
He returned fire and the shooter’s head dropped out of sight. He signalled to the three Korpsmen with him, sending two around the structure to its rear.
Sporadic bursts of gunfire reached his ears from all directions. Few workers were giving up without a fight, but those fights were inevitably one-sided. Rayoul and his fellows in the shack were the best-embedded of them.
Graven had been counting shapes at windows. ‘Five or more hostiles in there,’ he called out, ‘three autoguns between them.’ His regiment had battered down the ferrocrete walls of thousand-year-old strongholds. Even without cannons, mere planks of wood would not deter them.
He gave his Korpsmen time to get into position. He nodded to the one still with him, his old engineer, who rolled a smoke grenade towards the shack. They charged into the black cloud pumped out by it, breathing clean air through their filters. Two guns fired blindly at them, missing wildly.
Graven’s comrade smashed a window with his shotgun and fired through it as the colonel shoulder-charged the door. Its old latch broke, as did a hinge, and he ploughed through into a startled worker.
A rear door splintered open, allowing in more smoke and Korpsmen. Workers tried to run but were suddenly hemmed in. They panicked, shrieking with fear and anger. Only one got off a shot, which ricocheted off body armour. Reluctant to likewise fire into the crush, Graven wrestled his opponent’s weapon from him and drove its butt into his skull. Another, unarmed, leapt at him, impaling herself through the stomach on the autogun’s readied bayonet.
In less than a minute, it was over.
Two workers were dead, three more restrained. Graven located Rayoul in the thickening miasma. He was on his knees, bleeding from a head wound, the fight knocked out of him. Graven seized him by the armpits, hauled him out into the light and sent him sprawling in the mud.
He levelled his laspistol at the old man’s head. ‘The truth this time!’
‘You know the truth,’ Rayoul mumbled. ‘I told you the truth.’ He looked up at the colonel and a shadow crept across his face, hardening his features. ‘Most of it.’
‘What happened to Inquisitor Idelax? What did you do to him?’
‘You won’t find him.’
‘Then he is still alive?’
Rayoul held Graven’s gaze. His entire demeanour had changed, no longer subservient but self-assured. ‘You’ll join us someday soon.’
‘The warp I will!’
‘Another fallen soldier, his life traded for a false promise. If not on this battlefield, then on another like it. Death is life’s only certainty.’
‘And not to be feared,’ said Graven.
‘You would not say that if you knew.’
The words chilled him to his core. Lies, he told himself, intended to weaken my resolve. ‘If you value life so much, then answer my questions!’
‘I am you, Colonel Graven, you and all the others like you. The nameless in their billions, marching blindly to their fates. How many will it take, do you imagine? How many more deaths before your Carrion Lord feels sated?’
‘Shut up!’ he hissed.
‘I am all of your comrades-in-arms, the Korpsmen who burnt for your mistake and cry out from beyond the veil for justice.’
Graven cocked his pistol. ‘I warned you.’
‘It’s all so clear to us now. No sacrifice can ever be enough. For Krieg, there can never be atonement. Your God-Emperor will never set you free.’
A las beam through Rayoul’s head stilled his vicious tongue forever.
The gunshot turned more heads towards the colonel: Korpsmen and their prisoners en route to the old barn. ‘At ease,’ he called to them. He worried, How much did they overhear? He had spared them the ravings of a heretic, he assured himself. Spared himself too. The old man lay in the dirt, face down. There was no doubt that he was dead – until his body moaned and spasmed.
Rayoul’s very shadow was alive. Graven leapt back as it seeped out from underneath him, writhed about him. Like oily black smoke, it billowed up into the air, where it collected into a humanoid shape. Hovering above Graven, the spectre leered at him with its semblance of a face as if in mockery. Then, before he could recover himself to shoot at it, it dispersed on the breeze.
His watchmaster and two Korpsmen hurried to him, weapons drawn. Graven poked Rayoul’s body with his toe, but it had fallen still now.
‘Are all of them… influenced?’ asked the first Korpsman to find her voice. ‘Do all have spectres clinging to them?’
‘They can’t, not if the body’s death reveals them,’ the watchmaster said, ‘for we’ve seen others die.’
‘Just him, then? Just their leader?’
To Graven, both sounded oddly distant. The hamlet’s wooden buildings seemed to shrink away around him. He was back in the previous night, back on his bedroll with the spectre looming over him. He felt its cold in his heart and lungs again. He had been briefed about a lord and lady coming to Oleris in search of the dead and finding them. Rayoul, if he could still be called that, had described an attack upon a nephew: ‘…as if it were suckling on his very soul.’
‘No,’ he said aloud, and snapped back to the moment. ‘The spectre, the spectres, last night,’ he said dully, ‘weren’t seeking to feed off us as we thought. Rather, it seems they wish to recruit us.’
Sixteen prisoners lay in the old barn, secured by ropes.
Some glared at Graven as he marched in, cursing him. Others were wrapped up in self-pity, sobbing to themselves. ‘Murderer!’ hissed the boy he had noticed before, no longer retiring but seething with malevolence.
He confirmed Rayoul’s execution and threatened that it wouldn’t be the last. He told them their only hope lay in confession. He picked the worker with the most mutinous look and asked him the whereabouts of Inquisitor Idelax. Barely had the worker drawn breath to spit defiance when Graven shot him dead.
This had an effect upon the others. This time, Graven chose the one who looked most fearful. Staring down his pistol, she couldn’t find her voice, so he had her dragged whimpering outside to where her fellows wouldn’t hear her.
Rainwater trickled down her upturned face in grimy rivulets. ‘Please, sir, I had no part in this, I swear. The spectres whispered to me like they did the others, but I… I never listened. I did no harm to no one.’
‘Nor did you try to stop it.’
‘What could I do? Rayoul… One night, he changed. We’d always followed him, he was the wisest of us, but now he was so cold and cruel. He said we weren’t to work no longer, and when he led morning prayer, it was not to the Emperor but…’ Shuddering, the woman made the sign of the aquila.
‘You could have spoken out.’
‘Some tried, but, sir, we didn’t know… we didn’t realise how many had been listening till they turned on the dissenters. We had to do as Rayoul told us, or else… They took my neighbour in the night. Her screaming woke me. Others tried to run, but he had them hunted down, and… and…’
‘And what?’
‘And taken underground, to be fed to… to the creature.’
Graven exchanged a look with his watchmaster. ‘The creature?’
‘I heard it once, just once, while I was down there. Its terrible roar, echoing along the tunnels. It must be the size of… I… All I could do was pray, sir. I prayed for someone to come and save us, and it worked. It worked because He sent you here, so I did right, sir, didn’t I?’
‘And yet still you said nothing.’
‘I wanted to – I tried – but there was always someone watching.’
‘The witch hunter,’ said Graven. ‘Was he taken underground?’
‘Yes. Yessir, he was, but not to the creature like the others. What they did to him…’ The woman made the aquila again.
‘Then you can take us to him.’
Her cheeks paled even further. ‘No, sir, I can’t. I can’t go back down there. Please, please, don’t make me go, I beg you, sir.’
Graven nodded to his watchmaster, who hauled the wretch to her feet. Brusquely, he said, ‘If you still have faith as you claim, then you will be protected. No creature is a match for ten Death Korpsmen.’
‘No, no, not just the creature!’ the worker cried. Graven turned his masked face towards her and she swallowed. ‘That… that’s where they always come from. From the catacombs. The… witches.’ She whispered the word.
The colonel waited.
‘Rayoul sent a message when we saw your tank coming. He sent us back to work as if everything was normal. Like the last time, sir. Like when the witch hunter… He fought them, sir, so hard, but the witches had the green fire in them and they burnt him with it.’
‘You set an ambush for us,’ Graven said in realisation, ‘and all of your lies and your pretence were meant to keep us here until it could be sprung.’
The watchmaster asked, ‘How long before they come?’
‘Last time it was less than a day,’ the woman said. ‘They’ll be here any minute, sir, and we… we must be gone before they are, or else they’ll kill us too. Or something worse.’
Colonel Petrakov took a short tour of the trenches. He thought an appearance by him might reassure his Guardsmen. His commissars had warned him that word of last night’s events, one of their own turned traitor, had spread quickly.
He was surprised to see for himself how much the trench network had expanded. This was due to the Krieg, of course, several squads of whom he saw labouring with shovels. Others manned their giant Earthshakers, loading, firing, reloading with clockwork regularity. Petrakov wore ear defenders, but the booming of the guns still almost deafened him.
Each officer with whom he spoke, his throat raw from having to raise his voice, told him the same. They had pounded the walls of the Ecclesiarchal Tower, destroying gun emplacements, but their scouts had seen no sign of life within.
Loath as he was to admit it, Graven may have been right all along. Petrakov had the creeping feeling that the tower was only a distraction, the true threat lying elsewhere. Sister Superior Serafina had contacted him again. She had been monitoring vox-traffic and was also concerned, piling further pressure on him.
He found the highest-ranking Krieg officer he could in Graven’s absence: a commissar, who led him to a claustrophobic dugout some way behind the guns, where mud walls deadened their sounds to a tolerable level. Krieg bedrolls lay on shelves scraped out of the walls. As there was nowhere else to sit, Petrakov remained standing, the low roof pressing down on his fur hat.
The commissar, of course, was not Krieg-born, and though she wore a gas mask, she removed it to speak with him, a gesture very much appreciated. Her face was set like rockcrete, her voice rough like gravel. She heard his proposal and remarked, ‘This could still be an ambush.’
‘It could,’ the Vostroyan acknowledged.
‘In which case, the cost of hasty action could be my regiment’s ruin.’
‘Are you saying the Krieg would fear to take that risk?’
‘If you knew them as I do,’ she said sharply, ‘you wouldn’t ask that question.’
‘Then?’
‘A large part of my role with the Krieg,’ said the commissar levelly, ‘has been to rein in their penchant for self-sacrifice – and the tendency of others, not many but some commanding officers, to take advantage of it.’
Prickling at the implication, Petrakov said, ‘Then what would you suggest?’
‘In two more days, we can tunnel half the distance between the front trench and the tower.’
He shook his head firmly. ‘No. We can’t afford to wait that long.’
‘If that is your assessment, Colonel Petrakov.’
‘It is,’ he said, finally decisive.
‘Then I suggest we step up the bombardment overnight and send the first infantry wave over the top at dawn.’
‘I will issue the orders,’ he said.
‘And of course,’ said the commissar, in a studiedly neutral tone of voice, ‘the Krieg will lead the charge.’
Graven rested his laspistol’s stock on the window sill, into which he had carved shallow grooves to keep it steady.
Through half-drawn shutters, he had a perfect view of the door of the meeting house below him. From his vantage point he could also see two Korpsmen, crouching behind rain barrels. The rest were hidden from him. They had been in position for two long hours and more, but the Krieg were nothing if not patient. Graven stretched his muscles to stave off cramp, but kept his eyes firmly on the door.
A Korpsman tensed and signalled up to him. He had detected something. A moment later, Graven too glimpsed movement through the meeting house window.
At last the door was opened from within, revealing a man behind it. He was tall and emaciated, wrapped in a tattered brown cloak. He was hairless and his forehead was horrifically swollen, pockmarked with suppurating sores. Though Graven would have assumed it anyway, he was certainly a mutant.
He swallowed his disgust to fix his target in his sights. Said target, however, remained on the stoop of the hut, the doorframe obstructing his shot. The witch looked around with sharp eyes narrowed in suspicion. He must have wondered why no one had come to greet him.
The colonel held his breath, finger tensed on his trigger. The witch murmured something and, behind him, Graven saw a second figure, as he had been led to expect.
More seconds crawled tortuously by.
Then the first witch stepped out of the meeting house, into the rain.
And, at this pre-agreed cue, the Krieg kill team opened fire.
The witch reeled, gloriously, caught in a las-beam crossfire. His leg buckled, dropping him to his left knee. He gesticulated wildly, and in his hand Graven saw a bleached-white human femur. The witch drove one end of the bone into the mud while from the other, green sparks flew. The air around him shimmered, and suddenly the Krieg found their shots deflected by an almost invisible shield.
Graven cursed to himself.
The second witch stepped out into view, but the shield also protected him as he helped his ally to his feet. Graven took the chance to yell to his squad, ‘Las fire won’t penetrate that thing from this distance. Get in closer!’
The second witch turned to glare up at him.
This one was shorter, wizened, his bones twisted, leaning on an old, gnarled cane. Sewn into his brown cloak, three circles formed a triangle, arrows pointing out between them. The hateful symbol of the Plague God. Green fire ignited in his eyes, casting his face into malevolent shadow.
Graven tensed himself to leap for cover, but then the witch stepped forward through the barrier, which didn’t impede him in the slightest, and he couldn’t help but seize his chance to get off one more shot – but it only grazed his target’s shoulder.
Faster than he had thought possible, green flames erupted from the witch’s eyes and from his nose and open mouth, and streamed towards the colonel like a flamer’s cleansing discharge, only with a sicklier quality.
The blast struck the window squarely, blowing its shutters inwards. Graven flung himself aside but was engulfed by overwhelming heat and light and searing pain. Determinedly, he held tight to his senses, but felt them slipping from him. Headfirst, he fell into a yawning pit of darkness, at the foot of which dead comrades reached for him with eager hands and vengeful cries.
Graven fell into their unforgiving grasps.
V
The sound of gunfire drew the Krieg watchmaster.
He had been stationed behind the meeting house lest someone try to slip out through a window. Now he crept along a narrow passageway between that building and the next. His back against the meeting house’s wall, he peered around its corner. He saw the witches at its open door, mere feet away.
Having heard his commander’s shout, he was just in time to witness the furious response. The watchmaster recoiled from an outpouring of unholy fire.
When he dared look again, the hut across the way was burning. Smoke belched from the window at which he had last seen Graven. He couldn’t have reached him, even had the imminent threat not taken precedence.
The fire-wielding witch had stepped back to the other’s side and now they advanced together, the shimmering dome around them moving with them. Two Krieg were flushed out from behind barrels as the psychic shield rolled over their position. They had nowhere to fall back to. They charged with bayonets fixed. The fire witch twisted out of one’s way, his cane parrying the other.
