THE DEAD, IN THEIR BARROWS
1
Inside the tomb, the storm’s sparse light diminished to nothing. With the eyes my Chapter had given me, I saw my palm and fingers as a heat-smear of orange and red through my right eye, and a contoured monochrome impression through my left. Close one eye and it was like looking through a sniper rifle’s thermal scope. Close the other, and it was like seeing silhouettes through mist. No human eyes could have pierced that darkness.
Down, down, always down. Soon my boots struck thicker stone, leading into the first chamber. I smelt death, but not fresh death. Decay, but so far in the past that it lingered now as a musty suggestion of spice in the still air.
Thermal sight showed nothing alive but me and the barbed, emaciated vermin that Nemeton possessed in place of rats. Rats would at least scatter without challenge; these things raised their quills and hissed at me as I approached. I relaxed my throat and let my implanted vocoder mimic the sound back at them, adding my own snarl. That sent the little bastards scuttling away.
Alcoves lined the walls, each the resting place of a single corpse that had long gone to bone. Each one had their skinless hands folded over their chests, clutching the hilt of a corroded sword. A few heads were turned towards me, eyeless sockets watching my intrusion. Their dead grins offered no comment, only amusement laid bare by rot.
Up close, I examined several of them. The skeletons asleep there were betrayed by their massive frames. None were human in life; each one was an Adeptus Astartes warrior. As if their size wasn’t enough to confirm it, there was evidence that anyone aware of Space Marine ritual practices would easily recognise. Medicae saws had scraped against these bones. An Apothecary’s drills had gouged through them. Damage to the reinforced clavicle struts and the fused sternums indicated the removal of progenoid glands before internment. Even in death, their gene-seed lived on, implanted into adolescent males to grow successive generations of warriors.
Most of the bodies showed horrendous battle-scarring, even down to the bone. The damage wasn’t just from the wounds that killed them; these were cartographies drawn over long lifetimes of war. Blade-scoring and projectile impacts marked every skeleton. Cybernetic limbs and organs were commonplace, disconnected from their anchors on the bodies now all soft tissue had decayed.
The Imperium was so used to Space Marines as the Emperor’s Angels of Death; how would Imperial citizens react to see this truth laid bare?
I should have been above such bias, but I’m as fallible as anyone else. I’d grown used to the invincibility of men like my master. I’d dressed Amadeus for war mere hours ago, paying no heed to his flesh, focused only on the mechanics of sealing him in ceramite. Reading his service record was a dry recitation; the next time I arrayed him for battle, I promised myself I would read the stories on his skin.
I moved on, deeper through the crypt. On the next level down, things changed. The bodies were barely skeletal. The decay here was the result of decades, not centuries, with evidence of hair, sinew and scraps of skin marking the clean bones.
And the bones themselves…
There were monsters interred here.
This was mutation. At first I couldn’t distinguish between the results of misfires in the genetic process or warp-born malformation. These twisted simulacra of Space Marines must have lived brief lives saturated by pain. Bloated ribcages. Swollen skulls. Withered limbs. The most telling sign of all: miniscule durametal threading showed, undecayed, in their rotten joints and layered in where tendons once coated bone.
These were Second Generation. Primaris warriors. Living and dying within the last century. Something had failed catastrophically during their growth processes.
Their chests and spines also showed the bone-markings of an Apothecary’s craft. I doubted their progenoid organs were taken for re-implanting. Far likelier they were harvested for medicae study or ritual incineration.
None of them showed any sign of war wounds. The majority displayed terminal cranial damage, inflicted by the puncturing bite of an Apothecary’s reductor, evidence of the day each one was put out of his misery. Several of the youngest didn’t even possess signs of medicae termination. They must have died natural deaths after short, unnatural lives.
My eye clicked with every third beat of my heart, recording all I saw. The absorption of data within my memory spools was an unpleasant prickling behind my eyes.
That was the moment I knew I’d come too far and seen too much. Exploration of a gravesite could be explained. Witnessing a Chapter’s secret shame, or whatever this genetic disaster represented, was far harder to justify through diplomatic protocol. It was time to leave.
I turned, and I was no longer alone.
One of the bodies had moved. It stood at the far end of the chamber, slouching by the entrance. He – it –was a shadow against the other shadows, silent and swaying.
The moment I drew my laspistol, my terminus-eye locked on to the distant figure, relighting my thermal-optics by default. The dead man became a smear of heat-bleach resonance. Not cold at all, like his somnolent brothers. Not dead. And unlike the others, this corpse wore a storm cloak.
He watched me, as I watched him. When he spoke, even his calm tone was a sudden artillery of sound in the barrow’s black silence.
‘You should not be here.’
My eye clicked again, recording his murky image. As if that were a signal, he began to move towards me with an awkward stride that ate up the distance with disquieting swiftness. He limped with the speed a human would run. It did nothing to make him seem more natural. Images of undeath blossomed in my mind.
I found my voice. ‘Stay back.’
He didn’t obey. He stood almost close enough to touch, and though the darkness wasn’t diminished, I could better perceive the massacre of his form. The twist of his limbs. The curl of his hand into a frozen claw. The failed-muscle pull of his face to one side. The hang of one eye and the droop of his mouth. To see such familiar immensity so deformed triggered a flood of revulsion. Before me stood perfection ruined. An Angel of Death, cruelly broken.
If he had been allowed to live, surely it was as the caretaker of this mournful place. The cripple would chasten me now, I was sure. I shouldn’t be here, he had said it himself, and he would lay judgement upon me. If he reached for me, I would move aside and deploy my subdermal weaponry. I’d grant him one warning not to follow me, and if he pursued me, I would kill him.
If I could.
But he did none of those things. He asked me who I was.
‘I am Anuradha Daaz, Helot Secundus to Lieutenant Commander Amadeus Kaias Incarius of the most noble Mentor Legion.’
His eyes blinked out of time with each other. Yet another dissymmetry. ‘This is no place for your kind,’ he told me in a soft tone. ‘You should not be here, Anuradha Daaz.’
The words were hesitant. I couldn’t tell if he was cognitively stunted in some way. It was too dark to determine the quality of intelligence in his arrhythmic gaze, and the halting gentleness of his voice might have been the result of mental damage or simple respect for where we stood.
I didn’t reply. When every word may damn you, it is wiser to say nothing at all.
We studied one another in the dark, and he was the one to break the burgeoning silence. ‘Mentor thrall,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you think of this place.’
I didn’t dare lift my eyes from him. Nothing in his posture or the set of his muscles suggested battle-readiness, but that could change in half a heartbeat. Nor did I understand his words. The simplicity of them rendered them difficult. What did I think of this place? I asked him, did he mean Nemeton? Did he mean the tomb?
The mangled warrior gestured with his good arm, not the one curled into a claw against his chest. ‘No. Not the world. Not even the barrow, just this sublevel.’
He meant the mutated warriors that lay here. He meant his brethren.
I decided to risk the truth. ‘This is a place of sadness.’
Something changed in his mismatched stare. Surprise or interest, I wasn’t sure. ‘Sadness, is it? Why do you say so, Anuradha Daaz of the Mentors?’
I mirrored his earlier gesture. My bionic arm purred as it swept to indicate the closest corpses. ‘Because they died unwounded. They never fought for their Chapter.’
Whatever was in his gaze faded, replaced by an empathy rarely seen among the warriors of the Adeptus Astartes. He nodded, slowly, barely, and took his eyes from mine to look over his entombed kin. His words were quiet, as if in confession.
‘I am Serivahn of the Vargantes. These are my brothers. A failed generation, each one a blade that never drew blood.’
The Vargantes. The same clan, I noted, as Brêac. When I made this observation to Serivahn, he nodded once more. ‘Aye, the warleader and I share a bloodline. The Vargantes aren’t a large tribe, but we make our mark on the Chapter.’
He shifted his posture with a faint grunt, pained simply by standing straight. ‘What?’ he asked me suddenly. ‘Whatever you are thinking, say it. You’ll come to no harm.’
There was no delicate way to phrase it. ‘I possess a great deal of knowledge in the morphology of the Adeptus Astartes, and I know the Fifteen Sacred Stages of Gene-Seed Implantation. These men died due to failures in the adaptation process. Their bodies rejected the Primaris Alpha and Beta phases.’
Serivahn nodded. ‘This is so.’
I gestured to him, to the misgrowth of what should be a perfect physical form. The malformation of his bones and muscles must have been a constant torment. Every minute of this man’s life was spent in the throes of pain.
‘I believe your body rebelled in the same phases. So how is it that your brothers died, and you did not?’
His smile, if it could be called a smile, was a dragging back of one side of his face, bearing strangely flawless teeth.
‘Luck.’
Whose luck, I wondered? His, for surviving? Theirs, for escaping his fate? I wasn’t foolish enough to ask.
‘Why are you here, Anuradha? Why have you come to Nemeton?’
‘I go where my Chapter commands me. My master is here to gather information, assessing the disposition of forces in Elara’s Veil.’
Serivahn surely knew this, for he showed no surprise. He wiped the paralysed side of his mouth with the back of one hand.
‘And if that requires him to fight alongside the Spears?’
‘Then my master will fight. Willingly. Gladly.’
‘Then he’ll likely be welcomed,’ the flawed man replied. ‘For the Exilarchy darkens much of the Veil, these nights. Every warrior is precious.’ He smiled ruefully, or at least he tried to: half of his face refusing to form the expression. ‘And what if we ask Amadeus to lie about what he sees here? What if we have secrets we wish kept on this side of the Rift?’
That, I couldn’t answer. There was no way of knowing. Amadeus’ role was to bear witness and report on all he saw. I struggled to imagine what circumstances might force him to omit the truth from his accounts.
‘I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘My master is… traditional… regarding his duty.’
Serivahn gave a truly ugly smile, uglier still because of its flawed sincerity. ‘Straight-backed and serious, aye? We’ve met his type before.’
My vox-bead chimed, where it was surgically implanted into the tragus of my left ear. The sound was inaudible to humans and most animals, but between the silence of this place and the keenness of Serivahn’s senses, I saw his eyes narrow.
‘Your master calls, little thrall.’
‘He does.’
‘And so your evening’s spying comes to an end. Will you waste your breath and my time both, by pretending you never meant to venture into this hallowed tomb?’
The truth had served me well so far. I hoped it would do so once more. ‘I meant to come here,’ I admitted. ‘I never meant to get caught.’
He gave another of those facial-collapse smiles, but said nothing.
‘Am I allowed to leave?’
Serivahn nodded. Even that seemed to pain him. ‘You are. Your presence here is a transgression, but a forgivable one.’
I bowed, aware that as I cast my gaze down it would be the perfect chance for him to kill me. But he merely watched, then limped aside for me to pass.
‘Thank you, Anuradha.’
I turned, facing the mutilated angel once more. ‘For what?’
‘For understanding the nature of this place. For seeing sorrow here, instead of shame.’
It was my turn to nod. I walked on, and this time I did not look back.