Sister Akemi crouched at the corner of a dark and moss-grown wall, her heart pounding. The wall was basalt, and carved in lines and patterns that still glowed faintly, as if with a biolume all of their own.
Five paces ahead of Akemi’s position, Sister Viola crouched with the heavy bolter covering the roadway. Her armour glistened scarlet with condensing mist. Behind Viola’s shoulder, Sister Caia had her bolt pistol in one hand, and her auspex in the other.
‘The shipmaster was right,’ Caia said, over the vox. ‘There’s nothing out here.’
Akemi had read the reports, and she knew what the Sisters had been expecting. There should have been people here – hunters, foragers, crafters, builders. There should have been farmers, and the strange, pot-bellied livestock they called ‘paru’. There should have been soldiers, coming to welcome them, or to warn them away. There should have been the local priest, the leader of her people.
But there was nothing.
With its eerie, patterned gleam stretching outwards into the swamp-mist, the entire town looked empty.
From plague, deceit, temptation and war…
The words of the hymnal were warming, familiar.
…Our Emperor, deliver us.
‘Be sure.’ Augusta’s tone was calm.
‘I’m sure, Sister,’ Caia told her. ‘There’s nothing moving, not so much as a beetle.’
‘Very well,’ the Sister Superior said. ‘We remain in skirmish formation and proceed into the town. Viola, on point. Caia, on scan. Be alert, we cannot miss anything.’
‘Aye.’ Viola moved forwards five paces, then crouched, again, to cover the roadway.
Behind them, they’d found the basecamp empty. Allaying some of the squad’s initial fears, the fusion reactor and chemical batteries had been untouched; the interior lumens had shown pods and corridors in all their reinforced plasteel glory. Akemi had not known what to expect, and she’d found it oddly severe, carving its place out of the jungle with electro-fences and gun-emplacements, all still fully operational. The field emitters had even kept the flora at bay.
Jencir, Augusta had commented, had extended the original camp – enlarged the area to accommodate his servitors, and the equipment he would need.
But Jencir had gone. The servitors had gone. Felicity and their Sisters had all gone. The tiny chapel had been deserted, the pods echoing empty. The food in the storage units had been rotting in the heat, the water purifier all congealed with a thick, local moss.
Even the tech-priest’s little brass cogitator had been left all alone, standing in his workshop with its metal beginning to corrode.
While the squad had moved to secure the area, Akemi had studied the thing, trying to understand Jencir’s precisely noted analysis. But even from the tech-priest, there had been nothing – the reconnaissance of the cathedral had commenced on schedule, and the parts of his records that she could read had been chemical compositions, structural assessments, and endless, endless lists.
She had tried to read more, struggling with the mist-rotted printouts, and she’d listened to Augusta’s attempts to make contact over the vox, listened to the bristle of static that was her only answer.
The basecamp had been deserted.
And now, the town was exactly the same.
What had happened to the people?
From the scourge of the Kraken…
Suddenly, the silence seemed huge, and full of waiting. Her flesh crawling, Akemi fine-tuned her preysight. She wanted to see down the misted streets; she scanned the doorways and the windows and the tops of the walls. Surely there must be people still here somewhere, out in the farmlands, or standing by the odd, obelisk-shaped fountains and collecting the water that flowed down their sides?
But even the water was stilled now, choked by the moss.
The mist seethed, mocking, and she shuddered.
…Our Emperor, deliver us.
Augusta said, ‘Keep moving.’
‘Aye.’
Following Viola and Caia, Akemi ran to the next point and crouched again.
This time, she’d ducked down beside a square, open-fronted stone building. Outside, a stylised figure, familiar armour crudely depicted, stood with its arms outstretched. Against it leaned a dozen electro-spears, their points scattered with rust, and glinting with moisture.
From behind Akemi, Melia breathed, ‘Where did those come from?’
‘Jencir, I would think – or Lyconides. A gift for the town.’ Augusta picked one up and thumbed the switch. The weapon fizzled and died. She put it back against its stone support, and said, ‘But I do not understand why the weapons are abandoned. If the people have left, then why are these still here?’
‘Cross the jungle unarmed?’ Jatoya commented, from the back of the line. ‘Unwise, even without the orks.’
‘Perhaps they’re all dead,’ Viola commented.
‘Then where are the bodies?’ Caia’s answer was bleak.
‘I dislike this.’ Even the Sister Superior sounded tense. ‘I want every building checked, every road, every corner.’ There was something in her tone that made Akemi’s fear rise again – Augusta usually seemed so indomitable. ‘Whatever’s happened here, we need to know, and we need this location secure before we move on to the cathedral. I’m not leaving our backs open.’
‘Aye.’
They moved on. The hymnal was a breath now, almost subvocal as the squad listened to the silence of the town.
From the blasphemy of the fallen…
Another zig-zag crossroads, another fountain. The ancient stone patterns gleamed in green, all blurred by the mist.
But nowhere was there movement. Not a bird cawed as it fled their advance; not a beetle scuttled as it escaped their boots. Even the surrounding jungle was utterly silent, as if the festooned loom of the trees was as bereft of life as everything else. Despite the environmental protections of her armour, Akemi was beginning to perspire. She had a sense of darkness and pressure, of rising claustrophobia; she felt like her helm had been broached, somehow, like she was inhaling the sweltering closeness of the atmosphere, the tightness of the sweat-thick air.
…Our Emperor, deliver us.
But none of the internal breach-warnings had been triggered, and sternly she told herself to breathe more deeply.
Slowly, the moss grew thicker. It clustered in the corners of the walls and blotched the roadway like an infection. Desolation stretched out around them, endless and soundless. Side-road after side-road showed nothing – only the patterned lines in the dark stone.
From the begetting of daemons…
They crept onwards, even more slowly now, watching in every direction. The hymnal faded to almost a thrum, a steady rhythm that offered strength and faith, and the town gradually opened out into a sequence of wider, more regular crossings, many of them offering odd, metallic sculptures at their centres. These were huge and angled, impossible creations that rose high above the buildings and that defied Akemi’s comprehension.
Jencir had recorded these, his drawings exquisite and exact – but she had not understood his extrapolations.
Now, the moss had covered and blurred the metal. Thick and dark and rust-red, it clung to the sculptures, and to the stone, and to the fountainsides. It choked the waterflow, and it suffocated the flowers in the untended gardens. It swelled from the windows as if the very buildings were clogging from the inside.
Surely, there had not been time for the moss to grow that thickly?
Even the air felt thick, infecting their very breathing. Akemi could almost feel it, growing in her lungs.
…Our Emperor, deliver us.
Augusta, however, showed little interest in the metalworks – she had seen them before. Instead, she gave the gesture for the squad to move on. Again and again, Akemi saw Viola kneel and watch, saw Caia pause to use the auspex, straining to find something – anything – some ghost of motion, some hint of life.
And every time, she responded in the negative, and she and Viola ran on.
‘Where are they all?’ Melia asked, her words soft with horror. ‘Where did they go?’
Like Felicity, the entire population of the town had simply…
…vanished.
Akemi shuddered, sweat still sliding over her skin. She remembered running the gantries of the Sorex, the endless, repetitive drills. They’d been training missions to make her combat-responses reflexive, she knew that – but out here, the safety of the clattering metal walkways seemed very far away.
‘I feel like something’s watching me,’ Melia went on. ‘Or like something’s growing–’
‘We walk in His light,’ Augusta said, her voice like steel. ‘With me, Sisters. From the curse of the mutant…’
‘…Our Emperor, deliver us.’
Slowly, the buildings grew taller, more decorous. As they turned, at last, into a wide and ornate plaza, Akemi paused, surprised.
More of the metal sculptures loomed here, brass and rust and steel – and these were even larger, stretching upwards into the mist. There was a circle of them, like twisted dancers, all fathomless and extreme. And they looked… wrong, somehow, their angles distorted, their struts and cogs and pipes a mystery and all covered in rot.
With an odd flicker, Akemi understood that the other sculptures, the smaller ones, had all been part of the same construction and shape. Pieces of the same thing, perhaps?
Jencir had drawn this one also, his recreation meticulous.
‘Wait. Sisters, wait!’
Augusta paused. As the Sister Superior nodded, Akemi moved to study the closest, to walk around it until she found what she was looking for…
Writing.
She blinked. Jencir had drawn this too, and the symbols were unknown to her. They seemed to writhe across the metal rather than being engraved within it.
For a moment, the fear in her throat almost threatened to choke her.
‘What does it say?’ Caia asked her, auspex still in hand. The scanner was flickering, and its green light played on the sculpture’s metal.
‘I cannot read this, Sister,’ Akemi said, apologising. ‘It is not a language I comprehend.’
‘Is this not machine dialect?’ Augusta asked, surprised. ‘We had concluded that these came from Mars, from the Ring of Iron. As the town and the ziggurat were first built by the Great Crusade, so the machines of the Mechanicus…’ Her voice faltered, and it was enough to bring Akemi out in a fresh sweat.
Seeking reassurance, she said, ‘Sister, Jencir showed much interest in these… creations. They captivated him. But if this is – was – a machine, then its spirit is long, long dead.’
A ghost seemed to pass across all of them – a shiver of something other, something beyond their experience or comprehension. Melia was nervous, restlessly checking the empty roads; Caia was studying the auspex, as if puzzled by its behaviour.
‘What did his notes say?’ Augusta asked Akemi. ‘Exactly?’
‘I’m sorry, Sister,’ Akemi said. ‘I could not read his records very well.’ She had an urge to reach for her fetish, dismissed it. ‘He speculated a twenty-nine-point-eight per cent possibility that the machinery had been for mining, a thirty-four-point-two per cent possibility that its purpose had been construction. Those percentages… are not very high.’
The notes had gone into painstaking and unreadable detail, but Akemi paused as Augusta commented, ‘Then what would be the purpose of such devices?’
‘I do not know,’ Akemi said. She offered her ignorance hesitantly, as if she expected a reprimand.
But Augusta tapped a boot, thinking. ‘Did he offer speculation? A source – or purpose?’
‘No, Sister,’ Akemi said. ‘Not that I could read.’
Restless, Viola kicked at a stone and sent it scuttling across the plaza.
‘Desist.’ Augusta snapped the order at the impatient younger Sister, and turned back to the metalwork. She considered it for a moment longer, then moved as if she’d made a decision. ‘Thank you, Sister Akemi. We will keep this information for the future. For now, we cannot make use of it. Jatoya, hold this point. Akemi, with me. There’s something else here that I need to check.’
‘Aye.’
Jatoya commanded the squad to a compass defence, watching every approach; Augusta directed Akemi to the building beside the sculpture. It was the largest one they’d seen, the patterns on its walls more elaborate than the rest, and it was almost smothered in the thick, rusty lichen, creeping from its insides like decay.
Her blood thumping, her mind still reciting the words of the litany, Akemi moved to the door.
And stopped, her heart suddenly in her mouth.
‘Throne!’
Her exclamation was involuntary, and she knew Augusta was behind her, and she knew the drills. Controlling her initial shock, she dropped to one knee, her bolter covering the mess.
Augusta swore, her words vicious enough to almost make Akemi blush.
This building had a much larger living space, a room big enough to accommodate a group – maybe a town meeting or council. Its interior walls were carved in incredible patterns, and they lit its inside to a thick, green light.
Behind her, Augusta’s voice was grim. ‘So, there was fighting here after all.’
In the living space, there were signs of a struggle. The furniture had been smashed and scattered, the rugs torn from the doorways.
Augusta’s chainsword, still silent, pointed past Akemi’s shoulder, and the younger woman looked down.
The floor-rug was shredded, as if by frantically scrabbling hands. Pieces of bright fabric were scattered across the black stone, alongside what looked like a familiar votive candle.
But they were not what Augusta had indicated.
Beside the rug’s remains, there was a long, rough smear, harder to see against the rock.
But it looked like something – or someone – had been dragged from the building. Dragged, and fighting all the way.
Following the line of the marks, Akemi found herself looking at a stain on the bottom corner of the doorway, right by her foot.
One that looked very much like fingers, grasping at a forlorn and final hope.
‘Kawa Koumu lived here.’ Augusta named the priest who had governed her people, who had fought the orks as best she could, and who had welcomed the Sisters as protectors. ‘She was a good woman, strong in her faith.’
The Sister Superior stepped past Akemi and into the room, her armoured shoulders rigid with anger, and with tight, personal control. She picked up the candle and put it in its niche on the wall.
‘Sister,’ Akemi said. ‘Whatever took her, it took her out towards the ziggurat.’ She used the muzzle of her weapon to gesture at the lines on the floor, how they curved when they passed the doorway. ‘She did not go willingly.’
‘I doubt she would have,’ Augusta said, her tone bleak.
‘But why the priest?’ Akemi asked her. ‘This is the only place we’ve seen fighting. Why would she, alone, offer resistance?’
Augusta had crouched and was inspecting the stains.
From behind them, Jatoya’s rejoinder was dark. ‘Perhaps because she was the only one that could.’
Akemi caught her breath, stopped herself from cursing.
Gesturing for Akemi to remain in the doorway, Augusta moved carefully through the debris, shifting it with the end of her chainsword.
But though they searched every corner, there was nothing else to find.
They left Kawa’s home, and turned at last into the centre of the town.
Here, close and looming, stood the ziggurat. It was huge and stern, its dark flanks stepped, its head and shoulders rising high above the levels of roofs and trees. The mist curled round its sides, making the stone gleam with moisture; carved warriors decorated its sides and two armoured figures stood like twin guards at the foot of its long flight of steps. And, at its peak, a lone figure waited, His chin lifted, His head haloed in light-rays.
Akemi paused. The others may have seen this before, but this ancient depiction of the God-Emperor was new to her, and wondrous. She touched one gauntlet to the front of her armour and bowed her head.
But the ziggurat, too, was blotched in moss.
Viola muttered, her tones vicious.
Here, the stains seemed a travesty, a confrontation – and the sight of them prickled the hairs on Akemi’s neck. And it wasn’t just at the moss, not just its blasphemous invasion of the stone; it was the creeping, suffocating anxiety that had been with them from the moment they’d left the Arvus. As Melia had said, it felt like they were being watched, like there was something lurking in one of the moss-splotched buildings, or in the surrounding streets. It was something dark, something inhuman, something hidden in the hot mist.
Something that had all of them in its sights.
But they had, at least, found the population of the town.
Under the ziggurat, there lay bodies.
At first, Akemi didn’t realise what she was seeing – the people lay in a wide half-circle, almost as if they were sky-gazing. Foolishly, she thought at first that they were unwell, and that she was seeing some sort of outdoor valetudinarium.
And then she realised that the faint blur to her vision was not the smear of heat in her preysight.
It was the flies.
‘Dominica’s eyes!’ The curse was Melia, quiet with shock.
‘Sister?’ Augusta’s bark was subdued.
Melia said, ‘They’re all dead. Have been for some time.’ She sounded shaken. ‘Whatever killed them must have laid them out like this. Done it deliberately.’
Akemi knew what would happen to a corpse, left outside and in this heat. She paused, her fear clamouring at her; she raised her eyes to the ancient God-Emperor as if asking Him for help.
‘Viola,’ Augusta said. ‘Follow the outside of the plaza until we get full visibility. If something has left this here intentionally, it could well be an ambush.’
‘Aye.’
‘Akemi!’ Augusta’s bark was sharp in her vox-bead. ‘Move!’
Akemi jumped, did as she was ordered. They moved onwards, more cautiously now, circling the bodies and the lined grey-green of the plaza itself. It seemed almost that the blood-rust moss had started from here, had flowed outwards from the ziggurat’s foot and had spread like corrosion through the deserted streets.
And then, Akemi saw something else.
Every single one of the dead townspeople had been…
‘Where are their heads?’ Viola voiced her exact thought.
Akemi faltered, stopped. The moss was in her lungs and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t…
A morte perpetua…
‘That’s not the only problem,’ Caia said. ‘Sisters, the plinth…’
‘Hold this location.’ Augusta’s command was almost unnecessary; the Sisters had halted in a combat half-wheel, their backs to the nearest wall. They bristled bolters in every direction, waiting for that lurking foe, for that darkness that had stalked them through the town.
…Domine, libra nos.
Akemi, holding to the litany like she’d held to her little fetish, looked over at the single basalt plinth that occupied the centre of the plaza, and the foot of the ziggurat’s steps.
A single figure lay upon it. It was arched backwards, chest thrown out, as if it still struggled, but it had been dead for many days. Its flesh had bloated and blackened, and it had started to decay.
The flies hovered over it, fat and lazy.
Its head, too, was gone. Its ribcage had been cracked open and parted like doors; its internal organs were liquefying in the heat. Black stains covered its robes and had spread down the sides of the plinth – black stains that now swelled with the thick, rust-red moss.
She caught the stench and gagged.
‘Kawa,’ Augusta said, the word a breath, grieving. The Sister Superior dropped to one knee, touched one hand to the front of her armour. ‘Fighting to the last. Walk in His light, my friend.’
The Sisters repeated, ‘Walk in His light.’
Stretched out in some barbarous and heretical sacrifice, the town priest had lost her battle against whatever had dragged her from her home. Beneath the ziggurat, beneath the ancient stone gaze of the Emperor Himself, she had been executed – and in some vile act of mockery, in some rite of blood-worship that Akemi could not understand.
But she made herself look, think.
Kawa’s wrists and ankles showed no signs of restraints. It suggested that she had been rendered incapable of fighting, or that something – somethings – had been holding her down.
And around her, her people lay headless, their blood staining the stone.
Augusta said, ‘That Thou wouldst bring them only death, that Thou shouldst spare none…’
Reciting the litany, her chant grew in tension, and her voice trilled with tightly controlled fury. Akemi knew the squad’s history – the priest had been their friend and supporter, had welcomed them, as she’d welcomed Sister Felicity.
‘…That Thou shouldst pardon none, we beseech Thee, destroy them.’
The squad answered her. Viola’s voice seethed as she shaped the words. Jatoya’s deep tones were soaked in a low throb of pure wrath.
Augusta looked up at the ziggurat as though she made her promise to the Emperor Himself. ‘Whatever did this, we will find it.
‘And we will be its ending.’