The hounds had left no corpses.
Daemons of the warp, they had exploded, they had twisted and folded and faded. And like the echoes of bright lights on closed eyes, they had left red smears across Augusta’s vision.
Caia stood with her hand wrapped over her elbow, blood oozing between the fingers of her gauntlet. The wound was deep, but Melia was beside her, chirurgeon’s tools ready. ‘Witch bane and tetraporfaline,’ she said. ‘This will cleanse and heal the wound. Can you move your elbow?’
‘Not very well,’ Caia said. ‘I feel foolish, letting it get that close.’ She turned to Augusta. ‘What did you say these were?’
Neither Sister had been there upon Hephaestus; they’d never seen these beasts before, never felt their hot breath, never witnessed the destruction they could bring.
‘They’re flesh hounds,’ Augusta said. ‘Khorne’s pets.’ Her voice was tight with anger. ‘They hunt us, test our mettle, wear us down.’
‘Sister Felicity fought these things?’ Viola asked.
‘I would think so,’ Augusta said. ‘But these are not the things that slew Kawa, nor emptied the town.’ She paused, then said, ‘No, somewhere, these things have a master. Something with purpose.’ Her boot tapped, restless, on the stone. ‘And whatever that purpose may be, we must prevent it. Sisters, we have been called here for this, exactly this. We carry His blade, His bolter, and His name. The forces of darkness cannot withstand us. And we do not fear.’ Augusta placed her gauntleted hand on Akemi’s shoulder.
‘Confidunt in Eo, Akemi. Believe.’
‘I believe.’ The young woman’s response was fervent. Her bolter had taken lives now, and it had not left her hand. And she had not hesitated again. ‘He is with me.’
‘Always,’ Augusta said. She let Akemi go, then pulled the data-slate from her belt to call up the maps that Felicity had left them. A wash of pale light bathed their armour.
‘We will progress into the crypts,’ she said. ‘Here.’ She pointed, then indicated various other lines on the map. ‘They’re simple, underchapel, valetudinarium, reliquary – we observed them upon our previous reconnaissance.’
‘The shipmaster said there were no life signs,’ Viola commented.
‘The density of the stone could have defeated the scans,’ Caia told her. ‘The Sister Superior is right – these beasts must have come from below.’
Jatoya commented, ‘They always come from below.’
Jatoya had been there, upon Hephaestus. Like Augusta, she remembered the screaming.
The fire.
The hooks.
‘But…’ Viola studied the map, confused. ‘There’s not enough room. How can they?’
‘A breach in the warp, perhaps,’ Jatoya commented. ‘Though such things are relatively rare.’
Augusta said, ‘Or simply enough bloodshed, somewhere beneath this building… The false gods of Chaos can manifest wherever such deeds are performed, even if it is not in their names.’
‘I have a suggestion.’ The voice was Akemi’s, surprising Augusta slightly, but she let the young woman speak. ‘During the Great Crusade, the cathedrals of the Emperor were often built upon older, local sites. Perhaps this is true of the town?’
‘Just so.’ Augusta placed the data-slate back in the pack. ‘It may perhaps explain the town’s metalworks – dead things, left over from the Age of Strife.’ The thought made her pause as something in her mind caught on the presence of the tech-priest. Jencir had volunteered for this mission to Lautis, and now she found herself wondering why. She considered for a moment, then banished the thought in favour of more practical matters. ‘I suspect the crypts are not as we remember them.’
Viola snorted, counting her remaining ammunition. She pulled the half-empty magazine from the heavy bolter and replaced it with a full one, slamming the thing home with a noise like pure defiance. ‘Whatever’s lurking down there,’ she said, ‘we will send it straight back to the hell it came from.’
‘We will cleanse this place,’ Jatoya told her.
‘By His light,’ Augusta said. She sheathed her sword almost regretfully. ‘Viola, on point. Jatoya take the rear. Akemi, stay by me. We fear neither rift nor daemon.’
The crypts were high and vaulted, their ceilings and pillars all swarming with dark clusters of roots. Navigating by jury-rigged strips of lumens – more evidence of Jencir’s explorations – the Sisters came to the bottom of the dipped-smooth steps.
Before them, stone sarcophagi lay in a silent circle. Some bore recumbent, robed statues upon their lids, each with his or her hands still crossed in the sign of the aquila. They had been swept clear of dust, and candles left upon them. By the dates on their sides, these were the cathedral’s builders, more recent than the Great Crusade.
But something had changed.
The air down here should have been still, thick with age. Last time, there had been a single, root-clogged exit – a gap that opened out into an old oubliette – but that had been all.
Now a hot wind blew past them like the exhalation from a planet-core forge.
‘No motion,’ Caia said. Her wound had been bound and treated, but the vambrace of her armour was in pieces, and they could not afford to go back for a replacement. Her left gauntlet was missing completely, her hand and forearm bandaged, but bare. ‘But the air’s at thirty-three degrees, and the humidity’s fallen significantly.’ They held a defensive formation while Caia continued to scan.
Then she said, ‘It’s coming from the valetudinarium.’
And there it was – the error that Augusta had made. Something so simple, and something that the tech-priest must have found so easily.
The room had changed.
Augusta remembered it as small – a hospice to serve the people of the town. Now, it stretched outwards, far beyond her memory of it and back into the dark – a huge stone chamber, crumbling with age. Augusta could see where the rubble from the previous wall was tumbled at the room’s edges; the marks of Jencir’s servitors were still visible in the stone.
Beside her, Caia watched the auspex. She shook her head as Augusta glanced around. ‘Nothing.’
‘Look,’ Akemi said, pointing. ‘What’s that?’
Amid the tumbled stone at the wallside, there were fragments that looked different – curves like carved armour.
‘I recall no statue,’ Augusta said.
‘Perhaps it was on the other side?’ Caia’s suggestion drew no answers. Akemi was already kneeling by the pile, finding more of the pieces.
‘It’s not very big,’ she said, finding another, and another, and fitting them like parts of a puzzle. ‘It must have been recessed into the wall.’
Viola stifled a grumble. ‘Do we have time for this?’
‘Wait,’ Augusta said.
Fragments laid out on the floor, the statue was coming together.
‘Sisters…!’ Akemi sat back on her heels.
Augusta stared.
The statue was familiar – a female figure with her sword held aloft. The blade itself was still missing, but the armour was just like their own…
Augusta touched a hand to her fleur-de-lys, but said nothing. She watched as Akemi picked up the final pieces: the statue’s boots and plinth.
Akemi said, ‘There’s an inscription.’ As the Sister Superior looked at her, she went on, ‘Fluxu sanguinis vitae nostrae, Et in supplementum it et liber: De quomodo eraserit magos et quod, Velint beatificare illos quasi impotens!’ She brushed at the dust. ‘It’s an older verse, and it means “our Blood and Sacrifice”, but it could… it could be translated in other ways. It could mean “bleeding for survival”, or “blood for our lives”… It must have been a part of the fallen wall.’
‘Blood for our lives,’ Augusta repeated.
The statue was the Saint herself, of course it was, but Augusta could make no sense of it. Why had she not seen it before? Why had it been on the other side of the wall? And in her head, she was remembering Hephaestus’ daemons – creatures of greed and laughter and cruelty. They’d slavered in the mines’ darkness, roared with flame and blood. Their appetites had been more than human, more than–
Blood for our lives…
She found herself shuddering, and stopped.
‘The curiosity of the Mechanicus is often their undoing,’ Jatoya commented. She indicated a fallen servo-skull, apparently crushed by the tumbling rock. ‘Whatever they loosed in here, it slew them all.’
Her words brought silence as they contemplated the darkness. Fear yammered at them, taunting at the edges of their awareness.
The screaming.
The fire.
The hooks…
‘We are missing something,’ Augusta said. ‘Some piece of the history of this place…’
‘Sister?’ Akemi stood up, curious. ‘I studied Lautis in some detail, and there is nothing–’
‘Our answers lie ahead of us,’ Augusta said. ‘We will proceed.’
‘Aye.’ Viola flicked on her suitlight.
Jatoya said, her voice soft, ‘From the begetting of daemons…’
Taking up the prayer, they stepped out of the crypt’s illumination, and into the unknown.
As they walked, the construction of the walls began to change. The stone became rougher cut, as if the work had been left somehow unfinished, and the air became steadily hotter and thicker. Augusta was not surprised to see the devices of the sanatorium: the suspended cages, the steel chairs with their swing-down bridles, the tiny cells set back against the walls.
But – and the question loomed large in her mind – to whom had they actually belonged?
Here, the symbols of the Creed had gone. They had been replaced with odd, geometric designs that looked more like the unnamed machinery in the centre of the town.
Augusta stopped, struggling with her memories, with screams that, once again, were echoing in her mind. The town’s machines had come from the Age of Strife, but her understanding of that fact had been academic. Now, she found herself trying to encompass what that really meant.
That this had been a godless world, a world of no faith.
The concept made the place seem suddenly, horrifically empty. It was a vacuum, bereft of hope or purpose or meaning.
Blood for our lives…
Blood for the Blood God.
For a moment, the horror threatened to bring her down. She longed for a warship – for the armaments to eradicate this hell-planet, once and for all…
But she did not have that power, or that choice.
She had her faith, and that was enough.
The far end of the room opened out onto a balustrade, a walkway that circled the smooth edge of a pit. In the faint illumination of the Sisters’ curious suitlights, it seemed to stretch downwards to the planet’s very heart. When Augusta picked up a stone and dropped it over the edge, there was no sound of it hitting the bottom.
About her, the squad had drawn together, tension in their voices as they recited their prayers. Akemi’s fetish was back in her fingers, and even Viola seemed subdued – her grip on the heavy bolter was vice-tight, as if the weapon was the focus of her courage.
On the far side of the room, across the yawning threat of the pit, there waited five – six – other entranceways, each a carved arch in the rock. They were crumbling, layered with moss and roots and vast age.
Too regular for mining tunnels – but it no longer mattered. The squad needed to progress, to face their fears, and to find the masters of the hounds…
‘Catacombs.’ Melia shuddered. ‘I wonder what’s down there.’
No one offered an answer.
With no choice, they ventured onwards.
But Caia’s sense of direction was as sharp as her wits. Despite the still-flickering auspex, she directed them carefully and they moved downwards, always downwards. They passed rusting doorways into more cells, many of them empty. Some showed cold firepits, or elaborate metal frameworks, each sized to hold a human body. Several bore faded red tally marks, hundreds of them, decorating every wall – and leaving them with images of prisoners, abandoned and rotting in eternity. Sometimes, the squad encountered rockfalls or dead ends, and then had to loop back on themselves to try another route. And sometimes they paused, confused, convinced that they had explored this tunnel before.
But at last, wordlessly weary, they stumbled into a second open space.
And stopped.
Here, the roots could no longer penetrate – but eight sarcophagi stood about the walls, each one bearing a grotesque face, its tear-ducts caked with fluid. At the room’s centre, there was a pool, stained to darkness with a layer of desiccating flakes.
The chamber offered two further exits, each one carved in the shape of an open mouth.
Still on point, Viola’s breathing was harsh.
‘Which way?’ she asked, paused at the entranceway, her head bowed. ‘Or are we just going to get lost again?’
‘You try navigating,’ Caia answered her, tone sharpening.
The Sisters were tired, and the fear of this place was strong – but such behaviour was not to be tolerated. ‘That’s enough.’ Augusta’s order brought silence. ‘This is frustrating, and I understand. But our faith is tested in many ways – and patience is one of them.’
The words were a warning, and the younger members of the squad fell silent.
‘Let us rest,’ Jatoya suggested. ‘And pray. Clear our minds and our hearts. We have good lines of sight and a defensible location. Fifteen-minute rotations for trail rations and water. Viola, Akemi, you first.’
‘Aye.’
While Melia took a longer look at Caia’s injury, and Jatoya prowled restlessly, flamer in hand, the two chosen Sisters sat on the raised lip of the pool and removed their helmets. Viola’s red hair and freckled skin were sticky with sweat; with a slight shock, the Sister Superior saw that the young woman was more afraid than she’d realised. Viola was hiding it well, but her reactionary bravado was the only thing that was keeping her on her feet. And it may yet get her, and the squad, into trouble. Beside her, Akemi’s pale face was drawn and worried, her shining black bob of hair a curtain as she bowed her head.
Augusta came to sit beside them. ‘Pray with me, Sisters,’ she said. ‘For courage to face the darkness. Ego veritatem tuam. Vos ipsi nos docuit non timere, quia tu omnia superare.’
I hold to Your truth. You have taught us not to fear, for You have overcome all.
Leaving Caia to study the sarcophagi, Melia broke out the flatbreads that were their ration packs – condensed, super-nutritional foodstuffs that tasted like solidified gruel. As Augusta finished speaking, she handed one to each of the younger Sisters. Viola, her helmet in her lap, pulled a face.
‘Might be easier to starve.’ Her quip sounded almost like relief.
It made Akemi laugh. The sound was so unexpected – and so utterly out of place – that Augusta turned away, hiding a smile. In the midst of all this horror, a prayer could still bring strength and joy.
‘Eat it,’ Melia said, her tones amused. ‘You cannot battle monsters on an empty belly.’
Caia had paused at one of the sarcophagi, frowning.
‘These are hollow,’ she said. She tapped the metal sculpture and then used her fleur-de-lys blade to prise the front of it open.
Akemi leapt upright, spitting her rations across the stone.
Augusta stared, her memories suddenly moving, curling like smoke…
The screaming…
The fire…
The hooks…
From inside had slumped a body, run through with two dozen metal spikes. The corpse was recent, dried out like old grox-leather, and still in the garb of the town.
‘The townsfolk came here?’ Caia said. Her voice was soaked in dismay. Wordless, Jatoya pointed her flamer-muzzle downwards, indicating the floor.
At the sarcophagus’ feet, there was a gutter in the rock, a straight line that led to the pool. It, too, was caked in the now-familiar flaking darkness.
‘More blood,’ Augusta said. She was tense, shaking; her head echoed with remembered cries of pain. ‘And more blood. The taint of Chaos is strong here, and it lured them from their homes.’
‘Perhaps it has been here from the beginning,’ Jatoya said, her tone bleak. ‘Soaked into the stone.’
Melia said, ‘Perhaps that’s why the wall in the valetudinarium was constructed. When the Great Crusade came to Lautis, the people wished to embrace the Light, to forget the bloodshed of their past–’
‘The cathedral is younger than the Crusade,’ Augusta reminded her. ‘It was built many centuries later than the town.’
‘Then perhaps it was built to convert the more reluctant,’ Caia said, ‘and then walled off when it was no longer of use. Either way–’
‘Either way.’ Augusta said, her tone like steel. ‘We will cleanse this holy place of the presence of Chaos.’
‘Maybe we should feed them some of this – it’s guaranteed to kill anything.’ Viola stashed the last of her rations, and clicked her helmet back into place. She picked up the heavy bolter, checked its ammunition.
Jatoya said, ‘We will cut the rest of the break until we have a better location. Sister Caia?’
A glimmer of green bathed Caia’s faceplate.
‘Scanning.’
Augusta’s preysight could see the faint blur of warmth that came from each entrance, the constant, exhaled sigh that was the hot breath of Chaos. But they both glowed the same, neither brighter than the other. Caia shook her head, shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, Sister, I still have no reading. We could walk down here until we perished from exhaustion. Which way do we choose?’
The squad remained silent, oddly reluctant. Augusta could feel the darkness as if it blurred the sharp edges of her mind.
She whispered, ‘Domine deduc me mi Imperatoris.’
Guide me, my Emperor.
‘Contact!’ Caia suddenly said, her voice like a pulse of alarm. ‘Left-hand tunnel.’
The prayer of thanks was a rush, a touch of His grace in the silence of this sweating hell. She said, ‘How close?’
The light from the auspex glittered green. ‘Five hundred yards,’ Caia said. ‘And closing.’
‘Defensive formation, we’ll hold back from the doorway. Jatoya, watch the other exit.’
‘Aye.’
‘What is it?’ Viola’s tone was sharp. ‘More hounds?’
Caia said, ‘Too slow for hounds. Moving wrong.’
Then Augusta saw a faint flicker of light from the far side of the chamber.
In the tunnel mouth opposite, there was a figure, a brass firebrand raised in one hand. It moved slowly, but the sight of it was completely unexpected.
She stared.
It was an ork, its bolt-on steel jaw pitted with rust-red moss.
Viola raised the heavy bolter.
‘Wait!’ Augusta said, puzzled.
Behind the ork came a second greenskin, this one smaller and slighter. Both creatures had great, carved scars in their hides, spikes of brass embedded in their skin. And then, behind them, came a woman in the garb of the township, her clothing torn and bloody, her eyes torn out. She carried an orkish axe in one thin hand.
More figures closed in behind her, their flesh ripped open, their faces scarred with staples and stitches. And all of them stared at the Sisters with teeth bared and gazes that burned like fire. Like fanaticism.
Every one of them, orks included, had the same symbol upon the flesh of their foreheads, etched there in dripping black fluid.
Khorne.
Tightly, Augusta let out her breath.
The townspeople had not been slain – they’d deserted their homes and farms and workshops, left everything behind them. Kawa, the priest, had resisted, had fought and been executed – the headless bodies in the town plaza must have been those with the strength to have followed her. But the rest had faltered from their faith, drawn by some ancient, buried bloodlust that had stirred in their darkest hearts, in their deepest ancestry.
Khorne.
It made her wonder about the town’s strange machines – had they somehow been made of the darkness here, inspired by the long presence of Chaos?
More figures were assembling now, eyes flaming with madness. Like the daemonic hounds, they had no sense; they were hungry, thirsty, greedy. Their teeth were bared in skull-grins.
For an instant, everything was still.
And then, howling, the horde came at them.
The people had no weapons, no armour, no technology. They carried the occasional axe, left over from the orks’ raids, or farm tools brought from the town itself. Some bore pieces of Jencir’s fallen scaffolding. But they had nothing to face, or to resist, the Sisters’ bolters.
‘Viola!’ Augusta ordered.
The first suppression cut them down in their scores.
But they didn’t care; they threw themselves over the dead and the dying, and they just kept coming.
Augusta knew what this was – knew what they were doing. This was just more blood, more lives, more fuel, but there was no other choice. If they did not defend themselves, these people would do their best to tear the Sisters to pieces.
And they were heretics, and deserved no mercy.
On another command, Viola fell back to reload and the other four bolters opened up.
Melia chanted the litany in the vox, her voice angry. Always the gentlest of them, this was not how she saw her faith, and Augusta knew that she did not wish to do this.
Yet still, she was a warrior to her core, and she fired without hesitation. A large, balding man pushed to the fore, a ball of flames seeming to burn in his overhanging belly. She took him down with a single shot.
Somewhere, Augusta thought she could hear laughing, deep and harsh and exultant.
‘Hold!’
Viola had slammed another magazine in the bolter. ‘Sister?’ She raised the weapon, unsure what the Sister Superior was doing.
‘Hold your fire.’
The furious barking of the bolters stopped.
The people kept coming, clawing over the top of one another. Their hands were covered in the blood of their fellows; they picked up fallen weapons and left their friends to suffer and die. They had no awareness of themselves, or of each other, or of what they had been.
Or of the occasional greenskin, no different to the rest.
‘Cover me,’ Augusta said.
Viola nodded. ‘Aye.’
The Sister Superior clipped her bolter back to her belt, drew her blade, but did not start the mechanism. She stepped in front of her squad and began to recite, her voice ringing from the stone.
‘Quod haereticum de prioribus surrexit. Videt Imperator non est Lux…’
The heretic has risen, he sees not the Emperor’s Light…
Behind her, her squad joined the words of the Litany of Banishment, the strength of their faith fighting back against the mad eyes of the incoming villagers.
But it was not enough. If Augusta had hoped to stop the people by the power of her faith alone, she was failing – the grip of the bloodlust was too old, and too strong. As they reached her, she slashed at first one and then another with the still-silent chainsword, then stepped back and gave the order for Viola to resume firing.
The heavy bolter cut the people down and covered the stone in more blood, and more blood. Slowly, the runnels and the pool filled with it.
Melia shook her head, but she raised her bolter and shot again.
And then they saw something else.