Raezazel absorbed a man named Hoygens, and devoured his memories, glimpsing scenes of a life of fear and horror, and the final delicious denial of his faith.
He was so enraptured with eating Hoygens"s ignorant mind that for a moment Raezazel did not notice the last survivor grabbing the autopistol on the floor.
HAGGARD KICKED ERKHAR"S severed hand aside and picked up the pistol. He stumbled back against the navigation helm as the full horror of Raezazel oozed finally onto the bridge. The last few faithful were disappearing into its ma.s.s. Haggard knew that the others on the ship were dead. There would be no freedom from Drakaasi. None of them would survive.
Finally, Haggard understood that survival was not enough.
Hundreds of eyes turned to look at him. Haggard didn"t know if he could move. It was the most horrible thing he had ever seen, glowing blue flesh and golden blades, rippling with silver.
"Where..." he stuttered, "where are my friends? Are they dead?"
"Of course," replied Raezazel in a hundred voices at once.
"Good," said Haggard. He slammed the b.u.t.t of the pistol down on die navigation helm.
The command stud rescinded the last coordinates input into the cogitator. The Hammer of Daemons reverted back to its previous course: the way to the Promised Land.
Haggard emptied the rest of the gun"s ammunition into the navigation helm. The controls exploded in sparks and blue flames.
Haggard fell to the deck, slick with the blood of the faithful.
Raezazel the Cunning looked up at the viewscreen. The Hammer of Daemons swung around, the stars marching past until the view centred on a glowing red slash in s.p.a.ce. It was the warp rift, the gateway to the warp into which Raezazel had promised to deliver souls for Tzeentch.
The daemon"s eyes widened in something like fear.
Raezazel threw Haggard aside, but the controls were ruined.
Raezazel"s realm was the human mind. Machines were just tools, just pieces of metal. He had no way of rewriting the ship"s cogitators as he might rewrite the memories of a victim.
Deep inside the warp rift, a great golden eye opened.
The Hammer ofDaemons"s main engines kicked in, propelling the ship towards the rift. It grew larger and larger in the viewscreen, the eye unblinking, transfixing Raezazel where he stood.
"RAEZAZEL," said a voice that boiled up from the warp. "YOU PROMISED ME SOULS. YOU PROMISED ME THE FAITHFUL.
YOU HAVE FAILED ME.".
For those last few moments, Raezazel screamed, and Haggard laughed.
ALARIC WATCHED FROM the c.o.c.kpit of the shuttle as the Hammer of Daemons suddenly veered off course, main engines flaring. The ship rocketed towards the red slash that Alaric had guessed was the warp rift, the intended destination of Raezazel"s flock.
There could be little doubt that everyone on the ship was doomed: Dorvas and the brave men of the Hathran Armoured Cavalry, who had been failed once more by Alaric; Erkhar, whose faith had kept him sane while men like Gearth were losing their souls; and Haggard, the only friend Alaric had really had on Drakaasi.
He tried to grieve for them. He tried to feel the weight of their deaths on him, but he was tired, and he could feel nothing.
Alaric lay back in the grav-seat of the shuttle. The constellations of the Eye of Terror whirled around him in their endless pattern, unconquerable and infinite.
Alaric wanted very much to sleep. He surrendered his mind to the suspended animation membrane that covered his brain, and the stars went dark.
ALARIC STAYED IN suspended animation for seven months.
The catalepsean node in his brain shut down everything except for his breathing and heartbeats. He woke once every several weeks to deplete the shuttle"s meagre food and water stash and keep his muscles from atrophying. He was glad when he went back into suspension, because in deep, total sleep he did not dream.
A salvage team trailing an Imperial battlefleet found the distress beacon on Alaric"s shuttle. Thinking it was a saviour pod from a larger ship, and that they could ransom the crew inside to the Imperial Navy, they eagerly boarded the shutde among visions of retiring on the armfuls of credits the Navy was sure to give them for the officers inside. By the time they breached the hull they had become convinced that the occupants were officers, rapidly rising in rank until they expected to see a rear admiral or fleet commissar weeping with joy to see them.
Instead, they got their first look at a real live s.p.a.ce Marine.
Since they had no idea how valuable a s.p.a.ce Marine might be, but were very aware of how dangerous he was, the salvage crew debated whether to cast off and leave the shuttle to drift. The s.p.a.ce Marine"s great size suggested that he would eat too much for the salvage ship to be able to make it back to port without running out of supplies. Other crew members were in favour of killing him, since he was no doubt a devout warrior monk h.e.l.l bent on exterminating evildoers, and none of the crew had particularly spotless records. Alaric put a stop to all this by kicking down the airlock door and telling them that if they did not take him to a location of his choosing, he would kill them. The crew believed him.
His chosen location was the Inquisitorial fortress on Belsimar.
THE GENERAL LUMBERED up onto the peak of the ridge. He had lost many limbs in die past few months, but he still had just enough to drag his insect bulk around. His abdomen was covered in scars, and his mandibles were blunted by enemy armour and bone, but he was alive, and that was more than could be said for any of Drakaasi"s lords. They had burned brightly, charging at the head of their armies, and duelling one another in week-long conflicts, but they had burned out first as well.
The old scaephylyd took in the scene around him. Aelazadne stood in the distance, its crystal towers shattered and blackened like the stumps of decaying teeth. In the valleys formed by the undu-lations of die plain, he could see bands of humans, near-feral, armed with teeth and fingers and the odd stone spear, sc.r.a.pping with one another.
New champions would be born from this, new heroes of the Dark G.o.ds. They would look upon die collapsed heap of ancient weapons in Vel"Skan and the corpse-mountains of Gorgath, and they would seek to emulate those who had created them. The general, and the scaephylyd nadon, had seen it happen before.
For now, there was nothing: no order, no structure, and no power save that which a man could wrench from the bodies of his enemies.
More scaephylyds clambered up the ridge. Many of them were scarred by war too, and all of them had become veterans. It had been a long time since the scaephylyds had marched to war, and before long, when the predatory war bands began to organise themselves again, they would retreat below the earth and take up waiting once more.
Among the scaephylyds were newcomers. Green-skinned and hulking, most of them were brute animals, barely able to hold an axe the right way, but a few of them had enough cunning to lead their fellow creatures, and one, the grizzled one-eared greenskin, had a light in his eyes that suggested he might still understand.
The scaephylyds and greenskins a.s.sembled around the general, lowering their weapons in deference. The general waved a forelimb, encompa.s.sing the shattered city and the landscape still torn by desperate, endless war.
"Do you see now?" he asked, his intonation of the scaephylyd tongue a momentous rumble. "Chaos."
"THIS PLACE," SAID Inquisitor Nyxos, "used to be a pleasure world."
Nyxos leaned his old body against the railing of the balcony. He looked out on a rampant forest dappled with dead browns and greys. Colonies of swooping predators fought for sc.r.a.ps in the tteetops. The sky was stained, and the rivers flowing down from the distant mountains were the colour of mud.
"You could win a place here with a lifetime of service and a few medals. Lord generals, admirals, that sort of thing. Good hunting, plenty of imported lads and la.s.ses> all very willing. Hot and cold running narcotics. Well worth a couple of centuries in the trenches."
Nyxos turned away from the sight with a smile. "I suppose the planet didn"t like it."
Alaric did not return his smile. There wasn"t anything particularly funny about Belsimar.
The stately pile, half-reclaimed by the forest, had apparently once been the Inquisitorial fortress. All the equipment had been stripped out when the planet decided to turn on its inhabitants, but the mansion still had warrens of cells and storage vaults beneath the handsome exterior. Alaric fancied it looked better now than it had ever done, its garish mosaics fragmented and its overwrought architecture split and dragged down by the forest. Belsimar had been worth watching over once, no doubt because of the temptations of pleasure cults and the dangerous nature of knowledge being brought together by noteworthy people from across the Imperium.
"You picked a h.e.l.l of a place to turn up, you know," said Nyxos.
"It was the only place I could think of in the Eye that wasn"t under siege," replied Alaric. "I"m surprised I remembered anything was here." Alaric had heard that there was an Inquisitorial facility on Belsimar from an inquisitor he had been a.s.signed to before he had attained the rank of jusdcar. That same inquisitor was probably elsewhere in the Eye, trying to fend off the tide of Chaos that was flowing out of the Eye.
"And I"m surprised you"re alive."
"Haulvarn is dead."
"So is Thane. Dvorn and Visical made it."
"They"re alive?" For the first time in a very long time Alaric felt something like elation. He had thought he was the only one left.
"They made it to a refinery and got out on the last fuel container.
Dvorn is a.s.signed to Brother-Captain Stern"s Terminator retinue.
Visical"s under Inquisitor Deskanel around Agripinna. I don"t know how they are faring, I"m afraid. Things are rather confused around the Eye."
"Not so confused that you couldn"t find me."
"Ah, Justicar, what are friends for?" Nyxos sat on the stone bench beside Alaric. The room had once been a ballroom, with grand windows opening onto die balcony and its once stunning view.
Now chunks of fallen decor and an orchestra pit full of dead leaves were all that remained of its opulence. "I have read your preliminary report."
The full one will be a lot longer."
"So it will, so it will." Nyxos looked up at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. "Ah, Hawkespur."
The last time Alaric had seen Interrogator Hawkespur, he hadn"t been able to tell if she was dying or not. It had evidently been a close thing. The lower half of her face was ruined by pock-marks and chemical burns from the pollution she had inhaled on Chaeroneia, and the front of her throat was taken up by a bulky rebreather unit. She still wore her naval uniform, stripped of its insignia. She was carrying a heavy piece of machinery that looked like it was designed to punch holes in metal.
"It"s primed, sir," she said, her voice stiff and metallic.
"It"ll work?" asked Nyxos.
"There were good results with prisoners at Subi-aco," replied Hawkespur.
"Then proceed, interrogator."
Hawkespur stood behind Alaric. Even with him seated, she had to hold the device at eye level to reach. Clamps fastened around the Collar of Khorne around Alaric"s neck. A flash of heat hit the back of Alaric"s neck, and the clamps banged shut. Alaric felt pain, and a great pressure on his neck. Metal complained, and then barked as it was sheared through.
The two halves of the Collar of Khorne clanged to the floor.
Alaric gasped. He saw the ghost of Belsimar, the image of a beautiful planet flickering over the dreary landscape. Then it was gone, replaced with a new hyper-awareness. Alaric could feel the echo of Belsimar"s sorrow, and the pain of the war in the stars overhead.
"Did it work?" asked Nyxos.
"Yes," said Alaric, a slight shudder in his voice. "I am whole again."
You will be back to normal in a few days," said Nyxos.
"Disorientation is normal." He prodded the remains of the collar with his toe. "Dispose of this thing," he said. Hawkespur obliged, picking the halves of the collar up with sanctified tongs and carrying them away.
"I"m glad she"s alive," said Alaric when she was gone. He fingered the callous around his neck where the collar had rubbed away at his skin.
"She would say the same about you," said Nyxos, "if she felt that such a thing was appropriate. We had written you off, Alaric, I am sorry to say. When we found out who had raided Sarthis Majoris we feared the worst. I hoped that you had died on that battlefield, Emperor forgive me."
"Perhaps..." said Alaric faltering, still coping with the return of his psychic awareness, "perhaps it would not have been such a bad thing."
"What makes you say that?" asked Nyxos. He did not sound surprised to hear it. There are few enough Grey Knights in the galaxy. Why would it benefit from one less?"
"To survive," said Alaric, "I did some terrible things. I turned Drakaasi"s lords on one another, just like a cultist would to foment rebellion. I consorted with heretics, and aliens. I left a great many people to die to escape, and to get revenge. A Grey Knight would not have done those things. Many times, I wondered if the right thing to do would be to just die, but I... could not. I had to survive. I had to go that far, and even survival was not enough."
"You fear corruption," said Nyxos.
"I do. More than anything. I know what fear is now."
Nyxos smiled again. He was a very old man, probably centuries old, and even by Inquisitorial standards he had done a sterling job of avoiding death. He had probably seen just about every strange and terrible form corruption could take, but a Grey Knight who had fallen was beyond any of that. "Alaric, there are ways you can be purified. It is not easy, or painless, but it can be done. We have ways."
"Can I fight as a Grey Knight again?"
"Ah, what an interesting question. There is more than one way for a Grey Knight to serve, and many more for you. You have an imagination, Alaric, dedication, yes, but creativity too. How many Grey Knights could have survived on Drakaasi? Ignoring whether it was right or not, how many could have thought it up in the first place?"
"Not many," admitted Alaric.
That is something to be proud of. It is another blade in the Emperor"s hand. I dare say my word would get you back into the training halls of t.i.tan, if that is where you can best serve, but matters at the Eye are reaching a dire state and we need more than just soldiers, even Grey Knights." Nyxos dusted his hands on his long dark robes and stood up. "Our shuttle leaves in two hours. Say some prayers and forgive yourself for a while. Think about what you can do for your Emperor, instead of what sins you committed in the past. I have some very particular plans for you, Justicar Alaric. You might be surprised just what a man of your skills can achieve. Although no one on Drakaasi would be in any doubt."
Nyxos followed Hawkespur down to the lower floors of the mansion and the shutde hangar.
Alaric hung his head, feeling the psychic eye inside him blinking in the sudden light. He was glad that it had been shut while he was on Drakaasi. The underlying ugliness of the place might have been too much.
He thought about Haulvarn and Erkhar, and the Hathrans on the Hammer of Daemons. He thought about Raezazel, Ebondrake and Arguthrax. He saw Venalitor"s face as he fell, the expression turning to horror as he realised he had failed. Thinking about it, reliving it, would not change it.
He clasped his hands in front of him and began to pray.
"I am the Hammer," he whispered. "I am the point of His spear, the mail about His fist..."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR.
Freelance writer Ben Counter is one of the Black Library"s most popular SF authors. An Ancient History graduate and avid miniature painter, he lives near Portsmouth, England.
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