Hammer Of Daemons Part 3

Slowly, the column rotated on gears that ground like thunder. The other cages had their own occupants: human prisoners, naked and weeping, old corpses, half-glimpsed freaks either alien or mutated, all of them suspended above the t.i.tanic blood cauldron. Alaric could hear droning alien prayers, pleading with the Emperor, and the ragged breaths of dying men. Tears and blood fell in a thin drizzle.

Walls of black stone rose around the column and the cauldron.

Alaric looked harder and saw that it was not stone at all but flesh, rotted black. High above, the cliff edge was festooned with barrel-sized cages, each holding a body in an advanced state of decay.

Flocks of flying creatures, like oversized crows, but with ribbons of flayed skin instead of feathers, feasted on them. The decaying cliffs were riddled with tunnels and caves, and the beetlelike alien creatures scurried through them, chewing at the flesh with insert-like mandibles. The sky above was indigo, almost black, shot through with red, as if the sky itself was bleeding.

He was in h.e.l.l. Alaric had died at the hands of Duke Venalitor and woken up in h.e.l.l. He had failed. Everything he had ever done, ever thought or said, and everything he might ever have done had he lived, was meaningless. He had failed as completely as it was possible to fail.

Alaric slumped down onto the floor of his cage. He had never felt such despair. It was made complete by the fart that if he was already dead. He could not die again, and so it would never end.

However, Durendin had told him he was not dead: Durendin, a Chaplain of the Grey Knights, a man he could surely trust completely.

Alaric looked up. Through the bars he could see the cage above.

Inside it was a huge humanoid form, one that Alaric recognised.

The huge size and surgical scars matched Alaric's own.

'Haulvarn!' called Alaric. 'Brother Haulvarn, can you hear me? Do we yet live?'

Haulvarn did not answer. He was presumably unconscious, or dead, and like Alaric had been stripped of his war gear. Alaric tried to force the bars of his cage apart, and then to rock it from side to side in the hope of grabbing the gnarled metal of the column and climbing up to Haulvarn, but the cage was too strong and suspended too far out.

'Haulvarn! Brother, speak to me!' shouted Alaric.

As if in response, Alaric's cage fell.

Alaric kicked out in desperation as the cage plummeted towards the blood cauldron. He was slammed against the side of the cage as it hit the surface of the blood. Blood closed in around him, and hands reached in, the skin sloughing off them. Alaric kicked at the hands of the revellers, but there were too many of them. The sound of them was horrible, blasphemous prayers spilling from bloodied lips in a hundred different tongues.

Something roared, and a whip cracked. A daemon threw the wors.h.i.+ppers aside and stood over Alaric, leering. Alaric recognised its kind from countless battlefields. It was a foot soldier of Khorne, a 'bloodletter' in the jargon of the Inquisition. Alaric remembered they carried two-handed swords as weapons of choice, but this one's whip was just as cruel.

The daemon recoiled as soon as the bodies were clear of the cage.

The mere presence of a Grey Knight was anathema to the daemon.

Even without the pentagrammic wards built into his armour, the psychic s.h.i.+eld around Alaric's mind pushed back against the daemon's presence with enough violence to make its skin smoulder.

The bloodletter snarled and lashed at the revellers around it, slicing off a hand here, a leg there, in its rage. Then it grabbed the bars of the cage with one hand and dragged it through the gore towards the chasm wall.

The daemon hauled the cage out of the blood and into a cave opening. The smell was appalling, putrescence so heavy in the air that Alaric could see it trickling down the walls in foul condensation. Dark, twisted creatures scuttled towards him. These were not daemons, but some alien species, and their skin carried the brands and manacle scars of a slave race.

The aliens dragged Alaric through the stinking tunnels into a cavern that glowed with a close red heat. It was a forge, where human and alien slaves pulled glowing weapons from vats of molten metal. Other slaves were chained to anvils, their spines twisted by years of servitude, where they beat an edge into the swords and spear tips. The din was appalling.

Alaric saw Haulvarn's cage being dragged through another opening, a gaggle of aliens following it.

Haulvarn had awoken and was raging inside, trying to kick his way out of the cage.

'Haulvarn!' shouted Alaric over the ringing of the anvils. 'We are not dead! We are not dead!'

A crowd of alien slaves pressed around Alaric's cage as he was dragged towards one of the anvils. They were misshapen, asymmetrical creatures with a dozen eyes each, arranged without pattern around their faces, and complex mandibles that dribbled slime as they gibbered to each other in their language. A bolt was drawn back somewhere and the top of the cage swung open.

Alaric tried to force his way out, but shock prods were jabbed down at him. His own strength was turned back on him as he spasmed. A single shock prod with a semicircular head was pressed down against his torso, and he was pinned in place. His muscles were paralysed, save for involuntary convulsions, and though he fought against it with everything he had left he couldn't break free.

At full strength, he would have thrown the aliens out of his way, grabbed a weapon fresh from the anvil and killed everything he saw, but he was wounded and exhausted. He did not give in, he could not, but in the back of his mind a voice told him that it was futile.

One of the aliens, larger and darker-skinned than the rest, and evidently in charge, reached a pair of tongs into the closest forge. It withdrew a circle of glowing metal that was hinged on one side so it hung open. It was a collar.

The alien leaned over Alaric. Its caustic spittle dribbled onto his chest.

'Rejoice,' said the alien forge master, its Imperial Gothic thick and slurred through its mandibles, 'for this shall make you holy.'

The alien plunged the collar down onto Alaric's throat. It snickered shut around the back of his neck. His skin hissed as it cooked under the hot metal.

Alaric could struggle no more. His mind felt as if it was suddenly frozen. He realised what had been done to him. He knew, for perhaps the first time, what fear was.

THE HUMAN SPECIES was evolving.

This was a truth the Inquisition went to great pains to suppress, but it could not be denied by the inquisitors themselves. Some even held the heretical belief that the Emperor planned to shepherd this evolution onwards and help the human race achieve its potential.

The emergence of psychic humans created one of the critical tasks of the Inquisition: the identification, imprisonment and liquidation of emerging psykers. Every planetary governor was under pain of death to hand over all the psykers collected by his forces, whenever the Inquisition and its Black s.h.i.+ps came calling. What happened to the great majority of psykers herded into those Black s.h.i.+ps, only those sworn to secrecy knew for sure.

A few of the psykers, perhaps one in ten or less, were strong and adaptable enough to be properly trained. An untrained psyker was a dangerous thing, an unguarded mind through which all manner of horrors could gain entry to the worlds of the Imperium.

However, a properly trained psyker could guard his mind against such threats, and sometimes even make his mind far stronger than those of his fellow men.

It was an irony, often a cruel one, that such trained psykers were essential to the functioning of the Imperium. They were the astropaths whose arcane long-range telepathy made interstellar communications possible, the soothsayers whose skill with the Emperor's Tarot enabled them to advise on the vagaries of the future. Many Imperial citizens viewed even these sanctioned psykers with fear. Yet, in spite of the fear that followed the psyker everywhere, without him the Imperium could not function.

To most citizens a psyker was a witch, a rogue prowling the shadows of the Imperium's worlds to corrupt Emperor-fearing minds or bring forth foul things from the warp. A child foolish enough to display an unusual talent for magic tricks could expect his friends or family to turn him over to the local clergy. Wise women and fortune-tellers were burned at the stake on backwater worlds where Imperial servants rarely visited. s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p crews swapped tall tales of night-skinned humans who could rip a man's mind out of his skull, shapechangers, firebreathers and stranger things besides. Once, long ago, a time before he could remember anything at all, Alaric had been one of those witches.

Alaric was a psyker. All Grey Knights were. While most s.p.a.ce Marine Chapters made use of some psykers, only the Grey Knights required psychic potential from all their recruits. It was what made the Grey Knights capable of fighting the daemon, for a daemon's most potent weapons threatened the soul itself.

Daemons brought with them corruption, and fighting them exposed a Grey Knight to that corruption. They were trained to resist it, taught prayers of will-power so potent that they drove some recruits mad. Their armour was impregnated with sigils against the powers of the warp, the same symbols tattooed on their skins so that their bodies were s.h.i.+elded against corruption, but the most powerful defence was a Grey Knight's psychic s.h.i.+eld. Alaric had been taught in the very earliest stages of his training to imprison his soul in a cage of faith and contempt where no daemon could reach it.

It was the only weapon a daemon truly feared: an incorruptible mind, anathema to the warp. The mere existence of the Grey Knights was a victory of sorts against Chaos.

The collar fixed around Alaric's neck was a dead, heavy thing that weighed down Alaric's soul. It was an artefact of Khorne, the Blood G.o.d. The Blood G.o.d despised sorcery, and it despised the righteous, holy mind of a Grey Knight.

The Collar of Khorne suppressed psychic abilities. Alaric's s.h.i.+eld was gone. He was still a Grey Knight, he had still trained his mind and his body beyond a normal man's tolerances against corruption and possession, but without that psychic s.h.i.+eld, he was ultimately defenceless.

FIVE.

IT WAS A long time before Alaric could feel anything. He was somewhere infernally hot.

Alaric was standing, and he was chained to the wall. The chamber was lit by ruddy furnaces taking up the opposite wall. Unfinished swords and sections of armour were heaped up either side of a well-scored anvil.

'You're not supposed to wake for a good while,' said a voice behind Alaric. Alaric tried to turn, but he was chained in place. He was dimly aware that he was still in the forge where his collar had been attached, and the iron weight of it around his neck seemed to drag him down towards the floor.

'Where is my battle-brother?' asked Alaric through split and b.l.o.o.d.y lips.

'I heard there were two of you,' said the voice. It was deep and gravelly, from a throat scorched by years amid the forges. 'He's somewhere in this hole, probably having the collar fixed. They had you down as witches as soon as they brought you in. Not many get the collar, you know. It's quite an honour.'

The speaker walked to the anvil, his back to Alaric. He was a ma.s.sive man with brawny shoulders and dark skin that gleamed like bronze. Tools hung from his waist. He bent over the anvil and picked up a sword, a magnificent blade, but rough and half-finished. 'I have been down here a long time,' he continued, 'heard a lot of things, but it has been a long time since an Astartes graced this world. A long time indeed.'

'Who are you?'

The speaker did not look round. 'A smith by trade. Too useful a man to kill. I guess I should thank the Emperor for that. If there's one thing this planet needs, Astartes, it's blades, good blades, and lots of them. So this is where I shall stay until I die, and probably well beyond, making their blades. Perhaps you'll end up with one of mine. Believe me, you'll know it. There are no blades like mine on this world.'

'Where am I to be taken? What will happen to me?'

The smith still did not turn to face Alaric. The muscles on his back snaked beneath his dark skin as he laid the sword on the anvil and took up a hammer. 'Not for me to say, Astartes. Not for me to say. If I had anything worthwhile to my name, though, I'd wager it on you fighting for your life sooner rather than later. So, I'll make you a deal.'

Alaric laughed, and it sounded as bitter as the taste of blood in his mouth. 'A deal, of course.'

'Ah, hear me out, Astartes, unless you have somewhere better to be.'

Involuntarily, Alaric fought against his chains.

'I'll make you a suit of armour,' said the smith, 'the best you've ever held.'

'I have armour.'

'Not any more, and you've never had armour such as I can craft.

Fits like a steel skin. Bends like silk. Toughened by fires as fierce as the heart of a star, strong enough to turn Khorne's own axe aside.

How does that sound? Tempting?'

'But it will not be for free. I know your kind. Any promise from the corrupted is as good as a betrayal.'

'Oh no, you do not understand. In return, I ask that you seek something out for me. I dare say you will have more luck finding it out in the world than I will down here.'

'End this,' said Alaric. 'No servant of the Emperor would bargain with one such as you.'

'Such as me? And what am I?' The smith turned just enough for Alaric to see his face in profile. His face was as beaten as one of his blades, his nose broken many times, his eyes almost hidden in scar tissue. 'Find the Hammer, Astartes: the Hammer of Daemons. They say it lies somewhere on this world, and with it a hero will rise up and topple the lords of the Blood G.o.d. What would be dearer to a slave like me than to see that?' 'Lies.'

The Hammer of Daemons is very real. Nothing more is known of it, but it most definitely lies somewhere on this planet. If I didn't know better I might even say that it is right before me, chained to a wall in my forge. For you are the Hammer. Is that not so, Grey Knight?'

The weight of the collar was too much for Alaric to bear. His head bowed as it dragged him down. Black spots flickered before the forge fires, and he smelled burning iron and bolter smoke.

He drifted back out of consciousness, lulled into oblivion by the ringing of the smith's hammer on the anvil.

KARNIKHAL!.

That self-devouring beast! That tumour city, that cancerous glory! A great parasite oozed from the black of the earth!

Some say Karnikhal plummeted to Drakaasi from some distant star, and grew mindless and vast over the aeons. Others claim it as some native thing, some fungus or parasite, mutated to immense dimensions by the ever-present power of Chaos. What fools are they, to seek logic in its form!

The caverns of its entrails, the blood rivers oozing from its wounds, the groaning of its eternal pain, these are a face of Chaos, a face of Khome!

The city built across Karnikhal is a parasite upon a parasite, shanties crammed between the fatty folds of its back, spires tumbling at the whim of the beast, temples and slaughterhouses heaving with its t.i.tanic breath. All this at the whim of the mindless thing, the idiot monstrosity, the city monster that is Karnikhal!

- 'Mind Journeys of a Heretic Saint,' by Inquisitor Helmandar Oswain (Suppressed by order of the Ordo Hereticus) 'GOOD CROP THIS year,' said Lord Ebondrake.

'Indeed, my lord,' replied Duke Venalitor.

'Khorne will be pleased to see them die.'

The torture garden gave Venalitor and Ebondrake an excellent view of Karnikhai's slave market. The market was one of the largest on Drakaasi. It was built into the site of a dried-out cyst like a meteor crater. Hundreds of slavers' blocks were embedded in the tough skin of the ground, each one with several new slaves chained to it. The shouting of slavers rang out, punctuated by the sounds of whips and cracking bones.

Lord Ebondrake flexed a claw idly, like a stretching cat. The warp speaks of you, Venalitor.'

Then I am blessed, my lord.'

'It says you have brought the Blood G.o.d a very particular prize.'

Venalitor bowed. 'It is true. The Imperials fought us at Sarthis Majoris. They were swept aside, and many were taken alive.'

'More than just Guardsmen, though, so the seers say'

'You shall see, my lord.'

Lord Ebondrake padded to the edge of the torture garden's balcony. The garden was a place of reflection for Karnikhal's elite, where they could consider the dismembered bodies displayed where they had died on the intricate torture devices arranged on the obsidian. A rebel might be granted a final honour in death, to be slowly tormented on a frame of silver, to serve as inspiration for the garden's visitors.

Lord Ebondrake was a huge reptilian creature. He bore a resemblance to dragons of various human myths, and perhaps this was not a coincidence, since Ebondrake had presumably chosen his form at some point in his distant past. He had scales of jet-black, yellow feline eyes and countless bony spines, on which were sometimes mounted the heads and hands of those who had displeased him.

His long, sinuous body and enormous wings moved with a speed and grace alien to his size, and he brought with him a majesty that marked him out instantly as the de facto ruler of Drakaasi. For the occasion, Lord Ebondrake wore armour of obsidian and bra.s.s, cladding his ma.s.sive scaly body in a way that echoed the stern armour of his personal troops, the Ophidian Guard. He was accompanied by a detachment of these elite armoured warriors, who followed their master at a respectful distance. They were the most powerful fighting force on Drakaasi, with their black enven-omed blades and eyeless helms, and their presence was a constant reminder that strength at arms was the ultimate decider in Drakaasi's power struggles.

'I have no doubt there are rumours,' said Ebondrake, 'of where my rule shall take us next.'

Venalitor weighed his words carefully for a moment. 'One hears things. I am aware of a great undertaking.'

'We have stayed on this world too long,' said Ebondrake. He stretched out his wings as if indicating the expanse of Drakaasi's bloodshot sky. This filthy rock, this lump of b.l.o.o.d.y dirt, it is too small a place to contain the wors.h.i.+p due to our G.o.d. Do you not agree?'

This is a fine world,' said Venalitor simply, 'but there is always room for more blood.'

'Ha! Have some imagination, duke. Think what we could do. We leave Drakaasi only to enslave, and return our captives to this world to watch them die. On Sarthis Majoris you did just that.

However, if all Drakaasi's lords made a common cause and took our best followers out into the stars, whole worlds could fall to us.

Drakaasi will be a monument to our bloodshed.'

'You speak,' said Venalitor, 'of a crusade.'