Heart & Soul - James Swallow Read online

  Other adepts stood around in disarray, many of them keening to one another in binaric cant as they clambered over the structure of the techno-relic, desperately checking its functions and the integrity of the force wall.

  ‘Did you see it happen?’ Miriya asked her Sister.

  Isabel shook her head, anger and sorrow warring across her scarred face. ‘I was close… But not close enough. I heard their voices, the gunfire… But by the time I got up here, they were through. Gone.’

  Miriya’s gaze shifted to a tall oval of brass that lay pressed against the undulating surface of the force barrier. It was the only place in the membrane of energy where an object could pass through from outside and back again, and the power field swirled and crackled within its bounds. Her jaw set as she tried to make sense of what had transpired.

  Limping, dragging a damaged machine-leg behind him, Questor Nohlan came out of the shadows and gave her a weak, brittle smile. The expression seemed grotesque on his hybridised face of metal and flesh. ‘It would seem that the Honoured Celestian Oleande did not wish to wait for a higher ruling.’ Oil and watery processing fluids were dripping from beneath his cloak, but he paid them no mind. ‘She was quite insistent.’ He nodded towards the dead bodies. ‘We were taken by surprise, you understand. Our protocols for such an attack are incomplete…’

  ‘You did not expect an act of aggression from an ally,’ concluded Cassandra. ‘Curse them for this! What do they hope to achieve here?’ She turned on Miriya, as if the other woman could give her the answer she could not find. ‘Why in the Emperor’s name would they do such a thing? Oleande must know she will be punished for it!’

  ‘Perhaps she does not care,’ said Verity without looking up, as she scanned the torn-open corpses with her auspex. ‘She may believe she is atoning.’

  ‘It is impossible for a Sister of Battle to turn against the Imperium,’ said Rubria, rising to her feet, ignoring the hospitaller. ‘Our faith is unbounded! There must be an explanation for this act!’

  No one wanted to voice what lurked in everyone’s thoughts, and so the words hung in the cold night unspoken and threatening. ­Treachery. Betrayal. Disloyalty. Miriya felt her heart shrink in her chest when she considered them.

  No Sororitas has ever fallen. That was what a novice was taught from the very first days of training. In every convent, in every Order, it was the bedrock upon which their unbreakable conviction was built. To even dare to suggest otherwise was to court censure of the greatest severity.

  And yet Miriya found she could not meet Rubria’s searching, imploring gaze. Instead she cast around, taking in the rest of her squad. They stood around her in loose formation, their uncertainty clear in their manner. Slowly, her old, keen battle-rage began to rise. Familiar and empowering, the Sister let it fill her. There was only one thing that could be done.

  ‘Questor.’ She shot a look at Nohlan. ‘Do you function well enough to stand with us?’

  ‘Processing. Processing.’ The adept made a clicking sound and reached under his robes, staunching the flow of fluids. ‘I do, ­Honoured Sister. If you wish it.’

  ‘I wish it.’ She nodded and drew herself up before barking out an order ‘Strike formation!’ The call had the desired effect, and Isabel, Cassandra and the others snapped to attention, presenting their weapons ready. ‘We go in after them.’

  ‘Are you sure that is wise?’ Verity said quietly. ‘If Oleande and her troops are in there…’ She faltered. ‘We don’t know what her intentions are.’

  ‘Yes we do,’ Miriya corrected. ‘We know full well.’

  At length, Verity gave a nod. ‘I suppose so.’ She gathered herself up and made a show of checking over her medicae gauntlet. ‘I will attend you.’

  Rubria looked askance at the slight hospitaller and it was clear that she considered Verity’s offer to be foolish; but Miriya had served too long with the Sister of Serenity alongside her squad to doubt Verity’s capability in even the harshest of war zones. To suggest she wait outside the force barrier would be a slur on her character, as marked as the affront Miriya had felt when Oleande demanded the same of her.

  ‘Take your place, Sister,’ she commanded.

  Nohlan led the way to the brass gateway and pushed aside the fussing adepts minoris working at the humming power grids that surrounded it. ‘The transition will be very unpleasant for unmodified humans,’ he warned. ‘Prepare yourselves.’

  He stepped across, vanishing into the shimmering field matrix as if passing through a wall of captured lightning.

  Miriya voiced an invocation under her breath and went after him.

  The Questor’s estimate was conservative at best.

  Once, Sister Miriya had been hit by a witchkin’s psychic shock-blast that lit up her nerves with white fire, searing her body with an agony that seemed to last an eternity. This was worse.

  Although the energy membrane was as thin as a sheet of gossamer, it felt as if she had fallen into an inferno. The pain was unbelievable. Every atom of her seemed to be alight and burning, tearing itself apart with the murderous violence of the transition. For a moment, all she wanted was to die and have the agony end. But that flash of weakness was smothered even as it formed by something greater, something unbreakable. The knowledge that her duty was yet to be done.

  This was but another trial, another moment of pain and hardship along the path that was destiny to every Adepta Sororitas that had ever lived.

  Adversity is a test, her mentors had taught her. Never fail it.

  And then she was through, pulling down her breather and fighting the urge to heave and bring up bile. Nohlan stood before her, twitching and giving off a peculiar ululation as he bled away the static charge that had built up in his cyborg body through the crossover.

  The stale air inside the force wall cordon was still and rich with the metallic tang of spilled blood. Miriya looked behind her, for the first time seeing the world outside the force wall from the perspective of those trapped inside it. Frozen, smoky shapes that might have been human figures hovered out there. They looked like wraiths.

  The other Sisters came through one at a time, each of them sweaty and twitching from the experience. Ananke and Isabel­ first, then Danae and Verity before Cassandra brought up the rear with Marcia, Rubria and Aemilia. Each of them shook off the effect of the transition in their own way. All of the Sisters knew it was only the precursor to the horrors that awaited them.

  With quick, cutting gestures she silently ordered them into a staggered battle formation and shot Nohlan a look. By now he had gathered himself, and one of the mechadendrites emerging from beneath his cloak rose up to eye level like an angry serpent.

  The tip snapped open to reveal a detector fan, and it moved this way and that, tasting the air. After a moment, he pointed. ‘Processing. Readings are in conflict and… Unsettling. Processing.’

  Miriya drew her bolt pistol and chainsword. ‘Our mandate is a ­simple one,’ she told the others. ‘If you lay your gaze upon anything that is not loyal… Kill it.’

  They advanced on what had become of the chapel. Miriya had seen picts of the building on mission briefing slates, images of the holy site in days before the agents of Chaos had come to Meseda Quintus. Once, it had been a monument to the glory of the Imperium, a series of ­towe­ring spires arranged like the Emperor’s crown rising up on the highest point of the city surrounding it.

  Now those pinnacles were covered in blasphemous banners sewn together from human skins, tanned flesh branded with sigil of the Blood God, endlessly dripping with ichor. Heaps of skulls lay in drifts around the sides of the stone walls, and the pathways towards the holes blown through the shrine’s sides were uneven roads of broken bone fragments ground into the dirt.

  At her side, Sister Aemilia smothered a noise in her throat – half-choke, half-sob – as they approached a line of X-shaped crucifixes. Each of the fra
mes were made of girders, and hung upon them were the brutalised bodies of their Battle Sisters, lost months before in earlier attacks on the city. Their armour punctured by sword blows and shots, their lifeblood staining the sanctified ceramite and the ground beneath them, they were a tragic sight to behold. It was no death for one as noble as a Sororitas.

  Verity detached herself from the group, openly weeping but still standing tall, and from her belt she pulled a small, jewelled bottle filled with water from the Font of Memory on Ophelia. She whispered a prayer for the souls of the lost and flicked a measure of the sacred fluid at the feet of each of the dead.

  They paid their respects with a final bow, and moved on towards the ruined chapel. ‘The Emperor knows their names,’ said Cassandra, throwing a final, grim-faced look over her shoulder.

  And will He know ours before the day is out? The question pricked at Miriya’s thoughts and she forced it away.

  The stagnant air seemed to resonate, and her moment of distraction faded as the crackle of las-fire and bolter shots reached her ears.

  ‘Inside–?’ The question was still forming on Isabel’s lips when a cloud of bone-dust billowed out of the closest hole in the wall, and from within it came a screaming, howling mass of people.

  The Army of the Iconoclast were nightmare figures. A ragged mix of commoners, civilians, enforcers and guardsmen from every reach of the planet, all of them fallen to the blood-soaked madness of the Mark of Khorne. Their eyes were wide, lost to unreason and death-lust. Their clothing was coated in a slurry of congealed blood, organ meat and other body matter; some wore conical hoods made from the skins of those they had killed, some in crude armour fashioned from lashed-together human femur bones. They carried weapons of all kinds, from war-swords and makeshift stone clubs to lascarbines and autostubbers.

  Their chants were a cacophony of dissonant shrieking, but one phrase repeated itself over and over as they boiled across the rubble towards the Battle Sisters. ‘Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!’

  Miriya took careful aim at a chattering, flabby-faced man at the front of the group and fired a shot that turned his head into crimson mist. It was the signal for the rest of the squad to open fire, and as hostile rounds sparked off their armour, the Battle Sisters advanced and slaughtered their way through the enemy defenders.

  The Iconoclast’s devotees were so tightly packed together that some of the mass-reactive rounds over-penetrated their targets and ended more than one of them with a single shot. The following ranks hurdled the still-warm bodies of their dead brethren without pause, and as the slide on Miriya’s bolt pistol locked open, she went to her buzzing chainsword. Revving the spinning tungsten teeth of the blade, she cursed the enemy and waded into their ranks with savage sweeps of the weapon, her face twisting in fury.

  She killed a dozen in the span of a few heartbeats, opening torsos to the air, spilling out ropes of intestine and wet gushes of blood across the ground. A brutal kind of joy washed over Miriya as she briefly lost herself in the action. She felt herself being pulled towards the same berserker rage that her targets showed. Jetting streamers of red spattered over her armour and through the stale air, glistening brightly, daring her to wallow in the act of killing.

  It lasted only a moment, but the feeling shamed Miriya and the ­Battle Sister expunged it brutally, mouthing a sacra­ment of protection to herself as she ended the lives of a group bearing heavy energy pikes. They were the last of the defenders at the entrance and they fell screaming, the echoes­ of their foul prayers fading away.

  Miriya’s heart pounded against the inside of her ribcage and she stilled her bloodlust with an effort of will. ‘The power of the daemon Khorne is strong in this place,’ she said aloud, her voice rough and cracked.

  Rubria spat on the ground and made a sign of warding. ‘I feel it. The beast does not care who wins in the wars that it creates, only that blood continues to be shed for eternity. Ours, or the traitor-kin’s, it matters not.’

  ‘Guard yourselves, my Sisters,’ said Miriya, moving into the shadows of the ruined wall as she reloaded her bolt pistol. ‘This will test us all…’

  The horrors grew worse within.

  Inside the chapel’s devastated atrium, they came upon a heap of butchered bodies dangling from hooked chains, each of them milk-pale where they had been exsanguinated into troughs. The churn of thick, glutinous blood sloshed heavily along crude, jury-rigged channels into pipes along the walls, pumped upwards by chugging machines to then cascade down once more in a vast red waterfall. The curtain of hissing liquid acted like a shimmering partition to the vestibule beyond, and through it Miriya glimpsed more bodies – but these were lithe, armoured figures.

  ‘The Celestians!’ cried Verity, and she started forward, before baulking at the notion of pushing through the blood-fall. Danae and Ananke took the initiative and fired rounds into the mechanism of the horrific device, blasting the pumps into fragments. In moments, the rain of red became a trickle, and the scene within the vestibule was made clear.

  The fallen Sisters of the Valorous Heart lay in a cluster. Miriya knew the circumstances of their fate immediately – the way most of them lay back to back, their guns all aimed outwards in a wheel of death, the cascades of spent bolt-shells scattered about their boots. When the end had come for them, they had been firing in every direction, and as she mentally tracked the lines of attack, Miriya’s hard gaze found heaps of heretic bodies. A ring of dead enemies lay around the Battle Sisters, all of them carrying heavy man-portable autocannons of a type more suited to blasting through tank hulls than power armour.

  ‘This…. This was butchery,’ growled Marcia.

  ‘This was an ambush,’ corrected Danae, kicking at the headless corpse of a heretic fighter to turn it over. ‘And curse Oleande, but she walked her squads right into it!’

  Miriya nodded bleakly. The Celestians had fallen victim to a ploy that the Sisters of Our Martyred Lady had encountered on more than one occasion during this campaign. Her judgement was confirmed when she stooped and grabbed a fistful of heavy, slick material fashioned into a cover; a camo-cloak. The cloak shimmered as she tightened her grip, the colours of the material shifting and blurring, breaking up.

  ‘Survivors here!’ Rubria shouted from among the ranks of the fallen Sororitas.

  Miriya tossed the ruined cloak away and ran to her side. She stood over an olive-skinned Celestian whose eyes were bloodshot and unfocused. At her side, a few others of her cadre were still alive, although their wounds were grave. ‘Can you speak?’ she asked.

  The Celestian nodded, coughing up pink foam in a rattling­ wheeze. ‘We… were undone by our own… arrogance.’

  Miriya looked around, imagining how it had played out. The heretics, silently waiting in the shadows around the edge of the wide vestibule, concealed beneath the sensor-opaque cloth that mimicked exactly the shade of the blood-stained stonework around them.

  ‘Oleande led us in…’ the Celestian continued. ‘The Iconoclast set a trap…’

  ‘Eloheim,’ Rubria said quietly. ‘Sister Oleande… She is not here.’

  The injured Celestian heard her and managed an agonised nod. ‘My commander broke through while we… We held. Even now, she searches to find the Iconoclast and end… the mission.’

  ‘Such a waste…’ muttered Cassandra, standing nearby. ‘If only they had waited! We would have known to watch for this tactic–’

  Miriya held up a hand to silence her. ‘No matter now. We must finish what was started here.’ She beckoned to Danae and the Questor. ‘Sister. Take Marcia and Aemilia, get the wounded back to the entrance. Nohlan, go with them.’

  ‘What will you do?’ said the adept. ‘Without me to scry the way–’

  ‘We will manage,’ insisted Verity.

  Miriya nodded at the hospitaller’s words and turned away. ‘Ananke. Cassandra. Rubria. Take the south
ern aisle across the way and search towards the reliquary. Signal via vox if you find anything.’ The three women nodded as one and set off into the shadows. She turned to Isabel and Verity. ‘You will come with me. We’ll push forward down the nave towards the far side of the chapel.’

  Verity frowned. ‘You believe Oleande is still alive in this charnel house?’

  Miriya nodded, checking her weapons as they moved off. ‘I have seen her fight, Sister. She will not sell her life cheaply.’

  Her words proved prophetic.

  Crossing what had once been the ornate space of the main transept, skirting pyres made of bodies and desecrated artefacts, the clatter of blades and the skirl of weapons fire echoed off the high ceiling overhead.

  Miriya broke into a run and Isabel kept pace with her. Verity was close behind, clasping a small-gauge holdout bolt pistol in her hands. She hid her hesitance well, considered the Battle Sister. Any other hospitaller might have asked to join the evacuation of the wounded, but not Verity. Her dedi­cation remained exemplary.

  They passed the low archway leading into the great chancel, and at last, the object of their mission presented itself.

  The Iconoclast was in full flow of combat, fighting among a troop of traitor soldiers in debased Auxilia carapace armour festooned with spikes and kill-cult runes. Sister Oleande and a pair of her Celestians were giving them no quarter, but it was immediately clear that the enemy had them on the defensive. They were being toyed with, cut and bled with each surge of attack but not killed outright. The servants of the Blood God wanted to extend and savour the agony of their eventual defeat.

  Miriya had never been this close to the arch-heretic before. Clad from head to foot in close-fitting wargear of porous white material that glistened like porcelain, the Iconoclast was rendered into a blank, indefinable human shape. She thought of a denuded mannequin or an artist’s figure model; the Iconoclast had nothing to define it, no hint of identity or self. The only characteristics that broke the uniformity were the two weapons in the heretic’s gauntleted hands – ancient khopesh-fashion sickle swords, wicked silver curves that flashed in the dull illumination filtering through chapel’s stained glassaic windows. The ends of the hilts had concealed bolter magazines inside them, allowing the wielder to attack from range if needed. Miriya had witnessed the after-effects of those weapons up close, months before in a burning hive tower when they had arrived too late to prevent the heretic’s escape. They were the grisly tools of a killer who revelled in bloodletting. A killer who could not be allowed to escape again.