The Bloodied Rose - Danie Ware Read online

  ‘Yes, Sister.’

  ‘I’ll take the field emitters and the gun emplacements, make sure everything is rearmed and fully operational. And once we’re secure, we’re going into that town.’ She was still watching the scan, watching the rising blur of stone that was the ziggurat, now looming close. ‘From this point, Sisters, we assume that Felicity’s squad has passed into the Emperor’s blessing, that the area is hostile, and that this is a full combat mission.’

  ‘Yes, Sister.’ They saluted her, fists to chestplates.

  ‘Helmets on,’ Augusta said. ‘And may His light be with us all.’

  Akemi dropped her fetish back into her vambrace. She picked up her helm, dropped it over her head, and twisted the seal closed.

  ‘Approaching the landing point,’ the shipmaster said. ‘Dropping speed-flaps now. Thirty seconds.’

  Augusta could feel the vessel lowering, slowing to a hover. Her ears popped, and she lifted her own helm and snapped it into place. She flicked off the safety on her bolter, checked its ammo for the fourth time, and laid her other hand on her chainsword.

  From plague, deceit, temptation and war…

  The alarm on the rear hatch started to blare. The lock released with an audible clunk. Hydraulics whined.

  Like uncoiling ribbons, light and steam stole down into the cargo-bay.

  Viola was already on her feet, heavy bolter in both hands.

  To Augusta, she looked like she wanted to fight.

  The Arvus hovered, jet engines thundering. The air reeked of promethium fuel and shimmered with oily heat. Bright belly lights showed the landing area – an open surface of cracked, dark stone that bordered the town on one side.

  …Our Emperor, deliver us.

  Under the engines’ noise, the words of the Litany of Battle flowed, steadying them. Line and verse wove from one voice to the next over the vox – where one Sister paused, another would take up the words, and the prayer rolled through and around them all, reminding them that this was His work, that they were here in His name.

  Here, upon Lautis.

  Again.

  Perhaps, Augusta thought, they were hoping that Felicity would hear them.

  The shuttle door lowered more fully, and the thick mist of the jungle flooded the back of the vehicle. Looking out at the swamp, the Sister Superior felt a pang of unease.

  She came to the side of the ramp to see more clearly, and saw that the rock of the landing area was speckled with green. There was only a tiny amount, but gentle, curling fronds of jungle vegetation had crept between the slabs, up through the various cracks. Small, perhaps, but with enough time, they could shatter the rock asunder.

  Obsessive to a fault, no tech-priest would permit such carelessness – no one had been out here in weeks.

  The lowering hatch thunked to a stop.

  Viola was already moving, boots crashing down the ramp, heavy bolter to her shoulder. She jumped from the ramp’s edge, landing in a combat kneel and moving her weapon in steady arcs. The heat of jet and jungle would confuse the preysight in her helmet, but Viola had the vehicle at her back and a clear field of fire – if anything moved, she’d see it.

  Nothing moved.

  Caia and Melia followed at a low run, dropping from the edge of the ramp. They crouched to offer Viola cover as she dashed forwards again.

  The Sisters’ skirmish-deployment was perfect, a smoothly functioning combat-machine. Their voices came back over the vox, now together, united in a quiet, steady chant of the hymnal – not the harmonised rage of full-on warfare, but the calm, clear caution of routine scouting.

  The still-firing engines drowned other noises out. The Arvus dangled in place, three inches above the stone ground, waiting.

  ‘Jatoya!’ Shouting to make herself heard, the Sister Superior instructed Jatoya to take the position at the ramp’s foot, flamer covering the approach. Then she gestured for Akemi to give her a hand with the gear.

  One by one, the two women threw the heavy cases out of the back of the shuttle. Silently cursing the absence of loaders, Augusta kept her bolter and chainsword holstered, and gestured to the side of the landing area, where the walls of the township could be clearly seen.

  ‘Over there! Stack it by the watchpost!’

  The cathedral, further back and on the other side of the town, had faded to a shadowy blur, drowned in the planet’s noxious mist and the colossal overgrowth of flora.

  ‘Viola! Advance and secure the basecamp area! Caia, Melia, with Viola. Jatoya, Akemi, with me! Let’s get out of here!’

  Breathless from the heat, ducking the noise of the Arvus and its hot convection winds, the Sisters picked up their gear and ran for the camp.

  Once they were clear, the shuttle lifted to the top of the canopy, its lights bright.

  It hovered there a moment, almost as if it were waiting for something, then it turned, and was swallowed by the trees.

  Chapter Four

  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 c
ompositions, 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.