The Bloodied Rose - Danie Ware Read online

  Augusta swore, her words vicious enough to almost make Akemi blush.

  This building had a much larger living space, a room big enough to accommodate a group – maybe a town meeting or council. Its interior walls were carved in incredible patterns, and they lit its inside to a thick, green light.

  Behind her, Augusta’s voice was grim. ‘So, there was fighting here after all.’

  In the living space, there were signs of a struggle. The furniture had been smashed and scattered, the rugs torn from the doorways.

  Augusta’s chainsword, still silent, pointed past Akemi’s shoulder, and the younger woman looked down.

  The floor-rug was shredded, as if by frantically scrabbling hands. Pieces of bright fabric were scattered across the black stone, alongside what looked like a familiar votive candle.

  But they were not what Augusta had indicated.

  Beside the rug’s remains, there was a long, rough smear, harder to see against the rock.

  But it looked like something – or someone – had been dragged from the building. Dragged, and fighting all the way.

  Following the line of the marks, Akemi found herself looking at a stain on the bottom corner of the doorway, right by her foot.

  One that looked very much like fingers, grasping at a forlorn and final hope.

  ‘Kawa Koumu lived here.’ Augusta named the priest who had governed her people, who had fought the orks as best she could, and who had welcomed the Sisters as protectors. ‘She was a good woman, strong in her faith.’

  The Sister Superior stepped past Akemi and into the room, her armoured shoulders rigid with anger, and with tight, personal control. She picked up the candle and put it in its niche on the wall.

  ‘Sister,’ Akemi said. ‘Whatever took her, it took her out towards the ziggurat.’ She used the muzzle of her weapon to gesture at the lines on the floor, how they curved when they passed the doorway. ‘She did not go willingly.’

  ‘I doubt she would have,’ Augusta said, her tone bleak.

  ‘But why the priest?’ Akemi asked her. ‘This is the only place we’ve seen fighting. Why would she, alone, offer resistance?’

  Augusta had crouched and was inspecting the stains.

  From behind them, Jatoya’s rejoinder was dark. ‘Perhaps because she was the only one that could.’

  Akemi caught her breath, stopped herself from cursing.

  Gesturing for Akemi to remain in the doorway, Augusta moved carefully through the debris, shifting it with the end of her chainsword.

  But though they searched every corner, there was nothing else to find.

  They left Kawa’s home, and turned at last into the centre of the town.

  Here, close and looming, stood the ziggurat. It was huge and stern, its dark flanks stepped, its head and shoulders rising high above the levels of roofs and trees. The mist curled round its sides, making the stone gleam with moisture; carved warriors decorated its sides and two armoured figures stood like twin guards at the foot of its long flight of steps. And, at its peak, a lone figure waited, His chin lifted, His head haloed in light-rays.

  Akemi paused. The others may have seen this before, but this ancient depiction of the God-Emperor was new to her, and wondrous. She touched one gauntlet to the front of her armour and bowed her head.

  But the ziggurat, too, was blotched in moss.

  Viola muttered, her tones vicious.

  Here, the stains seemed a travesty, a confrontation – and the sight of them prickled the hairs on Akemi’s neck. And it wasn’t just at the moss, not just its blasphemous invasion of the stone; it was the creeping, suffocating anxiety that had been with them from the moment they’d left the Arvus. As Melia had said, it felt like they were being watched, like there was something lurking in one of the moss-splotched buildings, or in the surrounding streets. It was something dark, something inhuman, something hidden in the hot mist.

  Something that had all of them in its sights.

  But they had, at least, found the population of the town.

  Under the ziggurat, there lay bodies.

  At first, Akemi didn’t realise what she was seeing – the people lay in a wide half-circle, almost as if they were sky-gazing. Foolishly, she thought at first that they were unwell, and that she was seeing some sort of outdoor valetudinarium.

  And then she realised that the faint blur to her vision was not the smear of heat in her preysight.

  It was the flies.

  ‘Dominica’s eyes!’ The curse was Melia, quiet with shock.

  ‘Sister?’ Augusta’s bark was subdued.

  Melia said, ‘They’re all dead. Have been for some time.’ She sounded shaken. ‘Whatever killed them must have laid them out like this. Done it deliberately.’

  Akemi knew what would happen to a corpse, left outside and in this heat. She paused, her fear clamouring at her; she raised her eyes to the ancient God-Emperor as if asking Him for help.

  ‘Viola,’ Augusta said. ‘Follow the outside of the plaza until we get full visibility. If something has left this here intentionally, it could well be an ambush.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Akemi!’ Augusta’s bark was sharp in her vox-bead. ‘Move!’

  Akemi jumped, did as she was ordered. They moved onwards, more cautiously now, circling the bodies and the lined grey-green of the plaza itself. It seemed almost that the blood-rust moss had started from here, had flowed outwards from the ziggurat’s foot and had spread like corrosion through the deserted streets.

  And then, Akemi saw something else.

  Every single one of the dead townspeople had been…

  ‘Where are their heads?’ Viola voiced her exact thought.

  Akemi faltered, stopped. The moss was in her lungs and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t…

  A morte perpetua…

  ‘That’s not the only problem,’ Caia said. ‘Sisters, the plinth…’

  ‘Hold this location.’ Augusta’s command was almost unnecessary; the Sisters had halted in a combat half-wheel, their backs to the nearest wall. They bristled bolters in every direction, waiting for that lurking foe, for that darkness that had stalked them through the town.

  …Domine, libra nos.

  Akemi, holding to the litany like she’d held to her little fetish, looked over at the single basalt plinth that occupied the centre of the plaza, and the foot of the ziggurat’s steps.

  A single figure lay upon it. It was arched backwards, chest thrown out, as if it still struggled, but it had been dead for many days. Its flesh had bloated and blackened, and it had started to decay.

  The flies hovered over it, fat and lazy.

  Its head, too, was gone. Its ribcage had been cracked open and parted like doors; its internal organs were ­liquefying in the heat. Black stains covered its robes and had spread down the sides of the plinth – black stains that now swelled with the thick, rust-red moss.

  She caught the stench and gagged.

  ‘Kawa,’ Augusta said, the word a breath, grieving. The Sister Superior dropped to one knee, touched one hand to the front of her armour. ‘Fighting to the last. Walk in His light, my friend.’

  The Sisters repeated, ‘Walk in His light.’

  Stretched out in some barbarous and heretical sacrifice, the town priest had lost her battle against whatever had dragged her from her home. Beneath the ziggurat, beneath the ancient stone gaze of the Emperor Himself, she had been executed – and in some vile act of mockery, in some rite of blood-worship that Akemi could not understand.

  But she made herself look, think.

  Kawa’s wrists and ankles showed no signs of restraints. It suggested that she had been rendered incapable of fighting, or that something – somethings – had been holding her down.

  And around her, her people lay headless, their blood staining the
stone.

  Augusta said, ‘That Thou wouldst bring them only death, that Thou shouldst spare none…’

  Reciting the litany, her chant grew in tension, and her voice trilled with tightly controlled fury. Akemi knew the squad’s history – the priest had been their friend and supporter, had welcomed them, as she’d welcomed Sister Felicity.

  ‘…That Thou shouldst pardon none, we beseech Thee, destroy them.’

  The squad answered her. Viola’s voice seethed as she shaped the words. Jatoya’s deep tones were soaked in a low throb of pure wrath.

  Augusta looked up at the ziggurat as though she made her promise to the Emperor Himself. ‘Whatever did this, we will find it.

  ‘And we will be its ending.’

  Chapter Five

  The Lautis cathedral was not as Augusta remembered it.

  Walking down the ruined aisle, the building hollow and roofless over her head, the Sister Superior let her boots ring from the stone. Kawa’s fate and the desecration of the town had left her tight with anger, and she walked bolter in hand, the weapon issuing an outright challenge to whatever was lurking here.

  With her, her squad walked in double-file.

  But they could not reach the steps.

  Unlike their previous visit, the nave was filled with rubble – tumbled pillars, collapsed walls, smashed pieces of fallen buttresses. Augusta knew the pattern of krak grenade debris all too well; she recognised the scars in the stonework where the ammunition of her Sisters had chewed chunks from the rock.

  She halted, Caia behind her, auspex in hand.

  ‘Full suppression bursts,’ Caia said. ‘Bolter and heavy bolter alike.’ She paused, studying the spreads of the scars. ‘They fought a retreating action, backwards, up the aisle.’ Turning slowly, studying the instrument in her hand, she pointed. ‘There!’

  From beneath the rubble she saw a single, augmetic foot, grip-talons extended as if in some final act of rage or pain.

  Scatters of warm rain misted across the air.

  Augusta knelt, carefully moving the rocks. ‘Common construction servitor.’ The thing was smashed to a pulp, the flesh parts of its face rotting and the cogs in its skull all starting to corrode.

  ‘Melia?’

  ‘Been dead longer than the townspeople.’ Melia dropped to one careful knee beside the Sister Superior and turned what was left of the head with a red-gauntleted hand. ‘Flesh doesn’t last in this climate – there’s nothing left but tools and circuitry.’

  ‘Jatoya, watch our backs.’

  ‘Aye.’

  They moved more of the fallen stone. The heap groaned and shifted; scatters of dust and pebbles rolled down its sides. Slowly, they exposed more of the thing, its chest a disintegrating mess of cybernetic organs, its left arm ending in a heavy, stonecutter saw.

  Its right arm was completely missing.

  ‘It was fighting something.’ Melia tapped the dried stains on the sawblade.

  Augusta nodded. ‘They must have been surrounded, or overwhelmed.’

  ‘But what could do this?’ Melia asked her. ‘What could move with this sort of swiftness? Overwhelm a squad of our Sisters and a contingent of fully-equipped construction servitors?’

  ‘And was it the same thing that emptied the town?’ Augusta’s question was rhetorical; she was still moving the rubble, searching. ‘I do not yet comprehend this, Sisters, not this place and its mysteries, and not this foe. I fear that there are darker things here than orks.’

  Melia said nothing. The other four had deployed to a compass defence, covering pillars and archways; Caia still moved her auspex in careful arcs. Augusta’s mention of the orks had returned the memory of their previous battle, and the squad had no intention of being caught a second time.

  The Sister Superior moved more of the pile. It shuddered and shifted, exposing a second, semi-human body, this one with its face all but missing.

  She looked down at it, gauging. Servitors could put up a hard and nasty fight – there were worse melee weapons than heavy construction tools. And, like Melia, she did not understand what could have overcome them so swiftly.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘We scout by twos, roll call every ninety seconds. Melia, with me. This puzzle requires an answer.’

  The squad deployed as it had done once before, spreading out to explore what was left of the transept and cloisters. Augusta kept Melia with her, needing the woman’s medical training – Melia was not a Hospitaller, but her field knowledge was excellent.

  What they found were pieces.

  The dismembered remains of the servitors were spread throughout the nave – almost as if some predator had gone on a hunting rampage and had scattered leftovers in its wake. Not one of the corpses remained intact: many of them were missing heads, or limbs, or tools, or tracks. Many more had been disembowelled and their internal organs spread out around them.

  Yet they found no sign of Jencir himself – and nothing to show what had happened to the Sisters.

  Melia picked up a servitor’s detached clamp-arm and turned it over. ‘This was bitten,’ she said. She held it out. ‘What can bite through plasteel?’

  ‘Very big teeth,’ Augusta commented, taking the limb to examine it.

  Over the vox, Viola said, ‘There were gun-servitors in the east transept. There’s no sign of whatever took them down.’

  ‘Which way are they facing?’ Augusta asked.

  ‘They’re a mess,’ Viola commented. ‘But my instincts say the attack came from the nave.’

  ‘Understood,’ Augusta said. ‘Keep looking.’

  ‘Aye.’

  Picking their way past the fallen stonework, pieces of it as large as an immolator tank, Augusta and Melia reached the bottom of the steps. Electro-candles had been left here, one on each step climbing towards the altar, but they stood rusting and lightless, now – forgotten.

  But still, not a single flash of scarlet armour.

  Bitten.

  A suspicion was starting to grow in Augusta’s heart.

  Over the vox, Jatoya’s voice said, ‘West transept clear, proceeding into the cloisters. Looks like the repairs started as scheduled, Sister, there’s a full support framework out here, platforms and scaffolding.’

  ‘What of the defences?’

  ‘Gun-servitors here, too,’ Jatoya said. ‘Weapons are still half-loaded. Whatever took them down was fast.’

  Augusta’s suspicion was solidifying with every word Jatoya said. She paused before the top step. The drop to her knee was as much a part of her faith as drawing breath, but this time, she stayed standing.

  And her hand tightened on her bolter as the anger surged in her soul.

  On the Emperor’s high altar, there sat a skull.

  Just the one.

  It was – or had been – human, but its plates and eyestalks and mechadendrites identified it easily.

  Jencir.

  It had been flayed of all skin and placed in the altar’s centre, exactly where the Holy Aquila should have been. To one side of it lay a rosarius. To the other, a single fleur-de-lys blade.

  All three items were stained with dried and flaking blood. It had been poured lavishly over them. It had streamed from Jencir’s eye sockets; it had covered the top of the altar, coated its sides and spread out across the stone like a stain.

  A flicker of sweat stole across Augusta’s skin – like an echo of a dark disquiet.

  I know this…

  Melia had stopped at her shoulder.

  Softly, the Sister Superior murmured a prayer – for the tech-priest, for the profaned altar. She spent a long moment looking, then she stepped onto the top step, the Holy of Holies. With a surge of anger and the slam of one armoured fist, she knocked the skull sideways. It clattered across the chancel and rolled to a stop.

  ‘Noli timere,’ she sai
d. ‘Feruntur Lucem.’ The words were soft, aimed at the bloodstains, at the dark and eerie creeping in her skin. I do not fear you. I carry the Light.

  Carefully she picked up the blade and the rosarius and tucked them into her belt. Then she turned around and drew the chainsword with a rasp that echoed down through the nave.

  ‘Sisters,’ she said. ‘To me. We are played.’

  Melia had put her back to the altar stone, was covering the approach with her bolter. ‘What do you mean?’

  Augusta’s suspicions had become a certainty, cold and hard. ‘This was a gift,’ she said. ‘A taunt.’ She stood still, framed by the desecrated altar, by the empty window where the Emperor should have been, resplendent in glassiac and glory. ‘All of you, to me.’

  ‘Aye.’ Jatoya’s tones were dangerous; Augusta could hear the squad moving, running for the steps.

  ‘I have faced this foe before,’ she told them. ‘Witnessed the depths of the horror it brings. It thirsts for blood, and for warfare. It haunts my dreams, and it wakes me in a cold sweat.’ The admission was a warning, not a weakness. ‘And it knows that other members of the Order must come, seeking their Sisters.’ She turned to look through the nave, searching. ‘It has been waiting for us.’ Then she snapped, ‘Like that!’

  Unsurprised, she used the blade to point down the steps, indicating a curl of red flesh that crept around the base of a pillar. The motion was sinewy and horribly familiar. It brought a mouthful of anger and bile, echoes of images she could never forget. But her faith burned fiercely and she held herself still, her flickers of fear and fury absolutely controlled.

  She said, ‘What has teeth that could bite through plasteel?’

  Melia cursed. ‘What in Dominica’s name is that? It looks like it’s been…’

  ‘Skinned alive.’ She knew these things, these things that brought terror like a herald, like a rush of sickness to their hearts.

  ‘There.’ She pointed the blade again, at another one, a second slide of hot, red skin. ‘And there.’

  And at another, around the pillar opposite.

  At a fourth, a fifth.