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Blood Drinker – James Brogden

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Accursed’

A Black Library Imprint

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BLOOD DRINKER

By James Brogden

Actaeon flees the Beast through a labyrinth of dark, twisting corridors. Though shaped like a man in armour, it has the head of a wolf, with eyes that burn the darkness like searchlights and a tongue that drools for the taste of his flesh. The thunder of its footsteps shakes the ground, and its talons scrape the walls like the shrieking of demented souls. The only thing that stops it from seizing him immediately is its sheer size; it must bludgeon and tear its way through the narrow passages, bent into a feral crouch, its shaggy head cocked sideways against the ceiling, while he slips through the narrow spaces ahead of it – falling, scrambling, running. It howls its elation and hunger.

The Beast has no interest in stalking him. It wants him to know how close it is. It is enjoying this.

He is naked, weaponless. It occurs to him to simply let himself be caught and have an end to it, but he has a vague and unformed sense that denying the Beast its prey is an obligation more important than his own single life. Where this obligation has come from, or to whom it is owed, he does not know. He cannot remember a time when he was not running from the Beast, nor has he any sense of where he might be running to, in this endless maze of cramped passages. But this is not to say that there are not momentary respites. The labyrinth is inhabited by acolytes of the Beast – they are small, weak creatures that fall easily to Actaeon’s hands, and when he paints himself with their blood, its smell momentarily disguises him, and he is able to rest.

But such respites never last long, for the blood soon dries, and the Beast catches his scent again, and the hunt resumes.

‘And who is this witness, exactly?’ demanded Prime Adjutant Galla Domitia. She stood regarding a hololithic display that showed the mile-high tower of the Spike, which floated like the ghost of an upturned fang above the primary control altar, rotating slowly. The sepia image flickered and crawled with static, but it was clear enough to make out the inhabited areas in green towards the top, the amber of those regions in the Middle Reaches that had been charted but not yet deemed safe for settlement, and the red of the Lower Reaches, where the djinn fires burned ceaselessly and the crawlers made warrens in their mutagenic glow.

Arbiter Darius Reiven tried not to look too closely. It made him nervous to see his home depicted in this fashion. With the hab-halls occupying only the Spike’s uppermost portion, he did not like to think of the abyss of abandoned tunnels and chambers that stretched far below his feet, and he especially did not like to think about what was Outside. No right-thinking person did. Better instead to distract oneself by concentrating on the job at hand.

‘A scraper, prime adjutant,’ he replied. ‘Collecting mould in a duct below the hab-halls, here.’ He pointed at a spot on the ghostly display just beneath the green zone, careful not to actually touch the image.

Domitia’s frown deepened. ‘These attacks are getting uncomfortably close,’ she murmured. ‘You have him in the interrogation chamber?’

‘Yes, prime adjutant.’

‘Good. Let’s go and talk to our unfortunate mould-scraper.’

She dismissed the ghostly image with a curt prayer and strode from the imaging chapel, the staccato tak-tak-tak of her walking stick echoing in its sepulchral space. She was not slowed by her limp; if anything, the injury seemed to make her faster. She had fought something from the Outside and lived, it was said, and the fact that the encounter had not driven her irretrievably insane only made Darius even more frightened of her. The same fight had killed almost half of her arbiters, and he had been recruited hurriedly in its aftermath – it came with an increased food ration and a sidearm, but there was no uniform except for his badge of authority: a double-headed eagle with outstretched wings pinned to his tunic. The aquila was an ancient symbol, often discovered stencilled on relics belonging to the Spike’s original crew, and venerated as a sign of continuity with those first brave souls who had fought the Outside. He was determined to earn it, so he made sure that it was on straight and hurried after her.

The scraper was a worm-pale scrawl of a man named Velk, out of Hall Sturgo. His identity was the only reliable piece of information they could get from him, however – everything else was an incomprehensible babble, wet with snot and punctuated by shrieks and whimpers.

‘It was white, corpse white!’ he moaned. ‘And fast! Blessed Saint Geller, it was so fast!’ He was filthy, smeared in blood, grease and the mould that it was his job to collect for the food vats. The only clean things about him were the tracks down his cheeks made by his tears and the bandages that swathed him from fingertip to elbow. He had escaped, it seemed, by throwing himself into a thermal vent. He stank of rotting duct-slime and burned flesh, and he was shackled to the cot on which he lay, as he’d tried to bite out the throat of the chirurgeon who’d attended him.

‘Was it a crawler?’ Darius asked.

‘Crawler? ’Slight, no! This was bigger, so much bigger! And crawlers’ll mob ye, y’know? This was on its own, and I thank the Emperor that there was only one of the things!’

‘Was it man-shaped, then?’ Darius was acutely aware of the prime adjutant standing quietly in the corner of the interrogation cell, watching his technique, listening to his questions, assessing him. Her approval meant more than just professional esteem: Darius’ own hab-cubicle was not much bigger than this cell, and a promotion meant bigger living quarters away from the daily scuffles for scraps. Respected families might even see his improved status and introduce their daughters to him.

Velk gestured helplessly. ‘It had hands, I know that much! It tore Petyr to pieces in front of me with ’em!’

Petyr had been his cousin – not that this said much, since everyone on the Spike was somebody’s cousin to some degree, but maybe more so in Hall Sturgo, where there was a high incidence of crawler births.

‘You know when a hydro duct bursts?’ Velk continued, staring at Darius with wide, red-rimmed eyes. ‘That gushing sound it makes when it’s spillin’ every which way?’

Darius nodded.

‘Well, that’s what I heard, even after he’d stopped screaming. Just… wet sounds. Wet sounds, y’know?’ He giggled, and started to scream ‘Wet sounds! Wet sounds!’ over and over, screaming and laughing at the same time, while tears ran down his face and his bare feet drummed bloody footprints on the wall.

Darius and the prime adjutant left him to his screaming.

‘Deputise a squad,’ she said in the corridor outside. ‘Investigate the scene of the attack, ascertain whether he’s telling the truth, and recover any remains. Take a body bag.’ She stopped and considered. ‘Actually, take several, just in case. If you see any sign of the attacker, do not engage, do you understand? If this white beast is from Outside, it is beyond you. Do. Not. Engage.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said. He did his best to sound cold and professional, just like her, but as he left to put together his squad, his step quickened and his heart swelled. He told himself that it was with excitement and pride, and tried to ignore how badly his palms sweated.

Darius led his squad through the confusion of tunnels and galleries below the hab-halls. There were four of them besides himself – deputised from their civilian duties in the name of the prime adjutant. He had chosen mould-scrapers and scav-rats, those who knew something of the Middle Reaches – they had heard the same rumours of the white beast that tore men apart and bathed in their blood, and were none too happy about being ordered to accompany him, but the authority of his shining aquila badge compelled them. Resting a hand meaningfully on the pistol at his side might have helped, too. Denied firearms, his conscripts had equipped themselves with knives and improvised weaponry, and shuffled along behind him, muttering darkly.

The Spike had once been a battleship, they said. Darius’ only reference point for such a concept was the bedtime stories told to him as a child, and the elaborate illuminated panels in the Great Chapel that told the story of the Spike’s deliverance from the horrors of the Outside by Blessed Saint Geller. It was clear that due to some calamity in the long-forgotten past, across had become down, and so any attempt to travel from one place to another involved negotiating old corridors and hallways that were now precipitous shafts, some of which dropped all the way to the djinn fires at the Spike’s uttermost depth. They were crossed by catwalks and rope bridges, gangplanks and girders, and up from the lightless deeps came strange cries, thuds of machinery, poisonous glows, and gusts of foul air strong enough to send a man plummeting to his death.

One of the scrapers, a squinting man called Sarun, led them to where Velk had been working at the time of the attack: a clot of tunnels and ducts where a peculiar combination of heat and condensation allowed thick mats of algae to grow on every surface. They could see where patches of it had been scraped away with large spatulas, and the half-full sacks that lay abandoned. Not all of the fungal growths in the Spike’s bowels were edible. Some secreted acids strong enough to dissolve flesh in seconds. Others were the nests for foot-long, blind centipedes that wielded poisonous stingers. Still others produced hallucinogenic and psychoactive compounds that were much in demand by citizens of the Spike who wished to alleviate the tedium of existence, and there was some muttering in the squad that it was more than likely Velk had murdered his partner under the influence and sought to blame the crime on an imaginary fiend.

Then they found Petyr – or what was left of him.

He had been torn apart and eviscerated so thoroughly – limbs and internal organs strewn and glistening – that it looked more like he had simply exploded from the inside. It seemed impossible that a human being could have wrought so much damage on another, even while affected by mind-altering spores.

Darius swallowed thickly to prevent the contents of his own stomach joining the mess. ‘Sarun, Mogach, collect up… that,’ he ordered. ‘Use the spatulas. Brack, Festine, you’re with me.’

Brack was a big lad who didn’t have enough imagination to question orders, but Festine narrowed his eyes suspiciously. ‘Why? What are we doing?’ He was a scrubber, lean where Brack was thick, built for crawling through larger ducts with a mop and cleaning out blockages. He had come armed with one of his tools: a vicious-looking billhook on the end of a telescopic pole.

‘We,’ announced Darius with what he hoped was a look of grim resolution, ‘are going to track this beast to its lair and kill it.’

All four of them looked at him.

‘You what?’ said Festine.

Darius drew his sidearm and assumed an impressive stance. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘You might be content with crawling around stinking tunnels like rats for the rest of your lives, but there’s a chance here to make your mark and improve your lot. When we take its head back to the prime adjutant, we’ll all be rewarded handsomely.’

Festine pointed with his billhook at the mess on the floor and up the walls. ‘You do see this, don’t you?’ Behind them, the slopping noises of the other two men clearing up Petyr’s remains were very clear. Wet sounds.

Darius swallowed. ‘What I see are the remains of an unarmed and untrained civilian. What I also see,’ he continued, lowering his voice to sound as threatening as he could manage, ‘is a lowly pipe scrubber dangerously close to getting a bullet in the head for insubordination.’

Festine backed up, hands in the air. ‘All right, chief, all right. No need for that. I was only asking.’

The attacker’s trail was not difficult to follow. It had left not just gory footsteps but also smears on the walls and ceiling, as if it had so little fear of detection that it hadn’t even tried to hide its tracks. Darius, Brack and Festine almost lost it at the crossing of a shaft; there were no traces on the other side and Brack only spotted it by accident while standing in the middle of the creaking catwalk and looking up. Where the shaft continued upwards into the ceiling, crude metal staples had been riveted to the inside to provide hand and footholds, and one of them was smeared with the rust brown of dried blood. Darius felt his bowels run cold; every level higher took the creature closer to the hab-halls.

‘Up you go, then,’ he ordered Festine.

Festine backed away shaking his head, his eyes wide and white with fear. ‘No chance!’ he protested. ‘Up there? With that thing skulking about? You’re out of your mind!’

Darius tapped his badge with his pistol. ‘Do I have to remind you of the consequences of disobeying a direct order?’

Festine uttered a high-pitched laugh. ‘A bullet in the head?’ He set his jaw grimly and tapped himself between the eyes. ‘Go on, then, sir. If it’s a choice between that and what happened to Petyr, well, at least it’ll be quick.’

‘Oh, I don’t mean to kill you,’ Darius growled, ‘just leave you bleeding enough to attract the beast so I can ambush it. But if that’s your choice…’

There was a slithering, thumping sound in the shaft above them. Both men looked up.

It was just inside the opening, hanging upside down, its face nearly level with their own. Humanoid, or close enough, but caked with the crumbling rust brown of old blood. It bared its teeth in a grotesque parody of a smile, and Darius noticed that its canines were particularly sharp and pointed. Its mask cracked further, and little brown flakes drifted onto their upturned faces.

They screamed and it dropped between them, twisting in mid-air with preternatural agility to land crouched on its feet, then rose to its full height, towering over them.

Festine brought his billhook around in a short, hard sweep, but it was plucked from his grip and brought down on his head, cleaving his skull down to the chin. He stood for a moment, spasming, until his body received the message that it was dead, and collapsed. Then Brack charged, swinging his thick arm, his roar turning to a scream punctuated by the pistol crack of breaking bone as that arm was gripped and twisted by giant hands, bent in impossible directions, snapping, white bone shards piercing the skin. The creature flung him over the catwalk and into the abyss, but by that time Darius was halfway back to the others, screaming for them to run.

He rounded the last corner and saw that Sarun and Mogach had already drawn their blades, when something hit him from behind hard enough to throw him through the air and into them, only narrowly avoiding being impaled.

Then the ochre-and-bone monstrosity was amongst them. In contrast to the flailing and screaming of the Spikers, it fought in icy silence, naked, and with an almost balletic grace. It dodged a wild swing from Mogach’s blade and kicked his legs out from underneath him, then, as Darius tried to aim his gun with trembling fingers, it pulled Sarun’s head back and bit into his throat, its fangs shredding his carotid artery. Blood geysered over the ceiling, and Sarun stumbled away, gurgling and jetting, making more wet sounds of his own. The attacker pirouetted back to Mogach, grasping his face with one huge hand, raising him into the air and slamming the back of his skull onto a projecting spur of metal with a crunch so that he hung there, several feet off the floor, legs kicking like a marionette. While he was pinned, the creature plunged its hand into Mogach’s belly and pulled out a fistful of purple-grey viscera. Darius managed to get off one wild shot before it turned and reached for him…

And stopped.

Its red-dripping fingers flinched away as if burned, and the creature fell back a step. Darius saw now that it was in fact a human being – a man, impossibly tall, and rail thin as if starved, and that beneath the flaking coat of old blood, his pale flesh was tattooed with arcane symbols. His face was gaunt, with a broad blade of a nose and eyes that burned beneath lowering brows. But they seemed more confused now than ferocious, and his thin lips writhed like worms as if he were trying to say something.

Then the man leapt, and was gone.

Actaeon flees the Beast, though it is closer now. Multiple eyes in its black carapace burn in the dark like searchlights, seeking him, and its mocking laughter echoes in the cavernous spaces of the world. Desperate for the blood of its acolytes to disguise himself, he dispatches more of them easily – all except for one. It bears a sigil that he knows, or thinks he recognises from some half-forgotten nightmare. The sigil burns so brightly that it is painful to look at, and he knows that if he touches it, it will burn him as no fire has ever burned flesh, it will sear its wing-shaped scar into him and force him to remember…

…something of what he was. He awoke curled in a foetal position, crammed in some narrow space. He realised that he could see the angular shadows of walls in the dim red glow that seeped up from a shaft in the floor nearby.

Singing. There had been singing. No, not just now, but earlier, awakening him from a deeper sleep, one so deep that it might have been death. There was no singing now, just the whisper and hum of the derelict around him, and the syncopated thud of his twin hearts.

You’re on the Spira Tenebris, remember? he told himself, but he could not remember what that was, because his thoughts kept sliding away, buried beneath the reek of blood that surrounded and permeated him. He raised a hand to his face and saw that his fingers were caked with it, tatters of flesh beneath his cracked fingernails.

‘Emperor save me,’ he whispered, appalled. ‘What have I done?’

He put his fingers to his mouth and sucked them, and the heavy salt-copper taste of blood…

Protects him from the Beast, but he has been here too long. Already he can hear it approaching – thundering, shrieking, laughing – so he climbs out of his hiding place and does the only thing he knows.

He runs.

‘Well, that was enlightening,’ said a voice, cool and amused.

Darius jerked awake with a cry. He hadn’t been asleep, but catatonic, sitting and staring for an unguessable time at the abattoir carnage in front of him. He stared around wildly but couldn’t see the speaker. ‘Is… is anybody there?’ he ventured.

‘He is repelled by the aquila,’ the voice continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. It seemed to be that of a woman. ‘He obviously recognises it, which suggests that there is something of him left – he is more than just an animal. Enough left to reach, though? That’s the question.’

Darius jumped to his feet, waving his pistol at the shadows. ‘Who’s there?’ he shouted. ‘Show yourself! By the authority of the prime adjutant, I command it!’

‘Oh, well, if Domitia commands it, who am I to refuse?’ the voice replied. A part of the shadows unfolded itself and a young woman was standing there. She was unarmed, dressed in an ordinary vat-worker’s coverall, and appeared fairly unremarkable except for a fuzz of blue-dyed hair shaved close to the scalp. She was leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, regarding him and his trembling pistol without the least sign of trepidation.

‘Who are you?’ Darius demanded. ‘Of what hall? What are you doing here?’

She ticked them off on her fingers as she replied: ‘You may call me Raidne, I am of no hall, and I am going to help you defeat the creature that is killing your people.’

He snorted in disbelief. Already his mind was telling itself that she couldn’t simply have appeared like that – she must have stepped stealthily out of the darkness without him noticing.

‘You’re lying. How can you be of no hall? And how can you possibly be of any use against that thing? Why, you’re…’ He waved his gun contemptuously at her. ‘You’re nothing but–’

And she changed. Just for a fraction of an eye-blink, too quickly for him to be sure that he’d really seen it, but enough to make him reel with shock. There was a suggestion of mismatched eyes and withered limbs, flesh naked in the tunnel’s humidity but contorted and twisted like melted tallow…

Raidne watched his reaction. She hadn’t changed position.

‘You’re a crawler!’ he gasped.

‘And you’re an idiot,’ she observed. ‘But maybe we can be of some use to each other for all that.’

It was unthinkable. Crawlers were only slightly less abhorrent than the daemons of the Outside. Most were descendants of the Spike’s original underclass, warped and mutated by proximity to the djinn fires, their abnormalities magnified by generations of inbreeding, and it was rumoured that some even had psyker powers. That in itself would not be such a problem; the crawlers could be shut in the Lower Reaches and left to themselves, their numbers kept under control by periodic cleansing raids. But the pernicious influence of Outside sought to infiltrate the womb of every human mother from the humblest vat-worker to the daughters of the high-born – all lived in fear of giving birth to a crawler, and no birth was acknowledged nor infant named until the chirurgeon-brother had decreed that it was pure in the image of the Emperor. For the slightest taint – be it so much as an extra little toe – the newborn would be abandoned in the Lower Reaches to either perish or be taken in by its monstrous kin, such was the prime adjutant’s fervour for purity. Darius had no idea whether Raidne was the result of such a misbirth or the descendent of deviants, and he didn’t want to know.

‘Begone, foul thing!’ he spat. ‘Back to the pit that spawned you! And take your illusions with you!’

She nodded calmly, but not in agreement, more like his response had been entirely predictable. ‘While you do what?’ she replied. ‘Go back to Domitia and tell her how you got your squad killed and let your quarry escape? I confess that I don’t know too much about how you arbiters work, but I can’t imagine her promoting you for that.’

He found that he couldn’t answer that.

‘Or,’ she continued, ‘you can go back as a hero, having single-handedly defeated the blood-drinking beast. I’ll let you think about it for a bit while you stand here and look at…’ She prodded something that glistened redly with her bare foot. ‘Who was this, again?’

Reluctantly, Darius lowered his gun. ‘How can you possibly help me? And what is it you want in return?’

‘Not here,’ she replied, looking around. ‘It’s gone, but we’re still too close. There’s something you need to see first. Come on.’

She turned to go, but he hesitated, and she turned back.

‘I promise that you won’t end up being roasted on a spit, if that helps.’

‘Not really,’ he muttered, but he followed her all the same.

Raidne led him along twisting passageways and through echoing chambers, across bridges that spanned churning depths and through narrow gaps where they had to squirm on their bellies like worms. They climbed canted staircases and picked their way down scree slopes of rusting wreckage, edging their way around the walls of a cathedral-like space where the colossal hulks of machines lay tumbled atop each other like prehistoric beasts locked together in death. Darius lost any sense of time or direction long before that. All he knew was that she was leading them steadily, inexorably downwards, into the Lower Reaches where nobody except crawlers and the most foolhardy of scavengers dared to go.

Eventually, she stopped. ‘We’re here,’ she whispered.

‘Where?’ he asked.

‘Where I found him. Where I woke him up.’

They entered a wide, lopsided chamber through its narrowest and lowest end, and Darius gazed in awe at the sight of huge pipe-like ducts stretching up and away from him, each itself as large as any one of the tunnels that Raidne had led him along, far beyond the reach of his meagre torch. His spirit quailed at the thought of having to scale them, but fortunately the object of her interest was much closer to hand, lying on the sloping floor.

‘I couldn’t feel his mind until I was almost right on top of him,’ she said. ‘He was so weak. Not even dreaming.’

Seeing it in silhouette, his first thought was that it was another body, but quickly he saw that its outline was too rough, more like a statue of a man or a crudely carved sarcophagus, its features nothing more than lumps and indentations, legs fused together, arms fused to the torso. Closer still, Darius realised that his torchlight was shining through it in mottled shades of ochre, amber and a red so deep it was almost black, and that what he had taken for solid plasteel or resin was in fact a hollow shell of something like scab tissue, gnarled and knotted, and split open from brow to groin. The edges of the split were curled outwards as if it had been peeled open, or something had emerged, as from a chrysalis.

‘This was keeping him alive,’ Raidne whispered. ‘I cannot imagine how. He must have been here since the first days of the Spike – a dozen generations, who knows? Down here all this time, sleeping, waiting to be awakened.’ She traced the cocoon’s whorled contours with her fingertips.

‘But who is he? What is he?’

‘He is a Space Marine,’ she replied simply.

Darius laughed; he couldn’t help it. It was as if she had told him that it was Blessed Saint Geller himself, come down from his seat at the Emperor’s right hand. Darius had only ever seen the Adeptus Astartes in the glassaic of the Great Chapel – winged, angelic beings that blasted righteous fire from their hands as they drove back the seething hordes of the Outside. He could not equate those bright-burning protectors with the ravening, gore-slicked wraith that had torn apart his crew, and he told her so.

She regarded him coldly. ‘I have seen him,’ she said. ‘I saw him lying here in his deathless sleep. I saw the intrusions in his flesh where he was made stronger than mortal men. I saw the marks on his skin – he has an aquila, just like your arbiter’s badge, tattooed across here.’ She drew a line across the top of her chest from one shoulder to the other. ‘It is the symbol of his fealty to his brothers and the Emperor.’

‘You can’t possibly know that!’ he objected.

Now it was her turn to laugh. ‘Oh, you’d be surprised the things I know. We “crawlers”, as you call us, do not have tech-priests or adepts, but those of us who have such gifts as I do pass on our knowledge just the same. The individual that woke up in this cocoon – while his body might have survived more or less intact, his mind is extensively damaged. I have been tracking him since he awoke, and when it has been safe to get close enough, I’ve been able to glimpse what is left of it. He is trapped in a state of waking nightmare, believing that he is pursued by a great beast and that the only way he can hide from it is to consume and cover himself with the blood of its servants. In this delirium he sees your people as those servants, which is why he has been killing you. The only way to stop him is to free him from his nightmare.’

‘And just how do you propose to do that?’

‘Put simply, you’re going to tell him to wake up.’

Darius snorted humourlessly and turned to leave. ‘If you have brought me all this way simply to mock me–’

Something arrested his movement. He looked down at his legs, willing them to move, to carry him far from this madness, but they refused his command. Instead, he found himself turning around to face her as if he were a puppet. He could not even strain against her control, since the muscles required to do so no longer obeyed him. She had dropped her illusory form, and he gasped at the horror of her. She was pointing at him with something that was more of a claw than a hand, and eldritch symbols swam in the air like heat haze around her outstretched fingers.

Her lopsided face twisted into a grotesque parody of a smile and she sidled closer, her proximity making his skin crawl. She touched the aquila badge pinned to his chest. ‘He recognised this,’ she said, and he realised that there was no way that the ruin of her throat could form intelligible sounds; he was hearing her voice directly inside his head. ‘It is the only possible explanation for why you are still alive. I believe that there is enough Astartes left in him to respond to its authority – possibly he is repelled by it because on some level he recognises how far he has fallen from the nobility of his duty. We can use that – you can use that – to command him.’

‘Command him?!’ he echoed, appalled. It seemed that she had left him control over his voice at least. ‘Command him to do what?’

‘To stand in his nightmare and face the beast. It is some deep part of him that he fears greatly – I don’t understand it fully, but while he runs from it, he is a coward, nothing more than a beast himself, in the thrall of his own terrors and appetites. He must be reminded that he is more than that. I believe that he will obey you because of the symbol that you bear.’

‘But I’m no Astartes!’ he blurted, alarmed at the direction her thoughts were taking. ‘He’ll take one look at me and tear me to bloody shreds!’

‘Ah, but in his delirium he won’t see the wretch that you really are. He’ll see a towering figure of authority that he will be compelled to obey.’

‘Because of your… gifts.’

‘Yes.’

‘In that case, why don’t you just create an illusion of the whole thing? Why do you need me at all?’

‘Because it doesn’t work like that. I can’t make something from nothing. There has to be a basis in reality, a framework, something for my gifts to… to…’ She struggled for words, having never been forced to explain such things before.

‘Twist?’ he suggested. ‘Pervert?’

Raidne glared at him. ‘Have a care, arbiter,’ she said. ‘If you decide to make yourself useless to me, there are many perversions I can visit upon you instead.’

Darius raised his chin defiantly. ‘You are an abomination against nature and an affront to every standard of decency and normality,’ he said. He steeled himself for her retaliation, but to his surprise found that he could move. She had released him. When he looked up again, shock and surprise froze him almost as effectively, as he saw that she was neither the blue-haired girl nor the shambling mutant.

She was Prime Adjutant Domitia.

‘What is your duty, arbiter?’ she snapped.

He wavered, stammering. A small part of his mind knew it could not really be Domitia, but it was getting smaller by the second, squeezed by the unrelenting pressure of her psyker powers, and in turn something came bubbling up from deep inside him, some animal compulsion to obey his superior. And now that he looked again, he saw that of course it must be Domitia. She must have followed him down here. Of course she wouldn’t have abandoned him! He felt a great surge of gratitude mixed with shame at the abject way in which he had failed her trust in him.

She took a step closer, drew her sidearm and pointed it at his face. ‘Your duty!’

He stared into the tunnel of the gun’s barrel, and swallowed. ‘To… to protect the Spike. I’m sorry that I–’

Her eyes were as cold and sharp as drill bits. ‘You will address me as prime adjutant, boy, or I will paint the wall with your sorry excuse for a brain.’

‘Please, let me explain–’

She thumbed the hammer back.

‘Sir, yes sir!’ he squeaked. ‘Prime adjutant, sir!’

She lowered the gun fractionally. ‘Better. And the tools that you use. Are they discretionary? Are you permitted to pick and choose or decline an order to fulfil your duty because you feel it to be an abomination or an affront?’

‘No, of course not. Sir!’ he added hastily.

‘Correct. Now, kneel.’

‘I don’t under–’

‘KNEEL!’ she roared, in a voice that echoed around the chamber. She needed no psyker powers to control his legs this time – they unhinged themselves of their own accord and dropped him to the floor before her.

She changed back into the blue-haired girl and smiled down at him sweetly. ‘See?’ she said. ‘That wasn’t so difficult, was it?’

The Beast is so close that Actaeon can smell the carrion stench of its breath. At times, he can see on the walls the shadow of its massive wolf’s head, teeth curving like daggers, and the claws on its right hand, each longer than his arm. The blood of its acolytes is becoming less effective – each time, the Beast catches up with him a little more quickly, and gets a little closer. Its bubbling howl now seems to form words: ‘Come to me, son of Blood! Give yourself to me!’ He has no breath to spare for reply. He just runs.

Then he hears the singing.

It is wordless and ethereal, trickling distantly like a sip of cool water in the tunnel’s foetid heat. It is the same singing that awoke him to this nightmare; he remembers tearing himself out of some constricting space in order to find the owner of the voice and instead finding himself pursued by the Beast. After a moment’s consideration, he changes direction. He does not know whether the song will bring salvation or damnation, only that it represents the possibility of something different.

‘He is coming,’ said Raidne. ‘He responds to my call. Are you ready?’

‘Do I have a choice?’ Darius replied. He had watched the preparations for her ritual with a deepening dread and a sense that not only was he in way over his head but also that he might never resurface.

She had found a large chamber with only one entrance, and while he cleared the floor of debris, she had gone around the walls painting symbols at certain points using her own blood. She opened a long, shallow cut on the side of her twisted thigh, and now that he looked closer without being actively repelled, he saw that much of her body was criss-crossed with old scars. When she approached him with the knife, he shrank back. She was undisguised, and the sight of her shuffling lopsidedly towards him with a blade was unnerving; it seemed to be made of bone, for one thing.

‘The ritual requires your blood too,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Because you are a participant, obviously.’

‘Surely there must be some other way…?’

She cocked her head to one side again in the way that suggested he was being more stupid than normal. ‘Tell me then,’ she said, ‘given our limited resources, what alternative to a sanguinary vector you think would suffice to establish the primary somatic nexus for this ritual?’

‘I… I…’

‘Exactly. Shut up and give me your arm.’

He rolled up his sleeve and she drew a cut along the back of his forearm. The pain was quick and bright. She dipped her fingertips in the red that welled from him and used it to extend and elaborate on the sigils she had already drawn. They seemed to dance in the air just above the surface of the wall in a way that hurt his eyes, and lingered behind his lids even after he closed them so that, before long, he felt a headache beginning to build. She connected the sigils on the walls with lines that ran down to the floor and to a central circle, at the four cardinal points of which she piled crushed fragments of the creature’s cocoon, and then she set light to them. They burned fitfully, with much spattering and crackling. The stench of it was somewhere between scorched hair and animal fat, and made his head swim even worse than before.

And all the while, she sang under her breath – a wordless, wandering tune that insinuated itself into his ears the same way her symbols made his eyes blur. The only thing that stopped him from bolting back towards the safety and sanity of the Upper Reaches was the fear of how he was going to explain any of it to the prime adjutant. Instead, he did what he was told: he positioned himself between Raidne and the entrance, with his badge held in front of him like a ridiculously tiny shield.

‘I have to say,’ he ventured, ‘I don’t look much like a commanding figure of authority.’

‘You will,’ she murmured. ‘He will be fast, but he will stop when he sees the aquila, as before. In that moment, when the shock of seeing it causes him to lower his guard, I will be able to breach his defences and find out what I need in order to create the illusion. You understand that this will be a reciprocal experience, yes?’

He stared blankly at her.

She sighed. ‘We will be sharing his nightmare. He will see you as I intend him to, but you will also see the beast that pursues him.’

‘But it’s not real, is it?’

‘It is real to him.’

He stared around at her, alarmed. ‘But what does that m–’

Then there was a horrific squeal of tortured metal as the blood-crazed Astartes ripped his way up through the floor, right into the middle of Raidne’s protective circle.

Regardless of what Actaeon can or cannot remember, the warrior’s instincts ingrained into the deepest levels of his psyche recognise the strong possibility of an ambush, ruling out a direct approach along that passage. Fortunately, the Beast’s labyrinth has many weak spots – doors, grilles, flimsy partitions – and it is easy enough for Actaeon to navigate his way underneath the source of the singing, even whilst evading his pursuer.

‘Son of Sanguinius!’ it roars. ‘There is no escape! You will give yourself to me as did your sire!’

The name is familiar. It jolts something deep in his mind, but he can’t allow that to distract him because the Beast is almost upon him, just around the last corner, closer than it has ever come, so he pulls at the plasteel panel in the ceiling, peeling it off like a scab and tossing it aside, and hauls himself into the cavity above.

Sanguinius.

It was all she needed. As if that name were an opened sluice gate, the truth of him spilled into her, but despite her elation she quickly realised how badly she had miscalculated. Because a lot of it was not him at all – somehow, in a manner that defied her comprehension, what he was seeing had been played out before. The Beast was not just a random fabrication of his crippled mind, it was some deep terror given shape from an ancient memory. It was something ancestral, as much a part of him as the blood in his veins, and so ancient that it reeked of the charnel pits of the universe. The merest glimpse of it made her want to run and hide and weep and wait for death like some small burrowing animal, and it had a name.

Horus.

Then the floor erupted, and the screaming began.

‘Darius!’ shouted Raidne. ‘Now!’

He spun towards the sound, and saw two long, bone-pale arms emerge from a hole in the floor, planting hands either side, and the Space Marine sprang into the chamber. It bared its long and bloodstained teeth, and glanced around in quick movements.

Darius could see that at points along its limbs and up its torso, black nodules erupted, though he had no idea whether this was by design or the result of some disease, and its skin was heavily tattooed. Many of the images made no sense to him, but Raidne had been right that there was an aquila stretched wide across its back like an angel’s wings, and in the middle of its chest this was echoed by a winged chalice overflowing with blood.

‘For Geller’s sake, say something!’ she screamed.

Darius opened his mouth.

Actaeon has expected many kinds of ambush – that the singer is in league with the Beast seems most likely – but the last thing he expects to find in this chamber is a towering figure in crimson power armour emblazoned with the insignia of an assault squad sergeant. They are his own colours. They were his own colours, and seeing them reminds him of how far he has fallen. He collapses to his knees.

‘Get up!’ commands the armoured figure, its amplified voice booming. ‘Would you crawl on your belly like a worm? What are you?’

He cannot answer this; all he can do is grovel at its feet. But the Horus-Beast has entered the chamber below. Seeing where he has gone, and knowing its prey to be within reach at last, it howls its triumph. Up through the hole reaches its massive lightning claw, each arm-long talon etched with archaic sigils and crackling with ruinous energy, with which it hacks the hole wider so that it can climb up after him.

The red sergeant grabs his arm with one huge gauntleted fist and drags him to his feet. With the other it presses something into his hand: an aquila the size of a short sword, its edges sharpened to a razor’s keenness.

‘Take it,’ he is ordered. ‘Do your duty to the Emperor and face His enemy, or else cut your own throat and be done.’

He takes the weapon, appalled at how puny it is in comparison to the leviathan that is birthing itself from the floor in a scream of claws on steel.

‘Yeeeeeeessss,’ he hears it croon. ‘Run, son of Sanguinius. Flee like the coward you are.’

And it seems to him now that he is not in this dark and cramped space but on the bridge of a colossal battle-barge, surrounded by fire and the broken bodies of his brothers, their screams mingling with the gleeful shrieks of the writhing hordes of warp spawn that beset them. He is not naked, but armoured in gold, and the makeshift dagger is the Blade Encarmine, the great ruby in its crosspiece burning with eagerness for blood. This is a memory, he understands, but not one of his. He is Sanguinius and he has always been fighting this battle, knowing that he is doomed but bound to serve his Emperor – not just to the end of his life, but the lives of all his progeny to follow.

He turns and faces Horus, as he always does, as every son of his must.

The Beast towers over him in its obsidian armour. Blasphemous runes crowd its surface and amber eyes set in the breastplate burn while the clawed right hand flexes, hungry for him. That claw has tasted the blood of angels and gods. In its left hand he sees Worldbreaker, a maul taller than a man; it is the weapon that will kill him, has always killed him. But above the Beast’s gorget, where Horus’ face should be, is instead a massive wolf’s head, lips curled back in a snarl from teeth like scimitars.

‘Run, son of Blood,’ it growls, and the floor trembles at the thunder of its voice.

This is not merely a recollection of past events. The memory of his ancient sire’s defeat might be clothing this nightmare, but it is Actaeon’s nightmare and this is Actaeon’s Beast. And he realises now that it has never wanted to catch him – simply to drive him, to make him run mindless and terrified like an animal, indiscriminately killing anyone in his path. He had thought he was fleeing its control but had been in its thrall just the same. The Chaplains of his order had a different name for this Beast. They called it the Black Rage.

He knows that he cannot win this fight, but he knows that he doesn’t have to – all he has to do is face it.

He raises the aquila-sword and says, ‘No. No more running.’

The lanterns of its eyes narrow into slits. ‘Fool!’ it howls. ‘You will feed me one way or the other!’ And it leaps to attack.

Raidne huddled in the corner where she had dragged herself and watched the battle unfold in Actaeon’s mind. On the floor next to the hole through which he had climbed, his physical form lay twitching and thrashing. His fists curled and uncurled while grunts and whimpers issued from his throat. Across the far side of the chamber, Darius lay curled in a foetal ball, drooling, and bleeding from the eyes. There had never been any chance that his mind could withstand the confrontation she had forced upon him; he had taken the brunt of the psychic force unleashed by Actaeon’s crisis exactly as intended. If he survived at all, it would be with no more intellect than tunnel mould. She could safely and happily disregard him – one fewer of Domitia’s killers.

And with a pet Space Marine under Raidne’s control, maybe one day soon there would be a lot fewer of them.

The uncertainty lay in the figure spasming before her. The Beast might not be Horus, but it was extremely powerful for all that, and the likelihood was high that when Actaeon opened his eyes again, there would be nothing but the Black Rage staring out of them.

Moving as swiftly as stealth would allow, she crept around the walls to Darius, and took his sidearm. Then she retreated to the corner behind him, putting the catatonic arbiter’s body between herself and the Astartes, which was the best she could do for cover, and trained the pistol on Actaeon’s head. If he awoke as the Beast, he might go for Darius first. It would give her the opportunity for one clear shot, at least. There was no point even thinking of running, so she settled down to watch, and wait.

Slowly his struggles began to subside, until eventually he lay still, his naked skin slick with the sweat of his exertions, panting. In contrast, her own breath was frozen in her throat, and her finger trembled on the trigger.

He opened his eyes, and she assumed her illusory form, just in case.

His gaze found her.

‘You sang to me,’ he whispered, and smiled.

Actaeon no longer ran from the Beast, though he heard it sometimes, far off in the distant tunnels of the Spike, roaring in hunger and frustration. Blue-haired Raidne told him that what he heard was nothing more than the echoes of his nightmare, but he wasn’t sure; he felt that there would be a reckoning with it one day. In the meantime, he rested with her and her kin in the narrow places, recovering his strength and his memories. She promised to help him tell the false ones from the true, and he trusted her.

Darius sits cross-legged on the floor of a cavernous chamber, giggling. He is so far down in the Lower Reaches that he can hear the endless churning of the djinn fires, throbbing like the blood in his own head. He is drawing with his fingers, using his own blood and shit, attempting to recreate the sigils that he saw on the armour of the Beast. Concentrating on them helped him to keep his mind from guttering out like a candle; they whispered to him, promising him the glory that the crawler scum had cheated him of, if only he had the strength to survive and bring them to life.

He is getting better at it. The shapes become clearer, and his giggles turn into barks of laughter because it’s funny, really, to think he’s been so silly, being afraid of the Outside when the sigils he found came from much deeper inside than anybody could have possibly imagined.

His laughter turns to shrieks as, slowly, in the seething air above his scrawlings, something starts to take shape.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Brogden is a writer of horror and dark fantasy. A part-time Australian who grew up in Tasmania and the Cumbrian Borders, he has since escaped to suburbia and now lives in the Midlands, where he teaches English. When not writing or teaching he can usually be found up a hill, poking around stone circles and burial mounds. He also owns more lego than is strictly necessary.

An extract from ‘The Cache’
By James Brogden
in the anthology The Accursed.

Lyse Urretzi was on the verge of opening up a cluster of unexplored chambers in the Spike’s mid-reaches – almost half a mile below the inhabited levels where her clan and their neighbours lived – when the crawlers attacked.

Obviously nowhere below the hab-halls was entirely safe, but even so, for crawlers to venture so far up from the lower reaches was unusual. Who knew what had drawn them? Hunger? Well, every living creature in the Spike was starving to some degree. Something bigger and fouler than themselves moving into their territory? Lyse didn’t like to think about that. All she knew was that one moment she was doing her job – squeezing her scrawny body down through the wreckage that blocked this particular shaft and bolting a vertical zip line to the wall as she went – and the next, a grille to her left was smashed open by something pale that chittered as its claws flailed and snatched.

If she had been wearing clothes she would surely have been snagged and dragged to her death. As it was, garments only hindered the work of a pit-rat like herself, who often had to squeeze through the most claustrophobic of spaces, and so apart from a utility harness, boots and gloves, her biolux tattoos and a generous amount of engine grease covering everything else, there was nothing for the crawler to snag. Even as she yelped, its grip slipped on her slickened flesh.

She fell, and the lightless gape of the shaft swallowed her instead.

A dozen deaths flashed through her mind. Brains splattered on riveted hull plating. Torso impaled on some jagged barb, guts unspooling. Garrotted by tangled wiring. Broken but alive, helpless at the mercy of the crawler’s kin. She dashed the images away and fumbled for the emergency glob-gun.

Then she hit something hard enough to knock the wind out of her. A sloping surface, so that even as she was groping for a handhold the protective grease betrayed her, and she fell and bounced off something else, her skull cracking against the metal hard enough to make bright spots flare. By then she’d got the glob-gun free and fired upward blindly, praying to Saint Geller for salvation. He must have been listening because in the darkness above, the glob hit something and stuck. The strand of goo that attached it to her harness stretched under her weight like jellied sinew. Her invisible anchor point shifted with a grinding squeal of metal, but held, and she bounced and spun like a crude toy, ricocheting from one wall of the shaft to the other. Eventually, her mad penduluming calmed to a slow spin. Her eyes clenched tight as she whispered, ‘Thank you, thank you, oh thank you.’

The blue biolux glow of her tattoos showed the walls of the shaft around her: riveted plating, pipes and conduits, torn wiring. Close by was the narrow oblong of a half-open doorway, and blackness beyond. She looked up. Blackness above, too. Calling for help – or even just to let her crew know that she was alive – was out of the question, since it would only draw more crawlers. As for climbing up without the zip line? Impossible. She looked at the doorway again. There could be anything in that chamber – a hundred ways to die. On the other hand, it could be exactly the kind of thing that she was down here to look for in the first place: fragments of tech from long ago, when the Spike had been something else entirely. Such things were ancient and unfathomable to her, but Brother Putorius could sacrifice them to keep the Geller generators alive for another day. Her clan’s ancient duty. Her duty, as the daughter of Sutomore Urretzi, clanfather. Also, her only chance of finding her way back to the hab-halls was to hope that there were stairs or another shaft, something that she could climb.

Lyse swung herself over to the doorway, caught the jamb and spun herself around to sit on the threshold with her legs dangling over the abyss as she detached the glob strand. Then she took a deep breath, offered up a prayer of thanks to Saint Geller and went inside.

There was a drop to the floor on the other side, of course, but it wasn’t as far as some. She landed, crouched and still, and listened. No echoes of crawlers, just a distant drip and trickle. She was in a cavernous space of huge, angular shadows, the darkness overhead criss-crossed by the dim columns of ducts fallen and jammed at all angles from one side to the other. It was cold, with condensation sheeting the walls. Any water was a precious commodity, and she tasted some of it from a fingertip. It was sulphurous but didn’t burn her tongue, so was probably no more toxic than anywhere else. She swept more from the wall with her palms and licked them.

In such vastness the meagre light emitted by her tattoos was useless for anything more than illuminating her immediate surroundings as she picked her way through a junkyard of wreckage, wincing at every scrape and clatter that she made. Occasionally she passed an opening to left or right, but nothing that smelled like it might lead upwards. And all the while her senses strained for any sign of tech – the fire-spark flicker or whispered hum of powercells doggedly clinging to life despite the utter dereliction of the devices that they had once served, dying alone in darkness and futility. It was a mercy, her work, salvaging these expiring gasps of the machine-spirit and putting them to one final use, to keep the clans safe. It was holy.

What she found deep in that chamber was the exact opposite.

Towards the far end, the wall was shrouded in tall drapes of heavy fabric, in front of which there was a raised, circular platform many yards across. It gleamed with what she assumed to be more condensation, and a tumble of organic shapes was stacked in the middle. She smelled shit and old blood, the miasma of violent death, and was about to turn away because no good could come from whatever this was, but then she caught it – that fire-spark flicker, a tremble of amber right in the middle of the stack.

Her excitement at the promise of tech turned to revulsion when she saw what surrounded it.

Around the platform’s circumference, unlit candles sagged in their own tallow like degenerate monks, some cupped in severed hands, some socketed in skulls, all joined by a perimeter rope of intestines. Lines painted in blood linked them, and where they intersected something had been built out of the remains of those who had given hands, heads and viscera. Whatever abomination it was supposed to be had no place being formed from human parts. It had far too many limbs, for a start. The teeth in its leering mouth were the stumps of a shattered ribcage; its eyes were the loops at the bottom of a pelvis with the wings flaring high above like a crest. In the effigy’s lap was cradled a blood-crusted bowl, and littered around its feet were smaller bones that she didn’t have to look at too closely to know were scored by gnawing.

Cannibalism itself didn’t particularly shock her. The Spike’s dead were routinely given to the corpse-starch vats. It was only in lean times, when there was a blight or a power failure, that a clan might resort to the flesh itself to survive – and even then, it was kept firmly within the family, with Prime Adjutant Galla Domitia using her arbiters to enforce a ban on inter-tribal killing. For the Urretzis there was only ever reverence and gratitude towards those who gave their bodies for the clan’s uttermost need. This, though, revolted her on every level. There was no love here. No respect. This was an abomination, mutilation for its own sake, a glorification of torment in worship of… what? There were rumours of some who gathered in forgotten chambers and raised shrines to the things Outside that hungered to get in – as they surely would if her family failed in their duty to maintain the machines that kept them at bay. There were few absolute heresies in the Spike: as long as nobody endangered the welfare of all, Prime Adjutant Domitia was content to let them do as they liked. Worship of the Outside most definitely was an absolute heresy. Lyse would report it, and delight in watching this atrocity put to the torch, along with those who had committed it.

But not before she helped herself to the glimmering thing that hung around the effigy’s neck.

She tiptoed across the dais, careful to avoid touching any of the body parts. They glistened as she passed, as if shifting to watch her, and she couldn’t shake the impression that nothing here was entirely dead. Up close, the effigy’s stench was like the breath of something rotting alive. The tech was a large and ornate medallion hanging about its throat; she checked for booby traps or alarms, but whoever had built this was obviously arrogant enough in their power to not bother. Her knife made short work of the cord, and the medallion fell into her hands.

It was a lot heavier than it looked – probably gold, but in this light that was a guess – and ridged with concentric dials that were themselves busy with slide-switches and mechanisms whose purpose she couldn’t begin to guess at. All she cared about was that the large central crystal held a dim flicker of amber within its depths, like a welding torch seen far down a shaft. She hoped it was enough for Brother Putorius to keep the machines running – maybe just for a day, maybe only for a few hours.

It would now be a simple matter to follow the tracks of those who came here, ideally back to the hab-halls or at least somewhere close. She stashed the medallion in a pouch and turned to go, and as she did so her biolux caught something metallic woven into the drapes cloaking the wall – some kind of tapestry created from stripped electrical wiring. Maybe there was another chamber behind it, a door, a passage and stairs up. There was a cord running from somewhere high above and anchored to the edge of the platform. She pulled it slowly and the covering drew to one side.

Instead of a door or passage there was some kind of twisted mural, and the shock of seeing it made her reel backwards.

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WARHAMMER HORROR

A BLACK LIBRARY IMPRINT

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
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