Aaron Aaron Dembski-Bowden - Cadian Blood

Seth was hearing the voice with astonishing clarity now.

And that was the problem. It was coming from everywhere now, from the dust on the ground, from the bloodstains on the walls, from the pores of his sweating skin.

The inquisitor trailed his every step now. Seth knew what this was about—they needed him to find the source of the voice. It was obvious. But as Thade’s small army descended down the wide stone stairs into the undercroft, he knew they were setting their hopes on a false path. He couldn’t make out any sense of place or direction in the voice’s ululating scream. Even with his senses opened wide to the hidden world, all he could feel was the illusory sensation of unseen fingernails scratching lightly at his mind.

He began to wonder after a while if the feeling was really just an illusion. A taste appeared in his mouth, raw and rancid and tingling on his tongue like burning copper. He was stronger than this. He knew it. He could listen for the voice and remain untainted. Caius did, didn’t he? Zaur had?

Seth placed one foot in front of the other, at times shambling forward like one of the plague-slain and remaining upright only by gripping his black staff. He felt their eyes on him… Thade’s, Caius’, the bastard Jevrian’s.

They didn’t care if he died. Whatever it took to get their prize. Whatever it took to reach the crashed ship. Here he was, swallowing the taste of blood and trying not to choke on it, while they silently willed him on with smiles on their faces.

He could, he realised, kill them if he wished. Within that realisation was a flare of shame, quickly quenched in Seth’s rising anger. Cadian Blood, the fuel of the Imperium… Born to die in service to the Throne. It was laughable, Seth realised. Laughable and grossly wrong.

Damn the Throne. The Throne was a meat-grinding engine feeding on the souls of those that wasted their lives worshipping it. Damn the Throne. To the Eye with all of them for wishing me dead.

They were in a vault with a ceiling so low many of the taller soldiers had to slouch as they walked. It helped the popular opinion that the entire cathedral, raised over several decades of toil by tens of thousands of workers, was thrown together more by faith than sensible design.

As Seth passed between rows of stone sarcophagi, each one adorned with golden decoration and bearing long-faded names carved into the stone, the Cadians detected a curious noise.

“You hear that?” Thade asked Caius.

The inquisitor nodded, gesturing to the sarcophagus closest to Seth’s trailing coat. As Thade passed it, he heard…

—something inside, something made of dry bones, furiously scratching to get out—

…something within. An eerie sound, like vermin running over stone.

“Tell me that’s the rats,” he said to Caius, loudly enough for the men nearby to hear.

“It’s the rats,” the inquisitor replied, not looking back.

From that point on, Tionenji followed Seth with his laspistol drawn.

The Cadians had been within the monastery for approximately three hours when the voice addressed Seth by name.

“Why are you smiling?” Thade asked him immediately. Seth blanked his face and looked at the captain while they walked. The false pity on Thade’s face sickened him so powerfully he had to tense his stomach and force it not to rebel.

“Nothing,” he said at last.

“You’re looking bad, Seth. Do you need to rest for a while?”

“No rest.” Caius shoved Seth forward with the palm of his hand on the psyker’s spine, right between the shoulder blades. Seth drooled as he staggered on. He’d been about to say yes. Been about to mention that the voice was calling his name now.

Thade moved closer to Caius as the troops walked through a tunnel lit by dim strip lighting running off one of the forgotten power generators in the city-sized monastery. This, too, was unnerving. The Cadians were used to Solthane as a city devoid of power.

“This is killing him,” the captain whispered.

“This will kill us all,” Caius replied in a tone that brooked no further comment. The inquisitor wondered if Thade had really considered the sanctioned psyker’s chances of survival after all. Either way, now was not the time for sentimentality. Now was the time to shut up and serve.

From up ahead, where the tunnel branched into a T-junction, Lieutenant Horlan voxed back to the main force.

“We’ve got some chanting up here. The tunnel splits north and south and leads into attached chambers. We’ve got chanting coming from the south side. Silence from the north.”

Caius stared at the back of Seth’s head as the sanctioned psyker shivered in the cold air. He seemed to be listening to something only he could hear.

“We go south,” the inquisitor said. Thade voxed the order to Horlan, and the units closed together once more, catching up with their scouts.

The chanting turned out to be the dregs of some plague cult lost in the darkness of the catacomb maze. The 88th squads stormed in, opening fire and cutting down the handful of heretics as they crouched down for their evening meal.

Several soldiers spat on the corpses as they passed on once the fighting was done, disgusted to see how the heretics had been feasting on the bodies of their own dead. They were but the first of several splintered, isolated gangs of mindless pilgrims lost down in the dark. Each one fell before the guns of the Imperials, and the 88th ventured deeper and deeper through subterranean burial vaults, storage chambers, habitation wings and abandoned ritual halls. None of these had been used in thousands of years except for the recent deprivations of the scavenging heretics.

“We’re in the real catacombs now,” Thade said at one point, running his metal hand across the wall of a chamber.

“How do you know?” asked Caius.

Thade tapped the wall with his knuckles. “Stone. Not marble. This is cheap and serviceable, probably never meant to be seen by any pilgrims even when the temple was still growing. What? Don’t look at me like that. Just because I’m a soldier doesn’t mean I’m an idiot.”

“I’m beginning to forget what sunlight feels like,” muttered Darrick. He held a lamp-pack in one hand, panning it around the dark chamber. Power was sporadic in the undervaults, and the ceiling lightglobes were off more often than on.

“It’s only been six hours,” Jevrian said. “Grow a backbone.”

“It’s been nine,” Thade said, holding his wrist chronometer within Darrick’s circle of illumination.

“I count seven hours and fifty,” Kel piped up. More responses came. Not a single chron agreed with another.

“This can’t be good,” Darrick commented.

“Move,” called Caius. “Time displacement is a common effect of warp distortion. Just keep moving.”

“Oh,” Darrick muttered. “Well, that’s fine, then. Silly me for worrying.” Grin in place, Darrick expected Thade to tell him to shut up. He found the fact the captain remained silent to be more disconcerting than time itself playing around.

Typhus wrenched his scythe clear and the Raven Guard sank to the ground. It had been a brief fight: brief but deliciously satisfying. Blood hissed and bubbled on the Herald’s blade, cooking black on the surface of the psychically-charged metal.

Brief. Satisfying. But costly. The Raven Guard had swooped down all too literally, striking from the air as they descended on jump-packs with howling thrusters. Chainswords sang and bolters barked at close range as the Astartes butchered one another in a savage brawl.

The black-armoured Astartes had been outnumbered three to one, but the advantage of surprise counted for much. Typhus stared through the Y-shaped visor of his gory, horned helm. Death Guard, their cracked armour the colour of gangrene, lay across the landing site. Men (or beings that had once been men and still maintained roughly human form) that had stood alongside the Herald for millennia, lay cleaved by Imperial chainblades or burst open by bolter fire.