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  THE BEAST OF CALTH

  Graham McNeill

  Blood dripped from the tip of the blade as it hovered in front of Kellan’s eye. He’d watched its lethally-sharp edge cut his comrades up, helpless to stop their mutilation and murder. The beast had killed them all. Joelle, their flinty-eyed sergeant, had fallen first, her belly opened in grotesque mockery of the births she had once presided over in her pre-Defence Auxilia days. Dour-hearted Aquillen had been next, the blade opening him from groin to sternum.

  Young Telion, named for the venerable scout of the Chapter, had cried for his mother as the knife removed his leg with the speed of a laser-amputator. He’d bled out after a few minutes, weeping and begging her to take away the pain. Karysta had given the beast nothing: no screams, no pleading cries for mercy. She’d heard the scare stories too, and known the beast had no mercy in him. She wasn’t about to waste her breath on futile words.

  Then the beast had turned on him, gladius in hand. Proportioned for an Adeptus Astartes warrior, it was enormous to a mortal: a hewing broadsword with a blade that could cut deep into the toughest war plate. It had sliced through the layered mesh and kevlar of their Defence Auxilia uniforms like paper.

  The beast had come out of nowhere, a monstrous figure in battered armour with the paint stripped from its plates. Flashes of yellow and black leapt from between two abandoned dwellings, and Joelle was dying, down on her knees and vainly attempting to stop her guts from spilling out over the rocky ground. Kellan had managed to fire a shot, the only one of their squad able to even raise his weapon, but it hadn’t done any good.

  A fist punched him through the air and left him sitting with his back to the wall of an empty domicile with his breath coming in painful, rasping gurgles. Like everyone in the Calth Defence Auxilia he’d received training from the medicae. Not much, but enough to know that several of his ribs were broken and that at least one of his lungs was punctured.

  The beast had killed them all, and Kellan had watched the whole thing, unable to move and unable to block out the agonised cries of his squad. The beast had made him witness the mutilation of their corpses, promising to inflict even greater pain were he to look away from the butchery. Blood sprays painted the grey-tiled walls in dripping arcs, and the beast had wet his fingers in the gaping wounds he had cut, daubing strange symbols on the buildings: cursive stars, leering skulls and hideous words in an abominable language unknown to Kellan. It had the appearance of unclean sorcery, but that was only to be expected from such a monstrous enemy, one that had sold its soul to the Dark Gods. Kellan didn’t look at the designs, remembering the teachings Prelate Justian had drummed into them at the very beginning of the invasion.

  With his mutilations and obscene graffiti complete, the beast knelt before Kellan and rested one enormous hand upon his shoulder as though to comfort him. Kellan wanted to shrug off the killer’s loathsome touch, but it was too painful to move.

  ‘To know the workings of the enemy is to be corrupted by them…’ he whispered, screwing his eyes tightly shut.

  ‘I told you what would happen if you didn’t look,’ growled the beast, prising them open once again. Kellan’s eyelids tore free, and blood streamed into his eyes. Antasia had once sleepily told him that his eyes were his best feature, and he clung to thoughts of her as unbearable pain lanced deep into his skull. Kellan couldn’t blink the sticky fluid from his eyes, and saw the hideously disfigured face of the beast through a scarlet haze.

  Ruined by war and injury, the beast was everything Kellan had imagined him to look like: scarred, stitched with bloody augmetics and hideous beyond belief. Since the defeat of the Bloodborn, stories had been circulating the lower caverns of a hideous spawn-creature, loosed by the defeated enemy to devour the honourable people of Calth. No one had given the stories real credence, and the wealth of people still listed as missing after the war made it that much harder to confirm or refute the stories of deaths and mutilations.

  Kellan now knew the truth, and it was far worse than any monstrous creature.

  Though his pain was incredible, Kellan was grateful for the haze misting his eyes. To look into the eyes of the enemy would be to damn his soul for all eternity.

  ‘There is only the Emperor,’ stated Kellan. ‘He is our shield and protector.’

  The beast shook his head, as though disappointed at so predictable a response.

  ‘Is that what they tell you?’ the beast asked him. ‘I thought Guilliman’s people would know better. It’s almost pitiful how much you’ve forgotten of your past.’

  Kellan didn’t answer, his stinging eyes roving the bulk of the beast. The armour rendered him enormous, and there was no mistaking his genhanced physique for anything other a Traitor Space Marine. The devotionals said the Iron Warriors had been utterly defeated, that their forces were being routed all over Ultramar. Six long, hard months of fighting since the victory at Castra Tanagra had seen the Bloodborn driven from every world they had defiled. Kellan had railed against the fates that had seen his unit confined to tunnel clearance on Calth instead of taking the fight to the enemy.

  Caretaker duty, that’s what Aquillen had called it. Six months of patrolling empty caves to ensure every last shred of the enemy was gone. Six months of boredom and endless hikes through wide caverns, forgotten tunnels and echoing underground galleries. Their daily patrols had explored cathedral-like caverns filled with glittering blue stalactites as thin as threads, rainbow caverns of frozen rad-waste and abandoned agri-caverns that had exploded with all manner of strange and fecund vegetation. Karysta had once joked that they were getting to see areas of Calth even its people had forgotten about.

  But something else had found these negative spaces and made its lair in the dark.

  It had hidden from the light, biding its time, and they had stumbled across it in this last patrol. The map didn’t even have a name for this sunken gallery of tunnels and caves, simply a greyed-out region that had long since been abandoned in favour of roomier caverns with better light and access to the surface mag-levs.

  An abandoned settlement, its name unrecorded, sprawled empty and forsaken at the edge of a deep chasm. Though it had likely been many centuries since the buildings had been occupied, they had not fallen into disrepair. Such was the attention to detail and skill of Calth’s builders that all it would take to render them habitable again would be a strong back and a broom.

  Every such abandoned place needed searching for signs of the enemy, though, of course, none had yet been found. Everyone knew the Bloodborn had been stopped at Four Valleys Gorge, and the idea that any of that bastard horde might have found their way into the caverns beneath Calth was laughable.

  Kellan wasn’t laughing now.

  ‘You’re the beast, aren’t you?’ he said, fighting to keep his voice from betraying his terror.

  ‘Is that what they’re calling me?’ replied the beast. ‘Trust Guilliman’s lot to come up with something so unoriginal. After all the people I cut up, I’d hoped for something with a bit more… theatre to it.’

  ‘You’re a monster,’ spat Kellan.

  ‘You say that like I don’t know already know it,’ said the beast, looking over his shoulder at the bloody heaps of dismantled bodies. ‘I’ve been doing this for a very long time, and it would be hard to deny the horror of what I’ve done.’

  ‘Then why do it?’

  ‘Do you like what I did to your friends?’ asked the beast, ignoring the question and turning the tip of the blade in front of Kellan’s eye. ‘And the symbols? What do you think of them? I’m not sure t
hey’re right, but they’re close enough. Should get the attention of someone who matters, don’t you agree?’

  ‘Don’t make me look at them,’ said Kellan. Unable to blink, his eyes felt like they were on fire, the dry air of the cavern sucking up what little moisture was left in them. ‘You’re going to kill me. Don’t damn my soul as well.’

  ‘Stupid not to look,’ said the beast. ‘The first thing you need to know is who your enemy is and what he’s capable of. Wasn’t it the Imperial Fists primarch who said that the first axiom of defence is to understand what you defend against?’

  The hulking figure chuckled, a rumbling avalanche of sound that began deep in his belly and gradually spilled from his lips. ‘Gods preserve me, but Obax Zakayo’s soul will be burning in the warp to hear me quoting Dorn.’

  ‘They’ll hunt you down,’ said Kellan with pink-frothed breaths as his head lolled onto his shoulder. ‘When they know what you are, the Chapter will send everyone they have to find you.’

  ‘That’s what I’m counting on,’ said the beast, taking hold of Kellan’s head with one hand and twisting it to face him.

  ‘They’ll kill you for what you’ve done,’ said Kellan.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ agreed the beast. ‘But you never really defeat an Iron Warrior, not entirely. He’s always got one last trick left to him, a final solution that makes him just as dangerous in death as he was in life. If I die down here, half of Calth is coming with me.’

  Kellan tensed as the beast brought the knife closer, its polished steel tip scratching the surface of his cornea. The blade eased forwards and clear fluid mixed with the dried blood as it sliced deeper into his eye. Kellan screamed, and though his body thrashed in agony the beast held his head immobile.

  ‘I’m not going to kill you,’ smiled the beast. ‘But I am going to hurt you.’

  Inquisitor Arakai had been fond of employing gardening metaphors in his teachings, and had liked to quote Galan Noirgrim, a man who had evidently shared his love of growing things. As a young interrogator, Namira Suzaku had endured much pious pontificating on all things heretical crouched in images of weeds and cankerous roots.

  Suzaku disliked such obvious allegories, believing that they reduced the most terrible threat humanity faced to something the common man might understand. Since her elevation to full inquisitor status, Suzaku believed that the mysteries of heresy and the machinations of the immaterium should be left unknowable to the bulk of her species. Once that lightning had escaped the bottle, there was no putting it back.

  Better to leave the bulk of humanity ignorant of such things.

  The war against the Bloodborn had convinced her of that more than ever.

  And now this…

  The cavern was wide and high-ceilinged, though some quirk in the rocks’ structure was preventing the range-finders incorporated into her ice-blue eyes from determining exactly how high. Certainly it was large enough that three Adeptus Mechanicus battle engines could stand upon each other’s shoulders and barely brush the roof. Even Magos Locard’s Lex Tredecim could pass through and seem small.

  The walls glittered with moisture, but the air was chill. Suzaku pulled her long black storm coat tighter about herself as she stepped from the warm interior of her Rhino.

  Underground winds, stirred from deeper caverns, tousled her winter-white hair, stark against the caramel hue of her smooth skin. The tattoo of the hammer on the underside of her wrist itched, and she had long ago taken that as an omen of dark times ahead. She kissed the tattoo, an unconscious gesture of childish superstition she’d never quite been able to shake ever since Soburo had shown it to her in the scholam.

  Thoughts of her brother made her pause, and she took her hand from the ebony-inlaid handle of her long-barrelled pistol. Suzaku hadn’t fired the weapon since the battle against the Bloodborn in Four Valleys Gorge. She had field-stripped the weapon a hundred times or more, oiling the mechanisms and cleaning each individual part while reciting the mantras of accuracy and the catechisms against jamming with every sweep of her cloth.

  But no amount of obsessive maintenance could purge the memory of the shot that had ended her brother’s life.

  ‘That’s another bottle of scalp-oil you owe me,’ said Milotas, as he turned to climb down from the Rhino onto its plasteel running board.

  ‘What?’ replied Suzaku, though she had heard her savant perfectly.

  ‘You know fine well, Namira,’ said Milotas.

  Milotas Adelmo was one of the few individuals permitted to use her given name, a privilege he had earned many times in their long association. Though it was awkward for him to disembark from the Rhino, Suzaku knew better than to offer him a helping hand. Milotas was no dwarf, but his spine had been dreadfully foreshortened and twisted after long months of painful reconstructive surgery in the aftermath of their banishment of the Uromere Pseudoscorpionida.

  Her savant’s stunted physique made even the simplest tasks difficult, but he had steadfastly refused any augmetic repairs to his body. The flavour of Imperial Cult that flourished on his homeworld promulgated a vision of human perfection in the Emperor’s image, and shunned mechanical augmentations. It made for a contentious relationship between the planetary government and the Adeptus Mechanicus at times, but a global quirk of genetics that produced a much higher proportion than average of mathematical and statistical savants per head of population ensured that any areas of theological friction were diplomatically navigated.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of Soburo,’ said Suzaku.

  ‘Then why did you release your pistol?’ asked Milotas, dropping from the running boards while holding onto the flanged hull plates of the armoured vehicle.

  Suzaku looked down. She hadn’t even realised she had let go of the weapon.

  Milotas stepped down to the rock of Calth with a grimace of discomfort and adjusted the roomy surplice of purple and crimson he used to mask his affliction. Blessed with absurd good looks and a gracefully aged face that was free of juvenat treatments, his hairless skull gleamed with an application from his extensive – and growing – collection of oils and fragrant perfumes. Tucked under one arm was his mirror-slate, and Suzaku knew a snub-nosed pistol was holstered beneath his shoulder. Too small to be of any real use in a serious fight, it was, nevertheless, perfectly able to penetrate his own skull should the need arise.

  ‘Because I don’t need to draw it,’ said Suzaku, archly. ‘Don’t make me change my mind.’

  ‘And you kissed the hammer tattoo,’ said Milotas, pressing his palm to the face of his slate and giving a soft smile as it responded to his touch with a pleasing chime. Numerical data streams cascaded over its reflective face, unintelligible to anyone except a savant or augmented calculus-logi.

  ‘Fine,’ admitted Suzaku. ‘Yes, I was thinking of Soburo.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Milotas without looking up from his numbers. ‘I think a bottle of distilled crimson saxifrage would be nice. I hear it grows in some of the deeper caverns here on Calth. Apparently, the artificial sunlight gives it a quite unique scent.’

  ‘Fine, I’ll see to it.’

  ‘Do you want another lecture from me?’

  ‘Throne, no!’

  ‘It wasn’t really a question, you know,’ said Milotas, staring at her with unabashed frankness. ‘Soburo’s death was a necessary death. You know that. He had been tainted by the warp-sorcery of the Archenemy. You couldn’t have allowed him to live.’

  ‘You’re right, I do know that, Milotas,’ said Suzaku with a faint sigh. ‘I don’t need to hear it again.’

  ‘You know it, but you don’t believe it,’ said Milotas, modulating his tone to one less flippant. ‘You forget that I was there too. I stood on the walls of Castra Occidens when the enemy warpcraft struck. Soburo knew he was tainted and accepted the only option open to you.’

  ‘He forgave me with his last breath.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Milotas with a nod. ‘He was a good man.’

  ‘He was
, but I didn’t think he’d make a good inquisitor. I thought he was too compassionate, that his empathic gifts made him too… open. Too forgiving.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now I think he might have made a better inquisitor than I.’

  Milotas reached out and took her hand, placing it back on the textured grip of her pistol.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said Milotas, and Suzaku smiled a little. ‘Yes, Soburo was a good man, but the Inquisition does not need good men, it needs strong men and women who can make the decisions others are afraid to make. It needs agents who will countenance the unthinkable act because no one else dares to. You and I both know the threats we face are too real and too dangerous to be met with the slightest moment of indecision or compassion. To believe otherwise is dangerous folly. And while I have the greatest respect for the sanctity of human life, I understand the hard truth of the dreadful arithmetic that must be employed to determine who lives and who dies. You understand it too, and that’s what makes you an inquisitor.’

  ‘Are you sure about that? Now?’

  ‘More than ever,’ said Milotas with a sage nod. ‘You wouldn’t have pulled the trigger and killed your brother if you didn’t accept the truth of it. Now that today’s lecture is done with, shall we see what has Sergeant Dante so agitated?’

  ‘Do we have anything further on why we’re here?’

  ‘Nothing more than a request for your attendance at this location,’ said Milotas.

  Suzaku nodded and set off into the cavern, wondering what could be left on Calth that was so important it required the presence of an inquisitor. Part of her was irritated at such a peremptory summons, but her instincts for trouble were warning her that this day would be like no other, and she kept her ire in check.

  Two of her storm troopers disembarked from the rear of the Rhino, falling into lockstep on either side of her. Once, they had been elite soldiers of the Jacintine Marauders, but now they were the bodyguards of an inquisitor, augmented and weaponised to be even deadlier.

  Milotas followed Suzaku with a waddling gait, scanning the surface of his slate and surveying the extent of the cavern.