By Jude Reid
“I knew someone like you once,” the veteran tells me, as our dropship hurtles down into the dark. “Arrogant bastard, he was. Thought he was better than everyone else. Smarter. Stronger. Luckier. Same as you.”
The other two members of our reject squad sit in silence opposite us. Preacher Eudora’s eyes are closed, her hands white-knuckled on the hilt of her chainsword, her mouth moving in endless, obsessional prayer. The rough-hewn lump of muscle and blubber that calls itself an ogryn is vibrating with terror, piggy eyes wide and staring, wet lips pressed into a bloodless line.
The idiot roughneck is wrong.
I don’t think I’m better than this collection of gutter scum.
For all my sins, I know I am.
The dropship lurches, and the ogryn lets out an unhappy moan. “I don’t like this, boss.”
“I know.” The veteran leans forward and pats the ogryn’s massive hand. “You can call me Vincet, big man, you know that?”
“Call you Vincet.” The ogryn nods. “Okay, boss.”
Vincet rolls his eyes. “Free advice for you, witch, seeing as how it’s our first time in here together. If you’re going to survive this, you’ve got to be strong, or stupid, or better yet, both. Big Jak there’s covered. It’s the rest of you I’m worried about.”
Unspoken words burn my tongue. I could tell him my strength was tested long before the Black Ships came, before I faced divine judgment at the hands of the Astra Telepathica– but what would be the point? We are rejects now, my former service as a primaris psyker of no more significance than his faded violet eyes. The past is a rotting corpse, and so is the future – when this place claims us, as claim us it surely will, we will spend eternity as part of the loathsome shambling horde within.
The dropship judders to a halt. Vincet is on his feet before the landing gear is fully down, checking his lasgun as the bulkhead grinds upward. I check my own weapons – a standard issue laspistol, and a combat knife made for a pair of hands twice the size of mine – and wait for the helscape beyond to resolve out of the darkness.
This is Tertium.
We have come here to die.
“I don’t trust him.”
Preacher Eudora is a small woman, full of a fizzling nervous energy that radiates like a physical force from her emaciated frame. Her hair is cut in a blunt-ended bob in self-conscious emulation of the God-Emperor’s holy daughters, but Eudora is no saint. There are no saints in this place.
“You mean Vincet?”
We are walking carefully along what must once have been a majestic boulevard between two rows of broken basalt columns. The air is thick with smoke that sets my eyes stinging, but even its bitterness cannot entirely mask the stench of decay. “I don’t trust any of you.”
The zealot shakes her head. “No. Not like that. He’s cursed. This is his eighth time in. The last four times, he was the only one who came back.”
I shoot a glance at Vincet, moving like a warp-ghost ahead of us as the boulevard narrows. The ogryn clumps along a few paces behind him, oblivious to the need for stealth. “Sounds more like luck than a curse.”
“Lucky people don’t end up here. Criminals, scum and traitors end up here–”
“You two, move up,” Vincet calls back over his shoulder. I start as though I’ve been caught with my hand in the offertory box. “We don’t want to get strung out. Not where we’re going.”
“And where are we going?” I call back, but my question goes unanswered.
Eudora catches my eye. “You see? Be careful.”
“This is the place,” Vincet says. The cathedrum entrance towers over us as we reach the top of the black marble steps, a pair of great brazen wings spreading in bas-relief across its doors. There is something wrong about this building, something that tugs at my sixth sense, nagging in the back of my skull. He rattles the door handle, then, when it fails to open takes a step back. “Locked. Never mind. Jak, you’ve got the key.”
The ogryn turns his idiot gaze on the veteran, brow furrowed, eyes narrowed. “The key, boss?”
Vincet sighs. “Break the door down, big man.”
The ogryn steps forward and smashes his club into doors over and over, until a ragged-edged aperture appears, large enough for all of us to step through into the dark beyond.
I follow Vincet through the gap with my breath caught in my chest. At first sight, there is nothing in the cathedrum that I have not seen before – smears of old dried blood, the barricades against the door and windows, corpses littering the ground.
But here, the barricades are on the inside. Whoever died in here locked themselves in first.
Something moans in the darkness.
And the dead rise.
They come from the shadows slowly at first, their limbs stiffened by death, but whatever malign force is animating them grows in strength and speed with every step. Their faces are slack and expressionless, their mouths stretched wide in rictus-grins, but these groaners are different to the usual scum. Stained and tattered remains of pale blue uniforms hang from their rotting forms, battered flack armour dangling from mouldering straps – but the same mindless hunger burns in their sunken eyes.
These were soldiers once.
Not any more.
The ogryn reacts first, his huge feet thundering across marble as he charges the rising dead. Crimson bolts of lasfire sear through the dusty air as Jak’s heavy club turns a dead woman’s head to a bloody mash of meat and bone. “I – hate – groaners!”
“Glory to the master of mankind!” Eudora sprints past me, flame belching in a broad arc from her ministorum flamer. I raise a hand and extend my will, and a crackling lightning bolt tears the air in two, arcing from groaner to groaner and flash-frying them where they stand. The act seems to send the mob into a frenzy, and before I can draw another breath the world turns to a writhing mass of poxridden flesh, gnashing jaws, broken-nailed hands reaching out to grab me and drag me down. I unleash bolt after bolt of psychic energy, but for every one I fell two more press forward to take their place.
This is Tertium.
The words beat out a frantic refrain in my skull.
They have sent us here to die.
A hand locks on my shoulder. Panic seizes me by the throat, and when I reach for my power I find only emptiness. I fumble for my dagger, knowing that the time for self-defence is past, that all that is left is to die with a weapon in my hand – then a flack-armoured forearm knocks my blade aside and spins me roughly around.
“Witch!” Vincet’s voice cuts across the moans of the damned. “Fall back with the others. I’ll cover you.”
The horde is pressing close around us, but there is still a clear route to the door, held open by Eudora’s flames. Vincet’s lasgun is missing, replaced by a laspistol in his right hand and a heavy bundle of explosives in his left. A few yards away, Jak is cracking skulls and splintering limbs with joyous abandon.
“What are the explosives for?” I ask.
Vincet dispatches a poxwalker a split second before its hand would have closed on my ankle. “Time this place came down. Look after Jak, will you?”
“Why would you–” I stop as realisation dawns. He is going to destroy the cathedral, but not to save our lives.
This is to end theirs.
“You knew them.”
He aims, nods and shoots. “Saw them every time I went in. Friends, or close enough as makes no difference. Drank together, when we could. Tipped each other off when trouble was coming. Rannick didn’t like it much.”
Eudora pauses before incinerating another groaner to ash. “Rannick doesn’t like anything much.”
Vincet manages a humourless laugh between shots. “Then one day I got my hands on some stimms, good ones, too. Just what you need to get through the day in a place like this.” Another lasbolt. Another dead groaner. “So I sold them to my good friends in the Moebian 21st for a decent sum. Hooked them up with a steady supply, too. Only it turns out the last batch were contaminated with throne-knows-what, spiked by those bastard heretics in the Carnival. The ones that died were the lucky ones. The rest ended up like this.” He meets my eye with fragile defiance. “So this is my mess. And I’m clearing it up.”
“Our mess, boss,” the ogryn rumbles.
“Frekk’s sake, Jak–” Vincet begins.
“No. Listen to me.” I cut him off. He’s crude and brash, this roughneck, the kind of gutter scum that I was taught to loathe from the cradle, but there’s substance to him, even virtue in a debased sort of way.
And if there’s hope for him, then maybe there’s hope for the rest of us rejects, too.
“Set the explosives. We’ll cover your back.” I raise my combat knife, and channel a crackling psychic energy field down it with the dwindling remains of my strength. One flick of my wrist takes a leering head from its rotting shoulders, but another two press instantly into the gap.
“No time for that.” Vincet motions with his laspistol to the altar, to the pair of huge pillars supporting the roof. “I need to set those charges at the base–”
“Nah,” Jak’s meaty fist lashes out with astonishing speed, grabs the explosives, and hurls them at the altar. They strike the pillar with pile-driver force, and for a single panicked moment I am convinced they will explode and bring the roof down on our heads – but the God-Emperor, it seems, does not intend for us to die just yet.
“Jak! Throne’s sake!” For the first time, I see fear in Vincet’s eyes, hear the panic in his voice. “I need to prime the bloody things – explosives don’t go off by magic!”
Silence. Then, the absurdity of the situation draws a blurt of laughter from my mouth.
“On this occasion, roughneck, you are entirely wrong.”
And we run. As we reach the broken doors, I raise my hand, and send a bolt of blue-white psychic energy into the desecrated cathedrum. For a moment I am made holy, the instrument of the God-Emperor’s light – and then the fyceline detonates with a roaring yellow flame. I have just enough time to see the left-sided pillar crack at its base, and then we are falling back as the cathedrum’s roof caves in on the walking dead, and sending them to their rest at last.
“What happened to him?” I ask, as Vincet and I lean shoulder to shoulder against the heap of smoke-blackened rubble that used to be the cathedrum. “Your friend. The arrogant bastard.”
“Oh, him. He made mistakes. His friends died.” Vincet pulls a crumpled pack of lho-sticks from his pocket, lights one and tucks it between his lips. “Then somehow he earned himself a conscience. Stupid mistake, that, the sort that gets you killed.”
A few yards away, Jak is sitting with blood streaming down his face, while Eudora dresses the broad gash where a chunk of flying masonry glanced off his shaven scalp.
“Then consider yourself lucky you have us to watch your back.”
He takes a long, slow drag of the lho-stick, then offers it to me filter-first. I take it, and he grins. “No such thing as luck in a place like this.”
This is Tertium.
They have sent us here to die.
But not today.
Not yet.
