The Killing Ground

  Their heads were fused along the rear quarter of the cranium so that neither could look upon the other. The poor, malformed girls had two mouths and two noses; in each face an eye, well conformed and placed above the nose with a third, milky and distended eye in the middle of the forehead common to both girls.

  The brain of one girl was quite visible through a thin membrane of bruised skin that glistened and heaved in time with her breath. On the right side of her head was a rudimentary external ear, from which hung a golden earring, and their small, withered bodies lay in the grip of an embrace that their accident of birth had forced them into.

  They were wrapped in dark green robes of plush velveteen, and Uriel saw an eagle head badge pinned there, the symbol of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica. Was this the astropath who would transmit their message of return to the Ultramarines?

  Uriel was horrified at the pitiful sight of the girls, seeing the light of intelligence in the single eye of each one. The milky eye in the forehead of the conjoined girls swam with patterns like droplets of coloured ink stirred into white paint.

  Uriel had seen patterns like that once before, when he had looked through a crystal dome into the seething depths of the warp when the Omphalos Daemonium had seized the Calth's Pride in its grip.

  'Welcome, Uriel Ventris,' said the left mouth. 'I am Kulla.'

  'And I am Lalla,' said the other.

  'We are the Janiceps,' they said in unison.

  TEN

  LALLA's VOICE WAS sweet and sounded like a carefree young girl who knew nothing of the cruelties of the world. Kulla's, on the other hand, was bitter and husky, as though she alone bore the full knowledge of what the vagaries of unthinking nature had wrought upon them.

  Uriel stared in uncomfortable fascination at the conjoined girls, unsure of what to say.

  Astropaths were often eccentric souls, cursed with the ability to hurl their minds across the vastness of the galaxy and communicate with others of their kind, thus allowing the Imperium to function.

  Uriel had seen many astropaths, but none as physically tormented as the Janiceps, none so cursed by birth as to be better off dead than consigned to this fate. On ninety-nine worlds out of a hundred, the girls would have been killed, but whichever world had birthed them had obviously been a more tolerant place.

  As much as Uriel felt sorry for them, he couldn't shake the sense that they were dangerous mutants and fought to get past that impression.

  'Don't feel sorry for us, Uriel,' said Lalla. 'We like being useful.'

  'Be quiet,' snapped Kulla. 'What do you know of useful? I do all the work!'

  'Come now, girls,' said Barbaden, his voice unusually soft and yielding. 'You shouldn't argue. You know what happens when you argue.'

  'Yes,' sulked Kulla. 'You have your damned warders tighten their noose on us.'

  'And it hurts us so!' squealed Lalla.

  'This is the astropath?' Uriel asked Barbaden.

  'You can speak to them yourself,' said the governor, 'they're right in front of you.'

  'He thinks we're mutants, Kulla,' said Lalla pleasantly.

  'Well, aren't you?' asked Uriel.

  'No more than you, Astartes,' sneered Kulla. 'What are you if not a freak? In fact your gene structure is more removed from humanity than ours.'

  Uriel took a deep breath. From the precautions Barbaden had taken with their confinement, Kulla and Lalla were obviously powerful psykers and it would be foolish to needlessly antagonise them.

  'Yes, it would,' smiled Kulla.

  Uriel started and Lalla sniggered. 'She does that all the time, but don't worry, she can only read your surface thoughts, unless you want her to read more, and then we'll know all your sins.'

  'I am a Space Marine of the Emperor, I have no sins,' said Uriel.

  'Oh, come now,' said Lalla, laughing, 'we all have our secrets.'

  'No,' said Uriel, 'we don't.'

  'He's got secrets to hide,' said Kulla, laughing with a cackling screech that stretched the membrane across her brain.

  'Can we get on with this?' asked Uriel, uncomfortable in the presence of the Janiceps now that he knew they could read minds as well as communicate telepathically with other astropaths.

  'Of course,' said Barbaden, amused at Uriel's discomfort. 'Simply kneel before the twins and do as they tell you. It will go much quicker if you do not question everything.'

  'Both of us?' asked Pasanius.

  'If you'd like to,' said Lalla. 'It wouldn't make any difference.'

  'Then I think I'll sit this one out,' said Pasanius, gesturing to Uriel to step up.

  'And you have awards for valour,' said Uriel.

  'The burden of command is that you sometimes have to lead from the front,' replied Pasanius, 'and she said it wouldn't make a difference.'

  'How convenient,' said Uriel, kneeling before the twins.

  'Give us your hands,' said Lalla, 'and hold on.'

  Uriel nodded, wondering at the necessity of Lalla's last comment, and lifted his hands towards the girls. He took their hands hesitantly, feeling the rapid pulse of blood in their tiny, delicate fingers.

  'We're not made of china,' said Kulla. 'I thought you Astartes were supposed to be strong. Grip our hands.'

  Lalla giggled and Uriel blushed as he tightened his hold.

  'That's better,' said Kulla. 'Now we can control your mind.'

  Uriel's eyes widened, but Lalla smiled. 'She's joking. We wouldn't do that, not without asking you first.'

  His hands became cold and he felt the chill spread along his arms and into his chest. How much of the twins' banter was playful and how much was truth, he didn't know, but he had the feeling that were they of a mind to do him harm, there would be nothing he could do to prevent them from killing him with a thought.

  'So what do I need to do?' asked Uriel, trying not to let his unease show.

  'Where are you sending this message?' asked Lalla, her eye drifting shut.

  'Who are you sending it to?' demanded Kulla.

  'To the Ultramarines,' said Uriel. 'To the world of Macragge.'

  'Open your mind, Astartes,' ordered Kulla, her voice rasping and harsh.

  Uriel nodded, though the instruction was vague, and closed his eyes, slowing his breathing and awaiting the touch of the twins' mind. He felt nothing and tried not to get impatient.

  'Your mind is closed to us,' said Lalla, 'like a fortress preparing to resist an invader.'

  'I don't understand,' said Uriel.

  'You Astartes, your minds are as rigid and unbending as adamantium,' said Kulla, and Uriel knew that her mouth was not moving. Her voice was arriving directly in his thoughts without recourse to speech. 'You are trained, conditioned and enhanced in so many ways, but your minds are like locked doors to a place of miracles and wonder. All the potential you are trained to access: memory, language, combat analysis, and yet your masters train you to close off the one part of your mind that might actually allow you to soar. You do not feel as others do, but we can open that door for you if you let us.'

  'Stop it, Kulla,' said Lalla. 'You know that's not allowed. Leave him to his blindness.'

  'Oh, all right,' sulked Kulla, with a sigh that Uriel heard in his mind. 'Very well, Astartes, picture your home world: its people, its mountains and its seas. Smell the earth and taste the air. Feel the grass beneath your feet and the wind on your face. Remember all that makes it what it is.'

  Pleased to have an instruction he understood, Uriel pictured his last sight of Macragge, a beautiful blue globe turning slowly in the depths of space. The vast seas that covered much of its surface shone with an azure light and spirals of storm clouds, like miniature galaxies, spun lazily in the atmosphere.

  Passing through the clouds, Uriel pictured the awesome marble colossus that was the Fortress of Hera upon the great peninsula. He saw the soaring fluted columns of its majestic portico, the colonnades filled with statues of heroic warriors. His mind soared onwards, over golden roofs, silver domes and towering
spires of glittering light: magnificent libraries, halls of battle honours, and gilded halls of pilgrims and worshipers come to the Temple of Correction, where the body of the mighty Roboute Guilliman was held in stasis.

  Beyond the Fortress of Hera, Uriel imagined the wild, untamed glories of the Valley of Laponis, its white cliffs towering above the achingly blue river that wound its way through the mountains to the plains below. As though a bird in flight, Uriel plummeted down through the valley, speeding towards a thundering waterfall cascading from the heights above.

  Billowing clouds of spray boomed into the air, filling it with bitingly cold mist and Uriel laughed aloud as he tasted the crystal clear waters of his Chapter's home world. He soared from the valley, visualising the mountains and forests of Macragge, the sweeping, rocky coastlines and vast, depthless oceans.

  'Pasanius,' he breathed, 'I'm there.'

  'Hold to thoughts of home,' said Kulla. 'Speak of your desire.'

  'My desire?' asked Uriel.

  'To return home,' said Lalla, a note of strain in her voice.

  Uriel nodded in understanding. 'We have completed our Death Oath,' he said. 'It is time to return to our battle-brothers.'

  'Show us,' said Kulla, 'all of it.'

  Though he hated to return there, even in memory, Uriel summoned images of Medrengard, the ashen plains, the belching continents of manufactorum and the hellish, damned creatures that dwelt there. He pictured the nightmare fortress of Khalan-Ghol, the horrific daemon-wombs of the Daemonculaba and the final victory over Honsou.

  Uriel felt the twins' hands shaking and opened his eyes as the awful stench of burning flesh arose in his nostrils. Ghostly flames swelled and billowed around the chamber, but its occupants appeared to be oblivious to them.

  The flames bathed everything around him in light and Uriel had the distinct impression of hungry eyes watching him from the darkness.

  The cold, heatless fire reflected a strange light from everyone gathered here and Uriel gasped as he saw a measure of what the twins saw.

  A shadowy darkness surrounded Eversham, and a nimbus of silver, like a moonlight reflection on a stagnant lake, bathed Barbaden's features with a cold halo. Flickering arcs of golden lightning crackled around the twins' heads and a scarlet bloom like blood in the water surrounded Pasanius's outline. Uriel saw that the red glow extended past the stump of Pasanius's arm and formed the blurred outline of a hand.

  Looking down at his own body, he saw that same red glow, like the embers of a smouldering fire, around his arms and torso.

  'You are warriors,' said Kulla, her voice sounding as though it came from far away. 'What other colour would you expect your aura to be but that of blood?'

  Pasanius said something, but Uriel could not understand the sense of it, his friend's voice sounding as though it came from an impossibly far-off distance. As the sound of Pasanius's voice faded even further, Uriel felt his gaze drawn to the swirling, milky eye in Kulla's and Lalla's cartilage-fused forehead.

  Stars wheeled in the eye's depths, planets and the endless gulfs of trackless space that separated them. Uriel cried out as he was carried into that eye, a mote in the void of space. Distances so vast that the human mind simply had not the capacity to imagine them, flew past at the speed of thought. He was part of that thought, everything he had visualised and everything he had sought carried with the psychic beacon of ideas and images that were cast across space by the power of the twins' mind.

  The dizzying sense of vertigo was almost unbearable and it was all he could do to hold onto the twins' hands as they passed what he had given them to the void.

  Then it was over.

  Uriel gasped as the twins released his hands. He blinked rapidly, his normal sight restored, and all the colours he had seen earlier vanished like the fragments of a dream.

  'Is it done?' he asked, the breath heaving in his chest.

  'Your call will be heard,' said Lalla.

  'By any with the wit to listen,' added Kulla.

  WHEN EVERSHAM LED Uriel and Pasanius from the Argiletum, the sky was dark and painted with a scattering of stars. The sense of relief at leaving the presence of the Janiceps was total, and as Uriel took a cleansing breath, it tasted as sweet as the crisp mountain air of Macragge.

  'How long were we in there?' asked Uriel, staring up at the stars.

  'Too long,' answered Pasanius as the soldiers once again flattened the razor wire to allow them to cross. 'You crouched in front of those... girls for hours.'

  'I did?' said Uriel. 'It felt like a few minutes at most.'

  'Trust me,' said Pasanius, scratching at the raw flesh at the end of his arm. 'It wasn't. Barbaden left almost as soon as you started.'

  'Is your arm hurting?' asked Uriel, following Eversham over the bridge of sheet metal.

  'A little,' admitted Pasanius. 'It wasn't exactly removed with surgical precision.'

  Uriel caught the anxiety in Pasanius's tone and knew that his friend was worried. Pasanius had lost his arm fighting an ancient star god beneath the surface of Pavonis, and microscopic slivers of the living metal of its blade had entered his bloodstream and incorporated its structure into the augmetic the adepts of that world had grafted to him.

  The augmetic had developed regenerative powers and Pasanius had struggled with the guilt of that for long months until he had been forced to confess the truth to Uriel. The Savage Morticians, horrific torturer-surgeons of the Iron Warriors, had later amputated the arm and presented it to the Warsmith Honsou, but the guilt was still there.

  'You are free of the xenos taint,' said Uriel, keeping his voice low. 'I am sure of it.'

  'What if something from Medrengard got into me?'

  'You'd know if it had,' said Uriel. 'If the Ruinous Powers had corrupted your flesh, you would not be speaking to me like this. You would have turned that bolt pistol on me when we were in battle yesterday.'

  'Would it be that quick? Maybe I've only taken the first steps on the path to evil.'

  'I don't know for sure,' replied Uriel, hearing the fear in his friend's voice, 'but I believe that to question whether you are evil tells me that you are not. Those who have fallen to evil never question, never believe they are wrong and cannot see the truth of their actions. If you were on that path, I would see it.'

  'I hope you're right,' said Pasanius.

  'If you want to be sure, I will ask Governor Barbaden for a medicae scan.'

  'You think that would find anything?'

  'It would at least show any infection,' said Uriel.

  Pasanius smiled in gratitude. 'Thank you, Uriel. Your friendship means a lot to me.'

  'In these times, it's all we have, my friend,' said Uriel.

  RYKARD USTEL WAS going to die, as sure as day turned to night. Pascal Blaise could see it in the boy's eyes, the look that said his body had already given up the fight to live and that it was just a matter of time before the biological machinery shut down. They had done what they could for him, but none of them were trained medics and their imperfect knowledge of how to treat battlefield injuries had been learned by seeing others die.

  Serj Casuaban had delivered the medical supplies as promised and many of those who had been wounded in the attack on the Screaming Eagles would live: many, but not all.

  Unfortunately for Rykard Ustel, he was not one of the lucky ones.

  Cawlen Hurq sat by the boy's bed, holding his hand and speaking softly to him, the light from the two oil-burners casting a warm, healthy glow over Rykard's pale face that belied his prognosis.

  Pascal rubbed the las-burn on the side of his head and took another drink of raquir, suddenly wishing that he could drain the bottle and fall into dreamless oblivion. He knew he couldn't; there were people who depended on him and he was grimly aware that the Sons of Salinas could not continue in this way.

  He had known that stark fact for years, but his hatred of Leto Barbaden had blinded him to the simple reality of it. This was a war that could not be won with violence, and th
e futility of the fighting and killing he had taken part in sickened him. Had it all been for nothing?

  Pascal heard a soft curse and looked up.

  'He's gone,' said Cawlen, his face a mask of anger as he slumped into the chair opposite Pascal. 'Rykard, he's dead.'

  Pascal nodded and slid the bottle over the table to Cawlen, who took a long swallow of the powerful spirit.

  'What did he die for, Cawlen?' asked Pascal. 'Tell me why he died.'

  'He died for Salinas,' replied Cawlen, 'to defeat the Imperium.'

  Pascal shook his head. 'No, he died for nothing.'

  'How can you say that?' snarled Cawlen. 'He died fighting the oppressors. How can that be for nothing?'

  'Because the idea of defeating the Imperium is ludicrous,' said Pascal sadly. 'I think I always knew that, but I just wouldn't admit it to myself. I mean, what can we do? Really? We fight with stolen weapons that are so old they're probably more dangerous to us than anyone we actually point them at. They have tanks and aircraft and now they have Space Marines.'

  'Only two of them,' said Cawlen, 'and one of them is missing an arm.'

  'Doesn't that tell you something? That we only merit the attention of two Space Marines? It tells me plenty.'

  'So we can't win? Is that what you're saying?' demanded Cawlen.

  'No. Yes... Maybe. I don't know any more,' said Pascal.

  'Sylvanus Thayer would never have given up!'

  'Sylvanus Thayer led the Sons of Salinas into a suicidal battle without hope of victory and I won't do that, Cawlen. I won't.'

  'He died a hero,' Cawlen said defiantly.

  For a brief moment, Pascal wanted to tell Cawlen the truth, that Sylvanus Thayer lay burned and horribly mutilated in the House of Providence, but fate had cast the former leader of the Sons of Salinas in the role of martyr and it seemed churlish to deny him that honour.

  'Yes,' said Pascal, 'he did, but I don't want any more martyrs. I want people to live their lives. I want peace.'

  'That's what we're fighting for.'