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The Place of Pain and Healing – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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THE PLACE OF PAIN AND HEALING

Justin D Hill

I

A century before, these rough wool fibres had been shorn from giant yaks on the planet of Fenris. They had been rubbed, steam-pressed and boiled in successive rounds of rigorous processing till the individual fibres had matted into one impenetrable military-grade felt. The sections of felt served in a small but vital role, as dampers in the magazines of the Space Wolves Chapter’s void fleet. But now the strike cruiser’s magazines in which they reside are empty. The pallets of fyceline propellant are bare, the cartridges spent in massive broadsides, and the piles of disused felt are stacked in the corner of one magazine aboard Alpha IX, Fang of Fenris, where they act as crude bedding for the dirt-smeared form of Whiteshield Minka Lesk.

Minka lies pale and still and dirt-smeared. She might be a corpse, but for the occasional sign of life. A twitch, a flicker of eyelids, a half-formed word that could be alarm, or anger, or fear. Or all of those together, for during the battle there was no time to make sense of what she was going through. The Battle of Cadia is a tangle of nightmare moments, twisted and bound and tightened into an ugly, cancerous lump. But now her brain starts to tug at the loose ends, trying to unravel it, trying to process it all.

To sanitise the insane.

In one dream she is squatting in the sally port of the eastern gates of Kasr Myrak, hundreds of other Whiteshields around her – packed like sheep, clutching their lasrifles in trembling fingers. The skies of Cadia have always been a nightmare bruise of swirling purple – as the Eye of Terror stared down at them – and they have grown up thinking that there could be no worse a sight. But now they know that they were wrong.

Hell has vomited a host of spiked and barnacled and rusted hulks into orbit above them. The skies are thick with enmity, and searchlights illuminate faces, tentacles and screaming maws of fanged teeth howling despair down onto the planet.

This is something they will tell their grandchildren of, if they live… which looks doubtful at this particular moment in time, because the Black Fleet smothers Cadia like a swarm of cockroaches, blotting out the light and hope and any chance of reinforcement. The dark sky strobes with fire and lance-strikes as it hails its fury down at the planet.

Minka and the other Whiteshields have never experienced anything like this. The void shield bubble crackles and fizzes as energy trails ground themselves. But they know enough to know that this is just a prelude, a prologue, a preliminary, a preparation.

The enemy’s gunners are seeking a weak point, and the tension builds as the void generators whine with effort. Above the Western Bastion, the blue bubble fails with a pop of pressure. Klaxons wail. Flames leap up, and a sudden lightning storm hammers down. Eruptions rip through the whole massive edifice, and then the thin blue shell of the void shield returns. But even the commanders are rattled. Their vox-enhanced voices carry over the huddled heads of the Whiteshields. Medicae teams run past them, shouting instructions to one another.

The casualties are clearly severe. Units are already being redeployed. The shock trooper platoons next to them move off along the barricades.

‘Fill the gap!’ The order goes out and the Whiteshields shuffle sideways. Their lines stretch thinner. They’re on their own now.

The onslaught drags on. The stress becomes too much for some. They cry out in terror, weep silently or fire wild shots into the night sky.

‘Hold fire!’ Another order goes out, and grim discipline returns. But each time the void shields crackle, Minka is sure they will fail. She is beyond terrified. She presses her eyes closed, tries to recite her catechism, to recall things her mother told her, to run through the many codes of her Whiteshield training. But she is shaking so much her teeth rattle within her skull and she cannot get the words out. It is all she can do to hold onto her lasrifle.

In desperation she reaches inside her flak armour. Her fingers close over the items within, and she presses them into her palm. The hard metal shapes are deeply familiar. One is an autorifle hard round; the other is a cheap press-metal image of Saint Katherine picked up on a scholam field trip to the Adepta Sororitas abbey, perching on the crags above Kasr Batrok.

She prays to Saint Katherine of the Order of Our Martyred Lady and feels a moment’s calm spread through her body. She focuses on this moment of calm, and at last her teeth come to rest, and the words start to tumble out.

She prays with a fervency she has never known before. She doesn’t ask for much.

‘Just let it begin,’ she begs, and petitions for courage and strength and a clean end, when it should come. ‘And let me take a heretic with me,’ she asks. It is a little thing to trouble a saint with. It is all she dares to hope for. ‘Saint Katherine, please do not let me die a Whiteshield.’

There is another devastating lance-strike hitting the outer defences, and suddenly a whole section of wall lifts up into the air as tunnel mines erupt along its length. The blast throws her down onto her face. They’re all struggling to get up as a whistle blows and the call goes out: ‘Breach! Breach!’

And then that dream ends as suddenly as a human life. And another begins.

Minka is weeks into the battle. She is lying on a pile of rubble with the crumbled edifices of habs rising up on either side. She is in the ruins of her city, Kasr Myrak.

‘Shock troops’, they are called, but it seems that all they are doing is falling back from one brief defensive point to another.

Las-bolts stitch the air above her head. She hunkers face down in the rubble. They have dubbed the army of heretics and penal convicts ‘the Unnamed’. It’s better to put a moniker to them. To separate yourself from them. To draw clear lines of distinction. But there are hundreds of thousands of them, and a few hundred are clambering over the barricade Minka abandoned twenty seconds ago, just fifty yards up the remains of Brewhouse Straat.

And she has to kill as many of them as she can, before they kill her.

Above her, to the left, comes the resonant thud-thud of a heavy bolter team, firing through the remains of the eponymous brewhouse. The bass-note rattle dislodges a stream of dust from the loose debris. Brass shells clatter down through the ruins. The stink of alcohol mixes with fyceline and ozone. The rockcrete dust catches in her throat.

Through the smoke and flames, she searches for a target.

She picks a man crossing the intersection. His head is hunched as if he’s running into a storm. So much about him is familiar – scuffed and torn fabric boots, scavenged flak armour, Munitorum-issue overalls. He looks like he spent a past life as factorum labourer. She lines him up in her scope, and he looks up, as if he senses her staring at him. For a moment she looks him in the face and recoils. His face is a mask of horror. She takes it all in – the tattoos, the piercings, his lipless mouth, the scream of hatred.

The salvo strikes true, but the cultist does not falter. He leaps over dead and burning bodies, a bloodstained knife in his fist, powering towards her, spittle flying from the corners of his mouth.

Minka keeps her finger on the trigger till the stream of las-bolts blinds her.

Ten feet from her, he falls. She can hear him cursing and snarling. She wants to finish him off, but there’s no time because another face leers up where he has been. This time the face is of a girl her own age, her scalp crudely shaved, her humanity defaced with heretical symbols carved into her bleeding cheeks.

Wake!

A boot roughly nudges Minka. The voice is muffled and distant, the accent almost unintelligible. Girl, wake! Wake!

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1,D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Darren Tan.

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-718-3

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