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Within These Walls - Extract

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Within these Walls

C Z Dunn

I

Though he knew the explosion was coming, having planted the device that caused it himself, it still took Gathrite Pound by surprise.

One moment he was talking to one of the contractors supplied to him by the governor – a pleasant enough man but not as skilled as Pound would have liked and no doubt the lowest bidder – then the next he was rocked backwards, grasping hold of the doorway he sheltered within in an attempt to retain his footing. The full fury of the blast ripped up into the bright midday sky of Niebuhr, smoke and dust rising high above the desert floor and into the cloudless blue vista. The noise of the blast assailed them an instant later, the sound delayed on its near eight mile journey to reach their ears.

Sister Agentha, some two hundred miles further away in the capital, also heard the sound and felt the shockwave, briefly looking up from her work to acknowledge it, but it was only later that she realised what the cause of it had been and what the precise implications were for her.

His composure and balance regained, Pound stared out from the ancient ruins he and his demolition team had hunkered down in over to the ancient ruins he had been paid to destroy. He scowled in puzzlement.

‘Is something wrong, Meister Pound?’ the cheap, under-trained workman said from beside him. The unfortunate fellow had not been as quick to react to the explosion and was dusting himself down, having landed roughly on the debris strewn floor of what thousands of years ago would have been the foyer of an opulent hab building.

Pound ignored him and reached for the magnoculars stashed at his waist, a memento from his service days that, like the snub-nosed laspistol secreted in the waistband of his trousers, never left his side. As the smoke dissipated and the dust and fine particles of brick and stone fell like rain over the desert and ruins, he placed them to his eyes and manipulated them into focus. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong, but he wasn’t about to share that with a lowly contractor who barely knew one end of a fuse wire from another.

Gathrite Pound had been the instigator of so many explosions during his lifetime that he had long ago lost count. As a younger man he had blown things up to hinder and destroy the foes of the Imperium, risking his life and his luck behind enemy lines in the name of the Mydraskian 17th and the God-Emperor of Mankind. In his later years, after his luck had finally run out and his usefulness to the regiment was negated, he put his aptitude with explosives to a different use, aiding the Imperium’s expansion by clearing the way for human settlement and habitation. In all that time, in both phases of his life, he had never witnessed an explosion like the one he had just set off on Niebuhr.

The charges had been planted low in the structure and shaped in such a manner that the ruins should have collapsed in on themselves. Instead, all of the energy of the blast had been projected skywards, the debris lying on the surface instead of in a pit of hardcore that could be built upon with minimal clearance and preparation. The noise of the explosion was just as unnatural, as if the sound had been sucked in before being spat out, the delay in it reaching the ears of Pound and his workers being closer to what the Demolition Meister would have expected if they were fifty miles away from the blast site rather than half a dozen. He placed the magnoculars back at his hip and turned to the contractor.

‘Get me over there,’ he said, retrieving his crutches. ‘Now.’

Pound’s progress through the debris field was painfully slow, his crutches sinking deep into the fine sand of the desert as he picked his way through the scattered and charred remnants of what had once been home to Niebuhr’s original settlers. Not for the first time since he had left the Mydraskian 17th, he cursed that his body had rejected the crude augmetic leg that had been grafted to him following his final mission, that the metal sticks jammed uncomfortably under his armpits were now his only means of getting around. Twice the contractor attempted to aid the older man in traversing the silt and detritus and twice he was rudely rebuked. On his third attempt, Pound grudgingly accepted his aid.

‘What’s your name, son?’ Pound asked, letting the contractor slip a burly arm around his torso. He shifted both crutch poles into one hand, allowing himself to be supported and guided through the jagged remains of what was once a city.

‘It’s Fenacy, meister,’ the man said with a wide grin. ‘Jerro Fenacy. And let me say it’s a pleasure to work with an artist such as yourself. The things you can do with a shaped charge make me and my boys look like rank amateurs.’

Pound snorted. He should have realised that Jerro was related to the governor. Those same tiny eyes spaced just too far apart. The same greasy shock of jet black hair. The same weasely tone that would no doubt turn nasty should Jerro not feel like he was getting his own way or gaining some form of advantage in any given situation. Pound was just about to ask how low a branch on the Fenacy family tree Jerro sprouted from when something grabbed his attention in the middle distance. Something that most definitely should not have been there.

‘Over there, Jerro,’ Pound said, raising his crutches to point at a dark structure, stark against the greys and reds of shattered masonry. ‘Quickly. Help me.’

The two men stumbled and tripped over the broken landscape, Pound’s haste at times almost dragging them both to the ground. The closer they got, the less densely packed the rubble became until, eventually, there was no debris at all carpeting the desert floor, just a moat of sand encircling a black structure sunk into Niebuhr’s surface. Both men stopped dead in their tracks, incredulity getting the better of them.

‘I don’t... How...?’ Jerro stammered, his tiny eyes widening.

‘Under the surface,’ Pound whispered, his voice as dry as the sand he stood upon. ‘They must have built the city right on top of it.’

‘Is that...’ Jerro began before swallowing hard to get some moisture in his throat. ‘Is that an entrance over there?’

Pound followed the younger man’s gaze to where the perimeter of sand broke from its smooth, regular pattern, instead giving way to what looked from where he was standing to be a pit.

Jerro made to put his arm around the Demolition Meister once more but Pound had both sticks under his arms and was dragging himself towards the anomaly before the contractor had chance. As Pound reached the edge of the pit he realised that Jerro had been right. Instead of it being a mere hole in the ground, the sand gave way to a set of steps that led down to a door made of the same black stone as the rest of the sunken building.

‘That’s not possible,’ Pound said hoarsely. ‘The blast should have destroyed everything. This should not be.’ As if in a trance, he descended the steps, barely noticing that they were crafted from the desert sand. He stood in front of the door, transfixed. Pound considered it for a moment before reaching out a hand to touch it.

‘Stop. Don’t,’ Jerro tried to call out, but his tiny voice caught in his throat, failing to carry over the sound of the desert breeze and the half-track idling in the distance.

Pound’s fingers brushed against the onyx stone, shocking him out of his reverie. Where he had expected the structure to be cold after being buried underground for what he could only assume was millennia, perhaps even longer, it was instead hot. Red hot. He jerked his fingers away, instantly placing them on the cold metal of one of his crutches in an attempt to soothe them. Biting his lip to stifle the pain, he closed his eyes.

When he opened them, there was something on the door that hadn’t been there before. Writing. The door was covered in it, pearlescent white script covering every inch of its surface.

Pound could read Low Gothic. He had taught himself after leaving the Imperial Guard, in part to aid him in attaining contracts in his new line of work, in part to ensure that he could read instructions and warnings on explosives and detonators in an attempt to avoid accidents like the one that had left him bereft of a leg. Unfortunately, the words on the door were not written in Low Gothic, or High Gothic, or any other language that Pound could recognise, let alone read.

‘Jerro!’ Pound called. Seconds later, the contractor appeared at the top of the sand steps. ‘Take the half-track back to the capital. Bring me the scribe.’

Agentha had been on Niebuhr for almost a year but she was still not used to it.

The heat she could cope with, despite growing up on an ice world and her order’s convent world only being blessed by the Emperor’s light for scant weeks in each of its rotations. Even the dryness of the air did not bother her, having spent most of her formative years in buildings with artificial heating and, more lately, in the processed, moisture-free atmospheres of spacecraft.

What was really getting Agentha down was the gravity. Just as she had been so used to the heating and ship-board atmosphere prior to finding herself on Niebuhr, Agentha had grown accustomed to living under gravitic conditions similar to those on humanity’s cradleworld.

To the natives of Niebuhr the higher gravity wasn’t an issue; they had adapted over generations to it. The only adverse effect was that the indigenous peoples were markedly shorter than humanity’s average, to the point where the crews of the off-world ships that periodically dropped into orbit to fill their holds with semi-precious stones cruelly referred to Niebuhrians as ‘ratlings’.

To Agentha, with her six-foot frame, it felt like the world itself was constantly bearing down upon her, though hopefully not for much longer.

She pulled herself out of her chair and stretched, locking her fingers together and throwing her arms out in front of her, the low ceiling of her spartan quarters preventing her from extending them upwards. She unclasped her hands, pushed her eyeglasses back up the bridge of her nose and stepped over to a shelf unit groaning under the weight of myriad leather-bound tomes, hand-printed chapbooks and loose-leaf folios. Instantly locating the volume she was looking for, she slid it from between a book pertaining to the history of the Draconian Sub-sector she had acquired on Stern’s Remembrance, and one of the several books she had liberated from the Herald of Piety before it stopped off at Niebuhr and she took her leave of the pilgrim craft.

Agentha’s long fingers flicked through the yellowed pages with practised ease and she soon found what she was looking for. Carefully replacing the book on the shelf, she returned to her chair at the small candlelit desk in the corner of her chamber, picked up her stylus and began writing again.

Though still thousands of light years from her order, Agentha was determined to make it back to the convent world and retake her place among her sisters. From the moment she had set foot on Niebuhr she had put her linguistic skills to good use, starting out as a translator for the gem merchants in the trade quarter before plying her trade as a scribe once she had amassed enough coin to secure lodgings and workspace of her own.

Though unswervingly loyal to the Imperium, Niebuhr was of little importance in the grand scheme of humanity’s empire – the gems mined from under its surface had no military application beyond providing epaulet decoration for a handful of un-notable regiments – and as such none of the august bodies in service to the Emperor maintained a presence on the world. Its population was too small in size and stature to provide a worthwhile tithe to the Astra Militarum, and the comparatively few souls who called it home required no Ecclesiarchy presence. The sole figure of Imperial authority – aside from the governor – was an Administratum clerk who oversaw the payments of the not inconsiderable taxes that flowed from Niebuhr into Imperial coffers, but the previous holder of that office had died three years before Agentha had arrived on-world and his replacement had yet to arrive. It was Agentha’s hope that when the new clerk finally made it here she would be able to leave on the ship that brought them and continue on her journey back to her order.

Ever the pragmatist, Agentha was not placing all of her hopes on the idea that someday an Adminstratum ship would whisk her away, which is why she took whatever scribe work she could get. In the main, this involved drafting contracts for use between the various trade guilds that represented the miners, gem cutters, merchants, shippers and other factions with interests in the planet’s stone trade. Occasionally the work would be a little more interesting: transcribing the memoir of a wealthy tradesman, rewriting historical documents for the governor’s office, or translating letters between lovers.

Agentha was just about to pick up the stylus when there was an urgent knock at the door of her single-room quarters.

It was after dark and her hours of business were long since over. Agentha did not socialise so she had no idea who could be on the other side of the thin wooden door.

Another knock, louder, more frantic.

‘Who is it?’ Agentha asked sternly, retrieving her laspistol from beneath the bare bed and pointing it at the door.

‘It is Jerro Fenacy, the governor’s second cousin,’ said a reedy voice, muffled by the wood. Agentha lowered her weapon. She had done business with Jerro before, some contract or other for a big demolition job.

‘What business do you have here at this Emperor-forsaken hour?’ Agentha said, her tone pitched to leave Jerro in no doubt regarding her level of annoyance.

‘Forgive me, my lady. The ruins in the desert. We tried to clear them to make way for new manufactories.’ Jerro was out of breath. ‘Underneath. We found something.’

‘You found something? What did you find?’

‘Structure. Black stone. And a doorway. Got writing on it. Strange writing. Don’t know what it is.’

Agentha tucked her laspistol into the belt of her orange robes and took down her hide jacket from the hook beside the door. Putting her hand inside her pocket, she checked that the metal orb was where it should be and, satisfied that it was, slid back the bolt of the door. Jerro Fenacy was hunched over before her, his hands on his thighs as he fought to draw air into his hungry lungs. The light from the candles in Agentha’s chamber lit her from behind, making her shadow flicker crazily over Jerro and the staircase behind him.

‘Take me there,’ Agentha said. ‘Now.’

The ride to the ruins was long, hot and, for Agentha, very cramped. The half-track had been designed and constructed with the native population of Niebuhr in mind, not to transport a sister of the Adepta Sororitas over long distances. Agentha spent the entire journey with her legs tucked up against her chest and her head crooked over to one side as Jerro gunned the transport over the dunes. Initially, she had wanted to travel in the rear compartment of the half-track but when Jerro had pointed out that it was full of demolition equipment she was left with no alternative other than to ride up front.

‘Nearly there,’ Jerro said with some sympathy, as the vehicle crested the top of a particularly steep dune and a clump of ruins hove into view. Beyond them, in the distance, something caught Agentha’s eye: the roof of a black structure, the heat haze emanating from it more intense than that of the surrounding desert. Unnaturally so.

‘Can this thing go any faster?’ she said, gritting her teeth and pulling her legs in ever tighter to her chest.

Minutes later, she emerged from the cab, her entire body a tapestry of bruises. Ignoring the aches, she paused only to slide her spectacles back into position and set off at a run towards the dark building that had recently been unearthed. A figure waved to her from her peripheral vision and she headed towards him. As she got closer to the stranger, she realised that he was an off-worlder, at least a head taller than the average Niebuhrian, although still much shorter than Agentha. He rested two metal crutches under one arm as he waved, swaying as he struggled to maintain his balance on his sole remaining leg.

‘You must be Pound,’ Agentha said, slowing as she approached him. ‘I am Sister Agentha Castarno of the Order of the Fractured–’

‘No time for all that,’ Pound snapped. ‘This way. Quickly, before the writing fades.’

Agentha had become accustomed to brusqueness and ill manners – the sister superiors of her order were no paragons of social comportment and she had spent many months in the company of Adeptus Astartes of the Black Templars Chapter– but to be spoken to like this by a common citizen of the Imperium took her aback. She was carefully considering her rebuke when Pound spun on his heel and scrambled across the sand at speed, his crutches sinking deep through the fine grains. Agentha soon drew level with him but before she could speak, Pound threw out an arm, gesturing.

‘There. The doorway,’ he blurted impatiently, before losing his footing and sprawling face-first into the desert floor.

Ignoring Pound, Agentha continued to where he had pointed, pausing briefly to regard the steps down to the obsidian construct, perfectly formed from dry sand that by rights should have been blowing in the not inconsiderable desert wind.

‘Did you make these?’ she called back to Jerro, who had caught up with Pound and was helping to lift him onto his crutches. Both men were pale, all colour drained from their cheeks.

‘No… No, my lady,’ Jerro said, his mouth suddenly becoming as dry as his surroundings. ‘They were like that after the explosion.’

Agentha turned her attention to the door, cautiously taking the unnaturally formed steps lest the laws of nature and physics reaffirm themselves and the desert consume her. Reaching the bottom, her eyes widened as they fell upon the shimmering, pearlescent script, perfectly formed and stark upon the black of the stone. Since Jerro had first stammered that a structure had been uncovered below the planet’s surface, Agentha’s only thought had been it was of Necrontyr origin. She had witnessed first hand what that ancient evil was capable of and if the xenos were here, lying in wait beneath Niebuhr, then the world was surely doomed. But the script she was looking at was not of alien origin, but Terran. Ancient Terran. She held out a hand to brush the lettering with her fingertip.

‘Don’t!’ yelled Pound from behind her. ‘It’s hot to the touch.’ Much to his irritation, Jerro was helping him to stand, his crutches devoured by the sands.

Instinctively, at the mention of ‘hot to the touch’, Agentha pulled her hand back and grasped the orb in the folds of her orange robes. Ice cold, its very presence brought her comfort.

Burrowing deep into her memory to recall the archaic Terran languages she had studied long ago, first at the Schola Progenium on Kholorn, then at her order’s convent, she began to translate.

The first three words were relatively simple, the context of their location aiding her understanding.

‘Within these walls…’ she whispered, leaning in, careful not to brush her flesh against the surface of the door. She stopped abruptly. The next three words were complex, difficult to translate, but she had already skipped ahead to the seventh word, a word she recognised instantly, a word that was common to many human dialects and tongues that had formed over the last ten millennia.

Daemon.

‘Fetch me a quill and parchment,’ Agentha said, turning to the two men waiting at the top of the steps. ‘But most importantly, fetch me the governor.’

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