Chapter 7: The Root of Corruption
The cellar entrance was hidden under a false panel in the granary floor. Duvette lifted it. A smell came up from below: old grain and wet earth, the particular cold damp of a space that had been sealed for a long time.
He cracked a glow-rod and dropped it through. The pale light settled on stone steps leading downward.
"Stroud." He turned. "Take five. Go ahead and scout. Keep the vox open. Any contact, pull back immediately."
The bald lieutenant nodded, selected five veterans from the group, and they checked their weapons, dialed their lasguns down to minimum power to reduce both sound and light signature, and slipped down the steps into the dark without a sound.
Duvette waited roughly three minutes, then led the rest of the company down. Anderson came last, the heavy stubber across his shoulders with two soldiers walking beside him managing the ammunition feed. The three seriously wounded were lashed to field stretchers and carried by relays. Evan stayed close to Duvette's side. The young girl was on a veteran's back, arms around his neck.
The steps went down for about twenty meters before the floor leveled out. Compacted earth underfoot, rough brick walls on both sides, every surface heavy with dust. The air was cold enough that breath came out white.
Stroud had left markers on the way: small arrows scratched into the wall at each junction with his knife.
Duvette followed the arrows and watched the floor. The dust was thick, and through it he could make out several sets of footprints moving in different directions, clearly not all left at the same time.
The passage branched repeatedly as they went deeper. Some side-tunnels ended in cave-ins, a wall of collapsed stone blocking the way. Others ran off into darkness with no visible end. Their progress slowed until sometimes they were halted for several minutes waiting for Stroud's short-range vox reports to come back and guide the next decision. The signal was weak and full of static, but audible.
"Sir." Stroud's voice broke up slightly. "Wide passage ahead. Rail tracks. Someone tore them up."
Duvette frowned. They moved up to meet him.
The passage at this point had clearly been expanded by deliberate construction. Two carts could have passed each other side by side. The floor was laid with crushed stone, and down the center of it ran two iron rails, now rusted and wrenched violently from their mounts. The sleepers were scattered across the floor, bolts and spikes lying in the dust where they had been knocked free.
"Civilians did not do this." Duvette crouched and picked up a spike. The break at the end looked like something had hit it with a heavy tool. "They were trying to stop something from using this passage."
Footsteps came from ahead. Stroud's team materialized out of the dark. Their expressions were not good.
"There is a chamber ahead." Stroud's voice was quieter than usual, the casual edge gone out of it. "Blood everywhere. The walls are covered in those sigils."
Duvette felt the decision settle in his chest before he consciously made it. He looked back at the company. Thirty-seven soldiers. Supply at a quarter. Three men on stretchers. Every rational calculation said find the other route.
A new prompt appeared in his vision.
[Quest: Uncover the Truth]
[Reward: ???]
The Emperor's timing, Duvette thought, had an absolute gift for moments like this. He kept the thought brief.
"Stroud. Check the other fork. If it goes through, we take that way and leave this alone."
Stroud went. The wait was long. Underground silence amplified every small sound into something larger than it was: suppressed breathing, the occasional drip of water somewhere deep in the stone.
Stroud came back and shook his head. "Blocked. Cave-in, three or four meters of packed stone. Not moving without equipment we do not have."
Of course.
Duvette exhaled through his nose and checked the company status. Morale had slid to 60% from the continuous march and the weight of the wounded. Loyalty was still holding at 90%. They still trusted him. He needed to keep that.
"Everyone listen." He kept his voice down. "Stay close to me. Stay quiet. If anything goes wrong, pull back immediately." He looked at Stroud. "Take point, but stay within range."
"Understood."
Duvette activated Emperor's Gaze.
The darkness in the passage changed.
A viscous crimson luminescence bled into the walls and floor and air around them, pulsing faintly, as if something were breathing. The glow was everywhere, and it was intensifying as they moved forward.
"Sir." A soldier's voice, tight. "Something happened to my vision. There is a... red light?"
"Long-legs, mine too, it just appeared..."
Duvette could hear the suppressed unease moving through the squad. He spoke before it could take hold.
"There is nothing wrong with you. I did this. It is a power granted by the Emperor."
Silence fell through the company. Everyone was looking at him. Then the vox crackled and Stroud's voice came through with a very different quality than usual.
"Sir. Are you... are you actually one of those living saints the stories talk about?"
"Close your mouth and keep moving."
Duvette did not deny it. They kept moving.
The further they went, the stronger the red light became. A smell entered the air alongside the cold and the damp: blood, old blood, layered thick over years. The walls increasingly showed the carved and painted sigils of Chaos, and looking at them for more than a moment produced a headache that settled in behind the temples and throbbed steadily.
This place had been wrong for a long time.
The passage ended.
The space that opened before them was enormous. Duvette had been expecting a large cellar. This was a grain distribution hub, a subterranean logistics center serving the entire outer district of Heras. Metal support columns rose from the floor like the trunks of massive trees, disappearing into a ceiling that the glow-rods could not reach. Rows of great metal storage containers lined the walls, each one built to hold thousands of tonnes of grain.
None of them held grain now.
The glow-rod light reached the center of the space.
Every soldier stopped.
Skulls. Thousands of them, stacked into neat conical cairns and arranged in rows across the floor. Some had long since dried to clean bone. Others were recent. Their faces still held expressions: fear, confusion, the absolute blankness that comes when death arrives without warning. The blood had long since dried to black crusts on the concrete.
Duvette looked at the nearest cairn. Then he recognized some of the faces.
At the very top, positioned deliberately to face the entrance, was a man of middle age. Hair carefully combed even in death. A face that had carried authority for a long time.
He found the memory in the original body's recollections.
The Planetary Governor of Farrak IV. Around him and throughout the cairns were the faces of almost every noble and senior administrator the planet had possessed. They had all lost contact at the start of the uprising, before the relief regiments arrived.
This was where they had gone.
Stroud stepped out of the shadows holding a thick notebook with a black cover. The cover had dried blood on it, but the embossed insignia was still legible: the seal of the Planetary Governor's office.
"Found it over there." He pointed toward a small table in the dark behind the cairns. "Just sitting on top, like it was waiting to be read."
Duvette took the notebook and opened the first page. The handwriting was precise and controlled, clearly the work of a practiced administrator.
Farrak Year 7974. Late autumn. The Administratum tithe fleet will arrive in thirty standard days. This collection will cover all outstanding arrears. Total levy...
He skimmed forward. Supply ledgers. Crop yield estimates. Weather reports. Then, in the second half of the book, the handwriting began to change.
The cold season prophecy... Emperor's blood, I truly did not want to believe those raving madmen, but every indicator confirms they are correct.
A cold snap of once-in-a-century severity will sweep the full continent. Duration: four months. After taxation, current stored grain will sustain the planetary population for half a month. Less. Civilian rations and garrison rations must both be cut.
A delegation of young officers from the 3rd Regiment petitioned today. They are demanding access to the strategic reserve granaries and a suspension of the tithe. I refused. The Administratum's orders supersede everything. Any delay will be construed as insurrection.
The way they looked at me. I know what it means. The seed has been planted. But they do not understand the severity of Imperial punishment. They cannot comprehend it.
Several pages had been torn out. When the text resumed, the handwriting was completely different. Frantic strokes, pressing hard through the paper.
Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!
Those parasites who sat above everyone else! They drained us dry and now they want to take the last of our food! My parents were beaten to death by the tax collectors for being short one sack of grain!
We prayed to the Blood God. We offered up the skulls of those corrupt officials. The god answered. Power. Power enough to tear apart every injustice that was ever done to us!
More torn pages.
There is no going back for any of us.
Why (bloodstain) can we not stop!! (deep score marks tearing through the paper) Kill!!! Kill!!!
The notebook ended there. The last page had only one thing on it: a large eight-pointed star, and in the center of it, written in blood, a single line.
The freeze is coming and everything will die. Better to burn as brightly as possible before destruction finds us.
Duvette closed the notebook.
He stood for a moment with the dead silent around him and breathed.
He understood now. This had not been an invasion. This world had grown its own rebellion from the inside. Poverty, oppression, despair, the Administratum's merciless tithe collection, and a natural disaster of exceptional severity all combined into something that had nowhere else to go.
And Khorne, the god that thirsts for blood and skulls, had simply put a flame to kindling that had been piling up for years.
Perhaps, in the beginning, they had only been trying to save themselves.
In the end, that had not mattered. The Chaos Gods had never been known for their mercy toward the people who called on them.