Sabbat Crusade

by Dan Abnett

  ‘Why?’ he asked, and looked up at her.

  ‘Haven’t you heard, soldier? The Emperor’s magnificent Guard runs on bullets, blood, and heroes. Finding the first two can be tricky, the third, Throne near impossible. Live ones at least.’ She smiled, grey eyes sparkling like polished gunmetal. ‘Plenty of the other kind.’

  He looked down at the dockets in his hands. No choice… There never was a choice, ever.

  She straightened, nodded to the papers in his hand.

  ‘It’s all in there, timings, posting details, all the stuff that the ink drinkers want.’ She gave another nod, which said not to bother saluting – in case he was thinking of it – turned and began to walk away, boots clicking on the plastek coated floor.

  ‘I can’t read,’ he said, throwing the only thing he could think of at her.

  ‘Learn,’ she said, without looking back.

  V

  There is a majesty in desecration, a truth in horror. As I kneel here, I am clad in the stuff of nightmares. My head is bare, the skin the gloss pink of scar tissue. My mouth is masked, and the hand that covers it came from an unwilling sacrifice. The skin of the hand has withered, but the nails still grow; their hooked tips claw at the skin of my cheeks. I cut my own ears from my head. They hang around my neck, knocking softly on my breastplate. My armour is plasteel, bronzed, and the dried crust of blood blessings cling to its carving. Ink, scars and brands mark my arms, and tell the gods that I am theirs, and that my master raised me to them. Bones gather at my waist. Fingers, fragments of skull, and teeth, looped on wire or held on chains beside the knives of sacrifice, flaying and mortification. I know each bone, and made the sharpness of each blade edge. They are bound to me, though I do not own them. They have their own souls, their own silence.

  I can see the terror in the eyes of those who look on me. That is as it should be. They are weak, and lost in the din of their delusion. They look on the marks of the Dark Beyond, hear the clatter of bones on sharp iron, and they think these devotions are for them. They think that their fear is why I took the finger bones of the priest who ended in a pyre on Noor, why I burnt the eightfold star on my hands, and why the first blood of battle wets my eyelids. I do not do these things to be feared, and the unshriven do not fear me because of them.

  They fear me because I am everything that they fail to be.

  I wear the truth of the universe as my skin.

  VI

  Sartusa’s rain drummed on the visor of his helmet. He had pushed it up so that it could shield his eyes, and his breath would not fog his vision.

  ‘Any word from command?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing, sir. Just the same as before.’

  ‘Try again, keep trying,’ he said. He did not look at the sergeant standing at attention, water pouring from the gilt and green of his chest-plate. The golden lions were wet and bright in the flash of lightning. ‘Get the rest of the irregulars down to the southern edge. Sandwich them between whatever is down there from the Circanian and Kenrenith.’

  ‘Sir,’ said the sergeant. In less than three hours he would be dead, the left half of his head sheared away by a flake of shrapnel the size of a food plate. Blood would replace the water running over the gold of the lions on his chest.

  ‘Tell the provender-at-arms to get every cell we have next to a soldier with a gun.’

  ‘Sir…’ began the sergeant. He is an older man, seasoned, experienced, he knows when it is best to question an officer, and how to do it when he feels he must. ‘Sir, what was the last order we had from command?’

  ‘Last thing they said was that we were to sit tight, and wait.’ He met the sergeant’s eye, and gave his best version of a grin. It looked real. He had had long years to practise. For him, and for the sergeant, it was part of the expected form in the situation, part of the drill among soldiers who know that they might have reached the end of the odds. ‘That was before command went silent, and every other unit outside the city limits became unreachable. But they said sit tight, and we are following that order.’

  He left the fact that command said nothing about going to full battle readiness unsaid.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the sergeant, and saluted.

  ‘Get moving,’ he said with a nod. The sergeant went, and the rain and gloom filled the space where he had been.

  The rain kept falling, thick and unrelenting. Sartusa lay before him, its low sprawl of plastered walls and tangled streets swallowing the wet curtains from the sky above. The spires of temples rose here and there, sharp fingers pointed at the storm-shrouded heavens. The city should have been called a town, but a disciple of Saint Sabbat had drunk from a spring here, or some such, and so it clung to the ancient title, even while it refused to grow to fit it. It was a long way from Khulan, or Urdesh, let alone Balhaut. Too many people lived here, though, too many for a world which was now on the front lines, too many to keep safe, and far too many to just leave here in the hope that the Archenemy would not come.

  And they were coming. That is what the silence meant.

  He looked around. There were eyes watching him. He could feel them, and knew that what he needed to do was not look for them. People want their leaders to look to destiny, to hope, to the future which they pray will still come. Look into their eyes and they see that those they follow feel the same fear. Dreams of salvation die in that look. He knew this; he had followed its wisdom many times. It was part of what he had become, a lodestone for the weight of others.

  He unsheathed his sword. He did it casually, turning it over so that the rain ran down its fuller. He could read the words etched in the blade, but did not; they were not intended to comfort. He gave the blade a lazy swipe, like a child hitting grass, and allowed a tune to whistle from his lips. He made a smile with his mouth as he sheathed the blade. The eyes watching beneath helmets and above sandbag walls saw the smile, and for some it was enough to stop their fingers rattling against their guns. It was what was needed of him, one more act of futility in a lifetime without meaning. Above him the statue of the Emperor looked down with empty eyes from a cast bronze face.

  The sergeant ran to his side.

  ‘Everyone’s in place, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, sergeant,’ he said, but kept his eyes on the darkening boundary between storm sky and shadowed ground.

  They will come. They always come, in the end.

  He wondered why he was there. He knew every step of his life, but they did not feel like his. He had seen the stars he craved to see as a child, he had been called a hero, and been given rank. He had learnt to read, so that now the words on his sword and the marks on prayer books could mean something to him. They don’t, though, and they never have. He stood there not because of the will of a distant god, or because he had risen to greatness. He stood there because he had never seen a choice, other than the quick oblivion of a gun barrel in the mouth.

  So he waited, and the rain fell, and high above the clouds the approaching bombers roared with the thunder’s growl.

  He will meet the end that he craves, but does not have the courage to embrace.

  He and I will meet when the men and women who looked to him for courage are corpses. The sword in his hand will be shaking with the fatigue he is fighting to control. We will meet then, the Son of Sek and the hollow son of the Imperium. The chemical fires will billow in the rain, and we will save him for last, so that he can hear the sweet cries from those he tried to save and failed. We will let him watch as we take offerings from them. He will think then that he never wanted any scrap of his life, that he has done nothing that has been his own choice since he first breathed. He will see us, our knives, and the tatters of skin hanging in our fingers. We will let him see all this, and then, at last, slowly – because it is important how such things are done – we will come for him. I will come for him.

  All this will happen. I know because I was there, under th
e rain, with the smell of burning flesh and dead civilisation in my mouth and on my tongue.

  But those moments were still to come to this man, this hero. The rain rolled down, and the eyes of those who would soon die watched him, and he waited, not knowing what he waited for.

  VII

  The door will open soon, and I will be called to rise and go to meet Him. He will ask me of the man that ended in Sartusa, of his last words, of the plea that the universe cannot grant.

  ‘No… no… no…’

  I will tell him of that long fall to the ground, of the thoughts which had turned in his skull since the stars took his parents, but which had never found a voice.

  Make it stop.

  Please make it stop.

  Please.

  ‘Please.’

  I will tell him all that I know, and all that can be known, of a life that is now not mine, of a life that was another man’s, a man who is no more. I will tell him what he already knows, for he is the mouth of the gods, and his voice is the voice that drowns out all others.

  He will speak then.

  And I will be his son.

  In the original Sabbat Worlds anthology, Nick Kyme took on the arrogant and aristocratic Bluebloods, an Imperial Guard regiment historically at odds with the ‘inferior’ Ghosts, and showed that they possessed a heroism all their own. He managed, with great skill, to deal with characters who had essentially always been villains and make convincingly honourable men out of them.

  Here, he returns to those characters for a powerful sequel, in which the vaunted Volpone Bluebloods find out what it’s like to be the underdogs for a change, cowed by a vastly more brutal force… and, at the same time, get caught up in a thoughtless, thankless, merciless storm of battle.

  In all his Warhammer 40,000 writing, Nick has managed to conjure up the bleak and nigh-on overwhelming atmosphere of the battlefield to great effect. I think he’s outdone himself here.

  Get ready for some serious warfare…

  Dan Abnett

  Tempest

  Nick Kyme

  Titus City, Lotun, 775.M41

  (the 20th year of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade)

  In the year 774.M41 Slaydo’s crusade to reclaim the Sabbat Worlds from the grip of the Archenemy had reached as far as Lotun.

  Little more than a dirt world, Lotun possessed sparse natural resources, provided little in the way of industrial hive production, and its tithes to the sprawling military of the Imperium were meagre.

  Wracked by storms, monsoons resulting from its aberrant atmospherics, Lotun was a poor world for a war, and would probably have been overlooked but for the fact of its clandestine importance to the Archenemy.

  But despite our gathered intelligence, none of us, not even great Slaydo himself, could have predicted what we would find there.

  – Personal journal,

  Major Vasquez Regara, ‘Royal’ Volpone 50th

  There are many traits that distinguish the Volpone from the regular rank and file of the Imperial Guard. Even Scions enviously regard our proud history, our discipline and lengthy honour roll.

  One trait stands out above all others: breeding. Our bloodlines are pure and undiluted. Lineage and heritage are everything. Legacy endures. Are there those who come from Volpone unions who could be deemed ‘imbalanced’ as a result of their shared, pure blood? Don’t be utterly ridiculous.

  – General Noches Sturm

  I

  Corporal Stuber struggled for his life. The strong hands clenching around his neck were trying to crush his larynx. Slowly, incrementally, the grip of those thick fingers intensified like an iron trap overcoming the inertia of a rusted spring. One snap and it would be over.

  He turned his head, and came face to face with the scarred visage of his enemy. Dead eyes rimed in deep arterial red glared back. Stuber had been watching for the wrong kind of threat. Too late, he had realised the Blood Pact were not the only foes to fear in the ruins of Titus.

  A gasp, little more than a whisper of breath, escaped the flailing corporal’s lips, but drew nothing back. Stuber was no medic. Had he been, he would have known his larynx and trachea were being crushed. It took strength to do that to a man, strength and the sort of determination and stamina born from the desperation of survival or some deeper mania. Stuber’s face was ice-blue from the bitter cold, but began to purple under slow and painful asphyxiation. Hypoxic blemishes had already formed around his mouth and nasal cavities. They ringed his eyes like violet-coloured kohl, intensifying his dying stare.

  He kicked, and in the deluge raining down upon the two men wrestling in the mud trench, the strangler lost his grip. Fenk snarled, trying to regain his dominance as Stuber flailed, but a savage punch glanced the side of his head, dislodging his officer’s cap and cutting a shallow gash that immediately started bleeding into his right eye. Stuber was a fighter, but he was starved of oxygen and therefore weak. It only took a few seconds for Fenk to reassert his iron grip around the other man’s throat.

  Stuber thrashed one more time before he grew still, and Fenk could feel the man’s lungs spasm in instinctive panic. Stuber’s eyes bulged, trying in futile impotence to convey his shock, betrayal, anger and… ultimately, fear. Then they shrank, the pupils narrowing to pinpricks and the lids drooping as if to presage some hypnagogic state.

  All life left Corporal Julius Stuber, and as Fenk sank back onto his haunches, exhausted and utterly spent, he shuddered, savouring the deed, fulfilling the deep, abiding need within and staving off the monster cleaved to his psyche.

  A monster, but not a daemon, though such things had possessed men of this dark millennial age. Nor was it a foul xenos parasite Fenk harboured. It was much simpler than that, much more pervasive and inescapable. It was his bloodline, his own abnormal mind. No rites of excoriation, no invasive surgeries would excise it, for how could a man cut away something that was an integral part of himself?

  With the retreat, the sounds of war receded on the monsoon wind: the diminishing cracks of lascarbines, the lower, more distant and plosive sounds of mortar and heavy cannon. Defeat would have stung Second Lieutenant Fenk’s Volpone pride were it not for the exhilaration of the kill to take the edge off.

  He sagged, and allowed gravity to carry him off Stuber’s body and dump him in the mire of the trench, among the dead and the damned. A vox-unit crackled, spitting out dead air and silent curses. The 66th platoon was gone. Fenk was it.

  Sole survivor.

  Stab-lamps intruded on the monsoonal gloom, limning the trench spikes, the bayonets and the wire in magnesium white. Bodies were rendered into frosty monochrome, bleached of what little colour remained in them.

  Fenk gazed up into the light as it strafed and searched the long trench ditch. He hid his eyes behind his hand, struggling to see against the bright glare of the lamps.

  Voices resolved; voices that became silhouettes; silhouettes that became uniformed men.

  Royal Volpone 50th. My regiment.

  Their urgency cut through Fenk’s pathological torpor.

  ‘This one’s alive!’

  The speaker was dressed in mud-splattered Volpone grey and heavily dented gold carapace with an indigo aquila clasp to seal the armoured gorget. It was ornate, better suited to the parade ground than the battlefield, but the Volpone took great personal pride in their attire. With his high crimson collar and gilded brocade, this one was most certainly attached to the officer cadre. His eyes were hidden in the shadows of his regal helmet. Fenk barely noticed the face, fixating on the scratched paint instead. A lascarbine hung on a strap over his shoulder. Other men, above and outside the trench, were firing their weapons. Flashes lit the darkness.

  ‘Throne… It’s Bertram Fenk.’

  A hand was thrust towards him.

  ‘On your feet, second lieutenant!’

  Fenk took the proffered hand an
d felt the strong, certain grip of a career soldier. Then he was hoisted out of the ditch. Twenty-something men were strung across the high side of the trench. Two crouched by the vox; one the operator, the other an officer with the receiver cup pressed to his ear taking fresh orders.

  The rest lined up with their carbines, some standing, some on one knee. A pair of troopers frantically set up a heavy cannon on a tripod. The thrum of its energy coils powering up was deeper than the carbines. Fenk flinched as a las-bolt shrieked from its barrel, tearing open a distant enemy transport.

  ‘Must be in shock,’ said another, stepping into Fenk’s sight line to shine a light in his eye.

  The medic saw fading rapture, not shock. The second lieutenant let him draw his own conclusions. He followed the index finger as requested. He nodded when prompted with his fallen company’s name. He clasped his hands behind his back and raised his chin, just as the Volpone drill-sergeants had taught him. Stuber’s ident-tag fell into Fenk’s back pocket. He had snapped the chain when he wrenched it from the dead man’s throat.

  The officer returned just as the cursory examination concluded.

  ‘Full retreat,’ he told what Fenk first assumed was his aide. ‘Regara’s pulling us back to the Iron Line.’

  ‘He’s doing what? We’re almost in.’

  No, not an aide. A fellow officer.

  ‘I think these poor swines would beg to differ.’ The first officer gestured to the dead piled inside the trench line. ‘Conditions have changed. We’re being reinforced.’

  Overhead, the muffled explosions of landed mortar shells thundered. The fire exchange that had begun sporadically grew in intensity and purpose.

  The second officer ducked reflexively as a fiery bloom lit the horizon into no-man’s-land. Jagged silhouettes appeared in the flare of bright, violent light. Several brigades. Hundreds of men, and that was just on this side of the wall.

  ‘Reinforced?’ he asked. ‘By whom?’

  The first officer licked his lips.