Sabbat Crusade

by Dan Abnett

  They called it ‘the Fissure’. They tried to get close enough to fill it, plug it, cover it, stem the tide of blackness, force the darkness back to wherever it had come from. No one dared to speculate on what it was or where it had come from, nor dared voice their fears. No one truly knew. There were legends of the empyreum, but it was more myth than reality, and if it were real it was a distant, impossible thing.

  The Administratum sent for the hive militia. There was nothing else for it.

  The first penetration of the warp, the first slender beam of un-light, killed two hundred construction workers who were erecting the retaining walls that would form the dozen underground levels of the hive, and the deep foundation upon which the great skeleton of the above ground levels rested. More than half of that number died as the blackness cut a seam through the veil that separated one reality from the other, where the warp met real space. It tore a ragged slit in time and space, and conjoined the two.

  The other half died with promises of great financial rewards and of heroic tales told in their names, wearing little more than the standard construction hazard armour, intended to protect heads and limbs against machinery, falls and falling building materials. There was no protection against the warp or its denizens, but they did not know it was the warp, and were easily persuaded that it was some natural, if rare, geological phenomenon.

  When the hive militia arrived two days later the remaining workforce had fled, and no one remained except for the unit boss, holed up in one of the temporary habs. He had built a complex structure from dismantled sections of the cots, tables and chairs that provided the basic furnishings of the temporary workers’ accommodations, an elaborate nest that he had climbed into the centre of, and curled up inside it, foetus-like.

  ‘Get him out,’ said the sergeant in charge when he could not rouse the civilian by bellowing at him, but the task proved impossible. The structure was a magnificent feat of engineering, stronger than it appeared, and functionally impenetrable. It wouldn’t have mattered. The man was insane, his mind turned to insensible mush by the warp and by the miserable mortality he had witnessed. They had died. They had all died, his comrades, his brothers, his workforce, his friends: all dead.

  ‘There’s nothing to fight here,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Then what’s that?’ asked his corporal, raising his old, Guard-issue long-las to his shoulder as he spoke, and sighting it. Something loomed in the mouth of the Fissure: some creature.

  ‘What the Throne is that?’ His voice was distorted by the rush of black air that accompanied the creature, and, in a split second, half a dozen weapons were raised and firing at the beast.

  Some of the las-rounds hit solid black and popped like fireworks, spraying arcs of dense, grey impotent sparks. Some slowed until they stalled altogether, fading and dying in the heavy, cloying air. Only the hard rounds from two autopistols, one fired from the sergeant’s hip and the other carried by the oldest member of the unit, an ex-Imperial infantryman who couldn’t bear to retire, hit home, and only then because the beast was emerging from the warp ether, just a few metres from their feet.

  It was an unwholesome creature, about a metre and a half across, with five unequal, bony limbs and a gelatinous, drooping body like a half-filled bladder. It had several orifices, which might have been for breathing, eating, hearing, communicating or evacuating waste, for their purposes were not obvious, but it had nothing that resembled an eye.

  Two rounds hit its body mass, and a third and fourth took out its biggest limb, which caused it to list, and then flop in a mess of ichor and some green liquid that resembled bile, except that there was more of it than might be expected from a relatively small creature. There was no doubt that it was dead, but one of the hive militia nevertheless vomited copiously at the sight of it, and another fainted clean away.

  ‘We need serious firepower, and no mistake,’ said the infantryman.

  ‘If you’re addressing the sergeant–’ began the corporal.

  ‘Shut up,’ said the sergeant, and turned to the soldier. ‘We can call in further units, and–’

  ‘That thing came out of the empyrean. We need firepower of a different order. This is quite beyond our resources.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked the sergeant.

  The soldier raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Holy Emperor!’ murmured the sergeant.

  ‘You should return to the governor’s palace and persuade him to have the astropaths send out an urgent request for support,’ said the soldier. ‘We need the Adeptus Astartes, and until they get here, the best we can hope for is to build a damned great wall and pray to the God Emperor of Mankind.’

  ‘The Emperor protects!’ said the corporal.

  ‘You’d better bloody hope so,’ said the soldier, holstering his auto-gun and walking away.

  III

  Utropius, Apothecary to the Iron Snakes, broke the seal on Basilion’s left gauntlet. His right hand and arm were entirely missing. It didn’t matter. Basilion had always favoured his sinister side; it was better to honour him with his left gauntlet, which was virtually intact, despite his left shoulder joint having been torn out of his armour, dislocating his shoulder, rupturing the muscles in his neck, arm and back, and tearing the flesh, which hung in ragged, bloodless strips.

  The Apothecary removed the gauntlet. It was intact but for some superficial scratches and dinks in its surface, and passed it to Cleon, who held it up to his face in both of his hands, and then stowed it for the journey back to Ithaka once their duty here was done. Utropius was already pouring sacred water onto Basilion’s muscular, unmarked left hand, as perfect in death as it had been in life, only pale and inert. Utropius held the hand in his, poured the water, pushed his flask back into his belt, and then made the signs with the same hand, still holding his battle-brother’s hand.

  The words of ritual prayer rang clearly in the air as they had over every Iron Snake who had met his end in service, and as they would over every Iron Snake who would ever meet his end in duty to the Emperor of Mankind. Finally, Utropius bound the fingers of Basilion’s left hand together so that he might never wield a weapon again, that his soul might never strive nor do battle in death, that all might end in eternal peace.

  IV

  The foolish came first to the Fissure, the foolish, the curious and those drawn by the subliminal call of the empyrean. They came to gawp and to marvel, and they came to die. Some revelled in the un-light, drawn to it, sucked in by its murderous intensity. They walked into it. They could not help themselves, and they could not be helped.

  The hive militia set up a cordon that was breached, over and over again, and hundreds of construction workers were brought in to build defensive barriers and walls, metres high and thick.

  The faithful came to pray... The God Emperor’s faithful and the heathens alike.

  Months passed. The great, gleaming hive spread east, away from the Fissure, and around it. The huge project covering hundreds of square kilometres, reaching three kilometres below ground and fifteen above, was being constructed at the height of the planet’s growth and wealth, and reflected all that it had to offer. It was naive to think that the Fissure could end that. Nothing could stop the march of man.

  V

  Months passed. The Fissure was shut away behind a tonnage of rockcrete so massive as to be utterly impenetrable.

  Construction had moved on, the area cordoned off, hung with tarpaulins and semi-permanent hoardings to advertise the new habs and to steer people’s eyes away. There was nothing to see.

  There was, however, something for the believer to stay for, something for the cultist, something for the Chaos enthusiast, something for the follower of the Ruinous Powers. There was the promise.

  Word spread far and wide, and they came, mostly singly or in pairs, to this strange, forbidden place, hidden behind the promise of a bright, manmade future. They ca
me and they prayed, and they sacrificed and they flagellated, and they taught each other all they knew.

  They faced the Fissure, and they spoke their words at the tons of rockcrete that divided them from the warp, and for a long time, nothing happened.

  VI

  It took the three-man unit of Apothecary Utropius and Battle-brothers Basilion and Cleon twenty-two months to travel from Ithaka. The governor did not expect them, had almost forgotten he had sent out the call, and when he did remember, he felt foolish for believing the old Guardsman who had suggested the warp might have bled into his hive city. What did a Guardsman known of the warp?

  There had been some panic. There had been deaths, but it was a construction site; things happened during construction work on this scale. It was industrial damage, nothing more.

  When they came, the Space Marines terrified the governor, just as the threat of the warp had terrified him, and when they insisted on examining the site, he dared not resist their intentions, however foolish he felt. At least there were only three of them, as vast as they were, and as imposing, for the governor had never been in the company of such warriors before. At least he did not have to endure the embarrassment of being faced with an entire squad when there was no enemy for them to battle.

  VII

  Basilion had bled out through his back. His right arm and leg were almost entirely missing, and his left shoulder was wrenched and ragged. The air purifiers in his armour were mangled or missing, the backplate was torn and the flesh pulped, and the top edge of the breastplate was buckled and broken, although the seals at the neck and waist were almost entirely intact. The breastplate itself was pristine, apart from a film of rockcrete dust; there wasn’t a scratch or a dink on it anywhere.

  Cleon removed his helmet and stood guard over Basilion and Utropius as the Apothecary leaned over the corpse, one foot on either side of his battle-brother’s waist, and reached down. He did not think about Basilion’s missing right leg or his twisted left. He did not think of the beast.

  The Apothecary did what he was trained to do: he concentrated his mind on the words he must recite while he extracted the gene-seed from Basilion’s chest, the gene-seed that was the legacy of the Iron Snakes, the gene-seed that made the future possible.

  He laid the last of the winding cloths over the wound in Basilion’s chest, and made the signs over his battle-brother’s body with his left hand while he wielded the reductor in his right.

  He was gone. Basilion was no more. He had departed his body as his gene-seed was extracted. There was nothing left of him now, only his helmet in its final resting place, and his gauntlet, power sword and his gene-seed returning home.

  VIII

  No one knew when the Fissure began to penetrate the walls that had been built against it, no one but the cultists who were gathered before it. Those who did not die in the first concentrated thread of un-light were in rapture to it, their minds befouled with the warp. They were turned to Chaos. They tore open the bodies of the heretic dead, illuminated as non-believers, as frauds, as fickle pretenders, and they gorged themselves on the flesh that was not, could not be, turned.

  Their hunger sated and another dark step taken towards ruin, they turned back to bathe in the narrow beam of un-light with renewed energy, with vigour and intent. A woman stepped into a curling drift of utter blackness, and began to chant and spit a sequence of hard, guttural, incomprehensible sounds. Then a young man joined in, his voice lower than hers, setting up a discord. Then a third voice joined and a fourth, until all the remaining pilgrims were chanting, each in a slightly different key, each in a slightly different rhythm, so that the discord built, splitting the air, visibly, dividing the un-light.

  As white light divides into the colours of the rainbow, so the un-light divided. Streaks of dense, fathomless grey shook away from each other, trembled and formed jagged bands in the air, each vibrating at a different frequency. When they bled together they seemed to repel each other, like iron filings reacting to magnetic fields. Each frequency, each band, distorted the sound of the chanting as it passed through, creating further discord, generating a cacophony that caused the crack in the massive rockcrete wall to grow and spread at an alarming rate, until a section of wall eight metres high and five metres wide was crazed all over with beams of banded un-light streaming through at all angles.

  One of the beams of light began to coalesce into a searing, pinpoint shaft of un-light, which fell on the nearest of the chanting acolytes, the woman who had begun the unholy ritual. Her eyes were glazed and her nose and mouth trickled black blood as the inhuman utterances came from her throat. The un-light fell in jagged lines across her face and around her wrists as she knelt at the altar that was this new Fissure, and her skin began to singe and blister. Then it began to smoke and cauterised as the un-light cut her eyes from their sockets and sheared through her wrists. The other disciples watched more beams coalescing as they approached them, praying for them, chanting ever louder in their bliss.

  It took hours for the beams of un-light to do their work, to slowly dismember, eviscerate and then remove the organs of the acolytes until only the skeletons and vocal chords remained, chanting their never-ending hymn to Chaos.

  The governor was relieved when the Space Marines refused his offer to accompany them to the site, sending the captain of the hive guard in his stead.

  The captain fell to the ground in a seizure as he entered the site of the Fissure and saw what had become of the acolytes. They had been chanting for several weeks, their flesh rotting around them, their reeking skulls suspended on fleshless spines, the rasping, guttural sounds still emanating from their wretched throats.

  The rockcrete wall, shot through with beams of un-light, crazed with darkness, split into a myriad greys, seemed to throb and flex as the voices continued to build towards some relentless crescendo.

  ‘Not nothing, then,’ said Utropius.

  ‘It is never nothing, my brother,’ said Basilion, raising his power sword to cut down the chanting corpses, one by one.

  Where the beams of un-light struck the weapon, they made it tremble and thrum in the Space Marine’s hands. The blackness seemed not to be reflected off the sword’s perfectly polished surface, but to be absorbed by it.

  Crashing into the spinal columns of the corpses made no difference to their integrity or their ability to chant, so Basilion began to attack skulls, hacking at craniums and mandibles, but the unbroken corpse-beasts continued to sing.

  Utropius lifted his lascannon to his shoulder and shot a burst of las-fire into one of the corpses, the largest of the group, who’d been a butcher in his former life, over two metres tall, weighing two hundred kilos. The las-rounds fizzed and sparked, and died in the air around the corpse. Those that did reach their target lit up in the un-light, were absorbed by it, and, somehow enriched it, enhanced it, making it even more sinister.

  The butcher’s corpse bobbed its skull and stretched its spine, as if pulling itself up to its full height and inflating its chest, and the sounds that came from its dead throat were louder and more insistent than ever.

  ‘Hard round weapons, only,’ said Utropius, unshouldering his lascannon and priming the boltgun he carried as a sidearm.

  Basilion continued relentlessly to do battle with the corpse-beasts, the un-light, when it crossed paths with his blade, disappearing into it, darkening and dulling its surface as it sliced and hacked at the floating bones.

  Cleon took one look at the threads of un-light penetrating the rockcrete wall and knew that his meltagun was useless. If the wall was to be penetrated it must be done strategically or by whatever was on the other side. The meltagun was a liability, so he, too, must rely on his sidearm, and hope that he could come to the aid of his brother, Basilion, since it had fallen to his lot to control the situation.

  The Iron Snakes filtered out the cacophony that was growing all around them as the corpses re
doubled their efforts to open the Fissure and bring forth the beast they had come to worship and sacrifice themselves for. They relied, instead, on their internal helmet comms. There was little necessity to speak. Each warrior knew his brothers and had weighed up the situation and his own strengths and weaknesses, and was acting accordingly.

  The wall was fragile and unpredictable, and must not be attacked. The corpse choir clearly had some power over the wall, and possibly over what awaited on its other side, the dark side, for the Space Marines had known, before they were within ten kilometres of the site, that they were approaching the presence of the immaterium.

  Killing the dead in the face of the un-light was their first task, and they were ill-equipped to accomplish that task, not least because, while they were not under the immediate threat of attack, the singers simply would not perish. The Apothecary and Cleon could not use their main weapons, since the melta was too risky and the lascannon impotent in the un-light, and they had only their sidearms – a Godwyn pattern boltgun and a standard issue boltgun respectively – the shells from which did little more than ricochet off vertebrae and skulls. Only Basilion’s power sword seemed able to inflict any damage on the pilgrims.

  Apothecary Utropius continued to fire his boltgun judiciously across the face of the wall, while Cleon holstered his sidearm and began to attack the skulls with his fists, using them like punch bags. They simply bobbed and bounced, as if on springs instead of spines, and came back for more.

  Basilion did the real work, hacking and slashing, lunging and swinging, finally beginning to disconnect vertebrae, smash teeth, and, in one case, managing to sever the skull from the spine of one of the corpses, even though the skull landed on its side on the rockcrete platform that formed the floor, and continued to wheeze out its discordant melody.