by Ben Counter
Sacrifice
by Ben Counter
The warp tore at him.
The unearthly cold shot right through him.
He could see for a billion kilometres in every direction, through the angry ghosts of dead stars and the glowing cauls of nebulae, dark for aeons. Alaric fought it, tore his eyes away from the infinities unravelling around him. The psychic wards built into his armour were white hot against his skin, tattooing him with burns in the shape of their sacred spirals.
Alaric’s lungs tried to draw breath, but there was no air there. He tried to move, but space and movement had no meaning here. And beyond his senses, far in the black heart of the universe, he could sense vast and god-like intelligences watching him as he flitted through their domain.
Man, he managed to think, was not meant to be teleported.
The air boomed out as Alaric emerged in real space again, several hundred kilometres from the teleporter array on the Obsidian Sky where he had started the journey. Even a Space Marine, even a Grey Knight, was not immune to the disorientation of being hurled through the warp to another part of space, and for a second his senses fought to make definition of reality around him.
The squad had been teleported onto the grand cruiser Merciless. The familiar architectures of an Imperial warship were everywhere, from the aquilae worked into the vault where the pillars met overhead to the prayer-algorithms stamped into the ironwork of the floor by Mechanicus shipwrights.
The air was a strange mix peculiar to spaceships. Oil and sweat, incense from the constant tech-rituals, propellant from the ship’s guns. It was mixed with the tongue-furring ozone of the squad’s sudden arrival.
Alaric took a couple of breaths, forcing out the supercooled air in his lungs. ‘Brothers!’ he gasped. ‘Speak unto me.’
‘I live, brother,’ came Dvorn’s reply from where he lay, a few metres away, ice flaking from his armour.
‘I too,’ said Haulvarn. Alaric’s second in the squad leaned against a wall of the corridor. His journey had been one of intense heat instead of cold and his armour hissed and spat where it met the wall.
Brother Visical coughed violently and forced himself to his feet. In reply to Alaric, he could only meet the Justicar’s eyes. Visical was inexperienced for a Grey Knight, and he had never been teleported before. It was rare enough even for a veteran like Alaric. The technology that made it possible could not be replicated, and was restricted to a handful of the oldest Imperial warships.
The whole squad had made it onto the Merciless. That was something to give thanks for in itself. Teleportation was not an exact science, for even the oldest machines could simply fling the occasional man into the warp to be lost forever. He could be turned inside out, merged with a wall upon re-entry or fused with one of his fellow travellers. Luckily this had not happened to any of Alaric’s squad. Fate had smiled on them so far.
‘We’re in the lower engineering decks,’ said Haulvarn, checking the data-slate built into the armour of his forearm.
‘Damnation,’ spat Dvorn. ‘We’re off course.’
‘I...’ spluttered Visical, still suffering from disorientation. ‘I am the hammer... I am the point of His spear...’
Alaric hauled Visical to his feet. ‘Our first priority is to find Hyrk,’ said Alaric. ‘If we can find a cogitator or take a prisoner, we can locate him.’
As if in reply, a monstrous howl echoed from further down the corridor. This part of the ship was ill-maintained and the patchy light did not reach that far down. The sound was composed of a hundred voices, all twisted beyond any human range.
‘First priority is survival,’ said Dvorn.
‘Where is your faith, brother?’ said Haulvarn with a reproachful smile. ‘Faith is the shield that never falters! Bear it up, brothers! Bear it up!’
Dvorn hefted his Nemesis hammer in both hands. ‘Keep the shield,’ he said. ‘I’ll stick to this.’
Alaric kicked open one of the doors leading off from the corridor. He glimpsed dusty, endless darkness beyond, an abandoned crew deck or cargo bay. He took shelter in the doorway as the howling grew closer, accompanied by the clatter of metal-shod feet on the floor. Sounds came from the other direction, too, this time the rhythmic hammering of guns or clubs on the walls.
‘Hyrk has wasted little time,’ said Alaric. ‘Barely a month ago, he took this ship. Already it is crewed by the less-than-human.’
‘Not for long,’ said Dvorn. He looked down at Visical, who was crouching in another doorway, incinerator held ready to spray fire into the darkness. ‘You were saying?’
‘I am the hammer!’ said Visical, voice returned and competing with the growing din. ‘I am the shield! I am the mail about His fist! I am the point of His spear!’
‘I see them!’ yelled Haulvarn.
Alaric saw them, too. They had once been the crew of the Merciless, servants of the Emperor aboard a loyal warship. Now nothing remained of their humanity. The first glimpse Alaric had was of asymmetrical bodies, limbs moving in impossible configurations, stretched and torn naval uniforms wrapped around random tangles of bone and sinew.
He saw the stitches and the sutures. The humans they had once been had been cut up and rearranged. A torso was no more than an anchor for a random splay of limbs. Three heads were mounted on one set of shoulders, the jaws replaced with shoulder blades and ribs to form sets of bony mandibles. A nest of razor-sharp bone scrabbled along the ceiling on dozens of hands.
‘This side, too!’ shouted Dvorn, who was facing the other way down the corridor.
‘Greet them well!’ ordered Alaric.
The Grey Knights opened fire. The air was shredded by the reports of the storm bolters mounted onto the backs of their wrists. A wave of heat from Visical’s incinerator blistered the rust off the walls. Alaric’s arm jarred with that familiar recoil, his shoulder hammered back into its socket.
The mutant crewmen came apart in the first volleys. The corridor was awash with blood and torn limbs. Carried forwards on the bodies, as if riding a living tide, came a thing like a serpent of sundered flesh. Torsos were stacked on top of one another, sewn crudely together at shoulder and abdomen. Its head was composed of severed hands, fastened together with wire and metal sutures into the approximation of a massive bestial skull. Its teeth were sharpened ribs and its eyes were beating hearts. The monstrous face split open in a serpentine grin.
It moved faster than even Alaric could react. Suddenly it was over him, mouth yawning wide, revealing thousands of teeth implanted in its fleshy gullet to crush and grind.
Alaric powered to his feet, slamming a shoulder up into the underside of the thing’s jaw. He rammed his fist up into the meat of its neck and trusted that his storm bolter was aiming at some vital place, some brain or heart the thing could not live without.
Words of prayer flashed through his mind.
Alaric fired.
The light was worse than the dark.
He was bathed in it. He felt it illuminating not just his body, but his mind. All his sins, his very fears in that moment, were laid open to be read like the illuminations of a prayer book.
Up above him was the dome of the cathedral. Thousands of censers hung from it, smouldering in their clouds of pungent smoke. The dome was painted with a hundred methods of torture, each one inflicted on a famous sinner from the Imperial creed. A body, broken on a wheel, had its wounds picked out in clusters of rubies. The victim of an impaling, as he slid slowly down a spear through his stomach, wept tears of gold leaf.
The light came not from the dome, but from below. Faith was like fire – it could warm and comfort, and it could destroy, Fire, therefore, filled the ca
thedral floor. Hundreds of burners emitted a constant flame, so the cathedral seemed to contain an ocean of flame. The brazen walkways over the fire, where the clergy alone were permitted to tread, were so hot they glowed red and the clergy went about armoured in shielded and cooled vestments.
The man who knelt at the altar was not one of the clergy. He was not shielded, and he could barely draw breath in the scalding heat. His wrists were burned where his manacles had conducted the heat. He knelt on a prayer cushion, but even so his shins and knees were red raw. He wore only a tabard of cloth-of-gold, and his head had been shaven with much ceremony that very morning.
A silver bowl on the metal floor in front of him was there, he knew, to catch his blood.
One of the cathedral’s many clergy walked up to where the man knelt. His Ecclesiarchy robes almost completely concealed him, forming a shell of ermine and silk that revealed only the clergyman’s eyes. His robes opened and an arm reached out. The hand, gloved in crimson satin, held a single bullet.
The bullet was dropped into the silver bowl. The kneeling man winced at the sound.
Other clergy were watching, assembled on the metal walkways, lit from beneath by the lake of fire. The reds, purples and whites of their robes flickered with the flames. Only their eyes were visible.
One of them, in the purple and silver of a cardinal, raised his hand.
‘Begin,’ he said, and his words were amplified through the sweltering dome of the cathedral.
The priest in front of the sacrificial altar drew a knife from beneath his robes. It had a blade of gold, inscribed with High Gothic prayers. The prisoner – the sacrifice – flinched as the tip of the knife touched the back of his neck.
The city outside was dark and cold. It was a city of secrets and dismal hope. It was a place where for a normal man – the kind of man the sacrifice had once been – to get by, rules had to be broken. In every side street and basement, there was someone who would break those rules. Fake identity papers, illicit deals and substances, even murder for the right price. Some of those criminals would open up a slit in a customer’s abdomen and implant an internal pouch where a small item could be concealed so well that even if the carrier was stripped to the waist and forced to kneel at a sacrificial altar, it would remain hidden.
The sacrifice had also paid what little he had to have one of his fingernails replaced with a miniature blade. As the priest in front of him raised the knife into the air and looked up towards the dome, the sacrifice used this tiny blade to open up the old scar in the side of his abdomen. Pinpricks of pain flared where the nerve endings had not been properly killed in that dingy basement surgery. The sacrifice’s stomach lurched as his finger slipped inside the wound and along the slippery sides of the implanted pouch.
His fingers closed on the grip of the gun.
‘By this blood,’ intoned the priest, ‘shed by this blade, shall the weapon be consecrated! Oh Emperor on high, oh Lord of Mankind, oh Father of our futures, look upon this offering!’
The sacrifice jumped to his feet, the metal scorching his soles. With his free hand he grabbed the priest’s wrist and wrenched it behind his back, spinning the man around. With the other, he put the muzzle of the miniature pistol to the back of the priest’s head.
A ripple of alarm ran around the cathedral. Clergy looked from the altar to one another, as if one of them would explain that this was just another variation on the ritual they had all seen hundreds of times before.
‘I am walking out of here!’ shouted the sacrifice. ‘Do you understand? When I am free and deep in the city, I will let him go. If you try to stop me, or follow me, I will kill him. His life is worth a lot more than one sacred bullet. Don’t make me a murderer.’
The assembled clergy took a collective step backwards. Only the cardinal did not move.
Even with his face hidden, the presence and authority that had made him a cardinal filled the cathedral. Vox-casters concealed in the dome sent his voice booming over the sound of the flames.
‘Do not presume to know,’ said the cardinal, ‘what a life is worth to me. Not when I serve an Imperium where a billion brave men die every day. Not when the Emperor alone can number those who have died in His name. Do not presume to know. Be grateful, merely, that we have given you the chance to serve Him in death.’
The sacrifice forced the priest forwards a few steps, the pistol pressed against the layers of silk between it and the priest’s skull. The sacrifice held the priest in front of him as if shielding himself from something the cardinal might do. ‘No one needs to know you let me go,’ he said. ‘The priests will do whatever you say. They will hold their tongues. And I will simply disappear. No one will ever know.’
‘The Emperor watches,’ replied the cardinal. ‘The Emperor knows.’
‘Then cut a hundred men’s throats on this altar to keep him happy!’ retorted the sacrifice. ‘A hundred killers. There are plenty of them out there. A hundred sinners. But not me. I am a good man. I do not deserve to die here!’
The cardinal held out his hands as if he was on the pulpit, encompassing a great congregation. ‘That is why it has to be you,’ he said. ‘What worth is the blood of a sinner?’
‘Then find someone else,’ said the sacrifice, walking his prisoner forwards a few more paces. The main doors were beyond the cardinal, a set of massive bronze reliefs depicting the Emperor enthroned.
‘Brother,’ said the cardinal, his voice still calm. ‘A thousand times this world blesses a bullet with the blood of a good man. A thousand other worlds pay the same tithe to our brethren in the Inquisition. Do you think you are the first sacrifice to try to escape us? The first to smuggle a weapon through the ritual cleansings? Remember your place. You are but one man. There is nothing you can do which another has not tried and failed before. You will not leave this place. You will kneel and die, and your blood will consecrate our offering.’
‘This man will die,’ hissed the sacrifice, ‘or I will be free.’
The cardinal drew something from inside his robes. It was a simple silver chain, with a single red gemstone in its setting. It had none of the ostentatiousness of the cardinal’s own diamonds and emeralds which encrusted the heavy golden chain around his neck. It looked out of place dangling from his silk-gloved fingers.
The sacrifice froze. Recognition flooded his face as his eyes focussed on the necklace in the cardinal’s hand.
‘Talaya,’ he said.
‘If you do not kneel and bare your throat to the Emperor’s blade,’ said the cardinal, ‘then she will take your place. She is a good person, is she not?’
The sacrifice stepped back from his prisoner. He did not look away from the necklace as the backs of his legs touched the scalding metal of the altar.
He threw the gun off the walkway, into the flames.
He knelt down, and bowed his head over the silver bowl with its bullet.
‘Continue,’ said the cardinal.
The sacrifice did not have time to cry out in pain. The sacrificial knife severed his spinal cord with a practised thrust, and opened up the veins and arteries of his throat. He just had time to see the bullet immersed in his dark red blood before the darkness fell.
The consecrated bullet ripped up into the serpent’s skull and detonated, blowing clots of a dozen brains across the ceiling.
The weight of the mutant thing fell onto Alaric’s shoulders. He shrugged it off, glancing behind him to the rest of the squad. Dvorn was breaking the neck of a thing with too many limbs and Haulvarn was shredding the last of the crewmen seething down the corridor with bolter fire. Fire licked along the walls and ceiling beyond, clinging to the charred remnants of the mutants Visical had burned.
‘Keep moving!’ yelled Alaric. ‘They know we are here!’
Alaric ran down the corridor, his armoured feet skidding on the spilt blood and crunching through corpses. Up ah
ead were what had once been the crew decks. Upwards of thirty thousand men had lived on the Merciless, their lives pledged to crewing and defending the grand cruiser. Between the mutiny and disappearance of the ship and the confirmation that Bulgor Hyrk was on board, only a few weeks had passed. That was more than enough time for Hyrk to turn every single crewman on board into something else.
Some of those transformations had taken place in the crew quarters. The walls and ceiling were blistered up into cysts of translucent veiny metal, through which could be seen the fleshy forms of incubating mutants. The crewmen had been devolved into foetal forms and then reborn as something else.
Every one would be different, obscene in its own way. Hyrk considered himself, among other things, an artist.
‘Would that we could burn it all,’ said Visical.
‘We will,’ said Dvorn. ‘The fleet will. This place will all burn, once we know Hyrk is dead.’
One of the cysts near Visical split open. The thing that fell out looked like two human torsos fused together at the waist end-to-end, forming something like a serpent with a lumpily deformed head at each end. For limbs it had hands attached to the sides of its length at the wrists, fingers like the legs of a centipede.
Visical immolated the mutant in a blast of flame. It shrivelled up, mewling. ‘How can honest human flesh become such a thing?’ he said.
‘Think not of how far a human is from these abominations,’ said Alaric. ‘Think how close he is. Even a Grey Knight is not so far removed from Hyrk’s creations. The line is thin. Do not forget that, brother.’ Alaric checked his storm bolter and reloaded. Each shell was consecrated, blessed by the Ecclesiarchy. Many, many more would be fired before Alaric saw the last of the Merciless.
Haulvarn had ripped a panel off the wall and was examining the wiring inside. ‘The cogitator data-lines run through here,’ he said. He hooked one of the lines into his data-slate. ‘There is a lot of power running to the astronav dome. Far beyond normal tolerances. Whatever Hyrk’s doing here, it has something to do with the dome.’
‘The dome on the Merciless is archeotech,’ said Alaric. ‘It’s older than anything in the fleet. It must be why Hyrk chose this ship.’
