Sacrifice

by Ben Counter

  It was from that vortex that Hyrk drew his power. That power coalesced into sights from Hyrk’s depraved life, churning randomly as the vortex echoed the seething pit of Hyrk’s mind. A million bodies writhed in joy, smiles on their faces, as they were burned in the golden flame that Hyrk taught them to summon down upon themselves. The blasphemies in the Library of Absalaam tore themselves free of their pages, flocking like ravens around the figure of Hyrk. A hive city’s population wept with such sorrow at the heretic’s crimes that their tears rose up in a flood and drowned them.

  Alaric tore his eyes away. Hyrk’s many arms were making the gestures with which he channelled his own form of witchcraft. Pulses of golden fire, like miniatures comets, rained down. Alaric broke cover and ran forwards, powering through the storm. Hyrk’s face broke into a faint smile, as if amused by some trifle, and another gesture hurled a spear of ice into Alaric’s chest. The spear splintered against his breastplate, the armour’s wards discharging purple spirals of power away from the impact.

  Alaric was knocked onto one knee. He forced himself another step forwards, planting the haft of his Nemesis halberd in the dome’s floor to give him purchase against the storm.

  ‘I have seen a thousand like you, Hyrk!’ shouted Alaric. ‘A thousand gods. A thousand vessels of the warp’s glory. And I know what you cannot.’

  ‘And what,’ said Hyrk, ‘is that?’

  ‘You all die,’ replied Alaric, forcing himself another step closer.

  Hyrk conjured a shield of energy the colour of moonlight, covered in runes of invulnerability taught to him by his patrons in the warp. ‘I am immortal,’ he said simply.

  ‘Then your masters will have forever to punish you for your failure,’ said Alaric.

  ‘You cannot hurt me,’ replied Hyrk, one of his hands waving dismissively, as if he was bored of Alaric’s presence at his court and was commanding him to leave.

  Alaric did not reply to that.

  He drew back his arm, the head of the halberd hovering beside his head. Hyrk’s eyes glimmered with amusement at the motion, for he knew that even a Nemesis weapon hurled by a Grey Knight could not get through the magics he commanded.

  Alaric’s gaze went upwards. He focussed on the eye in the heart of the vortex overhead, the eye that stared directly from the warp.

  He was strong. He would have to be. It was not an easy shot.

  Alaric hurled the Nemesis halberd straight up. The force of his throw kept it flying true even through the storm. It seemed to take an hour for it to spin upwards through the vortex, past the endless atrocities pulled from Hyrk’s mind.

  Hyrk realised, a split second before it hit, what Alaric was trying to do.

  The blade of the halberd speared the eye through the centre of its pupil. The eye recoiled, folds of timespace rippling around it, and a bolt of iridescent blood squirted from the ruined pupil.

  The vortex went dark. The power drained away. The daemons and the victims in Hyrk’s visions dissolved away to skeletons, then darkness.

  The storm died down. Alaric could hear the gunfire from his battle-brothers now, he could stand at full height without being swept aside by the storm. The gods who watched Hyrk and granted him his power were blinded for a moment, and turned away from their champion. Hyrk could not call on them now.

  Hyrk was stunned. Alaric was too quick for him. Alaric dived forwards and grabbed a handful of Hyrk’s feathered tail. He dragged Hyrk down to the floor, fighting against the psychic force keeping him aloft.

  ‘I can hurt you now,’ said Alaric. He wrapped an elbow around Hyrk’s jaw and twisted. Bulgor Hyrk’s neck snapped in his grasp.

  The first time, Thorne was ready.

  The room into which they wheeled him was of polished steel, so harshly lit that the reflection of the glowstrips in the mirror-like walls turned it into a cube of light. Thorne was strapped into a wheelchair, for the nerve stimulation had rendered him malcoordinated and unable to walk without fear of falling. His hands shook and he sweated constantly, his body still geared up for the next tide of bafflement and pain.

  Instructor Gravenholm sat in the room, a thick file on the table in front of him. He was haloed in the light, as if he was a bureaucrat sorting through sins and virtues in the Emperor’s own court. Gravenholm was an old man, too old to live were it not for the juvenat machine sighing on the floor by his feet. Gravenholm was important enough for the Ordo Malleus to keep alive through arcane technology. Once, long ago, he had been a lowly trainee like Thorne. That was one of the thoughts that kept Thorne going.

  ‘Trainee,’ said Gravenholm, his words accompanied by the stuttering of the juvenat machine hooked up to his ancient lungs. ‘Speak your name.’

  ‘Explicator-Cadet Ascelan Thorne,’ replied Thorne, forcing the strength into his voice.

  ‘Good,’ said Gravenholm. ‘What process have you just undergone?’

  Thorne swallowed. ‘Direct-pattern nerve stimulation.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Part of my training as an interrogator. We must resist interrogation techniques ourselves.’

  ‘I see.’ Gravenholm leafed through the file. ‘Prior to this process you were given data to memorise. Describe to me the content of that data.’

  ‘No.’

  Gravenholm looked Thorne in the eye. ‘Tell me, Cadet Thorne.’

  ‘I will not do so.’

  ‘I see. That will be all.’

  The orderlies returned to the room to wheel Thorne away. ‘Did I pass, sir?’ he said. The words came unbidden, blurted out. In reply Gravenholm merely gave him a last look, before turning a page in the file and starting to make notes with a quill.

  The second time, Thorne was not ready.

  He knew there had been nerve stimulation again. But there had been more, too. He had watched pict-grabs of destruction and death, cities burning, murders and mutilations spliced with images taken of himself doing things he couldn’t remember. In a dark room, men had screamed at him to confess his treachery with witches and aliens. He had woken up on an examining table with doctors describing the mutations they said he possessed. He did not know where the nerve stimulation ended and his own thoughts began.

  He had seen Gravenholm many times. Perhaps it had been one of the pict-grabs, perhaps a nightmare. Perhaps he had actually been there. But now he was in the cube of light again, this time lying on a medical gurney with intravenous lines in the backs of his hands.

  ‘What is your name?’ asked Gravenholm.

  Thorne coughed, and arched his back in pain. The nerve stimulation had been applied this time along his spine, and the points of pain remained where the probes had punctured between his vertebrae. ‘Thorne,’ he said. ‘Thorne. Explicator-cadet.’

  ‘I see. What processes have you undergone?’

  ‘I don’t... I’m not sure.’

  Gravenholm made a few notes. He had not changed since the first bout of resistance training. The juvenat machine still did his breathing for him and his bald, lined face still tilted oddly so he could look over his spectacles at Thorne.

  ‘You were given data to remember. Tell it to me.’

  ‘No.’

  Gravenholm made another note. ‘If you do not, further processes will be performed on you. They will include further nerve stimulation.’

  ‘No. I won’t tell you.’

  ‘I see.’

  Thorne smiled. It was the first time he had done so in a long time. ‘I did well, right?’ he said. ‘I didn’t break. Have I done it? Will you make me an interrogator?’

  Gravenholm didn’t bother to look up this time. He waved a hand, and the orderlies took Thorne away again.

  The third time, Thorne barely recognised the room at all. The cube of light had been there before, but he did not know if it was in his mind or whether he had really been there. The inside of his mind was ful
l of half-truths and random fragments. Faces loomed at him, and gloved hands holding medical implements. He saw hideous creatures, many-eyed beasts squatting in pits of rotting bodies and swarms of tiny things devouring his arms and body. He saw his hands become charred skeletal limbs and his face bloated and decaying in a mirror.

  Maybe there had been nerve stimulation. Maybe not. Maybe a key word brought back the pain without any need for attaching the probes to his spine. It all ran together. There had been no passing of the days – just an infinite ribbon of time, a few loops illuminated in memory, most of it in darkness.

  Thorne was again on the gurney. He had been lying on it for some time. His limbs were too weak to support him. Orderlies had to turn him onto his side so Gravenholm could speak to his face.

  ‘What is your name?’ said Gravenholm, the juvenat machine sighing in unison.

  Thorne took a long time to answer.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Throne alive. Oh... merciful Emperor! I don’t know any more...’

  Gravenholm smiled, made a final annotation, and closed the file.

  ‘Then you are ready,’ he said. ‘I have no use for an interrogator with his own personality. With his own name. Only when the vessel is empty can it be refilled with something the Ordo Malleus can use. Your training can begin, explicator-cadet. You shall be an interrogator.’

  Alaric watched the interrogator at work through the one-way window that looked onto the explicator suite. Like the rest of the Obsidian Sky it was dressed with stone, more like the inside of a sepulchre than a spacecraft. The interrogator, wearing the plain uniform of an Ordo Malleus functionary, was speaking to Bulgor Hyrk. Hyrk was bracketed to the wall of the explicator suite, with his neck braced so his head did not loll on his useless neck. His spine was severed and his body paralysed, and it had been quick work by the ship’s medicae to save the heretic’s life when Alaric brought the dying body back to the Obsidian Sky.

  ‘Thorne is good,’ said Inquisitor Nyxos. The Obsidian Sky was Nyxos’s ship for the duration of the mission to capture Hyrk. He was an old, bleak-humoured man who seemed ancient enough to have seen everything the life of a daemon hunter could throw at him. He looked frail, but Alaric knew this was an illusion Nyxos cultivated with his bent body and ragged black robes. ‘He is already getting answers from Hyrk. Hyrk thinks his gods have abandoned him so he is telling all out of spite more than anything. Much of what he has told us is rather interesting.’

  ‘How so?’ said Alaric. He had spent many hours cleaning the filth off his armour and reconsecrating it, and now it gleamed in the dim light coming through the window.

  ‘It seems he took over the Merciless because he had somewhere to go in a hurry,’ replied Nyxos. ‘Nothing to do with the crew or the Imperial Navy. He just needed a spaceship. Everything he did to the crew was for his own amusement, as far as we can tell.’

  ‘Where was he going?’

  ‘To the Eye.’

  Alaric shook his head. The Eye of Terror had opened and the forces of Chaos had poured through. Billions of Imperial Guardsmen and whole Chapters of Space Marines were fighting there to stem the tide, which threatened to break through into the Imperial heartlands of the Segmentum Solar. Heretics like Hyrk were flocking there, too, to pledge themselves to the cause of the Chaos lords.

  ‘Specifically,’ Nyxos was saying, ‘a planet named Sarthis Majoris. A call has gone out to filth like Hyrk and Throne knows how many have answered already. It seems that Hyrk was summoned by a creature there called Duke Venalitor. I have sent to the Eye for confirmation, but either way, I intend to see your squad reinforced and sent to Sarthis Majoris as soon as we have gotten everything we can out of Hyrk.’

  ‘I see. Could Hyrk be lying?’

  ‘Perhaps. But as I said, Thorne is really very good.’ Nyxos said this with a telling smile that told Alaric all he needed to know about what would happen to the paralysed Hyrk.

  ‘Look at this ship,’ said Alaric. ‘At the crew and the resources we have spent. How much did it take to put my squad on the Merciless? What sacrifices are made so we can do what we must do?’

  ‘Indeed, even I cannot count them all,’ said Nyxos. ‘We must take more from our Imperium than any of us can understand. This thought troubles you?’

  ‘I can allow nothing to trouble me,’ said Alaric. ‘If we turn our thoughts to these things, we lose our focus. Our sense of duty is eroded. If our task is not worth sacrifice, then no task is.’

  ‘Good.’ Nyxos’s face darkened. ‘But speak not these thoughts too freely, Justicar. To some, they might sound like moral weakness. Like the thoughts of one who harbours doubt. Would that you were an inquisitor, Alaric, that you could speak freely and unveil the inquisitor’s seal to anyone who dared question you! But you are not.’

  ‘I know,’ said Alaric. ‘But someone must think of them. Otherwise, what are we? It is the Imperium we are supposed to be protecting, and yet it must suffer for our efforts to protect it. How far can we go before all become madness? Someone must watch over what we do.’

  ‘Leave that to us. And in the meantime, prepare your men. Sarthis Majoris will not be easy, and we are thin on the ground in the Eye. You and your squad will be on your own, whatever you might encounter there.’

  ‘I shall lead their prayers,’ said Alaric.

  For a while after Nyxos left, Alaric watched Thorne work. Even without eyes, the expression on Hyrk’s face was that of a broken man.

  It had taken untold sacrifices to break him. But Nyxos was right – that was a dangerous thing to think of. Alaric closed his eyes and meditated, and soon the thoughts were gone.

  A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

  Published in 2011 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

  Cover illustration by Hardy Fowler

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