Atlas Infernal

by Rob Sanders

  As Czevak came to see his own face in the eldar’s mirror-mask, he realised how completely the Harlequin held both his horror-crippled mind and dread-seized heart in its hand. Spinning and backing towards the captain’s throne with the Shadowseer playfully stalking after, Czevak brushed past Klute. A momentary spark of survival instinct flared in the darkness of Czevak’s mind. Snatching Klute’s Cadian street silencer from his friend’s robes Czevak turned the sawn-off shotgun on the Shadowseer. The Harlequin theatrically lifted the leaf-shaped blade of its witch weapon. The sidearm felt strange in the High Inquisitor’s hands. He was not a natural marksman and usually abhorred personal violence, much preferring to let others around him indulge their brute predilections when necessary. Holding the weapon firm and aiming at the Shadowseer, Czevak yanked on the trigger. The expected barrel blast and kick did not come. The trigger was stuck. Further panic washed through the High Inquisitor, and fearing his inexperience had somehow jammed the weapon, he went to work the shotgun pistol’s lever action, only to find that jammed and inflexible also.

  As realisation dawned and the Shadowseer towered over him, Czevak let the heavy shotgun tumble weakly from his fingers and thud to the deck. Like everything else – the bridge crew, the instrumentation, the elevator doors – the weapon was frozen in time and the inner mechanism needed to fire would not move. Another thought leapt into his fear-stricken mind. Thrusting out his fist, Czevak activated his wrist-mounted stinger. He’d never used the eldar monofilament launcher as a weapon before but now seemed the most appropriate time. Like the sawn-off shotgun, nothing happened.

  Czevak tripped backwards over a fat cable running across the pulpit, into the captain’s throne. Thoughts of violence scattered like a disturbed flock of bats in his mind. He was on his back, arms held out in front of him with the mindless pleading of prey about to be slaughtered. The Shadowseer spread its long legs and stood directly over the High Inquisitor, the sword clutched tightly in both hands, ready for a downward thrust, the tip of the steaming witchblade hovering over Czevak’s chest. Czevak was a nothingness on the command deck floor, feeble in the face of death. Crawling around, the inquisitor presented his back to the mighty Harlequin and buried his head in his arms like a child.

  Solus

  Interregna

  Pancratitaph, Battle barge Impossible Fortress, Above Etiamnum III

  CHORUS

  Czevak was in several kinds of hell.

  The inquisitor’s aged and broken body had been dragged by sallow-faced serfs through the warped corridors of the Thousand Sons battle-barge. The vessel was a monstrous base of operations for the Chaos Lord Ahriman and every available space was used to store the fruits of the sorcerer’s labours – his galaxy-wide hunt for dark lore and arcane understanding – so that one day the monster could unlock the secrets of immaterial immortality and achieve Chaos godhood. The traitor vessel was a floating museum of recovered artefacts, daemon weaponry, damned tomes, hexscript, alien technologies and emaciated prisoners – only kept alive for the information held in their tormented minds. As the serfs hauled him through the insane architecture of chambers and corridors, Czevak’s shattered bones grated and his wounds gaped and bled leaving a gore smear trailing behind. The passages were crowded with maniacal cultists, drunk on dark understanding and minor powers, along with hordes of wan-faced serfs and cluttered relics; the vessel had the feel of a swarming archeomarket. All the while, sorcerous lieutenants orchestrated diabolical machinations in quiet, shadowy corners of the ship, daemons crept and Ahriman’s Rubric Marines kept an impassive, silent, bolter-clutching watch over proceedings from sentinel vantage points.

  Drifting in and out of consciousness, Czevak was taken to the pancratitaph, a huge pyramid-like monstrosity reaching out of the battle-barge’s superstructure. It housed Ahriman’s most prized relics, hosted and architecturally amplified the psyker’s pre-cognitive communion with the warp and was the location from where the daemon-sorcerer conducted his intricate campaign of galactic terror.

  Czevak was taken to a chamber situated below the pyramid’s crystal apex. There he was bound to a sacrificial plinth that was decorated with cyclopean designs. About him an honour guard of Rubric Marines stood in death-defying silence.

  Days passed on the plinth with intermissions of brutal but calibrated physical torture. These torments – from a myriad of otherworldly cultures and races – were barbarically practised upon Czevak’s butchered form. The pain and its wretched continuance was about all that the inquisitor could bear and it was all the inquisitor could do to imagine that he no longer had a body upon which the terrors could be inflicted. He was but a mind and a soul. Unfortunately, they were the focus of the Thousand Sons’ primary timetable of suffering.

  Ahriman and Xarchos – armourless and dressed in extravagant, Coptic robes – conducted the psychic aspects of the interrogation themselves.

  Whereas Ahriman was the arch-prognosticator and illusionist whose skills had effortlessly helped to acquire the unreachable Czevak, Xarchos was the telethesiac and telepath. It was his job to commune their minds and bring interrogator and prisoner together in horrifying, spiritual unity and mind-perfect understanding. The sorcerers experimented with vivamantic puppetry, potions of exactitude, Nekulli songwashing, attempted daemonic possession, mind-rape psionica, pentagrammic thought transference, neural scourges and deepsoul truth mapping, among a hundred other violations of Czevak’s being.

  As the self-professed patience of the dark sorcerers became increasingly stretched, even a half-insane Czevak began to question how he could withstand such extreme torture and manipulation. While in the Black Library of Chaos, Czevak had become aware of the Library’s own seeming psychic ability to bar the weak and corruptible from crossing its thresholds. It was one of the dark craftworld’s many defences. Czevak began to wonder – between the agony and intrusion of his tormentors’ efforts – if that otherworldly protection extended to knowledge concerning certain aspects of the Black Library itself. Could knowledge of the Black Library be protecting itself in Czevak’s tortured and terrorised mind? When Xarchos and Ahriman pummelled him with test questions regarding his deepest, most embarrassing secrets – the inquisitor vomited forth truthful answers under the myriad tortures.

  ‘What shames you, pawn of the False Emperor?’ Xarchos put to Czevak as the inquisitor bit back his sobbing and suffering. ‘What haunts your memories with its self-loathing and disgust?’

  ‘Pissed my robes… on the firing range, at Schola Byblos.’

  ‘Yes,’ Xarchos hissed his insistence.

  ‘Bolt pistol jammed and exploded,’ Czevak gagged. ‘Thought I was dead.’

  ‘Another?’

  ‘Mind is sharp,’ Czevak said, ‘but lived beyond my years. I am a tired soul waiting in a cadaver’s body.’

  ‘You have repugnance for this body?’

  ‘Long time…’

  ‘And repugnance for yourself,’ Xarchos insisted. ‘For you have not the courage to take your life, hoping that another may do it for you. The infamous Bronislaw Czevak – who fears no one – but himself.’

  ‘Yes,’ Czevak coughed, spitting blood and phlegm.

  ‘One more,’ Xarchos said. ‘A deep disgrace.’

  ‘I ache for a girl I cannot have,’ Czevak admitted, tears streaming down the sides of his battered face.

  The androgynous giant savoured Czevak’s cruel honesties. Then his face changed to that of a concerned mother, then to a cardinal world confessor with prayers and homilies tattooed into his face-flesh. ‘Czevak the deviant,’ Xarchos said.

  ‘She both disgusts and excites me.’

  ‘Continue,’ Xarchos urged, soaking up the inquisitor’s squirming mortification. ‘What is she? Xenos? Child? Mutant?’

  ‘Bloodlover,’ Czevak said. ‘But that is not why I long for her.’

  ‘Long for her?’ Xarchos repeated, drawing out Czevak’s dark truth. Callibrating the prisoner for further truths of greater significance. ‘You l
ove her. From afar. Why not take her?’

  ‘I cannot defile a Living Saint of the Creed Imperial.’

  ‘And why not?’ the sorcerer repeated playfully.

  ‘She must be pure. Her reason just. She is a Saint, for Throne’s sake. It is by His Will she lives at all. She is His to do with as He will.’

  ‘And what would you do?’ Xarchos asked, looking up at his master. The sorcerer’s face morphed from one form to another with rapid excitement. They were getting closer to breaking him. Ahriman looked down on proceedings with the disinterest of divinity. To Czevak’s further shame, he told them.

  This went on. Even questions relating to the inner workings of the Inquisition and the intricacies of his life’s work and investigations – questions he’d been trained by the ordo to resist under torture – he spilled when inflicted with the sorcerer’s mind-invasive arsenal. When Xarchos demanded the rune designations for the eldar warp gate on Etiamnum III, however, Czevak seemed to find an inexplicable strength of mind that resisted the horrors committed on his person and soul.

  Beyond this consequential resistance, inherited from the Black Library’s alien architecture and defences, Czevak had wiles of his own. Xarchos bled insanity and insistence into the air about him. Under the cold, sapphire blaze of his master’s gaze he had pursued detail after detail down the long corridors of the inquisitor’s broken mind.

  ‘My lord,’ Xarchos advised. ‘Our forces are on the ground. Mordant Hex has the warp gate. Let us end this, take what we need from this specimen and step through into eternity. The Black Library will be ours and then the galaxy.’

  Instead of giving a lot of information about the few things the Thousand Sons desperately wanted, Czevak began feeding Ahriman a little information about a lot he didn’t need. Long lost details and secrets, buried at the heart of the Black Library and unearthed by Czevak’s in-depth researches: incantations, hidden artefacts, the true names of daemons, lost alien races, heretical technologies, dark tomes, legends and locations. Chaos and dark power in all its forms. The sorcerer hungered for detail, moving from one item and piece of information to another. For days the dark Adeptus Astartes questioned him, pumping him for rare and antique knowledge while all the time neglecting the true purpose in capturing and interrogating the High Inquisitor.

  Czevak saw in Ahriman’s graven eyes the brightness of the fever he had planted. An unquenchable thirst for knowledge. The meme-virus. Czevak had spat into the sorcerer’s eyes just so he could infect the monster with an affliction that in the already insatiable Ahriman would become an undeniable and all-consuming obsession. An obsession that had kept Ahriman away from securing the prize. And so Czevak had given the Chaos sorcerer a thousand dangerous but time-consuming facts in order to deny him detail of apocalyptic proportions. The Counter-Clock Heart, the Black Sovereign of Sierra Sangraal, the Corpus Vivexorsectio, the location of the Obsidoculus, the fragments of the Indiga Staff. Hundreds of dark secrets – irresistible obstacles to the Black Library’s location. Xarchos began to realise that something was wrong when his usually distant master assumed control of the interrogation himself. Both questions and answers flowed freely, reducing Xarchos to silent observer. The shattered inquisitor began to draw strength from the respite his truths provided. Ahriman seemed less than himself. He was there, feverish in the moment rather than cold, controlled and everywhere at once. His desire for knowledge and answers an all-too-human hunger in comparison to his usual cool omnipotence.

  ‘My lord,’ Xarchos addressed his master, ‘all these petty secrets and much more can be yours when you take the Black Library as your own. There in the alien eldar’s ancient shrine of lore you can drink your fill of the galaxy’s mystery and devour the feeble hopes of everything that walks or crawls. There, he that is more than man may become god!’

  Ahriman halted his questions. Steam hissed from the sapphire blaze of the sorcerer’s skin. The unnatural radiance was no random mutation – and Czevak had seen many among the followers of Chaos. It was the full power of the warp coursing through its chosen vessel. Ahriman was a conduit of awesome immaterial power – a walking crack through which the warp and the real world bled into one another. The steam was something else and this was not lost on Ahriman’s apprentice. A silence descended upon the chamber. All the while the empty armour of the Rubric Marines looked on. Silent. Impassive. Mindless. When Ahriman did speak, the slightest trace of anger betrayed itself in the sorcerer’s serene words.

  ‘You think to tell me what I will and will not do, apprentice?’

  ‘I live to serve you. But you are not yourself, my master,’ Korban Xarchos told him, his face now remaining that of the androgynous giant. ‘I fear this mortal has tricked or poisoned you with his weakling ways.’

  The insult went home, as the devious sorcerer had intended and Ahriman calmed to statuesque contemplation. Ahriman of the Thousand Sons would not be toyed with by a thing of lesser existence. As both his unusual anger cooled and the warp ran to stillness within him, the steam stopped rising from his sapphire skin. Beads of sweat cascaded down his face, evidence of the fever that wracked his body unnoticed. The demigod looked upon the broken Czevak – powerless on the altar – in silent disbelief.

  Rending a claw-like hand through his Coptic robes to reveal the withering curves of an ancient but still muscular chest, Ahriman began to ripple his fingers in a drawing motion. With some exertion, tiny droplets began to appear on his chest, blotching and collecting on the white hair of his body before drifting towards the mesmerising motion of his hand. As the last of the liquid was drawn from his enchanted bulk, Ahriman relaxed and held a fist out over Czevak’s smashed form. The stringy secretion dribbled from between the knuckles of the ancient Adeptus Astartes’ pulverising fist. Czevak had no doubt that the fell sorcerer had just used his powers to extract the raging meme-virus from his body. When he spoke, his words were as ice again.

  ‘Men like you,’ Ahriman said, ‘and men like me – when I was but a man – are maggots in the False Emperor’s putrefying flesh. You wriggle about, seeking out corruption and feeding on the rot – for your own needs and that the foetid carcass that is the Imperium may shamble on. Your defiance is no more than that of a maggot and I have seen its futility.’

  ‘The girl?’ Xarchos asked. Ahriman didn’t have to say anything.

  Czevak blinked up at the crystal apex roof of the pyramid point. Through it Czevak could see light-years of darkness and the filth-puce tendrils of dreadspace reaching out of the Eye of Terror. A blackened pulley chain ran across the chamber above the prone inquisitor. Czevak tried to turn the spasmed gristle and wrenched vertebrae of his neck. Xarchos thrust his palm at the warped curvature of a wall in the pancratitaph top-chamber. A furious wave of extreme heat rolled across the chamber as Xarchos imposed his telekinetic will upon the heavy door and it violently opened, revealing what Czevak assumed to be some form of oven. An all too natural inferno blazed within. The inquisitor could almost taste the tang of promethium. As the blasted chains of the pulley ran above Czevak’s sacrificial altar, something appeared out of the blinding flame. A skeleton, manacle bound at the wrists, hanging from the running chain, bouncing and spinning as Korban Xarchos drew it towards them with a motion of the hand.

  As the scorched, soot-encrusted bones turned, Czevak moaned. Not a moan of shock or pain but of stomach-pit despair. He instantly recognised the glinting adamantium cuspids set in the skull, the signature adornment of the Path Incarnadine Haemovore Death Cult.

  As the sorcerer Xarchos brought the skeleton to a swinging stop with a flick of his finger, Czevak was forced to watch as the sickeningly incredible happened. The skeleton’s bones blanched white, before sprouting a labyrinthine net of veins, arteries and capillaries that swarmed its female frame. Muscle blossomed from the bones like fungus on and around a fallen tree, blooming through the blood vessels. The twirling ribcage housed a nest of organs, growing amongst one another: intestines snaking around a liver and kidneys, lu
ngs that inflated, the fist of a heart that began to pound and beat. The rawness of tendons and skinlessness enveloped the horror beneath, followed by the sheen of beautiful dark flesh that sculpted itself across her back and buttocks. Tiny, sausage curls cascaded down her shoulders and as she craned her neck around to see behind. Czevak could make out the divinity of her full lips and big, brown eyes. Once again, Joaqhuine the Renascent, Living Saint of the Creed Imperial had returned from the dead.

  ‘Joaqhuine…’ Czevak whispered.

  The Idolatress looked down at him and with the finishing touches of her agonising regeneration complete, allowed a tear to roll down one perfect cheek.

  ‘I know something of this, inquisitor,’ Ahriman said. ‘To destroy the thing you love. What were you trying to do? Harness the secrets of resurrection? Did she know that eventually she would be destined for a laboratory? That her gifts were meant for your Corpse-Emperor, in the vain hope that you might resurrect Him one day?’

  Czevak seemed not to hear him. The old man’s heart felt crippled in his chest. Crippled for the torment he’d suffered; crippled for the torment his enemies had made Joaqhuine suffer; crippled for the suffering yet to come for them both. Ahriman went on, ‘Was that not why you involved yourself with the alien eldar, so that you might steal their secrets of soul transference technology?’