by Various
The Astartes are notoriously secretive, sometimes downright blatant in their uncooperative relationship with the Administratum. At best, it might involve a series of formal approaches, delaying tactics, bargaining.
Even so, I wanted to alert my brethren on Lorches to the possible lead. I damned Saint Bastian when I remembered the place had no vox-caster! I couldn’t even forward a message to the Astropathic enclave at Symbalopolis for transmission off world.
A sister brought me supper on a tray. Just as I was finishing, and Kalibane was lighting the lamps, Niro and Jardone came to my chamber.
‘Brothers?’
Jardone got right to it, staring at me through his half-moon lenses. ‘The brotherhood of the hospice have met, and they decided that you must leave. Tomorrow. No further audiences will be granted. We have a vessel that will take you to the fishing port at Math Island. You can obtain passage to Symbalopolis from there.’
‘I am disappointed, Jardone. I do not wish to leave. My recollection is not complete.’
‘It is as complete as it’s going to be!’ he snapped.
‘The hospice has never been so troubled,’ Niro said quietly. ‘There have been brawls. Two novitiates have been injured. Three inmates have attempted suicide. Years of work have been undone in a few moments.’
I nodded. ‘I regret the disturbance, but–’
‘No buts!’ barked Jardone.
‘I’m sorry, Higher Sark,’ said Niro. ‘That is how it is.’
I slept badly in the cramped cot. My mind, my memory, played games, going over the details of the interview. There was shock and injury in Ebhoe, that was certain, for the event had been traumatic. But there was something else. A secret beyond anything he had told me, some profound memory. I could taste it.
I would not be deterred. Too many lives depended on it.
Kalibane was slumbering heavily when I crept from the chamber. In the darkness, I felt my way to the stairs, and up to the third floor. There was a restlessness in the close air. I moved past locked cells where men moaned in their sleep or muttered in their insomnia.
At intervals, I hugged the shadows as novitiate wardens with lamps made their patrols. It took perhaps three quarters of an hour to reach the cell block where Ebhoe resided. I stalked nervously past the bolted door of Ioq’s room.
The spy-slit opened at my touch. ‘Ebhoe? Colonel Ebhoe?’ I called softly into the darkness.
‘Who?’ his cold voice replied.
‘It is Sark. We weren’t finished.’
‘Go away.’
‘I will not, until you tell me the rest.’
‘Go away.’
I thought desperately, and eagerness made me cruel. ‘I have a torch, Ebhoe. A powerful lamp. Do you want me to shine it in through the spy-hole?’
When he spoke again, there was terror in his voice. Emperor forgive me for my manipulation.
‘What more is there?’ he asked. ‘The Torment spread. We died by the thousand. I cannot help with your cause, though I pity those men on Genovingia.’
‘You never told me how it ended.’
‘Did you not read the reports?’
I glanced up and down the dark cell-block to make sure we were still alone. ‘I read them. They were... sparse. They said Warmaster Gatus incinerated the enemy from orbit, and ships were sent to relieve you at Pirody Polar. They expressed horror at the extent of the plague-loss. Fifty-nine thousand men dead. No count was made of the civilian losses. They said that by the time the relief ships arrived, the Torment had been expunged. Four hundred men were evacuated. Of them, only one hundred and ninety-one are still alive according to the records.’
‘There’s your answer then.’
‘No, colonel. That’s no answer! How was it expunged?’
‘We located the source of infection, cleansed it. That was how.’
‘How, Ebhoe? How, in the God-Emperor’s name?’
‘It was the height of the Torment. Thousands dead...’
VII
It was the height of the Torment. Thousands dead, corpses everywhere, pus and blood running in those damnably bright halls.
I went to Valis again, begging for news. He was in his infirmium, working still. Another batch of vaccines to try, he told me. The last six had failed, and had even seemed to aggravate the contagion.
The men were fighting themselves by then, killing each other in fear and loathing. I told Valis this, and he was silent, working at a flame burner on the steel workbench. He was huge being, of course... Astartes, a head and a half taller than me, wearing a cowled red robe over his Doom Eagles armour. He lifted specimen bottles from his narthecium, and held them up to the ever-present light.
I was tired, tired like you wouldn’t believe. I hadn’t slept in days. I put down the flamer I had been using for cleansing work, and sat on a stool.
‘Are we all going to perish?’ I asked the great Apothecary.
‘Dear, valiant Ebhoe,’ he said with a laugh. ‘You poor little man. Of course not. I will not allow it.’
He turned to face me, filling a long syringe from a stoppered bottle. I was in awe of him, even after the time we had spent together.
‘You are one of the lucky ones, Ebhoe. Clean so far. I’d hate to see you contract this pestilence. You have been a faithful ally to me through this dark time, helping to distribute my vaccines. I will mention you to your commanders.’
‘Thank you, Apothecary.’
‘Ebhoe,’ he said, ‘I think it is fair to say we cannot save any who have been infected now. We can only hope to vaccinate the healthy against infection. I have prepared a serum for that purpose, and I will inoculate all healthy men with it. You will help me. And you will be first. So I can be sure not to lose you.’
I hesitated. He came forward with the syringe, and I started to pull up my sleeve.
‘Open your jacket and tunic. It must go through the stomach wall.’ I reached for my tunic clasps.
And saw it. The tiniest thing. Just a tiny, tiny thing.
A greenish-yellow blister just below Valis’s right ear.
VIII
Ebhoe fell silent. The air seemed electrically charged. Inmates in neighbouring cells were thrashing restless, and some were crying out. At any moment, the novitiate wardens would come.
‘Ebhoe?’ I called through the slit.
His voice had fallen to a terrified whisper, the whisper of a man who simply cannot bear to put the things haunting his mind into words.
‘Ebhoe?’
Keys clattered nearby. Lamplight flickered under a hall door. Ioq was banging at his cell door and growling. Someone was crying, someone else was wailing in a made-up language. The air was ripe with the smell of faeces, sweat and agitated fear.
‘Ebhoe!’
There was no time left. ‘Ebhoe, please!’
‘Valis had the Torment! He’d had it all along, right from the start!’ Ebhoe’s voice was strident and anguished. The words came out of the slit as hard and lethal as las-fire. ‘He had spread it! He! Through his work, his vaccines, his treatments! He had spread the plague! His mind had been corrupted by it, he didn’t know what he was doing! His many, many vaccines had failed because they weren’t vaccines! They were new strains of the Torment bred in his infirmium! He was the carrier: a malevolent, hungry pestilence clothed in the form of a noble man, killing thousands upon thousands upon thousands!’
I went cold. Colder than I’d ever been before. The idea was monstrous. The Torment had been more than a waster of lives, it had been sentient, alive, deliberate... planning and moving through the instrument it had corrupted.
The door of Ioq’s cell was bulging and shattering. Screams welled all around, panic and fear in equal measure. The entire hospice was shaking with unleashed psychoses.
Lamps flashed at the end of the block. Novitiates
yelled out and ran forward as they saw me. They would have reached me had not Ioq broken out again, rabid and slavering, throwing his hideous bulk into them, ripping at them in a frenzy.
‘Ebhoe!’ I yelled through the slit. ‘What did you do?’
He was crying, his voice ragged with gut-heaving sobs. ‘I grabbed my flamer! Emperor have mercy, I snatched it up and bathed Valis with flame! I killed him! I killed him! I slew the pride of the Doom Eagles! I burned him apart! I expunged the source of the Torment!’
A novitiate flew past me, his throat ripped out by animal tusks. His colleagues were locked in a desperate struggle with Ioq.
‘You burned him.’
‘Yes. The flames touched off the chemicals in the infirmium, the sample bottles, the flasks of seething plague water. They exploded. A fireball... Oh gods... brighter than the daylight that had never gone away. Brighter than... fire everywhere... liquid fire... flames around me... all around... oh... oh...’
Bright flashes filled the hall, the loud discharge of a las-weapon.
I stepped back from Ebhoe’s cell door, shaking. Ioq lay dead amid the mangled corpses of three novitiates. Several others, wounded, whimpered on the floor.
Brother Jardone, a laspistol in his bony hand, pushed through the orderlies and ecclesiarchs gathering in the hall, and pointed the weapon at me.
‘I should kill you for this, Sark. How dare you!’
Baptrice stepped forward and took the gun from Jardone. Niro gazed at me in weary disappointment.
‘See to Ebhoe,’ Baptrice told the sisters nearby. They unlocked the cell door and went in.
‘You will leave tomorrow, Sark,’ Baptrice said. ‘I will file a complaint to your superiors.’
‘Do so,’ I said. ‘I never wanted this, but I had to reach the truth. It may be, from what Ebhoe has told me, that a way to fight Uhlren’s Pox is in our reach.’
‘I hope so,’ said Baptrice, gazing bitterly at the carnage in the hall. ‘It has cost enough.’
The novitiates were escorting me back to my room when the sisters brought Ebhoe out. The ordeal of recollection had killed him. I will never forgive myself for that, no matter how many lives on Genovingia we saved.
And I will never forget the sight of him, revealed at last in the light.
IX
I left the next day by launch with Kalibane. No one from the hospice saw me off or even spoke to me. From Math Island, I transmitted my report to Symbalopolis, and from there, astropathically, it lanced through the warp to Lorches.
Was Uhlren’s Pox expunged? Yes, eventually. My work assisted in that. The blood-froth was like the Torment, engineered by the Archenemy, just as sentient. Fifty-two medical officers, sources just like Valis, were executed and incinerated.
I forget how many we lost altogether in the Genovingia group. I forget a lot, these days. My memory is not what it was, and I am thankful for that, at times.
I never forget Ebhoe. I never forget his corpse, wheeled out by the sisters. He had been caught in the infirmium flames on Pirody Polar. Limbless, wizened like a seed-case, he hung in a suspensor chair, kept alive by intravenous drains and sterile sprays. A ragged, revolting remnant of a man.
He had no eyes. I remember that most clearly of all. The flames had scorched them out.
He had no eyes, and yet he was terrified of the light.
I still believe that memory is the finest faculty we as a species own. But by the Golden Throne, there are things I wish I could never remember again.
Torment
Anthony Reynolds
Death was nothing to be feared. Death he would have welcomed. It was the in-between place that that filled him with dread.
To some it was the Undercroft, Tartarus, or Limbo; to others it was Sheyole, the Shadowlands, or Despair. On old Colchis it was known as Bharzek. Translated literally, its meaning was simple and direct – Torment.
Those condemned to wander its ashen fields were said to be cursed above all others. They lingered there, haunted, confused and lost, suffused with impotent rage, longing and regret. Unable to move on, yet equally unable to move back to the lives they had left behind, they were trapped in that empty, grey wasteland, doomed to an eternity of emptiness.
He knew now that the old stories were wrong, however.
It was possible to come back...
‘Burias.’ That voice was not welcome here. It was an intrusion. He tried to ignore it, but it was insistent.
‘Burias-Drak’shal.’
He awoke to pain. It blossomed within him, building, compounding, multiplying, until every inch of his body was awash with fire. He was blinded by agony, yet he grinned, bloodied lips drawn back in a leering grimace.
Pain was good. Pain he could endure. He was alive, and not yet confined to the hell that the Dark Apostle had promised him. Burias embraced his pain, letting it draw him back from the brink of oblivion.
He knew where he was – deep within the Basilica of Torment, on Sicarus, adopted homeworld of the XVII Legion. He’d been dragged here in chains by his former brothers, but he had no concept of how long ago that had been. It felt like an eternity.
Gradually his senses returned.
The smell hit him first. Hot, cloying and repellent, it was the stink of a dying animal. It hung in the unbearably humid air like a fog, something that could be felt on the skin, oily, clinging and foul. He could taste it. Sickly stale sweat, charred meat and burnt hair; none of it could quite mask the stench of bile and necrotising flesh.
But more than anything else, he could smell blood. The room reeked of it.
He discerned low whispers and chanting, and the hushed shuffle of feet on a hard stone floor as his hearing returned. He heard the clank of chains, the hiss of venting steam, and the mechanical grind of gears and pistons.
This is not your fate.
The words were spoken with the confidence of one who does not need to raise its voice in order to make itself heard. It was familiar, but he could not place it. He tried to answer, but his lips were dry, cracked and bleeding, his throat raw and painful. He swallowed, tasting blood, and tried again.
‘Who are you?’ he managed.
I am the Word and the Truth.
‘Your voice... is inside my head,’ said Burias, wondering if his torture had driven him to insanity. ‘Are you real? Are you a spirit? A daemon?’
I am your saviour, Burias.
The haze of his surroundings was slowly coming into focus. He was staring straight up at an octagonal, vaulted ceiling. It was shrouded in darkness, lit only by a handful of low-burning sconces mounted upon the eight pillars surrounding him. Oily smoke coiled from these fittings, rising languorously.
He lay spread-eagled upon a low stone slab, bound in heavy chains bolted to the floor. The links that bound him were each the size of a Space Marine’s fist and heavy manacles were clamped around his ankles, wrists, and neck. The flesh around these bindings was blackened, raw and weeping, burnt almost to the bone.
The manacles were inscribed with ancient Colchisian cuneiform. Painstakingly replicated from the Book of Lorgar, the potent runic script glowed like molten rock, and the infernal heat radiating from them made the air shimmer. Yet more of the angular ideograms were carved directly into Burias’s tortured flesh, and these too smouldered with burning heat.
His body was a ruin of raw scar tissue, burns, cuts, abrasions and welts. His sacred warplate had been torn away piece by piece, with all the eagerness and hunger of feeding vultures. Where over the years it had become fused to his superhuman frame, it had been crudely hacked off with cleavers and blades that he suspected had been purposefully dulled to make the work longer and bloodier.
Every conceivable torture had been inflicted on him. But he had not been broken.
You are already broken, yet your mind refuses to accept it.
‘
You lie,’ Burias gasped.
I do not. I am here to help you.
‘Then help me!’
Look to your left. That is your way out.
With some difficulty, his movement painfully restricted, Burias turned his head. Before him was the reinforced door of his cell. It was closed and bolted, and rust and corrosion was sloughing off its surface like dead skin. The door was massive, thick and solid, and the stonework around the lintel was carved with runic wards.
A pair of hulking executors were slumped in shadowed niches to either side of the door. Huge even compared to a Space Marine and vaguely simian in appearance, these mecha-daemon sentinels appeared completely lifeless except for their eye-sensors which blinked unceasingly in the darkness. They were behemoths of armour and barely-checked fury, mechanical constructs built around a brain and nervous system that had once been human, though daemonic entities had long since been bound within their steel bodies.
When roused, they were easily capable of ripping him in half with their immense powered mitts. Even in his weakened state, chained, tortured and stripped of his armour, Burias stared at them with eyes narrowed; an apex predator sizing up its rivals.
His muscles tensed as his body responded to his desire to fight, yet he was bound securely and he knew that any attempt to break his bonds was futile. There was no hope of escape.
All that imprisons you is your own perception, Burias, and nothing more. You believe that there is no escape, and so there is none.
‘You can hear my thoughts,’ said Burias.
Yes. You are not speaking aloud now, you realise?
‘Who are you?’
Burias’s question was met with silence.
‘Are you Drak’shal?’
Again, silence.
His view of the dormant executors was abruptly blocked as a dark figure shuffled in front of him, chattering incoherently. More of these robed figures moved around him, attentive and whispering, their faces hidden in the shadow of deep cowls. They were loathsome creatures, emaciated and hunched, the definition of their ribs and vertebrae clearly visible through their black robes. Their arms were corpse-thin and grey. Rusting cables and tubes that leaked milky fluids protruded from their flesh, and their bony fingers were tipped with a plethora of needles, hooks, blades and callipers. All were stained with blood. His blood.
