25 For 25

by Various

  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 bat
hed 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 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.

  WRATH OF KHARN

  William King

  ‘Blood for the Blood God!’ bellowed Khârn the Betrayer, charging forward through the hail of bolter fire, towards the Temple of Superlative Indulgence. The bolter shells ricocheting off his breastplate did not even slow him down. The Chaos Space Marine smiled to himself. The ancient ceramite of his armour had protected him for over ten thousand years. He felt certain it would not let him down today. All around him warriors fell, clutching their wounds, crying in pain and fear.

  More souls offered up on the altar of battle to the Supreme Lord of Carnage, Khârn thought and grinned maniacally. Surely the Blood God would be pleased this day.

  Ahead of him, Khârn saw one of his fellow berzerkers fall, his body riddled with shells, his armour cracked and melted by plasma fire. The berzerker howled with rage and frustration, knowing that he was not going to be in at the kill, that he would give Khorne no more offerings on this or any other day. In frustration, the dying warrior set his chainsword to maximum power and took off his own head with one swift stroke. His blood rose in a red fountain to slake Khorne’s thirst.

  As he passed, Khârn kicked the fallen warrior’s head, sending it flying over the defenders’ parapet. At least this way his fallen comrade would witness Khârn slaughter the Slaanesh worshippers in the few delicious moments before he died. Under the circumstances, it was the least reward Khârn could grant such a devout warrior.

  The Betrayer leapt over a pile of corpses, snapping off a shot with his plasma pistol. One of the Slaanesh cultists fell, clutching the ruins of his melted face. Gorechild, Khârn’s daemonic axe, howled in his hands. Khârn brandished it above his head and bellowed his challenge to the sick, yellow sky of the Daemon World.

  ‘Skulls for the skull throne!’ Khârn howled. On every side, frothing Berzerkers echoed his cry. More shells whined all around him. He ignored them the way he would ignore the buzz of annoying insects. More of his fellows fell but Khârn stood untouched, secure in the blessing of the Blood God, knowing that it would not be his turn today.

  All was going according to plan. A tide of Khorne’s warriors flowed across the bomb-cratered plains towards the towering redoubt of the Slaanesh worshippers. Support fire from the Chaos Titan artillery had reduced most of the walls around the ancient temple complex to just so much rubble. The disgusting murals painted in fluorescent colours had been reduced to atoms. The obscene minarets that crowned the towers had been blasted into well-deserved oblivion. Lewd statues lay like colossal, limbless corpses, gazing at the sky with blank marble eyes.

  Even as Khârn watched, missiles blazed down from the sky and smashed another section of the defensive wall to blood-covered fragments. Huge clouds of dust billowed. The ground shook. The explosions rumbled like distant thunder. Sick joy bubbled through Khârn’s veins at the prospect of imminent violence.

  This was what he lived for, these moments of action where he could once again prove his superiority to all other warriors in the service of his exalted lord. In all his ten thousand year existence, Khârn had found no joy to touch the joy of battle, no lust greater than his lust for blood. Here on the field of mortal combat, he was more than in his element, he was at the site of his heart’s desire. It was the thing that had caused him to betray his oath of allegiance to the Emperor of Mankind, his genetic destiny as a Space Marine and even his old comrades in the World Eaters Legion. He had never regretted those decisions even for an instant. The bliss of battle was reward enough to stay any doubts.

  He jumped the ditch before the parapet, ignoring the poisoned spikes which lined the pit bottom and promised an ecstatic death to any that fell upon them. He scrambled up the loose scree of the rock face and vaulted over the low wall, planting his boot firmly into the face of a defender as he did so. The man screamed and fell back, trying to stem the flow of blood from his broken nose. Khârn swung Gorechild and ended his whining forever.

  ‘Death is upon you!’ Khârn roared as he dived into a mass of depraved cultists. Gorechild lashed out. Its teeth bit into hardened ceramite, spraying sparks in all directions. The blow passed through the target’s armour, opening its victim from stomach to sternum. The wretch fell back, clutching at his ropy entrails. Khârn despatched him with a backhand swipe and fell upon his fellows, slaying right and left, killing with every blow.

  Frantically the cultists’ leader bellowed orders, but it was too late. Khârn was among them, and no man had ever been able to boast of facing Khârn in close combat and living.

  The numbers 2243, then 2244, blinked before his eyes. The ancient gothic lettering of the digital death-counter, superimposed on Khârn’s field of vision, incremented quickly. Khârn was proud of this archaic device, presented by Warmaster Horus himself in ancient times. Its like could not be made in this degenerate age. Khârn grinned proudly as his tally of offerings
for this campaign continued to rise. He still had a long way to go to match his personal best but that was not going to stop him trying.

  Men screamed and howled as they died. Khârn roared with pleasure, killing everything within his reach, revelling in the crunch of bone and the spray of blood. The rest of the Khornate force took advantage of the destruction the Betrayer had caused. They swarmed over the walls in a howling mass and dismembered the Slaanesh worshippers. Already demoralised by the death of their leader, not even these fanatical worshippers of the Lord of Pleasure could stand their ground. Their morale broken, they panicked and fled.

  Such pathetic oafs were barely worth the killing, Khârn decided, lashing out reflexively and killing those Slaanesh worshippers who passed too to close him as they fled. 2246, 2247, 2248 went the death counter. It was time to get on with his mission. It was time to find the thing he had come here to destroy – the ancient daemonic artefact known as the Heart of Desire.

  ‘Attack!’ Khârn bellowed and charged through the gaping mouth of the leering stone head that was the entrance to the main temple building.

  Inside it was quiet, as if the roar of battle could not penetrate the walls. The air stank of strange perfumes. The walls had a porous, fleshy look. The pink-tinged light was odd; it shimmered all around, coming from no discernible source. Khârn switched to the auto-sensor systems within his helm, just in case there was some trickery here.

  Leather-clad priestesses, their faces domino-masked, emerged from padded doorways. They lashed at Khârn with whips that sent surges of pain and pleasure through his body. Another man, one less hardened than Khârn, might have been overwhelmed by the sensation but Khârn had spent millennia in the service of his god, and what passed through him now was but a pale shadow compared to the battle lust that mastered him. He chopped through the snake-like flesh of the living lash. Poison blood spurted forth. The woman screamed as if he had cut her. Looking closer he saw that she and the whip were one. A leering daemonic head tipped the weapon’s handle and had buried its fangs into her wrist. Khârn’s interest was sated. He killed the priestess with one back-handed swipe of Gorechild.