Bastion Wars

by Henry Zou

  The Kosi brave took a deep breath and planted a foot inside the carved boundary. The crowd inched back, fearfully expectant, but nothing occurred. Exhaling slowly, the Kosi entered the circle fully and knelt down to inspect the machine.

  The machine seemed intuitive enough and there was nothing for the brave to do but turn the cranking handle. Gingerly gripping it with thumb and forefinger, he started to wind it. To his surprise, it began to turn smoothly despite its considerable age. He began to turn it faster, feeling the gears within the machine tick over, building up momentum as a soft purr began to emit from the tin box.

  With a sudden flash, lights within the temple came alive. Some of the elders exclaimed in wonder while others screamed and covered their heads. High up in the vaulted ceiling, light they had never known existed flared after five thousand and seven hundred years of dormancy, lighting the temple with a bright orange radiance.

  The brave continued to turn, as if he had known all along what to do. The purr become a loud, steady hum. Acoustic resonance thrummed the air, shivering the skin with its building pressure. In the back of the assembly, someone begged the brave to stop turning the handle but the Kosi could not stop turning even if he had wanted to; the cranking wheel was now spinning on its own, moving so fast the man could not lift his fingers away.

  Then it stopped turning with a click. The temperature in the temple plunged. The breath of the elders plumed white as they waited in expectation. Even the alarmed ones who had screamed were now still. Frost did not exist on Hauts Bassiq, except for when mind-witches used their mind powers. But frost now coated the temple, a thin furry sheet that covered the walls and even the wool of the elders’ shukas.

  But nothing happened. Except for the winking sequence of lights that played across the machine’s press pad, nothing happened. The Kosi brave backed out of the circle and the elders leaned forwards, eager to get a closer look now that the work was done.

  That was when a seismic rumble flattened the entire congregation. A wall of energy pushed them down and the machine rose up into the air, suspended for a blink before it clattered back down. This time, everyone shouted in fright. The lights winked out and the temple dimmed, as if a shadow had passed overhead. The elders felt exhausted as they tried to claw their way upright, groping lamely in the darkness.

  All of them, even the most dim and psychically inert, could instinctively feel what had happened. Although they could not truly understand it, they knew that the power from the little tin machine had been real.

  ‘I think I have summoned them,’ the Kosi brave said, staring at his own hands as if they were sacred objects.

  The slave scratched at the scar on his cheek without thinking. It was a habit he had developed without ever realising. The small incision, shaped like a ringworm, had been cut below his cheekbone. Every slave bore the same mark as a sign of servitude.

  Although he had been a slave for many years he had never become accustomed to that scar. It worried him. He could feel a lump in his face, if he dug his fingers in and felt past the skin, fat and flesh. Inside, the Blood Gorgons had buried a small larva, a thread of white worm no bigger than a fingernail.

  For now the larva was inert, hibernating within his flesh. The slave was not sure how it worked, for it was not his place to know such things, but he knew that each larva was genetically coded to a particular Blood Gorgon, so that if a slave ever strayed too far from his master, the larva would hatch.

  What occurred thereafter was the stuff of speculation. Slaves did not wish to talk of such unfortunate things.

  Their masters told them often that it would take many hours for the larva to reach the pupal stage, but from there, growth to the final stage was instantaneous. Self-destructive death and engorging of human flesh was its final stage of development but by then, as far as any slave was concerned, escape would be impossible.

  It meant he was bound to Master Muhr. Even when he was more than a sub-deck away from his master, the beetle often itched, a sign that the creature was waking and growing hungry.

  He scratched again and quickened his pace.

  The slave climbed the stairs from the Cauldron Born’s cavernous lower decks and began the long trek towards the upper galleries. The ship’s size was immense and even after nineteen years of servitude, the slave still found himself lost if he did not leave glowing guide markers to retrace his passage. Some of the passages had been disused for so long that they had developed their own ecology. Softly glowing patches of bacterial flora crept up the walls, while shelled molluscs sucked on reefs of neon dendrites. There, the plant life wept a weak organic acid which corroded the metal bulkheads, forming small grottos and burrows for the darting lantern-eels and other flesh-hungry organisms.

  It was a dangerous walk for a slave and he thrashed the darkness in front of him with an ore stave in one hand and a phos-light in the other. He found one of his guide markers at every bend in the tunnels: little glow stones that he had put down when he had walked this path the first time. The walk had taken much longer than expected, and he was afraid his master would punish him for his tardiness. He picked up the glow stones and returned them to his satchel as he found them, until finally he reached a clamp shutter at the end of a tunnel, wreathed in gently nodding anemones of pink, purple and electric blue tentacles.

  ‘Catacomb serf Moselle Grae,’ the slave said to the brass vox arrays overhead. ‘I have the nutrient sacs that Master Muhr requisitioned. Hurry please.’

  The clamp shutters shot upwards with a clatter of machine rollers. On the other side were two guards in brass hauberks and black, tightly wound turbans. They too were slaves and their cheeks were scarred by scarabs, but to Grae they were imposing nonetheless. Grae nodded at them briefly and scurried beneath their crossed halberds.

  The guards stood at the threshold of Master Muhr’s personal chambers, a towering spire that jutted from the upper tiers of the Cauldron Born.

  The neotropical flora grew less abundantly here, as if the organisms dared not anger the sorcerer. They were tamed to a fluorescent garden that flanked the winding path towards the spire’s lower entrance. Thousands of luminous ferns, swaying like synapses, were surrounded by ponds of condensation from the ship’s circulation systems. Only the lower portion of the spire was visible, for its height protruded from the ship’s hull, rising through the inner mantle, vacuum seals and the hemispheric armour. The strip path led to double doors of old wood, a rarity aboard the ship, and likely plundered as a trophy on some past raid.

  ‘Emperor bless me,’ Grae muttered to himself while touching the iron of his slave collar three times.

  The spire of Master Muhr had always made him feel a nauseous fear, no matter how many times he had been there before. It was different from the other parts of the ship. The air here seemed sorcerous, alive with a hateful presence. Grae likened it to a feeling of walking through the site of some terrible past massacre or touching the clothes of a murder victim. Things had happened within these walls, horrible blasphemous things that had left a psychic imprint.

  As Grae crept down the path, he found the doors to be ajar. He hesitated, unsure of whether to enter, but decided that it would be an evil day if he did not bring his master the nutrient sacs on time. Easing the door open, he crept inside.

  ‘Master Muhr?’ he called out.

  There was no answer. As his bare feet padded into the antechamber, glow strips reacted to his movement and permeated the area in low green light. The walls were honeycombed with preserved specimens immortalised in amniotic suspension. Grae went about his business quickly, trying to avoid eye contact with the jars and tanks containing Muhr’s creations.

  It was like a horror house Grae had visited in the travelling rural fairs, when he had been a child growing up in the tableland counties of Orlen. He made sure to scurry past an open display at the entrance to the west corridor. From afar the display looked like thesp
ians frozen mid-scene. Up close, they were taxidermed slaves, posed in a sickening recreation of a scene from the stage theatre Ransom of Lady Almas. Thankfully their glass-eyed faces ignored him, their waxy skin frozen permanently in their rigid poses.

  Grae began to check all the chambers in the lower levels, working his way from the lower laboratories into the trophy galleries. There, glass display cases housed the relics Master Muhr had collected on his campaigns. Orkoid teeth, rusting blades, eldar jewellery, polearms, xenos attire and ceramics, all neatly labelled and well dusted. Yet Master Muhr was nowhere to be found.

  From these galleries a spiralling staircase of black iron led to the upper levels, but Grae had never been that far up before. Briefly he considered leaving the nutrition sacs at the base of the staircase for Master Muhr to find, but he feared such a gesture would be seen as a sign of disrespect. In fact, many of the jarred experiments had been slaves who had shown Master Muhr disrespect. He thought better of the idea and climbed the staircase.

  It was the first time he had been up this far, and frightened though he was, it was difficult not to be awed by the view. He stood in a circular observation deck. The heavy drapes had been pulled back and beyond the void glass was a three hundred and sixty degree view of deep space. It was a never-ending darkness, an infinite deepness interrupted by the fizz and pop of billions of stars. Thousands of kilometres away, a pillar of gas was ponderously exhaling, its plume resembling the head of a horse. Grae knew its unfathomable distance, yet it seemed to rise so close, almost eclipsing his vision. It felt as if a horse-headed god was peering into the tiny viewing glass of his interior.

  ‘The void glass will need resurfacing and cleaning,’ Grae muttered to himself as he climbed higher up the staircase. He was talking to himself out of fear. Shaking his head, the slave began to climb to the top level.

  But that was when all the glow strips faded out.

  Grae almost dropped his satchel there and then. Startled, he fumbled to turn on his phos-light but the bulb had fizzed out. It was strange, as he had made certain to place a fresh bulb into the hand light when he set out. Shaking his head, Grae began to grope his way upwards, cautiously tapping the ground before him with the ore stave.

  The air was coarse with chill and Grae became acutely aware that he was shivering. The loincloth and studded iron belt he wore afforded no warmth and he wore nothing else, for his masters were wary of concealed weapons. As he ran his hand along a wall panel, it left a furrow in the hoar frost there.

  ‘Witchcraft,’ Grae moaned. He felt as if he were going to be sick.

  Grae had been a governor’s aide before the Blood Gorgons ransacked his world. His daily job had been receipt of aerial parcels and message wafers for the governor’s Chamber of Commerce. It was dreary work for the most part, but once Grae had seen an adept of the Astra Telepathica transmitting urgent interstellar messages from the governor’s office. The eyeless man had spooked him, and Grae had become withdrawn in his presence, showing more timidity than he would have liked. By the time the adept had finished his work Grae remembered vividly that the room had become freezing and he’d spent considerable time mopping up the after-frost. The adept had wet the parcel shelves and frozen the ink in his typographer.

  He was shocked out of his thoughts as something brushed past him. Grae turned around but saw nothing, or rather, could see nothing. It had been astonishingly quick, like a brisk tug of his clothes.

  ‘Master Muhr?’

  He climbed the next few levels slowly, calling for his master the entire way. The air grew colder. He almost lost the skin of his left palm when he placed it on the hand rails.

  ‘Master?’

  At the upper atrium, Grae froze. He heard voices. Master Muhr was talking to someone. Not daring to interrupt, Grae crept to a standstill at the top of the stairs, glad that he was hidden within the shadow. He stood within the folds of the curtain with his eyes fixed firmly on the floor. In the periphery of his vision, Grae could see the atrium was bathed in a green light. A forest of black curtains as tall as trees hung from the ceiling; beyond that, he could see nothing else.

  ‘Then it is done. The ambush was clean and the dark eldar performed excellently. Gammadin is dead.’

  ‘That’s a good start, Muhr, but we need better assurance,’ said a voice that Grae could not recognise.

  ‘Only a start,’ Muhr rasped. ‘The Crow has begun the sowing of Hauts Bassiq.’

  ‘Plague and famine, Muhr – you’ve promised plague and famine for so long.’

  Grae tried not to listen, he even blocked his ears. These were things a slave had no right to know, he was sure of it.

  ‘The Crow will maintain his side of the bargain,’ Muhr retorted. ‘He needs our hand in this as much as we need his.’

  ‘And what of Sabtah?’ the voice inquired.

  ‘I will kill Sabtah myself,’ Muhr answered.

  Grae squeezed his eyes together and held his breath. Most of what he heard he did not understand, but there were glimmers of things that he knew he should not be hearing.

  ‘Who else knows about this?’ asked the voice in the curtains.

  Muhr cleared his throat. ‘Only you, a handful of unnamed squads in Fourth and Sixth Companies… and a slave named Moselle Grae.’

  The reply jolted Grae. Frightened, he looked up and realised Muhr was already looking at him. The witch’s eyes sought him out in his hiding place, boring into him.

  ‘Did you think you could hide there, little mouse?’ Muhr asked, addressing him directly.

  Grae’s nerves could not hold out any longer. He was done. He turned and ran, taking the nutrient sacs with him. There was no logic to what he did, but the fear he felt was deeply primal. It was the same flight instinct that early man had relied upon, a thoughtless, baseless need to just run. That voice was too much for him.

  He clattered down the spiral stairs but only made it to the third step.

  Stop,+ commanded Muhr.

  Grae’s legs instantly seized up, his mind overwhelmed by Muhr’s psionic will.

  Turn around.+

  Jerked like a marionette, Grae spun around without consciously doing so. He saw Muhr rise from the ground, utterly naked except for his mask. A grotesque mass of scars ridged the muscles of Muhr’s abdomen, long and thin like the deft cuts of a razor. Grae wanted to scream but he no longer had control of his own body.

  Muhr hovered over Grae with his towering stature and studied the slave. He inspected his shaven scalp and tested the muscles of his arms like a rancher inspecting stock. Apparently satisfied, Muhr nodded.

  ‘You are a strong slave. We Blood Gorgons do not waste the lives of our slaves needlessly,’ Muhr remarked. ‘So you will live.’

  Grae was so relieved his left eye began to twitch. It was the only part of him that Muhr’s psychic paralysis had not affected.

  ‘But we should lobotomise you. I do not want my aspirations undone by gossiping slaves,’ Muhr said sagely.

  Grae’s left eye widened. There was pure terror in his pupils. The veins on his neck bulged visibly as the slave struggled to move. But Muhr would not let him go.

  ‘We have need for workers such as you on Bassiq. Not living like you are, of course, but dead, yet obedient all the same,’ Muhr muttered as he parted the curtains and moved out of Grae’s paralysed view. He rustled through the atrium, clicking his eyelids rapidly to adjust to the darkness. With a satisfied whistle, Muhr picked up a sliver of long surgical steel from a trestle table – an orbitoclast.

  ‘This is harmless really. I’m going to insert it through your eye socket and puncture the thin wall of bone to reach your frontal lobe. A few medial and lateral swings should separate your thalamus,’ Muhr stated. ‘You will not feel much after that.’

  Chapter Four

  Nine hundred Traitor Marines in congress was unsettling. The Temple Heart barely seemed t
o contain their wild, exuberant ranks. They stamped their feet like bulls and boasted on vox-amp of their scars and trophies. Silence only fell across them when Sabtah ascended the central dais.

  ‘Chapter-strength deployment,’ announced Sabtah the Older. The declaration was momentous and all of the Blood Gorgons, all nine hundred of them, roared their approval.

  ‘Hauts Bassiq is an ancestral world. Many of your brothers can trace their blood line to the lineage of the plains people. I’d wager many more of you have infused Bassiq lineage in your veins through the blood bond.’

  The gathered Traitor Marines howled in approval. They sat, lounged or crouched about the temple without any particular display of company order. Congregating in six-man squads, each formed by three blood-bound pairs, each of the pairs were attended to by a train of retainers – black turbans, armour serfs, helm bearers and dancers.

  ‘With Gammadin’s death there is a void in rulership,’ said Captain Hazareth in his deep metallic bass. ‘Until such time as a warrior will be chosen to reign, I pledge wardship of my company in your hands. Whoever else may do so is not of my concern. For now, my swordarm is yours.’

  Hazareth the Cruel, Captain of 1st Company, was an embodiment of the Blood Gorgons Chapter. Wild and boisterous, he was a violent thing. When he laughed, and he did so often, the humour behind it was black and bitter yet genuinely mirthful. His face had been melted by fire and his cheek pockmarked with bullet scars. Hazareth wore them like laurels of honour, for his men feared him and the gods favoured him well. A tortoise-like shell had solidified around his shoulders and power pack like a hunch-backed mound of bone, a powerful sign of daemonic favour. The shell ended in a short, muscular tail that sprouted from the base of Hazareth’s spine and ended in a knot of fibrous growth. So monstrously thick-framed that he resembled a Dreadnought, Hazareth had his club tail swept low to balance his ponderous steps.