Bastion Wars

by Henry Zou

  They dragged the slow and trundling carriage through the neatly ordered industrial tier with its smoking foundries and running rivers of molten metal. The air there was cooled by turbine fans the size of small hills that whooped with a constant urgency.

  Barsabbas was taken up into the residential tiers, past layer upon layer of stacked, multi-storey villas. Although several children picked despondently through the street litter, the tiled streets were dominated by Nurgle infantry who patrolled in squads.

  They led him up and up, towards the apex palace and where the chimney columns protruded through the void shields to belch black clouds into the atmosphere. There, the nobles and prestige castes of Ur, those who had sworn obedience to their Nurgle overlords, now waited to see him: the captured trophy.

  Barsabbas had expected more of the barony. But the denizens of Ur were a sad, sick group, milky-skinned from the sun protection of their void shields, their faces wrapped in glare shades. Their clothes were crumpled and filthy. Their isolationism was evident amongst their fading finery; the textiles once rich and well made were now thinning into thread. The men preferred tabards and cloaks of coarse hessian for their resilience, while the women wore shawls of blues, greys and blacks for their ease of dyeing. It seemed the barony held a monopoly of the planet’s resources but had nothing to spend it on.

  The isolation had eroded their health too. Even a visitor such as Barsabbas could plainly see the effects of inbreeding and an indigenous immune system which hadn’t been in contact with the pathogens of an outside world. There were not many children, and many people balanced upon crooked limbs and crutches. Rarer still were those of an older age, for it seemed the elderly did not live long in Ur. Barsabbas imagined that the arrival of Nurgle would have devastated their sheltered existence through mere contact with bacteria alone.

  They stood with the inattentive wistfulness of forlorn prisoners. The fusion reactors had been made to leak on purpose, allowing Ur to irradiate its surrounding land and slowly kill its inhabitants. The Plague Marines with their supernatural constitution and power-armoured containment were immune, but these people were not.

  Nurgle was poisoning them slowly, yet still they jeered Barsabbas as his open-topped carriage trundled past. They shouted and hurled pebbles although their taunts lacked conviction. Barsabbas had the sense that these people performed their hate simply to curry the favour of Nurgle. Many simply watched him with sullen looks, empathising with his state of captivity.

  In truth, the decay of Ur had begun long before the coming of Nurgle. It could be said that by some strange, or perhaps divine, consequence, Nurgle had chosen to conquer them and accelerate their process of decline.

  Once, the citizens of Ur had been men of a mono-segregationist Imperial cult. They had believed Bassiq was a trial for the colonists and the God-Emperor had wanted them to remain pure, to shore up their city-state as an island of salvation amongst a sea of godless sin. They believed, in short, that Bassiq with its fire and heat was the canonical damnation of the warp.

  But they had devolved over the centuries. Sealed away in their city, the people had atrophied, withering like an unused muscle. The Barons of Ur, once Imperial cultists, had quickly relinquished rule to Nurgle.

  Now the Barons of Ur attended their sumptuous courts, in a dining gallery in the highest tiers of their clay palace. The woven rugs that adorned the walls were threadbare with silverfish. Men roosted on ceremonial tables whose gilt was flaking to show the worn, chipped wood beneath.

  High Baron Matheus Toth sat in his fading chiffon. His ring-clustered fingers darted as he pantomimed the act of eating. The table was bare but he supped on a spoon delicately and drew deep breaths from a hollow goblet.

  The full court had been summoned by their Plague Marine overseers. Some guests were living, while others, quite dead, were dragged unceremoniously from their coffins. The unliving sat in their high-backed chairs, their hands curled into stiff fists and their faces unmoving. Some were bloated with corpse gas and slumped awkwardly in their seats. The aggressive ones had to be tied down by rope, their dignity long faded as they shouted garbled words from black lips.

  A full court of dying nobles, eating dust and attended by the dead. The richly dark humour of Papa Nurgle was evident in the actions of his followers. A royal guard blew on a horn with flaking lips and the celebrations began.

  Sindul scratched his cheek, fidgeting incessantly at the mark. If he probed with his fingertips, he fancied he could detect the hard lump buried in his flesh. He was insufferably bored.

  The human architecture did not at all interest him. The walls were too neat, too vertical and bared brick. Ugly, wrought-iron torch brackets were fixed to the walls, but their flames had been replaced with phosphor lighting. Sindul supposed the sconce fixtures were meant to complement the dining hall but they didn’t. The placement of the long trestle tables was not quite symmetrical and everything about the chamber was linear and claustrophobic. Sindul had not wanted to accept the barony’s invitation to be the guest of honour at their banquet. He felt like a vulture dining alongside rodents.

  For a moment, it seemed as if the barons were watching him. Playing the part of a willing guest, Sindul’s hand drifted back to the table and he picked up a fork. But then he cursed himself inwardly for he remembered they were mostly dead. Those sitting around him were mere carrion kings, propped up between living vassals. Among the hundreds of guests, more than half were corpses set into place by their household servants.

  Those who were yet living regarded the xenos in their midst with weary resignation. He remembered that these barons had once been puritanical men. Now they were nothing but puppets of Nurgle. They regarded him with suspicion, and rightly so.

  One of the barons leaned over and laid a chubby paw on Sindul’s shoulders. His nails were yellowed from malnutrition. Sweaty, yet oddly soft with fat, he smiled at the dark eldar. When he did so, a varicose ulcer on his cheek fluttered tentatively like the heartbeat of a tiny bird.

  ‘If you are hungry, feel free to dine on our departed guests,’ the baron suggested, handing him a carving knife.

  For a second, Sindul contemplated driving the fork in his hand straight into the man’s face. He pondered the after-effect of fork against flesh. The baron was a moist, breathy man and Sindul wondered if he might simply deflate with a burp of corpse gas. The concept intrigued him.

  But before Sindul could be tempted to respond, a sentry of Ur began to blast discordant, human music from a crude horn. At the summons, Barsabbas was wheeled in on a stone carriage, his limbs bound to the edges of a circular yoke. They had cleaned him and polished him like a trophy, scouring away the dirt to reveal the rich umber ceramite beneath.

  Sindul looked away, feigning disinterest, as other nobles rose from their seats and stole closer to the living trophy.

  Finally, almost reluctantly, Sindul mopped the corners of his mouth with coarse cloth and pushed his chair back with a squeal. Now was his chance.

  Sindul stole close to Barsabbas. He pretended to marvel at the Traitor Marine’s power armour, tracing the enamel and filigree with his hands. Deftly, he slipped a filing spike down Barsabbas’s elbow joint.

  ‘I’ll find you in the asylum,’ Sindul whispered.

  Barsabbas nodded imperceptibly.

  Touching his cheek gingerly, Sindul moved away from Barsabbas as the nobles closed around him, touching, prodding and gasping in fascination.

  After the ignominy of the banquet, Barsabbas was wheeled into a low-ceilinged room. They closed the door behind them with a krr-chunk of a wheeled lock, sealing him in a cubicle of stone. Claystone floor, the same ruddy red on the walls. Marks had been made there, the ant-like scrawl of previous prisoners, scratched, chipped and scraped into the clay brick. He could make out Imperial prayers in the mortar, written in a bastardised Low Gothic. Last testimonies, letters to loved ones, lamentations.

>   It very slowly dawned on him that those words etched in the stone were the scrawls of dead men. There was a finality to the lines that sat heavily on Barsabbas’s heart as he read them. He became convinced, by virtue of those lamentations, that he was now in an execution chamber.

  This was where many had spent their last hours.

  Renewed with sudden urgency, Barsabbas began to work the file out from his gauntlet. He wriggled his wrists, nudging the blade file out by friction, trying to bend his fingers towards his palm to catch its tip.

  It slid out ever so slightly. Barsabbas changed the angle of his wrist, allowing the file to slide further out from the vambrace. It shifted, slipped out of his grasp and, to his sinking horror, fell to the floor. Barsabbas blinked in disbelief, looking at the file. He struggled for a while, straining against the shipping chain, whipping taut the bindings of his wrist. On board the Cauldron Born’s palaestras, it was not uncommon for Barsabbas to press three hundred and eighty kilograms of loaded kettles overhead, unarmoured. Yet the chain did not yield in the slightest.

  Finally, with a last look of resignation, Barsabbas began to bite at the chains on his wrists. They were thick industrial links. At first the shock of cold metal against his teeth alarmed him, but he worked through the pain and continued to chew at the metal. A Space Marine’s teeth, although heavy and calcified in order to chew indigestible proteins and fibre, could not manage iron. But by the time his calcified enamel was beginning to crack, Barsabbas had mostly lost feeling in his mouth anyway. He salivated, allowing his Betcher’s gland to drool acidic mucus as he worked. He savaged the links at his wrist.

  Finally the metal, softened by acid, gave way with a snap that split all his remaining molars. Spitting out flakes of iron and fragments of his own teeth, Barsabbas tore his way out of his restraints and began to recouple the power cables to his reactor pack.

  The throbbing pain of shredded nerves was forgotten as his power armour hummed to life. Suddenly elevated by euphoria and the surging strength in his limbs, Barsabbas ran his tongue along the jagged rubble of his teeth.

  Sindul climbed the stairs to the palace through the darkest of routes. Humans were hostile to aliens as a rule, and the sight of a dark eldar, especially the mercenary guest of their new overlords, would not invite good intention. He shied away from the lighted puddles of street lanterns and glided along the narrow side lanes. Gumede followed a respectful distance behind, as befitted a slave. He too carried a weighty medallion of Nurgle to display his favour.

  With his body swathed in a hooded cloak of steel thread, Sindul passed the palace sentries with a wave of his copper crest of Nurgle.

  The servants and house boys averted their gaze as he passed them by, frightened by the spectre that brandished the favour of their Nurgle overlords. They knew of stories, passed through hushed whispers in the kitchens and launderettes, that the dark eldar slaver had single-handedly captured a great beast of Chaos. A Space Marine.

  Finally, Sindul came to the asylum of Ur, a fortified wing of the palace itself. It was connected to the spires of the palace by means of a narrow sky bridge, but it seemed distant and forlorn, a finger of clay balanced on a low tier that overlooked the gas and chemical plants of the lower stack. Even from a distance, Sindul could see the asylum had no windows and despite its proportions, the only entrance was a remarkably ordinary door of very ordinary height. It almost seemed like the door had been added as an afterthought, as if the asylum had never been intended to have any windows or entrances.

  A pair of sentries stood guard. They were largely ceremonial, if all that Sindul had heard of the asylum were true. The Barons of Ur, paranoid as they were, incarcerated many. Political dissidents, illegitimate noble births, heretics – any who might threaten the stability of their cloistered, pocketed existence.

  But the asylum’s reputation had been built upon its most dangerous inmates – psykers, mutants and killers of men. Ur was an unwholesome place and it bred strangely unwholesome deviants. If these were to escape, the pair of sentries, Sindul reckoned, could do little. But then, where would the inmates flee? Into the thirsty death of the desert sands?

  Sindul waved Gumede ahead and the chief played the part of slave well, bowing subserviently. He scampered forwards and brandished his emblem of Nurgle at the door. Overbright sodium lamps mounted overhead shone directly into his eyes.

  The guards studied him before shaking their heads.

  ‘No,’ one said shaking his head dismissively. The man was the younger of the pair, with a pugnaciously set jawline.

  Gumede thrust the emblem before him again.

  ‘No, the emblem does not allow,’ snapped the sentry in his stilted, idiomatic tongue. His older companion nodded sleepily.

  Sindul gritted his teeth. His left hand, hidden within his cloak, closed around the hilt of his needle blade. He stepped out of the shadows and waved Gumede aside. ‘I am a guest of Opsarus the Crow. His captains host my stay.’

  ‘Are you stupid?’ snapped the sentry. ‘Opsarus cannot be pleased by entry here. No one. No one ever enters. If you enter, you do not leave. This is your last home.’

  Sindul still held out his hand with the emblem. But he was no longer showing them. He was distracting them. The guards stared at the emblem, then back to Sindul, before returning their gaze to the emblem again.

  Suddenly frustrated, the younger sentry tapped Sindul’s forehead. ‘No access!’ he said. He poked Sindul’s forehead again. ‘No access.’

  Upon seeing this, the older sentry took several quick steps backwards. He was wiser with age and did not have the ego of a younger man. He knew when to be quiet.

  As the younger sentry continued to harass Sindul, the dark eldar clenched his jaw. The needle blade flicked out four times. It punctured pressure points and the sentries stiffened and died, their hearts stopped by poison, yet they remained standing. The young man died while pointing pugnaciously at Sindul.

  The older sentry, for all his wisdom, died with his face to the wall, the dark eldar knife finding his back again and again.

  Their voices were frantic. ‘He is out! The monster is out!’

  Barsabbas could hear them echo in the corridors. He could hear the clumsy drone of footfalls as the sentries gathered to find him. They would be checking each of the doors along the passage, checking their prisoners were still contained, all of the mutants, the murderers – the high threats. In their voices he heard panic and the slowed vowels of confusion.

  Barsabbas knew the sentries were outmatched. This was not their game. Until several months ago, before the taking of Hauts Bassiq, these men served cloistered military tenures. Raised within the sealed city, most of these men had never heard of a Traitor Marine before, and could have no idea of their capabilities.

  Barsabbas rounded a corner, looking for a weapon. He almost walked straight into a quartet of sentries. Before they could finish their initial screams of surprise, Barsabbas swept his forearm and pinned the closest against the wall, crushing his spine. The rest backed away, yelling loud, panicked words. One of them began to fumble with a lasrifle, but he was unfamiliar with it beyond ceremonial purpose. He attempted to fire on Barsabbas with the safety still caught.

  Like a great fish breaking the surface, Barsabbas tossed a sentry away and flung him down the corridor. Hastily lashed shock mauls bounced off his unyielding hide. The remaining three men were tossed about like bushels of grain. Each surge of Barsabbas’s steel-bound limbs threw them from wall to wall, bouncing them, breaking them. The Blood Gorgon was simply playing with them.

  Finally tired of his sport, Barsabbas left the four broken sentries and kicked down the nearest door. The asylum inmates were agitated by the commotion and they had begun to keen and howl, making nonsense noise through the tiny slits of their armoured doors.

  Within the cell Barsabbas had opened was a bookish-looking man. Slender from malnutrition an
d pale from confinement, he had a dash of handsome white hair punctuated with almost neon blue eyes.

  As Barsabbas lowered his head to peer through the door, the man struck at him, hacking at his neck seal with the snapped handle of a chamber brush. Before his attack landed, Barsabbas pushed him aside contemptuously.

  ‘Do that again and there will be no turning back,’ Barsabbas growled. He should have killed the man for his mistake but he had a use for him yet.

  ‘You are free. Go and kill. Now,’ Barsabbas commanded.

  Go. Kill. The slender man understood him perfectly. Without another word, the man squirmed through the door past Barsabbas and disappeared, screaming in glee down the hall.

  By now the asylum was ringing with the shrill bells of disaster. Sentries huddled behind shields and shock mauls advanced in formation down the hall, three abreast. It would not be long before the Plague Marines responded in force. Barsabbas heard the sentries yell warnings. Something about ‘priority inmate’. He did not know who the priority inmate was, but he noted the consternation in their tone.

  He began to bash through each door he came across, punching the metal plates off their hinges. There were all kinds in there: murderers, lunatics, an ox-necked man with a hammerhead for a hand, an elderly female who appeared entirely harmless. None attacked him, as if they were minor predators cowed by a far greater threat. Some paused to thank him briefly, awed by his physical size and appearance, before sprinting away to wreak havoc on their gaolers.

  Barsabbas followed a sandstone drawbridge that extended across to an otherwise inaccessible door high in the wall. The door was almost invisible in the brickwork, placed in the centre of a wall perhaps forty metres high, as if the sentries had wanted to forget about the inmate within. Judging by the hysteria of the sentries that pursued him, Barsabbas guessed the door to be of some significance. The guards tried to retract the drawbridge, grinding the ancient mechanical gears slowly. Barsabbas leapt the gap with ease as the drawbridge continued to edge back. A las-shot sparked over his head and another missed him by a wide berth. Snorting with disdain, Barsabbas ignored the sentries.