Bastion Wars

by Henry Zou

  Beyond them, the last door was reinforced with thick brass bands. Not a door but a true vault seal much like the one where he himself had been confined. A coiled nest of pipes was funnelled into the door. They writhed with pumped gases, and Barsabbas scented the sugary smell of nitrous oxide and barbitane. Whatever was inside was kept in a state of controlled sedation.

  For a moment, he considered the beast that lay within. He was not prone to fanciful thinking, but the occupant must have been a dangerous one, at least the equal of he. Grasping the locking wheel, Barsabbas turned it, retracting the bolts that anchored the vault seal to bolt locks in the walls. The vault popped with a hiss as the sedative gases were expelled.

  The explosion caught even Barsabbas off guard.

  Barsabbas was blown backwards off his feet immediately and thrown against the far wall by a wave of pressure. Light poured through the opened vault. The clay walls were melting, dripping with condensation and ice crystals. A voice so deep it was slurred issued from the light.

  ‘I am death!’

  A toddler emerged, wild-haired and chubby. He had a mole on his left cheek but besides that was unremarkable. Barsabbas rose to his feet and the boy did not reach past his shin.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ asked the boy in fluent Low Gothic. ‘I am death!’

  Barsabbas smiled. He had not found a Blood Gorgon but the potential for destruction nonetheless excited him. ‘I am a god and I have freed you. Go do your work.’

  It amused Barsabbas that the young, crazed psyker thought himself to be an incarnation of death. A juvenile imagination combined with limitless destructive potential would always be entertaining. Moreover, the child seemed devoid of any sanity whatsoever.

  He could already hear the horrified shrieks of the sentries across the chasm of the now retracted bridge. The child psyker curled his chubby arms in an upward direction. There was a snapping of chains and the walls shook as if someone had loosed a succession of bombs. The drawbridge slammed back into place as if it were a mere toy. Clapping, the child skipped across the bridge.

  The monsters had escaped, cried the sentries. All the monsters had escaped.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The monsters left a trail of mangled bodies in their rampage. Even in their execution of violence, there was no order, only pandemonium and a sense of reckless savagery. Dead men lay amongst the rubble of broken walls, askew and half-buried.

  A mezzanine of the second gallery had buckled over its support columns. Sentries of Ur sought shelter under the collapsed walkway, holding their shields timidly above their heads as inmates sprinted through the corridors screaming in their delirium. Far away, in the other wings of the asylum, there could be heard a low banging that was jarring in its reverberation.

  Sindul danced over the remains of a sentry, delighting in seeing patterns within the blood fall. Several respectful paces behind him, Gumede stepped gingerly around the carnage. For Sindul, the asylum was festive with the sounds of pandemonium and he felt the flush of excitement. He hurried his pace at the jubilant sounds of screaming.

  The pulsating beneath his orbital bone had dulled and the searing pain was beginning to numb as the slave scarab grew calm. It meant Barsabbas was nearby. Perhaps the mon-keigh would remove the creature for good once he kept his part of the bargain. Perhaps not. By his adolescence, Sindul had already murdered his own eldest half-brother over a modest gambling debt. To ‘promise’ was not a concept that Sindul fully understood. He knew of its existence but had never seen a proper use for it.

  He followed the banging sounds. Even at a distance, it seemed the very walls were being clapped together. He hugged the walls for cover, a splinter pistol now holstered against his ribs. High overhead, hooded lamps swung fitfully with each tremor. Crushed clay, red and soft, covered the tiled floors. Metal doors and entire sections of wall had been cast to the ground, discarded like wind-torn debris.

  Gumede followed behind him, his steps frustratingly loud to Sindul’s ears. His bow was notched, his sinewy forearms tensed against the string. Despite the muffled, indistinct sounds of destruction, the air was still and tense. Sindul did not have the firepower to deal with one of the Ang’mon-keigh, especially those half-corpse giants of Nurgle. At his side, the high-velocity splinter pistol seemed terribly meagre. As a species the eldar knew no equal – subtle, savant and entirely beyond human in their intelligence and philosophy. The eldar had developed and proven theories of universal creation and expansion before humanity had invented the wheel. But even the fearsome eldar warriors in full battledress had learned to respect the savage rage of humanity’s Space Marines. They fought with a fearless ignorance that the eldar could never hope to replicate…

  ‘Sin... dul,’ Gumede whispered. The chief’s eyes were saucered in consternation. ‘Do you feel that?’

  Sindul turned on the chief, ready to lash out at him for disrupting his thought process. But he stopped himself short when he felt it too. A continuous tremor in the very walls. He placed a palm to the clay and it vibrated loosely.

  ‘What is that?’ Gumede asked.

  ‘I–’

  Sindul did not finish his sentence. The hall shook so violently that the lamps shorted out, burying them in darkness. The ground heaved underneath them as if the world had been tilted onto an angle. Sindul could hear tables and other unbolted furnishings slide across the tiles.

  ‘Get away from the walls,’ Sindul managed to shout before his voice was lost to a thunderous clash. Covering his head, the dark eldar curled up and let the world rock him back and forth. The sensation continued for some time, a violent shaking that hummed in his skull and loosened his joints.

  By the time he opened his eyes, the light had returned. Or rather, light now pierced where none could before. As he opened his eyes and adjusted to the haze of brick dust, he could see that he lay on the broken edge of tiled flooring. The ground plummeted away from him, along with the entire left-hand wall and structure. An entire portion of the asylum had collapsed.

  Beyond the rubble of the destroyed wing, he saw a child standing atop a stone plinth, flinging up his arms like an orchestral maestro. With one lift of his left arm, a surge of clay rose like liquid, radiating outwards with seismic tremors. With a sweep of his right wrist, a wall burst into constituent bricks. Up went both his arms in crescendo as a column of spiralling sandstone spiked from the ground to pierce through the skin of the ceiling. From behind the cover of dog-toothed rubble, sentries of Ur as well as a formation of Plague Marines hammered him with volleys of shots. The ammunition sparked harmlessly off a bubble of kinetic force around the child. It was the most terrifying performance of telekinesis Sindul had ever witnessed.

  He might have remained there, mesmerised, had a hand not dragged him away from the edge. Sindul turned, expecting to see Gumede, but found himself staring into the face of a stylised gargoyle – Barsabbas.

  ‘It is ever glorious to meet you,’ Sindul said, scratching his cheek.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Barsabbas refuted, entirely ignorant of Sindul’s sarcasm. ‘You lie too much.’

  Behind them all, the wall ruptured, silencing their exchange. They moved then, darting through the open storm of rock shrapnel and stray rounds. Barsabbas only paused to pick up a weapon, a stray bolter lying next to the body of a fallen Plague Marine. While the power armour of the corpse was unmarked, ugly wounds marked the bare flesh at its joints. The ‘monsters’ had done their work well here.

  Weaving through broken remains of masonry, they left the skirmish between the inmates and their keepers behind.

  The central blockhouse was empty. Without fuss or ceremony Barsabbas, Sindul and Gumede made their way down the three-hundred-metre hall to the one door at its end. They followed a trail of dead and dying sentries and inmates alike.

  The final door was high priority indeed. Despite the rumbles of a not-so-distant fight, a phalanx o
f twenty Urite sentries crouched pensively by the nickel-plated door. Their collective fear became tangible as they spotted Barsabbas approaching, as if each man were literally shaking from fright. The Traitor Marine’s horned helm clapped against the ceiling and his massive, plated shoulders chafed the walls. The tiny, flitting black ghost of the dark eldar was barely noticed and Gumede, eager to indicate his apartness from the group, trailed behind nursing his bow.

  At first they panicked. Their sergeant, a wilting man of middle years, flapped his arms in some sort of command or pre-drilled order. ‘Release our hound!’

  The phalanx remained fixed, no one willing to break away from the protective formation as the Traitor Marine drew closer, towering above them. The sergeant executed the same hesitant command signals. ‘The hound, damn you. Babalu! Unlock Babalu!’

  Willing themselves into action, the soldiers began to pry open the weighty door, taking two men to haul on the steering lock and three of them to scrape it open against the suspension hinges.

  Barsabbas paused. He staggered his stance into a low crouch ready to receive an oncoming charge. The door edged upon. From beyond came a roar, a challenge.

  Stepping under the door frame rose the largest non-modified human Barsabbas had ever seen. At first the man seemed naked: so much flesh did he possess that his bib-and-brace did not trail down past the rolls of his knees or cover the fleshy mountains of his breast. He was easily shoulders, traps, neck and head taller than the guards and weighed perhaps in the mid-three hundred kilos. They had housed most of his torso in riveted metal sheets like a submariner’s rig and his paws ended in studded spheres of solid black metal – wrecking balls, pitted, spherical and brutally physical. Barsabbas gathered that this was ‘Babalu’ – the thing responsible for their so-called ‘tier market massacres’.

  Babalu turned on his gaolers first, crashing his sledgehammer fists into their soft, yielding bodies. It was only then that Barsabbas realised the guards had been terrified not of him, but of their own weapon. Cringing, the Urite sentries pressed themselves against the walls as Babalu crushed his way through them to lunge at Barsabbas. Some Urites drew their knees to their chests and simply lay down, their will to fight having long deserted their hands and hearts.

  The killer issued a challenge, unimpressed by Barsabbas’s stature. He clashed his kettled hands together, sounding out his strength and stomped his legs to establish his girth. He postured, flexing the rolling orbs of his biceps. He had the gall to roar at Barsabbas with his quivering jowls.

  Barsabbas slapped Babalu’s head: a casual, insulting blow that bounced his skull against the wall and it cut the killer’s raging screams short. Pressing up close, Barsabbas slapped him again, snake fast. The blow broke Babalu’s jaw and he fell, his insensate head lolling to the side. His fat bunched obligingly as he dropped, his bulk jammed against the corridor. Dragging him by his belt, Barsabbas hauled the feared killer aside and did not bother looking at him again. He guessed the man was dead, but he did not really care.

  Unnerved by Barsabbas’s warpath, Gumede and Sindul followed behind, cautious of the Traitor Marine’s volatile strength. As they picked their way through the antechamber, the chief stole glances at the cowering sentries and felt a deep understanding of their fear.

  Barsabbas was not an enemy, yet Gumede’s manner was nonetheless furtive in his monstrous presence. Barsabbas was running roughshod over everything that stood before him.

  The room beyond was a cavernous cell plated in sheet alloy. The reflective floor stretched far out into the distance and the inward-slanting walls warped the reflections back and forth in a nauseating mess of images. There were no seams nor rivets to the coppery compound; the chamber appeared as if it had been hollowed out from a monolithic block of metal, and the asylum had simply been built up, brick by brick, around the maddening metal core.

  The prisoner, large though he was, was buried in a cocoon of chains. They had bound him from his head to his shins in the centre of the chamber, anchoring him in mid-air with an archaic winch. Glyphs and ward runes radiated out from him in concentric circles and overlapping hexagons, poured onto the floor with red sand. Barsabbas was not well versed in daemonology, but he recognised the runes of binding and psychic dampening directly beneath the oubliette.

  Who is that? You are familiar. I have met you before, brother.+

  The words brushed across Barsabbas’s mind in a quietly commanding manner. He felt compelled to answer, but realised the prisoner would not be able to hear him through the solid ball of chains.

  Possessed by a sudden conviction he could not rationalise, Barsabbas kicked and brushed through the wards, sweeping the red sand away. He felt the psychic power emanating more strongly from the prisoner.

  Lower the winch, brother+

  The voice resonated with Barsabbas. He felt compelled to obey, and indeed found himself doing so on muscle impulse. Eagerly, Barsabbas began to unwind the chains.

  Outside the chamber, the pandemonium sounded like the roar of ocean waves. The military force of Nurgle would respond soon if they had not already. Barsabbas knew his time was limited.

  Yes. We do not have long. I can feel the Plague followers coming closer now. Many of them, like a seething tide.+

  Barsabbas tore at the chains with his fingers, snapping the links and shredding the metal fragments with his gauntlet tips. An involuntary cry of triumph escaped his lips: beneath was a corpse-white powder that was familiar to him, the very same pigment with which Blood Gorgons dyed their skin.

  He tore at the cheeks to unveil kohled eyepits and a high forehead. The brow ridge was scarred and shelf-like, furrowed over a long, battered face. The bare skin was pitted like gravel. Dark eyes squinted at the light, as if breaking the wards had awoken their owner from some deep, dreadful sleep.

  ‘Lord Gammadin,’ Barsabbas cried, falling to his knees.

  ‘None of that,’ Gammadin intoned. The Ascendant Champion seemed to flex beneath his cocoon as his dampened mind began to rouse. In a rapidly unwinding spool, the chains fell away. Beneath was the leviathan bulk of horn and plate – the hulking body of Lord Gammadin, thick in the shoulder and heavy in the hands, with its ursine profile. The recognition brought a flutter of thrill to Barsabbas’s stomach.

  ‘It is I, Bond-Brother Barsabbas,’ Gammadin replied in measured tones. ‘Lower your weapon.’

  Outside the vault, the sound of footfalls became urgently incisive. A great number of hostiles was gathering outside, yet Gammadin was not at all hastened. Sighing slowly, he shook his head. ‘Squad Besheba have fallen, then. I do not feel their presence.’

  ‘They have. I carry the name of Besheba on my shoulders.’

  ‘That is a heavy burden, Barsabbas. After the shame of Govina, the other squads already see you as a weaker pack,’ Gammadin said, his neutral tone not at all accusatory.

  A small detonation shook the adjacent chambers. Shouts and commands, closer now. Barsabbas heard the bellow of Nurgle trumpet voxes, crackling with coordinates and field reports.

  Yet still Gammadin seemed unaffected. He shook out his arms, flexing his one hand. ‘How did you arrive?’

  ‘By aerial craft. I have memorised the route from the hangar by retina overlay–’

  Barsabbas was cut off as a gunshot echoed from the entrance hall. An arm-sized sliver of wall was gouged out by the slashing bolter-round. Sinking to one knee, Barsabbas returned two shots on instinct.

  Ponderously, almost like a mountain harassed into motion, Gammadin met the enemy.

  When Gammadin moved, he did so with an unstoppable momentum. He housed so much physical power that it took him some time to pick up speed, like a rolling avalanche, but when he began to move he did not seem capable of slowing.

  Plague Marines shot at him. Those shots that Gammadin did not slap out of the air, he took against his shoulder plates. Shrapnel puffed against him. He rose in
his full armour, for it had become fused to his muscle and bone, the ceramite laced throughout his entire body. Barsabbas could not even tell where Gammadin’s armoured suit ended and his own flesh began. According to Barsabbas’s thermal imaging, Gammadin simply appeared as a solid block of ceramite with arterial warmth running through the deepest core. The data calculated Gammadin at seventy-six per cent metal density. By his memory, even a standard template Rhino tank stood at only sixty per cent metallic composition.

  As Gammadin howled and bolt shot powdered against his thickened hide, Barsabbas realised how truly destructive his lord could be.

  Bodies were tossed aside. Flesh impacted violently with stone. Gammadin simply walked into and through the walls. Small-arms fire glanced against him. Contemptuous, Gammadin pushed his hand through the brick walls like damp card. He was entirely fixated upon moving.

  ‘Lord Gammadin,’ Barsabbas called. ‘I have an escape route prepared in the city’s flight docks.’

  With grinding deliberation, Gammadin wrenched a vault seal off its hydraulic hinges. ‘Go then, brother. I will follow.’

  A changing of heart. Perhaps that was the one true flaw of the dark eldar race.

  Try as he might, Sindul knew no other way. Deceit was like a game to him. It was a constant, never-ending puzzle that he constructed in his mind, whenever he felt himself drifting away. As a culture, the eldar saw cunning as a manifestation of culture and intellect. It was a desired trait in any courtship; indeed, an evolutionary aspect of their entire culture.

  Those who could not scheme were seen as dull-witted, pen’shaar’ul, which meant ‘waiting to be murdered’.

  Sindul did not consider himself pen’shaar’ul. He had been scheming the moment he and Gumede reached the Harvester. The vessel was docked in an open courtyard and had been left unguarded. Septic foot squads passed them, too rushed to give Sindul and his slave any notice.