‘Ensure Tabbris sanctifies Blood Cog. Its spirit is strong; it will serve him well.’
‘It will taste flesh again,’ Nisroc answered. Tabbris was Amaru’s pupil, a novitiate Techmarine. That Amaru would cede him his weapon signified his faith in the novitiate’s abilities. Nisroc would see to it that the Master Artificer knew of Amaru’s wishes. ‘Death find you well, brother.’
Amaru said nothing. Extending a cable from his armour, he plugged into the firing console. Behind him, the forces of the Archenemy had already blasted through the rubble. He could hear them striding along the corridor. There was no time to perform the correct consecration or rites of firing. The missile’s machine-spirit was ancient. He hoped it would not be offended. Launch. Amaru sent the command to the missile. A tremor passed underfoot, rattling a canteen pack off a nearby workstation. Shrill klaxons screamed through the corridor as the warhead powered up. The Techmarine deactivated them. Sensors and bundles of thick cabling detached and fell away from the rocket as pressurised hydraulics moved it into the firing position. More rumbling. Fuel pipes retracted. Exhaust vents ground open beneath the floor of the silo. Amaru interrupted them, closing the grilles. The engines gurgled into life. More alarms rang out as the compound’s safety systems detected the block in the ventilation, Amaru overrode them, silencing the alarms and pushing the missile up thorough the shaft into the final position.
‘For the Chapter.’
A wash of flame erupted from the missile’s booster like the breath of an angry dragon, propelling it upwards on an expanding pillar of fire. Amaru’s world burned away in an instant, the temperature gauge on his retinal display flashing red as the thruster backwash broiled him. A second warning blinked across his vision for the briefest of instants before he, and everything else in the compound, was incinerated.
The maglift whispered to a stop. He stepped off into the corridor, his armoured boots making a dull thud as they contacted the deck plating. He paused for a moment while his enhanced eyes strained to adjust to the gloom. They could not. The walkway floated in complete, impenetrable darkness, shrouded by a long-forgotten technology that defied even the keenest of auspexes. To walk the passageways of this level was to know exactly where to tread or to fall to your doom amid the ancient bowels of the ship. He continued along the corridor, making the turns instinctively, following the pattern imprinted in his eidetic memory. His pace quickened as he felt his ire rise, his warrior blood drumming in his veins at the frustrating tediousness of the journey. He stopped and drew a breath, calming his mind. He did not have the luxury of indulging his baser nature. Such things were his burden to bear and some secrets were not meant for the light.
A door slid open into a darkened chamber. He stepped inside and the door closed behind him. The faint glow of an idling pict-screen cast the face of the room’s single occupant into half-shadow.
‘Where did you find them?’ As always, his voice was dangerous, his pensive demeanour only ever a heartbeat removed from the violent rage that made him such an implacable warrior.
‘The strike cruiser Jagged Blade intercepted them just beyond the Arere system.’ Captain Araton stepped closer, the light from the pict-screen illuminating the crimson of his breastplate. The serrated blade emblazoned on his armour was thrown into menacing relief.
‘Survivors?’
‘Only three, lord. The fourth…’ Araton paused, unsure how to continue. ‘The fourth, Brother Micos, was killed in transit.’
‘Explain.’
‘He succumbed to…a rage. The others were left with little choice.’
‘The curse?’
‘Perhaps, but Nisroc believed it to be something more, something worse.’ Araton turned to a console and activated the playback on the pict-screen. ‘These feeds were extracted from the datastacks the squad recovered from the outpost.’ The captain stepped away from the screen, retreating into the darkness.
++Recorder 3: Sanctum: I808++
The sanctum was alive with motion. Men clambered behind consoles and data stacks as explosions wracked the chamber. A straggler was hit in the back, the force of the blow spinning him through the air, his torso a bloodied mess. The Guardsmens’ fatigues marked them out as the Angorian Rifles, the garrison regiment of Arere. A figure burst into the room, too quick for the pict-recorder to capture fully. It barrelled into a huddle of Guardsmen. They tried to run. A vicious chain-weapon struck out and sent a bodiless head spinning past the pict-recorder lens.
An officer stood up and screamed, motioning for his men to fall back. His battleplate was blackened and pitted, his creased face caked with mire. Shrapnel danced around him as mass-reactive rounds slammed into the console he was using for cover. He shouted again, dragging the man nearest him to his feet.
A jet of super-heated flame blew over the console, incinerating both men in a wash of burning promethium.
++Recording Interrupted++
++Recorder 7: Barracks: I827++
Two squads of Angorian Rifles were taking cover behind a row of overturned kit-lockers. The barrels of their lasguns glowed hot as the troopers poured an endless stream of fire towards the doorway. Two objects flew in from off camera and exploded in front of the lockers. Ashen smoke filled the viewer.
It cleared to reveal a twisted mass of metal, the Angorians’ makeshift barricade in ruins. The corpses of half their number lay slumped lifelessly over the shredded lockers, shards of metal embedded in their flesh. A figure advanced from the doorway, his armoured back filling the viewer. The Guardsmen opened fire. Untroubled, the attacker fired back. The unmistakable muzzle flash of a boltgun illuminated the Angorians as they flipped backwards, torn apart by the mass-reactive rounds.
The attacker turned his crimson breast plate–
++Recording Interrupted++
++Recorder 19: Armoury: I901++
A crimson armoured warrior was sprinting down the corridor into a hail of las-fire, his breastplate scorched clean of insignia by their attentions. A bright muzzle-flash blazed into life up ahead. Heavy calibre, solid-state rounds began churning up the floor and walls as they stitched a line towards him. One struck his right pauldron. Splintered armour fragments struck the pict-recorder as he spun to the ground. The warrior rolled to his feet and continued into the gunfire, his weapon forgotten on the ground behind him as he disappeared from view.
The ruined corridor lay empty, battered ceramite flaking to the ground. The intensity of the gunfire lessened, sporadic rounds zipping down to the corridor. Then it died altogether. Within moments, the armoured warrior emerged from the end of the corridor. Blood pooled in the recesses of his damaged armour, which was pitted and cracked like the surface of a moon. His hands and forearms were thick with gore. Blood dripped from his fingertips, leaving a macabre trail behind him as he strode back towards his weapon.
++I901: Segment Ends++
++Recorder 12: Courtyard: I873++
A Flesh Tearer lay slumped against the wall, one of his brothers bent over him. The brother turned, withdrawing the blade he’d driven into the other’s heart. His helmet was gone, his face contorted into a bestial snarl. He made to rise when a searing plasma round struck his chest.
A shadow fell over the Flesh Tearer’s prone form. He pushed his hands into the dirt and tried to stand when a second plasma round obliterated his head in a stream of sparking gore.
The shadow grew larger until the Flesh Tearer’s executioner was right beneath the pict-recorder. The man looked up, straight into the lens.
The image froze as the viewer’s recog-system analysed the man’s face. The image blinked once as data began to scroll down the screen.
First Commissar Morvant, attached to the Angorian Rifles. Awarded Iron Faith honours for the Ivstyan Cleansing. Last posting Arere, Substation 12BX. Current status: Unknown.
The image blinked again and playback continued.
The man’s passive stare didn’t change as he raised his pistol towards the pict-recorder.
++Reco
rding Interrupted++
The viewer clicked off, emitting a faint buzz of static as it returned to idle.
Silence persisted.
‘Destroy it.’
‘And Arere?’
‘Exterminatus.’ Gabriel Seth, Chapter Master of the Flesh Tearers, turned on his heel and headed back into the darkness.
He had a world to kill.
Gilead’s Curse
Chapter Four
Nik Vincent and Dan Abnett
I dreamt, I think, a strange and brutal dream. I sleep so little now that I am ancient, and when I do, I find myself riding the night horse with a vigor that belies my age and sex. The boy was right, it is always the skaven.
The stories I have heard and told of the skaven cause me to wonder yet if they are not the most damned of beasts, the most cruel and vicious of races; certainly, they haunt me still.
‘Go home,’ said Gilead, mildly revolted by the feel of the human words on his lips. ‘Return to your family.’
‘I have none,’ said the boy. ‘I was the last of them. My brothers, older and younger, and my baby sister... All are dead,’ he said, with a catch in his throat, making the words sound even more guttural and ugly to Gilead’s ears than they might otherwise.
‘You have a homestead, somewhere,’ said Gilead, ‘a village... a town.’
They were more words than he had spoken to another living soul since he had left his brethren at the funeral, more words than he cared to speak in the ugly human tongue.
‘All gone,’ said the boy. The catch in his throat had cleared. He spoke in a matter-of-fact tone without any discernible affect. Gilead turned to the boy, surprised by such composure in one so young and so unutterably related to the coarser species.
Gilead had been sitting before a small fire at the edge of one of the roads that radiated out from the dreadful, defiled town. He had not gone back into the woods; there was no need. The remaining humans were resting and regrouping and mourning their dead. They would not miss the elf, and neither would they travel at night.
Perhaps he had come there on purpose. Perhaps he had made it easy for the human boy to follow him and come upon him so easily and so quickly after the battle. He looked at the boy who stood a little way behind him and to his right, at the edge of the road. He said nothing, and then turned back to the simple meal that he was cooking at his fire. He pushed the point of his knife into the glowing orange-grey embers under the fire, spearing something that nestled there. With a flick of his wrist, the elf sent the object arcing through the air. It landed in the boy’s outstretched hands, but he had to toss it from one hand to the other to prevent it burning his palms. Ash dropped away from the small tuber, and the boy popped it into his mouth, biting hungrily into it. It was too hot, and he spat it out, the two pieces landing unceremoniously in his hands, the bright pink insides, fluffy and steaming.
When the first tuber was eaten, Gilead tossed the boy a second. It was sweeter than the first and dark purplish red in hue. After biting into it, the boy looked from its exposed flesh to Gilead, a question in his eyes.
‘It’s good,’ said Gilead. ‘Almost anything can be made to be edible.’
The boy smiled and took another healthy bite from the tuber.
The tea that Gilead handed to the boy in a horn beaker that looked more like a thimble, even in his small, feminine hands, tasted slightly bitter, but wonderfully aromatic. He did not know what it was made of, only that it was intense and warming, and unlike anything he had ever tasted. Somehow, it quenched his thirst too, despite being so meagre in quantity.
‘It is cleansing,’ said Gilead. ‘A little is enough.’
When he had finished drinking, the boy ran his little finger around the inside of the beaker and sucked on it, eager not to miss a drop of the delicious liquid.
Gilead did not smile; at least, if there was a smile somewhere within him, it did not find its way to his lips.
‘Sleep,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, we shall talk.’
‘Then I can stay with you?’ asked the boy.
‘Tomorrow, we shall talk,’ said Gilead again.
The boy looked at the elf’s face and saw that it was useless to ask his question again. He looked into a face that frightened him a little, but which was also reassuring. He knew what an elf was; everyone knew what one was, but no one that he knew had ever met a member of the ancient race, and he doubted that anyone he would ever know would find himself in the position of being the guest of one.
The countryside was full of them, and yet they went undetected by the human boy, until they were pointed out by Gilead; but the kid was smart and eager, and he soon learned the signs that would lead him underground, into the realms of the skaven.
The ground was often built-up around the entrances, which appeared on the shaded sides of mounds constructed by the rat-kind or in convenient natural slopes. They were generally not to be found in dense or difficult ground, so rarely very deeply into woodland where tree roots would make it difficult to penetrate easily underground.
In open country, it was easy enough to locate entrances to the burrows and warrens that the skaven excavated and then made their homes in, nor was it difficult to work out whether the entrances were currently in use or had been abandoned some time previously.
Gilead was a skilled tracker and was endlessly patient. He would watch and he would wait for clear evidence of skaven movement. He was capable of sitting in hiding, lying in wait for hours or even days at a time, despite cramped or difficult conditions.
The boy, once shown how to identify possible entrances to underground skaven lairs was sent out into the surrounding countryside to locate new positions. He travelled on foot over several miles each day, taking arcing paths in previously determined sectors. Gilead told him where to go, pointing out landmarks, and the boy covered the ground.
He had told the elf warrior his name once, but had never heard it spoken back to him. They did not talk. Gilead tolerated his presence because he was useful.
‘Aargh!’ he cried.
It was dusk and he had quartered a large area of pasture on the north slope of a wide shallow valley. The tree line had been cut back decades or even centuries ago and the land had clearly been used for common grazing. The animals were gone, the livestock long dead, either slaughtered to feed the famished locals, or starved to death for the want of enough healthy grass. The boy had been up to his waist in weeds that were clumping in odd formations and showing small flowers that were almost grey. Hungry, the boy had pulled a handful of the tall, slender stalks, but when he put the plant up to his nose, it stank of putrefaction and he tossed it aside in disgust.
It was late and he had not found any evidence of excavation, so the boy was hurrying back to the elf, through the last section he was supposed to be examining, convinced that to stop and study the land properly would be a waste of his time. Besides, the elf was bound to have something for him to eat, and it had been several hours since he had almost eaten the weeds that grew in this area.
He was embarrassed by the scream. He had placed a foot without looking, and it had dropped away beneath him, startling him into crying out. He had landed hard on his backside, but his foot had not touched the bottom of the hole, so there was no damage to his leg or ankle. He withdrew the leg and, still seated, began to part the weeds to expose a ragged, almost elliptical hole in the gently sloping ground.
The boy dropped his head closer as he saw the faint twinkle of a light somewhere below the opening, and then he cried out again.
Claws reached up to clutch the boy’s head, dragging him by the neck into the darkness. Then he heard a shriek close to his ear and another fleshy paw, complete with needle-sharp black claws, began to swipe and tear in the general direction of his face.
The boy grabbed the haft of his hoe close to the head, and drove it hard into the hole. He couldn’t see to aim the blow as his face was half-covered in grappling paws, but he could feel the end of his hoe meet the resistance of fl
esh-covered bones. Something squealed and bucked in a frenzy of movement. The boy could feel the ground beneath him vibrating with the violence of the skaven’s fit. He could not believe that the frenetic shrieking, bucking and clawing was deliberate.
The boy shook his head and neck clear of the flailing claws, but not before he had taken several deep scratches to his face and neck; one, connecting with his mouth had left a flap of skin hanging from his lower lip, exposing the pink of his gums. He backed away from the hole, watching intently for evidence of another attack from the rat.
He saw not one pair of shining eyes, but three. Or, at least, he counted five sparks of light glinting off five eyeballs, suggesting the presence of three of the skaven in the hole . Then he saw the flash of small, bright white claws, when previously he had seen only black talons. The squeals were pitched higher than he thought possible, even for the ratmen, and he could discern very little fur. He reached out to take a tuft of fine hair that had been torn out on the ragged lip of the hole, and rubbed it between his fingers; it was as fine as a baby’s breath, and, when he lifted it closer to his face to get a better look at it in the failing light, the hair was pale and silky and smelt sweet, like overripe fruit.
There was another shriek, and the boy thrust his hoe into the hole once more. He was less afraid for his own life, now, and more concerned about what was happening in the dark shadows of the burrow.
A claw reached up, took hold of the haft of the boy’s weapon and started yanking at it. The boy pulled back hard on his end of the staff, leaning his back against the slope and bracing his feet. After four or five seconds of stalemate, he suddenly let go his grip on the weapon, making his opponent fall abruptly backwards deeper into the hole. Then he renewed his grasp, burning his hands slightly as the wooden haft sped through his grip. Finally, he held it firmly again, close to the end of the long handle, but determined to make ground. The skaven who had fallen back into the hole must be hurt, surely? The boy pulled and thrust on the haft, by turns, knowing that he couldn’t risk letting go of his only weapon and losing it forever.
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