Sepulturum - Nick Kyme

by Warhammer

  Morgravia’s eyes flicked to the sarcophagus, to the childlike hand reaching from its shattered lid and the tendrils slowly eking from its dark confines.

  ‘It is the Simulacrum. It is older than ages, a relic from before. It is sentience in the machine, the apogee of aspiration. You have been remade for it, the perfect incubator. That is your purpose and now you shall fulfil it.’

  And it was dying, Morgravia realised. Whatever dark technologies had preserved the Simulacrum had begun to fail. She was to be its vessel, a host fashioned so it might endure, nourished by her machine body. Hel had brought her here willingly but unwittingly, another pawn in the game.

  Hel… scraped clean of her humanity, a killer without a face. A daughter laid upon the sacrificial slab of the Imperium. Death by any other name. And now she had suffered another. Her final death.

  Morgravia felt it scratching at the core of her, aching to be unleashed. The monster inside.

  Let it…

  The rage and grief spilled out of her, skin unstitching, limbs distending. She became blades and churning teeth and whips of razored metal, lashing. Unmade. Remade.

  Shouts in the machine language of the cult suggested panic. She had already eviscerated two without thinking, her flesh face dappled with oil and blood. Their parts lay scattered, perfectly, brutally dissected. Offal and scrap.

  The stalkers lunged for her, cantering out of the shadows to the defence of their black-robed masters, hacking and cutting.

  Morgravia flung herself in a whirr of teeth and blades. She bifurcated, eviscerated, decapitated. Cleaved and severed. Tore and wrenched. An orgy of violence, sickening and satisfying in its application. The monster well fed, but far from sated.

  The last of the stalkers slid off her bladed limb, impaled. The machine light died in its single eye. She did not slow nor consider. Humanity faded, an overexposed image turned to white. Whatever she had become, whatever they had made her, it was no longer human. Arachnoid, insectile, she sprang onto the cult, stabbing with the mandibles unfurled from an overstretched jaw. She tasted them as they died. Their oily plasma, the gelatinous fluids pumping like ichor through their bodies. She drank of it, revelled in it. Slashing and hunting and gorging herself until only two remained.

  ‘It is inexorable,’ said the seven voices that now were one. ‘Nothing you do here will stop it.’

  She speared the voice, slitting it down the middle and leaving the two halves sparking and spewing in a shivering heap. Then she met the gaze of the last, the leader. He seemed untroubled when she took his head. A single snip, paired blades scissoring his machine neck. Black sludge gushed from the wound, corro­ding and dissolving.

  Morgravia sank down and felt her flesh reknitting, her limbs retracting. Pain, abject and magnesium bright suffused her like acid. She shuddered, howling her anguish. Screaming it over and over until, at last, the resonance of her agony faded and she was left silent and alone.

  Naked but for the scraps that remained, she hobbled over to the sarcophagus. The tendrils reached for her as she closed, a neonate grasping for its mother’s sustenance. It lay within the Simulacrum. A face, beatific, infantile, gave expression to a tentacled abomination, a slithering accumulation of malign and proscribed science. It felt. And as Morgravia looked upon it, as its tendrils gently but purposefully wrapped themselves around her, she realised it did not want to die. That it would do anything to live, kill anyone to perpetuate.

  I love you, it said, that cold alien presence intruding, persuading. I love you, Mother.

  Morgravia stiffened, her lip curling.

  ‘I’m not your fucking mother,’ she uttered, her pistol against the Simulacrum’s tiny forehead as its tendrils squeezed desperately.

  A loud boom resounded, emphasised by the confines of the sarcophagus.

  The tendrils slackened, letting Morgravia slide away. She slumped down, her back against the sarcophagus. A pistol lay in her hands, heavy with purpose. One bullet remained. She crawled across the pieces of bodies and the machine wreckage, through spilled blood and oil. To reach her.

  Hel.

  Trembling, she took off her mask and found a girl behind it. Pale skin, eyes like fiery amber. Her hair shaved, but still a girl. Her girl.

  ‘Now we end it…’

  Morgravia touched a hand to Hel’s cheek, pressed the gun against her own left temple and spent the last bullet.

  Chapter XXX

  Survivors

  They got almost half a mile away from the gate when Barak decided to turn back. Jana didn’t argue or even object. Still weak, still pale, he reversed the rig and headed south. To the church. To Morgravia.

  He drove in silence, Jana loading up the shotguns as he hammered the accelerator.

  Two hundred feet away and he saw the girl. Thought it an apparition at first, a symptom of his injuries. It was only when Jana yelled at him to stop that he pumped the brake and slewed the Mule to an ungainly halt. She stood there, half lit by the forward lamps, a young female ganger. Scared, alone. Needing help.

  Jana stepped out, a shotgun slung across her back.

  ‘I don’t…’ the girl grimaced, running a hand through her hair, looking this way and that, ‘I don’t know where I am.’ She wrung her hands, wet her lips. ‘They were killing each other. Eating each…’ She trailed off, her face turning blank. ‘Oh, Throne…’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Jana, holding out her hand. ‘It’s all right. You’re not alone. Come with us. We’ll help you.’ She edged closer. ‘But you need to put that down.’

  The girl frowned, eyes glazing as she regarded the bloody knife in her hand. Her arm was slick. It glistened tackily in the light.

  ‘I must’ve…’ she said, touching the base of her neck.

  ‘Come with me now,’ said Jana. ‘You don’t need that any more. Come with me and you’ll be safe.’ She smiled. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘My name?’ The girl looked around, as if searching for the answer. ‘Karina,’ she said at last. ‘I’m Karina.’

  ‘I’m Jana,’ said Jana, ‘and this is my husband, Barak.’

  ‘Barak? My father knew a man by that name.’

  Barak had stepped out of the rig and his eyes narrowed as he recognised the girl in the young woman before him.

  ‘Karina,’ he said, disbelieving. ‘You’re Cristo’s daughter.’

  Karina wept, nodding. She let go of the knife and Jana embraced her, held her long enough that she could stop crying.

  They didn’t head any further south. Nothing left there, Karina told them. Nothing but the dead.

  The gate remained sealed as they approached it, the rig giving its last dying breaths. Its engine failed at the edge of the long processional leading to hive edge. Bodies burned on either side of it, some contorted by the plague, others simply corpses. Barak found it hard to count, to even fathom. He led his wife and the girl through the fields of the dead, past cleansing crews in proctor garb.

  As they reached the gate, looking up upon the vast and indomitable edifice, he saw evidence of a vicious battle for the ramparts. A watchman speaking through a loudhailer addressed him, demanded they turn back. Uphive was sealed until further notice. Containment, he said. Plague, he said. Weapons edged from murder slits, anonymous and deadly.

  Barak held up the rosette Morgravia had given him, a spark of grief lighting within at the thought of her as he raised it, for surely she must be dead.

  A scope peered down. Seconds passed, freighted with the possibility of imminent execution. He heard shouted orders. Hurrying feet.

  The weapons retracted.

  The gate to uphive opened.

  Two years later…

  The ship was coming, and throughout Low Sink bells rang in celebration. A landing field had been prepared, near hive edge overlooking the Iryn Mere and the old ruin where a priory had once stood. A
blackened spur of rock stood there now, a sapling having taken root in the rich soil left in its wake.

  Karina stood, shoulders back, her face tilted to the sky as she watched for the lander. She had a knapsack slung across her back, a knife in her belt that she hoped they’d let her keep. Rugged clothes and a heavy coat that Barak had given her.

  He and Jana stood nearby, proud as parents, already missing the daughter they never had.

  Karina had never told them what happened at the church. In truth, she remembered little after she had fled. There was a shadow, a ship suspended above her. And then she was in the street, wandering, alone and afraid.

  They had found her and they had taken her in. She had found purpose, inspired by her father’s example. She would give her life for something greater than herself. She had answered the tithe and would find her place amongst the stars as a soldier. She knew it would be hard, that the galaxy held terrors the recruitment parchments omitted. Death held no fear. Insignificance did.

  Rumbling the earth, engines growling as it made its descent, the lander came into view. Smog parted, pushed aside like waves before its mass and power. Fire lit the sky, muted and diffuse across the heavy cloud layer.

  A klaxon sounded, signalling for the recruits to advance onto the landing field.

  Karina turned before she headed out, a smile and a wave for the man and woman she had come to trust and think of as her family. Both held back tears, clinging to one another, already wondering how they would fill their lives without her.

  A Munitorum officer approached her at the threshold of the landing field, one of an advance party here to ensure the tithe went smoothly and in an orderly fashion.

  ‘Name,’ he said curtly, eyes on a data-slate cinched in the crook of his elbow, a stylus in the other hand primed to write.

  ‘Karina Cristo.’

  The officer ran through the names, and made a face. ‘Not many from Blackgheist.’

  Karina stiffened as old, unpleasant memories intruded.

  The officer frowned then, rubbing at his temples. He looked suddenly ill, a vein throbbing in his neck like a cord of rope. Flushed, sweating, he appeared starved of breath.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Karina asked.

  It passed, whatever it was, a shadow withered by the sun.

  ‘It’s nothing. Just a headache.’ He gave a watery smile, and thrust a piece of parchment in her hands, stamped and approved for tithe. ‘Must be the hive air,’ he said. ‘Never much cared for it.’

  Karina smiled back. It was a tight, contained thing, almost cold.

  ‘Neither have I,’ she said, and advanced onto the landing field.

  About the Author

  Nick Kyme is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Old Earth, Deathfire, Vulkan Lives and Sons of the Forge, the novellas Promethean Sun and Scorched Earth, and the audio dramas Red-Marked, Censure and Nightfane. His novella Feat of Iron was a New York Times bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection, The Primarchs. Nick is well known for his popular Salamanders novels, including Rebirth, the Sicarius novels Damnos and Knights of Macragge, and numerous short stories. He has also written fiction set in the world of Warhammer, most notably the Warhammer Chronicles novel The Great Betrayal and the Age of Sigmar story ‘Borne by the Storm’, included in the novel War Storm. More recently he has scripted the Age of Sigmar audio drama The Imprecations of Daemons. He lives and works in Nottingham.

  An extract from

  ‘Suffer the Vision’

  by Jake Ozga

  from the Warhammer Horror

  anthology Anathemas.

  A detail captures my attention: there is something about the way the dead woman is lying that suggests she was crawling even while she bled out. Her arm is outstretched, her hand lost amidst viridian undergrowth. I brush the flowers and vines aside with my boot to reveal a child’s doll, a simple thing carved from a single piece of wood; it lies broken, splintered and snapped. Even though my soul is bereft of poetry, I can see the obvious parallels with the scenes of slaughter that surround me, and the sight is strangely poignant. I contemplate it for a while, even as the savage sun beats down and the flies begin to settle.

  We have seen no sign of any child. I reappraise the dead woman; with her barbaric tattoos and animal-hide clothing it is hard to think of her as anything more than another wildling creature in this realm of beasts and monsters. But she could, I consider, be a mother that fought protecting a child and then died reaching for this doll in a final, futile gesture. A mother’s desperation fuelled by a mother’s love. I have heard of such a thing.

  The clearing smells of blood and excrement, of death and pollen and fresh rain. The forest already reclaims the filth into rich, black soil. In this realm nothing is sacred for long: life is wild and death is voracious. Scavenger beasts have disturbed the corpses so that they are scattered and mauled, the flowers are trampled, and body parts and vividly coloured petals sit in pools of congealed blood, gathering flies. The events here are hard to interpret. I see a clump of red hair; I see tanned flesh patterned with blasphemous symbols. I see dark eyes, frozen in the moment of death. I see wounds wrought by tooth and claw. But I am far from an expert in the ways of beasts and this is not my realm, and so I travel here with guides.

  It is my holy duty to seek those who would hide from Sigmar’s embrace: the apostate preachers, the children of a poisoned seed, the beasts that hide in the flesh of men. I lead a savage band, men of this land that turned on their own kin and renew their pledge of devotion to the God-King with unsurpassed violence. I strive every day to serve my god. I strive every day to be more holy in his eyes, for I know that he watches me. And at my back, I bring a storm.

  ‘Witch hunter.’ One of my companions calls to me. Grar is a man with eyes like chipped flint, twice my years and a native of this realm. He is a veteran who has worked alongside many witch hunters, but he is new to my employ and indeed, I am inexperienced at working with others. In his mouth my honorific is made to sound like an insult – these men bark and snarl like the animals they track. But it is merely posturing, or else it is some game of baiting they play amongst themselves, and either way it concerns me not at all.

  He speaks again, and his accent – that of the Olg’hal hill tribes, one of the smaller tribes in this remote region of Ghur – is thick and his words seem to snag on teeth filed to points. ‘A bear, maybe an amberback. Not so common. This happened two days ago, at most.’

  It is not like Grar to sound uncertain. He pauses to spit – more posturing. There is a sheen of sweat on his skin that the dirt and the pollen clings to. He is stripped to the waist and his scarred flesh is stained dark blue with a powerful dye that the Olg’hal apply as warpaint. The heat is oppressive, smothering. He copes with it far better than I.

  ‘A bear, then, a large one. They disturbed it in its lair.’ My guide gestures at the nearby cave. ‘And it reacted badly.’ He bares his sharpened teeth in what passes for a grin, then turns a body over with his foot. ‘They were Gath’ok tribe. This one was their warband leader. The others were his family or his slaves. They share family markings. See here? He had sworn them to Dark Gods.’ Grar spits in his hand and runs it over his shaven pate, a gesture I have come to recognise over these past few days as a sign of warding.

  He looks me in the eye. ‘This beast has done good work for us, I think.’

  ‘And the child?’ I use my scabbarded sword to point to the broken toy, and he shrugs with practised indifference.

  ‘No sign of a child. Maybe the bear took it. Maybe swallowed whole.’ He gestures broadly at the mess made by scavengers. ‘Impossible to tell.’

  I persist. ‘Could a survivor have fled into the cave?’

  Grar looks unconvinced. ‘Or to the village, witch hunter. We are close now. Maybe the villagers have already strung the little beastling up for us, to celebrate our arrival.’ He bares his teeth again and I
look away. This is no place for a child.

  The other two trackers join us, fellow warriors of the Olg’hal. Like Grar they are outcast: men that now hunt their former tribe and the slaves of the Ruinous Powers. They are savages in exile, hunters in the service of the God-King. One of these men – No’grok – is the size of an ogor, while the other – Rhukhal – is a young man, maybe of an age with myself. They too have shaved heads, filed teeth and skin stained blue with warpaint they can never remove. The bond between the three men is deep, formed by the severing of all other ties. They have each other and no one else. I have no tribe of my own, no kin. I have my god.

  The younger tracker pauses at the corpse of the woman, and with a practised motion he cuts off an ear, threading it onto a belt along with dozens of others. At first these trophies appalled me, but I have come to respect what they represent – when they turned on their former kin, these men burned all their bridges, and there would be no mercy for them now among the tribes. It is man’s nature to be duplicitous; all men are liars and deceivers, but these three make their truth a simple thing. They are a bane to Chaos. They are dogs that tear at the throats of monsters. Should my god judge them, he will find them to be true.

  ‘Witch hunter.’ Rhukhal addresses me with slightly more respect than Grar. ‘We should leave this place now. Before the storm comes. Before the beast gets her hunger back.’

  I nod in agreement. Beyond the next hill lies the village we seek, and so we resume our journey. We pass the cave mouth cautiously. No’grok hefts his warhammer over one massive shoulder and waits, tense with anticipation, but all remains quiet. I stare into it, into the yawning darkness. It is only my imagin­ation that it stares back.

  We have travelled for eight days through jungle and forest to a place far removed from Sigmar’s gift of liberation, here at the edges of this so-called Realm of Beasts. The village we approach now was discovered by a warrior angel, borne aloft on wings of light. Seen from a distance, the Stormcast Eternal described a place untouched by the violence of this land. It seems unlikely that we will truly find free people here in this place of monsters – this land of warring tribes pledged to dark gods – but if there are men and women that have defied the corruption then I must find them and claim them for the God-King, to offer them his embrace. And if the corruption has claimed them first – if it has wormed under their skin and into their souls – then in the name of Sigmar, I will judge them, and I will show them what it means to defy the God of Lightning.