Dark Imperium: Plague War

by Guy Haley

  Thick white caps clustered round the poles. Icebergs, as monumental as everything on the unfriendly planet, sailed in armadas from the ever-fracturing pack ice.

  ‘This is Honourum, this is our home. This is your home. We shall go to view the…’

  Poor Bjarni, thought Justinian. He had taken his assignment as badly as only a son of Russ could. Physically. Ferociously.

  The Rudense barracks needed a new refectory after he had finally calmed down.

  Can I honestly say I am doing any better? he thought.

  He could not take any more.

  ‘Enough!’ he said, though his words were a silent tourbillon in water. Justinian tore away the bulky headset that engulfed his head. He felt a rush of faintness from magnetic induction fields stimulating the wrong parts of his brain as the equipment shifted around his skull.

  He was afloat in a saline tank, his multilung breathing brine oxygenated by a stream of bubbles. A tocsin blared. Outside, disapproving machines complained about what he had done to their brother device.

  The two Space Marines on the other side of the glass looked barely more pleased.

  The water rushed out of a grille in the floor of the chamber, leaving him dripping wet and cold, as if Honourum’s frigidity had followed him from the machine-vision. Was this what it meant to be a Novamarine? To carry that coldness within him forever?

  Mentally numb, Justinian clambered up the ladder and out of the hatch. There were a dozen tanks in a line with his, each one playing host to one of the Primaris Marines assigned with him to the Chapter. Many of them were now his squad, his brothers, though he had known none of them well before. One tank had its lid open. He was not the only one struggling to assimilate.

  He wondered who it was.

  ‘Brother-Sergeant Parris, come down.’ Captain Orestinio called to him. He and Chaplain Vul Direz were in full armour. Orestinio was bareheaded. Lines of tattooed images crept up over his neck softseal to the very top of his throat, curling up round the line of his jaw to touch the corners of his lips. Vul Direz’s features were hidden by his skull mask. As in some other Chapters, the Chaplains did not reveal their faces to anyone below a certain rank. Justinian could feel Direz’s disapproval nonetheless.

  He clambered down to face them. His bare feet rested on deckplating that vibrated hard. The star fortress Galatan was many times more powerful than any warship, and the working of its reactor arrays conveyed that fact through every bit of its structure. He welcomed it after Honourum’s graveyard quiet. The peace of the frigid, marmoreal world was not one he wanted any part of.

  Captain Orestinio looked dolefully up at him – Justinian was a head taller than he. The captain was born Honourian. You could tell by the expression. It was the kind of face that woke up every day to rain.

  ‘It is not working,’ said Justinian, somewhat petulantly, and the slip in his manners made him angrier. He waved away a pair of serfs in Novamarines’ quartered heraldry who approached bearing towels. He wanted the water to drip away from him, so he could be free of the memory of that black ocean. The ridiculous idea dogged him that if he dried the water off too quickly the black sea would be angered and plague his dreams.

  His skin quivered a hard, canid’s shudder.

  ‘You fight it, brother,’ said Vul Direz. His voice was as miserable as Orestinio’s face, made more so by his vox-mask. ‘You should not. You must learn of your new home. You must become one of us.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Justinian. ‘Maybe it is my age. Maybe my brain is too developed to accept the machines.’

  ‘The Novum hypnomat works as well on any brain,’ said Direz. ‘These machines are used by our full brothers as well as our neophytes.’

  ‘And is it calibrated for Primaris Marines?’

  ‘It is,’ said Orestinio. ‘To Belisarius Cawl’s specifications.’

  ‘Cawl?’

  ‘We asked, he answered, brother,’ said Orestinio.

  Justinian let his anger get the better of him. ‘It is not working. It is…’

  ‘My brother,’ interrupted the captain gently. ‘I understand. What you have been through is hard. It is no easy thing to undergo the breaking of a brotherhood.’

  Justinian looked from the impassive bone-white helm of the Chaplain to Orestinio. He should hold his tongue, he thought. He could not.

  ‘How could you understand? You are Honourian, born a Novamarine.’ His tone was sharp.

  ‘You would do well to moderate your words, brother,’ said the Chaplain. ‘You address your superior. It is you that is at fault here, not we.’

  ‘Please, Brother-Chaplain,’ said Orestinio. He held up his hand without looking at the warrior-priest. The fingers curled into a loose fist, but not aggressively. It was a grasp not a bludgeon, meaning to cradle something delicate. ‘Listen to me, Justinian Parris. I do understand,’ said Orestinio. ‘We have a home, Honourum, and our hearts are there. But we are an itinerant Chapter. This is why we place such importance on Honourum, and on commemorating the deeds of the dead. These things bind us together when we are apart. We are often distant from one another.’

  ‘How is this similar to what I experienced?’ said Justinian.

  Orestinio tilted his head in admonishment. He was not angry. Justinian had the impression he felt sorry for him. ‘I have not finished, brother. We may fight together for as long as you and the other Unnumbered Sons did. Sometimes longer. We may come to the Chapter, and grow to some age within a single group. The bonds between us go deep. But we must go where duty commands. When we finally return home our brotherhoods are broken up according to the demands of war. We may never see our comrades again. Does this sound familiar to you now?’

  I will never see my brothers again, thought Justinian.

  Orestinio gripped Justinian’s shoulder. ‘There is always another brother­hood, brother. Always. You have done many great things in your life already. I have read your combat record.’

  Justinian gave a hesitant nod.

  ‘Come with us. We shall perform a remembrancing. You will receive tattoos of your past glories, as we all bear.’ He tugged the edge of his neck softseal down, revealing the exquisitely inked rendition of a dying aeldari.

  ‘So that the Emperor might judge the worth of our deeds when we fall,’ said the Chaplain.

  ‘Ordinarily, we require corroboration of autosenses and brothers from within the Chapter,’ said Orestinio, ‘so we know the act is true. We shall trust you to inform us correctly of your worth. It will help your sense of belonging. You should do it now, before we go into action at Parmenio.’

  ‘Another time,’ said Justinian. He looked away, no longer able to bear the captain’s sincere eyes. ‘That was my old life. This is my new. I shall record the deeds I do in this Chapter’s service in this Chapter’s manner. My old deeds belong in the past.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Orestinio. He was disappointed, but did not insist. ‘As you desire.’

  Direz seemed to glare at this rebuffing of the Chapter’s traditions. Justinian felt it through the skull mask’s black eye lenses.

  ‘If I may, I would like to go,’ said Justinian. ‘My squad’s duty rotation is not for another two hours. I wish to train. There will be little opportunity once we reach Parmenio.’

  ‘War is our calling. Go with my blessing,’ said Orestinio.

  Chaplain Vul Direz did not offer his.

  Chapter Four

  Ku’gath summoned

  ‘More slops! More gore! More rot! More! More!’ bellowed Septicus Seven, the Seventh Lord of the Seventh Manse, Great Unclean One of Nurgle, and most fortunate servant of Ku’gath Plaguefather, third in Nurgle’s favour.

  Or so Septicus styled himself. Today was not a fortunate day. Ku’gath – glorious, flatulent, exalted Ku’gath – although never cheerful, was especially disappointed. His mood was turning ugly.


  ‘More eyes and livers, guts and gore. More despair! More pain! More sorrow! Now, now, now!’ Septicus shouted with a huckster’s melodrama at the labourers in the plague mill. ‘See how sorrowful our lord has become. Do not let him feel such misery!’ Septicus raised his flabby arm to point. ‘Oh, see how he weeps!’

  It was a somewhat disingenuous call to action. Ku’gath Plaguefather was always sorrowful. He glowered at his lieutenant from on high. With a sour expression, he pushed his giant wooden paddle around Nurgle’s Cauldron, peered inside dolefully, and sat back on his haunches with a sad tutting. Sickly green lit his rotting face, picking out his sores and tusks at their worst angle and making him appear especially hideous, but even that couldn’t cheer him. He hunched with misery, his peeling shoulders brushing against the broken edges of the medicae facility roof the legion had commandeered for its plague mill. Rain pounded from the sky, running over his greasy flesh in torrents. In his current guise he was so huge his minions sheltered beneath him, the mighty Septicus included.

  To his eternal chagrin, Ku’gath’s surly moods could never dent the spirits of his daemonic host. Misery loves company, and he had none. The din of gleeful industry filled the plague mill to the brim. Daemonic jollity stuffed every ear with maddening titters. Nurglings giggled as they worked. Cohorts of plaguebearers droned out counts of daemon mites, mortal germs, fresh diseases, supernatural maladies, flies, para­sites and whatever else their blind, roving eyes alighted upon. They were irksomely devoted to their work.

  Little trace of the facility the plague mill had supplanted remained. The floors were smashed through down to the lowest sub-basement. The roof was open to the poisoned sky. Once-white walls wept black slime. Crumbling rockcrete played host to a dripping array of mosses, fungi and yellowed weeds. In the rank foliage were the rusted cages of hospital beds. Glass cupboards peeked out through slimy leaves with huge window eyes. Bones gleamed in the boggy mulch carpeting the floor. These remnants were all that was left of the medicae facility’s equipment and patients. All else had been subsumed by Chaos. On Iax, the Garden of Nurgle had spilled out of the warp and made of the world a living hell. Beyond the walls of the hospital, the Hythean wetlands were transformed into a stinking morass where unnatural creatures swam. Already, past their watery margins, the taint was spreading further with every day, sickening the globe, bringing its populace the heady delights of Nurgle’s maladies.

  Soon after arrival the daemons had broken the hospital, polluting and corrupting it to their own design, turning it from a place of healing to a manufactorum of disease. Nurgle’s Cauldron dominated the shell of the facility. The cauldron was not tied to the physical universe in any meaningful sense, and it had swelled in size since the plague host had arrived.

  Most of the internal walls had been torn out to accommodate its potbellied bulk. An enormous breach had been gnawed through the exterior shell to allow it to be dragged within. A fire of soaking logs ripped from the dying vegetation of Iax gave slow, spluttering flames to heat the cauldron. Noxious vapours lifted lazily out of it day and night. Lacking the energy to rise higher, they gave up and streamed down the side in smoky falls that poured out of the hospital. Outside, the smoke and steam added to the rank mists slowly choking the life from the world.

  Ku’gath had swelled in size to match the cauldron, nourished by winds of Chaos blowing into the mortal realm until he was the size of a hill. Septicus came to his knee. The nurglings were like fleas to him. He was an impossibility, too huge for the anatomy of mortal creatures to support, but there was nothing of possibility about Ku’gath. On Iax, at that time when sorcery waxed and physics waned, he wore whichever shape pleased him best.

  The Plaguefather’s plans as much as his size necessitated many of the changes to the medicae facility. The edges of certain of the floors had been left in place and cleared of internal divisions to serve as work benches. What had been wards housed bubbling alembics of filthy glass. Offices were handy spots to house rotting wooden boxes containing his supplies. Pinches of the choicest ingredients of decay drawn from dozens of realities rested in moss-covered personnel lockers tipped on their backs.

  No effort was spared in making this giant’s laboratory. There was no need for one of Mortarion’s alchemical clocks to spread the network of decay on Iax. The cauldron was Nurgle’s own artefact, a piece of himself, and therefore the epicentre of all of the Plague God’s efforts within Ultramar. It was the lynchpin of Mortarion’s and Ku’gath’s scheme. From its bubbling depths, Chaos’ foulness spilled out into the network of warp fissures generated by Mortarion’s infernal devices and spread all across Ultramar.

  Legions of daemons toiled in the plague mill to ensure the plan’s success. Around the cauldron a spiralled walkway of rotting wood wound, allowing a multitude of nurglings to hike to the brim and tip filth inside. To carry their sloshing loads they used all manner of ephemera taken from the mortal realm. They bore bedpans and bottles, empty skulls and stolen cribs, gourds, cups, bowls, rusting bathtubs, helmets, canteens, ration tins, empty food containers, halved tyres and broken plates of armour. All were rusted, rotted, caked in filth so thick many objects’ origins could only be guessed at. Drip by drip, slop by slop, slime by slime, the nurglings poured disgusting matter into the cauldron. Quite a few pitched themselves after in their enthusiasm for the work, to the hilarity of their fellows.

  Septicus glanced up nervously at his lord. ‘Quicker now, you rotting wretches, fill the cauldron! You impede the great work with your sluggardiness!’

  ‘It won’t do, it won’t do!’ grumbled Ku’gath. Before his rheumy eyes, a green vortex gurgled. Its glassy shaft reached past the confines of the blighted garden world into other times and places entirely. Ku’gath saw himself in some of them, and smiled fondly at the decay he unleashed there.

  ‘But not here!’ he snarled. ‘No! Never here!’ He trembled with frustration. Sheets of rotting skin unpeeled from his antlers and fell into the pot, bearing tribes of screaming nurglings to their doom.

  ‘I… I… I will whip them harder!’ said Septicus, forcing himself to remain cheerful. ‘I will command the horde to head out into the swamp and fetch more sickness. We will bring more mortals to incubate Nurgle’s diseases. Let your servants heed the word of I, Septicus. Do not trouble yourself, dear lord. Let Septicus set all to rights for you!’

  ‘No, no, it won’t help,’ said Ku’gath miserably.

  ‘Perhaps, then, a tune will jolly them along!’ Septicus declaimed, and sliced reality open in order to pull out the bag of guts and wind that made his plague pipes.

  ‘No piping!’ roared Ku’gath. His anger was so tempestuous that the sickened sky belched yellow lightning and rumbled dyspeptic pain. The nurglings ceased their giggling, and blinked in shock at their master, shuffling backwards to avoid attracting his attention. The plague­bearers’ droning enumeration came to a mumbling stop.

  ‘Certainly no piping. No music. None of that. No, no, no, no!’ Ku’gath said. ‘Let me have some peace! Let me have some quiet!’ He turned his attention to the cauldron’s heart. The noise returned, quietly to begin with, but the tittering of the nurglings was irrepressible, and the groans of the plaguebearers as they realised they must start their count anew was louder still.

  ‘Your efforts are for nothing, Septicus. This cauldron is a loan from the Grandfather himself. It is a great honour to be given its use! It has an infinite capacity for slime, guts and all other manner of vileness. It will never fill. You can tip in a universe of filth, and the mixture will never overtop. Truly, it is a marvel. My birthplace, my pain.’

  A nurgling crawled from one of Ku’gath’s boils and stood upon a scab as commanding as an outcrop on the cliff of his cheek. Unlike his capering fellows, the nurgling was a sombre imp, who looked into the cauldron with the air of a disappointed connoisseur.

  ‘He knows.’ Ku’gath tickled the wobbling chins of the imp with a gar
gantuan black fingernail. ‘He knows what it is to be so mired in sadness.’ He smiled affectionately. ‘Care not, little one. I will not make the same mistake Grandfather made with me.’ He plucked the nurgling from his face and into his mouth, popping it between tombstone teeth. ‘It is a terrible thing to bring a being into this world only to suffer, a terrible thing,’ he said. He looked morosely into the cauldron, and pushed his paddle around. ‘Maybe one day it can be done, this disease to end all others, a malady to slay a primarch, and bind all this realm of Ultramar into the bounteous garden forever. But– Oh, bother.’ Ku’gath sighed mightily and looked at his clawed foot. ‘It begins with the itch and the burn! The creeping tightness of fungal infection. Oh!’

  ‘Sounds delightful,’ said Septicus.

  ‘It is not! It is not!’ moaned Ku’gath. ‘It is the troublesome itch of the Mycota Profundis. Lord Mortarion is calling to me.’ Creeping mycelia ran up over Ku’gath’s foot, rushing in criss-crossing tendrils up his leg, into his groin, up over his belly, where they multiplied in size and thickness, and continued their race towards his face.

  The first veins reached his lips. One burst up his face and plunged into his eye, turning it milky, then black.

  ‘Bother it all! Septicus, stir this for me a moment. I shall not be long.’

  ‘My lord?’ said Septicus.

  Ku’gath went rigid. His giant mouth flopped open. Septicus held his foetid breath as Ku’gath’s massive bulk swayed on the brink of fleshy avalanche.

  The Plaguefather slumped into himself, and remained upright.