by Guy Haley
Unnatural things disappeared under the water with gloopy plops when they felt the touch of his gaze. He let out a little of his soul, letting it brush all things around him. The mud boiled with eager life as his essence leaked into the marsh, but he felt nothing that could think, or that would care what he was about to do, or, most importantly, tell anyone about it.
Anyone like Rotigus, for example.
He looked around one last time, and softly cleared his throat.
‘Tattleslug, Tattleslug, come, come, come,’ he sang, very quietly. ‘I have a secret I must tell. Wriggle out, wriggle out, ears aflap, under revelation’s spell.’
He looked around again. No sign of the thing he would enlist to his cause, no sign that he had been heard. A cold wind, redolent of flatus, blew over him.
‘Hmph,’ he grumbled. The Tattleslug was a lesser thing than he, but he could not simply command it: its allegiance must be bought. He sighed. He was going to have to appear more enthusiastic.
‘Tattleslug, Tattleslug, come, come, come,’ he sang again, more loudly now. ‘I have a secret I must tell. Wriggle out, wriggle out, ears aflap, under revelation’s spell.’
The wind blew stronger. Tree branches rattled. Damned souls moaned further out in the wastes. He listened hard, and heard a faint and ghostly tittering.
Encouraged, he sang again, and louder still. ‘Tattleslug, Tattleslug, come, come, come. I have a secret I must tell. Wriggle out, wriggle out, ears aflap, under revelati… Oooof,’ he said, and gripped his stomach. A most pleasing reflux burned his gullet. Gas bubbled, forced its way out, ballooning his exposed guts, where it escaped from an ulcer with a hissing, wheezing stink.
Ku’Gath gritted carious teeth. ‘Tattleslug, Tattleslug, come, come, come. I have a secret I must tell. Wriggle out, wriggle out, ears aflap, under revelation’s spell!’
The pain moved outward, as if something with sharp claws was swimming through his innards, up, up to the surface of his body. The something pushed against the inside of his leathery hide, and bit.
Ku’Gath gasped. Again he sang his little song, and the pain became a blister upon his skin. A sixth repetition of the spell saw the blister grow, until he sang for the seventh and final time.
‘Tattleslug, Tattleslug, come, come, come. I have a secret I must tell. Wriggle out, wriggle out, ears aflap, under revelation’s spell.’
The blister burst. A slippery, slug-like thing encased in a membrane slipped free in a wash of fluid. Ku’Gath lunged for it, grasped it, but it popped through his fingers like a well-greased stool, and he found himself grabbing at it three times before he had it cradled in the palm of one vast hand. It squirmed within its birthing sac, and Ku’Gath licked at it gently with his sticky tongue until the sac was free, and the creature exposed.
It uncurled, and shook, flinging off mucus, and lifted a broad, eyeless head. It had a body like a tadpole crossed with a maggot, round at the front, tapering to a muscular tail. The face was simply a broad mouth set with flat teeth, and lurid purple lips. It had no legs as such, but four stumpy arms tipped with sharp-clawed, three-fingered hands.
‘Tattleslug,’ said Ku’Gath. ‘You came.’
‘Great and mighty Ku’Gath Plaguefather,’ said the Tattleslug. It thrust itself up on its tail, spread its tiny arms wide and bowed. It had a soft, incipient voice, full of cunning and treachery. ‘What service might I provide you, oh first in Nurgle’s favour?’
‘First indeed, but for how much longer?’ grumbled Ku’Gath. ‘I have been told of many things by a rival of mine.’
‘You speak, of course, of Rotigus,’ said the Tattleslug.
Ku’Gath’s cold blood boiled that this insignificant thing should know of his woes, but that was its nature.
‘Yes. Rotigus. I must complete the plague I brew in yonder plague mill, or else I shall suffer a subtraction of regard, and find myself lower in the estimations of our Grandfather. I will not kowtow to that arrogant bringer of weather. Never!’
‘You would know his designs then, his plans, his schemes, so you might foil them?’ said the Tattleslug.
‘No!’ snapped Ku’Gath. ‘Foolish mite. That is too unsubtle. I do not want to move against him, and risk the Grandfather’s ire. I say I must have success, is all, right here on Pestiliax.’
‘How so then, mighty one?’ asked the Tattleslug.
‘I have to prove myself right, and him wrong. My plague must work. I have to kill the thrice-cursed, seven-times-damned Anathema’s son. Only then will Nurgle esteem me higher than the rain-dripper.’
‘You want to kill Mortarion?’ said the Tattleslug slyly.
‘No! Not Mortarion, though I can think of sadder worlds than ones where he does not exist. But no! I mean Roboute Guilliman.’ His jaw clicked and spasmed as he forced out the name. ‘He is coming here, soon. I would know his plans.’
‘I cannot pierce the veils of light that surround him. He is protected by…’ the Tattleslug shuddered. ‘Him.’
Ku’Gath chewed his lip. ‘I thought as much, though dared hope otherwise, so I had simpler methods in mind. I need a cunning mind to fare in mortal lands. Gather intelligence, and suchlike.’
‘A spy then?’ The Tattleslug cocked its head and stuck out its lip. ‘Such work I have done, and I was made to do, for Grandfather enjoys to eavesdrop. Spy it is. Who?’
‘Someone who can see and hear him, but not too close. None of his sons, or the golden beasts of the Emperor, nor any of his priests or his warrior women, or those checked by and close to the same.’
‘Then a normal man? A mortal who can come and go, not too important, but invested with sufficient authority to move freely. One of this world perhaps, not of his crusading host. The son of the Anathema is wary, but he is alone. His attention cannot be everywhere at once.’
‘Yes! Yes!’ said Ku’Gath enthusiastically. ‘That sounds good, that sounds right! Important, but not too important.’
The Tattleslug nodded. ‘That way, then, it shall be done.’ It clasped its hands before its pallid gut. ‘You know the price. If it is secrets that you seek, then it is secrets you must trade, like for like, that is my custom. Whisper a thing unknown for me to have as my consideration.’
‘How do I judge what is worthy to tell?’ bubbled Ku’Gath.
‘You are far above me, mighty one, first in Nurgle’s favour. I am lowly in the hierarchy, nine thousand nine hundred and seventeenth, but in this case my will supersedes yours. I shall judge the weight of your secret. It will dictate the length and nature of my service. The greater the secret, the greater the risks I am permitted to take.’
‘Hmmmm,’ said Ku’Gath. ‘A secret.’ He thought long and hard. The Tattleslug waited patiently in the Great Unclean One’s hand. ‘I have it!’ said Ku’Gath. He bent his pocked face forward. The Tattleslug cocked its head, and cupped a hand around the place where its ear would have been, if it had had ears.
‘Speak!’ said the Tattleslug.
‘I…’ wheezed Ku’Gath, his voice very quiet. ‘I never really liked Septicus Seven.’
The Tattleslug stood back on its tail and folded its little arms. ‘Is that it? Is that the best you can do? For that morsel I would not risk stealing a baby’s name by listening to its mother. This is most pathetic, my lord.’
‘I… Oh, um. Well.’ Ku’Gath leaned a bit closer. ‘I really don’t like Mortarion either, or Typhus, and I hate Rotigus.’
‘Oh great one,’ said the Tattleslug, not entirely unsympathetically. ‘I appreciate that you try your best, and that these confessions cause you a little embarrassment, but they are of no use, because the very nature of a secret, my lord, is that it is unknown to others, and if the great and good of Nurgle’s Garden know one thing about you, it is that you hate everybody. So I suggest you try again. Go on, I know you can.’
‘Very well.’ Ku’Gath dropped his voice even fu
rther, until it was nothing but a tickle on his halitosis. ‘I have a drop of the primarch’s blood.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said the Tattleslug eagerly, clapping its hands. ‘Give me more. This is known, but I sense a secret coming.’
‘I got it on the battlefield of Hecatone. It will enable us to kill him.’
‘Go on. Tell me something I do not know.’
‘I still have it.’ Ku’Gath rooted about with ragged fingernails in one of his many unhealed wounds. He pulled out a tiny phial, and hung it from a chain before the Tattleslug. The glass was clean, the chain free of corrosion; a single ruby drop slid around the inside, resolutely unpolluted. ‘I keep this about me at all times, even though it burns me so! This is not a pleasant suffering, being the awful touch of the Anathema Himself.’
‘Most impressive,’ said the Tattleslug. ‘But not enough. It is known you require it for your concoction. No secret, no service.’
Ku’Gath dropped his voice. ‘I do not need it all for the Godblight. I was careful. It is precious. I could do all manner of wondrous things with this, things that even Mortarion would be powerless against. They are siblings, you know. They share some of the same strengths, and some of the same weaknesses, because they share the same blood.’
The Tattleslug clapped its hands and spun around on its belly. ‘Excellent! Excellent! Plots and schemes are the best of secrets. I would say yours are safe with me, but then I am the Tattleslug, and that would be a lie. This information suffices for my employment. Our compact is sealed. I shall perform the duty you require.’
Crimson slits appeared on the Tattleslug’s back, and a double set of ragged wings unfolded. They beat swiftly with the sawing sound of fly swarms, and the Tattleslug rose up.
‘What I shall learn, you shall know, oh great one,’ said the small daemon, executing an aerial bow. Obeisance given, it buzzed away into the night.
Ku’Gath watched the Tattleslug until it was lost to sight. ‘This had better be worth it,’ he sighed, and waded back to the plague mill and his work.
Captain Diamider Tefelius slept uneasily beside his wife. It was a hot night, as all nights were now on Iax, with damp winds coming off the infected lands. Counterseptic-soaked sheets hung in his windows, filling his quarters with a chemical fug that made his head buzz and his mind sluggish in the mornings. His dreams were vividly unpleasant, but whether that was down to the diseases the enemy had unleashed upon the garden world, corrupting fully four-fifths of it, or the measures the humans living in the last free lands were forced to take against them, he could not say. He was no medicae expert, and had to trust what he was told.
But by the Emperor, he hated the smell of the counterseptic. He was dreaming about it: how when he put his sanctified, bio-pure uniform on, the smell clung to him; how it was worse when the helmet respirator was sealed in place. He could taste it on his food, on his wife’s kisses, and he could taste it in his sleep.
In his dream, he was an infantryman again, and Sergeant Sovaset was bellowing at him to put on his helmet, even though it was full of counterseptic. He’d hated Sovaset, thinking him a bully. Although in his later years he understood why the sergeant had behaved that way, in his dreams Tefelius was still terrified of him.
‘But I’ll drown, sir,’ he said.
Sovaset’s reply was an incoherent stream of rage, nonsense sounds and spittle that made Tefelius cringe. Tefelius was suddenly even younger, a child, the sergeant still shouting at him though Tefelius was half the sergeant’s size. The uniform pooled around his feet and hung off his body, and the helmet had grown to four times life-size. Now Sovaset wanted him to get into the bath of stinking fluid the helmet contained.
The dreaming Tefelius cried, then cried more when Sovaset began to beat him. He had never wept at punishment in real life, but throughout his training Tefelius had feared he would, and dreamed about it often.
He felt a feather touch upon his mind, and a curious soul peer in.
‘Would you like to see something else?’ a soft, friendly voice asked.
Tefelius, now curled upon the floor as Sovaset’s hard stick whacked into his ribs, whimpered.
‘Yes.’
Then he was someone else, or something else, perhaps – a little fellow who flew so freely through the air. The dream was calming, and a relief after Sovaset’s rage. He was flying over the plague-racked world of Pestiliax – he knew that name was wrong, but could not remember what its proper name was – towards the city-port of First Landing, where the mortal lords lived, and where the primarch would undoubtedly land in a few days’ time. Tefelius was confused; he had no information about the primarch’s whereabouts, and never in his life had he had a glimmer of foresight, but he seemed to be in possession of a store of secret knowledge, and he knew, he just knew, that Roboute Guilliman would be coming to his city soon.
As he neared the bladed karst mountains where First Landing lay, the land grew less and less sickly. For some reason this upset him.
He saw the passing world as if he were there himself, but he did not direct the flight, and the wings that he could feel as his own were not his to move. The view tilted. The stepped gardens of First Landing raced up to meet him. He saw the first, second and third-tier walls, ranked up the mountain like an Ascension Day cake, and the broad Spiral Way that wound about the blade. The buildings, the castella, the dying hanging gardens. Soon he was over the district of his domicile, then his home tower, tall and conical like that of a termite colony, then his window, the counterseptic sheets wafting in the breeze.
There was a soft thump, a skid as of a sack of fat slung along the ground, and his flight was done. A pallid hand, also not his own, but nevertheless somehow his, lifted aside the drapes with a hiss of discomfort. The smell seemed worse than ever.
Awake, a voice in him said with some urgency.
The room was dark, but in the city glow he saw sleeping forms ahead in a bed of carved wood. His bed. It seemed huge, tall as a cliff. A curl of brown hair he knew to be his wife Almeya’s poked out from the covers to hang over the edge, and over the top there was a lump that could only be his own back. The sleepers slumbered, unawares, as malice crept towards them.
Awake now, or be damned, the voice said.
Grunting softly, dream Tefelius hauled himself up the bed sheets hand over hand, wriggling onto the brocade bedspread. The cleanliness of the stiff cloth was painful on dream Tefelius’ body, and he squirmed quickly to the head of the bed to avoid touching it too long. A small hand reached down, and pulled back the sheets.
Before him, mouth slightly open, was his own unconscious face.
Awake! Awake!
In his dream sight, Tefelius twitched and moaned, but could not shake off the dream.
‘Hello, human,’ dream Tefelius said to his own sleeping self. ‘By dream we have touched, and by dream become one.’ The small, clawed hand reached out, and pressed into his cheek, moist and horrible.
Awake!
With a gasp, Tefelius awoke. For a moment, he experienced a strange sense of bilocation, looking down at his own shocked features, and up at the disgusting, slug-like creature squatting on his chest.
‘Such a sweet, sweet little soul you have. But I don’t need that.’
Wings folded moistly back beneath the thing’s skin. Tefelius opened his mouth.
‘I only need your eyes,’ said the Tattleslug.
Before Tefelius could scream, the Tattleslug’s soft head thrust itself into his mouth, jamming his jaw wide. Pushing hard, it forced itself down his throat, wriggling, stretching, choking him on its noisome body, until with a slippery give, it slithered inside his chest.
Tefelius sat bolt upright, drenched in sweat; he gasped hard, choking for breath.
‘My love, are you unwell?’
Almeya’s concerned face came into sharp focus. It was no longer night. Weak daylight pour
ed through the curtains. On the stand, where his uniform hung, his vox-bead was honking.
He put his hand to his chest. He was soaked. A hard lump seemed to sit behind his breastbone, and he had the most disgusting feeling it was laughing, quivering his viscera with its mirth. He blinked sweat from his eyes, and turned to look at his wife.
‘I…’
‘Diamider?’ she asked, thoroughly unnerved.
He grasped the front of his nightshirt, but the awful feeling in his chest faded away. He gulped. His throat was raw.
‘A nightmare,’ he said. ‘I had the most terrible nightmare!’ He laughed with relief.
‘Of what sort?’ she asked. The priests had asked that nocturnal terrors be reported. Tefelius was having none of that.
‘Not that kind, not the kind that needs to be tallied with the others, I’m sure,’ he said, although he wasn’t sure. He was so very far from sure, although he would not report it. A compulsion grew in him not to tell, and became stronger the more he thought on it.
‘Your vox-bead is clamouring,’ she said sleepily. She flopped down onto her side of the bed. Her hand flung out and touched his side. ‘You’ve soaked the sheets,’ she mumbled. She was falling back asleep.
‘Then have the servants deal with it while I am on duty.’ He got out of bed on legs that still trembled, went to his uniform stand, and fumbled at his collar. He had to try twice before he managed to press the vox-bead response rune.
‘Captain Tefelius,’ he said.
‘Captain, your presence is needed immediately at the command centre, by order of Planetary Governor Costalis.’
‘Are the enemy coming?’ he asked. They had been expecting an attack for months. It would be a relief to get it over with.
‘No, sir,’ the officer on the other end of the line said, and Tefelius noted his excitement. ‘It’s the primarch. He’s coming here. The crusade fleet made warp egress an hour ago. They will be in orbit of Iax within a few days.’