by Rob Sanders
As Czevak strode through the stone mist and the pumped network of vapour fig vines, the others followed, stepping out onto a tangled incline of rubble and twisted foliage. The High Inquisitor picked his footholds carefully as he skipped from felled pillars to ruined chunks of rockcrete and corroded struts and girders, all of which were ensnared in a carpet of dank shrubbery and crawling with rust mites that took to the languid air in lazy clouds.
They were standing on the rubble-strewn side of a man-made mountain that rose thousands of metres above their heads. Similar structures dotted the landscape beyond, islands of architectural collapse rising out of a carcinogen swamp that oozed and percolated with both pollution and ablution. Carbonic sedge and fern palms dominated a mangrove wetland of acidic peat, cancerous fungi and petrochemical floodwater. The vegetation was a sickly sulphur in colour, which clashed horribly with the stagnant expanse of the floodplain, reflecting as is did the puce dreadlight of the Eye from the sky above. In the distance a colossal structure dominated – a swollen hive city, like a ripe pustule, reaching out of the filth in the hydrocarbon haze. This was the Ablutra Hive, the planet’s reeking capital. The urban nightmare sat in a shallow sea of its own waste, perpetually fed by the torrents of sewage and industrial contaminant spewing from its broken drains and terminus pipes. This environment created new opportunities for the hardy and adaptive flora and fauna of the burgeoning hive-world and soon Ablutra and its sister hives came to crown the carcinogen swampland that rapidly colonised the toxic flood.
The hive and its surrounding spire remnants had formed a network of powerhouse manufacturing metropoli, the plasfibre sweatshops of which had supplied Cadia with cheap, durable flak armour for the fortress-world’s vast regiments.
Between the 12th and 13th Black Crusades, the Eye of Terror expanded, bursting its borders and rolling its thunderhead of warp storms and dreadspace out into new territories. Ablutraphur had been one of the planetary causalities and now, cut off from the Imperium and under the influence of Ruinous Powers, the stinking plasmills of Ablutra were more likely to be manufacturing armour plating for the False Castellan’s Unbound, the Blightlanders and various other cult armies of the Great Lord of Decay.
Picking his way carefully down through the scree and mangrove tangle, Czevak made his way to the shoreline, the retinue in dumbstruck tow. As an ancient and abandoned satellite hive, the derelict highland formed a mountainous island upon which the bubbling, methanogenic fenwater of the wetlands lapped.
‘Is that where we’re going?’ Epiphani called down the slope, the warp-seer now intent on complaining about their descent rather than the climb.
‘What we seek is in Ablutra – yes,’ Czevak confirmed, standing at the water’s edge. He mouthed, ‘How are we going to get across there?’ as the same words fell out of the psyker, for once able to predict the prognostic’s actions.
Czevak allowed the question to hang in the rank humidity as Klute and the team joined him. He fully expected to have an answer for them by the time they arrived and was as surprised as they were at his continued silence.
In the end, all he could manage was, ‘It can’t be that deep,’ as the group stared out across the muckscape of sluggish channels, fermenting pools and peat bog islands that were held together by nothing more than the decaying root architecture of carbonic sedge and palm anchors.
Objections died in the throats of almost everyone present as the oily waters beyond the shore suddenly began to churn and vortex. A wide, flattened jaw of huge dimensions was opening beneath the surface, allowing a small lake to flow in down its huge, inflating gullet. Czevak and his team stared down its gaping, toothless and seemingly bottomless throat as the beast feasted on the filtered methanogenic organisms swarming in the captured sluice. The gulping giant was repulsive to behold. Although not equipped with the daggered maw of a man-eater, the sudden appearance of the umbrella-jawed behemoth from the mire shallows had given the band a taste of what dangers the carcinogen swamp had to offer.
‘Depth doesn’t seem to be the problem,’ Klute said and the five of them backed away from the swelling shore.
An unexpected coolness drew Czevak’s eyes skyward as the sunrise was momentarily blocked from sight. Sensing danger from above, rather than below, the High Inquisitor crouched. Klute and the others followed suit. With dawnlight once again burning their faces, the retinue followed the progress of a vehicle that had passed overhead. It was all but silent, accounting for the fact that nobody – even Torqhuil with his superhuman hearing – had detected anything out of the ordinary above the gurgle and slosh of the swamp. A balloon, made of patchwork plasfibre and rigging, reinforced and filthy. A rough methane burner on gimbals rotated between heating the air inside the balloon and providing steerage. Beneath the airship was suspended an open plasteel frame from which dripped chains, tackle and a large torsion engine, resembling a giant ballista or crossbow hanging from the airship and pointing towards the ground. Swale gypsies swarmed both the rig and rigging in their filthy rags, desperate to crank the windlass and prepare their jumbo harpoon for launch.
Hiding in the long sedge, Czevak and the team watched as the balloon swung in from above and fell towards their position. The wicked grapnel tip of the harpoon passed over their heads before gaining a little altitude off the shore. Here the balloon hovered, waiting for the moment to strike. The hideous monster surfaced again, gulping half the channel in one impossible mouthful. The ballista fired explosively and the gypsies buried their uncompromising weapon in the wide head of the beast. The harpoon speared the monster through the mouth – the grapnel releasing on the tip. As the gypsies cheered and locked off their line the filter feeder spasmed, rolling this way and that, desperate to free itself. With the lightweight frame bucking and chains jangling back and forth, the swale gypsies secured themselves by hooking the plasteel bars with the inside of elbows and knees. The gypsy in charge of the blast valve hit the burner and took the airship up into the sky, dragging its monstrous catch out of the shallows. While still huge, the creature was mostly mouth, the rest of its body a trailing, serpentine tail with primitive gills and pectoral sails running down the considerable length of the beast.
‘High Inquisitor,’ Torqhuil warned Czevak. ‘Multiple targets closing on our position.’
‘Oh no,’ Czevak said flippantly to himself. He had been hoping for such an intervention ever since they had spotted the balloon. Czevak nodded to the Relictor, thankful for the Space Marine’s enhanced senses. Both Klute and Torqhuil went for their weapons but the High Inquisitor waved them down. Czevak had no doubt that his henchmen could handle a group of gypsies. As patient prisoners, however, they might all be treated to free passage to Ablutra and avoid the worst of the swamp.
‘Follow my lead,’ Czevak told them.
The mangrove was suddenly alive with bodies crashing through the ferns. Swale gypsies were everywhere in their filthy, plasfibre rags and headdresses, jabbering at them in a guttural mixture of bastardised Low Gothic and shanty-speak. The gypsies were unkempt and hairy with faces full of hoops and cheap trinkets. They thrust the barrels of blaze-dribbling flamers at them, the battered methane tanks of which they carried like satchel bags on their hip. What appeared to be the swale gypsy leader came forward, a stubgun and holster on his belt and a pair of scavenged magnocular goggles in his headdress. His face creased with fury and demands.
Czevak raised his hands. ‘Follow my lead,’ he said with hushed insistence.
Torqhuil looked down with infuriation on the angry little men with their primitive weapons.
‘I don’t know if I can do that,’ the Space Marine told the High Inquisitor.
‘You’re sure?’ Klute said as gypsies darted in, slapping his robes aside for his sidearm.
‘We surrender,’ Czevak told the gypsies confidently in Low Gothic.
Klute and Epiphani raised their arms, while Hessian settled for the grin of an imbecile. The Relictors Space Marine brought his servo-arms in close to
his harness so that they appeared a little less threatening. He couldn’t bring himself to do anything with his actual arms. The gypsies instinctively gave the Space Marine and daemonhost a wide berth but were very hands on in their prompting of the inquisitors and the warp-seer.
The retinue were marched through the mangrove and along the putrid shoreline. The gypsies walked about them with their chugging incinerators at the ready, led by the be-goggled leader, who every few steps stabbed his stubgun into Czevak’s back in insistence. The High Inquisitor took this with good grace at first, but on the seventh or eighth jab started to get the feeling that the be-goggled leader was enjoying it. ‘We surrender,’ Czevak told him in slow syllables that even the jabbering gypsy should have been able to understand.
For his trouble he got the gaping muzzle of the stubgun in his face.
Rounding the overgrown spire of the island, the group saw the sickly sky fill with balloons both large and small: one man gyro-blimps, harpoon-trailing sky hunters and largest of all, a hovering shanty settlement of canvas and corrugated plasteel – all held in place using a ramshackle collection of plasfibre balloons of different shapes and sizes, draped in chains and rigging. The be-goggled leader took them to a chain-ladder hanging from the underside of the floating community and prompted them to climb, which Czevak did with enthusiasm and aplomb and his companions less so.
Climbing up through a hatch in the shantytown deck, Czevak stood up only to find himself doubled back over when almost immediately the stock of a flame thrower slammed him in the stomach. The High Inquisitor gasped and went down on his knees, gagging on his incredulity.
‘We surrender!’ he wheezed. ‘Do you understand?’ he asked an approaching gypsy with a greasy beard. ‘We offer no resistance. We are happy to go with you.’
The bearded escort ignored the High Inquisitor’s insistence and two gypsies grabbed and half-dragged his winded form across the rusty surface of the deck. His flame-prompted team followed, requiring considerably less instruction.
‘You should have let me tear them limb from limb on the ground,’ Torqhuil rumbled from behind.
‘I still might,’ Czevak croaked, turning his head in acknowledgement but his custodians shook him back around roughly. Gypsies screamed at them in shanty-speak to remain silent.
As the group was escorted across the scrap-welded decking, between corrugated shacks and canvas extensions, the ragged community of men, women and children stopped on the rigging and rope-bridge walkways, showing the newcomers their hostile eyes and browned teeth in a universal expression of dislike and distrust. Around and above them the raggedy cavalcade of balloons and airships soared, while about their legs, narrow-jawed dwarf archosaurs sidled with hissing requests for food scraps.
Pushed through canvas drapes and into the darkness of shelter, Czevak came to find himself in some kind of meeting place. Inside, the ragged beards of the gypsies were longer and the headdresses more lice-ridden. Shanty hags hobbled about the gathering, looking over the new arrivals while both the be-goggled gypsy and his bearded compatriot came forward to deliver proud testimony of the capture to the gathered elders. The chieftain council dissolved into a cacophony of chatter and squawking shanty-speak, giving Czevak opportunity to reach inside his Harlequin coat.
The be-goggled escort grabbed his wrist but by then the High Inquisitor had tossed a collection of finger-sized adamantium ingots onto the deck in front of the gathering. The bars clattered on the deck and glittered in the pilot flames of their escorts’ weapons, silencing the crowd of elders and drawing the crones down on them with greedy glances.
Czevak snatched his wrist back and tore back the canvas drape to reveal the menacing shape of the Ablutra Hive looming in the hazy distance. He pointed at the ingots on the deck and then at the distant metropolis.
‘We require transportation to the hive,’ Czevak told them with deliberate syllables, looking from one liver-spotted face to another for some form of recognition, ‘in exchange for payment.’
The aged throng parted and a sag-skinned elder came forward, his wrinkled visage stretched to grotesque youthfulness by the sheer weight of rings, hoops and decorations hooked through and dangling from his face. A muscular frame of yester-years was visible through his open rags but like his face, the chieftain’s chest was a sorry remnant of wasted muscle, white wisps of hair and the cheap jangle of torso jewellery.
‘You not go there,’ the chieftain told him, ‘there is no welcome for you there.’
Czevak and Klute exchanged glances.
‘Of course,’ the High Inquisitor said under his breath. ‘They speak Low Gothic.’
‘We’re not getting much of a welcome here,’ Klute sighed back.
‘We know of the dangers,’ Czevak told the chieftain.
‘We do?’ Klute asked.
‘We only require transportation,’ Czevak continued, ‘to the Spire.’ The High Inquisitor gestured at the floor where the hags were recovering the adamantium ingots. ‘Take these as half payment, the same again when the job’s done.’
The gathering descended upon the gypsy and the gabbling recommenced, the adamantium ingots snatched from the crooked fingers of the hags and passed to a toothless adviser beside the hook-faced chieftain. As his scrawny hand came up the chamber fell to a hush. The chieftain chattered in gumspittle shanty-speak at both the gypsy in the goggles and the escort with the greasy beard before hawking horribly and spitting into his hand. Offering the palm of his hand to Czevak the High Inquisitor bridled slightly before doing the same and engaging in the squelchy agreement.
As it transpired, the monstrous catch Czevak and the team had witnessed being harpooned and landed was also a trade. The airship they had seen earlier now had orders to transport the colossal gulper up to the hive spire for the palace kitchens. As the balloon drifted across the carcinogen swamps, the loathsome behemoth still swinging from the harpoon line below, Czevak and his team clung to the rusty plasteel frame and rigging. Swale gypsies leapt from rig to cage and cage to line with an agility, if not a grace, learned almost from birth in their sky shanty.
Klute demonstrated some surprise that the palace kitchens would entertain such a horrific dish in the form of the giant swamp feeder. Czevak, who had been up at the burner with his goggled friend, informed them all that Ablutra Hive was in open rebellion. Starvation had wracked the obscene metropolis as it had done with Hive Katharse, Hive Squalus and other megapolis sprawling across Ablutraphur’s stinking surface. The capital had descended into a financial meltdown with what little control the Houses and the Spire commanded in the city swallowed in full scale civil war between various ganglords and cultists. The war was tumultuous and bloody, with new victors emerging weekly and occupying the hive city’s Spire palace in mock-governorship. As ammunition and food supplies ran dry, gang loyalties dissolved and starvation riots tore the hive apart. The hivers themselves began to degenerate into cannibalistic armies with untold billions of emaciated Ablutrans dying in gutters or rampaging murderously through the mills, habs and underhive, feeding in ghoulish masses on the dead and unfortunate. The goggled balloon captain told Czevak that they only traded with the changing denizens of the Spire and scavvies from the Deeps, who not unlike the nomadic swale gypsies, had found security in environments where even rabid, cannibal hordes would not roam.
Klute shook his head in saddened disbelief.
‘Hive worlds…’ Klute said. ‘Rat nests of vice and villainy. This world is being punished for turning away from the light of the God-Emperor.’
‘To be fair,’ Torqhuil returned, ‘the petty denizens of this planet can hardly be held responsible for the freak immateriology of the Eye. Warp storms swallowed it whole.’
‘Agreed,’ Klute said, ‘but why Ablutraphur? Perhaps the manifold wickedness of this world had already attracted the attention of some dark power – and that’s why they were taken?’
‘Some say Lord Variccus and the Unbound have a presence here and that the False Caste
llan’s cult armies benefit from Ablutran body armour,’ the Relictor informed the inquisitor. ‘Variccus’s master, the Great Lord of Decay holds sway here now.’
‘The Ablutrans had to deal with somebody,’ Czevak said.
‘You would excuse this hive scum their embrace of the Ruinous Powers?’
‘No,’ Czevak returned with conviction. ‘The Imperium abandoned this system. Nobody sent assistance. No military support. No supplies. An embargo on trade. What did you think they were going to do? Wait forever? The denizens of the Eye have to eat also.’
‘Well, if our guide is right, they’ve taken to eating each other,’ Klute said.
‘That we can’t blame on the False Castellan,’ Czevak insisted.
‘The daemon Mammoshad?’ It was more of a statement than a question, but the High Inquisitor nodded in confirmation.
‘King of Kings, Enslaver of the Craven Worlds and Keeper of the Vault Abyssal. When the Daecropsicum visited their Gellersection on the unfortunate entity, Torqhuil tells us that they bound individual parts of the creature to different artefacts and Chaotic weapons,’ Czevak added. ‘The daemon’s definitive essence – its greed and ambition – was bound in a single artefact, a coin. The Black Library detailed the existence of this accursed object and the incalculable damage it has caused over the centuries.’
‘What damage can a coin actually do?’ Klute enquired.
‘It is called by many names,’ Czevak revealed, ‘since it is rumoured to change its appearance, but its most common incarnation is the Black Sovereign of Sierra Sangraal. As the Black Sovereign changes hands, passing from person to person, hive to hive, across planets and even sectors, it brings poverty and riches to those it touches. Through this indiscriminate good and bad fortune, economies are destabilised, value is debased, plutocracies are created and everything in between crumbles. Mammoshad makes kings and he breaks them.’
‘The Black Library places the coin here?’ Klute asked.