by Dan Abnett
Then they came. Black dots on the ice-floes, thousands of them, waving banners so obscene, they...
Whatever. We were in no mood to fight. Driven mad by the light, driven to distraction by the lack of sleep, unnerved by the curious geometry of the place we were defending, we were easy meat. The forces of Chaos slaughtered us, and pushed us back into the city itself. The civilians, about two million strong, were worse than useless. They were pallid, idle things, with no drive or appetite. When doom came upon them, they simply gave up.
We were besieged for five months, despite six attempts by the Doom Eagles to break the deadlock. Faith, but they were terrifying! Giants, clashing their bolters together before each fight, screaming at the foe, killing fifty for every one we picked off.
But it was like fighting the tide, and for all their power, there were only sixty of them.
We called for reinforcements. Getus had promised us, but now he was long gone aboard his warship, drawn back behind the fleet picket in case things got nasty.
The first man I saw fall to the Torment was a captain in my seventh platoon. He just collapsed one day, feverish. We took him to the Pirody Polar infirmium, where Subjunctus Valis, the Apothecary of the Doom Eagles company, was running the show. An hour later, the captain was dead. His skin had blistered and bubbled. His eyes had burst. He had tried to kill Valis with a piece of the metal cot he had torn from the wall brace. Then he bled out.
You know what that means? His entire body spewed blood from every orifice, every pore. He was a husk by the time it was over.
In the day after the captain’s death, sixty fell victim. Another day, two hundred. Another day, a thousand. Most died within two hours. Others lingered... for days, pustular, agonised.
Men I had known all my life turned into gristly sacks of bone before my eyes. Damn you, Sark, for making me remember this!
On the seventh day, it spread to the Fancho as well. On the ninth, it reached the civilian population. Valis ordered all measure of quarantine, but it was no good. He worked all hours of the endless day, trying to find a vaccine, trying to alleviate the relentless infection.
On the tenth day, a Doom Eagle fell victim. In his Torment, blood gouting from his visor grilles, he slew two of his comrades and nineteen of my men. The disease had overcome even the Adeptus Astartes purity seals.
I went to Valis, craving good news. He had set up a laboratory in the infirmium, where blood samples and tissue-scrapes boiled in alembics and separated in oil flasks. He assured me the Torment would be stopped. He explained how unlikely it was for a pestilence to be transmitted in such a cold clime, where there is no heat to incubate and spread decay. He also believed it would not flourish in light. So he had every stretch of the city wired with lamps so that there would be no darkness.
No darkness. In a place where none came naturally, even the shadows of closed rooms were banished. Everything was bright. Perhaps you can see now why I abhor the light and cling to darkness.
The stench of blood-filth was appalling. Valis did his work, but still we fell. By the twenty-first day, I’d lost thirty-seven per cent of my force. The Fancho were all but gone. Twelve thousand Pirodian citizens were dead or dying. Six Doom Eagles had succumbed.
Here are your facts if you want them. The plague persisted in a climate that should have killed it. It showed no common process of transmission. It brooked no attempt to contain or control it, despite efforts to enforce quarantine and cleanse infected areas with flamers. It was ferociously contagious. Even Space Marine purity seals were no protection. Its victims died in agony.
Then one of the Doom Eagles deciphered the obscene script of one of the Chaos banners displayed outside the walls.
It said...
It said one word. One filthy word. One damned, abominable word that I have spent my life trying to forget.
V
I craned in at the dark doorway. ‘What word? What word was it, colonel?’ With great reluctance, he spoke it. It wasn’t a word at all. It was an obscene gurgle dignified by consonants. The glyph-name of the plague-daemon itself, one of the ninety-seven Blasphemies that May Not Be Written Down.
At its utterance, I fell back off my stool, nausea writhing in my belly and throat. Kalibane shrieked. The sister collapsed in a faint, and the novitiate fled.
Baptrice took four steps back from the doorway, turned, and vomited spectacularly.
The temperature in the corridor dropped by fifteen degrees.
Unsteady, I attempted to straighten my overturned stool and pick up the artificer that the novitiate had knocked over. Where it had recorded the word, I saw, the machine’s parchment tape had begun to smoulder.
Screaming and wailing echoed down the hall from various cells. And then, Ioq was out.
Just next door, he had heard it all, his scarred head pressed to the cage bars. Now that cage door splintered off its mount and crashed to the corridor floor. Berserk, the huge ex-Guardsman thrashed out and turned towards us.
He was going to kill me, I’m certain, but I was slumped and my legs wouldn’t work. Then Kalibane, bless his brave heart, flew at him. My devoted servitor rose up on his stunted hind limbs, the bionics augmenting his vast forelimbs throwing them up in a warning display. From splayed foot to reaching hand, Kalibane was eleven feet tall. He peeled back his lips and screeched through bared steel canines.
Froth dribbling from his tusked mouth, Ioq smashed Kalibane aside. My servitor made a considerable dent in the wall.
Ioq was on me.
I swept my staff of office around, and thumbed the recessed switch below the head.
Electric crackles blasted from the staff’s tip. Ioq convulsed and fell. Twitching, he lay on the floorboards, and evacuated involuntarily. Baptrice was on his feet now. Alarms were ringing and novitiates were rushing frantically into the corridor with harness jackets and clench poles.
I rose and looked back at the dark doorway. ‘Colonel Ebhoe?’
The door slammed shut.
VI
There would be no further interview that afternoon, Brother Baptrice made plain, despite my protests. Novitiates escorted me to a guest chamber on the second floor. It was whitewashed and plain, with a hard, wooden bed and small scriptorium table. A leaded window looked out onto the graveyard and the jungles beyond.
I felt a great perturbation of spirit, and paced the room as Kalibane unpacked my belongings. I had come so close, and had begun to draw the reluctant Ebhoe out. Now to be denied the chance to continue when the truly dark secrets were being revealed!
I paused by the window. The glaring, crimson sun was sinking into the mauve oceans, throwing the thick jungles into black, wild relief. Seabirds reeled over the bay in the dying light. Stars were coming out in the dark blue edges of the sky.
Calmer now, I reflected that whatever my internal uproar, the uproar in the place itself was greater.
From the window, I could hear all manner of screams, wails, shouts, banging doors, thundering footsteps, rattled keys. The word of blasphemy that Ebhoe had spoken had thrown all the fragile minds in this house of insanity into disarray, like red-hot metal plunged into quenching cold water. Great efforts were being made to quieten the inmates.
I sat at the teak scriptorium for a while, reviewing the transcripts while Kalibane dozed on a settle by the door. Ebhoe had made particular mention of Subjunctus Valis, the Doom Eagles Apothecary. I looked over copies of the old Pirody debriefings I had brought with me, but Valis’ name only appeared in the muster listings. Had he survived? Only a direct request to the Doom Eagles Chapter house could provide an answer, and that might take months. The Adeptus Astartes are notoriously secretive, sometimes downright blatant in their uncooperative relationship with the Administratum. At best, it might involve a series of formal approaches, delaying tactics, bargaining. Even so, I wanted to alert my brethren on Lorches to the possible lead.
I damned Saint Bastian when I remembered the place had no vox-caster! I couldn’t even forward a mess
age to the astropathic enclave at Symbalopolis for transmission off-world.
A sister brought me supper on a tray. Just as I was finishing, and Kalibane was lighting the lamps, Niro and Jardone came to my chamber.
‘Brothers?’
Jardone got right to it, staring at me through his half-moon lenses. ‘The brotherhood of the hospice have met, and they decided that you must leave. Tomorrow. No further audiences will be granted. We have a vessel that will take you to the fishing port at Math Island. You can obtain passage to Symbalopolis from there.’
‘I am disappointed, Jardone. I do not wish to leave. My recollection is not complete.’
‘It is as complete as it’s going to be!’ he snapped.
‘The hospice has never been so troubled,’ Niro said quietly. ‘There have been brawls. Two novitiates have been injured. Three inmates have attempted suicide. Years of work have been undone in a few moments.’
I nodded. ‘I regret the disturbance, but–’
‘No buts!’ barked Jardone.
‘I’m sorry, Higher Sark,’ said Niro. ‘That is how it is.’
I slept badly in the cramped cot. My mind, my memory, played games, going over the details of the interview. There was shock and injury in Ebhoe, that was certain, for the event had been traumatic. But there was something else: a secret beyond anything he had told me, some profound memory. I could taste it.
I would not be deterred. Too many lives depended on it.
Kalibane was slumbering heavily when I crept from the chamber. In the darkness, I felt my way to the stairs, and up to the third floor. There was a restlessness in the close air. I moved past locked cells where men moaned in their sleep or muttered in their insomnia.
At intervals, I hugged the shadows as novitiate wardens with lamps made their patrols. It took perhaps three-quarters of an hour to reach the cell block where Ebhoe resided. I stalked nervously past the bolted door of Ioq’s room.
The spy-slit opened at my touch.
‘Ebhoe? Colonel Ebhoe?’ I called softly into the darkness.
‘Who?’ his cold voice replied.
‘It is Sark. We weren’t finished.’
‘Go away.’
‘I will not, until you tell me the rest.’
‘Go away.’
I thought desperately, and eagerness made me cruel. ‘I have a torch, Ebhoe. A powerful lamp. Do you want me to shine it in through the spy-hole?’
When he spoke again, there was terror in his voice. Emperor forgive me for my manipulation.
‘What more is there?’ he asked. ‘The Torment spread. We died by the thousand. I cannot help with your cause, though I pity those men on Genovingia.’
‘You never told me how it ended.’
‘Did you not read the reports?’
I glanced up and down the dark cell block to make sure we were still alone. ‘I read them. They were... sparse. They said Warmaster Getus incinerated the enemy from orbit, and ships were sent to relieve you at Pirody Polar. They expressed horror at the extent of the plague-loss. Fifty-nine thousand men dead. No count was made of the civilian losses. They said that by the time the relief ships arrived, the Torment had been expunged. Four hundred men were evacuated. Of them, only one hundred and ninety-one are still alive according to the records.’
‘There’s your answer then.’
‘No, colonel. That’s no answer! How was it expunged?’
‘We located the source of infection, cleansed it. That was how.’
‘How, Ebhoe? How, in the God-Emperor’s name?’
‘It was the height of the Torment. Thousands dead...’
VII
It was the height of the Torment. Thousands dead, corpses everywhere, pus and blood running in those damnably bright halls.
I went to Valis again, begging for news. He was in his infirmium, working still. Another batch of vaccines to try, he told me. The last six had failed, and had even seemed to aggravate the contagion.
The men were fighting themselves by then, killing each other in fear and loathing. I told Valis this, and he was silent, working at a flame burner on the steel workbench. He was a huge being, of course... Adeptus Astartes, a head and a half taller than me, wearing a cowled red robe over his Doom Eagles armour. He lifted specimen bottles from his narthecium, and held them up to the ever-present light.
I was tired, tired like you wouldn’t believe. I hadn’t slept in days. I put down the flamer I had been using for cleansing work, and sat on a stool.
‘Are we all going to perish?’ I asked the great Apothecary.
‘Dear, valiant Ebhoe,’ he said with a laugh. ‘You poor little man. Of course not. I will not allow it.’
He turned to face me, filling a long syringe from a stoppered bottle. I was in awe of him, even after the time we had spent together.
‘You are one of the lucky ones, Ebhoe. Clean so far. I’d hate to see you contract this pestilence. You have been a faithful ally to me through this dark time, helping to distribute my vaccines. I will mention you to your commanders.’
‘Thank you, Apothecary.’
‘Ebhoe,’ he said, ‘I think it is fair to say we cannot save any who have been infected now. We can only hope to vaccinate the healthy against infection. I have prepared a serum for that purpose, and I will inoculate all healthy men with it. You will help me. And you will be first. So I can be sure not to lose you.’
I hesitated. He came forwards with the syringe, and I started to pull up my sleeve.
‘Open your jacket and tunic. It must go through the stomach wall.’ I reached for my tunic clasps.
And saw it. The tiniest thing. Just a tiny, tiny thing. A greenish-yellow blister just below Valis’ right ear.
VIII
Ebhoe fell silent. The air seemed electrically charged. Inmates in neighbouring cells were thrashing, restless, and some were crying out. At any moment, the novitiate wardens would come.
‘Ebhoe?’ I called through the slit.
His voice had fallen to a terrified whisper, the whisper of a man who simply cannot bear to put the things haunting his mind into words.
‘Ebhoe?’
Keys clattered nearby. Lamplight flickered under a hall door. Ioq was banging at his cell door and growling. Someone was crying, someone else was wailing in a made-up language. The air was ripe with the smell of faeces, sweat and agitated fear.
‘Ebhoe!’
There was no time left. ‘Ebhoe, please!’
‘Valis had the Torment! He’d had it all along, right from the start!’ Ebhoe’s voice was strident and anguished. The words came out of the slit as hard and lethal as las-fire. ‘He had spread it! He! Through his work, his vaccines, his treatments! He had spread the plague! His mind had been corrupted by it, he didn’t know what he was doing! His many, many vaccines had failed because they weren’t vaccines! They were new strains of the Torment bred in his infirmium! He was the carrier: a malevolent, hungry pestilence clothed in the form of a noble man, killing thousands upon thousands upon thousands!’
I went cold. Colder than I’d ever been before. The idea was monstrous. The Torment had been more than a waster of lives; it had been sentient, alive, deliberate... planning and moving through the instrument it had corrupted.
The door of Ioq’s cell was bulging and shattering. Screams welled all around, panic and fear in equal measure. The entire hospice was shaking with unleashed psychoses.
Lamps flashed at the end of the block. Novitiates yelled out and ran forward as they saw me. They would have reached me had not Ioq broken out again, rabid and slavering, throwing his hideous bulk into them, ripping at them in a frenzy.
‘Ebhoe!’ I yelled through the slit. ‘What did you do?’
He was crying, his voice ragged with gut-heaving sobs. ‘I grabbed my flamer! Emperor have mercy, I snatched it up and bathed Valis with flame! I killed him! I killed him! I slew the pride of the Doom Eagles! I burned him apart! I expunged the source of the Torment!’
A novitiate flew
past me, his throat ripped out by animal tusks. His colleagues were locked in a desperate struggle with Ioq.
‘You burned him.’
‘Yes. The flames touched off the chemicals in the infirmium, the sample bottles, the flasks of seething plague water. They exploded. A fireball... Oh gods... brighter than the daylight that had never gone away. Brighter than... fire everywhere... liquid fire... flames around me... all around... oh... oh...’
Bright flashes filled the hall, the loud discharge of a las weapon.
I stepped back from Ebhoe’s cell door, shaking. Ioq lay dead amid the mangled corpses of three novitiates. Several others, wounded, whimpered on the floor.
Brother Jardone, a laspistol in his bony hand, pushed through the orderlies and ecclesiarchs gathering in the hall, and pointed the weapon at me.
‘I should kill you for this, Sark. How dare you!’
Baptrice stepped forwards and took the gun from Jardone. Niro gazed at me in weary disappointment.
‘See to Ebhoe,’ Baptrice told the sisters nearby. They unlocked the cell door and went in.
‘You will leave tomorrow, Sark,’ Baptrice said. ‘I will file a complaint to your superiors.’
‘Do so,’ I said. ‘I never wanted this, but I had to reach the truth. It may be, from what Ebhoe has told me, that a way to fight Uhlren’s Pox is in our reach.’
‘I hope so,’ said Baptrice, gazing bitterly at the carnage in the hall. ‘It has cost enough.’
The novitiates were escorting me back to my room when the sisters brought Ebhoe out. The ordeal of recollection had killed him. I will never forgive myself for that, no matter how many lives on Genovingia we saved.
And I will never forget the sight of him, revealed at last in the light.
IX