by Dan Abnett
A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL
SABBAT MARTYR
Gaunt’s Ghosts - 07
(The Saint - 04)
Dan Abnett
(An Undead Scan v1.1)
It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants — and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
“By 773.M41, the eighteenth year of the Sabbat Worlds Campaign, the Imperial crusade force under Warmaster Macaroth had yet failed to take the notorious fortress world Morlond. As long as Morlond stood, the thrust of the crusade was stalled, and Macaroth could not drive his forces onwards into a decisive war with the core military strengths of the archenemy overlord (‘Archon’), Urlock Gaur, in the Carcaradon Cluster. More than ever, the crusade host seemed disastrously overstretched and increasingly vulnerable to flank attack. Already, Chaos hosts commanded by two of Gaur’s most ruthless lieutenant warlords, Anakwanar Sek and Enok Innokenti, had enjoyed considerable success by counter-striking along the coreward portion of the Imperial thrust. If such successes continued, the crusade force risked being split in two, and the greater part of it, along with the Warmaster himself, becoming cut off, surrounded and annihilated.
“Macaroth was all too aware of the danger, and all too aware of the imponderable nature of the problem. He could not remain overstretched for fear of flank attack, but neither could he spare any forces from the Morlond front, as a weakening there would leave his vanguard vulnerable to Gaur. Either option seemed cursed with failure. Macaroth simply had to decide which one to risk. Famously, he showed one of his generals two identical cups of wine and asked him to pick one. “One is elixir, one is poison,” he said. “How can I tell them apart?” the general asked. “By taking one up and tasting it,” replied the Warmaster.
“Macaroth eventually decided to remain as he was, risking overstretch, and fight on to take Morlond with one last effort. In the third quarter of 773, Enok Innokenti began his murderous, catastrophic flank attack in the Khan Group. It was a time of disaster, looming failure.
“And miracles…”
—from A History of the Later Imperial Crusades
PROLOGUE
The intelligence, such as it was, had been in their possession for a week. Yet two or three times a day, and more often during the watches of the night, He would review it, as if somehow He expected it to change.
Etrodai wasn’t sure what that meant. He wasn’t sure if it meant He was excited by the news, or disquieted. That troubled Etrodai enormously, for he prided himself on knowing His whims and moods like no other. Etrodai had been His lifeward for ninety-two years, had won that vaunted position by besting the previous holder of the office in a legal murder-fight. No one knew Him better than Etrodai.
Except now, Etrodai was no wiser than the rest.
All along the tarnished pillars and dusty alcoves of the Process, the cobwebs fluttered and the bones began to chatter. It meant He was restless again. Before the onyx door had even opened, Etrodai was on his feet, his changeling blade skinned and raised in front of his face.
Etrodai waited, attentive, apprehensive. The chatter became more urgent. The dry, beetle-clicks of the human skulls, most of them mottled brown with decay as if they had been varnished, were bearable enough. The sounds of the more alien skulls were harder to tolerate. They lisped and coughed, clucking like birds, ticking like clocks, disarticulated mouthparts twitching in the dust like dead leaves. Once, while He had been resting to heal a psi wound, Etrodai had idled the long hours attempting to count the skulls in the Process. He had given up around about ten thousand. They kept interrupting him and making him lose count.
A soft rumble, and the onyx door, tall as five men and as broad, slid back into the wet marrow of its hatch seal. Warm air exhaled through the gap. The bones fell silent.
He emerged from His inviolable chamber. The null field popped like surface tension around Him.
“Magister,” said Etrodai, keeping the blade raised but averting his gaze respectfully. “What is your will?”
“I have made psyk-audience with the Archon, and now know his mind on this. He says that if the news is true, I must act according to my heart.” His voice was brittle, yet musical, like the notes of a bale-pipe or a sonoret, and always made Etrodai feel ashamed of his own ugly, mechanically-formed speech. “And my heart tells me we must make this our first duty above all other concerns. Now, the instruments?”
“They’re assembled, Magister. On the hinterdeck. All of those it was safe to assemble, that is.”
“I’ll speak with them and charge them,” He said, then hesitated. “But first… I will review this great truth one last time.”
Etrodai was not surprised. He turned and led the way down the Process, hearing each and every skull grate in its alcove as it turned to watch Him pass.
The Process, tomb-dark and lit only by ancient crazed glow-spheres, was a kilometre long. At the far end, goat-headed slave-carls turned the iron keys and swung the towering brass doors open. The slave-carls looked at the walls and sobbed, terrified lest they should catch the slightest glimpse of Him.
Seven times thirteen men of the Retinue waited in the anteroom, under the gilt-arched ceiling and the flaking murals of the Five Atrocities. Their heavy boots slammed to attention in one perfect motion and they shouldered arms. Their flanged body-armour was blue-black like Etrodai’s, and their heads were concealed under broad-tailed helmets and visors with bulbous, insectoid goggles.
With Etrodai leading, his sword pointing at the roof and skinned for so long now that beads of blood were welling up along its thorny edge, the Retinue fell in around them and marched in escort, right arms bent and locked around each shouldered weapon, left arms snapping free like pendulums at their sides. Two men ran ahead to open each set of doors in turn.
Access to the data crypt was sealed by a void shield that shimmered in the air like oil on water. It disengaged at His merest touch. Any other man would have lost his arm to the elbow if he had made contact. The Retinue waited outside as Etrodai stepped into the crypt with Him.
The data crypt was cold and dim, and ribbed with a porous tissue like calcified sinew. In the panels between the ribbing, the walls were etched with words from a pre-Imperial language. A foggy, hazy light billowed around
their feet.
The secrets kept here whispered about them, hissing like steam or fat on a skillet. Their murmur was not as loud as the chatter of the countless skulls in the Process, but it was more insistent and far more repellent Vile whispers settled around Etrodai, penetrating his armour, his skull and crawling into his brain, telling him things that he, even he, had no desire to know.
The intelligence had been placed on a pedestal near the centre of the crypt. It had been teased from the fused synapses of an expended seer gestalt and kept in its latent thought-form to preserve its accuracy. This glowing engram was a ribbon of light circling in a figure-of-eight path around a doughy lump of vat-farmed cerebral tissue, on which it had been anchored onto to give it focus.
Etrodai stood back as He stepped to the pedestal and ungloved his hands. The chrome gauntlets hung from the wrist straps of His vambraces as His long, quadruple-jointed fingers slid into the light and began to knead the tissue with lascivious strokes. The winding ribbon of light faltered and broke, and then the luminous strands of information began to flow up His outstretched arms, across His wide shoulders and into the base of His brain. He sighed and His head rolled back. Light shone out of His mouth and illuminated a tiny spot on the crypt roof.
Etrodai waited…
The long fingers withdrew, and the engrain streamed back into its orbit around the lump of tissue. He replaced His gloves.
“There’s no mistake,” He said. “I have examined this every way I know, testing for invention and falsehood. This is not a lie. This is a manifest truth from the sentiences of the immaterium.”
The notion chilled Etrodai and He seemed to notice the look on the lifeward’s face.
“Don’t be troubled. While it might appear that this is a great blow to us, I believe this is rather our perfect moment of triumph, and the feeble godlings of human order have given it to us themselves.”
“Then my heart rejoices, Magister,” said Etrodai.
A respectful silence awaited them on the hinterdeck. The only sound was the gusty hiss of the air scrubbers and the sub-threshold harmonic thrum of the massive warp engines twenty decks above. The hinterdeck was a subsidiary landing platform, reserved for the Magister’s personal use. It jutted out like a shelf high above the long, gothic vault, fifteen hectares square, that formed the primary flight deck for the colossal flagship’s fighter screen. The squadrons had been ramped out to secure storage during the voyage. The echoing space below was empty now except for rows of energy bowsers, electric munition trains, and the launch cradles hanging like open crab claws from the high roof. Yellow lights winked in series along the runways scribed into the battered floor.
There were eight beings assembled there in the middle of the empty metal platform. He had specifically requested nine for, according to Him, nine was a significant number. The ninth, too dangerous for direct intercourse, was suspended in a null field outside the hull, in the mouth of the main bay, connected by tele-audience relay to the proceedings on the high platform.
Etrodai ordered the Retinue to wait by the entry hatch, and then stood beside Him as He presented Himself to the assembled figures. Etrodai’s skinned blade was so hungry by then that blood was dripping off his knuckles and his arms ached with it. But Etrodai would not reskin his blade until it was all done.
“I’ve a task for you,” He said. “A task of significance. I charge you nine with it.”
They murmured. The triplets slithered and coiled their clammy grey hides around each other. The other trio bowed their heads. The two loners remained stiff and unmoving. An obscene rasp of digital filth crackled via the vox relay from the thing in the null field outside.
“A martyr. A martyr once, a martyr always. Our enemies think they have us, so we’ll abuse them of that idea. We’ll take this, their latest burst of vitality, and make it their last. One amongst you will perform this deed. I don’t care who. You will break their renewed hopes and cast them into the dust. This trust I put in you.”
They murmured again, a vow of promise.
“Look at me,” He said.
They had all been standing with their backs to Him, fearful of gazing directly upon His form. Now, one by one and hesitantly, they turned. The triplets hissed at the sight of Him and regurgitated venom-soaked lumps of their last meal, which had been digesting in their throat sacks. The other trio turned, but only their leader, the tall one with the green silk robes and intricate body art, blanched to look on Him. The tattooed leader was as tall and thickly muscled as Etrodai, but his two companions were little base-formed things with the morbidly blind eyes of psykers. The two loners turned too. The figure in the crimson armour of the Blood Pact dropped to his knees and uttered a stifled prayer. The other, the cadaverously pale xenosbreed in glossy black, just stared.
“Good,” He sighed. He turned around and stared out of the main deck’s mouth at the feral thing trapped in the force-sphere “And you, Karess? Are you ready?”
From the null field outside, a brutal curse rasped over the vox-link. It was as ingenious as it was anatomically horrific.
He smiled. That was the one thing Etrodai could not stand. His Magister’s smile was the most terrible thing in creation. He shuddered and felt as though he were about to retch.
“Two rotations from now,” said Enok Innokenti, Magister and Warlord, “the word will be given and my host will fall upon this cluster and quench the fires of its suns with blood. The crusade of the Imperium of Mankind will break and beg for a quick death.”
He paused. He was still smiling. “Under cover of that great attack, the real work will begin.”
ONE
THE BRINK OF MIDNIGHT
“How many times have we stood here, you and I,
surveying the field before battle? How many times have we won?
How many times must we lose to have lost all those
victories and promises of victory? Once, old friend.
Once. Once. Once.”
—Warmaster Slaydo, to an aide, before Balhaut
“Bad day coming!” the man cried aloud. “Bad day coming! Bad day in the morning!”
He had clambered up onto an almsman’s wagon, ignoring attempts to pull him down, and was now shouting, arms outstretched and fingers clawing, at both the sky and the gathering crowd.
“Bad day is coming down upon us all! On you! And you, sir! And you, madam! Nine more wounds! Nine times nine!”
Some in the crowd were booing him. Others made the sign of the aquila or the beati mark to ward off any evil luck he was bringing on with his words. Others, Anton Alphant noticed wryly, were listening quite intently.
There was nothing new in the man’s rantings. He, and others like him throughout the camps, had been causing scenes like this regularly in recent days. It wasn’t good for morale, and it certainly wasn’t endearing the pilgrim mass to the city authorities.
Almsmen, their rank denoted by the blue ribbons that fluttered from their long dust-cloaks, were trying to coax the man down off the wagon. His feet had already knocked over several sacks of the corn-wafers and hardtack they had brought to distribute through the camp. An ayatani from one of the farworld congregations had elbowed his way through the crowd and was holding up a prayer-paddle as he shouted benedictions at the man. Two junior Ecclesiarchy adepts were clutching pewter cups and using their silver aspergillums to shake water at the improvising preacher. Holy water, Alphant was sure, that they had purchased at great expense from the stoups of the Holy Balneary.
Alphant closed his fingers around the ampulla of holy water in his own coat pocket. He’d come an awfully long way to get it, and it had cost him the last of his coins. He wasn’t about to waste it so generously.
“Maybe we should stop him,” Karel said.
“We?” smiled Alphant. “You mean me.”
“Everyone listens to you.”
“He’s entitled to his opinion. Every last soul here came because it mattered to them more than anything else. You can’t deny his
passion.”
“He’s scaring people,” said Karel, and a fair few of the other infardi grouped around the clock shrine with them agreed. “Things could get ugly.”
They were right. Several penitents in the crowd had become so agitated by the man’s preaching they had begun to scourge themselves. The row had even captured the attention of some of the nearest stylites. They turned round on their pillar tops to watch, and some shouted out over the heads of the crowd. Other pilgrim troupes had wheeled or carried their clock shrines up close to the wagon, pointing them at him as if the symbolism might deter him.
It seemed to make him worse.
“The brink of midnight, and then the bad day dawns! Fire from the heavens and the precious blood spilled!”
“Can’t you make him stop, Alphant?” Valmont asked.
“I’m no priest,” said Alphant. How many times had he said that? Just an agri-worker from Khan II who had made the pilgrimage here when he’d heard the news because it seemed like the right thing to do. Along the way — and it had been a hard journey — he’d somehow become the nominal leader of those he’d travelled with. They looked to him for opinion and direction, more than ever since they’d reached the cold, austere reality of the camps. He’d never asked for the responsibility.
Then, of course, she’d never asked for hers.
Alphant had no idea where that sudden, sobering notion had sprung from. But it was enough to make him change his mind, hand his bowl and breviary to Karel, and walk towards the ruckus around the wagon.
He’d gone no more than three steps when someone in the angry crowd hurled a lump of quartz at the gibbering man. It missed, but others followed. One cracked against his forehead and he toppled back off the wagon top.
“Damn!” said Alphant.
The crowd went mad. Fighting broke out, and more missiles flew — rocks, ampullas, bless-bottles. The alms wagon overturned with a crash and people started shrieking.