Heaven's Gate

by Toby Bennett

  Heaven's Gate

  By Toby Bennett

  The first Pilgrims called it the Land of Flies, the Devil's Bowl. A wasteland, cut by the shattered streams of the Blue Snake and the rusted windings of the Western line. Not even the First Fathers knew the secrets of the line, but they rode along with the rest and are with us when we ride the tracks today. It is more than a thousand miles from Hale, through the aching winds of the Bowl, down to Triumph where the tracks end. The desert's rhythms are measured on the line, spelt out in each laboured halt of the two trains that plough their way back and fourth, never ceasing and apparently oblivious of their passengers. Tyre and Flame simply pass us by like lazy dragons, leaving only black columns in the sky.

  Extract from “Musings of a Lost Pilgrim”

  It is in this crucible of stone and burning air that God tests his faithful and separates the pure metal of faith from the base ore of flesh; it is here we join the Christ man in his wilderness.

  ‘The Good Book Gospel’

  “Corruption of the body is followed by corruption of the soul. Both are all too easily found in the desert, but let not the unquiet spirit nor the twisted in body seek to spread their corruption to our towns; the bullet and the crucifix are strong here, we will abide no mutant nor undead. Therefore breed pure and indulge not in necromancy, for God’s laws are rightly harsh for those unworthy of His Grace.”

  General Angus Leedon, Protector of the Faith.

  Prologue (UY 1810,):

  “The Citadel”

  The great building casts a long shadow on the burning plain of Golifany but only the dead enjoy that dark respite, while seven thousand men fight on, caught in the hateful glare of the late afternoon sun. Here, at last, the crusading armies of the Inquisition have reached their goal, the last refuge of the evil they have hounded for three bloody years. An evil that, for uncounted years, has crept into sleeping houses at night, to satisfy its endless hunger for the blood of their children and their wives or worse to claim their souls. More than one soldier is gripped by the fear that he might find some long lost brother waiting, pale and sharp-toothed, in the impenetrable darkness of the ancient corridors that twist through the alien building, towering over the fiery sands of Golifany. Whatever the Citadel had once been in its forgotten past, it is now a fortress. A fortress strong enough to weather the thunder of the Crusaders’ artillery and return it with a raking fire that tears a crimson swath through the fanatics massed around it. Legend has it that the huge stones cover an older structure and that, within that ancient building, are held the unholy secrets, which have served the Strigoi, the Devil’s undying children, in their insidious domination of men since they became trapped in the burning prison of the Bowl.

  Three years ago the man, who commands this army, had been counted little more than a boy, a child leading his fellows into darkness with a guttering candle, of no account in the machinations of Barons and Daemons, yet today General Leedon and his army stand poised to destroy the last great fortress at the heart of a silent empire that has manipulated and corrupted mankind, unopposed, for untold centuries. The fires of his Crusade have swept the vermin back quickly, harrying them from one stronghold and desert town to the next until, at last, the devil spawn will pay the ultimate price for their complacency. The war is his, if he can breech one last set of walls before sundown, before the bloodless lords within the Citadel awake.

  “It will be a fine balanced thing, Angus.” Father Rugan says tensely, guiding his horse closer to the preoccupied general.

  Rugan’s normally rotund face is strangely drawn with tension and his worry is written plainly on his suddenly sallow features, so that by comparison to the young warlord next to him, he seems impossibly ancient and worn. In the reddening light Angus experiences a moment of concern for his old mentor but he thrusts the thought aside, almost as soon as it is formed. Rugan could not be so changed or pale as he seemed, it must just be the light of the sun, the exhaustion of their forced march and the anxiety of battle. Rugan is strong, Angus reminds himself. Without the priest he would never have begun the great Crusade and the blood sucking Strigoi would have been left unchallenged.

  “We shall press on, whatever the cost,” he replies, giving voice to his own uncompromising determination.

  “It is as it must be,” his wizened confessor agrees, lending the young man what strength he can spare with a glance and the brief touch of a reassuring hand.

  Once more Angus raises his sword; as always he feels the true weight of the slim, curved blade, the fulcrum for the lives of thousands causing his young hand to shake with the pressure. He cannot allow doubt to unman him now, when the fate of humanity balances on a razor edge of winking steel and on the slow setting of the sun.

  “Another charge!” The General calls out to his officers.

  Ignoring the carnage already spread out in the Citadel’s growing shadow, he curls his hand tighter around the roughened grip of his sword hilt, tenses, then brings the flashing metal down like a bolt from the cloudless sky.

  With a wail the fanatical Crusaders respond, echoing the trumpets with a frenzied battle cry that seems to shake the Citadel’s very foundations before being swallowed abruptly by the desert’s emptiness. The silence is quickly filled again by the rumble and crash of the charge and the individual cries of martyrs, flinging their living flesh and hearts’ blood against the unforgiving stone of the Fortress. From within, the hard pressed defenders howl with fear; driven to near madness by conflict between the fear of the approaching army and the terror of their sleeping masters’ displeasure. Canons roar, sending thick smoke mixed with spent souls curling into the heavens. Behind that deafening roar comes the more regular crack of rifles, punctuated by the cries of dying men and the golden notes of the trumpets, drowning pain’s lament with glory.

  Captain Blake is near the front of the charge, when it reaches the wall, a mass of humanity tight packed about the narrow breach. Two men go down in front of him, more behind and suddenly he is standing alone in the ragged gap. Bullets rip through his heavy coat, as it flares around him but the bullets fail to penetrate the thick leather and double layer of tight linked mail that lie just beneath the regulation blue, protecting his chest and pounding heart. Despite those bruising impacts, his own revolver whips up, returning fire with a deadly accuracy; each shot sounding like a cannon blast in the confines of the darkened chamber already rank with the smell of smoke and blood. The defenders fall back before him, firing as they go, a bullet tears through his calf. He raises his gun to return fire and the hammer clicks loudly on an empty chamber.

  The wound and the loss of his firearm give renewed courage to the wretches defending the breach. Three men charge forward, their bayonets already stained with the blood of his fellow Crusaders but instead of the wounded man they were expecting to face they find themselves looking into the eyes of a beast. With a berserker’s laugh, Captain Blake frees his sabre. The metal hisses like a snake’s warning as the blade clears its sheath. Suddenly cowed, the men try to backpedal into their own ranks but it is too late. The Strigoi servants give way before Blake, their will broken, not by the deadly strokes of his sabre but the familiar unholy glimmer in his eyes.

  Brooking no obstacle, the madman leads the way into the great Citadel, his eyes lit with a smoldering fire that grows only brighter the further he goes from the ruddy light outside. The fortress is a confusing network of tunnels and strange unused rooms but he chooses his course unerringly; led deeper by his terrible hunger and the sickly sweet smell of death. The smell of the Strigoi is all around him now, the youngest waking first to defend the masters that have dreamed away untold centuries. The scent of the Elders is what leads him onwards, through towards the slumbering miasma waiting in the oldest depths
of the ancient building. Blake cuts down all who block his path; while outside, the crusading army lets out a cry and surges in after him but it is of no account to the maniac at the head of the charge, Blake is seeking more than simple victory. Like many who answered Leedon’s call, his is a quest for salvation.

  Soon enough the ranks of servants are replaced by pale figures, still weak from their breathless sleep, yet feral and ferocious for all that; the Strigoi, true masters of the dusty corridors and crypts that coil through the Citadel, like dry, thirsty, veins. These new defenders crawl from their dark tombs and boil up from tunnels like pale termites, gaining strength with each death. Even then the Crusaders might still have been turned by the darting blades and snapping teeth of these fiery-eyed creatures but for the captain who, despite his countless wounds, keeps moving forward, driven by a fanaticism beyond even that of the flagellant regiments, who had died so willingly at the outset of the battle. Afterwards some would whisper that, when the captain flagged, he would even tear the throats from the unholy creatures with his teeth and use their blood to give him strength. Many tales are born in war and this truth is lost in them along with many others. Indeed by the end of the day three different captains will be claiming to have led the bloody charge into the heart of the Citadel.

  Light is what breaks him from the frenzy, a pale light without the flicker of flame and cleaner than lamplight. His ferocity has taken him well beyond his own ranks and for the moment, he is free to explore on his own. Crimson drops fall unheeded on the pale white floor as he walks further into the light; wonder robs his wounds of pain and desperate hope makes him sob like a child. The chamber that opens before him is full of light, it gleams from the walls and flashes from silver metal, brighter than anything he has seen before. Twelve sarcophagi radiate around a central point, a single glance tells him that five of the containers are empty, the other seven are filled with hairless figures, barely human in appearance, that stare at him with knowing milky eyes.

  “Welcome childe, servant of my sister, what you seek is not to be found here.” The sleeper furthest from him tells Blake with a glance.

  Dim recognition stirs in the captain, a feeling that he has seen this hairless gargoyle before, perhaps in another lifetime before the Crusade, before anyone in it was even born. “Albian!” The soldier breaths, pulling the name back through more than sixty years of bitter experience. The creature had been so different then, dark looks and darker eyes, a hunter, seemingly at one with the night. Whether the lord he had known then had been all glamour or more than half a century dreaming in their tanks had left the Elder and his brethren so alien and wasted Blake has no way to tell. The pallid occupant of the tank simply inclines his head in acknowledgement of one of his old names and repeats.

  “What you seek is not here.”

  The Elder savours the irony that the very hope which has driven the captain so far, holds in it the very despair that can break him.

  “Where, then?” The captain demands, despite himself he feels tears pooling at the corner of his eyes. He has no way to tell whether his reaction is simply disappointment or if the Elder is already so deeply in his mind.

  “In the name of Christ, child and man, I abjure you from my thoughts.” Blake intones but the Elder shows no ill effect from the mention of the Saviour, he only smiles slightly, showing a hint of his prodigious fangs.

  “I thought Julia, would have taught you better, but then she was always amused by your superstitious nature. I will not deny that it has its uses though, indeed I might be able to help you find what you seek.”

  “And what would you ask of me to do this?”

  “Keep them from us for a while and I may yet tell you, if only to have the pleasure of seeing you find your ‘salvation’. I might do this for you, if it takes my fancy but I should tell you that you misapprehend, I do not ask.”

  The hollow reply, unspoken yet somehow clear in those dead eyes, eats into his mind like a chill wind; turning him against his will with its force.

  Blake feels the urge to give into that gradual, irresistible pressure, to feel the bliss and relief he knows will follow. Instead he forces himself to focus on the dark red fluids gurgling through the tubes into the sarcophagi, reminding himself that those tubes are filled with the innocent blood of others, who had similarly succumbed.

  “You are not bothered by that; you know you will not be used so.” The voice in his mind soothes

  “No! But it is likely that I would die in your service, all the same.” He answers more to remind himself of the reality than from any hope of debating with the implacable will even now worming its way through his mental defenses.

  “You must not judge. You have killed, just as we must. You have served our kind before have you not?” The sleeper whispers in his mind, anticipating his objections and quieting his churning thoughts.

  “Never again!” Blake snarls, through gritted teeth grown sharp with use. Yes! Remember the anger, the despair. It is all there is left to fight with.

  “Do you not want your redemption after all?”

  “You offer no redemption, only servitude. I will take what I need from your veins.” Blake promises vehemently, for a second his own eyes burn with the same pale flame that has sustained him thus far.

  “It is as I thought, you have been ruined. Still you will serve to buy us the minutes we need.”

  “Never…” Blake growls but already his voice is wavering. The old subservience is shutting down his thoughts, leaving him at the mercy of a mind stronger than any he has ever known.

  “In there! Follow the bloodstains. Quickly! A voice commands from outside the chamber.

  Blake remembers the priest’s voice, the unease he had always felt even at a distance. Somehow the thought of the priest seems to ease the pressure on Blake’s struggling mind. The sleeper’s eyes widen in shock at the sound of the voice, panic races through the gathered creatures at what their leader reads in the captain’s mind.

  As one, the lids of the Sarcophagi fly up, spilling gaunt figures, spattered with the blood spilled by exiting their strange beds too quickly. If the undead that he had fought in the passageways were daunting, then these beings are the beyond any mortal description! Wild and vital, yet with all the dread of the grave hanging about them like a mantle. One look into the flashing eyes around him and Blake knows he’d been a fool to ever think he could wrest his salvation from these fell creatures.

  Then the Crusaders come flooding into the room wielding fire and sharp blades and those pale eyes are mercifully turned on these new attackers. Men die with each sweep of the newly risen creatures talons and more spill their blood on the ferocious lords’ razor teeth but as quickly as they can tear them down more troops spill into the room hacking and burning with fanatical zeal. The voice in his mind is an insistent scream now urging his help. Before Blake can react one way or another, Rugan enters the room. At the sound of his voice many of the fallen stumble back onto their feet, ignoring mortal wounds and renew their attacks.

  Seemingly indifferent to the carnage, the priest gives his orders.

  “Lay that one out, we don’t know how much they have dominated him. More fire! Burn this unholy place to its foundations!”

  “No, wai….” Blake begins to protest, but a blow to the head sends his exhausted body and his hopes tumbling forward into darkness.

  Strong hands lift him and drag his unconscious body, back out into the last rays of the sun. The blood of the fallen is already beginning to steam in the chill of the impending desert night. His watering eyes seem to open and close of their own will so that he gets only flashes of the scene around him. He catches one more blurry glance of the broken walls surrounded by the twisted dead, then feels them hoist him onto a cart with the other wounded. He hears their groans and forces his eyes open to stare into the face of the man laid next to him. To his surprise the dying man does not support the military blue but instead has clothes of various hues, the man still clutches the flute with
which he had gained the General’s favour.

  “I thought they would keep you away from the front line, Etine.”

  “I held onto this better than I held the pistol!” The man says with a rueful smile, the bells at his throat jingling with each ragged breath. “But I had the honour of entering beside the General and I suppose, at the last, they needed every fool.” The little troubadour’s wit is undulled by the pain in his eyes.

  “Too many fools have died already.” Blake chokes back, he tries to rise but there is more than the blow to his head holding him back now, he has lost too much blood, ignored too many wounds. He gives much of the strength he has left to seal the worst of his injuries, before he falls unconscious again, his exhausted mind holding onto the image of a pillar of blue-white flame piercing the sky.

  Chapter 1 (UY 1816):

  “Ghost Town”

  A train’s coming. That’s what all Robert Tenant’s senses tell him, senses honed by long years scrounging his way across the treacherous grid of abandoned tracks that wind through the Bowl. The Bowl, the great wasteland that stretches from the sheer, unassailable, plateaux of the Southwal range to the brooding grey crags that mark the boundaries of the North; known to map makers as ‘The Wraiths’ and to a few crazed silver miners as ‘home’.

  No one has dared brave that barrier in many years, there are no explorers left to give new names to whatever lies beyond, the inhabitants of the Bowl know the shape of their prison well enough. Bob had certainly not set off on his wanderings out of curiosity or a need to ‘see the world’, one stretch of sand looks much like another to those bred in the rich towns that lie on the Blue Snake and the Western line. Only the hermits and savages of the great desert know any different and most city folk wouldn’t care to learn the skills that allow the mutants and death cults to survive in the true desert, on the Anvil.