Bastion Wars

by Henry Zou

  There was a maelstrom of warp fire, coalescing into a spiralling column. With a clap of crashing air it disappeared and Yetsugei found himself in the familiar Temple Heart. Pentagrammic wards criss-crossed his vision like the interlaced bars of a cage. They sprouted from the wide marble floors and lanced down from the domed ceiling. Beyond the dais he could see the souls of the assembled Blood Gorgons. Patron or not, Yetsugei could not deny his daemon hunger. Given the chance, he would devour them all.

  ‘You intrude upon my slumber again?’ Yetsugei cawed, feigning shrill indignity. In truth, he had grown tired of the warp and a glimpse of the prime worlds was a welcome respite.

  The Blood Gorgons psyker he knew as ‘Muhr’ stepped forwards and onto the dais, stopping shy of the external pentagram. ‘Yetsugei – the most grave and reverend. Baron of the Reef of Terror, what deeds you soon must hear! What sorrow you must behold, for we mourn the passing of our Great Champion.’

  Yetsugei rolled his ropey shoulders. ‘Most dreadful to hear and even more so to see. But first, loosen my bonds, they are too tight.’ Yetsugei pretended to contort his daemonic form in discomfort.

  Muhr crouched down and brushed a line with his hand. Pigment came away from the marble onto his palm. On his hands was a tiny smear, almost imperceptible considering the immense size of the marking, but it broke an external seal. It was a calculated risk, and a dangerous one at that, but Yetsugei knew the humans needed something from him and Muhr did not dare to antagonise him. He had other plans.

  Yetsugei felt his confines loosen ever so slightly. Their souls grew brighter to him.

  The daemon stretched languidly. ‘Ah. How these bonds make me weary.’ He yawned and opened one eyelid coyly. ‘Perhaps you can loosen another?’

  ‘So you say,’ Muhr replied coldly. He stepped back from the dais.

  The witch was no fool, and he knew better than to trust a daemon. Although Yetsugei was their chosen patron, he was a deity and they his mere humans. He appeared to Muhr as a leaping shade, narrow-waisted and smoky, with horns that formed an intricate crown atop his head – a towering pillar of unreality – a thing from another existence. They trusted him for his prophetic knowledge but not with their lives.

  ‘Amuse me, then. What favour would you crave of me?’

  Muhr cleared his throat. ‘Lord Gammadin is dead.’

  Yetsugei yawned. ‘How did Gammadin die?’

  Muhr lowered his head solemnly. ‘Lord Gammadin and his warrior few embarked across the warp-sea to claim a new slave world for harvest. But the pirates of the eldarkind had long ago colonised this world in secret. They were prepared and the battle was their theatre, their stage. We were ambushed and fought on their ground. I was the only survivor.’

  Yetsugei steepled his fingers and fixed his eyes on the witch. Muhr was a good liar, and it was clearly a story he had rehearsed and no doubt recounted many times. But a daemon could see deception against the fabric of reality. Although this was the story Muhr had told the Chapter, Yetsugei knew the witch was hiding his own involvement.

  ‘Yes, so you spake of his demise, that is not your present plight,’ the daemon purred. ‘It matters not the death of an old champion. Merely that you present a new one to the gods.’

  ‘Gammadin has appointed me sole guardian in his stead,’ Muhr recited.

  The daemon knew this to be a lie too. There were other factions at play here and Muhr was simply one such cog in the machine. But Yetsugei did not reveal Muhr’s lie. He would enjoy whatever plot was to unfold.

  ‘Tell me, witch. How did he die?’ the daemon asked, baiting the witch to reveal more.

  ‘Slain by treachery,’ Muhr responded.

  That was the truth this time. Yetsugei smiled.

  ‘I challenge that claim!’ said a low voice. ‘The witch has no proof.’

  Yetsugei knew that voice. Sabtah! The daemon clapped with glee. ‘The bond of Gammadin! Come forth! Come forth!’

  Sabtah stepped onto the dais from the audience. Yetsugei could see raw aggression rippling from the old warrior. ‘The wardship is mine to hold,’ he stated boldly.

  ‘So it should be!’ Yetsugei agreed eagerly, straining against the circle of ash and paint. As he writhed, paint faded from the walls and several of the wards disappeared from the marble. His constraints were breaking. Souls grew closer, brighter.

  ‘Then denounce this man as a liar,’ Sabtah said, stabbing his forefinger at Muhr.

  Yetsugei cocked his head. ‘I sense this witch has some power. A foreign power. Perhaps Gammadin has given you this power... or perhaps another...?’

  Yetsugei could tell Muhr was beginning to wither under his attention. The witch was being influenced by greater powers, a rival patron perhaps? There was something more to this tale. Gammadin had not simply been slain by the dark eldar in an accident, leaving the witch a sole survivor.

  Muhr’s eyes narrowed defiantly, as if sensing Yetsugei’s intent. ‘Gammadin chose me.’

  Biding his time, the daemon leaned forwards and smiled at the witch and the old wolf. ‘You must enthrone an Ascendant Champion. Hear me this – do not displease the gods or there will come bad spirits. They will snatch good fortune from your grasp.’

  Yetsugei was cracking the seals now. He strained against his weakening confines. He hungered for their souls. Reaching out with his hand, Yetsugei beckoned Muhr closer.

  ‘Daemon, begone!’ Muhr shouted suddenly, as if angered. He dispelled the coven’s bindings and unravelled the daemon back into the warp. There was a swirl of cold and the wards blackened to ash.

  Chapter Three

  On the first day of Swelter, in the Central Territory of Hauts Bassiq, herdsmen of the plains were mustering their caprid for the early morning drove. When they looked up, they saw a dark ochre cloud hidden amongst the swells of the light dawn cumulus. It was the colour of powdered groundnut and seemed to have the same grainy texture. Heavy and brooding, the strange cloud spread out and descended to cap the distant ridges.

  The herdsmen thought little of it, rushed as they were to return to their kinships with caprid milk for breakfast. Yet there was something about the cloud that troubled them. The season of Swelter brought with it brutally clear skies, bathed almost white by the harsh suns. By morning, the red rocks of the plains would be hot enough to curdle lizard eggs. Seldom did the storms come until evening, and even then only briefly.

  When the cloud landed, far away from their eyes, it began to kill. More clouds like it soon followed and the microfauna began to die first. Across the plains and dunes of Bassiq, beneath the layer of red iron oxide dust, ore beetles shrivelled up into husks and died. The microscopic filing worms that inhabited the top layer of ferric sand writhed in toxic pain, burrowing deeper to no avail.

  The cloud savaged the earth. Distant Ur, the sealed city, cocooned its gates and weather-shields against the encroaching clouds. For as long as Ur had stood, it had been sealed and silent against the outside, opening only intermittently to trade with the plains nomads. Now it sealed itself permanently.

  A light southerly carried the fumes across the dry clay seas and dispersed the poison across the lower part of the continent. Ancient boab trees whose swollen trunks and leafless branches had survived centuries of remorseless sun and drought sickened visibly, their silver bark peeling like wet skin. Amongst sheltered gorges that had resisted the climate, patches of coral brush and cacti wilted upon contact.

  Only when the clouds began to affect the caprid herds did the plainsmen become concerned. The leaping caprid was the lifeblood of the Bassiq kinships. In ages past, when the mining colonies of distant Terra had harvested the ferrous-rich planet of Hauts Bassiq, these goat-antelopes had been brought with them as a hardy food source. It had been a wise choice, for the horned bovids proved remarkably resilient in the scorching desert, surviving off runt flora while providing the settlers with milk and meat.<
br />
  Even when the colonists began to leave Bassiq, abandoning its ultraviolet heat and its isolation from the Imperium, the caprid flourished. With their musterers gone, they escaped their pens and became wild, their numbers multiplying. The industrial mines fell silent and the colonists who remained were too few to operate the earthmovers or tectonic drills. Some retreated to the walled city of Ur and sealed themselves within against the heat, drought and radiation. Their fates became unknown, their envoys only emerging from their sealed city to trade. An isolationist Imperial cult, Ur became a forgotten bastion of the early colonists.

  Many others wandered the plains in loose familial bands known as kinships, gathering petrochemicals in a vain attempt to keep their machines running and resist their decline into savagery. Soon the Imperium had forgotten that scorched, thermal planet of Hauts Bassiq and Bassiq, in turn, forgot the Imperium.

  Even then, the caprid remained a key factor of their survival. From their shaggy long hair sheared in the Swelter Seasons the colonists-

  turned-plainsmen wove their fabrics, and from their curved horns they crafted tools. Although official history had largely been forgotten, it was said, by word of mouth from kinship to kinship, that the caprid were the true settlers of Hauts Bassiq.

  The animals’ death was of great concern to the plainsmen. Affected caprid refused to eat, wasting away within a matter of days. The herdsmen could not bear to watch the caprids shrink away until they could barely lift the thick horns on their heads, stooped and bent as they stumbled about. Before succumbing to the disease, the caprid would become aggressive, their eyes rolling white as they bit and kicked in a frenzy. The herdsmen soon realised it was better, and safer, to kill any caprid they suspected of being ill before they could become ‘possessed by the ghost’ as the plainsmen coined it.

  In due time, the sickness spread from the caprid to the plainsmen. At first there was panic amongst the nomadic kinships. They sent emissaries to the north, to the only permanent settlement on the continent, to the Mounds of Ur. But the city hid behind its walls, blind to the fate of wandering nomads. The denizens of Ur had never considered the plainsmen worthy of anything more than infrequent trade.

  Although the nomads had no central king, an elder named Suluwei gathered all the wisest elders of the North Territory to discuss this great catastrophe that had befallen them. Suluwei was not a king, but he was the elder of the Ganda Kinship and he owned a great many head of caprid. His possession of so many herds earned him a respected place among the leaders of other kinships and they acknowledged his word.

  At his request, the wisest men of the Northern Kinships gathered to discuss the disease that was spreading so rapidly. As was custom for the plainsmen, stories were abundant. Some spoke of black skies in the extremities of the north, dark clouds that besmeared the sky even during the hottest midday. Others spoke of famine and entire kinships disappearing. Others still muttered of ghosts and the restless dead. It was difficult to separate fact from fiction amongst a nomad’s word of mouth, but it was clear that strange and frightful things were occurring.

  Suluwei spoke briefly of summoning the Godspawn, but the elders, grave though the situation, dared not resort to such measures. In the end, nothing came to fruition from the meeting and the elders returned to their kinships. Within two days, Suluwei was sick, his brain wracked by fever and his eyes rolling white as he succumbed to a sickness he had likely contracted during the meeting of elders. He died soon after, not remembering his own name or where he was. Within ten days, fully half of his kinship fell ill. Even Suluwei’s slight exchange with the other kinships had been enough to infect them all.

  Yet most frightening of all was the story of Suluwei after his death. It was passed, from word of mouth, by kinless herdsmen to the Southern Territories, and there were many variations of the tale, but the core of it always remained the same. It was said that Suluwei’s kin buried him in the hollowed bole of a boab tree, as custom required, and sealed the hole with many heavy rocks. They performed the ceremonial dances to calm his spirit into the plains and buried him with his warbow, hatchet and saddle so he would not need to seek his possessions in the afterlife.

  Yet despite their precautions, Suluwei returned many days later. Here the tale differed, for some said Suluwei returned to his kin with his eyes white and a smile on his face, asking them for one last meal. Others spoke of Suluwei returning at dusk, a flesh-hungry ghoul who tapped on the carriages of his kin, pleading to be let in with a beguilingly sweet voice. Whatever the truth, the story spread as rapidly as the sickness.

  When this story reached the ears of Suluwei’s brother-in-law, Chetsu, an elder of the Zhosa Kinship, it was decided that they could wait idle no more. Although Chetsu did not own many caprid, nor did his kinship boast many young men, the Zhosa were a brave family. There was evil in the northern tip and Chetsu was resolved to ride out and find those kinships that had fallen silent there.

  Chetsu chose five of his kinship’s most robust men, all of them his own blood cousins. He made sure they groomed and saddled their talon squalls properly, preening the black feathers of the flightless sprint-birds with oil until they were glossed against the sun and hooding their beaks in sheaths of leather. As usual, young Hantu neglected to oil the bare legs and long neck of his bird, featherless parts which were especially susceptible to sunburn, and Chetsu had berated him furiously, dashing a clay bowl onto the ground in anger. Chetsu was in no mood for slothfulness at a time such as this.

  The riders were dispatched in the dawn before the suns could grow thermal. Each man wore a shuka of brilliant red wool, a loose sarong worn by all the plainsmen across the territories. Red was a favoured dye and it would give Chetsu and his riders much bravery and aggression. They rode with bows across their saddles and weighted hatchets at their hips. The kinship saw them off with dancing and singing, jumping up and down on the spot to clatter their wrist bangles and necklace wreaths. The plainsmen were not a warlike people and the departure of five warrior braves was a momentous occasion for the Zhosa.

  Chetsu rode to the north and that was the last time his kinship saw him. The days passed and the riders did not come back. Chetsu’s wife waited for his return, watching the horizon. For as long as she watched, the sky in the distance was ominously dark, contrasting with the harsh white everywhere else. Some of the clouds were pileus, rolling like caps of toxic amber; others were low stratus clouds, coating the horizon in a flat, featureless black rind. They uncurled ponderously, boiling themselves into monstrous shapes that resembled faces, always creeping closer. It would not be long, she thought, until they blocked out the many suns.

  The temple had no name. It had no name because it was the only temple they knew. From outside, it resembled a pylon of uncarved red rock, like a ridged tooth that rose from the flat ground around it. If one were to carve away the exterior, to tear away the rust storms and ferric build-up that cocooned its outside surface, one would find a cathedral of grand design, an edifice built to worship the double-headed eagle from another era. Within its cool interior was a vaulted ceiling of coloured glass, arches and columns – designs that the plainsmen of Bassiq had forgotten how to construct.

  By the time the elders of the various northern kinships met in this temple, only three weeks after Suluwei’s first summons, there were very few of them left.

  Many of the kinships had never responded to the ageing hand-wound vox-casters, nor had they responded to the secondary smoke signals. Although it had not been spoken, they were already counted among the dead.

  All the elders waited in reverential quiet, sometimes expressing their concern in hushed tones. The temple was dark and only pinpricks of sunlight managed to pierce gaps in the rocky crust that covered the windows. The darkness did not matter, for the attention of the assembled elders was centred solely on the single shaft of light at the centre of the temple.

  Captured beneath the beam of an open skylight
above was a curious machine piece. All the elders had seen it before; some had even prayed to it, but never had they seen it used. There had never, in all their collective memories, been a time that required it.

  It just lay there, on the ground, an oblong of tin no larger than a block of compacted nut flour. It was inert, like a sleeping beast, with a thick skin of dust that covered its dials and press pads. In all the time it had been there, no one had dared to touch it. A cranking shaft, delicate and small, protruded from one end of the machine, as if waiting to be turned.

  Around the machine, a wide circle had been marked in the stone and simple illustrations of armoured warriors in bulbous helmets had been scratched into the floor. They depicted the helmeted warriors slaying a double-headed eagle, smiting it out of the sky with stylised tongues of fire. Like the machine itself, this circle bore no footprints in its dust rind, although the stone outside its circumference had been worn smooth by pedestrian traffic.

  ‘Someone has to do it,’ croaked a toothless elder of the Muru kinship.

  ‘Nay, you are older than I, so the honour is yours!’ rebuked another elder.

  ‘Do not be frightened, you are young and vital. You should do it!’ another countered.

  Soon the congregation were openly shouting and it became clear that no one wanted to touch the machine. No one knew what it would do.

  ‘I’ll do it!’ shouted a young man as he stepped forwards. ‘I’ll summon the Godspawn.’ The brave’s distinctive plaited hair marked him as a brave of the Kosi kinship, reckless riders from the Western Plains. No one argued with him as he pushed his way through the assembly and made his way towards the centre of the temple.

  The plainsmen had once worshipped a God-Emperor in the darkest reaches of their dimmest histories. But that had been during the time of the Colonies, a time of dreaming for them. Isolated as it was, Hauts Bassiq suffered many raids from alien invaders and human pirates. For a time, the plainsmen had lived fearful lives, constantly nomadic to avoid conflict. But then the Godspawn came to drive away the xenos. The Godspawn had been their protectors and so it had always been, as far as the plainsmen were concerned.