Hammer and Bolter 15

by Christian Dunn

  The message had been subliminal. He had not even been aware that he was summoning them, and yet summon them he had, in their hordes. Every tribal leader, every champion, every lieutenant had taken up his clarion cry, and soon they would fill the crypt and stand in awe as they listened to his orders.

  He had sacrificed so many of them to his cause, and each of their lives had lengthened his by a breath or two, by half a dozen beats of his blood organ. Their lives were cheap.

  It did not matter how many of them he sacrificed to ensure his immortality, there would always be more of them. Every time he killed a champion, every time he slaughtered a leader who knew too much, every time he tore into a warrior who coughed at the wrong moment, or turned his back, or showed the slightest disrespect to the Rat King, another happily took his place. They lived fast and they died young. The brood-mothers, their mothers, the glossy bitches, serviced by all and any who could fight their way through the throngs to get at them, simply produced more. The nurseries were full of them, teeming with the little bastards who would fight and die, even as pups, for the sake of violence.

  There would only ever be one Fell One, and he had a plan to take him captive. He had a plan that would decimate his hoards of ratmen, but it would never exhaust their numbers entirely.

  He did not know how long he stood in the antechamber, mesmerised by the voices in his head, and by the plot that was forming from the strange words. When his senses returned, the Rat King could hear the sounds of skaven jostling for positions in the crypt. They had answered his call. They had come. He could sense that the lanterns had been lit, and that his bodyguard, none of whom had served him for more than a few days, and none of whom would serve him for many more hours, were in position.

  He left the antechamber and climbed the short spiral of stone steps that led to the mound. He tapped his staff down hard on each step, quieting the crowds that could hear his egress and feel the vibrations he was summoning from the staff and the old worn steps. There was menace in every footfall, and more in the deliberateness with which he placed his staff, not to aid his climb, but to instill fear and wonder in the waiting audience, his congregation.

  He needed no words to silence them. They stood in rough ranks, facing him. They stopped jostling and pushing. They did not elbow, or shove or trip one another.

  The Rat King’s snout twitched slightly in air that felt thick with fear and awe, fear and awe for him, and for the power he was about to wield.

  The Rat King spread his arms to his sides, his left clutching the haft of his weapon. He looked down on the backs of the heads of his bodyguard; none twitched. They were still and they were silent.

  He looked out over their heads, watching pairs of red and black eyes glinting and throwing light in the great space. The air above their heads was dense and dark and full of presentiments.

  The Rat King took hold of the amulet and lifted it out of his coat. He didn’t wind the hair-ribbon from around his neck, but simply tugged on it, and it came away in a small cascade of drifting hairs. He held the amulet high above his head and opened his hand.

  The charm spun slowly in the air, and then faster and faster, casting brilliant light into the darkest of corners. Then the voices began, first chanting some strange incantation that made some of the minions furthest from the dais sweat and gag, and fall dead to the earth floor beneath their feet. Finally, the chanting stopped and a single voice echoed around the great hall.

  ‘I will bring him, so I will. I will bring him. When he comes, for come he will, I’ll live forever. I won’t live for now, not just for now. I’ll live forever.’

  The skaven joined in, first singly and in small numbers, and then in groups and tribes, and soon they were all reciting the words.

  ‘We shall bring him so we shall. We shall bring him. When he comes, for come he will, you’ll live forever. You won’t live for now, not just for now. You’ll live forever.’

  As they spoke, the miasma of their breath, finding its way into the vaulted space above their heads, augmented by the ethereal, brilliant light from the amulet, formed shapes and patterns in the air until the entire plot was drawn in stark detail before them. The boy was there – the bait. The Fell One with his sword stood out in stark detail, defending the human boy. Some of the skaven tittered and gurgled odd laughing noises as they witnessed the Fell One’s unfounded loyalty to the ugly, slow, smooth-skinned human boy. They laughed less when they witnessed the speed and savagery of his weapon as it cut down their shadows right above their heads.

  The plan was laid out before them. Their mission was etched indelibly on their collective mind. They would obey their Rat King and master, even knowing that they would die doing his will.

  A young skaven, maddened by the sights before him, clutched his bladed weapon in both of his hands, like a scythe, and swept through the legs of a dozen of his nearest compatriots before he could be stopped. Another ratman, a frenzied tribal leader with a deep battle scar cleaving his brow, that should have left him dead, drew a thick-edged serrated blade across his own throat until bright pink blood gouted from his carotid, signaling his death.

  Many succumbed, but those that remained were galvanised by the experience. It was all before them. They had a mission and they would give their lives in the quest for its completion.

  They began to turn from the Rat King as he held his arms aloft and stared deeply into the light show high above him in the vaulted ceiling of the crypt.

  Gradually, the amulet, slowed in its spinning motion, and the light began to disperse from it.

  The hordes banded together and chose their routes out of the crypt, their feet pounding on the earth floor, and their voices echoing down the tunnels as they departed.

  As the last of the skaven made ready to leave and the Rat King’s bodyguard turned to him for permission to fight for his greater glory, the amulet stopped dead in the air. The Rat King did not reach out to take it.

  There were no more than a dozen of them in the crypt, standing around and on the dais mound, when the amulet began to revolve in the opposite direction; began sucking light back into its core, began to regenerate, just as the Rat King was revitalised by the losses of the lives around him.

  All of the energy in the room was gone, and the darkness turned to something beyond dark, beyond the densest black darkness that the skaven were so familiar with in the depths of the dirt.

  The amulet began to suck the light out of their eyes, catching the gleams that bounced off their claws and teeth; sucking the refracted pinpoint luminescences from the drops of saliva that coated their tongues.

  It began to suck the light from the air among the hair on their bodies, and from the pores in their skin.

  Then it began to draw light from the dressed stone of the crypt, from the vaults and buttresses, from every mason’s cut and mark.

  When it was done, the amulet was dull and cloudy, and looked utterly unremarkable, aside from the fact that it sat in the air where there was nothing but necromancy to keep it aloft.

  When it was done, the Rat King closed his hand around the amulet and stepped from the top of the mound towards his antechamber. As he left the crypt he turned to look at the desiccated corpses of his bodyguard. Then he turned to look back into the crypt, to take in all that had occurred.

  The light was low, but that did not affect his sight, or what he saw.

  The crypt was wrought new in obsidian stone, blacker than any stone hewn with a mason’s chisel had any right to be. It was dull and black in an infinite, endless way that would endure beyond anything that the skaven had ever known.

  Whatever happened in the nether-lands, whatever became of the Rat King, of his minions and of his kingdom, the crypt would remain forever.

  TORMENT

  Anthony Reynolds

  Death was nothing to be feared. Death he would have welcomed. It was the in-between place that that filled him with dread.

  To some it was the Undercroft, Tartarus, or Limbo; to other
s it was Sheyole, the Shadowlands, or Despair. On old Colchis it was known as Bharzek. Translated literally, its meaning was simple and direct – Torment.

  Those condemned to wander its ashen fields were said to be cursed above all others. They lingered there, haunted, confused and lost, suffused with impotent rage, longing and regret. Unable to move on, yet equally unable to move back to the lives they had left behind, they were trapped in that empty, grey wasteland, doomed to an eternity of emptiness.

  He knew now that the old stories were wrong, however.

  It was possible to come back...

  ‘Burias.’ That voice was not welcome here. It was an intrusion. He tried to ignore it, but it was insistent.

  ‘Burias-Drak’shal.’

  He awoke to pain. It blossomed within him, building, compounding, multiplying, until every inch of his body was awash with fire. He was blinded by agony, yet he grinned, bloodied lips drawn back in a leering grimace.

  Pain was good. Pain he could endure. He was alive, and not yet confined to the hell that the Dark Apostle had promised him. Burias embraced his pain, letting it draw him back from the brink of oblivion.

  He knew where he was – deep within the Basilica of Torment, on Sicarus, adopted homeworld of the XVII Legion. He’d been dragged here in chains by his former brothers, but he had no concept of how long ago that had been. It felt like an eternity.

  Gradually his senses returned.

  The smell hit him first. Hot, cloying and repellent, it was the stink of a dying animal. It hung in the unbearably humid air like a fog, something that could be felt on the skin, oily, clinging and foul. He could taste it. Sickly stale sweat, charred meat and burnt hair; none of it could quite mask the stench of bile and necrotising flesh.

  But more than anything else, he could smell blood. The room reeked of it.

  He discerned low whispers and chanting, and the hushed shuffle of feet on a hard stone floor as his hearing returned. He heard the clank of chains, the hiss of venting steam, and the mechanical grind of gears and pistons.

  This is not your fate.

  The words were spoken with the confidence of one who does not need to raise its voice in order to make itself heard. It was familiar, but he could not place it. He tried to answer, but his lips were dry, cracked and bleeding, his throat raw and painful. He swallowed, tasting blood, and tried again.

  ‘Who are you?’ he managed.

  I am the Word and the Truth.

  ‘Your voice... is inside my head,’ said Burias, wondering if his torture had driven him to insanity. ‘Are you real? Are you a spirit? A daemon?’

  I am your saviour, Burias.

  The haze of his surroundings was slowly coming into focus. He was staring straight up at an octagonal, vaulted ceiling. It was shrouded in darkness, lit only by a handful of low-burning sconces mounted upon the eight pillars surrounding him. Oily smoke coiled from these fittings, rising languorously.

  He lay spread-eagled upon a low stone slab, bound in heavy chains bolted to the floor. The links that bound him were each the size of a Space Marine’s fist and heavy manacles were clamped around his ankles, wrists, and neck. The flesh around these bindings was blackened, raw and weeping, burnt almost to the bone.

  The manacles were inscribed with ancient Colchisian cuneiform. Painstakingly replicated from the Book of Lorgar, the potent runic script glowed like molten rock, and the infernal heat radiating from them made the air shimmer. Yet more of the angular ideograms were carved directly into Burias’s tortured flesh, and these too smouldered with burning heat.

  His body was a ruin of raw scar tissue, burns, cuts, abrasions and welts. His sacred warplate had been torn away piece by piece, with all the eagerness and hunger of feeding vultures. Where over the years it had become fused to his superhuman frame, it had been crudely hacked off with cleavers and blades that he suspected had been purposefully dulled to make the work longer and bloodier.

  Every conceivable torture had been inflicted on him. But he had not been broken.

  You are already broken, yet your mind refuses to accept it.

  ‘You lie,’ Burias gasped.

  I do not. I am here to help you.

  ‘Then help me!’

  Look to your left. That is your way out.

  With some difficulty, his movement painfully restricted, Burias turned his head. Before him was the reinforced door of his cell. It was closed and bolted, and rust and corrosion was sloughing off its surface like dead skin. The door was massive, thick and solid, and the stonework around the lintel was carved with runic wards.

  A pair of hulking executors were slumped in shadowed niches to either side of the door. Huge even compared to a Space Marine and vaguely simian in appearance, these mecha-daemon sentinels appeared completely lifeless except for their eye-sensors which blinked unceasingly in the darkness. They were behemoths of armour and barely-checked fury, mechanical constructs built around a brain and nervous system that had once been human, though daemonic entities had long since been bound within their steel bodies.

  When roused, they were easily capable of ripping him in half with their immense powered mitts. Even in his weakened state, chained, tortured and stripped of his armour, Burias stared at them with eyes narrowed; an apex predator sizing up its rivals.

  His muscles tensed as his body responded to his desire to fight, yet he was bound securely and he knew that any attempt to break his bonds was futile. There was no hope of escape.

  All that imprisons you is your own perception, Burias, and nothing more. You believe that there is no escape, and so there is none.

  ‘You can hear my thoughts,’ said Burias.

  Yes. You are not speaking aloud now, you realise?

  ‘Who are you?’

  Burias’s question was met with silence.

  ‘Are you Drak’shal?’

  Again, silence.

  His view of the dormant executors was abruptly blocked as a dark figure shuffled in front of him, chattering incoherently. More of these robed figures moved around him, attentive and whispering, their faces hidden in the shadow of deep cowls. They were loathsome creatures, emaciated and hunched, the definition of their ribs and vertebrae clearly visible through their black robes. Their arms were corpse-thin and grey. Rusting cables and tubes that leaked milky fluids protruded from their flesh, and their bony fingers were tipped with a plethora of needles, hooks, blades and callipers. All were stained with blood. His blood.

  Lobotomised cantors were hard-wired into hooded alcoves positioned half way up the chamber’s eight pillars. They chanted litanies of binding and containment in long, monotonous streams, their entire existence focused solely on this duty. Their eyes were wired open, and their grossly obese bodies were the pallid shade of a creature that had never seen daylight. Reams of parchment unfolded endlessly before them, and their mouths bled from the potency of the words they read aloud.

  Everything about the cell, from the runic chains to the inscriptions upon the cell door and the drone of the cantors, had been designed with a singular purpose – to ensure that the daemon Drak’shal remained tightly bound, suppressed and quiescent.

  With the daemon dormant within him, Burias was as any other warrior-brother within the Host; a demi-god of war in comparison to lesser, unaugmented beings, yes, but nothing more than a shadow of his former self. He could hardly feel the daemon’s presence at all, and this cut him more deeply than any physical torture. It felt like he was missing a part of himself, something so integral to his being that he felt like he had been hacked in two.

  The daemon had been bound to his flesh in the early days of his induction into the Legion. He had been one of the special few, chosen for this path with great ceremony and care. Few warrior-brothers were able to survive the rituals of possession. Fewer still were able to master the daemon once joined.

  There had been a period of struggle when Drak’shal had fought to gain ascendency, of course, but Burias had won out, asserting his dominance. He had been reb
orn. Everything of his former life was forgotten.

  Drak’shal had given him strength – great strength – as well as speed, cunning, and rapidly accelerated healing that had seem him walk away from injuries that would have killed any other Space Marine. He’d fought in wars across a thousand battlefronts, and yet he bore not a single scar to show for all the countless wounds he had sustained – until now.

  Fused with the daemon, his every sense had been heightened beyond anything he could ever have imagined. He could see in total darkness without the aid of his helmet’s optic augmentations. He could taste a drop of blood in the air at a hundred metres. He could run as fast as a Rhino APC and maintain his pace for days on end. His strength was easily that of five of his Word Bearer brothers.

  ‘You are nothing without Drak’shal,’ Marduk had said, standing over him as the manacles that now held him had been welded shut. Burias and Drak’shal had roared as one, knowing what was to come, but powerless to prevent it. The Dark Apostle had smiled as the runes had burst into flame, pushing the daemon back into enforced dormancy. ‘This is the punishment for your treachery, Burias.’

  His muscles tensed at the memory, his lips curling back in a snarl.

  It is your choice what path you take, Burias. To your left lies freedom; to your right, slavery.

  Somehow Burias knew what he would see to his right, but he was still compelled to look.

  For a moment the horror of the sight carried him somewhere else entirely; drowning, blinded, screaming.

  The moment passed as quickly as it had come, and he was staring into a cavernous alcove, like the lair of some great beast. Slumped motionless in the shadow was the mechanical prison that would be Burias’s tomb for all eternity.

  A Dreadnought.

  War machines of colossal power, with a chassis of heavy ablative armour and toting weaponry comparable to that of a front line battle tank, the Dreadnoughts had been conceived early in the Great Crusade. Every time a Legion lost a battle-brother, particularly a captain or veteran, a wealth of hard-won knowledge and wisdom was lost along with them. The Dreadnought was designed to ensure that the greatest warriors and heroes of a Legion might live on even after suffering fatal wounds.