SABBAT WAR

by Edited by Dan Abnett

  And as always, it began with silence.

  Each warrior anointed one of their hands in the thick pungent ochre pigment that would usually stain their uniforms and drove the digits against their own closed mouths. They did not gag or retch as they did so, and though the pigment stung and the blows they forced against their own flesh were heavy-handed, they did it with quiet pride and determination.

  Without the hands of others to hold their mouths closed they would use will alone, until the will and word of the Anarch animated them.

  Until they were ready to speak His truth.

  Packsons stalked to the fore, robed in makeshift black, smeared with ashes. There were no true heritors. No lekts. No guiding hands or quicksilver minds to shape and lead them in the ritus. There were only these pretenders, charlatan-shamans who spoke in hisses. When they smiled Gerik could see the rotten ruin of their teeth. Too fond of their own elixirs.

  With such bastard implements must we endure…

  Half-remembered and once-observed undertakings were put into action. They grinned as they ground resin and amber against silvered bowls. Some opened their veins and spilled blood into the mixture, while others spat to smear liquid about the edges of the bowl. No two ingredients were the same: the eye of a blind seer, plucked from the skull and pickled; dust ground from a tongue which had never kept an oath; and scintillating powders that the peddler insisted were inchoate dreams given form. Desperation drove them onwards, to attempt and to protest that their efforts would be successful.

  They chanted as they prepared the bowls and laid them before the assembled warriors. Kyresh, Vzar, Dhareg, Ekren, Liran, Vrin, Urx. There were two others who Gerik did not recognise, nominated from amidst the milling packsons – ascended, like Tyvas had, from the multitudes. Gerik stood with them. He observed. He held rank and was entitled to take part. To join the sacred rites.

  Each warrior knelt and picked up their bowl. The mixture shimmered under the torchlight and strange colours danced along its surface, like oil upon water. Gerik almost fancied that he could see shapes undulating just beneath the surface, sub-aquatic life ready to rear up and snap at him. He swallowed back whatever mortal distaste rose in his throat, before drowning it completely with the fluid.

  It burst upon his tongue.

  Sharp.

  Sour.

  The world convulsed. He shuddered as he struggled to keep it down. He drew deeply, gulping it down. The others were doing the same. Some were doing so with difficulty, just as he was. Despite all his bluster Kyresh looked as though he would vomit it back up. Dhareg, by comparison, had already finished. He smiled in perfect contentment. Gerik hated him in that moment.

  A gagging wet sound broke their own internal conflicts. One of the strangers had sunk to his knees, spluttering into the ashes. Vomit and blood left his lips in a torrent. His eyes rolled back, and he pitched forward into the mess. His brother gazed down at him, then dropped his bowl with a clatter. He could not move. He barely even shivered. Gerik saw the flash of red as something burst behind his eye and the bloody tear which followed it, before he too dropped to the ground.

  This is why we cling to our priests and idols. Why the lekts whisper into our minds. Without the tools of the Anarch, we court so many deaths. We falter at the first hurdles.

  The survivors placed their empty bowls down before them. Chests heaved, eyes were wide, and they looked at each other with grudging respect and new-born insight.

  ‘Shall we begin?’ Gerik asked.

  Kyresh went first.

  He strode into the centre of the chamber and threw his arms wide. A ripple of praise echoed from the packsons gathered at the edges, punctuated by the encroaching hammer of artillery and the world-shaking detonations above. They did not have to look up to know that ships were dying in orbit – bleeding their fire across the skies to eclipse the stars.

  ‘He has all the preening pretence of one of them,’ a voice whispered at Gerik’s ear. He turned, coming face to face with the glower of Vzar. Before this day of days, Gerik had never met the Shadow, but his reputation preceded him. Few among the Sons who remained had not heard of Vzar and his exploits. Vzar raised a gloved hand, clenched it into a fist, and then snapped it back to his side. He wrestled with the kill-urge, as they all did. He wished to spill the blood of those he considered brothers or to throw himself into the tumult beyond. Where once patience had reigned now inaction galled him.

  All bulwarks, with time, could be worn down.

  ‘The Commissariat,’ Gerik repeated carefully, as though it were ancient wisdom, ‘is the strength of the Guard. As it strengthens the Militarum so it has made the Sons stronger. You know that better than many others, having seen the failings of the Pact first-hand.’

  Vzar laughed and shook his head. ‘You speak accepted knowledge as though it were purest truth, damogaur. What good has it done us though? We have embraced these ideas to our hearts and carried them as the banners of our ascendancy. We have been shaped to believe that we would see our day and our hour. That the Anarch would rise to eclipse the Gaur and that the Imperium could be driven back. We were to be the edge of that blade. Sons and scions of a new age. The sanguine tide would drive back Imperial iron.’

  ‘That was always so,’ Gerik began, but Vzar cut him off. His broad face creased into an almost bemused sneer.

  ‘And we would do it in borrowed finery? The Imperium’s discipline officers, the Gaur’s framework… We are made of the borrowed and the broken. Is it any wonder that we break in turn?’

  ‘Some would call that blasphemy,’ Gerik said. ‘Some would say that you do not hold to your heart the words of the warp’s Kings.’

  Vzar laughed coldly. ‘Let us watch and see, damogaur,’ he said. ‘And we shall see what blasphemy is defined as come the ritual’s end.’

  Gerik was about to answer when the first impacts rang out across the hallowed space. Flesh against flesh.

  The ritual began, as it would end, with blood. Violence was the knife against the skin of the universe, whetting the hunger of the Kings beyond.

  The warriors had cast aside their weapons and fought in the oldest fashion, hand to hand. Pure in its primacy, the first way by which men had ended men. The first cut which had opened the way. Mortal might pitted against its like. It was always an invigorating sight and every last packson of the Anarch was as a beast when it came to such things. They were like canids wrestling beneath the table for the last scraps of meat.

  Duty and the honour of command though… that was a more precious prize than roasted flesh.

  Kyresh was all swagger. He posed and flexed while his opponent flailed at him. He sidestepped and weaved away from the errant and uncoordinated attacks. Liran… what a fool he was. His fire was no match for Kyresh. Not even enough to make it sporting.

  Kyresh caught Liran with a savage backhand. The man staggered back. He spat blood, and the ashes beneath their feet took on yet more of the crimson hue, as if it were a spreading corruption. Like the reach of the Archon across the hololithic maps and the slow extent of the Warmaster’s fronts. Gerik bit back the thought, too much like blasphemy itself, and instead focused upon the ritual combat.

  Liran was on one knee, breathing heavily, spilled sweat making his powdered flesh run white and ochre. Kyresh was equally exerted but he showed no weakness. His lips parted in a long, drawn-out breath. His eyes shifted upwards as though seeing something for the first time. Widening in revelation. Even from here they could hear the scourger’s breathing hitch. A quaint quirk of Imperial architecture ensured that any word spoken at the centre of the chamber could radiate out to subordinates and supplicants.

  ‘You know me,’ Kyresh whispered and then spoke again – louder and with greater determination. ‘You know me to be Kyresh. I have the honour to serve as a scourger of our proud brotherhood. I am the strength in your arms and I am the lash at your backs. I am the Anarch’s fury and vengeance and vigilance. To whatever end comes.’

  Liran was t
he only one not listening, it seemed. He drove himself up and swung a fist for Kyresh’s face. Kyresh took the blow, reeled from it, and then looked at Liran as though seeing him for the first time. He drew back his own fist and smashed it into Liran’s nose. The sirdar crumpled.

  ‘Is that all, boy?’ Kyresh laughed. He looked up at the gathered packsons and at his rivals. Gerik felt his gaze sweep him like a waft of forge-cinders. ‘We fight for our very soul, brothers, for our continuation in this glorious war, to bear the warp’s great Voice within us… and these are the dregs laid before me? How did you ever rise to sirdar? I will never know. You would not have left my tender mercies, let alone begun to climb in our regard!’ He laughed again and turned, arms outstretched, to greet his brothers. ‘This is who presumes to bear the Voice? To speak as the Anarch once spoke? To be our master?’

  This was not the parade ground. It was propaganda. As inevitable as such displays were, they turned Gerik’s stomach.

  ‘Unworthy,’ he let himself mutter. His eyes found Ekren again, across the ceremonial ring. The boy was watching, learning, processing everything that Kyresh did as surely as Gerik was. He could see Ekren’s lip curl in distaste.

  The boy was good. He had promise.

  Unlike Liran. Liran who now gawped face down on the ground. He flailed like something dredged up from the traitorous seas of Urdesh, and all who looked upon him knew only disdain. This was something weak. To be crushed under the heel. To be dashed upon the rocks at birth. They were elevated beyond such things by training and patronage.

  ‘It would take more than a little grasping man to end me,’ Kyresh panted. He placed his boot upon Liran’s neck and pushed him into the ash. Bursts of the pale dust rose from the struggle of the man’s breathing. Kyresh ignored it. He had them now. He knew that. His eyes were alight with savage pride. ‘I have fought for Him and bled for Him. I have killed in the name of the Anarch and there can be no greater honour than that.’ He knelt and scooped up a handful of ashes, letting them fall between his fingers, before standing again. As the firelight caught the drifting flakes, the world shifted. Images seemed to writhe and dance within it, though the warp remained still and quiescent.

  Yet still the world shook and changed, glittering against the skin of reality like shattering glass.

  ‘A scourger is a drumbeat in your soul, and I have ever been thus.’ His words writhed from him with the febrile shudder of true belief, even as his prey struggled underfoot. ‘When we marched against the men of the Imperium we did so with righteousness in our hearts and silence upon our lips. We moved through the desert like a holy thing, like a fire, a plague, a storm. All that stood before us fell. Their skins we took as cloaks and their bones became our pipes. It was a fine and sacred undertaking.’ He seemed wistful then, content to crouch low and still Liran’s movements with a hand at the back of the head. He let the man turn and look up at him, holding his gaze as he spoke.

  ‘But they were far away. Across a greater expanse of salt and rock, unkissed by water or the hands of men. The wild places belong to the Kings of the warp, and so they belong to us, but this does not mean that they love you. A holy thing may still kill you. As sure as a blade is a blessing.’ The ashes blew, kicked up by the distant rumble of the artillery wind. Not so distant now… Yet it was more than that. As Kyresh spoke the world seemed to curdle and slough away. Soon there was only the expanse of blasted earth. Sun-baked and dead.

  Gerik blinked. He saw–

  –the dull plains as they stretched out forever. Parched as eternity’s edge, as surely as any world which had known the bite of a jehgenesh’s thirst. Sand stirred at their feet like powdered bone as they trudged on inexorably. As duty demanded. They were his Sons and they would not be turned from their course by such petty hardship.

  ‘Suffering,’ so the etogaur said, ‘is how the gods reward the faithful.’

  The column stretched out across the sands in a vast track of black and ochre, etching their progress through the landscape like the writhing marks of a serpent. The sun beat down upon them as they marched – reducing everything to the reflected glare from the pale, dry earth. Parched lips remained closed as though in devotion. None raised a voice in complaint. To admit as much would be a show of weakness. In a place such as this, weakness was death.

  Such places were sacred. Sanctified by the many names and faces of death. Reaved of life, so unlike the green and pleasant lands the Imperium coveted. They were men of the shepherd and her crook, of the farmer and his plenty, but they ignored the primal truth.

  One day all places shall be such as these.

  Kyresh strode ahead and scanned the horizon. He paced back and forth like a hunting canid, a jackal of the deep deserts. Sometimes he stopped and let them pass him before he pulled the flail from his belt and let its bladed tails fly freely.

  Men collapsed under his ministrations, but they were true Sons of Sek and soon pulled themselves up once more, accepting punishment as though it were blessing. They kept their silence and locked it away with the worn, rotting hands of the enemy, employed either as clasps holding helmets to heads, or simply bound to the face. The symbol of their devotion. The demonstration of their resolve.

  Their hands. His words. His will, their bodies.

  There was an echo on the wind. A whisper. A scream. The world resounded with the only voice that mattered. They each felt the fingers pressed against their mouths tighten in sympathy as it stole their exhalations, took them as a tithe. Felt the grit gather between worn and mouldering fingers. Watched it snag against borrowed and defiled flak plates. Followed the traceries of blood as they seeped from the wounds rendered by their scourger.

  ‘I will bring you glory!’ Kyresh snapped. ‘In the name of the Anarch, whose voice drowns out all others!’ He added the words almost as an afterthought, but no one raised their voices against him. His place was to inspire. To drive them forward and to be the iron rod ever at their backs. The blade at their throats. Pushing them onwards.

  Towards the citadel.

  Though they did not speak, even the surest of the Sons felt their breath catch at the sight of it. Walls of rockcrete and iron. Raised with all the plodding lack of imagination which blighted the minds of the Imperium. They would not coax a fortress from the earth – fed upon blood and bone and made divine. Instead they grubbed in the dust and built their child’s castles. Ignorant of the sanguine tide that would wash them asunder.

  All except Kyresh moved in silence. Scourgers spoke with the voice of the Anarch. They acted with the holiness of His will. If it fell from the lips of a scourger then it could not be untruth or sin. They were allowed a voice beneath their sallet helms and Kyresh used it as a weapon.

  He goaded. He raised his voice with every crack of the flail. Just as barbed. Just as sharp. For some it was the last thing they heard before they succumbed, crashing into the dust as he rained down blows and imprecations.

  The Commissariat, for all its failings, had taught well by example – and been exceeded, surpassed and outdone in its brutality. As with all things it was improved in the hands of the faithful.

  In the heat and dust of the desert, death was a familiar thing. A useful gift. Brothers died that their blood might quench thirst and their flesh end hunger. Equipment was passed around to those who needed it most. Talismans danced from hand to hand, to draw the eye of luck or destiny. The gods had loved their fellows enough to draw them up into the holy rancour of the warp. Any man would wish the same. They kept one body. Marked him with sacred signs. Cut him open and bared him to the attention of the gods and their spirit hosts. He would serve, when the time came.

  Through it all Kyresh raged and bellowed. The beating heart of their enterprise. All the while the fortress grew more distinct. More true.

  ‘Only cowards would fail to take this from them!’ he roared. ‘Look and behold who you face! Will you break before them? No! You shall break them in turn!’

  At the sight of their banners, all could see
who they faced. The Vitrians. Glass men, all. Kyresh threw back his head and laughed as he whipped yet another brother to death. All thoughts of use or plundering the body were lost as they surged ahead.

  In silence. In unity.

  They charged under the arc of the enemy’s guns. Light seared down at them with the crackle-fizz of high-power las. Plasma lashed at them from heavy emplacements and turned the sand to glass – turned men to bloody vapour. All that was needed was for them to reach the walls. To breach the fortress. To drown them in blood and thunder and fury.

  ‘Now!’ Kyresh screamed.

  The body, ritually prepared and readied, threw itself up and its voice was the howl of the warp. They had worn thin the veil with suffering and blood, and now the wolf they had conjured forth tore its way towards the enemy. Their brother had died, as so many others had died, so that victory could be snatched from the jaws of defeat.

  The blood wolf was a migraine smear of unctuous light as it hurled itself into the fray. It snarled, features blurred like bad pict-film, and it tore through the storm of fire. It was lightning in a bottle made of broken human bones, caged in flesh even as it burned out and through it. Talons of fire extruded from ruptured fingernails and it bounded up the sheer side of the fortress like a felid chasing avians.

  The plasma emplacement swivelled and sighted. It fired. The bolt never connected. The blood wolf caught it, held the miniature sun in its hand for a perfect moment, and then crushed the light. A roiling, angry wave of flame gouted back at the gunnery crew and cooked them to bones within their glass armour. Scales shattered at even the reflection of the thing. It grinned with teeth of sanguine warp-fire and laughed with the mirth of atrocity as the first shots finally found it.

  The inferno raging beneath its skin finally reached the charges and grenades that the packsons had adulterated the corpse with.