SABBAT WAR

by Edited by Dan Abnett

  It detonated in a rush of heat and fury, unbinding the daemonic force within it in an eruption of hellish force. An inconstant false un-dawn rose above the walls even as the stone sloughed away. Like boiling water, like rotting flesh, the fire of the apocalypse consumed it and the Sons poured into the breach like daemons.

  Kyresh threw himself forward, blade up, and embedded his weapon under the chin of a stumbling Vitrian. Blood gouted across the scourger’s face, hot and coppery against his teeth. He grinned with savage adulation as his brothers swept in around them, each of them falling back to bladework, to the sanctity of the knife: iron against glass and flesh set against flesh.

  They could cleanse cities in a night. This place, for all its false bravado, would be no different. Kyresh let the body fall and wheeled about, looking for new prey. He turned and paused. As though seeing something for the first time…

  Gerik shook himself and realised that he was staring at Kyresh’s gloating features. Twisted with callow, overweening pride, the scourger’s face was distended by his grin and stained with blood and pigment.

  No one else seemed as affected as Gerik. None of the others who had imbibed the sacred unguent were unmanned. He looked from face to face and saw only the resigned acceptance of Kyresh’s boast; even Ekren had bowed his head in acknowledgement. Gerik looked down at Liran. The man’s eyes stared blankly, his jaw sitting slack, and it was obvious that Kyresh had broken his neck. As before, two Sons strode across the ceremonial space and dragged him away.

  Gerik did not remember hearing the man’s neck snap, so lost had he been in… in what? He swallowed hard. The vision had passed, and he had lost time, living Kyresh’s offering as though he had been there.

  He had not been there.

  They had not fought in the hot dust against the glass-men of Vitria together. He had heard of Kyresh’s triumphs as others had but they were not his to share or glory in. His fingers twitched as though seeking a blade, and he quieted them with a significant effort. He did not move even when Vzar shouldered past him. The Shadow looked back at Gerik as though he were a simpleton and then turned to face his opposite. The warrior was called Vrin, Vzar’s brother in blood as well as allegiance. The similarity was striking, though Vzar was sharper featured, save where Vrin had marked himself with five long ritual scars over his lips and down his chin – in imitation of questing fingers.

  Vzar reached down and removed his gloves, letting them fall to the dust, already forgotten, and all eyes went to his suddenly bare hands. They bore no skin upon them. It had been removed, painstakingly, and never allowed to heal. Gerik knew that some who had renounced the Gaur had replaced the skin about their hands with unblemished flesh – but Vzar despised such half measures.

  He wore his pain as a gift to the gods and the Anarch.

  The two men nodded at each other and then turned their gaze to Gerik. He swallowed and pronounced the words of his judgement.

  ‘The first sacrament has been undertaken. An offering of blood and breath from the hand of a brother. Let the next offering be one of blades.’

  They each drew their skzerrets, turning them over in their hands. They were almost identical – bone-handled, barbed, their edges serrated to extract the most worthy of pain from their victims. They circled but neither raised their weapons. Vzar sneered and Vrin spat into the ashen dust at his feet. They smiled with the mirth of wolves, the joy of hunters who finally feel themselves challenged.

  Vrin had risen in the estimation of his packmates precisely because his brother had carved a legend into the galaxy’s skin. In many ways, there was no greater spur to competition. So he had fought and clawed his way up, as a rank trooper and then a heavy weapons gunner, and then onwards – upwards, to stand as a weaponmaster.

  All these warriors, these men of dark renown, were known to Gerik and yet he had never met them. He had seen the merest shadows of them upon the walls and thought them mighty.

  Knowing these men in the flesh… am I impressed or merely disappointed?

  There were so many of them and yet so few. So few truly worthy. Gerik looked around the chamber, at the observers and the sanctified. Were any of them truly worthy of the Voice’s attention? The galaxy was changing. Their worlds were shifting beneath their feet. In such times, were any deserving of the power that such a blessing would confer? Would it even be enough to stop the inevitable?

  Gerik listened and he watched. Rumour and legend were as whispers, echoes and reflections of the truth. They spoke to him with their every action. Each movement was a precise thing. A blade arcing through the air to meet its fellow, muscles bunching with the effort of the strike, dust kicked up by the shift in stance.

  Sparks cut across the empty air as the blades met and serrated edges ground against each other. Evenly, though not equally, matched. Gerik’s breath caught as he watched. Sheer single-minded skill ground against dogged iron determination. The blades clashed again and again in mid-air. The others watched intently, hunching forward to try and pick out details, to note specific instances of skill. Even Kyresh seemed impressed.

  Gerik tensed. Every click of metal against metal was another creeping tremor along his spine. He could feel sweat beading his forehead and running down his chin. He could taste the thick chemical reek of the powder as it bled from his skin.

  Vzar ducked under his brother’s swipe and drove in, etching a crimson line along his sibling’s flank. The weaponmaster jerked back, suppressing a curse, but Gerik barely noticed. He looked about the circle. Kyresh was laughing as he spoke with Ekren. There was something there. A grudging respect. Did the scourger see it too? The potential the young warrior carried?

  Power and experience accepting the promise of youth. Gerik was fascinated as he watched. He could see it, Kyresh could see it. He wondered how the others could not see the near-numinous possibility that shrouded Ekren.

  Gerik wanted to go to them, to speak with them as brothers, but he could not move. The clatter of the ritual combat drew him back in. He had to focus.

  He felt his eyes roll as Vzar began to speak.

  ‘I lived amongst the Gaurites and wore their colours.’

  He lived amongst the Gaurites and wore their colours. He hid his face behind cruel, cold iron and affected the feral disdain common to the Sanguinary masses. Vzar answered to a false name, broke bread with men who were not his packsons, and let the barbs of his mask gouge his cheeks. He bore the scars of allegiance upon his hands, as though cut into him by the Gaur’s own armour.

  He was a liar. A spy. A ghost in their midst. A shadow waiting to strike. He was pheguth. A brand he would wear proudly in the atrocity to come.

  The death brigade held a line ten kilometres across, strewn throughout the misshapen interior of the equatorial forests. They glimmered with strange bioluminescence, fogged with fungal blooms of deep blue and roiling crimson. It lit against his uniform, the fabric dyed so deep a red that it was almost black – soiled in the blood of sacrificed men of the Militarum and granted a final sanctity by the murder of its previous owner.

  Vzar found that the most difficult affectation was setting aside his superior discipline. It was not an idle boast to say that the Sons of Sek were better drilled and more consistently equipped than the Blood Pact. He held himself to a lower standard, moved with a little less surety, and worked to draw as little attention to himself as possible.

  He was amongst them for a year. A year of curdled camaraderie, of deceit. He lived and breathed treachery as though he needed it to live. Every moment sharpened him, whetting his entire being until the moment he was required.

  A year. A year fighting the Gaur’s battles for him. A year stinking of blood and offal. A year of gore-rites and eked out suffering. Of trading the future for the past. Of holding close to his choler any time they took the Anarch’s name and word in vain.

  He could ignore but he had not forgotten. He charted every slight by tracing patterns into his palms until they bled. Encoding them with pain and the
offering of his agony. He grew accustomed to the taste of blood and continued the practice of drinking it as a novelty – even when the blood of others replaced his own.

  Vzar became a world unto himself. He was smeared in the toxins of the battlefield, stained again and again with the viscera of the weak men of the Imperium. The sorties and advances dragged out and bled into one another. He began to wonder if he would ever truly know his purpose.

  He had volunteered for the first night’s patrol, as much to get away from the others as to clear his mind, when he heard it.

  The wind shifted with a fecund whisper. There was a song upon the air. The world itself stilled, held its breath, and then began to speak again in the voice that drowned out all others.

  He trembled in the fragrant dark, only the barest of details picked out by the fungal light, and then moved off. New purpose flooded him. His every muscle tensed and bunched as he jogged onwards through the undergrowth.

  For all their sins and lapses of practice, the Pact had the presence of mind and efficiency to maintain an ammunition dump in this portion of the forest. A squat collection of drums and crates nestled under the boughs of a sprawling tree. Men squatted amongst the bulging roots or sat upon low slopes. Three of them. One looked up as he approached.

  ‘Gaur Magir,’ he declared, and they nodded. Relaxing. They returned the greeting. War cries subdued, pensive, waiting.

  ‘All is well. What do you need?’ one of them asked. His grotesque was rough, indicating his youth and inexperience, and he held his lasgun loosely. Even amongst the elite there was room for laxity. Imperfect imitation of the Militarum bred mistakes such as these. Like cogitator errors creeping in or the imprecise transcription of monastic savants. The promise of victory had been lost, and worlds had burned, at a heritor’s error before… so too would the failings of these men bring down their masters.

  ‘There has been a breach,’ he said simply. He watched the man’s eyes widen. The other two shared glances. The disorientation of shock. The sudden rush of realisation.

  ‘What?’ the young one asked as his face twisted into an angry snarl. ‘The Imperium?’ His eyes snapped around, wildly, in one direction and then the next. Searching for shadows. Hunting for ghosts.

  ‘No,’ Vzar whispered and let the last vestiges of pretence fall away. Control reasserted itself like a strap snapping taut. His knife was in his hand and up before he even finished his sentence. ‘We are betrayed.’

  He drove the blade into the youth’s eye and bore him to the ground. The others were moving as though underwater, leaden by surprise as Vzar snatched up the rifle and fired twice. The shots were precise. Perfectly executed. The men stopped and tumbled back with steaming holes drilled through their foreheads. He could taste the burning flesh as the smell of it rose onto the wind. Vzar checked the charge on the weapon and marvelled for a moment at the Urdeshi maker’s mark. He kept his silence and checked the bodies for their clips.

  And their grenades.

  When the moment came, he would make a pyre of their sacrifice. He would draw their eye and then disappear into the darkness. Like a shadow.

  First though there was a deeper sacrament to be undertaken. He returned to the first of them and pulled the blade from his skull. He looked at the blood covering the length of it, the sanctity of it – of a life taken by the hands of the faithful and given to the Kings beyond. He did not clean the blade before he lifted the warrior’s hand by the wrist and held it up. His tongue wetted his lips as he began to saw through the flesh and bone.

  Soon he would be complete again.

  The explosion tore through the darkness and the silence. Immediately the camps were on high alert. Lines of communication contracted, and the war fronts followed with them. Turning inwards as outriders hurried to investigate.

  He stood in the shadows, in the darkness that was holy to him, and he prepared his weapon. The fingers of the enemy felt good against his lips. Still warm with the last flush of life. Ready to bear him forward, animated by only will and word.

  He stepped from the shadows as the first Pacted soldiers ran past him, and shot them in the back. Not the single precise shots of before, but a burst at full-auto. He peppered their spines with shots that maimed, that paralysed, and that killed, then spun on his heel and faded back into the shadows.

  He would kill them all. By degrees. With intent. This portion of the line would fold and fail – whether the betrayal truly killed it or opened it up to external pressure. The Gaur would be shamed. The Pact would be routed. The Sons could profit and the Anarch would be exalted.

  That was what the whispers promised.

  Gerik blinked.

  An eternity seemed to have passed between one breath and another. Time had indeed flowed on, lost like sand between his fingers. He took in the scene of bloody horror. Vzar had subjected his brother to an intricate end. A thousand cuts had easily been etched into the other warrior’s skin. In places it had peeled away as though fully flensed. Vzar said nothing. He simply cast his knife down beside the body and took his place at Kyresh’s side. He ignored the man’s encouragements and little boasts. He barely even looked back at the others.

  Gerik felt bile boiling in his stomach. He knew what he was experiencing was not right.

  Was he dying like the others? A drawn-out coward’s death of sickness and shame? He did not know. He did not want to know.

  Worse though… The idea that it would not be his death alone. If the Voice did not speak, did not claim a new champion from the mass of the Sons… what then? Annihilation. The end of all they were. The seeds that had been sown upon Gereon and other sacred worlds would never bear their fruit – only wither and fall.

  Dhareg placed a hand on Gerik’s shoulder. His fingers were rough, calloused by the intricacy of his craft, shaped by a life of devotion to his art. ‘Is it not sublime?’ he asked, his eyes wide and staring – pupils huge.

  ‘It… it is.’ Gerik shook off his hand and turned from the bitter taint of his rapture. He was lost in the storm of sensation. Was this what revelation was? The pounding migraine agony spreading through his skull?

  Ours is the brotherhood of necessity. The camaraderie of the hells. No room for mercy nor weakness. Simple fidelity is what we trust in. Not to ourselves but to the gods. To Him.

  Dhareg nodded and moved off into the centre of the arena, passing the young Ekren.

  The others preened and posed, yet Ekren evinced a simple faith. A quiet power. Perhaps they were all looking in the wrong place, so swept up in signs and wonders that they missed the simple mortal truth…

  The will to power.

  Dhareg stopped and turned, before sinking to his knees. All eyes were upon him now. All focus. Even his opponent, sirdar commander Urx, paused to stare at the Worker-in-Metal. The Father of Wolves.

  Dhareg’s eyes were closed. He moved his head gently as though listening to a song only he could hear. They all ached for that certainty. To know and hear the voice that they all missed. It was so close, so familiar, but it denied them. The Anarch was gone. He no longer walked the worlds in opposition to her hateful light. Everywhere the stench of the sacred flower closed in. It was behind the fyceline crackle of the enemy’s shells. It drowned out the unwashed gore stink of the Pact. The world stank and shrank and the warp kept its silence.

  The hall shook. They were close now. Close enough that the sounds of combat were impossible to ignore. Urx snarled and hurled himself forward, spurred on by the encroaching thunder of battle – aiming his fist squarely at the placid features of Dhareg.

  His eyes opened. Dhareg reached up and grabbed Urx’s hand. Squeezing until he heard bones break. His features creased into a beatific smile. It was kindness warped by cruelty.

  ‘Shall I tell you how I came into the grace and favour of the Anarch? You who holds rank but lacks soul?’

  Gerik could not look away. He succumbed again, slipping under the tide of nausea as another wave crested him. He surrendered.

&n
bsp; His hands were always still when they worked.

  Perfect placid concentration exuded from him. He was at odds with so many of his brothers and so he had become an outcast. Solitary. Only snipers knew greater isolation amidst the armies of the Anarch.

  In many ways he had long since given up being a warrior. His muscles remembered. His heart. His soul. His being had forgotten. That was why he had ranged so widely. Why he had trained under heritors and opened himself to the wisdom of the warp. To wear at reality as a sculptor wears at marble, to polish the skin of the world until it shone with the light supernal.

  He had taken the hand which he wore as a devotion from a shaper of silver idols, a man whose fingers had been burned and scarred by his own art – as he had moulded the hated aquila and the icons of the Saint. He had deceived the silverworker and then he had killed him. The hand was rough against his lips. Sacred. Beautiful.

  Dhareg had walked a dozen worlds and carved the wirewolves from metal. He had caged the infinite and gazed upon its beautiful wonder. He had watched the dance of the glyfs as they were born from pure conceptuality and found their courses in the world.

  Those courses had become his. He had heeded the whispered voice and had ranged ahead of his brothers. For his duty was a holy thing and it was not a fear of arms alone.

  He wormed his way into the heart of their world like an imago into flesh. Ever beneath their notice, cloaked in shadows and signs and wonders, but always vigilant for their attention. The hated Saint had visited the world in ages past and reaved it of its true name. He did not care what stolid hateful Imperial label had been forced upon it. Instead he fed on lesser names. He listened. Waited. Fixated.

  Such diligence brought him to the Marble Garden. A shameful extravagance. A simple grove where once she-in-her-unworthiness had rested. They had caged it in smooth stone and coaxed clear waters into it – while their people thirsted as surely as any throat-dry world of the Consanguinity – and girdled it with statues. She stared down with dull judgement alongside Kiodrus and Faltornus.