‘Goodbye, Mister Noverin,’ she said, and finally turned to look at me. There was nothing but serenity in her face now. ‘We won’t meet again. But He knows us all, and remembers us all. And I will remember you. Go well.’
She touched the back of my hand, just the fingertips resting on my skin, then placed her hands in front of her again, prayer-like, facing the stars again.
If He knows us all, then He knows that I never ever wanted that moment to end. Even with everything that had happened, all that squalid, petty, murderous, blasphemous stupidity, right then and there I felt the most profound peace and rightness that I can ever remember feeling, that feeling that the universe had come to just precisely the point that it needed to be, with her sitting before the Visage and me by her side.
But eventually I pushed myself away, got stiffly to my feet. The gallery was dark now, and I could only see her in silhouette. I turned my back to her and walked away.
I don’t know exactly when she left the ship. I know we delivered most of our nobles back to Diadem, and we met a huge pilgrim fleet at a shoal point zenith of Metody, where the ayatani and imhava shuttled across and went on towards Verghast and the Menazoid Clasp. The weapons and relics that had been properly consecrated were hauled away when we docked at Balhaut, bound for points to spinward. What happened to their desecrated counterparts, I don’t know.
There was a brief bit of excitement en route to Nuria when one of the senior officers had a religious turn of his own, and tried to take his personal staff with him to jump ship at Anice to take the imhava road on to Tunusk. Yebrett got an acting promotion out of the ensuing shake-up and thought he was in with a chance of a permanent move to the high decks, but it didn’t go through and he came back to us cranky and full of nasty gossip about the bridge staff. And all around us and ahead of us, the war for the Sabbat Worlds ground on, slow as the spin of the galaxy itself or so it seemed.
Sometimes when I’m back in quarters for a sleep shift I still like to take out the scroll of commendation that came down from the bridge for solving the matter. I’ll read it once or twice, roll it back into the tube and think back for a while. I think of those strange few days out in the deep in front of the Visage, and of course I think of her.
We’ve all heard the stories, now, the stories that started a few months after that voyage and flew across the reclaimed worlds. The Saint reborn on Herodor. The Saint casting down the Archenemy’s banner at Lyubov. The Saint walking on Urdesh. I’ve seen some of the picts. In my tired, sad moments I tell myself I’m being an old fool, prey to fancies, but that’s just the shadows talking. I know it’s her. One day, when the years finally get the better of me, I may forget about Wymes, and Holtch, and Mowle and Yebrett and the rest. But I don’t think I’ll ever forget her. And if she breaks her word and forgets me, well, I understand and I forgive her, but if she does remember me then I hope her thoughts are fond.
THE TOMB OF VICHRES
WRITTEN BY JUSTIN D HILL
PREFACE
I’m a big fan of Justin’s work… A big fan. His Astra Militarum books are highly recommended. They have a great sense of humanity, of real humans, and a wonderful feel of historical authenticity, which is hardly surprising, given the stunning novels he also writes when he’s not working for Black Library. His ability, and his track record with the Guard, got him an instant invite to this collection.
Justin chose to write about the Chaos side, and it was an inspired decision. It is appropriately vivid and brutal. His story is set in the past, in that it begins in an early part of the crusade, but it propels itself forwards from there, and races hungrily towards the future. In terms of time span, it’s probably the longest story in the book. It’s a character arc, a career. And there’s a victory in it too… for someone.
I
After a year of holding on to the front line in the upper spires of Harshen Hive, Okumi Sirdar swore that he would die for a lungful of fresh air. They were his last words. He fell back into the captured bulkhead, blood leaking from the headshot.
His former brothers looked down. One of them tipped the body over with his boot. It was a rare thing, as one of them noted.
‘Clean death.’ They looked to Güyük. He was the sirdar now.
He nodded. ‘Only clean thing this side of Hive Nazeth.’
They laughed. It was true. Cociaminus was a meat grinder of a warzone. For years it had been turning men and women into scraps of flesh and blood and burnt meat. The water was putrid, rations had to be dug out of the mud, and the air was foul with dust, smoke and the stink of buried millions.
As soon as it was safe, Güyük and his brethren used poles to shove Okumi’s body out of the rockcrete bunker. It tumbled down the flakboard facing, and caught on the flay-wire, one arm raised as if in warning.
Months ground over them all. Okumi’s body swelled, burst, and then began to decompose. Rats and maggots did their work. By the time the front line had pushed forward over his body, only his gnawed bones were left, and his masked skull, grinning up at the ruined dome above their heads.
But his replacement, Güyük, had better luck. On the nine hundredth day of the attack, his unit stumbled forward through the thicket of las-fire on hive-shaft nine, and found that there were no reserves to hold their advance. Within hours they had plunged through the lines of the enemy.
The promised breakthrough had come, at last.
Six days later, the remains of Güyük’s unit picked their way back through burnt-out stairwells, collapsed halls and hab-domes, so narrow in places that they had to wait as the thousands of ‘fresh’ troops pressed upwards through the hive.
They were limping ghosts, white with dust. They made their way back to their rough camp, where a small crowd of starved figures saluted their return with the wolf-howls of the Sanguinary tribes. The wounded and the maimed pressed their scarred palms to his armour and Güyük lifted his hand in a defiant salute. His voice was a bare rasp.
‘The hive shaft has fallen!’ he confirmed. The battle could not go on much longer. The upper levels were within sight.
He had three heads hanging from his belt. He cut them free and tossed them onto the victory pile that his company had made by the side of their ridgeboard huts. The heads landed with a dull thud, slid and then settled into place on the festering heap. With eyes rolled up into their skulls, jaws hanging slack, the rot-swollen faces barely looked human any more. But the gods knew, and noticed.
Someone brought out a bottle of amasec. A plundered Imperial sword cut the cork free. The broken bottle was passed around from disfigured fist to fist. They had been blessed. They had been found worthy by their deities, and they knew it.
‘We must thank the gods!’ Güyük swore, as he took a swig of the grog.
He kicked open the door of a stinking lean-to where a huddle of slaves were mending scraps of mail and flak armour. All of them fell to their knees and pressed their foreheads to the floor. Except one: a one-handed woman with needle-filed teeth.
‘Down!’ Güyük shouted. He thumbed the power stud of his chainsword to intimidate her, but she was fearless, and the fearless did not make good sacrifices.
He swung the chainsword. His blow stopped just short of her face. The spinning steel teeth flicked gobbets of gore across her cheek. She did not even blink.
‘Down!’ he snarled.
She smiled a sharp-toothed smile. ‘Yes, master.’
Güyük grabbed the next slave by the hair. The man’s terrified squeal ended as his head was savagely sawn off by the gnawing blades. His body fell as heavily as a sack. Güyük shouted for the gods to witness his sacrifice, then started back to add this new trophy to the pile.
A voice called out. It was the fang-toothed woman.
‘Forgive your worthless servant,’ she hissed. ‘May I ask a single question, lord? I hear our forces are attacking the cathedral complex… Is it true?’
Güyük’s steel-shod boot connected with her midriff. The blow forced the air from
her gut, and the slave fell forwards onto her stump, wheezing. He threw the chainsword down at her. It landed with a thud on the matted furs.
‘Clean it, slave!’ If Güyük knew the woman’s name, he did not use it.
The woman struggled back to her knees. But when she lifted the bloody weapon she did so with all the ease and strength and confidence of a trained warrior.
She might have been a slave. But she was not nameless.
II
My name is Briar.
I never knew my father. He was killed, my mother said, when our planet was enslaved. It was the same for all of us. The forces of the Mansa were like a tempest that swept over our world. The survivors were herded into the noisome hangars of the Mansa’s slave-ships and transported to the chattel-camps of the Mansa’s home world – a festering series of slave-shanties that filled the crater pits of the equatorial highlands.
It was not clear why the Mansa had brought us here. In our transport ships we had imagined terrible fates, but the truth was after the cargo-lighters unloaded us into the chattel-camps, we were left to ourselves. It was as if he had lost interest in us. Our fates were now our own. If we wanted to live we had to learn to fight and struggle and kill.
There were irregular water and ration drops. Gangs formed to take control of the plundered food stores. Their leaders grew rich and lived short, violent lives before other warlords took their place. Within months we had all turned against each other. The greatest danger was not heat or starvation or thirst, it was those who we had once shared a planet with. Our comrades had now become our keenest foes.
My mother and I were too weak to survive there. We headed out, away from the crude settlements to the outer craters, which were bleak and exposed wastes of green glassy rock. We scraped out a grub-hut to shelter from the sun. Roofed it with a few precious scraps of flak-board and rusting iron. And so we lived, venturing out only at night, scavenging through midden pits, using scraps of metal to dig up roots and grubs, and boiling them inside a tin can with whatever water we could find.
On my home world I had been born into a well-to-do family. But now I lost all modesty. I gulped everything down. Insects, larvae, beetles – grinding their thin shells with my hind teeth, savouring every last morsel. I was young and hungry for this world, and my mother saw this and often gave me half her portion. She was starving herself. I knew that. But my belly was bloated with parasites, the rest of my body was just skin and bones.
‘Do you remember such and such?’ my mother would ask me in the quiet as we lay, listening to our bellies rumble. The memories comforted her. But I thought only of food. Memories of our home world faded.
All except slab. I could not forget that! In my dreams I could see it hanging above me like a mirage: the wet grey block, still ridged from the tin in which it had been preserved, cut into thick, round, gelatinous slices, and eaten cold. How full it made your guts feel! How well you slept at night without a belly full of worms.
Despite all these misfortunes, my mother kept her faith.
At night before we slept we said our prayers to the Emperor. But the words, for me, were as hollow as my gut. I had no faith, only hunger.
‘Thank the Emperor,’ she told me, and I did not understand her. We lived in the chattel-camps. Why should we thank anyone for that?
I was nine or ten when my mother shared with me the details of my father’s death. We were sitting in a hollow, coughing with the smoke from our pitiful fire, and I was angry with all of this.
‘I don’t believe the Emperor protects,’ I told her.
She could not have been thirty years old yet, but already her black hair was shot with grey, her skin lined with care and worry. When I spoke these words her hand trembled. But she did not chastise me. She sniffed back her tears and said, ‘Briar. You must not repeat to anyone what I am about to tell you. It would be death to us both.’
‘Why?’
She looked about as if someone cared what she was about to tell me, and whispered, ‘Your father was a preacher.’
She paused to let the impact of that sink in, and then the story tumbled out of her.
‘He had a chance to escape but he chose to come with the slave-ships. He knew that we would be cast into the shadows but he wanted to keep our belief alive. To be a candle in the darkness. A hand to the desperate. Strength for us when we feel weak…’
‘Did they kill him for his faith?’
She shook her head. ‘No. They killed him for slab. But he died with the Emperor’s name upon his lips. And prayed that we would prosper.’
She told me many things that I do not remember now, but at last those memories overwhelmed her. She put her head in her hands and started to weep. Dry, retching sobs that shook her whole body.
She had sought to change my mind, but she had made me more determined in my faithlessness. My father had had deep faith, and the Emperor had not protected him, either.
My mother died not long after that.
It was the bloody flux. She could not go an hour without crawling away across the glassy rocks to relieve herself. Nothing was going in, but she kept straining to pass strings of bloody mucus. A coldness had come between us since she had told me about my father. I stopped even the pretence of praying with her, and as she knelt and said her benedictions, I looked away, and then we sat and ate our boiled scraps in silence. But her prayers did nothing for her. Day by day the illness devoured her. She begged for water. I gave her all I had, and still she begged.
In the end I went out in daylight to a mudhole sunk three tiers down, at Rust Tower. Gangers charged for water, but I waited until they had left for the grog-house and stole in with all the other vagrants.
There was a short fight. Victory went to the most desperate and vicious and determined. The rest of them crouched in the shadows, licking their wounds, as I went first.
When I got back to our grub-hab my mother was delirious. I dribbled the water from the can into her mouth so it did not spill. Cradled in my lap, her head was too heavy for her neck, and this world was too heavy for her soul. She knew she was going to die. Her last words to me were, ‘The Emperor protects. Pray to Him and He will hear.’
I could not answer. I choked up. I did not understand my grief. It was like a rope, twisting and curling up inside my guts. I had words of parting, but I could not speak them.
Afterwards I could not bear to look at her corpse.
I was too weak to bury her and I could not bear to leave her. But there was nothing for it. Her body was there, but she had gone. When I kissed her forehead her flesh was cold, her eyes sunken.
‘Farewell, mother,’ I said.
I stood and turned my back and walked away. I have never felt so alone. What was I but a scrawny little thing with dark skin and guarded eyes, and scant hope that I would survive? My mother had been both shield and angel, and once she was gone I avoided other people and crept about under cover of darkness, looking for food. I do not know how I remained alive in the following months. I was more vicious than the others, so they would give way. But I was still just a child.
As the weeks ground on, I dreamt of grubs and insects in the same way that I had once dreamt of slab.
Salvation came one night. I stumbled over a crater-lip, and peered down at a little circle of adults. There were seven of them, all kneeling in the dirt, and a single man standing in the centre, his face up lit by a single flame – as my mother’s had once been. He was tanned brown with the sun. His grey beard came almost up to his eyes. But it was his eyes that struck me. I had never seen such a colour before. They were pale blue. The cold colour of a night sky, once the sun has retreated into darkness. The colour of ancient ice. The colour of fresh, clean, tumbling water. I was entranced.
I got so close I could hear the words that they were saying. They were all speaking in unison. Words my mother had taught me. I wanted to flee, and I wanted to linger.
These people were praying.
I thought of how happy my mothe
r would have been to find solace in the wilderness. These were her people, and she had died without them. She should have been here in the brotherhood of worship! It was the strangled sob that betrayed me.
I did not get far. I fought and bit and struggled, but I was still a child and there were seven of them, grasping, kicking, pulling.
It was the preacher who shoved them back with an open palm. He stood over me, bearded like a prophet, a foot on my chest and a rough, glassy stone in his hand to smash my skull in if I did not speak correctly.
‘The Emperor…’ he began, and I knew the answer from my mother.
‘Protects,’ I wheezed in reply.
His blue eyes, cold as dawn, transfixed me. He dropped the stone, put out his gnarled fist and dragged me up from the dirt.
‘Come, child!’ he said. ‘And join us.’
The preacher’s name was Fjara.
He was ardent in his beliefs. He had to be, because an Imperial preacher was a wanted man.
‘Does the Mansa hunt you?’ I asked him one night, as he hardened a length of wood in the ashes of the fire.
‘He hunts all the devout,’ he told me, his eyes fixed on the turning spike, careful not to burn it too deep. ‘The Mansa is a heretic,’ he said. ‘A magister. A sorcerer. He sacrifices holy men to his gods. They give him power.’
I was silent as I thought. ‘What kind of power?’ I asked at last.
‘Heretical power,’ Fjara said, his blue eyes as clear as the morning sky. ‘Bought with human blood.’
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