SABBAT WAR

by Edited by Dan Abnett

  ‘It is, lord! I was at Hive Harshen when it fell. And I took the skull from his tomb.’

  ‘Tomb,’ the Mansa mused, amber eyes narrowing. ‘So, you did not kill him?’

  ‘No, lord. Not I. Though I was the bearer of his death. And I stood by when he died.’

  The Mansa listened as I related, briefly, the events that had happened nearly a decade earlier, at Sabre Bridge. Those moments were etched into my brain. How the thing that I had carried had singled out his enemy. The look on Vichres’ face as it tore through his honour guard. The horror of recognition. And my own torment, as his body was dragged away by his men.

  At the end the Mansa laughed. A sound that weakened my will. ‘So. It was Vichres who created his own enemy! That is a fitting end.’

  I had no more left to say, and bowed to make my exit, but the Mansa stopped me.

  ‘Briar. You carried two skulls. Who is the other?’

  I looked down. ‘A man of no worth,’ I told him.

  ‘Show me.’

  I nodded and lifted the second by the hair that clung to the scalp. It was fresher than the first. An iron grotesque covered its face, now spotted with rust.

  ‘This is Güyük Sirdar,’ I said.

  The Mansa gave me a questioning look.

  ‘When I failed to bring Vichres’ skull to you, death would have been too easy.’ I held up my stump. ‘I mortified myself. I had once been a slave, and to slavery I returned. Güyük Sirdar was the last who dared to call himself my master!’

  The Mansa presented me with this sword that I still carry into battle.

  When he was done with me he signalled that I should leave.

  I walked away, feeling almost weightless, but at the end of the room, I paused and turned and saw Mansa tip the skull of Lord Militant Vichres upside down, like a bowl, and break it upon his knee, then lift it to his mouth and lick the inside, as if he was a starving man, polishing a bowl clean.

  That night I walked out onto the dust of my home world and I stopped at the flay-wire fences. On the other side a new chattel-camp had been recently populated with fresh slaves. I could see figures moving furtively. Men, women, children. Fearful, uncertain, still looking for boundaries, still searching for the purpose of their incarceration.

  It was the children who drew my eye. They clung to their parents’ rags, or huddled in orphan bands. Like me, the best of them would fight their way through that hell, and eventually they would be lifted up, and made into the Ghulam of the Mansa.

  Night was falling. Soon the rimward sky would be freckled with stars – just a fraction of the billion worlds the Archenemy had at their command. And against all that, all we – the People of the Rim – had was our spirit, and our conviction.

  I took in a deep breath.

  Those children picking grubs from the dust were our hope and our future. Life in the chattel-camps would make them strong. It would make them hard. It would make them the finest warriors this side of Urdesh.

  It would make them Ghulam.

  DEEP

  WRITTEN BY EDOARDO ALBERT

  PREFACE

  A warning: if you’re at all claustrophobic, this probably isn’t the story for you.

  I always assumed it would be me, eventually, who would take a deeper (no pun intended) look at the hard-scrabble Roane Deepers regiment and their work as sappers and pioneers. But Edoardo picked them, and who was I to argue? Edoardo, like Justin, has a great reputation for historical fiction outside Black Library. There, and in his Black Library work, he creates an amazing sense of realism, often through tiny details and observations. This story – dark, stifling and oppressive – is set in the crusade’s past, and evokes tunnel rats, mining dramas, and the hellish trench warfare of the First World War, both above and below ground.

  Do not read it in the dark.

  ‘They’re down here.’

  The whisper came from behind Sapper Mal Lyhan as he sat, back braced against a wedge of sandbags, feet poised to push the shovel into the clay face in front of him. Lyhan was the kicker of the tunnelling team.

  ‘Where?’

  The question, as quiet as the first whisper, issued from below Lyhan’s feet, where Till Hacquet, the bagger, lay poised to ease away the next wedge of clay that Lyhan dug from the face. Hacquet’s face, arms and body were smeared grey.

  Barl Coppet, the trammer, back from pushing the latest load of clay down the tunnel, reached past Lyhan’s shoulder, cutting the silence sign through the tunnel fumes, and pointed.

  The three men listened, not moving, the hiss of their rebreathers whispering back down the attack tunnel they were digging. The tunnel was a metre and a half high and one metre wide, braced and supported by timbers and spars and anything else the Roane Deepers could scavenge above ground on Hisk, their only tools a shovel and a handcart set on makeshift rails sunk in the clay floor.

  The tunnellers turned their heads slowly, so slowly, that the rasp of cloth might not be mistaken for the cut of spade through clay. Lyhan eased his shovel down, laying it out flat on the floor of the tunnel. The metal of its blade caught the dim light of the snap-lumens shining dully through the fumes. The clay was saturated with pockets of gas, some natural, others the result of the slow downward seep of the heavy vapour residue left by the never-ending rain of artillery far above.

  But down here, deep and dark, it was silent. Still.

  Then, through the silence, they heard sound: faint and distant as a fading star but just as clear.

  The heads of the three listening men turned, tracking as one in the direction of the sound: ahead, above, the gritty scratch of iron cutting into clay.

  A faint noise. In the grey clay of Hisk the sound of a team grafting might carry through three to four metres of the heavy subsoil.

  The enemy was close.

  They listened, not moving, taking in the rhythm of the enemy. They were cutting fast, the kicker kicking his spade into the clay with a relentless, helpless fury; the bagger throwing the wedges back up the tunnel, the trammer running the spoil back. In among the noises of shovels and picks, there came the faint piston wheeze of a cutting machine driving its blades through the clay.

  The Deepers’ cutting machines were men.

  Lyhan traced the line he judged the enemy to be digging, just above the course of their own attack tunnel. Then he pointed up, at an angle of thirty degrees, and drew his finger across his throat.

  ‘It was knife work, sir.’ Lyhan paused. He glanced at Markwell, who was waiting, quietly, for his report. The chief sapper was a miner himself. He knew how the memory of the desperate battles in tunnels drew you back into the scrabble and blind slashing, the ceiling pressing down on top of you, with nowhere to escape the blades and the blows for the heavy earth squeezing in on all sides.

  Lyhan’s eyes, trapped in memory, glazed. He saw again the narrow tunnel, flowsand oozing through the roughly battened roof. He remembered peering through the thin opening they had cut in between the supports, waiting, listening, as glow gas flowed down through the cut into their own attack tunnel, moving not like water but in discrete lumps, as if it were a stream of trench rats abandoning the tunnel. The mirror, on its stick, pushed warily through the opening, turning to the tunnel face and then the tunnel head. The crawl, as quick and quiet as possible, along the tunnel towards its face, fearing to see the enemy trammer approaching as the sound of the tunnellers got louder. The back of the trammer turned towards them, emerging fitfully from a pocket of glow gas. Knife, right hand. Knuckleduster, left hand. No lasguns, stubbers, bolters: the gases in the tunnels would ignite, roasting then burying all within. The trammer, loading a wedge onto the wagon, seeing them, rearing back, his face a nightmare of scarification. The desperate scrabble along the final metres of tunnel, then jabbing, slashing, hitting, biting, blind in the glow gas.

  It was all confused after that. In memory, it lasted for an hour; in time, for less than a minute. Lyhan killed the trammer – in the struggle, he didn’t even notice the
cut he took in his thigh – while Coppet and Hacquet, pushing past, dealt with the bagger and kicker.

  Only when the knife work was done did the Deepers see that most of the enemy’s tunnelling was being done by the abominable machine he had created, a structure of iron and flesh and teeth, a mole made of what was once a man.

  ‘We buried it,’ said Lyhan, ‘then set mines as near the tunnel head as we dared go and fired them.’

  Chief Sapper Markwell nodded. ‘The attack tunnel?’

  ‘Some minor collapses, but all cleared.’

  ‘Very well.’ Markwell paused as the air in the deep mine shelter pulsed: a pressure bomb must have exploded near the head of the shaft that connected them to the surface. ‘How much further do you have to drive the tunnel?’

  ‘Another thirty metres.’

  Markwell got up from his desk. The shelter lights flickered, flared, then died. Backup snap-lumens glowed into light, one after the other, as the men – eating with the steady, ravenous hunger of the tunneller – paused briefly before returning to their food.

  Markwell went to the plot table, signing for Lyhan to follow: the reflex to silence ran deep among tunnellers.

  The chief sapper looked at the plot table. The Deepers had made the surface from scavenged plasfoam and the geological strata beneath from bags of medigel, stained to represent the different layers of flowsand and grey clay. The main shaft cut straight down through the flowsand into the relatively stable – although generally toxic – grey clay beneath. From the tunnel head at the bottom of the shaft, attack tunnels bored into the medigel, with lateral galleries linking the tunnels to encourage air flow – a constant circulation was the best defence against accumulations of explosive or poisonous gas – and to allow rescue attempts in case of a tunnel collapse trapping the digging team.

  The plasfoam on the surface of the plot table had been cut and sculpted into the shape of the trench fields and, in front of the trenches, the long, low ridge that had been the graveyard of regiments of Guard. The Scar. Now it was the Roane Deepers scuttling through the trenches over which the Scar glowered, with the great dug-in bastion at its height.

  ‘How are your bagger and trammer?’ asked Markwell.

  Lyhan jerked a thumb towards where the off-shift teams sat in silent groups, Coppet and Hacquet among them, heads on the table, asleep.

  ‘When can you go back in?’

  Lyhan pursed his lips. A thin stream of air hissed past his teeth as he thought.

  ‘Six hours.’

  ‘Four.’ Markwell pointed to the plot table. ‘We’re under operational silence but I received a message from the surface. The general has brought forward zero hour. We’ve got twenty-four hours left to tunnel in under the enemy positions and set the mines.’

  The air in the deep shelter shuddered again. Markwell glanced up at the low ceiling, buttressed with a mixture of timber, rockcrete and scavenged plasteel from destroyed armoured vehicles. The supports flexed, letting loose several thin streams of flowsand and a general dust fall.

  ‘Even if they kept this bombardment up for a month, no matter what the artillery says, I still don’t reckon they would dig the enemy out of their rat holes, and neither does the colonel. But so far as the general is concerned, the Deepers are just bullet soaks, blood bags to catch the rounds meant for his precious Bluebloods. All the really big stuff is being concentrated here’ – Markwell pointed to a section of the Scar east of the Deepers’ lines – ‘and that’s where he’s expecting the big breakthrough. We’re just meant to keep this part of the enemy line busy.’ The chief sapper looked up from the plot table to Lyhan. ‘Your attack tunnel has the furthest to go. But if we can’t blow the enemy bastion by zero hour, it’s going to be us charging those fortifications on foot.’

  With the practised eyes of a miner, Lyhan looked at the plot table and the radiating lines of the attack tunnels weaving between the flow layers and clay seams that lay under the upthrust limestone ridge of the Scar. He traced the tunnels of the other teams, seeing how the flowsand forced one lower and another to change its angle of approach. Only his tunnel bored straight on, deep, towards the highest point of the Scar and the bastion dug into it.

  ‘The enemy knows we’re down there now,’ said Lyhan. ‘They will dig further counter tunnels.’

  ‘They know we’re digging, but they don’t know where. Your team is the quietest I’ve got, that’s why you’re on A. Keep them guessing.’

  Lyhan looked at Markwell. ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’ve got some sort of fiendish tunnelling machine. What we saw was part human, part animal and part machine. It was cutting through the clay five times as fast as we could, though it’s noisy and you can hear it coming from a long way off – probably six metres in clay. Thing is, I think these things might be able to smell us.’

  Markwell wrinkled his nose. ‘Not that difficult.’

  ‘Through clay.’

  Markwell nodded. ‘Chaos filth. That would explain why I have lost so many teams.’

  ‘Sikes and his gang?’

  ‘Still trying to reach them.’

  ‘One of those things, the way it cuts through the clay, the enemy could have cut in behind them and taken them unawares.’

  ‘Which is another reason for getting through. At the least, we will give Sikes and his boys the burial we owe them.’

  Lyhan laughed, a sharp cough of mirth, abruptly cut off. ‘We’re already underground. Don’t see it makes much odds to dig ’em out only to bury ’em again.’

  ‘It makes a difference to us. The rest of the Guard might treat Deepers like trench rats but we look after our own.’

  Lyhan nodded. ‘I’ll get back to the boys. Tell ’em they’ve got four hours.’

  ‘Three and a half now.’

  Three hours and twenty-eight minutes later, Lyhan’s team was back at the tunnel face. They had waited, in one of the regular scooped-out passing places, for Wynn and his gang to go past, pushing the trolleys of bagged clay that they had dug out during their shift. Reaching the passing place, Wynn reached up and, in a gesture known to all miners, pushed a twist of seed through the wire of Tavish’s cage. Inside, the little yellow bobbin fluffed out its feathers and pounced on the seed. The passing place, near the junction with a lateral tunnel, was clear for air breathing. Tavish was the guarantor of that. Wynn and his team unlatched their rebreathers, their faces red and bruised, touched the roof supports above Lyhan’s team and headed back down the tunnel towards its head.

  The face now empty, Lyhan, Hacquet and Coppet made the ritual payment of seed to Tavish, buckled on their rebreathers, and made their way along the attack tunnel to the face. They moved with care, hunched over, for there was not height for any of them to stand upright, the man following tapping the one in front if he was straying high and coming in danger of brushing or snagging on the roof supports.

  Pools of glow gas shifted lazily under the duckboard. Going in front, Lyhan felt the familiar ache in the back of his neck from turning it up so that he could scan ahead. Behind him, Hacquet replaced the snap-lumens as he passed them, twisting a new one into light at each sconce along the way. They did not speak. They would not for the rest of their shift, save for the direst emergency.

  Lyhan saw, up ahead, a section of three supports bulging slightly at their middle. He approached and stopped, moving the snap-lumens to look past the supports at the quick-cast rockcrete above. That too showed evidence of bulge, with some cracks opening in the rockcrete. The kicker shook his head. Wynn’s team should have dealt with this during their shift. But with time so short, he could not afford to delay their own return to the face. Lyhan looked back to Hacquet, now waiting behind him, pointed up at the ceiling, and then made the sign for flowsand – a horizontal motion, his hand turning slightly as it went. Then he pointed past Hacquet to Coppet, following behind. Hacquet saw the bulge and nodded his understanding. The trammer turned back to Coppet, the last man up
the tunnel, to make sure that he understood the bulge needed bracing while Lyhan continued to the face. With time so short, they could not afford for everyone to stop and fix in fresh bracing: Coppet would do that while the kicker and bagger made a start digging.

  Leaving Coppet, Lyhan and Hacquet pushed on to the face. The air from the rebreather tasted of metal and toilets. The soak pads the Deepers added to the rebreathers – rags left for an hour in a solution of vinegar and urine – did a fine job of removing the low-density gases that the rebreather missed, but at the expense of the throat-clutching smell. However, most anything can be become customary, particularly something that stopped the green glow gas that rotted you from the inside. The smell of urine was small sacrifice in comparison.

  Reaching the tunnel face, Lyhan and Hacquet set out the listening posts. Hacquet checked the cans and basins, filled with liquid, that were embedded into the floor of the tunnel; he watched them intently for a minute, searching for any sign of vibration. The liquid surface clear and unruffled, he signalled to Lyhan, and the two men picked up the listening tubes that had been left at the tunnel face. Taking opposite sides of the tunnel, they slowly and carefully pushed the tubes into the exposed clay to a depth of half a metre or more. Then they sat, with the open end of the tube in their ear, and listened to the sounds of the deep underground.

  Crew fresh to the task of listening expected the earth to be silent; that they would be listening for the sudden noise of miners cutting through it. But the task of detecting enemy miners was far harder than that, for the earth – even the earth of Hisk – was never silent. The underground groaned and it murmured, it rumbled and purred; sometimes, it screamed. There were times when it sounded as if giants battled beneath and around them. At other times, voices, ancient and unimaginably alien, sang songs in the deep, of the making and dying of continents, a music that had no human nor even mortal counterpart, but that the listener felt in his blood and his bone.