Sabbat War Read online

  Duraki knew that feeling well.

  The man’s eyes were red and suspicious, his uniform torn and bloodied. The camo-pattern of his trousers was dark grey, and a few glistening flects of glass still clung to his uniform jacket, like it had once been scaled like a lizard and he’d recently been plucked.

  ‘You’re Vitrian, aren’t you?’ said Duraki.

  The man nodded, his eyes darting over Duraki’s clothes.

  Confusion, mixed with a faint ember of hope, danced in them.

  ‘Puzzle-camo?’ he said, his voice parched from dehydration and screaming. ‘Urdesh?’

  ‘Once,’ agreed Duraki. ‘Not much left now.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Knox, pointing his knife at the crumpled pages in the man’s hand.

  ‘The Byhata,’ said the man, clutching them to his heart like a talisman. ‘My honour code.’

  ‘What, like the Primer?’

  The man shook his head, tears spilling down his cheeks. ‘No, I mean, yes. Sort of. It’s so much more than that.’

  Knox took a step towards him. ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re not Vitrian.’

  The man struggled to rise, using the regulator station to haul himself upright. He saw the inked eagles on Knox’s arms, the Militarum serial number tattooed on the side of his neck.

  ‘You’re Imperial…?’ he said, his eyes widening. ‘Emperor’s mercy, you escaped too?’

  ‘No,’ said Duraki, snuffing out whatever hope was growing in the man’s breast. ‘We’re here to take you back.’

  The man’s entire body began to shake.

  ‘You’re with them?’ he gasped. ‘No, you can’t be… please… You’re Imperial!’

  ‘Not any more,’ said Duraki, aiming his laspistol. ‘This is your last chance. Come with us, or I’ll shoot you right now.’

  The man sank to his knees, the pages of his Byhata pressed to his chest as he made the sign of the aquila. Swift words spilled from his lips, prayers to the God-Emperor on Terra.

  Duraki knew the words. How could he not? He’d heard those same prayers since the day he’d been born, had spoken them himself since he was old enough to know their meaning. Even now, they still had the power to reach him, but he forced memories of his mother teaching him the words to the Imperial Hymnal to the back of his mind.

  Dangerous thoughts like that could get you killed if a glyf sensed them in your head.

  ‘The Emperor of Mankind is the Light and the Way,’ said the man, glaring at Duraki and Knox with unbridled hatred. ‘All His actions are for the benefit of mankind, which is His people, and above all things, the Emperor will protect…’

  Duraki shot the man in the head.

  His dead body slid to the deck, leaving a smear of pinkish brain matter on the wall behind him. He toppled onto his side, eyes open, his face at peace.

  Duraki put another las-round through his skull.

  ‘Shit, Renn…’ said Knox, kneeling by the headless body and lifting the bloody pages from the dead man’s grip. ‘Vraed wanted this one back alive, another soul to serve the Anarch, whose voice drowns out all others.’

  ‘No,’ said Duraki. ‘That one was never going to be a Son of Sek.’

  ‘I reckon you’re right,’ said Knox. ‘He’d have spat in Vraed’s face and had his guts cut out inch by inch. At least this way it’s quicker.’

  Duraki holstered his weapon and said, ‘Take his hands though, they can use them to make a couple of mute-masks.’

  Knox nodded and set to work with his blade at the dead man’s wrists.

  ‘What’ll we do with the rest of him?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Duraki, turning away. ‘There’s things down here that need to eat too.’

  The shutter to their packson berth was marked with a series of slashed tally marks the Sanguinary tribes used in lieu of alphanumerics. Duraki always avoided looking at it, which was easy when you walked with your head down everywhere you went.

  Too many things sought to drag your eyes up, things that would kill you for looking at them, things that would leave you a drooling meat-shell. Things that would remind you of where you were and what you had become.

  Duraki didn’t walk with his head held high any more.

  Not since he and the others had been taken from Urdesh in the weeks before the first Militarum landings at Zarakppan. Urdesh had changed hands more than once over the years of fighting, enough that it didn’t seem to matter much whose boot was on your neck.

  Urdeshi-folk were pragmatic, hard-boned, and didn’t give a damn who they offended.

  He reached for the shutter handle.

  ‘You sure you don’t want to report to Vraed first?’ said Knox.

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘He’ll be pissed if he thinks we didn’t go straight to him.’

  Duraki sighed. He knew Knox was right, but he was soul-sick and exhausted.

  ‘I don’t care,’ he said, pushing open the door. ‘What more can he take from us?’

  Knox pushed past him with a frown. ‘You stupid shit. You’re alive, aren’t you?’

  Duraki didn’t answer and followed Knox inside.

  According to the markings on the steel walls, their berth had once been office space for a Munitorum supply clerk to officiate this section of the ship’s hold. Intended for a single individual, it now housed seven soldiers in such close confines that even the most parsimonious billet officer would baulk at the cramped conditions.

  The air stank of sweat, filthy clothes, and old food. Just entering the space made Duraki’s throat close up. The low-level buzz of hushed chatter faded as they entered, but picked up again when the others saw it wasn’t a scourger looking to spill a little blood or a random Excubitor driven to murder by whispers only they could hear.

  Taliam sat cross-legged on her bedroll, bent over the husked case of her vox-caster and surrounded by its internal workings. She looked up, her features pinched and her shaven skull now tattooed with squirming snakes like some cursed goddess of antiquity.

  ‘Any luck?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing yet,’ she said, ‘but I’m hopeful. I found a scrap of copper on the range. If I can file it down enough, I think I can use it as a connector on the transceiver array.’

  She lowered her voice. ‘The machine-spirit’s still here, it’s just, you know… hiding.’

  ‘Keep at it,’ he said, and she smiled.

  Shanno sat in the corner of the room, turning his laspistol over and over in his hands, like he couldn’t decide whether to clean the barrel or put it in his mouth. Tears ran down his rune-branded cheeks as he finally pulled out a cleaning rag and began disassembling the weapon.

  ‘No one’s checking how clean your weapon is any more,’ snapped Knox, dropping his weapons onto his bedroll and collapsing to his haunches.

  ‘Hey,’ said Taliam. ‘You want him with a weapon that jams up when you’ve got a Tempestus Scion coming at us?’

  She realised what she’d said, and immediately put her head back down. No one wanted any reminders of who they’d likely be fighting next. No one cared to think that those same soldiers they’d have to kill were once their comrades in arms.

  A loaded silence fell. No one looked at each other.

  Only the sound of Kezra’s soft weeping from her bedroll disturbed the silence.

  ‘She at it again?’ asked Duraki.

  ‘You know the dreams or visions or… whatever they are haven’t stopped since she took her oath,’ said Vaslov without looking up from his card game. ‘Any other time or place, a commissar would’ve declared her a witch and put a bullet in her brain.’

  Sitting opposite him, Hansen played a card onto the upturned ammo box.

  Vaslov shook his head, and said, ‘That was stupid,’ before playing a card from his own hand and taking the round.

  ‘Any water left for clean up?’ asked Duraki.

  Vaslov nodded, dealing another hand. ‘N
ot much, but enough for a doxy’s bath. They’ve cut back on the water rations. My guess is we didn’t have time to take enough on before we broke orbit. Likely means they don’t expect all of us to survive translation.’

  ‘Always the optimist, eh?’ said Duraki.

  ‘Tell me once when I’ve been wrong about shit like this.’

  Duraki left him to his game, stripping off his tunic-coat and undershirt. His body was lean to the point of borderline malnourished. Life in the Urdeshi regiments had made him tough, but he’d become hard since being forced to choose between life in the Sons of Sek or death with Vraed’s blade buried hilt-deep in his guts.

  He thought back to the man he’d just killed.

  ‘You got off easy,’ he whispered.

  His arms were wiry and dirty, the muscles hard knots beneath his tattooed flesh, a mix of knives, skulls, and names that had once meant something to him. Like everything else, they’d faded and now felt like they belonged to another person entirely. Upon his repudiation, Vraed had burned the aquila from his shoulder with a plasma-brand. He didn’t know exactly what the scorched sigil represented, only that it marked him forever as property of the Anarch.

  Duraki scrubbed his face, his armpits and his chest with opaque water and a wiry brush, hard enough to leave his skin red raw.

  He ran his hands through his hair and over his wildly bearded face, catching his reflection in a polished scrap of metal Taliam had managed to scavenge up.

  On impulse, he took his combat knife and began scraping the blade down his cheeks. His skin was warm, and the water cold, but his blade was sharp. It was a messy process, and before long the water was red with blood. He kept at it, scraping the edge down his stubbled skin until he was as close to clean-shaven as he could reasonably get.

  It wouldn’t pass a Militarum personal hygiene inspection, but it was good to feel the air on his skin. He patted his face dry on the stiffened rag they used as a towel and wiped his knife dry on his trousers.

  ‘What you do that for?’ said Knox, looking up and doing a double-take as Duraki stood next to him.

  ‘I didn’t like it. I looked like a feral-world savage.’

  ‘No Ordo Prefectus here to pull you up on a charge for being Dishevelled on Duty.’

  ‘I remember Captain Haxworth used to say that discipline always fell apart when soldiers stopped shaving,’ said Duraki. ‘First, they stopped bothering to care for their personal appearance, then it became their weapons, then orders… Pretty soon they were walking around like the rules didn’t apply to them, you know?’

  ‘Rules don’t apply to us. Not here.’

  ‘Not the old ones,’ said Duraki. ‘Now we have new ones and they’re worse.’

  Knox stood up and leaned in close, keeping his voice low.

  ‘Shut your mouth,’ he hissed. ‘Are you trying to get us killed?’

  Duraki didn’t answer and cursed his stupidity. Knox was right. They always knew when soldiers like them – the ones who’d turned – spoke of their past lives as Militarum. As if the walls were spies and could relay any faltering of devotion to their new masters.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ hissed Knox in Duraki’s ear. ‘This isn’t what we agreed.’

  He saw the dead man’s face, eyes closed as he recited a child’s prayer to the Emperor.

  The killing had affected him more than he thought, which was stupid. Duraki had killed gods-alone-knew how many soldiers of the Militarum since he’d become a packson. He’d stood by and watched as Vraed had gutted hundreds more in the Sanctum.

  So why was this man still lodged in his thoughts like a splinter?

  Was it his shock and disgust that Duraki was ex-Militarum?

  Was his anger a reflection of Duraki’s own?

  Or was it that his faith was so much stronger than Duraki’s had been?

  ‘Are you listening to me?’ said Knox.

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘It’s just… I used to think we did the right thing, that we could hang on to who we were. Fight from the inside, you know? But everything they make us do…’

  Knox turned his back on the others so that only Duraki could see what he did next. He swept his hands across his chest, fingers brushing over one another and briefly interlocking.

  Just long enough to form the sacred aquila for a fraction of a second.

  Duraki looked down and saw Knox still had the pages the dead man had so desperately clung to wedged in his tunic pocket.

  ‘You’re lecturing me?’ he said. ‘Those’ll get us all killed. You need to burn them.’

  ‘I will, but I want to read them first.’

  Duraki was about to answer when he looked over Knox’s shoulder and saw Kezra sitting upright. She was looking right at him, her head cocked to the side like a curious bird.

  Did she know what they were talking about? Had she seen or heard?

  No, her eyes were sunken hollows, bloodshot and haunted by dreams that woke her screaming in the night, but they were focused somewhere far behind him.

  She pulled herself up and threaded a path between the others to stand in front of Duraki.

  ‘The pale face of death,’ she said, reaching up to touch his face.

  ‘I know I haven’t seen sunlight much, but that’s a bit harsh,’ he said.

  ‘Swords of three will come,’ she said, running her fingertips across his forehead, left to right then diagonally down to his chin before finally tracing a line back up to the other side of his forehead in a triangular pattern.

  Her touch sent a shiver of pleasure through Duraki.

  It had been too long since anyone had touched him softly.

  ‘The pale face of death,’ she said again. ‘Swords of three. Only you will see it coming.’

  Then she slapped him, hard, leaving a stinging red handprint on his cheek.

  Duraki flinched and angrily pushed her away. Off balance, she crashed into the ammo crate Vaslov and Hansen were using as a card table. It and the cards went flying as Kezra toppled to the deck, limp like someone who’d just taken a perfect long-las round to the head.

  ‘Slaydo’s hairy arse!’ yelled Vaslov. ‘I was winning there!’

  Hansen bent to help Kezra to her feet. She blinked and took a deep breath, like a sleepwalker waking from a dream and not knowing where they were.

  ‘What happened? Why am I on the floor?’

  ‘You hit me,’ said Duraki, his cheek still smarting from her slap.

  She saw the handprint on his face and said, ‘You shaved.’

  ‘It’s a fair point,’ said Taliam, looking up from the now mostly rebuilt vox-caster. ‘You look weird without facial hair.’

  Duraki had no answer to that, the ridiculousness of it all mingling with the cognitive dissonance boiling beneath his skin. Everyone was staring at him.

  He laughed, the sound unfamiliar to him. It bubbled up uncontrollably, like a geyser blocked for centuries and now surging to the surface. He bent double, holding his sides as tears ran down his face, salt stinging where he’d cut his face with his blade.

  The others looked at him like he’d gone mad, and maybe he had.

  But it was a contagious madness, and the laughter passed between them like the viral strains of a toxin-bomb. Even Kezra joined in, her gaunt cheeks ruddy with mirth.

  Duraki sank to his haunches, his tears of laughter turning to tears of self-loathing and self-pity. His chest heaved as the laughter turned to sobs. It didn’t matter, no one could tell the difference. The hiking laugh-sobs kept coming as he pictured the man’s head exploding.

  His hand clenched into a fist at the memory of pulling the trigger.

  Yes, the laughter was contagious and hysterical, but it died instantly in their throats at the sound of a fist hammering against the shutter of their berth.

  Three quick, authoritative blows.

  They turned as the shutter slammed open and a hulking shadow filled the doorway. Tall, armoured in bronze and black, a pale hand of mottled flesh fasten
ed across his mouth.

  A sirdar squad leader.

  One of the low-level ranks, but still with the power of life and death over the Repudiated.

  ‘Eskar va Duraki?’ Which of you is Duraki?

  Knowing why the sirdar was here, Duraki forced himself to his feet and slid his tunic-coat back over his shoulders.

  ‘I’m Duraki,’ he said, wiping his face on his sleeve and pushing down the rising insanity bubbling away in his gut.

  It burned there like spoiled meat ready to be vomited up.

  ‘What is it you want with me?’

  ‘Vraed Damogaur enshak yah,’ said the sirdar with a relish that easily spanned their divergent languages.

  Damogaur Vraed summons you.

  They called Vraed the Tongueless Man not because he had cut out his own tongue, but because it was the one body part he never took from those he mutilated.

  He left his victims their tongues so their tortured souls could yet scream in the immaterium, their anguish serving as a demented choir to the eternal voice of Anarch Sek.

  The Repudiator was waiting for Duraki in the Sanctum, down on all fours and surrounded by scores of disembowelled corpses.

  Duraki didn’t look at them; he had no wish to see the inventive cruelty of Vraed’s skzerret.

  ‘Khin voi Seksangua?’ asked the Repudiator without looking up. Where is Sek’s flesh?

  The Sanguinary tongue wasn’t new to Duraki; he’d heard enough of it on Urdesh before the liberation, but found it hard to fluently parse its guttural, unintuitive structure, as though some part of his brain simply rejected knowing it.

  ‘Dead,’ he replied.

  ‘Mortek?’

  ‘Yes,’ confirmed Duraki, tossing the two severed hands to the deck beside Vraed. ‘He fought back. Gave us no choice. We had to kill him.’

  Vraed ignored the hands and rose from the deck in one smooth motion, his arms and legs wet and glistening with coagulating blood.

  The Repudiator stood two metres tall, encased in warplate that had once been dull ochre, but was now muddy with rust and painted sigils. Shrivelled spheres and flaps of rotted flesh hung on chained hooks, excised eyes and severed ears cut from those who refused to repudiate. A leather thong of teeth hung from the high collar of brass encircling his muscular neck, and his cloak was a collage of flayed skin taken from a hundred bodies.