Sabbat War Read online

  His hairless head was a scarred ovoid pierced with weeping cabling and hammered with spiked rivets that held a mute-mask fashioned from the tanned flesh of a hand over his mouth.

  Yellowed eyes sunk in the doughy mass of his branded face fixed on Duraki.

  ‘Esar Sek khar sartra ghur impertek,’ said Vraed. Sek requires all to be given the chance to renounce their god.

  Duraki took a moment to translate the words in his head.

  A moment too long.

  Vraed’s gnarled hand lashed out and struck him hard across the face. Duraki slammed into the iron bulkhead. Before he even hit the ground, Vraed moved with inhuman speed and fastened a grey-skinned hand around his neck. He unclasped his mute-mask, letting it dangle from the hooked rivets above the gouged wounds in his skull that served as ears.

  The Repudiator’s breath tasted of ash, his skin of grease. His teeth were splintered things: not sharpened, just broken, as though he were rotting from the inside.

  ‘I talk now. In your words. So you hear,’ said Vraed. ‘All souls belong to He whose voice drowns out all others. None are yours to kill. You hear?’

  The Repudiator’s skzerret was at Duraki’s throat, its serrations pressing into the soft meat below his Adam’s apple. Rivulets of warm blood pooled in the depression at his collarbone.

  ‘I… hear,’ gasped Duraki.

  ‘Too few souls renounce,’ said Vraed. ‘Etogaur Shida-kai demands more. Our gift to the Anarch will be nothing. Too many refuse to serve Sek. Too many break too easy. You broke just right, Du-ra-ki…’

  ‘I live to serve the Anarch,’ said Duraki, reaching up to place a hand over his mouth. ‘He whose voice drowns out all others.’

  Vraed leaned in, his sulphurous eyes boring into Duraki’s.

  ‘You heard His truth,’ said Vraed, gently running the tip of his blade down Duraki’s body in the same cut he favoured when gutting those who refused to hear the Anarch’s truth.

  He tapped his knife against Duraki’s skull. ‘But Vraed thinks old voice still linger in you.’

  ‘No,’ snapped Duraki. ‘It doesn’t.’

  Vraed loosed his grip, dropping him to the deck. Still wet with gore, Duraki slipped and fell onto his backside, feeling the still-warm blood soak into the seat of his trousers.

  ‘Up,’ said Vraed. ‘Etogaur Shida-kai demands account.’

  Duraki’s heart stuttered.

  ‘You will come,’ said Vraed. ‘Confess how you denied the Anarch a Son.’

  Like most Militarum soldiers, Duraki’s experience with voidships was limited to snapshots of what he’d seen through the armaglass of trans-orbitals, marching onto vast embarkation decks, then shuffling in a mob through vaulted transitways to the billet decks. Then, the same process in reverse when they were ready to go to war.

  An Imperial ship was echoing reverence and grandeur, plaster saints staring down at the marching soldiers in disapproval, flaking gold columns, bare steelwork, skeletal carvings and guttering firelight glinting on dusty marble. Magnificent in a stark way, to be sure, but the feeling you were walking through an artefact of a dying age was impossible to escape.

  A ship of the Archenemy was something else entirely.

  Visceral and alive, it was filled with sound and fury, terror and death.

  The central processional was hung with banners of stripped flesh, the reliquaries overflowing with bleached bones, and pale, lifeless hands beckoned from the shadows. Wails of the damned echoed from every corner, and the sound of sharpening blades seemed to emanate from the very walls.

  But no matter how grating or dissonant was each individual sound, the Anarch’s voice overpowered them all. It grated on Duraki’s nerves like a barbed hook being forced slowly into his ear canal. The words were strident, repeating, frantic, zealous, berating, ferocious and exhorting. Leering faces pressed out of steel bulkheads in response as though the ship itself sought to answer the Anarch’s demands.

  Duraki’s mind filled with sickening images: mass murders in the Sanctum, his hand wet with the blood of the dead; an eagle, its wings broken and featherless, eyes weeping tears of dark blood.

  ‘The voice… the Anarch…’ he managed, keeping his eyes focused on the riveted deck plates. ‘Something’s changed.’

  At first the Repudiator didn’t answer.

  ‘Sek kayav utama sangua vanak,’ said Vraed. Sek speaks of blood and victory.

  ‘So this is like, what, a motivational speech?’ said Duraki, fighting the urge to look up.

  Spectral shadows slithered around his feet, projected by the ghostly light of a glyf.

  He wanted to look up at it, he needed to. Even felt his chin lift a fraction before Vraed struck him an admonishing blow.

  ‘Your head stays down,’ he said.

  Duraki’s mouth filled with blood and tasted of cinders as they approached the bridge.

  The Vociferator wasn’t built as a warship, so had little of the structural defences common to a fighting vessel. Its only concession to security had been a series of reinforced blast doors, but they lay buckled and blackened on the deck, blown open by demo charges upon its seizure from the orbital yards.

  Duraki felt his stomach turn over as Vraed led him towards a pair of the largest Excubitors he’d ever seen. Half again as tall as Vraed, their plate was midnight blue and silver, marked with painted runes and carved like exposed muscle. Their eyes were concealed by carved fright visors, their mouths sewn shut with flay-wire.

  Vraed spoke to them in the tongue of the Sanguinary tribes, quickfire bursts of guttural barks that used an argot Duraki couldn’t follow. The voice of the Anarch was louder now, and the barbed hook twisting in his ear felt like it was rooting around in the middle of his brain. Vaslov had once told Duraki about an ancient Terran culture that preserved the brains of its kings and queens by scraping the organ out through the nose with long hooks, and he felt a measure of sympathy for those ancient rulers.

  The Excubitors allowed them past, and Duraki’s heart pounded fit to burst in his chest. His breath came in short, sharp bursts, the blood surging in his veins. Its roaring filled his head like a tempestuous ocean, and the awful sound of the Anarch’s voice was carried on every crashing wave.

  Duraki imagined the remainder of his life could be measured in moments, but he wasn’t afraid. Not because he was especially brave, but because he was past caring. He’d known many masters in his life, but was determined to die with a curse upon all generals, warmasters and commanders, a last blaze of defiance to mark an unremarkable life.

  The bridge was shallow but wide, a semicircular stage bounded by curved tiers, like a horizontal section through the upper reaches of an amphitheatre. Upon the upper three tiers, skeletal figures were chained to benches like slave rowers in an ancient galley, naked but for soiled loincloths. Their shaven heads were pierced with cabling, and their lipless mouths twisted like chewing grox as their worn-down teeth clacked together in a constant chattering tattoo.

  ‘The lekt choir,’ said Vraed, noticing his revulsion. ‘Mind-speakers. Through them we hear He whose voice drowns out all others.’

  Then he could hear it, a pattern in the chattering, a whispering beneath the raging madness of the blaring screams.

  Anarch I am. Anarch of all.

  Repeated over and over, an endlessly aggrandising refrain.

  Below the lekts, the brutish machinery of command bounded the space, mechanisms by which the ship’s master directed it through the void. Servitor creatures in sunken pools of corrupted oil monitored the base functions of the Vociferator as fallen Martian adepts hung just below the vaulted ceiling on rotating gimbal-cradles, enveloped in spheres of red light.

  At the centre of the command bridge, half a dozen armoured warriors argued around the glowing disc of a navigation hololith. An orb of dirty blue and yellow light jerkily spun between them, sector-scale representations of war fronts, warp routes, and storm fronts too complex for Duraki to comprehend.

  Every one of
these warriors was larger than any soldier Duraki had seen, armoured in bronzed plate, heavy-duty fatigues, pelt-cloaks and regulation-issue weapons.

  But for the eye-watering runes cut into their bare arms and the trophies cut from living foes hung from their armour, they might have been high-ranking Militarum command staff.

  A monstrous figure swathed in a cloak of iridescent feathers like a peacock reclined on a vast palanquin of brass and bone. His physical form was grossly swollen, plates of corroded metal fused to his body, with folds of distended flesh spilling out where the armour had split.

  He held a pair of upturned ruby hands on an ebony handle at his mouth, and as he spoke the red fingers of the hands caressed his cheeks in time with his words.

  Shida-kai.

  Vraed advanced towards the hololith, but Duraki remained rooted to the spot.

  The deck was sticky underfoot, reeking of corruption and spoiled meat.

  Realising Duraki wasn’t following, Vraed turned and sharply beckoned him to move. Duraki shook his head, his earlier defiance melting like ice before a flamer. He didn’t belong here; this wasn’t a place for baseline humans.

  People like him were brought here to die.

  Vraed drew his skzerret, and that broke the spell holding Duraki immobile.

  Eyes cast down, he reached Vraed, and together they approached the hololith.

  Shida-kai looked up from his contemplation of the map, the ruby fingers stroking his face describing gentle circles on his cheeks. His eyes were a collection of black orbs, as if a nest of insect eggs wriggled in his sockets. Duraki looked away, feeling as if everything about him would be lost were he to catch so much as a glimpse of his reflection in them.

  A pair of Excubitors in red-scaled armour and bearing long, hooked polearms stepped towards them, but Shida-kai waved them away with a red-gloved hand.

  ‘Etogaur Shida-Kai,’ said Vraed, dropping to one knee and placing both hands over his mouth. It shocked Duraki so much to see Vraed showing deference that he forgot he was still standing.

  ‘Yha takar skerza mortek!’ bellowed one of the Excubitors. You kneel or you die!

  Duraki dropped to his knees, still refusing to meet the diabolical gaze of the etogaur.

  ‘Do you have the Sanguinary tongue?’ said a dry voice, a sound forced up through a mummified throat and so close it could have been whispered right in his ear. Simultaneously Duraki felt the soft pressure of a crystalline fingertip trace a line from his cheek to his lips.

  He flinched, but there was no one there.

  ‘Damogaur Vraed says you denied a soul the boon you so willingly accepted.’

  Duraki felt his bladder tighten and his throat clamp shut. He knew who was speaking to him, and felt his head lift involuntarily. He hadn’t heard Vraed tell the etogaur anything, but maybe he’d missed it? His mind was wrapped in a fog, his skull filled with the incessant buzzing of swarms. He couldn’t be sure of anything right now.

  ‘No, no, no…’ he whispered.

  He tried to keep his eyes shut, but the lids peeled back anyway.

  The etogaur’s black eyes were squirming gateways into somewhere impossibly dark and empty, an echoing void where a soul ought to be. To meet the gaze of such a hollowed-out being was almost too much for Duraki, and he felt his gorge rise.

  The fingers on Shida-kai’s mask extended and curled like crab legs, stroking the etogaur’s cheek, and Duraki felt their echoing touch on his own skin. He whimpered, the sensation like the warm, slimy presence of a leech pulsing on his skin as it fed.

  ‘You are Urdeshi.’

  It wasn’t a question, so Duraki was thankfully spared the necessity of answering.

  ‘Even now, the Anarch, whose voice drowns out all others, spreads His truth upon Urdesh,’ said Shida-kai. ‘But the soldiers of the corpse-prophet yet deny His voice. The Anarch brings fire and ruin, turning the key to victory in the great lock of the universe.

  ‘But such an endeavour requires meat and bone and sinew, and that is how I serve, by bringing Him trained hands to hold guns, devoted hearts to drive knives into flesh, and Repudiated souls awoken to the truth He brings.’

  Duraki wept hot tears, feeling Shida-kai’s words crawling inside his skull and prising open every secret place within him. He wanted to scream, but the invisible touch of the etogaur’s phantom fingers kept his lips sealed tight.

  ‘My gift to the Anarch is an army, an eightfold host of those who once served our enemies, for it pleases Him to turn his enemies’ swords against them. Vraed brings me the Repudiated, but you killed one destined to serve His will.’

  Duraki wanted to scream, to rage and wail that one life meant nothing in the galactic scale of the war. Force was measured in army groups, in cohorts and brigades. A single soul could never make a difference.

  ‘You are wrong,’ said the etogaur, plucking the thought from his head. ‘For how is a victory earned but by infinite individual actions? To deny one life is to deny the Anarch, and the Anarch is never denied anything.’

  A terrible heat built within Duraki’s skull, the psychic force of Shida-kai’s words like a wildfire in his mind. His eyes, unable to blink, burned under the furnace gaze of the etogaur, and with every passing instant, yet more of his inmost secrets were hauled out into the light.

  Then the fiery touch of the etogaur’s mind snapped away, and Duraki fell forward onto all fours, breath heaving and his skull pounding as if someone had beaten him with a hammer.

  The sounds of the world rushed in to fill the silence.

  Howls from the lekt choir, the thrashing of the servitor creatures in their pits.

  The bellowing roars of denial and shock from the warriors around the hololith.

  Duraki blinked furiously, rubbing the heels of his palms against his eyes and scraping his cheeks free of the memory of Shida-kai’s touch. A warm rain fell on him, splashing his cheeks and smelling of hot tin.

  He held out his hands. The palms were bright red, wet with raining blood.

  He sat back on his haunches, staring in open-mouthed amazement.

  Etogaur Shida-kai writhed on his throne, his mask of hands fastened around his throat, his undulant black eyes bulging as they strangled the life out of him as though now possessed of their own murderous life.

  The damogaurs and sirdars stabbed and tore at one another in a frenzy, like hunger-maddened beasts in a cage. Even Vraed, still on his knees, was plunging his skzerret into his belly again and again like a lunatic. His screams were not of pain, but anguish.

  A booming detonation drew Duraki’s eyes upwards.

  One by one, the lekts were dying. Fully three-quarters of them already had no heads, their swaying trunks topped by squirting stumps. Their headless bodies writhed and spasmed before collapsing inwards, as though consumed by an inner fire.

  One of the lekt stared right at Duraki with pain-filled eyes.

  ‘Ger tar mortekoi! Ger tar mortek!’ it screamed before its head exploded like someone had planted a frag in its skull. Bone fragments and a mist of brains and blood aerosolised in the air, adding more volume to the scarlet rain.

  The few remaining lekts screamed in one unified voice.

  ‘Sek esa mortek! Sek esa mortek!’ they screamed, until every voice was silenced in an explosion of blood, bone, and blue fire.

  The meaning of their words unfurled like a banner in the wind.

  Sek is dead! Sek is dead!

  ‘Open the damn shutter!’ yelled Duraki, hammering his fists against the metal.

  Breathless and bloodstained, he rattled the shutter in its frame.

  His lungs were on fire, his muscles burning after his flight from the bridge.

  It had taken him twice as long to get back to his crew billet.

  The voice of the Anarch was gone, but a howling, desperate madness had replaced it.

  Packsons were roaming the cavernous halls in murder-gangs, driven insane by the sudden absence of the Anarch’s voice. Screaming Excubitors dragged captive
s from their cells and executed them in ritual slaughters before turning their guns and blades on one another.

  The scrap-monsters hanging in the gibbets were screaming and thrashing in lunatic hunger, while their maddened glyfs screamed in loss.

  Duraki kicked the shutter again and again, buckling the metal with every desperate blow.

  ‘Open up! It’s me, Duraki!’

  He stepped back as he heard the rattling of heavy chains. The shutter lifted a few inches.

  ‘Renn?’ said Knox. ‘That you?’

  ‘Of course it’s me, you moron, let me in.’

  ‘What’s going on out there?’

  ‘The whole place has gone bloody mad,’ said Duraki, kneeling to speak through the gap at the bottom of the shutter. ‘The packsons are tearing each other apart, and – if it’s all the same to you – I’d prefer not to be alone in the damn middle of it all!’

  ‘You’re alone?’

  ‘I just said I’m alone, didn’t I? Now let me in!’

  Duraki heard gunfire farther down the transitway. Zipping bolts of las streaked overhead, followed by the dull crump of frags.

  The chains rattled again, and the shutter ground upwards. Duraki didn’t waste any time and threw himself flat to the deck, squirming under just as soon as there was enough room.

  He rolled onto his back and put his hands up as he saw himself facing a host of weaponry.

  ‘Woah, woah! It’s me. It’s bloody me!’

  Knox was the first to lower his las. Shanno, Vaslov and Hansen kept theirs trained upon him, as if he might attack them.

  ‘Hells, Renn, what’s happened out there?’ said Knox, offering him a hand up.

  Duraki took it and levered himself to his feet. He took a moment to let his breathing settle, bent over as he tried to get his tumbling thoughts in order. The berth stank of fear and charged las power packs. He took a deep breath, running his hands over his scalp, before shaking off scraps of flesh and tiny bone fragments.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ said Knox. ‘That’s a lot of blood.’

  ‘It’s not mine,’ said Duraki. ‘The lekt choir, their heads all exploded.’