Sabbat Crusade Read online

  ‘How close do we need to get to the wall?’

  Drado couldn’t even bring himself to speak the psyker’s name, but it was the telepath who answered.

  ‘Need you to take this off,’ he slurred, the cadence of his voice that of a man under some strain. Perhaps he was afraid? He would have to be a wyrd and insane not to be, so Culcis fervently prayed that he was scared.

  The telepath tapped a finger against the metal clasp around his neck.

  Unsure, Drado looked to his lieutenant.

  After a few seconds of indecision, Culcis nodded. ‘Remove it, corporal.’

  Hesitating, Drado turned back to the telepath. His hands were trembling slightly and he nervously licked his lips.

  Culcis hustled Corporal Drado aside. ‘I’ll do it, damn it!’

  He took off the clasp, but handled the null-collar as if it were an unexploded bomb.

  The telepath suddenly appeared lighter, stronger, though he still had the appearance of a man under a tremendous burden. Culcis caught the faint flare of power behind his eyes. The lieutenant’s hand strayed instinctively to his pistol.

  ‘You still with us?’ he asked, wary.

  The telepath nodded.

  ‘Then I’ll repeat the corporal’s question. How close?’

  ‘We need to keep going,’ replied the telepath. ‘You’ll know when we are close enough.’

  Drado’s expression suggested he didn’t want to know what that meant, or to ever find out.

  Despite his officer’s breeding, Culcis couldn’t help but echo the corporal’s sentiment. He laughed. It was an empty sound, a gallows laugh.

  ‘Then we advance, corporal,’ he said, but his eyes were on the psyker. ‘For Volpone glory, by the Throne.’

  Scurrying from the crater, Culcis led the line.

  The east wall of Titus loomed a short way off in the darkness. Black, rain-slick, its featureless rock reminded the lieutenant of a tombstone.

  VI

  Sporadic vox reports came in from the field. Regara’s scowl deepened after each one. They made for grim listening.

  As far as he could tell, Culcis and his men had crossed the tranche of no-man’s-land between the trenches, and were entering enemy territory. Speers marked the relative positions of each platoon on the map with coins. He did so silently. Some of the coins had not moved in a while as the vox traffic from the platoons in question had died, probably along with the men.

  There was an actinic charge in the air; Regara could feel it all the way back at the command tent. It was thick, cloying and sickly. Ever since the engagement had begun and Culcis had advanced farther away, Regara had felt it intensify.

  He heard the throb of the Valkyrie’s engines overhead, drowning out the most recent vox report, and decided to open up a line to Ardal.

  ‘I thought the Volpone were known for their exactness and precision, major,’ the Tempestor Prime began icily, ‘and yet here I find evidence to the contrary. Your timing could not be worse.’

  Across the vox-link, the drone of the gunship’s engines was even more pronounced.

  Regara had lost patience with Ardal. He opted for blunt. ‘Your wyrd? What is he here to do?’

  ‘Locate the hub, just as I told you not an hour ago.’

  Regara replied through gritted teeth. ‘What else?’

  ‘Nothing else.’

  He was lying. Even with the ambient noise distortion, Regara could tell. He had received Commissariat interrogation training and knew when a man was dissembling. But Ardal was trained too, highly trained. He wasn’t about to confess, so a different approach was needed.

  ‘Where are your men?’ Regara asked.

  ‘In the field.’

  ‘So are mine. Except mine are dying, sir.’

  Ardal didn’t answer, but the engine noise told the major the link was still open.

  A sick feeling rose in Regara’s gut, and not just from the prospect of losing Culcis and his men.

  ‘Have you ordered my men into a trap, Ardal?’ asked Regara, increasingly angry. ‘Tell me what else your psyker is here to do… Ardal, damn you!’

  The link went dead and would not soon be re-established.

  ‘Bastard,’ Regara murmured, gripping the table so hard his knuckles turned white. He had a bad feeling. It was Sagorrah Depot all over again.

  Regara met Speers’s gaze. The corporal was trying to look studiedly neutral and composed, but the empathy in the man was almost palpable.

  ‘Get the men ready to move out. As soon as humanly possible, corporal,’ Regara told him, reaching for the strap of his ceremonial sword.

  Speers nodded pugnaciously. ‘At once, sir.’

  VII

  Fenk was sweating, and not just from the weight of his armour and the thick layers of his uniform. The night was hot, despite the rain. Las-beams burned the air, shivering molecules that warped Fenk’s view in a shimmering haze, but the second lieutenant’s only concern was Juba Klaye. He didn’t look much, shrivelled in his cloak, a hood to mask his eyes, but to Fenk the telepath was the most dangerous man on the field.

  ‘Sir…’ It was Private Villiers. His young voice drew Fenk back from his thoughts. The ‘grey host’ was near, and he had to fight to keep that part of him quiescent.

  Thirty-three men waited in the trench behind Villiers, heads down, crouching against the rain. They needed orders.

  Culcis had given his. Advance.

  The black walls of Titus looked impregnable, and Fenk saw only an invitation to oblivion in their depths.

  ‘Squads forward,’ he said, having to shout. Led by their sergeants, the men climbed from the trench and were hit by unremitting salvos of las-fire. Nearby, a dirt plume mushroomed with its carriage of Volpone bodies. ‘Villiers.’ The private had been about to go over the top when the second lieutenant’s voice stopped him. ‘Vox. We must report to Major Regara.’

  Struggling in the wind and rain, Villiers turned the crank to charge the unit. All the while, Fenk regarded Juba Klaye down the scope detached from his rifle.

  ‘Can you feel that, private?’ asked Fenk of Villiers, the only other Volpone left in the trench.

  ‘Sir?’ Villiers didn’t look so good. He looked as if he was about to puke.

  ‘Like an ion charge, but more than just the las.’

  ‘Oh… Throne…’ Villiers nearly fell, and had to steady himself against the wall of the ditch. A nosebleed drenched his lips and chin in crimson.

  Through a trench-dug murder hole, Fenk nodded towards the psyker. Culcis was pressing hard, and some distance fell between Fenk and his commanding officer in the field.

  Villiers held up his bloody fingers, the torrential rain already washing them clean. His face likewise.

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Yes, private,’ said Fenk as the ‘grey host’ returned with greater insistence. ‘Tell me, son,’ he asked, just as he made vox contact, ‘how much do you trust a wyrd?’

  VIII

  Culcis took a glancing hit to the shoulder and staggered. Drado reached out in support but the lieutenant waved him off. He grimaced.

  ‘Just a flesh wound. Already cauterised.’

  They had advanced maybe fifty metres, hunkered down behind a barricade of sandbags that had been long abandoned, when the telepath raised his hand.

  Culcis didn’t catch the signal at first. He was too busy firing into the darkness, watchful for another assault by Blood Pact Jaegans. At first, he thought the psyker had just stumbled. When the man’s eyes began to spark with fulgurant energies, he realised it was something else.

  ‘Close enough,’ the telepath murmured, slurring again. Beneath the folds of his hood, his expression looked even more pained. ‘I can feel her now…’

  Drado looked at Culcis between retaliatory bursts of las-fire.

  ‘Her?’ t
hey asked of each other in unison.

  IX

  Regara was ready to move out when the vox crackled. Twice. The first message came from Second Lieutenant Fenk.

  ‘Sir, something is happening out here.’

  Regara frowned, struggling to make out the poor audio. ‘Define what, second lieutenant.’

  ‘The wyrd, sir,’ replied Fenk. ‘He’s… affecting the men. It’s–’

  ‘What?’

  The link broke up. Speers tried to get it back, but the storm was making communication difficult. When the vox crackled to life again a few seconds later it was Culcis on the other end of the line.

  ‘Tell Ardal the telepath has found what he was looking for.’

  ‘You’ve located the hub?’ For a moment, Regara was tempted to tell Culcis to take whatever men he had left and neutralise it before the scions could even get a look. What the lieutenant said next stole that thought and crushed it.

  ‘Yes, but it’s not what we thought. It’s something else. Another psyker.’

  Regara masked the receiver cup with his hand.

  ‘Holy Throne of Earth,’ he breathed.

  What in the damned Eye had Ardal led them into?

  X

  A cascade of energy like arc lightning speared from the mouth of Juba Klaye in a jagged, violent parabola that struck the outer face of the east wall and split it. A ragged fissure ran down the black stone, reminiscent of a wound.

  Culcis and Drado were thrown back, their hair standing on end and their armour scorched by the sudden flare of psychic power.

  ‘I thought he was meant to be a telepath, a mind-reader,’ yelled Drado, struggling to his feet.

  ‘He’s a primaris,’ uttered Culcis.

  Primaris was the name given to alpha-class psykers as described during his Militarum training. Exponents of several mental disciplines, primaris were also extremely dangerous.

  A second bolt followed the first, as if the wizened wretch was vomiting up all of his psychic strength in a single punitive deluge in order to force a breach. A third, then a fourth crack of lightning split the night, and brought something eldritch to augment the natural storm that had grown around the Volpone and their enemies.

  Desperate, retaliatory fire stabbed at the psyker as the Blood Pact recognised the principal threat in their midst. Both bullets and las-bolts flared, then disintegrated against an unseen shield, a kinetic ward that denatured energy, turning solid mass into an etheric mist that the barrier simply absorbed.

  Overhead, the sound of a gunship’s turbines cycling up to attack velocity overwhelmed the percussive exchange of the battle and the shriek of arc lightning.

  Ardal had his signal and was sweeping in to assist his already entrenched scions.

  Another flash rendered the battlefield in grey monochrome, and caused Drado to jab a finger in the direction of a silhouette revealed in the brief illuminating flare.

  First Sons… Culcis saw them too, the predatory scions advancing on their prey.

  The fissure became a cleft, then a chasmal opening in the wall. Death Brigade swept out, cradling heavy-gauge ‘tritons’ – semi-automatic self-loaders. Staccato discharges ripped thunderously from the combat shotguns.

  In the carnage, Culcis thought he saw a scion take a hit and fall from sight. The riposte was swift, merciless. Despite his breeding, Culcis recognised the superiority of the Tempestus soldiers. They gutted sixteen of the Death Brigade, emerging from ambush positions barely three metres from where the lieutenant had advanced and was now taking cover.

  More Blood Pact were moving up to fill the breach. With the shadows, the rain and their iron grotesques, they had the aspect of true daemons.

  The scions did not flinch.

  They charged.

  Each soldier of the Tempestus carried a hot-shot as part of his standard loadout, a considerably more powerful version of the basic las-carbine or las-lock, and wielded it with the kind of accuracy and purpose Culcis had only ever seen in Throne-sworn Angels.

  When the vanguard squad of scions encountered their first real impediment, Culcis saw something else. She was tall and lithe, her body clad in form-fitting leather. Her iron grotesque was slighter and more angular than those of her kin and only masked the upper half of her face, leaving the mouth uncovered for incanting.

  She performed an incantation now, inciting a formless mass to manifest before the charging scions like a pall of black cloud. It was hard to see at first, especially in the darkness, a slowly billowing essence of darker black on black.

  Culcis did not understand warp-craft. Few men did, and even some of those wished for blissful ignorance. Sagorrah Depot, against the blood-witch, had been his first true encounter with the unnatural arsenal of the Archenemy. Although at times the Blood Pact bore the trappings and the bearings of men, when they unleashed their horrors that falsehood was ripped away and exposed as a convenient mask.

  Several names sprung to the forefront of Culcis’s mind, those taught to him when he was a child.

  Wirewolf

  Graylok

  Sebajinn

  They were things drawn of darkest myth, diabolus daemonicus, names and manifestations unknown to men. For to know such things would mean knowledge of a half-world, the one that existed beyond the invisible veil, a place of never-born creatures and souls trapped in eternal torment. Here, only the deranged or the supremely pious would dare tread. Mere mortal men had no business knowing the true terror of the warp. But Culcis knew death, and saw the cloud and the half-glimpsed forms within it as the physical incarnation of that primordial fear. And it was coming straight at the scions.

  XI

  ‘Damn it, Ardal! Answer me!’

  Regara had marched out of the Volpone camp and into the shadow-haunted trench line with all four hundred men in the reserve. By allowing himself to be ordered around by the scions, he had failed Culcis and he had failed those men under the lieutenant’s command.

  Never venture into battle without knowing one’s enemy.

  It was virtually creed where the major had undergone his training. Volpone were not just the best because their drill-sergeants were tougher, because they had the finest equipment their royal houses could afford or even because their superior breeding elevated them above ordinary men.

  Victory was second nature to them, it was expected of them, because they left as little as possible to chance. The Volpone were a pragmatic people. Fate did not shape their destinies, they did, and their arrogance concerning that fact was wholly justified.

  In kowtowing to Prime Ardal, Regara had not only ignored his better judgement, he had gone against his very heritage and culture. That required redress. It would be enacted now.

  ‘Ardal, you whoreson!’ Regara yelled down the vox, spitting fury. He had been at it for several minutes, his voice reduced to a grating bark. Speers stayed by his commanding officer’s side throughout, carrying the vox and maintaining lockstep with the major. So far, static was his only response, the growing sense of impotence only fuelling Regara’s deepening ire.

  ‘You lied about the hub. I know about the blood-witch, Ardal. Prove to me you’re a real soldier and–’

  Ardal’s voice manifested on the other end of the link, interrupting Regara’s impassioned tirade.

  ‘I suggest you hold your ground, Regara. That’s a bludvayne out there in the darkness, not some Sanguinary tribal hag, but something the likes of which you will never have faced.’

  ‘You bastard, Ardal. You knew that and let me march my men in there without proper warning.’

  ‘You have Klaye,’ Ardal replied, dismissively. ‘The primaris will keep your men from dying too quickly.’

  ‘And yours won’t take a scratch.’

  ‘Oh, I doubt that, major, but they appreciate the risks. You’re not seeing the broader perspective.’

 
‘Perspective? I see perfectly well, both broad and narrow.’

  Ardal scoffed.

  ‘No. You don’t. The bludvayne is a priority alpha target, and I would gladly sacrifice every First Son I have in the field to effect this mission. I have twenty-five men deployed in four strike squads. Just so we understand each other, each First Son is the equal of fifty of your Volpone. Perspective, major. Now, do your job and hold back the men you still have.’

  ‘With respect, sir,’ said Regara genially, ‘up yours.’

  The major severed the link.

  ‘Corporal Speers,’ he said, removing his cap to smooth down his hair in order to affect an air of absolute command and composure, ‘bring us out, double-time if you will. I’m not leaving Volpone to die in this crap hole.’

  Speers bellowed down the line. Trumpet clarions answered a moment later, and the Volpone marched with all haste.

  XII

  Juba Klaye unleashed his gifts, spewing arc lightning at the cloud as if a storm had somehow reversed its polarity and attracted bolts instead of expelling them.

  The First Sons that touched the cloud convulsed. Even with their full-face rebreathers, the vapours wormed their way insidiously into their bodies and onto unprotected flesh.

  Seeing the effects of the dark contagion was grossly disconcerting for Culcis and his men. One scion had the misfortune to tear off his mask, revealing the acid-flayed skin beneath, tendrils of his partially dissolved flesh strung out like soft wax, clinging to the inside of the rebreather cup.

  Juba Klaye took a step, leaning heavily on his staff. The lightning storm intensified, throwing off heat and furious incandescence.

  ‘Bludvayne…’ Culcis heard him cry. From the psyker’s scorched black lips it resonated like a curse, and the lieutenant assumed he was referring to the other witch. She recoiled, revealing a cloak of dark flesh wrapped around her feminine form. So too did the cloud… until the rifle shot rang out, impossibly clear and loud, like a death-knell clarion against the tempest.