The Bargain

[Andrew Benn]

The Bargain

 

Under smoke streaked skies a world was burning. It had begun burning weeks ago when the first uprisings began far out in the endless plains of gene-crop fields. The flames of rebellion had been spread quickly through poverty stricken farmers and migrant labourers, all those for whom the bright lights of the cities was a distant dream of wonder and decadence. They had all grown up on the stories of what the ‘Citylanders’ did to occupy their time between issuing new quota directives and repeating the same tired, empty promises of change, of improvement. The agri world of Alteer had been practically grateful when the Heralds and their followers came.

 

Those people readily turned their tools into weapons, learning quickly how to efficiently end a life with a planting-fork or a sonic thresher. On the other hand, their overlords learned slowly. Their responses to the mass of riots and rebellions had been predicable and would probably have failed even without the Heralds and their armoured brothers. Small response teams of arbites and Planetary defence forces were sent out piecemeal to deal with a problem their officers refused to believe was real. Even before the uprisings combined to form a single cohesive offensive, driving steadily through outposts and cities, these handfuls of overpaid and under trained men and women weren’t god for anything than a short sharp shock; a sudden show of force, driving the masses back in line. By the time they were first deployed it had already gone far beyond that.

 

By the time the planet’s regiments had been fully mobilized the soldiery were as mutinous as the population. Fear had spread through the major cities rapidly as the rest of the planet went steadily dark. It didn’t matter that frantic signals had been sent out to all nearby systems begging for help; by the time that decision had been taken it was so far beyond too late.

 

Mobs surged through the outskirts of the capital, the last city still holding out, they met no resistance. They reached the manufactoria, they still met no resistance; the tech priests and their servitors falling into step with their workers, joining the tide. Only when they reached the great cathedrals of the ecclesiarchy did anyone block their path. There the few standing officers, priests and commissars rallied the loyal defenders to hold the city centre. The drive onwards had become bloody and grinding after that. The poorly armed and armoured attackers being cut down in swathes by defenders armed with tripod mounted heavy bolters and autocannons.

 

But there had been too many, eventually the human tide bore over the last bastion and crashed through the final barricade. Now the maddened army of liberation had descended on the battered city and was taking its gleeful revenge for offences old and new. Millions had died, and hundred of thousands more were to join them as rebel death squads roved the streets seeking anyone baring badges of state or even the hair colour associated with a particular noble house.

 

The Heralds, and those whom they had convinced to aid them in their true endeavour, paid no heed to the screams of the dying. They, their followers and allies, had orchestrated the downfall of a planet. The let the slaughter below continue as they sealed off the highest spires of the governor’s palace, and began the ritual.

 

It had taken years to perfect the formula and years more to perfect the method, and neither of the Heralds would risk an attempt until they were absolutely certain everything was correct. Once they had been, once their Alpha Legion allies went to work, the fall of Alteer had happened in short order. The necessary prisoners had been secured, as had their effects, the required parts of the palace had been prepared and secured, even before the armies of the people reached the city. Now they were here, now was the time.

 

The cavernous audience chamber of the Planetary Governor had been cleared; all stools, tables, plinths, pict- or vox-interfaces, even the throne, all ripped from the floor and tossed unceremoniously into what had been the chambers of the Ruling Council next door. Then the paint had been scoured clean; the gaudy reds, purples and silver of the many icons, manners, mosaics and frescos had been burned away with powerful caustic chemicals leaving only a pitted stone grey surface beneath. Then the runes had been written, winding their many concentric circles round and round the room’s central point in scripts that made the eyes of the few onlookers permitted to see it sting and water persistently. Now they too were all in place, the dull sicky redness attesting to the fate of some of the select group of prisoners taken well before any fighting began. The rest had now been brought, blindfolded up from their cells. They walked in a long line, necks connected by a rusting chain, the leading end of which was held by one of the Heralds.

 

Dariel tugged on the links in his hand causing a train of stumbles and shuffles from the dejected sacrifices behind him, scorning their resignation to death. He walked on, pulling the human centipede behind him, tracing a twisting spiral closer and closer to the centre, the central circle, the one patch of bare floor amid the sea of runic lettering. Dariel walked the winding path, his armoured boots dully ringing on the rough stone floor. Reaching that central nexus, he stopped and surveyed the trail of human souls he had left. He could say one thing for their cowed submission; it made them very easy to orient correctly. He had barely finished looking from row to row, his head hight well above that of the unfortunates he had lead to the slaughter.

 

Then the chanting began. Not from Dariel, not from the sacrifices, but from his many followers lining the walls. The chants issued from their helmets in soft unhurried, implacable words. Like the Primordial Chaos they venerated, like the destruction they sought to bring on, like the bitterness in their hearts. Not in unison, not in one single choir, but each a choir on their own, clashing and combining with their fellows with some maniacal inner logic only the Heralds knew the totality of. The rhythm rose with almost imperceptible slowness, building from a vox-enchanced echo gradually to a hum, then a rumble, then it started to thunder from wall to wall as each brother bellowed the words, each syllable seeming to leave their mouths and join their fellows in the air, all stubbornly refusing to diminish or die away.

 

As the chanting started rising the legs of some of the standing line of prisoners gave way below them, they hung suspended by the rigidity of their fellows and it was not until the words were reverberating back and forth ringing in their ears and rattling their teeth that the majority fell, and the rest were dragged down with them in a ragged collapse until all one hundred and fifty of them were sprawled on the rune crusted floor. Those letters were glowing now, and there were screams where they came into contact with unprotected skin. Those screams rose up and joined the building tempest that filled the room, throbbing through it, straining the air, compressing it, energising it.

 

From the moment Dariel entered the chamber with his shuffling charges to the moment the ritual reached its climax took many long hours, the tireless voices of his brothers rising, harmonising with their own echoes, giving vital form to formless energies. Turning the room, the building, the burning planet below into a beacon, drawing out from primordial darkness vile things that have no true name.

 

At that moment of climax, when the colliding beat of words seemed to resolve from cacophony into the steady two-step beat of a heart, a great sonorous heart, the pounding of which shook the walls and rattled the tightly boarded windows. At that moment when every atom in the place seemed charged, at that moment when the potential energy was at its height, Dariel brought the chain up, and cracked it down. His super-human muscles sent a powerful wave rippling along the links, it kicked each sacrifice high into the air as it passed over them causing a ripple of small cracking noises in echo of the original, the prime cause. As it passed down the line and more and more sacrifices fell broken to the floor the wave seemed to gather strength, keeping the sound of snapping necks in time with the pounding of the chant. Both picked up pace, building from one another as more and more of those people who had been destined for this moment since birth died blind and terrified.

 

When the last pair of feet left the ground and the chain ended the final crack seemed deafening even combined with the throbbing dirge. The last sacrifice died and his body exploded in blue forks of lightening. The earthed through the chain, arcing back along the spiral of corpses, each one bursting in turn as the warp energy danced over them. The wave returned along the chain much faster than it had gone, but Duriel was still ready. He sifted the weight of the links wound around his hands and forearm, knowing there was only one chance, one moment, that could avoid disaster.

 

The moment came. Dariel whipped the chain up again to meet the commission lightening. The two forces met, and the equations balanced, the forces matched, the sea was calmed, and the warp flowed in through the stillness. It licked in ghostly tendrils along the chain, outwards again, tracking over the spattered remains of the sacrifices, covering them in blue mist. From within at mist hideous noises came, squelching, liquid sounds bones cracked, organs burst, muscles melted into one another hidden from mortal sight, but clearly visible to Dariel’s psychic senses.

 

When the thing reared up from the thick carpet of warp tainted mist it was fully formed. Fully formed was without doubt entirely the wrong word. It was anything but fully formed in every sense bar one; it had fully formed itself out of the blasted remains of the sacrificed bodies. What it had formed into was an abomination.

 

In vague outline it was a worm, coiled around the circle in which Dariel stood, but beyond that, all sanity took flight. Misshapen body parts jutted from it, limbs twitched uselessly, three hundred eyes blinked out of step with one another all along its length. When the thing moved, bones could be heard snapping within the chaotic folds of its body. Muscles wrapped around one another tautened over living skulls, rearing the end closest to Dariel high into the darkened air. It roared and one hundred and fifty twisted and torn mouths joined together in united wordless agony. The rearing end, the one nearest Dariel, the one which might loosely be called its head, had the chain issuing from a knot of exposed sinews. The chain which Dariel still held firmly in his gauntleted hand.

 

When the thing reared and roared, he yanked hard on the chain, dragging it back down with a force it could not resist. He had created it, he had given it form and summoned a spirit to occupy the mangled flesh, and now he would command it.

“Hold!” his voice rang out over the creaming, the continued crunching and the endless chanting that maintained this unspeakable creature in existence against all natural law, “Hold and be silent! I have built you. I have given you existence. I have called out out of the warp because a covenant must be made. I know your name, I know your power, as you know mine. I know your destiny as you know mine. Now you will listen.”

 

“We are chaos.” the words came from every mouth, every word screamed, “We are not commanded. We are not summoned. We are eternal. We are infinite. You are nothing Dariel El’Stander, nor is your absent master. You have built nothing, given fleeting existence to nothing. And to nothing you will return soon enough.”

 

As the great thing spoke, Dariel saw one of his brothers sink to his knees, blood leaking from visor, mouth grill, and armour joints. His brother pitched to his face and lay still. Dariel turned from the corpse, keeping a firm hold on the chain and refusing to be cowed, even by the unutterable horror that now spoke to him with so many dead mouths.

 

“Into nothing all shall return.” he said, betraying none of the trepidation he felt, “But not today. Today I have called you here, and you came as surely as water flows downhill. And just as surely you will listen to the words of the Heralds of Kraven.”

 

“We know your words. We know your mind. We can see your designs laid out before us. We defy them, as your lord defied ours. We came to him, for you were unworthy of our attention. We spoke to him, and we listened to him. And he defied us. So we defy you.”

 

“Spare me your petty pride. We know, or can guess what Kraven said to you, for we know him from long before he ever came to your notice, and we know his mind, for all that he thinks himself so wise. We know he will not return willingly to the real world, even to hasten the coming of the end we all seek. He will wait beyond all worlds for us to burn and pillage and die for our own reasons. Alone. He will wait out us all, he will have victory, while the rest of us perish.”

 

“What awaits for Kraven when all is over is not for you to guess. What his final victory may bring matters nothing to us. Nor does his waiting. We are patient. We are eternal. You are fleeting. We remember you when you were with us, lost in the sea of souls. We remember the pain, we remember your fear. We remember when the first mortal crawled on their belly looking up at the stars and felt their minute insignificance. We remember when the last soul will be cast on their back to gaze up at dying suns and bleeding skies and feel their ultimate destruction. We remember it all. We are patient. The end will come.”

 

Dariel stifled a spasm when the thing’s chorus of voices taunted him. He remembered the warp too, however much had been lost to his mind on his screaming descent back into the real world, he remembered that, the paroxysms of agony that eclipsed all other existence. He would not return there, he knew that much.

 

“I know that well. By the will of my master I felt and perceived much more than your delicate attentions when I last swam among you. I perceived you denied by Kraven’s might. I felt you shrink from his touch. And I felt the touch of the Straight Path. That you know just as well. It is by that power we hold you here, by that power we alone have called the ruinous pantheon in chorus before us. You know that each of us that Kraven saved, freed from your claws, stands now as he stood before his departure. We stand astride three worlds; connected to each, enslaved to none. You know the souls we command grow ever stronger, their acts of veneration, ever directed at you for all that they shriek Kraven’s name at his deaf ears, growing ever greater. Even now the planet below us destroys itself; a microcosom of the galactic destruction we may wage together.”

 

The many mouths let out gouts of laughter, each one different, each one mirthless and tortured.

 

“Our servants destroy many planets in many ways. They despoil and slaughter their way across millions of systems. They send legions of souls to us with every passing day. What does one little world matter? What does a handful of bitter mortals savaging one another in primal exaltation matter when the galaxy burns?”

 

Dariel permitted himself a smile, which elicited a manifold growl of rage from the gestalt flesh-creature he had created. When he spoke he pulled the chain harder, dragging the monster closer, though it never ceased its straining to escape.

 

“It matters, as you well know, because of what we might do should we turn our considerable energies to different cause. Perhaps we will no longer extol our followers away from slaughter and death. Perhaps we will show them the Straight Path just as it was shown to us. Perhaps we will lead a great exodus of souls out through the warp to join our Lord in his seclusion. A pilgrimage.” he paused to enjoy the guarded silence of the many mouths and the fragments of expression as eyes clustered randomly on warped flesh tried to narrow in unison.

 

“Can you imagine it? A great tide nothing like anything the warp as seen over its tortured existence. A great river of life streaming away from the limitations of the physical, away from you. Think of a hundred, a thousand, a million words emptied in silence, their populations ascending like angels through your dwindling masses. Then imagine, imagine all of those souls diving back into your realm, swimming through the warp as Kraven did, saving loved ones, saving ancestors and descendants, saving even the souls you have ensnared, enslaved and consumed. Leaching the life from you like a open wound. Bleeding you dry. Offering you your end, but denying you your satisfaction. Imagine, your existence ebbing away as each soul is pried from you, calming your storms, stilling your rage, peeling away your power until the last shred of you vanishes with the last soul saved, brought home, returned. Then you will die, silent, unmarked. There will be no glorious slaughter, no sublime annihilation. Just silence, just oblivion.”

 

He knew at once he had pushed too far, over played his hand. Painted too vivid a picture from the fragments of understanding that had clung to him from his momentary psychic contact with Lord Kraven, pressed too hard on the pressure points he knew to be there in these ancient and powerful creatures. He knew because of the roar the abomination emitted, from the tortured howl of one hundred and fifty throats wrapped around muscles and connected to lungs that were not their own, from the spasms of movement that rippled along the writhing, twitching length of the thing, from the rearing of head, tail and numerous folds of pulsing, bleeding, partially flayed flesh. But most of all he knew from the sound and feeling of the taut chain clutched in his hand snapping and instantly shattering, glass-like, into crystalline fragments lost on the madness that ensued.

 

Dariel raised his staff, giving the signal. His brothers, many more of whom had died bleeding over the course of the conversation, ended their chanting. The throbbing beat ended suddenly, but seemed to continue in its absence, echoing in Dariel’s head. The thing quivered, fresh fountains of blood erupting from it as for a moment the forces that held it together, held it in existence flickered and died. Limbs fell limp, mouths sagged, eyes dropped from fractured sockets. For a moment there was no sound save the soft organic sound of flesh succumbing to gravity and the ethereal echo of the artificial, ritualistic heartbeat maintained by Dariel’s brothers.

 

Then, to Dariel’s horror the echo became real sounds. Real sound emanating from the creature that now nebulously reformed; shed chunks of meat and organ slithered back into place and the flesh-monster reared up again, its own tortured flesh now self-sustaining, fuelled by the warp power leaking in through its unholy conglomeration of a body.

 

He reacted at once, signalling again to his followers, their armoured forms still half hidden in shadow reacting at once. Hidden weapons snapped into ceramite-clad hands and sheets of bolter fire streaked from each one. Tracing lines of white hot fire lit up the chamber, showing in their fierce light the true extent of the horror that now fought back against those who had created it.

 

There was a central form; a roughly snake-like core formed of solid meat, but most of the mass was composed of the many flailing limbs and trailing torsos that hung in disjointed, bloody chaos from every inch of that mass. Legs ended in feet that were fused to shoulders, that themselves held multiple arms. Chests, their necks terminating in clusters of tiny infant fingers flexed back and forth, blindly grasping for something to rend, something to kill. Heads, or parts of heads leered down with blood-weeping eyes and bellowed curses in unguessed at languages, sniffed hungrily with malformed noses at the end of flailing strips of cartilage and skin.

 

Dariel had a moment to marvel at the sheer horror that could be brought to exist in the rigid reality of the physical, before the head-end of the thing, bolter explosions blasting smoking holes in it as it moved, dived for him a dozen skinless arms popping themselves out of their joints in their desperation to rend his body. He sidestepped it, bringing the staff he had been holding in his free hand round in a wide arc. The psychically charged head connected with the side of the hideous thing as it connected with the floor, crushing its own arms under its bulk. The weapon discharged into the mass of flesh as it connected, searing it black and withering a viciously kicking leg into shrunken ruin. The thing rolled, legs and arms battering Dariel as it bore down on him, trying to crush him. He threw himself back, drawing the combi-bolter from his belt. His shots melded with the continued hail of fire from his brothers, but that hardly seemed to slow it. The bulk connected with his armoured form, the suit screaming and grinding under the weight. His legs and one arm, the one holding the bolter, pinned by the broken remnants of the same flayed arms that had reached for him before. The pressure bore down on him, pressing on his breastplate with mounting force. He struggled vainly, trying inside his head to summon the power to blast the thing off, or at least back enough that he could get away from its tightening coils.

 

Then something large and armoured in black and silver barrelled across Dariel’s obscured vision, crashing into the monstrosity with the force of a small tank. The momentum of both his newly arrived brother, and the coruscating powerfist which he brought up with all his might to strike heartbeats after he did mercifully shifted the thing and Dariel felt breath return to him as the pressure lapsed. He heaved against it, adding his own strength to that of his brother Herald. In moments he was free and back on his feet, bolter spitting on full auto, raking the flanks of the thing as all along its length it fought back against the legionaries intent on blasting it back to oblivion.

 

Dariel felt his brother clap his shoulder. The grim armoured helmet of Sepharion shaking almost imperceptibly as they both turned, and back to back, laid into the throng of disjointed limbs and gnashing mouths that advanced on them from all directions. Dariel’s staff withered them on contact, his mentally charged blasts ripping through their unholy flesh reducing them to inert death. Sepharion’s power fist fell again and again battering flesh, bone, organs and sinew into useless, lifeless paste. They both battered against exposed sections of the things central mass, both rent and blasted huge holes in its hulking body. Between them their bolters reduced the rearing head-end to a bloody stump of fragmented muscle, but still the thing fought on seemingly unaware or uncaring of the many mortal wounds being inflicted on every inch of it.

 

“We must stop its heart.” Dariel yelled into his vox as he flattened a pointed leering half-face which cursed at him in ancient terran, “We must find the heart and kill it.”

 

“How,” his brother replied between shuddering blows from his fist, “do you propose we do that?”

 

“Give me time, give me a moment to look.” Dariel replied.

 

His brother groaned, but did as requested, beginning a complicated rotating dance around his sworn-brother, who had sunk to his knees, completely ignoring the fighting all around. Sepharion orbited Dariel diving back and forth swatting at the limbs with flailed in his direction, bolts and fist protecting his brother, at the cost of protecting himself.

 

Dariel closed his eyes and let his mind go free. He opened his other eyes, his inner eyes, and saw the true horror of the thing before him. Whatever nightmare form it might be forced into in the real world, the gestalt entity they had created defied description in the warp. It was a mess of dimenions, folded in on one another, it was a vortex of screaming souls, it was a boiling cauldron of pain, it was an inferno of rage. And there, there in its impossible centre, Dariel could see it, feel it, the beating heart of a monster.

 

He opened his eyes, in time to see a forest of arms wrap themselves around his struggling brother and lift him from his feed. Dariel sprang to his feet, raising his staff high, the metal head with its glowing red stone formed the lens to focus his psychic attack. The lance of white light slice clean through the thing, burning a hole from one side to the other before melting its way through most of the ferrocrete wall. Dariel didin’t run to save his brother from the arms now trying to strangle him, Dariel dive forwards to that gaping hole.

 

He dived over a swiping leg, rolling with his momentum and coming to his feet again to face the gaping aperture. From within blood spouted in floods, coating Dariel as he surged forward, not pausing to think, not pausing to fear, just driving onwards to what he knew was there. He jabbed at the hanging offal with his staff, burning more curtains of flesh away and exposing it. It nestled among coils of intestines, rows of ribs, and was crowned by four skulls. It was a human heart.

 

Not the simple mortal organ, the likes of which beat inside Dariel’s chest, but a heart made of humans. It stood three meters high and one and a half wide. It’s broad musculature formed from the compressed bodies of more than a dozen people, its horrible beating accompanied by the agonised screams of those unfortunates. With each beat it pulsed, sending warp energy pulsing through the body Dariel was now within, energising it, healing it, strengthening it. He knew the hole he blasted in it would already be closing, but that didn’t matter, nothing mattered as he brought the head of his staff down to point at the thing’s very heart and released a plume of fire that melted all it touched into super-heated nothingness.

 

This was not ordinary fire, it was not even the witch fire of the warp. This was the burning intensity that before only Kraven possessed. This was the irresistible force of the Primordial Chaos against which nothing could stand. It took great willpower to summon, yet more to control, but Dariel had used its power before. Nothing, not solid armour, not unwavering faith not vile abomination could stand it. All was reduced to that which it had come at the beginning by its touch. The flames licked around the heart, enveloping it, consuming it. Once again the diabolical beating ended, this time the echoes within Dariels head faded and died, and did not thunder back into life in continued defiance.

 

As, with another effort, his mind doused the fire and Dariel saw the charred lump of carbon which was all that remained of the cured organ made to pump warp energy out of the warp and into its dead veins, the monstrosity began to die. Once again chunks of flesh slipped and slopped from its body, arms fell limp, legs disintegrated, curses and spells died on a hundred and fifty tongues as the life line that supported them was cut. Then all Dariel could see was a wave of mouldering flesh raining down on him, washing him away, as everything of the creature; bones, blood, everything, lost all cohesion and was reduced to red-brown slop which fell like flood water over and around him. The thing, at last was dead.

 

When Sepharion pulled his brother-Herald from the reeking piles of organic residue, which still steamed and spat with the heat of its former occupant, it was with a scowl. Hidden though it was behind his helmet, Dariel knew it was there.

“It worked, brother.” he said breathlessly, reaching up to scrape the stinking stuff from his own helm.

 

“This was a success?” his brother replied, surveying the carnage. Two dozen of their brothers had died during the ritual, and another twelve had died during the ferocious nightmarish battle with the thing. Crushed, strangled, bitten or simply absorbed into its many folds before Dariel had managed to kill it. “If this was success, do not let me see failure.”

 

Dariel hardly listened. His mind was still ringing with the words that had filled it in the instant before the heart had been stilled, the last message of the gods spoken in an eternal heartbeat before the entity which the Heralds had created flew apart, scattering its constituent parts across the warp, hurling the vast, eternal essences of the chaos gods back to their realm of nightmare.

 

“The bargain is struck. By the souls that died on this world, by the abomination you created, by the power you have wielded, the Ruinous Powers will aid you as you aid them. Our servants will be your servants. Our victory will be your victory. Our end will be your end.”