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  Abyssal – David Annandale

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Heralds of the Siege’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Abyssal

  David Annandale

  The guards dragged Aveth Vairon and the other prisoners through corridors dark as despair. They were clad in thick, black carapace armour. Their faces were hidden by forbidding armaplas helms. Two of them held Vairon under the arms, and brandished shock mauls with their free hands. To Vairon, the guards of the Black Ship Irkalla were inhuman, hulking, emotionless automatons, as remote from sympathy as if they were part of the ship’s machinery.

  They frightened him, but they were nothing compared to the silent women. Their armour was gold and their faces, when they were visible, were colder than masks. A pair of them walked ahead of the guards. They were conversing with each other using a hand cant. Vairon didn’t know what they were saying, but he could guess from the angry jerk in their movements.

  This is my doing, and I cannot undo this.

  The prisoners in the hold had been on the verge of full riot, despite the efforts of the guards. The women had imposed order through force, and through the brutal fact of their presence. Now they were bringing the leaders of the riot to their punishment. Vairon hoped that Harvus and Cassina had the strength to survive what was coming. He wasn’t sure he did.

  This close to the golden women, Vairon felt as though he couldn’t breathe. He was shut down, empty, the psychic energy that tormented and defined him vanishing as if it had never been. Around the silent warriors, Vairon felt as if he had never been.

  There were doors on both sides of the corridor. They were iron, lined with lead. Hexagrammic warding runes were inscribed upon them, and Vairon twitched with a stab of pain as he passed the ancient marks. Each rune was as wide as the door it covered, as if it named the inmate of the cell. Instead, it was a hand of judgement, reinforcing the prison by oppressing the powers of the psyker behind the iron. Even with these precautions, and with the dampening interference signal screeching perpetually through the prison deck of the ship, the suppression was not total. Power leaked out, weak and distorted. It was only the proximity of one of the silent women that temporarily shut abilities down completely.

  Vairon caught glimpses of movement and pain through the barred observation windows in the doors. Despairing, garbled laughter rang out from one cell. The bars shivered in sympathy with the sound, and flakes of metal drifted up into the air, the laughter itself gnawing away at them. At another door, a man pressed his face against the window and gabbled syllables that sounded too rhythmic and precise to be pure nonsense. The air around him was thick and dark as if with the approach of a storm. In yet another cell, someone hurled themselves back and forth, colliding with the walls, screaming in madness, their figure blurred with superhuman speed.

  The ceiling of the corridor was lost in the darkness above many levels of galleries, all running past more lines of doors. The howls of psykers, tortured by their powers and by the repression of those powers, entwined with the interference signal, the shrieks of humans and machines becoming a choir of horror.

  At its end, the hall widened. The door there did not even have a window. The air before it shimmered with energy. A psy-shield surrounded this cell. Special measures were required to contain its prisoner. Despite the thickness of the door and the walls, Vairon heard moans coming from inside.

  She was there, then. The woman he had seen when he was captured.

  There was a line of trapdoors in the floor. The two silent warriors gestured, and the guards hauled Vairon towards one. A guard grabbed the plasteel ring in its centre and opened it with a sharp yank. Vairon stared into utter darkness. The guards lifted him by the arms, lowered him feet first into the shaft until he was entirely surrounded by the void, and then they dropped him. He fell a short distance, then landed hard on a cold iron floor.

  The trapdoor to the oubliette slammed shut above him.

  Vairon whimpered. He crawled around, banging into the walls of the narrow space. He curled up, surrounded by darkness, oppressed by the signal even here. The awful nothingness eased, though, and he knew that the silent women had left.

  Now he had to wait. Wait, and try not to go mad. Wait, and hope that he had made the right decisions, that his visions had not led him astray.

  In the dark, in the nothing, there was time to think. He remembered what had brought him here. Perhaps he would find more slivers of hope in the memories. And perhaps he would see the rune again. It was different from the ones on the doors. It did not oppress him. Its shape made him think of an angular serpent. He did not know what it meant, but he had seen it in his mind’s eye since childhood; it never left him entirely, sometimes so vivid he thought others could see it when they were near him. When it was at its strongest, it was a lure, a hook in his mind, pulling him on. He learned early on that its pull was guiding him. It called to him from the future. It was his destiny, mysterious but certain, convincing him that at some point in the years ahead, he would become something more than a low-grade Administratum scribe. He would sense what actions he would have to take to get closer to the rune, and he obeyed those impulses. More than once, doing so had kept him alive, and there had been plenty of moments, during the great panic on his home planet of Kithnos, when he would have been trampled under the rush of the terrified mob if he hadn’t followed the pull of the rune and ducked into doorways and up narrow alleys.

  The panic was caused by the Warmaster. News had spread on Kithnos of the approach of his forces. World after world had fallen to his advance, their resources scraped up to power his ships, their populations enslaved or destroyed. The fear of his coming came like a bow wave ahead of his fleet. A massive evacuation was underway, though no one knew where refuge might be found, and there could not be enough ships to get everyone off Kithnos.

  Following the instinct that was leading him closer to the rune of his destiny, Vairon had made it to a space port and come close to boarding one of the big lifters that was transporting civilians off-world. But then squads of the black guards had arrived, led by the silent women. They had taken him, and brought him to the Irkalla. But before they had done so, he had seen the woman who now was kept behind the psy-shield.

  When she appeared, in all her horror, a few hundred metres from the entrance ramp to a lifter, it had seemed impossible that a creature such as she could possibly have lived until then. He thought perhaps that her mutation had only just manifested itself. It might have been brought to the surface by the great terror on Kithnos. The psychic energy unleashed by the fear had been strong. The rune had rarely been as searingly present in Vairon’s mind as during those days.

  The woman had almost escaped. Many guards died trying to take her. Only the silent commanders had been able to subdue her.

  Vairon had seen what she could do. He kept thinking of her as he was swallowed up by the timeless night of the Irkalla’s main prison hold. And when, very faintly, despite the screaming signal and the occluding psychic waves that buffeted the hold, the rune had appeared to him again, he had seen what he must do. He had convinced Cassina and Harvus to act with him. Harvus had comforted him in his early moments on the ship. Cassina had been one of the few other psykers around him who was still defiant, still looking for a chance to fight back. In whispered moments when the guards’ attention had been elsewhere, he had urged them to follow his lead. And they had.

  Vairon could not see beyond the immediate outcome of the riot they would cause. He trusted in the rune as Cassina and Harvus trusted in him. He believed his destiny would show him what t
o do.

  Only now, in the oubliette, he saw nothing. He could not picture the rune. There were no actions he could take here. It wasn’t long before he was screaming in the dark. He screamed until he was hoarse. He beat his fists against the walls. His muscles burned from being cramped for so long. Soon he was screaming again, though now the only sound he could make was a whistling rasp.

  Then the shock came. A violent blow shook the entire hull. It hammered the ship, and something deep inside. Tremors threw Vairon around the tiny cell, and he heard the enormous, tearing cracks reaching into the interior of the ship. The shaking faded. As they did, Vairon felt the premonition of action return. He could see the rune when he closed his eyes, and it was much stronger than before. The interference signal had ceased, and his head felt clearer than it had ever been since his capture.

  The trapdoor opened. The dim light of the corridor above was blinding after the darkness.

  ‘Aveth,’ Cassina called. ‘Take my hand.’

  Vairon reached up. She grasped him. Harvus appeared and took his other hand. The two of them hauled him free of the oubliette.

  The floor of the corridor was canted, and it had cracked wide open above other oubliettes. The walls leaned away from vertical, and above, in the upper prison galleries, came the sounds of doors slamming open and the howling of freed madness. The air was thick with smoke. Part of a wall had come down on the other side of the wide space of the corridors, and it had crushed the two guards who had remained on this level. One of them was almost entirely buried, a solitary gauntleted hand sticking out of the wreckage. The other body was mostly free, only the head and shoulders crushed beneath the slumped metal.

  ‘The ship is under attack,’ said Cassina.

  ‘By whom?’ Harvus wondered. He had the pinched frown of someone whose head throbbed with perpetual agony. There was always a small trickle of blood running from his left eye. He was empathic, and he could never fully shut out the pain that surrounded him.

  ‘As long as we stay out of their way, I don’t much care. This is the chance we need.’

  ‘You knew this was going to happen,’ Harvus said to Vairon.

  ‘I didn’t know what was going to happen,’ Vairon said. ‘I just knew what we had to do.’

  ‘Either way, things are moving,’ said Cassina. Her head was completely hairless. Her skin was flushed with an endless fever, made worse since the suppression systems had blocked the relief her body could get from the release of psychic energy. Now, tiny flames flickered along her arms. ‘What next?’

  Vairon pointed to the sealed door. The psy-shield had shut down. ‘We open this.’

  ‘Whoever is behind that is dangerous,’ said Harvus.

  ‘I know who it is,’ said Vairon. ‘She is dangerous. But I think, if we’re careful, she will be more dangerous to the guards.’

  ‘You think.’

  ‘I know this is what we have to do.’

  ‘Then let’s hurry,’ said Cassina. She searched the guard’s body, found his iron keys and passed them to Vairon.

  He unlocked the door. It took all three of them to pull it open.

  In the cell beyond was a ragged woman. She was skeletally thin, the angles of her limbs so sharp they were like an insect’s. She had a mouth but no face. Where it should have been was only smooth flesh, without even a hint of the depressions of eye sockets or the protrusion of a nose. She had no ears. Lank hair framed an egg-shaped skull. There was only the mouth, the teeth unnaturally white, the jaws wide.

  The door and the walls of the cell were thick, and Vairon discovered, his blood running cold, just how loud the mutant’s groans were to have been heard through them. He clenched his teeth against the sound that was the unity of grief and fear and madness. The moans cut through him, deep into his soul. It was all he could do to take another step inside.

  Cassina gasped in horror, and Harvus covered his ears. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, no, no.’ He started to back away.

  Feeling like he was marching against a gale, Vairon went towards the woman. She did not react to his presence. When he went around her, the force of her voice diminished dramatically. He could move freely again. Her psychic force was directional.

  ‘Come around here,’ he told the other two, and after a hesitation they obeyed, straining as he had, then sighing with relief.

  ‘What are you planning to do?’ Harvus asked, blood coursing from the corners of his eyes.

  ‘Guide her out of here,’ Cassina guessed.

  ‘Yes,’ said Vairon.

  ‘She walks before us.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Vairon. He and Cassina each took one of the woman’s arms. Harvus stood directly behind her and gently pushed at her back. She staggered forward. Vairon and Cassina went with her. They left the cell and the groans grew louder. They never stopped. Even when the woman took a breath, it came as a rasping, chest-rattling noise, like stone on metal.

  They made their way back down the corridor. The doors here were still shut, the slumping walls holding them closed forever. Vairon kept his eyes straight ahead, but the warding runes on the doors still burned his mind as he passed them. The woman’s groans grew louder.

  ‘Where are we heading?’ Harvus asked.

  ‘Up,’ said Vairon.

  Cassina gazed into the smoke. The screams above were now being punctuated by the stuttering of boltguns. ‘Into that?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’ The rune was tugging Vairon forward to another path. ‘There are other stairs. We go through the main hold, then climb until we reach the main decks. We’ll find life pods and take them.’ That had to be what they were going to do. He could think of nothing else that made sense.

  ‘And then where?’ said Harvus.

  ‘Anywhere is better than here,’ Cassina told him.

  Vairon was glad he didn’t have to answer Harvus. He couldn’t. But his destiny called, and he could not believe it would be to die in a life pod after it ran out of fuel and oxygen.

  They kept moving, and Vairon ducked ahead of the faceless woman to open the door to one of the Irkalla’s great holds.

  It was a vast space, holding thousands of psykers. When the guards had taken Vairon and the others away, prisoners had shuffled aimlessly in the dark. Others squatted, clutching their heads or wrapped their arms around themselves and rocked back and forth in their misery. The shielding and the occluding signals shut down most of their powers.

  Now the psychic suppression measures had broken down, and cast the hold into bedlam.

  The warding runes in the corridor had still had a muffling effect on Vairon, but now he was exposed to an explosion of psychic power. The earlier riot had been a prelude to the eruption that rocked the chamber. Psykers ran in the grip of power and madness. Guards tried to restore order, but they had abandoned all efforts to subdue. They beat with intent to kill, and those with laspistols fired them relentlessly. Their hate and fear poured into the psychic cauldron of the prison, intensifying the energy, adding to the frenzy of the riot. They were terrified of their unleashed prisoners, and the prisoners were just as terrified, and almost none of them were sane.

  Harvus fell to his knees, clutching his head. Cassina groaned with the effort needed to contain her power. The flames jumped higher on her arms.

  In the tumult, other flames burst unrestrained from psykers’ hands. They washed over guards and fellow inmates. Bodies flew through the air, caught in currents of clashing kinetic forces. Hallucinations became manifest, and monsters ripped from a hundred nightmares stalked the hold, flickering in and out of existence, the sight of them fuelling even greater frenzy.

  Vairon couldn’t move. His mind was exposed to the thrashing, screaming, roaring concerto of horror that shrieked across material and psychic realities. For two beats of his heart, a space of time long enough for universes of illusions to rise and fall, Vairon was helpless before
the onslaught. The smothering null he had experienced in the presence of the silent women was a blessing next to the war of psyches that now engulfed him. He could not think. The materium vanished from his sight as the inchoate psychic storm grew. It was consumed by flames made of flesh, by the void broken into heaving waves, and by the visible anger of a hundred minds – a stabbing incoherence of colour and movement that raked his soul like talons.

  And then the faceless woman screamed.

  Vairon was behind her, out of the line of fire. Even so, his hand tightened convulsively on her arm, and he had to fight down an almost overwhelming urge to flee. The scream tore through the hold like a scythe, like a hurricane, like the very claws of horror. It blasted through the raging of psykers. It immobilised prisoners and guards, and they answered the scream with their own that it tore from their depths. They screamed louder and louder, their jaws opening ever wider, the horror inside them seeking still greater voice. The sound of their screams was not loud enough. The screams had to be something greater. And so their flesh became part of it. Skin ran. It melted. It flowed down their skulls until, for a moment, they were a choir that mirrored the mutant, featureless faces with howling mouths.

  When their screams were done, they fell. And the faceless woman began to take another slow, moaning breath.

  After the riot, after the scream, the relative calm seemed like utter silence. There were moans and pleas from the psykers who had been at the edge of the cone of the scream, and lay writhing on the ground. Tormented minds scratched at Vairon’s, but so many had died, he could think clearly again. The guards were all dead, and no one standing dared approach the faceless woman.

  Vairon pushed on as the woman screamed again. He was more prepared than he had been the first time, but the shriek was still an ordeal. He looked back at the others. Stricken eyes met his.

  ‘Why won’t she stop?’ Cassina moaned.

  ‘Her fear is too great,’ Harvus said slowly, sounding as if he were on the verge of collapse. He was having trouble speaking. ‘It won’t go away, easily. I don’t think it can ever leave her on this ship now.’