Anathemas Read online

  • THE VAMPIRE GENEVIEVE •

  by Kim Newman

  BOOK 1: DRACHENFELS

  BOOK 2: GENEVIEVE UNDEAD

  BOOK 3: BEASTS IN VELVET

  BOOK 4: SILVER NAILS

  THE WICKED AND THE DAMNED

  A portmanteau novel by Josh Reynolds, Phil Kelly and David Annandale

  MALEDICTIONS

  An anthology by various authors

  INVOCATIONS

  An anthology by various authors

  THE HOUSE OF NIGHT AND CHAIN

  A novel by David Annandale

  CASTLE OF BLOOD

  A novel by C L Werner

  DARK HARVEST

  A novel by Josh Reynolds

  THE OUBLIETTE

  A novel by J C Stearns

  SEPULTURUM

  A novel by Nick Kyme

  THE COLONEL’S MONOGRAPH

  A novella by Graham McNeill

  PERDITION’S FLAME

  An audio drama by Alec Worley

  THE WAY OUT

  An audio drama by Rachel Harrison

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer Horror

  HAB FEVER LOCKDOWN

  SUFFER THE VISION

  A THRENODY FOR KOLCHEV

  THESE HANDS, THESE WINGS

  VOX DAEMONICUS

  SKIN MAN

  A DEEP AND STEADY TREAD

  THE THING IN THE WOODS

  MUD AND MIST

  THE SHADOW CROWN

  RUNNER

  MIRACLES

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  VOICES IN THE GLASS

  THE FUNERAL

  About the Authors

  An Extract from ‘The Oubliette’

  A Black Library Publication Imprint

  eBook license

  A dark bell tolls in the abyss.

  It echoes across cold and unforgiving worlds, mourning the fate of humanity. Terror has been unleashed, and every foul creature of the night haunts the shadows. There is naught but evil here. Alien monstrosities drift in tomblike vessels. Watching. Waiting. Ravenous. Baleful magicks whisper in gloom-shrouded forests, spectres scuttle across disquiet minds. From the depths of the void to the blood-soaked earth, diabolic horrors stalk the endless night to feast upon unworthy souls.

  Abandon hope. Do not trust to faith. Sacrifices burn on pyres of madness, rotting corpses stir in unquiet graves. Daemonic abominations leer with rictus grins and stare into the eyes of the accursed. And the Ruinous Gods, with indifference, look on.

  This is a time of reckoning, where every mortal soul is at the mercy of the things that lurk in the dark. This is the night eternal, the province of monsters and daemons. This is Warhammer Horror. None shall escape damnation.

  And so, the bell tolls on.

  HAB FEVER LOCKDOWN

  Justin D Hill

  Your girl, Tarja, pushes herself up from the cot, runs a hand through her hair to tease out the worst knots, and coughs. It is the first thing she does every morning. She sits up, bends over the spittoon, then wipes her mouth on the back of her sleeve.

  ‘Think I’ve got the plague?’

  ‘Yes,’ you say, in the deadpan way you do every morning. ‘You’ll be a stiff by lights-out.’

  Tarja grabs some cold slab and shoves it in. Her work is all the way across Buttress Nine. The overseer punishes any who are late. She swills the slab down with brown sterilised water and slips on her shoes. That’s it, she’s ready to go. There’s no weather in the hive-city. It’s all one temperature. That’s all there is, lights-on and lights-out, work and sleep.

  As she moves to the door you reach out to hold her back.

  ‘Later,’ she says and slips out of your grip. And then she is gone.

  Your name is Arvid. Your parent hive is Panxir, a continent-spanning sprawl of spires that run like jagged mountain ranges, each one miles high, with their own foothills of daughter spires and rising buttresses.

  Your spire is Ramsay 893. It’s a new development, only a few hundred years old, and it’s still growing upwards, like a volcanic island, rising on the mountains of slag that the excavations produce.

  Your hab is located in Arena Green 36. It’s seventeen levels above the arena floor, balconies rising up like an amphitheatre, each one set with narrow corridors and porches. It’s all new-build but already the hive has started to settle and the doorways are bent out of shape. They’ve worn grooves into the floor and damp has rotted the bottoms. The whole place smells of mould. But it’s your home and it’s the best you can afford.

  You exit your hab-stack into the hubbub of the arena below. It is a hectic and busy communal area, with salesmen, peddlers and fungus brokers lining the main thoroughfare with their wares spread out before them on squares of sackcloth. Old women poke about the slab-sellers. The toad butcher works constantly, hooking, dispatching and skinning, and then tossing the legs to one side and the scraps to the other.

  You turn left and head down the broad bore-tunnel to the shaft-gantries. These great vertical chambers are the main arteries through the hive. They carry the air that keeps you all alive. It tastes faintly of the outside. Depending on external climatic events, you sometimes taste ash on its down currents, other times the earthy feel of fine dust. The walls are damp stone, thick with moss and algae, and dripping water. But the stairs are metal, and already rusting.

  The treads are always crowded at this time. Everyone is going to their work. Your feet drum on the press-metal steps. In places they are worn smooth, and someone has spread sand to improve the grip. It’s one of the advantages of a new-build colony. People are still looking out for each other. The old hive gangs have not moved in. Cynicism has not yet taken hold.

  You turn up at the pithead ten minutes before down-shaft. You change quickly into mine gear, and queue up for the lift. The lift-master is a bull-necked fellow, with a bulbous fleshy face and a head that slopes down into broad shoulders. He dislikes ­miners. He dislikes everyone, and he glowers at you as he checks you have nothing metal on you.

  A spark in the methane-ridden pits would blow you all to mincemeat.

  When all is ready, he shouts, ‘In!’ and uses a bar to squeeze the last few inside. He draws the chain-fence closed. You’re pressed cheek to jowl, like roaches in a tin. ‘Faith in the Emperor!’ he calls as he thumbs the lift button and the holding clamps release, and there is a sudden lurch as the lift plunges downwards.

  It’s a sickening feeling. You are free-falling into the found­ations of the hive. Only for the last hundred metres do the brakes engage. The sudden slowing makes your knees buckle but you’re all pressed too close to fall. The dampers whine and screech and the lift stinks of burning brake pads.

  When you stumble out, you’re feeling sick. The lady at the bottom is short and round. She counts you out and then rings the all-clear and the lift begins to rise again.

  Overseer Chinata fills the office at the bottom. Her small and sallow face peers down at you out of the barred window. She hands you your pit-tag. Each tag has a number. Each number tells you exactly which face you are working on.

  65-V, you see, with relief. So today is not going to be too bad.

  You take the conveyor to the mine-head. The walls of the excavated tunnels are a patchwork of rotting coir props, press-blocks and cheap rockcrete bricks, corrugated iron, flakboard and compressed coir fibre. Whatever is cheap and came readily to hand and will do the job.

 
The last hundred metres you crawl on your belly, the pit props just above your head. The picks are waiting where the last shift left them. You take one up, the wooden shaft damp from another man’s sweat.

  Time is credits and you have work to do.

  Your hours are filled with sweat and labour, hard work, danger. You are part of a team. You depend on each other to survive. One team push forward and when they’ve gone ten feet, the pit-proppers come in to secure the crudely arched roof with props of compressed coir fibre, strong enough to withstand the immense weights upon them, and yet with enough give that they will not splinter under their burden.

  It is foul, filthy work. And you can never get over the fact that the whole hive presses down upon your head, nor that you are hacking your way into compressed detritus of millennia past. A midden-pit of human filth, plastek crap, rusted iron and occasional scraps of valuable tech that drop out of the dirt with all the drama of sparkling gems.

  When you stop for food, the fifteen men of your shift sit together, heads bent over pressed-starch lunch boxes, old ­fyceline containers or recycled detonators. Each one, like yours, is wrapped in knotted cloth. You untie the cloth and lay it over your lap to keep the dirt off your food. The newest coir props creak as the weight of the hive settles above you. The sound used to terrify you, but you have heard it so many times you’re numb to the fear.

  If you can hear the hive-quake then you’re too late. You try not to think of the weight of refuse and decay pressing down upon you. It could crush you like a louse. If it could be ­bothered. But the hive does not care about a peon like you. It is vast and ancient and will outlive your ashes. You are barely a heartbeat in the scheme of things.

  Your work team have no warmth. To be honest, you do not particularly like each other. You are a pack brought together by the simple need to survive. You’re like war veterans. You face death every day. You rely on each other. In this time, usually, no one speaks. But the news is preying on all of you. It’s nagging at the back of your skulls, until someone is driven to say something.

  ‘Hear there’s a plague warning?’

  You have. It’s like a distant rumble of hive-quake that draws closer.

  ‘How did it get here?’ another asks.

  Some shake their heads. It’s beyond their grade to know stuff like that. But then the gobby ones throw in a few scraps.

  There is rot plague, flesh plague, purge plague. No one knows which one it is. All they know is that it came onto the planet on a coke conveyor returning from the spinwards trade routes. It affected the starport first, brought in by an infected dock worker who blew his wages on whores and grog and all the pleasures that an orbital station like Sintown could offer.

  ‘Probably infected a hundred that night. They infected another thousand. The authorities closed the airlocks to Sintown and voided the whole lot into the upper atmosphere. Bam! Cleaned the whole place out in minutes!’

  You think on that as you chew. Ten, twenty thousand voided into space.

  ‘No half-measures,’ the gang leader says. ‘If it gets to the hive then we’re all doomed. They’ll seal us off and wait a decade. A billion lives. Just like that.’ He clicks his fingers for emphasis.

  Everyone puts in their two credits, and then you fall silent again, chewing and swallowing.

  Plague, you think. You’d rather the hive fell on your head. Though sometimes you wonder what, exactly, you are trying to survive for. There will be no improvement on your lot. No real chance of betterment. The best you can hope for is that life does not get any worse. It could be worse, you have told yourself, and you are right. It could be a lot, lot worse, and in fact, the one thing that you are sure of is that it will be worse.

  But worse can wait. Now you get to sit and rest and eat in silence. It is bland, tasteless mush. You can barely afford the salt that makes it palatable. You are still chewing the last gummy scrapes when the klaxon rings. There is no time to waste now, finished or not.

  It is dark when you return to your hab. A pipe has burst in the upper levels, and in the tunnel from the mine-shaft, dirty effluent swills about your ankles. It flows down the stairs like a waterfall and is lapping under your hab door as you shove it open.

  The door closes with a splash.

  There is a shape in the bed. ‘Tarja?’

  There is no answer. You are dead tired. Irritation mixes with concern. It is a combination that makes you volatile. ‘Tarja?’

  You throw your wet shoes off. The rockcrete is cool and gritty underfoot. The cot you share is shoved up into the far corner. You are lucky. Others sleep on the floor like rats. You are not rats.

  She is lying on the cot. You think for a moment that she is dead. But then a hand moves weakly.

  A voice croaks out. It does not sound like her.

  ‘Arvid?’

  She reaches for you. Or is she warding you off? You put a hand to her forehead. ‘I got bitten.’

  She sticks her foot out of bed. It is red and swollen. ‘It was a bile-rat.’ She coughs and you fill a cup with water to give her. It is brown with steriliser. It tastes of chemicals.

  Bile-rat poison knocks you out for a day or so. But then you recover. Nothing serious. ‘How did you get bitten?’

  She pushes herself up woozily, and sits there with her knees drawn up to her chest. Her chin rests on her kneecaps. Her work trousers are stained. Her bare feet are engrained with hive-filth, the nails rimmed with half-moons of dirt. Her face is swollen from tears. There are purple bags under her eyes and beads of sweat on the upper surfaces of her cheeks. She swallows. Her left eye is bloodshot.

  ‘It doesn’t matter how,’ she snaps. ‘I got bitten. Understand?’ The livid red stares out at you. ‘I got bitten and you don’t care.’

  ‘I do.’ You really do, but she’s nasty when she’s sick. ‘Let me see.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I want to see.’

  She glares up at your from under her fringe. She decides that you are telling the truth and she lets you take her right foot.

  Her skin is warm. The flesh around the puckered raw incision marks is swollen and purple and yellow, and an angry, inflamed red. ‘Ow!’ she says. You’re not being sufficiently careful. You let go of her foot and it falls to the bed. Nothing much, but enough to send a jolt of agony up her leg.

  ‘Throne!’ she hisses.

  ‘Sorry!’

  ‘Are you?’

  She looks into your eyes. You see the line of her nose, the upturned almond shape of her black eyes, the hair that she has looped behind her ears, the blood clot in her left eye that is slowly growing. She is looking into you. She is searching for the truth and you look her first in one eye, then the other, the bloodshot eye, and then back to the first.

  ‘Sorry,’ you say again.

  Her nostrils flare. She purses her lips, and nods and scratches to either side of the swelling. ‘It’s driving me crazy. Even when I don’t move it, it’s so frekking itchy!’ she hisses. ‘I can’t bear it.’

  ‘Sleep,’ you tell her. ‘Let’s see how it is in the morning. I can go get medicine.’

  ‘Can we afford medicine?’

  No, you think. You can’t. She’s off work and not earning. You’ll have to pay bribes. You’ll have to grease the path. You have to work for everything in this shitty hive.

  ‘Of course,’ you say. ‘Sleep.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  She lies down. The flood is already starting to recede, leaving a scummy line of filth where it had once been. You use a mop to sluice the water out, and roll a cloth and set it under the door to stop it coming back in, just in case. Your stomach is groaning by the time you start to boil your own slab. You shovel in the food. It is bland and tasteless.

  A bile-rat! you think before bed; this is all you need. How could she be so frekking stupid? She’s always letting you down like this
. It all ends up on your shoulders.

  She is hot in the night. It makes you restless. You have to move to the edge of the bed to get away from her. In the morning she’s sweaty. The flesh around the bite is blotched purple and red. The skin is taut with the swelling beneath. ‘I feel crap,’ she says. She lifts her head to see. ‘It’s getting worse.’

  It is. This is all you need, you think. But you say, ‘I’ll go and get some medicine.’

  ‘What about your shift?’

  ‘I’ll take a double to make up.’

  She doesn’t like you doing that. Working doubles can kill a man. Not just from exhaustion, but from the mistakes an exhausted man makes. The mine is a war, remember. It’s hungry and ruthless. It chews up lives. But what else can you do? If she won’t work, you must.

  You eat your slab and set off. Outside there’s a nervous atmosphere. The slab-seller tells you that there’s plague.

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘It’s planet-side now.’

  You pull a face. ‘I thought they vented Sintown.’

  ‘They did,’ he says. ‘But not until they got their own out. Nobles with enough credit to buy themselves an exit.’

  ‘Impossible,’ you say. But this is hive life.

  He looks at you like you’re stupid. ‘Of course it’s possible. Just heard this morning. The whole port-levels have been sealed off. Slab-iron is piling hab-high. Total quarantine in the entire dock area. Military law.’

  You blow out your breath and lift your eyebrows. It seems serious now. ‘Think they’ve caught it?’

  He laughs. ‘Do you?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Me too,’ he says.

  You get halfway to the gallipot dispenser when the klaxons sound. Usually they stop after five seconds, but this time they keep ringing. You think it’s a mistake at first. Then you pause. Everyone stops what they’re doing and looks about, and at each other.

  When the klaxon stops a voice speaks.

  ‘All denizens to return to their habs. Military law will be imposed in ten minutes. Transgressors will be shot.’

  There is a moment of utter shock as you all process what this means, and then everyone starts shouting and running and pushing others out of the way. You’re fit and strong and you have sharp elbows. You are going to make it.