Blood Sacrifice Read online

  ‘I will prepare the operating theatre,’ the Genetor replied. ‘I want them within thirty minutes.’

  ‘I don’t think it will take that long,’ Vorn said, and hit the switch that threw back the bolts on the ceramite door and triggered the attack servitors.

  Cully stepped out of the stairwell into a vision of hell. The two things that charged them were abominations. Each was limbless, welded at the waist into a scaled-down, tank-tracked chassis that clanked and rumbled and tore tiles up from the floor beneath it as it advanced. Their left arms had been replaced with articulated blades, while the right arm of one was a heavy autocannon and the other a reeking, promethium-dripping flamer. Their greyish chests were bare, and the one with the cannon bore a crudely inked aquila tattoo across its right pectoral.

  ‘Sustained fire!’ Lopata ordered, and opened up on full-auto.

  The two charging servitors twisted in the blistering hail of las-shots, but kept coming.

  ‘Throne!’ Varus shouted over the blaze of las-fire, ‘I recognise that tattoo! That’s Sharrik!’

  ‘Was,’ Lopata stressed, ‘and I’d lay odds the other one was Ells. That was then – they ain’t our mates now!’

  ‘Shut up and kill!’ Cully bellowed, squeezing the trigger of his lasgun harder as though that could make it shoot any faster.

  Steeleye launched hotshot after hotshot into the grinding, relentless foe, speed reloading again and again in a blur of hyper-focused intensity that spoke of her consummate skill.

  Chunks exploded out of the wall as the monster that had once been Trooper Sharrik unleashed its cannon, sending Varus to the floor in a heap as a ricochet slammed into the side of her helmet and dropped her, stunned.

  ‘Back!’ Lopata roared. ‘Don’t let them close the distance or we’re done!’

  They fell back, still shooting, leaving Varus slumped on the ground. The servitors swerved around her prone body, and somewhere in the back of Cully’s head the crown dropped.

  ‘They want us alive,’ he said. ‘We… Emperor’s teeth, we’re next! This bastard wants us for the operating tables. We’ve been lured here as subjects, Lopata!’

  The big man uttered a roar like a bull ork and charged, his lasgun clamped in his right hand and still shooting as he ripped his bayonet free with his left. He blasted the nearest servitor, the one who had once been Sharrik, forcing it back under the hail of sustained fire until he could ram his bayonet through the flesh-welded joint where the autocannon met its shoulder. A flash of sparks erupted into the air and the weapon died. The hideous thing drove a long, wicked blade through the meat of Lopata’s thigh, pinning him to the wall. He screamed in pain, but still somehow found the force of will to ram the muzzle of his lasgun into its mouth and blow the back of its head out with a savage burst of full-auto.

  ‘Kill, kill, kill!’ he bellowed.

  Varus was unsteady but back on her feet then, and she and Steeleye and Cully turned their weapons as one on the thing that had been Ells and tore it to ragged chunks of burned meat and blackened, smoking augmetics, and it was done at last.

  Death and death and death.

  There would be no mention on the roll of honour for Sharrik and Ells, and no one would send the Letter to their next of kin. No one in the Astra Militarum could ever admit that this had happened, Cully knew that. They were wretched, honourless deserters. That was how it had been recorded, and that was how it would stay. The Munitorum’s word was law in these matters.

  He lowered his smoking weapon and looked down at the blackened, twisted remains of his dead comrades while Lopata wrenched the blade out of his thigh and limped towards them, the leg of his battledress trousers running red.

  ‘We always kill our own. Death and death and death,’ Cully whispered. It was like Vardan IV all over again. Like Baphomet. ‘Emperor protect us.’

  He felt Steeleye’s hard hand alight on his shoulder, bringing him back from the poisoned brink of memory and madness.

  ‘We’ve got a job to finish,’ she rasped.

  They met no more resistance until a single bolt-round blew Steeleye’s head apart.

  She fell in a spray of red mist. The bulbous, broken mechanism of her eye hit the ground and rolled across the tiled floor to come to rest against the side of Cully’s boot.

  Lopata put a long burst of full-auto through the doorway the shot had come from, and Varus and Cully swarmed down the corridor to contain the threat while the big man limped after them.

  ‘Come out, you bastard!’ Cully shouted. ‘You might want us alive, but I don’t care either way about you. Three seconds and I’m rolling a frag grenade in there!’

  ‘I have money,’ a man’s voice called out, and there was a note of terrified desperation in his tone. ‘Lopata, listen to me! A thousand crowns, right now! Ten thousand, if you can get me back to the hive. Get me out of here, please! We can still do business!’

  ‘I’ve got grenades too,’ Lopata snarled. ‘Steeleye was my mate.’

  ‘I can…’ the man said, and Cully lost his temper.

  He kicked the door in and charged, shooting high but laying down enough supressing fire to send the lone man inside face first to the floor.

  Lopata landed on him like a Rhino dropped from orbit, knocking the air and the fight out of him all in one. Cully stamped on his hand until he let go of his bolt pistol, and they held him fast with field restraints.

  Cully knelt down beside their captive, drew his bayonet, and pressed the tip into the corner of the man’s eye. There was no mercy in Corporal Cully’s gaze just then, no compassion and no hesitation. He was Astra Militarum, and the thing needed to be done. Just like it had on Baphomet.

  ‘Name?’ he demanded.

  The man’s jaw clenched in empty defiance.

  ‘Your name, or Emperor help me I will blind you,’ Cully promised.

  The ganger held out until Cully’s blade drew blood from the corner of his eyelid, then he finally seemed to think better of it.

  ‘Vorn,’ he said at last. ‘Dareus Vorn.’

  ‘Who else is here?’

  ‘I’m alone,’ Vorn said.

  Cully pressed the edge of his blade back to the man’s face with a snarl that was just this side of deranged.

  ‘You’re no chirurgeon,’ he growled. ‘You’re the money man, I can see that just from the way you’re dressed. The chirurgeon! What’s their name?’

  ‘Babette Vitzkowski.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Go sit on a grenade,’ Vorn said.

  Lopata kicked their captive so hard Cully could actually hear the man’s ribs shatter.

  Vorn howled.

  ‘You’ll answer him,’ Lopata promised, ‘or you’ll answer to me. I was a ganger too, back on Reslia. I know tricks with bolt cutters and needles that would make you beg for death, you piece of filth. Answer him!’

  ‘Operating theatre,’ Vorn admitted at last. ‘Fourth door on the right. That’s where she does the work. This is all her. I just sell the things!’

  ‘How could you?’ Varus asked.

  ‘How do you think?’ Vorn snarled. ‘For money. To get rich. To not have to live like them. Like you.’

  ‘Let me show you how I live,’ Lopata said.

  Then the beating started. It went on for a long time.

  When it was done, Lopata’s fists were red and dripping. Vorn was dead. Cully put a round through his forehead anyway, and turned away.

  He had a chirurgeon to kill.

  They found the operating theatre in darkness.

  Cully stepped cautiously inside with Lopata and Varus behind him, their lasguns held tight to their shoulders as they advanced.

  ‘I see something,’ Lopata said. ‘There’s–’

  The searing purple flash of plasma fire all but blinded Cully. He threw himself to the ground, barely bi
ting back a scream as his hands landed in boiling liquid.

  When Cully realised that molten liquid was all that was left of Lopata, he went berserk. He came up on one knee, clutching his lasgun in his already blistering hands and blasting into the darkness on full-auto. Somewhere at the end of the room sparks flashed from something moving.

  ‘Lopata’s gone!’ he shouted at Varus, who bellowed and hurled a grenade.

  The explosion smashed the operating table into scrap metal and shattered a long row of glass jars, spilling preserved organs and slimy fluids into the air.

  In the sudden flash of light Cully saw that there was something huge standing at the end of the room. It had a plasma pistol in its unnatural-looking hand.

  The pistol discharged again just as Cully was rolling. The beam of searing light only took his left leg off at the knee instead of vaporising him altogether.

  He shrieked and crashed to the ground, barely able to draw another breath for the agony that sent his lungs into spasm. He could smell his own flesh cooking as the intense heat of the weapon’s beam cauterised the ragged wound.

  Cooking human flesh.

  Baphomet.

  He had always known it would come back on him, in the end.

  ‘Always shoot the big one first,’ a vox/synth voice said, away in the darkness. ‘That is how one deals with orks, and you are little different in the eyes of the Omnissiah.’

  Cully’s vision greyed with unspeakable pain.

  Little different to orks. Since Vardan IV, since what he had done on Baphomet, Cully could almost believe it. Was this it? Was this the Emperor’s judgement, at last?

  No, Cully told himself. No. He still had his lasgun. He was still a Guardsman. He could fight. He dragged himself forward with his elbows, the weapon clutched in his weeping, burned hands, biting back a scream as the exposed bone of his ruined leg scraped against the tiled floor.

  Varus was shooting, somewhere in the darkness.

  ‘Such waste,’ the mechanical voice said. ‘At least I still have two subjects.’

  A drill whined: the high, piercing shriek of the dentist’s chair. Varus howled.

  Cully fired blind, the staccato light of las-shots showing him a towering robed figure bent over his squad-mate. Arching mechanical tentacles reached over its shoulders and took Varus’ lasgun away from her even as the drill went into her forehead. Cully’s shots ricocheted uselessly from the figure’s armoured mechanical carapace, doing nothing but putting holes in its crimson robe.

  Varus slumped to the ground, subdued and drooling.

  ‘No!’ Cully howled. ‘Emperor’s mercy, no!’

  ‘The Emperor has no mercy,’ the monstrosity declared.

  It began to walk slowly towards Cully’s prone form.

  His lasgun’s power pack died, leaving him without even the light of gunfire. The heavy tread of steel boots brought the horrific chirurgeon relentlessly closer.

  The darkness reminded him of Baphomet, and of what he had done there.

  Cully found that he was weeping uncontrollably. For Varus, for Steeleye and Lopata and Strongarm and all the countless others he had lost over the years. Most of all, he wept for Sergeant Rachain.

  The Emperor protects, but He does not forgive. This was the Emperor’s judgement, come at last.

  For Baphomet.

  For everything.

  Death and death and death.

  Corporal Cully began to scream.

  About the Author

  Peter McLean has written several short stories for Black Library, including ‘Baphomet by Night’, ‘No Hero’, ‘Sand Lords’ and ‘Lightning Run’ for Warhammer 40,000, and the Warhammer Horror tale ‘Predations of the Eagle’. He grew up in Norwich, where he began story-writing, practising martial arts and practical magic, and lives there still with his wife.

  An extract from Genevieve Undead.

  He had a name once, but hadn’t heard it spoken in years. Sometimes, it was hard to remember what it had been. Even he thought of himself as the Trapdoor Daemon. When they dared speak of him, that was what the company of the Vargr Breughel called their ghost.

  He had been haunting this building for years enough to know its secret by-ways. After springing the catch of the hidden trapdoor, he eased himself into Box Seven, first dangling by strong tentacles, then dropping the last inches to the familiar carpet. Tonight was the premiere of The Strange History of Dr Zhiekhill and Mr Chaida, originally by the Kislevite dramatist V.I. Tiodorov, now adapted by the Vargr Breughel’s genius-in-residence, Detlef Sierck.

  The Trapdoor Daemon knew Tiodorov’s hoary melodrama from earlier translations, and wondered how Detlef would bring life back to it. He’d taken an interest in rehearsals, particularly in the progress of his protégée, Eva Savinien, but had deliberately refrained from seeing the piece all through until tonight. When the curtain came down on the fifth act, the ghost would decide whether to give the play his blessing or his curse.

  He was recognized as the permanent and non-paying licensee of Box Seven, and he was invoked whenever a production went well or ill. The success of A Farce of the Fog was laid to his approval of the comedy, and the disastrous series of accidents that plagued the never-premiered revival of Manfred von ­Diehl’s Strange Flower were also set at his door. Some had glimpsed him, and a good many more fancied they had. A theatre was not a proper theatre without a ghost. And there were always old stage-hands and character actors eager to pass on stories to frighten the little chorines and apprentices who passed through the Vargr Breughel Memorial Playhouse.

  Even Detlef Sierck, actor-manager of the Vargr Breughel company, occasionally spoke with affection of him, and continued the custom of previous managements by having an offering placed in Box Seven on the first night of any production.

  Actually, for the ghost things were much improved since Detlef took over the house. When the theatre had been the Beloved of Shallya and specialised in underpatronised but uplifting religious dramas, the offerings had been of incense and a live kid. Now, reflecting an earthier, more popular approach, the offering took the form of a large trencher of meats and vegetables prepared by the skilled company chef, with a couple of bottles of Bretonnian wine thrown in.

  The Trapdoor Daemon wondered if Detlef instinctively understood his needs were far more those of a physical being than a disembodied spirit.

  Eating was difficult without hands, but the years had forced him to become used to his ruff of muscular appendages, and he was able to work the morsels up from the trencher towards the sucking, beaked hole of his mouth with something approaching dexterity. He had uncorked the first bottle with a quick constriction, and took frequent swigs at a vintage that must have been laid down around the year of his birth. He brushed away that thought – his former life seemed less real now than the fictions which paraded before him every evening – and settled his bulk into the nest of broken chairs and cushions adapted to his shape, awaiting the curtain. He sensed the excitement of the first night crowd and, from the darkness of Box Seven, saw the glitter of jewels and silks down below. A Detlef Sierck premiere was an occasion in Altdorf for the court to come out and parade.

  The Trapdoor Daemon understood the Emperor himself was not present – since his experience at the fortress of Drachenfels, Karl-Franz disliked the theatre in general and Detlef Sierck’s theatre in particular – but that Prince Luitpold was occupying the Imperial box. Many of the finest and foremost of the Empire would be in the house, as intent on being seen as on seeing the play. The critics were in their corner, quills bristling and inkpots ready. Wealthy merchants packed the stalls, looking up at the assembled courtiers and aristocrats in the circle who, in their turn, looked to the Imperial connections in the private boxes.

  A dignified explosion of clapping greeted the orchestra as Felix Hubermann, the conductor, led his musicians in the Imperial national anthem, ‘Hail to
the House of the Second Wilhelm.’ The ghost resisted the impulse to flap his appendages together in a schlumphing approximation of applause. In the Imperial box, the future emperor appeared and graciously accepted the admiration of his future subjects. Prince Luitpold was a handsome boy on the point of becoming a handsome young man. His companion for the evening was handsome too, although the Trapdoor Daemon knew she was not young. Genevieve Dieudonné, dressed far more simply than the brocaded and lace-swathed Luitpold, appeared to be a girl of some sixteen summers, but it was well-known that Detlef Sierck’s mistress was actually in her six hundred and sixty-eighth year.

  A heroine of the Empire yet something of an embarrassment, she didn’t look entirely comfortable in the Imperial presence, and tried to keep in the shadows while the prince waved to the crowd. Across the auditorium, the ghost caught the sharp glint of red in her eyes, and wondered if her nightsight could pierce the darkness that sweated like squid’s ink from his pores. If the vampire girl saw him, she didn’t betray anything. She was probably too nervous of her position to pay any attention to him. Heroine or not, a vampire’s position in human society is precarious. Too many remembered the centuries Kislev suffered under Tsarina Kattarin.

  Also in the Prince’s party was Mornan Tybalt, grey-faced and self-made keeper of the Imperial counting house, and Graf Rudiger von Unheimlich, hard-hearted and forceful patron of the League of Karl-Franz, a to-the-death defender of aristocratic privilege. They were known to hate each other with a poisonous fervour, the upstart Tybalt having the temerity to believe that ability and intellect were more important qualifications for high office than breeding, lineage and a title, while the pure-blooded huntsman von Unheimlich maintained that all Tybalt’s policies had brought to the Empire was riot and upheaval. The Trapdoor Daemon fancied that neither the Chancellor nor the Graf would have much attention for the play, each fuming at the imperially-ordained need not to attempt physical violence upon the other in the course of the evening.

  The house settled, and the prince took his chair. It was time for the drama. The ghost adjusted his position, and fixed his attention on the opening curtains. Beyond the red velvet was darkness. Hubermann held a flute to his lips, and played a strange, high melody. Then the limelights flared, and the audience was transported to another century, another country.