‘No one thinks about the grades of corpse starch.’ A small, elderly man by the name of Esurian Semper told a group of trainees hoping to become Mortis Keepers, the civilians charged with rendering human remains into the staple food of the hive.
‘They don’t understand that there are such things as moisture content, milling quality and fungus levels in every batch that change quality. And that’s before you’ve even considered the bodies.’
Esurian stood in one of the many processing bays on the Sepulchral Factory floor. The white tiled unit, a two-metre square cubicle with meticulously scrubbed grouting, was barely big enough for two bodies, but the old man had managed to squeeze an additional five people into the space.
Above, high up in the rafters of that cavernous space, thousands of fluorescent tubes bathed the room in a steady pool of cool medicinal light. The new inductees strained slightly to hear Esurian’s soft voice over the whirl of hundreds of mechanised hand-saws, the constant grind of bone crushers, and the roiling of the protein vats.
Esurian was small by anyone’s standards and what little hair he had around the base of his scalp had turned white more than twenty years ago. He was amiable, if a little dull. Dedicated to the job, he had few interests beyond it. His eyes were the only peculiar thing about him. He had vivid green irises spread out over each pupil like thin spider webs. The Medicae had called them Persistent Pupillary Membranes; newcomers would stare in fascination at them, lost in tracing the patterns. Esurian politely ignored the two trainees, who were already more interested in gawking than paying attention.
‘Sump-folk in the Underhive are half radiation most of the time, blood as thick and dark as oil and leave a chem-filled aftertaste. Low-hivers are hardy, not what you’d call filling, but we keep you going. Upper-hivers, those you save for a special day, talk about it for a month, then tell your kids about it. I can only imagine what starch in the Spire would be like, not that you’d ever see them down here.’
‘Mortis Keepers process each body manually, separating the best cuts of meat and preparing the remaining material for the rendering plants. First, they remove the head, split the body and carefully place the harvested organs into the sluice. After that comes the primal cuts: shoulders, joints, belly and leg. Protein Technicians need a sharp boning knife and a sturdy saw to complete their work. They are taught to be efficient but observe all of the traditional rights of dissection, treating each corpse as kindly as they would their own family.’
‘People may not like the thought of it, but what do you do with eight thousand dead a day? Put them in a big hole? It’s just a waste. You’re letting the fruit rot on the vine. We’re not monsters. Every man, woman and child we see, we honour and thank the God Emperor for. In our veins flows the lives of generations.’
The speech was interrupted by a commotion outside. Esurian excused himself from the trainees and peered out around the corner of his butchery cubicle. ‘Of course,’ he thought, ‘it’s the visitor again.’
Keepers saw themselves as guardians of the dead, but on that day, there was one who saw their work as a punishment. Uvam Fictus: a spire scion, a frustrated lordling too young to rule but too old for a wet nurse.
No one knew exactly why Uvam had been sent into the Underhive to work, but it must have been bad; a Spire Dweller wouldn’t be caught dead amongst the dregs if they could help it. What no one there knew was Lord Fictus demanded Uvam act as a corpse carrier for a month to show him “the weight of responsibility for every choice made.”
Uvam began as he meant to go on: a sullen boy with sadistic tendencies who bends the knee but breeds rebellion. Esurian watched as the young lord dragged one of the dead along the floor, a smirk plastered across his face. It was a profane act, shocking anyone who dared to look. Who could challenge it? On any other world, hive-serfs would be shot just raising their heads in the presence of a Spire-dweller.
Uvam was flanked by a personal guard, but they had been instructed not to help, only to keep the boy safe or just to menace those unfortunate enough to get in the way. All of Fictus’ features were an exaggeration: a large, pointed chin, prominent nose and a wide, gap-toothed leer.
The first body had been a young girl, easy to physically manhandle, but Uvam became increasingly angry the harder the work became. The frustration was boiling on the man’s face by the fourth body, an overweight rarity in the processing pits, probably a well-off overseer by the size of him.
Uvam was red-faced, tugging at the deceased man’s arm, wrenching it with every step along the corrugated walkway. If he had stopped to look, the petulant youth would have noticed that Bodymen work in teams, carrying the departed using stretchers, a shared burden for an important role. Fictus would never stoop to ask for help and so ground himself down with effort until the dead man’s clothes got caught on a railing, and he burst into a paroxysm of rage.
The inheritor of Fictus house, a socialite of the upper spire, lashed out, kicking and stamping on the expired overseer’s head and stomach. The momentum of the attack was so violent his boot split the man’s side, causing a slurry of intestinal tract and bile to burst out, engulfing Uvam’s leg right up to the knee. It seemed the dead wanted to have their last laugh at the youth’s expense as he cried out in disgust and flailed his leg to kick the entrails away.
Esurian knew he should look away, but the sight of Uvam’s humiliation was too much of a distraction. He quickly regretted it, though, as the lordling, looking wildly around, caught Esurian’s eye, stapling him in place with a glare.
With one final kick, the boy freed himself, ‘I’m done!’ Uvam stated loudly. ‘Let father sort it out if he cares so much about them.’ The lordling departed with his small retinue trailing after him. Esurian tried to continue his impromptu lecture but faltered, lost for words and dreading what came next.
House Fictus owned this sector’s Mortis works, so nothing became of the Scion’s outburst. Uvam was no longer a Bodyman. The stint must have been some kind of warning from his father. Uvam failed upwards, from shift supervisor to foreman to upper manager, always flanked by enforcers, always petty, cruel and incompetent in anything he turned his hand to.
Uvam was vindictive and, as it turns out, had an especially long memory. Within a year, he was nominally in charge of the Sepulchral Factory, and consequently, the quality of life for the workers had fallen significantly. That was the reason why Esurian Semper couldn’t afford to properly feed himself and his wife, nor afford the medication that would have saved her during the long winter caused by lower-hiver heating riots.
Dulcis Semper was set to be processed by Esurian, as was traditional in the hive, a final act reserved for the Mortis crews so they could personally return their loved one’s souls to the communal spirit. After more than a month of eighteen-hour shifts, with barely enough time to sleep, eat and watch his wife die, Esurian’s old body was almost close to death itself as he stumbled into the factory that morning and saw what awaited him.
Hanging, chained from the rafters, was his poor wife’s body. She was pale and physically ravished from the fever, a burial shroud hanging loosely over her emaciation. Dulcis’ feet were inches above the giant interlaced cogs of one of the bone-crushers.
Work on the harvesting floor had completely stopped. The workers left milling around, confused by the absence of the ever-present processing din. The bodies were piling up within the intake ports, a backup of hundreds of corpses threatening to spoil.
Esurian, although bone-tired and malnourished, fought his way through the stagnating crowd of workers. He struggled towards the conveyor controls but found a cadre of guards, along with Upper Manager Uvam Fictus, waiting for him. As soon as Uvam saw Esurian, he activated the vox-caster in his hand.
‘Good morning, workers!’ The tannoy crackled into life, booming out Uvam’s voice alongside a painful scream of interference. ‘I know that in the past, House Fictus has allowed you to indulge in processing rights as a privilege, but today, we break from that tradition. Many of you have become complacent, and I intend to put a stop to it. I hereby decree that all familial inhumations are dependent solely on personal performance.’ Uvam locked eyes with Esurian and smiled. ‘Failure to meet minimal corporate targets will be met with harsh punishments.’
Uvam activated the industrial grinder with a theatrical flourish, filling the factory floor with a cacophony of tortured metal. The lordling’s arm shot out, wrapping around Esurian’s shoulder and pulling him in for an aggressive one-armed hug as the announcement continued. ‘This brings me to dear old Esurian. He’s known to be a reliable member of the Mortis Keeper team but recently has let his productivity slide dramatically. I can’t in all good conscience grant him the right he has so unequivocally failed to earn. Do you think that’s a fair assessment, Mr Semper?’
The vox-caster was thrust down at Esurian as he stood stock still, deathly pale from shock and on the verge of mindless babbling. All he could muster were three words: ‘No… please… don’t.’
‘I’m afraid my hands are tied,’ replied Uvam as he activated the winch.
As Dulcis’ body fell into the churning wheels of the grinder, Esurian broke free of Uvam’s grasp, cried out in unintelligible fear and stretched out his hand in a vain attempt to arrest his wife’s grisly end. Esurian grabbed Dulcis’ simple funeral shroud at the same time as the wheels began to chew through her corpse. Ribbons of flesh bucked wildly along her frame, tearing fabric snatched up by eager, crushing annihilation.
One moment, Esurian clung desperately to the physical memory of his wife; the next, he was being dragged backwards, fighting with every ounce of strength to remain where he was: a bloody stump for a hand where he refused to let go of her memory.
Esurian used to think of his small hab space as cosy, a bolt-hole from the ever-eroding brutality of Hive Examen. Now, it was almost completely bare, the majority of his belongings having been sold to afford the crude mechanical replacement for the hand he’d lost. Nearly every trace of his life with Dulcis had been bartered away. Now, the hab only reminded Esurian that his life was nothing but an empty shell.
The prosthetic servo-shears, bonded to Esurian’s wrist, itched constantly, a sign the poor quality immuno-meds were beginning to falter. The humiliation of the factory floor was more than two years ago, but he still woke up in the middle of the night, screaming, picturing himself back there, Dulcis shredding into a debris of flesh and bone.
The old man found himself waking earlier and earlier to avoid the terror of sleep, wandering in ever-lengthening sojourns of the greater hive. Discovering a long-abandoned quarry, he would absent-mindedly pick through the detritus, trying to avoid thoughts of what he’d lost.
One morning, while retracing a path he had committed to memory, Esurian fell. He had been walking along a poorly lit stretch of rock, half-covered in scree, when he was distracted by something out of the corner of his eye that disappeared as soon as he turned his head to look at it.
Esurian fumbled, chipped rock slipping out from under his feet and sending him sliding into one of the areas of the lower quarry. He fell heavily on his side, his hand scraping along the ragged floor but slowing his descent along the gradient enough to stop him from plummeting into the darker recesses of the lower mine.
His hand was bleeding from a cut. He staunched the bleed with a scrap of rag he used as a handkerchief. The rocky incline was steep and looked unstable, forcing Esurian to try and look for an exit elsewhere. He had found himself in the strangest place. Before, there was rust, abandoned tools and tumbledown ferrocrete shacks. Here, though, the quarry gave way to an inconspicuous system of tunnels.
Some of the passages opened up into larger areas. Vaulted ceilings crisscrossed with the memory of hundreds of hours of painstaking labour dominated the space. It was a place clearly meant for worship; it radiated devotion. Esurian explored the space cautiously, lo-glow in hand, marvelling at the shadows in the dark. There had been some kind of terrible war within those rooms. Everywhere, there were scattered remains of machinery littered with las-burns and punctured with snub rounds.
There were signs of an intense fire. Thick ash caked the walls, and the charred remains of synthetic wood settled alongside piles of what Esurian was sure was powdered bone. He wasn’t a highly educated man, but long experience with handling the deceased had imparted Esurian with enough knowledge to know those fires burned hot enough to cremate these people, bones and all.
He didn’t quite understand why, but every revelation, rather than sending him into a fleeing panic, pulled Esurian further into the nest of stone arterials. Drawn into the heart of the complex of tunnels, the frail man could almost hear the spirit of his dear departed wife calling out to him, pleading with him to rescue her from this underworld and return her to life.
Without realising it, Esurian wiped tears away from his eyes in the obsidian night; the paltry silhouette of his being lost in the fantasy of rescue, his mind had formed out of the darkness like a mirage. Eventually, the floodgates came crashing down, and Esurian cried out, ‘Dulci! Where are you?’ never expecting he’d hear a reply in return.
“Pleeeaaassse, Essssurian,” the voice seemed to rasp in his mind, “I don’t want… to diiiieeee.”
The stygian night the old man found himself in was close and oppressive. The warrens of bare rock had ended in a chamber filled with stagnant air and a putrescence he couldn’t place, a strange alien tang that threatened to invade his sinuses.
The room itself was half-buried under tonnes of rock, more than likely a result of the collection of ruined mine supports sprayed across the floor, thick bars of disfigured, twisted metal. The weight of entropy in that room was terrifying, an inevitable end gradually weighing down reality until it collapsed, bringing total oblivion.
Esurian’s light was beginning to falter; the lo-glo, only designed for short usage in low-light areas, needed time to self-charge, but he was afraid to turn it off. He had to find the source of that voice he’d heard so clearly in his head. He had to see the phantom for what it was, merely a figment of his addled mind.
Suddenly, there was a flash of movement in the dark, a furtive burst of speed. Esurian, his heart pounding, fought the urge to run as he trained his light on the source of the disturbance.
It was a sump-mouse, a relatively young one at that. They grew to around a foot and a half in length, tail to head, but this juvenile was half that size. Their eyes adapted to the darkness they had spent most of their lives inhabiting. The mice relied on speed for survival and lived well on the various mosses and lichens found scattered around most of the lower hives. There was a look of fear in the mouse’s eyes that Esurian felt a deep kinship for.
‘It’s alright, little one,’ Esurian said to it, while cautiously reaching into his pocket for the crumbs of food he’d managed to save for his breakfast. Holding out a morsel of food, the geriatric took a cautious step forward. The move, although causing the creature to retreat slightly, did not completely scare it off. The sump-mouse turned, wrinkled its nose to take in the scent of the food, then took a tentative step forward.
Esurian had just enough time to notice a set of eyes opening in the abyss behind the mouse before a taloned hand shot out from the darkness and, in one fluid movement, crushed the spine of the quicksilver rodent. There was a terrified shriek from the poor creature as it fought with every last ounce of strength it had as it was dragged inexorably back into the jaws of death.
The abject terror of the scene shot through Esurian’s body; the aching muscles that had plagued the man for years were coursed suddenly with violent energy, and he ran. Esurian ran as if all the fires of eternity lapped at his heels.
There was a fog of confusion. The old man could feel the lactic acid burning his muscles and seizing his arthritic joints but when he looked past the racing thoughts in his mind, Esurian realised he hadn’t moved at all, not one muscle. It was like his mind was being carried away by an imagined body: a runaway fantasy of escape.
‘Thank you, Esssurian…It has been so long…since I…havvvveee fed,” said the voice, between what the old man could only assume were chunks of flesh being eagerly bolted down.
Esurian stood, transfixed by the strange violet eyeshine emanating from the dark, studying him. It was like a gallery of razor-sharp intelligences observing a specimen in a jar.
‘Who are you?’ asked the man.
‘You are lost,’ stated the voice. ‘We can feel it. You long for family. You long for life. We are both.” With each word, Esurian reeled from the memory of everyone he had ever known. Hundreds of faces flashed into his conscious mind, some he hadn’t thought of in decades, all now gone. Although sad, there was a comfort of a sort in seeing those faces again.
Then Esurian was back on the processing floor, the sound of Dulcis’ body crunching into annihilation filling his ears, the smell of her spoiled body flooding into his nostrils. There was a soundless scream wrenched from the old man’s flayed psyche.
As the darkness of the mined catacombs returned, the grating, high-pitched, piercing laughter of Uvam Fictus followed Esurian back. Tears had fallen down the deeply wrinkled face of the frail Mortis Keeper, a mixing of the deep well of Esurian’s heartache and impotent rage.
The voice continued, ‘We are never alone—our every fibre issss ussss. We came here to share our unity but were discovered, burnt, crushed underneath this rock… but we… sssurvived. Help us, Esssurian, and we can right all wrongs… together.’
The thought was crazy, wasn’t it? What reason could Esurian have to ally himself with whatever this thing was? Then his mind thought about that poor, terrified sump-mouse.
‘What would I need to do?’ the man asked in a barely audible whisper.
Seconds ticked by, and the amethyst glare within the twilight considered Esurian Semper, as if slowly reading through his soul, one page at a time, as if deciding whether or not to bring the simple man into the greater truths it had to impart.
An instant later there was a rending, cracking sound compounded with a muffled gasp of pain. A small object appeared from the dark, spat from what sounded like the creature’s own mouth.
‘Take thisss,’ it said. Esurian looked in trepidation and saw one of the creature’s clawed fingers lying in the dust at his feet, a ragged bite mark along its edge, slowly weeping luminescent blood.
‘We give of ourselves, for your flesssh harvest, for the greater good,’ dripped into Esurian’s mind as he picked up the strange gift, grabbing it gingerly with his bloodied handkerchief and shoving it deep into his pocket as his body finally allowed movement again and he immediately fled back into the tunnels; those amethyst eyes still burning into his mind.
Esurian found himself pulled from thought to thought as he left the midnight Tarturus of the carved warren. The confused tangle of synaptic collisions lit up his brain but barely registered as the concussive force of fear beat out a rhythm within his soul. There was a raw power there that shone brighter than any forge and inspired a level of awe he’d only ever felt during the pict-screen sermons piped through every square inch of the hive on holy days.
Those fiery sermons were day-long broadcasts, accompanied by thundering bass so overpowering they caused the metallic roots of the city to vibrate in sympathy—a roar of tuned metal, harmonising with the chanted castigations of the wicked. Every Ministration ended with a brief but spectacular choir of a thousand voices singing praises to the destructive majesty of the Emperor of Mankind. They would all bask in the baking tempest, certain of his Omni-powerful annihilating presence, sure in the knowledge such ire would forever be focused on the enemies of man.
However, those days were gone. A slow erosion of the vid-screens inexorably diminished the grandeur and impact of the sermons. Tech priests would conduct their rituals, but they were purely palliative measures toward each device’s machine spirit. Without the additional backing and funds from the Noble families in the Spire, Holy days were destined to fade to nothingness.
Religious holidays, though observed, became a brief acknowledgement within reclaimed working days. A two-minute reflection on the sacrifices of the Lord of Terra to be pondered only once a quota was filled. Profits increased, but did anyone ever calculate the true spiritual cost?
Esurian missed not just believing in humanity but the feeling of damnation averted through their devotion to the Imperium. It would have been sacrilege to say as much out loud, but as horrified as Esurian was, he had felt that self-same beauty of dominant purpose when staring into that creature’s eyes, a burgeoning confidence and meaning to life.
Without knowing how, Esurian found himself out of the memory of fiery devotion and pitch-black catacombs, pulling on a work suit, unsure how he reached the factory from that nightmare place.
Esurian found his way to his processing unit, accepted a body and quickly drew the opaque curtain across the cubicle’s opening. His heart was galloping in his chest and pulsing heavily in his temple. He placed his hand reflexively on his chest, attempting to will it into abeyance before it gave out completely. Instead of relief, however, Esurian felt the lump of that severed claw.
In his anxiety, he’d forgotten about the token he’d carried away from the voice in the shadows. Esurian reached into his coverall and coat, pulling out the small bundle and carefully placing it near his inspection suite; a small collection of instruments designed to assess the quality of proteins.
Unwrapping the ball of fabric, it struck Esurian that this was the same handkerchief he’d used to stifle the bleeding of his cut hand. The bleeding had taken time to stop, staining a patch of material in the immediate aftermath, but now, as he unveiled his find, the blood was gone. All that remained was the elongated, barbed talon.
Despite his unease, Esurian was fascinated. It was like the claw had sought out every last scrap of vitae and swallowed it whole. He took out his work tools and deftly extracted a minute tissue sample from the clotted wound on the end of the talon, placed it on a slide and inserted it into his analysis matrix.
Peering through the eye-piece, Esurian was stunned by what he saw. He had thought of the discarded finger as something now dead, separated from the whole, but he couldn’t have been more wrong. Every single cell of this creature was separately and unmistakably alive. It was a colonial animal of thousands of microorganisms living in a chaotic orgy of life. The complexity of the colony was staggering, almost hypnotic to watch.
Esurian had an idea to test what exactly had happened with his blood. He quickly moved over to the cadaver waiting to be processed and withdrew a small stagnating vial of blood. He then introduced a drop of that blood into the tissue sample and eagerly went back to the eyepiece.
There was a violent tempest of activity from the zooids of the cellular aggregate. As the tarnished crimson liquid pooled, its component parts were being rapidly consumed by the mass of veracious life. More astoundingly, normal human cells were seemingly being co-opted, hollowed out and rapidly converted into more ravening organisms. Death had been converted into life.
‘…You long for family; you long for life. We are both,’ echoed in Esurian’s mind. He had not been speaking with a single creature but hundreds of thousands, millions! And that was only a part of something larger?
It had been decades since anyone in the hive had heard the passionate orations of the Ecclesiarchy, the ministrations damning all those tainted by outside influence as half-remembered parables. All Esurian could truly remember was the sense of unity the Emperor’s might brought to this awful universe, a strength beyond any normal human bond.
And what was this if not a true miracle of flesh? A strength of billions within an entire race of these beings, working on harmony; what wonders could they achieve? There were legends of the great genetic works the Holy Emperor carried out thousands of years ago. Maybe fate had intervened and brought one of those miracles to Hive Examen in its hour of need: to save it from people like Uvam Fictus.
That’s why the creature gave me a piece of itself! Esurian thought excitedly. It wants us to join them. But how can I convince everyone I’ve not gone completely mad?
He thought back to the destruction within the tunnels. Others had found out, hadn’t they? And they had been silenced, almost certainly, by the Spire. The creature had almost been destroyed once before. How could Esurian ever hope to stop that from happening again? What did anyone in Hive Examen have that the Spire didn’t already have in droves?
Looking up in despair, Esurian saw the body he was set to dismember, eclipsing the light pouring into his cubicle, and he was struck with an epiphany.
‘They don’t eat corpse starch in the Spire,’ Esurian said, smiling to himself.
From there, it had been a simple matter to finely slice the meat of the creature and to secrete slivers of it throughout that waiting cadaver. Esurian worked with a zeal and passion he hadn’t felt since before Dulcis’ desecration. How strange it was to have been steeped in death for so long, only for it to now be the genesis of something far grander. It was a simple enough act to apply the protein glues he’d become adept at using, chemically sealing in bulbs of exotic tissue into the corpse he dismembered.
Esurian sent the joints on, grading their quality as low as he dared to ensure the resulting starch would reach those he knew needed it the most. Although Esurian had no idea if the microcolonies from the creature could survive the powdering process, there was something deep down that convinced him those entities were far more resilient than anything Hive Examen had to throw at them.
With the transmission of the creature’s flesh complete, Esurian carried out his final act of recklessness. Before the true magnitude of what he was doing could dawn, Esurian Semper placed the last piece of the creature’s finger into his mouth, and he swallowed it whole.
Hours later, thrashing wildly in his sleep, the man who was once entirely Esurian found himself in what he would only be able to describe as a choir of beings. Thoughts, feelings, sensations, souls, actions, all combined into a single, unending explosion of intent. If he concentrated, he could distinguish harmonies layered so thickly on top of one another that they formed dense tapestries of existence.
As Esurian stared off into the depths of that liminal space, he could feel the cold stretch of emptiness between galaxies extending outwards for thousands of years. Beings, drawn towards a beacon of intense psychic brilliance.
Nomads on a pilgrimage of salvation, eager to spread their message of hope. What terrible destruction they saw! Pain so deep it could manifest as its own un-life, planet after planet studded with the generic experiments of now, long-dead Gods. How quickly did the nomads adopt the brutality of this new place in order to survive? What horrors might have been avoided if those first guests were met with love instead of the end of a gun?
Generation upon generation was wiped out, even as their rapidly evolving vocal cords and temporal brains fought to process language fast enough to establish some kind of understanding. ‘We mean you no harm!’ they screamed over and over again, but to no avail. And with each death returned something more suitable to the war that greeted them: monstrosities designed to force peace at any cost.
Esurian recognised that same sense of injustice; the only way to change things is through force; it was all so much clearer now. He must join with the voice, lose himself, be one with it. As Esurian let go of everything that tied him to his fears and anger, he felt truly free for the first time in his life. The man who was once Esurian Semper would do anything to keep that feeling alive, accepting his gifted role from the Gods. Esurian was no longer a butcher. Esurian was a Magus.
The old man could feel every iota of himself changing. Cells chattered and sang their praises, their song helping to bolster the choir of what he could now only call the Star Gods, true saviours of all existence. Magus Semper felt his thoughts expand as he connected to the knowledge of those untold billions of minds…
Spores of change proliferated through the protein-stock; with such vast quantities siloed, only a fraction of a per cent transmuted into the gift, but that was enough.
Those most reliant on the corpse-starch banks, starving families and desperate people living from hand to mouth were the bedrock of the new dawn. It was only a matter of time before hundreds were exposed to the seed of change. Huddled in their run-down habs or cowering within the shadows of unkind streets, those touched by germination soon began to hear the songs of the choir.
Those songs appeared in fits and starts, one note at a time. It was sump root politics, an organised and secretive collective, feeding the poor and housing the destitute. Kitchens sprang up alongside informal schools and prayer meetings. People were encouraged to take pride in their communities and protect what little they had.
Every day, those communities became a little more independent, a little more anxious that their newfound freedom might be taken away. Unofficial guards patrolled at night. Having friends and family outside of the network was discouraged at first, and then they were outright shunned as they couldn’t be trusted.
Open, lively debates were held, and the newly educated were encouraged to discuss anything. They challenged long-held beliefs on class, power and religion; nothing was taboo. Each of these symposia would conclude with inspiring sermons from the same man, Magus Semper. A man whose words seemed to speak to the deepest desires of the crowd. His was a personality that set the mind aflame and allowed those who listened to imagine a world of peace they could never have imagined before; all they had to do was have the courage to make it.
The more they listened, the tighter the tribe became. They began to hoard weapons, then doctors and medical equipment to protect their newborn children. Strong, healthy, beautiful children that outsiders may label as nothing more than genetic freaks and mutants.
As the children grew, almost inhumanly fast, the change they embodied ripped through the bowels of the hive like cancer. More blessed children were born every day. The collective knew they must take action or be swept away. As expected, the Magus knew exactly what to do. And it would all start with freeing one of their long-lost Star Gods from its underground prison.
For Uvam Fictus, things were going well for the most part. Sickness was down, productivity was up, and the malaise that had fallen over the workers since he had taken control of the Factory seemed to have cleared. Even though Uvam’s personal income had never been better, there was disquiet in his life he couldn’t quite identify.
The output of the factory had tripled; Uvam’s exports were taking up the slack caused by a few recent catastrophic but admittedly beneficial industrial accidents. The starch factories in sectors four and seven had been put out of commission for at least three years. Uvam was more than happy to step in and cover the shortfall for an extortionate amount of money.
Yes, things were going better than Uvam could have ever dreamed, but something still felt wrong. One thing that puzzled Uvam was his guards. They’d been disappearing steadily over the last three months. No sign of where they’d gone. They’d just vanish overnight. Uvam had his suspicions that they were being poached by that feckless House Desidia or those louts in House Superbia. Uvam wasn’t too worried; like the factory workers, there were always new recruits to plug the gaps.
That was the funny thing, though, wasn’t it? Those new recruits readily accepted the job, no matter how little he paid them. He’d had a hard enough time getting his original personal guard to follow him into this slum, but now, there were more than enough locals looking to become his enforcers for a pittance.
Wealth, power, and control were all Uvam’s, so why was his mind still plagued by a vague sense of unease? He used to spend his free time surveying his domain, flanked by minions ready to enact his bidding. Now, Uvam felt a kind of creeping dread, an anxiety whenever he thought of leaving his office.
In a moment of weakness, he had almost considered confiding in his father about his doubts, but he dismissed the idea almost as quickly as it had arrived. Uvam had limited all contact with the Fictus patriarch to cogitator communiqués, highly edited reports and impersonal messages to keep that doddering old fool off his back. Demonstrating any flaw in that well-crafted emotional separation would be entirely unbecoming for a member of high society, such as Uvam.
The anxiety flooded back when Uvam thought about what happened last week. One of those newly hired butchers couldn’t tell his arse from his elbow, spoiling cuts, contaminating batches, slowing things down to a crawl in his unit.
Like all other times before, Uvam had made a show out of it. Stringing the scrawny lad up to one of the cadaver hooks, Uvam recited the carving rules with each application of a newly acquired shock-baton. It wasn’t until the third shock and terrified yelp that Uvam realised there was a different mood on the Sepulchral floor. Where there had been a cowed fear, now there was a pressure. That’s the only way Uvam could describe it.
A set jaw here, a glare there, a clenched fist, a look of barely controlled sedition. All fleeting, caught out of the corner of the eye but there. It felt like all the mob needed was a single word, and anarchy would reign. Uvam had seen the same before, countless times over the years, that hadn’t bothered him. What had truly shaken Uvam was when he noticed that same anger in the eyes of his own guard.
For a moment, Uvam swore he had seen that one-handed worker he had punished as his first act of management, standing at the head of the crowd. Those horrendous green webbed eyes staring at him almost piteously before the little man disappeared into the silent crowd like a ghost.
It was that evening that Uvam had the first of his nightmares. He had fallen into a huge jade web; the more he struggled, the more it drew him into the bottomless black pit below it. Just before Uvam would be choked to death by the threads wound tightly around his body, he would wake, horrified and gasping for breath.
An urgent knock shook the lordling out of his reflections. Uvam panicked briefly before regaining his senses and, straightening his clothes, opened the door.
It was the captain of his personal guard, mirrored visor lowered, shotgun raised, ready for trouble.
‘Sir, you need to come with us,’ the man said as every alarm in the building erupted into life at once.
The alarms were blaring everywhere. The unrelenting wail of nose bore into Uvam Fictus, burying itself in his chest. The malignant force wormed its way through his body, infecting every fibre with the urge to flee the low-hives and never return.
Workers were trying to flee. They clogged gantries and corridors as they scrambled for exits. Each time Uvam thought salvation was just behind the next bend, there’d be a crush of bodies blocking up another escape route. Every frustrated flight forced Uvam and his guard further down into the inner recesses of the facility.
‘What’s happening?’ Uvam shouted. ‘Are we under attack?’ Maybe those incidents in sectors four and seven weren’t accidents after all? House wars hadn’t occurred in decades, but they were normally limited to gangland skirmishes. Why destroy infrastructure when you could just take it over instead?
None of the guards responded. They just kept moving, almost dragging Uvam along with them. When he started to lag behind, his protectors began getting heavy-handed, physically dragging Uvam along by his collar.
The alarms faded, lost behind floors of thick, reinforced ferocrete. Uvam had no idea the complex dug down that far. Narrow descending stairs opened out into a vast garden of silos used to store thousands of tonnes of corpse starch. Brushed steel behemoths frosted over in the artificial chill of the sub-basement.
Uvam staggered and fell. The captain wrenched him violently up by his shirt collar, twisting it, almost choking his employer. Hurt, Uvam lashed out, spluttering, red-faced and angry.
‘Take your gakking hands off of me!’ said the lordling as he and his protectors stopped dead among the remains of the rendered citizenry. ‘Now tell me what in Throne’s name is going on?’
The guards remained silent. Eventually, the captain answered for them.
‘Your life is in danger, sir,’ the captain said as he raised his visor, prompting the rest of the guard to follow suit in curious unison. Uvam was struck dumb as he returned the glare of each of the men and women that surrounded him. Every one of them had eyes that were as vibrant green as that one-handed cripple’s, and they all shared those strange threaded irises, webbed jade over fathomless black pits.
The captain smiled with horrible malice, and Uvam knew he had fallen as deep as anyone could fall.
There had been more steps down. Islets of blurred halogen were the only things visible through the course material over Uvam’s eyes. The shock had given way to fear, struggling turned more fierce as the gripping hands of his guard bit down hard against any perceived resistance in movement.
Instinctively, Uvam shouted curses, screams of retribution, pleas for deliverance, offers of bribes. Torrents of words, trying to find any line of attack he could use to sway those around him onto his side. Everything said was met with total silence, frustrating Uvam and causing him to fight even harder against their hold. He soon tired, though and eventually concentrated on turning himself into awkward dead weight, ready to spring into action when his captures let down their guard.
The wardens and their prisoners reached the very lowest roots of the processing plant. Cold spiked the lungs and wrapped around limbs. Uvam wasn’t sure if the shaking in his body was from the frost-bitten air or the terror creeping through him as he was wrestled into a chair, straps fastened across his entire body.
The bag over Uvam’s head was removed, but there was so little light he could barely tell the difference. As Uvam’s eyes adjusted to dark, a figure slowly appeared in front of him. A small, almost gaunt man, slightly hunched, waiting patiently for his attention; a maimed hand, replaced by a pair of metal shears.
‘You!’ Uvam spat, straining against his bonds.
‘Overseer Uvam,’ replied the old man with a grin. There wasn’t an ounce of fear in that voice. ‘We welcome you. When we last met, I was known as Esurian Semper.’
‘I don’t care what your name is!’ Uvam interjected.
‘Was,’ corrected Esurian. ‘Now my Lord calls me Magus. I believe the word means Magician.’
‘Ha! What’s the matter? Did they need a meat Psyker? A corpse conjurer? I am your lord, you idiot! Untie me immediately, and I swear I’ll make your punishment far quicker than it ought to be. What was your plan? Ransom me back to my father.’ Uvam laughed. ‘He’d settle this with virus bombs before he’d open his purse. Or is this revenge for mincing your wife?’
‘Ransom? Revenge? No, Uvam, I’m not sure you understand what’s happening here. My lord is here to take the factory from you.’
A new gout of cynical laughter hissed out of Uvam. ‘A hostile takeover? Him and whose…’
The threat died on the young man’s lips as two huge, shining purple eyes opened somewhere behind Esurian as their owner stepped into what little light there was.
A half-remembered tale came back to the lordling from his childhood. Sat, cross-legged in one of the Spire’s Ecclesiarchy Sunday schools, they were told one of the old fables from a time when humanity believed in fantasies. It was about a place like the warp, filled with evil, hate and punishment for those who spurned their God. Even though the place was filled with fire, lakes of lava and cauldrons of boiling blood, At the very bottom of that realm, for the worst of people, there was nothing but unending ice. In the very centre of the ice was the demon that was the cause of it all, a being who had rebelled and chose to remain there for all eternity rather than serve his creator.
It was meant as a parable for the Emperor of Man and his arch-enemy. For weeks afterwards, Uvam would have nightmares of being trapped in that expansive wasteland, frozen in place, staring up at that creature, knowing that it was only a matter of time before it noticed him, snatch him up and devoured his soul. Cocytus, that ever-frozen place of dread.
That same existential dread now spilt from Uvam, saturating the air. Fear-driven incontinence caused Uvam to void his bowels and bladder in his body’s immediate flight response to the monster he now saw.
There had been Inquisitorial edicts going back for decades, released periodically as compulsory education for all the great houses. Warning signs for the many dangers all planetary leaders had to root out and report if they were seen. You’d have thought the material would be exciting, but I was always the same. Dry, unchanging lectures, anatomical diagrams and endless lists of judicial rulings that drove you to sleep or insanity.
Tyranids, they were called. They had been burnt out of the hive maybe two hundred years ago, but the infection had been so slight the inquisition didn’t even think it noteworthy. Yes, Tyranids, devourers of worlds, genetic monsters that turned you into them and then things got worse. Holy Terra! The corpse starch, what in the name of the Throne could those things do to it?
‘Es…Esurian. Please tell me that’s not your new lord.’ The calm look in Magus Semper’s eyes told Uvam all he needed to know. ‘Semp… urgh… Magus! Listen to me. Whatever that thing has told you is a lie. It’s going to destroy everything!’
‘I know,’ replied the man once called Esurian. ‘I see now none of it should exist. You, me, we’re all part of the same cruel cosmic joke. We’re the offcuts of a long-forgotten war. The only way we can fix it is to tear it all down and start again.’
‘But we’ll all be killed, you gakking moron!’
‘We’re already dead, Uvam,’ reasoned Magus Semper.
The Lord moved forward, its huge, chitinous, segmented body moving far more gracefully than its bulk would suggest. Uvam made to plead more with Esurian but was stopped dead by the penetrating command of “enough” whispered into his mind by the Lord creature. Uvam lay there, trying with all his might to move, shout, or do anything other than wait mutely as the abomination moved ever closer.
Esurian moved next to Uvam and continued. ‘We’ve done all we can with the small band of converts I managed to recruit, but it’s time for us to bring the true might of my Lord’s genetic will to bear, but for that, we need full control of the plant.’
‘You… you can’t have it!’ Uvam shouted, jealous, clinging onto his place of power through instinctive pettiness.
‘Why not?’ asked Esurian, intrigued. ‘You’ve only ever hated this place. You’re not doing it out of love for your father or your family. The Spire would rather skin you than listen to you. What has all that privilege ever brought you? Look where that life has led you!’
‘Join us willingly and help us topple everything those creatures cling to.’ Magus Semper turned away, ‘Or die here, pointlessly. It’s up to you, Uvam. It’s time to show your father what sort of a man he left to die down here.’
Guided by the will of the Lord creature, Esurian dug into Uvam’s mind. He peered at the lordling’s life as a four-dimensional tapestry of failure. An attempted assassination of his Father gained Uvam a month of torture, not because of the act itself but because it was so sloppily planned. Money-making schemes flashed alongside gambling debts, threats from money lenders and the pawning of stolen heirlooms. The scorned advances of marriage betrothals jostled with rejections from Military academies and endless reams of governmental rejections for anywhere other than Hive Examan. Yes, it was a life of decadence but one done to silence the inescapable trappings of the life that had been given to Uvam.
Tears of shame, hatred, longing; every extreme emotion Uvam felt for the galaxy poured out of him, unbidden. Then Magus Semper whispered the secrets of the universe he had been told…
And that was that…
The fulcrum that turned the proud young man away from the light of the Emperor was nothing more than seeing this world for what it really was, nothing more than a diseased hand that needed to be cut away.
As the Lord implanted his gift, the pain of the transposition coursed through Uvam. Semper reflected on all that had brought himself and this man together and now, all that they would do to change this world, this sector, this galaxy. Two differing grades of potential corpse-starch set to render the entire universe. Maybe they’d finally see what those in the Spire tasted like.
Yes, it was a glorious day.
