Uprising, page 2
Valjun stopped. He stared at the flesh and the blood.
What are you looking for?
It couldn’t be this. Yet the words kept repeating in his head. What are you looking for? What are you looking for? He wasn’t sure he was asking Guervis the question any more.
He was taking root. He couldn’t tear his gaze away. The torn, crushed remains held him. For the first time in his life, he looked at them with something other than horror. He took in more and more detail. The way a streak of blood covered one end of a larger shred of flesh. The pieces of bone, sharp and white, tiny needles, stuck to the metal in the slick of gore. This had been a life. This had been Hesh, to whom he had nodded at the start of the shift. Hesh was still present. He had been transformed. He was everywhere in the grinder.
The shapes of the crushed body called to Valjun in ways he could not understand.
Something stirred in depths he had forgotten. He did not understand what he felt. It was too old and too vast to be grasped right away.
Valjun blinked, shook himself free of his trance. He left the rendering chamber and made his way down the cramped, dark stairwells that stank of urine and blood, to the narrow alcove where he slept. He had to scramble up some rungs to reach it. The space was too small for him even to sit upright in it. It was barely larger than the coffin he would never have. He squeezed inside, and slid its grate shut.
He tried to sleep.
All the while, the thing he could not identify, yet felt like his truest self, slowly uncoiled in his chest.
Guervis was there again during Valjun’s next shift. He and his guards went through more slowly this time. If the overseer was trying to avoid another embarrassing death, he compensated the apparent care with increased brutality. The slightest hesitation on the part of a worker to stop what they were doing and submit to a search was met with a beating. Valjun kept an eye on Guervis’ approach. He forced the hatred out of his eyes. He would not give the overseer the satisfaction of disciplining him. He timed the rhythm of his work. He had the skill to do so after all these decades. He finished reducing a corpse to chunks just as Guervis was drawing abreast of his station. Valjun turned to face the overseer with an expression of utterly blank subservience.
Guervis looked him over for a moment, then nodded at the guards. Valjun raised his arms. He was indifference made flesh as they searched him. When they were done, Guervis nodded for them to move on to Marrika. He regarded Valjun for a few moments more, then said, ‘Come with me.’
As the guards continued the search, Guervis led Valjun out of the rendering chamber, and up the manufactory levels to his office. The noise of the machinery was muffled in here. It was the closest to quiet that Valjun had experienced in his memory. Standing before Guervis’ desk, he wavered slightly, the sudden sensory deprivation assailing him with vertigo.
‘What is your name?’ Guervis asked.
Valjun told him. A servo-skull hovering above the scarred, heavy desk chattered mechanically. A parchment strip unspooled from between its jaws until its teeth snapped shut. Guervis reached up and tore the parchment off, then ran his eyes over it. ‘You have been here a long time,’ he said, apparently realising this for the first time.
‘Yes, overseer.’ You needed a servo-skull to tell you that?
‘Your work record is without blemish, I see.’
‘Thank you, overseer.’ I would like to see the blemish of my handprints around your throat.
‘Your attention to duty has earned you an honour, Operator Valjun,’ Guervis said. When Valjun said nothing, Guervis cleared his throat and continued. ‘You will assist me in ensuring the compliance to order and faith of this manufactory.’
‘Yes, overseer.’ I have no idea what you’re talking about. What are you looking for?
‘You will be my eyes and ears on the rendering floor.’
‘Yes, overseer.’
‘If you witness anything unusual, you report it to me. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, overseer.’ No. I do not understand.
Valjun returned to the floor, trying to imagine what Guervis thought he might see. We turn our dead into food. What is there that can be forbidden in this place?
‘What did he want?” Marrika asked.
‘He wants me to be his spy.’ He adjusted a body on the table, then cut off its feet.
Marrika’s laugh was hard. ‘What is he afraid of? What does he think we can steal?’
Valjun shrugged. But while he worked, Marrika’s words lingered in his mind. They formed a chorus with the other questions.
What does he think we can steal?
What is he looking for?
What is forbidden?
What is forbidden?
What is forbidden?
He kept thinking, too, of the spattered remains of Hesh. How they had glinted in the light of the lumen arcs. How they had pulled the soul. And for the first time, he focused on his work and felt something very different from horror. He admired the way the saw sliced through skin and muscle, the whirring blade effortless, yet the wounds it tore ragged all the same. The bite of metal into bone, the breaking down of the human into slabs of meat, there was an intimacy here, a closeness no other act could even approximate.
What is forbidden?
He knew. The certainty hit him with the surprise of joy. Corpse-starch was a lie. What was forbidden was the truth. When the billions of Necromunda ate corpse-starch, they did not perceive the human beings it had once been. Its origins were invisible, the truth destroyed, erased, by the actions of the bone saw and the grinder. What was forbidden was to eat in the full knowledge of what one was consuming. The starch was the lie. The flesh was the truth.
Valjun cut the body into its pieces. When he reached the torso, it took him more than a single pass of the blade to slice all the way through the body. He made sure of that. He made sure that he brought the blade down in two very slightly different positions, and a strip of glistening muscle dropped from the blade to the table. As he pulled the body forward, he palmed the strip, and concealed it in the sleeve of his work tunic.
No one saw.
At the end of his shift, when he was alone in his cell, he turned his back to the grate and pulled out the morsel of flesh. He could not see it in the dark, but the damp texture of the muscle made him shiver with anticipation.
This is forbidden.
This is the truth.
He put the muscle in his mouth. He ran his tongue over sinew. He tasted blood, and the purity of its horror.
He began to chew.
The thing that had begun to uncoil in his chest the day before now rushed through his veins. He gasped at the force of revelation. He chewed and tore at the flesh, and when he swallowed, he snarled in furious joy, because in that moment, he felt the touch of the divine.
And he knew he would not keep this revelation to himself.
The thought of Mnethac no longer caused him pain.
After a month of pointless searches, and of pointless meetings with Valjun, who never had anything to report, Guervis realised that he had to accept one of two possibilities. The first was that there truly was nothing wrong with his manufactory. He liked that option. It flattered his pride and his laziness. The other possibility was that his efforts at vigilance had failed, and that he would have to try something else.
He wanted the first possibility to be true. He was afraid that the second one might be, and even more afraid of being found negligent if it was.
But what am I supposed to be looking for?
There was no point in asking. If he was meant to know, the orders would have told him.
So after a month, he tried something different. He did what he had done his best to avoid for his entire tenure as overseer. He oversaw the plant.
A narrow corridor from his office ended at a balcony that looked down upon the concentric floors of the central rendering chamber. There was another balcony above each of the other chambers as well. Guervis leaned against the railing and looked down. The work below made him think of maggots writhing through meat. The stench was suffocating. As they had during his inspections, his eyes began watering immediately. He rubbed at them, breathed through his mouth and concentrated on what he was seeing.
This is pointless. What could I possibly see?
The workers were so small from this height. They could be doing anything, and he wouldn’t know it. Even so, the fear of condemnation held him at his post. So did growing resentment at the idea that something was being concealed from him. He felt as if his superiors and his inferiors were both plotting against him. He would make someone pay. And he could only strike downward.
He stood there for hours, growing stiff, yet becoming mesmerised by the rhythms and patterns of the labour he commanded. This far up, though the smell was appalling, the revolting nature of the work was harder to see, and the activity became an abstraction. The repetitiveness of the motions was almost soothing, and when the shift changed, the interruption of the work was jarring.
Jarring enough to prick him back into alertness. And jarring enough that he noticed the single note of continuity. It was on the nearest level to him. One of the workers lingered over her bone saw after the horn sounded for the shift to end. She stayed there, leaning over the corpse on the table. Her replacement loitered a short distance away. Then she looked up and around suddenly, and walked quickly towards the exit from her level.
Guervis made a note of her station and ran back to his office. ‘Bone saw table thirty-five, level one, chamber primus,’ he said to the servo-skull. ‘Shift beta.’
The servo-skull squealed to itself in binharic, then said, ‘Operator Fantun.’
‘Give me her cell coordinates.’
After another consultation with itself, the servo-skull delivered the parchment that showed where Fantun slept.
‘Krantz! Ilden!’ Guervis shouted.
The two guards entered from the antechamber of his office. Guervis held up the parchment. ‘Come with me. We have an inspection to make.’
The two men fell into step behind him. He set a swift, determined pace and they marched from the office and down the long, echoing staircase towards the warren of the workers’ quarters.
The corridors beneath the rendering chambers were narrow, barely more than irregular fissures in the dank walls. The lumen strips were few, the ones that worked fewer still. It would have been easy to lose his way, but the guards were more familiar with this deep sector of the hive than he was, and it took them less than an hour to locate which honeycomb of floor-to-ceiling cells held Fantun’s crawl space of a home. Fantun’s cell was in the bottom row, level with the floor. Krantz held a lumen stick’s beam down while Guervis crouched before the grate. Fantun was lying on her side, her back to the corridor.
‘Operator Fantun,’ Guervis said, ‘turn around.’
She did not move.
Guervis seized the grate and yanked hard. Its rusted latch gave way and he hauled it aside. At the same moment, Fantun whipped around, fast as a snake. She grinned at Guervis, her teeth smeared with blood, bits of flesh coating her lips. In both hands she clutched a face, recently flayed from a corpse. It was tattered and gnawed. Fantun chewed slowly, mockingly.
Guervis rocked back on his heels and sat down hard. He stared at the grotesque in the cell. For a several seconds he refused to understand what he was seeing.
Krantz’s lumen stick dropped to the floor.
‘Arrest her,’ Guervis told the guards. ‘Drag her out of there.’
There was no answer. Fantun snarled.
Guervis looked up. Krantz and Ilden were standing still, heads slumped and arms hanging loose. Boning swords protruded from their chests. Their killers held them upright for a few moments longer, then let the bodies collapse.
Dark figures were emerging from all the cells up and down the corridor. Trapped, Guervis scrabbled backwards, a moan of fear rising from his chest. Hands seized his shoulders and held him in place. Valjun stepped out from the gathering shadows and into the small pool of light cast by the lumen stick. He was carrying a butcher’s cleaver. He looked down at Guervis.
‘Now we have both found what we were looking for,’ he said.
‘What are you talking about?’ Guervis demanded. He tried to summon his vanished authority. ‘Release me at once!’
Valjun shook his head. He bared his teeth in contempt. ‘You are not worthy of revelation,’ he said. ‘So it shall not be yours. But you are owed our thanks.’
‘Your thanks?’ Guervis struggled to rise, but the hands pressed him down hard, their grips like iron.
‘Yes. You showed me the way.’
‘You are speaking nonsense. Let me go!’
‘You searched, and so I searched too. You showed me the way to the Lord of Meat. And through me, all are turning to Him.’
Guervis looked around, desperate for help. The shadowy faces surrounding him were all smeared with blood. Then he remembered a detail from Valjun’s data parchment. ‘I don’t see your daughter here.’
‘No.’
‘Whatever you think you’re going to do, cease now, and she, at least, will be spared your punishment.’
‘She will join us soon. I will know when she is ready. There is nothing for you to spare us. You never did before. Now there is nothing from which you will be spared.’ The sickle in Valjun’s hand gleamed.
‘You said you owed me thanks!’
‘I have given it. Now we will collect the coin that is owed us.’
With quick, savage motions, Valjun hacked at Guervis’ legs with the cleaver. The attack was so sudden, the pain so enormous, Guervis’ scream froze in his throat. Valjun severed the legs at the knee. Another of the workers passed him two lengths of cloth, and he used them to tie off the stumps.
‘You must be awake a bit longer,’ Valjun said. He passed the limbs to his followers, who bit into the flesh with greedy, drooling pleasure. ‘You are our reward. We finally have payment from you, and in return, you will witness your sacrifice to the Lord of Meat.’
Then Valjun stepped aside. The hands released Guervis’ arms, but he was already too weak to crawl away. When Valjun’s flock closed in, though, with more sickles, and began to carve, then, at the last, he had the strength to scream.
HIS TERRIBLE VISAGE
GARY KLOSTER
Curled in his nest of rags, Tibbet clutched the tools of his penance close. A sparker, so ancient the Imperial aquila stamped into its side was almost worn away, and a thin piece of wire, its end twisted into a crude copy of that double-headed eagle sigil.
‘Master of Mankind…’ The words were familiar, but Tibbet couldn’t force them out. His teeth locked, his hands clenched, his eyes shut, and he curled in on himself, shaking with frustrated rage. Useless, stupid, know-nothing, got-nothing, weak, pathetic. Every insult that the Broken Bloods had hurled at him through their rusty masks still echoed in his head, and every word had hurt more than the kicks and punches that had followed when the gangers had driven him away.
Again.
‘I’m not useless!’ Tibbet snarled as he twisted, the meagre muscles of his scrawny body drawing tight over malnourished bones. ‘Why can’t they see it? I can see it!’ And he could, red and hot and bright behind his clenched lids. Fire filled him, hot and ready to burn. Fire so clean, so righteous – but the Broken Bloods didn’t see it. They were the fist of holy House Cawdor in this shadowed, stinking portion of Hive Primus, and House Cawdor was the instrument of the Golden Throne, the Master of Mankind. The Broken Bloods were dedicated and deadly, and Tibbet…
Tibbet shuddered, every muscle quivering with tension. He was nothing. He’d been taught that since birth. He was nothing, but he was not useless. Beneath the dirt and rags, beneath his fragile flesh, his weak mind, he burned, and he would give that holy fire to the Broken Bloods, to House Cawdor, to the Master. He would give it to them, if they would only take it.
‘They can’t see it. So I’ll show it to them.’
The words soothed him. Made his muscles unknot, let him uncurl. Slowly, smoothly, Tibbet began the ritual again. He snapped the sparker and heated the wire in its flame until the double-headed eagle began to glow, bright, bright, bright. He raised it up from the purifying flame – then pressed it down into the flesh of his forearm. The pain came first, sharp and perfect and clear, and then the smell, the reek of burning flesh that was so familiar, so comforting.
‘Master of Mankind, I have failed you again.’ Tibbet spoke the words smoothly, even as his body twitched from the pain. He’d said them many times before. The little brand he’d set into his skin was just one of many, on his arms, his legs, his belly, his chest… So many marks for such a short life.
‘I have failed you as I will always fail you.’ Tibbet slipped the sparker and warm wire back into his belt with his collection of battered tools and rusty blades, and rolled out of the louse-infested hollow of his coffin-sized cell. The scavengers called the place ‘Sepulchre’, and it stretched around him: a wide, rough dome whose walls were honeycombed by stinking cells like the one he’d just left, all carved into the rockcrete. Ropes and frayed nets climbed the walls and stretched across the dome, so that each hole could be reached by whoever wished to claim it for their rest. The floor of the great nave was too crowded for sleeping, heaped as it was with great piles of scrap, each carefully sorted by scavengers like Tibbet. The only clear area lay at its centre, where a rough plasteel tower reared up, wrapped in rusted razor wire and studded with flickering torches. The den of the Broken Bloods. Tibbet stared at it and pressed his thumb against his new brand, feeling the familiar pain.
‘May my meagre penance remind me of my unworthiness, and press me to fail you a little less,’ Tibbet breathed, finishing his prayer. Around him, he could hear the sounds of thousands, eating, arguing, sorting scrap, snoring, but all his eyes could see were the flames dancing around that tower.
