Rostium Al Nabez found himself in quite the problem. He knew a client with a burning need for some very select merchandise, but was forbidden from actually delivering them. Being told to walk away without payment had been a nasty shock, nothing but a promissory note to show for it.
Oh they’d had their “reasons”. Not wanting to make him a target. Not having the thrones on hand. There were always reasons, excuses. He’d been quietly panicking and trying to figure out how to break this to the family when a messenger had arrived less than a day after his return to inform him a mercenary company working in the Lower Hive had left him payment for delivery of goods. In a state of shock, he’d gone to the guild and found every throne owed delivered.
That did not happen in this business. Clients did not refuse to pay, throw merchants out on their ass, and then pay a simple promise, as they had promised. This was not an official meeting of the Court, with dozens of Noble witnesses.
“How in all the ash planes did I find the one Underhiver Barbarian Noble so un-civilized to throw me out with nothing but a note, and so stupidly honorable not to screw me over after?”
Rostium had no idea what he was dealing with anymore. Survivors in the Underhive weren’t like this. They did not build mansions and… and parks!
So he wanted to wash his hands of this. Being banned for a year? Good. Great! By the time the year is out, others would have gotten involved and someone will have figured out what damned weirdness was going on with House Nikos. Who wasn’t even a formally registered Noble House, because he’d checked.
Now, all he wanted was to sell the route and be done with it.
Two weeks later he got his wish, when a passing fellow was stuck on layover while his navy carrier was undergoing minor repairs. He wanted to do a quick pick up job, and had some goods. Not enough for even one full case, but some was better than nothing.
Not two days after that, his door blew in and he got beaten about the head. By the time the world made sense again, he woke up in deep trouble. The Underhive was forsaken, ignored. But the bottom of the Lower Hive wasn’t. While the richer houses continued to build up the hive and expanded it outwards, one house was given leave to watch over and slow down the decline of the Lower Hive floor. Of course, they didn’t try to stop it, the cost of that would be ruinous. But they patched things up, and most importantly, ensured no mutants menaced the menials. Or menaced them just enough, depending on the times.
The Al Nabez traders had always paid their bribes, well and on time. But in this case, the Minor Noble House Vormir was out for blood. In the words of their third son:
“House Nikos? Nikos! There is no such House. There will never be such a house! The floor is Ours! Ours, by Holy Writ! Do you hear me you wasted shitstain!”
So Rostium was in trouble. Getting between a Noble House and the target of their ire? He wasn’t that stupid. Now getting out unscathed after his trades, that would be harder. He measured the difficulty of his situation: arrested, deep in the hold of Arbites who were certainly under sway, if not under orders of House Vormir, and suspected of being an agent of a rival claimant House?
It was, perhaps, the third most difficult negotiation of his life. Rostium was Al Nabez. His family had not survived generations of cutthroat backstabbing in the capitol hive without some measure of skill at deception and reframing inconvenient truths. The merchant didn’t walk out of there, but he evaded more spirited interrogation.
He never did find out if that was a temporary success or not. Once given the route, the situation escalated.
***
Acolyte Xavier Varus, currently posing as a mutant hunter by the name of Benedict Salvus, had managed a stroke of luck. He wasn’t the finest investigator in service to Inquisitor Cosano, but he was a subtle sort well used to hives. It hadn’t taken him long to re-establish contact with the local scum and find the fool who was all but screaming for Wraithbone. Of course it was always possible he could be underselling himself. He was competing with a mind-reader, but what’s life without some professional rivalry?
The point was that less than three days after arriving at Fenksworld he’d found a point of contact he was reasonably sure wasn’t trying to send him into an Underhive ganger ambush, and several former mercenaries willing to confirm the merchant’s trip below. Xavier was feeling just a touch satisfied with that quick a turnaround.
Of course the Enemy must have heard him, because but a few days later, while he was still mapping the edges of the target’s territory and probing their security while his hunting party secured his back, thousands of House troops poured into the tunnels behind him.
Less than four hours after allowing himself to be pinned between two enemies, his targets had caught him sneaking about. So Xavier found himself cursing them, cursing the fools who’d come behind him and Nobles in general.
“At least I’m still going in the right direction.”
Xavier had memorized the map as a basic precaution, and his captor, for all his skill and strength in navigating the broken warrens and halls of the Underhive, was not trying to disguise where they were going.
It was possible he could have usurped the force sent down here to no doubt punish the upstart. But he hated going through rubble as a way of ensuring he’d gotten the right traitor and accounted for all of them.
Bound hand and feet, and carried by an armed guard, that is how the first of the Inquisition Acolytes first laid eyes on Sanctuary.
***
House Vormir marched to war. Jocop Vormir was sure that stories of it were spreading among the menials as they entered the Underhive. It was foolish ignorance. Menial gossip. Jocop listened, not to lone voices but the hum of the masses. Often, his House knew something was wrong simply by hearing how the hum of the hive shifted.
Jocop did not march to war. He was an exterminator, and him and his went to cleanse the lower halls. His family knew no good came from allowing those raised beyond the Emperor’s light to rise. Hertics, scum, mutants, it didn’t matter. Every attempt from below to rise had ended in fire and blood, the Houses, Arbites, or even Inquisition, coming down to cleans the filth and corruption.
He did not blame the menials for falling for the Enemy’s tricks. They were poor and ignorant. But being unwilling, unknowing, or innocent was no defence, not when giving aid or succour to enemies of the Imperium. Only House Vormir, with its proven record of rule, could be trusted as stewards of the border, the Underhive. So once again, they marched into the tunnels to cleanse the dark before it could swell with malevolent purpose and threaten the Emperor’s works.
Up high, they were mocked for their low station, the lowest any Noble House could hold. House Vormir knew the truth. While the high Nobles schemed and plotted, They were doing the Emperor’s work. He cared not for the wavering among some of the Arbites servants. Not the schemes, plots and deceptions of the enemy. His faith was pure, his purpose unshakable.
Chase them to their lair and burn them out with blessed promethium. It was the only way to be sure.
***
Nithart Kruden and Hartusch Grunen were long time partners. They weren’t friends, but over the years they’d reached an understanding. Nithart tolerated Grunen tastes and indulgences, suffering the attention of those women who looked at them and only saw their Arbites uniform. Hartusch looked away when Kruden took a little extra to look away, as long as he shared. It was a tolerable arrangement. Neither of them was actually a full Arbites, Emperor protect, but somewhere far above them where their reports reached, there surely was one.
They’d spent years on this job, guarding the lower reaches of the Hive, and hunting down escaped mutants. That was the core of their job. They’d gotten decent at it. A healthy habit of ignoring any non-obviously mutated scum on their rounds made for a longer life. Others were dealing with that. Mutants, that was their job. And because House Vormir was slated with the same, they could often count on their armsmen as support. Sharing credit was easy, when the other choice was a messy death.
While Kruden and Grunen would have preferred more thrones, they knew their limits. But in the last couple of years, Kruden had come up with another scheme. While their pay was hefty for a menial, menials they were not. They had expenses, needs. Ammo, repairs, wear and tear. Lovers and expensive habits. It was common tradition that manufactoriums still operating this deep could give a little extra to ensure they’d be given special consideration in case of an outbreak. It was common sense.
But apart from sending some Redemptionists after them, or owing a favor to House Vormir, they had few ways to kill the things that came and went, troubling their charges. Short of catching them in the act, and they could hardly linger in one place for long. They had to patrol, you know?
But Kruden’s friends had friends, and some of those had given them another option. While the Adeptus Arbites wasn’t going to pay them a bounty for going into the Underhive to hunt the mutants, it was not impossible to wrench some thrones free for specialists, if they had the support of local manufactorium managers. It helped the mercs were cheap and the hive large, jobs plentiful.
It was even better that when some fool fucked up ten floors up and an inspection came down, the mercs proved better then their ilk usually was, and could deliver the mutant monster corpses to present to the livid officer looking to drag them in for corruption and moral degradation. A quick trip into the Underhive with these hunters, and the inspector had turned around and given them a recommendation.
Yes, things had been going well for Kruden and Grunen. Until someone in House Vormir looked at why the Arbites in their sector had stopped calling them in. Then it was all Noble Rights and Prerogatives, Holy Writs, and flamers.
In this, like in most things, Kruden and Grunen disagreed. Grunen was thinking with his dick, as usual. He looked at the admiringly unusually pretty huntress and besotted as the fool was, figured this Nikos woman would hand the Emperor botherer his teeth. Which is why they both had a red circle, with a red diagonal slash through it on one side. Kruden. being a much better informed and reasonable fellow, knew that even the least Noble House could bring thousands to bare to any issue, and ensured they wore black scarves as a show of support to House Vormir as they marched into the depths to oversee their work.
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Grunen was delusional, but Nithart Kruden wasn’t above hedging his bets.
***
Kiki didn’t remember her Mom’s face. It had a beak, she thought. She’d been too young when her family and clan were taken from the polluted depths by cold man-mashines. A sect of Logicians, she’d later learn. All she knew was fire under her skin, pain in every limb and breath as they twisted her. Kiki had been a mutant. All her family had. She was the only survivor of that batch of project “Abhuman F”. They’d used her blood as a base for the next set. There were only four of them in Sanctuary, total.
Kiki was a mutant. That wasn’t as terrible as it had been. Not in Sanctuary. No one tried to kill her, or beat her. But it was felt, seen. Sanctuary was crowded. There were more people in it than Kiki had ever through possible. And still, all those from Above told stories of endless corridors crammed even further with bodies. As if the current crowds were sparse and small. Kiki had never been Above. It was too dangerous for her kind.
Now the distant stomping of feet was coming. Sanctuary was in danger. Kiki would die for it, a hundred times over. Let them pray to their Emperor, she had but one Lady.
***
Kiki. Her name was Kiki. Not Abhuman F-01. For the sound her family made with their throats. Kiki. Kiki hated them. The cold metal men. She’d been stuck here, pinned in place, trapped like bait, surrounded by others stuck just the same. Watched the metal men shape flesh, melt bone, watched them burn. So few didn’t burn in the end.
Until the day one of the Pure came into the meat room. The subject chamber. The metal man was cold, his voice flat, but Kiki understood. He was proud, bragging. Kiki hung in place, metal pins in her hands and feet, pinned in place. She knew she could rip herself off them. She’d done it before. But it did nothing. Only more pain, blue crackling fire that made all her muscles hurt and clench. Metal men with empty eyes. Servitors.
The Pure was just another torturer. Another enemy. Pure hunted clan. That’s how the world worked. She remembered her lessons. Pure hated mutants.
The redheaded Pure said something, and it stuck in Kiki’s mind. Kiki’s clan were hunters, survivors. Her voice ran a shiver down Kiki’s spine.
“This is clearly a sophisticated operation. Well planned and long running. Tell me Magos, how long have you been doing this?”
Kiki doesn’t remember the answer. The red Pure had found Kiki and locked on her eyes. Kiki was obedient. Kiki didn’t struggle. She’d learned not to. Struggle only brought pain. But Kiki had not broken. Her eyes were not empty, like most others. So when the redheaded pure met her eyes, Kiki did not look away. She couldn’t stop herself from flinching when the pure raised a hand to her cheek, or the soft whimper her traitorous mouth uttered when the touch wasn’t pain. When it was gentle, warm and kind. It didn’t belong here, in this place of cold pain. It was alien.
The Magos was still bragging, but Kiki only had eyes for the pure. Large, open green eyes. Eyes asking a question. Kiki didn’t know what possessed her. Why she did it. But she’d spent her endless days hanging from this rack listening, learning. She knew some of the pure tongue. Knew enough to ask, as she pulled on her pinned arms, no matter the pain:
“Please.”
The magos lost his head. Lost his head and was nearly bisected by a single swing of a blade so swift Kiki had blinked and missed it. The Pure pulled her off the rods and bandaged her wounds. Went on to take on the whole compound on her own. Kiki watched. She’d been told to stay there, to stay safe. But only one place was safe. In Her shadow. So she saw. Witnessed. Watched the servitors falter and crumple at a look, the metal men seize and die under steel. Saw her dance through deadly thunder and crackling light. Silence them all. Nearly all.
By the end, they were in a large chamber, over the corpse of the largest and most metal of the men. That’s where he found them. The one torturer she never saw. The metal man of plants and power.
***
Kiki had never forgiven the Magos for his part in her torture. Even if it could be all he did was run maintenance and work on servitors. Only her Lady’s wrath kept the same cold indifference at bay. It was the gardens that changed her heart, stopped her from looking forward to the day when she could kill him unnoticed. Him and his made the gardens possible. Her Lady was learned and wise, a Master, a teacher, a Professor as she’d call it. She was a smith, of steel, weapons and armor. Guns too. But she didn’t know everything.
They still needed the techs, even if the Academy was fighting that reliance. Her own years of lessons in the school her Lady insisted on, and the Hunter Academy after had changed Kiki in ways she didn’t think she could ever explain. Kiki didn’t hate where she came from. The families and clans of mutants out in the dark. Whenever she could, she sent them on their way, made them go away. At least those of her kind. But it wasn’t always possible.
These were not them. Not her former lifeblood. These were Imperials from above. A Noble House. Kiki was learned. Just a year from graduation into a full Hunter, with her friends. Her team. Team COKE. Kiki had her first cookie last year. It was alright, but the kids loved them. Kiki liked a bit more chew in her bites. Sweets weren’t her thing. No matter how much her annoying friends insisted she was the sweetest thing on the cookie team. They were idiots sometimes. That’s what they had Kiki for. To slap some sense in them.
She missed having them, by her side. But crawling up the edge of a chasm over a pool of deadly polluted gunk wasn’t their place. No one in her generation could match her sneak, her stealth. Or her speed. Both would be needed for this.
Kiki ghosted up to the edge of the cliff and peered over. She had some support, a spotter to help, but she didn’t need him here. The cavern was close by, the enemy force in a rest cycle. Guards and soldiers paid more attention to each other than a single smooth shadow slipping between the edges of their circles of light. Until she was close enough. Her spotter had done a good job. Kiki threw her fire bomb unto a neat pile of flamer fuel and booked it, leaping over the edge before it blew.
The bright flash and horrid screams behind her as she fell told her all she needed to know.
***
The one good thing about this whole mess was that Jocop Vormir and his personal bodyguards had survived in their power armor. The terrible thing was that if Nithart hadn’t listened to Grunen and his “stories from the Guard” they would have made their beds near the noble and fried with the rest of his escort. The cavern, the material, it was all consumed by a conflagration set of by some saboteur the guards had failed to stop and the two servants of the Arbites didn’t have time to worry about the wider consequences of that.
Because right after the explosion, a part of the wall to the side had opened and a line of autoguns and stubbers had spat death into the surprised, disorganised mass of troops, adding to the panic. Their leader emerging from the flames alive had given them back a fighting spirit, but by the time they were ready for a real counter attack the ambushers were gone. Less than twenty men had ambushed over four thousand, and then disappeared down a tunnel and across a cable cut behind them.
More than 300 had died in the fire, another 200 in the ambush, and almost a full 100 had simply fallen over the edge trying to flee, or fight, in the initial moments and the dark. 600 dead and half again injured but still able to fight done in a single fight. Those weren’t significant casualties for any purge of the Underhive, but those deaths were usually press-ganged menials and gangsters, not House troops. What the Noble should have done was gone back up, shamed, and came back with a full purge group. What was a significant injury to their effort wouldn’t be so much as an inconvenience to 20 000 men.
Jocop Vormir did not do that. Jocop Vormir led a fiery and passionate sermon, tripled the guards, doubled the perimeter and promised to push on. It was at this point that Nithart began to wonder if Grunen might be right. Not in time, no. House Vormir had a crushing advantage in men, thrones and material over any Underhiver Gang Lord. No, what worried Nithart was that this expedition, the one he was on, might fail, falter and be slaughtered. Including him. He did not work for years with care and dedication, building his accounts, only to have it all ruined by some zealot Noble.
What he needed was an angle, a plan.
***
Lady Nikos looked over the estimated casualties. Of this action, and the projected ones, since their leader had chosen to push ahead. She had hoped that he’d turn back. Give her time to find another way. She always hoped. So rarely did it prove true. The leader of Sanctuary watched over her home, over all they’d built. Pyrrha did not harden her heart. In time, when she was alone in her chambers, she would weep for all those trapped men, serving an underserving leader in a cruel and uncaring Imperium.
But right now, she looked over their invasion defence plans and choose how her military would make sure the blood spilled wasn’t theirs. It pained her that for the planet, not even the Imperium, this was a minor scuffle. That the death of thousands would barely be a footnote to some Administratum Scribe report.
Pyrrha had paid the price of her ignorance. Others didn’t have to. It was a cruel world. A cruel galaxy. She did not shy away from the truth. This Lady Nikos understood, even if she wished she’d never had to learn it. That some truths in her new home could be so devastating and terrible, that they had to be hidden from the common family. Like hiding the Grim behind walls, so as not to produce the very emotions that drew them.
It was a familiar problem to her.
The answer of House Nikos was simple: “The truth is both powerful and dangerous. It is a heavy weight that risks your soul. Some are so terrible you may lose it simply by learning them, should you fail. But someone has to take up that burden, carry those truths, or we will all drown in an ocean of lies. You will be prepared for it. Armed and made ready. Some will be disqualified. Some will pass the training. Then you will have to choose: will you take up that trial, that test? For once chosen, it will burden you for a lifetime. So why would anyone do so? Because we need you. We all need that help, those champions willing to bear it. Only you know if you want to be one of them.”
Pyrrha had written it into the lesson plan of the Hunter Academy. Mandated the class for every student. Her people would not be led by their nose to slaughter, nor would she insist they all carry the weight. She would do all she could to help them along, and hold faith that it would be enough. They’d trip and fail and learn from it. Here, now, where it was still just one Academy and a few dozen students.
Every generation she refined the training, the lessons. Someday she’d be satisfied. For now, it was time to see just how she’d failed her students this time.
“Let what painful lesson come not stop them from coming home.“ she told herself, as she chose her battle plans. It was part wish, part prayer.
***
In a distant part of the deep Warp, in the corner of the Plague Gardens, in a rusted cage, the Goddess of Life heard another rustle of a new kind of spark, tiny and hidden. Only a few decades old, but the sparks were slowly, slowly spreading. She showed no sign of it. She never had. Isha would do her best for any mortal who honestly worshiped life. The whole of the Imperium and humanity was seeped either in the corruption of the Four, or the Death that permeated the Imperium at every level. So few humans worshiped life, in this dark and cursed age.
Not Nurgle’s mockery of it, but life as it should be. So Isha suffered under disease and plague. So she fought and undermined his work. More souls that would listen to her warnings of what the plague God was readying in his cauldron.
***
Pyrrha never probed. Never pushed. This buried, hidden light that felt like it was coming from the bottom of a rotten bog. But every now and again, a whisper would come in her dreams. Lady Nikos would send in her Magos and healers. Since she took over, turned the promise of sanctuary under her guard in the shadow of a Logician bio-lab into a real Sanctuary under her rule, not once, not once, had Sanctuary suffered the fires of rampart plague.
It was one of the things keeping the Magos on his best behaviour. Forcing him to cede that when it came to warp-craft and Dust Forging, she was the expert, not him and his. Because Pyrrha wasn’t a healer. A Magos Biologis, or a Genetor. She lacked the knowledge, the learning.
***
“This does not fit the logical boundaries of your ability.” her Magos had protested, once upon a time.
“Logic and the Warp don’t mix well Magos. That is the core of your order’s failure. Not that you didn’t. Not that you failed. You cannot. The very reliance on order, truth and sense robs you of the ability. I did not find the plague. I felt the touch of its master. Logic isn’t enough. It will never be enough. It takes truth, trust and faith.”
“You speak of Sorcery.”
“No. I do not. But you will never see the difference. Not in the method, only in the consequences. You lack the senses for it.”
“Which require me to already trust you and have faith merely on your word if I am to see said result. When we already know warp-craft and sorcery can and will twist the minds of those exposed to it. Vexing.”
***
Sanctuary had its flaws, and they were many. Compromises and failures. It was still far better than anything else on the entire planet. Fenksworld, Hive world. Home to billions. Just one among many.
Pyrrha went to war. The blood would never wash out. Never fully. She did not want it to. But someday she hopes to make a future where her distant, future students won’t have to face that same choice.
Just that would already be an incredible victory.