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Abyssal – David Annandale

About the Author

A Black Library Publication

Abyssal

David Annandale

The guards dragged Aveth Vairon and the other prisoners through corridors dark as despair. They were clad in thick, black carapace armour. Their faces were hidden by forbidding armaplas helms. Two of them held Vairon under the arms, and brandished shock mauls with their free hands. To Vairon, the guards of the Black Ship Irkalla were inhuman, hulking, emotionless automatons, as remote from sympathy as if they were part of the ship’s machinery.

They frightened him, but they were nothing compared to the silent women. Their armour was gold and their faces, when they were visible, were colder than masks. A pair of them walked ahead of the guards. They were conversing with each other using a hand cant. Vairon didn’t know what they were saying, but he could guess from the angry jerk in their movements.

This is my doing, and I cannot undo this.

The prisoners in the hold had been on the verge of full riot, despite the efforts of the guards. The women had imposed order through force, and through the brutal fact of their presence. Now they were bringing the leaders of the riot to their punishment. Vairon hoped that Harvus and Cassina had the strength to survive what was coming. He wasn’t sure he did.

This close to the golden women, Vairon felt as though he couldn’t breathe. He was shut down, empty, the psychic energy that tormented and defined him vanishing as if it had never been. Around the silent warriors, Vairon felt as if he had never been.

There were doors on both sides of the corridor. They were iron, lined with lead. Hexagrammic warding runes were inscribed upon them, and Vairon twitched with a stab of pain as he passed the ancient marks. Each rune was as wide as the door it covered, as if it named the inmate of the cell. Instead, it was a hand of judgement, reinforcing the prison by oppressing the powers of the psyker behind the iron. Even with these precautions, and with the dampening interference signal screeching perpetually through the prison deck of the ship, the suppression was not total. Power leaked out, weak and distorted. It was only the proximity of one of the silent women that temporarily shut abilities down completely.

Vairon caught glimpses of movement and pain through the barred observation windows in the doors. Despairing, garbled laughter rang out from one cell. The bars shivered in sympathy with the sound, and flakes of metal drifted up into the air, the laughter itself gnawing away at them. At another door, a man pressed his face against the window and gabbled syllables that sounded too rhythmic and precise to be pure nonsense. The air around him was thick and dark as if with the approach of a storm. In yet another cell, someone hurled themselves back and forth, colliding with the walls, screaming in madness, their figure blurred with superhuman speed.

The ceiling of the corridor was lost in the darkness above many levels of galleries, all running past more lines of doors. The howls of psykers, tortured by their powers and by the repression of those powers, entwined with the interference signal, the shrieks of humans and machines becoming a choir of horror.

At its end, the hall widened. The door there did not even have a window. The air before it shimmered with energy. A psy-shield surrounded this cell. Special measures were required to contain its prisoner. Despite the thickness of the door and the walls, Vairon heard moans coming from inside.

She was there, then. The woman he had seen when he was captured.

There was a line of trapdoors in the floor. The two silent warriors gestured, and the guards hauled Vairon towards one. A guard grabbed the plasteel ring in its centre and opened it with a sharp yank. Vairon stared into utter darkness. The guards lifted him by the arms, lowered him feet first into the shaft until he was entirely surrounded by the void, and then they dropped him. He fell a short distance, then landed hard on a cold iron floor.

The trapdoor to the oubliette slammed shut above him.

Vairon whimpered. He crawled around, banging into the walls of the narrow space. He curled up, surrounded by darkness, oppressed by the signal even here. The awful nothingness eased, though, and he knew that the silent women had left.

Now he had to wait. Wait, and try not to go mad. Wait, and hope that he had made the right decisions, that his visions had not led him astray.

In the dark, in the nothing, there was time to think. He remembered what had brought him here. Perhaps he would find more slivers of hope in the memories. And perhaps he would see the rune again. It was different from the ones on the doors. It did not oppress him. Its shape made him think of an angular serpent. He did not know what it meant, but he had seen it in his mind’s eye since childhood; it never left him entirely, sometimes so vivid he thought others could see it when they were near him. When it was at its strongest, it was a lure, a hook in his mind, pulling him on. He learned early on that its pull was guiding him. It called to him from the future. It was his destiny, mysterious but certain, convincing him that at some point in the years ahead, he would become something more than a low-grade Administratum scribe. He would sense what actions he would have to take to get closer to the rune, and he obeyed those impulses. More than once, doing so had kept him alive, and there had been plenty of moments, during the great panic on his home planet of Kithnos, when he would have been trampled under the rush of the terrified mob if he hadn’t followed the pull of the rune and ducked into doorways and up narrow alleys.

The panic was caused by the Warmaster. News had spread on Kithnos of the approach of his forces. World after world had fallen to his advance, their resources scraped up to power his ships, their populations enslaved or destroyed. The fear of his coming came like a bow wave ahead of his fleet. A massive evacuation was underway, though no one knew where refuge might be found, and there could not be enough ships to get everyone off Kithnos.

Following the instinct that was leading him closer to the rune of his destiny, Vairon had made it to a space port and come close to boarding one of the big lifters that was transporting civilians off-world. But then squads of the black guards had arrived, led by the silent women. They had taken him, and brought him to the Irkalla. But before they had done so, he had seen the woman who now was kept behind the psy-shield.

When she appeared, in all her horror, a few hundred metres from the entrance ramp to a lifter, it had seemed impossible that a creature such as she could possibly have lived until then. He thought perhaps that her mutation had only just manifested itself. It might have been brought to the surface by the great terror on Kithnos. The psychic energy unleashed by the fear had been strong. The rune had rarely been as searingly present in Vairon’s mind as during those days.

The woman had almost escaped. Many guards died trying to take her. Only the silent commanders had been able to subdue her.

Vairon had seen what she could do. He kept thinking of her as he was swallowed up by the timeless night of the Irkalla’s main prison hold. And when, very faintly, despite the screaming signal and the occluding psychic waves that buffeted the hold, the rune had appeared to him again, he had seen what he must do. He had convinced Cassina and Harvus to act with him. Harvus had comforted him in his early moments on the ship. Cassina had been one of the few other psykers around him who was still defiant, still looking for a chance to fight back. In whispered moments when the guards’ attention had been elsewhere, he had urged them to follow his lead. And they had.

Vairon could not see beyond the immediate outcome of the riot they would cause. He trusted in the rune as Cassina and Harvus trusted in him. He believed his destiny would show him what to do.

Only now, in the oubliette, he saw nothing. He could not picture the rune. There were no actions he could take here. It wasn’t long before he was screaming in the dark. He screamed until he was hoarse. He beat his fists against the walls. His muscles burned from being cramped for so long. Soon he was screaming again, though now the only sound he could make was a whistling rasp.

Then the shock came. A violent blow shook the entire hull. It hammered the ship, and something deep inside. Tremors threw Vairon around the tiny cell, and he heard the enormous, tearing cracks reaching into the interior of the ship. The shaking faded. As they did, Vairon felt the premonition of action return. He could see the rune when he closed his eyes, and it was much stronger than before. The interference signal had ceased, and his head felt clearer than it had ever been since his capture.

The trapdoor opened. The dim light of the corridor above was blinding after the darkness.

‘Aveth,’ Cassina called. ‘Take my hand.’

Vairon reached up. She grasped him. Harvus appeared and took his other hand. The two of them hauled him free of the oubliette.

The floor of the corridor was canted, and it had cracked wide open above other oubliettes. The walls leaned away from vertical, and above, in the upper prison galleries, came the sounds of doors slamming open and the howling of freed madness. The air was thick with smoke. Part of a wall had come down on the other side of the wide space of the corridors, and it had crushed the two guards who had remained on this level. One of them was almost entirely buried, a solitary gauntleted hand sticking out of the wreckage. The other body was mostly free, only the head and shoulders crushed beneath the slumped metal.

‘The ship is under attack,’ said Cassina.

‘By whom?’ Harvus wondered. He had the pinched frown of someone whose head throbbed with perpetual agony. There was always a small trickle of blood running from his left eye. He was empathic, and he could never fully shut out the pain that surrounded him.

‘As long as we stay out of their way, I don’t much care. This is the chance we need.’

‘You knew this was going to happen,’ Harvus said to Vairon.

‘I didn’t know what was going to happen,’ Vairon said. ‘I just knew what we had to do.’

‘Either way, things are moving,’ said Cassina. Her head was completely hairless. Her skin was flushed with an endless fever, made worse since the suppression systems had blocked the relief her body could get from the release of psychic energy. Now, tiny flames flickered along her arms. ‘What next?’

Vairon pointed to the sealed door. The psy-shield had shut down. ‘We open this.’

‘Whoever is behind that is dangerous,’ said Harvus.

‘I know who it is,’ said Vairon. ‘She is dangerous. But I think, if we’re careful, she will be more dangerous to the guards.’

‘You think.’

‘I know this is what we have to do.’

‘Then let’s hurry,’ said Cassina. She searched the guard’s body, found his iron keys and passed them to Vairon.

He unlocked the door. It took all three of them to pull it open.

In the cell beyond was a ragged woman. She was skeletally thin, the angles of her limbs so sharp they were like an insect’s. She had a mouth but no face. Where it should have been was only smooth flesh, without even a hint of the depressions of eye sockets or the protrusion of a nose. She had no ears. Lank hair framed an egg-shaped skull. There was only the mouth, the teeth unnaturally white, the jaws wide.

The door and the walls of the cell were thick, and Vairon discovered, his blood running cold, just how loud the mutant’s groans were to have been heard through them. He clenched his teeth against the sound that was the unity of grief and fear and madness. The moans cut through him, deep into his soul. It was all he could do to take another step inside.

Cassina gasped in horror, and Harvus covered his ears. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, no, no.’ He started to back away.

Feeling like he was marching against a gale, Vairon went towards the woman. She did not react to his presence. When he went around her, the force of her voice diminished dramatically. He could move freely again. Her psychic force was directional.

‘Come around here,’ he told the other two, and after a hesitation they obeyed, straining as he had, then sighing with relief.

‘What are you planning to do?’ Harvus asked, blood coursing from the corners of his eyes.

‘Guide her out of here,’ Cassina guessed.

‘Yes,’ said Vairon.

‘She walks before us.’

‘Exactly,’ said Vairon. He and Cassina each took one of the woman’s arms. Harvus stood directly behind her and gently pushed at her back. She staggered forward. Vairon and Cassina went with her. They left the cell and the groans grew louder. They never stopped. Even when the woman took a breath, it came as a rasping, chest-rattling noise, like stone on metal.

They made their way back down the corridor. The doors here were still shut, the slumping walls holding them closed forever. Vairon kept his eyes straight ahead, but the warding runes on the doors still burned his mind as he passed them. The woman’s groans grew louder.

‘Where are we heading?’ Harvus asked.

‘Up,’ said Vairon.

Cassina gazed into the smoke. The screams above were now being punctuated by the stuttering of boltguns. ‘Into that?’ she asked.

‘No.’ The rune was tugging Vairon forward to another path. ‘There are other stairs. We go through the main hold, then climb until we reach the main decks. We’ll find life pods and take them.’ That had to be what they were going to do. He could think of nothing else that made sense.

‘And then where?’ said Harvus.

‘Anywhere is better than here,’ Cassina told him.

Vairon was glad he didn’t have to answer Harvus. He couldn’t. But his destiny called, and he could not believe it would be to die in a life pod after it ran out of fuel and oxygen.

They kept moving, and Vairon ducked ahead of the faceless woman to open the door to one of the Irkalla’s great holds.

It was a vast space, holding thousands of psykers. When the guards had taken Vairon and the others away, prisoners had shuffled aimlessly in the dark. Others squatted, clutching their heads or wrapped their arms around themselves and rocked back and forth in their misery. The shielding and the occluding signals shut down most of their powers.

Now the psychic suppression measures had broken down, and cast the hold into bedlam.

The warding runes in the corridor had still had a muffling effect on Vairon, but now he was exposed to an explosion of psychic power. The earlier riot had been a prelude to the eruption that rocked the chamber. Psykers ran in the grip of power and madness. Guards tried to restore order, but they had abandoned all efforts to subdue. They beat with intent to kill, and those with laspistols fired them relentlessly. Their hate and fear poured into the psychic cauldron of the prison, intensifying the energy, adding to the frenzy of the riot. They were terrified of their unleashed prisoners, and the prisoners were just as terrified, and almost none of them were sane.

Harvus fell to his knees, clutching his head. Cassina groaned with the effort needed to contain her power. The flames jumped higher on her arms.

In the tumult, other flames burst unrestrained from psykers’ hands. They washed over guards and fellow inmates. Bodies flew through the air, caught in currents of clashing kinetic forces. Hallucinations became manifest, and monsters ripped from a hundred nightmares stalked the hold, flickering in and out of existence, the sight of them fuelling even greater frenzy.

Vairon couldn’t move. His mind was exposed to the thrashing, screaming, roaring concerto of horror that shrieked across material and psychic realities. For two beats of his heart, a space of time long enough for universes of illusions to rise and fall, Vairon was helpless before the onslaught. The smothering null he had experienced in the presence of the silent women was a blessing next to the war of psyches that now engulfed him. He could not think. The materium vanished from his sight as the inchoate psychic storm grew. It was consumed by flames made of flesh, by the void broken into heaving waves, and by the visible anger of a hundred minds – a stabbing incoherence of colour and movement that raked his soul like talons.

And then the faceless woman screamed.

Vairon was behind her, out of the line of fire. Even so, his hand tightened convulsively on her arm, and he had to fight down an almost overwhelming urge to flee. The scream tore through the hold like a scythe, like a hurricane, like the very claws of horror. It blasted through the raging of psykers. It immobilised prisoners and guards, and they answered the scream with their own that it tore from their depths. They screamed louder and louder, their jaws opening ever wider, the horror inside them seeking still greater voice. The sound of their screams was not loud enough. The screams had to be something greater. And so their flesh became part of it. Skin ran. It melted. It flowed down their skulls until, for a moment, they were a choir that mirrored the mutant, featureless faces with howling mouths.

When their screams were done, they fell. And the faceless woman began to take another slow, moaning breath.

After the riot, after the scream, the relative calm seemed like utter silence. There were moans and pleas from the psykers who had been at the edge of the cone of the scream, and lay writhing on the ground. Tormented minds scratched at Vairon’s, but so many had died, he could think clearly again. The guards were all dead, and no one standing dared approach the faceless woman.

Vairon pushed on as the woman screamed again. He was more prepared than he had been the first time, but the shriek was still an ordeal. He looked back at the others. Stricken eyes met his.

‘Why won’t she stop?’ Cassina moaned.

‘Her fear is too great,’ Harvus said slowly, sounding as if he were on the verge of collapse. He was having trouble speaking. ‘It won’t go away, easily. I don’t think it can ever leave her on this ship now.’

‘She’s our way out,’ said Vairon. ‘Who can stand against her?’

‘As long as she doesn’t face us,’ Harvus said.

They guided the woman to the exit in the aft wall of the hold. Harvus used one of the guards’ keys to unlock it, and they pulled it open. Beyond was an antechamber leading to the next hold. To the right was an iron staircase. The psykers began their climb.

They went up through more decks of nightmare and riot. They headed down galleries like those that had loomed above the oubliettes. They entered labyrinths of cells, and had to snake through twisting corridors designed to confuse the sensitive minds of psykers. The faceless woman’s screams cut a path for them, a thinning of the herd that made it easier to move through the psychic storms. Vairon tried to look away but the mesmerism of horror held his gaze.

There were choices of paths to take on every level. The rune shone in Vairon’s mind, showing him the way. He never hesitated, and he grew more and more confident that the call of destiny would lead them through all danger.

It was the silent women who worried him the most. There was no defence against the psychic void that radiated from them. Several times, he saw them from a distance, just as the rune pulled him another way. There they were, at the end of halls, or on an opposite gallery, cutting down the freed psykers with calm, merciless precision.

‘They’ll kill us all if they see us,’ Harvus said as they hurried the faceless woman through another door, onto another staircase. He did not have to specify what he meant by they.

‘They won’t see us,’ Vairon said.

‘We’re lucky there aren’t more of them,’ said Cassina.

‘Whoever has attacked the ship is a greater threat than any of us.’

They climbed higher, and the sounds of combat grew louder. Signs of damage multiplied, and bodies littered the decks. Most of them were psykers, but there were many dead guards too.

As the four escapees mounted yet another staircase, Harvus trembled with shock. ‘Why have they done this to us?’ he asked. ‘Why did they imprison us in this place? What did we do?’

‘We exist,’ Vairon said, thinking of the fear and the hate he had seen in guards’ eyes during his imprisonment. ‘That’s enough.’

The woman screamed. The narrow stairwell compressed the sound, turning it into iron claws that smashed at Vairon on all sides. His ears were still ringing, his heart still beating too fast when they pulled open the next door.

They had left the containment decks behind. They were on one of the main decks now. Smoke filled the dark hall. Lumen strips flickered, giving off no more than a dull, amber glow. Shadowy relief sculpture in the iron walls whispered of discipline and silence.

The din of combat was much closer now. The corridor ran lengthwise along the hull. There was an explosion somewhere forward of the psykers’ position. A red glow pulsed in the dimness.

‘No one around,’ said Harvus. ‘That’s lucky.’

‘We won’t be lucky long,’ Cassina said.

The faceless woman’s groan was building towards another shriek. Their movement was not going to be stealthy.

‘So we hurry,’ said Harvus. ‘But which way?’

The rune blazed in Vairon’s mind’s eye, stronger than ever before. He turned aft and pushed the woman ahead. ‘This way,’ he said.

The woman’s scream sounded down the seemingly endless length of the corridor.

As they hurried as best they could, Vairon kept hoping he would see alcoves leading to life pods. But every intersection was with just another hall to other regions of the deck. He moved straight ahead, trusting in the guidance of his fate.

The smoke grew thicker, and the sounds of battle grew louder in this direction too.

‘What are you taking us into?’ Cassina hissed.

‘There is no other path for us,’ Vairon insisted. Destiny called. The rune called.

The combat was terrifyingly close. As they approached the next intersection, they heard booted feet coming down the portside branch. Vairon froze. As the steps closed in, he felt smothering lead close in too. The rune, its terror and its guidance receded from him, dropping out of reach and out of sight.

One of the silent women thundered into the intersection. Her lower face was covered by her golden armour’s grille, and her eyes were terrible to behold – things of deep, merciless ice. Her head was clean-shaven except for a mane of red hair bound in a tight braid. She was wounded, the left side of her armour ripped open, and blood pouring from her waist, yet she was rushing towards the sound of battle.

She stopped when she saw the psykers, and levelled her boltgun. Vairon shrank back with Cassina and Harvus, instinctively sheltering behind the faceless woman. He could barely breathe. His psychic power was gone completely, so thoroughly shut down it was as if it had never existed. In its place there was emptiness, a vast abyss into which he was falling.

The mutant screamed. Except she did not. Her mouth was wide open, but the only sound that emerged was a hissing exhalation.

The silent woman opened fire. Bolt shells cut through the mutant, exploding her body to shreds. Vairon recoiled, jerking to the side and slamming against the starboard wall as blood spewed over him. The mutant vanished in the volley. Cassina and Harvus shuddered, nailed where they stood by the burst of shells. Their bodies disintegrated too, and Vairon was left alone.

He slumped to the floor, the numbness of despair overtaking him. Why would destiny lead him to die pointlessly here? Why not leave him to perish in the oubliette? That would have been kinder. He would have been spared the poor joke of hope.

The silent warrior turned the muzzle of the boltgun towards Vairon.

Before she could pull the trigger, a massive barrage struck from the starboard side of the corridor. She turned into the hail and fired back, but she was dead in seconds. The assault would have ripped apart a tank. The shells smashed craters in the port wall, and the air filled with the stinging smell of spent fyceline.

The numbness vanished. Vairon felt his mind open wide again, but the rune did not come for him. Instead, he was held by a gigantic sense of imminence. He held his breath. Fate had not lied. Fate was approaching. He heard more boots now, many of them, marching with the unstoppable heaviness of destiny. Vairon stumbled forward around the corner to meet it. He must show his readiness. He must show his gratitude.

Giants headed his way. They were clad in crimson armour and dark robes. Vairon stared at destiny made flesh. He saw the angular serpent rune on the armour of the lead warrior. He saw what he had been running towards all his life, and he knew that he would at last know what the rune meant.

Vairon’s relief melted away.

The giant in the lead turned his helmet to look at Vairon. A legionary. He nodded. ‘Here’s another,’ he said. His voice emerged as an amplified snarl, deep with hideous knowledge.

I don’t want to know, Vairon thought. I don’t want to know. But knowledge was descending upon him with a raptor’s claws.

The warrior stepped forward and seized him with one hand. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This one will serve. We’ll put him with the others.’

The twisted rune on the armour, surrounded by a hundred others, filled Vairon’s vision, and he sobbed. He longed for the mercy of the oubliette. He prayed for the quick death that had been stolen from him.

Before him, the abyss of life opened wide.

About the Author

David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novel The Damnation of Pythos and the Primarchs novel Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar. He has also written the Yarrick series, several stories involving the Grey Knights, and The Last Wall, The Hunt for Vulkan and Watchers in Death for The Beast Arises. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction, including the novella Mephiston: Lord of Death and numerous short stories set in The Horus Heresy, Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar universes. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Mharaid Morrison.

Abyssal © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. Abyssal, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78030-776-3

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.