Brian Craig - Pawns of Chaos

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++Priority Transmission: Coding/Delta/Rouge++
++Recipient: Loyal Imperial Commanders – as designated
by Commissariat, The Librarius Staff, Inquisitor Baptiste
& Canoness Arrea.++
++Subject: Traitors and Executions++
++Author: [Rus]Incubus – Scrivenor-in-attendance to
Inquisitor Nikolay Vinogradov++
++Thought for the Day: To cheat is both cowardly and
dishonourable++
Attention all loyal citizens of the Imperium!!!
Scanning of sacred books is a mortal sin!
*********
Whispered by Tzeentch, Lord of Hidden Knowledge.
Inspired by Slaanesh, Master of Forbidden Pleasures.
Resist foul machinations of the Dark Gods and buy
books from the Black Library.
***********
Thought of the Day: All traitors will be executed
without mercy and compassion!
Inquisition are watching YOU!
A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL
PAWNS OF
CHAOS
Brian Craig
^
PROLOGUE
IT WAS NOT until he saw the wall dissolve that Zarcon realised
how stupid he had been to imagine that men like him could
possibly make a stand against the invaders. The man to his left
was blown apart by a shot that went clean through the stones,
and then through him. The billowing grey dust seemed,
absurdly, to be mopping up the blood and shredded flesh in
mid-air.
The man to his right died barely a second later, having raised
his head above the parapet to measure his throw. A searing
flash of light drilled a hole through his right eye a moment
before bits of his brain sprayed through an improbably neat
exit-wound above the nape of his neck. The snapping sound
which might or might not have been the discharge of the
weapon responsible had arrived a split second later. By then
the dead body had already begun to fall back, its lifeless limbs
crumpling.
The firepot which the defender had been intending to hurl
down at the enemy truck went the wrong way, but the arm
holding it had lost its strength so abruptly that the primitive
bomb dropped to the sandy ground with a dull thud. The stone
8 Brian Craig
jar cracked. The wick set fire to the oil that leaked out. It looked
more like a broken lamp than a weapon of war.
That's all we are! Zarcon thought, his mind in a panicked
whirl. Not fighting men - just pathetic broken lamps, matching our
light against the blaze of the noonday sun.
The ugly cloud that had been blasted out of the first dying
man's shattered body stretched as far as a dozen feet behind
him before beginning to settle and dissipate. Zarcon could
make out two severed legs, and an unsightly lump that might
once have been a head, but the arms had been catapulted out
of sight, while the torso and abdomen had both been ripped
into ridiculously tiny shreds.
The men further away to Zarcon's left and right were faring no
better. Those who had not been blasted apart by bolters or holed
by lasguns were in the process of being crushed and maimed by
falling stones. Some of them were screaming, but not many. No
one was running away. It had all happened too fast.
Zarcon realised, far too late, that the only reason he was still
standing, still able to see what was happening to either side of
him for a few moments longer, was that a section of wall in
front of him, no more than four or five feet wide, had been
haphazardly spared by the first careless sweep of the heavy
bolter.
He knew that the respite was momentary, and that the sec-
ond sweep would slash him down as easily as the first had cut
down his companions.
He had never, even in his wildest nightmares, imagined such
destructive force. He had been told that there were such things
as bolters and lasguns - and he had been told what they could
do - but his imagination had been unable to turn the words
into accurate images.
He knew now how foolish he had been to think of the wall
as a real defence. It had seemed a protected vantage point, from
which he and his fellows could rain down missiles upon the
invaders' vehicles, but it was not. There was not a wall in
Culzacandra that could provide adequate cover against massed
Imperial firepower.
This was not a skirmish; it was a massacre. If it were to be
conducted on these terms, the defence of Gulzacandra would
not be a war but a mere folly: an endless series of savage sacri-
fices offered to the hungry war-machines of Kalazendra.
Pawns of Chaos 9
Zarcon had known all along, of course, that the missiles the
defenders possessed - arrows, rocks, javelins and firepots -
were pitiful by comparison with the guns the enemy possessed.
While the enemy were numbered in their thousands, though -
tens of thousands at the most - and the defenders of
Culzacandra in their hundreds of thousands, he had clung
naively to the opinion that no matter how many battles the
defenders lost, the invaders could not possibly win the war.
Now he knew different.
Pie had been told that the invaders had only a few bolters,
and only a few lasguns, and that the vast majority of their
troops would be armed with cruder weapons churned out by
the factories of Kalazendra. But he knew now that even a hand-
ful of bolters and lasguns would be more than enough to take
the invaders into the deepest heart of Gulzacandra.
Once they had taken the city of Rintrah and the port of
Chemosh, it would be impossible to be rid of them. Even if
they exhausted every last bolt shell and every last power pack
in attaining that primary objective, they would be impossible
to dislodge once they had the heartland. What could possibly
stop them? Not men like him, that was certain. Not even
magic, of any kind to which he had ever been a witness.
Determined to make one last effort before he fell, Zarcon
hurled his own javelin with all his strength - but even though
he knew that he would die within seconds, he could not quite
bring himself to expose his head long enough to take proper
aim. He heard the head of the javelin strike solid metal, and
knew that it had bounced harmlessly from the vehicle's
armour.
Even if he had taken the risk of raising his head, it was
unlikely in the extreme that he could have done better, but as
he saw the last section of the wall implode, and knew that he
was about to be torn to pieces by the blast, he cursed himself
for his failure.
Once he was dead, of course, it did not matter at all what the
last thought to cross his mind had been, or the last emotion to
stir his heart. It would not have served Gulzacandra or
Gulzacandra's god any better had he died with a prayer on his
lips, or with the futile hope in his heart that the invaders' inten-
tions were not as violent as the Wisdom of the Dreamers had
prophesied.
10 Brian Craig
It did not matter, as Zarcon's own severed head bounced on
the ground, haloed with bloodstained dust, whether his fate
were his alone or far more, a symbol of the fate of an entire
continent. There was no one left to see it fall but the implaca-
bly advancing gunners, who had seen such things happen far
too often to read more than the slightest significance into any
single death.
Had they had a better idea of what they were, or what they
were supposed to stand for, the invaders might have thought
Zarcon's death even less significant still. For what could the
death of one mere man on one mere world possibly mean, in
the context of a battleground that extended across four hun-
dred billion stars, and a war that might last a billion years and
never be won?
ONE
DATHAN WAS sriTiNt; under a dombeny tree on Metalion Hill
when he noticed the great plumes of dust way out in the Amber
Waste. As soon as he saw them he knew that there was some-
thing odd about them. He had often seen riders approaching
the village from that direction, usually horsemen moving in
small groups at a trot or the gallop, or sedate pack-trains of
camules. Twice he had seen camule-trains moving much faster,
pursued by brigands, but even they had not stirred up as much
dust as whatever was approaching now.
It must, he told himself uneasily, be some kind of freak wind.
Perhaps it was the beginning of a violent but localised storm,
or even an earthquake.
Dathan had only lived fifteen years, and had never experi-
enced an earthquake, but he had heard of them. He had lived
through a hundred dust-storms without ever seeing one like
this, but he had never actually seen the start of a storm, so he
could not be certain that they did not begin in this fashion.
Either way, the phenomenon was new and deserved close
attention, so he stood up and stepped out of the shadow of the
dombeny's crown, shading his eyes against the mid-moming
sun as he peered into the distance.
11
12 Brian Craig
The Amber Waste was awkward territory for travellers. The
crystalline sand-particles that rendered the land incapable of
growing crops were often sharp as well as hard, and if a partic-
ularly nasty specimen became trapped between a horse's shoe
and hoof it could pierce the homy part of the hoof and prick
the living flesh within. The seemingly soft-footed camules,
which had always lived in the wastelands rather than sharing
the territories occupied by the human colonists, were better
equipped by nature to resist such penetration, but even they
preferred the higher and harder ground that was regularly - if
rather ineptly - swept by the wind. For this reason, there were
trails across the Amber Waste that every experienced traveller
followed. The plumes of dust that Dathan was watching were
fanned out broadly and indiscriminately, so they had to be
some kind of weather formation.
Or had they?
Dathan began to feel a peculiar sick feeling deep in his stom-
ach, and he couldn't help wondering whether it might be a
kind of premonition. He had never had a premonition before
- and not for want of trying - so he didn't know what they
should feel like. He had often asked Hycilla, who had them all
the time, but she had never been able to give him a clear
answer. Hycilla had so many premonitions that Pater Saltana,
the local priest, had declared her a sensitive and marked her
out for early initiation into the Mysteries - but that had come
as no surprise to anyone, given that her family was said to be
distantly related to that of Gavalon, the most powerful coven-
master in all Gulzacandra.
Dathan and Hycilla had been close friends when they were
children, but that was because they had been bom within days
of one another. Now they were almost adults they were bound
to grow apart, and would have been directed towards different
goals even if Hycilla had never shown the least talent for wise-
dreaming.
The ochre dust-clouds continued to rise higher and higher,
billowing and spiralling in such an uncanny fashion that
they seemed almost alive. Occasionally Dathan caught a
glimpse of a half-formed shape suggestive of a leering face,
but such semblances of order flattered only to deceive, dis-
solving into confusion as soon as he tried to make sense of
them.
Pawns of Chaos 13
Long ago, so legend had it, the Amber Waste had been a very
different place - not a desert at all but a fabulous land so full of
life that the very rock had been animate. The 'amber', shards of
which gave the waste its name, was said to be the remnant of
some exotic life-form, half-plant and half-animal, which had
dominated the landscape before the human colonists arrived. It
fed on multitudinous creatures too tiny to be seen by human
eyes and provided food in its turn for all kinds of exotic walkers
and flyers, of which only a handful that were useful to man -
including camules - had been allowed to survive. Perhaps it was
true and perhaps it wasn't; there was no way to know, even
though wise-dreamers sometimes claimed to have returned to
that magical time while they slept, to see the world as the first
humans had seen it - except, of course, that according to those
same wise-dreamers, the first humans in the world were not the
very first, but only new arrivals from some other world, which
had in turn been seeded by humans from elsewhere.
According to the Wisdom of the Dreamers, the stars in the
Great Cluster were suns, with worlds of their own. Dathan
doubted this. Given that the stars moved like coloured fireflies
in the night sky, how could they be suns? If they really were dis-
tant suns, similar to the great light that stood above him in the
sky, why was there so much strange colour and confusion in
the shades of night? The Wisdom of the Dreamers undoubt-
edly had much wisdom in it, but Dathan had begun to wonder
of late whether his ancestors had contrived to sift out all that
was merely dreaming, of the kind that anyone might do.
He had, of course, kept such thoughts entirely to himself; it
was direly unwise to challenge Wisdom that even coven-mas-
ters revered.
As he realised at last what he was looking at, the hand that
had been shading Dathan's eyes began to tremble.
Premonition or not, the sick feeling in his stomach had been
right to give him warning.
The plumes of smoke were not the result of some freakish
limited storm, nor were they the produce of an earthquake.
They were like any other plumes of dust, raised by the passage
of travellers - but these newcomers weren't riding horses or
camules. They had vehicles.
The travellers' tales that told of the wondrous vehicles of
Kalazendra had never seemed to Dathan to belong to the same
14 Brian Craig
class as those legends which spoke of the time before there
were men on this world or in these distant reaches of the Great
Cluster. Tales of wondrous vehicles that could cross deserts
were only a few generations old at most, and whether or not
the men who had arrived on the world to fuel such stories were
its second wave of invaders or its first, there was little doubt
that they were invaders. These men had never crossed the
Amber Waste in force before, but they were crossing it now, and
one thing upon which every rumour that spoke of them agreed
was that when invaders like these arrived, they would not come
as traders, let alone as friends.
Dathan was terrified, but he knew that he had to fight his ter-
ror. He was fifteen years old, and the one thing that frightened
him more than any other was the possibility that he might
seem childish to others. He was an adult now, and he had to
act and react like an adult. Yes, he could let his fear show - but
only if it seemed like mature concern, born of a dutiful worry
for others rather than a paralysing and crippling dread of what
might happen to him. Yes, he could run, but he must not sim-
ply run away, screaming and sobbing. He must run to the
village, waving his arms so that no one would know that his
hands were trembling, and he must shout a warning in a voice
that was clear and loud and forceful.
So he turned and ran westwards, back towards the village,
waving his arms and calling the alarm in a voice that was
clamorous without ever quite falling into hysteria. The fact
that he was moving helped him, channelling the energy of his
fear into appropriate action and away from merely childish
expression.
Although travellers who were passing through it some-
times called the village Odienne, to Dathan and everyone
else who lived there it was merely 'the village', just as the
world was merely 'the world'. It was where he and everyone
else he knew had always lived. He had expected that he
always would live there, as a journeyman of some sort: a car-
penter, perhaps, a roofer or even a baker. His own father was
long-dead so could provide him with no craft to follow, so he
had become everybody's helper and nobody's apprentice, but
the village looked after its own and a firmer place would
have been found for him soon enough. Now, all of a sudden,
he had to face the possibility that the map of his life would
Pawns of Chaos 15
have to be torn up, and that the village might be reduced to
rubble before the sun set.
He was surely entitled to be terrified. Was this not the most
terrifying possibility imaginable?
The Imperium!' he cried, as he ran pell-mell down the slope
towards the gap between the Negram farm and the forge. The
Imperium is coming!'
Dathan had little idea what 'the Imperium' was, but he had
been taught from infancy that the Imperium was the ultimate
enemy, and that the worst thing in the world that could ever
happen to his village or to the entire land of Culzacandra was
that the Imperium would come. He had been taught, too, that
he would know the Imperium when it came, because the
Imperial forces would come in vehicles. So large had the bug-
bear loomed in his imagination that he had always conceived
of the vehicles in question arriving in thousands, manned by
giants twice as tall as ordinary men, but the fact that they were
far less in number did not matter.
Just speaking the ominous words 'the Imperium' aloud
seemed to make the threat fully real, and the sound of the syl-
lables made tears rise into Dathan's eyes.
The Imperium!' he howled, trying with all his might to con-
vert all of his ravening fear into furious anger. 'Imperial
vehicles are coming across the wastes! They'll be here within
the hour!'
His shouts provoked an instantaneous response as he ran
past the forge and the blacksmith's cottage towards the
thatched houses on the road to the village square. The smith
must have been in the stables behind the forge, because his
brazier had not been lit - nor had the fires beneath the kilns
which the village wives used to harden their pots. Most of the
people who came running from the smaller houses were
women and children, because their menfolk were at work in
the fields, but when Dathan came closer to the square, where
the houses were made of wood instead of earth, with sealed log
roofs, the craftsmen left their tools and followed their wives.
Caborn the carpenter and Relfthe baker ran past Dathan, obvi-
ously intent on making sure that what he had seen really was
an Imperial force, but neither challenged him as they went.
They allowed him to continue on his course, shouting his
chilling warning.
16 Brian Craig
Dathan knew that if anyone who heard his shouts doubted
the truth of them, that doubt would not be allowed to stand in
the way of quick action. The mere possibility that it was true
would be enough to set all everyday matters aside. Every man
who had a weapon would run to fetch it, and every man who
had never had money with which to buy a machete or a crafts-
man's bow would go to fetch a club or a pitchfork. There was
little enough money in the village - the resident craftsmen had
to make almost everything that was needed by its people - but
the harvest had been good enough in five out of the last eight
years to allow the bigger landholders to sell their surpluses over
in Mancip and Elvenor, so the village's stocks of keen blades
were by no means restricted to its spades and kitchen-knives.
The Imperium, it was rumoured among menfolk whose con-
versations Dathan had occasionally overheard, had guns that
shot forth lightning and liquid fire. It was also said, however,
that the Imperial masters had sunk mines in Kalazendra and
built factories there to turn out guns of much simpler design
which fired metal bullets, and mechanical bows that fired darts
like shortened arrows.
Every child in Gulzacandra was told that the Imperium's
wheeled metal vehicles could move faster than a galloping
horse, but it was also said that the Imperium was training cav-
alry to use lances, and conscripting sucars from the far south to
turn the loxodonts they used as massive beasts of burden into
living engines of war. From which it seemed to follow, so far as
Dathan could deduce, that the Imperium could not have very
many guns that shot forth lightning and liquid fire, nor very
many wheeled vehicles, nor the means of easily making more.
In which case, Dathan had to suppose, there was a possibil-
ity that the Imperium could be fought, even with the crude
kinds of weapons that hunters and farmers kept. Perhaps there
was even a possibility that the Imperium might be beaten, if
only there were enough hunters and farmers in Gulzacandra to
force the invaders to use up their best resources and make them
fall back on makeshift reinforcements.
The Imperium!' Dathan yelled again and again, as he ran
through the square into the lane between two other rows of rel-
atively mean dwellings, heading for the huts whose inhabitants
were said to keep cleaner straw for their animals than they did
for themselves. Even the disreputable were entitled to be
Pawns of Chaos 17
warned, and even men who were said to be too fond of the ale
their wives brewed to be good labourers would fight with all
the ferocity they could muster to defend their homes.
By this time, Dathan had delightedly discovered that his fear
really was turning to anger, and that the excitement pumping
through his blood as he ran was three parts fighting instinct
and only one part impulse to keep on running. Take arms
against the Imperium!' he cried - and others were crying the
same, now that Cabom and Relf had seen what he had seen.
Alas, Dathan's instincts could not keep that brave balance
once he came in sight of his own petty hovel and saw his
mother hurrying to meet him. Other people called his mother
Ora, but to him she was simply his mother, and in her presence
no words were enough to stir aggression. In her presence, he
would always be a child, even if he grew to the ripe old age of
forty and she somehow clung on to life long enough to reach a
venerable fifty-five.
'Dathan!' she shrieked. She had made no effort at all to hold
back her tears and negotiate her terror into wrath. She did not
ask him whether it was true, because she trusted him. She had
heard him coming while he was still at the forge, and she was
already thinking of the next move - but her mind was on flight,
not fight.
摘要：

++PriorityTransmission:Coding/Delta/Rouge++++Recipient:LoyalImperialCommanders–asdesignatedbyCommissariat,TheLibrariusStaff,InquisitorBaptiste&CanonessArrea.++++Subject:TraitorsandExecutions++++Author:[Rus]Incubus–Scrivenor-in-attendancetoInquisitorNikolayVinogradov++++ThoughtfortheDay:Tocheatisboth...

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