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Pain Engine – Extract

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Pain Engine

Chris Thursten

The path begins at the Feast of Keening Razors.

The brutalities and death games of the arena followed a pattern of escalation – lethal competition orchestrated with an artist’s eye and an epicure’s palate. Terrorised alien captives were harried into the path of scything Hellions; these same were then dragged to the ground by the impossible acrobatics of the wyches of the Razor. My archon, Torakhis, bade his Trueborn forward and then halted the order, his attention arrested by the weapon brought forth by his rival, Raidmaster Nahaerian.

Her contribution to the Feast was a single combatant – a Pain Engine, hunchbacked and barbed, whose glowering aspect drew all eyes inward. It was a singular thing, redolent with suffering, and though it is rare for a haemonculus to acknowledge the mastery of another’s work, I did so. Nahaerian’s herald stepped forward atop her twin-decked barge and projected a single word:

SEETHE.

The gathered throng erupted and the fray that followed was a paean to violence. My archon shuddered at the affront of it, but he could not deny the Engine’s potency and nor could I. To the craftless, this was a single moment of overwhelming ecstasy. To me, it was but a crack of light through a doorway. The path began at the Feast of Keening Razors, and I felt all the joy and agony of fate diverted.

Now, centuries later, I feel nothing.

I descend the final step and face a wall engraved with the master’s sigil. Aside from that jagged mark, its surface is smooth and flat, a slab of dark metal that pinches across the twisting pathway like a suture.

Why do I not sense it?

This is a lost, lightless place, a cavity scarcely fit to die in. Yet it is the privilege of the haemonculus to curate sensation beyond such mundanity, to trace the unseen patterns of a murderous universe and bend them to new purpose. A teeming array of sensor-grafts and spliced nerves blossom upon my palms and I direct them to the sigil – and then beyond, to an orbital ridge, molecule-thin, that indicates the presence of a hidden aperture.

Where is the agony that made thralls of Halfborn and archons alike?

My senses bared, I strain beyond the portal for the soul-scent of the Pain Engine called Seethe, whose secrets I have pursued across a graveyard’s fill of lifetimes. Nothing.

Yet.

I know that I am upon the final threshold. Knowledge, cruelly won, has permitted me to undertake this last journey into the black depths of Commorragh. At every step, a tithe has been levied – and I have spent lavishly, goading my followers forward into the myriad horrors that protect the hidden paths of the haemonculi. This is, after all, the expense for which they were spared.

It has gratified me, in the course of the descent, to elevate this grim transaction to poetry. When a flesh-crafted terror uncoiled itself from its dank eyrie and set about us, starved and soul-mad, I bade my kabalites to hand their weapons to the menials in my service and withdraw. We slipped away under the cover of howls and splinter-fire, the shriek of blades drawn in darkness, the struggle and shock of death-in-shadow. I drank the kabalites’ disquiet as something like martial privilege was granted to the lowest among us at their expense.

The loss of their armaments unsettled them, and I sensed the cracks in their resolve as they returned to their posts at the vanguard of our expedition. There, the bitterness of their obligation to me was slowly replaced by thoughts of an archon’s favour upon their return. Uneasy minds peered out beyond the darkness of the path and quieted themselves with dreams of the raids to come. They heard the shuddering wail of skimmer engines, felt the kick of a new rifle, inhaled blood and pain under bright, burning skies.

My kabalites did not feel the soft press of armoured boots upon a bed of swollen little bulbs, nor did they taste the shimmer in the air. We watched as they blundered duty-blind into the perils of the master’s garden, then we diverted our path and left them foetal in the darkness, lost to creeping fantasia, fallen irrecoverably from the ladders of power.

As for my acolytes, those who would shadow me on the master’s path – for these bright ones I reserved the most ignoble ends. I let the gleam of ambition linger in their eyes long enough to see it bisected by red lines of sprung monofilament. I heard the unspoken treacheries on their breath as it was crushed from them under the weight of crudely set rockfalls. I waited long seconds when the ground gave way beneath them, and I let the squalid report of their terminal descent stand as the final word on aspiration.

It is in this way that I have made the path my own, taken the snares set to slay me and incorporated them into my own art. It is the fatal error of students to assume that these final steps lead to the master – they must be taken as the master or they must not be taken at all. As I near the hidden domain of Seethe’s creator, I do so alone, in the creator’s stolen image.

I drift closer to the doorway, sensors at high baud, alert to threat. Nothing. Null. The walls are thick and sense-dead. The master’s chamber could draw power from the effluent of the blazing Ilmaea and I would not know it.

Perhaps this is also why I do not sense the Pain Engine. Its power marked me, I acknowledge, as it hung low and heavy over the fighting pit. A brute weapon should not radiate such delicate grief, nor such ruinous ecstasy. We each felt it – the ravenous Halfborn pressing to the arena’s edge, the Heketarii dying upon the blood-thick sands, the archon at my side. The shock of Seethe’s potency slipped through layers of vicious self-government and spoke something to my soul. My ingress to its creator’s domain is a gesture returned.

I extend a grafted anterior limb to the sigil and push. I permit the stolen flesh some autonomy for a moment, allowing its subdued nerves to flare to life, alert not just to the possibility of death but the myriad forms that death might take – the acid heat of a disintegration charge, the tang of a concealed blade, the hard-coursing blood of a lurking assassin.

Nothing. The door communicates only the weariness of old metal. It yields. It is open.

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Warhammer horror

A Black Library Imprint

First published in Great Britain in 2022.
This eBook edition published in 2022 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Pain Engine © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2022. Pain Engine, Warhammer Horror, 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.
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ISBN: 9781804071861

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