Uprising, p.1
Uprising, page 1
Other great Necromunda reads from Black Library
KAL JERICO: SINNERS BOUNTY
Josh Reynolds
SOULLESS FURY
Will McDermott
ROAD TO REDEMPTION
Mike Brooks
TERMINAL OVERKILL
Justin D Hill
UNDERHIVE
An anthology by various authors
Includes the novella Wanted: Dead by Mike Brooks
VENATORS
A three-part audio drama
Justin D Hill, Matt Keefe & Josh Reynolds
KAL JERICO OMNIBUS
Includes the novels Blood Royal, Cardinal Crimson and Lasgun Wedding
Will McDermott & Gordon Rennie
FLESHWORKS
Lucien Soulban
SALVATION
C S Goto
SURVIVAL INSTINCT
Andy Chambers
BACK FROM THE DEAD
Nick Kyme
OUTLANDER
Matt Keefe
JUNKTION
Matthew Farrer
CONTENTS
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
Necromunda
THE BIRTH OF HUNGER
HIS TERRIBLE VISAGE
SLUDGE HARBOUR PAYBACK
LOW LIVES
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Epilogue
PARADISE
DEAD DROP
BANNER-JARL
LONG WAY HOME
THE LAST VOYAGE OF ELISSA HARROW
CUT AND GUT
About the Authors
An Extract from ‘Kal Jerio: Sinner’s Bounty’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
In order to even begin to understand the blasted world of Necromunda you must first understand the hive cities. These man-made mountains of plasteel, ceramite and rockrete have accreted over centuries to protect their inhabitants from a hostile environment, so very much like the termite mounds they resemble. The Necromundan hive cities have populations in the billions and are intensely industrialised, each one commanding the manufacturing potential of an entire planet or colony system compacted into a few hundred square kilometres.
The internal stratification of the hive cities is also illuminating to observe. The entire hive structure replicates the social status of its inhabitants in a vertical plane. At the top are the nobility, below them are the workers, and below the workers are the dregs of society, the outcasts. Hive Primus, seat of the planetary governor Lord Helmawr of Necromunda, illustrates this in the starkest terms. The nobles – Houses Helmawr, Cattalus, Ty, Ulanti, Greim, Ran Lo and Ko’Iron – live in the ‘Spire’, and seldom set foot below the ‘Wall’ that exists between themselves and the great forges and hab zones of the hive city proper.
Below the hive city is the ‘Underhive’, foundation layers of habitation domes, industrial zones and tunnels which have been abandoned in prior generations, only to be re-occupied by those with nowhere else to go.
But… humans are not insects. They do not hive together well. Necessity may force it, but the hive cities of Necromunda remain internally divided to the point of brutalisation and outright violence being an everyday fact of life. The Underhive, meanwhile, is a thoroughly lawless place, beset by gangs and renegades, where only the strongest or the most cunning survive. The Goliaths, who believe firmly that might is right; the matriarchal, man-hating Escher; the industrial Orlocks; the technologically-minded Van Saar; the Delaque whose very existence depends on their espionage network; the fiery zealots of the Cawdor. All striving for the advantage that will elevate them, no matter how briefly, above the other houses and gangs of the Underhive.
Most fascinating of all is when individuals attempt to cross the monumental physical and social divides of the hive to start new lives. Given social conditions, ascension through the hive is nigh on impossible, but descent is an altogether easier, albeit altogether less appealing, possibility.
– excerpted from Xonariarius the Younger’s
Nobilite Pax Imperator – the Triumph
of Aristocracy over Democracy.
THE BIRTH OF HUNGER
DAVID ANNANDALE
Valjun still thought of the lie they had told him on his first day. ‘You’ll get used to it,’ they had said. Every Corpse Guild veteran had uttered the same words, one after the other, as they had shown him, still a child, how to operate the bone saws, how to break the bodies down before they went into the grinders, how to pull out the organs for the macerator.
You’ll get used to it. You’ll get used to it. You’ll get used to it. The lie repeated again and again, always with the same dead tone, no matter who spoke, as if every member of the Corpse Guild was, in truth, an extension of the machines, a mechanical armature covered in flesh, and the only real humans were the dead things being rendered into corpse-starch. He had always known those words were a lie, even on the first day he had heard them. That first day, when the terror and the horror and the revulsion at what he was being shown and told he must do were so great, he had thought he would have to go mad. He had thought he would go mad because it was impossible to remain sane in this place. Impossible to see the butchered corpses and smell the sweetness of rot and the cloying, damp grasp of blood, and not scream from the soul. Impossible to hear the whine of the saws through bone and the squelch of intestines hitting the floor, and impossible to rend the dead apart without screaming, without going blind, without retreating into the shrieking dark of the mind forever. So yes, on that first day, even then, even then, when any kind of hope, however weak, would seem like salvation, he had recognised the lie.
He had thought about the lie every day since he had first heard it. There had been a time, a short time, when he had tried to believe, and at the beginning of each shift he had wondered, Am I used to it yet? Is it getting easier? At the end of each shift, as he had staggered back to cramped, dark quarters that were little more than a holding tank, the answer had been No, but for that time, that short time, he had dared to hope that perhaps the next shift would be a little less terrible, the horror a little less absolute.
Such a short time.
Valjun was old now, as old as anyone in the rendering plant ever became, older in spirit than in body, old enough that death was no longer a distant prospect, though it held no true promise of release. Death meant becoming meat for grinding. There was no true escape from the machinery of the Corpse Guild.
Valjun possessed a single point of pride, the one thing in his life that he could cling to that was not tainted by failure. He had never freed himself of the corpse-starch manufactory. He should have been rotated out many years ago, but either he had become invisible to the administrative machinery of the guild, or he had made the mistake of being too efficient and too ideal a worker. He knew he was trapped here forever, as if he were another tool, soldered to the rendering floor.
He would have been proud to have saved his daughter, Mnethac, from this life. He had failed at that too. She worked, gore-spattered, at the grinder, barely thirty feet away from him.
His only pride, his single victory, was that he had not perpetuated the lie. He had never promised anyone a surcease from horror. He had only ever spoken the truth about existence on the low rungs of the Corpse Guild.
When he spoke at all, that is. He saw less and less reason to talk with the passing years. There was nothing to talk about. Even to Mnethac. Perhaps especially to her, when the mere sight of her was another reminder of pain. There was only horror to be endured.
No. Wait. That was not quite true. There was more than horror to be endured. There was also Guervis.
There was the voice of the Corpse Guild overseer now, its sharp, nasal honk of command cutting through the wet, crunching, grinding clamour of the rendering floor. Valjun was operating a bone saw. He lowered the spinning blade onto the legs of the corpse he was working on, slicing through first at the shins, then at the knees. After each act of severing, he raised the blade to drag the body forward to section it again. Even the high-pitched shriek of metal and bone failed to drown out Guervis.
Valjun pushed up on the heavy lever, raising the huge, iron blade again. He paused before repositioning the gutted corpse, and glanced left at the overseer.
Guervis and three of his enforcement guards were moving slowly along the catwalk. The vast rendering chamber, one of the cluster that made up this corpse-starch manufactory, had a network of iron walkways and ladders providing access to the butcher machines. Guervis was working his way around the gutting stations. Workers toiled around tables that were ten feet on a side. They shoved the extracted organs into chutes beside each table, which carried the material down between the heavy, rotating cylinders of the macerator one level below, where they were crushed to pulp. Gutters in the tables poured the blood into pipes that fed into the machine as well, lubricating the process of destruction.
The emptied bodies were tossed onto wide trolleys. Other workers hauled the trolleys to the bone saw stations. Valjun and his fellow operators dragged the corpses onto the saw tables and carved them into chunks. They transferred the pieces into carts that would be collected in their turn and tipped into the grinder, a gaping maw filled with interlocking teeth.
Above and below Valjun, on other levels more than fifteen feet apart, the same tasks were repeated at identical machines. It never stopped. There was no day or night here, only rotating shifts, endlessly pushing the dead towards their final service as food for the living.
Guervis and his guards were moving from worker to worker, ignoring some and forcing others to stop what they were doing and be frisked.
‘What are they looking for?’ Marrika asked. She was much younger than Valjun, yet in only a short time, she had been aged by the work into the same wrinkled, knotted, withered husk. She was working the bone saw to Valjun’s right.
‘No idea,’ said Valjun.
‘Why the search? What does he think we could steal?’
Valjun shrugged. He lowered the saw, cutting the torso in half. Then he looked at Guervis again. He was curious, and that surprised him. He hadn’t thought he still had it in him to be curious. He hadn’t thought there was room for any emotions other than revulsion and horror. But Marrika was right. There was nothing to steal in this terrible place, unless it was the souls of those who slaved here, and those were stolen on the first day on the rendering floor. The pittance earned from the work was not a living. It was just a marker of pain. And there were no items of value here, nothing to smuggle out. Did Guervis think something was being smuggled in? Valjun could think of nothing that would be of concern to the likes of the overseer. Valjun didn’t think Guervis cared about anything as long as the quota of each shift was reached, and there were no disruptions in the manufactory. If the overseer’s well-being was assured, all else was beneath notice.
Valjun raised and lowered the saw, raised and lowered it, his movements automatic. He finished sectioning the corpse. Its head rolled freely back and forth on the table. He grabbed it by its hair and tossed it into the cart. He turned to the heap of bodies next to his station. He took the next on under the arms, and paused again, staring at Guervis, enjoying the feeling of hatred displacing horror.
The overseer was a useful figure for Valjun’s hate. Guervis, strutting in his Corpse Guild livery, did not suffer as the serfs did. He had never rendered a corpse in his life. He was a thin man who had grown paunchy in middle age, though he carried himself as if his self-image were still the wiry figure of his youth. His overseer’s uniform was a bit too large, as if to camouflage his stomach, a testament to the comforts he knew that Valjun was better off not even imagining. He ate more than he needed, and his life was not one of labour. He sat a lot. He had opinions. He received coin he had not earned. He benefitted from the misery of his workers for no other reason than the luck of his position.
Valjun resented Guervis and all of his kind. He loathed the man when he could not see him, and hated him even more when he could. Guervis strutted with authority based on nothing. It was rare that he deigned to come down into the noise and filth of the rendering chambers. Now here he was, looking as if he had constructed every machine himself, even while his eyes skipped about, avoiding the sights that surrounded him.
He and his guard interrupted the workers with no warning, no consideration of what they might be in the middle of operating. ‘He’s going to get someone killed,’ Marrika said. ‘Or himself.’
Valjun grunted in agreement. He entertained the thought of Guervis slipping and falling face first into the spinning blade of a bone saw. That would be something. It was also not to be. Fools like Guervis never hurt themselves.
Valjun heaved the next corpse onto the table, and brought the saw down on its lower legs. He kept half an eye on Guervis’ progress, making sure he would have a moment to pause when the overseer reached his position.
But Guervis did not have him searched. He looked Valjun over as he passed, his expression one of haughty satisfaction, and that was all. He paused for a longer look at Marrika, but made no demands of her either, nor did he of any of the other bone saw operators.
Is he bored? Valjun wondered. Did he already find what he was looking for?
Apparently not. He rounded suddenly on the workers heaving chunks of bodies into the grinder.
‘Stop what you are doing!’ he shouted into the ear of Hesh, enraged that the worker had shown no sign of being aware of his important approach. The younger man jumped, startled.
He lost his footing.
He tipped forward, flailing, grabbing at anything.
His hand clutched at the sleeve of the worker beside him.
Mnethac’s sleeve.
Valjun’s eyes widened, horror swamping his hate in an instant as he saw his daughter’s life teeter on the point of her balance.
Mnethac threw herself backwards and tore loose. Hesh shrieked and toppled over the raised lip of the maw and down into the grinder. The machinery ground hard against the strain of a full body. A fountain of blood spurted upward. Gears whined, pumping smoke. Hesh’s scream cut short, and after a few moments, the machine’s normal rumble returned.
Guervis stepped back, wiping at the blood on his cheek. He marched away quickly, and did not search anyone else until he had reached the floor below. Valjun watched him go, the burst of relief creating room for the hatred again.
What are you looking for? Was it worth what you just caused?
For Guervis, no doubt. For Guervis, Hesh was now worth more. He was product, and did not have to be paid.
Still. Still. Guervis had killed a man, and was still looking for nothing that Valjun could imagine.
What is it? What are you seeking?
Guervis returned to the overseer’s quarters after a few more spot checks, and left the rest of the search to the guards.
‘What should we be on the lookout for?’ they had asked.
‘You’ll know it when you see it,’ he had replied, emphatically enough, he hoped, to disguise his own ignorance.
He sat down at his desk. He wiped his cheek again, reflexively, though the blood was gone.
His office was small and dark, but it was clean. It was located above the highest of the rendering chambers. There were no windows. He did not enjoy watching the Corpse Guild’s work. He did not like going to the work floors more than was necessary. Until today, he had not felt it necessary at all. But the order had come, bearing the heraldry of the Lord Helmawr, the order commanding increased and rigorous vigilance in the Corpse Guilds manufactories.
Vigilance against what? The order, delivered by servo-skull, did not say. So he had gone looking, for anything that seemed wrong, for anything his workers should not have.
He had found nothing. These people had nothing. What could he have found?
The only result of the search had been that stupid accident. That was not his fault. The man had not been paying attention. He had been worse than oblivious. He had been disrespectful. He had to have known Guervis was there. He had turned his back on a superior. It was his arrogance and his carelessness that had killed him. Not Guervis startling him.
He wiped at his cheek again, trying to remove the memory of blood, and the sight of the living body being crushed to mulch. He should not care about the face of that fool. He should not care about the explosive agony that lingered on the features after he was already dead. He should not think about seeing the face compressed and shredded by the toothed cylinders of the grinder.
He scratched his cheek until it hurt.
Just before Valjun’s shift ended, the grinder started screaming again. Hesh’s full body had been too much after all, straining parts of the rusting, centuries-old mechanism until they broke. The machinery was simple, and there were replacement parts in storage warehouses. There was no need to send for a tech-priest. This was part of the routine of the rendering floor. The machines died too, but they could be resurrected. They had value. But this grinder would be inactive for a few hours.
When he turned his bone saw over to his replacement, Valjun walked past the stilled grinder. He was still thinking about Guervis’ search, trying to imagine what its purpose was. What are you looking for? His eyes fell on the motionless cylinders. On the blood dripping from the interlocking spikes of their teeth. On the shreds of flesh clinging to them, the little pieces of Hesh, his brief memorial before the grinding started again.
