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Hive Sibellus - Intro

Contributed by Adam France
Thursday, 07 August 2008

I first arrived at Hive Sibellus in the year of

our Emperor eight hundred and sixty nine of M41, and I remember it like
it was yesterday. I had come into the service of the famed Perturabo
but months before, after that great and terrible man saw something in
me which caused him to pluck me from my previous life and to make of me
a man reborn.

I had been serving as a mere junior naval officer

aboard His Divine Majesty’s Frigate Warspite, when we had been attached
to the emergency flotilla that Battlefleet Calixis had placed in
Perturabo’s hands for his personal campaign aimed at quelling the
Wytchships of Sleef, a terrible fleet of pirato renegades that had
latterly fallen under the command of a heretic rogue space marine known
as Theodryn the Excoriator. For three years I had been assigned by my
captain as liaison to the awe inspiring Inquisitor Lord, a figure who
seemed to me, and yet still seems to remain in my memories, as having
been something more than simply a man. Perturabo was a giant, a titan,
a superman, he fought at the front of every boarding action of the
campaign, he never shirked, though he had no need to put himself at
such risk.

Ah, but I ramble, I was talking of Sibellus, you’ll

forgive an aged man such as I, my wandering mind and old war stories.
Yes Sibellus, the gilded whore with a heart of filth, that’s what
Perturabo called it, I remember, as we slid down into the atmosphere
from space on my first visit. Perturabo was always the arch-puritan,
the sternly disapproving monodominant. He preferred the vaulted chapels
and cathedrals of Tarsus, and he did his best to avoid spending any
more time in Sibellus than he had to.

"Beware this place Simon."

He would admonish me sometimes, during those cherished and rare moments
when he would tutor me personally. "It is sunk in evil. A black
sickness lies in the very girders of it’s bones, the rockcrete and
ouslite flesh of it’s body, and most of all in the hearts of it’s
people ... the swarming masses that are become it’s blood. It’s tainted
blood."

Hmph. Perhaps I make him seem too grim? My lost master.

My beloved master. Oh yes, I loved him at least as much as a son might
love his father. Indeed far more than I had felt for my own paternal
forebear. Perturabo was not just some unthinking thug though, a simple
callous hammer to smash the heads of anyone who got in his way, far
from it. He taught me the sound basis of morals and theological
philosophy that has sustained me through the hard times of my later
life, and which without question saved me on more times than I would
care to begin to count. He could laugh too. Oh yes, no one believes me
these days when I tell them that. They look at his statue in the
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Tricorn, or that ugly and inaccurate stained glass monstrosity of a

monument at Icenholm on Sepheris, and they cannot imagine such a man
could ever do so frivolous a thing as laugh or make merry.

What?
The Inquisitor Lord who personally slew the daemon prince Cernrex, and
thereby ended the Six Generations War of Ganf, sit with his acolytes
making them chuckle and guffaw with mocking impersonations of Sector
officials? Never! Impossible! But he did though. I know, I was there,
and on other times besides. He had a wonderful laugh, ringing,
infectious. I just wish I could remember it clearly.

That’s the
thing y’see, when I try to picture him happy and pleased, for some
reason I can only bring to mind those teeth-clenchingly terrifying
times when we were side by side in battle, or when he was chastising
me, or warning me about some hazard or other. Well ... those times, and
the worse times that came later. Perhaps he haunts me, to ensure I am
allowed no comfort in him, even in memory. More likely it is simply my
conscience that pesters me. If that is I still retain such a rare gift
for a man of my calling, as a conscience would represent.

There I go again. I was talking of Sibellus wasn’t I?

You
may not know this, but it is agreed by the wise, that the word Sibellus
denotes a prophet or prophecy in the ancient human tongue of the
pre-Imperial Scintillans, and there is a legend, forgotten for perhaps
thousands of years now, but which is recorded in some old texts I have
seen. It begins, like all the best stories, a long time ago, ages past
before there were any hives on Scintilla, or any cities or towns either
come to that, and in this time a wandering fortune teller made his way
across the Divide Mountains out of the desert and down towards the sea.
He stopped for the night somewhere on the empty, then verdant, coastal
plains, and gazed into his crude camp fire, perhaps aware of the danger
he was in, perhaps not.

He had wandered, you see, into the

hunting grounds of the terrible, but beautiful, Queen Cobadia, who
claimed all the lands between the mountains and the sea as her own, and
the queen and her savage guards were out hunting nearby.

"Who is
it that dares make a fire on my grass?" Cobadia is said to have
demanded of her lieutenants, and when they could not answer she led
them at a gallop toward the sliver of firelight in the dark of the
night.

"Who are you that dares mark my land with fire?" Cobadia
raged, as her men surrounded the fortune teller, threatening him with
their guns and spears.
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"I am a Sibellus, your majesty." The

wanderer replied, looking up from his fire. "And if you will spare me
and grant me but one wish, I shall tell you what I have seen tonight in
this;" He gestured at his campfire. "This ... tiny scintilla of light
in the eternity of darkness that surrounds us."

The Queen’s
guards were shocked at the rogue’s effrontery, as they saw it, and
moved to club him down, and to batter him to death.

"Stop!" The Queen cried out however, at the last second before their blows fell. "This tramp’s nerve amuses me.
Let him speak."

"I have your word then Majesty?" The Sibellus asked, his eyebrow arched. "You will grant me my wish?"

The Queen slid down the flank of her mount and strode over to the man, her sword drawn.

"Agreed." She hissed. "If I am able to give it. But know this, I’ll still kill you after."

The Sibellus grinned, admiring her beauty openly.

"Look into the scintilla of flame with me then." He said. "And I shall show you."

With
that the Queen was granted a vision of a great and impossible city that
rose all around her, mighty spires soared up out of the earth,
mountains of metal and glass to challenge the peaks of the Divides,
utterly dwarfing the trees that studded the plain, and the night was
suddenly lit with a million million splinters of light.

"This
city will one day stand on this very spot." The Sibellus whispered to
the Queen. "It will become the greatest city beyond the mark of the
eye, and will be the seat of a realm so enormous you cannot comprehend
it."

"Will ... will my line rule this place?" The Queen gasped
in stunned awe, and the Sibellus grinned, perhaps seeing base pleasures
that lay before him.

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"Aye my Lady, for a time at least, before

as with all things your line will pass. But know this too, this city
which I show you, will carry a dark curse in it’s heart and it will be
here that the Empire of the Stars, which will dwarf even the realm this
city will command, will fall into utter disaster."

With that the

city was gone, and there was only the plain under a night sky. The
Queen fell to her knees and behind her the Sibellus waited, until the
beautiful woman turned to him and asked what he wanted of her.

"I
wish to marry you Majesty." He said calmly, savouring her still rather
dazed expression of offended dignity, and licking his lips lustfully.
"For it is our children who will one day found the city you saw tonight
in that scintilla of flame."

***

Perhaps I should hurry

onto my more picaresque memories and descriptions of the great hive
city and it’s environs, but I at least find it interesting that even
the very name and mythic origins of this place, which Perturabo swore
was evil to it’s core, is so bound and linked not just to ancient
prophesies of doom for the Imperium, the Star Empire of the legend, but
also to trickery and lasciviousness.

There are whole cycles of

legends that continue the tales of the Sibellus and his Queen by the
way, all forgotten now by the masses and the nobility of course. She
slew him eventually, it is said, just as she said she would, but only
after she bore him many children and founded the first true Scintillan
nation. Perhaps she was the one who named the city for him, perhaps she
missed him. Or more likely they’re just stories, forgotten stories now.
Except by the Inquisition of course.

- From the Private Journals of Inquisitor Simon Catafalk

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