"There is no need to dissemble here, I know why you have come. You have come for something real, something unique, something to drown your boredom in spilled blood and deafen you with the wild beating of your own living heart. You have come to find the Beast House. Now tell me, what's your pleasure?"
- —Ryrin Night Eye, Mistress of Beasts
A group of xenos monstrosities like those employed by the Beast House in their blood sports.
The Beast House is an interstellar criminal syndicate that deals in the trade of exotic xenos creatures and holds bloody arena combats between them for the entertainment of its clients. It is active in the Calixis Sector of the Segmentum Obscurus and is a target for eradication by the Ordo Xenos of the Inquisition.
In the shadowy entertainment zones on the edge of underhives from Scintilla to Solomon and beyond in the Calixis Sector, the name "Beast House" is synonymous with extreme blood sports, arena combats, and the xenos-creature trade. Likewise, many jaded sons and daughters of the wealthy great houses also know the term through wicked and scandalous tales of hunts and monstrous things forbidden by the restrictions of Imperial law -- all provided for discerning clients at enormous expense.
Stories and rumours about the Beast House have been doing the rounds, high and low, for so long most believe that the name itself is little more than a traditional effectation for those who deal in the blood sport trade. The popular belief held by most is that if an original Beast House once existed, it is now long gone and that others have long since sought to cash in on the legend to further their own reputations. This is a view shared by many local enforcer groups, most criminal groups, and until relatively recently by the Adeptus Arbites and the Ordo Xenos. However, recently several incidents have come to light casting a far darker pall over the Beast House and its secrets.
The Ordo Xenos and the Calixis Sector Arbites are slowly recognising that there is a dark thread connecting those who run the blood arenas and those who deal in xenos beasts. In the last few solar decades, encounters and reports of dangerous and proscribed xenos-predators appearing in illegal arenas or the hands of depraved recidivists have steadily increased in the sector's core worlds and on Scintilla in particular.
Subsequent investigations into these occurrences pointed time after time to the so-called Beast House. Further investigation also turned up rashes of disappearances among the poor and the underclass in the areas where a particular Beast House was said to exist, rumoured links to smuggling rings, murder for hire, strange sightings of creatures, and other peculiarities.
Yet nothing was concrete enough to show an overarching threat. It was only when Inquisitor Layvan and his retinue disappeared while investigating the Beast House on Fenksworld that the full attention of the Ordo Xenos came to bear on the organisation, and it has not liked what it has begun to uncover.
Currently, Inquisition-backed elements are conducting a widespread series of covert investigations into the Beast Houses on several worlds, but they have met with little success in penetrating its higher echelons. However, alarm at their discoveries to date is spreading due to the Beast House's links to many of the wealthy houses and criminal gangs across the Golgenna Reach and Markayan Marches sub-sectors and the suspicion that extreme and dangerous alien corruption lies at the Beast House's heart.
In direct response to ongoing events and with characteristic subtlety, the Ordo Xenos is doing its best to uncover the full extent of this xeno-crime before it takes overt and decisive action, rather than attempting a premature strike risking the Beast House's fragmenting and scattering only to resurface latter. This strategy, while sound and based on past experience, is not without the wider risk that the alien corruption may spread further before it is checked and thus is the cause of some contention within the Holy Ordos.
History
Origins
Humanity hates and fears the alien. For Terran millennia this attitude has been taught and ingrained in each successive generation. Indeed, the very word "xenos" conjures up deep-seated feelings of horror and revulsion within the heart of the average Imperial citizen. However, there is a flip side to this ingrained loathing, a terrified fascination with the alien, and in the dark sub-levels of blood sport arenas and fighting pits, this dreadful attraction is played out for those that can afford the spectacle.
In its most common form, such bloody entertainment and the arenas that provide it are quite legal. Bull thornox battle to the death in Iocanthos barter-kraals, and carnosaurs rampage against teams of Human gladiators upon Scintilla's many Red Circuses nightly. Yet, removed from the garish lights of such public entertainment, the rich and the jaded, not to mention the lowest of the low, crave more desperate, darker, and forbidden pleasures. Their preferred games feature unwilling fighters, innocents stalked for sport, and creatures so vile and dangerous that the Imperial authority forbids their use on pain of death. Within the Calixis Sector, the most widespread and powerful network of such illicit arenas have but a single, whispered name -- the Beast House.
As long as there has been a Calixis Sector, it seems as if there has been a Beast House. It is not in any true sense a cult, rather it is closer to a criminal network. However, behind this façade worse things lurk than can be found at the heart of any narco-gang or underhive clan. So insidious has the Beast House become that the name and the role of this secretive organisation has become ingrained upon the psyche of Calixian civilisation -- the Beast House and the horrors it secretly contains go unobserved and unlooked for, hiding almost in plain sight.
While local enforcers may raid an unlicensed arena linked to the group here or the Adeptus Arbites may break up a xenos-creature smuggling ring there, the Beast House goes on undiminished. Indeed, it is actually strengthened by the removal of those in its employ "weak enough" to fall foul of the authorities.
Today there are Beast Houses on many worlds, but few realise just how far the Beast House has spread through the criminal underbelly of the Golgenna Reach sub-sector and how far its tendrils stretch into the dim stars beyond the Calixis Sector. The Beast House is more than a set of physical locations, a trade, or even a loose guild of hunters and dealers in proscribed creatures.
The hidden truth is that the Beast House is a criminal empire that spans many worlds and is founded on blood and pandering to the very worst aspects of Human nature. Centuries old, it maintains its shroud of secrecy by working through layers of intermediaries and local agents, and it is growing stronger standard year by standard year. It hides many dark secrets the Inquisition is only just beginning to suspect, and for some in the Ordo Xenos, the realisation is dawning that they may have let a serpent of alien-tainted corruption coil around the very heart of the Calixis Sector.
Blood Sports and Fighting Arenas in the Imperium
Aside from more sedate or spiritually worthy pleasures, the common Imperial citizen, particularly if they live in the crowded and heavily regulated societies found on most Hive Worlds, favours their public entertainments in the form of visceral and often violent spectacle. Fighting contests, from simple bare-knuckle brawls and displays of martial skill right up to the rare extreme of prisoners condemned to battle as augmetic gladiators, are all popular in the low hives. Meanwhile, attending duelling schools, sponsoring champions for battle, and hunting dangerous prey are all common pastimes of the elite.
Beast shows and games at the circus or carnivora are somewhat rarer than the more mundane Human fighting attractions. However, they are a long-standing tradition on some worlds whose own hazardous life-forms make for suitable opponents, or whose wealth allows such beasts to be imported from afar. In the Calixis Sector, Hive Sibellus on Scintilla has by far the greatest number of such arenas, as the hive city's position as capital and trade nexus for the Calixis Sector has long afforded it the ability to pack its circuses with a bewildering variety of beasts and creatures from across the sector.
But without doubt, the pale pits of Hive Volg on Fenksworld have the undisputed crowning reputation as the most horrific, dragging up "things" from the polluted depths below to fight against Human combatants.
Despite public demand for ever more exotic and ferocious battles, certain xenos creatures are forbidden or have their trafficking proscribed by Imperial Law. Some are simply judged too alien or too dangerous for public exposure, while others represent a threat that goes far beyond that of a mere loosed beast should they escape.
This proscription, of course, does not prevent the desire to see such terrors for those willing to flout the law, and in the underhives and black markets of many worlds, all kinds of forbidden creatures and deadly games can be enjoyed by those with the money and stomach to do so.
Fenskworld Xeno Conspiracy
Fenksworld has long been a breeding ground for cults and conspiracies, many of which have been known to spread out into the wider sector, and the notorious independence of its rulers has much to do with this. One collection of conspiracy tales persisted for solar decades about a shadowy group based in the dilapidated sections of Hive Nova Castillia's industrial underbelly, devoting themselves to obtaining illegal xenos specimens for the purposes of study and experimentation.
This rogue cabal of xenophiles and Heretics persisted on the edge of the Inquisition's attention until three standard years ago when a junior Ordo Xenos Inquisitor called Layvan and his retinue undertook a close investigation of the circumstantial evidence.
Layvan quickly discovered the group was little more than a front for a darker conspiracy. His last communiqué alleged that the conspiracy used a hidden facility somewhere in Nova Castillia to breed and augment a variety of vile alien and mutated creatures, which were then transhipped through the busy orbital port and out across the sector to various Beast Houses on other worlds.
Shortly afterward, Layvan and his entire retinue disappeared, and despite the sudden and direct action by the Holy Ordos and a full Adeptus Arbites-backed operation to seek out and purge the suspected xenophile presence, no trace of Layvan or the xeno-lab was ever found.
A standard year later, a raid on a Heretek workshop on the distant Hive World of Solomon recovered a damaged data-slate. Ordos officials reconstructed the dying and confused testimony of Layvan's savant Acolyte Urisa from the slate.
The recordings contained on the slate show scenes of some hidden industrial centre given over to xenos flesh-craft, where Urisa alleges that hundreds had died in blasphemous experiments and that monstrous things walked. Clearly suffering from shock and blood loss, Urisa's testimony was garbled and rambling, but he clearly named the Beast House as the secret power behind the conspiracy.
Organisation
"I'm not interested in your money or who you are, pretty one, just how nice you can scream for me"
- —Shakas Wvendal, Beast Slaver
The Beast House operates to supply, store, and in some cases, even modify or breed alien creatures for use in arena-circuses and blood sport operations in the Imperial criminal underworld. It has also been known to provide beasts to private owners, including Chaos Cults and Hereteks, for their own dark ends.
The Beast House is adept at acquiring all manner of xenos beasts, including intelligent creatures, as well as any xenos technology they use so that they will prove fitting opponents in the fighting pits the Beast House runs called "Red Cages." For a sizable sum, an individual can commission the Beast House to acquire a specific creature. For an even greater sum, the individual can keep the alien afterwards. These fees are justified by the Beast House's discretion, as well as its unfailing ability to deliver goods as promised in pristine condition.
How the Beast House acquires live aliens is a closely guarded mystery, but its network must surely extend to proscribed xenos cultures. The Beast House is able to obtain a live example of almost any alien species, as well as many forms of alien technology, especially their melee weaponry. For its services and goods, the Beast House requires either an extortionate sum of money, the patronage of a powerful individual, a large number of slaves for the Red Cages, a rare and exquisite specimen to fight in the Red Cages, or some other despicable form of payment.
There is a great deal of money to be made from this illegal trade, and in order to do so, the Beast House acts to control the supply chain, running the whole operation from initial capture of the creatures to their distribution. Furthermore, the Beast House sometimes acts as the secret owner or backer of the venues that host its creatures, often taking a hand in incidental activities such as gambling and criminality that surround these places.
The Beast House protects itself by making extensive use of local intermediaries on the worlds where it operates and maintaining progressive layers of secrecy about its true size and what it can supply. This secrecy means that many of those who work for it don't know the full truth and that parts of the group and its assets can be "cut loose" if faced with sanction by local law enforcement, or when infiltrated by outsiders, with little danger to the other parts of the organisation or its true masters, the "beast slavers."
Just how many true members of the Beast House are privy to its inner workings remains unknown to the Inquisition, but probably there are no more than a few hundred in total scattered across the Golgenna Reach and the Markyan Marches sub-sectors of the Calixis Sector, and perhaps that many again operating to acquire savage livestock on numerous far-flung worlds and roving hunting ships.
Of these, those who lead the organisation and hold the power of life and death over their fellows and their creatures are fewer still. This last group consists of the most secretive and dangerous members of the Beast House. They are the beast slavers, hunt masters, and flesh-crafters who are the true driving force behind the organisation. However, all report to a single mysterious authority who's power and mastery over the Beast House is without question, a man known as Solkarn Senk.
Outer Circle
The outer circle of the Beast House is made up of hired muscle, local criminal groups, and contacts developed through bribery and coercion to serve the Beast House's interests, acting as a legitimate cover (such as licensed arena or trader operations), keeping it safe from the authorities, or simply buying its services. Made up of largely ignorant intermediaries or individuals bribed or scared enough to keep their suspicions to themselves, the Beast House at this level appears to be no more or less than a criminal enterprise dealing in xenoscreatures and illegal blood sports with extensive off-world contacts.
Such intermediaries may work for the Beast House without ever knowing they have done so. Others looking to enhance their reputation (and wealth) may well pick up numerous, often contradictory, rumours and dark tales that they are more than happy to spread. Of these hirelings and go-betweens, only those who show the uncommon bloodlust and particular talents the organisation favours will be chosen by the Beast House to be drawn further into its ranks.
Inner Circle
The Beast House's inner circle is made up of those who directly control outward activities, primarily the capture and trade of illegal and proscribed aliens. Secretly they also control its hidden lairs and beast-pits, and assassination, torture, narco-dealing (particularly combat drugs), mass-murder, and slavery are sidelines many also indulge in.
They are uniformly psychopathic, cruel, and callous individuals, selected for their brutality and skill. Rightly feared by those they deal with, a reek of darkness and a lurking feral madness hangs about them that even hardened recidivists are wary of. Consequently, few local criminals and gang leaders will cross them.
Those who have direct dealings with the Beast House's inner circle may quickly develop grave misgivings about doing so despite the potential rewards. Conversely, for some, the first inklings of the horrific truth of what the Beast House is are a lure rather than a warning sign, and they soon fall into the depths of what the Beast House has to offer.
Darker Activities
Very few know or dare suspect what lies at the Beast House's dark heart, and the Inquisition has never been able to glean anything more than a few scattered after-action reports by shocked Adeptus Arbites strike teams. Therefore, the Holy Ordos have not yet come to realise just how dangerous or powerful the Beast House is.
Behind the scenes, the Beast House is steeped in blood and unimaginable savagery. Aside from trafficking in forbidden creatures, Solkarn Senk's true disciples conduct their own awful games and bloody entertainments, as well as creating utterly illegal fleshworks to satiate their lust for violence and sport. These include capturing alien beasts so terrible their mere presence threatens thousands of lives, fabricating murder gholams from living victims, and creating "forced" mutants and other transgenic blasphemies to serve their sick needs for spectacle and the hunt.
Senk's inner circle are the true Beast House, and each one is a monster easily as terrible and deserving of death as any pure alien threat. Should this dark truth be fully uncovered, the Holy Ordos will be forced to strike immediately and resolutely to destroy the Beast House, but such is the widespread infiltration of Senk's followers into the underworlds and dark recesses of the Golgenna Reach sub-sector of the Calixis Sector that they are more than likely to survive to work their evils again.
Behind the Mask
The Beast House focuses on the xenos elements of the beasts it uses and the evil and corrupt men and women who are involved in running it. The evil of the beast slavers is best expressed as an unrestrained bloodlust and the love of the hunt gone mad, with such attendant evils as slavery and the torture of lesser creatures for sport.
The danger the Inquisition and Imperial law sees in this is not simply the crimes of those involved but also the myriad possible dangers presented by the xenos creatures themselves, both known and unknown. At the secret heart of the Beast House, this menace has gone so far as to enter the realms of the truly horrific, with hideous experiments and insane games where innocents are killed for nothing more than sport. It is also possible that at the Beast House's heart lies a connection to an intelligent xenos enemy of Humanity or to Chaos or some other Daemonic presence.
Calixian Conflict with the Adeptus Arbites
Only in the last few standard years have the Adeptus Arbites made the chilling realisation that their prosecution of the Beast House in the Calixis Sector is far from the success they had thought. Full-scale Arbitrator assaults have broken the Beast House's operations with two major raids on Malfi and a string of successes across the Adrantis Nebula sub-sector, but Detective-Intelligencers at the Great Precinct level are now piecing together clues that imply that the Beast House is not reeling from these setbacks, or even ignoring them, but actively benefiting from them by using such prosecutions to prune their less-capable cells. The syndicate's backbone operations and leaders, as far as the Detectives can tell, have remained entirely quarantined from the Arbites' efforts.
The response to this was a second wave of rigorously-planned raids on the Beast House's walls of secrecy, conducted by task forces of surveillors and personators organised across the Pendulum and Stave High Precincts of Malfi with astonishingly little of the usual politicking and territorial feuds. The operations were catastrophic failures, with entire teams of field detectives vanishing with no intelligence to show for it, and traps and ambushes being laid for the Arbitrator squads who attempted to scour their sites of operations for clues or bodies. Since then the Beast House investigators have been on notice that Detective-Commander Doyenko is taking a particular interest in their progress, and are feverishly working to vindicate themselves.
With infiltration proving such a costly and fruitless approach, the Arbites are switching tacks and exploiting a defining weakness of the Beast House: its constant need for exotic and vicious animals. The thinking is simple: force the Beast House into visibility by choking the trade in combat creatures down to so small a fraction of itself that no hunting and transportation operations can escape scrutiny.
Arbites ships are staging rolling interdictions of Fedrid and its cousin Death Worlds, seeding the system with spy stations. Quarantine edicts at space docks across the Calixis Sector are being tightened, and ships whose routes have even brushed a Death World, or one noted for dangerous fauna, are liable to be scoured by teams of Verispex Adepts. A small detachment of the bravest and most capable cyber-mastiff handlers is currently in special training at the sector capital world of Scintilla, working with customised dogs whose sensory arrays have been built specifically to hunt down the Beast House's cages.
The backlash against the operation has already begun. The beast trade is small, but its market is elite, and the sector's bluebloods have been listening to the complaints of their procurers and passing them on with interest to their Imperial governors. The backbone of the operation, the fleet interdiction, needs far more ships than the Adeptus Arbites Precinct fleet can afford to give it and despite its best efforts its coverage is patchy.
The task force has had to resort to placing Chartist vessels under Adeptus Arbites commissions to assist with the interdiction, much to their chagrin. The Arbitrator detectives are trying to make a virtue of this necessity by setting careful watches on these privateers, watching for evidence of Beast House collusion or infiltration.
Sources
- Dark Heresy: Disciples of the Dark Gods (RPG), pp. 82-85
- Dark Heresy: The Radical's Handbook (RPG), pp. 136
- Dark Heresy: Book of Judgement (RPG), pp. 30