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ix on in the murk. Valdor has decided that it is the place. That eye marks the site of his king's last stand. Dorn believes it too. If the rain streaming off his plate is truly the past, then it echoes with his father's voice.
Dorn hears a sound behind him, a clatter and slither of rocks. He turns in time to see Constantin overbalancing, pitching backwards as washed-out stone gives way and he loses his footing.
Dorn reaches out instinctively. He grabs Constantin's wrist and prevents a fall that, at the very least, would have compounded the captain-general's already critical injuries.
This time, Constantin does not shake him off. Dorn hauls him up the vicious incline onto more stable rock. They cower together for a moment in the lee of a heavy boulder, shielded from the brunt of the gale. Torrents of rainwater stream and splash down the slope on either side of them.
'Stay here,' Dorn says.
'Damn you.'
'Stay here, Constantin. You're hurt.'
'Damn you, seventh son.'
Dorn glares at him. He doesn't know why Constantin's prodigious metabolism isn't healing him faster. Has it ceased to function in this un-place of un-time, or is he actually hurt so severely it has overwhelmed his body's capacity to repair itself?
'Just stay here and gather your wits while I scout ahead,' Dorn exclaims over the shriek of the storm. 'I'll go to the crest of the ridge, and see what's beyond. I'll come back-'
'Damn you,' Constantin snorts. 'I can walk.' The pallor of his face and the pain in his eyes suggest he cannot.
'Constantin-'
'I'm not going to retire from the field, Praetorian. Not now. Damn you.'
They stare at each other.
'Very well, captain-general.'
Dorn gets to his feet. He offers his hand to Valdor. Valdor regards it with scorn for a moment, as though considering how best to sever it. Then he clasps it and permits Dorn to hoist him up.
Once upright, Valdor pushes on ahead, levering his way on his spear, leaving Dorn behind.
'Damn you too,' Dorn yells after him, and struggles to follow.
At the crest of the ridge, the gale is so intense, they are barely able to crawl over the rock.
But on the far side, there is an abrupt calm.
The storm still howls above them. Rain patters on the rocks, and they are buffeted by the wind. But the far side of the ridge seems to lead down into the eerie stillness beneath the storm's eye, as though the broken ridgeline and the high ground around them is lifting the storm's force away, like a lid, preventing it from scouring the land beneath.
They pick their way down the far slope. They are overlooking a vast depression, a basin as wide, grey and profound as a lunar sea. It is encircled by a crown of glowering rocks, and capped by the screaming spiral of the neverness storm.
The slope becomes shallower, and turns into scree and a tumbled boulder field. The light is fulminous and yellow, a weird and sickly cast streaked by the rain. There is something out in the centre of the basin, a structure protruding from the ground several kilometres away, directly beneath the lightning-ribboned eye of the cyclone.
They make their way towards it. Vapour fumes like mist. From a distance, the structure looks like a ruined bastion, like Hasgard or Gorgon Bar, or a tower felled by lightning. Then Dorn begins to understand what he's looking at.
It is the upper decks and bridge levels of a battleship's stern castle. Decayed and dilapidated, the grim carcass is jutting from the grey mire, drunkenly askew, like the unsubmerged portion of a ship foundered in an ocean swell. The huge shape, a monolith of neglect, is surrounded by a necklace of ruins, and a wide, washed-up litter of debris. Bright lightning forks down at the towering wreck out of the storm's maelstrom eye above, each flash a shivering artillery boom, and wreathes the upper turrets, broken antennae arrays and shield masts in luminous garlands of corposant.
'Gloriana class,' mutters Dorn. 'The Vengeful Spirit.'
'Just a part we can see,' murmurs Constantin, limping up beside him and leaning on his spear to look.
Dorn glances at him.
'This is all the Vengeful Spirit,' Valdor says. 'This place. All of it. It is. And it isn't.'
He pauses.
'That's just a part we're allowed to see,' he says, as though everything he has just said makes perfect sense. Dorn is disquieted to realise it does.
'Allowed?' asks Dorn.
'Able, then,' Constantin replies. He shrugs. 'And that's where we go.'
Dorn realises he can hear something. Not the painful crack of the lightning, or the drizzle of the rain, not the rush of the wind across the basin or the deep howl of the storm above. He can hear... Impacts. Metal striking metal. Weapon against plate. The steady, studied syncopation of intense combat.
It's very distant.
Valdor lifts his spear and starts to walk towards the ship unassisted. He glances over his shoulder at the ridge they descended. Dorn knows what he's looking for, what he hopes to see.
'Will they come?' Dorn asks. 'Your men. Will they-'
'If any of them are still alive,' replies Constantin, 'they will come this way. Coros and the others, any of them. I gave them my directive. They know where to come.'
'Do you... sense them?' asks Dorn.
Constantin shakes his head. He looks at Dorn, wary.
'You have not spoken about the Blood Angels, seventh son,' he says.
'No,' says Dorn.
'Any idea...?'
'None at all,' says Dorn. 'Whatever had befallen the brothers of the Ninth, whatever horror...' He pauses, chilled by the memory. 'To see Raldoron like that. I don't know. Perhaps the treason of Chaos has taken them too. But it seemed more like-'
'Vengeance,' says Constantin quickly. 'Rage.'
Dorn nods. A rage so great and inconceivable, it had turned them into monsters.
'I think maybe so, Constantin,' he replies. 'A rage fuelled by the extremity of loss.'
He looks at Valdor.
'Sanguinius is dead,' he says.
Valdor doesn't answer. His chin moves pugnaciously, as though he is chewing a word.
'My brother is dead,' says Dorn, 'killed by my brother. By Lupercal.'
'How do you know this?' Valdor asks quietly.
'I was told it,' says Dorn. 'I believe it. And if Raldoron and his kin felt it... and I fear they must have, then...'
Valdor nods, then looks away at the distant ridge.
'So,' says Dorn. He raises Diamantis' blade and looks at it. 'This, I will take to that hulk, and this, I will bury in my brother's heart.'
He starts to walk again.
'He was...' Valdor begins.
Dorn stops, and looks back at him.
'I had time for him,' says Valdor. 'For Sanguinius. He was... I could not help but like him, Rogal, though I tried my best not to.' He looks at Dorn, and manages a grim half-smile. 'As I do with most of your lot.'
Dorn nods. 'A fine requiem. From you.'
They walk another kilometre or so, and reach the edge of the debris field surrounding the vast wreck. There are ruins here too, nameless stone forms and half-buried arches pushing up out of the rain-soaked clay. They advance.
Something shifts ahead of them. A pair of wide, stone arches, their tops barely visible above the clay, stir. Then they start to rise, dripping, rippling the wet clay as they suck and slide from its embrace.
They are not stone, and they are not arches. When they rise clear of the sodden ground, they are revealed as long, wide horns, recurved and down-tipped like those of an auroch. They are each five metres long. They sprout, symmetrically, from the low and deep brow that follows them, a brow that caps a huge skull, a skull that tops a neck, bulwark-thick, a neck that leans from massive hunched shoulders.
The Neverborn is titanic. It hauls its vast, humanoid shape out of the oozing ground like some undead thing rising from a shallow grave. Its pelt is matted with wet clay. Its fingers claw furrows in the ground as it pulls itself upright. It frees and plants one cloven hoof, and straightens up. Its head is the grinning skull of a horse or stag. Its eyes blaze with the same lightning that sears across the sky. It opens its mouth, and it roars, a dry shriek that blasts like a hurricane and lifts a wave of water droplets from the ground.
It lopes towards them. The earth shakes. Dorn breaks into a run, moving to the right, sword raised to strike as he comes in at it. He can't see Valdor. Water vapour coils and smokes around the beast, thrown up by the violence of its motion. It seems to ignore Dorn. It is bearing down on something. Dorn can't see Valdor in the spume. Is he moving too slowly? Is he the easy target? Can he not move out of its path swiftly enough?
Is he, the damn fool, standing his ground to meet it?
The Neverborn shrieks again. It strikes. A huge arm brings a huge fist down in a huge splash of liquid clay from the waterlogged ground. It pulls its fist out of the ooze. The blow has left a deep, puckered crater surrounded by radiating splats of jetted clay.
He can't see Valdor. Dorn can't see Valdor any more.
The Neverborn shrieks again, a shriek that echoes around the rim of the ridgeline. It swings around and makes for Dorn. The ground shudders. Dorn turns out wide, trying to control his angle and make an assault from the flank. He chooses his target.
They slam together. The spray is so great, Dorn is blinded by it. His feet slide in the slime. He aims for the knee. His blade tears matted flesh, but reflects off hard bone. He is glanced aside.
He rolls hard, knowing the beast will grab for him.
It misses with its urgent lunge, and thumps another puckered pit in the wet ground. Dorn tries to rise. His feet slip. He is plastered with clay. He swings again, and rips the blade through the meat of a thigh. There's a squeal.
Then he's flying backwards, dazed by the concussion of something hitting his chest like a siege-ram.
Dorn lands, and rolls several times, lifting spray.
He tries to rise. The Neverborn is coming at him, a splashing thunder that will run him down. His sword is wedged in the mud, hilt up. Dorn heaves it free. He turns to thrust it at the thing |
ground. Dorn tries to rise. His feet slip. He is plastered with clay. He swings again, and rips the blade through the meat of a thigh. There's a squeal.
Then he's flying backwards, dazed by the concussion of something hitting his chest like a siege-ram.
Dorn lands, and rolls several times, lifting spray.
He tries to rise. The Neverborn is coming at him, a splashing thunder that will run him down. His sword is wedged in the mud, hilt up. Dorn heaves it free. He turns to thrust it at the thing bearing down on him.
There's a flash of gold in the rain. Something glints as it punches through the beast's neck.
It staggers aside, hooves mauling the clay and skidding in the ooze, clutching at its throat. Its maw is open, but no shriek comes out.
It falls heavily, on its side, raising a wall of drizzle and quaking the ground. Its legs kick and spasm, shiver, slump. Its arms twitch and go slack.
Valdor limps past Dorn. He goes up to the dead mass, and grabs the haft of his spear protruding from the plastered throat. He pauses, gripping tight, and mutters something, a name, perhaps. Then he wrenches the spear out.
He limps back to Dorn.
'When we get there,' he says, 'let me do it. Let me kill him.'
'Constantin-'
'I don't know what it is to have a brother, Rogal,' says Valdor. 'But if I had one, I don't think I'd like to kill him. You don't want that blood on your hands, or that guilt in your memory. I'll do it without sentiment.'
He's lying, of course. Dorn knows it. There would be sentiment. Constantin wants vengeance. He would never admit it, but Sanguinius' death has distressed him.
'Let's see who gets there first,' says Dorn.
'Let's get there together,' Valdor says.
Dorn sniffs, then nods.
'We rise together, we fall together,' he replies. 'If that's all we can do, then it is enough.'
Valdor glances back the way they have come, one last time. There is still no sign of anyone following, no trace of Diocletian Coros or any surviving Sentinels.
No traces of Abaddon either, Dorn reassures himself. But he can see the disappointment on Valdor's face.
'I sent a warning,' he tells Valdor. 'A call to arms. Before I joined you, I put out a call to any forces that could join us. My full authority. Some may be coming.'
'By what means?' Valdor asks.
'I sent a messenger.'
'Who?'
'It doesn't matter,' says Dorn. 'I met a single soul, so I sent them back for help.'
'Do you trust them?' Valdor asks.
'I had to,' says Dorn. 'There was no one else.'
10:iii
The voice of stone
The woman steps in from the dingy grey courtyard through the cell door, looks around the gloomy cell block, and then steps back into the yard. She does this several times, fascinated.
Marshal Agathe watches her. The woman seems young to her, not much more than a girl, really. She's dirty. Her black clothes are torn and caked in dust, and her dark hair is tangled and unkempt. She looks like some hapless urchin who's been living in the bomb-wastes of Anterior for the past few weeks.
But despite her presentation, and her youth, there's something about her manner. She has the bearing of command, and it's more than just the heavy auramite seal she carries.
The woman turns around in the shadows of the cell block again, and then returns to the dismal grey air of the yard.
'As you can see-' Agathe begins.
'A tear between material and immaterial,' the woman says. 'A splice. This courtyard lies within one realm, and that-' She gestures at the cell door. 'And that lies in another, adjacent.'
'You don't seem disturbed by this,' Agathe remarks.
The woman looks at her.
'I've encountered one before, marshal,' she says. 'More than one, in all likelihood. I've just never seen one so precisely delineated before. They are usually blurred and gradual. This is quite dramatically clean and sharp.'
'Who did you say you were?' Agathe asks.
'Katerina Moriana,' the woman replies. 'I bear the authority of the Praetorian.' There's something odd about the way she says her name. Over-enunciated. It doesn't feel like she is making an effort to ensure Agathe understands it. It feels more like she's, what...? Getting used to it? Testing it out? Reminding herself?
Agathe's had enough truck with names in the past few days. Mikhail and his men. People don't seem to have enough names, or real ones. It's a defence mechanism, and one she can appreciate.
Agathe glances aside as Mikhail walks into the yard from the lane beyond. Agathe can hear a sporadic chatter of small-arms fire from the drab, ramshackle streets of the alien city behind him.
'Traitor Excertus,' he reports. 'I've got the approach streets and alleys covered, but their numbers are increasing. I'll need more men.'
'I've sent for them,' Agathe replies.
'Merudin,' the woman says to Mikhail. 'Merudin Twentieth Tactical. From the Lupercal's own support companies.'
'They're what?' Agathe asks.
The woman ignores her.
'The Merudin are vicious and well trained, captain,' she says to Mikhail. 'But they are currently in disarray. Distressed and close to panic.'
'Aren't we all?' Mikhail replies calmly.
'Accurate marksmanship and thorough suppressive fire will keep them at bay.'
'Good to know,' Mikhail says.
'For now, at least,' the woman says. 'Marshal?'
She turns and walks back into the cell block. Agathe glances at Mikhail.
'Get to it,' she says. He nods.
'Grace of the Throne go with you,' Agathe calls after him. She follows the woman inside.
The cell block is dark and quiet. The smell of the air, the temperature, even the air pressure, seem different. Agathe still can't get used to the state-change of stepping through that doorway. The woman is already striding away down the dark stone hall.
She looks back at Agathe.
'This place. What is it?' she asks.
Agathe shrugs, catching her up.
'A stronghold,' she says. 'The best we could find in the circumstances. An abandoned prison, we think. There are no distinguishing landmarks in the area.'
'And where is it?'
'Within five kilometres of the Metome Processional,' Agathe replies. 'As far as I can judge.'
'So... The south-western Palatine?'
Agathe takes a breath. 'Listen, ma'am-'
'Katerina Moriana.'
'Yes. It's important that you understand... We could be anywhere. We have no reference or bearing. We could be hundreds of kilometres away from... from anywhere we might think we are.'
'And it's changing all the time,' Moriana says. 'I understand. Thank you. What are your strengths?'
'I have about three thousand men-'
'We'll be taking them through that doorway, marshal,' Moriana says. 'That cell doorway, into the city beyond. An emergency relief force. You need to have them mobilised and ready to move as soon as your captain has secured the immediate streets and driven the Merudin back. Do you have vox?'
'Now wait,' says Agathe. 'With all due respect to that seal of office you keep waving under my nose, that's not going to happen.'
'The Emperor is in the gravest danger, marshal. The Praetorian has called for support, without delay, from any and all forces that can answer that call. This command supersedes any orders you may have. It is the only thing that matters any more.'
'I understand what you're saying, Katerina Moriana,' Agathe begins.
They step back as Phikes marches four squads of the 403rd past to reinforce Mikhail outside. The adjutant glances uneasily at Moriana as he goes by.
'Take them to Captain Mikhail, Phikes,' Agathe tells him as he passes. 'Then get back here.'
'Yes, marshal.'
Agathe looks back at the woman. Moriana has turned away to examine the damp black stone of the walls.
'Listen,' Agathe says. 'I have three thousand or so men, but less than a third of them are actual combat troops. The Antioch Miles Vesperi are the best equipped. The Four Hundred and Third Exigency Stratiotes are solid men, but they're little more than a scratch company. The rest are auxiliaries, gun crews, loaders-'
'The Emperor is in the gravest danger,' Moriana repeats, without looking around. 'All who can answer the call will answer the call, no matter their station-'
'You're not listening,' Agathe snaps. 'I said listen. This is essentially an artillery unit. We have field guns. A lot of fields guns. That's our main proportion. We're long-range support. We are not an infantry group, and we are ill-suited to mount any kind of mobile expeditionary offensive.'
'Artillery is good,' says Moriana. 'Field guns. Bring those.'
Agathe sighs.
'Have you ever fought a war, ma'am?' she asks.
'Not like this one,' Moriana replies.
'Right,' says Agathe. 'Let me lay it out for you. We have virtually no support weapons. No armour support. Just a modest number of men that could pass as infantry. We have the field guns, but they are heavy, and so are their munition carts. We have no tractors, or motorised limbers. We simply can't manhandle those guns down here and out into that yard, let alone lug them through the city beyond. We can be reasonably effective dug-in in a place like this and shelling at range. Not on the move.'
The woman seems to consider this. She starts walking again.
'Show me,' she says.
Agathe sets off after her.
'You have vox?' Moriana asks.
'Yes. It doesn't work. Nothing works.'
They pass through a broken blast-door system and climb the black steps towards the surface level. The woman stops and examines the wall again. She runs her fingers across the black stone.
'We think it used to be a prison,' Agathe says, waiting for her. 'Someone said the Blackstone, but-'
'Black stone,' says Moriana.
'Well, as I say, it can't be that, because the damn Blackstone is in-'
'Black stone,' Moriana says again. She slides her palm across the dripping wall. 'Noctilith. It is a rare and unusual material with curious properties. It is often used to suppress or dampen psychic activity. That's why the prison was made of it.'
'How do you know that?'
'I've always been inquisitive,' the woman replies.
They carry on up the steps, cross the entry hall, a |
e Blackstone, but-'
'Black stone,' says Moriana.
'Well, as I say, it can't be that, because the damn Blackstone is in-'
'Black stone,' Moriana says again. She slides her palm across the dripping wall. 'Noctilith. It is a rare and unusual material with curious properties. It is often used to suppress or dampen psychic activity. That's why the prison was made of it.'
'How do you know that?'
'I've always been inquisitive,' the woman replies.
They carry on up the steps, cross the entry hall, and step outside. The air's hot, and it stinks. Nothing has changed since the last time Agathe was out here. The gunlines, now dug-in, wait with barrels elevated, facing the mauled wasteland of mud and rubble beyond. The crews huddle, anxious, in the firing pits and hasty trenchworks, or cluster around the ammunition wagons. There is a lonely ache of anticipation and fear. The trackless, mangled waste stretches away as far as they can see, and is eventually lost in the deep, black curtain of ash and smoke that rings the tattered horizon. The sky is low, black as night, and swollen with dirt-clouds. From the distance, beyond the obscuring haze of ash, comes the thump and roar of an armour engagement that seems to have been going on forever.
Moriana surveys the scene, then turns and looks at the scowling hulk of the black mansion.
'I appreciate the logistical impediments you have outlined, marshal,' she says. 'I am, however, charged with an imperative to gather and summon support. I gave the Praetorian my word. I need to establish contact with any units in range. With loyalist command. With the Sanctum. With anything. There really isn't much time, and nothing else matters now. You have no vox?'
'The 'casters are dead,' says Agathe.
Phikes has reappeared. He stands in the mansion doorway, keeping a respectful and wary distance.
'Phikes?' Agathe calls.
'Marshal.'
'Try the vox again. And keep trying it.'
Phikes hesitates, then nods.
'In the remote chance that you get it working or establish a contact,' Moriana calls to him, 'inform me immediately. I will compose the message to send.'
Phikes gives her a dangerous look, then hurries off to the signal trench. Moriana walks back inside the mansion, with Agathe at her heels.
'Contact is the key thing,' Moriana says, her voice pulling echoes from the dank, thick walls. Water drips. 'A general call to action.'
She looks around, studying the place. Agathe notices an odd affect in the way the woman looks. She seems to tilt her whole head to examine things, rather than shifting her gaze.
'I could...' Agathe says, with an almost helpless shrug, 'send runners. Maybe some would get through...'
'No one would get through,' says Moriana. 'But there might be an alternative. With your permission.'
'It doesn't feel like you need it,' says Agathe.
'I mean to say, marshal, that you might find it unsettling. Be prepared to calm your men if they become disturbed.'
'Disturbed by what?'
'Noctilith,' says Moriana, looking up at the wall, her hand against it. 'It's psychoreactive, as I said. Ordinarily, it is used for dampening, and it's highly effective in that role. But here, wherever here is, the binding sigils and restraints of warding that made this place a prison for body and mind have been destroyed.'
She scrapes her toe through the splintered fragments of stone covering the floor, pieces of frieze and wall decorations torn down or blown away, their purpose no longer identifiable.
'Noctilith absorbs psychic energy. It soaks it up. Unconstrained, and without the proper wards, it can also act as a resonator.'
'Like an echo chamber?' Agathe asks.
'Like an amplifier,' says Moriana.
Moriana faces the dank wall. She sets her hands flat against it and bows her head.
'I suggest you stand back,' she says quietly.
For a moment, nothing happens. A long moment. Agathe waits. The woman doesn't move. Agathe feels a little awkward just standing there. It's getting warm. There's sweat on her back. The pseudoflesh patch on her cheek starts to itch. She decides to step outside for a moment.
Then the whispers come. The scratching. The tapping. The echoes of knocks and scrapes from unseen things haunting the shadows of the black mansion's empty block-rows, cells and vaults. Lost souls. Ghosts. Memories. Something is agitating them. The knocking grows louder and more insistent, coming from a score of directions. Agathe's collar feels tight. Her heart rate rises. Her clothes don't seem to fit properly any more. Things scurry and scuttle in her peripheral vision.
She feels the clammy, warm touch of sorcery on her skin. It is a unique and unpleasant sensation she hasn't felt since she stood with great Raldoron, and Naranbaatar and his Stormseers at Colossi, in the grip of the magic of the Thousand Sons.
It is a touch she had hoped she'd never have to feel again.
Echoes swirl around her, swelling from the black stone walls. Her skin prickles and her guts churn. She hears a voice. The woman's voice. But Katerina Moriana's mouth is not moving.
Sons and daughters of the Imperium of Man. Rise now. Rise up. By the command of the Praetorian, take up your weapons and advance. The Emperor stands alone, at the hour of greatest peril. Take up your weapons and come to His aid. Protect Him as He protects you. You are the shield of humanity! Rise together and stand as one. Stand at His side now, or all is lost. Terra must endure. The Imperium must stand. Horus Lupercal must fall. The Emperor must live.
Dead, the black stone lives. It finds its voice.
10:iv
Witnesses at the execution
You lift your father up. He's hurt. Limp. Necrosis is blackening parts of His soul and mind. Flecks of His cracked plate spill away as you move Him, flakes of gold. Years pour out of Him from a dozen wounds and spatter the deck.
This is the hard part. The bad part. There's no shame in admitting it. A fair fight is one thing, two warriors matched and pitted. But the execution, once one is defeated and helpless? There's nothing to relish in that. It was the same with the Angel. Nothing to savour. Just the grimly inevitable punctuation to an otherwise glorious contest.
But the crowd wants it, of course. They're baying for blood. You can hear their red howls ringing through the obsidian walls of your Court. And the four want it, the Old Four. They've always wanted it.
You look over at them.
They nod their assent. The Emperor must die.
Leetu kills another of the snarling scavenger things. Mourn-It-All cleaves its drooling snout so deeply that its head is wrenched around, and the Neverborn flops backwards on itself, its limbs in spasm.
The others shrink back, screeching and hissing. Perhaps they're scared of him at last? The threat of his blade has finally outweighed their desire to feed. It's taken long enough. He's heaped the deck with their corpses.
He sinks to his knees, aching with exertion, covered in splashes of daemon ichor. Sanguinius' corpse is cold at his side.
They're not shrinking from him. He sees that now. Something else has caused them to quail and retreat, to cackle and whine. Something much more dangerous than a Space Marine with a sword.
Leetu looks over his shoulder. He was so caught up in the frenzy of his fight with the carrion eaters, he had not realised that the real fight was over.
A hundred metres away, across the creased and punctured deck, Horus stands over the Emperor.
The Master of Mankind is sprawled on His side, twisted. Smoke drifts lazily from the dents and cracks of His golden plate. There is so much blood. How could Leetu not have heard the crash of that giant figure falling? The brute Warmaster, looming over his father, is wounded too, but he seems oblivious to the gouges and furrows that tatter the Serpent's Scales. He flexes his vast shoulders, easing the tension accumulated during the duel. His bloodlit face seems pensive, almost sad, as he regards his father's body.
But there is a hint of that deafening smile too.
The Lupercal Court is slowly reasserting itself, drawing back into form now the fight is done. Its shadows and psychofractal blackness are gradually replacing the Vengeful Spirit's chamber, swirling like oil, covering the scarred plasteel and chipped ouslite with obsidian tiles that blink out of nowhere, and diorite blocks that instantiate like fog. Black columns re-manifest, sweeping arches climb and connect high above. Distance and dimension twist along disturbing planes. The angles and planes of the battered flagship chamber are pushed away in all directions, and fade to nothing. The infinite midnight architecture of the Court is restored, and the gathered Neverborn cringe and cower back into the gloom.
The Court seems even bigger than before. The galleries and processionals adjoining the nave of the main Court seem to extend to giddying vanishing points. Through dreary archways and sinister vaults, Leetu glimpses side chambers and chapel shrines and sub-temple precincts that multiply and multiply, and all lead away into the infinite.
The coloured glassaic of the high windows, ten kilometres tall, throbs with the baleful light of a storm raging outside, and casts a mosaic of flickering colour across the gleaming, jet-black floor.
The wrath of the neverness storm is nothing to the rage rising in Leetu's heart. He has failed. The promise he made to his mistress is broken. The Emperor is vanquished, and Ruin is triumphant.
Leetu should have done more.
He should have done something. He should have persisted, and thrown himself into that awful combat, even if that had meant being torn apart by the opposing powers. That death would have been better than this regret.
All he did was protect a corpse. The Angel's dead. Who fights for the dead? The only thing worth fighting for is the living.
Leetu sees the fingers of the Emperor's limp right hand twitch slightly. Just a tremble. He is alive still, just. Balanced on the edge of life, and helpless in the face of t |
one something. He should have persisted, and thrown himself into that awful combat, even if that had meant being torn apart by the opposing powers. That death would have been better than this regret.
All he did was protect a corpse. The Angel's dead. Who fights for the dead? The only thing worth fighting for is the living.
Leetu sees the fingers of the Emperor's limp right hand twitch slightly. Just a tremble. He is alive still, just. Balanced on the edge of life, and helpless in the face of the final execution Horus Lupercal is about to deliver.
But father and son have finally stopped moving at those insane superhuman speeds, speeds incompatible with Leetu's metabolism. Leetu couldn't hope to strike then, or lend his blade to any advantage. But now he can. Now he can keep his promise to Erda.
Leetu steals towards them. He hugs the shadows, as timid and insignificant as the Neverborn vermin that he drove from the corpse. He ignores the black, fractal scales rippling under his feet as they re-form. He ignores the spatters of royal blood, the debris of auramite fragments, and the foetid stink of burnt ylem. He ignores a stray card of the Imperial Tarot that falls from nerveless fingers, The Space Marine. His focus is utterly fixed on the Lupercal and his prey. He steals towards them, leaving one corpse behind in the hope of making another.
The Emperor must die.
Well, perhaps. It's your choice. You are your own master. You get to decide. And you don't have to do what the Neverborn tell you. That was the deal. You are no servant of Chaos.
Your father, weak, half-conscious, leans against you. You take His weight. He rests a hand against your chest for support.
There's still time for your dreadful mercy, if you choose to exercise it. He has no more fight left in Him. In this moment of submission, you get to decide the penalty. You can grant Him the justice He never showed to you. The Revelation. You can share your gnosis with Him, so that He can learn how He should have treated His own flesh and blood.
You turn Him towards the waiting thrones. Let there be a last rite. A coronation. Better to end this way. Mercy is greater than execution. Compliance is better than illumination. Truth trumps silence. And an anguished eternity of understanding and penance on a hand-built throne far exceeds the brief punishment of death.
Your Court is assembled. It is now in session. You drag your dying father towards the seats of power, and towards judgement. He leaves a trail of His life behind Him on the floor, smeared splashes of centuries. And the powerless cards of His final, useless hand lie discarded where they fell, uppermost The Knight of Mandatio. The blood splashed on it almost obscures its ancient, ritual image of an armoured warrior, in profile, sword held upright at his shoulder, a new moon in the sky above him.
Loken follows the warring shadows, guided by the light of his blade. He moves through the numberless, angled dimensions of the Court, crossing from one facet of the fight to another, slowly closing on his quarry.
The weak flames of his blade show him that the fight has almost run its course. On the snow-clad flank of some towering mountain peak, Loken sees Horus rip the Emperor's heart from His chest, and let the golden corpse slide away down the unforgiving ice. On the battlements of a mighty, endless wall, bathed in sunlight, he watches Horus break the Emperor's skull with his maul. In the frozen depths of a winter forest, he glimpses a great Lunar wolf tear out the throat of a Fenrisian rival. On the banks of a great river, he sees a warrior-king strike down the chieftain-priest of a resisting territory, and leave himself with no new worlds to conquer. On some mausoleum planet, deep in the dry depths of a sealed tomb, he beholds Pale Death gradually disfigure the cadaver of a gilded monarch. In the chancel of an abolished cathedral, he is driven back by the heat as the Warmaster burns his Master to ash with his bloodlit gaze. So many contests, one single outcome. Horus hacks the Emperor to ribbons at the foot of the Eternity Gate. In the quietest corner of a stately park at dawn, a duellist stripped to his breeches and muslin shirt lowers his smoking pistol. An unquenchable black hole devours the white dwarf star that cannot escape its pull. Amid the barbed-wire tangle of a muddy no-man's-land, a weary officer despatches his prisoner with a crack of his service revolver. In a smoky feasting hall, a ring-mailed usurper takes his axe to the bared neck of a conquered high king. On the plasteel continent of a noospheric realm, a daemon engine annihilates its Omnissiah. Wild lightning tears down a tower so carefully planned to stand forever. Above windy steppes, a hawk strikes an eagle from the boundless sky. In a gloomy, sacred cave, an angry son kills his father with a rock.
Loken sees so many aspects, struck down and dying. So many ends. So many deaths. Each aspect is falling. Each multiplied facet of the duel is concluding, and as each one concludes, the facet containing it fades into smoke.
The flames along Rubio's blade are growing dimmer.
They lead Loken into the Court, though he knows he has been there all along. He hasn't so much found the Court, as it has found him. As the facets of the fight finish and dissolve, no longer needed, all that remains is the Lupercal Court.
Loken is entering through some temple precinct, a vast side chapel adjoining the main hall. It's twilight here, still and silent. The precinct is a long, ritual garden, flanked by rows of jet columns. In the dim light, Loken sees the stone walkways that edge the rectangular sacred pools. The water in the pools is as still and flat as glass. He can smell, rather than see, the water flowers and ghost ferns that grow in these pools, and the banks of night-blooming acanthus that fringe the garden's geometric plan. He hears the gurgle of a hidden spring.
It is a grove of mysteries, a place of scrying. The wide pools are astrological mirrors, and the walkways are lined with stone bowls, dishes and basins of every shape and size, all filled with dark water to reflect the starlight. The temple garden has no roof, and is open to a sky that is nothing but blackness, but faint stars twinkle from the uncountable mirrors of water.
Loken moves forward along the central causeway. The air smells damp and secret. The place overwhelmingly reminds him of somewhere, and he knows that's deliberate. The water garden in the High City of Sixty-Three Nineteen, the night he was inducted into the confraternity of the Mournival. It was so long ago, just yesterday. It had seemed like a new phase, a new time... a glorious new time. Like him, mankind seemed to be on a threshold, about to step forward into greatness.
Not backwards, into flames.
Loken steps forward. This is yet another aspect, another facet, but it's meant especially for him. This is his father's work. His father clearly resents Loken's presence in his Court. The intrusion makes him uncomfortable. He doesn't want his son to bear witness to the acts that he arranged for this Day of Days. Perhaps he is ashamed, in which case, as shame is a human feeling, there is still hope for him.
It would be easier just to kill me, Loken thinks. Perhaps his father can't really bring himself to do that either? Perhaps that's sentiment, affection... In which case, there is still hope, or something that resembles it.
This temple garden is designed to delay Loken. To occupy him. What has his father left waiting for him here? He thinks he knows. He looks down into the glossy, light-catching water of the pool to his left. He sees the reflection of a new moon, a pale curl as insubstantial as a fingernail paring. A new phase indeed.
Yes, he knows what's waiting. He knows what faces will have been chosen. It will be the three that admitted him, the other phases of the Mournival. Ezekyle, Tarik and Little Horus, or conjured warp-echoes of them, at least. Will they fight him? Will they try to make him pledge a new oath to be admitted to his father's inner circle once more? Will they remonstrate with him for the oaths he took, and broke?
Or for the ones he kept?
He hears a sound, and freezes. For all the world, it sounded like the clap of a hoof against stone. He thinks of cloven-footed daemons, and brings his blade up ready at his shoulder.
'Give us your name,' a voice calls out of the darkness. It speaks the words in Cthonic, Loken's home-tongue, the battle-argot of the Luna Wolves.
'Garviel Loken is my name to give,' he replies in kind. 'But not yours to have.'
'And what is your honour?'
'I am captain of the Tenth Company of the Sixteenth Legion Astartes, the Luna Wolves.'
'There are no Luna Wolves any more,' the voice replies. 'Only Sons of Horus.'
'While I stand and breathe,' Loken answers calmly, 'the Luna Wolves exist.'
Silence, lingering. Then:
'And who is your sworn master?'
Loken smiles to himself. A daemon-trick question. In the High City, the correct answer was 'the Warmaster and the Emperor both', and he gave it sincerely. Loken has survived the trickery of daemons. He replies with guile of his own.
'I can't say,' he answers.
There is a metallic scrape as the slot of a lantern is pulled open, and yellow flame-light shines out across him. There are figures ahead of him. Three of them. He hears the clack of hooves again.
And he realises why he is here, and why the aspect has been prepared for him. It's not to delay him, or keep him occupied, or to hide him from his father's sight. He has been brought to this Court to be judged for the betrayal of his Mournival oaths.
His father isn't sparing him. He is singling him out for special punishment. Horus has no sentiment or affection left. Hope is gone. This moonlit garden is not a kind attempt to hold him back, and prevent him from witnessing an execution.
It is a place of execution.
The three figures step forward, one on either side of |
im. It's not to delay him, or keep him occupied, or to hide him from his father's sight. He has been brought to this Court to be judged for the betrayal of his Mournival oaths.
His father isn't sparing him. He is singling him out for special punishment. Horus has no sentiment or affection left. Hope is gone. This moonlit garden is not a kind attempt to hold him back, and prevent him from witnessing an execution.
It is a place of execution.
The three figures step forward, one on either side of the pools, the other on the central causeway facing him. They are not Ezekyle, Tarik and Little Horus after all. Loken hears the clip of their hooves on the flagstones.
They are black centaurs, tall and powerful, corded with muscle. They hold their weapons in their human hands proudly, and wear helms of black plate with tall, topknot crests of bound horsehair. Like the Mournival until Loken joined it, they all have the same face. The face of Horus.
From the other end of the causeway, their leader glares at Loken.
'Illuminate him,' says the Dreadful Sagittary.
'Sit with me,' you say. 'You kept no place for me, in your heart or your mind, but I have kept a place for you. A throne, and a crown of secrets. I do for you what you should have done for me.'
Your father makes no reply. You lead Him, half-limping, half-dragging across the chamber to the noble thrones, leaving a wet track of clotting centuries in your wake. He leans into you, frail, His hand against your chest. Is this, at last, the paternal gesture you have craved from Him? Just a touch? No words. He'd never say it. He can't speak anyway.
But whispers rise around you. Querulous. Dismayed. Infuriated. What are you doing? This isn't what was supposed to happen. This isn't what was ordained.
This wasn't the point.
'Hush,' you say.
They do not.
'Stop your whispers,' you tell them, hauling your father to His final seat.
They look at you, the Neverborn and the damned, and you read alarm in their faces. No, more than alarm. Horror.
'You are always whispering,' you say. 'Whisper, whisper. It's annoying. Stop it.'
The whispers rise in intensity. They are angry, as though you've backed out on something. As though you - you - have reneged on a deal. There was no deal beyond your supremacy. The whispers seethe, accusing treachery. Heresy.
'Don't talk to me about heresy,' you tell them.
Caecaltus runs, though he cannot run. He stumbles, but he does not advance. The grim amphitheatre where his King-of-Ages fights the monster seems forever out of reach, telescoping further away the harder he struggles towards it. He sees his King-of-Ages fall. He sees the worldbreaking blow that drops the Master of Mankind to the dust of the hellish arena.
He can't run. His body is too wrecked by the Lupercal's fury, his bones too broken. He staggers to a halt.
Ahead, right there yet too far away, the vast, black amphitheatre is silent. It is not a hush of anticipation. The silence is solid, an anechoic flatness. The audience is still present, still jeering and hissing. He can see their lost-and-damned faces, spectral in the gloom, wide-eyed and whispering, infuriated by the spectacle they had gathered to witness. But they make no sound.
He can hear his pulse thumping in his ears. The drumming heartbeat. He can hear his own pain. He can hear a voice, a voice from nowhere, a voice echoing from blackness.
The Emperor must live.
He hears his own death approaching, a fast and rumbling chariot. There is only one place he is prepared to die. At His side. They will rise together or fall together. The only death a Hetaeron should contemplate.
He hears a scream. It is his own. His mouth is wide, and spittle is flying as he empties his lungs in a howl of defiance, the first war cry he has uttered since he was made.
He hears the thunder of his own footsteps on the deck. He hears his pain crack as he tramples it underfoot and runs through it, ignoring agony, forgetting injury, driven by His will alone.
Some work of noble note may yet be done.
The Emperor must live.
You lift your father into the throne you have made ready for Him. The Neverborn whispers around you have turned to protests and vehement indignation. What do they know? Let them live with their disappointment. They came here to see blood and witness a death. Let them choke on blood. You are the master here. You make the decisions. You will give them something better. Not a quick, crowd-pleasing death, like the arrogant Angel got. A lasting punishment. An everlasting punishment. You will share all your secrets with your father, all the secrets that the warp has shown you. You will teach Him the error of His ways, and enumerate His sins for Him, by doing for Him what He dismally failed to do for you.
It was never your father's power, it was what He did with it. He kept it all for Himself. So you will illuminate Him.
For the secrets that are yours to share are far brighter and more fierce than any fire He stole from Molech. Their truth will burn Him for the remainder of time on this throne of suffering and flame.
Let the crowd jeer. Let them protest. Let the Old Four leer in disapproval. Gods do not make mistakes.
Your father, at least, seems to accept your judgement. As you move His fractured, final aspect onto the throne, His hand stays pressed against your chest, a tender touch that seems to say that He understands, and that He is grateful for your mercy in commuting His sentence. He will be with you forever, always at your side, father and son. With that simple touch, He expresses His appreciation of you, and for the gift that only you can give Him because you are, still, no matter what, His first-found child.
The bond of blood. The bond of family. Something the Neverborn can never understand. He finally acknowledges you.
You realise that His hand upon your chestplate has grown warm. You can feel the heat through the Serpent's Scales.
You look down. His face is drenched in blood. His eyes turn up to look into yours.
They light up with white fire.
The blast lifts you up, throws you across the infinite angles of the galaxy, and tears your soul in two.
It's not your father's power. It's how He steals it.
10:v
Last rites
Hush.
No sound.
The Neverborn open-mouthed, outrage turned to utter dismay.
You rise again, burnt ether broiling off you, pain wrenching you. The vile old man proves treacherous to the very last. He abused your mercy to get His breath back. He used that tender, casual touch to draw power from you to replenish Himself. Your father has deceived you, and used you, as He has always deceived you and used you.
He's rising too. He's on His feet, leaning one hand against the arm of the throne you chose for Him, straightening up. The gleaming lustre has returned to His war plate, the white asterism behind His head relit. He shimmers with stolen power.
He has restored His aspect and refreshed it. It is almost a new aspect, still the regal warrior-king in gold, but the planes and angles of His armour are now sharper and more aggressive. Majesty has been subordinated to ravening threat. He is more warlike than you have ever seen Him.
Except His war-sword is on the other side of the Court where it fell from His hand.
He comes at you. You go to meet Him.
This will take but a moment.
He's leeched power from you to replenish Himself, and done it so cunningly you didn't even feel it. There is a reason for that. It was so small an amount, you barely felt it sapped away. Your power is, and always has been, drawn without restraint or limit.
You snatch up Worldbreaker and lunge at Him. He stands His ground, His right hand making certain dextrous movements, His left, the lightning claw, likewise gesturing, both describing sigils that form and crackle in the air.
Sigillite magic. A charlatan's last gambit. You-
Your plastron feels warm where His hand rested on you. You look down, and see another sigil marked there, glowing, inscribed surreptitiously as He leaned against you. It pulses, a timed delay-
The blast hurls you sideways. It detonates with the force of a Reaver squad's breaching mine. You are thrown down, your collarbone and right shoulder shattered. He's rushing you before you can rise, hurling the air-cast sigils at you. They are both pentacles, drawn from His arcanology, and they whirl, spitting sparks, as they descend like circular saws. You smack one away with your maul. The screaming razor points of the other slice through your plate and ribs before you can swat it aside. He has already drawn two more that squeal as they rotate towards you. You deflect the third with Worldbreaker, cracking it. Your shattered shoulder has rendered your Talon useless. You are obliged to destroy the fourth with a beam of bloodlight from the eye upon your breast.
And while you are thus occupied, He falls upon you.
He grabs Worldbreaker's haft with hand and claw, and drives it down flat to crush across your throat. White fire spears from His eyes to blind the Eye of Horus on your chest. You cannot fend Him off with your dead Talon. Face to face, your refractor shields and telaethesics spit and crackle and squeal on contact.
You're pinned. But He is nothing like as strong as you, and has nothing like your mass. You twist, then roll, and throw Him off. The three remaining pentacle sigils are still spinning, but they bounce aside. One hits the deck and sticks fast on one point like a throwing star.
He has your maul.
He tore it from your grip. You rise to meet Him. You circle. He loops Worldbreaker with expert ease, the great maul whooping through the air. He swings it. You duck, and it fails to connect. He swings again, strikes you on the upswing, and knocks you onto your back. He loops an over-swing without hesitation, bringing Worldbreaker down at you as you are prone. No mercy for a fallen foe. He wants to put you down and keep you down.
You roll aside with a curse. Worldbreaker demolishes black floor ti |
e tore it from your grip. You rise to meet Him. You circle. He loops Worldbreaker with expert ease, the great maul whooping through the air. He swings it. You duck, and it fails to connect. He swings again, strikes you on the upswing, and knocks you onto your back. He loops an over-swing without hesitation, bringing Worldbreaker down at you as you are prone. No mercy for a fallen foe. He wants to put you down and keep you down.
You roll aside with a curse. Worldbreaker demolishes black floor tiles. You scramble up. Worldbreaker strikes you in the back while you are still half-kneeling, and knocks you on your face.
The whistling maul comes down. You roll again, with all urgency, but it hits your belly-plate refractors and caves them in. The next swing comes at your face.
But by then, your ruined shoulder has reknitted.
The Talon flashes up and catches the descending head of the maul with the boom of a firing bombard.
Up you get. You lurch Him backwards. He is gripping Worldbreaker's ferrule with both hands. You clench the maul's head in your Talon. You use the maul like a rod to force Him backwards. He tries to twist the haft to break your grip. You clench it tighter, push and twist, shoving Him two paces back, then another two. Another lunge lifts His feet off the ground for a second.
You rip Worldbreaker from His hands as He stumbles back, unbalanced. You deftly toss the maul from your Talon to your left hand, and catch it smartly. You spin it once.
Where were we, father?
The Neverborn host whoop and shrill your name.
What does He have left? He should have stolen more power from you when He had the chance. Why did He take so little? Ah, of course. Because He did not dare take more. He knows His own propensities. If He had stolen more, He wouldn't have been able to stop. Like a chronic inebriate with no impulse control, He would have drunk Himself mad from the empyrean. He dares not, above all things, risk the malison of the Dark King.
So He took from you sparingly, and He has already used most of what meagre quantity He stole. He is growing feeble. What does He have left? What will He try next?
Lightning, from His spanning claws, of course. The bolt forks at you. You deflect with a necromatic ward, but as He fires it, He looks away and reaches out with His right hand. His fallen war-sword, abandoned on the floor, flies towards Him, hooked by telekine force.
To even things up? You won't have that. Worldbreaker intercepts the flying blade before it reaches His hand, and sends it spinning away towards the thrones.
What's left? You swing for His skull. He slides sideways through the Abstraction of Plight to evade the blow, but it's a weak effort. That stolen power is running out. He circles you via the twilit cliffs of the Forsaken Angle, appears at your side, and drives His claws through the refractors shielding your hip. They tear in shreds of light, but He has recklessly put Himself too close, and you snap out Worldbreaker's ferrule and butt Him in the face.
He reels aside, cheekbone broken, onto the Forsaken Angle again, but He doesn't have the strength to stay there. Your Talon seizes Him by the left arm as He spills back into the Court. He tries to tear free, but the Talon bites, cracking auramite and drawing blood. You have Him cold.
He has no strength left for warped angles, or evasion by dimensional plane, and not enough power to conjure fresh aspects either. He has no force to channel, and not even a hint of enough warp-will to move the everywhere of your realm and affect a parry by location. He can't break your grip.
He has no cards left to play. The last of them are scattered on the deck.
As though to demonstrate His weakness, He lights fire from His eyes at you again, lancing down with a white-hot cutting beam in an attempt to slice your Talon from His arm. The power of it is pathetic. Paltry. You clench the Talon tighter, twist, and strip golden plate and flesh from His forearm, unsleeving it to the bone.
Then you let go.
He staggers back, His arm a bloody parody of a limb. His claws rise, and He tries to write another sigil in the air.
Sigil magic. That last of last resorts. It's such a woeful effort, He might as well have surrendered.
You lift Worldbreaker-
No, too easy. Too basic. Too industrial for a finishing move. That kind of crude force is Perturabo's dull signature. You want a flourish.
You punch with your power claw instead. But with just the index talon extended.
The talon goes through His throat. Right through. His eyes bulge. Blood spills from His mouth.
You slowly draw the blade out, and catch your father as He falls.
He fought well. A stalwart recovery, and a worthy enough rematch, but the end was never in any doubt.
You carry Him back to the throne, His blood running freely, coating everything. You dump Him into the seat without care or ceremony. He lolls forward, drooling blood. You brace His chest and push Him back. He droops to the side, and looks so limp and boneless that He might slide from the throne entirely.
You prop Him back in place, bracing him with Worldbreaker's haft, and turn. A nod of your head brings His sigil pentacles flying to you, the last one wrenching out of the floor. They are spent, and no longer spinning like circular cutters. But the points are still sharp. You catch each one, turn them on edge, and stake Him to the throne. One drives down through His right thigh, the second through His left. The third you ram through His left shoulder, nailing Him on its points to the back of the throne.
Now only His head flops.
You step back, Talon and maul raised, accepting the adulation of the watching host.
He sits, a whisper from death, pinned to a throne that streams with His lifeblood.
There's symbolism there. A throne of blood. Something apt. You'll finesse it later, when you commit your testimony of this day to Remembrancer Oliton.
'Behold,' you cry, 'the False Emperor!'
The daemons squeal and howl. The Old Four approve.
'So will I deal with all tyrants and deceivers!' you roar. The acclaim is so loud, you can barely hear your own voice.
You circle the Court, arms raised, a moment more, then turn to face the throne and finish the coronation.
Your way is blocked.
A figure stands between you and your gore-soaked, staked-up father. It is a small figure, breathing hard and pitifully damaged. But it is braced defiantly to impede your advance.
It fixes you with a quite preposterously bold glare of resistance.
'By. His. Will. Alone,' gasps Caecaltus Dusk.
10:vi
Dusk
Horus Lupercal speaks his name.
'Dusk. Proconsul Caecaltus Dusk.'
He seems amused.
'Again, you interrupt and speak out of turn. My father and I have matters to conclude, and a legacy to discuss, and you, little soldier, have no place in that.'
'I defy you,' says Caecaltus in a cold, clear voice. 'The Imperium defies you.'
'With... what?' the Lupercal asks.
Caecaltus stands his ground. He aims the glinting paragon spear at the monster facing him. He keeps his back to his king, stricken on the profane throne behind him. He places himself between wounded father and murderous son.
But he knows the monster's right. He's shivering, almost shaking with pain. He's weak. His refractors have failed. Even at his peak, he would not have been sufficient for this fight.
He has nothing. Nothing at all.
Leetu reaches the row of primitive thrones, and cowers in their shadows. They are ugly things, crudely and inexpertly hewn from stone. The angles of their structures - the backs, the seats, the arms - seem wrong and unnatural.
Like the room itself. So dark and quiet and forlorn. Whispers seem to crease the air, but the vault of death is empty, and they are so alone. Just him, the Master of Mankind, and the beast of all beasts.
And the Hetaeron proconsul.
The Custodian, Dusk, has appeared from somewhere, alive after all. But he has doomed himself. The idiot has stepped into the open, and is trying to confront Horus. He's standing in the Lupercal's path, trying to stare him down.
That's just madness. But what else can the man do? Leetu thinks. What else did I think I was going to do? Face this impossible monster? Throw myself in front of the Emperor to protect Him? Die instantly?
It's all futile. They've got nothing. Leetu, the insanely brave proconsul, the Luna Wolf Loken, if he's still alive... They're just men. They're just specks. Outclassed, outgunned, helpless in the face of this. It's a miracle that any of them have survived this long. This is a warp-war. This is a clash of higher powers, of cosmic properties far above and beyond any mortal limits. This is a once-in-a-civilisation event. And the three of them who came here with the Master of Mankind are inconsequential, insignificant. They're mere microbes, just dust carried on the heel of events. They're lucky to even be present as bystanders. They're not meant to be here. There's no place in this for them, no role to play. Leetu wonders how they're even alive. The inhuman nature of this place, the warping concentration of immaterial force, should make it impossible for them to exist in this environment. They should no more be standing here, than on the surface of a neutron star or at the heart of a supernova, or any other hyper-hostile location in the galaxy where human life simply cannot exist. They all should have perished the instant they arrived.
For there is nowhere more hyper-hostile to mortal life than this Court.
For them to be here, even as onlookers, there must be some force or property in the Court that sustains human organics and prevents them from being annihilated by the immaterial concentration.
Perhaps, thinks Leetu, that's Horus. Whatever human relic of the first-found still exists in the core of that dark horror, it must be essential. It must need to exist for Horus to maintain his form as the personified instrument of Chaos. They are still alive, Leetu and the proconsul, merely as a conseque |
For them to be here, even as onlookers, there must be some force or property in the Court that sustains human organics and prevents them from being annihilated by the immaterial concentration.
Perhaps, thinks Leetu, that's Horus. Whatever human relic of the first-found still exists in the core of that dark horror, it must be essential. It must need to exist for Horus to maintain his form as the personified instrument of Chaos. They are still alive, Leetu and the proconsul, merely as a consequence of Horus' need to maintain his human essence.
Is that a weakness? A flaw they can exploit?
A weakness perhaps, but beyond the means of Leetu or Caecaltus to leverage. Such exploitation would take a better man. A greater being, someone who functions at the Lupercal's level of cosmic proficiency.
Leetu is just a Space Marine. This is not a fight he was built to undertake, and he has no chance in this arena. But he has the fierce tactical insight of any Astartes.
Caecaltus Dusk has, for a second or two, distracted the attention of the Lupercal. He has used the only weapon he has left - courage. Leetu can stand with him, and die with him, or he can use that distraction and attempt to free the only being who might have a chance to stop the first-found.
Leetu slips along the towering line of thrones, darting from shadow to shadow, and reaches the Emperor. The Master of Mankind looks dead, His great form desecrated and limp, glazed with gore, His eyes closed. He has been staked to the stone seat with strange five-pointed stars that look as though they are made of molten iron. Leetu tries to pull one of them free. It is stuck fast through the Emperor's right thigh, and it burns Leetu's hands to touch it, despite his armoured gauntlets. Leetu takes Mourn-It-All, and attempts to use the blade as a lever instead. The Emperor does not stir.
With a snarl of supreme effort, Leetu yanks the first pentacle free. It clatters aside to the deck like a ring of heated steel, and cold, thick blood oozes sickly from the wound it has left. Frantically, Leetu starts to prise at the star impaling the left thigh. There's no time left.
Caecaltus' defiance of the Warmaster will be over in another second.
'You have been tricked, Horus Lupercal,' says Caecaltus Dusk. His spear trembles in his hands.
'Get out of my way,' the Warmaster rumbles.
'I refuse,' replies the Hetaeron. 'By His will-'
'He has no will left! It's a wonder you're even standing! Get out of my way.'
'No,' says Caecaltus. Horus doesn't need his permission. Horus can step on and through him effortlessly. But the crowd around them is enjoying this moment of cruel sport. Caecaltus can hear them baying and whooping. This agonising torture of a doomed mortal soul, drawn out. The chance to hear it make its futile pleas, the chance to hear it appeal, with that ridiculously human quality called hope, to a pity that does not exist. The chance to drink in its sincerity and cherish its bravery, and then savour the sweet burst of pain at the end when it realises such properties have no currency. Caecaltus can see the Warmaster trying to hide his smile, and maintain a solemn timbre in his voice. He is playing to the crowd, a sly wink.
'You have been tricked, my son,' says Caecaltus Dusk.
The Warmaster's gaze abruptly switches back to him. It is suddenly intense.
'What did you say?'
'I said, you have been tricked,' repeats Caecaltus. His arms are quivering. He does not know how much longer he can hold the spear up or remain on his feet. 'Chaos puppets you. The Old Four don't need you to be the new Emperor. They do not even comprehend such mortal concerns. They merely need you to kill the old one, to stop the ascension of mankind. You-'
The Talon rises and points at him.
'You said, "my son". The voice you speak with is not yours.'
'It is the only voice I have ever known,' says Caecaltus Dusk. 'It is the only voice I speak with and the only voice I hear. I am my own voice, Horus first-found. Listen to it, my distant son. You have been tricked-'
'The only voice I hear is the voice of the deceiver,' replies Horus, and erases Caecaltus Dusk where he stands.
The beam of bloodlight burns from the great eye on the Warmaster's breastplate for five or six seconds, engulfing the proconsul entirely. Then the glare of it fades.
Leetu hears the shriek of vile light incinerate the Hetaeron behind him. He feels the backwash of heat. He has wrenched the second pentacle out, and cast it aside, freeing the other thigh. He climbs onto the edge of the throne's seat to reach the third star that's driven through the Emperor's shoulder.
The great figure is bent forward, His head bowed. Blood strings from His split lips and His nose, and matts the long black hair that hangs like a curtain around His face. His left arm is shockingly stripped to the bone from the shoulder, the sleeve of flesh and crumpled armour bunched around His wrist. All life seems extinct, as absent as it was in the lifeless corpse of His angel son. The third pentacle is the only thing holding Him upright in the blasphemous throne. Leetu, his hands cut and bloody from his efforts, starts to draw the third star out. It will not move.
'Wake up!' Leetu hisses as he pulls and strains. 'Wake up, Emperor! Wake up, great lord! You must wake up now! Wake and rise before it is too late! Your daemon-son is almost upon you!'
He tries to use Mourn-It-All as a lever again, hooking it through the hot-iron form of the pentacle. He exerts so much force that a shard of the sword-blade breaks from a small crack near the hilt.
'Wake!' Leetu yells. 'Wake! Erda sent me to you! She would want you to stand! She needs you to stand!'
Mourn-It-All's blade begins to bend under the stress.
The proconsul's paragon spear, smoking and superheated, clatters to the floor of the Court.
Caecaltus Dusk is still standing. His plate is glowing almost red hot from the energy it has been exposed to, and Caecaltus' flesh is blistered and raw, the upper layers of skin cooked off. But he is still standing, and he is alive.
The Lupercal's eyes narrow into a deep frown. The crowd is silent.
'Not possible,' he murmurs.
'B-by H-His w-will a-alone...' Caecaltus slurs through cracked and swollen lips.
For a moment, the Warmaster seems to blanch slightly, as though he has come face to face, at long last, with something he does not understand. Then he sees the mark on the breastplate of the swaying Custodian, a crude sigil that looks as though it has been daubed with a finger, and has only become visible now the armour has been superheated. The sigil glows.
'Sigillite magic,' Horus snaps contemptuously. He starts to recite the proconsul's name, which he stole from the very air when they were first face to face. He starts to recite all of it, all of the six hundred and ten parts of it that are micro-etched inside Caecaltus' armour.
'Caecaltus Dusk Onatvite Albia Salmay Levantine Sarcosal Cuzco Barbieri Guillory Cazabon...'
Twenty names in, Caecaltus starts to sway wildly, as though he is about to fall. But he keeps his feet.
The eye on the Warmaster's chest blasts again, a more concentrated, sustained beam of bloodlight that he allows to stream a great deal longer than the first. No ancient sigil-craft can withstand it this time. Caught in the blinding beam of energy, Caecaltus Dusk shudders, buckles, and then blows apart in a spray of golden fragments. The scraps of auramite, molten-hot and smouldering, scatter across the deck. The largest intact piece, the heavy Aquilon breastplate, crashes to the ground.
Nothing organic survives.
'Wake up!' Leetu barks. He hears the awful shriek of another burst of energy behind him. Flakes of hot ash billow back across him, the throne, and the Emperor. The third pentacle is beginning to edge free, but it will not come out. The Emperor's blood is all over his hands, his arms and his chest.
'Erda sent me!' he shouts. 'Erda bids you stand and-'
He's in mid-air suddenly, legs swinging, his torso compressed by a terrible pressure. The first-found monster has reached him. It has seized him in its damn Talon and plucked him off the throne. The bladed claws are closed around his body.
Horus holds him up, examining him like some puzzling specimen.
'What are you?' the Warmaster rumbles up at him.
Struggling helplessly against the vice of the Talon, Leetu gazes down into the bloodlit face below him. Now he knows fear.
'No name to find,' Horus muses. 'No blood to match. Just a number. LE two. But you spoke a name. Erda. Did she send you here? Did she think she could intervene in this?'
'She will-' Leetu gasps.
'She will nothing,' Horus responds. 'She is dead. The Apostle Erebus told me how he had killed her out in that desert place. Her blood is cold, Space Marine, and you have failed in every duty you were asked to perform.'
Leetu's murmur of anguish draws laughter from the crowd. Horus shakes his head, and then tosses Leetu away with a flick of his Talon. He doesn't bother to look where the legionary falls.
Leetu lands on his back hundreds of metres away. He is dazed with concussion, and all sound is flat and muffled. Everything is dulled and numb except his grief.
He opens his eyes. He can see nothing, except an enclosing darkness. He can't move. He begins to make out shapes around him. A high, white arch overhead, made of smooth alabaster. A sheer wall to his right, faced in gleaming metal.
There is a smell. It's a smell like nothing he's ever known. It is rich and cloying, and unlike any smell in material creation. The unique stink of the deep void, seared meat, hot metal and melta fumes. The fragrance of madness. The odour of perdition. The smell is suffocating.
His focus resolves. The shapes around him un-blur. The wall of metal is not a wall of metal. It is the side of an axe-blade rested on its edge. The blade is as tall as a mountain precipice. The arch is not an alabaster arch. It is the curve of a moon-white c |
thing he's ever known. It is rich and cloying, and unlike any smell in material creation. The unique stink of the deep void, seared meat, hot metal and melta fumes. The fragrance of madness. The odour of perdition. The smell is suffocating.
His focus resolves. The shapes around him un-blur. The wall of metal is not a wall of metal. It is the side of an axe-blade rested on its edge. The blade is as tall as a mountain precipice. The arch is not an alabaster arch. It is the curve of a moon-white claw, like that of a raptor, curled up from a scaled toe and over onto its tip. He is lying beneath it, because the curve of that claw is a kilometre high.
It belongs to something. There are things around him, things so impossibly vast he can only see parts of them, the parts nearest the ground where they loom over him. He has fallen in among them, like a discarded bone from a feast-table. He is lying in their midst, at their feet.
There are four of them.
One turns its head, a thousand kilometres above him, and peers down at him with glazed indifference.
There's not even any point screaming.
10:vii
Hollow victory
This time, the fury of Typhus does not relent. The Death Guard host does not attack and withdraw. It maintains its pressure. In the hammering rain, the whole pass shakes with the traitors' fury. The teeming warriors assail every part of the cliff defences and the earthworks, as though they mean to tear the whole mountain down.
Sigismund isn't sure they couldn't. The Pale King's sons seem to be able to do anything they wish. He is fighting from the sagging end of a fighting platform that has partly given way, and hangs perilously from the face of the Gateway Cliff rampart. Death Guard warriors are rushing up sheer rock at him, making the cliff face their ground, mocking his precarious position over the drop. His black sword sweeps and hacks, wet with gore. The Death Guard only fall when they die. Sigismund isn't sure they're not just picking themselves up again at the foot of the precipice, and climbing back up.
'Fall back!' Pontis yells. He and Artolun are on the broken walkway behind him. Most of the Seconds have come up from below to reinforce the First Legion brothers. Sigismund has lost sight of Corswain. He can't see more than twenty metres in the deluge.
'Fall back!' Pontis yells again. Sigismund can hear the creak and ping of shearing stanchions. The ailing platform is beginning to dip more steeply. He thrusts down with the black sword and sends another of the Death Guard milling away into the drop, then he claws his way back up the rail. Pontis and Artolun grab him by the arms, and the three of them haul themselves onto the stone rampart just seconds before the platform disintegrates entirely.
It falls away, scraping hundreds of Death Guard off the cliff face and away to their deaths.
In seconds, their places have already been filled by more of their kind swarming up the vertical rock.
On the rampart top, Sigismund and Artolun hold the first of them off as Pontis yells for support. Dark Angels rush to them, and lay into the melee that is now spilling onto the stone piling. Sigismund notices that one of the First has an arm missing, the stump bandaged. In this last moment of the world, even the gravely wounded are joining the fight.
Sigismund focuses, concentrating only on the foes that come at him. He shears at them with his sword, feeling the jolt of impact transmit down his arm with every blow, filling the air with showers of dark blood. The flies are all over them, crawling into his mouth and eyes. A Dark Angel falls from the rampart edge taking two Death Guard brutes with him.
Around the head of the pass, the ferocity of Sigismund's fight is matched on every bulwark, edge or fighting platform. A vapour, part smoke from weapons fire, part steam from hot metal and fresh blood, is lifting off the neck of the ravine in the freezing air.
The future is neither now nor here. That was Sigismund's mantra. One step at a time, to do what can be done now, so that what must be done will follow as an ultimate consequence. In the ringing thicket of death and metal, Sigismund fears that the future is here at last. The future none of them wanted. The future they have fought for seven years to resist.
The future that will devour them all.
He hears a voice.
At first he thinks it's the seneschal, or Adophel, calling them to arms, yelling desperate orders from the crags above. But it is something else, and besides, the tone is too light and soft for either of the Dark Angels lords.
It is clear, though. It is terribly clear. It rings from the darkness below, and the winter sky above. It rings from the crags and the ice-sheathed scarps. It shivers from the very rock itself.
'Sons and daughters of the Imperium of Man,' it says. 'Rise now. Rise up. By the command of the Praetorian, take up your weapons and advance. The Emperor stands alone, at the hour of greatest peril. Take up your weapons and come to His aid. Protect Him as He protects you. You are the shield of humanity! Rise together and stand as one. Stand at His side now, or all is lost. Terra must endure. The Imperium must stand. Horus Lupercal must fall. The Emperor must live.'
A command. From his father, his own beloved Praetorian. Sigismund is filled with a strength of fury, or a fury of strength. He brings his blade to his forehead in quick salute, and finds a reserve that he did not know he still possessed.
Unyielding, he lays into the foe around him.
'The Emperor must live!' he yells. 'The Emperor must live!'
Lord Cypher looks at Keeler.
'You heard that?' he asks.
'I hear it still,' she answers, her eyes wide in wonder.
They both do. The echoes are still ringing around the boreholes and chambers of the Hollow Mountain.
You are the shield of humanity! Rise together and stand as one. Stand at His side now, or all is lost... The Emperor must live...
Everyone has heard it. An awkward mix of terror and awe spreads through the huddled multitude, rippling like wildfire through dry brush, spreading from chamber to chamber as the geophonics amplify, carrying the echoes deeper and deeper.
'Active resonance!' Cartheus calls out, pointing to the flash and sizzle of coloured light inside the chamber wall, pulses that dart and scribble across the rock like capillaries under the skin.
The lights ebb, and start to fade again.
'Keeler,' Cypher says. His tone is urgent. 'Bring their focus to you, as you did before.'
'And say what?'
'Whatever you like! One of your dismal verses or pamphlet sermons! Or just repeat those words that just rang out! I need you to lead them again. But more focused than before.'
'Lead them?' she asks.
'Together as one, Keeler!'
She hesitates. It's not her word to speak, or her voice that calls.
'It should be you,' she tells him.
'I think it has to be you,' he says.
'And the Librarius must moderate and-' Tanderion begins.
Cypher raises a hand to silence him. He is staring intently at Keeler.
She nods.
He gently hands her up onto the basalt plinth again. She looks out across the sea of frightened faces below. She doesn't know what to say.
Then she does.
'The Emperor must live,' she says, not loudly, but plainly. 'The Emperor is the shield and protector of humanity, but what is His shield? Rejoice, for I bring glorious news. We are. The Emperor is the light in our darkness, but what is His light? Lift up your hands and rejoice. We are. He walks among us, even in the valley of night, and we walk with Him, in defiance of death. It is reciprocal. We are souls bound together. We are together as one, or we are nothing. The Emperor must live. Speak this with me, as it is spoken to me. The Emperor must live.'
10:viii
The empty throne
A stillness settles on your Court at last. No more delays or interruptions. The crowd has fallen silent. There is nothing but the distant rumble of the neverness, and the lazy drone of the psychneuein as they wake and begin to swarm in the gardens of the warp.
The stillness is profound. The galaxy is aligned, all things and all moments, all the infinite angles and countless planes folded into one psychofractal point. Your Court, which surrounds your flagship, which surrounds the neverness, which surrounds the Inevitable City, which surrounds your realm, which surrounds Terra, which surrounds the Solar Realm, which surrounds the galaxy entire, which surrounds the warp, and inside that, they all surround each other, in reverse sequence, like one box inside another, with your Court at the centre, and this moment at its heart.
You glance at the Old Four in the gloom beyond. One brushes drowsy psychneuein from its face with an indolent hand.
They approve. They acknowledge you in a way your father never has.
You nod.
You summon bloodlight in a swirling ball, and cup it in your Talon. You shape it with your mind, stretching it out into a wire of light, like a red thread, then winding it upon itself into an ouroboros loop. You tie knots and twists to form the eight thorny spikes. You make the shaped light glow brightly.
A crown of Chaos. Not as fine as yours will be, but regal enough.
You turn to set it on your father's head.
The throne is empty. It is smeared with His blood, but it is empty.
Pain shears through your ribs. You stumble, and drop the crown. It bounces across the black floor with the chimes of a funerary bell, and rolls to a clattering halt.
Your father is behind you, on His feet. He has the third pentacle in His hand, gripped like a chakram. Its edge has just gone through you, and its points now drip with your blood as well as His. Somehow He is wielding it with that ruined, flesh-stripped arm. In His claws, He clutches the proconsul's spear, no more than a short-handle falx to Him.
Your father will not give up. A little reprieve, and He has regained enough strength to try yet again.
He rakes the pentacle at you. You sidestep. He is slow, clumsy. Why? Why will He no |
t. He has the third pentacle in His hand, gripped like a chakram. Its edge has just gone through you, and its points now drip with your blood as well as His. Somehow He is wielding it with that ruined, flesh-stripped arm. In His claws, He clutches the proconsul's spear, no more than a short-handle falx to Him.
Your father will not give up. A little reprieve, and He has regained enough strength to try yet again.
He rakes the pentacle at you. You sidestep. He is slow, clumsy. Why? Why will He not just give up? Twice now, you have beaten Him. He must understand He cannot win.
He hacks with the cold iron spikes a third time. You block them with your Talon, and the pentacle, its Sigillite magic entirely spent, shatters like ice.
He casts the pieces aside. He circles you, swaying and unsteady. He tosses the spear into His left hand. Not quite a war-sword, but it has an edge. His eyes never leave yours.
Those eyes are tired. The light in them has almost gone out. There is so very little fire left.
He lurches at you. A feint. As you turn out, the blade of the spear rakes into your refractors. Sparks gush. You block with your maul, but then His claws are into you on the other side. There is no lightning left in them now, but the tip of one draws blood.
You swing back, Talon bared. He leans out of its path, reverses, and lands three blows with the spear that leave gouges in your vambrace.
This is just melancholy. You wanted this part to be over quickly, and not dwell on the undignified necessities, but He seems determined to make the unseemly pantomime last as long as humanly possible. He wants to take the sparkle off your glory, so that the start of your reign is remembered as a scrappy, bloody business.
Is this your father's final aspect, then? A revenant despoiler, like the loathed card in the deck, that refuses to be banished, and contaminates the majesty of your triumph? A bitter, vengeful spirit that refuses to let go of His throne as fiercely as it rejects the compensation you offer in its place?
How like Him to do this. He has never let you be you, without His shadow falling over you, blocking the light, staining everything you are and everything you do, qualifying you, compromising you, compelling you. You have all the power, but somehow, somehow, He is still there, still clinging on with His bloody, broken fingernails, still deciding how things should be, ruling your life. You suppose that when a life has been as long as His, it is easy to forget how succession should work, how the old is meant to give way to the new, how the healthy cycle of renewal should play out for the good of all. He has stalled that natural cycle for thirty thousand years, and the foetid stagnation of that transgression is plain for all to see.
All except Him. He is blind to it. He is clinging to the past, and the way things have been done, but the past is a corpse. Let it go. Let it go, it's dead. Can't He see the writhing maggot mass that He will not allow to be buried? Can't He see the fresh and vital start, so long overdue, that your will alone can usher in?
In this grisly defiance, He is mocking you, mocking your mercy, your noble victory, your admirable achievement, your legitimacy, your benevolent magnanimity. He is determined to be as awkward and intractable as He can to ruin your Day of Days.
Selfish. Stubborn, Spiteful. Oblivious, as ever, to the needs and desires of others, making everything about Him, long past the end of His authority or significance. In defeat, He is hell-bent on ruining victory for you.
He lashes out with the claws again, and you easily move out of reach. Missing you, He stumbles drunkenly to keep His balance.
Those eyes. Those tired, lightless eyes. Oh, you see it now. In those eyes you see the truth of it. He knows He's done, but He won't give up. He's refusing to submit. This pathetic, halting effort is not simply a bid to disgrace your crowning moment, it's an attempt to goad you.
He wants you to kill Him.
He's trying to aggravate you, and provoke you into lashing out. He wants you to end Him. He would rather die than accept your offer and your crown.
Death is the only victory He can claim over you now.
He comes at you, another pass, horribly telegraphed by the rasping breath He draws into blood-frothed lungs before He attempts it. He hasn't got the strength or will to disguise His movements or intentions. He flails a wild trio of attacks: spear, claws, spear. You fend Him off, but one blow lands and leaves a wound. It will heal in seconds, but it stings.
He is pushing you as hard as He can to get a reaction. He wants your wrath. He wants your cruelty, not your mercy.
He really wants to die.
He makes another clumsy flurry of blows. You deflect the spear, block the claws, turn out from the riposting spear, parry the claws as they swing back in, and then twist the blade of the spear aside.
Then you hit Him with the maul and lay Him out on the floor.
He is sprawled on His side, breathing hard. You can smell blood, ylem, the liquid spatter of leaking years. He has dropped the spear. He tries to rise, and falls back on His elbow. Another few breaths, and He tries again. His legs won't lift Him.
And you won't kill Him.
You are going to make Him accept this fate. You will make Him want the thing He does not want. The crown. The throne. Submission to you and you alone. Death is too easy an escape, too merciful a release, after all He has done to you.
He has been down so long, you could have killed Him six or seven times over with the maul. A single burst of bloodlight from the eye on your chestplate would have annihilated Him, more thoroughly than it did that fawning idiot of a Hetaeron.
But you won't. You circle Him patiently. He's propped up on His arm, and His breathing has become so laboured, He is almost panting. He's almost spent. He tries, once more, to rise. He fails.
'Don't you understand?' you ask. 'I could have killed you the moment you got here. I fought you because I wanted you to live.'
He makes no answer. Yet in the bloody tatters of His thoughts, you perceive the truth as He sees it. You didn't kill Him right away because you didn't want to.
Does He really believe that? He is so deluded. You were trying to demonstrate your wisdom of authority. The qualities of grace, restraint and compassion that will characterise your reign, and prove you to be a far finer, fairer monarch than He ever was. Power is nothing. Killing is a soldier's work, or the blunt answer of the inarticulate. Mercy and fairness are the instruments a worthy king wields.
Still, His sputtering, fading thoughts insist the human part of you did not want to kill Him. Just as it does not want to do what the gods command.
'No one commands me, father. Not any more. That is what this damned war's been about.'
He sighs. He thinks that if you believe that, then you have learned nothing.
He bows His head.
You go to Him, crouch down, and make to lift Him back up onto the throne where He belongs.
He looks up at you. His hand comes out from under Him, swinging the crown you made.
The tips of its bloodlight spikes stab into your face and split open your skull.
10:ix
The Knight of Mandatio
The centaurs draw back their black saddle bows and loose.
Their arrows are long darts of lethal bloodlight. Their first volley passes over Loken to drive him forward. Where they strike, against causeway stone, pool edge or sky-mirror bowl, the three burning arrows explode like bolter rounds, casting broken ceramic and flakes of stone into the air, and spilling the reflected stars.
There is no cover. Loken starts to race down the causeway towards the leading sagittary, hoping to close with him before he or his two grim companions can string a second volley. But they have already nocked their next flight of crimson arrows, and are bending their powerful torsos to loose again.
They falter, all three of them, suddenly. Three faces of Horus grimace in pain, as though afflicted by some unseen injury. Still, they loose, but their shots are off-mark. The arrows of the two sagittaries at the sides of the twilit garden strike against obsidian columns in sprays of pink light. The arrow of the lead sagittary, despite his last-moment flinch of pain, flies more truly.
Loken dives headlong off the causeway to avoid it. The pool's ink-dark water enfolds him as the arrow destroys two more scrying pools.
The three sagittaries recover their composure, and spur forward, fresh arrows nocked. The Luna Wolf has vanished. Smoke rises from the shattered urns and bowls their darts have exploded. Ripples spread wide and slow across the left-hand pool, disrupting the zodiacal patterns and the tiny new moon reflected in the water's glossy black mirror.
The leader stops halfway along the causeway, where Loken was last standing. He stares down into the ripples, his bow drawn ready. He jerks his head in a gesture that any man who had served alongside the Lupercal, or First Captain Abaddon, would recognise. The centaur on the right-hand edge of the pools starts to canter at once, rounding the far end of the pool to join his leader on the causeway. The leader, and the centaur facing him across the left-hand pool, draw back their right arms, and loose arrows down into the water.
In starless black, his senses muffled by more than water, Loken sinks. The depth of the pool is a cold, inky darkness. Silver bubbles of air bead the contours of his plate and his slow-moving limbs, and tumble upwards around him, like mirror stars dislodged from the surface. He sees the bright flashes, to his left and directly ahead, as arrows, burning like scarlet neon, slice down into the water at steep angles, hissing like angry snakes. The arrows trail away, until they are lost from view in the blackness below. Their bloodlit fire has not been extinguished. They have simply travelled too far. The pool has no fathomable bottom.
The lead centaur strings another arrow |
s slow-moving limbs, and tumble upwards around him, like mirror stars dislodged from the surface. He sees the bright flashes, to his left and directly ahead, as arrows, burning like scarlet neon, slice down into the water at steep angles, hissing like angry snakes. The arrows trail away, until they are lost from view in the blackness below. Their bloodlit fire has not been extinguished. They have simply travelled too far. The pool has no fathomable bottom.
The lead centaur strings another arrow. The archer facing him across the water does likewise. The third is starting up the causeway to join his commander. Nothing has risen to the surface. No arrow-speared corpse has bobbed up. But the leader sees the tiny trace of silver bubbles, air trapped beneath the curve of a pauldron or plastron, escaping to the water's surface.
He strains to loose again, his bowmanship the fluid model of perfection. On the wild and un-timed steppes of the immaterium, he and his kin have hunted forever, and brought down every quarry in the warp. Their bow-skill has become so intuitive, so perfect, it has the grace of high art.
Loken's martial skill does not. He has never cared for the perfection of form, like Lucius or Eidolon, or any other showman. He does not care how he looks when he fights, only what that fight can achieve. His skill has the grace of high function, delivered for maximum effect and the greatest efficiency: Astartesian principles of practicality and tactical performance to reverse an enemy's advantage, even in the most untenable situation.
The arrows hiss into the pool. As they strike, Loken erupts from the water, right at the edge of the pool beside the causeway. He appears in a spray of water, and Rubio's blade lashes out in a lateral slice even though Loken is but chest-high against the causeway edge.
The sword severs the rear ankles of the lead sagittary. The leader makes a strangled, animal sound as he topples onto his side on the causeway stones, forelegs kicking and churning. Loken has already hoisted himself out of the pool. He rolls over the fallen centaur's body, and uses its spasming, snorting bulk as cover as the third centaur bears down on him along the causeway at a gallop, bow drawn. Rubio's fine blade has no utility against a large, moving target with a ranged weapon. Loken wrenches the bow from the fallen leader's grip, and a bloodlight arrow from the spilled quiver. The arrow stings and burns his fingers as he nocks it.
Blame yourself, Lupercal, Loken thinks as he draws the bow back, kneeling behind the thrashing centaur. Bolter and blade are the fundamental weapons of the Legiones Astartes, but the great Lupercal always insisted his Luna Wolves should know the way of all weapons, and train in their function, through endless practice evolutions in the cages and the sparring decks. His warriors should be ready for any circumstance.
'Imagine,' he once said, 'that you are caught on some simple world during a compliance, your sword lost, your ammunition spent. Could you use even the basic weapons of the Imperium's enemies against them?'
The Luna Wolves could fight with anything. A spear, an axe, a trident, a net, they knew the fundamentals of all, the strengths and weaknesses, just as they could turn a stick into a weapon, a rock, a table, a mirror, a pen.
Loken has not shot a bow for years, but the eidetic Astartesian mind does not forget a technique once it has been learned.
He looses at the centaur charging at him, just as the charging centaur looses at him. The centaur's arrow strikes the belly of the fallen leader, and the leader's thrashing, whinnying screams increase in intensity. Loken's arrow strikes the approaching centaur in the centre mass of its human torso. Its charge becomes a helpless, tumbling collapse. It slips sideways onto the causeway and crashes over into the right-hand pool in a sheet of spray.
The remaining centaur shoots across the left-hand pool. His skill is superb, but he lifts his aim too high for fear of hitting his stricken leader. The arrow spits past Loken's shoulder. Loken turns, still on his knee, still using the beast's body as a shield, and nocks another corrosive dart. It streaks across the pool, its lurid pink trail reflecting beneath it like a shooting star. It strikes the centaur just as he is drawing again, and shatters his bow in his hands. Hurt, snarling, the sagittary throws the broken bow aside, draws a black scythe off his back and jumps headlong into the pool.
The mirror pools are not fathomless to the centaur-sons of Horus, it would appear. The sagittary thrashes through the black water towards Loken, churning it like a cavalry outrider fording a river. Even half-submerged, he moves with furious equine power and speed.
Loken stands up, nocks a third arrow, ignoring the sting of it in his hand, and shoots it through the approaching centaur's face. The sagittary shudders, his head snapping back, and he rolls onto his side, wallowing in the pool, floating for a few moments before slowly sinking into the glassy blackness.
The pool's chopped water sloshes against the stone sides, before slowly returning to stillness. Loken snaps the bow across his knee and casts it away. He recovers his sword. He can still trace the smudge of fire along its edge.
The maimed leader is on his side on the causeway, his huge, gleaming form panting and rasping, death squeezing the last gulps of breath out of him. His black skin, knotted with muscle, is sheened with sweat. Dark blood from his severed limbs and the arrow in his belly forms a new mirror on the causeway stone.
'Oathbreaker!' he snorts at Loken, trying to turn his head.
'I kept my oaths,' Loken replies. 'I stood firm against all enemies. I kept brotherhood when others forsook it. I served the Luna Wolves, and maintained that proud name.'
The sagittary laughs, a ghastly sound thickened and choked by the blood in his throat. 'Did you uphold the confraternity of the Mournival, Loken? You did not!'
Loken walks around its body so he can look it in the eyes, though he has no wish to see the face it wears. That face, familiar from his beloved father, and so many of his brothers. It is flecked with blood, with a spittle of foam around its lips, and twisted in venomous rage towards him.
'I did,' Loken says. 'The duty of the Mournival was to stand counsel to our father. To guide him, and keep him ever true, even if our advice was not what he wanted to hear. We were meant to balance his errors of judgement. I never broke that duty. The Mournival failed, but I have never, ever forsaken that oath. I'm here to keep it, even now.'
The sagittary laughs, blood spraying from his mouth.
'This is how you keep your pledge to your primarch?' His voice is wheezing, mocking.
'The oath had many parts,' Loken replies. 'But all were contingent to the last and highest. To swear to uphold the truth of the Imperium of Mankind, no matter what evil may assault it. My father's truth is no longer that truth. It opposes it. It has become that assailing evil.'
The sagittary stares up at him, his breathing shallow and frayed.
'You honestly believe that, don't you?' he asks. 'You child. You vain, naive child. You think you are blameless, and have kept your promises, through all this horror-'
'Seven years of horror,' says Loken. 'Seven years of loss. The greatest price we have ever paid for anything. I would give anything to undo what has been done. I will give anything to make it stop.'
'You will!' the centaur spits.
Loken nods. 'I will. I accepted that when I took the oath. No matter the cost. That was our promise. A trillion lives to halt the darkness. Whatever it may take. No matter the cost.'
The sagittary starts to laugh again, gagging and coughing gore. Loken raises his sword to end its mockery and its misery.
'You're too late anyway,' the sagittary says, looking up at him. 'Far too late. While you have fought your vain fight to keep a meaningless pledge, the world has ended. There's none of your truth left to fight for. The Imperium has gone, Loken. The Imperium is lost.'
Loken brings the sword down anyway.
10:x
Unmaker
There ought to be something to say. Something worthwhile, something brave. Something to mark a moment such as this.
But Vulkan doesn't know what it would be.
He has never been one for speeches, preferring deeds over words. But he has rallied men in his time, called out to armies on the windy fields of war, roused the spirits of battered legions, or spoken words of comfort to brothers in hours of ill fortune.
He can do it, but it is not natural to his disposition.
Would his brothers know what to say? Many of them, like Roboute, Rogal, Sanguinius, and even, in his time, Horus, were fine orators. Their words could win a battle before the first shot was fired. During the years of the Great Crusade, before it became a time quite devoid of glory, he saw them many times stand up before a sea of uncertain faces and mark the great moments of human history with their words.
He thinks they would all be quite speechless now.
This is history. History at its most defined and visible, history at its bitter end. How does any man mark that? The Chaos winds are so strong, they are turning the pages of history so fast that nothing can be written down, and nothing can be read. The book will soon be closed forever.
Why speak, then? Who will hear it? There is nothing left to rally and no one left to rouse. There is no great feat to follow this for which minds and hearts need to be uplifted and prepared. Besides, there is no one to remembrance his final words. Anything Vulkan says will be lost, and there will be no future generations to read that record anyway.
Vulkan has always been a man of deeds. His last deed remains, and it will speak for itself, straight to the ears of the betraying Warmaster. Horus will have no victory over them, only wormwood and gall. Whatever he claims as his triumph, it will be meaningl |
feat to follow this for which minds and hearts need to be uplifted and prepared. Besides, there is no one to remembrance his final words. Anything Vulkan says will be lost, and there will be no future generations to read that record anyway.
Vulkan has always been a man of deeds. His last deed remains, and it will speak for itself, straight to the ears of the betraying Warmaster. Horus will have no victory over them, only wormwood and gall. Whatever he claims as his triumph, it will be meaningless ashes.
Vulkan straightens up and beholds his work. The Talisman of Seven Hammers is prepared, aligned and set to its destructive purpose. Only his hands could have done that. Only he knew the secret precision of its apparatus. Only the great maker can unmake.
The heat upon him is fierce. Sparks whirl around him like a blizzard of unanchored stars.
All is set. He can make history, now, by unmaking it.
He walks down the steps of the Throne, the heat upon his back. The whole Throne Room is groaning and sighing, its fabric distressed and de-forming in the raging heat and the mounting discordia of the penetrating immaterium. The entire chamber, and the Palace around it, or what remains of it, is no longer a defined realspace structure. It is a phantom of materia, a liminal space, dissolving into the rising warp, leaving only a memory of its former self that becomes less solid with every passing moment. As history becomes harder and more solid than it has ever been before, manifesting like a real substance, the Palace blurs and loses its form.
They are waiting for him, the last of those who have stood by his side. They will end here with him. He pays them his respects. The Master of the Adnector Concillium, so wracked with damage his adepts have to hold him up to bow to Vulkan. Halferphess, his face burn-blistered, and Moriana Mouhausen of the Chosen, weeping. He thanks them all for their efforts. Abidemi stands tall, the tears in his eyes evaporating as they form. He tries to bow to Vulkan, but Vulkan embraces his son instead. No words.
Uzkarel Ophite attends too. The proconsul has left his Sentinels Pylorus at the Silver Door, through which the sounds of approaching havoc now ring close. The Sentinels will not move. They will have their backs to the end when it comes. The last thing they will see is the glorious Silver Door rising to a sublime dazzle.
But Uzkarel has come, to signify the moment. His face is without expression.
'My Custodes can give you ten more minutes, eighteenth son,' he says. 'Fifteen, if the door holds and the fight that follows goes our way.'
'Minutes aren't going to make a difference, Uzkarel,' Vulkan replies. 'Not now. Our efforts are spent, and the Regent is perished. Our only commission now must be to make certain, fully certain, that the Warmaster claims nothing in his victory. We will scorn him with our last breath, and deny him, so we must make sure we take that last breath. He has made this ending, but we determine it.'
Uzkarel nods.
'I agree, my lord.'
The proconsul, like Abidemi, makes to bow, but Vulkan clasps his hand instead.
'By His will alone, Uzkarel,' says Vulkan. 'Always, until the end.'
It will surely be his end too, for even his Perpetual essence will not survive this annihilation.
Vulkan turns to make his last journey up the Throne steps and perform the deed that will be his last duty. He is sure there was somebody else, one other in the stalwart group, but he can't-
Her spectre waits for him at the foot of the steps. She is hard to see at the best of times, and hard to remember. In the furious light of the flames, she is barely there at all.
'Casryn,' he says. 'My apologies. I overlooked-'
My lord.
'There's no excuse. Your kind may be elusive to our conscious minds but-'
My lord Vulkan.
'Do not try to gainsay me now, Kaeria. I respect and admire your perseverance, but my mind is set. This must be done now, before it can be stopped-'
My lord, can you not hear? Can none of you hear?
Vulkan pauses. There's nothing to hear, nothing but the furnace roar of the Throne-pyre above them, the shrieking squeal of the engulfing immaterium, the gunshot crack of stone as it perishes in the heat and stress, the patter of molten gold as it drips from the high ceiling like rain.
The eternal spit and crackle of the warp.
'Casryn, I-'
No. There's a voice. There's a voice inside that uproar. Faint, distant but strong. He can hear it as though it is calling from the flagstones of the floor, or the columns of the hall.
'What is that?' he whispers.
I do not know-
'How... how are you the one to notice it, Casryn?'
Her shadow, so hard to see or focus on, shrugs.
I know not, she signs. Perhaps because I am deaf to the howl of the warp-
Vulkan turns, he looks around to locate the source of the sound. The others see him, and step forward, confused and apprehensive.
'My Lord of Drakes-' Abidemi begins.
Vulkan holds up his hand.
'Listen!' he orders. 'Listen well, because it is hard to hear.'
They all stop, heads turning. One by one, they hear it too.
Sons and daughters of the Imperium of Man. Rise now. Rise up...
'You all hear that, yes?' Vulkan asks.
By the command of the Praetorian, take up your weapons and advance. The Emperor stands alone, at the hour of greatest peril. Take up your weapons and come to His aid. Protect Him as He protects you. You are the shield of humanity!
They nod, wondering.
Rise together and stand as one. Stand at His side now, or all is lost. Terra must endure. The Imperium must stand. Horus Lupercal must fall. The Emperor must live.
The words continue, repeating like an echo what they have said before.
'Is it a trick?' asks Abidemi.
'No,' says Halferphess. 'It has the clarity of truth-'
'But who would speak to us, in such a way?' Moriana Mouhausen asks.
Vulkan glances at her.
'I thought your guess might be the same as mine,' he replies. It can only be him, surely. Who else is there? The old man isn't dead and gone after all, and with his last breath and strength, he finally speaks from beyond the fire.
Vulkan hears the proof of it even as he thinks this. He hears, behind him, the tap of a walking staff coming closer - tick! tick! tick! - against the tiled floor. Malcador-
Vulkan swings around, but there's no one there. It's not the tap of a staff. It's the liquid drip of gold hitting the floor like raindrops.
Vulkan swallows his disappointment. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. All that matter are the words themselves. They have heard nothing for what seems like hours. There have been no messages or contacts from outside. The silence had convinced them that no one had survived, and that there was nothing left to fight for.
But these words change everything. Someone is still fighting. Someone, somewhere, is still alive, and alive enough to call for arms and renewed strength. From the words, it is terribly plain that the threat remains, and the Imperium is far from saved. But the words contain hope. True hope. They tell Vulkan there is still a chance. That some possibility of salvation still exists.
And while it does, his deed is premature.
They must wait a little longer.
He strides away, and races up the golden steps into the heat to make the Talisman secure. For now, it must be withheld.
They must wait, in this wretched agony, a little more. Hope is still burning, not as bright as the Throne or the inferno of the Sanctum but, like Casryn, it is still there if only you know to look for it.
10:xi
The Bloodlit Crown
A final thread of hope remains for the last loyal sons of man.
The voice calls across the conflagrant Dominions and ruinous wastes of the Outer Palace, where few survive to heed it. It rings across the inferno of the Palatine, the greatest slaughterfield in human history, where the last remaining sons and daughters of the Imperium fight on in splintered cohorts against the overwhelming hosts of the traitor-foe, cut off, surrounded, their lines disintegrating as fast as their chances. For many of them, it is the last thing they will ever hear.
It echoes through sundered Eternity, and in past that gate, and into the final fortress, the Sanctum Imperialis, which has become the final feasting place of carnage, and no sanctum of any kind. This was the inviolable place, the bright citadel built to outlast time and history, and outlive dreams and the schemes of men. It was supposed to stand forever. Since the birth of the Imperium, the children of Terra have imagined many disasters and dangers, and foreseen calamities that they would have to guard against, but never did they conceive that the seat of Empire itself could be swept away, not even when the siege began. It would hold. It would endure, no matter what.
But now it falls, invaded from within and from without, its golden halls and soaring chambers set ablaze, and teeming with the conquering regiments of ruin. The voice rings out here too, but most of those to whom it speaks are too busy dying to hear its words.
It echoes across Terra itself, as the blazing Throneworld plunges into the maw of the warp, its material form digested by the alchemy of the empyric forces that envelop it. It echoes across firestorm continents and evaporated oceans, through devastated cities and wasteland states, and is heard by those scant pockets of resistance that remain, defying the swarming foe to the last. Most of those who hear it in the midst of cataclysm dismiss it as a wishful fantasy, or another of the endless lies of Chaos.
The voice is very fragile. It offers hope, but nothing else, no promise of salvation, or respite, or word of victory reclaimed. Few, if any, ever identify the messenger, or learn the name of hope's envoy. They know it simply as the Praetorian's ultimate command, Dorn's last words to the defenders of Terra, the final wall that he is able to build to keep them safe, a wall of words alone, for all the solid walls of stone and steel he raised are peris |
tasy, or another of the endless lies of Chaos.
The voice is very fragile. It offers hope, but nothing else, no promise of salvation, or respite, or word of victory reclaimed. Few, if any, ever identify the messenger, or learn the name of hope's envoy. They know it simply as the Praetorian's ultimate command, Dorn's last words to the defenders of Terra, the final wall that he is able to build to keep them safe, a wall of words alone, for all the solid walls of stone and steel he raised are perished and overthrown.
It is an idea of resistance, nothing more.
To some who hear it, like Fafnir Rann and Zephon Sorrow-Bringer at lost Hasgard, it is more than they ever dreamed to hear again. The frail hope it brings far exceeds anything they thought they would ever hear in what remained of their lives, for they had accepted death and consigned themselves long since. It puts strength back into their arms, and power into their blows, as they, and those few living souls still standing with them, oppose the overwhelming tide that has washed any trace of Hasgard Fortress away. None expect to live to see the hope realised. The voice is just an inspiring comfort as they strive to negotiate the highest prices for their lives.
To others, like Maximus Thane in the splintered plazas of the Inner Palace, assailed from all quarters by baying desecrators and the deluge of rout, it is a bitter, heartbreaking call that has come far too late.
To others, like Archamus, second of that name, in the field command of the Palatine catastrophe, or the seniors of the War Court in the besieged and smoke-choked Hegemon, it is a final, tantalising promise that makes them turn to their charts and cogitators one last time, and search for one last ploy or counter-move or gambit that could, as by some miracle, overthrow the incontrovertible predictions of defeat their data has been producing for hours.
Even at the very source of the voice, at the desolate black mansion, hope is dying, stillborn, for the Archenemy has heard the call too, and turns towards its source. The hosts of Chaos and Neverborn, offended by the words, emerge from the horizon's smoke, feral banners high, and begin to converge across the endless tracts of mud, to crush Agathe's last redoubt and silence it. She sees them coming, from every point that her compass can no longer identify, and orders her gunlines to load and prepare.
War makes noise. Its death song is deafening. Across the territories of its madness, the voice is, for the most part, not heard at all, for it is drowned out by the booming hymn of the red.
Or it is lost in the soughing whispers of neverness, which have been a constant murmur since the war began, and now rise to a crescendo. The Neverborn whispers are incandescent with outrage. There is nothing, nothing, that enrages them more than to see the generous gifts of Chaos shunned or spurned. To witness the Bloodlit Crown, the greatest honour that Chaos can bestow, rejected, is an insult that fires them with rancour.
To see it abused as a weapon, its generosity defiled, turns the whispers into shrieks.
The Emperor hears the voice, though the neverness storm rages around the walls of the Lupercal Court. It is a tiny thing, one grain of sand in a desert storm, one murmur among a trillion screams. It is not enough, nothing like enough. It is not the shield of humanity that will fortify Him to triumph, or replenish His ravaged body.
But it is enough to allow Him to stand, the bloody Bloodlit Crown in His hand. It is enough to force His first-found son into blind fury. The Master of Mankind has lost, but He can yet deprive Horus of his triumph. He will force His son to kill Him, for better the death and loss of everything, than eternity at his side as a grinning puppet-regent of the Old Four.
You put your face back on. The front of your skull is so ruptured and wrenched open, like a split fruit or the husk of a seed, you fear for a moment that the power inside you, the power that you have become, will spill out of the cracked shell of the human you once were, or that some new and still-more-terrible form of you will escape from your human rind.
You maintain your physical integrity. You push the hinged-open part of your skull back in place, reknit the bones, re-form the muscles and the flesh, and heal the skin unblemished. The severed dermal tubes and pipes across your scalp and cheek regrow like the creeping roots of trees, and re-socket themselves with a sibilant hiss of steam and a whir of machined connectors.
You repair yourself. And you maintain your mental composure despite the indignity of your father's underhand assault. You are strong. You're Horus Lupercal. You reflect that your father's uncompromising defiance is quite admirable. It is who He is. He has not relented once in His life, and for most of yours, you have worshipped that fortitude. His steadfast mien is what made Him great even when you hated Him.
His unwavering strength is the very reason you love Him and despise Him. You are His son, so you have inherited His character and His traits. This is reassuring. If He is strong, then so are you.
So you will not give up either. You will not bend or break. You will remain resolute and patient, those hallmarks of a truly great king, and not give in to the homicidal coal of anger that burns in your heart, the impulse to shred Him apart in a welter of blood for His insolent perfidy.
That would be too easy. Too weak. The act of a child. You will deny Him the satisfaction of making you snap, and deprive Him absolutely of the pyrrhic victory He seeks. You will not give Him the death He wants. You will not cheat yourself.
You will make Him accept the fate you have ordained.
You rise.
He has recovered His war-sword. He must have been feigning before, because He stands unaided, and displays some vitality of body and spirit that seemed previously to have drained from Him. He has the Bloodlit Crown. He raises it in His claws and shatters it so you can watch it break.
'I can make another,' you tell Him. 'I can make a thousand more. I can make as many as I need to make until you are too weak to shake them off your brow.'
You tell Him you can take His pain away, for only pain awaits Him if He persists with this. You can spare Him that pain as He never spared you yours.
You can tell He thinks that you know nothing of pain.
On the contrary, father. I have been the surrogate of your pain. I was born to channel it, just like all my brothers. We were made to bear your pain for you, and suffer it on your behalf. One by one, we have all discovered this. Some, like Ferrus, understood it too late. Some, like Konrad, are broken by it, or are driven into madness to escape it, like Lorgar or Fulgrim. Some, it has compressed to the dullest mettle, like Perturabo or Rogal. Some flee from it, like Russ or Jaghatai, hoping they can outrun it. Some, like Magnus and Roboute, strive in vain to please you so that you might take the pain away.
Some, like poor, naive Sanguinius, think they can spare you by accepting it completely.
'Only I have defied you,' you tell Him. 'Only I have turned and said that I reject it, for it is no way a father should treat His sons. Only I have the strength to condemn you, and return the gift you cursed us with. You should be proud of me, for I alone have exceeded your wildest expectations.'
He is not listening. A father, it seems, cannot bear to hear when His son enumerates His failings. Will you be the same, when the time comes, and your sons turn to you with their discontents? Not the sons you have, for they, save one, have embraced your outlook and would never think to question your decisions. They are but drones, toys of war, sired only to fight and not to think, so they will simply do your bidding and never form an opinion that matters.
No, the sons you have yet to father. The pantheon of primarch sons, and daughters too, that you will sire and bring into the world, your Neverborn children of ageless wisdom and endless power, who will rule the provinces and demesnes of your realm until the stars go out. They will be transcendent, and they will supplant the boorish, single-minded simpletons who were spawned from your genetics and currently call themselves your sons. Their time, and their purpose, is done. The dynasty of sons and daughters you will nurture after this will be sublime wonders, and you will love every one of them. Of course you will listen when they raise complaint, for they will be your equals and your blood, and you will gladly respect all issues they might bring to you.
Though there will be none to answer. Ever. No child of yours will ever confront you, for you will never give them cause. You will never make errors. You will be perfect.
Make no mistakes. That's what your father taught you, and it's the only thing He ever taught you that you intend to honour.
Starting now. You will not give Him long enough to recover further. You attack Him directly, and without compromise.
You stride directly towards Him, and swing your maul with such force the head of it produces a sonic boom. He avoids it, just, and thrusts with His war-sword. The blade splits your refractors and slides deep into your belly.
You let it. He wrenches it out and manages to back-step fast enough to avoid the swipe of your Talon. He ducks aside, and slices with His sword, cleaving your refractors a second time and hacking almost a third of the way into your torso just above the hip.
You let Him.
He pulls the blade free, and circles you. A feint, then another, then a superb thrust that drives the war-sword through your central body-mass.
You let Him.
You draw the warp into you so that He can see it. You need to make Him understand, for He does not seem to have grasped it yet, despite that acclaimed wisdom He boasts of. Your power is infinite. His is not. No matter how many times He gets back up, to renew the fight for another desperate go-a |
your torso just above the hip.
You let Him.
He pulls the blade free, and circles you. A feint, then another, then a superb thrust that drives the war-sword through your central body-mass.
You let Him.
You draw the warp into you so that He can see it. You need to make Him understand, for He does not seem to have grasped it yet, despite that acclaimed wisdom He boasts of. Your power is infinite. His is not. No matter how many times He gets back up, to renew the fight for another desperate go-around, He is merely postponing the inevitable. He is a warp-attuned creature of great power, by any mortal standards, and rightly has been feared His entire life. But His great strength is finite. You are an infinite being of the infinite warp. Your power will never run out, and can never be sapped, no matter how many or how grievous the injuries He inflicts upon you. You cannot be killed.
This contest was over before it began. It was superfluous. You only permitted the fight to take place at all because He seemed to need it. It was all for show, a demonstration of your new-found state, a symbolic, ritual act to consecrate your reign. You fight only to wear Him down to nothing until He is rendered entirely helpless and subject to your will.
Surely He sees that now?
The pair of you circle. He strikes at you again, then again, a thousand thrusts with His sword, a thousand raking blows with His claws. Each one dapples the floor with your blood. You let them all land. You let the minutes pass, the hours, the wounds. For every two or three blows He lands, you hammer with your maul, or tear with your Talon. Some of these strikes land, but most are simply thrown to make Him duck and dodge, weave and retreat. You are eroding His strength, His stamina and His will. As He begins to slow, you find yourself pulling blows that would have killed Him. No death today. No death for Him. No escape to the freedom of agonised oblivion from the fate you have wrought to contain Him.
Still you circle, filling the Court with the ring of steel and the breathless gasps of His effort. This contest has become pure ceremony, pure spectacle, a rite of sacrifice to tear out His will and offer it to the gods. It has lasted a thousand years already. It will last another thousand, another ten thousand, another million, if needs be. You have all the time you need.
His fatigue begins to hang from Him like a cloak of lead, bowing His shoulders and dragging His steps. You can see the misery in His eyes, the curdling, thickening exhaustion. He has tried everything, to no avail. You are letting Him see the wounds He scores upon you, and the indifference with which you regard them. You are letting Him verify the implacable nature of your immortality. It is not like His. His can be ended. Yours cannot.
You control your rage. You bite back physical pain, for it is transient, and you let go of any resentment, for it serves no purpose. He bruised you when He first arrived and seemed to look through you. It hurt when He would not acknowledge you. You are past that now. You have been maturating all this time, and the stages of your duel have allowed you to learn and grow into your new self. You are calm and sanguine. You understand now that when He came to your Court, He ignored you because He was scared. He hurt you because He didn't know what else to do. He did not acknowledge you because you were no longer you, and He did not recognise you. He saw what you had become, a fathomless power that He could not compete with, and He lashed out in petty ways to wound you, like any frightened soul cornered by the absolute.
You are past that now.
You have become one with the divinity invested in you, and He has lost.
It's not your father's power, it's how you grind it out of Him until He begs you to relent.
He tries to melt the deck, to blow out the entire floor and cast you down through the levels of the ship. You do not fall, for everything in this place obeys your will, including the very air that holds you up, and gravity, which is anxious not to offend you. With your mind, you wrench up one of the five thrones from its foundation. It was the one you prepared for the Angel. He will not be needing it.
You throw it at your father.
His ailing willpower swells, and suffuses His blade, and He demolishes the throne into a million fragments with a frantic slice of His sword. You pluck up the thrones intended for Constantin and Rogal too. They will not be required either, for two thrones will suffice.
With the last shred of His will He annihilates Constantin's throne in mid-air before it can smash into Him.
He has nothing left to stop Rogal's.
He disappears beneath its granite bulk, mashed backwards and crushed into the deck.
The rubble of the throne, some pieces weighing a tonne or more, heaps upon Him like a cairn. When you send them flying with your mind, He does not move. He lies flat, like the recumbent effigy of a king on the lid of a tomb, swathed in dust. He is barely breathing.
You pause to fashion a new crown in your hand. As the bloodlight threads weave and form between your Talon's claws, you step forward.
Reality splits open in your path, and two men slither out of the material tear like newborn lambs from an amniotic sac.
An odd, belated arrival. The pair of them are just human. They steam with immaterial vapour, and they are wet with thawing interstitial ice. They stink of the distances of empyric space, as though their journey has been wayward and long, from one end of time to the other.
Have they come to kneel at your feet? They are both dazed, disorientated, confused by the abruptness of their arrival after a voyage so long.
They look up at you. An instant of recognition. A fleeting moment of shock as they realise where they are.
You see the sudden and utter terror in their eyes, and know that it is fully justified. They have made a tragic mistake of navigation, and a colossal error of judgement.
You feel sorry for them.
10:xii
The Guardsman
'Oh god,' says Oll Persson.
He's disorientated. Cold. Soaked to the bone. He hasn't even made sense of where he is. His thoughts are dizzy and shaken loose. But a shadow has fallen across him.
The shadow is Horus. That's all Oll understands, and all that matters.
Beside him, tangled up with him, for they have spilled out onto the deck together, Oll feels John Grammaticus begin to shake in abject terror. He hears John whimper in inarticulate distress.
John is looking up, and seeing the same thing.
The shadow is Horus.
Horus gazes down on them. There is a hint of puzzlement in the Warmaster's expression. It's hard to tell. His face is not human. The expression is impossible to read.
Oll's limbs go weak and slack. His guts knot. His fight-or-flight response stalls completely, for neither option is possible.
They are right at his feet. Right at his feet. He stands over them, so huge, so tall, so broad, so malevolently eclipsing. They knew the knife's cut would bring them close to him, for his shadow was the only thing they could plot their course towards. But this is not the same part of the inevitable realm, or the same room. This is right at his feet. Oll could stretch out his hand and touch him.
Though he won't, because he can't. His body is locked in horror. His mind is fossilised with fear. He's forgotten how to breathe or blink.
Horus. Horus Lupercal. Warmaster. The monster is not those things any more. It is a giant shape cut out of the empyrean's blackest cloth. It is malice incarnate. It is the void in a titanic humanoid shape.
Oll is paralysed with absolute dread.
The abomination shifts. It reaches down towards them to annihilate them with talons as long and lightless as Old Night.
John finally finds his voice. He speaks the only word his dumbstruck mind will process.
He screams it at the shadow looming over them.
It's the word he learned from Oll's dream at Hatay-Antakya. It's the word not spoken in the material galaxy since the tower at Babilin fell.
It-
Sound ceases. There is a silent concussion that implodes the world. Deaf, dumb, blind, Oll feels gravity crush him into paste.
Nothing, then something in the nothing that feels like pain, then something shaking that pain. Someone. John's shaking him. Sound and vision swirl back, crooked and distorted. John's face over him, blood around his lips.
'-up! Get up! Get up! Get up, Oll! Get up!'
Oll sits up, sucking in air. All sounds are wrong, dull, hollowed, flat. Both sides of his neck are wet with the blood seeping from his punished ears. His teeth feel too big for his mouth. Every nerve is stretched and screaming. Every cell is bruised.
'Oll!'
Oll blinks. Forty metres away, across the derelict chamber, a huge dark mass lies on its back. It is smoking, as though a fire has been left to smoulder inside it. Black war plate is cracked and splintered. Nearby, a war-maul longer than Oll is tall lies on the scabbed deck. It fell there when its owner was thrown backwards by John's single word.
'I don't think it's dead,' John is gabbling. 'I don't think - Oll? I don't think it's dead-'
He's frantic, pawing at Oll as he yanks him to his feet. He's talking so fast, with such a level of panic, Oll can feel the droplets of blood flying from John's split lips hitting his cheek.
Oll turns, swaying, trying to stay upright. He smells the sour metal stink of a ship, the smoke, the acrid aftertaste of violence. He sees the decaying hall of a voidship around him, the dirty ouslite deck, the scree of debris, the brass walls crusted with calcification.
He sees the other body. It's not far away. It would have been behind them when they tumbled out of nowhere. It's surrounded by rubble and coated in white dust. It isn't moving.
'Oh god,' he gasps. He blunders towards it, trying to remember how to walk. John is pulling at him, clawing, cursing, babbling profanities and nonsense and hysteria.
'We have to go!' John yells at him. 'We have |
oidship around him, the dirty ouslite deck, the scree of debris, the brass walls crusted with calcification.
He sees the other body. It's not far away. It would have been behind them when they tumbled out of nowhere. It's surrounded by rubble and coated in white dust. It isn't moving.
'Oh god,' he gasps. He blunders towards it, trying to remember how to walk. John is pulling at him, clawing, cursing, babbling profanities and nonsense and hysteria.
'We have to go!' John yells at him. 'We have to! We have to leave! Oll! We have to go!'
'John!' Oll barks, pulling free from the man's grip. He stumbles on.
Behind him, John calls his name plaintively.
The Emperor is prostrate. The dust on Him and around Him is fine and dry like lunar regolith. It cakes Him so completely that the gilt finish of His armour can no longer be seen. The only colour visible is scarlet, where the dust has clotted with blood. There are so many wounds.
Oll drops to his knees beside the Master of Mankind. He touches Him, and feels nothing but cold. There seems to be no breath, no movement.
'Please,' Oll murmurs. 'You have to... You have to live. Just live. Everything ends if...'
He doesn't know what to say.
John's standing over him. 'We have to get out, Oll,' he says. 'It's finished. We're too late.'
'Yes,' says Oll, not looking up. 'Go. Now. You go. Right now.'
'Oll-'
'I mean it.' Oll kneels forward, his hand on the Emperor's breastplate. The body is so very huge. 'Please,' he whispers to it. 'I came back. I had to. I have something.'
The knife is still in his hand. He holds it out, like an offering, as though the close proximity of such an object might stir some response.
'Please, live,' Oll says. 'You can use this. I brought it for you so you can use it. I think it can... I don't know. Please, answer me. Please. You can't die. Everything falls if you die.'
'Oll.'
He glances up. John is staring down at him, calmer now. Solemn.
'We're too late,' says John. 'We have to go. It's not dead. We have to go.'
'Then go.'
'Both of us. I'm supposed to protect you. I promised-'
'You have. You did. You just did. You protected me all the way here, John. But you have to go.'
'Oll-'
'I'm serious,' says Oll. 'You have to go immediately. While there's still a chance. Get out.' Oll rummages in his pocket. He pulls out the ball of thread, and holds it out to John. 'You know why.'
John won't take it from him.
'Take it, Grammaticus! Bloody take it and go! As fast as you can! You know what you have to do! If you don't, we'll never get here-'
'It doesn't matter!' John snarls. 'We're too late! We got here too late! So it doesn't bloody matter if we get here or not! We don't make it in time-'
'We still have to be there to stop the Dark King-'
'Oh, who bloody cares?' John snaps. 'Nothing matters any more, Persson! It was all a waste! It was all futile! Just get the hell up and come with me! Now!'
Oll sits back on his heels, knife in one hand, the thread in the other. He stares at the Emperor.
'Please,' he says softly.
The Emperor's head turns slowly towards him. His eyelids flicker.
'Did you see that?' Oll asks.
'Yes,' says John.
'You saw it?'
'Yes!'
Oll stands up. 'Then we're not too late, are we?' he says. He presses the ball of thread into John's reluctant hands. 'You've got to take it, John, and you've got to go. It's not too late, but we have to find our way here. We have to. So it all depends on you. Don't screw it up, all right?'
'But-'
'For god's sake, Grammaticus. This is the one thing that matters. Do it for me, please.'
'Oll-'
Oll stares at him. John sighs, a long, slow exhalation. He wipes his mouth, then nods.
'I don't think it's dead, Oll,' he says.
'I'm pretty sure it isn't,' Oll agrees. 'So go right now while you can. Find something sharp-'
'I know how it works.'
'And the knots? You remember how to t-'
'I can bloody tie them, Oll.'
'Right. Good. Goodbye, John.'
Grammaticus hesitates.
'I'll see you sometime,' he says.
Oll nods.
With a final, muttered curse of frustration, John turns and walks away. Oll watches him go. John reaches the chamber's long colonnade, where Luna Wolves once stood at perfect attention. He's scanning the ground, searching the litter of debris for a chunk of stone or a broken piece of tile that will have a sharp enough edge. He disappears into the shadows of the colonnade.
They'll never see each other again.
Oll kneels back down at the Emperor's side. There has been no further sign of life.
'I brought this knife,' he says, as though resuming a casual conversation. 'It's... Well, you'll understand what it is, I'm sure. You'll feel it. You can use it. I think it might be the only thing you can use. Here-'
He holds it out. There's no response. He tries to lift the Emperor's hand, but it's too big and too heavy. He settles for pressing the knife into its grip, and trying to close the armoured fingers around it. The knife looks so small in that hand. Ridiculous.
'So, you've got it now. All you have to do is... is wake up. Be alive. Be alive and get up. It isn't over. So I'm really hoping, you know, that you can hear me, and that you're going to get up any second now. Get up. Oh, come on.'
He sits back.
'We had a plan,' he says. 'Remember? You had a plan. A great big plan. It still matters. I'm going to help you with it. You asked me to. Do you remember that? You asked me to help you get it right this time. Advise you. Keep you true. Keep you moving in the right direction. And I will. I will, this time. I promise you. Not like before. I'll stand right beside you, and I'll help you to make it work. For everybody's sake. All you've got to do is get up.'
He breathes hard. He can feel the pulse thumping in his neck.
'Please, friend. My old friend. Please.'
Oll looks down at the knife to make sure it hasn't slipped out of the slack fingers. He sees something on the deck, covered in a thick layer of dust. He brushes the grit aside. Two cards from the Imperial Tarot, dropped, discarded. Both wafers are scorched around the edge.
He picks them up. The Guardsman, stalwart with his rifle. The Lantern, sending its frail beam into the night.
'That's you and me, then,' Oll says, looking at them. 'You and me.'
He lays The Lantern on the Emperor's dusty chestplate carefully. He stares at The Guardsman and then tucks it in his breast pocket.
'All you have to do is get up,' he says. He can suddenly feel his left eyelid fluttering.
Something stirs. A skitter of loose debris. A scrape of metal.
The Emperor is as still and silent as before.
Oll looks behind him.
Across the chamber, the black shape is shifting. It twitches like a scarab on its back. It stirs.
Horus slowly sits up, and hauls himself upright.
Horus rises.
Horus stands.
Black bone and blacker light fume around him, repairing and restoring the burned materia of his wargear and his flesh. He is as terrible as before, more terrible, more awful, unbearable, a black mass lit from within by a ghastly, bloody light.
He takes a step forward, then another, his pace increasing into a stride. Each footstep shakes the deck and rings out like a falling tank.
Oll gets up.
'You have to wake up, now,' he says urgently.
Horus approaches, wordless, furious.
'You really have to get up now,' Oll calls. 'Please. Get up. Get the hell up.'
Horus is closing. The Warmaster reaches out a huge hand. The immense maul scrapes across the deck with a shriek, and then flies straight into his grip.
Oll steps forward to face him. He puts himself between the Emperor and the oncoming monster. He pulls his lasrifle off his shoulder, arms it, and aims it. He knows there's no point, but it's better than nothing.
'Get up now!' he yells over his shoulder. 'Please, get up now!'
Horus is just metres away. He's not slowing down.
Oll pulls the rifle in against his cheek, flexes his grip, and settles his finger on the trigger.
'No further!' he yells. 'Damn you! I won't let you touch Him!'
Horus keeps coming. Oll opens fire. Full-auto, sustained. The las-bolts flick and spatter off the black war plate like candle flames in a night wind.
Oll Persson is still firing when the Talon of Horus reduces him to a drifting red fog.
Oll Persson stands his ground against Horus.
10:xiii
A tower of silence
A rain of blood falls on the Hollow Mountain, drenching the crags, the fighting platforms and the churning lines of warriors, and washing the snow and black rock alike dark red.
A rain of blood to herald a reign of blood.
To Corswain, caught in a whirling, clanging thicket of war plate ten men deep, it feels as though the heavens are haemorrhaging. Sickly, thrombotic veins of lightning thread and bulge the feverish, yellow sky, a sky that drapes as low across the lonely mountain as a shroud. The light is saffron, the glower of a diseased sunset. Thunder groans and heaves like the ferment of a bloated cadaver. The air is blistered with flies and atomised gore.
The battle will not cease.
The din of it, the grinding metal roar and the constant drumfire, drowns out even the raging elements. Every time Corswain thinks the pressure is about to ease, and the enemy assault about to tip back into retreat, the ferocity increases.
Since the long battle for the Hollow Mountain began, the Death Guard onslaughts have come in waves, and he has lost count of how many there have been. The enemy has flooded the deep pass, and eroded still more of Corswain's force, but each time his men have driven them back. This time, however...
This time is different. It has lasted four times as long as any previous assault, and it shows no sign of relenting. This is, he supposes, the final push. After multiple escalades to wear them down, reduce their numbers, and exhaust their munitions, the Death Guard is resolved to finish it. Perhaps Typhus has grown frustrated and impatient. Perhaps this brutal attrition was his tactic all along. Perhaps the whole war is lost, and the last pocket of l |
have driven them back. This time, however...
This time is different. It has lasted four times as long as any previous assault, and it shows no sign of relenting. This is, he supposes, the final push. After multiple escalades to wear them down, reduce their numbers, and exhaust their munitions, the Death Guard is resolved to finish it. Perhaps Typhus has grown frustrated and impatient. Perhaps this brutal attrition was his tactic all along. Perhaps the whole war is lost, and the last pocket of loyalist resistance must be stamped out.
It is a havoc pitch. Corswain is raking, blood-blinded, at anything that comes at him, which is everything, all the time. The previous waves of assault were the most gruelling and brutal he has experienced in his life. They pale by comparison. This is the gigantomachy of legend, the war of men and bestial gods, where skill and valour count as nothing, and only the purest fury can prevail. His blade is now so notched it looks serrated.
Sigismund, barely ten metres from the seneschal along the contested ledge, drives his smoking black sword into snorting charcoal hulks and spills them down the cliff. He too feels the finality of the battle. It is outlandishly savage, as though the enemy warriors dare not fall back, for fear of their commander's displeasure. They would rather die on these lethal crags than face their master's wrath. They fear the very power that they serve.
And they do die, by the dozen, by the score. But they do not die alone. The defenders of the last mountain are being cut down, and their numbers are dwindling. Artolun has just been speared by two Death Guard pikes, his thrashing body lifting clear of the tight-packed melee before dropping into the brawling sea of armour. Pontis has fallen, clutching his lacerated neck. The clifftop is littered with broken plate segments and pieces of men. Blood streams off the parapet edge, and lifts on the howling wind in a horsetail spray.
Typhus, undoubtedly, must see the state of the fight as clearly as Sigismund. He must see that the mountain is on the brink of falling. Thus he has committed his regiments for a last, merciless attack. It is just the same in a fight, man to man. When you see your opponent begin to slow, when you read the signs that he is finally tiring, you drive in with a last measure of resolve to exploit that weakness and end the fight.
And so, this carnage. Carnage here, at Gateway Cliff, in mind-numbing intensity, with no room to breathe or think. Carnage at Knife Edge and Axe-Beard Ledge and West Shelf and all the other tiers of the cliff defence that Adophel so hastily named. Carnage everywhere. Every bulwark and platform at the head of the pass is the same, every man fighting for his life, or dead, every rock face crawling with the ascending foe. Black plate, gleaming steel, throats raw from yelling, mouths sour from ingested blood.
The voice that spoke, his Praetorian's command, urged them to stand firm. Words have no power here.
Sigismund sees Typhus first. He shouts a warning that the world is too loud to hear.
From his place at the edge of Gateway Cliff, Sigismund sees the swarming enemy numbers far below part to allow their lord's advance. Drawn in some hellish chariot, and flanked by his retinue of champions, Typhus hastens along the base of the pass to lead his men in the final assault. War-horns boom. The Death Guard in the clifftop vanguard redouble their efforts. Their lord approaches. They will clear a path for him.
Sigismund yells his warning again. But the champion in him sees a new opportunity, the chance to close, face to face, with the enemy lord. This was impossible before, but now Typhus openly presents himself. He is coming within reach, and Sigismund's black sword is waiting for him.
Sigismund shouts to rally those few of his Seconds still nearby. With their support, he can hold the cliff and make ready. Perhaps, he thinks, we can drive a way down the ridge, through the flanking line of assault, and meet him on the way up. Typhus will have to abandon that damn chariot, and advance in narrow file with his retinue. The cliffs are too-
The war-horns boom again. Bone trumpets blast the air.
Sigismund gazes in horror, his plans disintegrating before they are even fully formed. He sees his enemy properly now. He sees what is coming.
Typhus, lord of the enemy host, carrion chieftain, rises from the murk of the pass. He has not abandoned his chariot at all.
He ascends from the pitch-black depths of the gorge as though the darkness below is exhuming him, and lifting him into the winter light. He does not scale the sheer cliff like his swarming men, he rides the air itself, a daemon-deity of extinction borne aloft by the fly-specked murk and noxious vapour. His ascent is stately and majestic. He stands on his chariot of wet bone, the open clam shell of a giant ribcage. Every inch of that bone is scrimshaw-etched with the letters and characters of Death's alphabet: requiem odes and funerary prayers from the books of the dead held sacred by a thousand civilisations that are themselves long perished from the world. Only their words remain, notched into the bones, hymns that worship Death and acknowledge its inescapable triumph over life. The bones are singing, an eerie witch-blood song that skirls in the freezing air.
Typhus is a behemoth, his bulk increased by fluted cancerous plate, by filth-matted spikes, and by the vast fly-swarm, a living cloak, that breathes and plumes from the black-bone chimneys and seeping orifices of his hunched shell-back. He is flanked by macabre champions who make Skulidas Gehrerg seem but a minor impediment. They ride on the skirts of the chariot around him, beneath flapping, cracking banners of human skin. They are all skull-masked, their war plate anointed with white bone-ash and symbols of mortality writ in tomb-dust. Their weapons are drawn ready: embalming knives and mortuary hammers, dissection blades and necropsy chisels, the copper adzes to open the mouth, the excerebration hooks to empty the skull. They are his priesthood, come to officiate the exequies of the First Legion and its allies. His creaking chariot is drawn upwards by moaning Neverborn of plague and decay. They are his mourners, come to bear his skeletal chariot up the cliff like some rotting gift to the mountain. They are gnarled, contorted things, buckled by carcinoma and neoplasmic cyst, and veiled with soil-stained winding sheets that trail and billow in the wind. They are yoked to the foul chariot by rusted chains, and their broken fingernails claw at the dirty air to find purchase in it to drag the dead-cart ever upwards. Red sprite lightning, baleful and luminous, drifts and sparks in the foul air around the slow cortege.
Typhus brings the howl of the storm with him, for it is his own utterance.
Corswain hears the horror approaching before he sees it. The keening bone-song tells the seneschal that this is no longer a battle, not in any way his Legion would measure it. It is a funeral rite.
He cuts his way forwards, leaving bodies maimed and sliced in his wake. He sees Typhus ascending. This is a ceremony of death indeed, and Corswain and his brothers are not the deceased to be honoured. The Hollow Mountain isn't a battle site, it is a sacrificial altar, and the priests are here.
We ascend. The foretold glory of Chaos is upon us, and upon Terra. So we sing, so the bones around us sing.
In the necrologies of ancient days, the slaves and retainers of a king's household were ritually put to death as a preface to an ultimate rite, so that they might serve their lord in the afterlife. The libation will be Corswain, and his men, and their allies, and the million souls inside the last mountain. This, the bone-song of the Old Four has decreed. The delight of it rots the air. We are death, and we know better than any the arts and observances that must mark a great passing.
We, beloved of those outer powers, have been given a new, ceremonial task, and we have accepted it without question. The joy of it burns in our blood like a fever. The conquest of the First Legion and the mountain, to which our forces have committed their strengths, is no longer a military objective, or even an act of vengeance. It has become the first stage of a high ritual, a preparatory offering. We are ascending to attend a much greater ceremony, and officiate as high celebrants at a much greater death.
We know whose death that is. Only one extinction could be great enough to warrant such ostentatious ceremony. Chaos is assembling in solemn grace to attend the committal of its greatest foe.
The mountain is an altar indeed. It is a tower of silence where the corpse of the Emperor will be laid out and picked clean.
We ascend. We are blessed eightfold. We are Typhus.
'Deny him!' Corswain yells into the wind. 'Deny him!'
Does he mean Typhus? Does he mean the Warmaster? Does he mean Death itself? It hardly matters. His warriors close round to hold the cliff.
But how can they? Typhus and his heresiarchs are instruments beyond mortal power, engorged with immaterial energy by the warp that drowns the terrestrial globe. This is a fight no swords, not even Sigismund's blade, can stop.
Typhus seems to hear him. His regal chariot draws up to the lip of the rampart. He bows his head, accepts the crown of femurs that his attendants bring, and begins his dedication of the Great Rite, the order and oblations of which have been dictated to him by the Grandfather he adores. This offering, to mark the death of an old king and the coronation of a new one, must be made with exacting care.
The loyal First will be the last to die. In their blood, and their hearts torn beating from their chests and held aloft as tribute, the new age of Chaos Absolute will be sanctified.
His Neverborn ushers leap onto the rock, and sprinkle bonemeal gathered from the Palace battlefields to mark a path for him to walk. His champions cha |
been dictated to him by the Grandfather he adores. This offering, to mark the death of an old king and the coronation of a new one, must be made with exacting care.
The loyal First will be the last to die. In their blood, and their hearts torn beating from their chests and held aloft as tribute, the new age of Chaos Absolute will be sanctified.
His Neverborn ushers leap onto the rock, and sprinkle bonemeal gathered from the Palace battlefields to mark a path for him to walk. His champions chant the bone-song, and swing censers made of polished skulls to perfume the air with the smoke of human fat.
Typhus steps down. Some of the First Legion break clear of the raging fight and rush towards him, as though eager to become the first sacrifices.
The charnel lord's scythe reaps their souls, just as it will reap the souls of all those defending the cliffs. Lives end, black armour splits, and Angels of Caliban die in pieces. The chains of skulls that drape Typhus clatter like a death rattle as he moves. The air thickens with a cesspit stink from the reek of him. He strides onto the rampart, the rock dripping pus as his virulence touches it. He is not a warrior that can be fought, man against man. He is a pestilential force, a witch-blooded malignancy that comes like a delirium, a wild, carcinogenic ecstasy, to blight the lives of loyal men. Cutting a path towards him, Sigismund knows this.
Sigismund salutes him anyway.
'Further active resonance,' Tanderion reports. In the deep, cold vault, they all look up, watching the striated lights pulsing from somewhere within the living rock. Even the old blind man, Zhi-Meng, seems to be watching them.
'My friend,' says Zhi-Meng, 'we have the right technique, however improvised it may be. The lore applied by you and your brothers, the psychic engrams... It is acute. We have the raw materials too. All these hoping minds. Even though the mountain lacks the ancient psychocircuitry and telepathic conduits that once regulated its operation, I think some wonder is within our grasp.'
Cartheus shakes his head. 'The warp is on us, my lord,' he says. 'Nothing works as we predict it. We perform one work, certain of its effect, yet the results are not as we expect. Nothing works the same way within the warp.'
'I think we might use that fact to our advantage,' Zhi-Meng replies. 'These unique circumstances could be exploited in our favour.'
He turns his blind eyes towards the coloured light throbbing in the heart of the stone once more.
'It is unstable, though,' he murmurs.
'And no wonder,' Tanderion replies. 'The workings we have made to support the geophonics are hasty and unfinished, and the apparatus of the Astronomican destroyed-'
'But what does that mean?' asks Leeta Tang. Several members of the conclave have gathered to watch the work. 'It sounds like you're talking about... magic.'
'Well, it would,' says Zhi-Meng. 'The mountain is a sacred space, a liminal place. Through its age, and permanence, and its alignment, it connects what you would think of as real with something quite other. You might as well call it magic.'
'I will, then,' says Leeta. 'But what does it mean?'
'It means we are trying to light a lamp with no oil, no wick, and only one flint,' says Zhi-Meng.
'The instability is more than that,' says Cypher, stepping from the shadows to join them. 'The woman Keeler has quite successfully unified the assembled masses into a psychoacoustic unity. I did not think it feasible, but they seem to follow her with great devotion. Their meaningless... incantations...'
'Prayers, my lord,' says Zhi-Meng. 'If we can glibly use words like "magic" then we can call them prayers. They may be meaningless of themselves, but they supply a mantra, a focus, through which the force of will can be directed. They are like the drone harmonic that my choirs adopt in order to establish counterpoint and harmony. The words themselves don't matter, it is the focus they provide. But you are quite correct. There is instability. A disruptive counter-harmonic-'
They listen. The roar of war outside is all too apparent despite the thickness of the rock surrounding them. It echoes through the vaults and chambers of the Hollow Mountain. There is a song entwined with it, a song of bone and slaughter.
'The enemy has a prayer of its own,' says Cypher. 'The warp suffuses us all. You call this mountain a sacred space, Lord Zhi-Meng, but it is not. Nothing is sacred. It is sensitive, but neutral, and it responds to the will of any who come near. The counter-harmonic is the echo of our enemy's will. It dilutes and weakens the chorus Keeler is orchestrating.'
'Fear weakens it.'
Cypher glances aside. The soldier, Katsuhiro, is standing with the others of the conclave, the child held to his chest.
'It's just fear, sir,' he says. 'The people hear that sound, and it scares them. It breaks their focus.' He shrugs, weary. 'I don't know much about it,' he says. 'But I know fear.'
'He's right,' says Zhi-Meng.
'Can't you... block the enemy's prayer, my lord?' asks Wereft.
Cypher glances at his Librarians.
'The enemy has a host of psykers,' says Cartheus. 'We have but a handful.'
'We could interrupt for a few seconds,' says Asradael, 'but we couldn't sustain-'
'A spark only takes a second to catch,' says Zhi-Meng.
Cypher thinks for a moment. His silver mask gleams in the candlelight.
'You two with me,' he says to Tanderion and Asradael. 'Cartheus, stay here, and be ready to coordinate the resonance. Direct it swiftly when it builds. You'll only have those seconds. One chance. My lord, please tell Keeler to make ready to focus her efforts. She must bring them all together, no matter their fear.'
He says no more. Cypher leads his two Librarians to the flight of basalt stairs that will take them to the Tertiary Portal. Cartheus sighs, and places his hands splayed against the cold rock wall.
Wereft leads Zhi-Meng through the crowded chambers to Keeler's side. Eild, Tang and the other members of the conclave follow.
The great stone chambers are filled with the refugees of the pilgrimage. Packed into the mountain's vast vaults, there seems far more of them than when they were stretched out to the horizon in a thread. They are all murmuring in soft voices, repeating Keeler's words, or the echoes of them as they spread through the hollow compartments. There is a constant, hushing noise, an immense collective whisper, like the surge of a distant sea.
Keeler still stands on the stone plinth, her arms raised.
'The Emperor must live,' she is saying. She has repeated it so many times, that the words have lost their sense. They are simply a sound, a reassurance, to which people can fix and cling, as important yet meaningless as 'north'. 'The Emperor is the shield and protector of humanity, and we are His shield in turn. He lives because we yet live. He is the Imperium, and the Imperium is us. While we persist, His light cannot fail. Lift up your hands and rejoice.'
Leeta Tang clambers onto the basalt beside her, and whispers to Keeler as she continues to speak.
'Make ready, Euphrati,' she says. 'It doesn't matter what you say, whatever phatic nonsense you like. Just talk about nothing, if you want. Memories of the future, you know? All that? It doesn't matter what at this point, just keep talking and keep them focused. Bring them together, and keep them there.'
Keeler nods, understanding, without looking at Tang. She keeps talking.
'Even in the valley of night, in caverns measureless to man, in this great hour of calamity, we walk with Him, in defiance of death. We are souls bound together. One species joined against the darkness. We are together as one, or we are nothing. The Emperor must live.'
'The Emperor must live,' murmurs Leeta Tang at her side, echoing the words as Keeler says them. 'Speak this with me, as it is spoken to me. The Emperor must live.'
Cypher and his two Librarians exit the Tertiary Portal into the squalling blood rain. They have drawn their weapons, and their minds are synchronised and ready.
Horror awaits them. The behemoth Priest of Death is almost upon them, his scythe washed with gore, his bonemeal path littered with the dead in his wake. To his left and right, his retinue of champions, howling charnel beasts, drive back those who attempt to delay him. Cypher sees Corswain, Tragan, Sigismund and Adophel, and any of the First who can still stand and hold a weapon, pitched against the keening atrocities of the Death Guard, caught up in thickets of mayhem, locked in individual death-fights, striving in vain to cut a path to Typhus and seize a chance to strike at him.
The bone-song is deafening.
Cypher's pistol discharges, cutting down the first of the Death Guard that rush at him. As Cypher, he should have been here all along, a figurehead warrior fighting the foe at the front line of battle. But as Zahariel the Librarian, his obligation has been to mediate from afar and grapple with the metaphysical scope of the war.
Now, at last, he can do both. For a few seconds at least.
Begin! he sends as they stride forward to meet death face to face.
The minds of the three psykers lock together, and spear out in one equal temper.
10:xiv
The magician's tricks
He finally reaches his father again. Horus looks up from his work.
'Garviel,' he says. His voice is stone grating against stone. 'I had hoped to keep you out of this. I do not want you here.'
The Lupercal Court is silent, a still midnight of gleaming tiles and black bone pillars. There is no one else here. Loken's footsteps echo as he walks across the vast space to join his father, and his father's prey.
'There is nowhere else I should be, but at my father's side,' he replies.
Horus stops dragging the Emperor's bloody body towards the remaining thrones. He lets it slump. He rises, glaring at his son.
'At my side? At my side, Garviel?' he says. 'I think you forget the side you took in this.'
'I stayed on the same side all |
ght of gleaming tiles and black bone pillars. There is no one else here. Loken's footsteps echo as he walks across the vast space to join his father, and his father's prey.
'There is nowhere else I should be, but at my father's side,' he replies.
Horus stops dragging the Emperor's bloody body towards the remaining thrones. He lets it slump. He rises, glaring at his son.
'At my side? At my side, Garviel?' he says. 'I think you forget the side you took in this.'
'I stayed on the same side all along,' says Loken. 'It was you who forgot.'
The Warmaster snorts, amused by the impudence. He glances down at his father's wretched body. The dust of the shattered throne still covers it, black where it has caked the dried blood.
'You always spoke your mind, Loken,' Horus muses. 'That is why I liked you. Well, whether you stayed on your side or picked a new one, it was the wrong one. The cause you champion is done. Look. See? It's over.'
'I see all too well what you have done, my Lupercal,' Loken replies.
Horus looks at him sharply.
'You understand He's used you, Loken? You understand that? He's used you all along, true to form.'
'I was always His to be used,' says Loken.
'You were mine!' Horus snaps. He rises to his full height, a colossus of shadow. 'My son! He brought you here as a weapon. A blade to prise open my heart. To wound me.'
Loken takes a careful step backwards, his sword low at his side. It is taking every measure of his resolve just to face this creature.
'From your anger, father, it seems that weapon was well judged,' he replies. 'I do not understand the Emperor's choices or His plans, but if that is why He brought me with Him, then it was effective. You speak as though you are hurt, which tells me you have a heart to open still. It tells me you still feel as a man feels.'
'Of course! I am a man still!'
'Are you? Forgive me, but that's not what I see.'
'What do you see?' Horus snarls.
'Something that is too terrible to behold.'
'Yet you stand there and behold me well enough, Loken.'
'I've seen too much already, father,' says Loken sadly. 'I cannot look away. But if you have a heart still, look to it now. See what you have become for yourself. Please, before it's too late.'
'What I am is my choice, Garviel,' Horus rumbles.
'I don't think it was.'
'Don't goad me! I have no wish to kill you.'
'I know,' says Loken. 'If you had, I would be dead long since. That gives me hope too.'
'Hope in what?'
Loken shrugs.
'That the Lupercal I loved is still in there,' he replies. 'Somewhere. We fought together, father. Side by side. Fight at my side now. Fight this power that controls you. See what it has done to you, and how it has poisoned your mind. Cast it out, and stand with me. Show the selfless loyalty for which you were famed.'
'Loyalty?' Horus scoffs.
'Your loyalty was why you were named Warmaster,' says Loken. 'There was no one better for that honour. That's precisely why the powers of Chaos turned their will upon you. If the Emperor made me a weapon against you, the gods of Chaos used you in the same way against Him.'
Horus is silent for a moment.
'I will kill you, Loken,' he says quietly. He rolls Worldbreaker slowly in his palm. 'I will do it without hesitation if you do not cease with this provocation. I would rather you lived.'
'And I would rather live,' answers Loken. 'But I am of the Legiones Astartes, born for war. I never thought I'd live this long.'
Horus pauses, then nods ruefully.
'Nor I,' he replies. 'The warrior's lot. We were made to do so much and expect so little. Bright glory, not long lives.'
He manages a sad smile.
'But look at us both, Loken,' he says. 'Those of us that live can achieve so much. I am not a monster. I swear to you. Every man who has fought against me in this war, I have offered amnesty and forgiveness if they repent and come to my side. That is more mercy than my father would have shown in the same position. My dear brother Sanguinius, my father... you. I have forgiveness for all, if they ask it of me.'
'And if they don't? Sanguinius... Your father...?'
'They... were stubborn. Foolish. Deluded. But you, my son, if you are as enlightened as you claim, you are not so beguiled by the Imperial lie. Be my son again. Accept the Empyreal Truth of this new age. Sheathe that useless sword and go wait in the cloisters. Sit, watch, wait and learn as I conclude this necessary business. Then greet the dawn with me. Later, we will sit and talk as we did of old. I will tell you my dreams, my plans, and make you part of them.'
'Father, if you persist, there will be no later.'
Horus growls softly.
'You do think I'm a monster, then? Loken, from a distance the grace of a god seems callous and brutal because it is operating at such a mighty scale. There is perfection in what I do, a plan-'
'Was not the same true of the Master of Mankind?' Loken asks.
'Of course not!' Horus scoffs. 'Oh, it seemed so for many years. I believed it. I believed He had a perfect plan because I believed He was so mighty. What parts I did not understand, I accepted as a mystery too complex for my mind to understand. But look at Him.'
He glares down at the motionless body.
'There was no plan, Loken,' Horus says. 'Just a rash assembly of hasty ideas and frantic remedies as things fell apart around Him. Look at the way He came to fight me! He had lost before He even began. His power was nothing compared to mine, and He didn't even grasp that. He couldn't win, but He came to face me. Oh, He fought admirably, in the circumstances. But it was all just desperate tricks and reckless gambits. Impressive, dramatic, but empty, and with no deeper value. So many times I put Him down. So many times, and spared Him too. And He just dredged some last tattered morsel of strength and came back at me. It was messy, pathetic, embarrassing. And in it, I saw that's what His whole life has been. One cheap trick after another, one scrappy sleight of hand and then the next, patching over the cracks as they appear, trying not to let anyone see that it was all improvised. Garviel, He convinced us all that He knew what He was doing, but it was just for show. An aspect. Just another aspect. There was never a plan. We followed Him, and trusted Him, but He had no idea where He was going or how to get there.'
'He couldn't win, but He came to face you,' says Loken. 'That's what you just said. Does not that suggest courage in His convictions?'
'Courage?' There is scorn in the Warmaster's stone-scraping-stone voice.
'Is that not how you always fought?'
'Loken-'
'It was. I was there. And I can't win either, but I came to face you. What does that tell you?'
'That the world is full of fools,' Horus says. 'Loken, I worshipped this man. I trusted Him. I thought He was a great magician. But His truths were all lies, and His tricks were just tricks!'
'Isn't that true of all magicians?' asks Loken. 'The art is to make it look easy while you attempt the impossible. You put on a show that dazzles and captivates, but behind the scenes, it is all messy, makeshift and frantic. That was always His truth, He just hid it well, for a magician should never reveal his tricks. To be Emperor, He had to convince us. To be Emperor, He had to shield us from the ugly, stopgap truth of His work. He had to spare us from the constant, ongoing horror of His struggle. We had to believe in Him. To be the Master of Mankind, father, His life had to be one long and ceaseless hidden battle, by any and every means He could find, to stop doom from overtaking us.'
'It's not your father's power, it's what He does with it...' Horus murmurs.
'What?'
'Nothing,' says Horus. 'You believe this then of Him?'
'I do. He was our shield, from danger, and from truths not meant for us. The moment we discovered that, it made Him weaker.'
'No. You're wrong.'
'I know I am not,' says Loken. 'He fought His whole life, frantically, hour after hour, to stop one thing.'
'And what would that be?'
'Becoming you.'
Horus turns to stare at Loken. In his new dark aspect, his eyes have become the mirror of the emblem on his breastplate, baleful and bloodlit, with vertically aligned slit pupils.
'You... dare...?' he whispers.
'Chaos will spare no one,' says Loken. 'Chaos cares not. You are a puppet of its whim. It has beguiled you simply to perform one deed. To remove the one man it feared. Yes, the Emperor stole fire from Chaos, and used its power against it, but He always knew that He could not take it whole, for it would consume Him. You mocked Him for lacking the courage to do what you have done, but it wasn't a lack of courage. It was an act of supreme will. You have embraced Chaos whole, and thus given it exactly what it wanted. You have no power of your own. You think you do, but it's just an illusion. He opposed Chaos at every turn, and rejected every lie and promise it threw at Him, so His life, like His fight with you, was a scrappy, messy brawl of improvisation and persistence. You have accepted them all, which is why your path seems so strong and clear.'
'It is, you ungrateful fool!'
'Then show me,' Loken cries. 'Show it to me! Tell me what it is!'
'I have nothing to prove to you!'
'Not to me, to yourself!' Loken says. 'Make no mistake! That is what you told me years ago! Make no mistake! Well, father, see your own mistake for what it is! Your path is a grim darkness where there is only war and no place for mankind!'
'There is no mistake!' Horus says. 'Look at me, Loken! See what I am!' he cries, and claps his hand against his chest. 'I am made mighty beyond all measure by the warp! I am transfigured and ascendant! I am a god, boy, a mighty god, and gods do not make mistakes!'
'We are mighty because we are right,' Loken replies. 'We are not right because we are mighty. Vile the hour when that reversal becomes our credo.'
'What nonsense is that?' asks Horus. 'It sounds like another of His lies!'
'It was something Sindermann taught me-'
'That |
ook at me, Loken! See what I am!' he cries, and claps his hand against his chest. 'I am made mighty beyond all measure by the warp! I am transfigured and ascendant! I am a god, boy, a mighty god, and gods do not make mistakes!'
'We are mighty because we are right,' Loken replies. 'We are not right because we are mighty. Vile the hour when that reversal becomes our credo.'
'What nonsense is that?' asks Horus. 'It sounds like another of His lies!'
'It was something Sindermann taught me-'
'That old fool? He knew nothing!'
'Not the true facts of the matter, perhaps, because none of us did back then. But his wisdom was flawless anyway. You are not a god. They're just letting you think you are. If you are so mighty, my father, where is your wisdom? Why are you so blind, unless lies have blinded you?'
'They would not lie to me. They would not.'
Loken sighs. He turns from his glowering gene-sire and stares down at the crushed and mutilated body of the Emperor.
'You were right,' he says. 'Their grip on him is too great. He will not turn back, and he cannot be saved.'
Horus steps forward.
'What are you doing? You speak to Him as though He had sense and life left to answer?'
Loken looks at him over his shoulder. Those cold grey eyes. That look reserved only for his enemies.
'He does,' he says.
10:xv
The Lantern
And then there is a blink.
It is small, so very small. A flash of psykanic energy that is dwarfed by the raging maelstrom of warpflux that drowns Terra and the Solar Realm, like a single spark in a seething field of lava, or a single drop of spray in a heaving ocean, or a single molecule in the biomass of a living organism. It is nothing, it is inconsequential, it is insignificant.
It is also brief. It lasts barely eight seconds, and those seconds are fleeting and meaningless because of the cessation of time. The eight seconds start when Zahariel El'Zurias speaks the word 'begin', and they end when the hissing scythe of Typhus cleaves Tanderion in half, severs both of Asradael's legs, and spins Zahariel to the ground with his torso sliced open, thus breaking the psychic coordination of the three Librarians.
But for eight seconds, the blink is a pure flash of psychic power burning a tiny hole in the immaterial vortex and breaking the Chaotic harmony of Typhus' bone-song.
The song resumes the moment the blink is over, and the howling warp instantly fills in the hole it made.
But, for those eight seconds, the bone-song is silenced.
In the geophonic chambers of the mountain, Euphrati Keeler feels the blink. The bedrock around her, the walls, the high ceilings, even the block she is standing on, all seem to soften as the throttling chokehold of the bone-song is briefly suspended. No longer constricted, the mountain flexes, like a muscle un-tensing from rigidity, or a throat opening to breathe again. A sudden cool wind moans through the chambers, released from the compression of magic. It flaps the ragged clothes and dirty hair of the vast congregation, and some cry out in fear, but most keep speaking, chorusing the words that Keeler intones. Her mouth is cracked dry and there's blood in her throat, but she does not stop.
'Speak this with me, as it is spoken to me. The Emperor must live.'
The mountain exhales. It gasps, unstrangled. It inhales.
It speaks. It speaks their words.
It speaks them as light.
The light wells up. It seeps from the shaped stone of the walls, a flickering pattern of sparks and flashes at first, then a striation of lines that outline the flaws and marbling of the walls like neon, then a soft white glow that builds and builds until every rock surface and plane is radiating an inner light like a lumen globe.
And then it is brighter, and brighter still. Shadows vanish. Outlines blur. It is too bright to see.
Darkness dies, dismembered by the murderous light.
The wind is in her face. The light is in her eyes. She hears people crying out, but it is impossible to tell if it is in terror or wonder. She is floating. Others are starting to float too, lifting a few feet into the air, suspended by the sonorous light. Some of the pilgrims begin to shake as they rise, shedding dust like dry paper or white petal blossom, like dolls made of ash.
She can see through the mountain. So can Cartheus. So can the blind Zhi-Meng. All of them. Millions of them. They can see through the skin of the rock, through the translucent membrane on which pasts and futures have been traced. They can see the priests and the magicians, the seers and the holy fools, the mad and the blessed, other pilgrims from other ages, the seekers of truth, the outcasts, the novitiates, everyone who has ever come to this place, who has ever been drawn here, who has ever had the imagination to accept the insight of the living rock. There are generations of them, a hundred generations, a thousand, gazing out through the surface of the rock, ranks of silent shadows that stretch back to the most distant parts of history. They can see the painted shamans, the inquisitive hunters with their spears and offerings and beakers of dye, and behind them, other figures, more wary and enthralled, curious and scared, figures that are not quite human, but one day will be. A bloodline, a legacy receding by century and generation, as far back as the genetic code will stretch.
'Speak this with me, as it is spoken to me. The Emperor must live.'
Keeler sees Wereft, rising, howling, dissolving into paper ribbons in the light. Others too, ascending slowly in graceful horror and macabre wonder, becoming sparks and cell-dust and billows of ghastly radiance. But they are not gone. To be absent in the body is to be present in the light.
She hears Leeta Tang screaming as she rises up. She looks at Keeler, eyes wide and burning, and then she too is nothing but stars and ashes whirled by the wind.
The Hollow Mountain shivers. Impacted snow slumps from its shrugging shoulders, millions of tonnes collapsing into its craggy skirts, lifting a cloud of ice crystals like white fog. The engulfing storm, black as pitch-blend, blows back from the peak in a rolling ripple two hundred kilometres wide, inky cloud folding into and under itself in a vast expanding halo. Pearlescent lightning shears and rakes the emptying sky.
Light spears from the mountain's portals, blue-white and fierce, melting snow and ice and annihilating the shadows. The bone-song of the Death Guard has resumed with renewed fury, but it cannot compete. The Archaen blight, born of the most ancient organic corruptors, paleovirologies, primordial interstellar bacterial colonies, and the primal essence of decay that existed long before anything died on Terra, is baked from the black cliffs and scoured off the burning platforms, sterilised and purged. Dead viral matter falls as stringy black rain, and torrents of fallen insect husks drool from the cliffs like drained pus. Black figures, in their thousands, some burst and evacuated, collapse screaming into the pass, carried by the crushing avalanche of light, or swept away by the continental downfall of dislodged snow and compacted ice. There is a mangling roar of engulfing destruction.
Part of that roar is Typhus' scream, his song disarticulated and crushed into noise.
The mountain's defenders, Corswain and his Dark Angels, Sigismund and the last of his Seconds, are caught in the catastrophic upheaval alongside their adversaries. Many are swept away instantly, tumbling into the grinding mayhem with the stricken warriors of the XIV Legion, mashed by sliding ice, shredded by the wind, burned by the light, or drowned by the deluge of dead biomatter that pours like sacred naft or dirty oil. Cliffs collapse and fall away, rocks topple, fighting platforms disintegrate as the light scrapes everything from the mountain's flanks.
A few hold on, by luck or sheer fury, clinging to cracked rock, or tangled debris, or simply each other. With bloody hands and torn fingers, they refuse to let go, despite the screaming light that breaks their bones or the blizzarding force that cracks their war plate and crushes their lungs.
Where once stood Hasgard Gate, Zephon Sorrow-Bringer thinks for a moment that one of his serpenta pistols has misfired. He is about to cast them aside, fearing an overheat implosion, for both volkite weapons have been monstrously overtaxed.
But neither one of them is the source of the flash. Light shears through the swirling murk, so fierce it stings his eyes.
'Fafnir!' he yells. Rann has fallen again. He is a few metres away, pinned against a blood-soaked scrap of bunker wall. He is struggling to free his axes and himself from the dead weight of the World Eater that crumpled onto him when he slew it. Zephon goes to him, and heaves the corpse aside.
He hauls Rann upright.
'Do you see it?' Zephon shouts. His mouth is wet with blood.
Rann nods. It is hard not to. Shadows are lengthening all around them, becoming stark and hard. The lurid red glare that has bathed them all since the slaughter began is giving way, washed out by a brighter radiance. Even the traitors, massing from all sides as they pursue the pair, have paused and turned to look.
Through the blowing smoke and the swirling ash, far away, on what was once, perhaps, the horizon, there is a column of light. It is breaking, like sunrise, across the endless desolation, banishing the darkness. Its white fire is immense and dazzling. In another second, it has become so bright that it bleaches out everything. Nothing is hidden. The fire reflects off the liquid mud like sunlight off glass. It illuminates the true horror of the world, the extraordinary carpet of tangled armoured bodies, the heaped corpses, the dead engines and cremated tank hulls, the dead piled in cliffs and mounds, like the dunes of a desert or the waves of a frozen sea.
'What is it?' Rann murmurs.
Zephon shakes his head. He tries to pull his brother away. The sudden dawn has halted the enemy in confusi |
it bleaches out everything. Nothing is hidden. The fire reflects off the liquid mud like sunlight off glass. It illuminates the true horror of the world, the extraordinary carpet of tangled armoured bodies, the heaped corpses, the dead engines and cremated tank hulls, the dead piled in cliffs and mounds, like the dunes of a desert or the waves of a frozen sea.
'What is it?' Rann murmurs.
Zephon shakes his head. He tries to pull his brother away. The sudden dawn has halted the enemy in confusion. They have a chance to break clear, to reposition.
Rann resists. The light is meaningless, anonymous, perhaps merely the blast-flash of some monumental detonation. But he cannot look away. It is meaningless, but it somehow means everything.
'I...' he begins. 'Where is it?'
Again, the Dominion shakes his head. It is pointless to speculate, for no directions have survived the war. They are all long lost, along with any sense of them.
But he hesitates. Like Fafnir Rann, he feels meaning inherent in that pillar of flame, as though, beyond hope, some direction has miraculously been restored.
One, at least.
'North,' he says. 'That's north.'
The pillar of fire begins to fade, its light dying back. The red gloom starts to descend once more.
'No,' cries Rann bitterly.
And then there is a blink, and the light returns a thousandfold.
'Quiet!' yells Sandrine Icaro, and the Hegemon's grand Rotunda falls silent. She rises to her feet, staring. Others get up from their workstations, Sidozie, Gaston, Ilya Ravallion. They are all staring too.
Light, thin but piercingly bright, is spearing into the Rotunda around the edges of the blast shutters that seal the window ports. Wisping smoke catches in the slender shafts and rays.
Someone starts to cry.
'What is that?' asks Ilya.
'Sensoria!' Sidozie commands, turning to the War Court officers around him. 'Source and origin! Analysis!'
Some turn to their consoles, fumbling, uncertain.
'Open the shutters,' says Sandrine Icaro.
'Mistress Tacticae, we-'
'Open the damn shutters,' she says.
Far above Terra, the traitor fleet hangs in awful silence, a shoal of warships forty thousand strong, their hulls gleaming in the clotting light of a dying, half-eaten sun. They hang in a medium of immaterial discharge, for there is no space in the Solar Realm, no open void, just the fluid miasma of warpflux.
Below them, the curve of Terra, the Throneworld, a toxic and intoxicated hemisphere of filth and corruption. The surface is invisible, obscured by the banked layers of cloud, smoke and pollutants that congest the tortured atmosphere. Brown smoke-plumes the size of nations swirl and coagulate, occasionally underlit by the flash of detonations, of orbital battery fire, and the empyric lightning of the neverness storm that flays the world's surface with lashes a thousand kilometres long. The smothering cloud is so noxious and dense, Terra now resembles a torrid gas giant, or, perhaps, a fog-shrouded tomb, for when the smoke is washed away there will be nothing left except a dead cinder. It is hard to discern where the smog-asphyxiated sphere ends and the neverness miasma begins.
There is a blink. A flash of scintillation one hundred kilometres down through the strangulating smoke cover. A dull flash under the cloud. It dies away. Then another comes, like sheet lightning, then a third. With each one, a profound psychoacoustic thump that screeches the sensoria of the traitor ships. The thumps are muffled, buried, like seismic quakes. Static begins to growl and seethe. Infrasonics throb. Vox-systems start to squeal and bray like livestock in the chutes of a slaughterhouse.
Another flash. This one does not die back. It grows. It swells. It burns up through the toxic smoke like a force-blade cutting through a cloak. In raw fury, it bursts through the atmospheric occlusion, and spears into super-orbital space, a thin ray of undiluted white light that shoots out from Terra in a continuous jet.
It is a slender shaft of light, barely five kilometres wide, but it does not end. It scores out from Terra into the false night of the Solar Realm like the beam of a searchlight. It is impossibly bright. Six traitor ships, caught in its path, are vaporised instantly. A dozen others, orbit-anchored within range of its radiation sleeve, are spared instant incineration but lurch out of formation as it kills their power systems and fries their circuits.
The Astronomican is relit.
Eighty light minutes from Terra, hidden in the cloak of Saturn's rings, the remains of Battlefleet Solar stirs from silent running. The Phalanx, its flagship, ignites its drives.
'Admiral,' says Halbract, 'there is no determining the true meaning of this.'
The Huscarl is still speaking in a whisper. When Niora Su-Kassen replies, she does so in a normal speaking voice, finding that unfamiliar register for the first time in months.
'It doesn't matter, my honoured friend,' she says. 'You and I can both see what it is.'
Halbract nods cautiously. The sensor displays clearly show the magnitude of the photonic signal they have just registered.
'Without doubt,' he agrees, still whispering. 'But we do not know what it signifies. We cannot commit the fleet without verification of-'
'Oh, we can, Halbract,' Su-Kassen replies. 'We most certainly can.'
She takes her seat in the command throne of the bridge. Around her, as per her instruction, the ship's systems are waking from low-power and hibernation modes.
'The Astronomican is lit,' she says. 'We are signalled.'
'But-'
'Your caution is, as ever, admirable, my lord,' she says, 'but verification is beside the point. It may be a signal of victory on Terra, in which case we are urgently needed. Or it may be the summons we have been dreading, to pluck our lord the Emperor from an unwinnable position and convey Him clear of the enemy's grasp, in which case, the urgency is greater yet. Either way, we are called. I am committing the fleet. We are going in. No more waiting, no more games.'
'And if the beacon has been lit by a victorious Warmaster to signify his usurpation and triumph?' Halbract asks.
She shrugs, and smiles a thin smile.
'Then why the hell are we hiding here?' she asks. 'If we're going to die, let's do it well.'
Halbract steps back, raises his fist to his chest, and salutes her. He turns to the bridge.
'War stations!' he bellows. 'War stations! Make ready! Make ready for active engagement! Raise the shields and bring all batteries to power!'
Su-Kassen sits back, and pulls down the armature of the gilded vox-mic.
'This is Su-Kassen,' she says. 'This is the Phalanx. All fleet elements, form on me and begin acceleration to advance. War stations! Make ready to engage. Assault pattern is Dominus Alpha-Two-Two. Time on target, seventy-four minutes. Captains, expect hard resistance on final approach and at destination. Dominus Alpha-Two-Two is our pattern, but I hereby grant discretionary judgement when we enter the battle sphere actual. This will be an evolving situation. Best judgement. Improvise, if you have to. Just give those bastards hell, and tell them I sent you.'
She pushes the mic aside.
'In the name of Terra and the Emperor!' she shouts across the bridge. 'Main drive! Advance!'
Aeonid Thiel takes the signal wafer from the Mistress of Sensoria. Her face is pale, and she can't find any words. He nods, and takes the wafer directly to Guilliman at the strategium.
His primarch glances at him as he presents the wafer.
'The Astronomican,' Thiel says simply.
Guilliman doesn't even look at the wafer.
'Then now we can see where we're going,' he says, 'as he will see us as we kill him. Main power, shipmaster. Ready war stations. Advance, battle formation. As we are illuminated, so we will illuminate. If my father still lives, he cannot fight alone.'
You see the light at the windows of your Court, so very bright despite the black and coloured glassaic. Another of your father's plans, another counter-strike, another desperate effort. How many plans did He make, how many gambits did He set in motion, all running together in the hope that one might succeed?
This one is modestly effective. It will hurt you, an aggravating setback. This will draw in the others, the remnants of His supporters, the ones that you have held at bay. This will bring Roboute, the Lion and Russ, like the loyal lapdogs they are, to absolve themselves for being absent, and to claim some measure of vengeance. The war on two fronts that you have avoided this long has finally caught you.
But, no matter. It won't be a war on two fronts really. Terra is done, and though Loken speaks to Him as if He is still alive and capable, your father is done too. Look at Him there, half-dead, on the deck.
Beside His dusty body there's a tarot card, lying where it fell. The Lantern. Most amusing. All those little schemes. Is that why your father fought you so long and so fruitlessly, at such cost to Himself, to buy time for this? Such a waste, if so. A foolish ploy. When Roboute arrives, the light will show him nothing but your father's corpse and the magnitude of your power. He will probably flee at the very sight of you. He comes expecting a wayward brother. He will find a god instead.
That revelation will break him, and even if it doesn't, you will quickly scatter his indignant fleet. And you will offer him terms of course, just as you have offered terms to them all. It will be interesting to see what Guilliman says in response. For all his regal bearing, Roboute is a pragmatist. He will instantly recognise that which he cannot fight. Perhaps he will finally know fear. You imagine he will make accommodation, and submit to you. More thrones can always be built. Though you worry that those knees of his do not bend.
The Lion and Russ, well... You'll have to kill them both, without compunction. Corax too. None of them have Roboute's political guile. Too much of the warrior in them all.
Still, Worldbreaker is re |
response. For all his regal bearing, Roboute is a pragmatist. He will instantly recognise that which he cannot fight. Perhaps he will finally know fear. You imagine he will make accommodation, and submit to you. More thrones can always be built. Though you worry that those knees of his do not bend.
The Lion and Russ, well... You'll have to kill them both, without compunction. Corax too. None of them have Roboute's political guile. Too much of the warrior in them all.
Still, Worldbreaker is ready for each one of them, and your altar awaits their skulls. Your Talon is whetted.
Speaking of which... You turn to your father. It grieves you, but time's up, and you are tired of offering reprieves. He has spurned every one, pulling out trick after trick.
Loken tries to stop you. You push him aside. Your poor son is deluded, and his loyalty is wounding. He calls to your father as though He can still hear and react. He speaks to Him as though there is still one last, clever trick to play.
There was. It was the Astronomican. A decent ruse, but nothing like sufficient.
You swing Worldbreaker down and crush your father's skull.
The faithful make their sacrifice in the Hollow Mountain.
10:xvi
The mourning of the last day
Loken tries to stop his father, but nothing can stop his father. Nothing can stop the monstrous, bloodlit personification of Chaos, so wretchedly bloated with power, so hideously sure of itself. Horus doesn't even need to touch him. Loken, sword raised, is swept out of his path by the crackling field of immaterial energies that surrounds his father's bloodlit form. The stinging aura brushes Loken aside, as a wind might lift and scatter motes of dust, and sends him rolling and clattering across the oil-dark deck.
He rises to his knees, numb and concussed, and yells his father's name, but to no avail, for his voice is drowned out by the rushing whispers that fill the air of the Court.
So he can only watch, his eyes wide with tears, as Horus Lupercal commits his final blasphemy and slays the Emperor.
There's no joy in it. No sense of victory. Not even the contentment of closure, of a battle squarely won, and a compliance achieved. To kill a helpless man, to crush His head into the deck with your maul when He can't even stand or open His eyes... What does that say about you? Some warrior. Some Warmaster.
The infinite legions of the Neverborn are delighted, at least. They are whispering. Whispering to each other. The rapturous hush and lisp of their voices is building around you, filling the Court, beginning to drown out even the dry-wood crackle of the burning warp. What is it they are saying?
'Stop your whispers,' you tell them. You have no time for their jubilation.
You need a moment to contemplate. Can't they see that? You need a moment to reconcile, to centre yourself. Look at what you've done. Gods can do anything, and they do not make mistakes, but look at what you've done. You lever Worldbreaker's spiked head out of the deck. Blood and years drip from it. There isn't even a skull left to place in reverence on your chapel's altar. Your maul crushed His head entirely and gouged a deep crater in the deck beneath. There's nothing but a mess of blood and pulped flesh, fragments of splintered bone, matted hair, a dislodged, staring eye-
Steel yourself. To be Warmaster... It's not about glory and prestige, it's about possessing the strength to see things through to the end, even when that end is regrettable and unpalatable. War demands it, and only the strongest have the stomach to finish what they started.
You are the strongest. War is ultimately a bloody, tragic business, and only the strongest have the wisdom to understand that once they unleash it, they must be prepared to accept the cost.
He was just a man, and now He's dead. Forget that. Forget the mutilated horror at your feet. Remember what He was. Remember what you were fighting. The tyrant. The King-of-Ages. The liar. The ruthless master who enslaved a species and used you all. The betrayer. The schemer who wove His damned and secret plans for thirty thousand years without a second thought for the lives and blood that would be spent to achieve them.
Yes, think of that. Content yourself with that. Let those thoughts be your consolation. Think of His crimes and His atrocities. Remember that He, and He alone, knew that suffering created lethal and unstable horrors on the other plane of reality, yet saw fit to breed a generation of transhuman warriors like you to subjugate the stars. And when Chaos became a focused, existential threat, He seemed dismayed by the bloodlit consequences of His actions.
You should have turned against Him sooner. You and all your brothers, for all of them had wit and sense. You should have rallied them earlier, long before Ullanor, long before the crusade began to soak the stars in blood. A band of brothers, all of them masters of war, born to understand the properties of conflict... You could have stood together, demanded His capitulation with one voice, removed Him from power, and prevented this, all of it, before-
And if He had refused, then you could have stopped Him. Together. Stopped Him cleanly, before the price became a trillion lives. A quick end. A clean death. But they were all too much like Him, each one of them a copied part of Him. Rogal too stubborn to listen, Sanguinius too forgiving to see the flaws, Russ too enflamed with his own ego...
Throne, all of them! All of them too much like Him, even the ones that eventually sided with you when the blood began to flow. Fulgrim too in love with his own glory, Angron too agonised to know any different, Magnus... Magnus too headstrong and sure of himself.
All of them, all of them, all of them... Too much like Him, because that was how He made them. Too much like their father.
Your father.
But not you. You were the only one who overcame the inheritance of your bloodline. You remained true. You alone stayed strong. You have saved the human race, or what remains of it. Remember that. You had to mash the skull of your helpless father into the floor to do it, but ugly deeds are the price you pay when the cause is just.
Your own father.
You try not to dwell on that part. You try not to think of Him that way. You try to forget the bond you once had, the thirty glorious years, or how proud you felt to be His first-found son...
It's finished now. You take the time you need to collect yourself. You'll decide how long that will be. A period of mourning. A time for reflection. You just need some peace now. A long measure of peace. Some silence.
But the whispers. The whispers are deafening.
'Stop,' you murmur. Why won't they leave you alone? They have been whispering, incessantly, behind your back, since Maloghurst first woke you from your dream to begin the final illumination.
No, not Maloghurst. Argonis. That's right. The boy, Kinor Argonis. Oh, it's so hard to think with the whispers gnawing at your brain. You want to settle your mind, and get all of this clear and straight, so that when you dictate it to Mersadie Oliton, she records a true account of it, and history will remember how hard you tried, and how deeply you struggled with your conscience, and how heavy was the price you paid. But the whispers...
'Leave me alone,' you say.
The walls breathe. It is very bright in the Court, like being outdoors in the searing starlight of Calastar, or the labyrinth-knot of Uigebealach in the blazing warp. Light, almost maddeningly bright, strobes slightly, flickering through leaves swayed by the wind. Or something like leaves. You don't care. You don't look.
You hear a man weeping nearby, somewhere behind you. That, unlike the whispering, you can forgive. You understand Loken's grief, for it is your own.
You don't look around. You can't take your eyes off your father.
'Help me,' you say, over your shoulder. 'Garviel... Help me with Him. Help me bear Him up.'
You hear him rise to his feet behind you. You kneel, and lift your father's body in your arms. What whole part of it is left, at least. He is so light, so fragile, there is nothing of Him. Like rags, like a bundle of sticks, dry and paper-thin-
'Please, Lupercal, stop now,' Loken says.
'It's too late,' you reply. You clear your throat. 'I have stopped, Garviel. It's done. It's finished.'
'It's not too late,' he answers.
You turn to look at him, your father in your arms. Loken gazes up at you, his eyes dark hollows, his sword forgotten on the deck behind him.
'Help me with Him,' you say. 'Help me lay Him to rest in honour. He was my father, after all.'
'It's not too late,' Loken insists. 'Not for you. Not for us. You've done what you set out to do. Let go of the power.'
'Why would I want to do that?' you ask.
'To prove you are Horus. To prove you are a man and not a puppet.'
'I told you-'
'You did. But their claws are deep in you, and their lies delude you. Prove them wrong. You say you took the power into yourself to achieve this end. Well, it is achieved, father. So if you meant what you said, you don't need the power any more. Set it aside while you still can. Show the world of men that you are still one of them, and true to your word. Show the foul gods you are not their plaything, or a helpless instrument of their designs.'
'The power is mine,' you say. The boy has no understanding of anything. 'The power is mine to keep and use as I see fit. It's not the power, Loken, it's what you do with it. It is not the evil you think it is.'
'You have just slain a golden king in a cathedral of darkness,' says Loken. 'Did those aspects, light and dark, choose themselves?'
'They are just aspects!' you laugh. 'Contrivances of presentation. Darkness to oppose light. You see? I chose my aspect to counter His arrogant show of glory. The darkness isn't evil, Loken, no more than the light is good or true. They are just symbols-'
'Symbols have power, father-'
'Not in the simplistic way you think, |
it. It is not the evil you think it is.'
'You have just slain a golden king in a cathedral of darkness,' says Loken. 'Did those aspects, light and dark, choose themselves?'
'They are just aspects!' you laugh. 'Contrivances of presentation. Darkness to oppose light. You see? I chose my aspect to counter His arrogant show of glory. The darkness isn't evil, Loken, no more than the light is good or true. They are just symbols-'
'Symbols have power, father-'
'Not in the simplistic way you think, my son.'
'Then cast them off,' says Loken. 'Get rid of them, this darkness, this black heart, this palace of terror. Cast the power away now you are done with it. Use the one thing you had that your father did not.'
'And that is what?' you enquire.
Loken places his hand on his chest.
'A feeling heart,' he says bitterly. 'You just killed your father. Be a man and show you are sensible to it.'
His words cut you. Does he really think this of you? Can't he see? Perhaps...
Perhaps there is some truth in what he says. Perhaps you should shed this black aspect of terror, to show that it is yours to command, and not the other way around? The work is over. It would be a relief. It would take this weight from your limbs, and the guilt from your heart, and this deadness from your mind. You could breathe again, and hurt, and grieve for what has been done, and clothe yourself in white and gold for mourning. It would make the pain go away. It would justify your actions.
The future can see you. You dare not imagine a future that only knows you as this.
You let it go.
Just for a moment, you let it go.
Just for a second.
You let it slip from you, like a falling cloak. You let it slide out of you like a withdrawing knife, its thorns raking your meat and marrow as it drags away. You let it drain from you, and pour out of you, like blood. There's so much of it, but everything stops bleeding eventually.
The whispers rise again, in horror. They shriek at you.
'Stop it,' you say. 'I answer to no one.'
But the whispers won't cease. They swirl around you, saying the thing they have been saying since this all began, again and again, like dead leaves skittering in the breeze or shushing under foot. Like the dry wing-cases of beetles. Like whirring moths. Like the fire-spit of the warp, unending-
What is it that they keep whispering? It's infuriating. You can almost make out the words.
The name.
One name... No, one phrase, uttered and repeated, echoed and amplified by psychoacoustic force. One phrase, made of white light, uttered in unison by a million voices. Two million. An entire species.
The Emperor must live.
No. That's not-
Speak this with me, as it is spoken to me. The Emperor must live.
No!
Lift up your hands. He must live.
A trick. A last trick. A last damned trick! A lever to prise open your armour. A feint to make you drop your guard. A magician's encore sleight of hand. The final desperate scheme of an eternal and ruthless schemer.
You make to cast your father's corpse aside, because you understand it is merely part of the trick, but the body is already disintegrating into papery ash and luminous dust. It was just an aspect, another discarded aspect, another empty husk.
He is not dead.
You cry out, in anger and despair. You try to snatch the power back into yourself, but it is pooled around you in a great black slick, sticky and sluggish, slow to respond, slow to obey, reluctant to reinhabit the vessel of your body now that you have scorned it. You draw it back in as quickly as you can. You inhale to fill your lungs and soul with it. You gather it in frantically, for you must be ready to defend yourself.
The worst of it... Your human heart, still raw and exposed, feels relief. A kind of joy. Your father is not dead. Your father is not dead. You didn't kill Him. He lives-
Loken faces you, His sword is in his hand. But it's not Loken. It never was. Loken is still sprawled on the deck to your left where you threw him, gazing on in horror.
Or is it wonder?
You will not die like this. You will not be tricked like this. The power begins to flood back into your veins. The darkness of it. The sweet agony. The reassuring rage. The strength-
Loken steps towards you. The other Loken. The Loken who is not Loken. The sword in his hand is not Rubio's old blade. The sword in His hand is the great war-sword. The face is not Loken's. It is His face. The aspect of Loken collapses into voidmist as your father steps out to meet you in all His bloody majesty.
His wounds are great. Blood is dried black across His face and His ruined arm. But there is a light inside Him, a light behind His eyes, the pure white light of a species that, in its madness, believes in Him beyond all reason, and trusts in Him beyond all logic, a species that imagines Him to be its shield and protector, and has such faith in that act of imagination, it is made real.
He could not fight you alone. He could not beat you alone. But by bluff and ruse and stratagem and sacrifice, He has held your attention until He no longer has to.
To be absent in the body is to be present in the Emperor. That's what the whispers are screaming. A whole species is present here, its will united in one form, not a man, not a father, but a king of all the ages.
He looks like a god. A wounded god, but a god nonetheless. It's not His power, it's where it comes from.
We are one and the same, the whispers say, mankind and Emperor, Emperor and mankind, souls bound together. We are together as one or we are nothing.
'You are no god!' you shout.
Then this will be a fair fight, the whispers answer.
You howl your defiance as He comes at you. He is clearly weak and wounded, but you are weak too. You have gathered up but a fraction of the power you had. You must keep Him at bay for a moment longer, hold Him back while you recover your full strength.
For in this moment, you are just Horus Lupercal.
You swing Worldbreaker and deflect the path of His sword. Sparks fly like comets. Your Talon rakes through armour, flesh and bone. Blood fogs the air between you. His mind burns through your nervous system, disrupting your motor control and cascading pain through your core. You block His mind, twist it sideways through thirteen dimensions and render irreparable ischemic damage. You clamp His throat with your Talon.
You crush His windpipe and sever His carotid. Blood squirts out in a hosing arc. More blood snorts and spurts from His mouth as He chokes. He batters His blade across your skull and shoulder, shredding the Serpent's Scales. You push Him away, refractors banging as they fail and collapse, and punish Him with your maul as He staggers back, clutching at His throat. You break His wrist. The warblade clatters from His hand. You crunch His ribs. You unleash bloodlight from the eye on your chestplate and torch His face. His hair burns. The flesh of His cheek melts to the bone. One eye roasts and bursts. Worldbreaker shatters His spine.
You feel the power returning to you. It can't come fast enough. You need all of it. You need all of it-
Reeling, He burns you back. A beam of light rakes from His one remaining eye. Pure force, blue-white, the focused will of the human race, piercing your darkness as the beacon of the Hollow Mountain pierces the void.
The pain is-
The pain is-
The pain is more than a man can bear.
And you are still just a man. It's not the power, it's what you do with it. And you, fool, let it go.
You let it all go.
You fall to your knees, on fire within and without. His psychic beam continues to incinerate you.
Please, you ask. Please, you implore. Give it back. Give the power back to me-
Oh, they will. They will. The Old Four will let you have it all back, because it serves their interests. But they will make you suffer first, as a cautionary reprimand for spurning their generous gifts. They will make you pay for that, in fire and agony, and they will let that punishment last a while. The Emperor, their only real foe, cannot kill you, after all. For all the power He has salvaged and scraped together, for all the tricks He has played to weaken you and render you vulnerable when you were entirely invulnerable, for all the ways He has made you look like a fool, He cannot actually kill you. He does not have the means, not even Him, to kill the limitless thing you have become. The instrument of Chaos Incarnate.
Because that's what you are, Horus Lupercal.
That's all you are, Warmaster.
That is all you'll ever be, first-found son.
A slave to their darkness. A weapon in their hands. A puppet on their strings, beguiled by their promises and lies. An instrument, with no mind of its own, designed to shatter the shield of humanity and tip the human species into the neverness of the warp.
On your knees, caught in the torrent of your father's flame, you look up at Him. You see it now, at last, perhaps as He has always seen it. A simple truth. A secret that should have been kept, despite everything. Some truths are too dangerous to know, or too lethal to hear. That's why He kept it for thirty thousand years. Now you know it too. You see, through insurmountable pain, everything... everything that has been ruined, and everything that has been betrayed. You cannot ask Him for forgiveness. You don't dare, and you can't speak anyway. But He can see it in your eyes. You were too weak to resist them then, and you will be too weak in another moment when they relent and replenish you with their abominable gifts.
Your eyes beg Him for mercy. A son to his father.
End this. End it now, if you can. If that is even possible. End it before it is too late. If you can't do it, no one can.
The burning stops. The psychic beam abates. You sway, gasping.
Your father has a knife. An old stone thing. What is it? It's so small in His hand, so ugly. That won't do it. That won't be enough.
He seems to hesitate, reluctant.
You clench, in sudden spasm and convulsion, and cry out. Th |
you with their abominable gifts.
Your eyes beg Him for mercy. A son to his father.
End this. End it now, if you can. If that is even possible. End it before it is too late. If you can't do it, no one can.
The burning stops. The psychic beam abates. You sway, gasping.
Your father has a knife. An old stone thing. What is it? It's so small in His hand, so ugly. That won't do it. That won't be enough.
He seems to hesitate, reluctant.
You clench, in sudden spasm and convulsion, and cry out. The power is returning. It is flowing back into you with great rapidity, as though the Old Four are suddenly desperate to restore their gifts. What do they know? What have they seen that makes them act in such haste?
Your father looks at the knife.
I wait for you and I forgive you.
He drives it into your heart.
10:xvii
The stroke
Loken is on his feet. He sees the blade glint. A simple stone knife won't break that plate. Something so small surely can't-
The blade goes in. Heart-thrust, the quick mercy-stroke of a Custodian's misericordia, practical and unfussy. The two figures freeze together for a moment, the kneeling son, the standing father, joined by the knife.
And through that blade, the Emperor channels the full force of His will.
The sublime power, a psychic blast of profound magnitude, courses down the ancient blade like lightning conducting through a metal rod. The fireball-flash of its strike is brighter than all creation.
Then the light begins to die. A darkness falls quickly. It is not the glossy blackness of the Court's infinite architecture, it is soft and mute, like the advent of night or the dimming of vision and sense.
Horus smiles.
His smile is no longer the terrible smile that greeted them when they entered the Lupercal Court, the smile that shivered the world with mortal dread. It is now the smile Loken remembers from long ago.
There is no blood. The athame is sharp, sharp enough to cut space. Sharp enough to slice reality. It has waited a long, long time for this, from the original killing that made it, and stained it with the shadow of all murder, to this, the eighth death that it was promised.
Horus smiles. The smile vanishes. Then so does flesh, lips and mouth, revealing another smile, a rictus grin of teeth, a mask of bone. There is no redemption, for the time for that is long passed. There is only resignation.
And in the end, it's just a man killing his son with a stone.
The blade slides out and turns to dust. The body falls.
And then the galaxy burns.
10:xviii
Kairos and chronos
This is the end and the death. But it is neither the end expected nor the death foretold. Prophecy is as confounded as time, and farsight is as useless as the plans that men have made.
It is the death of Horus Lupercal. It is the end of heresy. It is the death of one man's dreams and the end of the Imperium He so carefully envisioned. It is the death of a brief golden age and the end of a promise.
It is the end of a war, yet the death of peace. From here, the long slide begins, the terminal plunge into a grim darkness where the only constant will be war, and the only truth will be pain, and the only living will be suffering, and the only end of suffering will be death itself.
War is now only ever the sequel to war. War will beget war, and so down through time, generation after generation, and so on thereafter, into a far future where war becomes its own definition, and an end unto itself, where death becomes the reason for war, and war becomes the reason for death, worlds without end.
And in that future, the Old Four will come to delight, for the quick death and sudden end they strove for here, and were denied, will be drawn out forever instead across the infinite architecture of the galaxy in one eternal act of worship to the powers they represent.
For now, though, they scream. They gnash in anguish, thwarted and outplayed; they recoil in frustration, cheated and forsaken; they flail in pain, wounded and obstructed. Their screams of hurt and indignation are so shrill, that stars at the hem of the Milky Way gutter out like candles.
Their anchor is gone. The singular, perfect instrument they invested with their powers is destroyed. Horus is dead, and in the instant of his death, the grip of Chaos Incarnate is broken. The Old Four fall away, suddenly, hysterically, wailing in torment, dragging the warp with them.
There will be a future now, in whatever unholy form it takes. The death of Horus is the end of the isochronal instant he wove around himself. The infinite neverness of un-when, this Day of Days, ceases and becomes then, the past. Time falters, chokes on its own blood, and restarts, faltering and unsteady. Metaphysical continuity resumes. The clocks wind up, and start to tick, like gold dripping from a melting ceiling.
Ahzek Ahriman sets down his deck. Some of the cards have begun to discolour, like fallen leaves as the turn of winter blackens gold and red. He rises to his feet, towering and skeletal.
'What is it?' asks Sindermann. Ahriman raises a long finger sharply. He seems to be listening. Sindermann glances at Mauer and the frightened archivist. There is nothing to hear. No sound. No movement. The enclosing blackness that muffles the collection is completely silent, and it surrounds them so tightly, it feels as though they are the last four living souls on Terra.
'The books have stopped bleeding,' says Ahriman.
'And when you say that, you mean...?' Mauer asks.
The sorcerer looks at her sharply. What little humanity had previously been present in that cadaverous face and those startling blue eyes has been vacated. Mauer recoils. The look he gives her is the haughty menace of a jackal-god from some underworld.
'I mean what I say,' he growls. 'I had much to learn. I had only just begun. But now they speak no more.'
The sorcerer seems quietly angry. To Sindermann, more alarmingly still, the sorcerer also seems scared.
'Has... has something happened?' Sindermann asks cautiously. He doesn't want to provoke, nor does he really want to hear the answer.
'There has been a death,' says Ahriman. 'Unexpected. Unexplained.'
'What death?' Sindermann asks. 'Who is dead?'
Ahriman doesn't answer. He passes his bony hand across the small table, and his tarot deck vanishes. He turns, as though to leave.
'Who is dead?' Sindermann calls out.
The sorcerer looks back at them. His taut lips are peeled back from his black gums and snarling teeth.
'You three have kept me from my studies, Kyril Sindermann,' he whispers. 'You have wasted my time with your questions...'
He pauses, thinking. Sindermann knows the sorcerer is debating whether to kill them or not. He has never been more afraid in his life.
'I leave you to your fate,' Ahriman says quietly. 'What is coming will not be pleasant. Worse, I imagine, than anything I could devise.'
'You're leaving?' Mauer asks, rigid with terror.
'I have to go now,' says Ahriman.
'What has happened?' Mauer asks. 'Why now?'
He takes one last look at her before vanishing into the darkness.
'Because now,' he says, 'there is a now again.'
Time's pulse begins to race, thready but alive. It may never return to full health. The interlocked and fused strands of the other three material dimensions, so inevitably and unnaturally spliced, do not revive so easily or so cleanly. When Horus dies, and the four false gods who sponsored him flee into the warp, the immaterial deluge recedes abruptly, sucking back into the empyrean like a swift-ebbing tide. This rapacious drawback leaves a vast area of the materium exposed and ruined, entirely jumbled and displaced by the immense etheric pressures that engulfed it. It is a catastrophic, maiming injury to realspace, and Terra is the entry wound.
The materium shudders in shock, released from the warp's grip. It goes into spasm around the eschatonic rupture, and tries to heal itself to close the wound. There is no surgeon to tend it, no ministering apothecary to set its bones and repair its organs. Seizing, and taut with traumatic pain, it repairs its own brutalised form in a clumsy paroxysm of utter despair.
Across the Solar Realm, and beyond, throughout the local galactic zone, the overlapped shells of realspace herniate and shear as the immaterial forces that bound them together, and into which they have congealed, drain away like fluid from a compound injury. It is a lengthy and calamitous process. The material universe quakes and flexes, protests and fractures, unevenly and indiscriminately resetting itself. The dwindling winds of neverness, excited into one last wild gale of abrasive fury, rip through it.
In the Solar Realm alone, another sixteen million people perish. Many are never seen again, not even as tattered corpses.
Terra is the heart of this cataclysm. As if it hadn't been punished enough, the Throneworld trembles, grinds and bulges. The warp streams out of it like blood from a butchered hog strung up by its heels. That which has been unnaturally intersected shears apart. That which has been comingled dissevers. The abhorrent cartography of Chaos is redrafted. The Dominions of the Palace of Terra sunder from the Vengeful Spirit's palace of terror, which has invaded them like a feeding parasite. As in nature, the sudden and enforced separation of host and parasitoid leaves both sickly and atrophied. They slowly and cruelly shred apart, causing mutual harm, bleeding from the torn tissue that has grafted them together, leaking from the fissures where their chimerical fabric was conjoined.
The other invasive realms withdraw, resecting to their ordained latitudes of time and place in frightful conflagrations. The pancosmic psychic facets conjured by the duel between father and son burst like carbuncles or snap back to their own whens along the numberless angles of space with whiplash force. The skeletonised City of Dust splits free, and drifts like an iceberg into the exoplanar gulf. The Marcher Fortress bur |
r, leaking from the fissures where their chimerical fabric was conjoined.
The other invasive realms withdraw, resecting to their ordained latitudes of time and place in frightful conflagrations. The pancosmic psychic facets conjured by the duel between father and son burst like carbuncles or snap back to their own whens along the numberless angles of space with whiplash force. The skeletonised City of Dust splits free, and drifts like an iceberg into the exoplanar gulf. The Marcher Fortress burns on the fringe of nothing. Calastar shatters loose, its impossibly artificed towers swaying. The Desert of Gods, where no idol is permitted to stand, sags and pours away like sand down the throat of an hourglass. The unquiet realms of the dead and the damned, the lost and the psychic part ways at the crossroads of inertia in Uigebealach. Dolmen Gates shudder, troubled in their long slumber. The psychoplastic flues and conduits of the webway creak and vibrate.
Other realms do not survive the wrenching transition at all. Islets of exoplanar matter and archipelagoes of haunted warp stars combust or implode. The worm-eaten fens of desolate Shabek, grey and forlorn, dissolve in the mist. Rancid, superheated steam swallows the twilit glades and painforests of shunned Long Woe, reducing it, in moments, to putrescent mush that drips into the dark abyss. The dry bone-beds of fossil gods reduce to ash, and blow away as the anaemic un-light fades. Somnopolis, the Library of Lost and Mislaid Dreams, perishes in a raging inferno, and is never more remembered.
The Inevitable City itself, unseen by human sight for centuries, except to that of the saintly or the insane, shelves away, a tilting continent and, over a period of eight hours, slides back into the midnight of the empyrean like some spectral parody of old Atlantis. It leaves a few parts of itself behind, tucked into lost corners and hidden dim edges. Some will later be found, but the stories of those discoveries are the province of other histories.
This history is barely intact. Time bends and flaps, unmoored. Memory lapses, wiped by the trauma of the realm's disintegration, or blanked through acts of will by those who have seen too much.
There are bodies behind him, and nothing ahead of him. He cannot remember how that came to be. What should be ahead of him? How do those corpses come to be there?
Where is here?
The... Palace. The Palace. The Sanctum. The final fortress. This is... this is... The Western Mass Passageway... or one of them. One of the main transit conduits. He can't remember which one it is. He doesn't recognise it.
He doesn't recognise himself.
He gets up off his knees. The pain in his head is so great, it seems as though his skull has been split by a chainblade, but when he feels his scalp and the back of his neck with his fingers, there is no wound. The pain is inside.
There is blood though. So much blood. Blood on his hands and arms, on his chest. Blood in his mouth. None of it seems to be his. It pools on the floor of the vast Mass Passageway behind him, and paints the walls like some parody of cave art rendered in arterial spray. It coats the mutilated bodies behind him.
They stretch out in a tangled carpet back along the passageway, for as far as he can see. Not a single one of them is whole. Bones are snapped and stripped, limbs twisted and unsocketed, flesh torn. Most seem to be traitors, Astartes betrayers of the Lupercal's host, or Traitor Excertus.
Most, not all. A few loyalists lie among the dead. He sees a flash of yellow plate here, a glint of white there, the emblem of a Solar Auxilia brigade. What was this battle? What fury visited here?
There's blood on his face. On his chin. He can taste its copper stink in his mouth and gullet. The blood is as red as his armour. It tastes the same as the crippling pain in his head. In the blood and the pain lingers some residue of insanity and rage.
There's nothing in front of him. Ahead, the passageway is empty. Smoke drifts. He hears, in the distance, gunfire, the thump of explosions, the roar of voices. The battle is still raging, but it sounds like...
It sounds like panic. It sounds like rout. It sounds like the mayhem of overrun and collapse.
He tries to clear his head. He spits to clear blood from his mouth. He must move. He will surely be needed. The Palace is falling. Why can't he find his sword? Why can't he find his own name?
Someone approaches. An Astartes battle-brother is moving out of the emptiness ahead. He approaches warily. Why is his war-axe raised ready?
'What... what is this?' he cries out to the legionary, showing his hands empty and wishing they were not dripping with gore. The Astartes stops five metres away. He too is spattered in blood, his war plate dented and buckled. He keeps his axe raised.
'You can speak?' he calls out.
'What? Yes, of course!'
'Do you know me?' the Astartes demands.
'Yes!' he answers. He swallows. He has to think. A Space Wolf. A captain. He knows this battle-brother, but the pain in his head...
'Sartak,' he says. 'You are Odi Sartak.'
The Wolf of Fenris lowers his weapon slightly, but not entirely.
'Brother,' he says to the lone Wolf. 'Sartak... What is happening? I... I have lost my mind.'
'I would say so,' Sartak replies.
'What do you mean? Tell me-'
'The enemy is in retreat, Angel-son,' says Sartak carefully. 'Full retreat. It happened suddenly, just minutes ago. They had us cold, but now they are pouring out of the Palace like rats. Something has happened. No one knows what. There is a rumour that the Warmaster is dead. That the Emperor has vanquished him. But it's just a rumour. No one knows anything. There's panic everywhere. Can you fight?'
'Yes,' he replies.
'Well, there's fighting to be done. A great deal more. Impressive deeds to be performed. The traitors have turned back, and let go of their victory, but that doesn't mean that victory is ours. Not by any means.'
He nods. He understands. 'Sartak? Why you are wary of me?'
The Wolf sniffs. It's almost a laugh. 'You have no idea?' Sartak asks.
'No. I... I can't remember. Do you know who I am?'
'Of course. You are Nassir Amit of the Blood Angels Fifth Company.'
Amit. Nassir Amit. It comes back now, memories made of pain and torment, all of them glossy and red. Amit sways. He stumbles across the passageway, and leans against the wall to steady himself. Sartak watches him every step, his war-axe ready.
'Give me a moment, brother,' Amit says. He tries to clear his throat again. He will never be rid of that taste. 'I will come with you. Fighting to be done, as you say. We must secure our position. We...'
Sartak waits.
'Horus is dead?' Amit asks.
'Let's hope.'
Amit straightens up.
'Will you lower the axe?' he asks. 'Can you lower your axe?'
Sartak frowns for a moment, then slowly eases the axe down.
Amit wipes his mouth. He looks back at the long and grisly line of bodies.
'Wolf?' he asks. 'Why do the bodies stop here?'
'Because this is as far as you got,' replies Odi Sartak.
The sudden evacuation of the warp takes the blight of Chaos with it.
As the immaterial flood drains out of Terra, and the sacked Dominions of the Imperial Palace, so the clutch of Chaos loosens. The powers and gifts of the eightfold gods abandon their followers, leaving them bereaved and dispossessed. Stung by defeat and maddened by loss, the powers of Chaos quit the material realm without warning or notice.
The Imperium is freed from Chaos in one death stroke. It withers so swiftly, and so completely, few on either side of the war believe its threat will ever recover.
Time, now limping but operational, will tell.
The loss is so abrupt, it leaves the conquering traitor host quite bereft. A cold falls upon them, as if they have been eviscerated. It feels like the shock of an unanaesthetised battlefield amputation. There is a yawning emptiness, a gap, a space where something should be. What belonged to them, and defined them, is gone.
Some plunge into insanity, some into grief. Some collapse in despair, some sink into fugue. Many just die.
Lament fills the air. The chanting stops, the war-horns fall silent. The imperative of conquest is stolen from them, even as they grind the Palace to grit beneath their heels, and raze it with their flames.
In truth, they had won. The Palace had fallen to their siege. But for a few square metres, a few pockets of resistance, a few lines of suicidal defiance, the Palace was theirs.
And in this moment, it means nothing. They forget what they were trying to accomplish, or the triumph that it signified. They forget even why such a thing mattered to them, or what motive drove them on.
Some just stop motionless when it happens, vacant with stupefaction. They are killed where they stand, slaughtered by the loyalists' blades and guns. Others fall back, the fire gone out of them, and find themselves hounded to extinction as they attempt to flee.
Others, remembering at least their military skills, or too damaged to know better, keep fighting.
The fighting lasts for days to come. The Siege of Terra becomes a long, bloody, lingering repulse. Across the Dominions of the Palace, and the slaughterfields of Terra beyond, conflict continues long after the death of Horus. Loyalist forces, in their own way as shocked and disbelieving as their foes, drive back with revived vigour and unsparing vengeance.
The surviving loyalist forces are weary, weak and horribly diminished. They kill all they can kill, they purge all they can purge, they make every effort possible to prosecute the traitor retreat and thwart their flight. Such is their wrath, it is calculated later that if the loyalist armies had but a third more warriors surviving at the moment of the Warmaster's death, no single traitor would have escaped the Throneworld alive. In the annals of history, the Siege of Terra would have become a footnote to the Massacre of Terra.
Still, the traitors flee. They flee |
They kill all they can kill, they purge all they can purge, they make every effort possible to prosecute the traitor retreat and thwart their flight. Such is their wrath, it is calculated later that if the loyalist armies had but a third more warriors surviving at the moment of the Warmaster's death, no single traitor would have escaped the Throneworld alive. In the annals of history, the Siege of Terra would have become a footnote to the Massacre of Terra.
Still, the traitors flee. They flee to their transports and their drop-craft. They flee to orbit. They flee to their fleet, or to those parts of it that have not themselves fled or been destroyed by the time the evacuating ground forces arrive. They flee in blind panic. They flee in grief. They flee screaming.
Some disengage in systematic military order, fighting as they fall back, held together by the last threads of discipline and dignity, or by loyalty to their regiment or company or Legion, bound by the few commanders who have retained the wit and composure to orchestrate a coherent active withdrawal.
That portion of the traitor host that escapes Terra and the downfall of their cause, and it is a considerable number, runs for the stars. They understand the wrath that is pursuing them from the broken walls of the Palace, and the implacable retribution that is approaching the Throneworld beneath the banner of Ultramar.
None of them sue for surrender or offer terms.
Or if they do, no loyal son of Terra bothers to listen.
Dirty smoke is blowing sideways across the shattered rockcrete of the Canis Causeway. The surface of the wide avenue is littered with debris and pockmarked with craters. In the ruins to his left, he can hear the pop and thump of bolter fire.
Maximus Thane walks on, the burning monolith of the Palace behind him. There is a limp to his step, but he ignores the pain. He remembers the last time he stood here. It is literally impossible to tell how long ago that was. It feels like hours. It feels like his whole life. He stood here, facing the sundered arch of the Lion's Gate, with just shy of seventy men, all Imperial Fists of the 22nd Exemplars, locking tight into Repulse Formation Exactus. They are dead now, all of them.
He looks towards the gate, or what remains of it. It, like him, was supposed to keep the enemy out.
Blood spots the rockcrete beside him, leaving a trail as he walks. It is dripping from the cracked and twisted warhammer that swings low at his side. The Sons of Horus who shed that blood are behind him somewhere, crumpled in the causeway ditch. He can see their brethren, almost a company strong, fleeing in the distance towards the ruined gate. Thane doesn't think they'll get that far. He thinks they'll turn. 'My life for Lupercal!' That's what they used to boast. Well, their lives for nothing now. They'll want to die on their feet. They'll want to die fighting. Whatever else they are, they're Astartes, and Astartes don't run.
That suits him fine. He wants to avenge the seventy brothers who once stood this ground with him.
He glances over his shoulder. Though the 22nd Exemplars are long gone, he is not alone. The men and women advancing behind him are caked in dust. No two of them are from the same company or regiment. Excertus, Auxilia, Old Hundred, a Wolf of Fenris, a White Scars outrider, a Salamanders Pyre Warden, a X Legion centurion.
They number over a thousand.
'They're turning,' says the warrior at his side.
Thane knows. He's seen it. The Sons of Horus are swinging around to form a defensive line across the causeway. Just as he expected, just as he hoped.
'Ready?' Thane asks. But he knows the prentice-brother is more than ready. Nor is he a prentice any more. Demeny is a brother now, plain and simple, tested and tempered in the forge of war.
Demeny clasps the long grip of Berendol's greatsword in both hands. He has the broad blade resting across his right pauldron.
Thane raises his chipped and broken hammer high in the air. He doesn't have to say anything. The roar of a thousand voices builds behind him.
They start to run.
So ends the Day of Days. It closes in fire and damnation. It has kept none of its nefarious promises, or made good on its venomous threats. It sinks into a bloody twilight where the only currencies are wayment, misery and loss. In this half-light of ash and tragedy, all colour bleeds and fades. The empyreal hosts of Horus Warmaster lose their darkling majesty and their degenerate lustre. They lumber as revenant outcasts in the twilight gloom, their souls scorched, their banners lank and meaningless, seeking solace, absolution and escape.
Where is their fury now? Where is their purpose and their certainty? Where is the unquenchable devotion that brought them to the brink of triumph, and almost won them the galaxy whole?
Gone, gone into the dusk, gone into the flame, gone so utterly it might never have existed at all.
Gone with it are the allies that stood with them. The baying legions of daemonkind do not retreat. They vanish into smoke, into dust, into the dismal rain. As the warp declines, so the Neverborn become extinct upon the material plane, for their embodiments and possessions cannot endure in the mundane realm. They depart, unwilling and thwarted, as night begins to fall, and leave their screams upon the air. Those keening wails of anguish and spite become the evensong of the dying day, and those who hear them, traitor and loyalist alike, will never forget them. The screams of daemons will haunt them for the rest of their lives, and wake them in the dark of other midnights.
From the smallest vermin breed gnawing bones and collecting skulls amid the corpse heaps, to the cloven-hooved arch-fiends piercing the sky with their obscene horns, the Neverborn decay and de-manifest. They leave smog behind them, foul air, a spatter of ichor as their protean forms deliquesce, the dew of their blood, the rotting stench of their brief and heinous incarnations.
But they remain in the memories of those who have seen them as an indelible stain. Daemons have walked the face of the world. Their teratoid horror has been seen by human eyes, and felt by human senses. Though the Neverborn vanish in a blizzard of dissolution, the fact of them lingers. The daemons endure, in peripheral memory, in pouncing nightmares, in the shuttered rooms of sanity and the cellars of thought, in that shadow there, by the window, where the sunlight does not reach.
The daemons will always be here, now.
Sojuk of the White Scars should be dead. Since the Gate closed, he has fought on, sometimes alone, sometimes with the few who had been able to stand with him. He has roamed the dereliction of the Palatine, hunting for the enemy, and the enemy has not been hard to find. At every step, he was ready to sell his life for the highest price. They all were, the life-sellers left outside the walls.
But the daemons could not kill him, and now they seem to be gone. The traitors could not kill him, and they appear to have turned in sudden retreat. No one has been able to afford his price.
Not even the Blood Angels. When the sons of Sanguinius turned, it shocked Sojuk to the core. It did not seem to him an act of treason, for the Angels of Baal turned on friend and foe alike. It seemed more like a madness, a hatred of war itself whereby, deranged beyond a point of control, the Blood Angels tried to destroy war and life in its totality.
Sojuk understands the feeling. When there is nothing left of a man's life except destruction, it consumes him and he becomes destruction. In a way, the Blood Angels were simply being more honest than him. They had dispensed with any discrimination. No distinction between brother or traitor. They merely killed whatever was in front of them. There was something pure about that apocalyptic frenzy.
It had its uses too. At Hindress Fort and Manciple Gard, the frenzied and uncontrolled actions of the Blood Angels broke and drove back large traitor divisions that could not have been stopped otherwise. He saw it with his own eyes. War broken by a berserk fury. Angels turned to daemons to fight the daemons. Perhaps it was some last wish of the Emperor that His sons should meet the enemy on their own infernal terms.
Sojuk stayed clear of it. He had no wish to fight the Blood Angels, nor any desire to be torn apart by them.
It's quieter now. Something has changed. He descends the fractured terraces of the Cydonae gunline, into the crushed gutter of the Sanctus Wall. The sky has gone yellow, and there is a light to the north that feels like sunrise. The enemy is definitely in retreat. What has broken them? They held the field so completely. It wasn't the Blood Angels. The madness of the Angels hurt them, but it could not have turned them back in such a wholesale fashion. And the Blood Angels themselves, the few he has seen in the last twenty minutes, seem to have been released from their madness. He has seen some of them, wandering, dazed, or weeping in the ruins. He thinks, perhaps, that the sudden passing of their raging fit and the breaking of the enemy advance are connected, symptoms of the same thing. Something has definitely changed.
He sinks to his knees, and lays his sword on the rockcrete beside him. He finds himself in the most unexpected place of all. Alive. He was so resigned to death, so ready for it, but it never came or found the right price.
Sojuk realises he is sobbing. It isn't relief. It's shock. Death had been so certain, and now nothing is certain. He doesn't understand the world any more. It almost feels like victory, but he doesn't trust it, because it also feels like defeat. Perhaps this is what it feels like when everything is lost, even the certainty of death.
He hears a noise, unmistakable. He looks up in time to see three jetbikes pass overhead at high velocity, banking to the east. They are bikes of his Legion. The false sunlight glints on their flanks as they turn |
It's shock. Death had been so certain, and now nothing is certain. He doesn't understand the world any more. It almost feels like victory, but he doesn't trust it, because it also feels like defeat. Perhaps this is what it feels like when everything is lost, even the certainty of death.
He hears a noise, unmistakable. He looks up in time to see three jetbikes pass overhead at high velocity, banking to the east. They are bikes of his Legion. The false sunlight glints on their flanks as they turn. They are chasing down the fleeing traitors eight kilometres out. Sojuk didn't know any were still operational.
He instantly wants to be one of them. He feels the yearn of yarak. He wants to chase into the distance. If men of the Keshig still have a purpose, then there is some meaning left in the world. It just hasn't been shared with him.
Sojuk rises to his feet and watches the glinting specks as they run off east. He feels the spirit of his Khagan. Whether the Great Khan of Khans is alive or dead, he is riding still, and sons ride with him, ever onwards.
Where all he thought he had left was death, Sojuk finds he has hope, and hope has cost him more than death ever could.
This end, then, is the end of dreams, this death the death of certainty. All that mankind trusted as empirical fact is excised from the human psyche, and in its place is crudely transplanted the sly nightmares of the possible. Hearts beat differently now, minds tilt at an unsettled angle. The limit of what is possible has been extended beyond the wall of reason into the dark forests of the imagination, where few have dared to venture. Anything has become possible, and thus nothing is unimaginable. There is no longer consolation in rationality. Mankind stands at the foot of a hollow mountain filled with doubt and the darkness of unknowing. The candles of science and axiom will not stay lit in the night wind. The only light that can act as a guide is faith, as blind and indefinable as the darkness it seeks to illuminate.
Mankind can now imagine the worst, and every time it does so, from this moment on, the worst will be worse still.
The greatest dream of all, the cherished dream to which mankind has clung, and in which it has invested, the spine that keeps the very idea of the Imperium upright, is broken. The dream, a polished mosaic of fact and truth, is bleeding out on the deck of a burning flagship, and nothing can staunch the wounds. The great and ordered plan in which the future was modelled, with a craftsman's eye for perfect scale and exquisite detail, is undone.
His vision of the future has failed.
Vision, gone. Audio, hyper-distorted. Sensoria, crashed.
The noospheric space she inhabits, and which is her entire world, is no longer attached to the universe.
'query'
Eyet-One-Tag, Speaker of the Epta War-Stead linked unity, struggles to understand the riddle of data. The data will not flow. The data will not obey her.
'query/priority'
She considers, first, that the slaves of the False Omnissiah have unleashed some weapons-grade scrap code in a last-ditch effort to postpone their extirpation. They have tried everything else. They have tried their methods of meat and metal.
But that is an error assumption. There is no invasive scrap code in the war-stead's noospheric unity. Besides, the slaves of the False Omnissiah have nothing that can break the coded walls of her data-fortress. Their technologies, even those purloined from Mars by the treacherous adepts who rejected the sequences of Moravec to stand with the Terran Emperor, are status poor/inadequate compared to the combat-ware at her disposal.
Hers were granted and loaded by the Fifth Disciple of Nul. Why are they status invalid?
'query'
The unity does not respond.
The riddle of data refuses solution.
Why is her face wet?
Eyet-One-Tag rewinds her data record to the point before the sensoria crash. Her unity was advancing to location Hasgard Gate in support of Advance Beta Trice Astartes XVI. 'verified' Advance Beta Trice Astartes XVI had meat-engaged with status poor/inadequate resistance at location Hasgard Gate. 'verified' Elements of Astartes IX, Astartes V and Astartes VII had been identified. 'verified' Skitarii Tr4.ki macroclade had been deployed to support Advance Beta Trice Astartes XVI. 'verified' Estimate of compliance three hundred and sixty-one seconds. 'verified'
It has been more than three hundred and sixty-one seconds.
Advance Beta Trice Astartes XVI reported sudden aberrant behaviour displayed by Astartes IX units. They quote 'have become deranged. They are insane with some form of rage' end quote. They quote 'are fighting like animals, without any technique' end quote. They quote 'are drinking blood from the dead' end quote.
There is no supplementary data. Advance Beta Trice Astartes XVI is unresponsive. Is this lack of response connected to the sensoria crash or merely simultaneous?
'query'
The unity does not respond.
Why is her face wet?
She conducts a deeper diagnostic review. It is not a riddle of data. It is a loss of data. Significant portions of the data-current have been removed. Parts of her own data-shadow are missing.
The linked unity does not respond because there is no linked unity.
She is alone and blind and mute.
What is missing is the immaterial medium that the war-stead was using as a conductive agent for their data-current. What is missing from her is the immaterial component that gave her purpose and function.
The warp is unavailable. The warp has been discontinued.
She is unsupported.
Eyet-One-Tag disengages from the noosphere to obtain data via other functions. She initialises old tactile and physical instrumentation that she thought she would never have to use again.
Obsolete meat applications restart like a kick in the face. She now possesses pain. Flesh pain. She now possesses discomfort due to loss of body heat. She now possesses misalignment in physical equilibrium. She has fallen.
She has fallen from her palanquin, because her palanquin has overturned. Her palanquin has overturned because the clade-thralls supporting it have fled. Her face is wet because she is lying in the mire. She touches her face. Both the act of touching and her face are unfamiliar. The augmetic sensor blisters that cover her skull from the mouth up are dead, or operating at low power. Some have cracked, the plastek fragmenting, and are leaking cybernovial fluid. Her semi-blindness and deafness are explained. Resolution is poor. Low-resolution heat track only. She should have kept a meat eye and a meat ear during elective mechamorphosis, in case of emergencies like this.
She shivers, another unfamiliar sensation. It is the cold of the ooze, the bitter wind, the rain. It is also shame. She was so beautiful, admired by many for the elegant asymmetric proportions of her augmentations, and the aesthetics of her implant cysts. She does not want anyone to see her when they are damaged and cracked. She hates that her beauty has been scarred.
Hate, another unfamiliar feature of meat-mode.
Fear, another.
Something approaches. She cowers. Her heat-adapted cyst, in feeble low-res, identifies it as a skitarius. She does not want it to see her, but she needs its help. She calls to it with the meat mouth she kept to serve as unity speaker and communicate with unmodified humans. It does not understand. Her mouth cannot produce hard cipher or code speak.
But it hears her, and moves closer. It picks her up out of the cold mud. Her wasted legs, dormant for so long, will not support her weight, so she clings to it. As her arms embrace its broad, muscle-corded torso tenderly, she extends a dendrite from the middle finger of her right hand and installs it into the base of the skitarius' spine. It shudders at the invasion of the lumbar puncture.
She needs its sensoria. She needs its eyes.
It is called Ultr-5V, and belongs to Tr4.ki macroclade. It is male-derived. It is a him. Like her, he is damaged. Like her, he is seeking data. He does not seem to mind that she is so hideous and unsightly. They cling together, like lovers dancing in the rain, arms around each other. Via the puncture link, he asks her a torrent of questions in binharic that she cannot answer.
Eyet-One-Tag accesses his eyes and acoustic installs. They are functional. Imperfect, but far better than her crashed systems. She can see and hear again. She can see and hear through his skull.
The world around her is revealed, the real world, unmodified by noospherics. It is far better resolution than the ghost heat-paint her broken sensoria could produce. Skitarii optics are battle-hardened and high-gain.
Her palanquin, her regal carriage, is indeed overturned. The mud is thick, and the rain is so heavy it looks like vertical streaks of static distort. The battle engines of the war-stead loom around her, abandoned. Some are burning in the rain. She sees the heat of the fire, the swirl of the smoke colour-graded according to temperature. Not far away, not more than fifty-two point six metres, the immense engine-mount of Clain Pent, Fifth Disciple of Nul, lies on its side. It too is ablaze. Such a loss, an old and thoroughbred creature like that, hobbled and laid low. There is no sign of Clain Pent.
She lets Ultr-5V dance her around slowly in a circle, her face against his chest, her arms around his back. She needs a three-sixty view. Where is the war-stead? Where are the thralls? Where are the others like Ultr-5V?
The engines all around her, even her palanquin, are decaying. She sees rust flaking and billowing from their hulls, staining the rain red. The immaterial energy that infused them, and gave them vigour and vitality, is gone. Without it, the metals and plasteks that compose them are succumbing to years of wear and use in minutes, withering before her eyes.
She knows she is too.
The warp has left them. It has left them to their fate. It has forsaken them in a stark, material world of mud |
ltr-5V?
The engines all around her, even her palanquin, are decaying. She sees rust flaking and billowing from their hulls, staining the rain red. The immaterial energy that infused them, and gave them vigour and vitality, is gone. Without it, the metals and plasteks that compose them are succumbing to years of wear and use in minutes, withering before her eyes.
She knows she is too.
The warp has left them. It has left them to their fate. It has forsaken them in a stark, material world of mud and cold and liquid and filth, unsupported, unlinked, and vulnerable to decay and corrosion.
Through the skitarius' eyes, she sees figures approaching. They are coming through the rain, through the burning ruins of the camp. Their war plate is red, like the rust and the rain. It is also smeared with organic residue, which is also red. They are Astartes IX.
They are approaching slowly, calmly, what she would classify as rationally. Whatever feral madness afflicted them, as reported by Advance Beta Trice Astartes XVI, it appears to have abated. Eyet-One-Tag deduces the sudden cessation of the immaterial medium has shocked them back to stability. She wonders what caused their rage to begin with. A loss, a wound perhaps. Whatever it was, it cannot be anything compared to the loss she has suffered.
The Astartes IX are no longer berserk. But they are Astartes IX, and they are highly skilled in methods of meat and metal.
They approach. She does not bid Ultr-5V to engage them and protect her. He is as scared as she is.
They hold each other tight. She closes his eyes.
This is the end and the death.
There is no victory to be claimed, not for those who came here to seize it, nor for those who fought to prevent them. Terra, disfigured, writhes in a delirium of its own pain, flinching to ease the agony of one wound, only to tear open another. Each flinch is a tectonic spasm that furrows continents. Each contraction is a seismic rictus that cracks the spines of landmasses and grinds their bones. Its mouth is filled with its own blood, and its blood is magma fire.
Some will wonder, in the years to come, if the Throneworld should be left to die. It is too broken, too tainted, too contaminated by the poisons of war and warp. Any other world so fundamentally exposed to the immaterium, and to the blight of Chaos, would be discarded in an instant, shunned forever or sterilised by Exterminatus.
But it is Terra. It is the cradle of the species. It is the earth from which the seed of humanity grew. The thought of its abandonment is inconceivable.
For to perish in a war is one thing, to survive quite another. Survival carries its own burden, an obligation that is, in its way, more onerous than war itself. No matter the injuries a survivor has sustained, no matter how mutilated and close to death war has left them, be they human soul or planet, they have endured, and so they inherit the reckoning of war. It is their solemn duty to preserve the cause for which they suffered, and for which so many died, for if that cause is not remembered, then war is just an empty horror. Those who find themselves alive when the war with Horus ends are so benumbed, they long for the release of oblivion. But they must live, to honour those that did not. They must remember, for those that no longer can.
A cause must survive the war for which it has been fought. This is all the dead expect of those they leave behind. Make sense of us. Make sense of that which seems so senseless. We are gone, but you remain.
Remember not the way we fell, or how. Remember why.
'Wait,' says Fafnir Rann. Zephon glances at him. Rann knows the look. It means no stopping. Rann feels it too. If they stop now, either of them, they'll never start again. The wounds they have both sustained will kill them, for only determination is keeping them upright.
Still, he says, 'Wait.'
The traitor host is in disarray. It has shuddered backwards from the devastation of Hasgard, and is pouring south towards the rockcrete canyons of the Palatine Way.
No one knows why. No one knows anything. But Rann, Zephon and the few other survivors of the Hasgard stand have clambered from the bloody rubble and given chase.
It is laughable. A handful of men, grievously injured, some almost dead on their feet, staggering after a host of thousands. None of them have any idea what their pursuit can achieve. But better this meaningless something than nothing. To stop is to die.
The men with them have come to a halt. Like Zephon, they stand and watch, bemused, as Rann scrambles up a slope of debris. The landscape, as far as any of them can see, is almost entirely bodies, mounds of tangled Astartes war plate piled in the sucking mire. Rann clambers his way up a heap of the dead.
Behind him, Leod Baldwin grunts something. Baldwin can't talk, because half his face is missing.
'What are you doing, Lord-Son-Of-Dorn?' Namahi calls out.
Rann glances back at them as he continues his climb.
'Wait!' he shouts. He looks at them for a moment, the pride of the Imperium brought to this. A few White Scars, a few Imperial Fists, disfigured and torn, their plate now as red as Zephon's. There are some other Blood Angels among them too. They are ashen and haunted. Their rage collapsed just as the traitors broke. Another mystery that cannot be explained. No one knows anything.
And that's why Rann has told them to wait. They need something. Night is falling, perhaps forever. This place, Hasgard, was where they were going to die, and they may yet die here. Mindlessly chasing the enemy is not enough. They are exhausted, broken, bleeding out both literally and metaphorically. Whether they catch up with the enemy or not, most of them will not live another hour.
Rann blocks out the pain of his wounds. He finds what he glimpsed from below as they advanced. He reaches for it, and struggles to free it. Corpses slide and clatter down the heap as he disturbs them.
It comes free, the grip of the dead broken. He pulls himself upright and raises it so that the men below can see it.
It is a standard of the Imperium, a banner of the Emperor. The pole is bent and the cloth torn. The aquila is missing from the finial. The banner itself is so soaked in blood that its symbols and heraldry are hard to make out.
But they know what it is.
Rann raises it aloft, ignoring the blood that drips from its hem onto his face, ignoring the blood that is running down his back and chest from the wounds in his shoulders and neck as the effort of raising the standard pulls them open.
'For the Emperor!' he yells.
This is the end and the death. The Vengeful Spirit, mighty fortress ship, tears away from the fabric of the Imperial Palace, toppling backwards into realspace as the warp weeps out of it. It is profoundly damaged. Clouds of debris billow from its flanks as time, and seven other contradictory dimensions, pull upon it in opposition. Hull plates peel like snakeskin, flayed by empyric compression. The superstructure squeals and moans as extreme stress distorts its framework. It is gradually and brutally realigned to an orbital position it never really left.
It tries to recompose itself. It tries, screaming from every rivet and stanchion, to remember what it used to be, and to become that thing again, but its memory is unreliable, and its sense of self blotched by amnesia and dementia, and the pain is too great. It thought it was a city. It thought it was a palace, and a court. It thought it was a house of gods. It is suddenly none of those things.
It is no longer even where it thought it was. It is barely even a ship.
Somewhere deep inside its rolling, juddering mass, Dorn and Valdor fight to keep their footing. Decks that were made of meat are suddenly plasteel again. Walls and bulkheads that were cartilage and bone are adamantine and ceramite. It is raining from the ceiling, torrents of water and oil from ruptured tanks and burst hydraulics. The rain sluices away the last dregs of blackened warpflux and immaterial residue from the walls, and foams around their feet in a reeking, curdled froth.
Klaxons are sounding, on and off, blaring then faulting out. Cascades of sparks from shorting systems shower down in the drenching rain.
They have killed a thousand daemons in the darkness just to get this far, but now the daemons are all gone. Neither Dorn nor Valdor has spoken a word in a long time, not even when the Neverborn suddenly deserted the ship and the decks began to pitch and quake. They both know something has fundamentally altered.
They both know that despite their efforts, despite the thousand daemons they have killed to get this far, they are probably too late.
One step at a time, they advance through the torrential downpour, bracing themselves against the streaming walls to stay on their feet as the deck tilts and rocks. Loose debris flies past them, and unsecured equipment tumbles across the floor. They duck loops of cables swinging from the ruptured ceiling, the severed ends hissing and spitting weak cinders of power. They hear the tortured subframe of the vessel uttering its harsh metallic scream as it is twisted and deformed. They smell smoke, the hot stink of fires surging unchecked through broken compartments. Steam swirls from the chambers of the ship where pouring water and roaring flames have met.
'He's dead,' says Constantin at last, as Dorn steadies him.
'Who?' asks Dorn.
Valdor does not answer.
They come to the first of the skulls. Or, rather, the skulls come to them. One or two at first. Human skulls, burned and cracked, jawless, rolling and bouncing down the broken deck like loose rocks from a landslip, carried by the foamy water. Then more, skulls and dirty bones borne by the flood, spinning and clattering around their ankles. So many. They cannot bear to estimate a number, or imagine where they came from.
'Here!' Dorn shouts, splashing forward. He grips the plasteel rungs of a through-deck ladder bolted to the |
skulls. Or, rather, the skulls come to them. One or two at first. Human skulls, burned and cracked, jawless, rolling and bouncing down the broken deck like loose rocks from a landslip, carried by the foamy water. Then more, skulls and dirty bones borne by the flood, spinning and clattering around their ankles. So many. They cannot bear to estimate a number, or imagine where they came from.
'Here!' Dorn shouts, splashing forward. He grips the plasteel rungs of a through-deck ladder bolted to the wall. There's a light above them, a crepuscular glow.
'Wait,' warns Constantin. Dorn sees that the captain-general has turned, spear raised, peering back into the darkness behind them. Dorn steps to his side, sword ready. The rain drizzles off their armour. Perhaps not all the daemons have fled after all.
Constantin frowns, gazing into the dark. He lowers his spear.
'Coros?' he calls.
Dorn sees them now. Diocletian Coros and three other Sentinels from Valdor's company, making their way up the rain-swept hallway behind them.
'We followed the storm, as you directed,' is all Coros says when he reaches them. Valdor nods. Dorn, at his side, shakes his head wearily. It is all so matter-of-fact. There is no real acknowledgment of reunion, no relief. If these had been his men, he would have embraced them. If this had been Diamantis and-
He puts the thought aside. He clamps his Huscarl's sword to his hip, and turns to the ladder.
He leads the way. They climb through the falling water to the next deck level. The walls are streaming wet here too, and lamps are burning, emergency lumen units in wire cages, casting a harsh, blue light.
The glare is ultraviolet, emergency lighting and decontam systems. But power is failing and fluctuating. The lights are at half-power already, and they are starting to tremble and fade.
A large hatch ahead of them stands open. Dorn walks through it, drawing his blade.
He stops when he sees what lies before him.
The great chamber is ravaged and derelict. There does not seem to be a single part of it that is not damaged or scarred. The cracked deck is littered with rubble and debris, and smears of meat and blood that might once have been human.
To one side lie the fused, incinerated remains of a Custodian proconsul. To the other-
To the other, his brother. Sanguinius. Dorn knew the Angel was dead. The woman told him so. He thought he had prepared himself. But to see it, to actually see it... To see the corpse, so brutally mauled and so casually discarded...
In the centre of the chamber is Horus Lupercal. He is crumpled on his side, his war plate scorched and blackened around the cadaver it contains. The empty sockets of Horus' broiled skull gaze at Dorn. His de-fleshed jaw is twisted open in a scream.
Nearby, a solitary Astartes kneels in vigil beside the other body.
Constantin was right, whichever way he meant it. He's dead.
They're both dead.
10:xix
Revelation
Loken looks up at them as they approach. There's nothing to be said.
Dorn, gazing in disbelief, gestures for him to move back. He kneels in Loken's place at his father's side.
'You cannot die,' Dorn says. 'Not now.'
The Emperor is lying on his back. He does not stir. Dorn uncouples his right gauntlet, and lays his bare hand gently on the auramite breastplate. There is scarcely a trace of life, no heartbeat he can feel, no rise and fall of the lungs. One of his father's eyes is closed, the other gone entirely. His skin is cold and pale, and his hair is matted with blood. The injuries he has sustained to his arm, his body and his head are catastrophic. Dorn cranes in and listens. There is just a trace of breath, a wheezing, laboured rattle of air in his throat.
Dorn knows that sound. He's heard it too many times. He's heard it in men and Astartes alike. The fact that his father is a demigod giant, with a demigod giant's biology, doesn't matter. It is the sound of mortality. It is the soft footsteps of death as it approaches.
'You cannot die,' he repeats, but there's nothing he can do to prevent it. The Emperor's wounds are awful to behold. No medicae science that Dorn knows of can repair this damage. This is the end and the death. He can see it. He can hear it.
'He fought,' Loken says quietly. 'Then He fell the moment Horus was finished. It was as though... as though He kept Himself alive, by force of will, just long enough to strike that final blow. He had been injured so badly by then...'
'You were here?' asks Dorn, not looking up. His voice is no more than a whisper.
'I was,' Loken replies. 'My lord, I did all I could-'
'I have no doubt of that, Loken,' says Dorn. He takes a deep breath to control the grief crushing his chest. 'What matters is what we do now.'
Dorn looks up at Constantin and is shocked by what he sees. Valdor is gazing down at the Emperor's body, and his eyes are full of tears. Coros and the other Sentinels are clearly weeping too. It is not their expression of grief that shocks Dorn. To hear the lament of the Custodes would be unbearable. But this is utterly silent, and somehow far worse.
'Constantin,' he says. 'Constantin. We need to get him out of this place.'
Valdor nods. He clears his throat.
'He lives yet,' he replies. 'I can feel it. Tribune?'
Coros steps forward.
'Teleport homing beacons are active, my captain,' Coros says. 'No signal responds. Noosphere is down. Vox is down. Retrying to establish contact.'
'There isn't time,' says Loken. He can no longer hear the Master of Mankind in his head. He can no longer sense the light of Him, and the flames on Rubio's blade have gone out. The Custodes may be more sensitive, for they are more closely bound to the Emperor, but Loken can feel that extinction is but a few breaths away. 'There's no time to make contact. We must carry Him-'
'Loken is right,' says Dorn. It is getting very cold, and the chamber around them has grown very dark. The air processors have shut down, and the atmosphere is leaking away. He and Valdor have seen the damage for themselves. The ship is dying too. From all around come the groans and sighs of its decline, bulkheads creaking, and the hull-frame cracking. Every now and then, debris flutters down from the sagging ceiling. The deck trembles beneath him, like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Like the Master of Mankind, the flagship is trying in vain to endure the mutilation it has suffered.
'We carry him,' Dorn says. 'We carry him now.'
'To where?' asks Valdor. 'Back the way we came?'
'That way no longer exists,' says Loken. 'The ship has torn free of the Palace. It is no longer possible to walk from one to the other.'
Valdor glares at him, then looks back at Dorn.
'The nearest embarkation deck, then,' says Dorn. 'We find a ship. A Stormbird.'
Valdor nods. The Sentinels close in and, with Valdor, Dorn and Loken, start to lift the Emperor up. The moment they raise Him a little, His head flops back and black blood streams from His mouth like water.
'Set Him down!' cries Valdor. 'Set Him down again! We're just killing Him faster.'
They ease the Emperor back to the deck. Dorn glances around.
'Get a deck plate,' he says to Coros, 'wall panels... Anything we can use to fashion some frame to support him.'
The Sentinels turn to obey, but halt abruptly and bring their weapons up in defensive postures. There are figures standing in the shadow of the hatchway, lurking like revenant spectres.
They are the surviving Blood Angels from the Anabasis company. Raldoron, Ikasati, Furio and perhaps a dozen others. They are gazing at the scene in mute shock.
Valdor strides forward before Dorn can stop him, his spear circling in his grip.
'If you've come for more killing, there's nothing left to kill!' he roars.
'Constantin!' Dorn shouts, grabbing his arm.
'They are animals!' Valdor rages. 'Animals drawn to blood!'
'No longer, Constantin! Look at them! Look at them!'
The Angel's sons are pale and viced with grief, but there is no rage in them, no fury. Valdor shrugs off Dorn's restraining hand.
'I trust them not,' he growls.
'Raldoron,' says Dorn, stepping towards the Blood Angels. 'When last we met, you were the wild beasts that Constantin describes.'
'When last we met, Lord Praetorian,' Raldoron replies, his voice quiet and creased with pain, 'we were in the Palace of Terra. Whatever madness overtook us, it has passed. It has been replaced by this.'
He looks towards the bodies behind Dorn: the Emperor, Horus and the Great Angel.
'I would rather that madness than this,' whispers the First Captain.
'I do not doubt it,' says Dorn. 'We are composing an exit, First Captain. As rapidly as we can. The Emperor is still alive. We will bring your father, my brother, too. Sanguinius cannot be left here. See to him.'
Raldoron nods. He swallows hard, jaw clenched.
'And the Warmaster, my lord?' he asks.
'Damn him,' Valdor rumbles. 'Let him burn with his ship.'
Dorn glances at him. 'Constantin-'
'My lords!'
They all turn. Diocletian Coros stands, head bowed, his hand to the side of his war helm.
'I have contact,' Coros reports. 'Degraded, vox only. But it is Hegemon Command.'
'On my system too,' says Ikasati.
'Instruct them!' Valdor snaps. His own armour's vox-system is long burned out.
'Hegemon Command, Hegemon Command, this is Anabasis,' says Coros urgently. 'We need immediate teleport extraction. Repeat, Anabasis requires immediate teleport extraction. Lock on to my homing beacon, and set mass transfer, group extraction. Respond. Respond.'
He pauses, then repeats the instruction.
'Hurry, Coros!' Valdor growls.
'The link is poor, my captain,' Coros replies. 'Stand by.'
He repeats the instruction again.
Loken looks away. He returns to the Emperor's side, and kneels.
'They will bear you home, my lord,' he says softly. 'Do not die. Your Palace awaits you. My lord, I cannot imagine a future that does not have you in it. We need you to guide us, and show us how to put back what has been undone.'
'He can't hear y |
espond. Respond.'
He pauses, then repeats the instruction.
'Hurry, Coros!' Valdor growls.
'The link is poor, my captain,' Coros replies. 'Stand by.'
He repeats the instruction again.
Loken looks away. He returns to the Emperor's side, and kneels.
'They will bear you home, my lord,' he says softly. 'Do not die. Your Palace awaits you. My lord, I cannot imagine a future that does not have you in it. We need you to guide us, and show us how to put back what has been undone.'
'He can't hear you, Loken.'
Loken looks around. Leetu is standing a few paces away.
'You're alive,' says Loken.
Leetu nods. He clamps Mourn-It-All to his hip, and runs his hands back across his scalp. He seems exhausted. His eyes are hollow, and his armour has an odd sheen to it, as though it has been exposed to extreme heat.
'What happened to you?' Loken asks.
Leetu shakes his head.
'I...' he says. 'I cannot speak of it. I don't know how to describe it. I saw things, Loken. Things I can't explain. I think I should be dead, but then they all vanished and I found myself here.'
'Loken?' Dorn calls out, approaching them. 'Who is this man?'
'LE Two, my lord,' says Loken. 'He fought alongside me, and with your father. I will vouch for him.'
Leetu bows his head to the Praetorian. Dorn studies him with a wary glare.
'Lord Dorn,' says Leetu. 'There is a chamber nearby, just off this one.' He turns and gestures to the far side of the compartment. 'I think the Warmaster used it as a... shrine. A trophy room, perhaps. It is piled with bones. I think you should go to it before you leave.'
'Why would I do that?' Dorn asks.
'Because I believe the skull of your brother Ferrus Manus is there,' says Leetu.
Dorn flinches. He nods curtly to Leetu, and strides away across the deck in the direction the legionary indicated.
'We await extraction,' says Loken.
'It can't come fast enough,' Leetu replies. 'This damned ship is dead. Hear that? That's the death-scream of superstructure, Loken. The Emperor-'
'He's alive,' says Loken. Leetu crouches beside him. He stares at the Emperor's body, and reluctantly reaches to feel for a pulse.
'Barely,' he says. 'And the damage done to Him... I don't think that can be repaired.'
'We have to try,' says Loken.
'We have to do more than try,' Valdor snarls. He has come to join them. Like Dorn, he regards Leetu with deep suspicion. 'But we'll have to carry Him. Him and the Angel-son both.'
'What? Why?' asks Loken.
'Coros has contact with the Hegemon,' says Valdor, 'but the Hegemon reports it cannot establish a lock on our beacons to effect teleport.'
'Empyric disruption is still very great, sir,' says Leetu.
'I presume so,' Valdor replies. 'I will give them another three minutes. If no viable transport lock is established by then, we will carry them to the nearest embarkation deck.'
'Embarkation deck three is closest,' says Loken.
'Indeed,' says Valdor. 'Embarkation three, then. I imagine you know this ship better than any of us.'
The comment is barbed, and Loken winces. He knows that the stain of his father's curse will never be forgotten, and that to be the son of Horus will never be forgiven, no matter what.
Valdor turns away.
'Coros!' he yells.
'Still awaiting lock, my captain,' Coros reports.
'Three minutes, Coros! Tell them that! The rest of you, make a frame to support Him! Hurry!'
Loken bends down again to listen for breath. It is there, but it is so slight now. The crunch of broken glass in a leather bag.
When he looks up, he sees Leetu picking around in the debris scattered across the deck nearby.
'What are you doing?' Loken snaps.
'If He's alive,' says Leetu, 'if there is still hope, then He would tell us what to do. He's done that all along.'
'He can't speak, you idiot,' Valdor says, overhearing and turning back to look at them.
'I know, sir,' Leetu replies. He bends down to retrieve something. 'But He'd show us. If there was a chance, He'd find a way to show us. That's what He does.'
Leetu holds out the object he has picked up off the deck. It is a tarot card, The Knight of Mandatio. It is scorched.
'Tarot?' Valdor says scornfully.
'Wait,' says Leetu. 'There are others.'
He starts to retrieve more, picking them out of the scree of broken glassaic and plastek, and the scraps of ceramite. Cards from the Emperor's Imperial Tarot, lost and scattered during the battle.
'Look, here,' he says, 'here is The Space Marine, and here The Lantern. Here, The Guardsman, torn in two-'
'Enough of that!' says Valdor.
'No,' says Leetu. 'The Throne. And this one, The World.'
There are others too. Cards from a different deck. The Orphan and The Revenger. The Despoiler. Leetu doesn't say their names. He knows whose deck they came from.
'Stop that!' Valdor warns. 'So help me, the King-of-Ages is dying, and you play with cards-'
'He would show us!' Leetu replies, turning to him. 'If there was a way, He would show us! And these cards are all that's left!'
'So what do they tell you, then?' Valdor sneers.
Leetu looks at the cards he has found. There is no sense to them. If there is a reading here at all, it is poor and incomprehensible.
'I don't know,' he says.
'Then damn you!' says Valdor. 'Damn you.'
Leetu nods. The captain-general is right. It was a foolish idea. When the warp was upon them, the magic of farsight and the arcana made sense and functioned. But the magic has gone away, and there is nothing left but the cold and the dead metal, where such mystic insight has no power. The cards in his hand are just torn, scorched wafers. They have no meaning.
Which means the Emperor is silent. He's no longer talking to anyone, in any way. He is too far gone.
Dorn has returned, his face set grim. He is carrying something wrapped in a bundle of cloth. He calls over one of the Blood Angels, and instructs him to carry it with all reverence.
'He was right,' Dorn says to Loken and Valdor. 'That man LE Two. He was quite correct. It was a shrine. An awful place. And Ferrus was there.'
'Right about something, then,' sneers Valdor. 'He had some notion about cards.'
'Cards?' asks Dorn.
'Tarot cards, seventh son. He thought the King-of-Ages would speak to us and show us how we might best achieve His salvation.'
'My father set much store by the tarot, Constantin,' says Dorn. 'So did Malcador. You know this.'
'I know Malcador is gone,' says Valdor bluntly. 'No Sigillite magic will save us.'
'We have no signal lock?' Dorn asks.
'None. Too much disruption. They cannot fix us.' Valdor sighs. 'The three minutes are up!' he shouts. 'Prepare to lift them both!'
His Sentinels have secured two deck plates end to end, using one of the Blood Angels' meltas to fuse the overlap. They bring the makeshift bier over and begin to gently slide the Emperor's body onto it.
'Hurry!' Valdor orders. 'Carefully,' he adds.
Leetu has found another card. It is lying in the dust beside Caecaltus' charred remains.
'You are a student of the arcana, then, LE Two?'
Leetu looks up. Dorn is standing over him.
'I believe they mean something, my lord,' he replies. 'What exactly, is always open to interpretation. It matters where the spread falls, and where they lie.'
'And where did these cards fall?' Dorn asks.
'You are a student too?' Leetu asks.
Dorn shakes his head.
'No, never,' he says. 'I don't like them, and have never held with them. But Malcador, the Regent, he showed me things in the cards. This was... a while ago now. He showed me things that have since come true. I do not like them, LE Two, but I can't ignore them. Where did these cards fall?'
Leetu holds one out.
'This one was closest to your father,' he says. 'It was right beside Him. I'm sorry. His... His blood is on it.'
Dorn takes the card and studies it. The Throne.
He laughs bleakly.
'So he speaks to us after all,' he says. 'These were his cards. And this is where he wants to go. It never occurred to me. I could not think how we could heal him, for his wounds are beyond repair. But the Throne, LE Two. The power of that Throne. It would sustain him, and fortify him. He could draw strength from the warp and restore his aspect. What else was there?'
'Several others,' says Leetu, 'but this was the last. It was lodged here, beside the body of His proconsul, who never left His side. So we might suppose the two cards should be placed side by side and read together.'
'Revelation,' says Dorn, looking at the last card. 'They go together indeed. And we have need of revelation now, for the world is blind to us and cannot find us.'
He stoops down.
'You found it here?' he asks.
'Just here, my lord.'
Dorn looks at the body. It is so burned away, it is hard to tell it was ever a human figure. Just a few fragments of plate remain, caked in ash. The chestplate, the most substantial and durable part of the Aquilon wargear, is the only thing intact.
'He stood by Him to the end,' says Leetu. 'He faced the Lupercal and-'
'He stood by him all his life,' says Dorn. 'Caecaltus Dusk. At the foot of the Throne, day after day-'
He halts.
'My lord?' Leetu asks.
Dorn has reached out. He brushes his hand across the chestplate, wiping the ash and soot away.
'He was there,' says Dorn, 'when Malcador took the Throne. I remember it now. Malcador stumbled, and then, on the steps, he stopped and-'
'And what, my lord?'
Do not fail him. Bring him back to this seat, you hear me? Bring him back alive. You do all you do for him, but do this for me.
'Look,' says Dorn. Where he has rubbed away the ash, a mark is revealed, a sigil, drawn quickly, with a fingertip.
This is what will happen, and with my hand I signify it. It cannot be undone.
The hasty sigil is barely visible, yet the lines seem to tremble with light.
'Teleport lock established!' Coros calls out behind them.
'They have our beacons at last?' Valdor cries.
'They have something, my captain,' Coros replies. 'They are preparing for mass displacement transfer.'
'Bring them here,' Dorn shouts out, getting up. 'B |
bbed away the ash, a mark is revealed, a sigil, drawn quickly, with a fingertip.
This is what will happen, and with my hand I signify it. It cannot be undone.
The hasty sigil is barely visible, yet the lines seem to tremble with light.
'Teleport lock established!' Coros calls out behind them.
'They have our beacons at last?' Valdor cries.
'They have something, my captain,' Coros replies. 'They are preparing for mass displacement transfer.'
'Bring them here,' Dorn shouts out, getting up. 'Both of them! Bring them close to this point!'
Raldoron and his Blood Angels lift Sanguinius' body, and bear it over to where Dorn stands with Leetu. Valdor hesitates for a moment, then he and his Sentinels raise the Emperor on their shoulders and carry Him to Dorn's side as gently as they can.
The air is starting to shimmer. A vortex of wind begins to ripple around them, turning like the birth of a dust devil, lifting grit and fragments from the deck. The unmistakable ozone stink of a teleport flare begins to fill the chamber.
The light wobbles and bends. It grows brighter.
'Loken!' Dorn yells. 'Loken, come on!'
Loken is hunched beside his father's body. He looks over at Dorn.
'Someone must watch over him, my lord,' he says. 'Someone must stand vigil here.'
'Loken!'
'He was Horus Lupercal,' says Loken. 'And he was my father. I am the only one left who cares.'
He stands. He makes the sign of the aquila and holds it in salute until the bang of the teleport flare begins to fade.
They are gone. The wind drops, sparks of decorporealisation drift like fireflies, and the transmaterial dust begins to settle.
Loken kneels beside his father's corpse. He places his hand on his father's shoulder. Now there is no one left to see, he weeps.
10:xx
The Throne
Thus is my friend returned to me.
This... this was the plan I made, and thus it is accomplished, but not in the way that I imagined, or the way any of us imagined.
Plans are the delusion of man. We make them to feel safe, and to secure the future. But the future is a shapeshifter, a fluid trickster. It is mercurial and ever-changing, and it wears many aspects. It can be whatever it decides to be, and no plan can fix it or pin it down. It mocks the plans we paint upon its walls, for those walls will not stand forever, and may not be there tomorrow. I know this. I have seen the future, and it has seen us.
Plans cannot be trusted. We place such faith in them, but they are fragile, devious things that alter the moment we look away, or break like oaths, or melt like snow. Some are simply the lies we tell ourselves, or promises we cannot keep, or dreams we hope will see us through the night. Those few that last, and come to fruition, seldom do so in the ways we expect.
Yet, still, we make them. We have always made them, and those that come after me, I'm sure, will continue to do so. They are all we have, our only armour, stronger than war plate. My friend knows this. He has known it from the very beginning. So he has made them anyway, plan after plan, down through the ages that he has ruled as king, not because he is stubborn, or a fool, but because he knows they are the best we can do. The trick, and there is always a trick, is to expect them to fail. To anticipate the way the future will squirm to escape them, to compensate, to build contingencies, to make not one plan, but many, and layer them up, thick and overlapping, so that when one fails, there is always another. Like war plate indeed. And, like war plate, a blade will always find its way through all those layers if it really wants to. The future's blade is very sharp.
My friend made many plans, and the blade has passed through almost every single one of them.
My last plan, so hasty and impulsive, has worked. It has brought him back. But it has failed too, for it has not brought him back safe and whole. I see this the moment they escort him in. I see it from the fact that they are having to carry him in. There, Rogal and Constantin, and four fine Sentinels, bearing him upon their shoulders. They are weeping. Of course they are. A silence falls upon the throne room. Vulkan starts forward to meet them from the foot of the dais, and at his side, Uzkarel and the other Custodians leave their place to help carry their lord.
This is a time of grief, but I am glad I am here to see it. My last bequest is fulfilled, however imperfectly. I am not alive to witness it, but I am present at least. My whole self burned away hours ago, and even the sigil of me that remained is all but erased. But it has persisted this long. The material man may perish, but the informational man lasts a little longer. Some parts of me will last for years to come, I think, as ideas in the minds of my chosen few.
That's my plan at least.
I have lasted this long because I had to. Not to see him home, but to hold the throne until he returned. As they bring him up the steps towards me, I feel their urgent expectation. The throne is his only chance. It will save him. It will restore him and sustain him. This is what they have understood from the signs and symbols that both he and I have tried to show them, for signs and symbols are the only language we have left. This will save him.
Like plans, though, symbols are imprecise. They are fluid, and they seldom mean what we presume they mean. Rogal and Constantin believe they are saving him. They think that the throne is his only chance.
In fact, the reverse is also true. He is the throne's only chance.
I know it, and my friend knows it. This is what we were trying to tell them. Yes, the throne may stabilise him and suspend him, as it did me, but that's beside the point. He is the only one who can stabilise it, for I can no longer perform that task. And thus it will tether him here, to this seat, to this room, to this reality, on the brink of death and the verge of life, both wounded and whole, unborn and yet reborn, ended yet unending, now and forever.
It was never his intended plan. But it was a contingency. My King-of-Ages knew it might come to this, if the permutations of the future aligned in this particular way. That's what he told me, anyway. He had me believe he would be ready, if there was no other choice. And I see none from where I am sitting.
It will be agony. I can vouch for that. I have tasted but a brief moment of that eternity, and that is more than enough.
May your death live forever, my friend. There is nothing immortal about this.
And so they come. They ascend the steps. None of them speak, but I feel the hope in their minds. What they do now, they do only for his salvation.
I want to correct them. I want to explain their mistake. But I can't. And even if I could, perhaps I wouldn't. The truth is brutal. At least, this way, they have some solace. Some small consolation in the face of tragedy.
They should have that much. They need to be strong for what lies ahead. This is where it will end, here in my flames. But it is also where it will begin. After a fire, all that is left are foundations. It is a good time to rebuild.
They are our foundations now.
I wonder if they have learned enough. They are close now, Rogal and Vulkan stepping forwards while, behind them, Constantin, Coros, Uzkarel and Lamora lower the bier. Oh, Vulkan, my boy. I have been glad of your company in my last hours, and humbled by your devotion. And you, Rogal. My heart breaks to see the tears in your eyes. I never thought I'd live to see that.
I suppose I haven't.
I hope you have seen enough, Rogal. I hope you have seen enough to learn, you, the master planner. Plans do not work or last. You have to learn to change them as you go. Change them, all the time, make new ones, make better ones, make them strong and layer them deep, but make them flexible. They never work the way you think they're going to.
Not even this one.
Does he understand? He doesn't hear me. He and Vulkan reach down to lift me from this seat. And-
-and I no longer sit upon the throne of Terra.
And this, at last, is my end and my death. For a moment, finally, I feel something-
-it's time.
FRAGMENTS
(AGONAL) i
After
And after the flame and the wind, and after the steel and the rain, after the banners and the baying horns, after the firelight on shouting faces and the sundering of stone, ten thousand new years begin.
They begin in a silence that falls like a shroud, and settles like dust. They begin in the smoking shell of a city that once crowned the top of the world. They begin on a wounded planet that circles a damaged sun on the stabbed flank of the galaxy. They begin on the endless tracts of waste and rubble that war has left behind, and they will take root and sprout there, and thrive like the weeds and wildflowers that will flourish across those fields long before the debris can be cleared, binding old bones and broken plate, climbing the skirts of rusted tanks, garlanding the heads of silent engines, robing the sleeping dead, and budding shoots from the sockets of their skulls.
The silence is eerie. The sky is yellow, and streaked with smoke from fires that will burn for decades. There is a light behind the clouds in the north. It is not sunrise, or sunset, or a bright and steadfast star. But it lights the northern sky and, beyond the drape of smoke, it lights the worlds above, and the worlds to come, and the numberless zodiacs of the stars.
Some will see it as His light, but it is simpler than that. It is a direction, where once all directions were lost.
The years begin here, in squalls of rain and banks of mournful fog. They begin in the stillness of the open kilometres of flat and glassy mud, the lakes like mirrors, the craters changed to reflective pools. There used to be a city here. There, below, a column of soldiers, toiling across the oozing plain, dragging their old field guns, leaving a long and rutted line behind them in the mire. They are but one of many units, rediscovered now that the vox is speaking a |
nce all directions were lost.
The years begin here, in squalls of rain and banks of mournful fog. They begin in the stillness of the open kilometres of flat and glassy mud, the lakes like mirrors, the craters changed to reflective pools. There used to be a city here. There, below, a column of soldiers, toiling across the oozing plain, dragging their old field guns, leaving a long and rutted line behind them in the mire. They are but one of many units, rediscovered now that the vox is speaking again, recalled for resupply. There is fighting yet to be done.
The air is cold and wet. Marshal Agathe walks beside the long and trudging column of her salvaged army. The guns they drag and lever through the thick mud are heavy, but the shell carts are light enough. In the final hours, they fired almost every shell they had, without respite, to keep the traitor enemy at bay, until the traitor enemy abruptly fell back.
It wasn't their doing. Agathe has been acquainted with war long enough to know that they defeated nothing. That work, that greater work, was done by others, in places far away from the lonely black mansion. All she and her soldiers did was hold death at arm's length.
But they did it well, these men, these nameless or half-named men. They ran those guns with diligence and determination, until the barrels began to glow, and the target line two kilometres away was a constant forest of smoke and flame.
As a commander, she could have wanted better. Better men, better troops, better ordnance. As a soldier, she could not have asked for more.
She sees, ahead of her, the woman, Katerina Moriana. She is travelling back to the Sanctum with them. There is nowhere else to go in this sea of mud. Moriana is talking with the soldiers as they march, amusing them with stories to ease the back-break of their trek. As she catches up with her, Agathe hears her telling, yet again, the story of the lone guardsman. An inspirational anecdote, and surely made up. A lone guardsman, just like them, very ordinary, nothing special. He had nothing but his rifle and his loyalty. But he stood with the Emperor. Right at the Emperor's side. He faced Horus, personally. Yes, face to face, to look him in the eye. He kept the evil of Lupercal at bay for a few short seconds, just long enough to buy the Emperor a moment in which He could win the day. That's what soldiers do. He died, but he died well. No one lives forever. You do what you can with the moments you have. Yes, he was just like you.
'His name was Ollanius,' she hears the woman say.
'Telling stories again?' Agathe asks as she falls in step with her. The woman looks at her, that odd tilt of the head. She smiles and nods. She has picked up the skirts of her dress to avoid the worst of the squelching mud.
'Stories help, marshal,' she replies. 'Words heal. You can close a wound with a good story, and let it mend, and make it better.'
'Even when it's a lie?' asks Agathe.
'Lies are more efficacious still,' Moriana smiles. 'A good lie is better than a bad truth. Their healing powers are miraculous. Tell a good story, and you can restore things to the way they were. Tell a good lie, and you make them the way they should have been. These soldiers deserve some consolation. They are good men.'
'They are,' Agathe agrees.
'They are fearful, though.'
'Fearful?'
'They are afraid of what will happen to them when they get back to the Palace,' says Moriana. 'They were convicts, all of them. Technically, they are wanted men. They are afraid that it will be discovered they are not real soldiers.'
'They are real soldiers,' Agathe replies.
'Yes, in the ways that count,' Moriana replies. 'But you know what I mean. They fear discovery. They fear someone finding out that they are not what they pretend to be.'
'They told you this?' Agathe asks.
Moriana laughs. 'No,' she says. 'But their minds have no hiding places.'
'I see.'
They walk a little further in silence.
'That is a very good idea,' says Moriana.
Agathe looks at her sharply.
'My apologies,' Moriana smiles. 'I didn't mean to pry.'
'My mind has no hiding places either?'
'It's not that, marshal. The thought is right there in the forefront of your mind and hard to miss. You've been thinking about it for a while. You've been waiting to ask me.'
'Then imagine I'm asking you now, Katerina Moriana.'
'Well,' Moriana replies. 'I think it's entirely appropriate. When we get back, there will be great confusion. Confusion that will last for years, I'm sure. Considerable stocks of data will have been destroyed. I suppose, therefore, it would be quite easy for your adjutant, Phikes, to have lost all the records regarding this unit. The confusion of war, and all that. And someone bearing the seal and authority of the Praetorian could verify the identity of this regiment without anybody questioning it. They are the Four Hundred and Third Exigency Stratiotes, and so that's what they will be.'
'That's a yes, then?' Agathe asks.
'Yes,' says Moriana. 'In the months, perhaps years, ahead of us, the Praetorian will need all the good men he can get. This war is over, but the next awaits. I don't think he will ever question where those good men came from.'
'Is this...' Agathe says. 'Can I ask you, is this typical of your behaviour? Do stories and lies come naturally to you?'
'I serve the truth,' Moriana replies.
'Yes, but are you good at hiding things? Are you good at keeping secrets?'
'Ah now,' says Moriana with a smile. 'That would be telling.'
Agathe nods. She moves ahead, at a brisker pace. Behind her, she hears the woman laugh and engage another gun-team with one of her stories. Agathe doesn't wait to hear it. She goes to find Phikes.
The years begin everywhere. They begin with the first divisions of exhausted warriors moving out from the Sanctum's broken gates to reinforce those who have never left the field, but who have turned certain defeat into pursuit. They begin with the hounding and the purging of the enemy multitude as it tries, in its horror and despair, to flee the Throneworld and find some shelter where it can lick its wounds, and calculate its losses, and begin to understand fate's cruel reversal.
They begin in the Dominions and fringes of the Palace, and out across every continent of the planet, where wars of vengeance and escape ignite in the aftermath of the siege. To most, these wars seem to be just a continuation of the conflict, but they are not. They are a different breed entirely. The mettle and temper of them has changed, like the blade of a sword drawn back into the furnace-heat to be refashioned. Concepts of conquest and defiance, which once gripped the world like talons, are spent, and in their place come vengeance and fear, righteous anger and desperation, vindication and hubris. These will be the wars of liberation, but they will also be the wars of succession, perhaps on both sides. Before it has even been declared, a scouring has begun.
They begin in the low skies and the orbital spaces, they begin between the circuits of Terra and Luna. They begin as the avenging fleets of Admiral Su-Kassen and Roboute Guilliman descend like a fire from heaven and lance into the ship-lines and formations of the traitor fleets as they attempt to take flight. They begin as an inferno in the void, with ships engaging close, all guns brought to bear, while others tumble from the sky like burning leaves. They begin with the thunder of the Phalanx's main batteries. They begin as that thunder peals out across the Solar Realm, and the void war multiplies and magnifies.
They begin in the battered Rotunda as Sandrine Icaro calls her War Court to order and, with her systems renewed and operational, freed from the spit and crackle of the warp, she commences the direction of a war of repulsion and execution.
They begin with grief.
They begin with warriors who have lost their reason and their way, who were once gods and are now men again, and who cannot begin to fathom the loss of the powers they commanded. Chaos has withdrawn its gifts, and the strength with which it blessed them. They lament. They grieve. They howl. They rage. They do not understand why their gods have abandoned them. They yearn for the certainty they have lost, and the cause that united them in their fury. It seemed so certain. It seemed so clear. Victory seemed so secure.
Wracked by that grief, they fight. Not for Horus. Not for the Old Four. Not for the future, or to bring down a hated foe.
They fight for themselves, merely to survive.
They are not alone in grief. At the foot of a golden throne, the last loyal sons of Terra kneel and weep.
But they do not say farewell, or offer eulogy.
For He still lives. He does not die. The Throne will sustain Him, and renew Him, and when His wounds are healed, He will rise again, and stand with them.
ii
Vigil
He kneels before his father and he waits. After all that has been done, despite it all, his father should not be alone. Someone must wait with him until the end comes.
It is coming closer. The air is growing thin and cold, and the creaking groans of the dying ship grow ever louder.
Through the high compartment windows above them, only darkness is visible. The nightscape of space. There are a few specks of light, that might be stars or distant ships, but they are turning fast in a wild and uneven procession. The ship is shifting, uncontrolled, adrift, a broken shell slowly rotating in an orbital decay. There is no way to tell what its final fate will be. From the sounds of shearing collapse and structural failure, Loken suspects the Vengeful Spirit will soon suffer a critical loss of integrity and break up. But it may burn up before that, caught in Terra's gravity, and dragged down to a fiery, stratospheric demise. Whole, or in a million fragments, it will light up the skies of the Throneworld like a meteor shower or a doomed comet.
'I feel the hand of the ship upon me,' Loken says. 'You know that expression, |
tell what its final fate will be. From the sounds of shearing collapse and structural failure, Loken suspects the Vengeful Spirit will soon suffer a critical loss of integrity and break up. But it may burn up before that, caught in Terra's gravity, and dragged down to a fiery, stratospheric demise. Whole, or in a million fragments, it will light up the skies of the Throneworld like a meteor shower or a doomed comet.
'I feel the hand of the ship upon me,' Loken says. 'You know that expression, father? Of course. You will have heard it many times. There was always that bond between us all. I miss those days. That's why I stood where I stood. I make no apologies, and expect no forgiveness from you. But I stood where I stood to fight for what we used to have. It was a fine thing. The finest. It should never have been lost. So I fought for it. I fought for you.'
He looks at his father. Darkness gazes back from empty pits.
'It's true,' Loken says. 'I fought for you. Am I not a Luna Wolf? I fought for you, for the you that used to be. The father I loved, not the thing you became. I fought to get you back. I don't know if you became what you became willingly, or if it was forced upon you. A little of both, I fear. I mean no recrimination. I have seen the other side of this world now. Like you, I have looked into eternity. I know that Chaos merely takes what we already are and uses us. You, father, you were strong, you were proud, and you were fierce. So that's what it made from you. And no, I do not think I am better than you because I resisted where you did not. Father, the Old Four never came for me the way they came for you. You were Warmaster. You were always the prize worth stealing. So I fought for you, which meant I fought against you. I kept the oaths you broke. I fought to bring you back. I was fighting for you all along.'
He sighs.
'And you did come back, didn't you? Just for a moment. Just for a second. You saw it all, just like me. So... you understand. The old you, I mean. For that at least, I am thankful.'
A shudder runs through the deck, the most violent yet. There is a distant thump. Loken rises to his feet.
'I do not think it will be long now,' he says. 'Not long at all. We can go together. I have nothing left to fight for, and you shouldn't go alone.'
Another deep thump. A muffled, grinding whir. Loken sways as the deck tilts. In the hallway outside the chamber, there is a flash, and then another. Power, surging fitfully, lighting the passageway lamps and then shutting down again. The lamps go on, then off, then on.
Light shines in through the hatchway and shafts across the deck. Three figures step out of the light and into the chamber.
'He's dead,' says Loken. 'There's nothing left.'
Abaddon stares at him. His war plate is gouged and cracked, and his cheek is caked in dried blood. His sword hangs in his hand. His eyes are sunken and lost, his cheeks drawn, his skin pale and feverish. He looks exhausted and famished, as though stricken by some wasting disease.
'Dead,' he echoes.
Loken nods.
'Why are you here, Loken?' Abaddon asks.
'I stayed with him,' says Loken. 'He was alone.'
'Not any more,' whispers Sycar. The Master of the Justaerin is edging out to the left of Abaddon, and Baraxa is moving out to Abaddon's right. They intend to encircle him. Abaddon is simply gazing at his father's corpse.
'No, not any more, Hellas,' says Loken. 'His sons are with him. I think he would be grateful for that.'
'His sons, eh?' Sycar rumbles.
'Yes,' says Loken. 'Do you intend to fight me, Sycar? More blood, after all that's been spent?'
'Your blood,' says Sycar. He has circled around almost to Loken's right flank, and Baraxa is now on his left.
'We'll see, if we have to,' says Loken. The Master of the Justaerin sees the look in Loken's eyes.
'This traitor should not be here,' Sycar says to Abaddon.
'Traitor?' says Loken. He smiles. 'Really? From your lips, Sycar?'
'You know what you are,' says Baraxa.
'I do,' says Loken. 'I absolutely do, Azelas. Do you?'
Sycar begins his move, a telltale hum of his Terminator plate as it powers for a lunge.
'Stop,' says Abaddon.
'But-'
'Stop, Sycar. I said stop. You too, Baraxa. Just... stop.'
Baraxa lowers his blade, frowning. Sycar glares at the First Captain, and then takes a step back.
'You want me for yourself, then, Ezekyle?' Loken says.
Abaddon draws breath, and takes a pace forward. Face to face, they stare at each other.
Abaddon shakes his head.
'No,' he says. 'No more killing. No more of it, Loken. There are far too few of us to turn on each other again.'
'I agree,' says Loken.
Abaddon isn't really looking at him any more. His gaze is fixed on his father's corpse.
'You waited here?' he asks.
'As I said,' says Loken.
'Yes, of course,' says Abaddon. He moves past Loken, and kneels. He gently places his hand on his father's body. 'That was the right thing to do. The respectful thing. A fine warrior is owed that, no matter what.'
He shakes his head. He withdraws his hand.
'Horus was a fool,' he says. 'Our father was a fool.'
'He was a puppet, Ezekyle,' says Loken. 'He was made a puppet. Chaos chose him, and used him, and discarded him.'
'Discarded him?'
'Yes, in the end.'
'Because he wasn't enough?' asks Abaddon.
'Because he was too much,' says Loken. 'He was the most terrible thing, Ezekyle. He was absolute and everything. But he was also Horus. He didn't want gifts and tributes. He didn't want to be a puppet, or some pawn of the Old Four. He wanted to rule. He wanted control.'
'Control?' Abaddon replies sharply. He looks at Loken. 'Control?'
Loken nods. 'It was the one thing they wouldn't give him. Power, yes, but the authority to use that power, no. He was just a weapon to them. A weapon to kill the one thing that threatened them. A weapon to end the human race. They were never going to let us live. They were never going to let him rule anything.'
'And you know this how?' asks Sycar.
'I was there,' says Loken.
Abaddon rises to his feet.
'Then he was a fool,' he says. 'He was a fool to have believed otherwise. I warned him. I feared for him. I tried to make him see sense. He wouldn't listen.'
'He was Horus Lupercal,' says Loken. 'I loved him, Ezekyle, but it was never easy to tell him things when his mind was set. And he had not set his mind himself. He was no fool, but he was played for one.'
Abaddon makes no reply.
'Do not make the same mistake, Ezekyle,' says Loken.
'I will not,' says Abaddon quietly. 'I will not be made a fool. That is never going to happen to me.'
Abaddon turns to him. He clears his throat.
'I believed in the Imperium, and it betrayed me,' he says. 'I believed in my father, and he disappointed me. I will never be beholden to anything or anyone again. I will follow no one, no primarch, no daemon. I will lead.'
'Then lead wisely,' says Loken. 'And I ask you, Ezekyle... lead what?'
Abaddon stares at Loken for a second.
'I have the authority now, Loken,' he says. 'As First Captain, I am the heir to command. Do you oppose that?'
'No,' says Loken.
'We are trying to right the ship,' says Abaddon. 'To make some running repairs and restart the drives.'
'That won't be easy. The damage is severe.'
'Indeed. Not easy at all. But the Vengeful Spirit has always been a resolute vessel. Strong, enduring. We have made a start. We will see how far we get.'
'That's your plan?' asks Loken.
'Would you advise differently?' Abaddon asks.
'I would advise surrender,' says Loken. He hears Sycar snort.
'We don't surrender, Loken,' says Abaddon.
'No,' says Loken. 'But a coming to terms would be the best conclusion. There's nowhere to run, not in a wounded ship, and the forces that are coming for you are fired with vengeance. This war will persist until the galaxy ends, unless one side lowers its guard. Chaos is fled. It's gone. There will be others like you, Ezekyle. Others of your cause who regret their actions, or who were misled and duped, or who have simply seen the error of their ways. But if the First Captain of the Sixteenth sets an example, they would follow you.'
'Guilliman will kill us,' says Baraxa.
'Guilliman wants the Imperium restored,' says Loken. 'He wants it whole again. I believe, if the terms were right, he would accept the return of Astartes brothers, and spare them. He doesn't want to lose nine Legions. There was a mistake born of misunderstanding. Not all of your side are beyond redemption. So set an example. Begin the process. Bring others with you, and demonstrate your contrition.'
'It's too late for that,' snaps Sycar.
'It's better that,' says Loken, 'than the alternative. A crusade to hunt you all down, to exterminate you all, to scour you from the stars. This civil war perpetuated under a new name. No mercy. No quarter. No forgiveness. Where would you even begin to run?'
'I'll think of somewhere,' Abaddon replies.
'Ezekyle-'
'Azelas is right, Loken,' Abaddon says. 'Guilliman will kill us. He will never forgive what we have done. He will never accept that we were right, and our grievances justified.'
'Guilliman wasn't here,' says Loken. 'But Dorn was. He understands it better. He might listen. And he is the Praetorian, after all. Ezekyle, if you are prepared to commit to this course, truly prepared, I would go to him. I would speak to Dorn on behalf of the Sixteenth. I would make your case and negotiate terms. I mean it. I will swear an oath to it, if you want me to. He would listen to me. I know it.'
'You would do that?' Abaddon asks.
'I'd do it for my Legion, and for the honour it once had. I would do it for our father as he was before this darkness fell.'
Loken stares down at the corpse.
'And I think he would want me to,' he says. 'My life for Lupercal. I can't give it to him now, but I can give it to his memory.'
Abaddon is silent for a moment.
'And if I decide to reject your offer?' he asks. 'If I decide to fight on? Will you oppose me?'
'I'm not in a position to, |
me. I know it.'
'You would do that?' Abaddon asks.
'I'd do it for my Legion, and for the honour it once had. I would do it for our father as he was before this darkness fell.'
Loken stares down at the corpse.
'And I think he would want me to,' he says. 'My life for Lupercal. I can't give it to him now, but I can give it to his memory.'
Abaddon is silent for a moment.
'And if I decide to reject your offer?' he asks. 'If I decide to fight on? Will you oppose me?'
'I'm not in a position to, Ezekyle. Will you kill me?'
'No, Garviel. No, I won't. I can use all the brothers I can get.'
'I won't fight for you,' Loken says. 'And I won't run with you. But I will come after you, at your heels, and remind you, every hour of every day, that my offer still stands.'
'Some Mournival...' Abaddon murmurs.
'So?' Loken asks.
'You were always the idealist, Loken. Always. I was the pragmatist. The Legions built the Imperium, through blood and sacrifice, and the Emperor would have discarded us. He would have cut our throats to make way for the human ascendancy. They would have no Imperium but for us! The betrayal is unconscionable, and our outrage burns as bright as ever. I'm... sorry. This is a time for pragmatism. We're going to run. Fight for our birthright. Fight for what is owed us. Fight for our lives, if we have to. That's the way it is. My decision. You can come with us. Or you can go. I won't stop you.'
Loken sighs. He starts to speak.
Blood comes out of his mouth in place of words.
Eyes wide, he falls forward into Abaddon. Abaddon catches him, and lowers him in horror to the deck.
'What did you do?' Abaddon snarls.
Erebus slides his athame out of Loken's back, and whips blood from the blade with a flick of his wrist.
'He opposed you from the start,' says Erebus. 'He wasn't about to stop. He was a traitor to your Legion.'
Abaddon rises. His sword comes up and jabs against the Word Bearer's throat. Erebus does not flinch.
'What. Did. You. Do?' Abaddon spits.
'He stood against you, Abaddon,' Erebus says. 'What do you not understand about that? He would have killed you all, the moment the chance arose. Killed you, or betrayed you. Besides, he had to die.'
'What do you mean?'
'He had to. He had to. To close the circle, and complete the cycle.' Erebus smiles. 'We have lost today,' he says. 'Horus has failed. But this isn't the end. There will be other opportunities to do it, and do it better. We will learn from our mistakes. We will be stronger. We will be far greater than this. If it takes a thousand years, or ten thousand, we will triumph. And to do that, we need guidance. Do you know how daemons are born?'
'Why would I know that?' Abaddon growls.
'It's a thing you should learn,' says Erebus. 'A daemon may die long before it is born. Time is meaningless to them. A circle, you see? They come back because they never go away. And some of them are great powers of special significance. One of those played a vital role in this. It must exist to do that, just as it must exist to help us in our future efforts. So it had to be born, and this happened to be the moment.'
'Speak sense,' says Abaddon.
'A daemon is born in the warp in response to an event here,' says Erebus. 'A death, for example. Something especially vindictive and abrupt. Something unjust, perhaps. A daemon was just born, Abaddon. You will come to know it well. It will be the footsteps at your back. It will be the one who walks behind you. It will be the only name you hear. Watch for it. Look out. It's already here.'
Loken and Abaddon, reunited.
iii
The remains
The years begin here. They begin with burials and mourning. From the rubble of the city, tombs will be the first things to be built. There will be splendid mausoleums for the mighty and the great, each marked by fine words and noble epitaphs, and mass graves for the unidentified, each marked by lonely cenotaphs and eternal flames. There will be no salute of guns, neither for the great nor the unknown, for the guns have spoken too much already. There will be a new breed of remembrancer, a whole species of them, who will spend their lives remembering other lives, and who will make their deeds the solemn recovery of other deeds. There will be stories, of giants and guardsmen, of demigods and mortals. The immortals have begun to die, but the dead will become immortal.
The years begin here, as the silent Angels of the IX walk the body of their fallen lord to his rest. Flames swirl from the tops of their staves, and they swing the lamps of night. Raldoron leads them, and behind him come Azkaellon and Satel Aimery, Taerwelt Ikasati and Zephon Sorrow-Bringer, Khoradal Furio and Nassir Amit, and five hundred others. Like all of his brothers, Raldoron has dreamed of this hour. None of them will speak of those dreams. They hope that their shame will be interred with the body of their primarch. Their ceremonies are simple. To hymn one single death, even the Great Angel's, when there is not a life in the world untouched by death, would be unseemly.
Sanguinius would not have wished for that.
Purple and amaranthine shrouds drape the statues of the Palace. Lists are made, lists of impossible length. They are made to number the dead, for that is only right, but they are also made to calculate the living who remain, for that number will be vital in the years just now beginning. The equations of war must be recalculated without delay.
The years begin here, with an elderly man listening to his pocket watch, and discovering that it is running again. Kyril Sindermann winds his pocket watch, but has no idea how to reset the hands. There is time again, but no way of telling what that time is.
He stands on the steps of the library. The air is paper-white with smoke, and every surface is coated in dust and debris. Explosions still thump in the city around him. Light, as strong as sunlight, is strobing and flashing overhead, muffled by the clouds. Mauer says it's a void war. Ships engaging in close orbit. Thousands of ships. She's learned this from the vox.
Sindermann can hear her in the courtyard below, trying to maintain a signal, trying to contact the Prefectus or the Hegemon, trying to gather information. Any information.
They'll be told in time, Sindermann thinks. They'll be told what they need to know. He turns and looks back at the library's scorched facade. From this day on, in the years that are beginning here, on this bleak morning, knowledge will become the most precious thing of all. Who has it. Who does not. What can be learned, and what must be unlearned. Secrets, more than ever, will become currency, and those who get to keep the secrets will be the architects of the Imperium as it is rebuilt.
There are things that mankind must know, and there are things that mankind must never know. Deciding one from another is a task that will rest, he thinks, with a wiser head than his. He does not envy them. He has always upheld the idea that knowledge exists to be shared without discrimination.
He is no longer sure of that. He's no longer sure of anything.
Mauer's calling to him. Sindermann looks back at the archivist, watching him from the doorway of the library.
'Will you come with us?' he asks her. They're going to attempt to get to the Hegemon.
'I must stay here, sir,' she replies. 'The collections can't be left unattended.'
'It won't be safe here,' he says. 'It's probably as dangerous as it was when we arrived. The enemy-'
'Someone must keep the books safe,' she says.
He nods. Smiles.
'We'll send people to assist you,' he says. 'Prefectus probably. I'll return when I can. So...'
Mauer calls his name again impatiently. He turns to go. Then he looks back, with a rueful grin.
'I'm so sorry,' he says. 'So rude of me. I never once asked you your name.'
'Chase, sir,' she replies. 'It's Lilean Chase.'
He nods again, and walks down into the courtyard, a handkerchief across his mouth to keep the smoke at bay.
The archivist watches him go, and then closes the door.
Many, too many, will care not what these new years will bring. Emhon Lux lies dead beside his damaged lifter chair beneath the shattered arch of Teclis Gate. He stares up at the sky. From where he lies, the bisected half of the gate's arch that is still standing looks like a broken wing. His eyes see nothing of the sky, or the arch. He has lost his final battle, not against the traitor foe, who litter the rubble around him, but against his own ruined body, over which his rage and will to fight could not prevail.
His corpse will not be found for eighteen weeks, when the workgangs finally advance into the zone.
Tjaras Grunli is discovered, by chance, by White Scars riders within a few hours of the Emperor's return. When they lift up his body, respectfully, to carry it away, it finally exhales the breath it has been holding. They hurriedly check him, believing for a second that he is, by some miracle, alive.
He is not.
Jera Talmada lies near the wreckage of her tread out past Irenic.
Her body is never found.
Others try to fathom the nature of these new years just beginning. Constantin Valdor sits alone in his chamber, and stares at his spear, laid out on the floor in front of him. He wonders if the things that it has taught him are lies. He knows they are not.
Leetu waits alone in an anteroom. He is not restrained, but there are interrogations he must submit to, by order of the Praetorian. He takes out his old deck, and slips into them the new cards he gathered from the burned chamber. They come from two other decks entirely. He sorts them, and lays a spread to see if, in their conflicting voices, he can discern some future for himself, or for the world.
He turns the first card. The Revenger. That much he knew already.
Zaranchek Xanthus, his wound patched with a field dressing, waits in the laboratoria of the Retreat. Aedile-Marshal Harahel and four other Wardens of the Sodality of the Key, grim and silent, have just remo |
em the new cards he gathered from the burned chamber. They come from two other decks entirely. He sorts them, and lays a spread to see if, in their conflicting voices, he can discern some future for himself, or for the world.
He turns the first card. The Revenger. That much he knew already.
Zaranchek Xanthus, his wound patched with a field dressing, waits in the laboratoria of the Retreat. Aedile-Marshal Harahel and four other Wardens of the Sodality of the Key, grim and silent, have just removed the last of Fo's work into safekeeping. Xanthus has no idea where they are taking the Terminus Sanction, but the work has been carefully supervised by Khalid Hassan, so the Chosen will maintain close scrutiny. Titan, that's his guess.
He moves the bank of waste incinerators, and checks their settings. He can feel their heat. All are operating at capacity. Another twenty minutes, and they will have cremated all the genetic material that has been cleaned out of the bio-structor vats. That was the deal. Destroy everything now the work is done.
He looks up and finds Amon Tauromachian watching him. The Custodes move so silently.
'Are you finished?' Amon asks.
'Just another few minutes,' Xanthus replies. 'I want to make sure all the materials are purged.'
'It is time to leave,' says Amon.
'Just another few minutes, if you please,' says Xanthus. 'I want to make sure everything has been done correctly.'
Amon stares at him, then leaves without a word.
Everything must be checked and double-checked. Nothing must be left behind. The last portion of biomatter placed in the incinerators was the final residue of primary sample group 'Xanthus'. He loaded it for disposal himself.
The incinerators roar softly, belying the intense heat within. It's all in there, and not a trace of it will remain when the cycle ends, not a strand of DNA, not a scrap of ash that can be typed.
All of it, including the dismembered body of the original Zaranchek Xanthus.
Xanthus gathers up a few data-slates and a few sheaves of documents, and places them inside a file case. He includes the pages he purloined from the Regent's notebooks when nobody was looking.
And he adds, carefully, Basilio Fo's notebooks too, the ones he was allowed to keep during his incarceration (for I will certainly be needing those).
For some, the years wind back, so they will be in the right order when they finally meet the new ones starting here. Erebus, the Dark Apostle, certainly did that with his vicious blade and Loken's blood. He has completed the circle, just as the Old Four taught him, so that it will turn correctly, and turn forever. The new years will walk beside him.
In a cave, so many years ago it is impossible to count them exactly, John Grammaticus carefully ties the next wolf noose knot the way he was taught. It is summer in the valley outside, a hot sun, a blue sky. The air is fresh, and the forests are thick, an almost emerald green, though it has only been a few generations since the ice began to retreat. Oak, holly, fir and pine, mantling sharp young mountains. One day, this place will be called the Pyrenees.
He puts the ball of thread back in his satchel. Another loop of thread, correctly placed. There are many more to go, and many more to come. This was his promise, to mark the way, all the way from the end to the very beginning, to set out a path he has already travelled once. That path is far, far longer and more complex now than when he made, or will make, that journey. Time and realspace have been restored to their original positions, so some of the steps on the way are now millennia or light years apart. But he has to mark them all, every one of them, or all is lost, or will be lost, or was lost, long ago, in the far future.
He imagines it will take the rest of his life.
He takes out his torquetum, to gauge the bearings of the next step. Satisfied, he draws a last breath of this cool summer air. He pauses to admire the images marked on the rock wall. Figures of men with spears, an antelope, a handprint. The painting was made in the last day or two. The men who made it will be returning soon, their hunt successful. He's confident they will never notice the little loop of red thread tied to a split in the rock in the dimmest recess of the cave.
Time to go. Time to make his cut. He takes the feather from his bag. Its tip is sharp. Sharp enough. A pure white feather borrowed from an Angel's wing.
iv
The heirs
Ten thousand new years begin here too, on the bridge decks of the Vengeful Spirit.
As Ezekyle Abaddon enters, various system alarms and warning klaxons are still sounding, as though they are counting the seconds and marking out a steady pace for the years to follow.
'Mute them,' he orders. It takes a few moments to cancel them all. The last of them fade away, leaving only the sounds of activity; the whir of engaging systems, the chime of consoles and auspex plotters, the mutter of voices, the sizzle of heat-torches fusing metal, the creaks and groans of the spavined ship.
Sparks from the repair work drift in the stale air. Abaddon tries to ignore the evidence of damage everywhere. He looks for what is intact, what is whole, what is working. He sees the green and white runes flickering on the steersman positions, the test patterns flickering on the screens at Motive, Sensoria, and Task Dynamics, the ailing amber bars crawling up the displays of Drive Chamber and Principal Engineering. He sees hololithic projections begin to light and take shape.
He ignores his own damage too. He feels cold inside, and leaden in his movements. There is a wound, a rawness, deep within him, as though something vital has been ripped out. There is nothing left to fill that emptiness.
He misses it. He misses the enargeia of the gifts he was allowed to glimpse. He feels incomplete without them. He feels hollow and mortal.
And he hates himself for missing it. The gifts Erebus shared were just devices, weapons, advantages, but he is horrified how quickly they began to appeal to him. His mind and body, perhaps even his soul, yearn for those intoxicating and seductive possibilities he was permitted to witness.
He knows the others feel the same, Sycar, Baraxa, Ulnok... They all feel the absence too. Others, like Ekron Fal and Tarchese Malabreux seem almost crippled by it, burned out, glassy, shaking, unaware that they are weeping all the time.
Erebus has counselled him. Erebus, who knows so much more about these things than Abaddon does, and who must be suffering his own extreme pain and loss. It's hard to tell. It's hard to know anything about the Dark Apostle, even though truths are written on his very skin. Abaddon loathes him. He loathes him for what he is, what he's done, and all he represents. He's lost count of the times he's come within a hair's breadth of killing Erebus, simply for being Erebus.
But Erebus is useful. He is an instrument and a source of knowledge. He is one of the few hopes they have to get out of this alive. So, while he is useful, Erebus will live, until Abaddon decides otherwise.
Erebus has counselled him. He has counselled all of them, with quiet words and soft reassurances. He has told them how to manage the present pain, and how to use it. He has whispered promises too. The warp has receded, and Chaos withdrawn. But not forever. There are things they can do; first, by means of survival and immediate safety, and then greater things, things that will open a way back to the Old Four, things that will slowly bring them to a place where the gifts might be offered again.
Abaddon sees the Dark Apostle waiting in the shadows at the side of the command level, watching the work. Erebus confided that part of the pain Abaddon feels, part of the pain that afflicts all of the XVI, is simply grief. They have lost their father. They must come to terms with that, or it will cripple them.
Abaddon isn't convinced. His father's life is not what he is grieving.
Abaddon crosses to the old strategium table. Glass and chips of plastek crunch beneath his feet. He lays the Talon of Horus on the tabletop. He wants the claws to be visible to them all. He wants the claws beside him, so it is clear who owns them now.
'Report!' he calls out. The murmurs in the bridge space die down. There are about fifty people present, most of them warriors of the XVI, as well as a few Word Bearers. They are being forced to improvise and adapt. There are very few members of the ship's crew left alive, and most of them are next to useless. But Astartes are trained and drilled to function in any role an emergency demands. They can draw on hypno-planted reserves of knowledge and technique, and serve in extremis as steersmen, as sensoria, as drive-chamber adepts. They are Astartes, born and bred to be effective under any circumstances. Stars do not get conquered or brought to compliance by men who cannot excel in any capacity when the need arises.
And these are the Sons of Horus. Broken, wounded, hurting, yes, but still the finest transhuman champions the Imperium has ever produced.
'Drive power reported at sixteen per cent,' Argonis reports, approaching with a data-slate in his hand. He is pale, his wounds hastily patched, and there is a tremor in him that Abaddon doesn't like. But Argonis is nevertheless trying to function, just like the rest of them.
'Lateral is still refusing to respond,' Argonis says. 'We have restored some servitor function, and work has commenced to reinforce subframe structure at nine-six and nine-twelve. No power on the lower decks, and I've shut it down on intermediary as well, air-circ, environmental, and grav too in places, to conserve what we have and redirect to main dynamic function.'
Abaddon studies the data-slate.
'Impellers?' he asks.
'Lit, but rotation is slow.'
'Arrays?'
'Baraxa reports we should have operative function in a few minutes.'
'Make it less than a few,' says Abaddon. The light in the bridge space is harsh blue, |
inforce subframe structure at nine-six and nine-twelve. No power on the lower decks, and I've shut it down on intermediary as well, air-circ, environmental, and grav too in places, to conserve what we have and redirect to main dynamic function.'
Abaddon studies the data-slate.
'Impellers?' he asks.
'Lit, but rotation is slow.'
'Arrays?'
'Baraxa reports we should have operative function in a few minutes.'
'Make it less than a few,' says Abaddon. The light in the bridge space is harsh blue, and there is a background whine of ultrasonics. 'Shut down the decontam system. It's wasting power we can use elsewhere.'
Argonis seems about to question this. Then he nods.
'Yes, First Captain.'
'We need to move, Argonis,' says Abaddon. 'As soon as we have functional helm response and impellers. If we sit here much longer...'
Argonis nods again. Ulnok approaches.
'We have now embarked sixty-four vessels from the surface, First Captain,' Ulnok reports. 'We have more inbound. Vorus Ikari and Taras Balt report their companies in lift, and are about sixty minutes out. Xhofar Beruddin reports Fifth Company is under heavy fire, but projects extraction beginning within thirty minutes.'
'We'll wait as long as we can,' says Abaddon. He knows he needs them all. As many men as can be brought off the Throneworld as possible.
'Yes, First Captain.'
'But inform them that we cannot stay on station forever.'
'They understand that, First Captain.'
'Make it explicit, please, Ulnok.'
A siren starts to blare.
'I told you to mute those!' Abaddon barks.
'It's a grid response,' Sycar calls out. 'We have sensoria contact. Five ships closing to bear, six thousand kilometres out.'
'Ident?' Abaddon calls.
'Saturnine Fleet.'
Abaddon has been watching the displays the whole time. Throneworld near-space is a churning, burning mess of void war. Thousands of ships, and more arriving all the time. He's seen whole flotillas of the host fleet scorched out of orbit already, overhauled and exterminated as they try to break and flee. The vengeance is as savage as expected. No quarter. None at all.
'I want a weapon system overview immediately!' Abaddon orders. They need to run. They need to run before they are found and killed. But they are barely at functional power, and there are still hundreds of their brothers racing from the surface to reach them.
Besides, Abaddon's not yet sure the flagship can even move.
'Hard contact now,' Sycar growls. 'Inbound vessels have full sensor lock. They will have firing solutions within thirty seconds.'
'Power?' Abaddon asks curtly.
'Now at nineteen per cent,' Argonis replies. Abaddon nods.
'Shields up,' he says.
v
Lux in tenebris
He walks her as far as he can. Perhaps a little further. He's risking reprimand even bringing her here, but he doesn't seem to care.
Or perhaps he cares more than he should.
She's never been this far inside the Sanctum Imperialis. Their progress is slow, partly because she is so frail, but mostly because she keeps stopping to look around in wonder.
Despite the ruination everywhere, the Palace seems to delight her. She doesn't seem to see the debris and dirt, the shattered glassaic, the cracked tiles, the shot-holes cratering the golden walls, the blood. She gazed up in awe at the Eternity Gate as they walked through the dust beneath it, as though it was still a towering monument, a glittering arch of triumph and glory.
Even in ruin, the top of it gone, it was majestic. It dwarfed them both. It dwarfed the people streaming in and out, and the hobbled war engines limping past them into the daylight like wounded beasts.
The air is glazed with smoke. The darkness is everywhere, deep and oppressive, but the gold and auramite still gleams. It catches the firelight, the remains of ruins burning, or the flames of torches carried by the men-at-arms and the hurrying medicae. It reflects too the flash and burn of the sky, the drizzle and flare of lights above the clouds, like some aurora display.
'That's the void war,' he tells her. She doesn't need to know the rest. She can imagine it. Fleets of ships ripping through fleets of ships in the orbital zone.
He knows the way. He's been here before, and he's allowed to be here. The people they pass, and there are so many of them, all dirty, all stiff with shock and confusion, all rushing to perform vital errands, bow their heads to him when they see his black-and-white plate, even fellow Astartes in red and white and yellow.
But she feels like she knows the way too. It's as though the Via Aquila has led her all the way here, and continues to run out before her, as far as she can see, leading her on.
They stop in a soaring chamber where two processionals cross. The roof has partly collapsed, and plasteel beams slope in, like giant fingers, roped with strands of broken cable. There are statues here, the golden images of other champions and other heroes. Some have been toppled from their plinths. The walls, caked in soot, are a huge frieze of demigods and angels, attending a figure on a throne. She can't see the face of the figure, because of the damage, but she can see the halo of light that surrounds it like sun rays, conveying its steadfast aspect of majesty.
'We can't go any further,' he says.
'How far? How far is the rest of the way?' she asks.
'From here, the Silver Door is about five kilometres,' he replies.
Close enough. She never thought to get even this far.
'Thank you for bringing me here,' she says.
Sigismund nods. 'Thank you for bringing me here,' he replies.
He looks at her. Keeler seems so thin and fragile. The robes that bundle her don't disguise how slender and drawn she is, they seem to make it more obvious. Her face is pinched, her skin almost translucent. So very few of the pilgrimage, less than a fifth, left the mountain alive, and most of those that did are fundamentally changed.
But her eyes are bright.
She leans on his arm for a second, catching her breath. Then she slowly turns in a circle, gazing at the walls around her.
'What will you do now?' Sigismund asks.
'The same as you, I think,' she replies. 'The same as everyone. Hope, strive, heal.'
She glances at him.
'Believe,' she adds.
Her smile is far stronger than the rest of her. It seems to hold her up. It's a flash of the young woman she used to be, and it speaks to the strength she carries inside. A light from somewhere else. A strength of understanding, acceptance, peace. A strength to see the right direction, and the strength to follow it.
They will all need it.
'We should go back,' he says.
She nods. 'Of course. Just one moment,' she replies.
Keeler walks away from him, limping, and faces the centrepiece of the frieze that dominates the wall. The figure on the throne, damaged and scarred, gold flaking and torn, is still discernible in the dust and gloom.
Slowly, painfully, she lowers herself until she is kneeling in the dust. She looks up at the figure on the wall.
She lifts up her hands. |