by John French
Abaddon swayed, refusing to let himself prove weaker than his wounds in front of these warriors.
‘It will not be enough,’ he said. ‘It will be everything.’
Syrakul laughed.
‘I like him. He is going to be trouble.’
Abaddon watched the dark replace the past, then turned and walked away.
Freighter ship Antius, Trans-Saturnian Gulf
Mersadie awoke with a start.
‘No…’ she gasped with a breath that had been drawn in a dream of a wolf turning to smile at her with bloody teeth.
The staterooms were quiet around her, the thrum of the ship a low murmur swallowed by tapestries and cushions. She breathed hard for a moment, looking around at the shadows folded over the furniture by the single glow-globe mounted on a turned bronze stand. The cushions of the couch beneath her were damp, and her clothes clung to her skin.
‘Bad dreams?’ asked Nilus. The Navigator sat in an upholstered chair across the room, his long legs drawn up under him onto the seat, so that he looked like an old statue of a mystic that she had once seen in a Conservatory collection. He had found some clothes to replace his prison overalls: loose black-and-red fabric now hung from his spider-thin frame. He had a blanket half wrapped around him but he did not look like he had been sleeping.
‘The merchant’s sour-faced bodyguard left you some clothes,’ he said, nodding to a neat pile of fabric on a small table. ‘I don’t think she likes you much.’
Mersadie pushed herself up, scratching sleep from her eyes. There was a metallic taste in her mouth, like copper or iron.
‘Where are we?’ she asked.
‘Somewhere in the gulf between Uranus and the orbit of Saturn,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘At least that is what I would guess. You have been asleep for a while, but this is going to take days, even if this bucket of bolts and rust can make it. It’s really just an orbital hauler. I doubt it’s ever even done a full run from core to system edge.’ He smiled, and shook his head. ‘We may all die yet.’
Mersadie did not answer, but stood up and went to the pile of clothes.
The Antius had broken free of the cascade around Oberon and powered outwards towards Uranus’ outer orbits, and the gulf beyond. No one had challenged or tried to intercept them, but they were just another panicked small ship amongst many more. No reply had come from the signal they had sent, either, but she had expected none. For all her confidence in front of Vek, it was an act of desperation not certainty, a stone thrown into a pool in the hope that someone would see the ripples.
She lifted the folded clothes – loose, grey and red.
‘She said she would be back for you,’ said Nilus. ‘The bodyguard that is. I think she wants to talk.’
He stood, unwinding his limbs from the blanket, rolling his head on his neck and then moving towards one of the hatches that led to a different part of the staterooms.
‘I will leave you to your privacy,’ he said, and went out of sight.
She put the clothes on, the soft, clean fabric strange on her skin.
The main doors to the staterooms opened. The tall silhouette of Aksinya, the bodyguard, stood framed by the amber glow of lumen-strips. Pale eyes met Mersadie’s gaze for a second. Something in the cold intensity of that stare reminded her of something, a fragment of an image lost in the cracks of the past. Aksinya jerked her head, and turned back to the corridor.
‘Follow,’ she said. Mersadie complied.
They walked in silence for long minutes, descending ladders and stairs into spaces that smelled of raw oil and hot metal.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Mersadie. Aksinya did not answer, but keyed a control on a heavy door crossed with chevrons. The door released with a hiss and thump of pneumatics. The smell of human sweat and breath washed out. Aksinya moved aside and gestured for Mersadie to go through.
The light beyond was a different hue, dim but cold, like a stab-light running on low power. They were standing in the corner of a cargo hold. Its roof arched up to a flattened apex some ten metres above her head. It was small compared to the vast holds on a macro-transporter or warship, but somehow it felt even smaller to Mersadie as she looked at those who waited there. A loose wall of people faced her, staring eyes set in exhausted faces. She saw every age amongst the faces, children peeking out at her from between parents’ legs, the old, the young, all staring with a little curiosity and a lot of fear. They wore fabric of every kind and quality: the vulcanised rubber and oil-smeared suits of void dock-luggers, jackets of velvet dotted with brass buttons, smocks of service-stencilled drab, all grubby and stained with days of wear. None of the faces moved, most eyes barely seemed to blink. She heard sounds coming from the other side of the crowd, and realised that there must be people that she could not see, filling the hold space. Ribbons of cooking smoke coiled into the air. She coughed as the smell of excrement and urine touched the back of her throat.
‘Who are you?’ asked a clear voice from down near the floor. Mersadie looked down, and saw two brown eyes looking up at her from beneath a matted mass of ash-white curls. Mersadie glanced up at the adults standing next to the child, but they did not move or speak. They and all those others that she could see were looking at Aksinya, who had come to stand just behind her. She looked back at the child and bent down, so that she was level with that big, brown gaze.
‘I…’ began Mersadie and stopped, not sure what to say. ‘I am called Mersadie. I used to tell stories.’
‘What kind of stories?’ asked the child.
‘True ones.’
‘I like the stories that my grandfather tells. They aren’t true, though. They have ghosts and ships of treasure in them, and the kings and queens of the sun, and the knight of the moon. The ones about the knight are the best. She rides across the stars, you know, and she can never speak, not ever, and she has a sword that you can’t see, and she doesn’t dream because she had to give her dreams to the sun to keep while she went to find the creatures that live in the night.’
Mersadie found herself smiling.
‘I like stories like that, too.’
The child nodded, face serious.
‘My grandfather will tell me a story when we get back to Cordelia. That’s our home. We had to leave, but we will go back, but I have to tell the stories to myself until then.’
A hand reached down and took the child by the shoulder and tugged her back. Mersadie looked up into the face of a hard-eyed man with a Uranus indentured service tattoo circling his cheek.
‘Come on, Sibi,’ he said, then looked at Mersadie. ‘You bring any food down here with your nice words and clean clothes?’
Mersadie straightened, suddenly aware that the line of people had moved almost imperceptibly forwards. There was anger in their eyes now.
‘No…’ she began. ‘No, I am sorry. I didn’t know I was–’
‘What’s happening?’ came a call from further back.
‘I…’ Mersadie began.
‘Where are we going?’
The line was a crowd now, sliding closer, so that she could smell the sweat and breath and feel the static charge of fear.
‘Why are you here?’ came a growl, and a hand reached for her. Aksinya stepped forwards and batted the hand down. The crowd shrank back from the bodyguard.
‘Go,’ said Aksinya, pushing Mersadie towards the door they had entered through. The crowd did not follow them, but Mersadie thought she could feel their stares even after the chevron-crossed metal closed. She stood for a second in the passage. Aksinya moved to walk past her.
‘I understand,’ she said to the bodyguard.
‘Do you?’ said Aksinya, stopping and looking at Mersadie. ‘There are six holds on board. All of them just like that. How much food do you think a ship like this has in its stores? How long do you think it will last when split between hundreds of mout
hs? How long, do you think, until they are not happy to stay where they are? How long until they try to get out? What does your understanding say about what happens then?’
‘I am sorry, but I didn’t cause this.’
‘No, you didn’t, but you stopped it getting any better. If we could have docked, we could have got some of those people off, and we could have got supplies. There are people hunting us now, people looking for you – people who will shell fleeing ships on their own side to get to you. So now we all have to run. That little one you were talking to, what do you think happens to her if the people hunting you find us? Have you ever seen what that kind of violence is like?’
‘Yes,’ said Mersadie, holding the bodyguard’s cold gaze.
After a long moment, Aksinya nodded.
‘Perhaps you really have, but it makes no difference. I am bound to protect my master and his family. That’s it. This ship and the people on it are not mine to shield. That can be no other way.’ She took a step closer, and now she was so close that Mersadie could feel the thread of the other woman’s breath. It smelled like metal. ‘But you… you have pulled the fates of everyone on this ship, and made them yours. I do not know, and I don’t care, why the master believes you, but I want you to know that whatever happens to him and these people won’t be his fault. It will be yours, teller of stories. It will be yours.’
Aksinya turned and walked away down the dim passage.
‘Go back to your quarters,’ she called back at Mersadie without looking around. ‘He will want to talk to you soon.’
Mersadie Oliton stood still for a second and then followed.
Battle-barge War Oath, Supra-Solar Gulf
The armada split as it plunged towards the sun. Battle groups began to pull onto separate paths, first the smallest, which rode at the edge, then the larger ships, one layer of formation at a time peeling apart like a knot of rope unwinding into threads.
Far out, circling the dividing fleet, the White Scars saw the formation of enemy ships begin to change. They made kills then, driving in to pick off smaller frigates and gunboats as they broke from the safety of the herd. But the reformation of the armada went on, recasting the single fleet as many without it slowing down.
The White Scars plunged back in, but as they struck, a flock of hundreds of smaller ships broke from the divided armada. They were the fastest of the invaders’ ships, crewed by rogue traders and renegade privateers. They had flocked to Horus’ call and been given this task in exchange for promises of wealth and power. They were the crows of war that had followed the Great Crusade out to the edge of the dark, and now came back to feast on the corpses of their masters. They scattered outwards from the armada, spiralling out to meet the Falcon fleets. Hundreds of small battles spread across the dark, tumbling in the wake of the main mass of the armada.
And the shape of the armada continued to change. With the skin of smaller craft gone, the main force was revealed. Many vessels bore the livery of the Sons of Horus, blooded war crones like the Last Light, the Oath of Moment and the Spear Wolf. The legionaries on board were veterans, born in the time before the betrayal, breakers of their oaths to the Emperor and keepers of their bonds to their primarch. Beside them rode vessels of such different lines that they seemed less a fleet and more a collection of creations formed of mankind’s ingenuity in ship-craft fused with insanity. Galleons of black metal, their skins dotted with chrome pyramids; sleek needles of serrated bronze five kilometres long; slabs of red stone the size of mountain ranges hoisted into space and made into city-ships, their insides filled with ever-turning machines – these were the craft of the disciples of Kelbor-Hal and his New Mechanicum. No two were alike, their size and shape reflections of the magi who commanded them.
One by one the Legion and Mechanicum ships began to separate, pulling into twin spear blades. For a few hours the two formations continued to descend towards the disc of the Solar System together, leaving the Falcon fleets and the privateer carrion feeders behind to spin in battle. Hour by hour, the two fleets moved further and further apart, until each of them could see the light of the other’s engines only as a single dot of starlight.
Abaddon watched it all on a display enhanced by scan data, not moving from his place as the hours passed. Around him the business of the War Oath’s bridge went on in near silence. It was an act of will for him to remain still, his mind following all the details while the sound of his heartbeats filled his ears, restless and unsettled. But there he remained, watching time and distance pass. There would be battle and bloodshed before victory, but that all rested on these moments. From here, each part of the armada would follow its own path to its own target and its own battles. The White Scars would have seen this first division, and they would track both blades of the divided spear. But not yet. That could not happen yet. There was one more moment of vulnerability and secrecy still to come, one more sliver to be broken off this spear blade.
Abaddon felt the prickle across the skin of his back. His muscles twitched, his armour amplifying the tiny movement with a buzz of servos. He kept his eyes on the display, but bared his teeth.
‘I did not call you to my presence, priest,’ he said, ‘and I have no use for your counsel.’
Zardu Layak halted at his side. The incense reek of the daemon priest filled the air.
‘I go where I am needed, not where I am called.’
‘You are part of the comet strike force. That is where you need to be. The ships of the Fifteenth and your Legion are ready to depart.’
‘But I am not to depart,’ said Layak. Abaddon looked back at him, but the priest was already stepping close, his eyes on the display, his staff tapping the stone floor. ‘I remain here, with you.’
‘You will go to join the spear thrust to the comet,’ said Abaddon. ‘That is my will.’
‘But it is not the will of the gods.’
‘I do not care.’
Layak was silent for a moment.
‘These hands were once those of an iconoclast,’ he said at last, holding up a fist. ‘Did you know that? The warrior who became me burned gods and lived to send the devout and the deluded to the flames.’
‘Your conversion is of no interest to me,’ said Abaddon.
‘I was not a convert,’ said Layak. ‘The man whose face lies beneath this mask was taken, broken and remade. My faith is sacred because it is a lie, and all lies are music to the ears of the Pantheon. Piety like that is false, a creation, but it is pure. You live for Horus, for your Legion, for your brothers. That is your truth. Mine is that I am nothing. I am a son who left his father. I am a brother who made those brothers his slaves.’ Layak nodded to the still and silent figures of the blade slaves standing eight paces away. ‘I am like you, Ezekyle Abaddon.’
The choler beating in Abaddon’s blood lit to rage.
‘I am–’
‘On Isstvan, were the warriors that you slew not of your blood? Had they not bled with you? Had they not shared bread and oaths and deeds at your side, and you at theirs?’
Abaddon saw the ruins again, the smoke coiling into the sky, the ash blowing on the dead wind.
‘Betrayer,’ Loken had said. Abaddon tasted the words of his reply, still bitter even in memory.
‘There was nothing to betray.’
Layak inclined his head towards the blade slaves. ‘I put swords into my brothers’ hands. You sheathed your sword in the hearts of those who had trusted you and thought the bonds between you unbreakable.’
Abaddon could not move. In his mind the images of the past rolled over and over. The things done, the wars fought. Murder, slaughter and deception.
‘There was nothing to betray,’ he said. ‘They were not my brothers.’
‘Because they made a different choice?’
‘Because loyalty is everything,’ and as he spoke the words, he heard the old truth that he had carried in
him since he had been a boy standing in a cave looking at a knife that would kill his companions and make him a king. ‘We were brothers and sons.’
‘And that mattered more than oaths to an Imperium, more than duty, or truth?’
‘You can’t be loyal to an idea, priest, as your kind learned in the ashes of your first belief.’
A strange, dry rattle came from behind the teeth of Layak’s mask. After a second, Abaddon realised that the priest was laughing.
‘Belief is all that I have left, and loyalty to an idea is why I am here.’
‘Chaos,’ said Abaddon, his lips peeling back from his teeth.
‘No…’ said Layak with a shake of his head, ‘the truth.’
Abaddon felt another question form in his mind, but cut it away and turned back to the bridge displays.
The ships of the Word Bearers and Thousand Sons within the fleet were already aligning, forming their own formation within the greater mass of Abaddon’s armada, a subtle blade hidden amongst many. The vessels of this third force were few in number, a dozen only, but that was as it needed to be; their part in the greater plan required them to go unseen, while the eyes of the defenders of Sol were elsewhere. Within an hour, the bulk of Abaddon’s armada would turn and begin the next stage of their descent towards the inner system. The Thousand Sons and the Word Bearers would carry on, though, cutting their engines so that they fell away silent and dark, down and down into the gulf between the turning planets. Only once they were closer to their goal would they relight their engines. Sorcery would wrap them, pulling eyes and minds away from them until their task was done.
‘The sorcerers of Prospero and the warriors of my Legion will do what is ordained,’ said Layak, as though following Abaddon’s thoughts. ‘But my path lies with you, Ezekyle Abaddon, and I will follow it. That is my choice and my place. Kill me if you must, but I will remain.’
Abaddon watched the dance of the void without replying, and when he looked around the priest was gone.
Warship Lance of Heaven, Supra-Solar Gulf
Jubal Khan listened to the last ghosts of voices fade into the crackle of the vox-link. He looked at the tech-adept linked to the signal unit.