by Dan Abnett
A cosmic emptiness so massive and ever-lasting, my mind numbed as I raced across it. It was gone in a blink, just fast enough to prevent the sheer scale taking my sanity with it.
Another blink. Flares of red. Colliding galaxies, catching fire. Souls like comets furrowing the immaterium. Voices of god-monsters calling from behind the flimsy backdrop of space.
* * *
Blink. Oceanic blackness. Another snatch of plainsong.
Blink. Stellar nurseries, fulsome with embryonic suns.
Blink. Cold light, eons old.
Blink.
'Gregor?'
I looked around and saw Commodus Voke. I had not recognised his voice at first. It seemed to have been softened, as if the event had humbled him. We stood on a slope of green shale, under a pair of suns that radiated enormous heat. Desiccated mountains lined the horizon, looming like fortresses.
We moved across the clinking shale towards the sound of the excavator. An ancient monotask, its pistons slimy with oil, dug into the side of a rock face with shovel-bladed limbs. It gouted steam and smoke from its boiler stack and excreted rock waste down a rear conveyor belt into heaps of glittering spoil.
We moved past it, and past other excavations in the rock face where smaller servitors brushed and polished fragments from the exposed strata and laid them carefully on find-trays.
Malahite stood watching them work. He was younger here, youthful almost, tanned and fit by the suns and the work. He wore shorts and loose fatigues, his skin streaked with dust.
'I thought you'd come,' he said.
'Will you co-operate?' I asked him.
'I've little time to talk/ he said, bending down to examine items that a servitor had just placed on a tray. 'There's work to do. A great deal to uncover before the rains come in a week or so.'
He knew who we were, but still he could not quite divorce himself from the reality around him.
There's plenty of time to talk.'
Malahite straightened up. 'I suppose you're right. Do you know where this is?'
'No.'
He paused. 'A fringe world. Now I come to think of it, I've forgotten its name myself. I am happiest here, I think. This is where it starts for me. My first great recovery, the dig that makes my name and reputation as an archaeoxenologist/
'It is later events we wish to speak of/ said Voke.
Malahite nodded, untied his bandanna and wiped the sweat from his cheeks. 'But this is where it begins. I will be celebrated for these finds, feted in high circles. Invited by the noble and famous House of Glaw to dine with them and enter their service as a prospector. Urisel Glaw himself will recruit me, and offer me a lucrative stipend to work for him.'
'And where will that lead?' I asked. Tell us about the saruthi.'
He bristled and turned away. Why? What can you offer me? Nothing! You have destroyed me!'
*We have means, Malahite. Things can be easier for you. The House of Glaw has doomed you to an unthinkable fate.'
He caught my eye, curious intent. "You can save me? Even now?'
Yes/
He paused and then picked up one of the trays. It was suddenly full of the chipped octagonal tiles from the Damask site. They had an empire, you know/ he said, sorting through the tiles, showing some to us. The pieces meant nothing. The history is here, inscribed pictographically. Our eyes do not read it though. The saruthi have no optical or auditory functions. Smell and taste, the two combined in fact, are their primary senses. They can detect the flavours of reality, even those of dimensional space. The angles of time/
'How?'
He shrugged. The Necroteuch. It warped them. Their empire was small, no more than forty worlds, and very old by the time the book came into their possession. Carried by humans, fleeing persecution on Terra in the very earliest days. Thanks to their taste-based sensory apparatus, they derived from the Necroteuch more than a simple human eye could read. From that first taste, the profound lore of the Necroteuch passed through their culture like wildfire, like a pathogen, transforming and twisting, investing them with great power. It led to war, civil war, which collapsed their empire, leaving worlds burned out or abandoned, contracting their territory to the far-flung fragment we know today/
They are corrupted – as a species, I mean?' asked Voke.
Malahite nodded. 'Oh, there's no saving them, inquisitor. They are precisely the sort of xenos filth you people teach us to fear and despise. I have encountered several alien races in my career, and found most to be utterly undeserving of the hatred that the Inquisition and the church reserves for anything that is not human. You are blinkered fools. You would kill everything because it is not like you. But in this case, you are right. The contagion of the Necroteuch has overwhelmed the saruthi. Never mind that they are xenos, they are a Chaos breed/
He shivered, as if a chill wind was picking up but the suns continued to beat relentlessly.
What are their resources, their military capability?'
'I have no idea/ he said, shivering again. 'They abandoned their spaceship technology centuries ago. They had no further need of it. As I said, the Necroteuch had warped their sensory abilities. They became able to undo the angles of space and time, to move through dimensions. From world to world. They mastered the art of constructing spaces in four dimensions, environments that existed only at specific time-points/
'Like the one where the trade was meant to take place/
Yes. KCX-1288 was once part of their empire, ravaged in their civil war. They chose it for the meeting because it was remote from their main population centres. They built the tetrascape inside specifically for us/
'Tetrascape?'
'Forgive me. I coined the term. I thought I might use it in a learned paper one day. A tailored, four-dimensional environment. In that particular case, engineered with a human climate. We were their guests, you see.'
'How was the deal arranged?'
'Locke, the rogue trader. He was on a retainer to the House of Glaw, had been for years. A mercenary roaming the stars at the behest of the Glaws. He ventured into saruthi territory, and eventually made contact. Then he discovered the existence of the Necroteuch, and knew what it would be worth to his masters.'
And they agreed to trade?' I was becoming impatient. Time, surely, was running out.
He shuddered again. 'It's cold/ he said. 'Isn't it? Getting colder/
'They agreed to trade? Come on, Malahite! We can't help you if you delay/
'Yes… yes, they agreed. In exchange for the return of artefacts and treasures from worlds they had abandoned and no longer had access to/
'Wasn't the Necroteuch precious to them?'
'It was in their souls, in their minds, woven into their genetic code by then. The book itself was incidental/
And you were employed to excavate the materials that the Glaws intended to trade?'
'Of course. I was promised such power, you know…'
His voice tailed off. Beyond the distant mountains, the sky was growing dark. A strengthening breeze scattered loose shale around our feet.
'The rains?' he said. 'Surely not this early/
'Concentrate, Malahite, or you'll slip away! The Necroteuch is destroyed, the trade prevented, and House Glaw is shattered and defeated! So why are Locke and Dazzo leading their fleet into saruthi territory?'
What's that?' he asked sharply, holding up a hand for quiet. It was indeed colder now, and chasing clouds obscured the suns. A distant, plaintive threnody was just audible.
'What are they doing?' Voke spat.
He looked at us as if we were stupid. 'Repairing the damage you've done to their cause! The high and mighty masters of the Glaw cabal have masters of their own to please! Masters whose wrath defies thought! They must assuage them for the loss of the Necroteuch!'
I looked across at Voke. 'You mean the Children of the Emperor?' I asked Malahite.
'Of course I do! The Glaws couldn't do all this alone, even with their power and influence. They made a pac
t with that foul chapter for support and security, in return promising to share the Necroteuch with them. And now that's gone, the Children of the Emperor will be most displeased/
And how do they hope to avoid this displeasure and make amends?' Voke asked. Like me, he was becoming alarmed by the stain in the sky and the sound in the wind.
'By obtaining another Necroteuch/ I said, realising, answering for Malahite.
The archeoxenologist clapped his hands and smiled. 'Brains, at last! Just when I was giving up hope for you. Well done!'
There is another?' asked Voke with a stammer.
The saruthi happily traded back their human copy because they had their own/ I said, cursing myself for not seeing the obvious sense before.
'Well done again! Indeed they have, inquisitor/ Malahite was gleeful and smiling, though he was clearly shivering now, and desperate for warmth. 'It's a xenos transcription, of course, composed in their, I'd say language, but perhaps flavour is a better word. However, the arcane knowledge it contains is still the same. Dazzo and his masters will have the Necroteuch, despite the set-backs you have caused/
Lightning flashed, and the wind lifted walls of dust and storms of shale particles around us.
'Our time is up/ Voke cried to me.
'How true/ said Malahite. 'And now, your promise. I have answered you fully. Are you men of your word?'
*We can't save you from death, Malahite/ Voke told him. 'But the abominations you have chosen to align yourself with are coming to consume your soul. We can at least be merciful and extinguish your spirit now, before they arrive/
Malahite grinned, flecks of shale clicking off his exposed teeth. 'Damn your offer, Commodus Voke. And damn you both/
'Move, Voke!' I cried. Malahite had simply been keeping us talking, padding his story out. He knew damn well we had nothing much to offer him except a swift end. That didn't interest him. He wanted revenge. That was his price for speaking. He wanted to make sure we were still here, when the end came, to die with him.
The desert behind him raptured upwards, throwing rock and dust into the cyclonic gale. A column of blood exploded out of the ground like a geyser, half a kilometre wide and a dozen high. It rose like a gigantic tree, swirling with pustular flesh, sinew, muscle, ragged tissue and a million staring eyes that coated it like glistening foam.
Branch-like tendrils of bone and tissue whipped out from the swirling, semi-fluid behemoth and tore Malahite apart.
It was the most complete, most devastating fate I have ever seen a man suffer. But he was still smiling, triumphantly, as it happened.
TW E Ы TY-TWO
In the mouth of the warp.
A mandate to purge.
S6-Izar.
The psychically manifested memory of the fringe world and its excavation site blurred away, shattering like an image in a broken mirror. But the towering daemon-form remained, keening in the lethal darkness, driving the tempest of damnation down upon us.
I felt Voke lash out with his mind against the thing, but it was a futile gesture, like a man exhaling into the face of a hurricane.
'Back!' I yelled, my voice lost and distant even to me.
I saw him falling into the void at my side, reaching for me. I yelled his name again, holding out my hand. He cried out an answer I couldn't hear.
Instead, I heard shouting, screaming and the blast of gunfire.
I sprawled painfully onto the cold paved floor of the chapel, soaked with blood and plasmic-residue, gasping for air, my heart bursting. The noises now were all around me, deafening and clear.
I rolled.
Panic was emptying the chapel. Priests and novices alike, acolytes and retainers, all were fleeing, wailing, overturning pews. Lord Rorken was on his feet, his face pale, and his devoted bodyguard, with their saintly masks, were charging forward, their broadswords whirring as they described masterful figures of eight.
I saw Voke, unconscious, nearby. Like me, he was saturated with inhuman gore and the drooling liquor of the immaterium.
I couldn't find my balance, and there was a dullness in my head. I retched clots of blood. I knew I was damned. Damned by the warp, ruined and stained. I had strayed too close too long.
The astropaths were staggering backwards, frantic, shrieking. Some were already dead, and others were convulsing or haemorrhaging. As I looked up, two exploded simultaneously, like blood-filled blisters. Arcs of warp-energy flashed among them, frying minds, fusing bones and boiling body fluid.
Malahite's corpse had gone. In its place on the plinth, crouched a thrashing, screeching horror of smoke and rotting bone. The astropaths had broken the link, having staunchly sustained it long enough for Voke and I to escape. But something had come back with us.
It had no form, but suggested many, as a shadow on a wall or a cloud in the sky might flicker and resemble many things in a passing moment. Inside its fluttering robes of smoke, starlight shone and teeth flashed.
The first of Rorken's bodyguards was on it, slicing with his sword. The razor-keen blade, engraved with votive blessings and curial sacraments, passed harmlessly through wispy, ethereal fog.
In response, a long, attenuated claw of jointed bone, like a scythe with human teeth growing from the blade edge, lashed out and chopped through his torso and his holy blade, bisecting both.
I fumbled for a weapon, any damn weapon.
There was a cacophony of gunfire.
Storm bolters blasting, the three Deathwatch Marines advanced towards the horror. Their black armour was rimed with psychic frost. Over his vox-speaker, Cynewolf could be heard, admonishing the foe and barking tactical instructions to his comrades.
Their chapter-wrought bolters continued to boom in unison until the unremitting fire had blasted the thing from the warp backwards in a scrambling, shrieking smear of blackness and bone limbs. It fell back off the plinth into the retreating astropaths, crashing dead and living alike.
Brother-Captain Cynewolf moved ahead of his companions, faster than seemed to me possible for such a heavily armoured form. Tossing aside his spent bolter, he drew his chainsword and hacked again and again into the writhing mass, driving it backwards into the adulatory stalls, which splintered like tinder wood.
Lord Rorken strode past me, wielding a ceremonial silver flamer he had snatched from one of his attendants. The acolyte ran behind, struggling to hold on to the gold-inlaid fuel tanks and keep pace with his master.
Rorken's voice sang out above the mayhem. 'Spirit of noxious immate-ria, be gone from hence, for as the Emperor of Mankind, manifold be his blessings, watches over me, so I will not fear the shadow of the warp…'
Holy fire spurted from the Lord Inquisitor's weapon and washed across the warp-spawned thing. Lord Rorken was chanting the rite of banishment at the top of his lungs.
Endor pulled me to my feet and we both lent our voices to the words. There was a tremor that seemed to vibrate the entire ship. Then nothing remained of the vile creature except a layer of ash and the devastation it had wrought.
As penance for the act of transgression that had led to this warp-invasion, Konrad Molitor was charged with rededicating and reconsecrating the violated chapel. The work, overseen by the arch-priests of the curia and the techno-adepts of the Glorious Omnissiah, took all of the first six weeks of our ten-week transit time to 56-Izar. Molitor took his duties seriously, dressed himself in a filthy sackcloth shirt of contrition, and had his retainers scourge him with withes and psychic awls between ceremonies. I thought he got off lightly.
I spent a month recovering from the physiological trauma of the auto-seance in one of the battleship's state apartments. The psychological damage I suffered during that event lasted for years after. I still dream of that geyser of blood, clothed in myriad eyes, filling the sky. You don't forget a thing like that. They say memory softens with time, but that particular memory never has. Even today, I console myself that to have forgotten would have been worse. That would have been denial, and denial of such visions event
ually opens the doors of insanity.
I lay upon the apartment's wide bed all month, propped up with bolsters and pillows. Physicians attended me regularly, as did members of Lord Rorken's staff, dressed in their finery. They tested my health, my mind, my recovering strength. I knew what they were looking for. A taint of the warp. There was none, I was sure, but they couldn't take my word for it, of course. We had come close, Voke and I, close to the precipice, close to the edge of irreconcilable damnation. Another few seconds…
Aemos stayed with me, bringing me books and slates to divert me. Sometimes he read aloud, from histories, sermons or stories. Sometimes he played music spools on the old, horn-speakered celiaphone, cranking the handle by hand. We listened to the light orchestral preludes of Daminias Bartelmew, the rousing symphonies of Hanz Solveig, the devotional chants of the Ongres Cloisterhood. He warbled along with operettas by Guinglas until I pleaded with him to stop, and mimed the conductor's role when the Macharius Requiem played, dancing around the room on his augmetic legs in such a preposterous, sprightly fashion it made me laugh aloud.
'It's good to hear that, Gregor/ he said, blowing dust off a new spool before fitting it into the celiaphone.
I was going to answer, but the strident war-hymns of the Mordian Regimental Choir cut me off.
Midas visited me, and spent time playing regicide or plucking his Glavian lyre. I took these recitals as a particular compliment. He'd been dragging
the lyre around for years, ever since I had first met him, and had never played in my hearing, despite my requests.
He was a master, his circuit-inlaid fingers reading and playing the coded strings as expertly as they did flight controls.
On his third visit, after a trio of jaunty Glavian dances, he set his turtle-backed instrument down against the arm of his chair and said 'Lowink is dead.'
I closed my eyes and nodded. I had suspected as much.
'Aemos didn't want to tell you yet, given your condition, but I thought it was wrong to keep it from you/
'Was it quick?'
'His body survived the seance invasion, but with no mind to speak of. He died a week later. Just faded away'