Alcade shook his head. ‘I’m not sure you do, Lord Devine. Responsibility is a unique concept. You can share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. Blood has given you command of Molech, and its security is your responsibility. No evasion, or wilful avoidance of that fact can shift it to others.’
Raeven forced a mask of composure to settle upon his features and nodded as though accepting the legate’s patronising words as wisdom.
‘Your words carry the acumen of your primarch,’ he said, each word filling his belly with cankerous venom. ‘I will, of course, review the recommendations of the tithe-takers in due course, but perhaps this is a time for war stratagems rather than dry lists of numbers and dispute between allies?’
Alcade nodded and bowed in wary agreement.
‘Indeed so, Lord Devine,’ said Alcade, sitting back down.
Raeven let out a poisoned breath that felt like it was scorching his throat. He fixed his gaze on Brython Semper, taking a moment to compose himself and giving the Lord Admiral’s aide time to elbow him in the ribs.
‘Admiral Semper, can you tell us how long we have before the War-master’s forces reach Molech?’
Dressed in a regal purple frock coat of baroque ornamentation, Brython Semper stood and fastened his top button. The Lord Admiral’s hair was silver white and pulled into a long scalp lock, his face a scarred, partially augmetic mask.
‘Of course, my lord,’ he said, inloading the contents of his aide’s data-slate to his ocular implant. ‘The astropathic choirs send word of impending arrivals of scores of vessels, perhaps as many as forty or fifty in total. Nor are the approaching craft making any secret of their arrival. I’m getting all sorts of nonsense about astropaths hearing wolves howling in the warp and ships screaming their designations. More than likely it’s some form of empyreal distortion or simply reflected vox-transmissions, but it’s clear the Warmaster wants us to know he’s coming. Though if he thinks we’re a bunch of cowards who’ll run screaming at the first sign of the enemy, he’s in for a rude awakening.’
Vitus Salicar interrupted the Lord Admiral before he could continue. ‘It would be a mistake to think that just because you outnumber the Warmaster’s fleet, you hold the upper hand. Legion void-war is a savage, merciless thing.’
Semper bowed to the Blood Angel and said, ‘I know full well how dangerous the Space Marines are, captain.’
‘You don’t,’ said Salicar sadly. ‘We are killers, reapers of flesh. You must never forget that.’
Before the Lord Admiral could respond to the Blood Angel’s melancholic tone, Raeven said, ‘How soon will the enemy be here?’
Visibly struggling to contain his temper in the face of Salicar’s dismissal of his fleet’s capabilities, Semper spoke slowly and carefully.
‘The Master of Astropaths’ best estimate is a real space breach any day now, putting them within reach of Molech in around two weeks. I’ve already issued a muster order to pull our picket ships back from the system’s edge.’
‘You won’t engage the traitors in open space?’
‘Since I am not in the habit of throwing away the lives of my crews, no, I will not,’ said Semper. ‘As Captain Salicar helpfully pointed out, the warships of the Space Marines are not to be underestimated, so our best course of action is to dispatch a provocateur force to goad the traitors onto the horns of our orbital guns. Our main fleet will remain within the umbra of the orbital batteries on the Karman line. Between the hammer and anvil of our static guns and the warfleet, we can gut the traitor ships before they can land so much as a single warrior.’
Despite his bombastic tone, Raeven liked the cut of Semper’s jib and nodded.
‘Do it, Lord Admiral,’ he said. ‘Dispatch the provocateur force and wish them good hunting.’
The cell had no furniture, not even a bed. A thin mattress lay folded in one corner, together with a chipped night-soil pot and a small box, like a presentation case for a medal.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ said Mersadie, rising from her kneeling position.
Loken’s mouth opened, but no sounds came out.
This was the second dead person he’d seen, but this one was flesh and blood. She was here. Mersadie Oliton, his personal remembrancer.
She was alive. Here. Now.
She wasn’t the same though. The harsh light revealed faded scars tracing looping arcs over the sides and upper surfaces of her diminished skull. Surgical scars. Excisions.
She saw him looking and said, ‘They took out my embedded memory coils. All the images and all the remembrances I’d stored. All gone. All I have left of them are my organic memories and even they’re beginning to fade.’
‘I left you on the Vengeful Spirit,’ said Loken. ‘I thought you must be dead.’
‘I would be if it wasn’t for Iacton,’ replied Mersadie.
‘Iacton? Iacton Qruze?’
‘Yes. He saved us from the murder of the remembrancers and got us off the ship,’ said Mersadie. ‘He didn’t tell you?’
‘No,’ said Loken. ‘He didn’t.’
‘We escaped with Iacton and Captain Garro.’
‘You were on the Eisenstein?’ said Loken, disbelief and wonder competing for his full attention. Qruze had said little of the perilous journey from Isstvan, but neglecting to mention Mersadie’s survival beggared belief.
‘And I wasn’t the only one Iacton saved.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Euphrati got off the Vengeful Spirit, Kyril too.’
‘Sindermann and Keeler are alive?’
Mersadie nodded. ‘As far as I know, but before you ask, I don’t know where they are. I haven’t seen either of them in years.’
Loken paced the interior of the cell, raw emotions surging like a chaotic tide within him. Sindermann had been a dear friend to him. A mentor of superlative intellect and a confidante of sorts, a bridge between trans-human sensibilities and mortal concerns. That Keeler had also survived was a miracle, for the imagist had a real knack for getting herself into trouble.
‘You didn’t know she was alive?’ asked Mersadie.
‘No,’ said Loken.
‘You’ve heard of the Saint?’
Loken shook his head. ‘No. What saint?’
‘You have been out of the loop, haven’t you?’
Loken paused, angry and confused. She was not to blame, but she was here. He wanted to lash out, but released a shuddering breath that seemed to expel a heavy weight of bilious humours.
‘I was dead, I think,’ he said at last. ‘For a while. Or as good as dead. Maybe I was just lost, so very lost.’
‘But you came back,’ said Mersadie, reaching out to take his hand. ‘They brought you back because you’re needed.’
‘So I’m told,’ said Loken wearily, curling his fingers around hers, careful not to squeeze too hard.
They stood unmoving, neither willing to break the silence or the shared intimacy. Her skin was soft, reminding Loken of a fleeting moment in his life. When he had been young and innocent, when he had loved and been loved in return. When he had been human.
Loken sighed and released Mersadie’s hand.
‘I have to get you out of here,’ he said.
‘You can’t,’ she said, withdrawing her hand.
‘I’m one of Malcador’s chosen,’ said Loken. ‘I’ll send word to the Sigillite and have you taken back to Terra. I’m not letting you rot away in here another minute.’
‘Garviel,’ said Mersadie, and her use of his given name stopped him in his tracks. ‘They’re not going to let me out of here. Not for now, at least. I spent a long time in the heart of the Warmaster’s flagship. People have been executed for a lot less.’
‘I’ll vouch for you,’ said Loken. ‘I’ll guarantee your loyalty.’
Mersadie shook her head and folded her arms.
‘If you didn’t know who I was, if you hadn’t shared your life with me, woul
d you want someone like me released? If I was a stranger, what would you do? Turn me loose or keep me imprisoned?’
Loken took a step forward. ‘I can’t just leave you here. You don’t deserve this.’
‘You’re right, I don’t deserve this, but you don’t have a choice,’ said Mersadie. ‘You have to leave me.’
Her hand reached up to brush the bare metal of his unmarked plate. Thin fingers traced the line of his pauldron and swept across the curve of the shoulder guard.
‘It’s strange to see you in this armour.’
‘I no longer have a Legion,’ he said simply, angry at her wilful desire to languish in this prison.
She nodded. ‘They told me you died on Isstvan, but I didn’t believe them. I knew you were alive.’
‘You knew I’d survived?’
‘I did.’
‘How?’
‘Euphrati told me.’
‘You said you didn’t know where she was.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Then how–’
Mersadie turned away, as though reluctant to give voice to her thoughts for fear of his ridicule. She bent to retrieve the presentation case from the ground next to the mattress. When she turned back to him, he saw her eyes were wet with tears.
‘I dreamed of Euphrati,’ she said. ‘She told me you’d come here. I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous, but after all I’ve seen and been through, it’s almost normal.’
The anger drained from Loken, replaced by an echoing sense of helplessness. Mersadie’s words touched something deep within him, and he could hear the soft breath of a third person, the ghost of a shadow in a room where none existed.
‘It isn’t ridiculous,’ said Loken. ‘What did she say?’
‘She told me to give you this,’ said Mersadie, holding out the case. ‘To pass on.’
‘What is it?’
‘Something that once belonged to Iacton Qruze,’ she said. ‘Something she said he needs to have again.’
Loken took the box, but didn’t open it.
‘She said to remind Iacton that he is the Half-heard no longer, that his voice will be heard louder than any other in his Legion.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mersadie. ‘It was a dream, it’s not like it’s an exact science.’
Loken nodded, though what he was hearing made little sense. At least as little sense as answering a summons to war on the word of a dead man.
‘Did Euphrati say anything else?’ he asked.
Mersadie nodded and the tears brimming on the edge of her eyes like a river about to break its banks spilled down her cheeks.
‘Yes,’ sobbed Mersadie. ‘She said to say goodbye.’
EIGHT
The Eater of Lives
Confrontation
Hope in lies
The apothecarion decks of the Endurance were cold, bare metal and reeked of the embalmers art. Acrid chemicals fogged the air and hissing vats of noxious fluids bubbled on retorts between dull iron slabs, suspended cryo-tubes and racks of surgical equipment.
Mortarion had spent altogether too much time here already in the pain-filled days following the attack of Meduson’s sleeper assassins. Swathed in counterseptic wraps and bathed in regenerative poultices like an embalmed king of the Gyptia, his superhuman metabolism had taken only seven hours to undo the worst of the damage.
A squad of Deathshroud Terminators escorted him through the artificially cold space with their manreapers gripped loosely. The primarch’s honour guard lightly rocked their outsized scythes from shoulder to shoulder to keep them in motion. Even on the flagship, they were taking no chances.
Frost webbed the canted hafts and the light of organ-harvesters glittered from the ice forming on the blades. Armoured in dusky white armour edged in a mixture of crimson and olive drab, they spread out in a pyramid formation, threat auspex alert for the intruder they knew was somewhere on this deck.
Mortarion went bareheaded, fresh skin grafts flushed with highly-oxygenated blood that made him look healthier than he had in centuries. A rebreather gorget still covered the lower half of his face, and gusts of earthy breath sighed from its portcullis-like grille. His sockets were craters cut in a lunar landscape, his eyes nuggets of amberglass.
Silence was clamped to his armour’s backplate. He had no need of its edge, the Deathshroud had more than enough to go round. Instead, he carried the Lantern, a colossal Shenlongi pistol, drum-fed and possessed of an energy matrix few beam weapons of comparable size could match.
The Deathshroud spread out as their sweep of the chamber reached the impregnable vault at its end. Sealed with locks of magnificent complexity, the gene-vault was a place of mystery and a repository of the Death Guard’s future.
Caipha Morarg, late of 24th Breacher Squad, now serving as Mortarion’s equerry, shook his head and put up his bolter as he followed his master into the apothecarion.
‘My lord, there’s no one here,’ he said.
‘There is, Caipha,’ said Mortarion, his voice the breath of a parched desert wind. ‘I can feel it.’
‘We’ve swept the deck from end to end and side to side,’ reaffirmed Morarg. ‘If there was something here, we’d already have found it.’
‘There’s still one place to look,’ said Mortarion.
Morarg followed the primarch’s gaze.
‘The gene-vault?’ he said. ‘It’s void-hardened and energy shielded. It’s a wonder the damn Apothecaries can get in.’
‘Do you doubt me, Caipha?’ whispered Mortarion.
‘Never, my lord.’
‘And have you ever known me to be wrong in such matters?’
‘No, my lord.’
‘Then trust me when I say there’s something in there.’
‘Something?’
Mortarion nodded, and he canted his head to one side, as though listening to sounds only he could hear. The muscles in his face twitched, but with the gorget obscuring his jaw, it was impossible to be certain what expression he made.
‘Open the door,’ he ordered, and a gaggle of hazard-suited Legions serfs ran to it with pneumatic key-drivers and one-time cipher code wands. They inserted the power-keys, but before any were engaged, a green-cloaked Apothecary approached Mortarion under the watchful gaze of the Deathshroud.
‘My lord,’ said the Apothecary. ‘I beg you to reconsider.’
‘What is your name?’ asked Mortarion.
‘Koray Burcu, my lord.’
‘We have just breached Molech’s system edge, Apothecary Burcu, and there is an intruder aboard the Endurance,’ said Mortarion. ‘It is behind that door. I require you to open it. Now.’
Koray Burcu wilted under Mortarion’s gaze, but to his credit, the Apothecary stood his ground.
‘My lord, please,’ said Burcu. ‘I implore you to withdraw from the apothecarion. The gene-vault must be kept sterile and at positive pressure. This entire stock of gene-seed is at risk of contamination if the door is opened even a fraction.’
‘Nevertheless, you will do as I order,’ said Mortarion. ‘I can do it without you, Apothecary, but it will take time. And in that time, what do you think an intruder might be doing in there?’
Burcu considered the primarch’s words and made his way to the gleaming vault door. Numerous key-drivers turned simultaneously under Burcu’s direction as he wanded a helix-code unique to this moment and which would change immediately upon the door’s opening.
The door split at its junction with the wall and a blast of frozen, sharp-edged air escaped from within. Mortarion felt it cut the skin of his face, relishing the needle-like jab of cold. The door swung wider and the hazard-suited thralls withdrew as the reek of preserving chemicals and frost-resistant power cells tainted the air with bio-mechanical flavours. Mortarion tasted something else on the air, a fetor of something so lethal that only one such as he could authorise its release.
But such things were stored in the deepest magazines, locked away in
vaults even more secure than this.
‘Touch nothing,’ warned Burcu, moving ahead of the Deathshroud as they stepped over the high threshold of the gene-vault.
Mortarion turned to Morarg and said, ‘Seal the door behind me, and only open it again on my express order.’
‘My lord?’ said Morarg. ‘After Dwell, my place is at your side!’
‘Not this time,’ said Mortarion and his meaning was ironclad.
Devotion to duty clamped down on Morarg’s next words and he nodded stiffly as Mortarion turned and followed Koray Burcu into the vault. No sooner was Mortarion inside than the heavy adamantium door swung closed.
The space within was a hundred metre square vault of frost-white and gleaming silver. Shielded banks of gurgling cryo-tubes lined the walls, and rows of centrifuge drums formed a central aisle.
Illuminated sigils and runic inscriptions of genetic purity flickered on brass-rimmed data-slates, and Mortarion extrapolated mental maps of the gene-code fragments. Here was a collection of mucranoids, there a chemical bath of zygotes that would one day be a Betcher’s Gland. Behind them, bubbling cylinders of eyeballs.
Half-formed organs floated in gestation tanks and puffs of vapour from humming condensers filled the air with chill moisture that crunched underfoot in microscopic ice crystals. Koray Burcu claimed the atmosphere within the vault was sterile, but such was not the case. The air vibrated with potential, a thing pressing itself upon the fabric of reality like a newborn in a rupturing birth sac.
Only he could feel it. Only he knew what it was.
The Deathshroud advanced cautiously, and Mortarion sensed their confusion. To them, the vault was empty, no sign of the intruder their primarch said they would find. That they believed their gene-father might be mistaken amused him. What must it be like for a warrior of the Legions to think such a thing?
Much as it was for a primarch, he supposed.
But they could not sense what he could sense.
Mortarion had spent a lifetime on a world where the monstrous creations of rogue geneticists and spirit channelling corpse-whisperers had haunted the fogbound crags of Barbarus. Where monsters truly worthy of the name were wrought into being every day. Had even fashioned a few of his own.
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