Slaves to Darkness

by John French

  ‘He is far away, but he would agree.’ He paused. ‘Aximand agrees.’

  ‘Tormageddon?’ asked Ekaddon. ‘What does the creature think? Has it chosen a side? Because that’s what we are talking about, isn’t it. Sides chosen, lines drawn? He wants to use some sorcery to try to what? Revive the Warmaster? And you and Aximand think that the sorcerous ways taught by the likes of Erebus and Lorgar are suspect, and that the Warmaster will recover.’

  Kibre did not answer. Ekaddon grinned, the gesture wide and humourless. ‘You don’t trust me. You do not know if I would be with you if you gave the order to spill Maloghurst’s guts onto the deck, do you?’ He sneered and flicked the knife into the air. It spun as it fell. He caught it, threw it again and caught it in the other hand, then threw it up again, grinning, the knife tumbling and glinting. ‘We are all murderers and betrayers, hadn’t you heard, brother? I have two hundred and seven personal kills between Isstvan and Beta-Garmon to prove that I should never be trusted.’

  ‘This is serious, brother,’ growled Kibre.

  ‘So am I,’ said Ekaddon, catching the knife between forefinger and thumb as it flashed past. He held it steady. ‘I am captain of the Reavers, I wear the black of the First Company. I am bloodied many times over. I have stood at our Warmaster’s side, at your side, and have never hesitated to kill at our lord’s will. What is there that you would question in that?’

  ‘Your… lodge.’ Kibre said the word as though he were chewing something bitter and sharp.

  Ekaddon laughed and turned away.

  ‘It is not a lodge, brother. The days of the lodge have gone, its purpose served. Surely you remember, or perhaps you cannot say?’ He loaded the old words of secrecy with mockery and saw the Widowmaker’s eyes flash. He let his own satisfaction bleed into his grin. ‘We were both there, and we both know the truth now – there are no lodges, no Erebus pulling the strings to his own design. We are all of the one lodge now, and that lodge is the Legion of the Warmaster.’ He widened his grin, showing the black and silver runes set into his teeth. ‘All the rest are dead.’

  ‘Your Cathartidae…’ began Kibre.

  ‘There have always been brotherhoods amongst warriors, even as far back as Cthonia. You must remember that, yes? The Cathartidae do not follow me. They don’t follow anyone. They follow principles – will and strength and power. It’s about the individual, not the whole. You see, it is not even a secret. I would offer to induct you, but I think it might not suit your tastes.’

  Kibre held his gaze steady on Ekaddon’s grin for a long moment and then shook his head.

  ‘I should have killed you a long time ago,’ he said.

  ‘You should have tried,’ said Ekaddon. ‘Then at least we would not have had to have this conversation.’

  Both of them had gone very still. Ekaddon was still grinning, Kibre’s sunken eyes dark and unblinking.

  Then the Widowmaker laughed, the sound like a gunshot, his armoured bulk growling as he half turned away shaking his head.

  ‘Oaths in blood, but you make it easy to dislike you,’ he said.

  Ekaddon bowed his head.

  ‘One of my many gifts,’ he said. ‘But you came here to find out if I would stand with you, if you and Maloghurst and Aximand decide to tear the Legion apart. If you still want an answer, here it is – I don’t care. I don’t care if Maloghurst is right or you are, if Aximand agrees or does not. I don’t care. It’s your fight, not mine.’

  ‘Just like back on Cthonia?’

  Ekaddon shrugged.

  ‘Just like that.’

  ‘If it comes to it, are you with us or with the Twisted One?’

  ‘I stand where I always have, with myself and with Lupercal,’ said Ekaddon, shaking his head. ‘But you, brother… If you decide that everyone who is not for you is against you, then you will have even fewer friends than you do already.’

  Kibre raised his chin slightly.

  ‘Maloghurst says that he is helping the Warmaster, that his designs and sorceries are needed – those words would not move you to think that path worth supporting?’

  Now it was Ekaddon’s turn to laugh.

  ‘You know me better than that, Falkus.’

  ‘Captain Kibre,’ he snarled, but then nodded. ‘And yes, I suppose I do. Just make sure that it stays that way. You have always been a good soldier, Kalus.’

  Falkus Kibre turned and walked out of the training circle, the grinding purr of his armour receding into the shadows. Ekaddon watched the captain of the Justaerin go, and then turned back to the empty circle of the practice chamber.

  He rolled his shoulders, feeling muscle loosen.

  ‘Repeat previous training parameter,’ he said, and heard the control servitors clatter in response. ‘Increase combat servitor aggression to maximal.’

  ‘Compliance,’ said the control servitor. Ekaddon flicked the knife between his hands. Kibre had always been a sharp but straight­forward soul. He had accepted Ekaddon’s answer but had not thought to ask the question that really mattered.

  Fifteen combat servitors clanked forwards. Chainblades gunned to life, power flails and piston spears rose.

  The question was not what Ekaddon believed was right, or who was right. He did not care. The question was, what would give him what he wanted?

  ‘Activate,’ he growled, and the servitors charged.

  Layak

  Orcus was a violated world.

  It had never been beautiful. Once, clouds had swirled across much of the scrubland of its surface. Its seas and oceans had been the sullen black of poisoned wine. Ice had capped its poles, which extended their cold grasp down to touch the mountain ranges with bitter winds. Human colonists had found it in one of the measure­less epochs of Old Night. Orcus was not kindly to its adoptive children. All that remained of the generations who had tried to make a life on its surface were tiny clutches of humanity living in dread of unspecified fears. When the Great Crusade had found it, the iterators had been able to discover that the ragged, fur-clad humans believed they lived on the edge of the realm of the dead, that they were cursed.

  They were right, of course. Looking at the surface of Orcus rise towards him, Layak wondered if the bearers of the Imperial Truth had ever paused to ask themselves if those that they tried to ‘Illuminate’ already saw the truth perfectly. Orcus was a world on the edge of another realm.

  Now it lay amongst the heavens like a shattered skull on the battlefield of forgotten gods. Continent-sized fires had flayed the forests from its surface. Thermic charges had turned the ice caps to steam. Rolling clouds of grey ash were its shroud. The mountains alone remained, clawing at the lightning-threaded murk. Void stations ringed it, and ships laboured through the dust-filled void around it to bring pilgrim warriors to feed its dark mouth.

  ‘Did the burning of this place have a point beyond ritual devotion?’ asked Layak as the grey swirl of Orcus’ atmosphere rushed up towards their descending shuttle-barge. ‘Lord,’ he added.

  ‘It is beautiful, don’t you think?’ said Lorgar. ‘There are those amongst your brothers who have looked on this place and said that they can feel the breath of the gods on their faces.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Layak, forming the word carefully. He had felt strange ever since Lorgar had told him what role he would play in the plan to replace Horus as Warmaster. ‘They are blessed,’ he finished.

  ‘You have never beheld the doors to the labyrinth ways, have you?’ said Lorgar as the view beyond the shuttle-barge’s arched windows became a swirling sheet of grey.

  ‘I have never been so honoured,’ said Layak.

  ‘It is… something. Perhaps it will move even your soul.’

  ‘Perhaps, lord.’

  Lorgar looked at him, eyes unblinking. Layak’s mask contracted over his face. Iron hooks pulled red tears from his cheeks. He returned the primarc
h’s gaze. Besides the two of them, only Layak’s­ blade slaves shared the shuttle-barge’s hold. The space could have held fifty legionaries in full armour, but Lorgar had ordered that they travel to the door between worlds alone.

  ‘Watch,’ said Lorgar, turning his gaze back to the view beyond the ashen clouds.

  The shuttle-barge fired altitude thrusters and its flight levelled out. The clouds thinned. A splintered spike of black stone loomed out of the gloom. The shuttle-barge slewed around the finger of stone. Stablights lit on its hull and sliced down. Suddenly, the clouds around them were gone, the unbroken layer above seeming like a lid nailed over the sky. Clear air dropped away below. Flashes of lightning revealed the sheer flanks of black mountains rising around them as they dropped lower. Black rain fell in an unending deluge.

  The shuttle-barge turned, passing between two cliff faces. Layak caught the glimmer of fires burning somewhere in the wide bowl beyond. The craft cleared the gap between the mountains.

  And the ground fell away, and kept falling. Despite himself, Layak felt a jolt of vertigo. Blackness extended in front of his eyes, down and down without end.

  A wound lay open in the skin of the planet. Explosives and stone burners had scooped away half a mountainside, leaving a tapered shaft wide enough to swallow a battleship. Fused crystals glittered in the smooth walls. Huge metal gantries spiralled down the hole. Webs of girders and cables held them to the glass-smooth rock. Torch towers dotted the gantries, streaming white-hot flames into the rain-laden dark. The corpses of sacrifices hung from chains beneath platforms. The structures that covered their tops looked to have been made from the flesh of the mountain: temples, armouries, storehouses, all of their roofs scrawled with words incised into the black stone.

  But Layak could see that the darkness descended far below the deepest structure. As he watched, lightning earthed on the wall of the shaft and whipped down its walls. For a second he had the impression of a tongue flicking out of the mouth of a great beast.

  The shuttle-barge fired thrusters to hold station above the drop, then began to descend. The torch towers breathed blue-hot flames in salute. The buildings on the gantries grew larger, and Layak realised that the abyss beneath them had stolen their scale. These were fanes and muster halls that could house maniples of Titans, or tens of thousands of troops. This was a way-station on the road to the alien dimension known as the webway. War machines, soldiers and materiel came here, were blessed by the priests of the primordial truth and then went down into the dark of the labyrinth realm.

  The breach into the webway had not been made by the Word Bearers. It was old, a remnant of a war between ancient races now long dead. But the gods remembered, and their daemons had guided Lorgar to Orcus, as well as to other worlds where the doors between worlds could be forced open again. Some gates had been drowned under oceans. Deserts and the bones of dead cities had surrounded others. Alien jungles had grown up around the door on Lasil X, strangling it in metre-thick creepers. On Orcus the doorway had waited in darkness, far beneath the light of the land above – waited and dreamed strangeness into the world. Then Lorgar had found it, and his servants had bored a hole through mountains straight into its mouth.

  Layak realised that Lorgar was watching him as they slid down to the lowest platform circling the shaft.

  ‘Magnificent, is it not?’ said the primarch.

  The shuttle-barge jerked as its landing thrusters fired. It slewed around and settled onto a wide platform jutting from the shaft wall. The doors down the side of the barge hinged up. Wind gusted in, carrying the smell of rain and ash. Layak expected to see a waiting throng of supplicants on the landing pad – such things followed Lorgar like a shadow – but instead there were just ten figures, swathed and hooded in crimson, standing in a semicircle. Raindrops hissed a metre from them, exploding to steam in mid-air. A heat haze shimmered around them, blurring and folding their shapes. Some were tall and rake-thin, others squat and bulging beneath their robes. Some seemed almost human. All blazed in the rune-spun sight of Layak’s mask. Whispers of countless languages breathed in his ears as he looked at them. For the first time in a long time he felt himself pause.

  They were the Oracles of the Ashen Saint. All of them were sacred augurs who revered the Blessed Lady and who read the tides of the warp. They existed under the protection of the primarch and were esteemed almost as highly as the Lost Saint of the Pantheon. Few amongst the Legion had ever seen the Weeping Ones, as some called them. Layak had never encountered them himself and had thought them an indulgence of sentiment. Now he realised he had made an error.

  The crimson ten bowed as Lorgar walked towards them. All other mortals would have knelt and pressed their faces into the wet stone of the platform. These simply hinged their cowled heads down for three heartbeats and then raised them again.

  ‘Holiness,’ said a voice from amongst the ten. It sounded female to his ears, but cracked and folded with harmonics that made the wards etched into the inside of his armour burn. ‘Your coming was breathed into the blood of the dying, and your will is writ on the storm’s light.’

  ‘Favourable omens,’ said Lorgar.

  ‘Omens good and ill are all the same when seen from eternity.’

  Lorgar gave a small smile.

  ‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘I do not recognise your voice. To whom do I speak?’

  The figure did not answer but turned her hooded head towards Layak. He felt himself tense.

  ‘You bring your hollow man with you,’ said the voice.

  Layak felt his mask’s inner hooks bite and its silver fangs lengthen like a predator snarling at a rival.

  ‘He will be my companion as I cross the threshold.’

  ‘What do you seek?’ asked the hooded figure, looking back to Lorgar.

  ‘I seek my lost brother. I seek the angel of excess that was Fulgrim.’

  The crimson ten hissed, heads swaying beneath red velvet. Ghost auras flared from them in Layak’s sight, shimmering in grey confusion and blue fear. Some raised their arms. Layak glimpsed long fingers and parchment-white skin.

  ‘The Chosen of Perfection…’ said one of the tallest of the figures. Its voice was high and brittle, like the scratching of glass edges. ‘To walk such a path… To begin it…’

  ‘I know that only a few may pass on such a journey. That is why I bring only a few. I have read the augurs too. I will need a guide.’

  ‘Of course, Lord Aurelian,’ said the figure that had first spoken, and it raised its hands to drop its hood. The head beneath was shaved bare, the features young, female and unmarked by scars. Soot tattoos ringed her eyes and flowed down her cheeks in ragged tears. And the eyes themselves were cataract-white. Power burned from them. Layak realised she was blind.

  There was a pause as the two faced each other.

  ‘I do not know you,’ said Lorgar, and Layak thought there was doubt warring with certainty in the primarch’s voice.

  ‘How can even you know all that serve at your will?’ said the blind woman. ‘I am called Actaea. I am the oracle of this door. I will walk with you and be your guide.’

  Layak felt as though Lorgar would dispute it, but then the moment faded and he nodded.

  ‘We are blessed,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Actaea. ‘It has not been written.’

  Volk

  Perturabo watched the flow of cold data from the heart of the Iron Blood. Screens hung from the ceiling around him. Tactical information scrolled across them in an endless cascade. These were not displays that turned details into maps and readouts; this was primary data from across the Iron Blood’s fleet. Engine outputs, gun charge readiness, position error margins, crew status – all of it was passing over the screens undiluted and unmediated. Perturabo had been absorbing it all for an hour, only his eyes moving. Occasionally the arrangement of the screens would alter, but the Lord of Iron remained
still at their centre. His Iron Circle automata surrounded him in a loose ring. Green sensor beams flicked from their eyes, washing back and forth over their surroundings.

  Volk had come from the surface after his final ground action on the slopes of the mountain. Trench dirt still clung to the scratches in his armour, at odds with the sterile surroundings. He had stood in the Iron Blood’s strategium only once before. Then, as now, he was struck by the quiet. Others, who saw the Legion as the breakers of fortresses and heard the Iron in their name as the roar of cannons, would have been surprised at the peace of this place.

  The chamber was circular, its floor tiered so that the banks of system controls rose from the open space at the centre to a domed roof of bare metal. Hundreds of servitors sat in cradles of tubes and wires, their skin grey from years spent in perpetual gloom. Black-uniformed serfs moved silently amongst them. Here and there, tech-priests in white robes bent over control panels, metal hands clicking softly as they tapped keys and adjusted dials. All of them carried out their tasks with barely a word. The chamber was buried deep in the Iron Blood’s hull, its corridors watched by slaved gun nests and cybernetica maniples.

  On other ships the place of command would have been the bridge. The light of stars would have fallen through huge viewports, but not on the Iron Blood. Even before the first engagements of the war, Perturabo had kept the interior of the ship sealed from the view of the void beyond. Part of that was purely practical: viewports were points of weakness in the hull and afforded no advantage in battle. Their absence also focused the mind. Everything that you need to see is before you, it said, let nothing distract you from it. The last reason, Volk suspected, was a lesson taught by siegecraft and re-taught by the last decade of fighting warriors who possessed the same base capabilities as the IV Legion – a typical bridge, high on the hull of a ship, was too easy a target.

  ‘All elements are in place,’ said Perturabo, his voice low but carrying across the chamber. ‘Begin the first phase.’

  ‘By your will,’ came the reply from the serfs. The hum of control systems blended with the murmur of the crew passing orders. The vibrations of the ship were a base note that rose through Volk’s feet. He had tried to read and collate the data passing before Perturabo, but he had eventually had to admit defeat. There was simply too much. He had risen through the Legion’s hierarchy and passed through layers of mental conditioning that allowed him to function at levels of tactical complexity that would break most mortal minds. But this was like trying to drink from a waterfall. He could read generalities and hazy impressions of the reality in the void outside the ship, but that was all.