Slaves to Darkness

by John French

  ‘Your reward–’

  ‘Power is risk, is it not, lord equerry? I risk that you might prove less subtle than your reputation, and then we both…’ He paused, the grin still in place. ‘Well, we shall suffer the price. But if you succeed in whatever it is that you are doing, then you will need those you can trust, those that have served you. What is the point of making demands now? My reward is to rise as your enemies fall, lord. That is the way of things. That is the understanding I have. That is what I am agreeing to.’

  Maloghurst nodded.

  ‘You were always perceptive.’

  ‘I am what I will,’ the warrior said.

  ‘Cometh the hour, captain…’ said Maloghurst. The black-armoured warrior held still for a second and then dropped his aim.

  ‘You are late,’ said Kalus Ekaddon.

  Layak

  The platform descended into the waiting dark. Cries rose from the spiral of gantries on the shaft wall. The sky above was spider-webbed with lightning. Forty-seven figures stood on the platform. The Ashen Oracles had laboured over entrails and smoke for ten nights to determine the numbers most likely to be accepted by the doorway, and the most favourable moment for their departure. Lorgar, Actaea and forty-two warriors of the Unspeaking stood with Layak and his two blade slaves. Votive tapers of skin written with blood hung from the warriors’ armour. The rain ran down them, leaving gritty smears on the lacquered crimson.

  ‘Under the eyes of the gods we pass,’ said Layak. The chosen warriors clashed their weapons to their armour. Actaea raised her head, and even though her face did not turn towards him, he could feel her mind fix on him before moving away.

  ‘What do you want, hollow one?’ she had asked in her fane of black stone.

  ‘I want nothing,’ he replied.

  ‘Then why are you here?’

  ‘The gods guide all,’ called Lorgar as the darkness closed over them. He turned his face upwards, eyes closed, black rain running from his gold-dusted features. The cry echoed, the syllables of the words flaking away with each second.

  ‘The gods guide…

  ‘Guide all…

  ‘Gods…

  ‘All…’

  Hundreds of devotees gathered on the gantries wailed as the ritual masters cut the throats of the first in line and pushed them into the abyss. The dying humans fell past the platform. Blood pattered on Layak’s armour.

  ‘Lorgar did not order you to be here,’ Actaea said as he stepped into the shrine. ‘Your question is yours alone, I see it in your face.’

  He had gone to find her the night before their descent into the webway. She was alone in the fane. It was cut into the shaft wall, its lone door ringed by silver-threaded carvings of scenes alluded to in the Book of Lorgar.

  ‘Let none enter,’ he had commanded Kulnar and Hebek as he stepped over the threshold. Darkness filled the spaces within, the only light the glow of his staff and the eyes of his mask. The air inside was foetid and hot. The nostrils of his mask opened to allow him to inhale the scents: decay, blood, sweat and incense. Rot-draped bones covered the floor. Some looked as though they had been neatly butchered, others hacked, a few gnawed. Etched discs of copper hung from the low ceiling on threads. He knew most of the symbols. The fact that he did not know all of them disturbed him more than the force with which they pressed into his mind.

  ‘He did not send you here,’ Actaea said as she turned towards him with her sightless eyes. ‘And he does not know that you are here. So, Eater of Names – most high and loyal servant of Lorgar, most high amongst the blessed – why do you come with questions?’

  Corposant danced on the cables as the platform descended. The lights of the gantries above were growing smaller. The storm-lashed sky was a shrinking circle. Layak listened to the power crackle over the metal. Agony clawed at him from the inside of his mask. He breathed.

  ‘I see your face,’ she said, reaching out with a bloody hand. He flinched back, even though she was too far away to touch him. ‘You were beautiful once. Do you remember?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Do you wish to remember?’

  ‘It is not permitted,’ he said. She tilted her head as though in question.

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘It is blasphemy to know.’

  The platform halted its descent with a jolt. Layak’s sight snapped back into focus, as though he were waking from a dream. His eyes had been open all the while; he could not close them, the lids having long ago been cut from above his eye sockets. He could feel blood crusting on his lips. Kulnar glanced at him.

  Layak felt the slave’s hate boiling behind the obedient query.

  Nothing. Layak formed the words in his skull so that Kulnar might hear. It is nothing.

  Kulnar rotated his gaze back to the distance, and took his hand from the hilt of his sword. The burning cracks on his gauntlet closed.

  The platform swayed as Lorgar moved to the edge. Above, the cables reached up to a vanishing point.

  ‘This is it,’ said the primarch.

  Actaea nodded once.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘How do we proceed?’

  She shrugged. ‘With faith.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, and stepped from the platform, and fell into nothingness.

  Layak walked to the edge. Blood was still falling from the sacrifices above, mixing with the rain as it ran off the grey of his armour. He looked down.

  ‘Is our task blessed in the eyes of the gods?’ he asked Actaea.

  ‘That is not what you came to ask,’ she replied. Eight corpses covered the floor of the fane. Each one had been pinned to the floor at one of the cardinal points of the octed. None of them had died quickly. Blood drained down runnels in the white marble floor. Actaea stood at the centre of the eight-pointed star. Her robes were mottled with a deeper red, the velvet crusted. ‘You are a high priest of this new age of truth,’ she said. ‘Should you not know the answer? But if you have doubts, taste the augurs for yourself, hollow one.’

  She held out a black glass athame. Layak did not take it. Actaea shrugged and dropped the knife. She wiped the back of her hand across her face, leaving a bloody smear across her lips.

  ‘Is the blessed primarch right? Do we serve the true will of the gods?’

  ‘Truth…’ Actaea said and bit her bloody lip. ‘Truth is not what you want.’

  ‘Then why are we here?’ he asked.

  ‘At last, the true question,’ she said.

  Layak could feel the gaze of the other warriors on the platform and the burning glare of Actaea watching him as he hesitated. Somehow he knew that she was smiling beneath her hood.

  He stepped off the edge, and fell into silence.

  Volk

  Alarms wailed through the Iron Blood as it breached the skin of reality. Volk was halfway up the primary spine arterial as the ship screamed. The pulsing blue of warp transition lights vanished. Amber light blinked in time with the klaxon-blare. Volk felt the deck lurch as force slammed through the superstructure. He bit off a stream of invective, clamped his helm in place and began to run aft. Data spun past his sight as his display meshed with the ship’s tactical output.

  Eleven ships had ridden the warp with the Iron Blood, a smaller Grand Fleet than was usual but still a force that could have conquered systems. There was the battleship Defiance, the fleet carrier Strontium Dawn and the three heavy cruisers Stone Breaker, Sisyphus and Trident. The macro-bombardment ship Enyo was a block-bodied shadow to the Iron Blood, her banks of munition launchers retracted behind the layered panels of her hull. Two strike cruisers, the ­Sceptre of Orestes and the Iron Edict, formed the fleet’s vanguard, while a squadron of three frigates, Maiden, Mother and Crone, circled the whole, watchful and swift. All of them had just slammed out of the warp with no warning.

  Battle automata manipl
es folded out of niches to either side of the arterial passage. Scanning beams flickered over Volk, but they let him pass. He quickened his pace. He was alone. No bodyguard or entourage followed him when he walked the Iron Blood’s passages.

  He ducked through an arch. Slab doors slammed open in front of him as his authorisation codes overrode their lockdown. The ship was still juddering, vibrating with engine power and damage.

  He reached one of the primary transport hoists. Pulsing yellow lights surrounded it. He halted for the seconds that it took the doors to open. A hatch opened to his right. He whirled, hand on his bolter.

  ‘Hold!’ Argonis came through the hatch opening, hand raised. The Warmaster’s emissary was fully armoured but without his cloak or sceptre of office.

  ‘Where is Perturabo?’ asked Argonis as he followed.

  ‘With the Navigators,’ replied Volk.

  The door pistoned shut behind Argonis. Volk triggered the command override on the hoist controls. The platform shot upwards. Forces that would have slammed a mortal to the floor shuddered through Volk as the walls of the shaft blurred past. The hoist was covering a kilometre of hull in under a minute. Iris hatches peeled open above them and slammed shut as they passed.

  ‘Where are we?’ asked Argonis.

  ‘Gas drift,’ said Volk, still trying to assimilate the data pouring into his eye from the ship systems. ‘Nothing here except dying stars and debris, dead and empty.’

  ‘Storm forced us out?’ asked Argonis.

  Volk shook his head.

  The last twenty-four hours of passage had been bad. The warp had gusted into a fury, tugging the Iron Blood back even as it sliced onwards. Squalls of weeping and roars and rage had shivered over the fleet’s Geller fields, and the twelve ships had struggled to hold together, but they had ridden worse. All of the Navigators in the Grand Fleet had looked into the Black Oculus; they could thread the eye of the abyss, and storms did not bar their passing.

  The walls of the lift shaft trembled. Lights cut off and blinked back on.

  ‘What caused this?’ growled Argonis. Volk shook his head.

  ‘I am joining the primarch in the primary Navigator enclave,’ said Volk. Above him he could see the green lights of the shaft roof blinking as they sped closer.

  ‘He summoned you?’

  Volk did not answer. The truth was that he had seen little of the primarch since they had broken from Krade. The passage had been filled with solitary training. With ammunition hoarded for true battle, there had been hours with sword, hammer and axe, battering through servitor drones, or locked into the spinning cage of a flight simulacrum engine. Argonis had joined him for much of that training, matching blade and skill with Volk as the Iron Blood rode the edge of the storms. In that time Perturabo had only called for him once.

  ‘The son of Horus…’ he had said as Volk entered his presence. The primarch was working on his exo-armour with a mind-linked mechadendrite cluster. Welding sparks flared. Bolt drivers spun with a high melody. Servo-arms held armour plates, and fine manipulators wormed into the workings beneath. To Volk it felt strangely like looking at a surgeon operating on his own sinew, the skin peeled and pinned back while the razors did their work. ‘He has the arrogance of his kind, but is he true to the Warmaster?’

  ‘Would he have been sent to us if he were not?’ Volk asked.

  ‘Yet it is never the truest lieutenants that are sent on such tasks. Never Abaddon, never Aximand, nor Maloghurst.’

  ‘You think he has doubts, lord?’

  ‘I think he is flawed.’

  Volk hesitated, and then nodded.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said.

  ‘Find out for certain, and if he is, learn what weakness is in his heart.’

  Volk bowed his head but paused as he turned to go.

  ‘Lord, what purpose does knowing such things about our allies serve?’

  The machine array froze in motion for a second, the lightning of the welding torches holding above the metal.

  ‘The same purpose that every deed and life has in this age,’ Perturabo said. ‘As a weapon.’

  The hoist slammed to a stop. Hazard-striped doors pistoned open in front of them as they entered the Navigator enclave. Human screams replaced the sound of alarms.

  A small warship might only require a single Navigator to steer it through the warp. Larger ships, though, required a cluster of them, so that the weight of guiding such a large mass through the immaterium could be spread between them, and in case one of them died or went insane. Such occurrences were not uncommon. For a ship like the Iron Blood, the Navigator presence was a whole branch of a house, or rather it had been. Things had changed after the voyage into the Eye of Terror.

  The Iron Blood’s Navigators had looked into the dark of the universe’s heart. Those who survived had been… altered.

  Volk strode down a corridor lined with seamless brushed steel. Faces carved from green jade and white alabaster decorated the walls. All of the sculpted faces were blindfolded, their jaws open to show carved teeth framing mouths of shadow. One of the Iron Circle stood before the doors to the Navigation sanctuary, but it stood aside for Volk and Argonis with a clank of pistons and a pulse of scanning light.

  Cacophony filled the chamber beyond the door. The light of fire and stars poured in through the three triangular viewports that formed the chamber’s front and side walls. There had been chairs for the Navigators, once, but they were long gone. Cages were suspended between the ceiling and floor. Figures hung between the bars, limbs splayed. They looked human if you did not let your eye linger. Each of them had an iron mask riveted to the top of their skull, its blank surface broken only by an iris shutter on the forehead. The screams were coming from the three figures. Balloons of skin inflated in mutated throats, and openings that looked like gills rippled in between ribs. Perturabo stood before them. He was not looking at the screaming Navigators. He was looking at the void.

  ‘Lord Perturabo,’ said Argonis. ‘Why do–’

  ‘We could not go further,’ he replied. ‘There is a… pressure in the warp.’

  ‘The storms…’ began Argonis.

  ‘Not the storms.’ The Lord of Iron gestured at the Navigators. ‘Those who have looked into the Black Oculus can see the calm in storms. They can see everything, but something blinded them, emissary.’

  Volk realised that the Navigators had stopped screaming. He could hear the thump-hiss of the tubes and machines linked to their cages. In the distance, the ship’s klaxons shouted on.

  ‘What blinded them?’ asked Argonis.

  ‘Fever children…’ gasped one Navigator. ‘Fever children…’

  And then the Navigators were all saying the words, moaning them over and over again.

  ‘Fever children, fever children, fever children, fever children, fever children…’

  Volk flinched as the direct link to the Iron Blood’s command systems began to gush data into his eyes and ears. He felt his hearts kick and his breath still in his lungs.

  ‘Lord, auspex systems are reading multiple ship engine signatures,’ said Volk. ‘Warships. They have lit weapons. They are broadcasting hails…’ Volk paused.

  ‘Fever children…’ hissed the Navigators.

  ‘Who are they?’

  Perturabo must have somehow been absorbing the same information, though Volk could not see how. The Lord of Iron was looking at Argonis. He had gone very still. Not a single muscle moved on his face. The weapon pods on his arms were silent.

  ‘They say that they are of the Sixteenth Legion,’ said Volk. ‘They say they are of the Sons of Horus.’

  Seven

  Maloghurst

  ‘All entrances are sealed,’ said Sota-Nul. Maloghurst nodded an acknowledgement and continued to take the objects he had brought and lay them out on the floor. The tech-witch’s eye-lenses shrank
as they focused on the items.

  ‘Sealed or not, the doors will not hold our brothers out once they realise that we are here,’ said Ekaddon.

  The captain had removed his helm and was watching Maloghurst, eyes glinting coldly as they touched the athame and the inscribed silver coin.

  ‘Then it is well that I have you both to watch for such a possibility, and to divert them if they should grow suspicious.’

  Maloghurst looked down at the ritual instruments. They were relatively few given the potency of what he was attempting: the silver athame; the coin; the small pouch of human skin filled with bone ash; the eye of a still-living man, floating in a jar of blood-threaded oil; red lumps of incense in a small, iron censer; and a black-glazed clay cup. All was just as Layak had told him and as his research had confirmed.

  ‘What is it that you are going to action/do?’ asked Sota-Nul. There was a dry edge to the words that made Maloghurst think of thirst.

  ‘A little late for doubts and clarifications, don’t you think?’ he said, picking up the athame. He looked up, eyes fixed on the immobile figure of Horus.

  The primarch was still, a carven figure on a throne. The light of the stars glimmered behind the dais, distorted by the crackling of ghost energy as the ship slid into the warp. Blast shutters began to fold down over the viewport, an eyelid closing over the sight of the Sea of Souls. ‘As I said, I am going to talk to the Warmaster,’ he said.

  ‘You already tried sorcery,’ said Ekaddon. ‘Tried and failed.’

  ‘Worried that you might have made the wrong bet, boy?’

  Ekaddon did not answer.

  Maloghurst reached up and unfastened the rebreather mask from his face. He opened the jar containing the eye and lit the incense. Grey smoke coiled into the air, carrying with it the scent of spun sugar and burnt hair. The bone ash became a circle around him, the last of it a blessing for his eyelids.

  He had prepared for this for twenty-five hours. Patterns of words and sacred numbers ran through his subconscious.