Slaves to Darkness

by John French

  He ran his fingers around the inside of his gorget.

  ‘Come here,’ he said, gesturing to Ekaddon.

  ‘I did not–’

  ‘You will do as I command!’ he snarled.

  Ekaddon froze, eyes flashing with cold anger.

  ‘You will do as I command or everything… everything we have done, and everything you dream of, will be ashes. You want to rise? You want to feel destiny set its hand on your head? Then obey, boy.’ Maloghurst held his gaze, hearing his breath rasp between his teeth.

  Ekaddon did not blink, but the anger was vanishing under control.

  ‘When the blood falls, catch it and bear it to the Warmaster.’ He held the black-glazed cup out to Ekaddon.

  ‘The blood…?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maloghurst. ‘You will know when. Touch the blood to his lips.’

  ‘That is all?’ asked Ekaddon.

  Maloghurst grinned.

  ‘That is all.’ He knelt, settling himself in front of the instruments. He drew a breath and heard it rattle as it touched his lungs. ‘Now you might want to step back.’ He closed his eyes.

  His mind sank into itself.

  He felt the fingers of the warp reach from behind his awareness and tug him into its embrace.

  Words burned in his thoughts, old and ancient words that vibrated as they tried to slip the leash of his will.

  His bare right hand found the eye in the jar and brought it up to his mouth.

  This could kill you… came a smiling voice from the back of his thoughts. He stamped it down.

  He could feel his mouth working, his tongue forming sounds as he bit and chewed, but he could not hear them.

  This will kill you…

  He was burning and freezing, falling through infinity even as he tried to fly.

  This could destroy everything…

  The words were threads of fire and darkness in him, sucking in all of his will and sensation.

  But what choice is there?

  Somewhere out beyond the boiling agony of fire and ice, the air in the throne room was twisting, writhing with winds as the substance of being tried to shake off what he was doing. And out further, like the hunger of a black star, was the Warmaster.

  He willed his awareness back into being, felt his left hand rise, felt the athame’s handle in his fingers.

  A final syllable fell into place in his thoughts.

  He brought the knife up and opened his own throat.

  He felt himself begin to fall, black psychoactive ice forming and splintering from his limbs as blood gushed out of his throat. His mind was contracting, becoming a sphere without dimensions, a ball of being bound by rings of burning iron. Somewhere he was trying to breathe.

  Warmth…

  Red…

  Warmth…

  He could feel himself being lifted, though he knew that his body still lay on the floor pouring its life fluid onto the ash-scattered iron. Something huge, something so vast that it did not have edges, was rushing to meet him. He wanted to scream, but he had left his mouth behind.

  The darkness was a wall before him, blank, lightless, extending up and down and to every edge.

  ‘Hello, Mal,’ said a voice.

  Layak

  Sound.

  First there was sound.

  Voices. Words. Whispers. Cries. Songs.

  Layak fell through the sounds, feeling them tear at him, pulling at him as he passed, dragging him back, pleading and threatening.

  Higher and higher the sound rose, never ending or beginning. He heard languages last spoken when the galaxy was an ember in the belly of the universe. He heard pain. He heard sorrow and their anger rolling on, the deep currents of hidden rivers that would never reach the sea.

  Senses rebuilt around his awareness: pain, splintering in its intensity; taste and smell, laden with the grit of ash and the copper of blood; the feeling of his body and its wrapping of armour. Sight came last, rising slowly before his mind as the sounds fell into the background.

  Gossamer light unfolded in front of him, reaching to a vast height, curving into the walls of a circular tunnel. Beyond those walls a starless night turned. Mist flowed around his feet and hid the distance. Angry black-and-red stains bubbled and vanished in the mist. Layak’s mask was burning against his face.

  He turned his head slowly. The tunnel slid against his sight. Distances compressed and expanded as his view changed. The runes spinning in his helm display crumpled as they tried to form. The tunnel looked at once barely wide enough for five men to walk abreast along it, and vast enough that a spacecraft could slide down its gullet.

  He had no idea where he was. He had read of the webway, but those fragments of myth did little for him as he faced the reality of the labyrinth realm. He wondered if the door from Orcus always opened to the same location for all who passed through.

  ‘We should move.’ Actaea’s voice echoed flatly from beside Layak. He whirled, staff spinning in his hand.

  She stood a pace from him. Her hood was lowered and her head cocked to one side, as though listening. Her face was still, her eyes no longer white but crimson from edge to edge. Kulnar and Hebek stood behind her, their heads moving from side to side like dogs.

  Lorgar was there too, suddenly present, as though Layak’s view of the empty passage had been a painting on a curtain that had been pulled away.

  ‘We are forty-five,’ said Lorgar, his voice both loud and distant. Layak turned, his eyes moving over the ash-dusted armour of his own warriors. There were the veterans of the Kalteth, their armour edged in dirty gold taken from the hoards of dead kings. The Unktuth were already forming a circle, their autocannons tracking the coiling mist. The butchers of Gadeth and the bone-hung brothers­ of Grolth were there, moving slowly, as though waking from a dream. For a second, all seemed as it should. Then Layak looked again, counting at a glance, holding on to his recognition of each warrior. Two were gone. Gone so that he could not be certain they had ever existed.

  ‘The crossing claims its due,’ said Actaea. Then she said again, ‘We should move.’

  Lorgar turned in place, eyes glittering.

  ‘Fascinating…’ he said. Lorgar, like Layak, had not stepped into the webway before. He had sent tens of thousands through the breaches into the labyrinth dimension: warriors of his own Legion, World Eaters, martyrs of a hundred cults. But he had never crossed into it himself.

  ‘Fascinating and lethal,’ said Actaea. Her shoulders had hunched, and her head was twitching in different directions. ‘There are… forces here that we should not underestimate.’

  ‘I can feel them,’ said Lorgar.

  ‘Which direction do we go?’ asked Layak.

  ‘The direction does not matter,’ said Actaea. ‘Just the destination.’

  She pulled a shallow bronze bowl from the folds of her robes, cupped it in her hands and turned to Lorgar.

  ‘Blood calls out to blood,’ she said.

  Lorgar raised his left hand. The gauntlet released with a murmur of machinery. He flexed the bare fingers as he drew a narrow blade from his waist. He closed his eyes and breathed a silent word that rocked Layak back on his heels. Black veins bulged across the surface of the primarch’s skin. Lorgar slashed the blade over his palm. Blood poured out and splashed into the bronze bowl. Actaea was hissing words that smoked as they met the air. Lorgar closed his fist. Black runnels squeezed between his clenched fingers. Layak could taste the sorcery shivering through the air. The walls of the tunnel around them rippled. Red lightning flashed in the mist. The bowl was glowing cherry-red with heat. Actaea’s fingers were burning, but she held steady. Lorgar held his fist closed, his face threaded with the black veins under powdered gold. Then he opened his hand and stepped back. The last drop of blood struck the surface of the bowl.

  ‘Speak his name, lo
rd!’ shouted Actaea. ‘Speak it now!’

  ‘Fulgrim, third-born soul of our father, brother in blood, bound in fate, I seek thee!’

  The syllables rolled like thunder. Layak felt the floor twist over as the passage contracted and writhed. Light flashed above the bronze bowl. Actaea was a statue, her mouth open as though she were frozen in mid-scream.

  Silence fell like a hammer.

  Layak could not see the passage walls. A bruise-coloured mist surrounded them, lit by a defuse twilight.

  ‘I see…’ breathed Actaea. She lifted the bowl in her left hand, and in her right she held a spherical bottle of crystal. She poured the blood into it and sealed the top with a silver stopper. Layak felt his eyes want to move away even as he looked at it. The oracle held the bottle in front of her face. ‘The path opens,’ said Actaea. ‘Stay within sight of me. Don’t look back. Whatever you do, do not look back.’

  She began to walk, and the mist coiled in her wake. The Word Bearers followed, eyes glowing in the gloom. Layak heard voices behind him, hissing whispers in alien tongues. Spectral hands clawed and caressed his back. He felt the instinct to turn tug at his will. His mask clawed at his face. Ghost sensations walked up his nerves. Lurid green sparks played over his staff and the wards of his armour. He could feel etheric pressure wrapping around him. It was not an attack, not the constricting coils of a single presence trying to invade one’s mind. It was more like sinking to the bottom of the sea as the light of the surface receded, and the black water became a crushing weight.

  ‘This place is…’ he began to growl.

  ‘Lethal,’ finished Actaea without pausing in her steps. ‘Why do you think that those you send to war in here are blessed as martyrs?’

  ‘Then why use it on this journey?’ said Layak, through gritted teeth.

  ‘Because it is swift,’ said Lorgar, ‘and the only way of reaching where we are going with both stealth and certainty.’

  They walked on.

  Time faded out of awareness. Layak was no longer sure if the moments between thoughts and steps were seconds or weeks. He had experienced the mockery of time under the influence of the sacred realm, but this felt different, deliberate. Designed. He could feel himself shivering and called to mind the words of protection over the predation of spirits. The formulae lit in his mind, but the only answer was a hissing chuckle of words from the edge of hearing.

  ‘You understand what they are saying, of course?’ Lorgar’s voice pulled him back into focus. Somehow Layak had moved forwards, so that he was just to the side of the primarch. Actaea was a red shadow three paces in front of them.

  ‘I do, my lord,’ said Layak. ‘They are speaking in the tongues of the eldar.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Lorgar. ‘And what are they saying?’

  This place… It was…

  He tried to focus.

  ‘That we will die. That we are going the wrong way. That we should turn back.’ Layak felt the sacred agony of his mask bite deeper, the blurred edge of his thoughts sharpening. He could hardly think through the pain.

  ‘Why do you ask, lord? You must understand them better than I.’

  ‘I do, but they say different things to me.’ Layak felt his stride pause. Something in the exchange was wrong. His thoughts were wrong. ‘Do you want to know what they say to me?’

  Layak stopped. The whispers that followed him had vanished. The ghost touch of the presence behind him was gone. He could not hear the sound of his brothers marching in his wake. He needed to look behind. In front of him, the red shape of Actaea moved away deeper into the mist. Lorgar was still there, though.

  ‘What do the whispers say to you?’ asked Layak.

  Lorgar stopped just ahead and turned to look back at Layak.

  ‘They say that you are lost, and that you will die before you see the light of another sun,’ said the face of Lorgar. Layak jerked backwards, his staff rising. The face of Lorgar was splitting, its form dissolving into nothing as it opened its mouth wide to scream silence.

  ‘Kulnar!’ he shouted. ‘Hebek!’

  But the words found only echoes of themselves. He was alone in the mist, and the laughter in the back of his mind was a cry on the wind.

  Volk

  The gunship that slid onto the deck looked as though it had been pulled from the bottom of the sea. Knotted growth crawled over its fuselage. Bulbous scabs bloomed in the angles between wings and fuselage, and hung beneath its chin. Warm steam vented from rust-ringed pores in its belly as it settled into place. To Volk’s eye it looked less like a machine than a clump of diseased coral. He watched it with the targeting runes of his helm painting it in a pulsing amber. He had his boltgun in his hand. Beside him, twenty siege Terminators held position, shoulders hunched beneath missile racks, their bolters levelled.

  Perturabo stood beside Volk, the Iron Circle a wall to his sides. Weapon pods on the hangar bay walls and ceiling rotated and locked their aim on the gunship. They were unnecessary. A fraction of the arrayed might and firepower would reduce the gunship to wreckage in a heartbeat, but an excess of strength had another power all of its own.

  Argonis stood in front of Perturabo and Volk, cloaked and helmed, his sceptre of office in hand. He still had his weapons, but even in the hands of a warrior like the Unscarred that meant nothing. The firepower trained on the gunship was also watching him. Argonis glanced over his shoulder at Volk. The vox clicked as a private link between them opened. Static breathed into Volk’s ears, but Argonis said nothing and, after a second, looked back at the gunship. The emissary had assumed a stone-like silence ever since they had received hails from the vessels that claimed to be of the Sons of Horus.

  The ramp beneath the gunship’s chin released with a creak. Flakes of rust and calcified bone fell to the decking. The autoloaders in Perturabo’s armour cycled. Yellow steam swirled in the space beyond. A shape lumbered into view. Volk instinctively raised his weapon as it emerged into the light. Like the gunship, its form was crusted and spiked with coral-like growths. Scabrous boils the size of a fist dotted its torso. Pale fronds darted from tiny holes to lick the air. Beneath the growth, Volk could just identify the lines of Tartaros-pattern Terminator plate. It was the thing’s head that held his eyes, though. It was withered, the flesh sucked out of its features so that the parchment skin hung off its skull. Its mouth was a razor line slashed across the dry creases. It had three eyes, two lidless and yellow with cataracts, the third a blood-red orb set in its forehead. It blinked with its third eye as it looked at the assembled host.

  Argonis was the first to speak.

  ‘Who are you?’

  The figure did not look at him but turned its head in the socket of its armour.

  ‘The storm spoke and we answered,’ it said. Volk had expected a hiss or a dry rattle, but the voice was surprisingly strong.

  ‘You know who I am?’ said Perturabo.

  The thing nodded, its armour creaking as it shifted posture.

  ‘You are the Lord of Iron. You are the warrior who passed through the Eye’s pupil and saw the truth. You are the breaker and ender of worlds. Yes… We know who you are.’

  ‘What have you done to our Navigators?’ growled Volk.

  ‘We…’ said the figure, shifting its gaze but still not looking at Volk, as though it were not seeing the same space or disposition of warriors as everyone else. ‘We have done nothing. The storm brought us here and so here we are.’ It paused, and then its head turned slowly back like a cog rotating in a machine. Its red eye fixed on Perturabo.

  A murmur of weapons cycling to the point of firing filled the air. Perturabo shook his head.

  ‘The storm brought you?’

  ‘We are of the storm. It is our sire, we are its voice.’

  Argonis stepped forwards, a bolt pistol in his hand. He levelled the gun.

  ‘Your name,’ he growl
ed.

  ‘I was named Khalek,’ said the figure, holding its gaze on Perturabo. ‘I was called the Chieftain of the Hekora. I was called a Luna Wolf, and am now of the Sons of Horus.’

  Argonis was very still.

  ‘Khalek has not been seen for three years,’ he said. ‘His force was lost in translation to Novageddon.’

  ‘And now we are found.’

  Argonis’ finger tensed on the trigger of his bolt pistol.

  Perturabo took a single step forwards, a targeting beam flicking from a shoulder-mounted weapon pod to hold steady on Argonis’ gun hand. Argonis did not fire. Perturabo held the targeting beam still. After a long moment the emissary dropped his aim and stepped back.

  ‘How were you sent?’ said Perturabo to Khalek.

  ‘We are the storm, its sevenfold winds are our sire, and we its children. Where it carries us, we go. We are its voice. It took us from the graveyard of ships in its heart, took us and gave us life again, and so we come to speak for it.’

  ‘The warp…’ breathed Volk. ‘It is… in them.’

  ‘The storm is within all,’ said Khalek.

  ‘What did the storm send you to say?’ asked Perturabo.

  ‘It sent us to make you an offer. There is a throne for you, Lord of Iron,’ said Khalek, and he shivered as he spoke. Volk noticed a flash of red on the paper-dry lips. ‘A throne that weeps with the tears of your enemies. And with the throne, a crown that once on your brow will make the iron of your blood eternal. You are rotting, Lord of Iron. You layer metal on your skin and bind the killing edges closer to you, because they make you feel the strength that is bleeding out of you. You feel this truth. You know it in the fever-tremble of your skin.’

  Khalek’s body was moving, his shoulders heaving, as though the muscles inside his armour were writhing even as his voice held steady. ‘The Sixfold Prince has bitten deep and feasted long. The wound festers within your soul. You are dying. Your iron is rust.’

  Perturabo did not move, but Volk thought that the shadows deepened in the hollows of his face.