by John French
Khalek’s convulsions ceased. His chin was wet with blood.
‘You resist,’ said Khalek. ‘You fight, but that only steals more from you. You seek the Son of Blood, the Dog of Bones snapping in its brass collar. Father Storm sees this – it sees and knows that if you find the Hound of Red Sands, you will die. You are weak, and he is beyond your weakness. He will not yield. He will not obey. He will test your metal, and it will be wanting. The Father sees, the Father knows.’ Khalek took a rasping breath and bowed his head. ‘You can rise, lord. You can be eternal, unbreaking, unbreakable.’
‘Is that the extent of what you have come to say?’ asked Perturabo.
Khalek raised and dipped his head.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Good,’ said Perturabo.
The air screamed. Beams of incandescent energy and streams of rounds burned through the space between Perturabo and Khalek. The warrior vanished. Armour plating, flesh and metal tore into shreds and vapour.
Volk’s visor dimmed to dull the blaze of light. Perturabo was a blur, charging forwards through the flames. The rest of the Iron Warriors froze on the point of firing as the primarch passed in front of them.
Khalek’s gunship was trying to rise from the deck. Thrusters coughed dirty jets of flame. Cannon mounts spun, grinding bone and rust flakes from their fittings. The Lord of Iron struck the front of the gunship as it rose from the deck. He had not had a weapon in his hands; the hammer Forgebreaker still rested in the hands of one of the Iron Circle, but it did not matter. Power wreathed the primarch’s fists as the first blow landed.
Armour shattered. Lightning arced out. The gunship dipped, its nose shattered, oil and clotted blood showering to the deck. A broken gun mount twitched in its chin. Perturabo punched into the wound. An explosion thumped into the air. The gunship burst apart. Shreds of corroded armour spun out, rattling off the shields of the Iron Circle as they surged to their master’s side. The cloud of flame rolled upwards, smoke curdling black at its edges. The air reeked of charring meat and melting metal. Perturabo walked from the fire. Soot darkened his armour. Fire glinted from its edges, and for a second it seemed to breathe in the inferno.
‘All ships engage,’ he said, his voice carrying over the fading roar of the explosion. ‘Make ready for warp translation on my command.’
‘The Navigators…’ began Argonis.
‘We will face the storm.’
Volk’s augmetic eye flickered with a sudden cascade of tactical data.
‘Lord, they are launching boarding craft and torpedoes.’ Volk blinked, his eyelid closing over the metal sphere of his right eye. It did not interrupt the flow of command data. ‘There are hundreds of them…’
‘Launch interceptors, all squadrons,’ said Perturabo, halting in his stride, suddenly still. His gaze was hollow. ‘Burn them from the void.’
Eight
Maloghurst
He opened his mouth to scream.
Dust… He could taste dust… and the smoke of campfires.
He tried to stand… and realised that he was already standing.
He turned and looked at where the voice had come from.
Horus Lupercal stood next to him, hands resting on a balustrade of white marble. The engine fires of starships marked the night sky above them. Lights twinkled on the dark plain beneath the high balcony they stood on. A wind stirred the flames of a torch that burned in a bracket beneath them.
‘Lord…’ began Maloghurst.
‘What are you doing, Mal?’ asked Horus without looking up.
Maloghurst was about to speak, but then paused. He looked around. He touched the stone of the balustrade. It was hard and unyielding. He looked at his gauntlet. Grey-white ceramite encased his fingers.
‘You should not be here,’ said Horus.
‘Where is here, my lord?’
Horus straightened, a frown darkening his features for a second. Maloghurst realised that the primarch was arrayed not in the storm-green of the Sons of Horus, nor the black of the Master of the New Imperium. His armour was the white of days long past, the white of the Luna Wolves.
‘It is Ullanor, Mal,’ said Horus. ‘Can you not see? It is Ullanor, and tomorrow my father will do me great honour.’
Maloghurst looked up at Horus. The face was just as… No, it was not. It was somehow stronger, untouched by the concerns that had been there on the eve of the triumph. It was Horus serene, the image of what should have been rather than what was. He watched as the night filled the quiet of the plain, and he stood alone.
‘Warmaster…’ breathed Horus. ‘I am to be called Warmaster, Mal. Tomorrow, here, in this place, my father will pass command of the Great Crusade to me.’
Maloghurst blinked. The sensation of the wind on his skin felt real. Very real. Like the edge of something sharp pressed into his skin.
‘He says that He needs to return to Terra. There are matters that He needs to attend to. Matters…’ The word slid out and peeled away in the wind. ‘He takes Rogal with Him.’
‘Sire…’
‘Total command, complete authority to conquer by my own hand or others. Such an honour, Mal, such a show of trust…’
‘Sire, I am not here–’
‘Then why does it feel empty, a task unfinished to be tidied away?’
Maloghurst stepped closer.
‘Lord, this is not real. Ullanor was long ago. There is not much time…’
Horus’ head swung around. The dark sky shuddered to red dawn and then to brilliant blue. A burning sun arced across the sky. The plain of lights became a sea of faces and the flash of armour. The balcony shook with the tread of Titans. War-horns blared, the sound driving away the wind. The might of mankind marched and cheered as the sun raced into darkness, and the stars lit red in the returned night, and Horus was no longer clad in grey-white but loomed, a darkness given form by the glint of edges and the fraying of shadow.
‘Maloghurst…’ breathed the Warmaster, his voice rolling and blending with the cry of war-horns.
Maloghurst stepped back. The air was gone from his lungs. Heat was scorching his flesh. Pressure squeezed his bones. He could hear laughter, high and shrill, piercing his mind. Then the Warmaster was turning away, black against a sky that rolled with red thunder clouds.
‘You send this shade? What mockery do you make of yourselves?’
And he laughed, though Maloghurst heard the hollowness in the thunder.
Horus’ armour was still the grey-white of the Luna Wolves, but now it was streaked with soot and blood. The balcony was gone, the ground beneath him the grey granules of a city made ash by a firestorm.
‘Lord,’ he called. ‘Lord, listen to me. I am Maloghurst. I am your servant.’
Horus turned his head. Maloghurst almost fell.
‘You are a lie. No one is here. This is the wasteland of the gods.’
Horus looked up, and suddenly his presence seemed to shrink, to become something closer to a man. The shadows drained into the features of his face, the buzzing heat of his presence cooling. The red clouds and the spirals of ash froze. He looked at Maloghurst, and where there had been fire, Maloghurst thought there was now pain in the primarch’s eyes.
‘Mal?’
‘It is I, lord,’ said Maloghurst.
‘But you cannot be here…’
‘Lord, do you remember the Vengeful Spirit? Your wound…’
But Horus was shaking his head.
‘The Vengeful Spirit was long ago,’
‘No, sire,’ said Maloghurst. ‘It is now. At this moment you sit on your throne, and I am there with you. Do you not remember?’
‘Remember…’ said Horus. ‘I remember everything. I remember the earth turning under the first plough. I see the first sword rise from the quench water. I hold the ember of the dying sun in my hand.’
‘You
were wounded…’
‘The wolf bit deep but not deep enough. A scratch, a reminder that even my brothers still have teeth.’
Maloghurst shook his head.
‘It opened again, at Beta-Garmon. You were bleeding. You were–’
‘Dying.’
‘Yes.’ Maloghurst paused. ‘You still are.’
Horus did not reply.
‘Ullanor…’ said Horus slowly, and around them the clouds and ashen wind stirred for an instant and then were still again. ‘Ullanor…’
‘You remember, then, you remember the orders you gave?’
The primarch frowned, and for a second the shadows grew again, veins spidering under skin.
‘Orders? No, but Ullanor waits for me, out there. It waits for me.’
Horus began to walk. The ash was silent under his tread, the grey distance reaching before him.
Maloghurst felt his own thoughts swirl.
Ullanor waits for me…
Despite all he knew of the warp, and all the steps that he had taken to reach this point, he felt uncertain. Had he really been on the Vengeful Spirit? Was he there still, bleeding on the floor?
He began to walk after his Warmaster.
‘Sire, what is happening?’
Horus looked at him. The distance of the frozen expanse clung to his eyes.
‘There are prices, Mal, prices that have to be paid. I have to go.’
‘You cannot mean…’
‘I am not dying.’ He was still walking. The curtain of ash blurred his shape. The wind gusted back into force. Maloghurst raised a hand as burning embers stung his eyes. He blinked. Horus was a fading smudge in the swirl, moving further away.
‘Sire!’
‘I am not dying, Mal,’ came Horus’ voice, a thread coming from out of sight. ‘I am fighting.’
Layak
The spectre shrieked into Layak’s mind. One of the six eyes in his mask cracked. He roared a name of unmaking. Fire wreathed his armour and staff. The spectre spun past him. It was a nothing, a sketch of a fast movement and a screaming face. It still had claws though. Its touch grazed through Layak as he swung his burning staff. Ice exploded through him under its touch. His skin split and bled. His mind was a spiral of images of voices.
‘You are a pure soul, Layak…’
‘You are a hollow man…’
‘What is your name…?’
His mind called names and formulae, pouring their bladed shapes through his memory. Nothing answered. Nothing. He was falling.
‘Your gods have forsaken you…’
‘You were brought only as a sacrifice…’
‘Why do you think they are blessed as martyrs?’
The flesh of his face was burning. The metal of his mask was writhing. The hooks on the inside were teeth biting into his flesh. His staff was falling from his hand. His mind spun and spun without centre. His hands came up to his mask.
‘Who were you?’
‘You must have been someone once…’
‘I am no one.’
The mask came free in his hands. Blood poured from the clawed ruin of his face. The mist was a wall pressed against his eyes. The fire wreathing his armour guttered.
‘Now,’ said a distant cry on the wind. ‘Now you really are ours.’
He looked up. A face was looking down at him. It was young but made strong by gene-alchemy rather than time. A single black flame marked each of its cheeks. The eyes were dark. Ash-grey armour ringed its neck.
‘I do not know who you are,’ he gasped in a voice that did not sound like his.
‘Oh, but you do,’ replied a figure. ‘I was born within the light of the star that shines on Terra. That light… It used to come through the viewports, when the station came out of eclipse.’
Layak listened, frozen in place by the figure’s words.
‘Even through all the dust and grime, you could see the light. They used to say that it was dangerous, that if the film on the crystal was damaged that the light would kill… It didn’t matter. What was dying compared to seeing that light? I was alone then, a child growing to a man without memories of those that made me, just the instincts that had kept an innocent soul alive in a void-bound city of rust.’
‘Be silent,’ he snarled, tasting the weakness of the words even as they came to his tongue.
The grey-armoured figure did not move, its face tranquil. Layak could not look away. That still gaze was the world, the words louder than thoughts, softer than ash.
‘They found me. I was the last alive. They asked me if I believed in gods. Gods… They had come because of the gods. The gods were everywhere. There were the shrines at every passage junction piled with offerings – scraps of cloth, bright strings of pressure washers, tiny bones. Under the rubbish you could see the gods. They were made of old glass, dusty metal and wires. There were hundreds of them. Cal’dur’ha, the Giver of Breath. Su’nesh Janek, the Lady of Lightning. Vol’Teon, the Beginner, and so on, their names gibberish, but their power total. Their priest-gangers rattled with amulets. You could hear it when they came for a killing. Sacrifice, they called it, but it was just murder. The only thing I could remember from before I was alone was a priest-ganger with a star inked on his face and a pendant of blood swinging from a cord on his knife arm…’
Layak thought he saw images flower with the words, fractured, stained-glass visions of a boy who lived in shadows.
‘All of that ended when they came. Everything became fire, and the gangers screamed as they burned. They found me because I came out of hiding to watch the gods burn. I was weeping. They saw me. I did not run. They were huge. Giants in grey with fire in their fists. They did not kill me, even though they had killed everyone else. They asked me why I wept.’ The figure reached out a hand, the fingers open, as though to run them over Layak’s cheek. ‘I told them. They took me with them. They changed me. They remade me. And I saw the true light of the sun, and burned false gods. I was given purpose, and I found myself in the flames. I had the truth and that was all that mattered.’
‘I do not…’ gasped Layak. He was a creature of control, his world built of power, but in that moment he felt flayed, his mind empty of the will to resist. ‘I do not know you.’
‘No,’ said the figure. ‘You are a slave. A bearer of an empty name, a creature where once there was a man. It would be kind to say that this is a blessing, that you will have peace.’ Layak could see through the fingers. ‘But I was never kind, was I?’
A silver dagger sliced through the spectral figure’s throat. Blackness boiled through it. It slid backwards, bulging and billowing like smoke caught in a gale. A high shriek rose, ululating as it echoed and echoed.
A real, physical hand came out of the mist and grabbed Layak’s arm. He rose, muscles responding before his mind had formed the judgement. He looked up into the blank gaze of Hebek as the blade slave pulled him to his feet.
‘Move!’ said Actaea.
His blade slaves stood to either side of the oracle. She still had the crystal bottle in her hand, but she was turning her head, scanning the mist with blind eyes. The silver dagger in the other hand was tarnishing as he looked at it.
His staff was still in his hand, his mask in the other. He looked at Actaea.
‘It is all right,’ she snapped. ‘I can’t see your precious face, remember?’
He brought the mask up, and it clamped back into place.
‘Phantasms,’ he snarled, as his thoughts reformed.
‘Follow, fast,’ said Actaea. She began to run. Layak followed, pacing the woman after only two strides.
‘Where is the primarch?’ called Layak.
‘Where we all are, Hollow One,’ she said, panting. ‘Lost.’
Volk
The Lightning Crow speared into the dark. Volk’s helmet display lit wi
th target runes. The oncoming swarm was a pulsing cloud of threat markers. Beyond them the dust seemed to coil and billow. Ochre and emerald clouds folded into ghost faces, eyes shining with the fire of withering stars. Warships surrounded the Iron Blood’s fleet in a loose cage. Volk’s tactical feed registered twenty-five, and another ten ghosted at the edge of auspex range. Scabs of crusted growth hid what form they had once possessed. Some were fusions of craft, hulls welded together by metal that had grown through them like cancerous bone. Others had flowered with bulbous tumours that nested gun emplacements in open cysts. And all of them were vomiting ordnance and assault craft into the void.
‘A lot for us to kill,’ Argonis’ voice crackled over the vox. A glance over Volk’s left shoulder found the emissary’s interceptor outlined in blue, synchronised squadron data spinning in a halo around it. The craft was a Xiphon, smaller and faster than Volk’s Lightning Crow, but with a smaller payload. And 786-1-1 was fully armed. The magazines of the Legion might be almost drained, but if they did not survive this engagement then it would not matter how few bullets they had left.
‘Let’s hope you are still as good a killer as you were,’ said Volk.
‘And you, brother,’ said Argonis. Volk blinked at the blank sincerity in the words.
Volk had not been ordered into the fight, but he did not need to be. He was a warrior and before anything else he existed to fight. Perturabo had not commented on his choice. He was not sure if the primarch even thought of it as an important detail. He had been pulling himself into his strike fighter when Argonis’ voice had clicked in his helmet vox.
‘I will have your shadow, Iron Talon,’ he had said, the old call sign an evocation of a time that existed now only in memory.
‘As you will,’ Volk had replied.
In the void, Volk felt the roar of engines tingle down his spine as they pushed to the edge of the engagement envelope. Dozens of other craft were expanding out from the Iron Warriors ships to meet the enemy swarm. The warships were coming about, locking into a diamond formation, guns charged but not yet firing. At the edge of Volk’s helmet display, a timer was counting down to the warp translation.