by John French
‘Targets two-eight-five by three-five-seven,’ said Argonis.
‘I see them. Lock and engage.’
Argonis’ interceptor peeled over. Starlight caught the eagle feathers etched in gold on the black-and-green fuselage. Volk matched the move. It felt familiar, like picking up an old sword. Out here he did not have command of a Grand Flight. All of his brothers had remained on Krade. If they would ever reach the muster at Ullanor he did not know. He should have felt diminished, he knew, but he did not. As the chime of weapon locks filled his ears and the force of his turn pressed into his flesh, he felt suddenly as though something had briefly been returned to him.
Three pinpricks of light sparked in his sight, bracketed in amber. He blinked. A magnified view unfolded in his left eye. Each of the dots was a single craft, all of them several times the size of either his or Argonis’ machines.
‘Three targets, coming in fast, split and cut,’ he said into the vox. Argonis flipped his interceptor into a wide curve that would cut across the enemy craft as they came on. Volk split in the opposite direction.
Hostile weapon locks chimed in his ears.
Behind him the first munitions from the enemy fleet were punching through the sphere of fighters and burning towards the Iron Blood. The fleet’s turrets opened up. Fire gridded the dark. Torpedoes exploded. Plasma painted the night.
Volk’s three targets accelerated. Ragged cones of fire breathed from their engines. They were not evading, he realised. None of the enemy craft were evading. The entire enemy fleet was closing on the Iron Blood and its sisters, shrinking the sphere around them. They could not survive, Volk realised. Even with greater numbers they were running straight into the Iron Warriors’ guns. Whatever kills they took would be bought at the cost of their annihilation. It was a plan that made no sense.
Turrets on the three enemy craft pivoted. Volk slammed 786-1-1 over into a spiralling roll. A storm of las-fire reached for him. He was already spinning. The targets were live in front of his eyes, bracketed between him and Argonis’ interceptor. Target locks chimed in his ears. His finger squeezed the fire control. Rockets blasted from his wings. On the opposite side of the trio Argonis loosed a cluster of munitions and slammed his interceptor into a climb. Volk mirrored him a second later. The rockets ran to their targets and punched the enemy craft from the void. Corroded armour and bond growth vanished in spheres of dirty light.
‘Simple,’ breathed Argonis over the vox, as the pair slid back into formation.
‘Does killing your own Legion give you pride, brother?’
The volume of space around them glittered and strobed with explosions. The running counter at the edge of Volk’s sight was flashing down towards the moment that the fleet would be able to dive back into the warp.
‘You are a fool,’ growled Argonis. ‘Whatever these creatures are, they are not my Legion.’
‘You are so certain?’
‘What are they trying to do?’ asked Argonis, as though not hearing Volk.
Volk was about to reply when the sphere of space beyond the canopy flexed and distorted.
‘Look at the stars,’ called Argonis.
Volk looked.
The stars had gone. The coiled gas clouds had swallowed the dark. Ember-red luminescence pulsed in the murk. And there was no longer merely the ring of rust-crusted warships and the burning swarm of ordnance. There were shadows in the depths. Vast and great shadows. Shadows that moved like the silhouettes of sea creatures rising from the point in deep water where no light reaches.
The Iron Blood began to fire its main guns. New suns burst through the murk. Macro shells struck the void shields of enemy ships. Energies flared, splashing into the dark as multiple shield layers collapsed in a stuttering flash. The rest of the Iron Warriors fleet opened up. Three bloated ships died: torn apart, battered with fire, scattered in flames.
But the dark beyond the flames was not black space. It was a skin. A transparent skin over a black eye looking in. The swarm of oncoming torpedoes surged on through the wall of explosions, burning like a swarm of insects flying through candle flames.
Volk felt heat crawling over his flesh. He was sweating. He could feel the droplets squeezing from his skin. His vision was blurring.
‘You are too weak…’ breathed a voice in his skull that might have been a memory, or might have been his own. ‘Iron Warriors die with the iron in their veins running rust. They die without bullets in their guns. They die as they always did and always will. Like the weak and unwanted children of war.’
But what is the choice? answered a voice in his thoughts, quiet and measured in amongst the storm. We have no choice and never have. We are the tools of others’ conquest. Broken and cast aside when used. We have nothing else we can be.
‘There is always something else,’ answered the voice in his skull. ‘You just need to let yourself become it.’
‘Brother!’ The shouted warning pulled the world back around him. Red lights burned through the cockpit. Impacts shivered through the fuselage. Something hit the canopy. Cracks spider-webbed out from the impact. He was flying into a tumbling wall of debris. His finger was on the firing stud of his lascannons, draining their charge. He could feel the heat of destruction, in his nerves, in his soul.
He realised that he could not stop, that he had been flying directly into the oncoming enemy without being conscious of it. He had been killing. The debris hitting him was the remains of his victims.
The chrono at the edge of his sight was draining down to the time when the Iron Blood would be ready to translate into the warp. He should be flipping 786-1-1 over and burning hard to reach the ship. He should be leaving the sphere of battle. He did not, though. He could not. Something else, something that had been curled in the root of his altered flesh was holding him where he was. He did not want to endure. He did not want to bear the trials that others could not. He wanted to be the truth of what he had always been, what he truly was.
‘What are you doing?’ called Argonis.
The nerve connections to 786-1-1 burned. Missiles and cannons were his fingers.
An enemy craft flicked across Volk’s vision. He fired. Las-fire reached out from him.
Explosion…
Light… bright behind the fever-smear. He was spinning. Engines roared with the exhalation of his lungs.
Volk could see the rest of the fighter screen turning, engines bright as they burned the last of their fuel and ran back to the embrace of their mother ships. He should be with them. He had enough fuel to make it. Enough time.
A voice…
‘Break off,’ roared Argonis in his ear. ‘Break off now!’
Nine
Maloghurst
Silence closed over him like a hand. The red-edged clouds had become featureless black, the sound of the wind an echoing stillness. He breathed and heard the sound fill his ears. He took a step. Cold damp stone met his foot. His armour was gone. He felt rough cloth scratch his skin as he moved. A staff was in his hand, ready to take his weight as he took another step. Pain ran across his back, and he winced as he moved.
None of this is real, said a voice in his head, and then another voice answered. Whatever makes you say that? Just because it does not follow the same rules that does not mean it isn’t happening.
There was no sign of Horus, though. Just the dark and the sound of his own breathing. The sensation was different though. He had just two lungs and one heart.
Mortal again, if only for a while.
‘Sire,’ he called. ‘Horus…’
Echoes answered, rolling out and back into a space in front of him. A cave then, or chamber. He took a step, feeling the damp on the water-smoothed stone and steadying himself on the staff. Horus would be here. He had to be…
Does he? came a thought.
He blinked. There was light in the distance, small an
d cold but light. He moved towards it, slipping and nearly falling on the uneven floor. The light grew. It was not flame or the glare of a stab-beam or lumen. It was a slow-spreading glow that crept along the wet stone. Maloghurst kept his eyes on it as he worked his way across the cave floor until he could see its source. He stopped.
A black pool of water crossed the cave floor, running from wall to wall. The water was so black that he would have thought it an opening into an abyss, were it not for the moon shining from its surface. As he watched, a drop of moisture fell from the roof and scattered ripples over its face. He looked up. The ceiling of the cave was crystal-threaded stone without crack or opening. The pool was narrow, but barred the way to the opposite side, with no path around the edge. He moved to the bank and bent to test the water with his fingers.
‘Are you sure you want to do that?’
Maloghurst jerked up, stepping back from the pool, staff in both hands and ready to strike.
A figure stood on the other side. It was a man. Loose skin hung over withered muscle, and the hair that hung to his shoulders was white in the reflected moonlight. His back was straight though, and the time that creased his face had only etched his sharp, avian features sharper. For a second Maloghurst did not recognise the face, shorn of the genhancements it had worn in life. Then recognition pulled a name from his mouth.
‘Iacton?’
Iacton Qruze shrugged.
‘If you like,’ he said. Maloghurst noticed the figure’s clothes then. A long tunic of grey-white hung from Qruze’s shoulders. Blood stained the fabric. Maloghurst could see the sharp spatters from blade cuts and the dark blooms from deep wounds. A torn leaf of parchment sat on his chest, pinned in place by the broken-off tips of knives. A single word had been written on the parchment in a slashing, spattered hand. ‘Murder’, it read.
‘A warp spirit,’ growled Maloghurst, ‘a conjuring of daemons wearing the skin of a memory.’
‘If you prefer,’ said Iacton Qruze again. His eyes were empty holes, his gaze the blank stare of ancient statues.
All of the lore that Maloghurst had learnt and mastered on conversing with creatures of the immaterium clicked through his mind. He was seeking Horus, to pull his master back into the world of the living. He was walking the paths of the warp now, of dreams and metaphors, and the warp was twisting the task into something older and more deadly. He had to be cautious.
‘You are searching, Twisted One, searching beyond the bounds of your strength and ability.’
Qruze stepped forwards and bent down next to the moon-silvered pool. He extended a hand and slowly touched the water with his fingers. ‘But you can still have answers if you wish.’
‘What is the price?’ said Maloghurst. A suspicion was forming inside his thoughts, but he kept it unformed, the idea hidden in fragments. The subtleties required to lie to men were nothing compared to the deception of daemons.
‘The price?’ said Qruze. ‘You should know that, brother. For where do we stand and what is this water before us?’
‘Cthonia,’ he said, putting a name to the idea that had come to him as soon as he saw the cave walls and the black pool. He looked at the disc of the moon hung beneath the rippling surface. He thought of the Mournival and of the splinters of old customs that had been embedded deep in the Legion for so long that only now did their roots in darkness seem obvious. ‘The door of becoming,’ he said, then flicked his eyes up to Qruze’s empty stare. ‘The toll-taker, and…’ He reached up to his chest, and his fingers found the leather pouch that hung around his neck on a thong. He pulled it free and shook the contents into his palm. The single, shining mirror coin gleamed like an echo of the water-drowned moon. ‘The price.’
‘Are you the one I called?’ asked Maloghurst, lifting up a hand to show the silver engraved coin held between his finger and thumb. It was an old piece of lore from the deep tunnels of Cthonia, given new power by the craft that Maloghurst had learned. The crossing coin, a gift paid to bind a guide to take you through the unknown. Blood and the engravings on it gave the coin a presence here in the warp that was stronger than in reality.
Qruze did not move.
‘You understand,’ he said, the words a statement rather than a question.
Maloghurst looked at the wolf’s head on the silver disc. He tilted his hand and it became an eye, the pupil a slit. ‘My soul,’ he said. ‘All that I was and am and have fought to keep from the warp, while others give themselves to it.’
‘That is the price,’ said Qruze and held out his hand across the water. ‘That is always the price.’
Maloghurst nodded, closing his fist briefly over the coin, then opening it again. The silver was bright on his fingers.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course it is. I understand.’
He tossed the coin into the air. It tumbled, eye and wolf winking as it fell, struck the face of the moon and shattered it. Qruze darted forwards, hand plunging beneath the water to catch the coin as it sank. Maloghurst’s hand clamped around Qruze’s closed fist.
‘I understand,’ snarled Maloghurst. Qruze tried to pull back, but Maloghurst held firm. A syllable of power came from his lips. The cave walls trembled. The water of the pool churned and boiled. Qruze, or the thing that held that shape, was shaking. Boils formed and burst on its skin. ‘I understand,’ he said again and spat a string of syllables into Qruze’s face. ‘Layak placed you here, knowing where the path would lead. This is how you snare me. How you get to sink your teeth into my soul. How you get to place another slave by Horus’ side.’
The face of Iacton Qruze was distorting, the image of flesh bubbling and melting. His jaw cracked and elongated. Black fangs grew. Fur and feathers burst through split skin. Its body swelled, muscle expanding beneath grey flesh. The daemon roared in his face. Spittle and blood spattered his cheeks.
‘You are fallen,’ roared the daemon. ‘You are already fallen. You are already meat on our table. You have no choice. The only question is who holds your leash.’
‘You have no power over me. I gave my soul long ago…’
Maloghurst tightened his grasp around the creature’s hand, the hand that still held the coin, the coin that was the mirror of the real coin that hung around his slit throat in the real world, the coin that was burning into the daemon’s essence even as it tried to let go.
‘I gave my soul to Horus Lupercal,’ he said and spoke the final syllable. The daemon screamed. The coin was sinking into its flesh, burning and charring skin and bone. Maloghurst released his grip and stood.
The daemon twisted beside the pool, then went still. Its jaw shrank. Skin closed over quills and fur. When it stood up, it looked as it had before. Its right hand alone remained blackened and twisted, the skin shrivelled over the claws of fingers. The silver coin sat in the palm, fused with the blackened flesh. The daemon seemed to breathe for a second, and then looked at Maloghurst.
‘You will pay for this.’
‘What is your name?’
The daemon shook its head.
‘You have bound me. What need have you of my name?’
Maloghurst smiled thinly.
‘That I know what to call you. Give me your name.’
‘Amarok,’ said the daemon.
‘And you will be my guide, Amarok, just as you promised but never intended.’ Maloghurst indicated the pool. ‘Lead me to Horus.’
‘You have no idea what you are asking.’
‘I do not care.’
‘Very well,’ said Amarok and bent to breathe on the water. The moon vanished, and now there was just darkness, its surface no longer holding any reflections. The daemon stepped back and indicated the pool.
Maloghurst moved to the edge and then looked up at the daemon. Black spaces looked back at him.
‘Why did you wear this shape?’ he asked. ‘Of all the faces you could have taken, that old fool is
one that means very little to me.’ He gestured at the parchment still pinned to its chest. ‘And his death even less.’
‘We are all old men, Mal,’ said Iacton Qruze’s voice. Amarok smiled and gestured at the pool. ‘After you, my master.’
Layak
‘This place is an abomination!’ snarled Layak. The paths before him branched and curled away like the insides of a conch shell. They had stopped running a length of time ago that he was not certain he could judge. They had moved through spaces that he was certain were larger, vast and echoing places that pressed down on his senses even through the concealing mists. Gravity obeyed a simple perverse law: down was whatever surface you were standing on.
‘Or it could be seen as a marvel,’ said Actaea. She still had the crystal bulb of blood in her hands. Every now and then she would lift it to one of her eyes and press it to the socket. ‘The webway deceives, but is not deception sacred? Do not the righteous need to be tested?’
‘It defies us,’ he snapped.
‘And anything that defies should be torn down? Is that not rather short-sighted?’
‘Your questions are–’
‘Perceptive,’ said Actaea. ‘I would have hoped that one who has amassed so much power under the sight of the gods would value perception.’
‘I value only what serves the gods.’
‘You lie,’ she said and shrugged. She was moving her head from side to side, her face occasionally twitching. ‘Not that way,’ she said, pointing down one of the passages but not moving to take the other branch.
‘I do not lie.’
‘You lie all the time. Your essence begins with lies, and any truth you find is a rarity. You lie. So does everyone. So does Lorgar, but more to himself than anyone else.’
Layak went very still.
She looked around at him and shrugged.
‘I speak as I see,’ she said. ‘That is what my duty is.’
‘Duty to whom?’
‘The truth,’ she said. ‘Ultimately that is what we serve, isn’t it? Not primarchs or emperors or warmasters, but the truth of the universe.’