Slaves to Darkness

by John French

  ‘The gods–’ he began.

  ‘You call them gods and the title serves, but they are just an expression of truth. It does not matter if we kneel to it, if we offer prayers, or if we loathe it and despise it, the truth is eternal and claims all.’

  ‘You are a heretic!’

  Kulnar and Hebek had put their hands on the hilts of their swords.

  ‘No,’ said Actaea, unmoving. The blade slaves paused in their movement. ‘I am the part of your soul that is missing, Hollow One. The part that wonders why Lorgar despises you yet keeps you close, that wonders why you have no real name but chose one from a book – why you are a slave who does not even know what master holds his chain.’ Actaea shook her head. ‘What?’ she said. ‘Do you think that you should kill me?’

  ‘I have done more for less cause,’ said Layak.

  ‘Yes, at least that is not a lie. You cannot kill me. You are already lost, and you need me just to survive in here. And you should not think that this truth-speaking is a weakness – it is a necessity. The webway is not a labyrinth of tunnels, it is a labyrinth of the mind. It listens, it breathes in the secrets from those that walk its roads. The same path walked by different souls will lead to different places. Maps here do not mark branches and turns. They mark the shape of the soul that would reach its destination.’ She grinned. He noticed that her teeth were polished points of silver. ‘Why do you think that you and your brothers became lost? You are hiding things from yourselves. All of you.’

  ‘There are spirits in here,’ said Layak, shaking his head, ‘powerful and unbindable.’

  ‘Those that have been lost to the roads,’ said Actaea, ‘souls who will never leave.’

  ‘More ghosts,’ growled Layak.

  ‘This is a realm of ghosts, Hollow One. You should feel at home.’

  Layak was about to snarl a reply when a sound breathed across his senses.

  He raised a hand.

  ‘Do you hear that?’ said Layak. Kulnar twitched beside him. Hebek hissed something that might have been a word if the mouth speaking it had had a tongue. Actaea froze. Her face creasing into a frown.

  ‘I hear nothing,’ she said.

  Sound in the webway was flat. The clink of their weapons did not echo, and the buzz of their power armour had no depth. Layak turned slowly, aware of the itching in his nerves where the phantom had slid its hand through his flesh and armour. The sound came again, breathing from the left-hand path in front of them.

  ‘I heard the clash of swords. Bolter fire…’

  ‘There have been battles in here since its birth, and creatures fight and die in it still,’ said Actaea. ‘Sometimes you can hear echoes of those clashes from halfway across the galaxy and far into the past.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Layak, ‘but that was neither.’ He began to run down the left passage. The existence of the right-hand passage folded out of being. ‘Bring her!’ he called to the blade slaves. Actaea was already following Layak, red robe billowing behind her. Kulnar scooped her up, overtaking her in a single bound. She hissed in anger.

  Layak ran. The mist was pulling back, the tunnel hardening and unfolding in front of him like a flower opening to sunlight. He took a step…

  And stepped into a place of fire and slaughter.

  Volk

  ‘He is healing at a rate that is inconsistent with the standard properties of his physiology.’ The voice was a drone of static and turning cogs. He breathed, tasted iron. ‘I was unable to remove portions of the damaged armour.’

  Another voice, too distant to hear clearly but familiar in tone.

  ‘No closer to rapid regeneration and sinew-fusion, although there has been an alteration to the metallic structure of the–’

  The voice that interrupted remained just out of hearing.

  He could not see, but flashes of orange light bubbled in the darkness.

  Flashes…

  Darkness…

  There had been the light of fire, bright splashes in the black, stitches of bullets and las-blasts in golden and silver thread. He had been riding into the teeth of the enemy, and the heat of his machine around him had been like the red roar of blood. The displays had been red, the pulsing red of warning, of damage, of fire…

  He had…

  ‘What… happened?’ he asked, and his voice was a gurgle and gasp of fluid and cartilage.

  ‘You disobeyed orders,’ said Argonis, his voice now close and clear. ‘You took leave of sense. You came as close to dying as I have seen someone who is still alive.’

  ‘I… cannot see…’

  ‘The remaining biological ocular sphere was lost with the right upper portion of your skull. The augmetic in the left portion is still functional though deactivated. I can reactivate it at your command.’

  ‘Do so,’ said Volk. There were things clicking in his chest like the rise and fall of levers.

  His world filled with static. Pain lanced into his skull and exploded in a shriek of migraine-bright light.

  He did not cry out. The taste of iron was thick in his mouth.

  Ghosts of green-and-blue light blurred into being in front of him. He was suspended upright, the central node of a web of chains, tubes and wires. The web twitched in time with a rhythmic suck and hiss that crept into his ears. Below and in front of him stood a tech-priest. A mass of metallic tentacles flexed in place of its legs as it came closer. Discs of eye-lenses rotated beneath its cowl.

  ‘Perception achieved,’ it droned in its voice of static and cogs.

  ‘What happened out there?’ asked Argonis, stepping closer behind the tech-priest. He was still armoured, and his eyes were hard in his unscarred face. Volk saw the flicker and bloom of armour bursting under the deluge of fire, and then the momentary flower of rupturing fuel cells, fire swallowing the breath of air that fed it. And he felt the heat again, and tasted it against his teeth. It tasted of iron.

  ‘I… do not know,’ he said. Argonis looked at him for a long moment.

  ‘They had to cut you from your craft… What little there was left to cut out.’ He paused. ‘I have seen kill-frenzies before, seen a human pilot fly through a war cloud of fighters, clawing them from the air until his cells were dry and there was nothing more than air in his lungs to scream in rage before he died.’ He moved closer, looking up, and Volk saw that there was something that might have been pity in his eyes. ‘But you are the Iron Talon, not a mortal strung out on stimms and combat hours until you can’t see what is real. So what happened?’

  Iron within. Iron without. The litany circled him, and in it he heard an answer. Iron has one desire, it said. It dreams of whetstone and rasp. It lives to be a killing edge.

  Volk tried to shake his head but could not. The tech-priest skittered closer, adjusting something out of sight. Volk’s head lolled and then rotated.

  ‘Where are we?’ he asked.

  Argonis glanced at the tech-priest, then back at Volk.

  ‘Sarum,’ said Argonis. The tech-priest flinched, looking at Volk and hissing steam. Argonis did not respond. ‘You have slept long, brother.’

  ‘And you wake me now?’

  ‘No,’ said Argonis. ‘You woke as soon as we dropped from the warp at the system edge and came within range of its outer defences.’

  Volk felt the words buzz through his mind. Argonis had placed a weight on them, as though waiting to see how Volk responded.

  ‘How did you know when I woke?’ Volk asked.

  Argonis gave the slightest shrug, the smallest shadow of a smile at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘I was here,’ was all he said.

  Volk would have blinked, but his eye was a machine, and he realised that he could not feel his face.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked.

  ‘We survived,’ said Argonis.

  ‘Show me,’ said Volk.
>
  Argonis hesitated and then nodded, glancing at the tech-priest.

  Images and data filled his sight. He saw. He saw the bloated ships explode and burn as they closed on the Iron Blood and its sisters. He saw the rest keep coming, vomiting ordnance at the Iron Warriors until it seemed that they swarmed the stars. He saw the iron-hulled ships grid the darkness with fire, each volley coordinated, measured so that the spinning diamond of ships seemed one entity obeying a single will. The enemy kept pressing, heedless, until the first breaches into the warp opened and the Iron Warriors drove back to the storm. The sensor data blinked to black.

  ‘What did they want?’ asked Volk as the image of Argonis returned. ‘The creatures that claimed to be your Legion brothers–’

  ‘They were not of the Legion.’

  ‘Whatever they were, they must have known that they could not face our guns and prevail. What did they hope to achieve?’

  Argonis looked at Volk for a long moment.

  ‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘When the fleet returned to the warp, the storms had dissipated. Blown clear as though making way for us.’

  ‘The warp… Your broth– The one who claimed to be your brother claimed to speak with the voice of the warp.’

  ‘The Warmaster has harnessed the warp – it answers to him. No other speaks with its voice.’

  ‘After all I have seen of the warp’s hand in this war, I wish that I could hear that and believe it.’

  Argonis looked as though he was going to reply but then gave a shake of his head and looked away.

  ‘Perturabo goes to meet the Red Priests of Sarum at the gates of their realm. I must go to be there.’

  ‘Does the primarch summon me?’ he asked, and then realised that it was a strange question.

  Argonis shook his head. Again the tech-priest flinched and muttered a clatter of sound.

  ‘If you are going with him,’ said Volk, noticing that strength was replacing static fog in his nerves, ‘then I go with you. Get me down from here. Get me armoured.’

  ‘That request falls outside of my current advised parameter,’ began the tech-priest, lens plates spinning several times. ‘Augmetic integration is not complete. Mind interface linkages have not taken. The machine does not bless your animation.’

  Volk laughed. The tech-priest slithered backwards. Machines murmured out of sight.

  Argonis stepped forwards.

  ‘You should see,’ said Argonis softly and gestured at the hissing tech-priest. ‘Show him.’

  The tech-priest hesitated and then began to turn dials on a brass-cased box he took from beneath his robe. The image filling Volk’s sight vanished, so that now he was looking at a cable-wrapped lump hanging in a web of chains. It held the shape of a torso, but only just. Its limbs were gone below the elbow and knee joints. The metal of pistons and connection sockets gleamed amongst the flesh. Servo-arms moved around it like caressing hands, spraying a mist of counterseptic from tiny nozzles. Pieces of blackened metal clung to the flesh in places, fused by bulbous, pink scar tissue. The head was a lump of iron held on a cog ratchet neck. There was a cooked, wet look to the meat of its body, and a film of iridescent corrosion covered the exposed plasteel and chrome. It did not look like a Space Marine. It did not look like him.

  ‘Fit the augmetics,’ he heard his voice say. ‘Bring me armour. Make me walk from here.’

  The tech-priest looked at Argonis again.

  ‘The lord primarch did not–’

  ‘Do it,’ said Argonis. ‘Under the authority of the Warmaster, do as he asks.’

  The tech-priest complied.

  They took his sight away while they worked. There was pain. He endured it.

  He walked from the arming chamber with a hiss and snap of pistons. They had not been able to fit him into a standard suit of armour, so they had desecrated a suit of Tactical Dreadnought plate. It had been Tartaros-pattern, once, but modifications had had to be made to accommodate his flesh. He had begun to heal. They had told him that they had not been able to remove some of the augmetics that they had fitted first; his flesh had not allowed it.

  His first steps had juddered agony through him, but by the time he reached the launch bays, while he still felt pain, the feeling had a different meaning to him. He no longer cared that it hurt. They had given him weapons, a bolter and a chainsword. Neither felt as they should in his grip. He had supposed that was to be expected; his hands no longer had flesh to feel. Another whispered thought, which lurked behind the pain of iron and flesh, said that it was because the weapons had never taken life. They were dead, unbloodied, without a song to sing.

  Perturabo looked at him as he crossed the deck. Ranks of Iron Warriors waited in front of the open ramps of gunships. Volk slowed as he drew near his primarch. The Iron Circle’s targeting eyes washed over him and did not snap away for several seconds. Argonis walked at his side, armed and armoured, the Eye of Horus held in his right hand. Volk began to kneel, pistons hissing, as he waited for the censure to come from his lord’s lips. The primarch gave a single shake of his head before Volk could lower his body.

  The Iron Circle parted as Volk approached, and closed behind him and Argonis as they followed the primarch into the belly of a Stormbird. Only when the gunship was roaring and shivering through the void did Volk break the silence.

  ‘They did not dispute your right to come here, my lord?’

  ‘No,’ said Perturabo, looking away to gaze into the dark. ‘They were waiting for us.’

  Volk heard the words and felt a shiver pass through his piston- and metal-sheathed flesh.

  Ten

  Maloghurst

  He fell through a burning sky. Clouds of fire billowed from horizon to horizon. The ground beneath was broken stone and black, baked earth. There was no sun, just the light of an inferno, gleaming and flowing over shattered fortresses and the bones of war machines. Huge, serpentine shapes coiled through the fire clouds. Lightning struck from earth to sky and then back, a forest of thunderbolts bleaching the scene to monochrome for the blink of an eye. Maloghurst fell and felt the burning wind sting his skin. His robes were whipping behind him. The daemon that wore the shape of Iacton Qruze was just in front of him, close enough to touch. He was not tumbling, he realised; gravity was not pulling him, and he had a feeling that here its touch was no more real than the skin of his own body.

  An explosion blossomed far beneath him, the shock wave a kilometre-wide bubble, the mushroom cloud growing up from the burning ground. The roar of the detonation reached up and the fiery clouds echoed it with thunder.

  ‘Do you hear that?’ called the daemon. ‘That is the voice of a god.’

  A glistening, black sea rushed forwards in the wake of the explosion, flowing over and together, clashing in a red foam. But it was no sea. It was a tide of bodies, millions of creatures, some running on two legs, some bounding like beasts, their armour scorched black but their blood running red as it spilled. As he fell lower, he could see machines striding through the press and churning amongst the slaughter, crushing the dead and the living, their guns firing.

  He recognised the lines of some – Reaver Titans and Baneblade tanks – but others were of designs he had never seen or heard of, vehicles from wars long past or yet to be. He saw a machine shaped like a cut gem pulse, and a wave of cold light shred the armour and flesh from those nearby. He saw a thing with three spindle legs brought down by a blow from an alien creature of chitin and flesh. There were warriors in furs amongst the slaughter, stabbing with rock-tipped spears, slender figures that spun like bladed dreams, humans in blood- and mud-caked uniforms spraying torrents of fire into any that came near. On it went, a slaughter marching to the edge of sight.

  ‘Where is this?’ he called.

  The daemon twisted its head to look back at him.

  ‘Everywhere,’ it said. Then stretched out a hand and point
ed. ‘Look.’

  Maloghurst looked. There, on a hill of corpses, stood a figure in black armour. Even from here, with a world of slaughter laid out beneath him, Maloghurst felt his eye drawn to the figure.

  ‘Lupercal,’ he breathed. He watched the Warmaster swing his mace around him, smashing and breaking as the tide of warriors surged up the slope towards him and were battered back, broken, torn, blood scattering from crushed skulls. A hand of blades the length of scythes tore the life from those that came close enough to feel its touch. Bloody ghosts screamed around him, rising from the slain in red-threaded mist. Now that he looked, he saw how the tide of warriors, machines and fire circled the lone figure, each whirlpool of slaughter a mote in the greater vortex of death. And Horus was not still, somehow; impossibly he was moving, wading across the ocean of slaughter, blow by blow, step by step.

  As he watched, a spider-limbed war machine clambered up over the heaped dead towards Horus. Bright green fire lanced from it, blinding and neon-bright. The beam struck the howling spirits around the Warmaster. White light sheeted out. Figures fell, eyes burned from their skulls. For a second nothing moved, then Horus walked from the strobing core of light.

  He was wounded – even at this distance Maloghurst could see that. Blood glossed his bare face, and his armour fumed smoke. But on he came. The spider machine halted, staggered. Mandible guns shone with building power. Horus charged. The machine screamed energy. Worldbreaker struck it. Lightning crawled out, freezing the instant in slices of white and black. Metal folded and tore. The machine skittered back, kicking chunks of corpse-meat into the air. Horus’ second blow struck down, hammering its chrome torso into the ground. The Warmaster waded forwards to meet the tide of battle as it faltered, and more were falling and his talon was screaming as it pulled the souls of the dead from their flesh.

  ‘You see,’ said the daemon. Maloghurst looked at it, realising suddenly that they were no longer falling but hanging in the heat-tortured air. ‘You see how he is honoured. For others the Lord of Carnage would send an army. But for him the Brazen One makes a realm of slaughter spanning all time. Just for him.’