by John French
Perturabo was silent for a long moment, then released his grip on Volk’s throat, but the warrior remained hanging in the air, the burning grin still in place.
‘What is this that you have brought us to?’ asked Argonis, the words coming dry from his mouth but his bolter steady.
‘He brought you to where he thought he could find answers,’ said the daemon through Volk’s mouth. ‘But his path leads him in a circle down, ever down. No matter how far you try to move away, back you come to the black heart. He keeps finding the answers he does not want to hear.’
The daemon was still looking at Argonis.
‘The courts and principalities of the ether are at war, scrambling over the soul of your Warmaster and his bastard brothers. You are a sharp edge, Argonis. A sharp edge… I know you. I was in your hand when you killed for the first time. Every edge you honed was a song I heard.’ It smiled with the half-metal ruin of Volk’s mouth.
‘Release him, daemon,’ snarled Argonis.
‘You actually care, don’t you? I have no heart for human attachments. Only the severance matters, but you have a murderer’s soul, Argonis. You should not care what happens to this one any more than you cared what happened to the brothers you killed on Isstvan, or the other tunnel children you left bleeding for food before you became the Unscarred.’ It smiled. Molten metal stretched between Volk’s teeth. ‘You should not care, yet care you do. Like a brother.’
‘Enough,’ said Perturabo, and the word echoed over the roar of the molten iron falling from the world above. ‘You are the heart of Sarum. The Red Priests are yours. What they know, you know. So answer me now – where is Angron? How can we find him?’
‘The same way you can find any beast gone rabid – follow the carcasses and the cries of the dying.’
‘That is not an answer.’
‘Come, son of Iron, do not disappoint your father. I have given you many gifts in the long years, but this one thing cannot be given freely.’
‘How long have you been bound here?’ asked Argonis, before Perturabo could speak. Volk’s head pivoted towards him.
‘Since times lost and unremembered, wolf of Cthonia. I was there when the first soul made a tool to take life. I was born in bones sharpened to points and flint shattered into arrowheads. The roar of gunpowder and the curve of the scimitar are my breath and the smile I give to the battlefield.’ Embers breathed from Volk’s mouth. What remained of his visible flesh was black and blistering. ‘Others were born from the first murder, but the first weapon was my mother and the hand that made it my father. And every kill you make, I am with you in the making of. I am the muse of atrocity, and such songs have you made with the instruments I gave you.’
‘Yet you are trapped here,’ said Argonis. ‘I have seen your kind. I have seen the Warmaster summon and dismiss the most powerful of your kin. They do not sit in chains.’ He looked from Volk to Perturabo. ‘This is a thing of deceit, lord. A creature that will barter any lie to be free.’
‘But I do not want freedom, son of Horus.’ Argonis blinked then. ‘I am a prisoner who appreciates that its bars keep others out as much as they keep me in. Freedom is not the price for what you ask.’
Silence fell, stretching, broken only by the creak of Volk’s armour as it strained with growing heat.
‘What is the price?’ said Perturabo at last.
‘Are you set on doing as Horus asks, or are you going to turn aside?’
‘My course is set,’ said Perturabo. ‘Speak your price.’
‘There is a song to destruction, Perturabo. Every blade, every bullet, sings its song in the shadow of our realm. You have been hearing this song for your whole life. All I wish is that you open your soul to it – that you sing your song of obliteration, so that I may hear it.’
‘I will not give you my soul,’ said Perturabo, his voice a rasp of warning. ‘Not you nor any of your kind.’
‘I know, but I will hear you sing for me, son of Iron and Blood. It is not the price of what you ask. It is the consequence of the path you walk. The price was hearing you say that you would not turn aside, and hearing the truth in your words. You cannot give me your soul, Perturabo. You have been ours since life sparked in your flesh.’
Perturabo flicked a hand. The Iron Circle surged forwards with a boom of released pistons. Explosive rounds roared from the cannons on their shoulders. Volk twitched as the gunfire tore into him. His body was distorting with heat now, the armour plates flowing soft, the flesh glowing like unquenched steel. Within, he watched and heard every word coming from his lips, but he was not listening. He could hear the sound of eternity roaring around him.
‘Deluge,’ said the daemon. ‘You will find what you seek on Deluge.’
Perturabo turned and stepped towards the door they had come through.
‘He is not your brother any longer,’ said the daemon, ‘any more than the serpent-child fool that was Fulgrim is anything other than an echo of the being you knew. They are slaves, chained to the power that remade them.’
‘Give me back my son,’ said Perturabo, his voice low, his eyes unblinking. ‘Or I will shatter this prison that keeps you free from the tides of your master and vile kin. You talk too much, creature. You do not wish freedom from your chains. You want to keep the freedom from the god that would claim you. Give me my son.’
The daemon was silent. The air shimmered around Volk’s body.
‘I am not going to give him back to you,’ said the daemon. ‘I am going to give you a weapon. There are betrayals still waiting for you, Lord of Iron. Other brothers that will turn on you as Fulgrim did.’
‘Who?’
‘Not Angron, not any who are shackled to the gods. Mortal treachery cuts deeper than that of gods, for what promises did gods ever make that they can betray?’
Volk’s body dropped to the rocky floor, a jumble of half-melted metal and cooked meat.
‘Do you know what a weapon is, Perturabo? It is a question. Hold a knife against a throat and you have to ask – what am I?’
Volk’s body twitched. Perturabo’s weapons loaded and charged with a clatter of ammunition and a buzz of charge coils.
‘You see, for all of the beautiful-terrible things that I have helped mortals create, they are just matter. A knife’s edge means nothing. The bullet is just metal before it leaves the barrel.’
The mass of armour and bubbling flesh began to stand. Somehow a voice still came from its mouth.
‘It takes a soul and mind to pull the trigger, to make a tool a weapon.’ The last syllable was a creaking hiss from charred lips. The figure that had been Volk raised its head, and opened its eyes.
Twelve
Maloghurst
They did not chain him. He supposed that act was a measure of respect. His cell was a complex of rooms in the Black Levels. The vastness of the Vengeful Spirit meant that there were sections of hull that rarely felt the steps of feet, and some that through disuse or old battle damage were left lightless and without power or air. Even with the ship fully operational, the momentum of conquest always left places that it was simpler to seal off than repair. These volumes of darkness were like dead flesh in the body of the ship, he thought sometimes, haunted by the scars of old battles. Maloghurst had used some of these airless mazes himself in the past. There was always a need for places out of sight and mind. Now he found himself a prisoner of one.
They had let him have his amour, of course, but had drained it of almost all power, so that his limping walk was a slow plod. If he, say, tried to smash through one of the armoured bulkheads that closed him in, he would drain its reserves before he even made a dent, and then he would be left with nothing to do but breathe. They had even locked a collar around his throat inside the armour. It was brass, spiked on the inside and, he was told, able to sense disturbances in the warp. If he tried to use sorcery it would drive the spikes into h
is neck until they met in the middle. He wondered where Aximand had got it from.
The deck trembled and kept trembling. Maloghurst paused, counting as the rumbling vibration continued.
Sustained firing, he thought. The ship was unleashing its full weapon manifold.
‘Pride,’ he breathed to himself as he trudged down a lightless corridor. He had walked the entire volume of the sealed space three times in different patterns and had found no possible way out, not even a means of communicating with the rest of the ship. Even if he could, though, who could he trust? He thought of the way that Sota-Nul had left his side just before he had gone to the strategium. A sign of betrayal or a coincidence? He did not know which. But Aximand had suspected something. Poor doubting, fearful and fierce Little Horus… He had always had flaws, but Maloghurst had not expected this.
You were warned, came a thought, in a voice that sounded like Amarok’s.
‘We should talk.’ The voice was a chorus of knife tips scraped over metal in Maloghurst’s mind. Frost spread over the walls and floor, sparkling in the glow of his helm’s eyepieces. A static charge tingle ran over his skin.
Tormageddon stepped into view, its form seeming to coalesce from the dark. Its head was bare, its face powdered with ice crystals. It was smiling the fixed smile of a jackal, sharp teeth white in red gums. Its eyes were clouded pearl, with shattered amber irises and slit pupils. Its hands were empty at its sides.
‘Talk…’ said Maloghurst carefully. The daemonhost halted. Not for the first time Maloghurst wondered at the nature of the daemon he had helped draw into Grael Noctua’s flesh. He had helped create the creature, providing the body in which it could walk the world, but he had not bound it to his will. The Luperci that he had created were creatures of twin souls, mergers of Legion flesh and daemon-thing, hybrids of being. Tormageddon was not that. As far as he could tell, nothing remained of the hosts it had taken. All that remained of Grael Noctua were the traces of his features beneath the daemon’s touch. And the daemon itself… It claimed to be a thing formed from the husk of dead Torgaddon’s soul, a revenant born of the culling of the Legion at Isstvan, from the warp ripples created by that act of betrayal. Was that true? Could that be true? Maloghurst had doubts enough not to trust it, even though Horus had exalted it by placing it in his council. Who did the daemon serve, and to what end? Now more than ever, the question seemed most in need of an answer.
Maloghurst looked around the dark passages. ‘Is your visit sanctioned by the others?’
‘I go where I will,’ replied the daemonhost.
‘I have heard that before.’
Tormageddon shrugged, the strangely fluid movement sending frost dust falling to the floor.
‘Little Horus does not have the means to stop me if he tried.’
‘What side are you on, creature?’ asked Maloghurst. Tormageddon tilted its head, as though in question. ‘You know of what I speak, daemon.’
Tormageddon raised its head, still smiling its needle smile.
‘Your fickle kind will see us lose this war,’ said Maloghurst, ‘will see the Warmaster fail on the point of victory.’
‘Would it surprise you, Maloghurst, if I said I did not care…’
Maloghurst held its amber stare, and then shook his head.
‘No, it would not.’
‘I just want to ask you a question, Maloghurst…’ The voice hissed at the edges, as though it had been whispered by several throats. ‘Why do you care?’
‘The Warmaster–’
‘You are a man who has power, subtlety…’ It moved forwards, raising its hand to trace the remains of Noctua’s features with its fingers. ‘Ruthlessness… Yet you do not thirst for your own ends. You have the soul of a lord and yet bind yourself as a servant… Why?’
Maloghurst blinked for a second, and in the corner of his mind he saw the fire painting the walls of the mine cave with the shadows of the gangers. Laughter pulled mouths back into wolf grins. He smelled the tang of ore dust and cinders, the smell of a home left far behind.
‘For reasons that are my own,’ he said. The daemonhost was watching him, its pupils black razor slits in its eyes.
‘You will do anything to see him win this war…’ it said.
‘You know that I will.’
Tormageddon nodded once.
‘Yes,’ it replied, ‘I do know. The question is, are you willing to let others pay the same price?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘War, Maloghurst. War and murder.’
Maloghurst blinked again, and in the slice of time saw the daemon Amarok wearing Iacton Qruze’s face, the parchment pinned to his chest, the word ‘murder’ glistening wet and red.
‘You think you can bring Horus back, can help him win the war within him…’
‘I can.’
‘Perhaps… But you need to move out from the shadows, and put aside your spider’s ways for a time. Aximand will not let you do as you intend out of ignorance, and Kibre will not let you out of fear. Abaddon is not here to take the cause either way. So you are left here chained in the dark while Lupercal withers in dreams, and you can do nothing.’
He must submit…
‘Is that what you came here for?’ Maloghurst snarled. ‘To offer an observation of futility?’
‘No, I came to see if you would accept my offer to give you command of the Legion.’
The ship shook again in the silence. The recoil of guns and the impact of munitions trembled through Maloghurst as the daemon’s words hung in his skull.
He shook his head.
‘We are a Legion,’ he said. ‘We are the Warmaster’s sons. We do not turn on each other.’
‘Yes, we do,’ said the daemon. The voice was a dry rasp using withered vocal cords, but it was recognisable. It was not the blade rasp of the daemon’s thought-voice, nor the lilting growl of Grael Noctua. It was the voice of Torgaddon, half a decade dead on the pyre of Isstvan III.
‘Kibre and Aximand are loyal to Lupercal, they are–’
‘They are in the way. What do you want, Maloghurst? To help your Warmaster or to let loyalty to an ideal you helped murder stay your hand?’
Murder… The word caught again in his thoughts.
‘It will need care.’
‘What does not?’
He looked at the daemon’s eyes.
‘What power do you serve that you would help me so, creature?’
‘My ends are my own.’
And that answer worries me more than anything else, he thought.
‘Very well, brother,’ he said. ‘We have an agreement. Let war and murder be done.’
The daemon’s smile was still in the mask of its face as it bowed its head.
Layak
The palace, which was a city, wept as they processed through it. Cries of pain and loss and joy tumbled and echoed down the roads. Figures, some human, many not, flung themselves at their feet, pleading in hisses before cutting their own throats. Most continued to babble as their blood spread over the pure white marble. All of them had been crying before they died, Layak noted. The sounds rose up the walls of the buildings and flowed back down, the noise deafening. Figures watched them pass from delicate balconies projecting from the side of the smooth-sided towers. Mutants with the heads of bulls and bodies of oiled muscle huffed and snorted, brandishing hook-bladed swords and fists of razor chains. Bloated heaps of flesh in sheaths of silk and velvet chattered in a high, brittle tongue that Layak had never heard. Amongst them the Neverborn moved, sliding between forms lithe, languid, toothed and clawed, caressing and stinging the mortals at whim. Layak’s mind blurred with the beat of the warp-saturated air. He could no longer pick apart what was crafted of thought or matter; the two had merged, as interchangeable as song or speech.
‘We are being watched,’ said Actaea.
No one had stopped them entering. Indeed, he had not seen any gates or structures that could be called fortifications, but the threat he felt increased with every step.
‘No,’ said Actaea, ‘I do not mean daemons, or sorcery. There are… forces watching us. I can feel them.’
‘I know,’ said Lorgar. Actaea did not reply.
Their path led up and up, curving around towers and circling domes of brightly coloured glass and polished silver. Layak could detect the geometry of the eldar in their lines, but minutely altered, as though the mind that had guided the hand that had made every tower, pillar and door had intended a subtle mockery and insult. Every wall was softly curved, the angles pulling in the eye and not releasing it until it had guided it to a statue of pearl, a pool of water floating with towers, a flayed figure hanging in a web of bell-hung chains, its moans a perfect discord with the chimes. Occasionally they crossed a span between two structures and looked down on a canal of clear water or a road choked with bodies, winged daemons squatting amongst the carcasses, lips and hands red.
‘What path are we following?’ asked Layak. A daemon looked up at him and refolded its flayed-skin wings. Actaea looked at him but then looked away.
‘None,’ said Lorgar, ‘but we will reach Fulgrim. He will be where he always is when it is his choice – at the centre of things. He just wants to show off first.’
As Lorgar spoke they came into a wide piazza. Statutes of alabaster, marble and jade ringed it, each figure perfect at a glance but more monstrous the closer one looked. Water chuckled into the air from gold fountain heads in the shape of perfect human men and women. Layak saw wide, bloodshot eyes staring out from the sockets of one of the statues and thought he heard a gagged, silent scream in his mind. A crowd filled the open space. Bright silks flowed in the warm breeze. Masked faces turned to look at them, sorrow and joy in jewels and velvet. The crowd parted as they walked forwards. Willow-thin figures in pink tunics appeared from amongst the press and scattered grey flower petals and ashes into the air. Layak saw that all of them had either eyes, or mouths, or a nose, or ears, but never more than one.