Slaves to Darkness

by John French

  A shadow moved across the ceiling of the sky, a darkness beyond the clouds, black amongst the colours of fire. The World Eaters’ shouts were a single rolling voice now as they hacked and battered at the Iron Warriors. The shadow in the sky grew. Perturabo did not look up. Argonis realised that the primarch’s eyes were closed.

  The clouds split, spiralling, pulling the cords of lightning into ropes as they reached towards the summit of the hill. A shape fell with the cyclone. Wings spread from its shoulders, ragged skin taut in the gale. Brass armour coated a body of gore-slicked muscle. A mane of cables streamed from behind a head of flayed muscle and charred bone. Argonis looked at it and felt his nerves scream at him to run. His head was a ball of agony. Neon light streaked his vision. The reek of hot metal and hacked meat flooded his mouth as vomit rose from his throat. He could not feel his hands hanging loosely at his sides, fingers slack on forgotten weapons. Across the hillside, eyes rose and the flow of battle stuttered.

  Perturabo opened his eyes. Weapon pods armed. Plates of metal unfolded from his frame, layering deflecting edges over thick armour. A plough-fronted helm clamped into place over his face. The Iron Circle stepped close around him, shields locked, dead machine eyes bright. Volk was at his side, almost the size of the primarch, his eyes now fires in the mask of his face. Perturabo looked up. And above him the angel of slaughter that had once been a pri­march fell back to earth.

  ‘Fourth configuration,’ said Perturabo calmly.

  Fifteen

  Maloghurst

  Light and dark, dark and light sliced by the passing seconds. Light… Dark… Light…

  ‘Mal?’

  He must have fallen unconscious on the tunnel floor. He remembered blood. A lot of blood.

  ‘This is a death wound,’ he said, raising a red hand in front of his eyes. The shadows of the tunnel shifted and swam before him. The hair of his topknot hung lank down the back of his neck, matted and sticky. Where was he? Had he got back from Gerag’s territory? Had he taken a wrong turn? He did not recognise the tunnel and could see no markings on the wall. Metal scraped on rock nearby, and he twisted his head around, eyes reaching for the sound.

  ‘Mal. Ullanor, Mal. I must–’

  Gunfire pulled him from the dream of pain into the reality.

  Ekaddon was half lifting, half dragging him across the deck, firing his pistol as he moved. Banners hung in the dark above him, tatters of past wars hung in shadow. A blaze of bolter fire reached for them from the darkness. He could see warriors in black armour, and beyond them – set against the fire-laced sheet of night – a throne.

  The throne…

  And a figure on the throne, head bowed, wrapped in shadow.

  ‘Mal…’

  Light strobed beyond the viewport, blinking back the brilliance of the war in the void beyond.

  Ekaddon dropped and dragged Maloghurst behind a pillar. He ejected and replaced the clip of his bolt pistol.

  How had he got here? The question drifted across the rolling sea of Maloghurst’s mind, but then sank out of sight. It did not matter. There was always a way.

  ‘Mal…’

  There was no need for blood this time, he realised. There was blood enough on the deck already.

  Blood…

  There was blood on the throne, blood pouring from the side of the figure who sat on it.

  Maloghurst opened his mouth. Iron breath hissed over his tongue.

  ‘Sire…’ he gasped.

  The rotor blink of gunfire, and a cry rising through the throne room, and red on the steps before the shadowed throne, and…

  His hand was red as he raised it. His topknot hung lank against his neck, clotted with gore. He blinked away the dream of fire and iron and the blood-marked throne. A dream… Yes… A death dream. He felt laughter come to his lips, and the movement sent a fresh wash of blood down his side from the wound beneath his ribs.

  ‘Death wound…’ he whispered, and tilted his head back to rest against the wall behind him. It would end here, down this tunnel that he didn’t even recognise. He thought of all the scheming, all the throats he had opened to try to make himself something greater, and in the end it had been a blow from a scared whelp he had not even seen until it was too late. That was a fitting punishment, he supposed. He had tried to create something greater than himself, not just rule over this tunnel or that, not just gather the oaths of warbands and gangs – those were the small things, the petty things that had been attempted before. They passed. They were no greater than the vanity and the desperation of cruel men. No, his dream was of something greater still. A kingdom. A kingdom that would stretch from the deepest tunnel to the furthest minehead, a place that could pull itself up from the filth and blood. Now it would remain a dream.

  ‘You can have it,’ said a voice. He looked up. A figure towered above him, the burning promethium that lit the tunnel staining its pale armour red. ‘You can be part of something greater than this life and suffering.’

  He blinked, feeling his vision swim as it tried to touch the face looking down at him.

  ‘No…’ he said. ‘It did not happen like that. Horus was not there.’

  ‘No, he wasn’t,’ said the figure. ‘It was Qruze who found you in the tunnels, wasn’t it? He found you and thought that the youth who dreamed of being a king would make a Space Marine.’ Amarok stepped closer and the impression of Horus drained back from Iacton Qruze’s features. He was armoured now, face lined and weathered by years. ‘You wanted to be a king, but always stayed a step behind your masters. So much power, but here you are…’ The daemon dipped a finger in the blood pooling beside Maloghurst. ‘Dying of a new wound while dreaming of an old one to try to save a creature that is not and never was human.’

  Maloghurst grinned with the memory of bloody teeth.

  ‘You would not understand,’ he said. The daemon showed its teeth. ‘Horus…’ said Maloghurst. ‘Take me to Horus.’

  ‘Which one? He is scattered and dying, his essence pulled across existence. I can show you a part, but your Warmaster is…’

  ‘Ullanor,’ said Maloghurst, knowing the answer even as it came to his lips. ‘Take me to Ullanor.’

  Amarok seemed to let out a long breath and then nodded. It turned and began to walk. The tunnel pulled apart around it, motes of colour caught in a tumble of wind. Maloghurst found himself standing, no longer the young Cthonian warlord he had been but clad in armour, his frame just as twisted as it now was. He limped after the daemon as the world blew past him. The dust swirled before his eyes, the image of Iacton Qruze the only thing he could see.

  ‘Why do you serve him?’ asked the daemon. ‘You could have taken this opportunity for yourself. You could have left him to die, and his war to fail, and made yourself a greater warlord than any could dream.’

  Maloghurst opened his mouth to spit a reply but found a cold burst of laughter on his tongue.

  ‘Because he is my lord. Because if we are not striving for something greater than us then what are we striving for at all? Because… because he is my friend.’

  Amarok did not reply but walked on in silence for several steps.

  ‘Stay close,’ it said. ‘We are almost there.’

  The swirl of dust began to change colour. Red streaked the grey. Maloghurst felt the sting of sun on his skin. The smell of thruster fuel and burnt rock filled his nose.

  And then the sand and dust were gone, and he was walking beneath the dome of night across a plateau of beaten earth and stone.

  Campfires glimmered in the dark, throwing flame light across the flanks of landing craft and war machines. Starships crossed the sky, brighter than the stars. Snatches of conversation and laughter came to him on the wind, but distant. The great highway that stretched before him waited in silence, and rising at its vanishing point was the Imperial Dais, carved from the bones of the mountain that it ha
d replaced.

  Amarok faced him, waiting.

  ‘He is here?’ asked Maloghurst. ‘Truly?’

  ‘This is Ullanor,’ said the daemon. ‘This is where he always is in his heart.’ It turned and nodded towards the distant dais. ‘You have to walk the rest alone. I cannot go with you.’

  Maloghurst took a step then looked at the daemon. It looked less like Iacton now, its face sharper, the hollows of shadow deeper. The wind gusted past him. The outline of Amarok was blurring, the edges dissolving into billowing dust.

  ‘Goodbye,’ it said. The wind rose again, and on it Maloghurst thought he heard voices that he knew: Loken, Torgaddon, Sejanus. Then the air was still and the dark was empty where the daemon had been.

  Maloghurst began to walk along the highway. He knew it. He remembered it. Ullanor on the eve of the triumph. On the eve of everything that would come after. Now he was here, he did not need to seek Horus. He knew where his lord would be. He walked, limping, the taste of fire and dust in his mouth. Time passed in slow seconds, and with every step the feeling that this was no warp dream but reality made again, grew stronger. The dais rose above him in increments until it was a mountain of statues, steps and pale stone made grey by night. He reached the base, found the flight of stairs beneath an arch and began to climb. He passed a Custodian walking one of the landings. The gold-plated giant looked at him and moved on without a word. He kept climbing until the stairs ended. A balcony spread from the door at its top. Its white marble seemed like carved snow. He stepped to the balustrade and looked down. The parade highway and the lights of the camps lay beneath him, a black sea still at the base of this island.

  ‘Sire,’ he said softly, without looking around.

  ‘Mal?’

  ‘Yes, sire,’ he said. He was still looking out at the black distance.

  ‘I knew you would come.’

  ‘Did you, sire?’

  The wind filled the pause.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You need to come back,’ said Maloghurst. Silence answered him. ‘The war, the Legion, everything you have set into motion – it is coming apart. The dream is dying.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And yet you do nothing,’ said Maloghurst. He felt the tiredness in the words. By all the oaths he had ever made, he was tired. ‘You do nothing.’

  ‘I am fighting, Mal. I must win.’

  ‘Fighting…’ He shook his head, eyes closing. For a second the gunfire-streaked gloom of the throne room on the Vengeful Spirit filled the blackness behind his eyelids. The main doors had been opened. Black figures were advancing. The flares of bolt-rounds were bars of fire stretching between guns and targets. The Luperci were running into the fire, their images blurred silhouettes.

  Maloghurst opened his eyes. The night of Ullanor was there again, calm and still.

  ‘You are not fighting,’ he said, and turned. Horus stood next to him. His armour was white and bore none of the marks or the heraldry that it had taken in the thirteen years that separated that night with the present. ‘You are losing, sire.’

  Layak

  The final syllable rang across the space like the note of a struck bell, rising in pitch and volume. Layak’s throat burned and cracked. Wounds opened on his skin inside his armour. Time and substance slowed and expanded. And on the sound went. The mutants and human slave throng fell to the ground. Bowels and stomachs voided. Some were dead before the breath of their last cry left their lungs. Others lay bleeding and weeping as the blood and excrement soaked into the tatters of silk and velvet. Stillness flowed out through the palace city. Wounds opened in the sky above. Blood fell.

  Fulgrim hung in the air, pinned in place like a moth in a display case. His body had shrunk to that of a fine-limbed youth, his white hair spilling around his head as he gasped for air. Burning marks covered his skin, weeping black pus as they tried to close. Layak could not look at them even though they were the echo of the word he had just spoken. The air had gone still. The only sounds were the hum of the remaining Word Bearers’ armour and the hiss of blood cooking on Kulnar and Hebek’s blades.

  Lorgar turned his face to the bleeding heavens and closed his eyes. Layak knelt behind him, flanked by his blade slaves. The red rain sizzled as it struck the pair’s armour. Layak forced himself to begin to stand. He could feel Fulgrim’s mind and will battering against his own, but it was as though they were separated by a wall, and the cries and blows were weak and distant. He felt hollow, as though he were a shell skin around a void.

  Hollow man, the phrase sounded in his memory and he looked to where Actaea stood, shivering, bloody tears marking her face. She seemed to sense his gaze and turned her face towards him, then turned away.

  The daemon N’kari had halted in its charge a pace from Lorgar. It stood quivering, red steam venting from its nostrils, its whole body flexing as though straining against a chain that held it in place.

  ‘Be calm, O wrathful angel,’ Lorgar Aurelian said.

  N’kari hissed, teeth wide, six-pronged tongue snapping in the air.

  ‘You will suffer for this, priest. I am the keeper of your soul’s secrets, of your unborn dreams. I will tear them from–’

  ‘No,’ said Lorgar. ‘You will not. I serve the gods. If the Dark Prince wished this otherwise then it would not have happened so.’

  N’Kari’s muscles bloated, its head elongating into something that looked like a bull with a wolf’s smile.

  It laughed then, the sound hooting and rumbling as the thick rain fell into the quiet.

  Lorgar turned his back on the daemon and looked at Fulgrim.

  ‘You are a beautiful thing, brother,’ said Lorgar. He raised his hand and brushed the back of a bloody gauntlet down Fulgrim’s cheek. ‘So blessed, so radiant…’ Fulgrim’s eyes were burning with loathing. Lorgar gazed back at him, his face emotionless. ‘But to be even the most favoured instrument of a god is to do its will and to aid its purposes. You are beautiful and terrible, but you are an instrument now, brother, nothing more.’

  Lorgar looked at Layak.

  ‘Let him speak,’ he said.

  Fulgrim snarled as soon as Layak willed him speech.

  ‘I will take your soul and–’

  ‘Your consort has already issued the necessary threats. I do not expect you to like this, brother. You were always too bound up in the ideal of yourself to see that you have to submit to greater powers and greater goals. You will hate me for this. You will loathe me with all the spite of your immortalised being.’ Fulgrim’s eyes flashed. Lorgar held his gaze, face as calm as still water. ‘You will hate me, but you will obey, and that is enough.’

  Lorgar turned away and knelt, putting his fingers to the bloody ground and then touching them to his eyelids and forehead, chin, cheeks and temples.

  ‘We shall leave this place. You shall gather your Legion and bring it to Ullanor, where Horus calls his muster. We shall go to him and strike him down.’

  Fulgrim began to shake his head. Lorgar’s hand snapped out and closed shut on Fulgrim’s jaw. The white flesh burned under the grip.

  ‘That is what will happen, because you are now a slave, Fulgrim, and the gods have put your chain in my hand.’ The fingers bit deeper. Muscles formed and bunched beneath the skin on Fulgrim’s spread arms. ‘I take no pleasure in this power, brother. You are a sacred thing now, and I regret that this is necessary, but do not think that I will abstain from any means to see this crusade end.’ He looked into Fulgrim’s eyes for a long moment and then slowly, tenderly, planted a kiss on the daemon’s forehead. Then he turned and moved to where Layak stood.

  ‘Thank you, my son,’ he said. ‘There was never another as devoted as you.’ Layak bowed his head, but in his mind he thought he heard laughter at the back of his thoughts.

  Son… son…

  Devoted… devoted…

  He had
the sudden feeling that the mask was grinning at him from its inside surface. Grinning where no one could see it.

  ‘Give him the power to act but not the power to disobey,’ said Lorgar.

  Layak raised his head, his mind forming the web of will and command that spoke across the bonds linking him to Fulgrim. The daemon primarch arched and roared, fists and muscles balling. He shook himself, wings now six pinions of perfect white feathers. Pearlescent armour sheathed him.

  N’kari walked to Fulgrim’s side, its bull-headed form shrinking and thinning until it was a slender figure wrapped in red silk, its skin the colour of a shark’s belly, its eyes black orbs. A delicate crest of bone and skin ran down the centre of its scalp.

  ‘Where the Prince of the Princes goes, so go I,’ it said, its voice a melody that promised bliss and suffering. ‘I am bound to this and to him. As you command him, so shall I follow your will. I shall raise no hand against you, nor shall I seek to break the bonds you have placed.’

  The daemon’s throat bulged. Hebek stepped forwards, the hungering blade fused to him twitching. N’kari did not move, though, but coughed, seeming to choke for a second before vomiting something onto the ground. It was wrapped in thick, black fluid but rang hard as it hit the stones. Lorgar picked it up, smearing the black scum from its surface. It was a tooth, long and needle-tipped, its substance black and glassy. Light winked from its surface, each flash a different colour. Layak found that his first instinct was to look away, and then that he did not want to look away. He knew what it was, had even possessed some, though never one from such an exalted creature as N’kari. It was a token, a bargain given physical form. For some creatures such a token might be a rusted shard of a sword, a splinter of bone, a perfect pearl. Whomsoever possessed the black tooth could summon N’kari to their side, command it, and would not be directly harmed by the creature. Not the total control of a binding, but a bond given physical form. A debt marker from the Sea of Souls.