by Dan Abnett
He looked across at Loken. ‘Spirits. Daemons. The supernatural. Sorcery. These are words we have allowed to fall out of use, for we dislike the connotations, but they are just words. What you saw today… call it a spirit. Call it a daemon. The words serve well enough. Using them does not deny the clinical truth of the universe as man understands it. There can be daemons in a secular cosmos, Garviel. lust so long as we understand the use of the word.’
‘Meaning the warp?’
‘Meaning the warp. Why coin new terms for its horrors when we have a bounty of old words that might suit us just as well? We use the words “alien” and “xenos” to describe the inhuman filth we encounter in some locales. The creatures of the warp are just “aliens” too, but they are not life forms as we understand the term. They are not organic. They are extra-dimensional, and they influence our reality in ways that seem sorcerous to us. Supernatural, if you will. So let’s use all those lost words for them… daemons, spirits, possessors, changelings. All we need to remember is that there are no gods out there, in the darkness, no great daemons and ministers of evil. There is no fundamental, immutable evil in the cosmos. It is too large and sterile for such melodrama. There are simply inhuman things that oppose us, things we were created to battle and destroy. Orks. Gykon. Tushepta. Keylekid. Eldar. Jokaero… and the creatures of the warp, which are stranger than all for they exhibit powers that are bizarre to us because of the otherness of their nature.’
Loken rose to his feet. He looked around the lamp-lit room and heard the moaning of the mountain wind outside. ‘I have seen psykers taken by the warp, sir,’ he said. ‘I have seen them change and bloat in corruption, but I have never seen a sound man taken. I have never seen an Astartes so abused.’
‘It happens,’ Horus replied. He grinned. ‘Does that shock you? I’m sorry. We keep it quiet. The warp can get into anything, if it so pleases. Today was a particular triumph for its ways. These mountains are not haunted, as the myths report, but the warp is close to the surface here. That fact alone has given rise to the myths. Men have always found techniques to control the warp, and the folk here have done precisely that. They let the warp loose upon you today, and brave Jubal paid the price.’
‘Why him?’
‘Why not him? He was angry at you for overlooking him, and his anger made him vulnerable. The tendrils of the warp are always eager to exploit such chinks in the mind. I imagine the insurgents hoped that scores of your men would fall under the power they had let loose, but Tenth Company had more resolve than that. Samus was just a voice from the Chaotic realm that briefly anchored itself to Jubal’s flesh. You dealt with it well. It could have been far worse.’
‘You’re sure of this, sir?’
Horus grinned again. The sight of that grin filled Loken with sudden warmth. ‘Ing Mae Sing, Mistress of Astropaths, informed me of a rapid warp spike in this region just after you disembarked. The data is solid and substantive. The locals used their limited knowledge of the warp, which they probably understood as magic, to unleash the horror of the Empyrean upon you as a weapon.’
‘Why have we been told so little about the warp, sir?’ Loken asked. He looked directly into Horus’s wide-set eyes as he asked the question.
‘Because so little is known,’ the Warmaster replied. ‘Do you know why I am Warmaster, my son?’
‘Because you are the most worthy, sir?’
Horus laughed and, pouring another glass of wine, shook his head. ‘I am Warmaster, Garviel, because the Emperor is busy. He has not retired to Terra because he is weary of the crusade. He has gone there because he has more important work to do.’
‘More important than the crusade?’ Loken asked.
Horus nodded. ‘So he said to me. After Ullanor, he believed the time had come when he could leave the crusading work in the hands of the primarchs so that he might be freed to undertake a still higher calling.’
‘Which is?’ Loken waited for an answer, expecting some transcendent truth.
What the Warmaster said was, ‘I don’t know. He didn’t tell me. He hasn’t told anyone.’
Horus paused. For what seemed like an age, the wind banged against the longhouse shutters. ‘Not even me,’ Horus whispered. Loken sensed a terrible hurt in his commander, a wounded pride that he, even he, had not been worthy enough to know this secret.
In a second, the Warmaster was smiling at Loken again, his dark mood forgotten. ‘He didn’t want to burden me,’ he said briskly, ‘but I’m not a fool. I can speculate. As I said, the Imperium would not exist but for the warp. We are obliged to use it, but we know perilously little about it. I believe that I am Warmaster because the Emperor is occupied in unlocking its secrets. He has committed his great mind to the ultimate mastery of the warp, for the good of mankind. He has realised that without final and full understanding of the Immaterium, we will founder and fall, no matter how many worlds we conquer.’
‘What if he fails?’ Loken asked.
‘He won’t,’ the Warmaster replied bluntly.
‘What if we fail?’
‘We won’t,’ Horus said, ‘because we are his true servants and sons. Because we cannot fail him.’ He looked at his half-drunk glass and put it aside. ‘I came here looking for spirits,’ he joked, ‘and all I find is wine. There’s a lesson for you.’
TRUDGING, UNSPEAKING, THE warriors of Tenth Company clambered from the cooling stormbirds and streamed away across the embarkation deck towards their barracks. There was no sound save for the clink of their armour and the clank of their feet.
In their midst, brothers carried the biers on which the dead of Brakespur lay, shrouded in Legion banners. Four of them carried Flora and Van Krasten too, though no formal flags draped the coffins of the dead remembrancers. The Bell of Return rang out across the vast deck. The men made the sign of the aquila and pulled off their helms.
Loken wandered away towards his arming chamber, calling for the service of his artificers. He carried his left shoulder guard in his hands, Jubal’s sword still stuck fast through it.
Entering the chamber, he was about to hurl the miserable memento away into a corner, but he pulled up short, realising he was not alone.
Mersadie Oliton stood in the shadows.
‘Mistress,’ he said, setting the broken guard down.
‘Captain, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude. Your equerry let me wait here, knowing you were about to return. I wanted to see you. I wanted to apologise.’
‘For what?’ Loken asked, hooking his battered helm on the top strut of his armour rack.
She stepped forward, the light glowing off her black skin and her long, augmented cranium. ‘For missing the opportunity you gave me. You were kind enough to suggest me as a candidate to accompany the undertaking, and I did not attend in time.’
‘Be grateful for that,’ he said.
She frowned. ‘I… there was a problem, you see. A friend of mine, a fellow remembrancer. The poet Ignace Karkasy. He finds himself in a deal of trouble, and I was taken up trying to assist him. It so detained me, I missed the appointment.’
‘You didn’t miss anything, mistress,’ Loken said as he began to strip off his armour.
‘I would like to speak with you about Ignace’s plight. I hesitate to ask, but I believe someone of your influence might help him.’
‘I’m listening,’ Loken said.
‘So am I, sir,’ Mersadie said. She stepped forward and placed a tiny hand on his arm to restrain him slightly. He had been throwing off his armour with such vigorous, angry motions.
‘I am a remembrancer, sir,’ she said. ‘Your remembrancer, if it is not too bold to say so. Do you want to tell me what happened on the surface? Is there any memory you would like to share with me?’
Loken looked down at her. His eyes were the colour of rain. He pulled away from her touch.
‘No,’ he said.
PART TWO
BROTHERHOOD IN SPIDERLAND
ONE
Loathe and love
This world is Murder
A hunger for glory
EVEN AFTER HE’D slain a fair number of them, Saul Tarvitz was still unable to say with any certainty where the biology of the megarachnid stopped and their technology began. They were the most seamless things, a perfect fusion of artifice and organism. They did not wear their armour or carry their weapons. Their armour was an integument bonded to their arthropod shells, and they possessed weapons as naturally as a man might own fingers or a mouth.
Tarvitz loathed them, and loved them too. He loathed them for their abominable want of human perfection. He loved them because they were genuinely testing foes, and in mastering them, the Emperor’s Children would take another stride closer to attaining their full potential. ‘We always need a rival,’ his lord Eidolon had once said, and the words had stuck forever in Tarvitz’s mind, ‘a true rival, of considerable strength and fortitude. Only against such a rival can our prowess be properly measured.’
There was more at stake here than the Legion’s prowess, however, and Tarvitz understood that solemnly. Brother Astartes were in trouble, and this was a mission – though no one had dared actually use the term – of rescue. It was thoroughly improper to openly suggest that the Blood Angels needed rescuing.
Reinforcement. That was the word they had been told to use, but it was hard to reinforce what you could not find. They had been on the surface of Murder for sixty-six hours, and had found no sign of the 140th Expedition forces.
Or even, for the most part, of each other.
Lord Commander Eidolon had committed the entire company to the surface drop. The descent had been foul, worse than the warnings they had been given prior to the drop, and the warnings had been grim enough. Nightmarish atmospherics had scattered their drop pods like chaff, casting them wildly astray from their projected landing vectors. Tarvitz knew it was likely many pods hadn’t even made it to the ground intact. He found himself one of two captains in charge of just over thirty men, around one third of the company force, and all that had been able to regroup after planetfall. Due to the storm-cover, they couldn’t raise the fleet in orbit, nor could they raise Eidolon or any other part of the landing force.
Presuming Eidolon and any other part of the landing force had survived.
The whole situation smacked of abject failure, and failure was not a concept the Emperor’s Children cared to entertain. To turn failure into something else, there was little choice but to get on with the remit of the undertaking, so they spread out in a search pattern to find the brothers they had come to help. On the way, perhaps, they might reunite with other elements of their scattered force, or even find some geographical frame of reference.
The dropsite environs was disconcerting. Under an enamel-white sky, fizzling and blemished by the megarachnid shield-storms, the land was an undulating plain of ferrous red dust from which a sea of gigantic grass stalks grew, grey-white like dirty ice. Each stalk, as thick as a man’s plated thigh, rose up straight to a height of twenty metres: tough, dry and bristly. They swished gently in the radioactive wind, but such was their size, at ground level, the air was filled with the creaking, moaning sound of their structures in motion. The Astartes moved through the groaning forest of stalks like lice in a wheat field.
There was precious little lateral visibility. High above their heads, the nodding vertical shoots soared upwards and pointed incriminatingly at the curdled glare of the sky. Around them, the stalks had grown so close together that a man could see only a few metres in any direction.
The bases of most of the grass stalks were thick with swollen, black larvae: sack-things the size of a man’s head, clustered tumorously to the metre or so of stalk closest to the ground. The larvae did nothing but cling and, presumably, drink. As they did so, they made a weird hissing, whistling noise that added to the eerie acoustics of the forest floor.
Bulk had suggested that the larvae might be infant forms of the enemy, and for the first few hours, they had systematically destroyed all they’d found with flamers and blades, but the work was wearying and unending. There were larvae everywhere, and eventually they had chosen to forget it and ignore the hissing sacks. Besides, the fetid ichor that burst from the larvae when they were struck was damaging the edges of their weapons and scarring their armour where it splashed.
Lucius, Tarvitz’s fellow captain, had found the first tree, and called them all close to inspect it. It was a curious thing, apparently made of a calcined white stone, and it dwarfed the surrounding sea of stalks. It was shaped like a wide-capped mushroom: a fifty-metre dome supported on a thick, squat trunk ten metres broad. The dome was an intricate hemisphere of sharp, bone-white thorns, tangled and sharply pointed, the barbs some two or three metres in length.
‘What is it for?’ Tarvitz wondered.
‘It’s not for anything,’ Lucius replied. ‘It’s a tree. It has no purpose.’
In that, Lucius was wrong.
Lucius was younger than Tarvitz, though they were both old enough to have seen many wonders in their lives. They were friends, except that the balance of their friendship was steeply and invisibly weighted in one direction. Saul and Lucius represented the bipolar aspect of their Legion. Like all of the Emperor’s Children, they devoted themselves to the pursuit of martial perfection, but Saul was diligently grounded where Lucius was ambitious.
Saul Tarvitz had long since realised that Lucius would one day outstrip him in honour and rank. Lucius would perhaps become a lord commander in due course, part of the aloof inner circle at the Legion’s traditionally hierarchical core. Tarvitz didn’t care. He was a file officer, born to the line, and had no desire for elevation. He was content to glorify the primarch and the Emperor, beloved of all, by knowing his place, and keeping it with unstinting devotion.
Lucius mocked him playfully sometimes, claiming Tarvitz courted the common ranks because he couldn’t win the respect of the officers. Tarvitz always laughed that off, because he knew Lucius didn’t properly understand. Saul Tarvitz followed the code exactly, and took pride in that. He knew his perfect destiny was as a file officer. To crave more would have been overweening and imperfect. Tarvitz had standards, and despised anyone who cast their own standards aside in the hunt for inappropriate goals.
It was all about purity, not superiority. That’s what the other Legions always failed to understand.
Barely fifteen minutes after the discovery of the tree – the first of many they would find scattered throughout the creaking grasslands – they had their first dealings with the megarachnid.
The enemy’s arrival had been announced by three signs: the larvae nearby had suddenly stopped hissing; the towering grass stalks had begun an abrupt shivering vibration, as if electrified; then the Astartes had heard a strange, chittering noise, coming closer.
Tarvitz barely saw the enemy warriors during that first clash. They had come, thrilling and clattering, out of the grass forest, moving so fast they were silver blurs. The fight lasted twelve chaotic seconds, a period filled to capacity with gunshots and shouts, and odd, weighty impacts. Then the enemy had vanished again, as fast as they had come, the stalks had stilled, and the larvae had resumed their hissing.
‘Did you see them?’ asked Kercort, reloading his bolter.
‘I saw something…’ Tarvitz admitted, doing the same.
‘Durellen’s dead. So is Martius,’ Lucius announced casually, approaching them with something in his hand.
Tarvitz couldn’t quite believe what he had been told. ‘They’re dead? Just… dead?’ he asked Lucius. The fight surely hadn’t lasted long enough to have included the passing of two veteran Astartes.
‘Dead,’ nodded Lucius. ‘You can look upon their cadavers if you wish. They’re over there. They were too slow.’
Weapon raised, Tarvitz pushed through the swaying stalks, some of them broken and snapped over by frantic bolter fire. He saw the two bodies, tangled amid fallen white shoots on the red earth, their beautiful purple and gold armour sa
wn apart and running with blood.
Dismayed, he looked away from the butchery. ‘Find Varrus,’ he told Kercort, and the man went off to locate the apothecary.
‘Did we kill anything?’ Bulle asked.
‘I hit something,’ Lucius said proudly, ‘but I cannot find the body. It left this behind.’ He held out the thing in his hand.
It was a limb, or part of a limb. Long, slender, hard. The main part of it, a metre long, was a gently curved blade, apparently made of brushed zinc or galvanised iron. It came to an astonishingly sharp point. It was thin, no thicker than a grown man’s wrist. The long blade ended in a widening joint, which attached it to a thicker limb section. This part was also armoured with mottled grey metal, but came to an abrupt end where Lucius’s shot had blown it off. The broken end, in cross-section, revealed a skin of metal surrounding a sleeve of natural, arthropoid chitin around an inner mass of pink, wet meat.
‘Is it an arm?’ Bulle asked.
‘It’s a sword,’ Katz corrected.
‘A sword with a joint?’ Bulle snorted. ‘And meat inside?’
Lucius grasped the limb, just above the joint, and brandished it like a sabre. He swung it at the nearest stalk, and it went clean through. With a lingering crash, the massive dry shoot toppled over, tearing into others as it fell.
Lucius started laughing, then he cried out in pain and dropped the limb. Even the base part of the limb, above the joint, had an edge, and it was so sharp that the force of his grip had bitten through his gauntlet.
‘It has cut me,’ Lucius complained, poking at his ruptured glove.
Tarvitz looked down at the limb, bent and still on the red soil. ‘Little wonder they can slice us to ribbons.’
Half an hour later, when the stalks shivered again, Tarvitz met his first megarachnid face to face. He killed it, but it was a close-run thing, over in a couple of seconds.