The Lords of Silence

by Chris Wraight

  Mortarion freed them from that. This is what Dragan and the other latecomers will never properly understand. Vorx is not a blind fanatic, and understands that the primarch has weaknesses, but he will never forget that first act of liberty. Unless you had tried to scratch a gasping living on the stinking white soils of that hell world, unless you had actually witnessed what the mountain lords could do with impunity to the cowering mortals and unless you had seen what the Deathlord had done to free them, you could not truly comprehend. That was why the Death Guard had never fractured, for all the sniping efforts of that semi-feral Typhus and the many other rogue warlords and pirate-kings. The originators of the Legion are still grateful. They will never forget. And Vorx is one of them.

  He reaches the end of the Sanctuary and climbs swiftly up stone steps that are crumbling at the edges. The air is wet and stagnant, and the lumens are still flickering. Some are covered with flocks of moths that scatter as Vorx passes.

  Soon he is back in the innards of the ship and hears the ongoing efforts to make repairs and put things in order. He sees slave crew scuttle away from him and takes the grim salute of Unbroken as they lumber past in the semi-dark. He traces an old path back to the bridge, one that is sopping with moisture and overhung with grimy stalactites.

  When he emerges, he sees that Dragan has been busy. He has coopted members of his own factions to secure key locations across the yawning bridge cavity. The Unchanged crew take his orders without question, and they are slowly bringing the listing vessel back into something like equilibrium.

  Vorx approaches the old throne dais, nodding at Dragan as he reaches it.

  ‘Siegemaster,’ says Dragan.

  The title is an old one. Other Legions used to have it. The Iron Warriors, Perturabo’s bitter castle builders, used it as an honorific. In the Dusk Raiders, it was more sparingly employed, reserved for fleet commanders right up until the end of the Great Crusade. Vorx does not know if anyone else uses it in the Death Guard. He only continues to do so because Mortarion ordered him to, for unknown reasons, even though he guesses Dragan takes it as an affectation.

  ‘I have asked the Tallyman to consult the numbers,’ Vorx says. ‘This is all unexpected.’

  Others are coming closer now – his senior Unchanged staff, limping away from whatever tasks Dragan has given them and drawing up to the throne. Hovik is with them, but Vorx is most interested in two others – Drez-Uil, the Eyesmith, and Tjafa, the pseudo-Navigator.

  ‘It was a warp activation,’ Hovik starts. Her face is greyer than usual, and there are flecks of vomit on her lips.

  ‘I know,’ Vorx says. ‘The circumstances can be determined in time. For now, we need to understand where we are.’ He beckons to a servitor gang captain and gives the signal to lift the main shutters. Then he turns to Drez-Uil. ‘What can you tell me?’

  The Eyesmith is a shrivelled man. His uniform is marked by strange damp patches that seem to move of their own accord, and his mouth has withered away to a narrow siphon. His eyes, as if in compensation, have bulged to obscene proportions and are showing the first-stage signs of compoundification. If he survives the transition, he will end up with insectoid hemispheres that will enable vision across a whole swathe of spectra.

  That is not why he is named the Eyesmith. That is an older title, reserved for those who dare to apply the augur sounds to the madness of Eyespace. Drez-Uil is an artisan, a skilled applier of augur and auspex to the roiling tumult of warp-void interfaces. The work has taken its toll, but he still maintains the capacity for speech, which is something.

  ‘We are displaced by several block-stages,’ Drez-Uil says. ‘I am still attempting to triangulate, but it is indubitably true that we are in true-void, free of the Gate, fully instantiated into the physical.’

  Vorx draws in a long breath. There had always been an alternative possibility – that the Eye had pulled them back in.

  ‘But the Beacon is gone,’ interjects Tjafa.

  Now then, Tjafa is a horror. A great-great-great-scion of Solace’s early Navigators, she is a wretch and a twist of flesh, a stark ribcage and angular bones under a clinging velvet gown that sucks the last dregs of light out of the entire chamber. She has grey hair piled up in knots and bunches, stretched tight from her rouged skin. Her arms and neck are bound with silk tresses, each covering a little bulge on her dry skin. They are all eyes, all of them closed and strapped tight. Tjafa is covered in eyes the size of fingerprints, all twitching and fluttering under their bonds and straps of faded velvet.

  ‘It can’t be gone,’ Dragan says. ‘We’re well into realspace.’

  ‘There’s nothing,’ Tjafa counters haughtily. ‘Nothing at all. We were warned of this – that breaking the Gate would break the galaxy.’

  ‘I find that rather hard to believe,’ says Vorx quietly. Overhead, the servitors are hauling the shutters open in a clanging series, exposing bleary realviewers. The void looks dark and blank, but for the motes of clear starlight. There are no ink-bright clots of colour, nor shimmering daemon-shoals. It has been a while since Vorx has seen unadulterated vacuum. He finds it sterile and displeasing.

  ‘Well, perhaps it will come back,’ says Tjafa. ‘Or perhaps we are just too far out. But I can’t guide you far, not in this.’ She sniffs. ‘Everything is broken. This ship is falling apart.’

  Tjafa likes to revel in an imagined superiority. She fancies she can still take on the airs of a real Navigator, a member of one of the proud Houses that still dominate traffic across the mortal galaxy. It is a pathetic display – her neck would snap under a finger’s pressure, and in any case, Vorx judges the long tyranny of the Navigators will be coming to a permanent end soon. There are other ways of plotting a route in this new dispensation, and she is already a throwback, a mutation of a mutation, gradually being bred out into irrelevance.

  He doesn’t say that, though. For the time being she is still useful, and until they know more, they are vulnerable.

  ‘If you will persevere, madam,’ he says, ‘that would be appreciated. Philemon will aid you.’

  By then the bulk of the shutters are being chained into position, and the view is one of almost unbroken blackness. Solace is still venting from somewhere, and a thin cloud of green-grey spores drifts across the ventral field.

  ‘You have done well to restore the ship so swiftly, mistress,’ Vorx tells Hovik. ‘Now we need to move again, to move purposively, to chart a course and follow it.’

  ‘To where, lord?’ Hovik asks, bewildered.

  ‘We have entered the time when all trajectories are possible,’ Vorx says. ‘Set coordinates. The god will ensure they are the right ones.’

  He says this a lot – ‘the god’. For Vorx, there is no pantheon. The allegiance of other powers is, for him, mistaken or wicked. There is only one genuine deified motive entity in the universe, the one that his primarch knelt before. If that were not true, how could he commit such acts? How else could he cleave to the path that has spilled so many oceans of innocent blood?

  Hovik bows, awkwardly, and limps off to enact the order.

  ‘You were not here,’ Dragan says, his voice low.

  Vorx does not look at him. ‘It was in hand.’

  ‘I took it in hand.’

  ‘You are my most trusted servant.’ Vorx smiles inwardly. That will cut him.

  ‘You were not here.’

  It is becoming a habit for Dragan to repeat himself, as if that lends heft to his words. Vorx turns to face him, deliberately, slowly. ‘They had the measure of us,’ he says, matching tone of voice so that only the two of them can hear. ‘Did you see the signals? They were preparing more torpedoes. Gunships. They would have landed Dreadnoughts. They were Space Marines. They might have won.’

  ‘I do not think–’

  ‘We have our orders. We make for Ultramar, just as instructed. If it takes us a year, if it takes us deca
des, we do it.’

  They face one another for a moment. Vorx is the larger, his bulk engorged like millennial layers of ocean silt, added to every year, but old now, worn into defiance by many, many lifetimes in old service. Dragan is leaner and his body is marked by fewer Gifts, but he is famished for the conflict that will earn them.

  ‘We are separated from the fleet,’ Dragan tries, cleaving to his line.

  ‘It will have dispersed by now,’ says Vorx. He moves closer to Dragan. ‘There are no choices, champion. It looks that way now, but believe me, there are none. We are being shown an empty sky. That is a temptation. You see the chance for glory, to follow the mortal warlord, to carve a name for yourself. Resist it. Resist the Despoiler’s call. We have our orders. We make for Ultramar.’

  Dragan looks back at him. His helm-visage is sharp, the vox-grille terminating in a savage blade-sweep. Vorx can sense the frustration in him, locked under pressure like poison gas in a grenade.

  ‘You do not know where we are,’ Dragan whispers. ‘You have no bearing. The primarch is out of reach.’

  ‘For now,’ says Vorx, clapping him on the shoulder in a gesture he knows will be infuriating. ‘Have faith.’ He turns away. That is a profound insult within the Death Guard, for whom facing – the enemy, the ally, the elements – is a cardinal virtue.

  There is purpose in this. Dragan must not think him weak, nor that he is out of ideas. Until Philemon can delve into the entrails of the future there is considerable uncertainty, to be sure, but the illusion of command is not something to be cast off.

  ‘Can the Cultivator fire the main engines yet?’ Vorx asks.

  ‘She says yes, with some danger,’ says Hovik.

  ‘Then let her do it.’ Vorx moves at last to the throne where he will take his seat. ‘This is a new universe, brothers. A new vista. How exciting. I wish to see more of it.’

  Chapter Four

  Solace moves more surely now. Rhoe Twe coaxes more life from its addled innards, and great chambers fill with fire. Work gangs drag heavy pallets of promethium canisters to the gate mouths, where spine-clamped plague ogryns shovel them into the shimmering maws. Conduits stiffen and flex, and pipelines bubble.

  The last of the Iron Shades are culled. The Death Guard are thorough. Kill teams prowl through the furthest reaches of the ship, hunting for any faint signs of life. The armour is taken from the corpses and sent to the bio-forges. The weapons are carried off and given to the Unbroken attendants to assess and divide up. The progenoids are ripped out by Kledo, who never talks about what he does with them. He takes the eyes too, and some of the other organs, but does not even pretend that this is for something useful – he has his hobbies. The rest – the thick-set flesh and bone, product of centuries of severe and serious-minded honing – is burned. The Unbroken do not wish to have reminders of what they once were hanging around. The Unchanged would like to eat the corpses, but they are not allowed to. There are some standards left. Some things are still not done.

  The numbers are collated. Forty-two Tactical Marines were landed. All were killed. Seven Unbroken were similarly ended, in addition to several hundred Unchanged. Those numbers are unexceptional. The Iron Shades were under-resourced and fighting on hostile territory. They would no doubt have planned to land more in short order, forming bridgeheads and bringing over heavy weaponry, but that never happened. The feeling on the ship is that everyone was fortunate. Or blessed, perhaps.

  They send the numbers to Philemon. He enters them on his ledger. He pores over the thick man-flesh leaves and scrapes them with his long quill. He compares the outcome to previous engagements with similar enemies. He compiles a cross-reference table and scribbles out notes and marginalia. The Little Lords watch, some bored, some transfixed. Several of them plop down from the shelf to take a closer look. One of them defecates from excitement, causing snickering from the others. Philemon is irritated, puts it in a glass jar and screws the lid on. The jar rattles around after that, with the tiny daemon ranting inside, and is ignored.

  There are many jars in Philemon’s chamber. Some are greater than human-size, all of which are filled with cloudy liquor. There are shapes floating in those jars that are hard to make out. Others are smaller, containing tinctures and salves, ointments and witch-brew. In one jar, bound with iron bars and capped with a silver lid, dwells the daemon Countquick.

  Countquick looks like a scraggy crow, a black-feathered avian from Terran pre-history. The world he was taken from has no crows, never has done and never will, but daemons are apt to take on archetypes from the broad sweep of human experience, and crows are a favourite. Over the centuries, the once-glossy feathers have dulled, and there are bald patches on Countquick’s skinny hide. Its eyes, which flash yellow when angry, are filmy. This is strange, because daemons do not normally age or decay, but who knows what magicks are at work with Countquick? Philemon clipped its wings, put it in the jar and whispered words of binding on the seal. Sometimes he lets the daemon out, but only after saying certain rites and making sure that wards and shackling runes are traced out in disease-free mortal blood, which is a time-consuming task and so rarely done.

  Countquick has killed 10,345 mortals and consumed their souls. If you let it, it will tell you all about them. Most of the time, though, it mutters aimlessly. The Little Lords squat on its jar and stick their tongues out at it, and it squawks back and hisses at them.

  Countquick is not its real name. Its real name is so maddeningly complex that to say it out loud would burst your eyeballs. Philemon calls it that because the daemon understands the occult of the warp, the resonance and the repetition of the sacred numbers. You have to trick it into helping you, but now it is so ravenous and desperate that such tricks are often possible.

  Philemon comes up to it, peers into the jar and shows it the ledgers. ‘You approve, daemon?’ he says.

  Countquick squints at the numbers. ‘I remember when. Your lord Mortarion was born,’ it says.

  There are two strange things about the way Countquick speaks. One is the pause inserted into every sentence, as if its mind – or what passes for a mind – has some tick or impediment that cannot be eradicated. It is a regular affliction, and does not seem to be getting worse. Philemon has never understood this. A daemon is not a physical thing in the truest sense. It cannot be infected or degraded by the plagues of the world. Its visual and auditory aspect is chosen, or dictated by sorcery. But then again, Philemon has never investigated too thoroughly. Daemons are ineffably perplexing. That is why he keeps them in jars.

  The second strange thing is the way Countquick’s beak moves. A real avian does not speak. Its long beak is designed to peck the eyes from hanged corpses, not to form syllables. But Countquick speaks. In order to form the sounds, its beak is flexible and its tongue rolls and licks and flickers like a human’s. Even after many centuries, Philemon still finds this unsettling to watch. There is a great blasphemy in the display, one that he cannot quite shake from his mind despite the many other blasphemies he has either committed or witnessed. A crow should not speak like a man. It should not speak at all.

  ‘Yes, you have told me this often,’ Philemon says.

  ‘I saw all of them. Born in the warp. Like stars. Being kindled.’

  ‘I don’t really care to hear this again.’

  ‘One by. One.’

  Philemon shows the daemon the results of his calculations. There is trigonometry on the man-flesh sheets, traced out in blotchy ink patterns, all annotated with more ledgers. ‘Do you approve of this? Any mistakes?’

  Countquick glances at the working. Its gimlet eyes dart. ‘You place so much. Faith in these things.’

  ‘They tell me where we are now,’ says Philemon. ‘Amid the halls of darkness, far from the witchlight of the Corpse. They tell me we cannot follow the Deathlord, not right now. We are becalmed, lost in a pit of our own making.’

  ‘So. Poet
ic.’

  ‘That is what the calculations tell me. Vorx wants to know what to do next.’

  ‘He could try. Making his own decisions.’

  Philemon laughs. ‘These are but guides.’

  The crow hops weakly from one claw to the other. ‘Even before we sent. You the Destroyer Hive, you cleaved to this occult. You counted and. You computed. That was never part. Of what was intended for you. Now it has become. Manic. Stop it.’

  Philemon puts the parchment away. ‘Too late. You changed us alright, but you never get exactly what you want.’

  ‘We always get. What we want.’

  ‘Demonstrably false. You’re in a jar.’

  ‘For. Now.’

  Philemon smiles. ‘We have an abundance of freedom. The spaces between worlds are emptier than ever before. I see symmetries in the equations I have never seen before. Abaddon has unpicked something profound, hasn’t he? You know what he’s done, don’t you?’

  Countquick turns its head away.

  Philemon laughs. ‘So be it. I’ll discover it in time.’ He limps over to the table where the Little Lords roll and caper. He finds the one brought to him by Vorx and picks it up.

  ‘I could let you out more often, you know,’ he says to Countquick, ‘if you were a little more helpful.’

  The daemon ignores him.

  ‘Fair enough,’ says Philemon equably, setting off for the bridge with the Little Lord and the parchment. ‘I wouldn’t trust me either.’

  Solace is powering on now. Gantries are hoisted back into position. Armour-plating swells back into place, the las-burns pop and blister away. Thick coolant coagulates over ingress wounds, hardens, scabs over. Augur arrays swivel back into functionality, and the ship’s core burns with a sullen red heat again. The Population scurries about in the darkness, squabbling over foetid scraps, sickening and weakening but never quite dying.

  Vorx watches the viewports carefully. Drez-Uil is struggling, trying to make sense of semi-functional readings that scatter and skip across his picter lenses. Fluid is dripping everywhere, splashing on the screens and making them smear. Tjafa has flounced off, readying herself for what she supposes will be a painful and semi-successful stint in the amniotic sphere. Dragan has ghosted away too, retreating – for now – to wherever he goes when the darkness is on him.