The Lords of Silence

by Chris Wraight

  He sees the one he is after. The pilot says nothing – she has no vocal cords, after all – but the shuttle swings upward towards its destination. Amid illustrious company, this one stands out. Even when set against deep-keeled monsters and storied warships from the dawn of recorded history, it still holds its own. It has perhaps the most malignant of all the profiles in that place, one twisted and altered to decomposing extremes by the power of the god. Were it not for the sorcery that pulses within its ancient heart, it would fall apart. Its antiquated spine is a study in corrosion, its bilges a vile melange of dissolved heavy metals and bubbling plague broth. From most angles its precise dimensions are impossible to determine, for a cloud of warp-flies obscures it for many kilometres out. Over the centuries it has become a kind of permanent ward-field, a thick layer of physically impossible insects, zipping and droning across the void.

  As the shuttle reaches the outer skirts of the swarms, the tiny insects part to allow passage. If Dragan had not been a welcome guest, by now the small craft’s exterior would have been chewed down to the engine lines. He watches as the maw of the intake hangar looms ever larger – a gaping hole in the rusting hull, outlined by long yellow teeth that protrude from iron rings. To be swallowed by it feels like being swallowed by a living thing. Presumably, of course, that is fairly close to the reality.

  A shadow falls over them. A crackle ripples along the shuttle’s outer skin as the air-gravity bubble slides across. They touch down on the deck within, and from outside Dragan hears the clang of machinery, the bark of coarse speech, the long, echoing wind-down of the engines.

  For a moment he sits, at rest.

  Then he is moving, stirring himself and heading down the long ramp into the gloomy interior. He is greeted at its base by members of the Traveller’s own retinue, a mirror to the Deathshroud, armed with manreapers and cloaked in silence. They say nothing to him, but beckon him deeper into the innards of the ship. It is humid, and hot, and sunk into a heavy darkness that drips and lingers like bile.

  The Terminus Est is a big ship, and it takes them a long time to reach their destination. On the way, he witnesses similar scenes to those he left behind on Solace – gangs of Unbroken working on their weapons and their armour. They do not drill themselves in practice cages, like other Legions might. They do not engage in duels, nor do they make pilgrimage to an apostle to be screamed at. The Sons of Mortarion prepare for war in seclusion, tending to the maladies that they cultivate within themselves. They discover what has changed in them since the last time they went to war, for there are always changes. They listen to the chatter of the Little Lords and the wandering plaguebearers, and attempt to divine a scamper of fate within the multitude of possibilities.

  It is all so quiet. The ship’s beams creak, and the mighty engines growl, but the corridors are muted. There is no tense expectation of something immense to come, just a familiar grim sense of resignation, of diligence.

  Dragan finds himself irritated by this. There are days when he wishes to shake his brothers, to stir up something within them. There is so little anger in this Legion, despite it being set within a universe where the cause for it is so plentiful.

  In due course, his taciturn escort peels away, leaving him alone before a half-collapsed portal. The atmosphere is even hotter than before, and flies buzz everywhere, filling every gap, teetering on every surface. Some are fat blowflies, some are whining mosquitos, and some are the swollen-bodied stingers of the Destroyer Hive. Some are real, some are the excrescences of the immaterium. As Dragan stands before the portal, they flock to him in clumps. They crawl over his armour, they burrow between the gaps. He feels them on his skin and resists the urge to flinch.

  Even the most unschooled of the Legion knows not to flinch. This is the first of Typhus’ tests.

  ‘Come.’

  The voice is rotten, as grating as a rough saw’s edge. It feels almost unsuited to this Legion, as if the speaker had been somehow wrongly placed. Perhaps he might have been happier among Angron’s gladiators, or Perturabo’s gloomy technicians of pain. In this, as in other things, Typhus is very much of his own species.

  Dragan ducks under the sagging lintel and enters warily. The chamber beyond is large, its roof soaring away into the darkness above. He finds it hard to make much out within, for the only lamps are dull and crawling with tiny black shapes. The floor was once marble but has cracked and subsided, exposing what looks and smells like soil. The columns thrusting high into the unseen heights are running with teardrop lines of water, brackish and lumpy.

  For all the decrepitude, it feels like a wellspring, here. It feels like something started on this spot a very long time ago.

  Typhus is waiting for him at the end of the long central hall. There is a throne, carved of pale stone, but he does not occupy it. Instead he stands in the centre of a wide circular platform, surrounded by his ever-thickening clouds of flies. When he moves, the flies swirl and solidify and form shapes in the air, all of which dissolve again like smoke. Typhus is like his flagship – a solid core around which only shadows spin.

  As Dragan comes closer, he sees enough to form an impression. He has caught glimpses of the Traveller before. He has even seen him fight, from a distance. Up close, though, is a different proposition. All members of the Death Guard have a certain similarity of aspect, but Typhus is in many ways the archetype. Every trope and symbol employed by the servants of the Plague finds its ultimate expression in him, for he was the one to introduce the vectors of change. All know this. All are aware of their Legion’s genesis, and yet none ever speak of it. What is there to say? The deed is done, and there is no going back.

  ‘My Lord Typhus,’ Dragan says, dropping to one knee.

  Typhus stares at him for a moment, his tripartite-cloven helm almost lost within the huge curve of his battleplate. Aside from a single upturned horn, the helm is white, as pale as moonlight on a grave, and the strange purity of it looks lost amid the extravagant degradation.

  ‘Gallowsman,’ Typhus says. ‘I hear they call you that.’

  ‘Not a name I chose,’ says Dragan.

  ‘Where did it come from, then?’

  ‘I know not, lord.’

  Typhus grunts, and clouds of flies burst from his faceplate. He is constantly in motion, turning, twitching, dragging the hilt of his great scythe, as if the restlessness that provoked the Great Change has never settled down and continues to impel him.

  ‘Your blood is thin,’ says Typhus.

  It is a slur, that. A reference to the fact Dragan was not on Terra and thus does not share in the honour of those who fought on the Corpse-Emperor’s own ground. Dragan has heard it many times, and it does not trouble him. Those of the old Legion can cling on to their failure as much as they like – it has always seemed to him a strange impulse, to wallow in that infamous catastrophe, to harp on about it at every turn, to define every step forward in reference to that one colossal step into oblivion.

  Typhus moves again, lumbering around his low centre of gravity. The flies buzz, making the air shimmer with a wall of sound.

  ‘Perhaps you do not even know why we call ourselves the Unbroken,’­ he says.

  ‘I know it,’ says Dragan.

  ‘Tell me, then.’

  ‘We survived. We maintained discipline. We kept our ranks and our ships, and we lived to fight again.’

  Typhus laughs, and flies spill and tumble. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘It is well known.’

  ‘It is horseshit.’ Typhus turns back towards him, and tongues of steam slip across the marble. ‘I was there when the words were first uttered. I stood with my battle-brothers and first laid eyes on the primarch.’

  The primarch. Little enough reverence, there.

  ‘He was fresh from the surface,’ says Typhus, pacing. ‘There was still the poison mist curling from his robes. He was not even wearing armour
. He was so thin. The Emperor stood by his side. The light from His armour was impossible to look at. What did we think? That the primarch was a wretch? Something to be ashamed of?’ Typhus chuckles mordantly. ‘But the primarch had no doubts. He addressed us. He never raised his voice. He spoke as if he recognised every face in that audience, though most there were from Terra. It was the first, and last, time I heard him utter anything remotely affectionate.’

  Dragan listens. Typhus has an edge of scorn in his words, but it is hard to tell if that is simply the way he always speaks or whether some special element of it is reserved for his master.

  ‘He said that we were his unbroken blades. He said that we were his Death Guard. The Dusk Raiders were forgotten, leaving us with two new names. To the rest of the universe, we were indeed the Death Guard. Among ourselves, we were the Unbroken. It hasn’t changed. To those outside, we are terror. To those within, we are the persistent.’

  Dragan does not know if he believes this story. It has the ring of something told and told again, so many times that it generates an air of truth. Then again, Typhus has no reason to lie about it.

  ‘That is enlightening, lord,’ he says.

  ‘Why do I tell you this, you wonder?’ Typhus asks.

  ‘For my education. As a thinblood.’

  ‘Ha.’ The Traveller fixes him with a rare static glance. For a moment the clouds of flies clear, and Dragan is staring straight into that terrible horned face. The corruption in the white helm runs deeper than he has seen in any other – it looks like every scrap of armour is held together by something ephemeral, but also bone-strong. This is force of will, perhaps, or maybe just cheap magick. ‘I have heard stories of you, Gallowsman. We need fighters like you in this Legion. Ones with a sliver of anger still in them. That’s the danger, for those of us who have trodden the long path. We forget our fury. The god indulges us. The danger is in that.’

  Dragan finds himself nodding. He has thought similar things, often when confronted by one of Vorx’s sermons.

  ‘We were the Unbroken,’ Typhus says. ‘He never let us clean the filth from our armour. Over time, we stopped wanting to. We never turned away. It was a crooked road that took us to Terra, but once we were there, we extracted our blood price.’

  ‘And now we return.’

  ‘No!’ Typhus roars out the word, and the sound is like a blow. The cloud of flies bursts apart as if hit by a shockwave, swirls angrily, then rapidly coalesces again. ‘No. For some reason, for some reason, that wisdom is not heeded. We have the chance now. The road is clear. We could do what we did ten millennia ago and march with the new Warmaster to the Palace. The chance is there, hung before us, and our claws are across it.’

  Suddenly, Dragan knows what this is about. ‘Ultramar,’ he ventures carefully.

  ‘Ultramar!’ Typhus roars. Now the Traveller is even more animated, stomping from side to side, gripping his scythe tightly, sending the clouds spilling and slewing around his every move. ‘Damned Ultramar. Too much was expended on that rabble of worlds before. Just when we have the chance to focus on the real prize, Ultramar rears up again. I despise it. I despise its master. I despise everything about it, and it is not important. Do you give a freshly-squeezed shit about Ultramar, Gallowsman?’

  Dragan suddenly finds he is enjoying this. ‘The orders are there,’ he says.

  ‘And where do they come from? Why are they there?’ Slowly, Typhus controls his anger. His movements become less jerky, more stately. ‘It can’t be helped. I’ve spoken to the primarch. I’ll fight with him, just as ordered. I’ll be at his side. His faithful servant. But you know what this is about – his brother. I had thought that nonsense was all behind us. I had thought they were all dead, or lost. The child-kings were all gone. Speak to the Despoiler, then speak to a primarch, and tell me who you’d rather follow into battle.’

  This is lethal talk. Or maybe madness. No one speaks of Mortarion in such a manner, certainly not within the Legion, and Dragan is strangely thrilled to hear it.

  ‘We will do these things,’ Typhus says, growing sullen. ‘We will break the Gate, and we will spill our poison across the living galaxy. And then we burn a path towards that pointless realm. None of this can be prevented. I am bound to the course now, both by oath and by fate. But you, Gallowsman. You.’

  Dragan’s eyes narrow. This is more temptation than he had expected. ‘We, too, are bound.’

  Typhus comes closer. The flies buzz and bump into Dragan. The aroma is like that of tombs – a tinge of sweetness over a musty hollowness. ‘I bent the laws of the universe to bring us to Terra, once. I sacrificed my soul and those of my brothers, all for that goal. I did not do it so I could see us waste our strength on some family feuding. You understand me?’

  Dragan looks up at him. It is impossible to read the true intention on that ruined face. It is impossible to detect if Typhus is speaking seriously, or if this is just one more test. It is impossible to determine whether his own life is in mortal danger or whether the laws of the Legion still apply in this place.

  So Dragan does not reply at once. He thinks of Solace and his fellow warriors. He thinks of Vorx, and Garstag, and Philemon. He thinks what would be required to alter a course already set and how he might effect it. He thinks on the Traveller’s words and remembers the injunction to fidelity.

  You are my unbroken blades.

  Then Dragan nods, curtly, as a soldier nods when accepting an order.

  ‘Perfectly,’ he says.

  It takes weeks for the order to come in. Or perhaps days, or maybe months – it is always impossible to tell within the shifting temporal strata of the Eye. Across whatever period of time elapses, there are plenty more firefights, boarding actions, scuttling actions and withdrawals. Tension rises. The vast armies closeted tightly together within the thousands of holds teeter forever on the brink of explosion, as ready to turn on their own kind as the Imperials if not held on the tightest of leashes.

  In the interim, pacts are reinforced, daemonic allies are summoned or placated, old treaties are reaffirmed on the bridges of a dozen capital ships. Eventually, word begins to spread from ship to ship that the Vengeful Spirit has been spied entering the void volume, its guns run out and its engines burning star-hot. Shutters are slammed down, engines are kindled and command stations hurriedly cleared. Warning klaxons bray out across the assembled formations, and prows swing heavily towards exit vectors.

  The void is unquiet in that time. Great swirls of null-colour turn beneath the muster’s heart, flickering with bale-lightning along their flanks. The entire Eye begins to pulse, riven with aurorae and eerie flashes of discolouration. Every mind starts to race, every heart starts to beat faster. The decks tremble under the massed tramp of armoured boots, and standards are hoisted in readiness for the deployments to come. Across the Word Bearers’ ships, Dark Apostles begin their orations, the pulpits wreathed in black-tipped flame. On the World Eaters battle-barges, the fight pits run with fresh blood as legionaries work themselves up into their full pitch of frenzy.

  As fractious as the muster has been, once the final order starts to flow down the intricate chains of uncertain command, all thought of internecine warfare is snuffed out. There are many stratagems used by the Despoiler to hold his disparate coalitions together, but the greatest incentive is, as it always has been, to show them the true enemy.

  Thrusters boom up to full power, and in that deep well of space it seems as if a thousand new stars are born. Just then, just as the serried drivetrains boom into full-throated life, the flagship itself finally appears.

  Thrusting clear of its Black Legion escorts, emerging from an overlapping sensor shadow and into clear sight, like all such harbingers of the distant past, the Vengeful Spirit has, if anything, grown in sheer malevolence since its first incarnation as the fiefdom of the Doomed Warmaster. The centuries spent in Eyespace have blackened it, lengthened its s
pars and warped its beams until it is cadaverous and rangy, a mass of ebon prows and barbed parapets. It glides like a shark of the lost oceans, supreme in its killing potential, unrivalled in that fleet or any other, a last, dark reminder of the genius of Crusade-era humanity.

  Once it begins to move, all others fall in behind it. The entire massed fleet, one ship after the other, powers up to cruising speed. The escort-class ships spread out to the margins, leaving the leviathans to take up position at the centre. It takes many hours for the vanguard to process from the muster-sphere, and many more hours for those behind to fall in. Such is the concentration of the daemonic on those ships, bound by chains or spells, that the warp itself flexes and ripples, caught in sympathetic vortices across the scant protection of straining Geller fields. The skein of real space, already strained, buckles, throwing scatter patterns of distortion racing like tsunamis across a turbulent seascape.

  Vox silence descends, and the cavalcade makes its way in eerie quietness out to the staging grounds, where the first squalls of the borderlands begin to roil and churn. Arcs of witchlight crackle and snap, fuelled by the tectonic clash of realities. All ship captains have braved those shoals before and know the dangers. Many ships will be lost on the crossing even if the gods smile on this endeavour, such is the caprice of the Eye’s edge.

  The Vengeful Spirit does not slow. As the behemoth forges ahead, spectral lights, grey as ghosts, ripple into gauzy existence alongside it. In snatches, caught from the corner of an eye, it looks as if there might be more ships out there, riding the riptides with contemptuous ease. The ghosts force a path, their marker lights glowing like ships’ lanterns from the age of earth-bound sail. The void shudders, flexes, and begins to break. Rifts tear across it, exposing a lattice of strobing witchlight below. Some rifts explode into whirling vortices, spinning out of control. Others flicker into darkness the second they are born. Many more implode, dragging the fragile materium down into gaping abysses. The wells extend, burrowing like cancers into the foundations of the universe, and soon a thousand tunnels are bored between worlds. Storms grow, squalls lash, and one by one the battleships pass into the flickering jaws of the winding warp-ways.