The Lords of Silence

by Chris Wraight

  This is the realm where the physical meets the metaphysical. This is the place where madness crashes up against a static kind of sanity, where the laws of physics are sucked away and dribble into their weakened twilight state. Every ship creaks and clangs. Every shield generator flares and crackles. Geller fields scream, and the background howl of ravening Neverborn becomes ear-splitting.

  Solace thunders along with the rest of them, caught up in a barrelling momentum now and unable to stop. There are other ships on all sides, hemming themselves in, locking the Death Guard contingent into a procession of steadily increasing speed. Chronometers, all of them with mouldering faces and rusting hands, spin around in a frenzy, clattering and clicking as the numbers rack up crazily.

  The ship skids, as if it has thumped into something solid. Old powerlines blow, and the lumens sway on their supports, making the shadows leap and tremble. For a moment it seems as if the engines will overload entirely, wracked by faltering intakes and buffeted by the hammering gale of the immaterium. A whine breaks out, gets louder, then louder again until it is almost unbearable. The Unbroken stand at their stations, enduring it, while servitors and Unchanged crew succumb to the dreadful pressure, clamping hands over their bloody ears. Armourglass shatters, decks crack, bracings crumple.

  Then, after what could have been hours, or days, or even longer, the pressure suddenly splinters into nothing. The riot of colour, the spectrum of the Eye’s unquiet heart, is shredded away and replaced with a tapestry of pure black, speckled with the light of real stars. The howls die away, the clangs echo into oblivion. Ships shoot out into the mat­erium, their prows glowing as if fresh from the foundry’s fires, their engines cycling wildly.

  It takes a moment for the Navigators to truly realise what they have done. Inter-ship reports begin to crackle into vox-stations, a guttural mix of a thousand Eye-born tongues and hailing standards. Some report losses, or catastrophes, or sightings of incredible creatures lost far in the hidden depths, but the fleet is intact, still immense beyond comprehension, and more ships are bursting into instantiation every second. The Vengeful Spirit is powering ahead, carving through the void with its coterie of killers in tow. Solace, like all the rest, follows suit, now turning its attention to its gunnery crews and drop-pod hangars.

  For the focus of their endeavours can now be seen, blearily, on the extreme forward augurs. Across a million picter screens, it glimmers in soft focus, fractured by distance. On either flank, the virulent stains of Eyespace still linger, but the ships are travelling down the clear channel now, racing across space that offers them no impediment.

  And before them, isolated and embattled, a single point of light amid a galaxy of darkness, stands the object of their fury.

  Cadia stands. For now.

  V: The Weeping Veil

  Chapter Ten

  Dantine returns to Najan. He does not understand where these orders come from, nor why he is incapable of resisting them, but he does so anyway, mutely, weakly.

  He is sick. He lifts his hands and sees the pocks and the weals on them. His skin has become sallow, even more so than it was when he worked on the surface. There is a growth on his stomach, hard as a stone. He can push it around under the skin.

  And then there’s the wound on his chest. A while back, he dared to lift his filthy jerkin and undershirt and look at it. The flesh was angry, stitched closed with thick, inexpert sutures. A little pus leaked from it. It looked like the kind of infection a Guardsman would die from, were it left untreated. The least-experienced trooper under his old command could have performed more capable battlefield surgery.

  He has not looked at it since. He can leave his undershirt in place now, since he does not wash – there are no facilities on the ship, and in any case, he has lost the desire to. He no longer pays attention to his hair, which is running with biting lice. He lets his nails grow.

  For his entire life, Dantine’s personal habits have been fastidious. His regiments were always well run, with regular hygiene drills and dorm unit inspections. There were times when this seemed almost obsessive, as if the Departmento’s rules had become a part of the state religion that governed every other part of life. Those rules were a protection, though. Disease was always a big killer in the Astra Militarum, and efforts to stave it off were unrelenting for a reason.

  Now he does not care. Mostly, this lassitude appals him. He cannot understand why he no longer cares. But, deep down, buried where his old heart once beat, there is something else. Something infinitely shameful, so that he does not think of it often and pretends that it is just another part of his sickness, but it is there all the same – relief.

  He no longer has to make the effort, and that is a pleasure in itself. It is like falling asleep, or sinking into a warm pool of water. He lets it all slide, all degrade. He can feel his muscles atrophy and does not intervene. He can feel his bowels swell with inflammation, and it matters not. This is a kind of release. This is like a fist, clenched for a lifetime, slowly relaxing.

  But he resists it when he can. He continues to remember himself. He looks around, at the grimy walls and the filthy decks, and feels like screaming again. They let him walk throughout the ship unhindered, knowing that he will not try to escape. He does not go far. The noises from the levels below continue to fill him with dread, and he encounters enough on his own deck to make him gag.

  The smell is just as it was on Najan once the monsters broke into the compound, only intensified. The ship is stained hard with it, from every rivet and bulkhead to every lumen and plate bolt. The air is over-sweet, the corridors are dark and hemmed in. At times he imagines he has been swallowed by this place and is being slowly digested. At times he feels as if the ship is a stomach, moist with juices and ripe to contract around him. At times he feels as if the ship is alive.

  But then they tell him to go to Najan again. Numbly, he traces the route towards the shuttle bays. He knows the way well enough, although no one has ever explained it to him and he has never stumbled across the hangars before. He passes other menials on the way and avoids eye contact. This is easy with many of them – their eyes are long gone – but he is aware that others stare at him. Perhaps he looks like an enemy. Or maybe they stare at everything, their minds turned to porridge by the stink and the dark and the noise.

  He is greeted at the open door of the shuttle by a human pilot. She is fat and slovenly, her face hidden behind a rusty metal plate, and her hands replaced with input jacks. She says nothing, but clambers into the cockpit. Tendrils extend from the front panels and she grunts as they slot in. Dantine hauls himself into the crew section. He looks at the restraint harnesses hanging from the roof like sides of meat. He should put them on. He doesn’t. What’s the point? What’s the point of anything?

  It takes a long time to get drop clearance. Dantine listens to the muffled vox-traffic. To him it sounds like snarls and growls. He closes his eyes. Eventually, the deck rattles and the engines cough into intermittent life.

  The transfer to the surface is bumpy and slow. He looks out of the viewports until they are doused in re-entry flame. After that they give him a view of Najan’s desolate surface. The world is brown-grey, almost featureless. He can see orderly swirls of cloud passing below, the product of the operative weather system. It looks just as it did when he first arrived, a long time ago. That memory makes him feel instantly nauseous, so he closes it down. He sits back, his fingers gripping the vibrating bench, and grits his teeth. He tries to remember the words to the old drill manuals and finds that he can’t. He tries again.

  The shuttle hits the ground with a thud. When the doors open, dusty wind shrieks inside, making him blink and spit. Dantine stumbles out and down the ramp, wiping at his eyes.

  There are menials everywhere. They are all terribly ill, with bloody bandages around their foreheads and sore-crusted hands clutching at rags. He does not recognise any faces, and so assumes that these
are crew brought down from the monsters’ ship. He sees some of the old duty servitors in the distance, limping on too many legs or dragging a half-body along with too many arms.

  Najan is beginning to smell bad. It is beginning to fester. The wind is no longer dry, but feels like a canine’s breath washing over the fields. The colours, such as they were, have all gone. Dantine’s vision is a mess of greys now, a bank of fog that he peers through. Has the world changed? Or has he changed?

  He walks towards his old barracks. The gates are still broken, and the walls are crumbling and charred. In the grey light of day, the damage looks even worse than before. They demolished the entire place, just a handful of them.

  The Unbroken have congregated in the old parade ground and now stand like monoliths amid the wreckage. Their leader – the one called Vorx, who seems to have taken Dantine under his wing – is there, as are the others. Dantine knows their names now: Slert, the one with eyes under his skin; Kledo, the one whose soul has withered; Garstag, the slayer; Philemon, the corpse-counter. Dragan, the warrior, hangs back on the edges, and he is the most dangerous of them all.

  None of them acknowledges him, not even Vorx. Dantine takes his place with the other menials and slaves, standing in the hot dust, summoned, he assumes, to listen only.

  Garstag, who still has layers of blood on his gauntlets, is speaking.

  ‘It’s a big world,’ he says. The speech is the guttural, halting Mourtaig. Dantine has given up marvelling at how he understands all of these things. ‘We could use it.’

  Slert laughs. ‘It’s a dustbowl. There’s nothing for us here.’

  ‘It could feed us for as long as we wanted,’ says Garstag. ‘We could rebuild here.’

  ‘For what?’ asks Kledo.

  ‘He likes the earth under his feet,’ says Philemon.

  Dantine watches them intently. His pervasive sense of horror is, inevitably, fading. You can’t stay terrified forever, and in its place come other things – contempt, anger, even fascination.

  ‘Tell us where we are,’ says Kledo. The Surgeon’s voice is soft, a dry whisper.

  Philemon draws out parchment from bags and satchels slung across his armour. The Tallyman is possibly the strangest of the lot, burdened with lengths of mouldering vellum and long lists of scrawled names. His movements are hesitant, almost bumbling, though presumably he is as lethal as the rest of them when he needs to be.

  ‘My charts are old,’ Philemon says. ‘They will be inaccurate. But we are deep into Imperial territory. We have a number of choices. One. We bring Gifts to this world and make it our own. Two. We strike out on our original course, making for Ultramar. Three. We do… something else.’

  Dragan paces at the rear. His energy is in contrast with the rest of them, who are virtually static. ‘What are we thinking in this?’ he grunts. ‘Drifting aimlessly?’

  ‘We never had the luxury before,’ says Slert. ‘Choice, choice, choice. Too much of it will kill you.’

  The Putrifier has something crawling up his leg. Dantine knows that these things are called Little Lords, and he is still mystified as to what their purpose is, or why they are tolerated. They are disgusting sacs, ranging in size from a fist’s clench to a full lung. They strut and caper like foul infants, letting loose gouts of flatus or breaking into vicious little fights. And yet Slert reaches down for it now, picking it up gently. It settles into the crook of his arm, gurgling contentedly.

  ‘Or we forget all this,’ offers Kledo. ‘The Despoiler’s fleets must still be closer to us than the primarch’s.’

  There is division between them. Dantine finds himself compelled by it, drawn into it. The air seems to darken around them, to grow colder, and for a moment he imagines just what it would be like if these monsters took it upon themselves to fight one another.

  Vorx raises his hand.

  ‘You would be bored quickly by this world, Garstag,’ he says. The siegemaster’s voice is the oldest, the deepest, the most avuncular and the most reasonable. ‘Solace is stuffed with supplies – we will not need more for months.’

  The others are listening. Some more than others.

  ‘This is not the Imperium we are used to,’ Vorx goes on. ‘The Beacon is extinguished. Its defenders are scattered. Perhaps there is still fighting at Cadia, perhaps not. We are used to being hunted, out here. We will have to become used to being hunters.’

  Dragan snarls. ‘We have always been–’

  ‘I know, brother,’ says Vorx. ‘Listen to me. Sabatine is the target.’

  He lets that sink in. Dantine feels hollow inside. He tries to remember where it is, how far off it is, whether there is any way a warning could be given. In the past, he might have considered a world like Sabatine to be impregnable, but that was before he met these creatures.

  Philemon is looking at his master. ‘I know the name. I know what is on Sabatine.’

  Garstag is suddenly animated. ‘Is it within range?’

  ‘A fortress-monastery,’ murmurs Slert. ‘It would be a worthy way to end your life, siegemaster, but–’

  ‘Look around you,’ Vorx says. ‘Where are they? A year ago, they would have been on our tails. We would have been fighting for our lives, ready to hurl Solace back into the warp. If they live yet, they are weak. The moment may not last. We must seize it.’

  Najan’s winds moan around them, kicking up their familiar haze of husks and dust.

  ‘To end a Chapter,’ says Slert.

  ‘There were a lot of Chapters at Cadia,’ says Kledo. ‘Maybe they didn’t come back.’

  ‘Possible,’ says Garstag, his words sliding out carefully, as if he is chewing on them. ‘But still, a fortress-monastery. Nothing easy about it.’

  ‘It would be a world to remake, Kardainn-master,’ Vorx says. ‘You would have true foundations there.’ He turns to Dragan. ‘What say you, Gallowsman?’

  And then, Dantine understands what this is about. It is as if he sees the scene through Vorx’s eyes. The siegemaster has his heart still, dripping in that foul bag, and thus they are linked by the sorcery that prevents him from expiring as he should.

  Vorx is daring Dragan to refuse. He is showing him a prestige target, a target worthy of any warband in the galaxy, and daring him to prefer the Despoiler’s road. And he does this knowing it will take them further into the galaxy’s heart, a little closer to the destination he truly covets.

  Politics never alters. The outer visage may vary, from austere patrician to worm-eaten sadist, but the core concern remains the same. This is about power.

  Dragan knows it too. All eyes turn to him. For a moment Dantine detects uncertainty, just for a heartbeat.

  ‘They could be down to a tithe of their strength,’ Dragan says. ‘It would still be hard, on their own ground.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Vorx. ‘Very difficult.’

  That is the challenge. That is the accusation of cowardice, just there, wrapped up in that slow, equable tone of voice. Dantine almost smiles.

  Dragan’s head drops, just a little. ‘I must lead the assault,’ he demands, trying to claw something back.

  ‘That is your function,’ Vorx says – condescension swaddled in concession.

  ‘The ways of the warp are occluded,’ interjects Philemon, sounding uneasy. ‘We are in darkness. To find this place will be–’

  ‘Another challenge,’ Vorx says. ‘But nothing is random in this universe, as you know, Tallyman. We were brought here. And thus we have a guide.’

  They turn to Dantine without further prompting. Six pairs of green lenses, some angled, some round as navels, swivelling to focus on him. The effect is like a punch, and he stumbles back half a step.

  ‘You will take us to your old home world, won’t you, Captain Dantine?’ Vorx asks.

  There is only one answer to the question. He no longer has a will of his own. He no longe
r has a life of his own. He is a puppet now, a shadow within a world of ghouls and mists. It matters not that he cannot read the warp, nor that he cannot pilot a starship. His soul clings to his body despite its mortal death, tracing a slender path across the dark firmaments of both space and time. They can use that.

  So he bows, like a slave bows.

  ‘Yes, lord,’ Dantine says, breaking just a little more inside.

  They leave Najan with barely a backwards glance. The lifters boom off the fields, exploding the dry earth beneath their columns of fire. Unchanged crew members are herded back into shuttles and leashed to hooks before the doors are slammed closed on them.

  The servitors watch them go, those altered by Kledo and the thousands more who never stopped working the fields. They lift their withered faces to the skies and see the pale lines of smoke arcing away. Then they return to their work – to hauling, planting, furrowing. They do not notice that the crops are dying now. They shamble through the rows of corn, their eyes as dead as the soil underfoot, following prescribed patterns hardwired into their atrophied brainstems.

  Almost nothing is left behind but destruction and a slow grind of contagion that will spread and spread until the entire world is turned to silage. The only thing Vorx has placed on the surface is a wooden plaque, nailed to a wooden pole. It reads, in standard Imperial Gothic, Careless.

  The various landers return to Solace. They slip under the rotting eaves of the great ship, angling past trailing lines of solidified effluent. Solace excretes continually, a sludge of faecal brown that stains every orbit it has ever been in. Its many daughter craft know how to evade this and dock without being inundated, though Najan’s orbital zone is now tainted with the long arcs of spore mats.