The Lords of Silence

by Chris Wraight

  Slert’s position is behind a cluster of jutting rocks, out of the most direct lines of fire but well within striking distance of the walls. The vantage is boiling with activity – gangs of servitors and cultists from ­Solace, toiling away with hulking equipment brought down by drop-ships. Vats have been dragged into place and are now chained together by tangled lengths of cabling. Most of the illumination comes from the dirty panes of armourglass – lime-green and fervid orange, sweltering within the rusted-together tanks. Plumes of backlit steam gust from the seals, dribbling virulent toxins from every valve. These are big containers – the largest nearly the size of a Knight walker – and the servitor crews tending them are hundreds strong.

  Slert looks it all over. It has taken a long time to assemble under constant fire, and six feeder tanks were lost on the way down. It would be good to have more time, a little more space. It would always be good to have more time.

  ‘Enact it, then,’ he says grudgingly. ‘Let’s see what this world is made of.’

  The order gets barked down the line. Unbroken guards shuffle back, shoving aside the dumb clusters of servitors. A plaguebearer daemon, seemingly lost, shambles past, limping awkwardly as it blunders out in search of prey.

  Levers are thrown, dials are spun, great wheels are hauled by teams of bloat-bellied plague ogryns, and the whole chained-together contraption clangs like a hollow bell. Witchlight belches from the exhausts, followed by inky spurts of foul oil. Clattering generators rattle into life, and the boom, boom, boom of industrial pumps makes the ground drum.

  There’s a cough, a scrape, and then the tubes slam taut. Noxious fluids burst down feeder lines, snaking through a dozen connectors before reaching hydrant mouths and bursting out in a foaming torrent.

  Some of Slert’s attendants are too slow and get caught up in the deluge. The screams are short-lived, their bodies dissolved down to the bone in moments. This is more than acid. This is one of Slert’s special brews, one of his matter-eating broths that just keeps on chewing. It swills out across the cracked and broken terrain, gallons and gallons of it, and the stone splinters and squeals. Steam shrieks up, violent and outraged, as the broth pours down channels and burns its way in further.

  This is burrowflay, or rotrock, or matterchew, a species of daemonic solvent with only a little less than half a mind of its own. Once released, it will worm and wriggle its way into any weak point it finds, prising­ it and thinning it and rendering solid matter down to a gunge of semi-warp-shifted molecules. Already it has gouged a smoking well into the landscape ahead of them, and it is carrying on, sliding down under the crust and into the veins of stone beneath. The clouds of green steam billow, and the landscape reels.

  Slert nods towards the Unbroken under his command, and they trudge after the retreating tide, splashing through the scummy liquid as it boils and chunters. How does this substance gnaw through solid rock and yet leave ceramite alone? How does it know where to swirl and where to slither away from? How can it understand where Slert wishes it to go and do as he bids? Just one of the wonders of the empyrean, the great benisons of enchantment. All things are possible with the god if one is willing to suffer in order to learn, and Slert has suffered so very greatly to gain this knowledge.

  His warriors have turbo-drills and macro-hammers. Some have great encrusted shields for warding the worst of the slop, and others haul tracked earthworkers and delving claws. In their wake come servitors with bracing rods and scaffolds, and slave gangs dragging lumen cables. Where the burrowflay chews they pile in, descending quickly until their shoulders are soon at ground level and falling fast. They wade through the dissolving earth, carving out the tunnels that are already bending towards the distant citadel walls. Soon they will be underground entirely, shielded from the enemy’s guns and following a subterranean path that will claw the very foundations of the walls from under their feet.

  Garstag grunts again. This is the closest he will ever get to issuing a compliment.

  ‘How long?’ he asks.

  Slert watches carefully. He has taken great care with the mix, and there are still things that can go wrong. But it is working thus far. Working well.

  ‘Leave the gates to the fanatics,’ he says carefully, trying not to sound smug. ‘You’ll be inside that place within the hour.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Vorx is walking towards the hangars. A Little Lord, the one he brought to Philemon to recover, waddles along beside him. Out of courtesy, Vorx slows his pace, allowing the puffing creature to accompany him to the Thunderhawk.

  Hololiths glimmer around him, glowing like traces of a ghostly spider’s web. They show runes and trajectories and damage reports. They overlap, they shift and slide, and he absorbs them all. Nearly all of his forces are on the surface now, squeezing the citadel hard. He sees the vectors of his Legion’s few flyers as they pummel the outer walls. He sees the progress of tank groups, laying low the first level of defences before creeping forward. He watches the kill tallies click over and notes the names of his warriors who die. Lists will be drawn up when this is all over.

  The fighting has begun in earnest now. Breaches have been blasted into those ramparts, holes through which the twin Legions pour. The volume of cultist troops is enormous, and daemons come with them. Having overseen the assault plans, he must join them now. He must tear himself away from the ledgers and the scan-logs, and breathe the fyceline-acrid air of another world.

  He sees Philemon at the end of the corridor. The Tallyman has Little Lords clustered all over him, clinging to his armour and his quills and his strings of counter beads. Philemon looks flustered. He has had much to put in place for this assault, and only now will he join it.

  ‘Enjoy this, brother,’ Vorx says. Together they walk on down the corridor, surrounded by a scuttling mass of tiny bodies. ‘You wished for hunting – now you have it.’

  ‘It was a warp kick,’ Philemon says, pulling at the hem of his cowl. ‘Something got into the pulse-lines, an overload somewhere. We could have been atomised. We could have gone into full-shift, and now we’d be soul-food for the Neverborn. We were in a gravity well. By the god. I still do not understand it.’

  ‘You are not an engineer, Tallyman,’ Vorx says. ‘And now we are fighting. It can wait.’

  Philemon remains agitated. ‘You know why they did it. You know why. They wanted us blown so far off course we couldn’t follow the order.’

  ‘A dangerous way to achieve that goal.’

  ‘This is serious.’ A Little Lord reaches up to Philemon’s chin, and the Tallyman, uncharacteristically, slaps it away. ‘We were fighting then too. We were all engaged. And someone knew – they knew that the beacon would be gone and that we’d have to claw our way blind through the void. Who would know that, Vorx? What conversations were had before we left for Agripinaa?’

  ‘You tell me, brother. Did you ask your daemon?’

  ‘I plucked some more feathers. There’s a shroud over this. We should be halfway to Ultramar by now.’

  Vorx looks at him as they walk. He wonders why the Tallyman is so discomfited. ‘There would be better ways to achieve that goal,’ he says. ‘Less dangerous ones. I think someone made a mistake.’

  ‘Garstag was seen in the enginarium,’ Philemon says. ‘We looked into the Cultivator’s memories, Countquick and I. Garstag was down there. Why was he there? What business has the Kardainn-master in the engines?’

  ‘Garstag?’

  ‘What business, eh?’

  Vorx wonders if this is just combat stimms. Their bodies are not what they were centuries ago. Every engagement erodes them a little more. Their blood roars through weaker veins and seeps out into slacker muscles. Maybe Philemon is feeling it.

  ‘Garstag knows nothing about warp drives,’ he says.

  Philemon snorts. ‘You’re blind, Vorx. I have already told you, and you do not listen. We are a long way f
rom your protector, and the longer we linger here, the worse it will get.’

  Vorx halts. ‘Do you really think I am blind, Philemon?’ he asks gently. ‘Do you think I have done nothing, knowing what is whispered? Calm yourself. I have done as you recommended. We are at war again now, just as you counselled, and we will win this one handsomely.’

  ‘Your allies will betray you,’ Philemon says. Vorx almost punches him. ‘They have deployed seven hundred and forty-three warriors to our six hundred and twenty-one. They have thirty-four thousand, five hundred and sixty-seven troops drawn from their bonded slave caste and command the allegiance, currently, of a hundred and twenty-eight daemonic creatures. They have fifty-six major armour pieces and–’

  ‘I, also, have done the sums.’

  ‘The warp is thinning over that citadel,’ says Philemon. ‘Countquick tells me something big waits on the other side, and it will not be friendly to us. You know these people – you know why they desire a world like this. Just one sacrifice, one big drawing of blood, and they will have all the power they could ever command.’ He is becoming exasperated. ‘This is what they do.’

  ‘My friend,’ says Vorx, and means it, for they are friends, after a fashion, ‘our task is to take this world and give honour to the faith. That is my only intention. Your concerns are noted, though your intimation that I am ignorant of the dangers is unwelcome. All is as it should be. Now, I wish you to add your blades to the others. I have only one specific command – otherwise, you may slay where you will.’

  Philemon looks up at him. Doubt clouds his face. Unlike most of them, Philemon still has the lingering traces of human features and mannerisms, and does not spend his life masked behind a decaying helm-face. ‘Anything,’ he says.

  ‘They will fight hard, at the end. I would not wish for… one of us to take the credit for a successful outcome. You must detain him, Philemon. Wrap him up in fighting. I know you know how to do it.’

  Philemon looks at him doubtfully. ‘Is that not dangerous?’

  ‘Only for the enemy.’ Vorx smiles under his rotting mask. ‘Kledo has orders to find the master of the city. When he does, I must be at his shoulder, ready to claim the kill.’ He places his gauntlet on Philemon’s shoulder and feels the mass of boils and pustules blistering under the hard surface. ‘Try not to worry. All have roles, all have purposes. Even now, the matter unfolds according to the god’s grand design. Sooner or later, this will become apparent to all of us. Even the lowliest.’

  Dantine has fought on many worlds before, but not like this. He has gone into battle with a lasgun in his hands and a burning horizon ahead, but not like this.

  A part of him thought that he might be left behind on the ship, and so he curled up in his cell, alone, hoping to be forgotten. He knows that it was his soul-trail that brought them here. His life on Sabatine as a lieutenant in the Astra Militarum left its trace on the warp, just as all life leaves its trace there. Perhaps his valour even made its mark, his capacity for bravery among squads of loyal men and women. But it is likely that the other thing made a greater impression – the shame of his demotion, betrayal, discovery. The warp, Dantine thinks, seems to absorb the darker sides of human nature more readily than the lighter. It is a sink for the emotions but drinks more readily of baser instincts.

  Nothing he ever did in the past, however, compares to this. He was taken alive on Najan. He was made into a tool for the monsters. And now he has led them here, to the world of his birth, where they will destroy it all. His name is all over it. If any annals are ever written of this sordid episode, somewhere, in some footnote or cross-reference, it will be said that Captain Dantine, the weak, the traitorous, was the cause of it all. It matters not that he intended none of it. It matters not that he had no choice. Choice, intent, weakness – these are things to be despised, says the Inquisition. Only outcomes matter. Only orders followed or objectives achieved.

  They came for him near the end of the muster. Vorx must have sent them, he thinks – two of his Unbroken, foul-smelling, with seeping eye-lenses and fungus-brown armour. He could not resist, of course, and was dragged from his cot and thrown into a shuttle bay with hundreds of other Unchanged. Somehow he found himself with a rusty lasgun in his hands – an ancient marque, more like a flintlock than a serious weapon, its powerpack already half-depleted and leaking acid.

  On the descent, he reflected on the use of the word ‘unchanged’ for those human slaves the Death Guard employ. It is a strange name, for they have all been changed in many ways. Some of that is physical – they carry sores and boils and infections beyond count. Most are dying of something or other, although few seem to mind that, or even notice it. Some of their slavery, then, must be mental too. They cough up blood, and then grin. They wheeze and gasp and clutch at their throats, but no word of complaint passes their scabrous lips. Some are little more than imbeciles, the ones that grin all the time and seem like flesh ­puppets, but others retain at least some faculties. These are the ones that man the crew stations, that aim the ship’s great guns, that pilot the shuttles and refuel the landers. They are mad, by Imperial standards, but not insensible.

  Then again, as Vorx told him, what is sane about anything in this galaxy? What is the greater madness, to be sick and happy or healthy and desperate?

  Such blasphemy, he thinks. How swiftly I have fallen.

  After making planetfall, he finds himself jostled towards the front line along with the others. There are no orders, no ranks, just a stumbling, headlong race. He struggles to breathe, to keep his feet. His chest hurts, his hands ache. He barely recognises the world he once served on – it smells foul, corrupted. The ground is hot from the massed orbital lasers. It is pitch-dark, and the flashes of the explosions do little other than disorientate him, so he just stumbles with the rest of them.

  Only slowly, after a long march, does he get some sense of where he is. Great las-beams smash through the press around him, immolating those in their path. Shells land in the crowds, blowing the invaders into tatters of flying flesh scraps, and no one stops moving. He sees the pale lenses of his tormentors in the gloom, but they are far away, herding them like cattle. In the distance, somehow, over the crash and boom of ordnance, he can hear agonised cries and chanting in harsh tongues.

  Then he sees walls above him and realises how far he has come. The battlements are already ruined, their summits lying in a sawtooth slump of rubble. Bodies are piled up, absurd amounts of bodies, and they create a haphazard ramp up to the breach. Las-beams fly around him, making the air fizz, yet none touch him. The toothless wretch on his left side is hit by an explosive bolt and flies backwards into the dark. Another takes his place, and they keep climbing. He glimpses the great dark hulls of tanks crunching across fields of corpses, lights flaring, engines revving.

  Everything is blurred, everything is moving. He is not afraid. He feels cold, always cold, and guesses that is because Vorx is far away.

  He reaches a crown of buried corpses and smouldering wreckage, and spies the enemy for the first time. They are crouched in their positions on the inner rampart edge, holding the line, firing methodically and well. In the dark, he recognises the colours he used to wear – grey and blue – and sees the charred remains of battle-standards snapping crazily in the crosswinds.

  Somehow he has made it to the front line. The other bodies move jerkily, caught in a freeze-frame. The Unbroken, masked by the hordes of stumblers, are fighting their way inside the citadel, grinding towards the interior where the towers rise and the searchlights whirl. Mobile armour comes with them, smashing through half-demolished walls, barrels swivelling. Overhead, gunships hover on heat haze that makes the air shake, emptying magazines into far-off targets.

  He has not yet fired his weapon. He feels like a spare part, a piece of driftwood thrown up on a dark tide. The air fills with more las-fire, vivid and searing, and it makes his eyes water. He stumbles, falling to his knee
s on a pile of powderised stonework. Before he knows it, he’s falling, tumbling down the far side of a long heap. When he regains his feet, he has slipped far, down into the citadel’s grounds, and can see the enemy on either side of him, much closer now.

  From somewhere, a desperate hope suddenly kindles. He holds his gun up, holds his other hand up, and staggers towards the nearest barricade.

  ‘Do not… fire!’ he croaks. ‘I can… fight with you.’

  This is the only way out. One last time, fighting with those he has doomed. If he kills one of the monsters this way, just one of them, that would be something.

  He gets closer and can see the glint of grey helms over the heaps of rubble.

  ‘Let me…’ he shouts.

  The first shot hits him in the shoulder, throwing him back. The beam slices straight through, punching the mesh of his uniform and fizzling out the other side. He reels and drops to one knee. Then another one hits him, slapping into his chest and hurling him onto his back.

  It doesn’t hurt. It is just cold. He feels a trickle of blood in both wounds, but it is black and stinking.

  He rolls over, coating himself in mud. Both those wounds should have been fatal, but he is still breathing. He tries to lift himself, and his arm gives out. He collapses back to earth, and his face hovers for a moment over an oily puddle.

  There is a flash in the skies – some starburst of munitions going off – and for a fraction of a second he catches his reflection in the water.

  No wonder they fired. He barely looks human. His eyes are bulging, his cheeks hollow. His old uniform is just rags now, exposing a horrifying body – jutting ribs, swathes of bile-greased fat. He has no teeth – when did he lose those? – just an empty mouth that runs with bloody saliva. He has no hair, and the skin on his scalp is flaking off, uncovering the skull beneath.