Volos was surrounded by killing. Hungry for vengeance, raging at the harm that was befalling his company, he gave himself up to the rhythm of violence. He let his body be fire and bone. He became what he was designed to be. He was monster and he was death, and there was no stopping him. Every movement took a life. Finger pulled trigger and blew up a head. Arm thrust to impale, pulled out and swept to sever. Head ducked and horns gored face and throat.
Traitor Space Marines and heretic cultists rushing to their aid fell before him, and as the dance of war took him, there was no thought, and there was no grand purpose. There was only the perfect kill, the perpetual rending of body into pieces, the brutal pleasure of life ended again and again and again. Enemies landed blows on him. Blades stabbed through armour joints to tear muscle. Rounds chipped plate and took out chunks of flesh. But he was moving so fast, so fluidly, that his foes could never lock on to him with hands or with targeting sights long enough to bring him down. His Larraman cells rushed to fix the damage, clotting blood and knitting rips, but it was his frenzy more than anything else that took him beyond considerations of personal injury and bore him into the intoxicating nirvana of absolute war.
Then a Sword, as big as he was, wearing Terminator armour in the gold of sin, smashed him to the ground with a power fist. The traitor had lost his helmet, and as he raised his fist to reduce Volos’s head to pulp, Volos took in the expression on his face. It was peaceful. Volos’s rage had already swallowed him whole, but now it spiked to a higher intensity yet. He had fought and killed all manner of Traitor Space Marines, but these were the only ones who were perpetually delighted in themselves and the wars around them. Volos felt something so close to envy it was sickening as he slammed both blades up into the Sword’s groin. The warrior howled, his blow going wild as his entrails spilled over Volos and the floor. But as he fell, he gazed down at the ground, and the monster smiled, as if looking upon his work and seeing that it was good.
The incongruity of the expression slit through the haze of Volos’s anger, and he was rational again as he rolled out of the way of the tumbling corpse. Volos examined the floor as he rose, bolter already up and firing into the enemy, and he noticed now the intricate runes that formed the texture of the adamantium floor. They were only present in the disc of the depression. He saw the blood flow over the shapes, and then be absorbed by a substance that could absorb nothing. He realised that a large portion of the Swords had continued to kill their prisoners, as if the deaths of these people who could pose no threat was more important than fighting off the Dragons.
And perhaps it was. Volos remembered the sacrifices that had activated the doors of the Flebis vault. His finger hesitated on the trigger as the thought came to him that with all the blood they were shedding, perhaps he and his brothers were doing the Swords’ work for them. He looked to the advancing Dragons, saw how close they were, and realised that they were too far away to help.
The floor shuddered beneath his feet, and as the Swords roared their triumph, the circular platform (for that, Volos realised far too late, was what it was) dropped like a stone. Volos staggered while friend and foe around him lost their footing. He looked up. They were descending a shaft. A circle of light created by explosions and fire retreated to nothing in seconds. The plunge picked up speed. Volos felt himself growing lighter. He was almost in free fall. As the light from above vanished, the glow of the shaft became visible. Here too, the walls were covered in glyphs, and they shone, flashing by so quickly they were streaks of corpse-silver.
Faster yet, and when he tried to take a step, he floated. Though he knew he was falling, the three hundred metre-wide platform blocked the updraft he would normally have felt. The effect was of being in zero-gravity. In the second his body took to adjust to the new conditions, he processed the tactical situation. Hundreds of non-combatants, a few dozen cultists, the Swords of Epiphany down half their strength. But his squad had been hurt, too. The red runes of lost brothers flashed on his lens readout. Still with him, and already turning on the tumbling foe: Nithigg, Braxas, Vasuk, Liscar, Jesterka. That was all. It would be enough.
The Swords weren’t slow in adapting, either. What had been the defensive line turned inward now, and the butchers left their prey alone, their job done. The battle resumed, but with an odd care and grace. There was an elegance to the strikes as the warriors contended with the laws of physics as much as with each other. A Sword hacked at Volos with a chainaxe. The movement was dream-slow, and Volos had all the time in the world to avoid it, except that his own actions were far behind his impulses. He used a brief kick from the jump pack to rise above the swing, then reversed thrust to smash into the traitor, impaling his skull. Blood fountained upward and was left behind.
And then the fight ended, because the platform fell even faster, burning past terminal velocity, and the moment it crossed that barrier, it grabbed its passengers. Artificial gravity kicked in, and Volos was slammed flat. The platform was keeping everyone alive as the speed became a blinding terror.
They had travelled for hours, passing through the planetoid’s crust, when the platform dropped out of the shaft. Crimson light, the same shade as the moon, filled the world-sized cavern. Volos was near an edge of the platform. He dragged himself forward, looked down, and saw that the platform was actually a piston, retracting a length of thousands of kilometres. The core of Gemini Primus was hollow. The piston was off to one side of the empty sphere, and occupying the core was a bell the size of a small asteroid. The object was more terrible and awe-inspiring than any of the much larger monuments the Immolation Maw had passed on its journey through Abolessus. Those had been abstract shapes. This, like the organ on Flebis, was recognisable. It was something familiar, grown into a dark god.
The bell was the source of the light. It was suspended by a monumental yoke at the top of the cavern, and from the crown to the lip, it was textured with runes. Volos could not read the dead language, nor did he wish to. But at a thousand kilometres’ distance, these runes were not turned into smears by the speed of the fall. They mesmerised. They demanded contemplation. And they spoke. These runes were not those that the followers of the Ruinous Powers painted, carved and gouged onto every available surface. There was nothing here of the perverse, of cackling insanity and willed malevolence. Instead, the bell spoke of an unfathomable will indifferent to all but its own desires. The power that created this monster would think nothing of exterminating entire civilizations, not out of malice, but in the way a man crushes an ant hill that is in his way.
Volos saw a Sword crawling towards him. He waited, then managed to pull his legs free of the surface long enough to lash out. He kicked the Sword in the chest, and discovered that it was possible to overcome the piston’s gravity. The Sword flew into the air, and then appeared to rocket up, vanishing into the stone sky. He was still falling, but at a normal speed. He would catch up and die when the piston stopped.
When the piston stopped…
Volos looked down again. He saw the base of the piston coming to meet them. The speed of the plunge hadn’t slowed at all. They were rushing toward a series of linked, concentric rings. They looked like canals.
Pieces fell into place. The breathable atmosphere and the gravity that were keeping the civilians alive for the length of the journey. What would happen when the piston stopped? What would run down those canals?
Volos felt a moment of pity for the hundreds of Mortisians on the piston. Some of them were rebels, but others, he knew, were just confused refugees. None of that mattered. There was nothing he could do.
‘Ormarr,’ he voxed. ‘Jump packs for deceleration. Get off this thing. Now!’
He sat up, yanking himself away from the iron grip of the floor. Anvils weighed him down. He struggled to leap, and his jump pack blasted. There was a moment’s hesitation when he was caught in a tug of war of forces, and then he shot up away from the piston. The rest of the squad was right behind him. He fired multiple bursts with the pack, slowing
his descent. As the piston flashed down the last few metres, the Dragon Claws hovered briefly above the surface of the cavern. They were close enough to see the faces of those on the platform. Volos took in the terror of the civilians. A number of the Swords weren’t wearing helmets, and Volos felt grim satisfaction in seeing their ecstasy shift, at the last second, to confusion. They hadn’t been expecting this.
The piston stopped. There was no slowing down, no transition. One second it was a missile descending, and the next it was is if it hadn’t moved at all. Volos couldn’t imagine how its momentum was dissipated, but for a second the surface of the cavern blurred, as if the entire globe had vibrated. Everyone on the piston was crushed to paste. The transition from human being to liquid was instantaneous. There was, Volos thought as the Dragon Claws came down to land, an impressive efficiency to the sacrifice.
Blood and pulverised bone fragments flowed into the canals. The remains of a few hundred souls looked like a pitiful drop in the vastness of the cavern. The bell loomed overhead. He couldn’t see how something so vast would be satisfied by an offering of this scale. Yet he knew it would be.
‘Now what?’ Vasuk asked.
Nithigg stared upward. ‘I imagine we wait, unless someone has something like a teleporter stashed away in a belt.’ After a moment he added, ‘You realise that the gravity is still all wrong.’ He pointed to the bell. ‘I believe the actual centre of this world is in there. So we should be falling, not standing.’
Liscar grimaced. ‘Like the Flebis vault,’ he said. ‘Space and time are twisted here.’
Nithigg nodded. ‘This is more warp architecture.’
Volos watched the blood spread through the rings. Where the piston had been the bottom of a declivity on the surface of the planet, here it was the top of a rise. The entire ring structure was a few kilometres wide. It would have seemed big anywhere else. Here he resented how small it was, how quickly it would be filled, and how easily the coming event would be triggered.
Nithigg clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I know,’ he said.
‘They’re dead.’ Volos snarled. ‘They’re crushed to nothing. How can it be that they’re about to win again?’
Nithigg didn’t answer. The Dragon Claws stood in silence and watched the blood fill the rings. It took less than an hour. Then a terrible day dawned as the red glow of the bell’s runes became blinding. And with a ponderous, monstrous deliberation, the bell began to swing.
CHAPTER 25
THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES
On the Gemini moon, Rodrigo Nessun ran his hands over the embodiment of beauty. It was a musical instrument. Its shape made him think of an organ, in that there was a large primary body, ten metres high and twenty wide, and there were pipes of a kind. But these looked less like organ pipes than did the monsters of the Flebis vault. For one thing, once they emerged from the main mass of the instrument, they curved down and ran out of the temple before plunging beneath the smooth surface of the moon. For another, they were made of bone. So was the entire instrument. Where the keyboard should have been, Nessun was presented with a long chain of giant vertebrae. When he touched the backbone, he came into contact with something so smooth, so perfectly crafted to its purpose that it seemed to be stroking his hands rather than the other way around. The instrument was composed of individual bones. There were skulls, femurs, ribcages and hands of all sizes and variations, none of them human, none of them of any species he recognised. Thousands of bones, but the joins were so seamless, the machine also seemed to have been carved from a single, monolithic bloc of grey ivory.
The instrument held his hands and showed him where to place them. When the time came, he would be able to play it as if he were an extension of its being. His soul was legion, and so was this creation. Yet he and the instrument would also become a single expression of power and will. He bowed his head before the omnipotence of paradox.
Above the vertebrae was a large, smooth, convex surface of bone. It was in the shape of an eye ten metres across and blank as the gaze of a marble statue. He shivered with pleasure as he imagined the film drawn back. Soon. Soon.
The Gemini moon’s temple was situated on its equator, its face precisely equidistant from Primus and Secundus. It rose from the surface like a cobra’s hood, and was formed of the same rock as the moon itself: smoother than marble, harder than granite. It generated its own crimson light. The temple entrance was on the outer slope of the hood. The doorway was massive. Inside, a short corridor led to the main space of the temple. This was an enormous open area. Curving walls led up to a domed ceiling unsupported by columns. A stairway, its steps so huge they had to be climbed, wound around the wall, leading up to the transparent dome and, beneath it, a ringed observation platform. The dome appeared to be made of glass, though thicker than any Nessun had ever seen, and so clear that, at first glance, the temple appeared to be open to the air. Before the temple was a vast, fan-shaped, shallow depression. It stretched for kilometres. More than big enough to hold the tens of thousands of humans that stood there, disgorged from the Foretold Pilgrimage.
Other than the temple and its apron, the moon was featureless. There were no mountains or hills, not even any impact craters. There was no dust. The moon was as perfect and artificial as the Twins.
‘Father,’ Gabrille said.
‘Yes?’ Nessun listened with only half an ear. His hands travelled over the beautiful death of the instrument.
‘We have lost all communication with the Gemini Primus contingent.’
The cardinal’s hands paused. There was the possibility of enormous tragedy in this news. He might be about to find out that all his good work had been for nothing. He had, until now, resisted the temptation to attempt a mass conversion of the Black Dragons. The lure had been strong, but he had been virtuous in the pursuit of his goal, again and again trying to throw the Dragons off the scent. But they were as dogged as their captain was corruptible. He had begun to think that the conversion was not so much a temptation as fate, mapped out by the Changer of the Ways. He sensed that this was the moment of truth. ‘What was the last report we had from them?’ he asked.
‘That the route to the resonator had been opened.’
Nessun smiled. The path before him became clear. The crucial step to completion had been taken, quite likely at the expense of a large portion of his forces. On board the Revealed Truth, there were only servitors now. He had twenty Swords of Epiphany with him on the moon. Not enough, depending on how many Dragons were still alive. But plenty to welcome new sheep to the fold.
He stepped away from the wonderful thing before him. He needed his full concentration. There were minds he had to touch. He did not need the amplifying power of the Hall of Exaltation here. The entire moon was impregnated with the magic of the warp. He asked, ‘What is the disposition of the pilgrims?’
‘They are ready.’
‘Good,’ he said, and went to work.
‘What can you tell me?’ Toharan asked.
Maro consulted the data-slates before him. ‘They’re gathered at a point just over the horizon from us,’ he said.
‘Ship activity?’
‘Minimal. The Revealed Truth is in low orbit, doing nothing at all, and the Soulcage has landed.’
‘I see. Then prepare to assault the Revealed Truth.’ The Immolation Maw was still limping from its wounds. But the ship was hungry, too, eager to get revenge on those who had hurt it. It was also a question of honour. He would destroy that ship and everyone aboard. There would be no running away for the Swords this time. Then he would go after what was left of them on the moon. And then–
His train of thought froze. As soon as the image of being on the moon rose in his mind, he was hit by a staggering wave of desire. He didn’t know what was on the moon. He didn’t know what the Swords wanted. But he wanted it, too. He must have it. The scrabbling in his brain was frantic, but it would ease if he could win this prize.
He dragged himself back to the present. There was
a pain behind his eyes, like the crawling of spiny worms. He shoved it to the back of his mind. ‘Take us to the edge of the atmosphere,’ he told Maro. ‘We come over the horizon at the traitor ship with a full barrage.’
‘We won’t have any other moves after that one,’ Maro said.
‘I’m aware of that.’ The Maw had its arsenal, but in its damaged state, its manoeuvrability would be far less than that of the Revealed Truth. ‘So let our first strike be the fatal one.’
Maro said nothing, though Toharan could read his scepticism. The helmsman believed he was crossing the line between daring and reckless stupidity. His feelings were understandable. He was impure, his skull topped by a massive club of bone. Perfect for smashing doors open head-first, but clearly insensitive to intimations of destiny. Maro was another who would be left behind as the Disciples of Purity rose from the ashes of the Black Dragons. Toharan would deal with him when the time came.
Toharan watched the primary pict display in the strategium as the Immolation Maw made its attack run. Unlike on Flebis, the Revealed Truth was too low to approach from beneath. The assault was more frontal. The Chaos cruiser came into sight over the curve of the planetoid as the Maw opened up with its frontal turrets and a full torpedo salvo. Toharan felt the rush of destiny fulfilled when he saw that they had come upon the Truth on its starboard flank. Withering fire raked the superstructure, blasting apart the crown of the command spire. The torpedoes slammed into the hull, blowing open enormous holes. A series of hits to the rear detonated an engine compartment. The ship’s stern bucked upward, while its bow dipped towards the surface of the moon.
‘Well played, helmsman,’ Toharan said.
Maro grunted. He sounded dissatisfied, not triumphant. He leaned back in the pilot throne and turned his head to look at Toharan. With the mechadendrites webbing him to the chair, he struck Toharan as even more disgusting than if he were standing free with only his natural deformities on view. ‘There is no return fire,’ Maro said.
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