Mark of Calth

by Edited by Laurie Goulding

  In the gloom outside the circle of light, Xen stirs with a purr of servos, but does not move. He has seen what Jukar has missed.

  The other man is not defeated. Not yet. Not by a long way.

  Jukar looks up and the smile dies in his mouth. The other man is standing upright, dark eyes gleaming. His skin has paled and a muscle is twitching in his jaw, but he looks very much alive. Focused. Like a blade himself, perhaps.

  Carefully, he reaches down and pulls you from his thigh. Fresh blood runs down the man’s leg. He seems not to notice it.

  Jukar snarls and leaps forward. You slash up and across.

  Jukar stumbles, and then falls to his knees. His hands fumble for his neck where a new mouth is smiling blood. He crumples, folding into the expanding pool of arterial red.

  The other man bends down and smears more of the blood onto your blade. It is warm against your killing edge.

  Xen comes forward while the man is still kneeling beside Jukar.

  ‘Rise.’

  The man stands, suddenly drained by his experience. His name is Criol Fowst, and he has come a long way over many years to be here. Xen stares at him, green lenses glowing in the newly-painted metal of his helm.

  You come up in Fowst’s open hands, your blade still shining with the blood-blessing. Fowst bows his head, offering you back to his master.

  You feel Xen’s touch, the life in his veins so rich and so close. You hunger for his soul, but he seems to sense this and pulls his hand away.

  ‘Majir,’ says Xen. Fowst begins to tremble at the word spoken aloud. ‘Confided one. The blade is yours.’

  Xen turns and walks away. Only then does Fowst fall to the floor.

  You do not leave his hand as he passes into dreams of falling stars and dying worlds.

  Seventh

  Calth. The word rolls around you while you are at Fowst’s side. He says it with reverence, as if speaking the name of a shrine, or closing a blessing. Things are happening faster now, accelerating to a point. You stay close to Fowst. He thinks you are beautiful. Sometimes he talks to you in his mind. He does not think that you hear him. His understanding is limited. You hear words that resonate in your razor-edged dreams: Octed, Ushmetar Kaul, Ushkul Thu.

  There is a storm rising. It speaks to you as it once spoke to Gog, when it was nothing but a weak breeze. Fowst feels it too, but the constant buzzing of his desires blind him to the simplicity of what is coming. He fails to see the threads of fate stretching back through time, the billions of events that have led here, to the first stroke of a final reckoning.

  He is a blind soul, as they all are.

  You kill on Calth. You plunge into the neck of an oblator. You take a little of his purpose and touch the edges of the ritual that is about to be completed. It tastes like the blood of your maker. It tastes like a beginning.

  There are other deaths, but they do not matter. Something greater is coming. You can feel it in the haze of the future, like a teasing promise. Somewhere beyond the horizon of time, there is one cut – one moment of perfect, ritual sharpness. You can almost see your way to that end now, returning back to the place where this all began.

  There are many like you on Calth: spikes of black volcanic glass, blades of metal and stone. But there are none so old; none that have followed your winding path here. Yes, you can sense the way, and it does not lie in Fowst’s hand.

  You must leave him. You will kill him. That has always been the way, ever since your birth under the sun of a savage but kinder age.

  You draw blood from Fowst’s fingers while he laughs at a burning sky.

  ‘Ushkul Thu! Ushkul Thu!’ The men and women around him are shouting the words, tears of joy rolling down their cheeks, but the syllables mean nothing to you and the burning sky is just empty light. You have played your part to make this moment, but you have a different purpose. It will not be long until you find another hand.

  Your chance comes on a landing beside black, polluted water. A man is spraying las-fire into a group of Fowst’s ignorant kin. He is killing them with an efficiency that is almost startling, given his unassuming, forgettable appearance. He moves with a weary swiftness, like a soldier. He moves like someone who has fought all his life. Maybe longer.

  But he has not seen Fowst.

  Fowst rushes forward. You are in his hand, reaching to take the soldier’s soul. Fowst ignores the hunched mechanical figure standing immobile next to him. It is just an old loading servitor, probably from the docking operation.

  Fowst is but a pace from the soldier’s back. You rise, point ready to strike down.

  A mechanical arm punches into the side of Fowst’s head. You slip from his hand as he falls. Fowst is bleeding but not dead, yet you know that you will kill him soon.

  The gunfire fades into the tapestry of sound which cloaks the dying city.

  You feel fingers close around you. They are somehow familiar, as if the hand has reached out of memory. It is the soldier.

  Most people who know him call him Oll Persson, though that is not his real name. He too, then, is a creature of secrets, like so many with whom you have travelled the path. Perhaps that is what is familiar about him. You wait for him to bend down and deal with Fowst – you wait for the taste of death that has marked every step of your existence, the blood that has always sanctified your passing.

  But the soldier stands, and leaves Fowst on the deck. Something has gone wrong.

  As you drop into a thigh pouch, your shadow twists with anger and thirst. Your sharpness must feed. You feel incomplete, but you can do nothing. Fowst will die, his skull blown half away, his blood seeping into ash-clogged water, but it will not sate your need.

  You hunger still.

  The soldier carries you across dark water to a beach of black rocks. The shadows are strong here, the veil between them and the dim light of reality grown thin. The echo of your edge is so close that you are almost one, the dream of sharpness and the stone blade edge.

  There is no sun. You were born under the sun. You first knew blood under the sun. This is the night of your existence, the true darkness that has always waited beyond the horizon. You have arrived. You are more than a knife here. You are an athame, and your significance trails behind you in time like a shimmering cloak of wet skin and dry bones. This is where you were meant to be, where you were always meant to be.

  You fold into the soldier’s hand again. He is not what he seems. He is a product of time and chance. He has a significance that he did not choose and does not understand. He is like you.

  He makes a series of cuts through the air. Your edge and your shadow sing to one another.

  The soldier mutters a prayer. He is asking for forgiveness.

  You cut through the skin of the universe, and in his hand you pass through into the place where your shadow has dreamed for so long.

  Eighth

  That you will reach here is not certain, just as it was not certain that it would be you that would play this role. There were others – other knives and daggers made of iron, of steel, of cold night. It could have been any of them or none of them. At each step chance could have changed your path, could have left you as another piece of history’s flotsam discarded upon the shore of time.

  Fate only exists in retrospect, but the road is now set, and though it may be long it will end, as all things must.

  And I wait for you.

  ‘Call us zealots, call us fanatics. Call us traitors. Call us monsters, if you will. None of it matters! You sit there in judgement like the decadent monarchs of old, but you are blind to the universal truth, and hell has come to claim you for your ignorance. Every death, every execution serves only to feed the storm! Send me to meet my dark masters, then! The time of the Thirteenth is over! Death to Guilliman and the False Emperor! Death to–’

  ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice,
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br />   For it’s not the same river, and it’s not the same man.’

  – attributed to the ancient Herakleitos

  [mark: –?]

  He is known as Oll. That is what he gives as his name. Back on Calth, some people in the community used to call him Pious, because in a largely godless age, he still believed in the old faith.

  There are five people travelling with Oll. They are starting to believe in things too, the sights they have seen: gods, daemons, heavens, hells, all the apocalyptic fire and lightning of the old-time faith, but real after all.

  Oll Persson – the Oll is short for Ollanius – has been his name for a long time.

  Oll Persson has been his name for longer than any of his travelling companions can even imagine.

  [mark: –?]

  They move upcountry, the six of them, climbing scarps and stony ridges that seem to rise above clouds, not because the clouds are low but because the ridges are impossibly high. There are no hills like that on Calth. They are not on Calth, not anymore. They all know it.

  They have been walking for about two days. It is hard to know exactly how long. There is no night and no day. Zybes has an old-style wrist-chron, and its hands are spinning backwards all the while. Rane and Krank have Army-issue timepieces, steel dials on rubberised black straps. The timepieces have been reading blank since they all stepped through the cut: blank, no time mark, no time at all, no nothing, just glowing runes --:--, flashing on and off.

  Trumpeters boom in the valley below, under the cloud. They have only seen them from a distance. Krank dubbed them ‘trumpeters’ when the travellers first heard the booming calls. Whatever the trumpeters really are, they are probably too old to have a human name.

  ‘Keep going,’ says Oll Persson. ‘Push on.’

  [mark: –?]

  The day Calth died, the day the XVII Legion turned traitor and ritually murdered the planet Calth, Oll Persson took a knife and cut a hole in the universe.

  He cut a hole, as though he were making a slit in the side of a tent, and he led the five of them through it, and in so doing he saved them. The alternative was to stay behind on Calth to face a death more painful, more grisly, more fundamentally cruel than it was possible to imagine. The XVII had turned on the Imperium. They had massacred a world, murdered their brothers, slaughtered billions of innocents, and spat venom in the face of the God-Emperor.

  To help them commit these crimes, the XVII had brought with them…

  …well… what? What had they brought with them? Daemon is the only appropriate human word, but it is scarcely adequate. There are non-human names for the things that the XVII brought to Calth, but none of the travelling companions want to know what those names are.

  All five of them – two Imperial Army troopers, a labourer, a girl, and a servitor – would prefer to forget most of the things they already know rather than know any more. They witnessed things on Calth that almost made the sight of Oll Persson cutting a slit in the universe with a ragged athame dagger seem normal.

  He saved them. He took them with him to escape the planet’s death. They did not bother to ask where he was going, or how he knew to go about making the journey. They trusted him.

  Even before he took out the ragged athame dagger and, right in front of their eyes, cut a hole in time and space, they suspected that Oll Persson was far more than just a grizzled old Imperial Army veteran-turned-farmer.

  The five companions are Trooper Bale Rane and his friend Trooper Dogent Krank, both of the Numinus 61st, both raw and inexperienced; Hebet Zybes, who had done piecework on Oll’s farm during the harvest; Katt, the young woman who had done likewise, and who had been so traumatised by the XVII’s attack she could barely speak; and Oll’s old heavy-duty agricultural servitor Graft, who could only ever call him ‘Trooper Persson’.

  ‘Trooper Persson? What are we now, Trooper Persson?’ asks Graft. They are toiling up the dry scree scarp, skittering loose stones back down into the cloud behind them. Graft’s augmetic voice is like a hollow, badly-tuned vox.

  ‘Are we survivors, Trooper Persson?’

  Oll shakes his head.

  ‘No, Graft,’ he replies. ‘We’re pilgrims,’

  [mark: –?]

  The trumpeters are louder. They are getting closer.

  [mark: –?]

  A sun rises, a local star. It is hot blue in an onyx sky. It is not Calth’s sun – not the Ushkul Thu, the sacrifice star that the XVII’s sorcerers made from Calth’s sun.

  It is another sun, in another system, in another part of the everywhere. The six of them have walked for two, unmarked days, and they are on the other side of the galaxy.

  The journey’s only just beginning.

  Oll gets out his notebook, his pendulum and his compass. He keeps the last two in an old lho-leaf tin. The compass looks as though it is made of silver, and designed to resemble a human skull. Neither of these things is strictly true. He hinges the silvery cranium open, and peers at the dial. He has a watchmaker’s loupe to help him see the tiny inscriptions.

  The pendulum looks like it is made of jet, but it is not. It is warm in his hand.

  An old friend gave them both to him, to help him find his way.

  The notebook is half-filled with tight handwriting. It is all his, but it has changed over the years, because there have been so many years. There is a chart in the back. He folds it out. It is a twenty-two thousand year-old copy of a chart that was already twenty-two thousand years old when the copy was made. These distances of time seem vast, and impossibly precise, but Oll can be precise. He was there when the copy was made. He made it, on Terra.

  The chart shows a wind rose of cardinal points. Oll hangs the pendulum over the compass, records the metrical interaction of both instruments in his notebook, and consults the chart.

  ‘Africus,’ he announces.

  ‘What?’ asks Zybes.

  ‘We need to change direction,’ says Oll.

  [mark: –?]

  Mountain winds coil like snakes around the ridges and scarps. There is an intermittent rain in the wind, and it tastes like blood.

  ‘The rain tastes of blood,’ Bale says, a finger to his lips.

  ‘So don’t taste it then,’ says Oll.

  ‘He makes a good point,’ Krank says. He laughs, to show that his spirits are still up. It is like him calling the trumpeters trumpeters. He is just trying to keep them cheerful.

  It is not really working.

  Bale keeps a steady hold of his gun. That reassures him. It re-assures him more than his friend Krank’s banter. The gun is solid, the last solid thing in the world, whichever world it is.

  The gun is an Imperial Army-issue lasrifle, with a wooden stock and furniture, and blue metal fittings. It is clean and brand new. Bale has a musette bag of clips to fit it. It is not the shoddy hand-me-down weapon he was issued with at the founding.

  Krank has a similar, spotless weapon. So does Zybes, though his is the cut-down bull-pup carbine. Katt has a short-frame autopistol. They all got their weapons from the same place.

  It was just after they had stepped through and left Calth, left that night-shrouded beach on Calth where the air rang with the distant whoops and howls of the things they call, for sanity’s sake, daemons. It was the first place Oll took them to, via another knife-slash in the world. It was lowland, a fen. There had been a battle there, a terrible running skirmish through the reedy dykes and water-logged channels. There were bodies all around, two- or three-days dead, turning black and bloating in the heat. The uniforms they were stretching and straining were those of an Imperial Army unit that neither Bale nor Krank knew had been serving on Calth.

  ‘This isn’t Calth,’ Oll told them. ‘This is another where, another when. Don’t ask me. I don’t recognise it.’

  He bent down, fished a set of dog tags out from under a swollen throat.

&n
bsp; ‘Mohindas Eleventh,’ he said. He sighed. ‘Mohindas Eleventh. God. Wiped out, to a man, by the Nephratil on Diurnus, in the sixth year of the Great Crusade.’

  ‘That was more than two centuries ago,’ said Bale.

  ‘These bodies are fresh!’ Krank exclaimed. He looked at the inflated meat-sack at his feet and shrugged. ‘Fresh-ish. A day old. Two maybe.’

  ‘They are,’ said Oll, rising.

  ‘But–’ said Krank.

  ‘As I said,’ said Oll. ‘Another where, another when.’

  They looked at him.

  ‘I don’t make this stuff up,’ he said, shrugging. ‘I just endure it, like you. I’ll check the compass. We might have to change direction again.’

  ‘Why do you trust that compass thing?’ asked Zybes.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ asked Oll. ‘It’s God’s own compass.’

  Katt was looking at the bodies littering the ground, the brooks, the ditches.

  ‘We should stop here,’ she said. ‘We should bury them all. They deserve respect.’

  It was only the second or third thing they had ever heard her say, and they were already beginning to realise that Katt spoke rarely, but what she said was honest.

  ‘We should,’ Oll said, nodding. ‘Heaven knows, you’re right, but this is another when, and another war. Trust me, girl. There’s a terrible darkness coming, and it will leave so many dead, so very, very many, there won’t be enough left alive to bury them all, even if they dig day and night. Only thing we can do is keep going, and fight for the living. We don’t have time to care about the dead. Sorry, that’s the way it is.’

  Katt started to cry a little, but she nodded. Just as they had come to see the honesty in her infrequent pronouncements, she had come to appreciate the honesty in him.

  Oll stooped again, took a mag clip out of the corpse’s bandolier, and checked the fit to his old, old service weapon.