‘The Silver Skulls are stalwart warriors. They are fierce and savage in battle. I believe they should be...’ Garreon tailed off, considering how best to end the sentence. ‘I believe forming some sort of accord with them would be a beneficial arrangement.’
‘You seek to turn them to our cause?’ Finally, the Apothecary had Taemar’s attention. He looked around. ‘You think there is even the remotest of chances that they will do that?’
‘They are arrogant. Proud. Yes, I believe there is a chance.’ Garreon joined Taemar in seeking the stars above. ‘There always is. Mark well the Silver Skulls, Taemar. You and your men seek to create death and destruction. But they will revisit such behaviour on us in kind. I ask that you try your best to bring me some live ones. I suspect that there is much they can teach us.’
‘As you wish, my lord.’
Another ship sailed the empyrean, its destination fixed and certain.
His personal chambers were always gloomy without so much as a lumen-globe to light the way. He preferred to spend his private hours in the shadows and the darkness.
The messenger, a grovelling, wretched slave by the name of Lem who had lost the drawing of straws, stood in the pitch darkness, trying to stem the quivering in his spine. Despite the fact that he had been sent down to deliver good news, they had still lost a ship. This would undoubtedly incur the master’s displeasure.
It was silent in the chamber. But it was a loaded silence; the calm before the storm. The hesitation right before the explosive discharge from a bolt pistol detonated. The stillness of the air before a torrential thunderstorm. His master’s discontent was a thing denied a voice.
Something brushed past Lem’s cheek in the darkness and he flinched. His imagination. It was just his imagination. He squeezed his eyes closed and tried to control the trembling walls of his bladder.
All the while, the noise. A rhythmic drumming. The ring of metal on stone. One… two… three… four. One… two… three… four… Denied vision and thus unable to relate anything to the noise, Lem found it disconcerting.
After several long, agonising moments, he forced his eyes open again. He could barely make out the shape seated opposite him, nothing more than a bulky outline in the darkness, but now it seemed to move. The sound of scraping ceramite and the buzz and hiss of servos and hydraulics compensating confirmed his suspicion. The master was moving into a different position. He had remained silent during the delivery of the news and Lem had dared to hope that he might leave with his life intact.
‘Excellent. A confirmation that all is as it should be. All our forces are gathered, everything is in order. We will take this ship.’ The master’s voice, a low, predatory growl, was thick with saliva, coming as it did through metal teeth that had long since replaced anything natural that had ever grown in his jaw.
They were only a few words, but Lem could feel the sheer menace implicit in them. He nodded – a futile gesture in this darkness – and backed towards the door. As it slid open on old, grinding gears, a sliver of light from the corridor beyond sliced through the room. It fell on the impossibly huge metal power claw of the leader of the Red Corsairs as he drummed it against the arm of his command throne. Lem caught a glimpse of glinting, razor-sharp teeth as though the master’s mouth bared in a parody of a grin.
Then the door ground closed and left Huron Blackheart alone in his own darkness.
The Inquisition
++Open vox-net++
My most esteemed Lord Inquisitor,
This particular target has slipped through our grasp too many times, hiding in the darkest corners of untrodden space. We tore him from his bolthole, and now he bleeds answers to our many questions.
Interrogator Kerstromm Ordo Malleus
What are you working on at the moment?
I’ve just written a Warhammer short story for an upcoming anthology (Age of Legend). It was loads of fun, as I haven’t written a fantasy story before. There’s lots of magical goings-on in it – it features the Colleges of Magic – and in my head magic in Warhammer is every bit as dangerous and creepy as psychic powers and sorcery in the 41st Millennium. It was a fun new area to explore.
On the Warhammer 40,000 front, there’s a forthcoming novella featuring the Imperial Fists, to appear in the Architect of Fate collection. Captain Lysander is around in this and he was a very welcome challenge to write – making him a big bad Space Marine but also giving him some personal aspects, even some flaws, that set him apart from other Imperial Fists. One of the real challenges to writing for 40K, or anything that’s based upon already existing characters, is staying true to what people know about them while at the same time revealing some new aspect to them.
What will you be working on next?
Who knows? There’s no telling what I might be doing next. It could be that one of the things I’m working on will be the start of a new series, or maybe there’s some other area that the Black Library want to explore.
Are there any areas of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 that you haven’t yet explored that you’d like to in the future?
I’d like to write more Warhammer, especially involving the various flavours of magic in the Warhammer World. They’re all different and all very dangerous. Perhaps the ‘normal’ magic, the magic of the Imperial Colleges, is the most dangerous because the magisters and scholars think they understand what they’re dealing with but in reality they have no idea - the high elves knew it and that’s why they only taught the Empire’s wizards the basic stuff.
n Warhammer 40,000, I love the new dark eldar background and imagery. The models are amazing (I’m a huge miniature painting nerd) and the whole vibe – they’re evil, but also desperate and miserable underneath their arrogance – is very powerful stuff. I like the scourges the best. The idea of a scourge getting his wings and having to ascend all the way from the haemonculus’s lab, up through the various layers of Commorragh’s society, to reach the scourges’ aerie, is such a cool image and has so much potential.
What are you reading at the moment? Who are your favourite authors?
I’m currently getting various thrillers on audiobooks to listen to while I’m out and about. It’s a good way to fill that downtime (ie, when you’re getting from one place to another) with something constructive and entertaining. Something with a tight and complex plot, and a glimmer of character and snappy dialogue, is always good. Harlan Coben is my kind of writer.
I’m also playing a bunch of D&D and I’m putting together a Deathwatch RPG campaign in the hope that my group will jump at the chance to be Space Marines and immolate some xenos in the Emperor’s name.
Which book (either BL or non-BL) do you wish you’d written and why?
Either the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake or Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. Gormenghast is pretty much its own genre and its lush description and absurdist feel is intoxicating. A lot of the way I write is basically stolen from the Gormenghast series. And Sirens of Titan is a book so well-written that it can change your whole outlook on the world without your even noticing. I recommend it to everyone, not just fans of good old sci-fi but anyone at all.
More generally, I love some of the old science fiction, back when it really was a new frontier in fiction. The original Starship Troopers book, anything by Alfred Bester and The Forever War are good examples.
PHALANX
Chapter Thirteen
Ben Counter
It was a dismal thing, killing Chaplain Iktinos.
Iktinos was, by then, a barely sensible wreck. The infliction of the Hell had broken his mind so thoroughly that there was nothing left of the Chaplain save for his physical shell. The man that had once been, the paragon of the Chapter and the hidden traitor, were gone.
Sarpedon had carried Iktinos to a cluster of saviour pods adjoining the fighter craft deck. In the event of the huge hangar doors failing or some disaster befalling the fighter deck, the crew could use the pods to escape the Phalanx. The entrances to the pods were circu
lar shafts leading down from a slanting wall, like the open mouths of steel worms waiting to swallow the desperate crewmen as they fled. Oil stained the walls and ceiling, and the chill of the near-vacuum could not be completely kept out by the hull insulation. It was no place for a Space Marine to die, suited only to a shambolic, almost apologetic excuse for a death.
Should the saviour pods themselves be compromised, an emergency airlock was set into the outer skin of the hull beside the entrances to the pods. A crewman in a voidsuit who took that exit could conceivably survive an extra hour or two in space, and perhaps even be picked up by a rescue craft. Sarpedon placed Iktinos’s limp form on the deck and turned the wheel-lock, opening the airlock’s outer door.
‘If you have anything you wish to add, Chaplain,’ said Sarpedon, ‘now is the time.’
Iktinos did not reply. Sarpedon looked down at him, at his burned face and scorched, dented armour, and regretted speaking. The Chaplain was barely drawing breath.
Sarpedon placed a hand against Iktinos’s charred skull. Sarpedon had never possessed any great talent for diving into the mind of another. Some Librarians of the Old Chapter had specialised in peeling apart another’s consciousness, diving down and extracting secrets the subject himself did not know. Others read minds on a vast scale, divining troop movements from an opposing army as fast as their orders spread. Sarpedon had only been able to transmit, albeit at the tremendous telepathic volume that manifested as the Hell. Nevertheless he had sometimes caught echoes of the strongest emotions, an aspect of the sixth sense that all psykers possessed in some degree. He tried to read something from Iktinos then, to divine some final thought from the man he had once considered his closest ally in all the universe.
There was nothing. Complete deadness, as if Iktinos was an inert object with no mind at all.
Then Sarpedon caught something, faint and intermittent, like a signal from a dying transmitter light years away. It was the howling of a desolate wind, the sound of emptiness more profound that silence. It whistled through the ruined architecture of a mind as empty as a bombed-out city, as alone as a world where life had never evolved. It was as if there had never been a mind in there at all, scoured and scrubbed from the wind-blasted stones by a terrible extinction.
Sarpedon alone had not done this. The Hell was indiscriminate and crude, a force of destruction, certainly, but not accurate or thorough enough to erase the personality of another. Iktinos had done this to himself. The shattered fragments of his soul had gathered themselves into a whole coherent enough only to self-destruct. A logic bomb planted by Daenyathos’s teachings, a way to destroy any compromising memories trapped in a fractured mind. An atrocity quite in keeping with the Philosopher-Soldier’s conviction that everything he did, no matter how obscene, was for a good beyond the conception of lesser human beings.
Sarpedon knew now what Daenyathos planned. It was no less appalling than the betrayal of the Soul Drinkers had suggested. It was entirely appropriate that Abraxes, an icon of treachery and malice, should himself just be a cog in such a scheme. The annihilation of Iktinos’s personality was similarly in keeping with Daenyathos’s way of doing things.
Iktinos had not completed his mental suicide before the unconscious part of him, the one laid open by the Hell, had submitted to Sarpedon’s request. Iktinos had, indeed, told Sarpedon everything.
Sarpedon hefted Iktinos’s body into the airlock. He slammed the inner door shut and turned the wheel to lock it again. Through the thick portholes Sarpedon could see the multicoloured nebulae of the Veiled Region, unknowable and hungry. Sarpedon would give its ravenous young stars something to feed on.
He tried to think of something to say to Iktinos, some powerful parting statement that would both condemn the traitor and express regret that the Chaplain, his old friend, was gone. But there was no point. Iktinos could not have understood anything in his current state, even if the words did reach him through the heavy airlock door.
Sarpedon thumbed the control stud set into the wall beside the door. Pneumatic cables hissed as the airlock was depressurised. A warning light strobed, then the airlock’s outer door opened and the remaining air whistled out. Silence followed and Iktinos’s body, dislodged from its resting place by the final decompression, drifted out of the airlock and beyond the grasp of the Phalanx.
A craft the size of the Phalanx was typically surrounded by a halo of debris and thin gas out to a distance of several tens of metres. Sarpedon watched as Iktinos’s body fell beyond the halo zone, into the pure void. At some point the Chaplain had finally died, but it hardly seemed much of a distinction with his mind already destroyed.
The outer door slid shut again, and Iktinos’s body became lost through the condensation misting on the porthole as the airlock filled back up with air. Sarpedon turned away.
Iktinos was dead. Sarpedon had kept one of the promises he had made to himself. A tough as taking on Iktinos had been, the next promise would be harder to fulfil. Sarpedon knew where Daenyathos was and what he was trying to do, but the way he would stop the Philosopher-Soldier had yet to make itself clear.
It did not matter. The time for weighing up the risks and probabilities of battle had come and gone some time ago. Now, Sarpedon had something to fight for, and there was no deadlier weapon than that in a Space Marine’s hands.
‘Throne behold us,’ whispered Pallas as he set eyes on the Path of the Lost for the first time. ‘Watch over us, my Emperor. Watch over us.’
The Path of the Lost, as recorded in the archives of the Imperial Fists, was a dark place. Its floors were covered with grates to allow the blood to drain out, and a thousand rusting torture devices were piled up as detritus in its shadowy corners as the fashions of punishment changed. An Imperial Fist might have the honour of being interrogated in the Atoning Halls or perhaps brought in chains before the Chapter Master – but those who were outsiders, prisoners of war or condemned heretics would be banished to the Path of the Lost. There would be doled out their tortures or executions away from the eyes of the Chapter down in the Phalanx’s rusting, filthy underbelly.
That would have been bad enough.
The strike force advanced, fire teams covering one another, as they crossed the threshold and entered what the Path of the Lost had become. The horror of the warp’s invasion had bled down inevitably into the Path, some unconscious malice dragging the warp’s dark energies into the torture chambers and execution grounds.
Across the walls and floors shimmered the torn faces of the Path’s dead. Delicate eldar features, each forced into a dying rictus, bulged from the warping metal. Like drowning swimmers struggling to the surface, humanoid shapes broke the surface to sink down again, an endless pulsating mass of bodies. The ghosts of mutant renegades, fouled with horns or sloughing skin, pushed against the fabric of reality, teeth gnashing.
‘There must be a million dirty secrets down here,’ said Luko, casting an eye across the constant parade of the executed and damned.
‘Nothing of your concern,’ said Sergeant Prexus. His squad had been charged with forming the bulk of the strike force, with nine more Imperial Fists under his command.
‘I think it is, sergeant,’ replied Luko. ‘All those dark deeds the Imperial Fists thought hidden from the universe, they might well come back to bite us down here.’
‘If you are finished,’ said Sister Aescarion, walking between the Imperial Fist and the Soul Drinker, ‘time is a factor.’
Prexus’s squad advanced into the cluster of execution chambers that marked the entrance to the Path of the Lost. Pallas, Luko and Graevus followed the Imperial Fists in, Varnica and Sister Aescarion watching the angles behind them.
Several tiled rooms with drains built into the floor, walls crazed with old bullet holes, had seen hundreds of captives executed in the past decades and centuries. Now those walls bulged as if they held veins fed by a vast heart, faces and hands pressing against the surface. The floor quivered underfoot as grasping hands tried to snare
the feet of the Imperial Fists.
‘Steel your souls,’ said Sergeant Prexus, his chainsword held ready as he took point. ‘Recall the parables of Rogal Dorn. He walked into the hell of the Vengeful Spirit, and though assailed on every side, he did not fall. Though the Angel fell, the strength of our primarch’s soul did not let him follow. Though the Emperor was laid low, Rogal Dorn did not know despair. Let his strength be your strength, my brothers. Let his strength be yours.’
‘We are watched,’ said Varnica. He slid a hand into his force claw gauntlet, and it snickered shut around his wrist.
A shape flashed through the execution chambers, half-glimpsed through the gaping doorways and holes in the collapsed walls. The Imperial Fists gathered into a battle formation, gathered around Prexus with bolters aimed out in all directions. Pallas was beside Prexus, his own bolter ready.
‘They envy us,’ said Varnica. ‘No matter how grave our situation, it cannot compare to the unfinished business of the dead.’
More shimmering silver-grey forms rippled in and out of sight, flitting from electric chair to injection table to gallows. Quicker and closer they came, the howling of their voices growing, until they were like a tornado of torn souls with the strike force trapped in the storm’s eye.
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