by Dan Abnett
‘Yes, it is,’ he agreed. ‘Because of where we are now. It’s all about force. We are sitting in the eye of the greatest war that has ever been. We don’t have the luxury of waiting. The pot won’t fix itself. Here’ the thing… You broke with the Emperor, because He forced the pace of fate in defiance of nature. And you’re afraid that I’m doing, the same. An artificial drive. An artificial Perpetual trying to push cange. The embodiment of everything you tried to stop. Just another false demigod trying to alter fate. The difference is, He was driven by pure ambition. It was in response to nothing except the pace of evolution. My effort is simply in response to His. I am trying to apply force in response to force.’
She studied his face.
‘Tell me, John,’ she asked, ‘who do you fear more, the Emperor or
Horus Lupercal?’
‘At this stage, it’s hard to tell,’ he replied. ‘But only one can stop the other. Either way. Jury’s out. However, Horus will only destroy. He cannot be reasoned with. But intervention might work with your beloved Neoth. I’m not talking about helping Him win the war. I’m talking about stopping it completely.’
‘He has never listened, never learned,’ said Erda. ‘In the cycles of old lore, He is Saturn. Inflexible authority.’
‘What?’ asked John.
‘He is Saturn. He is Cronus. He is Oanis. It depends on your pantheon.’
‘You don’t believe in gods.’
‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘But the symbols have always intrigued me, and through the ages He has styled himself on many of them, for effect. Mithras, the soldier-god, Tyr Hammerhand, the Wolf of the Romanii, Arawn, Enlil of Storms, Maahes the lion-headed, Seth. And Saturn, most of all. The father-god. The maker. In the acroamatic texts of alchemy, Saturn is glyphed as lead, the prima matera. It is heavy and it seals, and limits, and protects. It is cold authority. Saturn is a black, stone prison, caging all truth inside its chain of rings.’
‘Great. You’re telling me to forget it.’
Erda smiled at him. ‘No. I am taken by your spirit, John Grammaticus. Your resolve. I believe you may be a trickster god, John, but tricksters have always had their vital place. They cannot be trusted, but they are needed.’
‘You’ve lost me, Erda.’
‘He is Saturn,’ she whispered. The Saturnine aspect is lead. Lead is heavy. But lead, John. Lead can be moulded.’
‘Lead can be moulded,’ he repeated. He smiled. ‘Yes, it can.’
‘It can be shaped. It can be re-formed.’
He got to his feet.
‘So you will help?’ he asked.
‘If I can.’
‘Because He is the Saturnine father, and you are… what? Nwt? Ma?’
‘I have no aspect as a mother any more, John. The effigies of fertility and vitality in this place are just memories of the past. But perhaps I could be an opener of the way. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’
‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘I need to get into the Palace. You fled from there. I think you know a way in.’
‘There are means, but John, you have Eldrad’s shears. You are already an opener of ways. When I came in you were examining that figure of Azoth-Hermes. You said you were drawn to it. Your kindred aspect.’
‘The Palace is warded, against even Eldrad’s device. I’m no way-maker. Maybe you were right, and I’m simply the other aspect of Hermes. The trickster arsehole part.’
‘I told you, tricksters play a vital role,’ she said. ‘Did you know that one of his names was stropheos? It means a hinge. It opens doors, but it also turns fate. Are you that, John? Are you the hinge of fate?’
‘I can try.’
‘In the early days,’ said Erda, ‘when gods were plentiful, every culture had a version of the trickster. One who opens doors that could not open, and changes things without warning, to much delight or consternation. Among the Yoruba, the trickster was called Eshu.’
‘Great story. Why are you telling me this?’
‘Because,’ she said, ‘Eshu, like Hermes, and Azoth, and Mercury, and all the swift couriers of fate, is the solution. The solvent. It is the agent that transmutes lead and opens the cage of Saturn’s black pкison. But it is also called the Enforcer of Sacrifice. To get a god to answer your bidding, you must make an offering. You must pay god his price. Are you ready for that?’
He went outside. The night was clear, and had become very cold. Some of Erda’s companions, including the three who had served him food, had gathered around a leaping bonfire, inside the ring of huts and tents. One was singing, an old, old song that seemed almost familiar. The others, especially the younger ones, were dancing and clapping. Sparks flurried up towards the unending stars.
When they saw him, they ran away, leaving the fire burning. They became darting silhouettes that flickered in the firelight, and vanished into tents.
Afraid of me, John supposed. Or afraid of the trickster god.
‘Bullshit,’ he whispered. Erda had a way about her, the storyteller’s knack. For all she said she didn’t believe in gods and spirits, that they were tall stories from a more credulous age of the world, she had a way of convincing you. Her words carried weight, freighting meanings inside meanings. She had an odd way of synchronising things, both real and symbolic, aligning them so they made some new, bewildering sense. John liked that. There was mystery left in her, and that was precious in itself. For all the Emperor was secret, and moved, across the ages, mysteriously, the way a god is supposed to, His ambitions were not. The direction of His Great Work was blatantly self-evident. He was unsubtle. He always had been. A blunt, brute monolith.
‘There should be more mystery in the world,’ said John. Mystery left room for all sorts of things, for doubt and ideas and exploration. The tales Erda wove blurred the line between myth and reality.
And that seemed right, because that was the cosmos now. A cosmos that denied gods, but accepted the existence of a vast otherness. Supernatural forms existed, Neverborn, reaching into the world. Some said if you acknowledged such spirits, you had to allow for the idea there might be gods too. John had heard that argument too many times in the last few years. It fell down on its basic premise. Just because one thing existed, it didn’t mean the other had to. The universe was many things, but it wasn’t symmetrical. The existence of daemons did not prove the existence of gods. There was just the warp, in its unfathomable immensity, and on the other scale, the tiny speck of mortal life.
John strolled down to the fire, and poked at it with a stick to make the flames use up again. He could understand why men had begun to see the Emperor as a god. At least the Emperor had the decency to deny that. He was just a man, only a man, but on a unique and different scale to any other.
And yet He was, to all intents and purposes, a god. A de facto god. And if He was that, then John was a trickster, and Erda was an Earth-mother. The real question wasn’t whether the Emperor was a god or not, it was should He be.
John took the torquetum out of his vest pocket, and carefully unfolded its intricate mechanism. It was the compass that Eldrad had given him to negotiate his path through un-space, and guide the cuts In made with the wraithbone scissors. It, too, was made of wraith-bone. It was as cold as the night air around him. No trace of warmth, of the tingle that hinted Oll might be getting close.
‘There is no sign,’ said a voice.
‘J|ohn started sharply. Leetu was standing right beside him.
‘Shit, you could stop doing that,’ John said.
‘Sony.’ The legionary didn’t seem sorry at all. ‘I made a sweep, right out to the rim of the eye and back. I checked every sensor trap and data-snare No sign of anyone. I thought this friend of yours might have been hurt or stranded somewhere, but-‘
‘Thanks for trying.’
‘I did it for her,’ said Leetu. ‘This person-‘
‘Oll Persson.’
‘Oll? Person? What did I say?’
�
��Just say Ollanius.’
‘Whatever, he seems to matter to her. I think she cares about him.’ ‘I think they were old friends,’ said John. ‘I mean, a long time ago.’ John glanced at the warrior.
‘Speaking of old, that’s an antique piece.’ He gestured at Leetu’s thigh-clamped weapon. ‘Mark Two Phobos?’
Leetu shook his head. ‘M676 Union Model. Pre-Phobos. Mark Zero, you might say. Made before the accord with Mars.’
‘How old are you?’ asked John.
‘Old enough to have been issued it new.’
Leetu unclamped it, and handed it to John. He struggled with the weight of it.
‘This is a real antique,’ John said. ‘Sickle-form mag. Side-sights, chambered for seventy-cal. They use seventy-five now.’
‘So I hear.’
‘You don’t hanker after one of the new patterns?’
Leetu took the weapon back and re-clamped it. ‘Why would I?’ he asked.
John shrugged. ‘Something new to play with? Improved stopping power?’
‘I stop all I need to stop,’ said the Space Marine.
‘I’m sure you do. So… what Legion were you?’
‘No Legion.’
‘Never assigned?’
‘Never anything.’
‘Right, sure, but which… bloodline?’ John asked. ‘Which primarch was your genesire?’
Leetu looked at him. ‘My father was Neoth. My mother was Erda.
I was one of the first. Before they spliced in the gene-stocks.’
‘You were a prototype?’
‘Template.’
‘And your name? “Leetu”? That’s just a contraction of your serial code, right?’
Leetu nodded.
‘So what is your name?’
‘I don’t have one. I’ve always been Leetu.’ Leetu looked at him, as it measuring him carefully. ‘You’ve convinced her to help you, I gather?’ he said.
Yeah, said John. ‘I’m not asking for much, but yeah.’
Leetu frowned. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said. ‘I don’t care for you. But if that’s her will, I’ll help you too.’
‘Because you answer to her?’
‘Always.’
John nodded. ‘Well, friend,’ he said, ‘I’ll take any help I can get.’
They were silent for a moment. The fire crackled and spat.
‘So then,’ said Leetu. ‘I was thinking. You arrived too late.’
‘What?’
‘It’s the twenty-second of Quintus. Earlier, you said you arrived too late. Eight months out.’
‘That’s right.’
‘You had to go back. Find a new route. Retrace your steps, so you arrived today instead.’
‘Yes,’ said John.
‘What if your friend did the same?’ Leetu asked. ‘Arrived too late? Or too early? I don’t know how it works. But the shadow of the warp has fallen across this world, and pathways may have been distorted. Twisted and bent out of shape. Maybe this Ollanius wasn’t intercepted. Maybe he got here. Just not at the right time. Like you.’
‘Oh god,’ said John, his eyes wide. ‘Maybe he did.’
FOUR
* * *
Locked away
Let me back in
Unwanted gifts
It is becoming quite disturbed out there,’ remarked Basilio Fo.
The black stone walls and floor of his cell, deep in the Blackstone prison, had just vibrated.
‘The whole Palace shivers,’ he added. He was pacing, fidgeting. ‘Should we be concerned?’
‘We’re safe here,’ said Keeler. She glanced up at Amon. The Custodian disliked giving her any details about the conflict raging beyond the ambit of the Sanctum, but that morning he had mentioned, in passing, specific points of turmoil at the Colossi Gate and Gorgon Bar. The siege was a ring of iron and fire around their throats, constricting with each passing hour. It was becoming so tight that the Imperial Palace, a structure she had always felt was the biggest and most resolute thing anywhere, had begun to tremble in fear.
‘I think you are naive if you think we’re safe anywhere,’ said Fo, with a pinched smile. ‘Outside howls a daemonic horror, pounding to get in, and we are locked inside these walls with the Great Daemon who made it. I do not know which would be safer, inside or out. Nowhere on Terra. Nowhere full stop. We could be hidden on an end world at the farthest limits of galactic space, and I fear we would not be safe there either.’
‘From Horus?’ she asked.
‘From him, or his father, dear girl,’ said Fo.
‘You were speaking, when we last met, of a weapon. A trigger.’
He pouted, and tapped the pad of his index finger against his lips.
‘Well, Euphrati,’ he said, ‘to construct a weapon, one must assess the intended target.’
‘Horus?’
‘Yes. And to understand him, we must consider his lineage. His family background. His bloodline. His sire.’
‘The Emperor?’ she asked warily.
‘Yes,’ said Fo. ‘I knew Him, you see. I knew of Him. Back in the Strife. No one could not know Him. Let me tell you about Him. I was there when He truly became a thing of terror…’
* * *
The noise was the worst part.
The giant Neverborn were appalling to behold, of course. They had ravaged Colossi’s northern and eastern lines, scouring away the trenchwork and emplacements that had held off the XIV’s assaults for days. They had pulped the land into a miasma, a churning lake of mud and flames. They had killed everything they could reach. Over seven thousand of the loyalist forces. Konas Burr was among the dead, lost in the first few minutes of their atrocity.
But the daemons were almost too awful to accept. To visually register Vast daemon forms, like blockprints of the Apocalypse, animated as raging shadows in the smoke and haze. Marshal Agathe tried not to look at them more than she had to, but when she did, they seemed unreal. Preposterous. A child’s drawing of a nightmare. A child’s unreliable at count of the thing under the bed that had woken him.The noise, however…
Under the Khan’s command, Colossi’s garrison had fallen back, an almost frantic effort to empty the outer lines. The Neverborn had lumbered in to shred those emptying emplacements, and while they were thus occupied, the Khan had directed the full force of Colossi’s wall guns, and the artillery, and tank formations, to pound the zone.
The daemons survived the long and exhausting barrage. They survived, or they were blown to shreds multiple times, and simply re-formed from the ooze. It was hard to say. What had yesterday been the front lines was today a burning zone, a vast furnace of destruction, in which very little could be discerned, no matter how hard you trained your field glasses. Agathe did not look very often, because sometimes, startlingly magnified, things looked back out of the fire.
The desperate and sustained barrage, which had drained Colossi’s munition depots back to a mere quarter capacity, had bought them time. It had slowed the daemons’ advance, and allowed the Great Khan and his men to pull as many souls as possible back behind the curtain wall.
Not enough. So many lost. Poor Konas, her unlikely friend. He wasn’t here, which is why the zone command pin had passed to her.
The Great Khan’s efforts had also bought them enough time to realign the heavy defences. Army and Mechanicum gangs had toiled to exhaustion, during the hours of the bombardment, to reframe the aegis and the telaethesic wards. Many major voids had to be dropped, and pulled back, their projection discs re-erected along the curtain wall to face outwards rather than up. The defenders had lost leagues of outwork ground, and they had also lost a great section of the void canopy that had protected them. The voids, crackling like frying meat, now covered the wall, and a little overhead, and the telaethesic wards had been revised to match.
The Colossi Gate had surrendered an immense portion of its outer front and support territory. The bastion line protecting the
Sanctum approach had, accordingly, suffered a massive reduction. Aegis cover, partial and damaged before, was now almost gone on the northern run of the Anterior Bastion. The Neverbom, previously active only at the Lion’s Gate space port and its environs, now had liberty to roam more freely into the Palace zone, deeper and closer than ever before.
The voids and the wards had stopped them at the wall. For the time being, anyway.
Then the noise had begun. Uncannily, it was far worse than anything they could glimpse. Deep in the inferno before the curtain wall, the half-seen fiends were clawing at the wards, and pounding on the shields. It was a constant dramming thunder, a scratching, a rasping, a squealing, like iron nails on glass, like teeth on stone, like blades on metal. And behind those excruciating sounds, sounds that made you flinch every few seconds, there was the endless braying and booming of daemon voices.
The noise was by far the worst part.
Agathe hurried to the blockroom. She kept bumping into personnel in the narrow tunnels of the wall redoubts. An extraordinary plague of flies, perhaps the entourage of the daemons, perhaps the work of the pestilential XIV, had got inside the walled fortress. They were everywhere, seething mats of shiny black bodies that covered faces and hands, and slipped into sleeves and boots and gloves and cups and nostrils. Environmental officers suspected bacterial clouds too. Everyone had suited in gas-gear, masks and respirators, partly to keep operating in the blanket of flies, and partly to keep breathing amidst the ghostly billows of the pesticide that was being pumped and sprayed, around the clock, to try to rid the fortress of infestation.
There were reports of plague cases. Wearing gas hoods, it was hard to sec, and hard to catch your breath. It was stifling. The eye-pieces of the hoods were tinted. Everyone bumped into each other, theirboundaries lost, their periphery vanished. Agathe could see almost nothing. It was as if she were approaching death, and her vision was tunnelling into darkness.
But she could hear.
The constant drone and buzz of flies. The patter and fidget of them clustering on her ear guards and crawling on her flak coat. I ler skin crawled in sympathy. And she could hear, no matter how hard she tried not to, the terrible noise. The braying and squealing and rasping of the daemons clawing at the shields.