'This is Caliban,' said the Lion.
'This is your mind,' said Savine. She looked around, feigning the interest of the remembrancer whose skin she wore. In this place of the mind her appearance was almost human, dark veins withdrawn, pupils shrunken, only a faint luminosity of skin that was in tune with the unreality of her surrounds. 'What a drab and flavourless place it is too. A mind like this has no right to exist. You, your brothers, your sons - you sicken me.’
The Lion struck with his sword only to find his hand empty. Fingers unfurled from their grip as Savine laughed.
'All your prowess, all your gene-wrought strength, it is worth nothing here. In here, I am g-'
The words became an airless choke as the Lion lifted her by the throat. Her eyes bulged, her feet kicking futilely as she scratched at his forearms, the leaves of the shadow-forest rustling and wavering as she did so, but no relief or rescue broke through the reality that the primarch had constructed.
The Lion was the master of all his domains.
'You have dived willingly into a primarch's mind, and for that hubris alone you deserve this failure.'
He squeezed tighter. The hands about her throat were metaphorical, the assault mental, the psychological equivalent of covering a candle with a jar, only this flame fed off the energies of the ether rather than air.
The shadows ran from the walls like wet paint. Stars ignited in the firmament of the imagination and wheeled, spinning around a supermassive black hole that gave a once-in-a-million-year pulse of light and matter with every hike of the woman's throat.
Through a web of psychic connectivity he felt the squirming of lights that were not stare. A nebula. By the Lion’s will, the perspective shifted, drawing closer to the cloud, the individual specks of dust resolving themselves as ships. The baroque, castellated lengths of Imperial warships slid through the void alongside the bloated scrap-plated bulk of ork kroozers and the infinitely varied craft of void-fairing xenos scattered amongst them. Most were incalculably ancient, belonging to races never encountered by humankind beyond a scrap of writing on a tablet or some unidentified debris in orbit around a broken world. Some were elegant, all crystal spindles and delicate pods, like palaces set adrift in the void. Others ploughed through the cold of space like true ships of war, their purpose relatable even if the mind behind them had not been. Their vessels were spined and barbed, hooked and armoured like void Crustacea, glittering with force shields and encrusted with weaponry. Within every one the foul souls of the khrave glowered. But the light there was dim. The Lion went further, the psychic trail leading him to the slender black ships, vividly haloed with alien power, that moved through the silent void like spiders stalking their nomadic prey.
The web of control widened further still.
The Lion followed it.
The mass of shipping became an asteroid field, then a debris cloud, a ring of orbital wreckage around a dead and broken world that itself turned slowly around a faded giant.
'Your home world in the Northern Fringe,’ said the Lion.
Savine said nothing. Closed off from the warp by the walls of the lion's mind, she could not speak, but her spirit was bidden to respond.
+Yes.+
The Lion drank in every detail, memorising every star cluster and visual anomaly. Even as he did so he felt the pull of a more massive mind, the star waned, shedding its photosphere into space. The world that listed around it crumbled, rock and plasma dragged inexorably into the yawning iris of the galaxy's core, the Milky Way's flame-wreathed eye holding Lion El'Jonson transfixed as he hung above the event horizon of oblivion.
+The khrave autochthonar+ Savine's struggles were lessening, but even under the reality-ending ferocity of that infernal gaze she was helpless to resist the Lion's probing. +The First. The Ender of Worlds.+
III
The air was thick with smoke, tainted with the harsh odours of burnt metal and solder. A hundred fires of various sizes and severity burned over the familiar, if grievously mauled, topography of the docking bay. The Lion shifted position, his body telling him he had been immobile for longer than his recollection of events could account for, and Savine's body slid limply from his shoulder.
She landed with the grace of a corpse.
Trigaine approached. The weight of his powered harness shook the debris-strewn decking. He looked down at Savine. 1 le looked up at his primarch.
The Lion gave a nod.
'She is dead.'
He turned to look away. Insofar as Trigaine would have been able to comprehend he was staring at nothing. But in his own mind the Lion recalled and deciphered the psychic imprint of a stellar duster, half a dozen augur-dark and unpromising systems located several thousand light years ahead of the Great Crusade to the galactic north. He remembered the lights of the xenos war-fleet as they had appeared to Savine, as numerous as specks of dust in an asteroid cloud - and converging inexorably on Muspel.
'Now, my son, to inflict the same on her species.'
NINE
I
The urgent chime of a priority summons woke Aravain.
He had no means of knowing exactly how long it had been blinking. His armour's chrono was broken and none of the terminals in his section were lit. He picked his ruined helmet up off the deck, studying the gouges left in the ceramite by the psychic imprint of xenos claws The summons blinked from the crumpled darkness within. He should have been as dead as his battleplate's systems. Even from afar, the Lion held the power to intervene on his sons' behalf. The khrave recognised the Primarch as a threat. His timely return to the Invincible Reason had made Savine-khrave careless in her execution.
He should have been dead.
The thought was humbling.
The alert in his helmet kept blinking. Such was the damage that had been done to it he was physically incapable of reaching inside and deactivating it. Aravain tucked the misshapen helmet under his arm and limped in the direction of the command deck.
There was no such thing as a direct route. The internal layout of the Invincible Reason was a puzzle designed to baffle any who had not earned the privilege of being there. A journey to the command deck from the enginarium sub-decks would take a mortal serf the better part of a day. Aravain could do it in under an hour, but only under ideal conditions. The condition of the Invincible Reason was a long way from ideal. Error runes glared from the fascia terminals of every mag-lift he approached. The grav-rails were functioning, but intermittently. Carriages loaded with troops and munitions flashed by the platforms, their systems failing to respond to Aravain's legion-priority overrides.
It took him almost three hours, leaking a trail of partially coagulated blood and liquid ceramite sealant jelly over a tri dimensional fourteen-kilometre zigzag of the ship, before finally limping his way through the command deck's outer barbican.
The great doors had been forced open, held ajar by transhuman muscle while human technicians crawled over the narrow space, bracing it with steel frames, attacking its exposed innards with arc torches and drills.
Every section of the Invincible Reason showed evidence of vandalism and sabotage, but the command deck had taken the brunt of the khrave's psychic uprising.
Every console beyond those of the primary dais, the Lion's dark throne still bathed in screen light, had been smashed. Doctrinal wafers had been torn from cogitators and smashed underfoot. Delicate instrumentarium had been prised open, reams of magnetic tape and wiring unspooled. Fire-retardant foams clung to bulkheads and hooded statuary like the acid spit of a predatory wildflower. While cracks haloed the crystalflex window plating, the auto-rounds that had been unloaded into them from within still stuck in the glass. More human crewmen worked feverishly through the wreckage, performing delicate surgery alongside knights of the Ironwing and their mortal apprentices, splicing portable units into the command systems, bypassing brutalised interfaces, even as the entire deck groaned like a deep-sea submersible at its depth limit Sensorium chiefs argued with master gunn
ers. Tech-priests remonstrated with Legion forge-wrights. Impacts dazzled across the forward void shield arrays, spectacular aurorae of bleeding colours filtering around the fracture patterns of the prow windows.
Aravain flinched as sparks erupted from a gutted conduit. Another shudder of pain torsioned through the spine of the ship as he limped across a protesting gantry and up a flight of aluminium steps towards the dais.
The Lion was seated in the high-backed throne; elbows on the plaited-wood rests, chin resting on the backs of steepled fingers. The shrouded figures of the Knights of Santales ringed their silent lord. They faced forwards. Before them, veiled by the distortions of an inconstancy of lithocast, stood a dozen robed and hooded knights. It was almost possible to gauge the warriors' relative distances by the stability and clarity of their projected image.
To the left of the throne, in a cone of phosphorescence beamed down from the overhead projection plate. Firebringer Griffayn appeared as real as if he physically stood at the primarch's right hand. His battleship, the Forest Sepulchre, was the second largest in the 2003rd Expedition Fleet, and remained close to the flagship, so as to more efficiently screen the fleet's capital assets behind lighter warships and escorts. Master of the Ravenwing, Garradin, aboard the Oaken Throne, and master of the Storm-wing, Brigaint, on the Sir Amadis were fuzzed and haloed, but with a core of solidity that rendered them readily identifiable. Duriel of the Ironwing, judging by the rain splashing off his image's armour, was still upon the walls of the Vaniskray. Relative proximity made his image clear, but the portable nature of his transmission gear made the signal erratic, his hololithic avatar periodically spreading and compressing, winking out altogether before re-establishing itself a moment later with a burr of stressed machinery. The other members of the conclave were evidently even more remote, distance-lagged outlines of projection static and audio feedback.
The only member of the Council of Masters to be physically present was Holguin. The lord of the Deathwing was garbed for war, encased in glossy black plate with ivory trim, Martian red gold worked hard into the finish A crimson cloak lay over one shoulder, leaving free the ornate leather-wrapped grip of a Terranic greatsword that was almost as huge as the Lion's own blade. His beast-mawed helmet was gripped underarm, draped in turn by the hanging cloak. He nodded without speaking as Aravain ascended the dais, the rings in his tri-forked beard glittering under a dozen dim sources of light.
Of the Dreadwing there was no obvious representation.
Aravain thought of Redloss, alone in the Santales armourium, and fell certain that the Dreadbringer was attending to his duties in his own way.
'You are late, brother,’ said the anonymous warrior to Aravain's left as he assumed his place within the inner circle of Santales Knights.
'It could not be helped.'
'What happened to your helmet?’
Aravain grunted 'What have I missed?'
Approximately four and a half hours ago a war-fleet of undetermined size and configuration entered Muspel's orbit. Our Santales brethren across the fleet helped to quell the uprisings amongst the mortal crew, but we're in no condition to engage this new enemy in battle. Thanks to our preparations, Brother Duriel holds the Vaniskray, but the enemy has been landing troops by the thousand and most of the city and the first two islets of the Sheitansvar chain are now theirs.'
'Khrave?'
'Not yet. So far they have only committed their thrall soldiers, but so long as we hold the Vaniskray it can only be a matter of time before they decide to show themselves.'
'We need to hit them before they can finish deploying ground forces,' said Brigaint.
'Our sensors con barely see what we would have them fire upon,' said Garradin with a snarl of such intensity that it shattered his likeness into pixels before it could be hastily reformed.
The Ravenbringer was a gravel-haired campaigner who had served the role under a different title for Grand Master Hector Thrane. fifty years before the First legion had stepped a little from the shadows to become the Dark Angels. To those under his Wing he was a hero of Unification, adored as much for his immense experience as for his trove of stories. To the majority of others, Aravain included, he was a relic of an unrecorded time.
'The sensors con see them perfectly well,' said Griffayn. 'It is the crewmen operating them that seem blind.'
'Why are the warriors of the legion not affected by this...’ Holguin pondered his choice of words, looking to his brother-knights for aid.
'Psychosis,' Duriel suggested.
'As good a term as any,' said Holguin.
Aravain dared a glance at the Lion.
The primarch sat in a repose of such preternatural deliberation that he appeared as something carved from spruce or alder, an arbiter of the hidden world, there to be called upon in times of strife, infinite in patience, just in prosecution.
'It is not because the khrave would not desire to corrupt us,’ Aravain said. 'But they exploit division and weakness and I find only brotherhood and courage in the soul of the First. My lord Griffayn of the Firewing is correct in his assessment. They do not fool our instalments as the weapons of the rangda were able to, but the minds of those who read them. The ships are there to be seen, brothers, but misinterpreted, erroneously disregarded as augur echoes or debris, or simply unseen.'
‘Well said, brother,' said Holguin, just as Stenius walked up the steps to the dais.
The Terran looked angered. An evil-looking burn, black and undressed, peeled from die side of his face. The las-burn had taken half of the warrior's face, including part of a lip and the entirely of an eyebrow, one nostril melted shut He could count himself fortunate that the shot had not claimed the eye as well. With the stormy expression of one who would, in future, snap the neck of such good fortune under his boot, he presented a data-slate to his primarch's eyeline.
The Lion barely looked at it. A flick of the eye was enough for him to parse the entirety of its contents.
"Direct your attentions to position grid 244-398-772.'
The primarch nodded a dismissal and Stenius withdrew, back down the steps to the primary deck level, where he snarled instructions at the gunnery officers. Runes lit up along the serried banks of gunnery consoles, indicating the armament status of the Invincible Reason's many hundreds of macro-ordnance batteries. Reports were passed between stations, updates received via hardline from remote battery chiefs located in situ, Stenius monitoring every step like a neophyte master in search of failure, launch klaxons sounded and the deck shook, bracing rods shivering and flexing, as a partial broadside was fired off into space.
They waited.
'What?' said Duriel. 'What is happening?'
"An explosion,' said Garradin. 'I see explosions on my screens.'
'Confirmed,' said Brigaint. 'Ship death, twelve thousand metres off my starboard bow.'
‘I see it too,' added Griffayn. 'But my auspex still returns nothing.'
The cenobium knight with whom Aravain had previously spoken drew back his hood. The warrior was the mortal equivalent of a geological feature, closely cropped grey hair the colour of worn slate and a face that had been carved into an irreverent mien with pale scar tissue and black melanchrome spots. Aravain fought back his surprise as the knight dipped his forehead in mutual recognition before hardening his expression once more and stepping out from the circle of equals.
'The insurgency that the khrave attempted to instigate aboard our ships was crushed,' he said. 'In light of that failure, they attempt a subtler mode of subversion. The human brain is a complicated organ, easily tricked. Every moment we spend conscious is a moment in which we are being deceived in some small but fundamental way by the nature of our own minds. How simple is it then for a species like the khrave to coerce an undisciplined mind into accepting a whole new set of lies? It is unlikely that our affected crewmen are even aware of the influence they are under.'
'Trigaine?' Aravain whispered, no longer able to keep his surprise entirely in ch
eck.
The old knight drew a Santales talisman from the collar of his surplice.
It was gold.
'You are preceptor of the Order of Santales?'
'Did you think it was coincidence that assigned you to Kaye's command for the Obrin mission?'
'I thought it was on the orders of Firebringer Griffayn.'
'It was. But why do you think he attached you to my squad?'
'I...'
The tangled hierarchies of the First Legion had always been a web of intrigue and inference, but, unlike the structures of the XX or the X who could lay their own claims to operational complexity, every strand of control within the First had been designed to answer to the will of the centre.
Trigaine gestured to the seated primarch.
As Grandmaster of the Six Wings and lord of the Preceptors' Council, I knew the nemesis that we might face here. The clad-ograms drawn up by Duriel and the linguists of his order have long pointed to the existence of a human empire that once spanned the borders of the Ghoul Stars. Through the efforts of others, the Santales included, there were those of us who knew, or at least suspected, what befell them.'
'You could have told me that l worked at the same mystery as my brothers,' said Duriel.
The Lion raised an eyebrow. He spoke no words in justification, for he needed none and Duriel bowed his head in acquiescence.
Aravain nodded. His lord's refusal to answer was an answer in itself, and truer in what it said than that which the Ironbringer sought. The sheer calculation required to manually bend a legion to one being's command was mind-breaking: several hundred ships, a hundred and fifty thousand warriors, tens of millions of ancillaries, auxiliaries and mortal support staff, all of them scattered across scores of distant warzones.
'This was why you ignored the call to Ullanor in favour of the Northern Fringe,' said Duriel.
Lion El'Jonson- Lord of the First - David Guymer Page 12