by Various
Silence answers his heresy. He is a traitor among traitors, his confession given at last.
Finally, the dead girl speaks, her own voice much softer now.
‘Jago,’ she says, ‘I don’t understand you.’
‘That is because I am the only simple man in a complicated galaxy. Now the Imperium burns and trillions die in the trenches of Horus’ ambition and the fires of the Emperor’s hypocrisy. Hnnh. To the abyss with them. I spit on them both. The Lords of the Night, they call us. The nobility in the darkness. That is where we were born to be. I am not a soldier, beholden to a master. I am justice. I am judgement. I am punishment.’
‘That isn’t what you are, it’s what you wish you were. What you should have been.’
‘I am not on trial here.’
‘But who do you judge now? Who do you punish?’
Before he can reply, she adds one last sting - a judgement of her own.
‘Jago, whose side are you on?’
Sevatar presses his pounding forehead to the cool stone floor, ignoring the blood that runs from his mouth. ‘I am not on anyone’s side.’
Once more, there is a long silence.
‘You used to try to escape. I think I know why you stopped.’
His grin is knifelike. ‘Do you now?’
‘You think you deserve to be here. This is justice, for all the things you’ve done. So you sit alone in the dark, while your brain rots inside your skull. Accepting it as your execution.’
He swallows, unable to speak for a moment. ‘As I said, I am a simple man–’
‘Someone’s coming,’ she interrupts him, and with a flicker that sends spikes through his skull, she’s gone. Blood starts running from his ear, a trickle as slow and thick as the one from his nose.
A mechanical voice comes from above. ‘Illumination.’
He knows to close his eyes as the lumen globes flash into stark life. Even his gene-forged sight is blinded by bright light. The last time he refused to close them for this daily ritual, he spent the hours afterwards seeing smears of scarlet pain written across his retinas.
The power field dissipates with a waspish crack and the drone of a de-cycling engine. Sevatar lifts his head to sit in patient composure, eyes closed, as the cell door grinds open on squealing tracks.
They must not see his weakness. They must not witness how he suffers.
‘Feeding time already?’ He greets his captors with a smile as unlovely as a rusted blade. ‘Such wondrous hospitality.’
His captors have long since ceased replying to him. In silence they stand by the door, their active battle armour thrumming, mechanical joints and machine-nerves snarling with each movement they make. Even without opening his eyes, he knows that two of them are standing there with their bolters levelled at his head, while the third – standing between them – is about to leave the gruel bucket on the cell floor. He can smell the oils they use to clean their weapons, and the charcoal stink of the incense they use in their knightly reverences.
‘Please convey my compliments to the chef,’ he says to them. ‘The last bucket was the finest yet.’
He hears the twin crunches of bolters braced against shoulder guards and can’t resist a smile even as his blood runs cold. ‘Well, this is new. Is there a reason you’re taking aim at me?’
‘We heard you speaking before we entered. Has madness come so swiftly to the great torturer now that he languishes in captivity?’
‘So it would seem.’
‘Who were you speaking to, Sevatar?’
‘The ghosts that share my cell. When you’re left alone for such a long time, you tend to conjure your own company.’
‘Are you aware that you are bleeding again?’
‘Am I? My thanks for your concern, cousin.’
‘It wasn’t concern.’
‘I know. I was imagining you were from a Legion where your primarch gifted you with manners. Can I have my nutrient slime now, noble knight? I’m ever so hungry.’
He manages to open his eyes, just enough to let in a sliver of vile light. Three blurred figures stand before him, just as he’d expected. Three Dark Angels, clad in their Legion’s black war-plate. His generous, caring captors.
But he has to close his eyes again. The light is acid against them.
‘I’ve not seen you before,’ he says to the first of his wardens. ‘I recognise the others, but not you. What brings you to my chambers, cousin?’
‘Do you find yourself amusing, traitor?’
‘You keep calling me that. Show some respect, Angel. I outrank you, you know.’
The warrior gives a disgusted grunt. ‘We are watching you, Sevatar.’
‘Seeing as I’m caged like a prized pet, I can’t imagine that makes for interesting viewing. Shouldn’t you be out there, fighting your little war?’
They don’t rise to his bait, as he knew they wouldn’t. The Dark Angels leave his container of protein paste on the floor, before retreating back through the door. Sevatar waits for the charged hum of the power field to crackle back into life. Only then does he move, eating as a beast would eat, feeding from the gruel in his cupped palm.
For a time he’s alone once more, shovelling the nutrient gruel into his mouth. There’s nothing to relish in its cold, chemical un-taste.
‘Jago,’ comes her voice again. The relief of her gentle tones is immediate and absolute, ice water poured onto a burning wound.
‘Dinner is served,’ he tells her. ‘Are you hungry, little one?’ He holds out his dripping hand, offering the protein slime to the darkness. ‘If you wish, you can share this glorious repast.’
‘No, Jago. Please listen to me. The knights of the First aren’t blind. They fear something is wrong with your mind.’
‘I am told there are many things wrong with my mind.’ He bares his gruel-wet teeth in a vile grin. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to be specific.’
‘Because of the blood and the pain, they suspect your secret. One of them had the talent. He knows you’re hiding something.’
Calm and suddenly cold, he licks the bland, grey taste of the protein paste from his lips.
‘One of them was a psyker? How... how could you know that?’
‘I could feel him in here, with us. He reached out for you with his mind, just as I am.’
So, the I Legion are using their Librarians to watch over him now. That is an unforeseen threat he will have to deal with. But it isn’t the Dark Angels that leave his blood running cold.
‘Altani,’ he says cautiously, as close as he’s come to fear since he was taken and reshaped by the VIII Legion. ‘Tell me something, little ghost. How did you die?’
‘What?’ Shock colours her tones. ‘I’m not dead, Jago.’
His blood is cold, like the frost that scales over powerless shipwrecks drifting in the deep void, far from the light of any sun. He breathes through clenched teeth, his hands trembling in helpless, weaponless unease. She’s in his head. This girl, this creature, has forced herself into his head.
‘Who. Are. You.’
‘Altani. Altani Shedu, Second Voice of the Choir.’
The choir. Realisation grips him in talons of black ice. She isn’t some wraith lingering on the wrong side of the grave. She isn’t the spirit of a girl that died aboard the Dark Angels flagship. She is–
‘An astropath. You are an astropath.’
‘I thought you knew. How else would I reach you, if I didn’t possess the talent?’
He finds himself laughing for the first time in this torturous ordeal, laughing through the diminished pain at the games that fate seems so keen to play.
‘You thought I was dead?’ she asks. She is faceless in his imagination but he can almost picture her innocent, open-mouthed surprise. ‘One of the dead voices that you dream?’
‘It doesn’
t matter, Altani. None of it matters. Will you not be punished for this contact?’
‘Yes, if they discover it. But I am the Second Voice, and the strongest of the choir. I would be the First Voice, were I older.’
For a child to be raised to the rank of Second Voice, her psychic strength must be almost beyond measure. That makes her precious to her masters, without a doubt, but Sevatar wonders just how safe she really is, speaking so intimately with the imprisoned enemy.
‘Why, girl, do you risk your life speaking with me?’
‘I saw your dreams. All of us have felt them intruding into our work – your dreams are destroying the rhythm of our choir’s astropathic song. The others turned away, guarding against the pain of your mind. I alone did not.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of what I saw in the redness of your nightmares. I knew I could ease your pain. I cannot teach you to master the talent, but I can keep it from killing you.’
His reply is a blade cast out into the dark, made vicious by his anger. ‘Is this a game you play with the First Legion’s prisoners?’ He feels the words flash from his tongue like throwing knives, hurting her – wherever she is – but anger steals what little guilt he is capable of feeling. ‘Is this some pathetic attempt to breed gratitude towards an ally of my captors? Some scheme to break me with kindness rather than privation?’
‘No. Not for that. Not for any of those reasons.’
‘Then why? Why would you do this?’
She doesn’t break in the face of his fury. ‘Listen to yourself, Jago. Unable to feel gratitude without suspicion. Unable to even understand why someone would help another soul in pain. Your home world has poisoned you.’
‘That is no answer at all.’
‘Not to you, no. You’re a broken soul, Jago – always thinking of yourself, always judging yourself. You’ve lost the right to judge anyone else.’
Her words hit him with the force of a blow to the head. He stares blindly into the darkness as if he might see her there, but she recedes from his mind. This time, for the first time, he chases her, reaching out with the untrained, instinctive sense he swore to never use.
But she is gone, and his invisible grip does nothing but dredge the empty silence.
Days pass in isolation. The pain is harsh enough to leave him drooling, murmuring words of madness as spit runs from his mouth in slow strings. Dazed and nauseous from the pressure in his skull, Sevatar lies in the centre of his cell, the fingers of his left hand quivering in the onset of another muscle spasm.
The pain transcends feeling – it’s fierce enough to hear, hot and wet against the inside of his skull, dragging and squealing like fingernails on porcelain.
All he can see is red. All he can taste is blood.
Sometimes, in his agony-stained dreams, he hears the girl screaming. She never answers when he calls for her.
The doors open and close, open and close. He can’t tell how many times. He doesn’t smirk at his captors, nor does he reach for the buckets of gruel that they leave.
‘Jago. Are you still alive?’
He doesn’t rise. He has the strength, but any movement stirs the sick heat in his head. The reply slithers from his lips.
‘Still alive,’ he says, ‘though I’ve seen better days.’
The pain begins to fade. He doesn’t know if she does it consciously or if it’s merely the effect of her voice in his mind. Right now, he doesn’t care.
‘Thank you,’ he says. It is the first time he has said those words and meant them in many years. ‘I wasn’t sure you would return.’
‘He caught me, Jago.’
Sevatar hears it then, some new tension in her voice that was never present before. Some new discomfort. It focuses him, drawing his wandering thoughts together in a blade of concentration. Despite the queasiness, he sits up in a slow, smooth motion.
‘Who caught you?’
‘My overseer. The Master of the Choir, and First Voice. He sensed our contact. I thought I was careful enough…’
‘Hush, now,’ he says softly. The sluggishness leaves his words. His tone grows as cold as his concentration. ‘They punished you, didn’t they?’
‘Yes. And not for the first time. But it’s over now.’
‘Tell me. Tell me everything.’
‘There’s no time. They’re coming for you. They’re taking you and your surviving brothers to a prison transport.’
‘No.’
Sevatar is on his feet without realising that he intended to rise. Strong hands, a killer’s hands, curl into claws. He misses his spear, but he’s killed plenty of men and women without it.
‘No. I am not leaving this ship until you tell me what they did to you, Altani.’
‘There’s no time! They’re coming!’
His voice filters into something savage and predatory, as hungry as the eyeless white sharks of Nostramo’s blackest depths. As he speaks the words and reaches for her mind – a gesture that feels no different from breathing in a scent or recalling a memory – he uses the connection to plunge his thoughts into her distant consciousness.
Tell me,+ he commands her.
He feels her flesh, elsewhere, as a husk of battered meat and broken bone.
In that moment he knows what they did to her.
He feels the utterly human panic of being beaten while helpless and blind, unable to raise a hand against the incoming blows. He feels the lashes of a whip crackling with electrical discharge across his unarmoured body. He feels something give in his spine, a crunching snap of dislocation, and the numbness that follows...
He knows everything. They scourged her for seven days and seven nights. She can no longer walk, but even paralysed she is still of use – an astropath needs no legs to sing her warp-borne song. Sevatar feels his lips peel back at the punishment; it is an ugly sentence fit for the madmen of the Martian Mechanicum, who are known to do such things to their disobedient thralls.
He releases her mind and faces the door. He hears them now. Their boots echo on the iron deck, sending minute shivers through the floor.
‘Let them come.’
‘You can’t fight them all.’
‘I have no intention of fighting them. You said it yourself, girl. I earned this punishment.’ There’s no self-pity in his words. No melancholy, no torment. Only vindication.
‘Illumination,’ declares a familiar mechanical voice. Sevatar closes his eyes against the coming razor-kiss of the light. The power field expires with a de-powering crack. A moment later, the bulkhead opens on its grinding tracks once more.
He keeps his eyes closed. Bootsteps enter his cell. He smells the metallic tang of the flexible machinery in power-armoured joints. He tastes the scent of battle-worn ceramite upon his tongue.
‘Cousins,’ he greets them.
‘Come with us, Captain Sevatar.’
‘Of course. May I ask where we are going?’
‘The prison transport ship Remnant of Brotherhood.’
‘What a dramatic and wholly appropriate name.’
‘Can you see, or do you need to be dragged?’
Sevatar smiles, opening his eyes to slits, bracing against the pain piling against his retinas. Ten of them. No, twelve. All armed with blades and bolters.
‘My eyes will adjust in a few moments. Have patience, cousin.’
They allow him the courtesy of letting his vision adjust. The pain diminishes but doesn’t vanish. It’s enough for him to walk unaided without the indignity of being carried.
‘Move, prisoner.’
The Invincible Reason is a Gloriana-class battleship, a city in space, and they spend almost an hour traversing its hallways. Through tunnels and corridors, they walk on in silence but for the thud of armoured boots. Sevatar never sees any of his brothers being similarly escorted. It seems that the Dark A
ngels are taking precautions.
Slaves, serfs, thralls and servants all ignore him, never sparing him a glance, never even looking up from their hooded robes. He has to admit, the I Legion has its minions trained very well indeed, though it’s a wonder they can go about their duties with their gazes forever cast at the floor in a peasants’ sign of respect.
After a time, he feels the child-astropath drawing near once more. Watching him, as she always has. Watching him... and more.
‘Jago,’ says the Dark Angel closest to him.
All twelve warriors stop in the same moment, standing motionless in the red-lit reaches of a tributary corridor. He stops in their midst, looking at each of them in turn.
‘You’ll die if they take you onto the prison ship,’ says one of the other legionaries. ‘I can help you…’
‘…but I cannot hold them like this for long,’ says yet another.
‘How are you doing this?’ Sevatar murmurs in astonishment. ‘How strong are you, child?’
‘One of them is a Librarian. He fights me every moment, and his strength is immense.’
Sevatar looks to the head of the column. The lead warrior’s black armour plating is etched with elegant Calibanite runic script, and he stands unhelmed, his features shadowed beneath a hood of ivory cloth.
As the Night Lords captain draws near, he sees the warrior’s face drawn in a rictus of effort. Narrowed eyes quiver with the strain of fighting an unseen battle, and sweat forms diamonds on the Dark Angel’s brow.
‘Hello, cousin,’ Sevatar breathes softly. ‘Don’t struggle. This will only take a moment.’
The Librarian’s eyes roll with exquisite, trembling slowness to gaze upon the other warrior.
‘No… You are–’
Sevatar snatches the pistol holstered at the Dark Angel’s hip, and puts a bolt between his eyes. The headless corpse remains standing, but he feels Altani’s sigh of relief in his mind as he throws the pistol to the deck.
‘You didn’t have to kill him, Jago,’ one of the other Dark Angels says.
‘No, but it suited me to do so.’
Yet another warrior turns to him. ‘You’re almost at the ancillary hangar deck. I can help you steal away on a cargo hauler or a tug moving between the vessels at anchor over Macragge. You can hide on board one of the warships making ready to–’