War Without End

by Various

  ‘Soon, the spilling of blood… It was a daily occurrence. It had to be done, just to keep the shadows happy, you see? The things in the shadows, I mean. They take people. Sometimes they bring them back, too. And you wouldn’t want to see how that alters a man. Or a legionary.’

  ‘I have seen the like,’ Kell offered. The crewman gave him a wary look, as if he didn’t quite believe the Assassin. But then an unspoken understanding passed between them, a terrible similarity of experience, and both knew that this was truth.

  ‘I’m a coward,’ Letae ventured, ashamed of himself. ‘Weak. I don’t speak up. I keep my head down and I work and I pretend that I don’t see. But I see. Can’t talk about how it frightens me, because I don’t know who feels the same, and who is the believer now. You have to pretend, even if you are not. Or it’s death. And not the quick kind.’ He nodded towards the metal canyon. ‘There’s many who took that path rather than toil on under the lash of the Warmaster and his… lackeys.’

  Kell watched him shiver, even though the air was blood-warm. ‘You can’t speak of me,’ he told him. ‘I will end you if you do not swear to that.’

  The deckhand nodded. ‘I wish I had the courage to ask you to do it. But I don’t.’ He looked away. ‘Maybe you should make it quick and painless for me. If they suspect I’ve seen a man down here, they’ll force it from me. I am weak,’ he repeated.

  The Assassin had killed so many on so little a pretext that it was odd to feel what he did now – this reluctance. Was it that he was alone on this traitor-barge, and that he craved one other soul to speak to?

  How long had he been here? Was it days? Weeks? Months? Kell could not understand why it was so hard to reckon the passing of time. It gnawed at him.

  He put the crude knife away. ‘I need water,’ he said, at length, thinking of the brackish liquid he was forced to drink, laced with whatever unknown contaminants might be issuing from the ship’s structure. ‘Can you get me a purification filter?’

  A nod. ‘I can do that. It won’t be missed.’

  ‘Bring it,’ said Kell, ‘and perhaps you can aspire to be more than a coward.’

  Later, when he was alone, the Assassin tried to find the used stubs of the lho-sticks, just to have physical proof that the man had been there at all. But he had no success. The breathy wind up and down the canyon had taken them.

  At least, he imagined that was so.

  Do not seek aid from others, even if there is no alternative open to you. It is true that there are good and loyal souls abroad in the galaxy, those who would willingly aid the servants of the Emperor’s Will if they knew you moved amongst them. But you must not put them in jeopardy. They are not trained as you are. They may make mistakes. A slip of word or deed. Do not take the risk. Your rifle is the only husband, only bride, only friend you can confide in.

  He could not escape sleep forever, though. When it came for him, there was an inevitable return to the moment when he first came aboard the Vengeful Spirit. It was as if the ship itself wanted to be certain that Kell never forgot that, even if every other memory in his damaged mind became brittle and piecemeal. The vivid power of the recollection was there each time he closed his eyes.

  When the pod hit, the grinding of hull metal under the grappling teeth sounded like screaming. A child made of tin and glass, screaming as it was cut open by razors. That was the noise.

  The saviour capsule breached as it blew into the belly decks, foul air filling the tiny, coffin-sized space. It came to rest burning red-hot with force of entry, clicking and ticking as the ablative outer armour melted off in great tarry blobs. Kell seared his lungs and his flesh on egress. Temporarily blinded, the Assassin was greeted by the ship with biting, venom-laced fangs.

  The pod had bored into the hull near one of the warship’s mammoth bilge reservoirs, a reeking space heavy with organic fetor. Caked layers of filth deposited one over another for hundreds of years were home to colonies of fat, maggoty things that crawled and writhed amidst the vanes of the environmental system’s bio-processors. The maggots were prey to larger creatures that slithered in the darkness, eyeless serpentine forms with tooth-ringed maws. Ill fate had landed him near one of their nests.

  Kell was hauling what pieces of his gear he could from the crushed escape capsule when the snakes finally decided to attack him. Ripping jaws, muscular and savage, bit down and sank poison into his blood. In the maggots, the neurotoxic venom would induce an instantaneous torpor, allowing the serpents to eat them alive. But to a human, the effect was very different.

  The toxin acted upon his mind. At first he stumbled about like a drunkard as he beat off the predators, his limbs becoming rubbery and disobedient. Kell tried to stagger away from the serpents, dimly aware of the thick splashes behind him as he lost pieces of his kit to the deep and murky sewer waters.

  Then down to his knees as the poison took control of him. It swirled through his veins, reacting and changing, becoming psychotropic. For a time, it sent the Assassin into madness.

  What did he see there?

  The dream state curdled as it mixed with memories of recent experience, the horrific encounters with the un-human that Kell had lived through on Dagonet; the murders that he had witnessed and the twisted things that they augured. Flowing like pools of blood and oil, one across the other, time and sight showed Kell a surreal landscape.

  He beheld things that made no sense to him, images and scenes that did not come from his mind or memory. Later, in the quiet times as Kell waited out his endless vigil in the hide, he would pore over those moments and try to fathom their origin. What if he had been seeing not his own recollections, but something from the primitive brains of the serpents themselves? Such things were known to exist – xenos beasts with a tiny measure of psyker-power to open the thoughts of prey creatures. Did the venom make that happen? Or was it something else, something more subtle and sinister?

  Was it the Vengeful Spirit herself that showed those things to him? So great and so complex a mechanism, and now contaminated by warp-dark and daemon-taint, did it reach into his mind through the venom of the things living inside it, into him by poisoned blood? Did the ship gift him with these visions?

  Has my sanity fled me that I think that possible? He tormented himself with these questions. Am I mad?

  He had no answer. Kell held only the dream-vision-madness-fantasy-poison-hallucination. It remained glass-bright and burned indelibly upon his thoughts, embedded in the matter of his mind like a needle of sensation.

  The vision did not change in any iteration that he experienced. On the great dais protruding from the wall of the iron canyon, the shadow of the Warmaster came falling over him, blotting out the waxen light. The dark glory of the primarch, the cruelty and malevolence simmering beneath a face so perfect and noble.

  Like the statues Kell had seen on Dagonet.

  Come to life. Looming large. Reaching for him.

  But in the moments when he was most lucid, when the Assassin could hold his thoughts tightly and grasp some measure of rationality, the thing that frightened him the most were the sensations that the vision engendered. So pure they were, but shameful with it.

  Eristede Kell did not look upon the face of Horus and hate him, even though he told himself that he was supposed to. No, the Warmaster’s appearance was a kind of black fire that could not be fully beheld by a mortal man, but instead a dead radiance at once engulfing and desireful. A singularity of being.

  It was as if an emotional circuit in Kell’s heart had been reversed. He knew intellectually that Horus should bring forth the greatest hatred in him. A traitor is a traitor is a traitor, and death is the reward for all of them. But the words were rote performance, they were hollow things filled with ash.

  Kell knew that he should hate Horus, that he and all humankind should feel betrayed by the first-among-equals of the Emperor’s sons. He knew it. That was the mission
, after all: to slay the monster.

  But who had really betrayed the Assassin? Not Horus. Who had sent Kell and his sister and all the others on a fool’s errand, a mission that they could never, would never hope to complete? Who had left him to perish?

  In the vision-dream, Horus reached out for him. The gesture was not one of anger or violence. There seemed to be compassion in it.

  Am I mad? He asked it over and over. Am I now corrupted too? Is anything still pure?

  When the poison eventually released him, the Assassin found himself in the shallows of the tainted bilges with dead serpents all around him. His mouth was filled with bits of their scaly flesh, and black blood coating his teeth. Kell vomited the contents of his stomach into the water and dragged himself away, reeling, fouled and blood-sick.

  Fate smiled briefly – he found his medicae kit and tore it open, taking anything he could to make the horror retreat from his mind.

  At least for a while.

  The mission is never over. Until recall comes, until authority speaks differently, the mission endures. There can be no dissent to that diktat. It matters nothing how difficult the execution will be, how long the tasking may last, how much collateral will burn in the act. It must be done. It will be done. You will see it to its ending. You will do this.

  How would it occur, this killing of a warlord? That was the question that came to consume him as the days passed.

  Kell cleaned and prepared the precious Exitus rifle at regular intervals, even though it did not require such over-attentive care. It was in danger of becoming less about the action of vital maintenance for the Assassin’s tool, and more a kind of sacrament to be carried out. The passage of the cloth over the disassembled trigger assembly, the slow and intricate testing and re-testing of each sensor grid in the sighting array… These took on the measured and ritualistic pace of holy tasks in mimicry of the deeds that had been done in all the dead churches, burned away by the light of Imperial Truth.

  He put away the golden aquila that his sister – that poor, name-lost sibling – had left to him and never looked upon it again. Kell did not want to be distracted by such trivia. The hide was his altar, his cathedral. He was at peace there, for a time. His serenity was to kneel at gun-prayer, the spindly shape of the advanced sniper rifle rising from his hands as a sculpted hymnal made of metal and ferrocarbon.

  He rehearsed the killing in his mind’s eye until he could recall any fractional part of the deed without hesitation. The calculation of windage, the numerals on the scope’s glass eyes as perfect as a symphony’s notes. The shape of the target zone like the skin of a bed-partner beneath his fingers, known so very well to him.

  And in the finality, the single rifle bullet.

  It was all that he had left, and occasionally he would release the unfired round from the breech and roll it gently across his palm. The touch of the cool, brass shell was soothing. The motion of it, the subtle weight of the killing payload there in his hand, these things helped to root him in the moment. They kept him from drifting.

  The stamping around the ignition tab told him that the round had been made on Telemachus, in one of the secret forges owned by the Clade Vindicare. Tooled to within a tolerance of micrometers to fit the rifle and no other weapon, the round was fresh – only one Solar year old – when it had been issued to him. The mass was even, and finely distributed. The bullet head, a dense armour-piercing round with a discarding sabot and a frangible kill-core, had been spun into existence in a gravity-null manufactory chamber.

  Perfect. Flawless. Ready. It only required a murder to make it bloom.

  Kell calculated the transition time across the abyss, from the moment Horus would show his face to the instant that the trigger would be pulled, and on to the time of impact. He would have to put the shot directly through the Warmaster’s eye – he favoured the right one, but either would suffice – in order to have the best chance of killing the Luna Wolf lord outright. Once the shot pierced the ocular surface, it would begin a process of fragmentation down to the nanometre level. Tiny slivers of fractal-edged shrapnel would dissipate into a sphere of miniature daggers, each moving at supersonic velocity. They would cause a concussion wave that would shred even post-human flesh, fracture even the iron-dense bones of a war god. He estimated that with a perfect hit, there was a one in seven chance of an outright kill. The probability went down as other variables were factored in, but catastrophic brain damage without true death was still within his mission success criteria.

  Anything less would be classed as a task failure.

  All this predicated upon a target standing still, without a helmet or benefit of meta-energy barriers. A target unlike any other. A target… A being of a kind that has never been killed by the hands of a normal human.

  ‘Impossible.’

  Did Kell say that aloud, or did the breaths of air whisper it in his ear? It was hard to be sure. He often forgot what his own voice sounded like.

  Could a man kill a primarch? Could a mortal slay a demigod? Part of Kell wanted to find out if it was possible; another part ran screaming at the audacity of that suggestion. In the beginning, with his great and towering hubris, the Assassin had thought it a task he could achieve.

  But after all that had happened, Kell’s mind was changed. There were doubts.

  That was why it had to be done. To be sure. To silence the whispers.

  Vindicare.

  High Gothic, Old Terran origin (pre-Strife, approximate). Present active infinitive of ‘vindico’.

  Compound word, from elements: ‘vindex’ – meaning a protector or defender; ‘dico’ – meaning ‘to say’.

  Meanings (Multiple): To protect. To deliver or spare or liberate. To claim or to vindicate. To avenge or to punish.

  He drank from the broken water canteen, the flat taste of the filtered fluid dead and empty in his mouth. Kell remembered wine, suddenly and brilliantly, the memory like a flare in the dark caverns of his mind. He glared at the bottle. The purifier was clogged with particles, and he shook it out. Had the deckhand Letae brought the filter to him, or had he just found a spare at the bottom of his torn pack? Either was possible.

  Then the questions went away as he heard sirens lowing across the canyon.

  It was not an illusion, no. There were small flying drones moving around over there, eagle-mecha hybrids probing the gloom with pin-beam search arrays. What were they looking for?

  Kell could only guess at the Vengeful Spirit’s moods, but he was certain that the ship was ill-tempered this day. He had been here long enough – and how long was that? – to sense when something was awry.

  They were at battle. Somewhere up above, hundreds of decks away in his strategium, the Warmaster and captains of the Sons of Horus were engaged in the business of killing. Kell felt this more than he knew it, but by now he had given in to instinct over intellect. He had allowed himself to be the feral and reactive animal, the patient hunter-beast more than the man who would plot and wait and wait and plot. He had no interest in what participants the distant battle would encompass. Those thoughts were vague ideas, abstract and brittle in form. All Kell wanted was for Horus to come to him.

  And that would happen. He had seen it in the dream-vision. It had already taken place, in some other skein of time and possibility. That was what the whispers told him.

  ‘Eristede!’

  He whirled around as a crack-throated voice called his name and Kell saw the crewman running across the metal deck towards him. His face was bloody from a cut upon his cheek, and he was in the throes of panic.

  Kell swore and shot a look back across the iron canyon. Some of the machine-birds paused in their dipping and swirling paths and looked his way. The fool’s shout might have reached them.

  Not for the first time, he wished that the camo-cloak still worked properly. At full capacity, he could have dropped to the deck and shrouded
, and to the eyes of the drones he would have looked like nothing more than a nub of cold steel protruding from the gantries. But now, ripped and ragged, it could only make him visually indistinct. He could not use it to hide from short-range scrying, or from vision in thermal, ultra-violet or magnetosonic ranges.

  He ran to Letae, gesturing sharply for him to find cover. ‘Silent, you fool. Be silent! Don’t you see them coming?’

  The crewman scrambled clumsily into the lee of a heat exchanger. ‘I had to come warn you, Master Kell.’ The man’s face looked different close at hand. The witch-mark tattoo seemed more detailed than before, becoming scarification more than ink. The lines of it were raised against his flesh, and reddened with blood-flow. Letae was more gaunt than he recalled, too – eyes sunken, hollow of cheek. Even his trickling vitae seemed less potent. It was watery, like crimson ink.

  The menial didn’t notice Kell’s fixated attention. ‘There are intruders aboard the ship,’ he gushed, talking without taking pause for breath. ‘It is said, a force of warriors sent by the Sigillite himself!’

  It surprised Kell that the mention of Lord Malcador’s title actually made him flinch. He could not parse the strange reaction, and so he ignored it.

  ‘Are they here for Horus?’

  ‘Of course!’ Letae’s expression became one of surprise and confusion, as if the answer to that question was obvious. ‘What other reason could there be?’

  Kell had his hands on the man now, and he was shaking him violently. ‘How many of them? Where are they? Tell me!’

  The crewman’s hands came up to fend off the Assassin’s sudden assault. ‘No one knows! That’s why the monitors are searching the ship, they’re looking for them! Don’t you see? If these legionaries kill him, then we’re free–’

  ‘No! No!’ Kell shouted at him. Behind, steel feathers buzzed in the sticky air as the machine-birds rode the thermals across the abyss towards them, probing and scanning.

  But Kell wasn’t thinking of them at that moment. What occupied him totally was the chance that the fate he had glimpsed would not come to pass. It could not happen. Horus would not be killed by some rogue agents sent by that thrice-accursed psyker! The vision had promised that Kell would have his chance to slay the monster.