by Various
‘I have learned many things,’ wheezed Mortarion, gesturing to the arcane objects strewn across the floor. ‘Your kind can be warded against. You can be bound. You can be used, like blades, and then sent back to the hells that spawned you.’
Lermenta felt like laughing in his face. She had heard the same screeds from a thousand other mortals over the aeons, each one convinced that he alone had found a way to negotiate with the gods for no price at all.
‘Let me tell you of the empyrean,’ she said. ‘There are many great forces in the aether, and one of them has your name etched over his rusting throne. He is waiting, though not for very much longer. It matters not how many trinkets you rattle or wave – he will not be denied. He has claimed you.’
‘None have claimed me!’ snarled Mortarion. ‘Even my Father could not claim me! Me, who was guilty of patricide long before the seeds of treachery were sown in the Warmaster’s heart. I have seen them all off – the tyrants, the witches, the xenos filth. Only I remain – pure of it all, free of corruption.’
‘You do not look pure to me.’
The primarch glowered. ‘I can compel you, daemon. I know the words, the numerical constants that bind you, dragging you from one form to another. I have studied these things. It is not witchery, but scientific reason.’
Lermenta felt real contempt then. The damaged figure before her had no true knowledge, just false hopes and gleanings. Her own master’s favourite, Magnus – ah, now there was one who really understood the mysteries of the empyrean, and even he had been deceived.
‘You wish to know the truth?’ she asked.
Mortarion came closer. ‘I will know the truth,’ he hissed.
‘I can show it to you.’
‘I destroyed a world to find you. Give me the knowledge.’
Lermenta smiled sweetly. ‘Very well.’
Exerting her power was trivially easy. Most of the wards and cantrips Mortarion had assembled to keep her in place were embarrassingly weak, and only one thing in the chamber had the power to really hurt her.
‘This is the truth.’
Her bonds shattered. Her human shell peeled away, sloughing from her like a bloody cloak and revealing a glossy, insectoid true-form. She launched herself at the primarch, her jaws gaping obscenely wide, her claws raking.
She took him by surprise. It was her only advantage and she pressed it, gouging at his grease-streaked armour and trying to gnaw at the flesh within.
He hammered a heavy fist down, trying to take her head off, but she evaded him with ease. She punched a claw into his midriff, biting deep, eliciting a roar of pain.
By the gods, she was enjoying this.
His physical strength was enormous, but that would not help him, for she was a creature of anti-physics, shackled only by laws that he feared to invoke. She wounded him again, goading him like some huge taurodon, driving his anger deeper towards mania.
‘Banish!’ he roared as she laughed at him. ‘Go back!’
His fists were flailing now, trying to latch on to her, to drag her down. She slipped through his fingers like an eel, bloodletting as she went, adding freshly scored lines to his already battered war-plate. The two of them rocked back towards the circle, and she felt the power of the wards overlap in the air, tearing at her flesh even as she ripped through them.
‘Do it!’ she taunted, slapping him across the face. ‘Do what you came to do!’
He resisted, trying to tear her apart with his hands, still relying on the immeasurable strength in his post-human musculature.
Lermenta spat at him, and the acidic spittle clogged in his eye.
That did it.
‘Barbaroí!’ he roared, and the runes etched around the chamber flared into life. A hot wind suddenly howled from the centre of the circles, snatching at her revealed trueform and harrowing it. ‘Gharáz! Baghammon’echzhaza!’
She couldn’t help but scream, though the pain was mingled with a cold satisfaction at what she had provoked.
Mortarion kept up the chant, and now his fist-strikes, spiralling with warp-lightning, caused real damage. He smashed her back against the iron frame that had held her, and the blows drove into her carapaced stomach.
‘So it comes for you at last,’ she hissed through bloodied fangs, grinning. ‘You could not resist.’
The glorious stink of learned sorcery and hedge-magick was now pungent and inescapable. It was within him, and he was using it, in spite of every protestation.
‘Never mock me,’ Mortarion growled, spraying spittle from the vents of his rebreather. ‘Heijammeka! Never goad me!’
Lermenta sagged back against the wall, feeling her soul pulled back into the empyrean. The primarch was crunching her to pieces now, hammering furiously with his fists, pouring out all of his fury onto her broken physical shell. It was hard not to be awed by it – she was the first to see a fragment of what he would eventually become.
Here, above the burning remains of Terathalion, was the future of the Death Lord being born.
And so as she died, and her quintessential matter sucked itself back into the maw of the aether, she managed a mock salute. ‘Hail, Master of the Plague!’ she cried through the ruin of her jaws. ‘By the gods, you learn fast.’
Then the mortal universe ripped away, and the warp came rushing over her like a tide.
Mortarion stood over Lermenta’s crushed form, breathing heavily. He could smell the ichor upon his gauntlets. It wasn’t blood, however it stained just as richly.
His hearts were beating as one, though the combat had sickened him. He wanted to vomit, to expel the curdling sickness that hung heavily in his stomach.
But here was something else there, too. He remembered Malcador’s promises; the smooth words spoken, so it seemed, an age ago.
A day will come when all these things are no longer necessary.
The Sigillite had been wrong about that, either lying or mistaken. That day would never come now, and there was no point pretending otherwise. Perhaps all the old certainties would have to be overturned now, even the oldest, forged in the gas-clouds of the foundling world he had both loved and hated.
He remembered, too, the words that he had spoken.
I will never serve in your Crusade while there are witches among us.
For too long, he had been used by all sides – Nikaea had been and gone, and the promises made for it had all been hollow. The void now seethed with witchery, more virulent than ever, and he could feel its tendrils grasping for him.
He looked down at the etched floor, at the wards and the symbols and the runes. He would have to learn more. He would have to master all the paths of ruin. He would, as perhaps he had known for a long time now, have to become the very thing that he had always hated.
‘So be it,’ he growled, retreating back to the centre of the arcane circle. ‘It starts here.’
Mortarion, the Death Lord, primarch of the XIV Legion
‘Beyond the edge of the sky there is always another horizon,
Always a step further to take, always a new sun to see.’
– from Verses of the High Age of the Great Crusade (Canto XIX)
by Calus Quintus
I know you are there. I see you in the dark of your sleep. We have not met, and we will not meet yet. You cannot even hear me, but that does not matter. You don’t need to hear to listen to the truth. So I am going to explain this to you. I am going to explain it because I can’t show you. And you must understand, because if you don’t then I will be alone with this gift. And that I cannot bear.
It began with three words spoken by the primarch.
‘We go in.’
We.
Go.
In.
‘This is my order. Carry it out. Now.’
I have to obey. It is my function. It is my life. I am the ship and its cours
e. I go where I am ordered. The metal of the navigation throne was warm against my skin as I took my place. Sweat was running from my pores, pink with blood.
I was not alone. My cousins took their thrones beside me. They were slick and clammy to look at, like fish growing skins of slime under the sun. It took three of us, you see, three of us to pilot the Iron Blood as it threaded the warp’s needle – one to watch, and the others to watch what the first could not watch. I was the first. I was the Navigator Prime, and in the warp that great ship belonged to me as much as it did the Lord of Iron. So, as much as it was he that spoke the command, it was I who gave the ship to the black star.
I sat in my throne, and the shutters pulled back from the viewing portal.
I saw the sun.
White sheet.
The sound. Glass edges ringing against each other.
Disc of night.
I was shrinking in my throne, and the black sun was swelling. I could feel sound buzzing up my throat. The edges of my mundane eyes stung. Acid tears were upon my cheeks.
We go in.
I open my true sight.
The un-light of the sun touches the black of my third eye.
And I see.
We were made to see. I am a Navigator of the House of Thal, and our House is but one of many. We are not human, though we may seem human. We are an offshoot, a creation – a deliberate reaction to necessity, if you like. Navigators can look into the warp and read its currents, and so guide ships over distances that would take millennia to cross while keeping to the laws of time and space. For this we are set apart, our genes protected, and our Houses given privilege. The third eye in my skull is a portal between the madness of the warp, and human thought. My mind can look upon the impossible and not break.
I have looked upon horrors, and worse, and remained alive. I have remained myself.
That was, until my service to the IV Legiones Astartes led me to the black star at the heart of a wound left by the birth of a god.
Yes, I say ‘god’.
What else should I call them? There is a limit to our consciousness, a limit to our understanding, a limit to our words. So I say ‘god’ knowing that it exists, that they exist, and still I know that the word cannot fully encompass what they are. They are the truth beyond the veil. They are the pattern in the warp that I could never see. They are what waits beyond the gateways.
And I saw them. I saw the heart of all.
The black star took us.
The Iron Blood slid into the throat of the darkness. Existence stretched, became a line drawn upon a black sheet. I heard the silence, and the silence screamed. Light became solid. The solid became sculptures of light and reflection. Numbers and dimensions, tumbling down from reality into the pit. A single instant, thinner than thought and longer than time, stretching on, and on, and on, until it became a sound that had always been there but that no one could hear.
Until it became laughter. An eternity of laughter.
And then it ended, and I was screaming in my throne of steel, and a world of sick sensation and cruel edges tumbled over and over and over. There were alarms sounding, and the walls were bleeding red. The crew were running. The ship was spinning – thoughts, stars – without direction. The medicae’s eyes shouted – shouted in fear – as they rushed me and held me down and I heard words – say ‘alchemical formulae’ – and the words were puffs of red vapour in my sight. And then I felt the first needle in my flesh.
Red light. Machine screaming. Needles…
…and then silence.
I dream now. I dream beneath the waves of sedatives in a pit at the bottom of a murdered world called Tallarn. The sons of Perturabo keep me here. They keep us all here, all those who went into the black star with their eyes open. They wake us to see for them, to guide them to the end of the circle they wish to complete.
They think they understand.
They cannot, and do not, and never will understand.
To understand you have to see.
I see the shadows beneath the world. I spent my whole life as a creature moving through an unreal realm with the eyes of a mortal. Now I am a creature moving through the mortal realm with the eyes of a god.
And I always see.
I see now. Even as I hang here, silent and asleep, I see. I see you, son of iron, hiding in the distant dark beyond layers of earth and stone. I see you and I tell you secrets that you will never hear. And this last secret is my gift to you, a gift from the heart of a black star burning at the point where the mundane and the eternal meet.
Seen from here – from the other side of the skin-thin membrane of reality – you are not strong or weak, noble or cruel.
You are not heroes.
You are blind.
And the universe sees you.
And it laughs.
‘We are poor fathers, brother,’ I say to Horus’s armoured back. My brother’s attention is, as always, divided, torn between the twin roles of Legion primarch and commander. He stands at the head of his temporary war room, eyes fixed on the large hololith that dominates the wall.
‘How so?’ he asks without turning.
‘It is a father’s duty to educate his sons, to steer them towards a better path.’
Horus turns then. It is the first time I have seen his face these last few months. His brow has grown heavier, his eyes narrower under a burden that my words have done nothing to ease.
‘Look at what our Legions have accomplished,’ he says, gesturing to the hololith. He is a proud father in that moment, stood before me championing his sons. Across the display, the details of a thousand wars fought across a hundred systems scroll and resolve. The tapestry of information and tactical data tells of our sons’ unstoppable might – they are conquering worlds even in the face of overwhelming opposition. ‘Were the Legions not under our stewardship, they would have accomplished far less.’
He is the commander again. I smile to myself, wondering if even he is aware of how often he slips between the two roles.
I shake my head. ‘No. That reasoning is flawed. Our sons are born to battle – we did not teach them that. What they do in our names, and the name of our father, they do out of obedience, out of duty and honour. We use them as tools to accomplish our ends, but we teach them little.’
‘What would we have them be, if not what they are?’
‘Were we better teachers, we would be able to help Perturabo accept his place, or ease Lorgar’s mind. We could focus Angron and bring balance to Curze. Our limitations as fathers are doubly reflected in our failings as brothers.’
‘No.’ Horus’s voice was iron-hard, his resolve absolute. ‘We each have our part to play. The Emperor knew this and made it so. We are each of us the sword or the shield that He needs us to be.’
‘What of the warrior cast to the fighting pit who must wield both sword and shield?’ I ask.
‘It is not the weapon, brother, but how it is wielded.’
‘My point. We, each of us, only know how to wield our might one way.’
Horus speaks to me then the way I address my own captains: any sense of brotherhood hidden behind a mask of purpose and responsibility. ‘What is troubling you, Sanguinius?’
‘Nothing,’ I lie.
I tell him nothing of my visions, nothing of the Emperor’s palace burning with unnatural fire. I do not speak of my nightmares, or of the fear that my Legion will drown in its own cursed blood. What would I say? I cannot envisage any foe that could threaten Holy Terra, nor any catalyst that could send my sons as one into madness.
Of all my brothers, I had hoped that I could share my doubts with Horus. The sense of sudden isolation steals the strength from my voice. ‘Just a passing thought.’
I turn and walk from the chamber.
The memory of that vision follows me. It was a warning against shortcom
ings, a cautionary tale about trusting solely in one’s greatest strengths. My vision spoke of my sons, and their failures. At the last Tempest of Angels – a ritualistic duel from the distant history of Baal – I tried to teach the most polarised of my sons something of balance. Yet even atop the duelling stone, when all else but life and death was stripped away, my teaching was lost upon them.
I sigh.
True learning only occurs when consequence forces a change, for we are selfish creatures and we cling to our ways like deposed kings clinging to the ashes of a failed kingdom.
It is a truism from my childhood, a saying passed down from the first elders. The words burn in my gut. Anger draws my hands to fists. Amit and Azkaellon – my sword and my shield. But at the blades of my brothers’ sons, I will have them learn to be more than this.
Before the next Tempest approaches, I will teach them the virtue of the lesson.
Azkaellon
It always rains on Henvinka. An entire planet sodden by an unceasing downpour, its continents are turned to slurred mulch, its seas storm-wracked gulfs. The enemy hides in the planet’s core. Tomorrow, our companies will descend into the depths of this place and bring them the Emperor’s justice. Tonight, we stand upon a rig of steel and adamantium, a towering platform holding us proof against the perilous waves.
I remove my helm and feel the rain on my skin. Within a moment my hair is soaked through, slicked to my scalp by the downpour.
‘Where are the rest of your warriors, Azkaellon?’ My opponent gestures to the five Sanguinary Guard that have accompanied me here. Lucius, the greatest blademaster of the III Legion. His features are noble, patrician. Even blasted by the storm, his hair lashing in the wind, he looks as though he had been born to stand there.
Yet any beauty he possesses is ruined by the sneer that stains his face.