Old Earth

by Nick Kyme

  ‘Come no closer,’ said Rawt, and it took a second for Meduson to realise he didn’t mean him.

  Every tracked auto-turret turned towards Vulkan, at the same time as a phalanx of Immortals marched out to flank him on either side. A score of heavily armed servitors wakened with a grind of servos, their eyes flaring magnesium-white, their weapons trained on the primarch.

  ‘I do not know this being.’ Rawt turned to the primarch, imperious, cold.

  ‘Nor I,’ said Kernag, arms folded.

  Norsson and Arkborne said the same.

  Rawt stamped the ferrule of his long-hafted power axe against the arena floor. The blow echoed, almost a pronouncement, the declaration of a verdict.

  ‘An imposter stands before us. Vulkan is dead.’

  ‘Vulkan lives!’ Nuros unsheathed his sword without hesitation, stopping just short of reaching for his volkite caliver and really spoiling proceedings.

  ‘Brother…’ Lumak warned, but his grip had tightened around the hilt of his weapon.

  ‘I have a sword name for you, son of Ferrus,’ said Nuros, almost growling, ‘Betrayal. Is that to be it?’

  ‘I shall do us both a service and pretend you did not utter that just now.’

  ‘Lumak, Nuros…’ Meduson began, thinking he might have to intervene, when a resounding clang of metal arrested everyone’s attention. Even the Immortals gave pause.

  A hammer laid before the two councils, heavy, artisanal.

  Vulkan held out his hands, palms upwards.

  No shackles the Iron Fathers possessed could hold him. The gesture was symbolic.

  ‘Peace,’ said Vulkan, his deep voice calm. ‘The Iron Father is right. You do not know me, and none here you trust can vouch for my provenance.’

  Rawt slowly nodded, then gestured to two of his Immortals. The faceless warriors unstrapped their breacher shields so they could retrieve Vulkan’s hammer. It needed both to lift it, the strain required evident in their trembling limbs.

  ‘It’s called Urdrakule,’ said Vulkan, following the Immortals with his gaze. ‘It means the Burning Hand. Be aware that I know every scratch on it.’

  Despite himself, Nuros gave Lumak a less poisonous glance and Meduson felt some of the tension ease.

  ‘Your blade, Nuros,’ said Vulkan, still watching the Immortals as they lumbered. The primarch’s sworn warriors had remained disciplined throughout, but Meduson recognised in them a readiness to fight if the need arose.

  A dull scrape of metal against a leather scabbard echoed a moment later.

  Meduson turned to face Vulkan’s accusers, ignoring the scores of weapons trained upon him and his Shattered Legion brethren.

  ‘What now then, Fraters? You declare the Lord of Drakes false and claim our dead father reborn. How long have you harboured these beliefs? Am I next to face judgement?’

  Norsson sneered and the hypocrisy of it sickened Meduson.

  ‘It has already been made where you are concerned… Terran.’

  Kernag unfolded his arms to rest a hand on the pommel of his blade. That too was symbolic.

  ‘Shadrak Smyth is no Medusan.’

  ‘You have been reckless,’ said Rawt at last, ‘even you must concede that.’

  ‘Risks must be taken, Kuleg,’ Meduson replied. ‘To do anything other is to hide and embrace extinction. Surely, you can see that.’

  Rawt nodded.

  ‘I seek neither. I counsel only temperance. We must wait.’

  ‘For what? The longer we vacillate, the closer our enemies come to finding us.’

  ‘You misunderstand, Meduson. We wait not to make a decision – our purpose is already forged. We wait for him…’

  ‘What is this?’ asked Meduson, and saw Vulkan tense. The pri­march observed a pensive silence.

  ‘Step down as Warleader,’ Rawt demanded, ‘and let the Iron Fathers take temporary command of the Legion. Step down, Meduson,’ he said, anger colouring his words.

  ‘Or face your consequences?’ Meduson asked, unimpressed at Rawt’s sudden bravado. ‘You would attack a primarch? Are you mad?’

  ‘I know not what he is. It would not be the first time traitors have come to us wearing the colours of allies. A bitter lesson, well learned, that I do not intend to repeat. Step. Down.’

  ‘That was Isstvan.’

  ‘I saw him die, Meduson. Consumed by a nuclear fire.’

  ‘And our father had his head cut from his shoulders. Why believe one miracle and not the other?’

  Rawt paused. A flicker of emotion made his pale cheek twitch.

  ‘I could ask the same of you.’

  Meduson clenched and unclenched his fists, trying to maintain composure. A lapse in discipline now could prove extremely costly. ‘This is treason, against Throne, against Emperor, against Imperium,’ he said. ‘You renege on your oaths, Kuleg.’

  Rawt beat a fist against his chest. ’I uphold them! I commit treason against you alone, Warleader, a man whose authority I do not recognise.’

  ‘Aug, counsel your fellow Fraters,’ said Meduson, ‘and I shall see past this grotesque lapse in reason.’

  Aug did not answer.

  Meduson frowned, confused.

  ‘Jebez…’

  ‘I cannot.’

  ‘What did you say, brother?’

  Aug turned to stand alongside the other Iron Fathers.

  ‘I said, I cannot. This is the Gorgon’s will, Shadrak. I could not go against it even if I wanted to.’

  Rawt stepped aside, so did Norsson and Kernag. Arkborne took some gentle urging, unwilling to be parted from the figure that loomed behind them, cloaked in shadows until that moment.

  There was time for one last piece of theatre then.

  Aug’s face became still as marble, as whatever fraternity Meduson once knew with him hardened too.

  ‘We are the cult of the Gorgon, as we have been since Isstvan. ­Ferrus Manus lives.’

  Aug stepped aside, and the figure upon the throne behind him moved into the light.

  Fifteen

  One of the old kind, his fate decided

  The seer gazed up at the sunlit apex of the ziggurat and gave a sigh of resignation.

  Despite his excellent physiology, the climb had proven taxing and a fine veneer of sweat layered his skin. Acid burned in his joints.

  ‘No psychic powers,’ he muttered, griping. And climbing.

  Each step rose almost half a metre before yielding to the next. It made for hard going, especially in the heat.

  The sun had reached its zenith, and blazed with quiet, distant fury, slowly cooking the seer in his armour. The air throbbed, thick, hazy and reeking of the fecund jungle. A dense canopy stretched below, as vast and seamless as an ocean. The upper echelons of the ziggurat had mercifully crested the thickly layered trees several steps ago and subsequently provided a vantage point to observe the endless green beneath.

  The seer cared little for the view, though he preferred it to being beneath the jungle canopy. In the arboreal gloom below, the atmosphere had been almost tangible, palpably resisting his passage. The cloying, pungent blooms and earth scents had grown suffocating. Hanging vines snagged on weapons and armour. Great horned creatures of hard chitin and carapace emerged from burrows or the diseased boles of immense trees, noisome and aggressive. Even the flora hungered. Spiny cycads, fungal colonies, needle-fanged bladder traps and pitchers lined in flesh-eating mucilage shuddered with sentient hostility. And the droning… The endless, nerve-shredding discourse of arachnids, orthoptera and hexapoda…

  ‘You had better be up there,’ growled the seer, pausing to wipe his brow before resuming the climb.

  After several more hours, he reached the summit.

  No guards barred his way, which was either foolish on behalf of his prey or a sign of his colossal arr
ogance. Instead, a massive dais stretched before him. Even etched in strange sigils and wrought of something akin to stone but somehow different, it reminded the seer of a landing pad. No gunships ever came here, though; no vessels of any kind did. It could only be reached via secret paths known to those of the Cabal.

  Eldrad Ulthran had once been a part of that order. He believed he still was – his orientation had merely changed.

  But the Cabal had meddled and it, like the long lives of some of those who served it, had to end. The Acuity had been wrong, or, at least, imperfect. Humanity’s extinction would not bring about the outcome foretold.

  ‘Gahet…’

  An old word, an old name, for one of the old kind.

  At its utterance, the corpulent figure quietly meditating at the summit of the ziggurat opened its eyes. Something ophidian persisted about Gahet. His skin looked gelid to the touch.

  Eldrad, I knew you would come,+ he said, without moving his lips.

  ‘Then I am surprised I find you unguarded,’ answered the seer, and then realised he could not move. His hand froze a finger’s width from drawing his blade, refusing to go further. He could breathe, but only just, his chest crushed by an inexorable weight.

  I need no guards to protect me from you. I allowed you to come into my presence. I watched you through the jungle, throughout the long climb.+ Gahet blinked. A pale nictitating membrane slid across his eye, slow, deliberate. The pain in the seer’s chest increased. +The journey has left you weary.+

  The seer answered with difficulty. ‘It seems I underestimated you, Gahet.’

  I am of the old kind, Eldrad. Did you really believe you could come here and kill me?+

  ‘You sound disappointed.’

  Merely intrigued,+ Gahet conceded. +You have been altering fate, old friend.+

  ‘I don’t recall us ever being friends.’

  Gahet’s eyes narrowed to reptilian slits as the pain in Eldrad’s chest increased again. +Why?+

  Scalpels of agony burned into the seer’s skull as Gahet tried to strip back the layers of his mind.

  Curious. You resist.+

  ‘The Acuity…’ gasped the seer, and tasted blood in his mouth. ‘There is a third– hnng–outcome. Mankind…’

  Has to fall. You have seen this. The Primordial Annihilator shall triumph and its fire will burn, but like all hungry flames it will gutter and fail.+

  ‘You cannot see all ends, Gahet. Mankind must survive. Horus must–’ the seer managed, interrupting himself with another incoherent grunt of pain, ‘gnng– fall.’

  Gahet drew closer, and the alien’s proximity brought yet greater agony.

  You are hiding something, Eldrad. Plucking the skein. Who is your pawn this time, now the Gorgon is dead? Have you cultivated another?+ Gahet drew closer still. He gave off no scent, and his body radiated no warmth, though the form he wore might have been a shell, a simulacrum to better match his environs. His psychic assault felt real enough, though. The seer had to clench his teeth to prevent himself biting off his tongue. His limbs trembled, his bones, his marrow. +Am I an impediment to this scheme?+

  ‘Yes… you… are.’

  And you have killed others. Immortals and agents, even Cabal.+

  ‘I will… kill… more.’

  I cannot allow that, Eldrad. You mind is strong but you cannot– What are you hiding? Something else. Deeper…+

  The seer couldn’t answer. He could barely hear over the thunderous beat of two hearts stretched to their limit.

  Why are you smiling, Eldrad?+

  He heard that. Gahet had allowed it. He wanted answers.

  ‘Because…’ said the seer, his body straining with every iota of its transhuman strength, ‘I’m not Eldrad.’

  Gahet’s eyes widened as the witchblade pierced his bloated body. A protest died on his lips as eldritch lightning coursed through him, reducing his bones, his flesh, simulacrum or not, to ash.

  Eldrad, the true Eldrad, scattered the remains across the ziggurat with a sudden burst of violent telekinesis.

  ‘Well,’ said Narek, breathing hard and having fallen to one knee, his body bent over and held up by trembling arms, ‘that was deeply unpleasant.’

  The glamour masking his true form had faded to reveal a battered, blood-stained legionary wearing cracked war-plate and a ragged scowl as he looked up at the eldar.

  ‘I didn’t like this plan, xenos. I prefer it when I steal in under smoke and kill everyone with my rifle.’ He spat up a gobbet of phlegm and blood. ‘Or knife. Let’s do that from now on, shall we?’

  ‘Gahet required something subtler, more oblique,’ said Eldrad. He had sheathed his witchblade and begun to write in the air with his fingertips.

  ‘Sword through the gut, then set on fire.’ Narek nodded, finally getting to his feet again. ‘I’m surprised he even noticed.’

  Eldrad ignored him, sarcasm evidently lost on the eldar. A rune had begun to materialise, fashioned from tendrils of light. It had many facets, angular cells created by intersecting curves and accents.

  ‘Is that your language, xenos?’

  ‘An arcane one. It is a divination.’

  ‘You mean fate?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘Looking for another strand to cut? How many before it’s done?’

  ‘You mean how many before I am done with you.’

  ‘Exactly. I want what you promised me, seer. Do not think to renege on that.’

  ‘I have no intention of doing so, but the skeins are myriad and the cutting of one affects another and another, and so on.’ The rune grew brighter, coalescing more fully with each drawn iteration. ‘It takes time.’

  Shadows appeared within the facets, shadows that became apparitions and figments, lives rendered in ghostly resonance, unravelling in a cascade of images and impressions.

  Narek came closer, drawn by the flickering phantasms, some moving too fast to see, others lingering as the seer made a determination.

  A woman, a mother, her daughters held close. The confines of a ship, claustrophobic, overcrowded.

  ‘Not her…’ murmured the seer.

  ‘What am I seeing, xenos?’

  ‘Echoes, heathen, of lives lived, of those yet to be lived, and some never to be lived at all.’

  Now a farmer, tending his crop, enjoying the noonday sun beating down upon his back, a flask of water in his hand, gratefully imbibed.

  Eldrad lingered on this one, unspooling back and forth along the skein like a projectionist examining a roll of film. Narek had seen certain remembrancers do the same, long ago now, before the war, during the Crusade. It had intrigued him. Then the scene developed, revealing more. Revealing another.

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Yes, eventually.’

  And then the skein turned again, and the seer plucked the thread, pulling it, teasing it until it stretched, a thin psychic meniscus of potentiality that revealed a tall warrior in sculpted armour, long silver hair flowing down his back.

  Narek recognised the armour’s provenance, if not its wearer.

  ‘One of yours.’

  ‘Tell me, heathen, do you consider all of humanity your kin?’

  Narek snorted, amused. ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘He is not one of mine, though we share the same race. He is Cabal.’

  ‘Like that one?’ Narek gestured to the ash stain that had been Gahet.

  ‘Nothing like him. This one will be much harder to kill.’ With a curt gesture, Eldrad banished the rune. Motes of dust and light drifted in its absence and then were gone. He turned to face his huntsman.

  ‘Less oblique.’

  Narek smiled.

  ‘I like him already.’

  Sixteen

  The Gorgon, unmasked

  Vulkan’s gaze had not wavered from th
e hulking silhouette upon the throne. At the edge of the crowd, beyond the phalanx of breacher shields, past the slack-jawed servitors and the auto-slaved gun rigs, lingering at the periphery of his vision, he saw the other. The ghoul. The emaciated husk, wretched and angry.

  ‘Ferrus…’

  He shut his eyes, hard. No one had heard him. He had either whispered his brother’s name or not spoken it aloud. Vulkan looked again, and the apparition of his old madness had gone but the other one still remained, the one cloaked and seated upon a throne like some king of old Albia.

  Stature alone marked it out as something other than a legionary. It wore power armour, its mechanical rhythms familiar but oddly discomforting.

  It cannot be him. He is dead. If it is him then it means that I have lost my sanity. If it is him, I could still be inside the mountain and this could all be a figment of a fevered mind.

  The primarchs, at least some, could sense the presence of a sibling. Vulkan should have been able to detect truth from falsehood but called his instincts into question. He had seen Ferrus before in far darker circumstances than this. For one horrible moment, he considered he might never have dragged himself from that caldera beneath Deathfire at all, and instead still dreamed within the heart-blood of Nocturne.

  Vulkan’s eye alighted on the hand – the ‘iron hand’, though no falser honorific could be used to describe it. Silver shone in the weak light, caught and reflected by this miraculous limb. Neither iron nor silver, the metal of its creation defied any known classification. One thing was known.

  It was unique.

  Not just that, it had a finger missing.

  Is this my brother I see before me?

  Vulkan imagined himself reaching for the Ferrus shadow, in the manner of those who are haunted by the dead reach for the shades of the departed, but he remained still and the psychological trauma passed swiftly and unremarked.

  ‘It is the will of Ferrus Manus,’ said the one called Aug.