Its command bridge was huge and echoing – a dome of bronze and marble supported by pillars of glittering granite. Tiers of decking rose up on the inside of the circular walls, each humming with subdued activity from the thousand grey-shifted crew members at their stations. The central vault, a wide expanse of bare stone under the colossal armourglass roof, flickered with a series of hololith route projections, rotating kaleidoscopes of neon light that swirled and reflected from countless pict screens and observation lenses.
It smelled of stone and leather, the aromas of forge and fire-pit. Naked flames burned in iron grates and stained the walls black. Runes were everywhere – carved into the walls, the floor, even the glass.
One figure dominated that space – the embodiment of every savage aspect that looked down on him, as bestial and magnificent in profile as the vessel he commanded. He was the master, the undisputed alpha-beast.
The primarch Leman Russ, though, did not move. The operations of his flagship took place in a seamless dance around him, like lesser satellites spinning around a gas giant. Every so often his piercing eyes would dart towards some hololith readout or lens-feed. Then they would flicker back, inscrutable and frost-hard.
Two grey-pelted wolves with yellow eyes and grizzled haunches slunk at his heels. Every so often one of them would growl low, sending soft vibrations running across the marble, like the crack of glaciers sliding over scree.
The Wolf King’s jarls stood in a loose ring around him, each one a lord of combat in his own right, swathed in pelts and armour-plates and totems. Rune Priests stood amongst them, their bone-white hair and painted skin vivid in the dancing light.
In normal times they might have laughed with one another, growling in jest and challenge, gold-pinned eyes glittering with coarse-edged humour.
No one laughed now. Not since Prospero. Not since they had all slumped to the earth on that fire-scoured world and saw what they had done to it. For some reason, Prospero had been different.
Russ had always laughed before, sometimes with genuine humour, sometimes with a kind of wintry satisfaction in violence. Now he hardly even smiled. The cut lines around his sun-dried face seemed a little deeper.
‘So when will we be ready?’ the Wolf King asked at last.
Gunnar Gunnhilt, the one they called Lord Gunn, spoke first, as was his right. His voice had grown hoarse since the battle of Tizca; he’d taken a blade across the throat that had kept him under the knives of the fleshmakers for two days.
‘Ten days, Terran sidereal,’ he said.
‘More,’ objected Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot, Jarl of the Third Great Company. ‘Two weeks.’
‘Not good enough,’ said Russ.
Ogvai bowed. ‘We will work harder.’
The primarch didn’t so much as glance at them – he seemed distracted, his mind lost in another place. ‘This delay harrows us. We should have been on Isstvan. Now we must respond.’
His jarls did not respond. Some nodded grimly, others looked doubtful.
‘Has such a thing happened before?’ asked Russ, talking to himself rather than them, his expression caustic. ‘Do sagas exist in which the Wolf King was drawn to the wrong place, doing the wrong thing? Has our shame ever been greater?’
Still no one replied. When the silence broke, it was not a jarl who spoke.
‘We have no shame,’ came a younger voice. ‘At least, I do not.’
Heads turned. Russ’s twin wolves let slip a snickering purr-growl. The Wolf King’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Who speaks?’
A warrior of Tra moved forward, pushing his way to the heart of the circle. His face was riddled with new scars. It made him look like a phantom of the old ice, criss-crossed with hexes and witch-marks. His head was part shaven, his remaining hair as black as engine-oil. He had a mournful face. He had always had a mournful face, even before Prospero had dulled the Wolves’ animal spirits en masse.
He had no left hand. His armour-clad arm terminated at the elbow in a mess of augmetics and iron caps. A new gauntlet had not been fitted yet – the demands had been many.
‘Bjorn, of Tra,’ the warrior said.
‘One-Handed,’ said Russ, nodding in recognition. Bjorn’s saga was already being crafted by the skjalds. He had been there with the Horus-daemon and heard the words of mystery spoken by that thing. His stock had risen, and he was being spoken of as if some deep wyrd had locked itself on him. ‘That is a poor name.’
‘It suits,’ Bjorn replied coolly, flexing his half-ruined arm with something like pride. ‘It stands for all of us.’
‘You wished to say something?’
‘I am not ashamed,’ said Bjorn, his sad eyes unwavering. ‘I saw the thing that brought us to Prospero. I heard some of what it said. The skjald told me the rest. We ended evil.’
‘No doubt,’ growled Russ.
‘And Magnus was already lost,’ said Bjorn. ‘I speak boldly – he was your brother – but it was right that he die.’
Ogvai, Bjorn’s jarl, nodded slowly, chewing his lip. Russ noticed, and his nostrils flared in anger.
‘We were a side-show,’ muttered the primarch. ‘Ferrus is dead. We should have been with him. We could have stopped it.’
Reports of Isstvan V had filtered through to the fleet in broken snatches, blurts of astropathic half-dreams across an ocean of warp storms. Nothing had been reliable, everything needed multiple readings and confirmations, but in the aftermath of Valdor’s departure the hammer-blow had gradually become clear. Now they knew the shape of the tragedy.
The Iron Hands, Salamanders and Raven Guard were destroyed or crippled. The Sons of Horus, Alpha Legion, Emperor’s Children, World Eaters, Death Guard, Word Bearers, Iron Warriors and Night Lords had turned traitor. When the star-speakers had finally confirmed the interpretations, bringing the rune-webs with them to demonstrate the pattern of the scry, it had felt as if the universe were falling apart around them, collapsing into ruin in snatches of strange and incomprehensible gibberish. Even now the shock of it resonated, hanging like a pall of smoke over all of them.
‘We would not have stopped anything,’ said Bjorn evenly. ‘We would have been part of the massacre, and few would miss us.’
At that, Russ almost smiled – the hooked, sardonic grin he used to flash regularly. ‘Aye. Just a few.’
‘The question is,’ said Lord Gunn, ‘what next?’
‘We have Dorn’s summons,’ said Ogvai.
‘Summons,’ spat Gunn.
‘That is what we are for, are we not?’ asked Russ wearily. ‘We come when called.’
‘When the Allfather calls,’ corrected Ogvai.
‘And He is silent,’ said Russ. ‘Valdor would not tell me why, but he knew. Of everything that has happened, out of all the mistakes, that wears at me the most. Tell me this – what has happened to the Emperor?’
None of them replied. None of them were qualified to. They averted their eyes and closed their mouths. Only their minds ran with answers – suspicions, guesses, fears.
He is stricken.
He has abandoned the Throneworld.
He is dead.
Russ laughed then, but it was not his laugh of old. It was a strangled, half-committed sound. ‘This is what we need.’ He looked at each of them in turn. ‘I will not take orders from my brothers, only my Father. He will speak to me. We will set course for Terra, not because Rogal demands it, but because we choose to.’
Lord Gunn looked up. ‘When, then?’
‘Five days.’
The jarl of Onn took in a deep breath. Ogvai looked pensive; some of the others doubtful.
Russ glared at them. ‘No longer,’ he said. ‘Return to your ships, do what must be done – in five days we leave.’
His expression remained dark, but somewhere, sunk deep into his lupine face amid the cracked flesh and golden eyes, a flicker of resentful fire still burned. The dead weight of grief was lifting.
In its place came something else.
‘Never, not un
til now, have I been truly angered,’ Russ snarled, and the twin wolves stood up at the sound, hackles raised. ‘I am curious to see where it takes me.’
Beorth Ranekborn eased back into the Fylskiare’s command throne. He’d slept well enough during the off-shift and felt alert. The servitors and mortal crew in the pits below him were working away quietly, and the entire bridge worked with a calm buzz of activity.
Commanding an outrider frigate like the Fylskiare wasn’t glorious work. They’d been stationed a long way from the main Wolves muster, and the stellar sprawl of the Alaxxes Nebula was a barely-visible smudge on his rear viewers. Still, it gave him a chance to run the real space engines properly again. They’d taken a hit over Prospero from one of the few surface-to-orbit salvoes that the Thousand Sons had managed to launch, and it had played havoc with his systems ever since. He’d had his tech-priests working on it continually, but the core of the problem continued to elude them.
It really needed the attention of an Iron Priest, but they were all fully occupied with the big capital ships. All things considered, the Fylskiare had done all right. Patrol duty on the edge of fleet sensor range was at least moving.
‘Anything to report?’ he asked his bridge-lieutenant, Torve, a sandy-haired kaerl from one of Fenris’s tribute worlds – he could never remember which one.
‘Sensor ghosting at our augur limits,’ Torve replied, his honest face looking up for a moment from a cluttered console. ‘Probably nothing. Want to take a look?’
Ranekborn didn’t, not really, but there was little else to do, and the crew got restive with nothing to occupy them but vector plotting. ‘It’s why we’re out here,’ he said. ‘Course adjustment?’
‘A nudge,’ replied Torve, glancing up at a roof-mounted pict screen with glowing lines picked out on the glass.
‘Do it then.’
Torve complied. A few seconds later Ranekborn felt the dull whine of the engines altering pitch. It still wasn’t quite right – a grinding, rather than growling. Trajectory markers on various pict screens scrolled away, plotting new routes.
‘Anything?’ he asked after a while, absently adjusting the arm-rests on his throne. Aerolf, his watch-officer, had done something strange to them last time he’d been in command on the bridge.
He watched Torve run more tests. He watched the augur-lenses on his throne console begin to feed him fresh locator runes. He heard the dull chatter of the bridge crew pick up by a notch and saw a servitor down in one of the relay pits insert a spare interface node into a vacant shunt-coil and start clicking excitedly.
‘Maybe.’ Torve was looking intently at the sensor records. ‘Hold this heading.’
Ranekborn sat up a little straighter. He looked up at the realview ports – a cluster of lead-lined crystalflex panes forming a blister over the upper bridge. He didn’t know what he expected to see there. An unmoving screen of stars twinkled back at him, just as ever.
‘Yes, something,’ murmured Torve. ‘Getting something now. This is not a glitch, this is a reading.’
Ranekborn felt the hairs on the back of his hands stand up. ‘Detail.’ As he spoke he activated priority links to the enginarium and void shield stations.
‘Feeding to bridge display,’ said Torve, switching his incoming data-stream to the main roof-mounted monitors.
Ranekborn looked up at them. For a moment he saw nothing special – a blurry cubic schematic of local space picked out in glowing green lines, all overlaid with rune-symbols and known vessel courses. It didn’t change immediately. Then, just at the edge of augur range where the definite gave way to the probable, something flickered into life.
Ranekborn clicked open a brass keypad housing on the side of his throne and began punching buttons. ‘Voids up,’ he snapped. ‘Bring us about, two points nadir. Ensure a line to the fleet.’
The bridge immediately shifted into action – they’d all seen the same thing. The low drone of chatter changed in tone, turning tighter, more urgent, more directed.
‘Line established,’ reported Klaja, the comms officer.
‘Insignia yet?’ Ranekborn demanded, keeping a close eye on the Fylskiare’s trim and heading – it would be a bad time to lose the enginarium. ‘Hull-markings? I’ll need to give them something.’
‘Almost there,’ said Torve, working furiously at his console. ‘They’re still a long way out, but… Yes. Here we are.’
The picts updated. Something resolved in the corner of the screen, shot down data-lines to the cogitators. A single shape shuddered into clarity on the tactical display, rendered in glowing lines of phosphor. The pict was poor – taken at an angle and extreme long range, partly shadowed by the overhanging lip of what looked like a lance housing – but it was there.
A many-headed snake, rearing up against a circle of gold.
‘What is that?’ asked Torve, twisting to look up at Ranekborn.
Ranekborn felt his pulse pick up as he looked at it. ‘I suspected you hadn’t read my intelligence briefings,’ he said stiffly. ‘That’s a new one. They seem to want to announce themselves.’
He patched into the comms station. As he did so, more pin-points of light started to spread across the augur-cube – first a few, then dozens.
‘Priority message to command,’ ordered Ranekborn. ‘Perimeter sighting of hostiles. Major deployment. Tell them we’re scanning further before withdrawal. Assumed intercept course.’
He watched the points of light continue to grow, like bacilli multiplying on a specimen dish. The numbers were getting more than uncomfortable.
‘Ensure we pass those images on,’ said Ranekborn, his voice hardening as he calculated how long they had. ‘Make sure they take them. Tell them it’s a traitor fleet.’
He swallowed, wondering how operational the ship’s weapons really were.
‘Tell them it’s the Alpha Legion.’
The Observatory had been built in the north-east reaches of the Imperial Palace. Its domed roof was lined with turquoise mosaic tiles shining in the light of a hundred candles. Esoteric devices on the curved surfaces sparkled and moved with the soft play of shadow.
It was not easy to see what was picked out by those designs – astrological symbols, perhaps, or maybe mythical beasts from a forgotten age of Terra. At the very summit was shadow, a lacuna out of the reach of the candlelight. A face had been created there a long time ago but the detail could no longer be made out. It sat in the darkness, gazing featurelessly down on the floor below.
The Observatory had not been used to scry the stars for a long time. Ancient brass telescopes, orreries and astrariums cluttered the aisles, unused, most of them covered in heavy tarpaulins. Rosewood cabinets were locked. The dust on the bookcases was a finger-width thick.
The floor was marble, a chequerboard of ivory and sable, and the walls around it glittered with faded gilt. Twenty pillars sustained the dome above, each with a stone emblem carved into the capital. Some were illuminated clearly – a wolf, a serpent, a lion. Others were obscured.
Three lords stood in the centre. Two were titans, their huge frames enclosed in extravagant shells of armour. The third was hunched and frail.
For a long time they did not say a word. Their silence seemed immense in that place. It seemed as if the first one to speak might shatter the walls and bring the dome down upon them.
The first to break the calm was the tallest and the most physically imposing. His face was slabbed and hard, crowned with a shock of white hair cropped close to the skull. His golden battleplate looked as solid as the stonework around it – its owner might just as well have been one of its statues. A thick cloak hung from his shoulders, pooling darkly in the flickering half-light.
‘Anything?’ he asked.
The speaker had many names. From his origins on the ice-world of Inwit he had been Rogal Dorn. Later he was the primarch of the Imperial Fists. In recent times he had slowly become accustomed to being the Emperor’s chosen praetorian.
His voice had the ti
mbre of a hammer thudding into timber. It was the voice of a man who desired nothing more than to man his ships, to rally his Legion and head into the void to face the enemy that he knew was coming.
And yet that was the one thing, the only thing, that he had been expressly forbidden to do. It was a strange burden, to be condemned by one’s own expertise.
‘The Sigillite has not spoken,’ answered the second figure.
This one was scarcely less imposing. His armour had the same baroque quality the Observatory had – decorated with the phases of moons and symbols of what might have once been called the occult. Like Dorn he was clad in gold and bronze and enveloped in rich fabrics of crimson, and yet where Dorn seemed as solid as the bedrock upon which the Observatory rested, this one seemed somehow more ephemeral, more liable to burst into sudden movement. Words of power had been painstakingly engraved into his elaborate battleplate – ancient words, in characters so small that they might have been the near-silent whispers of spectres.
This man’s full name was so long that it could not be contained on a single sheet of bronze. He most commonly answered to a single version of it: Constantin Valdor, Captain-General of the Legio Custodes. When he spoke, his voice was surprisingly quiet. His eyes, though, were never quite still, flickering almost imperceptibly, forever searching for the next threat to be countered.
‘No, I have not,’ said the third. ‘I am struggling to find something to say that has not already been said.’
Malcador the Sigillite had none of the grandeur of his companions. His robes, though richly made, were simple. The staff he leaned upon looked to be made of little more than iron, though the aquila device that topped it was artful. His voice gave away his physical weakness – it sounded destroyed by age. None, save perhaps the Emperor himself, knew just how old he was. He had no known birthplace, no cultural identity. As far as the wider Imperium was concerned, he had just always been there, as solid a presence as the Palace itself.
Malcador and the Emperor. The Emperor and Malcador. They were like light and dark, sun and moon – each as inscrutable and unknowable as the other.
Horus Heresy: Scars Page 5