Xa’ven looked up at the projection again, and stared at it for a long time. Yesugei could tell what he was thinking.
The Word Bearer. That is the other way.
‘Do what you must,’ Xa’ven said eventually, his voice heavy.
Henricos stood back, satisfied. Yesugei examined the brass spheres more closely. Moving slowly, he extended his hand to touch the surface. As he did so, a static tingle ran down his arm.
He closed his eyes. Immediately, the chatter on the edge of his inner hearing grew louder. He heard a cacophony of semi-human voices whispering in his mind. Nothing of what they said made any sense; they were like half-words used by infants or animals. In his mind’s eye, he saw a smoky, congealing miasma boiling at the core of the structure.
Then, swimming up out of the confusion, he saw two runes clarify before him. Both glowed a furious red and their outlines seemed out of focus. Looking directly at them was hard.
He selected the one on the left, reaching out to it with his thoughts. As he did so, the babble hushed a little, and something like a hiss ran through the machine’s innards.
‘Ah,’ Henricos said. ‘Yes, that is more useful.’
Yesugei opened his eyes. The galactic map was overlaid with a hugely complex web of moving streams. It looked organic, like the lattice of blood vessels in a body. Worlds were picked out in various luminescent shades, each one marked by runes in a language Yesugei could not understand. The starfield underneath was mottled and rumpled in some areas, but clear in others.
‘Those are warp routes,’ said Henricos enthusiastically. ‘Navigator channels. They must be – that’s the core network.’
Yesugei’s gaze followed the translucent swirls. ‘I agree. And the worlds – that is Terra. That is Colchis.’
The warp conduits meandered and diverged like a silted up river delta. Few led straight, and most terminated in stormy wells.
‘What is growing over Ultramar?’ asked Xa’ven, pointing to a truly massive pattern of storms running in a single swathe across the galactic south-east.
‘They’re cut off,’ said Henricos.
‘If not now, then soon,’ agreed Yesugei. ‘And not just them. See the barriers around Terra, and Chondax.’
As his gaze rested on the system where the Khan had been sent, he noted how far the interference was clearing. The barriers in the warp there looked strange, almost geometric, as if caused by some algorithm rather than the fluctuations of the aether. Whatever its origin, the system looked to have been completely severed, though now a host of passages were opening up around it.
‘So they can see the shape of the warp storms,’ said Xa’ven. ‘Useful.’
‘How many of these machines can there be?’ asked Henricos. ‘The Hesiod doesn’t have anything like it. What else can it do?’
Yesugei smiled. Henricos’s passion for the mechanical was his most appealing attribute. ‘More,’ he said, channelling his mind back within the device. He directed his thoughts towards the second rune, and a second mesh of overlays rippled across the galactic hololith. By the time he looked up again, the shapes had solidified into recognisable sigils.
‘By the forge…’ whispered Xa’ven.
For a moment Yesugei couldn’t see what he meant. Then, slowly, the shapes made sense to him. ‘Legion icons,’ he said.
Henricos nodded. ‘Battle-groups. Expeditions. War fleets. Static formations.’ He shook his head. ‘They know too much.’
They didn’t know everything. There were no movements recorded close to Terra, and some Legions, like the Raven Guard and the Night Lords, were completely missing. However, the extent of what they did know was chilling. The Blood Angels trajectory was marked in red – they appeared to have been heading directly for a single system on the extreme eastern edge of the galaxy. The Ultramarines looked to be hemmed in around the margins of their great star empire, and massive formations of Word Bearers and World Eaters were heading through the warp storms directly for them.
‘Does Guilliman know this?’ breathed Xa’ven, horrified.
Henricos shook his head grimly. ‘Doubt it. He’ll be as blind as the rest of us.’
The detail was not complete. Some of the sigils glowed only softly, as if the machine were working on incomplete or unreliable information. The display had the look of an ancient manuscript rather than a data-slate ledger – the icons were florid, the symbols mystical. Some were completely indecipherable, others flickered in and out of existence altogether.
Still, it was far more complete than any galactic survey Yesugei had ever seen.
‘How are they doing it?’ asked Xa’ven.
‘No augur-station has the range,’ said Henricos.
‘Agreed,’ said Yesugei. ‘They are tapping the warp. Those fleets are deep in the aether, their presence is known to those that dwell there.’
Yesugei looked up at the Chondax sector. It was empty. Warp storms raged in broken fragments around it, the last embers of a long inferno.
‘That is not enough,’ said Xa’ven quietly. He turned to Yesugei. ‘It cannot be. They cannot just know these things – if they did, the war would already be over.’
Yesugei nodded, his eyes following a trail out of Chondax. Just on the edge of vision, he thought he caught fragmentary echoes of Chogorian symbolism and focused his mind on it. ‘Something else is needed,’ he said, distracted.
Henricos snorted. ‘Prayers and petitions?’
‘Do not mock,’ said Yesugei, his eyes following an indirect spinward route. Back towards Chogoris? Surely not.
Xa’ven moved carefully towards the brass spheres. ‘Weather-maker,’ the Salamanders legionary said, cautiously. ‘Is it wise to keep this active?’
Yesugei heard the hissing again, and immediately snapped his thoughts back into focus. He whirled around and saw the spheres blazing hard with dark energy.
‘No, perhaps not,’ he said, extending his mind back into the heart of the machine. ‘We have seen enough.’
His mind reached back within the device, down to where the symbolic runes glowed in their fog of semi-reality. He moved to shut down the process, and the first of the two sigils sunk into darkness.
The hissing grew. He saw what looked like a pair of eyes swimming up from the miasma. He had seen such eyes before, but only in visions. His hearts began to beat harder.
He reached for the second rune, closing it with his mind, sealing it off as if he were clasping a hand over a candle flame.
It would not disappear. It kept burning away, furious and intense, before rotating slowly and staring back at him.
‘Shut it down,’ he heard Xa’ven say, though the voice sounded far off.
Yesugei tightened the focus of his mind. The rune remained stubbornly in place. The coils of smoke around it grew in solidity, forming shapes in the half-present murk. A voice emerged from the babble – a single voice, bestial and maddened, raging with the anger of something lashing through layers of inertia to get at its prey.
‘Shut it down!’ Xa’ven shouted.
Yesugei could not see what was happening in the chamber. His mind sank further into the warp-interface within the machine. A face swooped up out of the morass before him – a long face, high-crowned, bone-ridged, blood-fleshed, a distillation of human nightmares.
It locked eyes with him, and in those eyes were reflected all the pains, all the agonies, all the terrors of a million worlds. Yesugei tried to pull away, and couldn’t. The creature had seen him.
Its malevolent eyes narrowed. Its glistening flesh solidified.
And then, with a twitch of cat-like sadism, it smiled.
Death had never held any terror for a son of Chogoris. In the days before the Master of Mankind had come, it had been everywhere – in blood-feuds, honour-killings, on the hunt, from want or exposure or disease. The plains-people took it in their stride, neither complaining of it nor celebrating it. They did not raise mausoleums to the slain, but left the bodies to be eaten away by the winds a
nd carrion-birds.
In that, as in everything else, the Khan had become one with his adoptive home. He had seen a hundred deaths before leaving his unnaturally short youth behind. Adulthood brought more bloodshed, much of it at his hands, and he met it in the same detached fashion. He had never mourned – death was the way of things, the immutable pattern of the universe. It was to be welcomed, for it curtailed sickness, it cut off the vigorous soul before it could become slack, it cleared the ground for new growth.
Even primarchs had died, so it was whispered. Even gods.
For all that, it was difficult to witness what had become of Magnus’s iridescent city of glass and crystal. The Khan crunched through layers of grey-silver dust, watching heavy skies scud across the blackened shells of old structures. The lightning never stopped, flickering away on the far northern horizon like dancing cracks into another, stranger reality. Every so often a deep peal of thunder would boom out, the irregular heartbeat of a world in the final throes of its death-agony.
The Khan’s keshig fanned out around him. They went as warily as he, and their bone-white armour made them look like ghosts in the dark. Already the dust of Prospero was clinging to them, tainting them, blotching and marring the white and gold of their battleplate.
The Terminators bore their energy-shrouded blades, glinting pale blue. As they moved, their combi-bolters swept the terrain ahead, whining faintly as targeting reticules half-locked on to half-targets. Everything that remained in Tizca – the place that Magnus had once proudly called the City of Light – was a phantasm.
The Khan stalked at the head of the group, his dao blade held lightly in his right hand. His long fur-lined cloak hung stiffly, stained black where the dust cleaved to it. The way ahead was picked out in the false colours of his helm display, though even that failed to leaven the oppressive sense of utter dark. The cloud cover was so complete that they might have been creeping through the bowels of some colossal hive-spire.
‘Something up ahead,’ reported one of the keshig Terminators over the squad-vox.
Qin Xa held up a gauntlet to halt the squad. ‘Detail.’
The Terminator paused. ‘No, nothing,’ he reported. ‘False positive.’
It had happened many times. The sensors were scrambled, crazed by the heavy rads and static that buzzed through the atmosphere.
The Khan pressed on. He half recognised some of the buildings. They soared up around the creeping armoured figures at their feet – just husks now, coal-black walls with nothing but smouldering rubble within. He had caught sight of old emblems amidst the debris: Imperial iconography, Prosperine eye-devices, stylised homages to ancient knowledge and the esoteric.
‘More corpses,’ voxed Qin Xa as they passed down the long boulevard leading towards the heart of the ruins.
The Khan had already seen them. Most were mortal skeletons, stripped of skin and muscle by some terrible weaponry. A few items of armour had survived in the dust: domed helms, shoulder-guards and boots.
Some of the corpses were much larger. Ceramite lasted longer than carapace-plate, and many crimson armour-pieces remained wholly intact. Most had the XV Legion’s serpent icon picked out in gold or sapphire, slowly eroding as the toxic dust wore at it.
‘And this,’ said Qin Xa, walking over to a long staff weapon, half-buried in a heap of drifting ash. He pulled it free and shook the detritus from it. ‘I have seen these before.’
The Khan had, too. The weapon was golden, heavily encrusted with star-and-moon engravings, and far too large for a mortal to lift, let alone wield. A long, black blade slung under the main shaft had once spat with disruptor-energy; a bolter fixed further back had once cracked from shell-recoil.
‘Custodians,’ the Khan voxed, stating what the others already knew.
‘But whose side were they on?’ asked Qin Xa, hopefully.
‘You know that, Xa,’ said the Khan, pressing on.
He had not wanted to believe it, not truly. His feelings about Russ had always been mixed – respect for the warrior; exasperation at the boasts, the self-appointed exceptionalism. It was another thing, though, to witness what he had done, to see the truth of the star-speakers’ testimony. The Khan found that the truth, now that it was before him, was a bitter draught indeed.
His boots kicked against a steel-grey pauldron and it rolled, rattling, away from him. Like everything else it was desiccated, scoured down by the wind. He saw runes on the curve of it, still visible, angular and Fenrisian.
‘Nothing,’ muttered Qin Xa, following closely. ‘Nothing alive.’
His tone made it clear that he saw no purpose in staying. No doubt he was already thinking through the implications of what they had seen, where they would have to go, and whom they would have to fight.
The Khan slowed, listening hard. He blink-clicked his armour’s aural filters off and let his enhanced hearing do its work.
For a moment, over the dull hum of the Terminator power units and the faint spit of disruptor-fields, he thought he caught something out of place.
It had been like… buzzing.
‘I know where we are,’ he said, looking out beyond the shattered sawtooth edges of nearby edifices. Over to the left rose the jagged remains of a pyramid, still hundreds of metres high even in its ruin. A few panes of dust-opaque glass clung to the substructure. Through a gap in the surrounding walls, he saw another highway running almost parallel to the one they now walked. ‘Eighty-one radial streets. Ridiculous.’
‘Leading where?’ asked Qin Xa, a blade in each hand, his helm underlit blue from the field-discharge.
‘The cult temples,’ said the Khan, pressing on. ‘The great pyramids. The Occullum. Everything.’
They passed more of the same – twisted corpses, dried out and decaying. Thunder growled over them all, the lightning bleaching the colour from their livery and rendering them all as grey phantoms in the glass. Ahead of them, the street widened, revealing three Rhino transport chassis slumped amidst the remains of some kind of barricade.
‘A stand,’ remarked Qin Xa as he pushed coils of razor-wire aside. ‘Did them little good.’
A few hundred metres ahead, the street opened up further as other thoroughfares intersected. Like a river reaching its delta, the radial highways converged, merging into a wide square. As they reached its margins, the scale of it became steadily apparent.
The space before them was vast, yawning away under the fulgurate skies like some fire-blackened imitation of the plains of home. Once it must have been paved and well-lit, surrounded by elegant architecture and thronged with crowds. Now only debris remained – armour-shells, the chewed remains of vehicles. Fissures had opened up among the marble flagstones, some wide enough to swallow a man, all as tar-black as the void. A lone pillar stood at the very centre, broken off about fifty metres up. The stone plinth at its base still carried recognisable figures – a robed woman being lifted aloft by a one-eyed, armoured figure.
The Khan walked out across the square, heading for the pillar. The keshig spread out silently in his wake, Qin Xa with them.
As he walked, the ground under his feet felt increasingly fragile, as if it were just a thin skin over nothing. Cracks were everywhere, cobwebbing out from the lips of the fissures like probing fingers. This had been the epicentre of the inferno. Perhaps the crust of the world itself had been compromised.
Then he heard it again – a buzzing, like the drone of massed insect wings.
‘Are you getting that?’ he asked, halting beneath the long, faint shadow of the pillar.
The keshig was by now dispersed widely, picking their way steadily through the residue.
‘No life signs,’ voxed Qin Xa carefully. ‘No proximity markers.’
His voice gave away his uncertainty. They could all feel it, whatever the armour-readings told them.
The Khan turned back to the cratered and pock-marked pillar. It reared up into Prospero’s eternal night, and the mottled sky above raced and boiled.
T
hen it came again – distinct this time, like the whine of an insect swarm.
The Khan whirled, blade in hand, and he felt the stone flags shifting under him. His armour still registered nothing – no targets, no bodies.
By then the keshig were moving too. They circled, blades and bolters ready, searching for an unseen enemy. One of them opened fire, and the sound of it crashed jarringly.
‘Eyes!’ voxed Qin Xa, suddenly running across the square towards – seemingly – nothing. ‘Disable auto-senses – use your eyes!’
The Khan blink-dismissed the lattice of targeting reticules and environment compensators, and the square sank into the dreary fog of unenhanced vision.
Only then did he see them: shimmering in spectral blue-white, arthropodic, winged and massive. There were dozens, sliding up out of the ground like unquiet shades rising from the grave. They disturbed nothing, not even a fleck of ash. Their rigid outlines glowed with the ghosting phosphorescence of witch-light, though their hearts were as transparent as glass.
They were ruined things, twisted and hunched, though still twice the size of the Terminators before them. They had bulbous roach-like thoraxes and abdomens, tattered gossamer wings and segmented limbs that trailed against the ground. Grotesquely swollen brains, throbbing with an eerie light amid tight cranial folds, burst out from low-slung tangles of mandibles. Once free of the broken earth they swayed through the air jerkily, lurching as though blind and famished.
The Khan gazed at them stonily.
‘Psychneuein,’ he said, taking up his blade. ‘So something survived after all.’
Aetheric energy sparked across Yesugei’s armour. ‘Go back,’ he commanded, raising a fist.
Deep in the Vorkaudar’s warp-interface, the nightmare face rose up, still grinning widely. Yesugei saw rows of needle-teeth, pupil-less eyes of molten iron, an extended claw.
The creature snarled and writhed, rocking back and forth. The miasma around it thinned. The rune remained activated, driving the machine, thinning the barrier between worlds. The power it controlled seemed to be accelerating, ramping up like an overloading drive engine.
Horus Heresy: Scars Page 23