The corridor is empty, as is the room beyond, a high-ceilinged chamber lush with alien furs, exquisitely crafted furniture of extinct woods and gilt-framed architectural plans said to have been a gift from Perturabo himself.
He hears something heavy and metallic behind him, and at first thinks it is the door-locks of the extremis chamber closing. Then he hears a scream and realises his mistake. Nagasena spins around in time to see one of Singh’s automata spill from the door, its head a pulverised ruin of sparking circuit boards and dribbling brain matter.
He knows immediately what has happened.
Severian has infiltrated the Warmason’s tower and broken through into the extremis chamber through its most unguarded flank, the roof.
Singh’s voice sounds from within, a reedy plea for mercy, and Nagasena wonders if Severian has any left in him. Strobing flashes of gunfire light the corridor and Nagasena hears grunts of pain and the sound of a furious brawl. Singh cries out and something explodes from within. The armoured door is still trying to close, but the body of the automaton is holding it open for now.
Two fist-sized objects fly through the gap, perfectly angled to bounce from the wall and land either side of Nagasena.
He throws himself back, dragging a heavy rosewood table after him as the fragmentation grenades explode. The blasts of fire and shrapnel are intensified in the confines of the room, and the table is blown to splinters by the impact. Sharp pain slices into him, and blood runs down his thigh. He tries to rise, but his leg gives out under him and he drops with a cry of pain.
Through the smoke of the explosion, Nagasena sees a vast shape moving towards him. He pulls his long-las tight into his shoulder and fires three shots in quick succession. He thinks all three hit, but he is smashed from his feet by a tremendous impact before he can be sure.
Nagasena lands badly on a sculpture of a golden lion. He spills from its back onto the soft furs. Ribs are broken and his leg is numb and useless. His long-las lies next to him, miraculously undamaged. Just as he reaches for it, a booted foot stamps down, breaking the weapon in two. Nagasena rolls onto his back and reaches for his sword, but the weapon is only half drawn before a fist too large to be mortal takes his arm and twists it.
Nagasena’s scream is one of agony and loss, for as his wrist breaks so too does Shoujiki.
The broken shards spin away across the floor, and through blurred vision, Nagasena sees Severian’s face. It is cruel and angular, sharply defined where many of his gene-brothers have a curious flattening of their features.
‘You let me live on the cliff,’ says Severian. ‘Now I return the favour.’
Nagasena sees that Severian carries the unconscious form of Vadok Singh under his arm, as easily as a man might carry a rolled up sheaf of papers.
‘You will not leave Terra,’ Nagasena promises him.
‘Watch me,’ says Severian, dropping Singh to the floor.
The legionary pushes open the wide doors that lead to the courtyard and the landing platforms. Automata descend from the roof on glowing flight packs, but they do not attack. Their targeting wetware has specific rules of engagement, and Singh’s own parameters for his safety render them impotent. Nagasena loses sight of Severian, gritting his teeth against the pain.
With his good arm, he drags himself across the floor. Every movement causes blood to pump from his wounded leg. He should lie still and bind his wounds, but Nagasena has not yet failed in a hunt and he does not intend to fail in this one. Sweat pours down his face. His features are drained of colour, but he keeps going. He leaves a line of smeared crimson in his wake.
Nagasena pulls himself through the doors into the courtyard. It is brightly lit, and the black-skinned automata stand motionless. The night-blooming flowers bend and flap in a roaring downdraught.
The building howl of engines comes from a double-rotored tiltjet sitting on a raised platform cantilevered from the villa’s outer walls. Severian sits at the flyer’s controls, with Vadok Singh slumped next to him. Nagasena shields his eyes against the hurricane-force propwash that billows dust into the air. He draws his volkite pistol.
Proximity protocols might keep the automata from engaging, but Nagasena has no such restrictions.
The rotor nacelles angle downwards and the tiltjet lifts into the night.
Holding the pistol is almost too much for Nagasena. Sweat drips in his eyes and his limbs tremble with the effort of holding it straight. He will get one shot, two if he is lucky.
His first shot stabs into an engine, a bright beam that fuses components and blows hydraulic lines. His second misses.
But one was enough.
The engine coughs smoke and something inside explodes with a fearsome bang that rips the rotor assembly from the side of the tiltjet. The nacelle drops onto the villa’s gateway and its sculpted structure is obliterated with a shriek of buckling metal and cracking stone. Broken pieces of rotor blades whip through the courtyard, beheading automata and scything others down like deserters before a firing squad. Nagasena buries his head in his hands as the nacelle explodes and the spinning tiltjet slams down next to it. The impact collapses the flyer’s structure, its spine broken and the remaining engine spitting black smoke and screaming with grinding rotors.
Nagasena crawls towards the downed flyer and uses its buckled prow to pull himself upright. Through the shattered ruin of the canopy, he sees Vadok Singh is still unconscious, but relatively unscathed.
Severian is pinned in the pilot’s seat, his legs broken by the crushed avionics panel. With a little time he could free himself, but Nagasena has the volkite pistol aimed at his head.
The Legion warrior sees the gun, but Nagasena does not shoot.
Instead, he asks: ‘You were one of the Crusader Host, yes?’
‘I was,’ answers Severian. ‘I stood on the walls of Terra as a symbol of the warriors fighting to reclaim the galaxy your ancestors let slip through their fingers. My brothers and I forswore the glories of campaigning to stand as honour guard on Terra. And what did we get for our sacrifice? Betrayal and imprisonment!’
‘How long were you on Terra?’ asks Nagasena.
‘One hundred and seventy-seven years.’
‘Then you never became a Son of Horus.’
‘We were the foremost of the Emperor’s Legions,’ says Severian. ‘None could match our tally of compliance. I am a Luna Wolf, and my loyalty is beyond question.’
‘A lot can happen in two centuries,’ said Nagasena. ‘Hearts can change.’
‘Mortal hearts, not Legion hearts,’ spits Severian, looking him right in the eye. ‘So if you’re going to kill me, get on with it.’
‘Goodbye, Severian,’ says Nagasena, pulling the trigger.
The volkite pistol is an artificer-crafted relic of a bygone age, a weapon that has never once failed. Its workings are a mystery to him, but its lethality is beyond question, as is its reliability.
But this time, the pistol does not fire.
Before either Nagasena or Severian can react to the misfire, the arc-lights of the villa are snuffed out and a shriek of jets sounds overhead. A host of aircraft descend on columns of stab-lights. Nagasena shields his eyes as a score of grey-armoured soldiers descend through billowing winds on zip lines. Nagasena does not recognise them, for the firelight illuminates no insignia or rank markings upon their uniforms.
Their equipment is high-end tech, powerful hellguns, ablative shock-armour and full-visored helms with integral combat-augmetics. They quickly surround the downed tiltjet with their guns aimed squarely at Severian’s head and heart.
None of the soldiers speak, and Nagasena slides down the buckled fuselage of the flyer as the last of his strength bleeds out of him. Movement draws his eye, and he lifts his weary head. Through the burning gateway walks a dark man, clad in a hooded robe and flanked by a dozen slender women in gold, form-fitting arm
our. The red and ivory of their helm-plumes twist in the thermal vortices.
They are the Sisters of Silence, and there can be only one reason they are here.
The dark man pulls back his hood, revealing a tense, patrician face, framed by long white hair pulled in a scalp-lock. His eyes are old, perhaps the oldest Nagasena has ever seen, and a pale light dances in them like snow falling through moonbeams.
‘Lord Malcador?’ asks Nagasena.
The Regent of Terra nods and says, ‘Your pistol, Yasu. Point it in the air if you please.’
Nagasena does so, and as soon as it is vertical a thin beam of incandescent energy cuts the night. The tension in Malcador’s face visibly relaxes and colour returns to his features.
‘The mechanisms of the volkite are complex and require a great deal of effort to confound,’ says Malcador. ‘Even for one such as I.’
‘You prevented my gun from firing?’
‘I did, for I have need of the Luna Wolf,’ says Malcador as a group of the grey soldiers carry Vadok Singh from the wreckage and into the villa. Another group free Severian with cutting gear and las-torches. His weight is enormous, and it takes six of them to lift him clear. His genhanced physique will be dulling the agony of his broken legs, but the pallor of his skin is testament to his pain. The Sisters of Silence surround Severian, and his face betrays a strange revulsion at the presence of the mute order.
Between them, they bear the wounded Space Marine up to the landing platform, where a black aircraft with a non-reflective hull descends from the darkness. The craft hovers just above the platform, and an assault ramp extends from its centre section. The silent sisterhood take Severian aboard, the assault ramp is retracted and the black ship rises on a near-silent repulsor field.
Nagasena groans and Malcador waves a pair of soldiers to his side. They have no markings, but bind his wounds with the expertise of battlefield medicae. One man readies a hypo of pain balm, but Nagasena shakes his head.
‘Lord Dorn wanted Severian dead,’ he says. ‘Why do you need him alive?’
Malcador turns, and the firelight from the burning flyer gives his features a harsh, calculating appearance: a regicide grandmaster whose pieces are living beings and who knows full well the cost of the decisions he takes.
‘We are at war, Yasu, a war for our very survival,’ says Malcador. ‘Lord Dorn fights his battles with guns and warriors. I wage a war of greater subtlety – a silent war, if you will, and I require men of singular talents to fight it.’
‘What talent does Severian have that brings the Sigillite looking for him?’
‘The Luna Wolf is a unique individual,’ says Malcador. ‘A latent psyker whose powers are so instinctual he does not even realise he has them.’
‘A psyker?’
Malcador nods. ‘One whose powers were only truly awakened when Magnus the Red sent his, shall we say, ill-advised message to Terra. In the years since then, Severian’s innate abilities have grown into something quite special, oh yes, quite special indeed.’
‘Years?’ asks Nagasena. ‘It was the Crimson King’s psychic attack that allowed the prisoners to escape from Khangba Marwu. That was only a few days ago.’
Malcador nods, then sees Nagasena’s confusion. ‘Ah, yes, I can see how it would appear that way from the outside, but Magnus sent his warning about Horus to Terra two years ago. It almost ripped the Palace apart, but the Emperor’s wards were able to contain it from escaping. A host of psykers from the Hollow Mountain attempted to dissipate that enormous reservoir of power before it broke the psychic levees, but the energies Magnus unleashed eventually overcame them. And the entire world felt the results of that. But mark my words, it could have been worse, a lot worse.’
Nagasena tries to process this information, but the pain from his wounds is overwhelming his thought processes. He feels a jab in his thigh and calming warmth spreads through him.
‘Lord Dorn will want to know of my hunt,’ he says. ‘What will I tell him?’
‘Leave me to worry about Rogal,’ chuckles Malcador.
‘And Singh? What will he tell of this night’s events?’
‘Vadok Singh has an impressionable psyche,’ says Malcador. ‘He will remember what I need him to remember.’
‘You would lie to Lord Dorn?’ asks Nagasena.
Malcador shakes his head and says, ‘Rogal and I have somewhat differing views on the means by which we must fight Horus. He has his knights, and I will soon have mine. Where his will blaze with fire and fury, my grey angels will move unseen through the Imperium. Severian will be part of that.’
Malcador’s eyes bore into Nagasena, and he hears the Sigillite’s next words echoing in the farthest reaches of his mind.
‘And so will you.’
Severian faces his pursuer
About the Author
Graham McNeill has written more Horus Heresy novels than any other Black Library author! His canon of work includes Vengeful Spirit and his New York Times bestsellers A Thousand Sons and the novella The Reflection Crack’d, which featured in The Primarchs anthology. Graham’s Ultramarines series, featuring Captain Uriel Ventris, is now six novels long, and has close links to his Iron Warriors stories, the novel Storm of Iron being a perennial favourite with Black Library fans. He has also written a Mars trilogy, featuring the Adeptus Mechanicus. For Warhammer, he has written the Time of Legends trilogy The Legend of Sigmar, the second volume of which won the 2010 David Gemmell
An extract from Garro: Vow of Faith.
As he waited for the dawn glow to rise higher, the man turned in a slow circle and passed the time reading the history in the landscape around him. Some of it he gathered from his own instincts, more he took from flashes of mnemon-implants fed into his brain by the hypnogoges, long before he had come to Terra.
The forest of tall, mutated fir trees filled a valley that had once been a bay bordered by city sprawls now long-dead and lost. The iron-hard trunks, grey-green like ancient jade, ranged away in all directions beyond the clearing where he had landed the cargo lighter. He could see former islands that were now stubby mesas protruding from the valley floor, even pick out the distant shapes of old buildings swallowed by the tree line. But to the east, the clearest of the decrepit monuments to the dead city were the towers of a long-vanished highway bridge. Only the twisted remains of two narrow gates remained, rust-chewed and thousands of years old. Beyond them, in the time before the Fall of Night, there had been a great ocean; now, the strange forest petered out and became the endless desert of the Mendocine Plains.
The bleakness of that thought was somehow comforting. Entropy is eternal, it said. Whatever we do today, it will matter not in centuries to come. Forests anew will rise and engulf all deeds.
He turned and walked back to the lighter. The snow on the ground hissed beneath his footfalls as he came around to the drop ramp at the rear, open like a fallen drawbridge. Inside the flyer’s otherwise empty hold, a man in a maintenance worker’s oversuit looked up at his approach and pulled listlessly at the magnetic cuff tethering him to a support frame. The two of them were similarly dressed, alike in average height and nondescript aspect, but the chained man’s face was swollen and florid.
‘Haln,’ he began, his words emerging in puffs of vapour, ‘Look, comrade, this has gone far enough! I’m freezing my balls off–’
His real name was not Haln, but it was who he was today. He stepped in and punched the worker in the face three times to stop him talking. Then, while the man was dazed and reeling, Haln released the mag-cuff and used it to lead his captive out of the lighter. He chanced a look up into the cloudy sky. Not long now.
The worker tried to speak, but all that came out was a wet, breathy noise.
Perhaps he had thought they were friends. Perhaps the fiction that was Haln had been so good that the worker bought its reality without question. People usually did. Haln
was a well-trained, highly accomplished liar.
He wanted to strike the worker again, but it was important that the man not bleed, not yet. With his free hand, Haln pulled a metallic spider from one of the deep pockets of his overcoat and clamped it around the worker’s throat. His captive whimpered and then cried out in pain as the neurodendrite probes that were the spider’s legs entered his flesh, and found their way through meat and bone to nerve clusters and brain tissue.
Haln released him, but not before giving the worker another item – an Imperial soldier’s battle knife. It was old, blackened by disuse and corrosion. There were stories in it, but they would not be heard today.
The worker accepted the blade, wide-eyed and confused. Wondering why he had been handed a weapon.
Haln didn’t give him time to think too long about it. He pulled back the sleeve of his coat to reveal a control panel with hologlyph keys, secured around his wrist. Haln placed the fingers of his other hand on the panel and slid them around, feeling for the right position. In synchrony, the worker cried out and began a sudden, spastic series of motions. The spider device accepted the signals from the control and made him a puppet. He staggered back and forth as Haln got a sense of the range of motion. He began to weep, and through coughing sobs, the worker begged for his life.
Haln ignored his slurred entreaties, walking him away into the middle of the large clearing where the chem-stained snow was still virgin. When he was satisfied, Haln looked again at the oncoming dawn and nodded once.
Highlighting two glyphs made the worker bring the old knife to his throat and draw it across. Manipulating other symbols forced his legs to work, walking him around in a perfect circle as blood jetted from the widening wound. Haln watched the spurts of crimson form jagged, steaming lines in the snowfall. Each wet red axis pointed away to the horizon.
Eventually, the cut killed the worker and he dropped, sprawled across the mark of his own making. Haln felt a change in the air, a grotesquely familiar acidity that was alien and uncanny. It was good, he decided.
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