The Path of Heaven

by Chris Wraight

  It should have been halted. By rights, even that mighty starship should not have made it into the Endurance’s ambit, but somehow, whether by guile, fortitude or merely through bloody-minded determination, the Swordstorm crashed its way through the combined assault of the system-murderers the Indomitable Will and the Reaper’s Scythe. Flank gunnery blazing, it knocked both of them back in a welter of macrocannon hits, immolating shield plates and overloading thrusters.

  The movement was neither mad nor suicidal – the concentration of fire on the Swordstorm had bought time for the bulk of the V Legion to escape to the warp rift’s lip, pursued now only by Eidolon’s forces. And yet it had not been bought easily. The flagship’s hull was blackened and cobwebbed with cracks. Its void shields flickered, tearing away at the edges, and its over-laboured engines trailed long plumes of red-tinged smog into the vacuum.

  Mortarion took his place on the teleporter pads. He could still view progress through the forward viewers, watching as his enemy’s fortress burned. Until that moment, the Endurance itself had not fired, but then the primarch gave the gesture to Kalgaro, and the flagship’s full, devastating power was finally unleashed.

  Lance-strikes shot out, the beams as vivid as young suns, angled at the very centre of the Swordstorm’s superstructure. A rain of explosive projectiles – vortex charges, corrosion clusters, iron-eaters – peppered the void, cracking into the target in driving waves. In their wake came more beam weapons, mass-drivers, and everything that the armourers could deliver, all in a single, rolling, barrage of utter destruction.

  The Swordstorm did not enter that arena without doling out pain of its own. It fired back, and the full complement of the flagship’s arsenal remained fearsome. Its missiles speared out, shooting through the blooms of plasma and smacking into the circling hulls of its pursuers. Its lascannons flashed in a never-ending strobe-pattern, draining every generator on board to maintain a thicket of adamantium-melting intensity.

  And yet, when the Swordstorm finally came through Endurance’s assault, it was already half broken, its void shield coverage fizzing into nothingness, its atmosphere venting. Like some mortally wounded aurox, it surged up from the mire of drifting smoke, still vast, still intact, but weakening rapidly.

  ‘Enough.’ Mortarion’s command was a single word, barely whispered, but the barrage stilled. The Death Guard forces loomed close on all sides, barring any escape, but their guns fell silent. ‘Clear the path.’

  The Endurance launched the coup de grace – a lone lance-beam that leapt eagerly from the battleship’s spinal macro-barrel, searing across the gulf between the two flagships before slamming into the Swordstorm’s burning bridge-spire. As its void shields exploded, the devastation briefly outshone the warp rift itself. The Swordstorm shuddered, rocking on its axis, halted in its onward charge. Secondary explosions daisy-chained down the length of the gunwales, blasting out hull-plating and sending fresh debris tumbling.

  ‘Fix locus,’ commanded Mortarion, his old hearts thudding hard, his grip on Silence tighter, the anticipation both toxic and sweet. ‘And take us over.’

  The Deathshroud assumed their places, twelve of them, their scythes glowing with pale disruptor fields. Many more Legion warriors took position in other transporter stations, their Cataphractii armour glinting dully under glaring lumens. All told, three hundred would make the first passage – the best of the Legion, a fitting bodyguard for the primarch – and more would follow on their heels.

  Mortarion felt the sudden heat of the teleport-column cycling up to full power, then the surge of warp-rending metaphysics. The bridge before him disappeared, lost behind a blinding screen of white.

  The heat turned to extreme cold, the fractured, brief shriek of aether-passage, and then the world of the senses came racing back.

  His boots crunched into solid ground, and the curtains of silver ripped away.

  The primarch tensed, gripping Silence two-handed and whirling around, ready for the thunder of bolters. His Deathshroud fanned out, their helm-lenses glowing a pale green, each one of them prepared to weather the storm.

  Nothing came back at them. The Swordstorm’s bridge was empty, its thrones deserted, its halls echoing. As the last clangs of the teleport-beams died away, the silence swelled up, spilling over the banks of flickering lumens and empty tactical lenses.

  Mortarion moved warily, his skin taut with alertness. ‘My brother!’ he called out, peering into the shadows.

  He reached the command throne. It too was empty. Severed power cables sent flares of light tripping through the dark, but no living thing rose to contest him.

  The Deathshroud followed, making no noise but for the low grind of their ancient armour and the tread of their iron-rimmed boots. Mortarion turned back from the throne, his fury now stoked beyond reason.

  ‘He runs from me!’ the primarch thundered, cracking the heel of his manreaper into the marble and breaking it open. ‘Find him! Get me after him – time enough remains to locate his spoor.’

  But no teleporter beam came burning into existence to carry him away. Across the empty servitor-pits, cogitator screens suddenly shook into life. All across the bridge, the Swordstorm’s void shields snapped into being again, furling back across cracked armourglass real-viewers like thrown gauze, preventing any external locus from being imposed. From down below, the sound of engines kicking back into life made the decks tremble, and great lumen-banks blazed into brilliance once more.

  The Deathshroud moved instantly, forming an unbroken ring around the primarch. The rest of the boarding squads swung their bolters in searching arcs, looking for the hidden enemy.

  High up in the terraces overlooking the command throne, one hundred and thirty-two power weapons kindled, flooding the heights with a wave of neon-blue. One hundred and thirty-two storm shields slammed into place, and one hundred and thirty-two throats opened in battle-challenge.

  ‘Khagan!’ they roared, in perfect unison.

  The sagyar mazan launched themselves over the edge, dropping down to the deck like falling angels. Bolter-fire roared out, flying across the gulf, punching into the metal columns and smashing through stone, and then they landed, blades whirling.

  Mortarion strode out to meet them, detecting the telltale whine of engine overload building up below him. The bridge remained shielded, keeping him from teleporting away, and already the entire space was consumed with desperate fighting.

  ‘Get these shields down,’ he hissed over the comm to Kalgaro, drawing his Lantern sidearm and opening fire. ‘Unleash every level of hell, but get them down.’

  Then he swept into range, his scythe pulled in terrible arcs, cutting them down, but not fast enough, never fast enough.

  The Swordstorm burned from within, its reactors bulging, its lower decks already swimming with burning plasma. The great lightning sigil hanging over the command throne crashed to the deck, smashing across the polished marble.

  Still the savages came on, fighting to reach the primarch, to drag him down and hold him up. The White Scars fought like the daemons themselves, shrugging off wounds that ought to have felled them, laughing with feral abandon as they surged up against the implacable Deathshroud.

  At their head was a lone khan, wielding a Terran longblade two-handed. With him came the others, whooping the war-cries of their bestial home world.

  They were hopelessly overmatched, but their charge never faltered. The Deathshroud sliced them apart, their scythes throwing blood across the deck, but they refused to fall back.

  Mortarion himself came among the desperate attackers, sweeping three aside in a single blow and hurling their mangled corpses back into the pits. He blasted the chest of a fourth open, then strode towards the leader, the one who held them together. As he approached, the White Scars legionary dispatched his opponent and swung around to face the primarch.

  ‘Hail, Lord of Death!’ he cried, sou
nding almost ecstatic, angling his longsword to strike. ‘Torghun Khan greets you!’

  ‘Why do this?’ asked Mortarion, holding Silence back, just for a moment. ‘Why waste yourselves?’

  But it was not waste, and he knew that. Every passing second brought the flagship’s doom closer. Every passing second gave time for the rest of the fleet to slip away. The ire of the XIV had been concentrated on this point to the exclusion of all others, and even now the lances were firing again, striking the shields that trapped their master on the rapidly decaying void hulk.

  ‘Why, my lord?’ the khan laughed, poised for the coming strike. ‘Atonement. At last.’

  Mortarion readied his scythe. ‘No such thing exists.’

  The Khan watched the Swordstorm die from the bridge of the Lance of Heaven. Every wound the flagship took was like a strike to his own body. The great hull was reeling again now, rocked by the flurry of beam-weapons aimed at the command bridge. They would break the last of the shields soon, retrieve their troops, resume the attack. The sagyar mazan would not last more than moments against his brother’s dread entourage.

  Shame gnawed at him. Once again, his sons had died in his place. Once again, the battle had been interrupted before the end, and this time it was him racing away from the epicentre, his fleet in retreat, the vengeful guns of the enemy trained on their overburning thrusters.

  Your destiny is on Terra.

  They had all told him that – Yesugei, Ilya, the sorcerer. The Stormseer’s dreams, surely, had been of the final battle on the fields before the Palace walls, and it would be there, if anywhere, that the culmination would come.

  But the cost. The cost.

  To race into battle, knowing that honourable death was the only result – that was easy. Any berserker could do it.

  To leave, though, to run, to dare the passage of the unknown and let the taunt of craven ring in his ears – that nearly ripped his hearts in two.

  Around him, the bridge of the new fleet flagship boiled with furious activity. All the legionaries and crew who could have been extracted had been, either by Stormbird or teleporter-beam. The Stormseers were out, as were the keshig and Jubal’s command group. All the gunships had launched before the Swordstorm’s final attack run, taking with them every weapon their holds could carry.

  Jubal was busy now, a furnace of energy, realigning the Lance of Heaven’s defensive grids and bellowing commands to pull the fleet back further. The Stormseers were immersed in their rites again, summoning up their elemental forces for the journey ahead. Arvida had taken the principal place among them, and none had gainsaid him, for with Yesugei gone there was none more powerful among their number, whether or not he was a true member of the ordu. The warriors of the keshig took up guard-places all across the bridge, and legionaries from the Swordstorm had been dispersed across every surviving capital ship of the fleet, bolstering the defences against madness and warp-fatigue.

  Ilya limped up to him, her arms folded around her body as if in protection. Her eyes were rimmed red.

  ‘You had to do it,’ she said.

  The words were no comfort, as much because they were true as anything else.

  Out in the void, the battle raged as fiercely as ever. The bulk of the Death Guard fleet had been distracted by the Swordstorm’s sacrifice, but the Emperor’s Children had not been deflected, and stayed in tight pursuit.

  ‘The rift!’ cried Taban. ‘The horizon clears!’

  Its edge swept towards them, a river of fire that bucked like massed horse-heads on the charge. Space flexed and stretched, putting further stress on already damaged hull structures, and vast arcs of aether-lightning licked up against the raging thrusters.

  For the first time, they could see over the shrinking lip of the rupture. Immense walls of raging static raced around and around, dizzying in both scale and speed. On the far side was a haze of gold and sapphire, a boiling mass like superheated promethium. In that terrible morass swam half-visible images of torture and insanity, breaking the surface for moments before sinking again in an endless ferment.

  ‘Warp shutters!’ ordered Jubal. ‘Lock down for aether translation!’

  Every White Scars ship was hurtling now, running ahead of the guns of the III Legion. Geller fields flickered into solidity, warp drives cranking into life, plasma drives still piling momentum onto the fleeing starships. The real-view ports locked closed.

  ‘What is to stop them following us in?’ murmured Taban, studying the fleet tactical readouts. The first of the big V Legion war vessels was already plummeting down the chasm, half in real space and half in the warp.

  ‘The rift is closing,’ said Jubal, indicating augur-sweeps showing the neck of the rupture collapsing in on itself.

  ‘Not quickly enough,’ said Jaghatai. Like Taban, he was looking hard at the tactical scanners. The vanguard of Emperor’s Children attack craft at least would make the horizon before it finally fell into ruin.

  Jubal nodded. ‘They are not enough to prevent us,’ he said, cautiously.

  The Khan narrowed his eyes, watching rune-patterns creep across the glass. The malign nausea of the warp grew stronger, calcifying in the air around them. It felt as if every surface swam with static electricity, and it would only get worse once they were inside the rupture. The enemy ships flew strangely, erratically, risking foundering just to remain in contact.

  ‘But what drives them now?’ he asked. ‘What do they carry?’

  The Ravisher veered hard to zenith, its thrusters wildly overfiring, its enginarium overflowing and spilling raw coolant into the bilge-decks. It no longer fired weapons, for its gunnery crews were all dead, torn apart on the flail-hooks of the ship’s new masters, their souls sucked from their chests and consumed in an orgy of psy-gluttony.

  Every deck swam with blood. It gurgled down fuel tubes and vaporised through the atmospheric cyclers. The lumens had all blown or were oscillating wildly, making the decks sway between pure darkness and blinding over-illumination.

  The children of Von Kalda’s half-understood magicks loped through the corridors and the transit shafts, hunting for more to kill. They had grown, all of them, swelling obscenely fast. The smallest of them towered far above the measure of a legionary, crowned with slung-back spikes and flailing long poison-barbed tails. They went lasciviously, alluringly, slinking and sliding through the wheeling lights, their whiteless eyes flashing like pearls.

  Manushya-Rakshsasi squatted amid the ruins of the bridge, relishing the vibrations of the tortured ship. A long slick of gore ran down its chin, fresh from where it had gorged on the last legionary to resist.

  It had grown far greater than the others. The blood, the warp, the deaths – all of it magnified and redounded upon its true nature – the persona it had enjoyed in the realm of dreams, unfolded and stretched and become true-flesh.

  So many names it had employed over so many long centuries of consciousness. It had been there in the very beginning, created amid the beautiful decay of the first star-empire, rising to sentience as those city-worlds of abundance were consumed by the tumults of a god’s birth. It had stalked across the riven planetscapes, dissolving them into pure sensation, drinking the spirits of the world-makers as they howled and wept. Manushya-Rakshsasi had taken the spell-casters of those worlds, the warlocks and the seers, and ground its teeth on their living souls, drinking in the essence of their power and of their knowledge. The daemon had grown strong then, just as its counterpart fragments of the Dark Prince had grown strong, as young as the blue stars in the abyss and as lethal as the greatest servants of older powers.

  Thus Manushya-Rakshsasi was still young, as the galaxy reckoned age, and that made it vital, and cruel, and in rapture with all it surveyed. It stretched out, and its lissom flesh glistened in the flickering lumen-beams.

  ‘I am indeed beautiful,’ Manushya-Rakshsasi said, and its choirs of lesser Intell
igences chimed their agreement.

  It rose up, unfurling its full majesty. A Keeper of Secrets, they called such creatures on mortal worlds.

  And there were many secrets to keep – the last gasped memories of the elder species, laced with the brutal hidden desires of the younger, all destined for dissipation into the deeps of the empyrean, locked in a stasis of exquisite agony for all ages.

  Manushya-Rakshsasi gazed out across the void, seeing through the blackening shell of the mortal vehicle as if it were translucent crystal. The world of the senses was thinning, melding into a mix of matter and mind. That made it stronger still, anchoring its wayward selfhood into the weave of temporal forces, bolstering muscles and steeling sinews.

  Soon they would not need the void barges of the mortals at all. In moments, they would be free to break out, to glide through the seething tempest as they did in the crucible of their birth-states.

  Manushya-Rakshsasi surveyed the carnage, scattered widely over the turning gyre of the warp bridge. It saw the starships like clots of blood in a vein, each one rich and glutinous and ripe for intoxication. One of them swelled more violently than any other, a great battleship filled with the singing souls of the aether-weavers, clustered around their prince, whose soul burned like the circles of pleasure themselves.

  ‘That one,’ Manushya-Rakshsasi intoned, sending the psychic command to its new-birthed legion, bidding them take flight. ‘We take that one.’

  Twenty-Five

  The steel-clad warrior had grown stronger. Every blow was heavier, judged more precisely, driven with a purer anger.

  It would not be enough, for Cario’s art was of a different kind – the disinterested pursuit of martial perfection, immune to the vagaries of battle-lust. It was one of the great galactic ironies that the doctrine, once shared universally in his Legion, had been changed into the pursuit of unbridled excess. But then, the ruin of the Great Crusade was replete with ironies.