The Path of Heaven

by Chris Wraight

  The two blades clashed again, sabre and glaive, one darting like a sliver of ice, the other whirling like a chain-flail loosed from its moorings. The tide of battle carried them both up the stairway, and he let it flow.

  ‘We are hunting you now,’ Cario said coolly. ‘Your flagship burns.’

  Shiban hammered another blow in – a furious strike, pushed with venom. ‘Better to burn than to break faith.’

  ‘Faith.’ Bolt-shells crashed into the archway above them, the passage to the high bridge. ‘Ironic, that you celebrate it. It was to have been expunged.’

  The White Scars powered up to the top of the stairway, to where the Palatine Blades’ banners hung from golden rails. Across the reflective floor, hundreds of legionaries clashed, some at close quarters, some racing to secure vantages. Each side was totally committed now, fighting with every scrap of genhanced expertise. Gauntlets crunched into flesh, blades sliced through ceramite, shells cracked bloodily home.

  ‘Not by us,’ Shiban grunted, evading a crossways swipe that would have severed his helm-cabling.

  ‘Ah yes. You were the exceptional Legion.’ The gates loomed, burnished and many-columned. A giant aquila, unsullied, shone above them, its severe head gazing out over the carnage. Beyond the doors, the bridge itself could be glimpsed. ‘Except for the other seventeen.’

  Cario was still fighting within himself, driving the blade in glittering figures-of-eight, containing the rage set before him and letting it exhaust itself. Shiban showed no signs of tiring yet, though, and kept up the barrage, his brothers beside him forcing the defenders back into the shadow of the burnished eagle.

  ‘Look what you have done to yourselves,’ said the White Scars legionary, contemptuously. ‘Look at the wounds you give yourselves.’

  ‘This, from the Scars.’ Cario felt the first stirring of his inner tempter then, and a spasm of alarm passed through him. Too soon. ‘Besides, not all of us indulge.’

  ‘Your master made his bargain.’ The glaive thrust deep, surrounded by a blinding halo of disruptor-light. Something had happened – the Scar was fighting beyond himself, more exuberantly than on Memnos. ‘It will come for you too.’

  The fighting spilled over into the bridge proper, and the barrage of bolter-fire cranked up further, exploding out against the armourglass real-viewers and the serried command columns. Cario retreated with his brothers, withdrawing in close-packed phalanxes towards the great throne at the head of the bridge.

  ‘None are immune,’ Cario said, his attention now wholly consumed on surviving the onslaught, for deep within him, a pair of eyes opened again. ‘You are in sickness yourselves.’

  ‘I have been.’ Shiban slammed the glaive down, two-handed, making the sabre flex almost to breaking point. ‘But now, here at the end, I remember how we were before.’

  The combat, close and brutal, swarmed up on the throne dais, surging in a locked wave of ivory and purple. The White Scars just kept on coming, defying the hail of bolter-fire and the sword­masters ranged against them.

  Cario felt the throne itself approach. As the bridge fell into the confusion of pitched battle, he was only dimly aware of the warp light raging across the void outside, and the tongues of flame licking out from the edge of the great vortex.

  But he knew what it meant: they were going over the edge. They were racing towards it, unmanned, blind, with no hope of pulling out.

  Deep within, the horned creature smiled, exposing its black teeth.

  ‘No...’ he said out loud.

  Cario smashed out a brutal sideswipe, clattering the glaive aside, then swept back and angled down for the throat. Shiban parried, but only barely, and for the first time recoiled from the impact.

  ‘Your effort is wasted,’ Cario spat. ‘Your gods are slain, your idols broken. This is now a world of greater powers.’

  The sabre danced, faster and faster, unstoppable, driven with superlative control and unmatchable power. Shiban was beaten back, struggling to match the sudden acceleration of swordmastery.

  ‘You fight for a cause already dead,’ Cario told him, listening as his own voice became tight-edged, suffused with the echo of another’s. ‘I told you before – there is no courage in being blind.’

  Shiban did not reply, his breathing coming in rasping gasps now. He hacked and flailed with the guan dao, but was now on the defensive.

  ‘And for the strong, there will always be a path,’ Cario hissed, driving his enemy back two paces and pursuing him remorselessly. ‘We control the things we use. They are subjects. They are slaves.’

  He thrust the charnabal sabre, catching the glaive in its centre and shattering the haft. With a snap of released energy, the weapon broke, each half spinning away in circles. Shiban toppled, his momentum carrying back down the dais steps. He sprawled onto his back, struggling to reach for another weapon.

  Cario pounced, leaping into the air, holding his blade vertically, aiming it at his opponent’s heart.

  As he did so, the presence within reared up, roaring in pleasure, becoming fully visible in his mind’s eye. Its flesh was luminous, its body as dry and glossy as a snake’s, and it was laughing, just as those in the rupture were laughing.

  Cario fell to earth, braced over the legionary, ready to drive his sword down to its target. As he did so, a massive explosion rocked the ship’s deck, coming from the void beyond. The real-viewers flared into light, hot and dazzling.

  For a split-second, Cario looked up.

  The Ravisher had gone, blown apart in an orgy of overloaded drives. Its hollow carcass rolled away, tumbling towards the gaping maw of the warp rift, and from its fire-torn heart came the creatures that had consumed it – a legion of them, swarming out into the mixture of warp and real space, screaming with delight. They were headed by a vast horned daemon-beast bearing a longsword, rising like an angel of destruction over the flames and the blood-wells, impossibly huge, impossibly beautiful.

  The creature within him responded. Cario felt his blood heating, his hearts racing. Sweat ran down his skin, fizzing as it boiled against his swelling carapace. His skin and the bone at his temples flexed. His greaves and vambraces began to bulge, to break out from the hardening of mortal muscle in warp-spun flesh.

  And for the first time, he wanted it.

  For the first time, he witnessed the empyrean’s hosts unleashed, and knew that there was no escape, that all he had ever had was time, ticking slowly down, and that it was now ended.

  Shiban drew a long dagger from his belt, clambering back to his feet. Cario could have lashed the blade out of the warrior’s grasp. He could have plunged his sabre into the legionary’s stomach and twisted his entrails clear. Instead, his own blade dropped, leaving the opening.

  Shiban leapt up to take advantage, plunging the dagger deep into Cario’s chest. The pain was intense, but not from the physical wound. The creature within him writhed, suddenly fearful, suddenly angry.

  Cario fell to his knees, fighting hard to contain the forces unleashed. Shiban loomed over him, ready to strike again, but then hesitated, holding the blade up high.

  By then Cario could hardly speak. His body would soon not be his own. The beast had uncurled, infecting his blood, taking over his limbs. The whispers were no longer whispers – they were commands.

  Every soul he had ever ended, he had done so as the mortal warrior he had been from the start, bearing the colours of the Legion as they had been forged on Chemos. Throughout all – the great Turn, the slaughter of the Terra-cleavers, the march towards the Throne – he had been himself: Ravasch Cario, Palatine Blade, most perfect warrior of the most perfect Legion, devoted to nothing but the quest for exactitude.

  He regretted nothing, no choices, no kills, for he had wished for all of it. But no longer. The fate of Konenos would not be his, and he would die as he had lived – the true and only Child of the Emperor.

&n
bsp; ‘You are as doomed as I,’ Cario told Shiban, grinning. ‘But that, my brother, was well fought.’

  Shiban rammed the dagger home, and with a flash of disruptor-fire it cut through Cario’s armour and deep into his primary heart. The White Scars legionary took the hilt in both hands and dragged it laterally, ripping the prefector’s chest apart and cleaving to his spine.

  The horned creature roared, thrashing wildly to the surface. But it was too late – Cario’s consciousness ebbed away as he fell back to the deck, his sabre clanging to the metal.

  At the end, as the roar of battle faded away to a blur of echoes, and he saw the vengeful White Scars carry the fight that they would surely win now, nothing could quench his joy.

  The beast howled, but it would be denied.

  ‘Unsullied,’ he gasped with his last breath, and knew no more.

  The Lance of Heaven thundered over the portal’s edge, its entire structure shaking as the tremendous forces took hold. There was a kind of gravity in the vortex – a pull that ripped every starcraft in and yanked it deeper, sucking like quicksand. What remained of the V Legion fleet was hauled faster and faster, blurring from the speed, dragged far in excess of the power locked in their warp drives.

  Walls of force roared past, flashing like heartbeats, accelerating with every second. The profiles of those on the bridge became smeared, the voices distorted. Behind them, far behind now, the portal collapsed shut, sending fresh buffets of force haring after them. Strangled curves of neon-white aetheric lightning pursued them, snapping at their heels, curling around the burning engines and reaching, futilely, to snare them in their desperate chase.

  As the last of the warp shutters slammed down, the Khan caught a final glimpse into the roiling madness ahead, and perceived a split-moment in the heart of the storm. Far ahead, too far to catch, the remnants of Dark Glass spun and disintegrated. He saw the last of the black iron casings fly free, burning into ash.

  Beyond it was the stuff of the underverse, the warp space that Veil had spoken of – the stratum profundis, the Seethe, the Deep Warp.

  Then that too was gone, locked away from mortal sight, cocooned behind lead and iron and ancient sigils carved by the technomancers of Terra.

  We always knew, the Khan thought. We always knew it needed symbols and arcana to control. How easy it was forget, to pretend, and that was the first error.

  The first hull breach was signalled by a sudden slew to starboard – a kick far greater than warp turbulence would give.

  Jaghatai glanced up at the tactical displays. His fleet stretched away ahead of him, in close formation, all travelling at the same insane speed. The chronos rattled around, the sensors cycled, the velocity meters fused and burst. On the flickering augur screens, he saw that III Legion ships had followed them in and had broken up on the cusp of the portal. Burning remnants flew along in the momentum-stream, clustering close to the Lance of Heaven’s plasma-trails.

  Nine Stormseers remained on the bridge, plus the sorcerer Arvida, and they broke off from their warp-scrying rituals. Naranbaatar, the greatest in power after Yesugei, an age-steeped warrior in rune-carved armour bearing a staff of carved ebony, looked up at the bridge’s lofty ceiling, his unhelmed face suddenly tense.

  The noises followed, like steel spikes dragged over rusty iron, digging deep. Great rattling clangs resounded along the length of the domed structure.

  The Khan knew those sounds. They had ever been in his dreams since the earliest memory, the distant whirls of ice and fire that had preceded his first true recollection on Chogoris.

  They had tried to claw their way in then, too.

  ‘Be still!’ he cried, striding to the edge of the command dais. Every face on the bridge lifted to him – the menials working at the nav-stations, the officers in their white robes, the legionaries standing at every intersection and gantry-head, the seers with their bone-chains and horsehair staffs. ‘We are now in the realm of the gods. This is their place, where they do not suffer the mortal to endure.’

  The hull vibrated again, riven by heavy blows from the outside. There were no cracks in the adamantium, for the denizens of the empyrean fought not against the physical constraints of matter but the psychic barriers of tech-sorcery that sheathed it.

  ‘They come now, hungry for more blood,’ the Khan told them. ‘But we have bled enough, and others have bled to bring us here, and they shall have no more.’

  The first claw broke through, punching out of the inner roof, shimmering like a hololith. A pungent stink of maddening perfume bloomed across the entire bridge, followed by the distended shrieks of another world.

  The Khan drew his tulwar. All across the bridge, every warrior took up a blade. The warp shutters rattled, the warp drives whined.

  ‘They seek to bring us down, because we guide the others!’ the Khan cried, striding over to where Arvida stood. ‘We must not fall!’

  More claws burst through. The aether-screams reached fever-pitch. Barbed whips snaked out through living metal, curling like a sentient things, and the internal shielding layering the bridge vaults shattered, dissolving the last elements of the Geller field.

  ‘So we stand here!’ roared the Khan, defiant against the gathering swarm. ‘We stand in this place! We are the Talskar, Sons of Chogoris, and this is the last test!’

  They broke through then, screaming and yowling, the heralds of the greater horror – slim-limbed, hook-handed, horn-headed, cloven-hoofed, dropping like liquid from the inner hull.

  ‘To the ends of time!’ the Khan thundered, braced to meet them. ‘We defy the dark!’

  Then every mortal voice rose up in acclamation and fury, undaunted by the legion of terror bursting through matter to claw at them, bearing every weapon they still possessed, and led into battle by their primarch as the fleet plunged deep into the forgotten ways of the aether.

  ‘Khagan!’ they roared, drowning out the screams of the empyrean. ‘Ordu gamana Jaghatai!’

  Then the gap closed, the daemons came among them, and battle was joined on the Lance of Heaven even as it raced through the deeps of the living warp.

  Twenty-Six

  Arvida never saw the daemons, though he sensed their presence. By the time the Lance of Heaven was invaded, his mind was bent on the warp. His mortal eyes were closed, his mortal body prone, his mind turned in on itself, and thence to the aether beyond.

  He had expected the passage to trigger the flesh-change, to force the mutating horror to rise up and transform him for good, but the truth was the opposite. As soon as they entered the rift’s mouth, the pressure at his temples dissipated, the roar in his ears guttered out and the pain in his joints eased. In took a moment for him to realise the truth – the place they had entered was shielded from the greater mass of the Seethe. Vast walls of psychic matter held the tides back, enclosing the entire fleet in a barrier of swimming sorcery. They were hurtling along titanic tunnels, bored down into the foundations of the aether, burrowing like the tracks of insects under the very feet of creation.

  Freed from the need to fight the flesh-degradation, Arvida’s mind roved ahead, outpacing the fastest of the ships as they raced. He saw branches upon branches, breaking into a web of staggering complexity. The more he roved, the more colossal it became, a galaxy-spanning network of channels and thoroughfares, each one linked and switch-backed and threaded under and tangled with a hundred others. No human mind could have conceived of such a thing, far less built it.

  There was no Astronomican in that place, just an endless, dizzying labyrinth of tunnels winding through the dark, each suffused with sorcery greater and older than he had ever encountered, even on Prospero at the height of its glory.

  He remembered Yesugei’s final words.

  They will need a guide.

  The Navigators could not follow this path – they had been trained to perceive the Emperor’s light amid the eddies
of the true warp. Arvida exerted himself, projecting his mind’s strength out ahead of the fleet. He scanned the web of passageways, divining which led most truly towards their goal, and lit the way himself, projecting a beacon that every psychically attuned individual could follow.

  They responded. One by one, the ships of the fleet latched on to the signal. By then they were all travelling at speeds beyond thought, exceeding by orders of magnitude anything experienced by normal human starships, carried along by the elemental forces that raged and burned in the hidden ways.

  Arvida traced the route ahead unconsciously at first, letting his future-sense guide them. The lattice spread out, vast and shimmering, a tangle of gold flung across the face of eternity. Against all reason, he found himself wishing he could linger – to study it, to trace its thousands of ways and discover all its secrets. Amid the blur of velocity, he caught sight of wonders buried yet deeper down – vast gulfs that plummeted into utter velvety darkness, mighty chambers that glimmered like starlit geodes, clusters of red-tinged clouds burning from within, great glittering stalagmites ringed around the ebon globes of chained suns.

  They went in deeper. He felt the faint presence of minds pressing against his, as alien as any minds he had ever sensed. They were bitter, those minds, like long-deposed kings bereft of their armies, watching intruders rampage across lands they had once been able to defend. He felt mordant anger, but also empty impotence. They were ghosts, mere afterglows of elder powers, lingering like curls of smoke over embers.

  He focused his powers. Freed of the terror of the flesh-change, he was empowered to move high in the Enumerations, practising the scrying-methods taught to him in Tizca. The visions came tumbling in on him, fast, on top of one another in a disordered jumble. He scryed a thousand worlds spinning in the void, all laid waste, or besieged, or burning in war. He saw the numberless tides of daemon-kind clustered at the threshold of reality, poised to leap beyond the gap, and saw with dreadful clarity what they would do once unleashed.