Warhammer 40K - Farseer

by William King

  'As I recall, you are no longer one of the Children,' said Shaha Gaathon. 'They expelled you after your last infraction of discipline.'

  Always, she brought that up. He hid his anger well. 'A minor misunderstanding, great mistress. I will eventually make peace with my peers. After all, we have all eternity. A little enmity adds spice to the otherwise dull millennia.'

  'I would not call mounting a surprise raid on your captain's palace and crucifying all of his pleasure-slaves a minor misunderstanding, Zarghan. I do not think Vilius thinks that way either.'

  'He was a little piqued, I will admit. Still, he did owe me several farthings over a wager that-'

  'I am not interested in your wagers, Zarghan. I am interested in Janus Darke. You will find him and bring him to me.'

  'How will I find him?'

  'He will be at the Palace of Asuryan on Belial IV. Just put yourself into orbit and scan for life-signs. You will find him.'

  'What if the warp currents are not propitious, great mistress?'

  'They were propitious enough for a human to make his way into the Eye. They should be propitious enough for you.'

  Zarghan was impressed. Very few mortals had the courage to attempt to enter the Eye, let alone the skill to navigate the great warp storms that guarded it. Navigate, yes, that reminded him of something. Oh yes...

  'I am assuming that he got there by ship, your unspeakable greatness.'

  'That is a fair assumption.' For some reason she sounded a little exasperated.

  'I will plunder the ship and add it to my fleet.'

  'As you wish, although I am given to understand that your fleet currently consists of only one vessel.'

  'A minor and temporary setback, most beauteous of immortals. Khårn the Betrayer surprised me off Altarak.'

  'Succeed in this and I will ensure that you have the power to repay him in full measure and with interest.'

  'I am sure that you will, great mistress,' said Zarghan, 'and maybe I will also pay off my score to you as well, if I play the cards I have been dealt with correctly.' A look of devastating anger played over Shaha Gaathon's face and Zarghan wondered if he had been foolish enough to speak his thoughts aloud again. Surely not! He was a Space Marine of the most ancient order after all, and such a thing could not happen to him.

  'Just get that man and I will see that you are paid in full for your service.'

  'As you desire, great mistress,' said Zarghan as the image in the mirror faded and went black, leaving him gazing upon his own rather surprised reflection. Looking at himself, he was forced to admit that even after a hundred centuries, he was still a handsome devil. Pride, he thought, my besetting sin. Or perhaps it was vanity? The Emperor had told him that once long ago, or so he seemed to recall. Anyway, it was a long time ago.

  He strode from his perfumed chamber towards the command centre. The crew had been redecorating again, he noticed. Those severed heads set off the black and red swirls on the walls quite nicely. Now where was it he was to go again? Oh yes—Belial IV.

  Capture the man, Janus Darke. Kill the rest. That seemed simple enough. He just hoped his crew did not make any of their usual mistakes. The music in his head returned, a throbbing, pulsing sound that spoke of imminent violence.

  SIXTEEN

  VISIONS

  Janus Darke knew he was dreaming. He was not certain how he knew, he was just certain he was. At first, it seemed to him that he lay on his bunk in his cabin. It was almost like being awake, until he noticed the strange quality of the walls surrounding him. He sensed their age. He had always known the Star of Venam was old, but this was the first time he had ever realised quite how old.

  It was as if, for the first time, he was aware of the corrosion caused by the moisture on the breath of every man who had ever breathed her air. It was as if every soul who had passed through her duralloy corridors had left some trace of its passage. And there had been many, many souls he realised in the long millennia since the ancient starship had been built.

  Images seeped into his mind. He saw the previous captains in the uniforms of the Imperial fleet. He saw the battles they had fought and the trips they had made. He saw back to the original creation of the ship back in the forge yards of Sidon 452 almost two thousand years ago.

  He sensed the spirits who slept within the datacore of the ship, echoes of past commanders, shadows of Navigators long gone, and he saw that they were restless.

  Not possible, he told himself. It's my imagination, a product of sleep and the strange drugs the eldar gave me, and my own overwrought brain. And yet, he knew that part of what he was seeing was, in a sense, the truth. Every man who commanded the ship, every man who patched himself into its internal systems, did leave something of himself there, a psychic residue that those who came after would touch and feel and join in their turn.

  Now the great walls became translucent. Not even their massive age-corroded quality could halt his vision. He could see the armsmen coming and going though the walkways, tech-priests working on the data-cables and engines and welding weak points in the hull. He saw Simon Belisarius asleep on the cot of his small cabin, and Kham Bell bellowing orders to his sweating soldiers as they went through their exercises in the great assembly chamber. He saw Stiel bent over a great ledger inscribing something in his tomes, a small smile twisting his lips.

  His soul seemed to roam the corridors of his space-going domain. The only thing that remained impermeable to its eyes was the outer walls of the ship itself. It was hardly surprising, they had been embedded with the strongest psychic runes to resist the daemons of the warp, and forged from triple-layered truesilver and duralloy to prevent the incursion of evil psychic forces from the warp.

  He felt something burning on his forehead, and he reached up and felt the eldar jewel there. At first he could not tell whether it felt hot or cold. It burned, but he knew only too well that the chill of space was as capable of burning as the hottest of infernos. Burning or not, though, he felt only a mild discomfort, a nagging sense of something pulling at him, the touch of premonition's ghostly fingers running through his brain. He allowed himself to drift, and, like a fish being reeled in on an angler's line, he was drawn forward. It did not surprise him in the least to see he was being pulled towards the eldar's chambers.

  What was going on, he wondered?

  He passed through walls with all the ease of a ghost, drifted across rooms in which men worked, slept, ate or played chess. The closer he came to the place where the xenogens rested, the more strained he could see were the looks of his followers. They too could sense something ominous was happening.

  He came to the doors of their chamber; saw Athenys was standing guard outside them. She held her weapons ready, but appeared completely at ease. She did not seem to notice him as he moved past. The chamber was warded. He could see the bright patterns of energy swirling in the air, knew they would be invisible save to those who shared his odd vision. He floated towards them and knew that the runes were potent enough to kill almost any creature that encountered them. A brief surge of nervousness and fear filled him, but he could not stop himself. The force that dragged him onwards had all the irresistible power a planet's gravity well exerts on a meteor blazing down through its atmosphere.

  He tried to back away, exerted all his will, but, as in a nightmare, he was drawn inexorably onwards, while the blazing gem on his brow grew hotter and hotter or perhaps, colder and colder. He thought he could see faint lines now running out from the room and connecting to the gem on his forehead. He touched the wards on the door and felt a brief flare of power. He entered the eldar's chamber and was surprised by what he found there.

  Auric was present. Instead of his normal garb he was clad in full ritual vestments. A huge black cloak trimmed with white fur was flung over his shoulders. A mask of some burnished metal covered his face. From a complex shoulder piece three large prongs, the highest topped with the head of a phoenix, emerged. In one hand the eldar held a blade of power. In the oth
er, he held a satchel of leather that seemed to contain something of as much power as the sword.

  As Janus entered the eldar looked up and the man sensed his surprise. Obviously he was not expected. There was a pause in whatever ritual the xenogen was preparing for. Janus now saw the burning censers on either side of the room from which multi-coloured incense billowed and swirled in uncanny patterns. After a heartbeat Auric appeared to come to a decision and began anew.

  Without being able to hear the words, Janus knew that the farseer was chanting, or singing, or some mixture of both. Without hearing any sounds, he was yet aware of a distant throbbing of energy and the beat of rhythm, and the surge of power in response the farseer's song. He was aware that powerful forces surged through the sealed chamber and wondered how they would affect him. If, as he suspected, his spirit had been torn from his body, was it possible it could die here? Briefly he wondered what would happen to his body, and then he dismissed such speculation as futile. Doubtless if it happened, he would not be around to be concerned.

  Auric swept his blade through a complex pattern of cuts. He had begun to move in a pattern that resembled a dance, and yet suggested some form of martial practice. The sound of his singing became clearer. It resonated within Janus with near unbearable keenness and beauty.

  Suddenly Auric stopped, turned to face each of the four corners of the room, and to each in turn performed a complex salute with the blade. Afterwards he spun it back into its scabbard. Whatever purification ritual he had performed seemed to be over. He was ready to begin in earnest.

  With his right hand he reached into the leather sack and produced a glittering stone. Using thumb and forefinger he held it before his masked face. It was a crystal of some sort which pulsed with its own internal light, sending glittering beams out to reflect on the eldar's mask. Janus inspected it and saw that the crystal bore a rune. It was a stylised representation of something, a scale or balance, of the ancient sort, the kind that certain merchant guilds still used as a symbol of truth, honesty and fairness. Without having to be told, Janus knew it symbolised something different to the eldar. It was a sign of powers in mutual counterpoise, of events balanced on a knife-edge that could go in any direction. Auric nodded as if this was something he had expected.

  He cast the stone into the air. Instead of falling to the ground, it hung there for a moment and then began to spin, holding its position immediately before the eldar's head. The xenogen reached into the pouch once more and withdrew another stone. This one bore a symbol of a stylised human with an elongated ovular head. The sign was a symbol of the eldar race. Janus wondered where that knowledge had suddenly sprung from. From the stone itself, from Auric, or perhaps from the gem in his forehead? There seemed to be some sort of link here.

  The second stone started to loop around the first, orbiting it like a small multi-faceted moon. The ritual continued. A third rune was drawn—this one bearing a stylised figure that Janus did not need to be told represented man. A pulsing reddish gem that seemed in some way fraught with menace swiftly joined it. The enemy, Janus thought. These two stones took up a close orbit circling the first rune, with the evilly glowing gemstone following very close on the track of the human. An image of himself followed by the powers of darkness flickered before Janus's eyes.

  As more and more runestones were added to the viewing, he began to get a sense of Auric's increasing disquiet. More than that, he began to perceive more and more about the pattern of stones. He could see that faint, near-invisible lines of psychic force joined all of them, and that they formed a lattice of energy that was somehow connected to Auric. He knew that the eldar was using this as a focus for his visionary powers, trying in some way to steer a safe course into the future in the manner similar to the way Simon guided a ship through the immaterium.

  The pattern pulsed with possibilities, was pregnant with many futures. It had a hypnotic fascination for him. The vortex of energy inexorably drew him closer, until he hovered a mere arm's span away. Looking now at each jewel in turn he began to see that the lines of force were not only connected in some way to the farseer but also to the gem on his forehead. What had Auric done?

  The suspicion blossomed in his mind that the dream-stone fused to his flesh was more than merely a protective talisman. The eldar had done something else. He sensed plans within plans, and hidden motives behind hidden motives. Anger touched him then, and fear. He saw that these hovering jewels were more than merely a focus of psychic power, more than a means of viewing potential futures. In some strange way, they represented a vast game-board. The rules applying to it were ones he could not even begin to guess. These gems were also a way of influencing the future.

  No! That was incorrect. What they represented was a way of influencing the future. The act of prophecy itself shaped things. Seeing parts of the pattern allowed you to take action to change that pattern, and that added an element of uncertainty to the entire pattern. By taking action on what he saw here, Auric sought to influence the future. He could gauge his own responses and shape what he wished to happen.

  It was something akin to using a small pebble to start an avalanche. Or perhaps it was like the example the ancient philosophers had been so fond of, where the flapping of a butterfly's wing on one side of a planet caused a storm on the other, simply by affecting the complex interacting currents of the air.

  And the stones were not just connected to Auric and to him. In some way they were connected to everything, to the whole vast ebb and flow of events across the universe. His head spun. It was too big for him to begin to comprehend. Instead, he chose to concentrate on individual stones, to try and see what he could perceive himself.

  Naturally the stone that first drew his eye was the one that represented man, and in some way, himself.

  Looking into it, he saw himself, not just as he was now, but as he had once been, and perhaps one day would be. He saw himself as a child on Crowe's World, an orphan apprenticed to the trading houses. He saw himself attend the mission schools. He saw his first day at work and the great battles in which he had fought, and he saw his rise to power and fame. Now though for the first time he sensed the presence of the thing that had dogged him. He saw what he owed to it, and to his hell-accursed powers.

  He saw now that the luck he had possessed was a product of what lay within him. He saw the insight he had been granted into the motives and tactics of others had come from his latent psychic powers. He saw that always something within him had shielded him from detection from the forces of the Imperium, but whether it was a natural gift or something reaching out to cloak him from beyond he could not say. He saw too that there had been shadows dogging him, creatures of evil that had watched him and waited. Faces he recognised and faces he did not crowded his sight. He saw Justina and her servants; he saw a man he had worked with in the offices of Sansom & Sansom on Crowe's World. He saw men who had been his business partners and warriors he had fought alongside. All of them had helped shape his life and wittingly or unwittingly had driven him onto the path he had taken.

  He became aware that something snuffled on his trail even now, that malign intelligences sought him and were for the moment baffled by the shields the eldar had laid about him. He saw too that it could not last for long. Those who wanted him were too powerful and too driven to be thwarted by even the most potent of magics. He became aware that this was all part of a greater pattern that involved him and the farseer and many others.

  Now inexorably his eye was drawn to something else, to the stone that represented the Great Enemy. Other stones orbited now, gems that represented women, men, ships and events, all of them somehow familiar, but it was the central gem that attracted him. His attention fell towards it, drawn once more like a meteor into a gravity well.

  He saw things now. He saw worlds of terror ruled over by beings of daemonic power. He saw things that feasted on the darkness that lurked in the human soul, and not just the human soul, but the souls of all sentient beings. He saw scorpio
n-tailed women and monstrous crab-clawed daemons. He saw things that were not even remotely humanoid and things that wore the shape of men, and to his horror he saw that one of them was himself. The vision swirled and he saw something that might have been a beautiful woman or man. And as he watched it began to change until it was himself. He knew that in some strange unclear way, he was looking into a future.

  The thing looked like him. It dressed like him. It had the same scars, the same voice, the same mannerisms. Only that which lay behind its eyes was not human. The soul that occupied the body was not his. Perhaps once it had been him, but something had battened onto it, sucked the energy from it, left it a cold husk and then took over his shape. It wore his flesh and his memories like a man might wear a suit, but it was not him.

  He saw this being occupying his life, like a squatter in someone else's house. It rebuilt his fortunes. It made its name among men. It rose high in the councils of the great. It gathered men and wealth and power to itself. It maintained a facade of the utmost respectability, and behind that facade lived a life of the utmost debauchery and wickedness. And all the while, as the span of its years lengthened, it worked on its great plan. It became wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, using means too despicable to contemplate. It used its money to buy machines and weapons and men. It used the levers of political power to steer the worlds into conflict, and man and eldar into war.

  Janus saw now what Auric feared. Part of him wondered if what he witnessed was merely the farseer projecting his own thoughts into his mind, but he felt that this was not the case. He felt like he really had tapped into the farseer's powers and was witnessing a possible future. Not that he was in any position to be able to judge, he thought sourly.