Warhammer 40K - Farseer

by William King

  His helmsman, old Malarys, who claimed to have once been a priest of the Emperor until his fondness for sacramental wine and other less mentionable things had got the better of him, stood before him.

  'Belial IV, great leader,' he said. 'Not a good place. Haunted they say. Spirits of the eldar, they say.'

  Zarghan considered this information. He did not really want to kill the old man. He was too useful a host for the Chaos Marine's pet daemon. On the other hand, orders were orders.

  'Perhaps you would like to explain your objections to all-knowing Shaha Gaathon, my friend,' said Zarghan in his most reasonable voice. All present flinched. Some laid off fondling their concubines, a few stopped injecting morphia. One or two even reached for their weapons. They knew that voice. When Zarghan used it it was time to walk very lightly indeed.

  'That will not be necessary. As you desire, my lord. As you desire.'

  Zarghan smiled. That was more like it. He studied the command deck. The drapes were rich and covered in pornographic images. Censers filled with hallucinogenic incense burned constantly. The far corner was a writhing mass of naked flesh where some of the crew were celebrating one of the major ritual orgies demanded by the Liberator. One benefit of such a profusion of cults was that there was always some holy day to celebrate. He leaned back on his throne and watched the old man begin the first of the ritual human sacrifices that would ensure they passed safely through the warp.

  A pity, he thought. The child looked barely twelve and she had such pretty eyes.

  Kham Bell sent Janus Darke an interrogative look as he entered the chamber. Twenty hard-bitten men in dark uniforms filed in behind him. Janus shrugged. Until an hour ago, he had known as much about what was to come as his master sergeant. In another few minutes, they would know as much as he did now.

  He glanced over at the eldar. They stood in the far corner of the room, their black garb blending in with the shadows almost sinisterly. Auric still wore the formal mask and armour he had put on for his ritual. Athenys wore lightweight body armour of a type Janus did not recognise but which he supposed was of eldar make, beneath a coat of black trimmed with white fur.

  Janus strode to the centre of the chamber to the command altar where he would be able to control the holospheres. He kept his back straight and his manner crisp and ignored all the stares his men aimed at the gem on his forehead. At least they were not making signs of protection against the evil eye, as the sailors did when they thought his back was turned.

  Janus reviewed what he wanted to say, weighing how much of what the eldar had told him it would be sensible to tell his men. Most of them shared Kham Bell's prejudice against the xenogens, and Janus was not sure that he blamed them. He glanced around to make sure he had everybody's attention then stabbed a finger at one of the command runes on the altar. Immediately the chamber became dark, save for the dim glow of the holospheric representation of Belial IV that hovered in the centre.

  'This is Belial IV. And yes, before anybody else asks, we are in the Eye of Terror.'

  He heard gasps from some of the younger soldiers. He could tell they were shaken. The Eye was a name spoken of in hushed and horrified whispers in any place in the Imperium.

  'The world is dead, the population were killed in a catastrophe.'

  'Are there daemons, sir?' asked Harker, one of the youngest of the soldiers.

  'So far our diviners have found nothing at all. No sign of life whatsoever.'

  'Then there might be ghosts,' muttered someone from the back of the room. Janus was not sure who had spoken, but it did not matter. He could hear the fear.

  'There might be, but I doubt it. From what the eldar have told me this world has been dead for at least ten thousand years. Any ghosts would most likely have faded long since.'

  'They say time flows strangely in the Eye of Terror, sir.'

  'Aye, they say. Nevertheless until we find out differently, I think it's safe to assume that we will find no ghosts. And if we do, then the farseer is an eldar priest of sorts. He will no doubt be able to exorcise them.'

  'They are going with us, sir?'

  'Aye, Sculley, they are. We're taking them to find a treasure.'

  Janus paused to give that time to sink in. In a strange way reality had turned his earlier lie to truth. From what Auric had said there would be no shortage of precious eldar artefacts to be found down there, and he needed to give the men something to aim for. Telling them there was treasure was giving them a reason they could understand for coming here. He could almost feel the tension lessen in the room.

  'Lots of treasure, sir?' asked Harker.

  'Enough to make it worth our while to come to this benighted place.'

  'Then it must be big indeed,' growled Kham Bell. Laughter filled the chamber. The sergeant was not laughing. Janus could tell he was still wondering why they had come here without him being told. Janus did not blame him for that either.

  'I think I can assure you of that. We have the pick of the plunder of an entire world to look forward to.'

  Janus sincerely hoped that this was the case, but he was not so certain. Some of these men would probably die to get Auric where he wanted to go, and he did not feel good about leading them to their destruction. On the other hand, he did not see what choice he had. It was either them or him, and when all was said and done, he was no hero.

  'Now if you gentlemen would be so kind as to give me your full attention, I will tell you what we are about.'

  He touched the runes again, his fingers flickering fast, as he made changes to the holosphere to illustrate his point.

  'This is the southern continent of Astayan.' The globe swelled and disappeared as a massive landmass zoomed into view. Their point of view soared across a desert of ash, a chain of burning mountains and came to rest on a monstrous ruined city.

  'This is the city of Zytheraa, once the most populous place in the world.' The towers were smashed and broken now, but even so it was easy to see that humans had not built the place. Even the broken stumps of the buildings looked too fragile and too graceful. Their crystalline forms glittered in the baleful light of the gloomy red sun. They looked more like plants than manufactured structures. They seemed to have grown to fit in with the hills on which they rested, and blend in with the bay around which they lay.

  Janus guessed that before whatever catastrophe had struck the city down it must have been a beautiful place. Even now there was something about it that... He forced his mind back to the task at hand.

  The viewing perspective swung over a massive bridge that seemed spun from spiderwebs and starlight although it was huge enough to take several super-heavy tanks abreast, and then came to rest in a low, curved structure that overlooked a dried out lake. The hulks of several pleasure craft lay in the dust below.

  Janus gestured and their point of view dropped closer. As it did so, he once more began to get some idea of the scale of the building and the bridge. The building was larger than the Star of Venam, a city contained within a city.

  'This is the Temple-Palace of Asuryan. It was a holy place to the ancient eldar, a place where great wealth and many artefacts were stored. We are going to put down here and enter the temple and find one of those artefacts...'

  'What artefact, sir?'

  'It is a sword. About the height of a man and made entirely of black crystal.'

  'Won't that break on the first swing, sir,' said someone. Other voices laughed.

  'Apparently not. Apparently it is hard enough to cut through duralloy and strong enough to endure the destruction of a world. I am quoting our eldar friends over there.'

  'Is that what they have come for, sir?'

  'It is. Anything else we find is ours. As long as we can carry it out.'

  'Surely those ancient people must have left some defences for their treasure?' said Kham Bell. Janus could tell he was thinking about the temple on Typhon and what had lain in wait for them there.

  'That would be a fair assumption but it would b
e a false one. These were an extremely peaceful folk until disaster overtook them. War and crime were unknown.'

  'Sounds unlikely,' said Kham Bell. 'I will believe it when I see it.'

  'I agree. We will take all sensible precautions. We will go in full battle array, and take nothing for granted. Touch nothing unless one of the eldar has cleared it. There may be some ancient machines still active.'

  'How long do we expect to be on the surface, sir?'

  'As long as it takes. The palace is a big place, as you can see, and it may take us some time to locate the sword. The farseer hopes to be able to find it swiftly, but there may be complications.'

  Janus thought it best not to mention that the farseer hoped to find it by using his psychic powers. The men were spooked enough by the situation as it was.

  'How will we get back?' Harker asked. 'To Medusa, I mean.'

  'The same way as we came. Simon Belisarius brought us here. He can bloody well take us back.' There was nervous laughter, then Sculley asked the question he had been dreading.

  'And when we get back, sir? What then? What about the Inquisition?'

  There was not much he could say to that one. The only response was a lie. Janus was pleased that his voice sounded so confident when he spoke. 'This is a secret mission on behalf of the Imperium. Mention it to no one. I mean no one. If word of this leaks out, it could mean the death of every man here.'

  Heads nodded. Janus was not sure if they believed him or not, but they could all see the sense of what he was saying. They were all in the same boat now. If anybody breathed a word of where they had been been, it was a death warrant for every man aboard this ship. The Inquisition would not care whether they had knowingly broken the interdict. All it would take account of was that they had. No excuses would be accepted. Janus wondered how long it would take the men to work out what he had done to them, and how much they would hate him when they did. Kham Bell's glare told him that at least one man present had already figured it out. Too late to worry about that now, he thought.

  Another part of him worried that the Inquisition had good reasons for keeping the Eye of Terror under interdict. In the unlikely event they survived this and returned to the realms of men, who knew what they might take with them? Some daemonic plague, some hidden evil that had seeped into the men's souls, some dreadful thing he could not even begin to imagine.

  After all, his own problems had only really hit him after Typhon. Was this the real reason they were here, he wondered, to bring home a shipload of men as corrupted as himself to the Imperium? It was not a pleasant thought.

  'Any more questions?' he asked.

  'Aye,' growled Kham Bell. Janus flinched wondering what was coming now. 'What are the bonus arrangements?'

  'Usual shares,' said Janus. 'Every man on the ground gets a double share. In the event of casualties, the survivors take the dead man's shares.'

  'What about them?' asked the sergeant, stabbing a finger in the direction of the eldar.

  'They get the sword. They want nothing else.'

  Kham Bell sucked his teeth. 'That is mighty generous of them. I wonder why?'

  You are not the only one, thought Janus, but kept his suspicions to himself.

  'Right, dismissed. I want every man aboard the lander inside the hour. Soonest done, soonest home.'

  The men rushed out to get their gear and head for the shuttle. Only the sergeant stayed behind. 'I don't know what they have done to you, laddie,' he said, 'but bringing us here wasn't right. I know it, you know it, and they know it. If anything goes wrong, there will be hell to pay.'

  The sergeant got up and stalked to the door.

  'There already is,' muttered Janus to his departing back.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE BIRTH OF A GOD

  The armoured shuttle settled down on the crystal plain outside the enormous temple palace. Janus strode out through the airlock, down the gangplank and set his feet on a new world again.

  'I claim this world for the Emperor of Humanity and his Imperium. I bring justice and truth for the loyal. Punishment and death for the guilty,' he murmured automatically, the words of the ancient formula springing to his lips from force of habit. He took a deep breath of the air. It tasted tainted. He tried to dismiss the thought. It simply missed the industrial tang of Medusa, or the faint chemical stench of recycled air within the Star of Venam, he told himself, but could not quite bring himself to believe it. There was something about this place that made his flesh crawl and set his nerves on edge.

  He strode forward and looked for a place to plant the standard. It would not do to try to break the hard crystal of the pavement and fail. It would be unpropitious. Behind him the boots of his men rang on the duralloy of the gangplank. The sound altered as they hit the eldar material covering the ground.

  He glanced back, shocked by the lack of numbers. Only twenty, he thought. Once I would have brought down nearly a thousand. There would have been dozens of shuttles, tanks, artillery, all of the things a rogue trader needed to show uncivilised savages the might of the Imperium. Glancing around, he doubted that the original inhabitants of this place would have been all that impressed. They looked to have been anything but savages.

  Even their ruins had a certain grandeur, and there was a sadness as well as an evil that brooded over them. He found himself striding towards an ancient statue of a tall slender robed eldar woman. It had been chipped and its nose and part of an ear as well as most of its right arm were missing, but it was still beautiful.

  Some collector back in the Imperium would pay a small fortune for workmanship like that, he thought, then smiled. It seemed that the reflexes of a lifetime of plunder and trade had not abandoned him. He still looked at everything with the eyes of a potential looter.

  His men fanned out behind him, looking for threats, finding cover, holding their lasrifles and bolters ready for action at a moment's notice. They too had come like conquerors in their heavy body armour and metal helmets. Suddenly he wanted to laugh.

  Twenty men on this dead world and they were treating it like an expedition of conquest. It suddenly seemed like an exercise in futility.

  Still, his men were not to blame. Such things were part of the mythology of the rogue trader. Had not Herman Bloch conquered the whole of the Zacatan continent with only 150 men and one Rhino APC? Kyle Langer had brought Kallista into the Imperium with a thousand troopers, and that had been an armed industrial world. In better days, he himself had contributed something to those Imperial legends, and those men over there still believed in him, at least a little.

  He found a crack in the paving, wondering what force had caused it, and pushed the standard home, then ritual complete he watched the eldar descend onto the face of Belial for the first time in more than ten thousand years. They came fully armed and armoured beneath their robes of black.

  If it was a homecoming for them, it was a bleak one, Janus thought.

  The entrance before them was huge and marked with runes in the graceful flowing script of the eldar. Before they entered, Auric knelt and spoke what sounded like words of prayer. The door, which had appeared to be made of some solid silvery metal, flowed outwards like liquid and he passed within. Athenys followed. Janus gestured for his men to follow and then strode into the warm darkness after them.

  The ceiling curved above them. Beautiful mosaics, seemingly untouched by time, glittered on the floor. They depicted trees, forests and scenes of great natural beauty. As they progressed through the place, Janus found there was something subtly disturbing about them. In many of the scenes there were hunts, or what looked like stealthy murders or ritual sacrifices. They became darker as they progressed.

  As if sensing his mood, Auric turned and said, 'The palace was built late in our history. The great corruption had already begun.'

  Janus lengthened his stride, until he walked beside the farseer. 'The great corruption?'

  'When my people first encountered the harbingers of the Great Enemy, they did not
run from them. Some of them embraced them.'

  Janus considered this. It sounded not unlike the Chaos cults that were said to riddle the Imperium. 'Did you not scourge them from your halls?'

  'No. Such was not our way. In those days we did not even recognise the enemy for what he was, for he wore our face.'

  'He came in disguise?' asked Janus mockingly, for he was tired of the eldar's cryptic games. 'Or he was possessed by a daemon?'

  'No. I shall tell you a great secret of my people, Janus Darke.'

  'I am honoured.' Sarcasm dripped from his voice.

  'More than you will ever know.'

  'What is this secret?'

  'It concerns the Lord of Pleasure. We are him. He is us.'

  'By "we" do you mean all of us?'

  'I mean my people, the eldar.'

  'I do not understand.'

  'Soon you will. That is why I am trusting you with secrets that only a few of my people know.'

  'That is not very flattering, particularly since most of my men are within earshot and now also share these close held secrets.'

  'They have not heard us. We have not been speaking with our voices.'

  Janus laughed mockingly and glanced around to see if any of the others also saw the funny side of this, but he received only curious stares from Kham Bell and the men. Perhaps they really had not heard. Perhaps the eldar had warped their minds with some of his sorcery. Or perhaps it was as he claimed and they had been speaking only with their minds. Perhaps they always had. Perhaps that was why they had been so unconcerned by Stiel's listening devices. Was it possible? Could this have been happening all along without him noticing it?

  Just the thought was disturbing.

  By nightfall, they were deep within the palace and still had not found what they were looking for. Janus was left with a profound appreciation for just how large this structure really was. They had been on the move for close to ten hours and the ruby red light of the sun had faded in the skylight overhead. The rest of the corridors had darkened into a sort of twilight gloom, as if seeking harmony with the cycle of night and day. It had been a long day, broken by many stops while the farseer opened the huge sealed doors with his spells and Janus was tired.