The Damnation of Pythos

by David Annandale

  The presence spoke. ‘Mistress Erephren,’ it said. ‘Do not be alarmed.’

  She lowered the cane and leaned on it, partly from relief, partly from the pain that crackled down the base of her skull and spine. The voice belonged to the Raven Guard, Ptero. She heard some of her own strain in his tones. ‘You are being attacked, too,’ she said.

  ‘All of us are. Some more acutely than others.’

  ‘The psykers.’

  ‘Yes, we are among the special targets.’

  She was startled and honoured by his open admission. It took her a moment to notice his qualification. ‘Among?’

  ‘There are others, not of our number, who are in the foe’s sights. For what reason, I do not know.’

  She straightened up. Ptero was of the Legiones Astartes, and she owed him every respect. But she represented, in this moment, the X Legion, and she would stand tall. The assault did not end, but it became a background siege. Her shields were strong. Her will stronger.

  ‘You wished to speak to me?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. You would agree that our foe cannot be defeated by force of arms alone?’

  Though the Raven Guard was careful in his wording, Erephren bristled at the implied criticism of Atticus. At the same time, she knew Ptero was correct. ‘I do,’ she said.

  ‘I believe you have a critical role to play against this enemy.’

  ‘I am an astropath. Nothing more.’

  ‘You are an astropath of enormous ability. Your perception of the warp is greater than that of anyone else on this planet. This is a power.’

  ‘I am bound by the Emperor’s Will.’ She won back a greater awareness of her body, and felt the embrace of the ceremonial manacle on her ankle. It was the symbol of her unbreakable fealty.

  ‘So are we all,’ Ptero reminded her. ‘But you have already done more than transmit communications.’

  This was true. ‘What do you want of me?’

  ‘The use of your gaze. To look is not a passive act. It is aggressive. It can destroy. The annihilation of the Callidora was as much the work of your hands as it was those of Captain Atticus. The enemy sees us. It knows us. It probes our defences, learns our weaknesses. This siege cannot continue. I agree with your captain’s goal in descending into the ruins. We must seek the enemy out. We must find it on its home ground, and then we shall be the ones besieging. But we need to know where to look, and we need to know how to strike.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Captain Atticus?’

  ‘I do not think he would welcome my suggestions. But I know you have his ear.’

  She managed a smile. ‘And thus you shape war from the shadows.’

  ‘We of the Raven Guard flatter ourselves that we do it well.’

  Ptero was right. Atticus did listen.

  It helped that she had a specific strategy to suggest. With dawn, the enemy retreated, leaving the field to the still-growing number of saurians. Her mind clear, Erephren cautiously opened her senses to the warp. The vista before her was still disordered fragments and pain. The only thing she could see with any precision was the storms. They defied her comprehension. They were so vast, they seemed to merge into a single expression of absolute chaos. The empyrean rose up in waves that dwarfed even the conception of mountains. Lurking behind the tempests was the terrible suggestion of intention. The awful idea formed that here she saw the works of an enemy of inconceivable malice and power. She looked away from the storms before the idea became a conviction. The foe on Pythos was threat enough.

  She forced herself to engage with the interference. It shattered any attempt to read the details of the warp. It turned her vision into splinters, shards, jagged energy, all dividing, overlapping, colliding in a frenzy of illogic. It was a torment to consider. Her mind tried to fly apart, but she disciplined it. She stopped trying to see past the distortion. She looked at the distortion itself. You are what I seek, she told it. You are the sign of the foe. You are its trace. Even the pain it caused was evidence. She seized on her own suffering. She made it her guide. She followed it to its source.

  Then she spoke to Atticus.

  An hour later, she was at the settlement, standing with an escort of Iron Hands at the edge of the first of the pits.

  ‘You’re sure the interference comes from here?’ Atticus asked.

  ‘I am.’

  She found the effort to speak exhausting. Being this close to the epicentre of the disruption meant weathering a constant assault. She had all but shut herself down again, but the disorder still reached her, striking through the tiny opening she left. That was its mistake. This was how she could reach it. This was how she could strike. The foe would pay for daring to confront her.

  ‘We have combed the structure,’ said Atticus. ‘There is nothing. No one. There is a region to which we do not yet have access, but there is no way in or out of it.’

  ‘Nevertheless.’

  ‘You still insist on descending?’

  ‘I do.’ She felt his evaluating gaze on her. ‘Captain, I am strong enough for this task. My pride will not permit me to be a burden to you or your men.’

  ‘I have many burdens,’ Atticus growled, ‘but you are not among them. You found us a target before. Do so again, and I will be forever in your debt.’

  ‘My duty to the Legion is the only reward I seek.’

  ‘You speak for us all.’ The voice was Sergeant Galba’s. Though he was addressing her, the remark seemed to be for Atticus’s benefit. Erephren did not like the implication of division within the ranks of the officers, but she placed the worry to one side. It was not her concern. Her mission would require all of her concentration. She could not risk the opening that a distraction or stray worry might give the enemy.

  ‘This way, then,’ Atticus said.

  She followed the sounds of his footsteps. The dull thud his boots made on earth gave way to the hollow knock of wood.

  ‘Be careful here.’

  Captain Durun Atticus, commander of the Veritas Ferrum

  ‘Thank you.’ She stepped onto a narrow platform. If she had still had access to the full scope of her psychic half-vision, she would not have needed Atticus’s caution. She would have sensed the precise dimensions of the platform, known how many steps forwards she could take before plunging over the edge. But the world was no longer conjured by spontaneous knowledge. Now it was tactile. The tap-tap-tap of her cane gave her the contours of reality. She could navigate, but her surroundings were shadowed. There were large blanks of ignorance around her, making her walk more tentatively. She was used to a sovereign authority over the spaces through which she moved, on the material and immaterial planes. Being reduced to mundane human blindness was an affront she would never forgive.

  The colonists had built a rough scaffolding against the face of the structure. This pit, at the base of the main lodge, where the earth had first collapsed, was where Atticus had commanded the primary excavation take place. Secondary ones continued in the other three chasms, but with no clear advantage in one location over another, the bulk of the effort was concentrated here. Volunteers made do with lines to climb up and down the façades elsewhere. Here there were steps. They were uneven, crudely hewn, zigzagging down between platforms that were just as rough. But they were sufficient to their task. With the help of her cane, Erephren was able to make her own way down. She could, she thought, indulge her pride to that degree.

  The further she descended, the more the blank spaces of the world grew. The disruption intensified. She had to commit almost all her psychic resources into blocking out the damage. She was left with mere traces of energy to keep herself mobile and able to interact with the physical realm. Two things gave her the push she needed to continue: unceasing rage, and the consuming desire to punish.

  She was aware of the Iron Hands speaking to each other, but their voices were reduced to impressionist b
ursts of mental static. There was anger in the tones. Inflections of doubt and suspicion. The thought came to her that here was another sign of the enemy’s campaign: machinic impassivity was being stolen from the Iron Hands. Isstvan V had dealt a blow that was as psychological as it was military, and that trauma was being worked on, deepened, shaped into something profound, something that might outlast the stars. Rage had become the heartbeat of the company, rage sharp as a dagger, yet wide as the galaxy. Rage in response to betrayal, a betrayal so great that it revealed the treachery in all things. She understood, because she had her small, mortal share of that rage. How much more incandescent, how devastating to all around them, would be the anger of the demigods.

  She found that she rejoiced at the idea. As long as the rage was not directed inwards.

  The anxiety rose, a bubble forming in the cauldron of her psyche. It was without value. It was dangerous. She suppressed it with the greater force of anger, and moved forwards. Downwards. One step at a time.

  Ahead of her, the sound of Atticus’s heavy footfalls changed again. Now there was the hard echo of stone. ‘We are about to enter the ruin,’ he told her. He had turned to the right.

  She thanked him. She followed his voice, felt the platform give way to the smoothness of the structure itself. Then she was passing through the threshold. It was a stark reality, cutting through the enveloping blankness. She sensed the contours of the arch as clearly as if the disruption had abruptly ceased. But when she was through, the scrambling of her perceptions increased a hundredfold.

  Time vanished. The world vanished. There was only disruption. She had stepped inside the assault, and it came in from all sides, overwhelming her barriers. She was drowning in malformed energy.

  Something that was not random intruded. It had a shape. It had a purpose. It had an existence in time, and its existence gave her back the succession of moments. The thing became clearer. It was a voice. It was Atticus, speaking her name. She grabbed the fragment of reality and struggled against the stream of madness. She reached a shore, and bit by bit, reclaimed the nature of sounds, of touch, of thought. She was surprised to discover that she was still standing.

  Atticus asked, ‘Can you continue?’

  ‘Yes.’ The word was a victory. Its truth was a greater one. ‘Captain, you said this building was inert. It is not.’

  ‘We know there is ambient warp energy at work here, but that is all,’ Atticus replied. ‘Auspex?’ he called.

  ‘No change.’ The speaker was the Techmarine, Camnus. ‘No coherent waveforms.’

  ‘Yet the attacks are directed,’ Atticus mused, ‘and are growing stronger.’

  ‘This is a machine,’ said Galba.

  Atticus grunted and moved on.

  Down, down, deeper. Erephren was spiralling into a searing gale. The taking of a single step was a war in itself. She claimed one hard victory after another, and the greater the pain, the greater her sense that she was closing with the enemy. Time disintegrated again. She existed on the fuel of rage and expectation. When next she was aware of the world outside her struggle, she had stopped moving.

  Atticus’s voice penetrated the galvanic haze, a transmission from a distant star. ‘We can go no further.’

  Complete your mission, she thought. The effort to speak brought her to the point of collapse. Duty held her upright. ‘We are very close,’ she said. She reached out with her left hand. Her palm brushed against a rock barrier. ‘What is this?’ she asked.

  ‘The barrier at the end of this tunnel,’ Atticus told her. ‘The excavations here have removed all the collapsed stone, but now this blocks our path. It is too uniform to be natural. It is part of the xenos construction of this site. Its purpose is unclear, and we can find no way around it.’

  ‘One of the other tunnels, perhaps…’ Darras began.

  ‘No,’ she said. She ran her fingers over the rock. Its presence filled her mind. ‘The surface has a curve to it,’ she announced. ‘This is a sphere. A very large one.’

  ‘Brother Camnus?’ said Atticus.

  ‘Our readings are nonsense, brother-captain. It is impossible to say with certainty. But it is very possible, yes. I think we should trust what Mistress Erephren detects.’

  ‘Can you tell what is on the other side?’ Atticus asked. ‘If we break through, will we find our enemy?’

  She pushed through the torment. She forced herself to look more fully at the disruptions, here in this place that was more warp than reality. She braced for the worst attack yet. She was convinced that she was about to encounter the heart of the disruptive power. Instead, she found nothing. The sphere was hollow. It was a vast emptiness, a void that crackled with potential, but there was no enemy.

  ‘There is nothing there,’ Erephren said. ‘This sphere…’ A shell? ‘It is the centre of the interference.’

  ‘The source?’

  ‘No. The centre.’ She took her hand away. ‘The entire structure is the source.’

  ‘A machine,’ Galba repeated.

  ‘The attacks are deliberate,’ Atticus said. ‘They are not just the effect of a mechanism at work. If this is a machine, someone is using it.’

  ‘Yes.’ Erephren agreed. With nothing more for her to see, she reinforced her barriers. She retreated into the relief of blindness. She could not close off the energy altogether. It was too strong. It leaked in. Her head rang like a cathedral bell. She wished this conversation would wait. ‘But that someone is not here.’

  ‘Then where?’

  Atticus’s question was rhetorical, but the answer loomed before Erephren. It was one she should not believe. It was also one she could not avoid. She waited, though. She wondered if Galba had come to the same unwanted, insane conclusion.

  He had. ‘Nowhere on this plane.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  The silence was a heavy one.

  ‘I will not countenance absurdities,’ Atticus declared, his fury expressed in cold, mechanical syllables. ‘I cannot fight myths.’

  ‘Captain,’ Erephren said. ‘I will not try to convince you of something that I wish, with all my heart, to be a mistake. But this I can tell you beyond any doubt – this structure is the cause of the interference. If you have any faith in my abilities, believe me now.’

  ‘Then we must end the interference.’

  Galba said, ‘Burn it.’

  Fifteen

  Refrain

  Communion

  Defiance

  Burn it.

  The idea was his, wasn’t it?

  Galba brooded over the question on the way back to the surface. He wrestled with it on the Unbending as it flew to the base. Atticus kept his council, perhaps giving Galba time to marshal his arguments or repent his madness. He did not change his mind. The ruins must be destroyed. That was self-evident, surely. They caused the disruption of Erephren’s ability to monitor the warp. Eliminate them, and the problem ended.

  That was logical.

  But he had been thinking burn it before Erephren’s diagnosis. He tried to justify his conviction. He tried to construct that rational set of observations and conclusions that had led to that idea. And to those very precise words.

  Burn it.

  He failed. Reasoning became rationalisations, and he discarded them in shame. He was honest with himself. The idea had come to him during the night, and nothing could be trusted in the nights of Pythos.

  He found that he could not even trust his dilemma. He was even more uncertain when Atticus took him aside. They spoke in the captain’s quarters, a small prefab chamber attached to the command centre. It was a windowless, almost featureless space. There was nothing on the plasteel walls. In the centre of the room was a table on which were spread star charts and a growing collection of maps of Pythos. Atticus had not given up on the idea of finding an enemy encampment, and had been sending the gunships out o
n reconnaissance missions, surveying more of the coastal region every time. The results consisted of contour maps of unbroken jungle. The parchments were covered in annotations, almost all of them crossed out. They were the leavings of frustration.

  There was nowhere to sit in the room. There was only the table. Atticus shut the door. He removed his helmet, placing it on the table. He began a slow, measured pace around the room, and Galba knew he was seeing how the captain used the chamber. This was the space of restless thought.

  Atticus said, ‘So you would have me burn the ruins?’

  ‘I feel very strongly that you should, brother-captain.’ That was the purest, most honest answer he could give. He hoped the captain would pick up on his choice of words.

  He did. ‘You feel this, do you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what do you think we should do?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  Atticus stopped pacing. From the other side of the table, he faced Galba. His gaze was cold, precise, anatomising. Galba felt himself being judged by an intellect as inhuman as a cogitator. Just as the left eye was the only visible echo of the flesh left on Atticus, the last emotion to live within his frame was rage. ‘Explain yourself,’ said the monster of war.

  ‘My primary impulse is to burn the ruins. Destruction would be the inevitable result of this action. But my impulse is to burn. I must take this action, captain. It is all I can think about. But…’

  ‘But you did not deduce that this was the way to achieve destruction.’

  ‘That is correct.’

  After a few seconds, Atticus mused, ‘The strategy is a rational one. The most effective way of destroying that structure would involve one form of fire or another. Sergeant, when did this desire to burn strike you?’