The first thing I felt from Telemachon was the crunching ache of cramps in his thigh muscles. A human would be in wailing tears at the crippling pain, but he met me with a grin. The second thing I felt was his amusement.
‘At last,’ he said in his mellifluous voice. ‘You come to speak with me. And you brought... her.’
Nefertari’s dark, slanted eyes glinted with the cold mirth that failed to grace her lips.
‘Greetings,’ she said to him. ‘Slave-child of the Goddess That Thirsts.’
Telemachon showed white teeth in the melted ruin of his face. He was plainly amused at the eldar race’s belief that the Youngest God was actually a Goddess. His handsome eyes never left the alien maiden.
‘My angel. My lovely angel, you know nothing of what you speak. You’ve spent a lifetime running from the Youngest God. But he loves you, sweetling. He adores you and all of your kind. I can hear him sing each time you breathe. And one day, when you leave your flesh behind, you will be his. A concubine of spirit and shadow, claimed by your true love at last.’
If Nefertari felt any unease, she showed none of it. Ruthlessly smooth armour joints purred softly as she crouched before the prisoner, her too-white skin a match – at least in shade – for the stretched white mess of his. Grey-black wings shivered, stirring the air inside the modest chamber.
‘We were like you once,’ she told him.
‘I doubt that, lovely one.’
‘But we were. We were slaves to sensation. We knew no pleasure beyond decadence that raked our nerves to the limits and beyond.’ She sounded gentle, though condescension ripened her weak aura.
Telemachon closed his eyes, breathing in her breath, drinking her every exhalation. Being near her was rapture.
‘Let me touch you,’ he said, shuddering. ‘Just let me touch you once.’
‘You would like that, wouldn’t you?’ She made to stroke her crystal-clawed fingertip down the side of his face, but no contact came. The glassy talon tip hovered a centimetre above the prisoner’s tormented flesh. He strained against his bindings, aching to lean forwards so Nefertari might lacerate his face.
‘I can smell your soul, eldar.’ He was trembling now. ‘The Youngest God shrieks for it, crying from behind the veil.’
She leaned even closer, close enough that I could barely hear her whisper. ‘Then let the Goddess shriek. I am not ready to die.’
‘You live in defiance of his hunger, lovely angel... Let me taste you. Let me bleed you. Let me kill you. Please. Please. Please.’
Nefertari rose in a silken motion, pacing back to me. ‘Your plan will work,’ she said, not even looking back at the shivering Telemachon.
Composure snapped back across the prisoner’s features, but the air was pregnant with his thwarted need. He didn’t just hunger for Nefertari, he yearned for her. The strength of his denied cravings emanated from him in a queasy halo.
‘What plan?’ he asked.
I crouched before him just as Nefertari had, and this time there was no gentle rustle of feathered wings but a servo-born snarl of ancient armour joints.
‘Were you at Lupercalios?’ I asked him.
He grinned with what remained of his mouth. ‘Thousands upon thousands descended upon the Monument – warriors from my Legion, from yours, from all Nine. Even warbands from the Sons of Horus turned on their kindred when it came to striking the final blow.’
‘Were you at Lupercalios?’ I asked again.
‘I was. And the pickings were deliciously ripe, I promise you that.’
‘You took Horus’s body. Tell me why.’
‘That had nothing to do with me. That was Lord Fabius and his laboratory ilk, ranting about the promise of cloning. My warband goes nowhere near their domain, and we share none of their passion for genetic perversion.’
All true, so far. Honesty radiated from his sensation-bleached brain. One more question, though. The one that really mattered.
‘Why did you abandon my forces on Terra?’
The smile became a wet, burbling chuckle. ‘That old wound still hasn’t healed, “brother”?’
Had it? I believed it had. No burning craving for revenge drove me, I merely wanted to know why it had happened. Just that, and nothing more. Were the Emperor’s Children truly so lost to their hunger for sensation even then? Had they sacrificed the battle at the Emperor’s Palace purely to slake their sick lusts on the undefended population?
‘Your battle company was supposed to support mine,’ I said. ‘When you left us without reinforcement, I lost thirty-three men to Blood Angels guns in the Hall of Celestial Reflection.’
Again the grin. ‘We had other objectives. There was more to Terra than the Imperial Palace, my dear Tizcan. So much more. All that flesh, all that blood. All those screams. Look how many slaves the Third Legion brought with them into the Eye’s tides. Our holds were full of man-flesh, and our foresight has served us well in the years since.’
I said nothing.
‘And what did those thirty-three deaths even matter?’ Telemachon pressed. ‘They’d have fallen to Ahriman’s Curse a handful of years later, anyway. They were dead men walking, whether my forces aided you or not. At least they died fighting, rather than to a traitor’s black magic.’
I still said nothing. I wasn’t looking at him, I was looking within him.
‘Nobody clings to the past like a Tizcan.’ When he said those words, they carried the resonance of old slang.
‘You are mistaking my intent,’ I finally said. ‘I merely wished to look you in the eyes while I told you of my brothers.’
‘Why?’
‘To see the truth of your heart, Telemachon, and to judge you by it. If you were truly without remorse at your Legion’s actions, then you would earn execution.’ I reached to tap the battleaxe bound to my back. ‘If you had looked into my eyes without any shame, then I would take your ruined head with this stolen weapon.’
His sharp laugh was closer to a snarl. ‘Kill me, then.’
‘Have you forgotten that I can read the lies behind your eyes, son of Fulgrim? I will not execute you. I will remake you.’
Again the melted grin. ‘I would keep mutilation honestly earned over the healing touch of a sorcerer.’
I watched him through the Art, seeing not flesh and bone but the interconnected cartography of nerve and sensation in his mind. The unseen touch of the Youngest God was visible now, showing itself in the neural cobweb of feelings and emotions within his brain meat. What he enjoyed. What he could no longer enjoy. How every sensory experience was wired into its own revelation of pleasure. How rendering someone helpless before him was enough to leave his fingers trembling with rapture. How an enemy’s final breath was the sweetest scent, and blood from a foe’s final heartbeat was the finest wine.
I watched his brain’s synapses fire and fade, each one a beacon guiding me along the pathways of how his mind worked.
At last I closed my eyes. When I opened them again I was looking at him with my first sense, not my sixth.
My gloved fingers rested upon the ruin of his face with deceitful gentleness. He grunted at the first whipcrack of pain behind his eyes.
‘I don’t want your healing, Khayon.’
‘I did not say I was going to heal you, Telemachon. I said I was going to remake you.’
Nefertari crouched next to me, her feathered wings folding tight to her body, smelling of night itself. She wanted to be close. She wanted to taste what was coming next.
I closed my eyes again, and with the prisoner’s nervous system as my canvas, I began to redraw the cartography of his life.
He never screamed, I will grant him that. He never screamed.
WEBWAY
Reaching the Eleusinian Veil meant passing through the Radiant Worlds. Only a fool would take his ship directly into them and face the destructive
waves of the phenomenon we called the Firetide, but fortunately there was another possibility. We would not sail through that region of psychic flame. We would cut past it. To do so we would need to drift into the webway.
Kingdoms fall. Empires die. It is the way of things. We now look upon the declining eldar as one of the galaxy’s most ancient species, yet they were nothing more than slave children to the First Race, known to us now as the Old Ones.
Of the Old Ones, we know almost nothing. Their blood was cold, their skin scaled, and all else remains myth and mystery. Their ambition, influence and power are beyond the minds of anyone still living. All we know for certain is that they understood the nature of the warp millennia before most species were even born, and knew its threat better than any of us can comprehend even now.
We call it the underworld and the Sea of Souls, but this is ignorant human poetry grafted onto cold metaphysical truth. The empyrean is made of souls the way texts from the Dark Age of Technology tell us water is made of three atoms: one of oxygen and two of hydrogen.
Aetheria, ectoplasma, the fifth element. Call it what you will, we are speaking of the very material substance of souls. The warp is not a realm where souls go to dwell. It is a realm made entirely from soul-matter. Souls do not exist within the warp – they are the warp.
The Old Ones knew this. They knew it and rose above its damning touch with the creation of a method of galactic travel that bypassed any need to sail through the underworld. Even my father Magnus the Red knew little of it, and named it the Labyrinthine Dimension. To those of us aware of its existence now, including the eldar, who still make great use of it, it is more commonly called the webway.
Behind reality and unreality alike, this dimension of hidden avenues stretches across our galaxy. On one planet it may be nothing more than a portal that opens on one landmass and leads to another, large enough for one man to pass through. Elsewhere, in the darkness where no stars shine, entire eldar fleets and craftworlds sail through its unseen reaches. Here is where hundreds of thousands of otherwise doomed eldar took shelter from the Youngest God’s genesis and the death of their empire. Commorragh, the Dark City of Nefertari’s birth, is the greatest alien port within its depths, but not the only one.
Time and endless war have not been kind to the webway. Daemons flood whole regions of its maze-like passages, and what was once a galaxy-spanning construct of inconceivable vision is now a hollow shell of its former majesty. So much of it is silent, cold and forgotten. The rest is largely unmapped by human hands, and its billion gates go unnoticed by human senses. It is not a realm for our kind.
Those of us in the Empire of the Eye see more of its legacy than any Imperial. It exists within our realm just as stone ruins of bygone civilisations may linger on any primitive Imperial world. Entrances into the broken labyrinth exist just out of sight, or show at the edges of our perceptions. On daemon-claimed worlds and in deep Eyespace alike, those of us with keen enough senses will feel these holes in our warped reality. Sometimes it is something as shadow-shrouded and darkly majestic as a rift in space – vast enough to allow a whole fleet through – showing the tenebrous image of an alien planetscape suspended in nothingness. Other portals are as simple and small as an arched wraithbone doorway, buried beneath a planet’s surface. There is no unity to the webway’s entrances and exits.
As you would expect, most of the webway’s pathways inside the Great Eye’s borders are worthless and shattered from the Youngest God’s devastating birth-scream. Functional or broken, most of those that remain are flooded with Neverborn seeking a way deeper into real space, hungering for the blood and souls on offer aboard eldar craftworlds. Only a rare few are considered viable avenues through our purgatorial domain, and even these lost routes are rarely sailed. Some are simply unnecessary – it is a crumbling remnant of a network, after all – offering passage from nowhere of relevance to nowhere of use.
Those that still function cleanly – the truly useful pathways – are some of the Eye’s most unquestionably valuable secrets. Individuals among the Nine Legions who manage to compile even fragmentary maps of worthwhile webway portals can name any price for their knowledge, and hundreds of warbands will willingly pay.
I learned of the Avernus Breach almost a century before, and the price of that knowledge was six years of service to an VIII Legion warband led by a warrior named Dhar’leth Rul. My services always came at a high price in Mechanicum artefact-automatons, but certain other offers were too precious to pass up.
Six years of binding daemons and destroying Dhar’leth’s enemies. Six years of my Rubricae serving in brutal raids against other warships, all to learn the location of a single reliable webway path.
It was worth it. I now knew of several dozen still-functional thoroughfares within the Eye, and while I doubted I had the most complete map of any warrior among the Nine Legions, what I did possess was valuable beyond reckoning.
There is no artificial marker or ancient gate denoting most entrances to the webway. We took the Tlaloc to a region of space that seemed no different from the rest of the Eye’s chaotic tides, drifting through the chromosphere of a cooling, dying white sun. There, in the shadow cast by the world’s pulsing core, we sailed from the Eye into... Elsewhere.
Blackness enveloped us. The occulus showed not the black of the deep void, but the black of colourless, starless nothing. When I reached beyond the hull, I sensed only empty endlessness. It was a sensation I’d not felt anywhere else in the galaxy. Even deep space thrummed with the half-alive residue of starbirth and the quiet thoughts of distant mortals. This was the antithesis of life, of matter, of anything at all. We sailed outside reality and unreality alike.
The engines flared hot, propelling us through absolute blackness. We felt becalmed, going nowhere at all. The Anamnesis assured us the Tlaloc was sailing ahead, and with our senses shrouded and our instruments mute, it was her word against the evidence of our eyes.
The bridge crew were unsettled, with tempers flaring and blood being shed between mutants and humans over insignificant disagreements. These creatures were used to living in a nightmare where daemons might prey upon them without warning, but the Old Ones’ broken webway was too much for their senses to easily endure. The absolute nothingness of this section was sensory deprivation on a ship-wide scale. When I slept, I did not dream of wolves. I dreamed of nothing at all, waking after a couple of hours each time no more rested than I had been before.
‘Was it like this the last time you sailed through?’ asked Telemachon. His handsome face mask, repaired by my armament priests, shone polished silver in the pale light of the command deck. He had a habit of resting his gauntleted hands on the pommels of the two swords sheathed at his hips. These he wore slung low, almost like a vain human gunslinger – a posturing fact that surprised none of us.
I kept staring out at the infinite blackness. ‘Exactly the same. This is the only stretch of the webway I have ever seen that is truly, wholly empty.’
‘What’s in the others?’
‘Death,’ Nefertari answered for me, from where she stood by my throne. ‘Things that broke free from other realms and realities. Things even the Neverborn fear.’
Telemachon, who stood casually on the dais’s stairs, kept his gaze on the occulus. His voice was contemplative.
‘I’ve never seen the Radiant Worlds. Are the stories true?’
‘There are many stories,’ said Nefertari. ‘The truth depends on which tales you listen to.’
‘How foolish of me to expect a straight answer on this ship.’
Nefertari’s reply was a soft laugh. Telemachon’s hunger for her was still a palpable thing, an aura that invisibly stained the air around him. He was imagining the salty richness of her blood on his tongue, and the thought made him shiver.
‘Eldar blood does not taste of salt,’ I said to him.
He growled behind the face mask, t
hough the gentility of his voice made it sound closer to a murderous purr.
‘I don’t like you reading my thoughts,’ he told me.
‘What a shame. I am sure you will get used to it.’
Nefertari, who was much less impressed than us by the endless black on display, smiled at our petty bickering.
‘I am going to duel Ugrivian,’ she announced as she left the dais. Telemachon watched her leave, and in turn Gyre watched Telemachon.
I want her, came the swordsman’s wish, as clear as if he’d spoken it aloud. He did not send the words to me, but his murderous desire was fierce enough that I couldn’t help but sense his thoughts.
Gyre heard them as well. My wolf’s growl was a truer, lower snarl than that which had left the swordsman’s throat.
Telemachon turned his helm to face the daemon, staring at her with silver-featured serenity.
‘Silence, dog. No one asked your opinion.’
One of the bridge crew, a bestial mutant from Sortiarius’s clan-herds, approached me with the requisite three bows. The slave’s head was a thing of elongated, equine goatishness, and not made for careful speech. With his lolling, spotted tongue and the shape of his jaws, he couldn’t show his disapproval with any human expression. Instead, he gave a grunting bray, and shook saliva from his distended maw.
‘Lord Khayon.’ The words left his feral face with a sound somewhere between a goat’s bray and an ursine snarl. A stringy stalactite of saliva roped down from his chin, spattering onto the deck.
I gestured permission. ‘Speak.’
‘How long in the Dark?’ His voice was a snarl through crooked, spit-wet teeth.
I sat forwards, casting a brief glance over at the platform where the usual gathering of ragged humans, servitors and beast-mutants pored over the scanning consoles. They were watching us both with unusual focus, slipping glances our way. The silent, endless black was unnerving them. I could feel their unease, not quite rich enough to be fear.
‘Trust the Anamnesis, Tzah’q.’
The creature lowered his horned head in submission. He was clad in piecemeal armour of flak-plate over primitive chainmail, a clash of wargear looted from an officer of the Imperial Guard and tattered Iron Era protection for the tribal duels fought by our slave caste in the ship’s bowels. The mutant carried no sidearm as a Naval officer would; instead a battered lasrifle with an aiming spotlight was slung over one shoulder. More than one bridge thrall had felt the crunch of that rifle butt in the face over the decades. Tzah’q was an effective enforcer and veteran overseer. The grey fur of his face and clawed hands was frosted with ever more white, year after year. He was as worried as the others but showed no sign of his fears. Bestial eyes glared at the rest of the crew with the same animal challenge as ever. My reliable overseer.
The Talon of Horus Page 17