‘Benefactor,’ a soft voice. He turned. Mayshana stood behind him. Her face was pale and stiff. She was not alone. Skalagrim was there as well, axe in hand. So preoccupied had he been, he had not heard them enter.
‘You live,’ he said, turning away.
‘No thanks to you,’ Skalagrim grunted. ‘We seem to be missing a few faces.’ He looked down at Igori, his expression unreadable. ‘I saved this one, though. You’re welcome.’ Fabius glanced at Mayshana, who nodded tersely. From the look on her face, she wasn’t happy about it.
‘If you had returned without her, I would have cut out your hearts and used them to feed the war-mutants.’ Fabius hesitated. ‘You have my thanks.’ He reached out, and stroked Mayshana’s hair. He wondered, idly, what effect her twin’s death would have on her. She looked at him, her expression unreadable, and then went to Igori’s side.
Skalagrim laughed. ‘I neither need nor want that. What happened?’
‘A mistake was rectified.’ Fabius frowned. Anger surged up in him, but he quashed it. Later. Later he would indulge in base emotion. Not now. There was work to do. Always the work. ‘The gene-tithe is in our holds. Take Khorag and check on it.’ He paused. ‘Khorag did survive?’
‘Yes. Savona and Saqqara as well. All your monsters live, Fabius.’ Skalagrim chortled. ‘Even the war hound, eh? Even me. You must be pleased.’
‘Savona… Tell Savona she is now in command of whatever elements of the Twelfth Millennial yet remain. And that she is welcome to them.’ Fabius spoke flatly. ‘Take Khorag. Check the tithe. Make sure it is secure. I want nothing to happen to it. I have endured too much to lose it now.’ He looked at Mayshana. ‘Go with him.’
She hesitated, looking at Igori.
Fabius lunged and caught her throat. She went limp, knowing better than to fight. He dragged her close. ‘Do not disobey me, girl. Do not make that mistake today.’ He spoke softly, calmly, biting back the frenzy that raged within him. The mad despair that had shrieked endlessly since he’d given Fulgrim up. It wailed and slammed itself against the cage of his discipline, and he thought she glimpsed it in his eyes. She turned pale and nodded stiffly. ‘Y-yes, Benefactor. I will not fail you.’
‘See that you do not.’ He released her and gestured dismissively.
Skalagrim grunted. ‘She is worried,’ he said. ‘They all are. I heard them howling, down in the bay, when we arrived. Like whipped curs. What really happened here?’
‘They failed me.’ Fabius slumped. He suddenly felt weak. Sick. Black spots danced before his eyes, and he tasted iron. Pain spasmed deep within him. He wanted to scream, to lift Torment and reduce his laboratorium and all that it contained to ruin. Instead, he closed his eyes. It would not do to let a creature like Skalagrim see him break. ‘Go.’
He did not hear them depart. Only the thunder of his blood, beating at his temples. He massaged his brow, trying to regain his equilibrium. ‘I had to do it,’ he said out loud. ‘It was necessary.’
‘Necessity is the answer to all questions, isn’t it, mon-keigh?’
Fabius turned, groping for Torment’s haft.
Veilwalker sat atop one of the other examination slabs, balancing its staff across one long finger. The Harlequin held up its free hand. ‘Peace, Manflayer. The performance is ended. Take your bow. It is well deserved.’
He caught hold of Torment, but did not lift it. He did not know if he were even strong enough to do so, at the moment. Pain – old, familiar pain – surged in him. Just punishment, perhaps. ‘Is that an admission of defeat, then?’ He didn’t bother to wonder how the creature had escaped Trazyn. He had half-expected it to return to bedevil him, though not this soon.
Veilwalker cocked its head. ‘No. Merely the acknowledgement that this story is ending, and a new one is beginning. Such is the way of theatre, oh, King of Feathers. Endings and beginnings, over and over again.’ It made a circular gesture. ‘Round and round we go, where we stop, nobody knows… save the Laughing God.’ It giggled. ‘And he isn’t telling.’
‘Have you come just to taunt me, or was there some purpose to this visit?’
‘Have you ever wondered why the great powers are so desperate to trap you in a story of their making?’ The eldar leaned forward, as if sharing a secret. ‘Because a story has an ending. Sometimes it is happy, sometimes not, but it is always there.’ It snapped its fingers. ‘We all have endings. Except you. No ending for you, Manflayer. No cessation. No peace.’
Fabius snorted. ‘All things end, even me.’ He looked down at Igori. ‘My ending is here. With them. When they are at last ready, I shall–’
Veilwalker laughed. It clutched itself and kicked its thin legs, as if his statement were the height of hilarity. ‘And when will they be ready? If not now, when?’ it shrieked, through its laughter. ‘Never. Round and round and round you go, again and again and again.’
‘Silence,’ Fabius snarled. ‘Or I will remove your tongue.’
The laughter ceased. Veilwalker sat up. ‘You will do nothing, mon-keigh. Can do nothing.’ It spoke flatly, all trace of humour gone. ‘I am outside of your story now, as you are outside mine. I am but a moment of transition, from one story to the next. You can no more harm me than you can understand the trap that holds you.’
‘Trap? What trap?’
‘Even now, you cannot perceive it.’ Veilwalker leapt from its perch and strutted towards him, tapping its shoulder with the length of its staff. ‘The only shame of it is that it is not ours. This story is yours and yours alone, and we have only ever been bit players in this performance.’ It swung the staff so quickly, he barely had time to interpose his sceptre. They stood like that, for long moments. He realised that the blow had not been aimed at him, but at Igori’s unconscious form.
‘How long can you protect them, Manflayer? How long will you protect them?’
‘Until my work is done.’
‘And here we go again, back to the beginning.’ Veilwalker gestured, and something appeared as if by magic on its palm. A data-spike. ‘A gift, to help you on your way.’
‘What is that?’
‘The secret to going neither forwards, nor backwards. When you are ready, you will see, and you will go, and go, and go, forever and ever, until the end of all stories.’ It stepped back, hand extended. ‘Take it.’
Fabius hesitated. ‘Why would you offer me this?’
Veilwalker was silent, for a moment. ‘This is the part we are meant to play. Only by doing so, can we take ourselves out of this story and into another. We could not trick you into one ending, cannot force you into another, so we must offer you a third.’ It shrugged with elegant disdain. ‘Maybe it is for the best. Only the Laughing God knows for sure.’
He reached for the data-spike. Stopped. ‘What’s on it?’
‘I already told you. A gift. The only gift that matters to you, whatever you claim. So take it, and follow your path, forever, wherever it leads.’
Fabius inserted the spike into a data-port on a nearby cogitator panel. A scroll of information spilled across the hololithic screen, and a map – not a star map, but one that closely resembled his makeshift webway map. It showed the innumerable branches, routes and eddies of the sub-dimension. He turned. ‘Why have you given me this?’ The question died on his lips. Veilwalker was gone. He turned back to the screen, following the route depicted. And at the end of that strange, winding path, a single name.
‘Commorragh,’ he said.
Somewhere, in the dark between moments, something laughed.
About the Author
Josh Reynolds is the author of the Primarchs novel Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix, the Warhammer 40,000 novels Fabius Bile: Primogenitor, Fabius Bile: Clonelord and Deathstorm, and the novellas Hunter’s Snare and Dante’s Canyon, along with the audio dramas Blackshields: The False War and Master of the Hunt. In the Warhammer world, he has written the End Time
s novels The Return of Nagash and The Lord of the End Times, as well as the Gotrek & Felix tales Charnel Congress, Road of Skulls and The Serpent Queen. He has also written many stories set in the Age of Sigmar, including the novels Hallowed Knights: Plague Garden, Eight Lamentations: Spear of Shadows, Nagash: The Undying King, Fury of Gork, Black Rift and Skaven Pestilens. He lives and works in Sheffield.
An extract from Fabius Bile: Primogenitor.
Oleander Koh strode across the dead city, humming softly to himself.
The dry wind scraped across his garishly painted power armour, and he hunched forward, leaning into the teeth of the gale. He relished the way it flayed his exposed skin. He licked at the blood that dripped down his face, savouring the spice of it.
Oleander’s demeanour was at once baroque and barbaric. It was fitting, given that he had left a trail of fire and corpses stretching across centuries. His power armour was the colour of a newly made bruise, and decorated with both obscene imagery and archaic medicae equipment. Animal skins flapped from the rims of his shoulder-plates, and a helmet crested with a ragged mane of silk strips dangled from his equipment belt, amongst the stasis-vials and extra clips of ammunition for the bolt pistol holstered opposite the helmet. Besides the pistol, his only weapon was a long, curved sword. The sword was Tuonela-made, forged in the secret smithy of the mortuary cults, and its golden pommel was wrought in the shape of a death’s head. Oleander was not its first owner, nor, he suspected, would he be its last.
Unlike the weapon, he had been forged on Terra. As Apothecary Oleander, he had marched beneath the banners of the Phoenician, fighting first in the Emperor’s name and then in the Warmaster’s. He had tasted the fruits of war, and found his purpose in the field-laboratories of the being he’d come to call master. The being he had returned to this world to see, though he risked death, or worse, for daring to do so.
He had been forced to land the gunship he’d borrowed some distance away, on the outskirts of the city. It sat hidden now among the shattered husks of hundreds of other craft, its servitor crew waiting for his signal. There was no telling what sort of defences had been erected in his absence. And while he’d sent a coded vox transmission ahead, asking for permission to land, he didn’t feel like taking the risk of being blown out of the sky by someone with an itchy trigger-finger. The few occupants of this place valued their privacy to an almost lunatic degree. But perhaps that was only natural, given their proclivities.
His ceramite-encased fingers tapped out a tuneless rhythm on the sword’s pommel as he walked and hummed. The wind screamed as it washed over him. And not just the wind. The whole planet reverberated with the death-scream of its once-proud population. Their delicate bones carpeted the ground, fused and melted together, though not from a natural heat. If he listened, he could pick out individual strands from the cacophony, like notes from a song. It was as if they were singing just for him. Welcoming him home.
The remains of the city – their city – rose wild around him, a jungle of living bone and wildly growing hummocks of rough psychoplastic flesh. The city might have been beautiful once, but it was gorgeous now. Silent, alien faces clumped on wraithbone walls like pulsing fungi, and living shadows stretched across the streets. Eerie radiances glistened in out-of-the-way places and tittering, phosphorescent shapes skulked in the broken buildings. A verdant madness, living and yet dead. A microcosm of Urum, as a whole.
Urum the Dead-Alive. Crone world, some called it. Urum was not its original name. But it was what the scavengers of the archaeomarkets called it, and it was as good a name as any. For Oleander Koh, it had once simply been ‘home’.
Sometimes it was hard to remember why he’d left in the first place. At other times, it was all too easy. Idly, he reached up to touch the strand of delicate glass philtres hanging from around his thick neck. He stopped. The wind had slackened, as if in anticipation. Oleander grunted and turned. Something was coming. ‘Finally,’ he said.
Gleaming shapes streaked towards him through the ruins. They shone like metal in the sunlight, but nothing made of metal could move so smoothly or so fast. At least nothing he’d ever had the misfortune to meet. They’d been stalking him for a few hours now. Perhaps they’d grown bored with the game. Or maybe he was closer to his goal than he’d thought. The city changed year by year, either growing or decaying. He wasn’t sure which. Perhaps both.
The sentry-beasts were low, lean things. He thought of wolves, though they weren’t anything like that. More akin to the sauroids that inhabited some feral worlds, albeit with feathers of liquid metal rather than scales, and tapering beak-like jaws. They made no noise, save the scraping of bladed limbs across the ground. They split up, and vanished into the shadows of the ruins. Even with his transhuman senses, Oleander was hard-pressed to keep track of them. He sank into a combat stance, fingers resting against the sword’s hilt, and waited. The moment stretched, seconds ticking by. The wind picked up, and his head resounded with the screams of the dead.
He sang along with them for a moment, his voice rising and falling with the wind. It was an old song, older even than Urum. He’d learned it on Laeran, from an addled poet named Castigne. ‘Strange is the night where black stars rise, and strange moons circle through ebon skies... songs that the Hyades shall sing...’
Prompted by instinct, Oleander spun, his sword springing into his hand as if of its own volition. He cut the first of the beasts in two, spilling its steaming guts on the heaving ground. It shrieked and kicked at the air, refusing to die. He stamped on its skull until it lay still. Still singing, he turned. The second had gone for the high ground. He caught a glimpse of it as it prowled above him, stalking through the canopy of bone and meat. He could hear its jagged limbs clicking as it moved. His hand dropped to his pistol.
Something scraped behind him. ‘Clever,’ he murmured. He drew the bolt pistol and whirled, firing. A shimmering body lurched forward and collapsed. Oleander twirled his sword and thrust it backwards, to meet the second beast as it leapt from its perch. Claws scrabbled at his power armour, and curved jaws snapped mindlessly. Its eyes were targeting sensors, sweeping his face for weakness. Oleander stepped back and slammed the point of his sword into one of the twisted trees, dislodging the dying animal.
He prodded the twitching creature with his weapon. It was not a natural thing, with its gleaming feathers and sensor nodes jutting from its flesh like spines. But then, this was not a natural world. The sentry-beast had been vat-grown, built from base acids, stretched and carved into useful shape. Idly, he lifted the blade and sampled the acrid gore that stained it. ‘Piquant,’ he said. ‘With just a hint of the real thing. Your best work yet, master.’
Oleander smiled as he said it. He hadn’t used that word in a long time. Not since he’d last been here. Before Urum’s master, and his, had exiled him for his crimes. Oleander shied away from the thought. Reflecting on those last days was like probing an infected wound, and his memories were tender to the touch. There was no pleasure to be had there, only pain. Some adherents of Slaanesh claimed that those things were ever one and the same, but Oleander knew better.
He kicked the still-twitching body and turned away. Something rattled nearby. The sentry-beasts made no noise, save for that peculiar clicking of their silvery carapace. More of them burst out of the unnatural undergrowth and converged on him. Foolish, to think there were only three. Excess was a virtue here, as everywhere. ‘Well, he who hesitates is lost,’ he said, lunging to meet them. There were ten, at least, though they were moving so swiftly it was hard to keep count.
Beak-like protuberances fastened on his armour as he waded through them. Smooth talon-like appendages scraped paint from the ceramite, and whip-like tails thudded against his legs and chest. They were trying to knock him down. He brought his sword down and split one of the quicksilver shapes in half. Acidic ichor spewed upwards. He fired his bolt pistol, the explosive rounds punching fist-sized holes in his
attackers.
All at once, the attack ceased. The surviving sentry-beasts scattered, as swiftly as they had come. Oleander waited, scanning his surroundings. He’d killed three. Someone had called the others off. He thought he knew who. He heard the harsh rasp of breath in humanoid lungs, and smelled the rancid stink of chem-born flesh.
Oleander straightened and sheathed his sword without cleaning it. ‘What are you waiting for, children?’ He held up his bolt pistol and made a show of holstering it. ‘I won’t hurt you, if you’re kind.’ He spread his arms, holding them away from his weapons.
Unnatural shapes, less streamlined than the sentry-beasts, lurched into view. They moved silently, despite the peculiarity of their limbs. They wore the ragged remnants of old uniforms. Some were clad in ill-fitting and piecemeal combat armour. Most carried a variety of firearms in their twisted paws – stubbers, autoguns, lasguns and even a black-powder jezzail. The rest held rust-rimmed blades of varying shapes and sizes.
The only commonality among them was the extent of the malformation that afflicted them. Twisted horns of calcified bone pierced brows and cheeks, or emerged from weeping eye sockets. Iridescent flesh stretched between patches of rank fur or blistered scale. Some were missing limbs, others had too many.
They had been men, once. Now they were nothing but meat. Dull, animal eyes studied him from all sides. There were more of them than there might once have been, which was something of a surprise. Life was hard for such crippled by-blows, especially here, and death the only certainty. ‘Aren’t you handsome fellows,’ Oleander said. ‘I expect you’re the welcoming party. Well then, lead on, children, lead on. The day wears on, the shadows lengthen and strange moons circle through the skies. And we have far to go.’
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