The Last Hunt

by Robbie MacNiven

  Qui’sin nodded, and when he spoke there was no more hesitation, no more uncertainty in his voice.

  ‘Truly we are blessed, my khan. Our last hunt shall be eternal. The Ayanga will not know of our true fate, but we shall return to them in glory. Such has been our purpose all along. I am sure of it.’

  ‘You shall see your brother Hagai too,’ Feng added, a hand on Timchet’s unblemished pauldron. ‘Nothing can keep true kindred separated, not for eternity. Of that I am sure.’

  Finally, Timchet nodded, and a sad smile touched his lips.

  ‘I do not know if I can endure that fool for an eternity. Regardless, let us be on our way. It will be good to see him again.’

  Yenneth led the White Scars to the edge of the shimmering portal. Joghaten went first, unhesitating, bold and sure as ever. Feng followed, after only a moment’s pause, and then Timchet, now smiling broadly. Only Qui’sin remained behind.

  ‘You still doubt, Stormseer,’ Yenneth said softly.

  ‘The Master of Blades is an incomplete soul,’ Qui’sin said, still facing the portal. ‘At times, he lacks a sense of reserve. I am that reserve.’

  ‘It is not just your natural predilection that is making you hesitate. You wonder whether you will see your father again, the one you call the Khagan.’

  ‘It is what we yearn for, more than anything, more so even than the other brotherhoods. We believe in being reunited with him. We believe the Khagan still hunts.’

  ‘Whether or not he does, I cannot say,’ Yenneth admitted. ‘But one thing I do know. To find out, you must pass through.’

  ‘Yes,’ Qui’sin said. ‘And that is why I must stay at my khan’s side, guiding him as best I can. That is my fate, just as it is his to seek out the Khagan.’

  ‘Seek him you shall,’ Yenneth said.

  Qui’sin nodded, and stepped through the shimmering light. She followed, her form melting into the haze between the stones.

  The portal blinked from existence, leaving only the ancient, weather-beaten stones, the wind sighing through the steppe grass, and the last of the day’s light vanishing amidst the long shadows.

  Epilogue

  Qui’sin tossed the scrap of flesh to Kemich, before lowering himself down onto the prayer mat. The scrying chamber was silent, once against lost in the flickering light of lumen sticks laid out around the Stormseer. Qui’sin closed his eyes, reached out and–

  A chamber of shrieking xenos spawn. Stygian darkness. A piercing white light, emanating from a slender, robed figure. Impossibility, reined in only by death. One reality shrinking and merging with another–

  He realised he was back on his feet, a protective ward on his lips. Kemich, still on her talon-marked perch in one corner, cocked her head to one side. The Stormseer rubbed his fingers over the worn bone of his force staff’s skull, trying to shake off the vision’s aftershock.

  That was the third time since leaving Darkand’s high orbit that he’d sought contact with his brethren in the Ayanga, and it was the third time his mind had instead been flooded with memories of events that had never happened. The first had been of an alien city, desolate but for screams, and the terrible whizzing sound of splinter weaponry. The second had been of Darkand’s plains and a collection of strange, mighty standing stones. Now he was seeing caverns and xenos infestations. He had fought long and hard beneath Heavenfall in the week since the breaking of the main swarm outside the Founding Wall, but at no point had he or any of the Fourth Brotherhood come across a cavern that matched the one in his memory. Nevertheless, all three recollections had been clear, as though the places he was witnessing had been visited mere days earlier.

  At the same time, somehow, he was certain he had never experienced any of them.

  He settled himself once more and drew a calming breath, taking up a slow, low throat-cant that helped steady his mind in times of duress. Kemich alighted on his shoulder, her heavy burden a sudden relief.

  One way or another, he would find the source of these vision-memories.

  They were behind him, a deadly presence in the Pride’s sparring ger. For a moment, Lau Feng didn’t move. For a moment his world was reduced to the beating of his hearts, the tension in his limbs, the well-balanced weight of his guan dao grasped in both hands.

  A noise ended the stillness, the merest brush of bare feet on the sparring mat. He turned, a whirl of keen-edged steel.

  They were coming at him at the same time, Jakar with an overhead stroke of his tulwar, Oda cutting in from the right, angling up beneath his guard. Jakar, however, had struck a fraction too soon. That was all the advantage that Feng required.

  He parried Jakar’s stroke with the notched haft of his dao, then knocked aside Oda’s strike by spinning the broad-bladed lance in his palms. The blade was slicing back towards Jakar before the hunt-brother had recovered from the shock of the parry, driving him back and keeping him off balance. Oda, understanding the danger of letting the steedmaster divide them, sprang back in with an over-hasty lunge. The bold thrust was almost met with reward – it sliced open the right thigh of Feng’s white silk leggings, but failed to touch his flesh.

  Oda payed the price for his attempt at a swift victory. The haft of Feng’s dao whipped around, cracking into his nose. A splatter of blood pattered onto the sparring mat, and the stocky hunt-brother had no choice other than to bow out.

  All the while, Feng’s eyes hadn’t left Jakar’s.

  The türüch saw resolve there, but also acceptance – this bout was only going to end one way now.

  Feng flicked aside another slash and turned defence into attack with a rapid three-step. The dao stabbed towards Jakar’s abdomen as he was forced back once more. Though the riposte fell short, Feng used his momentum to carry him into a spin to Jakar’s right. A heel in the back of his brother’s knee, perfectly timed, was enough to drop him to the mat. Before he could rise, he felt the kiss of Feng’s weapon on the exposed nape of his neck. After a moment’s stubborn recalcitrance, he let his tulwar drop to the sparring mat.

  Feng helped Jakar back onto his feet, and alongside Oda the three Space Marines bowed to one another. From Jakar’s first blow the entire clash had taken twenty-six seconds, according to the chrono ticking over on the wall of the deserted sparring ger.

  It had been a long time since Feng had won so convincingly. In truth, his brothers had noted the difference the moment they had engaged the cult beneath Heavenfall. It was as though the steedmaster had remembered the warrior and the leader he had once been.

  He helped Jakar and Oda roll away the mat, then stood alone as they left for their rest cycle. The lights in the echoing ger began to thud off, one by one. In the lengthening shadows, he waited. Even after the final lumen had clicked off, even after he had walked the corridors of the Pride of Chogoris and returned to his busad cell, he waited. But they did not come.

  It had all been different since he had seen himself in the quadrangle of the devotarium. It had been a sign, he now realised. A moment of resolution – a part of him, no longer able to bear his sorrow, had departed and gone to join his lost brothers. And they had accepted him. From the nightmare moment when he had seen his double, everything had changed. They had fought well against the cult, into the depths of Heavenfall’s subterranean heart. Himself, Jakar, Oda and Sauri, honouring Eji’s death. The brotherhood had brought a slaughter-end to the alien and the hybrid with bolt and flame, kindjal and tulwar. And since the devotarium Feng had seen nothing of the revenants of Ajai, Tenjin, Oyuun or Tayang. Their baleful presence had lifted like the passing of night before a steppe dawn.

  Feng stayed fully conscious through the night cycle, still watching, still waiting. In truth he knew he didn’t have to. His brothers had passed on. He was sure a part of him had done likewise, leaving what remained to carry on. Freedom, and freedom’s price.

  Feng paid it gladly. He did not need to see their s
hades to honour their memories.

  After taking a moment to ensure the wooden board beneath the vellum was angled correctly, Joghaten Khan leaned over and picked the aduu-hair brush from its pot. For a moment he stared at the white blankness of the page – furious white, old Arro’shan had once called it. Then, his spot picked, he raised his brush and administered the first long, steady stroke.

  It had been a hard struggle, and desperate, but ultimately as successful as any in the proud history of the Tulwar Brotherhood. The xenos had been broken out on the plains, in the slope-city, and in the void of space. The people of Darkand had suffered, but a great many had been saved, and the nomad tribes were now beginning to emerge once more from Heavenfall, parties of horsemen accompanying motorised Pinnacle Guard units in hunts across the plains for the xenos that yet survived, scattered and leaderless. It would be many months, perhaps years, before the planet had been truly purged, but the greatest danger had passed. The Devourer’s hunger had been weathered and the White Scars hunted elsewhere.

  And yet, and yet… victory had come at a price, and it had been paid in more than just the lives of many members of the Fourth. Sitting in his busad, sliding the ink across the vellum’s crisp surface in long, steady strokes, Joghaten Khan sought to pin precisely what had happened in the final few hours before they had purged Heavenfall of the cult’s taint. He knew he was not alone in believing some force, some strange, external knowledge, had guided them. Qui’sin was still struggling to identify and explain it, his wisdom taxed by their seemingly miraculous success. It was as though the Khagan himself had been with them towards the end, guiding their deployments and helping to scatter the alien filth.

  As he pondered such a possibility, Joghaten found his thoughts overwhelmed by a surge of memories. He saw a Space Marine, tall and warlike, with twin tulwars at his hip and furs about his shoulders. With a start he recognised his own armour and weapons, and yet when he tried to focus upon his face, he found he could not. The warrior’s features were an indistinct blur in his mind’s eye, somehow insubstantial and ethereal. The khan shuddered away from the vision, realising that his grip had grown so tight on his brush that it was close to snapping.

  He looked down at the vellum. A part of him expected to see his vision played out across it – the Master of Blades rendered faceless, a champion without either time or place, a ghost.

  But the parchment was blemished with no violent vision-scrawl. Instead he saw a pattern, not the one he had set out to inscribe, but delivered as cleanly and precisely as any of his calligraphy pieces. It was a labyrinthine knotwork design, the ulzi, the ancient Chogorian symbol for the inescapability of fate.

  For a moment, the khan considered taking such a portentous sign to Qui’sin. Then, instead, he sifted a portion of sand across its surface, blew, and slipped the dried parchment into the frame-drawer that held the rest of his work.

  Whatever had become of them on Darkand, they had emerged victorious. There was no turning back, and no escaping. For better or for worse, they would hunt again.

  The time for words was over. Joghaten Khan sat astride Whitemane, blood still slowly dripping from his armour. He looked out over the smoking desolation of the City of Pillars, following the plumes of smoke upwards, until he beheld the strange constellations that ruled over this unknowable place. The webway, where the Khagan still hunted, outside the normal boundaries of time and space.

  The Fourth Brotherhood was at his back, mounted and ready. His honour guard surrounded him, Dorich and Jubai, Khuchar, Tamachag and Bleda, fully armed. He looked right, to Qui’sin. The Stormseer held his force staff across his saddle, likewise staring up into the firmament. Kemich was at his shoulder. Neither reacted to Joghaten’s gaze, but the khan sensed their readiness. He glanced to his left, checking that Jubai was holding the brotherhood’s horsehair standard high. One last moment’s contemplation and then, wordlessly, the Master of Blades smiled. He raised his right gauntlet, palm open, fingers splayed towards an alien sky.

  Ride.

  About the Author

  Robbie MacNiven is a highland-born History graduate from the University of Edinburgh. He has written the Warhammer 40,000 novels The Last Hunt, Carcharodons: Red Tithe and Legacy of Russ as well as the short stories ‘Redblade’, ‘A Song for the Lost’ and ‘Blood and Iron’ for Black Library. His hobbies include re-enacting, football and obsessing over Warhammer 40,000.

  An extract from Carcharodons: Red Tithe.

  The screaming marked an end to the day’s toil. The aching noise came from the gargoyle-mawed klaxons that lined each of the narrow walls, tunnels, sub-surface lines and assembly points of Zartak’s vast mine works. Mika Doren Skell dropped his half-pick into its tool crate, his scrawny limbs trembling with exhaustion. His fingers ached as he uncurled them. The blisters had burst again, and blood was welling up in little, oozing patches to discolour the thick layer of dust coating his hands.

  ‘Move, inmate,’ barked the arbitrator overseeing equipment reclamation. The armour-plated lawman gestured with the barrel of his heavy combat shotgun, motioning him back into line. Skell bowed his head and fell in behind Nedzy and the others, dropping his magnicled hands. The explosive-primed bonds chafed at his wrists, a constant, aching reminder of five months of captivity. Five months since the cowardly gang boss Roax had ratted him out. Five months since he had arrived in the subterranean hell of Zartak.

  ‘Argrim’s here,’ muttered Dolar as he dropped into line behind Skell. The presence of his big cell-mate at his back was reassuring. Without him, Skell would have died at least twice already, either in the burrow pits and excavation lanes or trudging back to the prison cells of Sink Shaft One.

  He had repaid his cell-mate many times over.

  A sudden pain pressed against Skell’s temples, as though the atmosphere in the low rock tunnel had suddenly changed. None of the other inmates showed any signs of discomfort. Skell’s bloody hands clenched into fists.

  ‘Argrim’s going to try something,’ he muttered to Dolar.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeah. I can feel it.’

  Dolar said nothing, but Skell sensed him draw fractionally closer. The line ahead was beginning to divide as ragged prison groups were pulled from the column by shouting overseers and herded down the passages that would lead them back to their cell blocks and hanging cages. The pressure in Skell’s head increased. Argrim and his cronies would strike soon, once the mass of dirt-caked, dull-eyed labourers had been separated and divided. They’d tried it before, and Skell knew they’d try it again. They hated him. Not because he was from the sump-hive of Fallowrain, not because he was one of Roax’s old gang. Not even because he refused to bend before Argrim’s reputation and authority.

  They hated Skell because he was a witch.

  ‘That concludes the session review,’ said Warden Primary Sholtz. ‘Are there any questions? Sub-Warden Rannik?’

  The words dragged Rannik from the fug of boredom that had gripped her thoughts for the past two hours. The situation room was silent, the pict screen behind the warden’s lectern blinking, the lumen strips still dimmed. The transcription servitor in the corner clattered to a halt as its auto quill finished taking minutes. The other sub-wardens were all staring at her.

  ‘No questions, sir,’ Rannik said. ‘A thoroughly comprehensive review, as ever.’

  ‘Was it indeed?’ asked Sholtz from his perch behind the aquila-stamped lectern. The man’s stony glare was as hard as the blunt-force sarcasm he so loved to inflict on new officers. ‘What a relief to have met with your approval. I shall be sure to tell Judge Symons of your weighty opinion next time we share a holo-briefing.’

  The thirteen other Adeptus Arbites sub-wardens didn’t respond, but Rannik could sense their amusement. It made her bristle. She fought down her anger, channelling it into a deferential nod.

  ‘Perhaps,’ the grizzled warden continued, ‘you
could elucidate further upon the last point I raised?’

  ‘The last point, sir?’ Rannik repeated.

  ‘Yes, sub-warden. The one discussed barely a minute ago.’

  Rannik said nothing. The silence in the situation room stretched to a painful, unnatural length. Finally, a bang at the hatch door broke it.

  ‘Not now,’ Sholtz snarled, his gaze not leaving Rannik. The banging sounded again. Scowling, the warden deactivated the lock with a flick of his sensor wand. The hatch slid open and a youth in the pale grey uniform of the Precinct Fortress’ Augur Division ducked inside.

  ‘What?’ the warden primary snapped. The boy threw a hurried salute.

  ‘Word from Augur Chief Tarl, sir. The sensor relays just chimed. The augur outposts on the system’s trailward edge have detected a lone vessel breaking into real space.’

  ‘Identity?’

  ‘We’re still running verification, sir, but initial scans of its keel tag and ident-codes show it’s probably our latest shipment.’

  ‘The Imperial Truth?’ Sholtz demanded. ‘That would make it over a week early.’

  ‘Yes, sir, that’s what Chief Tarl said. We have tried to hail it but we aren’t receiving any response. Communications may just be choppy due to interference from the asteroid belt, but they’re definitely registering our messages.’

  ‘How far out is she?’

  ‘Just entering the belt, sir. Once she navigates it she’ll be three hours from high anchor.’

  ‘Gentlemen, we have a situation,’ Sholtz said to the assembled sub-wardens. ‘This session is formally adjourned. Come with me.’

  Sholtz left the situation room. The sub-wardens filed out from behind their benches and swept after him in a buzz of sudden, nervous excitement.

  ‘Bit of good fortune, this,’ Sub-Warden Klenn muttered as they entered the corridor, just loud enough for Rannik to hear. ‘The chief had her cold back there. She’s still making the same old mistakes.’