They were in ranks. It was an infernal regiment, each one a cohort pulled from the mirror realm, burgeoning and unfolding until an entire war host stood before us. Soon I could no longer count them – a Neverborn army, filling the entire void port from end to end, spilling beyond its bounds and into the chasms and towers beyond, all lightning-crowned, all blood-slick, all screaming blasphemies at the spires of Holy Terra.
Then greater horrors burst free of the world’s shackles among them – slobbering behemoths with a hundred eyes, iron-collared hounds that slavered and yanked at their thick chains, quasi-mechanical juggernauts with burning eyes and hunched smokestacks; more and more, thrusting up from the tormented earth, exhumed amid cataclysms of fresh etherplasm.
And finally, at the very apex, unfurled the greatest of all. They tore into existence with splintered bellows that annihilated the rockcrete around them, rising up into avatars of swirling detritus, higher and higher, bloating and firming into colossi of burnished muscle and flame-blackened brass. Immense bat wings fused and pushed out and stretched and enfleshed to beat the flame-torn skies, tattered and studded with chains and swinging skull-bundles. Huge heads lifted up high, each crowned with heavy thickets of twisted horns and distended with tusk-crammed, dripping jawlines. Mighty cloven hooves stamped, breaking the ground open into hissing blood-channels. Two-handed axes swung into being, clotting from thick smoke before extending into twin-faced plates of warp-cursed steel, etched with runes of ending and glinting with the reflected stars of another plane. Barbed whips rippled through the flames, vast and curling and lashing with infernal acumen of their own.
Bloodthirsters. Eight of them. Forged in the image of mankind’s oldest fears, the embodiments of battle-rage and the avatars of blood-lust, these were myth-born titans of ruin. When they strode out, the horizon shuddered. When their pinions snapped, the flames thundered back greater. Wreathed in lightning, garlanded in black-edged flame, cloaked in the storm’s surge, the mightiest of the mighty vassals of the Blood God raised their vast jowls skywards, and roared.
The clouds above us erupted, sending hammering channels of crimson rain slamming earthwards. The Neverborn army screamed, lashing out with their hooked blades, a chorus of feral ecstasy unleashed on a world they had coveted since the dawn of history. For a moment it seemed as if the heavens themselves had formed the image of a giant horned face, as vast as the Palace itself, leering in incipient triumph, before the vision was obliterated by the driving blood-rain.
The wall stood beyond them, gigantic and battle-scarred, towering higher than any hive-spire and surmounted by the heaviest concentration of defences in all the Imperium. For the first time ever, I looked at it and saw in truth how fragile it was. It was a creation of men set against the infinite malice of gods. The instantiated host of the Neverborn, the immortal intelligences of the eternal ether, surged towards it now, thirsting to break apart the parapets they had foundered on before.
Before I knew it, I was running again. I was tearing down new stairwells and leaping from platforms, ramping up to full speed. My blade was snarling, setting golden flames dancing amid the bloody dark. Around me came the Grey Knights, silver ghosts in the gloom, their own weapons glittering sapphire.
I knew every one of my brothers would be doing the same. All those on the wall and all those in the eternal city would be racing to face this, to bring their blades to bear, to cut into the warp-flesh that now rose up to extinguish all we had been born to preserve.
And as I ran, only one thought possessed me, animated me, drove me onwards into the opening maw of living perdition.
We cannot fail again.
Aleya
The Black Ship Enduring Abundance burned through the void, having taken its intended cargo on board. The Cadamara came along in its wake, flanked by a mini-fleet of similar warp-capable ships, a battered collection of largely ramshackle hulls that laboured to remain in the larger vessel’s wake.
I didn’t realise just how close we’d come. I’d been so consumed with survival that I’d never appreciated how remarkable our progress had been – by the time we were intercepted we were within a warp stage of the Sol System. I had to hand it to Slovo. Despite his carping and moaning and physical frailty, he’d steered us superlatively, although whether he’d have been able to negotiate that last treacherous leg was hard to know.
Our proximity to the goal, though, was what had saved us. The Enduring Abundance had been on its home world arc, brought back to the centre just ahead of the full impact of what Navradaran, in an echo of Slovo’s words, was calling the Great Rift, the catastrophe that had scissored the galaxy in half. The Black Ship had not been originally scheduled to return to the Throneworld for another three years, but Navradaran had boarded it and given the captain new orders – its most precious cargo was no longer the shackled psykers that raged and sobbed in its holds, but the wardens who guarded them.
But he had not been merely content with that, and had steered the ship on an erratic course back to Terra, taking in every known or rumoured convent of witch-hunters in the subsector before setting the straight course home. The ship had never made it as far as Arraissa, but others had told them of our existence, and so their astropaths had put their minds out into the ether, searching for the last scraps to recover before they would be buffeted back to their origin. Somehow they latched on to us, and took the chance to reel us in. If we’d outrun them and tried to go it alone, I suspect we’d be dead by now, our skeletons chewed on by gnawers.
I’d never seen such a ship before. It was enormous, more than twenty times bigger than the Cadamara, and obviously ancient. I could hardly read the Archaic Gothic inscriptions over the many cell doors, so mysterious were the cadences and vocabulary. The entire vessel was shrouded, the lumens kept low and the corridors blanketed in darkness. The term ‘Black Ship’ was not figurative – every part of it was formed of ebon metal, faintly reflective, adorned and studded with ward-patterns against corruption. Vast ether-sinks took up the bulk of the lower hull, thrumming with constant Geller processes to discharge and eject the build-up of psychic energy on board. The huge crew – three times what would have been present on a similar Navy battleship, I guessed – prowled the corridors incessantly. Most were human-normal, bearing the unmistakeable mark of psycho-conditioning and wielding strange weapons I didn’t recognise. Some, though, were blanks. And some of those, like me, were anathema psykana.
My first thought was that perhaps I knew some of them. Perhaps there were other refugees from Hestia’s convent. It did not take long to disabuse me of that hope. These were a mongrel mixture of refugees from the League of Black Ships, or Inquisitorial warbands, or such scattered convents as I’d been a part of. There were forty-five of us in total, drawn from twelve different units, each with its own armour and insignias and bitter histories.
Once I’d had a chance to adjust to my new reality, Navradaran had explained the situation. He had been sent out into the void, as had others of his order, following orders from his Captain-General. The ether had been growing more turbulent for decades, and portents of disaster had been growing in intensity. The Sisters of Silence, having been allowed to drift into memory, were being collected together again. The final actions had been taken just in time – any later, and the Rift would have made such a muster impossible. Even so, he suspected many hundreds of convents and Black Ships remained stranded on the far side, cut off from the light of the Astronomican and unable to force passage home.
As for us, we were little better off. The Enduring Abundance had a cadre of twenty Navigators, almost all of them stronger and healthier than Slovo. The entire ship was warded and buttressed against daemonic attack, with a crew of thousands all trained from birth to detect the slightest manifestation of the empyrean, and so they’d made better headway than us. Even so, Navradaran told me, they could not remain in the void for long. Each jump was escalating in danger, and they’d lost th
ree of their Navigators to madness on the last major haul. He professed surprise that we’d lasted as long as we had, and even more surprise that we’d managed to plot a route in the absence of the Astronomican’s guide.
I didn’t tell him about the map, which remained under guard on the Cadamara. In truth I doubted whether it had been the thing that had saved us at all – Slovo claimed that it had been a poor compass, and that we had made our way largely through luck and instinct – but still I didn’t wish to have its presence disclosed. It was the one thing I had taken from the ruins of my past life, and I felt sure its existence meant something significant, but I would only share that with someone I could trust.
You might think that was foolish, given the situation, and perhaps it was, but you must remember this: I was furious. My anger with the universe, which had always been there, always bubbling under, had burst out now. I saw in the Enduring Abundance just what could have been, had the Imperium not inexplicably lost faith in us. I saw the huge resources, once placed under our direct control, that the old Sisters of Silence had been trusted to administer. I looked at this Custodian’s fabulously decorated battleplate, and saw the astonishing equipment he used, and looked at my chipped armour and thought of my rusting flamer.
Whenever we conversed, always in Thoughtmark, I felt that resentment clouding everything.
You were not fighting, I wanted to tell him. We were here, all the time, forgotten and left to fend for ourselves. You remained behind the walls, treated like gods. And now you presume to gather us to Terra, beneficent and indulgent, as if we had been wilful children ripe for scolding.
I didn’t express that to him, not in so many signs, but he must have detected my latent fury, for he wasn’t stupid. The ship’s armoury was huge, and I was fitted out with better armour and better weaponry. It didn’t wipe away the sense of injustice, but it did make me feel more lethal. I donned myself in golden armour with a rich purple cloak, just as my predecessors had worn, and replaced my old helm with a portcullis grille of pure auramite. I put my flamer aside and took up a greatblade. It was an insane weapon, almost as tall as I was, but the extravagance appealed to me.
All of us aboard spent long hours in training. There were other Custodians alongside Navradaran, and they worked obsessively in the practice cages. I had to admit they were impressive to watch. They moved incredibly fast for their size, and I guessed they would have taken out that Black Legionnaire on Arraissa far more efficiently than I had. I studied them for a long time, trying not to be too envious, and often failing. I came to hate their quiet, steady resolve. They never complained, they never got angry. Everything with them was polished and reverent, like diplomats somehow siphoned into the suits of warriors. I might have thought they were automata had I not seen the way they moved a blade. Throne, they were even well spoken, and they treated me with such relentless politeness and consideration that I wanted to scream.
That was the core problem – I needed an excuse to loathe them, and they wouldn’t give me one. So I did what they did, took up my blade, and worked myself into a lather of exhaustion. I absorbed everything I could from them all – the Custodians, my fellow Sisters, even the Black Ship’s senior garrison command – drinking in what my isolation had prevented me from learning across all those years.
I don’t know how long that journey lasted. It felt like weeks, but time in the warp passed as strangely as ever and so that might be wrong. Navradaran was sure the whole time that we were headed back for war. He told me that, over and over.
‘Terra was already on a knife-edge when I left,’ he said to me. ‘There were portents, but they led us astray. The Council was divided, and Valoris could see more clearly than anyone that we were heading for crisis. Hence this harvest.’ He smiled apologetically. ‘My apologies – that sounds disrespectful, but you take my meaning.’
I could have punched his big, elegant face. Now we were needed. Now we were wanted. I suppose that was what Lokk had picked up on, only too late to be useful. The Enemy had known more than we had, it seemed – one way or another someone would have come for us, and only we ourselves had been ignorant of where the tides were headed.
There’s a limit to how much resentment you can indulge in, however. I was a servant of the Emperor after all, and for all Navradaran’s infuriating manner I had no doubt he was right about the time of crisis. The galaxy had split in two and the Astronomican had gone out. Half of me expected to reach Terra to find it already lain waste, not that I would have ever disclosed that thought to my more pious companions.
So on the final approaches, when the Enduring Abundance crashed through the raging warp like a cetacean wallowing in crude oil, its engines spluttering and its ancient hull creaking, there were no illusions. We suited up, we prepared our blades, we prepped the landers.
We were travelling into the inferno, that we knew.
But nothing could have prepared me, not really. I might not have had a soul, but I had an intellect and I had emotions, and neither of them helped with what we found once we broke the veil.
The Enduring Abundance burned inwards from the Mandeville point at full speed, kicking in plasma drives the moment the warp bubble ripped open. The rest of the fleet came through with it, clustered together to make the best use of the Black Ship’s superior navigation and power.
I never saw any of this. I was already in my lander – a heavy slab of adamantium slung under a big launch-claw in the outer hull. I was there with four of my sisters. One of them, Reva, had come from a convent like me, one based on the agri world of Ertecia, and shared much of my slow-burn fury at the way we had been treated. The other three were crew taken from the League of Black Ships, and they professed themselves unable to understand our lingering disgruntlement. They were strange, grim-faced women, and I doubted they’d have been likeable even if they had possessed souls.
I found out later that our ingress had almost ended there, shot to pieces on the broadside of the Imperial cruiser In His Manifest Constancy. The Enduring Abundance, it seemed, had no intention of slowing down for challenge-hails, and it was only Navradaran’s presence over a frosty vid-link that prevented us being annihilated before we’d even set eyes on the Throneworld.
The entire system, it became apparent, was already in turmoil. The Naval cordon was vast, but something had got to the crews. Ships had collided, defence stations had found themselves overrun by spontaneous outbreaks of madness, energy coils had overloaded and wiped out whole gun-platforms. Most of the truly heavy battle cruisers had already been recalled to Terran orbit, and so a veritable cavalcade of heavy voidcraft was churning its way towards system-centre, streaming back to the source to assist in the incursion that had bypassed all of them and struck at the Throneworld direct.
I couldn’t know any of this, of course, closeted as I was in the narrow, cramped crew bay of the lander. All I could sense was the jaw-break rattle of the pressed-metal deck as the outer doors of the Black Ship began to cantilever open. Under normal circumstances it would have taken us days to negotiate the tortuous approaches to Terra’s orbital space. Now we were making the entire journey in a matter of hours, propelled by gargantuan engines running at full tilt. It was like arriving at some vast citadel and finding no one was home, the battlements manned by ghosts and madmen.
As the huge roar of the plasma drives began to wind down, we knew we’d arrived. I felt the lander swing away, carried out and down by the enormous extending arms. I could imagine how it looked from the outside – a sliver of metal suddenly thrust from the embrace of the Enduring Abundance’s slick black outer armour, tiny against its bulbous hide.
Rune-screeds appeared in front of me, hanging in the air from my armour’s lithcast bead. I still hadn’t got used to these tricks, these little machine-spirit devices that made my current equipment so much better than the dregs I’d made do with for so long.
I only needed to study a few lines.
It was all happening so fast. We had our assigned squads, our lines of command developed over the preceding days. Most of those on board had been in transit for longer than I had, and so the thrust into action had not come so suddenly, but even so I felt hardly prepared.
I looked over at Reva.
Ready? I signed.
Always. You?
Of course not.
She smiled, and I liked what I saw. I couldn’t see her mouth, just her eyes, but they glittered with genuine mirth.
Something heavy slammed out of place below us, and the lander trembled. I had a sudden impression of us hanging like a leaf in autumn, shaking in the cold wind before being torn from the bough.
Then the bolts pulled back, the lander’s thrusters boomed into life, and we were thrown into our dizzying descent.
I slammed back against my restraints, as did my companions. We shook and we juddered, enveloped in the numinous roar of those incredibly powerful thrusters. Soon a greater roar overtook even those, and the hold temperature began to rise.
I switched to a tactical external feed, and a vid-link of our progress flickered into jerky life across one of the roof-mounted lenses. The forward view was burning. For a moment I thought something had set us on fire, but then realised I was looking at the entire world’s troposphere. The fires were both immense and ethereal, as unnatural as the sham-flames conjured by the shedim but presumably still deadly.
Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion Page 20