The Emperor's Gift

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  I felt them trying to read me, the way one knows when someone is watching in secret from nearby. That same sense of gentle discomfort, an elusive invasion, prickled the hair on the back of my neck.

  I resisted it. Partly from instinct, partly to see if I was capable – I reinforced my thoughts behind a wall of concentrated pressure. One of the paladins grunted, and both turned their helmed heads towards me.

  +Hyperion…+ Galeo warned.

  I lowered my resistance. Both of them raked through my mind, less gentle than they would have been had I not resisted in the first place. I felt them dredging through my recent recollections, pulling up what happened to Sothis, and seeing my shame in the aftermath.

  +That’s enough,+ I sent, and repelled them with a focused shove. The one who’d grunted before took a step back.

  +Hyperion,+ Galeo pulsed again. +Control yourself.+

  I could have argued. I could have cited that they were being needlessly invasive. Would it have sounded as foolish as it felt in my own mind? Far better to stay quiet and say nothing.

  ‘You may enter.’ The paladins spoke as one. They were still watching me as we walked between them. Lord Vaurmand didn’t come with us, nor did he acknowledge us as we left him there.

  +I felt you force them back,+ Malchadiel sent. +Your strength is admirable, Hyperion, but the Librarius will come for you if you’re not careful.+

  I had no answer for that, either. To be pulled from service within a squad and isolated from the rest of the knighthood… It was said to be an honour, of course. Such a position carried rank and responsibility, but it came with its share of sacrifice. No one wished to stand alone on the fringes of an order founded on the strength of brotherhood.

  The bronze gateway opened in stages, rattles and clanks accompanying the withdrawal of the sliding bars keeping the portal sealed shut. When it rumbled open at last, I watched both doors grind back on heavy tracks, close to three metres wide.

  The warm gloom of candlelight greeted us.

  +Enter,+ said another voice – one laced with weariness. +I bid you welcome, Castian.+

  V

  Even looking in his direction caused me pain. Behind the corona of psychic strength, his features had an agelessness that defied easy explanation. I caught the sense of someone young, idealistic, but ferociously strong and so very, very tired.

  +Forgive me,+ he pulsed, though his sending was an insistent pressure behind the eyes, rather than a whisper.

  The strength of his presence faded – not diminished, but consciously dampened, with the sense of the figure holding it inside the way someone might hold their breath.

  ‘It is rare that I receive other psychic visitors in person.’ His mortal voice differed only in how weary it sounded. If anything, he seemed even more exhausted. ‘I forget how consciousnesses can clash, sometimes.’

  With the corona gone, we stood before a knight out of his battle plate, wearing a style of formal attire I didn’t recognise: a polished chainmail hauberk with a grey cloak draped over one shoulder. He was surely no older than I or Malchadiel, and he carried little evidence of life beyond the monastery’s walls. Even his hands looked soft and unmarked by calluses or scarring.

  ‘I am Torcrith,’ he said.

  +Galeo,+ the justicar replied. We followed suit, saying our names in turn. He smiled at that.

  ‘I know who you are. I knew even before I spoke with Inquisitor Jarlsdottyr.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  He looked at me. ‘The spire has a hundred chambers, Hyperion. She is above us, in one of them. Her wounded ward, Grauvr, is in another. I will take you to her soon, but some of what we say is not for human ears to hear.’

  ‘We’ve not been told why we were summoned,’ Malchadiel admitted. ‘Are we to be questioned by the Prognosticars?’

  Torcrith’s tired smile returned. ‘Brother Malchadiel, I am the only Prognosticar here.’

  ‘The only one present on Titan?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘The only one still alive.’

  THIRTEEN

  LORD OF THE TWELFTH LEGION

  I

  Torcrith led us through into a larger, circular chamber. This one offered the same cold atmosphere of austerity and emptiness, even though hundreds of candles lined the walls in neat alcoves. A meditation mat lay at the room’s heart, surrounded by silver hexagrammic wards. Some were ringed in turn by concentric circles of white dust.

  Torcrith lowered himself to the mat. Despite his physiology, no different from ours, the Emperor’s Gift wasn’t enough to sustain him. He was weary, that much was obvious, but the lines cracking his face and the halting movements spoke of a deeper flaw. I’d seen the effects of psychic overexertion in humans, but never before in one of the knighthood.

  ‘Do I look so weak to your eyes?’ he asked. Once he knelt on the mat, he looked over at me.

  ‘No, my lord. Just weary beyond measure.’

  ‘I am no “lord”, Hyperion. I am your brother and you are mine. Nothing more, nothing less.’ He brushed his closed eyes with a thumb and fingertip. ‘I have failed the order most grievously. The Wolf told the truth, you know. The Armageddon War has been raging for weeks now, and their world has fallen silent. Is it not a Prognosticar’s duty to hunt through the Sea of Souls, seeking the ripples caused by our Archenemy’s greatest intrusions? And yet… at no point have I sensed a whisper of this in the warp’s winds.’

  He looked at us again, each in turn. ‘What does that suggest to you?’

  ‘That the enemy masked its approach to Armageddon,’ stated Dumenidon.

  +And the threat is powerful enough to conceal its own existence,+ Galeo added.

  Torcrith nodded to both answers. ‘Both are true, but not the truth entire. You have something to say, Hyperion?’

  Had he been reading my mind? ‘No. I have nothing to say.’

  ‘But you are holding something back. Speak your thoughts, if you would.’

  ‘It suggests to me,’ I ventured, ‘that one Prognosticar is not enough to serve the Grey Knights Order.’

  He nodded. ‘Coldest truth, from the tongue of the youngest among us. It doesn’t exonerate me from blame, but yes, the order is poorly served when I alone reside at the apex of the Silver Tower. The galaxy is vast, and I am but one man, with one mind. Still…’

  Torcrith trailed off, slowing his breathing as he closed his eyes. I could feel him reaching beyond his body, his consciousness drifting into the aether.

  +Come with me, Castian. I will show you the world we call Armageddon.’

  II

  I have, in my life, witnessed many acts of supreme psychic power, on both sides of the Eternal War. I’ve seen a lone man – admirable for his deluded courage if nothing else – sacrifice his soul to render his body an open gateway for daemons to enter our reality. I’ve seen one of my brothers reassemble an entire battle tank over the course of an hour, without physically touching a single piece of the wreckage. I’ve travelled across the surface of a world, from one continent to the next, city by city, drifting from mind to mind in search of a single secret.

  I believe nothing will ever match what Torcrith was capable of at the top of the Silver Tower.

  He gathered us up the way a tired beggar collects his coins at the day’s end, with no more than a sigh of effort. For a moment, I felt part of him – an observer within his consciousness – feeling the same strain he laboured through every hour of his life.

  +Forgive me,+ he pulsed. The stress that threatened to crack open my skull vanished as his attention grazed over us. +It wasn’t my intention to share that torment.+

  We moved without moving. The way he pulled us from our bodies was kin to a psychic reaching only in the way human breath is kin to a storm’s wind. One moment we existed in the candlelit chamber, the next we sailed among the stars.

  Few of us project our psyches the same way, and no knight but a Prognosticar had the same strength Torcritch displayed. We didn’t move th
rough the heavens; no stellar dance of planets passing by. He pulled us from our bodies, up into the black sky above Titan’s curdled atmosphere, and plunged right into the warp.

  Undefended by a warship’s Geller field – even unprepared to muster my own psychic strength – instinct forced me to resist his control. I thrashed in his invisible grip, throwing silent force against his consciousness even as it shrouded us. Too little, too late. We slid through the oily seas, ripping through an infinity of screaming souls.

  For the first time, I couldn’t make out individual faces in the boiling colours.

  +That is because we are moving too fast for them to manifest, let alone reach out to us.+

  +Even the Karabela cannot move at this speed.+

  +In warp flight, the Karabela is a physical construct in a realm without physics. She is real in an unreal place. So she struggles and suffers, labouring against the tides.+

  But he suffered, too. I could feel the echoes of his pain. He couldn’t mask it entirely.

  +How powerful are you?+

  I felt Torcrith’s weary amusement. +Not powerful enough, else Armageddon would never have been a surprise to the order.+

  Even as we tore through the shrieking ocean, I felt his focus spreading and shifting, casting about in every direction.

  +I am reading the tides,+ he answered my unasked question. +Seeking any sense of invasion into the material universe. They flow as the ocean becomes rivers, and rivers become the ocean. Thousands and thousands and thousands every second; on worlds, on deep space outposts, on ships lost in the warp…+

  Is this what he did? Was his life reduced to night after night of projecting his soul into the empyrean, tracking the flow of every single thread into humanity’s empire?

  +Yes. But I am only one hunter, Hyperion. I cannot stalk my way down every thread. Only the largest incursions matter to me. The most infected. The most dangerous. The most laden with ripening prophecy.+

  I felt Torcrith mustering his strength for something, but he gave us no time to brace. We tore back through the veil, lashing back into the true void in a sudden burst of absolute silence.

  Somehow, that was more disquieting than the shrieking.

  +How… How could we be here so quickly…?+ one of my brothers asked. I wasn’t sure which one, for Torcrith’s consciousness overpowered ours. +It will take the Karabela weeks to reach this world.+

  Torcrith didn’t answer. He merely bade us look.

  Armageddon was a world much as Terra had been, in the heathen ages of Old Earth. Jungles belted its equatorial regions, lush and green from the serenity of orbit. Wastelands bleached across much of the world’s face – tundra at the poles, and ash waste deserts across the larger continental bodies. Deep seas covered much of the globe, which marked it apart from Terra more than any other distinction. Terra’s oceans had burned away into dust and nothingness millennia before my birth.

  I turned from the world to seek the Imperial ships in orbit. With the world besieged and its cities flooded by the Archenemy, I expected an armada of Naval battleships and Imperial Guard troop transports – to say nothing of the Space Wolves cruisers.

  Beyond the satellite network and orbital docking stations above each of the hive cities, I saw little evidence of activity. The Space Wolves ships numbered three in total: a battle-barge of ancient and grand heritage, drifting alongside two smaller destroyers.

  +Where is the reclamation fleet?+

  +Do you see those hive cities burning? The war is only a handful of weeks old. While that’s an eternity to the people suffering in those cities, it’s not long enough for Imperial reinforcement. The Wolves sent their lesser ships out to cry for aid – messages in bottles – but to no avail. The Archenemy followed them, overran them, and rendered them silent.+

  +But the Frostborn,+ I pulsed, +and the Veregelt.+

  +They reached us eventually, though at great cost in priceless blood and loyal iron. I’ve quested through the tides, Hyperion. No other help is coming. By the time the rest of the Imperium learns of this war’s true depths, the world will be broken.+

  +I don’t understand. Your strength brought us here. Project yourself into the minds of governors and generals on nearby worlds. Rally them. Bring them here.+

  +I am a seer, not a speaker.+ For the first time, I sensed Torcrith’s frustration. He struggled to see things as we did, so different were our perceptions of the universe. +Think of astropathy, brother. It isn’t a clear bridge from one mind to another. Even contact between the strongest minds is an exchange of dreams and flickering memories that may or may not be understood, or heeded. Look to our own speech, when the knights of our order speak mind to mind. How much stronger are we by comparison to mortal men? Our minds make words from the connection between one consciousness and another, but are we speaking these words to one another? Of course not. We share emotions, intentions, meanings… and our perceptions twist that contact into something we can process with ease.+

  No. That wasn’t good enough. +You should still try.+

  +Should I? Perhaps I have. Perhaps I’ve already done so, and these mighty reinforcements will still not arrive in time. What vessels cut through the warp with the same speed as ours? None. And even if these legions of reinforcements arrive, will they be able to defeat the Principal Evil? Never.+

  +A shame,+ one of my brothers pulsed. +Their lives could be spent delaying the enemy’s advance before our arrival.+

  Dumenidon, then. I knew him well. Torcrith’s reply rippled with cold sincerity.

  +You speak as many of our order might speak, but the choice becomes one of morality against pragmatism. Every soul that witnesses the Archenemy on that world will be put to death for the sin of knowing daemons are real. Should I summon great hosts of Imperial soldiers, merely to doom them to the same fate? Armageddon lives and dies by its human defenders, brother. The Wolves stand with them. And, soon, so shall we. That will be enough death, I fear, without dragging more into the slaughter.+

  +I still don’t understand,+ Galeo confessed. His silent voice, so familiar to my mind, was undeniable. +I sense no greater corruption from this world than any one of a hundred other missions.+

  +I felt the same,+ Torcrith confessed. +First, look to the world’s skies. Do you see the debris burning up during its descent? Here a flare of flame, there a spark of fire. That is all that remains of the Devourer of Stars, dead to Space Wolves guns and consigned now to become ash. It was, in its foul prime, a twisted hulk large enough to sustain thousands of warriors and Neverborn aboard its warped decks. It drifted here upon the Sea of Souls, guided by the hands of black gods. I sensed nothing of its voyage, or its arrival. And at last I know why.+

  +Show us,+ sent Galeo.

  We fell towards the world, soaring above a city lost to char and ruin. Smoke choked the air, veiling our sight until we sank below the morbid cloud cover.

  In the city’s heart, ragged warriors armoured in ceramite of scarlet and bronze chanted and screamed to the blackening sky. They gripped axes forged in the Imperium’s infancy, chain-teeth roaring out of time with the warriors’ maddened chanting – which itself owed little to rhythm. Many of them were hunched and howling things, desecrating the human dead; eating the flesh of the slain or taking trophies. Others were screaming, laughing while piling the defenders’ headless remains into great corpse pits.

  And yet, there was something else here. Something vast and molten, giving off a sense of threatening size and devastating heat, without truly revealing itself.

  +You can’t see it,+ Torcrith pulsed, +can you?+

  I looked over the devastation, reaching out with my senses no differently from a blind man reaching with his hands. I sought the same resistance he’d feel when his fingers finally brushed a wall.

  And there it was. Behind the diseased humidity and stench of fresh blood: a shadow that stained the horde’s core. It rose from the wreckage of a temple, spreading monstrous wings to the sky.

  One of my brothers breat
hed the words +Throne of the Emperor.+ It may have even been me.

  Bone and ceramite armoured its sweating flesh in equal measure, while its skin was a scorched and cracked display of inhuman red meat, strained by pulsing veins of black iron. A thrashing mane of dreadlocked cables rose from the back of its malformed head in a daemonic crest. Some became brass chains ending in bound skulls. Others were connected to the creature’s ornate bronze-scale armour.

  +I… I…+ Malchadiel pulsed. +What am I seeing…?+

  +Rage.+ Torcrith sounded almost saddened by the thing in the ruins, wreathed in black smoke. +You are seeing rage incarnate. The serenity of depthless wrath.+

  +The smoke is bleeding,+ sent Dumenidon. And it was true. The way rain formed in thunderheads, so too did blood fall from the smoke rising in thick coils from the creature’s scarred flesh.

  With our senses shared, I realised we all saw something different. Dumenidon saw little more than the smoke. Galeo witnessed a thing of cracking bones and scaled armour, haloed not by flame and smoke but by a crescent of spiked gold. Once I became aware of our divided perceptions, the creature shifted between them all.

  Dumenidon had been wrong, though.

  +That isn’t smoke,+ I sent. Faces contorted in the mist, twisting and drowning in the foulness. +Those are souls.+

  It turned its eyes to us. The skeletal landscape of its face turned with a slowness I could only describe as bestial, but it most definitely saw us. The coal pits of its eyes steamed as blood bubbled and boiled in the thing’s swollen tear ducts. Slowly – still so very slowly – its jaws opened to reveal a quivering tongue the colour of spoiled meat, with pinkish saliva roping and stretching between rows of sharkish teeth. The thing’s tongue flopped in its jaws, slapping against the fangs – a fish trapped out of water.

  +How can it see us?+

  Torcrith didn’t answer me.

  It roared without warning, without even needing to drag back a breath. The sound shamed thunder – shamed even the storms of Titan – as the creature bellowed out a sonic boom.