The last thing I saw was its claw, armoured in bone and brass, curling as it reached for us.
III
I was the first to rise. The purr of my armour joints was a reassuring touch of familiarity after Torcrith’s enforced disembodiment. Blood flowed back into my fingers, setting them stinging.
Torcrith had no need to rise, for he hadn’t collapsed as we had. He remained sitting on the contemplation mat, watching us in meditative silence. When I met his dark eyes, he answered with a nod.
‘You saw it,’ he said.
I helped Malchadiel rise, hauling him to his feet as I answered. ‘We all saw it, though we each saw something different.’
‘That’s not unusual, when confronted by an entity of such strength. Just as reality warps around its presence, its form is so bound to the realm behind the veil that it remains in flux. In the truest sense, it is whatever it wishes to be, having ascended past the limitations of a physical form.’
‘How did it see us?’
This time, he deigned to reply. ‘It smelled our souls.’
‘Could it have killed us?’ Malchadiel asked.
‘Of course. It intended to. That’s why I pulled you back.’
Dumenidon waved me aside as I moved to help him rise. Galeo rose on his own as well.
+It masked its own existence.+
‘Indeed so,’ Torcrith agreed.
‘I’ve never heard of such a thing,’ I admitted. ‘Never once, in all my time amidst the archives.’
I looked to Galeo for enlightenment, but it was Dumenidon who replied. ‘The Conclave Diabolus.’
Galeo nodded. +I concur.+
The Conclave Diabolus was as close to legend as our archives could come: a record of the most reviled, most ardently pursued Neverborn our order had encountered in its ten-thousand-year history.
Even an eidetic memory has its flaws. Having never expected to confront any of the Conclave Diabolus in my lifetime, I’d paid little heed to their existence beyond the barest mentions in historical texts.
‘Even so,’ I said, ‘there are fewer than ten among the Conclave Diabolus capable of such mastery over reality. It cannot be one of them.’
Torcrith smiled, though I wasn’t sure why. ‘It cannot be one of them, Hyperion? Right now, the Imperium suffers through countless worlds enduring daemonic incursion across the vastness of space. In the last few days alone, I have sensed the portents and written prophecies on many of them myself. I have sensed an inhuman voice whispering words into the mind of a three-year-old girl almost three-quarters of the galaxy away from where we sit at the moment. Yet I sensed nothing of Armageddon – not the winds of the warp that brought the Devourer of Souls to the world, nor the horde of abominations that are butchering their way across it.’
He ended with a tired shake of his head. ‘So tell me, brother, how it cannot be one of them. It can be nothing else. Nothing else has the strength to mask its presence. The Dark Gods themselves hid this invasion from us. They would never act for a lesser being.’
Galeo made the sign of the aquila over his chestplate. +You were right to call the Chapter to war, Torcrith. We must commit to a crusade.+
‘But the order is spread thin across the Imperium,’ I said. ‘What can we bring to Armageddon? Ninety knights? A hundred?’
Torcrith’s eyes never left mine. ‘We will form a ragged brotherhood from the squads still within the fortress-monastery, and sail for Armageddon before the solar week is out. Hyperion, I understand your caution, but you haven’t seen all I’ve seen. Armageddon is a world on the edge of falling to the Archenemy. Already, the Wolves stand with the human defenders on the final untainted continent, falling back to defend the very last cities still standing.’
‘But there are scarcely one hundred of us,’ Malchadiel joined in. ‘That isn’t enough.’
Galeo looked over to him. +Will it be enough to annihilate the enemy hordes with overwhelming force? No. But it will be enough to banish him, brother. The Wolves and the Steel Legions can handle the rest.+
‘Suicide,’ Malchadiel said, but amended it with a smile. ‘And duty. I fear no death in the Emperor’s name. I fear only to waste his Gift.’
+This will be no waste.+
Dumenidon nodded. ‘Aye, justicar. A last charge to be remembered.’
I made the sign of the aquila myself, my fists banging on my breastplate. ‘One last matter, Brother Torcrith.’
‘Be swift. I must speak with each squad in turn. They must see what you’ve been shown.’
I gestured to the hall in which we stood. ‘You spoke of being alone here – the last Prognosticar.’
He inclined his head to that. ‘Individuals blessed with my psychic strength are rare, and my calling is no less dangerous than yours. Each death is a loss the Prognosticars feel most keenly. You were almost one of us, Hyperion. Did you know that?’
My silence answered for me.
‘It is true,’ he continued. ‘Your powers drew notice, even before you were lingering in the trials of assessment. But your lack of self-control was considered a terminal flaw for Prognostication. You were deemed unfit for entry into the Augurium.’
‘Who deemed me unfit?’
‘I did. It was I, and my brother Sorren, before his recent death. Now I am the last, and as you can see, such a weakness is a hole at the heart of our order. I pray more will rise to dwell within the Silver Tower soon.’
‘My self-control is still a flaw,’ I confessed, ‘but I thank you for your honesty.’
He smiled his subtle, sad smile again. ‘Go in honour, Castian. Ready yourselves to shed a primarch’s blood. The Lord of the Twelfth Legion awaits you on Armageddon.’
PART two
war with the wolves
FOURTEEN
THE JARL
I
My legs wouldn’t move, but they didn’t really hurt. That was the problem; that was what made it frightening. I’d expected pain. Not being able to feel my legs at all might mean I’d never walk again. I didn’t want to ask anyone else in case they agreed.
Everything looked the same with the city gone to rubble. Were we in the wreckage of a temple? A commercia? Too hard to tell. Grey stone dust covered everything, clouding around us since the building’s last wall fell.
‘Feeling’s coming back,’ I said. ‘Give me a minute.’
My friends were looking at me with expressions that said what their mouths wouldn’t: they knew I was lying.
‘Hey,’ one of them started to say.
+Hyperion.+
II
I sheltered in the shadow of a Chimera troop transport, trying and failing to ignore the rain still falling.
It was cold. Cold, cold, cold enough that it should have numbed me, but didn’t. It just hurt – hurt like an ice-burn.
The archives never described war like this. They never described the shit you actually went through, did they? It was all about the fear and the courage, the funerals and the parades afterwards, the warmth of brotherhood and the friends you made for life.
It never mentioned the weariness. That’s what war was – true war, not some little series of skirmishes between squads in the streets. Hell, no – in true war, when armies crashed together for hours and hours and hours on end, you had nowhere to run. You couldn’t just fall back to a safe haven and wait for another patrol to start.
Before a battle, you’d stand there holding back the need to piss, while forcing out bad jokes with a tongue as dry as boot leather. And after it, you’d be tired to the bone, with your arms and legs trembling with strain. After the last charge, I’d collapsed with hundreds of my regiment, just crouching or sitting where we’d been standing and fighting only moments before. Too tired to puke, too sore to voice a complaint. War stank, too. The sweat, the blood, the breath – and that was just to begin with. In the last months, I’d seen men and women soil themselves just for a few precious moments of warmth at night, and after every battle half of us would realise we’d pissed
ourselves without noticing; not from fear, but just biological necessity. We’d pissed like animals in the wild, no matter what we were doing at the time.
Jaesa pulled her rebreather mask off her swollen face, and three of her teeth came out with it, stringy with pink spit. Tym sagged to the earth with insane slowness, lying down in the wet soil with his head on a rock. I knew even as he was going down that he’d never get up again. Shalwen and Kal the Easterner were both laughing – or trying to, at least. They brayed a strengthless, breathy wheeze, thrashing in the mud, amazed to still be alive. Others kneeled in groups, thanking the distant God-Emperor, while their brothers and sisters went about the business of dying in their hundreds across the battlefield, still screaming, still crying out as they lay there in the rain.
A hand rested on my shoulder. I could smell the hot blood on those fingers before I turned to see it smearing over my uniform.
‘How bad is it?’ Cion asked. His face was as bloody as his hand. And his arm. And his chest.
‘It’s…’
Holy Throne, he’d lost an eye along with half of his face. Half of his head, even. What was I supposed to say?
‘It hurts,’ he said.
Yeah, I bet it did. How was he still alive?
‘Cion…’ I tried to say.
+Hyperion.+
III
At first, I’d tried to explain what I was seeing, but I didn’t know the right words. No, wait, that’s not quite right.
I didn’t know enough words. I couldn’t remember them, any more. Nothing I said made any sense, so I stopped saying much at all.
After that, I’d tried drawing. The patterns I drew never meant anything to the others, though. I sketched them on the walls of the command centre with a Guard-issue stylus, then on the hulls of our tanks with my boot knife, and at last, on the walls of my cell. They didn’t let me keep the knife, though. I had to use my fingers. Blood made good ink.
‘The war’s broken him,’ they kept saying. They looked at me when they said it, as if that made them right. The war hadn’t broken me. What did that even mean? I just couldn’t make them understand what I’d seen.
The last time I’d spoken to another person had been when they dragged me in here. ‘If I can just make you see,’ I’d said. They locked the door, leaving me with a bucket for waste and the walls as my parchment.
Then the attack had happened. I’d beaten on the door, shouting for a gun, swearing that I could help, and that I wanted to stand with the others.
Only I hadn’t. I hadn’t done those things. I’d stayed in the corner of my cell, silent as a secret, waiting for the sounds to go away.
The gunfire faded first. Then the screams had stopped. The base had fallen quiet soon after.
The door was still locked.
‘Thirsty,’ I said. I didn’t even realise I was talking to myself, as I drew runic symbols in a language I didn’t know, and sketched soulless creatures that had never been born.
‘Thirsty.’
‘Thirsty.’
‘Thirsty.’
+Hyperion.+
IV
I huddled in the dark, listening to the children cry. It didn’t matter any more. They’d find us even if we hid. They found everyone.
The knife in my hand was a sliver of glass from a broken window.
‘Girls,’ I said. ‘Come here.’
+Hyperion.+
V
I opened my eyes to the cold comfort of my meditation chamber aboard the Karabela.
Galeo’s presence was a ghost at the edge of my mind, insistent as a haunting. +Brother,+ he sent from elsewhere on the ship. +That’s enough. I have warned you to stay out of their minds.+
+Forgive me,+ I pulsed back. +It strengthens me to reach out.+
While true, that wasn’t the entire truth. Reaching out to the minds of humans on the world below took supreme focus and continual effort, but I hungered to see the world through the eyes of those caught in the chaos. It could be considered a vicarious pleasure of living through another being’s senses, but my curiosity was nothing so base. I wanted to know this world. I wanted to feel it the way I never would once I set foot upon it. I wanted to sense everything I could about this one world that had somehow drawn the foulest of foes to defile its surface.
Galeo’s voice came laced with patience. +I understand that, and I understand the temptation to see the world through mortal eyes. But you are needed. The brotherhood gathers.+
I rose to my feet, armour joints purring. +The Great Wolf comes?+
+He comes. And he’s not coming alone. We are to greet him aboard the flagship.+
I reached for my weapons, and left the chamber.
VI
Few souls in the Imperium command as much respect as the Master of an Adeptus Astartes Chapter. Their majesty isn’t the result of respect offered up by the masses – though many Chapter Masters earned the devotion of entire worlds, when they chose to make themselves known.
No, their respect was earned in the eyes of their brothers, and to stand at the forefront of one thousand of humanity’s finest warriors, proclaimed by the other nine hundred and ninety-nine as the one soul worthiest of leading them… What souls were worthy of such reverence and respect?
We waited for him in the main hangar of our fleet’s flagship, the Third Brotherhood battle-barge Ruler of the Black Skies. For organisation, we presented no pretence of rank and order, aligned only by the unity of squads. Justicars stood before their brothers, and ahead of us all, waiting to receive the Great Wolf, was Captain Taremar Aurellian – called Taremar the Gold for his maddeningly long list of noble deeds – Warden of the Third Brotherhood and master of the flagship.
He’d been chosen to lead us with no hint of opposition. Grand Master Vaurmand, as overall Lord of the Third Brotherhood, was bound to remain in the fortress-monastery. Tradition dictated his fate, no matter how he’d raged against it: Titan must always have one of the eight Grand Masters present to oversee the order’s operations. With Vaurmand, only a skeleton presence remained to walk our ancient castle’s cold halls.
One hundred and nine knights stood upon the deck here. A mere eighteen remained on Titan. The rest of the Chapter, may the Emperor bless them, fought their own battles spread across the stars.
A cadre of inquisitors stood with us, arrayed in their finery and battle armour respectively, depending on their personal preferences. Annika was one of thirty inquisitors to journey with us; she noticed my attention and returned it with a nod. At her side, Darford, the Khatan, Merrick, Vasilla and Clovon lingered in something approaching formality. For once, Darford wasn’t the only one standing with his back straight. A brief drift over their surface thoughts betrayed their focus, which to my shame was tighter than my own.
Armageddon rolled below us in stellar slowness, visible through the open hangar bay doors. Its visage was a patchwork of blue, green and yellow, marred only by the scabrous black pockmarks of burning cities. The merest flicker of psychic sense was all it took to feel the tension emanating from the gathered knights. We had no desire to be standing up here, safe in orbit, while the world below suffered violation after violation.
We’d arrived almost twelve hours ago, and the first message received from the surface had been from the Great Wolf himself.
‘Bide,’ he demanded. That, and nothing more.
Talk spread through our makeshift brotherhood soon enough, even though we journeyed here on different ships. Taremar was said to be enraged at being ordered into docility, like some bladeless serf. The justicars reacted variously with anger of their own, or reluctantly ceding to the Great Wolf’s greater understanding of the war below.
Galeo had been one of the latter. +We are a weapon best used once,+ he’d said to us, hours after our arrival when we were beginning to pace. +The Great Wolf will draw us as a blade and ram us through the Archenemy’s heart in one swift thrust. We will serve no one if we reveal ourselves too early, and commit to uncoordinated strikes.+
+The Wolves are down there, and have been for months. I trust their eyes for now. If you cannot survive a touch of bruised pride, then you still have as much to learn about self-control as Hyperion.+
While I couldn’t argue it was undeserved, I didn’t appreciate the comparison. It still rankled hours later as we stood on the hangar deck waiting for the Great Wolf’s gunship.
‘Why don’t they just teleport up to us?’ I voxed to the others.
+Fenrisian superstition,+ Galeo replied. I couldn’t miss the taste of derision in his silent voice. +I do not know the details, so I try not to judge them too harshly for it.+
The gunship came in slow, though its landing gear had scarce touched the reinforced steel of the deck before the gangramp began to descend on whining hydraulics. A group of figures stood in the red gloom of the Thunderhawk’s crew bay – thirteen by my count – before walking down in a loose pack.
We didn’t stand at attention, no more than they did. We watched in our vague ranks, conceding no dominance and offering no submission, facing them as equals. Perhaps they considered that their right, though in truth we did them a great honour. They were genetic thinbloods; their gene-seed formed from the flesh and blood of the Emperor’s son, Leman Russ. Our gene-seed came from a more direct, purer source. We didn’t call it the Emperor’s Gift as a jest.
Talismans rattled against their armour as they walked: trinkets and fetishes of string, amber, ivory and stone. Their armour was grey – not the unpainted purity of burnished ceramite, but the unsubtle grey of winter skies given over to storms. Wolfskin cloaks and loincloths overlaid their armour, the hues ranging all the way from as black as coal to a dirty, spattered white that reminded me of blood against snow.
Logan Grimnar led his pack directly towards the waiting figure of Captain Taremar, who wore a cloak of his own, in regal white trimmed by traditional grey. The Great Wolf was unhelmed, his scarred features bared without shame, his shaggy mane of hair entwined with knucklebones and the fangs of beasts, filthy enough to form accidental dreadlocks. Perhaps once it had been a darker, oakier brown, but winter had salted it with the first signs of silvering. Grimnar had led the Wolves for over a century; he’d earned the right to his scars. His steps thundered with dull echoes, as the joints of his Terminator warplate gave dry snarls in uneven accompaniment.
The Emperor's Gift Page 18