Jochi remained silent. Shiban could sense his uneasiness.
You feel it too.
‘They lost their battle,’ Shiban went on. ‘Tell me, Jochi – what do hain do with the bodies they take?’
Jochi nodded, as if his khan had confirmed something he had also noticed. ‘There is no mutilation.’
‘And these cuts…’ Shiban trailed off. He looked up at the sky. ‘When does Sangjai get here?’
‘He said within the hour. He is bringing a lander.’
‘I want the third one extracted,’ said Shiban. ‘I want all three taken to the Kaljian.’
‘What are we looking for, khan?’ asked Jochi.
Shiban didn’t answer immediately. He stared out across the plain, out to where the atmosphere was curdling into fresh storms.
This world is sick. Its soul is hateful.
‘I do not know, Jochi,’ he said quietly.
Torghun walked down the corridors of the Starspear. His movements were fluid. He barely felt the wounds he’d taken on Chondax any more. The whole Legion was patching up, making good, and he liked the feel of it. Some of the old disarray seemed to have been purged from the White Scars’ planning recently, replaced by what looked like some clear-headed concern for practicalities. He didn’t know why that was, though whispers ran through the fleet that a Terran had been appointed as a new counsellor to the Khan. They said it was a woman, someone high up in the Administratum, someone with the patience and the stubbornness to take some control over the Legion’s erratic direction.
Torghun hoped that the rumours were true. It would be good to see some control imposed. Over the years he’d come to appreciate some virtues of the Chogorian way, but that didn’t mean he’d ever found it easy to accept their shortcomings. If someone had finally decided to do something about that, so much the better.
The corridor around him was lit low, barely illuminating the pale walls. He passed a few ship-ratings as he went, all of whom bowed respectfully. They were mostly Terrans, though some from other worlds mingled among them. As time went on the Legion was less drawn from the Throneworld. He’d heard it said that in time all White Scars would be recruited from Chogoris.
Not yet, though the Terrans were a clear minority. It was hard not to become defensive about it. Chogorians were far too courteous for outright hostility – but occasionally Torghun had caught… looks. Or maybe gestures, passed between members of the same culture that he was excluded from by his own ignorance.
Or perhaps he imagined it all. That was also possible.
He reached the chamber he’d been heading for and pulled a hood up over his head. The lumens burned even lower, and the place had the look of a dormant area. The Starspear was a big ship, with capacious crew-holds and half-empty weapon-bays, and several decks were underused. He hadn’t passed any ratings for some time.
Torghun looked both ways before depressing an entry chime. After a pause, a low voice came over the comm. ‘State nature of business.’
‘Open the door, Nozan,’ Torghun said wearily.
It slid back, revealing a large space beyond: a hangar, largely empty, also poorly lit, with just a few transit-crates stacked around the edges. The floor was polished to a high sheen and reflected the lumens glassily. Above them, huge in the darkness, hung the emblem of the Legion, the lightning-strike in white and gold.
Thirteen figures waited for him, all Terrans, all out of armour and draped in cowled robes, all Space Marines. They remained still as he entered, completing them, bringing the number to fourteen.
‘Welcome, brother,’ said one with Hibou’s voice, inclining his covered head. ‘We were beginning to wonder if you would turn up.’
‘I was detained,’ said Torghun, taking his place in the circle.
‘I hope you were not observed.’
Torghun shot the speaker a withering look, not that he could have seen it. ‘What do you think?’
Hibou smiled thinly under his hood’s shadow. ‘So you have it?’
‘Really?’ asked Torghun, increasingly annoyed. Hibou was a khan just like him, commander of the Brotherhood of the Dawn Sky. ‘Do we have to do this?’
‘It is a formality. Then we can get started.’
Torghun shook his head and reached into his robes. He withdrew the medal – heavy, silver, marked with the head of a hawk imposed across a lightning-strike. ‘Satisfied?’
Hibou nodded. ‘Entirely.’ He gestured to the others, who pulled their cowls back.
Torghun knew all their names, their ranks, their companies. He knew each of them better than some of his own battle-brothers. Some matched his rank, though most were below him.
Brotherhoods everywhere, overlapping and contradicting. We have woven a strange tapestry here.
‘So we are gathered,’ said Hibou. ‘Let us begin.’
Torghun drew in a deep breath. Something about the early stiffness of lodge gatherings always wearied him. They were more satisfying once the wine started flowing and the real business could be done.
But that was just him. The others all took it very seriously. He had to respect that.
Soon it would begin, though. The real work.
It had all started with Nikaea.
Targutai Yesugei had known it even at the time. Every month that passed only reinforced his certainty. He had been there, with Ahriman, Magnus and the others. He had spoken, he had argued. Much of the debate had taken place in the corridors around the great arena, some of it in the presence of the greatest of all of them.
But after the Master of Mankind had spoken, of course, there was no longer any debate to be had. So many great minds, great warriors – they had all fallen silent at once. Perhaps they should have worried about that then, but no one did.
Something defining had taken place on that world. At times Yesugei thought that a terrible mistake had been made; at others, that one had been avoided. No matter how hard he turned the matter over in his mind, the truth of it eluded him.
He stood now, alone, out on the Altak, watching the wind brush the grass and feeling the sun on his exposed face. The empty landscape of Chogoris yawned off in every direction, unbroken by hill or tree. The vastness of it never failed to make one humble. It freed the mind.
Yesugei had heard it said that the human mind coped poorly with the immense vacuity of his birth-world, and that those who had been raised there were doomed to a kind of madness of insignificance.
He narrowed his eyes, watching the blue-green haze of the horizon blur out of focus.
Significance, he thought to himself. That is the real madness – to assume that we matter at all.
He allowed his mind to run free of the shell of his body, drifting out of itself and sighing like a spectre on the immortal wind.
He considered himself.
What do I see?
He saw a weather-worn figure, knee-deep in rustling rejke grass. He saw archaic battleplate, reverently cared for but age-blunt at the edges. He saw leather-brown flesh, hard and mottled with ink tattoos; oil-black hair gathered in a topknot; a dome of crystals over his head that flashed and winked in the sun.
He saw the trappings of his craft – a staff, topped with a bleached aduu-skull; the totems, the symbols, painted or engraved on the ivory of his armour.
Look deeper.
He saw the faint penumbra of force in the air, the heat-shimmer of power, the harmonics in his movement. He saw the world respond to him, reaching out, aware of him in its dim, eternal way.
That was all proscribed now. Since Nikaea, such things were to be put away.
He let his mind return to his body. He looked at the world with his own eyes. He breathed with his own mouth, and felt his own augmented lungs take in cold, clear air.
‘It is what I am,’ Yesugei said out loud. ‘I can no more put it aside than I could put out my eyes.’
His brow furrowed, making the long scar down his left cheek twitch.
Something defining had taken place.
; It had all started with Nikaea.
The passage of time had passed like this.
On Ullanor, the Warmaster had been invested. Yesugei was there, standing by the Great Khan’s side, watching with approval as Horus Lupercal took up the office. The two of them, Horus and the Khan, had fought together to take the system. They liked one another. Of all his brothers, the Khan had only ever been close to two, and Horus was the first.
Yesugei heard them confer in the aftermath.
‘I hope that I can call on you,’ Horus had said.
‘You call, I answer,’ the Khan had replied.
Then they had parted. The grand gathering of primarchs and commanders and battleships and officials dispersed, setting course for a thousand destinations and making the warp light up with the trails of their passage. The Great Crusade commenced again, though this time with a Warmaster at its apex, not an Emperor.
The Khan had been sent to the worlds of the Chondax System. He was sent to hunt the remnants of the empire destroyed on Ullanor, the last slivers of Urlakk’s greenskins. Perhaps some would have balked at that – it was not prestigious work – but the Khan was happy enough. It was hunting, and in a way that he understood: cavalry charges across open spaces, going up against prey that had no concept of capitulation or self-pity. He had never complained.
Nearly all of his Legion went with him, ranked in their various brotherhoods, eager for the hunt. Scores of white ships cut the void, each crammed with warriors of the ordu, all desperate to get back in the chase.
Yesugei did not go with them. Other duties called. An obscure world had appeared on Legion communiqués during the final phases of the Ullanor campaign. The Sigillite’s marker had been on many of them – others were classified, for the eyes of the Emperor’s gene-sons only.
That was the first Yesugei knew of Nikaea. Back then he had thought little of it. What was one world amongst the thousands the Legion had already charted? So many worlds had come and gone, falling one by one under the aegis of the ever-expanding Imperium of Man.
But it turned out to be more than that. In the end, it became everything, the fulcrum upon which the fate of a species turned.
He wished he had known at the time. Perhaps he might have found some way to prepare for it better. The outcome might have been different.
‘We will look back on this and weep,’ Ahriman had told him after the verdict.
Yesugei had nodded. ‘You are right,’ he had replied.
He walked through the grassland. The stems parted before him like water. Khum Karta was days distant, long since fallen below the smooth horizon. He was in the lands of the Khan now, the old Talskar hunting ranges. Few prey-beasts remained – they had become too good at hunting them, too careless at restraining themselves.
Yesugei thought that if he had taken a berkut out with him, perhaps he would have spied something cowering out in the openness, belly pressed against the earth and ears twitching. Then he could have gone after it in the old way, using the strength of his body and the agility of his mind – no weapons, no weather-magic.
No, that would be a sham. He could never go back. Everything had changed, for better or worse.
‘I do not know what to do,’ he said out loud, as if the Altak could hear and answer. ‘My dreams do not answer. Why is that?’
The wind said nothing. It pushed against him, buffeting across his breastplate and wearing at the ceramite edges of his shoulder-guards.
Something strange was happening. He had no words to describe it precisely. He had awoken one night with the sense that the entire galaxy was convulsing, like some vast creature disturbed in its sleep. He had heard screaming from far away. It had felt as if the screams were coming from worlds on the edge of knowledge, burning like candles in the infinite dark, but that was impossible.
If he had put his gifts aside – as he had been commanded to do – he might have avoided such dreams, but the tests of heaven did not come and go. They were not like clothes that one could discard. They were in his blood, in his breath.
Since the Khan, whom the Chogorians called Khagan, had left for Chondax, nothing had been heard of him. It was as if a great veil had been draped across the sector. No astropaths penetrated the shroud, no communications of any kind came from the other side.
Such blackouts were hardly rare – the way of the warp made any kind of long-range communication unpredictable and prone to interruption – but something about the completeness of it made Yesugei uneasy. Other sectors had also gone quiet. He had heard rumours that the light of the Astronomican was becoming intermittent. The Master of the Orbital Defence Grid on Chogoris told him that some ships had been lost entirely, something that with Legion-sanctioned Navigators was rare.
By themselves such signs were not sufficient to cause alarm, for the galaxy was a perilous place and the Great Crusade had only succeeded in banishing some of those perils. For all that, it was hard to shake the creeping sense of something happening.
Yesugei snorted to himself.
Something happening! Can I be no more exact that that?
But he could not. There were no interpretable patterns, no signs that could be read and understood. That alone was cause for concern.
He stopped walking, still knee-deep in grass, alone amid an ocean of nothingness. He saw the tips moving in gentle waves, travelling in ripples like whispers.
Some comfort was in those movements. Such undulations had swept across these lands long before the first explorators had arrived in bulky colony ships, ready to seize mastery of the emptiness and bend it to their will. When the hand of mankind was gone again, as it most assuredly would be one day, the grass would still be there, whispering and undulating in a hollowness of cold air and hard sunlight.
I cannot stay here.
The resolve had been growing for days, and now it reached crisis-point. His orders after Nikaea had been clear: return to Chogoris and await further instruction. He had waited for those instructions a long time, and it could no longer be believed that they were likely to come at any point soon.
Yesugei was, and had always been, the Khagan’s counsellor. The two of them had forged an understanding, a way of dancing around one another until the truth emerged. Yesugei knew that he needed the primarch; he flattered himself that, in some less obvious way, the primarch needed him. They had complementary skills. They had shared enough long campaigns and endured enough hardship to trust one another’s judgement.
He would not have failed to summon me. Something is wrong. I have lingered here long enough.
No more insight would come to him on Chogoris. He would have to find his way to the Legion, swimming against the turbulent warp currents until the mystery of the veil could be resolved.
From the enquiries he had already made, he knew that would be difficult.
‘It’s like a storm,’ the Master of the Grid had told him. ‘A huge one, eating up systems. I’ve never seen the like.’
It would have been safer to stay on Chogoris, perhaps wiser too. But safety had never been a concern of his, and ever since Nikaea the limits of wisdom seemed to have been soundly breached.
Yesugei stood square, leaning on his skull-topped staff and gazing up into the clear heavens.
‘I could walk these plains for a lifetime and not find the answer,’ he said out loud, his voice snatched away by the wind and turned to nothing. ‘The time has come to seek it in the void.’
Then he remembered what Ahriman had told him on the last day that they had spent together on Nikaea.
‘Magnus will not stand for it,’ he had warned. ‘Once a mind is opened it can never be closed.’ He had leaned closer. Yesugei remembered how it had been: the closeness between them, the shared understanding between kinsmen of the Librarius. ‘Speak to your Khan. He has always been with us. He understands.’
Yesugei had nodded. ‘I will, when I can, but he can be hard to find.’
‘So I hear. Try, though. Magnus has need of friends, and we have need of
allies. Speak to him.’
Since then, nothing. No word from Prospero, or Chondax, or Nikaea, or Terra. It was as if the universe had closed in on itself, holding its breath, tensing for some terrible trauma to come.
Yesugei started to walk again. He would go back to Khum Karta, and from there he would take ship. He had been alone for too long, and now a change needed to be made.
It had all started with Nikaea. He still had no idea where it would end.
Ships gathered like sleek, grey sharks in the void, ghosting on low-thrust above the rusty glow of the Alaxxes Nebula. Dozens of capital vessels hung at rest, immense and turreted, prow-lights blinking gently above the abyss. Each was attended by a school of lesser craft – fleet-runners, frigates, outriders, gunships. All of them had the same battle-burned look, the same scorched enginarium flanks, the same pockmarked hull plates. Some limped along on a scintilla of normal power, enclosed in webs of scaffolding and gun-drones. Others were carved open, exposing striated lattices of inner decks. The flickers of a million arc-welders danced across the honeycombs, pricking the soft murk of the gas clouds.
Only one type of fleet in the galaxy had such a profile. The Imperial Army possessed larger complements – vast conglomerations of swollen troop-carriers and supply behemoths – but they had nothing to compare with such concentrated killing power. Only a Legiones Astartes battle-group could muster such monsters of murder.
Each was gunmetal-grey, adorned with runes and bearing the shamanic company-signatures of Fenris. Each had been made to reflect the savage hearts of those who piloted them: the prows were muzzles, replete with the curving lines of jowl-snarls over jutting forward lances. They were slivers of ferocity hammered into dagger-shaped lines and given hearts of growling, unending fire.
Hrafnkel was at the centre of the muster, heavier and more brutal than any other, ploughshare-bowed, spine curved with the jagged profile of a thousand defence towers and drive housings, belly lit with the dull light of ruinous weapon batteries. The shadows of its attendants – fleet-tenders, maintenance vessels, shuttles, guard-destroyers – crawled across its colossal flanks like clouds across a mountain face.
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