Yesugei fixed his mind upon the rune. It spun before his mind’s eye, throbbing like a wound in the fabric of the universe.
‘Close,’ he commanded, then again, lapsing into Khorchin. ‘Yake’en.’
With a grind like rusty iron being dragged over steel, the rune winked out.
Yesugei opened his eyes, relieved. He turned to look back up at the galactic map.
It had changed. The stars pulled together, dragging into a single clump like a swarm of glowflies. The golden luminescence intensified, burning painfully. The machine’s engines gave out in a series of smoky clangs, but the shimmer kept growing.
Xa’ven drew his hammer, Henricos his bolter.
‘Can you halt it?’ the Salamanders legionary asked, standing his ground while staring at the swirling fog above.
Yesugei took his staff in both hands. The aduu skull at the tip rippled with finger-tips of lightning. The whole chamber felt suddenly tight and humid, as if too much air were pressed into too little space.
‘Machine is closed,’ he said.
Henricos backed away. ‘Well, something’s still working.’
The stars drew closer, accelerating into conglomeration and melding hard. A clap like thunder echoed around the vault, cracking the machine’s containment shell and resounding up the shaft above them.
‘Get back!’ warned Yesugei, suddenly realising what was happening.
The lights shuddered out. A sound like a fractured scream echoed from the air around them. What remained of the projected starfield coalesced into an inky clot and fell fast, ripping into corporeality and cracking to the floor. It burst, shattering like an eggshell.
Bursting free of it came a skeletal, long-limbed creature with blood-red skin and long, curving horns. It had the same molten eyes, the same needle teeth. It was bigger than all of them and moved with a jerky, unreal speed. It pounced across the deck, squatting like some vast and grotesque insect, before leaping right at Xa’ven.
Henricos fired first, hitting it with bolts that seemed to glance and whine from its hide. Xa’ven rushed forward, hauling his hammer round to meet it.
‘No!’ roared Yesugei, too late to drag him back.
The Salamanders legionary sent the hammerhead cracking into the creature’s torso. The blow was perfect – it should have ploughed into its ribs, breaking them open and sending the creature sailing, broken-backed, through the air. Instead, Xa’ven was thrown clear of the impact with a sharp crack of displaced energy, his weapon ripped from his grasp. His massive armoured body crunched into the vault wall, denting the stone and showering him with dust.
The creature sprang after him. Its every movement was blurred and splintered, as though recorded on some broken picter-lens. It landed, tearing at his throat, its claws pinning him, its jaws slavering in close and worrying at him like a dog upon its quarry.
Yesugei levelled his staff.
‘Ta qarija!’ he shouted.
Silver lightning, sharp as charged neon, leapt from the staff and smashed into the creature, showering it in a coruscating burst of aether-light and ripping it from Xa’ven’s prostrate body.
It shrieked as it flew clear, crashing to the deck again in a tangle of spines and hooves before twisting around to scream at him. For a moment, Yesugei found himself staring directly into its face, and the malice of it chilled his hearts.
He summoned more lightning, hitting the thing again and sending it skidding further across the floor of the vault. Warp energy was the only thing that seemed to hurt it: Henricos kept firing all the while, emptying his magazine into its flesh, but the bolts had no effect.
Xa’ven stayed down, out on his back and gasping wetly for breath. Yesugei went after the creature, and the aether surged through him like a flood, hot and painful.
‘Banish!’ he roared in Gothic. ‘Go back!’
More bolts cracked into the creature’s smouldering hide. It raged, skittering on the deck, screaming in pain. Lightning sparked and lashed from its horned and spiked back. Yesugei ramped the intensity up, pouring everything into the attack.
Amidst it all, the creature tensed for another pounce, shouldering up against the deluge of incorporeal spears of light. Its long limbs drew inwards, its spiked shoulders rose, its whip-like tail coiled.
Then it blew apart.
A deafening bang ran around the chamber, followed by an enormous rush of forge-hot air. Fragments of bone and sinew splattered and clinked from the walls, and thick laces of bile slapped across Yesugei’s armour. Echoes of the creature’s animalistic screeches rebounded for a moment, long, shrill and hateful, before the last slops of otherworldly flesh dropped to the floor.
Henricos stood motionless, his weapon empty, staring at the epicentre of the explosion. For once, he had nothing to say.
Yesugei looked around him warily, half-expecting to see more horrors pouring out of thin air, but the chamber remained empty, marked only by the ticking-down of the great machine and the stink of burning.
‘And what,’ said Henricos eventually, ‘was that?’
Yesugei didn’t know. He had heard legends of things that swam in the deeps of the warp – sentient dreams of ancient presences – but never guessed that he would live to witness one. They should not have been able to live and breathe in the material world, any more than he could live in the seething mass of the aether.
Have you ever travelled with Navigator? Seen the things they do?
‘We should never have used machine,’ Yesugei said, breathing heavily. ‘Knew they had fallen. Did not know how far.’
Screaming. Clawing at ship.
Henricos grunted caustically, though the sound was interrupted by Xa’ven’s hacking cough. He had not gotten to his feet.
Suddenly anxious, Yesugei hurried over and crouched beside him. ‘How bad, brother?’
The Salamander’s breastplate was glossy with blood. It pumped out freely from a deep neck wound, fountaining from the seal-gap between helm and gorget. The ceramite was rent, the fine gilt detailing marred by tooth-marks.
Xa’ven’s breath came in thick heaves. The blood wasn’t clotting. It rushed out of him, splashing across his plate and dripping on the floor.
Yesugei reached for the broken helm seal and prised it open. Henricos came to help, taking the helm and gently pulling it free. Mechadendrites whirled from his gauntlets – tiny saws and needles.
As soon as he saw Xa’ven’s face, Yesugei knew that they would not be needed.
The Salamander’s ebony features had already turned grey. His lips were pale, his eyes glassy. Yesugei pressed his gauntlet against the ragged wound at his neck, but the blood welled up unstaunched between his fingers.
‘Hold on, brother,’ he urged.
Xa’ven grabbed Yesugei’s arm by the wrist. His face creased in pain.
‘Use what you saw,’ Xa’ven rasped, blood running between his teeth.
‘We should never have done it.’
Xa’ven held on, clutching his arm tight. ‘You see what they are, now. Use it.’
His head lolled back. His eyes lost focus.
Yesugei felt sick. ‘Brother, I am sorry.’
‘Just use it.’ Xa’ven worked hard to spit out the words. ‘Storm-witch.’ He grinned painfully. ‘Find your Khan.’
Then Xa’ven coughed up a thick gout of blood. His back arched, his hands gripped tighter, before finally falling limp. The blood-slick expanded under him, as dark as oil.
For a moment, Yesugei remained motionless, stunned by the speed of it. He extracted himself from Xa’ven’s bloody grasp. His body was still combat-primed, flooded with hyperadrenalin, but for a moment he had no idea what to do. Nausea slowly took over from aggression.
‘Nightmares,’ he said, numbly. ‘They release nightmares.’ He pulled himself to his feet, hearing the dull clunk as Xa’ven’s gauntlet fell back. ‘You never see one before, not on Isstvan?’
Henricos shook his head. ‘I heard… stories.’
‘Stories
no longer. This ship should be destroyed. We must leave.’
Henricos stayed crouched over Xa’ven, holding the bloody helm in one hand.
‘Then what?’ he asked.
‘Back to warp. I saw where they are going.’
‘Chogoris?’
‘No. Prospero.’
Henricos looked up at the smoking silhouette of the machine. ‘If we know that, they do too. How are they doing it? How are they locating Legions as they move?’
‘I do not know,’ said Yesugei, feeling the bitter price of the little knowledge they had bought. ‘I do not know.’
‘Why do you call them lodges?’ asked Shiban.
‘It’s a tradition,’ said Torghun, drawing his cowl up over his head.
‘I have to wear this?’
‘To begin with.’
Shiban hesitated. He felt awkward, foolish. More than that, though, it was clandestine, and for reasons he still did not understand.
‘I know,’ said Torghun. ‘It’s tedious. But here’s the thing – we’re all equal in there, at least once the oaths are taken. Show your face before then, and you’d be taking your rank in with you.’
Shiban looked at Torghun. With his face hidden in shadow he looked like a thief. Not even his scar was visible – the mark of the Legion, the one thing that set them apart from all others. ‘This will be a small gathering?’
Torghun nodded. ‘Nothing grand. They’ll be pleased to see another member.’
‘How many lodges are there?’
‘Across the whole Legion? I don’t know. A lot, I think. It fits with the warrior ethos. Someone told me a quarter of Sons of Horus are lodge members. I’ve no idea whether it’s true.’
‘How could you have?’
‘Well, quite. Ready?’
Shiban pulled the cowl over his head, feeling faintly ridiculous. Torghun moved to the door and depressed the entry rune. It slid back to reveal a darkened chamber. Five or six others stood in the flickering gloom.
Shiban followed Torghun in, and the others parted to give them room. The doors hissed closed.
‘Well met, brother,’ said the first of the gathered lodge members. ‘You bring new blood.’
Torghun bowed. ‘One who has proved worthy.’
Shiban took his place in the circle. The faces of the others were only partly hidden – if he had wanted to, he could possibly have guessed the identities of some. The air smelled oddly sweet, as if incense might be burning somewhere close by. All of the assembled White Scars wore their armour under their robes – standard procedure now that the blockade had been established – and it made them look bulky and out of proportion.
‘Well met, stranger,’ said the speaker. ‘You wish to join.’
‘To observe,’ said Shiban.
‘That is acceptable. There is nothing to hide.’
You are wearing a cowl!
‘The time for decision is drawing closer,’ the speaker went on, addressing the others. ‘Questions have been answered, some matters have been clarified. We can speak more plainly now than before – you have all seen the images from the planet below. Can anyone doubt now what we heard from the Warmaster’s star-speakers? The schism has come, brothers, just as the Khagan always warned us it would. Now we have to take sides. Our task is to ensure the Fifth Legion remains pure of purpose.’
Shiban listened carefully. So that was it – not a neutral brotherhood, but a faction for Horus. Part of him was surprised at the overtness of it, but perhaps that was naïve.
He could feel Torghun tensing up next to him, as if anxious about Shiban’s reaction to what he was being told. Everything about the Terran khan’s desire to see him inducted into the lodge felt genuine, almost touchingly so.
They believe in this.
‘The link remains established,’ the speaker went on. ‘The loyal fraternities have already responded, and our window for action shrinks. Preparations are being made across the fleet. We need to be ready.’
The speaker’s mouth, visible under the shadow of his cowl, spread into a benign smile.
‘They are coming, brothers. They are coming here, to Prospero.’
Psychneuein.
Magnus had told him of them, but he had spoken of solid, flesh-and-blood things. Products of Prospero’s bizarre warp-drenched history, they had been a blight on the otherwise benign world, consuming the minds of mortals. The Thousand Sons had hunted them, driving them into the wilds and far from their glittering spires.
Now, like everything else, they had been reduced to ghosts – remnants of the living horrors they had been. Only, unlike all other the destroyed fauna, they had retained some vestige of their old wills. Their grotesque insectoid bodies still hovered, their sickeningly enlarged craniums still pulsed with the ravenous energies of the immaterium. Their mandibles clacked, just as they always had. Their huge wings still blurred, their twitching stings still arced under their bulging abdomen-sacs – only now they were translucent and shimmering, just psychic echoes of once vital neuro-predators.
They emerged from all over the square, slipping eerily from the stone and sweeping compound eye-bundles around them.
The keshig opened fire with their combi-bolters, sending rounds punching straight through them. That seemed to do nothing but attract them, and they began to home in on the source of the noise.
The Khan charged at the nearest of them, leaping and twisting in the air to plunge his dao through the creature’s head, aiming to slice it clean from the thorax.
It connected with nothing. His momentum carried him bodily into the psychneuein’s ghostly body, and a sensation of utter frigidity shuddered through him. His hearts burst into overdrive. He felt a sucking at his chest and a rushing boom in his ears.
He stumbled through on the far side of it, falling to one knee, panting heavily. Spots swam before his eyes.
The Khan twisted around, just managing to hold his blade in guard. The thing came at him again, still swaying erratically. It lurched at him, misjudging the direction and ploughing frictionlessly into the ground to his left.
It cannot see.
The Khan withdrew, panting, still feeling the horrific drag on his soul.
‘Do not let them touch you,’ he voxed. ‘They are blind – remain at distance.’
More psychneuein were rising by then, floating over the ash and ruins. One of them seemed to sense the presence of a Terminator close by and swooped straight at him. The warrior – named Maji, a veteran who had carved a bloody trail across a hundred worlds – loosed a perfectly targeted volley from his combi-bolter. The shells did nothing but shred the ruins beyond.
The psychneuein struck, clutching on to Maji with its trailing limbs and angling its swollen abdomen for a sting. Maji lashed out, plunging his blade deep into the creature’s body – but nothing connected. The psychneuein latched a long proboscis on to his helm and its glowing tip sunk beneath the ceramite.
Maji screamed. In a century of warfare, Maji had never screamed. The noise was appalling – a howl of pure agony wrenched from his helm’s augmitters and dragged into the night. Lumpy matter sucked up the translucent proboscis, which bulged and flexed obscenely. Maji went rigid, embraced by the psychneuein’s spectral limbs, dropping his blade and twitching violently. Blood spurted fitfully from his gorget-seal as he was lifted off the ground.
By then another of the keshig had raced to his side, thudding into him and hauling him back. Three more took on the creature itself, pumping bolt-rounds into its incorporeal outline with no visible effect.
The Khan, dao in hand, was almost there himself when he heard fresh buzzing diving low over his head. He skidded to a halt to stare up at the huge outline of a psychneuein dropping down upon him. He felt the same chill as before – like an icy fist closing over his lungs.
He thrust upwards instinctively, punching his blade into the brain-swollen head of the monster. For a terrible moment it felt as if his flesh were being ripped from the bone, flensed out of the armour and d
ispersed into nothing – then the metal connected with something spongy, piercing it.
The psychneuein recoiled, snapping its mandibles in pain but making no sound. It jolted, flickering in and out of focus. Seeing it could be hurt, the Khan pressed the attack, ripping his blade clear and swiping back at the creature’s thorax.
This time, the sword edge struck home. The wounded psychneuein exploded, dissolving into a cloud of lurid brilliance. Shreds of blazing matter radiated out, shrieking through the night in a whirlwind of released energy. The dust howled around him, stirred by the shockwave. A sound like shattering glass rang out across the courtyard, ripping the flagstones apart for metres in every direction.
Damaged by the detonation, the ground gave way further under the Khan’s feet, undulating like water before splintering into fragments. With a run of hard, sharp cracks, a fresh fissure yawned wide beneath him, dragging him down amidst an avalanche of tumbling stone and sliding scree.
He tried to grab hold of something, to seize the edge of the hole that was forming and pull himself out. He almost made it – his fingers caught onto a narrow ledge of stone, and for a second he thought that it might hold.
Then the flag cracked and he fell.
A shower of rubble sheered across his helm lenses. Over the thunder of collapsing masonry, he heard the shouts of his warriors, and the maddening buzz of more psychneuein.
Then it was all gone, lost in the roar of breaking stone. He fell fast, hurtling through a blurred underworld of collapsing earth. For a terrible moment he thought it might never stop – that some portal into the warp had been opened up under Prospero’s burned surface and that he had been sucked into its maw – but then he hit something solid.
More debris crashed and thudded, burying him even as he slid down further, scrabbling against the slope of whatever he had landed on. In the pitch-darkness his helm struggled to compensate, giving him only blurred and swivelling impressions of where he was.
Slowly, grindingly, he came to a halt. The rock fall continued for a few moments before that too gave out.
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