‘Do you think any of them have come from the same location as these ships?’ the Lion asked.
Khalybus shook his head. ‘We have examined all ships as they’ve arrived. They have been free of this taint. And none have been of the same vintage and disrepair. None of these vessels should ever have left their home system.’
They moved on. Once they left the region of the breach, they started to encounter bodies that had not been sucked into the void when the atmosphere vented. They passed corpses tangled in ruined bulkheads, caught in half-closed doors, and lying in sealed rooms. The Lion paused at one closed chamber and looked through the plasteel. He wrenched the door open and stepped inside. He examined the corpses. ‘These did not die from suffocation,’ he said. The room was a scene of mutual slaughter. Torsos had been cut open, throats slit. Runes had been carved on every forehead. Many of the dead clutched primitive blades. More than a few appeared to have cut themselves open, perhaps after all the others had been despatched.
‘This was not murder,’ said Holguin.
‘No,’ Khalybus agreed. ‘It was sacrifice.’
‘So the breach was deliberate?’
‘I would wish to examine it,’ Khalybus said. ‘But that seems likely.’
‘Too many ships dead at once,’ the Lion said. ‘We know how it happened. The question remains why.’
‘The warp storm would seem to be a result,’ said Holguin.
‘To what end, though?’ the Lion asked. ‘And why here?’
The path to the bridge was littered with more corpses. All of them bore self-inflicted ritualistic wounds. The faces of the dead were ecstatic in the frozen moments of their last suffering. The ship was a tomb, and it was a monument to triumph. The dead of the Chorale were degraded things even in life. The Lion observed their clothing and their tools. He saw hides that would have been still bloody when worn. He saw icons of human flesh and bone. Their weapons were crude, though crafted with horror as their intent. He was surprised that these people were capable of piloting void ships, no matter how poorly maintained. They seemed to be a feral people. They were so in thrall to the gods of the warp, they should have had no ability to reason.
Just outside the entrance to the bridge, Holguin stopped and kneeled beside a brace of corpses. They had died with the runes incomplete on their foreheads. They had been gouging their flesh with their fingernails when the end came for them. ‘Those look rushed,’ Holguin said, pointing to the wounds. ‘And the clothes are different.’ There were none of the perverse icons. Their robes were still primitive, but unobjectionable.
‘They were meant to pass,’ said the Lion.
‘An infiltration?’ Holguin asked.
‘Perhaps. You are sure of all your refugees on Thrinos?’ the Lion asked Khalybus.
‘As sure as we can be of the flesh,’ the Iron Hands legionary grunted.
The Lion nodded. He turned his attention back to the bodies. ‘They were not meant to die here,’ he theorised. ‘When they realised they were going to, they tried to complete their ritual. But the sacrifice was supposed to occur somewhere else.’
‘On Pythos,’ said Khalybus.
‘That does seem to be the only destination in this system.’ A destination closed to everyone. There the warp storm was ferocious. Nothing could cross the frontier of the Pandorax System.
The Dark Angels and the Iron Hands legionary entered the bridge, and found the heart of the Chorale’s self-contradictory madness. There were many more bodies here, and they had all fallen in the same kind of mutual suicide that had consumed the inmates of the previous chamber. A stone altar on a dais occupied the front of the bridge. It was stained brown by blood. A brass eight-pointed star rose above it. A human head was mounted on each of the eight arms. Each spike end punched through the bridge of the nose, caving in the skull. The last victim of the altar lay across it, a man whose gaze had frozen into a sublimity of horror.
The altar faced workstations, and each of them had its own crew. They were clad in the same primitive rags; there was nothing to differentiate them from their kin. Yet they had known how to bring the Chorale out to this heading. There was no data to salvage here. The cogitators were burned wrecks and the screens at every workstation were smashed. The crew had destroyed the bridge before killing themselves.
‘Where did you come from?’ the Lion muttered.
He moved through the rows of gutted pict screens until he was before the altar again, much closer now. His helm lamps swept over the carvings on the stone. He walked around the altar, sensing the risk he incurred in trying to understand what he saw, yet knowing that risk was necessary. On each side of the slab was a crawling density of runes. Lines of the figures had been chipped out of the rock with care and frenzy around the periphery of each face. They captured the eye, forcing the gaze to travel on insect legs. They circled engravings that the Lion recognised as star charts despite the presence of other lines suggesting monstrous beings and a galaxy caught in the claws of horror.
The Lion returned to the front of the altar, then walked around it again, counter-clockwise this time. The crawling of the runes was worse, and the engravings flowed one to the other. The altar stone was a narrative of travel. ‘This was a pilgrimage,’ he said. The word almost stuck in his throat. Its accuracy enfolded layers of perversity.
The Dark Angels and Khalybus gathered at the altar. They looked at the stone with a dispassion possible only through discipline.
The Lion pointed at the chart on the front of the stone. ‘Pandorax,’ he said. The positions of the stars were unmistakeable, despite the crude work and toxic embellishments. The work embodied the same paradox as the Chorale itself. The people aboard it appeared too primitive to pilot a void ship, yet they had. The Lion wouldn’t have believed they could map the positions of the stars in their home system, let alone their destination. Yet they had.
The Lion circled the altar again. Khalybus followed. They traced the corrosive vectors leading from Pandorax back to the first system. The effort made claws scratch at the Lion’s chest. The surface of reality felt a little thinner each time he walked around the obscenities. The charts would not click into place in isolation, though. He had to subject himself to the narrative.
Khalybus hissed in disgust as they walked the circuit. He was silent again as they looked at the start of the Chorale’s journey. Khalybus crouched, looking closer.
‘Do you recognise it?’
‘I do.’ Khalybus reached out to tap the world at the centre of the engraving. He stopped himself just before making contact, his bionic finger recoiling. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is Davin.’
Alone in his quarters, the Lion thought about what he had seen on the Chorale. He faced signs without referents. The origin point of the cultists was important, but he did not know why. He did not like the idea of approaching Tuchulcha without having some knowledge beforehand. He believed in the utility of the artefact and was willing to use it to travel, trusting it only one jump at a time. What he did not wish was to rely on it for information. He would not have what he believed to be true shaped by something inhuman.
By the time the Dark Angels fleet anchored in orbit over Thrinos, he was no further along. He could imagine Guilliman remarking about his singular lack of data, that he had absolutely nothing concrete to go on. And that was without Roboute knowing about Tuchulcha.
In the end, though, he entered Tuchulcha’s chamber again. The meat puppet was facing the door as if it had been waiting for his appearance.
The Lion had thought through his questions before coming. He was not going to commit the fleet to a jump based on a deliberate half-truth this time. The creature would answer him, and it would answer him well.
‘Davin,’ the Lion said.
‘Are you asking me something? That is a name and not a sentence.’
What did you expect? the Lion wondered, irritated wi
th himself. A guilty start? A refusal to meet your gaze? Laughable. Every expression that crossed the servitor’s face was a deliberately constructed imitation of the human. ‘Can you take us to Davin?’ the Lion asked.
‘No,’ said Tuchulcha.
That was interesting. The being had never answered in the negative before. ‘Why not?’
‘There are obstacles. Ones that even I cannot breach.’
‘Can they be crossed in some other way?’
The servitor cocked its head. The Lion was becoming used to reading this as a signal of amusement from Tuchulcha. ‘Shouldn’t that be my question for you?’
The Lion ignored the jab and took another approach. ‘Can you take us part of the way?’
‘Yes.’
‘As far as the nearest barrier?’
‘Yes.’
‘And if we succeed in crossing it, can you take us further?’
‘I can.’
‘As far as the next barrier.’
‘That is correct.’
‘Let us be clear. If we wish to reach Terra, we must reach Davin, is that correct?’
‘It is.’
‘Why?’
‘The current flows that way,’ Tuchulcha said.
The answer was enigmatic again after the plain speaking. The Lion knew he would not learn anything more.
When he left the chamber, Holguin was outside the doors. His face was respectful. His presence was concerned.
‘Speak your mind, voted lieutenant.’
‘Have you learned something, lord?’ Holguin asked.
‘I am told that Davin is the key to Terra.’
‘Do you believe what it tells you?’
‘Provisionally, yes.’ He did not need to justify himself, but he chose to answer fully. He decided that he wanted Holguin to understand the actions he was going to order the fleet to take. ‘Tuchulcha cannot take us all the way to Davin.’
‘Obstacles imply importance,’ Holguin said.
Good, the Lion thought. He sees. ‘Precisely,’ he said. The same is true for Terra, if only we had realised it sooner.
‘What will you command?’ Holguin asked.
‘The astropathic choir must contact my brothers. Let the word be sent. We have found the way.’
The order was given. The word was sent. It did not go easily.
They will kill us all yet, Vazheth Licinia thought. The mistress of the Invincible Reason’s astropathic choir wasn’t sure who she meant by they. She did not question the order from the primarch. She did not doubt its necessity. She would give up her life to see it transmitted.
Even so, the thought sprang to her mind. It was beyond her control, a flare of dark truth she could not suppress. This war, she thought. It tore apart the galaxy, and it tore apart every understanding of reality. The impossible march across the void, and the impossible demanded of every one.
The impossible was asked of her choir now. The message itself was simple and urgent. The way is found. Come to Thrinos. Its conversion into mental imagery was not difficult. To send it, though… That was a different task. That was the impossible.
Licinia stood in her pulpit. An articulated framework attached to her chest held her upright, its servomotor-driven legs giving her mobility when she had to walk. The curved rows of iron astropathic pews before her formed an amphitheatre. Though Licinia was blind, it often seemed to her that she could perceive the chamber as a vague grey space. The first row of astropaths were a hint of phantoms, a false dawn of sight. When she opened her inner, psychic eye, though, the hall became a tempest of energy. Each astropath was a blazing node. Beyond the choir was the non-space of the warp, howling with the Ruinstorm. The mere awareness of the convulsion was a dagger to the mind. Transmitting a message meant staring directly into the madness. It meant being completely vulnerable to its torments.
‘We call to the Ultramarines and to the Blood Angels,’ Licinia said to her choir. ‘We call them to us. We call to them across the infinite.’ Her words were command and invocation. As she instructed the astropaths, bringing them to the single-minded concentration on their duty, she conjured the collective power of the choir. Unity was its strength. Unity was the means by which the individual might survive. ‘We call to them through the bonds of loyalty. We call to them through our bonds to the Emperor.’ The ankle manacle each astropath wore was a symbol of the soul-binding to the Emperor. In the midst of transmission, when the individual became part of the whole, but also courted the risk of annihilation on the dream-storms of the warp, the anklet was a physical grounding, a lodestone for the self and its purpose.
As the transmission began, Licinia fell silent. Her guidance became entirely psychic. She reached out with the combined force of all the astropaths, and they reached out with the focus of her will.
They reached out to their counterparts in the IX and XIII Legions. They did not know where or how far away the Blood Angels and Ultramarines were. Location and distance were meaningless. The call went to the infinite.
But madness ruled the infinite. The call encountered the Ruinstorm, and the Ruinstorm answered with fury. Its winds sought to shred the coherence of the message. Its waves crashed upon the minds of the choir. The roar took Licinia. It plunged her perception into the maelstrom. She pushed back, urging the chorus to greater heights, summoning strength from determination. And as the storm raged harder, it reached into the minds of all to shatter the core of the collective.
A great distance away, blood ran warm from Licinia’s eyes and ears.
She cried out, again and again, hurling herself and her charges against the storm, until at last, there was a sudden crack across the non-space. It was a fissure, and the call went through it, travelling now on its wave of dreams, independent of any sender. It was also lightning, and it struck the choir. It was as if something in the warp welcomed the message at the same time that it punished its senders.
Licinia screamed, psychic vision blinded by shrieking silver, as she was slammed back into her physical self. She choked on the smell of ozone and burned flesh. She clenched her psychic vision shut against the pain and the feedback of energy. She was in the amphitheatre once more, surrounded again by the false sight of grey and phantoms. There was light in the grey now. Even with her inner eye closed, the psychic energies lashing out in the chamber were too strong to shut out completely. Some of the nodes were burning. People were screaming. An echo that might have been thunder or might have been laughter rolled away, fading with the dissipation of the energy.
Licinia breathed in and out, her lungs wheezing and gurgling. She would have collapsed, but her framework held her up. Her face and neck were sticky with her blood. She forced calm back into the storm in her head. When she felt she could stand it, she opened her perception by the smallest crack, and took in the tally of the dead.
Bright lights had gone out. Many pews held slumped, broken shapes.
The message had been sent. Almost a quarter of her astropaths had died in the process.
They will kill us all, yet.
Six
The Convergence of Fates
Datum: that was an ambush.
Corollary: they knew where to find us.
Corollary: they travel the immaterium at will.
Theoretical: their Navigators are able to do what ours cannot.
Practical: use them.
There were two Navigators from the Annunciation. That was unusual. Perhaps it had something to do with success of the ambush. They stood in chains and manacles in the interrogation chamber. The space was spare, the walls unadorned. A bank of focused lumen globes shone from the upper wall directly onto the prisoners. It illuminated them in a hard, unforgiving white light that bleached every shadow from them. They could hide nothing in the brilliance, and they could see nothing. To them, Guilliman knew, he was nothing but a huge silhouette. The g
uards at the four corners of the chamber would be dark masses. Lead bindings, thick with hexagrammic circuitry on their foreheads, covered their third eyes. The function of the Navigators was to see what others could not. Now they were blind.
Guilliman had the bitter sensation that they still saw more clearly than he did.
He studied them before speaking, surveying the field of battle to come. They were a man and a woman. Their names were Yathinius and Nekras. They were Terran, scions of important families of the Navis Nobilite. Guilliman made a note of their ancestry and the need to purge the families, root and branch, when the time came.
The two Navigators were old before their time, with only a few strands of lank hair hanging from their scalps. They were so weak the manacles had no strategic necessity. Their robes, burned and frayed when Hierax’s Destroyers took the Annunciation, were the crimson of their Legion, and threaded with passages from Lorgar’s writing. Guilliman had once seen that work as tragic, a philosophy of error consuming his brilliant brother uselessly. He knew better now. It was not futile. It was monstrous.
Yathinius opened his eyes wide into the light, daring it to burn his retinas. He smiled. Blood gushed from his mouth. He parted his teeth, and the front half of his tongue, bitten through, fell out.
Do you think you can use this creature? Guilliman asked himself. ‘You see through the Ruinstorm,’ he said.
Yathinius kept smiling while Nekras spoke. ‘We do,’ she said.
‘Tell me how.’
‘By the blessings of Chaos.’
She was being too forthcoming. Guilliman did not trust the eagerness with which she answered his questions. It felt like mockery.
Experimentally, he said, ‘You will serve my Legion now. You will take us where you are ordered.’
‘Of course,’ said Nekras. Yathinius’ laugh was wet and gargling. He started to choke on his blood, then laughed again.
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