Chains rattled around his throat, wrists and ankles as he sought to rise. His brothers had bound him to the throne.
They had much to answer for.
Whispers of ‘He returns’ and ‘He awakens’ wove their way through the mortal crew. From his seat of honour on a raised dais at the heart of the bridge, Talos could see them pausing in their assigned duties, face after face turning to regard him. Their eyes were bright with surprise and reverence in equal measure. ‘The prophet awakens,’ kept leaving their pale lips.
This, he decided with a crawling feeling of spinal discomfort, was what being worshipped must feel like.
His brothers clustered around the throne, each of their faces masked behind their helms: Uzas, with his painted bloody handprint across the faceplate; Xarl, his helm crested by sweeping bat wings; Cyrion’s eyes painted with streaking lightning bolt tears; Mercutian’s helm topped by brutal, curving horns ringed with bronze.
Variel knelt before Talos, the Apothecary’s bionic leg grinding and seizing, making the movement awkward. He alone wore no helm, his cold eyes fixed upon the prophet’s own.
‘A timely return,’ he said. His curiously soft voice held no shade of amusement.
‘We have arrived, Talos,’ Cyrion qualified. There was a smile in his voice, at least.
‘Fifty-five nights,’ said Mercutian. ‘We have never witnessed such a thing. What did you dream?’
‘I remember almost none of it.’ Talos looked past them all, at the world turning slowly within the elliptical frame of the occulus screen. ‘I remember little of anything. Where are we?’
Variel turned his pale gaze upon the others. It was enough to get them to move back a little, no longer crowding the reawakened prophet. As he spoke, the Apothecary consulted his bulky narthecium gauntlet. Talos could hear the auspex scanner crackling with static and chiming with results.
‘I administered supplemental narcotics and fluids to keep you in adequate health without activating your sus-an membrane these past two months. You are, however, going to be extremely weak for some days to come. The muscle wastage is minor, but significant enough for you to notice it.’
Talos tensed against the chains again, as if to make a point.
‘Ah, yes,’ said Variel. ‘Of course.’ He keyed in a code on his vambrace, deploying a circular cutting saw from his narthecium. The kiss of the saw along the chains was a high-pitched, irritating whine. One by one, the lengths of metallic binding fell free.
‘Why was I restrained?’
‘To prevent injury to yourself and others,’ explained Variel.
‘No.’ Talos focused on his retinal display, activating a secure vox-link to his closest brothers. ‘Why was I restrained here, on the bridge?’
The members of First Claw shared glances, their helms turning to face each other in some unknowable emotion.
‘We took you to your chambers when you first succumbed,’ said Cyrion. ‘But…’
‘But?’
‘You broke out of the cell. You killed both of the brothers standing guard outside the door, and we lost you in the lower decks for almost a week.’
Talos tried to rise. Variel fixed him with the same glare he’d turned on the rest of First Claw, but the prophet ignored it. The Apothecary had been right, though. He felt as weak as a human. His muscles burned with cramps as blood trickled back into them.
‘I do not understand,’ Talos said at last.
‘Neither did we,’ replied Cyrion. ‘You’d never acted in such a way while afflicted.’
Xarl took up the explanation. ‘Guess who found you?’
The prophet shook his head, not knowing where to begin to make assumptions. ‘Tell me.’
Uzas inclined his head. ‘It was I.’
That would be a story in itself, Talos reckoned. He looked back at Cyrion. ‘And then?’
‘After several days, the crew and the other Claws began to grow uncomfortable. Morale, such as it is among we happy and loyal dregs, was suffering. Talk circulated that you’d died or were diseased. We brought you here to show the crew you were still among us, one way or the other.’
Talos snorted. ‘Did it work?’
‘See for yourself.’ Cyrion gestured to the rapt, staring humans around the command deck. All eyes were upon him.
Talos swallowed the taste of something acrid. ‘You made me into an icon. That treads close to heathenism.’
First Claw shared a low chuckle. Only Talos was unamused.
‘Fifty-five days of silence,’ Cyrion said, ‘and all you have for us is displeasure?’
‘Silence?’ The prophet turned to look at each of them in turn. ‘I never cried out? I never spoke my prophecies aloud?’
‘Not this time,’ Mercutian shook his head. ‘Silence, from the moment you collapsed.’
‘I do not even remember collapsing.’ Talos moved past them, leaning on the rail ringing the central dais. He watched the grey world hanging in the void, surrounded by a dense asteroid field. ‘Where are we?’
First Claw came to his side, forming up in a line of snarling joints and impassive, skullish facemasks.
‘You don’t recall your orders to us?’ Xarl asked.
Talos tried not to let his impatience show. ‘Just tell me where we are. That is a familiar sight, yet I struggle to believe we truly stand before it.’
‘It is, and we do. We’re on the Eastern Fringe,’ said Xarl. ‘Out of the Astronomican’s light, and in orbit around the world you repeatedly demanded we travel to.’
Talos stared at it as it turned with indescribable slowness. He knew what world it was, even though he could remember nothing of these events his brothers insisted had happened. It took a great deal more effort than he’d expected to resist saying the words ‘It cannot be’. Most unbelievable of all were the grey stains of cities scabbing over the dusty continents.
‘It has changed,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand how that can be true. The Imperium would never build here, yet I see cities. I see the stains of human civilisation scarring what should be worthless land.’
Cyrion nodded. ‘We were just as surprised as you, brother.’
Talos let his gaze sweep across the rest of the bridge. ‘To your stations, all of you.’ The humans complied with salutes and murmurs of ‘Yes, lord’.
It was Mercutian who broke the silence that followed. ‘We are here, Talos. What should we do now?’
The prophet stared at a world that should have been long dead, purged of life ten thousand years before and abandoned by all who called it home. The Imperium of Man would never re-seed a cursed world, especially one beyond the holy rim of the Emperor’s beacon of light. Reaching this world under standard propulsion would take months from even the closest border planet.
‘Ready all Claws for planetfall.’
Cyrion cleared his throat. Talos turned at the surprisingly human gesture. ‘You have missed much, brother. There is something that requires your attention before we become involved planetside. Something pertaining to Septimus and Octavia. We were unsure how to deal with it in your absence.’
‘I am listening,’ the prophet said. He wouldn’t admit how his blood ran cold at the mention of those names.
‘Go to her. See for yourself.’
See for yourself. The words echoed in his mind, clinging with an unnerving tenacity, feeling somewhere between prophecy and memory.
‘Are you coming?’ he asked his brothers.
Mercutian looked away. Xarl grunted a laugh.
‘No,’ Cyrion said. ‘You should do this alone.’
He reached her chamber, appalled at the weakness in his own limbs. Fifty-five nights, almost two full months without the daily training rites, hadn’t been kind to him. Octavia’s servants lingered in the shadows around her door, hunchbacked royalty in the sunless alcoves.
‘Lord,’ they hissed through slits in their faces that were once lips. Their bloodstained bandages rustled as they shifted and lowered their weapons.
‘Move aside,’ Talos ordered them. They fled, as roaches flee a sudden light.
One of them stood its ground. For a moment, he thought it was Hound, Octavia’s favoured attendant, but it was too slender. And Hound was months dead, slain in the ship’s capture, scarcely twenty metres from this very spot.
‘The mistress is weary,’ the figure said. Its voice was somehow clenched, as though it strained through closed teeth. It was also a soft voice, too light to be male. She raised a bandaged hand, as if she could possibly bar the warrior’s passage with a demand, let alone with her physical presence. The woman’s cloth-wrapped face revealed nothing of her appearance, but her stature suggested she was less devolved – at least physically – than most of the others. Bulky glare-goggles covered her eyes, their black oval lenses amusingly insectile, giving the impression of mutation where none was immediately apparent. A thin red beam projected from the goggles’ left edge, following the attendant’s gaze. She’d welded a red dot laser sight to her facewear – for what reason, Talos couldn’t begin to guess.
‘Then she and I have much in common,’ the prophet stated. ‘Move.’
‘She has no wish to be disturbed,’ the strained voice insisted, growing even less friendly. The other attendants were beginning to return now.
‘Your loyal defiance does your mistress credit, but we are now finished with this tedium.’ Talos tilted his head down at the female. He had no wish to pointlessly slay her. ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘You are someone seeking to enter against my mistress’s wishes.’
‘That is true. It is also true that I am master of this vessel, and your mistress is my slave.’
The other attendants skulked back into the shadows, whispering the prophet’s name. Talos, Talos, Talos… like the hissing of rock vipers.
‘She is unwell,’ the bandaged female said. Fear crept into her voice now.
‘What is your name?’ Talos asked her.
‘Vularai,’ she replied. The warrior smiled, barely, behind his faceplate. Vularai was the Nostraman word for liar.
‘Amusing. I like you. Now move, before I begin to like you less.’
The attendant moved back, and Talos caught the glint of metal beneath the woman’s ragged clothing.
‘Is that a gladius?’
The figure froze. ‘Lord?’
‘Are you carrying a Legion gladius?’
She drew the blade at her hip. For a Night Lord, the traditional gladius was a short stabbing weapon the length of a warrior’s forearm. In human hands, it became a sleek longsword. The swirling Nostraman runes etched into the dark iron were unmistakable.
‘That,’ said Talos, ‘is a Legion weapon.’
‘It was a gift, lord.’
‘From whom?’
‘From Lord Cyrion of First Claw. He said I needed a weapon.’
‘Can you use it with any skill?’
The bandaged woman shrugged and said nothing.
‘And if I’d merely shoved you aside and entered, Vularai? What would you have done then?’
He could hear the smile in her strained voice. ‘I’d have cut out your heart, my lord.’
The chamber of navigation offered a little more illumination than the rest of the ship’s rooms and hallways, lit by the grainy, unhealthy half-light of almost thirty monitors linked to external pict-feeds. They cast their greyish glare across the rest of the wide chamber, bleaching the surface of the circular pool in the centre. The meaty reek of amniotic fluid was thick in the air.
She wasn’t in the water. In the months since they’d taken the Echo of Damnation, even after half the ship had been scoured and purged clean with flame weapons, Octavia had vowed to only use the amniotic pool for warp flight, when she required her deepest connection to the ship’s machine-spirit. Talos, having seen Ezmarellda, the chamber’s previous prisoner, could understand all too well why the Navigator refused to spend too long in the nutrient-rich water.
Mixed in with the chemical stink of the thin ooze were the usual smells of Octavia’s personal space: the tang of human sweat; the musty edge of her books and parchment scrolls; and the faint – not unpleasant – spice of the natural oil in her hair, even when recently washed.
And something else. Something close to the scent of a woman’s monthly blood cycle, with the same rich piquancy. Close, but not quite.
Talos walked around the edge of the pool, approaching the throne facing the bank of monitors. Each screen showed a variant view of the ship’s outer hull, and the cold void beyond. A few showed the grey face of the world they orbited, and its contrasting white rock moon.
‘Octavia.’
She opened her eyes, looking up at him with the moment’s bleariness that follows sleep but precedes comprehension. Her dark hair was bound in its usual ponytail, hanging from the back of the silk bandana.
‘You’re awake,’ she said.
‘As are you.’
‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘though I’d rather not be.’ Her lips curved into a half-smile. ‘What did you dream?’
‘I can recall little of it.’ The warrior gestured to the world on the screens before her. ‘Do you know the name of this world?’
She nodded. ‘Septimus told me. I don’t know why you’d want to return here.’
Talos shook his head. ‘Neither do I. My memory is in fragments from even before I succumbed to the vision.’ He released his breath as a slow sigh. ‘Home. Our second home, at least. After Nostramo, there was Tsagualsa, the carrion world.’
‘It’s been colonised. A small population, so it’s a recent colonisation.’
‘I know,’ he said.
‘So what will you do?’
‘I don’t know.’
Octavia shifted in her throne, still wrapped in her thin cloth blanket. ‘This chamber is always cold.’ She looked up at him, waiting for him to speak. When he said nothing, she filled the silence herself. ‘It was difficult to sail here. The Astronomican doesn’t shine this far from Terra, and the tides were blacker than black.’
‘May I ask what it was like?’
The Navigator toyed with a stray lock of hair as she spoke. ‘The warp is dark here. Utterly dark. The colours are all black. Can you imagine a thousand shades of black, each darker than the last?’
He shook his head. ‘You are asking me to envisage a concept alien to the material universe.’
‘It’s cold,’ she said, breaking eye contact. ‘How can a colour be cold? In the blackness, I could feel the usual disgusting presences: the shrieking of souls against the hull, and the distant cancers, swimming alone in the deep.’
‘Cancers?’
‘It is the only way I can describe them. Great, nameless entities of poison and pain. Malignant intelligences.’
Talos nodded. ‘The souls of false gods, perhaps.’
‘Are they false if they’re real?’
‘I do not know,’ he confessed.
She shivered. ‘Where we’ve sailed before, even away from the Astronomican… those places were still dimly lit by the Emperor’s beacon, no matter how far from it we sailed. You could see the shadows and shapes gliding through the tides. Daemons without form, swimming through liquid torment. Here, I can see nothing. It wasn’t about finding my way through the storm, the way I’ve been trained. This was a matter of tumbling forward into blindness, seeking the calmest paths, where the shrieking winds were lessened, even if only for a moment.’
For a moment, he was struck by the similarity between her experiences and the sensation of falling into his own visions.
‘We are here,’ he said. ‘You did well.’
‘I felt something else, though. The faintest thing. These presences, warmer than the warp around them. Like eyes, watching me as I brought the ship closer.’
‘Should we be concerned?’
Octavia shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It was one aspect of madness amongst a thousand others.’
‘We’ve arrived. That is what matters.’ Another silence threaten
ed between them. This time, Talos broke it. ‘We had a fortress here, long ago. A castle of black stone and twisting spires. The primarch dreamed of it one night, and set hundreds of thousands of slaves to making it. It took almost twenty years.’
He paused, and Octavia watched the passionless skull of his facemask, waiting for him to continue. Talos exhaled in a vox-growl.
‘The inner sanctum was called the Screaming Gallery. Have any of the others ever spoken of this before?’
She shook her head. ‘No, never.’
‘The Screaming Gallery was a metaphor, of a kind. A god’s torment, expressed in blood and pain. The primarch wanted to reshape the external world to match the sin within his mind. The walls were flesh – humans moulded and crafted into the architecture, formed as much from sorcery as from ingenuity. The floors were carpeted in living faces, preserved by feeder-servitors.’
He shook his head, the memory too strong to ever fade. ‘The screaming, Octavia. You have never heard such a sound. They never stopped screaming. The people in the walls, crying and reaching out. The faces on the floor, weeping and shrieking.’
She forced a smile she didn’t feel. ‘That sounds like the warp.’
He glanced at her, and grunted acknowledgement. ‘Forgive me. You know exactly what it sounds like.’
She nodded, but didn’t say anything else.
‘The foulest thing was the way you’d become immune to the wailing chorus. Those of us who attended the primarch in his last decades of madness spent much of our time in the Screaming Gallery. The sound of all that pain became tolerable. Soon after, you found yourself enjoying it. It was easier to think when surrounded by sin. The torment first became meaningless, but afterwards, it became music.’
The prophet fell silent for a moment. ‘That was what he wanted, of course. He wanted us to understand the Legion’s lesson, as he believed it to be.’
Octavia shuffled again as Talos knelt by her throne. ‘I see no lesson in mindless brutality,’ she said.
He unlocked his collar seals with a breath of air pressure, and removed his helm. She was struck, once again, by the thought that he’d have been handsome but for the cold eyes and the corpse-white skin. He was a statue, a scarred demigod of clean marble, dead-eyed, beautiful in his sterility, yet unlovely to look upon.
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