The Khan stared at him closely, as if his dark eyes could delve straight into the man’s damaged mind. ‘You’ve seen what they did here.’
Elias nodded.
‘Are you not angry?’
Elias shook his head. ‘They taught us that–’
‘They fed on you.’
Elias chuckled. ‘And what is better for a man, but that he nourishes the gods?’
The Khan sighed, and turned to Yesugei. The Stormseer was looking thoughtful.
‘You see the lesson we are being given?’ the primarch asked, almost accusingly.
‘A blunt one, certainly,’ replied Yesugei.
‘Malcador must think us simple-minded.’
‘Still. A reminder of inherent weakness.’
‘You should be insulted he even tried it.’ The Khan raised a finger by a fraction, and Elias was pulled away from his presence, grinning confusedly all the while. ‘It changes nothing.’
Yesugei looked less convinced, but did not reply.
Eventually, the Khan unfolded his arms, shaking them down. Once free, his gauntlet strayed, as it always did, to the hilt of his blade.
‘Hasten the clean-up,’ he growled, making to leave. ‘It’s time we moved on.’
The V Legion fleet pulled out of high orbit seven local – roughly nine Terran-standard – days later, leaving the remainder of the outstanding compliance work to be undertaken by three of the accompanying Imperial Army divisions. Their commander, an experienced general named Targon Klask, had initially protested, having been under the impression that the entire expeditionary fleet would remain intact and committed to full compliance activities for several weeks. However, once Hasik was dispatched to pass on the primarch’s direct expression of intent, the protests had dried up swiftly, and preparations were made for the division of forces.
The V Legion itself would not remain unified either. In the five years since its first great muster in the Solar System, considerable effort had been expended to propagate the new Chogorian-inspired cultural practices throughout the entire Legion. Now that Hoadh had been destroyed, and in a manner that would have been recognised by any rider of the Altak, that imperative was overtaken by a more deep-seated desire to let the individual khans have their head. Companies, more generally referred to as brotherhoods now, were given planetary coordinates to chase down, most gleaned from the addled minds of the nephilim’s slaves, some taken from standing Crusade war plans, but all of them sundered across huge stellar distances.
In theory, compliance assets would be sent out from Terra to complete the reconstruction of Hoadh and its tributary worlds. As for when that might be, none could say. There was no effective liaison in place between the Legion high command and the glacial structures of the Administratum. Some thought that ought to change; others were perfectly happy with the way things were. In the absence of a clear signal from the Khan, nothing was done, and the necessary business of contact was left to Klask’s extensive, overworked staff.
So dispersal went ahead. The Legion flagship, completed to the primarch’s specifications three years previously and christened – on a suggestion from Magos Dominus Galithium Vo-Phoex, no less – the Swordstorm, pulled smoothly from its orbital berth, escorted by a minimal protective cordon of four destroyers.
Hasik had taken the Tchin-Zar to head up his Horde division, while Giyahun had taken the Lance of Heaven, each tracing different paths into the deep void. All had their targets, spread out across the abyss like the old isolated citadels rising from outcrops on the eternal plain.
‘Good hunting,’ was all the Khagan had told them both before they departed, raising a flask of halaak.
Other Legions would not have allowed themselves to become so diffuse, perhaps, but in this too was the old method honoured. The archetype of the White Scars was the hunting eagle, the predator loosed to wheel into the open sky. The Terrans had accepted it; the Chogorians understood it implicitly.
Qin Xa remained on the flagship, as was his duty, as did Yesugei after dividing the Legion’s zadyin arga between the various divisions.
‘We will need a better system for this, Khagan,’ the Stormseer had told his master during the somewhat messy departure from Hoadh.
‘Did we have one before?’ the Khan had asked sceptically.
‘We were not conquering the stars before.’
‘If they don’t know where their fate should take them,’ the primarch had said, waving his hand unconcernedly, closing the discussion, ‘what hope for the rest of us?’
The ships had weighed void-anchor then, boosting their plasma drives and setting course for the next warzone in the series. The Khan’s flagship had broken the veil first, as if itching to get away from a planet where only low-grade killing had been offered, hungry to find worlds where a better class of enemy lay in wait.
Once in the warp, the primarch departed the command bridge and returned to his private chambers, taking only Qin Xa with him.
‘So,’ the Khan said, unhooking the cloak from his shoulders and throwing it over the back of his plains-chair, ‘we’re still being tracked.’
The keshiga shrugged. ‘Hard to say, Khagan. It may be an artefact of the ranged augurs. Or perhaps something designed to look like an artefact of the ranged augurs. Or nothing at all. What do you want me to do?’
The Khan reached for the seal of his gorget, unclipping the torc-like gold rim. Then he unfastened the leather bindings of his hair, letting the long black tresses fall loose over his ivory armour.
‘We could outpace this shadow,’ he said.
‘Almost certainly, if you wished it.’
The Khan smiled. ‘But you’d be right to disapprove.’ He went over to a low rosewood table and poured a fresh flask of fermented milk. ‘It’s one of ours. An inquisitive mind, drawn to our light like a moth. We’re a curiosity still, I think. But which one? And do I care enough to find out?’
Qin Xa returned the smile. ‘For as long as it intrigues you, yes.’
The Khan drained his cup and wiped his mouth before reaching for another flask.
‘Do not make it easy for them – keep the ship moving.’ He had an almost childlike expression on that grizzled face now. ‘If they want to find us, they’ll have to work for it.’
SIX
It took two standard months, to the extent such things could be measured against an objective standpoint. Three minor campaigns, lightning raids on what had been nephilim plunder-worlds, took place in the interim, further honing the Legion’s expertise but doing little to test them. As far as could be established, Qin Xa was proved correct – none of the xenos remained alive, and what remained were the human dregs of their slave empire, still committed to fighting even once their gods and angels had been ripped away from them.
More cathedrals were burned, more cities demolished, more signals sent to the following compliance fleets indicating they were clear to start the work of resettlement and formal incorporation into the Imperium. The Swordstorm itself pushed ever further out into the uncharted void, travelling now at such a pace that astropathic communications with the Corps Logisticae became even more unreliable than usual.
But they couldn’t entirely shake the sensor blip that had dogged them since before arriving at Hoadh – a faint shadow on one of the long-range feeds, as if something were making scatter-soundings and looking to analyse anomalous returns. Even deep in the warp, Yesugei would come to the Khan with a wry look on his face.
‘At it again?’ the primarch had asked, the last time it had happened.
‘I think they’ve given up on machines,’ the Stormseer had replied. ‘Now I get whispers in my dreams.’
The battleship pressed on, maintaining the hard pace it had set ever since leaving the Luna void-docks with its extravagantly upgraded plasma drives and replacement livery. Not until they were on the perimeter of the subsector, poised to boost across the unmapped region of lightless void known as the Lhostrum Gulf, did the phantom readings crystallise into
something more tangible.
‘We are being contacted, Khagan,’ reported the Swordstorm’s master of signals, seven hours before the scheduled commencement of the next warp cycle.
The Khan raised an eyebrow, turning to Yesugei, who stood beside the command throne. ‘Imperial?’ he asked.
‘Ident prefixes indicate the Ninth Legion Astartes – originator ship, the Red Tear.’
Even as the master of signals finished speaking, glowing runes appeared across the augur lenses.
‘The primarch of the Blood Angels requests audience with his brother-primarch of the Fifth Legion Star Hunters,’ intoned the Swordstorm’s mistress of astropaths from her bird-nest throne set high up amid a tangle of synapse conduits. ‘He congratulates him on prolonging this chase for so long, but asks now for permission to come aboard for formal reception.’
The Khan pondered that for a moment, watching the locator-runes swim closer. They were all still a long way out from visual range, and working hard to match pace with the Swordstorm’s pre-jump cruising velocity.
‘What do you think?’ asked Yesugei.
‘That I’d prefer to see inside his ship than let him on board mine,’ replied the Khan, getting up from the throne and gesturing for the keshig to make preparations. ‘And that you’d better come too.’
The flagship of the Blood Angels Legion was as much an object of beauty as an instrument of war. Every surface of its ten-kilometre-long structure was adorned in the classical Baal idiom, drawn from the rust-red deserts in which the heritage of an older, more intricate civilisational impulse had been semi-buried amid cataclysmic wars. Some said it was that fusion of devastation and aeons-long patrimony that had given the Blood Angels their intense aesthetic sense – a reverence for the past, combined with the bitter awareness of history’s callousness. They created artefacts for eternity, imbuing them with both strength and elegance as a defiant cry against the impermanence that had nearly destroyed them.
As the Khan’s shuttle passed along the long ventral hull section before pulling up towards the towers of the bridge, he took in the near-obsessive decoration on the gunwales and blast-plating: the golden faces with their sculpted locks of curled hair; the tracery of bronze set into jet panelling; the sweep of the mass-bearing superstructure as it wove between purely artistic additions. Compared to the Red Tear, the Swordstorm looked almost stripped bare, a shard of bone set beside a casket of jewels.
‘I can admire this,’ the Khan mused as the spires and domes slipped past below them.
Qin Xa was unmoved. The master of the keshig had austere personal tastes. Yesugei looked ambivalent, concentrating, as ever, as much on the unseen as the seen.
‘We are being studied,’ he said finally. ‘They are not shy about deploying their witches.’
The Khan looked up at him sharply. ‘Powerful?’
‘This is a Legion showpiece, Khagan,’ Yesugei said. ‘So yes, frighteningly powerful.’
The shuttle ghosted towards a cavernous hangar entrance, where squares of Blood Angels infantry were waiting as an honour guard. At their head was a warrior encased in pure gold armour that flashed under the hangar’s lumen banks. That battleplate was as intricate as everything else on the ship, polished to such a sheen that it might almost have been glass. The warrior wore no helm, and the face revealed was hard-edged and sculpted, like one of the many graven images that ran along the friezes and pilasters around them.
The Khan descended from the alighted shuttle, accompanied by Yesugei on his left and Qin Xa on his right, a minimal escort of four Terminator-armoured keshig warriors following behind them.
The unhelmed Blood Angels legionary bowed – a courtly gesture.
‘Welcome to the Red Tear, my lord,’ he said. ‘I am Azkaellon of the Sanguinary Guard. The Angel is eager to meet you, having heard so much of your accomplishments from a distance.’
The Khan acknowledged him with a nod. On Terra these encounters had often been awkward, with the primarch struggling to reel in his contempt for that world’s formless army of functionaries and courtiers, but here there was none of that. Azkaellon and the Khan regarded one another and both seemed satisfied with what they saw – warriors of the most strenuous breed, immaculate and uncompromising.
The Khan and his retinue were taken up through the battleship’s many tiers, and as they neared the command levels, the marble pillars and red-veined floors became more opulent. They were escorted to the primarch’s receiving chambers, set a few hundred metres beyond the mighty observation dome at the summit of the bridge complex.
Azkaellon paused at two gilt-faced doors marked with elaborate interlocking images of thorns and flowers. ‘It was my primarch’s wish that you should confer in private, brother to brother. If it pleases you, lord, we can… entertain your retainers.’
Yesugei laughed. ‘A test of arms?’ he murmured. ‘Very… gladiatorial.’
Qin Xa’s attention stirred at last, and he looked at the Sanguinary Guard with renewed interest.
The Khan gave his assent, and entered the room alone. As the doors closed behind him, the muffled tread of armoured boots headed away, companionably enough, to the duelling pits.
‘My sons are curious about you,’ came a voice from the far side of the chamber. ‘You must forgive them. I am too, if I’m honest.’
The room was large. Ranks of columns supported a high coffered ceiling, the panels decorated with plasterwork sigils of the Blood Angels home world. Porcelain vases stood on brass-topped tables. A basalt sculpture of an idealised human grappling with a writhing serpent dominated the centre of the space, under which a high dome had been raised, inlaid with a mosaic depicting the red walls of the famed fortress-monastery of the Blood Angels.
Everything was symmetrical, arranged in strict geometric proportion. The harmony was palpable, as concrete as the superficial decoration that only served to enhance the underlying principle. The architect of those chambers had been a spiritual soul as well as an intellectual.
And it was likely, of course, that the Khan was looking at him now.
The Angel Sanguinius was not merely beautiful. Beauty was a strangely cheapened word for the aura that the primarch of the IX Legion possessed. He was too dangerous and too nakedly predatory for that, and yet it was impossible not to be drawn to that smooth, pale face, so like the golden masks that adorned the flagship’s outer plating. When he moved, it was with a dancer’s unconscious poise. Everything was the epitome of the human ideal, save for the one obvious flaw, and yet even that – those ice-white wings that marked him out as that most hated and feared of things, a mutant – had a symmetry of its own.
Sanguinius came up to his brother, a goblet in each hand, and handed one to the Khan.
‘To fraternity,’ he said, raising his.
The wine was unctuous, heavily spiced, no doubt priceless.
‘You must accept my apologies,’ the Angel said, gesturing towards two immense thrones carved from mahogany and capped with ivory. ‘My herald was mistaken from the outset – they tell me that Star Hunter is a name no longer to be uttered.’
‘No apology needed,’ the Khan said, seating himself awkwardly opposite his brother. Despite himself, he could not help staring at the way the whispering wing quills settled around the Angel as he reclined, like a shimmering cloak of silver pinions. ‘It means nothing to us.’
‘White Scar,’ said Sanguinius, amused, though not maliciously. ‘Those are the two words now making us talk from Terra to Ultramar. Would it flatter you to know that you are a source of some fascination, brother? That there was a race among us to see who could corner you first?’
‘Not especially.’
‘No. I guess not.’
‘We were Talskar, that was the origin of it,’ the Khan said. For some reason, sitting there in the presence of this dazzling, ethereal presence, he felt there should be some explanation. ‘Our livery now, as it was on Chogoris, is white. They misheard the first, they observed the second. Their wor
ds, not ours.’
Sanguinius shrugged. ‘We’re all made into images for them. That is our purpose, you might say.’ He leaned forwards conspiratorially. ‘And between you and me…’ he flashed his impossibly handsome smile, ‘I am not really an angel.’
The Khan laughed at last. ‘And such things are impossible, or so our Father told me.’
‘Yes, I had the same conversation with Him. Somewhat awkwardly, in my case.’ Sanguinius took a long sip of wine. ‘I’ve been hunting you for a while, Jaghatai. My compliments – your Legion has learned some shipmastery. I thought my crews were good, but I believe yours could school them.’
‘We’re used to staying on the move.’
‘Clearly. And the destruction of Ninety-Two-Twelve – impressive. Once I heard you had located the home world, I made for it, expecting you to be there for some weeks.’
‘You’ve fought them before.’
‘On Melchior. The knowledge that they are wiped out gives me satisfaction. And they are, I take it, exterminated?’
‘All of them,’ the Khan said darkly.
‘Then I relish the prospect of never hearing them mentioned again.’ Sanguinius cradled his goblet in the palm of his hand, swilling it absent-mindedly. ‘All xenos are foul, but my sons developed a particular hatred for those.’
‘Then why were you not sent to destroy them?’
‘Your pardon?’
‘You had the measure of them.’ The Khan took a swig of his own. ‘We used intelligence your Legion had gathered. I wonder why you were not sent to finish the task.’
The Angel shrugged. ‘We had other battles.’
The Khan smiled cynically. ‘I’ve not been doing this for as long as you, but I’m not slow-witted.’ He placed his goblet beside him and leaned forwards in the throne. ‘We were sent there to witness the depravities of devotion. Through this we were enjoined to understand the wisdom of the Imperial Truth.’
‘You do not see the need for it?’
JAGHATAI KHAN WARHAWK OF CHOGORIS Page 6