JAGHATAI KHAN WARHAWK OF CHOGORIS

by Chris Wraight

  ‘I’m yet to be convinced.’

  ‘I’d heard the rumours.’

  ‘This is where you tell me that I need to understand the necessity – that we shield them for their own good, and that the deceptions are noble, for all that they remain illusion.’

  Sanguinius said nothing for a while. He looked at his brother thoughtfully, the last of his smile dying away. ‘You have psykers in your Legion,’ he said at last.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘A Librarius?’

  ‘Of a kind.’

  ‘Then that is already a refutation,’ the Angel said. ‘The populace can believe our powers are bounded by science. Even our generals, if they want to. We know it isn’t.’

  The Khan looked at his brother warily, as if cautious to avoid some kind of trap. ‘And what do you suppose that leaves us with?’

  ‘I will not debate with you of gods and monsters,’ the Angel said, ‘but the psyker cannot be avoided. Already there are those among us who wish to see them banished, shut away or blunted lest they unlock something fouler within us. Those voices are growing stronger. Despite what you may believe, my wayward brother, the Throne listens to its sons. One day, if we are careless, we will lose all these things, and then we will be the ones at fault, for we did nothing.’

  The Khan looked sceptical. ‘I care nothing for what another primarch does.’

  ‘They won’t stop at their own Legions.’ Sanguinius remained reclined, almost languid, his pristine golden robes catching the candlelight. ‘For the puritan, there is no comfort in scouring one’s own house; all houses must be made clean. You are on your own, Jaghatai, heading further into the void, an empire unto yourself, so you don’t hear the whispers.’

  ‘And I care nothing for whispers.’

  Sanguinius snorted. ‘You should. I’ve seen worlds destroyed by them.’ He too placed his goblet to one side. ‘Word has come to us of your gifted caste. Stormseers, yes? You know as well as I do that denying the far side of the veil only hampers the pace of the Crusade. You could be a powerful ally to us, were you convinced to add your voice to ours. Numbers are important.’

  The Khan said nothing.

  ‘Magnus is the greatest,’ the Angel went on. ‘In this matter, he carries the most weight, but he is… controversial. The preservation of this requires reasonable heads, ones who can make the case without extremity.’

  ‘Now you come to it,’ the Khan said. ‘What you wished to say. So tell me plainly.’

  ‘A defence of the Legion Librarius. A unified proposition – its dangers acknowledged and its benefits defined. At present, when our psykers are named sorcerers, we have no reply, for what do those words even mean? Scholarship is needed, a greater understanding of what we have. Your tradition is as rich and subtle as any – we wish for you to stand with us.’

  The Khan thought on that. ‘I’ve never desired fellowship with any of you,’ he said eventually, almost uncertainly, as if the sentiment were being dragged out of him. ‘Do not take that as pride. More like necessity.’ He grimaced. ‘I find obligation to others… difficult. When I see walls, I wish to escape them. That is a flaw, no doubt, but then we were made the way we are for a reason. You would not find me an easy colleague.’

  The Angel laughed. ‘Have you met the master of Olympia yet? These things are all relative.’

  ‘Our weather-makers are central to who we are. They fought with us before He came. They will do so for as long as we take up blades.’

  ‘Then defend them.’

  For a moment longer they held one another’s gaze, as if embarked on some silent test of will. The similarity between them was evident then – two demigods, created from the same source and imbued with the same terrifying level of self-belief. The Angel was the more splendid in aspect, his outline hazy with the gold reflection from his artificer plate, yet the Khan, lord of the plains-world, matched him in stature. As ever with him, there was the sense of something hidden, an elusiveness that was integral rather than incidental, as if when reaching out to grasp him you would always fail, clutching at air while his designs played out across another battlefield entirely.

  But it was the Khan’s eyes that moved away first.

  ‘I will think on it,’ he said.

  ‘Russ is opposed,’ the Angel said. ‘Mortarion and Perturabo are opposed. Ferrus is opposed. We need allies, taken from the masters of more enlightened Legions. Remain aloof forever, and they will outnumber us swiftly.’

  ‘Does our Father know of this?’

  The Angel shrugged noncommittally. ‘Few things escape Him.’

  ‘Engagement will not be easy. Already we are committed to more conquests.’

  Sanguinius smiled. ‘You will find a way to aid us, if you choose to do so.’

  The Khan suddenly looked up at him. ‘You have a name in mind,’ he said.

  ‘You will take your own course.’

  ‘Say it, for what it’s worth.’

  ‘I do not seek to guide you.’

  ‘Say it.’

  The Angel affected nonchalance then, for the first time, and not altogether convincingly.

  ‘Lupercal’s star shines strongest, all know it,’ he said. ‘To have him as a part of this, to even make the suggestion, if the chance came… Well, it could not hurt.’

  The crew bay of the shuttle back to the Swordstorm was a subdued space. The Khan was morose, lost in thought, and his warriors knew better than to ask him what had transpired with the Angel. Yesugei, who had conferred with a Librarian named Kano during a short visit to the Red Tear’s archives chambers, sat back calmly in his seat, and looked at Qin Xa.

  The master of the keshig was helmless. His face was a bloody criss-cross of wounds and bruises. One eye was swollen closed, and his lip was split.

  ‘How fared your counterpart?’ asked Yesugei.

  Qin Xa grinned. ‘We both walked away. He limped worse.’

  Yesugei laughed. ‘Good.’

  ‘But I liked them, brother. I would like to fight alongside them again, with something at stake.’

  For some reason, that thought seemed to trouble Yesugei.

  ‘It might yet happen,’ he said uncertainly.

  After that, though, nothing more was said, and they crossed back to the Swordstorm in silence.

  CHOGORIS

  M30.898

  SEVEN

  The flyer shot low over the plains, almost seeming to graze the tips of the blue-green grass, sending a long furrow swaying behind it with a hiss and a ripple. It was a single-occupant craft, controlled by two slaved servitor-cortexes, both dumb and mute. Yesugei sat in the bubble-dome rear, watching the empty landscape speed past.

  He was not wearing his armour, but had reverted to adapted versions of the clothes he had worn before ascension – a calf-length wool deel, leather boots and a crimson sash denoting his rank and specialism. The flyer’s air filters were open, allowing the wind to buffet into the cockpit, making his long black hair flutter around his scarred face.

  In the far west rose the line of the Khum Karta mountains, dark blue against the pale of the sky’s arch. In all other directions, there was nothing but the whispering knee-high grass, ruffled by the booming wind and churning under the glare of the sun.

  So much of it was still as empty as it had ever been. Some worlds had been utterly transformed following compliance, a number of them by the Khan’s own hand, but not Chogoris. Only a single pocket of terrain had been altered from its primeval state, forged, raised up and dragged into the Imperium of the Crusade. Out across the vast expanses of rejke grass, nothing much else had altered. The nations still fought, cleaving to old ties of honour and oath-making, only now they did so under the watchful eyes of recruiters for the Legion. After the bloodiest encounters, tribal khans had grown used to the tally of bodies not quite adding up, the bravest and the youngest being spirited away as if by ghosts.

  A new mythology had entered the crowded Chogorian panoply of gods and demons, that of the kena
avdagh – those who steal the brightest souls. This event was understood to be the highest honour, and the losses were celebrated rather than mourned. On clear nights, those same tribes might witness the glowing trails of landers scoring the empty heavens, hauling the taken warriors out of time and experience to fight wars beyond the mortal plane. Fires would be lit across the plains to mark their passing.

  They could have been rapidly civilised, those tribes. They could have had compliance teams sent among them, technology given to them, reactor-powered cities constructed for them to live in. Such things had even been discussed, back in the very first days, but the Khan had ruled against it soon after the first substantive discussions with his Father.

  ‘I know now that this world is uniquely blessed,’ he had said to Yesugei back then, the light of the encounter still reflected in his face. ‘It births the strong without rancour. It nurtures vigour without pride. Nothing must change that.’

  The line of mountains drew closer. Their lower slopes were fir-clad and stacked with steep cliffs of grey stone. Cataracts tumbled down broken sandstone shelves, feeding the Orkhon river that wound, lazily, out into the plains. There were hard edges in the Khum Karta range, ridges of ossified granite pushed up from the planet’s mantle, creating spire-pinnacles that tore at the clouds like fingers.

  No one had lingered much in those places until He had come – only beasts and those few souls seeking the Test of Heaven had trodden its ice-glazed maze of defiles, shrived by the thin air and perishing gales. Now, uniquely on Chogoris, the mountains had been transformed. Huge foundations had been delved and solidified by hovering Mechanicum terraforming-engines. Walls had been raised, sheer against the already-sheer natural cliffs, buttressed with adamantium ribs and crowned with lascannon emplacements. Sanctuaries had been constructed in the Khitan style, rising one above another until they shot higher into the atmosphere than the naked peaks had done, blasted smooth by the storms and bearing the lightning-strike sigil of the gods.

  The monastery-bastion, they called it – at once palace, fortress, gaol and library, the new repository for the V Legion’s entire history, personnel and cultural artefacts. Vast quantities of materiel, supplies and combat records had been lifted down from warships in orbit, reverently checked and marked, then interred in frozen depot-chasms carved into the mountain’s heart. Terran scribes and techwrights were imported, as well as specialists from a hundred other worlds, all of them made to swear oaths of allegiance to the Khagan and put to work turning the bastion, by then named Quan Zhou, into one of the mightiest citadels in the growing Imperium.

  During the most active phase of its thirty years of construction, it was said that the earth shook and the skies heaved, leaving the Khum Karta wreathed in lightning and the skies shot with tongues of fire. The Chogorian tribes fell back behind the line of the Ulaav, their seers frantically consulting the augurs for signs of apocalypse.

  They never came back. By the Khan’s decree, a cordon was set about the new fortress, sealing it from the roving nations of the steppes, such that only the ascended and their indentured menial cadres dwelt in those halls at the roof of the world. Later Imperial delegations would assume that this was to keep the citadel free of the barbarous habits of the Altak. In fact, the opposite was true: Quan Zhou was isolated in order to keep Chogoris free of the taint of the Imperium.

  Thus was the fortress’ Khitan title explained: the Forbidden Citadel. No roads led there. No gates opened out onto the lowlands below. It was inviolate, like a mountain itself, only greater and stronger than any natural terrain.

  Yesugei watched the walls loom closer as the flyer began to ascend. Parts of them were still unfinished, covered in a thick lattice of scaffolding while the Mechanicum’s red-lacquered drones crawled over them. A fifth great landing platform was nearing completion, ready to receive the big crew-haulers that would carry whole regiments of legionaries up to waiting strike cruisers. Pennants bearing the gold-and-red sigil of the Legion fluttered in the stiff breeze, trailing like prayer banners over the pale rockcrete.

  The flyer slowed, gliding through the towers and the domes, eventually touching down on a hexagonal platform jutting from the summit of a tall spire. The armourglass bubble folded away, and Yesugei walked down the extending embarkation ramp.

  A single portal opened before him, guarded by two warriors of the Legion in glistening ivory plate. As Yesugei approached, the heavy doors slid open, revealing another Stormseer bearing two staffs, both crowned with equine skulls and decked with ritual totems. He was wearing full power armour, and a crystalline psychic hood rose up over his exposed head.

  ‘Naranbaatar,’ said Yesugei, bowing, before taking the second staff. As soon as his hands neared the criss-cross patterned wood, threads of barely visible force snaked between his fingers and the thick bands of metal around the shaft. Both Stormseers were surrounded by an aura like reflected sunlight – a faint quickening of the elements, as if the world became more vivid in their presence.

  ‘Were you successful?’ Yesugei’s deputy asked, returning the bow.

  ‘Not this time.’

  ‘Aya, there will be better days.’

  ‘That there will.’

  The two of them passed inside the spire’s pinnacle. Although Yesugei was far less imposing out of his heavy Mark II armour, something about the way he carried himself gave away the disparity in power between them. Naranbaatar was younger, though he had been a full member of the Legion for twelve years and was one of the Chogorian recruits whose numbers had been steadily growing since the foundations of the fortress had been laid. He had not performed the functions of a zadyin arga within his tribe prior to his ascension – that aptitude had been discovered during gene-surgery – but since then his development had been prodigious.

  ‘In any case,’ Naranbaatar said, leading his master down a spiral stair cut into the stone, ‘the rate of incorporation may have to slow. The apothecaries tell me they are working far beyond capacity. Perhaps let some warriors live their lives for a little longer before plucking them here, eh?’

  Yesugei grinned. ‘Do not let the Khagan hear you say that. It will never be fast enough for him.’

  They passed through a second set of doors, moving outside again. A wide courtyard stretched away before them, open to the sky and bordered with plane trees. Long banners inscribed with calligraphic sigils swayed in the breeze. Curls of incense whispered across the stone flags, snatched away by the wind and sent tumbling out over the terraces below.

  ‘They tell me, anyway, parity will be reached soon,’ Naranbaatar offered.

  ‘It may already have done so,’ Yesugei said. ‘Recruitment from Terra has slowed, they say. We are not, I believe, seen as a prestige Legion.’

  Naranbaatar smiled. ‘Which are, I wonder?’

  ‘The Thirteenth.’ Yesugei glanced at his protégé with some amusement. ‘Watch that one.’ Then he laughed. ‘How do things progress here?’

  They moved towards the western end of the courtyard. Above them rose four slender watchtowers, each surmounted by a golden dome that winked in the sunlight. An arrowhead of birds flapped lazily overhead, buoyed by the mountains’ thermals.

  ‘See for yourself,’ said Naranbaatar, gesturing ahead.

  A square arena had been cleared at the far end of the courtyard, laid with fine sand and bordered with a low iron wall. At each corner a statue stood, symbolising the four dragon-winds of the Altak. On the far three sides, the ground fell away in steep walls, exposing the promontory spur to the whine of the world’s winds.

  A single acolyte stood in the centre of the sacred space, clad in white robes. He had the telltale upper-body bulk of a Space Marine, and the ridges of his black carapace were visible under the wrinkles of his tunic. His head was bare and shaved, the ritual scar still livid along his left cheek. He carried a long staff, free of ornament.

  Armoured attendants stood watch around the perimeter. Facing the acolyte was a wooden image, man-sized, carved in
the likeness of a bird-headed element daemon of Chogorian myth. The two senior Stormseers took their places, and Naranbaatar gestured for the acolyte to begin.

  He drew the staff before him, holding it loosely two-handed. He tensed, and the muscles of his arm tightened. His eyes closed, and a line of sweat from previous exertions ran down from his temple.

  Above him, almost imperceptibly at first, the wind began to quicken. An eddy broke out, spinning above the promontory, sucking in energy and flickering with pale lightning. The air seemed to shudder, to heat up, to thicken. The sand drummed, shaking into concentric wave-patterns on the stone.

  The acolyte lowered his staff, pointing at the image of the element daemon. With his eyes closed, he mouthed ritual words, channelling the pent-up force down the length of the shaft. The build-up was instantly detectable – a burning, spun out of nothing and wrenched into the world of the senses.

  With a final clenched-jawed utterance, the acolyte released the holding-ward, and a jet of searing lightning flashed out from his staff’s tip, leaping across the space and cracking into the wooden idol. The figure ignited instantly, flaring up in a plume of blue-edged flame. The acolyte span the staff around, freeing a single hand. He clenched it into a fist, and pulled downwards.

  The idol blew apart, scattering in a shower of charred fragments. The sand kicked up in a rolling shock wave, spilling over the parapet where it was pulled into gauzy clouds by the fading storm surge. A dull echo of the thunderclap came back from the far cliff edges, gradually fading away as the world’s weather reasserted itself. In the distance, the shocked cawing of the birds could just be made out.

  The acolyte, breathing heavily, recovered himself. He looked up, bowed formally, and took up the staff once more in both hands.

  Yesugei stepped onto the sand and walked up to him.

  ‘Your name, brother?’ he asked.

  ‘Borghal,’ the acolyte replied, working to control his breathing.

  ‘Zadyin arga in your tribe?’