Azkaellon watched the familiar landscape shoot by. Like all his Legion, he had a mixture of devotion and hatred for the world that had shaped him. Its punishing environment was the crucible that had made him what he was, turning him slowly from a baseline human into a son of Sanguinius. He would have died a hundred times over to defend it, and when away from it all he dreamed of was its emptiness, its raw beauty, its lurid colouration.
But it had never been an easy place to live in. Baal was not a nurturing home world, only a proving ground, an anvil, a test of the strong.
He turned from the viewport to look at the only other occupant of the generous crewbay. The primarch of the V Legion, sat in a burnished throne, was staring out at the same vistas. In the distance, the striated cliffs of the Moraglio massif piled up against a dull red sky, cracked and worn by millennia of rad-laced storms. Otherwise all was spare as iron, blasted and driven down to the most basic of elements. Nothing much could live out here save rustdrakes and fangworms, scuttling out at night to hunt by the eerie light of the twin moons.
‘Not quite as welcoming as your home world, lord,’ Azkaellon said.
The Khan said nothing for a while. He carried on scrutinising the landscape as it raced past. Ahead of them, the ground was rising steadily, thrusting up into broken-edged hexagonal plates. ‘But I understand it now,’ he replied, at length.
‘Understand what, lord?’
‘Where the fury comes from.’ The Khan turned to look at Azkaellon. ‘This is a fine world. This is a world for the raising of fighters.’
Azkaellon bowed. ‘Few off-worlders recognise it.’
‘Terrans, you mean.’
‘You say that with a certain antipathy.’
‘I am a Terran, Blood Angel, as is your master.’
Azkaellon laughed. ‘Of a kind,’ he said.
The landscape continued to rise, a gathering mass of piled cliffs, each one marked by the thin trails of cut-stone stairways. Chasms sliced through the rock, the channels of long burned-out rivers. The flyer skimmed across them, and leathery avians could be seen far below, flapping across the voids in lazy arrowheads.
At some stage, the natural stone gave way to artificial walls. The precise point of transition was hard to pinpoint – one moment, they were looking at the rust-coloured flanks of the desert highlands; the next, their flyer was passing not ridges but ramparts, not dry riverbeds but highways. The great warhold of the Blood Angels rose up from the earth of its world in organic majesty, morphing slowly into a spiralling collection of domes, towers and colonnades. Gold plating glinted under the red skies, barred with decorative friezes of ebony and chalcedony, and underpinned with geometric stonework hewn from Baal’s inimitable terracotta heart.
The flyer swept round in a long arc, giving a clear view of the fortress’ interior – its wide terrazzo courtyards, high basilicas and ceremonial cloisters, as well as the solid defence towers and multiple landing pads. Rows of gunships were visible from the open doors of mighty hangars, suspended from deployment cages. Legion aspirants could be made out down below, being schooled in formal bladework on fenced training grounds.
Then the flyer was swallowed up by the lumen-studded innards of an intake portal, and its speed finally began to ebb. It glided to a halt, touching down on a series of impeccably crafted flex-struts.
Azkaellon gestured to the opening doors. ‘If you will, lord,’ he invited.
The Khan rose and made his way to the extending embarkation ramp. As he emerged into an enormous reception hall, he tasted hot, dusty air. Basalt columns ran down the length of the echoing space, interspersed with graven images of gold-masked warriors. The place smelled faintly sweet, and a low hum of atmospheric processors murmured away on the edge of hearing.
Waiting for him was an honour guard of twenty-four Blood Angels retainers, plus a single figure in bone-white carrying a skull-topped staff.
‘Welcome to Baal, lord,’ Yesugei said, bowing. ‘It has been a long time.’
The V Legion delegation was small: Yesugei himself, four warriors of the ordu, a menial staff of thirty, some servitors and the crew of the starship Naman. The Blood Angels had housed them in a tower complex in the northeast corner of the enormous fortress. As was the way of their hosts, the guests had been treated extravagantly well, given access to every facility and offered repeat bouts of martial contest. If the IX Legion had a flaw, Yesugei had decided, it was this unwearying enthusiasm for testing themselves in close combat. The four legionaries in his delegation had initially taken up the challenge readily enough, but after a while the repeated gladiatorial bouts lost their appeal.
‘I do not know why they insist on it,’ he told the Khan, once they were alone in the Stormseer’s allotted chamber. ‘They cannot be compensating – they are ferocious.’
The Khan wandered over to a glass-topped table stacked with decanters. He lifted one to the red light and swilled what looked like wine. Then he looked around at the rococo decoration, the stone-carved walls, the ubiquitous images of smooth-faced, youthful warriors.
‘They’re restless,’ he said. ‘Getting ready for something.’ The Khan reached for a goblet and poured himself a drink. He sipped it, raised an eyebrow, then poured a larger one. ‘What, though? I don’t think they know themselves.’
‘And he’s gifted,’ Yesugei said. ‘Your brother.’
‘Of course he is.’
‘His soul is scattered through time, and he half perceives it. Forget the wings – that is why he supports this.’
‘I don’t envy him. Better to face the future without shades and phantasms whispering at you.’ He reached for another decanter and tried another glass. Everything tasted of burned sucrose. ‘Do you have a counterpart?’
‘They are political creatures here – their first captain, Raldoron, spoke to me often. Librarians, too – the one I spoke to on the Red Tear, Kano, has been present for some weeks. They are cultured but impulsive. They see us as a curiosity, I think. In truth, they are burning to know what the Thousand Sons will say, but I tell them nothing, for I know nothing.’
‘A happy state of affairs. And are they here yet?’
‘They have not sent a delegation. Only the primarch.’
The Khan laughed. ‘Really? Gods, he has his reputation for arrogance, but still.’ He strolled over to the long windows. Baal’s skies were fading to a deep crimson. It was still hot, but soon the desert climate would plunge into freezing. Like its sons, Baal was an all-or-nothing proposition. ‘So, tell me what you’ve learned.’
Yesugei sighed. ‘It will not be easy. Your Father gave you talents, but He also gave you egos. Sanguinius is uncertain. His future-sense makes him stay his hand, and I believe he fears the potential as much as he understands it. Magnus, on the other hand…’ He let slip a wry smile. ‘Magnus will either save this or damn it all. He sees no reason for restraint. I have not been given an audience with him, but I sensed his arrival. I could sense it even before his ships broke the veil.’ He shook his head. ‘So powerful. Truly, only once before did I encounter the like, and that was on Terra.’
The Khan took that in. ‘So what are our chances?’ he asked. ‘Optimistic?’
Yesugei grinned. ‘As I have always been.’
‘Then this was no wasted journey.’
Yesugei nodded. ‘As long as you’re sure.’
‘Sure. Sure. How can one be sure about any of this?’ The Khan drained the last of the wine, and placed the goblet back on the table. ‘What choice did we have? We could not stay in the shadows, letting others make the running forever. As it is, we’ve still no doubt been too cautious.’
‘For good reason. If they seek to use this–’
‘If they seek to use any of it,’ the Khan said darkly, ‘we will end it now. I will be the pawn in no player’s game. Either they take us for what we are, or they can have their empire and we’ll outrun them all.’
Yesugei never looked away. ‘And is there galaxy enough for that, Khagan?’
‘We’re fast enough.’ The Khan smiled. ‘We’ll always have the space we need.’
The conclave table was circular, three metres in diameter, carved from a single piece of Baalite black granite, faintly reflective and speckled with phaneritic points. A flame danced over its centre, the size of a human fist, suspended a few inches above the stone. That was the chamber’s only artificial light; the rest came from narrow windows cut into terracotta sandstone, each of which threw a bar of warm red across the flagged floor.
The room was high up, thrust into the red planet’s thin air near the summit of the fortress. The pale curve of the second moon could be perceived from one of the slit windows, translucent like a lens, gazing down serenely on the world it had long ago helped to destroy.
Three souls sat at the table – the Angel, the Crimson King and the Warhawk. All primarchs were creatures of magnificence, blessed with greater stature than any unaltered human, but this trio shared a certain symmetry of splendour. Each one was tall, clad in gold and ceramite finery. It was said by some that the power of the primarchs had always been combinatory, such that when gathered together their respective talents merged into something greater than the constituent parts. This had always been a dangerous idea, and one publicly rebuked by others with greater knowledge of the genesis of the project, but it never quite went away, and in that place, just then, it was hard not to imagine the auras of the three primarchs mingling, merging in the half-crimson glow of a Baalite noon, solidifying into something new, stronger and stranger.
All primarchs were also creatures of the warp. Whether by original design or by the taint of their scattering, all of them had the aether running through their veins like a lesser mortal had only blood. Some wore that heritage openly, some kept it hidden, others suppressed it through aversion to what they were, or had been made into, or feared they would become.
Magnus the Red was the most egregious example of the first inclination. Even the ungifted sensed the power beating solidly at his heart. Those with any sensitivity at all to the other side of the veil saw more closely to the truth – he was an inferno boiling away, barely contained within boundaries of flesh and sinew. When he moved, even the most modest of gestures, it was as if multiple shadows both preceded and followed, blurring across the networks of space-time. The most acute of all knew that his true form was almost certainly a mystery to all but himself and perhaps the Father who had created him, and that the projection was, for all its incomparable art, just that.
At a certain level, though, he was merely a ruddy giant with a vivid mane, a single eye and a ready and generous smile. His voice was pulled up out of his great galleon hull of a chest, superficially avuncular and with an almost childlike enthusiasm for esoteric language-forms. They said he spoke a hundred languages himself, some long dead, some not yet even codified by its natural speakers. They said he spoke xenos tongues too, and that he had conversed at length with the scholar-seers of the eldar.
They said so much about Magnus. No one, perhaps not even him, really knew how much of it was true.
‘You worry too much,’ he said.
The Khan shot him an amused glance. ‘So you keep saying.’
‘Because it is the truth. You hobble yourselves, not as greatly as our deluded brothers from Barbarus and Olympia, but you are hobbled all the same.’
The Angel looked up from contemplation. ‘Who will fight alongside you, then, Magnus?’ he asked.
The Crimson King laughed. ‘So you’ve heard of that.’
‘And I,’ said the Khan. ‘The Luna Wolves won’t do it anymore.’
‘They said that to you?’
‘More than once.’
Magnus sighed. ‘There are rumours about all of us. They say your people venerate the severed heads of your enemies. They say Baalites drink the blood of the fallen. Does it really matter, what they say?’
‘So much like our Father,’ smiled Sanguinius, shaking his head a little. ‘You talk, but don’t listen. No wonder He favours you.’
Magnus laughed. ‘Come, now. I was told this would be a conference for the betterment of all, not a trial for the Thousand Sons. All I’ve heard thus far is warnings, and I can get those from plenty of mouths.’
‘The mind-weapons must be preserved,’ said the Khan, patiently, setting out the case again, ‘but they have a blade on both edges. The Wolf King isn’t a fool – he knows this just like we do.’
‘Because you both come from witch-haunted devil-worlds,’ Magnus said. ‘The doctrine of Unity is anathema to you, because you see the future and you fear it. All this talk of purity and isolation – it can’t be sustained. Technology will come to Chogoris sooner or later, and you’ll have to put your folk tales away then.’
‘Why must you denigrate them?’ the Khan sighed, looking at him wearily.
‘Because they’re nonsense, brother. Gods and demons and sprites and witches – you should listen to yourselves.’ Magnus pushed back from the table, spreading his great arms along its curved edge. ‘We call it the Ocean. It is a product of galactic harmonics, something to be explored. Some of its manifestations seem to be of a sentient kind, at least in outline, but that is not how things are. That is the way our minds make it appear – what they conjure to help us understand it. We must do our best to make sense of the vortices, and so what do we cling to? The old figures and archetypes, the ones we used when we were scrabbling around in the dirt of Uruk. Come, tell me brother, do you truly believe in these goblins of the warp?’
The Khan regarded him steadily. ‘Yaksha,’ he said. ‘Yes, they are real.’
Even the Angel looked sceptical then. ‘As in, truly real, or as metaphor?’
‘Does it matter?’ the Khan asked. He raised his hand to the light. ‘What is this thing here? A gauntlet? A swirl of atoms? A mathematical description? It kills just as well, whatever the provenance.’
Magnus laughed again. He did so often, and it was unfeigned mirth when it came. ‘But some explanations are better than others,’ he said. ‘That’s the point.’
The Angel placed his hands together, and his wings rustled softly. ‘These discussions will not sway the Lord Russ, who, so far as I know, is not given to discussion of the finer points of philosophy. Our purpose here must be simpler – to retain what we have, and keep the zealots quiet.’
‘I’m not worried about Russ,’ said Magnus.
‘You ought to be,’ said the Angel.
‘Rules,’ said the Khan quietly.
The other two looked at him.
‘Laws,’ the Khan said, looking up at them. ‘Believe me, I’m no lover of them, but we require a statute of limitation. Something to keep things within bounds.’ He took a deep breath, as if staving off an unpalatable task. ‘We fought the greenskin xenos and their power was immense. What was their weakness? They could not keep it under control. We used that against them, and it accelerated the victory. Our doctrine has ever been this – we set bounds on what we aspire to. We draw on the nether plane, but we do not set up a house within it. We take the tools we can use, but we do not enquire of those that are forbidden.’
There was a short silence as the two others absorbed that. Sanguinius spoke first.
‘But where, then, does the line fall?’ he asked.
‘Exactly,’ said Magnus. ‘I will not make Chogorian myths the guide here.’ He shook his head. ‘This is against the spirit of the age. We cowered behind legends during the Age of Strife, and it took our Father to restore some spine to the species. We are exploring the physical galaxy, and so must also explore the psychic one.’
‘Then the Librarius will remain the same,’ said the Khan.
‘As it always has been. The Librarius houses our scholars, our keepers of knowledge. We are not just warriors, brother – we are the guardians of the species.’
‘And who will guard them from us, if we do not do it ourselves?’ said the Khan.
‘We need to at least speak of laws, that much is clear,’ said
Sanguinius, turning back to Magnus. ‘The turn is coming – you know it, we know it. We have supporters, but our enemies are more powerful. He will have to rule, sooner or later.’
‘A reformed Librarius could be taken to Malcador,’ said the Khan. ‘We could present it to him, now, before the test comes. He knows the power of mind-weapons, but it is for us to show him that we can control them. If we do not, others will whisper to him the alternatives.’
‘Draw them up, then,’ said Magnus. He grinned, then seemed to shrug. ‘Compile some lists of places-we-dare-not-go and things-we-dare-not-touch, and I’ll take a look. I’ll see what my wicked cabals make of them too.’
‘This is not a jest,’ said Sanguinius.
‘Is it not? I find it amusing.’ Magnus stretched his fingers out, running them across the black granite as if he would squeeze it into splinters. ‘I was told that we had been bled of fear. I was told we had been elevated to a greater state, and that the stars held no terrors for us any longer. It disappoints me to see that this is not so.’ He shook his head again, and the fronds of his mane shuffled. ‘What can we tell Malcador that he does not already know? You call them mind-weapons. He will have his own name for them, culled from aeons of research. He will know how they work, and why they were given to us, and what their destiny is. How could he not? He was there when we were made!’ He laughed again. ‘I wish that all the Legions had them. I wish that all our brothers celebrated them. I wish that everything were permitted that does not cause harm.’
Sanguinius snorted. ‘You know they cause harm.’
‘More than a bolter? More than a battleship?’
‘Far more,’ said the Khan darkly. ‘If unguarded.’
The two of them held one another’s gaze for a few moments. Slowly, Magnus lost his smile. For an instant, it seemed as if he were reading something in the Khan’s expression that went beyond the visual.
In the end, though, Magnus shrugged it off with another broad smile.
‘So what of Horus?’ he asked. ‘Your personal project? He would be a powerful addition to the cause.’
JAGHATAI KHAN WARHAWK OF CHOGORIS Page 15