The Khan shook his head. ‘I know not. Not yet. For a moment, I thought we had an understanding – that we had showed him what could be done – but then he pulled away. Nothing ruled out, nothing committed to.’
‘He plays the long game,’ said Magnus.
‘To what end?’ asked the Khan.
The Angel said nothing, and an awkward silence fell.
Eventually, Magnus relented.
‘You tell me I do not listen,’ he said wearily. ‘Maybe so. We were all made proud, so the crime is hardly limited to me.’ He curled his fingers back into fists. ‘But on this occasion, I will. See, even I can learn flexibility. I will study what you produce, and I will think on it. You have my word. Then we will meet again, and see what can be done. Perhaps there will be some way, perhaps not. It is good, I suppose, to even mention these matters without being accused of being some kind of moral deviant.’
The Khan looked sceptical, studying Magnus for a long time, probing for some subterfuge or dissemblance. ‘Keep it secret,’ he said at last. ‘Just the three of us. The fraternity of primarchs is quarrelsome enough.’
‘Yes, and all fuelled by secrecy,’ Magnus said. ‘Very well, though. Secret, for now.’
‘We present it only when complete,’ the Khan reiterated.
Magnus looked at him shrewdly. ‘You do not get on with our Father, do you, Jaghatai? This much is known about you, even when so much else is not. You think He’s too close and driven by plans He does not divulge. And yet, here you are, keeping this secret until all is accomplished, lest any misunderstandings or miscommunications jeopardise its success. You wish to remain close now yourself, to keep things under wraps, to manage us like children until the success of this vision can be assured. Perhaps you two are not so dissimilar. Or perhaps you understand the nature of politics better than you pretend.’
‘I never pretend,’ said the Khan.
‘All of us do.’
‘Believe that if you wish.’
The Angel held up a hand. ‘Peace,’ he said. ‘We came here as allies, we should leave as allies. If we cannot overcome our differences here, they will be rejoicing on Barbarus within the year, so this is the task before us – find a vision. If we do not do it, no one else will.’
Magnus switched his amused gaze to the Angel. ‘So statesmanlike,’ he murmured. ‘But you’re right, of course.’ He leaned forwards, extending his open hands across the tabletop, one for each brother. ‘We swear it here, then, on this day – the safeguarding of the Librarius, under our watch, for an eternity of service. Do not take my levity to heart – I wish this to succeed. I understand the dangers, and I understand the need.’
Sanguinius took his brother’s hand, and the jewelled gauntlets locked tight. ‘Said well.’ The Angel extended his other hand towards the Khan.
For a moment, he hesitated. He was still looking at Magnus. Perhaps his famed pride had been dented, or perhaps he was merely weighing up how far he believed his brother’s words.
In the end, though, he relented, and his own hands reached out to those of his allies.
‘So long as you do, brother,’ he warned, sealing the triangle.
‘So you made progress?’ asked Yesugei, with the sun setting in a fiery sky.
‘Of a sort,’ said the Khan. ‘Work remains.’
‘Will you stay here, then?’
‘Until the Crusade calls again.’
‘And Horus?’
The Khan looked pensive. ‘I don’t know. I still hope he can be a part of this.’
‘His reputation has never been higher.’
‘There’s danger in that.’
Yesugei smiled. ‘You see danger everywhere, Khagan. You have achieved everything you set out to achieve – the survival of the ordu, the protection of the Test of Heaven. Now the last worlds topple, and we are on the edge of securing our honoured place within the Legions. Where is the danger? Where does it come from now?’
The primarch didn’t reply immediately.
‘I always knew,’ the Khan said eventually. ‘From the earliest days, before I understood anything but the Altak, I always knew where the threat lay, and how to counter it.’
He turned away from the sinking sun, hot even in its long decay.
‘But not now,’ he said pensively. ‘That is what worries me. For the first time, Targutai, I have no idea at all.’
ULLANOR
M31.000
FIFTEEN
It was a world laid low and then made anew, a testament to the newly unfettered power of humanity, the high tidemark of its burgeoning power. The Emperor had become both creator and destroyer, the commander of an Imperium that could reshape the physical galaxy into whatever image it desired. The Legiones Astartes were his right hand of vengeance, the Mechanicum his left hand of restitution. Now the planets themselves were baubles, mere fragments of rock to be hewn afresh and recast. After the inferno, the last retreat of the ork warlord Urlakk Urg had been burned down to its core, excised of all remnants and made pure for a new age.
Yesugei did not even know what it had looked like before. Perhaps it had been a swamp world, infested with splashing columns of hain marching under thick vines, or a desert, or a teeming hive, or a ball of ice. He found himself looking for clues, kicking over the rubble to seek a sign of how things had been, but found nothing. Ullanor’s gravel was lifeless now, a dust of almost inert semi-fused rock, ready for the terraformers to move in and begin the process of settlement. There were no clues left, nothing that would ever tell an observer that once an empire had been spawned here, one that had briefly risen up and challenged the growing domain of mankind.
Carthago delenda est.
How many humans would know what those words meant? How many Terrans, whose world had birthed them, and how many on the thousands of newly populated and rediscovered orbs, all frantically developing and building and reaching upwards to a dimly understood but fantastically powerful future? Just a handful, maybe, who had access to lost books written in dead languages. History had a penchant for repeating itself, though, for rehearsing old patterns in ever grander circuits even if the participants had forgotten their origins.
Yesugei walked further along the massif. Iron-black rocks were scattered away from him in every direction, a dry crust over life-crushed soil. It was hot, almost as hot as Baal had been, though he did not know whether this was from the munitions unleashed in the atmosphere, or because Ullanor had always been that way. The air was gritty and unpleasant, and the wind barely picked up from a faint stir that wafted against the exposed flesh of his face.
He had walked far after the great ceremony, wearied by its overblown triumphalism. The Khan had given him licence to stay away for a long time, and so he had taken the chance, exploring the crevices and peaks of the world, trying to divine what had made it such a totem for the orks before the end had come for them.
They had fought here longest and hardest, even more so than they had on their sentinel worlds. If Horus had not been there – if the Warmaster had not been there – it might have gone another way. They had to remember that now. Amid all the recriminations, bewilderment and envy, they had to remember that it had been the XVI Legion that had broken the enemy. Maybe another Legion could have done it, maybe not. It didn’t matter now – the deed was completed, the announcement made, the balance of Legions turned upside down.
Even after a lifetime of service in the Crusade, he still did not know many warriors of the XVI. They had always struck him as a coarse and brutal people, overly proud of their martial record, unwilling to share glory and possessed of the obsessions of pre-eminence. They were hardly alone in that, but the tendency could only get worse now.
So Yesugei had avoided them, both during the Triumph and also in the aftermath. The only conversation of significance had come just before the great processions, when thousands of warriors mingled on the avenues under the shadows of Titans, pressed up against one another so that no avoidance was possible.
&n
bsp; The warrior had had pale skin, dark hair, sunken eyes. His manner had been proud yet brittle, his eyes darting. Yesugei had sensed the power there, though heavily curtailed, bound under layers of control for a very long time, as if weight and vigilance had ever had purchase over such things.
‘You are Yesugei,’ the warrior had said, pushing his way in close.
Yesugei had nodded. They hadn’t met before – he would have remembered – but something about him was dimly familiar.
‘Jereth,’ the warrior had said. ‘I am named Jereth. I spoke to one of your order. A very long time ago, I suppose.’
‘Is that so.’
‘I’ve thought about him often, in the years since.’ His steel-grey eyes had flickered. ‘The Librarius is everywhere now. His were prophetic words, and I do not forget them.’
In the distance, war-horns had blared. The skies had churned, the first stirrings before His own craft began their long descent.
Yesugei had not found an adequate reply. Courtesy had demanded he remain engaged, but he had found he had no wish to. Something about this Jereth had been unsettling.
‘You speak of Borghal?’ he had asked, gauging the name from the resonance around them.
Jereth had seemed not to register that. ‘Know this,’ he had said. ‘I came to believe he was right. I did nothing to sabotage his overtures. Truly. My master was already looking to the future. If things had been… different, he would have backed the project. He remained aloof. That was for other reasons.’
Yesugei had said nothing.
‘It failed at that world. At Gar-Ban-Gar. No one will ever know it, but it failed there. Once he saw what was on offer, he couldn’t be seen to take sides.’
‘All must take sides, in the end,’ Yesugei had said.
‘Not always.’ Jereth had looked up at the growing torment in the heavens. Dust storms were kicking up, driven by powerful thruster downdraughts. ‘Does he live? The Stormseer?’
‘No. Died in battle.’
Jereth had looked genuinely pained. ‘I had hoped to speak to him again.’
And then the skies had split open, riven by columns of flame. The crowds had surged forwards, separating the two of them, and no more words were said.
That had been days ago. After the last fervour of it all had died away, Yesugei left, treading paths that a year ago had been burning and echoing with screams, and were now nothing at all, a blank sheet of parchment, a fresh start.
He detected the tracer signal following him a long time before he did anything about it. He had not been alone, truly alone, for a very long time, and he was in no hurry to change that. After a while, he began to be amused by its tenacity. He could walk a long way before becoming remotely fatigued, something even motorised transports struggled to match in that shattered landscape, and so the follower would surely give up soon.
But it kept coming. In the end, he chose to crest a particularly challenging scarp, and waited at the summit. He watched the crawler pick its way up the dry valley below, rocking on its axis and labouring on damaged tracks. The world’s sunlight was already beginning to fade, smeared to grey in a toxin-rich atmosphere. So many explosives had been detonated in the planet’s air that it would take decades of Mechanicum scrubbers to make it even vaguely safe to breathe.
The crawler came to a halt at the base of the cliff, and a slender figure got out. From the way the figure moved, Yesugei determined it was a woman, relatively old, in only moderate fitness and poorly equipped for the terrain. No doubt she was the one he had been informed about, the Terran whose enquiries had been more persistent than those who had come before. He might have picked his way down the slope then to intercept her, but decided to wait, to see how keen she really was for a meeting. He withdrew from the edge, turning away to look up at the scudding clouds, feeling the hot wind on his exposed neck.
He felt curiously dislocated then. The woman making her way up the steep clifftop suddenly became a source not of curiosity, but of doubt. He could hear her breathing from afar, hear the scratch of boots against scree.
He still could have walked away. She would not have been able to follow for long. He needed neither sustenance nor rest – she would last only a short while before having to turn back.
Yesugei felt his heart rate begin to pick up. For some reason, he wished to be elsewhere, another place, anywhere but there. The clouds were still racing overhead, the soils were still hot. His mouth became drier.
He had no future-sense. The Khan was right – that was a curse, a way for the gods to mock rather than bless. And yet, just then, a whole succession of strange images ran through his mind. He saw worlds burning – ones he recognised, ones he didn’t. He heard a voice crying out his name, and somehow knew it was this woman’s, though he had no idea why she was doing it.
He steadied himself. She had got herself in trouble. He could hear her losing her footing – if she slipped now, the fall would likely kill her, and whatever purpose she had in coming here would go with her. The urge to leave her alone was powerful, like a weight on his limbs.
He hurried back up to the edge of the cliff, just in time to see her teeter on the brink, her hands missing their hold. He reached out, catching her by the wrist, and it felt as fragile as glass in his powerful grip.
‘General Ilya Ravallion, Departmento Munitorum,’ he said. ‘Be careful.’
She looked up at him. He could see her face through a transparent helm visor, caked in dirt and sweat and visibly shaken. She was too weak for that ascent, but something told him that she would not have given up, but would have fought her way to the summit against all common sense. He could sense the determination there, the mental toughness, as formidable as her body was weak.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I will.’
Five days passed. The fleet was making preparations to leave again. It was no trivial thing to arrange for the orderly departure of those behemoths of the void. Refuelling, reprovisioning, rearming – it all took time, and the labour of many thousands of menials. The matter was complicated by the presence of other Legions in-system, all of whom made their own demands on an overstretched Imperial administration.
No greater gathering of primarchs had ever taken place, and every one of the assembled brothers took the chance to converse with his sundered kin, knowing that the chance would not come again for a long time. Emperor’s Children warriors mingled with the Luna Wolves; Death Guard infantry exchanged terse words with World Eaters pit fighters. The White Scars, as ever, kept themselves away from the hot centre, preferring the void to Ullanor’s blasted plains.
Eventually, though, Yesugei returned to the surface, taking a lander down for the human woman, as he had promised. There were sound military reasons for that – she was a general, one whose long service had not dulled a certain native commitment to the cause, and the Khan’s desire to bring the White Scars more into the mainstream of the Imperial war effort would require allies. Some of those were drawn from his peers – the Angel, the magician of Prospero – others had to be taken from less lofty stock. Ravallion had, after all, asked for the audience.
As ever, the remaking of the Legion was a work in progress. It would never have an end, and even its beginning was already starting to be forgotten. It had become hard to tell the Terrans from the Chogorians, at least amongst those who had served for any length of time. Perhaps they would never excise their weaknesses. The important thing, as Qin Xa was fond of observing, was to make the attempt.
Yesugei did not speak much to the woman on the orbital ascent. She was nervous, almost cripplingly so, but there was little other than platitudes that could be said. A Space Marine was an exalted creature; a primarch so much more so. That such creations were necessary was a marker of just how hostile the galaxy truly was – better that the masses never knew too much about them, and merely gazed up in awe from a distance.
But he had sympathy for her, for all that. She looked frail, like the almost forgotten bird on the far side of that bar
ely remembered Terran pane of glass, and there was only so much a determined mental attitude could compensate for.
‘Try to understand him,’ he said calmly. ‘He may even like you. I have seen stranger things.’
They docked soon afterwards, weaving through the clusters of void-craft drifting around the Swordstorm. From there it was a long walk to the Khan’s chambers, during which her agitation only grew. In the end, she did well enough – looking him in the eye, answering his questions honestly and without bluster. Yesugei watched her the whole time, ready to step in if the transhuman dread became too much.
It was unfortunate, perhaps, that the Warmaster chose that moment to make his long-promised appearance.
Horus was a bruising, dominating presence, even for Yesugei. It was hard to know how much that had always been the case, or whether the Triumph had altered him somehow. Now, the four of them were thrown together – Warmaster, primarch, Stormseer, human – as if in some kind of descending allegory of psychic evolution.
‘My brother,’ said the Khan, getting up to greet him.
‘Jaghatai,’ said Horus.
There was already an inequality between them. Before they had been nominal equals, part of an order without formal rank, albeit with a constant churn of rivalries and internal standings. Now the hierarchy had been made concrete – the Emperor had gone back to the Throneworld, and his favoured son had been appointed master of the Crusade.
That changed everything. Yesugei could see it. Perhaps even Ravallion could sense it. Horus seemed to have grown in stature, although he still exuded that old and easy charisma. The change was enough to make the exchanges stilted and awkward.
‘We should fight together again, you and I,’ Horus said to the Khan. ‘It has been too long, and I miss your presence. Things are uncomplicated with you. I wish you would not hide yourself away.’
It sounded like a compliment. Perhaps it was. Yesugei knew his master well enough, though, to notice the faint resistance there, the merest whisper of detachment.
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