But Karras held on. There was only one way to salvage Shadowbreaker. He was not sure what it would do to him, but he had to take that gamble. It was the only shot he had.
He merged the woman’s soul into his essence, swallowing it like a phage cell swallows an invading foreign body.
The effect was immediate, like being struck with a thunder hammer. He lost his grip on himself and plunged further down the tunnel, ripped along by the powerful current. The waters got stronger, more turbulent, as he neared the light at the tunnel’s end.
‘No!’ raged Karras. ‘No!’
He threw his will against the currents and managed to halt his progress, but the waters were churning furiously around him, unceasing in their attempt to carry him onward.
Struggling to keep himself steady, he began the mantra Athio Cordatus had taught him – the mantra that had saved him from the Black River more than once already. He prayed that it would be enough. He had never come this close to the tunnel’s end.
Cordatus had warned him long ago. Those that did seldom, if ever, returned.
He gave all conscious thought over to the words, and slowly, ever so slowly, the black waters began to lose their hold. They started to fade as the mantra lent him strength, empowering him to return at last to the material realm.
He landed back in his body with a jolt. Opening his eyes, he found himself on hands and knees, the taste of blood on his tongue. His pulse was pounding. His head ached and his eyes itched.
He pushed himself up and found Aranye staring hard into his eyes. She hadn’t moved, wasn’t even breathing hard.
‘The daemon,’ said Karras.
‘Gone,’ said Aranye.
He looked down at the inquisitor. She lay on her back, staring up at the sky. Wisps of smoke still rose from the crater Coldwave’s shot had burned in her body. Her eyes were lifeless.
She was gone.
Karras searched within himself. No, he thought. She is not gone. I have her, right here inside me, trapped inside my mind – all that she was beyond her physical form. Shadowbreaker is not lost. I have her.
Aranye took a single step towards him. ‘There are three ways we may do this, Death Spectre. You will not like any of them.’
Sixty-two
The first option was no option at all.
Karras knew he couldn’t match Aranye’s power. Were he to attack her now, the others would be murdered by her troops. Even if he could hold his ground against her eldritch might, he could not hold against her entire force. Her ship alone had armament enough to raze Kurdiza to the ground.
The second option was to allow her deep into his mind. Karras had trapped Epsilon’s soul within himself. He had full access to her knowledge, her memories, her patterns of thought. What the farseer sought could be learned by letting her dive.
He might have conceded to that if he could have trusted her, but she was xenos. And she was powerful. No matter what inner walls he might erect, if he let her in by choice, she would have unprecedented access to all he knew – the ways of the Death Spectres, the existence of the Shariax, everything.
The eldar were the most capricious of all races. He would never risk the secrets of his beloved Chapter falling into their hands.
Better he die and she learn nothing.
The last option, and the only real option worth considering, was little better, but that little was at least something.
‘You will come with me,’ said Aranye. She pointed upwards. ‘The woman’s soul can be encoded into a gem aboard my ship. You will retain her knowledge, but she will no longer reside within you, and I will be able to glean what I need from her without directly accessing your mind. It ought to satisfy your need for secrecy. Be warned, the process is neither quick nor easy, but once it is done, I shall deliver you to an Imperial world, there to do as you wish.’
Her face was expressionless, unreadable. ‘What will you do, Space Marine?’
She seemed to care little, or not at all, which option he chose. Aranye would have what she sought regardless. If he chose to fight, Karras had no doubt she would find a way to entrap his soul as he had Epsilon’s. She would get what she wanted.
She could not lose.
He, however, could lose everything.
He cast his gaze over the inert forms of his Talon brothers, of Scimitar, of Striggo and the Elysians. Armed eldar were all around them, weapons held ready, awaiting her command.
His eyes settled on Copley. She lay where she had fallen, arms and legs splayed, her head at an awkward angle on Triskel’s right shin. Both looked deathly unwell. Perhaps it would be better for them not to awake. All that lay before them was a slow, grisly end.
Something occurred to him then. ‘Though it will stain my soul and my honour both, I will go with you,’ said Karras, ‘and allow the woman’s soul to be transferred as you say. But you will sweeten the deal. Two of my comrades are dying. They will not last long. If it is within your power to save them…’
Something changed in Aranye’s expression, but hers was the face of the alien. Whatever the change signified, Karras couldn’t read it.
‘It is within my power. They will have to come with us, and will be dropped with you when we are done, but I will have them healed. Is this acceptable to you?’
‘And no harm will come to the others?’
‘No harm will be done to them here. I came for information. Your cooperation in this will buy them their lives.’
Karras breathed deep and turned his eyes skyward.
The eldar ship hung above Kurdiza, a dark shadow against the bright blue of mid-morning, silent, unmoving, imposing. The grounded t’au ship looked like a toy by comparison.
The inquisitor’s ship, Song of Scaldara, was still in a hangar, fully crewed but for a Navigator and an astropath. With stealth systems engaged, she would get everyone back to Chatha na Hadik without the t’au running her down.
Broden had said the Saint Nevarre was holding somewhere in-system, cloaked, hopefully hidden from t’au and eldar both. Sigma would slip in and extract his assets from the rebel hold in the north. At least, so Karras had to assume.
Such things were out of his hands.
He returned his gaze to Aranye.
If there were any other way… any way at all…
But there was not.
‘Let us be away from here, then,’ he said, his tone sharp, edged with anger and frustration. ‘I would be done with all this quickly.’
Sixty-three
Agga did not watch the Imperial forces depart, but she felt them. She stayed in the lower levels of the drowned city, as befit her servant role, carefully suppressing her psychic signature, anxious that someone or something aboard that larger ship would yet recognise her for what she was and send someone to end her life, as they had done for her son.
The Imperium, she knew, did not tolerate unsanctioned psykers. Even among allies.
One of the other Space Marines, he with the daemon’s skull carved on his pauldron, had come looking for the man he believed was the Speaker of the Sands. Agga had not lived this long without solid intuition. She knew in her bones that this Space Marine had been ordered to kill him. Forseeing this, she had sent her son away into the rainforest with his bodyguards.
When the Space Marine asked to be taken to the Speaker, he was told that the Speaker had gone to lead the fighting in the capital and had been killed there.
The giant’s face said he knew it was a lie, as if he could smell it somehow, but he gave no words to such thought. There was no time. The Inquisition ship was ready to depart. He had turned and thundered off to board it with his brothers.
When the Imperial ships were gone, she’d call her son back. She’d continue to work through him – the male face needed to lead the Kashtu and maintain their unity with the Ishtu.
Karras and Copley had, apparently, not told a s
oul of the Speaker’s true identity.
Silently, she thanked them.
As Agga thought again of the armoured giant without a soul who had been sent to execute her boy, she shivered. There was something profoundly wrong about him. How could any man exist on this side of reality without a soul?
And then she reminded herself that these Space Marines were not really men. The stories and legends presented them as such – giant men of greatness and power and of holy lineage – but they were not really men at all.
They were something else, born for a lifetime of constant bloodshed and death, revelling in slaughter. She hoped she would never meet another. Fight as they did for the sake of mankind, they were dark and terrible and unknowable for all that.
She hadn’t seen that in a vision, but then she’d never had a vision of her death. Old as she was, she knew even her strange gifts would not keep her alive indefinitely. In all likelihood, it would happen soon. Even two decades earlier, her longevity had already been surprising to her. It occurred to her that perhaps those gifted as she was were spared visions of their own deaths. She couldn’t know for sure. There were no others like her on Tychonis to ask.
Lyandro Karras, the Death Spectre, might have known, though he claimed to be no seer. But he was long gone, and he had not departed on the same ship as the others. She’d felt the alien craft arrive, even this far from the battle, so powerful had the presence aboard it been. She had even felt her mind being abruptly scrutinised from afar by that inscrutable being.
Such a cold and remote intelligence. It had examined her soul as some tech-priest might examine some curious but ultimately irrelevant device.
And then it had left.
With the Death Spectre.
Agga had known that the others would be coming back. She’d seen that, seen the coming of the larger ship that would take them offworld and leave the Kashtu and Ishtu survivors to grieve for their dead.
And to take control of Tychonis, to make it ours again now that Coldwave is dead and his troops and machines much reduced. They gave us that, at least – a fighting chance at last. And we’ll take it.
She rose from the cushion she’d been sitting on and slowly got to her feet. Old age was such a pain. So much still to do, and this aged body was so slow and weak. It frustrated her.
Her stomach growled and broke her chain of thought. She was hungry.
As she shuffled along a torch-lined corridor towards the kitchens, she thought of the future of her world. Once again, it was down to the old tribes of Tychonis and the t’au. The fight was more balanced now. Fairer. But it could still go either way.
She reached the kitchens. One of the tribeswomen gave her a bowl of broth and a large slice of buttered bread on a tray. Agga took it with her back into the corridor outside. There she sat on a bench, her back resting against the wall, the scent of the spiced broth tugging at her nose.
As she was about to bite into the bread, a piercing psychic screech lanced straight into her mind.
The tray clattered to the floor. The soup spilled out over cool stone. Agga dropped to her knees, gasping in psychic pain.
That sound. Powerful. Inhuman.
It had come from the far south.
Suddenly, her mind was snatched out of her body and thrown violently into the tides of the prime futures.
There, she had a vision like no other she’d ever seen.
She tried to stop it, to turn from its horrors, but she could not. The vision would not be denied.
At last, it ended – a gut-wrenching, heart-breaking and unimaginably bitter end – and her surroundings became solid again.
She felt her mind resettle in her body, felt her old bones and muscles and skin weighing her down.
Her cheeks were wet with tears.
‘So,’ she muttered to herself, ‘we witch-sighted can foresee our deaths after all.’
Sixty-four
Four months Standard Imperial after the battle at Kurdiza, the astropathic relay on the agri world of Rilaea Secundus found itself visited by three unlikely guests.
The guards at the tower gates dared not prohibit their entry, for the leader of the trio was a terrifying figure known to them from legend and storybook, a titan of a man in sculpted armour of silver and black. His blood-red gaze dared them to get in his way. None took up the challenge.
His companions, a man and a woman, had a look of hardened soldiers about them – a certain way of moving and a cold, predatory look in their eyes. The tattoos on their arms marked them as Astra Militarum special forces, though they would not speak of regiment or rank.
Only the Space Marine spoke. He demanded that the relay send an extraction request on his behalf. The codes were of the Inquisition. Ordo Xenos.
Nine days later, a strange black ship appeared in the skies of Rilaea Secundus. It showed on no auspex scanners. It made no effort to announce itself to the Planetary Defence Force or Navy Aerospace Control.
As quickly and mysteriously as the three individuals had arrived, they were gone, and the black ship with them, leaving the populace to their wild stories and speculation.
No Space Marine was ever seen there again.
Sixty-five
The torches flickered and danced.
The same two hooded figures sat facing each other across the same broad wooden table, and yet, so much had changed.
‘He has been truthful?’ asked Omicron.
‘There may be details he is withholding, but my analysts assure me that the answers he has given are true,’ said Sigma. ‘Or rather, that he believes them to be true.’
‘The eldar warned us not to pursue Blackseed. Clearly, they were not content to leave it at that. For now, at least, it seems the possibility of locating Al Rashaq has diverted their attention.’
‘A matter of time, I’m sure,’ said Sigma. ‘They will turn their eyes to Facility fifty-two soon enough. Al Rashaq will not occupy their attention forever.’
‘To think that it exists after all… the warp anomaly described by Acanti. The Adeptus Mechanicus searched for so long. In the end, they decried it as a hoax. Yet the t’au found it.’
‘And lost it again in their battles with the Y’he.’
‘Had Epsilon not stumbled across the trail, it would have stayed that way.’ Omicron was silent a moment, then added, ‘She was not wrong to pursue this. She made grave errors in judgement, but her motivation was sound. If Al Rashaq is as legend claims, it could offer an opportunity to utilise Blackseed much earlier than expected.’
‘The Death Spectre took pains to impress on me the import this farseer places on locating it. He believes we should send a force to secure it before the xenos do. If the eldar believe it of such worth, the Imperium must not let it fall into their hands.’
Omicron pressed his fingers together as he considered that. ‘He wishes to go into battle against them? Even after their fortuitous intervention at Kurdiza and the saving of Copley and the other?’
‘They are xenos. He is conditioned to detest them. He claims he had no other choice but to put himself in their charge temporarily in order to fulfil his mission objective. The ordo would have been left utterly in the dark had he not found a way to return with the information he gleaned from Epsilon’s soul.’
Omicron’s avatar nodded its hooded head. ‘He is right in that. I’m sure it does not sit well with him.’
‘He clearly bears a powerful hatred towards them,’ said Sigma. ‘The farseer’s manipulations cost him much. Honour and pride are ever the weakness of the Space Marines.’
‘As well as their strength.’
‘He wishes to be deployed as part of, if not in command of, an intercepting force. It would have to depart almost immediately. The eldar have had a significant head start.’
‘How have the rest of Talon reacted to his return?’
�
�There was apprehension at first. The Ultramarine demanded his dismissal, then called for purity tests. For the most part, they trust him. He has told them much of what transpired. I ordered him to exclude certain details, naturally. But his actions saved their lives and Operation Shadowbreaker both. They recognise that.’
‘Twice now he has pulled operational success from a seemingly impossible situation,’ said Omicron.
‘At great personal cost each time,’ said Sigma. ‘Much as I harboured doubts, the predictions were accurate. He seems strangely blessed… or cursed. I cannot quite decide which. Shall I reinstate him as Talon Alpha?’
‘See it done,’ said Omicron with a nod. ‘Let us see how long his destiny serves our interests. There is much the covens still cannot tell us, but still… Fate has chosen this Death Spectre for something very particular. Have the Exorcist continue to watch him. Should Lyandro Karras drift out of alignment with our aims, issue the execution order.’
‘What of Blackseed?’
‘Epsilon’s work on Tychonis is exciting in its potential. It’s clear that she was very close to a breakthrough. As such, I have issued orders for the capture of more t’au. We will continue her work. However, the progeny of White Phoenix is showing all the potential we have been looking for. We will soon be ready for field tests.’
‘To be conducted against Hive-Fleet Jormungandr, my lord? Surely a smaller tendril, a splinter of Gorgon perhaps…’
‘My coven has scried the hybrid’s prime futures extensively. Jormungandr features in all of the most promising. I think it no mere coincidence that the Death Spectres also feature so prominently, but the nature of this link remains unclear. We must watch and wait. All truth is revealed in time.’
‘With Facility fifty-two’s location now revealed to the eldar–’
‘Operations will be moved. I am handling the matter personally. Your focus must be on locating and securing Al Rashaq. Consider the forces you will need. Ordo assets only. I do not want word of this reaching our opposition. Submit your requests to me as soon as possible.’
Shadowbreaker - Steve Parker Page 44