by Guy Haley
It was inevitable that Elver would feel a sense of anticlimax. All his effort and his hard won expertise were applied successfully. Now it was done. Even the change in the ship’s noises, vibrating and rumbling with distant engine roar after years of silence, was a novelty for only a few moments, before it became the new constant.
Months stretched ahead, months of waiting for Curze to strike, or to come speak with him; equally terrifying experiences. And then what?
Elver shuddered. He left the bridge in a hurry and barricaded himself in his room.
There he picked up the bottle of rough spirits he’d been saving for the day, and drank it all without a shred of celebration.
Finally, finally, Tsagualsa lay beneath them. Elver looked at it through the scratched observation blister, the sole window anywhere on the whole of the Sheldroon outside of the airlocks. His manically grinning face reflected off the inside. He was a dishevelled lunatic, he thought, and so what? To get there he’d had to provide himself with the education Overton had singularly failed to give, and so much more besides. He was now a capable engineer, astrogator, pilot and captain.
‘I’m a one-man crew,’ he said to himself proudly.
The cost of his expertise stared back at him. His face, never pretty, was ruined. The prize his efforts had won him was not much to look at either.
Tsagualsa was the ugliest planet he had ever seen, and all he had ever seen were ugly worlds. A sphere whose colour palette extended solely to various hues of grey. Continental plates frozen by long inactivity scabbed the edges of dust seas. The sun was small, white and warmthless. Grey, white and black, the view was of a universe bled of all life.
A reflected face appeared next to his, huge and inhuman, pale and colourless as the scene on the other side of the armourglass blister. Dark hair cut Curze’s face into ragged stripes. Black holes stared where the glint of soul-light should shine.
Elver’s grin became a rictus. His heart leapt in his chest. Sweat prickled all over his body.
‘Tsagualsa,’ said Konrad Curze. ‘You have done well.’
Curze’s voice so close to Elver’s ear in the cramped blister sent painful shivers through him that reawakened the agony of torture, and stabbed at phantom limbs with hot daggers.
‘What now, my lord?’
‘We land,’ said Curze. ‘Prepare the ship’s shuttle.’
The primarch departed as soundlessly as he had arrived.
When Elver ventured out from the blister into the gangway only a second later, the primarch was nowhere to be seen.
Elver added ‘atmospheric shuttle pilot’ to his list of skills. He’d anticipated Curze’s lack of interest in flying to the surface. There was no simulator on board the Sheldroon. Venturing into the void risked becoming lost in it, so his experience was restricted to lifting the shuttle off and landing it within the cramped docking bay, and reading the operating manual so many times he saw the words floating in his vision when he fell asleep at night.
He was well aware that was pitifully insufficient.
Leaving the Sheldroon was child’s play. He had become totally familiar with the battered shuttle’s systems by then. Nevertheless, he was not naive enough to believe atmospheric entry would be easy, and he was not wrong.
Tsagualsa did not appreciate visitors. Winds tearing around its upper atmosphere sent the ship into a bouncing descent that had Elver wrestling with controls imbued with a sudden, malicious life of their own. The ship slewed from side to side, sending it kilometres away from Curze’s polar landing zone. Elver dragged too hard at the controls, his overcompensation sending them kilometres away in the opposite direction. The ship bounced, swerved and dropped down through the violent Tsagualsan air. Ventral vid cameras showed nothing but the blankness of a dust storm rising to meet them. Graphical displays depicted the slalom twist of their landing corridor as Elver’s inexpert piloting bent it out of shape. Alarms chimed and bleeped at him from every quarter. His hands slipped sweatily on the flight sticks. The engines howled in complaint. They fell through the cloud ceiling into fogs of dust that made the atmospheric engines scream. More alarms joined them as robust components suffered friction damage. The wind speed picked up, tossing the small ship around. Elver gritted his teeth, a soft grumble of concentration in his throat rising to a moan of panic. They were coming in too fast, too hard. Nothing he did seemed to help.
Throughout their plummet, Curze sat at the back of the shuttle. There were four other seats in the cockpit, all too small for him, so he sat on the floor with his back to the door, long, dirty fingers gripping the backs of the chairs in front of him so hard the worn upholstery split. The reflection of his unblinking glower in the cockpit canopy swam in and out of Elver’s view.
Wind howled around the ship. The shuttle pitched violently to the left, nearly flinging Elver from his seat, like a horse dissatisfied with an amateur rider.
The ship’s minor systems were less bullish, and eager to help. Proximity alarms screamed. Dark grey crags flashed by to starboard. Elver yelled, yanking the ship to the side, tipping it further back to port, then struggled to bring it back under control. It went into a drifting spin. Altimeters whirred downwards.
‘I would fire the braking thrusters and extend the landing struts, if I were you,’ said Curze calmly.
‘Yes, my lord!’ Elver’s good hand swept banks of toggle switches in the hope of activating the landing gear on the way to punching the thruster switch. The ship bucked, swung around. The struts squealed out of their housing, bringing new notes from the gale screaming around the ship.
The altimeter was still running down too fast. Zero approached with terrifying speed.
‘Brace, my lord!’ shouted Elver.
Curze remained unmoving. Elver dragged back to the flight sticks, twisting them, trying without success to halt the ship’s spin and level it out.
A second later hard rocks greeted the shuttle with a resounding crash.
The landing claws must have taken the brunt of the impact, for the ship remained in one piece. Still, Elver thought his spine had been kicked out of the top of his head. He blacked out, coming round to the ship sitting more or less level upon a plain of grey sand rippling with shrouds of gale-chased dust.
He was frankly surprised to be alive. The instruments winked and burbled quietly, all their complaints over. Green and yellow replaced the red of alarm. Environmental readouts showed racing wind and freezing temperatures, but the air carried sufficient oxygen to breathe.
‘I did it,’ he said. For the second time that day, a crazed grin split his face. ‘I did it!’
He looked around for the primarch. The cockpit door was open onto the small cargo bay. Curze was approaching the ramp release.
Elver looked at the dust storm in alarm. He needed protective equipment. Goggles at least, and a respirator. Dust like that would shred his lungs.
‘My lord, please, wait!’
Elver struggled to release his restraints before staggering up from his pilot’s seat. His neck twinged mightily. His head ached. The ship rocked on its landing claws in the storm.
‘My lord, please, I need to prepare!’
Curze turned to regard him silently, his hand hovering over the button.
Elver pulled himself through the door, half throwing himself at the supply locker. He dragged out his breathing kit and shrugged the purification tanks onto his back; he had no time to pull on the coat he’d brought down from orbit.
‘We are home,’ said Curze. ‘I am going out.’ His hand descended towards the gangplank switch.
‘Wait!’ shouted Elver. Gasping, he struggled his backpack on, twisting knobs to activate it. He couldn’t run the checks he should.
He was trying to catch the respirator mouthpiece swinging on its rubber tube when Curze pressed the door release with a gentle finger, and let Tsagualsa within the ship.
Wind shriek overrode the door mechanism’s hum.
Barely had the door opened a crack before
talcum-fine dust blasted into Elver’s face, drying out his throat and mouth instantaneously, and cutting at his innards with razor edges. He tugged on his respirator; like all his equipment it was a composite piece salvaged from the best components on the Sheldroon. Even with a crew’s complement to choose from, it was still little better than mediocre. As the ramp descended further, larger pieces of debris clattered in, borne on a wind that slapped at Elver’s face. He screwed up his remaining eye, knowing that to look into that wind was to ruin his cornea and lose what little sight remained to him.
When he’d got his goggles on and blinked the grit from his streaming eye, Curze was already walking down the ramp onto the murderous surface, slow and stately as a ghost attending his own funeral.
‘My lord!’ Elver shouted, but the rubber and plastek of his mask muzzled him, absorbing his words and turning them into a risible honk. ‘My lord!’
Curze walked through the wind without trouble, erect as a statue, his cloak wrapped around him tight as a winding sheet. Elver struggled against the raw strength of the storm as the whole planet seemed to exert itself against him.
His leg stump ached ferociously as he set his crude prosthetic against the deck and leaned hard into the gale.
Dust whirled the shuttle interior. The wind tore up anything not strapped down. Already, the paint was pitting, and drifts of merciless sand, unwelcomely sharp, colonised sheltered corners.
‘My lord!’ he shouted.
Elver experienced an appalling panic that he would not see Konrad Curze again, that he would go out into the storm and be lost. Curze was a monster, his tormentor, but there was a strange bond between them.
At the same moment, the seductive whisper of freedom enticed him. He could shut the door, deny the wind, fly away to the Sheldroon and make all speed for whatever system he could find. The nearest was ten years’ sailing, but there were enough supplies aboard to last him. He would be the master of his own vessel, still young. He could raise a crew, sell off the cargo and ply a new route between fresh stars. In a few years he might even be able to afford new augmetics to repair the damage Curze had inflicted.
Curze.
He hesitated.
The primarch was lost to sight behind the wind and its merciless cargo of sand. He had moments to decide.
Freedom, or horror?
For all his defiance, he knew freedom was a lie. The very concept was absurd. He had been a slave, now he was a slave to a different man. In a galaxy of unfree men, a slave must define himself by his master.
He served death itself. What more powerful lord could there be?
‘My lord!’ he shouted, staggering into the storm. ‘Wait! Wait, my lord!’
Deadly cold tore into him with every bit as much force as the wind. He gasped as its claws bit. He staggered forwards; it was too late to return for his coat. Curze was a pillar of night in the grey of Tsagualsa’s permanent twilight. Elver hurried after him, struggling against the weather where the primarch seemed to drift serenely through it.
The slow pursuit continued for an hour. Elver lost feeling in his limbs. Grit got into his augmetic arm, causing it to malfunction. More gathered in the cup of his peg leg, tearing the scars of his stump. Still he pushed himself on. Gradually the storm spent its fury, dropping by degree, until the wind was gone completely, and Elver was walking through a stilled world where fine particulate floated in the air, and the only noise was the rasp of his breath in his respirator mask.
Curze stayed the same distance ahead, never drawing away, never nearing. He saw now that the primarch waited when he dropped too far behind until Elver gained a little ground, then moved on ahead.
A blackness emerged from the gritty fog. At first, Elver took it to be a mountain, but it was far mightier than that.
The dusty air parted, giving up a huge building. Black stone that remained at a high polish despite the cutting nature of the weather gleamed at him. A small patch of white near the horizon showed the position of the sun. The glow of this pathetic sunset caught on battlements and mighty portals, and windows filled with fine stonework and finer glass. The primarch stopped before a yawning gateway set into a curtain wall a hundred metres high.
Elver doubled his pace, and with great weariness joined his tormentor.
‘My house,’ said Konrad Curze, though the word did no justice to so immense an abode.
By then much closer, and with the air clearing as dust snowed down to rest, Elver saw that the palace was unfinished. Many doors and windows were empty holes. The upper reaches ended in reinforcement spikes awaiting higher storeys. Not only unfinished, he thought, but abandoned. Construction equipment and pallets of materials hid beneath dunes heaped around the wall’s foot, their tarpaulins ripped by years of storms. Coverings for scaffolding hung in limp flags. There was no soul abroad beside the two of them, no life of any kind.
‘Now we wait,’ said Curze.
‘For what?’ asked Elver.
‘For whom,’ Curze said. ‘For my sons.’
Elver retrieved supplies from their shuttle and set up a small camp in the gateway for his lord. They were out of the worst of the dust and winds, but it was still cold, still inhospitable. There must have been many halls within the castle, but when Elver pressed him to go inside, Curze refused to enter.
‘We shall go within later,’ he said determinedly. ‘Now is not the fated moment. We wait here until the time is right.’ He said nothing more, but sat down in the lee of the gate tunnel, where he stayed unmoving, his head bowed, for days. Elver feared he might have expired, but dared not check.
Curze’s sons came in dribs and drabs, announced by roaring in the night. Elver emerged from his sleeping sack amid a shower of displaced sand. The primarch was standing now, a shade darker than the night, framed in the gullet of the gate.
The thundering of gunships echoed around the sky. The storm’s load did not fall easily, held aloft by electrostatic charge and lingering so long Elver wondered if it were possible ever to see the stars from Tsagualsa’s surface. When Elver reached for objects he was rewarded with flashes of electricity and stung flesh. The same effect dragged nets of light behind the ships as they came down, and though the craft themselves were invisible in the dusty air, the blue lightning pursuing them danced bright announcements across the sky.
The ships set down with noisy, avian shrieks some way from the unfinished fortress. Elver went to the gate mouth and awaited his master’s offspring.
The first of them emerged as a group five strong. Instrument glow from their helm lenses preceded them, red slants in the dark like the eyes of animals. They came to their father, who towered over them as they towered over Elver. It was so dark their forms were fuzzy, with hard edges highlighted by the bloody glow of their helm lenses, and the actinic flashes of discharge earthing itself through their battleplate. The lightning painted on their armour blinked under this brief illumination, confusing their shape further. Symbols covered other panels – most had death’s heads painted over their face-plates, and the skulls of their victims knocked hollowly together on chains hanging from their shoulders. Spending years alone with a primarch did not lessen Elver’s awe for these beings. They were more terrible creatures than their gene-father, he could see that. Curze was clearly insane, tortured by conflicting drives and a monstrous sense of injustice. These warriors were not mad. They followed their lord’s despicable example freely.
‘Soul Hunter,’ said Curze.
Their leader knelt in the dust, followed by his fellows.
‘Night Haunter,’ said the warrior.
‘You came,’ said Curze. For the only time, Elver saw him smile at his warriors.
‘I foresaw your return, my lord.’ The Soul Hunter angled his helm upwards. ‘We heard your call. We are your loyal sons. We are here.’
‘So few of you,’ said Curze sadly.
The Soul Hunter’s reply was hard. ‘We bled. We died. We fought on Terra. You were not there. Why did you forsake us?’
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‘Get up, Talos,’ said Curze tersely, his indulgence soured at the question. ‘The rest of you, First Claw of Tenth Company.’
They rose.
‘Is there news of Sevatar?’ asked Curze. ‘I thought he would come first.’
Clicks sounded from the helmets of the group as they conversed privately.
‘You do not know?’ asked Talos eventually.
‘The last I saw of him, he came unasked to my side aboard the Invincible Reason,’ said Curze. ‘I lost him as I fought the Lion.’
‘For that reason we thought you might know what became of him,’ said Talos. ‘We have had no word of him since then.’
Another of them spoke, a cold killer’s voice harshened by helm speakers. ‘He must be dead, my lord. The Lion took him when he took you. None have heard of his fate since Thramas.’
‘We do not know that he is dead, Xarl,’ said another.
‘It is most likely,’ said Talos.
‘Horus lost,’ said the killer.
Curze gave his sons a pitying look. ‘As was ordained,’ he said. ‘Do you believe it could have been any other way?’
The killer was angry at the reply, and turned his head away.
More of the giants were emerging from the dusty night. Their eyes swarmed, dull as noctilucent insects. Curze asked many times of the one named Sevatar, but no information regarding his fate was forthcoming. All said the same, that he was lost to the Dark Angels.
Curze surveyed his sons. ‘You are the first to come. Many more will follow. All of you have fought hard, and are exhausted. I have endured events far beyond your understanding. In that time, I have had my faith tested by daemons and my brothers alike. I return from the dead for but a while.’
‘Don’t speak so, lord,’ said Talos. ‘Time may tell a different story.’
‘Fate is fixed!’ Curze said. ‘The path of events cannot be changed. Horus was always going to lose. I am going to die. When I am gone, you will take the truth to the stars, and tear down the edifice of lies built by my father. Until then…’ He looked up at the half-finished walls of the palace. ‘We shall build a fastness the likes of which has never been seen, within chambers furnished by the nightmares of better men. There I shall write my scripture of despair, the great antidote to the hope which plagues our species.’