‘It’s time we breached the upper decks,’ said Bror Tyrfingr, as Tubal Cayne halted their progress to update his plotter with fresh measurements. ‘We’ve roamed below the waterline long enough.’
‘The higher we go, the more we risk exposure,’ said Qruze.
‘And encountering Legion forces,’ added Karayan.
‘Bring them on,’ said Varren. ‘It’s about time my axe split some traitor skulls.’
‘That axe of yours will be heard all the way to the strategium,’ said Altan Nohai. ‘As soon as the Sons of Horus are aware of our presence, this mission is over.’
‘We’re not here to fight,’ Loken reminded Varren. ‘We’re here to mark the way for the Sixth Legion to assault.’
‘Then it’s time to mark mission-critical targets,’ insisted Bror. ‘Main gun batteries, Legion arming chambers, reactor spaces, command and control nodes. And once we mark them, we move forward. The Wolf King isn’t above a bit of subtlety and misdirection, but he won’t come at the Warmaster from the shadows. He’ll come at him head on, fangs bared.’
After facing Leman Russ across the hnefatafl board, Loken was inclined to agree, but the thought of heading into more familiar spaces within the ship was an unappealing prospect.
‘You’re right, Bror,’ he said. ‘It’s time to show why we were chosen for this mission. We need to mark this vessel’s jugular, ready for the Wolf King to tear out. We’re going higher into the Vengeful Spirit.’
Another vox-interrupt tried to cut across Banelash’s sensorium, but the echoes of its former pilots dissipated it before it could reach him. Just like him, they did not care to hear Tyana Kourion’s demands for him to return to the battle-line.
The Grand Army of Molech was assembling in the hills north of Lupercalia, stretching eastwards from the rugged haunches of the Untar Mesas to Iron Fist Mountain. With thousands of armoured fighting vehicles, hundreds of thousands (if not more) soldiers, battery after battery of artillery and two Titan Legions mobilising to fight, the Lord General could surely manage without one Knight.
He’d searched the upland forests for days now, climbing through rugged crags and mossy valleys to find the White Naga. His initial thrill of being on the verge of something miraculous had faded almost as soon as he’d left camp. The divine avatar of the Serpent Cult had singularly failed to manifest before him, and his patience was wearing thin.
He’d chosen a direction at random, marching his Knight from camp with purposeful strides. The damage the Warmaster had inflicted was still there, a bone-deep hurt that would never go away, a permanent reminder to rival that of the loss of his sons. Being connected to Banelash via his spinal implants made their loss seem remote, disconnected, as though it had happened to someone else.
Tragic, yes, but ultimately bearable.
That remoteness would end as soon as he disconnected, and he entertained the wild idea of never removing himself from Banelash. Ludicrous, of course. Prolonged connection with the machine-spirit of a Knight filled a pilot’s brain with foreign memories, unrelated data junk and sensory phantoms.
To remain within a Knight for too long was to embrace madness.
As crazed as it was, the idea had taken root and could not be dislodged.
Raeven’s mouth was parched and his stomach growled. He hadn’t eaten before leaving camp, and wine soured in his belly. Recyc-systems filtering his waste were allowing him to continue without food and water, but he could already feel toxins, both physical and mental, building throughout his body.
If the White Naga didn’t reveal itself soon, he wouldn’t survive to return with any divine boon. The thought of dying alone in the deep forest amused him momentarily. How ludicrous an end it would be for a Knight of Molech. He would become a statue of iron and desiccated flesh, standing alone and forgotten for thousands of years. He imagined debased savages of a future epoch discovering him and coming to worship at his corpse as though Banelash were an ancient pagan altar.
He blinked as the sensorium flickered and stretched like poured syrup. The images it displayed were not externally rendered by machines, rather they were mental projections, controlled stimulations of his synapses to trigger a visual representation of the auspex returns.
Then Raeven saw it wasn’t the sensorium that was faulty.
It was the landscape that was twisting.
Normally the display was a monochromatic thing, stripped bare for clarity in battle, but now it erupted with sensation. The trees blossomed with new life and incredible growth. Flowers sprouted where he walked and their perfume was intoxicating and almost unbearably sweet. Colours with no name and sounds hitherto unheard assailed him. Raeven saw circulatory systems in every blade of grass, unblinking eyes on every leaf, a history of the world in every rock.
Every colour, every surface became unbearably sharp, excruciatingly real and swollen with vital potential. It was too much, a sensory overload that threatened to burn out the delicate connections within his mind. Raeven gasped, nausea stabbing his gut. If it hadn’t already been empty, he would have puked himself inside out.
Banelash staggered in response, an iron giant lumbering like a drunk. The Knight’s bulk smashed writhing branches apart and dislodged rippling boulders. Its energy whip lashed out, felling centuries old trees that shrieked as they fell. The rain-slick ground offered no purchase, as though it wanted him to fall, and Raeven fought to keep the Knight upright.
To fall so far from help would be death, but the thought no longer amused him. He wrestled with the controls as the overwhelming ferocity of the world’s hyper-reality cut him open and pared him back to the bone.
‘Too much,’ he screamed. ‘It’s too much!’
‘There is no such thing as too much!’
The power of the voice stripped the blinking leaves from the trees for a hundred metres and set Raeven’s mind afire like an aneurysm. The armourglass canopy of his Knight cracked and he screamed as blood filled his right eye.
He finally righted his staggering Knight.
And saw the divine.
‘The White Naga,’ he gasped.
‘One of my many names. I am the Illuminator, the beginning and the end, the ontological ideal of perfection.’
Without conscious thought, Banelash knelt before the godly being. The White Naga shimmered with light, a sun come to Molech in corporeal form with a heat so savage it would burn him from existence in the blink of an eye.
‘Here,’ wept Raeven. ‘Throne, you’re here…’
Amorphous clouds of scented musk attended it, together with the sound of mirrors shattering in their unworthiness to reflect such beauty. Its manifestation was wondrous and inconstant, a tapestry of writhing, winged serpentine imagery.
‘Your blood sacrifice brings me to Molech, Raeven Devine.’
Its many arms reached for him, beckoning him. Raeven wanted nothing more than to bring his Knight to its feet and lose himself in its embrace. To surrender to beauty was no surrender at all.
A last shred of human instinct restrained him, screaming that to submit to the White Naga would bind him to its service forever.
And would that be so bad…?
Its every incarnation was burned and reborn, as though it ever sought to reach a pinnacle of perfection. A starburst of ice-white hair haloed eyes the colour of indulgence.
Raeven wanted to speak, but what could he say to a god that would not be trite?
‘Speak and do as you wish, Raeven Devine. That is the whole of the law. You are free to throw off the shackles of those who chain your will and confine your desires. All must be free to indulge in every excess! Wring every moment of sensation and you draw closer to perfection.’
Raeven struggled to follow its words, each one a hammer blow against the inside of his skull.
‘Mankind was once free, Raeven, well-born and living with honour. That freedom intrinsically lead to virtuous action, but the Imperium has shackled your species. And so constrained, your noble natures fight to r
emove that servitude, because men will always desire what they are denied.’
The message was so simple, so pure and clear that it amazed him he hadn’t grasped it on his own. The barbed anger he’d felt before the Ritual of Becoming twisted in his gut, a powerful knot of painful disgust that misted his eyes with tears.
And as though filtering lenses had dropped over his eyes, Raeven saw through his tears to what lay beyond the White Naga’s veil.
Bloated and serpentine, it was no creature of the divine, but a hideous monster straight from the ancient bestiaries. A loathsome snake of iridescent scales and draconic wings, grasping arms and a grotesque face at once beautiful and repugnant.
‘What are you?’ cried Raeven.
It heard his horror and its glamours dug their claws deeper in his mind. The image of a godlike avatar warred with the bestial thing he knew it to be.
‘I am your god, your deliverer. I will lead you to glory!’
‘No,’ said Raeven, feeling the White Naga’s powerful will wrapping around his own like a constrictor. He held to the barbed hatred in his heart, and the White Naga cried out as they tore at its presence.
‘You don’t offer freedom,’ said Raeven, forcing each word out through the narcotic musk surrounding the creature. ‘You offer enslavement. It’s a lie, a damned, filthy lie!’
The musk surged with intoxicating power, and Raeven felt the monster’s rage like a physical force. It battered him towards submission. Whatever the White Naga truly was, it reared up on its coiled serpent body to face him through Banelash’s canopy.
‘What is more foolish than denying the perfection of an all-embracing being? There can be no creed, no leader, no faith that is as harmonious, perfect and finished in every respect as I. What madness would cause you to reject me?’
Raeven felt the walls of his resistance crumbling and fought to hold onto the heart of his sense of self. The image of the monster was slowly overlaid with the beauty of a god. Desperate survival instincts threw up a fragment of the tedious classes on aesthetics he’d been forced to endure in his youth.
‘There is no such thing in the world as perfection!’ he screamed, dredging his memories for the teachings of his boyhood tutors. ‘If a thing were perfect, it could never improve and so would lack true perfection, which depends on progress. Perfection depends on incompleteness!’
The White Naga’s hold on him slipped. Just for a second, a fraction of a second. It was enough for him to look into its eyes and see the yawning abyss of madness and ego that thought nothing for a single other living being, and cared only that they fall to their knees and adore it.
Raevan clenched his fist and Banelash coiled its energy whip.
With a cry of rage, horror and anguish he swung.
The whip cracked, its photonic length slashing down through the White Naga’s powerfully muscled shoulders. Milky light spurted from the wound, as though the creature was formed from hyper-dense liquid under intense pressure.
A wing crumpled, torn like tissue, and its upper arm spun away like a broken tree branch. The whip tore through the creature’s torso and its anguished screams were those of a god whose most fervent believer has turned against it.
The White Naga – or whatever damned thing it truly was – lurched away from Banelash. Shock twisted its once beautiful features and made it ugly. Worse than ugly, the furthest extreme of loathsomeness wrought into being. Its repellent form fuelled Raeven’s towering sense of injustice.
Raeven shucked his other arm and felt the heat of his thermal lance engage. He rarely employed the lance, its killing power too swift and sure for his liking. But that was exactly what he needed right now. The White Naga surged in anger, its ruined body bleeding radiance from the galaxy of stars in its chest.
One wing hung from its muscular back, and its right side was a crumpled, molten mass of lightning-edged flesh where its arms hung limply at its side.
Raeven burned the thermal lance through its chest.
And ran.
EIGHTEEN
Eventyr
Torments
Deaths overdue
Every bump in the road was exquisitely transferred up through the suspension of the Galenus to send jolts of pain into Alivia’s side. Her chest hurt abominably, and the fresh grafts in her chest pulled painfully every time she shifted position on the gurney.
Still, she knew she was lucky to be alive.
Or at least lucky it hadn’t been worse.
‘You need more pain balms?’ asked Noama Calver, the surgeon-captain, seeing her pursed lips.
‘No,’ said Alivia. ‘I’ve slept for altogether too long.’
‘Sure, just let me know if you need any though,’ she said, missing Alivia’s meaning. ‘No need to suffer when there’s a remedy right here.’
‘Trust me, if it gets too bad, you’ll be the first to know.’
‘Promise?’
‘Hope to die,’ said Alivia, crossing her heart with her hand.
Noama smiled with matronly concern. She squeezed Alivia’s arm as though she were her own daughter, which was exactly the emotion Alivia had planted in her mind. Noama Calver had a son serving in an off-world Army regiment and her concern for his wellbeing ranked only slightly higher than the wounded men under her care.
Alivia didn’t like using people this way, especially good people who might have helped her if only she’d asked. Getting to Lupercalia was too important for her – for them – to take any chances that Calver might not have helped.
Kjell had been even easier. A good man, he’d joined the Medicae out of a desire to stay away from the front lines – little realising that medics were often in the thickest fighting without a weapon. The Grand Army of Molech was preparing to meet the Warmaster’s army in open battle, so it had been child’s play to ease his thoughts towards heading south to Lupercalia.
Noama moved down the Galenus, checking on the other wounded they carried. Every one of them ought to be back with their units, but they’d kept quiet when Noama ordered her driver, an impressionable boy named Anson who just wanted to get back to Lupercalia to see a girl called Fiaa, to drive away from the fighting.
Too easy.
Jeph lay stretched out on a gurney farther down the Galenus, snoring like an engine with a busted gear. She smiled at the softening of his features, hating herself for making him care for her so much. She’d had enough of time alone, and there were only so many years a girl could spend on her own before company, any company, was infinitely preferable. She knew she should have left him back in Larsa the minute the starship crashed, but he wouldn’t have lasted another hour without her.
Honestly, back in the day, would you have looked twice at him?
An easy enough question to answer, but it wasn’t that simple.
There’d been complications. Two complications to be exact.
Miska and Vivyen sat playing a board game called mahbusa with a number of ebony and ivory counters. She’d taught it to them a few months back. An old game, one she’d learned in the counting houses of the Hegemon, though she suspected it was older even than that compact city of scribes.
The girls had been suspicious of Alivia at first, and rightly so. She was an intruder in their world. A rival for their father’s affections. But she’d won them over with her games, her kindness and her fantastical stories of Old Earth’s mightiest heroes and its magical ancient myths.
No one told a story quite like Alivia, and the girls had been captivated from the beginning. She hadn’t even needed to manipulate their psyches. And quite without realising it, Alivia found herself cast in the role of a mother. It wasn’t something she’d expected to relish, but there it was. They were good girls; cheeky, but with the charisma and wide eyes to get away with it.
Alivia knew Jeph wasn’t the reason she’d gone back to the hab, it had been for Miska and Vivyen. She’d never even considered being a mother, wasn’t even sure it was possible for someone like her. She’d been told she had greate
r concerns than individual lives, but when the first impacts hit Larsa, Alivia had understood how foolish she’d been to blindly accept that.
Every part of her mission was compromised by having attachments. She’d broken every rule she’d set herself when she first came to Molech, but didn’t regret the decision to become part of their family. If John could see her now, he’d laugh in her face, calling her a hypocrite and a fraud. He’d be fully justified, but she’d still kick him in the balls for it and call him a coward.
Vivyen looked over at her and smiled.
Yes, definitely worth it.
The girl got up from her box seat and came over to Alivia with a hopeful look in her eye.
‘Who’s winning?’ asked Alivia.
‘Miska, but she’s older, so it’s okay.’
Alivia smiled. Okay. One of Oll’s words. Another thing she’d taught them. They said it in the scholam, where the other children looked strangely at its unusual sound.
‘I can teach you a few moves if you like,’ said Alivia. ‘I was taught by the best. Could give you an edge.’
‘No, it’s okay,’ said Vivyen, with all the earnestness of a twelve-
year-old. ‘I do lots of things better than her, so it’s good she has this.’
Alivia hid a smile as she saw Miska make a face behind Vivyen’s back and make a gesture her father wouldn’t approve of.
‘Are you all right?’ said Alivia, as Vivyen climbed onto the gurney. ‘It’s been pretty hard since we left Larsa, eh?’
Vivyen nodded. ‘I’m fine. I didn’t like it when the tanks were shooting at us, but I knew you’d get us out in one piece.’
‘You did?’
‘Yes.’
Alivia smiled. A child’s certainty. Was there anything surer?
‘Will you read me a story?’ asked Vivyen, tapping the gun-case tucked in tight next to Alivia. Even wounded, she hadn’t let herself be parted from it.
‘Of course,’ said Alivia, pressing her thumb to the lock plate and moving it in a way she kept hidden from the girl. She opened the case, feeling over her Ferlach serpenta to the battered storybook she’d taken from the Odense Domkirke library. Some people might say stolen, but Alivia liked to think she’d rescued it. Stories were to be told, not for sitting in an old museum.
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