by Ben Counter
Xenos. Aeldari.
‘I know where it is,’ said Yathe. ‘The Ecclesiarchy calls it the Lyre of Innokens.’
‘Yet you do not have it,’ said the lead aeldari.
‘It is guarded,’ replied Yathe.
‘We were told you could command this world,’ replied the aeldari. ‘You cannot be untruthful to us, Yathe. Better beings than you have tried.’
‘I can have the cities,’ replied Yathe. She was fighting to keep her composure in the face of the sheer wrongness of the two aeldari standing before her. ‘The cult is already in place. They call me their prophet.’ She waved a hand at the body on the slab – the body through whose eyes Cyvon was watching. ‘I have an army of these. I can seize the cities whenever I want. Those who do not join me will flee or be killed. But the Lyre is not in the cities. It’s a relic of the Church, it’s in one of the shrines, and those are ruled by the Ecclesiarchy. They’re preachers and confessors. There’s no way I can sway them. I have to take it by force and that cannot happen overnight.’
‘They suffer,’ said the aeldari. He took a step closer to Yathe, looming over her. ‘I can hear their voices from across the webway. They beg for release. They plead for an end to the agony. Every second you delay, you will lose another part of them.’
‘I can’t just take it,’ said Yathe. She was shaking with anger. Even through the eyes of a dead man, skimming off the final memories, Cyvon could see the torment in her. ‘The whole Ecclesiarchy will mobilise. They have thousands of militia. I will have to hit all of the shrines at once so they cannot reinforce one another and strike back. If they get the chance they will move the Lyre off-world. Then I have to besiege them and starve them out. It could take… It could take months, years.’
‘Then do so,’ said the aeldari. ‘Time matters not to us as it does to you. The only thing that matters is this… this Lyre. But for your sake, and theirs, make haste.’
Yathe swallowed and bunched her fists. Cyvon saw she was a woman not used to begging from another. She was used to power, and here she had none. ‘I have given you my whole world,’ she said. ‘I have done all you ask. When the sieges…’
‘You have done nothing we ask,’ retorted the aeldari, cutting her off. ‘We do not hold the Lyre of Innokens.’
‘You don’t understand what you are demanding.’
‘The baseness of your language causes me pain,’ said the aeldari. ‘There is no more to say. I would be gone.’ He cast a scornful glance at the body on the slab, then turned to the heavily armoured aeldari beside him. The second xenos activated a device on its wrist and a shimmering light shone from just out of Cyvon’s field of view. The two walked into the light, and were gone. The light gate boomed closed and a furious silence fell in their absence.
Yathe let out a shuddering breath. She pulled a laspistol from her uniform holster and fired into one of the cogitator screens. It burst in a shower of sparks. She fired twice more, but the fury in her was not satisfied.
‘Would you judge me, too?’ she snapped at the subject on the table. ‘I have sacrificed more than you. All you lost was your life!’ She fired point-blank into the body’s chest, and the vision greyed out.
The last thing Cyvon saw was the fading image of Yathe turning away from him, holstering her laspistol and stalking out of the room, while he bled out on the table…
‘Aeldari,’ he said as his vision swam back to the present. The dissection room’s polished walls and cogitator banks were replaced with the ruination left by the frag grenade’s detonation.
‘I pray I did not hear you right, brother,’ said Sasan.
‘I must contact Captain Quhya,’ replied Cyvon.
He headed back out of the dissection room and through the laboratory strewn with mutated bodies. He saw in them the many experiments it had taken to perfect the Thricefold, and the countless lives the process had taken. It was not even for something as honestly evil as human greed. It was at the behest of a being that was not human.
The House Yathe compound above was a war zone. The other Soul Drinkers squads had hit the cultists hard and Cyvon could not see any of the heretics left alive. Bodies in robes and stained workers overalls covered the ground. Others lay on the rooftops where they had been shot down. The glass walls of the arboretum were all shattered and the main building was on fire.
The survivors of Hollowmount’s loyalists tended their wounded or sat in a shell-shocked daze. Far fewer of them had made it inside the compound than had attacked the walls. Cyvon saw Inquisitor Stheno moving among them, dispensing encouragement and confirmation that they had done the Emperor’s work. Father Eugenivov had survived, too, and prayed quietly with the most severely wounded to calm their souls in their last moments. A breach in the compound wall was choked with loyalist bodies.
‘Brother Cyvon!’ called Epistolary Oxyath. Cyvon guessed it was his mental lightning that had set the house on fire. ‘Was the blood shed here worth the spilling of it?’
‘I hope so,’ said Cyvon. ‘For this we lost a battle-brother and others are wounded.’
In the open air, Cyvon’s communicator was able to link up long distance with the strike force’s command vox-channel. He sent an alert signal, knowing it would flash a rune projected onto Captain Quhya’s retina.
‘Quhya,’ came the reply. There was static, but it was clear enough.
‘Brother Cyvon here.’
‘Brother, where is Sergeant Phraates?’
‘Wounded, alas. But we are victorious. The House Yathe compound has fallen and the Uppermost Hand is dead. But there is more. We have intelligence about who we really face on Kepris.’
The sounds of gunfire and raised voices could be heard over the vox. Wherever Quhya’s strike force was among the shrines of Kepris, they were fighting. ‘Can we act upon it, brother?’
‘I bring news of the xenos, captain,’ said Cyvon. ‘Yeceqath and her cult are in league with the aeldari.’
‘We know,’ replied Quhya, and Cyvon could hear screaming engines and stuttering heavy weapons fire behind his voice. ‘They have just arrived.’
After the House Yathe compound fell and as the Soul Drinkers made ready to leave, Father Eugenivov told Cyvon the tales. They had been passed down Kepris’ generations and the old preacher had relayed them so many times that telling them came to him as easily as breathing.
Saint Innokens, he explained, had wandered in the desert, and had died. The Emperor heard the prayer that formed from his final breath, and granted him life. So Innokens wandered on, following the increasingly vivid visions sent to him by the Emperor. His winding path across the desert ended within sight of the ocean, where Innokens finally succumbed to the exhaustion and deprivation of his pilgrimage, and died once more.
On the way he wrote down his visions, and they became a sacred book of the Imperial creed. Innokens had seen the galaxy ending a hundred times, and each version of the end times was rife with its own morals, allusions and prophecies so dense they defied understanding. That did not prevent generations of Imperial clerics spending a lifetime studying them, drawing what morsels of knowledge they could from the barrage of imagery that had coursed through the mind of Saint Innokens.
A shrine sprung up at each spot on Innokens’ pilgrimage. They ran from the northern edge of Kepris’ man-habitable regions to the edge of the equatorial ocean. Where Innokens found fresh water to sustain him, there was built the Station of Exalted Respite. The many Reposing Shrines were built where Innokens had recorded he found time and comfort to sleep. Among the biggest shrines were the Temple of the Breath Returned, where Innokens had died and been revived by the grace of the Emperor, and the Hall of the Grand Revelation, where Innokens had witnessed a vision of a terrible slash of darkness bisecting the galaxy and heralding its end. The Tomb of Innokens, meanwhile, was built to house his remains in the centre of the region defined by his pilgrimage, and
became the halfway station for those pilgrims who sought to retrace his footsteps.
The shrines of Kepris were run and guarded by the Ecclesiarchy. Their clergy gathered faithful laypeople to maintain the shrines and serve as a militia to protect the pilgrims who walked the trail. Above all, they guarded the relics housed in the shrines, for the relics of Saint Innokens were among the most sacred objects in the sector. The handwritten records of his visions, the devotional icons and rosaria he carried to remind him of the presence of his Emperor, the stone from which fresh water sprung to sustain him, all were kept in void-locked sarcophagi and vigilantly guarded. Only pilgrims who had proven their devotion were permitted to file past the sacristy chambers to view the relics of Saint Innokens’ life.
That had been the story for thousands of years. Eugenivov was also familiar with the more recent history of the Trail of Saint Innokens, and it was far less inspiring. When the cult of Yeceqath, the Voice of All, had arisen in the cities, militia flocked to defend the shrines from this heretical threat. As the cultists in Kepris’ military mutinied and plundered the armouries, the clergy organised the militias and armed the pilgrims.
As the cities fell, the shrines held out. Columns of cultists rode out into the desert to find thousands of defenders holding the whole Trail of Saint Innokens. Unable to breach the temples, the cult besieged them instead, draining its manpower in the cities and pressing armies of citizens into service. The Temple of the Letting of Blood fell, and its defenders were staked out in the harsh desert sun to die over agonising days. A column of pilgrims heading for the Temple of Breath Returned was massacred. Thousands died on the barricades and at the gates, and thousands more faced disease and starvation as the cult tightened its noose.
They were looking for something. Whatever Yeceqath’s goals, she needed the shrines conquered and was willing to spend every life on Kepris to do it. And with time, she would win.
That was when the Soul Drinkers arrived.
Cyvon helped Sergeant Phraates up into the belly of the cargo hauler. The tracked vehicle was just large enough to hold six Space Marines, and the Weldworks had proven to contain enough of them to transport the whole strike force. The sergeant said nothing, but it was clear he bristled at needing help to do anything. His wounds were too severe for him to fight, a state antithetical to such a pure warrior as Phraates.
‘When will you return?’ asked Father Eugenivov. The old man was watching the Soul Drinkers embarking ready to depart, and there was a wetness in his eyes.
‘Soon,’ replied Cyvon. He had no idea if it was true or not. Every facet of war had been drilled into him during the conditioning and training of the Adeptus Astartes, but that had not included raising the morale of the Imperium’s bedraggled defenders. ‘The Emperor knows His own,’ he said, searching for words that might encourage the loyalists of Hollowmount. ‘He protects.’
‘Indeed, He sent you to us,’ said Eugenivov. ‘But you are gone so quickly.’
‘Finish what we started,’ said Cyvon.
Eugenivov nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes. Yes, that is what He asks of us. He protects, and He expects in return. We are abandoned, for we must all fight alone in the end. But you have shown us how, my lord! You have shown us how.’
Cyvon didn’t know how to react. He was grateful when Father Eugenivov turned away and walked back towards what remained of his flock – the filthy, exhausted walking wounded who had returned to the Weldworks from the assault on the compound walls.
The loyalists would be without Inquisitor Stheno, too. The Inquisitorial operative was joining the strike force on their journey to link up with the larger Soul Drinkers force in the desert, where Captain Quhya was commanding the assault on the cult forces besieging Kepris’ shrines. Now Cyvon had an idea of what Yeceqath’s objective was on Kepris, he realised how fortunate it was that Quhya had taken the bulk of the Soul Drinkers’ strength to the Trail of Innokens.
Epistolary Oxyath climbed into the cargo hauler as Stheno approached. ‘Librarian,’ said Stheno. ‘Word from my contacts in the city archives. The woman Brother Cyvon saw is named Kalypsa Yathe. Younger daughter of House Yathe. It appears she is our Yeceqath.’
‘What about this Lyre?’ asked Oxyath.
‘A relic of Saint Innokens,’ replied Stheno, ‘kept at his tomb. Pilgrims found it recently in the desert ruins, the first new relic for millennia. Its discovery was thought of as quite the promising omen, ironically enough. As for what the xenos might want with it, that is another matter.’
‘Can your contacts tell us where it is from?’ said Oxyath. ‘What it can do?’
‘I doubt those contacts will survive much longer,’ said Stheno. ‘With the reprisals for the death of the Uppermost Hand, Hollowmount’s loyalists are all but gone.’
Cyvon looked behind him, to where one of the last gatherings of those loyalists heard the news from Father Eugenivov that the Angels of Death were departing and leaving them to the mercies of the Voice of All.
‘There aren’t enough of them left to defend the Weldworks,’ said Cyvon. ‘As soon as the cult learns we are gone, all these people are going to die.’
‘Are you minded to remain with them, to buy them a few more seconds of life?’ Stheno raised an eyebrow in amusement. ‘Is that really the best use of a Space Marine’s death?’
‘Merely an observation, inquisitor,’ said Cyvon.
‘Certainly not for a Soul Drinker,’ added Stheno. ‘Tell me, brothers, what manner of death befell those who once carried your name?’
‘We do not know,’ replied Oxyath. ‘History does not remember. The legacy of the Soul Drinkers is ours to forge.’
‘As I suspected,’ said Stheno slyly. ‘Evidently my sources are rather more reliable than yours. But then, I can search the places you cannot.’
‘What do you know?’ demanded Cyvon. Too late, Oxyath’s warning glance told him he should not take the inquisitor’s bait.
‘Suffice it to say,’ replied Stheno, ‘there are reasons the Soul Drinkers were forgotten.’
Cyvon swallowed his next words. An inquisitor could not be cowed or intimidated, even by a Space Marine. He watched as Stheno headed for the next vehicle in the column, feeling a sense of helplessness that was completely alien to him.
Cyvon climbed into the last seat of his squad’s hauler and slammed the rear hatch closed behind him. The engine growled and the vehicle began to move. It was unarmoured and slower than an Impulsor, forced to negotiate the difficult terrain, but it was well protected from the harsh environment of the desert and its industrial nature would make it inconspicuous as the column made its way through Hollowmount’s manufacturing hinterlands towards the Trail of Saint Innokens. Brother Sasan had to drive the vehicle, and had made his dislike of its crude handling well known.
‘What does he know?’ asked Cyvon, more to himself than to anyone else. ‘And how?’
‘The Inquisition know a great deal,’ replied Oxyath. ‘One might say it is what they do.’
‘Then why try to bait us so?’
‘The ordos seek every advantage, at every opportunity,’ said Oxyath. ‘He may just be reminding us of his superiority. An inquisitor has to be the supreme authority wherever he is. As to how, he has repositories of information at his command, and perhaps a way to contact an underling off-world.’
‘He’s just blowing incense up our fundaments,’ said Sasan from the driver’s seat. ‘He doesn’t know anything.’
Cyvon tried to force the questions out of his mind, as he had learned to do to make room for the battle-rites and tactical sermons of a Space Marine, but they would not go. They stuck in the surface of his mind like pieces of shrapnel. ‘What does he know?’ he said to himself.
‘Brother Cyvon,’ growled Phraates, ‘if your questions were bullets this city would be full of corpses. Stick to asking how we can break this enemy.’
‘Of course, brother-sergeant.’
‘The Principles of Siege and Counter-Siege,’ said Phraates. ‘Prime verses, from the preface. Begin, Brother Cyvon.’
‘The siege is the means by which the will of an enemy is broken, not his body,’ began Cyvon, the words spooling out of his memory as if a dam had broken and the sleep-taught doctrine was flooding his brain. ‘Instead, the target is his spirit. His surrender, not his death, is your goal. And yet death is at the same time the principal tool in the arsenal of he who seeks the reduction of the enemy by siege, and the means by which the besiegers shall themselves be broken…’
Cyvon recited the tactical sermon as the vehicle column snaked out of the Weldworks and towards the outermost foundries and factoria. Behind it, in billows of smoke and the stutter of gunfire, Hollowmount continued to bleed.
Part III
EXECUTION
Chapter Five
Looking back, it was inevitable that as our world’s suffering began in blood, so would our deliverance. Even now, however, I am startled by just how much blood there was.
– Father Balthan Eugenivov, The Keprian Vengeance
‘We have one advantage,’ said Captain Quhya. ‘We know what they want.’
The captain of the Third Company had set up a temporary command post in a trench a little more than a bolter shot from the walls of the Temple of the Thousand Tears. The trenches had been dug by the besieging cultists forces, and their corpses still littered the no-man’s-land between their defences and the temple. The Soul Drinkers had hit them so hard and so fast that the Hands of All had not had the time to direct the cultists against this new foe before Inceptor Squads Astyagon and Karavad had dropped into the middle of them from the sky. Quhya had led the rest of the Soul Drinkers into the suddenly disorganised enemy, and created a crossfire that cut down well over two thousand of them before the survivors fled into the desert.
