by Nick Kyme
Tagiomalchian raised his sword. Gilded whorls and ornate intaglio caught the light. A crackle of energy ran up the blade.
A short row of steps led up to the old bathhouse dais. Dark streaks ran down the grimy stone. It waited for him here, as he knew it would be waiting ever since it had tasted his blood. A ragged black cloak sat around its armoured shoulders, draped over scaled war-plate the colour of forgotten seas. Strange, organic spines poked through its sackcloth mantle. It needed no weapons. Its fingers ended in long talons that had tasted Tagiomalchian’s blood. It had been a legionary once, but now something else had taken residence in the mortal flesh it wore.
‘Abomination,’ declared Tagiomalchian, unhurried as he climbed the steps and so calm he could have been commenting on the weather. His gaze stayed on the legionary, but he was also aware of the robed figures by its side. Eight men and women. Though they were hooded, and stood over several bodies in the basin. Partly clotted blood rimed the drainage grate, clinging to the metal and darkening the rust at the edges.
The robed figures each bore the brand of the hydra on their cheek, so did the dead. Willing sacrifices. Each mark looked freshly made and raw, just like the one Tagiomalchian had seen in the dive bar before he had been attacked.
A ritual circle had been drawn in the black tar. He was to be sacrificed. The Emperor’s blood flowed in his veins, potent and preternatural. That had meaning for these depraved creatures and the thing they served.
Amongst the robed supplicants, a demagogue stepped forwards.
‘He is coming,’ the woman uttered, without zeal, as if she were simply speaking a fact.
‘Lupercal,’ the rest replied.
‘Lupercal,’ the cultists chimed as one.
‘Lupercal,’ echoed the legionary. He spoke in two voices in opposite registers. Then he leapt at Tagiomalchian.
I heard the crash of metal hitting stone, the sound of an armoured body borne down by something bigger and heavier. Flickering torchlight beckoned at the tunnel edge and the hint of a larger chamber began to come into being.
I smelled the ice plains again, heard the wind and fought to keep the old dreams at bay. Whatever had had its way in the Swathe, had killed Vezulah and led to Tarrigata’s death was here. I alone could reckon that debt and avenge the dead.
The rad pistol slapped at my thigh as I ran. The broad-blade felt leaden in my grasp, old muscles protesting even before this last battle. I ignored the pain and activated the disruptor. It flared then failed. I tried again, still running, about to break through an archway and into the light. It flickered and held. The actinic crackle running along the blade tanged my mouth, as though an electric current had just been laid across my tongue.
I breached the cordon of light and saw a golden warrior on his back, and a thing that defied understanding hacking at him with dagger-length talons. I knew the warrior, if not by name. A Custodian of the Emperor. I had fought beside them during the wars for Unity.
He half turned at my approach, expecting another enemy, but powerless to do anything about it if I was. His faceplate was impassive, but his struggle was far more obvious. The beast, the part-legionary, part-mutant that thrashed at the Custodian paid me no heed at all.
The eight figures on the bloody dais above them did and turned at once, opening their robes to reveal long, curved blades. Cultists.
Tarrigata, you old bastard. You were right after all…
Howling madness, they came at me.
I gutted the first, impaling him on the end of my sword. The disruptor field blew the body apart. Skin, bone and organs evaporated. The others seemed undeterred despite the spattering of gore. As I hacked the arm off one, I felt a blade cut into my bicep. It went deep and I stifled a growl of pain. Never show your weakness – the arena had taught me that. Another blade bit into my back. Now I roared. They had me surrounded. I felt the dreams of Unity pull at my mind. If I drifted now, I died, and so did the Custodian. Weakened, he struggled to fight back. The beast gored at him like prey it had brought down from the hunt. A few more minutes and it would be over.
I swung my arm, feeling a solid hit and the sharp crack of bone as one of the cultists flew like a broken spear haft and crashed somewhere out of my immediate sight. Holding the broad-blade one-handed, I drew my short sword and staked another into the ground. Despite his mania, the wretch began to wail.
I finished off the partly dismembered cultist next, my skull splitting hers open like an egg. A wild slash of my broad-blade brought death to another, a disembowelling blow that sluiced the ground with his guts. Stamping on the one I had staked a moment before left two still standing.
The first rushed me, curved blade swinging. I extended a savage kick into his torso, hard enough to penetrate the ribcage and snap through the spine. My boot came through his back and I had to shake off the ragged corpse. The last, the leader I think, slit her throat rather than face me, her body falling off the dais and into the empty basin to join the other bodies below.
Now the beast turned and in its gaze I saw something fathomless and evil. And I knew, in my marrow, it was no beast. At least, not of the natural order. All the stories I had heard, of the darkness coming to Terra, of the pacts made with beings older than the Imperium, I believed them.
Evil was amongst us, defying the Emperor’s rule of order. And I served the Emperor. I always have. I always will. It is my oath. It is the thunder and the lightning.
It threw the Custodian aside, casting him off like tough meat forgotten in preference of a sweeter kill. I brandished my sword.
‘For Unity!’ I roared.
We charged at each other, man against beast.
It struck like a tank, smashing me off my feet. My sword had barely cut a groove in armour that resembled arachnid carapace only many times more robust.
I staggered up, sword as heavy as a tombstone, skull pounding.
The Sibir ice plain…
Smoke drifting from the Abyssna…
Shaking off the dreams, I scarcely parried a slashing talon. It had prodigious strength, the repelled blow nearly jolted loose my shoulder, but its presence felt… wrong. A deeper malaise, more than just physical pain, began to wear at me. Old voices of the dead, visions of carnage yet to come. My own ignominious death, sacrificed to some entity from beyond…
I cried out, and realised its talons ripped at my flesh, taking a butcher’s fill. I swung, cutting off a hand or a claw. The appendage flopped to the ground, flipped from back to front and then scuttled, spider-like into the shadows.
Such horrors, I had barely seen the like.
I backed away and knew I was dying, not from the wasting of my limbs and mind, but from the wound it had dealt. I felt it. I knew it.
I barely had the strength remaining to lift my sword. I had dropped the other blade. It had scattered away into the same shadows where the spider-hand had sought refuge.
I slashed wildly, trying to hold off the beast. It laughed at my efforts, its voice inhuman enough to set the hairs on the back of my neck on end. Then I reached down, out of instinct or by design I could not be certain, and felt the grip of the rad pistol. The mark of Unity pressed against the palm of my hand as I wrenched it loose of the holster, not knowing if it would even fire.
I clenched the trigger.
A focused burst of intense radiation struck the beast in its torso. The mortal shell it wore shuddered. It sagged, momentarily weakened. In that moment I swung the broad-blade with every ounce of my strength and cleaved through shoulder, through torso, through neck. It should have been dead, but instead it mewled and staggered, its plaintive wailing enough to set my teeth on edge.
Then I fell, unable to stand any longer and felt the depth of my failure.
‘For Unity,’ I spat, blood lacing my phlegm.
‘For Unity,’ said the Custodian, risen up behind it, his great golden blade splitting the beast’s head in two.
A second thrust of that perfect sword pierced where the heart should be,
the beast now prostrate on the ground. A shriek tore from its mouth grille, a ghastly and inhuman sound. Tarry smoke issued from the joins in its armour like a guttering candle starved of air.
‘Is it dead?’ I asked, sunk to my knees and leaning heavily on the pommel of my sword.
The Custodian looked at me and I felt the weighing of judgement in his wary gaze. At length, he nodded.
‘In a manner of speaking, yes. You have my thanks…’
‘Heruk,’ I said, recognising the pause as an invitation, ‘Dahren Heruk.’
‘Thunder Legion?’
It was my turn to nod.
‘I thought your kind were all dead.’
‘We are. Near enough.’
‘Tagiomalchian. I am in your debt, Dahren Heruk. Terra is in your debt.’
‘Then I have one favour to ask of you,’ I said, raising my hand to stop Tagiomalchian from sheathing his sword.
He looked at me, that impassive mask as unreadable as a statue, but then I saw the slightest nod.
As the grip of mortality closed about me, I felt the dream. Smell and taste at first, but then I began to hear the cheers of victory as the Lightning Banner was lifted into the sky. I stood upon the slopes of Mount Ararat, Kabe and Gairok and Vezulah at my side.
Reality grew fleeting though I heard the soft clank of Tagiomalchian’s armour as he came to stand behind me, and the scrape of his blade as he brought it aloft.
‘Give me the honoured death,’ I said, and the cheers rose louder.
Unity! Unity! Unity!
I closed my eyes as tears of joy flowed down my face, and whispered.
‘For Unity…’
And heard the blade fall.
THE BOARD
IS SET
Gav Thorpe
‘The Wolves will be here soon.’
Eirich Halferphess, Astrotelegraphica Exulta, frowned at Malcador’s statement, his yellowed skin creasing like a discarded rag.
‘We detect no approach of the Rout. Have you had word from Russ?’
‘I misspoke,’ said Malcador, bowing his head in apology as he leaned his staff against the broad battlement, crossed his arms and looked out across the vista of fortifications and warriors. ‘I was referring to the Luna Wolves.’
‘You mean the Sons of Horus,’ said his companion, the co-head of the Higher Tower of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica.
‘That lacks any poetry.’
The astropath grunted and shrugged.
‘You are right. The traitor fleet is days, perhaps hours away from arrival,’ he said.
They stood atop the pinnacle where Eirich and his cohort of soul-bound psykers delved into the mysteries of the warp and rode the light of the Astronomican to send and receive messages from distant worlds. Just as astronomers used to place their observatories on high points to escape the miasma of light pollution, so the astrotelepaths gathered in the Higher Tower far from the psychic shields that emanated from the Imperial Dungeon in the heart of the Emperor’s fortified domain.
‘There is a cacophony that comes with them,’ continued Eirich. Stubble marked his chin and cheeks, when usually he was meticulously clean-shaven. His green robe was a little dishevelled also, telling a tale of tension, sleeplessness and constant activity that was continued in the red rims of his eyes. ‘At first we thought it was simply backwash, warp static. There are dozens of ships, after all.’
‘Hundreds,’ Malcador quietly corrected. ‘Thousands, perhaps.’
‘Indeed.’ Eirich coughed nervously, another recent tic he had developed, along with fingers fidgeting at his rope belt. Malcador absorbed it all without comment, but the strain of seeking the traitors in the warp had taken a heavy toll on all of the warp-scryers under the Sigillite’s demesne. ‘But it is not warpwash. It is the empyrean itself, a psychic resonance that travels with the traitors, not caused by them.’
‘What’s the business, that such a hideous trumpet calls to parley the sleepers of the house? Speak, speak!’
Eirich scowled in confusion at the Emperor’s Regent. Malcador sighed. ‘Great alarums. The heralds lift their clarions to their lips and announce the arrival of their treacherous lord.’
‘What heralds? Now is no time to speak in your mysteries and riddles, Sigillite.’
‘It does not matter,’ said Malcador, dismissing himself and Eirich’s concerns with a waved hand. He took up his staff and gazed at the Astrotelegraphica Exulta, measuring his mettle. ‘Cease your deep watch. There is no more to be learnt in this way and your people must have rest. There will be even greater challenges in the days to come.’
‘But what of Horus?’
‘He is coming. We can neither turn aside his course nor stall his arrival. Better to be strong to receive him in the right fashion, yes?’ Malcador turned and headed along the rampart back towards the tower. His next words were for himself. ‘And when he arrives, there is not a living soul on Terra that will not know it.’
For nearly seven years a labour force of more than a billion souls had worked beneath the tireless genius of Rogal Dorn, building the most daunting fortress in the history of humanity. And yet as Malcador traversed the Imperial Palace, heading deep towards the Imperial Dungeon, the activity was as noticeable as the day it had begun.
The Praetorian took nothing for granted. Even now, on the very cusp of the greatest battle for mankind’s survival, he left nothing to chance. Thousands thronged the passageways moving supplies to just the right batteries and storehouses, or deployed cannons and blades to guardhouses as Dorn finessed some arc of fire or incorporated the last dregs of industry from foundries that would soon fall cold.
Malcador was more sanguine, although far from complacent. As he had told Halferphess, events had been set in motion that would not be steered by the placement of forty more shells in the rightmost tower of Gate Forty-Two in the Lower Maiyla Periphery.
The Sigillite had once read a theory that the tiniest of acts could have profound, devastating consequences; that stepping on a beetle in Chuzu could somehow precipitate a chain reaction that led to hurricanes devastating the Floridal Isles. The theory had been expounded upon at great length with many mathematical symbols and equations. Yet that was before knowledge of the warp had become widespread. The warp – and the beings within it – cared nothing for causality. They shaped fate on a far grander scale. Destiny was as malleable to their manipulation as the flesh of their followers.
The future of the Imperium would be decided here, within these walls, but not by weight of fire or placement of big guns. Yes, those things would shape the nature of the confrontation that had to happen, the grotesque bloodshed, the price that had to be paid to bring matters to their head.
The warp heralds had it right. Their psychic clarions were not just an announcement, they were a challenge from the darkness itself. ‘Here is our champion,’ they cried. ‘Kneel before him or perish!’
Not Dorn nor Vulkan, Sanguinius nor Jaghatai would beat Horus, not now that his ascension was almost complete. Together? Perhaps. But Horus, for all the weakness in his soul now exposed, was not a fool. He had always demonstrated the ability to set the field to his need, making victory look easy. The challenge was for one alone, the one that made him.
The thought agitated Malcador. Ever since the collapse of the webway endeavour, his hopes for mankind had been eroded. There was only one who could defeat Horus, and only one who Horus wanted to defeat.
And Horus had never picked a fight he could not win.
Shoulders hunched, jaw clenched, Malcador sped his descent, a clammy fist of foreboding gripping his heart.
The door opened at the approach of the Sigillite, ancient wood swinging open to reveal a small antechamber, not far from the far grander entrance to the Imperial Dungeon. The timbers closed quietly behind him as he stepped over the threshold and waved a hand, brands springing into flaming life in the sconces around the walls.
The plaster was cracked in places, the mural that had been on them litt
le more than a memory of faded colour. The tiles of the mosaic floor were similarly indecipherable, worn almost smooth and colourless by generations of passage across them.
There were no other doors and the only furniture was two high-backed chairs facing each other across a circular table. Upon the table was an octagonal board of granite and pale marble beside a light wooden box, and upon the geometric spaces were set twenty playing pieces.
Malcador placed his staff against the back of the chair, sat down and regarded the game pieces thoughtfully. They were all plain, spindle-like shapes at present, of lifeless grey. On one side of the table waited a deck of thin crystalline wafers, the back of each marked with the Sigillite’s rune. He picked up the top card but it was blank, as he knew it would be.
Malcador put the cards back and as he raised his eyes they came upon a figure seated opposite. He was tall, the hood of a scarlet cape about his shoulders. His expression was stern but not cruel, utterly unremarkable but for the potency in his eyes. His hair was dark, pulled back in a short scalp-lock. In the flicker of torchlight the skin might have been suede, tough and worn by a long and uncaring life, but not a line of age marked it – in stark contrast to Malcador’s own weathered and withered flesh.
It reminded Malcador of an ancient tale of a cursed portrait, but before he could say anything his companion spoke.
‘Would you like to be Warmaster?’ asked Revelation.
Malcador arranged the red pieces before him, but his opponent shook His head before He was finished.
‘No, we start at the beginning,’ He said. A calloused hand started placing the pieces in the spaces at the centre of the board, forming a cluster around a rectangular gap the same size as the crystal cards. When all was arranged, the pieces shifted colour, turning a deep blue.
Malcador picked up the cards and shuffled them.
‘Why do you do that? They are all blank for the moment.’
‘Habit,’ Malcador admitted with a chuckle. He continued all the same, sliding the cards into each other with deft fingers before riffling them together with a flourish. One of many inconsequential skills he had taught himself over a long life that had, until relatively recently, been mostly spent in isolation.
