by John French
Maloghurst knew now what he was looking at. In writings that had been shunned even during Old Night, he had read the fever-dream impressions of souls who said that they had seen places where battle flowed across lands that never slept, where the ground fumed with the pyre smoke of the fallen, and the dead rose with the rising of red suns to begin the eternal slaughter anew.
‘Take me to him,’ he snarled at Amarok. The daemon bowed its head, and they descended through the ember-laden wind. Maloghurst could feel the heat of fire and explosions, but it was faint, as though it were just a shadow of true flame and a memory of pain. No bullets rose from the sea of war to great them, and when they touched the ground the tide of battle flowed around them. It did not part, Maloghurst noticed, but somehow the wild movement of machines and bodies never touched them.
Horus loomed above them, his every movement killing. The corona of souls whirled around him, streaked red with the blood of their deaths. Maloghurst could feel the presence of the primarch. It was the same pull he had felt in the throne room, as though he were caught on the edge of a typhoon.
‘Sire!’ he shouted and drew breath to shout again, but Horus looked at him. His face was blood-streaked. There were wounds in his armour, Maloghurst saw, and blood in his mouth as he spoke.
‘Maloghurst,’ he said, the movement of his slaughter continuing without pause. ‘You should not be here. I left you…’ He heaved the head of Worldbreaker through a press of bronze-armoured bodies. ‘I left you on Molech. How have you defied my will?’
‘This is a dream,’ he replied, shouting over the sound of gunfire and the cries of the dying. ‘This is a fugue of the warp. You need to come back to us, sire. You need to follow me back.’
‘I will not fail,’ growled Horus, baring bloody teeth. ‘I will break this realm of gods. I will make it bow to my will. Go back to Molech. Do not defy this command as you defied me by following me here.’
Horus surged forwards, not looking back at Maloghurst as he struck another blow, and blood showered up with shattered splinters of bone.
‘Molech was long ago, sire,’ called Maloghurst. ‘You returned to us. You came back from the realm beyond the door.’
‘No, he did not,’ said Amarok. The daemon’s voice was quiet, but Maloghurst heard it clear through the din of battle. He turned to look at it. The thing with the face of Iacton Qruze shook its head almost sorrowfully. ‘He did not return, at least not whole.’
‘What lies do–’
‘No lies, Twisted One. Just cold truths. Truths that should have been obvious to you all.’
‘You are–’
‘I am bound by you,’ it said. ‘Command me to speak the truth and you will hear the same words, Maloghurst. Horus remained here, in the Land of Slaughter, and if we looked we would see him walking beneath the Orchards of Decay and maybe even catch sight of his reflection as he seeks a way out of the Castle of Mirrors.
‘He is the anointed of the gods. He won and claimed the favour of each of them, greater and lesser, from highest power to lowest prince of despair. They poured knowledge and power into him, more than any other champion has received, for such a vessel they have never had before. They raised him up, and they gave him knowledge, insight, power, strength. They whispered that he was all and more than his father was. And he accepted the lie.’
‘It was no lie,’ said Maloghurst. ‘He will cast his father down.’
‘That is not the lie, Twisted One. You should know the taste of falsity. He returned to you but part of him, part of his soul, part of his strength, remains here, forever bound to the gods.’
‘He is not here. I am not here. This is a metaphor, a way of seeing something that is happening between him and the warp…’
‘If you like, but it is still real. As is his struggle.’
‘He said he was fighting.’
‘And so he is, fighting the gods that he believed he could make cower.’
‘There is something else, is there not? If he is fighting the gods within his soul, then they are trying to consume him.’
A smile flicked over the daemon’s lips.
‘Power is a game, a great game without dimension or limit. When the plague winds wax, the fire of war comes and burns the festering corpses from the fields. When excess reaches perfection, wild chance comes to spoil it. On and on in an endless dance.’
‘He has seen and given pact to all the powers,’ said Maloghurst, but in his thoughts he could see the implications of the daemon’s words, even while he snarled at it. ‘He is no pawn in their game.’
‘But he is. Not a pawn but still a piece to be played with. That is the truth of all power, is it not?’
‘But the warp powers chose the Warmaster as their ally against the Emperor.’
‘As their tool, not their ally. The lie, remember. For once, all of the powers of the other realm put that goal above the struggle to gain ascendency over each other. Can you understand what a rare event that is? Chaos, some of you name us in your mortal tongue. There is truth in that name. And Chaos abhors unity and balance. It thirsts for discord, for battle, for slyness and dissolution. No matter what brings us together, the forces that pull us apart are stronger.’
‘They each want him for themselves,’ said Maloghurst. ‘They know that victory is close and do not want to share the spoils.’ He looked at the bloody figure of Horus wading across the eternal battlefield. ‘They are tearing him apart…’
‘Like children with a toy.’ The daemon looked in the direction of Horus. He was still moving forwards but slowing now. Dog-like creatures with six legs and flayed skulls were climbing over each other to bite at him, teeth raising sparks from his armour, their howls shrill above the gunfire.
‘And as in heaven, so on Earth. They are pulling him apart, just as they are pulling you and your allies apart in the realm of flesh.’ Maloghurst looked at the daemon, his eyes narrowing. ‘You have seen it,’ said the daemon, ‘all the factions and lies, and changes festering in the dark. The gods use many instruments, some knowing, others ignorant, but all serve whether they know what they do or not. Battles fought for pride, festering ambition, desires realised in darkness, all tip the balance one way or another. And all the while, Horus is getting weaker.’
‘You are saying–’
‘The wolves circle, Twisted One. Horus is fighting, but he is losing.’
‘Then Chaos will have nothing.’
‘Won’t it?’ said the daemon. Maloghurst stared into its fixed, smiling face. ‘He has to accept it, Maloghurst. He has to surrender to be victorious. It is the only way. He has to take the last step. Otherwise they will rip him apart as he struggles, and put another in his place.’
‘There is no other,’ said Maloghurst. ‘There could be no other.’
‘Yes, there could. If you want to save him, you have to make him see that he must submit.’
‘You lie,’ he breathed.
‘No,’ said Amarok. ‘No, I tell you the truth you don’t want to hear.’
‘He will not fail,’ Maloghurst spat, and started after the image of Horus. ‘And I will not fail him.’
The sky blinked to blank red above him. The swirl of warriors and the sound of gunfire and dying was still there, but it seemed to be getting further away. ‘No!’ shouted Maloghurst. The image of Horus was becoming dim, a black swirl of ink in bloody water. ‘No!’ He rounded on the daemon.
‘It seems that the world of flesh calls,’ it smirked.
‘You–’
‘Remember what I said, Twisted One,’ it said, its voice Iacton Qruze’s again. ‘As in heaven, so on Earth. The wolves circle.’ Amarok raised its right hand as its image began to fade, the silver coin at the centre of the placating palm. ‘We will speak again. After all – I am with you now and forever, brother.’
And then it was gone, and pulsing screams were surrou
nding Maloghurst as pain peeled away his body and gave him another one in its place.
Air gasped into his lungs. He felt himself choke. Pain shivered through him. The deck was under his bare hands. Frozen blood fell from him. The air was screaming.
‘Get up!’ shouted a voice nearby. ‘Get up, you shrivelled old bastard, or I will cut your throat again.’
His chest heaved, and he vomited crystallised blood and bile. He touched his neck and found soft flesh where the athame had opened his throat. He pushed up to his feet and staggered.
‘You have to get out of here now,’ said Kalus Ekaddon. Behind him Sota-Nul was already at the access hatch. ‘The Mournival commanders have called you to the strategium.’
Maloghurst blinked. His sight was swimming, the screaming still filling his ears… No, not screaming: alarms. Battle alarms.
‘Why?’ he gasped. ‘What is happening?’
‘The enemy,’ snarled Ekaddon. ‘The Emperor’s dogs have found us.’
Layak
The space was a smooth-sided cavern, like the inside of a vast seashell. Bridges of a glossy substance criss-crossed it like the strands of a web. Polished crystals were set in a curved arch at each point where two of the slender bridges met. As tall as a mortal man, the crystals glowed with a pale light. Lightning crackled between them. Where a bridge met the wall of the webway, a curved hole opened into the mist-shrouded beyond. Layak realised that he had run out of one such opening. A narrow bridge projected away from him.
Gunfire stitched between the delicate bridges. Red warriors were running forwards, beams of energy and streams of shells flickering from their guns at unseen targets. Layak’s vox shrieked, and then his ears were filled with a clicking rasp like the rubbing of insects’ wings. He knew the sound; it was the voice of the Unspeaking. Without tongues they could not speak, but in battle they controlled the crack and hiss of the vox to create a language that billowed like the roar of a dust storm.
‘Remain,’ he called to the blade slaves. ‘Protect the oracle.’
He ran to the middle of a tapered bridge.
‘Xithras’ka’hemek,’ he breathed. The silver teeth of his mask champed open and closed as the unholy word ripped past them. The sound took shape. Smoke-black sigils tumbled in Layak’s wake, tumbling, dissolving and reforming. The shapes of feathers and curved claws shivered into ethereal existence. High, hungry cries cracked the air. Layak’s will flowed across the bond to the daemons, and they wheeled high above him as a shadowborn murder of crows. His sight filled with the multifaceted vision of the daemons. Red smeared the view. His mind absorbed the vision, melding it with that of his true eyes.
He saw the enemies that his brothers were firing at then. They burned white in the daemons’ sight. Plumes whipped behind their tall helms as they spun bladed pole arms. They were golden beings, lightning threading their essence, as though their bodies were sculpted from thunderbolts.
Custodians, thought Layak, the Emperor’s companions and soulbound warriors.
And before a group of the Custodians stood Lorgar. Power haloed him, shimmering, folding light to shadow as blows struck at him, coiling bolts of energy to cords of fire. The red of his armour seemed black amidst the blaze. His bladed sceptre was in his hand, its head screaming as it struck. As Layak watched, a Custodian stepped back as the sceptre swept past him, then spun and lunged with his spear. The blow sang with killing grace. It never landed. The hurricane of power around Lorgar struck the Custodian. For an instant the arcane craft worked into the warrior’s armour flared. Then the Custodian was torn apart. Armour became slag, flesh ash, bones black splinters that scattered in the gale. Lorgar had not even broken stride.
To many he was a priest, a demagogue who could inspire mortals to deeds that breached the veil of heaven. Layak had seen it done, had seen his primarch cow a conquered city to silence and then raise its voices in praise of the gods. But in that moment, Layak saw that Lorgar was no priest; he was the killing force of faith given form.
A squad of red-armoured Word Bearers moved after their lord. Silent screams of exultation rattled from their tongueless mouths. Two Custodians stood on the bridge before them and their primarch. They did not flee, though they must have known they would die. Layak supposed that some would have found that defiance worthy of honour, but for him it deserved only contempt. There was no bravery in them embracing martyrdom; their souls had been mutilated, stealing the decision of self-sacrifice from them.
They fought well though, moving back, spears spinning in unreadable patterns, firing bolts from their weapons even as they whirled.
Lorgar lashed his sceptre into a Custodian. The golden warrior moved faster than the eye could track, but the spiked head crashed home. Crushed gold and charred flesh scattered from the sceptre as it pulled free of the ruin it had wrought.
Gunfire lashed down. Explosive rounds hammered into the Word Bearers nearest Lorgar. Chewed armour and blood fell from the bridge. Fire and detonations churned the air around the primarch.
A trio of automata had stomped into sight on a bridge above the Custodians and the primarch. Their armour was the red of setting suns, and the marks of the Martian Mechanicum spidered over their armour plates in lines of binaric. They seemed to be suspended from the bridge, hanging by their feet, aiming above their heads with piston-braced batteries of weapons. Except, of course, they were not upside down from their point of view.
Layak yanked the flock of daemons into the air between the automata and their targets. Targeting beams flicked towards them, weapons rotated. The winged daemons shrieked and tried to twist aside. Layak’s will lashed out, holding them together as they flew into the torrent of gunfire. Bodies of clammy skin and black feathers tore apart. Layak felt the daemons dissolve into nothing and heard their curses as they tumbled back into the depths of the warp. They lasted seven seconds.
But it was enough.
Lorgar stepped through the burning air. His eyes had become windows into a realm of fire. He raised a hand. The gesture was slow, the fingers open as though in a blessing. The closest automaton flashed white with heat. Rounds and fuel ignited. Pistons melted. It sagged forwards, like a wax doll in the flame of a cutting torch.
Layak was in the middle of a bridge directly beneath the primarch now. Fire blazed from above him and to his right, punching into the Word Bearers trying to reach their primarch’s side. Layak twisted as another pair of automata walked into place on one of the other bridges. One of the machines’ targeting beams found him. Its weapons rotated. Recoil compensators locked into place with a hiss of pistons.
‘Khii’na’uk,’ Layak spoke. The word vomited into being, burning towards the automaton as it fired. Heavy rounds met rotting flesh as the daemon bloated into reality. Seven wings unfolded from its abdomen. Multifaceted eyes glinted in clusters above a dangling proboscis. Metre-long insect legs dangled from its thorax. Larvae and pus scattered from it as it flew at the automata. Gunfire ripped into it, and rotting fat and bloody meat showered out. The automata unlocked their legs and tried to step into a different firing position. The daemon struck the first as it was moving and pitched it backwards. Splinters showered up from the bone-smooth surface of the bridge. The automaton struggled, battle protocols trying to select a course of action. The daemon was smothering it, wrapping its legs around it, drooling acid onto it as its proboscis wormed into its torso. The second automaton was still locking in place to fire when the daemon dragged itself back into the air and flew at it.
Layak turned away, leaving the daemon to its instincts. His eyes found Lorgar. The primarch was at the centre of a storm of smoke and fire. More Custodians were on the bridge with him, advancing from both ends behind tall shields as fresh squalls of gunfire converged on him from units emerging onto other bridges.
Lorgar paused, the fire of his slaughter rolling back as the air around him shimmered with psychic force. The Word Beare
rs were at his side now, a circle of silent crimson. The Custodians were advancing, and for an instant Layak saw them out of the corner of his eye.
‘Lord,’ he called.
Lorgar turned. His skin was taut over his skull. Black veins stood out beneath the dusting of gold. His eyes met Layak’s gaze, then moved back to where the blade slaves sheltered Actaea close to the entrance they had emerged from. A beam of vibrating energy struck one of the warriors at Lorgar’s side, and blasted him into a black dust.
‘Lord, this is not–’
The bridge shattered. Pale splinters showered out, pulled in every direction by conflicting gravities. The Custodians fell. Lorgar straightened, eyes closed, his skin sheened with white light. The broken wraithbone halted in mid-air. Threads of fire grew over them, glowing brighter and brighter until they were like coals pulled from the heart of a furnace. Then they were flying out, scything through automata, battle servitors and Custodians, melting armour, kindling fire from oil, cooking flesh to ashes. The wraithbone shattered with each impact, hundreds of smaller shards flying out until the chamber was glowing with what looked like clouds of fire-touched feathers. Shouts and machine cries rose and then became fewer and fewer, until there was just the hiss of wraithbone dust in the wind. Then the cloud became still, a fading blush of heat in the air. Lorgar opened his eyes. The dust fell.
Layak climbed up, following the twists and spirals of the alien bridges. The blade slaves followed him with Actaea between them. He reached Lorgar in time to see the primarch rising from where he had knelt before the broken span. Layak slowed, bending to look at what remained of the corpses that lay on the smooth ground. He reached down with bare fingers to the pulped matter and dust-ground fragments. Black ectoplasm coated his fingertips.
‘These were no creatures of the Emperor,’ he said, and looked up. Lorgar was looking down at him, the mask of serenity in place on the gold-dusted face once again.
