by John French
‘Once they were,’ said Lorgar.
‘More ghosts,’ said Layak. Above and around them the web of wraithbone shook.
‘It is trying to turn us aside,’ said Actaea. ‘This is a confluence chamber. Time and choices branch from here. We are close. They will return, and stronger.’
‘You are our guide,’ said Lorgar. ‘What is the path we must take?’
She opened her mouth, and then closed it.
‘What path?’ said Lorgar.
Actaea still did not move or speak.
Layak felt his mask twitch on his face. In his mind, fragments of words coiled in his memory. A high, keening noise, like a single cry pulled from one throat after another, shivered through the air.
‘Do you hear that?’ he asked.
Actaea twitched her head.
‘No,’ she said. ‘What do you hear?’
He turned and began to move towards the sound. It was coming from the entrance that Lorgar had emerged from. Light flickered within it, shadows moving over the pale walls as though cast by a growing fire.
‘We came that way–’ began Lorgar.
Gunfire erupted from across the chamber. Silver mist was pouring into the air from out of the walls, rushing towards them like a closing hand.
‘Follow him!’ shouted Actaea, as Layak began to run towards the beckoning scream in his head. Before him, the suddenly black portal looked back.
Volk
The Red Priests waited in a moon made of weapons. Swords, tanks and the shells of Titans lay alongside pistols, live bullets dug from battlefields, axe heads, power field generators, the husks of virus shells, smashed tank turrets and knives of bronze, iron and steel. There too were conversion projectors, segments of macro-cannon barrels, kill-shells still warm with radiation from forgotten wars, bladed chains and lumps of knapped flint. All were jumbled and bonded together in an irregular ball that arced through Sarum’s outer reaches like a rusting morning star swung at the heavens. Perturabo’s gunship had slid into the moon’s heart through the mouth of a nova cannon barrel. The rest of the Iron Warriors fleet, under Forrix’s command, surrounded the moon, weapons lit, sensors watching but hearing only silence.
A lone servitor greeted the primarch as he disembarked. It was an ancient thing, encased in a patchwork of battle-scarred armour. A helmed skull lolled back on its shoulders, its grin visible through the vertical split in the ancient bronze. It had bowed to them with a clatter of bones and a whir of cogs, and then led them into the dark.
The walls of the tunnels they walked were the same tangle of weapon components, all fused and beaten into a gleaming unity.
Volk did not hear the voices until they were out of sight of the gunship.
At first he thought they were rogue signals on the vox, but they persisted even after he had shut his communication systems down. They did not speak any language he knew, but he thought he almost understood them. The weapons in his hands ached.
‘Hail to Perturabo,’ boomed a voice that echoed from the walls as they stepped into a domed chamber. ‘Hail the Lord of Iron.’ Eight figures stood at the centre of the chamber. Heavy folds of deep red hung from their spindle frames. The robes were edged with white triangles that resembled the blade of a saw. Or teeth. Elongated skulls of black metal sat under the shadow of heavy cowls. Some looked like the flayed heads of horses cast in iron; others were narrow and vulpine. One was not a head at all but a circular mouth set with rings of metallic fangs. Volk could see no weapons, but that did not mean that they were not there. He knew they were. When he looked at the figures it was almost as though he could feel the guns and blades waiting beneath their robes.
‘Your coming here is an honour,’ said the voice again, and Volk wondered which of the eight priests was speaking, or if they all were.
Perturabo looked at the eight as the Iron Circle spread in an arc behind him. Twenty Terminators lumbered into place behind them, cyclone missile racks locking into position as they halted. Argonis stood level with the primarch, Volk a pace behind them both.
‘Honour…’ said Perturabo, letting the word hang in echoes. ‘Not honour enough that you would answer my call to feed the hunger of our guns as we starved for the means to make war.’
The priests were silent. Red light glinted in the holes of their eyes.
‘Sarum stands apart,’ Argonis had said in the days after they had begun their journey to the forge world. ‘They have aided the Warmaster’s allies, but they keep their own counsel. We should not trust them.’
‘I do not think he intends to trust them,’ Volk replied, ‘only to get from them what he needs.’
Volk knew why they had come here in their search for Angron; of all the forces Sarum had come close to favouring with alliance, it was the World Eaters that enjoyed the closest bond. Angron had subjugated the world, and in the process had resolved a conflict within the priesthood of Sarum. Weaponry and armour had flowed from the forges into the bloody hands of the XII Legion. Since the war within the Imperium had begun, Sarum had seemed to serve the broad interests of the Warmaster but had not come into line with Kelbor-Hal’s Mechanicum, nor made any sign of serving anyone but itself. They were not trusted, and stood in their presence Volk could feel why.
‘You are welcome, Perturabo,’ said the voice of the priests. Then they began to move, the eight figures spreading to the cardinal points of the chamber. ‘You must come with us.’
The Iron Circle locked shields with a boom of hydraulics. Weapons armed. Volk felt his weapons twitch in his grasp.
‘No,’ said Perturabo, with the smallest shake of his head. ‘You will give me what I came here for, and then I shall leave.’
‘You shall have what you seek, though you have not spoken it,’ said the priests. ‘You shall receive it and more. But we cannot grant those gifts. You are favoured, Lord of Iron and Death. You will see the heart of all, and it shall speak to you.’
Argonis opened his mouth to speak, but the echoing voice spoke again before he could.
‘You who have passed through the Black Star, and sought the weapons of the gods, will find everything that you seek if you follow us.’
Volk felt the words settle into his blood. Cold and heat ran through him. He could feel the impulse in his limbs to move, to follow the promise in the words of the Red Priests. It did not feel like desire. It felt like hunger.
‘You know why I am here,’ said Perturabo. Until now no mention had been made of information on Angron or the XII Legion.
The priest with an equine skull shook its head. The chain teeth rattled in its jaws.
‘We are the keepers,’ it said, the voice coming from it alone now. It sounded like cogs chewing meat. ‘We only come to convey you beneath.’
‘Beneath?’ asked Argonis.
The iron horse skull turned towards the emissary.
‘Beneath,’ said the priest again.
‘This is honour above all,’ said a priest with the grin of a shark set beneath a red sensor band. ‘Such things are not refused.’
Volk was certain that Perturabo would turn away, but the Lord of Iron gave a small nod.
‘Take us to your revelation,’ he said.
The priest had frozen for a second, but then nodded in turn.
They left the chamber by a door that Volk had not seen when they entered. He was not sure if it was a trick of angle or technology, but until the priests led them towards it he would have sworn that there was no door. The tunnels they walked became rougher and rougher, the wreckage in the walls jutting out across their path so that they had to step around spear blades and the muzzles of field guns. The air grew hotter, as though they were walking towards a blast furnace or the heart of a volcano. He wondered at Perturabo’s words, ‘Take us to your revelation,’ and the shock that had been apparent in the priest’s stillness.
‘There
is something at the heart of this realm,’ said Perturabo as he walked in front of Volk. The primarch glanced back briefly, his black gaze touching Volk’s. Then he looked back towards where the escort of priests moved ahead of them. ‘It is a matter of geometry, really. You can see it in the structures of power the priests create, in the words they speak and leave unsaid. These creatures do not serve the Omnissiah of Mars.’
Volk looked at the priests and the white teeth at the edge of their robes, which looked black in the low light. Their eyes were coals.
‘They serve something else,’ said Perturabo, ‘something that they have kept secret. Something that speaks in their dreams of guns and blades.’ Volk thought he heard a smile in his primarch’s voice. Volk felt his pulse freeze. His sight was blurring at the edges. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.
‘We are going to meet it, my son. We are going to see our destiny.’
And the priests walking ahead of them turned their heads, necks rotating with a snap of bones and gears. Volk saw red coal eyes and the iron smiles of skulls, and his flesh was burning and the roar of pain was ripping up through his lips, and he was not walking but spinning through the void as his fighter shredded around him.
‘You died,’ said a voice that sounded just like Perturabo. ‘But you can live again in fire.’
And Volk screamed his reply.
The passage blinked back into being before him. The priests were walking ahead of them just as they were before. Perturabo strode between the towering bulk of the Iron Circle, his exo-frame purring with each stride. Volk could still feel the heat of his burning flesh melting from him like a fading dream. A faint, orange glow was seeping from the distance ahead. A glance behind showed him only blackness. He felt a shiver pass through his armour and body.
What was happening to him? What was happening to all of them?
‘We have lost vox contact with the Iron Blood,’ called Argonis, stopping, his bolter in his hand. Perturabo halted and looked back at the emissary. Beyond him the priests had also paused.
‘The reason that we have lost the link to the fleet,’ said Perturabo, his voice level, ‘is that we are out of range of its vox-transmitters.’
‘The fleet should have coverage into the moon,’ said Argonis. ‘Unless our hosts are jamming it.’
‘Or unless the fleet is now over a billion kilometres away from us,’ said Perturabo. Argonis began to shake his head. ‘We have not walked deeper into the moon. We have passed through a doorway. We are walking to the heart of Sarum itself.’
Volk heard the words and knew they were true. The Red Priests did not respond, though Volk was certain they had heard the primarch. Argonis kept his gaze locked on the tunnel in front of them, his expression fixed.
The glow in the distance was growing. A blush of red heat had started to creep into the walls. Volk could feel it too. Actually feel it. Most of his nerves had been burned out by the damage he had sustained and the swift fitting of his augmetics. Sensation was now a sensor-mediated tingle of data. But he could feel the heat. It spread through the servo-sheathed metal of his limbs and breathed into his skin.
The priests halted in front of them and turned as one to face Perturabo.
‘We do not go further,’ they said, their single voice coming from every direction. ‘You go on alone.’
Perturabo gave a single shake of his head.
‘These come with me.’
‘As you wish,’ they said and moved aside.
Perturabo moved forwards, but Argonis raised his staff of office, the Eye of Horus barring the primarch’s path.
‘What have you brought us to?’ asked Argonis.
‘Answers,’ said Perturabo, and pushed the staff aside as he walked on. Argonis did not move for a second. Volk looked back at him as he followed the primarch and the Iron Circle. Their eyes met for a long second, metal and crystal to Cthonian black. For a moment Volk thought he saw something in his brother’s eye, a ghost of emotion that he could not read. Then the emissary was following them and they were walking into the furnace heat, past the bowed heads of the priests.
The walls were glowing now, cherry-red and coal-black. The jumble of weapons had given way to rough stone shot with seams of crystal and flecks of ore. The dust on the passage floor was soft, grey ash, thick enough to muffle the tread of the Terminators and automata. A low rumbling, like the flow of a great river, was growing as the passage curved before them. Volk felt a sudden urge to turn and go back, but his feet carried him onwards, pistons and meat flowing smoothly as the heat prickled his senses.
And then they stepped around a last curve and into the furnace light of Sarum’s heart.
Eleven
Maloghurst
‘Fleet systems at full alert,’ said Sota-Nul as they hurried through the dark of the Vengeful Spirit’s underworld. Maloghurst was breathing hard. He was sweating blood inside his armour. He thought he could still feel the heat of the burning sky on his face.
‘Why did we come out of the warp?’ he asked as they hurried on. He needed to get to the bridge, he needed to see what was happening. Sota-Nul was siphoning information from the ship’s systems, but it was not the ship or its systems that worried him.
‘As in heaven, so on Earth…’
‘Emergency translation owing to sudden extreme change in etheric conditions,’ said the tech-witch, and coughed a blurt of binaric that might have been an approximation of a mirthless laugh. ‘It threw us back into reality.’
‘And the enemy were just there?’
‘We dropped right on top of an outer system orbital fortress cluster,’ said the tech-witch, her voice sounding all too human as it purred the words. ‘A major one. Five star forts, a beta nine-grade weapons platform network, forty monitor craft and a battle group-sized fleet of warships. I sense the presence of my unenlightened kin and the sons of Rogal Dorn. Do you ever have the sensation that you are being tested/cursed?’
‘You think this amusing?’
‘I think it catastrophic, but not without opportunity.’
‘To lose men and materiel in a pointless fight.’
‘To see if your Legion can kill without the hand of Horus on its shoulder.’
He did not answer. Ten minutes of silence later they reached a primary access hoist. Maloghurst overrode the lockouts and sent the hoist shooting up to the Vengeful Spirit’s aft command cluster. Sota-Nul peeled away as the doors opened, floating above a cluster of lesser tech-devotees as they fell to the floor in obeisance. Maloghurst kept moving, shrugging off the calls of guards and Legion warriors as he strode into the strategium. Shouted orders and the calls of system servitors replaced the blare of battle alarms. Holo-light blinked and spun in the air beneath a domed roof of crystal. The shimmer of reactivating void shields blotted out the light of the stars as he glanced up.
Aximand stood on a stone pillar at the room’s centre. A curtain of light surrounded him, changing as his eyes flicked across it. His mouth was set in the stitched mask of his face.
‘This is not the time for whatever you are here for,’ said Aximand as Maloghurst came to the base of the pillar.
The deck trembled. Maloghurst recognised the sensation of the short-range guns firing.
‘Hold launch of all boarding formations,’ shouted Aximand. ‘Bring everything into formation around us, full weapon overlap.’ He glanced at Maloghurst. The skin of Aximand’s sutured face was sweating. ‘They are already inside firing range. We have no time to calibrate the main guns.’
‘So close?’ asked Maloghurst.
‘We came out of the warp in range of their guns, and they began to move while we were still recovering from the translation.’
‘How long until we can make translation back to the warp?’ asked Maloghurst.
Aximand’s face twisted as though he were about to spit, then it settled, his eyes sti
ll on the mass of displays.
‘Too long,’ he hissed.
‘This is Heta-Gladius,’ breathed Maloghurst, looking at the displays. ‘Our intelligence identified it as one of Dorn’s cordon worlds to the Solar Segmentum.’
‘The reports were accurate,’ snarled Aximand.
‘We are a long way off course,’ said Maloghurst. ‘We should translate back into the warp, even if it means running a storm.’
‘Warp engines across two-thirds of the fleet are damaged. We need time before we can translate again. That’s dependent on the warp surge that forced us out having ebbed. And what there is left to make the jump.’
‘Even so, the Warmaster wills us to make all speed to Ullanor.’
‘Does he?’ said Aximand softly.
Maloghurst looked up at him sharply.
‘Yes, he does.’
Aximand was silent for a second, eyes flicking between displays. Maloghurst could almost taste the pressure of concentration in the air.
‘Where have you been?’
Maloghurst did not answer but moved to the warp engine control banks. Tech-priests were levering the scorched meat of servitors out of their cradles. Static-blurred runes spun across screens.
‘We need to get back into the warp and back–’
‘I asked you where you had been,’ said Aximand.
‘Where are the others?’ asked Maloghurst, looking around. ‘Where are Falkus and Tormageddon?’
Now it was Aximand’s turn not to reply, instead calling down to one of the serf officers.
‘As soon as the Black Wolf and the Son of the Sword are in formation, all ships close on the third fortress.’
‘We are going into the guns?’ asked Maloghurst.
‘We either strike or we sit here and take their cuts without reply. As you said, this is the Warmaster’s fleet. He does not falter, he conquers.’
The Vengeful Spirit began to slide forwards. Screens and displays showed the magnified images of the enemy fortress-stations and the dark barbs of their ships. The ships were spreading outwards and forwards, enveloping the Vengeful Spirit’s fleet in a cone with the star fortress cluster at its narrowest point. Behind it, the star of the system it was tethered to glimmered, a dot of silver just brighter than the firmament behind it.
