by Various
Then I heard the noise of the aduun. I heard their hooves drum on the packed earth, and without looking back I knew there were many of them. I kept my head down, and scoured the way ahead, fruitlessly, for any kind of break in the featureless landscape.
They caught up with me quickly. An aduu can outpace a man many times over and gallop tirelessly. Those of the Altak are fine beasts, with dark hides and powerful limbs. I heard their throaty breathing and the slap of their long tails.
I cast a despairing glance at the horizon a final time. The Khan was nowhere to be seen. I had placed all my hopes in finding him, and I had failed.
As the hoof-beats rang in my ears, I stopped running and turned to face my killers. Of all the crimes of our people, none was worse than showing fear to an enemy, and I resolved to make my death a good one.
I saw a line of mounted troops come at me, racing across the plain with poise and skill. They wore plate armour, overlapping and glinting in the sunlight. One of the riders carried a long spear with a tail of thick hair pinned just below the blade. Pennants streamed out behind them, brightly coloured and cracking in the wind.
One of them rode out ahead of the others, bearing down on me quickly. I saw a steel helm crowned with a spike, bronze-lined armour pieces, churning hooves, a loop of rope whirling out at me.
The lasso slipped over my shoulders and pulled tight around my waist. The rider hurtled past, yanking me after him. As the lasso closed, I was jerked off my feet and hurled to the ground. I hit the earth face-down.
For a moment I thought he intended to drag me along, but the pressure slackened immediately. I pushed myself back up to my knees, the rope knotted around my midriff and blood running down my chin.
The rider brought his steed around and dismounted, clasping the other end of the rope all the while. He walked up to me and grinned, tugging at the rope like I was a beast on a leash.
‘You run fast, little one,’ he said. ‘But not fast enough.’
His tone made me angry. My arms were still free, and though I didn’t have a weapon, I could still fight.
I launched myself at him, pushing up from the ground. I had no plan of attack, no thought about how I would grapple with a man nearly twice my weight and wearing full armour.
And it happened then.
The path of my life turned, slipping from one course to another. It was so sudden, when it finally came. Perhaps my visions on the Ulaav had been nothing more than delirium, or perhaps they had given me a true glimpse of some deeper, darker reality. It matters not. Something had awakened within me, and it chose that instant to make itself manifest.
When I look back, thinking of Chogoris, the lost world I loved, that is the moment I see, etched forever in my mind like acid-washed steel. That was the moment that sundered us, turning my destiny away from the plains and into the stars, out into the void where both horror and wonder waited for me in the immortal darkness.
I did not know it then. I did not know it for many years afterwards. None of that alters the truth.
It happened then.
I lunged out, stretching both fists in front of me like a wrestler going for a hold. Piercing, blinding light burst from my hands, crackling and spitting like splinters of lightning.
It was painful. I cried out in agony. Coruscation swarmed all over me, swimming across my flesh in a haze of heat and scouring energy. The world exploded in a hail of silver and gold, spiralling and thrashing, blazing madly, roaring in my ears and burning in my nostrils. It suffocated me – I could feel my lungs blistering. I lost my feet. I lost everything.
I saw the broken outline of the soldier reel away from me. I heard his cries of shock and pain. I saw him scratch at his eyes. The rope that had bound me exploded in a cloud of sparks. I staggered backwards, my fists clenched, still surging with gouts of hard, clear incandescence. Raw elemental power, the stuff of the other universe, thundered out of me, bleeding me, hollowing me.
I have no idea how long I was lost in that state, blazing like a pearlescent firebrand, reeling across the plains and vomiting destruction. It might have been seconds, it might have been far longer. I remember the vague impression of riders circling me, their outlines broken amid the torrent of white fire, unwilling to come close in case they were burned. I remember the faces of the four man-beasts swaying before my mind’s eye, pointing at me with their hooked, cruel fingers.
Drink they told me.
I fell to my knees. The inferno raged, burning my flesh but not consuming it. My whole body locked rigid, clenched in spasms, convulsing.
The first I saw of him was a dark shape against the fire. He walked through it, pushing the curtains of energy back like they were sheets of rain. It didn’t hurt him.
He knelt over me. He seemed gigantic – far taller and broader than any living man should be. I looked into his eyes, blinking away tears as fire spilled from my own, and saw something familiar in them.
I remembered the light-wreathed figure of my vision. For a moment, I thought the man before me was the same person. Soon I realised that he wasn’t, but felt sure that there was some link between them.
Then I felt the crushing weight of his authority sink down upon me. The flames around me guttered out, flickering into nothing and rippling into the wind. Like a man casually snuffing a candle, he staunched the torrent of bleeding madness. Even then, locked in bewilderment and pain, my mind numbed, part of me knew how astonishing that was.
He remained stooped over me. His helm was spiked, like those of his men. His armour was elaborate and finely-made, with gold and red beading arranged around a breastplate of white bone panels. I saw a long scar running down his left cheek, as I had been told the Talskar people wore. His eyes were deep-set and intense. I had never seen such eyes.
Perhaps I had been wrong about my hunters. Perhaps they were not Khitan.
Panting, shivering, I still clung on to the hope of a noble death. I tried to hold his gaze, sure that he had come to kill me.
I could not do it. Something about that giant overwhelmed me. I saw his face swim before my eyes, breaking up like a reflection in water. He seemed to be peering into my soul, shriving it, flaying it. I felt myself losing consciousness.
‘Be careful,’ he said.
Then I passed out, and the rising darkness was as welcome to me as sleep.
Six days later, I awoke.
I learned, long afterwards, how dangerous that time had been for me. My inner eyes had been opened in the Ulaav, but I had not been shown how to use them. I could have died. I could have suffered worse than death, as could all those around me.
He had prevented that. Even then, long before the Master of Mankind had shown us the path to the stars, he had known how to control the fires that raged within the minds of the gifted.
He did not have the gift himself, as far as I know. I never saw him summon fire, nor bring the storm to bear on his enemies. He used his warrior’s body – that magnificent, enhanced body – in the cause of war and nothing else. I cannot believe, however, that he did not have some innate knowledge of the paths of heaven. He was made to be a player in the other universe, to contest those who remained on the far side of the veil, and so he must, like his brothers, have had some understanding of the hidden deepness of things.
Back then, though, all I knew was that he had captured me, and that, under the laws of the Altak, I was his slave. Having been denied an honourable death, I resigned myself to a life of drudgery. The khan – my khan, the one I had served until then – would not be able to rescue me. I had seen the nature of my new gaoler, and knew that he far surpassed any other warrior of the plains, including my kin-lord.
He was at my side when I awoke. I lay on a bed of furs within a large ger. A fire burned in the central pit, and the air was red and smoke-filled. I could hear voices murmuring in the shadows. I heard the sound of sword-edges being filed, arrows being fletched.
He looked at me, and I looked at him.
He was massive. I had
never seen a man so domineering, so nakedly potent, so replete with coiled power. His big, lean face flickered in the shadow and flame.
‘What is your name?’ he asked.
His voice was low. It thrummed deeply in the murmuring space.
‘Shinaz,’ I said. My mouth was dry.
‘No longer,’ he said. ‘You shall be Targutai Yesugei, the child who ran and the man who fought. You shall be a zadyin arga of my household.’
His words were not presumptive. By the custom of the Altak he owned my life, at least until such time as another warlord could take me from him by force or I could somehow escape. I doubted that either thing were possible.
‘You come to me at the beginning, Yesugei,’ he said. ‘I am the Khan of many khans. You are joining the ordu of Jaghatai, the tide that shall sweep across the world and make it anew. Be thankful that I took you before you returned to your old khan. If I had faced you in battle, you would have died.’
I said nothing. I was still groggy from sleep and sickness. I could not see his face clearly, and his voice had a strange, unsettling quality. I lay back on the furs, feeling my breast rise and fall gingerly.
‘You shall be trained, like the others,’ he said. ‘You shall learn to use what you have been given. You shall learn when to use it, and when not to use it. In all these things, you will follow my word of command. No other man shall ever tell you how to use your gifts.’
I watched his lips move in the lambent darkness. As he spoke, I saw fleeting remnants of the visions I had seen from the mountain. I saw those broken vessels, burning amid the stars. As he talked of conquest, I remembered the insignia on those pieces of charred metal.
A wolf. A many-headed snake. A lightning strike.
‘I have brought a new way of war to the world,’ he said. ‘To move fast, to remain strong, never to rest. When the Altak is ours, we shall take this war to the Khitan. After that, we shall take it to every empire between earth and sky. They shall all fall, for they are sick, and we are healthy.’
My heart beat shallowly in my breast. I could feel the heat of fever in my cheeks. His words were like the words of a dream.
‘All empires fall,’ he said. ‘All empires sicken. This is the lesson we have learned. This is the lesson that you shall learn.’
I saw the scar move on his face as he spoke. In the blood-red light, it looked alive, like a pale snake clamped to his skin.
‘We will not serve empires,’ he said. ‘We will remain in motion. We will not have a centre. Wherever we are, that is the centre.’
I knew he was telling me something important, but I was too young and too sick to understand it. Only later, much later, was I able to look back on those words and recognise the truth of what I was being told.
‘Will you serve me, Targutai Yesugei?’ he asked.
Back then, I assumed the question was rhetorical. I was a child. I had no idea how long it was possible for a human to live, what it was possible for a human to become. I thought that only trivial things were at stake: my life, the feuds between clans, the old cycle of war on the Altak.
Now, knowing what I know, I am not so sure. Perhaps, even then, I had a choice to make.
‘Yes, my khan,’ I said.
He looked at me for a long time, his eyes shining in the blood-light.
‘Then you are Talskar now,’ he said. ‘You will be marked, like we are. You will bear the white scar on your face, and all will learn to fear you.’
Firelight rippled across his bone armour plates.
‘For now, we are unknown,’ he said. ‘It will not always be so. A day will come when we will be revealed, fighting in the way that I will teach you.’
His eyes were like jewels in the night, burning with hungry, boundless ambition.
‘And when that day comes,’ he said, ‘when we are revealed at last, I tell you truly, zadyin arga – the gods themselves will cower before us.’
VI. Ilya Ravallion
He came for me five days later, just as he’d said he would. I’d been kicking my heels in the wastes of Ullanor all that time, trying to find something useful to do. I hadn’t been very successful – the fleets in orbit were beginning to break up. The war was over, and already new battles had been identified.
I catalogued things. I submitted reports to my superiors. I read the notes I’d made after meeting the Stormseer.
The summons came with no warning. I was in Miert’s complex looking over some of his shoddily-done datawork when my secure comm-bead pulsed.
‘You have your audience, General Ravallion,’ came the message. ‘Be ready in an hour. I send a lander to your location.’
I had no idea how Yesugei had obtained access to the Departmento’s grid. My immediate reaction was to feel a swell of nerves bloom in the pit of my stomach. I had served in many warzones and argued my corner with many powerful military commanders, so did not consider myself easily overawed, but this…
This was a primarch, one of the Emperor’s own sons.
I tried to imagine what he would be like. I had heard different things about them: that they were constantly engulfed in light, that their armour shone like the sun, that they could kill with a word or a gesture and their gaze alone could flay skin and crack bone.
I had plenty of time to speculate. Typically for the White Scars, the lander arrived late. It eventually came down in a flurry of dust just north of the complex’s perimeter. From my window I saw its white flanks and its gold-and-red lightning-strike sigil, and felt a fresh twinge of nervousness.
‘Control yourself,’ I said out loud, adjusting my newly-acquired weapon belt a final time before leaving for the lander. ‘He is just a man. No, more than a man. What, then? Flesh and blood. Human. One of us.’
But I didn’t know if even that were true. I was faced with a problem of categorisation, something that I’d always found difficult.
‘On our side,’ I settled on, feeling sick with anticipation.
The lifter was a Legiones Astartes variant Horta RV local-space shuttle – a late issue pattern. I knew everything about it. Fixing on the details helped my mood.
Yesugei was waiting for me in the crew-bay. He was wearing his ivory armour, and looked enormous in the confined space. He bowed to me as I climbed up the ramp to join him.
‘Are you well, General Ravallion?’ he asked.
I bowed in turn, trying to hide my anxiety with, I suspect, little success.
‘Very well, Yesugei,’ I said. I had learned by then, after much research, that Stormseers did not take the title ‘khan’. They didn’t take any kind of title at all; their name, and their calling, seemed to be enough. ‘My thanks again, for arranging this.’
The boarding ramp to the lander closed behind me with a whine of servos. I heard airlocks clunk closed, and the craft’s engines begin to power up.
‘Pleasure,’ he said, sitting back against the metal walls.
The dimensions of the lander fitted Space Marine physiology; everything, even the benches and the restraint harnesses, was far too big for me. I sat opposite Yesugei and fiddled with the straps, my feet barely touching the floor. He didn’t bother using a harness, and sat serenely, his gauntlets resting on his knees.
‘May I ask, general,’ he said, ‘you have met primarch before?’
The engines continued to power up, and I saw dust billowing up on the far side of the tiny viewports.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Ah,’ said Yesugei.
With a muffled roar, the lander took off, hovering over the apron for a few moments before generating lift. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the dry valleys of Ullanor begin to fall away.
‘In that case, may I offer advice?’ he asked.
I smiled grimly. I could already feel uncomfortable waves of vibrations running through my body, and the walls of the crew-bay shook like a drum skin. We were climbing very fast. I wondered if the pilots made any allowances for the nature of their passengers.
‘Please do,’
I said. ‘No one else has been able to.’
‘Address him as Khan,’ said Yesugei. ‘That is not what we call him, but it is proper address for you. Look him in the eye when speaking, even if you find difficult. The shock of first meeting can be… bad. It will pass. He will not try to intimidate. Remember what he was created for.’
I nodded. The lander’s violent ascent made me feel nauseous. I pressed my hands firmly against the rim of my seat and felt moisture on the inside of my gloves.
‘I am told, by those who know, he is not like his brothers,’ said Yesugei. ‘He can be hard to read, even for us. On Chogoris we use hunting raptors. We call them berkut. His soul is one of theirs: far-ranging, restless. He may say things that seem strange. You may think he mocks you.’
I saw the sky in the viewports fade into black, and the tiny points of stars emerge. We had broken into the upper atmosphere incredibly quickly. I tried to concentrate on what Yesugei was telling me.
‘Remember only this,’ he said. ‘A berkut never forget the shape of the hunt. In the end it always comes back to the hand that loosed it.’
I nodded, feeling light-headed.
‘I will remember,’ I said.
I caught my first glimpse of our destination in the far distance: a warship, vast and battle-scarred, its curved prow painted white and its marker lights blinking in the void.
I knew its name from the records: the Swordstorm.
Capital-class. Huge. Retro-fitted for speed – those engines are enormous. Was that sanctioned by Mars?
I knew he was in there. That was where he was waiting.
‘Try to understand him,’ said Yesugei calmly. ‘He may even like you. I have seen stranger things.’
We touched down in one of the Swordstorm’s hangars, and then things moved quickly. Yesugei escorted me down long corridors, up elevator-shafts, across huge halls thronged with menials and servitors. I heard singing in a language I didn’t understand, and laughter echoing along service corridors. The entire ship had an air of furious, good-natured, slightly chaotic energy. It smelled cleaner than the Army cruisers I was used to, with an underlying aroma of something like incense rising from the polished floors. Everything was brightly lit and copiously decorated with the colours of the Legion – white, gold and red.
