“It is too late. We all know it. We can all feel that craven hunger inside us now. You have infected all of the ogre-kin with your greed, and created something far greater and more terrifying, out there in the wastelands.”
Halting not ten feet away from Gilmog, Groth reached up and pulled back his hood.
Though many were appalled, only the chieftain actually made a sound—he wailed in something like fear and shame as he saw the burned remains of the prophet’s features, sinking to his knees at the water’s edge and unable to look away.
Groth’s lipless jaws hung festooned with sharp, black teeth of knapped flint, slathers of bloody spittle plastered across his empty cheeks. His nose was gone, leaving only a gaping hole in the centre of his face; though the horror of this paled in comparison to the shocking, dry yellowed orbs of his eyes that stared wide from sockets where no lids remained. The scent of charred meat hung about him, such that even the stifling wind could not dispel it.
“I know this to be true, because I have seen it for myself.”
The sound of skittering pebbles and the splash of shallow water came as the first of the emaciated Lass’ar ambled closer. Gilmog cried out in alarm, though he could not tear his gaze away from Groth’s.
“You have taken so much from our people, tyrant,” he hissed. “Now the Maw tells me that it is time for you to give something back.”
The first blow came with an enraged bellow from one of the bulls stood behind Gilmog, knocking him from his knees and into the shallows. Dazed, he felt the bronze mace snatched from his grip only a moment before the club of a second warrior shattered his pelvis.
The fury of the stone-eaters was soon forgotten, though, as the Lass’ar fell upon them all. With sticks, stones and their bare hands, dozens of the withered ogre-kin beat them down and tore into their flesh; like ghouls in the twilight, their eyes burned with hatred and pure, ravenous hunger.
Gilmog struggled to pull himself forwards, but a sandaled foot stomped down on the back of his neck with an agonising crackle of vertebrae. Blood washed into his mouth—even as he felt rusted blades piercing him, he tried to swallow it.
Anything to feed the hunger in his belly...
Groth had sat then upon the rocks, gazing into the poisoned waters for a long time as the lass’ar feasted. When finally they were done, he rose and drew up his tattered hood once more.
“Children of the Maw, follow me now,” he said, a jagged smile breaking over the scabrous ruin of his face. “I have something great to show you.”
The story continues, of course, but from this point onwards the content becomes rather fanciful, and refers to places that exist on no map of the eastern lands. Fraulein Nitikin acknowledges the ambiguity of the source material in her footnotes, which I will distribute shortly.
The question remains, then: what exactly did the self-styled prophet Groth Onefinger discover out there in the blasted wastes? And, subsequently, what became of him and his followers? The true answer is likely lost to myth, if indeed it ever was more than thinly veiled allegory.
Before we adjourn for luncheon—eternal hunger being the curse of ogres and academics alike!—I should like to draw your attention to this woodcut, which comes from the university collection and is believed to be a copy of an original Cathayan scroll.
It is a hypnotic image, is it not?
Note in particular the colossal teeth, which are presumably symbolic, and the tiny ogre-like figures that have prostrated themselves before it. Were this indeed a truthful depiction, then what a terrifying, vengeful god it would be, no?
I see that some of you clearly have questions. One at a time, if you please.
Sister Agentha of the Order of the Fractured Cipher realised what she was listening to over the vox mere seconds before the eldar raiders sprang their assault. One moment she was standing next to Chaplain Gerataus on the bridge of the Black Templars strike cruiser Inevitable Retribution, the next she was sprawled unceremoniously across the deck as xenos fire rocked the Space Marine ship.
Blinking into realspace, almost three dozen of the dark craft discharged full weapon salvos against the Inevitable Retribution, though most of their firepower was reserved for the vessel accompanying the Black Templars, the Executioners craft Guillotine. Taken unawares by the aliens’ surprise attack, Guillotine’s captain had neither the time to raise its shields nor return fire and in the space of mere seconds the huge vessel was bleeding atmosphere into the void. Vast rents opened up in the hull through which poured manpower and materiel. The human crew and Chapter serfs perished instantly, their physiology no match for the ravages of open space, while the battle-brothers of the Executioners drifted aimlessly, their power armour life support systems preserving their existence.
Several of the smaller eldar craft broke off from the assault and targeted the survivors. No mercy was shown and the zone surrounding the two Space Marine vessels was soon filled with slowly dissipating balls of crimson and metal.
The Inevitable Retribution, by virtue of being further away from the point of the eldar’s realspace translation, did not take as many immediate hits and was able to raise its shields before catastrophic damage was inflicted. On the bridge, klaxons wailed and Black Templars and crew alike barked and relayed orders, getting fire teams to the sites of the most crippling damage and calling up replacement crew from below decks to take the positions vacated by those who succumbed to the initial assault.
Castellan Kaleb commanded the helmsman to face their ambushers head on. For tortuous minutes the massive vessel swung around, eldar craft harrying the ship with sustained barrages of fire that dissipated against the shields. Halfway through the turn, all those on the bridge witnessed the final demise of Guillotine.
Also attempting to turn and fight, the stricken ship had ponderously rotated, but this did little more than present its unshielded flank to the xenos raiders. Like hungry animals pouncing on a scrap of meat, the eldar lit up the void with the discharge from their weapons, raking the exposed side of the ship and setting off a series of detonations that culminated in Guillotine’s warp drive going nova. Despite their greater speed, not all of the eldar vessels were able to outrun the corona of immaterial energy, and several of them disintegrated as the raw stuff of the warp engulfed them.
“Brace for impact!” yelled the Castellan across the bridge, and Space Marine and Chapter serf alike gripped anything that was riveted down as the tsunami of Chaos energy broke against their shields and washed over the ship. For the second time in the space of minutes, Agentha slammed against the deck of the bridge, sustaining a deep gouge just above her brow.
“Captain, damage report.” The Castellan was rooted in the same position he had been before the wave had struck. The only other woman on the bridge besides Agentha, answered him.
“Shields are down to less than ten per cent and warp drives were damaged during the initial assault. Praise His name that we did not suffer the fate as those unfortunate souls.” Through the occulus, Agentha could see Guillotine slowly falling through the dust belt of the planet below, inexorably caught in the pull of its gravity well. The captain didn’t need to say that if the eldar came back for more, their chances of survival, let alone victory, were virtually nil.
Agentha pulled herself up to a sitting position and dabbed at the gouge on her forehead with the sleeve of her robe, the orange fabric slowly turning to crimson around the cuff. All around her, medically trained serfs were tending to the wounds of their comrades, applying bandages and tourniquets to the most severely injured and removing the bodies of those beyond treatment. All of them ignored Agentha. Her presence on the mission had been a necessity, as she was only one of a handful of people in the Imperium able to read the complex hieroglyphs of the necron Khansu Dynasty, but her initial excitement at leaving the order and seeing more of the galaxy had soon turned sour.
The Black Templars barely tolerated her being on board one of their ships, and since the cleansing of the tomb world she had bee
n virtually confined to her quarters. The only reason she was on the bridge when the eldar attacked was because the vox-operators had picked up a faint signal from the world below, and Chaplain Gerataus had ordered her aid in deciphering it, which she believed she had done just before the alien attack.
“All stations,” the Castellan said, opening up a ship-wide vox-link. “We are taking the ship into the dust belt around the planet. Those alien vessels do not have sufficient shielding to follow us in, and that should afford us enough time to effect repairs.”
From the other side of the bridge, the figure of Chaplain Gerataus strode purposefully towards the Castellan until their faces were only centimetres apart.
“Need I remind you, Castellan, that it is not the Black Templars way to run and hide. Chapter protocol dictates that we turn and face the xenos scum, and not relent until they are vanquished.” Such was the passion with which he delivered those words that Agentha could see flecks of spittle landing on the Castellan’s cheek.
“Chapter protocol dictates that I do not needlessly send this ship and the battle-brothers on board to their certain doom.” The Castellan’s words were calmer, more measured than the Chaplain’s. “We take shelter, we make our repairs and then we strike back.”
The Chaplain stood there for a moment, the red lenses of his two ocular implants staring the Castellan square in the eyes, before slowly turning and making his way back to the vox-array.
Agentha had fashioned a workable dressing, and though she could still feel her wound pulsing as it gently bled, blood no longer poured into her eye. Unusually for a Sister Dialogus, Agentha’s eyes were unaugmented. Sisters of the Order of the Fractured Cipher believed that they were created in the Emperor’s own image and accepted no form of bodily modification. Some of the senior sisters of her order even frowned upon Agentha’s use of eyeglasses, which she now wiped clean in the folds of her robe before placing them upon her nose.
The bridge had become a much calmer place since their descent into the dust belt and the near-silence of serfs and crew carrying out their duties was only punctuated occasionally by the sound of a large chunk of debris smashing against the shields of the Inevitable Retribution. Agentha made her way back over to the vox-array. A serf had just finished repairing the communications device and was fiddling with dials to test whether it still functioned.
“May I?” Agentha asked the startled serf as she gestured for him to give her the headset. Frozen like a small mammal trapped in the beam of a hunter’s lamp, he glanced towards the Castellan, who nodded. The robed youth hastily dropped the headset and scurried away. She picked up the headset from where it had been dropped to the deck and, placing them over her ears once more, tried to tune it to the same frequency it had been on before her work had been so rudely interrupted. She gently rotated one of the large dials, but moments later quickly pulled the headset off, face painted in a grimace.
“Is there a problem, Sister?” Gerataus said, irritation evident in every syllable.
“The signal. It’s... It’s much stronger than before.”
The Chaplain broke off from the chart he was studying and loomed over Agentha. “Impossible. The only way that could happen is if it was being transmitted from the planet below, but all auspex returns confirm that it is a dead world. The vox-array must still be damaged. Serf! Get back here and perform a proper repair of this unit.”
“No. It’s not that.” Agentha waved a hand at the serf to gesture him away and once more the baffled youth had to look to the Castellan for confirmation. Kaleb ordered the serf to return to what he was doing and joined Gerataus and Agentha at the vox.
“Then what is it, Sister?” the Castellan asked, ignoring the Chaplain’s scowl.
“I’m not certain, but I believe that this is an old signal that has somehow retained its integrity over the millennia. My guess is that the dust field trapped the radio waves.” She put one of the headset cups to her left ear, leaving the other free to listen to the Space Marines.
“Ridiculous. Why are you even listening to this girl, Castellan? That head wound has addled her mind.”
Agentha had spent time in the company of the noble Adeptus Astartes before and though she knew to give them their due deference and respect, she would not be cowed in this matter. “It’s not ridiculous. On old Terra, mariners who traversed the polar regions would often report picking up radio signals from centuries previous. Just as the ice preserved whatever was frozen in it, the signals bounced off its surface, gradually weakening until they eventually faded altogether. I think that’s what the dust belt is doing here, bouncing the signal around and preserving it.”
The Castellan looked impressed, but sceptical. “But you said that this signal has been preserved for millennia, not centuries. How can you tell, and how could it have been sustained for so long?”
“I realised how old it was before the attack. The signal is a voice speaking in a derivation of High Gothic.”
“I too heard that broadcast, girl, and whatever language that voice is speaking, it is not High Gothic.” Gerataus turned to the Castellan. “See. I told you that injury had scrambled her faculties.”
“It is High Gothic... Just an ancient version of it.”
“Explain.” The Castellan sounded as if his curiosity had been piqued.
“My entire life has been dedicated to the study of language, and in that time I have come to realise that it is a living thing, language grows and evolves, discards those parts of itself that no longer serve a purpose and shapes itself to its environment and current needs. All languages do this, be they human or xenos, and have done ever since the first life forms gained the ability of speech.”
The Castellan nodded thoughtfully. Even the Chaplain looked as if he was giving this some consideration.
“High Gothic is no different, but it has the added complications of being one of the oldest human languages, pre-dating the Imperium even, and being a ceremonial language spoken on a million worlds. If you were to speak High High Gothic to somebody living a thousand years ago or a hundred light years away, then you should be able to understand each other almost completely. Comparatively little of the language would have changed. But if you were to go back five thousand years, or to the other side of the segmentum, then you’d have a hard time understanding each other but may get a general sense of what is being conveyed. Go back further than that, or to the far ends of the Imperium? Well, you might not even recognise it as the same language.”
“So, that’s what we’re listening to here? A local form of High Gothic from over five thousand years in the past?” Gerataus said.
“Yes. Some of the words are identical to current usage, and the grammar hasn’t changed a great deal, but this is definitely an ancient form of High Gothic.”
“How ancient?” asked the Castellan.
“I believe that it is around ten thousand years old... from the time of the Great Crusade.”
Castellan Kaleb eyed her incredulously. “How can you be so sure?” he said.
“Because in the time we’ve been speaking, the voice on the signal has mentioned the term ‘Great Crusade’ over a dozen times and ‘Emperor’ almost twice that. Here, listen.” Agentha flicked a switch on the front of the vox-array and the bridge filled with the sound of a woman’s voice delivering what appeared to be a sermon. “There. Can you hear that? ‘Imperator’. That phrase there? That’s ‘Imperial Truth’.”
Though her vocation meant she dealt mainly with the written word, all Sisters of her order were trained to recognise the spoken forms of all languages they dealt with, for those rare occasions when dead languages unexpectedly sprang back to life, often on the lips of a race or culture long thought vanquished by the Imperium.
“I think I can make out the word for ‘fleet’. It’s the same term some of the Venerables use for it. What’s that word she’s using before it? ‘Exploratory’?”
Agentha cocked her head and squinted, deep in concentration. “Close. It’s ‘
Expeditionary’ I think.”
The scowl returned to the Chaplain’s face. “So we know it’s somebody speaking High Gothic. That still doesn’t explain how the signal has persisted for so long. You said the radio waves on ancient Terra broke down after only a few centuries, but this woman’s voice has been preserved for over ten thousand years. How is that even possible?”
Agentha bowed her head slightly. “My lords, I do have one theory.”
“Well, what is it, girl?” The Chaplain’s patience had worn parchment-thin.
“I believe the signal was extremely strong in the first place and thus has taken longer to decay. Rather than being a vox-to-vox communication, this was originally broadcast on a very wide spectrum.”
Kaleb and Gerataus both came to the same realisation simultaneously
“This was a broadcast to the entire planet,” the Castellan said.
The darkened confines of Agentha’s chamber flickered in the dull light afforded by the handful of candles she had managed to scavenge. Her chamber, more a cell if she was being strictly accurate, was sparse, with only a bedroll and blankets, a seat and a simple table. The only other items in the room were a stack of ancient books and charts, arrayed almost floor to ceiling, that she had recently acquired from the ship’s archive.
With the Inevitable Retribution effectively trapped while repairs were made, Castellan Kaleb had granted permission for Agentha to carry out research into the world below and the origins of the transmission. It was a vain hope at best, but, as she was escorted into the ship’s archive by a battle-brother of the Black Templars, her spirits lifted.
The archive was easily as large as the library back at her order’s convent, but where the Fractured Cipher’s vaults held only tomes pertaining to languages both dead and active, the Inevitable Retribution’s collection—only a fraction of the Chapter’s as a whole—covered all manner of subjects. After poring over a collection of antique star charts, Agentha turned her attention to the Military History section, which formed easily a third of the archive.
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