by William King
Around the circle stood the Blood Claws, all five of them, together with Sergeant Hakon and Inquisitor Sternberg. All of them watched, grim-faced, as Isaan continued her ritual. Ragnar sensed Sternberg’s excitement. The hunt was on again. They were about to take another step forward towards saving his world from the plague.
Inquisitor Isaan started to chant in Imperial Gothic, the elevated language of ancient psyker litanies rolling from her tongue. The rhythm of the words lent them power, made her voice seem deeper and more resonant, as if something else was speaking through the woman’s mouth. Regrettably that was all too possible, Ragnar knew. Psykers were notoriously prone to daemonic possession, which was why most of them were soul-bonded to the Emperor, or fed to him as sustenance in his Golden Throne. Ragnar guessed that, like the Space Marine Chapters, the Inquisition had its methods of screening and protecting its psykers. He only hoped they were as effective as those used by the Fang’s rune priests.
He guessed that protection was the reason for the circle and those sacred symbols. They were designed to protect the psyker from unwholesome external influences as the ritual progressed. Ragnar gave his attention back to his own prayers. The inquisitor had instructed them all to pray silently as the ritual progressed so that no malign influences might be attracted by their thoughts. Ragnar wasn’t sure what she meant by that but he was determined not to take any chances. He prayed fervently to Russ and the Emperor to watch over them, and guide the psyker in her task.
Suddenly the hairs on the back of Ragnar’s neck rose, and it felt like the temperature had dropped a degree or two. His mouth opened in an involuntary snarl. He sensed the presence of something. Strange energies crackled in the air around them, unseen and yet undeniably present. There was a smell like burnt metal. He opened his eyes once more and gazed at Karah Isaan. At first he doubted his eyes: was there the faintest trace of a halo of light surrounding her head? Maybe. No, definitely. As he watched, prayers forgotten, it grew brighter, until it was a shimmering circle of amber light which grew stronger as he watched, became brighter and brighter until it eclipsed the dim lighting of the room and made the female inquisitor the focus of every gaze.
Her short-cropped hair rippled slowly, as if caught by a breeze, although there was not the slightest breath of wind within the sealed chamber. When she opened her eyes, Ragnar could see the unnatural light within them. Her pupils and iris glowed like two tiny suns, as if they were part of a binary system within her head that provided the illumination for the halo. Slowly she raised her thin brown hands until the talisman was cupped between them. It, too, began to glow, the light of her halo catching on the thousands of facets of the gem, becoming split into millions of points, refracting all around the room. Ragnar could see the beams of light playing over the faces of his comrades. Some of them landed on his own chest like the eerie red dots of a targeting laser. The thought made him shiver slightly and give his attention back to his prayers.
The chanting continued. Ragnar watched in fascination. From the woman’s mouth a mist had started to emerge, a writhing vapour which shimmered and glittered and swirled around her — and then began to take on concrete shapes, like images projected by a holosphere. Ragnar saw a world gleam against the cold depths of space. He saw the blue of oceans, the white of clouds and the green of jungles.
Even as he watched, the bizarre scene projected in the air changed. It was as if they were dropping from space onto the surface of the world. One continent leapt into view. They dropped closer towards an endless sea of green. The dizzying speed of descent slowed. Ragnar saw huge towering trees, and brightly coloured flowers almost as large. Huge insects. Strange beasts. A monstrous stone temple, ancient, shaped like a stepped pyramid, covered in strange eroded carvings of humanoid faces. Creepers and lichens swelled into view. Ragnar shivered, sensing some sort of inimical presence in the air. He wondered about daemons and prayed more fervently. The temperature in the room was dropping very rapidly now and the stink of burning, mingled with the incense, was foul.
The point of view descended, passing like a ghost through the walls of the pyramid and into a hidden chamber at its core. On an altar tended by emerald-robed priests lay an amulet twin to the one that glittered on Karah Isaan’s neck — save that the gem was green and seemed slightly smaller. This was what they sought, Ragnar knew.
The chill in the air of the chamber deepened. Ragnar’s breath came out as a stream of mist. Droplets of moisture seemed to condense then freeze on his armour. He was a Space Marine and his armour was designed to let him survive in far more extreme temperatures, but still he felt the difference. The sense of an evil presence deepened and the picture changed again, swirling, condensing, until it formed a single huge, green-skinned head. Malevolent yellow eyes glared out at everyone in the room. Huge tusks protruded from the thing’s leathery lips. A massive scar ran from the forehead across the left eye, down across the mouth and ended on the right side of its chin. It looked as if it had been crudely stitched together with rough twine, and the twine left in place. As Ragnar watched, the thing opened its mouth and bellowed in rage. The echo of that distant roar seemed to ring in his own head. It was spoken in a language other than his own, but still he understood the meaning. Come here, and you will all die! Every last one of you! The vision vanished. There was a shriek of pain. A gust of wind which came from nowhere blew out all the braziers and the lights flickered. For a moment the room was plunged into a blackness as deep as death.
Inquisitor Isaan shivered. She was wrapped in Sternberg’s cloak now but it was still cold in the metal chamber. A sense of that brutal alien presence lingered all around them, making Ragnar’s fingers seek the butt of his pistol.
“That was an ork,” Sven muttered. Ragnar nodded slowly. He remembered the descriptions of the things, and the images which had been pumped into his brain by the tutelary engines back in the Fang. They were a warrior race, savage, brutal and wicked, utterly without redeeming features. They fought endlessly to conquer and enslave any world they came to.
Sternberg stared at Karah Isaan meaningfully, a fanatical glint in his eyes. “Your vision quest was successful?”
The woman shivered and nodded. “Yes.”
“Names! Places!”
Sternberg sounded like a man possessed, Ragnar thought. “Gait,” she said simply.
“Then that was the Temple of Xikar?”
“Yes.”
“So the talisman ended up there.”
The woman looked very weak and pale. Using her strange powers had obviously drained her. She looked direly in need of rest and yet her colleague showed no sympathy. He touched the communication amulet on his throat. “Helmsman! Lay a course for the Gait system. I want to get there with all possible speed.”
Moments later, in answer to his command, a deep siren sounded and the lights flickered in an alert pattern. In the distance Ragnar could hear feet pounding down the corridors, as starsailors raced to prepare the ship for the jump into the warp.
“Best return to your chambers,” Sternberg said to the Wolves. “No leap into the Immaterium is a pleasant experience.”
Ragnar lay on the old leather of the acceleration couch in his chamber. A starsailor had entered earlier and showed him how to strap himself in. He had been surprised to find that the chairs doubled up as acceleration couches. A touch of a hidden button and they folded outwards and backwards, extruding restraining straps which looked thick enough to hold a bull mastodon. The harness was controlled by a quick release button similar to the ones on the restrainer straps in a Thunderhawk. The Blood Claw wondered why they could be necessary. The huge starship had seemed utterly stable the whole time he had been on it. The starsailor had been insistent though. He claimed that everyone not performing vital duties absolutely requiring freedom of movement would be doing the same. The tenseness of the man’s body, together with the undertones of dread and anticipation in the man’s scent, convinced Ragnar. This man claimed to be a veteran of a thousand war
p jumps, yet still he was afraid.
“Never gets any easier, sir,” he had said, just before he left the room. Now bells clanged throughout the ship and warning sirens blared. The lights flickered from normal to red, then back again. There was no doubt about what was going to happen next.
A final long siren wail blared. Over the intercom, a deep voice boomed: “Thirty seconds to jump. May we be blessed in His sight.”
Ragnar felt a sick feeling of anticipation in the pit of his stomach, and just for a moment wished that all of the pack had been assembled in one chamber. He knew there would be something reassuring in their mere presence. Might as well wish to be back on Fenris right now, he thought sarcastically. It’s not going to happen.
His double heartbeat accelerated. He began to sweat. With an effort of will and the words of a Litany of Calming, using the control of his nervous system granted to him as a Space Marine he brought his heartbeats back to normal, and stopped the sweating. Immediately he began to feel the panic subside into mere unease. “Twenty seconds to jump. Watch and guide our path.” Still he felt anticipation. He had never made a warp jump before, although all his training had told him it would be a very strange experience. The ship would be passing out of this space-time continuum and into another place where matter did not exist and time flowed strangely. In some ways it would be like a submersible going under water. It would become lost to the sight of all tracking devices which operated in the normal universe, until it emerged in real space again. Of course, this might not happen. It was all down to the skill of the ship’s Navigator, who would set his course by the mighty beacon of the Astronomican on distant Terra, and would try to find a path for the starship through the treacherous currents of warp space.
The warp itself was a turbulent medium, unstable, as full of ebbs and flows as a mighty ocean. It was said to be haunted by daemons and ghosts and the hulks of the thousands of ships, some of them human, which had been lost in it since time immemorial. It was a shifting, ill-understood realm which filled even those who travelled through it with superstitious dread. All manner of tales were told about the warp. Of starsailors who travelled through it convinced that only days had passed and who later emerged to find centuries had gone by in real time and that all who knew them were dead and gone. It had happened even to the Space Wolves. Ships had been deemed lost for hundreds of years and then their crews had returned to the Fang, unheralded and unexpected, to rejoin their comrades. And other, stranger fates had befallen travellers as well. Sometimes crews would travel out and return what seemed days later to their comrades; only when they emerged from their ships, they had grown old and senile and some had died of ageing. Their crews felt like they had been lost for decades in the warp, and showed all the effects of having been so. Sometimes entire crews went insane the moment they slipped into the Immaterium. No one knew why. And sometimes, most ominously of all, ships, even entire fleets vanished, never to be seen or heard from again. It was all down to luck, the favour of the Emperor and the skill of the Navigator. “Ten seconds to jump. May He return us safely.” Ragnar wondered if anything would go wrong this time. He hoped not but it was always a possibility. All he could do was strive to keep calm, and pray to the Emperor and to beloved Leman Russ for succour, cold comfort though that might be. The worst thing, he thought, was the helplessness. He was a Space Wolf, trained for battle, schooled to face a thousand perils in the line of duty. Right now there was no way he could control the outcome, or indeed have any effect on it. He could not take his bolter in his hand and slay a visible foe. He could not take cover and retreat from the danger. All he could do was wait, and try to endure the knowledge that his fate was in the hands of other men. He tried telling himself that the Navigators had been as hard-schooled in their trade as he was in his, but it did not help. At the end of the day he was a Space Marine, a man of action, and this sort of waiting came hard to him.
Still, he remembered the words of Ranek during one of the many sermons the Wolf Priest had preached during his induction to the Space Wolves: When there is nothing to do but wait, then wait is all you can do. He knew he must simply let go of his worry; it was counter-productive, could not affect the outcome one way or another. That was what he strove to do now.
“Five seconds to jump.”
Whatever was going to happen was going to have to happen soon, Ragnar thought. In the distance he could hear the howling of the engines as their power emission began to reach a peak.
“Four.” Was that a faint halo of light beginning to appear around all the furnishings? The howling rose and lowered in pitch until it became a noise like thunder and a whine like a plummeting Thunderhawk.
“Three.” Yes. The halo was there and getting brighter. Distant thunder rattled the metal walls. The ship was vibrating; it quivered as if with eagerness, anticipation. It reminded the Space Wolf of a wardog being readied to hunt.
“Two.” The whole ship was shaking violently. Would it break apart in the warp?
“One.” The whole of the vast starship seemed to spring forward, like a hound that had been straining against a leash and was now released. There was a huge thunderclap of sound, and the ship rang as if it had been hit with a titanic hammer. Ragnar wondered how it could endure the stress, then thought of all the gigantic bulkheads and reinforcing struts he had seen on his earlier wanderings. Had those been as much to resist the strains of the warp jumps as to protect the ship in battle, he wondered?
The ship shuddered hugely. Ragnar could hear the metal creak, like the masts of a ship in a storm. It felt as if massive forces were being brought to bear on the ship, now puny in comparison to the typhoon in which it seemed caught. With his enhanced senses Ragnar could feel the tension in the juddering vibrations of the couch beneath him. Was the Light of Truth about to shatter like a dragonship dashed against a reef?
The Blood Claw felt a surge of nervous fear in the pit of his stomach and fought to control it. What was that shrieking sound? It sounded like the wailing of lost souls. And that ominous scraping? Was it the claws of daemons dragging themselves along the hull? The stories he had heard came back to him. He had a half-horrified, half-fascinated desire to look out of the porthole but it had been sealed with massive metal shutters in the ran up to the jump. It was said that looking out into the warp was a sure way to madness. Yet he felt the tug of morbid curiosity.
Could it really be the souls of lost starsailors he was hearing? Or the call of daemon lovers to the curious and unwary? Were these things really penetrating the shields and baffles which protected the ship or were they simply products of his own morbid imagination? Part of him was curious and part of him hoped he would never find out.
The ship seemed to have settled now. It shuddered and shivered occasionally but it was less unsettling than the movement of a ship on the sea and Ragnar was well accustomed to that. After a moment’s hesitation, he hit the release mechanism on the restraining straps and rose to his feet. His keen ears picked up the sharp metallic ringing of the other Space Wolves doing the same.
Ragnar emerged from his chamber into the central hall. Sven strode into the room almost simultaneously. He looked at Ragnar and grinned.
“Well, we’re bloody well away now,” he said and laughed aloud.
“Aye! That we are.”
A curious anti-climactic feeling had settled on Ragnar. They had made the jump. They were in warp space and speeding to their destination. All they had to do now was get out again.
Galt.
Ragnar called up details of the system from the ship’s mnemonic banks. The information flashed onto the old televisor, a mixture of pictures and Imperial runes. Not an enormous amount of detail, but that was to be expected. It was consulting only the Index of the Compendio Mundae, which contained only the most basic of details. More could be summoned on request, providing the information was not in some way under a ban or interdiction.
Ragnar’s eyes flickered quickly over the screen. Sun: yellow and terrestrial type. S
ix planets. One inhabited, known as Gait Three. Two moons. A warm world. Closer to its sun than Fenris, and on a regular helical orbit, not elliptical as his own home world was. Three large continents. Three-quarters ocean. Some large island chains. Most of the human population was confined to the largest continent, where most of the landmass was covered in tropical rainforest. Several large cities. Lots of logging and agriculture. Most common export to the Imperium was the buds of the red lotus used as the basis of many Imperial alchemical products. Also many pre-Imperial ruins — temples, cities, roadways. These indicated the presence of a primitive human culture which had survived the collapse at the end of the Dark Age of Technology. Naturally the cults had been expunged when the people of Gait were welcomed back into the fold of the Imperium. Many of their sacred places had become monasteries and seminaries used by the Ecclesiarchy.
The Temple of Xikar was one such place, an enormous complex set in the jungle which had become home to the monastic sect known as the Brothers of Perpetual Bliss. The sea had been investigated for the contamination of heresy on several occasions, but the inquisitors detailed to the task felt that its deviation from the broad thread of Imperial scripture fell within acceptable and tolerable norms. The inquisitorial jargon made Ragnar’s head swim but he deduced that what it really meant was that the Inquisition had decided not to cleanse the Brotherhood with fire and the sword.
And now one of those temples was found to contain part of the Talisman of Lykos. Ragnar wondered how it had got there.
