“Knowledge is power, but ignorance is safety,” murmured Tanthius under his breath. He didn’t like this at all.
“Why?” The abrupt question came from Ephraim.
“Why what?” asked Jonas.
“Why was the sword committed to that Armorium? We have a number of force weapons in the other armouries in the fleet.”
“The Psykana Armorium is more than merely an armoury, brother Ephraim. It acts as a conduit for the psychic potentials of the weapons it holds, channelling them into the Beacon Psykana itself, amplifying the psychic signal that pulses in the heart of the Blood Ravens.
“After a certain period, the weapons become psychically fused with the beacon. When new Librarians are initiated into the order, they are free to select one of the weapons as their own. Carrying this weapon with us ensures that we retain a permanent connection with the beacon at all times—this means that we can draw on its power at times of need, but it also means that the beacon can draw on us. This is partly how the Summoning of the Exodus functions.”
Gabriel nodded. He felt that he had known this already. For an instant, his mind flashed with half misremembered images of the Astronomican, and he wondered whether there was any connection between these dubious moments of unsanctioned psychic awareness and the secret beacon held in the core of his battle-barge. With so much psychic energy confined within the structure of a space vessel, surely there would be some unexpected or uncontrollable consequences?
“What does this have to do with Rhamah coming to this planet?” asked Corallis, his clear headedness bringing the conversation back on track.
“In the legend of the Fall of Lanthrilaq,” began Jonas, turning to address the sergeant who had once trained under him on Rahe’s Paradise, “Lanthrilaq’s blade is broken in combat with the necron. Afterwards, Lanthrilaq is slain and his imperfect blade falls to the ground on an unknown planet. However, the fragment that broke off his blade has a story of its own. It was found shortly afterwards by Lavena the Joyful, who had it re-forged into a new blade: the touch of death.”
“Vairocanum,” realised Corallis.
“Exactly. Rhamah’s blade contains part of the essence of the last Blade Wraith.”
“Its nature is now divergent—it is tied both to our Beacon Psykana and to its origins as part of the imperfect blade of Lanthrilaq. It is perhaps because of this that the Great Father chose not to wield the blade himself—he was aware of the dangers,” explained Korinth.
“But Rhamah chose the blade?” asked Tanthius, his concern for the moral choices of the Blood Ravens coming to the fore once again.
“The blade chose him,” answered Zhaphel simply.
“When he plunged it down into the deck of the Litany of Fury while we were struggling through the warp, perhaps Vairocanum saw a chance to return to its source,” said Korinth. “It can be no coincidence that Vairocanum snapped in exactly the same way as Lanthrilaq’s blade. Coincidences are for the weak-minded and the ignorant,” continued Zhaphel. “Even the remaining fragment of Vairocanum was so potent with psychic power that it overwhelmed the beacon when we attempted the Summoning of the Exodus. Neither Rhamah nor the rest of the sword are lost. If anything, their powers have grown since their fall.”
“We can only assume that this is because they are drawing close to the psychic home of Vairocanum,” concluded Jonas. “That is why we think that Rhamah is here on this planet, and why the Sword of Vaul is here too. The presence of the Harlequins supports our theory, and the interest of the Traitor Marines is also circumstantial support.”
Gabriel looked his old friend directly in the eyes and saw the constancy of his purpose. The explanation had been an act of trust and confession; Gabriel had never asked and would never have asked Jonas to betray the details of the Order Psykana. As scholars, the Blood Ravens were fully aware of the value, importance and power of secrets.
Shifting his attention to the other two Librarians, he realised that they were taking a big risk. They had never served under him before, and he was fully aware that their opinion of him was probably shaped by the rumours that circulated through the Ninth Company under the command of Ulantus. Now, it seemed, they were on even ground.
As he looked from one to the other, the last of the Arcadian suns broke the horizon and a blinding blast of red light and heat swept across them, bathing them in a shower of burning sand. At that moment, Gabriel found himself wondering whether Taldeer had known all of this from the start.
Clicking his helmet back into place to protect his eyes and face from the harsh elements, Gabriel activated the vox bead. “It’s getting late. Let’s find out what other secrets we can explode in this city.”
Dozens of fake grins glared down onto the stage. It was almost impossible to differentiate the Harlequins in the stands from the mannequins that simply made up the numbers when the audience appeared overly thin. It was thin today.
“They have come, Eldarec. The mon-keigh have come in greater numbers.” The voice echoed down from the highest balcony in the amphitheatre, bouncing around the acoustics until it appeared to have no origin at all. It might even have come from one of the lifeless, smiling mannequins. Such was how it should be for the voice of the chorus: impersonal but insightful. “They tried to kill the farseer, Eldarec!”
“She was alive on the surface of Arcadia—and then they tried to kill her!”
“We were there!”
“We watched her fall before the ugly and clumsy violence of the mon-keigh!”
“Karebennian was wrong, Eldarec! He is not to be trusted. The seekers of truth bring death not assistance in our fight.”
“The mon-keigh are all the same—they have no place on Arcadia!”
“The arebennian is deceitful—he is a trickster. The mon-keigh must die.”
“We must prepare for war, Eldarec! We must purge the surface of Arcadia!”
“The Solitaire takes the role of the Great Enemy and leads us to our doom!”
The lights in the theatre flickered and flashed then a controlled explosion detonated in the middle of the stage. As the smoke cleared, the lithe yet solid shape of Karebennian was revealed.
“Oh cegorach,” he began, “it is true that the mon-keigh have landed in greater numbers. But it is not true that the newcomers are the same as those who have taken up position in the ancient repository.”
“They tried to kill the farseer, Karebennian,” countered Eldarec.
“It is true that the farseer suffered, but the cause of her injuries is not unclouded, cegorach. She was not killed—I saw to that. She led the mon-keigh here, and I believe that she did so willingly. Her mind spoke of the seekers of truth—we have encountered such creatures before. Lavena the Joyful once danced with their leader.”
“And she was killed, a fate that may yet befall this Taldeer of yours.” Eldarec’s tone was grave despite the sudden grin that cracked across his mask.
“How can you tell them apart, Solitaire?” The shout echoed out of the audience; it carried accusations as much as interrogations.
Swirling to face the audience, Karebennian swooped into a leap and then a bow. “One of them carries the Vairocanum! His words were like song and his movements seemed to enact the drama of the Blade Wraith all over again. “I have seen it.”
There was a hush of silence.
“They come for our resources, as once they came for the sword!” The call ricocheted and bounced around the stands. “There is no trust amongst such animals. The farseer was wrong to bring them here.”
“Whatever differences you see between them: they are all the same! They come for our power!”
“Knowledge is power!”
“We should rid Arcadia of their stench!”
“We go to battle!”
“Commence the Dance of War!”
The call to arms echoed with the support of dozens of voices, as the sound whirled around the amphitheatre, gathering volume and power.
“I will not dance this danc
e with you,” said Karebennian, walking to the front of the stage and slumping, cross-legged to the ground. “There is no harmony in this move. All great symphonies contain moments of rest and calm: this should be such a moment. We should wait before we act rashly: the mon-keigh may surprise us yet.”
Eldarec watched the Harlequin troupe spring to its feet in the stands, flipping and leaping their way down to the stage, leaving the grinning mannequins immobile and sinister in their seats. As the troupe started to assemble on the stage behind the Solitaire, Eldarec threw his head back and laughed, filling the arena with the rattling, guttural sound of mirth.
“If you will not join us, you will be alone, Karebennian.”
“Such is the path of the Solitaire.” There was no joy in his voice as he faded slowly out of visibility.
The Great Harlequin took up the centre of the stage and raised the Sword of Lanthrilaq above his head in a dramatic pose. As he did so, the rest of the troupe fell into position around him, each striking a combat stance that seemed frozen in time, as though the theatre had suddenly been thrown back into the dimness of history to the point at which Lanthrilaq and Eldanesh had mustered their greatest heroes to confront the soulless evil of the yngir. Gradually, the troupe’s dathedi-shields powered up and their images were actually transformed to resemble the mighty host that once laid waste to the silvering minions of the star gods.
A series of dull impacts reverberated through the theatre and then a distant explosion shook the stage. Immediately, the rattle of gunfire and the hiss of warp discharge filled the background of the performance on stage. For a moment, the troupers wondered whether this was a new trick of the Great Harlequin, designed to make their posturing even more dramatic. But then cracks began to appear in the ceiling of the amphitheatre, sending dust and debris raining down onto the stage. More explosions sounded, and the theatre rocked.
In a sudden plume of flame, Karebennian reappeared at the edge of the stage, still cross-legged on the floor, facing up into the mannequin-filled audience. “The mon-keigh have engaged each other. They are in the plaza in front of the main repository.”
The command deck of the Litany of Fury was silent. Captain Ulantus stared at the blank viewscreen as his mind raced to try and make sense of what was going on. It seemed like only hours before that he had been engaged in the simple and unambiguous affair of war: the Litany of Fury had proven itself once again in battle against the orks and even the necron. It now hung massively in orbit around the devastated spoils—Lorn V.
However, life was more complicated than war, even for a captain in the Emperor’s Adeptus Astartes. The presence of two fully-armed eldar cruisers in tight formation just off the stern of his battle-barge was not something that Ulantus was comfortable with. Although he was relatively confident that they would be no match for the awesome firepower of the Litany, especially from such close range, the mere presence of the aliens made him feel uncomfortable. In a moment of insight, Ulantus realised that his discomfort was proof of his steadfast spirit: he was not Captain Angelos, and the presence of the eldar should fill him with righteous revulsion. His discomfort was his shield against heresy.
But the alien witch had confirmed many of the things that the errant Captain Angelos had claimed before he had gone gallivanting into the warp with the other eldar seer. The coincidence was simply too striking, and Ulantus was too much a Blood Raven to let such a coincidence pass unmarked.
“Coincidences are for the weak-minded and the ignorant,” he muttered to himself, echoing the words of the Great Father himself, still staring at the blank blackness of the viewscreen.
He considered the facts: it was true that there had been a webway portal on the surface of Lorn V. This had been confirmed by General Sturnn independently of Gabriel and the alien seer. It was further confirmed by the covert arrival of an Ordo Xenos inquisitor, the furtive Tsensheer, who had been summoned by Sturnn when the Cadians first discovered the site of the portal.
Tsensheer had studiously avoided all contact with the Blood Ravens since arriving in the Lorn system, which made Ulantus both suspicious and angry: Gabriel’s reputation tarnished everything he touched. It would not be appropriate for Ulantus to contact the inquisitor himself—to do so would be to suggest that his lines of communication with the Blood Ravens Commander of the Watch were obscured in some way, which would fuel rather than dispell any rumours about the current state of the Blood Ravens. It was undoubtable that the direct and straight-forward Sturnn would have informed Tsensheer that Captain Angelos had already been down to the surface with an eldar seer in tow.
Not for the first time, Ulantus cursed the Commander of the Watch under his breath.
It was also true that the portal had been disabled in some way, but that neither the Blood Ravens nor the Cadian Guard had done anything that could have achieved this result. Gabriel had spoken about the presence of a Nova-class frigate out near Lorn VII, and had implied that it might have been a Chaos vessel that had somehow ruptured the portal from a distance. Leaving aside the question of who those Traitor Marines might have been and why they might have wanted to disable a webway portal, Ulantus had ordered the scan-array servitors to go back through the records of the mid-range scanners for the last day, and they had indeed shown the abrupt presence and sudden disappearance of a frigate-sized vessel around Lorn VII at about the time the Ravenous Spirit had entered the system.
The biggest hole in Gabriel’s account of events, however, had been the leap from these factual observations to the assertion that the destruction of the webway portal was simultaneously an opportunity for the unidentified Traitor Marines to find a way to an ancient, lost eldar planet of forbidden knowledge and power.
Gabriel had made this leap on the basis of information gifted to him by an alien witch who, until merely hours before the appearance of the necron menace, had been assaulting the Litany of Fury.
Ulantus turned away from the viewscreen and strode towards the exit of the control deck, deciding that he should go and check on the progress of the young neophyte, Ckrius, in the Implantation Chamber. He needed to see something material and controllable, something that spoke of the future of the Blood Ravens in a more affirmative manner. Something uncomplicated by the affairs of Gabriel Angelos.
As he walked he realised that Farseer Macha had basically confirmed Gabriel’s story. He wasn’t sure what to make of the realisation. Thinking back to his conversation with the alien, Ulantus realised that he had referred to Captain Angelos as “Your Gabriel”, when speaking to the farseer. It had been an unconscious move, but he wondered whether it revealed something deep-seated about his views concerning the commander.
The farseer had implied that the destruction of the portal would bring doom to Lorn. She had said that Gabriel and the other seer had to move quickly. But she had not said why.
As the blast doors hissed and clunked closed behind him, Ulantus found himself wondering whether he should try to re-contact the eldar farseer to find some answers to this question: with the orks and necrons defeated, what could possibly be the threat to the Lorn system now?
Behind him, Ulantus heard the blast doors unpressurise and hiss open once again.
“Captain Ulantus,” called Saulh, stepping out of the control room after him. “You should see this.”
Ulantus stopped at the end of the corridor and turned back to face his sergeant. “See what, Saulh?”
“The sun, captain. It’s… it’s changing.”
The sound of gunfire drew me through the sweeping, circular window cavity in the wall of the librarium and out onto the balcony beyond. The light of the three red suns streamed into my face as I emerged out of the shadow of the countless book stacks housed within the great reading-room. I held my hand to my face to shade my eyes from the glare and stepped up to the stone balustrade that ran in a beautiful arc, matching the crescent-shaped sweep of the balcony’s floor.
It took a while for my eyes to adjust—the brilliant sunlight jousted t
hrough the long, thin streets and emerged into the plaza below the balcony like the beams of a laser, bursting into blinding radiance against every polished or metallic surface. I could see two groups of figures moving around the piazza: one group was growing as reinforcements stormed out of the gates that led into the building below me. The other group, on the far side of the square, was smaller and more isolated.
What is happening here? Who are those soldiers?
Good questions, friend, answered Ahriman. He was leaning against the wall of the librarium at the far edge of the balcony, watching the developing battle and bathing in the radiance of the bloody suns. In the startling light, his face seemed almost translucent.
Those are not Harlequins. The newcomers were much bigger than the eldar warriors and their movements were heavier. Even against the bursting light of the suns, I could see that their armour was not characterised by the multicoloured patterns of the Harlequins, but by solid colorations in red and gold. Two or three of them appeared to be in blue. And the armour was much more solid than anything employed by the Harlequins. Their weapons coughed and barked with a familiar gravity and resonance. They look like Space Marines.
Yes, young friend. They look like Space Marines. All of this knowledge acts like a beacon for the thirsty and for the seekers of power. If there is anything worth dying for, it is knowledge. Ahriman leant over the edge of the balcony for a moment, watching a volley of shells crash into the wall below and blow great chunks of masonry down into the piazza. Then he turned and peered back into the librarium through the circular arch. If nobody else wanted this, how could we be sure of its value?
I stared down into the blaze of sunlight, which was now hazed with smoke from the explosions and fires that had erupted around the plaza. Something about this scene felt wrong. Ahriman is not surprised by this battle. He expected it. He needed it to happen—it is like an affirmation of his success. “You were expecting them?” I asked.
We did not start this fight, young sword of Vidya. My Prodigal Sons are merely defending themselves. Those Blood Ravens drew the first blood. The great sorcerer had stepped back through the archway into the librarium, as though the unravelling battle was already boring him.
[Dawn of War 03] - Tempest Page 24
