‘I’ll wait here,’ says Slaunn.
Vorx looks at him for a moment. He wonders if this is some elaborate trap, but that seems a trifle theatrical. There are many ways to kill someone on the Plague Planet, after all, and no one will ever come looking for you.
‘Very well,’ he says, and goes inside.
This is the Inner Court. Vorx has been here only three times before. Many within the Legion, even some of the most senior, never come so far. Only the word of the primarch himself affords admittance, and those words have been scarce.
The last slivers of activity are gone. It is cold in here, and hoarfrost hangs from distant ceilings. The floor is glassy with ice; the dark pillars glitter faintly. The clouds of flies are sluggish, and they crawl rather than buzz across the shadowy vaults.
Vorx walks down a long nave. In design it is Imperial Gothic – imposing, solid, grave. His footsteps resound eerily in the high space between columns.
At the end of the nave there is a throne, shrouded in shadow. Long banners hang from spears set into the arches above, each inscribed with the names of worlds. Scrolls lie on the stone floor, half-frozen, their scripts a melange of human and xenos tongues.
The throne is high-backed, fluted and crowned with a raggedy peak of skulls. Thick cobwebs smother it, and swollen spiders squat at the heart of them. It is far bigger than any designed for mortals. It was smaller when it was first made, but its granite-and-ebony frame has gradually cracked and extended, swelling out along with the bulk of its owner.
Vorx comes to a halt. The darkness is almost complete here. All light and heat have been drained from this place, soaked away from an empty heart. It smells fusty, like confinement.
‘Welcome back, siegemaster,’ says the occupier of the throne.
Vorx has seen many things over his long service and is not easily daunted. It is impossible, however, to not be cowed by the sight of Mortarion. The primarch was always an imposing figure – lean, drawn, sinister – even when he retained mortal dimensions. Since becoming engulfed within the pantheon, the last fetters of restraint have been cast off. He is gigantic now, a cadaver of truly monstrous proportions. His armour has been reforged and gilded with daemonic alloys. His grey flesh has atrophied further, clinging to outsize bones. His back has erupted into spines and vents, while his shoulders are now clustered with muscles for the ragged wings that drape across the throne’s ripped backcloth.
When he breathes, yellow-green steam vents from an ancient, battered rebreather. Vorx sees a concave chest rise and fall under a corroding breastplate. Seamy eyes peer out from under the deep shadow of a threadbare cowl. Pale gauntlets grip the arms of the throne.
Vorx bows. ‘It is… good to see you again, lord.’
Mortarion stares at him. It is always hard to know what those eyes are witnessing. Vorx knows enough of the price of daemonhood to know that the physical universe is something the primarch now perceives only dimly. For all his immense power, he is clinging on, as all who make the bargain do. The majority of the possessed become howling imbeciles, given long enough, but this is a primarch, one of the sons of the Corpse-Emperor, and there is something indomitable about them even in their compromises.
‘I did not foresee this,’ the primarch says. His voice is like the grate of a tomb’s gate being swung lazily open. ‘I did not foresee the galaxy cracking.’
Vorx does not know what that means, and stays silent.
‘I had a different future mapped,’ Mortarion says. ‘I believed my part in all this was over. My duties lay on another plane.’ He chuckles, which makes his neck tremble and the macabre baubles across his armour rattle. ‘The Despoiler convinced me. He convinced all of us, one by one.’ He coughs, and his whole body shakes, stirring the dust on the ground. ‘Did I know, back then, that it would be Abaddon? Horus’ angry whelp? I often wonder if I should have. They were so alike, those two. For a long time I thought he was dead. And then I thought I’d killed him, when he dared come here. But we were always wrong about him. Ha.’
Vorx is not entirely sure he is being addressed. The primarch was always prone to audible introspection, and the centuries cloistered here have only made him more solipsistic.
‘I’d resigned myself to what I’d become,’ Mortarion says. ‘I kept half an eye here, half there, but mostly on the abyss. And that was the choice I’d made, to exchange the Petty Game for the Great Game and leave the old worlds and the old wars to mortal hands.’ His eyes briefly focus, and he appears to see Vorx for the first time. ‘But the galaxy has cracked. I do not know if the Despoiler intended that.’
Vorx tries to make sense of this, and fails. ‘Apologies, my lord. I do not understand.’
Mortarion looks confused for a moment, then recovers. ‘Ah, yes. For you, it has not happened yet.’ He leans forward in the throne, and the slight movement causes lines of dust to fall from the roof. ‘The Despoiler is ready to move. You will hear the call soon. There will be those in your service who already cleave to it and are waiting to throw in their banners with his.’
‘Not on my watch.’
‘No, very good. But it’s coming, all the same.’ Mortarion wheezes, and draws in long breaths from the rebreather’s filter. ‘Everything has been working towards this moment, for him. I have to admit my admiration – he cannot let the past go. He worries at it like a wolf with a hunk of meat, wearing it down to the marrow. He will break the Eye and loose his Angels on my father’s castle. And he will succeed, and that will shake the order of things, but it will not come without a price.’
Vorx listens. Some of this has been hinted at by others, but he knows Mortarion sees things no others can.
‘I contemplated this and reflected on the count of years, and what was done and what was not done,’ Mortarion says. ‘And I surprised myself. I found the old itch coming back. I understood what would happen once the Eye bleeds out into reality, and glimpsed the chance to conclude affairs started a long time ago.’
Vorx still struggles to understand. ‘You will take ship again, lord?’ he asks.
‘When the Rift is complete, yes,’ Mortarion says. ‘There are things I have seen, snatches of dreams that I never thought would be waked from. My brothers are stirring. You hear this? My brothers. Magnus revives his tedious old blood feud, but it will not end there. The few surviving loyal sons will be found again.’ Mortarion chuckles. ‘Abaddon can do what he wishes. I no longer care for Terra – I was there, and damaged it so deeply it will never recover. My business now is, you might say, within the family.’
Vorx hears the words no longer care for Terra, but does not take them in. That must have been some mistake, some lack of understanding on his part, but it is rare for Mortarion to speak loosely, despite all the vagaries and part-prophecy that always litter his utterances.
‘I have seen this,’ Mortarion says, cracking a half-smile that makes the puckered skin above his rebreather flex awkwardly. ‘I believe I am the first to do so. Guilliman will revive. The numbers tell me this, and I have travelled far within the Garden to confirm it. There are groves that hiss his name in the wind. I look into pools and see his face staring at me. Guilliman! Stiff, dreary Guilliman. I’d have preferred another one. The Lion, perhaps, whom I always quite admired. But one will do, even the dull one.’
Vorx tries to decide how much of this is real and how much is hallucination. The Age of the Primarchs is over. All know that. They are either dead or spirited into demigods whose interests bend away from the physical and into the metaphysical. It was a failed experiment, and one whose effects have been slowly dying for ten millennia. The Age of the Psyker is on the cusp of realisation, the one that will bring the next great test for the species. That is what has been believed here for a long time.
But he says nothing. There is a keen light in Mortarion’s eyes now, where for many centuries there has only been emptiness, and it would be dangerous t
o query that.
‘He… lives?’ Vorx asks uncertainly.
‘He never died. His soul was bound to his body – you could see its echo in the warp, if you knew where to look. But the day is coming, and here’s the irony – the Gate will break, and that shall release him.’ Mortarion is drooling a little now. A speck of saliva hangs on the end of the rebreather, teetering at the point of falling. ‘I’ll be there to meet him, siegemaster. I wish to have you by my side.’
Vorx is still working hard to make sense of it all, but the last statement is what he has been wishing to hear for millennia. ‘The Legion entire, lord?’
‘The Legion entire, siegemaster,’ Mortarion says. ‘I’m calling them back, cohort by cohort. We’re still a force, for all the erosions. We’ll answer the Despoiler’s call, and do so united. We’ll help him break the Gate, and, once out, as the galaxy burns with warpfire and the stars go dark, we’ll cleave our own path – not to the Throneworld, but to my brother’s little kingdom.’
Before he knows what he is doing, Vorx finds himself kneeling. ‘I did not dare to hope,’ he says. He sees then, in that moment, just how truly powerful his primarch has become. He had not realised how empty the campaigns have been without the Deathlord at their head. Despite all the decay, the infighting, all the many changes, Vorx is still a Space Marine, and somewhere within his addled innards he still possesses the gene-seed that binds him tight to his master’s will.
Mortarion rises from the throne, an arthritic movement that sends dead skin cells shedding like grave-spoil. He reaches out, extending a long, bulky arm, and lifts his warrior to his feet. The gesture is surprisingly deft, almost gentle.
‘By my side,’ Mortarion says. ‘As we were before.’ He is still smiling. ‘Prepare your ship, get your fighters ready for the muster. If you have any unfinished business with them, any flotsam to eject, do so now.’
‘How soon?’ Vorx asks.
‘I don’t know.’ Mortarion’s wings extend as his body unfurls, and a carrion stench wafts out from under the gauzy shadow. ‘But make no mistake – all will change, for us, for them, for everyone. We will be out. We will have freedom the likes of which the galaxy has not seen since He walked among us. How to use it? Now, then – that is the test.’
III: Dark Imperium
Chapter Six
Administrator-General Io Battacharya runs down the corridor. Her heart is thudding. She feels stress hormones coursing through her system, just as they have been for the last few weeks. She has not slept for a long time, not properly. When she has a rare pause in rushing around, she holds her hand to her face and sees it shaking.
She reaches the slide doors and punches the code. Inside is the sector coordination chamber. There are several hundred people there already, more than it was ever designed to accommodate. They are shouting, many look like they’re coming to blows, and there are shoving matches over tables.
She pushes through them, looking for Machard. Ducking past a furious-looking man with a torn jerkin, she spies him in earnest conversation with Windib. She makes her way towards them, swerving around more clusters of scared, angry people.
Machard sees her coming and gives her a weary smile. ‘You got back, Io,’ he says, coming to embrace her.
She nods, noticing his stale aroma as he puts his big arms around her. That’s not his fault – they’ve been stuck in these airless rooms for a long time. Windib nods at her curtly. She is not the hugging kind.
Machard gives her a concerned look. ‘Find anything out?’
Battacharya shakes her head. ‘All nodes down. Just like ours are.’ She can’t stop her voice shaking a little. It’s mostly from exhaustion, but they might mistake it for fear.
‘That can’t be right,’ says Windib. ‘It can’t be.’
Leonore Windib does not take easily to system failure. She is a creature of the system, her life devoted to ensuring Najan’s products are grown, tested, harvested and transported with maximum efficiency. She has power of life and death over the production cadres, something she has exercised more than once, all in the service of system integrity. System integrity is life to her.
‘Take a flyer yourself, then,’ says Battacharya, too tired to stay polite. ‘Try to find a functional node.’
Machard calmly places his hand on Windib’s. ‘We can stop pretending now, I think.’
Olav Machard is a reassuringly calm presence. He’s a limited man, well suited to being magister technicae, happiest with the enginseers of the big grain-vacuums and hover-scythes out on the high Resource, but in these kinds of situations that’s actually welcome.
Battacharya tries to calm herself down. She moves closer to the other two, to keep her words from travelling too far. ‘So. This is the situation. Intra-system comms – down. Orbital grid – down. Astropaths – dead. Defence clusters – down, as far as I can see. There might be something working on the far side of the planet, but it would take hours to find out.’
Machard’s brow creases. ‘What could do this?’ he muses. He sees the issue as a technical one, and seems almost to take pleasure in its inscrutability. ‘Electromagnetic burst? Not likely. Not everything. So what about the astropaths?’
Battacharya remembers what it was like in the system-local Tower of Sight, that old steel pinnacle just south of the main defence station. She’d been warned not to go into the sanctum by the thralls, but had ignored them. Then she’d vomited. A lot. It turns out there are worse ways to die than being caught up in the blades of an auto-thresher.
‘There were dictated screeds on the auto-typers, just a few,’ she says. ‘Mostly standard dream traffic, but then it all started going wrong. I didn’t understand any of it. One of them had begun drawing. Things. It was all… horrible.’
Windib is getting impatient. ‘News is getting out. We have fifty thousand workers in this processor node alone, and once they start to panic–’
‘No one’s panicking,’ says Battacharya firmly. ‘Where’s Captain Dantine?’
‘He couldn’t raise a line to the garrison, so he took a crawler over,’ says Machard.
Battacharya has a terrible feeling about all of this. It’s more than physical – for months now, the nightmares have been terrible, and there’s this awful sensation in the pit of her stomach. It started with those first long-range distress calls from the near-void, all bleating something about the Astronomican going out, which was absurd, but the audex snippets just kept coming. And then the scheduled conveyers never turned up. That hadn’t happened on Najan for as long as the records had been kept – more than two thousand standard years. And then the lights had appeared in the night sky, first flickers that looked like shooting stars, then ripples of weird green and purple that made it impossible to sleep and somehow got through even blackout shutters. And then the astropaths had started dying, and then the ranged comms had crackled out, and it began to seem very much like the universe was folding up on itself around them.
‘Stay here,’ Battacharya says to Windib. ‘Get some more staff into the overlook units and calm everybody down. Get them going through the emergency protocols, one by one.’
‘It won’t do any goo–’
‘It’ll give them something to do.’ Battacharya turns to Machard. ‘You have a crawler docked?’
The magister technicae nods.
‘We’ll take it out. I want to talk to Dantine.’
The two of them start to march off, leaving Windib scuttling after them. ‘What’ll you get from him, administrator?’ she asks querulously. ‘He’s just a soldier.’
Battacharya swivels on her heel. ‘You think we won’t be fighting soon?’ she hisses. ‘You think this is something natural? You stupid woman.’
Then she is marching again. Machard stares at the stricken Windib for a moment, then hurries after her.
‘She could have you sanctioned,’ he says, sounding slig
htly awestruck.
‘Throne,’ she says, never looking back. ‘Scary prospect.’
Najan is an agri world. There are templates for such places, drawn up in the fathomless past and never altered by the Administratum. All agri worlds are of similar size, located in similar orbital zones within their void systems and subject to specific exposure to a prescribed spectrum of solar radiation. Their soils have to be within a tight compositional range, and they have to be close to major supply worlds.
The Imperium is not a gentle custodian of such places. After discovery of a candidate planet, the first fifty years are spent in terraforming according to well-worn Martian procedures. All pre-existing life is scrubbed from the rocks, either by the application of controlled virus-chewers or by timed flame-drops. The atmosphere is regulated, first through the actions of gigantic macro-processors and thereafter by a land-based network of control units, more commonly referred to as command nodes. Weather, as least as generally understood, disappears. Rainfall becomes a matter of controlled timing, governed by satellites in low orbit and kept in line by fleets of dirigibles. The empty landscape is divided up into colossal production zones, each patrolled by crawlers and pest-thopters. Millions of base-level servitors are imported, kept at the very lowest level of cognitive function but bulked up by a ruthless level of muscle-binders.
Soon after this process completes, every agri world looks exactly the same – a flat, wind-rummaged plain of high-yield crops swaying towards the empty horizon. A person could walk for days and never see a distinctive feature. Not that anyone sane would choose to walk in such places – the industrial fertiliser dumps are so powerful that they turn the air orange and make it impossible to breathe unfiltered. A single growing season exhausts the soil completely, requiring continual delivery of more sprays of nitrates and phosphates, all delivered from the grimy berths of hovering despatch flyers. The entire world is given over to a remorseless monoculture, with orthogonal drainage channels burning with chem-residue and topsoil continually degrading into flimsier and flimsier dust.
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