Perhaps it is the eyes that do it. Looking into those deep lenses, swimming with what looks like some kind of marsh gas, drains his resolve. Or perhaps it is the crushing stink, his physical weakness, the knowledge that everyone who had served with him on that world is now dead.
‘I served in the Astra Militarum for fifteen years.’
‘Fifteen years.’ The creature – Vorx – shifts so that he is standing a little further off. His movements are almost awkward, as if the bones within that colossal hulk have been warped or rearranged. Things gurgle as he shuffles, or they drip, or they weep lines of glistening liquid. ‘That is a long time to stay alive in service. You must have been a good soldier, Captain Dantine.’
‘Not really.’
‘What brought you to Najan?’
He does not wish to answer this. The creature senses it and – surprisingly – lets it drop.
‘No matter. Every man must have his secrets.’ Vorx reaches up to brush a strand of something viscous from his gorget. ‘I have more important questions. The world you guarded was not unimportant. It should have been better protected. There should have been ships on response patrol. There should have been distress signals sent. Why was this not done?’
Dantine doesn’t know. Battacharya hadn’t known. He shrugs and shakes his head.
‘We have analysed your records,’ Vorx says patiently. ‘There should have been Naval support, and regiments of your Astra Militarum on standby. And, at the very last resort, you are under the protection of a Chapter of Space Marines, are you not?’
There seems little point in denying that. Dantine finds he wants to talk, and that disgusts him. He had hoped to be so much stronger.
‘The White Consuls,’ he says.
‘The White Consuls.’ Vorx nods appreciatively. ‘A venerable name. Why are they not here?’
Dantine shakes his head again, miserably. ‘Nothing works,’ he mutters. ‘The beacon’s down. The astropaths are dead. The sky’s… bleeding.’
Why did he use that word? That’s not like him. He’s a soldier, not a poet.
Vorx nods, taking it all in. ‘So you are all blind now, just as the other one said. How interesting.’
Dantine scowls. ‘There’ll be a response. From someone. You’ll be sent back to…’ He has no idea where these horrors have come from.
‘To the Eye of Terror, Captain Dantine,’ Vorx says. ‘You know that name, I assume. It has been our home for a long time, and not by choice.’ He comes closer again, and the aroma of festering meat is hard to cope with. ‘It was a prison, rooted into the fabric of reality. Breaking it open, it appears, has also broken everything else. Perhaps that was anticipated by those who did it. Perhaps not.’ He sniffs. ‘I find myself disappointed. We are cast adrift, and all has already been lain waste. I have my followers to think of. They are made for a life of conquest. If I cannot give it to them, they will find someone else who can.’
Dantine cannot look away, even though he wants to. He feels sick again, as if his body has been scraped empty. He does not know what to say. He does not even know what to think.
‘I am a great horror to you,’ Vorx says.
That is certainly true.
‘A long time ago,’ Vorx says, ‘I was a horror to myself. The universe is full of horror. You can resist it, and drive yourself into madness. Or you can accept it, and then begin to understand it. I would recommend the latter course, though I accept you must feel quite differently. For now.’
The conversational tone is absurd. Dantine has seen what these… things do.
‘Why did you come here?’ he asks weakly, wishing he could think of something better to say, something more accusatory.
‘We did not come here by choice. The warp’s winds blew us here. Before reaching your world we had no fixed point to guide us. Now we know where we are, to a degree, and can plan where to go next. It is the beginning of something unexpected.’
Dantine tries to make himself angry. He tries to remember all those he saw being killed. ‘Why?’ he asks feebly.
‘Not for the reason you think.’ Vorx lumbers off again. He seems to feel the need to keep moving, albeit in his stilted, stumbling manner. ‘There is a nobler way of living. We show this to the galaxy. We demonstrate it in our bodies, and we protect them from those who would harm it. We are the bringers of the god’s blessing.’
Dantine stares at the monster. For a moment, he is entirely lost for words. ‘You… killed them all.’
‘I did not kill you.’
‘Why?’
‘I do not know. Ha. Do you believe that?’ The monster muses. ‘I am a believer in fate. I recognise a conjunction when I see one. For what it is worth, that has kept me alive for longer than most, and I do not intend to turn an opportunity aside.’
‘Why do you do it?’ Dantine can feel himself losing control. He could become angry, if he were not so worn out and nauseous. ‘You were a man once, were you not? You were a human?’
‘I still am, of a kind.’ Vorx is not looking at him. ‘We are all on a spectrum, captain. You are at one end, I am at the other. We are still the same species.’
‘You are mad.’
Vorx chuckles again. ‘I have lost count of how many times that insult has been aimed at me. By your kind, by my kind.’ He is still pacing, as if counting out steps. There are things, sluggish things, that seem to be living in his armour. ‘The accusation is only meaningful if you can give me some suitable account of sanity. I saw the way you lived on that world. I have seen the way Imperial citizens live on a hundred worlds. If you truly believe that this is a sane galaxy, and that we are the aberrations, then I pity you. But then, you have not seen all the alternatives yet. When you do, your mind may change.’
Dantine tries to clench his fist. As the monster speaks, he attempts to gather the strength to lunge at him again. When he cannot do so, he slumps against the bench, defeated. ‘I wish to hurt you,’ he says mournfully.
Vorx stops pacing. ‘Of course you do. I do not blame you for that, but I cannot allow it. See, we have arts for this.’ He reaches down to one of the many pouches at his belt. He rummages for a moment and then draws out a thick bag, stained black from the liquids within. He moves closer to Dantine, opens the bag and brings something out.
For a moment, Dantine does not know what it is. Then he thinks it is meat – raw meat – offered as sustenance. Then he sees that it is a heart, blotchy with blood, and that it is still beating. The grisly spectacle makes him recoil, until a greater horror dawns on him. His hands fly up to his chest, under the ripped jerkin of his uniform, and he feels the ridge of scar tissue there.
Vorx puts the heart back in the bag and ties it to his belt again. ‘Your first lesson,’ he says. ‘How are such things possible? They are not, in the only world you have ever known. But there is a greater one in which all things are made possible.’
Dantine is hyperventilating. He cannot bear to touch the wound at his chest anymore – it makes him feel dizzy.
‘How… did…’ he starts.
‘Hush,’ says Vorx, holding a stumpy, calloused finger to his vox-grille as he moves back to the door. ‘Enough for one day. You will need to rest if you are to be of service.’
‘How am I alive?’
Vorx looks at him. ‘Are you sure that you are, captain?’
He opens the door and steps across the threshold.
‘You are insane!’ screeches Dantine, crawling after him.
Then the door clangs close, and ripples travel across the watery filth on the floor.
Dantine is trembling. He draws in huge breaths, unable to understand how he is still able to do so.
It is a nightmare. I will wake from it soon.
He tries to sing the words of the hymn, the one they recited on the barricade, to give him strength.
But he cannot reme
mber the words. He looks around, at the walls and the ceiling, at the rot and the slurry. He smells the decay, the dankness, and sees how complete his prison is.
By the time he is screaming, the cell door is securely locked. Dantine’s despair adds to the cacophony of voices already raised, just one more addition to Solace’s varied choir.
It goes on for a long time, until unconsciousness takes him again and the cell finally slinks back into its watery, torpid well of silence.
IV: Eye’s Edge
Chapter Nine
There have been musters before, countless times, though it is hard to remember one of such dark magnificence. Some of the ships here gathered likewise at Beta Garmon, a god’s lifetime ago. Some were constructed barely a century earlier, and their keels are still slick and free of the worst deep-stained void patina.
The numbers are mind-bending. Ships have come out from every cranny and vault of Eyespace, dragging themselves from daemon-haunted void docks and up from the lightless gaols of asteroid-delved fortresses. There are sleek corvettes of the Emperor’s Children, shunned by all but their own kind, burnished in gold and chalcedony, and reeking of sadism. They go as proudly as they have ever done, though the old claim to primacy has been long lost amid their unique indulgences.
Then come the renegade warbands, the motley barques looted from Imperial stations, each one bearing a different sigil in blood-red or ink-black. More have been spawned over the last millennium than ever before, and even the archivists of the Eye’s sorcery-infested scriptoriums have long ago given up trying to catalogue them. They are hunted creatures, those renegades, always liable to be devoured by larger predators, and so they hang back within the less-crowded void volumes, their weapons kept hot and their engines fully primed.
More stately craft arrive as the weeks go by, surging up from the warp-broiled depths in ancient and storied warships. The Thousand Sons answer the call, bringing with them pyramid-crested battlecruisers that still retain a certain aesthetic restraint. They are graceful things, those vessels, clean as jewels, pushing softly on blue-white plasma burners. There was once a time when the commitment of Magnus’ sons might have been doubted, as well as their capability, but no longer. Prospero is not a word that haunts them any longer. Nor, for that matter, is Fenris.
The gracefulness ends with them. Next to arrive are the flotillas from Perturabo’s industrial soul-forges, each one as grey as his heart and thick with venting filth. His Dreadnoughts slide out of the warp, occluded in smog and wallowing heavily amid promethium discharges. Many of those craft are steeped in the daemonic, having been fused and augmented over painful centuries within hammering hell foundries. Their blunt prows, blackened with the scorchmarks of battle and never cleaned, jut aggressively in a pitiless display of military uniformity.
Then come the lesser Legions, in terms of numbers and coherence at least. The dusk-black kill-ships of the Night Lords, drenched in projected terror, skulking like thieves on the margins. The ophidian warcraft of the Alpha Legion, spreading out in variegated clusters, distrusted more than most even among themselves, victims of a reputation they spun a long time ago and can now never escape. The World Eaters, stragglers amid the coordination of the cohesive Legions, their destroyers bearing the wounds of continual conflict, spattered arterial red.
Fights break out, of course. Cruiser captains suddenly recognise the prow of a vessel they fought a decade before, or a navigation hail is misinterpreted as a challenge, or a daemon trapped within a battleship’s weapons grid bursts loose and sets itself to devouring. Flashes of cannon fire spot the entire muster-sphere, breaking out at random and then dying away again as feuds are settled or greater powers intervene. As the gathering grows, these breakouts become more severe and more frequent, as if they were beasts clustered at a drying waterhole. There are battles in those weeks that, in another time or place, would be worthy of record, but here, among this outsize mustering, are merely pinpricks against a greater ground of conformity.
This is the Despoiler’s gift to the Eye’s realm. There are feuds and there are hatreds, but there is no greater feud than the one he perpetuates, and no greater hatred. He has bound them, impossibly, into common cause. Not since Horus himself, the great flatterer, the great master of soldiers’ souls, has there been a figurehead so dominant and capable of command.
He is not even here yet. The Vengeful Spirit will come to this place last, as is befitting. When all others are gathered, that ancient Gloriana leviathan will make its entrance, forcing all to yield as it once did over the burning skies of Terra. Until that moment, the new arrivals keep coming. The Word Bearers, one of the three Legions who have retained their old disciplines, take up positions near the centre. Their battlefleets are marked with the bronze-hammered octed and bristle with the screams of the Neverborn. The greatest of those ships are floating cathedrals, stacked with impossibly lofty towers and parapets and bursting with the gifts of the warp. Sacrificial fires burn along their lengths in defiance of physics, and their ranks shimmer with shifting, flickering witchlight.
And then comes the greatest collection of all, the most varied and the most powerful by a distance – the hunt packs of the Black Legion, numerous beyond counting, drawn from every strain of Chaotic allegiance and every vessel marque imaginable. Here are corruption-steeped battlecruisers from the very dawn of the Imperial Age, ravaged by millennia of constant warfare, strutting proudly as pre-eminent slayers of the Corpse-spawn’s dreams. Here are new-founded designs, birthed from the shackled minds of savant shipwrights, freed from the strictures of standard templates and allowed free rein to create monstrosities of innovation. Here are gun-barques that strain with barely controlled energies. Here are personnel carriers with holds crammed full of Black Legionnaires. Here are transports that chain up Titans and Traitor Knights, gifted by forge worlds of the Dark Mechanicum and sent to war under the Black Legion’s ubiquitous standard.
Just as the Luna Wolves were in the Age of Wonder, this Legion is now the first among equals, its mongrel bloodline the healthiest and its clarity of loathing the purest. It has made no pacts, it has retained its soul, and now it swaggers through the Eye in an earned exhibition of dominance.
The Death Guard are the very last to arrive in numbers. Just as it was so long ago, they turn up to bolster an already galaxy-ending display of power. Their living ships burst from the warp’s grip like ejected spittle from a throat, straggling long lines of grimy matter, their grey-green marker lights filmy and weak. These are some of the very oldest ships in the muster, eroded by the decay that blights all things under Mortarion’s rule, but also engorged by it. The ships are paradoxes within a Legion of endless paradoxes – the strongest and sickest, the most archaic and yet the most constantly renewed, the most uniform in their allegiance and yet the most variable in their outward aspect.
They were the last to come under Abaddon’s banner. They were the proudest, the ones who for the longest time maintained their own plans and powers. To see them here is the most striking mark of the Despoiler’s grand vision, the final victory of his gathering-in of the strays.
The Death Guard do not mingle with those of other Legions and warbands. Their presence is not welcome on the grand bridges of the fleet, for even the denizens of the Eye find their bodily corruption hard to stomach. They are, as they have ever been, an army apart.
Dragan knows very little of this deep history. He does not appreciate study of the past, as Vorx does. His hinterland is sparse, a world of slaying motivated by current grudges and slights rather than the elaborate interlinked vendettas of history. He looks out of the viewports of his shuttle and sees Solace from the outside. It is black and brown, matted and congealed, a hunk of rotting vegetation hanging in the void. Its lights are dim, its mighty batteries almost obscured by blistered overhangs. It is hard to reconstruct what the ship must have been like at its birth. Dragan is no shipwright either, and so does not waste effort tryin
g to imagine.
Solace has been his home for almost fifty years, and yet it retains an alien quality. It may be that the ship’s semi-dormant consciousness is deliberately repelling him. Still, he cannot fault its power. The wearing ages have made its bones strong, made its creaking weapons banks devastating, kept its engines stoked and thunderous. Solace will never be a nimble ship. It will never match the raw firepower of a full-line battleship, nor will it deliver the massive armies to war that a conveyer could, but it is a tough old creature, like leather boiled away for an eternity.
He sits back in his seat. He should be on the ship now, preparing himself for the warp stage. Some of his brothers, Slert in particular, are fizzing with excitement at what is to come. Even Philemon, that rot-headed old corpse-counter, is palpably stirred. Vorx, presumably, thinks Dragan is somewhere in the old practice cages, or hunting bilge filth for food, or doing something else on board in secret. Solace is big enough that someone, even an Unbroken, need have no difficulty keeping to oneself.
He drums his armoured fingers on his armoured knee. He can see the shuttle’s pilot up ahead, her body lost in a lattice of looped nutrient tubes. Like most pilots in the service of the Lords of Silence, this one is biologically part of the shuttle, limbs and torso fused into a ganglion of wires and pins. Her eyes are hidden by tubes leading to the external sensors, her fingers lost amid the twist and quiver of signal relays. He can see pox on the skin of her exposed neck, and it is advanced. She might last a few more years before either insanity or bodily collapse ends her. Then she will decay into the matter of the shuttle itself, forming a fertilising layer for its next series of growths and a nutrient-rich base for when Kledo wires her successor into place. That is all part of the great arc of rebirth, the essence of the great creed, for those that care about such things.
He looks back out of the viewport. The vista in all directions is crammed with starships. Even Dragan’s wry soul is stirred a little by it. If you let your eyes lose focus for a moment, it seems as if the void has disappeared entirely, replaced by a plasma-like forest of over-mingled thruster glow.
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