The foremost of the group has a helm crowned with splayed vanes and a long, ragged cloak. His faceplate is burnished gold and fashioned in the style of a gaunt death’s head. He carries a crozius at his belt, a heavy item that pulls tight on its chains. Like all members of the old Legions, he is gigantic now, his already-outsize frame burgeoned and extended by the noxious stimulation of a life lived in hell. Every so often, a thin gauze of dark flame gusts and ghosts across the marked faces of his armour, as if he teeters on the knife-edge between the seen and the unseen.
‘Mor Jalchek,’ he says, in that same cruel voice. ‘Apostle of the Weeping Veil.’
Vorx bows. Set next to such tarnished finery, the siegemaster looks slumped and dirty. ‘Vorx,’ he says simply. ‘The Lords of Silence.’
‘We give ourselves these names,’ Mor Jalchek says.
‘Or they are given to us.’
‘What are you doing here?’
Vorx thinks on a response. Dragan knows that the siegemaster will be smiling wryly under that heavy helm-face, inasmuch as his lips still have independent function. He hates that. This is not a place for smiling. These are serious warriors, steeped in the blood of the Imperium, and they must be made respectful.
‘We do not ask for leave to travel the void,’ Vorx says in the end.
‘You were at Agripinaa,’ Mor Jalchek says.
‘As were you, I think. It seems the fates have driven us to the same place.’
‘We were driven here by no one. There is prey in the void now.’
‘Not very much of it,’ Vorx says. ‘The Angels of Death are all gone.’
‘Oh, no.’ Mor Jalchek’s lenses flicker briefly with a reddish, deep-set tinge. ‘You seem ignorant, cousin, so let me enlighten you. The fleets we fought over Cadia are not yet destroyed. They have been driven far from the Gate’s edge, but they fight still. Chapters are answering the call, racing to staunch the wound before it splits apart completely. But they are blind now. Their Throne-leash has been cut, and they stumble in the darkness. We pity them. We come to bring them to the light.’
Garstag, standing on the far side of Vorx, lets slip a guttural snort.
‘You find this amusing?’ Mor Jalchek asks calmly. The cruelty in his voice never wanes. ‘This is a moment of crisis. It will not come again. We reap now, here, so that we will not need to do so a second time.’
‘You are a speaker of the truth, Mor Jalchek,’ Vorx says. ‘I have met many of your kind, and they were all truthful. In that, we have some sympathy, if in little else.’ His fingers stray, briefly, to the many bags clustered at his belt. ‘We were lost, for a time. The warp’s winds were not kind. Now we travel in these strange places, and our trail takes us to the masters of the kingdom.’
Mor Jalchek nods. ‘What remains of them.’
‘You hunt them yourself?’
‘Our sacred task.’
Mor Jalchek gestures – a brief flick of a taloned finger – and one of the wall panels hisses open. The thick metal lifts, bifurcates, then slides apart on a squeal of runners. Steam spills over the threshold, and wisps of engine smoke perspire from runnels on the far side.
A void is revealed, lost in shadow and smog. Something is hanging in the murk, shivering a little. It is hard to make out what, exactly, for grave damage has been done to it by expert hands. There are tubes wrapping it now, all gurgling with fluids. There are hooks, and barbs, and serrated saws.
It glistens. It weeps.
Only one item is distinct, lodged amid the disturbing flotsam like a gem cast amid filth – the half-moon remnant of a pauldron. Vorx is a connoisseur of such things and recognises Mark VI Corvus plate, carefully tended, evidently old, now chipped and dented but with the insignia still visible amid the bloodstains – a royal blue eagle’s head on an ivory ground.
‘This one failed to see the light,’ Mor Jalchek says, with possibly genuine sadness.
‘Evidently.’
‘Even reduced, they do not talk easily. However many we take, we have still found it difficult to find the path.’
‘We could help you with that.’
Mor Jalchek turns to Vorx, interested for the first time. ‘How so?’
‘This path, out of them all, is clear to us. Come to Solace, and you will see it. We are both close now, though not so close that you would be bound to find it without assistance.’
Dragan almost interjects. This is not a transaction, he thinks. This is not a bargain. This is just giving away possessions.
‘Why?’ Mor Jalchek says.
‘Think of the numbers,’ says Vorx. ‘Think of what you attempt. These are not fragile troops. They man their own walls. They have nowhere else to go. Even with these two great ships of ours, it might be difficult. With one, either one, perhaps impossible.’
There is a principle here, one that goes back to the days of Horus. Imperial institutions are, admittedly, like cats in a sack, mauling one another over resources and prestige, though they will fight alongside one another well enough when the tactical necessity becomes apparent. For those on the other side of the Long War, however, things are less clear-cut. They have been known to claw at rivals even as the greater enemy looms up behind them. Hatreds vary in intensity, and those shared between rival gods can become incandescent. It was the greatest mark of the Despoiler’s power that he was able to bind them all together for so long, and he is a long way away now.
So they wait. They watch.
‘The world has been marked for conquest,’ says Mor Jalchek. ‘The pantheon demands it.’
‘Well, I am sure my own small part of the pantheon would agree,’ says Vorx. ‘I do not think we are at odds here.’
They wait again.
‘What is your greater purpose?’ asks Mor Jalchek.
‘The same as yours. To bring lost souls to the light.’
‘To your limited, decayed creed.’
‘Now, then. No need for insults.’
Mor Jalchek radiates an aura of extremity. His armour is a thing of excess. His ship is a cathedral to pain. For him, compromise is a sin, and alliance the first step to moral turpitude. Dragan watches to see which instinct will win out within him – the desire for his enemy’s destruction or the pride in solo accomplishment that surely drives him. Perhaps he has promised this world, Sabatine, to some power of the empyrean. Perhaps he will sacrifice its inhabitants to bring some greater force into the world of the senses. Vorx must know this. He must know what a dangerous game is being played.
‘I will consult,’ Mor Jalchek says at length. ‘I will contact you. In the meantime, stay on your ship.’
‘Where else would we go?’ says Vorx, sounding amused.
‘Nowhere. Not without speaking to me.’
The tone of presumption borders on the absurd. Garstag hisses, moving his weapon a finger’s width closer to deployment.
Vorx is unmoved, though. He chuckles – chuckles – a soft, gurgling sounds that resonates within the caverns of his armour. Somehow, that sound diffuses things. It makes it impossible to take all this pomposity seriously, and that, Dragan has to admit, has a certain tactical value.
‘Very well, Apostle of the Weeping Veil,’ Vorx says, amusement still dancing across his stolid words. ‘Think on it. Consult whatever augurs you employ. I trust you are wise enough to see what the gods have placed before us, and will know what to do with it.’
The tone is so affable. So emollient. It makes Dragan want to snarl, and he clamps the instinct down.
‘So we take our leave now,’ Vorx says, offering a stiff half-bow. ‘But I am sure, very sure, that we will speak again soon.’
‘They will betray us,’ says Dragan.
‘Yes,’ says Vorx.
‘They have been commanded to take the world,’ says Dragan. ‘They will not stop until it is theirs.’
‘
Yes.’
‘Then why are we doing this?’
Back in the shuttle’s crew bay, Vorx regards Dragan. Despite everything, he still likes the warrior. He remembers when he first saw him fight. He remembers the boundless energy, spun tight around limbs that seemed capable of pile-driving through rockcrete. He knows almost as much about Dragan’s early years in the Death Guard as Dragan does. He knows even more than Dragan of his past life as a servant of the Throne.
For a long time Vorx thought of him as something like a protégé. A potential successor to Garstag once the Kardainn-master’s time was ended. Maybe a trusted war counsellor. A part of him grieves that Dragan now wishes to kill him and assume command of the warband. Another part of him understands that this is just the way things are. The will of the god must be maintained and exalted in all things, and he would not dream of confronting the threat openly. There are ways that these things are done, methods of retaining the allegiance of the Unbroken, and those who flout the old laws soon die from them.
For all that, he must find a way of channelling Dragan’s ambition soon. He knows what the rest of his followers think. He knows that less than half now see him as their best hope for conquest. That situation cannot be allowed to continue.
‘Because you are right, Gallowsman,’ Vorx says. ‘Despite everything, a fortress-monastery might very well be beyond us. Even if fewer than a hundred White Consuls still man it, we might dash ourselves against its walls in slaughter. We might lose, they might burn Solace. That would strike at my soul. The Weeping Veil are strong, and so, together, I see a cleaner victory.’
‘They will cut us deep, when they can.’
‘Then we will have to be quicker.’ Vorx leans forward, feels his old organs slosh around within his ceramite hide. ‘You are the one who can do this. You retain what the rest of us are losing.’ He places his calloused hand on a calloused knee and feels the remnants of cartilage pop and slither. ‘We need to fight with our feet on the ground. We need a prize worthy of the god. It would be a waste to burn out our guns on these true believers.’
Dragan looks at him for a long time. His entire body, still lean, radiates distrust. That huge fist, blistered with sores and bearing talons the length of a man’s arm, twitches.
Garstag is pretending not to listen. The rest of the Kardainn affect the same disinterest. By ancient convention the honour guard have foresworn involvement in the warband’s power games, but that fools no one. Garstag no doubt has designs on the command throne himself, though he would be a weak candidate, and possibly even knows it.
‘You test me, siegemaster,’ Dragan says.
‘We are all tested,’ says Vorx. ‘That is the great lesson – it will never stop, whoever takes this world.’
‘But, sometimes, I do not think…’ He does not finish that statement, perhaps wisely.
‘Trust me,’ says Vorx. ‘Our paths are leading to the same summit – in time, you will see that.’
The shuttle shakes. Solace is above them now, a huge shadow cutting out the meagre light of lost stars. It will gobble them up soon, fold them within its great cavities.
Dragan looks away. His expression is the same as it always is – a snarl and a grimace of ceramite moulding, the vestiges of an Imperial terror template slowly morphing into something softer.
Vorx admires him. He admires his struggle to retain what he was, to take on the advantages of the Legion without accepting its temptations. It is a doomed struggle, and one day he will fail, but the attempt is valiant nonetheless.
‘It will be conquest,’ Dragan says at last, grudgingly.
‘What we were made for.’
‘I will summon Naum.’
‘If you can. Be wary, though – it has been a long time.’
Dragan looks at him. Vorx can sense his bafflement then, honestly held, unfeigned and unhidden.
‘What do you want, siegemaster?’ Dragan asks.
For a moment, the question floors him. He has not been asked it for a long time, but now he feels that it lurks everywhere, on everyone’s lips. The universe has long since been a place where wants are never indulged – it has been needs for millennia, the endless grind of survival, plunder, the harrying run from bolthole to bolthole.
But Dragan is right. There are choices now. A tyranny of them. They demand better answers, new answers, ones that may not issue from the mouths of primarchs.
‘I want the games to end,’ Vorx says, almost to himself. ‘I want the struggle to cease. I want the truth to be recognised.’
‘But the games have no end. All there is, is the game.’
That is the orthodoxy, spun out of a lifetime in the Eye’s endless churn. There will always be four gods, it is said, balanced against one another in perpetual contest, toying with the mortal plane and raging with the immortal. That is why Dragan envies the Despoiler’s hordes. He envies the Word Bearers and their undivided allegiance. He does not yet fully understand Vorx’s true belief, the reason why he has never taken an order from anyone but Mortarion.
There is a hierarchy, even across the great game. Desire, knowledge, rage – these are the lesser things, the subordinate things, the ones that came later. Before them all was despair, and succour, and the slow release into abandonment. This was what came first, the primordial slop from which all else arose, only then to float like phantasms over it. In the end, despair will prevail again. In the end, every world will be a Plague Planet, and the tide of decay will once more lap at the foundations of reality, drowning all else.
‘Do not believe everything you are told,’ Vorx says, watching as the viewports go black and Solace’s old smells permeate the shuttle interior again. ‘There are still possible victories. And if I read the entrails right, this is where they start.’
Chapter Twelve
For a while the two ships drift alongside one another in silence. It is an odd configuration – two giants of the deep, both armed to the gunwales, holding position with their cold thrusters yawning and empty. The Ayamandar runs with constant light, a strobe of reds and oranges along its spiked hull. Solace is quieter, dripping with darkness, its blurred outline a haze of vegetative greens and greys. All around them the void fizzes and blinks as if electrified, and strange shapes part-form in gasps of smoke, short-lived and misshapen.
Dantine sees none of this. He is more mobile than before, limping from chamber to chamber, driven now by a curiosity that outweighs his fear. He estimates that there are thousands of men and women like him on this ship – probably tens of thousands. Few of them ever speak to him. As far as he can tell, few of them ever speak to one another. They seem strangely content, stumbling across the decks, just as he does. Some have tasks, most do not appear to. This is a listless ship.
And yet it functions, somehow. On a Naval Grand Cruiser, this level of lassitude would have seen the captain executed and the ratings given heavy beatings. The commissariat would have come in, sweeping level by level, restoring fear and efficiency, getting the chains of command pulled taut again.
The people here are not afraid. Some are sick, very badly sick. Most are carrying obviously terminal diseases, and their bodies are falling apart, but they are not afraid. Dantine begins to realise it has been a very long time since he has been among people who do not possess fear. He resists the urge, the dangerous urge, to think of this as a good thing.
It is likely, he reflects as he wanders the decks, that this ship, this Solace, has a self-perpetuating community, much as a big Imperial starship does. There will be children born in the bilges, raised in the sticky darkness, learning a trade in the shadows. There will be strange hierarchies – the upper decks, unimaginably far off and prestigious; the gun gangs and ammunition-haulers, an aspiration; the shit-shovellers and slop-servers, the likeliest occupation for any who survive the knife fights of the under-deck. They brawl with one another, and jostle, and protect, rut, perhaps eve
n love. Then they die.
All is done in the stink, the dark, the heat. This is an alien world, as alien as Dantine has ever encountered. The filth is phenomenal, burned deep into every surface so that it feels less like an encrustation and more like the very matter of the world around them, and yet these souls persist here, against all odds, eking out short and strangely fecund lives before the phages bite, after which their superannuated bodily remains are scraped into boiling vats and served up to the next, unknowing generation.
He tried to speak to them, a while back. He thought it might help, if he exchanged a few words. Deep down, a part of him even thought that he might be able to find a few whose spirits had not been crushed, and he had visions of raising some kind of rebellion.
He spoke to a woman first, tugging at her insect-eaten cloak and making her stop and look at him in the dark.
‘What is your name?’ he asked.
Her face was drawn, a pull of skin across bone, her eyes bulging like those of a mantis. She seemed unable to focus on him, and a line of black drool ran from her cracked lips.
‘Forty-seven,’ she said.
‘That’s your name?’
‘Forty-eight.’
‘What?’
‘Forty-nine.’
He found out after that that a lot of them count. They mutter away in the deeps, scratching for food, or something cool to slap on their boils and sores, and they mumble numbers mindlessly, over and over again.
After that he found a man, perhaps his own age. He grabbed him by the shoulders, dragged him into the lee of a big engine bulkhead and forced him to talk properly. As he did so, hot sparks from the turning shafts spat and wriggled, cooling across the muddy deck.
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