‘Hundreds of thousands.’
‘We should ask ourselves what the traitors need with all those people.’
‘What do you mean?’ Vasuk asked. ‘They’re always scooping up slaves. That’s nothing new.’
‘No, but everything they’ve done on this planet can’t just be about gathering a few slaves. Do you think Flebis was all about blowing a whistle? No. These are moves in a game where we haven’t been allowed to see the stakes.’
The Soulcage began to rise from the port. A cloud of flame lifted it from the ground and engulfed the crowd. The screams were different now.
‘Our battle,’ Volos said, pointing to the ship, ‘is wherever that abomination is heading.’
CHAPTER 20
METASTASIS
Toharan didn’t argue with Volos’s conclusions. Given the frost between them, Volos was almost surprised, but it was clear Toharan hated being outmanoeuvred as much as he did. The captain of the Black Dragons issued new orders: re-embarkation on the Immolation Maw and pursuit of the Swords of Epiphany. Maro reported the Revealed Truth and Foretold Pilgrimage transiting into the empyrean together. There were only a couple of obstacles in the way of the Dragons furious crusade: their ship was crippled, and they didn’t know where the Swords had gone.
On the ground, the battle for Aighe Mortis was all but won. Volos wasn’t sure if he would call the planet pacified. The movement that the Dragon Claws and Setheno had triggered was too big a storm, and as it swept the globe, what little structure the civilization of Aighe Mortis still had collapsed further. But loyalty to the God-Emperor at its most fanatical had replaced the older apathy. Heresy would find the ground infertile now. In the region of the Concordat, something approaching a functioning order returned, and it was possible to have needed materiel sent up to the Immolation Maw. The healing of the shattered engines began. Once they were functional, and the Geller field generators were deemed warp-worthy, the pursuit could begin. Other repairs would have to be undertaken during the journey.
That left the question of the destination.
‘The information will be on the Metastasis,’ Toharan told Lettinger. They were walking the corridors of the Immolation Maw, inspecting damage, tallying the losses. Seventeen brothers had been vented to the void when the hull plating over their decks had peeled away. Deeper into the ship, in areas that hadn’t been breached, the damage took the form of twisted, broken corridors, many of them blocked by wreckage. Toharan couldn’t feel the ship’s machine-spirit in the immediate, visceral way that Maro did, but he could still feel its pain and its hunger for retribution. ‘The captain had to know where he was going.’
‘Are you sending a boarding party?’ Lettinger asked.
Toharan nodded. ‘The enemy’s bridge is still intact.’
‘Who is going?’
They stopped at a dead end. The deck ahead of them had been ripped apart, and there was a gap now, a plunge of hundreds of metres through shattered stone and shredded metal, down to the depths of the hull. Toharan stared into the blackness, and felt an odd tug. ‘I’m going myself,’ he answered, a little absently.
‘No,’ Lettinger said.
‘No?’ Nothing but dark below, nothing but void. To fall into nothing, into the purity of non-being: there was an odd comfort to that idea. A seduction. A relief from the disappointments and betrayals. Perhaps even relief from all the movement in his brain.
‘Send Volos.’
Toharan blinked and tore his eyes away from the drop. What’s wrong with me? he wondered. ‘Why?’ he asked.
‘The Metastasis is utterly corrupt.’
‘And?’
‘And so is Volos.’
‘Yes, we both agree on that. I don’t see the connection.’
‘Old loyalties die hard,’ Lettinger explained. ‘We need all the evidence we can gather to convince your brothers of Volos’s taint. If all know that he has been in direct contact with Chaos, the arguments will be easier to make.’
Toharan nodded. ‘There’s always the chance,’ he said, ‘that Volos won’t come back.’
‘The ship is dead,’ Toharan had said. ‘It lies open to the void. The two of you should be more than enough to find what we need.’
The argument was a logical one. Volos could find no reason to challenge it. Not formally. And it was true that every hand was needed to prepare the Immolation Maw for its return to battle. It was also true that all Dragons were joined in blood, and that Volos should be able to serve by the side of any brother, any brother at all.
All these truths. But as he transited from the Battle Pyre to the hatch into the spire of the Metastasis’s command cathedral, he had the ashen taste of lies in his mouth.
‘Be on your guard, brother-sergeant,’ Danael said. ‘Let purity be our watchword as we travel this forsaken ship.’
‘As you say, brother-sergeant,’ Volos replied. He was reasonably certain he had kept the contempt from his tone. It was being assigned Danael as mission partner that, more than anything else, gave the whole exercise the stench of subterfuge. Why Danael? Never mind that it made little sense to pair off two squad sergeants for this task, and never mind that Danael should not have been made sergeant in the first place. Danael was a good fighter, but he was no leader. Worse, he was a malcontent and sycophant, a combination that made Volos’s skin crawl. He had always found it an effort to remain civil with the Neidris squad member, and could remember many times in the past when Toharan had bemoaned his fate in having Danael under his command.
Things were different now. Danael had received the advancement he had always claimed was his due, despite all evidence to the contrary. He had attached himself to Toharan like a leech, and the new Toharan welcomed the slavering loyalty. And then there was Danael’s incessant prating about purity. The concept was an important one to Volos, one that he had wrestled with in the complex catechisms of Chaplain Massorus. It was also one that he felt was being torn away from him by Setheno, or at the very least transformed into something he had yet to understand. Purity of action, of faith, of loyalty to the God-Emperor: therein, he hoped, lay truth and the counterbalance to the monstrosity of his physical being. It was not a monstrosity he rejected. It was one he embraced. He blessed the curse. But he knew, too, that a dark temptation could wait down that road. That was why Massorus’s lesson was so important: the curse must be the spur to purity. The correct path was becoming increasingly tangled and hard to discern, making the struggle to find it all the more vital.
Danael’s version of purity struck Volos as something shallow, a construction of words and gestures and nothing else. Danael had always seemed to resent his deformity. He hated his curse, and his embrace of purity seemed to begin and end with the physical concept embodied by Toharan. So his words rang false and weak in Volos’s ears, especially in this place, where all purity except of the vilest kind had been put to death centuries upon centuries ago.
They were on a deck one level below the bridge. The interior walls, ceiling and decking had some of the same sickly gold hue as the hull, but were darker, and were so covered in runes that they seemed to pulse and jump in the corner of the eye. Knowledge, power and madness had lost all distinction, and they shouted for Volos’s attention from every flat surface. The dim light came from the runes themselves. This was a place of illumination, freely offered, and hungry to devour. Footing was treacherous, not because the corridor was moving, but because it appeared to be. Then there were the whispers. Even though the ship was in its final agonies, the lesson that it embodied still ached to be taught, and a low, constant susurrus of half-voices enveloped Volos, murmuring litanies of paradox and change. Words clawed for purchase on his mind, looking for a way in. He pushed them away and moved forward.
He checked the glyphs on his retinal display. These decks still had a full atmosphere, though the power was off. ‘No other breaches,’ he voxed Danael. ‘Be ready. Some of the crew might still be alive.’
‘Not for long,’ Danael muttered
.
Bolters up, they moved silently through the pulsing, insinuating corridors, up stairs that were softer and more knowing than metal should be, and reached the door to the bridge. Volos gave it a tug. It was shut tight, either locked or frozen by the absence of power. Volos nodded to Danael, who backed halfway down the stairs. Volos mag-locked a small demolition charge to the door, set the timer to thirty seconds, and joined Danael.
The door blew open with crump and a shriek of murdered runes. The Black Dragons charged onto the bridge and stopped three paces in. Ahead and to their right, dozens of servitors sat before cogitators and ship controls, mindlessly repeating actions at stations that no longer responded. The once-human creatures all showed signs of surgical mutilation. Some had no legs but four hands; others had flesh replaced by tapestry. Each was different, but all had had their eyelids removed and their lips flayed to create faces that were expressions of perpetual tortured joy. The hololithic displays were dark. The only light, other than that of the runes, came from the reflected shine of Aighe Mortis visible beyond the main viewport. To the left was the upper level of the strategium. The command throne was empty. The bridge appeared to be abandoned.
‘Auspex?’ Volos asked.
‘Negative,’ Danael answered.
Volos moved in deeper. He took the steps to the strategium. On its table, he saw an array of maps and data-slates. He was reaching for the nearest when a blur of rancid gold shot out from behind the command throne and filled the air with bolter fire. Rounds glanced off Volos’s pauldron and he dropped flat. He rolled next to the strategium table. Using its bulk as cover, he rose to a crouch. There was a pause in the gun burst and he was about to fire when a frag grenade came bouncing onto the strategium floor from the direction of the stairs.
Volos vaulted back, over the strategium balcony. He was in mid-air when the grenade went off, the blast sending him spinning, shrapnel embedding itself deep into the ceramite of his armour. He crashed onto the bridge deck, crushing servitors and smashing cogitator stations. More bolter rounds sought him out, but these ones came from the same deck. Danael was yelling incoherently as he fired, and all Volos could make out were the shrieked words ‘tainted’ and ‘traitor’ spewing out of the other Dragon’s mouth like an idiot refrain.
Volos scrabbled backwards, desperate to get a wall at his back and not be pinned down in a crossfire. The Sword captain opened up again, and over the stuttering chug-chug-chug of the bolters, he could hear the traitor laughing.
It was almost funny. Volos conceded that much. The triangulations of who was a traitor to what at this moment were too complex and too ridiculous to sort out. Volos didn’t laugh. He reached the back wall and began to crawl along the periphery of the bridge, staying out of sight behind banks of consoles. Bits of glass and plastek and iron filled the air, and servitors exploded blood and bone, but the shots were generalised, sweeping the space with destruction rather than zeroing in on his location. Between Danael’s automatic fire and death raining down from the strategium, the bridge was a chaos of minor explosions and flying debris. Neither Danael nor the Sword was aiming at the other. The unspoken alliance had determined to kill Volos first. So be it. At this moment, neither knew where he was. He knew where they both were. He listened to the shots, identified the different guns, and placed the enemies at precise points on his internal compass.
He palmed a frag, pulled the pin, let the grenade cook, and then leaped out from his cover near the viewport. He took the impact of stray rounds, felt their punch and damage, but with momentum and rage, he completed his move. He felt the entire space of the bridge as an extension of his nervous system, knew precisely where each of his strikes would hit. He tossed the grenade at the strategium, twisted to his left and emptied the bolter clip at Danael. The grenade went off on the downward slope of its arc. Volos heard screams above him and to the side as he landed. The bolter fire stopped.
Volos ran in a crouch to the strategium balcony, jumped up and pulled himself over the railing. The Chaos Space Marine was prone, a massive hole in his breastplate revealing a suppurating mass beneath. Strange noises were coming from his helmet grille. They were buzzing, staccato groans, and Volos recognised them as the desperate, final gasps of ruined lungs. Volos fired twice into the wound, blasting the Sword’s hearts.
He made his way back down to the entrance to the bridge. Danael was slumped in the doorway, bleeding from a dozen wounds to the upper torso and throat. Volos had concentrated his fire so the first shells would punch through the armour, opening the way to flesh for the others. Danael’s right hand was twitching against the deck, fingers reaching for the fallen bolter just out of his reach. Volos stood over him, torn between pity, contempt and fury. He knew he would shortly feel something much worse, but there were a few seconds yet before that happened.
‘Why?’ Volos demanded.
Danael coughed. Volos reached down, released the locks and pulled Danael’s helmet off. The wounded Dragon spat dark blood. ‘Tainted,’ Danael wheezed. ‘Know what you did… Have to be stopped.’
Volos wondered if Danael really believed what he was saying. If a bandwagon jumper like he was could find a depth of belief, then Second Company was riven in a much worse way than Volos had suspected. And he didn’t think that Danael was simply spouting rhetoric in extremis. Volos took a breath and asked the question whose answer he didn’t want to hear. ‘Did Toharan order you to kill me?’
Danael grunted. ‘Going to finish me?’ Volos wasn’t sure if he’d heard the question. ‘Going to slice me with your Chaos blades?’
Volos felt a chill in his soul. Danael had named the concern that Volos had been trying to avoid facing. His arm-blades had changed, and their transformation had been caused by a Chaos spell. But he was no different. His essence had not changed. He had to believe this, and he had watched and prayed and guarded against any deviation on his part from the Emperor’s light. There had been none. He was sure of it.
But the change…
He shook the thoughts away. ‘Did Toharan order you to kill me?’ he asked again.
Danael said nothing. He had stopped coughing and was very still. Volos knelt over him. He was dead.
Volos straightened, took a few steps back and grabbed at a console to steady himself. That other emotion, held at bay, now arrived, and it was worse than he had guessed it would be. He had killed a battle-brother. That he had acted in self-defence made no difference to the enormity of the act. He had tried to tell himself that the divisions that had begun spreading through the Black Dragons upon Toharan’s ascendancy were political ones, and though injurious to morale and to the company, they would pass with time and sufficient good will. He’d been a fool. Now he had slain another Dragon, and the worst of it was that he knew Danael would not be the last. He looked down at his wrists. He extruded the blades. The pain of their emergence was, in this moment, more than physical. He stared at them, at the ultimate expression of his imperfect, corrupted body.
‘I am not tainted,’ he whispered. ‘I am not tainted,’ he repeated, praying now. ‘The Emperor is my light, and my arm is eternally and solely at his service, until death releases me.’ For a flashing moment, he found himself wishing Setheno were here. But her words came to him: You are the Emperor’s monsters. And you are necessary. They were a dark comfort.
He retracted the blades and returned to the strategium. He sorted through the wreckage left by the two grenades, and found a few intact data-slates. There was a star chart, too, and it surprised Volos not only because it was still in one piece, but because of its age. It was printed on vellum so old it was cracking. He folded it carefully and collected the data-slates. Then he turned his attention back to the corpses. He realised the lie he would have to tell. Without knowing if Toharan had ordered his assassination, and lacking any proof to back up the accusation, admitting to killing Danael would only exacerbate matters on the Immolation Maw, and if he found himself imprisoned, Toharan and Lettinger would have a free hand. Better
that the story be of Danael’s heroic death in combat with a traitor. Volos’s word would be doubted, but he would still have some latitude to act.
So he had to lie. And he had to cover his tracks. He grimaced. He wondered just how many black deeds the awful word necessary could swallow up. He hoped he would never know, because he feared the number might be infinite.
He hauled Danael’s body onto the strategium. He gathered all the grenades both the Dragon and the Sword carried. The sacrilege he was about to commit made him pause. He was going to obliterate Danael’s body and deprive his Chapter of the precious progenoid glands. An entire genetic legacy of Black Dragons would be no more. Necessary, Volos thought, accepting the guilt and self-loathing, and vowing he would make a greater good come of this, even if his own life were forfeit. Then he pulled the pins on the grenades. He strode away from the bridge as it erupted in flame.
CHAPTER 21
ACTS OF FAITH
The data-slates went to Ydraig. The Techmarine wrinkled his nose at the tainted devices, but he pried some useful information out of them before he purged them in fire. The star chart became the study of Nithigg and Tennesyn. The ancient warrior and the scholar of the distant past found in the chart an object worthy of their shared obsessions. It was difficult to decipher not just because of its age, but because it was not, they soon realised, drawn by human hand. Between Ydraig’s efforts and their own, a destination was identified. The Swords of Epiphany were on their way to the Abolessus system.
Three days later, limping but hungry for blood, the Immolation Maw plunged into the empyrean in pursuit.
Volos sat in the apothecarion, murmuring to Massorus’s comatose figure. He had chosen here, rather than the chapel, to unburden his soul. Massorus could no more hear him than could the icon of the Emperor, but there was more privacy here, and there was an illusion of comfort in seeing the Chaplain. Volos could indulge, for a few moments, in the hope that Massorus might awaken in the middle of his confession and begin to untangle the theological knots for him. The Chaplain’s breaths were slow and widely spaced, prompted more by the machines connected to his body than by his lungs themselves.
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