Nithigg entered the chamber and sat down quietly opposite Volos. ‘Why did you want to meet here?’ he asked.
‘So we could talk.’ They were alone, and more visitors were unlikely. Volos told Nithigg what had happened on the Metastasis.
Nithigg drew a sharp intake of breath. ‘So we’ve reached that point.’ He sounded sad, but not surprised.
‘You were expecting this?’
‘At the back of my mind. I kept telling myself I was wrong.’
Volos sighed. ‘To tell you the truth, I think I was doing the same.’
‘Was Danael acting on Toharan’s orders?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But he might have been.’
‘Being assigned to work with him was odd.’
‘Then we have to assume the worst. The question is what we do now.’
‘I’m open to suggestions,’ Volos said, hoping Nithigg might have a plan, any plan that was different from the course of action that Volos saw looming ahead.
‘You have to take over command,’ Nithigg said. ‘Arrest Toharan and his followers.’
And there it was: the action Volos dreaded, and had avoiding articulating to himself. So much for alternatives, he thought. ‘On what evidence?’ he asked. ‘I have no concrete proof.’
‘It won’t matter.’ Nithigg spoke as if he were trying to convince himself more than Volos. ‘The loyalty of the company belongs to you.’
‘Still?’ Volos asked. ‘Before Aighe Mortis, perhaps that was true. But after what we did… You must have heard the talk.’
With visible reluctance, Nithigg nodded. The divisions were deep, and they were broad. Volos didn’t know any longer where the bulk of the Dragons stood.
‘And it’s still mutiny,’ Volos said. ‘Toharan is our duly anointed captain.’
‘Mutiny against a criminal is a duty, not a crime,’ Nithigg said. ‘Are you saying that you wouldn’t have mutinied against Horus?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I would have.’ But he conceded Nithigg’s point. The time to worry about the ethics of resisting Toharan had passed. ‘I would still need evidence,’ he said.
They were silent for a moment.
Nithigg asked, ‘Do you think he’ll try again?’
‘I’m not sure. It would be a bit more difficult to have me killed on the ship and not trigger open warfare. But he’ll try something. Maybe when he does, I can counter it, turn the move against him.’
‘And in the meantime?’
Volos hesitated for a moment. There was a line he was about to cross. Until now, he had advocated no action, and had been talking to no one other than Nithigg. When Melus and Setheno had raised the idea of moving against Toharan, he had shut them down. Now he was going to commit himself to the path of sedition. Toharan has left me no choice, he reminded himself. ‘We speak to our allies,’ he said. ‘We tell them what happened. We warn them to be on their guard.’
‘Do we know who our allies are?’
Volos thought he did. ‘Ormarr,’ he said. He trusted all the Dragon Claws with his life. ‘And anyone else whom Toharan believes to be my ally, because whatever such a warrior might actually think of me, his life is in danger.’
‘Agreed,’ Nithigg said. ‘So tell me, how does it feel to be engaged in conspiracy?’
Volos turned a regretful eye on the body of the Chaplain. ‘Awful.’
Toharan paced the length of the prison chapel. ‘Why do you make it so difficult?’ he shouted at the icon of the Emperor. ‘I am doing everything in my power to bring our Chapter into compliance with the Codex. I am trying to bring us closer to you. So why do you insist on thwarting my every effort?’ How difficult, he wanted to know, would it have been to let events take their natural course aboard the Metastasis? There were so many reasons why Volos should never have returned from that vessel, but there he was, and though there were many whispers about what the daemon-tainted must have done to Danael, there were, Toharan knew, plenty of murmurers who saw things differently. The company was coming apart under his leadership, not unifying and moving towards a greater purity.
Then there was the humiliation on Aighe Mortis. Toharan’s lip curled in disgust as he thought of the rebels. He had shown them mercy, and he had shown them an example. In return, they had proven themselves unworthy of either. They had betrayed him, and then become a mindless, howling mob in Volos’s hands. He advanced to the altar and stared at the icon. ‘Was there anything worth saving down there?’ The black marble figure said nothing, but Toharan knew the answer. No, there hadn’t been. The planet was unworthy of salvation. Exterminatus would have been too good for it.
The image hung in the air before him of the planet scoured of life, all that messy unpredictability and ingratitude and impurity wiped away. In the wake of the act, the purity of nothing at all. He thought again of that moment he had experienced looking down the gap in the ship’s decking, of feeling the seductive grace of absence. If there was nothing, then the squirming in his brain would stop, because all those things that tormented him and set his mind to writhing would be gone. Then, and only then, would true purity be achieved.
The more he gazed at the icon, the more he resented it. The figure was nonsense. What was the Emperor doing, shackled to that rotting body? That material excrescence wasn’t pure. It was just the opposite. If the Emperor were so perfect, why hadn’t He transcended the body? Why hadn’t He left it behind altogether to become pure and infinite will? Instead, His will was dependent on the survival of this hideous monstrosity, this shambles of deliquescent flesh and exposed bone, this helpless, perpetual reminder of death and weakness and the infuriating limits of the body. The Emperor’s body was corruption. How had Toharan never seen this before? If the summit of human perfection was now this incarnation of the disgusting and rotten, then where was purity? What was there to strive for?
Toharan’s hands tensed and he felt the urge to tear his hair from his scalp, and his flesh from his face. His body was an unbearable contradiction. It was so pure that the Black Dragons used it to disguise their fundamental impurity. And yet its lack of impurity, its missing excess of bone, ensured that he would always be an impure Black Dragon. He could never be at one with the full identity of the Chapter.
Unless he changed that identity. Unless he remade the Chapter in his image, body and soul. Perhaps, if he eliminated any reminder of the limits of the body, he could rest. If his body became the eternal and infinite model, perhaps he could find peace. But what an undertaking that would be, and in the name of purity, there would be so much, in the Chapter and beyond it, that would have to be destroyed. Well, what of it? That which was impure was already a form of destruction. He would simply complete the process.
He lifted his bolter and emptied its clip into the icon. He blasted it to stone fragments, and the fragments to dust. When he was done, there was a crater in the frieze above the altar. He was staring at an absence. In the moment of calm that descended, his task appeared before him in its full clarity. The first step would be one last attempt to convert Second Company. He would give his brothers a final chance at redemption, a chance that only existed because he did.
Volos was beyond redemption. That was clear. He was moving as rapidly toward total impurity as Toharan was racing to the opposite pole. He had to be destroyed before his contagion proved irreversible. But the problem was the same as it had been before the Metastasis: Volos had to be neutralised in such a way as to leave no doubt as to his corruption. He must not become a martyr. What he represented had to die with him. Maybe then there would be the possibility of salvation for the rest of the company.
It would be a welcome redemption if it came to pass. Toharan wanted unity for the confrontation with the Swords of Epiphany. He still had no idea what game they were playing, but he really did not care. However much he hated the morass into which the Black Dragons were sinking, he still felt the collective humiliations as acutely as ever. He would track the Swords down, and he w
ould annihilate them. The mission was that simple, and that pure.
And yet… There was something about that scrabbling and scratching at his cortex. Amidst the throb in his head that sometimes pulsed in the corners of his vision, there was something like a black pearl of promise. The hook to follow the Swords was more than retribution. There was something they wanted, and they were going to enormous lengths to acquire it. Perhaps, the lure in his buzzing thoughts suggested, it should be his.
When he pushed this thought to the surface, acknowledged it and embraced his desire, then the scrabbling eased again, just a bit, and just for a short time. As it ebbed, it left excitement. To grasp this pearl, he felt, would be to clear the path to his goal. Every obstacle to his divine purity would be obliterated with a wave of his hand.
This would be so. Because he willed it.
Volos, then. Destroy Volos before they reached Abolessus.
He strode out of the chapel to find Lettinger. Behind him, the void over the altar gaped.
The warp was the raw stuff of thoughts and emotions. Every conscious and unconscious twitch of every sentient being formed its matter and shaped and fed its denizens. It was everything that Werner Lettinger held in abhorrence. It was what he had been created, through his nature and his training, to combat. In the makeshift meditation chamber he had established in his quarters on the Immolation Maw, he strengthened his will and his faith against the leeching temptations of the warp. It was especially important that he do so while the ship was travelling the sea of the immaterium. That was what he was doing now.
At least, that was what he told himself each time that he began the game.
As he meditated, he found himself travelling over the vectors and angles of his thoughts, tracing their intersections and leaps, following their twists to see where they might lead. What had begun as mere thought exercises – asking himself ‘what if’ and exploring the consequences to their logical conclusions – had become something deeper. He wasn’t sure when the shift had happened. He thought it might have been during his period at Lexica Keep. But its origin didn’t matter to him. What was important was the exploration he undertook, and how it made him feel. The game would begin as it always had, as a simple litany of questions and hypotheticals. But as he descended along the strings of logic, those strings gradually took on a pseudo-existence of their own. He could caress the lines of his own mind, and swim in its currents. It was intoxicating. It was empowering.
It was wrong. Part of him knew this, the part that still held to the credo of Monodominance, and it clamped down on him with iron ferocity, filling him with the most profound guilt. But the guilt was its own narcotic, leaving him tingling with the visceral reminder of his own fundamental morality. In forbidding his mental exploration, the guilt made the transgression even more enticing, and each time he crossed the line, the intensity of the cycle ramped up.
He was becoming stronger for the experience. He knew that he had reached a new level of understanding about his psyche when he had spoken with Toharan about destiny. That both of them felt the same premonition of greatness was, he felt sure, a confirmation of its truth. This certainty was his counter to the guilt, his invitation to plunge into the game again and again, and go deeper each time. Lately, the descent into the twisting depths of thought wasn’t limited to his meditation sessions. His dreams carried the same charge. More than that, his dreams were inspiration. New possibilities suggested themselves each time he slept, and he woke with a nagging tug towards new realms. There was a consistency to the direction now, too. He was on the verge of something momentous. He could sense it just over the next mental horizon, and it came closer the more firmly he held the threads of the Black Dragons future in his fist.
Since the Immolation Maw had entered the warp, he had been twisting on the edge of gigantic revelation. The Abolessus system held the key. He was as convinced of this as anything in his life, and the fact that he had no concrete evidence on which to base this belief was itself confirmation that the knowledge came from somewhere other than the sad normalcy of the physical world.
It wasn’t just destiny that waited around the corner. It was the supreme flowering of his potential.
That thought, the promise of his transcendence, was the one whose contours he was exploring when Toharan entered his quarters. The presence of another jerked Lettinger back to the here and now. It took him a moment to get his bearings. As he gathered himself, the guilt arrived, and he caught himself glancing furtively around the chamber for signs of his trespass. There was nothing unusual about the furnishings. Lettinger hadn’t altered the layout of the quarters. There was a small bedchamber, barely larger than a closet, and a study, which was where he sat. This space held a chair and an iron desk. Lettinger had pulled the chair out to the middle of the room, and he had been sitting facing the door, his back to the small viewport. He had drawn no circles of protection on the floor, had set up no wards. Why would he? He was just sitting here thinking, after all. But as he blinked his way back to full consciousness, he saw the flicker of an oily darkness withdrawing to the corners of the room.
If Toharan noticed, he didn’t appear to care. ‘Volos has to die now,’ he said. ‘And his corruption must be obvious even to the most blind.’
Lettinger couldn’t argue the point. He agreed completely. What wasn’t clear was how this necessity was going to come about. He opened his mouth to say so. The words caught themselves. He started, hit by inspiration so powerful it was a physical blow. ‘Oh,’ Lettinger gasped in wonder and shock. The idea was so perfect, such a round, hard, flawless jewel, and so foreign to him, that it could only have a divine origin. His smile, he knew, was beatific. It couldn’t be otherwise, when destiny was so gloriously affirmed.
Toharan frowned at him. ‘What is it?’
‘We’ll need a volunteer,’ Lettinger said.
CHAPTER 22
THE DUELLISTS
Space tore open, the edges of the wound bleeding nightmares. Through this gap, the Revealed Truth and the Foretold Pilgrimage re-entered the materium. When Nessun saw the wonders of the Abolessus system, he could almost believe that he was still in the warp. The confusion delighted him. It was the first of many gifts Abolessus would give him. The multiplicity of his being exulted in the promise of what lay ahead.
There is no corner of the Imperium that can truly said to be forgotten. Somewhere, in some archive, no matter how remote from the pressing concerns of Terra, records exist of every system and every planet to fall under the Emperor’s protection. But for some regions, the line between ‘forgotten’ and ‘ignored’ is a thin one. These are worlds whose value to the Imperium is minimal, and is outweighed by inconvenience of location, strategic worthlessness, doubtful character, or even embarrassing history. Abolessus had the unfortunate privilege of combining all these qualities.
It was located far beyond even the Flebis system, at the extreme southern edge of the Maeror subsector, itself a backwater of the Segmentum Tempestus bordering the Veiled Region. Like Camargus, Abolessus had only one colony, strictly speaking. But Abolessus Gemini was no Aighe Mortis, and the rest of the system had no equivalent anywhere in the Imperium.
There were wonders here. Orbiting the swollen, dull red massiveness of Abolessus were monuments. They were planet-sized monoliths of a geometry that was simple seen from a distance, as if they were not much more than impossibly massive oblongs, cubes and triangles fastened together in shapes of mourning. Closer up, they revealed ridges and lines as large as any mountain chain, and as intricate as any geologic formation, but carved with a regularity and precision no natural formation had ever possessed. They were runes in a language that had been forgotten before life on Terra had sparked in the primeval seas. They were unreadable, but they spoke.
Nessun did not hear what they had to say. His only interest in the monuments was the power that their existence implied. Growing in the viewport, in the orbit nearest the red sun, was the key to that power. If Nessun’s eyes still h
ad functioning tear ducts, he thought he might have wept in ecstasy as Abolessus Gemini presented itself to him.
The twin, perfectly spherical, 5,000-kilometre wide planetoids had been colonized for one reason alone. A system with such a massive xenos-taint would normally have been quarantined. But the Gemini bodies were composed of pure adamantium. Mining concerns had rushed to exploit this unheard-of bounty, ignoring the prefects in the Adeptus Administratum who feared what such a massive influx of the metal might do to the economies of the entire segmentum. In the end, the prefects needn’t have worried. The adamantium was impossible to mine. The planetoids were fully finished, the metal forged to a density beyond human comprehension. They were indestructible.
By the time the last, most stubborn corporations had given up the cause, permanent colonies had been established, and an odd consolation prize had been won. Each of the Twins was striated with a dense network of mountain chains as uniform and straight as latitude lines given concrete being. The mountains were narrow and razor-peaked, and travel between the constricted valleys was possible only by air. But those valleys were covered by topsoil whose richness and fecundity was the envy of Ultramar’s most luxuriant garden worlds. The colonists came as miners, and stayed to become farmers.
The departure of the corporations and the remoteness of the system meant that, within a few generations, trade with the rest of the Imperium ground to a halt. The citizens of the Abolessus Twins barely noticed. Their worlds were self-sufficient. After a few centuries, they ignored the Imperium as much as it ignored them. And yes, there were records of the system, and what it contained, so it could not be said, to the distress of an Administratum bureaucrat, that Abolessus had been forgotten. But those records had not been looked at for over four thousand years.
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