Betrayer

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  SEVENTEEN

  Voices in the Night

  Russ’s Lesson

  Warp

  Lorgar was listening to worlds die. Above and around him, kept at bay by the warded glass dome, the warp thrashed and surged in a dance of colours that couldn’t exist. He saw things in the boiling tides, as everyone did, but the tormented faces and helpless hands were easy to ignore. All that mattered was the melody.

  The rest of the song continued in its arcane flow, coming closer and closer to the crescendo he required. Not long now. Soon, the tune would reach such aetheric artistry that he would be free to channel it for the material realm to hear. Each world enslaved to their suns had a part to play, which is why they had to die in perfect harmony with one another. All Lorgar lacked was a conduit to release the accrued power, and that would come in time.

  Serving as conductor for an astrological orchestra was more taxing than he’d dreamed, though his blunter, more militant brothers would struggle to grasp the finer points of his efforts. Exhaustion left him wondering, even if only briefly, whether absolute peace would create a stellar song as divinely inspired as absolute war. Fate had played its hand and Chaos was destined to swallow all creation whether or not Horus and Lorgar raged against the Imperial war machine, but if what if they’d stayed loyal to the Emperor? What then? Would the Great Crusade have shaped a serene funeral dirge, to play behind the veil as humanity died in a defenceless harrowing?

  Therein lay the fatal flaw. The Emperor’s way was compliance, not peace. The two were as repellent to one another as opposing lodestones. It didn’t matter what enlightenment the Imperium stamped out in its conquering crusade when obedience was all its lords desired. It didn’t matter what wars were fought from now into eternity. The Legiones Astartes would always march, for they were born to do so. There would always be war; even if the Great Crusade had been allowed to reach the galaxy’s every edge, there would never be peace. Discontent would seethe. Populations would rebel. Worlds would rise up. Human nature eventually sent men and women questing for the truth, and tyrants always fell to the truth.

  No peace. Only war.

  Lorgar felt his blood run cold. Only war. Those were words to echo into eternity.

  He didn’t trust the Ten Thousand Futures the way Erebus claimed to. Too many possibilities forked from every decision made by every living thing. What use was prophecy when all it offered was what might happen? Lorgar was not so devoid of imagination that he needed the warp’s twisting guesswork to show him that. Anyone with an iota of vision could imagine what might happen. Genius lay in engineering events according to one’s own goals, not in blindly heeding the laughter of mad gods.

  More than that, Lorgar sought to keep one thing in mind above all else. The gods were powerful, without doubt, but they were fickle beings. Each worked against its own kin more often than not, spilling conflicting prophecies into their prophets’ minds. Perhaps they weren’t even sentient in the way a mortal mind could encompass. They seemed as much the manifestations of primal emotion as they did individual essences.

  But no, there was a wide gulf between hearing them and heeding them. Gods lied, just like men. Gods deceived and clashed and sought to advance their own dominions over their rivals’. Lorgar trusted none of their prophecies.

  He’d even seen glimpses of potential futures where the Imperium came to worship the Emperor as a god. What would have to transpire in countless trillions of human hearts for that faith to ever take hold? The very faith Lorgar was chastised for spreading, the very beliefs he was punished for believing – how could mankind’s empire ever embrace their lord as a deity, after the XVII Legion had been humiliated for daring to claim such a truth?

  He shook his head at the thought and sighed softly.

  ‘Lord?’ one of the choir asked, interpreting the sigh as one of displeasure.

  Lorgar softened the interruption with a golden smile. ‘Forgive me a moment’s distraction,’ he said. ‘Please, continue.’

  The choir numbered fifty-one souls, and they all spoke over one another. Each of them wore the white robes of their calling, almost priestly in their sombre regalia. They stood in loose disorder, with no discipline to their formation beyond the accidental artistry that each of them faced Lorgar, sharing their words as if they truly spoke to him.

  Several mumbled. Others cried out. Most spoke in a placid monotone, bleaching their words of all emotion.

  ‘My legs,’ one of the choir said without any expression at all, standing perfectly straight. ‘Mikayas, help me, I can’t feel my legs.’

  ‘The Western Adelfia District is already lost,’ droned another, staring with eyes both wide and dead. ‘Aren’t you listening to me? The World Eaters took it an hour ago. I need more men, governor. I need more men.’

  A third swayed on her feet, her unremarkable face striped by an unattended nosebleed.

  ‘My son,’ she whispered. ‘My son is trapped under there. Don’t shoot. Please. Don’t sh–’

  Her sudden, abrupt silence made Lorgar wince.

  At the choir’s edges, several of his thrall-scribes noted every word, doubtless to be pored over later for any lost significance. They paced across the cathedral floor, weaving between the astropaths, careful not to brush against any of them.

  Angron entered the basilica, armoured in his usual stylised bronze and ceramite and with two oversized chainswords strapped to his back. He even wasted time with a greeting, raising his hand in the first time Lorgar could ever remember such a gesture from his broken brother. The Word Bearer tried not to let his amazement show at his brother’s new consideration.

  ‘Lotara says you stole her astropathic choir.’ Angron’s lipless smile was a ghastly thing indeed. ‘I see that she may have been correct.’

  ‘Stole is a strong word. “Appropriated” seems much less ignoble.’ Lorgar spared a glance for the skies above the cathedral, as the Lex ripped onwards towards Nuceria.

  ‘What do you need them for?’ Angron asked. His wounds from being buried alive had already faded to scrunched scar tissue pebbling his flesh, just another host of scarring to overlay the last.

  The Devourers lurked behind him, stomping into the cathedral without the primarch sparing them a glance. To be one of Angron’s bodyguards was no honour, despite how fiercely the World Eaters’ champions had fought for it in the first, optimistic years. Angron ignored them no matter where they went, never once fighting alongside them in battle. In their Terminator plate, they’d never managed to keep up with their liege lord, and they were as prone to losing control as any other World Eater, meaning any hope of them fighting as an organised pack was a forlorn one at best.

  Lorgar watched the Devourers – those warriors who’d spent a century learning to swallow their pride and pretend they weren’t ignored – speaking amongst themselves at the basilica’s entrance.

  ‘Hail,’ he greeted them. They seemed uneasy at being addressed, offering hesitant and wordless bows.

  Angron snorted at his brother acknowledging them. ‘Bodyguards,’ he said. ‘Even their name annoys me. “Devourers”, as if I’d named them myself – as if they were the Legion’s finest.’

  ‘Their intentions are pure,’ Lorgar pointed out. ‘They seek to honour you. It’s not their fault you leave them behind in every battle.’

  ‘They’re not even the Legion’s fiercest fighters, any more. That rogue Delvarus refuses to challenge for a place in their ranks. Khârn laughed when I asked him if he’d ever considered it. And do you know Bloodspitter?’

  ‘I know Bloodspitter,’ Lorgar replied. Everyone knew Bloodspitter.

  ‘He beat one of them in the pits, and carved his name into the poor bastard’s armour with a combat knife.’

  Lorgar forced a smile. ‘Yes. Delightful.’

  Angron’s face wrenched again, at the mercy of misfiring muscles. ‘What primarch ever needed guardin
g by lesser men?’

  ‘Ferrus,’ Lorgar said softly. ‘Vulkan.’

  Angron laughed, the sound rich and true, yet harsh as a bitter wind. ‘It’s good to hear you joke about those weaklings. I was getting bored of you mourning them.’

  It was no joke, but Lorgar had no desire to shatter his brother’s fragile good humour. ‘I only mourn the dead,’ Lorgar conceded. ‘I don’t mourn Vulkan.’

  ‘He’s as good as dead.’ The World Eater smiled again. ‘I’m sure he wishes he were. Now, what are you doing with Lotara’s choir?’

  ‘Listening to them sing of other worlds and other wars.’

  Angron stared, unimpressed. ‘Specifics,’ he said, ‘while I have the patience to hear such details.’

  ‘Just listen,’ Lorgar replied.

  Angron did as he was bid. After a minute or more had passed, he nodded once. ‘You’re listening to the Five Hundred Worlds burning.’

  ‘Something like that. These are the voices of the freshly dead, and those soon to join them. The mortis-moments of random souls, elsewhere in Ultramar, as our fleets ravage their worlds.’

  ‘Morbid, priest. Even for you.’

  ‘We’re inflicting this destruction on them. We mustn’t consider ourselves distant from it. It may not be our hands holding the bolters and blades, but we are still the architects of this annihilation. It’s our place to listen to it, to remember the martyred dead, and to meditate on all we’ve wrought.’

  ‘I wish you well with it,’ said Angron. ‘But why steal Lotara’s choir? What happened to yours?’

  ‘They died.’

  It was Angron’s turn to be surprised. ‘How did they die?’

  ‘Screaming.’ Lorgar showed no emotion at all. ‘What brings you here, brother?’

  ‘Curiosity. I’ve followed you so far. We’ve killed the worlds you wished to kill, and now you owe me an answer or two.’

  Lorgar laughed. ‘You’ve killed several worlds in the last year that I wished to sail right past. Do not pretend you’ve been an obedient war hound, brother. Armatura was the first engagement I actually wished you to prosecute for me.’

  The reply didn’t entirely banish Angron’s stable mood. ‘I have a question that you will answer, Lorgar.’ The World Eater finally turned to acknowledge his Terminator elite. ‘Be somewhere else,’ he told them.

  They saluted, and did exactly that. Several of the Vakrah Jal stood at the basilica’s immense doors, watching the Devourers thud past. They turned to Lorgar, awaiting his order before following their cousins of the XII Legion. The primarch nodded, granting them leave to go. He looked next to the astropathic choir, who were slowly coming to their senses.

  ‘You may return to the Conqueror when the ships next fall from the warp. Leave us, please.’

  They bowed and shuffled from the chamber in a slow, dazed procession.

  Once the two brothers were alone, Lorgar raised a hand as if to stall Angron’s words. Ephemeral light ghosted into the space between them, swirling into spheres, mirroring the universe’s formation so many millions of years ago. Suns coalesced first, then the planets that depended on them. All of it drifted in a slow, stellar dance: the gravitic ballet of creation. A hundred stars rotated in the air, each with worlds revolving around them.

  Angron bared his teeth at his brother’s shadowplay. ‘Ultramar?’

  ‘Ultramar,’ Lorgar confirmed. ‘A mere one-fifth of mighty Ultramar.’ He walked to one star, cradling it between his curled fingers. The sun paled to a murky grey, spreading white mist from its pulsing core. ‘Calth’s sun,’ he said. ‘The star Veridian.’

  Angron’s mouth pulled into another sneer. ‘I am not an idiot, Lorgar.’

  The Word Bearer’s smile was sincere enough. ‘Indulge me a moment more. Watch.’

  Several stars paled the same way, while others played host to worlds that darkened and died in whirling clouds of subtle fire. Sure enough, tendrils of the white mist lengthened from their genesis at Calth, reaching across the heavens in slithering jealousy. They started to spread, but behaved as stunted, directionless things, never reaching any of the other orbs.

  ‘I once sailed to the edge of reality,’ Lorgar said softly, ‘and instead of godless, hopeless infinity, I found the remains of an empire destroyed when a god was born. The eldar gave birth to a deity that killed them because of their ignorance, Angron. The Great Eye is Slaa Neth’s afterbirth, joining reality and unreality as one holy realm. The Imperium has archived such events as warp storms, but – to my regret – I know better.’

  At last, he came to an unremarkable star on the edge of his illusory display. A lone world turned around this sun: no more notable than any other globe, and less remarkable than many. Blue marked its oceans and great lakes. Green, grey and yellow marked its various landmasses, with the white of ice at both poles.

  ‘Here,’ said Lorgar. ‘The answer to your unspoken question.’

  Angron wasn’t a creature given to hesitation, nor to patience. Even so, in that moment he seemed reluctant to speak, for once showing no annoyance at his brother’s lengthy, poetic scheming. Even the Nails were still, not forcing his face to twitch.

  ‘Nuceria,’ he said at last, and his voice cracked on the word. Iron teeth pushed together hard enough to give a metallic whine. ‘I have no wish to return there, Lorgar. No wish, and no need.’

  Lorgar nodded, the sympathy of kinship in his eyes. ‘I know. None of us are the souls we once were, when the Emperor first brought us up into the stars. Each of his sons has grown, either learning from the past or throwing its shackles aside. But look.’

  As the world drifted past, Lorgar reached out to touch it, the barest brush of his fingertips. The globe was swallowed in worms of fire, blanketing all detail beneath the burning cloud cover.

  ‘The conduit,’ Lorgar said. ‘It seals the pattern, and makes it whole. Watch.’

  The tendrils of light straining at Calth suddenly leapt from world to world, grasping and curling across the reaches of space. As they spread across Ultramar’s borders, they looked undeniably eager – they looked hungry – clawing towards the burning orb of Nuceria. By the time they reached it, they’d formed a misty boundary between the Five Hundred Worlds and the rest of the Imperium.

  Angron heard Lorgar’s gentle exhalation, even from almost twenty metres away.

  ‘Nothing from Terra will get in,’ the Word Bearer said, walking the misty line, ‘and nothing will get out. Not even an astropathic whisper will pierce this storm. We’ll set fire to Guilliman’s corner of the galaxy, and only you and I will know the way back through the flames.’

  Angron’s voice was rusty metal, chewed up and spat out in a snarl. ‘Why Nuceria? You could choose any world near Ultramar’s borders to form the other end of this… barricade. But you chose Nuceria.’ The World Eater’s blink was lazily predatory, almost crocodilian. ‘You will answer me now, priest. Why Nuceria? What waits for us on that world that makes it such a tempting target?’

  The Word Bearer lowered his hand and the illusory stellar cartography ceased to be. ‘It must be Nuceria,’ he said.

  ‘Not good enough.’

  ‘Why are you so reluctant to return?’ Lorgar asked quietly. Reluctance. This was something he’d simply not expected from his warlike brother, even on this most difficult of decisions.

  ‘How many times have I said this to you?’ The World Eater grunted, his throat forming a lingering ‘Hnnngh’ sound. ‘I died there. Everything after it is meaningless. Do not reduce me in your mind to a snarling, inhuman thing forever blinded by its own anger. I am still a man, no matter what they did to me. I chose to let the world live. There’s nothing there for me now.’

  Lorgar nodded, sensing he had to make some small allowances to chain his brother’s temper.

  ‘Vengeance is there, Angron. Is that so meaningless?’

 
‘Hnh. Vengeance for what? Will it bring my brothers and sisters back from unfair graves? The bones of my past have long grown cold, Lorgar.’

  The Word Bearer pressed harder, his eyes narrowing. ‘There was talk that the Emperor concealed the world from you. I’d always thought–’

  ‘You thought wrong.’ Angron spat on the mosaic deck. The saliva was red. Something in his skull was bleeding.

  ‘You played the Emperor’s games,’ Lorgar allowed. ‘You wore his collar before the rebellion. You tried to be the son he needed you to be. You were exactly that, beyond the moments you lost control. But now, whether you wish it or not, I need Nuceria dead. And you are the perfect architect of its demise, brother.’

  Angron hesitated. Despite his words, there was no concealing the slow rise of fire in his eyes.

  ‘Why Nuceria?’

  Lorgar looked rueful. The Word Bearer usually wore his feelings on his face, but he could be difficult to read when he chose to be, and Angron was no master at the subtleties of human expression.

  ‘The metaphysics are complicated,’ said Lorgar.

  That had Angron growling. ‘I may not have wasted days in debate with you and Magnus inside our father’s Palace, but the Nails haven’t left me an absolute fool. I asked the question, Lorgar. You answer it. And do so without lying, if you can manage such a feat.’

  The Word Bearer met his brother’s eyes, and the rarely-seen palette of emotions within their depths. Pain was there in abundance, but so was the frustration of living with a misfiring mind, and the savagery that transcended anger itself. Angron was a creature that had come to make his hatred a blade to be used in battle. He’d weaponised his own emotions, where most living beings were slaves to theirs. Lorgar couldn’t help but admire the strength in that.

  ‘We’re going to Nuceria,’ he said, ‘because of you. Because of the Nails.’

  Angron stared, and his silence beckoned for his brother to continue.

  ‘They’re killing you,’ Lorgar admitted. ‘Faster than I thought. Faster than anyone realised. The rate of degeneration has accelerated even in the last few months. Your implants were never designed for a primarch’s brain matter. Your physiology is trying to heal the damage as the Nails bite deeper, but it’s a game of pushing and pulling, with both sides evenly matched.’