Mark of Calth

by Edited by Laurie Goulding

  They have stopped singing, though. They just look at each other. Bale Rane is to Oll’s right, Katt to his left. Oll places a hand on each of their shoulders.

  ‘Don’t look,’ he says. ‘It’s going to be okay.’

  It is not, but what else is he supposed to say?

  The voices are in his ears. The pain of his life is unimaginable. He knows the others are hearing their own voices too. Bale can hear Neve. Zybes is begging his mother to stop calling out. Krank is crying about someone called Pappi. Katt is just shuddering. Oll does not want to know what she is hearing.

  He takes his hand off her shoulder slowly. If there is a chance at all, it is coming and it is going to be miniscule.

  ‘M’kar!’ she barks, an involuntary sound.

  ‘Shhhh,’ he soothes her through his tears.

  ‘Mmmmkk!’ she blurts.

  ‘Easy,’ he says. He lowers his hand to his waist, to his belt, to the wrapped athame. He can feel the daemon’s breath on the nape of his neck.

  The athame is warm too.

  One chance. One tiny chance.

  ‘Maloq!’ Katt squeals, eyes rolling back.

  ‘Hush now,’ Oll says, taking hold of the dagger.

  ‘Maloq! Maloq! Maloq!’ she screams. Meaningless. He has lost her. She has gone.

  ‘Maloq Kartho!’ she cries, and vomits. ‘Maloq Kartho! M’kartho! M’kar!’

  He has the dagger. One chance.

  He wheels around, blade raised.

  [mark: –?]

  The thing is gone.

  Only ordinary darkness surrounds them. The smell of it has gone, and the heat of it. The tar has vanished.

  Only the voices remain, just for a minute or so, receding into the distance like whisperers moving away into a room beyond.

  Oll blinks. He realises his mouth is open to scream, so he closes it. He feels sweat on his flushed face. He lowers the blade.

  ‘I don’t–’ he starts to say.

  He looks at the others. Bale is nursing the sobbing Krank. Zybes is sitting on the ground with his head in his hands. Graft has picked Katt up. She is limp.

  ‘Oh God, no!’

  She is not dead, though. There is vomit down the front of her clothes, and blood streaming from her nose.

  ‘It went back,’ she murmurs, looking up at Oll.

  ‘Back?’

  ‘Didn’t you feel it? It was pulled back. It was yanked away from us, from here. It was needed somewhere else, for something more important than us.’

  Oll shakes his head. He remembers John’s words. Keep away from it for long enough. It will eventually have to give up and turn back.

  ‘What in God’s name?’ Oll wonders, out loud.

  ‘Maloq Kartho,’ Katt says. Graft helps her to stand up. She is not steady.

  ‘That’s not a human name,’ Oll says.

  ‘No, it is,’ she insists. ‘I feel it is. A transhuman name, at least. Whoever Maloq Kartho is, Maloq Kartho is why M’kar had to go and leave us.’

  ‘Then I pity poor Maloq Kartho,’ says Oll.

  Katt shakes her head. ‘I don’t know why, but I don’t think you should.’

  It has a destiny of its own.

  [mark: –?]

  Dawn breaks, soft over the thorn wood. The winds rise with it, rustling. Oll takes a bearing. He is pretty sure that the approach of M’kar was shielding them from the winds and prevented them getting a bearing.

  The skies are clear, for now at least.

  They have still got a long, long way to go, and it is not going to get easier.

  ‘What do we do?’ asks Zybes.

  ‘Do we keep going?’ adds Krank. ‘Do we have a route? A… direction?’

  ‘Boreas,’ Oll tells them, putting the compass and chart away. ‘The north-north-easterly. Boreas, or Mese, to the Grekans, at least. Nordostroni to the Franks. To the Romanii, Aquilo.’

  He takes out the dagger and prepares to make the next cut. Their voyage will continue as it has been, like their lives and their destinies, unmarked.

  That is why they might succeed.

  ‘So what do we do?’ asks Bale.

  Oll puts his hand flat against the air and starts to cut.

  ‘We push on,’ he says. ‘Okay?’

  I am sorry. I used to have faith. I used to believe that there was more to the universe, that there was more than what we could touch and see, that there was a power higher than all of us guiding us, keeping us safe. I never told you because I knew you would be angry, because you might leave. Now you are gone anyway, and I do not believe it anymore. I am sorry. I was right – there is another world beyond our dreams. I wish I could still believe it was a place of kindness. I do not want to go there.

  N.

  AFTERWORD

  If you’ll forgive one final pun, Calth certainly left its mark upon me…

  It was just over a year ago that Know No Fear landed in my editorial email inbox. I knew that Dan Abnett had been working on it for some time, but I wasn’t expecting anything to be handed in before the Christmas break. Considering how much of a Horus Heresy geek I’ve become in the last seven years or so, I actually knew relatively little about the battle which comes to define the Ultramarines as a Legion in the Horus Heresy, and so I really had no idea what to expect from the novel.

  I can honestly say – and I think I Facebooked to this effect at the time – that this was the first Black Library manuscript I’d ever read that made me want to laugh, cry, puke, and bang my fists on the desk in frustration all at the same time. It was compelling, gripping, painful, cathartic stuff. There are sections of that book that feel like a gut-punch, and others that make you want to start a whole new gaming army right then and there. Seeing Guilliman and his sons skipping merrily towards the precipice with looks of blissful ignorance plastered all over their patrician features – it’s like watching a documentary about a disaster, when you already know the ending. Far from being a straight-up military battle, this was bordering on sci-fi terrorism that quickly descends into warp-spawned madness.

  One of my editorial comments to Dan at the time was something like: ‘You’ve dropped in loads of plot hooks here – aren’t you going tell some more of these other stories?’ Of course, his only response was, ‘Maybe one day… But who says it has to be me that tells them…?’

  In my mind, at least, that was when Mark of Calth was born. The über-fan in me wanted to see the rest of Ventanus’s legendary tale, and to find out just what the hell happened to the Campanile. I knew that there were still many hundreds of pages of plot left in the battles beneath the planet’s surface, but the Horus Heresy always has a habit of moving on to the next big story and leaving a lot of the minor threads behind. This is where I think anthologies come in, since they provide a chance for short stories or novellas to pick up where the novels leave off, and vice versa. Speaking as an editor and following in the footsteps of The Primarchs, I’d like to see more anthologies themed towards specific characters or events as the Horus Heresy series continues.

  The High Lords of Terra (that is to say, the authors) really took to this idea when we first tabled it for discussion. At the quarterly meetings at Games Workshop HQ, ideas began to take shape and sections of the Underworld War were marked out. Without even needing to add anything new into the mix, the existing continuity from Know No Fear and Graham McNeill’s Warhammer 40,000 Ultramarines novels gave us some great starting points, and inspired a lot of the guys to get started straight away.

  The interstitial snippets between the stories grew out of that initial rush of enthusiasm, too. There were so many story ideas flying around that we realised there wouldn’t be enough pages to tell them all in full – given Guilliman’s predilection for note-taking and reviewing events in detail (why does that feel so familiar?) I invited everyone to write 100-word mini-stories to r
epresent all these little disparate fragments of ‘evidence’ after the fact. With a little prefacing note from the primarch himself, these become less like colour text and more like an additional narrative in and of itself; some of them relate indirectly to the stories they append, and some of them hint at far darker things still to come in the wider Heresy series…

  For me, the continuity is what makes all of these stories really special, regardless of word count. It’s the crossover, the opportunity for little references to be made across different plotlines; for recurring themes like flooding, daemonic possession or the presence of simple ritual daggers which crop up time and time again. The Horus Heresy has always been an awesome exercise in collaborative writing, but this really is something else. Having up to ten authors simultaneously working on the same bit of background not only facilitates plenty of holographic storytelling, but also lets each of them write in their own individual style.

  I say ‘ten’ because, of course, the Mark of Calth is still running.

  At the same time as these fine gentlemen were penning the material for this anthology, other stories were being written to further explore the battles between the Ultramarines and the Word Bearers. Gav Thorpe has outdone himself with the exciting audio drama Honour to the Dead, which really depicts the ‘epic scale’ of Titan combat; similarly Nick Kyme continues the saga of Aeonid Thiel – everyone’s favourite bad boy in blue! – in Censure. Also, Dan and cover artist Neil Roberts have begun work on the magnificent graphic novel Macragge’s Honour, which follows the naval duel between the Ultramarines flagship and Kor Phaeron’s battle-barge, fleeing for the Maelstrom at the end of Know No Fear. Any and all of these stories could have been included as prose in this anthology, but this way we get enough Calth action to satisfy even the most impatient Horus Heresy fan.

  Besides, who knows how many more Calth-based stories are out there, waiting to be told?

  Well, I know, obviously. But as always – I can’t say.

  Laurie Goulding

  December 2012

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Dan Abnett

  Dan Abnett is a multiple New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning comic book writer. He has written over forty novels, including the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series, and the Eisenhorn and Ravenor trilogies. His Horus Heresy novel Prospero Burns topped the SF charts in the UK and the US. In addition to writing for Black Library, Dan scripts audio dramas, movies, games, comics and bestselling novels for major publishers in Britain and America. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent..

  David Annandale

  David Annandale e is the author of the digital short story Eclipse of Hope and the novellas Yarrick: Chains of Golgotha and Mephiston: Lord of Death for Black Library. By day, he dons an academic disguise and lectures at a Canadian university on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games. He lives with his wife and family and a daemon in the shape of a cat, and is working on several new projects set in the grim darkness of the far future..

  Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Aaron Dembski-Bowden has written several novels for Black Library, including the Night Lords series, the Space Marine Battles book Helsreach, The Emperor’s Gift and the New York Times bestselling The First Heretic for the Horus Heresy. He lives and works in Northern Ireland with his wife Katie, hiding from the world in the middle of nowhere.

  John French

  John French is a writer and freelance games designer from Nottingham. His work for Black Library includes a number of short stories, the novellas Fateweaver and The Crimson Fist and the forthcoming novel Ahriman: Exile. He also works on the Warhammer 40,000 role playing games. When he is not thinking of ways that dark and corrupting beings can destroy reality and space, John enjoys making it so with his own Traitor Legions on the gaming table.

  Guy Haley

  Guy Haley began his career on SFX Magazine in 1997 before leaving to edit Games Workshop’s White Dwarf, followed by SF magazine Death Ray. Since 2009 he has been a wandering writer, working in both magazines and novels. He lives in Somerset with his wife and son, a malamute and an enormous, evil-tempered Norwegian Forest Cat called, ironically, Buddy.

  Graham McNeill

  Graham McNeill has written more than twenty novels for Black Library. His Horus Heresy novel, A Thousand Sons, was a New York Times bestseller and his Time of Legends novel, Empire, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award. Originally hailing from Scotland, Graham now lives and works in Nottingham.

  Anthony Reynolds

  After finishing university Anthony Reynolds set sail from his homeland Australia and ventured forth to foreign climes. He ended up settling in the UK, and managed to blag his way into Games Workshop’s hallowed design studio. There he worked for four years as a games developer and two years as part of the management team. He now resides back in his hometown of Sydney, overlooking the beach and enjoying the sun and the surf, though he finds that to capture the true darkness and horror of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 he has taken to writing in what could be described as a darkened cave.

  Rob Sanders

  Rob Sanders is a freelance writer, who spends his nights creating dark visions for regular visitors to the 41st millennium to relive in the privacy of their own nightmares, including the novels Atlas Infernal and Legion of the Damned. By contrast, as Head of English at a local secondary school, he spends his days beating (not literally) the same creativity out of the next generation in order to cripple any chance of future competition. He lives in the small city of Lincoln, UK.

  A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

  Published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

  Cover illustration by Neil Roberts

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