The Magos

by Dan Abnett

  ‘Eisenhorn is breathing,’ said Nayl.

  They knelt down around him.

  ‘Need to do something about these cuffs,’ said Nayl.

  ‘No idea where the key is,’ said Macks.

  Eisenhorn opened his eyes. They were pale and looked very old.

  ‘You shouldn’t have stopped me,’ said Eisenhorn quietly. He was staring up at Drusher.

  ‘Well, I think I should,’ said Drusher.

  ‘I was close,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘The King was going to fall.’

  ‘He’ll fall one day,’ said Drusher. ‘Sometimes it’s important to do a small thing.’

  Eisenhorn sat up slowly.

  ‘Why did you say that?’ he asked.

  ‘No reason.’

  ‘Someone said…’ Eisenhorn began. ‘Someone said something like that to me. I think I was dreaming. My mind is whirling.’

  They helped him to his feet.

  ‘Magos Drusher,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘You may face the censure of the ordos for your actions today.’

  ‘Yep,’ said Drusher. ‘And so will you. And I know which set of charges I’d rather be accused of.’

  The smoke was getting thicker. Their clothes were heavy with the weight of crawling insects. From far below, they could hear the groan of tortured metal.

  ‘I vote we leave,’ said Nayl. ‘As fast as we can.’

  They headed for the steps, left the gantry and walked towards the hatch. Macks and Drusher helped Voriet between them. Nayl gave his arm to support the limping Eisenhorn.

  The hatch was open. They went through into the long, tall hallway of the shade hall. It was cooler there, but smoke was flowing out of the tower and gathering in thick black folds up in the high ceiling. Insects covered every surface, chirring and ticking. They swarmed in the air.

  ‘Did you open a door?’ asked Voriet.

  ‘I think so,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I feel a breeze,’ said Macks.

  A figure stood in the hallway ahead of them.

  It was Draven Sark. He had bathed and shaved off his beard and filthy hair. He wore the long white robes of a magos of Materia Medica.

  ‘You should have finished your work,’ he said.

  Nayl raised his laspistol.

  ‘Come with us or stand aside, Sark,’ said Eisenhorn.

  ‘Goran made such a mistake,’ said Sark, gliding forwards. ‘He thought you were usable. Transmutable. What a fool. You cannot make a heretic out of someone who is already a heretic.’

  +Stand aside.+

  Sark winced slightly.

  ‘That will of yours,’ he said. ‘Indomitable. Unbroken, even by the Torment. You were already where the Torment wanted to take you. It just made you stronger.’

  He smiled.

  ‘It made you stronger, and yet you still did not have the strength and purpose to finish your work. You could have defeated us, and you failed. Human weakness got in the way.’

  ‘Not my weakness,’ said Eisenhorn.

  Sark shrugged. ‘Human weakness. It is why your side will lose, and the Rot-God-King will fall. It is why we will prevail.’

  Nayl fired. The las-bolt hit Sark and left nothing but a tiny scorch mark on his white gown.

  Sark’s eyes lit with a violet glare. A wall of force slammed down the hallway. Nayl, Macks, Drusher and Voriet were hurled off their feet, and went tumbling as if cast by a hurricane wind. Swarming insects billowed everywhere.

  Eisenhorn remained standing.

  ‘I will unmake you now,’ said Sark. ‘Punishment for your abuse of the Loom, and for your obstruction of our work.’

  There was another gust of force. Eisenhorn groaned and sank to one knee. The magos advanced upon him.

  ‘We have both known the Torment, Gregor Eisenhorn,’ he said. ‘It has changed us both. It has made me stronger. I carry it with me.’

  ‘You carry… something…’ said Eisenhorn, struggling to remain upright.

  ‘I will cast you to the wind,’ said the magos, ‘and I will save the Loom. The Great Work will continue.’

  ‘Go to hell,’ grunted Eisenhorn.

  Sark blasted him again. Insects billowed up, moving as one, and covered Eisenhorn from head to foot, writhing and ticking. Eisenhorn bent his head and raised his cuffed fists in front of him, like a man at penance.

  ‘Fall,’ said the magos, and unleashed his power again. Eisenhorn slid back along the marble floor.

  ‘The King seeks to tame us,’ said Sark. ‘Chain us. Harness us with incantation. What little he knows. How small he thinks. Freed from his bounds, loosed in your world, we will do such wonders.’

  Drusher hauled Macks to her feet, trying to shield them both from the surging wind and boiling clouds of insects. Nayl dragged Voriet upright.

  They all staggered backwards as the magos blasted again with invisible power.

  Eisenhorn looked up at Sark. Even moving his head took great effort. He raised his cuffed hands in front of his face. He was quaking, like a great oak in a gale, about to splinter.

  He spoke an un-word.

  The force of it struck Sark full in the face. It also struck the cuff-chain binding Eisenhorn’s wrists and exploded it, driving metal fragments into the magos like buckshot.

  Sark staggered backwards, blood streaming from a dozen wounds in his face. They bled like stigmata, dripping onto the white cloth of his gown. His left eye was gone.

  He screamed at Eisenhorn in rage. The un-word knocked Eisenhorn backwards. His hands now free, he clutched at the hallway wall to stay upright. He answered with an un-word that struck the magos like a sledgehammer.

  The insect swarm became frenzied. Their mass clung to the high, white walls, scoring marks in the stone. In long, threading lines, they were inscribing the words of Enuncia that Eisenhorn and Sark were hurling at each other. Drusher realised where the odd script lining the walls of the tower had come from. The ancient, chirring cackle of prehuman times, recorded syllable by syllable in the fabric of the world, marks in stone left by things before man, the swarming plagues of truth and destruction, the litany of the Torment.

  Face-to-face, enveloped in a whirlwind of light and hammering air, Eisenhorn and Sark yelled un-words at each other, trying to un-make each other’s flesh and souls. Eisenhorn’s eyes shone violet, as bright as Sark’s remaining pupil.

  With fury, Eisenhorn screamed and drove Sark backwards.

  ‘Go! Go!’ he yelled to the others. ‘Get out! He’s not human!’

  ‘And you are?’ asked Drusher, shielding his eyes.

  +Get out!+

  They tried to struggle past the two figures, but the wind was too strong, the concussion of the un-words too great. Eisenhorn focused and began to drive the un-words out of him with his mind instead of his mouth. He drove them with the will that impressed Magos Sark so much.

  Sark was hurled back against the wall. It cracked behind him. Chirring insects etched words around his form. Pinned, he writhed, screaming. Black dust began to puff out of his skin as it desiccated and shrivelled. The howls coming from his wide-stretched mouth shattered the windows overhead. Glass rained down.

  The black dust continued to spray out of him. He was becoming a skeletal thing, wrapped in the white cloth of his robes. He slid slowly down the wall.

  ‘Move!’ cried Eisenhorn.

  ‘You broke him,’ yelled Voriet.

  ‘No,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘Not even slightly.’

  Locustforms fluttered around them. A door stood open at the end of the hallway. It had not been there before. Daylight shone through it.

  ‘Quickly,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘Quickly. Don’t look back.’

  And they were outside. The Karanine glade. Early evening. The old and mossy rocks of Keshtre Fortress lay around them in the undergrowth.

  It was a still evening, but a sharp wind was blowing across the glade, swaying the old trees that faced them.

  Drusher looked back.

  A sliver of darkness stood be
hind them, a vertical slit in space like the shadow of a half-open door. The wind was spilling out of it, carrying smoke and clouds of locusts. The sliver was just standing there without a frame or any reference to the forest, a wound to another world.

  +Thorn wishes Talon. Aegis, uplifting, a door without walls. Pattern Hawk.+

  ‘What was that?’ asked Macks, holding her head.

  ‘Keep moving,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘We have to get as far away as possible.’

  ‘From what?’ asked Drusher.

  ‘Sark’s not dead, is he?’ asked Voriet.

  ‘The human part is,’ said Eisenhorn. They were stumbling through the trees, locusts buzzing around them. ‘The shell is gone. But not the thing that took up residence inside Magos Draven Sark during those long years he spent inside the cage.’

  ‘What kind of thing?’ asked Drusher, wishing he hadn’t.

  ‘Something of the warp,’ said Voriet.

  ‘Let’s use the word daemon,’ said Eisenhorn.

  ‘Oh, let’s not!’ exclaimed Drusher.

  ‘Can you close the door?’ yelled Nayl, trying to help Voriet to keep up. ‘Shut it in there?’

  ‘Not any more,’ said Eisenhorn.

  They ran down the slope, through the ancient woodland. There was a stream ahead. All the birds had fallen silent, as if knowing it was time to be elsewhere.

  A wind howled down the high valley from the slit in the world. Trees hushed and swayed. From the Keshtre site two hundred metres behind them, they heard the air popping and tearing, squeaking and splitting as something wrenched it open like a medicae surgeon levering apart a chest with rib-spreaders.

  They splashed across the stream to the far bank. Behind them, they heard trees collapsing, torn up from the roots. Voriet could barely stay with them. Nayl and Drusher grabbed him to carry him.

  Drusher heard another sound, a different howling. It was high-pitched, and the roar of it shook his insides.

  A shadow passed over them. This was Eisenhorn’s daemon, surely. He didn’t want to look.

  He did anyway, in time to see a massive orbital gunship pass overhead. It was moving so low it slammed through the upper branches of the tree canopy, showering down twigs and leaves. Its burners flared as it slowed and turned. The ground shook.

  ‘We need a clearing,’ yelled Nayl. ‘Medea can’t bring that in here.’

  ‘Two hundred metres that way!’ shouted Drusher.

  ‘Really?’ asked Nayl.

  ‘Well, maybe three hundred,’ replied Drusher. ‘I remember Fargul’s maps!’

  They turned the way he had pointed and began to wade through the underbrush. Locusts still purred past their faces.

  ‘Keep going,’ cried Eisenhorn.

  ‘This is insane!’ yelled Macks.

  ‘Medea is telling me… keep going,’ Eisenhorn replied.

  Overhead, impossibly huge and low, the gun-cutter swung around hard, attitude jets flaming. Nose down and lifting slightly, it moved back up the slope towards the Keshtre site.

  Something was erupting up through the trees, pushing them down and splintering them back. Stone by stone, the walls of Keshtre Fortress were rebuilding themselves, rising up, pale and loam-caked, out of the old earth.

  And something was climbing out of the fortress mound.

  Something tall and slender, four times the height of any tree in the Karanines, rose up from behind the ragged curtain of stone. Then, a second, a third.

  Drusher stared in amazement. He knew what they were. He’d seen them before. Seen them in a microscope field, magnified a thousand times so he could examine the joints, the chitinous cuticle structure, the black strands of hair follicles that sensed movement and vibration.

  Spider legs. Some arachnid form, anyway. A xenos variety of chelicerata.

  But these limbs were not under a microscope. They were two hundred metres long.

  ‘That’s not local,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not an arachnid either,’ said Eisenhorn.

  ‘A daemon, is it?’

  ‘A plague daemon,’ said Eisenhorn.

  The joints flexed, the legs stepping up over the fortress wall, gaining grip to raise the body behind them. Imagination was no longer Valentin Drusher’s worst enemy. Imagination was woefully inadequate compared to this.

  The world rattled. The gun-cutter had taken station and opened fire, hosing the fortress site with ordnance from its gunpods, chin-turret and underwing racks.

  Fire bloomed in huge hemispheres, ripping up soil, splintered wood and fractured stone, five hectares of woodland laid waste.

  The gun-cutter swayed slightly and unleashed again. Rapid-rate las-fire ripped from its chin-mount.

  ‘Throne of Earth, that’ll flatten the whole world!’ cried Drusher.

  ‘No,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘Medea’s just trying to keep it at bay. To hold it back and buy us time.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Reach the clearing.’

  Drusher looked back, still running. The huge dark mass was rising up out of the smoke and raging flames that enveloped it.

  It lashed out with its long, clawed limbs. Then tendrils whipped out from the half-seen body mass too. They were organic and boneless: tentacles, or pustular cords, or maybe ragged loops of intestine. Drusher could smell the stench of rot and faecal waste.

  One of the huge limbs struck the gun-cutter a glancing blow, it veered hard to the right, jets howling to compensate. The engines shrieked.

  ‘She’s too low!’ Nayl yelled.

  The gun-cutter was ploughing sideways, ripping through treetops and pulverising trunks. It was beginning to shake and rotate, unable to pull clear. There was no room to gain lift and energy.

  ‘Oh Throne!’ Voriet wailed.

  +Medea!+

  There was a long, terrible crashing noise of trees uprooting. The gun-cutter vanished behind the treeline.

  The thing from the warp pulled itself clear of Keshtre’s walls on its vast legs.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Unwoven

  ‘I think this is probably all my fault,’ said Drusher. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘If you hadn’t pulled me out of the cage, Sark would have killed me in it. Taken control of the Loom again. And the thing inside him… It is a greater daemon, Drusher. And one not bound and trapped by the King in Yellow’s conjurations. It has used Sark as a loophole, a door into our space, freed from the proscriptions of summoning and binding. Sark has unwittingly unleashed a greater and far more immediate threat to Imperial space than the damned King in Yellow.’

  They had reached the clearing. It was an old patch of hill pasture that sloped down to the woods at the base of the valley.

  Drusher looked back. He couldn’t see the daemon, but a vast fog of buzzing blackness veiled the sky beyond the nearest trees. A mass swarm. Trillions of insects, bathed in filthy light.

  The ground vibrated. Footsteps, thought Drusher. Giant, scuttling footsteps. In the distance, landslips kicked off by the vibrations thundered down the mountains, raising plumes of dust.

  Behind them, something in the black fog screamed. A bellow, an exhalation. An exaltation. It boomed out across the Karanines, echoing from peak to peak. A deep, wet, clotted pulsing howl like the droning note of a giant Udaric war-horn, but one big enough to swallow the world.

  Drusher wondered how to face his death. He wondered how a man did that, and if it mattered. He felt like sinking to his knees, but that was just the exhaustion. He doubted there was a protocol for facing death when your death was an abomination the size of a city.

  He decided to stand and face it, whatever it was going to be. He damn well wasn’t going to cry. It had been a good life, really. Hard work, some insane adventures. A few, sweet, maddening years somewhere in the middle that he wouldn’t have given up for anything. Shouldn’t have given up for anything.

  Macks was tugging at his arm.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘What are you doing?�
�

  He shrugged.

  ‘Facing death,’ he replied. ‘What else is there?’

  She sighed.

  ‘Not a lot, now,’ she replied.

  ‘You see the trouble you get me in?’ he said.

  ‘Bet you wished you’d never met me,’ she said.

  ‘Not even once,’ he replied.

  The howling came again. Wind rushed across them.

  The gun-cutter rose up behind the trees on the edge of the pasture, jets screaming. Nose down, it swept across the grass, lifting clouds of spinning leaves and stalks into the air. Drusher could see the amber-lit cockpit. Medea, grim-faced, pulling on the controls.

  The forward ramp was lowering even before she put the big craft down on its heavy undercarriage.

  They ran up the ramp.

  ‘Are you all in?’ Medea’s voice crackled through the intercabin vox.

  ‘Go!’ Nayl yelled.

  ‘Handholds!’ Eisenhorn ordered.

  They grabbed what they could. Eisenhorn pushed Voriet into an acceleration couch and held him down. Macks grabbed an overhead strap, then grabbed Drusher as he staggered past.

  The gun-cutter lifted. The ramp wasn’t even shut. Drusher could see the ground dropping away, the pasture…

  The gun-cutter swung, lifting its nose. Everyone lurched the other way. Now, Drusher could see evening sky through the still-closing ramp. Acceleration pulled at them hard.

  ‘Strap in,’ ordered Eisenhorn. ‘Medea! Brace for shock wave in three!’

  ‘Shock wave?’ asked Macks.

  ‘I can feel it coming,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘The fire, you see? It was never put out.’

  The gun-cutter climbed on maximum thrust, racing into the high altitudes of the great peaks.

  Behind it, in the black fog of the valley, there was a blink. A flash of violet light and jade-green electrical discharge.

  A two-kilometre square patch of the woodland folded into itself, and vanished.

  Then, the shock wave.

  TWENTY-NINE

  At the Closing of the World

  ‘Caffeine?’ asked Medea.

  She held out a tin mug to Drusher.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said as he took it.