I am no witch! She was fierce with resolve.
But the content and the fact of the vision were not the only shocks. As her mind started to function properly again, Ptolemea ran the events that occurred after she had regained consciousness back through her brain. There was something else: Meritia had acted very strangely too, as though she understood what was happening to her. There had been a look of resigned solidarity in her eyes when she nodded to say goodbye. What did the Sister Senioris know about her dreams? Was she somehow implicated in their occurrence or form? If not, could Ptolemea dare broach the subject of unsanctioned visions with a Sister Senioris of the Order of the Lost Rosetta? Ptolemea shook her head in agonising frustration as she realised that she would not have hesitated to turn Meritia in to the Ordo Hereticus had the elder Sister come to her with such a story.
Sergeant Kohath stared down at the rusty, red planet of Rahe’s Paradise, watching its giant diagonal ring of mountains and volcanoes slowly rotate. Most of the senior Marines from the Third Company had accompanied Captain Angelos down to the surface, leaving Kohath to hold the fort. The Blood Ravens’ serfs who served as the bulk of the crew on the command deck of the Ravenous Spirit were poring over their control panels, which were clucking and chattering irritably.
“Well?” prompted Kohath, waiting for a definitive answer. “Can you see anything?”
There was no reply, as the serfs continued to concentrate on their machines, none of them daring to give a response before they were absolutely sure. Knowledge was valued by all Blood Ravens; ignorance and foolishness were not tolerated lightly, especially not amongst the Chapter’s own pledge workers.
The instruments had registered a slight interference signal on the edge of the system, but it had vanished almost the moment that it had appeared. The serfs were feverishly checking to verify whether it had been the ghostly signature of another vessel or whether it had been merely a blip in the ship’s machine spirit. The local system was notorious as a hide-out for pirate-raiders, and the Blood Ravens could not afford to be seen to tolerate their presence, especially while there was a fully armed strike cruiser in orbit around the main habitable planet. In addition, Captain Angelos had made it very clear to Kohath that he should keep a constant watch for eldar infiltrations into the system. He seemed to believe that there was an imminent threat of invasion by the mysterious aliens, although nobody seemed entirely sure why. Father Librarian Jonas Urelie had certainly been surprised by this view when Kohath had checked in with him a short time earlier.
“There’s nothing, sergeant,” said Reuben finally, glancing up from the glowing green screen over which he was hunched. “It must have been a glitch.”
“Very well,” nodded Kohath, apparently satisfied by the eventual confidence of his serf. Nonetheless, he clicked the view screen to shift its orientation, bringing the scene behind the Ravenous Spirit into relief. In the far distance, he could make out the slow perambulations of the outer planets as they came into alignment, eclipsing each other in a faint ring of light. For a moment, he thought that he saw a tiny glimmer, little more than a fleck of light dancing around the farthest planet, where it would normally have been hidden in the glare of the planet’s reflected light. Then it was gone. It was probably a moon or even an asteroid orbiting the distant world—the outer reaches of the system were peppered with space debris.
As he watched, the little glittering speck reappeared and then disappeared again, blinking like an inconsistent and far-off beacon. Clicking the controls, Kohath enhanced the view and then strained his eyes into the darkness, a quiet, suspicious voice in his soul making him ill at ease. No matter what the Ravenous Spirit’s instruments said, there was something not quite right about the faint, flickering light, but it was just slightly too far away for Kohath to see it properly. The thought that this could be a deliberately strategic placement prodded its way into the sergeant’s military mind.
“Bring the prow around,” said Kohath slowly, still staring out into the blackness. He couldn’t see anything unusual, but many battles were won on the basis of sound human intuition, no matter how insistent the Inquisition was that this was usually folly bordering on heresy. If there was anything that Kohath had learnt during his long years of service with the Blood Ravens, it was that war was always the most likely outcome—it was peace that should strike the soul with suspicion and dread.
In the silent blackness at the edge of the system, the flicker of light shifted almost imperceptibly into a burst. It was the merest phase shift, just a slight alteration in the colour spectrum.
“There,” murmured Kohath, as though his suspicions had been confirmed. “Target torpedoes on—”
A stream of light-bolts flashed into view and the view screen collapsed into a blanket of white. Instantly, a series of explosions shook the command deck. Some kind of laser fire sunk into the armoured shielding, but it was followed by a cluster of impacts from ballistics that Kohath did not see. The ghostly rockets punched into the softened armour and detonated, sending plates of adamantium splintering off into space.
The command deck bucked and rocked, sending any unsecured serfs and equipment careening across the floor, colliding and crashing into the instruments. Only Kohath stood immovable, even as a crate skidded and bounced off his armoured leg, ricocheting off and crunching into the workstation next to Reuben. The terminal exploded, spraying glass and metal shards up into the face of the serf that clung to it for stability. The serf threw himself back away from the unit, clutching at his head and screaming as mists of smoke hissed out of the cracked station. As he fell onto his back, his hands dropped away from his face exposing his ruined skull. His left eye was impaled by a spike of green glass and the right side of his face was completely missing, spilling his pulverised brain out onto the deck.
“Return fire,” said Kohath firmly, still standing in front of the main view screen, unmoving amidst the commotion around him.
“We still have no target identified, sergeant,” insisted Reuben, looking up desperately from his terminal.
“That’s the target!” stated Kohath, finally losing his calm as he pointed at the starburst on the view screen, which had just flickered back into life. Whatever it was that was firing on them, he would not permit anything to attack the Blood Ravens without at least trying to fight back. If he had to incinerate the entire outer system, it would be done. Nobody and nothing could take a free shot at the Ravenous Spirit, not on his watch.
There was an audible hiss as the volley of torpedoes roared out of the frontal batteries and rocketed out towards the outlying planets. Kohath watched the progress of the missiles on the view screen as they diminished into distant invisibility, then he saw the even more distant flickering target burst into a streak of light and vanish.
Turning away from the viewer in disappointed disgust, Kohath surveyed the destruction on the command deck.
“Clear that body away and put those fires out,” he snapped, repulsed by the mess that disgraced the spirit of his venerable cruiser. “Reuben,” he began, using the serfs name in an attempt to inspire him to greater effort; Kohath always tried to learn the names of a few serfs in the crew for this purpose. “Track that vessel—”
Before he could finish his order, another cluster of explosions wracked the Ravenous Spirit, this time even throwing Kohath to the deck. When he climbed back to his feet, in amongst the flames that suddenly filled the chamber, he looked over to Reuben and saw the serfs head rammed into the screen of his terminal with blood oozing out over the jagged glass that framed it. The rest of his body had already slouched back into his seat, where it was bathed in fire.
“Farseer,” called Laeresh in greeting as the doors to her chambers in the heart of the Eternal Star slid open and he swept through into the shadowy interior. His frustration about the abortive battle with the mon-keigh had abated and now his voice was tense with concern for Macha.
In the half-light of the farseer’s sanctum, Laeresh could see the shimme
ring field of sha’iel that coruscated around her body as she lay on a shining black, circular, wraithbone counter that had risen up out of the floor in the centre of the room. Her body was covered in a thin, white shroud, and underneath it Laeresh could see thousands of tiny wounds speckling her pale skin. She wasn’t moving and her eyes were closed, but the interlacing pulses of energy seemed to both emanate from her and be feeding her with vitality at the same time, as though existing in multiple realms simultaneously. Laeresh had no intellectual tools with which to understand what was happening to Macha, but his intuition told him that the field of sha’iel was a good sign—it meant that she was alive, and that she was recovering.
Standing in a line behind the farseer were three of the warlocks from her retinue, each clad in robes of the deepest emerald—a colour that was darker than black, which cast no reflected light whatsoever. Their heads were bowed and a faintly audible chant was seeping out from under their hoods, gently filling the chamber with an electric peace. The one in the middle, Druinir, looked up and acknowledged Laeresh with unblinking, sparkling, fathomless eyes.
Having burst into her chamber so vigorously, Laeresh now found himself at a loss, not really knowing what to do; acting without thinking was becoming his motif. As soon as the Reaper’s Blade had taken up its position on the far side of the fourth planet of Lsathranil’s Shield, he had rushed across to the Eternal Star to check on the farseer, gripped by a sudden panic that he had brought her across the galaxy only to watch her die within moments of emerging from the webway. He cursed himself for the recklessness with which he had charged into battle, and his mind taunted him with the voice of Uldreth the Avenger, accusing him of abandoning Biel-Tan’s farseer at the first promise of combat.
Shutting out the jibes of his subconscious, Laeresh knelt down by the side of the wraithbone tablet and bowed his head, hoping that his strength might somehow be transferred into Macha’s body, or that she might at least feel his presence. He had only the faintest understanding of the nature of farseers, but he had absolute faith that she would draw on him when she needed him most. He was no warlock, but he freely offered whatever he could.
Laeresh. The thought was weak and almost trembling, as though it had travelled a long way.
Farseer, replied Laeresh with an abrupt eagerness that seemed clumsy and loud. Farseer, what happened? he continued, more softly.
The runes rebelled, Laeresh.
What do you mean? asked Laeresh, raising his head and inspecting the multitude of lacerations that covered Macha’s body.
There was blood coursing through the webway, began Macha. It was drowning our souls in the blood of our own kin, crashing like a tidal wave against the defences of our craftworld. Biel-Tan itself was crushed under the liquid weight of its own dead as every eldar was suddenly drained of his life and flung from the bloody hand of Khaine.
I don’t understand, farseer, thought Laeresh, confused by the ghastly image.
Neither do I, Laeresh, but I am certain that there is more to Lsathranil’s Shield than the mon-keigh. We cannot afford to be rash here. There are forces at work that I do not properly recognise.
I am sorry, farseer, replied Laeresh, accepting the advice as a reprimand and wincing inwardly as the voice of Uldreth returned to taunt him once again.
We need to get down onto the planet’s surface, directed Macha.
What about the mon-keigh? They are already on the surface, farseer.
There was a long pause and for a brief, panicked moment Laeresh feared that Macha had died.
I cannot see them, she confessed, finally. The planet has no present, and even its past teeters on the edge of an abyss. The mon-keigh are there, but I am blind to their presence and their role in the planet’s fate, since the planet itself seems devoid of destiny. Lsathranil’s Shield is cracked.
The afternoon sun was still bright through the stained glass, filling the librarium with coloured beams of light as Jonas sat at the great wooden table, deep in thought. The mysterious wraithbone tablet was laid out in front of him, and an inexplicable sheen shimmered across its surface as the runes glowed and shifted before his eyes. Every time he thought that the text had settled and he started the work of translating it, something or things deep inside the warp-spawned material would blink and swim, sending the lines of script spiralling into a vortex before they finally settled into an entirely new configuration.
After several cycles in this way, Jonas had realised that there were actually only a set number of patterns and that there was some kind of psychic mechanism at work that triggered the transition from one to the next. In a moment of clarity, he realised that the tablet was effectively turning the page for him, paced for the eyes of an eldar who would doubtlessly be able to read each page before the next appeared. Unfortunately, Jonas could not read the ancient alien script so quickly, and he had to labour over each rune in turn, waiting for the shuffle-cycle to complete itself before he could move onto the next as the first page reappeared.
Between them, Jonas and Meritia had finally deciphered the first rune, which appeared to act as a title for the whole text: Ishandruir—The Ascension. For the last few hours, Jonas had been working on the first cluster of runes by himself, struggling even to trace their unsettled shapes into a likeness that he could recognise. He had searched through dozens of tomes in the librarium, leafing through a collection of texts that had been supplied to him by the Order of the Lost Rosetta years before—hence the Blood Ravens’ librarian assumed that he had inquisitorial sanction for these dangerous volumes, which contained within their illuminated pages the ruminations of researchers, priests and inquisitors on the nature of the eldar tongue. The Inquisition had been known to arrest scholars for the possession of much less perilous books than these, and it was a mark of the respect that the Ordo Hereticus had for the scholarship of the Blood Ravens that they were prepared to look the other way in this case, in the name of furthering truth and knowledge for the Emperor. However, Jonas occasionally wondered whether the Sisters of the Lost Rosetta seconded to Rahe’s Paradise actually served a double function, not only to help with the research, but also to keep an eye on the research being done; in the back of his mind he was always vaguely conscious of the order’s twin allegiances to the Ecclesiarchy and the Ordo Hereticus.
He had struggled for hours over the very first rune of the main body of the text. It was an archaic and complicated shape of sweeps and curls, run through with decorative strikes and other strokes that seemed intrinsic to the character’s meaning. There was a bold triangle at its centre that seemed to glow with a sickly green. It had taken Jonas long enough just to work out which marks were integral to the rune and which were merely illuminations. Finally, he had found a rune in the forbidden Obscurus Analects of Xenoartefacts, inscribed by the notorious Inquisitor Ichtyus Drumall, who claimed to have spent three years in the underworld of craftworld Saim-Hann, attempting to incite a civil war amongst the bellicose gangs of that monstrous vessel. Within moments of his alleged escape, he had been seized by agents of the Ordo Hereticus, his analects removed from his possession, and his soul had been ritually purged until it was finally liberated from the irrevocably tainted form of his flesh.
The rune appeared to be an ancient variation of Jain’zar, which had been translated by Ichtyus Drumall as “storm of silence,” but that interpretation seemed almost wholly inappropriate in the current context. The position of the character suggested that it should be the grammatical subject, and Jonas originally thought that it could be a reference to some kind of mythical figure in eldar folklore that bore the name Jain’zar. The tablet was ancient beyond reckoning, and it was entirely possible that the rune had subsequently appropriated the meaning gleaned by Drumall after this original figure had passed from the memories of the eldar. However, as he worked his way through the rest of that first rune cluster, Jonas realised that the rune was actually a variant of the markings seen on some eldar warriors that the Imperium called banshees, because o
f the way that they howled in the face of battle. Indeed, rendering the complicated rune as “banshee” seemed to make sense, although it was still not clear what the sentence actually meant: The Banshee’s call shall wake the dead, when dark portents wax nigh—heed them as the counsel of a seer, or a father.
Closing the heavy covers of the Obscurus Analects, Jonas pushed himself back in his seat, rolling his neck to loosen the tense muscles of his shoulders. Space Marines were not built to remain hunched over a desk for hours on end—his augmetic body needed to move. Through the window, high up in the atmosphere, Jonas saw a sheet of blue light suddenly flare and then vanish, like an aurora.
With his hands massaging the base of his neck, the father librarian gazed back down at the tablet that lay next to the old, forbidden book on the wooden table. He shook his head, partly to work his cervical vertebrae and partly because of his mystification concerning the meaning of the ancient runic script. He didn’t know a great deal about the so-called eldar banshees, and he wasn’t sure where he would be able to look to find out more. Perhaps the Ordo Xenos would have more information, but it would not be appropriate or safe to send off a request to them. Without that knowledge, however, it was almost impossible for Jonas to understand what was meant by the “banshee’s call” or what the “dark portents” might be. Whatever they were, the author of the tablet seemed most insistent that they were extremely important and should not be ignored.
Sighing deeply, Jonas pushed his chair back and stood up, turning to survey the vast collection of book-stacks that filled the cavernous librarium. There had to be something there that would help him, even if he had to go through each volume in turn. He was in no hurry—research always took time, and it wasn’t as though the banshee was calling right then.
The low afternoon sun rushed into the amphitheatre through the great arch, filling the circular arena with red light and dazzling any who dared to look out of the ancient stadium’s only exit. Any aspirant who even thought of looking out of that arch was not wanted in the trials in any case. Fewer and fewer of the hundreds of warriors that had collected during the first congregation on the previous day would walk out through that arch each evening, until there were only a handful left. Of those, perhaps three or four would discover that there was, in fact, another exit from the amphitheatre, through a series of tunnels and valves in Krax-7 itself, which led into the heart of the Blood Ravens’ monastery-outpost. Only those few, who would never dream of staring out into the blinding, bloody light of the local star, only they would eventually reach beyond it aboard the Ravenous Spirit, en route to the Litany of Fury, where their real trials would begin.
[Dawn of War 02] - Ascension Page 11
