by John French
There were many witches on their world. Most were killed or hounded into the wild, but more were born every year. When the emissaries of the Sky God came they took all the witches they could find up to the stars. If they found witches had been hidden their anger would be terrible. Cyrus had heard them talk and knew what would happen.
His mother had kept his abilities secret for several years, but it had not lasted; there was too much strangeness about him. Sometimes he yelled strange things in his sleep, or knew what someone was about to do before it happened. People noticed and people talked.
That night his father had sat amongst the men looking pale, saying little, not looking at his son. His mother had tried to hide him, had argued with his father, raging through falling tears. It had made no difference. The village had waited outside the house until his father led him out. They took him down to the plains where the temples that fell from the sky waited, swallowing long lines of people: confused old men, wild-eyed hermits and weeping children. Cyrus had not cried; there was no point. He knew what was going to happen.
The world had given up its witches, but it had ultimately made no difference. A clutch of uncontrollably powerful alpha plus psykers had been born there a decade later. The Imperium had burned the world from orbit, reducing it to cinders. Far away in his cell on Sabatine, Cyrus had woken with the taste of ash in his mouth.
Cyrus blinked and ran his tongue through his mouth. The memory of the gritty taste was a ghost sensation on his palate. The servitors pulled away, smoke coiling from where the wax cooled on his newly attached parchments. He nodded, flexing his hand inside his gauntlet. His storm bolter cycled to readiness with a metallic snarl. Another servitor clanked forwards on chained tracks, his helmet held in callipered hands. The helmet locked over his head with a hiss. For an instant, blind darkness wrapped him before his vision flickered with luminous readouts.
Now we wait for the storm to come, he thought.
In the gulf beyond the station’s hull, the void split like skin slit with a knife. A luminous miasma poured out of the wound, staining the light of the stars as it spread. It coiled in the vacuum, forming folds and tendrils like milk curdling in dark wine. Half-formed shapes moved through the spreading cloud as thousands of hungering eyes turned towards the station. The wound stretched wider and the cloud grew.
Claros station shook with the metal-voiced fury of cannon fire. Beams of energy and lines of shells streamed across the black expanse. They struck the oncoming tide and sliced through it like claws raking through fat. Chunks of solidifying matter cooked to charred fragments. Explosions scooped holes in ethereal flesh. Vast mouths opened in the cloud’s surface crying out in silent pain. And the guns kept firing. Auto loaders rammed macro shells into smoking breeches. Las-capacitors shrieked as they built up charge, and plasma generators boiled with overheating ferocity. Behind blast doors and barricades the defenders felt the station quake and prayed for hope, for salvation, for fate to favour them.
The first salvoes cut into the sickly pall, but it swelled without pausing. When it reached the station’s hull it writhed across it, searching for weakness. Where it found that weakness it poured through in an ethereal wave of extending talons and bared teeth.
Cyrus closed his eyes. Sounds and images faded until he was conscious of only a few sensations: the familiar feeling of his Terminator armour against his skin, the heft of his sword in his hand, and the worn segments of his gauntlets, flexing as he shifted his grip on the hide-wound hilt. The blade was keening, its edge shivering.
He opened his eyes. The dark metal walls of the lift shaft slid past, the red glow of his brothers’ eyes diluting the darkness. Galba and his squad stood beside him. Six figures in ghost white, the blue of their helmets lost in the low light. The top of the lift shaft receded above them. Numbers flickered across Cyrus’s vision, counting down the estimated time to engagement.
The enemy had broken through into a tunnel under the fifth station wing. The Helicon Guard defending the unshielded tunnel were on the edge of breaking. Panicked voices washed through Cyrus’s vox, and tactical assessments filled his helmet display. It was the sound and measure of a massacre.
This is what we exist for, he thought. This is what we were made for: to step into certain defeat and undo that fate.
The lift platform halted with a metallic clang. In front of Cyrus the blast doors waited. He could almost feel what was beyond those closed metal teeth.
‘The Emperor wills it, and we are His weapon,’ growled Galba from behind Cyrus.
‘The Emperor wills it, and His will is fury,’ said Cyrus. Cold power blazed down the sword in his hand, its edge singing in tune with his mind. Chainblades snarled to life. A crackling field enveloped Galba’s fist, casting the White Consuls in flickering shadows.
‘By His will,’ spoke the White Consuls.
The blast doors ground open. A broad, circular passage extended away in front of Cyrus. The pipes and support ribs lining its side made it look like the inside of a vast animal. A shoulder-high barrier of welded plasteel ran across the tunnel’s mouth. Behind it, the remains of a company of Helicon Guard were dying.
A wall of sound washed over Cyrus: human shrieks, the crack-fizz of lasguns, and inhuman sounds cried from the throats of daemons. Some of the Helicons were falling back, firing ragged bursts into a glittering fog that rolled across the barricade. Shifting shapes moved like shadows cast by a flickering fire.
Cyrus began to run. He was fifty paces from the barrier, armour shaking with each step. Las-bolts whipped past him, sparkling as they vanished into the boiling fog in front of him. The troops who had not fled the barricade were dying. Distorted shapes with many limbs spun amongst the Guardsmen. Blue flames ate through armour and flesh where the shapes touched. Single-eyed creatures pulled at the barrier with rotting hands. A thick sweet scent reached Cyrus’s nose, mocking his sealed armour.
He was thirty paces away. He began firing, his storm bolter stitching fire through threat markers, explosions blooming amongst the coiling fog. A Guardsman staggered away from the barricade and took a trembling step towards Cyrus. His face was pale and streaked with blood, his lasgun loose in his hands. A shape flowed out of the fog behind the man. He took another step. The shape snapped into sharp focus. It stood poised on the top of the barrier. Its body was a lithe sculpture of taut muscle and glittering skin. Eyes that were circles of reflective darkness looked at Cyrus and it hissed like a snake. Cyrus drew his sword back.
The figure leaped, its claws closing over the fleeing Guardsman’s head as it turned in the air. It landed in a whip spray of blood as the Guardsman crumpled to the floor. For an instant the creature stood, quivering as if in pleasure. It looked at Cyrus, and smiled with a mouth of hooked teeth.
Cyrus charged. The creature pounced, its teeth wide in its beautiful skull, its eyes glinting like moonlight on frost. Cyrus dropped into a half crouch and rammed his sword forwards. The sword tip punched into the creature’s slender neck. Glowing blood flowed down its length as the creature’s momentum rammed it onto the blade. Cyrus felt the creature’s essence dissolve into black vapour. He ripped the sword back. The creature’s death in his mind was like the taste of honey and bile.
Another creature blurred towards him, claws clicking, movements coiling. Cyrus cut, armour and muscles flowing. The figure swayed, and Cyrus’s sword struck the deck in a shower of sparks. The creature flipped through the air faster than Cyrus could turn his sword, its claws reaching for his face as it spun. He could see the death in its eyes, felt it call him to oblivion.
An armoured fist closed on the creature’s body with a crack of bound thunder. Galba lifted the broken creature from the ground and threw it down. The sergeant brought his foot down on its skull, grinding it to fragments.
‘They come,’ shouted the sergeant to Cyrus. Bolt shells roared from Galba’s pistol as he turned towards the tunnel mouth.
The barricade had given way. Rotting figures scrambled through
the breach, rusted blades scraping on the decking, their mouths drooling pus. The Helicon Guard who had clung to the barricades fell back. Cyrus felt a buzzing inside his head, an insect touch on his skin. Shells flew from his storm bolter. He kept the trigger squeezed, the gun sucking rounds from its drum feed. Targets vanished and pulsed back into sight. He stepped forwards into the space gouged by the storm bolter.
Cyrus glanced over at Galba. The sergeant was at the centre of a closing circle of leering faces, slime thick blades hacking at his armour. The four other members of his squad were cutting towards him with their chainblades. Galba punched forwards and gripped a horned head in his lightning-sheathed fist. He lifted the creature and fired his pistol into its eye. The head exploded like an overripe fruit. Cyrus saw Galba back-fist three creatures to pulp before the cage of hacking blades closed over him.
Claws and blades scraped across Cyrus’s armour. Rotting bodies surrounded him, their yellow eyes pressed against his helmet lenses. He tried to move his sword arm, felt the press of bodies weighing it down. Something sharp found a join in his armour. He could feel pathogens trying to find purchase in his immune system, radiating pain through his body. Their daemon’s reek reached inside his mind. He could feel their hunger. He remembered the vision: the circling creatures, the sword slipping from his hand. Was this the fate he had seen? The thought sunk into him and for an instant he teetered on the edge of doubt.
Anger flared through him, overwhelming his pain and doubt. He would not fall, not here. He would deny that fate.
A pattern of thought and feeling formed in his mind. It burned like a sun trapped in his skull. He held on to it for a moment, feeling it feed on his rage, growing wilder and hotter. He released the thought. Flames burst from him. The creatures around him wailed as their flesh cooked. He poured his anger into the fire, feeling power mirror his rage. It quickened and grew until he was a still figure, at the heart of a white-hot storm. The display inside his helmet dimmed against the brightness. In the inferno the daemons shrieked as he tore their essence apart.
His body sang with the power running through him, and his psychic hood was ice-cold against his scalp. He did not want to let go. He could hear something whispering, calling to him to never let this end, to give himself to it, to hold on to this power forever. It would be right, it would be…
He released the fury in his mind, the burning power collapsing into a dull ember ache in his skull.
Sudden silence and stillness surrounded him. He was breathing hard, his skin clammy and cold in his armour. Around him the floor and walls of the passage glowed. The barricade was a twisted mound of blackened metal, like a crumpled cloth. He turned, meeting the staring eyes of the Helicon Guard who looked up from where they cowered by the lift entrance. Sheathing his sword he reached up and released his helmet. The air smelt of cooked meat and sulphur.
Four members of Galba’s squad stood amongst the wreck of the barricade. The teeth of their chainblades were thick with oozing flesh. Galba lay between them. Congealing blood and yellow mucus caked his splintered armour. His helmet was a ruin of squashed bone and torn ceramite.
Galba’s four squad brothers lifted their sergeant onto their shoulders. They murmured the death lament of Sabatine as they moved. They would carry him back to the Aethon where he would wait in cold stasis until he returned to his birth planet for the last time. Hearing the old words from a planet that was home but which had not borne him, Cyrus found that there was nothing he could say.
Its new face was dull and uninteresting. It had worn more faces than it could recall, and it would forget this one as soon as it had taken another. The weaker flesh-born moved around it. They were those that they called soldiers. It found the idea of such a title laughable: as if a name could change their herd animal nature into something greater. It had many names, both granted and stolen. Changeling some called it, but that was not its name and the description barely touched the essence of its nature. It knew how little a name was worth.
It breathed, feeling the world as the flesh-born felt it, dulled to simple stimuli and base sensations. A giant warrior in blue stood close by. Space Marines: that was what the flesh-born called them. It could taste this one’s thoughts, feel their nuances, the characteristics and temperament they implied. Interesting. So much more interesting than the role it played now. There were subtleties and depths of self-deception at play that would make such an identity a delight to play. But it had a bargain to fulfil, and for that bargain the drab face that it wore was what it needed.
During the battle it had worn the form of lesser children of decadence, passing amongst its supposed kind with flawless ease. Isolated and forgotten on the edge of the violence it had found what it needed. The man had been hugging his legs to his chest and weeping silently. An ideal face to wear, it had thought. It had destroyed the original, reducing the flesh-born’s body to dust with a touch. Now it wore the flesh-born’s shape.
‘Harlik,’ said a voice close by.
For a moment it stayed where it was, staring at the scorched plating of the deck.
‘Harlik, come on, they’re pulling us out.’
Harlik. Yes, that would be the name that went with the face, a dull name for a dull entity. It turned to look at the speaker. A heavy-faced man, smeared with soot, the ochre and red of his uniform stained by blood and vomit.
‘Yeah, I’m coming,’ it said, its voice perfect, the layer of shocked slowness consistent with what Harlik would have sounded like had he survived the assault. ‘I’m coming.’
It followed the flesh-born, tasting their thoughts as it moved amongst them. Most were struggling with emotions and thoughts it could not comprehend: shock, terror, guilt, anger, hope. It could not understand these feelings, but it could imitate their effects flawlessly.
Shoulders hunched, eyes vacant, it trudged on with the rest. It would need a new face as it moved towards its goal. Yes, it would wear another face soon.
The blind figure talked to Cyrus in his dreams.
‘There is no way out. Your fate is written,’ says the astropath, turning in the cone of hololight, its voice a dry croak. He reaches out but the figure turns, and he sees that it has two faces: one grinning, the other snarling; both blind. He reaches for his sword but feels his hand close on nothing. The two-faced figure laughs.
He is falling through fading shadow, tumbling past stars and moons, drifting through eternity, his body a lie, time a lie.
He stands at the bottom of stone tiers that ascended into darkness. He looks up. Eyes blaze back at him.
His brothers are shouting at him, close by servitors are blurting code in frantic streams. He is raising his sword.
He is standing on the bridge of a ship as it falls through winds that howl with laughter.
Darkness folds over him.
There are Space Marines in blue armour. He can see dragons coiling on their shoulder guards. A figure in black armour moves amongst them, a reptilian cloak hanging from his back in folds of iridescent scales. They are walking through ghost-quiet corridors. Dark liquid seeps out of the walls in their wake. He calls to them, but they are wraiths hovering beyond an impenetrable veil.
He brings his sword down and the two heads of the astropath scream with the sound of a murder of dying crows.
This has not happened. This is the future, he thinks.
The blind figure turns in its cone of cold light, its two faces grinning, laughing from both of its mouths.
‘No, this is the past,’ says the blind figure.
Cyrus opened his eyes with a snarl of pain. A servitor with a skull of polished chrome cocked its head, looking at him with cold blue eye lenses, a piston hand poised above his shoulder armour. He took a ragged breath.
Shadows surrounding pools of harsh light filled the armoury. He was standing at the centre of a clutch of white-robed servitors, limbs splayed on a cruciform frame that supported the dead weight of his armour. The armour was silent, its machine spirit slumbering while th
e servitors peeled it from his body.
It had been some hours since the first attempts by the daemons to break through the gaps in the Geller field. The warp still enclosed the station but after the first attacks there had been quiet. It was not peace, though, just an in-breath before the next onslaught.
Scorched and stained by battle, Cyrus had returned to the Aethon to have his armour stripped and cleansed. He had hoped that the act would be mirrored in his body and mind, but his temples still throbbed with the psychic exertion of the battle. He had not been able to stop thinking about the signal that had called them here. The more he thought about it the more he was sure he was missing something about it, something just out of hearing waiting beneath the surface. Then the vision had taken him again.
He nodded to the servitors and they continued to unpick the Terminator armour, pulling away plates, and uncoupling system links with cold, mechanical fingers.
‘A hard fight,’ said a voice beyond the stab lights of the hovering servo-skulls.
Cyrus squinted, his eyes cutting into the darkness. Phobos stood in his own armour, the white Terminator plate making him look a marble statue.
‘You look weary,’ he said. There was a hint of a smile on his lips.
Cyrus nodded grimly. ‘We held the breach. It cost us Galba.’
The first cost we must pay, he thought, a cost I have said we must bear.
‘He goes to the ancestors,’ said Phobos, nodding. ‘As must we all.’
Cyrus did not reply but watched as two servitors disconnected a series of bio-readout cables from plugs in his side. They burbled to each other in machine code as they worked. In over two centuries of war he had seen thousands die. Brothers had fallen at his side, and he had made decisions that had both cost and saved lives. But the first tangible price of coming to Claros troubled him. He felt as if he had sleepwalked into a cobweb that bound tighter around him with every move he made.
