by Nick Kyme
‘You have not answered my question, seer.’
‘Such arrogance, even from you. Must there always be an answer? Have you not seen enough already to understand. You do not die here.’ He gestured to the Drakes. ‘They do not die here… if… if you can reach beyond the ignorance of your species and accept that there are forces in the universe which even mankind cannot hope to understand or master.’
‘Your reasons, seer,’ said Vulkan. ‘I must know, and judge the truth of it for myself. Remove your helm so I might see your face.’
‘There is little time for it. I have seen what happens next if you refuse…’ He sighed with centuries-long resignation, but reached up and slowly took off his helm.
Far from duplicitous or self-assured, the eldar looked weary and old for one of his immortal kind.
‘My concerns are not so different from yours,’ he said, his voice different without the filter of his mask, more tired and not nearly so aloof. ‘I was part of a plan. I believed it to be right. I was wrong. I wrote another plan from fate.’
‘We cannot trust this creature,’ said Gargo.
‘What other choice do we have?’ answered Zytos.
The seer turned his inscrutable gaze upon Zytos.
‘None, son of Themis. And yet here I am trusting you, putting all of my hope in mankind.’ He looked back to Vulkan. ‘It was not meant to be your path. It was your brother’s, the one you called Gorgon, if that brings any comfort. I witnessed his death, every skein led to it. No act you could have taken would have prevented it. He rejected the path. I was wrong then too. But what you do next will determine if your brother’s sacrifice was in vain. Do not submit to the laughter of thirsting gods, Vulkan. It is the cry of the lost and the damned.’
Vulkan looked to the hordes, at the daemons now hurrying for his blood and soul, at the ones still fighting at the gate. The last of the defending army had all but stepped through, but the way yet remained open. It could stay that way for an age and still Vulkan would not get through the legions in his path.
‘What must I do?’ he asked.
The seer stepped back to carve a circular rune into the ground with his staff. After a muttered incantation, the rune began to glow, as if a bright light burned through its cracks, and then it suddenly fell away and took the ground with it.
A maelstrom of light swirled within, a writhing tempest wracked by lightning.
‘This is the last time our paths will cross,’ said the seer. ‘I have done all I can for mankind.’
He sounded sad.
‘The path will close as soon as you pass through it. Do not wait.’
The seer vanished, swept up by the same storm that had presaged his arrival.
Vulkan was left alone with his sons. The talisman still felt warm to the touch, but he chose to say nothing, for what could he say that made any sense?
‘To have come this far and fought this hard, to be within sight of Terra itself…’ said Gargo, his gaze on the way ahead to the daemon horde.
‘Thwarted, and cast unto an uncertain fate,’ said Abidemi.
‘Our path has ever been uncertain,’ said Zytos. ‘And we have walked it regardless. Fate brought us here, but our brotherhood is what has kept us alive. I trust in that now, as I have always.’
A great sorrow fell upon Vulkan’s face then, tempered by pride and admiration for his sons.
Staring down into the maelstrom, he felt a hand upon his shoulder.
‘Where you go, we follow,’ said Zytos. ‘Wherever it leads us.’
Together, they stepped into the storm.
Thirty
His dark cults, arising
As a girl, Renski had grown up on an agri farm on a border world within the Sol System. A decent way of life, better than most. Her father had raised steers – fine, well-nourished bovids destined for the bellies of the Emperor’s crusading armies. He took pride in his stock, and fed and cared for them well. He loved his daughter too, especially since his wife had died of lung pox and left the two of them alone. Barely an adolescent, Renski had tended the herd, lending a hand after her mother could not.
She had been in the grazing pens when a slythig had found a way through the refraction field. It feasted well on the good meat, raising a panic in the bovids. Renski recognised the stampede for what it was too late. She became trapped in the pens, unable to escape. Her only hope was to wade into the herd and find the slythig, choking on animal sweat and her own terror of being crushed or stung. She killed it, of course, an electro-pike to its chitinous thorax, but her aspirations to be an agri farmer ended that day. The memory of it never left her, though.
It returned now with interest, Renski wading through the herd again, looking for a slythig.
She eyed the faces of the crowd with wary suspicion, glad she did so through her visor. That way they wouldn’t see her fear.
‘One stab to the thorax and it’s over,’ she muttered.
‘Proctor?’
‘Nothing,’ said Renski.
The wreck of Nade’s Valkyrie was ahead. It had crashed a few hundred paces from the wall. The pilot had managed to bring it down on its belly. Renski considered whether the intention of the saboteurs had actually been to hit the wall.
People scattered as the intercession squad approached, too timid to keep up their looting and shouting in the face of shock mauls and combat shotguns. They didn’t go far, however, lurking at the periphery of the wrecked gunship, hungry and fearful. Only at a distance did the belligerence continue.
The Valkyrie’s two door gunners were gone, flung loose during the crash, or taken. Renski hoped it wasn’t the latter and eyed the crowd with fresh disdain. A rash of indistinguishable, dirty faces looked back at her.
‘They hate us,’ said one of the squad, wisely using the vox to express his concerns.
‘They’re just afraid, Lenix,’ Renski replied openly.
The gunship’s hold had been stripped almost bare. Only what was bolted to the hull remained and even that showed evidence of attempted removal by force. Mercifully, the two heavy bolters mounted to the side doors remained intact.
Upon entering the gloomy hold, where smoke still hung in the air, Renski instantly noticed the medi-pack, tool kit and emergency rations were gone. So too a barrel of steel cable, its concomitant hand winch and an entire lockbox of photon flares. All were standard issue. She checked the armoury. The wall-mounted case had been severely tampered with but not breached. She allowed herself a small sigh of relief. ‘At least they didn’t get any weapons or ammunition,’ remarked Lenix.
‘They shot a Valk from the sky, Lenix. With a rocket tube. At least they didn’t get any more weapons.’
‘Who are they, proctor?’ asked Heg, an old veteran who had served the Lex most of his adult life. Renski trusted his instincts.
‘You tell me, Heg,’ she said, the three of them carefully working their way through the troop hold to the cockpit. The rest of the squad had formed a perimeter outside. They were disciplined enough not to chatter, and stayed vigilant.
‘Not opportunists, I’d say,’ answered Heg. ‘Takes planning to do something like this. Training too. And the weapons? Not easy to take out a gunship like that. Need to know where to hit for a start. That takes precision.’ He had looked down at the damage to the gunship, rubbing his salt-and-pepper stubble, but now turned his gaze back to Renski. ‘You served with the Reeves, didn’t you, proctor?’
Renski nodded.
‘Then you’ll have seen what they’ve been chasing. The rumours.’
She had – the cults, the ritual murders. Renski didn’t like to think of them as sacrifices. The fear was bad enough without fuelling it with superstition and stories about monsters.
‘What was it they heard?’ she asked.
‘Something about his dark cults, arising.’
‘I hea
rd a name too,’ said Lenix. ‘Heard it a lot recently. “Lupercal”.’
Lupercal. The name of Horus.
Lenix looked pale in the low light of the stab lumens. Renski had to admit even she felt colder, though she couldn’t attribute it to anything as mundane as the dropping temperature. Night was coming, and in more ways than the literal sense.
‘Let’s get moving, shall we,’ she said, and headed for the cockpit.
The door had been breached, and Renski felt a sick sensation in her stomach as she considered that Nade and his navigator, Uli, might have been taken. She gave a sigh of relief when she saw them still strapped in to their flight seats. Even from behind, as she forced her way into the shattered cockpit, she could tell they were both dead.
It wasn’t until she made it around to the front that she saw being taken by the mob would have been mercy.
Nade and Uli had been cut. Not from the glacis at the front of the gunship – that had weathered the impact, cracked but holding. Someone had come in with a knife and cut them. It hadn’t been to kill them; the blood was so minimal they must have died on impact. Nade had a head wound. Uli had been impaled by a piece of fuselage bent in from the crumpled nose cone. Symbols had been carved into their bodies. She had seen one of them before, a wheel with eight points. Something felt wrong about the air, it was too heavy and thick, as if the gravity had suddenly increased.
Lenix scurried from the cockpit. Bending double, he vomited in the troop hold.
Even Heg was breathing hard, unable to take his eyes off Nade’s mutilated body.
‘If they did this…’ he mumbled.
‘It means the perpetrators are close and any number of people in that crowd outside could have seen them.’
Renski raised the other proctors on the vox. Situation reports filtered in slowly. No meaningful progress. A few dangerous stills had been shut down, obscura peddlers rousted and shackled. Tents kicked in. No sign of a rocket tube, no sign of any insurgents, the so-called ‘dark cults’.
‘Can you feel it, Heg?’ said Renski, getting them both out of the cockpit.
‘Proctor?’
‘This place, it’s about to explode.’
The dry earth trembled, unnoticed by the crowds. They were too intent on the enforcers in their midst, or the trades they were making, or the hooded figures who moved amongst them. In sight of the wall but hidden by the masses, something stirred beneath the wastes.
Once they were back outside the crashed gunship, Renski got in touch with Gethe.
‘Warden-primus, we found something at the crash site.’
As she talked, Renski surveyed the immediate crowd. One woman caught her eye, stern-faced, cold. Something about her didn’t feel right, and Renski had learned long ago to trust such instincts. From her time in the Reeves, she had learned something of human behaviour, of the pathological desire in some perpetrators to linger by the scenes of their crimes, driven by a sadistic urge to see the aftermath.
She motioned to Lenix to investigate.
‘Have you apprehended the bombers, Proctor Renski?’
Gethe sounded nervous, and Renski craned her neck to try to get a look at him on the wall, but couldn’t find him. She saw the guns well enough, aimed at the crowd, at her and her men.
‘Not yet, warden-primus.’
‘Then get to it, Renski. The wall isn’t safe until you’ve rooted out these saboteurs.’
Renski bit her tongue, deciding against telling her superior how ridiculous and paranoid his request actually was. They had drawn what evidence they could from the wreck, some of it extremely disturbing. That would have to suffice for now.
She told Gethe what they had found, and the warden-primus fell silent for a long moment.
‘Warden-primus?’ she asked after deeming the pause long enough.
‘I don’t like this, proctor. I’m recalling you and your men. Expect immediate extraction.’
‘Sir, we’ve only been out here a short time. A larger sweep might reveal–’
‘I’ve made my decision, proctor. Prepare your squads. You’re coming back to the wall.’
Lenix had reached the woman Renski had identified and started questioning her. Another man had come to remonstrate with him, the woman’s husband perhaps or simply an agitated onlooker.
‘Yes, warden-primus,’ said Renski, wondering whether Gethe was concerned about her wellbeing or if he actually just wanted more troops on the wall.
She was about to go over to Lenix when she felt a gentle tug on her arm and looked down to see a little boy, no older than six she guessed.
Renski waved away two of her squad who had been about to intercede, and crouched down to the boy’s eye level.
‘Are you lost, child? Is she your mother?’
She gestured to the woman. An argument had developed, drawing in three other enforcers. Heg was nearby, already on the vox, calling it in with the other squads in case they needed reinforcement.
Renski was rising again, keen to quell any disquiet and avoid anything worse than an altercation, when the boy grabbed at her wrist.
She glanced down, her attention still half on the increasingly volatile exchange between Lenix and the woman. Other parties had begun to get involved. She needed to shut this down fast. The boy blinked, his face as cold and pale as alabaster, and the same disquiet she had felt in the Valkyrie came back.
‘Lupercal,’ he said, in a way no child should be able to.
Renski frowned, fear clenching her gut as if she were back in the grazing pen with the slythig. ‘What?’
The woman stopped arguing. She just stopped.
‘Lupercal,’ she said.
Then another, just a voice, hidden amongst the crowd.
‘Lupercal.’
A vendor set down the vermin he had been roasting on a spit.
‘Lupercal.’
A scavenger, sifting through his loot, let the sack slip from his grasp and his ‘treasure’ tumble free.
‘Lupercal.’
A hooded figure emerged from the ground. Several hooded figures. They were armed.
‘Gun!’ shouted Renski, and then the shooting started.
From the wall, Gethe saw the muzzle flashes, angry starbursts made brighter by the onset of night.
Fear had him. Of the unknown, of the night. Of Horus. He heard them chanting the Warmaster’s name, his followers. On Terra. Here at Plaintive’s Reach.
He didn’t even try to reach Renski on the vox. He just gave the order to open fire.
Renski tried to keep her head as she fired her sidearm. She had lost sight of the boy. He’d let her go as soon as the gun battle began.
Lenix was dead, shot through the throat at close range. Heg had a leg wound, but had managed to limp into the cover of an upturned vendor’s cart. Solid slugs ricocheted off the crude metal sidings. Two other enforcers were screaming as the crowd overwhelmed and crushed them. She tried but couldn’t reach Brankk or any of the other proctors.
‘To the wall! To the wall!’ she cried, knowing the sentries on the battlements would start shooting soon. She got off a shot with her sidearm. In the darkness, she thought she saw one of the hooded gunmen go down. Cultists, she realised. A few had shed their cloaks, revealing the sigil she had seen on Nade and Uli carved into their own flesh. It was sickening.
Someone stepped in Renski’s way. A large man. He had a piece of metal pipe in his hand and looked as if he wanted to knock her teeth out with it.
Cultist or not, she felled him with a single blow of her shock maul and didn’t wait to see the man jerk in nerve-shredding agony.
‘Move, move!’ she urged her men. The other intercession squads were coming in too.
‘We need immediate support and extraction,’ Renski shouted down the vox. ‘Get the Valks in the air and open up the damn gate!’
<
br /> Sporadic gunfire lit up the shadows, and threw scared and angry faces into sharp relief. The crowd panicked and they swept towards the wall. Renski and about thirty enforcers were just ahead of them. The rest fought running battles through the makeshift streets of the shanty town that had risen up outside Plaintive’s Reach.
Las-fire stabbed down from above like hot, deadly rain. In the distance, a man’s head broke apart as the sniper towers went to work.
A rocket tube fizzed out of the darkness on the wasteland side of the wall. One of the watchtowers exploded. Rubble and several bodies fell forwards from the wall to the screams of the onlookers caught in the middle.
‘Gethe! What are you doing? Gethe!’ Renski screamed down the vox, frantically urging on the remaining enforcers. They had to get to the wall. Gethe had to open the gate or they’d be dead. No room for the Valkyries now.
One hove in anyway, coming up over the wall like a bird of prey. Its side doors rolled open and two heavy bolters started up. The firing was indiscriminate. Bodies were churned to red mist. Mostly cultists, who had amassed in force, but not all.
‘Bloody Throne, Gethe! Cease fire, damn it!’
Gethe must have lost all capacity to think, to reason. All that remained was fear and the instinctive reaction to it. Fight or flight. It seemed Gethe had chosen the former.
Renski took a glancing hit to the shoulder and cried out. She stumbled, but found Heg beneath her and the two struggled on together, their enforcer brethren around them.
Maybe eighty men were left out of over two hundred that Renski could see. She led them to the wall. They were perhaps fifty paces out, Renski screaming at Gethe to open the gate and let them in when the Valkyrie came down. She didn’t see what disabled it. It looked like a haywire grenade, judging by the caul of electrical interference wreathing the hull.
The gunship came down hard, nosediving right into the wall. It was maybe ten metres away from Renski when it hit. An explosion followed, then another, but not from a rocket tube detonation. In the sudden flare of light, Renski saw the wall tremble. One of the outer armour plates that ran between each buttress buckled and split. Its absence revealed a crack.
