‘You should go now, khan,’ he said coldly. ‘I have heard enough.’
Shiban bowed. ‘Thank you for–’
Jemulan had already turned his back.
Jochi was waiting outside. ‘What did he say?’
Shiban kept walking, and the two of them strode back through the decks towards the shuttle bays.
‘He did not see the problem.’
‘I did not think he would.’
Shiban said nothing. It had been a slim hope – Jemulan did not have quite the same reputation as Hasik. He had not been there from the start. He was not as close to the Khagan. Perhaps it had always been too much to expect.
‘So what now? Do we wait for the Khagan to return?’
Shiban shook his head. ‘No. We are not children.’ He stopped walking. ‘We are reacting. We are waiting for others to move. When did that become our way? This thing needs to be seized.’
‘What do you have in mind?’
‘The Swordstorm,’ said Shiban firmly. ‘We cannot influence anything on the Kaljian.’
‘Hasik is already there.’
‘Then we need to be there too.’
‘That means disobeying orders.’
‘It does.’
Jochi smiled. ‘As long as I know.’
‘We will gather the brotherhood. All of them. They will be opposed to this madness, at least.’
‘How far will this go, khan?’
‘You mean, what am I prepared to do to halt it?’
Shiban thought of his guan dao glaive – the one that Hasik had given him upon his Ascension – hanging silently in his chambers, waiting. It would be in his hands again soon enough.
He thought of the last battle on Chondax, when he had witnessed the Khan fighting with such poise and perfection – the art of combat given physical form – that he had thought nothing could ever come close in imagination or reality.
He thought of his first meeting with Yesugei on the plains of home, the wind pulling at his hair.
These were the things that had made him. These were the things that made the Legion.
‘Anything, Jochi,’ he said, starting walking again. ‘I will do anything.’
The Khan did not believe the evidence of his senses for a long time. He kept his dao raised, poised to strike, as it had done against the psychneuein.
The spectre before him was just as they had been – translucent, glowing with faint light, flickering and broken as if filtered by a faulty hololith projector.
‘What are you?’ the Khan asked warily.
The shade looked thoughtful. ‘A remnant,’ he said slowly. ‘A dream of something destroyed.’ He raised an insubstantial hand and held it up before an insubstantial face. ‘Matter. Thought. Energy. We have learned that there is not much difference, in the end, between them all.’
The Khan held his ground. Magnus’s voice was the same, exactly the same – sonorous, a little mournful, rich with the accumulated cadences of a hundred dialects. His baroque armour was cracked open, hanging from his frame in slivers. His cloak was ripped, and his robes were stained with old blood.
‘You are not Magnus,’ said the Khan.
‘Maybe not entirely,’ mused the shade. ‘Maybe not. But we share a soul. That is the important thing – the soul. I see yours before me, much as it ever was. Impatient. Burning with resentment. I did not think to see it again.’
The Khan’s eyes narrowed. The likeness was uncanny – almost seductively so. The way the shade moved, the aura it projected, they were all the same. The phantasm picked its way through the dust before sitting heavily upon the shell of the great bronze Occullum scope. The metal flexed beneath his weight. In some sense, then, the spectre influenced the world of matter.
‘Put your sword down,’ said Magnus. ‘You couldn’t hurt me with it, and I have no intention of hurting you.’
The Khan lowered the point but did not sheathe it. ‘What happened here?’
Magnus smiled wearily. ‘The Wolves happened. Our father’s vengeance, sent from Fenris. They brought the Sisters with them too, and Valdor. Such violence. Valdor is a machine. Russ, for all his theatricality, is little different. It happened rather quickly in the end.’
The Khan felt hollow. Despite all that he had seen, to hear confirmation of it was still hard.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Why did they do it?’
Magnus drew in a long breath. As he did so, the dust around him stirred. ‘Don’t blame them. They were doing what they were bred to do, like dogs trained on a scent. And they were right to bring me to heel, in a way. I made mistakes. You warned me of some of them, back before I went to Nikaea. You remember when we spoke on Ullanor? I should have listened then. But I never did listen well. Happier to be listened to, more’s the pity.’
The Khan watched Magnus carefully as he spoke. The old flamboyance had gone, replaced by a kind of grim resignation. Every so often his outline would flicker out almost completely, then restore itself weakly. The ghostly presence looked on the verge of guttering out, as if sustained by some damaged power source.
‘Magnus,’ said the Khan, controlling his impatience badly. ‘Tell me plainly.’
‘You were right,’ said Magnus. ‘You were right, and that is all there is to say. I should have restrained my sons. You never made the bargains I had to, so your Legion was never compromised. But here’s the truth – we were all deceived. All of us. The Ocean was never benign, and it was conspiring against us even as we stepped into its shallows. The greater the soul, the greater the jeopardy. Horus was the greatest soul of them all, and so his was the furthest fall. Tell you plainly? Very well. Horus has been eaten by the warp. His body is bursting with it, corroding him, gnawing at him from the inside. There were others – Erebus, Lorgar – but it was his decision in the end. He can’t hide behind them, for they were only shadows compared to him.’
The Khan drew closer, never taking his eyes from Magnus’s face. It was hard to follow his train of thought – the Crimson King’s mind had always worked in strange, roundabout ways.
‘I tried to warn our father,’ said Magnus. ‘That was my crime, and this is the punishment.’ He looked around the dust-caked caves. ‘It was pride, that was all. Pride that swallowed Horus, too. You see, Jaghatai, here’s the problem – we were made too well. Nothing in the galaxy could stand against us. We learned that we, and only we, held the destiny of a billion worlds in our own hands. So the gods waited and they watched, and they realised what we did not – that only the primarchs could destroy the primarchs. Only we could bring down the eternal Imperium, because everything else had been annihilated. That’s what Lorgar called it. The Primordial Annihilator.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Save me, but Lorgar can be tedious. He might grasp the deeper truths, but he’s as much of a slave to his gene-coding as the rest of us.’
The Khan squatted down, bringing his eyes into line with Magnus’s. He rested his dao tip-down on the rock floor.
‘Russ did this?’ he asked.
Magnus nodded. ‘As completely as he does everything.’
‘And Horus?’
‘No, brother. No.’ Magnus shook his head a little impatiently. ‘Do you not see yet? We are all just two sides of the same coin. Most of us have cast our lots, and only a few remain. Then the game begins. I have come to see it like this – the gods demand entertainment. They demand contest and trial. We could not be allowed to defeat our own daemons, for that would be boring, and boredom is the only thing the eternals fear. We are being lined up, one by one, to tear at one another’s throats. I do not think they wish to see a victor. I think they wish us to fight forever, locked in madness until the universe’s end.’
Magnus smiled again at the Khan. It used to be a warmer smile; now it was condescending, self-aware, cynical.
‘I see much, from my new home,’ he said. ‘I see how things are lining up. You’re one of the last, Jaghatai. They don’t know which way you will go. None of them do, and that’s why you ha
ve the eyes of the galaxy on you at last.’
‘Do not talk like this,’ said the Khan, coldly. ‘I have never taken sides.’
‘You’d take them all on?’ laughed Magnus. ‘I believe you would at that. But come, there are only two paths here – you can hunker down in what remains of our father’s Imperium and try to keep the moon-wolf from beating down the door, or you can remember how Horus used to be, and stand at his side as he brings terror to the complacent. The first would be the more loyal course, but the other has its merits.’
‘What of you?’
Magnus paused then, as if the question had only just occurred to him. ‘Me? What of me?’ His one eye creased under a lone eyebrow. ‘My choices are constrained. I know more than anyone what awaits us on the other side. Do you think I welcome that? It is the ruin I worked for centuries to avoid, but our father is not the forgiving sort. My bridges are burned with him. They were burned when I broke the wards over his little project.’
Magnus looked sidelong at the Khan.
‘He’s been up to all sorts of things, our beloved father. Consorting with xenos, resurrecting ancient technology. Don’t believe that he is blameless in this, nor that old conspirator Malcador. Every choice is tainted now, and we’re all dancing down the same path of decay. The only question is which herd to follow, and which doom is less disagreeable.’
‘No.’ The Khan stood up again. ‘Whatever you are, you are not Magnus. You don’t even sound like him.’
Magnus shrugged. ‘Believe what you want. Perhaps I am not Magnus. I used to be, that is certain, but maybe what counts as my self is not what it was. Part of me dwells elsewhere, on a barren rock halfway across the cosmos. Part of me is here, lingering like a stench over carrion. I can’t quite leave, not yet. I think something has to happen first. Maybe you are it, or maybe you were never meant to be here. I favour the latter – you were always unpredictable.’
‘I came to find a friend,’ said the Khan distastefully. ‘Whatever else had happened, I thought, I could come to you for counsel.’
Magnus looked hurt. ‘Do not be harsh, Khagan. Only a part of me resides here, slinking in the shadows. The better part is elsewhere, pondering loftier things. Soon he – or I, or we – will come to a judgement.’
‘What will that be?’
‘I don’t know. I really don’t. Lorgar sends me pleas almost daily, reminding me what Russ did here. He thinks we are kindred spirits. Touching, really.’ Magnus paused, and stared down at his flickering hands. ‘Sometimes, though, I still think there might be some way back. I see it as a maze, one in which all I have to do is find the route through. Perhaps the Emperor will forgive. If He survives what I have unleashed, perhaps He will.’ Then Magnus’s spectral eye flicked up at the Khan again. ‘But you, Jaghatai? What is your choice?’
The Khan shook his head. ‘We are who we are – no one’s slaves.’
Magnus laughed. ‘That’s not good enough. You have to choose.’
‘If what you say is true, then the dream is over. It will be each Legion alone.’
‘It doesn’t work like that.’
‘Horus is corrupted, the Emperor is a tyrant.’
‘True enough.’
‘Then I choose neither.’
Magnus laughed again, though the sound was bitter. ‘This thing is a like a great dark star, ringed by fire. It will draw you in, bit by bit, until you are orbiting it with the rest of us. Even you do not have ships fast enough to escape it, Jaghatai. Even your White Scars will not get out.’
The Khan felt sick from the stink of death and ashes. His blade glittered coldly in the near-perfect dark. ‘We can outrun anything that lives.’
‘But they do not live, not like we do. I do not lie, brother. Choose. We will meet again, either as allies or foes, so you may as well decide now.’
The Khan stared down at Magnus, his mind in turmoil.
‘What have you become?’ he asked, no longer able to keep the horror from his voice.
‘What I was always destined to be,’ said Magnus, looking at him sadly. ‘But you still have a choice, brother. Make the right one.’
The chamber, like all those that they had marched through, must once have been magnificent. Qin Xa had stopped noticing the shattered finery – after a while, it became depressing to think on it.
Arvida had led them far through the empty city. As they went, the ground had shaken more frequently; cracks opened before their eyes, shooting up the sides of already broken walls. They had passed shafts that went down a long, long way, their hearts glowing red like molten iron. Some whole districts seemed to have slumped into the earth, lost in smoke-choked sinkholes.
They ended up in the ruins of a grand audience chamber. Ionic pillars soared up above them, holding aloft a half-collapsed dome. Marble bookcases lined the immense walls, though the contents had been burned away. The floor was strewn with debris, and each of the three doorways were blocked with makeshift barricades.
‘I can’t offer you much,’ said the legionary dryly, limping over to an old stone throne at the centre of the space. He sounded exhausted.
Qin Xa and the others remained standing. ‘How long have you been here?’ he asked.
Arvida shook his head. ‘No idea.’ He tapped the side of his helm. ‘Chrono’s blown. Every day’s the same. You lose track.’
Qin Xa looked around the chamber. An old library, perhaps. He tried to imagine it as it had once been.
‘There are no others?’ Qin Xa asked.
‘Not that I’ve found.’ The legionary looked up at him. ‘I was of the Fourth Fellowship. I was a sergeant.’
‘Your squad?’
‘Dead.’
‘What happened?’
‘I ask myself the same thing.’ Arvida drew in a long, filtered breath. ‘If you wish to know why this planet was burned, I can’t tell you. I arrived after the fighting was over. That’s why I am still alive. I’d rather have fought the Wolves, though. I’d rather have died and drawn some blood, rather than skulk in the remains, ignorant and useless.’
‘Avoiding those… things?’
‘The psychneuein, aye. Or rather, what became of them. There are other things, too. Fragments, ghosts. Prospero was soaked in the aether – it’s to be expected. There’s an aura, burning away up there. An aftershock. Sometimes I hear the voices of those who died. In the beginning I went after them, hoping. I stopped that. They’re just voices now. I don’t think they’re even really here.’
Qin Xa regarded Arvida watchfully. The sorcerer’s power was prodigious, even for one of his hexed kind, but his voice was barely more than a whisper. ‘When did you last eat?’
‘Like I say, the chronos have blown. A long time.’
Qin Xa gestured to one of the keshig, who opened a compartment in his armour plate and produced a nutri-pack. He lumbered over to Arvida and offered it.
The legionary took it, snapping open the receptacle under his breastplate and slotting it in. The armour’s mechanisms would do the rest – feeding sustenance slowly into his bloodstream, restoring what needed to be restored. Physically, at least.
‘You know we need to go back,’ said Qin Xa.
‘For your primarch? I wouldn’t worry. He can fight them. Throne, he was made to fight them.’ Arvida rolled his shoulders slowly, as if feeling sensation come back into long-starved muscles. ‘I was trying to get there myself. There’s something down there. The only source of power left. They beat me back every time.’
‘What is it?’
Arvida shrugged. ‘The Reflecting Caves are under the square. Perhaps something Magnus made still survives in the caverns. He made a lot of things, including enemies.’
Qin Xa checked his helm display. Contact with the fleet was still broken, but he might be able to get a data-burst through. ‘We have ships in orbit. Whole brotherhoods. If we need to break down–’
‘He’ll be back. Don’t waste lives on it. Get away from this world – that’s the only thing.’ He lo
oked up at Qin Xa, and something about the look gave away his desperation. ‘And take me with you.’
Qin Xa checked the vox-link again.
‘If I get a lock, I will call in more support,’ he said. ‘But when you are restored, we are going back to the square. I will not leave him.’
Arvida nodded, as if he had known what Qin Xa was going to say before he said it. ‘Fine. Whatever you wish. Give me some time, though. I’ll need it, if you want any kind of chance. I’m no pyrae – it’s not my discipline.’
‘What is, then?’
Arvida snorted a dry, bitter laugh. ‘Seeing the future,’ he said. ‘That turned out well, didn’t it?’
Torghun marched down the Starspear’s embarkation deck, over to where the Stormbirds waited on their launch rails. He was in full armour, his face hidden behind his angular helm. Hibou Khan marched beside him, similarly decked out. Behind them came warriors of their brotherhoods – hundreds of them, their boots clanking on the rough floor.
‘It failed, brother,’ said Hibou.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Torghun.
‘Your project. The Brotherhood of the Storm. Their khan’s been to see Jemulan. Hasik is not pleased.’
Torghun felt a spike of irritation. ‘It was at his request.’
Hibou chuckled, though the sound was tinny behind the vox-grille. ‘It does not matter much. The word is out now – there are disputes on a dozen frigates. Shiban is just one of the hold-outs, but there will be many more.’
‘What did Jemulan tell him?’
‘Who knows? Things are moving too quickly. Hasik has the Swordstorm, and I will take the Tchin-Zar. As long as we hold the capital ships the others will fall into line.’
Torghun turned to him. ‘And what of the Khagan?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘If he doesn’t see the truth of it?’
Hibou snorted. ‘You heard the speaker’s testimony – Horus and the Khagan have always seen things the same way. What could he do, if his fleet is of one mind? He will recognise what we have done. He will see the justice in it.’ Hibou turned to him. ‘You made your choice. Do not doubt it, brother. It was the right one.’
Torghun knew that. He had made his choice a long time ago, years back when the first stirrings of the lodges had come to his ears. It was the chance to mould the Legion into what it should have been – a shock-attack force to rival the vaunted Speartip of the Sons of Horus, only shackled to a greater, more generous mind than that of the flighty Khan.
Horus Heresy: Scars Page 27
