The Path of Heaven

by Chris Wraight

  ‘…must be taken up close,’ finished Sanyasa, kicking in the last ounce of boost to carry him ahead of the hunt-pack.

  The jetbikes angled up again, arrowing in on the cloud-hammer’s churning bank of motive thrusters. They were lost in a shaking mass of air, wreathed with afterburner plumes. The heat was detectable even through power armour, and they were still sixty metres out.

  Four of the seven jetbikes pulled alongside the cloud-hammer, raking its gunnery points. Torghun, Sanyasa and Ozad remained in the engine-wake, fighting hard to bring their jetbike prows under the immense lower lintel of the thruster-housing.

  Torghun crouched low in the saddle, ignoring the flickers of flame catching on the chassis of his mount. His targeting reticules danced wildly, knocked off centre by the buffeting thunder, so he turned them off and used his eyes.

  Sanyasa fired first, followed by Torghun, with Ozad a fraction of a second behind. Three streams of bolt-rounds shot directly into the heart of the furnace, smacking and cracking against the inner curve of the thrusters and splintering the metal into slivers. Debris flew out, clanging and wheeling as it broke from the substructure. Torghun dropped lower, firing all the while as a sickle-shaped slice of burning steel shot over him.

  The main thruster blew, exploding around its circumference and shearing from the cloud-hammer’s underbelly. As the entire unit came away, the three jetbikes angled steeply, pulling clear of the disintegrating engine assembly. Huge bursts of exhaust-smog vomited out from the ruined feeder-lines, laced with sparks. The cloud-hammer’s trajectory dipped. With a squeal and clank of tortured metal-plate, the machine began to list, beginning the plummet that would take it down through the atmosphere-layers and into Klefor’s distant core.

  Torghun spun away high, scything through desperate scatter-fire from the gunnery blisters. It would be pleasing to watch the thing burn, though its demise would still take hours and there were other targets to hit.

  ‘Darga,’ voxed Inchig from his vantage on the high-right flank, using the Khorchin sergeant rank-equivalent. ‘Pull to my position.’

  As Torghun wheeled away right, he saw what Inchig meant – a juddering rain of return bolter-fire emerging from the hunched spine of the cloud-hammer. Wai-Long was hit, and his jetbike careened erratically away, leaking promethium-smoke.

  Torghun’s helm zoomed in, revealing bare steel power armour emerging from a hatch on the cloud-hammer’s aft summit. Even as the airship lost altitude, the crew were coming out of it to fight.

  ‘Scrape them off,’ he ordered, zeroing in on the lead figure. He unlocked the heavy bolter again, sending a trail of impacts snapping down the cloud-hammer’s roof before they smashed into the legionary, slamming him from his footing and sending him sailing out into the clouds, limbs cartwheeling.

  But more crawled out of the interior, setting up fire-points and opening up against the jetbikes that circled around the carcass of the machine. Sanyasa smashed one apart, making armour-segments fly as a power-pack exploded. Another managed to erect a tripod-mounted beam weapon and punched a hole through Gerg’s jetbike-muzzle, but the array and its operator were blown away by a vengeful Holian following close behind.

  As the cloud-hammer plummeted further, only one defender remained exposed on the airship’s roof – a heavy-plated warrior wielding a chainsword. That one remained exposed even as the jetbikes circled for the kill, brandishing his close-combat weapon and bellowing challenges into the buffeting wind.

  Torghun detected the targeting beads locking on the warrior and dipped his jetbike towards the swaying metal below.

  ‘Leave him,’ he ordered, aiming his mount across the bucking airship-roof. ‘He is mine.’

  As the jetbike skidded into contact with the cloud-hammer’s hull, Torghun leapt clear, his power sword fizzing. His enemy charged towards him, negotiating the swaying terrain with perfect balance. He was clad in an old armour variant, crusted with reinforced cable-housings and ridged greaves. Oily smoke oozed from his damaged power-pack, and his slatted helm was marked with dirty yellow chevrons.

  Iron Warriors were rarely given to battlefield oratory, and this one did not depart from the pattern. He swayed into close range, his chainsword growling. Torghun met the first strike two-handed, absorbing the hit and throwing the whirling blade back. He darted in, moving with the tilt of the plummeting deck, reacting faster than his iron-heavy counterpart.

  ‘I like your spirit,’ Torghun voxed, trading more blows with the scything chainblade. ‘Though not your stench.’

  He lashed out, hitting the chainsword at full strength in the middle of the blade. The angle was perfect and sliced clean through the rotating teeth, sending chain-links flying free in bouncing lengths. The Iron Warrior clenched his fist and punched out, but Torghun had already pulled left, jerked the blade back, then slashed out again, hitting under his enemy’s gorget point-first. The disruptor-charged steel pushed on through, severing both flesh and armour-links.

  Torghun wrenched the sword upwards, tearing the Iron Warrior’s head free. The ruined chainsword clattered away, careening down the slope of the cloud-hammer’s carapace. Its owner’s corpse joined it soon after, dragged along the reeling roof-plates.

  By now the airship was pulling over close to thirty degrees, and the spine-sections were quickly turning into flank-sections. Torghun sprinted up the slope to where his jetbike had auto-anchored, its engines still gunning. He threw himself back into the saddle as the cloud-hammer’s carcass fell away into its death-dive, consigning any crew still within to a long, spiralling descent.

  He pushed clear of the wreck, sheathing his blade as the jetbike whined into altitude. As he did so, Sanyasa’s mount streaked past, dipping its wing-stubs in amused salute.

  ‘Necessary, darga?’ Sanyasa voxed.

  ‘The only way they learn,’ Torghun replied, catching up with the rest of the squadron. The cloud-hammer was now a hundred metres below them and picking up momentum. Its stabiliser vanes cracked, and the lifter-turbines started running wildly out of tolerance.

  Klefor’s gaseous heights gleamed around them, suffused with the light of its suns and scrubbed of the churning toxicity of the airship. Even the engine-trails of the jetbikes seemed cleaner, vaporising to interlaced lines of pale white over a blushed screen of colour.

  ‘Then this was good hunting,’ said Sanyasa, boosting ahead.

  ‘It was,’ said Torghun, powering after him. ‘And there’s more to come.’

  Twelve hours passed before they terminated the raid. They rendezvoused with the lifter, stowed the attack bikes and pulled clear of Klefor’s upper atmosphere. Then they docked with the system-runner R54 and headed out to the void.

  Wai-Long did not join them. His jetbike had exploded on an uncontrolled plummet following the bolter-hit, instantly destroying him and his mount. That was their only casualty, though they would mourn him, for he had been a good fighter and a good soul. The sagyar mazan were battle-brothers twice-over – once for the Legion, once for the kinship of enforced exile.

  They had started out with twenty-two. Torghun had been the only khan among them; the others had been drawn from the ranks of brotherhoods that had contested control of the capital ships over Prospero. They came into the squad as individuals, each sundered from his old comrades, for errant units had been carefully broken up by the Legion commanders.

  Many sagyar mazan had taken to the abyss in conjunction with other Legion units – Iron Hands, mostly, though some had travelled with Salamanders and Raven Guard. Torghun’s squad was purely White Scars, an even mix of Terran and Chogorian. They had taken the assault boat Hooked Arrow into the abyss, shot far ahead of the main Legion formation and had been charged, as all were, with a simple task: to erase their crimes through death in service.

  The Hooked Arrow had lasted two years, finally being destroyed in a sustained action against an Iron Warriors patrol off the Peri
clan Shoals. They had lost six of their number in that one encounter, but still death did not come for the rest of them. Those who remained commandeered a sub-warp corvette, scratching around for several months on inter-world comms-runs, before the opportunity of taking a faster vessel came along, and they seized R54. That gave them a proper berth for their retained jetbikes and an armoury ready to restock with seized trophies. It was a battered old ship, once a minor escort in service of the XIV Legion, now barely capable of surviving a medium-severity warp storm and as slow as the oils that seeped from its leaking enginarium. Still, it had a Geller field, a functioning gunnery array and a happy knack of keeping them alive for just one more attack run.

  Sanyasa had wanted to rename it. Like all Chogorians, he found non-poetic designations for warships offensive. Torghun had not let him.

  ‘It would be bad luck,’ he had told him. Luck was something that had come to obsess him since Prospero, something that had never been the case before. ‘We will be nameless soon – let this keep its old one.’

  One by one, more battle-brothers had died. The squad was whittled down to ten, then eight, then seven. Wai-Long’s death made it six, barely enough to crew the system-runner even with a skeleton mortal complement and servitor assistance. Torghun had seldom used his khan designation before, and henceforth did so even less, taking on the role of darga of an arban – the least of all divisions.

  Still, they ran ahead of the warfront. The main V Legion formations had long since dispersed, splitting their attacks into isolated strikes to avoid total annihilation. The surviving sagyar mazan units pulled back too, while staying for as long as they could in harm’s way. Their only tactical consideration was to remain in contact with the enemy – to disrupt his lines, to hit his communication routes, to go after his commanders.

  All of the penitential death-squads, via one tortuous route or another, had heard the stories of Dwell. That had been close. It would have been the crowning achievement of them all, one worthy of acknowledgement even in the upper echelons of the Legion. Hibou Khan’s position was now unknown, swallowed up by the vengeful Sons of Horus counter-offensive. Word of the Iron Hands commander Meduson still filtered back from time to time, though with him it was always hard to separate truth from rumour from misinformation. A shifting hinterland of half-snatched tales and deed-rolls for the fugitives had taken hold, fuelling ambition and keeping despair from overcoming those doomed to die.

  And so they lived a twilight existence, forever on the brink of their rightful death, riding the bow-wave of the enemy offensive, snapping at it like gadflies for as long as they could before its remorseless momentum caught up with them. That day would not be a cause for grief, for by the laws of the Altak their sins would be expunged by it, just as Wai-Long’s were – just as all the other penitents’ had been.

  Back in the system-runner, Torghun sat on his chamber’s metal bunk, holding Wai-Long’s old glaive in his hands, running a finger along the rune-carved stave. Wai-Long had been of the plains, and his brothers would wish to give him a plains ceremony, burning the weapon, warding his spirit for the journey across the arch of an empty sky. If there had been a body, it would have been stripped of its armour and committed to the void, in imitation of what they had once done when warfare was a matter of mounted equines.

  The Path of Heaven, they called it: the bridge between the world of souls and the world of flesh, something Torghun had never studied as much as he should have done. Few Terrans had. In the beginning, it had all been rationality and anti-superstition. Then, when that changed again, they had ushered in daemons rather than gods, and the virtue of keeping the immaterial locked away in ignorance suddenly became more clearly apparent.

  They had been so close to the edge. None of them had really known, not fully. At times, Torghun would wake from nightmares, his body sheened in sweat, remembering the voices that they had listened to on the Starspear.

  Since then, the consequences of failure had become all too obvious. He had fought Emperor’s Children legionaries with their self-mutilations, and warriors of the Sons of Horus in league with yaksha, and Word Bearers apostles with robes still sticky with mortal blood. That was the future he had been steered away from. Compared to that, death in combat felt like reward beyond price.

  Outside the chamber, Torghun heard the tread of armoured boots. He placed the glaive back on the rack, just as Sanyasa ducked under the mortal-scale door-hatch.

  ‘This came before we entered the warp,’ Sanyasa said, handing him a data-slate. ‘Sent direct.’

  Torghun looked down at the crystal-faced slab. It was a Legion communication, not an astropath signal. These were sent over encrypted sub-warp routes, stepping-stoned from kill-squad to kill-squad. That method reduced the message-range by many times, but increased speed and security. The last such missive had come two years ago, warning the death-marked to clear out of the path of an offensive run by the ordu. After that, nothing.

  He thumbed the entry-rune and waited for the retinal scan. Sanyasa stood just inside the doorway, making no attempt to join him.

  Torghun read the communique. Then he read it again. Then he erased the contents and data-scoured the slate’s storage coil.

  ‘When do you wish to perform kal damarg?’ he asked, tossing the slate onto the altar-top beside him.

  ‘When we next drop out of the warp. What did it say?’

  ‘A sector-avoidance command. We are to stay away from Lansis and Gethmora.’

  ‘We are months away from either.’

  ‘That is fortunate. How fares the ship?’

  Sanyasa looked at him for a few moments. Then his eyes dropped back to Wai-Long’s racked weapon. ‘Well enough. Ozad has picked up something on the augur. Might be something worth pursuing.’

  Torghun stood up. ‘Good. I will look at it.’ He moved to the doorway, and Sanyasa stood aside to let him pass. ‘Klefor was a victory, brother. It was noble, to die for that.’

  Sanyasa nodded. ‘May our fate be the same.’

  ‘Indeed,’ agreed Torghun, heading out and up to the bridge. ‘We can but hope.’

  Nine

  Konenos strode through the corridors of the Keystone, kicking aside the last detritus of combat. Muffled cracks still rang out from the lower levels – White Scars suicide squads, left behind to hamper the pursuit. They were proving tough to eliminate, though the end would come within the hour. Kalium’s docks had been retaken, purged of residual booby-traps, and made serviceable for III Legion landers to bring in constructor details.

  It had been a well-fought defence, one that had severely damaged the enemy. It ought to have been satisfying.

  Konenos entered the Hall of Images, barely looking up at the statues of the Imperial Virtues, abstract representation of things that had once been aggressively promoted: Resilience, Reason, Industry, Thrift. The artistry was shocking – the kind of numb, talentless dross that the Offices of Propagation had churned out in industrial quantities during the Expansion Phase.

  Even before enlightenment, he couldn’t imagine Fulgrim tolerating any of that filth on a III Legion warship. As it was, his troops had defaced those in the Keystone fortress, replacing the heads of the statues with the bloodied heads of White Scars warriors, hacking the outstretched arms off, replacing other body parts with various obscenities. Altogether, life was more rewarding under the new dispensation.

  He reached the portals leading into the facility’s Mirrored Sanctum, where Eidolon had chosen to place his command centre. The sentries, two legionaries wearing gold-and-sapphire aquila helm-masks, bowed as he passed.

  The walls beyond glittered with reflected light. The fighting had not penetrated this far into the Keystone’s superstructure, and so all was intact. Even so, sensory-thralls had been busy polishing, refining, re-equipping. Silken drapes hung from the high ceiling in layers, gauze billowing from the clouds of powdery incense pumped out of
hovering aroma-units. A hundred mortal slaves bowed as he passed, their heads pressed against the chequerboard floor, waiting motionless for orders. Most had been changed – elongated, compressed, blinded, given extra eyes, whatever whims the fleshweavers had felt like indulging. Legionaries lounged among them, some polishing blades, some in a post-combat stupor.

  Eidolon himself sat atop a throne of lapis lazuli and hammered bronze. Its armrests were carved into the form of two rearing serpents, the back moulded into a depiction of an open maw lined with curved teeth. Within the creature’s mouth, hellish visions writhed, moving subtly by the light of the many candelabra, or perhaps from other sources.

  Eidolon slumped in his seat, toying with something in the palms of his gauntlets. His helm was gone, and he looked maudlin.

  Konenos knew why – he felt the same. Combat-withdrawal was harder now than it had ever been. The stimm comedown was harsh, and only partly ameliorated by lower dose adjustments. The world outside the battlefield had become almost permanently fuzzy – a low-volume, soft-edged dreamscape.

  At least we can survive its withdrawal now, he thought, perfectly aware of where this direction led. That may not always be true.

  ‘Orchestrator,’ said Eidolon, lifting his bruised chin a fraction. ‘Your armour is disordered.’

  Konenos smiled. The last White Scars legionary he had killed had managed to crack his pauldron open. The resultant vox-scream had burst the warrior’s head, but the loss of symmetry had still been annoying.

  ‘It will be replaced, lord,’ he replied. ‘The order is already with the artificers.’

  ‘You will have creative suggestions, no doubt.’

  ‘There will be… Chogorian inspirations.’

  Eidolon’s eyes drifted over to the silk drapes. His movements were even more sluggish than expected. Perhaps he had dosed himself too vigorously. ‘I had hoped he might be with them. The Warhawk.’

  ‘Then we would have lost.’