The Path of Heaven

by Chris Wraight

  Shiban got back to his feet, leaving Torghun half kneeling at his feet. He turned on his heels, and stalked back towards the waiting shuttle.

  ‘So is that it?’ Torghun shouted after him. ‘Is that why you came – to stage this show?’

  Shiban kept walking. His troops fell in behind him.

  ‘You would have laughed at that, once,’ Torghun called out. ‘You would have laughed to even think it.’

  Shiban kept walking. The shuttle’s thrusters keyed up again, flooding the apron with a tide of boiling smoke.

  ‘You are not my judge, Shiban Khan. You have been judging me since the day I met you, but you are not the arbiter of this Legion.’

  Shiban kept walking. As he went, he replaced his helm, covering over the puckered mass of scar tissue at his neck.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Torghun cried out, getting back to his feet.

  Only then did Shiban halt, as if he would turn. He paused for a moment. ‘The same thing that happened to all of us,’ he said quietly, never looking back.

  Then he carried on, up into the crew bay, and the ramp hauled back up. The shuttle’s thrusters boomed into life, and the vessel lifted once more, turning tightly before blasting down the exit towards the void doors.

  The Proudheart led the spearhead into the Aerelion system, closely followed by the rest of the fleet. The formation remained tight, arranged to give the forward lances unimpeded access. Only at the very margins did the escort-class vessels move away into wide positions, throwing long-range scans out into the void.

  Signals flooded back immediately, hundreds of them, overlapped and mingled as the augur-beams calibrated on the mass of sensoria to be processed.

  Watching it all, Eidolon felt the first stirrings of combat stimulation begin to build in his ravaged body. He limped back across the throne dais, prowling the limits like a beast yet to be loosed.

  ‘Tell me,’ he growled. ‘Give me everything.’

  The mistress of the watch could not turn from her station, since she had been stitched into it for the past three months, her eyes hidden by the burnished cables that fed directly from the flagship’s sensor array into her narcotic-soaked mind.

  ‘Multiple capital ship signals,’ she reported in a stilted monotone. ‘They are moving, lord, pulling clear to one-ninety-thirty. We are placed between them and the Mandeville vector.’

  Eidolon grinned. His battle-group accelerated further. He watched data stream in from all sectors of the formation – gunwales unshuttering, macrocannons shunting out, lances hitting maximum energy, void shields snapping into full coverage.

  Konenos would be leading the starboard flank, making the same calculations. Cario would be racing ahead, desperate to bring his retinue into contact first. The cohorts of Kakophoni, fresh from the defence of Kalium, would be imbibing the last of their combat-stimms. Whole companies of Tactical Marines would be drilling the last of their armour into place, pressing the plates down over enhanced flesh and whispering rites of exuberance.

  ‘Bring me visual,’ Eidolon demanded, ignoring the speck of drool that had gathered at his mouth’s edge. ‘Let me see them.’

  The first images were grainy, shaking as the ocular feeds struggled with the extreme range. For all that, the visuals made his blood spike with pleasure – pale ships, already under way but far from warp-ready, out of formation, drifting at high anchor over the gas giant as if they had only just arrived.

  ‘Sloppy,’ Eidolon murmured. ‘Worse than their reputation.’ He stalked back to the throne, over to where his engorged helm waited to be donned. ‘Attack speed, all quarters,’ he ordered. ‘Engage before they have the chance to come about.’ He started to breathe more heavily, wetly, anticipating how the impact would go. ‘Let none escape.’

  The III Legion flotilla thundered up to full burn, each commander picking a target, each gunnery-master marshalling vast arrays of ship-breaking weaponry. Eidolon watched it all unfold from the Proudheart, placed at the vanguard of the charge, the first to strike, and sure to strike heaviest.

  Then the first contrary signals were received. Disquiet ran down the sensor-pits like a wave, followed by consternation. Warning runes glowed into life, and officials raced from station to station to confirm the readings.

  The mistress of the watch spoke first. ‘My lord, we are too late.’

  Eidolon turned on her. ‘Are you blind?’ he cried. ‘I see them! I see them myself.’

  He gestured wildly over to the great screens that hung above the command throne, each one linked via thick iron-rimmed cabling to the core real-viewers. The images were stabilising now, shaking down and losing the thick patina of interference.

  For a moment, he did not want to believe it. He let the attack-run continue, hoping against hope that some mistake had been made and would yet be corrected.

  In the end, it took the audio feed to shake him out of it.

  ‘Third Legion battle-group,’ came the grinding, unmistakeable accent of Barbarus over the inter-fleet comm-link, as unlovely and stolid as it had ever been. ‘This is the Endurance. You are on an intercept heading, your weapons armed. I am instructed by my lord to inform you that if you do not assume a more suitable trajectory then you will be disarmed.’

  Eidolon remained motionless, poised as if to strike. He felt a scream of frustration boiling up within him, and clamped it down – released then, it would have skinned half the crew.

  The fleet powered onwards. As the images resolved into further details, he saw the prow-sigils of the white ships become clear – death’s heads, poorly painted on slovenly ship-lines.

  ‘Order power-down,’ he snarled, eventually. He turned away, no longer willing to even look at those he had taken for the enemy. ‘Fleet-wide. Do it now.’

  He heard the orders despatched, and each one was like a twist in the wound.

  ‘More hails, my lord,’ came the enervated voice of the mistress of the watch. ‘The Death Lord demands your presence and has tidings from the Warmaster. How shall I respond?’

  Eidolon drew in a long, pained breath. ‘Tell him I will come.’ He started to pace again, allowing the combat-stimms to ebb, his blood to cool. ‘Tell him it will be an honour, a true honour, to parley with the Dread Liberator of Barbarus.’

  He looked out again, into the void. The gas giant was an object of rare beauty, its hue both intense and varied. Such would be wasted on the savages who orbited it, and with whom he was condemned to work.

  ‘Try to sound sincere,’ he said. ‘They tell me his pride is fragile.’

  Part III

  Fifteen

  They no longer played go. In less straitened times, Ilya and the Khan had passed many hours poring over the black and white stones, discussing the ways of the plains and the ways of the Imperial high command, considering the parallels between the patterns they created and the ones that played out in the void around them.

  She could not remember when they had stopped. Perhaps it had been after the first truly heavy defeat, when a force of Iron Warriors had correctly predicted an assault on the garrison world of Iluvuin and wiped out two brotherhoods. After that, the mood throughout the Legion had changed. Now the stones remained in their ceramic bowls, untouched.

  Now, alone with him again in his chambers on the Swordstorm, Ilya studied the primarch’s features, trying to remember how he had seemed to her when they had first met, back on Ullanor after the high point of the Crusade.

  He did not look any older, she concluded, but he looked wearier.

  He had led most attacks himself, taking on the brunt of the enemy vanguard. On a few occasions, she herself had witnessed the engagements, usually by long-range pict relay, but close enough to get a sense of how a primarch wielded his power. She had seen him overturn Land Raiders with his bare hands. She had seen him take on howling battalions of frenzi
ed horrors and annihilate them all. She had seen him cut through the heart of enemy elite formations – Terminator honour guard, Destroyer squads, veteran companies – all as if they were the rawest neophytes.

  None stood before one of the Eighteen.

  The Khan had slain and slain until his tulwar threw sheets of blood around it, and still it had not been enough. If his will to fight had been damaged by that, he did not show it. He spoke in the same cultured, measured way, balancing the lives of his warriors with the task of survival. It must have been the same for him from the very beginning, on a world of constantly moving warfare where borders meant little and speed meant everything. He did not understand pity, not for himself, not for others. He did what he had been created to do, just as all of the Emperor’s loyal sons did.

  And yet...

  The primarchs were posthuman, but they were not automata. Though the Khagan had never cared overmuch for the Imperial mantras, nor for territory or title, he loved his sons, and too many had been cut down.

  Now he stared into the firelight, toying with a long kiril dagger, his dark eyes heavy with thought. Ilya sat opposite him, lounging in a hide-bound chair, low-slung in the Chogorian style. She was tired herself, but had not been given leave to depart.

  The Khan was pensive. She had learned to read the signs – this was one of the rare occasions when he wished for her counsel. Ilya was never quite sure what he gained from that, since the advice of lords such as Yesugei and Tachseer was of far greater value, but still, from time to time, the occasion presented itself.

  ‘It was a success, Khagan,’ she said.

  He looked up, as if noticing her presence for the first time. ‘Hmm?’

  ‘The muster. Eighty-four per cent of known remaining Legion assets retrieved and in the warp. All capital ships in combat condition. You have your fleet intact, my lord. You have your army.’

  The Khan nodded absently. ‘A success. You are right, szu.’

  ‘You could look happier about it.’

  His mouth twitched, and on his lean face the half-smile looked ghoulish. He raised the blade up against the light, turning the steel one way then the other. ‘If we had achieved the goal, I might cele­brate. It is a faint chance that you offer me. Perhaps no chance at all. And then maybe that would not be something to mourn.’

  ‘It would be something very much to mourn.’

  ‘I have refused fights that I yearned to take. It is not easy, believe me, to run before the storm. I was made to embrace it.’

  Ilya raised an eyebrow. ‘Is that what disquiets you? My lord, you did what had to be done. A lesser general would have seen this Legion scattered to the winds by now, and I know of what I speak, for I have served under many lesser generals.’

  ‘I gave us survival.’ He mulled the word over for a while. ‘Not something to be cherished. I wish I had hurt them more. And I wish…’

  Ilya waited for the sentence to finish, but it never did. She sighed, kicked back her chair and clambered awkwardly out of it. The furniture in the Khan’s chamber had all been constructed for a primarch’s dimensions, and she looked almost comically small within it. She shuffled over to the fire pit and flung a log onto the pile. The wood – Chogorian haelo – burned ferociously, spitting sparks as it caught.

  ‘Achelieux will find us a path,’ she said, more confidently than she felt. ‘I know you doubt me, but no soul knew more of the warp than Pieter.’

  ‘So you told me, many times.’ The Khan remained seated, his limbs sprawled. Even recumbent, he looked dangerous – a tempest momentarily stilled. ‘If he does not, the enemy will be swift on our heels. Do you sense him? I do. I hear his breathing in the night, as harsh as it was on Prospero. He burns for vengeance. He burns to take up the fight we were unable to complete.’ The dagger’s blade flashed as it turned. ‘As do I, szu. There are nights when that is all I wish to do. There are nights when I forget my oath, and forget that my warriors look to me in all things, and I only wish to cast off into the abyss and find him again.’

  ‘These things are said by your sons, too,’ said Ilya, quietly. ‘You should listen to Yesugei, for he sees the danger of it.’

  The Khan chuckled – a sonorous, chest-deep sound. ‘I listen to Yesugei. I listen to many voices. By the four winds, I even listen to you, if you choose to believe it.’

  ‘I do,’ said Ilya, returning to her seat. ‘Of course I do – Achelieux was my counsel, and of all things I have cause to be grateful to you for, that remains the greatest.’

  The Khan tired of his bladeplay and let the dagger fall to the tabletop beside him. He sat forwards, steepling his long fingers.

  ‘The lie has always been present,’ he mused. ‘Right from the start. We preached the Imperial Truth to the masses, yet employed sorcerers and mutants to guide us through the heavens, and practised the very arts we pretended did not exist to sustain them. That was the great lie, and I could not endure that. It could never have lasted. And so here is the question – why was it allowed to happen?’

  Ilya listened. She knew that the Khan only half spoke to her, half to himself, but these were rare moments – the opening of a mind that preferred to remain locked tight.

  ‘My Father was neither a monster nor a simpleton. He did a thing only because it had to be done. Perhaps He could have explained more, but I will not believe, even now, that there was not a reason for His choices. He led us to Ullanor, then left. After that, He was silent, and only the words of the Sigillite emerged from Terra. What project could have kept Him from the Crusade that He instigated? Only one that was necessary for its survival. And so I have been pondering all His words to me, trying to find the ones that explain it, and I curse that we spoke so little, and that our minds were so unlike to one another.

  ‘In the end, I come back to the same place. My Father hated the lie as much as I did. He knew the Imperium could not last as long as its foundations were knee-deep in the warp. It was necessary to use these mutants and witches, but they could not be allowed to endure. They would be passing tools, like the warriors of thunder that united Terra – blades that would grow blunt and be cast aside. We were always told that the Great Crusade was the end of things, and all else was subordinate to it. I believe this now to be false. The Crusade was launched to give Him something he needed – knowledge, perhaps. Maybe forbidden, maybe lost, maybe xenos, maybe dragged from the aether. But after finding it He went back, and put into place His scheme of eternity, and for the first time since the Ages of Strife His mind was no longer turned towards His creations. Thus they wandered. Thus they fell.’

  Ilya had never heard the Khan talk like this before. She had never heard anyone talk in such a way about the Emperor, of whom the White Scars had always known – and had always cared – relatively little. ‘What scheme do you speak of?’

  The Khan inclined his head equivocally. ‘I know not. I do not have His genius. But consider this – the Navigators are the last of the old mutants, the final throwback to our distant horror. They are the clearest and most potent exemplars of the lie, and for as long as the Imperium needed them it could never rest secure. If my Father were truly set on making the Imperial Truth a reality, they could not have been suffered to remain. There must have been another way. And others, perhaps in the Nobilite itself, must have known or guessed this.’

  Ilya sank back into her chair. ‘Then I understand now.’

  ‘Understand what?’

  ‘Why you allowed me to pursue Achelieux. You do not believe it possible to return. You wish to meet your end out in the void, fighting your brothers in the honourable way. To hunt this place – the Dark Glass – is merely for knowledge. Before the end, you would know whether you were right.’

  The Khan smiled. ‘No, szu, you judge me too harshly. My oath binds me – if there is a path to the Throneworld, I will take it.’ The smile dissolved. ‘But if there is not, and all ways are barred,
then, yes, I would learn why my Father turned His back on us. This place may be the key, it may not. We risk these things, you see, as the end hastens.’

  ‘So if the moment comes,’ said Ilya, trying to hold his shifting gaze, ‘if you have to choose death with honour, or to flee home, what course will you take? How far will your oath bind you?’

  ‘To the end of time.’

  ‘But you have sworn more than one, so which bears more heavily?’

  The Khan did not answer. His aquiline face turned away from her, gazing back into the flames. ‘When did you learn to ask questions so fiercely?’ he muttered. ‘I preferred it when your fear made you mute.’

  ‘And what point is there in fear now, Khagan? After a lifetime of labour I have seen the worlds of man tear themselves apart and usher in the yaksha of ancient nightmare. I am old now. There is not much in the galaxy worthy of fear that I have not seen.’

  ‘Do not be so sure,’ said the Khan.

  Of all of them, Sanyasa took it the hardest.

  After the system-runner had been abandoned and scuttled, the sagyar mazan were transported over to a heavy crew transporter called Xo Gamail. The orders, it seemed, had come from Shiban Khan, whom, Torghun learned, they were calling Tachseer now, the Restorer. His name was spoken throughout the Legion with a kind of reverence, though a wary one. They knew what he had done, both at Prospero and since, but they spoke the name of Jubal, Master of the Hunt, with more joy.

  Seventeen sagyar mazan squads had heeded the call and made it back to the muster at Aerelion. The survivors in each varied, giving a total of one hundred and thirty-two warriors – less than a brother­hood, and thus not deserving of a khan. It was as Shiban had told Torghun: they would be reservists, left to fester while the loyal servants of the ordu faced the enemy.

  The Xo Gamail was stationed towards the rear of the fleet convoy, amid the supply ships and the munitions bulkers. It must have been in service for decades, maybe much longer, and it had not been well maintained. Unlike a line battleship, the interior was dirty, poorly lit, under-crewed and rust-laced. The shipmaster was a mortal, as were all the crew. They were mostly Chogorian, and paid all homage to the warriors in their midst, but not perhaps quite as reverently as they would have done for the faithful.