Age of Darkness

by Christian Dunn

  It’s perfectly true – we knew just how much our brothers mistrusted us, and as a result worked hard not to provoke them. He’s entirely wrong that we gloried in our superior understanding. Instead, we hid it, tried to show it as little as possible. Those instincts, as it turns out, may well have been mistaken.

  ‘You knew? You could have fought like warriors, rather than drift into witchery. You had choices. I don’t understand you.’

  Did we have choices? Prospero was a world soaked in the psychic possibility of the Great Ocean. We were all touched by it, for better or worse. I don’t think we could have turned down the opportunities that gave us, even though we knew it made the other Legions uneasy.

  Ultimately, though, the question is pointless. We did what we did, and no power in the universe has ever been able to undo the past.

  ‘We fought,’ I reply, remembering the conquest of Shrike, when Magnus himself had led us in war. He’d been magnificent, unstoppable, just as much as Russ or Lorgar, every bit the vision of the Emperor’s most favoured son. ‘We played our part.’

  ‘No longer,’ comes the riposte, savage with satisfaction. ‘Your part is over. Your pyramids are destroyed, and your bastard primarch’s back broken.’

  He hates us. The hatred has not diminished with the humbling of my Legion. That may be why he brought me here. To gloat. My mind-sight is beginning to return, and I sense enormous frustration boiling within him. He has been left behind while others have departed for further conquest. This is one source of his anger. Soon, he will vent it on me.

  But I cannot believe that is the only motivation. I am aware still how little I know. Why was Prospero destroyed? What, exactly, brought that doom upon us? The ignorance of that is more torture than anything this interrogator has planned for me. To die without uncovering those truths would be the most shameful way to go, and one that would vindicate Arvida’s doubts about coming back.

  Can I use the instability in my questioner to my advantage? Would he let slip secrets if I goaded him? A dangerous course of action – his cooped-up rage is like that of a beast, wild and indiscriminate. But then, there is little for me to lose. My Legion is scattered, my primarch missing, my home world blasted into a ball of lifeless slag. I would like some answers before he loses control of the furnace within him and ends this conversation for good.

  ‘Magnus is not dead,’ I say. ‘I would know if he’d died. It was in the hope of finding him that we came back here. You, though, seem to know everything about us and what happened to our planet. You hint at more, things that I can only guess at. Since you know so much, and I know so little, should it not be me asking the questions?’

  In the near-complete dark, I make out only the sharpest flash of dirty-grey. A gauntlet plunges out of the shadow and grabs my neck. The fingers squeeze painfully, just below the chin and just above the metal band that holds my head in place.

  ‘You are prey for me, traitor,’ comes the bloody rumble of a voice. ‘Nothing more than that. Forget it, and I will end you with agony.’

  The threat means little. As I struggle to breathe, though, I realise something else. My aether-drawn powers are returning. They are weak, to be sure, but they are creeping back to me in drabs. Perhaps he knows this, perhaps he doesn’t. In any case, I have a glimmer of a chance now. The longer this thing lasts, the stronger I will become. Maybe, just maybe, strong enough to break these bonds.

  The Ungifted Warriors have always underestimated what can be done with the mind, no doubt because we gifted have always been reluctant to use our skills unless pressed by necessity.

  He releases his fist, and I gulp in draughts of blood-tanged air. He withdraws, though I can still feel him seething. He keeps his anger on an uncertain leash, as if it were a ravening predator continually tugging at its inadequate restraint.

  ‘How many were in your squad?’ he asks, recovering his poise with difficulty.

  That’s good. I hope he has many such questions. I will answer them all fully, all the while letting my control over the aether return.

  ‘Nine,’ I say, and though my speech is grudging and surly, in my mind there already kindles an eager anticipation for what is to come. ‘There were nine of us.’

  By the time Kalliston arrived, Phaeret was crouched down before the base of a pillar. The shaft was broken off about two metres up and rubble littered the surroundings. There were more ruined remnants of other buildings ahead, some no more than swaying spurs hanging over the curves of blast craters.

  ‘What is it?’ Kalliston asked, coming down to the same level.

  Phaeret gestured towards the ground, saying nothing.

  There was a gauntlet lying amid the blasted stone. Kalliston picked it up, turning it over to make the most of the light. It was gunmetal-grey and ready to fall into pieces. The construction was Legiones Astartes power armour – no mortal would have been able to wear such gear. Two of the fingers were missing, and the hollow stumps were black from burning. On the back of it, where the main ceramite plate guarded the warrior’s fist, a rune had been inscribed. There was nothing clumsy about it. Even Kalliston, who was by no means an expert on artificer tech, could see the careful workmanship.

  ‘And which of our brothers makes use of the runes?’ he asked, speaking to himself.

  His mind went back to the assault on Shrike, the name his Legion had given to Ark Reach Secundus. It was there that Magnus and Russ had first clashed over the preservation of the avenians’ libraries. That had been a terrible day. Kalliston had been there when the Wolf King had stormed across the causeway with terrible violence in his eyes, and it had seemed as if Space Marine would fight Space Marine. He remembered the sheer majesty of the Wolves of Fenris, the terrifying potency locked into their single-minded frames. True, they had been stopped by sorcery for a time, but the barrier would have broken eventually. They would have kept on coming, heedless of the casualties, spinning into contact like a shell loosed from a gun-barrel.

  Remorseless. The power that, once loosed, can never be called back.

  ‘This is their work,’ said Phaeret, and his young voice was savage with emotion. ‘The Wolves of Fenris.’

  Kalliston stood, his eyes still locked on the gauntlet.

  They had always been the primary suspects. The bad blood between Magnus and Russ had been well-known, as had the capability of the Wolves for sudden and unpredictable brutality. The trial at Nikaea had been at the instigation of Russ, so it was rumoured. The Wolf King’s hatred of sorcery had given him the pretext, and it seemed that he had acted on his intolerance at last.

  But how had such a thing been dared? Had Russ gone rogue, finally giving in to the barbarism that burned in his feral soul? Or had this thing been sanctioned by a higher power?

  The more Kalliston gazed at the gauntlet, letting his eyes run over the single rune etched into the ceramite glove, the more questions clamoured at him. It was one thing knowing the perpetrator of an act; quite another to understand his reasons.

  ‘Captain,’ voxed Arvida, breaking into Kalliston’s train of thought. ‘Evidence. There are traces of Space–’

  ‘I know it,’ said Kalliston, a dead weariness hanging on the words. ‘Russ’s dogs.’

  ‘Armour fragments,’ confirmed Arvida. ‘And they’ve carved things in the walls. Some of them are... obscene.’

  Kalliston felt a stab of anger then. They were brutes, the Wolves, as shallow and thuggish as greenskins. He’d never understood what place they’d had in the Great Crusade, other than to ruin the reputation of enlightened humanity and stain the achievements of Unification. Only Angron’s berserkers were worse, and at least they’d been taken under the wing of the Warmaster. There had been no such wise, restraining hand to keep the Wolves of Fenris within civilised parameters, and it looked like they’d finally lost any semblance of control.

  ‘We’re getting more signs, the further we go,’ r
eplied Kalliston, speaking to the whole squad over the mission channel. ‘Head to the Pyramid of Photep, where we’ll regroup.’

  Phaeret started to move off immediately, but Arvida maintained the comm link.

  ‘There may still be Wolves on the planet,’ he warned. ‘Is this zone clear of targets?’

  ‘I read nothing,’ replied Kalliston, giving away his irritation. Arvida was only doing his job, but something about the sergeant’s drip-feed of scepticism was getting under his skin. ‘Move to heading–’

  Even as he spoke, Phaeret’s head and shoulders disappeared in a cloud of whirling armour, bone and blood. The booming report of heavy weapons echoed down the street, followed by the sharp clatter of bolter fire.

  Kalliston threw himself behind the pillar, feeling the stone tremble as the reactive rounds thumped into it and blasted the stone open. He scrambled backward, away from the firestorm and into the lee of a more solid wall-section. As he went, more shells impacted around him, throwing up glittering waves of glass.

  There were cries of alarm over the comm, and a thin recording of bolter-fire. His squad were all coming under fire. Two more life-sign runes dropped out of his helm-display.

  Throne, where are they coming from?

  ‘Heavy incoming!’ reported Orphide, two hundred metres away. ‘Getting multiple–’

  Then his signal wavered and died, leaving static on the channel.

  ‘Lock on to my position!’ ordered Kalliston, whirling round, trying to make the best sense of the terrain around him. There were plenty of cover-points in the ruined cityscape, but nothing much that would stand up to concerted assault. ‘Fall back to this location. Repeat, fall back to this location.’

  He risked a look through a gap in the wall, keeping his helm as low as possible. There were still no target runes on his helm display, but auspexes could be jammed.

  Two hundred metres distant, at the far end of the desolate street, he saw movement for the first time. Something pale grey flitted between cover, head low, moving fast. The profile was unmistakable – Space Marine power armour. Kalliston saw no others, but knew there’d be more out there. He checked the magazine was locked in place and that the ammo counter read full. His hearts had begun to beat in that steady, deep rhythm that always preceded action. He felt the familiar prickle across his skin as stimms entered his bloodstream and primed the muscle-nerve interfaces of his carapace.

  ‘This is my world, dogs,’ he snarled, his voice eager. ‘So you’re going to have to fight me for it.’

  ‘Nine of you,’ he says. ‘Nine fools. You seem to have had few plans, other than to sniff around in the ruins and look for scraps. Did it never occur to you that the destroyers of Prospero would leave troops behind?’

  ‘Of course it did.’

  ‘And you still came.’

  I briefly ponder whether to try my luck again. I can make him angry so easily, but there is the question of timing. For the moment, I restrain myself.

  ‘Yes. Our position was in any case bleak. We were alone, separated from what remained of our fleet. In such a position of ignorance, we were vulnerable. I decided to seek survivors on Prospero, perhaps the primarch himself. We knew that there were unlikely to be any, but there were other reasons to – as you say – sniff around in the ruins.’

  There was a minuscule pause then, a slight catch in the otherwise metronomic regularity of the breathing.

  ‘Other reasons?’

  I decide to keep talking, to stick to the truth. This interrogation will be coming to an end soon in any case.

  ‘Prospero was the greatest seat of learning in all the worlds of men,’ I say, and make no effort to keep the pride out of my voice. ‘There were libraries here that were the envy even of the ancient races. There were secrets in our vaults, secrets that even we hadn’t fully had the time to unlock properly. While you were sailing across the sea of stars, plundering and maiming, we were learning.’

  As I speak, I recall using much the same words to persuade Arvida of the wisdom of returning home. He’d listened just as intently as my questioner did now.

  ‘You speak of witchery,’ I say. I dare a little more. ‘You know nothing of it. There are subtleties to the Great Ocean that only we understood. We could peer into the very stuff of the warp and make sense of the patterns there. We saw glimpses of the future, of possibilities more magnificent than there are words to describe.’

  I begin to enthuse myself. I remember the devices that we used for learning, for discovery, for healing – the enormous potential that they had. We were like children, stepping into a dimension of wonder, our eyes glistening from the reflected glory.

  ‘I thought that, if some of those things survived, then we could retrieve them. If the fates determined that we were to be cast adrift, we could at least make some use of the tools that we’d accumulated.’

  ‘Did you find any?’

  He is still eager, hungry for information now. The scorn has left his voice, replaced by something like need. Perhaps he has no idea how transparent he is. Odd, that he should be so brittle. I’d always imagined the Wolves being more sure of themselves.

  ‘No,’ I say, deflating his hopes as bluntly as I can. ‘We had no time. And, in any case, I doubt anything could have survived the mess you made of this place. You have destroyed everything. If I’d known it was you behind this carnage, I’d have expected nothing less. You are butchers and psychopaths, sadists and morons, the lowest of the–’

  I know what I’m doing. His psychology is increasingly open to me. I raise his hopes, then dash them. I sense the fragility of his mind, and strike where I know the pain will be greatest.

  I only stop speaking as the fist crashes into my jaw. Even inured as I am to physical shock, it staggers me. He moves fast; far faster than I could have done. I feel bone breaking, my jawline fragmenting, and my head jarring back against the metal of the chair. Pain flares up, hot and bright behind my eyes. Then a secondary bloom of agony, rolling across my face.

  ‘You know nothing of us!’ he roars, and the voice is instantly unhinged with rage.

  Groggily, I realise I have unleashed something of incredible magnitude, and my stomach tightens.

  He strikes me again, using his other fist, and my head bounces painfully from its bonds. What little vision I had disappears, to be replaced by a red-black, blotchy haze. Something else – a boot? – thuds into my exposed midriff, cracking my fused ribs and driving the plates in.

  ‘Nothing!’ he bellows, and a whole curtain of saliva slaps across my ruined cheeks. He is screaming into my face.

  I can summon nothing against this. I have moved too soon, and he will surely kill me. More hammer-blows impact, breaking my skin, tearing my muscles, shivering the bone beneath. My head rocks on my neck like a top, cracked back and forth by the casual, deadly fists. If it were not for my restraints keeping me in check, my neck would be severed clean by now.

  Then he stops. Merciful Throne, he stops.

  I hear him raging still, incoherent with mania. He paces back and forth, trying to rein in whatever dark forces I have unleashed. I gasp for breath, feeling my punctured lungs labour. My head feels swollen with blood. The world reels around me, thick and dizzy with pain.

  His breathing is like an animal’s, ragged and laced with moisture. For a long time, he doesn’t speak. I don’t think he can. It takes time for the rage to subside.

  ‘You know nothing of us,’ he growls again, and the voice has resumed its terrifying, purring threat.

  I cannot respond. My own lips are puffy and cracked, and I feel my blood clotting in hard nodes within my wounds.

  ‘So certain,’ he spits, and I feel a slug of oily phlegm hit my body. ‘You’re so damned certain. And yet, as it turns out, you know even less than you think.’

  He comes close again, and I smell his sour aroma. That odour gives much away.
There is a bestial quality to it, like the sodden flank of an old hunting dog, but there’s something else. Chemical, perhaps.

  ‘You still don’t know why I brought you here,’ he says. His contempt is needle-keen. ‘Time to shed some light.’

  As he says it, wall-mounted lumens flare into life. The sudden exposure only adds more pain to the riot of it in my head, and my bruised eyes screw shut. It takes time for them to open again, gingerly, the lids trembling under flakes of dried blood.

  For the first time, I can see my questioner. As I look into his face, blurry and floating amid the harsh lights, I finally make out some detail, some identity.

  It is then that I realise, just as he said I would, that I know nothing at all.

  Revuel Arvida ran fast, keeping his head low, watching where his boots fell carefully. He reached his destination, a tall column of semi-melted metal on the corner of what had once been an intersection between two transit corridors.

  He slid down against the broken column and risked a look round the corner. The body of Orphide lay in the middle of the open street. On either side of him the hollow carcasses of buildings stretched away down the long avenue. There was no visible movement.

  He glanced at the proximity readings on his helm display. No enemy signals, and three of his battle-brothers dead. Three other active signals were converging on Kalliston’s location, a few hundred metres distant. Arvida was furthest away, out of position and isolated.

  The city was whisper-quiet, but Arvida’s aural amplifiers picked up a faint shuffling from a long way down the street. Something was moving towards him, sheltered by the drifting smog and the urban ruins.

  He crouched down with his back against the metal. Arvida was Corvidae, a master of the shifting patterns of the future. Back on his home world and surrounded by its familiar resonance, he felt particularly powerful. He allowed his consciousness to rise quickly through the enumerations.

  He saw paths stretching away from him, overlaid onto the pattern of the streets around him. There were many clear possibilities, each running amid the others like a herd of panicked, stampeding prey. Some routes were obscured, but many were clear. He saw the approach of his enemy, their movements and their tactics. They had encircled Kalliston’s position. There were dozens of them.