‘Agnes,’ Kanshell said, ‘we’ve already had this conversation.’
She clasped his upper arm. ‘And we’ll keep having it. You need it, even if you don’t think so.’
He gently removed her hand. ‘What I need now is some food, and then I need to be about my duties.’
‘Yes, there is much work to do. There is so much to rebuild. Not all of it can be forged by tools and hands. Our strength needs to be rebuilt, too.’
Kanshell grunted. His temper was slipping. After his encounter with Galba, he had little patience for Tanaura, and he felt strong enough to confront her. He took his tray of food: a slab of processed protein and a square of compressed vegetable matter. The basic necessities to keep the human mechanism viable and contributing, in its turn, to the X Legion’s war machine. Kanshell moved to a table and put his tray down with a clatter. He began to tear the rations into strips. ‘Do you see what I’m doing?’ he said. He chewed and swallowed. ‘I’m rebuilding my strength.’ He met Tanaura’s gaze and, pleased with his fortitude, refused to blink first. ‘My true, valuable strength. Turning to superstition is a weakness.’
‘You’re so wrong. Realising that we have limits, and that we have weaknesses, takes courage. It takes strength. We have to accept that we must turn to the Father of Mankind for his aid. The Lectitio Divinitatus teaches us–’
‘To go against the very teachings of the Emperor, even as it purports to worship him. The logic is ridiculous, and it is forbidden.’
‘You don’t understand. The Emperor’s denial of His divinity is a test. It reminds us to reject all false gods. But when we have done so, casting down all the idols who claim to be divine, the one true god remains. We have to see through the paradox he has given us. When you reach the other side, there is such comfort.’
‘I am not looking for comfort,’ Kanshell spat. ‘None of us should. That is unworthy of who we are.’
‘You really don’t understand. If I could show you the strength needed to commit to faith, you would see how wrong you are.’
Kanshell finished eating. ‘That isn’t about to happen, is it?’
‘It could.’ From a pocket in her worn tunic, Tanaura produced a worn book. She placed it against Kanshell’s chest. ‘Please read this.’
Kanshell shoved the book away as if burned. ‘Where did you get that?’
‘I’ve had it for years. It was given to me by a serf of the Word Bearers.’
‘Who betrayed us at Isstvan! What are you thinking?’
‘I think it is a tragedy that those who first knew the truth have turned away from it. And I think it would be another tragedy if we did too.’
Kanshell shook his head. ‘No. I won’t have anything to do with this cult, and I want you to leave me alone.’ He glanced back at the circle of worshippers. They were still deep in prayer. ‘Don’t you realise the risk you’re taking, carrying on like this out in the open?’
‘The truth should not be kept to the shadows.’
‘And if any of the legionaries sees this? If Captain Atticus finds out?’ Tanaura was in charge of the upkeep of Atticus’s quarters. Kanshell could not understand why she would jeopardise such an honour. The only reason he could think of why nothing had been done about the growing cult was that the Iron Hands had far more pressing matters to concern themselves with than the off-duty activities of the serfs.
‘We aren’t interfering with necessary work. We don’t speak to anyone who doesn’t want to listen.’
Kanshell gave a short bark of laughter. ‘What do you call this, then?’
That intense gaze, a mix of ecstatic revelation and a determination of steel. ‘Because I can see your need, Jerune. You want to listen.’
He backed away from her, shaking his head. ‘You could not be more wrong. Now please, leave me alone.’
‘Think about what I’ve said.’
‘I will not,’ he shot over his shoulder as he marched away.
He made his way toward the stern. A massive, closed bulkhead sealed off the damage beyond from the rest of the ship. There, Kanshell received his assignment and worked his way into the twisted, fractured corridors to join other serfs and repair servitors in the slow process of restoring rationality, order and mechanical precision to the interior of the Veritas. His group worked to clear a corridor of tangled metal. The passageway had run in a straight line, but now it resembled a fractured bone. There was a sharp cleavage in the floor, with the section running to port now raised half a metre above the rest. There was no way to bring the halves of the corridor back into alignment, but the disfigurement could be alleviated with a ramp.
The work was cramped and stifling. Kanshell had new cuts and burns within minutes. He welcomed the strain. He welcomed the pain. It seared away Tanaura’s superstitious fancies. More importantly, it put her insinuations about him to the torch. She was wrong about him. He did not deny that he needed to draw strength from somewhere outside himself. He knew he had limits, and he knew these dark days had pushed him to them. But he would draw his strength from the object lessons of the legionaries of the Iron Hands.
He vowed unswerving loyalty to the Emperor and to his teachings. One implied the other. It was that simple. Everything he needed to know about strength, he could see for himself in the ceramite-clad giants he served. He had no need for a grubby octavo that sought to undermine everything the Imperium and the Great Crusade had brought about.
And for just a few moments, cocooned in the sweat-box darkness lit only by the painful glare of soldering tools, he was able to hide from the knowledge of what had happened to the Great Crusade, and what was happening to the Imperium.
Then the floor collapsed. Its remaining strength had been a lie. With snaps and shrieks of tortured metal, several metres of decking fell into the lower depths of the vessel. Most of the work detail plunged with it. Kanshell felt the terrifying jerk and give beneath his feet and threw himself backwards. He caught a jagged corner of torn wall with his left hand. His feet scrabbled for purchase and he was suddenly holding almost his full weight with one hand. The metal cut a deep gash into his palm. Blood slicked his fingers. His grip began to slip. He flailed with his right hand, grasping air. His flesh tingled as the chasm before him drew nearer.
Then his heel caught a ridge in the decking. He steadied, and found a hanging pipe on his right. He took a careful step back onto level floor. There was no give, no creak of treacherous metal. He collapsed on all fours, gasping for breath, and crawled away from the hole. In the light of guttering flames and sparking cables, he stared at the hungry darkness, made dizzy by the act of chance that had spared him. His ears were filled with the echoes of settling wreckage, but there were no screams of the injured.
The silence of the dead was deafening.
The hololithic ghosts of his three brothers were fragile. They kept dissolving into jagged flickers, their words disappearing into static. Several times, Atticus had to ask the other three captains to repeat themselves. And given how often he had to do the same for them, his transmission was no better than his reception. There was little of the illusion of presence in the lithocast chamber. As sentences fragmented and faces lost definition, what Atticus felt instead was the reminder of absence. The candle-flame brittleness of the hololiths was the health of his Legion, what was left of its strength.
The Veritas Ferrum’s lithocast system was humble compared to those on the flagships of the Legions. It was also more private. Rather than being integrated into the bridge, it occupied a chamber next to Atticus’s quarters. The lithocast plate was in the centre of the space, surrounded by three-metre-high panels that acted as sound baffles. The lithocast operators’ stations occupied the periphery of the chamber. Atticus’s isolation during the lithocasts was not a matter of secrecy, but of efficiency. The panels were there to keep sound out, allowing the captain to turn his undivided attention to his distant visitors.
>
The operation of the system was energy intensive. It was not used lightly. The conferences that took place through its agency were always on matters of great import. In the past, they had almost always been initiated by Ferrus Manus himself.
In the past. Atticus suppressed that thought, because behind it lurked a worse one that he refused to countenance: Never again.
‘What are your auspex scans showing?’ Khalybus asked.
‘They aren’t showing anything unusual. We are experiencing the expected erratic behaviour this close to the Maelstrom, and it has been growing worse as we enter the Pandorax System. But they can’t pinpoint a source of interference themselves.’
‘But something else can,’ Sabinus deduced.
Atticus nodded. ‘The mistress of our astropathic choir thinks she can find it.’
Sabinus grunted. ‘Not your Navigator?’
‘I grant this is odd. But no. Though Mistress Erephren is working with Navigator Strassny to translate what she is reading from the empyrean into actual coordinates.’
‘What is she experiencing?’ Plienus asked. It took him three attempts before Atticus could make out what he was saying.
‘She says her perception is reaching a clarity and range she has never known before.’
‘I am surprised,’ Plienus responded. ‘My choirs are finding your messages harder and harder to transcribe.’
The other two captains were nodding in agreement.
‘That appears to be the other facet of the phenomenon,’ Atticus said. ‘The more clearly the choirs receive, the more difficult it is for them to send.’
Khalybus said something that was lost in a scraping whine of interference. When the sound cleared for a moment, he said, ‘Where does this lead, brother? To total awareness and absolute silence?’
‘How can I know? Perhaps.’
‘Are you sure of the wisdom of your course?’
‘Am I sure of the end result of this venture? Of course not. Am I sure of its necessity? Without a doubt.’ Atticus paused for a moment. ‘Brothers, our reality is hard, and we must face truths just as unforgiving. We cannot prosecute this war in our traditional manner, and we cannot reach Terra.’ What he did not add, but they all understood, was that they would not make for Terra even if they could. They would return as a smashed Legion, one to be absorbed, its culture forgotten, into the others. There had been too many humiliations already. There was no reason to willingly submit to this final one. ‘We have agreed,’ he continued, ‘to fight the enemy using what means we have to the fullest. We have no fleet. But we still have ships, and this region favours the individual predator. There remains the question of tracking the prey.’
‘You think you have found a way of doing so?’ Plienus asked.
‘I see the possibility of a great deal of useful intelligence.’
Sabinus was not convinced. ‘That is supposition.’
‘One that I believe is worth acting on.’
All three ghosts dissolved into a flashing phantasmagoria. Sound became a wailing electronic wind. In the midst of the storm, Atticus had a momentary impression of something distinct emerging from the static. It was as if a new voice scraped past his ear, whispering syllables both concrete and incomprehensible. As he tried to listen more intently, the storm passed, and his brothers stood before him again.
‘…you realise?’ Sabinus was saying. When Atticus asked him to repeat himself, he said, ‘I was asking if you are fully aware of what the loss of a single ship now means to the Legion.’
‘Of course I do. Just as I know the vital necessity of any tactical advantage.’
‘There is little point in arguing,’ Khalybus put in. ‘Captain Atticus is correct about the realities we face. Whatever any of us thinks of the wisdom of his strategy, it is his decision to make. By rank and by necessity, we will each be fighting our own war.’
There was a pause. It was a silence without static. Atticus felt a new weight pressing down on him, as he knew it was on his brothers. It was not the responsibility of command. It was something akin to isolation, only much more powerful, much more profound. It was loss. The Iron Hands fought on, but the X Legion was no more. The collective body of which Atticus had been a part for centuries had been dismembered. Atticus refused to believe in the death of Ferrus Manus. Such a monstrous impossibility could not be, not in any universe, no matter how insane. Did iron yet bend in the breeze? No? Then Manus was not dead. Some truths were that simple. They had to be, if there were to be such a thing as truth at all.
But Manus was not here. He was lost to his sons, and the great war machine he had forged had been smashed to a few scattered components.
As if speaking Atticus’s thoughts, Sabinus said, ‘The body of our Legion is gone.’ Of the four, Sabinus was the least transformed. His was the voice that could still express the depths of grief and anger for them all. ‘And our blood is adulterated.’ The Veritas Ferrum was not alone in carrying surviving Salamanders and Raven Guard. The other captains also had to look upon the allies who had failed their Legion.
Atticus held up a hand. He made it into a fist. It was unarmoured, but it could still punch through steel. Sabinus was correct – the collective being of the Legion was shattered, but he could rely on his own force, and that of the legionaries under his command, to crush the skulls of traitors to dust.
‘No,’ he said, and he revelled in the inhuman, fleshless rasp of his own voice. ‘We are its body yet. If we can no longer strike with a hammer blow, we shall erode our enemies like a cancer. We are in their domain. They will think themselves safe here, but they are mistaken. We are too small to find, but we are here. We will harry them, and bleed them, and if they should be lucky enough to destroy one of us, what then? Will that affect the operations of the rest? No. One blow destroyed the greater part of our forces. It will take more blows than the enemy can count to kill the rest. We have a strength, brothers. We have but to recognise it.’
They talked for a few more minutes after that. Atticus heard about the operations that the other captains planned, and how they hoped to track their targets. He listened. He committed the information to memory. But he knew how little that knowledge mattered. The Veritas Ferrum was on her own.
The lithocast ended. The ghosts vanished. Yet for a moment, the isolation vanished too. Atticus was seized by the certainty that if he spun around, he would see something else standing with him on the lithocast plate. He quelled the urge to turn and walked forwards off the plate. The sense of a presence evaporated, as he had known it would. No matter how much of the weak flesh he sacrificed to the Apothecary’s knife, his mind remained human, and subject to its perversities and compulsions to deceive itself. The key was to recognise this vulnerability, and to counter it with the empirical rationality taught by his primarch and his Emperor.
But when he returned to the bridge, and stood in the command lectern, and gave orders that the Veritas Ferrum cross the boundary of the asteroid belt and venture into the Pandorax System, one more thing happened. It was brief, so brief it should have been instantly dismissed. And he did dismiss it. It was faint, so faint he should have been able to ignore it. And he did ignore it.
What he dismissed, what he ignored, was an irrational phantom. It was as trivial as a hair in front of an eye.
It was as precise as a claw caressing the cerebral cortex.
It was a welcome.
Two
Mistress of the song
Age of wonders
A verdant land
Fear was the normal condition when touching the current of the warp. It was also the necessary one. Rhydia Erephren held it close to her being. She made it her constant companion. It was the friend she could count on. She had even trained herself to respond with terror should the fear ever diminish, because that would be the sign she was dropping her guard and in greatest danger.
Erep
hren believed in the secular universe promulgated by the Emperor. She celebrated the toppling of all gods. The extirpation of the irrational from the human race was a glorious quest, and she believed in its necessity with all of her strength and all of her yearning. Despite her bedrock loyalty to the precepts of the Imperium, or perhaps because of it, she also experienced awe, and knew it in the form of sacred horror. That was the power of the warp. It was everything the Imperium stood against, yet it was the precondition to the spread of the Emperor’s light. It was the impossible given a non-existent reality. It was the denial of place that was also the supreme means of travel. It seduced in order to destroy.
On this day, the warp was seductive as she had never experienced it before, and it was growing more persuasive by the second. It beckoned her with clarity, dropping one veil after another, filling her head with knowledge of the near systems, and promising more. It hinted that omniscience was just over the horizon. It would be hers, if she and the Veritas would come a bit nearer to a certain spot in the Pandorax System. Come to Pythos, it murmured. It promised so many sights to parade for her behind her blind eyes, so many secrets to whisper. As she stood at her pulpit in the chancel, leading the astropathic choir, the growing clarity became a kind of ecstasy. A brilliant dawn was flooding the night of the warp. Turning to find the sun was not difficult. It would have been impossible for her to do otherwise. The challenge came in not losing herself. It would have been easy to let her consciousness drown in the light of knowing.
Discipline held her back. Discipline, fealty and will. She was an astropath of the Iron Hands, and she had a war to wage.
‘This is a rare sight,’ Darras said under his breath as the bridge doors opened.
The Damnation of Pythos Page 3
