by Gav Thorpe
Guilliman raised a hand to halt any retort by the Blood Angels warrior.
‘We require immediate audience, commander,’ he said. He dropped his voice. ‘How is he?’
‘Of course, Lord Warden,’ Azkaellon replied with a bow, carefully directed towards Guilliman alone. ‘Lord Sanguinius has been… in reflection for the last three hours. He awaits your company.’
TEN
A brother hanged
Caliban
The Northwilds arcology was marked by the scars of battle and neglect, its surface towers and domes already succumbing to the elements. Rents in the plasteel and ferrocrete bled greenish-grey lichen and the tendrils of climbing plants like the pus of untended wounds. The scorch of las-marks, the chip of bolt impacts and the glassy sheen of plasma blasts stood testament to a troubled past.
A tower near the western limit of the overground structures trembled as though a mast caught in a suddenly veering wind. It swayed, masonry crumbled, metal supports creaked and bent. Foundation stones shifted, appearing to crack, and slid away from beneath the weight of the tower. The whole edifice trembled, fresh cracks travelling up the surfaces of the surrounding domes like eggs cracking from within.
The tower toppled outwards, slowly, gracefully, its component parts breaking away from each other as it descended by a force other than gravity. Shards of ferrocrete and buckled shafts of plasteel settled on each other as a fissure opened up at the base.
The crack in the ground widened further, several metres from jagged edge to jagged edge. With barely a sound, the pieces of shattered building landed around the newly opened chasm, seeming to form steps and arches.
A gleam of yellow light, the flicker of a flame impossibly strong, lit the fissure from within. Dust swirled like smoke, parting to form a path of clean air as a shadow appeared in the light.
Silhouetted, a broad-shouldered figure marched up from the depths, ascending the crazily formed stairway, curves of melting masonry forming arches, towering but disturbingly formless shapes overhead.
Reaching the surface, the figure stopped, shielding his eyes against the early morning sun.
Zahariel looked around for a few moments enchanted by what he saw.
Caliban was alive.
Not just the plants, the birds and the beasts, but the world itself. Zahariel looked on his home world with eyes clear for the first time. There was life, energy, everywhere, rising from the heart of the planet, coiling around the rocks and trees, soaring into the skies. Beyond the clouds he could see the tendrils still, a shining web of energy that knitted Caliban to the fabric of the material universe. But about those tendrils was something else, a sheathing of blackness that turned them not into anchors but shackles. Caliban strained against these primordial, immaterial bonds, its shrieks and bellows unheard by any ears.
He had thought the Ouroboros was an enemy, devouring Caliban from within, seeking to corrupt it. The Terran sorcerers had tried to bring it forth to destroy the Dark Angels, but even they did not know the truth of what they had sought to unleash.
The Ouroboros was Caliban. This simple revelation had set Zahariel free.
The Ouroboros was Caliban.
The Ouroboros was Caliban.
Those words had shown him the futility of trying to destroy the thing. He could no more kill it than he could kill a whole world.
More than that, he no longer desired to kill it. He had always loved Caliban, and now he loved it even more, having seen its beating heart, its emergent spirit given form. Caliban knew him too, and had spoken to him as it had tried to speak to him in the past.
The coming of the Imperium had broken that bond, for all Calibanites.
Before that, even. The coming of the Lion and the destruction of the last of the Great Beasts. They had laid oppressive chains upon Caliban, binding it to their will, seeking to break its spirit and exploit its body.
Israfael’s teachings had been nothing more than lies to blind Zahariel to the truth. The training he had received from the Chief Librarian, the tenets of the Librarius and the Emperor, were a cloud to obscure true knowledge.
Zahariel had forgotten how he had seen Caliban as a child, the memory scratched out by the chants and rituals and dogma of Israfael. Just as the Terrans had built the great arcologies on the surface of Caliban, the Librarius had taught Zahariel to erect walls within his soul.
Soul.
It was a word that had fallen into disfavour with the coming of the Imperial Truth, but now Zahariel found use of it again. The spark of life. The embodiment of all that was non-physical in a person. Their presence in the otherspace of the warp.
No wonder that the Emperor suppressed such thoughts. Zahariel had seen the soul of Caliban and his own was part of it.
A different sort of Enlightenment to that preached by the iterators had come upon Zahariel and it was his task to propagate it. Others would be shown the way, in due course. Their eyes would be opened to the truth.
More than anything else, Zahariel knew he had to protect what he had found. For the time being the Ouroboros – Caliban’s soul – had to be kept secret, kept safe.
Zahariel opened his mind, truly opened his mind for the first time in decades, and allowed the power of Caliban to pass into him. A serpent of energy rose from the depths, drawn by his will. He spread his arms and allowed it to lift him up, robe fluttering as he rode the power into the air. Pausing for a few seconds, a hundred metres above the ground, Zahariel glanced back at the fissure that had released him.
His presence removed, the stones were reverting to their inert nature, falling into heaps of ruin and rubble. Towering likenesses of the Ouroboros turned to piles of metal and brick. Dust settled on the debris like a shroud.
Zahariel felt a last impelling thought of purpose pulse from the incarnation of Caliban buried beneath the arcology, warming his soul.
He turned southwards, the power of the planet speeding him towards his destination faster than any gunship or shuttle. Within the hour he would set eyes upon Aldurukh and a reckoning with the man that had left him for dead: the Lord Cypher.
Zahariel stopped about five kilometres from the city. Aldurukh was a strange amalgam of the past and the present, of Caliban and Terra, of harmony and discord. In its roots Zahariel could feel the ancient stones of the world, even now glowing with the power of Caliban. Like the furnace that drives an engine, that power was the force behind the Order, unknown to a hundred generations of knights since Aldurukh had been founded.
It was no wonder the Lion had, by a tortuous route, come to this place of all the warrior chapters on Caliban. His presence lingered still, a veil over the old power of Caliban, tainted by the iron nails of Terran discipline and denial that held down the energy of the Ouroboros trying to burst forth from below.
The bulk of the city hummed and throbbed with the minds of its populace, human, Space Marine and animal, each part almost nonexistent, but as a whole forming a powerful mass of will.
And in the pinnacle, in the heights of the Angelicasta, there was something else. It was bright and small compared to the embers of Caliban’s soul in the foundations, but there was power there.
Luther’s library.
It had once belonged to the Knights of Lupus, texts on the Great Beasts, the semi-corporeal nephilla and the power from which they sprang forth. There was rumour aplenty on the contents of those ancient tomes, and now that knowledge was being freed, unleashed upon the world through Luther’s indulgence.
Zahariel smiled. The Order could not survive, not in its present state. It was too powerful, too united. As much as Luther sought to be free of the Lion’s legacy, the pre-eminence of the Order would always be the primarch’s greatest achievement and the one that Luther could never bring himself to overturn. But if Caliban were to be freed, if the Great Beasts and the nephilla were to roam again and the Ouroboros liberated from its physical prison, the Order had to perish. Humanity had to be fractured, conflict had to thrive for Caliban to grow stron
g on the turmoil.
Her soul required sacrifice, her soil required the nourishment of toil and blood.
Something approached from the south-east, quickly resolving itself into the shape of a Thunderhawk gunship. Zahariel dropped like a stone, only stopping his fall a few metres from the ground. He came to rest beside a cracked road, its surface pitted and half overgrown. It had not been used since the building of the overland expressway, a ribbon of metal and ferrocrete that snaked across the continent on a two-hundred-metre-high viaduct just a few kilometres away.
He let his mind stretch out to the gunship and its occupant, for he detected a solitary mind at the controls. His probing thoughts rebounded from a mental shield, its existence and shape identifying the pilot as easily as any successful scan.
It was Vassago.
The gunship put down less than twenty metres away, dirt and dead leaves swirling around Zahariel. The front ramp descended and Vassago hurried out, expression caught between hope and incredulity.
‘I knew I was not mistaken!’ the acolyte declared, his uncertainty resolving into a broad grin. ‘It was your thoughts I felt on the shifting winds.’
‘You are correct. My absence has forced you to push yourself further than I could have hoped possible. Your abilities have improved dramatically.’ Zahariel realised that his own powers were far beyond what he had been capable of before he had been taken by the spirit of Caliban. He drew his essence back into himself, wary that Vassago would detect the change. It was odd to look at his protégé now, seeing the bars of the cage Israfael’s teachings had set around Vassago’s mind, just as they had confined Zahariel’s thoughts. One day soon he would pull them away, freeing his pupil to roam farther than ever before.
‘I should have contacted you earlier, but I was in haste to return to Aldurukh.’
‘Understandable, master,’ said Vassago as Zahariel started towards the Thunderhawk. ‘We have all been anxious for news of your return.’
‘All? I think there is at least one that will not be greeting my arrival with welcoming clarions.’
Vassago stopped at the bottom of the ramp and allowed Zahariel to precede him, following a step behind.
‘I do not understand, master.’
‘The Lord Cypher,’ said Zahariel, picking his words with care. ‘What has he said of the events that befell us at the Northwilds?’
‘Nothing, to us. He has shared his counsel only with Luther, as far as I know.’
‘Unsurprising.’ Zahariel paused and turned as he reached the hold of the gunship. ‘He would not be keen to confess his cowardice to a wide audience.’
‘Cowardice?’ Vassago pushed the ramp controls as he passed. With a hiss, the assault portal closed, plunging them into gloom.
‘Yes, cowardice, Vassago. He left me to die beneath the Northwilds. Did he tell you that?’
Vassago said nothing, which was for the best. Zahariel was not in the mood for platitudes.
‘Do you know if the Lord Cypher is in Aldurukh?’ he asked.
‘I believe he is.’
‘Then let us get back without delay. I would not have him wait longer to make reparations for his betrayal.’
The look of consternation from Vassago stopped Zahariel as he moved towards the cockpit.
‘Something wrong, brother?’
‘I would avoid confrontation with the Lord Cypher,’ Vassago said, releasing each word reluctantly. ‘He has… allies.’
‘Of course he has allies. Luther, for one. When I have told my side of events, his friends will not stand by his actions.’
‘The Watchers, master.’ Vassago glanced around as though one of the creatures might materialise right there in the gunship. ‘Lord Cypher has made a pact with the Watchers in the Dark. They protect him. He interrupted our sessions, shielded from detection by them. We should not turn our faces against the guardians in the shadows.’
‘Interesting.’ Zahariel stroked his chin, thoughtful at this news. If it was the case, and he had no reason to doubt Vassago’s testimony, it was a complication. The spirit of Caliban had no love for the creatures known as the Watchers, though all tradition held that they were protectors of the world. Zahariel had seen that they were nothing but gaolers. ‘My thanks for the warning.’
The two of them passed into the piloting suite. Zahariel deferred to Vassago at the controls, taking a place at the gunner’s station.
‘Call the others together, Vassago,’ Zahariel said. ‘I must speak with them urgently.’
‘I understand, master. They are abroad on their duties, it will take some time.’
‘I will have plenty to occupy me,’ Zahariel assured his lieutenant. ‘First I must present myself to Sar Luther.’
‘And then?’ asked Vassago, his enthusiasm returned. ‘What do we do then?’
Zahariel had to think for a few moments before replying.
‘That will depend very much on him.’
Luther steepled his fingers and leaned forward with his elbows on the large desk of his study. He silently regarded the three figures before him, looking at each in turn for several seconds.
What a cast of characters, he thought, taken straight from an ancient morality play. They all thought they could use him for their own ends. Use Caliban. They saw his weaker body and could not help but assume, even unconsciously, that the mind was weaker too. He had seen it in the Lion as well, though not at first. Unquestionably genius, strategically and tactically superior to any native of Caliban, but the primarch had a terrible flaw: a blindness to people and their weaknesses. The Lion’s paranoia, hidden behind the armour of discipline and duty forged by the Order, always granted others more credit than they deserved, thinking them clever, bold, noble or ambitious when they were no such thing.
Luther looked at his visitors and saw them for what they were. He knew the chinks in their armour better than they did. Better to feign weakness, though, and let them struggle amongst themselves than to reveal his real strength and unite them against him.
The first was Astelan, the schemer. Old, wily, focused. The First Master had admitted straight to Luther that his only desire was to avenge himself on the Lion. He owed nothing to Caliban or Luther other than as an ally of the moment, one that would rarely take centre stage but preferred to call his lines from the wings. That made Astelan the best of them, in a way – while the Lion remained abroad, the First Master would do all he could to keep Luther in power as the best means to vengeance.
Next was the Lord Cypher, the young traditionalist. He was clad in a heavy robe, his face obscured beneath a deep hood. Luther’s enforcer, supposedly, but there was more to the mysterious warrior than simply guarding the lore and customs of the Order. His agenda was not yet clear to Luther, but the catastrophic events in the Northwilds, both historically and in the recent past, had been a catalyst of some kind. On the surface it appeared that the Lord Cypher was as loyal to the Order as the role dictated, but he took counsel and perhaps command from another also.
And lastly the idealist, Zahariel. Doubtless his return had sent the other two into a frenzy of fresh evaluation, trying to work out whether this was good or ill for their own plots.
The Librarian was the most dangerous directly, possessing the power to enforce his will upon the others if he ever desired it. Of the three, it was Zahariel that Luther most needed to remain loyal to the Order and his cause. Also, fortunately, the most likely to do so. A son of Caliban, dedicated to the Order for his whole life, a trusted companion through Luther’s most trying times.
Independently capable of astrotelepathy, able to read minds, judge lies and truth, see within the hearts of others… Yes, Zahariel and his psykers were formidable. Astelan had loyalty amongst some of the Chapters, and still maintained hopes for the warriors held in the cells. Lord Cypher could, in theory, call upon the Order to cast out their Grand Master, but could never directly command. But Zahariel posed a greater threat, and was potentially a superior weapon to both of the others.
An outsider would be wrong.
‘Lord Cypher, I have received a fresh account of the recent episode at the Northwilds,’ said Luther. The warrior’s eyes narrowed as he glanced at Zahariel. ‘You did not tell me that Sar Zahariel urged you to depart when the arcology started to collapse. If not for his testimony, I might have laboured under the illusion that you abandoned him. I owe you an apology.’
Lord Cypher shifted in what might have been surprise.
‘The decision was mine to make, Sar Luther,’ he said evenly. ‘It was the prudent course of action but one I took with a heavy heart. I am curious how Sar Zahariel was able to survive when the tunnels began to fall.’
‘The benefits of his unique talent,’ Luther replied for the psyker. ‘Where physical armour was absent, the protection of the mind was present.’
‘Our search parties could not locate you,’ added Astelan. ‘I personally led the first teams into the ruin.’
‘I was deep, brothers, very deep,’ Zahariel replied quietly. ‘Your augurs and surveyors had no chance. Even my fellow Librarians could not find me. It was a combination of fortitude and fortune that I happened upon a shaft created by the fall of several subterranean chambers, the materials of which had shielded me from your searches.’
‘Fortitude and fortune, both qualities required in those remembered as great,’ said Luther. ‘One of my forebears once claimed that he would rather have a lucky general than a good one.’
The others said nothing to this, each trying to assess their rivals according to their internal plans. Luther allowed the tension to rise for a moment. It served him better that they chased themselves and each other in circles. When the time came to declare his true intentions they would be looking anywhere but at the Grand Master.
