It was a Sio’t meditation — committed to memory long tau’cyrs ago — supposedly composed by the great hero O’Mau’tel. Since its inscription, of course, the tau had encountered both the insane, green-skinned Be’gel and the ever-devouring The: two races, each in their own way utterly incapable of integration with the tau’va. The meditation had been quietly dropped from later editions of the Sio’t, but Kais had always remembered it. Perhaps in some dark, rogue part of his mind, the idea that his people’s social principles were not always correct had given him comfort.
“What do you want?” he said, staring down at the creature. “Why are y... What are you doing here? Why are you fighting us?” Lame questions. Halfhearted questions. He was no water caste por’la, after all. But the need to try — the need to do something the right way — was too strong to ignore.
The language itself felt just as bizarre now, grating against his throat, as it had done when the fio’ui medics grafted it into his mind at the third didactic treatment. He remembered spending decs afterwards with Ju and Y’hol, trying out the strange alien words appearing as if from nowhere inside their memories.
The sobbing human didn’t seem to hear his questions. It just clutched at his leg gibbering. “Please throne no don’t sweet emperor no don’t kill me oh living god not now, p-please don’t I’m begging you...”
“Quiet. Human. Be quiet.”
It would not be silent.
“Please oh I don’t want to, no, I... oh, I don’t want to die oh Terra please...”
It would not be silent and, worse, it was bleeding all over his legs. Sticky warm gue’la blood, dribbling and filthy against his hooves.
“Throne no please Emperor no no—”
He pumped a shot into its head and blotted out the horror and revulsion before it even hit him. He was getting good at that.
Something was clanging nearby, a rhythmic knocking that sent him dropping into an alert crouch, wary of every shadow, senses racing on overdrive. His slow scan of the room ended on a thick metal door, whorls of rust and moisture patterning it obscenely. A crude magnetic lock to one side winked its red eye conspiratorially at him. He lifted the rifle and obliterated the small device, quickly turning the gun on the door to face whatever horrors were revealed.
The metal disc rolled aside with a throaty roar. A dead man stepped out.
“Kais?” said Y’hol.
* * *
The apparition outside his cell could hardly be less friendly in appearance. Its polished shoulderguards and taupe armour were dulled by dust and filth, splattered with a drying galaxy of blood. Its fio’dr regs were stained and torn, an ugly singe mark marring its upper arm. Its weapon — a tangle of human blood and flesh decorating its tip — tilted up to glare at him.
But the unit code on its breast was clear, even beneath the filth. Shas’la T’au Kais. Y’hol stared at his best friend in astonishment, mind refusing to work.
They greeted each other in a tangle of relief, all horrors forgotten, clasping arms and pressing twice on the circle of armour over their hearts, a greeting reserved for familiars and friends. Kais kept repeating, over and over:
“We thought you were dead... We thought you were dead...”
Y’hol nodded, amused. Kais had always been too ready to expect the worst. “Of course not,” he smiled grimly. “Just a scratch.” He grunted and lifted his leg, a singed chunk of flesh missing just below the knee. Kais hissed, scrabbling in his utilities for a spare medipack.
“Relax,” Y’hol winced, easing the limb back to the floor. “It’s sealed over. A snae’ta gue’la cauterised it in the shuttle on the way here. Said prisoners aren’t allowed to die until they’ve answered some questions.”
“There are more survivors?”
“Yes...” Y’hol blinked, the insanity of the situation finally catching up with him. “Kais, what’s going on? Where is this place... a-and why are you even here?” The morass of jumbled questions subsided as a single, overbearing enquiry bubbled in his mind. “What’s happening, by the path?”
“They’ve captured an Aim,” Kais said, leading him out into the corridor. Y’hol didn’t recognise the voice — full of a sharp resonance he’d never heard before. It sounded focused, an attribute he’d never have associated with Kais until now.
“An Aun?” he breathed, horrified.
“That’s right,” his friend nodded, gelatinous gore clotting across his limbs. “I’m here to find him.”
“What’s happened to you?” Yhol whispered, suddenly afraid. Kais just stared at him, expressions hidden behind the glaring optic of his helmet.
“I found my niche,” he replied.
Together they worked their way back to the sealed access ramp, Vhol leaning on Kais with every painful, limped step.
“Can you open it?” Kais said, all business, nodding at the smoking panel beside the ramp.
Y’hol frowned. “B-but... The Aun—”
“That’s my path, Y’hol.”
“Your path?”
“Can you open it?”
Y’hol sighed, turning to the controls. This was all too much, too bewildering. Dealing with mundanity seemed the only way to cope. He squinted at the blasted circuitry, sparing a disparaging shake of his head for the crude gue’la technology, despite his bewilderment. “Yes,” he grunted, “Yes, I can open it. It’ll take me a whi—”
“Fine. I’ll send the rest of the prisoners here. You should be safe when you reach the surface. I think El’Lusha has everything under control.”
“But Kais...” The grime-covered warrior, shadows lurking in the scored depression of the helmet’s central optic, turned to look at him. Yhol suddenly couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Good luck,” he grunted, lamely.
Kais nodded once and ghosted away into the shadows. Y’hol wondered whether he’d ever see his friend again. Part of him wondered whether Kais — the Kais he knew — existed any more anyway.
Captain Ardias, veteran of the sacred Astartes Ultramarines Chapter, leader of the 3rd Company and Commander of the Arsenal, rarely enjoyed the opportunity to sleep.
In accordance with the stringent non-campaign daily agenda documented within the Codex Astartes, every Marine was accorded four hours of natural meditation-induced sleep every day. It was dreamless, supposedly, a time for bodily relaxation and total mental rest. Ardias hated it. It was four hours wasted; four hours that might be spent on the firing range, or in a training hangar, or conducting any one of the multifarious and complex ceremonies of worship that the monastic life of a Space Marine entailed.
Seated enormously on the cold floor, eyes fixed on the miniature shrine devoted jointly to the Emperor and to the Ultramarines’ Primarch, Roboute Guilliman, Ardias fidgeted distractedly and tried to get comfortable. Divested of his armour and its servomusculature he felt slow and ponderous, subject to niggling distractions like the coarseness of his robes and the drafts of his cell. He sighed and closed his eyes, trying to focus his mind.
It wasn’t even that sleep was necessary, especially. Deep in his skull the artificial catalepsean node could, when required, divert the ceaseless flow of his mental activity, allowing each cerebral lobe to rest whilst the other remained alert. In such a state a Marine could operate indefinitely, relentlessly serving the Emperor in a fashion unthinkable to normal, inferior humans. Only because it was so decreed in the Codex (and, he admitted, because of the vague danger of cranial trauma and psychosis), did Ardias accept his four wasted hours with good grace. He didn’t have to like it.
But today... today sleep wouldn’t come.
Perhaps, he considered, it was the unfamiliarity of his surroundings. For a man raised beneath the martial disciplines of Ultramar, thereafter growing accustomed to the simple but inspiring magnificence of the Fortress of Hera upon Macragge, this small naval cabin with its duct artery walls and rusted bulkhead hatches was an untidy, disordered distraction. The vessel’s distant generariums elicited a constant hum, refusing to seep awa
y into the subconscious in a stave of tiny variations, forever reminding his ears of their presence.
But that was an excuse, he knew. He’d slept under far worse conditions in the past. He’d entered the fugue state on Galathas II whilst the population of the ice city trembled, waiting for the eldar to come... He’d slept in the shuddering hold of a strikehawk following the campaign to push back the orks on the moons of Feal’s World... He’d calmly slipped into meditation without concern or fear in the catacombs of Yielth, waiting for the tech-priests to fix the access elevator before the rainwater drowned his entire squad. He could sleep through a meteor strike, if the need took him.
No. The cabin wasn’t the problem. It was what lay beyond. Beyond the corridor striated innards of this ugly battlecruiser, its clamour-filled hollows so unlike the quiet solemnity of an Astartes battle barge; beyond its dark spaces and cable-infested walls, beyond its thick adamantium hull and the thrumming lenticular void shields.
Coiling and billowing, ethereal tentacles caressing the vessel as it churned by, the raw belly of the warp surrounded him on all sides. The empyrean, they called it. Crackling and seething, haunted by shifting, unreal things... It was the “beneath”. It was the “over there”. It was a gap into which entire vessels could be plunged, steered only by the arcane gifts of the frail psychic navigator entombed within the ship’s systems, guided by the radiance of the Astronomican — the Emperor’s dying legacy to the Imperium.
It was Chaos, raw and unfettered, and it made Ardias shiver. To be so close to such malevolence and yet to be completely at its mercy, helpless and insubstantial; it was a feeling distinctly alien to a Space Marine.
So no, today the sleep wouldn’t come. Today his meditations ebbed and shifted, drifting from subject to subject, refusing to allow his muscles to unwind, his tension to ooze away.
But there was more than that. Anxiety alone had never bothered him before, nor did it now. Today there was something else catching on his mind, turning his thoughts away from slumber.
Librarian Delpheus had received a vision. A vision of battle, so he said. A vision of chattering bolters, screaming enemies — the signature disordered order of combat. He’d reported it to Ardias scant hours earlier, moments before the riotous “vessel under way” alarms sounded and the warship slipped with a cold lurch into the warp. The librarian had been vague, clearly shaken by whatever mystical process he’d undergone. Ardias appreciated Delpheus’s work but could never bring himself to envy his old comrade. The psychic mutation was a poisoned chalice, more curse than gift. Still, whatever the details of the vision, the core of Delpheus’s prediction remained the same: action.
After a while, Ardias gave up trying to meditate and prowled his cabin restlessly, uncertain why he should be so eager for combat, but anxious for its arrival nonetheless. The Enduring Blade slid across the warp, ploughing a long furrow through the unseen somethings that gibbered all around it, gathering like mosquitoes around a faint light, raking their mist-like claws across its void shields in ceaseless hunger for the souls within.
There’d been ten other prisoners, in the end.
They’d staggered off into the compound, holding each other up, not sure whether to thank or flee their saviour. Kais had seen the look in their eyes; the way they stared him up and down. One of them — delirious from the pain of his wounds — had even said it. The one, ugly little word they were all thinking as their cell doors rumbled open and he stood there, gifting them with their freedom.
“Mont’au...” the warrior had hissed, feverish eyes staring in fear and uncertainty. The others had shushed him nervously, unwilling to tolerate such blatant sentiment, and limped away into the gloom — towards Y’hol and freedom.
Mont’au. The Terror.
It was a word from the time before the Auns came and preached the tau’va. Before the tribes became castes, before the wars ended and the blood stopped rushing and order came to T’au.
Mont’au was a state-of-being without progress, without unity or altruism, without direction or purpose or strength. There was a purity, he supposed, in its selfishness: a focus upon the “I” before the “we”. And they’d seen it in him.
As he descended the stairs, his HUD automatically adjusting to accommodate the waning light, Kais caught sight of his reflection in a polished illuminator fitting. Suddenly he could understand the captives’ anxieties.
He appeared, in that tiny fish-eyed representation, to be a lurching thing of soot and dust, dappled white and black in equal measure, crusted over by a drying layer of blood. He was a daemon in Fire Warrior armour. He was a ghost of the past, a Mont’au devil, bathing in the blood of his enemies and existing only to kill.
Only he wasn’t; he just looked the part. He took a breath and forced himself to believe it.
A doorway hung open, perpendicular to the stairway. He stepped through, scanning for movement. Above him the ceiling lifted away in a dizzying sweep of swan-neck buttresses of polished obsidian, catching and scattering the light from a phalanx of tall candles. Chiselled flagstones rose towards a marbled altar, itself crested by an enormous icon figure of carved alabaster.
The complex shape caught at his eye and he found himself staring in fascination, trying to decipher the stylised effigy. It seemed to comprise a withered shape, desiccated and frail. He realised with a frown that it was a gue’la figure, almost corpselike in its aspect. Its great papery head — ringed by serried light rays and lightning bolts, hung in limp necrosis, sallow features wrinkled and bloodless. Around and within the skeletal shape was a stylised machine encrusted with yellow and gold mosaic tiles, a rambling arrangement of clustered cables and bound tubing, puncturing and entombing the body, surrounding it in a metallic embrace.
The cadaver’s eyes peered down into the candlelit chapel with a great, hollow sadness, filling the chamber with mournful tension.
Was this their god? he wondered. Was this their Great Emperor, stubbornly hoarding the faith of his teeming flock and preventing their rightful acquiescence to the Greater Good? A rotting, pestilent corpse ruling over his rotting, pestilent empire. Kais fought to contain his revulsion, regarding the statue blankly. They deserved each other.
He raised his rifle and sighted on the pale figure, its very existence a bitter slur upon the efficiency and purity of the tau’va. To even waste an energy bead upon it was damning in its display of his intemperance, but he felt somehow that in obliterating the icon he would be achieving something palpable.
But he couldn’t do it.
The crosshair wandered across the smooth carved lines, full of destructive promise, but every time his finger tightened over the rifle’s trigger, every time he imagined the fragmented pieces of alabaster spinning nebulously away, every time he moved his gaze anywhere near the pitiful shape, those ancient, aching eyes pinned him to his spot.
Somehow, without even bearing a trace of similarity, the abrasive stare of the withered god reminded him of his father, seeing into and through him, exposing his ugliest thoughts. He couldn’t destroy it. He couldn’t even look away from it.
It was almost a relief when a gue’la soldier, hiding nearby, shattered the silence of the chapel in a hail of lasgun bolts and the stink of ionised air.
Kais rolled to the floor instinctively, scrabbling for the cover of a nearby pillar. A second opportunistic salvo from the lurking sniper snapped at his heels, kicking rocky craters in his impromptu shield. An idea formed.
Kais cried out, a scream of pain and fear that no true shas’la would ever articulate, and when the echoes from the sniperfire had died he moaned again, the anguished sob of a crippled, dying warrior.
The gue’la broke cover, chuckling in premature celebration, slouching over to inspect his trophy. The pulseshot pulverised his chest before he knew what was happening, blasting him backwards onto the flagstones with a strangled yelp. Kais silently picked his way back towards the corridor, keeping his back to the statue.
The hallway descended in a sn
aking series of chambers, each a little darker and more organically cluttered by the rambling, reticulated paraphernalia of gue’la technology than the last. As Kais entered the lowest level of the prison compound his thoughts were a tangle of violence, ancient devils and dark eyes glaring into his soul.
Genetor Farrachus wiped his sweating fingers on his robes and adjusted the valve wheel. A gurgle of steam belched past him, condensing on the cold components of his face.
High overhead the first ratchet joints of the chain clicked open and the device, wobbling and spinning, began to descend. Like a crown designed for a giant’s head, laced with intricate black circuitry and ornamented with all the arcane technology of the Adeptus Mechanicus, it creaked its way downwards: an ebony chandelier hung with wormlike wiring and festooned with flickering readouts. An angular strip of runes illuminated with a whine.
Seated at the exact centre of the chamber, thin arms and legs pinioned by steel brackets, the alien captive regarded the suspended diadem from directly below, features betraying none of its thoughts. Farrachus watched it closely, hoping for some small flicker of fear. None was forthcoming.
“It’s ready, my lord,” he mumbled, doing his best to conceal the nervousness in his voice. Beyond a thick lead glass partition across the chamber the governor waited, arms crossed impatiently. He leaned forwards and flicked at an intercom.
“Then get on with it.”
Farrachus nodded, looking back at the xenogen. Thus far its placidity had belied the accepted dogma, portraying aliens as vicious and aggressive, abominations that threatened humanity’s very survival. Still, he told himself, adjusting the plasma pistol in his belt, best not to take any chances.
The ethereal returned his gaze calmly. Where the restraints dug into its skin the creature’s grey colouration grew pale and wan, starved of blood. Farrachus fought the desire to touch it, to drag a fingertip across the dry texture of its flesh, just to experience the feel of it.
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