Warhammer 40,000 - [Weekender 01]

by Black Library Weekender- Volume One (epub)

  Titan – Augurium 0874313.M41

  Three sent me to the Crucible. They shared their deliberation with me so that I would know why: so that I would understand. I do understand.

  The three gathered in spirit rather than body. They had no need of names or greetings. They knew each other to a degree that no bond of blood or kinship can match. They emerged out of the darkness between each other’s thoughts. Each of them was a voice alloyed with notes of sensation and imagery. As they came together their thoughts became one. The Grand Master of the Seventh Brotherhood, his brother-captain and the prognosticar ceased to exist as separate beings. They became voices running through one consciousness. Such a gathering is an eye-blink of thought in mundane reality. For the three this state is more real than the touch of hands or the sound of voices. It is called communion.

  +The projection is certain?+

  +Certainty cannot be taken for granted.+

  +True.+

  +The likelihood of it being a different entity?+

  +Dependent.+

  +What is the dependent factor?+

  +How we respond.+

  +Explain.+

  +One of the highest choirs of daemons will manifest on the Crucible. We cannot prevent that; the cogs of fate have already turned. But which daemon will manifest is not certain.+

  +There is something you are not sharing, prognosticar.+

  Silence filled the thoughts of the communion. In physical reality the quietness lasts for less than a microsecond; in the telepathic representation it lasts for the equivalent of several unsettled minutes.

  +The matter could be made certain.+

  +How?+

  +There is one amongst your brotherhood whose name is set in opposition to the entity.+

  The communion became silent again.

  +If he is sent alone then the daemon will come. It may not realise why, but it will come. It will not be able to help it.+

  + For this victory there is a price.+

  +All victory has a price.

  We send him alone.+

  Crucible Rift – time determination not possible/

  non sequitur

  I blur as I move through the forest that is a ship. My thoughts turn my movements to quicksilver. The rift’s mouth yawns in front of me. I can feel more of the daemons oozing through the cracks at the edge of sight. I can taste their thirst and hunger panting at my heels. In front of me I see my doom come. It pulls itself from the rift like a great serpent coiling from a cave. Ectoplasmic birth fluid sheens its hunched body. Growing muscles twitch under its translucent skin. It twists on the ground, mewling with broken croaks. Quills spout from its flesh and begin to unfold into pale feathers. It raises its head and begins to stand. Around me I hear the lesser daemons begin to shriek as they melt back into the forest.

  I take another stride forwards.

  The daemon straightens. Its body is still forming, feathers elongating and colouring like an oily rainbow. Its spindle limbs lengthen, spouting delicate white claws. It towers above me. Its eyelids crack open. They are two holes into a fire.

  I send my mind forwards in a whip of lightning. The fog flashes white around me. The lightning strikes the daemon and spreads across its flesh. It is not ready, its powers still aligning to existence in the physical world. For this instant I have an advantage.

  The daemon falters, stumbles perhaps. I feel its anger on the wind. I surge forwards. The daemon screeches and charges to meet me. Shadows billow behind it like smoke. Its presence is like looking into a star. My mind lashes out again. Forked lightning bounds across the snow, coils around the daemon and tightens. My mind bites into its essence, digs deep, breaths pain into its core. It screams and twists, scattering black blood to the snow. Then it falls in a tangle of feathers and thrashing limbs. My lightning cages its body where it lies. I move closer, the tip of my halberd pointing at its twitching body. It seems smaller now, shrunken in my mind’s eye.

  The wind rises around me. It is howling, pushing wildly. A cold blue light is rising through the trees like a sapphire sun. I can hear branches cracking and trunks creaking in the fog beyond my sight.

  I look back down to the lightning-chained figure at my feet. Power builds within me, growing sharper with every instant. I raise my halberd, the words of banishment forming on my tongue. Perhaps the prognosticar was wrong; perhaps I will not end here, perhaps that is not a price that needs to be paid. The silver edge of my halberd slices down towards the daemon’s neck.

  It vanishes. My halberd slices into the ground in a shower of molten sparks. I feel the cage of lightning gutter out as the illusion it held dissolves. I realise how wrong I have been, how I have let myself be blinded. The daemon I came to banish is already here; it has been here all along, watching, waiting for me to realise how powerless I am.

  I hear a laugh on the wind. I turn. The daemon steps from the shadows and mist. It looks like nothing, like an absence sliced into the world. Looking at it feels like falling. It looms taller and taller, like a shadow cast by a growing fire.

  It is a moving shadow now, jagged features picked out by an inner furnace glow. A talon-tipped hand solidifies the instant before it thrusts at my gut. I pivot, and feel the talon’s tip gouge a molten line across my torso plating. I turn my halberd to cut as I spin. It is a kill stroke, intended to slice from one side of the torso to the other. But this is not a battlefield, it is a war fought in living dreams. The daemon whips back, snake-fast, then lashes out again. I bring my halberd around just in time. Blade and talon meet.

  And the dream reality shatters.

  My perception breaks into pieces, cleaving along planes of weakness. I have enough time to realise that this is what the daemon wanted all along, that I am entering the true battlefield, that I will die, and that I might fail.

  My mind’s eye blinks. I cannot see. The blackness around me is not an absence of light; it is the absence of anything to see.

  “Why did you come here?” The voice is made of razors. Wounds open in my psyche, and I feel strength bleed from my mind into the warp. Isolated from my body this is a duel of minds.

  “It is my purpose.” I say, and my will hardens over my mind like stone.

  “To die?” The voice is grave, without a note of mockery or contempt. I am not surprised. Few monsters cackle.

  “Yes.”

  “A tragedy.”

  “A duty.” I pause. I feel that if I do not speak then there will be nothing, not even my sense of self. “This is the sightless realm, the land of the mind without the spirit, is it not?”

  It chuckles now. I can feel it circling my consciousness, its words and laughter tracing over the surface of my thoughts like cold fingers over skin.

  “Is it? To you perhaps. To me it is the membrane of consciousness. It exists throughout the universe, a skin of connection between all sentience. From a certain point of view there is only one sentience. All you mortals are just the sparks falling back to the fire.” The voice pauses. Here in the blind silence I have no way of knowing how long passes before it speaks again. “You know who I am.”

  “Yes,” I say. I feel the daemon’s presence close to me. “You are folly, and hubris. You are abomination.” I send my will with my words, cutting out into the darkness. It rolls with a sound of thunder.

  The daemon laughs, and suddenly the sound comes from all directions.

  “Poetic. Crude, but poetic. You are not the first of your silver-clad kin that I have met. Do you not think it strange that your enemies know you, but you kill those you protect if they learn that you exist?”

  I remain silent. I have considered the truth the daemon states, we have all considered it; that and countless other heresies. The truth is one of the many gates through which we pass to become sons of Titan. Only those who can survive its cut truly survive to become grey, to die in battle for humanity. Those who cannot resist die sooner.

  “The first Space Marines were made to fight for illumination, to bring truth and knowledge.
Your kind is intended to bury it. That is the tragedy, is it not?”

  I feel its power building around my mind. The pressure begins to grow. I feel my soul buckle.

  “You are a remarkable soul, you and all your kind. You are the Imperium’s sacrifice, its sons offered up in hope of survival. You die for an empire that will never know that we lived. You do not push back the darkness, nor bring a new dawn. You fight a war that you can never win, only prolong.” The crushing force of its power presses from every direction. “I am glad we had this time at least. But you will die here.”

  “I know.”

  A wave of mental force radiates from me. My mind is cold with fury. The pressure releases and suddenly there is light rushing into my eyes.

  My true eyes open to the physical world. I am standing within the guts of the Crucible. The forest is gone, the metaphor collapsing into a reality that stinks like a death pit. I am standing in a cave of crushed metal. Light seeps through a spreading web of cracks; it is the icy light of oblivion. The walls around me are flexing and compressing with the sound of tearing steel. I can see sheets of flesh stretched amongst the broken girders as they shift like the branches of trees. Red-black liquid sheens flat surfaces. Droplets of oil, blood and bile spin without gravity through the air.

  The daemon clings onto the tangled wreckage. Loose skin and pale half-formed feathers cover its body. Its head is a flayed vulture skull on the end of a scaled neck. The metal wreckage is glowing blue hot where its claws grip. A stench of rotting fish and crushed flowers fills my nose even though my armour is sealed. It looks at me and I hear it laugh in my skull. I lunge at it as it unfolds to strike.

  Claws score across my temple and sink into my shoulder joint. I fall. The daemon is on me, worrying at me like a carrion bird on a corpse. Its flesh is burning from the touch of blessed silver but it roars and strikes me again. The glass of my eyepiece shatters inwards. I feel warmth on my face. I am blind in my left eye. The smoke of burning feathers is a choking reek in my throat. The cracks running through the ship yawn wide. The cold light of the warp is nova bright. Sympathetic wounds blister my skin inside my armour. I feel the daemon’s power flow through its claws and into my flesh. My blood is boiling. Fresh wet pain explodes in the right of my chest. I have one heart now, like a mortal.

  I still hold my halberd in my hand. I try to rise. The daemon rears and strikes down. I bring the haft of my halberd up to meet the blow. The daemon’s claws close over the weapon. Warp energy gushes into the halberd’s crystal core. The weapon shatters before my eye. The light burns my remaining retina out before I can blink. In the physical realm I am truly blind now.

  The daemon is all around me. I am suffocating in folds of oblivion. This is the realm of war fought not with blades or words but with the raw heat at the core of our being.

  I retreat, solidify, harden. I feel my soul become sharp. I am the wetted edge of a blade, the cutting caress of a razor. It was always going to end like this. It is the only way. It has always been the only way.

  I say my name for the first time.

  “I name myself. Istafel, son of Titan. Knight of the Seventh Brotherhood.”

  I hear the daemon scream. It recoils, spilling heavy panic in its wake like blood billowing from a wound. I taste copper, cinnamon and smoke. My name has cut it. As we are weapons so are our names. Each name is forged in opposition to one of the great daemons of Chaos. It sets us against them, binds us to them even as it repels them. In speaking my name I have thrust a sword into the daemon’s essence. It is hissing at me now, babbling with a hundred voices. It has begun to see what I intend and why I came here alone. It is afraid.

  “I name myself and I name you.” The daemon’s name comes out of my lips in a bloody flow of syllables. I feel ice spreading through my soul, spreading in dead nothingness. I become a flicker of purpose sustained by pain.

  The daemon strikes me. I feel its claws slice through my left arm and torso. It lifts me into the air. I force the words from my throat even as my lungs fill with blood.

  “I name us and bind us together, blood and soul, and fate.”

  I hear an instant of the daemon’s shriek then I embrace it to me. I feel fire blazing from my empty eyes. The flesh of my face burns to the bone. The daemon tries to pull away but it cannot. We are bound together now. We will burn as one.

  Every molecule in my body blows apart. My thoughts scatter. I have no centre. Time and memory become a flat plateau. I know everything. I can see every thought I ever had, every memory contained in my cells, all those secrets hidden from my mind. Nothing is truly lost. I see my own birth. I know the name that I once had before I was remade. I see the possible deaths that would have been mine: bleeding out in the dank guts of a stone city, blood oozing between my fingers from the slit in my belly; the fire rising around me as the mob cries witch; the hunger slowly leaching my life away as winter deepens. These are not ghosts, or projections. They are real. I can choose. I can change anything that I see. I do not need to end here. I can take any path, any path that was or will be. I can die and walk into oblivion. I can rest.

  Somewhere in the memory carried in my blood a knight walks into the darkness. He is bloody, his sword is broken, and he can barely stand. From within the darkness he hears a deep reptilian roar. He hesitates. He thinks of turning, of the feeling of cool water cleaning the blood from his skin, of blessed sleep, and the happiness of seeing those he loves again. He walks on, into the dark, raising a broken sword.

  I choose my path.

  My mind’s eye opens. The black branches of the forest thrash above me, and snow lies thick around me. The wind is a roar in my ears. I am dying. This is the last beat of my life, the last blade-stroke of a battle of souls. Somewhere my body lies broken and withering in fire. But here in the last blink of a dream I stand. The daemon is there, its feathers shimmering in the ghost light of the warp. Its eyes meet mine. We are bound together. It will be banished for thousands of years, but I have to die here. That is the price, a sacrifice as old as life.

  I raise my broken blade and walk to meet it.

  Titan – Augurium 0884313.M41

  The three that doomed me gather in communion.

  +It is done.+

  +We will remember him.+

  A pool of silence fills the communion. When the voices return they are one.

  +He was our brother, and so we name him.+

  All three minds echo the phrase. They begin the ritual thought pattern, rolling my memory between them until it is like a stone smoothed by the sea. They hold the thought until it is hard and clear, until it is ready to be remembered. A part of their thoughts that never sleeps adds my name to its murmured list. It is a list that has existed for ten thousand years. Portions of it are carved on stone, or etched into the metal of swords carried into the dark. But the whole list exists only in the minds of those who send us to die. There my name will live as they live. In time they will pass the burden of remembrance to others, and those successors will take up the recitation of the fallen. It is their honour and penance.

  +Istafel.+

  +Istafel.+

  +Istafel.+

  Somewhere, beyond time and hope, I hear them.

  No birds sang.

  Felix Jaeger paused, one hand on the hilt of his sword, his eyes flicking from the ruined doorpost to the shattered wall to the gaping ceiling. The ancient house had more holes than Averland cheese and it stank of age and beasts. The foundations might be stone, but the rest of the manse was rotting. Walls slumped against one another and the roof sagged down with alarming inexorability. Rotten support timbers stabbed down into the floor like the fangs of some long-dead leviathan. A pelt of hairy mould covered everything, and as he stepped through the hole in the wall the floorboards beneath his feet creaked and dipped alarmingly and Felix imagined for a brief, sickening moment that he was stepping onto the back of some vast, breathing thing.

  “Gotrek,” he hissed; then, louder, “Gotrek!”

&nb
sp; There was no reply save the sound of the house shifting on its foundations, settling. Swollen wood squealed. Felix stopped and glanced over his shoulder. It had felt as if there had been something on their trail since they’d entered the wild hills north of Wolfenburg. The Middle Mountains were rife with beastmen and had been for centuries, as the degenerate descendants of the rampaging hordes of Gorthor the Beastlord bred in the dark glens and bowers.

  “Aldrich,” Felix tried. Aldrich Berthold was the sole heir to the substantial mercantile empire of the Wolfenburg Bertholds, a family that had, of late, gone through an inordinately unusual number of suicides, accidental self-immolations and at least one incident involving cuttlefish. Aldrich was also the nominal owner of the ruin Felix found himself in.

  Star Hall, as it had once been known, had been abandoned centuries earlier, during the invasion of the aforementioned Beastlord. The Bertholds had left behind their former lives as country gentry for the urban comforts of Wolfenburg and had flourished ever since. At least if you listened to the gossips and wags. But though it had been abandoned, Star Hall remained and its secrets with it.

  Felix cursed under his breath. “Gotrek,” he cried out. “Where are you?” It had taken them several days to reach the hall; its location was a well-guarded secret among the Berthold clan, and for good reason, to hear Aldrich tell it. But evidently not that well-guarded, for Gotrek’s keen senses had caught a whiff of a cooking fire before either Felix or Aldrich had seen the thin query mark of smoke rising above the ruin and into the deepening dusk as they crossed the bluff above.

  Gotrek had insisted on circling around. Aldrich had vanished not long after. Felix found himself in the unenviable position of being utterly alone.