‘Colonel,’ the Lion snapped, breaking into her thoughts before she disappeared into them, reminding her of her duty.
‘Yes, my lord. I’m sorry. My troops are holding a block of the underhive. We might have a few more days. But there is nothing to break out to. The land is turning against us. We lost contact with the southern continent when it attacked the regiments there. These… things… these… My lord, there are billions of them. They cover the land. And there’s a disease, or a corruption. I don’t know how to name it. Our people are changing. This needs to end while any of us are still human.’
‘Are you clear about what you are asking?’ the Lion said.
‘I am, my lord. Save our souls.’
The Lion frowned. Revus was loyal to the Emperor, but in their extremity, she and her people were failing in their loyalty to the Imperial Truth.
‘Exterminate the monsters,’ she said. ‘Send us to the embrace of the Emperor.’
The Lion was silent for a moment. The endless whine sawed its way through his skull. Then he said, ‘Very well. Make your preparations.’
‘Thank you, my lord.’
He silenced the channel, then reopened communications with Guilliman and the Angel. ‘I am ordering the use of cyclonic torpedoes on Episimos Three,’ he said.
‘You said there were loyal forces still fighting there,’ said Guilliman.
‘I did. This is the liberation they request.’
‘This is precipitous,’ Sanguinius protested. ‘We did not know definitely there was a key to breaking open the barrier of the fortress until we were inside the manufactorum on Pyrrhan.’
‘The situation is different,’ said the Lion. ‘There is no victory here. Episimos Three is overrun with daemons. Nothing more. Or have you perceived something else, Sanguinius?’
‘No,’ the Angel admitted.
‘No. There is nothing to save here.’
‘Except the loyal troops themselves.’
‘Nor them. They are falling away from our father’s path. Their sacrifice is the last, best demonstration of loyalty they can still make. They know this. The planet is diseased. It must be purged.’
‘By that logic,’ said Guilliman, ‘we should destroy the entire system.’
‘I would if I could,’ said the Lion. ‘I will shatter a world sooner than stand by and let it be corrupted. So Episimos Three will die.’
Neither Guilliman nor Sanguinius answered.
‘Your silence is consent,’ the Lion said. ‘Captain,’ he turned to Stenius, ‘prepare cyclonic torpedoes for launch. Full barrage. This world is corrupt to its core. Let only dust remain.’
The command felt like a counter-attack against the malevolent resonance. The Invincible Reason had manoeuvred to place Episimos III directly before it. The smouldering planet occupied the centre of the oculus. At the edges of the Lion’s view, the corners of the great shapes intruded. He spared them a glare of hatred before he focused his attention on Episimos III. They were foul mysteries, secrets that he could not pierce, and he knew better than to try. The depths of the unknown were a reminder of the risks he was incurring in the relationship he was forging with Tuchulcha. A reminder so pointed, it was an accusation.
What would you have me do instead? he asked in a prosecutorial voice that sounded a lot like Guilliman’s. Would you have us still lost on the edges of Ultramar?
I will not. I will do what we must.
The torpedoes launched.
‘Vox,’ he said, ‘contact Colonel Revus again.’
‘The channel is open,’ the vox-officer reported, ‘but she doesn’t answer.’
The Lion listened to the noise flooding from the vox-speaker. There was static, the distant sounds of battle, screams human and inhuman, a rising clamour of voices shouting a language that formed a chorus with the resonance.
‘Close the link,’ the Lion said. Farewell, colonel, he thought. He wished her the good fortune of hearing the torpedoes arrive.
The first two torpedoes hit the besieged hives. The final bastions of Episimos III disappeared in a blaze of light thousands of miles across. The guttering eyes shone with a flare of vengeance. The intensity of the blast faded, then, but its spread kept growing. The atmosphere caught fire. The flame clouds reached around the globe like the peeling back of flesh to reveal the burning blood beneath. The second stage of the bombardment hit a planet that was already dying.
The Invincible Reason was close enough that its auspex array was able to filter most of the distortion caused by the resonance and register the process of the planetary crematorium. The initial torpedoes had split the crust. The wounds went deep, convulsing the mantle, triggering seismic upheavals that tore continents to shreds. In the southern hemisphere, the land screamed with the voice of a living thing. The second wave plunged through the wounds and hit the planet’s core. The pressure wave of the blasts pushed outwards in every direction. It could not be contained. The surface of the planet was invisible under the flaming atmosphere, but the upheavals were so violent, it vibrated before the Lion’s eyes. Arcs of magma rose thousands of miles. For a few seconds, the planet resembled a star. But the image was a lie. It was unsustainable. The pressure wave reached the surface, and Episimos III exploded. The raging heat of its annihilation caught the fragments of crust as they were propelled into the void. They melted, collided, disintegrated. Before the shockwave of the planet’s explosion buffeted the Dark Angels fleet, the Lion’s command had been executed. Nothing but dust remained.
The mind-scraping whine scaled new, acute, peaks in the moments of the world’s final agony. The Lion winced, and blood started flowing from his ears again. But when the planet shattered, the sound stopped at once. The silence was startling. For the space of a heartbeat, the Lion thought he was deaf.
He stood up from the throne.
‘My lord,’ the vox-officer called, ‘hails from the Red Tear and the Samothrace.’
I’m sure there are, he thought. ‘I will tell you when I am ready to answer.’ He strode from the bridge. There was something he had to do first. Someone else he had to speak with first.
In the chamber of Tuchulcha, the servitor was waiting for him. It had degenerated noticeably since the arrival at Episimos. The resonance had sunk into its flesh like rot. It had lashed at the body with a whip. Mottled skin hung from its legs. The musculature was spongy. The stench was thick. The Lion tasted its viscous quality at the back of his throat. The meat puppet’s scalp was splitting. It oozed yellow and green pus. Its eyes were filmed, but the will of Tuchulcha focused them on the Lion as if they were las sights. Blistered lips moved.
‘Do you wish to travel again?’ Tuchulcha asked through its proxy.
‘Can we?’
‘We can. You did what was necessary.’
So simple? the Lion thought. He caught himself. He must not trivialise the destruction of an entire world. ‘We did not damage the constructs,’ he said.
The servitor shrugged. ‘You altered the configuration of the system. The alteration is sufficient. They cannot hold me here now.’
‘And where will you take us this time? What nightmarish impossibility awaits us now?’
Tuchulcha did not respond to his sarcasm. ‘Where do you wish to go?’
‘Davin.’
‘As you will, it shall be done.’
The old formulation again. The words Tuchulcha had last spoken when the Lion had thought to travel to Caliban.
The Lion walked slowly back to the bridge. He was barely aware of Holguin’s presence. He hadn’t realised the Deathbringer had followed him to the entrance of the chamber. Holguin kept his peace until they were in the hall leading to the bridge. ‘Is the way clear, then?’ he asked.
‘So it seems.’
‘How?’
‘One of Guilliman’s Librarians believes it was the arrangement of sh
apes in the system that created the resonance. We removed a shape.’
‘That was…’ Holguin stopped.
‘Easy?’ the Lion asked.
‘I did not mean to suggest that.’
‘But you thought it.’
Holguin nodded once, visibly uneasy.
‘Our sense of scale has been affected,’ said the Lion. ‘Inevitably.’ The hall through which they walked was high-ceilinged. Marble columns formed its vaults. Monumental statues commemorated the extermination of the Beasts of Caliban. The light from the wall sconces could not pierce the dimensions of the hall, and deep shadows draped the walls. The architecture was designed for awe. The Lion felt the presence of the constructs pressing in, invisibly, through the hull. They made the hall insignificant. They made everything the Lion knew insignificant.
Yet he had defeated the trap. The fleets were about to leave the daemonic constructs behind. It did not matter how vast they were. They were the things that had lost their significance, and the Lion had taken it from them.
‘There is a lesson here.’
‘What lesson, my lord?’ Holguin asked.
The Lion shook his head. He hadn’t meant to speak aloud. ‘Ignore my incomplete thoughts,’ he said.
Only they were more complete than he admitted. The destruction of a world had punched a hole through an immaterial net. The Lion wondered how far he could extend the principle.
The vision was tempting in its simplicity. Horus and the rest of the traitors could not rule if they had no bases. The Lion pictured a programme of deliberate, systematic annihilation. If a world had fallen to the enemy, a campaign to take it back was a waste of resources.
Break the worlds and break the foe, he thought.
The Lion suppressed a smile as he and Holguin entered the bridge again. How do you like this theoretical, Roboute? he thought. He would shortly have the opportunity to put it to a practical test.
He sat in the throne once more. He looked through the oculus, at the debris field that had been Episimos III. He nodded to the vox-officer, who opened channels to Guilliman and Sanguinius.
‘Brothers,’ said the Lion, ‘our path forwards is clear. Let us take it.’
Part III
Davin
Twelve
The Embrace of Bone
Sanguinius felt the shadow before Jeran Mautus reported the contact. His shoulders tensed. His wings straightened, preparatory to a flight of combat. The presence of the shadow pressed on his spirit. He raised his eyes to the shuttered bridge windows as if he could see through them and perceive the enemy beyond. The Angel sensed the shadow was much nearer. Its presence seemed heavy enough to crush the hull of the Red Tear. When Mautus called out, Sanguinius asked, ‘How close?’ Space was a lie, yet battles could still be fought on the foundation of this illusion.
Mautus worked the controls of the auspex array, lips tight with frustration. ‘I can’t get a consistent reading.’ On the screens, the readings of the vague mass of the shadow kept changing. The phantom raced ahead of the fleets, then it was stalking them from behind, then keeping pace on different flanks.
The vox-channels between the bridges of the three flagships were now open continuously. ‘Brothers,’ Sanguinius said, ‘are you detecting an intruder?’
‘We are,’ Guilliman said. ‘Is this the same contact you had before?’
‘It appears to be.’
‘The readings are nonsense,’ said the Lion. ‘It is now between my formations and yours, Sanguinius.’
The changes in the shadow’s position were rapid. At the same time, there was a sinuous flow to them. Instead of blinking in and out of existence in its impossible locations, the spectre moved like a river, like a current, like a serpent. Sanguinius began to see it less as a presence, more as a manifestation of malaise, encircling and weaving its way through the fleets, spreading its influence by the fact of its presence alone.
‘You fought this,’ Guilliman said.
‘To no effect, though we lost some ships.’
‘Combat is futile,’ said the Lion. ‘There is no target. This must be a phantasm of the immaterium.’
‘Do you think so?’ Sanguinius asked. He took a breath. It grated with the effort. A huge stone weighed down his chest. ‘Are you telling me you can’t feel its presence?’
‘Perhaps,’ Guilliman said after a pause.
‘That is nothing we can fight.’ The Lion’s evasion betrayed his unease.
His brothers’ uncertainty disturbed Sanguinius. It was possible for them to view the phantom as a mirage. He could not. ‘Do not dismiss it,’ he said.
Before he could continue, the shadow appeared directly before the Red Tear. Elongated, made of night, it dwarfed the battleship. It fired a single shot. The defensive scans of the Red Tear recognised the attack, but not its nature. It appeared on the screens as a line, direct as lascannon fire, but it was dark, a lightning strike of black hitting the battleship.
The Geller field flickered. The failure’s duration was less than a microsecond, but the shot came through. It pierced the shielding. It slashed onto the bridge.
A thin beam. Black as despair. Precise. Unerring.
It struck Sanguinius in the chest.
The shadow passed over the Night Haunter in his cell. He caught his breath. His eyes widened, staring into nothing, and in that nothing he felt dread. He had foreseen the shadow’s arrival, but now that it was here, the future turned into a cascade of doubt. Possibilities multiplied, then winked out. The certainty of the implacable succession of moments vanished. They were replaced with a blank.
Nothing.
Curze frowned. He shook his head, the only movement he could make, trying to clear the amorphous, mocking fog that billowed through his thoughts. Anticipation, the bleak, remorseless companion of his consciousness, fell silent. He fell into limbo. The future left him.
He gasped. His body convulsed with psychic pain. He had foreseen the arrival of ignorance only in the last few seconds before it descended on him. He had thought he was mistaken. He had not believed in the loss of the fundamental principle of his life, of the nightmare bedrock of his existence.
Yet it had come. And he did not know what came next.
‘You’re a barrier,’ he whispered to the shadow. ‘You conceal, but you change nothing. There is nothing that can be changed.’
The tremor of a memory ran through him. He saw himself again on Macragge, the Angel transformed with rage, descending upon him to kill with his bare hands. He had lost the thread of the future in those seconds. The stream of futures had stuttered, paused. The moment of his death, the absolute that defined all others, had begun to slip from his grasp. For those terrible seconds, fate had seemed mutable. He had been confronted with the horror of a universe that not even fatalism could explain.
But then the Lion had materialised in the chamber. He had stopped the execution. Curze had fastened his grip on the future again, and the moments to come had begun hammering through his skull once more. It was the closest thing he had known to relief in decades.
Now, though, the future was blank. He strained against his manacles, as if he could physically force himself through the barrier and see once more. ‘Nothing changes,’ he said. ‘Nothing changes. Nothing changes.’ Beyond the barrier to his vision, the future unfolded as fate had determined it would. That was the lesson he had learned from his arrested execution. He had been wrong to doubt then. He would not doubt now. The shadow blinded him, but that was all, and it would pass. ‘Nothing changes,’ he said.
But the fog lingered. The seconds passed, one after another whose form he did not know before they came. And he did not know when the fog would lift.
Without foreknowledge, he could not act. The blindness was worse than his physical shackles.
‘Nothing changes!’ he shouted in defiance. The blanknes
s remained. It was a barrier, he told himself again and again. It was not a slate waiting for fresh script. ‘Nothing changes. Nothing changes!’
The scream echoed back and forth along the prison corridor. It fell into the background noise of the deep hum of the ship’s engines. Curze shrieked his defiance again. The barrier remained. On the other side, the future resided, hidden from its darkest prophet.
Mkani Kano was nearest to the Angel when the psychic beam struck him. Sanguinius staggered, stumbling off the command dais to the main platform of the flying bridge. He doubled over, clutching his chest. Kano rushed to his side. Azkaellon and the duty squad of the Sanguinary Guard were a few steps behind.
Kano put his hand on the Angel’s shoulder. ‘My lord?’
Sanguinius reared upright with a sudden jerk. His wings spread wide, pinions shaking with anger. His eyes glistened black. He turned to Kano, his face a perfect marble carving of rage. For an instant, he was indeed a statue, the nobility of his bearing transformed into the aspect of a predator. Then his lips drew back over his fangs. Hatred consumed his features. The air around him crackled. Kano smelled burnt ozone. On instinct he raised a defensive psychic shield. Sanguinius lunged but Kano was too slow. None of the Angel’s sons would have been fast enough. Sanguinius seized him by the gorget and lifted him high. The Angel’s jaw opened and closed as if straining to speak. The tendons of his neck stood out, taut as iron cables about to snap. No words emerged from his throat. The fury was too great. Snarling and groaning at once, Sanguinius threw the Librarian down. Kano slammed through the nearest cogitator stations to the dais, crushing a servitor and sliding fifteen feet across the deck.
Sanguinius pursued. He leapt over the wreckage of the cogitators, and landed before Kano. He took the Librarian by the chest plate and hauled him up. Kano’s training warred with his loyalty. He could not strike his primarch. He tried to pull away, but Sanguinius lifted him above the deck and drew the Blade Encarmine.
Azkaellon grabbed the Angel’s arm. Sanguinius lashed back, hurling Azkaellon away. His eyes never left Kano. ‘My lord,’ the Librarian pleaded, trying to break through the haze of fury. The black orbs stared through him, unblinking.
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