by Dan Abnett
I blinked the sword into my hand. They all stepped back sharply.
‘She’s damn well armed,’ said Not-Faria.
‘Custodians!’ Judika-in-blue shouted.
‘She won’t hurt us,’ the other me insisted. ‘You won’t hurt me, will you? You wouldn’t hurt me, no more than you’d hurt yourself?’
She stepped towards me again. I raised the sword, but she was right. I could not bring myself to strike at her.
So I said the word instead.
CHAPTER 31
Named
The world exploded. The word exploded. The word exploded the world.
I don’t know.
I was thrown backwards with great force as though I had been hit by a siege ram. I flew, in a spinning shower of broken glass. The ground caught me from behind, hard. It was wet and cold.
‘Bequin?’ Kys said, scared.
I swallowed. I could not speak. I felt word-burn in my mouth, my lips. I was lying on my back in the top room of the Maze Undue, the night sky above me, full of familiar stars. Drops of rain falling on my face.
I sat up. Splinters of glass slid off me and tinkled onto the floor. I was facing the quizzing glass. It was just an old and broken frame, the glass blown out of it. Pieces of mirror littered me and the floor around me.
Kys crouched beside me.
‘The hell?’ she said. She tried to help me, to comfort me, but she was not very good at it.
‘How long?’ I murmured.
‘What?’
‘How long was I gone?’
‘Five minutes,’ she said.
‘Then?’
‘You came back,’ said Kys. ‘Out of the glass, backwards. You flew out like you’d been thrown. Shattered the mirror, but not the frame. Like some damn carnival trick.’
I nodded.
‘Help me up,’ I said. She hauled me to my feet with her hands and a jolt of telekine force.
I swayed. She propped me with her shoulder, then turned my face with her fingers so I was looking into her eyes.
‘Where did you go?’ she asked.
‘There,’ I said. ‘The City.’
‘The City of Dust?’
‘It’s not a good name for it,’ I said.
‘What did you see?’
‘Everything,’ I replied.
She let go of me. I stood, unaided, badly.
‘I found myself in the City of Dust,’ I said.
‘And?’
‘No, Patience, I found myself.’
‘Well, good for you,’ she sneered.
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘We must go back. Go back to Gregor and Gideon. Will you help me?’
‘Yes, but will you tell me nothing?’ she asked.
‘I’ll tell you everything,’ I replied. ‘Give me a moment. I’ll tell it all to them too. They’ve made a terrible mistake. It is so much worse than they could have imagined. He has built an empire. He controls his reality. He shackles the empyrean itself. He rules Pandaemonium.’
Kys looked at me as though I were raving.
‘This is the King?’ she asked. ‘You mean the King in Yellow?’
I nodded.
‘You know who he is? One of the lost sons? What is his name?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But we are fools to think we can fight him. He is not some heretic warlord. He is…’
I felt my voice fade.
‘What? He’s what?’
‘I have no word for it,’ I said.
‘But you got in? Through the quizzing glass?’
I nodded again.
‘Well then,’ said Kys, ‘we have that. That’s something. A way in. Gideon and Eisenhorn, they will thank you for that.’
‘I don’t think they will,’ I said. ‘Not when I tell them the rest.’
It took us a while to make our way down through the ruin of the Maze Undue. I was tired, sore, cut and unsteady. Everything seemed so grey and lightless, so dirty and old, and stained with shadow.
By the time we reached the street, Low Highgate Lane, they were waiting for us. They stood in the street, solemn, like some estranged, dysfunctional family unwillingly assembled to pose for a group portrait. Eisenhorn stood, haggard and sullen, a violet light in his eyes, and the Chair waited ominously to his right. Kara, Medea and Deathrow flanked them. Kara’s hands were in her pockets, and she eyed me warily. Medea’s red-gloved hands were clasped in front of her and her face was expressionless. Deathrow was hooded, his face invisible, the dog sprawled at his heels. Nayl waited nearby, stiff and hunched in pain.
Of the daemon and the angel, there was no sign.
‘An explanation,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘You defied us.’
‘She did your work for you,’ said Kys. It came out as a snarl. ‘She’s found the way in. A door to the City of Dust, and she can do it again. So temper your demands with gratitude, heretic.’
‘Watch your tone, Patience,’ said Ravenor.
‘I don’t think I will,’ said Kys.
‘We have come to an arrangement,’ said Ravenor. ‘A truce, so we can work together. You will show Gregor respect.’
‘No,’ said Kys.
‘We have come to an arrangement…’ said Ravenor.
‘I’m happy for you,’ said Kys.
I put my hand on Kys’ arm.
‘Stop,’ I whispered to her.
‘You found a way in, Beta?’ asked Medea. She was wearing a formal black suit with a high collar, as though she expected to attend a funeral. The red of her gloves was a brutal splash of colour.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And the King?’ asked Kara. ‘What of the King?’
I started to answer. I wanted to unburden myself and tell it all, every last part of it, as I have done in this narrative. But there were voices in my head, whispers that hissed and scratched at my ears, and prevented me from focusing. A crackle, a prickle…
I realised it was my micro-bead. It was the tinny voice of Renner Lightburn, calling my name, over and over again, as though there were many of me to greet.
‘Wait,’ I said to the glaring warband. I held up my hand to silence them while I fumbled with the earpiece. Eisenhorn glowered.
‘Lightburn?’ I said.
‘Why the hell didn’t you answer?’ he said. ‘I’ve been calling you.’
‘I’m here now,’ I said. ‘What’s the matter? Do you have news?’
‘The old boy’s got a translation,’ Lightburn said. ‘Part of one, at least. The start. The book is a name. The whole damn book. A single name, written in that Hexad code thing, thousands of characters long. What–’
He broke off. I heard muffled voices away from the link.
‘Renner?’ I called.
He came back on. ‘All right. Freddy says millions of characters. I was wrong. He wanted me to be precise. He gave me an actual number, but I’m not being that precise.’
‘Renner, just tell me!’
‘It’s the true name of the King in Yellow,’ Lightburn said. ‘He’s sure of it. That’s what the book is. I can give you the start of it, the bit he’s translated.’
‘Please do.’
‘Hold on. I’ve written it down here.’
I waited. I looked at Eisenhorn.
‘We have his name,’ I said. His jaw clenched. He glanced at the Chair. Like me, they were both expecting the worst. The name of a lost primarch-son. The name of a daemon. The name of a god. The name of the Emperor above all, whose true name, once known and spoken, might pull reality apart or command the cosmos.
Renner Lightburn’s voice returned.
‘I have it here,’ he said. ‘Beta, the name begins as follows…’
I listened. I nodded. I turned to the warband.
‘The name of the King i
s Constantin Valdor,’ I said.
Beta Bequin will return in the final volume of this trilogy, which is called PANDAEMONIUM
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Abnett has written over fifty novels, including Anarch, the latest instalment in the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series. He has also written the Ravenor, Eisenhorn and Bequin books, the most recent of which is Penitent. For the Horus Heresy, he is the author of the Siege of Terra novel Saturnine, as well as Horus Rising, Legion, The Unremembered Empire, Know No Fear and Prospero Burns, the last two of which were both New York Times bestsellers. He also scripted Macragge’s Honour, the first Horus Heresy graphic novel, as well as numerous Black Library audio dramas. Many of his short stories have been collected into the volume Lord of the Dark Millennium. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent.
An extract from Lord of the Dark Millennium.
They were walking by torchlight, finding their way by the criss-crossing beams of their lamp packs. They were deep underground, so of course it was going to be dark.
Except it seemed unnecessarily, extravagantly dark. Lightless. As though some kind of anti-light, an un-light, had been poured into the gloom to thicken it.
Every few seconds, and to no particular rhythm, the earth shook.
Ibram Gaunt could feel it through his boots. He swapped his lamp pack to his right hand and placed his left palm against the tunnel wall. He felt the rough surface transmit the vibrations. At every subterranean quiver, dirt trickled down from the ceiling or spilled from loose sections of the old, decaying arches.
The men in the advance squad could feel the shaking too, and it was putting them on edge. Gaunt could tell that by the way the beams of their lamps jerked and shifted at every tremble. Gaunt knew someone should say something. That someone was him, a part of his duty.
‘Shelling,’ he said. ‘The Warmaster has focused the artillery divisions on Sangrel Hive. It’s just shelling.’
‘Feels like the world’s moving,’ muttered one of the troopers.
Gaunt tilted his lamp to find the man’s face. Picked out starkly by the bright beam, Trooper Gebbs shielded his eyes at the glare.
‘It’s just shelling,’ Gaunt assured him. ‘Concussion from the shelling.’
Gebbs shrugged.
The ground shook. Pebbles skittered.
‘Why are we here?’ asked another man. Gaunt’s lamp beam moved to identify Trooper Ari Danks.
‘You getting all philosophical now, Ari?’ Gebbs asked with a chuckle made throaty by the dust in the air.
‘I just wondered what the Throne we were supposed to be doing,’ Danks replied. ‘There’s nothing out here. Just these endless, pitch-black bloody ruins…’
‘So you’d rather be hacking your way through Charismites in the hive-stacks, would you?’ asked Trooper Hiskol.
‘At least it wouldn’t be as black as up my–’
‘Enough,’ said Gaunt. He didn’t have to raise his voice, and the troopers didn’t have to turn their beams to see his face and read its expression. They ceased their chatter. Some of them had served long enough to remember when Gaunt had just been ‘the Boy’, Oktar’s cadet, but none of them were about to forget what that young cadet had become. Gaunt was the commissar. He was discipline.
The ground shook again. Gaunt heard a little river of grit spill down the curve of the tunnel wall. He had to admit that Trooper Danks had a point. What were they doing here?
Gaunt understood the mission parameters clearly enough, and frankly, given the intensity of the hive-war, this advance detail was a blessed relief.
Even so, he’d calculated the journey time that morning, overestimating to allow for detours where the maps didn’t match the navigable reality of the undersink, and they should have reached the destination two hours ago.
Gaunt told the men to wait, and used his lamp to pick his way along the unlit tunnel. The officer in charge of the detail was standing at the next bend, checking his charts.
Major Czytel glanced up at the lamplight bobbing towards him.
‘That you, Gaunt?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘We may have taken a wrong turn back there, Gaunt,’ Czytel said. ‘At that junction where the tunnel split.’
He turned and twitched his beam back the way they had come, partly as an indicator, partly to pick out Gaunt’s face.
Gaunt nodded. He’d presumed as much. Galen Czytel was old school, and most definitely remembered the time when Gaunt had merely been ‘the Boy’. Unlike the rank and file, he had never really got over the idea that Ibram Gaunt was an over-educated, over-privileged scholam boy with too much book-learning and not enough actual soldiering. Czytel liked what he called ‘honest men’. He seemed to be allergic to anybody who had an air of the officer class or entitlement. Czytel had ‘dragged himself’ up through the Hyrkan ranks. He’d freely tell you that, possibly several times in the course of one regimental dinner.
In fact, when Gaunt received his full promotion at Oktar’s deathbed on Gylatus Decimus, Czytel had been one of a group of officers who had formally requested that Gaunt be transferred out of the Hyrkan 8th to another unit. They felt that it would ‘undermine morale’ because the men ‘would not take seriously the authority of an individual who had previously been the regiment’s mascot’.
General Caernavar had thrown the request out quickly. Ironic that it was officers like Czytel, and not the regular troops, who had found such difficulty in accommodating Gaunt’s maturity.
Gaunt, for his part, had learned that it was best not to correct Czytel unless absolutely necessary. An officer’s mistake could be carefully smoothed over by a diligent commissar. An open argument between an officer and a commissar had potentially devastating effects on discipline.
‘We’ll go back,’ Gaunt said. ‘It’s not far. Or we could go on to the next intersection, and move east.’
‘The next intersection?’ asked Czytel.
In the lamplight, Gaunt could see that Czytel was looking at him with a sort of sneer. ‘You haven’t got your chart out. You just remember that, do you?’
‘I reviewed the route this morning,’ Gaunt replied. ‘I don’t have my chart out because–’
He stopped. He had been about to say ‘because you, as officer in charge, were leading the route’.
‘I will double-check,’ Gaunt said. ‘I could be wrong.’ He reached for the data-slate pouch attached to his webbing, but Czytel just handed over his own slate. It looked like impatience, that Czytel didn’t want to wait while Gaunt produced his and woke it up. But it was actually a small concession, one which allowed for the idea that Czytel might have made a navigational error. The major wanted to keep the peace too.
Gaunt reviewed the screen.
‘Yes, you see, sir? The next intersection seems to allow for access to this sinkway here. That should lead us directly to the shrine.’
‘If it is a shrine,’ said Czytel.
Which is the point of us being here, Gaunt thought, but did not say it. He just nodded.
Czytek turned the squad.
‘Pick it up! Let’s go!’ he called into the darkness.
The crusade had finally begun.
The crusade.
The top brass had been talking about it for years, and received wisdom was that the region known as the Sabbat Worlds was past saving. It was a vast territory at the rimward edge of the Segmentum Pacificus, a major Imperial holding that had, in the course of two bloody centuries been overrun by the marauding armies of the Sanguinary Worlds. Some worlds had fallen to the Eternal Archenemy. Others, like Formal Prime, had struggled on, surrounded by the barbarous foe, fighting to maintain their Imperial identities. The Sabbat Worlds deserved the protection of the Throne, their seneschals and governors pleaded for it, but liberation was a monumental task. Few thought that High Command would ever sanction the massive ex
penditure that a crusade war would require.
Until Slaydo. Lord Militant Slaydo was a persuasive beast, and with the victories of the Khulan Wars on his honour roll, he had been declared Warmaster and allowed to prosecute the Sabbat Worlds Crusade.
It was the biggest Imperial mobilisation in the segmentum for three centuries. The Departmento Tacticae Imperialis estimated it would take a century to successfully complete the campaign.
Ibram Gaunt had no real interest in looking that far ahead. The fighting to retake Formal Prime’s ancient and crumbling hives had been some of the most brutal and intense he’d experienced, and his career with the Hyrkans had not been lacking in bloodshed. Eight years since he’d joined the Imperial Guard as a Commissariat cadet, and he’d seen plenty of action, but nothing like this.
Sangrel Hive, the world’s most massive hab centre, was the stronghold of an enemy ‘magister’ or warlord, a monster called Shebol Red-Hand. His cult followers, the Charismites, held their ground with a zealous rage that was quite intimidating. The previous week, Gaunt had seen more men die in one hour than he thought possible.
So this, this lamplight detour mission into the rambling, pitch-black undersinks seventy kilometres beyond the recognised limits of Sangrel Hive, this could be seen as something of a perk. It got a squad of men out of the line for a few days. It had the personal sanction of the Warmaster. The surroundings might be dismal – the unnerving darkness, the steady seep of tarry ground-water, the smell of rot and mildew, the vermin, the unsafe sections of tunnel – but the Hyrkan soldiers were out of the front-line action, and there were no screaming waves of spear-wielding Charismites rushing their formation every few minutes.
The ground shook. Dirt trickled. Gaunt noted the agitation of the men once again, the flickering beams. He realised there was a chilly lick of sweat between his own shoulder blades. Sangrel Hive was a long way away. If they could feel the earth-shock of the artillery bombardment at this distance, what kind of hell had the main front turned into?
The assault on Formal Prime was part of Operation Redrake, the Warmaster’s opening move. Named after the famous predatory serpent, Redrake was intended to be a lightning strike against multiple targets: four significant worlds at the trailing edge of the Sabbat group: Formal Prime, Long Halent, Onscard and Indrid. Slaydo had chosen to lead the Formal Prime assault personally. It was the keystone world.
