There is no time to react, and there is nowhere to go. The incinerating deluge sweeps over the Destroyers. It swallows and burns and melts. It makes a hollow roar as it scours the tunnel, and the legionaries roar back, defiant to the last, brief second.
Hierax is at one side of the mouth of the tunnel when the wave hits, the sheer force of the flood knocking him sideways. He falls through the heat of a blast furnace, reaches out on instinct and catches a rough edge of rockcrete. Dripping ore, his limbs jerking as his power pack overheats and the servo-motors of his armour misfire, he hauls himself onto the narrow causeway between channels.
At first he thinks he is alone. His men are dead, and so are the Iron Warriors. Then he sees a figure on the other end of the wall. It is the captain of the traitors.
Hierax stumbles along the stone, leaping clumsily over the gaps that open as the barrier crumbles. The level of the ore is rising as the new river pours in from the tunnel behind him. The explosions continue. More floods are coming.
Hierax has lost his rifle. No matter. He will kill the last traitor with his hands. The Iron Warrior is limping towards Hierax, dragging a useless right leg. The distance between them seems endless, and they are still fifty metres from each other when waves of ore crash against the barriers, now almost at the top.
‘And is this worth it?’ Hierax shouts at the traitor. ‘You have not stopped us. You have lost everything. Have you accomplished anything on this day?’
The Iron Warrior’s laugh is long and bitter. ‘I don’t know,’ he answers. ‘Have you?’
Compelled by the other’s confession, Hierax says, ‘I don’t know either.’
They are still five metres apart when the ore washes them off the wall.
Epilogue
Prelude and Postlude
In the Grand Borealis Strategium, Malcador asks, ‘Is there anything more to be gained here?’
‘No,’ Dorn admits.
As the time runs out before the coming of Horus, Dorn has found, to his dismay, that he has more time than he would like for speculation. He has done all that he can do to prepare for the coming storm. As for the XIII Legion, he will try not to torture himself with thoughts, alternating between hopeful and hopeless, about whether Guilliman’s spear will arrive in time..
The Praetorian and the Sigillite leave the Strategium. They leave the Bhab Bastion. It seems impossible that anything could breach its monolithic walls of undressed stone. But Dorn knows even this strength could be broken.
‘Of late,’ says Malcador, ‘I have felt as if, had I enough will, I could see far enough to know whether he will arrive.’
‘You too, then.’
‘Of course.’
Dorn gives in to the temptation and looks up.
The sky is thick with smog. There is nothing to see except blackness.
There will be nothing to see until the sky begins to fall.
A fragment of verse echoes through Guilliman’s head as he makes his way from the bridge of the Ultimus Mundi to his quarters. It is the work of Tseliot, a remembrancer from Age of Terra. The poem Guilliman read, years ago, was incomplete, and he did not think it had stuck with him. Yet the lines have resurfaced in his memory, taunting him.
Would it have been worthwhile,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question
Guilliman cannot remember the rest. Only a sense of the speaker’s agony, asking again and again, ‘Would it have been worthwhile?’, tormented by the shadow of the answer, No.
The question taunts Guilliman. Everything that has been done in the Carchera system, and everything that has been lost, will have meaning only if he can reach Terra before Horus has conquered it. The warp storm is over, and the fleet is under way once more. The question is whether that matters. He will not know if Hierax and his Destroyers’ deaths have meaning until his fleet arrives over the Throneworld. At this moment, he feels as if he would welcome the precognition that curses Sanguinius and Curze.
Guilliman opens the door to his quarters. He stops on the threshold, his eyes riveted to his desk. The damage the Ultimus Mundi suffered from the defence laser has reached into his sanctum. The chamber looks as if an earth tremor had passed through it. Books have fallen from the shelves. Chairs are overturned.
On the desk, the sandglass lies on its side, smashed, its grains scattered.
About the Author
David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Ruinstorm and The Damnation of Pythos, and the Primarchs novels Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar and Vulkan: Lord of Drakes. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine, the Yarrick series, several stories involving the Grey Knights, including Warden of the Blade and Castellan, as well as titles for The Beast Arises and the Space Marine Battles series. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he has written Neferata: Mortarch of Blood. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.
An extract from Dreadwing.
I
Darkness grew from the ironwork bocage of the partition bulkheads. It gathered in corners, watchful as crows. It filtered through the bowering of the ceiling. Starlight entered through tall, armoured casemates, vast windows glazed with diamantite and durifrost. The dim shadows it cast shrank and lengthened, tracing over forest scenes depicted in friezes and murals with the giant vessel’s inertial drift. The occasional ceiling-mounted banner – thick white drapes that served doubly as portieres between cloisters – stirred in the stilted breezes of the air cyclers and the occasional tremor from the dorsal gunnery decks.
This was the Invincible Reason, and nothing happened here.
II
The voted-lieutenant pressed a gauntleted hand to the fascia display and identified himself.
‘Holguin.’
A watery green light dappled his massive suit of artificer war-plate as scanning lasers slid across the glossy black plate, drawing out the red Martian gold worked into the finish, as though he had stepped into a column of infrared that illuminated his veins. The electronics trilled with sequential ident confirmations. Suit transponder. Vox print. Height-weight indices. All tallied with who he claimed to be.
‘Holguin. Recognised.’
The synthesised vox-blurt sounded cacophonous.
Most of the sections that the Lion had ordered sealed during his and Curze’s long hunt were still deserted. The ship had scraped by without them. Now they lacked the crew to fill them properly. This had been one of those sections, though, like so much else, it had been something grander once.
‘Restore lighting to this section.’
‘Cannot comply. Vermillion authorisation required.’
‘Who besides the primarch has vermillion-level authorisation?’
‘Cannot comply. Vermillion authorisation required.’
‘Does Captain Stenius?’
‘Cannot comply. Vermillion–’
Holguin withdrew his gauntlet from the panel, silencing the voice and killing the light. He frowned into the darkness.
‘You always had such a way with cogitators,’ said Samariel from behind him. The veteran legionary’s broad, bearded face creased into an unsteady grin. It did nothing to lighten Holguin’s mood, and something in his lieutenant’s expression wiped Samariel’s smile away.
‘Give me a lock with a key, brother. Or a guard with a secret word.’
‘That’s progress for you.’
Holguin’s eyebrow lifted. Progress. It was what the union with Terra, the industrialisation of Caliban and the Great Crusade itself had all been for. He was not sure what the word meant anymore, nor whether it made him want to laugh out loud or draw his sword.
For here they all were, back in the dark
where they had begun.
Hunting monsters.
‘Progress,’ he muttered.
‘Your moods are black of late, brother,’ said Samariel.
‘The galaxy is black. My mood but bears its reflection.’
Samariel had little to offer but a nod.
Valiel and Breunor advanced cautiously past them, into the cloister. Though they moved with exaggerated caution, every step they took was accompanied by an over-loud sound. The light from Brother-Paladin Kastael’s power sword conferred a weak, ambient gloam to a distance of about three metres.
‘Still dark,’ muttered Holguin.
Samariel slid on his helmet. There was a click, the lenses flickering red as his various systems auto-engaged.
‘Then we hunt in the dark,’ he said.
III
Farith Redloss felt the tremor through the skeleton of the ship, in the tinkling of the armour displays on their pedestals. The void battle was almost over, but not quite. A human, even an experienced naval officer, might have dismissed the vibrations as aftershocks from the gunnery decks, or the mild inertial stresses of a course correction, but Redloss had a fine-honed understanding of weaponry at every scale. That had been a hull impact. He looked up. This part of the suite of chambers was striped with armoured skylights. Unblinking stars filled the view. The vast gulfs of space swallowed all sign of the apocalyptic level of hell being unleashed upon the wider system.
That told him one important thing.
It was not nearly apocalyptic enough.
‘That was a shield impact,’ Gawain observed.
The young legionary, one of the last to have joined the primarch’s battlegroup since contact with Caliban had been severed, followed his lieutenant’s example and looked up. The shafting skylight rendered his pale Calibanite features ephemeral. The skull-in-hourglass symbol of the Dreadwing shone eerily against the darkened ceramite of his pauldron. Myriad tokens of allegiance and initiation, esoteric markers to secret hierarchies that even Redloss could never be fully privy to, adorned the worn plate further still.
‘No,’ said Redloss.
‘What makes you say that?’
Redloss could have spoken of the pitch and duration of the vibration, of metal tolerances and void shield disphasement patterns, but he did not. He glanced to Danaeus, his voted-second, who dipped his head slightly, his white face otherwise inscrutable.
‘One day, brother,’ Redloss said, taking Gawain by the shoulder. ‘When you have progressed further along the Spiral path, you will have proven yourself ready for such knowledge.’
Gawain bowed his head. ‘I understand.’
Redloss’ gaze returned to the skylights. ‘It was a hull impact.’
‘The shields are down?’ hissed Werrin.
The helmeted legionary held the point position of the five-man squad of Destroyers, covering the quiet, empty hall with a volkite serpenta aimed from the shoulder. If he was experiencing any hesitation about entering these chambers so armed, and in such company, then he masked it with the skill of the First. Horus’ war had pitted brother against brother, father against son. This intrusion felt like a small betrayal in the grand scheme of things.
Most betrayals probably did, at the outset.
‘Not necessarily, brother,’ said Redloss. ‘Most likely Stenius has sailed us into a piece of debris.’
Gawain snorted.
‘Or a boarding torpedo,’ said Danaeus.
Gawain, Werrin and Melwen tightened their grips on their weaponry. Redloss frowned at their over-reaction. He had trained them better than that.
‘The last gasp of a rotten corpse,’ he said. ‘There is nothing that this system can throw at the Invincible Reason that Brother Stenius cannot contend with. We are the Dark Angels, brothers, we are death, and we have a quarry of our own to concern ourselves with here.’
That had the desired effect of focusing their minds.
This was not the first time that the sons of Caliban had hunted a primarch through their own ship.
Redloss had not yet been aboard at that time. But he had been there in Illyrium, when the Lion had finally put a sword through Konrad Curze.
‘What is it, brother?’ he asked, noticing Werrin’s continued distraction.
The older warriors, former Knights of the old Order of Caliban, liked to remember themselves as great hunters. Caliban had tested them, they would say, and they had survived. They had endured its plagues, faced its beasts and its benighted forests, where every tree was poisonous and every creature, however small, was hungry, and they had survived. They had bested it at arms, honour and courage intact, and, with the coming of the Emperor, they could even claim to have been the generation that broke it. But Redloss knew that those older warriors, those former Knights, were wrong. In Articulo Mortis. Mankind had evolved as hunters and scavengers of the open plains. The forest was its primordial nightmare. The Knights of Caliban had not been hunters. They had been the hunted. They had been the mammal whose armour and claws had allowed it to fend off the Great Beasts for another day, who found dark and hidden places to endure and lit no fires for fear of the night.
Their instinct for hidden perils far surpassed that of those other self-professed ‘hunters’ of the V and VI. Their predisposition to darkness was rivalled only by that of the XIX.
Werrin nodded down the tapestry-lined hall and pointed with his serpenta.
‘I heard something.’
IV
Holguin pulled aside the hanging, revealing the Reclusiam alcove beyond. His shoulders sagged, the servos in his armour giving a dispirited whine. Empty. The partition walls were wood-panelled and scented, carved with the muses and satyrs of Calibanite forestlore. None of it was exactly faithful to the spirit of the Imperial Truth, but it was a lucky iterator indeed that was admitted this far into the heart of the Invincible Reason, and a brave one who would challenge Lion El’Jonson on the decor of his private chambers. If there were any iterators still abroad in the Imperium, then Holguin supposed they had larger fires to put out now.
‘Clear,’ he grunted, backing out, tagging the Reclusiam on the squad auspex.
‘I wonder if Jonson still holds the Night Haunter down here,’ Kastael whispered.
Seeing the Deathwing paladin nervous was like watching a stone sweat, but not all things of the Emperor’s design were created equal.
If the Night Lords had been the living incarnation of every evil in the human psyche, then Curze was its half-mad god of depravity and murder. He was terror weaponised, an atrocity of war simply by existing, and even the winnowed psychology of a Space Marine was not wholly proof against it. Indeed, if Holguin were to point at the one thing that had shaken his faith in the Emperor of Mankind then it would not be his disregard for the powers of the warp, nor would it be his elevation of Horus to the position of Warmaster over the Lion.
It would be that the creation of a ghoulish horror like Konrad Curze had ever been considered just.
After a cat-and-mouse pursuit that had left the Thramas sector terrorised and aflame and whole sections of the Invincible Reason itself consigned to darkness, the Lion had finally forced a confrontation beneath the ruins of Illyrium. Jonson was the keenest hunter and most complete swordsman that Holguin had ever seen. Having spent months in Macragge Civitas in the proximity of Guilliman and Sanguinius, none amongst the Dark Angels could make such a claim and be immune to accusations of boastfulness. And yet even he had chosen not to go up against the Night Haunter alone.
‘I didn’t ask,’ Holguin replied at last.
‘You’re not curious?’ said Kastael.
‘Of course I’m curious.’
But Holguin had given up on any expectation of receiving answers from the Lion. Curze was not the only dark thing that the Lion had hidden aboard the Invincible Reason. His thoughts drifted to Perditus, and he shudd
ered in his armour.
‘I heard that Sanguinius threw him into space,’ said Samariel with some relish.
‘The Angel and the Lion may well be brothers, but they are little alike. The Lion is a being of the physical. Like you and I, only more so. Sanguinius is something other. To be in his presence is like standing before a doorway to a room so bright that you cannot see inside. He is numinous, as if his appearance before you is a gift, freely given, but one that can be easily withdrawn should his favour turn. He is more akin to the Emperor in that respect.’ He sighed. There was an emptiness inside him and it seemed to be growing larger as he spoke. ‘I cannot imagine him doing such a thing.’
‘Azkaellon told me,’ said Samariel.
‘Azkaellon himself?’
Samariel nodded.
The commander of the Sanguinary Guard – perhaps then that rumour carried some truth with it. It would be the first.
‘Hold,’ came Kastael’s warning baritone. ‘Do you hear that?’
‘Hear what?’
Holguin looked up, even as a slow bleed of illumination turned the black walls a dark greenish-brown. The colossally thick crystal of the viewing portals shuddered as a dying ship sailed within a few hundred metres, the dorsal point defences of the Invincible Reason chewing on its misshapen carcass. In cosmic terms, the two vessels were practically cheek to cheek, but proximity on its own counted for little in the void. The vibrations in the windows were due to the surface-of-the-sun temperatures of its burning drive stacks and the explosions ripping across its underbelly as it crossed from fire-arc to fire-arc across the battle-barge’s batteries. Space conferred no objective sense of scale, but Holguin’s genhanced mental processes quickly established the other vessel as a Triton-class aegis cruiser. The size of its drives. Its armament. The dimensions of the lascannon clusters along its spine. A second-rate. Three hundred metres from bow to stern. Despite its identifying features, the vessel appeared to have been aggressively remodelled and up-armoured in the centuries since the original template had slipped the void-docks of its parent forge world, most of the work carried out using terrestrial-grade steels or even raw, corrugated iron.
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