claimed, to oversee the trial of the Soul Drinkers, and they held their
standards of the blinded eye aloft. They were hooded and robed and
issued a low chant, dark syllables repeated in a terrible drone.
N’Kalo was aware that he still wore his armour and his battered
helm was back on his head. It made no sense for his captor to leave
him armoured. He might not have a weapon in his hand, but a Space
Marine in armour was still more dangerous than one without. It could
help him when he broke out, and there was no doubt in his mind that
he would. Whatever agenda Daenyathos had, and whether the Soul
Drinkers were heretics or blameless, Daenyathos and Iktinos had
revealed themselves to constitute a moral threat and N’Kalo had a duty
to escape and bring them to justice.
‘You wear your thoughts on you as if they were written on your
armour,’ said Daenyathos. ‘You desire escape. That is natural. A
Space Marine is not created to be caged. And you desire revenge.
You would call it duty or justice, but it is ultimately death you wish on
me for orchestrating your defeat and capture. This, again, is natural. A
Space Marine is a vengeful creature. But do you see now, helpless as
you are, what a pitiful animal you truly are? Freedom and vengeance –
what do these things mean, when compared to the matters that shape
the galaxy? How much does your existence mean?’
N’Kalo struggled again. His chains were set into the deck of the
cargo hold. They were probably chains built into the deck to keep
tanks from sliding around when the Phalanx was in flight. One Space
Marine could not break them.
‘My duty is within myself,’ said N’Kalo. He knew he should have
stayed silent, but something in Daenyathos’s words, in the way he
seemed genuinely passionate in spite of the artificiality of his voice,
compelled him to reply. ‘Though the galaxy may burn and humanity
collapse, I must fulfil my duty regardless. And so I call myself a Space
Marine.’
‘That is the response of a weak mind,’ said Daenyathos. The
dreadnought’s body turned away to something off to the side, outside
N’Kalo’s frame of vision. ‘You choose to ignore the matters that affect
the galaxy, and shrink your mind down to one battle after another, one
petty victory over some xenos or renegade, and tell yourself that such
is the totality of your potential. I chose instead to abandon the duties
that restrict me, and rise to become one of those very factors that
mould the galaxy at their whim. It is a choice I made. Yours is a mind
too small to make it. The Soul Drinkers were like you, and I had to
make that choice for them. Were they wise enough to understand,
they would have thanked me.’
Daenyathos’s massive tank-like torso swivelled back to face N’Kalo.
One of his arms was a missile launcher, while the other ended in a
huge power fist. That fist was now encased in a gauntlet from which
protruded several smaller implements – manipulator limbs, blades,
needles, an assortment of attachments for finer control than the
dreadnought’s power fist afforded.
‘What is this?’ said N’Kalo. ‘Why have you brought me here?’
‘That is a question I am willing to answer,’ said Daenyathos. ‘But not
through words.’
A circular saw emerged from among the implements. N’Kalo tensed,
forcing against his bonds with every muscle he had. He felt joints
parting and bones cracking, shots of pain running through him as his
muscular power pushed beyond the limits of his skeleton.
The chains did not move. Perhaps N’Kalo could break and twist his
limbs until they could be slipped out of their bonds. Perhaps he could
crawl away, steal a weapon from one of the cultists.
The circular blade cut through N’Kalo’s breastplate. Sparks flew, and
bright reflections glinted in the lenses set into Daenyathos’s armoured
head.
Daenyathos worked quickly, and with great precision. Soon the
breastplate was lifted off in sections, smaller manipulator limbs picking
apart the layers of ceramite until N’Kalo felt the recycled air of the
The chanting changed to a terrible falling cadence, a piece of music
about to end. N’Kalo felt the power charging in the air and saw a glow
overhead, as if from a great heat against the ceiling of the cargo hold.
Crackles of energy ran down the walls, earthing off the massive feet of
Daenyathos’s dreadnought body.
N’Kalo felt pain. He gasped in spite of himself, the impossibly cold
touch of the saw blade running in a red line along his sternum.
The ceiling of the cargo hold was lifting off, metallic sections peeling
apart and fluttering into the void like dead leaves on the wind. The hull
parted and the air gushed out. The pilgrims looked up at the rent in the
side of the Phalanx, calm and joy on their faces even as the sudden
pressure change made their eye sockets well up red with burst
vessels. Hood were blown back by the swirling gale and, in spite of the
pain, N’Kalo’s mind registered the face of a woman ecstatic as
foaming blood ran from her lips. Another one of the pilgrims was their
leader, impossibly ancient, and his dry and dusty body seemed to
wither away as he raised his wizened head to the origin of the light
that fell on him.
The light was coming from Kravamesh, the star around which the
Phalanx orbited. A burning orange glow filtered down through the
debris swirling around the hull breach. The hull parted further, like an
opening eye, and the last tides of air boomed out.
The pilgrims were dying, each moment robbing another of
consciousness. N’Kalo realised his armour had been left on so that he
could still breathe while the cargo hold fell apart.
The saw was withdrawn. Without air, the only sound was now
vibrations through the floor. The faint whir of servos as a manipulator
arm unfolded. The rattling breath N’Kalo drew through the systems of
his armour as the cold hit the open wound in his chest.
‘Do you know,’ said Daenyathos, the sound of his voice transmitted
as vibrations through his feet, ‘what you are to become?’
N’Kalo gritted his teeth. He could see Kravamesh above him, its
boiling fires, and though its fires looked down on him its light was
appallingly cold.
‘The key,’ continued Daenyathos. The manipulators extended and
hooked around N’Kalo’s ribs. N’Kalo yelled, the cry not making it past
the insides of his own armour. ‘Dorn’s own blood is the only key that
will fit the lock he built around Kravamesh. The Soul Drinkers do not
have it, though it suited me for them to continue believing they did.
You have it, Iron Knight. The blood of Dorn flows in your veins.’
The manipulators forced at the edges of N’Kalo’s fused rib
breastplate. The bones creaked. N’Kalo strained every muscle in his
body, forcing against the pain as well as his restraints.
He saw Rogal Dorn, his golden-armoured body kneeling at the
Emperor’s fallen form. He saw the Eye of Terror open, and the
battlements of Earth burning. Some ancient memory, written into the
genetic material on which his augmentations were based, bled in the
final moments into his mind.
N’Kalo felt the impossible pride and fury of Rogal Dorn. They filled
him to bursting, too much emotion for a man, even a Space Marine, to
contain. The Primarch was an impossible creature, in every aspect
superior to a man, in every dimension vaster by far.
N’Kalo could see Rogal Dorn at the Iron Cage, the vast fortifications
manned by the soldiers of Chaos, the shadow of the entire Imperial
Fists Chapter falling on it as Dorn orchestrated the assault.
The last images were ghosted over the monstrous eye of Kravamesh
opening wide, vast and unholy shapes emerging from its fires.
Daenyathos punched the mass of his power fist into N’Kalo’s chest,
splintering through the ribs. Daenyathos ripped the fist free and
N’Kalo’s organs were sprayed across the cargo bay deck in the shape
of bloody wings. The gore iced over in the cold of the void.
Daenyathos’s massive form leaned back from N’Kalo. The pattern
scorched into the deck glowed red as if it was drinking N’Kalo’s spilled
blood. The glow was met by the burning orange light from above. The
head of Daenyathos’s chassis looked up towards the tear in the hull
as the fires of Kravamesh billowed suddenly close.
From space it looked as if a bridge of fire was being built, reaching
from the mass of Kravamesh towards the speck of the Phalanx.
Shapes rippled along the bridge, tortured faces and twisted limbs,
howling ghosts that split and reformed like liquid fire.
The observation crews on the Phalanx saw it right away. Every
sensor on the Imperial Fists fortress-ship screamed in response. But
the Phalanx was embroiled in open warfare, its crew managing the
chaos unfolding from its archives, and without the whole crew at their
stations the huge and complex ship could not react in time.
The tendril of fire touched the hull of the Phalanx. Daenyathos stood
in the swirling mass of flame that incinerated the remains of N’Kalo
and the pilgrims. From the flame emerged shapes – leaping, gibbering
things, limbs and eyes that turned in on one another in an endless
mockery of evolution. They danced madly around Daenyathos as if he
was the master of their revel. Reality shuddered and tore as the
insanity formed a huge circular gate in the centre of the cargo bay, the
fire rippling around a glassy black pit that plunged through the
substance of the universe and into a place far darker.
Daenyathos stood before the warp portal. The fires of the warp
washed around the feet of his dreadnought chassis, and the daemons
slavered as they slunk through the flame. But Daenyathos did not
falter. He had seen this moment a million times before. He had
dreamed it over thousands of years in half-sleep under Selaaca.
Vast mountains of filth and hatred shifted in the darkness beyond
the portal. Tendrils of their sheer malice rippled through the substance
of the cargo hold, blistering up the metal of the deck with spiny
tentacled limbs. Blood-weeping eyes opened up in the walls. The
daemon cavalcade shrieked higher and higher as one of the forms in
the portal detached itself and drifted, half-formed, towards the opening.
It coalesced as it approached, taking the shape of something at
once beautiful and appalling. A vast and idealised human figure,
glistening pale skin clad in flowing white silk, surrounded by a halo of
raw magic. Torn minds flowed in its wake, ruptured spirits shredded
into madness by the warp. A taloned hand grasped the flaming edge of
the portal, hauling its vastness towards reality.
The perfect, maddening shape of the head emerged. Its features
looked like they were carved from pure marble, its eyes orbs of jade.
The music of the warp accompanied it, a thousand choirs shorn of
their bodies.
‘It is time,’ said Daenyathos. ‘The threads of the destiny meet here.’
‘Free!’ bellowed the daemon prince in its thousand voices.
‘Banishment, agony, all over! A vengeance… vengeance flows like
blood from a wound! The wound I shall leave in the universe… the
hatred that shall rise in a flood. Oh unriven souls, oh undreaming
minds, you shall be laid to waste! Abraxes has returned!’
Chapter 10
Archmagos Voar was surrounded by a cordon of servitors as he
hurried through the guest quarters towards the saviour pod array.
Beyond the lavish guest rooms, he knew a shuttle could be found,
normally used for diplomatic purposes but perfectly suitable for taking
him off the Phalanx and onto one of the nearby ships – the
Traitorsgrave, perhaps, on which Lord Inquisitor Kolgo had arrived, or a
Space Marine ship like the Judgement Upon Garadan.
Voar had betrayed the Soul Drinkers on Selaaca. None of his logic
circuits entertained the concept that it might have been the wrong
thing to do, either logically or morally. But that did not change the fact
that the Soul Drinkers were loose and they might well want Voar, in
particular, dead. The Phalanx was not safe for him.
Voar’s motivator units, damaged on Selaaca, had been repaired well
enough for him to make good speed through the nests of anterooms
and state suites, winding around antique furnishings and artworks
whose uselessness accentuated their sense of the lavish. The Imperial
Fists were pragmatic in their dealings with the wider Imperium, willing
to receive diplomats from the various Adepta in a fashion acceptable to
the Imperium’s social elite. The servitors Voar had taken from the
Phalanx’s stores wound around the resulting tables, chairs and light
sculptures with rather more difficulty than Voar himself.
Voar paused at the infra-red signature that flared against his vision.
His sight, like most of the rest of him, had been significantly
augmented to bring him away from corruptible flesh and closer to the
machine-ideal. He had seen a heat trace, just past one of the
archways leading into an audience chamber. Reclining couches and
tables with gilt decorations, imported from some far-off world of
craftsmen, stood before an ornate throne painted with enamelled
scenes of plenty and wealth. Beneath the room’s chandeliers and
incense-servitor perches, something had moved, something interested
in keeping itself hidden for as long as possible.
Voar drew the inferno pistol, another item liberated from the
Phalanx’s armouries. The servitors, responding to the mind-impulse
unit built into Voar’s cranium, formed a tighter cordon around him.
Their weapons, autoguns linked to the targeting units that filled their
eye sockets, tracked as Voar’s vision switched through spectrums. He
saw warm traces of footprints on the floor, residual electrical energy
dissipating.
Chaplain Iktinos knew he had been seen. There was no use in trying
to stay hidden when he was over two-and-a-half metres tall and in full
&n
bsp; armour. He walked out from behind the dignitary’s throne, crozius
arcanum in hand.
‘You have failed, Soul Drinker,’ said Voar. There was no trace of fear
in his voice, and not just because of its artificial nature. His emotional
repressive surgery had chased such petty concerns like fear from his
biological brain. ‘Your escape from the Phalanx is a logical
impossibility. You gain nothing from exacting revenge against me.’
‘Logic is a lie,’ came the reply. ‘A prison for small minds. I am here
for a purpose beyond revenge.’
Voar waited no longer. Negotiations would not suffice. He dropped
back behind an enormous four-poster bed of black hardwood as he
gave the impulse for the servitors to open fire.
Eight autoguns hammered out a curtain of fire. Iktinos ran into the
storm, faceplate of his helmet tucked behind one shoulder guard as he
charged. The armour was chewed away as if by accelerated decay,
the skull-faced shoulder guard stripped down through ceramite layers,
then down to the bundles of cables and nerve fibres that controlled it.
Iktinos slammed into the servitors. One was crushed under his
weight, its reinforced spine snapping and its gun wrenched out of
position to spray bullets uselessly into the frescoed ceiling. The
crozius slashed through another two, their unarmoured forms coming
apart under the shock of the power field, mechanical and once-human
parts showering against the walls in a wet steel rain.
Voar ducked out of cover as Iktinos beheaded the last servitor with
his free hand. Voar took aim and fired, a lance of superheated energy
lashing out and slicing a chunk out of the chaplain’s crozius arm.
Voar’s mind slowed down, logic circuits engaging to examine the
tactical possibilities faster than unaugmented thought. He had to keep
his distance since, up close, Iktinos was lethal, while Voar’s inferno
pistol was the only weapon he had that could hope to fell a Space
Marine. The targeting systems built into his eyes would make sure
that his second shot would not miss. As long as he saw Iktinos before
the fallen Chaplain could kill him, Voar would get one good shot off.
The plan fell into place, paths and vectors illuminating in blue-white
lines layered over his vision.
Voar jumped out of cover, his motivator units sending him drifting