The Path of Heaven Page 11

  For a moment, Arvida was still. ‘You remained unsullied, right to the end,’ he said softly, remembering their first shared battle amid the glass dust of Tizca. Then, to himself, he murmured, ‘I may yet come to envy that.’

  He stirred, and straightened. Namahi was looking at him, as was Jubal, as were all the others.

  ‘The sound-weapons,’ Namahi said, disgusted. ‘No blade, no matter how fast, parries them.’

  Arvida was struck by the edge of grief in Namahi’s voice. The Khagan’s own brotherhood were as close to one another as blood-kin. And there was more: another link to the sundered home world cut. The strands were becoming frayed.

  ‘What did he tell you?’ asked Jubal.

  Jubal was different. He had been far away from the Legion during the upheaval on Chondax, carried into the furthest reaches of the galaxy at the head of an ikhan, a great hunt that had arced beyond the galactic plane in pursuit of the xenos mjordhainn raiders. By the time his strike force had returned bearing the head of the xenos’ controlling patriarch on a silver shield, the Imperium was turning in on itself, and he had been thrown into the heart of combat with no opportunity to ask why.

  A lesser warrior might have succumbed to fate in the confusion and void war that had followed, but Jubal had always been a spirit of fire, and all the traps laid for him were broken. The Lord of Summer Lightning he had been on Chogoris, a capricious spirit who had defied restrictions even by the standards of a Legion that placed little value on them. Almost alone among the White Scars, his name was known across the wider ranks of the Great Crusade, whispered alongside the most exalted company, held up as a legend of elusive renown on worlds that had never seen a son of the Altak. That he had lived to fight his way to the Khan’s side again was one of the few causes of joy in an otherwise harrowing campaign, a sign that their most vital soul had not yet been quenched.

  Regarding him now, Arvida saw just how different Jubal was to Qin Xa. The keshig-master had been quiet in voice, solid in manner, his strength coming from within like a deep well sunk into bedrock. Jubal was the other side of the Legion’s soul – flamboyant, artful, unfettered. Somehow he had retained that during the long retreat, his guan dao still flashing defiantly as blood flowed across worlds.

  Perhaps his time had come now. Perhaps this was the age of wildfire, of the Master of the Hunt rather than the Horde.

  ‘Little enough,’ Arvida said, no longer wishing to talk of it. ‘He died well, with his spirit laughing.’

  Jubal held his gaze for a while longer, searching. ‘We could have died alongside him if we had chosen. We could have held our ground. They would have made verses of that.’

  Arvida did not question his judgement. It was not his place – he was the outsider still, suffered to fight with the ordu, but never one of them. He had made sure of that himself, retaining the marks of his old order, refusing every offer to take up the ways of weather-magic, the arts of the plains-shaman.

  ‘We did what we came to do,’ he said, evenly.

  ‘But the price was high, this time.’

  ‘When has it ever not been?’

  Jaijan returned to the slab then, his narthecium already whining. His attendants began to prepare the body. From the rear of the medicae chamber, menials entered bearing white ceremonial robes, each marked with the calligraphic glyphs marking the passage into Eternal Heaven, the wide arch of the sky, the hawk’s flight.

  None of the khans moved. Jubal looked at Arvida.

  ‘We will give him kal damarg. You may stay, sorcerer.’

  He would have done. If he had been able to choose, he would have watched the Chogorian death-rite as he had done so many times, giving honour to the master of the Khan’s own elite, sharing in the privilege that almost none outside the ordu had ever witnessed.

  But the flesh-change had got worse. The pain sang around his collar, bleeding up into his neck and across his chest. He could feel his limbs press up against the inside of his armour, hot with blood, seething like squalid nests of insects. He had already lingered too long – the edge of peril had crept up on him, worsened by the use of his mind-voice. That was the curse of his home world, one that had pursued him into the void even after his rescue from Prospero, dragging him back towards the fate of his old Legion.

  To reject the offer made him feel wretched, but Qin Xa’s last command still resonated.

  Cure yourself.

  ‘He was your Legion’s champion,’ Arvida said, bowing stiffly. ‘He is yours to mourn.’

  For a moment, Jubal didn’t hide the slight. The offer, once made, would not be made again. ‘As you will it,’ he said.

  By then, though, Arvida was already moving. He left the way he had come, feeling the flesh-pressure mount. Only when he had reached his own chamber, ringed with the wards he had created himself using the last of the knowledge he had taken from Prospero, did the pain begin to sharpen into curative agony. He knelt within the circles and pentagrams, knowing that the worst was yet to come, and that soon he would be crying aloud, lost in the visions that came with the change and his fight to prevent it.

  He screwed his eyes shut, balled his fists, trying to recall the words of the Corvidae litanies. All he saw was Qin Xa’s face, and then the sky over Tizca, and then Kalliston’s death, and then the ghosts that had always been there within the shafts of sunlight and the crystal refractions, waiting for them, waiting for them all.

  ‘Damn you,’ he hissed. ‘Not yet.’

  And then the screaming started.

  The world was a black sphere of silver-veined iron. Its distant star was white-blue, casting its every surface with ghost-pale edges. Once it had possessed oceans, but these had boiled away a million years ago, leaving open pans of ebony rock naked to the heavens. Its cloudless sky was black to the void, revealing the torso of the galaxy, strung like a trail of jewels against the infinite dark.

  Spectre, the place had been called by the first explorators to make planetfall.

  The rock had been charted, surveyed for minerals, assessed for habitation or cultivation, and rejected on all counts. Chill winds ran across its empty plains now, curling at the edges of crystalline rock towers. Strange lights flickered and glowed in the frigid skies, glinting from mirror-pure chasms below. For a long time, the hush of those winds had been the only sound on Spectre, repeated through the centuries in overlapping, moribund murmurs.

  But now the winds raced from a different cause. Ancient dusts were stirred up, skittering across cracked rock-plates. The sky’s purity was broken by the heavy thunder of landing thrusters. Vessels, dozens of them, made atmospheric entry, powering down on columns of thick smog. Most were Legion gunships, fitted for fleet-escort duties, switching from orbital to atmospheric engines as they plunged earthwards. Their flanks were a dark sea-green, all emblazoned with the eye of their primarch.

  The gunships extended across the plains in all directions, setting up a cordon around the centre of a wide circular expanse, itself surrounded by ranks of towering stalagmites. Where they set down, Sons of Horus honour guards emerged, all wearing ceremonial cloaks and carrying heavy power spears. Once the cordon was complete, a lone Stormbird made planetfall in the centre. Down the steam-wreathed embarkation ramp trudged warriors in ebon-faced, bronze-encased Cataphractii plate – the Justaerin, most feared fighters of the most feared Legion. They marched with a perceptible martial arrogance, the confident tread of those habituated to ascendancy.

  The Justaerin had always made their armour their own, marking it with heritage-tokens extending back to the gangs of Cthonia, but now the alteration of their Legion-issue plate had accelerated. Blood-brown bones clanked from chains set about their waists, and their pauldrons bore iron spikes set amid more glistening eyes. Sigils had been daubed across shell-chipped ceramite, signs of potency now taught to them by their consorts beyond the veil. Spectre’s thin air shimmered as the Justaerin wa
ded through it, repulsed by the name-forms that flickered in its austere light.

  Once in position, the honour guard waited in silence, weapons held in static salute. They did not move even when the skies above them were sundered a second time. More landers cut their way down from orbit, this time bearing the white-and-green livery of the XIV Legion – named the Dusk Raiders by the Emperor, renamed the Death Guard by their primarch. Their own elites, the Deathshroud, clanged down the ramps from their Stormbird, each one a match in stature with his Justaerin equivalent. Bearing power scythes two-handed, they lumbered into position, and the two sides faced one another across the glass-dark rocks.

  The Deathshroud bore no new sigils on their pauldrons, and their armour remained much as it had been throughout the Great Crusade and its aftermath – rime-filthed, battered, plain. No daemon-whispered signs had been scratched on their vambraces and greaves, just the accumulated muck of an endless campaign, staining a livery that had never been pristine, even upon leaving the forges on Barbarus.

  They remained thirty metres apart, those two forces, making no move to close the gap. No hails were issued and no challenges laid down, for those killers were not the reason that Spectre’s long isolation had been disturbed.

  The first to emerge from his transport was the Death Lord, limping into the open from the Stormbird’s gaseous interior, leaning heavily on his reaper, Silence. His face was hidden under a battered cowl, his verdigrised armour swathed in the tattered remnants of a fine cloak, his iron boots plastered with the caked soils of a hundred worlds. Vapour trailed after him in curls, expelled from intestine-like coils of cabling. His breath rattled, his back was curved and his stance was crabbed.

  And yet, there could be no doubt of the power cradled within that savaged shell. Even in his seeming decrepitude, he somehow dominated all around him. Every dull ring of his scythe’s heel against rock echoed heavily. His great shoulders spoke of an almost infinite endurance, an ability to withstand forces that would have laid even his brother gene-gods low. The sickly pallor that hung over him was not weakness, but the spawn of a long-gestated bitterness that extended back to the toxic world of his scattering, one that made him almost infinitely capable of enduring punishment.

  As he reached the centre of the circle, the Justaerin bowed as one. The gestures were not the perfunctory bows of diplomacy, but the recognition of a paramount lord in their midst, one who had overseen the slaughter of entire systems at the head of a Legion whose pale ships had become a byword for implacable, silent, inexorable murder.

  If he noticed that, Mortarion gave no sign. He came to a halt, his rebreather clicking between hisses. A pair of yellow-green eyes peered out from the shadow of the cowl, heavy-lidded, windows onto a soul that had always been marked to suffer.

  Then, slowly, achingly, the Death Lord moved his weight from the reaper’s haft, pushed his mottled cloak to the side, and sank to one knee. His great head lowered in obeisance, followed in due course by those of his own retinue.

  Mortarion had only ever bent the knee to two souls in creation. One he had since sworn to destroy; the other now emerged from the facing Stormbird.

  He, like his Legion, had grown far beyond his allotted bounds. The old dynamism, the almost unconscious flair that had made men love him and armies pray to be given to his command, had been strangled long ago. The gold and white of his armour had stained and darkened, the furs had thickened, the ceramite plates had fused into new and tortured forms. His agility had been swallowed up by a new, horrific, cloying bulk. His armour-hood rose high over his head, lit from within by a seething cushion of blood-red energies. His right arm terminated in the immense, industrial outline of the Talon, which even at rest seemed to snarl with barely contained killing-lust.

  When he moved, it was as if the matter of the galaxy itself hastened to clear his path. He had become immense, obscenely so, an elemental force even among those who had been gifted with the Emperor’s divine touch. The gold-and-ruby eyes that festooned his baroque armour seemed to gaze out with wills of their own, scrutinising, judging, testing.

  And yet it was his own, mortal, eyes that were the greatest horror of all. Where once they had been vital, questing, alive with pleasure, they were now dark, ringed with ridges of pale flesh. They were the eyes of a soul that had peered into the epicentre of the abyss and faced the shape of reality in all its abject, cruel majesty. Nothing reflected from those orbs now. They were like black holes, greedily sucking every scrap of light into their unfathomable depths.

  Horus Lupercal, Warmaster, came to a halt before Mortarion, and extended his left gauntlet.

  ‘My brother,’ he said, ‘kneeling does not suit you.’

  Mortarion looked up, his expression, as ever, impossible to read behind the mask and the cowl. ‘You must accustom yourself to it. Soon we shall all kneel, sire.’

  Horus beckoned him upwards. Heavily, awkwardly, Mortarion complied. Then they embraced as brothers, and for a moment it was as if the lesser primarch were swallowed up in the mauling embrace of the void.

  Horus released him, and Mortarion looked around. ‘Ezekyle not with you? I thought he was your shadow.’

  ‘I thought Typhon yours.’

  Mortarion hacked a contemptuous cough. ‘Who knows what Calas does, or where he is? I seek him myself. If you should run across him, be sure to tell me.’

  Horus’ gaze flickered then. His eyes, those grey-ringed eyes, moved strangely, as if witnessing things that were not there, or things that ought to have been. ‘You know why I wished to meet.’

  ‘You have a thousand worlds under your heel. You have ringed the Throneworld with fire. The galaxy is severed, barring Guilliman and the Angel from reaching our Father’s side. These things are all now done, and the stage is set.’

  Horus did not smile. His once-easy humanity had drained away from him, replaced with the distant, distracted grandeur of a different plane. ‘In my mind, this thing had been done by now. Every day sees our advantage slip a little.’

  Mortarion shook his head, wheezing. ‘Then give the order, brother. Set it in motion.’

  Horus gave a wry smile. ‘And that is all there is to it,’ he murmured. He looked up, his bleak gaze sweeping the crystal-sharp starfield arcing above them. ‘We did not bring all of them with us. They are out there, still, fighting against the webs we have placed them in. That is the problem.’ His expression hardened. Even in those minuscule movements, the projection of incipient command was always lurking. ‘Lorgar’s storms will not last forever. They can be broken, given the will, given the strength. And what then? All those we have sealed away from our Father’s side, racing back to add their banners to His.’

  ‘Then give the order.’

  Horus turned back towards him, a brief flash of irritation rippling across his bloated features. ‘We do not speak of some petty warlord, scraping a living on a backwater rock. Even in His weakness He is unmatched. You know what made Him. You know why He and He alone could lay the foundations of all this. Can you compass what it is to even conceive of killing such a one? To do it, to do it properly, so that He cannot escape the blade’s cut and cling to His shrivelled soul… You do not see the full peril.’

  ‘Since Molech, brother, you have lost your good humours.’

  ‘Since Molech, there are no good humours. I am become vengeance, the destroyer of creation. So, no, I do not laugh as I once did.’

  Mortarion sighed. ‘Shall I say it a third time? No more delays. Launch the assault. My Legion stands ready.’

  ‘No doubt.’ For a moment, there was a kind of gratitude in those ruined features. ‘Dorn is accounted for. Russ has been crippled at Alaxxes, and wastes himself in dreams of bringing me to his strange form of justice. Corax is lord of an empty Legion, and Ferrus and Vulkan are dead. That only leaves one who could hurt us.’

  Mortarion looked wary, and said nothing.

  �
�I had resolved to command the Phoenician for this,’ said Horus. ‘He and Jaghatai always despised one another. I would have enjoyed the sight of Fulgrim teaching the Warhawk a lesson in humility.’

  ‘Then ask him.’

  ‘If you can find him, then you may do so yourself.’ Horus flexed his Talon instinctively, a gesture of impatience. ‘Come, we both know this – Fulgrim cannot be trusted. He performed his one great task on Isstvan Five, so do not look to him for anything more.’

  Mortarion shook his head, making the jars of toxins hung around his neck rattle. ‘I will not do it.’

  ‘You thirst for vengeance, do you not?’

  ‘He did not best me.’

  ‘No one says that.’

  Mortarion slammed the shaft of Silence against the rock, sending shuddering lines of forces snaking across the dark plates. ‘I will be at your shoulder,’ he hissed. ‘At the forefront. I have kept my sons pure. I could have twisted them like the others, but they still answer my command, and they still hold their discipline.’

  ‘You shall be with me, just as I promised.’

  ‘I will not be left behind.’ Mortarion’s speech was thick with long-bottled suspicion. ‘I have as much thirst to see our Father kneel as you. More, I would claim, if all be reckoned.’

  ‘And as the Palace burns, you shall be at my side.’

  ‘Then why place the Khan before me now?’

  ‘Because I can trust you,’ Horus said, exasperated. ‘Do you not see it? You look for slights in every shadow, waiting to be cheated, and yet you, my jealous brother, are only one I have left.’ He laughed out loud, bitterly. ‘Behold, the tally of my rebellion. Angron has made himself mad – I cannot charge him with the simplest tasks. Perturabo – by the gods, Perturabo. He would be left standing while the Khan’s savages ran rings around his trenches, and the Scars have no fortresses for him to lay low. Alpharius is silent, and ties himself up in knots of his own devising. The list grows short.’