The Lords of Silence Read online

  An air of expectance gradually permeates through the lower levels. Forges that have been out of action since the engagement are kindled again, and their cauldrons bubble into life. Hundreds of Unbroken are garrisoned on the ship, and few were given leave to make planetfall. They are simmering now, surly and impatient for killing.

  The main engines ignite. Turgid promethium slops down the pipes. Solace wheels on its centre, then grinds out of orbit, pushing powerfully into the cold. The plasma trains wheeze towards full power, and soon the ship is surging through the void, picking up speed. The Mandeville points are still hours away, but Tjafa’s pod-locked Navigators are roused by brain-spike and dragged, half-conscious, to the amniotic vats.

  Philemon returns to his sanctum. He has lists of bodies to collate and maps to consult. There were no fresh plagues discovered on Najan, so his tasks are light. As he descends, the weak light bleeds away to soft darkness.

  He almost misses the figure waiting for him at the base of the stairwell, standing entirely motionless, a clot of perfect black amid imperfect gloom. He reaches for his long knife.

  ‘Work to do, Tallyman?’ Slert asks, edging into a faint lumen echo.

  ‘As always, Putrifier.’

  Slert is smiling under his threadbare cowl. His empty eye sockets gape. ‘And you are a most faithful labourer.’

  Philemon keeps his hand on his weapon. ‘You creep around too much. This is not a safe ship.’

  ‘No, not at all.’ Slert walks towards the entrance to the sanctum, halting before the locked doorway. ‘Some parts more than others.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You spoke to Vorx.’ Slert turns to face Philemon. ‘He asked you to divine what happened after Agripinaa. Any results yet?’

  ‘Vorx does not know what he wants.’

  ‘He wants certainty.’

  ‘He’ll be waiting a long time for that.’

  Slert laughs. ‘I fear for him, brother,’ he says. ‘You know him. He’s been a good enough master. He is devout. The alternatives for us would be… tougher.’

  ‘When the augurs align, when I know the truth, I will speak to him. Him alone.’

  Slert looks at the locked door. ‘What do you keep in there, anyway?’

  ‘You can’t see through my walls?’

  ‘If I could, I wouldn’t ask.’

  Philemon draws closer, edging the blade an inch from its scabbard. ‘You’re right,’ he says, his voice cold. ‘I have work to do.’

  Slert does not move, not immediately. ‘I speak to the fighters. I listen to what they tell me. Vorx needs to give them red meat soon. Something for them to turn sour and chew on. Ask them who they’d prefer to follow, him or–’

  ‘I don’t want to hear it.’

  Slert smiles and looks down. ‘If you say so. But we’re allies. Truly. I don’t want to see change, not yet.’

  ‘Your loyalty commends you.’

  ‘Who moved the ship, Tallyman?’

  Philemon pushes the blade back into his guard. Then he shoves Slert aside and unlocks the door.

  ‘We’re on course again,’ he says. ‘Be thankful for that.’

  Then he’s through, and the door thuds closed.

  Slert remains where he is for a while, musing. Then he turns, silently, and stalks off into the dark.

  Vorx remains on the bridge for much of the period of transit. He oversees the ship being taken into the warp. He listens to its structure as the immaterium gnaws at it. He listens to the complaints of the bound daemons, who fear their void-loose cousins more than any mortal does. He listens to the cracks, the booms, the heartbeats of distress.

  The cadre of Navigators dies quickly. They were always weak, their mutant bodies riddled with the consumptive maladies of the warp-struck, but in the service of the Unbroken they collapse with often perplexing speed. Their Seeing Eyes go blind, their blood turns to molten lead. One of the greatest impediments on a realspace raid is this weak link. Imperial Navigators live short lives too, but they at least have the heri­tage of the Houses behind them and captains who appreciate their services. The scions of the Eye must make do with scavenged scraps, the mind-weak, the heart-sick.

  Now it is worse than ever. It has been said many times since Agripinaa, but Vorx thinks on it, over and over.

  The galaxy is cracked. Abaddon has destroyed it. Now we reave its bleeding corpse. We are the blowflies on its wounds. We will conquer nothing, only watch our quarry expire as we reach out to grasp it.

  When he thinks these things, his mouth moves silently. One, two, three, his lips say.

  He uses Philemon’s arts to guide them when Tjafa fails. He speaks to the Little Lords, who whisper truths into his ear. He presses his helm’s earpiece up against the inner curve of the hull and listens for the cackle of Neverborn riding the hot currents outside.

  Thus they make progress. Vorx sees Dantine’s life thread stretch away into virtual space, glittering like a line of silk. For as long as he keeps the mortal’s beating heart close to his own rotting innards, this skein is apparent to him, just as other skeins are apparent from other humans he has soul-harvested. Vorx is old, and the universe is full of such wondrous things, if one knows how to uncover them. Even as his real senses decay and fall out of use, his Gifts make up the lost ground. He does not see in colour anymore, but he detects psychic harmonics as an augur detects background radiation. He does not experience the passage of time in a purely linear fashion any longer, but he feels its wrinkles and its missteps.

  He does not ask Dantine what took him from Sabatine to Najan, even though he could find out if he wished to. He allows the man to keep fragments of himself locked away, at least for now. One day, in time, Captain Dantine will tell Vorx all, and willingly.

  Four, five, six.

  Progress is made. Solace crawls through the void like every Death Guard vessel has ever done – slowly, deliberately, ploughing a blunt furrow. They drop in and out of the warp as the travails of the Navigators and the chitterings of daemons dictate. There is no fixed point anymore. There is only an echoing chasm, running away down to infinity’s base, colourless, lightless, seething with malice. In such a dream place, the servants of the god, and those of the other real gods, have the advantage. They have arts denied to the enemy by superstition. They can swim in this, glide in it, wash themselves in it. For the others, for those who warm their freezing hands by the afterglow of the Throne’s failing warmth, it must be horror beyond all horror.

  Vorx sees things on that journey. He sees dead worlds turning in the dark, their seas turned to iron slag. He sees empty ships drifting, no lights, no heat signature, just tombs now, tumbling over and over. He sees the flicker of intelligences dance across the open void, something that was always forbidden by the Law of Reality.

  Seven, eight, nine.

  Most of all, the void is empty. The Imperium is empty. It has been scoured, harrowed. This is damage on a galactic scale. The pillars of creation are riven, and soon the foundations will crumble. There is no coming back from this. All has changed.

  Ten.

  He looks up. Hovik is shuffling over to a picter lens, her spine curving more than ever. Her forehead is nearly pressed into the deck below as she hunches. Drez-Uil is trying to divine something, his lips flecked with red spittle. The sensor relays are flickering, picking something up. It might be another empty hulk, from the early signs, but Vorx already knows it will not be.

  He stirs and gets up from the throne. As he extends his rotten muscles, threads of unwoven ceramite stick to the seat and armrests, stretching thin. They break as he moves away and curl around his feet like lizards’ tails.

  ‘Weapons,’ he murmurs.

  It is the first time he has spoken for many days. The crew respond, hauling on chains, yanking levers, skating bone-nodes across tallyboards. Kodad’s face appears floating in
mid-air, shimmering from the effects of lith-throw and rippling like a sheet of thin plastek.

  ‘Howitzers priming, lord,’ he reports.

  ‘Is the Gallowsman with you?’ Vorx asks absently.

  ‘Lord?’

  ‘Never mind. All power to ranged guns.’

  Solace is already responding. Only some of its functions require crew. All across the outer hull, skin-plates are rupturing, pushed apart by the maws of splinter-guns. Torpedoes slip out from their gravid tubes, shiny from afterbirth, and are dragged into the orifices of launchers. Void shields, blurry as clouds of midges, shrivel across the ship’s physical limits and snap down hard. Slave crews ratchet the long howitzer snouts out, extending thick barrels through yawning gunwales.

  ‘Magnify,’ says Vorx, coming to stand before a great circular lens. The glass is thick, syrupy, cracked and faded. From within its depths, stars swim and pan. Then something is detected, and machine-spirits greedily lock on. A mouthless station keeper, her ears trailing weak dribbles of slime, looks up from her console to stare at it.

  The ship is red, tinged with black. It is spiked like an urchin, and its raised back is crowned with towers. Its thrusters are fully lit, and they glow an angry crimson. It is like a blood clot, spun out of an artery and thrown into the night to pulse and leak. Its guns are out too, row upon row, glinting brassily. Torches have been lit along its flanks. Naked flames writhe amid the vacuum, giving off no heat or smoke, twisting like bound souls.

  Vorx studies it. A name comes to his mind, suggested by the form and his diligent researches.

  ‘Ayamandar,’ he says, softly. ‘Our cousins, the Word Bearers.’

  The ship is turning flankwards, lining up broadside. It is a Styx-class heavy cruiser, a capable enemy. Solace might well be bigger, probably older, but the corruption of the Eye makes the old void-displacement and weapons-capability ratings more or less redundant. On such ships, the difference between death and survival really depends upon who’s on board.

  Unbroken warriors are arriving on the bridge now, stomping up from the corridors below. All are armed, all are ready. Their desire for combat is like a stink, a musk, a stale odour born of too-long quarantine.

  ‘Firing solutions calculated,’ reports Kodad from his distant cubbyhole, down in the oily, hellish murk of the galleries.

  The same procedures are being enacted on the other ship, Vorx knows.

  It would be a close-run thing. Both ships might be destroyed by a committed exchange. That would be a waste, given what little is known about anything anymore.

  ‘Wait,’ Vorx says, letting his claw-fist unclench. ‘Wait.’

  He can sense the movement all across the ship. The entire hold is astir. Unchanged crew are reaching for whatever weapons they have. The wounds caused by the Iron Shades are still scabbed over, but Solace is ready to bleed again.

  Dragan’s voice crackles over the comm. ‘Boarding tubes ready,’ he rasps.

  He is so eager. Always so eager.

  ‘Wait.’

  Then the voice comes, ringing over the internal relays. It is bronze-hard, the kind of voice used for chastisement and inspiration. It is cruel, though not without purpose. Cruelty is a creed for them, just as indulgence is a creed for the Lords of Silence. It performs functions, it greases wheels, it summons the gods out from their sullen dens and yanks them into actuation.

  ‘What ship is this?’ says the voice. ‘What banner and what purpose? We are ready to fire.’

  Vorx detects another comm-burst, urgent and angry, from Dragan. He shuts it down.

  ‘Solace, of the Fourteenth Legion, the Death Guard,’ he says. ‘No banner but our own, no cause but that of the faith. Come, now. There’s no cause for firing. We should talk.’

  There is a long pause. The two ships drift closer, still a long way from unaugmented visual range but increasingly close to the outer limits of weapons fire.

  Vorx watches it come in. It feels like he is reeling it, a fish on a line, its spines wriggling. He enjoys the image.

  ‘On this ship,’ says the voice.

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘Siegemaster…’ Dragan voxes.

  ‘We are not savages,’ Vorx voxes back, keeping the exchange private. ‘This is our galaxy now. We must start behaving like we own it.’

  ‘They will kill you.’

  ‘They will not. In any case, I will have protection.’

  ‘You will take–’

  ‘My most trusted servant,’ Vorx says, and closes the link.

  For all that, his sluggish hearts are thudding a little harder. He looks at the red ship and sees the pain etched on its every pinnacle. ­Ayamandar has traced agony onto the void, pressed deep like a long blade’s pull across skin.

  One, two, three, his lips say.

  Chapter Eleven

  The two ships come to a full stop and hang in empty space. As they circle slowly, nudged by the last vestiges of momentum, lights pop and spark in the emptiness around them. These are the lights of Neverborn instantiating briefly, like unstable elements created in a laboratorium’s accelerator. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of them before they gutter out again – a mouth, an eye, the curve of a rib.

  This is the state of the void now. Dragan does not know if it is the case everywhere, or just in this region. It is both unsettling and intriguing.

  The delegation takes a shuttle – a big, cumbersome old hulk with a top-mounted lascannon. It has the name of an old Imperial world, Chattackta, still just about visible on its flanks. They might have chosen to accept the Word Bearers’ offer of a teleport locus, but even Vorx cannot quite bring himself to yield to the warp-meddling of Lorgar’s priest-sorcerers. A ship will do. Then, if the worst should happen, at least they have their own engines and their own guns.

  Dragan is combat ready, his body drenched in a hot flush of hyperadrenaline. His power fist rests on his knees, the blades sheathed but poised.

  Garstag sits opposite, next to Vorx. Six of the Kardainn make up the rest of the complement. They are all in their bloated and swollen Terminator plate, true giants of slaughter. Dragan wonders if he too will one day don such armour, or whether he will always value the relative mobility of his current protection, the kind he has worn since before the turn. To wear the Kardainn’s colours is to make an irrevocable choice. You do not step back from it again, for that armour will swallow you, mould you, and then consume you. Dragan cannot deny the raw power of it – he has seen Garstag absorb punishment that should have levelled a Dreadnought – but there is always a price.

  The older Dragan gets, the more he matures and steeps in the brine of killing, the more he understands that everything is transactional. The gods, the daemons, the magisters of the Imperium, even the empty husk on the Throne, they are all barterers and hucksters, trading a little of this for a soul-full of that. You wish for power? Give me your memories. You wish for strength? I will take your tears.

  Vorx would not recognise that picture. The siegemaster thinks of things in older terms, more fundamental verities, and has a pious mind. For all the many pettier disagreements between Dragan and him, that perhaps is the greatest divide.

  Dragan turns away to look at the approaching ship. He admires its projected malevolence. Solace, from a distance, looks like a festering liver. This vessel looks like a flayed spinal cord, twitching and vivid. The shuttle glides in across a cityscape of chapels and bone-towers, and he sees iconography hammered onto every surface. The octed is ubiquitous, beaten into iron and nailed to steel. It crowns cupolas and campaniles, it furnishes the mouths of the ship’s macrocannons, it gazes out across long trenches filled with snaking energy arcs.

  He can hear chanting. That is impossible, of course, for the shuttle is still within the void, but he can hear it all the same, a drone that echoes from tower to tower. Overlapping choirs are knocking out a dirge that he gu
esses has been going on for as long as the ship has been occupied. It is a grim, joyless sound. It is a product of rote and discipline, and it is not enjoyable to hear. Then again, at least those wretches have vocal cords. That is not always true of the Unchanged on Solace.

  The shuttle docks high up on the prow-facing flank of the largest tower, which juts from the ship’s upper hull amid groves of curved brass and barbed silver. The ornamentation is extravagant – a cavalcade of pillars and gold-filigree screens, crowned with engraved daemon faces and crouching gargoyles. When the doors open, a thick haze of incense sighs over them. The aroma is oppressive, a saccharine cocktail over basenotes of bodily frenzy.

  They are taken from the hangars by red-armoured escorts who do not speak. The interior of the ship is lit by flame, the corridor plates black and glistening. Dragan sees altars everywhere, stained and streaked with old blood. He hears cries from below that echo up long shafts, competing with the omnipresent chanting to make the auditory environment as intimidating as possible. In glimpses, as the delegation passes high windows, he sees long naves stretch off into the darkness, all housing crowds of shuffling, robed supplicants. It is as crowded on this ship as it is sparse on Solace. The Word Bearers have always valued fecundity.

  They reach their destination – an octagonal chamber with high gothic arches, black-beamed and drenched in cold blue shadow. Candles flicker in narrow alcoves, piled with melted wax like milky tumours. A battle-standard hangs above them, burned at the edges but with its imagery and legend still just about visible – XVII Legion, the Imperial Heralds. That is a strange relic, one celebrating a name that most of Lorgar’s sons have long since learned to despise. Higher up, where the air becomes hazier due to the burning censers, many bodies hang. One of them is dripping still, a faint pit-pat that bounces on the stone floor.

  Their hosts are waiting – twenty of them, all in full battleplate of dark crimson and black. Their armour is as ornate as the ship’s, riddled and crusted with complex sigils of allegiance and fidelity. Every one of those warriors has an intricate relationship to the warp-bound, a lattice of entreaties and bargains made with the intelligences, all written out in threads of spun gold and deftly woven down into the ceramite ground. One of them burns with the daemon mark, his outline blurred and jumpy. Another has a leather-like mask stretched tight across his faceplate. Dragan thinks it probably isn’t leather.