The Lords of Silence Read online

  Philemon reaches up to scratch his chin. Something pops, and his fingers glisten. ‘Where does it leave us?’

  ‘A long way from where we need to be.’

  Philemon pauses, and the abacus at his belt clinks. ‘Dangerous.’

  ‘No more so than normal,’ says Vorx. ‘Run the numbers, will you?’

  ‘If you want.’

  ‘I need to trust a little more.’

  Philemon gives him a severe look. ‘You do, siegemaster. You trust.’

  ‘All I have left, I think sometimes.’

  ‘It’s all beginning. I told you that. When the scales tip. You could be happier about it.’

  Vorx chews at his lip. He can taste blood in his mouth, a thick soup made tangy by acid and gut-rot. ‘Which way do they tip, though, eh?’ he ruminates, running a finger down the spine of the nearest book. ‘We could be sliding down the wrong path. We have done it before.’

  Philemon snorts, and shoots him an exasperated, though oddly affectionate, glance. ‘There are creatures, aquatic hunters, that are required to move at all times, or they die. That is our model. We stay in the void, we will die. Or Solace will kill you. Or Dragan will, or Garstag. If you pause here, if you think, if you hesitate, they will be feeding your guts to their familiars.’

  Vorx does not smile. ‘You’ve been saying the same thing to me for a hundred years.’

  ‘This year, then, I hope you will listen.’

  Vorx shrugs. His upper lip twitches, catching on the corroded flecks of his inner helm. He cannot take the helm off anymore. Very few of his warband can, at least those who have been Unbroken for some time. They are no longer body and ceramite, but an increasingly intimate meld of the two. That is one of the many hundred reasons they are so hard to kill – their fusion with their protection is so much more complete than that enjoyed by their Imperial cousins.

  ‘Run the numbers,’ he says.

  ‘They can only tell you so much,’ says Philemon.

  ‘Better than nothing at all.’

  Vorx looks up at the Little Lord, now snoring contentedly, with flecks of skin and keratin on its rolling stomach. He can smell the decay, the falling away of the parchment, the slow collapse of the deck beneath and the roof above.

  A number is eternal. It is a form, not a body. It is the last thing left, when the mind is rotted into a soup of tendrils, only fit for the gluttons of the deep bilge. You can hold on to a number. He wonders sometimes if even the Deathlord does just that, as if a number were a reminder of another possible life in another possible galaxy. He remembers what his master told him on the Plague Planet, and wonders if he somehow saw this coming. There are those who underestimate Mortarion’s subtlety.

  ‘I need to know,’ he says, turning away from the books and the mould. ‘Do this for me, please.’

  ‘Of course,’ says the Tallyman, watching him go. ‘Whatever you want.’

  Chapter Two

  The ship is moving.

  The Cultivator of the enginarium, Rhoe Twe, has succeeded in firing the third furnace, and there is fire and ichor chundering down the tubes again. More of the lanterns come on, flickering first then throwing out that familiar dirty-yellow glow from behind glass panels.

  The Population is stirring. Many of them were killed, either by hard-round void barrage or by the Corpse-spawn who got on board after the shields were knocked out, but there are thousands living in the dark deeps and it is hard to get all of them. They have white skin that sags from their calcified cartilage, black-in-black eyes and fingers made long and tough from the things they have to prise open. Some of them might still be technically human, though most have moved on to alternative taxonomic classes. The variety is interesting.

  They dwell in the parts of Solace that few of the Unbroken have reason to travel into, save perhaps for sport or to hunt. The ship is huge, and so there are many of these places.

  When the ship’s hull was laid down in the 34th millennium on the forge world Lashte, it was named Undying Valour. It entered service with Battlefleet Archon less than a year after structure completion, commanded by an inexperienced captain named Lutrecia Prask. Its complement of more than thirty thousand ratings was largely drawn from Naval levy stations strung out beyond the Mourn Ring, and was graded as competent by four subsequent inspection visits. Like all Corinus-class cruisers, it was heavily armed, with lance and macro­cannon arrays out of proportion to its relatively underweight shielding. It transpired that the class gradually fell out of favour with Imperial commanders, though the Undying Valour served with distinction for another five hundred years, gaining a kill ratio marginally higher than its reputation indicated likely.

  Prask died in an engagement less than twenty years after assuming command, and was replaced by a succession of captains promoted from the lower decks. A cruiser-class ship was a world of its own, and only the very greatest battleships regularly recruited senior officers from outside the hull – most captains were born, raised and trained on the ship they would later command. The last of the line, Orthan Hemmo, was of this tradition, and was said to have loved the ship more than his own children, of which there were twenty before circumstances intervened to curtail his commendable contribution to the replenishment of Imperial numbers.

  Those circumstances came at the battle of the Borghesh Channel, a vicious encounter in which the Imperium lost twenty vessels and had its grip loosened on three subsectors. By the time retribution fleets overwhelmed the region more than sixty standard years later, there was no sign of the Undying Valour at its last reported coordinates – only a slowly spinning core of metal to which Hemmo’s deep-frozen corpse was, it was rumoured later, nailed on tight.

  And that was that. The Corinus class continued their long decline in Imperial service. When variants reappeared in the sporadic warfare of later centuries, they had been changed by the heavy corrosion of the Eye, sporting modifications and eruptions that baffled, excited and appalled the tech-priests who studied them. One unnamed scholar, toiling away in some obscure forge world’s collation citadel, amended his report on these studies, changing the term Corinus to Repulsive, possibly as some recondite form of Martian humour. The Mechanicus, not being a humorous order, took up the emendation as purely literal, and like some spreading organic virus, it became the preferred classification for what remained a rare class of warship within Imperial zones of control.

  Vorx did not seize the Undying Valour. By the time he became its master, it was already Solace and was already growing, changing, spiralling slowly down those deep wells of the Eye and soaking up their bottomless malice. For more than five thousand years it steeped in that soul liquor, its spars flexing, its innards burning, its hull plates blistering. Its old core began to reform, untouched by daemon-wrights or renegade Techmarines but impelled by its own semi-dormant creative impulse. Like so much else in that realm of dreams, physical form began to suffuse with the matter of souls.

  Now it breathes. It has respiration, it has circulation. It has whims and it has moods. If it turns against you, you find corridors suddenly choked with bulging plates and boiling pits of run-off oil. Crew go missing from time to time, even from the ranks of the Unbroken. Sometimes they are discovered much later – bits of armour, stains on the deck, a faint smell of satisfied ingestion.

  Solace must be placated. It must be nourished, and it must be tended. If that is done, then it will fight for you, and it is very good at that. It is bulkier than it once was, heavier and thicker, and caked with steadily accumulated daemorganic detritus, so much so that the old weakness in defence is no longer really there. It is a monster. It is a killing beast, a void-wallower, a devourer of the Corpse-spawn’s empty iron machines.

  But it is not invincible. It has been hurt now. Its skeleton has been partly exposed, and huge strips of flesh burned into ash. It is off-centre, listing with its grav-pull askew as the stars wheel slowly around
it. It gasps, sending plumes of red-tinged smoke seeping into the void. Its main plasma thrusters are black and cold, though Rhoe Twe has ­kindled the third furnace now.

  The levels aft of the plasma generators are still dark. Kledo hurries through them, accompanied by four of his Unbroken bodyguards. His armour is badly damaged, the needle-arrays twisted and leaking, and there are sparks of strange electricity snaking over the plate. He is carrying two functional weapons, one in each hand. The first is a bolt pistol, its muzzle fashioned into the gaping jaws of some venomous species of blind-slug. The second is attached to his forearm, an old narthecium with its scissor-saw mandibles intact and the vacuum chamber working at near-optimal performance. That is a rare thing, and its owner is keen to use it.

  ‘Up ahead,’ growls one of the bodyguard, an Unbroken captain named Golkh.

  Golkh limps. One of his legs is wasted away within its armour-shell, yet still supports his considerable bulk. The bones are shot to powder, the muscles are a stringy mess, and yet he still walks. Such mysteries.

  Kledo does not respond. He already senses what he has come for. He can smell it, somehow, amid the rich tapestry of stinks in the underbelly of the starship. A Surgeon of the Death Guard learns to navigate by smells – the acrid puff of terror, the sweet and drawn-out fug of despair, the perennially exciting moment when a barren body is first infected, and the infinite joys are unleashed within its bloodstreams and limbic systems.

  The Population are scattering before him, splashing off into the darkness. They are like rats, squeezing into every hole that will take them. The rusted iron of Solace’s skeleton is intricate here, but still hot after the bombardment. There are places open to the void, and they must go carefully.

  They passed the carcass of a boarding torpedo some way back, burning in defiance of the void’s vacuum. Its livery was a deep sable, displaying the Chapter symbol of the Iron Shades of the Shoba death world.

  Kledo knows all the liveries. They have been studying their enemy for a long time, and there are only a thousand-odd Chapters to master. The Iron Shades are a good enemy – tenacious and unrelenting. They have a philosophical disinterest that marks them out from their many peers. Their commitment to martial excellence is aesthetical as much as it is anything – they fight because they believe perfection is achieved through contest.

  Kledo knows that this is nonsense. Fighting is mostly pointless, but if it has an end, that end is for some greater political purpose, such as putting the wheezing old super-psychic husk on Terra out of its misery and calling a stop to the whole sorry charade. In itself, considered in the abstract, fighting is little more than belching – a necessary part of life, but hardly the most distinguished.

  The smell becomes more intense. He hurries, his boots kicking up slurry. He can see bolt impact craters in the walls, already thickening with milky liquid. Bodies are everywhere, slumped and folded and floating in the scum-topped pools. God of Decay, but they killed a lot of menials.

  He enters a hemispherical chamber. A boltgun cracks out, flashing vividly and making the walls and roof burn white. He is hit twice – once in the chest, once in the leg. The aim is good, and he feels the pain of the impacts. His bodyguards return fire instantly, carpeting the far wall with a range of esoteric, more powerful weaponry. He hears grunts from the other side of the inferno and holds his narthecium hand up to halt the destruction. Steam hisses, bilgewater slaps and boils.

  Kledo can feel his wounds close over. He can feel the bolt-shells dissolving inside him, burned away by the acids within, and the pus oozing from his glands, coating the wounds and dribbling down the inside of his thick, soft armour-plate. Once, his protective ceramite would have aimed to keep projectiles away from him. Now it absorbs them, sucking them in close, chewing and corroding the layers of diamantine and depleted uranium and cordite and – best of all – the sickly sweet propulsive fluids.

  He barely breaks stride. He sees the Iron Shades Space Marine clatter to the floor, his armour riddled with catastrophic damage. Kledo takes in the tactical markers instantly – this one is from the Fifth Battle-Company; void-war specialists. He comes closer and sees the sigils of distinguished service. His armour was already carrying damage, and now it’s just a mess of shards and bloody flecks. He can see a face – gaunt, grey, studded with carapace plugs and honour tattoos. One eye stares at him. The Space Marine’s fingers try to move.

  Kledo kneels down close. The smell is overwhelming now.

  ‘Pretty good,’ he whispers, as the narthecium begins to whine up to speed. ‘You got a long way in.’

  The Iron Shade tries to rise, to fight, to reach for a blade. It’s pointless. His sinews are severed, his hearts haemorrhaging.

  ‘But I’m feeling a bit unreasonable at the moment.’ Kledo selects a needle from the cycler and slots it into the narthecium’s array. He presses it against the flesh of the Space Marine’s neck. ‘A bit put out.’

  The Iron Shade almost manages to move, to get to that dagger at his belt that is just so tantalisingly close.

  Kledo depresses the plunger. ‘I’d normally be taking your progenoids,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be doing that soon enough.’

  The Space Marine’s bloodshot eyes widen. He’s tough, and he’s trained, but there are pains beyond belief, and Kledo knows them all.

  ‘See, I was already irritated,’ the Surgeon says. ‘And then you shot me.’

  The saws spin, and then hover closer. An old, sick light kindles in Kledo’s eyes.

  ‘So this is going to be horrible,’ he says, and begins.

  Dragan is furious. This is not the low-level, habitual fury that animates his every breath and drives his every killing blow, but a precise fury directed at ignorance. They were fighting, and being stretched, and then something happened. He was ripped away, thrown out into darkness as the ship reeled, and now they are… He does not know where they are.

  Dragan hates not knowing. His deadliness is built on certainty. He is not as old as some of his brothers. He was not spawned on Barbarus, but on an Imperial world, and that fact worms away at him. You have to prove yourself in this environment, and any little thing can be made into a weapon against you. You have to work to turn those disadvantages into weapons you can use.

  And, see, so much of all the old prestige is no better than new shit. It doesn’t matter. Vorx was spawned ten thousand years ago on a world now rendered inert by virus bombs, and Dragan was spawned two thousand years ago on some Imperial hive cluster that is, as far as he knows, still very much in active life. What does that mean? That Vorx has eight thousand more years of experience under his sagging belt?

  No. It does not. It means nothing. Dragan has met creatures birthed at the dawn of the Imperial Age whose voyages in the Eye have given them less subjective life experience than he has. It matters not where one comes from, nor on what world one’s cells first fused together. It only matters what one does once the choked breaths start coming.

  In a similar vein, he has thought, from time to time, on the experience of the primarchs. Those demented paragons lived a real life only for a couple of centuries before being hurled back into their elemental prisons. There they squatted amid failure and sucked their yellowing teeth. They consulted grimoires and they built altars. They had less exposure to the realm of the real than he has had.

  Thus Dragan cultivates his contempt for the primarchs. Not quite for his own, of course – in the Death Guard, rank and suzerainty still have weight. But even then, there is that old paradox. The Imperials only venerate their primarchs because they are all dead; if any lived, they would soon remember what fools they were and despise them too.

  A long time ago, Slert had taken Dragan down to the under-piles of the engine run-off chamber. Slert had found something that piqued his obsessive interest – an insectoid hive, all wattles and hexagons running off into darkness, crammed with buzzing sting-nightmares wit
h jade eyes and dragging flails. The species, it seemed, was entirely novel – some kind of emergent fusion of blowfly and void-wasp. The drones had dragged some of the Population into their colony, injecting larvae under flabby skin as the wretches wriggled and twitched.

  Slert had burned his way deep into the hive, ignoring the stings that pumped fresh and welcome poisons into him. In the pulsing heart of that place, he found the queen. The thing was impressively grotesque, swollen beyond reason, with a translucent sac that quivered as it squirted out glossy eggs.

  He had shown this to Dragan, as if some great lesson were revealed by it.

  ‘What is this?’ Dragan asked.

  ‘Of all the creatures,’ Slert said, ‘this is the only one that never leaves the hive. They feed it. They feed it until its flesh stretches and it cannot get out.’ The Putrifier looked at Dragan in the dark, his rotted deathmask partly hidden behind the swarms. ‘So the queen is the slave.’

  It was an unsubtle point. Slert had a tendency to hammer these things home. Back then, though, the observation had more currency. The primarchs were still slumped on their self-made dreamworlds, rolling around in acrimony and self-loathing, and unable to leave them. Only the Despoiler had had the belly fire to strike out beyond the Gate’s reach in numbers, demonstrating at a stroke the indulgence and passivity of the elder order.

  Ah, the Despoiler. There is a conundrum.

  Dragan goes faster now. He vaults stairs and climbs up through the flickering dark. Everything has changed. The old lords are stirring again, breaking out through the breach carved for them by Abaddon’s ambition. Certainty, honed over millennia, has been fractured. It was never supposed to play out like this, and Dragan suspects that, now they’re out, the old Legion masters will go ahead and foul things up again just as they did before.

  That makes him angry. It is the source of much of his current anger. He can no longer cleave to a path that had once seemed utterly secure. He will have to improvise, ride the chances, see just how much stupidity the Lords of Silence will put up with from Vorx before it comes down to blades.