The Path of Heaven Read online

  The pod rolled further out, spinning like a shell-case into the violent abyss.

  ‘I will see him again,’ Cario said, knowing it to be true.

  Sensation.

  Sensation.

  The rush, the swell, the gorge, the joy, the infinity of it.

  There were no words, no images, no possibility of explaining the fullness – all there was was to live it, to let the flood rush into your veins and fill them with the fire that was pain and joy and forgetting.

  The pain never left. It ramped up, it became excruciating, so much so that his screams were real screams, let fly from shredded lips and birthed in bloody vocal cords. But that mattered not, for pain was what reminded him that he lived still, and the numb cold of the hereafter had been spited for another lifetime. Every breath he drew was testament to that – it vindicated him, made him greater, fuelled the hell-furnace that had been lit in his engorged, straining hearts.

  Eidolon waded into battle. Every sweep of the thunder hammer, every explosion as the metal head struck and slew, every recoil from the heavy shaft as it broke bone and armour; it all redounded into the melange of raw experience.

  And he wanted more.

  More.

  He crashed onwards, his vision a blur of colour, made jagged and hyper-exposed by the extreme inputs assailing his ravaged armour-senses. He could feel his mortal body operating far beyond its original genhanced tolerances. Fabius’ stimms were raging through his system now. They would one day kill him, if the enemy failed to, but he loved what they did to him all the same.

  This was the reward. The many thousand agonies of his new existence found their prize in these moments. Fulgrim had been no fool. He had been neither weak nor deluded. He had seen it before any of them had – the horizon of experience, extending far beyond what the lies of Unity had prepared them for. This was what humanity had been created to unlock – to remake itself, to grow, to take up the mantle of something better. If the darker fates were cruel, they were also the altars of creation, turning receptacles of poor flesh into vehicles for new and dynamic deities.

  We are not degrading, Eidolon thought as the hammer-head whirled, ripping through the blown chest of a reeling White Scars legionary. This is the perfection we were always denied.

  Blood splashed across his helm-lens, casting the world into filmy crimson. He could smell it in his flared nostrils – rich with hyper adrenaline, thick with nutrients, the matter of the False Emperor’s biotechnological genius.

  We are improving this. Eidolon laughed out loud, and the sound was enough to shatter glass and dent lead. We are improving this!

  He lurched onwards, grinning wide, overcome with the tide of emotion. Once unleashed, myriad sensory possibilities engulfed almost all else, and he had to fight to retain his grasp on the here and now.

  The wall of noise was ripping apart, torn like a great curtain. Something was opposing the Kakophonic Aura, blunting its edges and pushing it back.

  Eidolon blinked hard, forcing himself to regain self-mastery. He saw Terminator-plated warriors advancing towards him, flanked by warp-weavers in bone-pale armour. He saw wild energies coursing through the blood vessels of those ones, glowing like phosphor in the dark.

  They are mighty, he noted, reminding himself not to be surprised. The White Scars’ shamans were powerful – like the rune-readers of Fenris, only more honest.

  ‘Go back!’ he screamed, and the world blazed from the glory of his death-shriek.

  And yet still they came on, weathering the hurricane of destruction that the psychosonic blast caused, leaning into it, shrouded in the arts of their strange magic and the physical majesty of their war-plate.

  The greatest of those fighters wore a gold-crested dragon-helm, which to Eidolon’s swimming vision looked alive, its jaws snapping and its eyes blazing gold. That one, taller than all the others, fighting with a corona of beauty, weathered the sound-tempest as if born to it, and his long curved sword burned with reflected fires.

  Eidolon laughed. He was vaguely aware of his brethren charging headlong into contact, the two Legion elites slamming into one another. Heavy armour clanged from the impact of pressed steel and the air fizzed from raging aetheric release. Wild magic exploded around them all, igniting as it impacted on the running waves of daemon-screams.

  His enemy waited for him, driving his curved blade through those who came against him with almost lazy perfection. There was something striking about those movements – a freedom none of the Chemos-born would ever have allowed themselves.

  Eidolon hefted his hammer, gauging distances through the fog of noise and colour. Distorted tactical readings told him of the wider battle unfolding across the docks – whole squads burning, gunships downed, walkers annihilated. The onward drive had stalled. The assault was grinding into the mire of dug-in combat. This enemy could not take the Keystone. For all their aggression, they had not come in sufficient numbers. It was only a matter of time before they were forced back.

  Eidolon smiled, feeling the skin of his lips crack. ‘A brave attempt!’ he called out. ‘Yet you have lost your way here.’

  His enemy said nothing. Prayer-banners lashed around his ivory battleplate as he whirled into the attack. So fast, so unfettered.

  They came together. Eidolon hauled his hammer-head up to meet the incoming strike, and the two weapons smacked against one another. He reeled backwards, pursued by the fire-flecked blade. He screamed again, making the air shake, but the dragon-helm pushed through it. Their weapons swung, smashing into one another again.

  This time, the impact hurt him. Eidolon fell back, his vision laced with dark veins. They traded more blows – earth-breaking blows, ones that smashed the decking up around them, dented the ancient armour and made the burning atmosphere blister.

  ‘You cannot escape through the Kalium Gate,’ Eidolon spat, tasting his own blood alongside that of those he had already killed. ‘This door is closed to you.’

  Still no response. The dragon-helm towered over him.

  Coil, hit, withdraw, coil again. He is astonishing.

  Eidolon fell back, bludgeoned into retreat even as his troops held their own ground. Perhaps, then, the assault had all been for this – to end him again, to deprive the III Legion of its greatest tactical mind.

  Hammer and tulwar smacked against one another, shivering from the hits, spraying disruptor-discharge in all directions. Eidolon’s bloated breastplate cracked, disgorging white noise freely from damaged amplifiers. He fell to one knee, watching as the dragon-helm came to deliver the final blows.

  As the shadow of his enemy fell across him, Eidolon cracked a wry grin. To be slain by two primarchs – how many could claim that honour?

  And yet, as the fire-streaked storm howled, augmented by the cries of the dead and the dying, rocked by the explosions of mortars and krak charges, the truth came to him suddenly.

  ‘But you are not him,’ he said, clutching the thunder hammer tightly. ‘You cannot be, or I would be dead already.’

  He shoved himself back to his feet, thrusting the hammer before him two-handed. The weapons crunched together again, flexing from the deadening, repeated punishment. This time, Eidolon’s desperation made him stronger, and he forced his enemy back by a fraction.

  The race of sensations returned, as if rewarding him for the realisation. Eidolon laughed again. ‘So why did he send you? Do you know not who you fight against here?’

  His enemy redoubled his efforts, matching Eidolon’s ensorcelled, stimm-frenzied strokes with ferocious counters of his own. He was graceful in his speed, fighting with a looseness of limb that was almost xenos-like in its manner.

  ‘You are but one of his champions,’ rasped Eidolon, forcing his enemy back. He could half hear the growing volume of discord around him – the Kakophoni were forcing the Stormseers to cede ground, just as the Emperor’s Children all acro
ss the docks were recovering broken terrain.

  Eidolon launched a savage back-hander across at the dragon-helm, catching the golden mask and sending the warrior staggering. He seized the initiative, hitting him again, smashing the hammer-head deep into ridged plate. The tulwar bit deep on the counter, catching him on his leading arm and severing clean through ceramite, but it didn’t stop the furious assault. Eidolon jabbed upwards, connecting with the dragon-helm’s vox-grille. The gold-and-ivory mask was sheared clean apart, ripping free from the face beneath.

  Eidolon lashed out with his free fist, crunching a balled gauntlet into his enemy’s exposed face. More punches fell, a flurry of them, to his neck, his shoulders, his throat. He was fighting in the primordial way now, hands clenched, his raw strength unleashed. They grappled like beasts, and the dragon-helm slipped at last, his boots dragged across the bloody decking.

  Eidolon leapt atop him like a leonine atop its prey, thrusting his masked face against the ruin of his enemy’s.

  ‘Bested, Chogorian,’ Eidolon whispered. ‘A wiser Legion would have given up long ago.’

  For the first time, his enemy seemed to be trying to speak. Through his broken faceplate, the jagged scar running down his cheek was just visible.

  Eidolon lowered his face further. ‘What is it?’

  The words were lost – a hoarse whisper. Eidolon, losing patience, pressed his fingers against the naked throat, and prepared to squeeze.

  ‘Know that the Gate’s path is destroyed,’ Eidolon told him, speaking as softly as his augmetics allowed, watching thick blood pool over his purple-glazed gauntlet. ‘Even if you had prevailed here, it would have been for naught. You cannot escape to Terra. All ways are watched, all ways are guarded.’

  Still, his enemy tried to speak. Eidolon squeezed harder, choking the life out of him.

  ‘You have failed here. Know this. You have failed.’

  And then, despite everything, the warrior spoke, forcing the words out through his broken jaw.

  ‘It kept–’ he rasped.

  Intrigued, Eidolon relaxed the compression.

  ‘It kept–’

  Booms rang out, distant echoes of more destruction. The docks were being ripped apart, berth by berth.

  ‘Say it!’ hissed Eidolon, staying the killing strike for just a moment longer.

  The White Scars warrior managed to focus on him – clear brown eyes amid the ruins of a tight-skinned face, still unafraid, still with that infuriating serenity.

  ‘It kept you… away from… Herevail.’

  At that, Eidolon stood bolt upright, releasing his grip. He felt suddenly unsteady, as if the roar and echo in his ears had addled his mind.

  He knew that name. Or did he? The stimms throbbed in his throat, making it hard to remember. Herevail. A warrior? Another warp conduit?

  Yes, yes. He did know it. A world. But Herevail, surely, was nothing – a planet they had conquered months ago. It was heavily garrisoned, secure and far from major warp routes. But he had been there: assets had been drawn from the sector, for the Memnos response, for the other raids, for this.

  ‘What is on Herevail?’ he asked, crouching down again, half speaking to the downed warrior, half to himself. The blurs of colour swam before his eyes. He reached down for the warrior’s neck again, intending to seize him, to haul him up. He was still alive. He could be shriven, given pain beyond mortal imagining. Even now, he could be made to talk.

  Just as Eidolon’s fingers reached for the shattered gorget, though, a shock wave caught him, hurling him away and driving him bodily across the burning docks. His boots ground deep into the churned-up deck-plates as he righted himself, and his thunder hammer’s head kindled back into spark-laced life. He whirled back around, scanning for the source.

  Across the expanse of the smoke-clouded docks, the battle had tilted firmly in the III Legion’s favour – whole formations of White Scars legionaries were on the retreat, supported by heavy incoming fire from hovering gunship formations. The Inner Gates continued to blaze, but had not been taken, and more Emperor’s Children Tactical squads were on the march now, filing up out of the inner sanctums and onto the void-berth level.

  A crimson-armoured psyker – a Legion Librarian – remained before him, holding position even as his battle-brothers slowly pulled back. The Librarian stood over the body of the downed dragon-helm, his armoured outline crackling with black-edged silver, his feet planted firmly.

  ‘No,’ the newcomer said. ‘Not for you.’

  His voice was unlike the others – cultured, easy with the Gothic words, a less pronounced Chogorian inflection. For a moment, Eidolon couldn’t place it, before he finally put the armour’s livery and its owner together.

  ‘Unexpected,’ he murmured, gathering up the energy for the death-scream that would shatter the Thousand Sons legionary’s armour and burn his body into fiery skin-strips. ‘I rather thought your kind were on our side.’

  The sorcerer carried no weapon, but his gauntlets fizzed with distortion, as if they were half immersed in another world. Even amid the fog of chemical stimms, his power was plainly evident – a witch of Prospero, somehow transported from the ruins of his home world and fighting now amid bands of void barbarians.

  ‘Make no claim on him,’ the sorcerer warned, ‘or your thread ends here.’

  Eidolon found himself smiling even before he started to move again. The death-scream built up in his augmentation chambers, swelling in his chest and ready to spill into the ravaged atmospheric bubble. ‘Ends again,’ he corrected him, drawing in the initial breath.

  But the sorcerer had already moved. The gesture was hard to track, as it had been conceived before any of them had spoken, prepared out of time and now brought into the present, faster than thought. His shimmering gauntlets shot out wide, swirling with visual interference, sucking the light and form out of reality.

  Eidolon unlocked his throat, just as everything exploded. He was flung high into the air, his head slammed back hard against his inner helm. He heard fresh roaring in his ears, the thunder of racing winds, before he crashed back to the deck, thirty metres from where he had been standing.

  Groggily, he lifted his head, scrabbling to gain purchase. He had lost his thunder hammer, and he could feel blood sloshing all across his carapace. His helm display crackled with a zigzag pattern of static, making the battlefield lurch and jump.

  He caught sight of the sorcerer one more time, now alone amid a circle of nothingness. The psychic blast had flattened a whole swathe of the battlefield, scattering the Kakophoni and turning adamantium plates into a landscape of smouldering scrap. Aftershocks still pulsed out of his mind-blast, radiating from his clenched fists like heartbeats.

  Eidolon tried to open his throat, but the resultant wet waves of sheer pain almost made him gag. He looked down to see the cascades of blood across his chest, and saw just what a mess had been made of his pristine armour. Bare flesh glistened between jagged edges, pallid even by the light of the promethium fires.

  Wincing, he pulled himself to his feet, just in time to see the sorcerer teleport away with his wounded charge, no doubt pulled back to the interior of one of the huge warships still holding close position in the void above the Keystone. All across the berthing zones, White Scars formations were being lifted to safety by disciplined flights of landers, bolstered by a continual barrage from the numerous void fighters strafing the quays.

  III Legion assets were responding, redeploying units and artillery to bring as many down as they could. They had some success, and their opponents’ losses continued to be heavy, but it would not be enough to halt the withdrawal.

  ‘This is what they do,’ Eidolon muttered to himself. ‘Never a solid target – they come, they go, like birds over carrion. But for what?’

  Reports began to filter back to him as his armour systems reacted to the shock. He felt the combat
-stimms dropping quickly now that the enemy had been snatched away.

  Konenos was signalling. Von Kalda was signalling. The hunters were straining at the leash, urging their master to give them leave to pursue the savages back into the void.

  Eidolon ignored it all. He looked out over the burning docks, up to where the supermassive bulk of the Keystone rose away in perfectly constructed curves. He could imagine the thousands of mortal souls, those under his command, those sworn to end him, all locked in movement and counter-movement...

  They had all been feints. The feints at Memnos had concealed nothing but more feints over Kalium. The Khan had shown his right hand, then his left, but still the blade was hidden.

  Eidolon licked his lips, barely noticing the flavour of his hyper-rich blood.

  ‘And what, then, is on Herevail?’ he mused as the docks burned around him. ‘What can he have seen there that I did not?’

  Revuel Arvida stands defiantly against the traitors

  Six

  Veil felt like he had been running for a very long time.

  Perhaps he had always been running, first from his scarce-remembered home, then from Alatalana, then from Terra, then from whatever had emerged from the black maw of the void and turned everything to hell. Damn it, Veil was not even his own name, but he had been given it by Achelieux, and so it had stuck, and even now he had trouble remembering the old one.

  For all the practice, Veil was still no good at running.

  He was old now, and his health had been poor for a long time. They had almost rejected him from the Collegia Immaterium, and back then he had been as fit as he had ever been, conditioned in the scholam, hardened by auxilia officer training, well fed, well kept.

  But that had been many, many decades ago. His lungs were old, caked with the grime of a dozen worlds, which was eating away at his insides like the ballast-vermin of an old galleass. He felt the rims of his eyes clog up from the poisons in the air, and wondered how Achelieux and the others had coped with it. They had always been so careful about hygiene. They had to be – he understood that. He had always endeavoured to serve them, and for a long time he had believed that service to be of benefit, something to be proud of.