Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley Read online

  He was reaching for it when he felt something grab his leg. He looked down and saw that the Dragon captain had survived the fall. Both legs smashed, spine no doubt broken, he had dragged himself to Makaiel and had pulled a gladius from its sheath. Makaiel laughed.

  Volos fought unconsciousness. He rose to his knees. He was aware of combat all around him. His vision cleared, and he saw Vritras at the feet of the traitor, and the traitor was laughing. Anger gave him strength and focus, and he was on his feet. He had lost his bolter in the fall. He didn’t need it. His body was the blade of the Emperor. He charged.

  The Sword of Epiphany did not turn his staff on Vritras. Instead, he reached into a cavity in the plinth, and withdrew an object. It was about the length of his palm, and roughly tubular, though covered in short, twisted protrusions. It resembled a fossilised centipede. The Sword wore no helmet. His face was a nightmare of raw, oozing meat twisted into spirals, and beneath the surface of its flayed skin, other, worse faces moved and struggled. But his eyes were a terrible, beautiful blue, and they shone with ultimate joy and triumph as he raised one end of the object to his lips. He blew.

  There are sounds too big to be heard. This was one. Volos heard nothing. Nothing at all. As if out of awe at the enormity of what had occurred, the entire universe observed a second of silence. And through that terrible, absolute silence, Volos could feel what had happened, what had been so loud as to murder all sound. The pipes of the vault had given voice to something awful. The vault had sung. The games of echoes and threatened melody that he had heard and sensed at ground level had been but the hint of what the structure had been designed to do. Worse yet than the immense, silent song was its effect. Volos sensed a fundamental shift. Something in the materium altered. The Sword’s simple act had consequences that touched the core of being. For the moment of the silence, Volos could do nothing. Nor could anyone else. All combat around him ceased.

  The moment passed. Space Marines struggled to the death once more. Volos was again running towards his felled captain and the traitor.

  Vritras struck with his gladius. Even in his critical state, the blow might have injured the Sword, but he was slowed by his wounds. The Chaos Space Marine stepped aside from the thrust, and raised his staff. His eyes were shining with such enormous joy that he barely seemed to be paying attention to his adversary. Still, when he brought the staff down, he did so with the power of centuries upon centuries of honed skill. The writhing sickle end flashed red as it stabbed deep into Vritras’s head.

  There was nothing but rage for Volos then. The world was a wash of black-streaked scarlet, with his prey illuminated in lightning silver. He was upon the sorcerer as he lifted his staff. It flashed again, and something hit Volos’s chest hard enough to fracture ceramite, but it didn’t stop him. He crashed into the Sword, who fell against the plinth. The sorcerer raised his hand and a vortex of strobing, cancerous light engulfed Volos. It reached through his eyes, into his skull. It spoke to his body and demanded that it change. It shouted the promise and freedom of formlessness, the emancipation from shape. It demanded he let go. Pain lacerated his frame as his bones sought dissolution. He blocked their escape. He held on to his self through sheer will, and rejected the light with the force of his rage. He pulled back his arm, and the movement took an age, but it was his movement and his arm. He expelled the light from his body, pushed it back and back until it was an envelope surrounding him. He was whole. His consciousness and will focused to the jagged adamantine bone that burst from his wrists, and he was the Emperor’s blade.

  He thrust his arm forward, and time was his again, and his action had the speed of war. He drove the blade through the sorcerer’s mouth and out the back of his head. Teeth rattled against the plinth. The sorcerer slumped, suspended on the blade. Volos pulled the bone back inside, and the body collapsed.

  Panting, Volos turned from the dead traitor and faced the aftermath. The other Swords were dead. The Dragon Claws were still standing, their body language as haggard as he felt. The gunfire from the other levels had ceased. The other teams were arriving, and with them came more despair. Brother Volturious of the Terminators carried the decapitated body of Standard-Bearer Kommodor, who had been leading the other half of Squad Nychus. Volos tore his eyes from that further loss to see Melus supporting Setheno. Qanel and Graal from Pythios worked to free Toharan. No one said anything.

  They had won. The Black Dragons had exterminated the Swords of Epiphany on Flebis. Volos stared at the motionless Apothecary, Chaplain, and Librarian. He made himself look again at the corpse of the standard-bearer. Then at Vritras. There was bile in the back of his throat as he foresaw the dark times looming for his Chapter. And that was the darkness he knew about.

  What he didn’t know was what the sorcerer had done to the materium.

  Victory had never tasted more like defeat.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE GEMINI MOON

  Peregrine Delacquo was working the orchards. Night farming wasn’t his favourite thing. Never had been, never would be. It was hard to see what he was doing, and he was constantly tripping over roots and being raked across the face by branches. It was a stupid thing to do, or would be if it weren’t so necessary. The growing season never stopped on Abolessus Gemini Primus. Nor on Secundus. He stopped harvesting the caldena fruit for a moment and stared across the night sky at the neighbour and rival. That was when it happened.

  Gemini Secundus took up half the firmament. To look at it was to be looking at his own planet in a mirror, and it had always been the dominant of the sky, its reflected light strong enough to make the night farming possible, if not easy. It washed out the stars, and the distant reminders that there was an Imperium beyond the Abolessus system were visible only for the brief darkness between the setting of Secundus and sunrise. But tonight, as Delacquo looked up, another moon appeared. It did not rise. It was suddenly there, at the zenith. It was an eye that opened in the heavens. It was a sudden, incarnadine judgement.

  Something stirred beneath Delacquo’s feet. The movement was slight, but it was planet-wide. It felt like Gemini Primus was vibrating with anticipation. But that wasn’t what made Delacquo scream. What made him howl, what made every living human, awake or asleep, on the Abolessus Twins cry out, what fused a billion souls into an abyssal choir, was the music. It was a single note. Its pitch and tone did not change. There was no melody. It was brief.

  But it was enormous.

  It was the sound of a moon whistling.

  Volos took the object from the dead hand of the sorcerer. When he lifted it, he felt a tug towards the plinth. He looked closely, and saw that each hook-like protuberance along the shaft was connected to a flexible, tiny, almost-invisible tube running back to the stone. Volos brought his blade down and severed the connections.

  When the Dragons finally emerged from the vault, they had lost a month.

  He had sent the message. He had done that much. He had had an anonymous infantry career, and then led an even more anonymous life in the bureaucracy, but Bisset could say, if he had to sum up his existence, that he had warned the Imperium of a Chaos insurgency on Aighe Mortis. So that was something.

  He stayed mobile. He had no firm goal in mind, but he had, if nothing else, a notion: get away from the rebel-controlled territory, if he could. Find a zone still under Imperial control. If he could. The curse of Aighe Mortis was how independent it was. The shallowness of the ties between Imperial administration and the local powers meant that he couldn’t trust the loyalty of the government itself. But he had nothing else to try.

  Bisset had travelled five hundred kilometres from the site of the Munitorum palace. He had skirted frontlines, ducked street fighting, and reached what seemed like calmer territory. He wasn’t sure if that was because order was holding or if what passed for a regime on Aighe Mortis had already fallen. It was impossible to tell. Centuries of incessant gang warfare meant that signs of fresh damage on the rotting hive towers was meaningless. Still, he fo
llowed duty and idiot hope.

  The streets were quiet, which worried him. He pushed on, until he hit one of the few clear spaces still present on Aighe Mortis. The Grand Square, kilometres wide, lay before the Palace of Saint Boethius. The building was one of the few on the planet that truly was palatial. Broad enough to seem squat in its dimensions, it still loomed higher than any of the towers within sight of its domed roof. It had been the seat of Aighe Mortis’s ruling mercantile families. It was now, so Bisset hoped, still the planet’s administrative centre, the headquarters for the planet’s kleptocratic council.

  He started across the square, acutely aware of exposure, but there was no way to reach the main doors without being in the open. He watched the windows of the surrounding buildings, but saw no one. The emptiness unnerved him. There was never any calm on Aighe Mortis. The quiet was alien and wrong. Midway across, he noticed that the doors to the palace were ajar. He stopped. He knew, with complete certainty, that he was approaching an abandoned building, and now the only thing worse than discovering that it was empty would be to find that it was not.

  The council had fallen.

  Bisset turned away from the palace. He walked briskly, not wanting the building at his back for longer than necessary. He listened to the silence, searching for life. He found better. In the distance, to the north, he could just make out the crump of artillery. So there was still fighting. Combat was suddenly as good a sanctuary as any. He headed north.

  In the principal chapel of the Immolation Maw , the ceremony of investiture of rank took place. On this occasion, there was no sense of elevation. All the notes sounded were wrong ones. The rite had the appearance of propriety. Volos and his brothers lined both sides of the chapel. Through the doorway shaped into a dragon’s skull, Toharan entered. He walked the transept towards the altar, past tapestries of fiery glory. Behind the altar was an immense viewport in the form of the Black Dragons livery. The rearing dragon head snarled over the vista of the galaxy, the infinite expanse subject to the beast’s strength.

  That was the symbolism. Today, all Volos saw was indifferent space.

  There was no Chaplain to conduct the ritual. Massorus was in a sus-an membrane coma. So was Rothnove. And Urlock. Chaplain, Librarian and Apothecary down. Captain and standard-bearer dead. Second Company had been decapitated. So now they were making do.

  Brother Symael led the service. Volos didn’t know why Toharan had asked that he do so. Volos didn’t think of Symael as especially learned or theologically inclined, but he read the correct liturgy well enough. They all knew the call and response, and so the ritual was recognisable, and at the end, after bending knee and taking their oaths of loyalty and obedience, the Black Dragons had a captain again. Though they mourned the loss of Vritras, the continuity represented by the ascendancy of the first-sergeant should have been a comfort. Volos had been pleased to see Toharan become Vritras’s right hand. He had been pleased to think he would one day call his friend captain.

  But he wasn’t pleased, and there was no comfort.

  The presence of Werner Lettinger was part of the problem. The rite was sacred to the Dragons. It was not for spectators. But there the inquisitor was. It was possible, Volos supposed, that he had insisted, as part of his investigative purview, on attending the ceremony. But he had walked in behind Toharan before taking up a position to the left of the entrance. That arrival smacked of invitation, which puzzled Volos, given Toharan’s earlier extreme hostility towards the man. It also worried him. He was now less inclined to dismiss the danger Lettinger represented. He particularly didn’t like how the inquisitor had had the run of the ship for over a month while almost half the company had been in combat on Flebis.

  Toharan left the chapel first, the new captain requesting his sergeants’ presence in the strategium in half an hour. Volos and Nithigg were the last to go. Setheno and Tennesyn were waiting for them in the corridor outside. ‘Canoness,’ Volos said. ‘You are recovering well from your wounds?’

  ‘I am, thank you.’

  ‘My condolences, lord, for your losses,’ Tennesyn said.

  Volos nodded his thanks.

  Tennesyn went on, ‘The canoness and I have found a few items of interest in the librarium.’

  ‘Oh?’ Volos asked. ‘Do you know what it was that the Swords were trying to do?’

  ‘No,’ said Setheno. ‘Not exactly. We came across some fragments that are suggestive, and they are not reassuring.’

  ‘We have a few scrolls that are partial works by the ancient Terran remembrancer Ehmar Djaims,’ Tennesyn explained. ‘He appears to mention Flebis. Or rather, the name appears in a High Gothic phrase.’

  ‘Flabis, Flebis ,’ Setheno quoted. ‘You will blow, you will weep . It appears in conjunction with another phrase, which translates as “What is this that is coming?”’

  Volos took that in. Setheno was right. He wasn’t reassured. ‘And does Brother Ydraig know what that device is?’ Volos had given the tube to the Techmarine upon returning to the Maw .

  ‘A whistle of some kind, he thinks,’ Nithigg said.

  ‘A whistle.’ The word was so trivial. It was obscene to have lost so much over something that could be given that label. ‘Well, that’s good,’ he said, his frustration spilling into sarcasm. ‘I was worried it was going to turn out to be a horn.’ He sighed. ‘A whistle for what? To do what? Where?’ The other two didn’t answer. He asked Nithigg, ‘You’ve seen these fragments?’

  Nithigg nodded. ‘We were three in the librarium.’

  ‘And you’ve told our captain?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I thought you should know first.’

  ‘Why? He needs to know anything at all that we can discover so–’

  ‘So he can ignore it?’ Setheno interrupted. ‘I think you’ll find that Captain Toharan’s priorities lie elsewhere.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Aighe Mortis.’

  Volos shrugged, trying to come across as far more sanguine than he felt. ‘That’s perhaps as it should be. We can’t ignore our responsibilities there.’

  ‘At the expense of pursuing anything to do with Flebis?’ Setheno asked.

  ‘He wouldn’t.’ Volos turned to Nithigg for support. Nithigg looked him hard in the eye but said nothing.

  ‘You were offered the position of first-sergeant, weren’t you?’ Setheno asked. When Volos nodded, she said, ‘You were wrong to turn the honour down.’

  He kept his temper, but he was tired of outsiders judging the actions of a Dragon. ‘I was not suited to the job.’

  ‘You are lying,’ she said, and Volos was so startled by the bluntness that he couldn’t muster a suitable comeback. ‘To yourself, if not to us.’

  He counted to ten, then said, ‘Do you have a reason for telling me this, canoness?’

  She nodded. ‘You have a destiny with your Chapter. And you have a responsibility not to deny it.’

  Volos was having difficulty processing not just what he was being told, but who was telling him. The canoness had proven herself a valuable ally in combat, and the distance between her and Lettinger seemed more like a chasm all the time. Yet Volos still couldn’t shake the impression that she represented a serious danger. ‘You appear to be very concerned for our Chapter’s wellbeing,’ he said.

  ‘I serve only the Emperor, and do what must be done in that service.’ There was something terrible in her phrasing.

  ‘And you can see the future?’ Volos asked.

  ‘That is not my gift. I can see clearly. That is all, but it is enough.’

  ‘And what you can see is that we have the wrong captain.’

  ‘That’s right.’ There was no hesitation before she answered. She was emphatic.

  Volos realised that Nithigg had taken himself out of the conversation. The ancient veteran was saying nothing, but looking at Volos with a disconcerting intensity. ‘If I understand you correctly,’ Volos said to Setheno, ‘you are counselling
sedition. You would have me not only disobey my captain’s orders, but try to supplant him.’

  Setheno’s golden stare was as direct and unmoved as it always was. ‘That might be necessary, yes,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want to hear this,’ Volos said and walked away. He didn’t want to think about it, either.

  But he did think about it. He heard about it again, too.

  Lettinger said, ‘I’m troubled by some aspects of what happened on Flebis.’

  They were in the strategium. They had another five minutes before Toharan was to meet with his officers. ‘I’m troubled by everything that happened there,’ Toharan snapped.

  ‘Of course,’ Lettinger said smoothly. ‘I was thinking specifically of something you mentioned about Sergeant Volos.’

  ‘Concerning what?’

  ‘His arm-blades. You said that you had never seen them as deadly.’

  Toharan nodded. ‘They were cutting like a relic sword.’

  ‘Which they did not do before.’

  ‘No.’

  Lettinger held the moment for a few seconds. He wanted Toharan to see the implications. He wanted him to feel even a hint of the chill that was crawling down his own spine. He said, ‘So in an encounter with powers of the warp and Chaos, something changed.’

  Toharan said nothing. His eyes, grim, stared into the middle distance over Lettinger’s shoulder.

  Lettinger said, ‘Captain, both you and the sergeant have an avowed commitment to purity. Let me remind you that evil has its own perverted purity.’

  Volos saw a lot of faces being kept carefully neutral during the briefing.