‘I doubt there is a more abandoned space aboard the Vengeful Spirit,’ said Maloghurst with a grin. ‘You realise, of course, that the lodge has no more need to hide itself in shadows.’
Targost nodded. ‘I know, but old habits, you understand?’
‘Absolutely,’ agreed Maloghurst. ‘Traditions must be maintained. Even more so now.’
Maloghurst had earned the soubriquet, ‘the Twisted’, for having a mind that wove labyrinthine intrigues around the Warmaster, but the old nickname had assumed a more literal connotation in the opening shots of the war-making on Terra.
The other Terra, where the misguided fool who believed himself Emperor had stood against the Sons of Horus.
No, Targost reminded himself, back then the Legion had still been the Luna Wolves, their name not yet reflecting the honour of the warrior that led them. Maloghurst had healed, and despite the poor taste of the old nickname, he desired it kept.
They moved through the throng, and as news of Maloghurst’s arrival spread, the warriors parted before them to reveal their destination.
Atop a raised plinth marked with chalked geometric symbols stood two structural beams welded together to form an ‘X’. Chained to the cross was a legionary stripped of his armour with his head fixed in place by a heavy iron clamp across his brow.
Ger Gerradon, late of Tithonus Assault, he’d taken two Chogorian tulwars through the lungs on Dwell, and by the time the Apothecaries got to him his oxygen-starved brain was irrevocably damaged. Nothing remained of the man he had once been, just a drooling meat-form who could serve no useful purpose within the Legion.
Until now.
Sixteen hooded lodge members arranged in a circle around Gerradon held weeping captives taken in the assault on Tyjun. Highborns for the most part, some native to Dwell, some Imperial imports; men and women who’d thrown themselves on the mercy of the Sons of Horus only to find they had none to give. In any conventional war they would be bargaining chips, tools of negotiation, but here they were something altogether more valuable. They sobbed and debased themselves with begging or attempts at bargaining, while others offered their loyalty or things far more precious.
A reverent hush descended on the chamber as Maloghurst and Targost stepped onto the plinth. Maloghurst made a meal out of his step, and Targost shook his head at the equerry’s theatrics.
‘Let’s get this done,’ said Targost, holding out his hand.
Maloghurst shook his head. ‘You can’t simply rush this, lodge master,’ he said. ‘I know you are all about the fundamentals, but this is not a breach to be stormed. Ritual is everything here, Serghar, the proper order of things must be observed, the right words spoken and the offerings made at precisely the right time.’
‘Just give me the knife,’ said Targhost. ‘You speak the words and tell me when to open their throats.’
The captives wailed and their captors tightened their grips.
Maloghurst produced a long dagger from within his robes, its blade curved and worked from dark stone. Its surface was chipped and crude, like something hacked from the ground by savages, but Targost knew its edge to be sharper than any arming chamber tech could match.
‘Is that…’ he began.
‘One of the blades Erebus crafted?’ said Maloghurst. ‘No, not that one of course, but one like it.’
Targost nodded and took the blade, testing its heft and flexing his fingers on the leather-wrapped handle. It felt good in his grip, natural. Made for him.
‘I like it,’ he said and turned to Ger Gerradon.
Like him, Gerradon wasn’t a true son, his features bearing a malnourished sharpness from a Cthonian childhood that no amount of genhancing could ever restore.
‘A loyal member of the lodge and a ferocious killer,’ said Targost. ‘A man born for assault duties. It’s a blow to the Legion to have lost his sword arm.’
‘If I have the truth of it, then Ger will fight alongside his brothers with a new soul within him.’
‘What the Seventeenth Legion call a daemon?’
‘An old term, but as good a word as any,’ agreed Maloghurst. ‘Lorgar’s sons call their twin-flames the Gal Vorbak. Ours will be the Luperci, the Brothers of the Wolf.’
Gerradon’s eyes were open, but unseeing. His lips parted, as though he was trying to speak, and drool spilled onto his chest.
‘Nothing of the man we knew remains,’ said Maloghurst. ‘This will restore him.’
‘Then let’s get it done,’ snapped Targost.
Maloghurst stood before Gerradon, placing a tattooed hand on his scarred chest. Targost didn’t remember the Twisted having tattoos, but recognised their provenance. The books Erebus had shown him, the ancient texts said to have been borne to Colchis from Old Earth, had been filled with stanzas of artes rendered in the same runic script.
‘Be ready with that knife, Serghar,’ said Maloghurst.
‘Have no fear on that score,’ Targost assured him.
Maloghurst nodded and began to speak, but in no language Targost had ever heard. The more the equerry spoke, the less Targost believed it was a language in any sense that he could comprehend.
He saw Maloghurst’s mouth moving, but the motion of his lips wasn’t matching the noise in Targost’s ears; like rusted metal grating on stone, a death rattle and a tuneless singer combined.
Targost coughed a wad of mucus. He tasted blood and spat onto the deck. He blinked away a momentary dizziness and tightened his grip on the stone dagger as the bile in his stomach climbed his gullet. Targost’s eyes widened as noxious black smoke streamed from the blade. The miasma clung to its edges and Targost felt the weight of murder in the dagger’s long existence. The temperature plummeted, his every exhalation visible as a long plume of breath.
‘Now,’ said Maloghurst and the sixteen hooded warriors pulled the captives’ heads back to expose their necks.
Targost stepped towards the nearest, a young man with handsome features and wide, terrified eyes.
‘Please, I just–’
Targost didn’t let him finish and plunged the smoke-edged dagger deep into his throat. Blood fountained from the grotesque wound. The hooded warrior pushed the dying man forward, and Targost moved on, opening one throat after another with no heed of his victims’ horror or last words.
As the last one died, their blood lapped around Targost’s boots and spilled over the edge of the plinth. The chalked symbols drank deeply, and Targost felt a tremor in his hand.
‘Mal…’ he said as his arm lifted the blade to his own throat.
Maloghurst didn’t respond, his lips still twisting in opposition to the unsounds he was making. Targost twisted his head, but the world around him was a frozen tableau.
‘Maloghurst!’ repeated Targost.
‘He can’t help you,’ said Ger Gerradon.
Targost looked into a face alight with malice and perverse enjoyment of suffering. No longer slack with brain death, Gerradon’s features were pulled in a rictus grin. His eyes were milky white and empty, like the unpainted eyes of a doll. Whatever their ritual had drawn from the warp was not Ger Gerradon, but something incalculably old, raw-birthed and bloody.
‘Sixteen? That’s the best you could do?’ it said. ‘Sixteen measly souls?’
‘It’s a sacred number,’ hissed Targost, fighting to keep the blade from reaching his neck. Despite the freezing temperatures, sweat ran in runnels down his face.
‘To who?’
‘To us, the Legion…’ grunted Targost. ‘We’re the Sixteenth Legion, the twin Octed.’
‘Ah, I see,’ said the warp-thing. ‘Sacred to you, but meaningless to the neverborn. After everything Erebus taught you people, you still manage to get it wrong.’
Anger touched Targost, and the blade’s inexorable path to the pulsing artery in his neck slowed.
‘Wrong? We summoned you, didn’t we?’
The thing wearing Gerradon’s flesh laughed. ‘You didn’t summon me, I came back of my own accor
d. I have so much to teach you.’
‘Came back?’ said Targost. ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m hurt you don’t recognise me, Serghar.’
The smoking edges of the gore-encrusted blade touched Targost’s neck. Skin parted before its razor tip. Blood pumped as he pushed it deeper into his neck.
‘Who am I?’ rasped the daemon. ‘I’m Tormaggedon.’
Rassuah flew the pathfinders from Old Himalazia to Ultima Thule, the outermost structure still considered to be in Terran orbit. Discounting the as yet unfinished Ardent Reef, Ultima Thule was the most recent addition to the inhabited plates that made stately circuits around humanity’s birth rock; smaller than the supercontinent of Lemurya, less productive than the industrial powerhouse of Rodinia and without the grandiose architecture of Antillia, Vaalbara or Kanyakumari.
It had been constructed sixty-two years previously, by workers since assigned to distant sectors of the Imperium. Eclipsed in scale and power by its grander brethren, its entry in the Terran orbital registry was little more than a footnote.
Over the course of its life, Ultima Thule had been quietly forgotten by the vast majority of Terra’s inhabitants. And where most orbital architects would lament such a fate for their creation, anonymity had always been the goal of Ultima Thule.
Its structure comprised of a pair of matte-black cylinders, five hundred metres in length and two hundred wide, connected by a central orb-hub. No armoured windows pierced its structure and no collision avoidance lights strobed to warn of its presence. Any space-farer lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Ultima Thule, could be forgiven for mistaking it for dead orbital junk.
That appearance was deliberately misleading, for Ultima Thule was one of the most sophisticated structures orbiting Terra, its endless suites of auspex quietly monitoring spatial traffic throughout the system.
A docking bay opened on its dark side, remaining visible only as long as it took to retrieve the void-capable Valkyrie. Auspex-hardened blast doors shut behind the assault carrier, and Ultima Thule continued its procession around the planet below as though it had never existed.
Anonymous and forgotten.
Silent and invisible.
Just as Malcador had decreed when he ordered it built.
The Repository was cool, the air kept at a constant relative humidity and temperature. The more fragile artefacts stored here were hermetically sealed in stasis fields, and Malcador tasted the tang of the recessed power generators.
Crystal-fronted cabinets lit up at his passing, but he spared their contents little notice. A book that had once plunged the world into war, sketches by the Polymath of Firenza the Emperor had – wisely, it turned out – deemed too dangerous for Perturabo to see, the half-formed sculpture of beauty incarnate.
Malcador had lied when he told young Khalid Hassan that these rough formed walls were all that remained of the Sigillite Fortress, but some truths were uncomfortable enough without burdening others with them.
The chamber was smaller than those that surrounded it, and it took Malcador a moment only to reach the stele of Gyptia. It sat on a reinforced timber cradle, the black gloss of its original construction undimmed by the passage of millennia. Lives had been lost to retrieve this fragment of humanity’s soul, as was the case with many of the objects stored here.
Malcador closed his eyes and placed his fingertips upon the cold surface of the stone. Granodiorite, an igneous rock similar to granite. Hard wearing, but not indestructible.
Given what it had unlocked in ages past, there was a pleasing symmetry to what it now allowed him to do. Malcador’s breathing slowed and the already cooled air chilled yet further.
‘My lord,’ he said.
Silence was Malcador’s only answer, and he feared the holocaust raging beneath the palace was too fierce, too all-consuming for a reply. Beneath wasn’t strictly speaking correct, but it was the only preposition that seemed to fit.
Malcador.
The Emperor’s voice echoed within his mind, stentorian and dominant, yet familiar and fraternal. Malcador felt its power, even over so immeasurable a distance, but also the effort it was taking to forge the link.
‘How goes the fight?’
We bleed out every day, while the daemons grow ever stronger. I do not have much time, my friend. War calls.
‘Leman Russ is on Terra,’ said Malcador.
I know. Even here, I can feel the Wolf King’s presence.
‘He brings word of the Lion. Twenty thousand Dark Angels are reportedly bound for Ultramar.’
Why does he not make haste for Terra?
Sweat ran down Malcador’s back at the strain of maintaining this connection. ‘There are… unsettling rumours of what is happening in Guilliman’s domain.’
I cannot see the Five Hundred Worlds. Why is that?
‘We call it the Ruinstorm. Nemo and I believe the slaughter on Calth to have been part of an orchestrated chain of events that precipitated the birth of a catastrophic and impenetrable warp storm.’
And what do you believe Roboute is doing?
‘It’s Guilliman, what do think he’s doing? He’s building an empire.’
And the Lion goes to stop him?
‘So the Wolf King says, my lord. It seems the warriors of the Lion stand with us after all.’
You doubted them? The First? Even after all they accomplished in the time before the others took up their swords?
‘I did,’ admitted Malcador. ‘After Rogal’s secret emissaries to their home world returned empty-handed, we feared the worst. But Caliban’s angels came to the Wolves’ aid when Alpharius threatened to destroy them.’
Alpharius… my son, what chance did you give my dream? Ah, even when war presses in from all sides, my sons still seek to press their advantage. They are like the feudal lords of old, scenting opportunity for their own advancement in the fires of adversity.
The regret pained Malcador’s thoughts.
‘Russ still plans to fight Horus eye to eye,’ said Malcador. ‘He sends my Knights to guide his blade and no words of mine can sway him from his course.’
You think he should not fight Horus?
‘Russ is your executioner,’ said Malcador tactfully. ‘But his axe falls a little too readily these days. Magnus felt it, now Horus will feel it.’
Two rebel angels. His axe falls on those deserving its smile.
‘And what happens when Russ takes it upon himself to decide who is loyal and who deserves execution?’
Russ is true-hearted, one of the few I know will never fall.
‘You suspect others may prove false?’
To my eternal regret, I do.
‘Who?’
Another long pause made Malcador fear his question would remain unanswered, but at last the Emperor replied.
The Khan makes a virtue of being unknowable, of being the mystery that none can answer. Some among his Legion have already embraced treachery, and others may yet.
‘What would you have me do, my lord?’
Keep watching him, Malcador. Watch the Khan more closely than any other.
‘I have never wanted to fly anything so much in all my life,’ said Rassuah.
Looking at the sleek, wedge-shaped craft with its jutting, aerodyne prow, Loken couldn’t help but agree with her.
‘I’m told it’s called Tarnhelm,’ he said.
‘Call it what you want, but if I’m not flying it within the hour, there’s going to be blood spilled,’ said Rassuah.
Loken grinned at her eagerness. He disliked aircraft on principle, but even he recognised something beautiful in the Tarnhelm.
Perhaps because it looked so utterly unlike any other aircraft in the Legiones Astartes inventory. The warcraft of the Legions were designed to be brutal, in appearance as well as effect. Their form followed function, which was to kill as quickly and efficiently as possible. Tarnhelm’s sleek lines spoke of an altogether different purpose.
Its basic structure was constructed around
a central crew section with bulbous drive pods at the rear that tapered towards the prow and formed the ship’s delta-winged shape. Without any pennants or beacons, there was nothing to give any clue to its identity or affiliation.
‘What is it?’ asked Varren. ‘It’s not an attack ship or a guncutter; too few armaments. And there’s not enough armour for it to be a troop transport. One good hit is going to gut it. I don’t understand what it is.’
‘This is a craft designed to pass through the stars unseen,’ said Rama Karayan, and all eyes turned to look at him, as it was the most any of them had heard him say.
‘Why in the world would you want to do that?’ asked Callion Zaven, his expression as confused as Varren’s. ‘The point of the Legions is to be seen.’
‘Not always,’ said Altan Nohai. ‘What the Khan called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease before the enemy even knows he is there.’
Zaven looked unconvinced. ‘Shock and awe becomes a lot harder when no one sees it coming.’
‘It’s got teeth, mind,’ said Ares Voitek, his servo-arms unlimbering to point out the barely visible seams of recessed weapon nacelles and missile pods. ‘But as Macer says, it’s not an attack ship.’
‘It’s a draugrjúka,’ said Bror Tyrfingr.
Seeing the looks of confusion among his fellow pathfinders, Bror shook his head and said, ‘Don’t you people understand Juvik?’
‘Juvik?’ asked Rubio.
‘Fenrisian hearth-cant,’ said Tubal Cayne. ‘It’s a stripped-down, simplified language. No subtlety to it – punchy and declarative, just like the warriors that speak it.’
‘Have a care, Tubal,’ warned Bror, squaring his shoulders. ‘A man could take offence at that.’
That seemed to confuse Cayne. ‘I don’t see how. Nothing I said was untrue. I’ve met enough Space Wolves to know that.’
Loken expected anger, but Bror laughed. ‘Space Wolves? Ha, I forgot that was your idiot name for the Rout. If I didn’t think you were being completely serious I’d rip your arms off. Stay by my side and I’ll show you just how subtle a Space Wolf can be.’