No reply was forthcoming, and Loken considered his options.
As he saw it, he had two; continue blundering around the mist-shrouded mountaintop while being made to look a fool, or leave empty-handed.
He was being tested, but tests only worked if both participants worked towards a common goal. Loken had already played one game without knowing the rules. The Wolf King had beaten him to learn something of his character, but this felt like someone taking pleasure in belittling him.
If Loken couldn’t play by someone else’s rules, he’d play by his own. He turned towards the Valkyrie. The aircraft was invisible in the mists, but its transponder signal was a softly glowing sigil on his visor. Abandoning any pretence of searching the mountaintop, he marched brazenly back to the assault carrier.
‘Malcador and his agents were thorough in their recruitment of Knights Errant,’ said Loken. ‘There’s no shortage of warriors I can assemble in time to make our mission window.’
Loken heard stealthy footsteps in the shale, but resisted the obvious bait. The Valkyrie emerged from the fog and Loken switched the vox-link to Rassuah’s channel.
‘Spool up the engines,’ he said. ‘We’re leaving.’
‘You found him?’
‘No, but put that hunter’s eye upon me.’
‘Understood.’
The footsteps sounded again, right behind him.
Loken whipped around, drawing his weapon and aiming it in one fluidly economical motion.
‘Don’t move,’ he said, but there was no one there.
Before Loken could react, a pistol pressed against the back of his helmet. A hammer pulled back with a sharp snap of oiled metal.
‘I expected more from you,’ said the voice behind the gun.
‘No you didn’t,’ said Loken, lowering his own pistol.
‘I expected you to try a little longer before giving up.’
‘Would I ever have found you?’
‘No.’
‘So what would be the point?’ said Loken. ‘I don’t fight battles I can’t win.’
‘Sometimes you don’t get to choose the battles you fight.’
‘But you can choose how you fight them,’ said Loken. ‘How’s that hunter’s eye, Rassuah?’
‘I have him,’ said Rassuah. ‘Say the word and I can put a turbo-penetrator through his leg. Or his head. It’s your choice.’
Loken slowly turned to face the man he had come to find. Armoured in pitted and scarred gunmetal armour without insignia, he went without helm and his bearded face was matted with dust. A draconic glyph tattoo coiled around his right eye, the mark of the Blackbloods, one of Cthonia’s most vicious murder-gangs.
Loken saw rugged bone structure that mirrored his own.
‘Severian,’ said Loken, spreading his hands. ‘I found you.’
‘By giving up,’ said Severian. ‘By changing the rules of the hunt.’
‘You of all people ought to know that’s how a Luna Wolf fights,’ said Loken. ‘Understand your foe and do whatever is necessary to bring him down.’
The warrior grinned, exposing ash-stained teeth. ‘You think your assassin friend can hit me? She won’t.’
‘If not her, then me,’ said Loken, bringing his pistol up.
Severian shook his head and flipped something towards Loken, something that glittered silver and metallic.
‘Here,’ said Severian. ‘You’ll need these.’
Loken instinctively reached up as Severian stepped away from him. ‘And I had such high hopes for you, Garviel Loken.’
The mist closed around him like a cloak.
Loken didn’t pursue. What would be the point?
He opened his palm to see what Severian had thrown him.
Two gleaming silver discs. At first Loken thought they were lodge medals, but when he turned them over and saw they were blank and mirror-reflective, he understood what they were.
Cthonian mirror-coins.
Tokens to be left on the eyes of the dead.
FIVE
The painted angel
Bloodsworn
Pathfinders
The handhold was a good one, the stone of the ruined citadel still ruggedly impermeable despite being built on a storm-lashed coastline. It reminded Vitus Salicar of the hard rock of the Qarda Massif on Baal Secundus, the hostile range of rad-peaks called home by the tribe that had birthed him.
Granite-hard and bleached of colour after thousands of years’ exposure, the stone of the shattered tower offered plentiful handholds, but few were wider than the breadth of a finger. Salicar had climbed the tower many times, but this was his first attempt at the western facade. Erosion had worn the ocean-facing rock smooth, and truculent winds sought to tear him from his perch.
Clad only in a pair of khaki trews, Salicar’s transhuman physique was sculpted and pale, like one of the Adoni of the Grekan temples given life and motion. His muscled back was tattooed with a winged blood drop that writhed with every motion of his ascent. Salicar’s arms were marked with similar devices at his deltoids and biceps, with his forearms inked with images of dripping chalices and weeping-blood skulls. His hair was blond, long and pulled in a tight scalp lock, his features artistically handsome in their symmetry.
The sea was six hundred metres below him, a surging cauldron of thundering waves breaking against the base of the cliff. The advance of the tide filled deep depressions with foaming white water before its withdrawal revealed blades of rock beneath the surface. To fall would be to die, even for a transhuman engineered to be the perfect warrior by the gene-smiths of the Blood Angels.
And would that not be justice?
Salicar pushed away the troublesome thought and craned his neck back to scan the onward route of his ascent. A lightning strike had split the tower four decades ago, shearing it almost exactly in two. That it still stood was testament to the craft of its ancient builders. The path directly above him was impossible, the stone loose and kept in place only by a miracle of confluent compressional forces. Any ascent by that route would dislodge the entire upper reaches.
His current position at the edge of an arched window opening was tenuous as it was, but Vitus Salicar was not a warrior who refused any challenge once offered. Drazen had risked censure by calling him mad to make an attempt on the western facade, and Vastern told him in no uncertain terms that the Sanguinary Priests would not be held responsible for the loss of his gene-legacy.
So, up wasn’t an option, but across…
The opening was perhaps six metres wide, too far to jump sideways, but at the apex of the window was an overhanging corbel that might once have supported a long-vanished idol of the Stormlord.
Two metres above, and three to the side.
Difficult, but not impossible.
Salicar braced his legs, bending them as much as he was able, and leapt upwards like an enraged fire scorpion. The stone at his feet cracked with the sudden pressure. It fell from the wall as he jumped, and for a heart-stopping moment, Salicar hung in the air as though weightless.
Images of the shattered bones and pulverised organs Vastern had been all too graphic in describing flashed before his eyes. His arms windmilled for the corbel. One outflung hand scraped the edge of the stone and his fingers clamped down hard. He swung like a pendulum, grunting as the tendons of his arm tore.
Pain was good. It told him he wasn’t falling.
He closed his eyes and directed the pain away from his arm, letting it disperse through his body by repeating the mantra of flesh to spirit.
‘Pain is an illusion of the senses,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Despair an illusion of the mind. I do not despair, so I shall feel no pain.’
Athekhan had taught him that on Fraxenhold. The Prosperine mental discipline was simple, but effective, and soon worked its magic. The pain faded and Salicar opened his eyes, reaching up with his other hand to curl his fingers around the slender lip of the corbel.
He pulled himself up smoothly, as though performing calisthenics i
n the gymnasia. He swung his legs onto the narrow corbel and stood upright at the centre of the window’s arch. A projecting lip of a pediment above him offered another way onwards, but that route presented no significant challenge. He dismissed it and turned his attention to a portion of stonework further over that had fallen from higher on the tower.
Balanced precariously in a wedge-shaped gap in the wall, it sat on a rocky fulcrum like perfectly balanced scales. Salicar adjudged it wedged tightly enough to support his weight. Without taking the time to second guess himself, he vaulted from his narrow perch and landed on the block.
Right away, he knew he had been mistaken to believe it would support his mass. Though weighing several tonnes, it immediately tipped from position and slid from the wall. Salicar sprang away from the block and rammed his hands into a thin split in the rock above him. Skin tore and blood welled from his hands as he clenched his fists to bear his weight.
The block fell from the wall in a cascade of debris, carrying a wealth of shattered stonework with it. It tumbled end over end before slamming down with a booming explosion of splintered stone and a fifty metre geyser of seawater.
On the black stone quayside at the foot of the tower, heads craned upwards, little more than tiny pink ovals. The colours of their plate allowed Salicar to pick out his sub-commanders; Drazen in vermillion and gold, Vastern in white, Agana in black. The rest of his warriors were plated in Legion crimson, their swords glittering silver in the dying sunlight.
He turned from them and searched for another way onwards, but there was only the lip of the pediment above him. And as much as he desired challenge from this climb, there was no other way that wasn’t simply suicide.
Salicar eased one bloodied hand from the rock and grabbed hold of the projecting lip. With his weight borne, he withdrew his other hand and pulled himself up.
From here, handholds were plentiful, and he reached the uppermost course of mighty blocks without undue effort. He stood atop the ruined tower and drew himself up to his full height, a beautiful, painted man of idealised form.
He lifted his hands above his head, looking down at the crashing waves, transient pools and lethal rocks. Death hung in the balance of a heartbeat’s miscalculation.
And I might welcome it.
Arms swung down to his side, Salicar leapt from the tower.
The Citadel of the Stormlord had been raised at the northernmost peninsula of the island of Damesek; a forsaken spit of lightning-struck peaks carved from volcanic black stone. The island was all but uninhabited and linked to the mainland only by a fulgurite causeway from the pilgrim city of Avadon.
The citadel and the quay at its base were the only man-made structures on Damesek. The quay remained mostly intact, but the citadel was a ruined holdfast constructed in an earlier epoch around a solitary basalt peak. The pale stone of its construction was not native to the region, and the monumental effort it must have taken the pre-technological inhabitants of Molech to bring it here was beyond belief.
One of the planet’s oldest legends told of a mythical figure known as the Stormlord. Where he walked, thunder followed, and his Fulgurine Path had once been a pilgrim route across the landscape. The last portion of that route led to this peak, where the Stormlord had ascended on a bolt of lightning to the celestial ark that brought him to Molech.
Before the dismantling of the Blood Angels Librarius, Drazen had studied a great many such legends in search of the truth behind them, and this was a myth dismissed as allegory by most of Molech’s people.
Most, but not all.
A determined cadre of mendicants whose number dwindled with every passing generation still dwelled in the lower portions of the citadel, subsisting on the alms and offerings left by curious folk who came to gawp at the ruins.
Drazen Acorah first laid eyes on the citadel almost two years ago, and had trained here many times with Captain Salicar and the Bloodsworn. He found much to admire in the malnourished men and women who subsisted in the ruins of this barren coastline.
Like the Bloodsworn, they cleaved to a duty that appeared to serve little purpose, but would never dream of abandoning. They no longer called themselves priests – such a term was dangerous in this age of reason – but the word was appropriate.
There was something tangible in the air here. Not so long ago, Acorah might have openly called it ethereal. But like the azure of the Librarius he had once proudly worn, words like that had been cast aside. The citadel’s stones whispered of something incredible, something he had never felt before, and only with difficulty did he resist stretching out his senses to listen to their secrets.
Eighty-three chosen warriors of the IX Legion fought sparring bouts under the uncompromising gaze of Agana Serkan, their black-armoured Warden. These warriors were among the Legion’s best, hand-picked by Sanguinius to stand as his proxies. Commanded by the Emperor Himself, the Blood Angels had sent a Bloodsworn warrior band to Molech for over a century. As great an honour as it was to serve a direct command of the Master of Mankind, its members were distraught at being denied the chance to fight alongside their primarch against the hated nephilim in the Signus Cluster.
Acorah shared their dismay, but no force in the universe would compel him to break his vow of duty. Salicar had accepted a crimson grail filled with the mingled vitae of the previous Bloodsworn band of Captain Akeldama. Salicar and each of his warriors had drunk from the grail, releasing their predecessors from their oath before refilling it with their own blood to swear another.
He put aside memories of his arrival on Molech and walked to the edge of the quayside. Ocean-going vessels had once braved treacherous seas to bring pilgrims to this place, but many centuries had passed since any vessel had taken moorings here.
The mendicant priests that constantly fussed around them parted to make way for him. Fully armoured in his blood-red battleplate, even the tallest of them barely reached to the base of Acorah’s shoulder guard. They were in awe of him, but their fear kept them distant and Acorah was glad.
Their fear left a bilious taste in his mouth.
They didn’t like that Salicar regularly climbed the tallest tower, but that didn’t stop the captain. They couldn’t voice their objections in terms of blasphemy or desecration and instead cited the instability of its remains.
Acorah heard one of the mendicants gasp in terror and shielded his eyes as he turned his gaze to the top of the tower.
He already knew what he would see.
Vitus Salicar arced outwards from the summit of the tower, his outstretched arms haloed by the sunset like the pinions of a reborn phoenix.
Acorah blinked as Salicar’s body was flickeringly overlaid with vivid imagery: a red gold angel plummeting in fire; a comely youth borne aloft on disintegrating wings; a reckless son careening across the sky on a sun-chariot.
He tasted ash and soured meat, and bit back the urge to let his psyker power move through him as it once had so freely. He spat bile as Salicar plunged into a rocky basin of deep water the surge tide had filled only a fraction of a second before.
The water swept back, revealing his captain kneeling on the black rock between a pair of spear-like stalagmites. Salicar’s head was down, and when he stood upright, Acorah saw the same fatalistic expression he had worn since their return from the Preceptory Line.
Before the waters could rush in and fill the pool again, Salicar jogged over to the quayside and sprang upwards. Acorah knelt and grabbed his captain’s hand, pulling him up. Denied its bounty, the water boomed angrily against the stonework, showering them both with cold spume.
‘Satisfied now?’ he asked, as Salicar spat a mouthful of seawater.
Salicar nodded. ‘Until the next time.’
‘A less understanding man might say you had a death wish.’
‘I do not wish death,’ said Salicar.
Acorah looked back up the length of the tower.
‘Then why do you insist on taking such needless risks?’
‘For the challenge, Drazen,’ said Salicar, moving off towards the fighting men of the Bloodsworn. ‘If I’m not challenged, I grow stale. We all do. That’s why I come here.’
‘And that’s the only reason?’
‘No,’ said Salicar, but did not elaborate.
Acorah felt the tips of his fingers tingle with the desire to wield powers now decreed unnatural. How easy it would be to divine the captain’s true motivations, but another oath bound him against such a course.
They came to where the Legion thralls had placed Salicar’s battle armour, a master-worked suit of crimson plate, golden wings and black trim. His swords hung from a belt of tan leather and his gold-chased pistol was mag-locked in a thigh holster. His helm was a jade funerary mask, as empty of expression as an automaton’s.
‘The mendicants would rather you didn’t climb the tower,’ he said, as Salicar picked up a towel and began to dry himself.
‘They’re afraid I’ll hurt myself?’
‘I think it’s more the tower they’re concerned with.’
Salicar shook his head. ‘It’ll outlast us all.’
‘Not if you keep knocking bits of it loose,’ pointed out Acorah.
‘You fuss around me like a fawning thrall,’ said Salicar.
‘Someone has to,’ said Acorah, as Salicar looped a pair of glittering ident-tags around his neck. Even without his transhuman senses, it was impossible to miss the blood flecks on them.
‘Is it wise to keep those?’ he asked.
Salicar was instantly hostile.
‘Not wise, but necessary. Their blood is on our hands.’
‘We don’t know what happened that day,’ said Acorah, pushing against the nightmarish memory of awakening from a fugue state to find himself surrounded by corpses. ‘None of us do, but if there is guilt, it is shared by us all equally.’
‘I am captain of the Bloodsworn,’ said Salicar. ‘If the burden of guilt is not mine to bear, then whose?’
Yasu Nagasena’s mountainside villa had been extended several times in the last year, with numerous annexes, subterranean chambers and technological additions. It had originally been designed as a place of retreat and reflection, but had become an unofficial base of operations for many of the Sigillite’s operatives.