Текст книги "Aurelian"

Автор книги: Аарон Дембски-Боуден

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THREE

MAGNUS AND LORGAR

HE DID NOT wait long, nor had he expected to. Indeed, his brother awaited him in his chamber.

We must speak, you and I.

The phantasm’s form rippled, bright with witchfire, beaming myriad reflections across the angled walls of Lorgar’s inner sanctum. The chamber was cold, always too cold, and the air was forever moist as it ran through the filtration system. The primarch missed the dry climes of Colchis.

He rested llluminarium, the immense crozius maul, against the wall.

‘Magnus,’ he said to the wraith. The figure formed of silver fire gave a graceful bow.

It has been a long while since we spoke anything of substance.

Once, not so long ago, he would have smiled to see his wisest, most powerful brother. Now, the smile read false, and didn’t reach Lorgar’s eyes.

‘You exaggerate. We have spoken many times in recent years.’

Magnus’s remaining eye followed his brother’s steps as Lorgar moved over to his writing table.

Our last talk of any real worth was in your City of Grey Flowers, almost half a century before. Have anything beyond the shallowest pleasantries passed between us since then?

Lorgar met Magnus’s eye. The silvery form flickered as Lorgar’s voice resonated around it.

+ Times change, Magnus. +

The Cyclops visibly shuddered, though he kept smiling. I felt that, even here. You have grown strong.

+ I saw the truth on the very Pilgrimage you demanded I never make. And after Isstvan, a veil lifted from my eyes. There is no longer any need to hold back. If we restrain ourselves, we will lose this war, and humanity will lose its only chance at enlightenment. +

The distant primarch’s image wavered again. For a moment, Magnus looked pained.

You scream your strength into the warp without care. A vessel must sail with the aetheric tides, Lorgar, lest it break against them.

Lorgar laughed, a gentle, patient sound. ‘A lecture, from you? I have seen your past and future, Magnus. You stand with us only because our father exiled you. You stand as the crowned king of a Legion of the damned.’

My Legion? Of what do you speak?

Lorgar felt his brother’s questing probes, the softest psychic touch within his skull. It took the barest effort to hurl the insidious psi-touches aside.

+ If you ever seek to pry into my thoughts again, I will make sure you regret it. +

Magnus’s smile became forced. You truly have changed.

‘Yes,’ Lorgar nodded, writing upon a scroll. ‘Everything has changed.’

What did you mean about my Legion?

Lorgar was already distracted as he worked. ‘Watch for the greatest snarl in fate’s skeins, brother.’ He dipped the quill into an inkpot and resumed his scribing. ‘You are not free of the flesh-change your Legion once feared. Beware those among your sons that fail to embrace it as the gift it is.’

Magnus fell silent for some time. The only sound in the room was the scritch-scratch of Lorgar’s quill-tip, and the omnipresent bass murmur of the generators on the enginarium decks.

Fulgrim is dead.

‘So it seems.’ Lorgar stopped writing long enough to look up. ‘How long have you known?’

Magnus moved to the wall, reaching out as if his ethereal fingers could touch the paintings of Colchis hanging there.

I knew it as soon as I reached into Horus’s war room. He withdrew his fingers, curling them back with slow care. Like you, I am no stranger to the entities within the warp. One of them animates his body now.

+ Entities? Name them as they are, brother. Daemons. +

Magnus’s image wavered again, almost discorporated in the winds of Lorgar’s silent voice.

Control your strength, Lorgar.

Lorgar went back to his writing. ‘You should have told me the truth fifty years ago.’

Perhaps. The melancholy bleeding from Magnus was almost strong enough to caress the skin. Perhaps I should have. I sought only to protect you. You were so certain, so arrogant in your beliefs.

Lorgar spoke as he kept writing. ‘I stand at the right hand of the new Emperor, commanding the second-largest Legion in the Imperium. You are a broken soul, leading a shattered Legion. Perhaps I was never the one that needed protection, nor did my arrogance lead to my downfall. You cannot claim the same, Magnus. We both knew the truth, but only one of us faced it.’

And such a truth. Bitter amusement lapped at Lorgar’s senses. The galaxy is a foul place. We are only making it fouler. Have you considered that it might be better to die in ignorance than to live with the truth?

Lorgar repelled his brother’s creeping emotions with a burst of irritation. The spectre shimmered again, almost dissolving into the air.

+ Have you considered it, Magnus? If so, why do you yet live? Why did you not surrender to the howling death that came for you, when Russ broke your spine over his knee? +

Magnus’s ghost-image laughed, but it was a forced sound, barely reaching Lorgar’s mind. Is this what we have come to? Is this the bitterness you have hidden from all of us for half a century? What did you see at the end of your Pilgrimage, my brother? What did you see when you stared into the abyss?

+ You know what I saw. I saw the warp, and what swims within its tides. + He hesitated a moment, feeling his fingers curl, forming fists in his rising rage. + You are a coward, to know of the Primordial Truth yet fail to embrace it. Chaos Incarnate is only grotesque because we see it with mortal eyes. When we ascend, we will be the chosen children of the gods. When– +

Enough!

Three of the paintings burst into flame; the crystal sculpture of the Covenant’s tower palace shattered into worthless glass chips. Lorgar winced at his brother’s psychic release. He had to sniff blood back into his nose.

I am finished with this petty banter. You believe you know the truths behind our reality? Then show me. Tell me what you saw at the end of your accursed Pilgrimage.

Lorgar rose to his feet, extinguishing the small fires with a gentle gesture. Frost glinted on his fingernails as the flames hissed into nothingness, starved of air. For a moment he felt a twinge of regret, that he and his closest brother should be reduced to this.

But time changed all things. He was no longer the lost one, the weak one, the one brother plagued by doubt.

Lorgar nodded, his eyes thinned to dangerous slits.

‘Very well, Magnus.’

PART TWO

THE PILGRIM

FOUR

A DEAD WORLD

Shanriatha

Forty-three years before Isstvan V

HE TOOK HIS first steps onto the world’s surface, hearing the soft percussion of his steady breathing within the enclosed suit of armour. Targeting cross hairs moved over the emptiness in a sedate drift, while the delicate electronics of his retinal display listed his own bio-data in ignorable streams.

Slowly, he moved into the wind. Dust crunched underfoot, soil so absolutely dead and dry that it defied the possibility of life. His musings were accompanied by the rattle of grit in the breeze, clattering against his thrumming armour plating.

For just a moment, he turned and looked back at his gunship. The racing winds were already painting it with a fine layer of the powdery red dust that existed in abundance on this world.

This world. He supposed it had once possessed a name, though it had never been spoken by human lips. Its bleak, rusty desolation reminded him of Mars, though Terra’s sister world was a bastion of industry with few wild lands remaining. It also laid claim to calmer skies.

He didn’t look up; he didn’t need to, for there was nothing new to see. From horizon to horizon, a blanket of tortured clouds bubbled and churned, thunderheads crashing together to make tides of white, violet, and a thousand reds.

The warp. He’d seen it before, but never like this. Never around a world. Never in place of true weather. Never crashing through thousands of solar systems in a migraine tide, like a nebula rotting in the void.

Lorgar,said a genderless, breathless voice behind him, from a place where no one had been a moment before.

He didn’t spin to face it, nor did he bring his weapon to bear. Instead, the primarch turned slowly, his eyes laden with patience and a bright, too-human curiosity.

‘Ingethel,’ he greeted the aberration. ‘I have sailed into the mouth of madness. Now tell me why.’

INGETHEL SLITHERED CLOSER. Its claim to a humanoid form ended at its waist, which became the thick, ridged tail of a deep-sea worm or serpent. Mucous membranes along its underside were already coated with dust. Even its torso was human in only the loosest sense: four skeletal arms reached from its shoulders, in divine mockery of some ancient Hindusian deity, and its skin was a grey, mottled spread of dry leather.

Lorgar,it said again. Malformed teeth clacked together as the creature’s jaw chattered. What had once been the face of a human female was now a bestial ruin – all fangs and dusty fur, with a leonine mouth that couldn’t close around its deformed dental battlements. One eye stared, swollen and ripe with blood, bulging from its socket. The other was a sunken, useless nugget half-buried in the beast’s skull.

Why did you choose this world? the creature asked.

The primarch saw its throat quiver with the effort of speech, but no human words left the trembling jaws.

‘Does that matter?’ Lorgar wondered. His own voice emerged from the snarling vox-grille in the mouth of his helm. ‘I do not see why it would.’

From orbit, you must have known several things: you cannot breathe the air of this world, nor is there any sign of life upon its surface. Yet you chose to land and journey across it.

‘I saw the ruins. A city drowned in the dust plains.’

Very well,it said, as if expecting such an answer. The creature hunched its shoulders against the wind, turning its head to shield its swollen eye. From its spine and shoulder blades rose several black pinions of burned bone – an angel’s wings, with no muscles or feathers.

‘What are you?’ Lorgar asked.

The beast’s tongue bled as it licked its armoury of teeth. You know what I am.

‘Do I?’ The primarch towered above any mortal man, but Ingethel was taller still, rising high on its coiled tail. ‘I know you are a creature incarnated without a soul. I see nothing of the same life I see in humanity. No aura. No glimmer in the core of your being. But I do not know what you are; only what you are not.’

The wind picked up, tearing at the parchment scrolls fastened to Lorgar’s war plate. He let the storm claim them, not watching as they were ripped away, flapping in the air. A retinal warning flashed by the edge of his right eye, it was proclaiming another fall in the temperature. Was night falling? Nothing had changed in the sky above; no sun could be seen, let alone one that seemed to be setting. Lorgar cancelled the warning with a blink at the pulsating rune, just as his armour began to hum louder. The back-mounted generator growled as it churned out more power, entering a void-thaw cycle.

‘It is over two hundred degrees below the point water would freeze,’ he said to the monster. ‘Almost as cold as naked space.’

Another reason I wonder why you chose to walk upon this world.

Lorgar bared his teeth behind the granite-grey faceplate. ‘I am armoured to survive such extremes. What are you, to stand here and ignore an atmosphere cold enough to turn blood to ice in the time it takes the human heart to beat a single pulse?’

This is where the realm of flesh and spirit meet. Physical laws mean nothing here. There is no limit on what might be. That is Chaos. Endless possibility.

Lorgar took a deep breath of the clean, recyc-scrubbed air of his war plate. It tasted of ritual cleansing oils, coppery in his sinuses. ‘So I could breathe here? I would not freeze?’

You are unique among the Anathema’s sons. All of your brothers are whole, Lorgar. You alone are lost. They have mastered their gifts since birth. Your own mastery will come with understanding. When it does, you will have the strength to reshape entire worlds on a whim.

Lorgar shook his head. ‘I am bred from the best of humanity, but I am still human. You may stand unarmoured in this storm. It would destroy me in a moment. We are too different.’

The creature faced the primarch, its swollen eye cataracted by a film of red grit. Only one difference exists between the warp and the flesh. In the realm of flesh, sentient life is born ensouled. In the realm of raw thought, all life is soulless. But both are alive. The Born and the Neverborn, on both sides of reality. Destined for symbiosis. Destined for union.

The primarch crouched, letting dust fall through his gauntleted fingers. ‘Neverborn. I have studied the history of my species, Ingethel. That is no more than a poetic word for ‘‘daemon’’.’

The creature turned its back to the wind again, but said nothing.

‘What is this world called?’ Lorgar looked up, but did not rise. The dust hissed away in the racing wind, leaving his fingers in a gritty stream.

The eldar called it ‘‘Ycressa’’ before the Fall. After the birth of Slaa Neth, She Who Thirsts, it was named ‘‘Shanriatha’’.

The primarch gave a soft laugh.

You know the meaning of this word?

‘I learned the eldar tongue when my Legion first met them. Yes, I know the meaning of the word. It means ‘‘never forgotten’’.’

The daemon flicked a slit tongue over its maw, heedless of the bloody scratches it inflicted upon itself. You have met the soul-broken?

‘The soulbroken?’

The eldar.

Lorgar rose to his feet, brushing the last of the dust away. ‘The Imperium has encountered them many times. Some expeditionary fleets have clashed with them, to drive them from Imperial space. Others have passed in peace. My brother Magnus was always one of the more lenient when encountering them.’ He hesitated for a moment, turning to the creature. ‘Your kind know of my brother Magnus, do they not?’

The gods themselves know Magnus, Lorgar. His name is threaded through destiny’s web as often as your own.

The Word Bearer looked back to the horizon. ‘That gives me little comfort.’

It will, in time. Speak of the soulbroken.

He continued, slower now. ‘My Legion encountered them not long after we sailed from Colchis the very first time. A fleet of elder, their vessels built of bone, drifting through the void powered by immense solar sails. I met with their farseers, to determine their place in Mankind’s galaxy. During those weeks, I mastered their tongue.’

Lorgar took another breath, thinking back to that time. ‘It was easy to despise them. Their inhumanity made them cold; their skin stank of bitter oil and alien sweat, and their vaunted wisdom came at the cost of sneering condescension. What right did a dying breed have to judge us inferior? I asked them this, and they had no answer.’

He laughed again, the same gentle sound. ‘They named us mon-keigh, their term for so-called ‘‘lesser races’’. And yet, while they were easy to hate, there was much to admire in them, as well. Their existence is a tragic one.’

And what of your Legion?

‘We destroyed them,’ the primarch admitted. ‘At great cost, in both warships and loyal lives. They care for nothing but survival, the ferocious need to continue their existence saturates their whole culture. None of them ever die easily, nor do they fall cleanly.’

He paused for a moment. ‘Why do you name them ‘‘soul-broken’’?’

If such a thing as Ingethel could be said to smile, it did so now. You know what this place is. Not this world, but this whole region of space, where gods and mortals meet. A goddess was born here. Slaa Neth. She Who Thirsts.

Lorgar looked to the sky, watching the cosmic afterbirth raging above. He knew without being told that this storm would rage forever. And it would spread, over the coming centuries, engulfing ever more solar systems. It would spread far and wide, opening to peer into the galaxy’s core like a god’s staring eye.

‘I am listening,’ he said quietly.

In her genesis, brought about by the eldar’s worship, she claimed the spirits of the entire race. They are the soulbroken. When any mortal dies, its spirit drifts into the warp. It is the way of things. But when the eldar die, they are pulled right into the maw of the goddess they betrayed. She thirsts for them, for they are her children. She drinks them as they die.

Together, the daemon and the Emperor’s son began to move west. Lorgar moved against the wind, his helmed head lowered as he listened to the creature’s psychic speech. Ingethel closed its eyes as best as its deformed face allowed, its slithering passage leaving a sidewinder trail in the dust.

The marks they left didn’t last long, for the storm soon obliterated all evidence of their passing.

‘Something you said, it matches the Old Ways of Colchis.’ He quoted verbatim from the texts of the very religion he’d once overthrown in the name of Emperor-worship. ‘It is said that ‘‘upon death, the unshackled soul drifts into the infinite, to be judged by thirsting gods’’.’

Ingethel made a choking, coughing gargle. It took Lorgar a moment to realise the creature was laughing.

It is the core of a million human faiths throughout your species’ lifespan. The Primordial Truth is in humanity’s blood. You all reach for it. You all know that something awaits after death. The faithful, the loyal, will be judged kindly and reside in their gods’ domains. The faithless, the unbelievers, will drift through the aether, serving as prey for the Neverborn. The warp is the end of all spirits. It is the destination of every soul.

‘That is hardly the Heaven promised in most human faiths,’ Lorgar felt his lip curling.

No. But it is the same hell your species has always feared.

The primarch couldn’t argue with that.

You wish to see the ruins of this world,Ingethel weaved as it slithered alongside him.

‘This was once a grand city.’ Lorgar could make out the first fallen towers on the horizon, shrouded in generations of carmine dust. Whatever tectonic devastation had claimed this world long ago dragged the city into a crater, spilling its spires to the ground. What protruded from the earth now resembled the ribcage of some long-dead beast.

These ruins were never a true city. When the soulbroken fled the goddess’s birth, the survivors boarded vast domed platforms of living bone, carrying the remnants of their species into the stars on a final exodus.

‘Craftworlds. I have seen one,’ Lorgar kept trudging forward, into the wind. ‘It was magnificent, in its own alien, chilling way.’

Ingethel’s chittery laugh wasn’t quite stolen by the wind. Many of the fledgling craftworlds failed to escape Slaa Neth’s birth scream. They dissolved in the void, or fell to die on the faces of these abandoned worlds.

Lorgar slowed in his pace, casting a glance at the daemon. ‘We walk to the grave of a craftworld?’

Ingethel rasped another laugh from its malformed jaws. You are here to witness wonders, are you not?

AND SO THEY came to a dead city, fallen from the void to bury itself in the world’s lifeless dust.

Red-stained bone architecture reached as far as the eye could see, jutting from the fundament with all the grace of a mouth filled by shattered teeth. Lorgar and his guide stood at the crater’s lip, staring down into the grave of the alien void city.

The primarch was silent for some time, listening to the howl of the wind and the accompanying grit-rattle against his armour. When he spoke, he didn’t break his gaze from the ancient annihilation below.

‘How many died here?’

Ingethel raised itself higher, peering down with its foul eyes. Four arms spread in a grand gesture, as if laying claim to everything the daemon beheld.

This was craftworld Zu’lasa. Two hundred thousand souls burst in the moment Slaa Neth was born. Unguided, with madness rampant in its own living core, the craftworld fell.

Lorgar felt a small smile take hold. ‘Two hundred thousand. How many in the entire eldar empire?’

A whole species. Trillions. A decillion. A tredecillion. A goddess was born in the brains of every living eldar, and tore itself into the realm of cold space and warm flesh.

The daemon hunched itself, leaning with all four arms on the crater’s edge. I sense your emotions, Lorgar. Pleasure. Awe. Fear.

‘I have no love for the galaxy’s xenos breeds,’ the primarch confessed. ‘The eldar failed to grasp the truth of reality, and I feel no sorrow for them. Merely pity that any being can die in ignorance.’ He took a breath, still staring down at the buried craftworld. ‘How many of these failed to escape the goddess’s birth?’

A great many. Even now, some drift in the warp’s tides – the silent homes of memories and alien ghosts.

Lorgar ignored the wind tearing at his cloak as he took his first step on the crater’s slope.

‘I sense something, Ingethel. Something down there.’

I know.

‘Do you know what it is?’

The daemon wiped its abused eyes with careful claws. A revenant, perhaps. An echo of eldar life, breathing its last if it still breathes at all.

Lorgar drew his crozius maul, his thumb close to the activation rune. The weapon caught the tumultuous light above, reflecting the storm on its burnished spines.

‘I’m going closer.’