Текст книги "Aurelian"

Автор книги: Аарон Дембски-Боуден

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Behold this very world, Lorgar, in fifty years.

SEVEN

CITY OF LIGHT

FOR A MOMENT, to even face the light was painful. Silver in its artificiality, as cold and far removed from the warm gold of a natural star as could be imagined. Shadowing his face from the austere glare, Lorgar looked across the plains where Ingethel had gestured.

Shapes resolved themselves into an uneven skyline. Lorgar knew it instantly, for he had studied there for almost a decade, living among its people and coming to adore them as he loved the people of Colchis.

‘Tizca,’ he said the word only after swallowing his horror. Cracked spires of human ingenuity; great pyramids of white stone, pale metal and shattered glass; city walls fallen to nothing more than lumped rubble – this was the great and enlightened city of the Thousand Sons, reduced to the edge of devastation.

‘What madness do I see before me? What lies cruelly given shape?’

Tizca will burn in the crucible of the coming war. It must be so.

‘I will never allow this to come to pass.’

You will allow it, Lorgar. You must.

‘You are not my master. I would never hold faith in a god that controlled its worshippers. Faith is about freedom, not slavery.’

You will allow this to come to pass.

‘If this is the future, Ingethel, I will tell Magnus in the past. When I return to the Imperium, it will be the first thing to leave my lips.’

No. This is the final incident in Magnus’s illumination. Betrayed by the Emperor, betrayed by his own brothers, he will bring his city to the warp in order to escape final destruction. Here, he forges a bastion for the war to come.

‘What war?’ Lorgar spat the words. ‘You keep speaking of betrayals, of crusades and battles, as if I can already see into the same futures you describe. Tell me, damn you, what war?’ Lorgar started to move towards the ruined city, but Ingethel gripped his armoured shoulder.

The war you will begin, but will never lead. The war to bring all these truths to the Imperium. You came to find the gods, Lorgar. You have found them, as they always intended for you. Their eyes are turned towards humanity now. We said this to Argel Tal, as we say it to you now: Humanity must embrace the truths of divine reality, or suffer the same fate as the eldar.

Lorgar looked back to the city.

You already knew it would come to war. A holy crusade, to bring the truth to Terra. Too many worlds will resist. The Emperor’s grip on their lives is too complete, too merciless. The Anathema starves them of any chance to grow on their own, so they will languish – and then they will die – while shackled by his narrow vision.

The primarch smiled, the expression a mirror of his genetic father’s own faint amusement. ‘And in place of order, you offer Chaos? I have seen what walks on the faces of those eldar worlds lost in this great, drowned empire. The seas of blood and the cities of howling Neverborn…’

You look upon an empire that failed to heed the gods.

‘Even so, there are horrors no human will willingly embrace.’

No? These things are horrors only to those who look upon them with mortal eyes. Without belief in the true gods, humanity will fall to its own faithlessness. Alien kingdoms will break the Imperium apart, for humanity lacks the strength to survive in a galaxy that loathes your species. Your expansion will fade and diminish, and the gods will smite all who turned from the offer of true faith. Your kind can embrace the Chaos you speak of or it can taste the same fate as the eldar.

‘Chaos.’ Lorgar tasted the word, weighing it on his tongue. ‘That is not the correct word, is it? The immaterial realm may be one of pure Chaos, but it is changed when bonded with the material universe. Diluted. Even in this Great Eye, where the gods stare into the galaxy, physical laws are broken but it is not a place of pure Chaos. It is no random ocean of seething psychic energy. It is not the warp itself, but a meshing of here and there, the firmament and the aether.’

The primarch breathed in the ashy air, feeling it tickle the back of his throat. ‘Perfect order would never change. But pure Chaos would never rise in the first place. You desire a union.’

He turned to Ingethel. Blood ran from both the daemon’s eyes now, darkening its fur in bleak lightning streaks.

‘You need us,’ Lorgar said. ‘The gods need us. They cannot claim the material realm without us. Their power is strangled when they have no prayers or deeds offered in worship.’

Yes, but the need is not a selfish one. It is a natural desire. The gods are masters of Chaos as a natural force. The warp is every human emotion – every emotion from any sentient race – made manifest into a psychic tempest. It is not the enemy of life, but the result of it.

Lorgar breathed deeply, tasting more of the ash on the wind.

He said nothing, for there was little to say. Argel Tal had brought these words back with him, and now they were Lorgar’s to hear firsthand.

Chaos seeks symbiosis with life: the Ensouled and the Neverborn in natural harmony. Union. Faith. Power, Lorgar. Immortality and endless possibility. Sensations beyond mortal comprehension. The ability to feel maddening delight at any agony. The gift of ecstasy even when you are destroyed, making even death a great joke, knowing you will incarnate in another form over and over until the suns themselves go black.

And when the stars die, Chaos still lives on in the cold – still perfect, still exultant, still pure. This is everything humanity has ever dreamed of – to be unchallenged in the galaxy, to be omnipotent above all other life, and to be eternal.

Lorgar would no longer look at the fallen city. ‘You have chosen poorly. I am pleased and proud to have discovered the truth. I am honoured to be chosen by beings powerful enough to be considered divine by the truest meaning of the word. But I will struggle to bring this light to humanity. I cannot win a war against the god sat upon the Terran Throne.’

Life is struggle. You will strive, and you will succeed.

‘Even if I believed all of this…’ Lorgar’s blood ran cold. ‘I have one hundred thousand warriors. We will be dead the moment we make planetfall upon the Throneworld.’

You will attract more, as you liberate world after world. It is written in the stars; after you sail from here, your Legion no longer spends years crafting perfect worlds venerating the Anathema as the God-Emperor. You will crush resistance beneath your boots, and draw fresh, faithful humans into your service. Some will be slaves in the bowels of your warships. Others will be your flock, to shepherd them toward enlightenment. Many more will be taken into your genetic harvester asylums, and bred into Legionaries.

The primarch resisted the urge to curse. ‘I am growing increasingly uneasy with you discussing my future in such definite terms. None of these events have happened yet and may never occur. You have still not answered the one question that matters. Why must it be me?’

It has to be you.

His teeth clenched together, hard enough to squeak. ‘Why? Why not one of the others? Horus? Sanguinius? The Lion? Dorn?’

Each of the other Legions would die for their primarchs, and lay down their lives for the Imperium. But the Imperium is the cancer killing the species. Even when some of your brothers turn against the Emperor, they will fight to command the Imperium. Only the Word Bearers will die for the truth, and for humanity itself.

Faith and steel must now be joined. If humanity becomes an empire instead of a species, it will fall to alien claws and the wrath of the gods. It is the way of things. What has happened before will happen again.

Lorgar pulled a sealed scroll from his belt, unrolling it with exaggerated care. Red dust clung to the parchment from the surface of Shanriatha, as did a few speckles of blood from carnage beneath the Eternity Gate. They dotted the cream page, bold against the pale paper, almost like tiny wax seals.

His son’s blood. The lifeblood of one of his Legion, fifty years from now. A warrior destined to die on the home world of humanity, countless systems away from where he’d been born. Had that warrior even been born, yet?

Lorgar screwed up the parchment, destroying the Colchisian cuneiform scripture, and let it fall to the cold ground.

‘Is Magnus here now? Are we here, fifty years from the night I entered the Great Eye?’

Yes. Where we stand now is mere days after something humanity will come to recall as the Razing of Prospero. Magnus fell victim to his own arrogance, and now resides in the tallest tower of his broken city here, lamenting the destruction of his Legion and the death of his hopes. He intended only the best, but his curiosity saw him damned in the eyes of the Emperor. He looked too deep, too long, into ideals the Emperor did not hold.

Lorgar nodded, expecting nothing less. It was hardly unprecedented, after all. His own Legion – a hundred thousand Word Bearers kneeling in the dust of Monarchia…

He shook his head, looking back to the city, and the tower at the heart of it.

‘Why does he come here, to the empyrean?’

To hide where the Emperor’s dogs cannot catch him. He is here to lick his wounds. For his sins, Magnus was sentenced to censure. He chose exile over execution.

Lorgar started walking.

‘I am going to speak with him.’

You will not be allowed to stand before the Crimson King.

He didn’t need to turn to know the daemon was smiling. ‘We will see,’ he called over his shoulder.

There was no answer. Ingethel was gone.

HE WAS THREATENED by an abortion wearing the cardinal red ceramite of the Thousand Sons Legion.

‘Denlcrrgh yidzun,’ it demanded. A bronze bolter was wrapped in the quivering flesh-coloured tentacles it used as arms. Behind this lone sentry, the fallen city wall of Tizca rose in mounds of rubble.

Lorgar breathed a slow exhalation. Even from a dozen metres away, the Thousand Son reeked of spoiled meat and the rich, coppery tang of aetheric secrets. What remained of its face looked as if it’d melted down the front of its skull.

‘I am Lorgar, Lord of the Seventeenth Legion.’ He gestured to the bolter in the thing’s limbs. ‘Lower your weapon, nephew. I am here to speak with my brother.’

Another attempt at speech left the Thousand Son’s ravaged features as a meaningless blur of syllables. It seemed to recognise its own inadequacy in this regard, for a gentle, cultured voice drifted into Lorgar’s mind a moment later.

I am Hazjihn of the Fifteenth Legion. You cannot be what you appear.

Lorgar buried his discomfort beneath his father’s smile. ‘I could say the same words to you, Hazjihn.’ The ground gave a particularly violent shudder. Glass shattered in the lowest levels of the closest pyramid as more rocks tumbled from the ruined city wall.

The Crimson King tells us we are the only human life on this world. Hazjihn’s dripping face snuffed back a mouthful of air in ungainly respiration. You cannot be Lord Aurelian of the Word Bearers.

Lorgar spread his hands in a display of unarmed beneficence. ‘You know me, Hazjihn. Do you recall the evening I lectured on the Khed-Qahir Parables, in the west garden district of the City of Grey Flowers?’

The bolter lowered a fraction. I recall it well. How many of my Legion’s warriors were present that night?

Lorgar nodded in respect to the Thousand Son. ‘Thirty-seven, among a mortal crowd of over twenty thousand.’

The warrior’s sloping eyes blinked slowly. And what is the fiftieth principle of Qahir?

‘There is no fiftieth principle of Qahir, for he died of a consumptive sickness soon after penning the nineteenth. The fiftieth principle of Khed is to maintain cleanliness of flesh and iron as surely as one would maintain purity of soul, for the external inexorably bleeds into the internal.’

The warrior lowered his bolter. You may yet be a deceiver, but I will take you to my lord. He will judge you with his own eye.

Lorgar inclined his head again, this time in thanks. He followed the limping figure of Hazjihn, ascending the mounds of rubble to enter the city proper. The warrior’s halting stride set his armour’s servo joints snarling.

Lorgar watched the warrior’s limping movements. Whatever benefits the mutations offered, they were hidden by the Legion’s armour. Above all, a randomness lay in Hazjin’s corruption. Lorgar couldn’t help contrast it to the shaped, lethal warping of Argel Tal in his previous vision. His own son’s alterations had all the hallmarks of malicious intent, as if a greater intellect had kneaded the Word Bearer’s flesh, rewriting his life at the genetic level, crafting him into a living engine of war.

Hazjihn’s mutation showed no such design. If anything, he seemed diseased.

‘Nephew,’ Lorgar kept his voice soft, ‘what has happened to you? How many of my brother’s sons are as changed as you are?’

Hazjihn didn’t look back. This place, this world, it has altered so many of us. The Powers bless us, my lord.

Blessed. So the daemon Ingethel had spoken the truth: physical considerations faded when one embraced union with the gods. With psychic mastery and the ascension of consciousness to immortal levels, evidently the struggles of the flesh were increasingly irrelevant. Perhaps it made a sick kind of sense: when one was omnipotent, functions of the flesh hardly mattered. Power to such a degree overshadowed lesser concerns.

Yet even for one who prided himself on his enlightened perspective, it was a bitter pill for Lorgar to swallow. The truth may be divine, but that hardly rendered it any more appealing to the human race. Some truths were too ugly to be easily embraced.

A rancid, unwanted smile claimed his mouth for a moment. It would be a crusade, then. Another crusade to bring the truth to the masses at the point of a sword.

Humanity would never, could never, be relied upon to reach its own enlightenment. He found it the sorriest, saddest aspect to the species.

‘How long have you been here, Hazjihn?’

Some of us insist it has been months. Others claim mere days have passed. We cannot record the time accurately, for it flows in all directions. Chronometers dance to tunes of their own devising.The warrior made a strangled gargle, approaching a laugh. However, the primarch tells us mere days have passed in the material realm.

Lorgar.Ingethel’s voice, not Hazjihn’s. Turn back. This future is not yours to see.

The primarch held his tongue as they walked into Tizca, the City of Light.

AS HE LOOKED upon Magnus, Lorgar reconciled logic with emotion, forging both into understanding. This was not the Magnus he knew – this was Magnus five decades older.

In fifty years, he had aged a hundred. The Crimson King had abandoned the pretension of armour, clad now in nothing more than divine light that left aching after-images in the minds of all who looked upon him. Yet beneath the psychic grandeur, a broken brother stared at Lorgar’s arrival. His remaining eye showed little of its former pearlescent gleam and his features, never those of a handsome man, were now cracked by time’s lines and the ravines of tortured thought.

‘Lorgar,’ the figure of Magnus said, breaking the library’s stillness and silence. The witchlight roiling from him in waves illuminated the scrolls and books lining the walls.

The Word Bearer entered slowly, his purring armour joints adding to the breach of silence. Standing too near Magnus bred a painful tingling behind the eyes, as if white noise had evolved into a physical sensation. Lorgar turned his gentle gaze aside, taking in his brother’s collection of writings. Immediately, his glance fell upon one of his own books – An Epilogue to Torment– written the very same year he had won the crusade against the Covenant’s old ways on Colchis.

Lorgar traced a gloved fingertip down the book’s leather spine. ‘You do not seem surprised to see me, brother.’

‘I am not.’ Magnus allowed himself a smile. It only deepened the lines marring his face. ‘This world holds endless surprises. What game is this, I wonder? What incarnated hallucination am I addressing this time? You are a poor simulacrum of Lorgar, spirit. Your eyes do not burn with the fire of a faith only he and his sons understand. Nor do you bear the same scars.’

Magnus remained standing by his writing desk, but made no move to go back to his reading. Lorgar turned to him, narrowing his eyes at the glare.

‘I am no apparition, Magnus. I am Lorgar, your brother, in the final nights of my Pilgrimage. Time, as you see, is mutable, here.’ He hesitated. ‘The years have not been kind to you.’

The other primarch laughed, though the sound held no humour. ‘Recent years have been kind to no one. Begone, creature, and leave me to my calculations.’

‘Brother. It is me.’

Magnus narrowed his remaining eye. ‘I grow weary of this. How did you ascend my tower?’

‘I walked, in the company of your warriors. Magnus, I—’

‘Enough! Leave me to my calculations.’

Lorgar stepped forward, hands raised in brotherly conciliation. ‘Magnus…’

+ Enough. +

The explosion of whiteness stole all sense, save for the feeling of falling.

PART FOUR

CHOSEN OF THE PANTHEON

EIGHT

QUESTIONS

HE OPENED HIS eyes to see a familiar horizon, boiling in rebellion against the laws of nature. Dusk claimed this world, which was surely Shanriatha. Yet he could breathe now. And the temperature, while cold, was far from lethal.

Slowly, Lorgar picked himself up from the sand. The parchment scrolls were gone from his armour, burned away in the face of Magnus’s sorcerous dismissal. A tightness in his lungs didn’t bode well. He felt the muscles in his throat and chest clenching in uncertain spasm.

Not enough oxygen in the air. That was all. He reached for the helm mag-locked to his belt, and resealed his armour. The first breath of his internal air supply was surprisingly soothing. He breathed in the incense of his armour’s sacred oils.

Only then did he see Ingethel. The daemon lay curled upon itself on the ground, a foetal nightmare slick with the slime of gestation. Red sand clotted its moist skin.

He kicked it gently, with the edge of his boot. Ingethel rolled, baring its bestial features to the evening sky. Neither of its eyes could close, but both had made the attempt. They snicked open, and its jaw cracked as it heaved itself from the sand. The moment the daemon righted itself, blood gouted from its maw in a hissing flood. Things writhed in the pool of stinking liquid, squirming into the sand as soon as they came into contact with the air. Lorgar had no desire to examine them any closer.

‘Daemon,’ he said.

Not long now. Soon. This flesh will rot away. I will need to incarnate again. Its bones clicked and cracked as it rose to its slouched height. It cost me much, to pull you from Magnus’s tower.

‘My brother would not speak with me.’

Your brother is a tool of the Changer of the Ways. Are you still so blind, Lorgar? Magnus is a creature unaware of his own ignorance. He is manipulated at every turn, yet believes himself the manipulator. The gods work in many ways. Some of humanity’s leaders must be lured by offers of ambition and dominance, while others must be manipulated until they are ready to witness the truth.

The primarch spoke through clenched teeth. ‘And I?’

You are the chosen of the pantheon. You alone come to Chaos from idealism, for the betterment of the species. In this, as in all things, you are selfless.

Lorgar turned and began walking. The direction was irrelevant, for the desert was a featureless sprawl as far as the eye could see.

Selfless. Magnus had once accused him of the same thing, making it sound more like a critical flaw. Now the daemon used it with a honeyed tongue, as his greatest virtue.

It didn’t matter. Immune to vanity, he would not be lured by silken words. The truth was enough, despite the horror of it all.

‘Do I survive this crusade?’ he asked aloud.

Ingethel dragged itself alongside his bootprints, slower now, its breath sawing in and out of heaving lungs.

The Imperial Great Crusade is already over for you. All that remains is to play the role fate offers.

‘No. Not my father’s crusade. The true crusade, yet to come.’

Ah. You fear for your life, if you turn against the Terran Emperor?

Lorgar kept walking, a relentless trudge over the sand dunes. ‘The vision of Magnus said I had suffered in his era. At some point in the coming five decades, I must struggle to survive. It stands to reason that I may die. If you have stared down the paths of possible futures, you must know what is likely to occur.’

Once the betrayal breaks across the galaxy, there are countless moments in which you may meet your end. Some likelier than others.

Lorgar crested another dune, pausing to stare down at yet more endless desert. ‘Tell me how I die.’ He looked at the daemon, fixing it with his gentle glare. ‘You know. I hear it in your voice. So tell me.’

No being may know its future written out before it, in absolute terms. Some decisions will see you almost certainly dead. On a world named Shrike, if you interfere in an argument between Magnus the Red and the brother you name Russ, there is a concordance of possibility that you will be slain in their duel.

‘And?’

If you ever draw a weapon against your brother Corax, in a battle you can never win, you are almost certain to die.

Lorgar laughed at the maddening unlikelihood of it all. ‘You cannot offer me choices I will not have to make for many years.’

The daemon sprayed spit as it growled. Then do not ask questions of the future, fool.

Lorgar had no answer to that, though he found the daemon’s tone amusing. ‘Where are we?’ he said at length. ‘Shanriatha again?’

Yes. Shanriatha. The past or the present, perhaps a possible future. I cannot say.

‘But the air isn’t as cold as the void, here.’

The warp changes all things, in time. Ingethel paused, seeming to sag. Lorgar. You must be aware of the task ahead of you. I cannot remain incarnate for much longer, so hear my words now. In the course of the Emperor’s Great Crusade, you will come to many worlds. Those populated by alien breeds are useless to you. For the next few decades, let your brother primarchs purge those. You have a more solemn duty.

Find the worlds rich in human life. Find those with harvestable populations for your armies, with as little deviation from purestrain humanity as possible. Your Legion is one hundred thousand strong now. Over the next five decades, you must add a thousand warriors each year. For every Legionary to fall, you will replenish your Word Bearers with two more.

He shook his head, still staring out at the sea of dunes. ‘Why have you brought me back here? What lesson is there in this?’

None. I dragged you from Magnus’s chamber with crude force, not guile. It was not my intention to show you this world again. Something else pulled you here. Something very strong.

Lorgar felt his skin crawl at the creature’s tone. ‘Explain yourself.’

Even with its bloody, inhuman face, Ingethel’s worthless eyes were wide in something not far from fear.

You did not believe even the chosen of the pantheon will be allowed to leave the realm of the gods without first passing their tests, did you? It was chosen that the gods would elect one vizier to send, to stand judgement upon you.

The primarch drew his crozius with slow, careful intent. ‘If this is all proceeding as planned, why then do you tremble in fear?’

Because gods are fickle beings, Lorgar, and this was not the plan at all. One of the gods has overstepped the boundary, and violated the accord. It must wish to test you itself.

He swallowed. ‘I do not understand. Which god?’

He heard no answer. Ingethel’s psychic shriek went through him like a blade. For the first time since the maiden on Cadia had become his daemonic guide, he heard the girl within the creature.

She was screaming with it.