Текст книги "Age of Darkness"

Автор книги: Кристиан Данн

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

‘To the lander,’ replied Kalliston, ejecting the magazine and slamming home a replacement. ‘But not direct. We’ll break back towards the colonnade, and then cut round.’

He gauged the likely location of the closest enemy targets by the pattern of fire, threw himself onto the edge of the crater and let fly with a controlled salvo before dropping back again. As he landed out of harm’s way, the thick crust of earth, glass and rubble exploded in a plume of fire. Then there were more bolt impacts, and the second whine of a missile launch.

‘Now,’ Kalliston ordered, beckoning his men to go ahead while he covered the retreat.

The two Space Marines fell back quickly, keeping in the lee of the crater shadow and moving to the far side of the bowl. As they reached the ridge, they broke out quickly. Kalliston stood up, releasing a final burst before racing to join them. He ran quickly up the uneven slope, feeling the thud of the incoming shells as they landed only metres short.

Then he was out, back onto the street level, running behind his battle-brothers, searching out fresh cover.

Too late, Kalliston realised that there were more attackers closing in from the very point they were heading towards.

‘Incom–’ he started, seeing the missile contrail too late.

The shoulder-launched missile slammed into the ground just ahead of him, throwing him into a roaring confusion of pain and tumbling movement. Kalliston felt several further heavy impacts, including one that exploded against his chest. His body cartwheeled through the air, buffeted by the backwash of the multiple blasts, before slamming into something unyielding. His spine compressed agonisingly, and he felt the bones of his right leg fracture. His vision went cloudy, and the world reeled around him in a blur of lurid colour.

Dimly, he heard treads rushing towards him in the dust, and the ragged bark of bolter-fire. A muzzle was pressed against his temple, clinking sharply against the smooth curve of his helm.

‘No,’ came a voice from close by, bestial in character and alive with a barely suppressed pleasure in the kill. ‘Alive.’

Then agony surged through Kalliston’s body, forking through his frame like storm-lightning. There was a numb falling away. Then there was nothing.

I HAD ALWAYS considered it a gift to be able to peer inside the veils of a man’s mind. I had always valued my ability to tell whether my interlocutor was lying or telling the truth, just as an ungifted mortal might make imperfect use of pulse-rates, sweating, or evasive gazes. Such a capability seemed to me one of the most precious of possessions, just one more piece of evidence for the ineluctable progress of mankind towards mortal godhood.

Now I recognise the price for such perspicuity. I cannot doubt the things I have been told. I cannot reassure myself that Khârn is concealing the truth from me, because his mind is like a translucent vial and there is no concealment possible.

So I must believe. I must believe what he says about the ruin of the Great Crusade and the turning of the primarchs to darkness, and the gathering storm that even now extends its pinions towards Terra. I must believe that my gene-father, whom I had revered along with the rest of my brothers, was guilty of the most terrible miscalculation, and has passed beyond the confines of the physical universe with the remnants of our Legion. I must believe that my survival is a pointless thing, a piece of unresolved business from a war that I have been denied any meaningful part in.

As he speaks, my recovery accelerates, and my ability to make use of my powers returns more quickly. My body embarks on the astonishing process of repair that it has been able to conduct ever since the implant of my enhanced organs. I am preparing to extend my life again, to resist whatever fresh assault comes my way.

That is what I have been turned into, a vehicle for survival. Even in the face of such overwhelming trauma, my blood still clots, my sinews pull back into shape and my bones repair the cracks in their structure. By telling me these things, in such agonising detail, he has given me the space to become myself again. I have weapons. I have the ability to hurt him, perhaps even the ability to kill him. Does he know this? Is my degradation so complete that he no longer sees me as any kind of threat?

He may be right. My spirit, my certainty is gone. The actions of Magnus are either incomprehensible or evil. In either case, I cannot focus my thoughts on anything but the betrayal.

Why did he send us away? He must have known we’d seek to return, or that the vengeful forces that destroyed this world would come after us in the void. He was the mightiest of us all, the magus, the one who saw the snaking paths of the Ocean most clearly of all. So I cannot put it down to simple omission. There are patterns here to be read. There are always patterns.

‘So, Thousand Son,’ asks my tormentor. ‘What do you make of that?’

He delights in my misery. It draws his attention from his own discontent. It is a cliché as old as the universe, the bully inflicting pain in order to send it away from himself.

It won’t work. The pain will catch up with him in the end, even if he has to kill every other sentient life-form in the galaxy first.

‘You allied yourself with the traitor,’ I say, and I hear the hollow ring to my words.

‘You call him traitor. History will call him redeemer.’

‘And you tell me the Wolves of Fenris did this to punish our treachery. Then why do you hunt us?’

‘They came for you because they believed you had turned. We come for you because we know that you didn’t. Not truly. Not reliably. Our cause demands commitment.’

‘So you never did believe in Unification? It was always a sham for you?’

Khârn grimaces. He is like a child, and his emotions play across his face nakedly. My mind-sight is overkill here – the rawest practicus could read him now.

‘We believed in it completely,’ he growls, and the raw emotion rises to just below the surface. ‘None believed in it more than we did. None laid their bodies on the line to the extent that we did.’

He comes closer. His eyes stare at me, glistening in the bright light.

‘We are fighters,’ he says. ‘We are made in the image of our primarch, just as you are made in the image of yours, and he has been betrayed and cast aside, even as the rule of the galaxy passes from the warriors to the slavemasters.’

I do not understand the reference to slavemasters, but it scarcely matters, for Khârn is no longer talking to me.

‘They will use us again to fight their battles while they remain in the audience, laughing. They are the audience, who watch as we come for them in their stalls. We will do to them what Angron should have done in Desh’ea. We will fulfill the potential within us.’

I see his pupils flicker, and can only guess at what scenes he is seeing. Like a prophet trapped in his own visions, Khârn is locked in a world of unreliable memory and paranoia. The damage done to his mind is heartbreaking. All that energy, all that raw potency, has been harnessed to an engine of lunacy.

Enough. It is time to show him how much I understand.

‘You didn’t come here for the Moon Wolf,’ I say, keeping my voice quiet. ‘You came here because you knew what devices once existed on Prospero. You hoped to find a cure.’

That halts him. He glares at me, and a fleck of spittle shines on his hanging lip like a jewel.

‘There is still time,’ I say, knowing the danger it places me in. I begin to wonder if this encounter was foreseen after all. ‘The devices have all been destroyed, but I can replicate their functions. I can heal your mind. I can remove the implants and give you back your sleep. I can take away the fire that drives you onwards, the fire that goads you to the acts you abhor. Even now, I know that a part of you still abhors what you have done.’

The spittle hangs, trembling, on his unmoving flesh.

‘I can help you, brother. I can heal your mind.’

He remains locked, frozen in indecision. If I had been Corvidae, I could have seen the paths of the future bisect within him, one going left, one going right. He is at the juncture now, what the ancients called crisis. He has the power to choose, to pull back or to plough on. I cannot intervene. The slightest nudge now will unleash the inferno, one that would toss me aside like dried brush in the hurricane.

I dare to believe in him for the space of a heartbeat. He looks at me, and I see the vindication of my guesses. He is lost in a universe of pain, one that is only temporarily forgotten in the action of killing. I know that my words have reached the sliver of his old self that still endures. I know he can hear me.

And so we remain, alone, locked away somewhere in the ruins of Prospero, a tiny mirror of the battle of wills taking place all across the galaxy.

And for that single heartbeat, I dare to believe.

‘Witch!’ he roars then, and the spittle flies from his lips. ‘ Youcannot heal this!’

Like a prey-beast springing away from the spear, he drags up a cry of tortured rage, shaking his head from side to side, flailing sweat from the bronze skin. He balls his massive fists, and I know they will come for me soon. His face contorts into a vice of bitter anguish, the expression that it will surely wear for millennia hence if I cannot stop him now.

He has chosen.

I cry aloud words of power, words I had forgotten existed until this moment. I am weak, crippled by the rigours of my captivity, but the lessons of my long conditioning are strong.

I am Athanaean, a master of the hidden ways of the mind, and there are more weapons in the galaxy than fists and blades.

My bonds shatter, freeing me to move. I rise from the chair, wreathed in the blazing light of the unbound aether, ignoring the protests of my broken limbs.

He comes at me then, the Eater of Worlds, and there is murder in his red-rimmed eyes. I have hurt him by exposing the source of his anguish, and I know then he will not stop until I lie dead and my blood paints every wall of this cell.

But we are on my world, the wellspring of my Legion’s ancient power, and the very dust of Tizca fuels my mastery of the warp. I am more powerful than he guesses.

He howls, this ruined abomination, as he thunders into strike-range. I meet the challenge, and my conscience is clear.

I cannot cure him, so I will have to kill him.

ARVIDA ARRIVED AT the landing site just in time.

Just in time to see the corpses of the pilots being dragged across the ground, leaving furrows in the sharp-edged dust. Just in time to see the krak-charges being laid around the flanks of the lander. Just in time to hear the rasping laughter of victory from the berserkers who’d stormed the vehicle.

There were twenty-seven World Eaters clustered around the empty crew-bay. One of them lay in the dust, his armour punched open from bolter impacts. The only other casualties were the two Thousand Sons who’d been left to guard it. They hadn’t stood much of a chance.

Arvida ducked down, keeping hidden behind a tangled hedge of semi-melted girders thirty metres away. As he watched, the helms of his brothers were torn off. Their exposed faces were punched, over and over again. The heads lolled lifelessly, turning into raw lumps of gore and gristle under the pointless barrage. The World Eaters laughed some more, cheering as each fist hit home.

Arvida turned away. He felt angry enough, but not towards Angron’s warriors – they were just savages, and had long ago ceased to be capable of anything more than boneheaded thuggery. His real anger was directed towards Kalliston, the one who had led them here against his counsel. The captain had always had too much faith in the providence of fate. The very idea that Magnus might have been fallible, that the primarch’s leadership might have been badly misguided, was anathema to him. Clearly it had been. They should have remained in space, searching for more survivors before heading into the emptiness of the void to recover. Prospero was nothing but a graveyard.

Even so, that left much to be explained. Arvida might have understood if there had been Wolves on Prospero, but World Eaters were another matter. Had the two Legions been acting in concert? Had all the other Legions turned against the Thousand Sons? If so, then why now? And for what reason?

The World Eaters began to strip the rest of the armour from their captives, and the desecration of their bodies began in earnest. Whoops and roars filled the otherwise tranquil air as they set to work.

Arvida glanced at his helm display. His squad were all gone, their life-signs inactive. He was alone, facing an enemy he couldn’t hope to contest.

The safest course of action would be to retreat, to flee back through the silent streets and wait for something to turn up. He knew he would have to withdraw soon enough, but the senseless barbarism in front of him offended his highly-developed sense of pride in the rules of war. His Legion had never broken them.

He rose from cover and drew his bolter up in a single, flowing movement. As he took aim, he saw the path of the shell that he would fire snaking into the future, and took some solace from the certainty of the kill. He squeezed the trigger, then turned and sprinted back into the shadows.

Arvida didn’t see the captain of the World Eaters collapse to the ground, his helm carved in two by the detonation of the bolt-round, but he heard it. Then he heard the roars of anger, and the thud of four dozen boots as the warband wheeled and charged towards the source of the shot.

He ran, keeping his head low, ducking and weaving through the thickets of blasted iron. The noise of the pursuit echoed in his ears, harsh and brutal. If they caught him, he’d be lucky to suffer a quick death.

Arvida upped the pace, pushing his body into a new burst of speed, barely noticing the skeletal buildings rush past in the night. He knew it had been reckless to fire that shot. Stupid, even.

But, and just for a moment, it had felt good.

HIS STRENGTH IS breathtaking. It is as if every aspect of the Legiones Astartes has been stripped away in favour of that single facet. His fists move in blurs of speed, backed up by the prodigious power of his massive body. He has no weapon, but that scarcely seems to matter. He is used to carving up his foes with his hands.

He is always attacking, always looking for the way in. I parry as best I can, holding him back by attacking his only vulnerable part. I see his mind now as it will become in the future – a cauldron of seething, perpetual violence. The brief window I had on another Khârn has closed, and the corrupted half is all that remains. I can hammer away at that, flexing my telepathic muscles as he flexes his unnaturally stimmed physical ones, though I fear my attacks have little bite.

He wades through warp-born attacks that would floor a lesser adversary. I know I must be hurting him, but he brushes it off. Perhaps there is no pain I could inflict that is greater than the one he inflicts on himself.

‘Witch!’ he roars again, coming at me in a barrelling, swaying charge.

I leap to the side, crashing against the metal walls of the cell, only evading his outstretched hands by finger-widths. I unleash everything I have then, a whirling torrent of memory-scorching agony capable of ripping the sanity from a man and dissolving it like magnesium in water.

But there is so little sanity to rip away, and he barely stumbles.

I make use of the gap I created, and throw a heavy punch at his exposed head. My fist connects. It is a well-aimed blow, and impacts with all the force I can deliver. His skull rocks back and blood joins the trails of saliva in the air.

Then I am moving again, evading the furious response. He is like a whirlwind, a morass of hurtling limbs. I feel a heavy thud as his boot rises, catching me on my hip. There is a jarring crack as my pelvis fractures.

I scramble away from him, sprawling face-down to the floor. Another foot connects, breaking the femur in my trailing leg. Out of my armour, I have so little defence against attacks of this quantity and magnitude. The absurdity of my defiance is laughable.

I roll over onto my back, spinning away from a floor-breaking fist-plunge.

Khârn towers over me. Froth spills from his lips, and his eyes bulge from their swollen sockets.

It is my pity that has doomed me. Pity is the only emotion he can no longer tolerate, the one that reminds him of what he once was. If I had not offered to cure him, perhaps I would have lived. Perhaps he would have persuaded me of the righteousness of his cause, and I would have joined the movement that he says will liberate the galaxy.

It is that thought that persuades me I was right to try. As I gaze up into the mask of trembling fervour above me, I see what fate would have awaited me as a part of that dark crusade. He has lost himself, and what remains is now much less than human.

His clenched gauntlet swoops down, hitting me square in the face. The bones, already weakened, crunch inwards. I feel the back of my head drive a dent into the metal floor, and the hot stickiness of the blood in the well as it rebounds out again.

The world tilts, rocking on an axis of nausea. I only dimly feel the second blow, cracking into my ribs. My body becomes a chorus of pain, resounding in discordant polyphony.

Through blood-swelled eyes I see the fist coming that will finish me. It is fitting, to witness the cause of my own death. As a loyal son of the Imperium, I never wished for more than that.

I have time for only one more thought before the end comes.

I gave you the choice, Khârn. When the murder and madness are over, you will have the leisure to reflect on that. You could have turned back.

That knowledge, I know, will haunt him. I dread to think what he will become when his rampage ends and he is forced to confront that.

I can guess. I guess that he will become uncontainable, and will turn on whatever force has sought to channel his rage for its own purposes. None shall master him, for he has lost mastery over himself.

When the fist lands, that is what I am thinking. There is no comfort in it. And, of course, there will be no comfort in anything again.

ARVIDA KEPT MOVING. The dead city was crawling with World Eater kill-squads, roving through the empty hab-blocks like underhive murder-gangs. For the time being, he was ahead of them. He knew Tizca better than them, and remembered the intricate pattern of its streets perfectly. What was more, his future-sense still lingered, warning him away from taking wrong turns and preventing fatal mis-steps.

It wouldn’t last forever. Sooner or later, he’d have to rest, to sleep, to find something to eat. His enhanced constitution could stave off that need for days, but not forever. The Wolves had burned Prospero almost completely to the ground, so there would be meagre hunting ahead.

His only chance of survival would be to stay in the city, evading the predators and searching for some kind of transport off-world. He assumed the Geometricwas still in orbit, though his attempts to send a signal had failed. The ship was not without its defences, though it would struggle against a well-crewed World Eaters warship.

So. The options were limited, and the odds long.

Kalliston had been a fool. Coming back to Prospero had been a predictable error, one caused by excessive faith in the primarch. Arvida had never shared that faith, not even when the Legion had been intact. Whatever cataclysm had occurred here had been beyond Magnus’s power to prevent, so it was folly to retain faith in his stratagems. Any survivors from the sack of Prospero were alone now, a scattered band of warriors cast adrift on the rip-tide of the galaxy like the spars of a ruined galleon.

Arvida had no idea how many of his brothers still lived. Perhaps there were hundreds. Perhaps he was the only one.

He reached the end of a long, shallow climb away from the mass of the central conurbation. Arvida turned then, looking back the way he’d come. He had a view far across the centre of the city. Under the starlight, the fields of glass glittered with a pearlescent sheen. It was beautiful.

The City of Light.

He paused for a moment, lost in the vision of what had once been. Nothing moved. Even the drifting clouds of smog were still, suspended in a rare moment of calm.

Only one certainty remained. Arvida knew, as only a Corvidae could know, that death would not find him on Prospero. That was no consolation for what had been lost, but at least it lent the task of planning his next move a certain urgency.

He would survive. He would discover the true causes of his Legion’s destruction, and live to fight them. He would neither pause nor stumble until everything had been revealed to him, everything that would give him a weapon to employ.

‘Knowledge is power,’ he breathed.

Then he turned away from the scene, and stole quickly back into the occlusion of the ruins. As he went, the dim red light of the angry magma fires caught on his shoulder-guard, exposing the serpentine star set about the black raven-head of his cult discipline.

Then he was gone, a shadow among shadows.