CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The structure was ancient, and built to last. Its strange xenos material had weathered millennia of erosion from sand and wind, and even now, with the Imperium’s strongest weapons deployed in its vicinity, it still stood. It offered a pocket of calm in the chaos. The Emperor’s Children of 37th Company’s Rapier Squad moved through it, taking combat blades and power swords to wounded Salamanders, Iron Hands, and Raven Guard that had crawled to the structure for cover. There was a glee in their murder, and the vox rang with boasts and crude badinage.

‘I’m taking a trophy from this one, he’s a big bastard!’

‘He tried to stab me as I cut his throat. I was too quick, though.’

‘Leave this one alive a moment longer, I want to watch him suffer.’

How strange such speech was, once.

Xantine followed, watching the Emperor’s Children, as they took enjoyment in their grisly work. The structure finally cleared of living Space Marines, the squad reassembled.

‘Good cut, Rapier Squad,’ the sergeant said. ‘Reload, and we move to the next objective on my–’

Vavisk raised his bolter, and shot his sergeant in the back. The bolt travelled through the gap between the back of the Space Marine’s torso armour and his belt, severing his spine immediately. He took a moment to fall, body separated in two, but Vavisk didn’t stop. He raked the weapon across the remaining Emperor’s Children in the squad, severing arms and crippling legs, blowing out intestines.

Auctilion was the fastest, and tried to raise his own bolter. Xantine knew him: he was the only one of the squad to hail from the same recruiting world as Xantine and Vavisk, but he had arrived with the bulk of the Legion some months before the deployment on Isstvan V. He was fresh-faced, with a shock of white hair and a hairless chin. He smiled easily, and enjoyed poetry.

Vavisk shot him in the head. His helmet disintegrated as the mass-reactive round exploded in the depths of his skull, and the purple-armoured corpse slumped to the black sand.

‘Stop!’ Xantine shouted. He was drowned out by the sound of mass-reactive explosions as Vavisk continued to pump shells into his brothers’ injured forms.

‘Stop!’

Quandros crawled forward, hands digging into the sand, his left leg a stump from the knee down. Vavisk put three bolt-shells up the length of his spine, blowing out his backpack reactor. His torso exploded with a sound like an engine igniting.

‘Stop!’

Vavisk swivelled and pointed his bolter’s barrel at Xantine’s chest. He did not pull the trigger. Xantine looked into the green eyes of his brother’s helmet, before reaching up and releasing the seals on his own. He slid the helmet off, slowly, to reveal his face. Aquiline nose, high cheekbones, bright eyes. His long hair hung over the gorget of his polished war plate. So much like his father.

‘Vavisk. Brother. I do not know what has happened here, but I know that the choice we make in this moment will determine the course of the rest of our lives.’ He raised a hand, too fast, and Vavisk backed up, keeping his bolter trained on Xantine’s torso. He slowed the motion, showing he was no threat. ‘We are both Children of the Emperor. You can kill me for the sin of being just like you, and then you can die, killed by our brethren for your treachery.’ Vavisk stiffened at that last word, and Xantine carried on quickly. ‘Or we can trust that our father knows best for us. Whatever he has seen, whatever he knows, it must be worthy of our trust, if he can turn against his closest brother.’

Vavisk’s hand faltered, and Xantine knew he would survive this day. He reached out, and placed a hand gently on the bolter’s barrel. He could feel its heat through his reinforced gauntlets.

‘Nothing happened in this place, Vavisk. We were ambushed, our squad killed. We fought heroically, and slew our enemies. True Emperor’s Children, the greatest of all of the Legions.’ He pushed the bolter down, until it aimed at the black sand. ‘Trust in our father, Vavisk. Trust in me.’

Vavisk lifted his head. He dropped his bolter, and put his hands to his own helmet, sliding it from his skull. Dark eyes in a dark face, cheeks wet with tears. ‘I will follow you, brother. I will follow you wherever you take me.’

On the battlefield, Fulgrim cradled the severed head of his beloved brother. ‘What have I done?’ the primarch of the Emperor’s Children howled.

‘You have damned us, Father,’ Xantine said. ‘You have damned your sons.’

Lordling led the escape from the safehouse. The giant was not a stealthy presence, but he was a formidable fighter, and with tyranids dropping from the sky, Xantine felt that the element of surprise had been lost. The trio came out in the shadow of the Cathedral of the Bounteous Harvest, and paused, determining the best way to reach the Exhortation.

The streets around the cathedral still bore the scars of the Blood­thirster’s arrival, and the cathedral itself still emanated a dirge from the Noise Marines housed within. No longer protected by ferrocrete walls, the sound assaulted Xantine’s eardrums, and he thought of his absent brother Vavisk.

That thought turned to resolve, and Xantine placed a hand on Lordling’s arm once more. ‘Another task, brother. I hope you can perform as admirably as you did the last time I asked. You will protect her.’ He pointed to Cecily, and Lordling nodded deeply. Xantine caught the giant’s eyes again, staring deep into their black depths. ‘She must make it to the Exhortation. Do you understand?’

Lordling blinked, and Xantine asked again. ‘Do you understand?’ Lordling nodded again, deep, with something like resolve.

He turned to Cecily. ‘Go with Lordling. Use your powers to make it through. I will meet you both at the Exhortation.’

‘What?’ she exclaimed. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I will join you soon, but first, I need to find my brother.’ Xantine looked up, and saw the atmospheric flares of yet more spores. They were falling across the planet. ‘Go!’ he bellowed, and they moved, making for the closest sub-elevator to the undercity.

Xantine turned and headed for the cathedral.

The glassaic window was beautiful. Finished with gold leaf atop its coloured panes, it depicted the planet’s grass fields, pink and unending, underneath a sky of blue, flecked with silver stars. It was thousands of years old – ­predating the creation of the haze layer after millennia of sap refinement – and somehow had escaped the ravages of a civilisation now given licence to indulge its basest wants and desires.

It shattered into a thousand pieces as Xantine put his pauldron through it. The rest of the Space Marine followed a moment later.

Xantine had gifted the cathedral to Vavisk, and it had come to serve as a home for his cadre of Noise Marines. In the years since, the interior of the Cathedral of the Bounteous Harvest had remained much as it had been when the Adored arrived on the planet, albeit with some minor modifications. The vast pipe that rose from the undercity was now fed by golden tributaries: conduits that stretched down to pods placed on the patterned cathedral floor. From these pods dangled cables and tubes that connected to ports and orifices on the bodies of six Noise Marines – less than a third of those who had once made up Vavisk’s choir.

They played on, these warped figures, the music of the apocalypse infinitely more fascinating than the sudden intrusion of a figure from their recent past. At their head, there was a large golden pod that looked out across the room – a space for a grand conductor, able to guide his orchestra in their song.

The pod stood empty.

Xantine ran to the closest pod, and grabbed the Noise Marine – his name had been Tragus – by the shoulders.

‘Where is he?’ Xantine screamed over the music. ‘Where is Vavisk?’

The Noise Marine’s eyes rolled in his skull. They were atrophied things, milky white and shrivelled. His nose, too, had collapsed, falling in on itself as the warp changed his body to focus purely on his auditory senses. His mouth hung open, limp and useless.

Xantine shook him, so hard that he thought his neck might snap. ‘Help me, child of the Adored. I am your warlord. You know me – I am Xantine, brother of Vavisk.’ Tragus looked past him with dead eyes. ‘Where is he!’ Xantine screamed again, into Tragus’ fluted ears. A flicker of recognition, and the song changed, slowly at first. It took on a sadness, a sense of finality, and Xantine, a self-confessed musical connoisseur, heard lyrics in the music.

‘He is gone,’ the song said.

Tyranids were as alien to the Neverborn as they were to humankind. They existed in the warp not as the warm, vital presences that humans represented, but as a shadow. Cold, dark and unknowable. S’janth derived little pleasure from killing them.

Her fellow Adored seemed to be enjoying themselves a little more. She fought alongside Euratio, who screamed in glee. The Raptor Vordarelle jetted over slashing claws, firing bolt pistols down at the mass of alien flesh that writhed beneath him. Kaedes stood below, twin chainswords purring as he pirouetted through quadrupedal xenos, carving them into blood-squirting chunks.

She had left the fighting initially to the reorganised militia, but it soon became clear that this was no random incursion, but a full-blown invasion. Then, she had gathered her remaining elite warriors – her Sophisticants and the remnants of the Adored – and decided to make her stand in front of the central council building.

It was a good place to fight. Torachon’s hardcoded training had told her that, dredged up from the Space Marine’s memories. They occupied high ground, protected from the larger bioforms that spewed torrents of acid or gouts of flame by strong walls. Only smaller strains could reach them, and the Space Marines had forced them into kill-zones, ripe pickings for bolter and chainsword.

Yet still they came, climbing over the bodies of their fallen to slash with claws and bite with teeth. S’janth met a four-armed monstrosity in combat, each of its limbs curved into wicked claws that dripped with ichor. A single blow would have carved a mortal in half, but her combined form gave her a preternatural strength, and she parried the beast’s first strike on her power sabre. Ducking inside its reach, so close she could see the nictitating membranes of its eyes, she placed both hands against its chitinous ribs and pulled, splitting the beast open like some ocean crustacean.

‘Die!’ she screamed in exultation, but just as soon as she had let its bisected body fall, another had taken its place.

Legs and claws, teeth and eyes – the city was filling with the shadow in the warp. The cult had brought this endless enemy. She had destroyed its leader, long ago, but she had not scrubbed the stain from this world, and it had grown, like the shadow, until it eclipsed everything.

It was too soon. S’janth had tried to make Serrine a tempting target, restarting its harvest in an attempt to draw pirates, heretics, or smugglers to the world – at which point she would have taken a ship and sailed into the Eye of Terror to join her sisters.

We succeeded in that first stage, Torachon noted with perverse amusement from inside her consciousness. Too tempting indeed.

A tall tyranid strain fired a gob of hissing matter in her direction. It caught her on the pauldron and caught fire, burning with a phosphorescent light. She shot it neatly through the thorax, and it slumped, leaking unidentifiable fluids. Three more took its place, their weapons launching more gobs of matter from undulating sacs on their side.

‘Retreat!’ she called to her warriors, the Sophisticants and the remnants of the Adored. Vordarelle’s jump pack had been slashed open, and the turbines had failed spectacularly, launching the Raptor over the wall and into the streets below. His pink armour disappeared into the heaving mass of tyranids a moment later, ceramite discarded and his meat and bone broken down to form so much biomass.

‘Retreat!’ she called again.

‘Where do we go?’ Kaedes asked, his chainswords starting to slow with the weight of gore they held.

A light across the shadow, suddenly. She felt Phaedre touch her mind: a psychic message, sent from far away.

+I have found her,+ the witch said.

‘To the Exhortation!’ S’janth called. ‘To my ship!’

The Exhortation was a scar on the perfect pink landscape, black and cancerous amidst the living grass. The slave shanty towns persisted, but only barely. Amongst them, the ship’s crew eked out an existence, their affiliation apparent from their filthy uniforms. They stared at Xantine with sunken eyes as he pushed through their number. There was no hero’s welcome, nor any resistance that marked these men and women out as Torachon’s disciples. The crowds simply parted in silence as he moved through them, their people too weary to present a physical reaction.

The interior of the ship was cold and dark, the once ripe scent of Ghelia’s early decay now replaced by the cloying, sweet smell of late rot. No lights guided his path, but he knew the path well; he had walked it a thousand times. To the observation deck, to escape this world.

The observation deck was empty, filled only with the stink of rotting flesh. No, that was not true. As Xantine stepped onto his command deck, he spotted Cecily, lying prone on the carpeted floor, in front of the main viewports.

Phaedre hovered over her, the witch’s face locked into a cruel smirk. He had once enjoyed that smirk. It enraged him now.

‘Phaedre,’ he said, with mock formality.

‘Xantine,’ she responded. ‘My former master.’

‘Where is Lordling?’

‘Below. It was easy to conjure ghosts for the giant to fight. You must have been desperate, to put such an asset in his hands.’

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

‘Is it not obvious?’ Phaedre asked. ‘No, you were always a little slower than your peers. I will spell it out for you. I need this mortal. We need this mortal, my new master and I, to escape this world.’

‘You cannot have her.’

Phaedre laughed, and he smelled burnt flesh in the air.

‘You forget, Xantine, I knew your mind first, before you took this little wretch in. I know that you need her too. But you have lost, Xantine. You stand alone, in a dead ship, on a dying world. Your daemon left you. Your brothers left you. Your power left you.’ She giggled again. ‘Even you must be able to see that?’

Anger flared in his mind. ‘You are wrong, Phaedre,’ he said, and took a step towards the witch.

‘Ah-ah!’ Phaedre trilled, holding her finger up to forestall him. ‘I will burn her to ash if you come any closer, and then no one will get what they want.’ Flame climbed up her fingers, blackening the skin.

Xantine changed tack. ‘Come with me,’ he said, holding his palm forward as if to take Phaedre’s own hand. ‘If you know me, you know that I understand well the temptations of mortal souls, and I will forgive your indiscretions. Join me once more as my muse.’

‘You are nothing,’ she spat. ‘I serve another now – another far more powerful, far more wonderful than you will ever be.’ Her eyes burned with the same flame that licked at her fingers, and she stared hate at him, so hot that he thought he might catch light.

She did not notice Cecily stir. Xantine resisted the urge to flick his turquoise eyes downwards, keeping them locked instead on the witch he had taken from the swamp.

‘You will always be my muse, my dear,’ Xantine said. ‘Nothing more.’

Cecily sank her teeth into Phaedre’s ankle. The flame in her hand guttered and died as she screamed in pain. It was a momentary distraction, but it was all Xantine needed to draw the Pleasure of the Flesh, and shoot Phaedre through the heart with the pistol. The mass-reactive round travelled through the witch’s tiny body as if it was paper, and she fell, her bracelets and jewels falling like stars to the floor below.

Cecily could still taste Phaedre’s blood in her mouth – dry and acid, like poison – and she retched, spitting yellow bile onto the spongy floor. ‘Where am I?’ she asked.

‘The Exhortation,’ Xantine said from the shadows in the darkened chamber.

‘Thank the Throne,’ she said, drawing herself to her feet. ‘And thank you, my lord, for saving me. Why didn’t she kill me?’

‘They wanted to use you up. They said that you were their only option to escape this world, and that they would consume you in the process. Kill you, to save themselves.’

Cecily spat again, clearing her mouth of Phaedre’s blood, and locked eyes with Xantine.

‘The problem is,’ Xantine continued, ‘they were right.’

Cecily felt nothing as Xantine slipped the silver helmet over her head. The device emitted a gentle thrum as it powered up.

‘It is better this way,’ Xantine said. ‘I did not forget our pact, and now this is the only way to fulfil it. You will see the stars.’

Xantine stood, and placed his hands behind his back. He turned from Cecily, averting his gaze as the thrumming noise grew in volume. He heard her gasp – in pain, surprise or fear, he did not know. For the first time, he did not want to know.

‘It is time,’ he said, rising to his feet. ‘Qaran Tun was right about one thing. It is an honour.’

Xantine left the observation deck for the last time as Cecily’s body started to change.

Xantine keyed his vox to an old network, one he had not used in years.

‘Crew of the Exhortation,’ he called. ‘I am Xantine, magnificence of the Adored, paragon of the perfect Third, and I call upon you all to fulfil your oaths to me. The ship lives once more, thanks to my efforts. This world is doomed – it has failed me – but you may leave it at my side. Return to your posts, and I will grant you clemency. Be quick, and stop for nothing, and together we may leave and sail into a glorious future.’

He keyed the vox off and made his way down to the Exhortation’s boarding ramp, as the flesh around him thrummed into something like life.

The grass told its secrets at night. It was night, now. She couldn’t see the darkness, she couldn’t see the light, but she knew it, somehow.

She could feel. She felt the grass as it whispered. It tickled her body and caressed her skin, wafting and waving fronds tracing the softest touches as they moved with the wind.

You are safe, the grass whispered. You are home.

But she wasn’t complete. She was empty. She was cold. There had been hundreds, once, thousands, living with her. Inside her.

She pushed these memories back. They weren’t hers. Were they?

She knew the smell of grass, she knew the kiss of the breeze. She knew the cities – one above, one below. She knew their streets. She moved through them, a small, hidden thing.

But she was huge.

She felt the grass. It lifted her, with thousands – millions – of arms, raising her up, up, up. She moved with it, labouring at first, as if waking her body after a long sleep. Synapses fired, muscles contracted, the pleasure of movement, and she was soaring. She saw the haze, like unrefined sap, pink and unblemished, and she made for it.

She expected it to be hard, a barrier blocking her from the sky, but it welcomed her with the faintest kiss. She swam in its perfectness for a time, wisps and eddies of pink dancing along the length of her body, until the pastel colour thinned and darkened, and she could see the sky. The whole sky.

She had never seen the sky.

She had seen the sky a hundred thousand times. She had sailed in its blackness, and ached now for its dark. It had been so long, and the sensation of the void was delicious, cold and fresh on her hull.

Hull? She meant body. Didn’t she?

Her body. She knew its counters, knew its strengths. It was her. She tried to move her arms, her legs, to wiggle fingers and toes, to feel for creaking knees and muscular shoulders, to look for the scar across the back of her right wrist, the birthmark on her stomach.

She could not. Her body was unfamiliar. Not just unfamiliar, but impossible. Things moved within it, things with minds and wills of their own. They talked to her, these things, told her what to do, where to go. She tried to close her eyes, but she had no eyes, not any more. She could see everything.

Cecily – what remained of her consciousness – screamed in terror.

Fewer than a hundred souls had made their way back to the ship by the time the Exhortation’s engines came to life. He listened to the sublight drone, and hoped that fewer than a hundred was enough.

Xantine stood on the boarding ramp and watched as the ship began its journey from its resting place. Firing jets of plasma that burned the grass and blasted away the shanty towns that had grown up around the ship, it started to rise. Slowly, hesitantly at first, until its belly lifted clear of the fronds below. Xantine turned to make his way to the bridge.

The impact caught him between the shoulder blades, and he fell to the ramp’s metal surface. He heard a voice over the dirge of the engines and the whip of the wind, and turned his body, facing the world he was leaving behind.

‘Xantine!’ Torachon howled.

The young Space Marine stood further down the Exhortation’s ramp, his sabre held at his side. He was tall now – taller than Xantine remembered him – his armour purple, trimmed with shining silver, and his hair as white and pure as Fulgrim’s had been. It rippled and swirled around his head, caught in the currents from the plasma wash.

‘You believe you can escape me?’ Torachon roared. ‘Insolent worm. This is my ship, my world.’ He strode towards Xantine, firing a bolt pistol from his hip.

The first few shots pinged from Xantine’s armour, but one detonated on his shoulder, dropping him to his back. He felt the pain immediately, and smelled the blood a few moments later.

Unable to draw himself to his feet, Xantine raised his rapier, aiming it towards the oncoming Torachon.

‘I gave you what you desired, daemon – a weak and willing host. You should thank me.’

‘You gave me nothing,’ Torachon spat. ‘Everything I am, I have taken. I am S’janth, tempter of worlds, blessed of Slaanesh…’

‘Oh come on, then,’ Xantine interrupted, twirling his sword in his hand. He had a chance. If he could bait them into an overconfident strike, he had strength left to parry – all he needed was one counterstroke. ‘Kill me, if you can. I tire of your endless speeches.’

‘I will,’ Torachon said, closing the gap between them. ‘And I will enjoy it.’

A noise like a Titan’s war-horn blared, and Xantine almost dropped the rapier, as concentrated sound blasted Torachon in his silver breastplate. Xantine turned, and saw the man who had been known as little Ferrus, his sonic blaster raised and keyed to unleash the music of the apocalypse upon Torachon. Sound crackled across the space between the two warriors of the III like lightning, compressing air and ripping at the fabric of reality as it travelled.

A direct blast should have been enough to cripple the warrior, to scramble his organs inside his body, but Torachon was swollen with the daemon’s power. The force hit like a punch instead, concussive, knocking him off balance. He staggered on the ramp as the Exhortation climbed higher, closer to the pink haze that lay low above the planet’s surface.

Vavisk stepped forward as he fired, keying the sonic blaster through frequencies as the music rose in volume. Xantine’s vision wavered in response, sensation and reality warping in the presence of such a weapon.

There was another sound, too, discernible amongst the cacophony. Vavisk was singing. A hundred voices from his dozen mouths joined the chorus, channelling the discordia, the rapture, the maraviglia. Xantine’s brother sang of the purest sensations: despair and joy, love and hatred, pride and envy, raising his voice to Slaanesh above.

Torachon’s massive body lurched, buffeted by impossible forces, but still he maintained his balance. It would take more than a single sonic blaster to destabilise his possessed body.

Xantine weighed his rapier in his good arm. The weapon had been fashioned from the sliver of the spear that had contained S’janth, a reminder of her captivity that she had railed against. It was a good weapon, finely balanced and wickedly sharp, but he would find another.

He hurled it, point first, at Torachon. It flew, straight and true, its mono­molecular blade piercing Torachon’s burnished silver armour through the breast. It travelled through skin and muscle, organ and bone, and the force of it lifted the body that contained both the daemon and the Space Marine from the ramp of the Exhortation and out into the pink clouds.

They were not alone as they fell. They shared every sensation. The cold kiss of the frigid air, the gentle touch of the pink clouds, the sharp agony of the blade buried in their skin, and the hot rage that boiled in their stomach.

They were not alone in the sky, either. Tyranid spores fell alongside them, amalgams of flesh and bone and chitin, a similar shade of pink to the grass that their organic passengers would soon consume.

Nor were they alone as they died: together, as their broken body was consumed by xenos beings that barely registered the difference between muscle and bone and the grass that surrounded it. The daemon had been severed from her warp form by aeldari seers millennia before, and with this death – this final, ignominious death – there would be no resurrection. Weak and winnowed, something on the other side would claim her power for themselves.

These xenos cared not for her deeds and glories, nor the civilisations that had worshipped her, or the cultures she had debased. And the one man who had known these things, who had shared his body and her power, would never speak her name again, as long as he would live.