CHAPTER FOUR

Living chairs groaned under the weight of their occupants, their spines stretched and ribs splayed open to form seats large enough to house transhuman warriors.

Five such warriors occupied these seats, their genetically enhanced bodies draped in simple togas of white silk. The sixth and final chair played host to a much smaller figure, barely half the height of the others in the chamber, and so slight as to be a child in comparison. She, too, wore a slip of white material, but any claim to simplicity was undone by the amount of ­jewellery she accented the robe with. She was festooned in gold and silver, bracelets and rings lining her arms and fingers so that they jangled together noisily at the slightest movement of her body. Rubies and emeralds the size of eyeballs dangled from her neck on platinum pendants, pulling her head forward with their weight. They gave her the appearance of an exotic bird.

Xantine idly traced a silk-gloved finger around the knuckle of his own chair. The skin twitched in response to his touch, a shiver of either pleasure or revulsion – he wasn’t sure which.

‘My friends,’ he began, pleased to hear the conversation in the room die immediately. ‘My council. Thank you for joining me here today. I call you because before us lies a difficult choice, so I turn to my most trusted, wise and esteemed peers.’ Xantine inclined his head to each of the figures in the room in turn. ‘Vavisk, my composer. Sarquil, my quartermaster. Qaran Tun, my collector. Torachon, my champion.’ He turned to the woman last. ‘Phaedre, my muse.’

She bobbed her head in acknowledgement. Xantine had seen that head bob when he first found her: stinking, clad in rags, forced to steal snake eggs and trap insects to survive. She had lived in a choking swamp on the edge of a world that had been fought over by warlords whose armies used wooden catapults and blunt iron swords as their weapons, crushing their people into rigid social classes and forcing them to die for miniscule gains in territory.

This society cast Phaedre out when she was young, calling her a witch, or a monster.

They were right.

She was old already back then, much older than she looked now after countless rejuvenat treatments and flesh transplants. The Adored had ravaged her world, and with the battle fought, Xantine had taken to wandering the planet, his soul swollen with excess. He had been grateful of an audience when he found Phaedre, and he revelled in the detail of the destruction.

He expected anger, righteous and delicious, but she had laughed. Her laughter ignited the air, and as the dim sun rose the next morning, as they stood in the burnt ruin of her hovel, Xantine knew he had found his latest muse.

It was these six that Xantine would convince of Serrine’s value, and with these six that he would plan an invasion of the world. The decision had been made, of course. Serrine was too precious, too perfect, to pass up, and besides, after the last disastrous raid – where the Adored had been chased away by Black Legion forces arriving in-system – the planet represented the only realistic choice they had.

More than that, he wanted it. This world could be liberated, its people freed from the drudgery of their lives, with Xantine as their guide.

He began.

‘Our path has led us to Serrine, a planet only recently revealed to us by the weft of the warp. It is, I am delighted to say, a hidden jewel’ – he used the word S’janth had used for it – ‘in the Corpse-Emperor’s crown.’

The youthful figure in the chair opposite spat at the reference, a gobbet of thick fluid launching from his mouth to land on the polished stone floor, where it spread out into a domed puddle, fizzing gently.

Xantine’s glance was withering. ‘Quite, Torachon,’ he said, with mild exasperation. ‘But could we hold such emanations until we are outside of these rarefied halls?’ Torachon lowered his head in a short bow, and Xantine shook off the interruption, raising a hand to Rhaedron.

The shipmaster stepped forward, coughed lightly, and spoke.

‘Serrine is an agri world. Multiple defence lasers surround the void port in its largest city, and the planetary militia – its soldiers taken from the planet’s noble families and made up primarily of their retainers – is well equipped. An elite corps of these soldiers are recorded as being chemically enhanced. Despite auspex scans showing little orbital activity over the past century, these defences appear to be intact.’ She paced as she addressed them, her high-heeled boots tapping out a staccato rhythm. ‘The world’s primary produce is Solipsus, a potent chemical used most commonly in rejuvenat therapies across the Imperium. It also finds common use as a base for many sanctioned stimulants, as well as several of the galaxy’s more popular, and most illegal, narcotics.’

That would get their attention, Xantine thought.

‘Thank you, shipmaster.’ He spread his hands wide, palms open, a gesture that he hoped would display humility. He could never be sure – he had forgotten the feeling. ‘Your thoughts, my senate?’ he asked the room.

Torachon replied first, as he always did. ‘We must take it, your magnificence!’ he shouted, rising slightly from his seat. He was the largest of them, huge even among the genetically enhanced and warp-touched trans­humans that made up the warband. Broad pectoral muscles rippled under his white toga as he strained in his seat.

‘My boy,’ Xantine said, forcing good-natured bonhomie into his tone, ‘this is a place of equals! You do not need to address me as such. A simple “lord” will suffice.’

‘Of course, my lord,’ Torachon said. ‘My desires are yours. As you will it, this world must be ours. I simply wish to taste its splendour.’

Torachon had no deference for etiquette. It was a by-product, perhaps, of youthful exuberance, but it was a trait that Xantine found peculiarly irritating. A newcomer to the Long War, Torachon had not fought at Terra, nor during the Legion Wars, after Horus’ death and the end of his Heresy. He had not fought at Canticle City, where the Black Legion cast a black knife into the heart of the Emperor’s Children, destroying the galaxy’s most beautiful city in a monstrous and unforgivable act of desecration.

He had not even seen the beginning of the Warmaster’s Thirteenth Black Crusade, as Xantine’s former warlord Euphoros threw away his loyalty to the glory of the III Legion to ride Abaddon’s coattails, joining the wider Black Legion as members of the Children of Torment.

Torachon had come to the Adored later, fresh from Fabius Bile’s gene forges, the stink of the Clonelord’s arcane biology raw on his perfect skin. He was a reward, bestowed by Fabius himself for work well done by Xantine’s warband, and as far as prizes from such a creature went, Torachon was a good one. Strong, loyal, and rapid as starlight, he took to the debaucheries of the Adored as a sword to its scabbard: a natural fit for his regal form.

Long white-blond hair framed a symmetrical face that was split by an aquiline nose and embedded with two eyes of deep violet. They were Fulgrim’s eyes, and it thrilled Xantine to command such a perfect reflection of his primarch.

It unsettled him, too, to see such deference from those eyes. Torachon was loyal to a fault. Xantine didn’t know if Bile had bred that loyalty into his creations, or whether it was simply his gene-seed’s natural deference to a superior, but while he may have had his primarch’s eyes, he had none of Fulgrim’s deviousness. Xantine found the younger Space Marine’s guileless acquiescence cloying, like the attentions of a slobbering pet.

But he was useful. Torachon was young – far too young for a warrior to be admitted to the senate, typically, but Xantine had hastened his ascent, engineering his placement as the sixth member of the group after the death of Talon Yannos at the Shrieking Chasm. Power was always held in a light grip amongst the remnants of the III, and Xantine was conscious of the usefulness of a good yes-man in his decision-making body.

Some of the others had grumbled at the appointment, but Xantine – at pains to conceal his involvement in the procedure – pointed to Torachon’s unblemished record and popularity amongst the rank-and-file of the Adored’s hedonists for his martial prowess and good humour.

‘Of course, my boy,’ Xantine said. ‘I will count your vote as cast, making one of our esteemed conclave in favour. An auspicious opening. Who will speak next?’

Ever the cynic, Sarquil cleared his throat.

‘Hah,’ he coughed. Sarquil was never seen out of his Tartaros Terminator plate – not even by his closest allies amongst the Adored’s Terminator cadre – and the dark skin of his head was the only part of his flesh-and-blood body still visible. With one arm, he drummed the fingers of his massive power fist, while the other hung slack, surgically grafted to the firing mechanism of his beloved chaincannon. The top of his skull was covered in rippled silver, the result of the Space Marine’s practice of dripping the molten remnants of his enemies’ wargear onto the bare skin of his head after the close of battle. After generations of raiding, Sarquil now seemed to wear a silver skullcap that shone in the candlelight of the conclave chamber. A hawkish face sat beneath his metal pate, his mouth set in a permanent sneer.

‘A well-equipped army,’ the creature said. ‘Are we well-equipped, Xantine? Are we even acceptably equipped?’

Sarquil’s upper body had been shredded in conflicts long since passed, and his augmetic replacements were sterile and ugly in aesthetic. Meaty pistons in his neck worked as he spoke, their movement exposing raw muscle and veins. Xantine wished his quartermaster would have them replaced with something a little more appealing to look at.

‘We have three thousand four hundred and twenty bolter shells, one hundred and sixty-five lascannon power packs, and seventeen canisters of promethium remaining after our last sortie.’ Sarquil ticked each of these counts off on his splayed hands. ‘In the court of the Dark Prince, could we even call ourselves “equipped” at all?’

Coward, S’janth hissed in Xantine’s head. He has no passion. Let me taste his agony.

Xantine clenched, a bodily pulse of irritation that he aimed at the daemon, its meaning clear: Let me handle this. The Terminator hoarded his ­materiel like a dragon, and prising it from his grasp demanded a lighter touch.

‘My friend,’ Xantine said, his hands open across his chest as if he was welcoming a favoured pet home. ‘These are joyless numbers. What matters is our skill in using such wargear. And on that matter, our armour is impregnable and our weapons never miss, because we are of the Third. Just one of our warriors is the equal of ten thousand mortals.’

‘Tell that to Yannos,’ Sarquil said. ‘He was one of us, and he died just fine.’

‘Yannos was a preening fool, Sarquil, you know that better than all of us.’ The two had almost come to blows when they shared a seat in the Adored’s council, Yannos’ wasteful recklessness and taste for theatrics clashing with Sarquil’s material obsessions.

‘That he was, Xantine, that he was.’ Sarquil chuckled, leaning back in his chair. He flicked his hand as if batting the matter away, but Xantine pressed the issue.

‘Besides,’ Xantine said, turning the topic to the wider conclave, ‘the spoils of this world will stock our armoury for years to come.’

‘If we win,’ Sarquil said. ‘We are not equipped for protracted battle, and every shell we expend on this wastrel world must return to us fivefold in order to justify the penetration of my stockpile.’

My stockpile, Xantine thought, working his blackened mouth into a smile to avoid the frown of annoyance that had picked at his facial nerves. ‘Yes, my friend. Serrine promises us riches unlike those we have feasted upon before,’ he said.

Sarquil snorted, and started counting. ‘I need seventeen thousand one hundred bolter shells, eight hundred and–’

‘Not just our armoury.’ Xantine cut him off, aware that Sarquil, if he had his way, would talk about his hoard until all the stars of the galaxy blazed out. ‘Our slave decks will know once more the crush of mortal flesh, our storage hold will be swollen with new and exotic narcotics, and our decadence will call forth wondrous Neverborn for our archives.’

Xantine turned to Qaran Tun with this last promise. The diabolist sat motionless in his living chair, his back straight and his gaze even. His shaved head was covered in spidery tattoos that seemed to shift in the weak light of the chamber, forming symbols and shapes before fading back into skin the colour of bronze. Once of Lorgar’s XVII Legion, Tun had been compelled to travel far from his brothers, his need to research and catalogue the strangest and rarest daemons driving him to depths of debauchery that even his fellow Word Bearers found unsettling. Now he served with the Adored, his loyalty assured as long as Xantine ensured his obsession was fed.

‘My lord,’ Tun said, his hoarse voice hesitant. Xantine knew his attentions lay elsewhere. Serrine had survived the opening of the Rift – the galaxy-spanning tear in reality the corpse-worshippers called the Cicatrix Maledictum – in relative calm, the whims of the warp clouding it from view and decreeing that this world escape the horrors visited on others who had been less lucky. Xantine, with Tun alongside him, had heard stories of a planet whose billion-strong population had fused together in one agglomeration, so large that it breached the atmosphere. On other worlds the sudden influx of warp energy sent mortal populations into such ecstasies and agonies that entirely new clades and classes of daemon were vomited into existence. Tun was pragmatic, especially compared to the mercurial Emperor’s Children, but he was also an egotist, and ached to be the first to study such esoteric beings.

‘This world will offer a bounty of base attractions to those so inclined.’ Tun looked pointedly at Torachon, but the younger Space Marine appeared not to notice, preoccupied instead by measuring the span of his bicep with a gigantic hand. ‘But I believe our journey must take us into the depths of the Great Rift, where we may better escape the attentions of our former slavemaster’ – Xantine snarled at the reference to Abaddon – ‘and we will find more scintillating pleasures.’

‘More interesting pets for your menagerie, you mean?’ said Xantine, a teasing edge to his question. ‘The Adored do not sally forth to glorious combat purely to fill your vases and amphorae with tattered scraps of monstrosity, Word Bearer.’

Tun blustered, and his tattoos seemed to swirl faster as his hissed responses caught in his throat. Xantine raised a hand to forestall his defence, his choler falling as quickly as it had risen.

‘No, my friend, no matter. I asked for your counsel, and in accordance with our honour, I value it.’

Tun settled into his seat, back rod straight.

‘Two votes for, two against,’ Xantine said. He turned to the only mortal amongst his advisers – though he wondered if she could truly be considered mortal now – and opened his palm in an invitation to speak. ‘My muse, Phaedre. Your counsel, please.’

She took long moments to answer, and when she did, it was with a voice that sounded like the wind through reeds. The crystals and chimes that hung from her ears swayed gently as she spoke, producing a sound like soft rain.

‘How do they live, the people of this world?’ she asked.

‘In luxury, my dear,’ Xantine said in response. ‘They live above the clouds in cities of polished stone and shaped marble, and their children want for nothing.’

She sighed in pleasure. It sounded like a soul escaping at the moment of death.

‘I should like to see this world, Xantine,’ she said, her milky eyes staring into the middle distance as if picturing the treats that awaited them. Her gnarled hands grasped gently at the air as she spoke, reaching for something Xantine couldn’t see.

‘Of course, assuming that my dearest brother concurs with our course of action. Vavisk? Tell me, will we take this prize as our own?’

The sixth and final member of the conclave sat slumped in his living chair, breathing heavily. Each rise and fall of Vavisk’s chest was accompanied by a musical wheeze that jangled Xantine’s nerves and set his jewel-studded teeth on edge. Buzzing, brassy and electric, the life rhythm of the Noise Marine filled the air with static.

Vavisk’s body, so rarely removed from his baroque armour, was a ruin. The wet little mouths along his neck and upper chest opened and closed, their palpating tongues and pursing lips visible under the silk of his already stained toga. It was a cracked reflection of the man Xantine remembered – a warped vision of the most noble of their number.

The Noise Marine heaved another musical breath, and his bass voice burred. ‘No, Xantine,’ he intoned. ‘This world is a distraction.’

Xantine’s hearts fell. He had expected Sarquil’s reticence, even banked on it. Tun, too, was conservative, a natural voyeur rather than a participant. But Vavisk’s denial threw his calculated gambit – engineering the conclave’s vote of approval to offer legitimacy to his plans – into disarray.

Some warlords ruled through vulgar force or displays of power; others stocked their warbands with dullards and dimwits, unthinking slabs of muscle that shouldered the load for their masters.

That was not the way of the Emperor’s Children. Theirs had been a collective of artists and aesthetes, the most cultured of all the Legions. The most cultured beings in all the galaxy. Xantine thrived in company that stimulated him, but such an arrangement brought with it more practical concerns of control. His grip on power amongst the Adored was light, like a rapier held in a fencer’s stance, and Vavisk’s support – typically unwaver­ing – was the foundation on which he could legitimise his demands.

‘My choirs have taken voice, following the song of Slaanesh. It guides us, back to our Legion, and back to our primarch. It leads us beyond this little world.’ Vavisk heaved another sigh. ‘To stop its cadence means death.’

Do you see? S’janth whispered in the depths of his soul. He has forsaken us.

‘Vavisk,’ Xantine said, his honeyed voice betraying something of the genuine hurt he felt. ‘We can make this world sing a new and glorious song. Millions, liberated from the tyranny of the Corpse-Emperor, living free and unfettered, with equal ability to indulge their every whim. All in the name of the Youngest God. All in the name of us.’

‘There is only one song, Xantine,’ Vavisk said, affixing him with a red-eyed glare. ‘It is the song of joy and agony, and it leads us to our brothers.’

Xantine indulged the Noise Marine’s desires as long as it suited him, promis­ing the dream of the unification of the III, but he would only seek out his brothers if he could command them, and there was little chance of that happening as long as Eidolon drew festering breath. The promise of unification, the threat of the Black Legion, his pledge to his dearest brother Vavisk that he would follow the strains of his mindless song – these were all truths of convenience, wielded by Xantine to destabilise and distract, to head off any organised resistance to his command with enemies both real and conjured.

‘My brothers are here, Vavisk. Look around you. A surfeit of sensation for them to gorge on, and you deny them their feast for your dour asceticism? Must we prolong the satisfaction of today for tomorrow’s fleeting promise?’

Vavisk was drawing away from him, from reality, with each passing year, becoming insensate to earthly pleasures as his entire body attuned to the music of the universe – music that only he could hear. His warband, his brothers, Xantine – he was forgetting and forgoing them, becoming a receiver for a truth beyond comprehension.

Xantine opened his palms again. The right hand, he noticed, was once again clenching a fist. ‘How can I convince you, brother?’

‘You cannot, Xantine.’

He folded his hands together, a gesture of finality designed in part to stop the involuntary motion in his right hand.

‘Very well.’

Three votes for. Three against. Time, then, for the hidden blade.

‘In this collective of equals,’ Xantine said, ‘I am your superior. But I am a fair leader, and I respect your judgements, flawed as they may be.’ He shot dark glances at the dissenters as he spoke. ‘But in this moment, my conclave, we are at an impasse. And so we turn to the final member of our group.’

Sarquil spoke up. ‘No! She has no voice here,’ he yelled, outrage in his voice.

Vavisk, too, rumbled his displeasure at what was to come. The mouths on his neck sucked and slathered, the wet sound of a nervous beast breathing hard.

‘Silence!’ Xantine cut them both off. ‘She is perfection given flesh – my flesh – and we will listen to her.’

Qaran Tun, his mood the counterpoint to his cousins’, broke his rigid posture to sit forward, self-control lost as he rubbed his hands together greedily, hunger in his eyes at the daemonic spectacle about to unfold. ‘Let her speak, my lord…’ he whispered.

My darling, Xantine asked inwardly. My body is yours to take.

There was a sensation, like fingers uncoupling from the embrace they shared, and he allowed himself to fall. As he fell, he saw S’janth ascend through a shimmering veil – a barrier that grew thicker and more opaque as he descended below the tides, down, down to the depths of his consciousness.

Xantine’s eyes rolled in his head as he gripped the arms of his chair with transhuman force. The bones broke under his grip, and he heard a scream of agony. It was distant and fading, like a wave on a beach drawing back out to sea, quieter and quieter, until he heard nothing but silence, and saw nothing but darkness.

Those in the room saw Xantine sit forward again, his motions smoother and more graceful than before, his turquoise eyes now shining purple. A long tongue worked blackened lips, and S’janth spoke through Xantine’s mouth.

‘You tarry too long, mortals,’ she said, her influence making their master’s voice more sibilant, more ethereal than Xantine’s deep tone. ‘The Prince of Pleasure aches for my return. Take me to Slaanesh.’

‘It is decided, then,’ Sarquil said, his tone exultant. ‘Xantine’s own pet has turned against him.’

She opened Xantine’s mouth to speak again, but her words were drowned out by a bang that rocked the Exhortation. The slaves staggered, almost falling to the ground, and the chairs wailed as their huge occupants steadied themselves.

Xantine felt the impact, even from his liminal space, and took advantage of S’janth’s surprise to gain a foothold in his own body, dragging his consciousness back to the forefront. He closed his eyes, and when they reopened, they were turquoise again.

‘Ghelia, report,’ Xantine said.

The mound of flesh quivered for a moment, its tapered end slapping the bier that it lay upon as it cogitated. Eventually, it spoke. ‘Combat analysis – incoming fire from surface-to-void defence batteries on the planet below. Damage report – major damage to plasma reactor, major damage to primary engines, major damage to secondary engines, major damage to warp drive, significant damage to weapon systems. Situational report – reactor leak contained, engines inoperable, warp drive inoperable, main weapons inoperable. Recommendation – disable source of incoming fire.’