The Soul’s Voyage
It did not do to think of the warp as an old friend, and yet it was a necessity that starfarers became accustomed to it. This was the great contradiction which had haunted mankind in every questing journey from its birthworld. That the reliable method of traversing the stars was to dive into a sea of poison. Of damnation. No matter how familiar it became, it was always other. One did not break bread in hell.
Erastus had tried not to think of it, but the thought haunted him. He had made many previous warp transits, all without incident. He had never been victim to a Geller field collapse, or any form of lesser reality desynchronisation. Throne willing he never would be. Days had passed into weeks, and weeks into months. Still without incident. He had watched from the bridge as his crew fell into well-drilled routines beneath the ever-shifting lumens, the simulated day and night cycle which continued to underpin their lives. Often, as now, he had taken to running laps of the ship’s corridors. First it had been in the company of the dynasty’s troops, and now it was frequently alone.
The corridors rang with his footfalls, the sound carrying through the vast body of the Soul, to sing throughout its hallways. He was alone. As alone as he could be in a construct as immense as a starship. His fatigues clung to him, damp with sweat. He reached out and braced himself on the cold wall of the passageway, trying to catch his breath. He closed his eyes. Waited. Braced.
The first of the attacks swung from around a corner with a sudden scream, lashing out with a clenched fist.
Erastus parried, batting the punch to one side as he moved into the assailant’s guard. He drove his own fist into the attacker’s side, feeling the resistance of tensed muscle and armour padding. He gritted his teeth, turning and slamming his elbow into their stomach even as another set of arms wrapped around his neck.
He swivelled and kicked out, bracing his leg against the wall as he smashed his second attacker into the wall behind. He brought his foot down, braced, and hunched forward. He grabbed his assailant’s arm as he did, and heaved their weight over his body. They tumbled, hitting the ground with a yelp muffled by their combat helm. Two more of their number bled into the corridor, a sudden presence that he turned to confront.
Erastus saw the silver flash of the blade as it arced for his stomach. He felt pain spiral through him as it clipped his side. He snarled, aiming his next blow squarely for the knifeman’s throat. There was a crunch, and a wet choking sound as they doubled over. Erastus drew back his knee and thrust it into the assassin’s faceplate. The lenses shattered in a flood of crimson glass tears. He allowed himself a grin, as he spun round to face the last attacker –
And found himself face to face with the snub barrel of a stubber.
‘Epsilon?’ the faceless helm asked, tilting slightly as it advanced. The gun did not move, or waver.
‘Epsilon,’ Erastus allowed. The assassin pressed a button on their vambrace, and the distant sound of an alarm went out. Erastus let himself sag. ‘That was better, though,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t it?’
‘It sufficed,’ they said as they reached up and unhooked their helm. Captain Zofia Taravel smiled coldly. Her features were pinched and pale, in contrast with her clipped dark hair. She, as captain of the Lamertine Shipguard, had taken a personal hand in Erastus’ training – ensuring both that he was protected throughout the transit, and that he was able to defend himself should they be absent. The rudiments of sabre and shot had gradually evolved into these surprise ambushes during his physical training.
Erastus knelt, scooping up the fallen knife and examining its keen edge. He could still see where the blood lay along its blade, putting him in mind of his father’s transfixed corpse.
‘You’re getting bolder,’ he said. ‘Not that I’m complaining, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Zofia said with a smirk, as she reached out and grabbed the hilt of the blade. She tugged it from his grasp, like a parent disarming a child – an indulgent gesture that brought a raised eyebrow from Erastus.
‘You still don’t trust me? As a king and as a warrior?’
‘I prefer to err on the side of caution, my lord,’ she said simply. ‘Evelyne, I could trust – but even then, only after the passage of years. Old familiarity. You would have the same rapport, the same synchronicity, with any of your tutors. You ran with diplomatic envoys and trade moguls. She ran with former generals and storm troops.’ She shrugged. ‘Different tools for different jobs. Sometimes you need a blade, sometimes you need a melta.’
Erastus furrowed his brow. ‘And… which am I?’
She laughed and shook her head as she watched him. ‘I’m not quite sure what you are yet, Erastus. What matters is that we make sure you can do some sort of damage.’
He leant back against the wall. ‘I’m not an idiot, Zofia,’ he sighed. ‘I know that the odds are against us. My father was murdered, in our own place of power. In his guarded sanctum. That bodes ill. At best it is a vendetta against the Compact, and at worst it’s a personal attack on our family. Take out my father, and they think we’ll be easy pickings. Especially with Ev dead and gone.’ He shook his head. ‘No heir, no leadership, and then they take us apart piecemeal. But who stands to gain?’
‘Any one of your rivals within the Compact,’ she said bluntly.
‘I was thinking in broader terms,’ he said. ‘It could be anyone. Another dynasty who didn’t answer the summons. One of my father’s many rivals. System warlords, or trade cartels? The Church, perhaps, if the involvement of the Astraneus is anything to go by.’
Zofia scoffed, and Erastus looked at her questioningly.
‘Those hidebound fanatics? You can’t honestly consider them as your prime suspects?’ she asked, shaking her head. ‘They’re capable voidsmen, but theirs isn’t the way of the hidden blade. I can’t see it being them.’
‘I have my doubts, I admit,’ he said with a sigh. ‘But until we know more, we have to maintain an open mind. If nothing else comes to light then I plan to send missives of summons once the journey is over. Have them attend me at Endymica, and plead their case. Perhaps I will be lenient, but in time, I pray, it will deliver the truth to us.’
‘As you will,’ she said and bowed her head. ‘I take it we’re doing this again tomorrow?’
Erastus nodded. ‘Same routine as before.’
‘Until then, my lord.’ She turned on her heel and walked off into the corridors, her fellow guards following close behind. He touched his fingers to his wound, wincing as he did so. It was shallow, and had mostly stopped bleeding.
He gingerly stretched, and then began his steady progress through the ship again.
It was ill luck and foolishness to gaze, unshielded, into the warp. Mortal minds were not equipped for such sights, and the risks it carried could scar the very soul. Vast shutters were lowered at immaterial transit, to protect the crew from the roiling seas of madness.
Egeria had no such luxury.
The Navigator mutation existed for this purpose alone, to parse the tides of insanity and find the paths through the fire. She had been bred for this, and trained to the exacting standards of House Vas Kastebor.
‘It is one thing to see with the eye, child. You must train yourself to see with your very being.’ Her father, Gaius Remus Vas Kastebor, had been an exacting instructor. She remembered every lesson – delivered in his monotonous rattle, and reinforced by sharp raps from an instructive cudgel. Their spire upon Vandium had been a cruel and sterile cradle, where they lived and served at his increasingly erratic whim.
Egeria rarely thought of home. Only in the moment, in the worst of warp eddies, did her thoughts guide her back to the warren-world of her inception. The dark and winding tunnels and atmos-cages which had linked each spire to its kindred – all the way to the heights of her house’s ocularum. There had been beauty there, and happiness for a time. She had enjoyed the company of her siblings, and the attentions of the house serfs. She had been kind, then.
Life, as ever, had had other plans. Her father’s spiral into madness had intensified, till all that remained was to lock him away like a filthy secret. She had been far down the line of succession: the sixth child, and second daughter besides. It was to men such as her brother Maximus, or even Petrus, to rule. She would serve, as was her duty, and one day contribute to the genetic tapestry of some other house.
She sighed despite herself, and the chamber shifted in sympathy as though anticipating her needs. She would have fluttered a hand at it, had they not been locked to the arms of her throne, white-knuckled with the interpretation of the ship’s passage.
She felt it, and she cursed that her father had been right. She felt it with her entire being. Every moment within the sea of souls was a low burr of agony, crawling along her spine as the immaterium tested the Geller fields, again and again. The relentless attempts at erosion, the way that the ocean ate away at the shore… It might take a thousand years, but inevitably it would creep in.
And a thousand years was the most optimistic of estimates.
Their course was a reasonably stable one. Endymica had been a fortress-world for a reason, set at a confluence of active warp routes whose use extended all the way back to pre-Strife epochs. The journey should, Throne-willing, only become perilous as they drew nearer to the new boundary which had infected the Imperium. The wall of fire and death and screaming which the mind-blinded called the Great Rift.
She shook her head, and the chamber shuddered again. Her eyes were fixed forward, as chaos resolved into patterns, and the ways ahead became clear.
The Great Rift. How short the term fell. As though it were a mere chasm to be leapt in a single bound, and not a devourer of the very spirit.
She looked away, her eyes seeking the golden light of the Astronomican and the calm it cut through the squalls. Even now, forty years into her service aboard ships, it never failed to bring a tear to her eye. It had been gone, not too long ago. The Days of Blindness had been a physical pain for her, for all who bore the warp-sight. It was like losing the sun. The thought of drawing too near to what had facilitated it made her worry.
‘I will not fail you,’ she whispered to herself in the gently shaking silence of her sanctum. ‘I shall see us through the storms.’