Mother of Monsters
The ship had done what was required of it, and she was pleased. Euryale stood on the smoking ruin of the Fickle Vault’s bridge, and stared at the smouldering, rune-marked hull of the Wyrmslayer Queen, which she had driven the ship into. She could almost taste the arrogance etched into the metal. For so long they had plied the void, presenting themselves as hunters. As heroes. Only those of the sacred blood knew the truth of women and men such as the Helvintr.
They were murderers, all. It made it easy to turn against the Imperium, to barb and poison every borrowed stratagem and tool against them, knowing that they supported such wanton iconoclasm.
‘You are monsters,’ she breathed. Euryale felt the weight of ages press down upon her. No, more than mere time. The psychic pressure of Endymica was absolute, pulling them into its gravity. It had grown strong, as all the seeds sown by the Lord Radrexxus had sprung to fruition. They were all children of the Starborne, blessed by the hand of the divine that they might spread love and fecundity across all the galaxy. She had shepherded so many of them into the world, guiding them as surely as she had helped to birth them.
From the lowest of the hybrids, to the most exalted of the Trueborn Sons, she had been there. She had watched them emerge into a world of form and matter, bound to inferior, disappointing flesh. Some were still swaddled in human weakness, but the later generations… It was the face of the gods, writ in mortal clay. When she looked upon them, she could not help but weep.
Such weakness must be beyond us, she cautioned herself with a thought. Her hands gnarled and knit about her staff, and she drew herself up. She was tall, when she did not slouch and shuffle, bearing the long, thin bone structure of one born to the void – common amongst the more peripatetic Navigator houses. House Tarescos was one such house, even before its enlightenment. Nomad. Vagabond. Shrouded House. They had borne so many names and insults down the years, before they realised that they no longer mattered. Only the truth mattered, when gifted the eyes to see it.
Generations had been born to the house in its illumination, shaped by the gifts of the Starborne. She was the culmination, the zenith, and now her mind reached out – a guiding light for the exalted children.
+Into the lair of beasts shall forge the faithful!+ she cast forth into the minds of her followers. Behind her, by the door, two guards let out a breathy hiss of adulation as they hunched forward with her sudden psychic intrusion. Their eyes widened behind the dark lenses of their helmets, and their lips drew back from their teeth in monstrous rapture.
‘We are ready, Mother of Sight,’ they breathed as one.
Mother of Sight. An old name. Perhaps even if she had not risen to glory as the magus they would have anointed her with it. She cast her warp-sight forth, able to see the rippling movements of her broodkin as they advanced upon the enemy: pods and ships, boarding craft and repurposed tugs. They poured forth like contagion, a wave of infective promise. She turned, looking at the men who guarded her.
‘You will get me onto that ship. They will need my guidance, before the end.’ She bared her teeth in a smile of triumph. ‘We shall deliver revelation upon the heathen, and turn their works against them. The way of the righteous is beset by the unruly and the deluded, but we shall drag them screaming into the light. Even if it burns them.’ She paused thoughtfully. ‘Even if it kills them.’
The entire world had shifted, unmooring itself. One moment they had been in flight, as true and proud as any spear cast, before reality had crashed down upon them.
This was battle. It was war. They had been braced for the harsh rigours of it, but still this had blindsided them. The ship listed, reeling hard from the assault. Screens were cracked, casting the corridor in a confusion of conflicting light sources. Static buzzed like snow across some, while others were lit green and black. Servitors, wired into their stations – contributing in their esoteric way to air circulation or signals processing – sat slack, idle, dumb and waiting.
Katla pushed herself to her feet, dabbing blood from her forehead with her fingers. In the mad light of the ship’s wounding, it seemed black. ‘I want a damage report!’ she snapped, scooping up her fallen spear and rounding on her huscarls. None of them had a chance to answer. The skirl of sirens was blocked out by the mechanical repetition of a single word.
‘Örlendr! Örlendr! Örlendr! Örlendr!’
Outsider. Alien. The true enemy was amongst them now. Not the hybrid and the mutant, but the beasts themselves. Katla remembered when she had heard the klaxon before; when the ship had been boarded in ages past. When she had earned her scars at the point of the spear.
She had almost died, then, but her thread had held. It would hold now.
‘What is our status?’
‘Dead in the void, my jarl!’ Eirik called. His face was slicked with blood and ash, already beginning to run into the rivulets of sweat that graced his forehead. He wiped it away with the back of one gloved hand.
‘Throne of the Allfather! I want us moving again!’
Gunfire tore through the corridor ahead of them, and the shield wall re-formed with fluid grace. Immediately they began to return fire. Katla spat her hatred, gesturing with her spear even as she drew and braced her volkite. The corridor filled with a sudden rush of crimson energy, the beam carving through the air and reducing the enemy to an ashen smear. The beam’s passing had left a scorched trench in the wall, but she ignored it.
Any price, here and now, was acceptable for victory.
‘We will fall back to the bridge and coordinate from there. We cannot be abroad with the second wave of vermin crashing down upon us.’ She paused, raising her head as though sniffing the air. ‘They are here. Now. On our ship. The masters, not the puppets. The beast in truth! The Devourer comes, and we will see it driven back as we have done before! You have all fought too long, too hard, and too far from home to fall here. Now, is where we stand. We hold them here, and we cast them back as we have ever done. Till none remain!’
‘Till none remain!’ they echoed, clattering weapons against their shields where they were not already firing. The shield wall drew back, step by step, maintaining their volleys of shot. The air was smoky with the stink of burning flesh and powder.
There was something else, though. She could feel it. It saturated everything, as pervasive as the smoke of war. Coiling and writhing within the guts of the ship. They had been compromised enough already, violated within and without, but this was more. She could hear it, carried in the distant timpani of claws upon metal. It drifted through the corridors, and from the vents, presaging ruin.
I told you that the wyrm would hunt you as you have hunted it. That it would find you, and drag you down into the darkness.
Bodil had warned her, with all the cold comfort of prophecy, and she had ignored it. She had laughed in the face of the beast and the abyss, knowing that it was her duty as jarl and as queen to stand against it. The Imperium depended upon true souls, and truer service. Without that the entire edifice would undoubtedly crumble, the Allfather’s will or no.
Katla bit back the thought. She did not fire again, nor show her back to the enemy. The warriors drew closer, their movements fluid. As proud, and as brave, and as strong as any warriors who had plied the ice of Fenris in their youth. They knew that retreat was not surrender, and to take a step backwards was enough to draw the enemy to your spears. She had taught them as much, and life – as ever – had imparted the rest.
The galaxy was vast, and teemed with terrors. These imposters, these monsters cloaked in human skin, were far from the worst of them. They possessed low cunning, the vermin-logic of the betrayer and the saboteur, bred in the shadows because they knew their own weakness. Every stratagem and trick they had employed only drove home their own cowardice. They could not hope to defeat the dynasties in open war, and so they had schemed and plotted, and corrupted. Their every act reinforced the brittle strength of their advantage.
Clawed and grubbed from the dirt they wallowed in.
The thought of them made her sick. Teeming through her ship, defiling each sacred space with the taint of their existence. Slaves, offering themselves up on an altar to false gods. They would die with a zealot’s mania upon their faces, and think it good and honourable.
‘News, my jarl!’ Eirik called, snapping her back to the moment. She looked to him, pausing for a moment to lean on her spear and catch her breath.
‘Are we operational?’
‘The ship ails, jarl, but the iron shipspeakers say that it shall sail once again in true service. The message was not about our progress, jarl. The masters of teleportation speak – your daughter is aboard once more.’
Katla laughed and shook her head. ‘The boy is many things, but he does have a habit of keeping his promises. His father, he was never as reliable.’
‘The young!’ Eirik agreed. ‘They have a way of surprising us.’
‘That they do.’ She smiled grimly. ‘He kept his word, though. That counts for much. As much as the enemy try to divide us, we have kept to our oaths. He has held his nerve through all of this. There is something to be said for that.’
Would I have been the same? Had it been me who had ascended, and taken again the throne and the crown? I would have brooked no word against my path, and burned them all from the stars a dozen times over. My blind anger would have ended us before we even got here.
It was hard to admit her failings, or to countenance a different path. All she had, all she trusted in, was the surety of her wyrd. To whatever end it led her.
‘To whatever end,’ she breathed. Eirik gave her a look, but said nothing. They maintained their dogged pace. Under arches of rune-etched stone and fire-scoured steel they passed, till the dull lumens died away and braziers burned with low, red flames. Smoke filled the air, not with the stench of battle, but with the woodsmoke ache of home.
And we are coming home, Katla thought. Back to the core of it. The struggle that has defined so much of our lives, and our tumult. We are returning, my daughter, to who we are.
Moaning whispers flooded around her, and Astrid felt something grab at her – something wet and writhing, corpse-putrid in the liminal space between worlds. She shrank from it, flailing out against the coiling touch of cold and fire, everything and nothing, as the whispering became laughter, became–
The hum of engines, vaster than worlds, as the world became solid again. Astrid panted, scrabbling at the decking. She felt bile rise, heavy and hot in her throat, but she swallowed it down. Cold air assailed her lungs as she drew deep, halting breaths. She could feel frost clawing at her, catching upon her teeth. She thrust her hands forward, and pushed up and onto her feet.
‘The bastard,’ she snarled. The adepts who had been tottering closer on their iron feet staggered momentarily, as though afraid they would have to flinch away from her wrath. ‘When this is over, there will be a reckoning. None set my path, save me!’
‘Honoured mistress, wolf-blessed daughter, we have reached communion with your mother – our jarl, may she be anointed in the sight of the Machine-God – and bear her will. You must meet her upon the bridge. The enemy’s coils tighten about us.’
‘Then I will go,’ she growled, ‘as is my duty.’ Her breathing had settled into a ragged sigh. She knelt and reached for her spear, scooping it up into her grasp. ‘There are beasts yet to be slain.’