Of what really happened that day in the orbit of the mine-world Chiaro, only those responsible could properly tell. But they were of the Holy Inquisition and, with but a single exception, they were answerable to no one.
‘
Blackseed
has been planted,’ said one hooded figure to another in a clear, toneless voice.
They sat across from each other at a table of polished wood, rich and dark, the grain unnaturally symmetrical. No Imperial iconography here. It was a simple room, lit by simple oil lamps with simple iron fixings. There were no glasses or dishes on the table, no tapestries or portraits on the walls. No need for such. This place, after all, and everything in it, was mere psychic projection. The figures, too, were projections only, in truth seated many light years away from each other, brought together by the life-sapping toil of the psychic choirs under their command. Nothing here was real save the words they shared and the wills behind them. Here in this mutual mindscape, no other could intrude without detection. No other could hear their words, for they were spoken in secrecy. And that was well.
‘Fruition?’ asked the other.
‘Four years for a ten per cent conversion, given the reported gestation times. Nineteen years absolute if the magos’s projections prove accurate. Monitors are in place, naturally, but if there are timeline problems…’
‘You’ll have the new assets you need. The Watch Commander may grudge it, but he will not refuse. The new accord bears your personal seal as arranged. The Deathwatch knows what it gains. You have other assets in place, of course.’
‘Some of my best, and I’m positioning others now.’
‘Nothing to which you are too attached, I hope.’
‘You taught me better than that.’
A nod, acknowledging the compliment. ‘You do me credit as ever. May it always be so. If
Project Blackseed
bears fruit, your most fervent hope may be that much closer to reality.’
‘Or it may not. In either case, your continued support–’
‘Mutually beneficial, my old friend, as I’ve assured you before.’
‘Even so, I would affirm my commitment once more if you would hear it.’
A raised hand. ‘Your loyalty is not in doubt. We both know the sacrifices that must be made. Let the opposition believe you work against me. Small wounds I gladly bear for the greater prize. You have done well in laying false tracks. They follow where we send them. They shall not discover their error until it is too late. By then we will have taken them apart from the inside, and our benefactor will rise to power unopposed.’
‘You mentioned new players.’
‘Middle-rankers. Nothing that need concern you yet. They play the long game, as we do, hoping to establish their own candidate. Others who share our
outlook
are already on hand to check them. Focus on your own immediate objectives. If there is anything you would ask before we part minds…’
‘Is she well?’
Always the same question, worded exactly the same way. His one true weakness.
His sister.
‘She sleeps peacefully as always, my friend. Envy her that. And may the Imperium to which you restore her be a better place for both of you.’
‘
Blackseed
will bear fruit.’
‘But only if White Phoenix is at the centre. Any other and we gain nothing. The psykers were adamant. Along that path alone lies the weapon we need.’
‘White Phoenix will be ordered to the relevant location when the time is right. Everything else will depend on successful extraction. I am sure the Deathwatch will not disappoint.’
‘Let us hope not. The visions were less clear on that count. In any case, I shall await your report. We’ll not speak again until this is over. Vigilance, my friend.
In nomine Imperator
.’
‘Vigilance. And may His Glorious Light guide us all.’
Around him, death. Familiar. Comfortable. Not the screaming, churning, blood-drenched death of thousands falling in battle. This was quiet death. This was the pensive, sombre death of the graveyard in winter. This was death carved artfully in stone. Death in repose.
A crow cawed in the chill air, noisily protesting the intrusion of the tall figure in grey fatigues who approached uninvited.
Lyandro Karras grinned at the bird and nodded in salutation, but as he drew nearer, the bird cawed once more, a last harsh reproach, and left its perch on the tallest of the headstones. Pinions clapping, it beat a path through the frigid air.
Karras watched the crow’s grudging departure until it vanished beyond a steep hill to his right. Falling snow danced for a moment in the wake of its passage.
We are both icons of death, my noisy friend
, he thought, psychically tracking the bird’s life-force as it moved farther and farther off, something he did out of long habit.
I precipitate it. My arrival signals the coming end. You come after to gorge on the spoils. And neither of us is welcome in gentle company. How misunderstood we are!
The words were not his own but quotes from a 31st millennium play by Hertzen.
Sunset on Deneb
, it was called. Karras had never seen it performed, but he had read it once during warp transit to a combat zone in the Janos subsector. That had been over a century ago. Thinking back, he allowed himself a moment of silent amusement as he remembered the improbable series of events that had befallen the play’s hero, Benizzi Caldori. Stumbling from conflict to conflict, the poor fool, unable even to tie his own boot-laces, had ended up a Lord Militant charged with winning a sector-wide campaign against the abhorrent orks.
Karras made a mental note to recall the play in its entirety sometime. There were several lessons in the second and third acts worth reviewing.
Turning his thoughts away from petulant crows and ancient plays, he continued his journey, snow crunching beneath his boots with every broad stride. He walked without destination, as he had done for the past three days, untroubled by sub-zero temperatures that would have killed a normal man, glad simply to have been called back here after so long fighting out in the dark reaches.
Occludus.
The grave world.
Chapter-planet of the Death Spectres Space Marines.
Home.
As he walked, Karras let his fingers run over the snow-covered tops of the headstones he passed. History could not recall the people who had made them, nor those who lay beneath, though they were certainly human. The writing on the stones was in a sharp, angular script that had lost all its meaning far back in the mists of time. Despite the Chapter’s efforts, no record could be found that told of the first colonies here. No archive explained how or why the entire planet had been dedicated to the interring of the dead.
And this world’s greatest secret…
That was a thing the Chapter kept well buried, for there were still things in the universe that mankind was far from ready to know.
Thinking of this and of the long-dead multitude beneath his feet caused Karras to recall his own deaths.
The first he had experienced at the age of four S.I.
[3]
, and it had lasted only twenty-three minutes and seven seconds. The poison they gave him stopped his heart and lungs – he’d had only one heart back then, and his lungs had as yet been unaltered. He remembered struggling frantically, unable to scream, his young muscles almost tearing as he wrestled with the restraints. Then the struggle left him and so did his worldly senses. His awareness awoke to the realms beyond reality. He had seen the nexus, the Black River of which others had spoken, its surface an inexplicable cylinder enclosing his mind, funnelling him towards the Beyond. He had felt its powerful currents pulling at him, dragging him towards an irreversible transition he was not yet ready to make.
In the lore of the Chapter, as it was written in ancient times, only those who died in battle could be reborn to serve again. The Afterworld waited to embrace him, to swallow him, to deny him that eventual rebirth, and he fought as his betters had instructed, using mantras, wielding his mental strength where the physical had no meaning. Other presences, hungry and malign, closed in on him as he resisted, but they could not breach the flowing walls of the tunnel. They belonged to other dimensions and lacked the power to tear their way into his. Nevertheless, he heard them screaming in rage and frustration. He felt it, too. Their combined anger manifested itself as a hurricane-like force, fearfully strong. He reeled as it buffeted his awareness. Still the Black River pulled at him, but he held on.
How long had he fought in those strange dimensions? Time flowed differently there. Hours? Days? Longer? Bright as his young life-force was, his reserves reached their end at last. He was sapped. He could fight the flow no longer. There would be no return to the world of flesh. Not ever. He had failed himself and the Chapter both, and the price was an eternity without honour or glory.
No! I cannot die. I must not die. Not like this, without weapon in hand.
Thoughts of disappointing his
khadit
[4]
were too much. That, too, was worse than death, a shame he refused to carry into the ever-after. Renewed strength infused his essence then, born of loyalty and natural tenacity both. He fought harder, a last desperate push, turning his rage upon the flowing nexus as if it were a sentient foe.
In the culmination of holy rites symbolic of the Great Resurrection itself, his immortal soul wrestled its way back to the physical plane. He gasped, flexed cold, stiff fingers, opened his eyes, and drank deep lungfuls of incense-heavy air. Lyandro Karras lived again, no longer an aspirant but a neophyte that day, embraced by the warrior cult that had taken him from his birth-parents and changed his fate to one of consequence.
The Black River terrified me back then
.
As he crunched through the snow between avenues of ancient graves, he remembered his second death.
He had been eight S.I. – almost twenty-two Terran years – and he had lain dead for one hour, eleven minutes and twenty-eight seconds. Dispassionate eyes had watched him as he lay on an altar of black marble inlaid with fine golden script. Those around him, robed and hooded in dark grey, murmured ancient litanies in low, hypnotic monotone. Again, Karras had fought against the currents of the Black River as it surged all around him. Experience gave him more fortitude this time around, but his strengthened life-force and growing psychic power also attracted more attention from the dreadful denizens on the other side of the walls. He felt them clawing frantically at the fabric of reality, scrabbling to get at him. They had come so much closer that second time, driven into a famished frenzy by the new vigour they sensed in him. But, as before, he won out. Bolstered by mantras taught since the earliest days of the Chapter, and the Deep Training passed to him by his khadit, he bested death and its raging currents once more.
When life at last returned to his cooling corpse, Karras rose once again. And once again, he ascended in rank, a neophyte no longer, a full battle-brother of the Chapter at last. The litanies ended. Silent smiles replaced thin-lipped concern. He stood now among equals, ready at last to visit death on mankind’s enemies in the Emperor’s holy name.
Karras remembered the look in the eyes of his khadit that day.
There
was the respect he craved. And beneath it, just for a fleeting second, something like the glimmer of an almost parental pride.
The third and final time Karras had died during the sacred rites of the Chapter, he was one hundred and nine years-old by the Terran count, and he lay as a corpse for a full Occludian day
[5]
. It was the greatest test he had faced thus far – a test which, this time, he undertook at his own behest. Success would elevate him within the Librarius, unlocking a path to greater psychic mastery that was, by grim necessity, closed to those of Lexicanium rank. If he survived, he would return to life as a Codicier, proud to stand among the most powerful of his psychic brethren. Only the most darkly blessed ever attempted the Third Ascension. The chances of a successful resurrection were far slimmer than with his previous deaths. His closest battle-brothers, bonded to him through incessant training and live combat, stood wordless and tense, anxious for his success. Some had counselled him against undergoing those rites, but Karras had been determined, sensing a greater destiny might lie along that path, not to mention a significant leap in power. He knew he had the potential to survive it. Thus, he had crossed over once again and felt familiar dark waters flow around him.
The currents of the Black River bothered him not at all that final time. He had mastered them by mastering himself. But his advanced psychic power was so great a beacon that it drew the attention of something new – a different order of beast from the Other Realm. Something sickening broke through that day, as Karras had known it must. It was a vast, pulsing thing of constantly changing forms, of countless mouths and tendrils, of strange grasping appendages that defied comparison with anything he had known. It was rage and hate and hunger, and it fell upon him with savage glee. The battle was one of wills, of two minds struggling for supremacy with everything they had, and it had seemed to last aeons. In the end, they proved well-matched, the abomination and he. Both spent themselves utterly in the fight. They became locked together in mental exhaustion, and the currents began to drag them both into the mouth of oblivion. But Karras rallied. The prayers and hopes of his battle-brothers penetrated to his consciousness from the distant realm of the living, energising him for one last, desperate push.
The surge of psychic strength blasted him free, and the beast was dragged away by the Black River, raging and thrashing against its fate until it was swallowed by distance and time and absolute darkness.
Karras’s cold corpse began to breathe again. Twin hearts kicked back to life.
He returned from death that day triumphant, a Codicier of the Death Spectres Librarius at last, and the Chapter rejoiced, for such gifted brothers were few.
In the long years since, Karras had served in that role, rarely setting foot back on Occludus. War had kept him away. He did the Chapter’s work, the Emperor’s work. It was what he had been born to do.
But, at last, his khadit had called him back.
There had been a development; an opportunity to earn great honour for himself and the Chapter both.
It was a rare chance to serve as never before.
‘The time is soon,’ his khadit had told him. ‘One must return before the other departs. Until then, go out alone. Be with your thoughts. Think on who and what you are. Sense of self is the pillar that supports us when all else falls. Go. I will send for you when the time comes.’
So Karras had started walking. Walking and thinking. Remembering.
He sensed a trio of souls, such strong shining souls, approaching from the east at speed. Fellow Death Spectres; their ethereal signature was unmistakable, as familiar and comforting as the land itself. He turned into the freezing wind to meet their approach just as something vast and dark and angular rolled in over the hills, almost clipping them. It pulled up great skirts of loose snow as it came skimming towards his location. Powerful turbofan engines drummed on the air. It slowed and began a fiery, vertical descent, turning the snow all around it to steam. The craft settled on thick landing stanchions with a sharp hiss of hydraulic pistons. There was a loud clang. Orange light flowed like liquid over the snow as a boarding ramp lowered.
It was a Thunderhawk gunship from the Chapter’s crypt-city, Logopol, and its arrival was a bittersweet thing to Karras.
His time out here alone was over. This visit to the Chapter world had been all too brief. What lay ahead, he knew, would make the trials of his past seem a mere game by comparison. He didn’t need witchsight to tell him that.
Only one in twenty ever returned alive from service in the Deathwatch.