‘I’ve seen this before,’ she said, suddenly remembering why the writing looked familiar.
‘I hardly think so, Euphrati,’ said Sindermann. ‘This book has been in the archive chamber for decades. I don’t think anyone’s read it since it was put there.’
‘Don’t patronise me, Sindermann, I’ve definitely seen this before,’ she insisted.
‘Where?’
Keeler reached into her pocket and gripped the memory coil of her smashed picter. She rose from her seat and said, ‘Gather your notes and I’ll meet you in the archive chamber in thirty minutes.’
‘Where are you going?’ asked Sindermann, gathering up the book.
‘To get something you’re going to want to see.’
H
ORUS
OPENED
HIS
eyes to see a sky thick with polluted clouds, the taste in the air chemical and stagnant.
It smelled familiar. It smelled of home.
He lay on an uneven plateau of dusty black powder in front of a long-exhausted mining tunnel, and felt the hollow ache of homesickness as he realized this was Cthonia.
The smog of the distant foundries and the relentless hammering of deep core mining filled the sky with particulate matter, and he felt an ache of loneliness for the simpler times he had spent here.
Horus looked around for Sejanus, but whatever the swirling vortex beneath Terra had been, it had evidently not swept up his old comrade in its fury.
His journey here had not been as silent and instant as his previous journeys through this strange and unknown realm. The powers that dwelled in the warp had shown him a glimpse of the future, and it was a desolate place indeed. Foul xeno breeds held sway over huge swathes of the galaxy and a pall of hopelessness gripped the sons of man.
The power of humanity’s glorious armies was broken, the Legions shattered and reduced to fragments of what they had once been: bureaucrats, scriveners and officialdom ruling in a hellish regime where men lived inglorious lives of no consequence or ambition.
In this dark future, mankind had not the strength to challenge the overlords, to fight against the terrors the Emperor had left them to. His father had become a carrion god who neither felt his subjects’ pain nor cared for their fate.
In truth, the solitude of Cthonia was welcome, his thoughts tumbling through his head in a mad whirl of anger and resentment. The Emperor tinkered with powers far beyond his means to master – and had already failed to control once before. He had bargained away his sons for the promise of power, and now returned to Terra to try once again.
‘I will not let this happen,’ Horus said quietly.
As he spoke, he heard the plaintive howl of a wolf and pushed himself to his feet. Nothing like a wolf lived on Cthonia, and Horus was sick of this constant pursuit through the warp.
‘Show yourselves!’ he shouted, punching the air and bellowing an ululating war cry.
His cry was answered as the howling came again, drawing nearer, and Horus felt his battle lust swim to the surface. He had the taste of blood after the slaughter of the Custodian Guards and welcomed the chance to spill yet more.
Shadows moved around him and he shouted, ‘Lupercal! Lupercal!’
Shapes resolved from the shadows and he saw a red-furred wolf pack detach from the darkness. They surrounded him, and Horus recognized the pack leader as the beast that had spoken to him when he had first awoken in the warp.
‘What are you?’ asked Horus, ‘and no lies.’
‘A friend,’ said the wolf, its form blurring and running with rippling lines of golden light. The wolf reared up on its hind legs, its form elongating and widening as it became more humanoid, its proportions swelling and changing until it stood as tall as Horus himself.
Copper skin replaced fur and its eyes ran like liquid as they formed one, golden orb. Thick red hair sprouted from the figure’s head and bronze coloured armour shimmered into existence upon his breast and arms. He wore a billowing cloak of feathers and Horus knew him as well he knew his own reflection.
‘Magnus,’ said Horus. ‘Is it really you?’
‘Yes, my brother, it is,’ said Magnus, and the two warriors embraced in a clatter of plate.
‘How?’ asked Horus. ‘Are you dying too?’
‘No,’ said Magnus. ‘I am not. You must listen to me, my brother. It has taken me too long to reach you, and I do not have much time here. The spells and wards placed around you are powerful and every second I am here a dozen of my thralls die to keep them open.’
‘Don’t listen to him, Warmaster,’ said another voice, and Horus turned to see Hastur Sejanus emerge from the darkness of the mining tunnel. ‘This is who we have been trying to avoid. It is a shape-changing creature of the warp that feasts on human souls. It seeks to devour yours so that you cannot return to your body. All that was Horus would be no more.’
‘He lies,’ spat Magnus. ‘You know me, Horus. I am your brother, but who is he? Hastur? Hastur is dead.’
‘I know, but here, in this place, death is not the end.’
‘There is truth in that,’ agreed Magnus, ‘but you would place your trust in the dead over your own brother? We mourn Hastur, but he is gone from us. This impostor does not even wear his own true face!’
Magnus thrust his fist forward and closed his fingers on the air, as though gripping something invisible. Then he wrenched his hand back. Hastur screamed and a silver light blazed like a magnesium flare from his eyes.
Horus squinted through the blinding light, still seeing an Astartes warrior, but one now armoured in the livery of the Word Bearers.
‘Erebus?’ asked Horus.
‘Yes, Warmaster,’ agreed First Chaplain Erebus; the long red scar across his throat had already begun to heal. ‘I came to you in the guise of Sejanus to ease your understanding of what must be done, but I have spoken nothing but the truth since we traveled this realm.’
‘Do not listen to him, Horus,’ warned Magnus. ‘The future of the galaxy is in your hands.’
‘Indeed it is,’ said Erebus, ‘for the Emperor will abandon the galaxy in his quest for apotheosis. Horus must save the Imperium, for it is evident that the Emperor will not.’
SEVENTEEN
Horror
Angels and daemons
Blood pact
W
ITH
THE
COMPACT
edit engine tucked under one arm and a sense of limitless possibilities filling her heart, Euphrati Keeler made her way through the stacks of Archive Chamber Three towards Sindermann’s table. The white haired iterator sat hunched over the book he had shown her earlier, his breath misting in the chill air. She sat down beside him and placed the edit engine on the desk, slotting a memory coil into the imager slot.
‘It’s cold in here, Sindermann,’ she said. ‘How you haven’t caught a fever I’ll never know.’
He nodded. ‘Yes, it is rather cold, isn’t it. It’s been like this for days now, ever since the Warmaster was taken to Davin in fact.’
The screen of the edit engine flickered to life, its white screen bathing them both in its washed-out light as Keeler flicked through the images she had captured. She zipped through those she had taken while on Davin’s surface and those of Captain Loken and the Mournival prior to their departure for the Whisperheads.
‘What are you looking for exactly?’ asked Sindermann.
‘This,’ she said triumphantly, angling the screen so he could see the image it displayed.
The file contained eight pictures, all taken at the war council held on Davin where Eugan Temba’s treachery had been revealed. Each shot included First Chaplain Erebus, and she used the engine’s trackball to zoom in on his tattooed skull. Sindermann gasped as he recognized the symbols on Erebus’s head. They were identical to the ones in the book that he had shown Keeler on the sub-deck.
‘That’s it then,’ he breathed. ‘It must be the
Book of Lorgar
. Can you get any closer to get the symbols from all sides of Erebus’s head? Is that possible?’
‘
Please,
it’s me,’ she replied, her hands dancing across the keys of the edit engine.
Using all the various images, and shots of the Word Bearer from different angles, Euphrati was able to create a composite image of the symbols tattooed onto his skull and project it onto a flat pane. Sindermann watched her skill with admiration, and it took her less than ten minutes to resolve a high-gain image of the symbols on Erebus’s head.
With a grunt of satisfaction, she made a final keystroke, and a glossy hard copy of the screen’s image slid from the side of the machine with a whirring sigh. Keeler lifted it by the corners and waved it for a second or two to dry it, before handing it to Sindermann.
‘There,’ she said. ‘Does that help you translate what this book says?’
Sindermann slid the image across the table and held it close to the book, his head bobbing back and forth between the book and his notes as his finger traced down the trails of cuneiforms.
‘Yes, yes…’ he said excitedly. ‘Here, you see, this word is laden with vowel transliterations and this one is clearly a personal argot, though of a much denser polysyllabic construction.’
Keeler tuned out of what Sindermann was saying after a while, unable to make sense of the jargon he was using. Karkasy or Oliton might be able to understand the iterator, but images were her thing, not words.
‘How long will it take you to get any sense out of it?’ she asked.
‘What? Oh, not long I shouldn’t wonder,’ he said. ‘Once you know the grammatical logic of a language, it is a relatively simple matter to unlock the rest of its meaning.’
‘So how long?’
‘Give me an hour and we’ll read this together, yes?’
She nodded and pushed her chair back, saying, ‘Fine, I’ll take a look around if that’s alright.’
‘Yes, feel free to have a look at whatever catches your eye, my dear, though I fear much of this collection is more suited to dusty academics like myself.’
Keeler smiled as she got up from the table. ‘I may not be a documentarist, but I know which end of a book to read, Kyril.’
‘Of course you do, I didn’t mean to suggest—’
‘Too easy,’ she said and wandered off into the stacks to browse while Sindermann returned to his books.
Despite her quip, she soon realized that Sindermann was exactly right. She spent the next hour wandering up and down shelves packed with scrolls, books and musty, loose-leaf manuscripts. Most of the books had unfathomable titles like
Reading Astrologies and Astrotelepathic Auguries
,
Malefic Abjurations and the Multifarious Horrores Associated Wyth Such Workes
or
The Book of Atum
.
As she passed this last book, she felt a shiver travel the length her spine and reached up to slide the book from the shelf. The smell of its worn leather binding was strong, and though she had no real wish to read the book, she couldn’t deny the strange attraction it held for her.
The book creaked open in her grip, and the dust of centuries wafted from its pages as she opened them. She coughed, hearing Sindermann reading aloud from the
Book of Lorgar
as he translated more of the text.
Surprisingly, the words before her were written in a language she could understand, and her eyes quickly scanned the page. Sindermann’s words came again, and it took Euphrati a moment to register that the words she was hearing echoed the words she was seeing on the page, the letters blurring and rearranging themselves before her very eyes. The faded script seemed to illuminate from within, and as she read what they said, the book’s pages burst into flames. She dropped the book with a cry of alarm.
She turned and ran back towards where she had left Sindermann, turning the corner to see him reading aloud from the book with a terrified expression on his face. He gripped the edges of the book as though unable to let go, the words pouring from him in a flood of voices.
A crackling, electric sensation set Euphrati’s teeth on edge and she cried out in terror as she saw a swirling cloud of bluish light hovering above the desk. The image twisted and jerked in the air, moving as though out of sync with the world around it.
‘Kyril! What’s happening?’ she screamed as the terror of the Whisperheads returned to her with paralyzing force and she dropped to her knees. Sindermann didn’t answer, the words streaming from his unwilling mouth and his eyes fixed in terror on the unnatural sight above him. She could tell the same fear that she felt was also running hot in his veins.
The light bulged and stretched as though something was pushing through from beyond, and an iridescent, questing limb oozed from its depths. Keeler felt the anger that had consumed her in the months following her attack break through the fear and she surged to her feet.
Keeler ran towards Sindermann and gripped his skinny wrists, as the suggestion of a rippling body of undulating, glowing flesh began tearing through the light.
His hands were locked on the book, the knuckles white, and she couldn’t prise them loose as he continued to give voice to the terrible words within its pages.
‘Kyril! Let go of the damn book!’ she cried as an awful ripping sound came from above. She risked a look upwards, and saw yet more tentacled limbs pushing through the light in an obscene parody of birth.
‘I’m sorry Kyril!’ she shouted and punched the iterator across the jaw. He pitched backwards out of his chair, and the torrent of words was cut off as the book fell from his hands. She quickly circled the table and lifted Sindermann to his feet. As she did so, she heard a grotesque sucking sound and a hard, wet thud of something heavy landing on the table.
Euphrati didn’t waste time looking back, but took off as fast as she could towards the stacks, supporting the lurching Sindermann as she went. The pair of them staggered away from the table as a glittering light behind them threw their shadows out before them, and a cackling shriek like laughter washed over them.
Keeler heard a whoosh of air and something bright and hot flashed past her, exploding against the shelves with a hot bang like a firework. The wood hissed and spat where it had been struck, and she looked over her shoulder to see a horror of flailing limbs and glowing, twisting flesh leap after them. It moved with a rippling motion, lunatic faces, eyes and cackling mouths forming and reforming from the liquid matter of its body. Blue and red light flared from within it, strobing in dazzling beams through the archive.