Upon the vision of Azul’s third eye had appeared an eerie, complex rune.
An eldar rune.
Rune of locating, rune of unlocking,
so Fennix’s voice seemed to cry from afar.
Intuitions of great brass-bound, hex-stamped alien tomes, brittle with age, infested Azul. Sensations of arcane incunabula and palimpsests and chained libers. Of ranks of daemonic codices and opuscules – the very words of which might melt the eye to keep the brain from imbibing what was writ. Impressions of labyrinthine ebon passageways and inky halls and chambers and cubicles wherein books themselves were luminous, phosphorescent. Impressions of a maze so extensive that an ignorant wanderer might well leave his bones there. Of terrible immaterial guardians of these macabre archives. Could those brooding presences be chained, tamed daemons, embodiments of formulae inscribed within certain volumes locked in arabesque cages?
Black... Library. Black... Library...
‘I
CAN SEE
the rune in my warp-eye!’ Azul cried. ‘Like a twisted grid, like a zigzag lattice overlaying my warp-sight. It corresponds to a route through the webway. It dictates a route. He who follows it, arrives. It’s a key as well. Only Fennix saw eye to eye with me. Oh thank you, Fennix my true friend!’
‘It is an agony vision,’ whispered Lex wonderingly. ‘Like the light of Rogal Dorn...’
Petrov’s voice faltered. ‘Is it fading a fraction... already? Will we have time to follow it? How can I fix it in my mind?’ The Navigator shut his ordinary eyes in concentration. ‘Ah, much brighter now. Yet I fear, I fear the fading of the light!’
A Fist was a thinker; and Lex thought hard.
He thought as hard as ceramically reinforced bone. Hard as the shrunken black jewel of a warp-eye.
He declared. ‘With my graving tool I shall scrimshander that rune upon your warp-eye, under your instruction, Azul Petrov! Then you shall always see it!’
Were there pain-nerves in a warp-eye, which would cause Petrov to flinch and spoil the design? To be unable to describe it lucidly, even if held immobile?
‘Would your warp-eye sense pain if carved by my graving tool?’ Lex demanded.
Petrov’s head shook, maybe in denial or maybe in terror. His teeth chattered.
‘I don’t know... I don’t think so. No.’
No to the artistic operation, or no to the question of pain?
‘To behold a Navigator’s third eye directly is deadly,’ warned Meh’lindi. ‘I’ve seen the consequences.’
‘Fennix was
blind
,’ said Jaq. ‘That’s how he could look Azul in the warp-eye. You’ll destroy yourself, captain.’
‘Ah,’ rumbled Lex, ‘but I shall not behold his warp-eye directly. I shall not have my visor open. A Marine’s visor isn’t equivalent to a window. Imagery is transmitted by impulses through the suit’s calculator to slim the visual centre of my brain. Thus I cannot be blinded even by the flash of a thermonuke. With my visor shut my regular vision is in abeyance.’
‘Lord,’ said Wagner, ‘I volunteer to test this out.’
‘Nay, sergeant,’ Lex said courteously. ‘I am fairly positive that my suit’s inanimate calculator can draw the sting of the deadly gaze. The matter is urgent—’
Urgent indeed.
The rearguards opened fire. The corpse of an eldar warrior, the like of which they had not previously seen, tumbled out of the mist. Ahead of it skidded a sleek yet substantial weapon.
That alien wore heavy black armour. From the red rune-marked helm jutted flanges resembling squared-off upturned ears. Those might well be rangefinders. The red weapon was the heftier on account of a long cone-shaped nozzle. Surely a rocket-launcher! ‘Uh-uh,’ grunted Grimm, ‘here come the heavy brigade.’
Heavy indeed. The detonation of a rocket in confined quasi-space might easily put paid even to Space Marines in power armour. Those who wore no armour stood little chance. Might such congested explosions destabilize the webway wall? Causing a local rupture? A sealing-off of the rupture? The plummeting of bodies into increate warp?
That eldar warrior surely had companions close behind him. Lex bellowed, ‘Carry the Navigator, Wagner. All of us run for it, at the pace of the slowest.’
Since Grimm’s legs were short, Lex carried the abhuman by the collar of his flak jacket. ‘Oh, ancestors! Did I ask for a ride? You’re shaking me guts—’
A
TRIPLE BRANCHING
of the blue. Head left at random. Almost at once, another branch. Head right.
Jaq sensed a nauseating immaterial barrier. Had they not been fleeing pell-mell he would have cried halt. They were already through the uncanny obstruction. It was a flimsy obstacle – as if it had been sapped psychically from the far side, weakened by sedulous thrusts. Beyond, the blue mist thinned suddenly. Other sickly light welled forth.
They had emerged by way of a cave. Hardly even a cave. A concavity in rock too shallow to accommodate more than a couple of armoured Imperial Fists at once.
A dreary slope of great boulders, poised on scree, extended downward into murk. Upward likewise. In the upward direction rococo metallic towers were visible. A small fleet of grotesque vessels might have impacted in the terrain. Evilly flamboyant, those towers were canted at absurd angles to one another in defiance of gravity, yet they were linked by eerily wrought bridges along which prowled tiny figures.
In a bilious sky hung an hourglass sun. Two suns were joined impossibly at the waist like a double yolk within a glutinous pulsing albumen-womb of glowing gas. This absurd sun made the eyes and the spirit ache. How was gravity thus defied? That double-sun should have cohered into one sun aeons ago. Two such celestial bodies could not exist side by side.
‘Chaos,’ breathed Jaq in horror.
Six battle-brothers had formed a picket circle facing outward. Just then, the whole terrain began to tilt – horribly to the sense of balance. What had been downward was rising. Soon the land became level. The rounder of the boulders began to roll across the scree as
upward
asserted itself. Irregular blocks slid.
The direction-quake, the quake of orientation, ceased.
Might the terrain sometimes become vertical, shedding its boulders and scree and inhabitants? No – or how should those leaning towers have endured? Those haunts of Chaos creatures...
This must be deep in the Eye of Terror here, deeper than when
Tormentum Malorum
had landed on a Chaos world. There, at least, gravity had not been a mere whim, as now.
Activity was increasing on those tortuous bridges. Had the intrusion by the Imperial Fists been noted? Sniffed psychically? How frequent were balance-quakes? What if this cursed land tilted sideways while Lex was engaged in his delicate work? And would his power gauntlets impede his dexterity by amplifying the slightest movement?
Wagner sat Azul Petrov down. Kneeling on the potent skulls which embellished his poleyns, the sergeant held the Navigator inflexibly – though Petrov must, of course, co-operate willingly.
Lex was obliged to ask Meh’lindi to delve in an external pocket of his armour for his cherished power-stylus. Who could have imagined that he would need to have recourse to the engraving tool in a combat situation?
She placed the tool, activated, in Lex’s powered fingers. Unbidden, she handed Jaq his force rod. Resolutely she looked away. Jaq also averted his eyes, stroking the rod gravely as he gazed towards those leaning towers.
Lex knelt bulkily before the Navigator.
He scrutinized the large cool green eyes in the insectoid face. That ashen face seemed all the frailer from shock and the loss of half an arm. Rubies upon the ear-lobes and nose and lower lip and chin might almost have been guidance markers preliminary to radical facial surgery – to the excision and unpeeling of Petrov’s physiognomy. Lex reached to raise the Navigator’s brow-bandage with a single powered finger.
‘I’ll never be able to navigate again,’ whispered Petrov tragically, and closed his ordinary eyes.
Indeed not. Hereafter he would always behold through his warp-eye the domineering pattern of that rune.
The warp-eye, exposed, was a glossy node of darkness. It resembled a nodule of vitrodur. Death had not come to Lex, nor even nausea. The calculator in his suit superimposed a curved grid upon the magnified orb.
‘Begin,’ murmured the Navigator. ‘South declination seventy, ascension twenty-five.’
Azul Petrov was an adept of celestial co-ordinates, and an eye was like a sphere of space.
Upon the grid in Lex’s field of vision a tiny telltale cursor blinked.
Stifled by Wagner’s gauntlets, the Navigator shuddered only slightly as the tip of the graving tool touched the surface of his inky eye.
‘Ascension twenty-four...’
With unshaking power-steadied touch, Lex began fastidiously to carve the evocative eldar rune upon the atrophied yet potent eye.
N
IGHT ROLLED TOWARDS
them like a velvet curtain, or like a negative of an aurora. It hid from view those leaning towers. In the sickly sky an eclipse was eating swiftly across the leftward sun.
This was not how night fell in any sane reality!
The curtain of darkness halted before it reached them. Within that darkness flapped moth-like shapes, faintly phosphorescent, visible in violet.
More such moths swiftly gathered. They massed to form a giant humanoid figure bestriding the shrouded land. The hulking figure gained substance by the moment, as Lex continued to engrave Azul’s eye.
On the shoulders of the figure were mounted what appeared to be plasma cannons. Great grasping powerhands dangled. Around the ankles of that solidifying ogrespook capered shadows – reminiscent of that horned spiked suit of armour which had lain in Ulthwé.
The ogre was a parody of a Titan, of one of the colossal fighting machines of the Imperium. This was a Chaos Titan, congealing out of immaterium. Or maybe the Titan did possess an actual existence, and had advanced within that curtain of night, camouflaged by the daemonic moths.
Those tinier shadows were dire Chaos Marines, come from the leaning towers which must be their citadel. They were assembling to attack.
Sergeant Wagner was praying, but Lex could not allow his attention to veer.
Jaq was sighting his force rod tentatively at the looming colossus, muttering prayers of his own. Just then an extremely low moon sailed into view. Astride the capsized crescent sat the vilest of creatures, as on a saddle. Such saucer-eyes, such a parrot-beak. That tentacled fiend resembled some kraken from the deeps of an ocean. Its tentacles trailed down, becoming vastly long threads. With these, it began to fish. A thread adhered to a boulder. The thread drew the stone upward, then dropped it.
How far away was the kraken? Or how close? How close, or far, was the crescent moon which was its vehicle? Distance and size had lost all meaning. Here was nightmare incarnate. Another thread snared a Chaos Marine, plucking the armoured brute from out of the darkness. ‘That ain’t no helmet,’ exclaimed one of the Imperial Fists, ‘that’s his head—’
To the amplified horror-struck gaze of the Marine it was evident that the grotesquely metamorphosed Chaos warrior was guffawing with insane delight as he was drawn up to share that surreal perch with the daemon.
One of the suns had disappeared. The other sun began to wink. It strobed so that the mockery of a Titan and the warriors around its feet vanished and reappeared, advancing jerkily, unpredictably.
Even with a floodlight beaming from Lex’s shoulder, to finish scribing the rune upon Petrov’s eye demanded such concentration and detachment.
‘Declination thirty-one, ascension forty-three. Yes, yes, just a little more—’
A battle-brother cried out. In the spasming of light and darkness, so disorientating, a whip-thin tendril from on high had found him. The tendril wrapped around the stabilizing jets and reserve air bottles and purificator and intake pipes behind his shoulders. It heaved him from the ground. He was rising, rising, all the power of his suit rendered futile. In the strobing flashes of illumination the tangled Space Marine seemed to be ascending at an accelerating rate – doomed to become prey to that daemon, or else to that Chaos Marine up on that cock-eyed sickle of a moon.
‘Wait!’ cried Jaq, before the sergeant could order his men to fire upon their captured Fist.
Jaq pointed his force rod upward. He summoned all his hatred of daemonry into a psychic thrust. Then he discharged the rod at the angler in the sky.
The moon crescent rocked. A boat pitched upon invisible waves. The kraken-creature howled. Discarded, the Chaos Marine was falling from a great height towards boulders. The true and devout Marine was still being reeled in. His arms were flailing. His legs were pistoning uselessly.
Jaq growled bitterly. Which was worse? For the man’s colleagues to blast him with bolts while still they could? If the victim’s staunch spirit went into the sea of souls here, deep in the Eye of Terror, and did not disintegrate, what torment might await it! If his life were prolonged by whim, he might be vilely corrupted.
‘Sergeant, kill the man to save him.’
Wagner barked an order. Bolts flew upward at the diminishing target. The bolts all seemed to veer. Their trajectory was bent by the twistedness of unreality which plagued this place.
Useless. Fruitless. Conserve ammunition.
Maybe there had been a single lucky hit at the limit of range...
Maybe the puissant Marine was merely injured by that hit, to add to his impending torments.
Meanwhile –
strobe, strobe
– the mass of Chaos Marines were leaping forward, jerky as grotesque insects.
Jaq swung his rod. Summoning an excoriating exorcistic fury, he discharged the rod at the Chaos Titan.
The colossus lurched. It stamped its way forward drunkenly, crushing at least one of its minion Marines beneath a massive cleated, clawed foot.
The Chaos Marines opened fire. Unnatural bolts flew from their weapons. Buzzing like robotic bees, these bolts swarmed towards their targets. They seemed to steer themselves to a limited extent. Maybe they were following oscillations in the warped space of this unreal world. A boulder erupted, spraying stone shrapnel at Grimm’s flak jacket. A Fist’s helmet erupted too.